someonewrongonthenet

Karma: 1,525

someonewrongonthenet May 20, 2015, 4:55 PM
1 point
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Log-normal Lamentations
Hmm....yes, guilt and shame distinction does get close to what I mean.

But you must also add to this mix, the meta-cognitive skill of not fooling yourself to avoid guilt, to get the truth orientation I’m talking about. (Even the shameless who are perfectly happy displeasing others will get defensive and rationalize to fool themselves if you imply they are guilty by their own standards.)

Those with shame hide away from the judgement of others. Most people with guilt orientations will look for ways to justify to themselves, pull out all the arguments to avoid being ashamed in front of the their own mind rather than other people. In truth orientation, you don’t worry about whether you feel guilty, you worry about whether you are and you additionally have the cognitive toolkit to avoid accidentally misrepresenting reality to spare your own feelings.

(Assuming large egos. A truth+outcome oriented person with a small ego isn’t obsessing about guilt or non-guilt in the first place, they just notice the feeling of guilt as a useful indicator (of truth) and then act (for the preferred outcome). But the end result is the same regardless of the size of ones ego. (Whereas a person with a small ego who isn’t truth+outcome oriented will just placidly dismiss the feeling of guilt but never really act.))

This is getting very Gita-esque isn’t it. Which is interesting, because in many ways the Gita is intended as a rebuttle to the contemporary rapidly spreading Buddhism...

someonewrongonthenet May 20, 2015, 3:35 PM
0 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Log-normal Lamentations
Honestly, for me personally it’s not that I have a small ego—It’s that my ego would be more offended if I was stuck in the sort of backwaters where I was the smartest person. I want to be the very best, not feel like the very best. To end up the stereotypical tragic genius who complains about how no one they know really understands or thinks like them, while everyone around them quietly smirks at how self important and arrogant those words sound, is not only sub-optimal but also a sort of failure, a blow to my ego.

Lesswrong (the name less wrong is relevant), transhumanism, all that is about being perfect, in a sense. We’re striving to eliminate the minor imperfections in our thinking, so that we can actually be right all the time.

I don’t think it has to do with “ego” so much as orientation towards truth and outcomes. The ego is attached to actually being right and actually being successful. Some people find it easy to admit to being wrong because it offends their ego more to be wrong than it does to admit to being wrong. The ego is still firmly in place, it’s just less able to deceive itself due to the sort of mind it is piloting.

I guess what I’m saying is that ego, and the arrogance/humility spectrum in general, isn’t a good model to describe the difference. You can be humble or arrogant to various degrees, but your orientation towards truth is a separate dimension.

For example, an extremely arrogant person might feel bad when faced with someone better than them, but if they have the truth orientation they can’t take that feeling away by shunning that person because their ego cares about truth and won’t let itself be tricked that way. So instead they hungrily observe that person and eat up their good qualities. And an extremely humble person with a truth orientation will do the exact same thing, simply because they do care about truth and outcomes.

And when these two people, humble and arrogant people with truth orientations meet, they hopefully understand each other and see that the differences in each other’s arrogance/humility related mannerisms is just a superficial personality trait, and not that important.

someonewrongonthenet May 20, 2015, 1:08 AM
13 points
on: Log-normal Lamentations

There’s a common story told about a hotshot student at school whose ego crashes to earth when they go to university and find themselves among a group all as special as they thought they were.

But they went to a Uni where the peers were equal to them. They won.

If you’re finding that everyone’s smarter than you, if you know at least one person better than you at everything, rejoice and jump for joy. Being the local best by a large margin is an extremely bitter thing unless voluntarily chosen: unless you really are at some kind of peak it often means you have underachieved in life. Gifted underachievers are not a happy bunch, not at all. They feel lonely and isolated and no one they know really understands why. (Though partly this may be due to common sociological, psychological, etc factors determining both unhappiness and underachievement relative to ability).

someonewrongonthenet May 19, 2015, 5:00 AM
1 point
on: Strategies and tools for getting through a break up
Interesting...that’s impressively fast, well done! Would be interested in an update if you still feel this way in a few months if you don’t mind (loss sometimes doesn’t really hit till later)

Also, gender? Gender differences are nontrivial here (apparently due to gender differences in caretaking and number of friends, but I do wonder if that’s really all it is...but even then i imagine with a depressed partner you had a big caretaking load)

someonewrongonthenet May 13, 2015, 4:01 AM
2 points
on: Wild Moral Dilemmas
When the social norms consider it well within your rights to do so, when should you trust people to make their own decisions for the sake of their own interests vs. when should you “paternalistically” extrapolate their desires and make decisions such as what you think they would want if they were smarter/wiser/disciplined comes about instead” is one that happens to me a surprisingly large number of times.

This often but doesn’t necessarily imply positions of authority. If your good buddy who isn’t very financially savvy is willing to freely give you large sums of money with no obligations attached, do you accept? A strict Mormon who just arrived at college feels peer pressure and impulsively asks you for a drink, and while you do not think it’s immoral you know they’ll feel guilt later-do you give it to them?

More succinctly: My respect for autonomy and my consequentialism conflict in all cases where I think I know what someone wants better than they do and have any measure of power over what happens. Paternalistic attitudes are also very lonely, there are some analogues to “heroic responsibility” here.

My current position is that consequentialism wins, and what feels like moral uncertainty is actually more a “but what if the other person really does know better?” risk which must be calculated. Respect for autonomy is not usually a fundamental value (except for sometimes, we might intrinsically value the choice) but in practice it is a heuristic which usually leads to the best consequences because people are usually best at knowing what they want.

someonewrongonthenet May 7, 2015, 8:44 PM
2 points
on: Guidelines for Upvoting and Downvoting?
My suggestion would be to downvote anything factually misleading, and to upvote anything for which you personally learned something from or had insight from. (Not agreement or disagreement). There are exceptions, as some threads (such as this one) are actually measuring agreement/disagreement, but that should be easy to determine.

I’m pretty sure I’m more proud of them than of all the work I did in high school put together.

I don’t think that’s not a good thing...there have been people in this community who attempted to drive out those they didn’t like by downvoting everything they posted. The community would probably be better off without the downvote, since those who aught to use it do not and those who aught not to use it do. (Not to mention that some people unfortunately attach negative emotion to being downvoted, even though they haven’t actually harmed anyone)

someonewrongonthenet Apr 29, 2015, 5:06 AM
1 point
in reply to: Epictetus’s comment on: Experience of typical mind fallacy.
Right, I agree that this is the outcome. I juat think that no one wakes up in the morning and says “I’m going to skirt my job by intimidating students and BS-ing.

First they don’t know the answer then they quickly rationalize under pressure, then they buy their own BS and honestly believe its an answer, then if they get called out they feel vaguely disrespected, and then the intimidation behavior comes out to defend against the disrespect. It’s not Machiavellian, it’s just brute human instincts reacting to one thing after another. A small child would act the same way on instinct. Later on you ask these people and they’ll quite sincerely say they love being challenged.

someonewrongonthenet Apr 29, 2015, 4:50 AM
1 point
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Experience of typical mind fallacy.
I would predict they’ll do whatever fails mode they’ve done in the past, or do the failures which i barely catch myself from doing.

Are you sure that you don’t first look at the behavior and then calculate an incentive map? (Which obviously will fit rather well since it is post hoc?) ((Because that’s the failure mode most people fall into))(((and doesn’t your last paragraph depict a thought process which is the exact opposite of Hanlons razor?)))

someonewrongonthenet Apr 28, 2015, 9:36 PM
4 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Experience of typical mind fallacy.
The difference is, that if the teacher was aware of what he was doing, he wouldn’t do it. And if the child wasn’t aware of what she was doing, she would behave the same way. If the teacher had a little neurofeedback button that somehow would light up when he was upset, or rationalizing, being impulsive, or otherwise cuing him when he was not thinking the way he would like to think, his behavior would change (somewhat).

It’s the difference between saying that someone with autism doesn’t care about people vs. someone saying with autism cannot understand how other people are feeling, or saying someone with ADHD is lazy vs. they desperately want to work but can’t control attention, or saying someone with face-blindness just doesn’t care about faces. (That’s what someone without those disorders would think first, since the behavior that the disordered person exhibits matches what they would do if they didn’t care).

motivation and intention do not have to be the same at all

I agree, they don’t have to be the same. I’m making the case that small instances of real difference, coupled with poor modeling of other people, enhances and exaggerates the perception that they are not the same, and that for smart people this is particularly bad because everyone around them is just kinda globally worse off on every dimension...and because of typical-mind fallacy the smart person will then assume everyone’s just kinda alien and terrible in their intentions rather than just slightly worse at carrying intentions out.

When I’m dealing with someone I know well who is “normal’ and I see behavior 6 happening in a situation where I would have done 2+3= behavior 5, I model the other person as accidentally doing 2x3=6. Under typical mind fallacy, I would assume that they had similar minds (2+3) but different behavior (5) and conclude that those people just don’t care about equal signs I am so very alone and that’s the trap to avoid.

someonewrongonthenet Apr 28, 2015, 7:46 PM
10 points
on: Experience of typical mind fallacy.
I was an atypical child with very noticeable unusual traits, yes, but as I’ve grown older I’ve “normal-ed out”. If someone really gets to know me they might still be puzzled why there are certain normal-person things I cannot do and certain things I can do that most people can’t, but for the most part I’m fairly close to baseline, with most of the deviation due to the hyper-WEIRD culture practically everyone on Lesswrong shares rather than unusual mental architecture. To the extent that my actual cognition is unusual, I consider most of the deviations from typicality to be a net negative.

I think the alienation and self-labelng of oneself as extremely atypical is paradoxically due to typical mind fallacy—when a person at first fails to accurately model other people and assumes others are like oneself, and then tries to figure out under what conditions would I behave like those people and do what they did, they very quickly start looking like fundamentally different aliens.

For example, people who are smart sometimes feel alienated from society because others around them are not able to respond appropriately to the nuanced conversational cues they are emitting. Others are unable to accurately express their feelings and thoughts and are generally more clumsy and fuzzy about everything. Others make bad decisions which they would not make if they understood what they did. The smart person attributes these differences to differences in intention and core mental architecture, rather than skill.

For example, picture a teacher of average cognitive ability worn down after a long day. He doesn’t have sufficient mental control to keep his emotions in check. He also lacks the meta-cognitive ability to notice he is stressed. The gifted child asks a question he doesn’t know the answer to, but the teacher lacks the meta-cognitive ability to realize that he doesn’t know the answer and before he can stop it his brain just made something up. The child says “No, that doesn’t make sense”, and the teacher fails at social cues and takes it literally as “I didn’t fully process what you just said” rather than a euphemism for “your explanation is not satisfying to me” and so they repeat themselves. Truth be told the teacher doesn’t really know what it means for something to make sense, the way the gifted child does. The child sighs in frustration. The teacher feels resentful about that, but doesn’t notice they feel resentful. Later on, when the child speaks out of turn the teacher snaps and gives them detention for interrupting. The teacher truly believes the detention was for interrupting.

The gifted child thinks to herself: “Even though I meant her no harm or disrespect, she has decided to find a small excuse to punish me after I questioned her knowledge. That teacher is punishing me because she thinks that children are not people, they do not have rights. She has status and she is willing to use it. Other human beings are conformist, they dislike those who question authority.”

The ordinary child in the same situation would have thought, “Ugh, I didn’t do anything really, what’s her problem” and not analyzed the situation further. It’s the same thought, but only the gifted child takes it to the logical conclusion that the teacher must be fundamentally alien to do such a thing. She’ll project her mind upon the teacher, take the teacher’s behavior, and then grossly miscalculate his intentions.

These would all be valid interpretations of the teacher’s behavior if the teacher had the self-awareness of the child, but as it stands they are not actually true. The teacher and the child are identical in their basic cognitive infrastructure and share motivation and intention, it’s just that the child just more self aware.

If the gifted child does not figure out how to accurately model the teacher, this will very quickly develop into “every single person except me and maybe that one other dude is absolutely batshit insane, and I am alone.” Every knee jerk political reaction, every instance of blatant injustice, every bad decision, and every rationalization will feed this misconception further, when really differences in meta-cognitive ability are entirely to blame. They subsequently grow up to become contrarians and the word “typical” becomes vaguely insulting to them.

I listed intelligence because that’s why I think lesswrongers think they are atypical at a far higher rate than could possibly be true, but another example: most college students might say that most people pressure others drink while simultaneously saying that they,themselves, would not pressure anyone to drink. They’re looking at their own mental state, the behaviors of others, seeing a disparity, and concluding that others are mentally different. Like the gifted child, they are simply failing to model other people’s failure to act the way that they would like to act, unable to realize that behavior isn’t a direct reflection of internal state.

someonewrongonthenet Feb 17, 2015, 8:21 PM
2 points
on: An alarming fact about the anti-aging community

maybe most of the money and psychology involved in this whole business is about buying hope,

I really think it just didn’t occur to them. It’s certainly about buying hope—but we’d like to purchase hope effectively!

Let me disclose first that I have no idea how to fix this problem… the problem of getting them to take information from the world of science and biomedicine and applying it to themselves.

Well, I do! Create a trustworthy central hub which analyses and disseminates this type of practical information. If such a hub exists, figure out why it missed this solution. There is a lot of information concerning how to stay alive for longer, and even someone trained in the biological sciences would have to put in huge time investments to separate the signal from the noise and seek out the creative, off-the-radar solutions.

There are people who are exercising their butts off, taking questionable hormones, intermittent fasting, and all kinds of extremely effort-full and sometimes paradoxically risky activities in the quest to stay alive, so if you truly know of an effective thing that people don’t know about and aren’t pursuing, it’s a flaw in information dissemination techniques...because there’s a ton of people trying.

someonewrongonthenet Jan 29, 2015, 11:21 PM
1 point
in reply to: c_edwards’s comment on: Optimal eating (or rather, a step in the right direction)
That’s Hyperinsulinemia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinsulinemia

It might or might not be Diabetes-II related: http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/31/Supplement_2/S262.full

In your shoes, I would recommend low carb diets -I’m partial to paleo, but whatever works. Keep in mind that if calories are to be kept constant, low carb diets are necessarily high fat diets, and this should ideally be animal or fruit fat—for example fish, coconut, olive, avocados …not milk fat or seed based oils.

(The paleo-fied version of this is simply to use fruits instead of grains for the carbs. Regardless of whether you do paleo, I don’t think it’s controversial that diabetes_II spectrum disorders benefit from cutting carbs, so you’ll likely end up with paleo-like macronutrient ratios one way or another anyhow.)

I would also up the exercise. I just had a quick look at Lesswrong’s “optimal exercise” routine—it is indeed optimized...for increasing strength and speed. However, if you need to lose weight (obesity will exacerbate your condition) you might want to add in extended periods of walking or running.

Also, technical correction: fruits are simple sugars. (Don’t let that stop you from fruits though, because it turns out that the simple/complex dichotomy turns out not to correlate particularly well with glycemic index anyway.)

someonewrongonthenet Jan 28, 2015, 4:25 PM
0 points
in reply to: tog’s comment on: What topics are appropriate for LessWrong?
Yup. That was normative advice, not a descriptive statement. In actual fact you should post whatever strikes your fancy and upvotes/downvotes will give you descriptive feedback. I often upvote things myself that are off topic by my standards if I actually learn something.

practically speaking, I think the votes decide, but from a standpoint of policing the boundaries this is what I’d encourage.

someonewrongonthenet Jan 25, 2015, 8:41 AM
1 point
in reply to: JonahS’s comment on: The Role of Attractiveness in Mate Selection: Individual Variation

What do you see as the key points of the article? / How is my new sumarry

Here’s what my “abstract” would be—apologies if the parts describing math are wrong.

“Speed Dating participants rated each other for attractiveness, fun, ambition, intelligence sincerity, and likability prior to choosing matches. While all participants were more likely to choose partners that others had rated highly, a principle component analysis revealed that a major source of variation was the degree to which participants differed in prioritizing ambition, intelligence, and sincerity vs attractiveness, fun, and likability. Further analysis suggests that this effect may be driven by… [demographic correlates from next posts, assortive mating, etc]

Our writing styles differ but your new summary seems to cover the same points, so we do agree on what they are! So much for irreducible complexity :P

I need to talk with psychology researchers to get a better sense for how what I’ve done fits in with the literature. In the past, I read some papers on the subject out of casual interest, but I haven’t done a deep dive.

I’m to be a psych or neuroscience graduate student fairly soon (depending on where I get accepted). Mate choice isn’t something I know a ton about and there are of course many, many better people to talk to than me, but I know enough that I could easily locate and understand the relevant literature. I’d be quite happy to collaborate if you are interested!

Anything that I might be able to help with? I have a background is in math education.

I’m not sure—there are a lot of unknown unknowns! Thank you for the links.

I’ve got a decent foundation in introductory calc and stats (by which I mean, I successfully memorized the relevant equations with a reasonable intuition about how they work) but the math bug didn’t really bite me until I took a proof based class on logic and set theory,finding it intuitive and fun. So, I thought I’d keep going in math, but I found myself seriously falling behind in subjects like linear algebra and never completed the major. (Got the certificate at least :D)

My impression is that I’ve got the fluid intuition for it but I start fall behind when cumulative crystallized knowledge requirements start increasing because I tend to forget things more quickly than others and rely on re-derivation a bit too much.

Statistics is probably going to be the most useful thing for me to learn, given my career choices—although I suspect I automatically gravitate towards less applied, proofy theory things more. (I’m probably too early in my math progression too early to know that for sure, but it certainly seemed like math which others found hard were easy for me, while some types of math which others found easy were really hard for me)

One sees that past a certain point, the low group is not responsive to increasing sincerity and intelligence, whereas the high group is.

^ from the article. Is this right? It seems like that aught to be reversed (low group is responsive, high group is not responsive)?

someonewrongonthenet Jan 24, 2015, 7:46 AM
1 point
in reply to: JonahS’s comment on: The Role of Attractiveness in Mate Selection: Individual Variation
Oh no that’s not what I meant!

I can’t speak to the validity because my quantitative skills are untrained to the point that I have to spend an entire day learning in order to pick up enough background to distinguish good math from bad math for anything more complex than a p-value, and until this changes (and I fully intend to change it) I have to just hope that the equation-using overlords know what they are doing.

I definitely wasn’t saying your math wasn’t well defined enough! I have no opinions on that particular matter, because, see above. It’s not the fault of your writing at all—you’d probably have to write a textbook to get me completely up to speed here. I’m generally sharp enough to know what you are trying to do with the math, but not nearly knowledgeable enough to know whether or not it is correct.

I very much enjoyed the results though! (Especialy the trade-off thing...it fits together with a lot of the other literature on prioritizing in long term and short term mating, and I don’t think anyone has ever supported that particular theory using this particular method. Kinda wish we had data on menstrual cycle phase to go with this :P If you’re planning on publishing you might want to cite stuff within that whole body of work.

I found it all quite understandable, clear, and interesting =) Totally disagree with shminux on the “dry” part. Although, an abstract up-front would probably help reach more readers..

someonewrongonthenet Jan 23, 2015, 9:14 PM
5 points
in reply to: Vika’s comment on: Purchasing research effectively open thread
Actually, my uninformed guess (from casual familiarity and friendship with people from various fields) is that physics and chemistry are cheaper than biology to conduct. There’s expensive equipment in Phys/Chem but it can be re-used over and over again by multiple labs. Biology on the other hand has major recurring costs in the form of maintaining animal populations and greater degree to which replication is important. And then things get cheaper again in the psych/social sciences, where experiments are often either computerized or conducted by undergraduates for credit and conducted on volunteers.

Basically, if you graph xkcd!purity by price, I think it is bell shaped with Biology at the peak. In an absolute “per researcher, per experiment” sense. That’s not to say that biology might not be “cheaper” in terms of return on investment from an EA standpoint.

someonewrongonthenet Jan 23, 2015, 9:08 PM
3 points
on: Purchasing research effectively open thread
What is a good source that will help me evaluate the merits of donating to scientific research vs., say, the merits of donating to global poverty and disease alleviation?

Before thinking about how to best donate to research, I’d generally want to know about the merits of research donation in general.

My priors say research is important and underfunded to a degree comparable with how global poverty alleviation is important and underfunded, but how to quantify which is more important?

someonewrongonthenet Jan 23, 2015, 8:54 PM
0 points
in reply to: polymathwannabe’s comment on: Open thread, Jan. 19 - Jan. 25, 2015
My feeling is that gorillas are pretty important just because they are apes (for practical research purposes, although I think they have a fair degree of intrinsic value too). Seed dispersion seems the least of these benefits. (On the other hand, I suppose the existence of other apes poses a disease threat to humans).

We should really demand more funding for research, in general. Under-funding research may be the single most irrational thing we do as a society, considering the return on investment.

someonewrongonthenet Jan 23, 2015, 5:59 PM
0 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: The Role of Attractiveness in Mate Selection: Individual Variation

tl;dr is that being conventionally pretty helps a lot :-P

That’s not the tl:dr of this analysis at all. there’s Betty-Veronica type trade off effects, there’s individual differences, there are mechanisms of assortive mating...i can’t speak to the validity/certainty of the statistics but if the conclusions are valid there is a publishable amount of juicy stuff in here.

someonewrongonthenet Jan 21, 2015, 7:30 PM
1 point
on: Optimal eating (or rather, a step in the right direction)
Do you know why you are hypoglycemic? (Diabetes? Liver failure...?) I feel that this is fairly important in determining what the diet aught to be.