Viktor Riabtsev

Karma: 38

Viktor Riabtsev Jan 4, 2019, 6:57 PM
0 points
on: About Less Wrong

Less Wrong consists of three areas: The main community blog, the Less Wrong wiki and the Less Wrong discussion area.

Maybe redirect the lesswrong.com/r/discussion/ link & description to the “Ask a Question” beta?

Viktor Riabtsev Dec 29, 2018, 2:15 AM
0 points
in reply to: Benquo’s comment on: Sunscreen. When? Why? Why not?
That was a great read.

figure out what was going on rather than desperately trying to multiply and divide all the numbers in the problem by one another.

That one hits home. I’ve been doing a bit of math lately, nothing too hard, just some derivatives/limits, and I’ve found myself spending inordinate amounts of time trying taking derivatives and do random algebra. Just generally flailing around hoping to hit the right strategy instead pausing to think first: “How should this imply that?” or “What does this suggest?” before doing rote algebra.

Viktor Riabtsev Dec 28, 2018, 12:14 PM
0 points
in reply to: Shmi’s comment on: Sunscreen. When? Why? Why not?
UV meters! Thank you! Seems such an obvious idea in hindsight.

Why wonder blindly when you can quantify it. I’ll look into getting one.

Viktor Riabtsev Dec 27, 2018, 11:01 PM
2 points
on: Resist the Happy Death Spiral
Dead link to “scientists shouldn’t even try to take ethical responsibility for their work” link is now here

Viktor Riabtsev Dec 27, 2018, 10:14 PM
0 points
in reply to: Ben Pace’s comment on: Sunscreen. When? Why? Why not?
I did that a couple minutes ago. Then tried to fix the formatting, and I think I then subsequently undid your formatting fixes.

[Question] Sunscreen. When? Why? Why not?

Viktor RiabtsevDec 27, 2018, 10:04 PM

5 points

22 comments1 min readLW link

Viktor Riabtsev Oct 30, 2018, 7:18 PM
9 points
0
in reply to: Stuart_Armstrong’s comment on: Human Evil and Muddled Thinking
Related:
“Sometimes a hypocrite is nothing more than a man in the process of changing.” ― Brandon Sanderson, Oathbringer (By Dalinar Kholin)

Viktor Riabtsev Oct 24, 2018, 1:52 PM
2 points
in reply to: pnrjulius’s comment on: 0 And 1 Are Not Probabilities
Umm, it’s a real thing. ECC memory https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECC_memory I’m sure it isn’t 100% foolproof (coincidentally the point of this article) but I imagine it reduces error probability by orders of magnitude.

Viktor Riabtsev Oct 23, 2018, 11:22 PM
1 point
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Lotteries: A Waste of Hope
I’d say there are mental patterns/heuristics that can be learned from video games that are in fact useful.
Persistence, optimization, patience.
I won’t argue there aren’t all sorts of exciting pitfalls and negatives that could also be experienced; I would just point at something like Dark Souls and claim: “yeah, that one does it well enough on the positives”.

Viktor Riabtsev Oct 23, 2018, 10:34 PM
2 points
in reply to: Drf’s comment on: The Third Alternative
That’s one large part of the traditional approach to the Santa-ism, yeah. But, it doesn’t have to be, as Eliezer describes in the top comment.

Viktor Riabtsev Oct 23, 2018, 10:17 PM
1 point
in reply to: glorius_lasagne’s comment on: The Proper Use of Humility
it is still relatively unlikely that a person disagree for an opportunity to refine their model of the universe.
It still does happen though. I’ve only gotten this far in the Recommended Sequences, but I’ve been reading the comments whenever I finish a sub-sequence; and they (a) definitely add to the understanding, and (b) expose occasional comment threads where two people arrive at mutual understanding (clear up lexical miscommunication etc.). “oops” moments are rare, but the whole karma system seems great for occasional productive discourse.
That is obviously not an analog for the face-to-face experience, but isn’t the “take a chance on it” approach still better then a general prohibitive “not worth it” attitude? You can be polite (self-skeptical etc.) while probing your metaphorical opponent. Non confrontational discussions are kind of essential to furthering one’s understanding about what’s going on and why.

Viktor Riabtsev Oct 22, 2018, 4:18 PM
3 points
in reply to: Ender’s comment on: Truly Part Of You
35 − 8 = 20 + (15 − 8)
Wow. I’ve never even conceived of this (on it’s own or) as a simplification.
My entire life has been the latter simplification method.

Viktor Riabtsev Oct 21, 2018, 8:33 PM
1 point
in reply to: johnlawrenceaspden’s comment on: Fake Explanations
My favorite thing to do in physics/math classes, all the way up 2nd year in university (I went into engineering), was to ask others how they fared on tests, (in order to) then try to figure out why my answers were wrong.
I found genuine pleasure in understanding where I went wrong. Yet this seemed taboo in highschool, and (slightly less) frowned upon in university.
I feel like rewarding the student who messed up, however much or little, with some fraction of the total test score, like 10%; would be a great idea. You gain incentive to figure out what you missed; even if you care little about it. That’s better then nothing.

Viktor Riabtsev Oct 21, 2018, 6:09 PM
1 point
in reply to: Vladimir_Nesov’s comment on: Closet survey #1
Reading these comment chains somehow strongly reminds of listening to Louis CK.

Viktor Riabtsev Oct 18, 2018, 4:25 PM
3 points
on: Occam’s Razor
I found a reference to a very nice overview for the mathematical motivations of Occam’s Razor on wikipedia.
It’s Chapter 28: Model Comparison and Occam’s Razor; from (page 355 of) Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms (legally free to read pdf) by David J. C. MacKay.
The Solomonoff Induction stuff went over my head, but this overview’s talk of trade-offs between communicating increasing numbers of model parameters vs having to communicate less residuals (ie. offsets from real data); was very informative.

Viktor Riabtsev Oct 16, 2018, 4:26 PM
1 point
in reply to: Ab3’s comment on: What is Evidence?
then your model says that your beliefs are not themselves evidence, meaning they
I think this should be more like “then your model offers weak evidence that your beliefs are not themselves evidence”.
If you’re Galileo and find yourself incapable of convincing the church about heliocentrism, this doesn’t mean you’re wrong.
Edit: g addresses this nicely.

Viktor Riabtsev Oct 14, 2018, 2:40 PM
2 points
in reply to: bigjeff5’s comment on: Applause Lights
Upvoted for the “oops” moment.

Viktor Riabtsev Oct 14, 2018, 2:05 PM
9 points
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Belief as Attire
Thank you. I tried using http://archive.fo/ , but no luck.
I’ll add https://web.archive.org/ to bookmarks too.

Viktor Riabtsev Oct 14, 2018, 1:48 PM
1 point
in reply to: chris-hexx’s comment on: Belief as Attire
Dead link :(.

Viktor Riabtsev Oct 13, 2018, 7:17 PM
1 point
in reply to: kodos96’s comment on: Religion’s Claim to be Non-Disprovable
Yeah, you never know if someone in the process of reading the Sequences, won’t periodically go back and try to read all the discussions. Like, I am not going to read the twenty posts with 0 karma and 0 replies; but ones with comments? Opposing ideas and discussions spark invigorating thought. Though it does get a bit tedious on the more popularized articles, like this one.

Viktor Riabtsev

[Question] Sun­screen. When? Why? Why not?

[Question] Sunscreen. When? Why? Why not?