Group Rationality Diary, October 16-31

therufs

This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for October 16-31.

It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:

Established a useful new habit

Obtained new evidence that made you change your mind about some belief

Decided to behave in a different way in some set of situations

Optimized some part of a common routine or cached behavior

Consciously changed your emotions or affect with respect to something

Consciously pursued new valuable information about something that could make a big difference in your life

Learned something new about your beliefs, behavior, or life that surprised you

Tried doing any of the above and failed

Or anything else interesting which you want to share, so that other people can think about it, and perhaps be inspired to take action themselves. Try to include enough details so that everyone can use each other's experiences to learn about what tends to work out, and what doesn't tend to work out.

The poll earlier this month seems to be sufficiently in favor of maintaining the current schedule that extra votes are unlikely to change things much, but if you'd really like to register your opinion, you are welcome to do so here.

Thanks to cata for starting the Group Rationality Diary posts, and to commenters for participating.

Immediate past diary: October 1-15

Next diary: November 1-15

Rationality diaries archive

This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for October 16-31.

It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:

Established a useful new habit

Obtained new evidence that made you change your mind about some belief

Decided to behave in a different way in some set of situations

Optimized some part of a common routine or cached behavior

Consciously changed your emotions or affect with respect to something

Consciously pursued new valuable information about something that could make a big difference in your life

Learned something new about your beliefs, behavior, or life that surprised you

Tried doing any of the above and failed

Or anything else interesting which you want to share, so that other people can think about it, and perhaps be inspired to take action themselves. Try to include enough details so that everyone can use each other's experiences to learn about what tends to work out, and what doesn't tend to work out.

Thanks to cata for starting the Group Rationality Diary posts, and to commenters for participating.

Immediate past diary: October 1-15

Next diary: November 1-15

Rationality diaries archive

I switch to routine tasks like checkin preparation, mail, time tracking, picking up conversations, eating, streching, surfing. If it really takes longer (>>15m) I will begin the next independent task.

But generally you should avoid long modify-test cycles. Use a much smaller data set/matrix/grid size to try out your modifications and if they show what they shoud run with the larger set.

I have more experience with accounting and media data but the principle of reducing the data volume or even generating synthetic test data should apply to most numerical or engineering problems too.

One anecdote by Feynman when he was in Los Alamos is about this kidn of batch processing (then with punch cards). One thing I remember from that is that they ran multiple computations in parallel. But then they got partial and early feedback which not every computation may.