i did it yay me
bramflakes
When you hear an economist on TV “explain” the decline in stock prices by citing a slump in the market (and I have heard this pseudo-explanation more than once) it is time to turn off the television.
Thomas J. McKay, Reasons, Explanations and Decisions
That title is a masterful bit of double-entendre clickbait.
I once debated with myself whether I should donate blood given that I’d had sex with men before, but whom I was sure were HIV-negative. I did a quick Fermi estimate looking at the amount of contaminated blood samples the blood bank could expect nationally, first with only heterosexual donors, and then with heterosexual + homosexual donors, given that each blood sample underwent the most accurate HIV tests. The results were pretty staggering (order of magnitude difference).
That convinced me that the proscription was there for a very good reason and that I shouldn’t violate it.
I then tried using it to destroy my sense of humour (partly because I thought this might boost productivity, by generally making actions’ dopamine rewards match their actual usefulness). This seemed to actually work well; I now experience humour-type amusement 20%-50% as often as I did two months ago.
and I thought LW was against spock-rationality
I’m not as opposed to political discussion on this site as many are, but I do think the original point of EY’s “Politics is the Mindkiller” post is worth keeping in mind. Inserting this kind of mind-killing aside in an otherwise non-political comment is needlessly inflammatory and distracting. I don’t want to see this sort of thing on LW.
Having seen many of his recent posts I believe he’s doing it on purpose.
Huh, I put svir uhaqerq zvyyvba sbe Rhebcr’f cbchyngvba. Turns out I was thinking of the Rhebcrna Havba, (svir uhaqerq naq frira zvyyvba) engure guna Rhebcr vgfrys, which is substantially higher.
It’d be cool if there were a link to the study hall in the sidebar.
- 23 Jan 2015 3:42 UTC; 11 points) 's comment on Open thread, Jan. 19 - Jan. 25, 2015 by (
I wonder is this because most humans can’t find joy in the merely real, praising deities and trusting in other supernatural stuff like signs and horoscopes, so disbelieving and living in reality is abnormal?
or more prosaically, because the sequences are written in an idiosyncratic semi-autobiographical style with few citations and often grandiose language, and many people are immediately turned off by that
I read about HBD first and then NRx second. I couldn’t have a sensible conversation about it with anybody I knew due to the prevailing progressive memeplex—for example, my History teacher once claimed that war was nonexistent in pre-agriculture societies due to it being economically unsustainable (I just about managed to avoid giving myself a concussion from slamming my head on the table). I knew cracks were appearing in the Narrative after I read the Blank Slate, and I knew I had to jettison it entirely once I finished The Bell Curve.
But what to replace it with? Mainstream conservatism was as clueless as progressivism, and while individual libertarians might have had the right mindset to discuss the issue if you framed it the right way, their answers were unsatisfying. Then one day, someone on LW linked to Moldbug—and here suddenly was a whole other narrative that made a lot more sense. It wasn’t about HBD as such, but an account of the Progressive idea machine that explained why it was so taboo. I toyed with some of the weirder aspects for a while (Patchwork and Corporate Governance) but eventually gave them up for similar reasons to libertarianism (in a word: too spergy).
I wouldn’t call myself a Neoreactionary. My beliefs are somewhere in between paleocon and the Traditionalist branch of NRx. In an entirely separate part of my brain there’s also an active transhumanist who is annoyed that this contrarian upstart is getting all the cognitive attention, and Annisimov’s early post about transhumanist/NRx synthesis hasn’t properly bridged the gap. I don’t know what I’ll believe in a year or two.
I show not your face but your coherent extrapolated volition
I got shivers when I read that and realized what the Mirror was. Another thing that ought to have been obvious, in hindsight.
I’m going to do the unthinkable: start memorizing mathematical results instead of deriving them.
Okay, unthinkable is hyperbole. But I’ve noticed a tendency within myself to regard rote memorization of things to be unbecoming of a student of mathematics and physics. An example: I was recently going through a set of practice problems for a university entrance exam, and calculators were forbidden. One of the questions required a lot of trig, and half the time I spent solving the problem was just me trying to remember or re-derive simple things like the arcsin of 0.5 and so on. I knew how to do it, but since I only have a limited amount of working memory, actually doing it was very inefficient because it led to a lot of backtracking and fumbling. In the same sense, I know how to derive all of my multiplication tables, but doing it every time I need to multiply two numbers together is obviously wrong. I don’t know how widespread this is, but at least in my school, memorization was something that was left to the lower-status, less able people who couldn’t grasp why certain results were true. I had gone along with this idea without thinking about it critically.
So these are the things I’m going to add to my anki decks, with the obligatory rule that I’m only allowed to memorize results if I could theoretically re-derive them (or if the know-how needed to derive them is far beyond my current ability). These will include common trig results, derivatives and integrals of all basic functions, most physical formulae relating heat, motion, pressure and so on. I predict that the reduction in mental effort required on basic operations will rapidly compound to allow for much greater fluency with harder problems, though I can’t think of a way to measure this. Also, recommendations for other things to memorize are welcome.
Also, relevant
I think you’d get replies if you didn’t pepper it so much with needless political tribal signaling. We get it; you read Steve Sailer.
The homepage says:
Less Wrong is an online community for people who want to apply the discovery of biases like the conjunction fallacy, the affect heuristic, and scope insensitivity in order to fix their own thinking.
Less Wrong users aim to develop accurate predictive models of the world, and change their mind when they find evidence disconfirming those models, instead of being able to explain anything.
So this person acknowledges their own biases, notes that some otherwise perfectly reasonable and in their opinion “Rational” people believe in HBD, and then (as far as I can tell) doesn’t make any effort to investigate whether they might actually be true?
This is what motivated cognition looks like. If someone cannot change their mind because (sorry for the bluntness but there’s no other way I can describe my impression in under a paragraph) their feelings might be hurt, and they are actively working against resolving this inner conflict, then they should not be in a rationalist community.
Was the main post edited? The comments seem entirely disconnected from the article.
My thoughts on the following are rather disorganized and I’ve been meaning to collate them into a post for quite some time but here goes:
Discussions of morality and ethics in the LW-sphere overwhelmingly tend to short-circuit to naive harm-based consequentialist morality. When pressed I think most will state a far-mode meta-ethical version that acknowledges other facets of human morality (disgust, purity, fairness etc) that would get wrapped up into a standardized utilon currency (I believe CEV is meant to do this?) but when it comes to actual policy (EA) there is too much focus on optimizing what we can measure (lives saved in africa) instead of what would actually satisfy people. The drunken moral philosopher looking under the lamppost for his keys because that’s where the light is. I also think there’s a more-or-less unstated assumption that considerations other than Harm are low-status.
I started watching Breaking Bad. It’s generally awesome in every way. One thing that really stands out to me is how lies are contagious and rapidly increase in complexity, needing more and more covering stories to cover the gaping contradictions and loose ends.
I’d kill Frank.
ETA: Even if I’d be the only sentient being in the entire nanofabbed universe, it’s still better than 2 people trapped in a boring white room, either forever or until we both die of dehydration.
But in order for them to even give a meaningful probability estimate, they’ll need to spend years actually studying the relevant physics and mathematics. It doesn’t matter how eloquently you explain MW—the Universe doesn’t run on rhetoric.
If you ask people about MW versus CI, from their perspective it’s no different from asking “does the glibbleflop spriel or does it just florl?”
Open borders is a terrible idea and could possibly lead to the collapse of civilization as we know it.
EDIT: I should clarify:
Whether you want open borders and whether you want the immigration status quo are different questions. I happen to be against both, but it is perfectly consistent for somebody to be against open borders but be in favor of the current level of immigration. The claim is specifically about completely unrestricted migration as advocated by folks like Bryan Caplan. Please direct your upvotes/downvotes to the former claim, rather than the latter.