A better slogan for that purpose might simply be “Politics makes for bad examples”. Straight to the point. It needs explanation, just like the “mind-killer” slogan, but after the explanation it is easy to remember the reasoning behind it.
roryokane
Karma: 404
PredictionBook might help with measuring improvement, in a limited way. You can use it to measure how often your predictions are correct, and whether you are getting better over time. And you could theoretically ask LW-ers and non-LW-ers to make some predictions on PredictionBook, and then compare their accuracy to see if Less Wrong helped. Making accurate predictions of likelihood is a real skill that certainly has the possibility to be very useful – though it depends on what you’re predicting.
“If only there were irrational people somewhere, insidiously believing stupid things, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and mock them. But the line dividing rationality and irrationality cuts through the mind of every human being. And who is willing to mock a piece of his own mind?”
(With apologies to Solzhenitsyn).
– Said Achmiz, in a comment on Slate Star Codex’s post “The Cowpox of Doubt”
I would think the difference is that sociable people feel comfortable even in a less formal gathering, when you don’t know of anyone you would particularly like to talk to and nobody has asked you to talk. Even in such a situation, a sociable person could find something interesting to do, involving other people, and be reasonably confident that they are not being rude or boring, and end up enjoying whatever they find to do.
I took the survey.
I chose to Defect on the monetary reward prize question. Why?
I realized that the prize money is probably contributed by Yvain. And if $60-or-less were to be distributed between a random Less Wrong member and Yvain, I would rather as much of it as possible go to Yvain. This is because I know Yvain is smart and writes interesting posts, so the money could help him to contribute something to the world that another could not. Answering Defect lowers the amount of prize money, making Yvain keep more of it.
Also, I would rather I have the $60-or-less than anyone other Less Wrong member, and answering Defect gets me a bigger chance of that happening.
Edit: pgbh had the same reasoning.
Link to the story: Friendship is Optimal. Though I wouldn’t call the story as a whole a horror story; rather, it has some fridge horror. And it is particularly horrifying to those interested in the singularity, rather than to rationalists in general.
Link to EmotionSense: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ubhave.emotionsense&hl=en
7. … I think of several things related to work that I really want to remember … as I’m trying to fall asleep …
I use my smartphone (Android) in cases similar to this, though it’s not usually work-related stuff that I think of. I have the sound recording app WAVE Recorder in my dock / quick launch area. If I want to note something for later with the minimum of fuss, it’s easy to unlock my phone, open the app, hit record, and briefly describe whatever it is that I thought of (or hum it, if it’s a piece of music). Then I just hit stop and lock the phone again.
However, the downside of recording audio is that it’s harder to read later. You can’t just skim what you wrote later to remind yourself what you said; you have to wait through the whole recording. This can be mitigated somewhat by giving the recorded audio file a relevant name. But sometimes I value reading the whole thing easily later more than noting the idea as quickly as possible right now.
In those cases, I write the idea down in a new Evernote note. Evernote is also in my phone’s dock. I use the SwiftKey Keyboard to write the idea quickly, and Lux to turn the screen’s brightness below the built-in minimum so that the screen doesn’t hurt my eyes or wake me up too much in the dark room.
The flaw in the argument is simply that it assumes E(X/Y) > 1 implies that E(X) > E(Y).
I didn’t understand this sentence very well at first, because the inequality on the right is two steps removed from the one on the left. I find this version clearer:
The flaw in the argument is simply that it assumes E(X/Y) > 1 implies that E(X) / E(Y) > 1. (If E(X) / E(Y) > 1, that would imply that E(X) > E(Y).)
A hypothetical based on an amalgamation of my own experiences during a co-op:
You work as a programmer at a company that writes websites with the programming languages VBScript and VB.Net. You have learned enough about those languages to do your job, but you think the Ruby language is much more efficient, and you write your personal programming projects in Ruby. You occasionally go to meetings in your city for Ruby programmers, which talk about new Ruby-related technologies and techniques.
You are nearing the deadline for the new feature you were assigned to write. You had promised you would get the web page looking good in all browsers by today’s followup meeting about that feature. Fifteen minutes before the meeting, you realize that you forget to test in Internet Explorer 8. You open it in IE8 and find that the web page looks all messed up. You spend fifteen rushed minutes frantically looking up the problem you see and trying out code fixes, and you manage to fix the problem just before the meeting.
It’s just you, the technical lead, and the project manager at the meeting. You explain that you’ve finished your feature, and he nods, congratulates you, and makes note of that in his project tracker. Then he tells you what he wants you to work on next: an XML Reformatter. The XML documents used internally in one of the company’s products are poorly formatted and organized, with incorrect indentation and XML elements in random order. He suggests that you talk to the technical lead about how to get started, and leaves the meeting.
This project sounds like something that will be run only once – a one-time project. You have worked with XML in Ruby before, and are excited at the idea of being able to use your Ruby expertise in this project. You suggest to the technical lead that you write this program in Ruby.
“Hmm… no, I don’t think we should use Ruby for this project. We’re going to be using this program for a long time – running it periodically on our XML files. And all of our other programmers know VB.Net. We should write it in VB.Net, because I am pretty sure that another programmer is going to have to make a change to your program at some point.”
If you’re not thinking straight, at this point, you might complain, “I could write this program so much faster in Ruby. We should use Ruby anyway.” Yet that does not address the technical lead’s point, and ignores the fact that one of your assumptions has been revealed to be wrong.
If you are aware enough of your emotions to notice that you’re still on adrenaline from your last-minute fix, you might instead think, I don’t like the sound of missing this chance to use Ruby, but I might not be thinking straight. I’ll just accept that reasoning for now, and go back and talk to the technical lead in his office later if I think of a good argument against that point.
This is a contrived example. It is based on my experiences, but I exaggerate the situation and “your” behavior. Since I had to make many changes to the real situation to make an example that was somewhat believable, that would indicate that the specific tip you quoted isn’t applicable very often – in my life, at least.
Yvain posted a follow-up post, “Extreme Mnemonics”, on his own blog. Readers have posted many comments.
For one thing, I try not to read many in-progress fanfics. I’ve been burned so many times by starting to read a story and finding out that it’s abandoned that I rarely start reading new incomplete stories – at least with an expectation of them being finished. That means I don’t have to remember so many things at once – when I finish reading one fanfiction, I can forget it. Even if it’s incomplete, I usually don’t try to check back on it unless it has a fast update schedule – I leave it for later, knowing I’ll eventually look at my Favorites list again and read the newly-finished stories.
I also think of the stories in terms of a fictional multiverse, like the ones in Dimension Hopping for Beginners and the Stormseeker series (both recommended). I like seeing the different viewpoints on and versions of a universe. So that might be a way for you to tie all of the stories together – think of them as offshoots of canon, usually sharing little else.
I also have a personal rule that whenever I finish reading a big story that could take some digesting, I shouldn’t read any more fanfiction (from any fandom) until the next day. This rule is mainly to maximize what I get out of the story and prevent mindless, time-wasting reading. But it also lessens my confusing the stories with each other – it still happens, but only sometimes when I read two big stories on successive days.
A variant of this question was discussed on Mathematics Stack Exchange. The top answer has a good explanation of the nature of this question – “vg’f n zhygvcyr-pubvpr inevnag […] bs gur pynffvpny yvne cnenqbk” (un-ROT13).
The presence of so many Kyon: Big Damn Hero files in the repo is kind of confusing. Especially
kbdh_trope_list.txt, which looked interesting, but then confused me in that it didn’t talk about Trust in God. If possible, you should remove the KBDH files from the repo.If you want to keep those files around to use as references, you could move them into a separate folder out of the repo. Or keep them in your working copy but not commit them, with the help of a
.gitignorefile. Or at least move the files to their own folder so we don’t have to figure out which story each file belongs to.
You could also call this “sieze the Schelling point”. You’re setting a Schelling fence for making the change between “the maximal probability moment” and “right after that” – if you slide past the Schelling fence, you can expect you will fail to make the change, and that encourages you to make the change now.
Indeed. To give an example, I currently have a bad habit of often being late for my first class of the day (in college). It’s a 50-minute long math lecture. When I’m late, I might arrive outside the classroom 15 minute after class has started. Standing outside, before I go in, I have an urge to skip the class entirely to avoid the embarassment of entering and sitting down in the middle of lecture, which would slightly disrupt class and draw the professor’s attention to my lateness. But when I gather my courage and enter anyway, I’m usually glad that I did, because I learn useful things in the remaining 35 minutes of class.
Specific source: Useful Notes: Japanese Language on TV Tropes
A book that greatly improved my code was Clean Code by Robert C. Martin. It helped me understand things such as when code comments are appropriate and how to split code into well-factored functions. The book’s main flaw is that it’s sometimes hard to tell which of its advice is Java-specific and which is widely applicable. But I definitely still recommend it.
The author wrote another book, The Clean Coder, which is also about improving as a programmer. It’s not about coding well – it’s “a code of conduct for professional programmers”, and talks about things like when to say “no” to your boss, how to make a commitment, and how to estimate time for tasks. It was not as good as Clean Code, but it was helpful.
You can easily download ebooks of these from Google searches: Clean Code, The Clean Coder.
When creating such a general algorithm, we must keep a human limitation in mind: subconscious, unsystemized thought. A practical algorithm must account for and exploit it.
There are two types of subconscious thought that an algorithm has to deal with. One is the top-level type that is part of being a human. It is only our subconscious that can fire off the process of choosing to apply a certain conscious algorithm. We won’t even start running our algorithm if we don’t notice that it applies in this situation, or if we don’t remember it, or if we feel bored by the thought of it. So our algorithm has to be friendly to our subconscious in these ways. Splitting the algorithm into multiple algorithms for different situations may be one way of accomplishing that.
The other type of subconscious thought is black-box function calls to our subconscious that our algorithm explicitly uses. This includes steps like like “choose which of these possibilities feels more likely” or “choose the option that looks like the most important”. We would call subconscious functions instead of well-defined sub-algorithms because they are much faster, and time is valuable. I suppose we just have to use our judgement to decide whether a subroutine should be ran explicitly or in our subconscious. (Try not to let the algorithm get stuck recursively calculating whether the time spent calculating the answer consciously instead of subconsciously would be worth the better answer.)
All morals are axioms, not theorems, and thus all moral claims are tautological.
Whatever morals we choose, we are driven to choose them by the morals we already have – the ones we were born with and raised to have. We did not get our morals from an objective external source. So no matter what your morals, if you condemn someone else by them, your condemnation will be tautoligcal.