Indoor rock climbing, mechanical keyboards, vacationing in Brazil, Lisp programming, and varieties of apples come to mind.
Kingoftheinternet
I don’t have a lot of strong reasons to disbelieve you, but what evidence makes you think this is so?
I think you overestimate how willing people are to read very long articles without a great reason to think it’ll be worth their time at the beginning. You have three meaty paragraphs before you even start what seems to be the article proper, and then that’s a summary of an abstract idea. Something this long needs to start with an awesome story.
Someone spending their precious time going through someone’s history to decrease their near-meaningless number as much as they possibly can is already losing. I hear about this happening so infrequently, and it’s so totally inconsequential, that I don’t think it merits thinking up/making changes to anything.
So you’re hoping people will read two other long articles so they know that this long article will be worth their time?
If you are reading this book and flipping out at every third sentence because you feel I’m insulting your intelligence, then I have three points of advice for you:
Stop reading my book. I didn’t write it for you. I wrote it for people who don’t already know everything.
Empty before you fill. You will have a hard time learning from someone with more knowledge if you already know everything.
Go learn Lisp. I hear people who know everything really like Lisp.
For everyone else who’s here to learn, just read everything as if I’m smiling and I have a mischievous little twinkle in my eye.
Introduction to Learn Python The Hard Way, by Zed A. Shaw
This is an expected utility calculation that involves a small probability of a large payoff with large margins of error. Here’s what I take as the essence of Holden’s post: “an estimate with little enough estimate error can almost be taken literally, while an estimate with large enough estimate error ends ought to be almost ignored.” I have very little confidence in both my and Academian’s estimate of which candidates winning will actually turn out to be better overall, and what the monetary value of each winning over their alternatives would actually be. Obama may seem to align with my values slightly more than Romney, but an office as powerful as the President of the US has many small, complex effects on many people’s quality of life, and we could all easily be wrong.
the problem with state-machine materialism is not that it models the world in terms of causal interactions between things-with-states; the problem is that it can’t go any deeper than that, yet apparently we can.
I may have missed the part where you explained why qualia can’t fit into a state machine-model of the universe. Where does the incompatibility come from? I’m aware that it looks like no human-designed mathematical objects have experienced qualia yet, which is some level of evidence for it being impossible, but not so strong that I think you’re justified in saying a materialist/mathematical platonist view of reality can never account for conscious experiences.
On individual comments and posts, the karma system is valuable for telling you if you’re being stupid or not, and I appreciate it for that. The total karma score is (how long you’ve been on LW) (how often you post) (how much people like what you say); it says something like “how much you contribute to this site”, which I find much less interesting, and I personally don’t care if it’s accurate.
I am, in fact, accusing people who downvote all posts by one person as using their time incorrectly; there are so many other things they could be doing that would make them happier and better-off, including nothing at all, that there’s not much excuse for going through with it.
If my karma were reduced to zero, I would continue carrying on as I do now, commenting on this and that, and my karma would from then on be a positive number I don’t pay attention to. A phlegmatic disposition has its advantages.
Mine made me learn where all the wacky symbols used in programming languages are, like {. If there’s a key on your keyboard that you didn’t learn when you first learned to touch type, but you now use, a blank keyboard will force you to learn to type it without looking at your keyboard.
The showing off is probably more important though.
I don’t think anyone would object if you gave us links and studies to follow up on...
That could definitely apply to a lot of the examples they presented. I’m still mystified by Washington D.C.: they already had a higher murder rate than the US average, then handguns were banned in 1975, then their murder rate tripled while the national average stayed fairly flat, then their murder rate came back down to its mid-70s level in the late 2000s, then the handgun ban was struck down. My current favored conclusion from that is “gun control laws themselves just don’t matter very much, and are dwarfed by other social and cultural forces.”
My strategy in these cases is usually “look for lots of facts relevant to this issue and see what stands out”. The things that jump out at me from just that page:
Many American cities/states (and the entire UK in one very interesting case) have instituted or repealed gun control laws long enough ago that we can look at what happens to violent crime before and after the law is changed. In every case that they showed me, at least, places that pass gun control laws see an increase or no real change in their violent crime rate relative to national average.
1⁄3 of incarcerated US felons claimed to have been shot at, scared off, wounded, or captured by an armed victim, but only 1⁄12 of violent crimes committed in the US ever result in a prison sentence. My interpretation of these two numbers combined is that owning a gun makes it more likely that anyone who tries to commit a violent crime against you will not be successful, and also will more likely be punished by prison time and/or being shot.
Just 8% of violent crimes are committed by someone visibly armed with a gun.
About 11,000 murders per year are committed by gun in the US (in 2008), and about 160,000 people (in 1993) claim they’ve used a gun for self-defense in a situation within the last five years where someone would have died had they not had a gun. Based on these two numbers alone, and probably not exercising as much care as I should in producing such a pithy and easily-repeatable factoid, widely available guns (in the context of American society in the recent past) prevent on the order of three deaths for every one they cause.
The relative lack of facts that would justify stronger gun control laws on that site makes me suspicious, but I don’t see anything wrong with the cited sources for any of these specific numbers.
Competitive weightlifting! Finite element analysis! Arguing with creationists on Reddit for four hours a day!
You mean in the History channel documentary and other videos on Youtube, or something else? I don’t usually like consuming knowledge in documentary form because it’s 1. slower than reading and 2. much easier to make emotion-based/nonsensical arguments without your audience noticing. Perhaps you could provide us with a summary of what happened when people tested Giles’ explanations? If there’s good text-based discussion you can link to us then I’d also be interested in that.
Trivialists think “Trivialists think trivialism is false” is true.
Many uses of the word “rational” here were fine (“rational economic agent” is understandable), but others really bothered me (“It is distasteful and a little bit contradictory to the spirit of rationality to believe it should lose out so badly to simple emotion”—why perpetuate the Spock myth? I want to show this to my friends!). I have no specific suggestion at hand, but circumlocuting around the word in some of the cases above would bring the article from excellent to perfection.
A friend of mine goes to The North American Institute of Medical Herbalism. Today, she and her classmates tried five different “flower essences” (made in basically the same way as homeopathic medicine) and talked about their reactions in what was described as a double-blind trial. Naturally, they all experienced very similar and significant effects from each essence. It’s too bad they can’t get anyone to thoroughly document these double-blind trials they keep running on energy medicine!
I think the spirit of the quote is that instead of counting on anyone to be a both benevolent and effective ruler, or counting on voters to recognize such things, design the political environment so that that will happen naturally, even when an office is occupied by a corrupt or ineffective person.