You know… purposely violating Godwin’s Law seems to have become an applause light around here, as if we want to demonstrate how super rational we are that we don’t succumb to obvious fallacies like Nazi analogies.
brilee
Karma: 574
Is there any editing being done? In my opinion, a lot of essay ‘refactoring’ could be of use here for Eliezer’s writing.
Modern highly processed food is optimized to our sense of taste, to the extent that they can be called superstimuli. They are also correspondingly unhealthier, on many metrics. (I suppose this is the part in contention… I don’t have any sources for this claim, sorry.)
The paleo diet, as well as the Atkins diet and other diets, inadvertently ‘works’ because highly processed foods tend to be carb-based (crackers, cookies, chips, sugary cereals, sugary yogurts, sugary soft drinks, sugary baked goods), and are thus excluded.
Would be nice to have details of their algorithmic approach, instead of some nebulous buzzword like ‘Recursive Cortical Network’. I suppose it does hint somewhat at neural networks...
Their website also seems to emphasize the wrong thing—emphasizing the potential of visual processing algorithms and such. I would be more worried about whether their team is smart/visionary/revolutionary enough to make significant headway on such a difficult problem. Because they’re emphasizing the ‘wrong’ things, it sets off my ‘Solyndra’ alarms.
Idea: Understand the human psychology that leads to the stability of the concept of currency/money.
While I agree with your sentiment, I think this is just begging the question—you are rejecting this speculation by assuming homo economicus.
I imagine the author has written this with a healthy dose of self-irony. I applaud him for being so forthright about what we should all do as advocates of cryonics.
Am I the only one who finds this about as distasteful as the rabbi who goes around a hospital ward trying to solicit deathbed conversions?
If a cryonics decision is to be made, it should be made when the person is not under duress.
This seems to be taking down a straw man, and far from “challenging a central tenet of LW: reductionism”, you perfectly describe it and expound on it, if a bit wordily. At least in my mind, it’s very obvious that physical ‘law’ is a map-level concept. Physicists themselves have noticed that for a map-level concept, physical ‘law’ fits the territory so amazingly well, that they have written articles such as “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences”
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Wigner.html
Ah. Thanks for the link. Why is that post not front-paged, or indexed somewhere in the wiki?
I was trying to make use of known research that people who believe themselves to be hard workers will work harder, while people who believe themselves to be smart workers will work less. Of course, explaining that would have destroyed the effect, which is why I instead opted to start my post with something intentionally harsh-sounding.
No, it isn’t. You’re preventing yourself from accomplishing anything.
Start small—accomplish progressively larger tasks, starting with something as simple as taking out the trash. Every time you successfully complete a task, say, “See look—my ‘cognitive distortion’ is just an illusion.”
Always check your assertions… (Winning the Lottery)
There seems to be some content here, but it requires massive editing to be of any use. First thing I’d recommend is to cut the first three paragraphs entirely.
In other words, a universe where the arrow of time runs backwards?
This is an interesting line of reasoning, which is not easily refuted. It seems quite plausible biochemically, and my strongest attack on it would probably be through the conjunction fallacy—while each of these steps seems reasonable, perhaps the entire chain is faulty.
However, there is one thing that seems blatantly out of place—and that’s the scale of the process. The citric acid cycle as a whole operates at a catalytic concentration of 1-5 millimolar, in just about every cell of the body. Multiplied by 70 kg of weight per person, that would equal 70-350 millimoles, or roughly 10-50g of CAC intermediates in the body. If this pill is really hoping to dump enough oxaloacetate into the system in order to temporarily force the cycle to run backwards, a 100mg daily dose seems small. I would think you’d need at least 1g daily before it actually affects the citric acid cycle.
Do they teach science in school nowadays? I feel like the analysis that I’m doing should be doable by most scientifically literate people.
I would suggest that an answer to “what do you think the percentage of employees who have stolen..” is a proxy question for, “just exactly how socially unacceptable to you is stealing from your employer”? It relates to, basically, your own levels of altruism, and what you perceive the local altruism levels to be. If you see that everyone around you is being altruistic, you feel a basic urge to keep the clean environment up, while if everyone around you is cheating, then you are less likely to keep up your own altruism.
I’ve had my bike stolen a few times. After getting a particularly nice bike stolen, I now am always on the lookout for unlocked bikes, and when I see one, the urge is most definitely there to grab it - ‘retribution’, if you will, for my own stolen bike. I don’t go through with it, but the possibility is a lot more present in my mind than if I had never had a bike stolen from me.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citric_acid#Occurrence
47 grams per liter of lemon/lime juice. That converts to ~25 g oxaloacetate per liter. Oranges apparently have less citric acid, to the tune of perhaps 500mg oxaloacetate equivalent per liter of juice.
Citric acid directly metabolizes to oxaloacetate in the body. This guy is selling you fruit juice at $50 bucks an orange.
In the first quote, he sets up the straw man as gwern describes it. In the second quote, he defends his first straw man by saying “but that’s what singularitarians believe”, essentially putting up a second straw man to defend the first.
It’s posts like this that remind me that the sequences are vast, excellent, and most importantly of all, not particularly organized at the moment.
Every so often, Lukeprog or others will make a small effort towards collating the sequences, but the resulting product disappears into the ether of Discussion archives.
Talk is cheap, but somebody really needs to do something about the sequences to make them more accessible and visible to a newcomer. The LW wiki index of the sequence is incomplete, and seems like it hasn’t been changed since ‘Tetronian’ created it six months ago.