Should I convert to Mormonism, or Islam? Which do...

Anonymous asked:

Should I convert to Mormonism, or Islam? Which do you think has the best shot at resisting modern degeneracy?

I would say Mormonism, because it doesn’t count if it’s not in a community, and Utah seems nicer than Dearborn Heights.

Also, a couple of rationalists legitimately converted to Mormonism and it went exactly as well as they hoped, so that’s a proof-of-concept that I haven’t seen with Islamic conversion.

Also, realistically there’s like a 5% chance it’s going to stick, and I understand Muslims get kind of angry when you deconvert.

Anonymous

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Anonymous asked:

Why can't we cut out that thing in the corner of our eye that always itches?

I’m not sure I have this thing. Or, I mean, my eye has a corner, and it itches sometimes, but it doesn’t seem like there’s a specific thing there that can be cut out. Am I missing something?

Anonymous

Anonymous asked:

If you were Bruce Willis, would you go back for the watch? (This is one of my favourite allegories for Judaism ever)

Man, I don’t know. I think during that scene I was thinking that I would leave without the watch, then have a friend get it a few weeks later and mail it to me. I know that’s a cop-out answer, but cop-out answers are all I’ve got.

But if I did, I definitely wouldn’t stay around to make Pop-Tarts.

Anonymous

Anonymous asked:

Have you ever thought about running for office? I'd be very surprised if you didn't at least end up being competitive. Especially if you ran in Berkeley.

I have Greg Cochran on my blogroll. I’m less sure than I once was that this means I can never get elected to anything, but I’m pretty sure it still means I can never get elected in Berkeley.

I understand that @uncrediblehallq is considering running for office someday with a pretty reasonable and EA-influenced platform. He seems like a much better candidate, and if he runs then of course I will support him in any way I can.

Anonymous

Anonymous asked:

You've talked about sleep before and you talk about heritability a lot, but it seems to me you've never talked about heritability of sleep patterns. Do you know good articles about that ?

No.

Anonymous

Anonymous asked:

What do you think of /ratanon/?

Visiting board billed as “rationalists on 8chan” =

Anonymous

Anonymous asked:

ADD doesn't exist. I'm sure it's more than 20% of people misdiagnosed with it. You're incentivized to pretend it does exist though so =\ just know that my medication ruined my childhood and I have no doubts it ruined others.

Request fewer of these “you are wrong and bad but I will not explain why” asks.

Anonymous

Anonymous asked:

I was diagnosed with ADD as a child, and I feel fairly certain that I do not have an attention disorder. I'm also fairly certain my medication altered my behavior and thinking patterns growing up, and I'm scared this has happened to thousands of boys

I am sorry that you are part of the 20% or so of people diagnosed with ADHD who were misdiagnosed.

If it makes you feel better, this is why I refuse to do child psychiatry more than I have to.

Anonymous

Anonymous asked:

Do you know anything about using HDAC inhibitors like Vorinostat as psychiatric tools to undo epigenetic changes caused by PTSD and such?

I only even understood about 90% of the words in that sentence.

Looking it up, it seems to facilitate fear extinction, which has been claimed about a couple of compounds, usually with varying levels of reproducibility. I get weirded out when I hear of something with an apparently really generic mechanism (histone acetylation) having some limited and useful effect (helping with PTSD) instead of something horrible like causing generic memory loss. But I really don’t know anything about this area so I will just watch it and hope someone looks into it further.

Anonymous

Anonymous asked:

What's your opinion on Eroom's law ?

I don’t know.

I recently learned that the main reason planes haven’t been getting any faster lately is because there’s a really nonlinear discontinuity in fuel requirements as you get close to the speed of sound, to the point where it becomes economically prohibitive. This seemed really interesting to me as an example of apparent technological stagnation actually having a meaningful physical-sciences explanation (although poorly-written regulation around sonic booms doesn’t help either). It does seem to me that we’ve cracked certain easy diseases where your thyroid is ten times normal size or something, and we’re left with really complicated things that require full knowledge of the immune system.

I don’t want to rule out “science has gotten worse” either. Now that Peter Thiel is Official Shadow President, I hope he does something useful about this. Maybe make Michael Vassar Secretary of Energy.

Overregulation of drugs is really bad, but I doubt it’s to blame. Drug companies still really really want good blockbuster drugs and if there were really good ones they would spend whatever it took to push it through. Overregulation of the pharmaceutical industry probably prevents a lot of marginal drugs from existing, and makes existing drugs cost much more, but I doubt it’s the reason we haven’t cured schizophrenia.

Anonymous

Anonymous asked:

Thoughts on the Princeton Election Consortium's "Is 99% a reasonable probability?" article?

Sorry I took so long to answer this, but I feel like the intervening time really clarified my opinion on the matter.

Anonymous

worldlypositions

Over the Atlantic

I am told that knowing about the planning fallacy and trying to account for it does not avert the planning fallacy. I wonder if this is because people are dutifully trying to shift their expectation of something going wrong appropriately close to 100%, when the actual expectation should be closer to 5000%. Nonetheless, I caught my plane and am successfully moving at six hundred miles per hour above the Atlantic Ocean. The contrast between the ease of this and the ease of moving at half a mile per hour from my bed to the bathroom at the start of this journey feels like a good example of something.

And while a few things have gone wrong, probably more things have gone especially right. Moving my things in a giant suitcase turns out to be much less terrible than lugging them around on my back in a bulging ‘personal item’, as is my usual strategy. Especially because someone else is in charge of the giant suitcase now.

There was no queue to check in, security was easy, my gate was right outside it, separated only by a shop I wanted to go to. I was fairly anxious at the start of the plane trip, but then a nice flight attendant gave me multiple tiny bottles of wine to drink. He also kindly informed me that my airplane food, while dubious in ways, was not dangerous and that I should just eat it, which is something I usually miss traveling alone.

This plane has a respectable selection of movies and TV. As well as a less respectable selection, from which I have mostly selected. I watched ‘Why him?’, a movie portraying a Silicon Valley billionaire boyfriends as a sort of horrifying other species, unable to communicate with or understand normal humans, but ultimately friendly. While I’m not opposed to laughing at the oddities of Silicon Valley boyfriends, I thought it was interesting that for this to work they had to basically make the guy seem really clueless and stupid in ways. Even though most such people are pretty smart. I wonder if the writers are not that familiar with such people, so don’t know how to justify a smart person behaving in laughable ways. But maybe it is just funnier if you exaggerate it to the point that it is impossible to justify.

I watched a TV show about finding strangers who look identical to each other, and getting them together to see how alike they are. If it was a real test roughly as presented, it was very striking. Of the seven pairs they had on the show, one pair were both homosexual night club workers with the same hair style, and another pair had the same first and last names. They mentioned a lot of other similarities between pairs, but those seemed more like what you might come up with if you took two random people and looked for things in common. Or things that would tend to make you either look similar or find each other. However the two coincidences I mention seem surprising. I suppose the show probably just had a lot of such people to choose from, and took the most interestingly similar ones. Which they didn’t explicitly claim to not be doing. But that seems naughty.

I downloaded Instapaper, and have been finding it a surprisingly appealing way to read things (surprising because nothing is an appealing way to read things). Possibly it just seemed appealing because I filled it with things from the archives of Slate Star Codex and The Last Psychiatrist.

I listened to half of a podcast about Alexander Hamilton, who seems to be now permanently classed in my mind as ‘topic of derpy fictional amusement’ rather than ‘history it would be virtuous to know about’. Hopefully I can gradually expand this circle so that the agricultural revolution seems like particularly obscure backstory to Hamilton, nonetheless fascinating to a fan.

The podcast said that Hamilton the musical is about the conflict between being shiny and political, and being straightforward and doing the work you think is important, or something like that. As represented by Burr and Hamilton. I observe that Burr and Hamilton also seem to represent a conflict between waiting for it and grabbing opportunity immediately. Which makes me wonder if those axes are related.

For instance, I wonder if waiting a lot is in general a better strategy in social spheres than it is in object-level ones, because there is often more to be permanently lost. Like, if you say a dumb thing people can bring it up forever, whereas from the perspective of object level inquiry, you can change your mind about it in five minutes when you decide that it is wrong. I’m not sure if this holds for actions more serious than saying things—if you run your company into the ground or burn down your house it may be hard to undo, but you can recover socially (eventually).

That podcast was destroyed randomly, and can’t be recovered because accessing the internet on this plane seems to require the internet. So instead I listened to a third of a podcast about people killing other people. I think some of them were the Assyrians. Some of their killing was especially not nice. That’s all I know, because I only listened to it for like an hour, and apparently Assyrians are not yet catalogued under ‘obscure Hamilton backstory’ yet.

atlantic ocean actual travel

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

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Over the Atlantic