I also second this mistake.
fiddlemath
Karma: 1,287
Census’d! And upvoted! But an upvote isn’t really quite strong enough to demonstrate my appreciation for this work. Thank you.
Seconded. This seemed outrageous and unthinkable to me before I was in grad school; now that I’ve been to grad school, I recognize it as obviously true.
Work your way up to emailing / calling them, but an introduction from a professor that likes you will go far.
Well-known professors get cold-emailed pretty frequently by prospective students, and are largely ignored. An introduction from a professor that likes you, in a related field of study, will get you pretty far.
Of course, you won’t get those introductions without having a professor that likes you; the easiest way to get a professor to like you is to demonstrate interest, and start to build expertise, in the field you want to do work in. Start reading papers, ask your professors questions about research, or just pointers to relevant research. If you want to do math or CS or theoretical X, make serious attempts at solving interesting problems. If you’re in a lab science, ask to help with relevant experiments at your university.
I did not do these things when I was an undergrad. Doing them would have made a serious difference; I’ve seen that difference in grad students since then. If you seriously want to do graduate research, this stuff is at least as important as your grades. It’s good practice and good signaling.
Nope, just terrible editing. :j Thanks.
I’d actually argue that Zendo is simpler than Clue, just less familiar. Specifically, the gameplay mechanics themselves are about as simple as they can be, while still supporting the idea of “be a game of induction”.
Is there anywhere it can be played online?
Actually, forums work out pretty well, and chat rooms (IRC, say) work excellently… because you can just use a family of text strings as koan space, instead of physical configurations. It’s lacks some visual and tactile satisfaction, but it works online and is free. (Examples: on lw, on Board Game Geek, on the DROD forums.)
Zendo is often described as “Science: The Game.” (More discussion here)
Lots of biases come up. You quickly learn to avoid positive bias if you play this often. You start to deal with confirmation bias and illusory correlation and neglect of sample size. Almost any bias that affects hypothesis generation and testing affects how well you play Zendo, and you can run through single rounds in as little as 10 or 15 minutes. I cannot recommend it enough.
If you’re serious about using it for didactic purposes, have players work together, collaborating aloud. This way, you can cover some of the social biases, and have a clearer record of what people were thinking and when they thought it. (If you’re really serious, record the play session, and show insight-generating clips as you go. When you play as the master, you get to see these all the time.)
Problem lacks specification: ought we assume that Omega also predicted TNL’s number? Or was that random both to me, Omega-past, and TNL? Omega predicting correctly in 99.9% of previous cases doesn’t determine this.
(eta: Ah, was answered on the Facebook thread; Omega predicted the lottery number. Hm.)
Yes, one should vigorously enact risky, positive-expectation plans. I think that’s clear to this audience.
How do you vigorously enact risky plans while acknowledging their uncertainty? This is psychologically much more difficult.
Things described around LW as productivity hacks will help. But the feeling of optimism and the acknowledgement of a risk are different things. I experience optimism as pleasant, motivating, and an aid to focus. It’d be awesome to feel optimistic about positive-EV risky plans, in general. Do you know ways to do this?
It struck me last night that, if you really wanted to get good predictions on what will happen in the rest of the story, you can just reread the whole thing, look for any potential plot devices that haven’t already been triggered in some central way, and figure out how those things might be used. There’s not a lot of story left; Eliezer said this arc, a couple of intermediate chapters, and one final plot arc.
I haven’t got the time to do this myself, but it seems doable. If you want to really solve everything, set up a collaborative spreadsheet or something, and start hacking away. :)
Ah, there it is!
Harry time-turned to just before the troll attack. (In the one-and-a-half minutes when he went into Hermione’s room.) This is probably pretty clear—he’s been keeping everyone else out of that room, and the centrality of the time-turner in this story more or less demands that Harry do so. Harry would have done this even if he couldn’t come up with a plan in his previous six hours, just so he’d have another six hours to think, or do what he deemed needful to preserve Hermione’s body.
Somewhere in there, he talked to the twins, and poorly obliviated them. Evidence:
Why does Harry know about the Marauder’s Map? When else has Harry learned plot-significant information off-camera?
Obliviation, and Memory Charms in general, and Harry’s horror of them, are repeatedly mentioned in the story, and haven’t really been used that much yet.
Harry has just learned that he has access to learn obliviation.
Quirrell suggests that obliviation is within his abilities, but barely—and so Harry is likely to botch it if he attempts it.
Who else in the story is likely to have performed a botched obliviation on the Weasley twins—such that they have vague memories of having the map, but no complete ones? Every potential foe is powerful enough to perform obliviation properly.
Besides, it’ll be a narratively nice, dark moment when Harry uses a spell whose existence he abhors on two of his best remaining friends and allies...
I found this deeply amusing. And made an audio version. I do not fully understand, myself.
Oh, right! I actually did the comute time vs. rent computation when I moved four months ago! And wound up with a surprising enough number that I thought about it very closely, and decided that number was about right, and changed how I was looking for apartments. How did I forget that?
Thanks!
This would avoid camaraderie, team spirit and reputation management being organisational factors.
Er, why would you want to do this? Do you have a specific management domain in mind, where these things actually don’t matter?
If not, perhaps you can just watch what happens in carefully-selected, massively-multiplayer games? Eve, maybe?
I’ve run meetups on this topic twice now. Every time I do, it’s difficult to convince people it’s a useful skill. More words about when estimation is useful would be nice.
In most exercises that you can find on Fermi calculations, you can also actually find the right answer, written down somewhere online. And, well, being able to quickly find information is probably a more useful skill to practice than estimation; because it works for non-quantified information too. I understand why this is; you want to be able to show that these estimates aren’t very far off, and for that you need to be able to find the actual numbers somehow. But that means that your examples don’t actually motivate the effort of practicing, they only demonstrate how.
I suspect the following kinds of situations are fruitful for estimation:
Deciding in unfamiliar situations, because you don’t know how things will turn out for you. If you’re in a really novel situation, you can’t even find out how the same decision has worked for other people before, and so you have to guess at expected value using the best information that you can find.
Value of information calculations, like here and here, where you cannot possibly know the expected value of things, because you’re trying to decide if you should pay for information about their value.
Deciding when you’re not online, because this makes accessing information more expensive than computation.
Decisions where you have unusual information for a particular situation—the internet might have excellent base-rate information about your general situation, but it’s unlikely to give you the precise odds so that you can incorporate the extra information that you have in this specific situation.
Looking smart. It’s nice to look smart sometimes.
Others? Does anyone have examples of when Fermi calculations helped them make a decision?
Later. Keep the project requirements small until it’s working well. Get it to serve one desired purpose very well. Only then look at extending its use.
This is true for any coding project, but an order-of-magnitude more true for a volunteer project. If you want to get a programmer to actually volunteer for a project, convince them that the project will see great rewards while it’s still small. In fact, you basically want to maximize intuitive value, while minimizing expected work. It feels so much better when your actual, original goal is achieved with a small amount of work than it feels when your tiny, first step is only the start of achieving your goal.
Have lots of problems prepared over a wide range of difficulty. Start with problems you’re pretty sure the student can solve, and turn up the difficulty slowly.
Actually, I have the whole thing now, and seed it when I can. My, the internet’s a powerful thing when used properly. :)
Well put! Have some internet status points!
I know it’s old, now, but can you seed the latter again? The swarm’s missing about 9% right now.
I’ve been collecting other analogues of open mode vs. closed mode. I have a strong suspicion that they’re all facets of the same underlying mental stance.
In brainstorming, generating vs. filtering seem to be open and closed, respectively.
In writing, drafting vs. editing.
The believing game vs. the doubting game.
In social settings, vulnerability vs. filtered interaction
In improv acting, “yes and” vs. rejecting ideas
And maybe even relaxed vs. tensed muscles, though this seems more tenuous to me. On the other hand, dancing in closed mode is just kind of embarrassing, while dancing in open mode is really fun.
This keeps coming up in creative and performance settings, and they often need reinforcement and extra explanation. The analogue of open mode makes new ideas more possible, and the analogue of closed mode makes checking ideas more possible. Both are generally valuable, but they seem to interfere with each other. (For instance, in brainstorming, it’s always tempting to generate and critically assess ideas at the same time, but it just doesn’t work!)
Newbies at almost anything are tempted to stay in the closed mode, because they’re afraid that they’re going to mess up somehow; but only in open mode are you likely to make new mistakes to learn from. Improvisation is nearly impossible in closed mode.
In all of these cases, I find the analogue of open mode to be much more fun, though often hard to maintain.