The thing is, when you pick your target, you’re going to pick someone who is unaware of their surroundings. By the time you’re stalking them, it’s too late for them. They’re not going to notice you because you’ve selected for that.
KenChen
Karma: 237
I meant to say don’t use your phone. Edited.
An exercise I learned from a martial arts class was to walk around at night, pretending that you’re an attacker. Stalk a few people, and try to get into the mindset of preparing for an attack by catching them unaware. Note down what types of people you are more likely to attack, and what types of people you are likely to skip.
Event calendar.
Since this is a regular meetup, I added it to the meetup page on the wiki.
Shoe
Intensional: Article of clothing primarily designed to be worn on the foot.
Extensional: Hiking boots, flip-flops, snowshoes, Vibrams.
Hope
Intensional: Human sensation of the anticipation that a severe negative outcome will be avoided, when the circumstances are outside of one’s control.
Extensional: A student waiting to receive the result of their final exams, for which a passing grade is required to pass the course. A rationalist wishing that cryonics will be successful. A religious person praying to God to cure a family member’s cancer.
N.B. Perhaps it is useful to distinguish between hope and optimism. We may want to call a person who constantly looks at the positive effects of a situation optimistic; it seems more appropriate to use “hope” when the stakes are higher and there is an element of desperation.
Wire
Intensional: Piece of material designed to efficiently carry electrons (low-cost and relatively high sensitivity to changes in electric potential across distances) across its length.
Extensional: CAT-5 cables, power lines, circuit board wiring.
N.B. The efficient criteria implies the thinness and longness of the wire, relative to the wire capacity.
Green
Intensional:
A certain wavelength of light, the intensity of which directly corresponds to the signal strength of the human M-type cone when such light is shone upon it.
The attribute of an object that directly corresponds with the reflectivity of the aforementioned wavelength of light shone upon it.
Extensional:
Output of a green laser, the green spectral line of Mercury, the output of a light filter that only lets green light through.
The reflectivity of green paint, the reflectivity of grass.
Politician
Intensional: Person who is popularly known for having had a significant direct impact on politics (the policy and/or decision-making part of a government or otherwise a large, self-sufficient group of people with shared interests) and has done so for a significant amount of time.
Extensional: Chuck Schumer, Schwarzenegger, Gandhi, Deng Xiaoping
Apple
Intensional: (taken from Wikipedia, since I can’t come up with anything better and I don’t know much about taxonomy) The apple is the pomaceous fruit of the apple tree, species Malus domestica in the rose family (Rosaceae).
Extensional: McIntosh apple, Granny Smith apple, Red Delicious apple.
N.B. For almost everything, including apples and genera, it is often more useful to think about whether something is more blegg-like than rube-like, than to think about whether an item is a blegg or a rube.
Difficulty of generating intensional definition (easiest to hardest): Shoe, Wire, Hope, Green, Politician, Apple
I found it very easy to generate extensional definitions once the intensional definitions were generated. However, this may have been a side effect—once I came up with examples that fit my intuition, but did not fit the intensional definition, I would revise the intensional definition to include it.
I found it easier to generate definitions when there’s a clearly defined purpose for the entity in question. It’s harder to define things when there are seemingly arbitrary boundaries (in the case of apple and politician).
My idea was to have some sort of calendar, where users can add events for one-shot meetups, or recurring events for the regular meetups. The events could then link to the appropriate post and/or mailing list.
Integration with Google Calendar / Apple iCal would also be awesome.
I commit to working on modifying the code to organize meetups in a way that makes more sense, if someone else is able to provide direction and authority. I haven’t worked on the code before, and I can’t promise anything except that I will attempt to work on it.
I have just read the github wiki. I will try to get an instance of the site running. What’s the next step after that? Who else should I be coordinating with?
You’ve been telling everyone at this cocktail party about this fantastic new rationality club, and how it’s changed your life. You manage to get a few people interested enough to actually listen to what you’re saying, a smaller subset to remember the name of the site, and a smaller subset to take the time to actually check out the site for an entire 90 seconds.
That’s all you got.
So, after telling a room full of people about the awesomeness of rationality, maybe you get one person who decides to visit the site. They are looking for a justification for why they should spend more time on your site. What do they see? What do you want them to see?
Hopefully something good. Something that will make them hunger for more. Something that will actually make them think (which is kind of the point of all this).
The about page is currently structured like this: Science is good. This site has science. Meta. Meta and code. Meta. Meta. Meta. Meta. Brought to you by viewers like you. Grid of juicy content. Link to Sequences. History. Code. Code.
The about page is great if you have been on LW already and want to know more about it. However, it is not a suitable front page. Unfortunately, it is not great even if you are already motivated to find out the core tenets of rationality.
IMO, there’s a distinction between regular meetups, and one-shot meetups. It wouldn’t make sense for a newcomer to see only one-shot meetups on the list, when a community in their city already exists.
Perhaps some sort of calendar would make sense, where anyone can post one-shot meetups, and regular meetups are represented by a recurring event.
As a quick alternative, would it make sense to create a promoted top-level post containing the Sequences, and “sticky” that post so that it’s the first thing newcomers see?
You could create a preference to not display it for logged in users, if that’s an issue.
Done.
Sorry. I was sure there was previous discussion on this, so I just linked to the first thing that I could find. I didn’t really read what you wrote, to be honest.
Hugh Ristik, who was linked in the article, addresses the question of how to generate good pickup advice:
Feminists tend to criticize male sexual behavior and only explain what not to do. PUAs are exploring what to do. If feminists want to guide the expression of male sexuality in ways other than shouting “don’ts” from the peanut gallery, then they would do well to study the teachings of the seduction community, take from it what they like, and throw away the rest.
Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.
– Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
I took the liberty of updating the meetup groups wiki page to include these weekly meetups. I couldn’t find any mention of the regular Sat/Sun monthly meetups, so I didn’t include those.
Also, it would be nice if these meetup posts linked to the wiki, which would allow newcomers to more easily find meetup information in one place (especially since I sometimes refer people from other cities to LW).
I seem to recall that Sweden is “somewhat mountainous”, so I suppose that the correct value is around 2000m.
I remember looking up the population of Libya recently, which is around 6m, and I feel like the population of Central African Republic is a bit lower. I suppose the correct value is around 3m.
“Ease of reading” is at least somewhat subjective, as different people learn and process information differently.
To the extent that the same idea may be presented in different ways, it may be beneficial to have different people write different writeups of the sequences (not necessarily shorter or less dense).
There is a site, True Knowledge, that attempts to answer such questions using methods similar to Watson’s.
It relies on NLP and “facts”; for example, the query “What is the capital of the United States” relies on this fact:
This fact asserts that the relationship ‘”is the capital of”’ exists between “Washington, D.C.” and “the United States” at some point in time. Other facts in the knowledge base assert that this fact applies for the following time periods:
Each “fact” is assessed by a variety of sources, both human and automated. For example, the fact above has, as some of its assessments:
Extracted by [true knowledge] from the infobox on Wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States, downloaded 19 May 2009.
and
Fact extracted from Factacular using natural language processing of the following snippit “The United States of America has the capital Washington, D.C..”
-- Paul Graham