If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
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Since utilions are a unit of caring and Less Wrong (the website) has helped me immensely in making the transition from a somewhat despondent college graduate to a software engineer job with an annual salary + benefits, is there any way I can donate some dollars towards the site's upkeep?
Failing that, and as a more immediate measure, I extend my sincere thanks to everyone on Less Wrong, especially Eliezer Yudkowsky and his works HPMOR & An Intuitive Explanation of Bayes' Theorem for enlightening me.
On a more useful note, it appears that the Java applets at http://www.yudkowsky.net/rational/bayes are now blocked by the current version of the Oracle Java Runtime Environment for Windows.
Since utilions are a unit of caring and Less Wrong (the website) has helped me immensely in making the transition from a somewhat despondent college graduate to a software engineer job with an annual salary + benefits, is there any way I can donate some dollars towards the site's upkeep?
Currently the site is run officially run by MIRI, CFAR and FHI. If you want to donate money to thank for LW's existence donating it to one of those three organisations makes the most sense.
Apart from just donating you can also support CFAR by taking part in a CFAR workshop.
I would like to see a published list of recommended improvements that could be made to lesswrong, (discussed and voted on by people) and then consider using your $$ to put a bounty up to pay someone to implement solutions. Do you think that would work?
I personally dislike the way that discussion posts age. It is doubtfully the most reasoning that can be done on a post where posts seem to die after a week, nor are we getting the most out of them when they are "too far behind us" in about two weeks. Not sure how to solve this, but its been bugging me for a while now.
My 4th grade teacher is teaching my class how to write poetry, and this is one of the poems that I wrote:
Where am I?
What is this place?
Is it the darkness of night?
I heard screams
and then I was here
Here, as in nowhere
This place was not nothing
it was less than that.
I didn’t see nothing,
for I had nothing to see with
I didn’t hear nothing,
for I had nothing to hear with
I didn’t feel nothing,
for I had nothing to feel with.
I had slept before, but nothing like this
Was Grandma here?
Did she meet this fate too?
I couldn’t know, for
I had nothing to know with
Even if she was here,
she did not exist for me
They said I would go to the land of the clouds
they said nothing of this place
Even the eternal flame would be better than this
for there they had warmth
and I had less than cold
Why would
anyone
want this fate?
The final sight,
and then less than nothing
I want to see the world
I asked my son Alex to post this because I'm proud of his writing skill, but also to show a challenge of raising a child without religion. He is far from obsessed with death, and told me he is thinking of death less than 1% of the time. Still, it would be comforting to be able to honestly tell him that he has nothing to fear from death, although knowing Alex he would use this as a counterargument when I tell him to be safe by, for example, buckling his seat-belt or looking both ways when crossing the street.
but also to show a challenge of raising a child without religion
Is this considered new? There are people in parts of Europe esp. post-Commie lands where even their grandparents had hardly any, or even their great-grandparents considered it more of a social ritual than personal faith. I was about 8 when one grandfather died, my parents simply said he is with us in our memories and that was it. There was nothing particularly difficult about it. If I may put it this way, I did not get a very optimistic upbringing, we expected life to be hard and rather painful and this was simply one of the pains, to lose loved ones. Also, as a child I was not really able to imagine or care about my own death, my parents usually rather scared me with maiming or disfigurement when I was doing unsafe things like not wanting to buckle the seatbelt or similar things. I don't remember the details, but living ugly or disabled looked far worse than just being dead. There may be a bit of an inferential distance here, so I will try to reword it: the idea of playing a particularly low-status or boring or painful game of life was scary, but simply not playing it anymore was not too scary.
Interesting, so the cost of raising a non-religious child is higher the nicer your family's life. Once, when my son was about 4 I told him not to stare at the sun else he go blind. He responded by saying that being blind wouldn't be so bad because he could read using braille. I wonder if a consequence of schools teaching inclusion of the physically disabled is that children don't fear as much becoming disabled themselves and so take more risks.
Yes, but I also have a different suspicion here - you may have already at 4 strongly pushed your son towards intellectual pursuits if he already thought reading is far more important than looking at cute or pretty things. Or people. Even being able to read before school is fairly rare, but already liking it so much more than say drawing, that is really rare.
Our life was nice enough, but I suspect it is more about e.g. American culture being in general optimistic no matter how bad is your life, Eastern Europe more pessimistic no matter how nice is your life.I suspect these come from centuries long historical habits, not about how nice your personal life is.
Quite frankly, I would like to learn to be more optimistic. But it is interesting that one part of me considers that "shallow". That must be a weird sort of rationalization.
Complexity-Induced Mental Illness by Scott Adams
My personal estimate is that 75% of adults are suffering from some sort of serious mental problem because the human interface to life is broken. In the year 2015, life serves up a level of complexity and unrelenting stimulation that most folks can’t handle it, and I believe it is frying our brains.
This gave me the idea that we might be in the middle of a great filter(ing) right now. Obviously humans are not made for the environment of modern society. Being here is not a stable state. The progression of the behavior of persons or (sub) populations become increasingly erratic. It is contained by societies regulation means but I can imagine that this might collapse - as other such systems did before. Compare also with Jared Diamond's Collapse.
For now I have less writing to do at work, so about a month ago I set out in my spare time to write up a discussion-level post on the Fermi paradox and what I see as neglected aspects thereof - what we have actually observed and actually have not, and what we can actually exclude and what we cannot, and options for intelligent systems that are neither universal expansion nor destruction. It's coming along, but has ballooned in size drastically. It has become full of what I feel are quite relevant digressions about our place and time in the universe, astrobiology, geochemistry, reasons that SETI candidate signals or lack thereof mean almost nothing, and ecology. This is what happens when you are a biologist who very nearly became an astronomer and grew up around a part-time geologist mother.
Anyways, I just wanted one piece of advice: do people think I should keep everything in one monolithic post, or chop it up into thematically-closer-related bits?
I asked Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh a couple questions about the status of CSER and he took the time to write me an in-depth reply that you can read here. (This isn't me encouraging you to ask him more questions, it's me sharing what he already wrote so he didn't spend his time in vain :P)
Eliezer wants to be a guru. No one calls him on it. There is an enormous amount of unhealthy hero worship. What did you expect, exactly?
Eliezer is constitutionally incapable of doing anything without coming across as hilariously over-the-top arrogant, and at some point instead of fighting it he just turned it into his style so that now it’s kind of hard to tell when he’s joking or not.
-- Yvain on EY.
I don't know, it feels like I see more people criticizing perceived hero worship of EY than I see actual hero worship. If anything the "in" thing on LW these days seems to be signalling how evolved one is by putting down EY or writing off the sequences as "just a decent popular introduction to cognitive biases, nothing more" or whatever.
Eliezer wants to be a guru. No one calls him on it. There is an enormous amount of unhealthy hero worship. What did you expect, exactly?
Even if you see Eliezer as a wanna-be-guru, he is not that powerful. The kind of hero worship that you see in real cults is on a different scale.
Very charismatic people who actually get people to follow them through the strength of their charisma don't come across as "hilariously over-the-top arrogant" to people within their in-group.
I also find it hard how you can cite such a paragraph by Yvain and at the same time say with a straight face "Nobody calls EY on it".
I don't know about that... We know how to eradicate malaria -- we posess the knowledge, the tools, we've successfully done it before. Really, the only thing that needs to happen is for the governments of the SubSaharan Africa to get their shit together. That, unfortunately, is not a medical problem.
This thread is one of the top-voted on the nootropics subreddit & looks like it has a few interesting ideas: How do smart people really think?
I can honestly say that utilizing a memory palace and linking was a significant jump in my life. I started training myself in their use about a year ago, but never had to put them into action in a constrained time frame until recently. It felt wonderful. Currently working on incorporating spaced repetition into my routine. My chief problem is prioritizing lists. Figuring out what needs to be memorized in a subject requires some understanding, and I usually lack that in subjects I'm deeply interested in.
A combination of mnemonic techniques and mental math methods that I'd never encountered in childhood make a huge difference. I wonder why they are not taught in schools.
CARVER encourages tertiary recon to validate whatever data was initially gathered. I'm sure this wouldn't be a problem for a neo-rationalist civilian or SOCOM, but when it's applied in regular Army, the element that's engaged in tertiary recon has incentive to simply agree with the initial report, especially if that's the sort of thing command encourages.
That's about all the topics I have serious familiarity with on that thread. Will check out the rest.
I am sure that there are many jobs where mental math makes a huge difference.
I manage a team of engineers, and though pretty much all of them are head and shoulders above me in their specialisation, they think I really know my stuff because I find errors in their work and zero-in on them on the fly. The skill that I have is doing rough approximations in my head. Then from experience: a factor-of-two difference is commonly confusing kg and lb, a factor of 10 - confusing kg and N, a factor of fifty - mistaking degrees and radians (usually in Excel, where radians are the default mesurement), etc... I get a LOT of mileage from this :). If they did the same, their already good work would be even better. And I imagine any calculation intensive job (finance, economics, science, business...) is similar.