anonym

Karma: 2,148

anonym Aug 30, 2011, 3:18 AM
2 points
in reply to: Bugmaster’s comment on: Book trades with open-minded theists—recommendations?
Upvoted for The Demon-Haunted World.

anonym Aug 27, 2011, 2:42 PM
0 points
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: Rational Home Buying
I actually do use the ‘save’ feature in reddit. I find it a handy way to distinguish articles that I found especially useful or high-quality, or that I know I’ll want to look at again in the future. Maybe I’m an exception though, because I don’t use browser bookmarks or any other bookmarking-type service very much.

That functionality still works in lesswrong just as it does in reddit, but there just isn’t a link to get to the page that shows all the stuff you’ve saved, as I noted elsewhere in this thread.

anonym Aug 27, 2011, 2:38 PM
8 points
in reply to: falenas108’s comment on: Rational Home Buying
You can ‘save’ an article by clicking the disk icon above the ‘Tags’ section below an article.

There’s no link anywhere to see articles that you’ve previously saved, but you can manually go to the following URL to see them: http://lesswrong.com/saved/

It seems like an oversight on the part of the developers that the ‘saved’ functionality they got for free from the reddit codebase still works correctly, and the saved pages are accessible, but there’s nothing in the UI that indicates how to access the page of previously saved articles.

anonym Aug 26, 2011, 2:46 AM
0 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: [Poll] Who looks better in your eyes?
One can’t get that from “who looks better to you?”, except through a lucky guess. It could just as easily have been many other things.

anonym Aug 25, 2011, 3:52 PM
0 points
in reply to: VincentYu’s comment on: [Poll] Who looks better in your eyes?
I couldn’t answer for this reason. It’s asking “whom do you rate higher [according to criterion X]?” without specifying criterion X.

anonym Aug 12, 2011, 3:48 AM
2 points
in reply to: handoflixue’s comment on: Leveling IRL—level 1
The example “Go is a much better game than chess” is much more likely to confuse, and that was the original phrase I objected to. Sure, if somebody thinks about it carefully, they’ll realize it hides a value judgment, but as maybe you’re aware, people don’t consciously analyze everything they read and hear—and things that are seen or thought about in passing often influence us in ways we are unaware of. I’m not trying to say there was a crime or anything or that one should never say a statement like “Go is a much better game than chess”, but am I so out of place to actually point out that it’s misleading?

Anway, you’re downvoted for pushing obfuscation and then neglecting to even engage with the substance of my comments.

anonym Aug 11, 2011, 2:36 AM
3 points
in reply to: handoflixue’s comment on: Leveling IRL—level 1
Yes, I should have said that. Thanks.

On the question of “I” statements though, there is a big difference between “Go is a much better game than chess”, and “Go has a much larger state space than chess” (or even “Go is a more complex game than chess”). The former is in the same class of statement as “Chocolate ice cream is much better than vanilla ice cream”.

What is the benefit of communicating “I prefer Go to Chess” as “Go is a better game than Chess”? It’s less clear, less accurate, and it is likely to confuse many people into accepting that it’s a statement about the games in general rather than a statement about one person’s taste.

anonym Aug 10, 2011, 3:03 AM
5 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Leveling IRL—level 1

Go is a much better game than chess.

You mean, “I like go much more than chess”, or “I think chess is a much better game than chess”.

Oh, and it’s not true that Go lends itself much better to measure progress. Chess has rating systems like the ELO rating system, which measure progress very well.

Tip: Reading LW on the Kindle

anonymAug 6, 2011, 10:40 PM

19 points

3 comments1 min readLW link

anonym Jul 30, 2011, 7:41 PM
6 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Stanford Intro to AI course to be taught for free online
whois ai-class.com shows Thrun (with his stanford.edu email address) as the registrant and administrative contact, so it seems legit.

anonym Jul 19, 2011, 4:14 AM
5 points
in reply to: JoshuaZ’s comment on: How to solve the national debt deadlock
What’s wrong with coming up with an interesting theoretical construct that has almost zero hope of being implemented? Can’t that be a vehicle for improving understanding? I don’t see any failing in that. It’s not like PhilGoetz was recommending we all start lobbying congress and spreading the word in the media about his idea.

anonym Jun 12, 2011, 4:03 AM
0 points
in reply to: timtyler’s comment on: More info about the book Eliezer is writing?
Or: “Becoming Less Wrong”.

anonym Mar 27, 2011, 8:38 PM
−2 points
in reply to: knb’s comment on: Just letting alcoholics drink
It seems from the article that for the people in the wet house in question there is no marginal point of overcoming their addiction. They’ve decided that given a choice between continued sufferring on the street and an early death, or getting clean in a treatment program, they prefer continued alcoholism and death.

Take a look at this 5-minute clip of supper time at a wet house. They’re not getting clean, regardless of whether they’re in a wet house or not. They’ve chosen to die slowly, and they’ll do that whether they’re homeless or not.

anonym Mar 26, 2011, 8:48 PM
0 points
on: Just letting alcoholics drink
This seems like a good idea to me. It saves the state money, reduces the many problems due to homeless alcoholics, and it lets those are beyond hope live out their last few years with as little suffering as possible given their situations.

My only reservation is that if they became a lot more common, then some people might make less of an effort to recover, and some people who might have recovered after their sixth failed attempt to stop drinking might not succeed in quitting. That seems like a worthwhile risk though given the huge benefits, and perhaps there would be ways to decrease that risk.

anonym Mar 25, 2011, 3:16 AM
4 points
in reply to: steven0461’s comment on: The “supernatural” category
Agreed on ‘mental’ not being a necessary condition. A magical pixie dust used in some new age prosperity ritual would be a purportedly supernatural phenomenon, but there would be nothing mental about that.

The supernatural is that which is believed by its believers to be neither reducible to, nor explainable in terms of, the natural.

anonym Mar 23, 2011, 7:28 AM
0 points
on: Rationality vs. intelligence
I think the benefit I’ve reaped by reading OB and LW over the years considrably outweighs any benefit I could have achieved by a measly 1 point increase in IQ without encountering LW/OB. And there are plenty of people who talk about OB/LW in life-changing ways that go far beyond the benefits I feel I’ve experienced. I’m surprised that nobody else seems to have argued that 1 IQ point is far too low.

I have a hard time saying I would sacrifice more, but I think on rational grounds, in terms of the probability of various practical benefits, the true value of something like LW/OB has to be significantly greater than 1 IQ point. I’d guess at least half a SD, assuming one has sufficient intelligence to be able to benefit from the community in the first place. I think my reticence to say that I would sacrifice that much or more to prevent myself from having never actually found LW/OB is mostly irrational, involving self-serving bias and others. I overestimate how much I would have learned anyway and from different sources, because some I already knew, and because other things seemed like especially lucid presentations of things I’ve always believed but not been able to fully articulate. But when I try to think about i critically, I have to admit that OB/LW—in particular, the writings of Eliezer—have probably been the largest intellectual influence of my life, which has been filled with intellectual influences.

anonym Mar 23, 2011, 7:02 AM
2 points
on: What is wrong with mathematics education?
I think discrete math is another tragically under-represented math topic that would be of more benefit to most people than calculus. Within that broad topic, I’d single out the essentials of logic, set theory, combinatorics, and basic discrete probability: those are the sorts of things that most people, regardless of what they do for a living, could profitably use to do their jobs better from time to time and to solve the problems that day-to-day life throws at them.

anonym Mar 22, 2011, 4:37 PM
0 points
in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: Costs and Benefits of Scholarship
I agree that it signals scholarship, but I think the most natural reading is that the “association” Eliezer had in mind would be the original association.

anonym Mar 22, 2011, 3:28 PM
5 points
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: Costs and Benefits of Scholarship
I don’t understand this. Everybody knows who George W. Bush is, but having a character in a dialogue speak with him wouldn’t impress. Likewise for a character speaking with Newton about mechanics, and Newton is far better known than Bentham and doesn’t have a generally negative reputation like Bush.

How is the ” ‘everybody knows’ conveys prestige” supposed to work?

anonym Mar 22, 2011, 5:20 AM
16 points
in reply to: Vladimir_M’s comment on: Costs and Benefits of Scholarship
Why do you say there doesn’t seem to be much interest? Your post has 48 karma and 244 comments. That doesn’t seem like “not much interest” to me.

anonym

Tip: Read­ing LW on the Kindle

Tip: Reading LW on the Kindle