Some magic bullets from the past:
plenty of other vitamins for plenty of other diseases
clean water for preventing bacterial infections
washing hands to avoid massive childbirth mortality in hospitals
bed nets for malaria
If you look how difficult it was to figure out those, and/or how difficult it was to do such tiny changes even while knowledge of it became widespread, I don’t find possibility of trivial solution to willpower problem unlikely at all by outside view.
Manual moderation is a big unknown—risk aversion means that you don’t want your time spent writing to be wasted by some moderator deciding not to publish. And delay between writing and publishing is a problem too—you want feedback as soon as you wrote it while it’s still fresh in your mind.
If people thought moderators would be very friendly, and very fast, that would matter less, but it’s unusual expectation to have, even when it turns out to be true.
These are two very rational reasons why people post on LW and not OB.
Suicide is almost as likely cause of your death as a traffic accident. People spend too little effort at preventing traffic accidents, no question about it (all statistics agree that we are getting better at it, just too slowly), but situation is many orders of magnitude worse when it comes to preventing risk of death by suicide. We don’t even do routine screening for depression! This total lack of concern is pure madness!!!
This might be a rather unpopular claim in a strongly atheist crowd like this one, but there’s really no reason to feel particularly hostile towards ostensibly religious customs like Christmas.
Why should atheists care so much more about “Christ” part of “Christmas” than Christians? To most “religious” people Christmas is just a fun family tradition with not much more than lip service being paid to its religious aspect. “Yeah, sure, Jesus was born, whatever, let’s have fun now”.
Even more amusingly consumerist culture has been amazingly effective at eroding religious character of Christmas. The right things usually happen for the wrong reasons.
It’s not necessarily a bad thing that 67% of studies are done on psychology undergrads. 90% or so of medical studies are done on mice. If you find something big, you should go outside your cheapest testing group (be it mice or psychology undergrads), but if something fails to produce interesting results even on them, you just saved yourself a lot of money and effort—and failures will be much more common than interesting finds.
Death Note is a brilliant anime, but not really a great of an example of rationality. Tvtropes calls it Xanatos Roulette.
First you start with a smart plan. That can be rational. Then you complicate the plan. It makes characters look even smarter, and still quite rational. At some point the plan is so overcomplicated, so many uncertainties are just assumed, that it’s no longer rationality but plain omniscience and characters “knowing the script of future episodes”. That’s what Death Note is. Light and L overplot, and it’s really fun to watch, and they look really “smart” when it’s well done, but it’s way past any reasonable pretense of rationality.
TvTropes has more examples, like Saw series. They’re all great fun, and not much rational.
Maybe I’m just being habitually contrarian here for no good reason, but it seems to me that for a supposedly “rationalist” community, people here seem to be far too willing to accept claims of LessWrong exceptionality based on shockingly weak evidence. Group-serving bias is possibly the most basic of all human biases, and we cannot even overcome that little?
Claiming that your group is the best in the world, or among the best, is something nearly every single group in history did, and all had some anecdotal “evidence” for it. Priors are very strongly against this claim, even after including these anecdotes.
Yet, in spite of these priors, the group you consider yourself member of is somehow the true best group ever? Really? Where’s hard evidence for this? I’m tempted to point to Eliezer outright making things up on costs of cryonics multiple times, and ignoring corrections from me and others, in case halo effect prevents you from seeing that he’s not really extraordinarily less wrong.
(Which, by the way, is also why self-help advice is so divergent: it reflects a vast array of possible deficiencies in a very complex system.)
Scurvy advice was also vast and divergent before it turned out it was all wrong and the problem was solved by a magic bullet. And so was our cholera advice. And advice about every single issue about which we were wrong. Advice divergence can as easily reflect our lack of knowledge as actual complexity of the problem.
So here are a few reviews:
I got used Aeron chair (the thing lasts forever, unlike other chairs I had that seemed to last 6 months on average), 30″ (2560x1600) monitor, Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 (which I use with Dvorak layout), and all of that was some of the best money I’ve ever spent. I also get the largest desk I could fit in my place, and I still regret that I couldn’t get anything bigger. These are awesome ideas.
I tried many memory foam pillows, and they are a bit better than “normal” pillows, but I haven’t been terribly happy about any of them. I always sleep on my side (I’m literally unable to sleep in any other position, no matter how tired, how the hell people sleep in airplanes or trains is a mystery to me) - people who sleep on their backs have very different pillow needs, so if you hear recommendation from someone who sleeps differently, disregard it completely.
Unless you’re running a lot, and virtually nobody does, “barefoot shoes” seem entirely pointless, and their main effect will be marking you as a total nerd publicly.
Fidgeters are much less likely to be obese than non-fidgeters.
Correlation called, it wants its causation back.
Also if you’re looking for low hanging fruit, even very modest amount (1-3h weekly) of light to moderate physical exercise does wonders to energy levels and general mood. inb4 anybody asks it’s been proven in every study imaginable to have zero effect on weight either way.
Second also: Ninja Zemgears seem to have highly polarized reviews online—some people’s feet fit well and they’re happy, other people’s feet don’t and they hate them. This problem probably applies to all “barefoot” shoes, since they need tighter tolerances than traditional shoes, and traditional shoes already have fitting problems with plenty of people, so people usually buy them in person than online. Also plenty of people complain about durability.
Another problem:
After fall of Tripoli and 90% of Libya falling under control of NTC, intrade contract that “Muammar al-Gaddafi to no longer be leader of Libya before midnight ET 31 Aug 2011” was getting lower each day intrade did not close it as done, since it became the contract that “intrade will not fuck up judging”.
There was zero disagreement about facts and predictions of facts on the ground, everybody agreed that Gaddafi’s government fell, so it turned into very heavy trading about intrade’s sanity, and people estimated chance of sane judgment as ~67% event.
Intrade judged sanely that time, but with so much distrust in judges, prediction markets on anything more clear-cut than election results simply cannot work.
In one of previous threads about it, SilasBarta had an example where intrade fucked up, so I doubt this is an off chance.
You cannot assume any α, and choose p based on it, for α depends on p. You just introduced a time loop into your example.