Tem42

The Pre-His­tor­i­cal Fallacy

• Tem42 22 Aug 2015 23:18 UTC

  19 points

  on: In­stru­men­tal Ra­tion­al­ity Ques­tions Thread

  I live in a smaller city, and don’t have easy access to a LessWrong meetup group. Are there any commonly-occurring social groups that attract rational (and interesting) people?

  I do not have a good example to give (that’s why I’m asking), but I will note that examples of “commonly-occurring social groups” would include things like the Unitarian Universalist Church (interesting people, open minded, not generally particularly rationalist) and the local game store game-play events (intelligent, diverse group, often with better than average critical thinking skills, but also includes a lot of people who are there mostly because they think that superheroes and zombies are cool).

• Tem42 13 Oct 2015 23:57 UTC

  18 points

  in reply to: NancyLebovitz’s comment on: Open thread, Oct. 5 - Oct. 11, 2015

  It sounds like we had an effective if unstated rule: “When someone does a bunch of stuff wrong, get rid of them.”

  AA checked four boxes:

  • Doesn’t listen to feedback

  • Doesn’t make strong arguments

  • Repeatedly posts on topics not of particular interest to LW

  • Posts things that are likely to be offensive to many

  We are missing some rules that might be useful to have, specifically ‘what are the boxes’ and ‘how many do you need to check to get banned’. But quite frankly, looking at those four sins, I would think that any three should be enough to get someone banned. If anything, NancyLebovitz probably waited longer than necessary.

  I would also say that making a rule based on only one of those factors would be counterproductive. I think most of us are forgiving (as far as bans go, albeit perhaps not in voting) when a user repeatedly fails on one of those, as long as they are also providing useful content in other posts.

• Tem42 10 Aug 2015 18:23 UTC

  13 points

  in reply to: Username’s comment on: Open thread, Aug. 10 - Aug. 16, 2015

  This is interesting, but I think that it is using an incorrect definition of introversion. I interpret an introvert as someone who prefers to spend time by themselves or in situations in which they are working on their own, rather than in situations in which they are interacting with other people. This does not mean that they necessarily need to feel extreme stress at public speaking or at parties/​social events. They may feel bored, annoyed, frustrated, or indifferent to these events, or they may even like them, but feel the opportunity cost of the time they take is not really worth it.

  “our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance”; “blitzed nerves and staggering bowels”; “We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies”

  This doesn’t sound like introversion. This sounds like an anxiety disorder.

• Tem42 29 Aug 2015 0:36 UTC

  10 points

  in reply to: CellBioGuy’s comment on: Open Thread—Aug 24 - Aug 30

  I would add to that that your first year or so, it is not bad to plant something easy that will overproduce. In the long run you aren’t going to want much zucchini, but your first year it is motivating to have something come up that is edible, once the birds have eaten your berries, the insects have devastated your lettuce, and your tomatoes have mysteriously decided not to give you anything. I would have given up early on if I didn’t have something that produced a reasonable amount the first year. And you can often give away excess fresh vegetables, gaining some small amount of social capital.

Stupid Ques­tions Novem­ber 2015

• Tem42 12 Dec 2015 1:29 UTC

  8 points

  in reply to: James_Miller’s comment on: [Link] In­tro­duc­ing OpenAI

  Moreover, the nuclear weapons situation is much simpler than the AI situation. Pretty much everyone agrees that a nuclear weapon going off in an inhabited area is a big deal that can quickly make life worse for all involved. It is not the case that everyone agrees that general AI is a such a big deal. All the official nuclear powers know that there will be a significant negative response directed at them if they bomb anyone else. They do not know this about AI.

• Tem42 21 Nov 2015 21:18 UTC

  8 points

  in reply to: Fluttershy’s comment on: Stupid Ques­tions Novem­ber 2015

  Check with your doctor about the acid reflux and its effect on your teeth. I would guess that the reflux had a greater effect on your tooth decay than the cough drops. He might know enough to tell you whether or not your dentist is reacting to the problem effectively, and at the very least has a better grasp of the problem than any of us :-)

  (Also, you should be seeing him anyway if reflux is a problem.)

• Tem42 19 Oct 2015 21:34 UTC

  8 points

  in reply to: Houshalter’s comment on: Open thread, Oct. 19 - Oct. 25, 2015

  If I were God of the World, I would model the problem as more of a River Crossing Puzzle. How do you get things moving along when everyone on the boat wants to kill each other? Segregation! Resettling humanity mapped over a giant Venn diagram is trivial once we are all uploaded, but it also runs into ethical problems; just as voting and enacting the will of the majority (or some version thereof) is problematic, so is setting up the world so that the oppressor and the oppressee will never be allowed meet. However, in my experience people are much happier with rules like “you can’t go there” and much less happier with rules like “you have to do what that guy wants”. This is probably due to our longstanding tradition of private property.

  This makes some assumptions as to what the next world will look like, but I think that it is a likely outcome—it is always much easier to send the kids to their rooms than to hold a family court, and I think a cost/​benefit analysis would almost surely show that it is not worth trying to sort out all human problems as one big happy group.

  Of course, this assumes that we don’t do something crazy like include democracy and unity of the human race as terminal values.

• Tem42 29 Aug 2015 19:09 UTC

  8 points

  on: Cal­ling refer­ences: Ra­tional or ir­ra­tional?

  The responses here are interesting, but would be more useful if they included an indication of what country the poster is in.

• Tem42 13 Aug 2015 23:05 UTC

  8 points

  in reply to: polymathwannabe’s comment on: Crazy Ideas Thread, Aug. 2015

  This seems like an enormous mismatch of needs and solutions.

  First and foremost, if you are in anything close to a position to mandate this sort of policy, you should also be able to control the number of homeless—preferably by buying them homes. Taxes are good for this. If you mean runaways, in many cases the first response should be to return them to their birth parents, although there may be good reason to monitor and adjust the situation as needed.

  Adoptions are good thing, and people already recognize this. The three barriers to full adoption rates are:

  1. Red tape. Newborns and babies are in high demand. People regularly pay between $10,000 and $25,000 to adopt these kids—although it can take many months for the adoption to go through, especially when adopting from overseas. In these cases you don’t need to make anything mandatory, just make it easier.

  2. Age. People don’t tend to want older children. This is where your model will be the most useful, but there is likely to be a lot of resistance. People who want a baby may resist a ten-year-old replacement even more than they would a random baby. I suspect that you will get a much better response if you don’t model it as a replacement. It won’t be hard to get these kids adopted (again, red tape is probably the biggest barrier), and they will be better off with parents that adopt them with the support of a stipend rather than those who adopt them as a legal mandate.

  3. Problem children. Kids with mental, psychological, health, and behavioral problems are the ones who are hardest to place, least requested, most likely to change homes multiple times, and have the highest needs. The current lottery of children that nature has set up is pretty awful; not all parents are ready for a child with special needs. Requiring a subset of parents to raise a “problem” child as their first child is likely to help with population control, but isn’t necessarily the best choice for the child. It is probably going to be better than cycling through multiple foster homes, so your system may be an improvement, but I suspect that here is another chance for you to use your impressive power to improve things not through the power of forced placement, but through the power of taxes. In these cases, an orphanage staffed with very-long-term employees including very patient adults who have experience with a wide range of kids, along with a few mental health professionals, speech therapists, occupational therapists, and nurses, is likely to be your best bet.

  There is some skepticism as to how reasonable it is create an orphanage with long-term live-in staff that can effectively act in all the roles that parents need to fill.… but I think it is a safe bet that even an imperfect but fully staffed high-needs orphanage will out-perform forced placement.

• Tem42 19 Aug 2015 21:54 UTC

  7 points

  in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Open thread, Aug. 17 - Aug. 23, 2015

  I have found that the single greatest cause of my forgetting things is being engaged in other things. So during short periods of down-time (under five minutes), I try to give over to non-directed thought. This has been very successful, and I am trying to expand it.

• Tem42 31 Jul 2015 5:38 UTC

  7 points

  in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Wear a Helmet While Driv­ing a Car

  For some reason your link is not loading for me, but here is another CDC link: Percent Distributions of TBI-related Emergency Department Visits by Age Group and Injury Mechanism . Falls are big causes of TBI for the under four crowd and the over 65 crowd. The 5-14 and 45-64 groups also fall a lot… but only about half as much. But, also look at this: Percent Distributions of TBI-related Deaths by Age Group and Injury Mechanism.

• Tem42 21 Nov 2015 23:52 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: Fluttershy’s comment on: Stupid Ques­tions Novem­ber 2015

  A possible partial solution, as far as your teeth go, would be to start chewing gum. Xylitol gum may be particularly effective, but failing that, sugar free gum is good. Chewing helps rinse your mouth with saliva (clearing reflux off of your teeth), keeps your mouth hydrated (dry mouth often accompanies reflux and is not good for oral hygiene), and helps control pH.

  Plaque and pH

  Xylitol gum

  Googling will easily find more information, including less technical information if desired.

• Tem42 20 Nov 2015 1:28 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Mar­ket­ing Rationality

  It might be useful to identify what exactly trips your snake-oil sensors here. Mine were tripped when it claimed to be science based but referenced no research papers, but other than that it looked okay to me.

  Unless you mean simply the site that it is posted on smells of snake oil. In that case I agree, but at the same time, so what? The people that read articles on that site don’t smell snake oil, whether they should or not. If the site provides its own filter for its audience, that only makes it easier for us to present more highly targeted cognitive altruism.

  What links here?

  • Gleb_Tsipursky's comment on Mar­ket­ing Rationality by Viliam (20 Nov 2015 4:56 UTC; 16 points)
  • Gleb_Tsipursky's comment on Mar­ket­ing Rationality by Viliam (25 Nov 2015 2:41 UTC; 10 points)

• Tem42 19 Nov 2015 22:38 UTC

  6 points

  on: Stupid Ques­tions Novem­ber 2015

  I would like more signaling opportunities related to rationality. Specifically, I recently searched for a logo indicating that I was open to Crocker’s rules, and could not find one.

  This seems like a significant failure. Perhaps particularly so given that there are multiple logos allowing you to indicate, for example, that you are an atheist, despite the fact that this is usually not generally a very useful thing to signal, and may be inappropriate in the workplace.

  I’m not sure if this is me being obsessive about iconography, or if there is any sort of real interest in rationality-related icons. In either case, I’m not volunteering to design anything myself, but I would appreciate a typical-mind check.

• Tem42 24 Oct 2015 13:44 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: JoshuaZ’s comment on: Crazy Global Warm­ing Solu­tion Ideas

  While we’re meta, perhaps a better placement for this would be in a new Crazy Idea thread. The last one was quite popular.

• Tem42 23 Aug 2015 23:57 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: PhilGoetz’s comment on: In­stru­men­tal Ra­tion­al­ity Ques­tions Thread

  I have not had luck with book clubs in the past, and so have not been to any in years. Are there any sort of book clubs that you have had particular luck with?

  I can second university clubs—philosophy and political science clubs have been good to me in the past, and math club was fun. These are pretty much limited to students, unfortunately. It might be interesting to hunt down a philosophy club for older adults, if I can find one that doesn’t focus on spirituality/​religion.

• Tem42 4 Jul 2015 2:32 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: shminux’s comment on: The Pre-His­tor­i­cal Fallacy

  I am talking about the pretty much anything that refers without references to the idea that ‘humans evolved to X’ or ‘it is human nature to X’. My background is in anthropology, with comparatively little exposure to evolutionary psychology, but in my experience the ethnographies, papers, and meta-studies that this information would ideally be based on are very clear about their shortcomings.

  However, even when your data is a handful of surviving and marginalized ethnic groups, field notes from the 50s, and some promising bones, you can make some good strong statements about behavior, diet, etc. This leads to conclusions that are highly technical and precise, but with limited scope. Most science writers want exactly the opposite—non-technical and broadly applicable. So they latch onto some factoids, make ‘reasonable’ generalizations, and ignore the fact that most anthropologists are very clear on what is known and what is supposed.

  There are examples of anthropologists giving interesting theories and arguing with limited data—the aquatic ape hypothesis is a perennial example (now long obsolete). But this is in no way a problem in the field; every science has hypotheses, and within the field the evidence, or lack of evidence, is clearly stated.

• Tem42 1 Jul 2016 15:22 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: Ishaan’s comment on: Ra­tion­al­ity when In­su­lated from Evidence

  Point #2 is a big important point. The media does not select relevant issues, they chose issues that play well to the public. Sometimes these overlap, but often they do not. GMO is a good example, because it is reported as monolithically important, but each genetic modification has to be considered individually; considering GMOs as a unified group is not very useful. Likewise, if you are interested in health and nutrition, you should also look for vegetables that are grown to be nutritious, which includes many GMO but not others: many plants are modified to look better, not be healthier; but many plants are modified to be more nutritious, not look better; etc. Moreover, you can also get some benefit in nutrition by ignoring the GMO debate and looking at things like soil health (organic works as a vague proxy for this, but again, ‘organic’ is a media chosen label, and so is touted as Very Relevant In Every Way and also does not limit itself to soil health) or time-since-harvest (locally grown, proxy, media pollution, etc.)