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Lots of school is propaganda and the goal of the assignment was undoubtedly to get the children to do more to help others throughout the children's lives. So giving the money was more about directly accomplishing the ends of the assignment. If we want to be more cynical, the goal of the assignment was to signal virtue, and by giving money my son accomplished this better than if he completed the assignment the normal way.
Debatably. There was a scene in the movie "A beautiful mind" where Nash walks into a class and closes the windows because of noise. One of his student's protests because it was so hot and he says he needs to be able to think without noise. Another student goes to the window and asks the workers outside to not make so much noise for 45mins while they have the lesson so they can keep the windows open.
as a pivotal moment in the movie it was fun, Nash replies, "sometimes there is more than one solution to any given problem".
This seems like what your son has done (found another solution to the problem). So long as he understands that. He is doing well.
Just musing on how LW has had a profound impact on my life. It was a strong influence in my deconversion from theism, it's helped me make significant medical decisions, and I'm in love with someone I met at a LessWrong meetup, as well as another person whose first interaction with me was a Bayes theorem joke.
I'm in love with someone I met at a LessWrong meetup, as well as another person whose first interaction with me was a Bayes theorem joke.
Based on your post, it is unclear to me whether you are in love with one person or two. Outside of LW, I would assume you were in love with one person, but here on LW, I assume polyamory is at play here.
Seeking help with Voronoi map generation
I'm hoping somebody here can help me create a particular map. I'd like to build a weighted Voronoi map of North America, with the weights corresponding to each urban area's population. Or, put another way, I'd like to start with http://lpetrich.org/Science/GeometryDemo/GeometryDemo_GMap.html , input the urban areas listed at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_urban_areas_by_population , and then tweak how the map is produced so that if one metroplex has a population of 1,000,000 and another has 10,000,000, the border between them is about 90% of the way closer to the smaller city.
I'm trying to build a scifi setting to put a story in, and have certain suspicions about what such a map would look like, but would like to confirm my intuition. I'm running Fedora Linux, and don't mind compiling oddball software, I just don't know which packages I'd need to even try to generate this thing.
By any chance, anyone here already able to generate the final product with just a few mouse-clicks? :) If not, anyone have any advice on how to get started?
You can use the pyvoro library to compute weigted 2d voronoi diagrams, and the matplotlib library to display them. Here's a minimal working example with randomly generated data:
edit: It seems this library uses the radical voronoi tessellation algorithm, where "weights" represent point radii. This means if you specify a point radius greater than the distance between it and the closest point, the tessellation will not function correctly, and as a corollary, if a point's radius is smaller than half of the minimal distance between it and a neighbour, the specified weight will not affect the tessellation process. Therefore, you need a secondary algorithm that takes the point weights and mutual distances into account to produce the desired result here.
The Northern Caves, probably. (I like Floornight by the same author better.)
I agree with the assessment of Good_Burning_Plastic and Lumifer that user vision is Eugine redivivus yet again.
Have our esteemed moderators taken a look at what accounts are upvoting all Eugine's comments (across his multiple identities)? If, as has often been suggested, Eugine is getting most of his upvotes from sockpuppets then disabling those might be somewhat effective in making it harder for each of Eugine's accounts to start mass-downvoting before getting banhammered.
R.A. MacAvoy on talking with imaginary people
Is it really a tulpa if you win all the arguments?
Top rated questions on the new prediction website metaculus:
Will 2016 be the warmest year on record?
Will a clinical trial begin by the end of 2017 using CRISPR to genetically modify a living human?
Will an AI successfully masquerade as human for 20 questions by 2017?
Has a new boson been discovered at the LHC?
Will Lockheed Martin and Skunkworks announce a successful test of a break-even compact fusion reactor by late 2019?
Skills are learned through training. Metaculus is a good way to train to estimate the future.
Sorry for mindkilling content, but I remember reading on LW long ago that the political left is supposedly morally different, because it doesn't use the "purity/disgust" moral axis.
Then I found these photos online, and I wonder whether that is the microexpression (except there seems to be nothing "micro" when these people do it) of disgust. Or am I reading the expression wrong?
My point is that if someone has this expression pretty much stuck on their face, I find it quite difficult to believe that they don't care about the "purity/disgust" axis.
So what exactly is the lesson here?
Is the hypothesis about the political left not using the "purity/disgust" axis wrong?
It is wrong. Or, rather, the original hypothesis was about which axis dominates in political discourse and yes, purity/disgust does not dominate, but it is not completely absent either.
A clear example of the left doing the purity/disgust axis is environmentalism, opposition to GMOs, organic food, etc.
are their expressions very unrepresentative of their usual behavior?
If I take a few dozen pictures of one person talking, I can find in them most any microexpression you want including ridiculous ones. These expressions are not representative of anything.
By the way, there is Kling's three-axis model and there is Haidt's moral foundations model. They are different.
If I take a few dozen pictures of one person talking, I can find in them there most any microexpression you want including ridiculous ones. These expressions are not representative of anything.
Tabloid news are a great example of this. If you take thousands of pictures of the most gorgeous and breathtaking people in the world, you can find one where they look like deranged freaks.