zslastman

Karma: 797

zslastman Sep 4, 2014, 10:38 AM
8 points
in reply to: twanvl’s comment on: The Octopus, the Dolphin and Us: a Great Filter tale
Yes. And this is what has happened to most branches of the tree of life. E.g. Archae Bacteria, the various Protists. Only very basic multicellularity occurs in most kingdoms.

zslastman Aug 31, 2014, 9:29 AM
18 points
on: The Octopus, the Dolphin and Us: a Great Filter tale
Agree. the road from creation of life to creation of any nervous system at all is an extremely long and fraught one.

Life on our planet has a very specific chemistry. It’s possible that almost all possible chemistries limit complexity more than ours—leading to many planets of very simple organisms. Very large number of phyla on earth reach evolutionary dead ends both archae and bacteria are stuck as single cellular organisms, (or very simple aggregrates) - Plants cannot develop movement because of their cell walls, while insects cannot grow bigger because their lungs and exoskeletons do not scale upwards.

Genetics is an entire optimization layer underlying our own, neural one. I think the fact that it had to throw up an entire new, viable optimization layer represents a filter.

zslastman Jun 24, 2014, 6:59 PM
0 points
in reply to: brazil84’s comment on: Open thread, 23-29 June 2014
I used to get these split second emotional flashbacks all the time, primarily when stressed. They were usually about embarrassing or frustrating moments, and would very frequently cause some kind of verbal twitch—usually these compulsive phrases like “I want to go home” or “I hate this place” or “I hate myself”. Very embarassing in the rare instances it occured around other people.

Meditation seems to have brought down their frequency a lot. Or at least, of the many things that have changed, the frequency with which I meditate seems to correlate most closely.

zslastman Jun 18, 2014, 3:13 PM
12 points
on: Rationalist Sport
I hate to sound machiavelian here, but i think an important criterion for a good sport missing from this discussion is “gain friends, respect, and a conversational topic with people who don’t identify as rationalists”.

A lot of us are going to be short on opportunities to achieve these goals. So the most instrumentally rational sport may be the one which happens to be popular in your immediate social environment.

zslastman Jun 18, 2014, 3:10 PM
2 points
in reply to: NancyLebovitz’s comment on: Rationalist Sport
I’d give it a shot.

zslastman Jun 18, 2014, 6:29 AM
7 points
in reply to: NancyLebovitz’s comment on: Rationalist Sport
Boxing is a great sport on almost all of the above criteria. Unfortunately, it’s not an option for those with a preference for keeping their blood and their spinal fluid separate.

zslastman Apr 30, 2014, 6:20 AM
9 points
on: Positive Queries—How Fetching
Also a chronic loser of keys. In addition to what’s been suggested below—are your keys heavy enough? MIne have, e.g., a bottle opener and a usb key on them, and a very thick ring. The bottle opener in particular makes it difficult for them to slip out of a pocket, and the whole thing is heavy and noisy enough that a) it makes a lot of noise when dropped b) I can easily check for it’s presence by patting my pants. Getting into the habit of doing this whenever leaving a location has saved me a lot of hassle.

zslastman Apr 15, 2014, 8:29 AM
1 point
on: My Heartbleed learning experience and alternative to poor quality Heartbleed instructions.
Well done, but your link to the list of updated websites is broken.

zslastman Apr 4, 2014, 6:47 PM
0 points
in reply to: Metus’s comment on: Open Thread March 31 - April 7 2014

though I am willing to accept an argument on statistical distributions and number of trials.

I would expect english media to just be better on average, due to the larger, more competitive market. Is this what you mean? (I imagine the foreign language/emotional reaction effect is the dominant thing going on though)

zslastman Mar 27, 2014, 12:38 PM
−2 points
on: Distribution of knowledge and standardization in science
A modest proposal: Anyone wishing to create a file format will be forced to write out a 10 megabyte example of the format, by hand, without error, before the new format will be accepted.

zslastman Mar 27, 2014, 9:05 AM
1 point
in reply to: aarongertler’s comment on: What are some science mistakes you made in college?
If I had only had this advice at the beginning of my PhD, I would have saved myself a lot of hassle....

Also, the above advice would suggest, for instance, that we should use SAP’s ridiculous, bloated crapware to manage human resources etc… Sometimes the multibillioner dollar companies fail.

zslastman Mar 23, 2014, 12:05 PM
20 points
on: What are some science mistakes you made in college?
One key meta mistake you see a LOT in computational biology is people not seeking out the proper expertise they need. I and countless other people have wasted months re inventing existing tools because I had no idea they existed, which is turn was because there were no experienced researchers around me with the relevant expertise to tell me.

zslastman Mar 15, 2014, 12:18 PM
2 points
on: Parenting versus career choice thinking in teenagers
I was quite frankly told by my father that I’d find a wife to love, and she would eventually force me to have children. I was eight at the time, and somehow managed not to draw the obvious conclusion about his own life. Probably just as well.

I have the impression that wanting children is seen as rather feminine in traditional cultures, and therefore not something to discuss with a son. Women seem to get more advice on it (In ireland and Germany at least).

zslastman Feb 18, 2014, 12:19 PM
47 points
on: Don’t rely on the system to guarantee you life satisfaction
It’s also worth noting that the social environment in school is artificially horrific. That many young people should not be left to socialize amongst each other without older peers to decrease the jostling for status, and enforce humane behavior. A large percentage of people will emerge from school with mild trauma and a set of learned social behaviors that are severely maladaptive in a more normal environment.

zslastman Feb 14, 2014, 12:39 PM
−1 points
on: How to illustrate that society is mostly irrational, and how rationality would be beneficial
Something about the War On Drugs maybe? Or even better, something which happened in the past and is now clearly absurd, such as the Dutch Tulip Bubble, or the threat to racial purity in america posed by the Irish.

zslastman Feb 14, 2014, 12:25 PM
17 points
on: [Open Thread] Links (2014-02-14)
The Ape That Thought it was a Peacock is a very good article on evolutionary psychology and gender differences, and should be read as a vaccine against the nastier elements of PUA etc… It argues for the position that gender differences between humans, though present, have been greatly exaggerated by evolutionary psychology. It makes several points which were, to me at least, novel:

1)Human children are costly to rear and our females are often pregnant—high cost of childrearing tends to result in more equal parental contributions and monomorphism (sexes being similar)

2)Human females as well as males show morphological indicators of mate choice selection—e.g. enlarged breasts. This again resembles monomorphic species (compare peacocks where females are drab, because males don’t help raise kids, and therefore do not need to choose). Intelligence maybe be a sexually selected trait in both sexes.

3)Distributions in effectively all traits overlap heavily, and the ones which are very different generally concern the tails of the distribution. E.g. we expect murderers to be the very right tail of the aggression distribution, where the slight average difference in the two populations could translate to a large proportional difference.

4)We expect human mating behavior to be facultative, and respond to relevant conditions, such as gender imbalances. This is what we observe anthropologically (Tooby and Cosmides made this point as well I think, in pointing out that variance does not imply the absence of behavioral adaptions).

zslastman 13 Feb 2014 13:46 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Emile’s comment on: Brainstorming: children’s stories
Nope, I generally just plagiarize the last film or piece of fiction I’ve read. Sooner or later I’ll probably end up traumatizing a niece because the last film I saw was by Lars Von Trier. As for life lessons, the typical stuff you teach children of that age group—younger kids need to learn empathy, self control etc. Older ones can be introduced to basic social commentary—sometimes people have to be mean to be nice, sometimes people get sick and go away, but this is nobodies fault, sometimes your imagination is unreliable etc.

zslastman 13 Feb 2014 11:58 UTC
4 points
on: Brainstorming: children’s stories
When pressed for this I tend to take a particular story, and try to strip it down into it’s abstract form—something like—protagonist and companion undergo journey, face 3 opposing characters, arrive at destination and have life lessons confirmed. Then redecorate it with different particulars from other stories—switch males for females, dinosaurs for insects etc. Often this process stimulates my own creativity and i end up with something fairly new, but it guarantees an acceptable bedtime story. Know your audience though. A three year old child mainly wants amusing images. Mild scatology tends to go down a treat as well.

zslastman 21 Jan 2014 7:56 UTC
45 points
in reply to: Eugine_Nier’s comment on: Rationalists Are Less Credulous But Better At Taking Ideas Seriously
My immediate thought was that there is a third variable controlling both experience in rationality and willingness to pay for cryonics, such as ‘living or hanging out in the bay area’.

zslastman 20 Jan 2014 12:43 UTC
0 points
on: Gender differences in spatial reasoning appear to be nurture
This critique of the paper makes a good case against it. http://www.pnas.org/content/109/10/E583.full