For those of you who have been enjoying Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, I thought I should point out that the author has a wiki/blog at http://wiki.lesswrong.com/
Of particular interest is the Sequences (http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences), which I am attempting to put into a single, readable, PDF format.
I tried crawling and converting those pages with a few scripts, but I was in a hurry to configure it and it didn't go very well.
The upshot is, that a misconfigured spider left running by itself for a while crawls and collects all sorts of things which means it seems that I now have about 1.15GB of supplemental data from other domains that are linked on lesswrong.com and wiki.lesswrong, most of them PDF files, I suppose.
I did also get all of the pages (I think), but it started crawling the history of different versions of the wiki pages at some point (even though I explicitly told it not to), and it's in zillions of files and directories and a bit of a mess.
I should probably write my own spider so it'll just do what I tell it to.
Quote from: Cain on June 28, 2010, 12:18:59 PM
Of particular interest is the Sequences (http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences), which I am attempting to put into a single, readable, PDF format.
This would be awesome.
Cain thank you for doing the work the rest of us should be doing. Myself included. I owe you one.
I'm up to Reductionism, the fourth set of sequences out of the 8 major ones. And I've already got 351 pages copied over.
I might pretty this up and email it to Yudowsky at some point, too.
I read through Reductionism, Rationality, and Changing Your Own Mind. Also a few of the minor sequences.
Pretty much stopped there. I feel like I have a handle on the basics and Yudowsky's posts and comments often feel like somewhere between lecturing, preaching and proselytizing. Especially when he presents false dilemmas in his own reasoning.
For example, this post: http://lesswrong.com/lw/kn/torture_vs_dust_specks/ The question is an obvious false dilemma looking for a third alternative.
I did like Alicorn's minor sequence on Living Luminously very much. I recommend.
Cain, if you finish this project, I may be forced to drop hundreds of dollars on a PRS-900 or Kindle DX.
HAVE YUO NO MERCY?! :x
The latest Kindle Wifi is actually pretty affordable.
Also, I have three more subsequences to go and I'll have completed this. It wont be pretty, I'll do that some other time, but all the entries and most of the diagrams (a few wouldn't copy over) will be present. This currently stands at 1112 pages, or, if you prefer, 529,909 words.
Here you are, fuckos
http://ifile.it/5fk84zg
3.694 MB, 32 hours of editing (according to Word).
Holy fucking crap.
I now owe you a paycheck's worth of beers.
(http://subotron.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/shirt_1up_girl.jpg)
Damn you are good, Cain.
Upload of the century.
Yeah, um... What format did you save that in? It's a ".docx" file on my computer, and it looks like I don't have anything on my (Mac, I know) that opens it.
.docx is the Word 2007 format. What format would you like it in?
Really? That's so weird. My Stanza program didn't even see it.
Let me see what formats it supports.
...you know, it might be that the tag is ".docx". Sometimes, if it change the tags, that works. Let me try again when I get home.
Then again, maybe my Open Office program can open it. More exploring needed.
OpenOffice doesn't support .docx as far as I'm aware, only .doc, which is the Word 2003 and 97 default format (yes, they made it different, just to force people to update).
So anyway here is the slightly larger .doc format, just for you http://ifile.it/5jsuxta
You are a very nice person, and I want to feed you scotch.
Quote from: Cain on October 05, 2010, 04:38:11 PM
OpenOffice doesn't support .docx as far as I'm aware, only .doc, which is the Word 2003 and 97 default format (yes, they made it different, just to force people to update).
So anyway here is the slightly larger .doc format, just for you http://ifile.it/5jsuxta
Open Office supports it, as well as it ever supported .doc anyway.
That must be a new feature then, as previous versions did not.
Also, this is worth looking at http://lesswrong.com/lw/2un/references_resources_for_lesswrong/ It's basically a site-map.
I had to convert to .doc in order to send it to my Kindle. Here's a copy if anyone wants it:
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=QDCUK1AB
For some reason I had to go through and delete A LOT of empty space between articles. Something weird must have happened when I converted it.
Word 2007 has a weird formatting system, changing things into Word 2003 always leaves blank spaces a plenty, in my experience.
Possibly relevant areticle, I found it quite interesting.
http://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html (http://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html)
QuoteFirst, picture a monkey. A monkey dressed like a little pirate, if that helps you. We'll call him Slappy.
Imagine you have Slappy as a pet. Imagine a personality for him. Maybe you and he have little pirate monkey adventures and maybe even join up to fight crime. Think how sad you'd be if Slappy died.
Now, imagine you get four more monkeys. We'll call them Tito, Bubbles, Marcel and ShitTosser. Imagine personalities for each of them now. Maybe one is aggressive, one is affectionate, one is quiet, the other just throws shit all the time. But they're all your personal monkey friends.
Now imagine a hundred monkeys.
Not so easy now, is it? So how many monkeys would you have to own before you couldn't remember their names? At what point, in your mind, do your beloved pets become just a faceless sea of monkey? Even though each one is every bit the monkey Slappy was, there's a certain point where you will no longer really care if one of them dies.
So how many monkeys would it take before you stopped caring?
That's not a rhetorical question. We actually know the number.
QuoteConversely, some people in the distant past naively thought they could sit all of the millions of monkeys down and say, "Okay, everybody go pick the bananas, then bring them here, and we'll distribute them with a complex formula determining banana need! Now go gather bananas for the good of society!" For the monkeys it was a confused, comical, tree-humping disaster.
Later, a far more realistic man sat the monkeys down and said, "You want bananas? Each of you go get your own. I'm taking a nap." That man, of course, was German philosopher Hans Capitalism.
As long as everybody gets their own bananas and shares with the few in their Monkeysphere, the system will thrive even though nobody is even trying to make the system thrive. This is perhaps how Ayn Rand would have put it, had she not been such a hateful bitch.
Good catch, Rem.
Quote from: Remington on October 27, 2010, 05:49:23 PM
Possibly relevant areticle, I found it quite interesting.
http://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html (http://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html)
QuoteFirst, picture a monkey. A monkey dressed like a little pirate, if that helps you. We'll call him Slappy.
Imagine you have Slappy as a pet. Imagine a personality for him. Maybe you and he have little pirate monkey adventures and maybe even join up to fight crime. Think how sad you'd be if Slappy died.
Now, imagine you get four more monkeys. We'll call them Tito, Bubbles, Marcel and ShitTosser. Imagine personalities for each of them now. Maybe one is aggressive, one is affectionate, one is quiet, the other just throws shit all the time. But they're all your personal monkey friends.
Now imagine a hundred monkeys.
Not so easy now, is it? So how many monkeys would you have to own before you couldn't remember their names? At what point, in your mind, do your beloved pets become just a faceless sea of monkey? Even though each one is every bit the monkey Slappy was, there's a certain point where you will no longer really care if one of them dies.
So how many monkeys would it take before you stopped caring?
That's not a rhetorical question. We actually know the number.
QuoteConversely, some people in the distant past naively thought they could sit all of the millions of monkeys down and say, "Okay, everybody go pick the bananas, then bring them here, and we'll distribute them with a complex formula determining banana need! Now go gather bananas for the good of society!" For the monkeys it was a confused, comical, tree-humping disaster.
Later, a far more realistic man sat the monkeys down and said, "You want bananas? Each of you go get your own. I'm taking a nap." That man, of course, was German philosopher Hans Capitalism.
As long as everybody gets their own bananas and shares with the few in their Monkeysphere, the system will thrive even though nobody is even trying to make the system thrive. This is perhaps how Ayn Rand would have put it, had she not been such a hateful bitch.
This may sound strange, but that is exactly why I can't understand why people care about celebrities.
Quote from: The Lord and Lady Omnibus Fuck on October 28, 2010, 06:01:46 PM
Quote from: Remington on October 27, 2010, 05:49:23 PM
Possibly relevant areticle, I found it quite interesting.
http://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html (http://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html)
QuoteFirst, picture a monkey. A monkey dressed like a little pirate, if that helps you. We'll call him Slappy.
Imagine you have Slappy as a pet. Imagine a personality for him. Maybe you and he have little pirate monkey adventures and maybe even join up to fight crime. Think how sad you'd be if Slappy died.
Now, imagine you get four more monkeys. We'll call them Tito, Bubbles, Marcel and ShitTosser. Imagine personalities for each of them now. Maybe one is aggressive, one is affectionate, one is quiet, the other just throws shit all the time. But they're all your personal monkey friends.
Now imagine a hundred monkeys.
Not so easy now, is it? So how many monkeys would you have to own before you couldn't remember their names? At what point, in your mind, do your beloved pets become just a faceless sea of monkey? Even though each one is every bit the monkey Slappy was, there's a certain point where you will no longer really care if one of them dies.
So how many monkeys would it take before you stopped caring?
That's not a rhetorical question. We actually know the number.
QuoteConversely, some people in the distant past naively thought they could sit all of the millions of monkeys down and say, "Okay, everybody go pick the bananas, then bring them here, and we'll distribute them with a complex formula determining banana need! Now go gather bananas for the good of society!" For the monkeys it was a confused, comical, tree-humping disaster.
Later, a far more realistic man sat the monkeys down and said, "You want bananas? Each of you go get your own. I'm taking a nap." That man, of course, was German philosopher Hans Capitalism.
As long as everybody gets their own bananas and shares with the few in their Monkeysphere, the system will thrive even though nobody is even trying to make the system thrive. This is perhaps how Ayn Rand would have put it, had she not been such a hateful bitch.
This may sound strange, but that is exactly why I can't understand why people care about celebrities.
Because celebrities get LOTS and LOTS of bananas... they get bananas thrown at them on stage with room keys. Also, celebrity monkeys can get lots of monkey sex if they want...
There was a recent study on mirror neurons where they noticed brain activity was similar for a monkey getting a banana, and a monkey watching another monkey get a banana.