I just graduated from FIU with a bachelor’s in philosophy and a minor in mathematics. I’d like to thank my parents, God and Eliezer Yudkowsky (whose The Sequences I cited in each of the five papers I had to turn in during my final semester).
jaime2000
Karma: 1,125
Probably not, though I have never had access to the Android marketplace, so I’m not sure. Have you tried installing the app directly from the downloadble .apk file?
Interesting! Before the great-grandparent I would have assigned a pretty low prior to sam being Jim; I never even considered the possibility explicitly. Now that I’m looking at it closely, sam does use a similar writing style. I’m updating substantially, and now believe there is a roughly 50-75% chance they’re the same person. Thanks for answering!
A former poster here (known elsewhere on the net as “James A. Donald”)
Where can I find evidence linking the sam0345 account to the identity James A. “Jim” Donald?
Has TDT been mentioned in HPMOR in the story before?
TDT specifically is not mentioned, but chapter 33 includes a discussion of superrationality as applied to the one-shot prisoner’s dilemma.
If civilisation falls, how do “pre-1965 silver dimes”, or anything else of little practical value, acquire that role?
It’s simple; gold and silver are schelling points. They have been used as mediums of monetary exchange for literally thousands of years. Maybe if you’re in a malthusian scenario where people are starving in droves and the survivors are spending every available minute working to stay alive just a little longer, gold and silver won’t do you much good. But as long as any kind of economic surplus exists, it’s a pretty good bet that people will be willing to trade for gold and silver, if for no other reason than because they think that other people will also be willing to trade for gold and silver.
It seems like the both of you just want everyone to use efficient RVs.
Agreed. Our society already has an RV subculture with relevant infrastructure; positing yurts and house cables seems like reinventing the wheel.
There’s also a recent trend of minimalists who try to reduce their possessions to whatever will fit in a backpack and a hard drive. I don’t think those people would have much trouble moving.
There is an important difference between “We don’t know all the answers yet” and “Do what feels right, man.” These questions have answers, because humans have biochemistry, and we should do our best to find them and live by the results.
~J. Stanton, “The Paleo Identity Crisis: What Is The Paleo Diet, Anyway?”
I have no talent for hardware modification, so I’d either have to find some way to get good at it or pay someone to do it for me. That said, I have also considered this (removing Wi-Fi antennas before purchase was one of the few practical suggestions I found while trying to read up on this topic). Right now it seems like my current plan is easier, but I am certainly willing to experiment with many variations on the basic theme if my initial approach doesn’t work.
Simple part first: yes, I claim that every city has or will soon have near-ubiquitous internet access. If you need to deny your future self the ability to choose to use the internet easily, you won’t be able to live in a city. Further, surrounding yourself with internet users is going to prove much harder to resist than surrounding yourself with a non-technical, somewhat isolated community.
Like I said, I fear for the future. There are some ideas which would help even in a future full of free Wi-Fi connections (I’ve been toying with the idea of buying an 5th generation iMac, which was the last model of iMacs not to include a built-in WiFi antenna, and installing Windows on it; or I could just pay some IT dude to physically rip the internal antenna from a new laptop machine), but if it reaches the point of a free internet terminal in every room or something like that, then yes, I may well have to flee first world cities. That said, we aren’t there yet, so I might as well take advantage of cities while I can.
Harder part: I don’t know what you’ve tried already (and specifically: get professional psychological assistance, which often requires that you try multiple providers until you find one you trust). This level of avoidance (where you’re considering careers based on availability) seems way more than you should undertake via self-diagnosis only.
I find the idea that I am supposed to consult with a “professional” before making drastic changes to my life a little creepy. However, if this doesn’t work, I will seriously start to consider the use of psychiatric medication, which will necessitate talking to a shrink.
This is the next step in a series of escalating steps I have taken to try to fix a worsening problem. I understand that from your perspective this probably looks like a very drastic action taken for no adequately explained reason, but I think of it as a very proportionate response adopted after lesser options have been exhausted.
As for my goal… let’s just say I find this passage very familiar, except instead of “day” it’s “days”, or perhaps “weeks”:
Opening Safari is an actively destructive decision. I am asking that consciousness be taken away from me. Like the lost time between leaving a party drunk and materializing somehow at your front door, the internet robs you of a day you can visit recursively or even remember.
Could you elaborate on why you think teaching math in a city might not be safe but being a farmhand in the country might be? If every city starts installing open WiFi networks you might be right, but right now it seems to me that creating an internet-less place at home should be enough (I’m glad routers are now coming locked by default, with long-ass alphanumeric passwords).
Paul Graham tried something similar. It didn’t work very well. My previous experiences with creating trivial inconveniences have also been far from encouraging.
I want to use computers without being exposed to the internet. I haven’t been able to find a lot of practical information about this. I would appreciate the LessWrong hivemind’s thoughts on this matter.
My current plan is something like have no internet access at home, record internet tasks on a todo list, go to a library once per week and do them (sample tasks include downloading fanfic reading material for the week, sending e-mails, downloading new versions of programs, checking my bank accounts, etc...). Lack of torrents is something I’ll just have to live with. I’m also thinking of switching my phone to a Nokia 106, which has no internet access. There’s a neat trick where you can get e-mails as text messages, which should be enough to deal with emergencies. I’ll make sure to avoid careers which involve prolonged interaction with internet-capable machines, such as programming. Is teaching math safe?
I dread the day when wireless internet becomes omnipresent. It’s a horrible, horrible supertimulus.
You commit to the marriage when you say “I do”. The idea that you cannot commit unless you have the right to sue your ex-spouse in a court of law for money seem preposterous to me on its face.
Not the right to sue; the right to be sued, which makes you less likely to become an ex-spouse, and more likely to become spouse to begin with.
I think I understand the idea Eugene is getting at in the sibling thread. Let me see if I can explain it a little differently.
As Sister Y explained in this excellent article, people no longer have a way of committing themselves to marriage. This is a problem for two reasons, neither of which applies to vegetarianism.
In a sense, marriage IS commitment, and talking about a “marriage” without commitment is like talking about a “prisoner” who can leave his cell any time he wants, or a “warranty” which can be ignored at the company’s discretion. Now, you could argue that this is a matter of semantics, and to some extent you would be right, but there is a deeper issue here; that marriage with commitment and “marriage” without commitment are so far apart in relationship-space that we should treat them as completely different things, and that we might be justified in not wanting to call these clusters of relationships by the same name at all (some people like to call the modern relationship cluster Marriage 2.0 for just this reason).
If you can’t credibly commit to doing something, you are going to have trouble finding people who are willing to expose themselves to risk should you fail to do so. Thus, by removing your freedom to pre-commit yourself to fulfilling a marriage contract, your freedom to enter into these contracts has been reduced (indeed, the collapse of the marriage rate appears to be an empirical confirmation of this model). Thomas Schelling covered this in his The Strategy of Conflict.
Among the legal privileges of corporations, two that are mentioned in textbooks are the right to sue and the “right” to be sued. Who wants to be sued! But the right to be sued is the power to make a promise: to borrow money, to enter a contract, to do business with someone who might be damaged. If suit does arise, the “right” seems a liability in retrospect; beforehand it was a prerequisite to doing business.
Now, the term under discussion is “monogamy”, not “marriage”, but back to problem 1; the modern serial “monogamy” is a completely different cluster of relationships from the old monogamy, which implied marriage. Dalrock, for example, argues that serial “monogamy” is a promiscuous and immoral relationship model, which are things he doesn’t believe about the traditional religious monogamy model. Whether you agree with him or not, the point is, again, that modern serial “monogamy” is pretty different from old monogamy which meant things like not marrying two wives at once, and maybe some people want to avoid overloading an existing term to incorporate such a different new concept.
Try Pimsleur. It’s an audio-based method of language learning which incorporates spaced repetition.
Also, Rosetta Stone.
Needs more context. You and I know what this quote refers to; others might not.
EDIT: Here’s a non-Tweeted version of the quote. It is used again later in the book, but to quote that scene would be a spoiler.
They finally got themselves together along the wall. Ender noticed that without exception they had lined up with their heads still in the direction they had been up in the corridor. So Ender deliberately took hold of what they were treating as a floor and dangled from it upside down. “Why are you upside down, soldiers?” he demanded.
Some of them started to turn the other way.
”Attention!” They held still. “I said why are you upside down!”
No one answered. They didn’t know what he expected.
”I said why does every one of you have his feet in the air and his head toward the ground!”
Finally one of them spoke. “Sir, this is the direction we were in coming out of the door.”
″Well what difference is that supposed to make! What difference does it make what the gravity was back in the corridor! Are we going to fight in the corridor? Is there any gravity here?”
No sir. No sir.
”From now on, you forget about gravity before you go through that door. The old gravity is gone, erased. Understand me? Whatever your gravity is when you get to the door, remember-the enemy’s gate is down. Your feet are toward the enemy’s gate. Up is toward your own gate. North is that way, south is that way, east is that way, west is-what way?”
They pointed.
”That’s what I expected. The only process you’ve mastered is the process of elimination, and the only reason you’ve mastered that is because you can do it in the toilet. What was the circus I saw out here! Did you call that forming up? Did you call that flying? Now everybody, launch and form up on the ceiling! Right now! Move!”
As Ender expected, a good number of them instinctively launched, not toward the wall with the door in it, but toward the wall that Ender had called north, the direction that had been up when they were in the corridor. Of course they quickly realized their mistake, but too late-they had to wait to change things until they had rebounded off the north wall.
In the meantime, Ender was mentally grouping them into slow learners and fast learners. The littlest kid, the one who had been last out of the door, was the first to arrive at the correct wall, and he caught himself adroitly. They had been right to advance him. He’d do well.
The Amazon Kindle is very cheap ($70-$210 depending on the exact model and features you want; assuming you buy one every 2-5 years, it is a trivial expense for all but the most destitute).
It’s not very hard to do when the original author is Mike Darwin. The man really needs an editor. Consider “Doing the Time Wrap”, which looks for all the world like someone wrote 2 or 3 amazing, wonderful essays on completely different topics, and then decided to cut and paste random sections of them to form a single article, with random song lyrics thrown in for good measure.