lmm

Karma: 1,634

lmm 29 Jul 2016 14:47 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Paul Crowley’s comment on: How to get cryocrastinators to actually sign up for cryonics
Looks like their website has been taken over by spam. Which in turn gives me very little confidence in an organization that’s supposed to be around until my death and for many years afterwards.

Do you know anything about the current state of play in the UK? Are you still covered?

lmm 6 Jan 2016 23:53 UTC
1 point
in reply to: ArisKatsaris’s comment on: January 2016 Media Thread
Shirobako: The most realistic portrayal of ordinary working life (at least, like mine) I’ve seen, in any fictional medium. Warm-hearted (perhaps to a fault), straightforward, very much writing what they know and love. I recommend it to anyone interested in animation, but especially to students or similar interested in seeing a day in the working life.

Hibike Euphonium. Teenage drama (not actually a romance show, but it felt like one) that again felt very true, and with KyoAni’s usual high production values.

A Farewell to Arms (one of the Short Peace shorts). High production values applied to a setting that’s pretty novel in animé - an Americanized military unit in a ruined city in the desert with a (less extreme) Three Kings-style overexposed look. A very fun battle sequence that deserves points for putting thought into what near-future combat might look like—I don’t think it necessarily got it right, but it goes much further than most.

Psycho-Pass Movie. A return to form after the trashy second season. Continues to ask the awkward question: given a paternalistic dictatorship that manages to act in the best interests of most people most of the time, what do you actually do? (I’m told there’s also a colonialism side but that largely passed me by).

Non-recommendations:

Gakkou Gurashi. Ok premise but not enough content to fill the time.

Expelled from Paradise. Actually quite fun: visually very pretty (very Male Gaze), and some good CG robot fights, including a very cool one on the way down from orbit. But the themes felt done-to-death; it’s not really adding anything new to the conversation, and I never found myself caring about any of the characters.

lmm 6 Jan 2016 23:45 UTC
1 point
in reply to: James_Miller’s comment on: January 2016 Media Thread
I hated Three-Body Problem. I found it incredibly slow and unrewarding (and I never got how ~200 intelligent people in a game called three-body problem somehow don’t figure out that the game’s about the three-body problem). Partly the dangers of hype, but I really don’t think it’s very good.

lmm 13 Dec 2015 17:43 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Curiouskid’s comment on: Rationality Quotes Thread December 2015
I don’t see the point. The whole point of “motivating doesn’t last” is “you will only be able to sustain effort if there is something in your day-to-day that motivates you to continue, not some distant ideal.

lmm 5 Dec 2015 10:14 UTC
7 points
on: LessWrong 2.0

There’s a reason why CFAR has workshops instead of writing articles and books.

Is there? Given that this community seems to be quite skeptical about the value of e.g. university over self-teaching from textbooks, what’s the rationale for that format?

lmm 5 Dec 2015 10:12 UTC
14 points
in reply to: V_V’s comment on: LessWrong 2.0

Discourage/ban Open threads. They are an unusual thing to have on a an open forum. They might have made sense when posting volume was higher, but right now they further obfuscate valuable content.

I’d say the opposite: the open threads are the part that’s working. So I’d rather remove main/discussion and make everything into open thread, i.e. move to something more like a traditional forum model. I don’t know whether that’s functionally the same thing.

lmm 3 Dec 2015 23:31 UTC
0 points
in reply to: gjm’s comment on: Omega’s Idiot Brother, Epsilon

In other words, gaining $1M has to be no more than about 25% better than gaining $1k.

Interesting. My thought process was that it’s worth losing $8000 in EV to avoid a 1% chance of losing $1000. I think my original statement was true, but perhaps poorly calibrated; these days I shouldn’t be that risk-averse.

lmm 26 Nov 2015 12:48 UTC
−1 points
on: Omega’s Idiot Brother, Epsilon
I would two-box on this problem because of diminishing returns, and one-box on the original problem.

lmm 26 Nov 2015 11:27 UTC
−1 points
in reply to: DanArmak’s comment on: Rationality Quotes Thread November 2015
I think there’s an underlying truth that most software engineers are too timid, perhaps because we’re calibrated for working with materials where mistakes are more costly and harder to put right.

lmm 26 Nov 2015 11:23 UTC
−2 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Rationality Quotes Thread November 2015
And one of the big issues leading to the financial crisis was that a lot of these ratings were wrong and a lot of AAA bonds defaulted.

lmm 26 Nov 2015 11:20 UTC
−2 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Rationality Quotes Thread November 2015
AIG was the borrower (and separately Fannie and Freddie), banks were the lenders, it is absolutely useful to think about the situation in those terms. It highlights the conflict between our political intuition that insurance should be protected and financial speculation should not—some people thought AIG was doing one, some people thought the other. Likewise some people thought Freddie and Fannie were widows-and-orphans investments that the government should guarantee and some people thought they were private financial traders. Clarifying these things could have averted the crisis, it’s absolutely a useful model.

lmm 10 Nov 2015 12:57 UTC
0 points
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: November 2015 Media Thread
Just for the record I really liked her arc. I think I saw part of myself in her? Would have to rewatch to be able to be any more specific.

lmm 7 Nov 2015 15:44 UTC
1 point
in reply to: ArisKatsaris’s comment on: November 2015 Media Thread
Until the Sea Shall Free Them. Inherently partisan, and I have no real measure of its accuracy, but a compelling narrative that goes some way in expanding to the systemic ways things go wrong, while still very firmly rooted in its single example.

lmm 6 Nov 2015 21:48 UTC
0 points
in reply to: ShardPhoenix’s comment on: November 2015 Media Thread
Do you know how much more there is to go? We’re still waiting for the prequel movie, right?

lmm 6 Nov 2015 21:48 UTC
1 point
in reply to: ArisKatsaris’s comment on: November 2015 Media Thread
Light, by M John Harrison (based on the first 22%). I’m finding it genuinely hard to read—a bit like The Quantum Thief or The January Dancer, but more so than either of them. I can’t yet say it’s good per se—in particular the three narrative strands show very little sign of converging at this stake—but it’s a striking, provocative experience.

lmm 6 Nov 2015 20:01 UTC
0 points
in reply to: SodaPopinski’s comment on: Open thread, Oct. 19 - Oct. 25, 2015
No. There are any number of predictable systems in our quantum universe, and no reason to believe that an agent need be anything other than e.g. a computer program. In any case “noise” is the wrong way to think about QM; quantum behaviour is precisely predictable, it’s just the subjective Born probabilities that apply.

lmm 6 Nov 2015 19:27 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Liron’s comment on: Open thread, Nov. 02 - Nov. 08, 2015
The problem is the site looks cheap. If I’m showing off how rich I am, I want something that looks elegant and refined.

lmm 4 Nov 2015 13:15 UTC
0 points
in reply to: SodaPopinski’s comment on: Open thread, Oct. 19 - Oct. 25, 2015
I don’t understand. Computers are able to provide reliable boolean logic even though they’re made of quantum mechanics. And any “uncertainty” introduced by QM has nothing to do with distance. You seem very confused.

lmm 4 Nov 2015 13:11 UTC
0 points
in reply to: ike’s comment on: Rationality Quotes Thread October 2015
I think it’s legitimate to criticise a company for pretending to sell utilons when it isn’t. Yes, this company may well be a better use of your money than Taylor Swift tickets. But Taylor Swift isn’t marketed as an investment.

lmm 24 Oct 2015 18:06 UTC
6 points
in reply to: ike’s comment on: Rationality Quotes Thread October 2015
I think there’s an analogy with “purchase fuzzies and utilons separately” here that Levine misses. If you want to be trendy and have a bunch of investment return in the future, it’s probably more efficient to buy those two things from separate sources than to try and get both with a single product.