Emile

Karma: 10,770

Emile 12 Nov 2017 23:13 UTC
8 points
on: Blind Empiricism
I’ve been the guy religiously arguing for pushing an early version of the product in front of users as soon as possible (as the saying goes, “if you’re not ashamed of your first version then you’ve released too late”), not in order to learn whether it’s a good product or not, but to learn details of what needs to be improved but also what doesn’t need to be improved (because nobody cares about / notices the “problem”).
A related debate has been about how much you should spec out your product before putting it before customers—Big Design Up Front vs. figure stuff out as we go along based on user feedback. I usually prefer the second, but have to admit that Big Design Up Front is probably the best (albeit less fun) approach. Part of that preference for improvisation is probably because of some halo effect around the fox approach or agile or XP or empiricism or something.
(probably paraphrasing this post a bit) So we probably have an issue where “we” (nerds) have plenty of warnings about trusting theory too much, but few warnings about trusting empiricism too much, so we’re bound to end up under-valuing theory. Especially once we start attaching identity labels (hedges vs foxes, scruffies vs. neats, hackers vs. architecture astronauts...).

Emile 11 Aug 2015 7:32 UTC
6 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Open thread, Aug. 10 - Aug. 16, 2015

if I could give them back just ten minutes of their lives, most of them wouldn’t be here.

He’s wrong about that. He would need to give them back 10 minutes of their lives, and then keep on giving them back different 10 minutes on a very regular basis.

I disagree. Let’s take drivers who got into a serious accident : if you “gave them just back ten minutes” so that they avoided getting into that accident, most of them wouldn’t have had another accident later on. It’s not as if the world neatly divided into safe drivers, who never have accidents, and unsafe drivers, who have several.

Sure, those kids that got in trouble are more likely to have problematic personalities, habits, etc. which would make it more likely to get in trouble again—but that doesn’t mean more likely than not. Most drivers don’t get have (serious) accidents, most kids don’t get in (serious) trouble, and if you restrict yourself to the subset of those who already had it once, I agree a second problem is more likely, but not certain.

Emile 13 Jul 2015 8:48 UTC
2 points
in reply to: TheAncientGeek’s comment on: Getting Over Dust Theory
I mean, roughly, that not only are the two empircally indistinguishable, but that I don’t even see a reason to care about whether I’m “in a simulation” or not, and it’s not even clear what would qualify as a simulation...

Emile 1 Jul 2015 18:11 UTC
2 points
on: Rational Discussion of Controversial Topics
A bug breaks it for me now:

I’m on iPad, any topic I click on redirects me to http://www.omnilibrium.com/topic_mobile.php, which doesn’t exist. So I can’t even read anything but the titles.

...edit: aaand it’s been fixed, thanks Cleonid, that was quick :)

Emile 21 Apr 2015 21:51 UTC
0 points
in reply to: sixes_and_sevens’s comment on: Open Thread, Apr. 20 - Apr. 26, 2015
I can’t say I ran into it before (whereas “economists think humans are all rational self-interested agents”, jeez...)

Emile 7 Apr 2015 16:33 UTC
1 point
on: Language Learning and the Dark Arts.
Pretty neat website you got there!

Knocking through a bunch of exercises every day feels efficient but it’s not exactly fun and I put in less time than I should.

I’ve been reviewing Anki pretty much daily for the past couple of years, and I put in enough time to have all my cards reviewed. What helps:
- Doing it on my smartphones at times were I can’t do much else anyway (in public transport, waiting in a queue); the most “productive” thing I could be doing with that time is reading a book, and even then, reading a book standing up is more of a hassle than looking at my smarphone.
- All the stuff in it is stuff I added myself and considered worth learning, and if I have doubts about something (a card or a whole deck), i’ll often suspend or delete it
- “Finish today’s cards” is a reachable, definite, objective (more so than “a bunch of exercises”) but I still don’t put big pressure on myself, since if I’m too busy to review today, I’ll review a bit more tomorrow, and eventually catch up (I don’t need to explicitly decide “I’ll review some more to compensate”, I just will have more due cards tomorrow).
- I only add new cards if I don’t feel overwhelmed by the daily review schedule
(and yes, I’ve been using this to learn Japanese and to review my Mandarin and German)

Emile 2 Apr 2015 15:05 UTC
0 points
on: Request for help: Android app to shut down a smartphone late at night
Alternative implementation: an android widget that posts a “snitch” message somewhere online if ever your phone is unlocked in certain time frames; such that other people can easily see online whether you unlocked your phone in the “forbidden” timeframe.

Emile 24 Mar 2015 12:22 UTC
0 points
in reply to: imuli’s comment on: Learning by Doing

As far as I can tell, folks either learn everything beyond the mechanics and algorithms of programming from your seniors in the workplace or discover it for themself.

… or from Stack Overflow / Wikipedia, no? When encountering a difficult problem, one can either ask someone more knowledgeable, figure it out himself, or look it up on the internet.

Emile 24 Mar 2015 8:57 UTC
5 points
in reply to: Adam Zerner’s comment on: Open thread, Mar. 23 - Mar. 31, 2015
One charitable interpretation is “it’s something you learn by doing, not something you learn by reading”.

“Art” has a bit of a double meaning, there’s the “something that’s pretty/pleasing/aesthetic/original/creative”, but there’s also the “craft” meaning, as in “the art of XXX”.

I want to focus on the “art is inherently intuitive and not about breaking things down into components like science” part. My thought is that these people who say this are confusing their map for the territory. They may not know how to deduce what the perfect painting would look like, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not possible.

Two reactions to this:

1) If someone says something can’t be broken into component parts, a more charitable reading is that they think that trying to do so is a waste of time and less likely to bring progress than just a lot of practice. Even if it’s possible in theory, that doesn’t mean it’s actually a good idea, so warning people against it can be totally reasonable, and isn’t “confusing their map for the territory”.

2) HOWEVER, in the case of art, most forms of art I can think of—drawing, painting, storytelling, animations, etc. - most definitely CAN be broken into component pieces, and often those component pieces can be broken into component pieces too, etc. - just check out the right section in any library.

You can’t learn to draw by reading a book, but a good book on drawing can tell you what individual skills you should practice, and how to do so.

Emile 23 Mar 2015 11:15 UTC
6 points
in reply to: CurtisSerVaas’s comment on: Open thread, Mar. 23 - Mar. 31, 2015
Yep, I’m interested!

Emile 23 Mar 2015 8:47 UTC
3 points
in reply to: dxu’s comment on: Is arrogance a symptom of bad intellectual hygeine?
I’d say there are cases where it’s reasonable to dismiss others’ opinions out of hand (apart from politeness etc.) BUT it takes more than “I’m much smarter than them”; there should be a factor like “I have all the evidence they have / I know all they know on that topic” and of course “I have good reasons to believe I’m smarter than them and know more”.

And even then it’s the kind of thing that’s reasonable “on average”, i.e. it can be a decent time-saving heuristic if needed, but it can still get wrong. Say Alice is studying for a Masters degree in physics and Bob, a high-schooler who’s not exceptionally bright (Alice had better science grades then him in high school), disagrees with her on something about black holes. As a rule of thumb, Alice is probably right BUT it happens that Bob just spent the summer camping with a family friend, Calvin, who’s a physicist and just wouldn’t shut up about black holes, explaining a bunch of concepts and controversies to Bob the best he could. Now it’s pretty likely that Bob is actually right (though Alice might be justified in not listening anyway, depending on how good Bob is at explaining his position).

Emile 17 Mar 2015 8:53 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Galap’s comment on: The Strangest Thing An AI Could Tell You
I think that for the specific case of Harry Potter Fanfic, this hypothesis has been disproved by [Yudkowsky, 2010].

Though for “many people’s perception of ‘quality’”, there’s probably some truth there.

Emile 13 Mar 2015 8:35 UTC
4 points
in reply to: skeptical_lurker’s comment on: [LINK] Author’s Note 119: Shameless Begging
It might be worth rereading the passage in question:

The Confessor held up a hand. “I mean it, my lord Akon. It is not polite idealism. We ancients can’t steer. We remember too much disaster. We’re too cautious to dare the bold path forward. Do you know there was a time when nonconsensual sex was illegal?”

Akon wasn’t sure whether to smile or grimace. “The Prohibition, right? During the first century pre-Net? I expect everyone was glad to have that law taken off the books. I can’t imagine how boring your sex lives must have been up until then—flirting with a woman, teasing her, leading her on, knowing the whole time that you were perfectly safe because she couldn’t take matters into her own hands if you went a little too far—”

“You need a history refresher, my Lord Administrator. At some suitably abstract level. What I’m trying to tell you—and this is not public knowledge—is that we nearly tried to overthrow your government.”

“What?” said Akon. “The Confessors?”

“No, us. The ones who remembered the ancient world. Back then we still had our hands on a large share of the capital and tremendous influence in the grant committees. When our children legalized rape, we thought that the Future had gone wrong.”

Akon’s mouth hung open. “You were that prude?”

The Confessor shook his head. “There aren’t any words,” the Confessor said, “there aren’t any words at all, by which I ever could explain to you. No, it wasn’t prudery. It was a memory of disaster.”

“Um,” Akon said. He was trying not to smile. “I’m trying to visualize what sort of disaster could have been caused by too much nonconsensual sex—”

“Give it up, my lord,” the Confessor said. He was finally laughing, but there was an undertone of pain to it. “Without, shall we say, personal experience, you can’t possibly imagine, and there’s no point in trying.”

The passage is very clearly about value dissonance, about how very different cultures can fail to understand each other (which is a major theme of the story). They don’t go into details because the only reasons characters bring it up is to show how values have changed.

And sticking to a less-controversial example would have defeated the point. And for illustrating this point, I much prefer this approach (meta talk between characters about how much things have canged) than one that would go into details of how the new system worked.

Emile 12 Mar 2015 17:01 UTC
4 points
on: Succeess depends on finding a balance between “geek” and “jock”
Counterexamples: Bill Gates nor Arnold Schwarzenegger seem respectively 100% geek and 100% jock, and are among the most successful people on earth. Which seem to show you can be extremely successful without “striking a balance”.

Going 100% geek seems like a perfectly viable strategy, especially if you mostly care about success at geeky things (which amazingly a lot of geeks do).

Which isn’t to say there aren’t any “geek failure modes” to avoid, but “try to strike a balance between geek and jock” doesn’t seem like a very useful rule of thumb.

Emile 12 Mar 2015 15:50 UTC
4 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Succeess depends on finding a balance between “geek” and “jock”

So this problem already arose at the earliest tribal societies, of the triangular chieftain—shaman—warrior dynamic.

Do you have good anthropological evidence that this “dynamic” actually exists / existed, and corresponds to what you’re referring to?

“How our proud ancestors lived” in popular culture is full of bad/old science, romantic notions, nationalist/political propaganda (in either direction), and I trust it as much as I trust talk of “positive energy”.

There are a bunch of stories (books, movies, games...) set in a fictional past, and they are often made understandable by projecting modern stereotypes there (because nobody has a good idea what life was millennia ago, and more importantly people don’t care, they prefer modern issues with an exotic backdrop). It seems that you’re seeing the resemblance of modern social stereotypes with “shamans” or “warriors” in popular culture, and acting as if it revealed some kind of profound truth about mankind.

(note that I don’t know that much history or anthropology myself)

Emile 12 Mar 2015 12:55 UTC
3 points
on: Defining a limited satisficer
Thinking aloud here:

Say I’m an agent that wants to increase u, but not “too strongly” (this whole thing is about how to formalize “too strongly”). Couldn’t I have a way of estimating how much other agents who don’t care about u might still care about what I do, and minimize that? i.e. avoid anything that would make other agents want to model my working as something more than “wants to increase u”.

(back in agent-designer shoes) So we could create a “moderate increaser” agent, give it a utility function u and inform it of other agents trying to increase v, w, x, y, and somehow have it avoid any strategies that would involve “decision theory interaction” with those other agents; i.e. threats, retaliation, trade … maybe something like “those agents should behave as if you didn’t exist”.

Emile 12 Mar 2015 9:14 UTC
8 points
in reply to: skeptical_lurker’s comment on: [LINK] Author’s Note 119: Shameless Begging
The bit on legalized rape is an important way of conveying that the future will seem weird and surprising and immoral to us, just like 2015 would seem weird and surprising and immoral to someone from a few centuries ago. I want my science-fiction to show how weird things are likely to be (even if the specific kind of weirdness is of course likely to be very wrong), I don’t want it to be a bowdlerized soap opera with robots and lasers in the background.

And if people can’t understand that and read any kind of far-off weirdness through the lens of this decade’s petty tribal politics, then basically, fuck ’em. I don’t want Eliezer or anybody else to bend backwards to avoid being misread by idiots.

And sure, it’s bad PR, but it’s a bit of a self-fulfilling policy, a bit like how “openly criticizing the Government” is a bad career move for a Chinese citizen.

Emile 9 Mar 2015 21:26 UTC
0 points
in reply to: DanielLC’s comment on: Open thread, Mar. 9 - Mar. 15, 2015

I’m toying with the idea of programming a game based on .

Are you missing a word there?

Emile 9 Mar 2015 9:29 UTC
4 points
in reply to: MathiasZaman’s comment on: Impartial ethics and personal decisions
But is caring for yourself and your friends and family an instrumental value that helps you stay sane so that you can help others more efficiently, or is it a terminal value? It sure feels like a terminal value, and your “morality of self-care” sounds like a roundabout way of explaining why people care so much about it by making it instrumental.

Emile 8 Mar 2015 21:04 UTC
20 points
in reply to: DanArmak’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, March 2015, chapter 117
Because children are not fully capable of taking care of themselves, and so there is a norm that all adults (and older children) have a duty of helping and protecting them (even against themselves).

And also because if an adult harms a child, it is much more likely that the victim is innocent and didn’t “deserve” that harm than if the victim is an adult.

(and I don’t think “greater moral value” accurately describes the situation)