Additional to that, you might want to consider posting larger completed stand-alone works directly into the discussion section as a link for discussion, feedback, and good karma.
sdr
Karma: 271
The Oatmeal: How to be perfectly unhappy ← This reminds me of On the unpopularity of cryonics: life sucks, but at least then you die
| Most people have a very limited range of interests and possibilities for gratification. This problem cannot be fixed for most by giving them more money, or even more money and autonomy. Do that, and they will drown themselves in what they already have, or kill themselves with drugs. How many cars, planes, and pairs of shoes or houses can you really gain joy from?
Happiness doesn’t scale. Being engaged does.
AMV short: Nostromo’s newest: AMV—Nostromo—Umbrella Corp
Crash course: Meta-ethics (Crash Course Philosophy #32) ← mostly classification, taxonomy, and a few thorny problems. Good review.
Anime / AMV short: Porter Robinson & Madeon—Shelter
The Gentle Seduction by Marc Stiegler ; search strategy was [short story about technological change saturn]
Elo,
You seem to be posting, like, a lot. This is good, this is what we have personal blogs for.
I do have an issue with syndicating your content straight to here, regardless of state, amount of research, amount of prior discussion with other people, confidence, or epistemic status. This introduces an asymetric opportunity cost on behalf of the lesswrong community; specifically, writing these is much easier, and lower effort, than the amount of effort these will collectively soak up for no gain.
For this reason, I have downvoted this post as is. I will also kindly ask of you to introduce a pre-syndication filter, which respects other people’s limited amount of time, and attention; and cross-post only the ones where you have 1, a coherent thesis, and 2, validated interest coming from other people (as in, someone explicitely remarked “that’s interesting”).
Thanks.
Heads up about the business side of this: selling to primary & secondary schools, esp outside of the US, is 8⁄10 difficult.
Specifically, even if the teachers are fully championing your solution, they do not wield any sort of purchasing authority (and sure as hell won’t pay from their own wallet). Purchasing authority’s incentive-structure does not align with “teacher happiness”, “optimal schedule”, or most things one would imagine being the mission of the school. It is, however, critical for them to control all sw used inside the school, and might actively discourage using non-approved vendors.
Exurb1a is making some excellent nihilistic mind-bending. Highlights:
What is You? -a short on the nature of experiencing
A short on the FAI problemset: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0PuqSMB8uU (“Rick and Morty—Keep Summer Safe”)
Within the context of online businesses, we have some stats on failure mode frequency, which strongly reflects my own priors, and the ~200 startup founders I’ve talked with to date (source: Quora )
patio11 on language learning:
″...A lot of people have vague goals like “I want to learn French” or “I want to be fluent in Japanese.” There is no defensible definition of the word “fluent.” Instead, you should have specific goals which test ability to complete tasks that are representative of the larger set of tasks you need to be good at to achieve metagoals which are important to you.
This is why I care relatively little about “fluency in Japanese” and quite a bit about “what percentage of commercially significant terms in my apartment lease did I understand without having to ask a Japanese speaker to explain them to me?”
That task is roughly representative of many tasks required to achieve my metagoal, which is “being a functioning adult / educated professional in Japanese society.”
Now how do I measure progress? Well, I have some notion of groupings of tasks by difficulty level. The “apartment lease” task is in the same grouping and difficulty level as the “employment contract” task was or the “extract the relevant rule for recognizing SaaS revenue from the National Tax Agency’s docs” was. Given roughly comparable levels of difficulty, if I start doing better on a task where previously I did poorly, then I’m progressing.
Why don’t I just take Japanese tests yearly? Because my metagoal is not becoming the best Japanese test-taker there is. They are good from the perspective of many decisionmakers, since they allow decisionmakers to compare me against other people in a reproducible and cheap-at-the-margin fashion, but that doesn’t get anything that I value. I don’t care how I compare to Frank or Taro—being better than Frank will not save me social embarrassment if I have to ask an accountant “Here is my… um, I don’t know what the word is, but it’s the piece of paper that records the historical prices I purchased by assets at and then their declining present value representing their worth diminishing over time as calculated by the straight line method. There’s an accounting word I’m searching for here and I bet it is followed by the word ‘schedule.’ DEPRECIATION. Yep, that’s the one, thanks.”
A fantastic short on existentialism: The missing Scarf
Here’s an evolutionary psychology question:
#1: Lemma: Replicator-selection works only through genes; that is, there is no such thing as group selection; from a reproduction perspective, the only which matters, is delta-reproduction-fitness increase.
#2: Lemma: Technologies, and techniques doesn’t require gene-transfer. Once someone comes up with a new idea, that idea can freely spread across the entire population. Therefore, technologies, and techniques doesn’t offer delta-reproduction-fitness increase.
#3: Observation: Some people appear to be interested more in things (as observed in Scientists, engineers; think “flow”), as opposed to other people (as predicted by the Machiavellian Intelligence Hypothesis )
For the purpose of this thread, I’m not interested in discussing lemma #1, and #2. Assume these to be axiomatic. How can #3 still increase delta-reproduction-fitness?
OK Go—The Writing’s On the Wall is categorically a mind-bending-music-video, remixing optical illusions into music
Vi Hart’s topic for the month is infinity; specifically, How many kinds of infinity are there? bridges a wide range of math fields
The rationale behind salary negotiations are best expanded upon by patio11′s “Salary Negotiation: Make More Money, Be More Valued” (that article’s well worth the rent).
In real life, the sort of places where employers take offense by you not disclosing current salary (or generally, by salary negotiations -that is, they’d hire someone else if he’s available more cheaply) are not the places you want to work with: if they’re putting selection pressure for downscaling salaries, all your future coworkers are going to be, well, cheap.
This is anecdotally not true for Google; they can afford truckloads, if they really want to have you onboard. So this is much more likely to come from standardized processes. Also note in Google’s case, that decisions are delegated to a board of stakeholders, so there isn’t really one person who can be put off due to salary (and they probably handle the hire/no hire decisions entirely separate to the salary negotiations).
(( For the uninitiated:
1, It would not be unrealistic from her to assume youtube’s copyright algorithms to flag her video into oblivion. It’s known to happen.
More importantly, 2, Vi work for Khan Academy, who is sponsoring her “to do whatever she wants”. That comes with lawyers. ))
Vihart’s “Twelve Tones” is quite possibly the most mind-expanding mix of interdisciplinarity (math, music & creativity) in 2013 I’ve seen so far: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4niz8TfY794
Specifically for business, I do.
The general angle is asking intelligent, and forward-pointing questions, specifically because deep processing for thoughts (as described in Thinking Fast and Slow) is rare, even within the business community; so demonstrating understanding, and curiosity (both of which are strength of people on LW) is an almost instant-win.
Two of the better guides on how to approach this intelligently are:
The other aspect of this is Speaking the Lingo. The problem with LW is:
1, people developing gravity wells around specific topics , and having a very hard time talking about stuff others are interested in without bringing up pet topics of their own; and
2, the inference distance between the kind of stuff that puts people into powerful position, and the kind of stuff LW develops a gravity well around is, indeed, vast.
The operational hack here is 1, listening, 2, building up the scaffolds on which these people hang their power upon; 3, recognizing whether you have an understanding of how those pieces fit together.
General algorithm for the networking dance:
1, Ask intelligent question, listen intently
2, Notice your brain popping up a question/handle that you have an urge to speak up. Develop a classification algo to notice whether the question was generated by your pet gravity well, or by novel understanding.
3, If the former,SHUT UP. If you really have the urge, mimic back what they’ve just said to internalize / develop your understanding (and move the conversation along)
Side-effects might include: developing an UGH-field towards browsing lesswrong, incorporating, and getting paid truckloads. YMMV.
I won’t speak to the content, but can wave towards the form: basically, there is a set of brain modules / neural pathways, which, when triggered by a set of thoughts, fills one with hope / drive / selflessness. Specifically for me, one of these thoughts include:
| “That was humanity in the ancient days. There was so much wrong with the world that the small resources of altruism were splintered among ten thousand urgent charities, and none of it ever seemed to go anywhere. And yet… and yet...” .. “There was a threshold crossed somewhere,” said the Confessor, “without a single apocalypse to mark it. Fewer wars. Less starvation. Better technology. The economy kept growing. People had more resource to spare for charity, and the altruists had fewer and fewer causes to choose from. They came even to me, in my time, and rescued me. Earth cleaned itself up, and whenever something threatened to go drastically wrong again, the whole attention of the planet turned in that direction and took care of it. Humanity finally got its act together.” Three worlds collide
How much this neural pathway is developed, and what specific form the actual software takes varies enormously between individuals. This is a problem with how atheism is being propagated currently: when you’re telling a person “god does not exist”, you’re basically denying him the reality of this brain module, while at the same time taking away a core motivator, without substituting it with anything even barely close to it, motivation / qualia-wise.
So, my import of people checking “non-religious spirituality”, is that they both have this brain module somewhat developed, and there exists some thoughts by which they can readily trigger it.