The text is beautifully condensed. And the handwritten style does help it look casual/inviting.
But the whole thing loaded significantly slower than I read. How many megabytes is this post? I haven’t waited this long for a website to load for years.
What really helps is mortality and our inbred need to leave a legacy. It is better to pick a project with low probability of success than none at all. That can help you stick with something you only estimate to have a low chance of success, at least long enough to have sunk costs kick in. Does for me anyway.
This mechanism may only work for one man projects, or work in tight knit groups like bands of musicians. Your contribution to a big project doesn’t feel like a legacy to the same degree.
That sounds a *lot* like http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/04/01/the-hour-i-first-believed/ .
It does not sound a lot like any existing variant of Panpsychism. Since the word isn’t doing any work here, I suggest you do without it.
No, the degree of outrage also depends on closeness to the victim. In this case Jews will feel closer to Israelis (the victims of Palestinians), and Muslims will feel closer to Palestinians (the victims of Israelis) so that’s what they’re outraged about. Closeness to the perpetrator is a factor I think, but I don’t expect it is stronger than closeness to the victim.
Yes! Thank you!
I’ve had similar ideas for a long time. I’ve translated three books and find that I think of many acts of communication as translations. In particular, I find it useful to think of misunderstandings as mistranslations.
To think of thinking/speaking styles as languages just plain makes sense, and I feel that when people “are on the same wavelength” what is really happening is that they’re (somewhat unusually) actually speaking the same language.
I don’t use this concept for processes inside a single mind, though. Might be worth thinking about, but a term that denotes work with explicit communications does not seem like a good fit for processes that are almost entirely implicit.
#6 is really “we want legal euthanasia” right? Might as well say it like it is.
I think legal prostitution belongs on the list as well.
And maybe an end to tax advantages for churches? Because that’s direct state funding for irrationality.
This fake frameworks thing looks quite clearly like Chaos Magic, and the reference to the Book of the Law quote “wine and strange drugs” is a dog whistle to that effect.
Some chaos magicians like to use drug experiences as ready-made containers for what Val calls the Mythic Mode. Some drugs can both increase the ability to suspend disbelief while inside the experience and make it easier to distance oneself from it when outside of it. A good description of techniques for this, with all non-scientific woo-woo strictly optional, is Julian Vayne’s “Getting Higher—The Manual of Psychedelic Ceremony”.
There’s more where that came from. I like to recommend Philip Farber’s “Meta-Magick—The Book of Atem” with a bunch of visualization-focused techniques very similar to the ones Kaj Sotola has described and demonstrated to great effect. Julian Vayne’s and Nikki Wyrd’s “The Book of Baphomet” is perhaps the best example of an artificial myth created with great artistic and poetic skill and then inhabited with significant personal results.
I posted the idea of installing very bright lights on LW five years ago and Eliezer commented there so I give myself credit for at least making that spontaneous idea more likely. And it happens to be the case I’ve been thinking about the failings of light boxes for SAD in the meantime.
What happened is that a few people experimented with light therapy, got succcess with 2500lux for two hours, decided two hours per day was infeasible outside the lab, found that they could get the same result dividing the time but multiplying the light intensity and then… just… stopped. They did studies with 10000 lux boxes and that’s a relatively expensive study so you better cooperate with a producer of such boxes. So you get some type of kickback and suddenly nobody’s interested in studying whether stronger, cheaper lights are even better. Light boxes became a medical device and magically became just as expensive as medical insurers would tolerate. That they don’t work for everyone was expected, because no depression treatment works for everyone (maybe except electroconvulsive therapy, and Ketamine but that was later). And LEDs only became cheap enough recently (five years ago they still weren’t clearly the cheapest option), so going much beyond 10000 lux presented enough of a technical challenge to make further trials pretty expensive, until recently.
Right now, you could probably do a study with SAD sufferers who have tried light boxes and found them insufficient. Give them a setup that produces like 40000 lux and fits in a normal ceiling fixture so they can have it running while they do things, rather than have to make time to sit in front of it. For a double blind control design, maybe give one group twice the brightness of the other? Have your participants log every day how much time they spent in the room with the lamp running, and how much time they spent outside. Don’t give them money but let them keep the lamp if they continue mailing their fillled out questionnaires. Should be doable at a hundred dollars per participant, and without ever physically meeting them. You still need six figures to run that study at a large enough size, and no light box maker is going to fund you.
Yes. I wonder how hard it’ll be to sleep in the things. I find sleeper trains generally a bad place to sleep, but that’s mostly because of the other passengers.
I should be disappointed, but disappointment requires surprise.
Don’t worry, you didn’t actually come across that way, Lumifer is just being a jerk again. You’re fairly new here, so you don’t yet know Lumifer prefers that kind of comment. Sorry about him, and about LW not having a mute button.
I completely agree with everything you said here.
contemporary car design is driven by law-mandated safety requirements
I don’t know about your country but in mine (Germany) the car industry has so much influence they basically write their own laws. (That’s how we got those safety requirements: They’re defense against cheaper cars from abroad.) If their business model stops being focused on general use cars, the laws will change very quickly.
a general-purpose car will spend less time sitting in a parking lot doing nothing while waiting for someone to require it
Sure! Not a problem if its TCO is pretty low. Most of those more specialized vehicles will be cheaper than general purpose cars, because they have sharply reduced capabilities. A great number of them will be pretty small, just enough to carry a single person or (in an even smaller, windowless car) a piece of cargo. Others will have to require paying a premium, but they’ll mostly be doing things general purpose cars cannot do, like transport a horse.
Side note: Some of those specialized cars will also be sold, not rented. I imagine rich parents gifting their seven year olds their own car. And as soon as someone makes what is basically just a bed on wheels, a small minority of people will live in those things.
The doctor doesn’t come to your house first because her time is more valuable than yours
That’s a good point. So maybe it starts with hairdressers.
Of course offering services at home will be most attractive to those who are new to their field and haven’t sunk costs into an office.
and second because it’s hard (=expensive) to bring along all the nurses and assistants and the medical equipment that she has around her office.
Most doctors need very little equipment most of the time. Some types of doctors (psychiatrists, dermatologists) need very little equipment period.
The cost of a driver is a minor component of the cost of renting large, expensive, luxury things. Taking it out will not make them suddenly affordable.
The main cost is insurance and autonomous vehicles means that one drops hard. The lack of a driver mostly means you can rent things out in a very large operating radius.
And, by the way, who will unload, set up, dismantle and load back into the self-driving truck all these jacuzzis and huge sound systems?
Most of the things never leave the “truck”. The vehicle is built around them, on a standardized flat chassis. Some of them will have staff, sure. For example, you’d have a bartender if you were renting out a highly specialized mobile bar that has casks of twenty different excellent whiskeys and might be popular with bachelor parties.
Also, about the “stuff that previously only millionaires or billionaires would afford” that your median-income person would be able to rent if only you take the truck driver out of the equation—literally nothing comes to my mind.
Alright. I’ll leave it at that.
They are called caravans or camper vans or RVs. They exist. Have you tried renting them? They are quite expensive to rent, much more so than hotel rooms.
You’re simply wrong about rental RVs: their prices are not much more expensive than hotel rooms anymore. (They do remain more expensive than small rental cars.) Check for yourself at places like http://www.apollorv.com/ . They’ll get cheaper by going electric (like all cars will) due to less moving parts and less repairs. They’ll get cheaper again by going autonomous (like all cars will) due to less mass for the driver cab and less accidents. So even if it was just self-driving RVs, they’d be an opportunity to disrupt stationary hotels.
But RVs are lower class than most hotel rooms, they’re cramped, they’re optimized for carrying lots of supplies and they have kitchens. A lot of people wouldn’t want to use an RV even if it was half the price of a typical hotel room. If you have a self-driving RV and you want to really tear into the market share of stationary hotels, you throw out the kitchen and most of the cupboards and put in the best bed that you can make fit and a great entertainment system.
″ for a large number of people, driving is their only reason not to drink or do drugs”—that’s, um, wrong. I have no idea how you came up with such nonsense.
Couple of years in psychiatric research.
no such thing as a “sailing license” (in most countries that I know of)
So you don’t know a lot of European countries? I don’t know a lot of non-European ones, so you may be right this isn’t a factor there.
renting sizeable boats is quite expensive
Exactly. And why? Because the risk of accidents, and the insurance to cover that, is a larger cost factor than with cars. And the main advantage of vehicle autonomy is the sharply reduced number of accidents.
Recreational boating doesn’t want fully autonomous boats, anyway
Maybe many don’t. But recreational divers and anglers and people who just need to get across the water will be happy with it.
commercial shipping already uses autopilots and still finds out that it needs people to run ships
Yes but it needs way fewer people. If you charter a yacht now, you have a crew of at least 5 people. With an autonomous yacht, you can go down to one crewmember who mostly cleans the place, and maybe a cook.
Renting a self-driving truck is not going to be cheaper than renting a regular truck
Your assertion is ludicrous. Yes it will be cheaper, and a lot. The self-driving truck doesn’t need to carry all the mass that the driver needs, including fragile points of failure such as windows, it doesn’t have mandatory stop times, it gets into way fewer accidents, it basically cannot be stolen. If you don’t think a self-driving truck company can undercut a traditional trucking company, I hope you don’t run a trucking company.
Wow, this is amazing! Thank you!
He talks about various general effects rather than specific business opportunities, so the overlap is very small, but his vision and mine seem entirely compatible.
What I failed to say is that I expect the time between production of a good and arrival at the customer to continue to shorten. I think additive manufacturing makes just in time production economical for a growing segment of goods.
Obviously the production and delivery specifics of different goods are very different. Wheat will continue to be warehoused long after jewellery and clothing have completely moved to just in time production and direct delivery. I misstated my position by not mentioning these important differences.
I say I think this transition will be slower than the others because I imagine it starts with goods that are precious, fragile or spoil quickly, i.e. the goods where you most want to minimize loading and unloading.
I don’t think trucks will be free, but I do think they’ll be much cheaper per ton per mile than they are now. Electric means the motor gets rid of most moving parts and becomes much more reliable. Autonomy means the rest of the vehicle gets rid of all the things that only a driver needs, especially the operator’s cab and mandatory stop times. A warehouse will still be cheaper in many cases (especially in rural areas), but the fraction of things that it is easier to just leave in the car can only go up.
There is a Secular Solstice in Berlin, Germany, but it happens in a small apartment so it has to be invitation only and is already full AFAIK.
Frankfurt, Germany might again be doing one but I do not know particulars.
Leipzig, Germany is not having one this year due to the place where the last couple of Solstices happened being currently infested with toddlers.