P/S/A: The /r/scholar subreddit is an easy way to get any academic paper that’s stuck behind a paywall—just post your request and someone will upload it for you for free within a day.
PECOS-9
Karma: 858
So this year I’ve stopped working out, and my grades have improved drastically, but at the cost of losing muscle mass and gaining fat, and becoming physically slower and lazier just as I became faster and more active intellectually. One effect I especially noticed was the disappearance of that perpetual state of happiness/satisfaction that comes from frequent physical exertion, which I think had a tendency to get in the way of a feeling of urgency regarding studies; why bother with tiresome and frustrating intellectual exercise when physical exercise yielded results and pleasure/satisfaction much more easily and reliably?
Are you sure there isn’t another factor causing improved grades? My impression was that it was pretty well-established that exercise improves mental performance.
Or possibly it’s the amount of time you spent exercising, which gave you less time to do other things? Were you spending a lot of time working out? If so, you may want to look into high-intensity interval training to get the benefits of physical exercise in as little time as possible.
Another idea: save your workouts for the end of the day, so you don’t have the post-workout feeling all day and will still feel like you need to get stuff done?
Conveniently, happier people tend to achieve more, so you actually don’t need to sacrifice happiness to do more good. You might need to sacrifice certain kinds of happiness (e.g. buying expensive cars), but the research on positive psychology tends to show that that kind of thing doesn’t contribute much to happiness anyway.
That’s not to say that the choices which would lead to the happiest possible you are the exact same ones which would lead to achieving the most good, but there’s a lot of overlap, and anyone aiming to do massive amounts of good should not neglect their own happiness.
Relevant LW posts on positive psychology:
Agreed, but I think the reason this experiment is interesting is that it previously didn’t occur to people (or at least to me) that trustingness is a possible alternative explanation of the classic marshmallow experiment, rather than self control. It was a blind spot.
I really don’t see how this casts doubt on the original experiment. Suppose we express a child’s decision as maximizing expected reward minus the cost of waiting, where the latter takes “self control” as a parameter. If we lower expected reward, (nearly) all the kids eat the marshmallow. If we raise expected reward (by reinforcing waiting twice), about half the kids wait. But still, 6⁄14 kids in the second group didn’t wait, so clearly there’s variance from another source.
The other source of variance could still be the children’s “trustingness.” The more trusting children could have a higher expected reward even after the kids are shown that the adults are reliable/unreliable. So the results are consistent with both of the following hypotheses:
More trusting children will wait longer and self control is not relevant
More trusting children will wait longer and children with more self control will wait longer
But this experiment ruled out the following:
It doesn’t matter if a child is more trusting; only self control affects how long they wait
I believe JoshuaFox wasn’t talking about any specific project, just suggesting that you find one.
If you want to contribute to an open source project, I recommend you look at the most-watched python projects on github.
Pick one that looks interesting to you (ideally one you’re already a user of, but it doesn’t need to be) and download the source code. Most should have a README file that explains how to actually run the code (which sometimes involves installing dependencies, editing some config files, etc.). If the README is any good, it should have line-by-line instructions of what to type into the command line. If you can’t get it working, either ask for help or try a different project.
Once you’ve got the code running, take a look at the source code. It will be impossible to understand everything immediately, but try to get a very basic idea of how it works. Try editing what’s displayed somewhere or adding “print” statements to make sure you have some idea of what’s going on.
Then, take a look at the “issues” page of the github project. This will have lots of reported bugs and feature requests. Pick one of the bugs, and make sure that you can replicate it (i.e. make the bug happen for you—this doesn’t involve writing or editing any code, just running the program). If you can, try to track it down and fix it (this means editing code).
Once you fix a bug, make a github account and learn the basics of git and how to submit pull requests (github has pretty good tutorials). If you can’t figure this part out (it’s a little tricky at first), ask for help on stackoverflow, the project’s IRC channel, LW, or from someone you know). Some would suggest you learn git before downloading the project or fixing the bug, but I think it’s better for you to start working on the projects asap rather than trying to learn git immediately.
I think you forgot to include a link to the original article.
RSI capabilities could be charted, and are likely to be AI-complete.
What does RSI stand for?
The reason I’m posting this is that I’ve become very skeptical about any theory which claims that something which is well-attested and physically possible is actually not happening.
Do you have some other examples?
I’m planning on making a flashcard deck (for anki) with basic emergency scenarios (e.g. What should you do if you’re in a car that’s fallen into deep water? What should you do if you encounter a bear in the woods?). Does anybody know of some good sources about this kind of thing? I’m especially interested in data comparing frequency/mortality rates of different situations, so I can pick the most important topics to make cards about, and quantify how likely adding these cards to someone’s deck is to save their life.
Of course, I’ll share the deck if/when it’s completed.
Can you give an example of an existing organization that could be rearranged to use control markets and specify what its stakeholders, feedback, actors, and resources would be?
This is also a solution to “I am underweight/too skinny, how do I get bigger?”
Sure, but if we assume we manage to have a human-level AI, how powerful should we expect it to be if we speed that up by a factor of 10, 100, or more?
As powerful as a a team of 10, 100 human slaves, or a little more, but within the same order or magnitude.
I’m not sure if that’s a good comparison. Compare the following cases:
A. 1 smart human, given 100 days to solve some problem
B. 100 smart humans, given 1 day to solve some problem.
C. 1,000 smart humans, given 1 day to solve some problem.
A would outperform B on most tasks, and probably even C. Most problems just aren’t that parallelizable.
Here’s my attempt to translate these lessons for folks who worry about foom:
(a) Taboo informal discussions of powerful AI and/or implications of such. If you can’t discuss it in math terms, it’s probably not worth discussing.
I’m not sure how this follows from the previous lesson. Analysing the impact of a new technology seems mostly distinct from the research needed to develop it.
For example, suppose somebody looked at progress in chemistry and declared that soon the dreams of alchemy will be realized and we’d be able to easily synthesize any element we wanted out of any other. I’d call this a similar error to the one made by the Dartmouth group, but I don’t think it then follows that we can’t discuss what the impacts would be of being able to easily synthesize any element out of any other.
It might be good advice nonetheless, but I don’t think it follows from the lesson.
Also, buy one without a number pad so that you can put your mouse in a reasonable location. Normal keyboards are too wide.
What is wrong with this attempt is that (A) ends up being a negative list. A list of what what I do not want to intake. Since possibilities are infinite, this will give me ridiculous cognitive load, and that is a problem. So here is simple solution, which I used for a food diet before, and worked great: Name not what you cannot do, but what you are allowed to do. Way fewer bits, way easier to check!
This has not been my experience with trying to do freelance programming on elance. I’ve applied for about 20 projects on there over the past few months, all of which I was very qualified for and gave evidence that I was qualified for (by linking to past projects of mine). I interviewed for one, which went well, but they went for a much cheaper programmer from India (I don’t blame them; he looks like he does a good job). Most just don’t respond.
I may be charging a bit too much, especially since I have no elance reputation), but on a lot of the projects I didn’t even cite a price, and instead asked reasonable questions about the project and stated I needed those answers before I could offer a cost estimate. Almost nobody even replied. So I don’t think cost is the only issue.
Maybe odesk is different, but I doubt it.
My impression from what other freelancers have said is that you need to do lots of networking to find good clients, and that most good freelance software development projects are never posted to job boards or elance or anything like that, they’re handled by referrals. (I haven’t actually successfully done this approach yet either though, so I can’t personally vouch for it)