Seconded. I’d love a decent incremental reading capability.
iconreforged
Karma: 136
Where do you get your jokes? I thought of this myself, but I only have a few, and I’m not sure where to find more.
Did you ever look into this more?
All right, where can I commit time-sensitive monetary rewards to those working on this? I’d like to see it done by next week, and I’d like to see it by about $50.
[LINK] Antibiotic seemingly improves decision-making in the presence of attractive women.
Also, reading here, I get the sense that this isn’t the first time minocycline has been used to aid sober decision making.
Scientists think the drug may clear the brain of distractions like, in this case, arousal, to improve focus for making rational decisions. And these scientists aren’t the first to show that the antibiotic has effects other than getting rid of zits. Other studies have demonstrated that minocycline can improve patients’ focus on social cues, encourage sober decision making and improve the symptoms associated with schizophrenia and depression.
I was excited to program this myself and you beat me to it!
Thanks! This will beat doing the random draw by hand.
A very small number of people read LW, and a fraction of those people are going to apply any status hacks. Only a small number of people are going to apply status hacks, and they are the people who are diligent enough to research and implement them.
Posting such hacks is not going to push everyone to universally adopt them and return everyone to the previous status quo.
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HIKE: A Group Dynamics Case Study
On the form, there is a question about Nicotine Usage. Is nicotine usage being conflated with smoking here?
I attended a talk by Julian Savulescu today, and I’m typing up some notes for a discussion-level post.
Am I mistaken, or is this a case of Coasian bargaining?
Even if you know that signaling is stupid, it doesn’t escape the cost of not signaling.
It’s a longstanding trope that Eliezer gets a lot of flack for having no formal education. Formal education is not the only way to gain knowledge, but it is a way of signaling knowledge, and it’s not very easy to fake (Not so easy to fake that it falls apart as a credential on its own). Has anyone toyed around with the idea of sending him off to get a math degree somewhere? He might learn something, and if not it’s a breezy recap of what he already knows. He comes out the other side without the eternal “has no formal education” tagline, and a whole new slew of acquaintances.
Now, I understand that there may be good reasons not to, and I’d very much appreciate someone pointing me to any previous discussion in which this has been ruled out. Otherwise, how feasible does it sound to crowdfund a “Here’s your tuition and an extra sum of money to cover the opportunity cost of your time, I don’t care how unfair it is that people won’t take you seriously without credentials, go study something useful, make friends with your professors, and get out with the minimum number of credits possible” scholarship?
Eddie has some math talent. He can invest some time, money, and effort C to get a degree, which allows other people to discern that he has a higher probability of having that math talent. This higher probability confers some benefit in that other people will more readily take his advice in mathematical matters, or talk with him about his math.
The fun twist is that Eddie lives in a society with many other individuals with varying degrees of math talent, each of whom can expend C to get a degree and the associated benefits. People with almost no mathematical talent have a prohibitively high C, because even if they can pony up the time and money, they have to work very hard to fake their way through. But people with high math ability often choose to stand out by getting the degree, because their C is relatively lower, and a very high proportion of them get degrees. This creates a high association between degrees and mathematical ability, and makes it unlikely to see high mathematical ability in the absence of a degree.
That’s the basic idea, plus degrees signal other things which may be completely unrelated to math, but are still nice. Even in the case where the degree has no causal effect no math ability, there are benefits to having one, in that the other math people can judge very quickly that they’re interested in talking to you.
Hopefully that demonstrates that I understand signalling. My question is about the costs and benefits of a particular signal.
Impressing Thiel is independent of a future degree or not, because he’s already impressed. Where’s the next billionaire going to come from, and will they coincidentally also be as contrarian as Thiel? Maybe MIRI doesn’t need another billionaire, but I don’t think they’d turn one away.
I’m not certain that getting a degree now counts as the traditional route. Also, I don’t think that an additional degree is particularly damaging to his image. People aren’t going to lose interest in FAI if he sells out and gets a traditional degree. Or they are and I have no idea what kind of people are involved.
Well, yes, there is going to be some inevitable crap, but the purpose of signalling is so that you could impress a much larger pool of people. So it might not be much help for gossip journalists, but it might help with the marginal professional ethicist, mathematician, or public figure. In that area, you might get some additional “Anybody who can do that must be damn impressive.”. Does the additional damn-impressive outweigh the cost? I don’t know, that’s why I’m asking.
True. It seems like the great-papers avenue is being pursued full-steam these days with MIRI, but I wonder if they’re going to run out of low-hanging fruit to publish, or if mainstream academia is going to drag their heels replying to them.
I watched an awesome movie, and now I’m coasting in far mode. I really like being in far mode, but is this useful? What if I don’t want to lose my awesome-movie high?
Are there some things that far mode is especially good for? Should I be managing finances in this state? Reading a textbook? Is far mode instrumentally valuable in any way? Or should I make the unfortunate transition back to near mode?