calcsam

• calcsamSep 5, 2011, 5:57 AM

  7 points

  in reply to: Owen_Richardson’s comment on: What Direct In­struc­tion is

  You’re right, writing concisely is definitely a learned skill.

  I became pretty good at it, but that’s only through practice and helpful editors at my college student newspaper and a couple of newspaper internships. If you want to improve your professional writing skills, find a place where you can practice and people will point out your flaws so you can improve. LessWrong can definitely serve that function.

  Glad you have a thick skin, glad you could start a useful conversation, and hope to see more of you in the future!

• calcsamAug 27, 2011, 4:01 PM

  3 points

  on: Hu­man Evil and Mud­dled Thinking

  :The German text of the taped police examination, each page corrected and approved by EIchmann, constitutes a veritable gold mine for a psychologist—provided he is wise enough to understand that the horrible can be not only ludicrous but outright funny. Some of the comedy cannot be conveyed in English, because it lies in Eichmann’s heroic fight with the Germna language, which invariably defeats him. It is funny when he speaks, passim, of “winged words” (geflugelte Worte, a Gemran colloquialism of famous quotes from the classics) when we means stock phrases, Redensarten, or slogans, Schlagworte....

  Dimly aware of a defect that much have plagued him even in school, he apologized, saying “Officialese [Amtssprache] is my own language. But the point here is that officialese became his language because he was genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliche...

  Eichmann’s mind was filled to the brim with such statements.....his memory proved to be quite unreliable about what had actually happen; the [reason], of course, was that Eichmann remembered the turning points in his own career rather well, but they did not necessarily correspond to the turning points in the Jewish extermination or, as a matter of fact, with a lot of the turning points in the history....

  But the point of the matter is that he had not forgotten a single one of his sentences that at one time or another had served to give him ‘elation’. Hence, whenever, during the cross-examination, the judged tried to appeal to his conscience, they were met with ‘elation,’ and they were outrage and disconcerted when they learned that at his disposal he had a different elating cliche for each period of his life and each of his activities...” (Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt, Chapter III)

• calcsamAug 27, 2011, 3:16 PM

  8 points

  on: Polyhacking

  Interesting. Very vivid insight into how the hacking was accomplished. A question I have from the outside looking in is about motivation, what makes people want to be poly in the first place?

  Alicorn, you said that your primary motivation was MBlume. (Or generalized, ‘a specific person.’) MBlume, what was your primary motivation?

  Other poly people please feel free to reply also.

• calcsamAug 26, 2011, 9:55 PM

  0 points

  in reply to: jsalvatier’s comment on: A His­tory of Bayes’ Theorem

  That is helpful, thanks!

  Not necessarily these specific examples, but some complex example.

  I’m not sure if I would buy a textbook, but I would definitely read a link. Others likely fall into this category.

• calcsamAug 25, 2011, 6:29 PM

  6 points

  on: A His­tory of Bayes’ Theorem

  Alan Turing used it to decode the German Enigma cipher and arguably save the Allies from losing the Second World War; the U.S. Navy used it to search for a missing H-bomb and to locate Soviet subs; RAND Corporation used it to assess the likelihood of a nuclear accident; and Harvard and Chicago researchers used it to verify the authorship of the Federalist Papers.

  I haven’t seen any explanation of how these kinds of things were done, including calculations. Eliezer’s Intuitive Explanation is good, of course, but the examples are very basic. Anything that is notable, even if it’s just a published paper, would (I presume) involve data sets and more complex calculations. Does anyone have any good links to complex examples where they actually go through the math and make it easy to follow?

  (I would like to understand this better; plus my father, a molecular biologist, asked me to explain Bayes’ Theorem and how to use it to him.)

• calcsamAug 19, 2011, 4:57 PM

  3 points

  in reply to: Metus’s comment on: LessWrong as place for sci­en­tifi­cally liter­ate advice

  I would be unable to tell that you weren’t a native speaker upon cursory reading, if you didn’t mention it.

• calcsamAug 16, 2011, 5:03 AM

  4 points

  in reply to: MatthewBaker’s comment on: The Goal of the Bayesian Conspiracy

  We have neither the numbers, the organizational skill, nor the social skills to be good at this. There is a joke that organizing libertarians is like herding cats and the same principle seems to be partly true here for the same reason: Lw draws a lot of smart contrarian people. Unless there is a technological way to conquer the world, say the Singularity, but that demands an entirely different organizational strategy, namely channeling all efforts into FAI.

• calcsamAug 16, 2011, 12:59 AM

  13 points

  on: The Goal of the Bayesian Conspiracy

  Not feasible. Let’s aim for a more modest goal, say, better PR and functional communities.

  Moreover, not this community’s comparative advantage. Why do we think we’d be any better than anyone else at running the world? And why wouldn’t we be subject to free-riders, power-seekers, and rationalists-of-fortune if we started winning?

• calcsamAug 10, 2011, 6:57 AM

  −2 points

  in reply to: CuSithBell’s comment on: Select­ing op­ti­mal group pro­jects and roles

  This thread illustrates my point.

• calcsamAug 7, 2011, 4:51 PM

  −2 points

  in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Raise the Age De­mo­graphic

  Oh, that makes sense. I guess we were just using the same word to refer to different things ^.^

• calcsamAug 7, 2011, 2:47 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Raise the Age De­mo­graphic

  the latter requires a lot more effort from the inductee

  I object here. I can’t comment on all religions, but here are the things we would ask people to do, mandatory if they wanted to join the LDS church:

  • No premarital/​extramarital sex (one woman we helped work through a really messy divorce to a man she was separated from and marry her boyfriend who she was living with.)

  • No porn

  • No tea/​coffee (and everyone in India is addicted to this)

  • No alcohol

  • No smoking

  • Give tithing, ie, 10% of your income

  • Resolve any job time conflicts so you can come to church on Sundays

  ...and more, but the other ones weren’t mandatory, and some like treating wives as equals, were more difficult to enforce.

• calcsamAug 7, 2011, 2:39 PM

  8 points

  in reply to: gjm’s comment on: Raise the Age De­mo­graphic

  The whole reason I’m writing this series is that I believe LessWrong is providing them with value, and I want it to continue doing so. However, if it doesn’t grow it will be unable to do so. People have made the comment in regard to specific tactics I suggested that they would cause the group to stop adding value, which I think is a legitimate counterargument. Do you have a specific argument here you would like to outline?

  Being this suspicious of the motives of people who come to your group is not a great way to encourage growth, either.

Count­ing up­votes/​downvotes

• calcsamAug 7, 2011, 3:42 AM

  4 points

  in reply to: CronoDAS’s comment on: Raise the Age De­mo­graphic

  That was my parents’ reaction, too (at Tortuga). My father is a molecular biology professor.

• calcsamAug 7, 2011, 2:13 AM

  4 points

  in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Raise the Age De­mo­graphic

  Shannon Friedman helps host the Tortuga meetups, and she is married to patrissimo.

• calcsamAug 7, 2011, 1:50 AM

  0 points

  in reply to: Alexei’s comment on: Select­ing op­ti­mal group pro­jects and roles

  This could be true, but I don’t think so. In my experience, church size is much more strongly influenced by other factors, like how leadership draws the boundary lines between church units, and which geographic area people who are already current members decide to move into. That said, you have the perfect test.

Select­ing op­ti­mal group pro­jects and roles

Raise the Age De­mo­graphic

• calcsamAug 4, 2011, 5:24 AM

  3 points

  on: Book of Mor­mon Discussion

  Story resolution: Arandur and I will discuss the Book of Mormon together with an atheist columnist friend of mine, practicing Examining Your Belief’s Real Weak Points, Crisis of Faith, etc, etc. Problem solved.

• calcsamJul 30, 2011, 9:26 PM

  0 points

  on: Stan­ford In­tro to AI course to be taught for free online

  I think a lot of learning comes in the assignments here...I have vivid memories of friends pulling all-nighters every night to finish their assignments for this class.