I meant to skip some of the extra credit questions (the ones about the changeability of personality in particular), but wound up stuck answering one of them by software glitch on my computer (I couldn’t uncheck it entirely, but at least tried to keep it from being noise).
CAE_Jones
That’s not a bad discussion to have, though! What if showering more than two or three times a week causes your back to break out? What if rinsing every other day is good, but using shampoo/soap/etc that often causes unwanted side effects? What if the optimal frequency of showers for keeping body-odor minimized is every third day, and showering every day or every other day actually makes BO worse? We need data!
(I’m not being sarcastic. However, the optimal showering strategy is likely to vary from person to person, and be influenced by diet, physical activity, genetics, environment, etc.)
So, you’ve noticed you are confused, and concluded that the false belief must be “the anti-aging community contains a non-negligible number of rational munchkin types”, rather than “storing tissue samples is cheap, flawless, reliable, and useful”?
You say you’ve asked loads of people. What did they say? “No, I didn’t do that. I dunno why.”? Did no one have an explanation like “I hadn’t thought of it” / “I never heard of it” / “It’s poorly advertised and I don’t know who to call” / “It’s too expensive for too little pay off; let’s fund cryonics / rejuvination therapy instead” / “It doesn’t actually work the way you think” / anything at all? It sounds like that’s what you’re saying, but did no one at least try to rationalize it? Even with “That sounds dumb” or just laughing it off?
Not even one rationalization, even a feeble one?
That seems unlikely.
Not just “I’d expect people to be smarter than that”, but “I’d expect people to make at least a tiny effort to justify their preference when it is called into question, even if by just saying ‘that is my preference’”. Maybe your responses were mostly noise, but what sort of noise?
If it’s just that people haven’t even heard of it, then clearly the solution is to raise awareness. If it’s that people aren’t getting sufficiently excited, then the solution is to do our own cost/benefit analysis, and if it still works out in favor of tissue-freezing, raise awareness of that.
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).
It’s also possible that he wanted to confirm the validity of the information he got from Quirrell. If Quirrell and Dumbledore agree on something, it’s probably true to the best anyone can tell, or at least that’s probably how Harry sees it.
(my reply wound up over 8kb long, but I don’t think it’s general enough to turn into a discussion article.)
Reading this and its comments immediately made me think of the current status of braille, where technology has completely failed to keep up with the mainstream, and now many people are claiming that braille is outdated and they’ll just use text-to-speech for everything. (Disclaimer: I was taught braille starting from kindergarten, and picked it up fast and thoroughly. A lot of anti-braille people appear to have had a very hard time learning it and can’t actually read any quicker than I could read large print when my vision was at its best. So I have to acknowledge some kinda privilege when talking about the subject. I’ll also acknowledge that mastery of braille and financial/academic/etc success are positively correlated among blind Americans, according to all the not-incredibly-transparent sources I’ve found.)
Some of the points made here about text in general apply to braille, some are just the opposite, and some depend entirely on the audio/video/tactual affinities of the specific user. For example:
•You can’t play background music while having a video conversation or recording audio or video content.
Is one of the arguments I use in favor of braille whenever the subject comes up, and it’s easily extended to consumption: noise and reading, noise and writing, privacy, the need/lack for headphones, all the different environments in which one can work, etc.
This, though:
•Low storage and bandwidth costs make it easy to consume over poor Internet connections and on a range of devices.
Is only technically true for braille, since braille technology is so far behind that devices are almost always bulky, expensive, cumbersome, in addition to the mainstream device to which they connect, and only the most expensive and bulkiest models display more than 40 characters at a time (so like half of one print line… and most people will get an even smaller model, because even 40 characters is bulky, expensive, and generally more than trivially inconvenient to use on anything but a dedicated device like the PACMate Omni). The base format, digitally, is the same and can be transmited and stored easily, but everyone who can hear but not see is going to convert it to speech anyway.
•Text can be read at the user’s own pace. People who are slow at grasping the content can take time. People who are fast can read very quickly.
Applies to text-to-speech as well; most TTS has adjustable speaking rates, and it’s possible to go back and reread things (however, checking the spelling of words is a trivial inconvenience which almost no one that relies on a TTS ever uses. Ever seen me misspell something? That’ll be why. On the other hand, what types of errors count as obvious visually vs obvious audibly differ, so blind and sighted text speak tend to differ simply for readability’s sake.).
•Text is easier to search (this refers both to searching within a given piece of text and to locating a text based on some part of it or some attributes of it).
Even people who don’t care for braille in general will agree that it helps loads with math and programming for exactly this reason. If hooking a braille display to a laptop were not so bloody inconvenient (and did not require so much desk-space), I’d have one connected pretty much all the time for this alone.
•You can’t play background music while consuming audio-based content, but you can do it while consuming text.
People usually reply to this with “Use the Windows volume mixer.” (I disagree with said reply under most conditions. If I have to have music quieter than a screen reader, then a lot of the impact is reduced. And screenreader + conversation is just plain impractical.)
On the flip side, reading text requires you to have your eyes glued to the screen, which reduces your flexibility of movement. But because you can take breaks at your will, it’s not a big issue.
Depending on the device, the opposite can be true for braille; a small display, or something smaller than a novel (braille novels are enormous) can be read while walking without compromising one’s awareness of one’s surroundings (especially if one can read one-handed). Audio is dependant on the device as well, however; walking around with bulky headphones on is a terrible idea (compare texting while driving), but external speakers while going about other business in the same room is fine.
The presence of hyperlinks, share buttons, the occasional image, sidebars with more related content, etc. add a lot of value.
Braille does not do formatting well, but neither does audio, and I’ve never had access to a braille device that can actually perform the equivalent to clicking or tapping a hyperlink. This is an improvement I thought of the first time I actually had a braille display for more than 5 minutes: every braille display I’ve ever seen includes cursor-routing keys, which are basically buttons above each cell that will move the cursor to that position when clicked. The obvious thing to do is to double-click one of those to simulate a mouse-click at that spot, yet I’ve never heard of this being implemented.
There’s also such a thing as 8-dot braille, which is typically used for unicode characters, to indicate capitalization, or to indicate the position of the cursor or highlighted text. Even most braille-using techies don’t learn 8-dot unicode (and from what I can tell, that isn’t even standardized, so it’d only matter for the specific hardware/software combination that one studied with), so it’s a little disappointing that using the two extra dots for formatting or HTML effects hasn’t really caught on.
(As an example of how braille and screen readers handle HTML elements, we have links: a screen reader reads Lesswrong.com as “link Lesswrong dot com”, and on a braille display, it shows up as “lnk Lesswrong.com″. I consider the latter to be more problematic, in that it costs 4 whole cells, which is anywhere from 5% to 33% of the display!)
•One can tag friends and Facebook groups and pages, subject to some restrictions. For friends tagged, the anchor text can be shortened to any one word in their name.
Side complaint: Facebook accessibility is mixed, and blind people tend to use the mobile site, where in-line friend-tagging is not possible. (Yes, the main Facebook page is bad enough that this is more than a reasonable tradeoff.)
•Training users: The augmented text features need a loyal userbase that supports and implements them. So each augmentation needs to be introduced gradually in order to give users onboarding time.
This is so obviously applicable to anything accessibility-related that I momentarily considered not including it here.
•Performance in terms of speed and reliability: Each augmentation adds an extra layer of code, reducing the performance in terms of speed and reliability. As computers and software have gotten faster and more powerful, and the Internet companies’ revenue has increased (giving them more leeway to spend more for server space), investments in these have become more worthwhile.
Referring back to m.facebook.com Vs facebook.com: it’s very hard for accessibility technology, an extremely tiny market with little funding and lots of coordination problems due to size, to keep pace with all these augmentations. The more powerful stuff on Facebook.com gives me lag that ends in me queerying my brain for incidents in the early 2000s to try and find something comparable.
For another example: Lesswrong is usually pretty responsive to screen readers, but if a post has a large number of comments (I’ve noticed that 80 or more tends to be a good predicter), there might be enough lag in reading or loading to be inconvenient, and there is a particular feature that is actually annoying: occasionally, while reading comments, I’ll be notified of a comment’s percent positive karma, at which point the screen reader takes a whole second to get back to reading, adds more spoken formatting information (“clickable”, mostly; bold/italics/font size are almost never spoken, but screen readers are getting better about those), and once this happens once, it will almost definitely repeat if I keep scrolling. (My solution so far has been to switch to “just read everything from the cursor down” if this happens. How more or less convenient this method is depends on the screen reader. And I’m using the free one, because I’d rather not incentivize charging $800 for a screen reader.)
However, when I’ve tried using a braille display and text-to-speech simultaneously, I’ve found that, frequently, a page that will take several seconds to get a response from TTS will start displaying braille much more quickly. Considering that the screen reader is managing both, this is a little bizarre; it’d imply that the lag is in the TTS program, rather than the screen reader itself, yet different screen readers seem to render speech faster or slower on the same websites.
Which is a bit frustrating in a couple ways, seeing as Paul (the most popular candidate for the originator of said line) was talking about a literal resurrection of everyone, hopefully during his lifetime, and canon Harry then proceeded to defeat death by dying and coming back.
If Quirrell were female, “he who stands within” would refer to someone else, since “he” is masculin.
That’s pretty unlikely, though, since he’s apparently keyed into the wards as a professor, so far as anyone can tell.
(Quirrell keeping a troll shrunken/in hammerspace on his person at all times is my favorite explanation at present, even though it sounds like it should have a silliness penalty. He did mention the Hungarian Horntail in the same lecture where he mentioned the troll, and this particular theory would give more credence to the idea that he has one of those hidden somewhere as well.)
I missed September’s and got ambushed by Akratic Goblins halfway through, but I think it still counts as in the last month (or did yesterday):
I went back to college, and immediately did what I should have done years ago and made a program for viewing images as sound or braille. I never managed to compile it into a distributable .exe, though, so no one cared. But it’s still a huge step forward that I’m frustrated didn’t happen a decade ago, at least.
I was absurdly lucky: the counselor I spoke to is new and motivated to put in the necessary effort for everything, and went to high school with my stepmother; it also turns out that the in-state training center has a thirty-day trial period, during which commitment is a non-issue. They also offered to provide any required technology, be it laptops or note takers or whatever. It could start as early as the first week of February, which is early enough that I wouldn’t need to worry about security at my property. So on the whole, a surprisingly good day.
- 12 Jan 2014 20:22 UTC; 4 points) 's comment on AALWA: Ask any LessWronger anything by (
I don’t see this as a problem, really. The entire point is to have high-value discussions.
High-value discussions here, so far as is apparent to me, seem to be better described as “High-value for modestly wealthy white and ethnic Jewish city-dwelling men, many of them programmers”. If it turns out said men get enough out of this to noticeably improve the lives of the huge populations (some of which might even contain intelligent, rational individuals or subgroups), that’s all fine and well. But so far, it mostly just sounds like rich programmers signalling at each other.
Which makes me wonder what the hell I’m still doing here; in spite of not feeling particularly welcome, or getting much out of discussions, I haven’t felt like not continuing to read and sometimes comment would make a good response. Yet, since I’m almost definitely not going to be able to contribute to a world-changing AI, directly or otherwise, and don’t have money to spare for EA or xrisk reduction, I don’t see why LW should care. (Ok, so I made a thinly veiled argument for why LW should care, but I also acknowledged it was rather weak.)
I spent most of my life up until 2012 loathing the concept of needing/wanting/working for money, and being particularly annoyed when people bugging me about schoolwork would talk about the potential for losing scholarships and employment and all that mess.
I wasn’t off campus and doing an online course for two months before I realized how mind-bogglingly stupid I’d been. Well, a fraction of how stupid, anyway; the full extent of it didn’t set in until I discovered that my student loan payments were $226 more than I was receiving in SSI. Unfortunately, I think it’s safe to consider the majority of my posting on LW to be a prolonged “Oh Shiiiiiiit” at this realization. (A little of this started to set in during 2011, but on a much narrower domain that would needlessly bloat this comment to explain.)
TL;DR: I agree with the article.
I’m planning to meet with my local Department of Services for the Blind tomorrow; the stated purpose of the meeting is to discuss upcoming life changes/needs/etc. This appears to be exactly what I need at the moment, but I’m concerned that I’m not going to be optimally prepared, so I’d like to post some details here to increase the chances of useful feedback.
(For transparency’s sake: I’m legally blind, unemployed, living with my parents until they take the necessary steps to get me moved into the place I own, with student loan payments outpacing my SSI benefits by over $200/month, and stuck in the bible belt.)
The plan to move out will doubtless frame the conversation.
I’m unsure as to whether this conversation will be private (me talking to a DSB representative), or if one of my parents will sit in. Who is in earshot matters, since for all the problems I have with my parents, they are the entirety of my support system at the moment, and the less risk to that relationship the better.
Most important topic: Training. My skills across the board are pathetic, yet I’ve been unable to improve them independently in the time since I’ve realized this (most of the past year and a half, IIRC). I find myself drawn toward the National Federation of the Blind’s training centers, but those involve a hefty time investment (six months), and the prices I’ve found suggest it would cost ~$3600/month, not to mention travel. This is exactly the sort of thing I would expect DSB to help with, but at the same time, I don’t consider it unlikely that I’ll be pushed toward cheaper, more local options. (My research over the past several months has reduced my confidence that the more local options are of much value.)
I feel I would greatly benefit from a functional Notetaker. The one I was previously using has stopped functioning. I’m worried about this one; I expect that anything for which DSB provides assistance will need directing toward a tangible goal, possibly with a narrower subset than “I can get much more done with it than I could hope to with just a laptop”. (I could write an entire post on why I think Notetakers are awesome, but this is already quite lengthy.)
I’m unsure as to how I will approach these topics, or the meeting as a whole, or if there are other issues I’ve missed/neglected/been mistaken about.
I do not like being a net drain on resources; managing this correctly seems the most viable path to reversing that.
We’re getting less of Harry’s inner narrative than we did before the troll, so it’s entirely possible that he’s fully aware that Quirrell is almost definitely the big bad, but still wants him to live in spite of this.
After these latest chapters, though, I’m starting to think Harry’s mind is being blocked specifically from anything that would harm Quirrell directly. Quirrell’s perspective in chapter 89 says that he can’t influence Harry directly through their connection, but Harry’s “Dark Side” might be another matter. (How did Quirrell think talking to an Inferius like he was modifying its memories would help? He knows exactly how smart Harry is!)
- 13 Dec 2013 16:49 UTC; 29 points) 's comment on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 28, chapter 99-101 by (
Then go somewhere else. Duh. :-)
This makes it sound trivial. Would you consider it trivial for someone ship-wrecked on a Ninja Island with a peg-leg and various other piraty injuries?
In canon, the Department of Mysteries has a room filled with preserved brains, presumably for research. For unexplained reasons, it includes a quick connection to the death room (where the vale is located). Ron, under the influence of an unknown mind-altering spell (confunding?), summoned one of the brains, and it attacked him with a silvery substance that sounds like a more solid version of the typical memories put into pensives. (This left scars, and seemed to break Ron out of the spell before silencing him.). Later, someone (I forget who, but a member of the Order of the Phoenix) commented that Ron would be fine, but the marks left by thoughts were deep—implication being that the silvery ribbons that came from the brain and grappled him were thoughts.
We don’t know, based just on that evidence, that the Department of Mysteries can preserve human brains, or that said brains are capable of some form of thought in that state. What we do know is that they had tanks of the brains (I seem to remember it being several tanks, but I’m not sure), they seem to be in good condition for all that non-neurologist Harry can tell, and that they resisted Ron’s accio with a projection that a knowledgeable wizard described as thoughts.
It makes me wonder what would happen if MoR Harry broke into the Department of Mysteries in his current state. (You know, in the few minutes before he found a way to open the “no, seriously, do not open this door” door and destroyed the universe.)
That was not my intention. (If it’s any consolation, I participated in the same firestorm.)
A quick look at the first page of your recent comments shows most of your recent activity to have been in the recent “Is Less Wrong too scary to marginalized groups?” firestorm.
One of the most recent users to complain about mass downvoting also cited participation in flame-bait topics (specifically gender).
The apparent inconceivability (in this thread) of the notion that someone might disagree on a deep level with local memes without being insane is quite amazing. Typical mind fallacy, the lack of realisation that there exist unknown unknowns.
I considered posting a third-hand account in the rationality quotes of a blind couple who, in a public park and not hearing anyone else nearby, decided to have sex. They told the judge they did not know that anyone could see them; maybe they didn’t, what with plausibly having no idea what vision is capable of.
It felt too lengthy, and it wasn’t originally intended as a parable, so I decided against posting it. I think it more easily explains itself in this context, though.
Done.
I tried doing it on my phone earlier, but was having “issues” and decided to wait until I could do so on a laptop. In the mean time, I read the digit ratio comments and decided to try and measure mine.
I measured wrong, and the ruler (which is no more precise than half centimeters) did not come with me to my current location. *is sad*