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Rationality Quotes December 2011
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On the difficulties of correctly fine-tuning your signaling:

I once expressed mild surprise at the presence of a garden gnome in an upper-middle-class garden …. The owner of the garden explained that the gnome was “ironic”. I asked him, with apologies for my ignorance, how one could tell that his garden gnome was supposed to be an ironic statement, as opposed to, you know, just a gnome. He rather sniffily replied that I only had to look at the rest of the garden for it to be obvious that the gnome was a tounge-in-cheek joke.

But surely, I persisted, garden gnomes are always something of a joke, in any garden—I mean, no-one actually takes them seriously or regards them as works of art. His response was rather rambling and confused (not to mention somewhat huffy), but the gist seemed to be that while the lower classes saw gnomes as intrinsically amusing, his gnome was amusing only because of its incongruous appearance in a “smart” garden. In other words, council-house gnomes were a joke, but his gnome was a joke about council-house tastes, effectively a joke about class….

The man’s reaction to my questions clearly defined him as upper-middle, rather than upper class. In fact, his po

... (read more)

Perhaps he's ultra-high-class, and is only defending the object-level irony of his garden gnome ironically.

Ah yes, my gnome. I’m very fond of my gnome.

Oh I am so getting my own gnome, just so that I can use that phrase on people.

I upvoted this half because I laughed and half because I now want a gnome.

6Multiheaded
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U_and_non-U_English Amusing illustration through a 1950s sociolinguistic study. (Damn, I swear there was a far longer discussion on signaling and countersignaling around here, can't find it.)
2Alejandro1
Yes, many of those words and their role as class shibboleths are discussed in Fox's book as well. IIRC, according to her in some cases there are three levels; either three different words for one thing used in lower, middle and upper classes, or (matching the counter-signaling in the gnome story) the same word being used in the lowermost and the uppermost classes.
6FiftyTwo
Out of interest, how does this read from a non-uk perspective?
3arundelo
I'm American and I thought it was quite funny.
2FiftyTwo
Funny in abstract or funny as in hauntingly familiar? ;)
4arundelo
Familiar -- but a little bit of both. It's a commonplace that English/British society is classful in a way that American society is not. That may well be true (I'm not qualified to judge), but America definitely has its own class distinctions. I would have trouble, though, putting them on a "lower, middle, upper-middle, upper"-type scale. On the other hand, I guess the story struck me mainly as an example of someone using irony as a personality statement, which can be done without reference to class. Just today when I was at the store I was idly playing with the idea of buying a Hello Kitty iPhone cover. (I am a 38-year-old male.) Edit: I can't think of an American analog of the garden gnome (we have them over here, but if they're as fraught as they are over the pond it's gone over my head), but when I try to think of a home-and-garden decoration that I would only display for irony (or maybe if a dear friend gave it to me), I think of a Thomas Kinkade painting.
1JoshuaZ
The degree of class issues isn't as conscious in the US (although by many metrics there's actually less class mobility in the US) but it still comes across as both funny and insightful.
4FiftyTwo
Someone, (whose identity I can't recall, some commentator or comedian) said that the British have class in the same way Americans have race. Not sure how true that is, but a middle class Indian person probably has more in common with a middle class white person in the UK.
4Prismattic
For a historical perspective, take a look at John C. Calhoun's statements on the need for racial hierarchy precisely to avoid the rise of class divisions among white Americans.
5Pfft
Maybe the story should be captioned "on the ease of fine-tuned signaling"? After all, the gnome-owner very effectively did communicate his class. On the other hand, deceiving people about your class is hard. But it's hard partly because there are so many way for people to send credible signals, so an absence of signaling becomes evidence on its own.

Hmm, what I had in mind when I wrote the caption was something like this:

The man's social model had three classes: lower class (owns gnomes non-ironically), middle class (would never own a gnome), upper class (can own a gnome "ironically" as a joke on low-class tastes), and he aimed for signalling upper-class status. He failed at fine-tuned signalling because he did not realize that his "upper class" behavior is actually upper-middle; true upper classes are allowed to own gnomes and genuinely like them, and don't need to defensively plead irony because they have no lingering anxiety about being confused with lower classes.

8Pfft
But how do we know that he aimed at signalling upper-class membership? The alternative I'm proposing is that middle-class people will not try to deceive others about their social position (because that would never work in the long run), but they are adopting lots of signalling about their true position, in order to not get mistakenly perceived as being lower than their true position during short encounters. I think this is consistent with common folk-wisdom about classes. I have often heard claimed that the primary concern of the lower-middle class is to distinguish themselves from working class. I have never heard it claimed that their primary concern is to pass as middle-middle class.

Miss Tick sniffed. "You could say this advice is priceless," she said, "Are you listening?"
"Yes," said Tiffany.
"Good. Now...if you trust in yourself..."
"Yes?"
"...and believe in your dreams..."
"Yes?"
"...and follow your star..." Miss Tick went on.
"Yes?"
"...you’ll still be beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren’t so lazy. Goodbye."

-- Terry Pratchett, The Wee Free Men

And they'll be beaten in turn by people who were in the right place at the right time, or won the genetic lottery. A little luck can make up for a lot of laziness, and working hard and learning things can just leave you digging ditches and able to quote every Simpsons episode verbatim.

working hard and learning things can just leave you digging ditches and able to quote every Simpsons episode verbatim.

http://www.engadget.com/2011/12/01/geeks-lose-minds-recreate-first-level-of-super-mario-land-with/

There's homage and there's homage. And then there's three guys spending over 500 hours to recreate the first two minutes and twenty seconds of Super Mario Land using more than 18 million Minecraft blocks. The movie, made by carpenter James Wright, Joe Ciappa and a gamer known as Tempusmori, had the guys running the classic monochrome platformer in an emulator and replicating it pixel-for-wool-block-pixel inside a giant Minecraft Game Boy. The team spent approximately four weeks, working six to seven hours a day with no days off...

[-][anonymous]190

And the worst thing is they don't use a piston array! Making a scrolling wall of blocks is fairly easy within Minecraft and would've saved them the trouble of manually shifting all their blocks every single frame. That's easily an order of magnitude less work, and can be re-used for other stop-motion movies.

Their excuse? "We dont have the smarts"(sic). Sigh.

2kpreid
Pistons can only push rows of 12 blocks; the Game Boy screen is much wider than that. I can imagine building a system to push groups of 12 separately without any exposed mechanism when idle, but I think that is likely to be impossible.
9[anonymous]
You could divide the screen into rows 12 blocks wide, each powered by an array, with a 2 block gap. You put the arrays one level below the display level and push the blocks up (via sticky pistons) each turn. You'd still have to manually fill in the gaps, but that's only 22 out of 160 lines. You can combine the arrays like a big stair and only have a 1 block gap, but that requires some manual working of the pistons each turn (because you can't hide the wiring). Not sure if it's worth it. I'm 30% confident it can be automated without exposed wiring. I have been thinking about a gapless way on-and-off over the last 2 days. I don't have one yet, but I'm 70% confident I can figure one out without the help of the r/redstone hivemind in less than 50 hours of thinking. I've put building a working implementation on my Minecraft todo list. There's no way this is impossible.
[-][anonymous]100

... and I've build a working prototype. Took about 3 hours to figure it out, 2 hours to get the wiring to work (first big redstone project), another 1-2 hours for the array and timing. It's trivial to scale and can be easily extended to push in both directions. The whole mechanism is hidden. I think there is a delay of ~8 seconds per 12 blocks, so scrolling the gameboy screen should take ~1.5 minutes. I'm sure you can get this below 1 minute if you try.

Here's the video. Here's the save. Here's a bunch of screenshots instead of a blueprint or explanation.

...why we can get people to do this but not our open volunteer tasks...

[-][anonymous]140

Volunteer tasks? I wasn't aware you (I'm assuming that means Less Wrong or SIAI) had any; perhaps you have a visibility problem?

Or maybe they're just not as engaging as an open-ended engineering environment with no arbitrary entry requirements and no visible resource constraints. . .

9gwern
http://www.singularityvolunteers.org/opportunities Less engaging and visible, yes. I was going to quote http://lesswrong.com/lw/h3/superstimuli_and_the_collapse_of_western/ back at Eliezer, but I don't think he's actually surprised, just lamenting the phenomenon.
-5Bugmaster
3JulianMorrison
What effort have you applied to making your volunteer tasks this catchy and rewarding?
0[anonymous]
You didn't get muflax to do this, he did it of his own accord.
1thomblake
Some exposed mechanism seems okay; it works for LCD displays (and some older ones had a pronounced screen-door effect). You could scale it up, but it is an unfortunate fact about Minecraft that mechanisms far away have no effect.
0spriteless
So it is a fail in both effectiveness and efficiency. http://www.ted.com/talks/tim_ferriss_smash_fear_learn_anything.html
7FiftyTwo
Its almost a new type of super-stimulus, where rather than being extraordinarily entertaining its extraordinarily difficult.
4wedrifid
Wow. That's absolutely bonkers. And impressive. XKCD almost seems realistic now!
1kurokikaze
I suspect it can be done programmatically, by wiring MC server to emulator, in less than 50 hours.
1Luke_A_Somers
What? They didn't implement the gameboy in minecraft? The bums!
3wedrifid
That would have been far more efficient after all. Do that and then copy out a game cartridge and you have a video of the entire game!

Thankfully for Mr. Pratchett, you can't influence the genetic lottery or the luck fairy, so his is still valid advice. In fact, one could see "trust in yourself" et al. as invitations to "do or do not, there is no try", whereas "work hard, learn hard and don't be lazy" supports the virtue of scholarship as well as that of "know when to give up". Miss Tick is being eminently practical, and "do or do not", while also an important virtue, requires way more explanation before the student can understand it.

8Nisan
Yeah. "Do or do not" / "believe in yourself" should either be administered on a case-by-case basis by a discerning mentor, or packaged with the full instruction manual.

“Should we trust models or observations?” In reply we note that if we had observations of the future, we obviously would trust them more than models, but unfortunately observations of the future are not available at this time.

Knutson and Tuleya, Journal of Climate, 2005.

2matt
In the absence of observations of future events, observation of the past performance of your model is advisable (and rare). If your confidence in the current accuracy of your model is much higher than the past performance of your models... you may be optimizing for something other than accuracy.
0dlthomas
Agreed, and in particular on data you did not consider in formulating it. Citation needed.
0matt
Your criticism is accepted. For my curiosity: which groups have you observed embracing the practice of introducing data on past model performance when presenting a new model? I failed to provide a source, but is it your impression that this isn't an area in which most people perform poorly
0dlthomas