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magfrump comments on What are you working on? - Less Wrong Discussion
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Improving social skills: I have made a number of new friends over the summer, took notes, started using alcohol as a social tool, and hit on and picked up a number of young women successfully.
Mathematics: I have been reading Silverman's "Arithmetic of Elliptic Curves" and attempting all of the exercises at the behest of my advisor, and attending number theory seminars at Stanford.
Practical: My computer's keyboard is having problems so I tried to fix it but I may have to replace it (every time I type "p" it also goes back a space, and other issues.)
LessWrong: I have been reading and taking notes (though my notes have suffered due to keyboard issues) on "The Skeptical Environmentalist" by Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish professor of statistics and former member of Greenpeace who evaluates the facts on various environmental issues. It is a great read and I'm glad I'm doing it but it is rather long.
Most of this sounds good. The last seems less so. Lomborg makes occasionally valid points but the book is in many ways an exercise in motivated cognition.
Have you read the book? The entire premise was that he was debunking claims and ended up being persuaded by them; this seems like the opposite of motivated cognition.
I won't deny that it seems fairly one sided but it does seem like taking opposing views would be difficult, since he uses the same citations as groups he disagrees with and presumably is better with statistics as a statistics professor; I don't mean to say that one should be totally convinced by his arguments, but more convinced than I should be by all the arguments without statistics I've heard before which were about 50 times as much motivated cognition.
Yes. I have read it. I'm familiar with what he claims he is doing, and frankly, I couldn't tell if it was dishonesty or general lack of self-awareness about his own cognitive processes.
This is not to say that he doesn't make good points on occasion. And a lot of the responses to him demonstrated about as bad motivated cognition or worse.
There's a January 2002 Scientific American that had multiple essays discussing the book, some of which are worth reading, and illustrate how some of the scientists he is citing have said explicitly that he's misinterpreting their work.
That's not to say that the book is a complete waste of time. There are two general points that Lomborg does make that I found to be worth-while: One, that everything has trade-offs and that much of the environmental movement doesn't appreciate that and how one should look at the marginal rate of return. I suspect that this sort of argument won't be at all original to most readers of LW. Two, that by many metrics much of the developed world is environmentally better off now than it was fifty or a hundred years ago, and by some metrics for some large cities, even larger spans of time. There are also interesting statistics he brings up which by themselves are useful for understanding a larger picture of the world.
The problem with a book like this that touches on a lot of different areas where the author is both not an expert and where experts in some of the areas have specifically pointed out issues with his interpretation of their fields is that it is very hard for a non-expert to tell when he's made a good point and when he's using the data well.
Voted up.
I intended to post this earlier but it didn't seem to go through: I'd be interested in references to the responses you have in mind, so that when I finish the book I could read them and incorporate them into the summary.
Unfortunately, the last time I paid attention to this book was shortly after it came out, so I don't have a lot of references off-hand. The already mentioned Scientific American seems to be a good place to start (although note that when Lomborg wanted a right of response SA behaved not so well.)
Mk, well chances are it will be a while before I finish the book since I have a lot else to do at the moment; if you stumble across anything let me know otherwise I'll search myself when I get around to it.
Could you explain how exactly you use alcohol as a social tool? I'm not issuing a challenge or anything; I'm just wondering what your experience has been.
Well, I looked over a handful of LW posts and PUA sites and videos and observed the key steps in socializing; something like "talk and then the other person talks and then get them to laugh and find something they're interested in and touch people in non threatening ways like on the shoulder when you talk to them." Then I looked at which of these things I had problems with, and what tools I could use to solve them; i.e. if I wore a fabulous sparkly pink hat a lot, that made it easy to get laughs at first, and if I had a few drinks first it made it easier to say the first few words to the other person.
I don't know how well I'm explaining this but basically, it can be helpful to emulate being another person; on some level this has to be a brain chemistry event, and alcohol modifies your brain chemistry in an observable way. For me, that way was often helpful to my goals of being more social.
I've always chalked up the useful effects of alcohol to be because it alleviates the embarrassment of making mistakes: "Wasn't my fault. I was drunk." Being too afraid of screwing up in front of others is a very common problem to have, so alcohol is helpful to a very wide variety of people.
Do you think that particular effect (helpful for emulating another person) could be subsumed under my above analysis, or do you think there's something else to it?
I think that if we tried to break down which specific chemical reactions we were talking about, we would be talking about the same ones. I haven't been very eloquent about this and my keyboard is glitching at the moment so it is frustrating to try to type about it. Maybe later I could talk more about the subject but I doubt I have anything new to say.