freyley

Karma: 331

freyley Mar 12, 2012, 6:59 PM
0 points
in reply to: Alicorn’s comment on: Biased Pandemic
Yay!

freyley Jan 24, 2012, 4:59 AM
3 points
in reply to: jswan’s comment on: How I Ended Up Non-Ambitious
I came here to say this, and also to say that nursing closes some doors, but it opens up others. Doctors I know often regret not becoming Nurse Practitioners, who can do almost everything doctors can do, but also get to switch fields when they want to, and get paid pretty well too.

Still, that’s about the details, and your post is about the generalizations from them. I think they’re pretty interesting generalizations, but mostly I just want to point people reading this to Study Hacks for a lot more conversation about how to achieve excellence in whatever field you end up in.

freyley Jan 19, 2012, 2:08 AM
3 points
on: The problem with too many rational memes
I think that might be the source of the somebody’s wrong on the internet thing.

freyley Jan 1, 2012, 10:52 PM
1 point
on: Meetup : Portland Meetup?
me! me! I’ll be there! I’ve wanted a meetup here for a long time, but was pretty sure nobody was here.

freyley Jan 19, 2011, 7:13 PM
5 points
on: Statistical Prediction Rules Out-Perform Expert Human Judgments
SPRs can be gamed much more directly than human experts. For example, imagine an SPR in place of all hiring managers. In our current place, with hiring managers, we can guess at what goes in to their decisionmaking and attempt to optimize for it, but because each manager is somewhat different, we can’t know that well. A single SPR that took over for all the managers, or even a couple of very popular ones, would strongly encourage applicants to optimize for the variable most weighted in the equation. Over time this would likely decrease the value of the SPR back to that of a human expert.

This has a name in the literature, but I can’t remember it at the moment. You see this problem in, for example, the current obsessive focus on GDP as the only measure of national well-being. Now that we’ve had that measure for some time, we’re able to have countries whose GDP is improving but who suck on lots of other measures, and thus politicians who are proud of what they’ve done but who are hated by the people.

Yes, in some cases, this would cause us to improve the SPR to the point where it accurately reflected the qualities that go into success. But that’s not a proven thing.

That said, I’d really like to see a wiki or other attempting-to-be-complete resource for finding an SPR for any particular application. Anyone got one?

freyley Oct 16, 2010, 2:28 AM
2 points
in reply to: jasonmcdowell’s comment on: Rationality Dojo
All of the members last night were professional programmers, so I’m not sure that will help us, particularly, but I do think algorithmic thinking is useful to people who don’t currently have it.

freyley Oct 16, 2010, 2:27 AM
0 points
in reply to: jasonmcdowell’s comment on: Rationality Dojo
That’s interesting. I’d be worried about establishing safety and about unstable mental states in unknown new members. But I’m interested in trying to make an exercise out of this.

Rationality Dojo

freyleyOct 15, 2010, 6:04 PM

11 points

18 comments1 min readLW link

freyley Jan 14, 2010, 7:43 PM
13 points
on: High Status and Stupidity: Why?
The thing I’ve noticed about high status people is that they’re only interested in associating with other high status people. But low status people are interested in associating with high status people. So high status people seem to spend a lot of time assuming that the person who just came up to talk to them is only interested in shining in their status. So a hypothesis:
- More time defending status than low status people need to spend
- Energy spent identifying need to defend status prevents engaged interaction with many of the people who come up to them.
To test this hypothesis, I would argue that high status people are more intelligent when they are in either contexts where they only interact with high status people or contexts where no one knows they are high status than they are in contexts where they interact with low status people who know who they are.

I’ve seen this with people who have high community status—they’re more intelligent in communities that they’re not usually members of.

freyley Oct 8, 2009, 1:43 AM
1 point
in reply to: HughRistik’s comment on: Let them eat cake: Interpersonal Problems vs Tasks
Yeah, I think you’re attempting to take over a separate concept (fluency?) with your idea of taskification. You generate tasks when you want to complete something piece-wise, and it may be valuable to break complex things into tasks for explanatory purposes, but fluency isn’t based primarily on understanding the tasks as tasks, it’s based on experience and, well, fluency.

freyley Oct 7, 2009, 10:03 PM
1 point
on: Let them eat cake: Interpersonal Problems vs Tasks
I was just lamenting this morning how my todo list, a set of tasks for the next few days, was depressing me. When I wrote it, it was a great joy to get all these things out of my head, but now that all I had to do was follow them, it felt mechanical and boring. I could rewrite the list and gain some excitement about a few of the tasks that way, but instead I’ve been trying to figure out the why of this feeling, and your post gets me right back into it.

I think there’s an ideal working state—perhaps the state of Flow is describing it, or perhaps that’s simply some peoples’ ideal working state, and there’s a more general form of it (I’ll use flow for this comment). In this ideal working state, we’re constantly encountering problems that are within a known scope. So they’re problems—we don’t immediately know how to handle them—but they’re scoped problems, so we know how to figure it out. This is fun, because there are problems, but they’re solvable problems.

Dating advice you describe as useful does the opposite of flow—it creates tasks. Tasks, because they don’t require the overcoming of scoped problems, are boring. Taskifying things make them routine, easy, and boring. Taskifying itself can be in flow. Re-taskifying recreates the sense of flow and allows a task to fall within that flow.

What I would want isn’t taskified advice, it’s the experience that would allow dating to feel flowful.

(I’ve italicised to try to mark flow as a technical term. Please let me know if I should change the format.)

freyley Aug 3, 2009, 3:45 PM
4 points
on: Pain
When you talk about pain being good, you’re talking about the information it sends being useful to survival, not about the method of signalling (pain).

Just as you looked at CIPA patients to ask what’s good about pain by looking at those who don’t have it, you can look at people who suffer from chronic pain to look at what’s bad about it.

People with chronic pain have the method all the time without the useful information, and their lives suck. Chronic pain suffers are exhausted and depressed because they’re fundamentally unable to do anything without it hurting.

Worse, because people without chronic pain don’t highly dis-value chronic pain, it’s not respected as being as bad as it is—most people, when asked, would prefer chronic joint pain to a broken arm, yet most people with one of these conditions have the opposite preference, for good reason.

freyley Aug 1, 2009, 6:48 PM
0 points
in reply to: taw’s comment on: Open Thread: August 2009
Shouldn’t thought experiments for consequentialism then emphasize the difficult task of correctly determining the consequences from minimal data? It seems like your thought experiments would want to be stripped down versions of real events to try to guess, from a random set of features (to mimic the randomness of which aspects of the situation you would notice at the time), what the consequences of a particular decision were. So you’d hold the decision and guess the consequences from the initial featureset.

freyley Jul 24, 2009, 12:46 AM
0 points
in reply to: Vladimir_Nesov’s comment on: The Nature of Offense
I think you should expand this into a post.

freyley Jul 20, 2009, 2:26 AM
4 points
on: Are You Anosognosic?
Ignoring, for the moment, the deeper metaphorical question of how many of us are any given brain failure, does anyone know whether anosognosics actually think that they’re using their paralyzed arm? Because I have a very strong sense of using my arms, and I suspect from the earlier description that anosognosics deny their arm being paralyzed, but wouldn’t claim that they are actually typing with two hands, for example. Anybody know more on that?

freyley Jul 20, 2009, 2:18 AM
0 points
in reply to: noahbody’s comment on: Sayeth the Girl
False dichotomy. Autonomy isn’t absolute, nor is “causing” someone to make choices.

freyley May 28, 2009, 5:56 PM
2 points
in reply to: HughRistik’s comment on: Do Fandoms Need Awfulness?
Your last phrase, “there is no need for solidarity of the fans in the face of criticism or being made fun of” really gets to what I think of as the core of fannishness.

It’s not about bad vs. good, it’s about ingroup vs. outgroup. The things that have fanatic fans have other people/society/social norm telling them one or more of a number of things designed to create an ingroup/outgroup dynamic. Bad in an artistic sense is one, but so are uninteresting, geeky, against the social norms, etc.

Under this theory, I would expect more fannishness now for Star Wars than for Indiana Jones: space is geeky. But I wouldn’t necessarily expect it back at the beginning, because in the 70s, space was cooler. And fannishness should have increased with time, as folks recognized that Star Wars has some significant artistic flaws.

This theory holds up, even in the face of Firefly, which is hugely fannish but doesn’t, as far as I know, have major artistic criticisms (but does have geeky, and also has FOX and the world at large saying that it’s not interesting enough to be worth keeping).

But this theory has a significant flaw: celebrity worship seems to be another side of the fan behavior, but fails to be explained by this. Sure, celebrities are high status, highly desirable people who, as primates, we would expect to worship—it’s not the worship itself that I think needs to be explained by group dynamics. But celebrity worship behavior and fan worship behavior seem to be very similar (and very different from other kinds of respect and worship), and I would hope there’d be an underlying unification of thinking to draw from that.

freyley May 27, 2009, 3:44 AM
0 points
in reply to: RobinHanson’s comment on: Least Signaling Activities?
I agree with that.

I guess what I’m not sure about is, it seems (very nearly) everything we do is social, so (very nearly) everything would have signaling. Asking what signaling activities we do seems to be asking the wrong question.

Thinking of it from an evpsych point of view, I would expect that there is a mental organ of signaling (or the result of several organs) which attempts to signal at all possible opportunities. So whenever there are humans around, we seek the shortest path to the highest signal value.

freyley May 22, 2009, 6:12 AM
1 point
in reply to: Alicorn’s comment on: Least Signaling Activities?
Robin assumes that anything done in public (visible to others) is for signaling, so for his assumptions, I think you’re right that this is the best answer.

I’m really questioning that assumption though. I think anything we do that species with less complex social environments also do would qualify as likely not for signaling: eating, sex, anti-predatory activities, etc.

And I think there’s value in distinguishing between things we do to strut (showing off the newest cell phone) and things we do because of required social signaling (mowing the lawn). Otherwise it seems too easy to say “Everything is signalling” and not really have learned much.

freyley May 22, 2009, 5:34 AM
1 point
on: Catchy Fallacy Name Fallacy (and Supporting Disagreement)
I keep trying to take Eliezer’s advice and think of things I learn here as not just applying here. And the problem with the rest of the internet is that so many people are wrong on the internet that it’s hard to take the extra time to be this thorough.

But then I remember that one of the reasons I like Eliezer’s posts so much more than Robin’s is a willingness to spell things out carefully. So this is probably a good idea.

freyley

Ra­tion­al­ity Dojo

Rationality Dojo