Software engineering, parenting, cognition, meditation, other
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Gunnar_Zarncke
Karma: 9,413
OK. I already mentioned that I’m preparing a longer post about it, but I didn’t brag about it:
Despite being left by my wife for a younger guy after 15 years and 4 children I have acted sensible, rational you might say, and bought a house, negotiated a fair marriage contract (separation of property), completed a much overdue freelance project and cared for the children a lot. I didn’t break. I didn’t hate. I didn’t run away. I think I succeeded in saving my sanity (salvaging instead of destroying emotions from the relationship), providing a dependable, caring and safe environment for the children now and in the future (the house is on the other side of the street). And get along well with my future ex-wife and her new partner and avoid alienation of her by family and friends.
Actually all of that didn’t happen in December but it is effectively done now. The children moved into the new house on Jan, 1st and all paperwork and such is done.
I have taken the survey. I like the new format.
Brain-like AGI project “aintelope”
Soft Paternalism in Parenting
I wondered what “processed meat” means exactly and looked it up in one of the studies:
“Red meat” was defined as unprocessed meat from beef, hamburgers, lamb, pork, or game and excluding poultry, fish, or egg; “processed meat” was defined as any meat preserved by smoking, curing, or salting or addition of chemical preservatives, such as bacon, salami, sausages, hot dogs, or processed deli or luncheon meats, and excluding fish or eggs; and “total meat” was defined as the total of these 2 categories.
I also looked up “resistance training,” but it is not clear exactly what is meant, and I have to assume that it is strength training.
I recommend adding this post to the boring advice repository.
Raising numerate children
It is easier to fight for one’s principles than to live up to them.
-- Alfred Adler
ADDED: Source: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alfred_Adler
Quoted in: Phyllis Bottome, Alfred Adler: Apostle of Freedom (1939), ch. 5
Problems of Neurosis: A Book of Case Histories (1929)
: People in and adjacent to MIRI/CFAR manifest major mental health problems, significantly more often than the background rate.
I think this is true
My main complaint about this and the Leverage post is the lack of base-rate data. How many people develop mental health problems in a) normal companies, b) startups, c) small non-profits, d) cults/sects? So far, all I have seen are two cases. And in the startups I have worked at, I would also have been able to find mental health cases that could be tied to the company narrative. Humans being human narratives get woven. And the internet being the internet, some will get blown out of proportion. That doesn’t diminish the personal experience at all. I am updating only slightly on CFAR or MIRI. And basically not at all on “things look better from the outside than from the inside.”
[Link] Childcare : what the science says
Most comments show exactly one downvote without a clear pattern why. I’d guess that a single person downvoted all these short comments. Can it be that this user doesn’t know the custom of upvoting survey-takers?
ADDED 2014-10-25T16:20 UTC: The single downvotes disappeared.
ADDED 2014-10-26T21:10 UTC: The single downvotes reappeared again (at least for a lot of high scoring comments).
I’m really surprised by the clear logic of this. Lots of interesting corollaries follow:
Roles are an efficient optimization to use instead of acting dumb (provided you got trained in the right ones).
To train your chosen roles is a good idea.
Roles can be tuned to better match your needs.
It should be possible to look for missing roles covering interesting behavior patterns.
All of the above implies rational behavior can be trained.
The clear exposition makes this Main material although I wonder whether that applies to cross-posted material. I also wonder how to place this in the sequences context. Seems to be related to Teachable Rationality Skills and Rationality Dojo. It also reminds me of Geek Fu—which I did consider as rather humorous until now.
EDIT: Typos fixed.
I want to remind everybody how efficient molecular machinery is in terms of thermodynamics:
this molecule [RNA] operates quite near the limit of thermodynamic efficiency [7 kcal/mol] set by the way it is assembled [~10 kcal/mol].
and
these calculations also establish that the E. coli bacterium produces an amount of heat less than six times (220npep/42npep) as large as the absolute physical lower bound dictated by its growth rate, internal entropy production, and durability.
From an article Statistical Physics of Self-replication by Jeremy England
deriving a lower bound for the amount of heat that is produced during a process of self-replication in a system coupled to a thermal bath. We find that the minimum value for the physically allowed rate of heat production is determined by the growth rate, internal entropy, and durability of the replicator, and we discuss the implications of this finding for bacterial cell division, as well as for the pre-biotic emergence of self-replicating nucleic acids.
https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.4818538That said I think that there may be many sweet spots for a combination of macroscopic and microscopic processes. Many industrial chemical processes are such combinations by providing very specialized baths of nutrients and substrates and combining efficient macroscopic flow and transport with microscopic chemical and organic reactions. But there may be more spots that allow for efficiently building up small-scale structures.
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Bed time stories with clear concepts
[Linkpost] Being Normal by Brian Caplan
Crazy Ideas Thread
[Linkpost] [Fun] CDC To Send Pamphlet On Probabilistic Thinking
[Link] Adversarially trained neural representations may already be as robust as corresponding biological neural representations
The only difference between reality and fiction is that fiction needs to be credible.
Mark Twain
Actually I found this in The topology of Seemingly impossible functional programs which is using topological methods to ‘check’ infinitely many cases in finite time. Which might even be applicable to FAI research.
Took it.
EDIT: I was surprised to find the BEM test in it. I took it some time ago and it resulted in 65-70% F and 50-60% M (as far as I can see largely because of my strong and caring relationship to my children).
I didn’t determine my digit-ratio during the test but did right now. I arrive at totally different values (between 0.91 and 1.05) depending and hand and exact points and the copier print reading gives still different values. My best guess is that it is somewhere around 0.96.