It requires some status and a consistent record of not being a jerk to do this (or to convince yourself to do this), but: “[Big Talker] has been talking for 2 hours, and [Small Talker] hasn’t really had much opportunity to talk about [thing Small Talker does]. Mind if we hear from [Small Talker] for a bit? ”
Bo102010
Karma: 881
Reading SSC brings back the feeling I got when I first discovered Less Wrong (right after the split with Overcoming Bias, when there were still sequences being posted). Here’s this extremely intelligent and articulate guy, posting very insightful things on topics I didn’t even know I was interested in—and he’s doing it pretty regularly!
I like what Less Wrong has evolved into in the post-Sequences era, but reading Less Wrong today produces a very different feeling from when it did early on.
I enjoyed the episode also. The show is consistently solid, which is quite impressive—I don’t think there’s been an episode that’s really low quality. The peaks aren’t very high, but there are no valleys to speak of...
There a laughable P vs. NP-themed episode in a previous season in which mathematicians use their proof to hack computers, but other than that the episode was watchable.
Great post!
Others have mentioned the HPMOR-style “take a poll of different aspects of your personality,” which I have found to be entertaining and useful.
I’d also like to endorse the method for troubleshooting. I got the idea from Ridiculous Fish’s blog post from 3 years ago.
When I have a technical problem I’m stuck on, I try to ask myself “What would someone who’s smarter than me do?” This is really just “imagine a parody version of person x and see if that causes you to think about the problem in a different way.”
I like to consult Imaginary Dr. House (“The problem is something very rare and obscured because your data is lying to you”), my former boss (“The problem is the most obvious thing it could be, trust yourself and go solve it!”), my college roommate (“Maybe there’s a YouTube video from a dedicated hobbyist that explains this”), and some others.
I wrote up one experience with this technique (not as good as Ridiculous Fish’s) a few months ago, when I had a baffling issue to solve at work (FTP on April 26th at 2 AM).
I am reluctantly someone who pretty much doesn’t care about what happens after I die. This is a position I that I don’t necessarily endorse, and if I could easily self-modify into the sort of person who did care I would.
I don’t think this makes me a monster. I basically behave the same way as people who claim they do care about what happens after they die. That is, I have plans for what happens to my assets if I die. I have life insurance (“free” through work) that pays to my wife if I die. I wouldn’t take a billion dollars on the condition that a third world country would blow up the day after I died.
As you say, though, it’s “me-of-the-present” that cares about these things. With the self-modification bit above, really what I mean is “I’d like to self-modify into the sort of person who could say that I cared about what happens after I die and not feel compelled to clarify that I really mean that I think good things are good and that acting as if I cared about good things continuing to happen after I die is probably a better strategy to keep good things happening while I’m alive.”
10 people said “Drug C: reduces the number of headaches per year from 100 to 60. It costs $100 per year” over “Drug B: reduces the number of headaches per year from 100 to 50. It costs $100 per year” on CFAR question #4...
I said “Drug A: reduces the number of headaches per year from 100 to 30. It costs $350 per year” personally. I think there’s a case for B, maybe, but who picks C?
Not to mention that any candidate up to the task likely has more lucrative alternatives...
I’m genuinely curious why hg00′s amended comment is now even more downvoted? And why my advice is also? Generally I take downvotes to mean “Would not like to read more of such comments at Less Wrong,” but I’m a little puzzled at these.
I didn’t think it was quite fair that your comment was downvoted to −2, but then I read the sentence “When women feel desperate, they cry about it.”
While I think your comment was overall constructive to the discussion, that kind of thing is a turnoff. I assume you meant it in the best possible way, but I would encourage you to avoid that particular construction in the future.
Great stuff! My wife and I married at the St. Louis Science Center in the middle of the day in a 30 second ceremony. We were in front of a wall painted with e = m * c^2 . Afterward we went to see a dinosaur exhibit.
I saw someone reading The Selfish Gene on an airplane the other day, and a similar thought came to mind. I thought, “Ah, I should say hello to this person when we get off the plane. Failing that, give the official rationalist nod of affirmation. Go science!” (I missed the person leaving while trying to get to my book bag in the overhead compartment).
After, I decided that I would have had a similar urge to express my admiration to anyone I saw reading any Dawkins book, except the God Delusion. I’m happy to have a conversation with a fellow science lover. Not nearly as much with a fellow God hater.
Project Euler problem 384. I thought I’d be able to crack it in an afternoon, but a couple week’s later I’m still stumped. I finally moved to another problem in the hopes of being able to return to 384 with fresh eyes, but no joy just yet.
I’m not sure if there’s a lesson to learn from the failure, except that to do a good estimate about how much work something will take often itself requires a bit of work.
Yeah. It pains me to say that I understand the principle, but that I always seem to be able to convince myself that just this once I should go ahead and knock out some other semi-trivial task outside of normal working hours. Later it seems obvious that I have not internalized the lessons of Micro 101.
I think there’s some ego-stoking going on—“I am the only person who can be relied upon to complete this task properly! Step aside, mortals, and I will wow you with my productivity.”
How to fix it? Cthulhoo’s comment below seems like a good start—I find that I trust certain people to get things done correctly, and that I should endeavor to work more closely with other co-workers a few times in the hopes of expanding the “trust” circle.
Of course, I run the risk of adding more to the “don’t trust” circle. Did you know some people use Copy and Paste from the Edit menu? With the mouse? Every time? It hurts me to watch.
Delegating tasks. At work we’re now short-staffed, and I’ve had to pick up work from a couple people.
Unfortunately, the principle of comparative advantage says that I should focus on the tasks where I’m most effective. Where I run into trouble is handing things off when I need to do just that. What if the other person screws it up, or worse, does it really inefficiently?
It makes my skin crawl to think of people bumbling around in Excel for 3 hours on a task I could complete in 1, so much so that I end up working on easy-but-time-consuming stuff when I should be at home looking at things on the Internet.
Physics and recreational mathematics + computer science improved my mental abilities.
I took Physics for Engineers as a freshman in college. It’s clear in retrospect that this class was designed to accomplish several things:
Force students who breezed through high school with little effort to work hard to maintain a good grade.
Weed out the students who don’t have the intellectual firepower or stamina for engineering.
Teach a particular problem solving methodology. To get decent marks on a problem set, you had to always draw a diagram, always start with appropriate equations, always derive the answer correctly (no numbers, just algebra + calculus), line by line.
Work quickly and accurately. Tests and problem sets were always difficult enough to require the full amount of time allotted.
Teach physics. Only this goal was ever mentioned explicitly, of course.
This was a difficult class to do well in, and probably the class most responsible for people leaving the engineering program. The default schedule also had it co-requisite with Calculus II, another demanding class, and the two classes used each others’ concepts—you’d have to understand one to do the other.
Going through this taught me all the intended lessons: I went through high school barely studying, but had to give up sleep to study and understand every homework problem to do well in this class. I wasn’t sure I had an A in the course until after I got the final back.
Internalizing the lessons of that course set me up for success in later courses, and now professionally. Physics courses aren’t about physics.
Project Euler is the other thing I think has changed my thought processes for the better. Being able to think of how to express an algorithm succinctly and correctly seems to help out in various situations, like training a new employee how to do a complex technical task.
Really? I felt like Dan GIlbert’s book was a bad attempt at writing a Dave Barry book, with some good and entertaining science thrown in. I enjoyed the book, but every paragraph seemed to have a joke shoe-horned in.
However, when I consulted the text to find an example, I couldn’t readily find one. Which is amusing, as part of the book deals with how inaccurate impressions can form lasting memories.
Still, I think lukeprog should aspire to a level higher than Gilbert.
One mistake I noticed when tutoring a high school student was what I might call “failure to take seriously the rules.”
We were studying Geometry, and many times the student would make a big assumption (e.g. the angle is 90 degrees) without noting or questioning whether it was true.
When I’d ask him about it, he would say “Look at it, it must be 90 degrees!” or “If it’s 90 degrees, then I can solve this other part over here and be finished.” When I’d explain “You can’t assume it’s 90 degrees,” or “You’re assuming what you’re trying to prove,” he would grudgingly go along.
So, I think there is a class of math mistakes that come from “a failure to realize that rules in math are not like ‘rules’ in your everyday life—they are ironclad and irrevocable.”
Ehrman’s books are all good.
Is Loftus’s second book better than “Why I Became An Atheist”? I read that and came out thinking: (a) he is an unsympathetic character, (b) he spends his time in intellectual gutters for no reason, and (c) my goodness these sophisticated arguments for Christianity that he thoroughly engages are stupid.
Sounds like my post from 2009, Misleading the Witness, perhaps?
Others have made these points, but here are my top comments:
The site was best when there was a new, high-quality post from a respected community member every day or two.
The ban on politics means that a lot of interesting discussion migrates elsewhere, e.g. to Scott’s blog.
The site’s current structure—posts vs. comments seems dated. I’d like to try something like discourse.org?