grouchymusicologist

Karma: 1,636

grouchymusicologist Jun 29, 2012, 4:26 AM
0 points
in reply to: Vladimir_M’s comment on: Scholarship: how to tell good advice from bad advice?
Yeah, but it might be useful to know what the person in question considers to have been the crucial aspects of their procedure, as opposed to merely ancillary aspects. This won’t be failproof but will at least have better than chance odds of contributing something useful to the advice.

grouchymusicologist Jun 29, 2012, 3:18 AM
3 points
on: Scholarship: how to tell good advice from bad advice?
For starters, I’d say it would be best to take advice from people whose careers and accomplishments are to some extent a matter of public record. Then you can evaluate (a) whether they seem to have actually accomplished the things they’re trying to teach you to accomplish, and (b) whether they seem to have accomplished those things via the procedure they’re encouraging you to follow. If yes to both, then you might proceed further.

In that case, the problem of making good advice seem too easy might come down to a couple of things. First, you want to see a good step-by-step procedure where you can really understand each step and imagine exactly what you’d have to do to achieve it. Second, it would be a red flag if any of those steps seem to be “magic” steps such as “Have a brilliant, lucrative idea for a business.”

grouchymusicologist Jun 28, 2012, 8:41 PM
16 points
on: Call for volunteers: Publishing the Sequences
Glad you’re doing this and sorry that I do not currently have time to proofread a batch of them myself.

This might be the only time ever that I can mention this without automatically sounding like an asshole, so here goes: Eliezer, whose writing is generally amazingly consistent and well-proofread with respect to style and punctuation, has the habit of using a hyphen, surrounded by single spaces, in place of a dash. He’s far from alone in doing this, and it’s an entirely reasonable habit to have given that the hyphen is an ASCII character but dashes aren’t. However, it doesn’t look good even on the web, and looks a lot worse in nicely typeset text. I’d strongly recommend replacing these space-enclosed hyphens with one of the two standard, correct dash usages: either an em (long) dash without spaces, or an en (short) dash enclosed in single spaces.

My apologies if this kind of advice isn’t welcome or, of course, if you and your proofreading team already thought of it!

grouchymusicologist Jun 20, 2012, 3:44 AM
6 points
on: Advice- Places to live
If you want to be a professional biologist (or any professional scientist) you will probably need to get one or more graduate degrees. (There are exceptions to this, but your career possibilities will be more limited.) This complicates matters in some respects and simplifies it in others. Let me mostly focus on ways it simplifies matters.
- Going to grad school will give you the chance to move someplace for a few years before eventually moving on to yet someplace else. This is great for a few reasons. You get a chance to see what it’s like to move—maybe it won’t be as bad as you think. You defer making a more permanent decision until you’re older and have more experience. You (maybe) get to see another part of the country for some perspective on where you live now. Even if you wind up not liking the place you go very much, it’ll still have been a good experience for these reasons.
- If your parents are remotely reasonable, they have to be more ok with you moving away for solid career-related reasons than they would be with you moving away for more nebulous lifestyle-related reasons. (Although from this and your other thread, it sounds like your parents might actually not be remotely reasonable at all.)
- However, if you get some admission offers from grad programs, they might pay your travel expenses to go there and check out the programs. Furthermore, most good science PhD programs will fully fund your studies and living expenses, so saving up a bunch of money before moving isn’t really an issue. Having this kind of financial freedom will enable you to defy your parents’ ridiculousness about this. (You won’t be living high on the hog by any means, but you’ll have enough to get by.)
- If you can get good advice from your college professors about which grad programs would be a good match for your interests and aptitudes, this will usefully constrict your options and help you overcome the paralysis of choice. While ultimately you may want to be more discriminating about where you move for the long run, see my first bullet point for why it would probably be good to just get that first move under your belt.
I’m not a scientist, so I may be underestimating the possibilities for interesting, fulfilling employment in the sciences without a graduate degree—others can correct me if this is the case. But I think I’ve given some reasons why you might want to consider grad school even if I’m wrong in that respect.

grouchymusicologist Jun 12, 2012, 6:44 PM
13 points
in reply to: lukeprog’s comment on: Glenn Beck discusses the Singularity, cites SI researchers
Well, at the risk of explaining my joke, I only meant to suggest that the opening of the chapter makes it sound like Beck thinks Beethoven’s Fifth would have been “famous” and instantly recognizable to Englishmen in 1678. Maybe I should charitably assume that Beck originally had it as “the latest church anthem by Purcell” but his editors made him change it.

grouchymusicologist Jun 12, 2012, 6:09 PM
4 points
in reply to: JoshuaZ’s comment on: Glenn Beck discusses the Singularity, cites SI researchers
He should have brought Archimedes’s Chronophone with him instead!

(ugh, I’m sorry for that.)

grouchymusicologist Jun 12, 2012, 5:55 PM
10 points
on: Glenn Beck discusses the Singularity, cites SI researchers
The chapter begins with a pretty delightful infelicity, since in 1678 Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony was still 130 years away from its premiere. Granted, this is very specialized knowledge available only to professional musicologists like myself and I doubt Beck’s publisher can afford my consulting fees.

(I can just imagine the English scientists standing around wondering why this lunatic is inflicting this cacophony on them and looking at them so expectantly.)

grouchymusicologist Jun 6, 2012, 4:45 PM
36 points
on: Help please!
You know, this is one of those cases (coming out as GLBT would be another one) where we sometimes have to, in essence, parent our parents. Be the patient grownup while they have their temper tantrum, and after they calm down be willing to forgive the hurtful, ridiculous things they said. I think it’s more than reasonable to say you’ll only talk to her about this when she can be at least calm about it. Encourage her to ask you questions and answer them honestly. Reassure her that nothing about your relationship with her has changed—she has no need to feel that she doesn’t know you.

If this is really a shock to her, it might be a while before she can get used to it, and again, you have to be the patient grownup during that time. But she will probably get used to it eventually. And if after a reasonable length of time she is still giving you grief about it and making it clear that she doesn’t accept you, you can let her know that she needs to hurry up and get over it or else she will not see you as often. (All this is entirely parrotting Dan Savage’s advice to people whose parents don’t accept their sexual orientation: as he says, the only leverage you ultimately have over your parents is your presence in their lives.)

I’ll add this: in your conversations with your mother, this is not the right time to argue for the factual correctness of atheism. Even if you don’t really believe this, I would emphasize that religion is a very personal matter and that you are just the kind of person to whom religion doesn’t seem right. That way you’re making it about you, not attacking the foundations of her own beliefs. (Furthermore, this can help reassure her that she didn’t fail as a parent—you were just not the kind of person who could have been given a Catholic education that would really stick.) Ultimately, having close personal relationships with people who you really disagree with about religion has to involve agreeing to disagree and to compartmentalize some things, and also at times to leave some topics off the table for discussion. Obviously, this isn’t the way we’d behave in a society of pure rationalists, but the fact is that we do often want to have those relationships and so allowances must be made.

Lastly: you’ve done the right thing by—and sorry to keep using this metaphor—coming out of the closet. Society as a whole is bettered when religious people think of atheists not as a faceless, scary group but as a group of normal people including their own friends and/or children.
What links here?
- grouchymusicologist's comment on Evolutionary psychology as “the truth-killer” by Benedict (Jul 24, 2012, 4:57 AM; 4 points)

grouchymusicologist Jun 2, 2012, 9:06 PM
13 points
on: Focus on rationality
Basically, I disagree with this. A few thoughts:

(1) Even if we were all perfectly rational, it’d still take time to research the optimal answer to every question. Why shouldn’t I outsource that research to people who are interested in doing it and whose basic viewpoints I trust? [Edit: RomeoStevens already made this point above.]

(2) What’s the harm to you from posts on “applied rationality” topics being posted on LW? Don’t read or comment on what you aren’t interested in. If you prefer posts on the theory and practice of rationality itself, just read, comment on, and write those kinds of posts. LW Discussion is currently nowhere near being such a firehose that you can’t quickly sift through what’s been posted recently and decide which threads you’re likely to be interested in.

(3) As we improve as rationalists, it’s vital to repeatedly apply those skills in various contexts in order to practice them. Why shouldn’t that practice take place in a quasi-social arena where others can point out flaws or gaps? If I think I’ve learned some skill of rationality (such as researching the optimal product to buy for some purpose), the odds of my continuing to apply it successfully with no further input from other interested people are not very good. I guess in this bullet point I’m arguing that even seemingly very object-level discussions are, in the LW context, actually functioning in part as discussions of rationality.

grouchymusicologist May 24, 2012, 9:58 PM
0 points
on: [LINK] How to develop a photographic memory
So, this is about developing a photographic memory for text, one paragraph at a time. Is that really something you want? Why not make an Anki flashcard out of the one thing (or more, if it’s a really information-dense paragraph) you most want to remember from the text?

grouchymusicologist May 20, 2012, 4:58 PM
0 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Learn A New Language!
Thanks for the pointer, I’ll check it out.

grouchymusicologist May 20, 2012, 2:49 PM
1 point
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Learn A New Language!
Leo, in my line of work, is one of the most useful resources on the web. I don’t think there are comparable resources for any other languages besides German, which is really too bad. (If anyone knows different, please link!)

grouchymusicologist Apr 3, 2012, 12:08 PM
12 points
in reply to: Will_Newsome’s comment on: Evidence for the orthogonality thesis
It’s a curiosity stopper in the sense that people don’t worry any more about risks from AI when they assume that intelligence correlates with doing the right thing, and that superintelligence would do the right thing all the time.

Stuart is trying to answer a different question, which is “Given that we think that’s probably false, what are some good examples that help people to see its falsity?”

grouchymusicologist Feb 21, 2012, 7:49 PM
26 points
on: I’m an Artist. How Can an Artist Help?
I guess I think this is, at best, only part of your true rejection. If there were some visionary artist who wanted to create art that would get thousands of people interested in the SIAI cause, such that donations poured in and some bright mathy kids decided to help solve FAI problems, I have a feeling you’d tell that artist “Go for it, with our gratitude.”

(Ahem.)

This would in no way entail converting that person into anything other than a “pure” artist. There would be no need for that person to become the kind of highly flexible SIAI researcher you’re suggesting here.

I think your true rejection is roughly as follows:
1. What you’re arguing here is that some kinds of things are just plain unuseful to the SIAI cause. You almost certainly don’t need the assistance of a musicologist, much as it may pain me to say. If I show up and say “I’m a musicologist, how can I help?”, you’re going to say “Well, either learn to do something useful for us or else donate some portion of your lavish musicologist salary to SIAI.” And then if I say, “No no, how can I use musicology to help?”, you’re going to think I’m an idiot. This is more or less what you’ve sketched above.
2. However, a whole bunch of other things, including all the activities you included above (artist, scientist, business person, politician, hacker) are indeed potentially useful to SIAI. What you actually don’t want—and quite reasonably so—is to be in the position of needing to manage those people’s efforts. This is for a variety of reasons: You don’t have enough people to manage them. You don’t have enough in-house expertise in those fields to manage them effectively. You don’t have jobs for them yet and don’t want them hanging around in the meantime. You don’t want the inertia that can come along with having a bunch of affiliated helpers act like they’re owed a role when they’ve outlived their usefulness. Or, as you hint at the end, you don’t think very highly of the quality of people who want to help but don’t want to learn a bunch of new skills and shed some of their old identity, which seems like a reasonable heuristic to me.
As I say, these are all perfectly good reasons to demur when asked “I’m a [whatever], how can I help?”. But I do not think that the answer is really “Sorry, an artist can’t help.” It’s more like “Sorry, we’re not interested in helping an artist figure out how to use art to help—if you can figure it out yourself, knock yourself out.”

grouchymusicologist Feb 15, 2012, 3:42 PM
5 points
on: How to measure procrastination?
If both your work and your procrastination are computer-based (and isn’t that a concise description of all my problems!), Beeminder plus TagTime looks like a pretty promising combination. Beeminder keeps track of personal goal-related data for you, and TagTime is a random sampling-based way of seeing how you spend your computer time. They’re put out by (at least some of) the same people, and TagTime can automatically send your data to the relevant Beeminder graph.

NB: TagTime is only available in a developer version right now, which means that I haven’t tried it because I don’t know how to clone a git repository (not a skill much needed among musicologists). So this is just going from the description on their website of how it works. They say it will be available in a user-friendly version eventually. Beeminder, on the other hand, I’ve been using for a few things, and it’s cool.

grouchymusicologist Feb 14, 2012, 5:21 PM
1 point
in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: “The Book Of Mormon” or Belief In Belief, The Musical
Yeah, I thought so too. :)

grouchymusicologist Feb 14, 2012, 3:32 PM
15 points
on: “The Book Of Mormon” or Belief In Belief, The Musical
That’s a great song—I hadn’t heard it before and it’s satire at its finest.

This is tangential, but I noticed that it’s a very literal parody (especially at the beginning) of “I Have Confidence” from The Sound of Music, which (while not exactly a rationalist anthem or anything) is a song about the virtue of shutting up and doing the impossible, when you have to.

grouchymusicologist Feb 8, 2012, 4:09 PM
5 points
in reply to: Grognor’s comment on: [LINK] Refuting common objections to cognitive enhancement
Interesting ideas—I can think of a few more. On the “smart = more moral” side:
- Smart people are more likely to be able to call on Kahneman’s System 2 when necessary, which correlates with utilitarian judgments (see this paper by Joshua Greene et al.). Similarly, they’re more likely to have the mental resources to resist their worst impulses, if they want to resist them.
- Note that some of your “smart = less moral” proposals concern a world in which some people are much smarter than others. If cognitive enhancement were widespread, we might get its moral benefits without the drawbacks of smart people suffering social stigmas of various kinds (your first two bullets in the second set).
- Being much smarter might include being much better at interpersonal skills, increasing empathy for others.
- Likewise, if there are morality network effects—as in the tendency for well-organized societies to be less violent—then a smarter overall population might be very much more moral.
On the “smart = less moral” side:
- If cognitive enhancement happens such that some people are much, much smarter than others, the temptation for the much smarter people to use their intelligence to take advantage of the less-smart people may be simply too great to resist. Presumably even very, very smart people will have their price.
By and large, I think I’d agree with you that it seems right that a smarter human population would be more moral, but it’s by no means certain.

[LINK] Refuting common objections to cognitive enhancement

grouchymusicologistFeb 7, 2012, 4:52 PM

32 points

6 comments2 min readLW link

grouchymusicologist Feb 6, 2012, 3:52 AM
6 points
in reply to: orthonormal’s comment on: How can people be actually converted?

This suggests to me that Task #1 is finding ways for people to engage with your ideas without involving a status competition between you and them.

I think this is exactly right. In other words, people who don’t yet know how to leave themselves a line of retreat might, at the outset, need us to do it for them.

grouchymusicologist

[LINK] Re­fut­ing com­mon ob­jec­tions to cog­ni­tive enhancement

[LINK] Refuting common objections to cognitive enhancement