katydee

• katydeeMay 19, 2014, 1:13 PM

  2 points

  in reply to: buybuydandavis’s comment on: Straw­man Yourself

  If you can reliably emulate a wiser person, why not just be the wiser person?

• katydeeMay 19, 2014, 1:47 AM

  −1 points

  in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Straw­man Yourself

  Yes, I consider this an empirical claim. I have a fair amount of anecdata from people I’ve shared this with in person about this being a useful approach.

  That said, I agree that some may not find this effective or will find it harmful; this is why I wrote “in many cases” rather than “in almost all cases” or “you will find” or similar.

  If you do not find this technique effective, I suggest that you don’t practice it. I and a few friends found it useful and interesting enough to be worth disseminating.

• katydeeMay 19, 2014, 1:43 AM

  −1 points

  in reply to: brazil84’s comment on: Straw­man Yourself

  Wouldn’t it be easier to just write down and then assess/​ameleriorate the biggest weaknesses in your plans?

  In theory, yes; in practice, this seems to work less effectively than we’d like to think.

• katydeeMay 19, 2014, 1:41 AM

  1 point

  in reply to: Creutzer’s comment on: Straw­man Yourself

  You even mention an example and then still fail to actually give it. That annoyed me because it would have been nice to see this abstract idea grounded.

  In general I think LessWrong cares far too much about this sort of detail. I posted this in Discussion rather than Main precisely because I didn’t want to write up a bunch of examples to express a straightforward principle.

• katydeeMay 18, 2014, 8:26 PM

  0 points

  in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Straw­man Yourself

  Is this intended to be an empirical claim?

  I’m confused as to what thought process generated this comment. Can you explain?

• katydeeMay 18, 2014, 5:03 PM

  2 points

  in reply to: palladias’s comment on: Straw­man Yourself

  I agree that “it’s arrogant for you to write a book” is probably not helpful, though “you can’t finish a project this long” may or may not be helpful depending on whether you generate that thanks to reference class forecasting (even insulting, biased reference class forecasting) or thanks to negative self-image issues.

  In general, I do not advocate this (or any other) technique if it causes damage to your self-concept, intrusive thoughts, etc.

• katydeeMay 18, 2014, 3:54 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: Tenoke’s comment on: Straw­man Yourself

  I actually find it more effective than the pre-mortem (and the closely related pre-hindsight technique I learned at CFAR). While those techniques are certainly effective, I think it’s easy to be too charitable to oneself, even in failure. This version has explicit safeguards against that possibility.

  As for the name, certainly it is not fully accurate. That said, being memorable and salient is quite important. The primary failure mode of this sort of technique is not remembering it in the heat of the moment, so I selected a name optimized for being shocking and memorable rather than fully accurate.

Straw­man Yourself

• katydeeApr 30, 2014, 9:40 PM

  2 points

  in reply to: Benquo’s comment on: Pos­i­tive Queries—How Fetching

  Unfortunately, I don’t know of an easy way to do this, aside from writing the post in the LW editor—that said, I think it looks good now. Thank you for editing!

• katydeeApr 30, 2014, 3:30 AM

  3 points

  on: Pos­i­tive Queries—How Fetching

  I would appreciate it if you reformatted this post to match standard LW font/​text size conventions.

• katydeeApr 27, 2014, 5:37 PM

  2 points

  in reply to: Gunnar_Zarncke’s comment on: Skills and Antiskills

  Very funny—my own choice for a fun-but-useless martial art was the épée!

• katydeeApr 27, 2014, 9:32 AM

  2 points

  in reply to: Gunnar_Zarncke’s comment on: Skills and Antiskills

  I used the term antiskill for parallelism with the concept of an antipattern. While I agree it is somewhat imprecise, I think the parallelism, ease of use in speech, and general aesthetic virtue of the term is enough for it to be better than “disadvantageous skill”—though I had considered that earlier and certainly think it’s a potentially valid choice

  The martial arts example I provided in this comment may prove to your liking.

• katydeeApr 26, 2014, 5:18 PM

  5 points

  in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Skills and Antiskills

  Could you give example where it helped you make decisions against learning a skill?

  For a while I was interested in learning martial arts for self-defense. Then I realized that a version of me that had advanced martial arts knowledge would be more inclined to fight people, while a version of me that did not have advanced martial arts knowledge would be more inclined to avoid conflict.

  Given that fighting someone—even with advanced/​superior skill—is likely much more dangerous than avoiding conflict, and that there is a risk of injury in martial arts training, I concluded that self-defense martial arts are largely an antiskill and instead pursued martial arts that are useless for self-defense but much more fun.

  What links here?

  • katydee's comment on Skills and Antiskills by katydee (Apr 27, 2014, 9:32 AM; 2 points)

Skills and Antiskills

• katydeeApr 16, 2014, 1:35 AM

  2 points

  in reply to: Gunnar_Zarncke’s comment on: Un­friendly Nat­u­ral Intelligence

  Could you give actionable feedback?

  I would run this post (and future posts) past an editor/​proofreader who is strongly familiar with the English language prior to posting.

• katydeeApr 15, 2014, 12:37 AM

  −1 points

  on: Un­friendly Nat­u­ral Intelligence

  While I like the concept, I think this post needs substantial editing and revision prior to posting on LessWrong.

• katydeeMar 27, 2014, 12:08 AM

  0 points

  in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: The Prob­lem of “Win-More”

  I don’t think so. It’s interesting that the LW article makes top 10 in google for google win-more card. There one article http://​​magic.tcgplayer.com/​​db/​​article.asp?ID=8867 about the concept.

  Hmm, I don’t see the LW article on the first page at all. Perhaps this is different search customization?

  In any case I see several other articles on this topic, as well as many forum discussions about it, people asking whether specific cards are or aren’t win-more, etc.

• katydee 26 Mar 2014 20:24 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: asr’s comment on: The Prob­lem of “Win-More”

  Picking individual stocks, being wary of “concern trolls” on the internet, making big elaborate complicated plans.

• katydee 26 Mar 2014 19:05 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Ander’s comment on: The Prob­lem of “Win-More”

  I’m of the opinion that almost everyone would become better players and would be better at card evaluation if they eliminated the concept of Win More from their vocabulary. It almost never is used to actually successfully avoid using an actual bad card, and almost always results in misclassifying good card that would actually help you convert games into a win as a bad card.

  I agree. That’s why I used it as an example here. The concept of win-more is useful—but only to high level players. Since very few players are high enough level to benefit from the concept, nearly everyone who uses it does so incorrectly and in fact becomes worse.

  What term should we use for concepts that are net harmful for ALL users?

  “Wrong?” “Bad?”

The Prob­lem of “Win-More”