Why does the edge of a shadow sometimes appear to shift when another shadow gets close to it?
Details: I was in front of a window. The edge of a chair cast a shadow on the floor from the window light. When I moved such that the shadow of my arm got very close to the shadow of the chair, part of the edge of the chair’s shadow was “pulled towards” the shadow being cast by my arm. The shadow of my arms didn’t appear to move. My arm was closer to the sun than the chair.
Tip for research: In personality psychology, the tendency to experience negative emotions is usually called neuroticism.
Woody Allen on time discounting and path-dependent preferences:
In my next life I want to live my life backwards. You start out dead and get that out of the way. Then you wake up in an old people’s home feeling better every day. You get kicked out for being too healthy, go collect your pension, and then when you start work, you get a gold watch and a party on your first day. You work for 40 years until you’re young enough to enjoy your retirement. You party, drink alcohol, and are generally promiscuous, then you are ready for high school. You then go to primary school, you become a kid, you play. You have no responsibilities, you become a baby until you are born. And then you spend your last 9 months floating in luxurious spa-like conditions with central heating and room service on tap, larger quarters every day and then Voila! You finish off as an orgasm!
The rationality gloss is that a naive model of discounting future events implies a preference for ordering experiences by decreasing utility. But often this ordering is quite unappealing!
A related example (attributed to Gregory Bateson):
If the hangover preceded the binge, drunkenness would be considered a virtue and not a vice.
“Context-free abstract pattern recognition” can be partially resolved into more legible subcomponents, some of which can be learned, and some of which can’t.
So working memory is one such component, and is often theorized as a big pathway for (intuitively defined) general human intelligence. It doesn’t look you can train working memory in a way that generalizes to increased performance on all tasks that involve working memory (although there’s some controversy about this). And as with other traits, increased performance on formal measurements of working memory might not translate to the real-world outcomes associated with higher untrained working memory.
At the same time, it seems that the universe must come packaged with a distribution over patterns, and so learning a few common patterns might transfer fairly well. The Raven pattern is XOR, a basic boolean function. The continued fraction is self-similarity, which is an interesting pattern (meta-pattern?), because while people already recognize trivial self-similarity (invariance, repetition), it look like people can be successfully taught to look for more complicated recurrences in math and CS classes.
Not because we have a specific “heretic burning” sense receptor, but because the parts of the brain containing the idea of burning the heretics were connected by neural pathways to the pleasure centers, just like all associations are created.
There is almost certainly hardware support for punishment behavior, albeit that which can be executed with very little high level conceptual understanding, as you note. Even more, it doesn’t always require a “belief that X is right”: It can simply happen, when everyone else is throwing stones, that a person may throw stones too, and the high level belief of person that they are “trying to do the right thing” is formed after the behavior has already happened, or in (hardware-embedded) anticipation of a hypothetical future demand to justify their behavior.
Outliers are interesting, but I’m not sure they are often useful examples. I suspect the focus on outliers is more due to a certain insecurity among specialists, which is exactly the last thing 99.9% of the people struggling to understand or enjoy mathematics need further exposure to.
Perhaps within mathematics, progress really is so dominated by the elite that it seems natural to worry so much about elites. I don’t know either way. But in most other fields, and in the everyday strength of society, there seems to be a decent potential from moving everyone else just a few notches in mathematical comfort.
Naturally, people rise to the level of their ability for any given level of pedagogic incompetence, and so it would be equally useless to blame people for not figuring out on their own how to maximize their own ability (whatever that may be), unless we can provide reasonably concrete advice.
Is he bullying or insulting people? Does he lack the machinery to detect social disapproval? Either situation would require specialized advice.
There is an option to only display only comments above a certain threshold. I tried to use a positive threshold (5 votes) but it doesn’t seem to work.
As an aside, I still find it much easier to sift through LW for good content, relative to other broad-domain sites. While I’m glad the ecosystem has diversified, it has become harder to find e.g. the good comments on a SSC piece, or to separate the wheat from the chaff on social media or single-author blogs.
Do you mean in casual social situations? Or is this people doing stupid things that directly harm you (e.g an incompetent coworker you still need to rely on; a roommate that keeps destroying stuff)?
This raises an interesting question: What is a population measure of sanity?
As you point out, stated beliefs might not be a great measurement. And even if a less-than-sane belief is genuine, the belief may be so compartmentalized that it isn’t a leading cause of irrational behavior.
A while back, I found this study: pdf which tried to correlate performance on a test of cognitive biases with the likelihood of reporting a bunch of different real-world “bad decisions”, like having been in jail or default on a loan. They found some modest correlations after adjusting for SES and an IQ-proxy.
Many ideological problems boil down to an error of expansive domain:
So a X=Marxist can talk intelligently about certain large-scale economic patterns. But there’s no reason to expect good career advice from a Marxist. Despite this, some Marxists are perfectly happy to reason “having a career is related to economics, and my theory of proletarian revolution is related to economics, and so clearly my theory of the proletarian revolution is related to giving good career advice!”. And then the critics of Marxism are happy to attack Marxism as a whole, but only by pointing out that the theory fails when applied to the problem of giving good career advice.
I think this maps directly to certain controversies over feminism. Feminism is about patterns X, Y, and Z in gender relations. But you shouldn’t expect a particular feminist framework to apply to literally every problem involving gender, despite the willingness of many proponents and critics to debate accept these misapplications as if they were meaningful. In particular, I would map “Marxist giving career advice” to “Feminist giving dating advice”.
Note that this position is consistent with supporting the underlying ideological framework: I could be a fervent Marxist, while still accepting that Marxism might have limited, or at least very complicated, relevance to your current job search.
There’s a content-neutral signaling dynamic too: Some BDSM fans (for lack of a better term?) are signaling sophistication by loudly complaining out that the recent “pop music hit” is crap. So there’s an opportunity for hipster counter-signaling if anyone with in-group credibility defends some aspect of the book.
Thanks for clarifying. I saw a few definitions that were less precise: wikipedia describes negative feedback as ”...when some function of the output of a system...is fed back in a manner that tends to reduce the fluctuations in the output, whether caused by changes in the input or by other disturbances.” I think I was confused by skipping the tends part, and applying the resulting definition to the shower example.
You’re right on the explosion.
So “negative feedback” does not imply “stable point”. Although “stable point” presumably implies “negative feedback” somewhere?
That an overexuberant negative feedback controller can still lead to explosions is one of the interesting results of control theory...
Terminology question: Does “negative feedback” have a precise definition? So if I point at something and say “this is a negative feedback loop”, is that exactly the same as saying “the current state of this thing is stable, or the state is known to be in the neighborhood of an implicitly communicated stable point”? (And conversely for “positive feedback” = “unstable”) I’m considering that a physical explosion will reliably reach a stable state. Or something that pushes a real value in [0,1] towards the nearest bound, but then stops.
The paper, or my comment? I interpreted the paper as an attack on (explanatory) models of risk aversion that are based on this (quite general) type of utility curve, with the conclusion that observed behavior can’t be motivated by such a curve.
Why people find it emotionally difficult to keep secrets?
The dynamic shows up very early in childhood (search for “google: louise ck secret”), it can involve self-sacrifice (confessing to a crime), and people find it relieving to share secrets even in completely anonymous and impersonal ways (“google: the confession bear meme”).
Also consider risks from future technology. For example, we might be able to “deanonymize” various public data records.
Conversly, if you’d pay much more than this, you are absurdly risk averse: Here’s a pdf of a classic paper by Rabin: Risk Aversion and Expected-Utility Theory: A Calibration Theorem
Abstract:
Within the expected-utility framework, the only explanation for risk aversion is that the utility function for wealth is concave: A person has lower marginal utility for additional wealth when she is wealthy than when she is poor. This paper provides a theorem showing that expected-utility theory is an utterly implausible explanation for apprecia- ble risk aversion over modest stakes: Within expected-utility theory, for any concave utility function, even very little risk aversion over modest stakes implies an absurd degree of risk aversion over large stakes. Illustrative calibrations are provided
Ah! I may have a meta-contrarian position to contribute:
This is not useful → This is useful for having fun → Fun is a valid goal, but this is a fairly ineffective way to have fun.
In the same way that people are routinely in error about how to improve everything else, they are routinely in error about what things are good at actually providing fun. And there is a familiar resistance to the direct application of thought to the problem, which relies on the normal excuses (“Isn’t it all subjective?”, “But thinking is incompatible with feeling! Haven’t you seen Spock?”).
Playing sports looks really good from an “effective hedonism” standpoint, even up to several hours a week. But for most people, I’m skeptical that regularly watching sports provides a decent long-term return, when done for more than a few hours every month or year.
Tangentially related: My local baseball team is far funner to watch than the top teams, because they make more mistakes, which leads to more unpredictable and exciting plays, but at the same time they’re still athletic enough that you’re not just watching children flounder around. In the same way, I really enjoyed the last superbowl.
Note: This post raises a concern about the treatment of depression.
If we treat depression with something like medication, should we be worried about people getting stuck in bad local optima, because they no longer feel bad enough that the pain of changing environments seems small by comparison? For example, consider someone in a bad relationship, or an unsuitable job, or with a flawed philosophic outlook, or whatever. The risk is that you alleviate some of the pain signal stemming from the lover/job/ideology, and so the patient never feels enough pressure to fix the lover/job/ideology.
Also, I’m pretty confident that the medical profession has thought about this in detail, but I’ve been spinning my wheels trying to find the right search terms. Does anyone know where to look, or have other recommendations?