Kevin
Probably more like $3500 in the Bay Area.
Lasik circa 2013 is way, way, way better than Lasik circa 2003. It’s mostly done by machine based on a precalculated map of your eye. Correcting higher order aberrations improves aspects of your vision that can’t be improved by glasses or contacts. To me, this feels like vastly improved 3d vision resolution. I can see the intricate structure of the leaves of trees much better than before.
The cost is reasonable enough when amortized over a decade. Lasik sort of wears off over time, so worst case, plan on getting your eyes lasered every decade. Or, plan on getting them lasered for a decade or two, and then get a lens replacement when they can come with high resolution heads up displays.
I knew that home film studio would be useful for something...
In the crazy economics of Bay Area housing, driveway parking for a van in a desirable location with electricity and shower access is $200-$300/month.
For something widely and intuitively believed to be true, I haven’t seen the evidence.
1) There isn’t that much of a pragmatic difference between whether the money is going to the workshop cost or to keep the CFAR doors open year round. CFAR needs to keep the doors open year round in order to continue to be able to host workshops and keep developing and refining curriculum. The venues and food are always great, but not $1000/night nice.
2) There’s something about the weekend retreat format that allows for a really strongly transformative experience. Your time at a CFAR workshop somehow feels more significant than your time in everyday life, like each moment is just pulsing with more of the very fiber that gives reality its existence. This also results in some optimization for remembering self—the moments at the CFAR workshop feel like something that will be remembered and deconstructed for far longer than the experience itself lasts. And there is a neat change towards increased emotional openness that happens over the course of spending such an intense weekend with new friends. Also, the kinds of people that attend $3900 weekend workshops can make for incredibly high value networking.
3) I expect it will happen eventually, sure.
Agreed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amfonelic_acid , an incredibly potent dopamine reuptake inhibitor, was discovered while investigating antibiotics.
Inulin?
We could just have a meta thread on Less Wrong.
See this (somewhat unreasonable) speculation from Paul Graham that bitcoin was created by a government. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5547423
It’s a possibility, I think, but it would be a very political issue if it happened, and I would expect the US Department of State to intervene to prevent it.
You can hire remote assistants (typically in the Phillipines) to do this for you via a Skype window for about $1/hour. I thought someone from here was doing that?
yawn
Can you please stop with this meta discussion?
I banned the last discussion post on the Basilisk, not Eliezer. I’ll let this one stand for now as you’ve put some effort into this post. However, I believe that these meta discussions are as annoyingly toxic as anything at all on Less Wrong. You are not doing yourself or anyone else any favors by continuing to ride this.
The reputational damage to Less Wrong has been done. Is there really anything to be gained by flipping moderation policy?
At this point, let’s not taunt people with the right kind of mental pathology to be made very uncomfortable by the basilisk or meta-set of basilisks.
At this point it is this annoying, toxic meta discussion that is the problem.
Yup.
Even when they do have it in their hypothesis space, it still gets mangled. I recently got a follow-up email from someone that still thought I was Singularity University. I had briefly explained to him about how SU had acquired the Singularity Summit from us, and his follow-up email said “now that you have acquired the Singularity Summit, you may be interested in my product...”
IRMI?
irm-y? Sounds like squirm. Or the name Erma.
Offering everyone modafinil or something at the beginning of future workshops might help with this.
It would help, but would inevitably offend people and not at all worth the consequences.
No, I was being serious, thinking that federal prisons are a great deal safer than state and county prisons. A cursory search says this may be marginally true but not to the extent that I should have reasonably claimed that the US Federal prison system doesn’t have a rape problem. Clearly there is a rape problem.
I just meant that paying $300/month for driveway parking would seem crazy to the large set of people used to paying $300/month or less for nice housing inside in various other parts of the world.