But I mean, isn’t it obvious that damage to the truck alone as a result of the attack would imply quite a higher cost than whatever the shotgun was worth? (And yes, I think this is clearly the case even when you consider that the probability of being attacked is quite a bit less than 100%.) I don’t think this shows lives being insufficiently valued in the military; I think it just shows the sort of pervasive dysfunction we would expect in any large-scale organization lacking internal mechanisms to ensure accountability and proper response to incentives.
totallybogus
Karma: 92
blockchain
That’s it, Effective Altruism has now officially jumped the shark.
PROTIP: Read this carefully before you take any of this tech seriously. The use cases for anything regarding “blockchain” or “crypto-currency” are extremely limited right now, and not even close to EA’s core advantages. If anything, EA proponents should work on relaxing existing regulations around access to mainstream finance platforms (similar to how recent regulatory efforts made “crowdfunding” significantly more accessible to casual investors), so that things like smart markets can be developed out in the open, without needing to resort to exotic and unreliable tech.
Since short-term satiation after orgasm (the ‘refractory period’) is much less of an issue in women, it’s at least reasonable to expect that they might have far less long-term orgasm satiation as well. Which is not to say that loss of relationship energy is not a problem more broadly (the stereotype of “lesbian bed death” indicates as much!), just that we shouldn’t necessarily expect orgasms to be the causal link in that case.
Therefore, we should relieve sexual pressure without orgasm and engage in more pair-bonding behavior
Note that this is not exactly a novel claim—many highly-developed sexual practices promote mate-bonding behavior in a broad sense, while discouraging mere ejaculation. Often this is accompanied by a claim that too frequent ejaculation ‘drains’ sexual and relationship energy, which would mesh quite well with it being a causal factor in satiety!
Crowdfunding approaches as seen e.g. in Kickstarter or Patreon have recently made it a lot easier for artists to capture significant amounts of value for their efforts. (This could still be supplemented though, e.g. via after-the-fact prize awards for especially impressive art.) It’s interesting to think of what comparable approaches may be applicable to goods and services that are very much unlike art, and where value may nonetheless be hard to capture efficiently.
FWIW, I didn’t necessarily intend the term “dissident” in an especially negative sense, or even with any real negative connotation. I literally mean “someone who disagrees or dissents, one who separates themself from the established religion; a dissenter.” It was also meant to highlight the fact that there are clearly a lot of people like that, as a necessary consequence of LW’s overall nature as a remarkably developed ‘memeplex’ (just like most real-world religions and perhaps political ideologies).
Sure, but my claims weren’t actually about libertarians and conservatives in general, only the fraction among them who support and oppose social insurance, respectively. It doesn’t actually take much formal evidence (that is, evidence that also reaches a high ‘admissibility’ standard—which ‘who I run into in my filter bubble?’ might not!) to show that sizeable such groups do exist, or to talk about their ideas.
I think academic math has a problem where it’s more culturally valorized to be really smart than to teach well
I don’t think that’s the issue exactly. My guess is that academic math has a culture of teaching something quite different from what most applied practitioners actually want. The culture is to focus really hard on how you reliably prove new results, and to get as quickly as possible to the frontier of things that are still a subject of research and aren’t quite “done” just yet. Under this POV, focusing on detailed explanations about existing knowledge, even really effective ones, might just be a waste of time and effort that’s better spent elsewhere!
Oh, I expect that he’ll be fine, but he’s clearly decided that he doesn’t want to be a part of LW2 after all. It is striking how similar this is to the Roko case though—what people don’t really understand today is how silly that whole episode in LW1 history had made him look, and how much of a perceived loss of ‘face’ that must have been for him.
I think that we’re dealing with something very similar here (if perhaps not on the same scale) and I do have to wonder what this says about our broader attitude to newcomers, mild dissidents and the like. How can we ensure that people as far as practicable will feel genuinely welcomed here, and not like they’re constantly being judged for the correctness and properness of their ‘rationality’, or placed under an uncomfortable ‘spotlight’?(I do have some simple ideas along these lines that might be especially appropriate for LW2, and I’ve even hinted at them before, but I expect them to be a bit contentious so I’d rather be sure that people are actually interested...)
Hmm, this could be the bug that’s seemingly resulting in a number of LW1 (“legacy”) accounts being locked out. Did you have a recovery email set on LW1 before the first database import? If you didn’t, but perhaps set it later, then make sure that you can request a “reset password” email from https://www.lesswrong.com with that address (don’t worry, this won’t actually reset your password or anything unless you click the link in the resulting email message). If you see an error because your recovery address can’t be found, visit the “edit account” page in your logged in session and resubmit your data there (your email should be there, but resubmit anyway), then retry the “forgot password” feature on lesswrong.com and make sure that it works for you. This should hopefully ensure that you can always upgrade your account, even if you get locked out from LW1 logins.
Not really on topic, but there’s some blatantly obvious spam in the “All posts” view right now. How should we report this sort of stuff in the future?
Looks like the post author is going Roko and wiping everything he/she ever wrote from the site—I have no other explanation of what’s happening. (To be clear, that’s of course within their rights as someone participating in an informal social group! It certainly isn’t that much of an inconvenience to the broader userbase.)
“Low vs. high art” is indeed a key dimension of variation, and both have a role to play in a complete arts ecosystem. For that matter, sometimes it is really hard to place works of art on the ″low vs. high” spectrum: for instance is a still life painting “low” or “high” art? Historically it was considered the lowest-status genre of them all in visual art, yet in practice, ‘still lifes’ heavily feature values such as symbolism and abstraction in their settings, that are very prominent, indeed even distinctive, features of “high” art!
Most libertarians who support social welfare (often in some unconventional form, like negative income tax or the citizen’s dividend, but whatever) do so because they understand that people vary widely in their ability to sustain themselves via market work, and that providing people with a minimal standard of living regardless of such ability (which is really more about ‘surviving’ than ‘thriving’!) is a widely-shared value that ultimately has to be acknowledged. Conservatives tend to be skeptical about these claims in some way or another, but even libertarians don’t actually think that one can design a social welfare system which won’t deeply impact incentives and make people more likely to freeload.
Personally, I think the greaterwrong site (or rather, something functionally equivalent to it) should be the main or only way LW2 is accessed via the web. The technical solutions found in Lesser Wrong (including Meteor and Vulcan) may be appropriate in an actual PWA (Progressive Web App, basically a bunch of JS and ‘style/formatting templates’ that get installed on your device/computer as a proper, well-defined application and then interact with the remote site via a web-based API of some sort) but they have no advantages to speak of in a traditional website.
Unless you consider variety to have its own value, which I do.
Yes, but does most new art really increase variety, in a broadly-acknowledged sense? It’s not at all clear that it does: even most of the OP is about how art- and design tendencies are getting more uniform rather than less, and variety is if anything being done away with. I think if we truly care about variety, by far the best bang for the buck is had by promoting availability of existing works from previous eras, and to some extent (especially in new media where there isn’t as much of a history to draw from) by specifically encouraging new art from less-represented geographical locales, social groups, political outlooks and the like. But this is not what usually happens when we subsidize new artworks.
As I recall, Docker itself is a rather “hacky” solution, with lots of technical debt embedded in it. I doubt that AWS Batch itself is much better. In these domains, applying a “systemizing” approach to only your piece of the puzzle is not really feasible. If you’re really committed to the systemizing outlook, your choices are (1) yak shaving—set the original goal aside and start paying down technical debt in e.g. Docker itself until the result is simple enough to understand in a systematic way. (2) if you can’t adopt this approach, because some of the complexity you’re dealing with cannot be feasibly reduced (or you simply don’t care about doing that sort of work), then just try to abstract away what’s ‘complex’ and ‘hacky’ about the original subsystem, and build a simpler interface that suffices for yoir goals and avoids ‘leaking’ the underlying complexity as far as practicable.
Both of these are in some sense high-cost, high-reward activities; hpwever, the ‘hacky’ approach comes with very real costs of its own (i.e. it provides little or no means of avoiding breakage of various sorts as complexity increases), so the common view of it as accruing technical debt that will need to be serviced or paid down later seems right to me.
Did you try https://www.greaterwrong.com/users/eliezer_yudkowsky?show=posts ? I mean, I’m not sure how reliable the whole “import” deal is, but the bulk of LW1 content was actually preserved quite nicely.
This seems quite right for the new feature of “private blogs” here on LW2, and for “drafts”, which IIRC behaved as you describe, even on LW1. But ordinary posts on LW1 were unambiguously public (both in the Main and in the later-added Discussion section)--roughly equivalent in visibility to “Featured” posts here on LW2; and once you choose to make a post potentially eligible for such status, it would be quite unfair if you could wipe both its text and its attached comments with the click of a button. (Note that a ‘deleted’ post did become anonymous, in addition to having its text wiped out; people might have been able to figure out the original author if she happened to be mentioned in the comments but this only occurred rarely, so there was quite a bit of reputational protection. And really, much of the value in large comment threads is actually in side-discussions that are only tangentially related to the ‘OP’, if at all.)
Classical rhetoric is old hat these days. The really persuasive Art is making PowerPoint slides!