My friend's kid explained The Hulk to me. She said he's a big green monster and when he needs to get things done, he turns into a scientist.
My 5 year old came to the dinner table, and calmly announced, "There is no Santa." I was puzzled because just couple of days ago he had taken his Christmas gift from Santa (though now that I think about it, he was not totally thrilled). So I asked why he thought so. He said, "Well, for Christmas I only got the gifts I told you about; I had gone to bed and told Santa himself what I wanted without telling you to see if he is real, and none of those came through - and I was a good boy all year!"
To be sure, I asked him, "But you saw Santa at the mall?" He laughed as hard as could be, then pointed out to me, "They are people in costumes!"
-- Wen Gong
A 5-year-old independently devised hypothesis testing. There is hope for this species.
Now we just need to teach him about estimating the probability that Santa looked at the full range of requests and decided to fulfill a subset that had only been told to the parents.
This morning my daughter told me that she did well on a spelling test, but she got the easiest words wrong. Of course that’s not exactly true. The words that are hardest for her to spell are the ones she in fact did not spell correctly. She probably meant that she missed the words she felt should have been easy. Maybe they were short words. Children can be intimidated by long words, even though long words tend to be more regular and thus easier to spell.
Our perceptions of what is easy are often upside-down. We feel that some things should be easy even though our experience tells us otherwise.
Sometimes the trickiest parts of a subject come first, but we think that because they come first they should be easy. For example, force-body diagrams come at the beginning of an introductory physics class, but they can be hard to get right. Newton didn’t always get them right. More advanced physics, say celestial mechanics, is in some ways easier, or at least less error-prone.
“Elementary” and “easy” are not the same. Sometimes they’re opposites. Getting off the ground, so to speak, may be a lot harder than flying.
I feel like this applies to programming as well. I'm rewriting a Rails project in Node. So, none of the higher-level aspects of re-writing it are difficult -- it's just learning all the idiosyncrasies of Node that takes time.
I spent my childhood believing I was destined to be a hero
in some far off magic kingdom.
It was too late when I realized that I was needed here.
If you don't pay appropriate attention to what has your attention, it will take more of your attention than it deserves.
-- David Allen
A remarkable, glorious achievement is just what a long series of unremarkable, unglorious tasks looks like from far away.
— Tim Urban (I think) of Wait But Why on How To Beat Procrastination
But losing can be upsetting, and can cause emotions to take the place of logical thinking. Below are some common “losing attitudes.” If you find yourself saying these things, consider it a red flag.
“At least I have my Code of Honor,” a.k.a. “You are cheap!”
This is by far the most common call of the scrub, and I’ve already described it in detail. The loser usually takes the imagined moral high ground by sticking to his Code of Honor, a made-up set of personal rules that tells him which moves he can and cannot do. Of course, the rules of the game itself dictate which moves a player can and cannot make, so the Code of Honor is superfluous and counterproductive toward winning. This can also take the form of the loser complaining that you have broken his Code of Honor. He will almost always assume the entire world agrees on his Code and that only the most vile social outcasts would ever break his rules. It can be difficult to even reason with the kind of religious fervor some players have toward their Code. This type of player is trying desperately to remain a “winner” any way possible. If you catch him amidst a sea of losses, you’ll notice that his Code will undergo strange contortions so that he may still define himself, somehow, as a “winner.”
I played a defender in high school school football. In football the defender can not touch or physically interfere the receiver of a pass from the time the pass is thrown until they catch the ball, to do so is a moderate penalty for the defenders team and considered bad sportsmanship at the amateur levels. As a adolescent that identified with Lawful Good, it came naturally to see Interference as against the rules, and not to be done.
It was an enlightening moment when a mentor explained that the penalties are not there to discourage and exclude types of behavior from the game. When they explained that penalties are part of the game with clearly defined rules, just another mechanical system to be gamed. That the penalty is not a punishment for bad behavior, but the price payed to implement certain tactics.
Yes and no. Sometimes certain things are against the rules because they risk injuring someone. I wish more sports would make explicit the difference between the rules you're allowed to break and pay the penalty and the rules you should never intentionally break, because disagreements over which category a particular rule falls into can be very vicious.
Competitive games like Go are most enjoyable when people all agree on the same rules, when losing grants you no excuses to salvage pride at the cost of the victor. For this to work, the rules must be unambigious. You either broke them and are a cheater and the match is invalid, or you exploited them and won fairly. Subjective codes of honor are extremely ambigious. My competitive game of choice (though I rarely play it these days) is Warcraft III, and the online community associated with it is rife with these kind of "codes of honor" (mostly in the mid levels of the skill hierarchy, or "ladder"; the low skill people are trying to learn, the high skill people got that way because they don't self-handicap, but the mid skill people want to imagine themselves as high skill people but with honor). I have seen several of these codes of honor. I once followed one. Examples are: "No mortar/sorceress, no mass chimera, no hero worker harass, no air worker harass no tower rushes, no tower/tank, no mass batriders, no mass raiders". There is never a clear line between honorable and dishonorable behavior. How many mortars and sorceresses do you have to have before i...
An example in chess could be the enforcement of the touch-move rule in a "friendly" game not played under tournament conditions. Personally, I would tend to see someone who insisted on applying this rule in a friendly game when the opponent makes a mistaken touch as a bit of a jerk who cares too much about winning. I am sure this varies across different people and different chess circles though.
Grossly overgeneralizing here, the difference between a "German-style game" or "Eurogame" and what is affectionately known as "Ameritrash" among boardgame enthusiasts (though there are games in both categories designed in both the US and Europe) is that Eurogames tend to be games involving strategic optimization to earn points, whereas Ameritrash tends to emphasis direct conflict between players. Though it's more of a spectrum than a dichotomy.
The big three light (as in easy-to-learn) Eurogames that really went mainstream are Settlers of Catan, Carcassonne, and Ticket to Ride. Of those three, only SoC really offers the possibility to be a dick to another player, and even there not to the degree you would see in direct-conflict games.
Note, among other things, that it is rare to have a runaway leader in these games, and in the cases of Carcassone and TTR, it's almost impossible to tell for sure who is winning until the game is over. That tends to keep everyone engaged and enjoying themselves.
If you want examples of heavier, pure Eurogames, take a look at something like Puerto Rico, Argricola, or Power Grid.
Watch Settters of Catan being played
Watch Car...
[I]n any system that is less than 100% perfect, some effort ends up being spent on checking things that, retrospectively, turned out to be ok.
[This] paper will be something of an exercise in saying the obvious, but on this topic it is worth saying the obvious first so that less obvious things can be said from there.
Influenced by this forum, I repeatedly tried to read up on basic philosophy over the last couple of years, only to recoil in disgust every time, after realizing that the "experts" keep discussing big ideas, big questions and so on without ever properly defining what the hell they are talking about to begin with. No wonder they then disagree on premises and conclusions.
People will call it immoral until they can afford it
-- blindcavefsh on reddit.com/r/futurology
I like this quote because it can serve as a replacement for "power corrupts" and also applies to things like embryo selection, so it seems to be pointing to something more general.
I don't think anyone is claiming that this describes all instances where someone calls something immoral.
It's merely calling attention to two interesting phenomena: (1) envy can make people regard something as immoral when their real problem with it is that others can have it and they can't, and (2) even when someone has actual principled reasons for disapproving of something, once they are in a position to take advantage of it themselves they are liable to forget those principles.
(Perhaps those are really the same phenomenon, deep down. But they feel different enough that, e.g., it took me a while to figure out how anyone could think the quotation had anything to do with the idea that "power corrupts" because I was initially thinking only of #1 while cousin_it was referring to #2.)
Thus the typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field. He argues and analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of his real interests. He becomes a primitive again.
Joseph Schumpeter
There are lots of mysteries in the world. But the truth is that maybe... those things aren't all that mysterious at all... Maybe they're just things I don't know about yet. And that's why they seem mysterious.
--Your partner in Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Gates to Infinity
It’s tempting to judge what you read: "I agree with these statements, and I disagree with those." However, a great thinker who has spent decades on an unusual line of thought cannot induce their context into your head in a few pages. It’s almost certainly the case that you don’t fully understand their statements. Instead, you can say: "I have now learned that there exists a worldview in which all of these statements are consistent." And if it feels worthwhile, you can make a genuine effort to understand that entire worldview. You don't have to adopt it. Just make it available to yourself, so you can make connections to it when it's needed.
Bret Victor, reflecting on Visualisation and Cognition: Drawing Things Together by Bruno Latour
The most traditional way to begin a study of quantum mechanics is to follow the historical developments--Planck's radiation law, the Einstein-Debye theory of specific heats, the Bohr atom, de Broglie's matter waves, and so forth--together with careful analyses of some key experiments such as the Compton effect, the Frank-Hertz experiment, and the Davisson-Germer-Thompson experiment. In that way we may come to appreciate how the physicists in the first quarter of the twentieth century were forced to abandon, little by little, the cherished concepts of classical physics and how, despite earlier false starts and wrong turns, the masters--Heisenberg, Schrodinger, and Dirac, among others--finally succeeded in formulating quantum mechanics as we know it today.
However, we do not follow the historical approach in this book. Instead, we start with an example that illustrates, perhaps more than any other example, the inadequacy of classical concepts in a fundamental way. We hope that by exposing the reader to a "shock treatment" at the onset, he or she may be attuned to what we might call the "quantum-mechanical way of thinking" at a very early stage.
-- Modern Quantum ...
The bulk of available evidence suggests that people in all societies tend to be relatively rational when it comes to the beliefs and practices that directly involve their subsistence... The more remote these beliefs and practices are from subsistence activities, the more likely they are to involve nonrational characteristics.
Robert Edgerton
As we saw, the E1A team [at Fermilab] found for some time that there were no neutral currents---they wrote letters saying so, even drafting a paper to that effect. By late 1973 they had a great deal riding on that claim. A consensus that neutral currents did not exist would have vindicated their earlier caution; they would have refuted CERN and denied the Europeans priority. For all these reasons it is stunning to reread Cline’s [a leading member of E1A] memorandum of 10 December 1973 that began with the simple statement, “At present, I do not see how to make this effect go away.” With those words Cline gave up his career-long commitment to the nonexistence of neutral currents. “Interest” had to bow to the linked assemblage of ideas and empirical results that rendered the old beliefs untenable, even if they were still “logically possible”.
[...]
Microphysical phenomena [...] are not simply observed; they are mediated by layers of experience, theory and causal stories that link background effects to their tests. But the mediated quality of effects and entities does not necessarily make them pliable; experimental conclusions have a stubbornness not easily canceled by theory change. And it is this solidity in the face of altering conditions that impresses the experimenters themselves---even when theorists dissent.
-Peter Galison, How Experiments End.
A major concept he introduces in this chapter is the stubbornness of empirical reality.
I'd like to offer a link to a blog post that looks very very rational to me. Though not in the usual-to-LW sense.
It starts like this:
One of the most consistent messages I offer here is about interactions with law enforcement, and can be expressed in two words — shut up — although "oh you dumb son of a bitch will you for the love of God shut up" might capture the flavor better.
I am so very good at what I do because I never really believe anything is going to work and I'm always looking for the ways the things I make will fail.
For it seemed to me that I could find much more truth in the reasonings that each person makes concerning matters that are important to him, and whose outcome ought to cost him dearly later on if he judged badly, than in those reasonings engaged in by a man of letters in his study, which touch on speculations that produce no effect and are of no other consequence to him except perhaps that, the more they are removed from common sense, the more pride he will take in them.
Rene Descartes
It's good to learn from your failures, but I prefer to learn from the failures of others.
-- Jace Beleren
"Indeed he knows not how to know who knows not also how to unknow." Sir Richard Francis Burton.
Probably written in the sense: "If you were really strong of mind, you'd will yourself into believing because I just threw an infinity into your expected value calculations", and upvoted in the sense: "Atheism is evidence of strength of mind, but it's become too common to serve as a really good test." (I know I've heard this idea on LessWrong before, I can't remember where though).
Kind of follow-up to the old does blind review slow down science post:
With all its merits, the traditional model of anonymous peer review clearly has flaws; reviewers under the convenient cloak of anonymity can use the system to settle scores, old boys’ clubs can conspire to prevent research from seeing the light of day, and established orthodox reviewers and editors can potentially squelch speculative, groundbreaking work. In the world of open science and science blogging, all these flaws can be – and have been – potentially addressed.
Actually found cited on the dark matter crisis by Pavel Kroupa where he gvies concrete examples:
...In addition to these 'formal' scientific interactions via academic publishers, there is also communication amongst scientists. For instance, early PhD students, who are still in the process of learning about the business of doing science, may be looking for advice from mentors and other more experienced scientists. Unfortunately, when the talk comes to controversial areas of science, students are often discouraged from getting involved in non-mainstream research (note, however, Avi Loeb's opposite advice). This begins with
I feel that music theory has gotten stuck by trying too long to find universals. Of course, we would like to study Mozart's music the way scientists analyze the spectrum of a distant star. Indeed, we find some almost universal practices in every musical era. But we must view these with suspicion, for they might show no more than what composers then felt should be universal. If so, the search for truth in art becomes a travesty in which each era's practice only parodies its predecessor's prejudice. Imagine formulating "laws" for television screenplays, taking them for natural phenomenon uninfluenced by custom or constraint of commerce.
I haven't read the whole text at the link (for which I'm grateful) yet, but I'll comment on the quoted paragraph.
I feel that music theory has gotten stuck by trying too long to find universals
More specifically, however, the problem is a confusion of universals with fundamentals. Music theory has succeeded in finding universals, but such universals by themselves aren't explanatory. If you don't know how to compose, it won't help you very much to learn that ancient flutes play the diatonic scale. And if you start doing statistical frequency analyses of local musical behavior patterns in some specific repertory, you've utterly gone off a cliff as far as explanation is concerned (at least, the kind of "explanation" that is of relevance to a prospective composer).
Music theory, as a discipline, suffers from a failure of query-hugging. My belief is that if theorists were to engage in honest introspection, they would, at the end of a (possibly quite long) chain of inference, reach the conclusion that their real goal is to devise a "programming language" for music: a set of concepts that facilitate the mental storage and manipulation of musical data. And that, if...
What he did love about this war was seeing theory put into practice. The life of the mind is a wonderful thing, but you don’t really know if a plan is any good when it’s still in your head, do you? You only have to read all of those vain treatises by long-ago rulers to know that self deception is one of the most common vices of Men. The only way to tell if your ideas are any good is to take them out and field test them.
-Erfworld
Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature.
-George Bernard Shaw
...In the fall of 1939, Martin Heidegger and his young Freiburg student and friend Günther Anders were walking along the river when they saw a newspaper vendor's sign announcing that the English had accused the German government of instigating a recent attempt to assassinate Churchill. When Heidegger remarked that it wouldn't surprise him at all if it were true, Anders retorted that it was impossible because "the Germans were too civilized and decent to attempt anything so underhand, and such an act was incompatible with the German 'national character'.
I think gwern is teasing us: there is no such quotation in Sluga's Heidegger's Crisis, or at least I cannot find it in the Google Books version. Perhaps gwern has taken the Wittgenstein/Malcolm story and swapped Britain for Germany to make a point about the universal applicability of the philosopher's rebuke.
But for what it's worth:
The date in the Heidegger version of the story is very suspicious: in 1939 Churchill was First Lord of the Admiralty; he did not become Prime Minister until May 1940 and it is only with hindsight that we see his significance (even in 1940 most political actors seem to have thought that Lord Halifax would be a better choice for Prime Minister than Churchill).
The version of the anecdote featuring Wittgenstein and Malcolm is backed up by a citation to Malcolm's Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir where Malcolm quotes the letter from Wittgenstein at length. Also, the 1939 date for the original quarrel about "national character" is a better fit to this story, because in 1939 no-one could doubt the significance of Hitler, and assassination attempts on Hitler were by that point a fairly regular occurrence.
A standard mistake is to do something to avoid criticism (as opposed to doing something because it is right), and, what's worse, show it. This seems trivial but smart people make the mistake all the time, not realizing the hormetic effect: critics will now have the stimulating challenge to find something else. If you are ever told "your critics will attack you for this", you should 1) answer: fuck them, 2) do more of it.
Surely you should do "0) consider why someone thinks it's wrong and whether there is merit to their view" before either 1) or 2)? Or is there some more context to this quote that makes this objection less relevant?
Taleb position of the topic is complicated.
He's a influential public intellectual. He advocates a style of engaging the 21st century intellectual discourse that useful if you want to become an influential public intellectual.
You become a public intellectual these days by making polarized points that allow people to engage with those points. If you add a lot of qualifications to what you are saying, people don't listen to you.
If you have critics that means that people are listen to you. Having critics is not a bad thing is you want to be a public intellectual. Nassim would say that the business of being a public intellectual is anti-fragile.
If you have found something for which critics will attack you, you have PR. Ryan Holiday worked as a PR person for Tucker Max and did thinks like defacing Tucker Max posters and in general making sure to increase the amount of feminists who criticize Tucker Max.
To be a public intellectual you have to make some points better than other people. It's an effective strategy to focus all of your energy on being able to make some points as strongly as possible.
Instead of "your critics will attack you for this" it's more important to focus o...
If you can discover in human life anything better than justice, truth, temperance, and courage... if, I say, you can see anything better than this, then turn to it with all your heart and profit from this supreme good which you have discovered.
But if nothing better is revealed... if you find all else to be trivial and cheap when compared to this, then grant no place to anything else which, if once you turn to it and turn aside from your path, you would no longer be able without distraction to pay the highest honor to the good that is proper to you and truly your own.
-Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (Book III)
You insist that there is something a machine cannot do. If you will tell me precisely what it is that a machine cannot do, then I can always make a machine which will do just that!
-- John von Neumann
Precautionary and Anti-Precautionary Heuristics. When harm is unbounded, never use a new technology if a more ancient one does the same function. When harm is bounded, never use a known technology if a newer one can do the same function. (Background: I just had a run-in on twitter with C Venter who was trying to invoke GMOs (Vitamin rice) as the only alternative to children's blindness (or moral grounds) when one can give these kids, carrots or pills, instead. But then Monsanto and other labs would never benefit from these standard solutions...)
Carrots have no measurable positive effect on eyesight.
Even for someone who is suffering from a clinical-grade Vitamin A deficiency?
What if the opposite of good wasn't bad? What if the opposite of good is real?
Those who answer directly to their blood often end up having a lot of blood to answer for.
Roderick Long
I spent my childhood believing I was destined to be a hero / in some far off magic kingdom / It was too late when I realized that I was needed here
...To give you an interesting quote from Hayden possible following up on the words of mine and others: We need to recruit from Snowdens generation, we need to recruit from this group because they have the skills that we require. So the challenge is how to recruit this talent but also protecting ourselves from the small fraction of that population that has this romantic attachment to absolute transperency at all costs."
And that's us. What we need to do is spread that message and go into all those organisations in fact deal with them. I'm not saying don'
You should act in a way that, if everyone acted that way, things would work out.
— Louis C.K.
Rules: