lucidian

Karma: 641

lucidian 19 Apr 2015 3:43 UTC
14 points
on: A simple exercise in rationality: rephrase an objective statement as subjective and explore the caveats
I suspect you’re aware of this already, but you are basically describing E-Prime.

lucidian 12 Jan 2015 18:20 UTC
13 points
on: Who are your favorite “hidden rationalists”?
Highly recommend kazerad, for Scott-level insights about human behavior. Here’s his analysis of 4chan’s anonymous culture. Here’s another insightful essay of his. And a post on memetics. And these aren’t necessarily the best posts I’ve read by him, just the three I happened to find first.

By the way, I’m really averse to the label “hidden rationalists”. It’s like complimenting people by saying “secretly a member of our ingroup, but just doesn’t know it yet”. Which simultaneously presupposes the person would want to be a member of our ingroup, and also that all worthwhile people are secretly members of our ingroup and just don’t know it yet.

lucidian 6 Jan 2015 16:27 UTC
7 points
on: Low Hanging fruit for buying a better life
Here are the ten I thought of:
- decorations for your house/apartment
- a musical instrument
- lessons for the musical instrument
- nice speakers (right now I just have computer speakers and they suck)
- camping equipment
- instruction books for crafts you want to learn (I’m thinking stuff like knitting, sewing etc.)
- materials for those crafts
- gas money / money for motels, so you can take a random road trip to a place you’ve never been before
- gym membership
- yoga classes (or martial arts or whatever)
Also I totally second whoever said “nice kitchen knives”. I got one as a Christmas present once, and it’s probably the best holiday gift I’ve ever received.

lucidian 19 Nov 2014 19:51 UTC
3 points
on: I Want To Believe: Rational Edition
Read more things that agree with what you want to believe. Avoid content that disagrees with it or criticizes it.

lucidian 1 Oct 2014 21:00 UTC
1 point
in reply to: sixes_and_sevens’s comment on: Open thread, Sept. 29 - Oct.5, 2014
I don’t have an answer, but I would like to second this request.

lucidian 24 Sep 2014 23:52 UTC
3 points
on: What’s the right way to think about how much to give to charity?
This post demonstrates a common failure of LessWrong thinking, where it is assumed that there is one right answer to something, when in fact this might not be the case. There may be many “right ways” for a single person to think about how much to give to charity. There may be different “right ways” for different people, especially if those people have different utility functions.

I think you probably know this, I am just picking on the wording, because I think that this wording nudges us towards thinking about these kinds of questions in an unhelpful way.

lucidian 15 Sep 2014 20:21 UTC
3 points
on: Should people be writing more or fewer LW posts?
I think that we should have fewer meta posts like this. We spend too much time trying to optimize our use of this website, and not enough time actually just using the website.

lucidian 11 Sep 2014 14:10 UTC
12 points
on: Overcoming Decision Anxiety
Thanks for this post! I also spend far too much time worrying about inconsequential decisions, and it wouldn’t surprise me if this is a common problem on LessWrong. In some sense, I think that rationality actually puts us at risk for this kind of decision anxiety, because rationality teaches us to look at every situation and ask, “Why am I doing it this way? Is there a different way I could do it that would be better?” By focusing on improving our lives, we end up overthinking our decisions. And we tend to frame these things as optimization problems: not “How can I find a good solution for X?”, but “How can I find the best solution for X?” When we frame everything as optimization, the perfect can easily become the enemy of the good. Why? Because suppose you’re trying to solve problem X, and you come up with a pretty decent solution, x. If you are constantly asking how to improve things, then you will focus on all the negative aspects of x that make it suboptimal. On the other hand, if you accept that some things just don’t need to be optimized, you can learn to be content with what you have; you can focus on the positive aspects of x instead.

I think this is how a lot of us develop decision anxiety, actually. In general, we feel anxiety about a decision when we know it’s possible for things to go wrong. The worse the possible consequences, the more anxiety we feel. And the thing is, when we focus on the downsides of our decisions, then we have negative feelings about our decisions. The more negative feelings we have about every decision we make, the more it seems like making a decision is an inherently fraught endeavor. Something in our minds says, “Of course I should feel anxiety when making decisions! Every time I make a decision, the result always feels really bad!”

Based on all of this, I’m trying to remedy my own decision anxiety by focusing on the positive more, and trying to ignore the downsides of decisions that I make. Last weekend, I was also looking for a new apartment. I visited two places, and they both looked great, but each of them had its downsides. One was in the middle of nowhere, so it was really nice and quiet, but very inaccesible. The other was in a town, and was basically perfect in terms of accesibility, but if you stood outside, you could vaguely hear the highway. At first I was pretty stressed about the decision, because I was thinking about the downsides of each apartment. And my friend said to me, “Wow, this is going to be a hard decision.” But then I realized that both apartments were really awesome, and I’d be very happy in either of them, so I said, “Actually this is a really easy decision.” Even if I accidentally picked the ‘wrong’ apartment, I would still be very happy there.

But here’s the thing: whether I’m happy with my decision will depend on my mindset as I live in the apartment. I ended up picking the accesible apartment where you can hear the highway a little. If I spend everyday thinking “Wow, I hate that highway, I should have chosen the other apartment,” then I’ll regret my decision (even though the other place would have also had its faults). But if I spend every day thinking “Wow, this apartment is beautiful, and so conveniently located!”, then I won’t regret my decision at all.

lucidian 26 Jul 2014 16:13 UTC
0 points
on: [QUESTION]: Looking for insights from machine learning that helped improve state-of-the-art human thinking
I think it’s worth including inference on the list of things that make machine learning difficult. The more complicated your model is, the more computationally difficult it will be to do inference in it, meaning that researchers often have to limit themselves to a much simpler model than they’d actually prefer to use, in order to make inference actually tractable.

lucidian 18 Jul 2014 11:04 UTC
4 points
on: The Correct Use of Analogy
Analogies are pervasive in thought. I was under the impression that cognitive scientists basically agree that a large portion of our thought is analogical, and that we would be completely lost without our capacity for analogy? But perhaps I’ve only been exposed to a narrow subsection of cognitive science, and there are many other cognitive scientists who disagree? Dunno.

But anyway I find it useful to think of analogy in terms of hierarchical modeling. Suppose you have a bunch of categories, but you don’t see any relation between them. So maybe you know the categories “dog” and “sheep” and so on, and you understand both what typical dogs and sheep look like, and how a random dog or sheep is likely to vary from its category’s prototype. But then suppose you learn a new category, such as “goat”. If you keep categories totally separate in your mind, then when you first see a goat, you won’t relate it to anything you already know. And so you’ll have to see a whole bunch of goats before you get the idea of what goats are like in general. But if you have some notion of categories being similar to one another, then when you see your first goat, you can think to yourself “oh, this looks kind of like a sheep, so I expect the category of goats to look kind of like the category of sheep”. That is, after seeing one goat and observing that it has four legs, you can predict that pretty much all goats also have four legs. That’s because you know that number-of-legs is a property that doesn’t vary much in the category “sheep”, and you expect the category “goat” to be similar to the category “sheep”. (Source: go read this paper, it is glorious.)

Anyway I basically think of analogy as a way of doing hierarchical modeling. You’re trying to understand some situation X, and you identify some other situation Y, and then you can draw conclusions about X based on your knowledge of Y and on the similarities between the two situations. So yes, analogy is an imprecise reasoning mechanism that occasionally makes errors. But that’s because analogy is part of the general class of inductive reasoning techniques.

lucidian 18 Jul 2014 10:50 UTC
5 points
in reply to: kilobug’s comment on: The Correct Use of Analogy
I’m also reading this book, and I’m actually finding it profoundly unimpressive. Basically it’s a 500-page collection of examples, with very little theoretical content. The worst thing, though, is that its hypothesis seems to fundamentally undermine itself. Hofstadter and Sander claim that concepts and analogy are the same phenomenon. But they also say that concepts are very flexible, non-rigid things, and that we expand and contract their boundaries whenever it’s convenient for reasoning, and that we do this by making analogies between the original concept (or its instances) and some new concept (or its instances). And I agree with that. But that means that it’s essentially meaningless to claim that “concepts and analogy are the same thing”. We can draw an analogy between the phenomenon we typically call “categorization” and the phenomenon we typically call “analogy”, and I think it’s very useful to do so. But deciding whether they’re the same phenomenon is just a question of how fine-grained you want your categories to be, and that will depend on the specific reasoning task you’re engaged in. So I’m just massively frustrated with the authors for not acknowledging the meaninglessness of their thesis. If they just said “it’s useful to think of analogy and categorization as instances of a single phenomenon” then I’d totally agree. But they don’t. They say that analogy and categorization are literally the same thing. Arggggghhhh.

(Metaphors We Live By, on the other hand, is one of my favorite books in the universe. It changed my life and I highly recommend it. (Edit: ok that sounds kind of exaggeraty. It changed my life because I study language and it gave me a totally different way of thinking about language.))

lucidian 10 Apr 2014 0:26 UTC
0 points
on: Meetup : Sydney Social Meetup—April (Bridge walk)
Potluck means we bring our own food and then share it? Is there a list of what people are bringing, to avoid duplicates?

lucidian 25 Mar 2014 15:50 UTC
2 points
on: Meetup : Sydney Meetup—March
Oh hey, this is convenient, I just got to Sydney yesterday and you guys have a meetup tonight. =) I’ll probably attend. (I’m in town for three months, visiting from the United States.)

I have an ulterior motive for attending: I am looking for housing near Macquarie University for the next three months. I don’t suppose anyone here has a room for rent, or knows of a good place to stay? (Sorry if this is the wrong place to ask about such things!)

lucidian 17 Mar 2014 22:07 UTC
0 points
in reply to: DanArmak’s comment on: Parenting versus career choice thinking in teenagers
That’s what I’m wondering.

lucidian 17 Mar 2014 21:06 UTC
0 points
in reply to: DanArmak’s comment on: Parenting versus career choice thinking in teenagers
Sure, but that understanding is very specific to our culture. It’s only recently that we’ve come to see procreation as “recreation”—something unnecessary that we do for personal fulfillment.

Many people don’t hold jobs just to avoid being poor. It’s also a duty to society. If you can’t support yourself, then you’re a burden on society and its infrastructure.

Similarly, having children was once thought of as a duty to society. I read an article about this recently: http://www.artofmanliness.com/2014/03/03/the-3-ps-of-manhood-procreate/

Anyway, my point is, our idea that career is necessary but children are not is culture-specific.

lucidian 17 Mar 2014 20:58 UTC
8 points
on: Friendly AI ideas needed: how would you ban porn?

To construct a friendly AI, you need to be able to make vague concepts crystal clear, cutting reality at the joints when those joints are obscure and fractal—and them implement a system that implements that cut.

Strongly disagree. The whole point of Bayesian reasoning is that it allows us to deal with uncertainty. And one huge source of uncertainty is that we don’t have precise understandings of the concepts we use. When we first learn a new concept, we have a ton of uncertainty about its location in thingspace. As we collect more data (either through direct observation or indirectly through communication with other humans), we are able to decrease that uncertainty, but it never goes away completely. An AI which uses human concepts will have to be able to deal with concept-uncertainty and the complications that arise as a result.

The fact that humans can’t always agree with each other on what constitutes porn vs. erotica demonstrates that we don’t all carve reality up in the same places (and therefore there’s no “objective” definition of porn). The fact that individual humans often have trouble classifying edge cases demonstrates that even when you look at a single person’s concept, it will still contain some uncertainty. The more we discuss and negotiate the meanings of concepts, the less fuzzy the boundaries will become, but we can’t remove the fuzziness completely. We can write out a legal definition of porn, but it won’t necessarily correspond to the black-box classifiers that real people are using. And concepts change—what we think of as porn might be classified differently in 100 years. An AI can’t just find a single carving of reality and stick with it; the AI needs to adapt its knowledge as the concepts mutate.

So I’m pretty sure that what you’re asking is impossible. The concept-boundaries in thingspace remain fuzzy until humans negotiate them by discussing specific edge cases. (And even then, they are still fuzzy, just slightly less so.) So there’s no way to find the concept boundaries without asking people about it; it’s the interaction between human decision makers that define the concept in the first place.

lucidian 14 Mar 2014 17:58 UTC
3 points
on: Parenting versus career choice thinking in teenagers
I can’t help but think that some of this has to do with feminism, at least in the case of girl teenagers. I hear a lot of people emphasizing that having children is a choice, and it’s not for everyone. People are constantly saying things like “Having children is a huge responsibility and you have to think very carefully whether you want to do it.” The people saying this seem to have a sense that they’re counterbalancing societal pressures that say everyone should have children, or that women should focus on raising kids instead of having a career.

It’s interesting, though, that no one applies the same advice to careers. (At least, not in my demographic.) No one says “Following a career path is a huge responsibility, so think very carefully whether you want to do it.” A lot of people say “think very carefully about which career you want” but not “think carefully about whether you want a career at all”.

I wonder, also, if there’s gender differences. Do parents talk to male teenagers about their careers, and female teenagers about their future children, or anything like that?

lucidian 5 Mar 2014 4:52 UTC
3 points
in reply to: whales’s comment on: Open Thread: March 4 − 10
Thanks!

lucidian 5 Mar 2014 3:47 UTC
13 points
on: Open Thread: March 4 − 10
Cog sci question about how words are organized in our minds.

So, I’m a native English speaker, and for the last ~1.5 years, I’ve been studying Finnish as a second language. I was making very slow progress on vocabulary, though, so a couple days ago I downloaded Anki and moved all my vocab lists over to there. These vocab lists basically just contained random words I had encountered on the internet and felt like writing down; a lot of them were for abstract concepts and random things that probably won’t come up in conversation, like “archipelago” (the Finnish word is “saaristo”, if anyone cares). Anyway, the point is that I am not trying to learn the vocabulary in any sensible order, I’m just shoving random words into my brain.

While studying today, I noticed that I was having a lot more trouble with certain words than with others, and I started to wonder why, and what implications this has for how words are organized in our minds, and whether anyone has done studies on this.

For instance, there seemed to be a lot of “hash collisions”: vocabulary words that I kept confusing with one another. Some of these were clearly phonetic: hai (shark) and kai (probably). Another phonetic pair: toivottaa (to wish) and taivuttaa (to inflect a word). Some were a combination of phonetic and semantic: virhe (error), vihje (hint), vaihe (phase, stage), and vika (fault). Some of them I have no idea why I kept confusing: kertautua (to recur) and kuvastaa (to mirror, to reflect).

There were also a few words that I just had inordinate amounts of trouble remembering, and I don’t know why: eksyä (to get lost), ehtiä (to arrive in time), löytää (to find), kyllästys (saturation), sisältää (to include), arvata (to guess). Aside from the last one, all of these have the letter ä in them, so maybe that has something to do with it. Also, the first two words don’t have a single English verb as an equivalent.

There were also some words that were easier than I expected: vankkuri (wagon), saaristo (archipelago), and some more that I don’t remember now because they quickly vanished from my deck. Both of these words are unusual but concrete concepts.

Do different people struggle with the same words when learning a language? Are some Finnish words just inherently “easy” or “hard” for English speakers to learn? If it’s different for each person, how does the ease of learning certain words relate to a person’s life experiences, interests, common thoughts, etc.?

What do hash collisions tell us about how words are organized in our minds? Can they tell us anything about the features we might be using to recognize words? For instance, English speakers often seem to have trouble remembering and distinguishing Chinese names; they all seem to “sound the same”. Why does this happen? Here’s a hypothesis: when we hear a word, based on its features, it is mapped to a specific part of a learned phonetic space before being used to access semantic content. Presumably we would learn this phonetic space to maximize the distance between words in a language, since the farther apart words are, the less chance they have of accessing the wrong semantic content. Maybe certain Finnish words sound the same to me because they map to nearby regions of my phonetic space, but a speaker of some other language wouldn’t confuse these particular words because they’d have a different phonetic space? I’m just speculating wildly here.

I’d be interested to hear everyone else’s vocab-learning experiences and crazy hypotheses for what’s going on. Also, does anyone know any actual research that’s been done on this stuff?

lucidian 3 Mar 2014 23:51 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Stefan_Schubert’s comment on: The Rationality Wars
Hmm. If you want to know how Bayesian models of cognition work, this paper might be a good place to start, but I haven’t read it yet: “Bayesian Models of Cognition”, by Griffiths, Kemp, and Tenenbaum.

I’m taking a philosophy class right now on Bayesian models of cognition, and we’ve read a few papers critiquing Bayesian approaches: “Bayesian Fundamentalism or Enlightenment?”, by Jones and Love “Bayesian Just-So Stories in Psychology and Neuroscience”, by Bowers and Davis Iirc, it’s the latter that discusses the unfalsifiability of the Bayesian approach.