jpulgarin

• jpulgarin 3 Nov 2012 23:20 UTC

  33 points

  on: 2012 Less Wrong Cen­sus/​Survey

  Do casual sex partners count under the “Number of Current Partners” question?

  The instructions tell me that higher numbers are for “polyamorous relationships” which makes it seem like a monogamous person who has multiple casual sex partners should answer 0 for that question.

• jpulgarin 6 Feb 2012 3:00 UTC

  24 points

  in reply to: wmorgan’s comment on: What are you work­ing on? Fe­bru­ary 2012

  I noticed throughout your post you said “turns out she didn’t like me” twice, as if this was a simple boolean value that you have to find out the value of.

  The truth is that attraction is pretty malleable and it’s totally possible that your friend had romantic interest in you which disappeared while having dinner with her, or that the potential date that cancelled on you twice was turned off through non-physical interactions (texts, phonecalls).

  Your 3 step action plan sounds solid though. The fundamentals of pick up artistry will also help a ton.

• jpulgarin 5 Feb 2012 16:03 UTC

  18 points

  on: What are you work­ing on? Fe­bru­ary 2012

  I am currently trying to become really socially effective. During the next 8 months I plan to:

  • Take voice coaching *

  • Take a public presentation class at my University *

  • Join debate club *

  • Join toastmasters *

  • Get a telemarketing job

  • Get a door-to-door sales job

  • Become a competent pick-up-artist

  • Take an improv acting class

  “*” means I’m currently doing this activity.

• jpulgarin 12 Dec 2011 8:39 UTC

  15 points

  in reply to: Dreaded_Anomaly’s comment on: khan Academy—Ra­tion­al­ity se­ries?

  Creating good exercises for traditional concepts that form the building blocks of rationality is probably the best way to go about this. Once you’ve shown that you can create engaging exercises, and have formed relationships with people at Khan Academy, your suggestions will have more weight and you can create more experimental type exercises. Sal can only create about 10 videos a day, and the requests he gets from teachers using Khan Academy in actual classrooms (or from the people giving him funding) probably trump those he gets from people on a rationality blog.

  For anyone reading this who wants to create an exercise teaching Bayes’ Theorem, first read the Github Wiki. You can also get help from Khan Academy employees and volunteers in the HipChat room.

  I’m an ex-intern at Khan Academy (who worked quite a bit on the exercise framework) so feel free to email me any questions or to get me to look at your pull request. My email is jp@julianpulgarin.com.

• jpulgarin 5 Feb 2012 16:32 UTC

  12 points

  in reply to: Pfft’s comment on: What are you work­ing on? Fe­bru­ary 2012

  I used a combination of google and reddit.com/​​r/​​waterloo to find voice coaches in my city (Waterloo). I settled on the two that looked best, and am now getting 1 half hour session a week from each of them to A/​​B test which one is better. It costs $20 per half hour session.

  I told them that my goal was to have a captivating voice that gets people’s attention in small/​large groups. They both said that learning how to sing was really important in terms of my stated goals, so right now I’m learning the basics of singing. This includes how to warm up your voice, properly breathing with your diaphragm, bringing up the soft-palette on command, etc...

  We also go over the speeches that I am going to present in my public presentation class, which I find incredibly useful. For example, we’ll go over the same sentence in a paragraph about 15 times, ensuring that I have correct diction, tone of voice etc...

• jpulgarin 23 Oct 2011 0:52 UTC

  8 points

  on: At­ten­tion Lurk­ers: Please say hi

  Hi

Meetup : First Cali, Colom­bia meetup

• jpulgarin 5 Nov 2012 5:41 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: adamisom’s comment on: 2012 Less Wrong Cen­sus/​Survey

  Largely a result of Salsa dancing.

• jpulgarin 11 Oct 2011 8:46 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: ftay’s comment on: What to do af­ter col­lege?

  There’s not that many legal hoops at all. WIth a bachelor’s degree it’s pretty simple to get an H-1B visa. I’m from Canada and a ton of my friends get jobs at tech companies after graduation with no problem. Larger companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Zynga are obviously more open to this type of thing, but many of my friends have gotten jobs at early-stage startups as well. You can also start your own tech startup via this “loophole”.

  You may also want to look at the expected value of being one of the early engineers at a tech startup. My prior is that it is significantly lower than the expected value of starting one.

• jpulgarin 6 Feb 2012 3:01 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: jimmy’s comment on: What are you work­ing on? Fe­bru­ary 2012

  I’m totally willing to by hypnotized by you. I’m also willing to bet I cannot be hypnotized.

• jpulgarin 24 Jan 2012 5:39 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: RobertLumley’s comment on: Tell LessWrong about your char­i­ta­ble donations

  One wouldn’t put all of one’s money into one stock in the market because we have decreasing marginal utility towards money. If we didn’t and all we wanted was the highest expected value (which is how we should optimize for charity), then we would put our money into the stock that is likeliest to make us the most money.

  In other words, I don’t want to have a minimum number of lives saved—I want to maximize the number of lives I save.

Meetup : Water­loo Meetup

• jpulgarin 4 Nov 2012 23:50 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: adamisom’s comment on: 2012 Less Wrong Cen­sus/​Survey

  Why?

• jpulgarin 30 Apr 2012 18:54 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: daenerys’s comment on: Ex­per­i­ment: a good re­searcher is hard to find

  I’m interested.

• jpulgarin 10 Apr 2012 0:04 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: curiousepic’s comment on: Mini­camps on Ra­tion­al­ity and Awe­some­ness: May 11-13, June 22-24, and July 21-28

  The food at RBC was awesome, mostly due to a small number of attendees being very good cooks. Many of us also had similar fitness goals with regards to gaining muscle, so we had a 25 pound tub of protein, and cooked high-protein meals.

  My diet has been nowhere near as good since leaving RBC.

• jpulgarin 19 Mar 2012 4:01 UTC

  4 points

  on: Sugges­tions on tech de­vice/​gear pur­chas­ing?

  A kindle has finally allowed me to start reading one book per week, something I’ve been trying to do for quite a while now with little success. The ability to buy books instantly, and the fact that it’s much easier to take along than an actual book, means I get a ton more reading done. The ability to highlight and have it automatically sync to Amazon servers makes Anki deck making A LOT easier.

  You can also sell your gift card for ~80% of its value (just google “sell gift card”).

• jpulgarin 6 Feb 2012 10:51 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Which Col­lege Ma­jor?

  I’ve spoken to Carl about the subject and he pointed me to this paper: http://​​www.nber.org/​​papers/​​w14219

  This paper puts the success rate of venture-backed companies at ~18%.

• jpulgarin 6 Feb 2012 10:39 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: jimmy’s comment on: What are you work­ing on? Fe­bru­ary 2012

  Name amnesia (I saw you mention this on the link you gave).

  I think this as a result of:

  1. My prior that you’re a good hypnotist

  2. My prior that I am a suggestible person

  3. My prior that this can be done through online means

• jpulgarin 10 Apr 2012 0:07 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: David Althaus’s comment on: Mini­camps on Ra­tion­al­ity and Awe­some­ness: May 11-13, June 22-24, and July 21-28

  Jasen Murray suggested specific techniques and specific resources, which I unfortunately cannot remember (I was not that interested in that part of RBC).

• jpulgarin 20 Apr 2020 10:36 UTC

  2 points

  on: The Car­toon Guide to Löb’s Theorem

  I don’t think there’s a flaw in this argument. I’m pretty sure that $\neg \square C\to C$ is a theorem of PA for any sentence $C$. However, even if we consider $C$ to be a sentence like $2=1$, that does not mean that we can conclude that $C$ is a theorem of PA, since proving that there doesn’t exist a proof for a given sentence in PA is equivalent to proving that PA is consistent, which is not possible if we assume that PA is consistent.