TTC lectures, Bloggingheads.tv (you can download the audio), In Our Time, Philosophy Bites, Guardian’s Science Weekly, This American Life, Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe, and Radiolab.
siodine
Karma: 803
Luke, this has little to do with this post, but I’d like to know how you’re consuming a seemingly inhuman amount of information. Maybe you can write a post on rationalist news/data consumption? Like, for example, are you using clip files, notebooks, RSS readers, and so on? How are you optimizing the amount of time spent per unit of useful data consumption? How much time per day are you spending in doing all this research?
Sorry for bringing this up a year or more later, but the seventh chapter of what?
How would you estimate the percentage of LWers in the Singularitarian movement? Maybe most Singularitarians really are that clueless.
Why do you think any of that will improve reading speed? What are your goals for this software? E.g., do you want to help slow readers (150wpm), or are you trying to help fast readers (350wpm) become considerably faster?
The antiquated publishing system is holding back self-improvement in academia. The journals are the incentivizers for quality research, but they’re not interested in quality: They’re interested in their impact factor. You’d think by now we’d be using science to create a collaborative system that self-improves and works towards incentivizing academia to find valuable truths.
We’re stuck with a Ferrari with wagon wheels.
I think people like Andrew Wakefield make the effects of fraud more obvious. And, I agree, fraud on that level is probably rare, but what about smaller acts of fraud? For instance, I don’t think it’s that unlikely that many scientists, while under pressure and deadlines, fudge their results. And not because they want to deceive, no, they already “know” what the results should be, so they’re not doing anything that’s really all that wrong.
Interestingly though, we’ve found that science works despite significant bias, poor research, and so on. So, I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a significant amount of fraud, and yet we still were able to do science.
Basically, I don’t think the question should be “is this really a big deal?” but “how much better would science be if this were fixed?”.
They have to topple the current system, which does make a killing, and I don’t see how a system controlled by academia would make a killing. I would think it would be more analogous to free and open source software than a business venture.
Here’s the code. Should work for lesswrong too, I think.
How is that connected with paper-machine’s comment?
Edit: Uhh… it’s an honest question.
Wow, James Croft singing excerpts from Rent...what the fuck was that about?
Ikiru, Tokyo Story, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Goodbye Solo. Not sure how well those apply to your criteria—it’s been a while since I last saw them. I would search through South Korean, Japanese, and European cinema because they’re more likely to have what you’re looking for.
Edit: Wow, I completely forgot about Ingmar Bergman. His movies are exactly what you’re looking for. The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries are classics.
That’s not even an argument, that’s psychologizing. Turn the tables and address his concerns with Freudian psychoanalysis. “Faustonian complex, you say? Interesting… interesting. Tell me about your childhood relationship with your mother.”
On the other hand, it’s not at all surprising. It takes a significant amount rationalization, compartmentalization, and cognitive dissonance to accept the life of Sisyphus. But I think most atheists do it to a varying degree, and once there, comfortable, they don’t want move back toward the possibility of existential despair. Of course, this is just me psychologizing, but I don’t see any validity to their arguments, and they’re fairly thin, so I’m left with the hypothesis that they haven’t examined their arguments well for the reason I mentioned.
I got the impression that Peter J. Bentley crafted his responses like a climate scientist responding to a climate change denier: patronizing and dismissive. I think you may be able to avoid that in future with the newly added Question 8. It should not only act as a shibboleth but also as effective in-group signaling. Might want to make it the first question, though.
may help if they know what those things are, but seems likely to do more harm if they don’t know them, or regard them negatively—and those people are, by hypothesis, the ones who are going to be patronizing and dismissive.
I had considered that. Here’s my assumptions:
The people that do and don’t know those things are more likely to elevate their responses from a deferential context to a professional one.
The people that regard those things negatively or want to be patronizing will produce responses that aren’t meaningful.
The people that do know those things and regard them positively will be impressed and thereby more generous in the quality of their responses.
If true, I think the first assumption is especially important. It’s the difference between answering a journalist’s question and answering that same question at a professional conference. In the former case, I would have to consider the variety of ways they’re likely to misunderstand or skew my answer, and, really, I just want to give them the answer that produces the belief I want. E.g., don’t freak about A.I. because you know nothing about it and we do. We’re not worried, really. Now, look at this cute dancing robot and give us more funding.
Edit: I forgot to add that I agree with you on changing the wording of Q8. Although, I don’t think it makes it any less shibbolethy, just less obviously a shibboleth. Sneaky, I like it.
So, split the silly things into another question, or remove them entirely, or replace them with similarly functional in-group signaling equivalents. My main thrust is that in-group signaling is important in this situation, but I think paulfchristiano got at that better than I did.
I think the concept of inferential distance applies to art. As a kid, I was mostly exposed to classic rock (Led Zeppelin, Queen, and so on), and I felt something close to disgust when listening to anything significantly removed from that genre. However, I eventually bridged the gap between genres by finding music that mostly resembled classic rock but with a bit of something else. Eventually, this led me to enjoying entirely different genres that I’m fairly sure I’d otherwise hate.
It’s the same with film. I moved from only enjoying blockbuster-type films to very strange films that some might say are pretentious or boring.
Before I thought there was an inferential distance for art, I tried to expose friends and family to some of my favorite movies. So, for example, I’d show them a movie like Festen—which I thought was actually somewhat tame and easy to like—and they’d hate it from the outset. The subtitles were a problem, the plot was a problem, it was boring, and so on. These were intelligent people with complex tastes in other areas. And now that I think about it, I’m confident that I’d feel the same way if I didn’t have the progression of experiences that allowed me to love that movie the first time I watched it.
So, I’d say if you want to enjoy the things “you’re supposed to like,” bridge the distance with things similar to what you already enjoy.