nhamann

• nhamannApr 29, 2011, 1:09 AM

  3 points

  in reply to: DavidM’s comment on: Med­i­ta­tion, in­sight, and ra­tio­nal­ity. (Part 1 of 3)

  Ahh, good point. My comment is somewhat irrelevant then with regards to this, as it seems that what you’re interested in is beyond the scope of science at present.

• nhamannApr 29, 2011, 12:09 AM

  8 points

  in reply to: Zetetic’s comment on: Med­i­ta­tion, in­sight, and ra­tio­nal­ity. (Part 1 of 3)

  A brief poke around in Google Scholar produced these papers, which look useful:

  Alterations in Brain and Immune Function Produced by Mindfulness Meditation. Psychosomatic Medicine 65:564 –570 (2003)

  Mindfulness training modifies subsystems of attention. COGNITIVE, AFFECTIVE, & BEHAVIORAL NEUROSCIENCE Volume 7, Number 2, 109-119

  Long-term meditation is associated with increased gray matter density in the brain stem. NeuroReport 2009, 20:170–17

  Attention regulation and monitoring in meditation. Trends Cogn Sci. 2008 April; 12(4): 163–169.

• nhamannApr 27, 2011, 8:33 PM

  6 points

  in reply to: Peterdjones’s comment on: What is Me­taethics?

  You think that claiming to have no understanding at all of ordinary words is getting at reality?

  It’s almost never sufficient, but it is often necessary to discard wrong words.

• nhamannApr 25, 2011, 2:08 AM

  17 points

  on: What To Do: En­vi­ron­men­tal­ism vs Friendly AI (John Baez)

  It was interesting to see the really negative comment from (presumably the real) Greg Egan:

  The Yudkowsky/​Bostrom strategy is to contrive probabilities for immensely unlikely scenarios, and adjust the figures until the expectation value for the benefits of working on — or donating to — their particular pet projects exceed the benefits of doing anything else. Combined with the appeal to vanity of “saving the universe”, some people apparently find this irresistible, but frankly, their attempt to prescribe what rational altruists should be doing with their time and money is just laughable, and it’s a shame you’ve given it so much air time.

• nhamannApr 22, 2011, 2:10 AM

  6 points

  on: Read­ing Non­fic­tion Selectively

  Suggestion: when you read a piece of nonfiction, have a goal in mind

  Agreed. See also: Chase your reading

• nhamannApr 16, 2011, 3:26 AM

  2 points

  in reply to: Nominull’s comment on: Offense ver­sus harm minimization

  Hmm, but it does seem like trauma triggers and the psychic-distress-via-salmon work via the same mechanism. So probably the key here is to distinguish between actual psychic stress and feigned stress used for status maneuvers. It is not, however, clear to me how to do that in general.

• nhamannApr 16, 2011, 3:02 AM

  11 points

  on: Offense ver­sus harm minimization

  Another case that’s interesting to consider is the Penny Arcade dickwolves controversy. The PA fellows made a comic which mentioned the word “rape”, some readers got offended, and the PA guys, being thick-skinned individuals, dismissed and mocked their claims of being offended by making “dickwolves” T-shirts. Hubbub ensues.

  What’s most interesting about this case is that, apart from perhaps some bloggers, many of the people taking offense appear to be rape survivors for whom reading the word “rape” is traumatic (I guess? This is what I gathered, but being thick-skinned and not a rape survivor it is impossible for me to understand). I don’t think it’s possible to claim Machiavellian maneuverings here, given that a feminist blog who made a dickwolves protest shirt eventually stopped selling the shirt on account of some rape survivors saying that the shirt acted as a trigger for them.

  More to the point: there is apparently a small population for whom using the word “rape” causes psychic horror. So what, are we now not allowed to ever use that word? Or can we not even allude to the act? Of course, reasonable concessions should be made (i.e. not using the word when directly in the presence of such a person), but at what point do sensitive individuals need to take it upon themselves to relocate their attention elsewhere?

• nhamannApr 15, 2011, 12:11 AM

  8 points

  in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Ara­tional quotes

  I agree, yours is a more reasonable interpretation. I think I was interpreting “winds” as referring to “the winds of evidence,” which is not reasonable in this context.

  I do think your accusing me of “tribal affiliation signaling” was unnecessary and uncharitable: I don’t consider Bush to have been a significantly worse a president than any other recent presidents. I just happened to have run into the quote awhile back, and in my misinterpretation thought it was a good anti-rationality quote.

  Edit: I did some thinking to try to figure out how I could have missed the obviously correct interpretation of Bush’s words. The first hypothesis (which Constant first put forth) was that I was signalling tribal loyalties—boo Republicans, yay Democrats. That does not make much sense, however, because I pretty solidly dislike all major political parties and the entire politics theater of the U.S. Maybe I was attempting to signal loyalty to the “boo politicians” tribe, but I think there’s a better explanation: a cached thought. Even though I do not currently belong to the anti-Republican tribe, I did belong to that tribe in my high school years (i.e. during Bush’ presidency), and I was most likely operating on a “Bush is stupid/​irrational” cached thought.

• nhamannApr 14, 2011, 6:43 PM

  2 points

  in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Ara­tional quotes

  Here’s the expanded quote:

  Is it hard to make decisions as President? Not really. If you know what you believe, decisions come pretty easy. If you’re one of these types of people that are always trying to figure out which way the wind is blowing, decision making can be difficult. But I find that—I know who I am. I know what I believe in, and I know where I want to lead the country. And most of the decisions come pretty easily for me, to be frank with you.

  When we take into account further context that this was spoken to children in elementary school, I think the only strained reading is the one which sees this quote as reasonable. Hey kids, the only thing you need to make good decisions is to know what you already believe in! Reasoning is so much easier when you write the bottom line first.

• nhamannApr 14, 2011, 5:36 PM

  −10 points

  in reply to: Vladimir_M’s comment on: Ara­tional quotes

  Hmm, good point: you need to take into account background knowledge about George W. Bush (such as that he is a person who believes that God talks to him.) If we take the quote to mean:

  If you know what you believe (and you have sound reasons for having the beliefs that you do), decisions come pretty easy...

  then the quote is actually pretty reasonable. If, on the other hand, you take it to mean

  If you know what you believe (because careful reasoning and evidence are unimportant to you), decisions come pretty easy...

  then the quote is clearly arational. Also, I interpreted his disparaging of people who are “always trying to figure out which way the wind is blowing” as him essentially saying “forget the territory, I’ve already got a map and that’s good enough for me”.

• nhamannApr 14, 2011, 4:04 AM

  8 points

  on: Ara­tional quotes

  Is it hard to make decisions as president? Not really. If you know what you believe, decisions come pretty easy. If you’re one of these types of people that are always trying to figure out which way the wind is blowing, decision making can be difficult.

  -- George W. Bush

David Marr on two types of in­for­ma­tion-pro­cess­ing problems

• nhamannApr 13, 2011, 12:51 AM

  9 points

  in reply to: David_Gerard’s comment on: Rea­sons for SIAI to not pub­lish in main­stream journals

  It’s not clear to me what the disagreement is here. Which heuristic are you defending again?

  If it’s not published, it’s not science

  Response: Can we skip the pointless categorizations and evaluate whether material is valid or useful on a case by case basis? Clearly there is some material that has not been published that is useful (see: This website).

  If it’s not published in a peer-reviewed journal, there’s no reason to treat it any differently than the ramblings of the Time Cube guy.

  Response: Ahh yes, anything not peer-reviewed clearly contains Time Cube-levels of crazy.

  Or none of the above? I’m not sure we actually disagree on anything here.

• nhamannApr 12, 2011, 4:31 PM

  0 points

  in reply to: jwhendy’s comment on: What are you work­ing on? April 2011

  Yeah, I’ve tried org-mode, but the problem isn’t that its Emacs-based (I use Emacs to write code), but it’s that it isn’t web-based. I wanted my notes to be accessible not only from both OSes I dual boot, but from pretty much any computer I might ever be at. I could make the file accessible I guess by putting it in a Dropbox public folder, but then there’s still the issue of “what if the computer I’m on doesn’t have Emacs”.

  Also the time-intensitivity thing of rolling my own code isn’t a major drawback, as I’m trying to find a programming job at the moment and I needed something to add to my portfolio. :D

• nhamannApr 11, 2011, 7:07 PM

  −1 points

  in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Rea­sons for SIAI to not pub­lish in main­stream journals

  I’m not really familiar with the topic matter here, but I want to note that Michael Nielsen contradicts what you said (though Nielsen isn’t exactly an unbiased source here as an Open Science advocate):

  Perelman’s breakthrough solving the Poincare conjecture ONLY appeared at the arXiv

  The important point is that it doesn’t appear that Perelman produced the paper for publishing in a journal, but he made it and left it on the arXiv, which was later (you claim) published in journals. That’s quite a different view than “if it’s not published, it’s not science”

• nhamannApr 11, 2011, 2:50 AM

  12 points

  on: [Er­ror com­mu­ni­cat­ing with LW2 server]

  This post that you have excreted has essentially zero content. You restate the core idea behind the representativeness heuristic repeatedly, and baldly assert that there are good reasons for people having the intuitions that they do, that people are “using valuable real life skills” when they give incorrect answers to questions. No ones arguing that it hasn’t been an evolutionarily useful heuristic, just that it happens to be incorrect from time to time. I cannot figure out where in your post you actually made an argument that the conjunction fallacy “doesn’t exist”, and I am overjoyed that you no longer have the karma to make top-level posts.

  Please stop posting and read the sequences.

• nhamannApr 10, 2011, 9:13 PM

  7 points

  in reply to: CronoDAS’s comment on: Rea­sons for SIAI to not pub­lish in main­stream journals

  If you want to play that game, then it’s not clear to me that the SIAI is doing “science” either, given that the focus is on existential risk due to AI (more like “philosophy” than “science”) and formal friendliness (math).

  I think a better interpretation of your quote is to replace the word “science” with “disseminated scholarly communication.”

• nhamannApr 10, 2011, 9:03 PM

  6 points

  in reply to: CronoDAS’s comment on: Rea­sons for SIAI to not pub­lish in main­stream journals

  Perelman’s proof of the Poincare conjecture was never published in an academic journal, but was merely posted on arXiv. If that’s not science, then being correct is more important than being “scientific”.

• nhamannApr 9, 2011, 5:27 AM

  7 points

  in reply to: David_Gerard’s comment on: Separate moral­ity from free will

  Relevant tweet: http://​​twitter.com/​​#!/​​vladimirnesov/​​status/​​34254933578481664

• nhamannApr 8, 2011, 9:33 PM

  4 points

  on: Failure Modes some­times cor­re­spond to Game Mechanics

  If you want to carry a brimming cup of coffee without spilling it, you may want to “change” your goal to instead primarily concentrate on humming.

  I keep reading this over and over, trying to figure out what it means. What does humming have to do with not spilling a cup of coffee?