to read PDFs with
and DJVUs. So there isn’t anything like this yet. Thanks for saving me some research time.
false_vacuum
Karma: 165
Me too. (This is turning into a confessional thread.)
Didn’t mean to imply that Wikipedia’s blocking policies constitute a problem. Just that all we need here is the standard ‘accounts that post spam will be blocked’. Which seems utterly uncontroversial, and doesn’t even need to be made explicit.
Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.
Corporations (and governments) are not usually regarded as sharing human values by those who consider the question. This brief blog post is a good example. I would certainly argue that the ‘U’ is appropriate; but then I tend to regard ‘UFAI’ as meaning ‘the complement of FAI in mind space’.
English speakers ought to know that its is the possessive adjective and it’s is the contraction for ‘it is’. It drives me crazy when people use it’s to mean its, and I do not understand why they do it. Do people not learn how to write by reading? (I certainly did, and I don’t see how else you could do it, but I realise I’m somewhat abnormal.) Or is the incorrect use of it’s so ubiquitous now that even if people learn to write by reading, unless they read mostly stuff more than ten years old they aren’t being exposed to a data set from which they can infer the correct rule? Or is it more a question of being published on paper than of age? And incidentally, does anyone know if schools have stopped teaching this and similar rules? (And if so, why?)
ETA: At least two people downvoted this, so perhaps I should make the following two points more explicit.
My comment was not intended to be censorious in tone (and rereading it I still don’t think it is). The bulk of what I wrote takes the form of wondering about the cause of this, to me particularly irritating, phenomenon. (Thanks to Vladimir M, I am a little less confused now.)
The reason why I find the phenomenon so irritating is primarily that I value my ability to effortlessly produce correct grammar, spelling, etc., and seeing the same mistake consistently a large enough fraction of the time bollixes up my machinery, tending to decrease the effortlessness with which I can perform correctly. Also, I fear that others are subject to the same effect, and that there could be a threshold of criticality, and even that that threshold may already have been reached. So it’s a (fairly minor) group rationality issue.
Do we even need to explicitly adopt such a standard at this point?
Wikipedia has its problems. I wouldn’t be too eager to ape it in any detail.
What do people think of the designs? My favorites are the SI-as-galaxy icons by Marah (especially #125) and the gravitational-singularity-as-wings ones by strelac (especially #124) --and my lettering and SI-sigil, of course. I’m not sure the semiotics of using a gravitational singularity in the logo are entirely advisable, though. I also like #109, but only because it’s kind of pretty.
This is fascinating! I’ve been told I memorised the alphabet before I was a year old… But it wasn’t until I was in college that I finally memorised which hand is called ‘left’ and which one is ‘right’. (Never had an analogous problem with compass directions.)
A possibly related deficit is that I typically think of the wrong word first when I want to name a colour; i.e. for example I want to refer to purple and I have to choke off the impulse to say ‘yellow’. And yet I have letter/colour synaesthesia!
Brains are weird.
pinkish in the middle should be fine.
For beef, not chicken.
However, I find it much easier to slice meat for stir-frying which is still partially frozen. (This also speeds the thawing process.) Probably if you use a cleaver or other heavy, extremely sharp type of instrument, no prior thawing would be necessary; but I don’t trust myself with those.
No, but I am.
This could function as an intuition pump for my own hypothesis that advanced self-modifying minds won’t compete at arbitrary preselected goals for fun. (At least not exclusively for fun; they might design themselves to enjoy competing to achieve goals in a pedagogical framework, but actually achieving the goal [or acquiring the skills/knowledge/etc. necessary to achieve the goal] will be the point.)
I believe you are correct.
Motivated cognition. It’s such a good word to show off with. (At least, it would be if it meant what I thought it meant.) In fact, I’m sure I’ve looked it up before. Maybe this time I can remember permanently.
Oops. I said I knew how to spell it, not what it means. (‘If you never misuse a word, you’re spending too much time second-guessing yourself/reading the dictionary’?) For some reason I thought ‘floccinaucinihilipilification’ meant ‘nitpicking’. Probably I inferred its meaning incorrectly from the context in which it appeared; that was my standard failure mode, during the era when I assume I picked up that word. (In fairness to my child-self, it was before widespread internet access—but not dictionaries.)
Also, I think I was suffering from some kind of localised cognitive impairment when I wrote that comment (sleep deprivation, perhaps). It strikes me as pretty boorish now, as well as incorrect.
Well, I didn’t find it obvious either. (Or I wouldn’t have said anything. Not big on sarcasm.)
I read ‘probable impossibility’ as ‘something that is probably impossible’. It’s a poor translation if it means something else; but your version at least makes some kind of sense.
It’s not about rationality?
Does this merely call attention to the high probability of the existence of unknown unknowns, or does it promote map-territory confusion?
This is fascinating. It’s not at all clear to me why such a thing would happen. I can’t think of anything in my own experience that seems analogous.