kpreid
The ABC’s of Luminosity.
Surely you mean The RGB’s of Luminosity. Ahem.
I like that you’re including forward links in your sequence. (I still think LW ought to automatically include adjacent-post-by-date-order links, too.)
This seems explainable as a simple heuristic — “routes containing retracing-your-steps are likely to be less efficient than other options” — which happens to be wrong in this case.
It isn’t just a linguistic trick: it is pointing out that there exist ways in which a dimension can end, even if the particular way is nothing like the other.
[Link] “How to seem good at everything: Stop doing stupid shit”
I like this post and am not intending to argue against its point by the following:
I read the paragraph about orders of magnitude and immediately started thinking about whether there are good counterexamples. Here are two: wires are used in lengths from nanometers to kilometers, and computer programs as a category run for times from milliseconds to weeks (even considering only those which are intended to have a finite task and not to continue running until cancelled).
Common characteristics of these two examples are that they are one-dimensional (no “square-cube law” limits scaling) and that they are arguably in some sense the most extensible solutions to their problem domains (a wire is the form that arbitrary length electrical conductors take, and most computer programs are written in Turing-complete languages).
Perhaps the caveat is merely that “some things scale freely such that the order of magnitude is no new information and you need to look at different properties of the thing”.
Hi Less Wrongers and Less Wrongerettes,
I dislike this wording as unnecessarily promoting male-as-unmarked-state.
I got “Don’t assume that the experts in the field [or the vineyard] are missing something obvious.”
The last time my family moved, we created a database of the exact contents of each moving box, and where that box was stored in the new space (including coordinates for boxes on shelves or in stacks). Each box has a label with a serial number and the rough contents, and is updated whenever we unpack or otherwise change the contents of a box.
This database neatly solves the problem of figuring out how to organize the 4500 objects that you aren’t regularly or recently using (e.g. books on a subject not currently relevant), and allows any given object to be found in roughly constant time (provided you remember the right keyword). On the other hand, it discourages achieving the state of “unpacked”.
This material, being an index of posts, seems like it ought to be on the wiki.
(If requested, I will take care of doing the markup conversion.)
Would it not be useful for the “Degree” question to distinguish between the two no-degree cases of current undergraduate students and not-trying?
Add controls at the bottom of subthreads for collapsing the subthread, jumping to the top of it, or both. This makes it easier to navigate to the parent or above-sibling of a given comment without counting nested borders.
Several of the high-quality forums* I read explicitly (ha) do not have formal rules; the rationale being that having them written down enables the antisocial behavior of doing the worst thing that’s still within the rules. However, these forums also have attentive and active moderators (as opposed to silent-except-when-things-go-seriously-wrong moderators) who speak up to discourage bad patterns early, which is not the case for Less Wrong and probably can’t be made the case.
* forums in the general sense, not in the genre-of-web-site sense.
I note that your recommendation is RFC 2119 compliant.
This is basic, but solid — perhaps it should be in Main?
This post is short on actual information and long on shiny words.
What is the sharp distinction you are drawing between “logical deduction” and “empiricism”?
What are you actually putting in the game to support empiricism, and how, if there is no cost for failure, does it prohibit process-of-elimination?
The art you present looks like a typical modern platform or swimming level. What is notable about it?
If something cannot at least in theory be tested by experiment then it has no effect on the world and lacks meaning from a truth stand point therefore rational standpoint.
Better version: …then it has no effect on the world and therefore is not useful to have information about.
As to the rest of your post, I will make a general observation: you are speaking as if epistemic rationality is a terminal value. There’s nothing wrong with that (insofar as nobody can say someone else’s utility function is wrong) but you might want to think about whether that is what you really want.
The alternative is to allow epistemic rationality to arise from instrumental rationality: obtaining truth is useful insofar as it improves your plans to obtain what you actually want.
Pain is sensory input; ideally it conveys useful information to the brain.
Pain which does not convey new information is bad, because it interferes with working towards what one values.
The anesthesiologist is removing pain which does not convey new information.
The CIPA patient lacks pain whether or not it conveys new information, and therefore lacks information.
It’s a nice joke, but I don’t think it’s actually good advice. There is a lot of background knowledge about how most computer software works that goes into actually executing the steps of this or similar procedures, e.g.
knowledge defining the “looks related” relation
knowledge about which things are likely to be destructive enough to exclude from “pick one at random”
knowledge about what “it worked” consists of when the shortest path to the goal is more than one step
Variant suggestion: Merge LW and wiki.LW account systems so that each user’s wiki user page can be their profile page.
Took the survey. Did not read the comments first. Here are my observations after filling it out and reading the comments:
Problems encountered:
I followed the instructions carefully for the digit ratio question. I then went to enter my answer and found that the instructions failed to tell me to image my left hand as well as my right, so I gave the partial answer I had rather than go through all the steps again for the left hand. As of this writing, one other person commented on this problem.
Criticism of questions:
I realize after the fact that when answering “how many books have you read”, I counted only things which are books in the sense of “the kind of thing that has an ISBN”, excluding book-length self-published-on-the-internet documents, and also thought only of new books as opposed to rereads. I request that future versions of this question clarify what counts as a book and whether rereading counts.
“Hours Online”: what counts as “on the Internet” in today’s world is unclear. If I’m writing a book in Google Docs, does that count? If I’m focused on a problem, but I have an IRC channel open in the corner of my screen, does that count? If I’m walking down the street and my phone notifies me of a post which I immediately read, does that count?
Generally: there is a spectrum of plausible interpretations from “performing any activity which requires a functioning Internet connection” (broad definition) to “aimless web surfing” (narrow definition).
“Moral Views” could benefit from links to definitions.