How are we operationalising “best” here? The purpose of textbooks is to efficiently impart material. Popular books have a wide variety of purposes (to inform, inspire, entertain, polemicise, etc.), so by what standard are we holding one popular book to be superior to another?
sixes_and_sevens
Karma: 6,805
I endorse this interpretation.
Do you love it to the tune of $20?
I’ve dabbled with ggplot, but I’ve put it on hold for the immediate future in lieu of getting to grips with D3. I’ll be getting all the R I can handle next year.
I did not know about the book, but it’s available to view from various sources. If I get time I’ll give it a look-in and report back.
A lot of online communities pay lip service to the idea that their experiences aren’t universal, but Less Wrong seems to be one of the few places that takes that idea seriously.
I’m looking for some “next book” recommendations on typography and graphically displaying quantitative data.
I want to present quantitative arguments and technical concepts in an attractive manner via the web. I’m an experienced web developer about to embark on a Masters in computational statistics, so the “technical” side is covered. I’m solid enough on this to be able to direct my own development and pick what to study next.
I’m less hot on the graphical/design side. As part of my stats-heavy undergrad degree, I’ve had what I presume to be a fairly standard “don’t use 3D pie charts” intro to quantitative data visualisation. I’m also reasonably well-introduced to web design fundamentals (colour spaces, visual composition, page layouts, etc.). That’s where I’m starting out from.
I’ve read Butterick’s Practical Typography, which I found quite informative and interesting. I’d now like a second resource on typography, ideally geared towards web usage.
I’ve also read Edward Tufte’s Visual Display of Quantitative Information, which was also quite informative, but felt a bit dated. I can see why it’s considered a classic, but I’d like to read something on a similar topic, only written this century, and maybe with a more technological focus.
Please offer me specific recommendations addressing the two above areas (typography and data visualisation), or if you’re sufficiently advanced, please coherently extrapolate my volition and suggest how I can more broadly level up in this cluster of skills.
I’m pretty sure flirting works more or less the same in most of the Western world. As a general strategy for gauging interest with plausible deniability, I imagine it’s universal.
Why?
1) It’s largely pointless in terms of one’s behaviour and psychological well-being. If you have an all-consuming infatuation and you’re not acting on it, the reason for not acting probably isn’t because some test statistic hasn’t crossed a predesignated threshold.
2) The whole sentiment of “I will calculate your love for me” is attached to a cluster of non-attractive features that probably get binned as “creepy”. No, this isn’t right. No, this isn’t fair. But it is the case.
3) The notion of a “prior” on other people being attracted to you is essentially asking “how attractive am I?” This is information that can’t be deduced by observing other people’s romantic behaviour, any more than you can measure your own height by reading about other people’s height.
Your attractiveness is not some inherent frequency by which people think you’re attractive: it’s made up of all the attributes and behaviours that people like about you. Maybe you should figure out what those things are and how to make them shine more, rather than trying to guess the odds on any given person finding you attractive.
I like to think I was tilling a rich, inner garden.
My claim is that your model is far too simple to model the complexities of human attraction.
Let’s use your example of pulling red and blue balls from an urn. Consider an urn with ten blue balls and five red balls. In a “classical” universe, you would expect to draw a red ball from this urn one time in three. A simple probabilistic model works here.
In a “romantic” universe, the individual balls don’t have colours yet. They’re in an indeterminate state. They may have tendencies towards being red or blue, but if you go to the urn and say “based on previous observations of people pulling balls out of this urn, the ball I’m about to pull out should be red one third of the time”, they will almost always be blue. Lots of different things you might do when sampling a ball from the urn might change its colour.
In such a universe, it would be very hard to model coloured balls in an urn. As far as people being attracted to other people are concerned, we live in such a universe.
There are various things wrong with this reasoning, but I don’t think you’re getting my general point: this entire approach is misguided and it will not lead you to good outcomes.
A twelve-year-old sixes_and_sevens had the 1988 print of Psychology: The Essential Science and The Definitive Book of Body Language. He was not a hit with the ladies.
It’s important to note that the base rate of people finding other people attractive is different from the base rate of other people finding you attractive. You’re way more interested in the second question than you are the first question, but no amount of polling people on the internet can answer that question for you.
It’s a bit like learning to juggle. You can’t learn to juggle just by reading books and imagining how balls get thrown and how fast they fall. To learn how to do it, you’ve got to throw some balls up in the air. You’ve got to figure out how your body and brain deal with throwing and catching, and then you’ve got to learn how to control it. To begin with, you’re going to drop a lot of balls, but that’s not the worst thing in the world that can happen.
This post may get downvoted, as I suspect it’s of low value and low interest to a lot of readers. You shouldn’t take this personally.
For what it’s worth, I admire your approach, though it’s based on incorrect assumptions. Trying to calculate whether someone is attracted to you will not end well. Researching psychology for romantic reasons will probably also not end well.
People solve this problem by making bigger and bigger signals at each other, until either one side stops making the bigger signals or until the signals are so big you can’t ignore them, (also known as “flirting”). If this sounds hard and unreliable, that’s because it is. It takes a lot of practice to get good at this. You would be best advised to practice talking to people while trying to figure out how they feel about the conversation instead of carrying out this sort of research.
I found this response very insightful. It ties in with a variety of other things I’ve been thinking about recently, and has given me a great deal of food for thought. Thank you for sharing it, and you have my sympathies regarding your sister.
I really don’t know what we’re actually disagreeing about here, so I’m going to tap out. Have a nice evening.
(If it’s not evening where you are yet, then have a tolerable rest of the day, and then have a nice evening)
Well if we’re talking about that version of “me”, why not talk about the version of “me” who’s a member of the International Dog-Kicking Association? For any given virtue you can posit some social context were that virtue is or is not desirable. I’m not sure what that accomplishes.
I think we’re talking past each other here. I’m not talking about how to cooperate with anybody, or how to cooperate in a value-hostile social environment. I’m talking about how I can cooperate with people I want to cooperate with.
I don’t claim that not kicking dogs is a universal moral imperative. I claim that having some internal feature that dissuades you from kicking dogs means I will like and trust you more, and be more inclined to cooperate with you in a variety of social circumstances. This is not because I like dogs, but because that feature probably has some bearing on how you treat humans, and I am a human, and so are all the people I like.
I obviously can’t directly inspect the landscape of your internal features to see if “don’t needlessly hurt things” is in there, but if I see you kicking a dog, I’m going to infer that it’s not.
This is all kinds of useful. Thanks!
You can learn an astonishing amount about web development without ever having to think about how it’ll look to another human being. In a professional context, I know enough to realise when I should hand it over to a specialist, but I won’t always have that luxury.