arundelo
archive.is has both things from Patri’s LiveJournal:
(Unlike archive.org, archive.is does not, IIRC, respect robots.txt.)
Gwern Branwen has a page on link rot and URL archiving.
I bet cousin_it didn’t link it because it’s not on the (public) internet. Edit: Nope!
physical existence of Wei is highly doubtful
People have met Wei Dai in meatspace, if that’s what you’re talking about. Edit: As confirmed by cousin_it.
gwern on “centaurs” (humans playing chess with computer assistance):
Even by 2007, it was hard for anyone to improve, and after 2013 or so, the very best centaurs were reduced to basically just opening book preparation (itself an extremely difficult skill involving compiling millions of games and carefully tuning against the weakness of possible opponent engines), to the point where official matches have mostly stopped (making it hard to identify the exact point at which centaur ceased to be a thing at all).
You can use ballet dancing or piano playing for status signaling but first you need to learn to dance ballet or play the piano.
It works for me in Firefox 53.0.3, Firefox 54.0, and Chrome 58.0.3029.110.
(All 32-bit on Windows. I tested it both by clicking on the link, which goes through Less Wrong’s redirect.viglink.com thing, and by entering the [https] readthesequences link in the address bar.)
The only weird thing is that after I upgraded to Firefox 54, the “TLS handshake” step of loading the page took a long time—ten seconds or so—a couple times, but it’s not doing that now.
The Resolve Cycle is a CFAR technique where one sets a 5 minute timer and resolves to solve the problem in the allotted time.
-- https://mindlevelup.wordpress.com/2017/02/20/resolve-post-cfar-3/
Eliezer probably means “sapient”:
(Or maybe by “is sentient”, he means to say, “is a person in the moral sense”.)
This statement has the letter “T” at the beginning; the next two letters are “h” and “i”; which are followed by “s s”; … ; the first letter is then repeated inside double quotes; …
What do the ellipses (”...”) mean?
We need downvotes for this sort of stuff. ^
Edit: By which I mean bogus’s comment, which does nothing beyond insulting lifelonglearner. Also, I’d guess quite a few commenters on this website are in the 95th percentile of (say) IQ at their school.
Yeah, I agree, but at the time I hadn’t been following this user closely, so I figured I’d allow the possibility of mistaken identity.
I’m sure I’m not saying anything you haven’t already given consideration to, but you probably should not feed the troll.
This was probably Aella, who took LSD every week for ten months.
I’m not finding the poetry on a quick scan of aellagirl.com but it rings a bell with me too. It might also be on aellagirl.tumblr.com (which, be warned, has a fair amount of NSFW images).
If you’re wondering how you can hold water in something made of paper, they’re “often lined or coated with plastic or wax to prevent liquid from leaking out or soaking through the paper”.
a participatory culture makes the notion of a skill-level hierarchy more apparent and well-defined
Not so. Fetishizing extreme ‘skill’, virtuosity, stardom etc. is a marker of a consumer culture, not a participatory one.
For one thing, fetishizing skill is a fairly small component of contemporary popular music culture. For another, that’s different from the skill-level hierarchy komponisto is talking about. As a musician (disclosure!), I expect a musician’s judgment of another musician’s skill level to be more accurate and finer-grained than the judgment of a non-musician.
If I may, let me agree with you in dialogue form:
Alice: 1 = 0.999...
Bob: No, they’re different.
Alice: Okay, if they’re different then why do you get zero if you subtract one from the other?
Bob: You don’t, you get 0.000...0001.
Alice: How many zeros are there?
Bob: An infinite number of them. Then after the last zero, there’s a one.Alice is right (as far as real numbers go) but at this point in the discussion she has not yet proved her case; she needs to argue to Bob that he shouldn’t use the concept “the last thing in an infinite sequence” (or that if he does use it he needs to define it more rigorously).
Broadly speaking, I agree, and Jesus mythicist Richard Carrier would also agree:
[A]mateurs should not be voicing certitude in a matter still being debated by experts ([Jesus] historicity agnosticism is far more defensible and makes far more sense for amateurs on the sidelines) and [...] criticizing Christianity with a lead of “Jesus didn’t even exist” is strategically ill conceived—it’s bad strategy on many levels, it only makes atheists look illogical, and (counter-intuitively) it can actually make Christians more certain of their faith.
But reading some of his stuff made me upgrade the idea that there was no historical Jesus from “almost certainly false” to “plausible”. (Carrier has written a couple books on this —Proving History: Bayes’s Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus and On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt —but I haven’t read those, only some stuff available on the web.)
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I think it is more likely that Jesus began in the Christian mind as a celestial being (like an archangel), believed or claimed to be revealing divine truths through revelations (and, by bending the ear of prophets in previous eras, through hidden messages planted in scripture). Christianity thus began the same way Islam and Mormonism did: by their principal apostles (Mohammed and Joseph Smith) claiming to have received visions from their religion’s “actual” teacher and founder, in each case an angel (Gabriel dictated the Koran, Moroni provided the Book of Mormon).
[...]
It would be several decades later when subsequent members of this cult, after the world had not yet ended as claimed, started allegorizing the gospel of this angelic being by placing him in earth history as a divine man, as a commentary on the gospel and its relation to society and the Christian mission. The same had already been done to other celestial gods and heroes, who were being transported into earth history all over the Greco-Roman world, a process now called Euhemerization, after the author Euhemerus, who began the trend in the 4th century B.C. by converting the celestial Zeus and Uranus into ordinary human kings and placing them in past earth history, claiming they were “later” deified (in a book ironically titled Sacred Scripture). Other gods then underwent the same transformation, from Romulus (originally the celestial deity Quirinus) to Osiris (originally the heavenly lord whom pharaohs claimed to resemble, he was eventually transformed into a historical pharaoh himself).
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[I]n Jewish cosmology, all sorts of things that exist or occur on earth also do so in heaven: fighting, writing, scrolls, temples, chairs, trees, gardens.
(To make the following paragraph more concise I’ll omit hedge phrases like “according to Carrier”. And even Carrier doesn’t regard this as certain, only more likely than not.)
The writings about Jesus that come the closest to being contemporary with his putative lifetime are Paul’s seven or so authentic letters. Paul, who converted to Christianity after Jesus came to him in a vision sometime around 33 CE, never claims to have met the historical Jesus, and never unambiguously talks about Jesus as a human who lived on Earth. (E.g.: Paul talks about about Jesus being crucified, but this crucifixion took place in some celestial realm not on Earth. Paul mentions “James the Lord’s brother”, but this means not that James was a literal brother of Jesus of Nazareth but that James is a fellow Christian, the way a modern Christian might refer to their “brothers and sisters in Christ”.)
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I was a super-forecaster. I think my main advantages were 1) skill at Googling and 2) noticing that most people, when you ask them “Will [an interesting thing] happen?”, are irrationally biased toward saying yes. I also seem to be naturally foxy and well-calibrated, but not more so than lots of other people in the tournament. I did not obsess, but I tried fairly hard.
Edit: “Foxy” in this context means “knowing many small things instead of one big thing”. See this pair (one, two) of Overcoming Bias posts by the late Hal Finney.
Perfectly clear, and probably in most contexts less likely to elicit off-by-one errors. The only confusing things I can see are:
Maybe someone might think you just meant the first decade of the 1900s?
Similarly, is “the 2000s” a century or a decade or a millennium? (This and the previous problem are solved by using e.g., “19xx”, but that’s probably only clear in written language.)
This style (it seems to me) is more common with older stuff (e.g., the 1800s and 1700s), so someone might do a double-take at “the 1900s”, thinking it sounds longer ago than it is.
There’s also the thing of how the twentieth century is, if we’re being pedantic, not the years 1900 through 1999, but the years 1901 through 2000.
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--archive.org blog, 2017-04-17