olimay

Karma: 101

olimay Nov 5, 2009, 7:39 PM
0 points
in reply to: AndrewKemendo’s comment on: Less Wrong / Overcoming Bias meet-up groups
Neat idea! I missed this first time around, and so posted a comment on the open thread asking about creating some central regular-meetup info repo. Same general desire to connect people with meetups.

I know a little PHP (can create forms, WordPress themes/plugins and such, but I use other languages more often). Let me know how it’s going and if I can be of any use.

olimay Nov 5, 2009, 7:20 PM
0 points
on: Open Thread: November 2009
Meetup listing in Wiki? MBlume created a great Google Calendar for meetups. How about some sort of rudimentary meetup “register” in the LW Wiki? I volunteer to help with this if people think it’s a good idea. Thoughts? Objections?

ETA: The GCal is great for presenting some information, but I think something like a Wiki page might be more flexible. I’m especially curious to hear opinions from people who are organizing regular meetups, how that’s going, and interest in maintaining a Wiki page.

ETA++: AndrewKemendo has a more complex, probably more useful idea that I passed over in my overcaffeinated eagerness.
What links here?
- olimay's comment on Less Wrong / Overcoming Bias meet-up groups by MichaelVassar (Nov 5, 2009, 7:39 PM; 0 points)

olimay Nov 4, 2009, 2:16 AM
0 points
in reply to: AdeleneDawner’s comment on: Less Wrong / Overcoming Bias meet-up groups
Yeah, it was intended to be the link title attribute—in Markdown, of course, but I didn’t close a quote around what was supposed to be the title attribute’s value.

I’d really like to be able to preview comments here. It would prevent me from further embarrassing myself.

olimay Nov 4, 2009, 2:10 AM
0 points
in reply to: saliency’s comment on: Less Wrong / Overcoming Bias meet-up groups
I see. Thanks for the feedback! I’ll see if we can get that fixed for next time.

ETA: I give you Karma for helpfulness.

olimay Oct 30, 2009, 5:14 PM
2 points
in reply to: saliency’s comment on: Less Wrong / Overcoming Bias meet-up groups
Sorry we missed you! Last week we had to change locations (Georgia’s Bake Shop has become too small) and at the moment we are still looking for a suitable venue for general gatherings. Are you subscribed to the mailing list? Please do!

Also, you mentioned the meeting place is “listed”… do you mean somewhere here on the main blog or on the Wiki? I was wondering if people were using the wiki to list meetup groups/locations, so we can prevent such difficulties as you experienced.

olimay Oct 26, 2009, 8:15 PM
4 points
on: The Value of Nature and Old Books

It seems to me that one good reason to do so is that for all the ways that these works have been analyzed and surpassed in the intervening years, the reader can be sure that what is written there is not the product of manipulation by the forces that are at work in the reader’s own time and place. So it represents another way to gain valuable freedom and distance.

Outside of learning about the context/history of some field of thought, I think that’s the general reason people give for recommending “classic” works of nonfiction.

Older works can also differ in their presentation, which can make them more interesting. You bring up Euclid, so I feel I’m free to mention I really, really wish I’d learnt Calculus from a high-level text like Courant, instead of Stewart and Sallas+Hille+Etgen. I would’ve have become more enthusiastic about math much earlier. (Maybe. Ah, counterfactuals.)

olimay Oct 26, 2009, 8:01 PM
1 point
in reply to: roland’s comment on: Near and far skills
There’s a good point: part of the general issue is whether the information we’re acquiring is relevant. Feedback from doing (whether procedural or propositional) is probably more relevant to the task you’re trying to accomplish than information gleaned from a broad search, like reading newspapers, etc—and experience can greatly help to establish just how important the information is.

olimay Oct 26, 2009, 7:52 PM
4 points
on: Near and far skills
Sounds like main problem in the examples you give is overconfidence about our ability to transform propositional knowledge into procedural knowledge.

Overweighting the propositional knowledge we have beforehand can cause us to discount ignore important information that we might pick up by doing—it can inhibit our ability to be empirical through the mechanisms of familiar biases. Planning fallacies, and problems of being unable to respond to unforseen circumstances—or recognize opportunity!--can come soon after.

Seems similar to the distinction Taleb makes between ‘Practitioners’ and ‘Theorists’, actually. I tend to be of the Not yet! I don’t know enough! group, so this summer I’ve been trying to find ways to encourage myself to be more of a practitioner than a theorist in certain domains of life.

My problem was more an emotional need to know as much as I can about the task and the context of the task before executing, or even practicing. I think this is a “nerd” tendency. Even excluding the epistemological pitfalls there is an opportunity cost for putting something off until later that needs to be part of the calculation.

olimay Oct 8, 2009, 7:17 PM
0 points
on: New Haven/Yale Less Wrong Meetup: 5 pm, Monday October 12
Interesting. I have a friend at Yale (Neuro/Psych) who doesn’t read this blog, but expressed interest in the Summit. I’ll send this info over to him; thanks!

olimay Jun 16, 2009, 6:00 PM
2 points
on: Rationality Quotes—June 2009

I have suspected that history, real history, is more modest and that its essential dates may be, for a long time, secret. A Chinese prose writer has observed that the unicorn, because of its own anomaly, will pass unnoticed. Our eyes see what they are accustomed to seeing.

--Jorge Luis Borges

olimay Jun 6, 2009, 8:32 AM
2 points
in reply to: botogol’s comment on: With whom shall I diavlog?
I would like to see Mencius Moldbug versus...

...Mencius Moldbug.

Not for insight or informational content, but perhaps as a sort of Théâtre de l’Absurde.

I think Robin has been right in not wasting his time further.

olimay Jun 1, 2009, 11:53 PM
1 point
in reply to: Drahflow’s comment on: Open Thread: June 2009
Um, then this is not a “safe” AI in any reasonable sense.

olimay May 21, 2009, 9:44 PM
0 points
in reply to: thomblake’s comment on: Catchy Fallacy Name Fallacy (and Supporting Disagreement)
There’s room for some confusion as to who commits the fallacy. If the speaker correctly classifies a mistake (that really is a mistake) as part of a category of structurally related mistakes, that’s hardly a fallacy. The fallacy is, as you point out, taking a nice sounding label itself as evidence. Using quotes from famous people creates a similar danger.

I think there is a name for this effect, “association” or “framing” or something. But whatever.

olimay May 21, 2009, 8:42 PM
6 points
on: Catchy Fallacy Name Fallacy (and Supporting Disagreement)
This is a sometimes-useful heuristic that falls under the strategy of “communicating honestly and effectively”.

If everyone understands well enough what named fallacies actually are (what they describe) to see where they might apply, of course we can save time and continue what we were talking about. Not the case, most of the time, so—right.

It’s not just wasteful that other people will be persuaded by a fancy label: it’s also that it might sidetrack the discussion into what the label refers to. Is X art? Is Y really consciousness?

The question to ask (to yourself as well) when tempted to use a fallacy, “Does referencing this named fallacy resolve disgreement by revealing object-level mistakes?”

olimay May 20, 2009, 7:06 AM
5 points
in reply to: Nominull’s comment on: Rationality quotes—May 2009
I guess it implies the extra cost of optimizing the useless task. Mostly agreed, though.

olimay May 20, 2009, 4:50 AM
1 point
in reply to: pwno’s comment on: Share Your Anti-Akrasia Tricks

Pay the price of procrastination. This one is for those who are chronic procrastinators. Give your trusted friend some amount of money and have him incrementally pay it back to you as you accomplish your goals. For instance, once you finish a page of your essay by a certain time, he’ll give you a quarter of your money back. Being productive will never seem easier.

It sounds like a good idea, but it’s never worked very well for me. I’ve tried monetary and other forms of incentives. Sometimes it would work, but over the longer term some part of me began to get more and more desensitized to failing. During some periods, it actually put me into a mode of learned helplessness, and even despair, where “akrasia” can describe nearly every aspect of life.

In general, I find that using negative incentives to motivate distracts me. Instead of taking action, the increasing salience of the possibility and consequences of failure makes it more likely to “hide” or just give up.

olimay May 20, 2009, 12:41 AM
5 points
in reply to: Jaffa_Cakes’s comment on: Share Your Anti-Akrasia Tricks
Here’s my context:

I failed out of a prestigious university (rather, I threw myself out before they could) because I just couldn’t get work done. (Underachieving, chronically disorganized, call me whatever.) In the process I also ran myself into a huge amount of debt (did I mention I’d been in and out of there for six years before I quit?)

I run into repeated difficulty doing things most people find easy: sitting down and getting work done, waking up in the morning, estimating the amount of time it will take to get somewhere. I want to change the present course of my life. I know how a reasonable person in general conducts himself. Why can’t I be like that? I understand what I am supposed to do, but on certain critical, common tasks, I fail. It’s getting harder for me to achieve positive net outcomes, as the bad consequences of previous mistakes stack.

Blah blah blah.

I’m concerned with akrasia for much more than just procrastination. And, of course I’m concerned with plain old rationality: in the conventional sense and the Eliezer “win” sense. (I obviously don’t have much of a grip on either.) I have trouble remembering when the last time I really did “win” was.

In summary: my reasons for wanting to learn about and discuss ways to be more rational in thought and action? I’m very bad at both. And it matters to me a great deal to get much, much better.

olimay Apr 17, 2009, 1:53 AM
0 points
in reply to: flawed_skull’s comment on: Where are we?
Princeton area. I’m good to meet up in NYC too.

olimay Apr 17, 2009, 1:47 AM
0 points
in reply to: dclayh’s comment on: Where are we?
I said Princeton above, since it’s my mailing address (and recognizable to non-locals.) Close enough, I guess, and anyway I’ve recently been spending most of my time (here) in Frist.

olimay Apr 17, 2009, 1:44 AM
0 points
in reply to: CronoDAS’s comment on: Where are we?
Princeton, NJ. Easy train ride up. I visit NYC every other weekend.