I really like “The facts don’t know whose side they’re on”, though the other two might require less wrong knowledge.
Bobertron
Karma: 451
following up to my own post: I was sceptical because the examples AshwinV provided were examples that lend themselves to punishing oneself and using guilt, shame etc. But by flipping the title of the post to “Make good habits the heroes” all that criticism becomes irrelevant and AshwinV’s idea remains the same. I think that is very related to the idea of identity, which has been discussed previously here on lesswrong. Use Your Identity Carefully is a good an relevant example.
First, your markup is broken. I can see the link-syntax, instead of the links. Also, the firs link is to an article by Phil Goetz, not Eliezer Yudkowsky.
Now about the actual content. I’m all for trying to use one’s natural tendencies, instead of just trying to compensate for them. But I’m critical of the concrete examples you gave. What you are trying to do seems to be to motivate yourself through shame and guilt. And no one seems to be in favour of that. Some reasons why I think it’s a bad idea:
I believe you train yourself to be judgemental, not just about yourself but about others. I see no reason why the behaviour of judging your own actions wouldn’t generalize to judging other people’s behaviour.
Punishing yourself is unlikely to be effective, because you are unlikely to do it every single time you transgress. AFAIK punishment works best when it’s a reliable consequence of the behaviour you want to control (‘continuous punishment’ in behavioural psychlology). It works very poorly otherwise, because every other time, the behaviour still gets reinforced. E.g. every time you take a cookie out of the cookie jar (a habit you want to minimize because you are on a diet) and you forget to conjure up a mental image of Dudley Dursly (a fat character from Harry Potter), you still get rewarded by a delicious cookie.
You start associate related concepts with the punishment. Essentially, you are building an ugh-field. Suppose you associate procrastination with laziness. What do you associate procrastination with? With the very tasks that you are putting off. Now event thinking about doing the dishes makes you feel worse than you felt before you conjured up the image of a disgusting messy dying of food poisoning in their never-clean house.
It simply doesn’t feel good.
See also: a summary of what /u/pjeby says about the topic, many posts on http://mindingourway.com/
If you never apply the negative image (the “enemy”) to yourself, that might be a slightly different matter. Maybe the image of an alcoholic can help keep you sober if you never drink alcohol in the first place. But even then, you learn to be judgemental of people and, should you start drinking, you will have the before mentioned problems with punishment.
EDIT: corrected “disgress” to “transgress”
I’ve heard of the controversy. I think it was mentioned in a link post on slatestarcodex, and obviously on GiveWell’s blog.
the community seems to be comprehensively inept, poor at marketing, extremely insular, methodologically unsophisticated but meticulous, transparent and well-intentioned
I find it stylistically strange to have a long list of negative adjectives end with two positive ones (transparent and well-intentioned are good things, right?) without any explanation. Wouldn’t one say something like “These things suck:...., but on the good side there is also ….”?
More importantly, you do not explain why “EA movement building does more harm than good”.
I understand you to mean “EA movement building does more harm than good, because the EA movement does more harm than good” (stop me right there if I miss understood you). Why though?
As I understood it, no one argues that de-worming does more harm than good. The argument is only that it is ineffective, not harmful. If you want to make some argument that de-worming takes away resources that should be better spend, you have to actually make that argument.
Could you explain what’s so bad about GiveWell’s reaction, particularly the blog post you linked? Not just where you disagree with their analysis, but how that post is evidence that GiveWell is more harmful than beneficial.
Finally, even if the EA-movement is wrong about de-worming, there are other interventions that EA tends to support. Your post isn’t very convincing right now because it doesn’t mention that fact at all. Do you think that all interventions popular among EAs are on as shaky a ground as de-worming (or worse)?
Great! Works so far.
Sounds nice. Making predictions about personal events makes more sense to me than predicting e.g. elections or sport events (beauce a) I don’t know anything about it, and b) I don’t care about it). But I don’t like the idea of making them (all) public, like on prediction book. Though a PredictionBook integration sounds like an obvious fancy feature.
And I liked what I saw the one second I could use the app ;-)
After installing, it crashed pressing “save” on the first prediction. Now it chrashed right on startup. I get to see the app for a moment, but I can’t do anything. After deleting the data (from the android setting) I can make a new prediction, but again, it crashes after pressing “save”.
I installed from the apk-link you provided.
I’ve got a Moto G (2. Generation) with Android 5.0.2.
Hope that helps. And if anyone can tell me how to diagnose the problem in more detail, I’d be interested in that, too.
Sounds like it’s the same or similar to what some modern practicing stoics do.
No, your real friend is the one you helped. The friend that helps you in a counterfactual situation where you are in trouble is just in your head, not real. Your counterfactual friend helps you, but in return you help your real friend. The benefit you get is that once you really are in trouble, the future version of your friend is similar enough to the counterfactual friend that he really will help you. The better you know your friend, the likelier this is.
I’m not saying that that isn’t a bit silly. But I think it’s coherent. In fact it might be just a geeky way to describe how people often think in reality.
I just read a book on behavior and that’s the kind of thing I would expect to read in that book: Attention is generally a reinforcer. Swearing can be reinforced by attention. When you stop paying attention to swearing, swearing stops (extinction). Of course that will only stop the child from swearing when talking to you, not when it’s in school.
Done
For the Greman speakers this is the introductory paragraph I already wrote for the blog: [...]
I’m not much of a writer, and this might not be the final version, but I still like giving advice.
I’d really like to see some citations and references here. Are all those opinions based only on you own observations or also from things you have read? Since I don’t have children, I’m not interested in the answer to that question, but your readers will be.
Werte, die während der Kindheit anerzogen wurden, werden während der Pubertät auch durch die natürliche Gehirnentwicklung in Frage gestellt
Ich würde “auch durch die natürliche Gehirnentwicklung” hier entfernen, da es eigentlich keine Informationen liefert. Außer du hättest villeicht irgend eine Referenz um deine Behauptunt (Werte werden in der Puberät in Frage gestellt) wissenschaftlich zu untermauern. Dann könnte das statdessen hin.
Meinem Verständnis der evolutionspsychologie nach nutzt dieses natürliche Verhalten den jungen Erwachsenen, da sie selbstbestimmt mehr (Fortpflanzungs-)Erfolg haben.
Zu sagen, dass etwas von Evolutionärem Nutzen ist, da es den Fortpflanzungserfolg steigert ist (zumindest nahezu) eine Tautologie, braucht also eigentlich nicht gesagt zu werden. Dass etwas was den evolutionären Erfolg steigert dem Individuum nutzen muss (du schreibst “nutzt [,,,] den jungen Erwachsenen”), stimmt meines Wissens nach nicht (Egoistisches Gen und so). Was ich hier wirklich gerne wissen möchte ist, warum Selbstbestimmtheit deiner Meinung nach den evolutionären Erfolg steigert.
I was wondering why. It doesn’t seem all that useful, unless you are abnormally bad at color perception or you have a job or hobby that somehow needs good color perception (something in art or design?). I suppose it’s fun and interesting to see how well that kind of thing can be trained, and how it changes your experience, but I was wondering if there was more to it.
I have written about this on LW in the past.
Can you tell me something about your color perception deck? Are you trying to train yourself to be better at distinguising (and naming?) colours for some reason?
I like the animation and the voice, but I dislike the text. I don’t need it and it really distracts from the animations. And if I did need to read along with what you say, I think YT has a subtitle feature that would be much less distracting and could be turned off. I suppose I’ve seen videos using the style you attempt here, but I’m not sure I like then, either, and they typically use text only, while you also use pictures.
Oh, and I suppose you would be faster in producing those videos if you were to give up on the text.
There is this idea (I think it’s a stoic one) that’s supposed to show that no one ever has anything to worry. It goes like this:
Either you can do something about it, in which case you don’t have to worry, you just do it. Or there is nothing you can do, then you can simply accept the inevitabel
It throws out the possiblility that you don’t know whether you can do anything (and what precisely) or not. As I see it, worry is precisely the (sometimes maladaptive) attempt to answer that.
Every calse dichotomy is another example for this failure mode (if I understood you correctly).
The idea that it’s a habit is, in a way, boring, true.
But when I read that industriousness and creativity can be learned like described in the learned industriousness wikipedia article, I was quite surprised. So the iedea isn’t boring to me at all.
I know it’s just an example, but concerning
I find it hard to do something I consider worthwhile while on a spring break
maybe you have learned to be lazy on spring break? I mean, the theory that it’s a habit seems more prosaic to me than being tired or something about “activasion energy”.
Such a person would probably strongly [missing verb?] rationality, rationalists, and the complex of ideas surrounding rationality, for probably understandable reasons
Since I kind of like your comment, I’d liked to know how that sentence should have sounded. Strongly dislike, hate, mistrust?
The “A=a” stands for the event that the random variable A takes on the value a. It’s another notation for the set {ω ∈ Ω | A(ω) = a}, where Ω is your probability space and A is a random variable (a mapping from Ω to something else, often R^n).
Okay, maybe you know that, but I just want to point out that there is nothing vague about the “A=a” notation. It’s entirely rigorous.
change your mind, get a cookie
admitting you’re wrong = winning/learning
conservation of expected evidence (add formula)
The path to truth is a random walk
discussions are random walks
what is true is already so
rationality: outcomes > rituals of thought
what can be destroyed by truth, should be
update beliefs incrementally
beliefs should pay rent
the cat ’s alive, curiosity got framed
optimize everything
delta knowledge = surprise
minimize future surprise
A diagram like this with some actual data e.g. about P(autism|vaccine) or P(violence|video games).
A matrix representation of the prisoners dilemma with an arrow pointing to (cooperate, cooperate) saying “let’s meet here”.