tungstenfurnace

If I drink salt solution this might have very little effect on my blood pressure.

However, if I add salt to my pasta bake it might make it tastier.

I might therefore eat more of it and raise my blood pressure this way.

My speculation is that 'willpower' or 'vitality' relates directly to the available reserves of neurotransmitter(s) in your nervous system.

Notes:

If you try to do something bad (that part of you knows is wrong), this will set up repetitious, conflicting thoughts which act to deplete willpower.

Willpower is replenished by sleep.

Activities seemingly opposite to those activities which require willpower are known as pleasures. However, my guess is that these also drain neurotransmitters, rather like revving an engine in neutral.

Therefore the way to maximise useful activity is to:

(a) do something that is genuinely in accordance with your highest wishes and values (b) decide that it will be your sole source of pleasure and entertainment

Yes, the glucose idea is pretty implausible.

Better might be: available reserves of neurotransmitters.

Isn't it better to focus on oneself -- trying to be a better parent or teacher -- than to focus on testing the child in your care and trying to predict his future? It's not possible to predict people's futures anyway and all this tyrannical nonsense is simply contributing to depression and to the bureaucratisation of childhood.

He does seem vulnerable, even tortured. Does this go hand in hand with great creativity?

He does seem vulnerable, even tortured. Does this go hand in hand with creativity?

Here's a radical idea: only read books that you enjoy and find interesting. Don't measure reading success by the number of books, but by how far your hair was blown back :-)

Minor suggestion: put the intro to narro the scrapdealer on the load page and lose the keyboard instructions page altogether.

Rule 10: for the wintertime, invest in an electric blanket. That way you don't lose the first 20 minutes of sleep having to warm up the bed.

Coming next week: the 12 rules for helping you to remember all the other rules you learnt :-)

The war on vice is properly regarded as a private war fought within each individual.

Problem is that, unlike in that movie, our computers aren't slick or fast. Gains in speed are quickly lost by the added load of new features.

I think 'great is simple' applies to programming too. The reason I learned BASIC at school was because there were computers lying around which all had the same BASIC pre-installed on ROM. They switched on in less than a second.

Nowadays, apart from a few web-based 'try it out' pages, learning a language usually requires installing it and several other packages and getting everything to work together and with your OS. This is hard, especially for beginners. In the meantime, you're using your computer for other important things.

If I could buy a pad with the major languages and text editors pre-installed, or even just with one language and one editor, I would. It would be separate from my browsing pad. Which would be separate from my gaming pad. Etc.

Hopefully pads will continue to get thinner and cheaper because they will be a lot of them lying around the house by 2020.

Stuff which is sufficiently interesting and important I remember automatically; the rest I forget. Presumably that's the case with most people.

So, rather than enjoining them to memorise stuff which I find interesting, I'm better off enthusing about it and showing how interesting it is.

And, on the side, how about a Manhattan-style project to produce a commerical scale Thorium Reactor within five years?

Yeah, sometimes novel phenomena are stumbled upon. Where they are deliberately stumbled upon I would call it exploration rather than science.

I don't think that exercise falls into that category. There is nothing surprising about exercise per se.

Popper once challenged an audience to go out and 'observe'; I think the point of his joke was that without knowing what you're trying to observe and why then the instruction is absurd.

In order to claim that 'more exercise is good' you need to start by guessing why some exercise might be good, whilst being open to the possibility that it may not be, and then start testing the best guesses. Otherwise you literally won't be able to interpret your 'more exercise' data, even if it is relevant.

Unfortunately there's no explanation which means there's no science here. (The world seems to be full of studies which measure things that are easy to measure and say things that people want to hear.)

Here's an explanation as to why exercise might be good for you: exercise transfers attention away from repetitive thoughts and into one's body and one's surroundings. It thus confers benefits similar to those of meditation.

This theory may well be totally false. But, hey, at least it offers an explanation. There's something there to be false.

The next step would be to criticise the theory and then, if it stands up, to test it against current theories.

Any testing though, would be highly unlikely to resemble the observations referred to in the linked article. It would instead depend on the relevant details of the rival theories.

I want privacy because

(1) I break laws I don't know about (2) I do things which might be misinterpreted as breaking the law or as being immoral (3) I do things which are considered immoral by most people, but which are not illegal.

For these reasons, I cannot act autonomously or creatively without privacy.

Educate students -- lecturing doesn't work. Best is working from the best material in small groups of peers and having help available from graduate students.

Socialise students -- learning to get on with people is best done with friends.

Networking -- done online.

Research and innovation -- yes. that's what universities are about.

Optimum path for students is now online self-study undergraduate degree. Can complete quickly or as slowly as required. Then go to university if you want to do a PhD.

>I can be upset and angry and still participate in a rational discussion.

The problem is that it would only take a few people who can't remain rational for a tipping point to be reached whereby the overall quality of debate badly degrades. (That's when some of the most valuable contributors start to disappear.)

>What will we do when an issue is both important and divisive

If such a political issue affected hackers directly then there'd be no way to avoid that discussion.

>Do we want to prevent, to silence, discussion?

Of course not. And that's precisely why politics in general should be avoided.

Aside from the eve psych, I'm with Eliezer Yudkowsky on this:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/gw/politics_is_the_mindkiller/

It's better to steer clear of political issues which are covered more than adequately elsewhere.

They are by their nature divisive and tend to make people upset and/or angry. This coarsens the atmosphere and makes reasoned and intelligent discussion far less feasible.

No explanation, no science.

>To survive these daily onslaughts, Esther put on her familiar mask of haughty confidence and switched on her emotional autopilot, mimicking social interactions while feeling nothing

Hmm, that summarises about 50% of social interactions generally.

I know what you mean; I couldn't do it either.

However, he confessed his lie, and now he works making movies. They're lies too! They're fictional. Yet good things -- including important truths -- come out of them.

Richard Branson confesses in his autobiography how he started his business career with lies. He would phone up a bank and try to sell advertising space in his student magazine by claiming that a rival bank had already bought space and that they should get in on the action.

>the privacy argument is a joke if you are in a public place

Surely not always a joke. If, for example, a couple is kissing in public then recording them against their will seems wrong to me. Whether it ought to be illegal is another question.

OTOH it seems to me that the actions of police ought to be regarded as public acts, and recording them in the public interest ought to be legal.

>Keep in mind that there is a big difference between taking a picture and publishing a picture

Yes, although the person being photographed doesn't know what the picture will be used for and so he may feel constrained nonetheless.

Great idea! Also, mount the dishwashers a few feet above the floor to avoid all that leaning over.

Affluent people are aggressively hooked on entertainment and stress-based productivity, which has dampened creativity and optimism somewhat, imo.

One field generating a lot of exciting discoveries seems to be materials science.

>bullish future where our society continues to have plenty of natural resources (oil, food and fresh water)

Thorium would cover a great deal of that; the critical resource we need is optimism.

Nutrient density, like he says, isn't the only factor in determining what makes food healthy.

For example, food which tastes delicious and raises blood sugar makes us 'high'. Being high is bad for the body (please note, I'm not saying it's wrong).

Note also that whether something tastes delicious depends on how we interpret the experience and therefore healthiness is not wholly attributable to the foodstuff in question.

To complicate matters still further, worrying about food is surely unhealthy, isn't it?

Yes, it's called day dreaming :-)

This corroborates the theory that long periods of doing nothing help to develop creativity. (Day dreaming makes you smarter; meditation makes you well.)

Arthur Dent: I wonder what'll happen if I press this button.

Ford Prefect: Don't.

Arthur Dent: [presses it] Oh.

Ford Prefect: What happened?

Arthur Dent: A sign lit up saying "Please do not press this button again."