handoflixue

Karma: 3,205

handoflixue Jan 19, 2014, 8:59 AM
0 points
on: I Will Pay $500 To Anyone Who Can Convince Me To Cancel My Cryonics Subscription
It’s easy to get lost in incidental costs and not realize how they add up over time. If you weren’t signed up for cryonics, and you inherited $30K, would you be inclined to dump it in to a cryonics fund, or use it someplace else? If the answer is the latter, you probably don’t REALLY value cryonics as much as you think—you’ve bought in to it because the price is spread out and our brains are bad at budgeting small, reoccurring expenses like that.

My argument is pretty much entirely on the “expense” side of things, but I would also point out that you probably want to unpack your expectations from cryonics: Are you assuming you’ll live infinite years? Live until the heat death of the universe? Gain an extra 200 years until you die in a situation cryonics can’t fix? Gain an extra 50 years until you die of a further age limit?

When I see p(cryonics) = 0.3, I tend to suspect that’s leaning more towards the 50-200 year side of things. Straight-up immortal-until-the-universe-ends seems a LOT less likely than a few hundred extra years.

Where’d that $30K figure come from?

You’ve said you’re young and have a good rate on life insurance, so let’s assume male (from the name) and 25. Wikipedia suggests you should live until you’re 76.

$50/month 12 months/year (76-25 = 51 years) = $30,600.

So, it’s less that you’re paying $50/month and more that you’re committing to pay $30,000 over the course of your life.

What else could you do with that same money?

Portland State University quotes ~$2500/semester for tuition. 3 semesters/year and 4 years/degree ~= $30K. Pretty sure you can get loans and go in to debt for this, so it’s still something you could pay off over time. And if you’re smart, do community college for the first two years, get a scholarship, etc., you can probably easily knock enough off to make up for interest charges.

handoflixue Jan 19, 2014, 8:42 AM
2 points
in reply to: somervta’s comment on: Stupid Questions Thread—January 2014
Read “rate of learning” as “time it takes to learn 1 bit of information”

So UFAI can learn 1 bit in time T, but a FAI takes T+X

Or, at least, that’s how I read it, because the second paragraph makes it pretty clear that the author is discussing UFAI outpacing FAI. You could also just read it as a typo in the equation, but “accidentally miswrote the entire second paragraph” seems significantly less likely. Especially since “Won’t FAI learn faster and outpace UFAI” seems like a pretty low probability question to begin with...

Erm… hi, welcome to the debug stack for how I reached that conclusion. Hope it helps ^.^

handoflixue Nov 22, 2013, 5:44 PM
2 points
in reply to: BenLowell’s comment on: 2013 Less Wrong Census/Survey
Second that :)

handoflixue May 12, 2013, 7:40 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: TeMPOraL’s comment on: Learned Blankness
I guess I learn better from manuals than from random experimentation :)

handoflixue Mar 22, 2013, 6:15 PM
−1 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Personal Evidence—Superstitions as Rational Beliefs

saying a theorem is wrong because the hypotheses are not true is bad logic.

If the objection is true, and the hypothesis is false, that seems like a great objection! If, on the other hand, he provided no evidence towards his objection, then it seems that the bad logic is in not offering evidence, not attacking the hypothesis directly.

Am I missing something, or just reading this in an overly pedantic way?

handoflixue Mar 11, 2013, 6:28 PM
3 points
in reply to: A1987dM’s comment on: Don’t Get Offended
Internally I am generally the same, but I’ve come to realize that a rather sizable portion of the population has trouble distinguishing “all X are Y” and “some X are Y”, both in speaking and in listening. So if someone says “man, women can be so stupid”, I know that might well reflect the internal thought of “all women are idiots”. And equally, someone saying “all women are idiots” might just be upset because his girlfriend broke up with him for some trivial reason.
What links here?
- Eugine_Nier's comment on Don’t Get Offended by katydee (Mar 16, 2013, 2:15 AM; 2 points)

handoflixue Mar 11, 2013, 6:23 PM
0 points
in reply to: OrphanWilde’s comment on: Boring Advice Repository
You missed the point...

handoflixue Mar 11, 2013, 6:23 PM
−3 points
in reply to: Eugine_Nier’s comment on: Don’t Get Offended

My conclusion still holds if you simply need mathematicians in the top 10%, for example, only the analysis is slightly more complicated.

So you agree that, in the original example, you’re more likely than not just being a racist? Because you certainly seem to be moving the goal post over to “top 10%” …

faul_sname’s definition

That link does not appear to point to a definition.

handoflixue Mar 11, 2013, 6:19 PM
2 points
in reply to: Larks’s comment on: Boring Advice Repository
Fair, and thank you for calling me on it.

I get the impression that a majority of LessWrong readers are in major US cities, so I’m leaving it up as useful to them :)

handoflixue Mar 11, 2013, 6:17 PM
−2 points
in reply to: Larks’s comment on: Don’t Get Offended
“Harm that is both genuine and unfair”, then? Income taxes are ‘fair’ (and I would find it baffling to call that ‘harm’ unless they somehow came as a surprise), getting fired is offensive if it’s done solely because your manager doesn’t like you, but fair (and therefor not offensive) if it’s because you failed to do the job. I think getting mugged is a good thing to get outraged about—we want to make that happen less!

handoflixue Mar 11, 2013, 6:12 PM
0 points
in reply to: sixes_and_sevens’s comment on: Boring Advice Repository
Apologies if my tone was overly critical or hostile. It was a cool suggestion, and I’m glad I heard it. I just don’t think it’s a practical suggestion for most people, given the other alternatives out there these days :)

handoflixue Mar 11, 2013, 6:11 PM
0 points
in reply to: A1987dM’s comment on: Don’t Get Offended
I’d disagree. The connotations of Eugine’s statement was to dispute HaydnB’s original point, “When someone says something offensive to you—they’re racist, homophobic, sexist—it seems like you should be offended by that. ”

handoflixue Mar 11, 2013, 6:05 PM
2 points
in reply to: A1987dM’s comment on: Don’t Get Offended
The last one should be read as “ALL” Irish people, my bad :)

handoflixue Mar 11, 2013, 6:05 PM
1 point
in reply to: Eugine_Nier’s comment on: Don’t Get Offended
Obviously false. I just stated them, so they’re not de-facto offensive; they’re offensive when you assert such an obvious falsehood as TRUE.

handoflixue Mar 11, 2013, 6:03 PM
3 points
in reply to: OrphanWilde’s comment on: Boring Advice Repository
I suspect that the vast majority of coffee drinkers disagree with you, and thus your advice is probably inapplicable to most people there. I could be wrong, but you’re the first person I’ve ever met who considers 8-hour-old coffee to be a good thing.

handoflixue Mar 8, 2013, 11:42 PM
11 points
in reply to: jooyous’s comment on: Boring Advice Repository
If it’s been more than a year, and it’s disruptive to your daily life (trouble enjoying pleasant things, pervasive thoughts, crying spells, difficulty functioning at work, difficulty connecting with new partners, etc.), it’s probably worth seeking help.

Heck, if it’s been more than 3 months, you’ll probably benefit from help.

If you have friends you trust, asking them is probably best, since they’ll know how important that particular person was to you.

If you feel like it’s “all piling up”, that’s a sign that you’re dealing with more than you know how to cope with. That’s exactly when getting someone else to help can be most useful.

Now I just need to convince myself to take my own advice here :(

handoflixue Mar 8, 2013, 11:35 PM
0 points
in reply to: OrphanWilde’s comment on: Boring Advice Repository
How do you have a cup of coffee ready to go before you wake up? I’d think it would be cold and unpleasant...

handoflixue Mar 8, 2013, 11:34 PM
6 points
in reply to: therufs’s comment on: Boring Advice Repository
If I’m interacting with people, I treat it as rude to pull out my phone without asking.

If I’m already not-interacting-with-people, I don’t see why it would be any worse than a book. So many other people have smart phones that “socialize while waiting” is dying off regardless of what I do, and a book generally kept people from trying to strike up a conversation anyway.

As to the “not aware I’m not aware”… I’ve always felt equally towards books and smart phones. Possibly a bit more aware with my smart phone, actually, since dropping it or having it stolen is a much bigger deal.

handoflixue Mar 8, 2013, 11:22 PM
5 points
in reply to: sixes_and_sevens’s comment on: Boring Advice Repository

“smart” substitutes for a compass are strictly inferior to an actual compass.

I know my city layout, so I always know where North is. It might require walking (gasp!) as much as a block, but even that is ridiculously rare. Trust me, this is superior to a compass.

The big problem with a compass is that it is Yet Another Thing I Must Remember To Carry. If I use it regularly, forgetting it will probably suck since I don’t have a backup. If I use it infrequently, why bother with the hassle of one more thing cluttering my purse? And what makes you think I’ll remember to pack it on the days I do end up needing it?

handoflixue Mar 8, 2013, 11:18 PM
0 points
in reply to: sixes_and_sevens’s comment on: Boring Advice Repository

north is always north.

Most areas of most cities have fairly intuitive street layouts, if you learn them. If I’m in Northeast Portland, and I am on a numbered street, then I am either heading east (number gets bigger) or west (number gets smaller). If it is a named street, then I am either heading north (number gets bigger), or south (number gets smaller).

Most named streets do have numbers, but you can also go off the building numbers.

I don’t know why it took me 25 years to really accept this, since I grew up being told about this, but most cities genuinely DO use a coordinate system, and learning it makes that sort of thing trivial :)