deskglass

Friends say they typically use Dynamo and that using a relational database requires approval from a vp (because of scaling concerns).

The replication crisis isn't merely in psychology, old studies, or studies that didn't carefully record their methodology. Eg the review I linked mentions a study from 2006 that didnt replicate in a larger trial. The one about stories involving immorality priming people to use more antiseptic wipes. It's weird to me that someone would write a book and reference that study without mentioning this replication failure. Especially in the context of the many other such failures to replicate for priming.

Theories ought to be backed by experiments that replicate. Maybe describing methodology precisely is hard, but replication is how we know a phenomenon is actually real and not p-hacked or otherwise mistaken (eg by experimenters mis-measuring).

Note that I didn't just read the word "priming" in the book and seize upon it generically. As noted in Ritchie's review, Sapolsky references specific studies which larger trials have failed to replicate (eg the Macbeth Effect where reading stories about unethical behavior made people more likely to grab antiseptic wipes).

True, but Behave was published in 2017! That's ~7 years after people noticed these theories fail to replicate. So it's not that some parts of the book don't stand the test of time, it's that it doesn't accurately represent the state of the science for when it was published.

I read Science Fictions and don't recall politics coming up much. Ironically, his most political point was his defense of the Mertonian norm of universalism from both leftist and rightist critiques. That norm is relevant in this discussion :P. That said, I haven't read his other book.

Politics aside, those theories did fail replication. Forget I mentioned Ritchie at all and the problem remains.

After enjoying Sapolsky's lectures on YouTube (including this one) I began reading his book Behave. I was surprised to see that it refers to theories that fail to replicate (eg priming) as if they were solid theories. Stuart Richie (a psychologist who wrote a book on the replication crisis) enumerates other examples in his review https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/rules-of-behaviour/

Please be wary of this failure to drop unreplicated findings when reading Sapolsky's works.

Automatic market making for prediction markets, eg Auger.

What is the recourse here? Would it be reasonable to contact the person that approved the patent with information showing that plenty flashcard systems precede this patent? I imagine there is some more formal system.

It’s why you see a lot of COOs and CEOs with some legal background or at least familiarity.

An alternative hypothesis based on people I know - traditionally, smart/middle-to-high class people pick between medicine, law, and finance, with law school being the default. Then many of these people realize they don't like practicing law so they transition into something else.

Incremental Reading[1] is a related tactic that coverts reading material into facts preserved via space repetition software.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incremental_reading

Makes sense, thanks!

Is 1 really all that different from driving in a car with the AC on? If I understand correctly, car filters typically only filter very large particles that would damage the engine.

Note that if your gambling laws are too restrictive/expansive you lose the social benefit of prediction markets, which enable society to have a well calibrated understanding of the likelihood of various events.

http://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/ideafutures.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prediction_market

It's interesting that you assume it's a myth. I can personally attest to answering spam calls, politely asking to be added to the do not call list, and still receiving calls from the same spammers over a period of months. Eventually I just downloaded a call blacklist app.

How do you take naps? It takes me an hour or two to fall asleep. I don't drink coffee.

I had success with earplugs combined with whitenoise. For white noise, you can used an air purifier, a fan, or a noise machine like https://www.marpac.com/

Similarly, I ate at an Indian restaurant in Beijing and didn't notice any difference from Chinese food.

Gwern discusses this in his essay at https://www.gwern.net/The%20Melancholy%20of%20Subculture%20S...

He makes an interesting point that by withdrawing from larger society into sub cultures, people can return to dealing with groups of a size our minds are more comfortable with. It's the same reason small towns are (I hear) less socially stressful. I am not convinced though. In larger society I end up dealing with relatively small groups anyway - friends, family, and co-workers.

It seems pretty straight-forward that people would want focus on their interests and spend their time communicating with people that share those interests. It's definitely unfair and unfortunate that other people end up supporting them financially. With that said, we'll eventually have to come to terms with vast numbers of people not being economically productive anyway. People will have to do something. Withdrawing from society at large in favor of the parts of it that interest them seems like a fine choice.

Those interested in this may also be interested in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incremental_reading which gradually converts reading material into flashcards that are memorized using spaced repetition software.

I faced the same decision you did, had the same concern, and chose New College. I was fortunate in that CS at NCF has blossomed recently. A couple more professors were hired recently and there's increased student interest in the field. I've graduated, but I imagine there's also cross-pollination with the Data Science masters program that NCF founded this year.

As for what it's like to attend - the experience is less radical than you may think. People generally stick to taking listed courses. Creating your own course (tutorial) and finding a professor to sponsor it takes work. You can do it, I took several, but it's rare and the ease probably varies with your major.

With that said, even if you stick to taking courses, you'll still have to do an independent project each January and a thesis project before you graduate. Also, the experience of taking courses at NCF is different from the experience elsewhere. The size enables more discussion-based classes and the pass-fail/narrative evaluation grading changes student incentives and culture.

Bazqux is also great because it can fetch content from social media - Twitter, Google Plus, some Facebook, etc. Unfortunately, you can't just get your account's entire feed from it, but you can, for example, give it a Twitter page and get that page's tweets.

I think you're responding to a strawman version of Eliezer's writing advice. He's never claimed that rational, goal oriented characters are sufficient to write good fiction. His "(first) Three Laws of Fanfiction," for example, list these rules:

You can't make Frodo a Jedi unless you give Sauron the Death Star.

Originality isn't easy, but it is simple: Just don't do stuff that's already been done.

The premise of a story is a conflict and its resolution.

With that said, a story is much more interesting if it contains characters that respond to their world in a manner reminiscent of actual people even if it would be more convenient to the author for them to act differently. Lawrence Watt-Evans is a good example of an author who writes such stories.

I think Ted Chiang is awesome too, but his stories tend to be too short to really get into character choice that much. They're more about serving as vehicles for interesting ideas.

Beijing airport had water fountains despite the water not being good to drink and traditional Chinese culture having a stigma against drinking cold water.

I used a pipe that created RSS feeds from Google+ pages in conjunction with some other stuff to get all the articles I'd want to read in one document (with a table of contents) delivered to my kindle. I'm now working on something that doesn't use Y! Pipes and simplifies the process.

We all knew it was coming, but the end of Pipes still sucks.

Awesome idea and execution! I'm reading through the featured emails and laughing at how unresponsive public officials are.

I recommend adding a signature feature. If I were to use this service, I'd want to add a signature to the effect that all emails to and from the account are publicly accessible.

Also, I recommend adding a way to read through a specific account's emails (nevermind, they have that) and a way to search through all email.

If you mean functional red-black trees in general, then there's http://matt.might.net/articles/red-black-delete/

This is awesome. Now, if I come across an interesting article, I can find places that may link to other interesting articles.

A suggestion: It'd be nice to be able to specify an article URL in the article search field. That way you can specify exactly what article you're interested in finding links to. For example, to get to the SMBC article page, I had to manually make my URL https://wikireverse.org/articles/en/Saturday_Morning_Breakfa... , I couldn't get there by searching for "Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal" (at least it wasn't in the first page of results) or "SMBC."

Anyway, thanks for making and sharing this.

Thanks for the recommendation. I'll check that book out.

Once, in thread similar to this one, I saw another recommendation for The Light of Other Days (http://smile.amazon.com/Light-Other-Days-Arthur-Clarke-ebook.... It explores a world where everyone can see and hear everyone else at any (past and present) time. While I did not always find the plot compelling, I still enjoyed reading it because it explores some cool ideas.

If you're interested in this idea you may like The Unincorporated Man, a book partially about a future where people buy and sell stocks of each other. Taxes, for example, are replaced with the government receiving 5% of a person's stock at birth. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unincorporated_Man

I think they were being sarcastic.