DeevGrape

Meetup : Tuc­son, Arizona

• DeevGrapeJun 4, 2012, 9:35 PM

  1 point

  on: Meetup : Phoenix, Arizona

  Me and an interested friend (both in Tucson) are planning to make the trip down (up?) for this meeting. If there’s anyone else who might be up for the carpool/​road trip… hit me up.

• DeevGrapeJun 1, 2012, 8:54 PM

  8 points

  on: Group ra­tio­nal­ity di­ary, 5/​28/​12

  My changes in fashion have been wildly successful. Hanging out with two separate friend groups the week after mini-camp, I was complimented repeatedly on how snazzy my new look was and how I was suddenly fashionable. They asked what happened and I said “I went to San Francisco!”

  Even better evidence: I went to a bar with a friend last week, wearing a blazer, black slacks, nice shoes, and a decent T-shirt. We got stopped by the bouncer, and he said they had a strict dress code: no athletic shorts, no plain white t-shirts, etc. (basically my friend’s entire outfit). He said “This guy’s dressed to the core, and you’re violating the whole dress code!”

  I’m maintaining my habit of studying Calculus on my own using Khan Academy videos, and have a no-money graph up on Beeminder. I’ve logged about 20 hours, in addition to Precalc videos (so probably over 25 hours), and with no calculus training prior to two weeks ago, I got a ⁵³⁄₁₀₀ on a Calc 1 final exam. So, not perfect yet, but certainly astonishing progress in my mind.

  This week I went into a complete slump triggered by a hangover on Monday and a difficult piece of schoolwork with a flexible due date (creating a syllabus). I’m still procrastinating on creating the syllabus.

• DeevGrapeJun 1, 2012, 8:38 PM

  0 points

  in reply to: CalmNearEnd’s comment on: Group ra­tio­nal­ity di­ary, 5/​28/​12

  “zombie mode”—I love this description! Mostly because it reminds me of Professor Quirrell, but still, it definitely describes how I feel when I’m in a procrastination/​akrasia/​depression cycle. I also have StayFocusd, which I find useful for automatically logging the amount of time I spend doing things I don’t care about. It doesn’t forcibly stop me from wandering (since it’s simple enough to disable), but just knowing that I’m eating up my “leisure time” is enough to keep me doing things that are at least pseudo-productive.

• DeevGrapeMay 16, 2012, 6:53 PM

  10 points

  on: Group ra­tio­nal­ity di­ary, 5/​14/​12

  Hello, fellow minicampers, this is Ethan! Hello to everyone else too :)

  Monday night a few of us went blues dancing, and rather than being all awkward like I’ve done in the past, I used Critch’s smile association method and ended up really enjoying myself!

  And I spent the 14-16 hour drive from San Francisco back to Tucson with excellent posture (based on Luke and Cat’s recommendation that it made me look fantastic), smiling and thinking something like “Yeah, I’m a badass,” every time I thought of my posture to make a positive association with posture and with self-modification.

  Just started using remember the milk, and I made a list of priorities /​ medium and short term goals using freemind.

• DeevGrapeApr 11, 2012, 5:29 PM

  3 points

  in reply to: ArisKatsaris’s comment on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 15, chap­ter 84

  Said by Quirrell, but appropriate to the question of EY publishing the name of the hero: “it is clear he does not wish the fact announced, and has reasons enough for silence. ”

• DeevGrapeApr 5, 2012, 3:26 AM

  3 points

  in reply to: falenas108’s comment on: Bayesi­anism and use of Ev­i­dence in So­cial De­duc­tion Games

  Seeming sure of who the spies are is a strong strategy—but it’s equally strong whether you’re resistance or a spy. Accurate Bayesian reasoning is only a strong strategy for the resistance, since spies don’t want the truth to come out. Spies want to lie either way, but it’s much easier to lie in a finger-pointing contest than in a discussion of evidence and probability updating.

  Using explicit Bayesian reasoning is less likely to lead your teammates into bad judgments of the kind I touched on (stemming from over/​under-confidence), and it gives your teammates evidence that you are resistance.

Bayesi­anism and use of Ev­i­dence in So­cial De­duc­tion Games

• DeevGrapeMar 28, 2012, 4:51 AM

  24 points

  in reply to: Vaniver’s comment on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 13, chap­ter 81

  Or, depending on how the interrogation went, ScrimQuirMort.

• DeevGrapeFeb 18, 2012, 9:45 PM

  0 points

  on: Meetup : Tuc­son Meetup

  Yeah, I neglected to make sure next weekend would actually work for me… I was just thinking, “This is far out in the future,” but I have plans as well. Yay, good first impressions. :-/​

  I’ll reschedule this for Friday the 2nd, and in the mean time I’ll check out the recommendations from ojspires.

Meetup : Tuc­son Meetup

• DeevGrapeJan 24, 2012, 3:58 PM

  0 points

  on: “Friends do not let friends com­pute p val­ues.”

  I’m a beginning experimental linguist currently enrolled in a frequentist statistics course in my PhD program. I need to be able to use statistical methods to show that my experiments are valid and show real effects.

  Could I successfully use Bayesian statistical analysis in lieu of ANOVAs and p-levels in real theoretical work? I have other reasons to want to drop this statistics class (like taking a different class that interests me more), so if learning frequentist statistics in this class is really going to be less useful than learning Bayesian methods on my own, I would love to know that.

  Any input, particularly from someone with experience in academics, would be greatly appreciated.

• DeevGrapeJan 2, 2012, 7:58 PM

  15 points

  0

  on: The Im­por­tance of Good­hart’s Law

  Goodhart’s law seems very applicable to natural selection: the Blind Idiot God wants creatures to have higher fitness (G), and so creates targets that are correlated with fitness in the ancestral habitat (e.g., pleasure-seeking and pain-avoidance (G*)). Once you get creatures that are self-aware (us), they figure out G-star, and start optimizing for that instead of G.

  Relevant.

• DeevGrapeDec 20, 2011, 9:01 PM

  13 points

  on: Ri­tual Re­port: NYC Less Wrong Sols­tice Celebration

  I definitely teared up reading this. It really makes me desire local rationalist friends to share this real and moving idea with.

• DeevGrapeNov 15, 2011, 6:47 AM

  14 points

  0

  on: Thomas C. Schel­ling’s “Strat­egy of Con­flict”

  Having read only a portion of the book so far (thanks for the pdf cousin_it and Alicorn!), I’ve noticed that the techniques and strategies Schelling goes over are applicable to my struggles with akrasia.

  I’m sure it’s been said before on lesswrong that when there’s a conflict between immediate and delayed gratification, you can think of yourself as two agents: one rational, one emotional; one thinking in the present, one able to plan future moves and regret mistakes. These agents are obviously having a conflict, and I often find Rational Me (RM) losing ground to Irrational Me (IM) in situations that this book describes perfectly.

  Say RM wants to work, and IM wants to watch TV online. If RM settles on “some” TV, IM can exploit the vagueness and non-natural settling point, and watch an entire season of a show. The two most stable negotiating points seem to be “no TV” and “unlimited amounts of TV”.

  Other techniques people use to avoid akrasia map really well with Schelling’s conflict strategies, like breaking up commitments into small chunks (“fifteen minutes of work, then I can have a small reward”) and forming a commitment with a third party to force your hand (like using stickk.com or working with friends or classmates).

• DeevGrapeNov 2, 2011, 10:28 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: Alicorn’s comment on: Polyhacking

  Yeah, that optionality is effectively what I’m doing right now, using OKCupid. I don’t see myself checking out polyamory groups any time soon, just because I’m much less sexual than my cached idea of a poly person is and the whole idea still makes me feel somewhat awkward.

  I’ve also found proposing a poly relationship is a nice alternative to dumping someone. I just stopped seeing a girl who I would be happy to be date, just not to the exclusion of everyone else (due to availability and pacing differences between us). If she had been amenable to poly, that would have been great, but the mutual break-up went very smoothly.

• DeevGrapeNov 2, 2011, 7:54 PM

  5 points

  on: Polyhacking

  This article had a big impact on me! I had never even considered the idea that mono vs. poly was a setting you could change, and I discovered that I didn’t have nearly as much of an attachment to monogamy as I had thought.

  One problem I’m having is getting started with polyamory in practice. I’m worried that adding another constraint on top of other requirements (i.e. women interested in men, around my age, in Tucson, looking for a romantic relationship, who are rational) will make it hard or impossible to find someone. Any tips?

• DeevGrapeNov 2, 2011, 7:27 PM

  22 points

  on: 2011 Less Wrong Cen­sus /​ Survey

  I’ve been lurking on here for a long time, and just now registered to get a free karma point for taking the survey.