I should also make some friends, as my standard reaction to stress is to isolate myself.
Won’t continuous biking and not being tied to a geogrpahic area make it harder to make friends? Unless you mean making friends with people you meet and practicing friend-making, in which case this may be a good way to go about it.
There would BE a claim, for starters… Excellent point though, you’d need some additional evidence or stagecraft to impress them, which probably counts as increasing the size of the message.
I imagine defending my arguments with people that I know, debate with, and find are good at challenging my beliefs/making me explain them—my girlfriend and my family most usually. They’re always not very good copies—I often make bad predictions at what people will think about certain concepts—but they are useful in getting me to examine arguments. That might be a good place to start.
I have been a bad composer, and a bad blogger. BUT recently I have been better at self-promotion (having put myself forward for more opportunities than I normally would), a better teacher, and a better pianist (I’m making technical breakthroughs and getting back into a good practice routine).
I know some of the reasons that I’m not composing and blogging as well as I’d like, and I have plans to deal with them. I also launched my soundcloud after putting it off for quite a while—file under self-promotion too, I guess.
I’ve re-established the habit of recording the time I spend practicing. I record the times to the minute, rather than close estimates—if I sit down at the piano at 4:52, I’ll write down 4:52 not “ten to five”.
Even though there’s no one checking my diary for practice times, it helps keep me focused and I’m more likely to practice for the length of time I’ve committed to and to meet my goals within the practice session.
Survey taken.
Brahms’ Rhapsody in G minor is wonderful, the other one in the set is good too.
One of my favourite pieces of all time is Beethoven’s Pathetique Sonata (1st movement here).
For more contemporary stuff, I can’t recommend Ligeti’s solo piano music enough. Etude 13 is in large part responsible for me getting into contemporary music, and thus, becoming a composer.
EDIT: Also, John Field was a big influence on Chopin; he’s credited with inventing the nocturne form I think. Not as virtuosic though, if that’s what you’re into.
I love the Illuminatus! trilogy. I have a soft spot for Discordian ideas in general, actually.
John Cheese is a very good columnist. Cracked has been linked here before; for a dick-joke peddling comedy sight, I find it’s usually very insightful and often pretty rational.
I quite like Regina Spektor! I was first introduced to her as being “like the Dresden Dolls without the vitriol”—not a totally accurate description but not far off. The Dresden Dolls are good fun, and some of Amanda Palmer’s solo work has some great moments.
Thanks for the reply!
For example, if it turns out that group A has a higher average IQ than group B, and that A and B can be distinguished reliably by genetic testing (including but not limited to visual inspection for associated phenotypes), I might decide to devote more effort to educating group B than group A, to make up for the difference. Or I might decide to devote more effort to educating group A than group B, to get the best bang for my education buck.
Fair enough, that’s an example of policy, based on this data.
Or I might decide to research the differences, to learn more about the physiological mechanisms of intelligence.
Also cool, seems obvious in hindsight!
Or I might change my ways of evaluating claims so that I give more weight to group A’s ideas relative to group B’s than I used to (assuming I used to believe they were equally intelligent).
I’d imagine a group’s ideas are more to do with non-genetic factors than genetic intelligence.
Or I might decide to structure my society in such a way that group A has access to certain privileges that group B is denied, on the grounds of their superiority, or such that B gets privileges A is denied, on the grounds of their greater need. Etc.
For me some of these would be contingent on the additional discovery that the group’s intelligence is a result of its genetic difference; group B could be generally poorer, or less well-nourished, or some other factor leading to lower intelligence, in addition to being genetically distinguishable. This is also making the assumption that IQ tests are culturally fair and the like—though I’m happy to use the term as a placeholder for ‘idealized intelligence test’.
To answer your general method query, this essay by Karl Popper deals with the issue of distinguishing science v pseudoscience. However, from my reading of, you need to know a bit about the topic, or at least observe it in action, to make a judgement.
autism/language troubles in particular, are fields in which there is a lot of pseudo-science… There are a lot of mysticism and sect-like gurus related to autism, too.
What gives you this impression? I’m not saying you’re wrong—just that it’s something I haven’t picked up on myself.
Regarding Freud, I get the impression that his therapies have some merit (placebos work; all talk therapies seem to have some benefit iirc) but his theories are utter horseshit. I know a lot of people that work in special needs education, particularly dealing with autism, and there seems to be no real professional consensus as to what the best approach is. I will ask some questions for you though. I’d hazard a guess that it’s important to reinforce whatever methods the kid’s parents or educators are using, as long as those methods aren’t counter-productive.
similarly, the anti-racist who gets infected by LW might be terrified of telling their family and friends that they’re now a race realist.
I recognize that if evidence shows differences in (for example) intelligence between races, then, yeah, I’ve got to change my belief and except that people of X race are smarter than those from Y. I don’t know that this would change my behaviour towards people of either race, or that I think any state policy should change. Perhaps my “racism bad” reflex is stronger than I’m consciously accounting for, but I don’t see any useful way to act on this data. Similarly, I don’t think my behaviour would change much if there was hard data about intelligence difference between the genders.
I choose intelligence because it’s a controversial, and common, topic. I can maybe see the value in applying this data to predisposition to violence, or things like calculating insurance premiums.
I think I’m three behind on his books at this stage, not even counting his children’s book… but the other books set in Bas-Lag (the Perdido Street Station world) are very good. The Scar is probably my favourite of the three. Iron Council is also pretty good—among other thing, it’s a clever pastiche of a number of different kinds of story—but a lot of people get turned off by how heavily political it is. (Miéville is very very Marxist, as far as I know.) It didn’t bother me too much.
The City and the City is very good. I’ve heard it described as a police mystery by Kafka (I’ve not read Kafka, but I’ve heard this a few times). It’s set in contemporary Earth, rather than a fantasy setting. His short story collection is also good—there’s one Bas-Lag story, and a few horrors. I started Embassytown and it seemed promising.
The main issue with Miéville is he adds a lot of concepts and doesn’t explain them clearly until well into the book, if he even outright explains them at all—that works to the book’s advantage sometimes but I found it a little tough in Embassytown.
Huh, that means I’ve read only half his adult books! Better catch up!
I’ve read a good few of Miéville’s novels—I found Perdido Street Station to be the weakest in terms of prose though I guess that could be cause it was only his second novel, or it deliberately homages Lovecraft (whose prose I’m not keen on either) in its style.
Still a wonderful book though.
But if all mathematically possible universes exist anyway (or if they have a chance of existing), then the hypothetical “Azkaban from a universe without EY’s logical inconsistencies” exists, no matter whether he writes about it or not. I don’t see how writing about it could affect how real/not-real it is.
So by my understanding of how Eliezer explained it, he’s not creating Azkaban, in the sense that writing about it causes it to exist, he’s describing it. (This is not to say that he’s not creating the fiction, but the way I see it create is being used in two different ways.) Unless I’m missing some mechanism by which imagining something causes it to exist, but that seems very unlikely.
However, I deliberately included logical impossibilities into HPMOR, such as tiling a corridor in pentagons and having the objects in Dumbledore’s room change number without any being added or subtracted, to avoid the story being real anywhere.
Could you explain why you did that?
As regards the pentagons, I kinda assumed the pentagons weren’t regular, equiangular pentagons—you could tile a floor in tiles that were shaped like a square with a triangle on top! Or the pentagons could be different sizes and shapes.
Mine, when I was a teenager, was that you actually died every night, and another mind with your memories woke up instead. I figured that there was not much point in worrying since I couldn’t do anything about even if it was true, and I needed to sleep besides. Still pretty scary!
Will try be there—apologies over having not been in touch since last meetup, life has been hectic. Looking forward to it.