Lumifer

Karma: 19,761

Lumifer 5 Dec 2014 15:50 UTC
80 points
in reply to: grendelkhan’s comment on: Rationality Quotes December 2014

If it’s stupid and it works, it’s not stupid.

This is what survivorship bias looks like from the inside.

Lumifer 13 Aug 2013 19:46 UTC
55 points
on: Engaging Intellectual Elites at Less Wrong
Hm. Let me throw out several points in random order:

-- I don’t think LW is a “general-interest” forum. Not even “relatively”. However that’s fine—there are really no such things as general-interest forums because their lack of focus kills them. What you have, actually, is online communities some of which spend their time chatting about whatever in the general section of their forums. But that general section is just for overflow, the community itself is formed and kept together by something that binds much tighter than general interest.

-- If I rephrase your post along the lines of “LW is a web-based club for smart people. How do we get more smart people to join our club?”—would you object?

-- Size matters. In particular, online communities have certain optimal size for cohesiveness—be too small and it’s just a few old-timers making inside jokes; grow too big and you drown in a cacophony of noise. I’ve seen online communities mutate into something quite different from the original through massive growth. That may be fine in the grand scheme of things, but the original character is lost.

-- While attracting “elite” how are you going to get rid of hoi polloi? If people arrive, set up camp in LW, and start discussing Jennifer Anniston’s butt and what a horrible hangover did they have today after being gloriously trashed yesterday, what are you going to do about it?

-- There is correlation between “being highly successful in real life” and “being able to avoid wasting time chattering away on the ’net”.

-- I think I would support some additional granularity to this site (subreddit style), especially if we get some population growth. Nothing like Reddit itself, of course, but the existence of two parts and two parts only seems to be an artifact from the olden days (when you went to school up the hill both ways).

-- And finally, the important question: what do you want to achieve? Is it just having more smart people around to talk to, or there’s more? In particular, with Pinky and the Brain flavour?

Lumifer 30 Jul 2013 1:57 UTC
46 points
on: Open thread, July 29-August 4, 2013
An interesting story—about science, what gets published, and what the incentives for scientists are. But really it is about whether you ought to believe published research.

The summary has three parts (I am quoting from the story).

Part 1 : We were inspired by the fast growing literature on embodiment that demonstrates surprising links between body and mind (Markman & Brendl, 2005; Proffitt, 2006) to investigate embodiment of political extremism. Participants from the political left, right and center (N = 1,979) completed a perceptual judgment task in which words were presented in different shades of gray. Participants had to click along a gradient representing grays from near black to near white to select a shade that matched the shade of the word. We calculated accuracy: How close to the actual shade did participants get? The results were stunning. Moderates perceived the shades of gray more accurately than extremists on the left and right (p = .01). Our conclusion: political extremists perceive the world in black-and-white, figuratively and literally. Our design and follow-up analyses ruled out obvious alternative explanations such as time spent on task and a tendency to select extreme responses.

Part 2 : Before writing and submitting, we paused. … We conducted a direct replication while we prepared the manuscript. We ran 1,300 participants, giving us .995 power to detect an effect of the original effect size at alpha = .05.

Part 3 : The effect vanished (p = .59).

Lumifer 12 Jan 2014 19:28 UTC
39 points
in reply to: XiXiDu’s comment on: AALWA: Ask any LessWronger anything

The problem I have is that measuring causes panic about the expected result, which increases the blood pressure. Then if the result turns out to be very high, as expected, the panic increases and the next measurement turns out even higher.

Measure every hour. Or every ten minutes. Your hormonal system can’t sustain the panic state for long, plus seeing high values and realizing that you are not dead yet will desensitize you to these high values.

Lumifer 9 Aug 2013 19:46 UTC
37 points
on: Interesting new Pew Research study on American opinions about radical life extension
Public discussions of life extension suffer from the confusion between two possible meanings of it.

The first meaning is to just postpone death. Maybe at 90 you don’t remember anything any more, the list of your chronic diseases doesn’t fit on a page, you require round-the-clock care and semi-permanent sedation, take 37 different pills and need a trip to the hospital weekly—but by golly! we can and will keep you alive for ten years more and as medicine progresses we’ll keep you alive for twenty years more.

The second meaning is to postpone senescence. You’re 90, but you look like a 60-year-old. You’re mobile, active, with most of your mind intact, with a functioning immune system and ability to enjoy life.

I feel these scenarios are rather different. In particular, they lead to different answers to questions about whether life extension is worth it.

Lumifer 27 Jun 2013 20:41 UTC
37 points
on: Public Service Announcement Collection
One of the basic P/S/As:

You can say no.
What links here?
- A1987dM's comment on Public Service Announcement Collection by Eliezer Yudkowsky (28 Jun 2013 12:02 UTC; 0 points)

Lumifer 2 Oct 2013 17:07 UTC
36 points
on: How to Become a 1000 Year Old Vampire
An interesting post. Two directions for more thinking:

(1) Goals. What do you want to get out of this? What do you really want? Doing lots of things quickly and intensely is one way to describe a rat race. Yes, you can run faster but where are you running to?

(2) Risks. There is a certain aura of invincibility surrounding this post. But do remember that shit happens and vampires happen to be already dead and quite hard to kill (again). You have to make sure that your broad intense experiences aren’t putting you into running for the Darwin Award. That American student who fought in Libya—what were his chances of coming home in a body bag? or coming back with severe PTSD and becoming emotionally disabled?

Lumifer 17 Oct 2014 16:45 UTC
34 points
in reply to: Daniel_Burfoot’s comment on: What false beliefs have you held and why were you wrong?

that the Reds rarely make

Oh, but they do. “God made every man different; Sam Colt made them equal.”

Lumifer 8 May 2015 20:33 UTC
32 points
on: The File Drawer Effect and Conformity Bias (Election Edition)
The, ahem, money quote:

Interestingly, those who invested their own money in forecasting the outcome performed a lot better in predicting what would happen than did the pollsters. The betting markets had the Conservatives well ahead in the number of seats they would win right through the campaign and were unmoved in this belief throughout. Polls went up, polls went down, but the betting markets had made their mind up. The Tories, they were convinced, were going to win significantly more seats than Labour.

A bet is a tax on bullshit :-)

Lumifer 7 May 2015 19:27 UTC
31 points
on: California Drought thread
There is nothing to figure out. The state controls the price (and allocation) of water. Farmers use up huge amounts of water very inefficiently, but they have political power. They use this power to get their water cheaply and to get the state to effectively subsidize their water.

It’s an entirely political issue. To quote reason.com

The reason that California is suffering from a water shortage is the same reason why there were bread lines in the former Soviet Union: Central planning that allocated goods by fiat to favored groups rather than price signals.

Lumifer 23 Dec 2014 1:40 UTC
31 points
in reply to: advancedatheist’s comment on: How to deal with Santa Claus?
Well, children, it’s works like this. Santa Claus comes and offers you the choice between one box and two boxes...

Lumifer 29 Mar 2016 21:35 UTC
29 points
in reply to: Alia1d’s comment on: “3 Reasons It’s Irrational to Demand ‘Rationalism’ in Social Justice Activism”

To the extent that some SJWs seem to want to say “I really, really want X,” and leave their argument at that, then rationality is irrelevant to them.

The problem is that some SJWs say “I really, really want you/everyone to do X” but the rest of the world is not married to them and is not particularly interested in their hedonic preferences. This means that they need to negotiate for what they want and at this point rationality jumps right back in.

“I really want X and don’t care about anything else” is the attitude of a small child.

Lumifer 2 Feb 2015 18:29 UTC
29 points
in reply to: Salemicus’s comment on: Rationality Quotes Thread February 2015
Failure is the child of a… very extended family, including impulsiveness and hot-headedness.

Lumifer 24 Oct 2014 18:46 UTC
29 points
in reply to: skeptical_lurker’s comment on: Non-standard politics

The west has too much trade, too much communication, too much tourism to want to fight

While that’s a valid observation, similar points were made just before WW1… Also you did notice how one European nation, Russia, invaded another European nation, Ukraine, just this year—right?

the fact that the US gave Germany money for rebuilding in the immediate aftermath of WWII really is an unprecedented act of generosity.

Not generosity. The US was building barriers against Stalin’s European ambitions.

Lumifer 21 Oct 2014 21:28 UTC
29 points
on: In the grim darkness of the far future there is only war continued by other means
You don’t run out of PvE content in games where players produce the content. The major contemporary example is Minecraft.

Another example relevant to this post is real life.

Lumifer 23 Mar 2016 16:00 UTC
26 points
0
in reply to: gjm’s comment on: Open Thread March 21 - March 27, 2016
Sarginlove, that is, Sargin Rukevwe, works as a “virtual assistant”. Basically you hire him to do whatever and in this case he seems to have been hired to promote InIn.

It’s interesting that his page says he graduated from the Polytechnic in 2013, but his introductory post here says he is a student at that school.

Let me repeat the observation I’ve made before—Gleb_Tsipursky is a very clear case of cargo-cult behaviour. He has no clue about marketing, but he’s been told which motions to make so that the planes will come and he’s making them very earnestly. One of these motions is “native” (or covert) promotion which is designed to look like spontaneous endorsement—and so he hires a lad from Lagos to post cringeworthy stuff here and everywhere...

P.S. Hey, look, Sarginlove has a Google+ account and his entire post history consists of—drumroll, please! -- InIn reposts.

I guess he was hired on Dec 3, 2015, amiright?
What links here?
- Lumifer's comment on The Valentine’s Day Gift That Saves Lives by Gleb_Tsipursky (17 May 2016 18:23 UTC; 6 points)

Lumifer 1 Feb 2016 17:26 UTC
26 points
on: The Valentine’s Day Gift That Saves Lives
I would prefer LW not to be spammed by HuffPo-quality advertisement pieces for charity donations, even if it’s for a charity many people here like.

Lumifer 29 Apr 2015 17:53 UTC
26 points
0
on: Tim Ferris Experiment

this seems to be exactly the kind of content that Less Wrong would be interested in.

It’s a TV show. TV shows are heavily optimized for entertainment and shock value.

Tim Ferris is an interesting guy, but his most outstanding talent is for self-promotion.

Lumifer 19 Feb 2015 20:18 UTC
26 points
on: Easy wins aren’t news

This is a big deal

What exactly is a big deal?

If you want to claim that this system will reduce the local governments’ financing costs, I would like to see evidence other than sales pitches.

fixing the auction mechanics is the easy win

You need to show that it’s a win to start with.

Lumifer 12 Jul 2016 17:22 UTC
25 points
in reply to: Sable’s comment on: Open thread, Jul. 11 - Jul. 17, 2016
The reason parties are oversupplied with food is because the incentives are asymmetrical. Specifically, the loss from having too much food is considerably smaller than the loss from having too little food.

Having insufficient food is a significant loss of status since you failed as a host to provide proper hospitality. There are a bunch of obvious historical and cultural reasons why not being able to feed your guests is a bad thing, status-wise.

Having too much food is just a matter of some wasted money and/or having to eat leftovers for few days. Not a big deal at all nowadays.