I’m so happy: I’ve just got this one right, before looking at the answer. It’s damn beautiful.
Thanks for sharing.
ABranco
Karma: 373
Great visualizations.
In fact, this (only without triangles, squares,...) is how I’ve been intuitively calculating Bayesian probabilities in “everyday” life problems since I was young. But you managed to make it even clearer for me. Good to see it applied to Monty Hall.
John:
Do you suggest any practical way to calculate how steep is my discounting curve, in real life?
That was helpful insight, thanks.
I might be interested in buying it. Is anyone here willing to resell it to me and make a small profit?
If yes, please reply with an offered price.
A feature I’d love to see implemented is a Q&A section. Let’s say that this would be to Yahoo! Answers as LessWrongWiki is to Wikipedia.
The idea is that people can ask questions—any questions—related to rationality and whoever wants it can jump in trying to answer them. Good answers gain karma. And whoever asked the question selects the best answer.
The question could be made looking for qualitative answers (as with Yahoo! Answers) or quantitatively, as a poll (such as here, but much more seriously...)
True. =)
On the other hand, I’ve found that time invested in being more productive pays itself handsomely in time saved.
Starting often is a major point. No more reminiscing about lost time. Just experiencing the now, and the next half hour. It seems like the bigger picture of a project disappears and I only notice what is right around me. Its a lot easier to commit to the next unit of work when its only 30min, than to think about entire 8 hour days in front of me.
Your impressions here match mine (see Eluding Attention Hijacks).
I have also noticed that the anxiety that arises from having too many things to do, distributed in lots of hours ahead, might be closely related to Schwartz’s Paradox of Choice—whenever you chose to do something now, you know you are choosing not to do hundreds of other possible tasks, and it seems that the only way around is to put blinders and forget you have other stuff. And then, looking back, you’ll have accomplished a lot.
That’s definitely interesting. I am curious: have you tried them?, do they actually work?
...which is pretty much equivalent to the writing down tip that I wrote—only that maybe for you emails are units easier to process.
Problem is that it takes some time to send an email. Really. I mean, not if you have three-four ideas a day, but if you have (like me) some dozens, the extra seconds of writing an email, multiplied by many emails, might become a barrier. So I prefer text files, and then I process them later.
I agree. It was quick, harmless, and relevant.
I have to say that I was recommended those ones as being the best. They are indeed the sexiest earplugs ever. Stylish.
Unfortunately, at least for me, they were inferior in blocking noise compared to the cheap ones in orange foam. Silicone still wins.
You are right, thank you. Corrected.
Eluding Attention Hijacks
I like your meta-analysis on to which kinds of tasks coffee works better.
I add something on the how much. Frequent small doses gives you better results than few large doses.
Actually, whenever in the absence of further specific evidences, I have found that small-doses-many-times is a good rule of thumb for a vast array of substances (eg: food in general, sugar) if the goal is to maintain a stable, productive mental state.
Curiously, this is pretty much what I normally do when learning new procedures, but being aware of those S.D.I. steps in a more explicit manner seems to be useful in terms of having a less hesitant, “what the heck should I do next?” attitude when about to do something.
I liked it. Very good procedure to learn new procedures.
“Avoidum” (pl. “avoida”) could be an alternative — but “evitandum”, having more syllables, does sound better.
Then vitamins are not evil, as the paper claims.
Roughly speaking, can we assume that the right thing they should have written as a conclusion in the paper would have been the weaker claim:
“Vitamins X and Y are evil under these daily doses; further studies are needed to confirm if they are beneficial in some other dosage, and if so, which is the optimal one.”
?
Seems like two separate issues: one thing is what you essentially think about the matter under discussion (whether if you make it explicit to the others or not); how you approach influencing the other side is something else.
There is a very similar quote from Ayn Rand as well:
It is not justice or equal treatment that you grant to men when you abstain equally from praising men’s virtues and from condemning men’s vices. When your impartial attitude declares, in effect, that neither the good nor the evil may expect anything from you—whom do you betray and whom do you encourage?
Your point is good. Sometimes it’s just a matter of allocation of resources—and yes, may sound like “you’re with us or you’re against us” depending on the tone.
I’ve practiced vipassana and can relate to the pain asymbolia thing, and do believe that more advanced vipassana practitioners develop a very high level of it.
Suffering seems to be the consequence of a conflict between two systems: one is trying to protect the map (“Oh!, no!, I don’t want to have a worldview that includes a burn in my hand, I don’t like that, please go away!”) and the other, the territory (the body showing you that there’s something wrong and you should pay attention). Consequence: suffering.
Possible solution: just observe the pain for what it is, without trying to conceptualize it. Having got your attention of it, the sensation stays, but there’s no suffering.
Of course, you get better at this after the thousandth time you hear Goenka say: “It can be a tickling sensation. It can be a chicken flying sensation. It can be an ‘I think I’m dying sensation’—just observe, just observe...”. ;)