Moofy
User ID: 1350
Moofy
1yr ago
No, it is in the middle of what used to be a cow pasture (and was still surrounded by it when I went there). The school (built on a 60+ acre property in the '70s) is centralized to serve a group of exurban communities to ensure kids don't have a long commute time.
Moofy
1yr ago
I returned to my regular group yoga practice after being absent for 10 months. I was a regular practitioner for 7 years, and the practice came to a halt in the lead-up to the birth of my son. Aside from the expected improvements in my flexibility and relief from minor aches, the most notable effect is a greater ability to focus.
I found that I was rather scatterbrained and overwhelmed with the tasks that I faced while doing WFH and taking care of my home and an infant at the same time. However, the practice of mindfulness and the 'moving meditation' that I engage in during my yoga sessions has made it easier for me to organize my thoughts.
During the months after the birth of my son, I didn't bother to engage in solo mindfulness/fitness practices (aside from walking) because the temptation to do work/housework became overwhelming. It's nice having returned to the community that I've practiced with for so long; just a few casual daily conversations with others (who aren't coworkers) outside of the home does wonders for my mood.
Finally, I want to note that having a kid has done more to strengthen my legs than all my prior yoga practices combined; chair pose is no longer a pose I dread.
Moofy
10mo ago
Would you pay one-time $5 fee to be able to post on a forum you like to read?
I did, on MetaFilter. Twice. The one-time fee served to keep some of the riff-raff out. It also gave users a feeling that they had a piece of ownership in the forum, which would inflame the dramatic 100+ reply threads on MetaTalk when unpopular mod decisions would be handed out.
What if it was $5/year?
Probably not, maybe if it were here. It's hard for me to justify the benefit to my wellbeing of finding more reasons to sit in front of a screen instead of doing anything else.
Moofy
1yr ago
I believe Obama said that the UK would go to the 'back of the queue' for any trade deals, not taking a trade deal off of the table, but making it clear that the promises of some Brexiteers that the UK could just seamlessly move from the EU into a free trade agreement with the US were unrealistic.
Moofy
1yr ago
Very much so. A precocious interest during my teen years, a few courses in undergrad, and continued curiosity afterward. However, after I started using psychedelics I had a appreciation of how the Dharmic religions and Taoism may all be reactions to the same transcendent experience.
Moofy
1yr ago
In my primary school a minority of students walked to school. None were permitted to leave school during the day and all ate in the cafeteria during lunch. In senior high it was a similar situation to primary and only 12th Graders were permitted to leave. At my middle school no one was permitted to walk as the school was only accessible via a road with heavy traffic traveling at 45mph+.
Moofy
1yr ago
Thank you for sharing. I have a jaded view of arts magnet schools because my wife attended one where she experienced bullying and a generally poisonous atmosphere. It seemed like each student wanted to undermine the others. It's reassuring to know that this isn't always the case.
Moofy
1yr ago
Whenever we hear a story of a lad engaging in some atrocity in a fantasy realm, I remind my wife that 'little boys have a little evil in them' (and then omit how many times I myself have exterminated whole species in Stellaris).
As is pointed out by others here, it's all about framing. I frame this as:
-Blue pill: You join a death cult that will commit suicide unless half of all people join them.
-Red pill: You don't join this death cult.
Those blue-pillers are going to live or die in circumstances outside of my control, but the one thing I can control is my ability to save my own life. Perhaps another reframing is that instead of making the choice for myself, I am making it for another person. By selecting blue for this other person, I am willing to wager their life on an unknown outcome, and by selecting red I am guaranteed to save one life that would not be saved otherwise. I suspect that the calculus of this decision changes when the life of someone else is being wagered instead of one's own, but the difference is between having compassion for others and having compassion for one's self.
Moofy
2yr ago
How do I deal with my AI-driven existential crisis?
The best I can do for you is plant seeds of doubt with a list of questions.
What is the similarity between Yudkowsky and his milieu and a new religious movement or a millenarian movement? What is the propensity for new religious movements to predict a near- to medium-term apocalypse? Is there something in special about the rationalist community that makes rationalists immune to the sociological dynamics that have popped up in other human groups throughout history, and for this group to be so different as to the the first group that is correct about predicting the apocalypse? Is there something about Yudkowsky that makes him more effective at prediction than the cassandras that proceeded him? Is Yudkowsky better at marketing himself than other cassandras? If Yudkowsky is so convinced of an AI apocalypse, then why would he bother inflicting memetic despair on much of humanity during its final moments? Is Yudkowsky more of a sci-fi writer or a domain expert of AGI? Even granting Yudkowsky the title of domain expert in AGI, how frequently do domain experts make inaccurate predicitons in their areas of expertise (think of Malthusian predictions among economists and ecologists, or of sovietologists prior to 1991)?
Moofy
11mo ago
You should think twice because the formal mechanism for denying him the nomination relies on either pledged delegates breaking their pledge, or him giving up voluntarily.
Also, it could make more sense to have him drop out after the convention to prevent an open convention and an open intra-party civil war that could ensue.
Moofy
5mo ago
I am going to make myself sound about 30 years older than I am, but there were also David Susskind and Joe Franklin
Moofy
10mo ago
In my neighborhood there is still one "In This House..." sign, it is counter-signaled by three "Love Lives Here" signs
Moofy
11mo ago
She'll be the American Kim Campbell; we'll have to hear a similar story about how the first woman president was set up to fail.
Moofy
1yr ago
Thanks for the suggestion, but it wasn't Freddie. I remember it being by someone further to the right (not necessarily a conservative or someone further right, either).
Moofy
1yr ago
I was a hospice volunteer and they tend to do a good job at connecting volunteers with people who have no kin or are estranged from their kin. The problem is, those people need to be on hospice to receive the benefit of the volunteers, and there could certainly be benefits for those not just on death's door.
Moofy
2yr ago
Why suddenly hate the laisses-faire outcome of Harvard deciding how to allocate Harvard's resources?
This is Culture War, the integrity of the debate crumbled long ago. As is often said here: My rules applied fairly> your rules applied fairly > your rules applied unfairly.
If all universities receiving federal funds were allowed to discriminate on the basis of race and could discriminate against any race, I think libertarians would have a more tempered view. But when its only against Whites and Asians, the one-sidedness of the argument becomes apparent and we enter the matrix above.
It is one hell of a performance of intellectual gymnastics to turn someone who spends all day tweeting, reporting people for minor traffic violations, and shilling his substack, into a Nietzschean Superman.
Moofy
1yr ago
Wikipedia says their black population is 10%, i.e. a smaller percentage than what the US has.
Going deeper into this, the Wikipedia article on the Demographics of Brazil makes it seem as though only those with almost entirely African ancestry are counted as black (at 7.6% of the population) and then indicates that 42% are classified as Pardos (with a mixture of white, indigenous, and black ancestry). The article on Pardo Brazilians includes some genomic analysis that indicates between 10 and 30% African genomic ancestry for Pardos in most areas, and that in many areas, those classified as black have at least 40% European genomic ancestry.
Moofy
1yr ago
In the US public schools I attended, we were restricted to eating lunch in the cafeteria. We were only granted liberty to leave the campus for lunch during our senior year. In suburban/rural districts most students are bussed and walking home and back within a 45 minute period isn't practicable (and at many schools, walking isn't an option at all).
And now FFIE is down 40% on the day.
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