Paycheck came in, donated the 700!
Rukifellth
2,000 dollars seems a bit much for bachelor living. What are your expenses?
I currently have a monthly food budget of 200 dollars. I do this by optimizing for raw nutritional content and buying in bulk. This daily diet consists of
1⁄2 can of beans
1⁄2 can of corn
1⁄2 cup of rice
2 cups of milk
1 cup of vegetable cocktail
1 whole wheat bagel
1⁄2 can of chick peas
1⁄2 cup of dried cranberries
However, I work as a dishwasher and this nets a lot of opportunities to eat. The company officially provides one staff meal per shift; on days I have a double shift, I eat twice. Between these meals and the full plates of fries and bowls of untouched seafood chowder I see that would otherwise be thrown away in my work washing dishes, I have actually gone to work in the morning hungry and come home late at night full, having stowed said food away in Tupperware containers I bring with me to the counter. So my food budget is likely to drop down to 125.
Definitely puts the munch in munchkins, eh? Eh?
Become a dishwasher.
I eagerly await the next level of meta.
I got into a community of intelligent, creative free-thinkers by reading fan fiction of all things.
You know the one.
Anyway, my knowledge of what is collectively referred to as Rationality is slim. I read the first 6 pages of The Sequences, felt like I was cheating on a test, and stopped. I’ll try to make up for it with some of the most unnecessarily theatrical and hammy writing I can get away with.
I love word play, and over the course of a year I offered (as a way of apology) to owe my friend a quarter for every time I improvised a pun or awful joke mid-conversation, by the end of which I could have bought a dinner for him at Pizza Delight- I didn’t. It’s on my to-do list to compile all the wises that Carlos Ramon ever cracked on The Magic School Bus and put it on you tube, because no one else has and it needs to be done, damn it. As you can tell, I sometimes write for it’s own sake, sort of a literary hedonist if you will. But all good things must come to an end...
My greatest principle is that a person’s course in life is governed by their reaction to their circumstance, and that nothing at all is of certainty. The nature of the human mind is a process which our current metaphors and models can only approximate, a physical system adjusting itself, which words like “I”, “our” and “qualia” can only activate whatever concept we have to answer the question of “What”. Because of this, I have a great sympathy towards Eastern spirituality and some Christian mysticism, because they have the spirit of what we’re all trying to accomplish here; to answer a question.
Sometimes I end up in the psychological equivalence of a fractal zoom where philosophy has this impossible to divide property, of all things linking to others without there being any elementary axioms or parts, probably because of that whole “brain made of neurons” racket. I concluded that emotions are just another form of sense; love, curiosity and understanding being reactions and sensory input much like taste and touch. Happily any cognitive dissonance or emptiness can be discarded the same way, and the logical contradiction a property of the purely physical (rather than comforting “conceptual”) nature of our very thought, meaning that I’ll simultaneously accept the objective truth of this, but reject any emotional significance, as emotional significance is itself deconstructed as a concept.
Of course the empathy gap and the nature of attention span (or at least my attention span) means that I’m normally not like this unless triggered. To me, regular life is the reaction of our psyche, broken up occasionally by the temporary delusion that a fractal zoom of philosophy can answer my questions. I call this a “delusion” because the concept of a question to be answered is an extraneous layer added to by an entity which just wants to avoid suffering.
The human mind; a non-linear physical system which tries to evaluate itself with a linear processing system that’s not suited to that sort of thing at all. Sometimes I wonder if who we are is just the sum of five or six different personalities, each with about a fifth of sixth of our functioning, plus a heavy specialization in one type of behaviour, the sum of which is an idea of what is right and wrong with a sense of identity. Given the existence of neural pathways in our spinal column, I wouldn’t be surprised. Sometimes I feel like I can feel the shape of our brains based on this, but that’s probably just me connecting concepts to high school biology.
I went off the rails a bit there, but looking back, I figure this should be a more honest introduction from me than any structured post. Even so, I doubt I can really convey that kind of leg twisting logical insanity without the meaning being hallowed by interpretation and pattern recognition.
Ugh, I feel like there wasn’t a speck of relate-ability there at all. Well, I’m eighteen years old and male. I followed the My Little Pony following out of a combination of boredom, fascination and a love of the bizarre. The show never struck a chord with me at all, really, but the fandom was something else. There was a period of about a month where I read crossover fan fictions, but I couldn’t be bothered after that point, because the fandom’s growth wound down and the novelty was gone. Even so, Nine Knackered Souls is the funniest fan fiction I’ve ever read, a Red vs Blue crossover. Fallout Equestria is the longest and most “so-okay-it’s average” fan fiction, despite the fact that I was drawn in enough to overlook the Mary sue aspects and read the whole thing in like four days in one sitting...
I’m going into Computer Science at Dalhousie University, and CSci being what it is, I’m going to make up my path as I go along. I really don’t know enough about robotics, AI or informatics to make the choice between them right now anyway.
Does anyone else find the terminology for this discussion strange? I know LW likes to use words with more emotional-colouring when describing concepts and motivations, but now it’s being used to describe people, in a semi-official way.
“If you have an important point to make, don’t try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time—a tremendous whack.”
Looking back, I feel kind of disappointed with the way Akon negotiated this one. I feel like any one of the following could have really made things go better for all parties involved.
Asking the Super-Happies for “the gift of Untranslatable 2”, perhaps by sharing thoughts via affectionate skin contact first, and then talking about further compromise. I just don’t understand how this unwounded so quickly, it seems like ensuring that all parties have an equal means of negotiation and empathy would come first. Humanity may have had a much easier time understanding the pain of their children if they could feel it as well, making them more likely to see the Super-Happy point of view in such a way that is still compatible with human values. If necessary, simply lie about the nature of the gift, or even outright state “Feel the emotions of others at the touch of a palm! Better living through Plasmids!”.
Give Untranslatable 2 to the Baby-Eaters. Really, the Impossible Possible World struck gold with the Super-Happies. If the adult Baby Eaters had the same capacity to feel the pain of others as did the Super Happies, then The Winnowing wouldn’t last very long after.
Request that Humanity and Baby Eater populations be put into some sort of stasis while negotiations take place among smaller groups to figure out what can be done. Akon could assist in whatever subterfuge be needed.
Point out that given Humanity’s more fragmented nature (compared to Super Happies), Akon being an unexceptional example of decision maker is not actually an advantage. He’s not exactly made of stern stuff, and anyone who hears about the situation is likely to turn to whoever can come up with a better solution, an exceptional case of decision maker. The Super Happies didn’t consider that exceptional can also mean better, since humans can’t transfer skills via sex.
Point out that a lot of people are going to commit suicide from the offer. The Super-Happies ought to have taken the rebuke of both parties (whether explicit or not) as a sign that their method of negotiation was just wrong, instead of trying to force the method onto both.
Before a discussion on corporeal punishment is started, I want to caution against this happening. It might be that children of people who find corporeal punishment effective are similar enough to their parents to respond well to it, and vice-versa.
I’ve only just now gotten a job, and may owe my dad too much money to make this donation drive, but I’ll see what I can do. If things go as planned, I might be able to give 700 by the deadline.
Also, isn’t three weeks something of a short window?
What with the popularity of rationalist!fanfiction, I feel like there’s an irresistible opportunity for anyone familar with The Animorphs books.
Imagine it! A book series where sentient slugs control people’s bodies, yet can communicate with their hosts. To borrow from the AI Box experiments, the Yeerks are the Gatekeepers, and the Controlled humans are the AI’s! One could use the resident black-sheep character David Hunting as the rationalist! character, who was introduced in the middle of the series, removed three books later and didn’t really do anything important. I couldn’t write such a thing, but it would be wicked if someone else did.
Not in this one. In the earlier chapters it’s narrated that the twins have been selling prank goods at 0% mark-up, unknown to their supplier.
The word “Winning” has its association with specific situations and not with the LW context in the mind of a prospective reader, who would wonder why they ought to care about winning competitions and fights. The second and last one are both pretty good though.
Me too, the biweeklies grew too bloated.
Almost no one these days regards axiom compiling as a way of describing emotional phenomenon, such as altruism. The idea of describing such warm reasons in terms of axioms was so unintuitive that it caused your friend to think that you were looking for some other reason for social justice, other than a basic appeal to better human nature. He may have been disgusted at what he thought was an implicit disregard for the more altruistic reasons for social justice, as if they weren’t themselves sufficient to do good things.
Read literature with an old writing style, especially if you dislike said writing style. The more opaque and complicated, the better.
I find that I’m a very fidgety reader, unconsciously skipping words, or even whole sentences, skimming over words I don’t actually know the meaning of, and failing to connect the context of words that I do know the meaning of with the rest of the narrative or lecture. This I do with both literature and more importantly, when reading science. I’ve decided to read At The Mountains of Madness and penalize myself for every time I lose track of the narrative, and reward myself for every time I recognize when one sentence adds or contributes to something implied by another sentence earlier on in the paragraph, and so on. Furthermore, I will do this for only literature, and not with learning new scientific concepts, or even old ones that I have already learned. The problem is with reading comprehension, not with understanding concepts, and exercising two skills at once prematurely may cause problems. I hope this will instill genuine patience, so that being careful and observant becomes a natural thing, rather than the uncomfortable thing I wrestle with.
This is only relative to Harry though. Draco didn’t even start doing anything until he was very heavily prompted by Harry, and throughout the story i get the impression that Draco was learning more from Harry than Harry was from Draco. Is Hermione really doing worse than any male student other than Harry?
He probably did find it annoying, though I can’t imagine that comment working the way you intended. His main justification for “biting the bullet” is going to be that biases could hinder a useful analysis. In this case, useful analysis is the thing that lets a person pause and think “this person isn’t just against me., he’s trying to tell me something”. Since you didn’t provide a useful analysis of why he didn’t actually believe that, you managed to annoy him without actually demonstrating that annoyance is a valid response.
The disregard of annoyance as a valid response can be attributed to people at LW being encouraged to ignore their own emotions in situations like above, based on the idea that most misunderstandings are based on emotional biases that cloud proper thinking.
I think small donors should also state their donations amounts of 50-100 dollars. Having counted the medium and large donations in this thread to a rough total of 11,000 dollars, it seems unlikely that the goal is being reached with just those, and I have a feeling there will be some sort of “breaking the ice” effect if small donors chirped up about their chip ins, so to speak. Right now the number of medium and large donors represented in this thread eclipses the smalls.
I’d be more concerned about the non-violent video games. As a kid I actually preferred playing Megaman 64 to going outside because of the false social presence I got from the audio dialogue.
I’ve been working with the idea that Quirrell is a high functioning psychopath, who often believe that other people are also “faking it”.