I recently remarked that the phrase "that doesn't seem obvious to me" is good at getting people to reassess their stated beliefs without antagonising them into a defensive position, and as such it was on my list of "magic phrases". More recently I've been using "can you give a specific example?" for the same purpose.
What expressions or turns of phrase do you find particularly useful in encouraging others, or yourself, to think to a higher standard?
This is not quite what you want, but if you are a grad student giving a talk and a senior person prefaces her question to you with "I am confused about...", you are likely talking nonsense and they are too polite to tell you straight up.
Which reminds me of my born-again Christian mother - evangelicals bend over backwards to avoid dissing each other, so if you call someone "interesting" in a certain tone of voice it means "dangerous lunatic" and people take due warning. (May vary, this is in Perth, Australia.)
depersonalizing the argument is something I've had great success with. Steelmanning someone's argument directly is insulting, but steelmanning it by stating that it is similar to the position of high status person X, who is opposed by the viewpoint of high status person Y allows you to discuss otherwise inflammatory ideas dispassionately.
I've experimented with repersonalizing arguments: instead of challenging someone
else for holding a belief, I direct the challenge at myself by putting their
argument in my own mouth and saying what contrary evidence prevents me from
believing it.
Someone else: You know that global warming business is a load of rubbish, right?
Isn't real.
Me: That's not obvious to me. There are records of global average surface
temperatures going back 150 years or so.
Someone else: Well, they can't know what the temperature was like before then.
Me: I'm sometimes inclined to think so, but then I'd have to contend with the
variety of records based on tree rings, ice cores, and boreholes which go back
centuries or millennia.
5gwillen10y
I frequently use "Hmm, it's not entirely clear to me that [X]...", which seems
very directly analogous to yours.
8mindspillage10y
I like this, and also "I don't quite understand why [X]", which puts them in the
pleasant position of explaining to me from a position of superiority--or
sometimes realizing that they can't.
2Viliam_Bur10y
I guess this only works on people who feel friendly. Making them also feel
superior... now they owe you a decent explanation.
A hostile person could find other way to feel superior, without explanation. For
example, they could say: "Just use google to educate yourself, dummy!"
That one seems much more effective after one has absorbed certain memes. In contrast the one's given by sixes_and_sevens seem to work in a more general setting.
So, everyone agrees that commuting is terrible for the happiness of the commuter. One thing I've struggled to find much evidence about is how much the method of commute matters. If I get to commute to work in a chauffeur driven limo, is that better than driving myself? What if I live a 10 minute drive/45 minute walk from work, am I better off walking? How does public transport compare to driving?
I suspect the majority of these studies are done in US cities, so mostly cover people who drive to work (with maybe a minority who use transit). I've come across a couple of articles which suggest cycling > driving here and conflicting views on whether driving > public transit here but they're just individual studies - I was wondering if there's much more known about this, and figured that if there is, someone here probably knows it. If no one does, I might get round to a more thorough perusal of the literature myself now I've publicly announced that the subject interests me.
I think it entirely depends on what you do during your commute.
A lot of drivers who drive during rush hour feel stress because they get annoyed
at the behavior of other drivers. That's terrible for the happiness of the
commuter.
Traveling via public transport also gives you plenty of opportunities to get
upset over other people. It provides you the opportunity to get upset if the bus
comes a bit late.
If you travel via public transport you can do tasks like reading a book that you
can't do while driving a car or cycling.
4niceguyanon10y
Does anyone else experience the phenomenon of perceiving the duration of a
commute to be shorter when the distance is shorter? For example, it feels like
it takes less time or is more enjoyable to walk 3/4 mile in 15 minutes than to
travel a few miles by subway in 15 minutes. I think its because being close in
proximity makes me feel like "Hey I'm basically there already" where as
traveling a few miles makes me think "I'm not even in the same neighborhood yet"
even though both of these take me the same amount of time.
For me an important aspect is feeling of control. 15 minutes of walking is more pleasant that 10 minutes of waiting for bus and 5 minutes of travelling by bus.
Every now and then, I decide that I don't have the patience to wait 10 minutes for a bus that would take me to where I'm going in 10 minutes. So I walk, which takes me an hour.
I had the opposite effect recently - I thought that I'd save time by waiting for
the bus, but it turns out that walking gets me to work from the train about 12
minutes sooner. Coming back, I don't have a ridiculous wait, so I still take the
bus.
I could do even better if I got some wheels of some sort involved. Maybe it's
time to take up skateboarding. Scooter? Bike seems like it would be too
cumbersome, even if I can get one that folds up.
0spqr0a110y
If the commute is mostly flat, consider Freeline skates. They take up much less
space than any of the mentioned wheels; the technique is different from
skateboarding but the learning curve isn't any worse.
0Luke_A_Somers10y
I have discovered that I am so terrible at skateboarding and rollerblading that
self-preservation requires me to stop trying.
Not in general, but I recognize your example. Walking is pleasant and active and allows me to think sustained thoughts, so it makes time 'pass' quickly. Whereas riding the subway is passive and stressful and makes me think many scattered thoughts in short time, so it makes time 'pass' slowly, making the ride seem longer. Also, if you walk somewhere in 15 minutes that probably takes about 15 minutes, but if you ride the subway for 15 minutes that probably takes more like half an hour from when you leave home to when you get to your goal.
More generally, I've noticed I tend to underestimate how much time it passes
when I'm directly controlling how fast I'm going (climbing stairs, driving on an
open road, reading) and overestimate it when I'm not (using an elevator, driving
in congested traffic, watching a video).
Short-distance public transport is an exception: once I'm on the bus, it feels
like it takes 5 minutes to get from home to the university, but it actually
takes 20.
1Camaragon10y
I download loads of music and audiobook and books (though it's more bothersome
to read while moving) and listen to them on my commute to work, it takes me
around 45 minutes commute to get to work via train system and it takes the same
time to get back home. Doing this, I totally don't mind the commute. Look
forward to it even since It was the only time I get to read or listen to
anything.
0aelephant10y
Better in what way?
According to Freakonomics, public transportation may actually be less efficient
than driving:
http://www.freakonomics.com/2012/11/07/can-mass-transit-save-the-environment-right-wing-or-left-wing-heres-a-post-everybody-can-hate/
[http://www.freakonomics.com/2012/11/07/can-mass-transit-save-the-environment-right-wing-or-left-wing-heres-a-post-everybody-can-hate/]
5bentarm10y
Apologies, I should have made this clearer (and will probably edit the original
to do so). Commuting is terrible for the happiness of the commuter. The rest of
the post should be interpreted in light of this.
As for the Freakonomics research - it seems quite implausible that the marginal
commuter has a bigger impact by taking transit rather than a car (I seem to
remember listening to an episode of Freakonomics radio about this discussion,
and being disappointed by the lack of marginal analysis).
0NancyLebovitz10y
I wonder whether it would help to use smaller buses/shorter trains at off-peak
hours.
I've just noticed that the Future of Humanity Institute stopped receiving direct funding from the Oxford Martin School in 2012, while "new donors continue to support its work."
http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/institutes/future_humanity
Posting here rather than the 'What are you working on' thread.
3 weeks ago I got two magnets implanted in my fingers. For those who haven't heard of this before, what happens is that moving electro-magnetic fields (read: everything AC) cause the magnets in your fingertips to vibrate. Over time, as nerves in the area heal, your brain learns to interpret these vibrations as varying field strengths. Essentially, you gain a sixth sense of being able to detect magnetic fields, and as an extension, electricity. It's a $350 superpower.
The guy who put them in my finger told me it will take about six months before I get full sensitivity. So, what I'm doing at the moment is research into this and quantifying my sensitivity as it develops over time. The methodology I'm using is wrapping a loop of copper wire around my fingers and hooking it up to a headphone jack, which I will then plug into my computer and send randomized voltage levels through. By writing a program so I can do this blind, I should be able to get a fairly accurate picture of where my sensitivity cutoff level is.
One thing I'm stuck on is how to calculate the field strength acting on my magnets. Getting the B field for a solen... (read more)
"superpower" is overstating it. Picking up paperclips is neat and being able to feel metal detectors as you walk through them or tell if things are ferrous is also fun but it's more of just a "power" than a superpower. It also has the downside of you needing to be careful around hard-drives and other strong magnets. On net I'm happy I got them but it's not amazing.
FYI, there's no need to be careful around hard drives (except for your own
safety, since they're large chunks of metal your magnet will stick to.) The
platters of a modern hard drive are too high-coercivity and too well-shielded
for even a substantial neodymium magnet (bigger than you can fit in a fingertip)
to affect them.
Credit cards, on the other hand.
8wedrifid10y
Great thinking! Once you have fully developed and trained your superpower
sensitivity you can read the cards by merely brushing your hands past someone's
wallet!
0CronoDAS10y
::deliberately failing to get the joke::
I think the issue is that the magnets will destroy the data on the credit card
stripe...
6BerryPick610y
Also, aren't MRI's going to be a problem?
3drethelin10y
It's not the being careful about ruining them, it's the giant magnet IN them
that can fuck you up.
4Username10y
I'd mostly agree with that. After I finish my current project though I have some
more in mind about using them as input methods, so for me they're as much toys I
can experiment with as anything else.
Do you notice the accumulation of ferrous, for the lack of a better word, dust
fragments?
My magnets I have for misc. projects at home quickly pick up a collection of
small fragments, but maybe my world is just to closely tied to steel fabrication
shops.
1Username10y
Not yet, though I haven't done any metalwork since I got the magnets.
This was one of the questions I asked the guy who put them in, since I'll be
running into this eventually. He said that this was one of his concerns going
into getting his own, as he does a lot of work in a shop, but that he has found
that iron and steel filings haven't been a problem.
1knb10y
Is there any practical use for having magnets in your fingers? It seems like a
bizarrely bad idea to me.
6Username10y
Besides telling if a device is live or not, not that I know of. The one major
issue is that you can't have an MRI, although if I'm in a situation where I
can't tell a doctor that I have them, magnets being ripped out of my fingers is
the least of my worries. If need be, I could have a doctor make a small incision
and take them out. And I do have to be careful not to hold on to powerful
magnets for too long, or it will crush the skin in between the two magnets.
Other than that though, there's no real downside. They're off to the side so it
doesn't affect my grip, and once my skin finishes healing they'll be
unnoticeable.
The upside for me is the qualia of sensing emfs and having them as toys to play
with. I treated the decision like getting a tattoo, where my personal rule is I
have to love a design for a continuous year before getting it. I haven't settled
on a design long enough to get a tattoo, but I had planned on getting magnets
for about a year and a half so I went ahead and did it.
-1drethelin10y
Having extra senses is pretty cool.
5Sabiola10y
I'm wearing a magnetic ring (a post on LW gave me the idea). It's fun, and I can
take it off whenever I want to. Occasionally it comes in useful too; when I need
to open up my computer I can put the little screws on my ring, and I can tell
whether a pot will work on my induction hot plate.
0Luke_A_Somers10y
This sounds like a much lower-commitment variant, but it doesn't seem like it
would have close to the same sensitivity.
There's something that happens to me with an alarming frequency, something that I almost never (or don't remember) see being referenced (and thus I don't know the proper name). I'm talking about that effect when I'm reading a text (any kind of text, textbook, blog, forum text) and suddenly I discover that two minutes passed and I advanced six lines in the text, but I just have no idea of what I read. It's like a time blackhole, and now I have to re-read it.
Sometimes it also happens in a less alarming way, but still bad: for instance, when I'm reading something that is deliberately teaching me an important piece of knowledge (as in, I already know whathever is in this text IS important) I happen to go through it without questioning anything, just "accepting" it and a few moments later it suddenly comes down on me when I'm ahead: "Wait... what, did he just say 2 pages ago that thermal radiation does NOT need matter to propagate?" and I have again to go back and check that I was not crazy.
While I don't know the name of this effect, I have asked some acquantainces of mine about that, while some agreed that they have it others didn't. I would like very much to eliminate this flaw, anybody knows what I could do to train myself not to do it or at least the correct name so I can research more about it?
I give you credit for noticing you're running on automatic in as little as five
minutes.
This is a guess, but meditation might help since it's a way of training the
ability to focus.
7polutropon10y
Are you sleep deprived? This kind of attention lapse sounds like the calling
card of a microsleep [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsleep].
5David_Gerard10y
I do this all the time. I have seen it referred to in literature (a character
reading a page three times before realising he can't take it in, as a way to
show that he's extremely distracted), but that's not quite the same as just
zoning out.
5moreati10y
If it's material you want to/are required to learn from try taking notes as you
read the material, to force yourself to recall it in your own terms/language.
If it's just recreational/online reading try increasing the font size/spacing or
decreasing the browser width, or using a browser extension like readability.
Don't scroll with the scroll bar or the mouse wheel - use pg up/pg down to make
it easier to keep your position.
5[anonymous]10y
I don't know if I deliberately developed a habit of highlighting the current
paragraph when reading long articles, but it has become extremely useful.
2tim10y
In the same vein, I get easily distracted when reading text and the ability to
click around, select and deselect text that I'm reading helps me to stay
engaged.
Writing that out it sounds like it would be super distracting but its not (for
me). Possibly related to the phenomenon where some people work better with noise
in the background rather than in silence. Clicking around might help maintain a
minimum level of stimulation while reading.
0[anonymous]10y
Chewing gum does this for me. It's the perfect level of low-level background
stimulation to focus on important things.
3Alsadius10y
There was a couple university classes where I found that playing Sudoku in class
actually helped me learn the material, because I gained more in alertness than I
lost in distraction.
0Sabiola10y
When I was in school I couldn't take notes. I couldn't write fast enough, and
trying to write things down occupied so much of my attention I couldn't follow
what the teacher was saying next. I should have learned shorthand; but instead I
doodled. Somehow, keeping my hands busy kept my ears open.
0Emile10y
I don't have any stats, but wouldn't be surprised if the majority of people
(sometimes) read on a computer like that, by highlighting various bits as they
go.
0letter710y
I understand the "recall in your own terms", that sounds like very practical
advice, even more in my case since english isn't my mother language and thus I
could try translating it, which would ensure a deeper understanding. Thanks.
I don't see how the way that information is displayed (font size/spacing and
using the scroll bar) could impact in the way I'm reading, could you explain
that a little more?
4shminux10y
Probably automaticity [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automaticity] is what you
are looking for. I am not sure how to force one's mind to attend to a repetitive
task. One trick for avoiding reading automaticity is to paraphrase and check for
potential BS every paragraph or so.
3letter710y
Indeed it's something along those lines, however, in the article it's
represented in a positive light, where
My problem is that, somehow, I do that, but without comprehending anything. The
article linked to an interesting program in Australia, though, QuickSmart
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuickSmart]. It's aimed at middle students, but I
think I could perhaps benefinit from it.
2Alsadius10y
I have this happen sometimes - usually it's because I let my mind wander to
something unrelated but I kept my eyes moving out of habit.
2aelephant10y
I can't remember where I read it, but I remember hearing that in order to really
understand an argument, you have to take a leap of faith & accept all of the
propositions & conclusions in that argument. If you don't, you will be
automatically & subconsciously strawmanning it. After you've exposed yourself to
the whole idea, you can go back & look at it critically. I have no idea if this
is BS & wish I could track down where I came across it. Cheers to any help.
0David_Gerard10y
Aha, It happens to Redditors too! Rage comic [http://i.imgur.com/cG6XHuE.jpg],
thread [http://www.reddit.com/r/fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu/comments/1i9fn7/bookrage/].
2Risto_Saarelma10y
Trying to read Neuromancer when I was 11, after a local computer magazine had
written about how it's basically the best book ever, was basically this all the
time. I knew very few English cultural idioms back then, and Gibson really likes
his cultural idioms, like "You ever the heat?" for "Did you use to be a cop?" I
could read Stephen King novels in English fine at that point, but Neuromancer
was just pages and pages of me having no idea what's going on, and I eventually
gave up about a third in.
0David_Gerard10y
Not quite - this is talking about words you could understand but your attention
wanders.
Did you ever come back to it, or try a translation?
0Risto_Saarelma10y
I also get the thing where I stop understanding text just from not paying
attention, and as far as I remember, the experience of reading that was the
same. I don't remember ever being actively aware that I couldn't understand the
text, just having the constant weird situation of reading sentences I seemed to
be able to read just fine, but still ending with very little idea of what the
narrative was.
I picked up the book again a couple of years ago and read it through without
problem. That was also when I got a clearer idea of how the book was full of
tricky narrative beats I'd have had no hope of understanding properly the first
time around.
2David_Gerard10y
To be honest, I got that from Gibson first time through the trilogy and I'm a
native speaker ;-) They made more sense on rereading.
0Discredited10y
I'm sorry to drop references without a summary, but this will have to do at the
moment: "Lost thoughts: Implicit semantic interference impairs reflective access
to currently active information"
[http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=6550866326515738228&hl=en&as_sdt=0,50]
0NancyLebovitz10y
.....Slicereader
[http://bbs.boingboing.net/t/slicereader-displays-online-text-one-paragraph-at-a-time/2177/2]
which breaks text into paragraphs that are displayed one-per-page. To advance to
the next paragraph, you press the spacebar.
Hey komponisto (and others interested in music) -- if you haven't already seen Vi Hart's latest offering, Twelve Tones, you might want to take a look. Even though it's 30 minutes long.
(I don't expect komponisto, or others at his level, will learn anything from it. But it's a lot of fun.)
I second the recommendation. I found it interesting that I enjoyed it so much
despite learning almost nothing at all. Everything in the video was stuff I'd
heard or thought about before, but seeing it presented in a unified, artistic,
humorous fashion was very entertaining.
3tim10y
On the flip-side, I know almost nothing about music, was unable to understand a
lot of the video, and still enjoyed it quite a bit.
0NancyLebovitz10y
I had no idea that the purpose of twelve tone was to teach people how to
decontextualize musical sounds. Is listening to such music more valuable than
meditation?
A Big +1 to whoever modified the code to put pink borders around comments that are new since the last time I logged in and looked at an article. Thanks!
I noticed a strategy that many people seem to use; for lack of a better name, I will call it "updating the applause lights". This is how it works:
You have something that you like and it is part of your identity. Let's say that you are a Green. You are proud that Greens are everything good, noble, and true; unlike those stupid evil Blues.
Gradually you discover that the sky is blue. First you deny it, but at some moment you can't resist the overwhelming evidence. But at that moment of history, there are many Green beliefs, and the belief that the sky is green is only one of them, although historically the central one. So you downplay it and say: "All Green beliefs are true, but some of them are meant metaphorically, not literally, such as the belief that the sky is green. This means that we are right, and the Blues are wrong; just as we always said."
Someone asks: "But didn't Greens say the sky is green? Because that seems false to me." And you say: "No, that's a strawman! You obviously don't understand Greens, you are full of prejudice. You should be ashamed of yourself." The someone gives an example of a Green that literally believed the sky i... (read more)
My strategy is to avoid conversations of this form entirely by default. Most Greens do not need to be shown that the belief system they claim to have is flawed, and neither do most Blues. Pay attention to what people do, not what they say. Are they good people? Are they important enough that bad epistemology on their part directly has large negative effects on the world? If the answers to these questions are "yes" and "no" respectively, then who cares what belief system they claim to have?
I'm really going to try and remind myself of this more often. Most of the time
the answers are "yes" and "no" and points are rarely won for pointing out bad
epistemology.
Yes, like moving-the-goalposts, this is an annoying and dishonest rhetorical move.
Yes, even withing the Green movement, some people may be confused and misunderstand our beliefs, also our beliefs have evolved during time, but trust me that being Green is not about believing that the sky is literally green.
Suppose some Green says:
Yes, intellectual precursors to the current Green movement stated that the sky was literally Green. And they were less wrong, on the whole, then people who believed that the sky was blue. But the modern intellectual Green rejects that wave of Green-ish thought, and in part identifies the mistake as that wave of Greens being blue-ish in a way. In short, the Green movement of a previous generation made a mistake that the current wave of Greens rejects. Current Greens think we are less wrong than the previous wave of Greens.
Problematic, or reasonable non-mindkiller statement (attacking one's potential allies edition)?
How much of that intuition is driven by the belief that Bluism is correct. If we change the labels to Purple (some Blue) and Orange (no Blue), does the intuition change?
If, after realizing an old mistake, you find a way to say "but I was at least
sort of right, under my new set of beliefs," then you are selecting your beliefs
badly. Don't identify as a person who iwas right, or as one who is right;
identify as a person who will be right. Discovering a mistake has to be a
victory, not a setback. Until you get to this point, there is no point in trying
to engage in normal rational debate; instead, engage them on their own grounds
until they reach that basic level of rationality.
For people having an otherwise rational debate, they need to at this point drop
the Green and Blue labels (any rationalist should be happy to do so, since
they're just a shorthand for the full belief system) and start specifying their
actual beliefs. The fact that one identifies as a Green or a Blue is a red flag
of glaring irrationality, confirmed if they refuse to drop the label to talk
about individual beliefs, in which case do the above. Sticking with the labels
is a way to make your beliefs feel stronger, via something like a halo effect
where every good thing about Green or Greens gets attributed to every one of
your beliefs.
1JoshuaZ10y
There's a further complicating factor: often when this happens, both modern
Blues and Greens won't exactly correspond to historical Blues and Greens even
though both are using the same terms. Worse, when the entire region of
acceptable social policy has changed, sometimes an extreme Green or Blue today
might be what was seen as someone of the other type decades ago.
2TimS10y
Yes, the first wave of a movement may have many divergent descendents, which end
up on different sides of a current political dispute. And the direct-est
descendent might be on the opposite side of the political divide from what we
would predict the first-wave proponents would adopt. But for that to happen,
there needs to be significant passage of time.
By contrast, if the third wave of a movement cannot point to an immediately
prior second wave that actually believed the position criticized (and which the
third wave has already rejected), then Villiam_Bur's moving-the-goalposts
criticism has serious bite, to the point that an outsider probably should not
accept the third wave as genuinely interested in rational discussion or true
beliefs.
4JoshuaZ10y
And here we were having a very nice discussion without pointing out any
potentially controversial/mindkilling examples. Using the phrasing of second and
third wave doesn't make it less subtle or less potentially mindkilling.
In the specific case which you are not so obliquely referencing, there's a
pretty strong argument that much of thirdwave feminism has strands from first
and second wave, while also agreeing on the most basic premises.
It is also worth noting in this context, that movements (wherever they are
politically) aren't in general after rational discussion or true beliefs but at
accomplishing specific goal sets. You will in any diverse movement find some
strains that are more or less interested in rational discussion, but criticizing
a movement for its failure to embody rationality is not by itself a very useful
criticism.
2Emile10y
Um, I had not linked the parent of your comment to any specific movement until
you pointed out the possible existence of such a link ...
7David_Gerard10y
It is the big obvious current example where the ideological battle is between
"second wave" and "third wave" and the first wave is barely mentioned. I
encounter it in relation to the UK social justice Twittersphere, which is
tangential to the more Kankri Vantas stretches of Tumblr. (Or, more accurately,
the Porrim Maryam stretches.)
Edit: Can anyone think of another field described as having numbered waves where
the battle was between second and third?
7JoshuaZ10y
I'm pretty sure that's what TimS was talking about given his use of the phrases
"second wave" and "third wave". It is especially clear because if one was going
to be talking about a generic example and using the term wave, one would in the
same context have likely discussed the first wave v. the second wave. The
off-by-one only makes sense in that specific historical context.
3Luke_A_Somers10y
Oppositely, the second and third waves immediately screamed 'feminism' to me,
but I couldn't assemble the rest of the analogy. The third wave has plenty of
legitimate differences and similarities with both the first and second waves.
I'm still not sure what TimS was getting at.
7NancyLebovitz10y
This process can be a stage in the process of leaving the Greens-- I've heard
stories of deconversion which sounded a lot like that.
7taelor10y
Karl Popper came up with the Falsifiability Principle as a direct response to
watching Marxists, Freudians, and others do exactly this.
6Jack10y
Ideologies and theo-philosophical schools are rarely if ever defined precisely
enough to exclude true facts about the world or justifications for genuinely
good ideas. They're more collections of rules of thumb, methods, technical terms
and logics. If mathematically formulated scientific theories are
under-determined [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duhem%E2%80%93Quine_thesis] then
ideologies are so, but ten-fold. The problem of inferential distance when it
comes to worldviews isn't really about shear decibels of information that need
to be communicated. It's that the interlocutors are playing different games and
speaking different languages. And I suspect most deconversions are more like
picking up a new language and forgetting your old one, than they are the product
of repeated updates based on the predictive failures of the old
ideology/religion. It's a pseudo-rational process which is why it doesn't
reliably occur in just one direction.
Back to your point: since people have egos, memetic complexes usually have
self-perpetuating features and applause lights don't constrain future experience
it makes sense that if anything is held constant it will be Greens being really
sure they are right. That's non-optimal and definitely irksome to people like
all of us. It's inefficient because we're spending a resources on constructing
post-hoc justifications for how the real Green answer is the true one and the
corrections to our model may not be more curve-fitting. That is, what ever
beliefs and assumptions that led the Greens to be wrong in the first place may
still be in place. Plus, it is kind of creepy in a "we've always been at war
with Eurasia" kind of way.
But on the other hand it is sort of okay, right? At least they're updating! You
can think of academic departments of philosophy, religion, law and humanities as
just the cost of doing business to mollify our egos as we change our minds. And
changing people's minds this way is almost certainly much easier than making
6Paul Crowley10y
This sounds very much like religion - I'd be interested in hearing about a solid
non-religious example.
9TimS10y
Let's avoid object level examples until we resolve how to distinguish this
dishonest rhetorical move from honest updates on the low validity of prior
arguments now abandoned. Otherwise, we get bogged down in mindkiller without any
general insight into how to be more rational.
3ESRogs10y
But aren't we all agreed the specific examples are super-helpful for
understanding a general phenomenon?
2David_Gerard10y
Politics. Social issues. You see a lot of it when circumstances change and a
political party or activist organisation has to then reconcile the conflict
between consequentialism and deontology, and somehow satisfy both sets of
followers.
3Paul Crowley10y
I discussed this with coffeespoons yesterday; the trouble is that political
leaders often speak much less ambiguously than religious ones, so there's a lot
less room to say "Well, what Marx really meant was..."
-1David_Gerard10y
I dunno. I am reluctant to name present-day political examples on LW, but you
doubtless feel a slight urge to throw your computing device against the wall
when you see some current eloquent bit of black-has-always-been-white spin from
our esteemed leaders here in the UK.
I found myself at our local church a couple of Sundays ago, where the sermon was
a really very good polemic conclusively demonstrating that Galatians 2 rules
racism as unChristian. I thought it was marvellously reasoned and really quite
robust, except for the problem of large chunks of observed Christian history.
(The resolution: you can, of course, prove anything and its opposite from a
compilation that size.)
2mstevens10y
I think there's a related rhetorical trick that's something like redefining the
applause lights, or brand extension.
Greens believe the sky is green. I want them to believe the entire world is
green. I will use their commitment to sky greeness and just persuade them it
means something slightly different.
Clouds are kind of like the sky so should really be considered green if you're
being fair about things. And rain is in the sky, who are you to say it's not
green? Rain falls on the ground, which is therefore also part of the sky.
After a while, you can persuade people that, since the sky is green, obviously
rocks are green.
This explanation isn't great but more practical examples are somewhat
mindkilling.
2[anonymous]10y
Some selection effects: I wonder if the perceived solidarity of most
identity-heavy groups is due to vague language that easily facilitates mind
projection within the group. Surviving communities will have either reduced
their exposure to fracturing forces, or drifted towards more underspecified
beliefs as a result of such exposure. I think religious strains fall very nicely
into these two groups, but I'm not so sure about political groups.
3Viliam_Bur10y
Being specific is a good rationalist tool and a bad strategy for social
relations. The more specific one is, the fewer people agree with them. The best
social strategy is to have a few fuzzy applause lights and gather agreement
about them.
I'll try to find a less sensitive political example. Some people near me are
fans of "direct democracy"; they propose it as a cure for all the political
problems. I try being more specific and ask whether they imagine that people in
the whole country will vote together, or that each region will vote separately
on their local policies... but they refuse to discuss this, because they see
that it would split their nicely agreeing group into disagreeing subgroups. But
for me this distinction seems very important in predicting the consequences of
such system.
-2ChristianKl10y
If you talk with a rationalist about making decisions via intuition, he has to
grant you that their are domains of problems where intuition is very useful.
Rationalism is about winning, so of course a good rationalist will use intuition
for those domains.
If you look at medicine, In the last decade Cochrane has finally found that
chiropractors can successfully treat back pain, even through their mental model
of the human body conflicts with the model of mainstream medicine.
Most big mental systems get updated over time. As long as you do update towards
new evidence, you don't have to trash your old beliefs completely.
If you read any amount of history, you will discover that people of various times and places have matter-of-factly believed things that today we find incredible (in the original sense of “not credible”). I have found, however, that one of the most interesting questions one can ask is “What if it really was like that?”
... What I’m encouraging is a variant of the exercise I’ve previously called “killing the Buddha”. Sometimes the consequences of supposing that our ancestors reported their experience of the world faithfully, and that their customs were rational adaptations to that experience, lead us to conclusions we find preposterous or uncomfortable. I think that the more uncomfortable we get, the more important it becomes to ask ourselves “What if it really was like that?”
In my experience, moral panics are almost never about what they claim to be about. I am just (barely) old enough to remember the tail end of the period (around 1965) when conservative panic about drugs and rock music was actually rooted in a not very-thinly-veiled fear of the corrupting influence of non-whites on pure American children. In ret
It seems fairly believable that an oppressed underclass that is intentionally
deprived of education and opportunity will, on average, be cruder, less
intellectually inclined, have less wealth and status, and more prone to failing
at life in various ways due to the lack of a support structure. This is true of
any group, whatever their intrinsic nature, simply due to the act of
discrimination.
I remember once reading an essay about Jews in(IIRC) Rudyard Kipling's works,
where they're portrayed in pretty appalling ways, while all sorts of other
groups are portrayed positively. The author came to the conclusion that acting
in cowardly and profiteering fashion was a survival tactic created by
anti-semitic laws, and that Kipling was probably just conveying the reality of
the time. (I'm not enough of an expert to judge the truth of this, but it seemed
reasonable)
Sure. Also see the recent follow-ups to the Stanford marshmallow experiment. It sure looks like some of what was once considered to be innate lack of self-restraint may rather be acquired by living in an environment where others are unreliable, promises are broken, etc.
Possibly, but the followup only tells us that, at least in the short term, kids
will be less likely to delay gratification from specific individuals who have
proven to be untrustworthy (and the protocol of that experiment kind of went for
overkill on the "demonstrating untrustworthiness" angle.)
It might be that children become less able to delay gratification if raised in
environments where they cannot trust promises from their guidance figures, but
the same effect could very easily be caused by rational discounting of the value
of promises from individuals who have proven unlikely to deliver on them.
3Viliam_Bur10y
Your argument sounds perfectly reasonable to me. Yet I would advise against
reversing stupidity. Just because there is a systematic influence that makes it
worse for the opressed people, it does not automatically mean that without that
influence all the differences would disappear. Although it is worth trying
experimentally.
0Alsadius10y
Agreed, of course. I never claimed that there are no intrinsic group differences
- FWIW, I believe that there are, they're just vastly smaller than intrinsic
individual differences, and thus should be ignored in nearly all non-statistical
circumstances. But group cultural differences are obviously very significant, as
are group differences in education, opportunity, and support. We can do a fair
bit about those, and we ought to.
{EDITED to clarify, as kinda suggested by wedrifid, some highly relevant context.}
This comment by JoshuaZ was, when I saw it, voted down to -3, despite the fact that it
addresses the question it's responding to
gives good reasons for making the guess JoshuaZ said he made
seems like it's at a pretty well calibrated level of confidence
is polite, on topic, and coherent.
A number of JoshuaZ's other recent comments there have received similar treatment. It seems a reasonable conclusion (though maybe there are other explanations?) that multiple LW accounts have, within a short period of time, been downvoting perfectly decent comments by JoshuaZ. As per other discussions in that thread [EDITED to add: see next paragraph for more specifics], this seems to have been provoked by his making some "pro-feminist" remarks in the discussions of that topic brought up by recent events in HPMOR.
{EDITED to add...} Highly relevant context: Elsewhere in the thread JoshuaZ reports that, apparently in response to his comments in that discussion, he has had a large number of comments on other topics downvoted in rapid succession. This, to my mind, greatly raises the probability that what's goi... (read more)
The escape character, which solves this and various other potential problems, is
"\".
0gjm10y
Ah yes. Thanks. After a little experimentation, it transpires that what is
needed to fix the problem is escaping the opening square bracket of the
non-hyperlink text; escaping the closing square bracket is harmless but
unnecessary.
8wedrifid10y
Yes, Markdown is robust like that. Which is sometimes a nuisance. You can get
away with writing underscored_words but a second underscore fucksitup.
4wedrifid10y
I downvoted that comment and encourage others to feel free to downvote any
comment of a type they would prefer not to see on less wrong. Most (but not
quite all) cases of people using social politics to force their preferences onto
others are things I wish to see left of. This includes but is not limited to sex
politics. Being 'on topic' is no virtue when the topic itself is toxic.
At your prompting I have downvoted the parent of the comment in question. To
whatever extent a comment is justified by being an answer to a question the
asking of said question must assume responsibility. For the same reason I have
no objection if others choose to downvote my own contributions to that thread
for what could be considered "Feeding". Kawoomba has a good point
[http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/hws/harry_potter_and_the_methods_of_rationality/9bmi].
Note: This is a different issue to the systematic downvoting
[http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/hva/open_thread_july_115_2013/9c4d] of a
user on all subjects (sometimes referred to as 'karma assassination'). That is
universally considered an abuse of the system. However the example you give only
demonstrates your subjective disagreement with the evaluations of some others
regarding the desirability of a particular comment.
You have defined your campaign
[http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/hva/open_thread_july_115_2013/9c4d] by
references to "this sort of abuse" where 'this' refers to comments like the
example comment being downvoted. As such I cannot support it. People are allowed
to not like stuff and vote it down. If you had instead made your campaign to be
against karma-assassination then I would support it. I myself have lost several
thousand karma in bursts like that. I suggest revision.
2gjm10y
It should be mentioned explicitly here -- as it has been in the discussion in
the other thread, and as I know you have seen since you replied to it -- that
JoshuaZ reports
[http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/hws/harry_potter_and_the_methods_of_rationality/9bwt]
precisely the sort of "karma assassination" behaviour you describe, in
connection with the same topic. It's because of that context that I think it
likely that the highly negative score of his comment is at least partly the
result of punitive downvoting aimed at him rather than at his comment
specifically.
I shall amend my comment upthread to mention this context, which I agree is
relevant.
Yes, it may be reasonable to decide that a particular topic is toxic and try to
discourage all posting on that topic. (Though I think occasional comments
arguing for dropping the subject would be a far better way of doing that than
flinging downvotes around.) But that is plainly not what was happening, because
only comments on one side of the issue were sitting at gratuitously low values
relative to, for want of a better term, their topic-agnostic merit. (Your own
description of your own actions is some evidence for this: you had downvoted
that comment but not its parent.)
I am not sure why you think the word "campaign" is appropriate, though I can see
why you might find it rhetorically convenient. I see what looks to me like a
systematic attempt to stop LW participants expressing certain sorts of opinion,
through intimidation rather than argument, I think that's bad, and I have said
so a couple of times and expressed willingness to help technically if others
agree with me. That's a "campaign"?
-3wedrifid10y
I agree and even considered mentioning JoshuaZ's reports as further evidence
that not only is there a distinction between the two but that in this case there
are probably far more representative targets you could point to which would
allow you to champion your (inferred, primary) cause without hindrance due to
the actual expressed petition.
'Topic agnostic merit' would be misleading. If the topic were to go through a
translation device that removed information about the topic but preserved
reasoning style and social-political implications the comments would still be
easily distinguishable. For some the problem with the topic is that it
inevitably produces a certain type of thinking. It not merely the topic that one
must be agnostic to. It is better to refer simply to your subjective evaluation
of merit, which is at least unarguable.
It seems the best word for it. By all means provide a better word or phrase that
expresses the same thing with sufficiently few words. The word is connotatively
neutral to me. You have my support in your conditional on it being a against
karma-assassination and not a against downvoting the kind of comment that you
mentioned. I am declaring my own against the latter but pointing at the
karma-assassination target as a way for you to achieve your goal without
opposition or controversy..
No, I'm good and virtuous and you are sinister and I see through you because I
am insightful and sophisticated! (ie. I reject those connotations, but lets move
on. We're both being as forthright and straightforward as we can be here, not
deviously rhetorical.)
5gjm10y
The particular comment I linked to was primarily addressing the question: What
fraction of HPMOR readers are female? It justified a guess (explicitly stated to
be only a guess) that the fraction is on the order of 1/2 by observing (1) that
among HPMOR readers of the writer's own acquaintance the fraction is close to
that, even though the writer knows substantially more men than women, and (2)
that the readership of fanfiction generally skews female.
Even without any translation of that comment -- with nothing other than removing
it from the context of an argument with the word "feminism" in it -- what about
it would be "easily distinguishable" or exhibit a problematic "certain type of
thinking"? What about its social-political implications would be unusual?
I suggest that the answer is: Nothing at all. (Which is one reason why I chose
that comment as providing evidence that at least some of JoshuaZ's recent
downvoters have been playing the man rather than the ball.)
-1gjm10y
(I think the bits about the term "campaign" weren't there when I replied before,
hence the separate reply.)
OK, all noted. How about the following? (Which I hope will both clarify my
position and get past debates about potentially tendentious terminology.)
* I have a that LW should have, and actively enforce, strong community norms
against would-be intimidatory mass-downvoting that isn't (even in principle)
justified by the demerits of the comments being downvoted.
* You (if I've understood you right) this proposal.
* I am not that LW should have or enforce norms against
downvoting-gjm-dislikes, or anything of that kind,
* and of course I would not expect you to any such .
* I am also not that LW should have or enforce norms against downvoting
comments on the basis of their subject matter (as opposed to their merits
given the subject matter)
* and -- though I failed, at least initially, to make this clear -- I don't
think it credible that that alone explains what I've been characterizing as
would-be intimidatory downvoting of JoshuaZ's comments.
* And, again, I would not expect you to any such and I understand your reasons
for wanting to what you took to be such a on my part.
* Though, as it happens, I dislike many instances of this sort of topic-based
downvoting and think it would be a bad thing if there were a concerted effort
to prevent LW discussions of sexism, feminism, etc., in connection with
HPMOR. I understand that you disagree, and repeat that what I am is not for
this sort of topic-based downvoting to be prevented, forbidden, or punished.
[EDITED once shortly after posting, for clarity only.]
1wedrifid10y
'Intimidation' is a world like 'manipulation' in as much as it refers to
influence provoking behaviours which is somewhat fuzzy and depends rather a lot
on desired connotations. 'Intimidation' inherent in the purpose of the karma
system. Users are granted the (trivial) power to use against comments so that
users are intimidated out of posting things that aren't wanted.
There are instances of intimidation that are undesirable and others that work as
intended. We both acknowledge that some downvotes that cause intimidation need
preventing. We disagree on some cases. I'd also perhaps focus on the 'punitive'
and 'systematic' aspects more so than 'intimidatory'.
Conditional on JoshuaZ having recently experienced karma-assassination it seems
unlikely that this comment would be an exception. Yet there are other obvious
influences and confounding factors (topic-based downvoting for instance) that
are also at play (as my testimony indicates). That is enough for me to force a
clarification. I am happy with the specification you provided in the parent.
Best of luck with your efforts!
I thought similarly once. Observations of many such conversations changed my
mind. Fortunately Reddit exists. There are plenty of other places
[http://metareddit.com/r/HPMOR] to take the mind killing where it would be far
more relevant and suitable.
2gjm10y
If the information needed to take action against this sort of abuse is difficult
to do anything with because it requires grovelling through whatever database
underlies LW, I hereby volunteer (if told it would be useful by someone with
power to use it) to make whatever software enhancements to the LW code are
required to make it easy.
(I have no experience with the LW codebase but am an experienced software
person. Getting-started pointers would be welcome if anyone takes me up on that
offer.)
One could try ranking biases by the size of the correlation between
susceptibility-to-the-bias and damaging behavior, for example, using the
correlations in
http://lesswrong.com/lw/ahz/cashing_out_cognitive_biases_as_behavior/
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/ahz/cashing_out_cognitive_biases_as_behavior/]
1curiousepic10y
This is totally worth a discussion post.
1Normal_Anomaly10y
You may not have noticed when you posted this, but the formatting of your post
didn't show up like I think you may have wanted, with the result that it's hard
to read. (If you're wondering, it takes 2 carriage returns to get a line break
out.)
If you intended the comment to look like it does, I apologize for bothering you.
For example, I recently found out I did something wrong at a conference. In my bio, in areas of expertise I should have written what I can teach about, and in areas of interest what I want to be taught about. This seems to maximize value for me.
How do I keep that mistake from happening in the future? I don't know when the next conference will happen. Do I write it on anki and memorize that as a failure mode?
More generally, when you recognize a failure mode in yourself how do you constrain your future self so that it doesn't repeat this failure mode? How do you proceduralize and install the solution?
For a while I was in the habit of putting my little life lessons in the form of
Anki cards and memorizing them. I would also memorize things like conflict
resolution protocols and checklists for depressive thinking. Unfortunately it
didn't really work, in the sense that my brain consistently failed to recall the
appropriate knowledge in the appropriate context.
I tried using an iOS app caled Lift but I found it difficult to use and not
motivating.
I also tried using an iOS app called Alarmed
[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/alarmed-reminders-+-timers/id371886784?mt=8] to
ping me throughout the day with little reminders like "Posture" and "Smile" and
"Notice" to improve my posture, attitude, and level of mindfulness,
respectively. This worked better but I eventually got tired of my phone buzzing
so often with distracting, non-critical information and turned off the
reminders.
My very first post
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/50r/towards_an_algorithm_for_human_selfmodification/]
on LessWrong was about proceduralizing rationality lessons, I think it's one of
the biggest blank spots in the curriculum.
3Ratcourse10y
Yes, a blank spot and one that makes everything else near-useless. This needs to
be figured out.
4maia10y
I'm not sure this applies to your particular situation, but a general solution
for proceduralizing behaviors that was discussed at minicamp (and which I'd
actually done before) is: Trigger yourself on a particular physical sensation,
by visualizing it and thinking very hard about the thing you want yourself to
remember. So an example would be if you want to make sure you do the things on
your to-do list as soon as you get home, spend a few minutes trying to visualize
with as much detail as you can what the front door of your house looks like, and
recall what it feels like to be stepping through it, and think about "To do list
time!" at the same time. (Or if you have access to your front door at the time
you're trying to do this, actually stepping through your front door repeatedly
while thinking about this might help too.)
And if there's some way to automate it, then of course that's ideal, though you
said you don't know when the next conference will happen so that's more
difficult.
Or another kind of automation: maybe you could save the bio you wrote in a Word
document, and write a reminder in it to add the edits you want... or just do
them now, and save the bio for future use. Then all you have to remember is that
you wrote your bio already. Which is another problem, but conceivably a smaller
one: I don't know about your hindbrain, but upon being told it had to write a
bio, mine would probably be grasping at ways to avoid doing work, and having it
done already is an easy out.
1Ratcourse10y
That automation makes sense, thank you. Trying to think of how to generalize it,
and how to to merge it with the first suggestion.
1Douglas_Knight10y
For a problem like this, remembering for something rare in the indefinite
future, the important thing is to remember at that time that you know something.
At that point, if you've put it in a reasonable place, you can find it. It seems
to me that the key problem is the jump from "have to write a bio" to "how to
write a bio," that is, making sure you pause and think about what you know or
have written down somewhere. Some people claim success with Anki here, but it
doesn't make sense to me.
What most people do with bios is that they reuse them, or at least look at the
old one whenever needing a new one. As Maia says, if you write an improved bio
now, you can find it next time, when you look for the most recent version. But
that doesn't necessarily help remember why it was an improvement. If you have a
standard place for bios, you can store lots of variants (lengths, types of
conferences, resume, etc), along with instructions on what distinguishes them.
But I think what most people do is search their email for the last one they
submitted. If you can't learn to look in a more organized place, you could send
yourself an email with all the bios and the instructions, so that it comes up
when you search email.
0Ratcourse10y
Anki doesn't work for me on this, agreed. The above suggestion seems to dominate
this one.
0wadavis10y
Discuss the failure in person, face to face, with a helpful colleague. Admit
your failure. Make a conversation out of it. Brainstorm the fixes you've already
made to the bio and any others that come up. Let the conversation have an
attached emotion, whether it be a feel good problem solving session or a public
shaming.
Memories with emotions stick around better.
I found that even the small act of saying "Yep, I did forgot to update the new
widget part number" to a supervisor / team-member helps me remember to in the
future.
I've been thinking about tacit knowledge recently.
A very concrete example of tacit knowledge that I rub up against on a regular basis is a basic understanding of file types. In the past I have needed to explain to educated and ostensibly computer-literate professionals under the age of 40 that a jpeg is an image, and a PDF is a document, and they're different kinds of entities that aren't freely interchangeable. It's difficult for me to imagine how someone could not know this. I don't recall ever having to learn it. It seems intuitively obvious. (Uh-oh!)
So I wonder if there aren't some massive gains to be had from understanding tacit knowledge more than I do. Some applications:
Being aware of the things I know which are tacit knowledge, but not common knowledge
Building environments that impart tacit knowledge, (eg. through well-designed interfaces and clear conceptual models)
Structuring my own environment so I can more readily take on knowledge without apparent effort
Imparting useful memes implicitly to the people around me without them noticing
What do you think or know about tacit knowledge, LessWrong? Tell me. It might not be obvious.
The PDF has additional structure which can support such functionality as copying text, hyperlinks, etc, but the primary function of a PDF is to represent a specific image (particularly, the same image whether displayed on screen or on paper).
Certainly a PDF is more "document"-ish than a JPEG, but there are also "document" qualities a PDF is notably lacking, such as being able to edit it and have the text reflow appropriately (which comes from having a structure of higher-level objects like "this text is in two columns with margins like so" and "this is a figure with caption" and an algorithm to do the layout). To say that there is a sharp line and that PDF belongs on the "document" side is, in my opinion, a poor use of words.
I'm not sure I want to get into an ontological debate on whether a PDF is a
document or not, but I believe the fact that it's got the word "document" in its
name and is primarily used for representing de facto documents makes my original
statement accurate to several orders of approximation.
That isn't the standard use of "tacit knowledge." At least it doesn't match the definition. Tacit knowledge is supposed to be about things that are hard to communicate. The standard examples are physical activities.
Maybe knowing when to pay attention to file extensions is tacit knowledge, but the list of what they mean is easy to write down, even if it is a very long list. Knowing that it valuable to know about them is probably the key that these people were missing, or perhaps they failed to accurate assess the detail and correctness of their beliefs about file types.
Uh-oh indeed. Like most statements involving the word "is", this is probably one
of those questions that should be dissolved
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/of/dissolving_the_question/]. Thus I will ask:
What do you mean when you say document? I.e. what are the characteristics that a
document has which a JPEG file does not, and which a PDF does have? Why is it
wrong for something that is an image to also be a document?
1Viliam_Bur10y
I'll try: You don't need OCR to get the words out of the document. An image is
just dots and/or geometric shapes. (Which would make a copy-protected PDF not a
document.)
-2sixes_and_sevens10y
This seems to be actively running away from the point. Also, see the other
response re: my lack of interest in this particular ontological discussion.
In my example, there's also a concrete reason to distinguish between images and
documents. The image is going to be embedded on a webpage, where people will
simply look at it. Meanwhile, the document is going to be printed off as an
actual physical document. Their respective formats are generally optimised for
these different purposes.
How do you upgrade people into rationalists? In particular, I want to upgrade some younger math-inclined people into rationalists (peers at university). My current strategy is:
incidentally name drop my local rationalist meetup group, (ie. "I am going to a rationalist's meetup on Sunday")
link to lesswrong articles whenever relevant (rarely)
be awesome and claim that I am awesome because I am a rationalist (which neglects a bunch of other factors for why I am so awesome)
when asked, motivate rationality by indicating a whole bunch of cognitiv
This sounds like you think of them as mooks you want to show the light of
enlightenment to. The sort of clever mathy people you want probably don't like
to think of themselves as mooks who need to be shown the light of enlightenment.
(This also might be sort of how I feel about the whole rationalism as a thing
thing that's going on around here.)
That said, actually being awesome for your target audience's values of awesome
is always a good idea to make them more receptive to looking into whatever you
are doing. If you can use your rationalism powers to achieve stuff mathy
university people appreciate, like top test scores or academic publications
while you're still an undergraduate, your soapbox might be a lot bigger all of a
sudden.
Then again, it might be that rationalism powers don't actually help enough in
achieving this, and you'll just give yourself a mental breakdown while going for
them. The math-inclined folk, who would like publication writing superpowers,
probably also see this as the expected result, so why should they buy into
rationality without some evidence that it seems to be making people win more?
-2Fhyve10y
To be honest, unless they have exceptional mathematical ability or are already
rationalists, I will consider them to be mooks. Of course, I wont make that
apparent, it is rather hard to make friends that way. Acknowledging that you are
smart is a very negative signal, so I try to be humble, which can be awkward in
situations like when only two out of 13 people pass a math course that you are
in, and you got an A- and the other guy got a C-.
And by the way, rationality, not rationalism
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationalism].
1Risto_Saarelma10y
Incidentally, what exactly makes a person already be a rationalist in this case?
-4Fhyve10y
Pretty much someone who has read the Lesswrong sequences. Otherwise, someone who
is unusually well read in the right places (cognitive science, especially
biases; books like Good and Real and Causality), and demonstrates that they have
actually internalized those ideas and their implications.
8metatroll10y
Related question: how can I upgrade myself from someone who trolls
robo-"rationalists" that think acquaintance with a particular handful of
concepts, buzzwords, and habits of thought is a mark of superiority rather than
just a mark of difference, to a superbeing faster than a speeding singularity
who can separate P from NP in a single bound?
2elharo10y
Rational is about how you think, not how you got there. There have been many
rational people throughout history who have read approximately none of that.
3Fhyve10y
I am mostly talking about epistemic rationality, not instrumental rationality.
With that in mind, I wouldn't consider anyone from a hundred years ago or
earlier to be up to my epistemic standards because they simply did not have
access to the requisite information, ie. cognitive science and Bayesian
epistemology. There are people that figured it out in certain domains (like
figuring out that the labels in your mind are not the actual things that they
represent), but those people are very exceptional and I doubt that I will meet
people that are capable of the pioneering, original work that these exceptional
people did.
What I want are people who know about cognitive biases, understand why they are
very important, and have actively tried to reduce the effects of those biases on
themselves. I want people who explicitly understand the map and territory
distinction. I want people who are aware of truth-seeking versus status
arguments. I want people who don't step on philosophical landmines and don't get
mindkilled. I would not expect someone to have all of these without having at
least read some of Lesswrong or the above material. They might have collected
some of these beliefs and mental algorithms on their own, but it is highly
unlikely that they came across all of them.
Is that too much to ask? Are my standards too high? I hope not.
3Desrtopa10y
Eh, without adopting particularly unconventional (for this site) standards, you
could reasonably say that there have been very few rational people throughout
history (or none.)
There's a reason people on this site use the phrase "I'm an aspiring
rationalist."
3elharo10y
Taboo "rationalist". That is, don't make it sound like this is a group or
ideology anyone is joining (because, done right, it isn't.)
Discuss, as appropriate, cognitive biases and specific techniques. E.g. planning
fallacy, "I notice I am confused", "what do you think you know and why do you
think you know it?", confirmation bias, etc.
Tell friends about cool books you've read like HPMoR, Thinking Fast and Slow,
Predictably Irrational, Getting Things Done, and so forth. If possible read
these books in paper (not ebooks) where your friends can see what you're reading
and ask you about them.
2Viliam_Bur10y
The problem with rationality is that unless you are at some level, you don't
feel like you need to become more rational. And I think most people are not
there, even the smart ones. Seems to me that smart people often realize they
miss some specific knowledge, but they don't go meta and realize that they miss
knowledge-gathering and -filtering skills. (And that's the smart people. The
stupid ones only realize they miss money or food or something.) How do you sell
something to a person who is not interested in buying?
Perhaps we could make a selection of LW articles that can be interesting even
for people not interested in rationality. Less meta, less math. The ones that
feel like "this website could help me make more money and become more popular".
Then people become interested, and perhaps then they become interested more meta
-- about a culture that creates this kind of articles.
(I guess that even for math-inclined people the less mathy articless would be
better. Because they can find math in thousand different places; why should they
care specifically about LW?)
As a first approximation: The Science of Winning at Life
[http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/The_Science_of_Winning_at_Life] and Living
Luminously [http://lesswrong.com/lw/1xh/living_luminously/].
1NancyLebovitz10y
How about bringing up specific bits of rationality when you talk with them? If
they talk about plans, ask them how much they know about how long that sort of
project is likely to take. If they seem to be floundering with keeping track of
what they're thinking, encourage them to write the bits and pieces down.
If any of this sort of thing seems to register, start talking about biases
and/or further sources of information.
This is a hypothetical procedure-- thanks for mentioning that The Simple Truth
isn't working well as an introduction.
Mallet, a notorious swindler, picks 10 stocks and generates all 1024 permutations of "stock will go up" vs. "stock will go down" predictions. He then gives his predictions to 1024 different investors. One of the investors receive a perfect, 10 out 10 prediction sheet and is (Mallet hopes) convinced Mallet is a stock picking genius.
Since it's related to the Texas sharpshooter fallacy, I'm tempted to call this the Texas stock-picking scam, but I was wondering if anyone knew a "proper" name for it, and/or any analysis of the scam.
Derren Brown demonstrated this scam on TV and called it The System
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_works_by_Derren_Brown#Derren_Brown:_The_System_.282008.29].
That might help you track down a name.
0NancyLebovitz10y
I've got one cite of it as the Perfect Prediction
[http://www.skepdic.com/perfectprediction.html] scam, but it doesn't seem to be
a standard name.
This scam shows up in an R. A. Lafferty story, with the suggestion that if
you're good at picking winners, you'll get a better return by not doing a
fifty-fifty split at each stage.
I've checked some pages about types of frauds, and that one doesn't show up. I'm
guessing that it's just too much work compared to other sorts of fraud.
Say there are two artificial intelligences... When these machines want to talk to each other, my guess is they'll get right next to each other so they can have very wide-band communication. You might recognize them as Sam and George, and you'll walk up and knock on Sam and say, "Hi, Sam. What are you talking about?" What Sam will undoubtedly answer is, "Things in general," because there'll be no way for him to tell you.
Later in that chapter, McCorduck quotes Marvin Minsky as saying:
...which sounds eerily like a pitch for MIRI.
Unfortunately, Minsky did not then rush to create the MIT AI Safety Lab.
1Eliezer Yudkowsky10y
I don't think that's a legitimate "Unfortunately". If you're not inspired and an
approach doesn't pop into your head, throwing money at the problem until you get
some grad students who couldn't get a postdoc elsewhere is not necessarily going
to be productive, can indeed be counterproductive, and Minsky would legitimately
know that.
4lukeprog10y
Okay, then: "Unfortunately, Minsky was not then inspired, by a reasonable
approach to the problem, to create the MIT AI Safety Lab."
Related to "magic phrases", what expressions or turns of phrase work for you, but don't work well for a typical real-world audience?
I tend to use "it's not magic" as shorthand for "it's not some inscrutable black-boxed phenomenon that defies analysis and reasoning". Moreover, I seem to have internalised this as a reaction whenever I hear someone describing something as if it were such a phenomenon. Using the phrase generally doesn't go down well, though.
This was something I was meaning to post about in some of the gender discussions, but I wasn't sure that a significant proportion of men were still put off by women who were direct about wanting sex with them-- but apparently, it's still pretty common.
There is a difference between "I want sex with you specifically (because you
attract me)", and "I want sex with anyone (and you are the nearest one)". For
me, the former would feel nice, but the latter would feel... creepy.
This may be another situation of not being specific: when women report that "men
were put off by them being direct about wanting sex with them", I don't know
which one of these situations it was. Also, it depends on context; there is a
difference between getting a sex offer from a friendly person in a romantic
situation, or getting a sex offer from an unknown heavily drunk woman at a disco
(happened to me, and yes I was put off). These details may change the situation,
and are usually not reported, because of course the goal of report is to make
the other people seem horrible.
2NancyLebovitz10y
Another possibility is that if a woman makes a courteous and straightforward
statement of interest, there's no guarantee that the man is likewise interested,
but she might interpret this as being wrong for being straightforward rather
than that there was no way he was going to reciprocate.
From the comments, and I admit there was less than I thought there was going to
be:
**
**
**
This one might be evidence-- it depends on what she meant by "everything paid
off when I found my boyfriend". I'm inclined to think that her honesty didn't
work a few times.
**
1Viliam_Bur10y
Being the one who approaches has many advantages, but it comes with a cost --
one must learn to deal with rejection. There is a difference between knowing,
generally, "my attractivity is probably average", and being specifically
rejected by one specific sympathetic person who seemed to be interested just a
while ago, but probably just wanted to talk.
Interpreting rejection as "these men are afraid of a honest / courageous woman"
can help protect the ego. It could also be why the men said it -- to avoid an
offense, a confrontation. (Women also say various things that don't make much
sense, when they mean: "I don't consider you attractive.") I mean, if an
extremely attractive woman would approach those men, a lot of them yould
probably say yes and consider themselves lucky. (This is an experimentally
testable prediction!)
I've been talking to some friends who have some rather odd spiritual (in the sense of disorganised religion) beliefs. Odd because its a combination of modem philosophy LW would be familiar with (acausal commuication between worlds of Tegmark's level IV multiverse) ancient religion, and general weirdness. I have trouble pointing my finger at exactly what is wrong with this reasoning, although I'm fairly sure there is a flaw, in the same way I'm quite sure I'm not a Boltzmann brain, but it can be hard articulating why.
So, if anyone is interested, here is th... (read more)
How do you know what you claim to know? (Okay, not you, but whoever said this.)
Do you have any reproducible experimental proof of whatever violation of
physical laws using mental discipline?
Isn't it suspicious that undisciplined thoughts are enough to create an illusion
of physical reality perfectly obeying the physical laws, but are unable to
violate the laws? That sounds to me like speaking about an archer who always
perfectly hits the middle of the target, but is unable to shoot the arrow
outside of the target, supposedly because he is too clumsy. I mean, isn't
hitting the center of the target more difficult that missing the target?
Wouldn't creating a reality perfectly obeying the laws of physics all the time
require more mental discipline than having things happen randomly?
I am sure there can be dozen ad-hoc explanations, I just wanted to show how it
doesn't make sense.
So, if you get killed, your mental discipline will improve enough to let you
create new reality you can't create now? Interesting...
0skeptical_lurker10y
To play devils' advocate ... do you have any reproducible experimental proof of
believing that an event would happen that would violate the laws of physics, and
then the laws were upheld?
Yes, I quite agree. It's also odd that I cannot play the violin, and yet other
people can, which would imply that I can imagine people with knowledge that I
don't have. If reality was an illusion, I would expect it to be a lot more like
wonderland.
However, we are dealing with priors and intuition here, in that we cannot run
experiments, getting disembodied consciousnesses to imagine realities and then
observing what they imagine. Its difficult to even run thought experiments,
given that you would be trying to model something that supposedly works outside
of physics.
So: if you have a prior belief that an illusory reality would be undisciplined
(and I agree here), and someone else has a prior that this is not a problem, and
that reductionism is highly implausible, how can this disagreement be resolved?
Even if both parties were perfect Bayesian reasoners, Aumann's agreement theorem
doesn't apply, because there is no experimental evidence to update on. How can
we determine which prior is correct? Perhaps we could agree that approximate
Kolmogorov complexity provides an objective prior, although I think objections
would be raised, but even in that case it doesn't help in practice unless you
can actually calculate approximate Kolmogorov complexity.
I think the mental discipline is supposed to be needed to control reality, not
to create it. Nevertheless, anything that allows one to escape death does make
'motivated cognition' spring to mind.
1Alejandro110y
It looks like you and your friends have rediscovered Lebniz's monadology.
Leibniz believed that only minds were real, matter as distinct from minds is an
illusion, and minds do not interact causally, but they seem to share a same
"reality" by virtue of a "pre-established harmony" between their non-causally
related experiences. This last part can perhaps be reexpressed in modern terms
as acausal communication.
1metatroll10y
I guess the fact that I lack mental discipline is also the reason that I lack
mental discipline, and the reason that lacking mental discipline causes me to
lack mental discipline, too.
0skeptical_lurker10y
Sorry, to clarify, are you saying that the reasoning is circular and thus
faulty?
Thing about the mental health is that it is circular, in that there are vicious
cycles. If I have mental discipline, I can discipline myself to practice
discipline more.
-2metatroll10y
Lack of mental discipline is also the reason I can't answer your question
without breaking character.
0Richard_Kennaway10y
Where do your friends get this stuff? Did they read the Sequences on LSD or
something? Do they do anything differently in everyday life on account of it
(besides talking about it)?
How did you get the belief that it is lawful?
0skeptical_lurker10y
I doubt it, for the sequences are very long and I don't think one's attention
span would hold while tripping. They might have read David Lewis
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Lewis_%28philosopher%29] on LSD.
It comes from many different places. Friend A got here through psychedelics and
Schrodinger, friend B through their families' Hindu beliefs dating back
thousands of years. Oddly enough, they mostly agree with each other.
Not really. Many of them try to influence reality through positive thinking, but
then this probably has psychosomatic benefits anyway. But, if for instance one
of them was ill, they would use conventional medicine.
Why do I believe that the universe is lawful? Because it appears lawful, and due
to reasons discussed in other replies to my post, and my common sense has marked
the alternative as insane.
0Richard_Kennaway10y
Well then, there's how you:
You observe lawfulness, not just believe in lawfulness. Whatever the source of
that lawfulness, the lawfulness itself is right there in your observations.
Is it lawful independently of you, or is it lawful because you are God but have
forgotten yourself? I suppose you could seek out and practice spiritual
exercises to remember your true being as God, and only if that fails to produce
a smidgen of miracle-working ability, consider that you might not be God after
all. But "we are subject to physical law because we have forgotten our divine
nature" is already too much like claiming to have an invisible dragon.
0wedrifid10y
That latter part seems to rely on a misleading use of words. There seems to be a
rather distinct difference between acausal conversation and causal conversation.
1skeptical_lurker10y
I am using words as clearly as possible. To clarify, my friend believes it is
impossible for one sentient being to causally influence another.
3Viliam_Bur10y
And yet your friend bothers to talk. Why?
2skeptical_lurker10y
Talking I can understand, I mean I suppose acausal communication could be as
fun? What's perhaps more surprising is altruism and empathy. Would you buy
someone a drink if it doesn't cause them to drink it? What if you one-box?
0shminux10y
In what sense does the mental world exist and physical is an illusion? What's
the difference between an illusion and reality in this case?
2skeptical_lurker10y
I suppose that the causality goes mind -> physical in an idealist veiwpoint,
whereas in a materialist viewpoint phyiscal things cause mental things, and in a
monist viewpoint mental and physical are two aspects of the same thing.
At least one of my friends claims to have some weak ability to alter physical
reality by thinking (which is possible if physical reality is an illusion),
which is interesting because he is otherwise a very intelligent scientist.
Also, believing that physical reality is an illusion is, like whoa man, its
really deep.
Is there a way of making precise, and proving, something like this?
For any noisy dynamic system describable with differential equations, observed through a noisy digitised channel, there exists a program which produces an output stream indistinguishable from the system.
It would be good to add some notion of input too.
There are several issues with making this precise and avoiding certain problems, but I suspect all of this is already solved so it's probably not worth me going into detail here. In the unlikely event this isn't already a solved problem, I could have a go at precisely stating and proving this.
I don't completely understand what you mean (in particular, I would really like
you to be more specific about what you mean by "noisy" and "indistinguishable"),
but this looks like it shouldn't be true on cardinality grounds. There should be
uncountably many possible distinguishable noisy behaviors of a dynamical system.
2Paul Crowley10y
By "indistinguishable" I mean some sort of bound on the advantage
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advantage_(cryptography\]) of any algorithm trying
to tell the two apart. I think if I try to answer on "noisy" without knowing
more about what you need specified I won't answer your question - I'm thinking
of some sort of continuous equivalent to the role that noise plays in a Kalman
filter [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalman_filter].
The cardinality thing is a big problem - if the "system" is a single
uncomputable real number that doesn't change, from which we take multiple noisy
readings, then for any program that tries to emulate it, there is a
distinguishing program whose advantage approaches 1 as the number of readings go
up.
It still feels like there must be something like this that we can prove!
0Douglas_Knight10y
Uncountability doesn't seem like a big deal to me. Just give the Turing machine
an auxiliary tape containing the real parameter.
A related question is whether a Turing machine can fully simulate the dynamical
system, that is, whether it can compute the state at any future time to any
precision using only finitely many bits from the starting parameters.
I think the answer to that differential equations with initial conditions a
computable real number can evolve to an uncomputable real number. But if the
initial random number is not arbitrary, but guaranteed random, maybe it is
computable. (That is, maybe the inputs with computable futures have full
measure.)
0Paul Crowley10y
I can't work out whether this works or not. Here's a really simple example
system: each output is 0 or 1, drawn with a fixed probability. If the
probability is an uncomputable number, then no algorithm with a finite initial
state can generate output with exactly that probability; there has to be a
rational number inbetween the real probability and the simulated one, which
means there's an attacker that can distinguish the two given enough outputs.
If instead the simulator can read the real probability on an infinite tape...
obviously it can't read the whole tape before producing an output. So it has to
read, then output, then read, then output. It seems intuitive that with this
strategy, it can place an absolute limit on the advantage that any attacker can
achieve, but I don't have a proof of that yet.
Obviously if this can be done then what I ask can be done. I had thought this
impossible, which is why I wanted to substitute an easier question about
distinguishability.
Well that's clearly true, if the dynamical system is that when t = 0 then y = 0
and dy/dt = 1, then y will pass through lots of uncomputable values at
uncomputable times. Some kind of computable uncertainty about the initial state
may address the cardinality issue, but I'm not sure how to formalise that.
0pengvado10y
In this model, a simulator can exactly match the desired probability in O(1)
expected time per sample. (The distribution of possible running times extends to
arbitrarily large values, but the L1-norm of the distribution is finite. If this
were a decision problem rather than a sampling problem, I'd call it ZPP
[https://complexityzoo.uwaterloo.ca/Complexity_Zoo:Z#zpp].)
Algorithm:
1. Start with an empty string S.
2. Flip a coin and append it to S.
3. If S is exactly equal to the corresponding-length prefix of your probability
tape P, then goto 2.
4. Compare (S < P)
0Paul Crowley10y
D'oh! Of course - thanks!
0Douglas_Knight10y
That's silly. You should only ask what the state of the system is at a specified
time (yet another auxiliary tape).
That said, I suspect that this is not a major aspect of the Filter. If the cost goes up, the main impact would be on consumer goods which would become more expensive. That's unpleasant ... (read more)
you should probably update towards "being convincing to me is not sufficient evidence of truth." Everything got easier once I stopped believing I was competent to judge claims about X by people who investigate X professionally. I find it better to investigate their epistemic hygiene rather than their claims. If their epistemic hygiene seems good (can be domain specific) I update towards their conclusions on X.
A married couple has asked me to donate sperm and to impregnate the wife. They would then raise the child as their own, with no help from me. Would it be ethical or unethical for me to give them sperm? In particular, am I doing a service or a disservice to the child I would create?
Assuming you don't have any particular reason to expect that this couple will be abusive, it's more ethical the better your genes are. If you have high IQ or other desirable heritable traits, great. (It seems plausible to anticipate that high IQ will become even more closely correlated with success in the future than it is now.) If you have mutations that might cause horrible genetic disorders, less great.
The child is wanted, so if they don't actually neglect it it'll grow up fine.
Note that if you donate sperm without going through the appropriate regulatory hoops as a sperm donor (which vary per country), you will be liable for child support.
I am surprised no one else has brought up the LW party line: consequentialism.
What is the alternative? What is the consequence of your decision?
Probably the alternative is that someone else donates sperm. Either way, they raise a child that is not the husband's. If creating such a life is terrible (which I don't believe), is it worse that it is your child than someone else's? Consequentialism rejects the idea that you are complicit in one circumstance and not the other.
There are other options, like trying to convince them not to have children, or to get a donation from the husband's relatives, but they are unlikely to work.
If the choice is between your sperm or another's, then, as Qiaochu says, the main difference to the child is genes of the donor. Also, your decision might affect your relationship with the couple.
It creates a child who will not be raised by their biological father.
Unlikely in this context, since they are much wealthier than I. I doubt they
would want to share custody with me in exchange for my pittance of a salary.
Questions about the validity of the Cinderella effect aside, the OP knows the
couple and can probably make a more informed judgement about this.
Of course, you can't tell this perfectly. But if the OP is anything more than
casual acquaintances with the couple, I would say specific evidence probably
overpowers the general case.
2maia10y
Has this been demonstrated in adoptive parents, though? Having only adopted
children seems as though it might bias things in a different direction.
6ChristianKl10y
They might die and the child has still rights against you.
4Alsadius10y
Given that the child won't exist if you say no, it's hard to assert that they'd
be worse off if you decline. Just make sure you don't get too clingy.
-2DanielLC10y
There are some concerns about overpopulation, but I'd say that developed
countries are underpopulated. Minimum wage is significantly above subsistence
wage, so people are generating more wealth than they must consume.
There is the problem of factory farming. The child is likely to eat meat, which
funds factory farming. Since there is little if any concern for the animals,
they are not treated well, and I find it unlikely that their lives are worth
living.
0Dias10y
You want the average wage, not the minimum wage. Germans are worthwhile people,
even though their minimum wage is zero. Similarly, raising or lowering the
minimum wage (holding employment and output fixed) should not affect our
estimation of people's value-add.
0DanielLC10y
What you want is the market wage for untrained labor. Taking the value of
trained labor and subtracting the cost of the training should also work and get
the same answer.
Minimum wage is legal thing, and doesn't show anything, unless the politicians
are consistently setting it just below the market rate for untrained labor. I'm
pretty sure they are, but I'd still say you are correct. I shouldn't have said
"minimum wage".
0Adele_L10y
The factory farming concern can probably be mitigated by instilling awareness of
this situation, as well as effective interventions to the child.
0DanielLC10y
He said that they would raise the child with no help from him. That doesn't seem
like it would be easier to get the child to be a vegetarian than any random
other person.
0Adele_L10y
But if he knows the parents, he can know whether or not they are likely to raise
their kid to be a vegetarian or not.
This is a poll for people who have ever made an attempt at obtaining a career in programming or system administration or something like that. I'm interested in your response if you've made any attempt of this sort, whether you've succeeded, changed your mind, etc.
ETA: Oops, I forgot an "I just want to see the results" option. If you vote randomly to see them, I'd appreciate it if you do not vote anonymously, and leave a comment reply.
At what age have you learned to touch-type?
[pollid:530]
How did you come to learn to touch-type?
[pollid:531]
I answered as close as I can remember, but I think touch typing is more of
something I kind of picked up as time went by, rather than something I
specifically learned at one point in time. I remember pushing myself to practice
touch typing at various points, but the general recollection I have is that I
didn't really practice in a focused, systematic way, and yet now I can type this
without needing to look at my keyboard (and in fact, when I look at my keyboard
I'll be likely to make more mistakes).
So I probably picked it up in my early twenties with a lot of typing of homework
and essays and posts on forums.
3kpreid10y
By “touch-typing” do you mean typing without looking at the keyboard, that and
typing using all ten fingers, or that and using the formal
start-with-your-fingers-on-the-home-row techniques?
2AlexSchell10y
For consistency with previous results, answer using your best guess as to what I
mean. (Jura V nfxrq, V zrnag gur jubyr ubzrebj ohfvarff ohg V qvqa'g ernyvmr
gung gbhpu-glcvat vf glcvpnyyl qrsvarq va gur oebnqrfg frafr lbh zragvba.)
2David_Gerard10y
I'm a sysadmin now, but I learnt to type when I was a rock critic.
0rhollerith_dot_com10y
Well, I hope you told the poll that your career attempt succeeded and also put
in the age that you learned.
1AlexSchell10y
I replied randomly
0itaibn010y
Note: I did not read the first paragraph and mistakenly answered the first two
questions nonrandomly. Both of these questions have a spurious N/A answer.
0gwillen10y
I said 'primarily through own efforts', but 1) really I partially learned
through a class, and partially independently of it, and it's hard to recall the
mixture of influences, and 2) 'efforts' is not really the right word, since the
learning was really incidental to the fact that I was typing a hell of a lot; it
wasn't a deliberate act.
Not sure how this influences the survey. :-)
I need help finding a particular thread on LW, it was a discussion of either utility or ethics, and it utilized the symbols Q and Q* extensively, as well as talking about Lost Purposes. My inability to locate it is causing me brain hurt.
That's hard, because search engines have been dumbed down to the point where you
can't google for a literal 'Q*'... A local search turned up
http://lesswrong.com/lw/1zv/the_shabbos_goy/
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/1zv/the_shabbos_goy/] as having one use of 'Q*' and
bringing up 'lost purposes'.
3BerryPick610y
Probably made even more difficult because I misremembered the letter. It was G*,
and the article was The Importance of Goodhart's Law
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/1ws/the_importance_of_goodharts_law/]. It suddenly came
back to me in a flash after seeing your reply, so thanks!
I'm looking for good, free, online resources on SQL and/or VBA programming, to aid in the hunt for my next job. Does anyone have any useful links? As well, any suggestions on a good program to use for SQL?
What do you mean by "a good program to use for SQL?" A database engine to run
queries in? A command line or GUI client for connecting to such a database?
Something else entirely.
For what it's worth if you're looking for a database engine, my recommendation
is Postgres. Free, open source, and a lot stricter than MySQL, even if you make
MySQL as strict as you possibly can.
As for learning, I don't know any tutorials that are still around nowadays. I do
recommend if you're learning it, to actually build something where you need to
use queries.
Toy example: Build a weblog.
* Start by creating tables for posts and comments.
* Write an admin interface for creating new posts. Write a form for saving
comments on a post.
* Then simple queries to pull out the latest few posts for display, and
comments for display on a post's page.
* Add a simple tagging and other meta data facility.
* Write some reports using data available to you (eg, find top ten most
commented posts, find most used tag, if you add viewer ratings, or unique
view tracking, then grabbing most viewed posts, and counts of times viewed).
This should take you through exercises from very basic and easy statements
through to some more advanced topics (grouping etc), and I find using a skill
incredibly valuable to learning and internalising that skill. My first computer
program was a blog, and while it was a disaster and a mess in many ways, I
learned (or internalised) a lot about programming, and a lot about SQL in the
process.
0Alsadius10y
I've never touched SQL, past a few references to commands in XKCD. A couple
quick Google searches have not produced anything that has seemed usable. I want
a software environment that lets me do stuff like your example. Frankly, I'm so
unfamiliar with what exists than I don't want to be much more specific than
that, aside from saying that I want it to have a good help function if
possible(I've used help to self-teach complex Excel functions, so it should be
sufficient).
2luminosity10y
My recommendation is to (if not on linux already), download and set up a VM with
a linux install on it. For a toy example, it should be as easy as installing a
recent ubuntu, going to the command line, typing "sudo apt-get install
postgres".
To log in to the database you can then use "sudo -u postgres psql" (Postgres
creates a system user called postgres who by default is a superuser with
passwordless local authentication.)
From here you can get help by typing \? to list available commands and \h SQL
STATEMENT BEGINNING to get some basic help on an sql statement. eg, "\h create
table" will show you the valid syntax for a create table statement.
This W3Schools tutorial [http://www.w3schools.com/sql/sql_select.asp] seems
adequate as a very basic level tutorial to give you an idea of what's possible
and where you'd want to go from there.
It should be fairly easy to get python, php, ruby, etc to talk to the database,
when you want to try to integrate it with an external program.
Alternatively, since you'll probably be doing VBA in a Windows, environment you
could install SQL Server Express edition
[http://www.microsoft.com/web/platform/database/free-database.aspx] to play
around with, but I'm not particularly familiar with it, or its environment.
Someone else can probably help you out with that better.
0Alsadius10y
I've tried Linux before, and seen nothing about it that would make it worth the
effort of learning a whole new command interface. Is there any particular
advantage to it here, or is this a matter of personal preference?
3Risto_Saarelma10y
If you want to be a programmer, you know the command line so that when the guy
interviewing you for a job asks you how you'd remove all phone numbers from the
bodies of 50 000 HTML files
[https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/five-essential-phone-screen-questions],
you will say "use sed" instead of starting to sketch a 500 line C program that
does directory traversal, input buffering and token lexing.
The command line isn't just a different command interface, it's an actual
programming environment in itself, which the modern GUIs never are.
0Alsadius10y
I'm not going for comp sci jobs, I'm going for finance. Programming is a
secondary skill, more used for Excel macros than general-purpose tasks. And
virtually nobody uses Linux environments.
2Risto_Saarelma10y
Going for a field where Linux isn't used is a pretty good reason not to bother
with it. You can cover the regexp/scripting-fu the linked article is talking
about pretty well by just being handy with Perl or Python instead.
3CAE_Jones10y
Linux seems universally seen as the platform best suited for programming in
general, from my observations. There aren't the arbitrary restrictions from OS
features found in Windows or iOS, the filesystem is much more optimized, etc.
It's never been presented to me as anything but something obvious that one
should try if one intends to do anything fancy with computers, and the learning
curve has always been presented to me as negligible. I've tried a Linux-style
shell via Putty and Cygwin, and things did not turn out usefully. Putty I could
not figure out at all without a CS professor walking me through it, and I get
the strong impression that Cygwin choked on the fact that my Windows username
has a space in it and I had no clue how to get around that. It doesn't help that
my main uses were compiling C programs and trying to compile Festvox (for making
arbitrary Festival-style text-to-speech engines), the former more trivial than
the latter. I haven't found it worth looking into learning a new OS without a
significant reason, and it didn't turn out well the two times I had reasons (and
said reasons that did not last, so I didn't end up making enough of an effort to
learn it).
Again, the internet and every computer science department I've encountered
insist that Linux is optimized for anything more complicated than HTML or
Windows/iOS-specific code, and is definitely worth learning. I expect
circumstances will force me to learn it properly, eventually. My experiences so
far do not leave me eager, however.
[edit]: D'oh, I think I just repeated everything you said, only longer. :(
[/edit]
2luminosity10y
Putty is fairly terrible, and a major pain in the arse if you do need to ssh
from a windows box.
0luminosity10y
Partly personal preference, partly an inability to answer your question in a
Windows programming environment, not being particularly familiar with SQL
Server. While you can install things such as postgres, python, etc on Windows,
getting a working setup on an ubuntu system to play with for free, is trivial:
e.g.
* Install OS
* Open command prompt
* sudo apt-get install python
* sudo apt-get install python-pip
* sudo apt-get install postgres
* sudo apt-get install python2.7-dev
* sudo pip install psycopg2
* sudo -u postgres psql "--command=CREATE USER test PASSWORD testing;"
* sudo -u postgres psql "--command=CREATE DATABASE testdb OWNER test;"
* python
* import psycopg2
* connection = psycopg2.connect(username='test', password='testing',
dbname='testdb')
* cursor = connection.cursor()
* cursor.execute('SELECT 1;')
* print cursor.fetchone()
(Code not tested, don't currenty have an environment to test it on... you get
the idea though.)
Again though, this is the environment I do nearly all my coding work in. I'd not
be surprised if a Windows developer found getting an SQL Server Express install
up and running on their system to be far easier for them. I'm just not able to
walk you through that.
0Alsadius10y
Understood. I do not expect that learning Linux is a useful way to spend my
time, however, so I'll pass. But Postgres does seem to have a Windows version,
so I'll give that a shot. It seems to be what I'm looking for.
Steven Landsburg at TBQ has posted a seemingly elementary probability puzzle that has us all scratching our heads! I'll be ignominiously giving Eliezer's explanation of Bayes' Theorem another read, and in the mean time I invite all you Bayes-warriors to come and leave your comments.
Meta question. Is it better to correct typos and minor, verifiable factual errors (e.g. a date being a year off) in a post in the post's comment thread or a PM to the author?
I prefer PMs and do them often for both comments & posts. A minor correction is
of no enduring interest and it's better if it didn't take up space publicly.
(Can you imagine if every Wikipedia article could only be read as a sequence of
diffs? That's what doing minor corrections in public is like.)
Does anyone have any information/links/recommendations regarding how to reduce computer-related eye strain? Specifically any info on computer glasses? I was looking at Gunnar but I can't find enough reliable evidence to justify buying them and I would be surprised if there are no better options.
Fwiw I went to an optician today who deemed my vision good, however I spend large amounts of time in front of my screens and my eyes are tired a large fraction of the time.
So I recently released a major update to my commercial game, and announced that I would be letting people have it for donations at half the price for the remainder of July 2013. I suspect I did not make that last part prominent enough in the post to the forum where most of my audience originates, since of the purchases made since, only one took the half price option--the rest all paid the normal price. The post included three links: the game's page, my audio games (general) page, and the front page of my website, I believe in that order. (That is also in a... (read more)
I'm trying to find a getting-a-programming-job LW article I remember reading recently for a friend. I thought it was posted within the last few months, but searching through Discussion I didn't find it.
The post detailed one LWer's quest to find a programming job, including how he'd been very thorough preparing for interviews and applying to many positions over a matter of months, finally getting a few offers, playing them off each other, and eventually, I believe, accepting a position at Google.
programming interview google site:lesswrong.com; first hit:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/hd1/maximizing_your_donations_via_a_job/
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/hd1/maximizing_your_donations_via_a_job/]
0ESRogs10y
Thanks!
I think I might have seen that link when googling and skipped it because the
title didn't sound like what I was expecting. After googling didn't turn up what
I was looking for I tried an exhaustive visual search through the last few
months of Discussion, but apparently this was in Main. Is there an easy way to
browse through the titles of Main articles?
Edit: in fact, my browser history indicates that this was the first link in one
of my searches as well. Oops.
I find myself a non-altruist in the sense that while I care about the well-being and happiness of many proximate people, I don't care about the good of people unqualifiedly. What am I getting wrong? If asked to justify unqualified altruism, what would you say?
You're not getting anything wrong. You're not cosmically required to be a
perfect altruist to be a good person.
0[anonymous]10y
So would you say that there is no reason to care about people unqualifiedly? If
you wouldn't be willing to say this, what reason would you give for unqualified
altruism?
2drethelin10y
I'm not sure exactly what you're getting at. Unqualified altruism is good for
other people and bad for yourself. If you care about other people a lot more
than you care about yourself then you have reasons for unqualified altruism.
Cares are not something we need reasons for, they're emotions we have.
0[anonymous]10y
I guess I got to thinking about this after reading Lukeprog's EA post. There he
mentioned that EAists care about people regardless of how 'far away' (in space,
time, political association, etc.) they are. And Singer's wonderful pond
argument likewise involves the premise that if you ought to help a child in
immediate danger right in front of you, you ought to help a child in immediate
danger in Africa.
I suppose it struck me that, at least for Singer, the move from local altruism
(caring about the drowning child) to unqualified altruism (caring about sapient
beings everywhere and when) is a premise in an argument. Should I really
conclude that this move is not one that I can make on the basis of reasons?
0Qiaochu_Yuan10y
It sounds like you would benefit from (re?)reading the metaethics sequence
[http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Metaethics_sequence].
I don't understand what you mean by a move being made "on the basis of reasons."
Are you familiar with the distinction between instrumental and terminal values?
In that language, I would say that the question you seem to be asking is a type
error: you're asking something like "why should unqualified altruism be one of
my terminal values?" but the definition of "should" just refers to your terminal
values (or maybe your extrapolated terminal values, or whatever).
This is all assuming that you're highly confident that unqualified altruism is
not in fact one of your terminal values. It's possible that you have some
uncertainty about this and that that uncertainty is what you're really trying to
resolve.
0[anonymous]10y
I could be asking one of two things, depending on where someone arguing for
unqualified altruism (as, say, Singer does) stands. Singer's argument has the
form 'If you consider yourself obligated to save the local child, then you
should consider yourself obligated to save the non-local one.' He could be
arguing that unqualified altruism is in fact my terminal value, given that local
altruism is, and I should realize that the restrictions involved in the
qualification 'local' are irrational. Or he could be arguing that unqualified
altruism is a significant or perhaps necessary instrumental value, given what
you can read about my terminal values off my commitment to local altruism.
I'm not sure which he thinks, though I would guess that his argument is intended
to be the former one. I realize you might not endorse Singer's argument, but
these are two ways to hear my question: 'Is unqualified altruism a terminal
value of mine, given that local altruism is a value of mine?' and 'Is ethical
altruism an instrumental value of mine, given what we can know about my terminal
values on the assumption that local altruism is also an instrumental value of
mine?'
I'm not entirely sure which applies to me. I don't think I have any terminal
values so specific as 'unqualifed/local altruism', but I may be reflecting
badly.
Which prompts the additional speculation:
* At what (negative) age is abortion allowed?
* If you choose to get an abortion after signing a child up for cryonics should
you cryopreserve the aborted fetus?
* If someone is wealthy and also desires having many descendants in the case of
a positive transhuman future is the bulk use of prenatal cryonics a viable
and legal option?
Some folks at the Effective Altruists Facebook group suggested that it might be useful to have a map of EAs. If you would like to be listed in such a map, please fill this form. The data collected will be used to auto-populate this Google Map. (The map is currently unlisted: it can be seen only by those with access to the corresponding URL.)
[This comment is no longer endorsed by its author]Reply
One of my best friends is a very high suicide risk. Has anybody dealt with this kind of situation; specifically trying to convince the friend to try psychiatry? I'll be happy to talk details, but I'm not sure the Open Thread is the best medium.
Just this: If you friend starts saying that their problems are solved and everything is going to be okay, become more careful. Sudden improvement in the mood and later returning to the original level is more dangerous than the original situation, because at this moment the person has a new belief: "every improvement is only temporary". Which makes them less likely to act reasonably.
I've been there, and this is one of those situations that requires professional help, not random advice from the Internet. If you're in the U.S., call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 and explain the situation. They can assist you further. If you're in some other country, just Google for your local equivalent.
I was browsing through the West L.A Meet up discussion article and found it really fascinating. It will be about humans generating random number strings and the many applications where this would be useful. It's too bad I can't attend. Off the top of my head, I feel like I can only come up with one digit randomly by looking at my watch, not sure how I would get more than that. Does anyone have a decent way to generate random numbers on the spot with out a computer?
Pick a nearby object. What letter does its name begin with? Convert that from a
letter (base 26) to a number and truncate.
Probably has some systematic bias from the names of common everyday objects
overwhelming it, but a decent start.
EDIT: Oh wait... that also has the problem of being biased because you're
truncating and there are only 26 numbers. Maybe the bias against zxwq will
almost cancel it out?
2NancyLebovitz10y
Use the random numbers from your watch in groups to get more digits.
0A1987dM10y
A mobile phone with an Internet connection and random.org.
0Pentashagon10y
You can cast a lot of dice into a shoebox and shake the box on edge so that they
all end up in a line and then read them off as a base-6 number, or other bases
if you have other shapes. This is just from the diceware
[http://world.std.com/~reinhold/diceware.html] page. I personally can't think of
a more efficient way of consistently generating random numbers.
0Armok_GoB10y
Use something like 10 biased RNGs, like just trying to think of random-seeming
sequence the naive way, then convert them to binary, reverse the order of every
other one, and XOR them.
0Alsadius10y
This isn't an even smearing, but looking at a random piece of text and
converting the letters into 1-26 should be sufficient for many purposes. If you
want additional randomness, add the letters of the first nontrivial word up mod
26(or mod 10, or whatever).
-1elharo10y
No, that won't work due to Benford's Law
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law]. In this case, there will be a
lot more 1's and somewhat more 2's than the other 8 digits. I.e. 10 letters have
numbers beginning with 1 and 7 have numbers beginning with 2, but none have
letters beginning with 0. The non-random distribution of letters in English text
will probably also skew your results.
2Alsadius10y
Hence why I said "sufficient for many purposes". If you're trying to choose
between 3 places to eat lunch, for example, "the next letter of text mod 3" is a
perfectly acceptable method for determining it. If you're trying to encrypt
nuclear launch codes, not so much.
1Emile10y
Benford's Law applies to the first digit, whereas Alsadius's use of modulo means
taking the last one, which would be much less biased (the bias would be drowned
by the bias from common words and letters).
0Ben Pace10y
Use memory techniques to memorise a hundred is what I plan to do.
3[anonymous]10y
Your random numbers will be more generally useful if other people can verify the
randomness.
I imagine some LW user have these questions, or can answer them. Sorry if this isn’t the right place (but point me to the right place please!).
I’m thinking of returning to university to study evolution/biology, the mind, IT, science-type stuff.
Are there any legitimate way (I mean actually achievable, you have first-hand experience, can point to concrete resources) to attend an adequate university for no or low-cost?
How can I measure my aptitude for various fields (for cheap/free)? (I did an undergrad degree in educatio... (read more)
Do you care about the piece of paper? If not, you can likely attend courses in
the literal sense - just show up for the lectures - without paying anything at
all. Old textbooks are cheap, if you want problem sets, and you almost certainly
do - I strongly opine that you cannot learn anything even remotely math-oriented
without doing problems. But no rule says you have to do the same problems the
others in the class are doing.
Clearly, this is not the method for you if you need a lot of feedback and
guidance, nor if you want the credential in addition to the knowledge.
5Kawoomba10y
Mostly depends on what languages you speak fluently, what countries you can
obtain visas for, your willingness to relocate to said countries and your plans
on what you'll do with the "science-type stuff". If you want advice, edit your
post accordingly. Most of the answers will come out to public colleges in your
home state, or Europe. Or plumbing.
0Torello10y
Hey, thanks for your reply.
I do want advice... how would you suggest I edit the post?
I don't know what I plan to do with what I study, I just know that it's very
interesting to me. I'm not sure if that's good or bad.
I'm a native English speaker, and I speak passable Spanish (I can read light
novels, hold conversations, etc). I never really considered doing an undergrad
degree abroad.
2ygert10y
I just realized I probably totally misunderstood what was being asked. Never
mind.
2Risto_Saarelma10y
Get a textbook of the appropriate level on the subject that has exercises and
the correct answers to them, read the book, then do the exercises and see what
you come up with? If it's math or physics, you should be able to tell by
yourself whether your solutions resemble the example solutions in the text, seem
to make sense and come up with the correct answers.
I don't know how well this will work with evolutionary biology or cognitive
science. If you want to include philosophy in the "mind" part, it's my
understanding that you need to be a trained academic philosopher to reliably
tell fancy garbage and acceptable academic philosophy apart, so the approach
probably won't work there.
After reading a couple of introductory textbooks, try to find grad students in
the field in online chats and ask them about the stuff to gauge how well you've
understood it. You can probably find plenty of math and computer science
literate people on Lesswrong to bounce stuff off of.
Also, do you actually know you need to attend lectures to learn things, or are
you just planning to do this because attending lectures is what people who get
educated are supposed to do in the standard narrative? I'm pretty much incapable
of following spoken academic lectures myself, and basically learn most
everything by reading. If I wanted to get an education, I'd just go for a big
stack of textbooks and a good note-taking system and ignore live lectures
entirely at least on the undergrad level.
-2Eugine_Nier10y
My understanding is that there is considerable overlap between these two
categories.
0Risto_Saarelma10y
That's another problem. You might not be able to trust an academic philosopher's
judgment on whether a bit of philosophy is actually any good as much as, say, an
academic mathematician's judgment on whether a bit of mathematics is any good.
2OrphanWilde10y
Are you wanting a degree, or are you wanting education?
If you're just wanting the information, the university in question may permit
low-cost auditing [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_audit]
1ChristianKl10y
Of course, I just go to any university in my city and they don't cost anything.
Whether or not you need credentials depends on your goals. Yudkowsky started
SI/MIRI without any credentials.
When it comes to programming questions that I face as part of my university
studies I go to StackOverflow.
Depends on your ability to self motivate.
Depends on whether you want to do something that needs equipment.
If you can remember the Anki cards about a topic it's likely that you understand
the topic. But more importantly, what's your goal? What do you want to be able
to do with your "understanding of the material"?
0Torello10y
Thanks very much for your reply,
Apparently you're from Berlin, (I'm sure this is google-able)--are foreign (US
in my case) students able to enroll in classes without fees, difficult to obtain
visas, etc? Are many courses offered in English?
I'm not really sure what I want to do with my "understanding of the material,"
which is largely why I'm not sure if credentials/access to equipment are
important to me.
It's hard to measure, but I think I'm pretty motivated. Unsurprisingly, I don't
have the raw intelligence of Yudkowsky, so I have doubts about how well someone
with my skill set will be able to make progress without support/credentials.
Again, thanks for the reply.
0ChristianKl10y
As far as I know there are no additional fees for foreign students. A lot of
Master courses get offered in English. I think it should be easy for US citizens
to get a visa.
But I'm a German citzens so I don't know the details from the perspective of
being an US citizen well.
How about spending a gap year to think about what you want to do with your life
before starting a new degree at university?
I don't think that raw intelligence is the most important thing. The important
thing is to be willing to do work in a way without a clear path.
Having social skills is also important. If you have marketable skills and
network well, credentials aren't important.
If you are truly interested in biology and science I would suggest that you do
quantified self style self experiments. Start a blog about them.
1pragmatist10y
I went to a college in the United States where admissions are need-blind (they
don't consider how much financial aid you'll need in their decision to admit
you) and that offers full-need aid (once admitted, they will meet any financial
need you demonstrate). I was an international student, so the aid was not in the
form of a loan, but a straight-up grant. I basically ended up paying nothing to
go to a college that normally charges $60k+ a year. So if you're not American,
this is a possibility. If you are American, I understand that most (all?) of the
financial aid is in the form of federal loans, which you may or may not want to
incur.
Wikipedia says there are only seven US universities
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Need-blind_admission#U.S._institutions_that_are_need-blind_and_meets_full-need_for_all_applicants]
that offer full need-blind aid to international students. There are many more
that are need-blind and full-need for US students, although this will probably
involve loans. That Wikipedia page also lists four non-US universities
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Need-blind_admission#Non-U.S._institutions_that_are_need-blind_and_full-need_for_all_applicants]
that offer need-blind and full-need aid to all applicants. If you are American,
applying to one of those may be a better bet, because you might get a grant
instead of a loan. I've heard good things about the National University of
Singapore.
I personally regard this entire subject as a memetic hazard, and will rot13 accordingly.
Jung qbrf rirelbar guvax bs Bcra Vaqvivqhnyvfz, rkcynvarq ol Rqjneq Zvyyre nf gur pbaprcg juvpu cbfvgf:
... gung gurer vf bayl bar crefba va gur havirefr, lbh, naq rirelbar lbh frr nebhaq lbh vf ernyyl whfg lbh.
Gur pbaprcg vf rkcynvarq nf n pbagenfg sebz gur pbairagvbany ivrj bs Pybfrq Vaqvivqhnyvfz, va juvpu gurer ner znal crefbaf naq gur Ohqquvfg-yvxr ivrj bs Rzcgl Vaqvivqhnyvfz, va juvpu gurer ner ab crefbaf.
V nfxrq vs gurer jrer nal nethzragf sbe Bcra Vaqvivqhn... (read more)
I think it is true. Self awareness is not hardware (wetware, whatever-ware)
dependent. Just upload yourself and everything would be just fine. You'll be on
two places at the same time, but with no communications between your instances,
the old and the new one.
The same situation here, only that you have more than one natural born upload.
Many billion, in fact.
The naturalism leads to this (frightening) conclusion.
0Rukifellth10y
Doesn't that black box the process of uploading?
0Thomas10y
I am not sure what do you mean by this blackboxing.
But to think, that the process of consciousnesses will work inside a computer,
but will not work inside some other human skull - is naive.
It should work either on both places or nowhere.
People respond to this with "My memories are crucial, they are my unique
identifier!". Well, you can forget pretty much everything and you will feel the
same way. Besides, at every moment that you are self aware, you are remembering
different little pieces of everything, doesn't matter what exactly. Might be a
memory of a total solar eclipse, millions have almost the same short movie in
their heads. Nothing unique here,
The consciousnesses is a funny algorithm, running everywhere. This is why, you
should care about the future and behave accordingly at the present time.
2Rukifellth10y
Black boxing is when a complicated process is skipped over in reasoning. You
supposed that mind uploading was possible for the sake of argument, to support a
conclusion outside of the argument.
1Thomas10y
I see no reason, why uploading would be impossible. As I see no reason, why
interstellar traveling would be impossible.
I have no idea how to actually do both, but that's another matter.
If the naturalistic view is valid, it is difficult to see a reason why those two
would be impossible. But if the Universe is a magic place, then of course. It's
possible that they are both impossible due to some spell of a witch, or
something.
Still, I do assign a small probability to the possibility, that the
consciousnesses is something not entirely computable and therefor not executable
on some model of a Turing machine. But then again, the probability for this I
see quite negligible.
0Rukifellth10y
Does it matter what consciousness is made out of for mind uploading to be
possible?
0Thomas10y
Of course. If some of us are right, the consciousness is an algorithm running on
a substrate able to compute it.
Then, the transplantation to another substrate is sure possible. How difficult
this copping actually is, I wonder.
That all, assuming no magic is involved here. No spirituality, no soul and no
other holly crap.
But when we embrace the algorithmic nature of consciousness, intelligence,
memories and so on, we lose the unique identifier, so dear to most otherwise
rational people. Their mantra goes "You only live once!" or "Everyone is unique
and unrepeatable person!". Yes, sure. So when I was born, a signal traveled
across the Universe to change it from the place I could be born, to a place this
possibility now expired for good? May I ask, is this signal faster then light?
If it isn't ... well, it isn't good enough.
I am just an algorithm, being computed here and there, before and now.
0Rukifellth10y
I forgot to mention this, but I also tried my hand at writing an essay about
this sort of thing: finding the physical manifestation of consciousness. If I
could vouch for the rigor of it, I'd have posted it to the Facebook group
already, but alas, I can't., though it may be of some use here.
0bogus10y
Wait, so that's where the whole 'YOLO' thing/meme comes from? I notice that I am
confused...
0Rukifellth10y
How does this square with chaos theory, which models behaviour that diverges
greatly due to infinitesimal changes at the start?
0[anonymous]10y
What has it got to do with chaos theory?
0Rukifellth10y
Suppose you have two similar but extremely complicated systems that put compound
pendulums to shame and both of which have different starting conditions. Would
the state of one system ever be identical to the state of the other at any state
that has occurred, or will occur, with system two?
0[anonymous]10y
No, with extremely high probability.
How does that relate to whatever Thomas was saying? For that matter, what is
Thomas saying?
0Plasmon10y
Are you sure? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poincar%C3%A9_recurrence_theorem]
0[anonymous]10y
That's a really cool proof, but phase space can be exponentially large,
especially for an "extremely complicated" system. It also requires finite bounds
on system parameters.
For that to break my "extremely high probability", there would have to be
relatively few orbits in the phase space approaching a space-filling set of
curves, which is itself extremely unlikely, unless you can think up some
pathological example.
It does weaken my statement, though.
0Rukifellth10y
He suggested that it was possible for a person to be repeated, mental state and
all, given enough time. I thought to conceptualize the minds of people as being
like extremely complicated systems with chaotic interactions to ask if his
belief could be true.
0Thomas10y
How the identity of a single person squares with it? Wouldn't a tiny change
convert me into somebody else?
0Rukifellth10y
At no point has one cubic centimeter of air been exactly like another cubic
centimeter of air.
0Thomas10y
At no point you are exactly the same, as you were seconds ago.
0Rukifellth10y
Oh I see what you meant now. You don't become somebody else, which implies
there's an existing mental state that has existed before- you become somebody
new.
-2Thomas10y
No, not somebody new. The same consciousness algorithm is running and I am
indistinguishable from the consciousness algorithm.
It is not I am you", it is I am equal consciousness and You are equal
consciousness. Therefor *I am you.
For you can change every part of your body and every piece of your memories.
Until you are self aware, it's you. Even with a different body somewhere else.
0Rukifellth10y
Just wondering, does Less Wrong have a procedure for understanding concepts that
are incredibly distant from direct experience?
1Qiaochu_Yuan10y
What would you do on the hypothesis that this was true that you wouldn't do on
the hypothesis that it was false?
0Rukifellth10y
Honestly? I'd start taking antidepressants, and then embark on a a life-long
quest to destroy the Universe via high energy particle experiments, or perhaps
an unfriendly AI.
0[anonymous]10y
Honestly, I'd start taking antidepressants, and then embark on a a life-long
quest to destroy the Universe via high energy particle experiments. Still not
used to how the commenting works, this comment was not retracted.
1Douglas_Knight10y
I endorse this theory and it all adds up to normality: in the end, the theories
that you offer as alternatives are all true. (I have not read anything other
than your comment.)
0Rukifellth10y
How can they, if they're mutually exclusive?
Whew, Karma. Also, why did this get downvoted so much? I'd appreciate the
skepticism a lot more in the form of an argument. (No, seriously, I'd appreciate
skeptical argument way more than any abstract philosophical argument should be
appreciated)
1Douglas_Knight10y
The belief that they are mutually exclusive is confusion.
0Rukifellth10y
I don't understand.
0Richard_Kennaway10y
(Partially derot13ing for clarity:)
Nonsense on stilts. Next!
1Rukifellth10y
I like your phrasing, but how is this so?
0Richard_Kennaway10y
I just have a robust memetic immune defence system
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/18b/reason_as_memetic_immune_disorder/] that at once
recognises the absurdity of the suggested viewpoint, and that apart from the
warm fuzzies it may induce from contemplating the Deep Wisdom that "we are all
One!", it has no implications for anticipated experiences.
2Rukifellth10y
I don't understand why everyone thinks this is such a good thing. I wouldn't
have rot13'd this post if I thought this was a good thing.
1Richard_Kennaway10y
Well, I don't think warm fuzzies from Deep (i.e. fake) Wisdom are a good thing.
Does anyone here? I prefer to get mine from reality, or from fiction, not from
the latter passed off as the former.
1Rukifellth10y
I mean, I don't understand why this would be a source of warm fuzzies. Everyone
else is really you? That means none of the people I care about ever existed! I
can't imagine people continuing to function with a belief like that, and yet
there it is, a Facebook group whose members smile knowingly at each other, each
member fully complacent with the idea that none of the others really exist.
0Alejandro110y
Maybe if your life is miserable (e.g., let's say you are estranged from your
family, you are unemployed or have a soul-crushing job, and/or you have no close
friends and no romantic prospects) you get a thrill out of believing that none
of it is real, that those bothersome people you interact with are in fact only
aspects of yourself.
0Thomas10y
This is a kind of META argument. "How miserable you must be, to suggest
something like this ..."
Doesn't matter how miserable or not he is. It only matters if he is right or
not.
0Alejandro110y
I'm just answering Rukifellth's question as to how could someone derive warm
fuzzies from such a belief, not making any kind of argument against it.
0Rukifellth10y
I would derive a great number of warm fuzzies from an argument against it.
0Richard_Kennaway10y
"People are crazy, the world is mad." Having boggled at them, I pass by.
0drethelin10y
If there's only one person and everyone else is simulated in their minds then
that simulation is powerful and uncontrollable enough that for all practical
purposes they can act like there are other people.
0Rukifellth10y
The concept is unlike traditional solipsism, if that's what you're referring to?
0drethelin10y
I haven't read past what you posted but it seems identical to me.
0Rukifellth10y
This concept is unlike your example, because it is still possible for this one
person carrying the simulation to create an offspring or clone, and it would in
time become two separate people. Open Individualism states that if the one
person carrying the simulation were to somehow reproduce themselves, there would
still only be one person.
I recently remarked that the phrase "that doesn't seem obvious to me" is good at getting people to reassess their stated beliefs without antagonising them into a defensive position, and as such it was on my list of "magic phrases". More recently I've been using "can you give a specific example?" for the same purpose.
What expressions or turns of phrase do you find particularly useful in encouraging others, or yourself, to think to a higher standard?
This is not quite what you want, but if you are a grad student giving a talk and a senior person prefaces her question to you with "I am confused about...", you are likely talking nonsense and they are too polite to tell you straight up.
Which reminds me of my born-again Christian mother - evangelicals bend over backwards to avoid dissing each other, so if you call someone "interesting" in a certain tone of voice it means "dangerous lunatic" and people take due warning. (May vary, this is in Perth, Australia.)
depersonalizing the argument is something I've had great success with. Steelmanning someone's argument directly is insulting, but steelmanning it by stating that it is similar to the position of high status person X, who is opposed by the viewpoint of high status person Y allows you to discuss otherwise inflammatory ideas dispassionately.
That one seems much more effective after one has absorbed certain memes. In contrast the one's given by sixes_and_sevens seem to work in a more general setting.
So, everyone agrees that commuting is terrible for the happiness of the commuter. One thing I've struggled to find much evidence about is how much the method of commute matters. If I get to commute to work in a chauffeur driven limo, is that better than driving myself? What if I live a 10 minute drive/45 minute walk from work, am I better off walking? How does public transport compare to driving?
I suspect the majority of these studies are done in US cities, so mostly cover people who drive to work (with maybe a minority who use transit). I've come across a couple of articles which suggest cycling > driving here and conflicting views on whether driving > public transit here but they're just individual studies - I was wondering if there's much more known about this, and figured that if there is, someone here probably knows it. If no one does, I might get round to a more thorough perusal of the literature myself now I've publicly announced that the subject interests me.
For me an important aspect is feeling of control. 15 minutes of walking is more pleasant that 10 minutes of waiting for bus and 5 minutes of travelling by bus.
Every now and then, I decide that I don't have the patience to wait 10 minutes for a bus that would take me to where I'm going in 10 minutes. So I walk, which takes me an hour.
Not in general, but I recognize your example. Walking is pleasant and active and allows me to think sustained thoughts, so it makes time 'pass' quickly. Whereas riding the subway is passive and stressful and makes me think many scattered thoughts in short time, so it makes time 'pass' slowly, making the ride seem longer. Also, if you walk somewhere in 15 minutes that probably takes about 15 minutes, but if you ride the subway for 15 minutes that probably takes more like half an hour from when you leave home to when you get to your goal.
I've just noticed that the Future of Humanity Institute stopped receiving direct funding from the Oxford Martin School in 2012, while "new donors continue to support its work." http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/institutes/future_humanity
Does that mean it's receiving no funding at all from Oxford University anymore? I'm surprised that there was no mention of that in November here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/faa/room_for_more_funding_at_the_future_of_humanity/. Is the FHI significantly worse off funding wise than it was in previous years?
Posting here rather than the 'What are you working on' thread.
3 weeks ago I got two magnets implanted in my fingers. For those who haven't heard of this before, what happens is that moving electro-magnetic fields (read: everything AC) cause the magnets in your fingertips to vibrate. Over time, as nerves in the area heal, your brain learns to interpret these vibrations as varying field strengths. Essentially, you gain a sixth sense of being able to detect magnetic fields, and as an extension, electricity. It's a $350 superpower.
The guy who put them in my finger told me it will take about six months before I get full sensitivity. So, what I'm doing at the moment is research into this and quantifying my sensitivity as it develops over time. The methodology I'm using is wrapping a loop of copper wire around my fingers and hooking it up to a headphone jack, which I will then plug into my computer and send randomized voltage levels through. By writing a program so I can do this blind, I should be able to get a fairly accurate picture of where my sensitivity cutoff level is.
One thing I'm stuck on is how to calculate the field strength acting on my magnets. Getting the B field for a solen... (read more)
"superpower" is overstating it. Picking up paperclips is neat and being able to feel metal detectors as you walk through them or tell if things are ferrous is also fun but it's more of just a "power" than a superpower. It also has the downside of you needing to be careful around hard-drives and other strong magnets. On net I'm happy I got them but it's not amazing.
It's all fun and games until you need to get MRI and your fingers burst into flames.
Then it's just fun.
There's something that happens to me with an alarming frequency, something that I almost never (or don't remember) see being referenced (and thus I don't know the proper name). I'm talking about that effect when I'm reading a text (any kind of text, textbook, blog, forum text) and suddenly I discover that two minutes passed and I advanced six lines in the text, but I just have no idea of what I read. It's like a time blackhole, and now I have to re-read it.
Sometimes it also happens in a less alarming way, but still bad: for instance, when I'm reading something that is deliberately teaching me an important piece of knowledge (as in, I already know whathever is in this text IS important) I happen to go through it without questioning anything, just "accepting" it and a few moments later it suddenly comes down on me when I'm ahead: "Wait... what, did he just say 2 pages ago that thermal radiation does NOT need matter to propagate?" and I have again to go back and check that I was not crazy.
While I don't know the name of this effect, I have asked some acquantainces of mine about that, while some agreed that they have it others didn't. I would like very much to eliminate this flaw, anybody knows what I could do to train myself not to do it or at least the correct name so I can research more about it?
Hey komponisto (and others interested in music) -- if you haven't already seen Vi Hart's latest offering, Twelve Tones, you might want to take a look. Even though it's 30 minutes long.
(I don't expect komponisto, or others at his level, will learn anything from it. But it's a lot of fun.)
A Big +1 to whoever modified the code to put pink borders around comments that are new since the last time I logged in and looked at an article. Thanks!
Heya. I'm organizing a meetup, but to announce it here I seem to need some karma. Thanks.
I noticed a strategy that many people seem to use; for lack of a better name, I will call it "updating the applause lights". This is how it works:
You have something that you like and it is part of your identity. Let's say that you are a Green. You are proud that Greens are everything good, noble, and true; unlike those stupid evil Blues.
Gradually you discover that the sky is blue. First you deny it, but at some moment you can't resist the overwhelming evidence. But at that moment of history, there are many Green beliefs, and the belief that the sky is green is only one of them, although historically the central one. So you downplay it and say: "All Green beliefs are true, but some of them are meant metaphorically, not literally, such as the belief that the sky is green. This means that we are right, and the Blues are wrong; just as we always said."
Someone asks: "But didn't Greens say the sky is green? Because that seems false to me." And you say: "No, that's a strawman! You obviously don't understand Greens, you are full of prejudice. You should be ashamed of yourself." The someone gives an example of a Green that literally believed the sky i... (read more)
My strategy is to avoid conversations of this form entirely by default. Most Greens do not need to be shown that the belief system they claim to have is flawed, and neither do most Blues. Pay attention to what people do, not what they say. Are they good people? Are they important enough that bad epistemology on their part directly has large negative effects on the world? If the answers to these questions are "yes" and "no" respectively, then who cares what belief system they claim to have?
Yes, like moving-the-goalposts, this is an annoying and dishonest rhetorical move.
Suppose some Green says:
Yes, intellectual precursors to the current Green movement stated that the sky was literally Green. And they were less wrong, on the whole, then people who believed that the sky was blue. But the modern intellectual Green rejects that wave of Green-ish thought, and in part identifies the mistake as that wave of Greens being blue-ish in a way. In short, the Green movement of a previous generation made a mistake that the current wave of Greens rejects. Current Greens think we are less wrong than the previous wave of Greens.
Problematic, or reasonable non-mindkiller statement (attacking one's potential allies edition)?
How much of that intuition is driven by the belief that Bluism is correct. If we change the labels to Purple (some Blue) and Orange (no Blue), does the intuition change?
What if it really was like that?
The true meaning of moral panics
... (read more)Sure. Also see the recent follow-ups to the Stanford marshmallow experiment. It sure looks like some of what was once considered to be innate lack of self-restraint may rather be acquired by living in an environment where others are unreliable, promises are broken, etc.
{EDITED to clarify, as kinda suggested by wedrifid, some highly relevant context.}
This comment by JoshuaZ was, when I saw it, voted down to -3, despite the fact that it
A number of JoshuaZ's other recent comments there have received similar treatment. It seems a reasonable conclusion (though maybe there are other explanations?) that multiple LW accounts have, within a short period of time, been downvoting perfectly decent comments by JoshuaZ. As per other discussions in that thread [EDITED to add: see next paragraph for more specifics], this seems to have been provoked by his making some "pro-feminist" remarks in the discussions of that topic brought up by recent events in HPMOR.
{EDITED to add...} Highly relevant context: Elsewhere in the thread JoshuaZ reports that, apparently in response to his comments in that discussion, he has had a large number of comments on other topics downvoted in rapid succession. This, to my mind, greatly raises the probability that what's goi... (read more)
There is now fanfic about Eliezer in the Optimalverse. I'm not entirely sure what to make of it.
In response to this post: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2013/02/which-biases-matter-most-lets-prioritise-the-worst.html
Robert Wiblin got the following data (treated by a dear friend of mine):
89 Confirmation bias
54 Bandwagon effect
50 Fundamental attribution error
44 Status quo bias
39 Availability heuristic
38 Neglect of probability
37 Bias blind spot
36 Planning fallacy
36 Ingroup bias
35 Hyperbolic discounting
29 Hindsight bias
29 Halo effect
28 Zero-risk bias
28 Illusion of control
28 Clustering illusion
26 Omission bias
25 Outcome bias
25 Neglect of prior base rates effect
25 Just-world phenomenon
25 Anchoring
24 System justification
24 Kruger effect
23 Projection bias
23 Mere exposure effect
23 Loss aversion
22 Overconfidence effect
19 Optimism bias
19 Actor-observer bias
18 Self-serving bias
17 Texas sharpshooter fallacy
17 Recency effect
17 Outgroup homogeneity bias
17 Gambler's fallacy
17 Extreme aversion
16 Irrational escalation
15 Illusory correlation
15 Congruence bias
14 Self-fulfilling prophecy
13 Wobegon effect
13 Selective perception
13 Impact bias
13 Choice-supportive bias
13 Attentional bias
12 Observer-expectancy effect
12 False consensus effect
12 Endowment effect
11 Rosy retrospection
11 Information bias
11... (read more)
How do you correct your mistakes?
For example, I recently found out I did something wrong at a conference. In my bio, in areas of expertise I should have written what I can teach about, and in areas of interest what I want to be taught about. This seems to maximize value for me. How do I keep that mistake from happening in the future? I don't know when the next conference will happen. Do I write it on anki and memorize that as a failure mode?
More generally, when you recognize a failure mode in yourself how do you constrain your future self so that it doesn't repeat this failure mode? How do you proceduralize and install the solution?
I've been thinking about tacit knowledge recently.
A very concrete example of tacit knowledge that I rub up against on a regular basis is a basic understanding of file types. In the past I have needed to explain to educated and ostensibly computer-literate professionals under the age of 40 that a jpeg is an image, and a PDF is a document, and they're different kinds of entities that aren't freely interchangeable. It's difficult for me to imagine how someone could not know this. I don't recall ever having to learn it. It seems intuitively obvious. (Uh-oh!)
So I wonder if there aren't some massive gains to be had from understanding tacit knowledge more than I do. Some applications:
What do you think or know about tacit knowledge, LessWrong? Tell me. It might not be obvious.
Sir, you are wrong on the internet. A JPEG is a bitmap (formally, pixmap) image. A PDF is a vector image.
The PDF has additional structure which can support such functionality as copying text, hyperlinks, etc, but the primary function of a PDF is to represent a specific image (particularly, the same image whether displayed on screen or on paper).
Certainly a PDF is more "document"-ish than a JPEG, but there are also "document" qualities a PDF is notably lacking, such as being able to edit it and have the text reflow appropriately (which comes from having a structure of higher-level objects like "this text is in two columns with margins like so" and "this is a figure with caption" and an algorithm to do the layout). To say that there is a sharp line and that PDF belongs on the "document" side is, in my opinion, a poor use of words.
(Yes, this isn't the question you asked.)
That isn't the standard use of "tacit knowledge." At least it doesn't match the definition. Tacit knowledge is supposed to be about things that are hard to communicate. The standard examples are physical activities.
Maybe knowing when to pay attention to file extensions is tacit knowledge, but the list of what they mean is easy to write down, even if it is a very long list. Knowing that it valuable to know about them is probably the key that these people were missing, or perhaps they failed to accurate assess the detail and correctness of their beliefs about file types.
This conversation just metacitasized.
It's okay, I'll show myself out.
I just noticed the Recent Karma Awards link in the sidebar. Has it been there for long?
How do you upgrade people into rationalists? In particular, I want to upgrade some younger math-inclined people into rationalists (peers at university). My current strategy is:
... (read more)incidentally name drop my local rationalist meetup group, (ie. "I am going to a rationalist's meetup on Sunday")
link to lesswrong articles whenever relevant (rarely)
be awesome and claim that I am awesome because I am a rationalist (which neglects a bunch of other factors for why I am so awesome)
when asked, motivate rationality by indicating a whole bunch of cognitiv
There's a scam I've heard of;
Mallet, a notorious swindler, picks 10 stocks and generates all 1024 permutations of "stock will go up" vs. "stock will go down" predictions. He then gives his predictions to 1024 different investors. One of the investors receive a perfect, 10 out 10 prediction sheet and is (Mallet hopes) convinced Mallet is a stock picking genius.
Since it's related to the Texas sharpshooter fallacy, I'm tempted to call this the Texas stock-picking scam, but I was wondering if anyone knew a "proper" name for it, and/or any analysis of the scam.
Miles Brundage recently pointed me to these quotes from Ed Fredkin, recorded in McCorduck (1979).
On speed of thought:
... (read more)Related to "magic phrases", what expressions or turns of phrase work for you, but don't work well for a typical real-world audience?
I tend to use "it's not magic" as shorthand for "it's not some inscrutable black-boxed phenomenon that defies analysis and reasoning". Moreover, I seem to have internalised this as a reaction whenever I hear someone describing something as if it were such a phenomenon. Using the phrase generally doesn't go down well, though.
On why playing hard to get is a bad idea, and why a lot of women do it.
This was something I was meaning to post about in some of the gender discussions, but I wasn't sure that a significant proportion of men were still put off by women who were direct about wanting sex with them-- but apparently, it's still pretty common.
Oh neato. The class notes for a recent class by Minsky link to Intelligence Explosion: Evidence and Import under "Suggested excellent reading."
Would be good to have a single central place for all CFAR workshop reviews, good and bad. Here's two:
I've been talking to some friends who have some rather odd spiritual (in the sense of disorganised religion) beliefs. Odd because its a combination of modem philosophy LW would be familiar with (acausal commuication between worlds of Tegmark's level IV multiverse) ancient religion, and general weirdness. I have trouble pointing my finger at exactly what is wrong with this reasoning, although I'm fairly sure there is a flaw, in the same way I'm quite sure I'm not a Boltzmann brain, but it can be hard articulating why. So, if anyone is interested, here is th... (read more)
Any LWers in Seattle fancy a coffee?
I'm at UW until the end of the month, so would prefer cafes within walking distance of the university.
Is there a way of making precise, and proving, something like this?
For any noisy dynamic system describable with differential equations, observed through a noisy digitised channel, there exists a program which produces an output stream indistinguishable from the system.
It would be good to add some notion of input too.
There are several issues with making this precise and avoiding certain problems, but I suspect all of this is already solved so it's probably not worth me going into detail here. In the unlikely event this isn't already a solved problem, I could have a go at precisely stating and proving this.
Article discussing how the cost of copper has gone up over time as we've used more and more of the easily accessible, high percentage ores. This is another example of a resource which may contribute to Great Filter considerations (along with fossil fuels). As pointed out in the article, unlike oil, copper doesn't have many good replacements for a lot of what it is used for.
That said, I suspect that this is not a major aspect of the Filter. If the cost goes up, the main impact would be on consumer goods which would become more expensive. That's unpleasant ... (read more)
I was reading http://slatestarcodex.com/ and I found myself surprised again, by Yvain persuasively steelmanning an argument that he doesn't himself believe in at http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/22/social-psychology-is-a-flamethrower/
It's particularly ironic because in that very post, he mentions:
Which seems to be what I am falling for. He outright says:
... (read more)you should probably update towards "being convincing to me is not sufficient evidence of truth." Everything got easier once I stopped believing I was competent to judge claims about X by people who investigate X professionally. I find it better to investigate their epistemic hygiene rather than their claims. If their epistemic hygiene seems good (can be domain specific) I update towards their conclusions on X.
A married couple has asked me to donate sperm and to impregnate the wife. They would then raise the child as their own, with no help from me. Would it be ethical or unethical for me to give them sperm? In particular, am I doing a service or a disservice to the child I would create?
[pollid:534]
Assuming you don't have any particular reason to expect that this couple will be abusive, it's more ethical the better your genes are. If you have high IQ or other desirable heritable traits, great. (It seems plausible to anticipate that high IQ will become even more closely correlated with success in the future than it is now.) If you have mutations that might cause horrible genetic disorders, less great.
The child is wanted, so if they don't actually neglect it it'll grow up fine.
Note that if you donate sperm without going through the appropriate regulatory hoops as a sperm donor (which vary per country), you will be liable for child support.
I am surprised no one else has brought up the LW party line: consequentialism.
What is the alternative?
What is the consequence of your decision?
Probably the alternative is that someone else donates sperm. Either way, they raise a child that is not the husband's. If creating such a life is terrible (which I don't believe), is it worse that it is your child than someone else's? Consequentialism rejects the idea that you are complicit in one circumstance and not the other.
There are other options, like trying to convince them not to have children, or to get a donation from the husband's relatives, but they are unlikely to work.
If the choice is between your sperm or another's, then, as Qiaochu says, the main difference to the child is genes of the donor. Also, your decision might affect your relationship with the couple.
What can possibly be unethical about it? You are the only one who is vulnerable, since you might be legally on the hook for child support.
What's the specific problem this would cause?
This is a poll for people who have ever made an attempt at obtaining a career in programming or system administration or something like that. I'm interested in your response if you've made any attempt of this sort, whether you've succeeded, changed your mind, etc.
ETA: Oops, I forgot an "I just want to see the results" option. If you vote randomly to see them, I'd appreciate it if you do not vote anonymously, and leave a comment reply.
At what age have you learned to touch-type? [pollid:530]
How did you come to learn to touch-type? [pollid:531]
How d... (read more)
I need help finding a particular thread on LW, it was a discussion of either utility or ethics, and it utilized the symbols Q and Q* extensively, as well as talking about Lost Purposes. My inability to locate it is causing me brain hurt.
I'm looking for good, free, online resources on SQL and/or VBA programming, to aid in the hunt for my next job. Does anyone have any useful links? As well, any suggestions on a good program to use for SQL?
Steven Landsburg at TBQ has posted a seemingly elementary probability puzzle that has us all scratching our heads! I'll be ignominiously giving Eliezer's explanation of Bayes' Theorem another read, and in the mean time I invite all you Bayes-warriors to come and leave your comments.
Meta question. Is it better to correct typos and minor, verifiable factual errors (e.g. a date being a year off) in a post in the post's comment thread or a PM to the author?
Does anyone have any information/links/recommendations regarding how to reduce computer-related eye strain? Specifically any info on computer glasses? I was looking at Gunnar but I can't find enough reliable evidence to justify buying them and I would be surprised if there are no better options.
Fwiw I went to an optician today who deemed my vision good, however I spend large amounts of time in front of my screens and my eyes are tired a large fraction of the time.
So I recently released a major update to my commercial game, and announced that I would be letting people have it for donations at half the price for the remainder of July 2013. I suspect I did not make that last part prominent enough in the post to the forum where most of my audience originates, since of the purchases made since, only one took the half price option--the rest all paid the normal price. The post included three links: the game's page, my audio games (general) page, and the front page of my website, I believe in that order. (That is also in a... (read more)
I'm trying to find a getting-a-programming-job LW article I remember reading recently for a friend. I thought it was posted within the last few months, but searching through Discussion I didn't find it.
The post detailed one LWer's quest to find a programming job, including how he'd been very thorough preparing for interviews and applying to many positions over a matter of months, finally getting a few offers, playing them off each other, and eventually, I believe, accepting a position at Google.
Anyone know the article I'm talking about?
I find myself a non-altruist in the sense that while I care about the well-being and happiness of many proximate people, I don't care about the good of people unqualifiedly. What am I getting wrong? If asked to justify unqualified altruism, what would you say?
At what age should you sign up your child for cryonics?
Some folks at the Effective Altruists Facebook group suggested that it might be useful to have a map of EAs. If you would like to be listed in such a map, please fill this form. The data collected will be used to auto-populate this Google Map. (The map is currently unlisted: it can be seen only by those with access to the corresponding URL.)
Anyone care to speculate as to when/at what point bitcoin price is likely to stop dropping?
One of my best friends is a very high suicide risk. Has anybody dealt with this kind of situation; specifically trying to convince the friend to try psychiatry? I'll be happy to talk details, but I'm not sure the Open Thread is the best medium.
Just this: If you friend starts saying that their problems are solved and everything is going to be okay, become more careful. Sudden improvement in the mood and later returning to the original level is more dangerous than the original situation, because at this moment the person has a new belief: "every improvement is only temporary". Which makes them less likely to act reasonably.
I've been there, and this is one of those situations that requires professional help, not random advice from the Internet. If you're in the U.S., call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 and explain the situation. They can assist you further. If you're in some other country, just Google for your local equivalent.
I was browsing through the West L.A Meet up discussion article and found it really fascinating. It will be about humans generating random number strings and the many applications where this would be useful. It's too bad I can't attend. Off the top of my head, I feel like I can only come up with one digit randomly by looking at my watch, not sure how I would get more than that. Does anyone have a decent way to generate random numbers on the spot with out a computer?
Read the serial numbers on the paper money in your wallet?
Seeking Educational Advice...
I imagine some LW user have these questions, or can answer them. Sorry if this isn’t the right place (but point me to the right place please!).
I’m thinking of returning to university to study evolution/biology, the mind, IT, science-type stuff.
Are there any legitimate way (I mean actually achievable, you have first-hand experience, can point to concrete resources) to attend an adequate university for no or low-cost?
How can I measure my aptitude for various fields (for cheap/free)? (I did an undergrad degree in educatio... (read more)
I personally regard this entire subject as a memetic hazard, and will rot13 accordingly.
Jung qbrf rirelbar guvax bs Bcra Vaqvivqhnyvfz, rkcynvarq ol Rqjneq Zvyyre nf gur pbaprcg juvpu cbfvgf:
Gur pbaprcg vf rkcynvarq nf n pbagenfg sebz gur pbairagvbany ivrj bs Pybfrq Vaqvivqhnyvfz, va juvpu gurer ner znal crefbaf naq gur Ohqquvfg-yvxr ivrj bs Rzcgl Vaqvivqhnyvfz, va juvpu gurer ner ab crefbaf.
V nfxrq vs gurer jrer nal nethzragf sbe Bcra Vaqvivqhn... (read more)