When I started depression treatment my wife expressed a concern that it might change my personality.
I reminded her that was the whole point.
When I started depression treatment my wife expressed a concern that it might change my personality.
I reminded her that was the whole point.
Spambots are a proto-unFriendly-AI. We should try to thwart them before one gets too advanced, and tiles the Solar System with knock-off jewelry.
I had trouble like this with inferential distance, describing my at-the-time Big Issue to my first psychiatrist:
Me: “I have a good life but can’t enjoy it because I’m convinced the Invisible Hand is going to snatch it away anytime now.”
Her, writing notes: “What kind of invisible hand?”
Me: short Adam Smith summary
My technique for keeping from being depressed by news: remember that, if it’s newsworthy, it’s rare.
“In sports, half the teams won their games today. All of the players are millionaires, most of whom have no major drug problems.”—Dogbert
I have a tendency to be “disagreeable”, as I’m sure several people on this website would agree.
I disagree.
Once, at the Little Gym with my then-2-year-old daughter, I unwittingly creeped out a 2-year-old girl, without interacting with her.
(I heard her mention to her mom “the creepy guy in orange”).
The self-esteem hit was decidedly nontrivial.
Just finished a new, improved sandbox. The prior one was irregularly shaped, hard to cover, and lined with a tarp so when it got wet it would stay wet. The new one:
Added a couple boards to make it strictly rectangular
Treated plywood lid in two pieces with handles, to make it easy to cover in a mostly waterproof way
Lined with landscape cloth, so if it gets wet it can drain, without letting in worms, ants and such from below
Motivation source: Starting a new (temporary) day job soon, so I could afford the materials, and would have little time to work on it.
It’s the doc that got me interested in Elizer’s writing, and thusly Less Wrong, just a year or two ago. (I was looking for Singularitan stuff to distract me from my bleak macroeconomic ideas).
I think the “Beyond Anthropomorphism” section is particularly insightful. [Gist as I understand it: Many of laypeople’s worries about uFAI, such as that it might resent its servitude to humanity and decide to wipe us out, are misguided, because e.g. resenting servitude is a property of evolved human cognition, not a property of minds in general.]
It’s terribly common for highly intelligent boys to become slackers as adults. (More precisely, to strive to be “ordinary” and not overachieve). This book is a classic longitudinal study on this topic. I don’t know how well this applies way out on the tail end of the bell curve where Jacob resides, as opposed to kids who are “just” in the top couple percent.
Allowing (US) employers to discriminate based on religion would probably hit atheists the hardest. (In the general labor market, not so much in academia).
Attempt to make beliefs pay rent, and beliefs in the supernatural will likely melt away as they fail to constrain your anticipated experiences.
And don’t worry too much about supernatural beliefs. Just keep trying to make your beliefs correspond to reality, and see where that goes.
On the other hand I’d think it would be easier for autistics to study social reality than NTs—for NTs, since much of that stuff “comes naturally” it’s going to be harder to decompose and explain.
Consider the classic problem of determining whether a person with whom you’re interacting is sexually interested in you. An NT would (I assume) simply have to make an opaque intuitive judgment. An autistic would (I assume) have to go through a checklist involving eye contact, amount of touching, conversational subject matter, posture, whether the subject has already initiated intercourse, etc.
I’m unfamiliar with this particular instance, but I’ve engaged trolls on Fark before, for these reasons:
1) Some trolls just give up when taken calmly seriously at face value, as opposed to getting hit with indignation.
2) Bored at work.
3) They provide such wonderful strawmen against which to clarify my own thoughts and sharpen my arguments.
4) In some discussions (political ones especially), Poe’s Law applies, oftentimes real people hold real opinions that are as blunt as trolls’ opinions.
Sensory Processing Disorder and/or autism. The two go together quite often; I’ve learned a lot about them from my 4-year-old. “The Out-of-Sync Child” is the classic text on SPD.
SPD treatment basically involves acclimitization via “sensory diets”.
When applying, model the probability of getting any specific job as zero. If you get through an in-person interview and it goes well, you can update that probability upwards a bit.
That is, don’t serialize your applications (you won’t hear back anything at all from most of them, anyway). Expect near-universal rejection, even for jobs for which you’re the world’s most ideal candidate.
Compensate by applying for hundreds of jobs.
I was without plumbing for several years as a teenager (1980s). Occasionally I marvel that I can use an automatic dishwasher instead of dipping up a pot from the rain barrel and heating it on the stove. It got mundane for me mighty quick though.
I remember from my intro micro-econ class in college, there were two versions: Econ H200A (with differential calculus as a pre-req), and Econ H200 (without).
I took the former; they explained the concept of “marginal” with one word: “derivative”. The latter apparently had to spend rather more time discussing that concept.
I’m not informed enough to judge whether the gold standard is a fundamentally good idea or not
Here’s Krugman’s tale of the babysitting co-op, a nice illustration of how and why manipulation of the money supply is useful. A gold standard prevents such manipulation, short of changing the gold exchange rate, digging up gold, or locking it away in a fortress.
Now you’re informed.
Yes. (Their worst-case scenario: You’re a “professional plaintiff” who hires on, sues for something or other, gets a (confidential) settlement, and moves on).
They also look down on being in the same job a long time (assumption: lack of motivation to advance, etc.). And they look down on gaps in employment (assumption: you were in prison).
To summarize the summary of the summary, HR reps hate people.
I’m not!