It’s good to see someone organize the relevant information and make it actionable. Good job lukeprog and Kaj_Sotala!
calcsam
Karma: 568
Thanks. My model is this, though that is more about election than governance.
The main question which is important here: why do you want to learn mathematics?
I suggest reading this Paul Graham essay:
Do you think Shakespeare was gritting his teeth and diligently trying to write Great Literature? Of course not. He was having fun. That’s why he’s so good.
If you want to do good work, what you need is a great curiosity about a promising question. The critical moment for Einstein was when he looked at Maxwell’s equations and said, what the hell is going on here?
It can take years to zero in on a productive question, because it can take years to figure out what a subject is really about....The way to get a big idea to appear in your head is not to hunt for big ideas, but to put in a lot of time on work that interests you, and in the process keep your mind open enough that a big idea can take roost
If you are measuring Flesch-Kincaid on Word it often only goes up to 12.0, so if you are getting that for Word, all you know is that you are at the top of the grade-level scale.
When I was an editor for my college newspaper I would show this tool to my writers, and encourage them to aim for like 10 or 9.
This might sound obvious, but:
Spending time frequently with different groups of friends with different value systems, each of which (you believe) has an accurate map of different parts of the world.
My experience:
My rationalist friends help me inject more empiricism/anti-happy-death-spiral memes into my church experience; my church friends help me keep other memes like “non-smart people are still worthwhile,” “actions perceived as demonstrating character and virtue aren’t all just signalling,” and of course the “no sex, no drugs” purity meme.
I am in favor of all of the preceding memes but tend to forget each of them over time if I spend too long in a community that doesn’t observe them.
This seems to be the crux of your distinction.
Under the willpower theory, morality means the struggle to consistently implement a known set of rules and actions.
Whereas under the taste theory, morality is a journey to discover and/or create a lifestyle fitting your personal ethical inclinations.
We should not ask “which is right?” but “but how much is each right? In what areas?”
I’m not sure of the answer to that question.
You’re correct.
One good study on religion and charitable giving is Arthur C. Brooks, Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth about Compassionate Conservatism.
Consider Le Corbusier, Robert Moses, etc. These men combined methods which claimed to be scientific. Corbusier tried to maximize population density; Moses, to maximize road construction.
But they were working in very intricate, complicated systems and ignored the effects that maximizing their favorite metric would have on everything else. They dictated everything from the center and ignored local knowledge.
This is what we call dangerous knowledge.
The failure of these methods—“the projects” housing inspired by Corbusier, Moses’s neighborhood destruction, helped trigger—as far as I understand—the current focus on aesthetics and intuition. It’s a reaction to that, a “risk-averse” strategy to picking the wrong metrics and trying to maximize/minimize them.
A parallel example might be Robert McNamara and the whiz kids turning into the Best and the Brightest in Vietnam.
[nitpick]
Exchanges are easier to follow if you bold the person speaking.
Also, this is technically not correct:
The FDA is supposed to approve new drugs and procedures if the expected benefits outweigh the expected costs. If they actually did this, the number of people saved by new drugs would be roughly equal to the number killed by them
Actually, if the FDA really did this the marginal—in this case, most-dangerous—drug approved should kill as many people as it save. But since every drug before that would save more people as it killed, on net there should be more people saved than killed.
[libertarian alert]
I’m not sure the drug example is a safety problems per se, it looks more like an incentive problem to me.
If an FDA official approves a bad drug that kills 1000 people/year, he probably gets canned. If he rejects a good drug that would have saved 1000 lives/year...well, no one including him will actually know how many lives it would have saved, and he will take his paycheck home and sleep soundly at night.
Can you come up with an example that doesn’t involve government?
The rationalist viewpoint seems to add a key point that is missing in the acutal article: the motivation why people would say they desire creativity. Signalling, of course.
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!
: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)
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.
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.
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.)
His parents seem rather judgmental, and typically returning early isn’t well received in the Mormon community in general either. Is he in need of people to bounce ideas off of, who understand where he’s coming from?
I would be happy to talk to him, or meet him in person if he’s still in CA (I’m in the Bay Area). I’m Mormon but have had lots of struggles with my own faith and am quite comfortable talking with (listening to) doubters on their own terms—or atheists, see any of my LW posts.
If he’d like to talk to me, I don’t come here often, but my e-mail is my username @gmail.com.
The most extensively I’ve written on my struggles with faith is here: http://free-samwise.blogspot.com/2008/12/year-of-dialogue.html..