No worries. I’m definitely interested in seeing nice things as opposed to just going places as quickly as possible, depending of course on how my travel time is going. I need to figure out what I’m actually going to do for Christmas—hopefully some friends of mine on the West Coast will take me in and feed me...
Despard
Great, thanks!
Well, it seems fairly close to Des Moines, and I don’t know anyone there… it’s just on my way to OK at this point. I’ll bear it in mind!
I’ll definitely look into that.
I know very little about what the most optimal way to get from place to place is in the US. Since I don’t have a car, I figured big highways would be the way to do it, either by bus or by grabbing rides. But of course I’m happy to take advice.
I’ve also heard Austin is fun. I wasn’t really planning on doing Texas and Austin’s pretty far out of my way, but I’ll think on it.
I was thinking of doing that anyway, but I wanted to have a general post up early to prime people that I’ll be travelling through. It would also be fun to see if I could pop from meetup to meetup and maybe post a cross-country review of them. Got a few months to plan it more carefully anyway.
Thanks—it’s a possibility. I’d love to see China. I do want to try to make Korea and Japan this trip as well.
Awesome, thanks! Madison’s actually somewhere I need a place to stay; I have friends in Chicago and Minneapolis already, for example. Good to know you’re there, I’ve heard Madison’s a lot of fun.
Fixed—thanks for that!
Very useful information and incredibly relevant for, among other things, rationality testing. I have some experience with these kinds of effects from my research on motor control, but it’s good to keep them in the forefront of one’s mind when designing studies.
I’m not sure growth is necessarily a thing LW needs per se, as some of the other commenters have pointed out. But I do think there is scope for improving the landing page and decreasing the bounce rate of people we want to be here. That last is crucial.
In my case, I still only have a handful of comments due to not having much time to post at the moment, but I got here through HPMOR and read the Sequences… and still had problems sticking around to post anything as I was somewhat underwhelmed by the design and ease of navigation. I think things can definitely be made a little more user-friendly without ruining the community.
So I’m here a couple more days—still up for grabbing a pint?
I’m interested in this—my PhD and postdoc work has all been in motor control, which is of course very much tied up with perception and action. I’m less interested in motor control now and more interested in beliefs, but this analysis demonstrates that the two systems are very much intertwined. You need to have beliefs about the world, which come from perception, before you can generate a useful motor command, for example.
Only thing I’d take issue with is that linking this process solely to reinforcement learning is a little simplistic. Motor learning is a rich field in its own right and learning can (and does) proceed without the presence of a reinforcing stimulus.
″...the importance of constantly making predictions of all of our sensory inputs as a functional part of our cognition, is only now dawning on neuroscientists and machine learning researchers.”
This sounds a lot like Emo Todorov’s work.
http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/todorov/
P.S. Somebody please tell me how to blockquote and link. Can I use HTML here?
This already happens in some cases. PLoS One, for example, publishes open-access entirely online and invites community criticism:
http://www.plosone.org/static/information.action
(Sorry, I’ve yet to figure out how to link things and suchlike; can HTML be used here?)
One issue with just allowing anyone to comment on a paper though is a high proportion of misinformed or ignorant people who can hijack the discussion. LW gets round this very well with its judicious gardening, and other sites do this too, so perhaps it’s not as big an issue as I’m making it out to be. Unmoderated comment forums tend to turn into slimepits though.
I generally agree. I have an aversion to just reading abstracts because it doesn’t let you get at the nitty-gritty of how exactly the studies were performed, but it’s way better than just reading the news reports—and not everyone has full-text access to studies anyway.
It’s definitely a good idea to be skeptical. There is definitely some badly-designed research out there, and some that shows less than it claims to. The best way to deal with that is to read the original papers and make sure the studies were adequately performed, although this doesn’t entirely solve the issue (see: publication bias).
Hello everyone,
Thought it was about time to do one of these since I’ve made a couple of comments!
My name’s Carl. I’ve been interested in science and why people believe the strange things they believe for many years. I was raised Catholic but came to the conclusion around the age of ten that it was all a bit silly really, and as yet I have found no evidence that would cause me to update away from that.
I studied physics as an undergrad and switched to experimental psychology for my PhD, being more interested at that point in how people work than how the universe does. I started to study motor control and after my PhD and a couple of postdocs I know way more about how humans move their arms than any sane person probably should. I’ve worked in behavioural, clinical and computational realms, giving me a wide array of tools to use when analysing problems.
My current postdoc is coming to an end and a couple of months ago I was undergoing somewhat of a crisis. What was I doing, almost 31 and with no plan for my life? I realised that motor control had started to bore me but I had no real idea what to do about it. Stay in science, or abandon it and get a real job? That hurts after almost a decade of high-level research. And then I discovered, on Facebook, a link to HPMOR. And then I read it all, in about a week. And then I found LW, and a job application for curriculum design for a new rationality institute, and I wrote an email, and then flew to San Francisco to participate in the June minicamp...
And now I’m in the midst of writing some fellowship applications to come to Berkeley and study rationality—specifically how the brain is Bayesian in some ways but not in others, and how that can inform the teaching of rationality. (Or something. It’s still in the planning stages!) I’m also volunteering for CFAR at the moment by helping to find useful papers on rationality and cognitive science, though that’s on somewhat of a back burner since these fellowships are due very soon. Next month, in fact.
I’ve started a new blog: it’s called ‘Joy in the Merely Real’, and at the moment I’m exploring a few ideas about the Twelve Virtues of Rationality and what I think about them. You can find it at:
Looking forward to doing more with this community in the coming months and years. :)
Great stuff—I just attended the June minicamp. I’m pretty sure you’ll love it. I look forward to meeting and picking your brains about it!
Fashion update: many people have complimented me on how good I’m looking!
This last couple of weeks I’ve started using RememberTheMilk to manage my tasks a bit better. It’s coming along. I’m probably not using it to its full potential yet but I’m actually GTD so that’s a start.
I’ve also experimented with Pomodoro to increase productivity; the couple of times I used it it seems to work. More data required.
Don’t see why I wouldn’t be able to stop a night! It’s going in the right direction at least.