I up vote meetup posts because running a meetup is work, and is undervalued in this community.
EvelynM
I noticed the distinction between wanting and liking as a result of my meditation practice. I began to derive great pleasure from very simple things, like the quality of an intake of breath, or the color combination of trees and sky.
And, I began to notice a significant decrease in compulsive wanting, such as for excess food, and for any amount of alcohol.
I also noticed a significant decrease in my startle reflex.
Similar results have been reported from Davidson’s lab at the University of Wisconsin. http://psyphz.psych.wisc.edu/
An external view of your life and health, from a trusted professional, may help you identify causes of your discomfort and, most importantly, strategies to improve your life.
Thanks for the review.
A more recent book on Set Theory: Basic Set Theory—A. Shen, Independent University of Moscow, and N. K. Vereshchagin, Moscow State Lomonosov University—AMS, 2002, 116 pp., Softcover, ISBN-10: 0-8218-2731-6, ISBN-13: 978-0-8218-2731-4, List: US$24, All AMS Members: US$19.20, STML/17
I found it in the American Mathematical Society for Student’s series, which is highly recommended on mathoverflow.com: http://www.ams.org/bookstore/stmlseries
“Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.” Bertrand Russell
- 2 Mar 2012 2:01 UTC; 7 points) 's comment on Rationality Quotes March 2012 by (
What do you aspire to knit?
This looks to me to be a recipe for adhering to a standard set of documents and roles, not a recipe for empirically investigating reality as it is, together with other investigators.
On [5], just saying you’re avoiding a gender stereotype is different than actually avoiding it.
This worked “dat ← read.csv(‘http://raikoth.net/Stuff/LessWrong/for_public.csv’)”
I have Android:
Sleep duration data collection (Sleepbot)
Sleepiness forecast (Sleep watcher)
Google Drive (writing/spreadsheet)
White noise/nature sounds for going to sleep (Lightning bug)
Bed lamp (full screen light)
Notes (Catch)
Google Tasks integration (gtasks)
Calendar
Countdown and count up timer
Sudoku
Streaming audio (SomaFM)
Fitness improvement (100 Squats)
Camera/Photo manipulation (Painteresque/Vignette/Paper Camera)
Knitting pattern counter/row counter
Habit building reminder (Beeminder/Habit streak/FailLog/TaskLife)
Daily diary
Rain forecast for where I am (SkyMotion)
Shared grocery list
Current images of earth cloud cover and of the sun (Solaris)
Current wave height, temperature and other data covering the whole earth (Earth Now)
Dual-n-back
IRC client (Android IRC)
walk tracking (MyTracks)
Psychological first aid (The Tools)
Work timer (Pomodroido)
When should I call my family again (Nextcall)
That is a hard thing you’ve done well. For all the people who will never thank you for this, I thank you.
Hey! I resemble that remark. Or at least, I hope I do.
I’m an outlier here on both gender and age scales. And spending time within this community is on the short list of best things I’ve ever done.
I got mine done last year. The practical benefit I received was discovering I was not at increased risk of any significant illness, including those which had occurred in my family, which relieved a source of minor worry.
Other than that, mostly curiosity satisfaction, and the opportunity to follow along with SNP research in a more personally significant way.
The reference I’ve been suggesting for Python is http://learnpythonthehardway.org/
A way I’ve found effective for learning beyond the basics, is to tweak existing programs. github.com has a massive amount of code for you to look at, to copy and change, searchable in many ways, including by programming language.
Learning programming is similar in difficulty to the project of becoming a clearer thinker, and as useful.
You may want to ask Yvain for assistance.
I object to your attributing this failure mode mostly to women, without additional support.
That’s an unhelpful, unthoughtful answer. You can do better.
“Optimizing Reality”
The article linked to is interesting, but your post isn’t detailed enough to indicate what the story is actually about.
An unusual form of lottery, with capped big jackpots, and distribution of excess funds to the remaining lower winning levels, attracted large betting pools because the state lottery officials had unintentionally created a positive expectation bet.
Some notes from the paper.
The distinction between Intention questions (“Do you plan on voting in the next election?”) and hypothetical questions (“If you were called to serve on the jury, would you be able to vote for the death penalty?”) was new to me.
Intention questions prime behavior positively when you already have positive beliefs.
″...Hypothetical questions may activate and update specific aspects of attitudes based on the new information they provide.”
So, hypotheticals may be context setting, rather than behavior inducing.
They discuss question-behavior and support theory papers. To make claims about “accessibility as an implicit mechanism underlying the impact of hypothetical questions on behavior”. Accessiblity is how easily an idea comes to mind. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attitude_(psychology).
Moderately large studies N=99, N=250. more to follow
I’m working on a novel,
Walking 60 minutes six days a week. Eating paleo. Glad I stopped drinking milk. Continuing to refine my supplement stack.
Planning house renovations for the fall.
Planning a software project to aid in cognitive calibration.
Successfully meeting new people in a variety of on the way by daily encounters.
Testing a new trading system.
Along with the usual running a business, reading a lot, studying statistics, programming python...
Gwern, you’re an inspiration to us all.