tetsuo55

Karma: 230

tetsuo55 5 Dec 2012 11:54 UTC
0 points
on: How to incentivize LW wiki edits?
I think the rules surrounding the wiki pages should be made more clear and strict. I suggest we use the same rules as wikipedia but with some twists, the main difference being that posts on lesswrong itself count as valid links to reference/quote from in wiki articles. Also we might want to consider now allowing downvoted posts to be used.

Other than that we might want to use a queuing system where a page maintainer reviews changes made and gives karma for accepted changes. At some point you might also consider removing karma for bad changes.

This maintainer thing does not have to mean we don’t instantly see the change. The review can be done after the fact or they can be queued and not be made visible until reviewed.

tetsuo55 4 Dec 2012 10:43 UTC
6 points
on: Train Philosophers with Pearl and Kahneman, not Plato and Kant
Would you consider turning this knowledge into an actual curriculum that includes practice problems and exams?

I’m thinking of something in the lines of MIT’s free curriculum and Khan Academy’s Math section. I have no problem with still linking to these text books as long as the freely available curriculum made by you or your team fills the gaps and there are plenty of ways to test understanding. I name khan’s math section specifically because it uses that infinite practice problems and 10 in a row signals proficiency and has built in SRS.

Unlike khan however i would want to see mastery of whatever is the current status of the field instead of the low target of a certain school’s exam requirements.

tetsuo55 4 Dec 2012 10:34 UTC
2 points
on: Train Philosophers with Pearl and Kahneman, not Plato and Kant
Great post.

I wonder is this study-list also good enough for applied psychology? I would like to learn Cognitive Behaviour Therapy and as you point out above most studies are flawed.

If this post post is not enough could you write another one answering my question?

tetsuo55 6 Nov 2012 13:02 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Nornagest’s comment on: 2012 Less Wrong Census/Survey
How to read the autism score was explained on the test page itself.

quote: “Psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen and his colleagues at Cambridge’s Autism Research Centre have created the Autism-Spectrum Quotient, or AQ, as a measure of the extent of autistic traits in adults. In the first major trial using the test, the average score in the control group was 16.4. Eighty percent of those diagnosed with autism or a related disorder scored 32 or higher. The test is not a means for making a diagnosis, however, and many who score above 32 and even meet the diagnostic criteria for mild autism or Asperger’s report no difficulty functioning in their everyday lives.”

So a score above 32 means you are highly likely of being autistic.

tetsuo55 6 Nov 2012 12:29 UTC
21 points
on: 2012 Less Wrong Census/Survey
I Took the survey and all the extra questions. I could not answer the USA centric school test results, we have a similar system in my country but they cannot be easily converted to eachother.

I’m glad to finally have a BigFive and IQ test that people somewhat agree on using.

tetsuo55 6 Nov 2012 12:28 UTC
1 point
in reply to: daenerys’s comment on: 2012 Less Wrong Census/Survey
i was unable to click or copy them

tetsuo55 16 Oct 2012 12:01 UTC
2 points
on: Decision theory and “winning”
possible typo: “But don’t you wish you were like me, Rachel?”… Rachael can and should admit that she does wish she were more like Irene… ”

“Rachael”

tetsuo55 19 Jun 2012 11:41 UTC
2 points
on: Organic food, conventional food
I have done a lot of reading, testing and visiting of farms for my own small farm. The promises of safe, healthy food at higher yields than conventional conventional farming sounds great.

I have researched 4 types of farming
1. Classic conventional
2. Modern Conventional
3. Organic
4. Permaculture
Unfortunately i will not be able to provide links to scientific studies or books at this time.

The differences between these 4 types are basically:
1. : high crop yield, moderate to heavy use of synthetic pesticides, low crop rotation, high quality crop
2. : Extremely high crop yield, low to moderate use of synthetic pesticides, high crop rotation, extremely high quality crop
3. : Low crop yield, moderate to heavy use of classic pesticides, high crop rotation, low quality crop
4. : Medium to high crop yeild, no use of pesticides, no crop rotation, medium quality crop
Because organic farming relies on classic pesticides the farmers are often forced to use dangerous types that are dangerous to humans and wildlife.

Because modern conventional farming has advanced techniques for choosing crop types and protecting them from pest they can get away with using very little synthetic pesticides. Unlike classic pesticides synthetic ones have to pass a lot of safety testing before they can be used. Rule of thumb: modern synthetic pesticides are safe

Finally due to the options modern conventional farming has, the crop will usually end up being better tasting, prettier to look at, bigger in size and cheaper to produce.

In the organic vs conventional discussion a lot of people fail to realize or mention that modern conventional farming is at a “space age level”, near my home there is a tech research company that designs cutting edge farming machines. These things are basically huge robots that can run a farm almost on their own. Almost all of the farming here occurs in greenhouses that have full climate control with pests being naturally dealt with through the use of wasps and ladybugs, note that these are not organic farms.

tetsuo55 25 Mar 2012 18:00 UTC
0 points
on: Meetup : Brussels meetup
In which language is the meeting going to be? Also how much would parking cost?

tetsuo55 16 Feb 2012 9:35 UTC
6 points
on: Empiricism in Gameplay
This post made me think about this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FpigqfcvlM

In the video the annoyed person who made it explains how games teach the game mechanics intuitively as opposed to not at all or through a spoken or text tutorial.

I think it would be good if you watched this video and applied the lessons it gives to the game as a whole.

tetsuo55 22 Jan 2012 12:14 UTC
9 points
on: How I Ended Up Non-Ambitious
I get the feeling a large portion of this story can be classified as learned helplessness.

Several studies(google for cal newport) have shown that base talent has little effect on how good you can be at something, the real variable is deliberate practice, pushing the limits of what you can handle a tiny bit to slowly keep improving. ( obviously your swimming example does have harder limits imposed by the limits of your body, this does not seem to apply to fields outside of sports though and in sports like boxing there are different classes because of the differences in bodies)

When I learned about grade signalling I started making mistakes on purpose to lower my average (which was around 9.5 at the time). That was a terrible tactic in hindsight and it still causes selfdoubt on exams today.

tetsuo55 21 Jan 2012 9:33 UTC
10 points
on: Some potential dangers of rationality training
I think this is a discussion about what the best order is in which debiasing should occur.

Project management seems to be an implementation of debiasing strategies and they first teach you to make more accurate predictions and then later teach you how to prevent the sunk cost fallacy from not cancelling a failing project.

Because of this i think debiasing should occur in a kind of logical order, one that prevents someone from cancelling all projects due to a good grasp of sunk cost and a bad grasp of utility calculations.

tetsuo55 20 Jan 2012 18:50 UTC
0 points
in reply to: arundelo’s comment on: The Singularity Institute’s Arrogance Problem
Thanks that helped. Too bad the spellchecker missed it.

tetsuo55 20 Jan 2012 16:35 UTC
3 points
in reply to: prase’s comment on: The Singularity Institute’s Arrogance Problem
Thanks, google docs is not flagging any typos, could you point some out for me?

tetsuo55 19 Jan 2012 23:19 UTC
0 points
in reply to: cousin_it’s comment on: POSITION: Design and Write Rationality Curriculum
Defining key performance indicators for things like these is not very hard, neither is developing ways to measure the performance. Tweaking the accuracy and fixing the gamable parts once the basics are done is the harder part. Also these metrics should like any theory be in a continual beta state and get tweaked, just make clear that the trend compared to previous measurements is broken. I can spend a little time on irc teaching someone how to do this but my time is extremely limited right now so it will have to be a formalish appointment with an eager student.

tetsuo55 19 Jan 2012 20:16 UTC
4 points
on: POSITION: Design and Write Rationality Curriculum
I would like to have this as an interactive application. It’s not always so easy to get into a teacher student situation.

There are applications out there for developing this curriculum in a better way than the regular approach. Like the app these guys are selling http://www.knowledge-values.com/ I use apps like this on a daily basis to create the training content at work.

I don’t need a whole game or anything, something as simple as the math exercises on khan academy will do the trick. And i would prefer each skill told as separately and atomically as possible/logically.

tetsuo55 19 Jan 2012 20:10 UTC
4 points
on: The Singularity Institute’s Arrogance Problem
People tell me SI is arrogant but I don’t see it myself. When you tell someone something and open it up to falsification and criticism I no longer see it as arrogance ( but I am wrong there for some reason)

In any case, what annoys me about the claims made is that its mostly based on anecdotal evidence and very little has come from research. Also as a regular guy and not a scientist or engineer I’ve noticed a distinct lack of any discussion of SI’s viewpoints in the news.

I don’t see anyone actively trying to falsify any of the claims in the sequences for example, and I think it’s because you cannot really take them all that seriously.

A second problem is that there are many typos, little mistakes and (due to new experimental evidence) wrong things in the sequences and they never get updated. I’d rather see the sequences as part of a continually updated wiki-like lesson plan, where feedback is reviewed by a kind of board and they change what the texts accordingly.

The nitpicks mentioned on rationalwiki also contribute to the feeling of cultishness and arrogance:

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/LessWrong The part about quantum mechanics could use some extra posts, especially since EY does explain why he makes the claim when you take the whole of the sequences into account. He uses evidence from unrelated fields to prove many worlds.

EDIT: for some unknown reason people are downvoting my comment, if you downvote(d) this post or see why please tell me why so I can learn and improve future posts. Private messages are ok if you don’t want to do it through a response here.

tetsuo55 1 Jan 2012 16:25 UTC
0 points
on: Meta analysis of Writing Therapy
Due to a lack of focus I could not read the whole document, but it does look pretty good to my untrained eyes.

The moderating factors seem to be pretty important, I was unable to collect them all but they should sum up nicely to a how to do writing therapy guideline.

tetsuo55 13 Dec 2011 7:58 UTC
2 points
on: [LINK] Matrix-Style Learning
Note that the matrix-style learning aspect is only in the news bulletin, the actual study has no such information. In fact the skill they learned was not even useful.

But it is nice to see proof that subliminal messaging can work.

tetsuo55 11 Dec 2011 14:53 UTC
7 points
in reply to: Shmi’s comment on: Why I write about the basics
I think it’s a chicken and egg problem. What luke writes on that page really does work, the page suggests building a set of skills and behaviors. But how does one overcome the akrasia about actually doing what the page suggests? I don’t think we have an answer for that.