Provide separate discussion areas (subreddits?) for geographic subcommunities.
Google Groups and Meetup.com are currently used for this purpose by some, but this is not the most elegant solution. It sprawls LW content beyond the main site, requires learning how to use different interfaces, and puts us at the mercy of outside companies. The possibility of karma would also encourage more discussion among these groups.
I have observed similar behavior in others. Only I called it ‘blackboxing’, for lack of a better word. I think this might actually be a slightly better term than ‘learned blankness’, so I hereby submit it for consideration. It’s borrowed from the software engineering idea of a black box abstraction.
People tend to create conceptual black boxes around certain processes, which they are remarkably reluctant to look within and explore, even when something does go wrong. This is what seems to have happened with the dishwasher incident. The dishwasher was treated as a black box. Its input was dirty dishes, its output was clean ones. When it malfunctioned, it was hard to see it as anything else. The black box was broken.
Of course, engineers and programmers often go out of their way to design highly opaque black boxes, so it’s not surprising that we fall victim to this behavior. This is often said to be done in the name of simplicity (the ‘user’ is treated as an inept, lazy moron), but I think an additional, more surreptitious reason, is to keep profit margins high. Throwing out a broken dishwasher and buying a new one is far more profitable to a manufacturer than making it easy for the users to pick it apart and fix it themselves.
The open source movement is one of the few prominent exceptions to this that I know of.
If noise proves to be a problem, would anyone be up for experimenting with alternate venues for future meetups? I really liked the quiet atmosphere that we had at our last meeting (until that second party showed up, anyway). But that may have been a fluke.
From what I’ve seen so far, pubs don’t seem to be overly conducive to rational discussion, though I am aware that some people have expressed their preference for them. If nothing else, we could compromise and alternate the venue every two weeks, between a pub and something slightly less noisy.
Unfortunately I have no suggestions, since meatspace is not my specialty.
I’ve tried and failed to come up with any reasonable interpretation other than my own. Please frontstab me.
So, what do you think he meant?
I tend to judge quotes on their own merit. I thought that was the point. Do people usually look up detailed contextual information about them?
I suppose it might be a little ambiguous. Here’s my interpretation (I’m curious to hear others).
The practice of backstabbing usually refers to criticizing someone when they’re not present, while feigning friendship.
Thus, “frontstabbing” would be to criticize someone openly and honestly, which is often very hard to do. Even, or perhaps especially, among friends. But it seems to be something worth aspiring towards, if one is concerned with rationality and truth.
Can someone wager a guess why this is being downvoted?
A domain-neutral interpretation of the same concept:
Entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity.
—William of Ockham
A true friend stabs you in the front.
—Oscar Wilde
I think Donald Robert Perry said it more succinctly:
“If you make people think they’re thinking, they’ll love you; but if you really make them think they’ll hate you.”
A domain-specific interpretation of the same concept:
“The real hero of programming is the one who writes negative code.”
—Douglas McIlroy
This one’s for you, Clippy:
The specialist makes no small mistakes while moving toward the grand fallacy.
—Marshall McLuhan
And with that in mind, how would it have affected the sanity waterline if Tony had donated that $135 to an institution that’s pursuing the improvement of human rationality?
Is it bad if you’re addicted to good things?
People taking the TTC: get off at the St. George subway station, walk out the Bedford exit, and head east on Prince Arthur Avenue. The pub is located on the north side. See you there!
Oops! I already have Anki running, so I only skimmed the original post, and I must’ve missed it. Plus, I’ve heard of Divia’s deck from an alternate source (IRC), so it wasn’t intentional redundancy.
Other than Divia’s deck, the one Nazgulnarsil is talking about is available by searching for “List of Cognitive Biases and Fallacies”. I’m not aware of any others.
On a related note, the titles of your Anki posts seem incomplete. It might be good to mention the LW-specific deck, since you make it part of the instructions and because it could be a major incentive to start using Anki for some of the people here.
There certainly is a bit of an art to learning from textbooks on one reading.
Sounds more like magic to me. I’ve seen research quoted recently that indicated people retain only about 2% of a book after a month of reading it through once.
Edit: Further elaboration, prompted by the downvote:
How do you reinforce understanding of earlier material without referring back to it?
And if you do refer back to it, can it still be called one reading?
Plus, If you periodically expose yourself to the same information multiple times, it’s not much different from using a SRS, though one could claim it’s less efficient, especially in the long run.
The sentence I quoted seemed to be making a claim for eidetic memory, hence my skepticism.
Go to File > Download > Shared Deck.
Search for “less wrong”.
You should have Divia’s deck for the Mysterious Questions sequence come up.
Pickup at the right end of the bell curve looks like this:
“If I were to ask you out, would your answer to that question be the same as the answer to this one?”
(Disclaimer: I didn’t make it up. I saw it somewhere else on this site, long time ago.)
Currently, there is a way for filtering LW content to view only submissions from people on one’s friends list (http://lesswrong.com/r/friends/).
This only displays original posts, though. I would like to see this extended to comments as well.