Dues

Karma: 46

Dues Mar 16, 2015, 2:46 AM
0 points
in reply to: syllogism’s comment on: Efficient Open Source
I totally agree. But in the job market, I have search tools to find the best job close to where I live, within my skills, and in my salary range to maximize my comparative advantage. And don’t even get me started on all the tools and advice you can get for the stock market. But there is currently no tool for maximizing the comparative advantage of volunteer work. The good news for me is that there are a lot of similar tools to what I want to do, so I don’t have to be terribly creative.

You did give me an idea. Let me edit my post.

Dues Mar 15, 2015, 12:51 AM
4 points
on: Pratchett, Rationality, and Winning
If someone came to lesswrong and asked: “I’m an average student, I don’t know what to do with my life. What should I do?” Then I would probably recommend studying hard, getting a good job, and trying to figure out what they enjoyed/were good at so they could specialize. Good general advice if I don’t know about the person.

On the other hand, if Young Pratchett had asked the question: “I’m a bad student, but I love writing and I’m obsessed with the news. What should I do?” I would probably recommend concentrating on his writing classes and getting a job that involved the news and writing, like the newspaper job he got. Advice tailored to the person.

You don’t win by competing with people who are better than you at something you are bad at. You win by finding what is important to you, what you enjoy, and what you are best at and doing that as well as you can. Giving the same advice to everyone seems like the way to lose at giving good advice.

Dues Mar 15, 2015, 12:25 AM
0 points
on: Stupid Questions March 2015
Is there a reason why we have trouble defining counterfactuals? Does this only apply to defining counterfactuals mathematically?

Intuitively a counterfactual/hypothetical situation seems like a simulation to me. But I’ve heard a couple times on the site that we don’t know how to define counterfactuals in AI, so I feel like I must be missing something.

Dues Mar 14, 2015, 11:48 PM
0 points
in reply to: ITakeBets’s comment on: Stupid Questions March 2015
I’m going to second the thing about about acne and add a recommendation that if you have skin problems, see a dermatologist. They might be able to fix your problem and then you won’t need acne makeup.

Dues Mar 5, 2015, 5:28 AM
1 point
in reply to: hamnox’s comment on: Useful Questions Repository
This reminds me of of the times when I have to compile reports for users from our database. I started requiring that everyone gives me a reason why they want the reports. Most of the users aren’t technical people so half the time I need to give them exactly what they asked for and half the time I need to give them something completely different. I’ve started preemptively adding the reason why I want something into my questions, and I have stopped bothering to guess why people want something. Now I go straight to asking questions.

Communication is hard.

Dues Sep 28, 2014, 8:53 PM
1 point
in reply to: lucidfox’s comment on: The Self-Reinforcing Binary
“Even slavery?” Seems like an amusing comeback until you put it into the context of the societies where it originated. In the ancient world, food was often very scarce. If you went to war with a group of people and you kept them as prisoners, they would starve to death because 9 out of 10 people were involved in food production.

It’s easy to say that slavery was a bad tradition now that we have a tradition that says ‘slavery is always bad and evil’, but let’s say you found yourself in a hypothetical post apocalypse. If you were actually making a choice between slaughtering a rival band of survivors and putting them to work (basically slavery), are you sure that you wouldn’t start a slavery tradition?

Dues Aug 15, 2014, 1:30 AM
2 points
on: Changing Emotions
Elizer, it seems crazy to me to think that we would need a second brain in order to not throw up. Couldn’t we just take advantage of the cognitive dissonance architecture built into our brains? I have personal anecdotal evidence where intellectually I remember having disgust reactions that I no longer experience. (You can thank the Internet for most of that). I agree that the arrangement of brains are different between men and women but saying that you need a new seperate brain in order to avoid disgust reactions seems like protesting too much.

Dues Aug 5, 2014, 5:02 AM
4 points
on: Tell Your Rationalist Origin Story
When I was a child, my parents took me to church a few times. My brother and I always pitched a fit, so eventually our parents gave up. I would love to say that was the start of my journey and that we did it because the things they tried to teach us didn’t make enough sense, but that would be a lie. The real sin that the local church made was to be super boring. So with my sanity waterline firmly unraised, I started my own religion. It had aliens, because aliens were cool. I even got a convert. (You are now free to laugh at middle school me.)

Eventually my friend decided that he didn’t want to play the game anymore. (This also included an awkward conversation where he asked if I actually believed what we were talking about.) I remember holding firm to my beliefs because admitting that I was wrong would be embarrassing. This was my first taste of my brain really going crazy and rationalizing ‘dangerous thoughts’ away. My first steps happened when my brain finally calmed down and let rationality take hold. I realizing that I never wanted to do something like that again and I needed to watch my thoughts.

(I also learned that being a cult leader is super fun. If you ever need priest for the Bayesian Conspiracy I will be there with a funny robe on.)

Dues Aug 2, 2014, 3:23 PM
0 points
on: Ask and Guess
Having different levels of ask cultures makes so much sense to me now that I’ve heard about it. It explains why I felt creeped out the first couple of time I heard a woman say, “There’s nothing less sexy that a man who asks to kiss you.”

If rationalists should win, then we should have a secret signal that lets others know whether we want to be asked or guessed at. So the older I get the more I want some of Yvain’s Rakiovik status beads to tell people, “Ask me anything, please criticize me, and don’t worry about offending me.” On the Internet, maybe those ‘how to treat me’ labels go in my profile?

Dues Jul 14, 2014, 4:40 AM
0 points
on: How do you notice when you’re rationalizing?
Whenever I start to get angry and defensive, that’s a sign that I’m probably rationalizing.

If I notice, I try to remind myself that humans have a hard time changing their minds when angry. Then I try to take myself out of the situation and calm down. Only then do I try to start gathering evidence to see if I was right or wrong.

My source on ‘anger makes changing your mind harder’ was ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People’. I have not been able to find a psychology experiment to back me up on that, but it has seemed to work out for me in real life. It suggests that, if you think someone else is rationalizing, then the first step to changing their mind is to get them to be calm. It also seems to suggest that calming yourself down and distancing yourself from whatever generated the rationalization (a fight, a peer group, your parents, etc.) is what you need to do to work through a possible rationalization.

Dues Jul 12, 2014, 3:36 AM
0 points
in reply to: Armok_GoB’s comment on: SotW: Be Specific
That depends on the scoring system. If the judge grade exponentially for better answers, then small increments are a loosing choice.

Dues Jul 8, 2014, 4:58 AM
0 points
on: Simultaneously Right and Wrong
I wondered if this bias is really a manifestation of holding two contradictory ideas (a la belief in belief in belief). I wonder because, when past me was making this exact mistake, I notice that it tended to be a case of having a wide range of possible skill rank coupled with a low desire for accuracy.

If I think that my IQ is between 100 and 80 then I can have it both ways. I don’t know that for sure, so I can brag: “Oh my IQ is somewhere below 100.” because there is still a chance that their IQ is 100. However, if I am bout to be presented with an IQ test, I am tempted to be humble and say 80, because the test is probably going to prove me wrong in a positive way. That way I get to seem humble and smart, rather than overconfident and dumb.

Why are we surprised that the subjects were still trying to act is high status ways when they weren’t being watched? This isn’t like an experiment where I’m more likely to steal a candy bar if I’m anonymous. My reward for acting high status when no one is watching, is that I get to think of myself as a high status actor even when other people aren’t watching. I always have an audience of at least one person. myself.

Dues Jun 9, 2014, 3:51 AM
2 points
on: 3 Levels of Rationality Verification
If rhetoric is the dark arts, then rationalists need a defense against the dark arts.

I’ve always seem debates as a missed opportunity for rationality training/testing. Not for debaters, but for the audience.

When you have two people cleverly arguing for an answer, that is an opportunity for the audience to see if they can avoid being suckered in. To keep things interesting, you could randomize the debate so that one, bother, or neither debater is telling the truth. (Or course in the toughest debates, the debaters are both partially true and the audience needs to find out what is the real answer.) And if we want to keep the students from compartmentalizing what they have learned, we probably need to make the debates a mix of real world and abstract debates. We might also have easy, medium, and hard difficulty debates, but you don’t tell the audience beforehand.

I think that this would be useful thing, because lots of place already have debate clubs and public debates. All we would need to have an audience game running in the background.

I think that the most helpful part of the lesson would come after the debate and after the audience has been scored on their confidence intervals. If we can get the debaters to explain the rhetorical tricks they used, so the audience can recognize them in the future and hopefully not fall for them a second time.