David_Gerard comments on London Meetup on 2011/1/2 - Less Wrong

7 Post author: Alexandros 19 December 2010 09:01PM

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Comment author: David_Gerard 03 January 2011 02:42:33PM *  1 point [-]

Homework!

Prompted by Anna asking what rationality techniques or areas LessWrong had yet to cover.

Need at least a few paragraphs for the discussion forums on the following.

  • ciphergoth:

  • How to think for more than 20 seconds

    • Prompted by Dawkins video in which he laments only being able to think coherently for about a minute at a time.
    • Methods: talking to oneself (my girlfriend kicks me when I wake her mumbling to myself at 5am); scribbling notes; mindmaps?

  • What LessWrong is to me (his elevator speech on the subject)

    • prompt: he kept coming out with bits of it

  • Andrei (cev)

  • How to teach rationality to eight year olds

    • Andrei's day job is teaching said eight year olds.
    • Cooking to teach science? - try something, see what happens, keep notes, predict things - very practical results

  • David Gerard

  • poison memes

    • find at least one coherent chunk in my tens of kilobytes of notes

  • Quickly estimating a belief's credit rating: is it likely to be able to pay its rent?

    • I have no idea how to actually do this, so ideas are welcomed
    • prompt: a philosopher (a Ben?) gave a philosophical question on morality, it struck me as "that's either very profound or complete rubbish" and I came out with something about it not having a good credit rating

  • How to ask the right question

    • prompt: how to think for 20 seconds ... most of the work is asking the question, which takes me days to months. This is an area ripe for exploration.

Did anyone else present come out with something that struck you as very interesting that you or they should write up?

Edit: markdown is such a PITA. Is there a proper way to do lists with sub-lists? Edit 2: ah, space in front per level, that's got it.

Comment author: taryneast 04 January 2011 10:52:46AM 2 points [-]

Cooking to teach science?

ooh - awesome. I've actually already been thinking about how to teach basic Cooking-chemistry. I've already got quite a list of ideas..

I've also got some for Garden Biology, Bathtub Physics and several other sciences.

Comment author: wedrifid 03 January 2011 03:52:39PM *  1 point [-]

Edit: markdown is such a PITA. Is there a proper way to do lists with sub-lists?

A space before the asterices that you wish to make into the nested list. Probably looks better if one of the levels is of a different kind. The lesswrong stylesheet does not appear to include different bullet point formatting based on nest level.

For example:

 1. One
* One sub
2. Two
3. Three
Comment author: David_Gerard 03 January 2011 04:04:36PM -1 points [-]

Yep, space in front per level. Thank you!

Comment author: gwern 03 January 2011 05:49:20PM 2 points [-]

If in doubt in Markdown, it's worth consulting either http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#list or http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/README.html#nested-lists

Comment author: wedrifid 03 January 2011 05:55:52PM *  1 point [-]

Or do as I did:

Comment author: ciphergoth 03 January 2011 03:49:32PM 1 point [-]

Your TODO list needs less writing and more reading...

Comment author: David_Gerard 03 January 2011 03:57:54PM *  1 point [-]

Undoubtedly.

  • Alternate Pratchetts and sequences.

(I've been rereading the entire Discworld series in order. I am shocked to realise what a startlingly intelligent and clueful man Terry Pratchett is, and his rationalist heroes are pretty amazing too: yer Granny Weatherwax and Havelock Vetinari. Even Vimes, as he slowly, painfully learns to think. Pratchett doesn't give much of how they do what they do to make them required reading, but noting that they are in fact rationalist heroes is IMO useful.)

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