Status, say, is the analogy of board position- it only leads to higher genetic fitness on average in some broad way, but it’s a cheap and effective heuristic for doing so, just like good board position is a cheap and effective (but not guaranteed!) heuristic for winning at chess
Yep, basically what I was getting at.
We’re all puppets, Laurie. I’m just a puppet who can see the strings.
Dr. Manhattan (Watchmen)
The extreme is uninformative, that’s why I was asking if you came to any heuristics about finding and optimal point. Clearly there are benefits to muscle, besides status: strength and increased metabolism (the way I understand it is you actually have to exercise less with weights than with aerobics to stay in shape). Too much is likely to lead to injury and possibly other problems (possibly caused by extreme blood pressure during heavy lifting).
My personal conclusion is that bodyweight exercises are pretty safe, though I do use weights where bodyweight alternatives are too complicated or require annoyingly many reps.
Feel free to pop onto the NYC meetup list here and say hello (and would love to meet you in person):
http://groups.google.com/group/overcomingbiasnyc?hl=en
I use weights a bit, and since you are on a rationalist site I’d ask this question: where is the point where lifting unusually heavy things contributes more to the destruction of the body than to its maintenance?
some of you that aren’t on that list or are a bit further away from the city.
And the reminder for those who aren’t on the list: we live here:
http://groups.google.com/group/overcomingbiasnyc?hl=en
(the Meetup.com group is really just a recruiting station, that’s how I got ‘in’)
AI makes philosophy honest
-- Dan Dennet
1) A drug against unrequited love, aka “infatuation” or ’limerence”.
Marriage might qualify as a solution, though you might need all other kinds of drugs afterwords.
Token booth clerks and bar bouncers are pithy too. You need to prove the average case ;)
Don’t know a direct answer to your question, but I think these types of books (Torah is the one I am very familiar with) are best deconstructed by historians, as they were not all written at once (at least this is the case for Torah).
And where is the markup help in this blog? I can’t seem to find it and it frustrates the hell out of me when I’m commenting usual posts.
Look at the Help link bottom right of the comment box.
Related by Cousin It: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/2sw/math_prerequisites_for_understanding_lw_stuff/
It would be helpful if the books we ordered by dependency (topological sort) & order of difficulty .
Funny… I’ve been thinking along the same lines (though I am not sure if this is technically Pavlovian). Except for nitrous oxide I was thinking of another highly pleasurable distraction.
This is a specific application of “meta”, but a valuable one for many people here and is probably generalizable to other areas:
Pretty much the best programmer I know (an author of a number of Boost libraries) once reduced his “secret to success” to DRY Principle.
The way I understood it that he looked for higher level of abstraction even if it was locally suboptimal (in small programs cut n’ paste works fine); it might have taken longer in some instances, but made him a way better at creating abstractions.
At top software companies they seem to weigh the technical aspects more, though (somewhat understandably) the interviewers want to imagine working with the candidate as a future positive interaction.
Personally I think I pass the personality test, but recently blown an interview due to being stale in some areas and insufficient mental flexibility (“going meta”) on a couple of questions.
Incidentally this is a very valuable instrumental topic for doing well on job interviews, specifically in software areas. The problems are usually a mix of skills, “basic” knowledge and a thinly veiled IQ test questions; the latter type rely on “going meta” at some point of problem solving. If I had a good heuristic for this I think I could pass almost any interview :).
E.g. (classic) how do you delete a node from a linked list if you only have (pointer) to that node, not the previous one?
It is a little counterintuitive but even though values are entirely subjective people are actually not the absolute authority on what their subjective preferences are.
Absolutely. In a way we owe this understanding to Freud, he popularized the notion that people do not know what they are really pursuing. Of course he thought they were pursuing sex with their mother...
Simons is an AI researcher? News to me. Clearly his fund uses machine learning, but there is an ocean between that and AGI (besides plenty of funds use ML also, DE Shaw and many others).