Mathy LWers will probably love Scott Aaronson’s Quantum Computing Since Democritus, which is funny, insightful, cutting-edge, and just as LW-ish as Gary Drescher’s Good and Real.
In addition to lots of stuff on quantum mechanics, quantum computing, theory of computation, computational complexity, cryptography, and cosmology, it also includes:
A steel-manning and then rebuttal of Penrose on AI.
A discussion of free will and Newcomb’s problem
A discussion of anthropics (Bostrom’s SIA vs. SSA) and the doomsday argument
It’s based on his 2006 lecture notes but has been updated in response to new discoveries, and one section of the preface explains all the new stuff that has happened that required revising the manuscript (e.g. fully homomorphic encryption, and Chiribella et al.’s proof that quantum mechanics is the only set of rules consistent with some general axioms of probability theory and one additional axiom.
I am not-very-far-at-all into Decisive by Chip & Dan Heath, but even just from the introduction it’s apparent that the book has a huge overlap with a lot of CFAR’s Instrumental Rationality content. And I know from reading Switch (also a great book) that they are thorough researchers and enjoyable authors.
I suspect that even if most of the concepts are old hat, it will be helpful to have more analogies, both for my own sake and to facilitate better explanations of CFAR concepts to people-unfamiliar-with-our-terminology.
The table of contents… (text in parens indicate my guess as to what it relates to, sometimes just from the title, other times I glance at the pages) Widen Your Options
Avoid a Narrow Frame (alternative hypothesis generation)
Multitrack (related to comfort-zone expansion, affordance-generation; not getting stuck in ruts)
Find Someone Who’s Solved Your Problem (updating on others) Reality-Test Your Assumptions
Consider the Opposite (e.g. status quo bias)
Zoom In, Zoom Out (outside view)
Ooch (I had no idea what this was, but the first page yields “to ooch is to construct small experiments to test one’s hypothesis”) Attain Distance before Deciding
Overcome Short-Term Emotion (System 1 vs System 2, urges vs goals)
Honor Your Core Priorities (goal factoring, winning at arguments) Prepare to be Wrong
Bookend the Future (confidence intervals, bookends refer to the min/max etc)
Set a Tripwire (schelling points/fences, murphyjitsu / planning kata / contingency planning) ..
Trusting the Process (a concept proposed in GTD unit… just skimmed the chapter though and while it appears valuable/useful, not obviously linked to CFAR stuff)
So basically this is just workshop-in-a-book. I mean, lacking the food/face-to-face-time/intensiveness/instructors-to-ask-questions-of/interactivity/commitment-mechanisms/followup/community, but otherwise seems to be a good literature review on instrumental rationality. Again, I’ve barely started it, but the authors are good and this is a good topic, so I would bet high odds on it being worth reading.
Haven’t yet, but I got several chapters in before it got put on hold, and I’ve already used some of the concepts/techniques, which is impressive for a book. This is also part of why I’m reading it slowly: so I can gradually integrate it.
One that has emerged several times: Never make an “X or not” decision IIRC, studies reveal that those decisions are statistically regretted. We don’t make them well. By contrast, decisions between 3 or more options are usually well-made. Part of it is that even if you choose one of the original two, you have better context for them.
One technique they recommend is to imagine that a genie comes and says, “About those options you’re considering… sorry, you can’t do either of them. You have to do something else.” … This little hack works pretty well.
I wrote this book in three months while running a startup, launching a hit iPhone app, learning to write 3,000 new Chinese words, training to run a four-hour marathon from scratch, learning to skateboard, helping build a successful cognitive testing website, being best man at two weddings, increasing my bench press by sixty pounds, reading twenty books, going skydiving, helping to start the Human Hacker House, learning to throw knives, dropping my 5K time by five minutes, and learning to lucid dream. I did all this while sleeping eight hours a night, sending 1,000 emails, hanging out with a hundred people, going on ten dates, buying groceries, cooking, cleaning, and raising my average happiness from 6.3 to 7.3 out of 10. And I wrote this paragraph beforehand—I haven’t edited it since. How did I do all of this? I hacked my motivation.
A few notes:
Nick writes that he was launched into this incredible self change by reading my post How to Beat Procrastination and then Piers Steel’s The Procrastination Equation (my post is a summary of the book), and then applying the techniques that worked best for him, all at the same time. Luckily, his book explains what he did in great detail.
He remembers the procrastination equation (Motivation = [Expectancy × Value] / [Impulsiveness × Delay]) as MEVID. Handy.
Nick attended the same CFAR workshop I did: March 2013.
This is neat and actually might be better in some ways than the original book. People tend to respond better to stories than statistics and science, though the most useful stories are those based on the latter. Could be the best of both worlds?
And I wrote this paragraph beforehand—I haven’t edited it since.
After reading your comment, i recently read the book (was great! thanks) and really looked for that line and haven’t seen it, did nick remove it in a later version?
I’m currently rereading Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue, which is a reasonably succinct steel-man job on Virtue Theory. He has some pretty good insights into how traditional moral philosophy got where it is, and why chronic moral arguments never seem to end.
The Selfish Gene, a lot of it was review for me (some of it is one less wrong, more was in my evo-psyc class), but I still enjoyed it. Its a good introduction to modern evolutionary theory.
Only that it’s a few decades old now, so you may want to check it against more recent findings. My impression is that it’s held up pretty well.
Oh, you’ll get angry when you see the word ‘meme’ used to refer to the narrow concept of momentarily-popular-Internet-things, but that will pass eventually.
Finally reading Bad Science by Ben Goldacre. I’m surprised how simple and clear it is—clearer, I think, than his newspaper columns (many of which he could have just bundled up into a series of books). I also have Bad Pharma in the pile, which I understand is heavier going (he really worked to back up every point he made with citations).
The personality of science is neither that of a chivalrous knight nor pitiless juggernaut. What, then, is science? Science is a golem.
A golem is a creature of Jewish mythology. It is a humanoid made by man from clay and water, with incantations and spells. It is powerful. It grows a little more powerful every day. It will follow orders, do your work, and protect you from the ever threatening enemy. But it is clumsy and dangerous. Without control a golem may destroy its masters with its flailing vigour; it is a lumbering fool who knows neither his own strength nor the extent of his clumsiness and ignorance.
(Actually, this passage is merely quoted from their previous book, The Golem: What You Should Know About Science.)
I’ve been reading through Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin to Munger by Peter Bevelin. It was mentioned on LW before here; I agree with Kaufman that his book is a better primer on business, but don’t think that’s the right comparison to make. Seeking Wisdom is much more of a primer to rationality (‘worldly wisdom’), with the added benefit of drawing heavily from the well of Munger and Buffett.
I haven’t finished it yet, but so far have been enjoying Bevelin’s approach to stepping through biases: each of the 28 he lists is explained, demonstrated in a story, finishing with advice on how to avoid it. One of the things I’ve found interesting about it is that Bevelin knows most of the people that are part of the LW rationality canon, like Kahneman, Tversky, Gilbert, and Cialdini, but also knows other people that rarely get mentioned here in the context of rationality, like Munger and Buffett.
Big Munger fan right here. I like Buffett too, but Munger cares to think outside of business (which is why he’s worth 2 measly billion compared to Buffett’s 40+ :-p).
This talk came on line recently, I’ve heard it before but it was not in wide circulation due to the things he said about certain people
I read Sam Kean’s The Disappearing Spoon (about the periodic table), and The Violinist’s Thumb (about genetics). Both are excellent pieces of pop-science. Somewhat like Bill Bryson, but gets a bit more technical in some places.
I much commend the writer for double-checking many of the legends, anecdotes (and debunking quite a few).
Newcomb’s problem has fractured decision theory into a host of warring parties and engendered formulations that are complicated, inelegant, and, I would venture, incorrect. These newer theories share a common trait: they are all more or less self-conscious attempts to secure a two-boxer resolution to Newcomb’s problem. Most disagreement between experts on this subject concerns the correct way to reach this conclusion. This entire edifice, its concordances and its disputes, are vulnerable to the possibility that two-boxing is the wrong way to play.
Eckhardt proposes a new decision theory, “coherent decision theory” (which annoyingly has the same acronym as causal decision theory).
Nonfiction Books Thread
Mathy LWers will probably love Scott Aaronson’s Quantum Computing Since Democritus, which is funny, insightful, cutting-edge, and just as LW-ish as Gary Drescher’s Good and Real.
In addition to lots of stuff on quantum mechanics, quantum computing, theory of computation, computational complexity, cryptography, and cosmology, it also includes:
A steel-manning and then rebuttal of Penrose on AI.
A discussion of free will and Newcomb’s problem
A discussion of anthropics (Bostrom’s SIA vs. SSA) and the doomsday argument
It’s based on his 2006 lecture notes but has been updated in response to new discoveries, and one section of the preface explains all the new stuff that has happened that required revising the manuscript (e.g. fully homomorphic encryption, and Chiribella et al.’s proof that quantum mechanics is the only set of rules consistent with some general axioms of probability theory and one additional axiom.
I am not-very-far-at-all into Decisive by Chip & Dan Heath, but even just from the introduction it’s apparent that the book has a huge overlap with a lot of CFAR’s Instrumental Rationality content. And I know from reading Switch (also a great book) that they are thorough researchers and enjoyable authors.
I suspect that even if most of the concepts are old hat, it will be helpful to have more analogies, both for my own sake and to facilitate better explanations of CFAR concepts to people-unfamiliar-with-our-terminology.
The table of contents… (text in parens indicate my guess as to what it relates to, sometimes just from the title, other times I glance at the pages)
Widen Your Options
Avoid a Narrow Frame (alternative hypothesis generation)
Multitrack (related to comfort-zone expansion, affordance-generation; not getting stuck in ruts)
Find Someone Who’s Solved Your Problem (updating on others)
Reality-Test Your Assumptions
Consider the Opposite (e.g. status quo bias)
Zoom In, Zoom Out (outside view)
Ooch (I had no idea what this was, but the first page yields “to ooch is to construct small experiments to test one’s hypothesis”)
Attain Distance before Deciding
Overcome Short-Term Emotion (System 1 vs System 2, urges vs goals)
Honor Your Core Priorities (goal factoring, winning at arguments)
Prepare to be Wrong
Bookend the Future (confidence intervals, bookends refer to the min/max etc)
Set a Tripwire (schelling points/fences, murphyjitsu / planning kata / contingency planning)
..
Trusting the Process (a concept proposed in GTD unit… just skimmed the chapter though and while it appears valuable/useful, not obviously linked to CFAR stuff)
So basically this is just workshop-in-a-book. I mean, lacking the food/face-to-face-time/intensiveness/instructors-to-ask-questions-of/interactivity/commitment-mechanisms/followup/community, but otherwise seems to be a good literature review on instrumental rationality. Again, I’ve barely started it, but the authors are good and this is a good topic, so I would bet high odds on it being worth reading.
If you’ve finished the book, how was it?
Haven’t yet, but I got several chapters in before it got put on hold, and I’ve already used some of the concepts/techniques, which is impressive for a book. This is also part of why I’m reading it slowly: so I can gradually integrate it.
One that has emerged several times:
Never make an “X or not” decision
IIRC, studies reveal that those decisions are statistically regretted. We don’t make them well. By contrast, decisions between 3 or more options are usually well-made. Part of it is that even if you choose one of the original two, you have better context for them.
One technique they recommend is to imagine that a genie comes and says, “About those options you’re considering… sorry, you can’t do either of them. You have to do something else.” … This little hack works pretty well.
Nick Winter, The Motivation Hacker.
The book opens like this:
A few notes:
Nick writes that he was launched into this incredible self change by reading my post How to Beat Procrastination and then Piers Steel’s The Procrastination Equation (my post is a summary of the book), and then applying the techniques that worked best for him, all at the same time. Luckily, his book explains what he did in great detail.
He remembers the procrastination equation (Motivation = [Expectancy × Value] / [Impulsiveness × Delay]) as MEVID. Handy.
Nick attended the same CFAR workshop I did: March 2013.
This is neat and actually might be better in some ways than the original book. People tend to respond better to stories than statistics and science, though the most useful stories are those based on the latter. Could be the best of both worlds?
After reading your comment, i recently read the book (was great! thanks) and really looked for that line and haven’t seen it, did nick remove it in a later version?
I’m currently rereading Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue, which is a reasonably succinct steel-man job on Virtue Theory. He has some pretty good insights into how traditional moral philosophy got where it is, and why chronic moral arguments never seem to end.
The Selfish Gene, a lot of it was review for me (some of it is one less wrong, more was in my evo-psyc class), but I still enjoyed it. Its a good introduction to modern evolutionary theory.
Do you have any caveats you think one should keep in mind whilst reading the book?
Only that it’s a few decades old now, so you may want to check it against more recent findings. My impression is that it’s held up pretty well.
Oh, you’ll get angry when you see the word ‘meme’ used to refer to the narrow concept of momentarily-popular-Internet-things, but that will pass eventually.
None come to mind. However, I read it over a fairly long period (I was reading other things at the same time) so I may have just forgotten them.
Finally reading Bad Science by Ben Goldacre. I’m surprised how simple and clear it is—clearer, I think, than his newspaper columns (many of which he could have just bundled up into a series of books). I also have Bad Pharma in the pile, which I understand is heavier going (he really worked to back up every point he made with citations).
Collins & Pinch, The Golem at Large: What You Should Know about Technology.
One quote from the preface:
(Actually, this passage is merely quoted from their previous book, The Golem: What You Should Know About Science.)
I’ve been reading through Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin to Munger by Peter Bevelin. It was mentioned on LW before here; I agree with Kaufman that his book is a better primer on business, but don’t think that’s the right comparison to make. Seeking Wisdom is much more of a primer to rationality (‘worldly wisdom’), with the added benefit of drawing heavily from the well of Munger and Buffett.
I haven’t finished it yet, but so far have been enjoying Bevelin’s approach to stepping through biases: each of the 28 he lists is explained, demonstrated in a story, finishing with advice on how to avoid it. One of the things I’ve found interesting about it is that Bevelin knows most of the people that are part of the LW rationality canon, like Kahneman, Tversky, Gilbert, and Cialdini, but also knows other people that rarely get mentioned here in the context of rationality, like Munger and Buffett.
Big Munger fan right here. I like Buffett too, but Munger cares to think outside of business (which is why he’s worth 2 measly billion compared to Buffett’s 40+ :-p).
This talk came on line recently, I’ve heard it before but it was not in wide circulation due to the things he said about certain people
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqzcCfUglws
I read Sam Kean’s The Disappearing Spoon (about the periodic table), and The Violinist’s Thumb (about genetics). Both are excellent pieces of pop-science. Somewhat like Bill Bryson, but gets a bit more technical in some places.
I much commend the writer for double-checking many of the legends, anecdotes (and debunking quite a few).
Eckhardt, Paradoxes in Probability Theory.
One handy quote:
Eckhardt proposes a new decision theory, “coherent decision theory” (which annoyingly has the same acronym as causal decision theory).