jaime2000

Karma: 1,125

jaime2000 30 May 2016 6:07 UTC
0 points
in reply to: nino’s comment on: The Library of Scott Alexandria
I have noticed one more issue. In “Efficient Charity: Do Unto Others…” the symbol “£” is twice corrupted into “ÂŁ”. This is not an ebook-wide problem, since “Searching for One-Sided Tradeoffs” and “A Modest Proposal” both use the correct symbol. Apparently this is simply a problem with the source; the copy of the post at the Effective Altruism Forum has this error, but the copy of the post at LessWrong, has the correct symbol.

jaime2000 4 Apr 2016 4:26 UTC
2 points
on: What makes buying insurance rational?
In addition to what everyone else said, I recommend Gwern’s “Console Insurance”. Also, Jacob from Early Retirement Extreme says the following about dental and vision insurance:

I don’t have dental or vision insurance. Paying insurance that covers “regular maintenance” like teeth cleaning or contact lenses which these kinds of insurance do makes no sense whatsoever. Suppose everybody pays $25/month for contacts. Now do you think that everybody paying those $25 through an insurance company will make it any cheaper? No, the insurance company will add a $5 administrative fee—they most definitely will not give away free money. As such this kind of insurance is nothing but a financing plan for people who can’t figure out how to save the money for a $200 dental visit. The point of insurance is to cover rare events with a six-figure cost, which dental or vision simply doesn’t have.

jaime2000 2 Nov 2015 0:27 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Vaniver’s comment on: Open thread, Oct. 26 - Nov. 01, 2015
The beginning is too slow (I would not have read past the first paragraph if I had come across this story randomly on the internet; consider starting at the second paragraph), but the idea was interesting.

jaime2000 1 Nov 2015 13:00 UTC
2 points
on: Problems in Education
Since the post never came back (much less with “citations galore”), here’s a mirror.

jaime2000 6 Oct 2015 21:19 UTC
2 points
in reply to: nino’s comment on: The Library of Scott Alexandria
Everything looks fine now. Thanks once again!

jaime2000 6 Oct 2015 14:17 UTC
6 points
in reply to: Sabiola’s comment on: Open thread, Oct. 5 - Oct. 11, 2015
Huh. I interpreted it as “not just women can’t get sexual experience until marriage in a healthy patriarchy,” but now that you mention it, your interpretation seems correct.

jaime2000 6 Oct 2015 5:07 UTC
1 point
in reply to: CellBioGuy’s comment on: Open thread, Oct. 5 - Oct. 11, 2015

Not just women.

My understanding is that in the patriarchies of the past there were a small number of prostitutes and bad girls which young men could use to gain some experience and confidence before settling down and marrying nice, virgin girls.

jaime2000 6 Oct 2015 4:10 UTC
7 points
in reply to: nino’s comment on: The Library of Scott Alexandria
Thank you! The book is fantastic. Combined with The Sequences ebooks that are already floating around (Eliezer Yudkowsky Blog Posts, 2006-2010: An Unofficial Compendium, Rationality: From AI to Zombies, and The Hanson-Yudkowsky AI-Foom Debate) it is now possible for someone to get most of the insights of the rationalist community distilled into extremely efficient book formats.

Do let me know if anything’s massively broken.

A large number of posts have extraneous > characters. The affected posts appear to be either SSC posts in which the > character appears at the start of a blockquote and LiveJournal posts in which the > character appears after and in between paragraphs. Examples of the former include “Meditations on Moloch,” “Misperceptions on Moloch,” and “Book Review: Red Plenty,” while examples of the latter include “The Meditation on Creepiness”, “The Meditation on Superweapons,” and “The Meditation on the War on Applause Lights.”

Also, the title of “We Wrestle Not With Flesh And Blood, But Against Powers And Principalitiebs” should be “We Wrestle Not With Flesh And Blood, But Against Powers And Principalities”. I normally wouldn’t report a typo, but this one appears to have been introduced by the ebook process; the mistake is not in the original article, nor is it on the list of titles RobbBB provided.

jaime2000 30 Sep 2015 6:08 UTC
10 points
in reply to: skeptical_lurker’s comment on: Open thread, Sep. 28 - Oct. 4, 2015

Do you ever get an anarchist, a communist and a neoreactionary turning up to the same meeting?

So an anarchist, a communist, and a neoreactionary walk into a LessWrong meetup...

jaime2000 9 Sep 2015 15:31 UTC
6 points
in reply to: roland’s comment on: Open thread 7th september − 13th september

Should we eliminate all news sources like some advocate?

Yes.

What about the news that are relevant, e.g. changes in the tax code that you need to know about?

If you try to read the news, you will see far more proposed changes tax changes than actual changes, and far more useless political debate than practical ramifications. Much more efficient to just google “tax changes [state] [year]” once a year or ask an accountant you know.

jaime2000 14 Jun 2015 2:58 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Elo’s comment on: A survey of the top posters on lesswrong
It’s a chess joke.

jaime2000 7 Jun 2015 18:06 UTC
2 points
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Open Thread, Jun. 1 - Jun. 7, 2015
Yes, except that I change the “Device” setting to “Kindle Paperwhite” instead of “Kindle 1-5”, and I usually convert the first 5 pages or so to make sure I have the borders right before I convert the whole document. The idea of cropping the margins is to set them such that page numbers and chapter headers are cut while retaining the text. You shouldn’t need to touch the left and right margins most of the time, only the top and bottom ones. Use binary search.

jaime2000 7 Jun 2015 15:55 UTC
2 points
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Open Thread, Jun. 1 - Jun. 7, 2015

How easily is a Kindle damaged by falling to the ground? Is it important to use a case to prevent damage?

I have accidentally dropped Kindle in a case a couple of times; there was no perceptible damage.

Do you have tips for good PDF conversion. Especially for textbooks?

K2pdfopt is God’s gift to Kindle readers. Compare a processed version of the latest paper I read with its original version.

jaime2000 3 Mar 2015 0:29 UTC
9 points
in reply to: D_Malik’s comment on: Open thread, Mar. 2 - Mar. 8, 2015
I like Eliezer’s solution better. Rather than wait until exponential population growth eats all the resources, we just impose population control at the start and let every married couple have a max of two children. That way, population grows at most linearly (assuming immortality).

jaime2000 2 Mar 2015 15:06 UTC
16 points
on: Open thread, Mar. 2 - Mar. 8, 2015
365tomorrows recently published a hard science-fiction story of mine called “Procrastination”, which was inspired by the ideas of Robin Hanson. I believe LessWrong will find it enjoyable.

jaime2000 26 Feb 2015 0:20 UTC
0 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, February 2015, chapter 112
Non-native speaker here; I agree with you. I knew what “insofar as” meant, and the statement parsed fine.

jaime2000 25 Feb 2015 20:02 UTC
4 points
on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, February 2015, chapter 111

“Power of unicorn’ss blood to presserve life makess excellent combination with troll’ss healing. Only Fiendfyre and Killing Cursse sshall girl-child fear, from thiss day.”

What, not basilisk venom? In canon, that was also a way to destroy a horcrux.

I am also updating towards the theory that what we are seeing in this chapter and the last is some sort of illusion; either the mirror or hpmor!legilimency. The biggest piece of evidence against it is Eliezer’s assurances that the story will not lie to us because he wants the plot to be solvable; he was very careful to point out that Draco’s false memory was, in fact, false.

jaime2000 24 Feb 2015 20:59 UTC
23 points
on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, February 2015, chapter 110

After reading comments in /r/hpmor, I’ve realized that Professor Quirrell has a superior move in the previous chapter, which has hopefully updated or will update soon.

Be honest, Eliezer; you just got sick of all the naked Harry jokes.

How I laughed when I realised it! When I saw you had made a Good Voldemort to oppose the evil one—ah, how I laughed!

I guess now we know what Dumbledore was laughing about in chapter 17.

The Cloak of Invisibility was torn away from him, and the shimmering black Cloak flew away from him, through the air.

Professor Quirrell caught it, and swiftly drew it over himself; in less than a second he had pulled down the Cloak’s hood over his head, and disappeared.

Quirrell can escape the trap because he is no longer reflected in the mirror, being hidden by the True Cloak of Invisibility. All he has to do is walk out of the reflection, which he did.

Into the hand of the Albus Dumbledore flew from his sleeve his long, dark-grey wand, and in his other hand, as though from nowhere, appeared a short rod of dark stone.

Albus Dumbledore threw these both violently aside, just as the building sense of power rose to an unbearable peak, and then disappeared.

The Mirror returned to showing the ordinary reflection of a gold-lit room of white stone, without any trace of where Albus Dumbledore had been.

After reading Reddit, my interpretation of this scene is that Dumbledore realized Quirrellmort would not be affected by the trap, and that the only result would be that Harry would be trapped eternally outside of Time. Dumbledore makes a split-second decision to sacrifice himself in order to save the boy, throws the Elder Wand and the Line of Merlin Unbroken out of the mirror’s reflection so that they will not be trapped with the headmaster, and trades places with Harry just before the Process of the Timeless (the rising sense of power) finishes. Albus Dumbledore is now trapped inside the mirror forever, and Harry Potter is back in the real room with Professor Quirrell.

jaime2000 23 Feb 2015 20:55 UTC
9 points
in reply to: lerjj’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, February 2015, chapter 109
Look at the html source.

jaime2000 22 Feb 2015 5:27 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Capla’s comment on: Open thread, Feb. 16 - Feb. 22, 2015
Read Chronospause, Cryonics, and Mike Darwin’s comment history. Mike Darwin is very, very based.

If you still want more, try reading all the articles under the “cryonics” tag and gwern’s “Plastination versus Cryonics”.