(My guess is you wanted to write “Can’t I post any Open Questions I have right now...“, so I will respond to that, but let me know in case I misunderstood)
Nope. My question was literally just whether I can post some open questions I have right now to LessWrong, this sounds like an excellent direction for the website to take.
We’re interested in people’s thoughts on the idea so far. Any questions about Open Questions?
Can I post any Open Questions I have right now with a title like:
“[Open Question] Bla bla bla bla?”
Will second not enjoying Neuromancer very much.
I missed that line and I apologize. A strong upvote for your troubles.
I have not invented a “new style,” composite, modified or otherwise that is set within distinct form as apart from “this” method or “that” method. On the contrary, I hope to free my followers from clinging to styles, patterns, or molds. Remember that Jeet Kune Do is merely a name used, a mirror in which to see “ourselves”. . . Jeet Kune Do is not an organized institution that one can be a member of. Either you understand or you don’t, and that is that. There is no mystery about my style. My movements are simple, direct and non-classical. The extraordinary part of it lies in its simplicity. Every movement in Jeet Kune Do is being so of itself. There is nothing artificial about it. I always believe that the easy way is the right way. Jeet Kune Do is simply the direct expression of one’s feelings with the minimum of movements and energy. The closer to the true way of Kung Fu, the less wastage of expression there is. Finally, a Jeet Kune Do man who says Jeet Kune Do is exclusively Jeet Kune Do is simply not with it. He is still hung up on his self-closing resistance, in this case anchored down to reactionary pattern, and naturally is still bound by another modified pattern and can move within its limits. He has not digested the simple fact that truth exists outside all molds; pattern and awareness is never exclusive. Again let me remind you Jeet Kune Do is just a name used, a boat to get one across, and once across it is to be discarded and not to be carried on one’s back.
While writing the about page for the upcoming Whistling Lobsters 2.0 forum, I took a shot at giving a brief history of and definition of rationality. The following is the section providing a definition. I think I did an okay job:
The Rationalist Perspective
Rationality is related to but distinct from economics. While they share many ideas and goals, rationality is its own discipline with a different emphasis. It has two major components, instrumental and epistemic rationality. Instrumental means “in the service of”, it’s about greater insight in the service of other goals. Epistemic means “related to knowledge”, and focuses on knowing the truth for its own sake. Instrumental rationality might be best described as “regret minimization”. Certainly this phrase captures the key points of the rationalist perspective:
Rationality cares about opportunity cost, which is the biggest shared trait with economics. Rationality is not skepticism, skeptics only care about not-losing. Rationalists care about winning, which means that the failure to realize full benefits is incorporated into the profit/loss evaluation.
A rationalist should never envy someone else just for their choices. Consider Spock, the ‘rational’ first officer of the USS Enterprise in Star Trek. Often Spock will insist against helpful action because it would “be illogical”. The natural question is “Illogical to whom?”. No points are awarded for fetishism. If there are real outcomes to consider, perhaps you hold yourself back for some social benefit, that is all well and good. But there is nothing noble in doing things that make you or the world worse off because you’ve internalized fake rules.
Long term thinking. Regret is generally something you start doing after you’ve had a bit of experience, it’s something you need to think about early to avoid. You don’t regret wasting your 20′s until you’re in your 30′s. Regret is about your life path, which is utility vs. time. Most economics focuses on one shot utility maximization scenarios, or iterated games. But the real world has every kind of game imaginable just about, and your ‘score’ is how you perform on all of them.
Yup. Empirically, people who lose lots of weight and keep it off have a CONSTANT VIGILANCE mindset going.
This isn’t to say that OP’s post is untrue, but rather they’re underestimating just how badly the odds are stacked against those who are obese.
HBO’s The Weight Of The Nation documentary goes into the Weight Control Registry study on long term weight loss, and the common factors between people who manage to keep it off:
Even if we take that interpretation, I think 3 and 4 are useful operational expansions of 1 and 2. They’re concrete things you can do to implement them.
“How hard it is to obtain the truth is a key factor to consider when thinking about secrets. Easy truths are simply accepted conventions. Pretty much everybody knows them. On the other side of the spectrum are things that are impossible to figure out. These are mysteries, not secrets. Take superstring theory in physics, for instance. You can’t really design experiments to test it. The big criticism is that no one could ever actually figure it out. But is it just really hard? Or is it a fool’s errand? This distinction is important. Intermediate, difficult things are at least possible. Impossible things are not. Knowing the difference is the difference between pursuing lucrative ventures and guaranteed failure.”
One of the reasons why academia has all those strict norms around plagiarism and citing sources is that it makes the “conceptual family tree” legible. Otherwise it just kind of becomes soupy and difficult to discern.
So how many “confirmed kills” of ideas found in the sequences actually are there? I know the priming studies got eviscerated, but the last time I looked into this I couldn’t exactly find an easy list of “famous psychology studies that didn’t replicate” to compare against.
To be really frank, and really succinct:
Abuse of the word ‘rational’ was one of the original social stressors that killed LessWrong.
It is not more fitting, and you should actually go back and edit your post to change it.
The most common pattern I run into, where I’m not sure what to do, is patterns of comments from a given user that are either just barely over the line, or where each given comment is under the line, but so close to a line that repetition of it adds up to serious damage – making LW either not fun, or not safe feeling.
What I used to do on the #lesswrong IRC was put every time I see someone make a comment like this into a journal, and then once I find myself really annoyed with them I open the journal to help establish the pattern. I’d also look at peoples individual chat history to see if there’s a consistent pattern of them doing the thing routinely, or if it’s a thing they just sometimes happen to do.
I definitely agree this is one of the hardest challenges of moderation, and I pretty much always see folks fail it. IMO, it’s actually more important than dealing with the egregious violations, since those are usually fairly legible and just require having a spine.
My most important advice would be don’t ignore it. Do not just shrug it off and say “well nothing I can do, it’s not like I can tell someone off for being annoying”. You most certainly can and should for many kinds of ‘annoying’. The alternative is that the vigor of a space slowly gets sucked out by not-quite-bad-actors.
On the one hand, I too resent that LW is basically an insight porn factory near completely devoid of scholarship.
On the other hand, this is not a useful comment. I can think of at least two things you could have done to make this a useful comment:
Specified even a general direction of where you feel the body of economic literature could have been engaged. I know you might resent doing someone elses research for them if you’re not already familiar with said body, but frankly the norm right now is to post webs spun from the fibrous extrusions of peoples musing thoughts. The system equilibrium isn’t going to change unless some effort is invested into moving it. Notice you could write your comment on most posts while only changing a few words.
Provide advice on how one might go about engaging with ‘the body of economic literature’. Many people are intelligent and reasonably well informed, but not academics. Taking this as an excuse to mark them swamp creatures beyond assistance is both lazy and makes the world worse. You could even link to reasonably well written guides from someone else if you don’t want to invest the effort (entirely understandable).
For anyone else reading, Harvard has a nice page up on how to do a strong literature review: https://guides.library.harvard.edu/c.php?g=310271&p=2071512
Excellent question. The short answer is when I’m not swamped and running on razor-thin margins of slack, hopefully soon.
This is actually a fairly powerful intuition that I hadn’t considered before. In case it might help others:
Keep in mind that a Dunbar-sized tribe of 300 people or so is going to have more than 1 ‘leader’ (and 300 is the upper limit on tribe size). Generally you’re looking at a small suite of leaders. Lets say there are a dozen of them. In that case we should naively expect the level of personal fitness required to ‘lead a tribe’ to be somewhere in the 1-in-30 range, you meet people that would have been leaders in the ancestral environment quite literally every day, multiple times a day even.
Reconcile this with what you actually observe in your life.
I don’t use them.