Nice~!
I’m driving to upstate New York afternoon of 11-16, but would like to meet you all at a subsequent gathering. So I hope you get together again. That time’s usually good for me.
Also: Infini-T, just around the corner down Witherspoon street is also a great place to meet, if it’s not too crowded. It’s a bit pricier but I like the drink selection better.
Right brained and left brained aren’t real things, but the right hemisphere and left hemisphere are:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbUHxC4wiWk
...and still provide a very useful an illustrative dichotomy to work with.
Yes, it makes sense to granularize when you are first learning, and when you run into problems (troubleshooting), but not once you’re already familiar with the process. When you’re not in learning mode, you want to consolidate as much as possible.
The software analogy is the difference between trying to run a program line by line in a debugger (pressing F8 for Step Into or what have you) versus just running a compiled or bytecode optimized version. Even worse is trying to type every line from hand into an interpreter every single time.
I understand your point, but a seemingly ridiculous amount of granularization can still be very useful if you can group certain steps. That way, you can collapse and expand sections of hierarchies as needed. You can also find new ways of doing things.
Here is a more positive example of granularization and reconsolidation applied to everyday actions.
I suggest putting the date in the post body as well as the title. There is who, what where, and why, so it makes sense to have a “when”. (...Unless this is an intentional test!)
My guess is that it’s related to what makes spaced repetition work—the process of switching forces the reader to recall the context and previous facts. See if you can even vaguely recall where you read this; I’d like to take a look at any pertinent research.
Okay, holy crap Divia. That is a lot of cards.
As an Anki user (yes I switched!), I would have the cards using a model where the source post is in a separate field, perhaps with the url as another field. I guess if we’re trying to stick to Q/A for compatability with other SRS systems, that’s not a good idea, and what I’m suggesting is a horrific amount of work if you were to do it by hand, because you’d have to redo all the cards. So, maybe these are goals for the long term, in case SRS learning really increases in popularity, and Anki decks become a good vehicle for delivery in of themselves.
Obviously I haven’t actually worked my way through the new additions (or even through most of the existing ones) but I think the cloze deletions are a good change. Overall I think your later cards reflect your increasing wisdom for structuring and formatting the cards.
Thanks and keep up the great work!
[Edit: Divia posted this one above, while I was composing this comment: http://divia.posterous.com/less-wrong-sequences-as-tab-delimited-text-file ]
Unless Divia has something better, here’s a rough export to Mnemosyne:
LW Sequences .mem Deck: lw-sequences.mem
LW Sequences cards in a tab-delimited file: lw-sequences.txt
Couldn’t figure out how to preserve the tags. AFAICT, Mnemosyne doesn’t support importing them at present.
(Psst, Zach, maybe I should’ve told you this earlier, but I switched over to Anki! It was a little bit painful, since I had to abandon learning info on 600 or so cards, but Anki is just that good that I’m not sorry at all. I encourage you to continue to use what you’re comfortable with and will actually learn with, but it’s worth watching the Anki vids! Among other things, Anki natively supports syncing across computers, and it’s possible to access the decks you’ve synced online via a web browser… Just sayin’.)
I know a full featured app is much better, but Anki Online is completely free, and accessible via most browsers—although it requires an internet connection. Any deck you sync from the desktop (or other) version of Anki should be available via AnkiOnline.
Only hoping I’m parsing this ramble correctly, but I agree if you mean to say:
We have plenty of people asking, “Why” but we need to put a lot more effort asking, “What are we going to do about it?”
I’m surprised that you seem to be saying that LW shouldn’t getting more into instrumental rationality! That would seem to imply that you think the good self-help sites are doing enough. I really don’t agree with that. I think LWers are uniquely suited to add to the discussion. More bright minds taking a serious, critical look at all thing, and, importantly, urgently looking for solutions contains a strong possibility of making a significant dent in things.
Major point, though, of GGP is not about what’s being discussed, but how. He’s bemoning that when topics related to self-improvement come up that we completely blow it! A lot of ineffectual discussion gets upvoted. I’m guilty of this too, but this little tirade’s convinced me that we can do better, and that it’s worth thinking about how to do better.
First, understand the domain of the problem so you can identify poential downsides. Is this area Black Swan prone? Does this resemble Newcomb’s problem at all? What do (I think) the shape of risk is here?
For most things people need to do in daily life, we might just consider the cost of further optimization against cost of remaining ignorant and being wrong as a result of that ignorance. It can ne good to be aware of the biases that Prospect Theory talks about—am I putting off reasonably winning big because I’m so afraid of losing pennies?
They had me for 20 years, and I can attest that except for the Young Earth Creationism, Phil is just about right. The position of Roman Catholic church, like that of other institutions, changes with times and with external politics and I notice that individual priests and religious education teachers often have widely divergent beliefs from what is supposedly the established party line.
I agree with your overall point because the priors required for a beleif in a Flying Spaghetti Monster are in the same order of magnitude as, say, belief in a Flying Chow Fun monster. To avoid nitpicking and the appearance of attacking a strawman, we could have picked something like the Nicene Creed, which every Roman Catholic mumbles communally every Sunday. In an in-person conversation, we could ask our interlocutor directly what he or she believes and avoid the problem of research.
If we were talking about the Great Schism, or ethno-religious tensions in 6th century Alexandria, what you just went on about would have been much more relevant. It’s really very much a tangental point here. Can you see why?
Background: two years ago, I dropped out of college with a tremendous amount of debt. I’d failed several classes right before I dropped out, and generally made a big mess of things.
Still alive today, I’m beginning to step free of a lot of social conventions, letting go of shame and the habit of groveling, and learning to really value (and not just know I should value) important things. I am searching for how to make my strongest contribution. In the short term, that probably has to do with making a lot of money, but on the side, I have an inkling that working on my writing and learning to take in and express complicated ideas in speech, prose, poetry, and myth could come in handy. I’m only okay at helping other people with their hangups, but I think it’d be a great thing if I could get really good at overcoming my own, especially the difficult seeming ones.
I owe Michael Vassar for some particularly good advice from a few months back. He also pointed me in the direction of the ancient Cynics—they’ve been a huge help to me, philosophically.
Proposal 1 sidesteps the karma system mechanism too much. It wouldn’t really encourage me to post more, and I don’t think it’ll improve quality beyond what a Discussion section would do.
Proposal 2 really doesn’t address present lurkers’ reluctance to comment. I would instead suggest all users get a small initial karma buffer that will absorb top post and comment downvotes. How that would work in conjuction with the top-post karma requirement, I’m not sure. The idea is to allow users to hide bad comments, give commenters a chance to integrate feedback, but still punish those who would use the “gimme’s” as a chance for abuse.
I have high hopes for the discussion section—AT LEAST make sure to put in a plug for it in the not-logged-in welcome message. Having a smaller environment to practice, test out ideas, and get feedback would be great.
I hope people will just go ahead and ask, “Hey, if I invested more time thinking about this, do you think it would make a good post?”
Great! I’m in Plainsboro and I’d enjoy meeting you sometime soon, if you’re up for it.
I go to the NYC meetings about once a month, but mostly the not-quite public ones—these aren’t advertised on Meetup.com. It’s for the regulars: game nights, focused discussions, and hang-out times. For example, one of our members recently hosted a poker tutorial (He’s a successful gambler works in math-of-gambling.) If you’re interested in those kinds of activities too, I’d encourage you to join the Google Group.
I always find it worthwhile, but maybe it’s not what you are expecting or looking for. It’s become a social group, with a slightly intellectual bent. It’s not an attempt to recreate LessWrong in-person. The core group really has become a community, as in: make connections, understand each other, communicate, and in certain ways, offer mutual support. I find the discussion almost always stimulating, and even though I only go up once every month.
Q: Generally, what kinds of meetups would you enjoy attending?
Do you happen to be in Central NJ? I remember someone mention being in the vicinity of New Brunswick, but don’t recall if it was you.
Discussion, mostly ad-hoc. On some occasions the discussion has been more focused it was assumed participants had read certain LW related things.
Jasen, is your talk and any ensuing Q&A going to be recorded? I can’t be there, but: advance cheers.
How was the meeting? Did you plan to meet again soon?