There is possibility to skip the singularity question, since skipping is chosen to mean “very unlikely”. Instead, choose some year like “-1″ or “0”
BenLowell
Karma: 370
This reminds me of how I met Nate Soares. He came to a few LessWrong meetups (his first ones), and I dismissed him because he was talking about a bunch of technical things that didn’t seem very interesting to me. (I’ve was much more interested in finding flaws in my own emotional thinking then in discussing things like many worlds quantum mechanics or decision theory.)
I wrote him off as not-a-very-interesting person. Some of it was his interests, I was also a little offput by his intensity and took it as a sign of bad social skills. These days I read and re-read his blog and have gotten enormous gains from doing so, and he’s off doing wonderful things.
This isn’t very broad, but it went much better than I expected.
I wrote a series of letters to my grandmother describing my experiences at CFAR and describing what I learned. She is finding them very valuable and says that she has been discussing and sharing them with her friends to understand the ideas better. She wishes that she heard a lot of the ideas much earlier.
I’m so far only finished writing about half of my experiences and it has been wonderful. Rewriting everything I learned is helping me connect it in new ways. Since my grandmother doesn’t know very much science, I haven’t used much as much jargon, or have been very patient to explain all of the small pieces. It’s good for learning what the inferential distances are.
Are there any known groups which have high conscientiousness? I would be especially curious to know about groups with high conscientiousness and openness to experience.
Another relevant excerpt from the article:
Which saddens me, as an MWI proponent, because I am very quick to admit that there are potentially quite good objections to MWI, and I would much rather spend my time discussing those, rather than the silly ones. Despite my efforts and those of others, it’s certainly possible that we don’t have the right understanding of probability in the theory, or why it’s a theory of probability at all. Similarly, despite the efforts of Zurek and others, we don’t have an absolutely airtight understanding of why we see apparent collapses into certain states and not others. Heck, you might be unconvinced that the above postulates really do lead to the existence of distinct worlds, despite the standard decoherence analysis; that would be great, I’d love to see the argument, it might lead to a productive scientific conversation. Should we be worried that decoherence is only an approximate process? How do we pick out quasi-classical realms and histories? Do we, in fact, need a bit more structure than the bare-bones axioms listed above, perhaps something that picks out a preferred set of observables?
A lot of times different ways that people act are different ways of getting emotional needs, even if that isn’t a conscious choice. In this case it is likely that they want recognition and sympathy for different pains they have have. Or, it’s more likely the case that the different hurts they have (being lonely, being picked on, getting hand-me-downs, whatever) are easily brought to mind. But when the person tells someone else about the things in their life that bother them, it’s possible that someone could say “hey, it sounds like you are really lonely being an only child” and they would feel better.
Some different example needs are things like attention, control, acceptance, trust, play, meaning. There is a psychological model of how humans work that thinks of emotional needs similar to physical needs like hunger, etc. So people have some need for attention, and will do different things for attention. They also have a need for emotional safety, just like physical safety. So just like if someone was sitting on an uncomfortable chair will move and complain about how their chair is uncomfortable, someone will do a similar thing if their big brother is picking on them.
Another reason people often make it look like they are being oppressed is that they feel oppressed. I don’t know if you are mostly talking about people your age, or everyone, but it is not a surprise to me that lots of kids feel oppressed, since school and their parents prevent them from doing what they want. Plenty of adults express similar feelings though, i just expect not as many.
This is awesome!!!
I wish I knew what I wanted to have studied when I went to college, so that I could have hit the ground running, with a goal in mind. Instead I took a year and half before I had settled on a major of physics. It seems that some people had a better idea of what to get out of college, but that seems largely dependent on their parents, where they grew up, and what part of the internet they lived in. I don’t feel like I had a good understanding of what different jobs and careers were like.
So for classes, I took more chemistry than I would have liked, but that doesn’t bother me that much, as it was interesting and still relevant to some of my physics classes.
What does bother me, is that I spent a lot of time taking classes that I thought I should take, instead of classes I wanted to take. I thought that doing theoretical physics was a bad idea because of job / grad school prospects (probability of getting a professorship is low) so I took lab classes and did laboratory research that I didn’t like as much, and did worse in, than theory classes. I still ended up doing theory in my spare time, and instead of research / laboratory work, but it was at the expense of that work, rather than purely additive. I was thinking that following my ‘passion’ was a bad idea, but I think that if i did so and did theory it could have worked out better—I would have been happier, and had a better resume in the end.
I have a lot of strong opinions about the physics curriculum, and wish that it had more programming, and less redundancy. I’m not familiar with how physicists get good at modeling or data-science, and can’t think of any undergraduates from my school who got much experience with this. But that seems like it would have been a good thing.
Something cool to have learned would be “practical mindsets and values”. For a long time I had an idea of that as long as I was learning things, that was great and all I needed to care about. This served me well, but eventually I was introduced to the idea of “get shit done” which was also very useful.
and “avoidance coping”
I think that it’s worth discussing the non-lesswrong term for an ugh field: Anxiety
I noticed that it wasn’t mentioned in the original article or comments, but this is a case of people rediscovering what there is already a large field of research on. It may be helpful for learning more.
Not measuring twice before I cut (machining), directly after my adviser told me this.
Before that happened:
I’m not sure if I can count it as a mistake, since it’s mostly his fault, but a month or so after I started my adviser came up to me and asked why I had been drawing all these plans, and not using the specs. No one told me that someone else had already designed the laser I supposed to be building.
For me, it seemed like it was the natural result of wanting to know ‘why’.
I started college thinking I wanted to do biochemical engineering and study molecular biology without knowing much about it other than I liked the sound of it. For most of my life I had been interested in nature/biology. However, I decided that biology classes seemed like just reading books and repeating the information, and I was interested in learning how the chemicals worked, so I continued to take more chemistry, and changed my major to chemistry. In organic chemistry I was upset that the rules I learned seemed vague and handwavy, and when I asked more about them, the professor said to take physical chemistry and learn quantum mechanics. So I took physical chemistry, and changed my major to physics. Now in physics, I find myself drawn to particle physics and phenomenology. I don’t have any direct memories of asking or wanting to know why as with my other switches, but I do have a distinct feeling of discomfort knowing that there is an underlying lower level reason for why something works, and ignoring it.
I’ve found that my tendency to go to the bottom occurs pretty much whenever I try to learn something new—when I learned programming, I ended up wanting to learn about computer architecture, and when I let myself past that, I still often ended up learning about little bits and pieces in far more detail then was necessary.
It seems to me that this pattern is what happens when I want to learn how things work and reduce uncertainty in a reductionist fashion, and don’t have outside goals I am applying my learning to. If I am trying to solve an engineering or research problem, create something, or get a certain grade I can (depending) skip over things that I don’t need to know or worry about. If I don’t set a goal like that, and just decide to “learn stuff” then the easiest question is to ask why, which gives me a goal.
Note, they are a free service.
I did the ~1/2 of the problems up through chapter 4, and am currently reading chapter 5. I’m not sure If want to spend more time doing problems or not, but I’m definitely interested in reading the rest of the book.
How do you not get fatigued with recording things?
What are your recommendations for amount of structure before you incorporate pomodoros? Is there any structural/organizational stuff you should have set up before you do them?
If possible, I’m interested in how unique the passwords were.
I used to not listen to music for similar reasons, yet I played piano regularly. I also was confused by it, especially the lyrics—I couldn’t understand what people were saying.
Eventually, peer pressure got me and I started listening to music, usually one cd over and over. Eventually I came to like it and became more comfortable with it as background, in a very similar way to wearing a watch or clothes different from my usual is extraordinarily uncomfortable, but after a week it becomes the new normal.
Beeminder: +3. Defining goals in a way that works well is difficult.
GTD + 0 It doesn’t seem to be very useful when you don’t have any appointments and things you want to do are more along the lines of “do all the problems in this textbook”
Getting on a somewhat decent sleep schedule + 2. Making my computer automatically turn off at 11 pm combined with putting shades made out of pillow cases on my bedroom lights has helped me go to sleep between 12 and 2 usually, which is much better. This gives me about 4 hours of extra time that otherwise would have been spent on the internet in a wasteful way. Flux (a program that dims/reddens the screen at night) is nowhere near powerful enough.
Journaling about what my goals are +8. It’s difficult to be motivated when I don’t know why I’m doing anything.
Changing how I visualize something so that I’m not thinking about an outcome that produces anxiety +5. I have found thinking about procrastination as anxiety to be much more helpful than thinking about the Equation. While it could be though of anxiety resulting from expectations, I usually frame it in the sense of “what am I afraid of?” Then I can imagine something bad happening. Addressing the actual likelihood of a Bad Scary Thing doesn’t appear to work. Instead what helps is if I change the framework and purposefully just start thinking about some other aspect that is more desirable.
An example is that I don’t want to “call some people” and tell them they need to redo a repair job because it sucks. Once I thought about “I want X fixed!” then calling them and the social barrier seemed less of an issue.
pomodoros +1. I find that I often have difficulty coming back to work after a 5 minute break, and I end up doing 25-15. I had more luck with periods of 50-10. When I don’t feel very excited about the idea of doing something, then they are more useful.
Social commitments −3. These make me feel yucky and I just want to avoid the activity all together.
I feel that there are lots of synergies between these things. A few years ago, I had well defined goals, but no organizational skills and poor habits. I became very unhappy with my inability to accomplish my goals. Once I started getting practice with beeminder, and a number of other things (one being Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, but I’m not sure how to fit that into akrasia tactics) then I was able to examine my goals again and things fit together much nicer.
Next time, please include a short introduction of what THINK is so I don’t have to look it up.
(It is an effective altruism group)
I’ve been coming back to this post for 7 years or so, and the whole time it’s obvious that I don’t have something to protect, and haven’t found one, and haven’t yet found a way to find something to protect. It seems pretty cool though—and accurate that people who really care about things are able to go to great lengths to improve the way they think about the thing and their ability to to solve it.
I can say that once I realized I cared about wanting to care about something, that helped me quite a bit and I started improving my life.