Nectanebo

Karma: 470

Nectanebo Jan 9, 2014, 12:05 PM
3 points
on: We need new humans, please help
Instead of having children as a pseudo-solution to aging and death, wouldn’t it make a lot more sense to work on solving those problems much more directly via research or earning-to-give to organizations doing research? From this perspective, having children is actually explicitly wasteful due to this clear opportunity cost of valuable time, money and effort, not to mention also very defeatist.

Nectanebo Jan 6, 2014, 9:06 AM
28 points
in reply to: Prismattic’s comment on: [LINK] Why I’m not on the Rationalist Masterlist
Let’s play the money as dead children game for a bit. Now, when the article was written you could plausibly save 1life for about $1000, but these days I think the number is a bit higher. Let’s say $10000 just to be safe.

Essentially, you’re saying that you would sacrifice the lives of 100 people in order to avoid a brief homosexual experience, using basic consequentialism. Perhaps you won’t change your mind even when thinking about the proposition from this perspective, but I know personally it would be too difficult ethically for me to refuse.

It doesn’t have to be lives, of course. If you’re more of a preferential consequentialist, you can help pay off your mates’ crippling student debt or mortgage, or donate to a longevity charity to help your chances of not dying, or even MIRI or something.

In any case, a million dollars has a lot of potential utility. Refusing because you’re not ‘materialistic’ is a bit short-sighted, I think.

Nectanebo Jan 5, 2014, 4:25 PM
5 points
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: January 2014 Media Thread
I began reading the manga on the recommendation of a friend before the first episode of the anime adaptation aired but after the promising PV for it dropped. I keenly remember not enjoying the plot at all to begin with, and the art is initially horrible, probably even worse than the rotoscoping in the anime.

I persevered with it, however, since this particular friend is yet to supply me with a poor rec, and gradually, the art has become quite pretty, and the story has also developed into an entertaining rollercoaster of events and emotion. I think it improves so much that of currently running manga, AnH is the title I anticipate new chapters of the most out of 50+ I’m following, and it has been consistently so since I first caught up, with each new monthly chapter delivering drama and excitement in spades.

Since the anime’s sales were amazingly poor, there will never be a second season, and imo the story only really becomes enjoyable a fair while past where the anime stopped, so I would recommend reading the manga if you ever plan on revisiting the franchise, or for anyone else who wants to pick it up.

As it isn’t finished, it could still turn to shit, but it’s pretty great right now.

-

Edit made months later: It turned to shit. No longer recommended.

Nectanebo Nov 23, 2013, 11:21 AM
33 points
on: 2013 Less Wrong Census/Survey
I took the survey, and look forward to the results.

Nectanebo Nov 18, 2013, 7:08 PM
0 points
in reply to: hyporational’s comment on: Open Thread, November 15-22, 2013
I have the same problem, although I don’t think it’s ever returned anything for me.

Nectanebo Oct 26, 2013, 3:31 PM
3 points
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Less Wrong’s political bias
And humans, even lesswrong readers, are all varying degrees of irrational. Therefore understanding the distribution of political affiliation of people that use the site is a significant step towards understanding the site’s bias.

Nectanebo Oct 25, 2013, 10:45 PM
12 points
in reply to: lavalamp’s comment on: Less Wrong’s political bias
Well, there’s a Lesswrong census every year, and that includes questions on political affiliation.

link to 2012 results

Other than that, I’m not sure how you would measure political bias.

Nectanebo Oct 15, 2013, 2:25 PM
0 points
in reply to: hyporational’s comment on: Open Thread, October 13 − 19, 2013
Personally, I haven’t really thought of it. Might be an angle worth looking at the product from, you’re right.

I haven’t really been following their progress or anything, so I don’t know, but it’s possible they’ve touched on it at some point before. You could dig around on the soylent forum or even start the topic yourself if you really felt like it. I think the creators of the product are reasonably active on there.

Nectanebo Oct 15, 2013, 10:31 AM
4 points
in reply to: passive_fist’s comment on: Open Thread, October 13 − 19, 2013
Rice Protein, it seems.

Relevant blog posts:

Previously the only factor preventing Soylent from being vegan was the use of whey protein. Whey is attractive due to its high absorption rate and complete amino acid profile, granting it a perfect PDCAAS score of 1.0. However, it is an animal product, some whey proteins can trigger allergic responses, and concerns were raised over the potential presence of lactose.

To allay these issues we have switched to a rice protein isolate / pea protein isolate blend. Rice protein is mostly complete except for a lack of Lysine and Leucine. This is why rice and beans became such a staple food, the beans make up for the Lysine deficiency of rice. In our staple food the blend of pea and rice protein isolate provide a complete amino acid profile with minimal risk of inflammation or allergic reactions.

soylent blog, 2013-07-24

We have found that Pea Protein is not available at the scale we demand. To compensate for this, we had to source and integrate pure Lysine into the formula, so everyone will get their complete amino acid profile.

soylent blog, 2013-08-27

link to blog

So it was whey, then it was rice protein and pea protein, now it’s just rice protein.

Their final ingredient list hasn’t been finalised yet, they seem to be getting close though. They said they’ll post it once it’s done.

Nectanebo Oct 14, 2013, 11:48 AM
8 points
in reply to: passive_fist’s comment on: Open Thread, October 13 − 19, 2013
It doesn’t use whey for protein any more. Apparently the only issue for veganism (and vegetarianism) at the moment is fish oil for Omega 3s.

Nectanebo Oct 14, 2013, 4:44 AM
15 points
on: Open Thread, October 13 − 19, 2013
I was thinking recently that if soylent kicks something off and ‘food replacement’ -type things become a big deal, it could have a massive side effect of putting a lot of people onto diets with heavily reduced animal and animal product content. Its possible success could inadvertently be a huge boon for animals and animal activists.

Personally, I’m somewhat sympathetic towards veganism for ethical reasons, but the combination of trivial inconvenience and lack of effect I can have as an individual has prevented me from pursuing such a diet. Soylent would allow me to do so easily, should I want to. Similarly, there are people who have no interest in animal welfare at all. If ‘food replacements’ become big, it could mean for the incidental conversion of those who might have otherwise never considered veganism or vegetarianism to a lifestyle that fits within those bounds, for only their personal cost or convenience reasons.

Nectanebo Oct 9, 2013, 12:48 PM
1 point
in reply to: curiousepic’s comment on: Open Thread, October 7 - October 12, 2013
This was also my experience.

Nectanebo Oct 3, 2013, 6:26 PM
6 points
in reply to: NancyLebovitz’s comment on: Rationality Quotes October 2013
I read that whole quote twice through and even thought about it for a few minutes as well, but I have no idea what I’m supposed to get out of it. Could anyone help me out?

Nectanebo Oct 2, 2013, 9:01 AM
7 points
in reply to: ArisKatsaris’s comment on: October 2013 Media Thread
I read Brave New World by Aldous Huxley the other day. It was pretty good, better than most ‘classics’ I’ve read. I probably liked it better than Nineteen Eighty-four as well, which it’s often compared to.

I found out later that Nick Bostrom explicitly used it as an example in some of his Existential Risk related writings, like this one, specifically, to illustrate what the ‘singleton’ or stable oppressive world government kind of existential risk may look like. If you aren’t too worried that you might generalize from fictional evidence, I’d say it’s worth a read if you somehow haven’t already.

Nectanebo Sep 27, 2013, 2:29 PM
3 points
in reply to: arundelo’s comment on: Rationality Quotes September 2013
Ideally, it would be nice if the world can move towards caring about the full outcome over factors like the satisfication of baseline levels of effort in more and more situations, not just exceptional ones.

Nectanebo Sep 27, 2013, 1:22 PM
12 points
in reply to: Stabilizer’s comment on: Why aren’t there more forum-blogs like LW?

Nor does it have good moderation.

I don’t think this is accurate as a blanket statement, since moderation quality and policy differs between subreddit to subreddit, with significant variation.

Nectanebo Aug 1, 2013, 2:06 PM
1 point
in reply to: Transfuturist’s comment on: More “Stupid” Questions
I’ve also been having a few very similar worries. In relation to them, I’ve come up with plenty of half-formed ideas for solutions or potential ways around it, like the possible need to downgrade to current levels of intelligence temporarily to be able to enjoy current-era stories.

Here’s the thing though: will there be much point in engaging in such activities? Perhaps we go through some kind of massive intelligence boost, and our current modes of fiction suddenly seem so outdated, simplistic and as you say, banal. Perhaps they will only seem that way compared to however sophisticated way we enjoy ourselves in the future? Perhaps we might have access to completely different media, with a difference in complexity comparable to that between cave-paintings and a motion picture or video game? Perhaps, like Mr Mind says, with a more intelligent brain we’ll be able to appreciate more complex stories? Maybe it won’t matter that the stories enjoy now won’t seem so great, because our equivalent stories will be so great?

How much value do you place on still valuing current-era stories post-intelligence boost? I’m reminded of that Ghandi not wanting to swallow a pill that would make him into a person who doesn’t mind committing murders.

I can only speculate. I feel like some of these kinds of concerns are touched upon at times in the fun theory sequence (possibly an understatement, you could consider the fun theory sequence to be a more generalised response to exactly these kinds of worries), among other bits and pieces.

Nectanebo May 3, 2013, 11:11 AM
0 points
on: Mortal: A Transponyist Fanfiction
I started reading and realised I didn’t understand a lot of the things that were going on so I went back and finished season 3 which I had stopped following about midway through. I now realise that that probably wasn’t necessary, and I could have read it with just the context of knowing that Twilight go turned into an alicorn, since all the other references were mostly events made up by the author or from season 1 and 2.

The comments were predictably deathist when lesswrongers get taken out of the picture, although it does appear that fiction like this works in some direction of changing people’s minds. At the same time it gave people an opportunity to restate in public deathist memes as their personal philosophy which might not be so positive, considering that would help to cement it in their minds as part of their identity that they are the kind of person to hold these positions or something like that.

Some factors would have been nice to explore more fully, like the response to Celestia & Co.’s argument, and to allow for some more back and forth. I think it would have been possible to more strongly steelman the deathist arguments. Celestia also comes off as less competent in general than I would have expected of her. The progress of the alicorn community was good to show though, and more of that would have been good also.

I still enjoyed it quite a bit. I wonder why MLP is such a common target for having fanfiction centred around these topics written and links to them posted on this site?

Nectanebo Feb 14, 2013, 12:21 AM
4 points
on: [SEQ RERUN] The Baby-Eating Aliens (1/8)
I really enjoyed reading Three Worlds Collide back when I was first exposed to LessWrong, it’s still one of those pieces of writing I often end up recommending to people. It tends to be received fairly well.

Nectanebo Jan 20, 2013, 2:25 AM
2 points
in reply to: latanius’s comment on: My simple hack for increased alertness and improved cognitive functioning: very bright light
That may be the placebo effect.