If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
The Brain Preservation Foundation has (finally) started evaluating their first candidate brain!
We like our referencing here on Less Wrong. Reference-heavy people (gwern, Yvain, lukeprog, I'm looking at you), do you have some system for keeping track of your common go-to references that you use over and over again in multiple pieces of work?
I'm kind of expecting "yes, I have a dirty great text file" as a response to this, but perhaps hoping for something more awesome.
I'm not super reference heavy but I myself use evernote quite a lot.
Whenever I find something that I probably want to reference in the future I clip it into evernote.
Evernote has the advantage that there a google plugin that searches through your evernote everytime you do a google search. Finding a reference again takes searching. Sometimes more sometimes less. If you want to reduce the time it takes you to refind information, evernote tags or simple hashtags help.
Back in Google Reader days Google Reader search was also quite central, because I often used to quote stuff that came into my RSS feed on some way.
If you want to go more high tech there are options like http://www.mendeley.com/ to manage references. Zotero and CiteULike are similar solutions that are specifically designed for references management.
I personally still use Evernote over single purpose reference management systems because I can simply dumb all information that I might need later into evernote.
Evernote happens to be a cloud service of a US company, so it not 100% secure for all types of information. If I could get a similar service that's hosted safely I would switch, but at the moment convenience wins over data privacy for myself for most data.
There also information that so important that I want to have it available in brain memory. That information goes into Anki.
Do you know why the age of consent for sex is 18? What would your sexual ethics be if it happened to have been raised to 21 not 18? Indeed this almost happened. Think about a wide array of questions, relationships, policies and norms you approve or disapprove of in light of this.
Even better, when you next time find yourself making judgements on them, try for a short time seeing them from the perspective of world-21-you instead of world-18-you. Applying the reversal test can be fun, but other people might not see it your way if you point it out.
Do you know why the age of consent for sex is 18?
The age of consent differs over the world. Even within the US. Kansas has one of 16 while it's 18 in Florida.
According to Wikipedia Spain even has an age of consent of 13 (with some exceptions) and the government recently announced that it wants to raise it to 15.
I don't think my morals on sexuality would change much by living in Spain.
I went to an early college program — a residential four-year college where most students entered at age 15 or 16, after two years of high school. This was in a state where the legal age of consent was (and is) 16. As a consequence, many sexual relationships among first-year students were illegal. However, they were also very common.
The culture at this institution was such that students were treated as "college students who happen to be two years younger", not as "gifted young teenagers who happen to be doing college-level academics". As such, the age-of-consent law was basically regarded as an inappropriate technicality. Students were cautioned about it, but along the lines of "Technically, if someone really wanted to hurt you, they could charge you with this ..."
So far as I know, the only time while I was there that anyone was even seriously threatened with legal charges over an "underage" relationship was one case where a freshman boy (age 15) cheated on his girlfriend with another guy (age 17). The girlfriend initially wanted to report this as "child abuse" but changed her mind before doing so.
I'm told, and quite willing to believe, that your salary has more to do with the five minutes of salary negotiation than the next several years of work. I am also told that salary negotiation is very much a skill.
As such, it seems it would be worth a fairly substantial amount of time and money to practice and/or get coaching in this skill. Is this done? That is, how likely am I to be able to find someone, preferably someone who has worked on the business end of salary negotiation at somewhere like Google, who I can pay to practice salary negotiation with?
ETA: I've read extensively about how to negotiate (though of course there's always something more). What I'm interested in is practice.
Referrals are the best source for finding someone involved in negotiation at a specific company. I believe that Google has HR negotiate salaries, so if you know any Googlers, asking them to introduce you to someone in HR will probably work.
If you haven't done so already, you can get ~80% of the value here just by practicing with a random friend playing the role of hiring manager. As you mentioned, most of the value is in ingraining the behaviors through practice, not in the extra knowledge you get. So you don't necessarily need a specialist for this.
If you are interested in Effective Altruism (donate 10% or more of your income or work at an EA organization) then I would be happy to help. I have successfully negotiated 80%+ raises before, and taught 7 people to negotiate with average results of 30% or more raises. About half of the teaching was role-played practice. Feel free to email me at [email protected] .
I believe Ramit Sethi is the general recommendation here.
What are some facts that would cause, an immediate update in beliefs and non trivial daily life application? I am looking for things that are relatively uncontroversial, things that people just aren't aware of and if they knew about it, they would change they way they feel about it immediately.
For example I just found out that 2/3rds of imported extra virgin olive oil is adulterated or not actually olive oil. Some brands that I recognize and have bought my whole life is not really extra virgin olive oil, therefore I never got the health benefits. Consumer reports and UC Davis tests show corroborating evidence that most cheap evoo is not what it claims to be. Knowing this, I will probably never again buy those brands who do not undergo voluntary quality testing and seek out to buy authentic evoo or at the very least attempt avoid overpaying for fake olive oil when I could just go with regular cooking oil. This article has information and links to the UC Davis testing results.
Conway Hall Ethical Society has an interesting history, which shows the Christian origins of Progressive Secular Humanist memeplex.
The Conway Hall Ethical Society, formerly the South Place Ethical Society, based in London at Conway Hall, is thought to be the oldest surviving freethought organisation in the world, and is the only remaining ethical society in the United Kingdom. It now advocates secular humanism and is a member of the International Humanist and Ethical Union.
...
The Society was formed in 1793 by a group of nonconformists known as Philadelphians or Universalists. William Johnson Fox, who had studied theology under Dr Pye Smith, became minister in 1817. In 1824 the congregation built a chapel at South Place, in the district of central London known as Finsbury
Conway Hall is named after an American, Moncure Conway, who led the Society from 1864–1885 and 1892–1897, during which time it moved further away from Unitarianism. Conway spent the break in his tenure in the United States, writing a biography of Thomas Paine. In 1888 the name of the Society was changed from South Place Religious Society to South Place Ethical Society (SPES) under Stanton Coit's leadership.
Is there a sentence or a word for an English-speaker to express this concept: a thing that is supposedly a secret, but everyone knows it, but still behave as if it were a secret?
Since there's a precise term in Italian for that, I was recently wondering that I wouldn't know how to express that concisely in English.
Why haven't we done an systematic investigation of drugs as means towards debiasing?
I recall some limited discussion of nootropics and microdosing on LSD but not much else. In particular I'm thinking about substances that are easily acquired such as off label use of medication, easy to synthesize substances or recreational drugs (legal and otherwise).
I spent about £19 on half a year's worth of 1mg Melatonin pills. I swallowed one last night at about 2300, then went to bed at midnight.
Thoughts:
I didn't notice any extra sleepiness during that hour interval between taking it and going to sleep. This may mean that melatonin as a solution to hyperbolic discounting may not work for me. Alternatively I just went to sleep too early and had I stayed awake, the melatonin would have kicked in and made me want to go to sleep anyway.
I woke up over an hour before my alarm, feeling /much/ more refreshed than usual, and with almost no desire to sleep in. If this was the work of melatonin then it will be very useful to me in stopping my habit of turning off my alarm and then going back to sleep again.;
Obviously, this was only one night, so things like placebo and random variation in effects are there. I'll continue with this experiment and take notes. I can't be bothered to do a blinding experiment like gwern did with his nootropics experiments, but given that the effects of melatonin are well-researched and that most people react the same way to it, I'm fairly confident the effects I'm getting are real. Even if it is a placebo, I'd still be satisfied with it given how much money I paid.