Evaporative Cooling in that situation should lead to readers and commenters being only people who like you and people who hate you and want to verbalize it on a regular basis.
On a seperate note, your karma history is 44% positive. I think people both often agree with your comments and often disagree with your comments. They just disagree slightly more often. I think this is a good reason for you to keep posting for the time being.
Depends on the amount and specific interval of time investment. MMOs create demands like playing 3-4 hours every tuesday and thursday evening without fail for raids. This now requires a 6-8 hour time investment a week minimum with strong social pressures from online friends. That’s not going to be helpful if you have a test on wednesday or friday. If you had a normal RPG or other hobby you could pick it up and put it down without social pressures and regular time investments at intervals in the middle of the week.
Let’s go with a minimum of:
Immediately delete or throw away all MMOs and games that require regular time investments
Stick to games that can be picked up or put down easily so that they don’t cause harm to your study schedule, sleep schedule, or social commitments
Two important questions to ask yourself about the job a major will get you:
What is the unemployment rate on these jobs?
Health
-Your health is very important for your success
-Getting enough sleep, having a good diet, maintaining energy levels, and being healthy will contribute to your long-term happiness and success.
Sleep
-Melatonin is a supplement that many rationalists take to get better sleep at night
-Sleep Cycle is a good app that monitors your REM sleep cycles and wakes you up in a 30 minute time period when you are closest to being awake
-Setting an alarm at 9:30pm to be able to keep track of time late at night can help avoid the “oh god, it’s already 2am?” effect. It also helps avoid...
-Hyperbolic Discounting
Diet
-You will be determining your own diet for the first time in your life
-Most freshman gain lots of weight after starting University due to poor diet and not knowing how to feed themselves in a healthy sustainable way
-Your diet is important for maintaining your general energy level and keeping you healthy
-MyFitnessPal is your new bestfriend for keeping track of what is in the food you eat and for losing weight
-If you want to lose weight: Avoid getting calories from liquids
-Eat and drink far less sugar. Sugar turns in to fat and has tons of calories. Soda and sugary coffee drinks are your new worst enemy
-Edit-
People on Slack reccomended
Cal Newport
and in the same vein as Cal Newport: Why Generation Y Yuppies Are Unhappy
I do this, though I hadn’t heard of other people doing it before and use it slightly differently. Mine is set to 9:30pm and it is a marker point for me to use when keeping track of time late at night.
If you have the kind of schedule where you get home at 6pm and use a computer until late, then it’s easy to lose track of time until it’s suddenly 2am. Having a marker point closer to your sleep time (say 9:30pm for a 11pm bedtime) helps in keeping up your internal clock and signals when you need to make schedule modifications in order to finish things up before you need to sleep. I think this is also a good idea to create the form of alarm that will get you to go to sleep but also avoid Hyperbolic Discounting at the last minute.
I might agree with your rationale, but not with following the conclusion. It can be very important to attend lectures in order to hear about most likely topics that will be on tests, any possible changes in test or project details and deadlines, to keep good rapport with the professor (so you aren’t one of those “students who never show up to class”), and to keep yourself focused on following the material at the rate from which you will be tested on it.
This may also vary by University and professor since some may care more about attendence and some are better than others at emailing information about test and project changes to students rather than just announcing it in class.
80000 Hours
The 80000 Hours Career Guide
An impressive career guide that helps people maximize future impact and future earnings. It gives lots of strong advice on a variety of career choosing topics as well as looking in-depth into a few specific ones. (This website was created for Effective Altruists, but can be used by others very easily.)
Adulthood Fallacy?
This is purely me talking. Do not trust someone to be wise, emotionally mature, responsible, or trustworthy just because they are old. This applies to everyone you meet in the future and everyone you already know. There are people older than you who are worth going to for advice, but they are rare and you will need other heuristics to figure out who these people are.
This is part of Argument from Authority but I think it could be a useful distinction. Most people are not experts on life anyway.
Social Skills and Networking Social skills and networking are extremely important for long-term success. People start building their skills and networks either in high school or university. Start early. I don’t think I am qualified to give specific advice in this area, but I am confident in saying that these things are very important and worth spending time building and learning.
Outside LW Links:
Three Things to Unlearn from School by Ben Casnocha
What You’ll Wish You’d Known by Paul Graham
LW Links:
Two More Things to Unlearn from School
College Discussion Thread
Interesting critique of British education by outgoing advisor
What Are Useful Skills to Learn at University
Which College Major
The Best Textbooks on Every Subject
Various books to read:
The Sequences (Start here)
Influence: Science and Practice (very important to learn how to stop other people from influencing you and from influencing yourself through the use of biases)
Thinking: Fast and Slow
Correction: first is an example of weak man argument mixed with personal uncomfortability. However, we could also strong man that as character 1 being agnostic and annoyed at people’s attempts at arguing for certainty on the topic.
Second comment is a variant on “my opponent believes something” (noncentral fallacy territory) but breaks into genetic fallacy with the emotion part. My opponent feels annoyed by two opposing groups which is kind of like he thinks that they are intrinsically inferior which is kind of like he thinks he is better/smarter than them which is kind of like he had a superiority complex which is kind of like he doesn’t care about the issue at all which is kind of like he is just self centered which is kind of like he’s a bad person.
(I may have added extra steps but you get the picture)
Also, good job at noticing your own confusion and uncomfortableness with it even if you weren’t sure why!
Is this a quote from something? Please rephrase in plain English so every user who reads it doesn’t have to take time decoding it.
That’s very interesting and I would be interested in seeing her proof. Was it a new idea that religious people had not thought of and spread before?
I should change my claim. People would be likely to think of “loads” of attempted proofs.
The theory I was trying to state is that certain perspectives or states of mind may be more effective at finding certain ideas than others. Calling “being a contrarian” might not be a good name for a perspective but I’ll treat it as such for the moment. Do you think if people at CFAR and LW (our local contrarians) were left to their own devices, they would occupy perspectives to reach every single one of the literally hundreds of proofs for the existence of god compared to people who are highly motivated by belief, social-utility, and dedication to an imagined highly dangerous omnipotent deity? Are there some that would be much harder to obtain or much easier?
I think what I may have been trying to get at was that while LW contrarianism is awesome and a pretty great method for thinking about things, it may not be the best for finding all the possible good ideas out there in idea space.
I like the idea of verified experts and fact-checking, though in practice I have a much smaller expectation of the mass public obtaining high quality experts.
I feel like my post is going to be way too negative and I’m sick right now with my cognition mildly compromised, but I like the idea of effectively spreading good ideas so I’ll make it anyway.
It also makes it much easier for people with shared interests to get in contact.
This is red flag #1 for me. Even with the ability to use the internet to connect to massive networks of people who have different ideas than use people still seem to have the habit of connecting with people who are already like-minded or close to like-minded. If your main social networking is Facebook and a list of subreddits that don’t annoy you then you’re less likely to be exposed to ideas that you would both consider different from your current mindset and worth considering. If everyone is spending time obtaining new ideas from their family, real-life friends (who have been selected for similar preferences), religious group, news channel that shares the same political bent as them, online-friends (from similar interests), and possibly worst of all a dictionary that shares the same political bent as them then they aren’t going to be getting quality new ideas.
Ways to break this cycle could include trojan-horsing people into it, creating multiple presentations/versions of an idea and then quietly exposing people in separate groups to them in ways that are most effective at gaining that one group’s following, figuring out ways of presenting information that skips over worldviews (I’m assuming this is hard), or some other method someone cleverer than me on here can think of. If you want to do something like get everyone to read the Sequences then you could create a handful of versions that covertly make bad but initially believable attempts to convince them that their current worldview is correct. (I may go to rationalist hell just for saying that and please no one attempt it without reading comments to this making it clear what a stupid idea it is.)
This will of course lead to a tremendous increase in the amount of false or useless information. But it will also lead to an increase in true and relevant information.
People still have limited time and limited resources for obtaining information from. Figuring out ways to decrease the false and useless information obtained and increasing the true and relevant information at the same time would be handy.
We also run into the problem that experts are wrong on occasion and our best attempts at true and relevant information fail. Correcting widely spread incorrect information should have a higher priority than a tiny blurb in the hard-to-see corner of a newspaper. Are there any blogs for “Things You Were Told By Experts Not Very Long Ago That We Are Now Pretty Damn Sure Are Not Correct”? If so, please tell me.
Now members of the cognitive elite are, or so I claim, reasonably good at distinguishing between good and bad ideas.
They do? I thought we just pushed ideas that match up to our worldviews, are novel, and we think other people will enjoy/give us status for.
On the other hand, [non-elite groups] are likely to be heavily influenced by the cognitive elite, especially in the longer run.
In the long run, yeah I can see that. People are influenced by new political ideologies and you have to be pretty smart to think of a brand new political ideology (to think of a single example). However, I’m not sure the pathways that ideas follow from the cognitive elite to the cognitive lacking are pathways that select for the ideas that you might want to see spread. Ideas that spread are selected for Divine Plaguespreadingness (I want to use the term memetic virility here but I don’t know enough about memetics yet and don’t want to explain it away with a fancy term).
Finding ways to hack into the normal Divine Plaguespreadingness could be useful here or finding ways to skip the normal pathways that ideas follow for moving from higher IQ to lower IQ populations. This is also true of different populations with similar IQ. Rationality is likely nowhere near hitting critical mass for the high IQ population in the English-speaking world. If we can hit a larger percentage of that population then other populations may follow. HPMOR certainly falls into the criteria of branching into other populations that might benefit from rationality concepts but wouldn’t normally be exposed to LW. Are any other groups trying to branch into other populations in similar ways? The online Harry Potter fanfiction community almost certainly can’t be the single low-hanging fruit here, guys.
There are a couple of ways of addressing this problem. One is better reputation/karma systems. That would both incentivize people to disseminate true and relevant information, and make it easier to find true and relevant information.
Oh please god no! No no no no no. If you want to go with a handful of experts Metacritic or Rottentomatoes style then okay we can try that out. However, I don’t trust democracy to be the effective way of finding good ideas and spreading them out to people. Democracy is the way of getting the majority to be in control and slowly shift from their current position to another close-but-similar-and-widely-agreed-upon position. It just produces groupthink over time (which can be good politically and could help avoid political upheaval but isn’t good for what we’re wanting it for).
We would still need effective methods of doing double-blind reviews of things with future changes in opinion only available when don’t publicly and the past opinion still visible. That, or some other method that we can get people to make reviews while avoiding biases like signaling their in-group, matching positions with people they regard as higher IQ than them, and all of the other mind-killing biases out there.
I would suggest doing rationality tests, but (assuming people on LW are more rational. now that’s a worrying thought) we’d need to adjust for the fact that it would select for people who are exposed to LW rationality or read some of the popular sources like SSC. Besides, people who are rational don’t have a monopoly on good ideas and some ideas may be more easily obtainable if you are already heavily biased. (You don’t get loads of interesting attempted philosophical proofs of the existence of god in a nation full of atheists.) (edit you would get “loads”. see comments) I think I’m just rambling and disagreeing with myself at this point so I’ll stop this line of reasoning.
Another method is automatic quality-control of information (e.g. fact-checking). Google have done some work on this, but still, it is in its infancy. It’ll be interesting to follow the development in this area in the years to come.
I like fact-checking. Definitely an applause light going on there. If we’ve gotten the p-value of studies low enough, the vast majority of experts agree, and there are a notable lack of studies disagreeing then that could be very nice.
Has anyone tried setting up a quality-control engine similar to fact-checking but instead works as a meta-analysis generator for scientific journals? It would be nice to see something along the lines of “Vitamin D is good for you (Note: Only 55% of studies agree on this for improving X, Y, and Z. There is not general consensus on the benefits of Vitamin D for anything by bone health. However, Vitamin D has been recognized as safe to take by organization A so take it anyway and see what happens.” And then we can also automatically set you up to an internet database that will email you if that information changes later on so that you can update your behaviors accordingly.
If people on LW are using Bayesian updating properly and check comments for refutations (which some commenters love to do), then this shouldn’t be as large a problem.
From our different observations of anecdotal evidence on this and the other comment thread I think that the university environments and populations you and I were exposed to were very different from one another. My environment was not with exceedingly intelligent people (likely below LW average) and was at a decent but not great university. My observations were from when I was a Freshman in college and observing other people that age though.
I’ve seen and heard of people who were older (grad school or working) and had much better experiences managing their time. However, I also remember meeting plenty of people when I was in high school who were much older and seemed to be playing far too much. Statistics on the topic would likely be useful at this point and people who are better at managing their time and dealing with
At this point for giving advice to Freshman aged students, I’d rather put out a warning and see how they handle it than not say anything at all. If someone isn’t already adept at managing their time at that age then I honestly think that playing an MMO on a regular basis could be detrimental and far more addictive a hobby than they should be testing themselves with at such a crucial time in their life.