Dmytry comments on Get Curious - Less Wrong

51 Post author: lukeprog 24 February 2012 05:10AM

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Comment author: Armok_GoB 22 February 2012 10:15:08PM 4 points [-]

I consistently fail several times over at this. I always feel I DO know everything worth knowing, and while obviously wrong can't come up with any salient counterexamples. Probably related to memory problems I have, I don't seem able to come up with examples or counterexamples of anything ever.

And when I do consider multiple possibilities, they never seem to matter for what actions I should take, which drains any motivation to find out the answer if it takes more than 30 seconds of googling or I happen to not be at my computer when the question occurs.

All the information I take in seems to be about new ideas, not evidence for or against old ones.

All this is obviously absurd and I'm a bad rationalist and deserve extremely low status for this heinous lack of virtue, being but a burden to the tribe! Woe is me!

Help?

Comment author: lukeprog 23 February 2012 01:12:19AM 16 points [-]

Good. Let's see if we can make progress.

  1. New habit: Every time you're wrong, write down what you were wrong about.
  2. Play 'the calibration game': Use Wits & Wagers cards and give your confidence intervals. You'll probably find that 40% of the time, the correct answer was outside your 90% confidence interval. Write down all those failures.
  3. If the different hypotheses don't matter for which actions you take, you're either bad at realizing the decision-theoretic implications of various hypotheses, or you're bad at spending your time thinking about things that matter. Which do you think it is?
  4. Rarely is new information not evidence for or against old ideas. Maybe you need more practice in model-building? This is a separate post I'd like to write at some time; I'm not sure what useful thing I can say about it now.
  5. Re: your "heinous lack of virtue." Reward yourself for effort, not for results. You have more control over the former.
Comment author: Dmytry 25 February 2012 04:36:28PM 0 points [-]

you need both the instances you are right and the instances you are wrong to do correct stats... otherwise i can have 90% confidence, be wrong one time out of 10, and 100% of those times that i am wrong, have the answer outside 90% confidence interval.

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