Is there any research on whether curing the infection actually undoes the damage?
printing-spoon
Implying that whether his post should be censored hinges on the conclusion reached and not just the topic?
I’m not sure we need to put more effort into making new users feel welcome. It’s a priority for churches because their entire business model depends on generating warm, fuzzy feelings in their members. Responding “Welcome to LessWrong!” to a new user’s first comment is fine, IMO.
group project goodness = U(project) / E(social friction),
Why is social friction an expectation, but not utility? Why division instead of subtraction? This equation should have been a sentence. I also don’t see why you’ve singled out “social friction” as the biggest drawback for community-building projects.
Woot, Stockholm syndrome.
LWer since 13, atheist since I can remember. I’m seriously embarrassed by my younger self’s posts. I am glad there are not more of me around. LessWrong is certainly good for teens, but can teens be good for LessWrong? Keep in mind our current bunch of teens are of higher quality than what we’ll get if we actually recruit some.
edit: btw i’m 15
I wonder why addiction is common among celebrities
Are you sure this is true?
I am 16 and I think I started reading this site 13. I think there is no need for another site. I also oppose any new forum/category of LW simply because interesting content here is getting thinner and thinner, half the discussion page is [META] (“Italics formatting is broken!”) or [SEQ RERUN] and a new forum would dilute that even further.
The dual of this approximated i-zombie is just a sleepwalker, not a literal, atom-for-atom-identical p-zombie.
Red(x) means “x is red.” X = Y in this case means that X and Y are either both true or both false. All x : Bouncy(x) means that everything under consideration is bouncy. Exists x : Fluffy(x) means a fluffy thing exists. The sentence says “if everything dies, then nothing doesn’t die” and vice versa. This is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-order_logic .
edit: And here are the fruits of google: http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/52323/how-do-you-read-this-logical-statement-aloud-and-how-do-you-notate-it-in-symbol
Multiplying 10-digit numbers using Flickr: The power of recognition memory
To me this just looks like a bias-manipulating “unpacking” trick—as you divide larger categories into smaller and smaller subcategories, the probability that people assign to the total category goes up and up.
How do you know the raised estimate with this “trick” is worse than the estimate without?
I could just as easily say, “As you merge smaller categories into larger and larger categories, the probability that people assign to the total category goes down.”
Make sure you decide whether to give a report before you do it or else we’ll be getting filtered information.
This reminds me of Berry’s Paradox: the most arbitrary hiding place you can think of is by definition not very arbitrary.
ask whether “Ma” means Mother (English) or Horse (Chinese).
“Ma” also means mother, depending on the tone. Actually, this example backfires since the word “mama” or some variation of it (ma, umma) means “mother” in almost every language in the world.
I haven’t read the book but this sounds pretty good to me. Since Harris himself is the judge calling his argument “stupid” might not be the best idea.
It’s just a name.
What’s the length of the average program for 3^^^^3? I suggest it’s 3^^^^3, with every language that gives it a shorter encoding counterbalanced by a language with an exactly longer encoding.
For a sufficiently crazy set of languages you could make this true for 3^^^^3, but in general what’s simple in one language is still fairly simple elsewhere. If 3+3 takes b bits to describe in language A it takes b+c bits in language B where c is the length of the shortest interpreter for language B in language A (edit: or less :P).
A more practical example: when people discuss cryonics or anti-aging, the following argument usually comes up in one form or another: if you were in a burning building, you would try pretty hard to get out. Therefore, you must strongly dislike death and want to avoid it. But if you strongly dislike death and want to avoid it, you must be lying when you say you accept death as a natural part of life and think it’s crass and selfish to try to cheat the Reaper.
nitpick: Burning to death is painful and it can happen at any stage of life. “You want to live a long life and die peacefully with dignity” can also be derived but of course it’s more complicated.
It’s not just a community norm, big chunks of the sequences seem to be built on small amounts of recent research.
Try to reframe the problem or parts of the problem in a way that connects to generic rationality, so that non-programmers can contribute something
This is harder than it sounds.
I think this site is dying because there’s nothing interesting to talk about anymore. Discussion is filled with META, MEETUP, SEQ RERUN, links to boring barely-relevant articles, and idea threads where the highest comment has more votes than the thread itself (i.e. a crappy idea). Main is not much better. Go to archive.org and compare (date chosen randomly, aside from being a while ago). I don’t think eternal september is the whole explanation here—you only need 1 good user to write a good article.