Haha, a bit of a drive yea.
quiet
Karma: 124
Synthesizers and guitars, mostly.
Death Grips—Hip hop/punk/noise
Bizarre, aggressive, and ridiculously creative music. I’m fascinated by musicians that manage to be simultaneously reckless and focused, though I should expect nothing less from any project that includes the drummer from Hella.
Songs: Hunger Games, Takyon Full Albums: Exmilitary, The Money Store, No Love Deep Web
Lola y Manuel—Flamenco
A husband and wife songwriting duo from mid-70′s Spain. Arab-influenced singing, technically spectacular guitar, and quite progressive compositions that expand, rather than abandon the traditional flamenco forms. PM me for a copy of their first album, it’s nearly impossible to find these days and is soul splittingly beautiful.
Songs: Sangre Gitana y Mora, Nuevo Dia
Great idea, I’m going to join you. Nothing of value will be lost.
March 26th: Reddit crashes as we open infinitely many new tabs in a fit of Burroughs-tier depravity.
Went cold turkey on caffeine a couple weeks ago after sustaining a 3-6 cup daily intake for months. Been feeling unmotivated, taking the occasional mid-day nap, and having unpleasant thoughts along the lines of ‘where’s my god damn coffee’ when urges went unfulfilled. The first 3 days were lazy, headache-clouded, and unproductive.
After that, though, I started to notice that I felt like working on projects in the afternoon and evening. It’s a minor change in mood that’s led to a major change in behavior, at least in the short term. Worth the costs, even if only for a brief change of pace.
I’m working on an algorithmic music system. The (likely unachievable) goal is to make a generative clone of my own creative process. It’s a kind of catharsis, bringing every unspeakable intuition bubbling up to the surface to be translated into a hierarchy of computational processes. Lots of trial and error, red herrings, and accidental success. My short-term goal is to be able to co-perform with it live in an entirely improvised manner, maybe by the end of 2013.
The current focus is ‘groove’, and it’s been a nightmare trying to find a common thread between dissimilar patterns that sound good. If anyone know of any good papers on the subject, please share! I’m just going to throw some boltzmann machines at the problem before moving on to something else.
Other than that, just some Coursera classes, finalizing a DIY 16 bit MIDI->CV DAC, and transcribing a really good flamenco record.
As an American male who went to work the day after breaking his collar bone, I can testify that without a doubt, my rugged outward appearance would get thrown aside if proper health care and sick time were available to me. Scamming an x-ray by using a fake name at the hospital and carefully rationing what little methadone I could buy from local junkies, while Cowboy As Hell, is a pretty awful way to get by. I’d much rather be at home in bed mending then lifting boxes of apples with one arm and ensuring that my bones set at an odd angle.
I think that if European style health care was available here that we’d adapt pretty quickly, rugged independence be damned.
Different audience, different language. I’m just impressed that a NY Op-Ed actually contained these sentences:
My case for these conclusions relies on three main observations. The first is that our own intelligence is an evolved biological solution to a kind of optimization problem, operating under very tight constraints of time, energy, raw materials, historical starting point and no doubt many other factors. [...] Second, this biological endowment, such as it is, has been essentially constant, for many thousands of years. It is a kind of fixed point in the landscape, a mountain peak on which we have all lived for hundreds of generations. [...] my third observation – we face the prospect that designed nonbiological technologies, operating under entirely different constraints in many respects, may soon do the kinds of things that our brain does, but very much faster, and very much better, in whatever dimensions of improvement may turn out to be available.
That’s a very gentile nudge toward a radical shift in how intelligence is generally thought of. Simple analogies and simple terminology (except for ‘optimization problem’, which I think could be understood from the context) for people reading the paper over a bowl of cereal.
Not in the slightest. DH does a good job of providing you with the things that he later asks you to use.
When in doubt, frame all drug talk as harm reduction.
You have a point! Updated for correctness and humor.
And given that rituals, whether religious or civic, are pretty much standard and often spontaneous in most communities, I don’t see how having a ritual for some subgroup would harm the High Ideals of Rationality.
Rationality Itself remains unphased by a backyard party blog meetup, that’s for sure.
I think Academian’s post on the role of narrative in self-image touches on the seemingly disjointed purpose of a Rationalist Ritual. We all have our unique approaches to rational thought—my own experience consists largely of the dissolving of narratives in search of actual cause & effect. Not all narratives are destructive (or even wrong), but my employment of rational thought has never included them. Constructing and reinforcing narratives is what ritual is all about. Subjectively, the two just don’t click for me.
Using Less Wrong as a maypole to dance around seems.. goofy, at best. Lesser things have been rot13′d around here.
It even might make the participants appear more human, by counteracting the perception of “straw Volcan”ness.
If this is what it takes to signal that we have emotional lives, then fuck me running.
I have never received evidence that I am less likely to be overconfident about things than people in general or that any other particular person on this site is.
You’ve never caught yourself in the act of falling for a cognitive bias detailed on this site?
My judgment of this site as of now is that way too much time is spent discussing subjects of such low expected value (usually because of absurdly low expected probability of occurring) for using this site to be worthwhile. In fact I hypothesize that this discussion actually causes overconfidence related to such things happening, and at a minimum I have seen insufficient evidence for the value of using this site to continue doing so.
I’m curious about what other web sites satisfy similarly high expectations. No snark intended.
RE: Cryonics—that particular *reverse Kool-Aid doesn’t come in my flavor yet, but I enjoy that a notable minority are willing to put their money where their mouth is. It gives discussions of futuristic edge-cases a novel weight.
I’ve lurked on LW for a long time and can shrug off the second-hand embarrassment without fail, but I’ll be damned if I ever link anyone I know to this web site. This undercurrent of LW does more damage than anything Roko ever posted.
I’m no stranger to ritual/awe/group bonding (Merzbow & MDMA: the reason for the season), but there is some hazy aesthetic line past which I cannot follow. Nor will I risk being associated with. Sorry.
If you enjoy this stuff, than more power to ya. Have a blast. Just keep in mind how many people are seriously turned off from LW because of it.
[in agreement with, rather than directed at, drethelin]
I’m on a computer all day at work and the bulk of my activities at home are computer-based as well. I’ve been able to get into a nice habit of taking daily walks, usually right when I get home from work (before even going in the door). It’s quite enjoyable and sometimes I end up wandering around for miles/hours before some other motivation urges me home. Just being in a place where things can be >100 feet away feels novel most of the time. Computer usage is bizarrely user-centric, compared with the outside world; a contrast that shouldn’t feel as profound as it does.
I started off just thinking of walking as a simple cure for fogginess/tunnel vision/vague anxiety, but it’s grown into a subconscious urge. Also, I recommend avoiding music or other audio media.
We should exempt any imagery fitting of a Slayer album cover, lest we upset the gods of metal with our weakness.
I appreciate the honesty of it. No one here is going to enact any of these thought experiments in real life. The likely worst outcome is to off-put potential SI donors. It must be hard enough to secure funding for a fanfic-writing apocalypse cult; prepending violent onto that description isn’t going to loosen up many wallets.
Not all fanfics are created equally, eh?
Curiously, none of this prevents people from seriously talking about interactive animatronic puppets as if they had emotions.
For now!
It will be interesting to see the cultural confusion when ‘simulations’ are as complex and deep as the real deal. I wonder if robots will look at me with (simulated?) disgust when I joke about circuit bending my friend’s little sister’s furby? Will I simulate shame?
Has this study been corroborated? 13 years should be enough time for a modest amount of supporting evidence to become known.