That’s something you might want to go by. Not me. I don’t thrive in controversy nearly as much as you. The topics on which LessWrongers go hivemind-y about can very easily be sidestepped without incurring downvotes; medium to low karma percentages more often indicate that the poster has a penchant for getting himself into every controversial shit the site has to offer.
Dahlen
Karma: 1,288
I actually meant to ask at some point whether the Username account would have protection against people changing passwords willy-nilly, but I didn’t because, you know… information hazards and all that. Didn’t want to give people the idea. But now that it’s happened, I suppose I could ask retrospectively: how come nobody ensured some protection against that?
My impression is that prolific posters show up on the Top Contributors list more often than low-post-count, high-karma posters. And, of course, worst of all they don’t get ranked by positive karma percentage, or by karma per post. Somebody posting a good article in Main seems to be a less common cause of showing up on the list than high output.
For that reason, I don’t see it as having a positive motivational effect either. I pay loads of attention to my positive karma percentage, none at all to karma in absolute terms. If I wanted to be on the list, my best bet would be to chime in on everything no matter how low-value my opinion actually is – which appears to be a poor and occasionally frustrating use of my time. Quality, not quantity.
Might have gotten better at calibration. I’ve been bookmarking about 55 items of various prices on a wishlist, and wanted to figure out their total price. I could have made an Excel document with all the prices, but I lazed out of it and assumed their average price was 400 (of my local currency), and computed a total from that. Eventually I did make the spreadsheet. Lo and behold, the calculated average really was 400.48! It’s probably my most accurate estimation to date. (Sure enough, n=1, but other instances of calibration haven’t been so accurate as to be this memorable.)
Now, to actually get to earn the money for that total price...
A more accurate impression is basically always one that notices more mistakes. Besides, after some time passes every flaw in my performance becomes painfully obvious to me, most likely because the piece is no longer in my recent memory and therefore probably no longer subject to this unconscious attempt to gloss over mistakes.
And of course, after a while, you just develop an intuition for this kind of thing.
Bias in action: I practice my singing by doing voice recordings with my phone and then listening to them for feedback. (2 years and going, the improvement has been tremendous, I went from ashamed to somewhat proud of my singing voice.) I’ve been noticing myself physically clench up while listening to pieces of particularly… uncertain quality. It’s a state of muscle tension that tends to accompany a mental state of defensiveness about my performance. As if I’m exerting effort in an attempt to squeeze every drop of appreciation from my perception. I certainly don’t mean to get so insecure about it that I have to dupe myself into liking what I hear, but it happens outside of my control.
I notice this most of the time, and reminding myself to relax muscularly usually helps with perceiving the quality of my practice more accurately.
Does anyone else get this in various other contexts?
Group Rationality Diary, August 30 - September 12
Assuming you’re doing the book justice and it really can be summarized as such, it comes off as an instance of the STEM mindset overstepping its boundaries. Did the author have any familiarity with the social sciences? I understand that the whole idea was to import the hard-science paradigm into the study of how to ensure the success of societies, but I’ve read scientifically-minded commentaries on society that didn’t seem this… off. It’s like he doesn’t even know how the other side of academia approaches the matter, which I find hard to believe given that he wrote a book on essentially their subject matter. I mean come on, he thinks mechanical engineers are relevant to basically any discipline and role in society.
Moreover, the perspective of the book is, if I can call it so, pan-STEM and that appears to render individual contributions from all sciences useless. You can make use of evolutionary biology to understand matters such as human sexuality and morality. You can employ cybernetics to design and improve social networks. You can use math to get precise answers to problems in micro- and macroeconomics. You can analyse biomolecules in the brain to draw inferences about how the mind works and how to alleviate its pathologies. But what baffles me is how, by viewing society through all of the sciences, you can negate the insights derived from any of them, and abandon all of social science on the way.
To give a few examples of what I mean when I say the author sounds like he doesn’t know his Social Sciences 101: dividing people by class into the rich, the poor, and the intellectuals is not so much a categorization as it is a trivial game of “odd one out”; the analogy human:cube::animal:square is so bad it’s not even wrong, and there was no point in bringing up dimensionality here aside from pushing this strange notion of “time-binding”; related, saying that humans are animals is not a category error, it’s a truth yet not exploited to its full capacity; knowledge of nature and science is not a remedy from, but orthogonal to, the failure modes of capitalism and socialism; chapter 9 is totally not how you build institutions; ethics changes less than one may think; economics is mostly not a study of transgenerational endeavours; prehistory is not just like history but older, etc.
Maybe it’s the age of the book, and maybe it sounded insightful at its time, but going by this summary, to a modern reader it might justifiably sound sophomoric. Then again, I haven’t read it and do not know exactly what the author claims in the book.
Hence the qualifier “basically”. I’m aware of a few exceptions related to products marketed to the 18-25 (or even 18-35) age range.
Well, that’s quite the coincidence – so did I! My German has been in need of revision for many years, and I was pretty surprised to see just how much I had forgotten. Also signed up for a project on teaching my own language through English; waiting to see what comes out of it.
This whole subthread stinks of Dunning-Kruger. Youthful savvy? Cultish following? Guilt about not using Facebook? Putting internet sales on par with a revolutionary movement spanning several countries? That doesn’t sound like you know what you’re talking about.
I don’t know exactly who you’re supposed to persuade, but your track record so far on LessWrong shows that you barely manage to break even with your karma, and that you lack the level of self-awareness of a socially well-adapted person. Whoever you successfully persuade would have to be even more oblivious than you, which is saying something. Given what you said here you’d use Facebook for, I for one am glad neither I nor you are using it.
I don’t mean for this to be a pointless ad hominem attack; the reason I’m responding this way is for you to take this as a prompter that you need to get out of your own head and think more clearly about matters involving yourself, or how you come off as. Because the way you think about this whole business is a huge red flag. The fact that self-promoters, salesmen, and slacktivists on FB tend to piss off people more than anything else, and the fact that youth is basically never an indicator of “savvy” are two things that should be obvious to everyone who has even a modicum of experience with the internet or life in general.
… Just out of curiosity, how old are you?
Is the imperative mood the new way to convince people of an ethical theory on LessWrong these days, or something?
Pick something from the context that has potential to lead to an interesting conversation, and start talking a little more passionately about it. Alternately, splinter the group into one-on-one conversations.
It’s an okayish exercise in brainstorming, one that, if nothing else, should drive home the point that there is a plurality of goals which can be pursued, and that they’re not necessarily commensurable on a single good-bad scale.
I was trying to do something similar, but under the broader umbrella of values rather than just goals – in that from values derive not just goals, but also virtues, vices and worldviews. The other difference is that values can be of maintenance rather than of maximization or change. Another thing I was working on compiling (but for a far more casual purpose) is a list of aspirations in life that define one’s role in the world, which might be closer to what you’re trying to do here.
By comparing your posts to my lists, here’s what I can tell you from my perspective: don’t neglect the more… ignominious things that humans can value. One thing that jumped out to me about your list is that it’s very feel-good and unobjectionable for the most part, fit for a self-help book. This may obscure the fact that there are some goals which people pursue in a very real sense but don’t admit to as readily. To many people here this probably sounds very Hansonian, and indeed, status can be listed here, but I also mean things like hedonism or sex, or reckless risk-seeking, or a class-based understanding of advancement in life, or even laziness. If you’re trying to follow this list as a mindfulness or productivity exercise, an invisibility of such goals can hinder you if you’re not aware you’re pursuing them instead.
Another thing: meditating upon a list of goals is weaksauce in terms of emotional salience. You’d need more elaborate related rituals and perhaps some communality in order to get really inspired to work on them. In other words, you’d need to get a bit religious about it. I don’t have any good suggestions as to how to act upon this observation (without having to swallow up a whole lot of accompanying bullshit), but it’s just something I thought I should throw out there.
That’s fine, but could you please change the font to the default one? Comic Sans is… ehh, not the best choice for most things.
Possibly, but how about any job at all?
What examples are there of jobs which can make use of high general intelligence, that at the same time don’t require rare domain-specific skills?
I have some years of college left before I’ll be a certified professional, and I’m good but not world-class awesome at a variety of things, yet judging by encounters with some well and truly employed people, I find myself wondering how come I’m either not employed or duped into working for free, while these doofuses have well-paying jobs. The answer tends to be, for lack of trying on my part, but it would be quite a nasty surprise if I do begin to try and it turns out that my most relied-upon quality turns out not to be worth much. So, better to ask: how much is intelligence worth for earning money, when not supplemented by the relevant pieces of paper or loads of experience?
Oh, I wasn’t suggesting that; I was just hoping that whoever has been exclusively posting from that account can take a hint and consider using LW the typical way. It’s confusing to see so many posts at once by that account and not know whether there’s one person or several using it.
Meta: How come there have been so many posts recently by the generic Username account? More people wanting to preserve anonymity, or just one person who can’t be bothered to make an account / own up to most of what they say?
I thought you said you had a wife?...