katydee

Karma: 4,700

katydee Dec 14, 2014, 7:57 PM
0 points
in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: Skills and Antiskills
Affordances; men with hammers and all that.

katydee Dec 3, 2014, 5:00 AM
3 points
in reply to: cmdXNmwH’s comment on: Open thread, Dec. 1 - Dec. 7, 2014
I’m considered pretty good in this respect. I think the #1 thing that helps is just paying attention to things a lot and having a high degree of situational awareness, which causes you to observe more interesting things and thus have more good stories to share. Reading quickly also helps.

When it comes to actually telling the stories, the most important thing is probably to pay attention to people’s faces and see what sorts of reactions they’re having. If people seem bored, pick up the pace (or simply withdraw). If they seem overexcited, calm it down.

One good environment to practice the skill of telling stories is tabletop role-playing games, especially as the DM/storyteller/whatever. In general, I think standards in this field are usually fairly low and you get a good amount of time to practice telling (very unusual) stories in any given session.

katydee Nov 5, 2014, 6:52 PM
12 points
in reply to: bogus’s comment on: November 2014 Media Thread

While it’s important to avoid encouraging political debates on LessWrong, exercising virtues such as moderation and tolerance when such issues do come up is even more important.

I agree. That’s why I looked at advancedatheist’s comment history before replying. If this were the only such comment, I would not have called it out—but this user has a history of posting similar comments.

Now, advancedatheist has also posted comments that advocate neoreactionary positions in ways that I consider totally appropriate for LessWrong—this one, for example. But IMO there’s a clear difference in tone and tenor between that and this.

katydee Nov 5, 2014, 5:43 AM
7 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: November 2014 Media Thread

Politics is an important domain to which we should individually apply our rationality—but it’s a terrible domain in which to learn rationality, or discuss rationality, unless all the discussants are already rational.

The purpose of LessWrong is to discuss and learn rationality, so I think politics are almost never appropriate here. But even if we think that civilized discussion of political matters is appropriate, the post I was critiquing was not, IMO, up to our standards of civility and polite discussion.

katydee Nov 5, 2014, 5:22 AM
7 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: November 2014 Media Thread

For discussion of political matters? A bit late for that, I think. This train has left the station.

Has it? Insofar as it has, that’s been thanks to our own failure to tend to basic principles. I think that in order to better reach as many people as possible, it’s critical that LW avoid politics and the potential biases that can result.

I do agree that having civilized discussions even while disagreeing about politics is important. But there are other venues for that, like Slate Star Codex, and if we indeed need more of this I think it’s better to move it off-site.

katydee Nov 5, 2014, 4:22 AM
10 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: November 2014 Media Thread
Yes, ha ha. This is a serious matter, though. I believe that it really truly doesn’t matter whether someone’s political points are good or not. LessWrong should not allow itself to be a venue for this sort of behavior, especially when it’s accompanied by this sort of tone.

In order for the LessWrong community to flourish, I think it is critical that it be divorced from bickering over political matters. So when it comes to posts like this one, I really truly don’t care whether their arguments are valid or not—either way, they shouldn’t be on LessWrong

katydee Nov 4, 2014, 11:59 PM
5 points
in reply to: Shmi’s comment on: November 2014 Media Thread
I don’t particularly care about whether the points are valid. This kind of discussion isn’t what LessWrong is for, especially when it’s being posted with this sort of tone.

katydee Nov 4, 2014, 11:20 PM
15 points
in reply to: Shmi’s comment on: November 2014 Media Thread
I disagree with the general concept that LW is an appropriate place to post bizarre, mindkilled political rants.

katydee Nov 4, 2014, 10:09 PM
15 points
in reply to: advancedatheist’s comment on: November 2014 Media Thread
Please stop making comments like this.

katydee Oct 21, 2014, 8:30 AM
7 points
in reply to: pewpewlasergun’s comment on: One Year of Goodsearching
The example that springs to mind most readily is that a few days ago, someone asked me if we had a video cable I hadn’t heard of in the office. I didn’t recognize the name but knew I’d recognize it by sight, so I searched for the name of the cable online, found a picture of it, and directed the person to the right location.

katydee Oct 21, 2014, 5:25 AM
9 points
in reply to: Douglas_Knight’s comment on: One Year of Goodsearching
It doesn’t take significantly longer for me (I just did a side-by-side comparison and couldn’t tell the difference), though I have Google Fiber at home and pretty fast Internet at work. I also didn’t notice the ads until you pointed that out and don’t consider them particularly annoying.

That said, if these are persistent stumbling blocks then by all means don’t use this service. If Goodsearch took 2-3 seconds more than Bing/Google for me I would certainly not use it.

One Year of Goodsearching

katydeeOct 21, 2014, 1:09 AM

21 points

22 comments3 min readLW link

katydee Oct 20, 2014, 10:28 PM
4 points
in reply to: Capla’s comment on: A Day Without Defaults
I have some degree of discipline and a pretty good degree of self-awareness, but in the past—even the recent past—I’ve definitely found myself doing shiny but unfulfilling activities for extended periods. It’s possible that I’ve gained a bunch of skill or willpower without noticing it and that this event caused me to shift into a mode that I didn’t know how to access before, but this didn’t feel like using discipline to me.

katydee Oct 20, 2014, 10:18 PM
2 points
in reply to: RomeoStevens’s comment on: A Day Without Defaults
I’ve experimented with different alarms. For some reason the one that seems to work best is very loud and harsh—not because it wakes me up, but because my subconscious hates it and consistently wakes me up a few minutes before it goes off. I’m not sure what exactly causes this effect but I’ve found it extremely useful.

A Day Without Defaults

katydeeOct 20, 2014, 8:07 AM

49 points

11 comments1 min readLW link

katydee Sep 19, 2014, 6:03 AM
2 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Simulate and Defer To More Rational Selves
Hmm, depends on what you mean by useful. I think lucid dreaming is:

a) very fun

b) useful for becoming more rational,, but only in a somewhat limited way—it can be very good for training noticing confusion but doesn’t seem to have a huge amount of potential beyond this.

katydee Sep 13, 2014, 5:50 PM
6 points
on: Simulate and Defer To More Rational Selves
This is a line of development that—while clearly useful—seems somewhat hacky and unpromising to me. While I agree that this is likely to yield useful benefits in the short run, it strikes me that fixing one’s internal structure in order to produce reliably correct external actions without these sorts of hacks seems more promising in terms of long-term growth and skills.

About a year ago, I thought that lucid dreaming was a great path to rationality. While lucid dreaming is a great way to train the skill of noticing confusion, I no longer recommend it to people asking me for advice on rationality practice, because I think you hit the skill ceiling relatively fast and it doesn’t particularly lend itself to further development.

I’m worried that this strategy falls prey to the same flaw—while it’s quite effective in the short run, I think that people using these methods will ultimately have to learn the internal solutions anyway if they wish to progress to more advanced domains. Therefore, it makes more sense to me to just start with the internal solutions.

(Of course, if you need rapid skill growth in the short term, this might well be a useful strategy to adopt—just be aware of the downsides.)
What links here?
- Better Rationality Through Lucid Dreaming by katydee (Oct 18, 2013, 8:48 PM; 14 points)

katydee Aug 22, 2014, 6:59 PM
1 point
on: A self-experiment in training “noticing confusion”
Extremely good post. I’d love to see more content like this on LessWrong.

katydee Jun 21, 2014, 2:51 AM
10 points
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: Proper value learning through indifference
“Cake or Death” was part of an Eddie Izzard joke from 1998-- I think it has achieved some kind of widespread memetic success, though, since I’ve seen it in quite a few places since.

katydee May 19, 2014, 1:32 PM
−1 points
in reply to: Creutzer’s comment on: Strawman Yourself
This approach 80/20s the point I want to convey. Writing up a bunch of examples is more work than the entire rest of the post combined and IMO adds substantially less utility, so I’m not doing it here. I’ll probably do so when/if I write this up for Main.