This thread is for asking any questions that might seem obvious, tangential, silly or what-have-you. Don't be shy, everyone has holes in their knowledge, though the fewer and the smaller we can make them, the better.
Please be respectful of other people's admitting ignorance and don't mock them for it, as they're doing a noble thing.
To any future monthly posters of SQ threads, please remember to add the "stupid_questions" tag.
Do any of you do anything nontraditional to improve your health/longevity? What I'm thinking about is radical lifestyle changes, such as using dozens of supplements like Kurzweil or mixing one's lunch out of raw ingredients like Bostrom, or avoiding all car travel and similar stuff, not exercise.
Lifestyle interventions to increase longevity, as found on Life Advice Repository, as curiously not found on Repository repository.
For what it's worth, I recommend CoQ10 supplementation to anyone I know on statin drugs (they interfere with its recycling, although you get at least some from literally anything you eat that was once alive) and am occasionally surprised that this is not standard practice given the biochemistry involved.
If you pay through PayPal, PayPal will do the currency conversion for you, but will charge a fee (I don't know what the fee for the conversion would be in your case, but it is based on the international interbank exchange rates). Since you pay the exchange fee, I don't think MIRI minds at all if you use the PayPal service. You might be able to get a better exchange rate through your local bank, but then you are still stuck on how to make the actual money transfer.
The Donate page recommends emailing [email protected] . If that doesn't get you a response in a week ask again and I'll put more effort into getting an answer for you.
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.
Kind of reminds me of a discussion of making a utilitarian emblem on felicifia.org. We never really settled on anything, but I think the best one was Σ☺.
I saw this recently, and immediately thought it must have something to do with rationality:
http://phys.org/news/2009-08-uc-wont-lost-hospital.html
But it was actually the symbol for mental health services.
The most successful companies in recent years: was human intuition or was it analytics driving them?
When I see predictive learning algorithms, they seem to be able to predict '0.3' or '0.4' on a good day. I don't know machine learning, I'm just a regular scientist.
But, I also here these miracle claims like 'AI that can diagnose better than doctors'. So, I'm not sure whether I should bother learning all this kind of data science stuff.
When should I use my intuition, and when should I opt for predictive analytics?
It seems to me that if you buy a stock, you could come out arbitrarily well-off, but your losses are limited to the amount you put in. But if you short, your payoffs are limited to the current price, and your losses could be arbitrarily big, until you run out of money.
Is this accurate? If so, it feels like an important asymmetry that I haven't absorbed from the "stock markets 101" type things that I've occasionally read. What effects does it have on markets, if any? (Running my mouth off, I'd speculate that it makes people less inclined to bet on a bubble popping, which in turn would prolong bubbles.) Are there symmetrical ways to bet a stock will rise/fall?
On the internet, but especially on the HPMOR subrreddit, I find notations such as "Canon!Harry" or "Vampire!Durkon" or "HPMOR!Quirrell". Does the exclamation mark simply stand for a space, or does it have additional meaning? And more importantly, where does the notation come from? Where was it invented?
Here, knock yourself out :-)
If I value my health a fair bit more than most and am a transhumanist, when should I bother to get second opinions before having dental work done?
I had 16 fillings done a month ago and my teeth mostly all still hurt, so I'm going to go back to the dentist and see what he says as soon as I can, but I'm not sure what he'll want to do to me, if anything. (I think fillings are supposed to stop hurting after a week or two). I like him, and I want to trust him, and finding a new dentist would be annoying, but it's so weird and scary that I just had that many fillings done, because... I've always gone to the dentist every 6 months for a cleaning, and I never had to get a filling before, even though I always got routine x-rays to check for cavities every year. I'm only 22. I think that the reason I had to have that many fillings done was because I'd been downing tons of cough drops which contained sucrose for several months, for the reason that my acid reflux had been upsetting my throat.
I guess that I'm really just reminded of my frailty by this experience, and of how easy it is for someone to get old or sick, or even die. Sorry I'm such a bucking mess right now (mentally and physically), and thanks for any suggestions.
I had 16 fillings done a month ago and my teeth mostly all still hurt
I had more than my fair share of tooth fillings, and they usually hurt for a day or two. Later only if I expose them to heat or cold, such as drinking hot tea, biting an ice cream, or inhaling cold air with my mouth. (Also if I touch the filling with an aluminum fork.)
What you describe feels wrong. The sucrose doesn't seem like a good explanation for the remaining pain-- cavities take time, new ones don't appear overnight. ChristianKl asked about X-rays because of two other options: either the dentist didn't clean the tooth correctly and there is still something under the filling, or maybe your tooth has two cavities: one visible which was fixed, and one invisible (under the gum) which wasn't. But this seems unlikely to happen under 16 teeth at the same time.
On the other hand, a tooth pain is sometimes hard to localize. I had an experience that my tooth hurt, and it felt like the whole jaw hurts; yet when one tooth was fixed, the pain was gone. (Not sure why: maybe the source of pain was too close to a common nerve for all teeth?) So, maybe you have a problem with one tooth, and it feels like all of them hurt.
This is helpful, if scary. Thanks. It does seem unlikely that all 16 teeth would still be screwed up--pain localization failures seem more likely, but Im just going off of my intuition. I'm going back to the same guy who did all of my fillings ASAP to get things checked out again. (I wonder, if some number of my teeth weren't cleaned correctly, does that mean it's ok for me to keep seeing that dentist?)
In my experience different dentists care about very different things and to very different degrees. So if you changed dentists, I would not be surprised at all if the previous one said nothing needed to be done and a new one said you needed 16 fillings. But if it's the same dentist, that is a bit strange.
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.)
Ok, I went in today, and the dentist says that I'm probably just grinding my teeth at night. I'll have him fit me for a night guard soon. I believe that that's at least part of the problem, and time will tell if he's right that that's the whole problem. (He did an x-Ray a month ago, before I had any of my fillings done, but not one this time. Also, my bite wasn't high.)
After they finish doing the fillings, they file the new material down to fit your bite. You might recall them having you bite down on a piece of paper and then they'd sand away all the parts that were hitting. The more fillings that get done at once, the harder it is to get this done properly, I think. If certain parts of your filling or teeth are hitting before the other parts are when you bite down, or if they are otherwise not fitted well, it can cause pain throughout. (They are also more likely to fall out then)
Source: Personal experience with bad fillings.
I find that often when I have a discussion with someone who isn't familiar with A Human's Guide to Words or Hayakawa's Language in Thought and Action, the conversation often ends prematurely because I can't seem to tactfully point out when someone is arguing over semantics or confusing the map for the territory. How do you guys approach a discussion where your partner seems to be making these types of errors?
The thing is that even when a disagreement seems to be about words, this very often also means that there are disagreeing motives; one persons either wants to accomplish something or to reach a certain conclusion, and thinks that such and such a definition will lend itself more easily to these goals. Meanwhile, the other person does not have these goals. The consequence is that at least one person may resist the clarification of meaning, because such a clarification will tend to impede his ends.
I recall there being some altcoin that seeded itself with donations to charities, and Googling 'nonprofit altcoin' gives things like the Clean Water Coin. My guess is this idea sounds better than it is (note that the CWC has donated $2k, which I suspect is a low return on time so far).