Note that I still have a timeline of 2-5 months before this plan can fully propogate to my actions. So that’s the amount of time I have to research decision-relevant information and be able to pull through towards making my choice.
Arkanj3l
Karma: 262
I am switching to biomedical engineering and am looking for feedback on my strategy and assumptions
I need some help debugging my approach to informal models and reasoning
How do we more reliably ask ourselves the questions in the Useful Questions Repository?
I would love to identify more questions with the theme of “getting your concepts and beliefs closer to tacit reality as possible”. I can’t think of a better way to say it.
“Who is already occupying the kind of world that I want to be in such that I should go out and interview them?”
Agreed. Or Oxford for that matter.
Not to conflate my opinion’s with shminux’s, but I feel like a set of these maps from different hotspots of activity could help provide greater balance to the more implicit parts of Less Wrong’s ethos. Consider the problem where those who visit Less Wrong for the first time conflate the above memes as what we consider a “rational” course of action; or consider how derivations of what’s rational might depend on a background knowledge in ways that are easy to miss (the kind of biases that “softer” sciences may attempt to track). It’s only possible to think what we have basis for in our memories, as per the availability heuristic. This could lead Less Wrong members to confuse the instrumental with the rational, similarly with the optimum and the rational.
It could also be possible to identify other potential “hotspots” for rationality communities if their culture follows a similar pattern. I imagine Minneapolis could be a city with such potential, for example, due to its youth population and tech firm presence.
Bagging Soylent: 40min work time, 60min elapsed (first time doing task, setting up. Optimization of manufacturing occurred while I was bagging.)
Doing Laundry: 70 mins total − 40mins washing with two rinse cycles and 30mins drying
Folding Large Laundry Load After Drying: 10 mins, 15 elapsed.
The world is a lot simpler than the human mind can comprehend. The mind endlessly manufactures meanings and reflects with other minds, ignoring reality. Or maybe it enhances it. Not very clear on that part, I’m human as well.
Spaced Repetition is only the beginning. http://bigthink.com/neurobonkers/assessing-the-evidence-for-the-one-thing-you-never-get-taught-in-school-how-to-learn
Here’s How to Read—on page 2 there’s a table that lists all of what this guy recommends, use that to evaluate if the rest of the document is worth your time. http://pne.people.si.umich.edu/PDF/howtoread.pdf
Also, if you know anyone who has gone to CFAR, start PMing them for the material on Propogating Urges. http://rationality.org/schedule/
Use some of the best-tested principles in experimental psychology to reinforce the behaviors you want to want, and avoid punishing yourself for doing things you want to do again. Pay attention to the immediate rewards and punishments you’re already doling out to yourself without noticing. If you always feel anxious when you think of a slow-moving project, you may be training yourself not to think about it at all. Connect the intermediate steps toward your goal to your natural enthusiasm for the result.
What you’re doing to make reading papers fun is apparently something that Andrew Critch is very very good at, so keep it up, Critch Jr.
You just became stronger.
If someone takes notes they would be helpful to upload as well.
Adding Carrot—a search engine which takes your query and creates dynamic clusters of websites that form around related concepts. It’s like a form of Google’s related searches that does the sorting for you. There are also visualizations that it can generate for you that allow proportionality comparisons.
This is an example query for ‘rationality’ and this one is Explore vs Exploit with a visualization on the side.
Thank you! I like this one.
I haven’t read the article so I could be full of shit, but essentially:
If you have the list of desired things ready, there should be an ETA on the work time necessary for each desired thing as well as confidence on that estimate. Confidence varies with past data and expected competence, e.g. how easily you believe you can debug the feature if you begin to draft it. Or such. Then you have a set of estimates for each implementable feature.
Then you put in time on that feature over the day tracked by some passive monitoring program like ManictTime or something like it.
The ratio of time spent on work that counted towards your features over the work that didn’t is your productivity metric. As time goes on your confidence is calibrated in your feature-implementation work time estimates.
From Jacques Vallee, Messengers of Deception...
’Then he posed a question that, obvious as it seems, had not really occurred to me: “What makes you think that UFOs are a scientific problem?”
I replied with something to the effect that a problem was only scientific in the way it was approached, but he would have none of that, and he began lecturing me. First, he said, science had certain rules. For example, it has to assume that the phenomena it is observing is natural in origin rather than artificial and possibly biased. Now the UFO phenomenon could be controlled by alien beings. “If it is,” added the Major, “then the study of it doesn’t belong to science. It belongs to Intelligence.” Meaning counterespionage. And that, he pointed out, was his domain. *
“Now, in the field of counterespionage, the rules are completely different.” He drew a simple diagram in my notebook. “You are a scientist. In science there is no concept of the ‘price’ of information. Suppose I gave you 95 per cent of the data concerning a phenomenon. You’re happy because you know 95 per cent of the phenomenon. Not so in intelligence. If I get 95 per cent of the data, I know that this is the ‘cheap’ part of the information. I still need the other 5 percent, but I will have to pay a much higher price to get it. You see, Hitler had 95 per cent of the information about the landing in Normandy. But he had the wrong 95 percent!”
“Are you saying that the UFO data we us to compile statistics and to find patterns with computers are useless?” I asked. “Might we be spinning our magnetic tapes endlessly discovering spurious laws?”
“It all depends on how the team on the other side thinks. If they know what they’re doing, there will be so many cutouts between you and them that you won’t have the slightest chance of tracing your way to the truth. Not by following up sightings and throwing them into a computer. They will keep feeding you the information they want you to process. What is the only source of data about the UFO phenomenon? It is the UFOs themselves!”
Some things were beginning to make a lot of sense. “If you’re right, what can I do? It seems that research on the phenomenon is hopeless, then. I might as well dump my computer into a river.”
“Not necessarily, but you should try a different approach. First you should work entirely outside of the organized UFO groups; they are infiltrated by the same official agencies they are trying to influence, and they propagate any rumour anyone wants to have circulated. In Intelligence circles, people like that are historical necessities. We call them ‘useful idiots’. When you’ve worked long enough for Uncle Sam, you know he is involved in a lot of strange things. The data these groups get is biased at the source, but they play a useful role.
“Second, you should look for the irrational, the bizarre, the elements that do not fit...Have you ever felt that you were getting close to something that didn’t seem to fit any rational pattern yet gave you a strong impression that it was significant?”′
I’ll say that I’m interested in what you have to offer just from the standpoint of novelty and exploration. However, your style doesn’t lend itself to brevity and even though thinking out loud is valuable, getting seven pages out has made me lose track of the point.
I’m glad to see that on certain issues we are in intellectual agreement, but your writing style combined with the sheer amount of academic context you are bringing to the field makes any specific understanding very difficult. Although I am cursorily familiar with maybe a fourth of the authors you mentioned, I feel like in order to do justice for all of them I would need to read primary texts and get to know the literature better. This is something I currently don’t have the time or patience for.
If there are any particular comments that you want to make to me, please do so in my private message box. I am open to picking your brain further and hearing what you have to say. Otherwise I would say that libertarian reform through quantum computers and courthouse bugs is outside the scope of this particular thread.
Anyway, much appreciated. Namaste.
I wanted to save time on doing time estimates of tasks when blocking them into a calendar.
Added GoogleGuide—http://www.googleguide.com/ (with practice and tutorials)
I would recommend editing the post.
I’m probably underweighing more conservative assessments like this, so I appreciate it.
I have not collected evidence the directly contradicts statistical assessments regarding the conscientiousness trait. Instead I’m making an inference based off a collection of evidence that I can name. I don’t think I’ve given much consideration to evidence strength yet so working through this will be a good exercise.
For example:
Historically my conscientiousness has been quite low in part due to depression. I’ve been coming out of that depression recently, and have improved in my ability to keep on task even when I’m discouraged. Oftentimes psyching myself out was the reason why I haven’t instigated behavioral change, because when I fall off the bandwagon I don’t get back on. This change towards optimism makes me feel comparatively more competent and willing to explore my alternatives for support and skills.
Though, as a counterpoint: I am not experiencing mania, but the fact that I’ve recently acquired and optimistic temperament that has not been subject to calibration by the new action-space means that I might still be overestimating my abilities instead of underestimating them.
But given that I am strongly interested in doing things that successful people do that I couldn’t before:
Nick Winter’s assessments in his book “The Motivation Hacker” make me believe that there exists low hanging fruit when it comes to motivation that I have not yet picked. I would guess the same for typically surveyed people due to the recency of prescriptive motivation literature like “The Procrastination Equation”.
Successful students and learners follow regular patterns of behavior that can be turned into habits. The particular examples would be the writings of Cal Newport, Scott H Young, in addition to consulting my academic advisors and the successful students themselves. Needless to say I probably haven’t been using those patterns, which include precommtiments, oicking a good study environment and using it regularly, processing textbooks in a way that produces reviewable notes, and using office hours.
Twin and developmental studies might make me eat my dust on this if I’m directly challenging claims about a personality trait. I’m feeling a bit of resistance to looking them up but I should probably push through it and get it over with.
There are other conditions by which the amount of work and stress that someone can take on goes up, like joining the military; yes, I’m considering it. But there are also less extreme options like just having good health and being more organized, taking up a martial art or doing a sport. Not all of these are going to take off and most certainly I won’t be doing all of them at once. So one obstacle I need to consider is the timeframe towards orienting myself properly for success in biomedical and whether the value is greater or lower than lost wages or other measures of opportunity cost.
I have also experimented with nootropics, which I know believe are overrated but still a useful tool in the toolkit. Finally I am beginning to use Anki, which might be a good way of managing larger volumes of knowledge.
At this point I would like to get answers to my questions on actual working conditions, hiring practices, and future work opportunities. Grabbing all of the experiences with the largest decision-relevant information:cost ratio possible could help me resolve whether this plan will work out. This is unless all of the evidence from current models is substantial enough to outweigh the potential evidence from empiricism.
There are at least two components here: the actual studying and skill acquisition, and the judgement made by the hiring practitioner.
I read on Less Wrong in this popular PSA that a handful of people have managed to get programming jobs through self-study. Although it seems reckless—would it be possible to define a satisficing case for the amount of practice that I would do towards the profile of skills of what a hiring person would want from their employee? This would help resolve the following:
whether or not the idea of studying is even feasible for the target skill level and time constraints
if you control for skill level, and add the condition of whether I have a compsci major or don’t have a compsci major, what do the probabilities of being hired look like? If for a person with a major at the expected skill level I will have has a largely dominating probability, then yeah, I would want to reconsider.
I could talk to HR people or other software engineers at developer meetups, or at career fairs, to get a clearer picture on this. But if like you claim this is a political factor, then maybe I won’t be getting the evidence I need.
I’ll keep this in mind. It does seem safer.