I was recently reviewing Calculus III. I had forgotten it since high school, and, to be honest, never really understood it at the time; though I blame the curriculum. This is a guide to learning the key ideas in a couple of hours. Please excuse my strong language, I wrote...
The beautiful fruit of LESSWRONG is corrupted. When you bite into it, a foul syrup, a horrid oil, pours black, suppurating, onto the tongue, and down the throat of the incautious. The idea of being "less wrong" is ingenious, but only insofar as it is humble. What is humbleness? It...
Non-athletic thinkers are myopic. I see at least three very important reasons any rationalist must value exercise. As someone who has trained extremely hard in distance running, sports in general and athletic conditioning in particular create an intuitive understanding of the fallaciousness of Cartesian Dualism and the accuracy of materialism...
Agreed. Unfortunately, I do not have the intellectual acumen to translate this into a playful rant, so I am afraid I must leave this as is.
A spicy hypothesis raised by this is that socializing too much with children is simply not good for your intellectual development. (I’m not going to test that hypothesis!)
Or, more likely, these children were unusual to begin with. Foucault, for all the weakness in his thinking, understood this pretty well. Strange people can help society to change. But remember, for every odd fellow ten standard deviations up there is another odd fellow ten standard deviations down.
^ Growing pains.
I was recently reviewing Calculus III. I had forgotten it since high school, and, to be honest, never really understood it at the time; though I blame the curriculum. This is a guide to learning the key ideas in a couple of hours. Please excuse my strong language, I wrote the following rant in an impassioned moment.
The way that Calculus III is taught today is stupid. The notation for the class is all from electrostatics, and the theory of the class is a single theorem from Riemannian Geometry (Summarized, Explained, Additional Lecture), but this is buried in jargon. Rather than mine for the truth, some bozo slapped a stupid river analogy on... (read 235 more words →)
You are both more correct than me, my wording was quite strong because I just felt like a discussion of the importance of a non-sendentary lifestyle for improvements in thinking was completely unadressed on the site. Hopefully someone else can read more carefully and help us to optimize based on our many varied characteristics. Thanks for the emotional dampening!
Playful thinking sets up questions in your brain that you wouldn't have known how to set up just by explicitly trying to set up questions. A question is a record of a struggle to deal with some context. These questions, like the dozen problems Feynman carries around with him, set you up to connect with new ideas more thoroughly.
Reminds me of Feynman's story about how a plate got him out of a depressive funk. https://kongar-olondar.bandcamp.com/track/at-cornell-part-2
You've reinvented God. Imagine if you could delude yourself into always thinking that someone was watching you. In you believed in God irrationally on rational grounds you might be able get the same effect.
The beautiful fruit of LESSWRONG is corrupted. When you bite into it, a foul syrup, a horrid oil, pours black, suppurating, onto the tongue, and down the throat of the incautious.
The idea of being "less wrong" is ingenious, but only insofar as it is humble. What is humbleness? It is the virtue of confidence in one's own incorrectness. It is the Socratic knowledge that he who knows the most knows only that he knows nothing, It is the assertion "I am wrong."
This assertion has motivated a great deal of thoughtful contemplation on this site, but the fruits of this contemplation have rotted and yet are still being accepted. We take the... (read more)
Non-athletic thinkers are myopic. I see at least three very important reasons any rationalist must value exercise.
As someone who has trained extremely hard in distance running, sports in general and athletic conditioning in particular create an intuitive understanding of the fallaciousness of Cartesian Dualism and the accuracy of materialism in the sense that the mind is merely a part of the body.
Physical challenges also force one to understand the limitations of Kahneman's "system two." For example, one may know what it means to not start a race too quickly and then "die" (running jargon for running out of steam prematurely), but repeated failures in actual races teach one to realize the limitations... (read more)
Non-athletic thinkers are myopic. I see at least three very important reasons any rationalist must value exercise.
As someone who has trained extremely hard in distance running, sports in general and athletic conditioning in particular create an intuitive understanding of the fallaciousness of Cartesian Dualism and the accuracy of materialism in the sense that the mind is merely a part of the body.
Physical challenges also force one to understand the limitations of Kahneman's "system two." For example, one may know what it means to not start a race too quickly and then "die" (running jargon for running out of steam prematurely), but repeated failures in actual races teach one to realize the limitations... (read more)
In your attempt to sound Rational, you have merely restated the platitude, "would you jump off a bridge if your friends did it?" You claim that you are a follower of efficient markets, but then you say that this was an acceptable exception. Great news, you got lucky this once. Don't defect again, you overestimate yourself.
If the false positive rate is 5 percent, 50 out of every one thousand will test false positive. An additional person will test true positive. Therefore 51 will test positive. The probability a positive tester being positive is 1 out of 51. Multiply to 2 out of 102, and it becomes clear .02 overestimates the true value of those who would test positive as 2 hundredths is greater than 2 hundred-and-secondths.
Have you incorporated Government Notkilleveryoneism into your model? Rational people interested in not dying ought to invest in AI safety in proportion to the likelihood that they expect to be killed by AI. Rational governments ought to invest in AI safety in proportion to the likelihood they expect to be killed by AI. But, as we see from this article, what kills governments is not what kills people.
The government of Acheampong is in more danger from a miscalculated letter than from an AI-caused catastrophe that kills 10% of people or more, so long as important people like Acheampong are not among the 10%. The government of Acheampong, as a mimetic agent, should... (read more)