Yvain comments on Rationality Quotes: June 2011 - Less Wrong

4 Post author: Oscar_Cunningham 01 June 2011 08:17AM

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Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 02 September 2011 09:57:56AM 17 points [-]

<mental model of Michael Vassar says>This strikes me as a nerdism. If you don't find less intelligent people easier to manipulate, you must be working on sympathetic models of them instead of causal ones. I expect that experience would cure this, and after a few months of empirical practice and updating on the task of reasoning with fools, you would find it was actually easier to get them to do whatever you wanted - if you could manage to actually try a lot of different things and notice what worked, instead of being incredulous and indignant at their apparent reasoning errors.</Vassar>

Comment author: Yvain 02 September 2011 10:36:34AM 14 points [-]

Upvoted the original for reference to Prince of Nothing series. And upvoted this comment for the terms "sympathetic model" and "causal model", which is one of those times that having the right word for a concept you've been trying to understand is worth a month of trying to untangle things in your head.

...although now I'm not sure whether I should upvote Eliezer or Michael Vassar. It seems kind of unfair to deny Michael an upvote just because the specific instantiation of his algorithm that said this happened to be running on Eliezer's brain at the time.

Comment author: thomblake 02 September 2011 01:37:13PM 2 points [-]

having the right word for a concept you've been trying to understand is worth a month of trying to untangle things in your head

On a related note, it's a programming cliche that 90% of development time is trying to think up the right names for things.

Comment author: [deleted] 04 September 2011 02:38:48PM 0 points [-]

"There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things" - Phil Karlton

Comment author: Douglas_Knight 04 September 2011 11:13:17PM *  0 points [-]

I read this out of context and interpreted "naming things" so that it generalized cache invalidation. So I wanted to complain that it's only one thing.

Comment author: Armok_GoB 02 September 2011 01:02:53PM 0 points [-]

I'd say both, although I'm actually to lazy to go find a random post by Michael and upvote it.