Never mind, I don’t plan on doing anything because charity is not about helping (and because it uses a lot of electricity). However, mlc@home seems promising, if someone really feels the need to help somehow.

I think this should be merged with feedback & criticism. Thoughts?

Thanks for responding so quickly!
I agree with you now (and I’m going to agree with your minimalist policy for now too, just since I think you’re better-informed than me).

Minor clarification that you might have already been aware of: I was thinking that posts tagged ‘zombie’ should also be tagged ‘consciousness’, if they didn’t merge. Now I’m fairly sure they should be merged.

It seems like a separate ‘zombie’ tag might be useful if people are specifically looking to read people’s thoughts on p-zombies, as opposed to just reading about consciousness in general. (There’s probably some inferential step I’m not catching on to, though).

I don’t know measure theory myself, if someone who knew it could improve this page, that would be much appreciated.

Not sure how okay it is to use external sources—if anyone wants to write their own definition, please go ahead.

It seems like this tag is a subset of the other one. I’ve added (very tentative) descriptions for both tags, but don’t know they should be merged or not.

edit made two minutes later: not a subset i guess, since individuals can start projects

I’m not sure if we should make this tag apply to all posts of historical interest, or only posts with historical information. Thoughts, anyone?

See also: https://​​www.gwern.net/​​Littlewood

That link is dead, but I found it on another site.

Since that’s hindsight, we’d expect Archimedes to get something that was controversial thousands of years before but widely believed at the time.

Along with zendo, mao might be a good game for practicing—you and the other mao players are scientists, while the grandmaster is the universe’s laws—you can induce the laws either by observing the other “scientists”, or by testing things out (possibly on accident). Jeffreyssai might say this reeks of competition, though—a possible fix would be to have all the “scientists” working on the same team.

A small nitpick—tranquilizer darts take at least a few minutes to work (https://​​www.reddit.com/​​r/​​explainlikeimfive/​​comments/​​1zzt5a/​​eli5_do_tranquilizer_darts_really_take_instant/​​). The story was amazing though.

I’ve heard of the term “History channel effect” to explain why that sort of topic doesn’t get coverage in the news. The idea is that people would rather hear about topics that make them feel well-informed than topics that would actually make them more well-informed.

As a rule of thumb, you should prefer rates (“X commit Y crime 3x more often than normal”) and proportions (“1 in 10,000 X commit Y crime”). Be wary of quantities (“100 X have committed Y crime this year”) and examples (“look at all these stories of X doing Y”).

1984 (like animal farm) is an analogue to the USSR—Goldstein may represent Leon Trotsky. I’m not entirely sure if Emmanuel Goldstein corresponds to anyone, though—we don’t know a lot about him except that propaganda considers him a traitor.

The link to Peter de Blanc is dead, try https://​​web.archive.org/​​web/​​20160305092845/​​http://​​www.spaceandgames.com/​​?p=27

You might want to cite the “8 hours of TV a day” bit—if you look into houses’ living room windows, you won’t see TVs blaring through anywhere near a third of them. (note: this experiment is not endorsed by the author)

In response to your main question: being unproductive isn’t a good reason to be more unproductive.

Manned spaceships have dozens of fallback plans to keep astronauts safe, even though they don’t anticipate things going wrong.