I think it’s more useful to keep the meaning of “skill” as something like “the ability to do something well”, which is what everybody expects you mean when you use the word, and talk instead about better and worse applications of skills. It’s not the skill that’s context dependent, but how useful or beneficial the application of the skill is in a particular scenario.
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Karma: 2,145
Survey completed. I cooperated without thinking about it much. I believed that TDT-like reasoning would probably lead a significant number of others to cooperate too, and I felt I should support the group.
When a concept is inherently approximate, it is a waste of time to try to give it a precise definition.
The opposite intellectual sin to wanting to derive everything from fundamental physics is holism which makes too much of the fact that everything is ultimately connected to everything else. Sure, but scientific progress is made by finding where the connections are weak enough to allow separate theories.
I’m the same. Great one-on-one, and extremely awkward when there are two or more other people, which I find to be very exhausting due to the extra conversation dynamics you note. It’s also very difficult too when you’re the sort of person who likes to periodically be silent for a period in order to think more deeply about what you’re talking about—with more than one other person there, somebody else will just start a new conversation on a new topic to avoid the “dreaded silence”.
Do you mean complimentary, and not complementary?
It’s much better now. The only issue remaining is that the ‘Frequently Asked Questions” is just a tiny bit too wide to fit on one line inside the containing box, so the ‘ns’ of ‘Questions’ sticks outside of the gray box it is supposed to be inside.
On the topic of how the site looks in different browsers, and finding out whether the layout is borked on some browsers, you could use http://browsershots.org/.
At the moment though, it fails due to an internal server error when it tries to fetch http://friendly-ai.com/robots.txt. If you fix that, you should be able to easily see how the site looks in a bunch of different browsers on different operating systems.
I also see the FAQ page as broken with ‘Questions’ in the header appearing overlayed on the #2 and #3 items in the ‘contents’ list. With Firefox 8 on Linux at default zoom, and zooming down to make the fonts smaller than normal does fix it.
I agree with nyan_sandwich that things would be much improved if the CSS used ems instead of pixels, which are guaranteed to break if users have non-standard fonts or font sizes or their browser happens to have different enough default CSS rules.
He did say “all exact science”, a phrasing I think he probably chose carefully, so I’d charitably interpret the remark as being about people uttering purported scientific truths.
Please elaborate. In what ways have you found it to be mind-altering?
It would be an error to suppose that the great discoverer seizes at once upon the truth, or has any unerring method of divining it. In all probability the errors of the great mind exceed in number those of the less vigorous one. Fertility of imagination and abundance of guesses at truth are among the first requisites of discovery; but the erroneous guesses must be many times as numerous as those that prove well founded. The weakest analogies, the most whimsical notions, the most apparently absurd theories, may pass through the teeming brain, and no record remain of more than the hundredth part….
W. Stanley Jevons
Although this may seem a paradox, all exact science is dominated by the idea of approximation. When a man tells you that he knows the exact truth about anything, you are safe in inferring that he is an inexact man.
Bertrand Russell
The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them.
William Lawrence Bragg
The most valuable acquisitions in a scientific or technical education are the general-purpose mental tools which remain serviceable for a lifetime. I rate natural language and mathematics as the most important of these tools, and computer science as a third.
George E. Forsythe
Thanks for the explanation. Your explanation accords with what I’ve heard from my coach and what I’ve read. What surprised me in your original comment was this sentence in particular:
The first goal was to memorize a massive amount of opening theory and what is known as ‘book’ knowledge.
That sounded to me like much more than “studying the Ruy Lopez and Queen’s Gambit to illustrate basic ideas about central control”. It sounded more like “try to memorize every line of every variation of the Ruy Lopez that is in MCO”.
In my experience, the main goal of chess coaching and training was to teach you how to act like you were a computer. Any kind of “intuitive” play or even creative play was harshly criticized from a young age. The first goal was to memorize a massive amount of opening theory and what is known as ‘book’ knowledge. Once a student has a reasonable amount of book knowledge, then you move on to techniques to focus you on calculating quickly.
This hasn’t been my experience at all. At what level do you believe that memorization of opening theory is the first goal? I’ve seen coaches state again and again that most players under 2000 (i.e., most tournament chess players) spend too much time memorizing opening theory, when they would get far more benefit from working on tactics and middlegame technique, playing through lots of master games, and playing more slow chess. This is what my coach has recommended to me (I’m only about 1700 ICC standard, probably much less than you), and I’ve heard it stated again and again that too much emphasis on opening theory is a serious problem for sub-2000 players.
A good way of getting cheap textbooks is to use a price alert service that notifies you when the price of a new or used book drops below a certain price. When you don’t need the text in a hurry, and would rather save money and buy used, that works well, because students often want to get rid of a textbook in a hurry and offer it for sale at far below the typical used price for that book. Those deals tend to go pretty quickly though.
Another good idea is to buy the previous edition, especially for texts that have many editions. When the 8th edition of a textbook is going for $80 used, you can often get the 7th edition used for ridiculously cheap (like $10 or $15), and the previous edition was often released just a few years ago (some texts have a new edition every few years) and has only minor differences.
I think the positive reactions are probably mostly a case of guessing the teacher’s password. Perhaps the teacher conveyed a positive impression beforehand, but the default password guessing behavior would probably be to guess “teacher wants us to write about this appreciatively” regardless of whether he said anything additional about the site—that would be expected for a community blog devoted to refining the art of {rationality, wisdom, justice, aesthetics, …}.
Tegmark’s Mathematical universe hypothesis is one answer to what that might mean.