Articles read
Status: notes; belief: emotional
This page records a subset of the articles I’ve read online. Additions to this page are meant to be brief and particularly optimized for speed instead of quality of content. Since this page will be updated much more frequently than I deploy the site, if you intend to keep up with this page, it’s likely better to do so directly through GitHub (rather than through this site). There is an atom feed specific to this page that can tell you when new additions are made (though unfortunately since it only shows the commit messages and doesn’t include the changes, it’s unhelpful on its own). GitHub also makes available the current version of the file; unfortunately even here there is a problem: the formatting of the page may be imperfect because GitHub does not use Pandoc markdown.
Overcoming Bias : Effective Altruism Complaints
Imagine someone who said they were in love with you, cared about you, and wanted to live with you to help you, but who didn’t seem very emotionally engaged in this. They instead talked a lot about calculations they’d done on how you two could live your lives together well. You might suspect them of having ulterior motives, such as wanting to gain sex, money, or status from you. Maybe the same sort of thing is going on in charity. We want and expect a certain sort of emotional relation to people who help us, and to people who help the same people we help, and people who say they are trying to help but who won’t join in the usual emotions in the usual way may seem suspect. We’d be more likely to find fault with their approach, and to suspect them of bad ulterior motives.
George Orwell: Why Socialists Don’t Believe In Fun
Many a revivalist minister, many a Jesuit priest (see, for instance, the terrific sermon in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist) has frightened his congregation almost out of their skins with his word-pictures of Hell. But as soon as it comes to Heaven, there is a prompt falling-back on words like ‘ecstasy’ and ‘bliss’, with little attempt to say what they consist in. Perhaps the most vital bit of writing on this subject is the famous passage in which Tertullian explains that one of the chief joys of Heaven is watching the tortures of the damned.
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It is the same with attempted descriptions of perfect happiness which are neither Utopian nor other-worldly, but merely sensual. They always give an impression of emptiness or vulgarity, or both. At the beginning of La Pucelle Voltaire describes the life of Charles IX with his mistress, Agnes Sorel. They were ‘always happy’, he says. And what did their happiness consist in? An endless round of feasting, drinking, hunting and love-making. Who would not sicken of such an existence after a few weeks? Rabelais describes the fortunate spirits who have a good time in the next world to console them for having had a bad time in this one. They sing a song which can be roughly translated: ‘To leap, to dance, to play tricks, to drink the wine both white and red, and to do nothing all day long except count gold crowns’ how boring it sounds, after all! The emptiness of the whole notion of an everlasting ‘good time’ is shown up in Breughel’s picture The Land of the Sluggard, where the three great lumps of fat lie asleep, head to head, with the boiled eggs and roast legs of pork coming up to be eaten of their own accord.
Brains are some of the most complicated things in the world. Thus, other humans (other minds) are some of the most complicated things we deal with. For us, this interaction has a unique character because of the sympathy we feel for others - the way that our brain tends to align with their brain - rather than our brain just treating other brains as big complicated machines with levers to pull. Reducing the need for people to interact with other people reduces the complexity of human existence; this is a step in the wrong direction. For example, resist the temptation to simplify people’s lives by offering them artificially perfect sexual/romantic partners. (Interpersonal Entanglement.)
Celebrity Causes - Look to the Stars
i find it intersting how they split all the diseases into separate causes.. though i suppose that’s just because celebrities probably emphasize that. or else that’s what ppl care about in general. i mean, even GW separates these i suppose (while others tend to view these all as “global health”). a flat list probably isn’t ideal for this type of thing
something to check for doing research into QS
2015-07-05
web - How do I get a websites title using command line? - Unix & Linux Stack Exchange
so im going to start recording articles i’ve read using a script i wrote (part of it is explained in the link above). sort of like, my own version of evernote, except this way it’ll all be git-logged and also won’t go away even if evernote does. of course, it won’t log images and stuff (at least not automatically, and not now) but you get the point.
i mean, ideally i’d put things in their own pages so related links are easier to find, but realistically, im too lazy to do all that when im just in “consuming mode”, so it’s best to juts postprocess things: throw everything into this page as i go along, then come back later to organize (by removing htings from this page and putting it in other page). so this page will probably eternally be “notes”.
2015-07-05 at 12:22:18
What has a higher chance of lasting into the 2030s-2040s: LessWrong or gwern.net? - Quora
lol
2015-07-05 at 12:12 PM
Anonymity - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
so im actually pretty impressed with wikipedia’s coverage of the topic…
Tags: articles, links collection, news.
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