Nice. I found out about one of the nearest meetups to me about a day or two before it happened, and about three days before I coincidentally discovered that my town’s forgotten tiny airport has service to that area for quite cheap (as in, actually within my barely-existent budget). Anyway, it would be helpful to get information on the general population of LWers within a certain distance.
CAE_Jones
Something I’ve wondered about recently that seems like it should have a straightforward answer… Are their benefits / costs to using soap for dental cleaning? I tried googling for information, but mostly found alternative medicine people wondering, and one person referencing something written in the 1850s, but nothing from the past century that says “soap cleans teeth better” or “soap will kill enammal [sic]” or “soap has no better or worse effects than toothpaste on oral health”. Is there data somewhere I haven’t found? Is the answer one of those common knowledge things that is so common people forget to mention it to new humans?
Taken, though I had to skip the IQ test because it wasn’t screen reader accessible (flash, with some text labels but no accessible controls, not that flash in general is particularly accessible).
Apologies in advance for the novella. And any spelling errors that I don’t catch (I’m typing in notepad, among other excuses).
It’s always very nice when I come across something that reminds me that there are not only people in the world who can actually think rationally, but that many of them are way better at it than me.
I don’t like mentioning this so early in any introduction, but my vision is terrible to the point of uselessness; I mostly just avoid calling myself “blind” because it internally feels like that would be giving up on the tiny power left in my right eye. I mention it now just because it will probably be relevant by the end of my rambling. (Feel free to skip to the last paragraph if you’d rather avoid all the backstory.)
I’m from northeast Arkansas. My parents were never really religious (I kinda internalized the ambient mythos of “God=good and fluffy cloud heaven, Satan=bad and fire and brimstone hell” just because it seemed to be the accepted way of things among all of my other relatives. TUrns out my dad identified himself as a Buddhist after one of our many trips to Disneyworld. … they.… really like Disney. They have a dog named Disney.). They did emphasize the importance of education and individualism and all of those ideals from the late eighties and nineties that turned out to be counterproductive (though I’m having trouble finding the cracked.com articles that point this out in the most academically sound manner imaginable. (note: the previous statement was sarcastic)). So I tried to learn as much as I could in the general direction of science. Being that this was all done at public schools, and that a whole 0 of the more advanced science books I wanted were available in braille, this didn’t get me very far.
I did my last two years of highschool at the Arkansas School of Mathematics and Science (which added “and the arts” when I got there, though before they’d actually added an art program), and somehow graduated without actually doing much science (I did a study of the effects of atmosphere on dreams for the year-and-a-half science project that everyone had to do, but forewent trying to organize an experiment and just wrote a terrible research paper). Then I got to college, and everything went to hell. I’d somehow managed to sneak around learning things like vectors, dot/cross products, and actual lab reports in highschool, and the experiments we did in gen physics never felt like experiments so much as demonstrations (“Behold: gravity still works!”). This is about where it became extremely clear to me that I simply could no longer make myself do things by force of will alone (and it became doubly clear that no one else seemed capable of understanding that I wasn’t just “blowing off” everything). It took several semesters after that for me to realize that I had seriously missed out on some basic life things and that I actually needed friends (and that I needed to seriously reevaluate what qualified as friendship). They finally made me pick a new major, seeing as I’d kinda kept away from physics after the first semester ended in disaster. So I took the quickest way out, that being French, and now I’m still living with my parents, have about a dozen essays on Franco-african literature to write, and am about $30,000 in debt (that’s only counting the loans in my name; my parents took the rest of the financial burden in their names).
So I mostly try to focus on creative endeavors, such as fiction and video games. Except the lack-of-vision thing makes that harder (I’ve been focusing on developing audio games for the past couple years, but it’s virtually impossible to actually live off the tiny audio games market. Oh, but I could write pages on my observations there, and I rather want to, as I’m sure many of you could make some meaningful observations/analyses on some of those trends.).
… Well crap, I just wrote a few pages without actually getting to anything useful. I have serious need of better rationality skills than I’m currently applying: independence, dealing with emotional/cognative weirdness, finding ways to actually travel outside of my house (public transportation might as well not exist anywhere but the capital in Arkansas, and good sidewalks are hard to find), social issues, productivity issues, finding ways to get in physical activity, being unemployed with an apparent hiring bias against disabilities, financial ability, etc. The total money that I have to work with is less than $400, so I can’t exactly sign up for cryonics or hire a driver to take me places. And this wall-o-text demonstrates my horrible disorganization rather well, I fear. (Hm, is there not a way to preview a comment before one posts it?)
Over this past summer, I decided to do some tests with my dreams. Overall this has gone nowhere (it doesn’t help that I’ve had difficulty keeping myself motivated enough to keep it going for long). I didn’t put it in Bayesian terms at the time (despite having been reading LessWrong), but ignoring weak priors is one of the biggest rationality fails I’ve experienced in dreams (I’ve documented quite a few incidents). There have been some cases where I have done something resembling updating dream priors, specifically as it relates to elevators, as there was a period from 2004-2006 in which elevators in dreams would frequently behave in an unrealistic manner (traveling more floors than would make sense, usually down, or having the door or floor become structurally unsound). It got to the point that I actively avoided elevators in dreams if I was interested in the situation I was experiencing. I’ve sort of half-tried for lucid dreaming, and consequently only been sort of half-successful. I’ve found that anxiety almost always outweighs desire when it comes to influencing the experience. I did try a little test where I would try to will the time on a display to be a particular number, then checked to see if it worked. I tried this several times, but by the time I remembered to write down my results, I only remembered two of the trials (though I do remembering them being pretty representative of the rest of them). I was able to get the time to appear close (no more than five minutes off, and usually much closer) to the target. I’d like to do an experiment involving my vision, but that’s proven much more difficult than I’d like. My left eye has been nonfunctional since birth, my right eye started scarring around age 3, stabalized at “I could read subtitles if you pause the video, give me inch-thick glasses and let me sit close to the screen for a couple minutes”, then dropped rapidly toward useless after I visited Las Vegas at age 14 (there are several factors that probably came to a head with that incident). Vision in my dreams took much longer to decline, but gradually got to the point where clear visuals are a novelty even while asleep.
Update: Finding this article got me to try again, and while overall it was a vague mess (though I attempted some more number experiments involving other people/NPCs), things got interesting near the end. I did have limited success working with visuals, and within moments of noticing this, observed a dog run up a slide and consciously decided that the probability of this having happened in reality and not having been made up just for the dream was pretty low. It’s worth noting that I was fully aware it was a dream by that point.
I want to get to one of the St Louis meetups at some point (since they’re probably the only ones I could actually get to), though I’d need to fly in and would need a way to get to the actual location. I doubt I’ll be able to make this one, but I’ll be watching it anyway in case this changes.
You should study geology. I’m convinced a basic understanding of the field is sufficient to debunk the “a global flood explains the fossil record” idea.
There are places in the Bible where it sounds very much like God does not want to be clearly understood. I seem to remember a verse (I don’t recall which book it’s in...) where Jesus says that he speaks in parables (as opposed to plainly) because otherwise most people would understand him. The general argument I’ve heard is that evil serves a purpose, and perfection according to God requires the experience of lots and lots of bullcrap. The obvious question is why he wouldn’t then create people with those experiences built in...
Is their meaningful data on thalamic stimulators with erodic side-effects? (See entry #1 here: http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-disturbing-ways-the-human-body-will-evolve-in-the-future/ ). Cracked gives the addictive potential of an accidental orgasm switch plenty of attention while citing just two examples (it’s a comedy site after all), but have other cases been studied? I’m not convinced this couldn’t be done intentionally with current models of the brain.
I’ve had people tell me to taboo “I don’t know” because I use it so much. These being fairly average or slightly above average people who are annoyed that I don’t have a strong opinion about things like “what do you want to eat tonight?” Some have made jokes about putting “I don’t know” on my tombstone. Assuming that I die and am later resurrected and discover this was actually done, I will be most displeased.
A few weeks ago, I set the goal for myself of having some significant accomplishment to show for each week, either in the category of creative content (writing / game development) or something of significant use (like general purpose utility software). This was based on something similar I did in the first few months of 2010, which was based on the “virtual series” idea—that is, write and release screenplays for an episodic series with the limitations of an actual weekly production in mind.
At first, this seemed to be working somewhat; I wound up adding a list of specific things I wanted for each week for the next year, and I’ve had less success with that. But the past two weeks have seen less success, so a few days ago I decided that I should at least be able to identify some kind of work I’ve accomplished each day. And I’ve accomplished nothing since.
The evidence still seems to be in favor of weekly deadlines more than anything else, at least.
This is not a bad thing
It is if you want to not die, rather than be copied. How likely would it be, assuming that politics and funding weren’t an issue, that we could grow a new body, prevent the brain from developing, yet keep it alive to the point that an existing brain could be inserted? I’m not necessarily concerned with the details of getting a brain transplant to work smoothly in general, just the replacement body.
It doesn’t seem like it should be difficult in theory; I’d be more worried about the resources.
I’m also curious as to what’s stopping us from keeping brains alive even if the body can no longer function. I’m not well researched in this area, but if it is a matter of keeping chemical resources flowing in and waste flowing out, then our current technology should be capable of as much. At that point, all we’d need is to develop artificial i/o for brains (which seems slightly more difficult, but not so difficult that it couldn’t happen within a few decades).
But I’ve probably overlooked something obvious and well known and am completely confused. :(
I don’t like the idea of being “revived” as an upload, though. An upload would be nice to have (It’d certainly make it easier to examine stored data, if only a little), but I still see an upload as a copy rather than preserving the original. And, being the original, that isn’t the most appealing outcome to me.
I have to wonder how much dolphin anatomy factors into their apparent lack of civilization-building. Then again, I haven’t read anything about dolphins developing anything like agriculture (whereas some social insects seem to manage some impressive achievements, such as ants domesticating other insects, farming fungi, and building vast inter-connected colonies). Yet it seems pretty clear that social insects are nothing like intelligent in the way that primates and dolphins are.
(Apologies for length...)
I doubt this is as relevant as it seems to me, but there is this timetravel strategy game called temporal: http://www.kaldobsky.com/audiogames/ (it’s toward the bottom of the page, and the main audience is visually impaired, hence the limited visual design).
The idea is that it is supposed to work similar to time turners, and the easiest way to lose the game is not by getting shot or crushed in security doors, but by losing track of previous instances of yourself and bumping into them to ruin the consistency of the timeline.
Of course, the developer didn’t get to the end of the game he had in mind, mostly because the final stage was supposed to be a conflict with an opponent who could also travel through time. I wound up trying to recreate it with a different engine (with the original developer’s permission), and got stuck at about the same point.
I also was able to create a paradox that didn’t trigger game over (in the original, not my reconstruction, though it works in mine as well). There is a part where you need to get an armed guard to shoot another guard, but nothing is stopping you from then going back in time and killing the armed guard before he could shoot the other… and this does not interfere with anything else you did that relied on the other guard being dead. It seems patchable, but still...
The developer’s strategy for the timetraveling boss AI, in as much as he told me, was to calculate where it could be within so many ticks, predict where it would move to, and have “future” instances spawn there. This doesn’t sound like it could take into account your actions (only how far you could travel spatially within x ticks), and doesn’t account for the fact that the only limits on your abilities are that you can’t travel back to before you last woke up, or later than has already occurred naturally. Oh, and it does prevent the sort of past/future interactions we see in HPMoR, or with the patronis in Prisoner of Azkaban. So you strictly avoid observing your future selves, while future you can observe all previous instances of you, provided the universe remains consistent.
So I suppose the difference here is that the timetraveler from the future is the one who experiences the results of the timetravel. Past you has to rescue future you before future you needs rescuing, but future you can do nothing for past you. So it’s what time turners would look like if the guidelines from the ministry of magic were strictly followed.
I might try to compute PoA type events by considering all timetravel-capable individuals, or individuals likely to become capable of timetravel within the limits of the ability, then calculate how they are most likely to react to a situation given foreknowledge… at which point this would be the outcome, and that individual would be required to have that outcome happen, or break temporal consistency. So if I knew of a timetraveler in vacinity of a life-threatening situation, and knew that said entity would try to prevent it if given the chance, I would calculate what they would be most likely to do, and make it happen. So in the case of Temporal, if I was, say, trapped in the presence of several armed guards that I did not believe I could escape, I might have the game try to calculate ways that a future instance could come to the rescue, and have it generate an instance to do just that, but then throw game over if you fail to make it happen.
This doesn’t strike me as complete, but I kinda want to try it.
I should probably have mentioned what happened the day after my previous comment on this post, but was worried I was getting annoying.
I decided to test the teleportation method I used in dreams while awake, fully realizing that this was a very silly idea.
At first, I selected a destination that would be distinct enough from where I was at the time. With the target as a mobile home, and me in a place with a solid foundation, all I had to do was take one step to be convinced it hadn’t worked. I then decided to try a destination more similar to my actual location. Such a destination quickly came to mind, and I moved to the place I considered most similar (the hallway). Though I couldn’t help but go over in my head all of the little details that gave away how different the two locations were in spite of this; acoustics, differences in the rooms that would be clear as soon as I left the hallway, and especially the ambient odors.
Thoroughly primed to expect nothing, I stepped out of the hallway… and experienced genuine surprise as to where I was. It seems that, even though I was focusing on everything against me confusing the two places intellectually, the part of my brain aware of the setting had been convinced I was already at the destination! I’ve actually tried self-deception regarding setting in the past (more so around ages 12-13), without any success; that tearing the idea apart in detail somehow actually made it work was surprising, and something I kinda wish I could design experiments for and actually find some use for.
Improving my updating on priors regarding setting in dreams has been less exciting. I’ll need to try and remember to ask myself about the setting and how I got there if ever I find myself wondering.
I’d always assumed it was related to Veres / Latin for truth.
I think EY might just not be familiar with the physiology of children. Didn’t the original version of chapter 7 imply that Draco couldn’t get an erection? Puberty is nothing resembling a requirement for those. And the alternate version of “boy who lived gets Draco Malfoy Pregnant” had female Draco as 13, when it would have made more sense for Harry to be the older one (boys hit puberty later on average than girls).
I wouldn’t, because a simulation of me is effectively a copy, and having a copy lying around would not keep me from dying. It’s not like I know a huge number of people would be thrilled at having a simulation of me to interact with (and probably annoy, hehehe). Having a simulation of me while I’m still alive, though, would probably come in handy, so it’s not an idea to which I am opposed. I just don’t see it making anything with a chance of preserving this instance of me redundant.
I remember having a response to either this article or one of its comments, but then a few hours happened before I was actually able to register (I physically can’t solve capchas and managed to overlook a couple important details in how to use the add-on that I finally decided to install so I could register here. And I ramble without paying enough attention to the readability of my sentences, apparently.)
Anyway, I’ve gotten myself into a mindset in which I can only think of approaches to my current problems that work if something highly improbable were to happen. (This usually involves either a bennevalent genie or a rather specific form of timetravel...). So if I find myself in the 1990s, I’ll have something vaguely resembling a plan, but that doesn’t help me if things continue as they have been. Seeing as rationality should win, I think it’s pretty safe to say this behavior is irrational. But I keep wanting to dive into tangents that consist of me whining about my situation as though doing so would somehow absorb everyone else’s problem solving skills for my own benefit, so I’ll stop now and reread more from the sequences.