AShepard

Karma: 293

AShepard 18 Oct 2014 17:02 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Capla’s comment on: Crossing the History-Lessons Threshold
Seconded. Or more generally, a framework for how to put together a good reading list, would be extremely helpful.

AShepard 4 Aug 2014 15:50 UTC
8 points
on: Knightian Uncertainty: Bayesian Agents and the MMEU rule
I think the analysis in this post (and the others in the sequence) has all been spot on, but I don’t know that it is actually all that useful. I’ll try to explain why.

This is how I would steel man Sir Percy’s decision process (stipulating that Sir Percy himself might not agree):

Most bets are offered because the person offering expects to make a profit. And frequently, they are willing to exploit information that only they have, so they can offer bets that will seem reasonable to me but which are actually unfavorable.

When I am offered a bet where there is some important unknown factor (e.g. which way the coin is weighted, or which urn I am drawing from), I am highly suspicious that the person offering the bet knows something that I don’t, even if I don’t know where they got their information. Therefore, I will be very reluctant to take such bets

When faced with this kind of bet, a perfect bayesian would calculate p(bet is secretly unfair | ambiguous bet is offered) and use that as an input into their expected utility calculations. In almost every situation one might come across, that probability is going to be quite high. Therefore, the general intuition of “don’t mess with ambiguous bets—the other guy probably knows something you don’t” is a pretty good one.

Of course you can construct thought experiments where p(bet is secretly unfair) is actually 0 and the intuition breaks down. But those situations are very unlikely to come up in reality (unless there are actually a lot of bizarrely generous bookies out there, in which case I should stop typing this and go find them before they run out of money). So while it is technically true that a perfect Bayesian would actually calculate p(bet is secretly unfair | ambiguous bet was offered) in every situation with an ambiguous bet, it seems like a very reasonable shortcut to just assume that probability is high in every situation and save one’s cognitive resources for higher impact calculations.

AShepard 2 Jul 2013 0:02 UTC
7 points
on: Rationality Quotes July 2013

We readily inquire, ‘Does he know Greek or Latin?’ ‘Can he write poetry and prose?’ But what matters most is what we put last: ‘Has he become better and wiser?’ We ought to find out not merely who understands most but who understands best. We work merely to fill the memory, leaving the understanding and the sense of right and wrong empty. Just as birds sometimes go in search of grain, carrying it in their beaks without tasting to stuff it down the beaks of their young, so too do our schoolmasters go foraging for learning in their books and merely lodge it on the tip of their lips, only to spew it out and scatter it on the wind.

Michel de Montaigne, Essays, “On schoolmasters’ learning”

AShepard 1 Jul 2013 23:56 UTC
22 points
on: Rationality Quotes July 2013

If (as those of us who make a study of ourselves have been led to do) each man, on hearing a wise maxim immediately looked to see how it properly applied to him, he would find that it was not so much a pithy saying as a whiplash applied to the habitual stupidity of his faculty of judgment. But the counsels of Truth and her precepts are taken to apply to the generality of men, never to oneself; we store them up in our memory not in our manners, which is most stupid and unprofitable.

Michel de Montaigne, Essays, “On habit”

AShepard 15 May 2013 17:57 UTC
−8 points
on: How to Build a Community
Good and important questions. I find it interesting, and indicative of a broader tendency at LessWrong, that books are the first place you looked for an answer. The academic approach has its place, but if you’re looking for advice you can actually put into practice, it would be more helpful to find some people who have successfully built communities and ask them what they did. Talking to a few thoughtful people who have built successful mid-size businesses, community organizations, or online forums from the ground up is going to be a lot more useful on the margin than thinking more about a public goods game.

AShepard 20 May 2012 17:05 UTC
3 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Learn A New Language!
My suggestion would be to add an introduction. There are many more things to be read than time to read. It’s incumbent on you as a writer to convince people that what you have to say is worth the time investment. And you need to make that case clearly, convincingly, and concisely right at the beginning.

For this particular article, you need to establish two things:
- Why the reader should care about learning a foreign language. You take this as given, but I submit that it’s not as obvious as you might think. It sometimes seems like everyone else in the world is trying to learn English—why shouldn’t I let them do all the work?
- Why the reader should listen to your advice. As far as we know, you’re just some random person on the internet. Even if I am interested in learning a foreign language, why should I trust your suggestions?
A paragraph or two addressing those two points would go a long way towards convincing your potential readers that your article is worth their time to read.

AShepard 30 Apr 2012 23:54 UTC
5 points
on: [Error communicating with LW2 server]
From your introductory paragraphs, it appears that you have a genuine desire to respond to feedback but are significantly underestimating the degree of change required to do so. Perhaps a good old fashioned dose of Strunk and White would help. Especially this (note both the content and the style):

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.

AShepard 22 Apr 2012 15:48 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Tuxedage’s comment on: Prisoner’s Dilemma on game show Golden Balls
To be even more technical, “Prisoner’s Dilemma” is actually used as a generic term in game theory. It refers to the set of two-player games with this kind of payoff matrix (see here). The classic prisoners dilemma also adds in the inability to communicate (as well as a bunch of backstory which isn’t relevant to the math), but not all prisoners dilemmas need to follow that pattern.

AShepard 11 Apr 2012 3:43 UTC
17 points
on: Attention control is critical for changing/increasing/altering motivation

I’m guessing these are very familiar to most readers here, but let’s cover them briefly just in case.

I, for one, was not familiar with the terms, so I appreciated the explanation.

AShepard 3 Apr 2012 16:12 UTC
34 points
0
in reply to: Vaniver’s comment on: SotW: Be Specific
I was reminded of something similar by AspiringKnitter’s post below. There is an event in Science Olympiad called Write It Do It. One person is given a constructed object made out of LEGO, K’Nex, or similar. They write a set of instructions for how to reproduce the object. These are then given to a teammate who hasn’t seen the original object, who must use the instructions to reconstruct the original object. Seems fairly simple to adapt to a group setting—you could just split the group into two rooms and have them first write their own instructions and then try to follow the instructions of a partner in the other room.

This exercise and malicious idiot exercise differ in the “when” and “by whom”. With a malicious idiot, your errors are pointed out immediately and by somebody else. When writing instructions, your errors don’t come to light until your partner’s object doesn’t look like yours, and neither of you might notice until that point. It’s important to notice a lack of specificity both in others (so they don’t lead you astray) and in yourself (so you don’t lead yourself astray), so it would probably be useful to do both kinds of exercises.

AShepard 31 Mar 2012 21:11 UTC
4 points
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: Minicamps on Rationality and Awesomeness: May 11-13, June 22-24, and July 21-28
Another thing you could do is measure in a more granular way—ask for NPS about particular sessions. You could do this after each session or at the end of each day. This would help you narrow down what sessions are and are not working, and why.

You do have to be careful not to overburden people by asking them for too much detailed feedback too frequently, otherwise they’ll get survey fatigue and the quality of responses will markedly decline. Hence, I would resist the temptation to ask more than 1-2 questions about any particular session. If there are any that are markedly well/poorly received, you can follow up on those later.

AShepard 30 Mar 2012 2:00 UTC
21 points
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: Minicamps on Rationality and Awesomeness: May 11-13, June 22-24, and July 21-28
I’d suggest measuring the Net Promoter Score (NPS) (link). It’s used in business as a better measure of customer satisfaction than more traditional measures. See here for evidence, sorry for the not-free link.
1. “On a scale of 0-10, how likely would you be to recommend the minicamp to a friend or colleague?”
2. “What is the most important reason for your recommendation?
To interpret, split the responses into 3 groups:
- 9-10: Promoter—people who will be active advocates.
- 7-8: Passive—people who are generally positive, but aren’t going to do anything about it.
- 0-6: Detractor—people who are lukewarm (which will turn others off) or will actively advocate against you
NPS = [% who are Promoters] - [% who are Detractors]. Good vs. bad NPS varies by context, but +20-30% is generally very good. The followup question is a good way to identify key strengths and high priority areas to improve.

AShepard 17 Feb 2012 0:22 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Ezekiel’s comment on: Hearsay, Double Hearsay, and Bayesian Updates
I think it’s just the standard “a thing, another thing, and yet one more additional thing”. A common species, of which “lies damned lies, and statistics” is another example.

AShepard 11 Jan 2012 5:52 UTC
16 points
on: Rationality meditation theory.
This is an odd post. It starts out with a suggestion for how to structure group brainstorming, then veers into an argument for why cannabis use enhances creativity. I think you would be better served splitting those arguments into separate posts.

AShepard 31 Dec 2011 20:47 UTC
2 points
in reply to: AShepard’s comment on: The Value (and Danger) of Ritual
Addendum: This is apparently a known issue with the LW website.

AShepard 30 Dec 2011 16:07 UTC
7 points
on: The Value (and Danger) of Ritual
Off-topic: in a number of places where you’ve used italics, the spaces separating the italicized words from the rest of the text seems to have been lost (e.g. “helpedanyone at all.”) Might just be me though?

AShepard 1 Dec 2011 21:03 UTC
4 points
on: Uncertainty
I’m having difficulties with your terminology. You’ve given special meanings to “distinction”, “prospect”, and “deal” that IMO don’t bear any obvious relationship to their common usage (“event” makes more sense). Hence, I don’t find those terms helpful in evoking the intended concepts. Seeing “A deal is a distinction over prospects” is roughly as useful to me as seeing “A flim is a fnord over grungas”. In both case, I have to keep a cheat-sheet handy to understand what you mean, since I can’t rely on an association between word and concept that I’ve already internalized. Maybe this is accepted terminology that I’m not aware of?

AShepard 22 Nov 2011 6:04 UTC
1 point
on: Drawing Less Wrong: Observing Reality
It looks like a couple of footnotes got cut off.

AShepard 9 Oct 2011 21:54 UTC
5 points
in reply to: KPier’s comment on: Calibrate your self-assessments
Interesting that your debate predictions tend too low. In my debate experience, nearly everyone consistently overestimated their likelihood of winning a given round. This bias tended to increase the better the debaters perceived themselves to be.

AShepard 9 Oct 2011 15:45 UTC
2 points
on: Morality is not about willpower
Upvoted for introducing the very useful term “effective belief”.