DaFranker

Karma: 3,234

DaFranker Mar 4, 2014, 3:25 PM
0 points
in reply to: DaFranker’s comment on: Open Thread: March 4 − 10
Meanwhile, I’d also pounce on the “Ontological Alternatives” chapter there to ask a slightly unrelated question: Regarding the “fourth option” there, has anyone ever tried to analyze a world ontology where, unlike here, particles can belong to multiple different worlds according to some kind of rule or per-particle basis? e.g. Instead of having a particle belong to World # 872 as an elementary property, which lets it only interact with other W-872 particles, it would have a set of “keys” where any other particle that also has at least one of those keys can be interacted with, while that other particle might have a slightly different keyset and thus be able to interact with a third particle “located” right next to the first one (insofar as position of two non-interacting particles is relevant to the second one in question)?

I realize I’m throwing ideas around while having no idea at all what I’m talking about, but at the same time from where I’m sitting it feels like all the “sides” of the QM interpretation debates always share a humongous bag of uncontested assumptions. Namely, assumptions about pesky details like “position” being a necessary, elemental and fundamental property of particles.

DaFranker Mar 4, 2014, 3:24 PM
7 points
on: Open Thread: March 4 − 10
Quantum Mechanics as Classical Physics, by Charles Sebens. It’s described as yet another new QM interpretation, firmly many-worlds and no collapse, with no gooey “the wave function is real” and some sort of effort, if I read correctly, to put back the wave-function in its place as a description rather than a mysterious fundamental essence. Not in quite those exact words, but that does seem to be the author’s attitude IMO.

Sounds interesting and very much in line with LW-style reductionist thinking, and agrees a bit too much with my own worldviews and preconceptions. Which is why I’m very much craving a harsh batch of criticism and analysis on this from someone who can actually read and understand the thing, unlike me. If anyone knows where I could find such, or would be kind enough to the world at large to produce one, that’d be appreciated.

DaFranker Mar 4, 2014, 12:38 PM
2 points
on: Intro to Rhetoric?
From my understanding, the LW community doesn’t have any cohesive view, appreciation or even level of understanding in rhetoric (or so many other skillsets and fields), beyond the general idea that it’s a useful social skills but that some areas contain a lot of Dark Arts and must be approached with caution by those with moral reservations towards manipulation and anti-epistemics.

DaFranker Feb 24, 2014, 4:24 PM
6 points
in reply to: Luke_A_Somers’s comment on: How to teach to magical thinkers?
I’ve heard “bias” and “conflict of interest” used as interchangeable synonyms in the same sentence before. I’ve also seen it often used to refer to partisanship.

Might want to specifically defuse those two preconceptions before any sort of course on biases can be taught.

DaFranker Feb 20, 2014, 1:01 PM
0 points
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Don’t rely on the system to guarantee you life satisfaction

I actually don’t think that game theory helps with winning friends. It’s useful to prevent other people from bullying yourself but it doesn’t make people like you.

Game Theory per-se won’t help with winning friends, but it does wonders at helping one analyze and plan strategies about political landscapes in the general sense, including the tribal and clique networks of highschool in the specific.

Dealing with negative shenanigans is definitely its primary strongpoint, but that in itself can be counted as removing obstacles or negative influences on winning friends. Which, in my interpretation, is equivalent to pouncing on those opportunity costs and making a profit.

DaFranker Feb 18, 2014, 12:55 PM
8 points
in reply to: seez’s comment on: Don’t rely on the system to guarantee you life satisfaction
Problem is, most high school denizens don’t have the slightest idea what a “serious attempt to learn social skills” even remotely looks like, let alone know how to go about it.

Hindsight says studying politics, monkey tribes, evpsych and game theory together with occasional experimentation outside of the main / high school community are probably the better way to go if you’re not socially gifted but at least moderately smart.

However, my first thoughts about politics and monkeys in high school were most definitely not “Yay better ways to make people help me!”. And I wasn’t aware at all that I didn’t even know about the existence of the field of game theory, and only peripherally aware that some evolution research might touch on psychological and social issues.

None of which is intended as a counterargument, mind you. It’s just that dropping “learn social skills” without something to support it, preferably a whole coursework guide including the above material, seems to me like it would only do more harm than good by way of wasting the student’s time they could spend studying other, easier things, while they’d learn good skills more easily later once they became more aware of things. Or, at least, that’s what seems to me to be happening most often.

DaFranker Feb 18, 2014, 12:49 PM
2 points
in reply to: seez’s comment on: Don’t rely on the system to guarantee you life satisfaction

I think if it comes naturally, widespread popularity is an incredibly helpful quality, and a very important one to nurture.

Is it? I think “popularity” is being conflated with “influence”.

I wasn’t popular at all with high school. I was the guy you suddenly want to be very friendly with and then stay far far away from for a few weeks when he started dropping names and pointed hints. And I was also the guy whom people came to tell what they saw in corridor E-2 so they could work in some good will or hopefully even make me owe them a few favors.

And all without the disadvantages of being publicly visible! Like having to maintain appearances to a much higher standards! Or the whole community turning against you once you cross one of its many invisible lines of unacceptability!

(note: The above examples were not the widespread thing I’ve portrayed them to be, but rather rare and isolated cases I’ve fished out as salient images. Still, I find the advantages I enjoyed much better than outright “popularity”.)

DaFranker Feb 17, 2014, 12:55 PM
2 points
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Rethinking Education
And the rest of being rational is making sure that the future likelihood of making the same kind of mistake is as low as possible!

DaFranker Feb 14, 2014, 12:56 PM
2 points
in reply to: hyporational’s comment on: How to illustrate that society is mostly irrational, and how rationality would be beneficial

You can’t just start from the assumption that society would be more rational if rationality was taught at school. You’d also need evidence that rationality can be taught to a lot of average people. I don’t think such evidence exists. Whatever taken out from the curriculum might be replaced by something completely ineffective.

Can’t specific rationality techniques be effectively taught to a large amount of average people, though? I vaguely recall that there might be some examples of that in studies where the researchers taught participants a trick or two before submitting them a test of some sort, but my ability to recall specific examples is almost geometrically inverse to gwern’s, so that certainly takes out of my point.

DaFranker Feb 11, 2014, 1:36 PM
3 points
in reply to: Calvin’s comment on: Open Thread for February 3 − 10

He is a rationalist (...)

He had rationalised (...)

(...) despite being informed that a previous partner had been infected (...)

So uh, let’s run down the checklist...

[ X ] Proclaims rationality and keeps it as part of their identity.
[ X ] Underdog / against-society / revolution mentality.
[ X ] Fails to credit or fairly evaluate accepted wisdom.
[ ] Fails to produce results and is not “successful” in practice.
[ X ] Argues for bottom-lines.
[ X ] Rationalizes past beliefs.
[ X ] Fails to update when run over by a train of overwhelming critical evidence.

Well, at least, there’s that, huh? From all evidence, they do seem to at least succeed in making money and stuff. And hold together a relationship somehow. Oh wait, after reading original link, looks like even that might not actually be working!

DaFranker Feb 11, 2014, 1:15 PM
0 points
in reply to: fubarobfusco’s comment on: Open Thread for February 3 − 10

A lot of the role of managers seems to be best explained as ape behavior, not agent behavior.

Localized context warning needed missing here.

There’s also other warnings that need to be thrown in:
People who only care about the social-ape aspects are more likely to seek the position. People in general do social-ape stuff, at every level, not just manager level, with the aforementioned selection effect only increasing the apparent ratio. On top of that, instances of social-ape behavior are more salient and, usually, more narratively impactful, both because of how “special” they seem and because the human brain is fine-tuned to pick up on them.

Another unstudied aspect, which I suspect is significant but don’t have much solid evidence about, is that IMO good exec and managerial types seem to snatch up and keep all the “decent” non-ape managers, which would make all the remaining ape dregs look even more predominant in the places that don’t have those snatchers.

But anyway, if you model the “team” as an independent unit acting “against” outside forces or “other tribes” which exert social-ape-type pressures and requirements on the Team’s “tribe”, then the manager’s behavior is much more logical in agent terms: One member of the team is sacrificed to “social-ape concerns”, a maintenance or upkeep cost to pay of sorts, for the rest of the team to do useful and productive things without having the entire group’s productivity smashed to bits by external social-ape pressures.

I find that in relatively-sane (i.e. no VPs coming to look over the shoulder of individual employees or poring over Internet logs and demanding answers and justifications for every little thing) environments with above-average managers, this is usually the case.

DaFranker Feb 7, 2014, 3:17 PM
1 point
in reply to: FeepingCreature’s comment on: Open Thread for February 3 − 10
In practice, this is relevant once you’ve already bought a chair and want to maximize the comfort you can get from it, balanced against the difference of comfort you could buy & chance of getting that comfort (or some lower value, or some higher) & money you’d need to spend.

When purchasing a new chair, I don’t think this will be an important factor in the overwhelming majority of situations.

DaFranker Feb 7, 2014, 2:15 PM
5 points
in reply to: EliasHasle’s comment on: Maximizing life universally
This seems like it falls face-first, hands-tied-behind-back right in the giant pit of the Repugnant Conclusion and all of its corollaries, including sentience and intelligence and ability-to-enjoy and ability-to-value.

For instance, if I’m a life-maximizer and I don’t care about whether the life I create even has the ability to care about anything, and just lives, but has no values or desires or anything even remotely like what humans think of (whatever they do think of) when they think about “values” or “utility”… does that still make me more altruistically ideal and worthy of destroying all humanity?

What about intelligence? If the universe is filled to the planck with life, but not a single being is intelligent enough to even do anything more than be, is that simply not an issue? What about consciousness?

And, as so troubling in the repugnant conclusion, what if the number of lives is inversely proportional to the maximum quality of each?

DaFranker Feb 3, 2014, 7:11 PM
5 points
in reply to: Antiochus’s comment on: Open Thread for February 3 − 10
In an attempt to simplify the various details of the cost-benefit calculations here:

If you spend:
- 1-2 hours on this chair per day: Might be worth spending some time shopping for a decent seat at Staples, but once you find something that fits and feels comfortable (with some warnings to take in consideration), pretty much go with that. You should find something below 100$ for sure, and can probably get away with <60$ spent if you get good sales.
- 3-4 hours / day: If you’re shopping at Staples, be more careful and check the engineering of the chair if you’ve got any knowledge there. Stuff below 60$ will probably break down and bend and become all other sorts of uncomfortable after a few months of use. If your body mass is high, you might need to go for solidity over comfort, or accept the unfair hand you’re dealt and spend more than 150$ for something that mixes enough comfort, ergonomy and solid reliability.
- More than 4 hours / day on average: This is where the gains become nonlinear, and you will want to seriously test and examine anything you’re buying under 150$. At this point, you need to consider ergonomics, long-term comfort (which can’t be reliably “tested in store” at all, IME), reliability, a very solid frame for extended use that can handle the body’s natural jiggling and squirming without deforming itself (this includes checking the “frame” itself, but also any cushions, since those can “deflate” very rapidly if the manufacturer skimped there, and therefore become hard and just as uncomfortable as a bent chair), and so on. At this point, the same advice applies as shopping for mattresses, work boots, or any other sort of tool that you’re using all day every day. It’s only at this point where the differences between more relaxed postures, “work” postures and “gaming” postures starts really mattering, and I’d say if you actually spend 6-8 hours per day on average on this chair, you definitely want to go for the best you can get. How much that needs to cost, unfortunately, isn’t a known quantity; it depends very heavily on your body size, shape, mass, leg/torso ratio, how you normally move and a bunch of other things… so there’s a lot of hit-and-miss, unfortunately, unless you have access to the services of a professional in office ergonomics. Even then, I can’t myself speak for how much a professional would help.

DaFranker Feb 3, 2014, 6:10 PM
2 points
in reply to: Shmi’s comment on: Open Thread for February 3 − 10
Beware that you need to “try” these chairs, and you need to pay attention to clothing when you try them too. A chair that’s super comfortable with jeans and a winter coat might turn out to be an absolutely horrible back-twisting wedge of slipperiness once you’re back home in sweatpants and a hoodie. Or in various more advanced states of undress.
What links here?
- DaFranker's comment on Open Thread for February 3 − 10 by NancyLebovitz (Feb 3, 2014, 7:11 PM; 5 points)

DaFranker Jan 21, 2014, 2:08 PM
2 points
in reply to: CellBioGuy’s comment on: AALWA: Ask any LessWronger anything
That was an awesome breakdown of things, thank you!

I’ve learned way more from this than from all my previous reading, without even including the data about what I didn’t know I don’t know and other meta.

DaFranker Jan 21, 2014, 1:37 PM
2 points
in reply to: NancyLebovitz’s comment on: AALWA: Ask any LessWronger anything
Usually, in person (either as a tag-team or “I’ll be right over here, call me when you’re stumped” approach; I’ve experimentally confirmed that behind-the-shoulder teaching has horrible success rates, at least for this subject), though a few times by chat / IM while passing the code back and forth (or better yet, having one of those rare setups where it’s live-synch’ed).

TL;DR: Look at examples of wildly successful teaching recipes, take cues from them and from LW techniques and personal experience at learning, fiddle a little with it all, and bam, you’ve got a plan for teaching someone to program! Now you just need pedagogical ability.

My general approach is to feel out what dumb-basics they know by looking at it as if we were inventing programming piecemeal, naturally with my genius insight letting us work out most of the kinks on the spot. I also go straight for my list of Things I Wish Someone Would Have Told Me Sooner, the list of Things That Should Be In Every Single So-Called “Beginner’s Tutorial To Programming” Ever, and the list of Kindergarden Concepts You Need To Know To Create Computer Programs—written versions pending.

For instance, every “Beginner’s Tutorial to Programming” I’ve ever seen fails to mention early enough that all this code and fancy stuff they’re showing is nice and all, but to actually have meaningful user interactions and outputs from your program to other things (like the user’s screen, such as making windows appear and put text and buttons in them!) you have to learn to find the right APIs, the right handles and calls to make, and I’ve yet to see a single tutorial, guide, textbook, handbook, “crash course” or anything that isn’t trial-and-error or a human looking at what you did that actually teaches how to do that. So this is among the first things I hammer into them -

“You want to display a popup with yes/no buttons? Open up the Reference here, search for “prompt”, “popup”, “window”, “input” or anything else that seems related, and swim around until you find something that looks like it does what you’re doing, copy the examples given as much as possible in your own code, making changes only to things you’ve already mastered, and try it!”

...somewhat like this, though that’s only for illustration. In a real setting, I’d be double-checking every step of the way there that they remember and understand what I told them about Developer References earlier on, that their face doesn’t scrunch up at any of the terms I suggest for their search, that they can follow the visual display / UI of this particular reference I’m showing them (I’m glaring at you, javadoc! You’re horribly cruel to newbies.) and find their way around it after a bit of poking around, and so on.

Obviously, that’s nowhere near the first things to tackle, though. Most tutorials devote approximately twelve words to the entire idea of variables, which is rather ridiculous when contrasted with the fact that most people barely remember their math classes from high school, and never had the need or chance to wrap their head around the concept of variables as it stands in programming. Just making sure a newbie can wrap their mind comfortably around the idea that a variable won’t have a set value (I pointedly ignore constants at that point, because it’s utterly, completely unnecessary and utterly confusing to mention them until they have an actual need for them, which is way way way waaaaaaaay later—they can just straight-up leave raw values right in the source code until then), that a variable will probably change as the program works, that it won’t change on its own but since programs get big and you can’t be sure you won’t have anything else ever changing it you should always assume it could change somewhere else, etc. etc. etc. There are so many concepts that already-programmers and geeks and math-savvy people just gloss right over that obviously those not part of those elites aren’t going to understand a thing when you start playing guerilla on their brain with return values, mutable vs immutable, variable data types, privates and scopes, classes vs instances, statics, and all that good stuff.

Buuut I’m rambling here. I suppose I just approach this as a philosophical “blend” between facilitating a child’s wonder-induced discovery of the world and its possibilities, and a drill sergeant teaching raw recruits which fingers to bend how in what order and at what speed to best tie their army boot shoelaces and YOU THERE, DON’T FOLD IT LIKE THAT! DO YOU WANT YOUR FINGERS TO SLIP AND DROP THE LACE AND GIVE YOUR ENEMY TIME TO COME UP BEHIND YOU? START OVER!

Of course, it might be my perspective that’s different. I was forewarned both by my trudging, crawly, slow learning of programming and by others about the difficulty of teaching programming, and as silly as it might sound, I have a lot more experience than the average expert self-taught wiz programmer at learning how to program, since I took such a sinuous, intermittent, unassisted and uncrunched road through it.

Anecdotally, I think I’ve re-learned what classes and objects were (after forgetting it from stopping my self-teaching for months) at least eight times. So I have at least eight different, internal, fully-modeled experiences of the whole process of learning those things and figuring out what I’m missing and so on, without anyone ever telling me what I was doing or thinking wrong, to draw from as I try to imagine all the things that might be packed and obfuscated in all the abstracts and concepts in there.

DaFranker Jan 20, 2014, 2:06 PM
69 points
0
in reply to: Oscar_Cunningham’s comment on: Tell Culture
If you speak the words fast enough and with enough conviction, your audience’s brain will fill in the gap with whatever pleases them while you retain full plausible deniability. Win!

DaFranker Jan 17, 2014, 1:11 PM
20 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Productivity tool: race!

Bahahah. Your current neurochemical high will wear off in 2 days.

This should be written in bold red letters on the fourth cover of every motivation and productivity book or guide.

DaFranker Jan 13, 2014, 9:03 PM
1 point
in reply to: Calvin’s comment on: Stupid Questions Thread—January 2014
Thanks for the response! This puts several misunderstandings I had to rest.

P.S. Why programing of Azathoth? In my mind it makes it sound as if desire to have children was something intristically bad.

Programming of Azathoth because Azathoth doesn’t give a shit about what you wish your own values were. Therefore what you want has no impact whatsoever on what your body and brain are programmed to do, such as make some humans want to have children even when every single aspect of it is negative (e.g. painful sex, painful pregnancy, painful birthing, hell to raise children, hellish economic conditions, absolutely horrible life for the child, etc. etc. such as we’ve seen some examples of in slave populations historically)