If the Bayesian Conspiracy ever happens, the underground area they meet in should be called the Bayesment.
falenas108
Karma: 2,403
Natural experiments: I’ve been trying a new acne wash for the past 6 months, and although I felt like it was working, I wasn’t sure. Then, the other day when I was applying it to my back, my partner noticed there was an area I wasn’t reaching. In fact, there was an entire line on my back where I wasn’t stretching enough to get the wash on. This line coincided exactly with a line of acne, while the rest of my back was clear.
Now I know the wash works for me.
Related: http://xkcd.com/700/
The Importance of Research
I think the first question was either discussed in the sequences, or in a post sometime a while back. This makes the result for that question far less convincing, although the overall data still definitely shows a correlation.
Maybe there should be an box to check for “I have seen this problem before,” so we could toss out those answers.
Successfully acted in my first theater production where I had actual lines I was saying to an audience. I have a mild form of dyslexia, and I have a problem where I often paraphrase things, so being able to comfortably deliver a series of lines exactly while under stress from having an audience is a big deal for me.
There’s a recommendation for 150 minutes of exercise/week, but this isn’t sound. People who report being active have better health. People who are fitter have better health. These are not evidence that having a person with low activity take up exercise will make them healthier.
I’m not sure where this statement comes from. Googling “exercise experiment health” in google scholar has the first 8 results be experiments, where they took an group of inactive people and made them exercise, and they showed improvement over people who did not. I didn’t look beyond the first 8, but I suspect there are many more
Two studies which find that lifestyle intervention has no effect on CVD in diabetics. [11:00] One study which found that lifestyle intervention prevents Type II but doesn’t affect microvascular disease (blindness and ulcers). [I’m not sure what this means. Maybe people can have the ill effects of Type II without the disease showing up in their blood sugar levels?] There are no supervised exercise-only intervention studies which show that exercise prevents long term disease progression.
Yes there are. Google “exercise cvd”, you’ll find several that show improvement.
It looks as though modern hunter gatherers expend about as much energy/mass as Americans on the east coast do.
The only relavent result I could find says the opposite: http://www.nature.com/ijo/journal/v29/n1/abs/0802842a.html
12% of healthy people make their blood pressure higher by exercising 150 minutes a week. 20% get little or no improvement. [42:00] Graphs of low responders for aerobic capacity, muscle mass, and insulin sensitivity.
Mixed results, not enough to show a firm conclusion either way.
Bottom line, the speaker appears to be heavily cherry-picking the studies he shows.
To be fair to LessWrong, although we do encourage quitting religion, we don’t condemn attending. This post got 44 upvotes, and a decent chunk of the post was explaining how she went to church. I personally think the “don’t attend church” mentality is more about the path being closed to us than anything against it.
Although it does cause some hiveminding, I like that the votes are visible to everyone. Many times I’m just skimming past comments, and if I see a +20 I know the person probably said something important, whereas otherwise I might have skipped over it.
In fact, it’s worse than this. Job A is subordinate to job B. You get promoted to job B if you are better at job A than your peers, even though the skill sets may be entirely unrelated. This lowers the average performance on job A, and puts someone new in charge who may not be good at job B.
This isn’t an entirely fair analysis, because often being good just means being willing to put in an actual effort to the job, which is transferrable. And this is basically how promotions work everywhere. But it’s still a worrisome model.
Edit: I talked to my friend who’s father is in the military, and she says this: “In the military, my dad says you want to be the guy they can replace. You want to streamline things as best you can, fill your role, and do what you can to make the whole system run better, but without YOU specifically. Because they don’t want to promote someone who they need where he is”
Thank you for doing this.
I was still posting on LW after the downvoting started, but I was definitely coming to the site less, reading less, and especially posting less. I’m not sure if was entirely due to the downvoting, as it started about when people were saying the quality of posts started to decrease. But for me, just going on to LW and seeing the decreased karma became a bit of an ugh field.
I’ve been systematically downvoted for the past 16 days. Every day or two, I’d lose about 10 karma. So far, I’ve lost a total of about 160 karma.
It’s not just somebody just going through my comments and downvoting the ones they disagree with. Even a comment where I said “thanks” when somebody pointed out a formatting error in my comments is now at −1.
I’m not sure what can/should be done about this, but I thought I should post it here. And if the person who did this is here and there is a reason, I would appreciate it if you would say it here.
The nocebo effect is evidence against this hypothesis.
ETA: Also, partial transfiguration. Harry shouldn’t get it right that quickly.
I think the point of that was partial transfiguration was a low hanging fruit that could be done fairly easily, but only if you had the right mindset. Other than having to hold timelessness in his head, it’s not any harder than regular transfiguration.
I have the feeling that this may not be the best post to show people who are predisposed to dislike rationality.
I’m also one of those target. Literally every comment I have ever made has been downvoted, 10 downvotes a day, for a few months. This happened until whoever was doing it reached my oldest comment. Recent comments are also downvoted.
Not only is mass downvoting feel pretty terrible, it also messes up the purpose of voting. Voting is meant to be a signal of how useful the community thinks a person’s comments are, and that’s no longer true of my votes or any other victim of downvoting.
There’s a simple utility calculation going on here. I’d say the chances of having cancer given your dentist says you might have it is much higher than .01%. Without doing any research, I think it’s safe to assume it is at least 10%, probably more.
So, you have a 90% of wasting $1000 and mildly inconveniencing yourself for a few days, vs. a 10% chance of having major oral problems in the future because you didn’t get this treatment. Plus all the social stigma you mentioned earlier. With this analysis, it seems perfectly reasonable to go through with the biopsy.
I think at least a large part of the slowness on publishing TDT is due to his procrastination habits with publishable papers, which he openly acknowledges.
Although this may be a personal problem of his, it doesn’t say anything against the ideas he has.
The thing is, we support his trolling.
From chapter 38, when Harry buys the Quibbler:
EDIT: Then,
Which is also true, because of Voldemort inside him. Which leaves....