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skosch

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Have you? Because the rationalists I know are genuinely well-adjusted people.

It's cheap and easy to make fun of the lesswrong community as a cringy cult of AI-obsessed neckbeards. And to be fair, the writing style on LW tends to support that impression. But I've found that most of the actual people within the rationality/AI safety/effective altruism communities actually don't fit that stereotype at all.

"Second most popular language in the area" is a gross distortion of reality. It would make zero sense for a local police officer to choose to yell at local protestors or local colleagues in a non-native language that carries significant stigma in HK.

The latent space of type design choices is large but very much finite, and concepts like "warmth" consistently refer to features like large curves, low stroke contrast, deliberate imperfections (that evoke physical reproduction) etc. I'm very confident that this would hold up to a randomized trial.

In this case, "warmth" refers mostly to the rounded corners and unique design quirks, which are meant to imply "I was crafted in analog by a seasoned master draftsman, not merely constructed from sterile geometric shapes by some hipster on a Macbook."

No, but RH knows, and could make that distinction if they wanted to. RH is punishing margin and non-margin users alike until it has enough cash again to resume making orders.

To be clear, the RH T&C very broadly protect them in case of any arbitrary service interruption, so on paper they're probably entitled to do whatever they want. But at the end of the day, it was them who got caught with their pants down because they went too far in their UX/risk tradeoff, and now users are paying the price and are understandably pissed.

Well, in a world where users had to have fully funded their accounts before making any orders, the clearinghouse would have nothing to worry about. So it's not exactly independent from whether end users are using margin.

It looks like RH let hordes of new users onto the platform and allowed them to put in GME orders before having those users' cash in the bank. Now the clearinghouse sees the volatility, throws up its hands and goes "listen RH, no more of these crazy GME orders from you until you have the cash to pay for them". Understandable – but that should be RH's problem, not that of its users.

What's not OK is RH's sledgehammer solution of disabling buying for all users, even those whose accounts are fully funded, not to mention force-selling people's shares against their will. IMHO they deserve all of the anger and lawsuits currently directed at them. (Edit: unless, of course, they are only force-selling stocks that were bought on margin in the first place, and if their T&C let them do that, in which case ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)

I'd like to add: org-mode is overwhelming, so just take it easy. Set up a notes folder, sync it to the web, and just use org as a plain markdown/todo list editor for a while. Perhaps add org-roam (like vimwiki with backlinks). Then, only if you feel the need to, give org-capture and/or the calendar/agenda features a try. Don't force yourself to use some obscure feature just because it's there in the manual on page 587, or because you saw someone on Youtube rave about it.

I switched to Doom Emacs about two years ago and while I miss the insane performance and simplicity of vim sometimes, the positives overall outweigh the negatives once you get over the initial differences (workspaces, command names, etc.).

I haven't listened to them but can recommend the Medlife Crisis episode [0], in which he reviews the scientific literature around the effects of cold exposure, blood oxygenation/acidity from hyper-/hypoventilation, and related topics. He comes to the conclusion that Wim Hof is likely a genetic outlier, but that breathing techniques can have real physiological effects on things like pain perception, and that cold exposure likely has a bunch of real benefits – but also that placebo may play a big role (which is nevertheless a very real effect).

[0] https://youtu.be/D6EPuUdIC1E?t=2215 (timestamped to the conclusions)

I don't know about vimagit, but vim's org-mode support is very barebones.

Give doom-emacs a try though. You really can have the best of both worlds nowadays.

That's not quite right. Even if there were no gravity or other forces, there would be no incentive for matter to go in one direction vs another, regardless of the distribution of matter around it. Over time you'd get a uniform-ish distribution, but that's a question of statistical mechanics, not one of pressure differences.

On earth, matter only rushes to fill vacuums because the surrounding air or water pressure pushes it in.

As another commenter pointed out, the victim is the public's trust in the financial market. With transactions between private entities, information asymmetry is a normal part of life. But if you want to be able to sell your shares on a public market, the public first needs to trust that you won't screw them over. That trust is a public good worthy of government protection, just like we have government agencies to protecting clean air and fair elections.

Radiolab has a wonderfully deep episode on this topic: https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/post-...

The main issue is the sheer volume of content. Four seconds – that's their estimate for how much time employees in Facebook's "censorship farm" centers have, on average, to make a decision about whether a reported post gets deleted or not. As a result, management decided to aim for the lowest bar: consistent enforcement of a limited set of rules. That's hard enough as is: is all blood gore? Are all references to race hate speech? Etc. etc.

So the censors simply have no capacity to fairly fact-check every single political post, and when in doubt, they err on the side of free speech. ML can help suppress certain viral posts, but not consistently so. I'm not a fan of Facebook by any means, but in this case they really are in a tough spot.

Yeah, sorry. I should be clear: I didn't in any way mean to imply that a carbon dividend would come close to being a UBI, just that it works the same way: a fixed chunk of money for everyone, every month/quarter/year. A nano-UBI, really. We'll still need a real UBI.

I also don't want to imply that the bill in question is primarily concerned with wealth redistribution or UBI. Its main objective is to allow the free market to find the most cost-effective solutions to emissions reductions.

We've had such a carbon fee and dividend program in Canada for 1.5 years now and yes, by and large poor people benefit more than rich people for the reasons outlined by Thorrez.

Everyone gets back the same amount. You can't even know how much carbon tax you paid, because it's levied at the source. It's a redistribution scheme at the expense of polluters.

fried his brains from LSD

This, too, is an armchair diagnosis and unnecessarily sensational language. According to Wikipedia:

Asked if Barrett may have had Asperger's syndrome, his sister Rosemary Breen said that he and his siblings were "all on the spectrum".

Waters maintains that Barrett suffered "without a doubt" from schizophrenia. In an article published in 2006, Gilmour was quoted as saying: "In my opinion, his nervous breakdown would have happened anyway. It was a deep-rooted thing. But I'll say the psychedelic experience might well have acted as a catalyst. Still, I just don't think he could deal with the vision of success and all the things that went with it."

You're right, changing one's worldview is difficult, and we certainly shouldn't force anyone to endorse views they don't hold.

That said, hitching one's identity to unfalsifiable beliefs ("there is nothing science can't understand", "this book is the word of god", etc.) is immature and stunting. It's human nature, but that doesn't make it worthy of respect or celebration. We should strive to get comfortable with the frightening uncertainty in our mental models of the world.

Therefore, insulting religion or irreligion isn't inherently problematic in my book. (Coincidentally, offending people is a terrible way of encouraging them to be more open-minded, but that's a different question.)

Insulting people is a bad idea in general, but there is an obvious difference between religion on one hand and sexual orientation/race on the other: you can choose (and change) the former but not the latter.

The overall design is nice, but you may want to reconsider the combination of Visuelt and Helvetica Neue. Not only are they just different enough to noticeably clash; what's worse, I thought the Helvetica was (unstyled, fallback-stack) Arial at first, which looked like carelessness. For Helvetica to look sharp, you need to really commit to the Swiss look, headings and all.

Variolation 6 years ago

You've got the right Robin Hanson.

The key argument is that there is lots of uncertainty, but variolation is probably worth trying. And if volunteers can be found, why not? One shouldn't need to be a virologist to credibly make that argument.

That's a misunderstanding of the problem.

Optimizing for engagement tends to favour extreme, simplistic, and highly emotional viewpoints. In other words, it caters to human nature. This tendency is harmful to rational discourse, regardless of whether or not you happen to agree with any given viewpoint.