latanius

Karma: 364

latanius Apr 1, 2013, 5:18 PM
2 points
in reply to: Kaj_Sotala’s comment on: Open Thread, April 1-15, 2013
Have you played the Portal games? They include lots of things you mention… they introduce how to use the portal gun, for example, not by explaining stuff but giving you a simplified version first… then the full feature set… and then there are all the other things with different physical properties. I can definitely imagine some Portal Advanced game when you’ll actually have to use equations to calculate trajectories.

Nevertheless… I’d really like to be persuaded otherwise, but the ability to read Very Confusing Stuff, without any working model, and make sense of it can’t really be avoided after a while. We can’t really build a game out of every scientific paper, due to the amount of time required to write a game vs. a page of text… (even though I’d love to play games instead of reading papers. And it sounds definitely doable with CS papers. What about a conference accepting games as submissions?)

latanius Mar 22, 2013, 9:02 PM
2 points
in reply to: Alexandros’s comment on: Open thread, March 17-31, 2013
I have a similar experience… around two years ago, both my laptop and desktop power supplies died (power surge), leaving me a pII-300… with which I had some “let’s be authentic nineties” fun previously, so Win98 and Office 97. Except for the browser (lots of websites didn’t even load on IE4-ish browsers), so I ended up with Firefox 3.x (the newest that ran on win98).

It actually took long times with 100% CPU to render web sites. And then further time to scroll them.

My observation is the same as yours: there is nothing better to discourage random web browsing than it being inconvinient. I could look up everything I needed to stay productive, I just didn’t want to, because it was soo slow. (Having a smartphone + a non-networked computer seems to have the same effect, but with phones getting too fast nowadays, the difference seems to be diminishing...)

latanius Mar 11, 2013, 4:03 PM
3 points
in reply to: Mqrius’s comment on: Co-Working Collaboration to Combat Akrasia
The problem with no notifications is that because you’re still in a room where interesting stuff is going on, of course you’ll check the chat history and/or join the people already chatting. (Unless you use up willpower not to, but the whole point is using less of that.)

Having a 25 min work + 5 min chat cycle seems to be a good thing though; start working because everyone else went silent is so much easier as going back to the “library” while everyone else is still talking in the lobby. If you’re working, don’t go there, that’s it.

latanius Mar 10, 2013, 11:27 PM
1 point
on: A Quick and Dirty Survey: Textbook Learning
I went through an Optimization course last semester (CS, grad), so it doesn’t really qualify as an “out of class experience”, nevertheless reading it was quite optional, and, actually, the questions I asked myself were very similar to yours.

Especially in the light of those small remarks textbooks tend to make along the lines of “we don’t have any more space here, so if you’re interested, the excellent book by X and Y is a very nice read”. As if they were referring to some light and entertaining book if the one you were holding weren’t really enough to fill up your entire afternoon.

Instead, I spent hours on the part about Conjugate Gradients for example, coming up with different (mostly wrong) mental models, drawing various maps, and thinking about what’s wrong with the way I try to study math. (I also ended up at #lesswrong, asking people how they study. Also brought home some ideas.)

So, in the second half of the semester, I upgraded my method to the proposed-by-some-people “ignore all the proofs, and generally, all of the textbook, try to complete the excercises that are likely to come up on the exam, and don’t try to see everything”. Which kind of worked: I understand most of the concepts, I can solve actual problems, and also, passed the exam. (As if that one counts as a proof of knowledge...)

But I’m still curious how studying textbooks is supposed to work. Like...
- what is the goal of people when reading textbooks? being able to solve real-world problems? passing exams? solving all the excercises? getting the warm fuzzy feeling of having eaten a huge book with lots of formulas while getting that “yes I understand” feeling that may or may not be the same as really understanding stuff?
- what is the goal of people who write textbooks? is the fact that they are hard to read an unavoidable thing, a way-too-common flaw or… are there people who read math like I read MLP fanfics? Is it possible to fix this?
- and also, the statistics you mention. About the average WPM when reading math books...

latanius Mar 10, 2013, 2:38 AM
3 points
2
in reply to: Shmi’s comment on: Rationalist fiction brainstorming funtimes
Good idea… especially given that the fact that the readers usually aren’t an immortal vampire / pony / wizard makes it relatively complicated to emulate the protagonists.

Not to speak of the fact that much of the fictional rationalist awesomeness comes from applying existing stuff (common sense / science) in a setting where it’s not expected to be applied. (See Harry’s Gringotts money pump or Missy’s sciencey superpowers). It’s hard to extrapolate that to our world...

Counterexample: Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother & Homeland. Although not really rationalist, they are full of things you can actually do in the real world (from programming and plausible deniability crypto to Burning Man).

Or Bella’s notebooks. (anyone else here who actually started text files with “what do I want” and having felt at least marginally more awesome as a consequence?)

latanius Mar 9, 2013, 11:54 PM
3 points
on: Caelum est Conterrens: I frankly don’t see how this is a horror story
just finished reading.

It’s kind of sad in a… grand way.

No one remembering anymore what exactly being “human” means. But… what do we expect? I don’t see any human values that are not statisfied, it just does not “feel like home” that much. But still, orpbzvat bar bs gur yrffre fhcrevagryyvtraprf naq fgvyy univat n fcrpvny cynpr va zvaq sbe fgne gerx? It’s as heart-warming as it gets, in a cold, dark and strange universe.

(If only we could do this well.)

latanius Mar 8, 2013, 6:04 AM
4 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Caelum est Conterrens: I frankly don’t see how this is a horror story
Attach lots of sensors to lots of axons, try to emulate the thing while it’s running… for me, it’s the on-line method that sounds more plausible compared to the “look at axons with microscopes and try to guess what they do” approach. Nevertheless, imagining a scenario with non-destructive uploads… how many times would you allow people to upload? Ending up with questions like that, I think it’s the destructive one that would generate less horrifyingness...

latanius Mar 8, 2013, 12:57 AM
65 points
0
on: Boring Advice Repository
If you are trying to do X, surround yourself with people who are also doing X. Takes much less willpower to keep doing it.

latanius Mar 7, 2013, 8:37 PM
7 points
in reply to: Matt_Simpson’s comment on: Boring Advice Repository
As for this thread: wouldn’t upvoting commens that you think are useful for someone else but not for you be actually an indirect case of other-optmizing?

latanius Mar 7, 2013, 8:28 PM
1 point
in reply to: beoShaffer’s comment on: Boring Advice Repository
Also consider mint.com. Draws awesome graphs. (It only works for US bank accounts only though...)

latanius Feb 27, 2013, 3:48 PM
29 points
on: Need help with an MLP fanfiction with a transhumanist theme.
It’s so nice that if you combine the words Alicorn + Twilight you get “let’s make everyone else immortal, too” independetly of the universe in question.

latanius Feb 20, 2013, 5:57 AM
2 points
on: Visual Mental Imagery Training
Do we actually have an objective test for the quality of visual imagery? (as compared to subjective quality of it.) What I’m thinking of is something like the mental rotation experiments, proving that in fact there is a representation of images in our heads… but with somewhat more complicated images. Or scenes.

Otherwise… I think I have good imagination abilities (I was also once told so while solving math problems involving rotating cubes), but my subjective quality levels are similar: pictures are somewhat vague, especially compared the ones I can get on 20 hour long bus trips in the middle of the night, half asleep. But isn’t it just about the fact that in half-asleep states, we accept anything as real, even it’s not really representing anything Euclidean?

latanius Jan 19, 2013, 9:32 AM
0 points
in reply to: drethelin’s comment on: My simple hack for increased alertness and improved cognitive functioning: very bright light
Wow. Thanks for the idea. Just got instantly sleepy in around 20 seconds after installing it...

latanius Jan 19, 2013, 9:21 AM
2 points
in reply to: Kaj_Sotala’s comment on: My simple hack for increased alertness and improved cognitive functioning: very bright light
theoretically yes… supposing that the smaller and bigger light sources are of equal efficiency and have the same spectrum. The number of photons emitted adds up linearly after all (I think it even works if the spectra are different.)

In practice, as it turns out (… “let’s read lots of wikipedia about lighting” project), a 100W bulb produces roughly 1.5 times more lumens per watt than a 40W one, so the “equivalence” is also somewhat questionable… as it’s the lumens that count (that being “the perceived lightness that is radiated”).

(This thing is called “luminous efficacy”, by the way. Am I the only one who thinks that it would make a nice LW post title at first look?)

latanius Jan 11, 2013, 3:03 AM
−1 points
in reply to: Vladimir_Nesov’s comment on: Evaluating the feasibility of SI’s plan
You’re right in a sense that we’d like to avoid it, but if it occurs gradually, it feels much more like “we just changed our minds” (like we definitely don’t value “honor” as much as the ancient greeks, etc), as compared to “we and our values were wiped out”.

latanius Jan 11, 2013, 2:53 AM
0 points
in reply to: OrphanWilde’s comment on: Evaluating the feasibility of SI’s plan
AIs that can’t be described by attributing goals to them don’t really seem too powerful (after all, intelligence is about making the world going into some direction; this is the only property that tells apart an AGI from a rock).

latanius Jan 11, 2013, 2:46 AM
4 points
in reply to: JoshuaFox’s comment on: Evaluating the feasibility of SI’s plan

design an AI so that it can’t self-modify

is there at all a clean border between self-modification and simply learning things? We have “design” and “operation” at two places in our maps, but they can be easily mixed up in reality (is it OK to modify interpreted source code if we leave the interpreter alone? what about following verbal instructions then? inventing them? etc...)

latanius Jan 11, 2013, 1:51 AM
−1 points
in reply to: Vladimir_Nesov’s comment on: Evaluating the feasibility of SI’s plan
The latter is not necessarily a bad thing though.

latanius Dec 27, 2012, 7:08 PM
2 points
in reply to: summerstay’s comment on: Intelligence explosion in organizations, or why I’m not worried about the singularity
… Accelerando by Charles Stross, while not exactly being a scientific analysis, had some ideas like this. It also wasn’t bad.

latanius Dec 20, 2012, 2:41 AM
0 points
in reply to: Karl’s comment on: Ontological Crisis in Humans
I’m saying that although it isn’t ontologically fundamental, our utility function might still build on it (it “feels real enough”), so we might have problems if we try to extrapolate said function to full generality.