byrnema

Karma: 2,650

byrnema Mar 7, 2014, 2:20 AM
3 points
in reply to: itaibn0’s comment on: How my math skills improved dramatically
Were you precocious?

byrnema Mar 7, 2014, 2:16 AM
0 points
in reply to: Kaj_Sotala’s comment on: How my math skills improved dramatically
I agree that while not exactly ‘volume conservation’, this addresses the exact same skill.

If the child gave a good explanation for a problem, there was only a 43 percent chance of his advancing the same explanation when later confronted with the identical problem.

Would you interpret this as meaning the children had not acquired the concept, after all? It seems that if the child actually truly understands the concept that moving things around doesn’t change their number, then they wouldn’t be inconsistent. (Or is the study demonstrating what I found unintuitive, that children can grasp and then forget a concept?)

byrnema Mar 6, 2014, 9:32 PM
2 points
in reply to: Kaj_Sotala’s comment on: How my math skills improved dramatically
What I summarize from the above is that educators have decided that Piaget’s theory is not helpful for deciding ‘developmentally appropriate practice’. Perhaps because the transitions from one stage to another are fuzzy and overlapping, or because students of a particular age group are not necessarily in step. Furthermore, understanding of a concept is ‘multi-dimensional’ and there are many ways to approach it, and many ways for a child to think about it, rather than a unique pathway, so that a student might seem more or less advanced depending on how you ask the question.

I think the real nail in the coffin would be if a young child does not understand a particular concept (say, volume conservation) and it is found that you can teach them this concept before they are supposed to be developmentally ready. This because I think the crux of Piaget’s theory is that certain concepts are physically possible only after a corresponding physical development?

byrnema Mar 6, 2014, 3:39 PM
0 points
in reply to: Gunnar_Zarncke’s comment on: How my math skills improved dramatically

The basic capability for formal operations sets in much earlier.

I think it depends. The wikipedia page says that the onset is between 11 and 20 years or so.

My aptitude in mathematics was a bit above average when I was 11 years old. Maybe I had already met the criterion for the formal operation stage, despite not doing well in math the first couple years of high school. But something significant happened when I was 17, and it seemed to be a qualitative change in the way I understood mathematics. I also seemed to be developed the ability to excel in Algebra (with motivated effort) later than my peers. Perhaps it wasn’t a specific stage identified by Piaget, but it felt physical/neurological.

I do think Piaget is considered outdated. He might have gotten some of the details wrong or its not the whole story. (For example, I’m skeptical that babies ever lack object permanence.) Nevertheless, Piaget is likely correct that certain concepts develop in stages that are timed with physical development.

byrnema Mar 6, 2014, 12:26 AM
9 points
on: How my math skills improved dramatically
Maybe.

When something very similar happened to me (failing Algebra in 9th grade, aptitude suddenly surfacing in 11th), I also thought motivation was really important, but I also noticed my brain working differently. Algebra went from being semi-confused symbol manipulation to understanding what a variable was actually about.

In a simultaneous psychology course, I learned about Piaget’s “formal operational stage” and that’s what I attributed it to. I think it happens when you’re 17 or 18. (Consider/compare with also this data point). So I agreed, it felt like it was a physical difference in development. What do you think of this as an explanatory hypothesis? (Any way to tell them apart?)

byrnema Feb 27, 2014, 6:06 AM
0 points
in reply to: Eugine_Nier’s comment on: Is IQ what we actually need to know?
I though the cartoon was a good example. The tiger convinced the boy that he was smarter than he actually was, with smooth talking.

byrnema Feb 27, 2014, 5:25 AM
0 points
in reply to: Eugine_Nier’s comment on: Is IQ what we actually need to know?
It seems you are using ‘seeming smart’ as interchangeable with ‘convincing’ or ‘persuasive’?

However, these are quite independent. Someone can easily convince me of something, without my thinking they are more intelligent than I am, and without convincing me that they are more intelligent than they are.

Consider a ‘smooth talker’. I think people generally recognize that these smooth-talkers are more likable and persuasive on any topic, but there is no necessary correlation with having a higher IQ. In fiction, there are extreme examples like Forest Gump (low IQ, very smooth) and innumerable moderate examples like Peter Venkman in Ghostbusters. Whereas intelligent characters are often portrayed, though not always, as not very persuasive.

...Smooth-talkers and scammers will often break-down defenses by signaling equal intelligence when they actually have higher intelligence.

In the example you gave, how do we know Velikovsky wasn’t very intelligent? (We do know he had the ability to write very well, to make a false history seem true.) My question isn’t that he is or wasn’t intelligent, but whether his deception of Yvain was due to Yvain over-estimating his intelligence.

..Can you think of an example (a fictional one might be easiest) where a deception (or even any conflict) was actually about someone overestimating someone’s intelligence?

byrnema Feb 27, 2014, 4:11 AM
1 point
in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: Is IQ what we actually need to know?
Fluidly using the right jargon, and signaling that you ‘know stuff’ without sounding like you’re trying hard too show that you know stuff, requires a fair amount of intelligence. (Incidentally, an inability to maintain a natural flow of conversation when someone knows a lot of stuff is one way highly intelligent people reveal that their social acuity is not that high. Their IQ may be extremely high, but a five minute interview can often easily identify these things.)

A certain degree of being articulate and appropriately assertive can be trained – I think I see this happen in the military. However, I don’t think it’s a fake signal, I think this training really results in greater general intelligence, or greater ability to succeed in any case.

byrnema Feb 27, 2014, 3:46 AM
2 points
in reply to: Eugine_Nier’s comment on: Is IQ what we actually need to know?
The outside view is very good to apply, especially in this case where there hasn’t been much independent validation and lots of opportunity for confirmation bias. However, I would and do generally trust the assessment someone else makes about the intelligence of someone else. (With the exception of any assessments based on politics or tribe affiliation.) I guess I agree with the OP that intelligence is fairly straightforward to estimate with secondary signals.

I’m not familiar with any charlatans or scammers being successful by pretending to be smarter than they were. People pretending to be smarter than they are, are usually pretty transparent. I suspect this is just availability bias, though, do you have any examples in mind?

byrnema Feb 26, 2014, 10:52 PM
0 points
in reply to: Eugine_Nier’s comment on: Is IQ what we actually need to know?
I find that I don’t agree with this comment, though perhaps if I thought about it more I would..

I often categorize people as 10-points-smarter-than-me, 20-points-smarter-than-me, etc, just naturally as I go about my day, and I’m (currently) fairly confident of my evaluations.

Sometimes I can get a pretty good estimate by speaking with someone for 5 minutes—but I’m aware this is heavily weighted towards verbal acuity, which is just one dimension. A high verbal acuity for me is a marker of high IQ, though average verbal acuity is not strong evidence either way. (I also understand someone can have very high verbal skills while missing some others, so there is an upper bound to what I can predict.) I’m recently studying signs of high social acuity, and I think I’m getting more perceptive at noticing and distinguishing levels that are one or two levels above mine.

Someone that is relatively deficient in one of these parameters can recognize higher levels by evaluating in hind-site how effective and original a particular solution, choice of words or behavior was. It’s much easier to judge a behavior than come up with the best behavior yourself. For example, during a meeting I’ll realize that someone is manipulating me or others very well. It’s much easier to recognize that manipulation that to recreate it. Though it does take some compensatory experience—since recognizing these manipulations can be as subtle as realizing that a awkward situation has been avoided or people feel better about something that you would have predicted, and determining the intention of the manipulation, and whether it was deliberate or accidental, makes the computation more noisy.

The main way that I judge an IQ higher than mine is if they are faster or more clear on something I’ve already thought about (this translates to slight increases in IQ) or can succeed at things that I cannot do well or cannot do at all (this is where someone would be at least a level ahead). For example, I’m fairly good at solving problems, and working within a given frame, but I am not very good at choosing problems, because I’m not very strong in selecting frames—this is a higher order cognitive skill I cannot do well, and no amount of time will increase my success very much. Thus I seek out mentors that are “10 or 20 points above me” to help me with that bit… I consider myself to be ‘borrowing’ their IQ points for a very short amount of time, so that I can then go and work on a problem within the way they’ve chosen to frame it. (Again, while I’m not as good at picking a frame, I feel like I am competent at evaluating whether my problem can be well solved within one.)

What I find curious is how people successfully model people of higher IQ in fiction. For example, the doctor in House seems very witty. Is he modeled by someone at least that witty? Likewise with Sherlock Holmes. I realize that the scenarios are contrived, so that the intelligence is mostly illusory, but how intelligent must one be to write a story that convinces someone, say, more intelligent than themselves watching a film that the film is about someone vastly more intelligent than them?

byrnema Feb 19, 2014, 2:17 PM
1 point
in reply to: Viliam_Bur’s comment on: Identity and Death

So it’s like the same algorithm operating on different data?

To be clear, just the part about feeling like I’m “me”. I think it would feel very different to be an alien, but I expect I would feel the same way about being myself.

On some level of abstraction this is both trivial and meaningless: at the bottom we all are just “particles following the same laws of physics”

I agree about the triviality. Especially for the thesis that we all share one consciousness—that we are all a physical computation is both obvious and meaningless (everything is a physical computation) but it also means it doesn’t matter if that particular computation is displaced in space or time or copied—there’s nothing unique that doesn’t get carried over (if it’s true that all our senses of self are essentially the same computation).

byrnema Feb 19, 2014, 10:36 AM
1 point
in reply to: Viliam_Bur’s comment on: Identity and Death

What exactly it means to “feel the same” in this context? The same memories? No. The same plans? No. The same emotions? No.

Memories, plans, emotions and even qualities of what it feels like to be a general or specific human are all aspects I would bundle with an identity’s ‘situation’. For example, in philosophies that assert there is ‘one shared consciousness’, they don’t mean we all think the same thoughts or have the same plans.

Rather, there would be something in common with specifically the ways it feels on the inside to be an ‘I’, to be an observer looking out through all the details of their situation. There seems to be some sort of intuition (possibly false) that there is something qualitatively identical about any computation that results in feeling like you are person. (For example, it would feel different, and ‘identity’ would be different, if you instead were part of a hive mind, maybe.)

Exploiting this particular intuition, it can’t possibly matter if you’re copied and destroyed. The situational details are the same for a copy, and then the elusive second part (“identity”) is identical for everyone, including adjacent copies, and so they are the same.

...looking at it from the other way, if someone didn’t think a copy was identical, what part would be different? This thing is what I’m suggesting is the same for all persons.

byrnema Feb 18, 2014, 11:08 PM
1 point
in reply to: Thomas’s comment on: Identity and Death
To try steel-manning your perspective, if I’m not misrepresenting it, the idea is that every identity feels the same from the inside, it doesn’t matter which one you have or which one is you.

I agree with this.

However (in response to Tenoke below) the situations of identities, and relationships between identities, do matter so it doesn’t follow that you can change situations (or kill people) without creating value differences.

byrnema Feb 18, 2014, 4:58 AM
0 points
in reply to: byrnema’s comment on: I like simplicity, but not THAT much
Oh, I see you already considered this:

But I’d say that there’s a small chance that maybe yes, and that if we understood the right kind of math, it would seem very obvious that not all intuitively possible human experiences are actually mathematically possible.

I think this is very likely, and in fact we don’t need to compute what is possible … What we experience is exactly what is mathematically possible.

byrnema Feb 18, 2014, 3:33 AM
−1 points
on: I like simplicity, but not THAT much

So why is our world so orderly? There’s a mathematically possible continuation of the world that you seem to be living in, where purple pumpkins are about to start falling from the sky. Or the light we observe coming in from outside our galaxy is suddenly replaced by white noise. Why don’t you remember ever seeing anything as obviously disorderly as that?

Who says all of this is mathematically possible? I’ve read this idea before, and I think it’s wrong.

First of all, I think it’s very difficult to guess what is mathematically possible. We experience the universe at a level which is already extremely evolved. For example, I imagine that mathematically possibility resulted in an incredibly complex structure that eventually mapped to the rules of physics (string theory maybe, but certainly eventually quantum mechanics and then atoms, etc). Then the universe we experience is just the manifestation of that physics.

Secondly, another way to look at it, is that counter factual ‘possibility’ is not the same thing as mathematical possibility. For example I could have chosen not to compose this comment (counter-factually) but it wasn’t actually possible that I wouldn’t because I’m computing a program which—certainly at this scale—is deterministic.

byrnema Feb 9, 2014, 10:31 PM
5 points
in reply to: hyporational’s comment on: White Lies
I also discovered I was like this as a teenager—that I had an extremely malleable identity. I think it was related to being very empathetic—I just accepted whichever world view the person I was speaking with came with, and I think in my case this might have been related to reading a lot growing up, so that it seemed that a large fraction of my total life experience were the different voices of the different authors that I had read. (Reading seems to require quickly assimilating the world view of whomever is first person.)

I also didn’t make much distinction between something that could be true and something that was true. I don’t know why this was. or if it is related to the first thing. But if I thought about a fact, and it didn’t feel currently jarring with anything else readily in mind, it seemed just as true as anything else and I was likely to speak it. So a few times after a conversation, I would shake my head and wonder why I had just said something so absurdly untrue, as though I had believed it.

In my early twenties, I found I needed to create a fixed world view—in fact, I felt like I was going crazy. Maybe I was, because different world views were colliding and I couldn’t hold them separate when action was required (like choosing an actual job) rather than just idle conversation.

That’s why I gravitated towards physical materialism. I needed something fixed, a territory behind all of these crazy maps. I think that the map that I have now is pretty good, and well-integrated with the territory, but it took 3-5 years. I’m still flexible with understanding other world views. For example, I was in a workshop a few days ago where we needed to defend different views, and I received one that was marginally morally reprehensible. I was the only one in my group able to defend it. (It wasn’t such a useful skill there, I think most people just assumed I had that view, which is unfortunate, but I didn’t mind—if it was important to signal correctly at this workshop I would have lied and said I couldn’t relate.)

byrnema Jan 22, 2014, 10:06 PM
1 point
in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: Rationalists Are Less Credulous But Better At Taking Ideas Seriously
So that’s what I am going to do. I actually ordered an external hard drive, and every few weeks I’ll back up my hard drive. The whole thing (no decisions).

I also understand that I don’t need to worry about versions—the external hard drive just saves the latest version.

I also talked to a friend today and found out they backed their data regularly. I was surprised; didn’t know regular people did this regularly.

byrnema Jan 22, 2014, 10:00 PM
0 points
in reply to: TheOtherDave’s comment on: Rationalists Are Less Credulous But Better At Taking Ideas Seriously
I understood (and my perspective changed quite a bit) as soon as I read about Miller’s Law in the exchange you linked. I really like having a handle for the concept (for my own sake, its usefulness is curbed by not being well-known).

I believe the default interpretation of the question you asked is the interpretation that I had (that you were using the Socratic method). The reason for this being the default interpretation is that there is an obvious, intuitive answer. (This question was a good counter-argument, which is why I think it was up-voted.)

… to deflect this interpretation, your question could be worded to be less obvious, and allow more nuance. Perhaps, “If you could remain healthy indefinitely, do you expect you would ever choose to die?”, or, “If you could remain healthy indefinitely, for which conditions would you ever choose to die?”

byrnema Jan 22, 2014, 3:32 PM
0 points
in reply to: TheOtherDave’s comment on: Rationalists Are Less Credulous But Better At Taking Ideas Seriously

I’m interested in the choices, and the factors that contribute to those choices, so I asked about them.

If you are specifically interested in the contexts of a person deciding that they do wish, or do not wish, to continue living in the current moment, then my comment wasn’t relevant.

However, I interpreted your question as a Socratic challenge to realize that one values immortality because they do not wish to die in the present moment. (I think these are separate systems in some sense, perhaps far versus near).

byrnema Jan 22, 2014, 4:42 AM
1 point
in reply to: TheOtherDave’s comment on: Rationalists Are Less Credulous But Better At Taking Ideas Seriously
I don’t think this question is a good way to investigate feelings about immortality and death.

This is somewhat related to Yvain’s post post about liking versus wanting / The Neuroscience of Pleasure.

While we’re alive, we want to keep on living. I recall moments—locked away for the moment, unreachable—when the idea of death caused feelings of intense terror. But one can also recognize an immutable biological component to this (immutable unless one is depressed or in pain, etc). To circumnavigate this immediate biological feeling about death, it is better to try and perceive, counter-factually, if you were already dead, would you care? I think it is interesting that the answers are different if we’re discussing tomorrow, or 100 years from now, or 100 years ago. (Tut recently shared this quote from Mark Twain.)