taw

• tawMay 1, 2012, 7:58 PM

  8 points

  in reply to: IlyaShpitser’s comment on: Do peo­ple think Less Wrong ra­tio­nal­ity is parochial?

  Entertaining doesn’t mean it’s a joke. Mythbusters is entertainment, documentaries are entertainment, Wikipedia is (usually) entertainment. Humans learn mostly for fun of it—just like all young mammals (except adult humans do so as well).

  If you claim that LW has some serious practical value, in terms of instrumental rationality—then I agree that its utility is greater than zero, but I could easily point you towards places online where you can learn instrumental rationality far better than here. And I’m always first to upvote such posts when they occur (like those about GiveWell for example, they’re not terribly common).

  If you claim that LW Solves Serious Problems And Is The Only Hope For Humanity, then unfortunately you’ve fallen for some serious crackpottery.

• tawMay 1, 2012, 4:10 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: JoshuaZ’s comment on: Al­cor vs. Cry­on­ics Institute

  What makes you reach this conclusion?

  First, we need technology of living forever as a precondition before any kind of rethawing makes any sense, and this technology is so obviously centuries away. Just notice how slowly any kind of anti-aging research progresses.

  I’d happily bet against any cryonics rethawing happening in the next few centuries, but there’s no market for that.

  The last anti-Pope was in the late 1400s. Even if one includes the Reformation and Counter-Reformation that at least three centuries of unambiguous stability.

  Just to mention a few breaks I remember—pope was imprisoned and Rome sacked in 1527), Napoleon took over Rome and exiled the pope in 1798), and takeover of Rome by Kingdom Italian was at least highly disruptive if it didn’t constitute a full break of continuity.

  There are also still extant corporations dating from the 700s.

  Their list is extremely dubious, and even cases where companies really operate since the listed date includes a lot of breaks (like Wedel’s for WW2, Communist takeover etc. - only the brand really continues all that time).

  I’d take no entries on their list at face value.

• tawMay 1, 2012, 12:49 PM

  −1 points

  on: Al­cor vs. Cry­on­ics Institute

  Such an acknowledgement, though appreciated, is frankly disturbing, considering that members depend utterly on these organizations remaining operational and solvent for decades, perhaps even centuries, after they are deanimated.

  Decades? You are being ridiculous. If cryonics works it will be many centuries as an absolute minimum. And no organization in the entire history had unbroken record like that. Even the Catholic Church had breaks from time to time.

• tawMay 1, 2012, 12:19 PM

  7 points

  in reply to: JScott’s comment on: Do peo­ple think Less Wrong ra­tio­nal­ity is parochial?

  I think EY is a self-important wanker, and SIAI is a society for self-important wanking, but I enjoy LW quite a lot. (and if you see LW as anything more than entertainment, you’re doing it wrong)

  And lukeprog is entirely wrong about LW being mainstream—there are parts of LWian beliefs that are “mainstream”, but a lot of them are anything but. Cryonics, AI foomism, weird decision theories etc. - that’s all extremely far from the mainstream, and also very wrong.

  Bayesian fundamentalism is also non-mainstream. Yes, Bayes rule is all neat, but it isn’t the answer to universe and everything.

• tawApr 28, 2012, 7:20 AM

  0 points

  on: Meetup : London

  Are these getting much more frequent? I thought I just missed one, and there weren’t any for quite a long time before it.

• tawApr 20, 2012, 9:02 PM

  −2 points

  in reply to: orthonormal’s comment on: Undis­crim­i­nat­ing Skepticism

  Policy of not mass murdering people is as close to drawback-free as it gets.

  I’m sure you can figure out some trivial drawbacks if you want.

• tawApr 18, 2012, 7:11 PM

  3 points

  in reply to: BarbaraB’s comment on: Undis­crim­i­nat­ing Skepticism

  There’s plenty of diseases we can now deal with quite well because we didn’t infanticide or murder everyone who had them. This isn’t a coincidence that a treatment is found, if we killed everyone with a disease there would be no search for treatment.

• tawApr 16, 2012, 11:12 PM

  −2 points

  in reply to: Alicorn’s comment on: Undis­crim­i­nat­ing Skepticism

  We cannot allow this any more than we can allow people to sold themselves to slavery as a loan guarantee.

• tawApr 16, 2012, 11:11 PM

  0 points

  in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Undis­crim­i­nat­ing Skepticism

  Start here, and follow the links.

• tawApr 16, 2012, 6:06 PM

  −6 points

  in reply to: BarbaraB’s comment on: Undis­crim­i­nat­ing Skepticism

  Killing another living thing doesn’t qualify as “euthanasia” if you do it for your benefit, not that being’s.

  By infant abandonment by giving it to an orphanage (it’s not legal everywhere, but in a lot of countries it’s perfectly legal and acceptable) you lose both your responsibility and your control over the baby, so you no longer have any right to do so.

  And speaking of euthanasia, we really should seriously reban it. We pretty much know how to deal with even the most severe pain—very large doses of opiates to get rid of it, and large doses of stimulants like amphetamines to counter the side effects. War on Drugs is the reason why we don’t routinely do this to people in severe pain.

  We don’t have a magical cure for depression, but if someone is depressed, they cannot make rational decisions for themselves anyway, so they cannot decide to kill themselves legitimately.

  Once you cover these casese, there are zero legitimate arguments left for euthanasia.

• tawMar 20, 2012, 1:18 AM

  −2 points

  in reply to: Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg) ’s comment on: Emo­tional reg­u­la­tion Part II: re­search summary

  It looks like an introduction, not like an abstract.

• tawMar 19, 2012, 11:31 PM

  0 points

  on: Emo­tional reg­u­la­tion Part II: re­search summary

  Abstract please.

• tawMar 18, 2012, 8:58 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: tgb’s comment on: How to avoid dy­ing in a car crash

  I didn’t know about that. Any research if this is working at all?

• tawMar 18, 2012, 2:44 PM

  0 points

  in reply to: wedrifid’s comment on: How to avoid dy­ing in a car crash

  Funny that you mention it, I did some correlational studies of early stages of dating, since sample size was big enough there to get something of value (and effect sizes were massive). Single blinded even, since none of them had any idea. I’d say it was more valuable than most correlational studies getting published.

• tawMar 18, 2012, 2:30 PM

  −4 points

  in reply to: wedrifid’s comment on: How to avoid dy­ing in a car crash

  Anecdotal evidence has about as much value as correlation studies. It’s inspiration for a real study at best.

• taw 18 Mar 2012 8:37 UTC

  −4 points

  in reply to: A1987dM’s comment on: How to avoid dy­ing in a car crash

  That’s about the only thing that would ever work, and yes you can do it.

  There was a real study where they gave people puppies randomly. There’s no reason why you cannot have a real study of giving people bicycles randomly. You could measure other health outcomes and extrapolate from that at least.

  This study is worse than worthless—it has negative worth because it seems to be making some people on lesswrong stupid.

  There are almost no correlation studies worth doing. Correlation studies correlate with being worthless really well.

• taw 18 Mar 2012 0:19 UTC

  −8 points

  in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: How to avoid dy­ing in a car crash

  This doesn’t count as evidence of anything any more than a study correlating number of pirate attacks with population of elephants in India would.

• taw 18 Mar 2012 0:08 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Dmytry’s comment on: How to avoid dy­ing in a car crash

  I’m not an expert in depression or suicide or Lithuania. If you’re high risk for any reason (like living in Lithuania), it would probably be a good use of your time to take a look at research.

• taw 17 Mar 2012 23:56 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: David_Gerard’s comment on: How to avoid dy­ing in a car crash

  I’ve never really notice that, how long ago is your anecdotal evidence from?

• taw 17 Mar 2012 23:55 UTC

  −5 points

  in reply to: A1987dM’s comment on: How to avoid dy­ing in a car crash

  This is so ridiculously far from a randomized study, I won’t even bother pretending it needs a serious answer.