LessWrong dev & admin as of July 5th, 2022.
RobertM
Karma: 2,669
How to save (a lot of) money on flying
I doubt it—this is a trick that high-volume fliers have been using for a while. That said, airlines being annoyed by it is a reasonable concern, though I don’t know what they could possibly do about—forbid you from flying with them? That seems like the sort of thing that would get attention.
Edit: see new posted warnings.
This is not a secret anymore, and the attention I bring to the issue by posting it on LessWrong is pretty marginal. The fact that there’s already been a lawsuit over this is an indication that the airlines think it’s cheaper to try and suppress it that way than to change their pricing structure.
Missing actor/incentive structure:
Our current justice system is largely based on the idea of retribution, not rehabilitation. This is a trade-off where the State delivers vengeance for victims/families of victims to prevent vigilante justice. It may not make much sense in terms of impact today, but as a cultural norm it still exists and this idea does nothing to address that.
Other thoughts:
Does not really address “recidivism” of victimless crimes, including most drug crimes, except in the most general sense. Convincing people that smoking weed is morally wrong is much harder than convincing them that murder is morally wrong.
Has anybody donated a car to charity before (in the US? CA in particular, but I imagine it’ll generalize outside of location-specific charities).
The general advice online is useful but not very narrowly-tailored. Couple points I’m looking for information on:
1) Good charities (from an EA perspective)
2) Clarification on the tax details (when car’s fair market value is between $500 and $5000)
Would appreciate any advice.
I was able to use Square to transfer money from a pre-paid gift card (not sure if it was Visa though) to my bank account. Transaction fee is ~2.75% iirc.
I don’t see what this has to do with rationality, or any other core interest of LW. This seems to be a fairly prototypical example of the genre, so I don’t even see what kind of useful analysis you can perform on it. Maybe try /pol/?
To extend the programming metaphor a bit:
Agents who understand and explicitly use a decision theory along the lines of TDT/FDT may be said to be implementing an interface, which consequently modifies the expected outcomes of their decision process. This is important in situations like deciding how to vote, or even whether you should do so, as you can estimate that most agents in the problem-space will not be implementing that particular interface, so your doing so will only entangle with the outcome of the limited set of agents who do implement it.
I found some of this difficult but not impossible to understand, without any prior context. Of course, it’s possible that I’m wrong about my level of understanding, in which case I’d prefer to be corrected.
Here is my understanding of the relevant details.
Erfeyah is confused by what you mean by mana, and more specifically what it meant to “apply” mana to a rental car company employee. If my understanding is correct, this was a process of using emotional support techniques, as you describe them (or perhaps the opposite—introducing a “hostile social reality”, i.e. dark arts—this is something I’m not clear on), in order to accomplish your goals.
I’m also not sure what this means:
“You must sever your nerve cords. The Khala is corrupted”
Unless it means disconnecting your perception of social reality from your goal structure, while maintaining a surface-level awareness.
I’m the Los Angeles organizer and can confirm that Elo seems to be fairly put together, as these things go(though we only met for a few hours.)
Yep, group is here: https://www.lesserwrong.com/groups/GSN7BypgiJcjEiRRS
Is it not showing up?
(On a related note: I ran into an error when trying to create the group when pasting an address in the “location” field, not realizing until I tried to create an event instead that it required me to allow it to autocomplete the address by typing it in from scratch. The error consisted of these lines:
Mongo location is required.
Group Location is required.
Location is required.
Schema validation error
Suffice it to say, it was not terribly clear why it wasn’t accepting the location at first.)
Thanks, I’ll keep that in mind for future events.
One-Year Anniversary Retrospective—Los Angeles
Thanks—I remember finding your post interesting the first time I read it. This time I put it in Evernote so that I actually remember to try some things out.
Sorry for the delayed response—for some reason I never got any notifications about comments on this post.
We never had a discussion about the schedule when the reboot happened, mostly because “weekly” was the way we’d always done it and nobody seemed interested in changing it. Yes, it was explicitly weekly. The “core” members had known each other for anywhere from 3-5 years, but that was mostly in the context of the meetup (with a few exceptions). That’s changed significantly—we (including the newer members) spend much more time together socially outside of the context of the meetups now than we used to.
You Are Being Underpaid
Do you have 10-15 hours a week to spend writing code? It’s likely possible to frame your absence from the job market in a way which doesn’t hurt your prospects too much. Feel free to DM me if you want to talk more.
In fact, all of my jobs (3 in total) until the current one had placed very lenient demands on my time. I think it’s more of a management/operational issue, though. While I won’t deny that I can solve some problems fast, most of the downtime was from an inefficient work pipeline.
Because I’m not sure what the motivations behind asking trivia questions are, I don’t know for sure how your answer would be perceived. That is likely how I would answer a question about an API I wasn’t familiar with, though filters are more of a structural aspect of .NET MVC than an API (though it’s still all functions at the bottom). Not knowing an important structural aspect of a framework you claim to be proficient in can be a red flag—though in my case I knew what they were, but did not know what they were called. (I looked them up after the first interview where I was asked about them, which was a good thing, because I was asked about them again in my last interview.) Another good lesson!
I agree that making the interview pleasant for the interviewer is a good idea. It does seem like a “too obvious to be said” sort of thing, which probably means it needs to be said more often. The question that follows is how to do that, especially if you don’t have an instinct for it.
I’ve also read the advice to practice answering questions on a whiteboard. It’s good advice, but in the interview that got me hired I didn’t actually do any whiteboarding, so I didn’t think to list it.
Thanks!
How should I contact Vassar regarding my willingness to follow his lead regarding whatever projects he deems sensible?