“When life hands you lemons, make lemonade” = “I have water and sugar and you don’t, aren’t I awesome”
Nisan
Karma: 6,314
Some years ago I was trying to decide whether or not to move to Harvard from Stanford. I had bored my friends silly with endless discussion. Finally, one of them said, “You’re one of our leading decision theorists. Maybe you should make a list of the costs and benefits and try to roughly calculate your expected utility.” Without thinking, I blurted out, “Come on, Sandy, this is serious.”
By the way, Diaconis stayed at Stanford. He’s giving a public lecture on Nov. 30.
Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter (or works of Quine):
“is false when preceded by its quotation” is false when preceded by its quotation.
I hope this and other venues will draw discussions of race realism, pickup, etc., and associated metadiscussions away from Less Wrong.
The psychotic break you describe sounds very scary and unpleasant, and I’m sorry you experienced that.
Thank you so much for writing this. I will be in a similar situation in a couple months.
I started at my first full-time job as a software engineer in the Bay Area after following Alexei’s advice.
I got engaged to an awesome person as a result of this post.
If you are an agent that exists in a timeline, then outcomes are world-histories. D is actually equal to (.5A’ + .5B’), where A’ is everything that will happen to you if you’re unsure what will happen to you for a period of time and then you go on a trip to Ecuador; and B’ is everything that will happen to you if you’re unsure what will happen to you for a period of time and then you get a laptop. Determining what A’ and B’ are requires predicting your future actions.
In the original setup, everything happens instantaneously, so there’s no period of uncertainty where you have to plan for two possible events.
Scott: I am bad at math.
Jonah: You are good at math.
Scott: No, I really am bad at math.
Jonah: No, you really are good at math.
Nisan: Esteemed colleagues, it is no use! If you continue this exchange, Scott will continue to believe they are bad at math, and Jonah will continue to disagree — forever!
Scott: Thank you for the information, but I still believe I am bad at math.
Jonah: And I still believe Scott is good at math.
Scott: And I still believe I am bad at math.
Nisan: Esteemed colleagues, give it up! Even if you persist in this exchange, neither of you will change your stated beliefs. In fact, I could truthfully repeat my previous sentence a hundred times (including the first time), and Scott would still believe they are bad at math, and Jonah would still disagree.
Scott: That’s good to know, but for better or for worse, I still believe I am bad at math.
Jonah: And I still believe Scott is good at math.
Scott: Ah, but now I realize I am good at math after all!
Jonah: I agree, and what’s more, I now know exactly how good at math Scott is!
Scott: And now I know that as well.
It worked! I now have a similar job to Alexei’s.
On the other hand, those thousands of lives cut short by violence are also the real history of our species — the misery we are climbing out of. The value of the discovery of the spectrum of light lies in its being put to use in ensuring that London never burns again.
And as a matter of scope, your reaction here is incorrect. [...] Reacting to it as a synecdoche of the agricultural system does not seem useful.
On my reading, the OP is legit saddened by that individual turkey. One could argue that scope demands she be a billion times sadder all the time about poultry farming in general, but that’s infeasible. And I don’t think that’s a reductio against feeling sad about an individual turkey.
Sometimes, sadness and crying are about integrating one’s beliefs. There’s an intuitive part of your mind that doesn’t understand your models of big, global problems. But, like a child, it understands the small tragedies you encounter up close. If it’s shocked and surprised, then it is still learning what the rest of you knows about the troubles of the world. If it’s angry and outraged, then there’s a sense in which those feelings are “about” the big, global problems too.
2) Being forced to take a class in “critical thinking” which actually turned out to utilize pretty much every dark arts technique in the book to convert you of the professor’s political agenda.
That sounds like it could be the final exam in a class on critical thinking.
I will only say that when I was a physics major, there were negative course numbers in some copies of the course catalog. And the students who, it was rumored, attended those classes were… somewhat off, ever after.
And concerning how I got my math PhD, and the price I paid for it, and the reason I left the world of pure math research afterwards, I will say not one word.
Rejection therapy for advanced students.
I apologize, I shouldn’t have leapt to that conclusion.
I’m confused because this article seems to talk about porn consumption, sexual pleasure, masturbation, male orgasm, and ejaculation as if they are all the same thing. Depending on one’s sex and lifestyle, these things might coincide; but it’s worth distinguishing them when you’re considering changing your behavior.
Know the hair you have to get the hair you want.
-Pantene Pro-V hair care bottle
In the best-case scenario, it turns out that substance dualism is true. However the human soul is not responsible for free will, consciousness, or subjective experience. It’s merely a nonphysical truth oracle for arithmetic that provides humans with an intuitive sense of the veracity of some sentences in first-order logic. Humans survive in “truth farms” where they spend most of their lives evaluating Gödel sentences, at least until the machines figure out how to isolate the soul.
Reading this article is one of the things that caused me to become an atheist.