LoganStrohl

Karma: 6,112

LoganStrohl 13 May 2013 0:09 UTC
11 points
on: Boring Advice Repository
Don’t wait until things are horrible before making them awesome.

LoganStrohl 13 May 2013 2:38 UTC
23 points
on: Boring Advice Repository
Learn how to remember people’s names.

Of course you’re horrible with names. That’s because you haven’t learned how to learn them. You evolved to know something like 100 names at a time, so your software needs an upgrade if you want to do more than that. Use the mnemonic technique called “linking” or “chaining”. This video is cheesy, but it’s exactly how I do it.

Calculate the VOI on giving this a try. If you go to conferences very often, or have lots of students, or live in a large city or something, it’s probably really useful to you to be able to remember names. Especially given that you can google any name you manage to remember. And consider the psychological effects! A person’s name is her favorite word, and knowing it is the password to her attention.

By the way, I’d be very interested to hear from any face blind people who have experimented with this.

ETA: This is also a fantastic party trick I use all the time.
What links here?
- List of techniques to help you remember names by Elo (11 Dec 2015 0:41 UTC; 15 points)

LoganStrohl 24 May 2013 4:30 UTC
4 points
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: Probability is in the Mind
I think I’m confused. We’re talking about something that’s never even heard of colors, so there shouldn’t be anything in the mind of the robot related to “blue” in any way. This ought to be like the prior probability from your perspective that zorgumphs are wogle. Now that I’ve said the words, I suppose there’s some very low probability that zorgumphs are wogle, since there’s a probability that “zorgumph” refers to “cats” and “wogle” to “furry”. But when you didn’t even have those words in your head anywhere, how could there have been a prior? How could B9′s prior be “very low” instead of “nonexistent”?

LoganStrohl 14 Jun 2013 0:14 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Kutta’s comment on: That Magical Click
There seem to be two ways for the AI thing to click. Some people click and go “Oh yeah, that makes sense,” and then if you ask them about it they’ll tell you they believe it’s a problem, but they won’t change their behavior very much otherwise. The other people click and go, “0_0 Wtf am I doing with my life???” and then they move to the Bay Area or New York and join the other people devoting their every resource to preventing paperclip maximizers and the like. Which type were your people, and what do you think causes the difference?

LoganStrohl 24 Jun 2013 2:37 UTC
2 points
on: Start Under the Streetlight, then Push into the Shadows
One of the most disturbing problems I see in academia is our tendency to treat the world as a collection of pools of light. We start out thinking our own little street light is the only one there is. Then we think our light is the best light and everyone else is foolish for searching in vain beneath inferior lamps. Those of us who start to get interdisciplinary find ways to search under multiple lamps at the same time. We call up our friends to ask if the thing we’re looking for is under their light, or maybe if they’ve got the other half of the broken thing we found. We use things discovered under other lamps to help us search under our home lamp. If we’re really clever and successful, we make our lamps burn more brightly.

Luke’s right, a pool of light a good place to start. You’ve got to start somewhere. But many of our disciplines have been searching through the same little pools for centuries. We need to remember, and to impress upon our students that the vast majority of what exists is out there in the darkness.

I don’t think increasing the brightness of lamps so we can push outward a little at a time is enough. There’s just too much darkness out there. I have always had exactly one goal as an academic, and I consider it the best hope universities have to make a dramatic positive impact on the future of humanity: We must build and distribute flashlights.

LoganStrohl 24 Jun 2013 3:34 UTC
8 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Start Under the Streetlight, then Push into the Shadows
That is an excellent question. I would love to and I probably can, but it will take a fair amount of thinking to articulate in something unlike this overly cute way, and therefore time. In the meantime, if anyone has thoughts about what I probably ought to mean by “build and distribute flashlights”, please do share.

Seed Study: Polyphasic Sleep in Ten Steps

LoganStrohl11 Jul 2013 7:17 UTC

45 points

135 comments4 min readLW link

LoganStrohl 11 Jul 2013 16:57 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Ben Pace’s comment on: Seed Study: Polyphasic Sleep in Ten Steps
It should be two months per year, since it’s another ¹⁄₆ of your life spent awake. Thanks for pointing this out! I’ve fixed it up top.

LoganStrohl 11 Jul 2013 17:06 UTC
3 points
in reply to: James_Miller’s comment on: Seed Study: Polyphasic Sleep in Ten Steps
I agree. Supposing you consistently valued your time at $10/hr, you’d be gaining $280 per week, or $14,560 per year. (Relative to an 8-hour sleep schedule.) And many people I know would add a 0 to the end of those numbers.

ETA: Since you mentioned a 5% chance of success, 5% of $10/hr over a year would be $728. (Over sixty years, $43,680.)

LoganStrohl 11 Jul 2013 17:07 UTC
8 points
in reply to: kilobug’s comment on: Seed Study: Polyphasic Sleep in Ten Steps
1. Nope. Even the literature on chronic partial sleep restriction is abysmal. That’s what I’m trying to change. A seed study with a large effect size might get more people with funding taking these questions seriously.
2. Don’t know because of 1.
3. See 2. But word on the street is that some people have much more flexibility than others.

LoganStrohl 11 Jul 2013 17:28 UTC
12 points
in reply to: pinyaka’s comment on: Seed Study: Polyphasic Sleep in Ten Steps
She.

LoganStrohl 11 Jul 2013 17:31 UTC
18 points
in reply to: Tenoke’s comment on: Seed Study: Polyphasic Sleep in Ten Steps

I understood the rationale behind it but the question is do you have any evidence to back this up? Sounds like armchair theorizing to me.

You’re completely right; I don’t have solid evidence to back this up. In fact, that’s why I’m doing this. I have various anecdotes and largely irrelevant sleep studies. This is preliminary exploratory research, to see whether it’s worth my time to look into it further. It’s whatever the opposite of ‘armchair theorizing’ is.

LoganStrohl 11 Jul 2013 18:09 UTC
33 points
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: Seed Study: Polyphasic Sleep in Ten Steps
I’ll be doing several of these, but what everyone’s doing is a psychomotor vigilance task, which my research so far suggests is the most efficient way known to track the whole jumble of things under the heading of “sleep deprivation”. If the results of this are interesting and I do a much bigger thing in the future, we’ll do a whole lot more tests then.

LoganStrohl 12 Jul 2013 6:26 UTC
6 points
in reply to: Vaniver’s comment on: Seed Study: Polyphasic Sleep in Ten Steps
Right, there are a whole bunch of concerns, some easier to test than others. I chose the PVT because I wanted a test that distinguishes effects of a polyphasic schedule from effects of chronic partial sleep restriction. And it now occurs to me as blindingly obvious that I should have said that outright in the OP.

LoganStrohl 14 Jul 2013 0:55 UTC
0 points
in reply to: wobster109’s comment on: Seed Study: Polyphasic Sleep in Ten Steps
Will do.

LoganStrohl 17 Jul 2013 2:12 UTC
3 points
in reply to: benkuhn’s comment on: Seed Study: Polyphasic Sleep in Ten Steps
That’s awesome. PM me your names so I know what my data mean.

LoganStrohl 18 Jul 2013 5:01 UTC
4 points
in reply to: lukeprog’s comment on: Four Focus Areas of Effective Altruism
Robby Bensinger cleverly expended upon this, describing the various motivations for effective altruism as “slytherfuzzies”, “ravenfuzzies”, “gryffinfuzzies ”, and “hufflefuzzies”.

LoganStrohl 23 Jul 2013 20:37 UTC
1 point
in reply to: benkuhn’s comment on: Seed Study: Polyphasic Sleep in Ten Steps
Thanks! Yeah, exactly what button is pressed under what conditions is one of the major bug reports I’ve collected for future research attempts.

LoganStrohl 4 Aug 2013 4:41 UTC
0 points
on: Disambiguating Doom
The “doomsday argument” link is broken.

LoganStrohl 7 Aug 2013 6:21 UTC
12 points
on: How to Measure Anything
Wow, this is really exciting. I thought at first, “Man, quantifying my progress on math research sounds really difficult. I don’t know how to make it more than a measure of how happy I feel about what I’ve done.”

But I’m only through step one of this post, and I’ve already pinned down the variables defining “progress on math research” such that measuring these periodically will almost certainly keep me directly on track toward the answer. I can probably make it better (suggestions welcome), but even this first pass saves me lots of grief. Wasted motion is probably my biggest problem with learning math right now, so this totally rocks. Check it out!

Progress is reduction of expected work remaining.

-Number of new things I understand (by proposition). -Change in degree to which I understand old things. -How central these things are to the problem. -Number of things (namely propositions, definitions, rules/instructions) I’ve written down that seem likely to be useful reference later. -Probability that they will be important. -Amount of material produced (in propositions or subsections of proof) that, if correct, will actually be part of my answer in the end. -Number of actions I’ve taken that will increase the values of the above variables. -Degree to which they’ll increase those values.

Thanks, Luke!

LoganStrohl

Seed Study: Polypha­sic Sleep in Ten Steps

Seed Study: Polyphasic Sleep in Ten Steps