I thought Elo submits the open threads via a scripted cron job—am I wrong? (and if I am, would that not be a good suggestion?)
root
Most silly thing I’ve seen in a while.
Is it supported by CBT though? It could look silly only to me.
I’m curious how effective it is. Getting beaten up can be a nice example: it’s painful can last for a moment. That zap thing can be
Easily circumvented
Takes the Pavlov banner while not actually being 100% loyal to it.
Isn’t actually much of a consequence.
Has there ever been any investigation to their identity?
How do you solve interpersonal problems when neither sides can see themselves as the one in fault?
I’ve had a a fight with my sister regarding my birthday present. She bought me—boosted with a contribution of my mom and dad—a bunch of clothes. I naturally got mad because:
it’s a large investment for an unsafe return (my disappointment)
I always hated getting clothes for my birthday and the trend haven’t changed. I always just asked for money instead.
It has caused a little bit of bitterness. I understand her point of view, which was to make me happy on my birthday but I still can’t excuse the invalidity of the function she was using, especially considering that I previously mentioned that I hate clothes for birthday.
What should I do in order to ease the situation? Also, do you think that my reaction was inappropriate?
I talked about this with other people and what people said was ‘it’s the intention that matters’ and that sounds like an excuse (and at this point I’m curious if I actually am looking for criticism or just subconsciously hoping I’ll get a bunch of chocolate frogs) so get the best criticism you can give.
Not going to use it but:
Good job on not having a javascript hell
Some people might like a mobile view (if there isn’t one already)
No RSS feeds?
Mainly because I don’t read rational fictions. I can’t call myself even sufficiently rational so the whole point of a rationalfic would be lost on me. I’ve read HPMOR. It was nice. I just felt that I’ve missed something on a different level because it seems (to me) to have a large amount of praise.
Piss off, Reddit.
I appreciate when people tell me why they downvote my posts.
I’m at fault for not saying it so for the sake of honestly, my main problem with these kind of posts is that despite being amusing, they don’t add much to the site. After a certain amount they actively harm the site and the quality of the humor would also deteriorate and would also replace possible quality posts. (Oppourtunity cost?)
The reason I’ve mentioned Reddit in my comment is that Reddit looks nice on paper, but from my experience I’ve often faced an issue where I’ll go to a subreddit, look for the ‘top’ posts and think there’s going to be a bunch of useful stuff in that specific endeavor only to find too many posts that aren’t even funny and take up 25% or more of the whole list of things. It feels annoying to spend time that ends up being a wasted effort.
I’m no expert (paging gwern?) but could an AI have it’s code put inside a DNA? Idea from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_digital_data_storage
Two questions:
Can anyone who is a user for a significant amount of time give links to anything that wasn’t deemed worhy of the sequences but is a worthy read? I have no idea when the sequences were collected but if LW was really great in the past, there would’ve been a bunch of other high-quality posts that are easily missed. This could also double as proof that LW was, indeed, as great as advertised.
What do other places have that LW doesn’t? If LW is dedicated to human rationality, is it truly doing that?
Am I a complete dumbass for typing this? In hindsight, it doesn’t take a special variation of Godwin’s law to think ‘someone probably posted a similar question before’.
Excellent. Much appreciated.
Man, I don’t really care what happens to LW but if I had to choose, I honestly would say, ‘dunno, shoot me’.
I’m just really getting the ‘I don’t know what to decide’ feeling here. It’s a bet, and by ‘bet’ I mean something I cannot put into concrete, set-in-stone numbers that I must decide on. For example, I recently got a new haircut. I didn’t get one compliment for it. Do you think it was a good bet? I could’ve got a better haircut. But on the other hand, I’m pretty satisfied with it. I got tired of the same old haircut I had and, despite not getting even one compliment, I’m going to keep going with it.
I once did some mindkilling and tried to cold approach[1] women. A significant majority of them said that they have a boyfriend. Only a few women totally appreciated it. Some of them probably invented an imaginary boyfriend. Maybe some of them later went on Facebook or some other media and complain about random guys hitting on them. I suppose that I made this particular branch of universe a slightly worse place to live in. But a very small minority gave me a wide, unexpected smile and at that moment I wanted to middle finger the non-existing camera filming my life and say “420 is for wankers”.[2]
Tomorrow, I’ll be visiting a previous workplace to say thank you (and ask to keep contact) to a woman who, the moment she saw me, had a welcoming smile and we engaged in conversation in a record-breaking speed of human cognition. And actually part of me screams that this woman is probably nice, or was just curious, or perhaps just happy to see me again, and that the whole effort of dressing up, going the non-trivial travel time, all for what could be yet another (possibly imaginary) boyfriend is a huge waste. But part of me also believes that I could succeed here. Do I know for sure? Nope! It’s yet another bet, and the dealer is the laws of physics (maybe biology is a better fit) and who knows what cards I get.
So let’s wrap this up. I know you like Mark Manson[3] so you probably noticed a similar theme[4] here. The people that believe LessWrong is going to make it should place their bets—bet with what you will. Money, effort, rationality is winning. The other party already placed their bets and the cards are still not revealed and the roulette has still not started spinning. Place your bets and we’ll see who wins.
[1] I basically went with some variation of an introduction, saying that she’s gorgeous and if she’d like to talk or meet up later.
[2] Imagine a Loony Toons character breaking the fourth wall. Alternatively, a paranoid schizophrenic psych ward escapee.
[3] markmanson.net does have excellent stuff. What are you waiting for?
[4] The theme is having to make a decision under unknown possibility of success. Which is the way I see it because I personally haven’t seen too much from the LessWrong 2.0 camp, despite the enthusiasm.
I do hope you’re not taking the hypothetical person in the second footnote bent on revitalizing LessWrong with a knack for movie scripts seriously.
I did have an extra footnote at ‘rationality is winning’ mentioning if someone with an extreme desire to see LW prosper would kidnap CFAR staff and other prominent bloggers in order to achieve his goal, but that victory would be too suspicious to pass. The possible escape scene seems interesting, but I can’t think of a way to make the villian worthwhile if he gets outsmarted too easily (Let’s say Eliezer does a sequence of posts and one post has 4 paragraphs, and they begin with H, E, L, and P. But I suppose the villian also read GEB and so he might notice it)
Anyhow, that supposed situation has a low enough probability that it shouldn’t be a worry and there are probably better people to shoot rather than neutrals.
EDIT: And let’s also stop this here, this is getting offtopic.
Too easily exploitable. It was common in the fax era to waste a lot of ink (paper too but you can’t waste more than one paper per paper) by sending a completely black document.
There’s probably more sophisticated ways to attack such a system, but don’t ask me. Go read Bruce Schneier.
Then yet another feature for LW 2.0: open threads published with cron. (I’m assuming that you’re not familiar with wget/curl so there wasn’t even a manual script written)[1]
[1] You can also use Python or some other language in a similar tier.
https://status.fsf.org/fsf
Good enough?
Not much lives 1000m under the surface.
Under the surface (for example, below the European continent) or in the deep seas? I’m not sure about the former but I’m quite confident that the following applies to the latter:
My layman impression is that investigating lower altitudes becomes increasingly (perhaps exponentially) difficult the lower you go. Wikipedia also says that “Humans have explored less than 2% of the ocean floor” so I would disagree with your assessment of “not much lives 1000m under the surface”.
I’m honestly interested in how you came to that conclusion though—If you have an interesting and reputable text that refutes me, please share. I came to mine based on reading Wikipedia too much.
Haven’t people been making contracts for a pretty long time? What is this new ‘smart contract’ thing and how is it unique?
in a way that’s already illegal.
Someone cracking a smart contract wouldn’t really mind the law.
I’m aware I’m being off-topic, but have you ever thought about alternative methods of memorization?
Here’s two examples, and they have an important thing in common: the answer is visible.
Non-trivia questions: Just like trivia shows, except that they’re focused on a narrow subject.
Practical example: Which of the following is [xyz]? [A] [B] [C] [D]
Fill in the blank and a ‘answers paper’. You need to fill in the correct answer from one of the answers provided in a separate paper.
Question XYZ: __ Answer1 Answer2 Answer3 …. AnswerN
I’ve designed those on the basis of me having a strong nonconsious memory, but haveing difficulty with active recall. But I feel much more confident in my answers when I can remember them like that. Your own milleage may vary.
I’m also interested in some criticism of SRS, because every time I see something ‘good’ I also want to see how many holes can be poked in it. The wiki gave me some sort of ‘this is amazingly awesome’ and I’m just curious, how true is that? For example, if we have x number of cards in a typical deck, can we grade the usefulness of each card? It can get rather personal here but sometimes I have a conflict between perfectionism and practicalism, in which perfectionism says ‘You could completely screw up by missing those details’ and practicalism says ‘How important is it that you know?’, and I’m curious if I’m the only one who feels this way.