nerfhammer

Karma: 565

Ambiguity in cognitive bias names; a refresher

nerfhammerFeb 21, 2012, 4:37 AM

39 points

8 comments3 min readLW link

nerfhammer Dec 19, 2011, 8:16 AM
0 points
in reply to: Normal_Anomaly’s comment on: How is your mind different from everyone else’s?
Check out Paul Ekman’s books

nerfhammer Oct 3, 2011, 3:33 PM
0 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Announcing rationalist blog aggregator
I’ve re-instated twitter so far. The issues are: general visual clutter, I found a way to mitigate this issue by using a trick to force lower the visual contrast of the buttons, and that these social buttons often really slow down the loading of the page, especially if you want the dynamic share/like/retweet counters for every item. I might leave the counter on twitter but omit it for the others and see what the page load is like.

I’m not sure what email-sharing service to use… facebook has one in its “share” button, there are probably others.

nerfhammer Oct 3, 2011, 3:26 PM
1 point
in reply to: djcb’s comment on: Announcing rationalist blog aggregator
I’ve thought of ways of working around this. There are ways of actually defeating the truncation. One issue is that there isn’t necessarily an obvious programmatic way of telling which feeds are truncated and which aren’t.

For now, try out this feed proxy: http://andrewtrusty.appspot.com/readability/ , e.g. http://andrewtrusty.appspot.com/readability/feed?url=http%3A//feeds.feedburner.com/planetrationalist

nerfhammer Sep 30, 2011, 8:20 PM
0 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Announcing rationalist blog aggregator
Hmm, I was wondering how much people used those things. Do you want just twitter + email? Facebook?

nerfhammer Sep 30, 2011, 6:37 PM
0 points
in reply to: FiftyTwo’s comment on: Announcing rationalist blog aggregator
To be completely honest, I wasn’t going on a strict definition of the term rationalist; frankly I consider the term kind of flawed anyway. But I don’t have a better replacement in mind. For me it means being interested in being rational, being interested in how the mind works, being interested in cognitive biases, Bayes’ rule, probability, statistics, logical fallacies, and scientific self-improvement.
- I selected the sources starting with lesswrong and overcoming bias, then taking suggestions from people, doing some rudimentary graph analysis, manually adding blogs of authors in related fields, watching what sources I selected linked to themselves.
- I tried to include sources that were readable but not gimmicky (e.g. top 7 secret tips to supercharge your goals!!!). Sometimes sources vary outside this interval, and I don’t have any filtration sophisticated enough to handle this.
- I selected against sources that posted too frequently, anything political, anything that seemed angry or upbraiding or read like a manifesto. I included some sources which include these but against which I was able to filter out the political etc. posts easily. The rudimentary methods I used to filter topics doesn’t work perfectly, though.
- I tried to include a few sources from less closely related subjects that were high quality and don’t seem to post that frequently. For instance, I included only a couple skeptic blogs, but there are tons and tons of them out there and I feel that it’s a different niche that’s already addressed pretty well elsewhere. Some fields I avoided almost entirely like entrepreneurship or economics.
- I tried to not let any one subject dominate the set of sources. I feel like I included too many psychology blogs, for example.

nerfhammer Sep 30, 2011, 6:13 PM
1 point
in reply to: curiousepic’s comment on: Announcing rationalist blog aggregator
Options for now:
- create a greasemonkey script to hide posts from the sources you don’t want. Every source has a unique CSS class so it should be trivial.
- create a yahoo pipe to filter the sources you don’t want through the rss feed and read it through a feed reader
- clone the set of sources using the OPML feed in your feed reader of choice and add/remove whatever you want from the source list. However, this will not be kept in sync in the likely event that the official set of sources should change.
Out of curiosity, what don’t you want to see and why?

nerfhammer Sep 30, 2011, 4:11 PM
0 points
in reply to: curiousepic’s comment on: Announcing rationalist blog aggregator
Meaning you want to turn some sources off?

nerfhammer Sep 30, 2011, 2:20 PM
0 points
in reply to: Dreaded_Anomaly’s comment on: Announcing rationalist blog aggregator
Yeah I couldn’t think of one.

Favicon contest?

nerfhammer Sep 30, 2011, 2:19 PM
0 points
in reply to: shokwave’s comment on: Announcing rationalist blog aggregator
Hmm I’ve seen that before somewhere.....svg)

nerfhammer Sep 29, 2011, 10:40 PM
0 points
in reply to: handoflixue’s comment on: Announcing rationalist blog aggregator
May not have been just you, I suspect my ISP was having problems earlier.

Announcing rationalist blog aggregator

nerfhammerSep 29, 2011, 7:34 PM

26 points

26 comments1 min readLW link

nerfhammer Sep 13, 2011, 8:54 PM
0 points
in reply to: djcb’s comment on: Seeking rationality-related blogs
I agree that some kind of filtering (human or machine) could provide additional value, but at this stage I want to see how well the most rudimentary version of the idea works for people before investing further.

nerfhammer Sep 13, 2011, 8:40 PM
0 points
in reply to: TheThinker’s comment on: Seeking rationality-related blogs
Thanks a lot!

I will limit aggregation to the Critical Thinking category as you suggest.

nerfhammer Sep 12, 2011, 6:57 AM
0 points
in reply to: Will_Newsome’s comment on: Seeking rationality-related blogs
Thanks, added.

nerfhammer Sep 12, 2011, 12:43 AM
11 points
in reply to: djcb’s comment on: Seeking rationality-related blogs

nerfhammer Sep 11, 2011, 8:17 PM
2 points
in reply to: atucker’s comment on: Seeking rationality-related blogs
Thanks there are some good ones there.

If it’s not strictly related but likely of interest to the same people that are interested in rationality (e.g. credible self-improvement) then it’s better if posts aren’t that frequently. For instance, there’s a lot of good stuff in hacker news but there’s 100+ front-page posts per day and it would drown everything else out.

If the aggregator proves popular I could introduce a text-classification filter to try to only include relevant posts from sources with varied content, but I’m only willing to invest time in that if it turns out that people are responsive to the aggregator in its current simpler form.

Seeking rationality-related blogs

nerfhammerSep 11, 2011, 7:45 PM

6 points

14 comments1 min readLW link

nerfhammer Sep 11, 2011, 7:40 PM
0 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Rationalist sites worth archiving?
Yes, I’ll do that. I’ve been looking for places to announce it/request feedback.

nerfhammer Sep 11, 2011, 5:06 PM
4 points
on: Rationalist sites worth archiving?
I’m working on a rationality blog aggregator, and should be ready to make it public in the next few days. Would you like to know when it is released?

nerfhammer

Am­bi­guity in cog­ni­tive bias names; a refresher

An­nounc­ing ra­tio­nal­ist blog aggregator

Seek­ing ra­tio­nal­ity-re­lated blogs

Ambiguity in cognitive bias names; a refresher

Announcing rationalist blog aggregator

Seeking rationality-related blogs