I doubt it's the most efficient method, but I've been running basic Bayesian math on things like "given the coin came up heads the last 20 times, should I assume it's a fair or weighted coin?" I figure learning to do the math quickly will help me get it down to the point where I can at least ballpark the math on the 5-second level. It's also been helping me ballpark priors, and observe how different priors can affect the math.

Skill: The accurate and timely assessment of basic probability ie: determining a person's likely response in any given conversation, determining odds of common occurrences, etc. The benefit to communication and the time-saving possibilities of such a skill are such that I feel any aspiring rationalist should pay specific attention to the development of basic probabilistic abilities.

So if you loved your brother dearly and everybody else knew this, you would feel less guilt if he died while you were on a hiking trip together with a group of other people?

Thinking back to how the cliff ledge where he'd been standing suddenly began to collapse, and everyone else had simply stood there, frozen, and you instantly lunged towards him, and actually managed to just just brush his finger tips... but by that time you had fallen over the edge yourself.

Then WHUMPH! an out-jutting tree broke your fall, knocking the wind out of you like the fist of a god. You hung there, bent double, bleeding and bruised, unable to draw even the shallowest breath, and could do nothing but watch in the slow motion vision of the adrenalin rush, as your twin brother and best friend in all the world fell... and struck a sharp outcropping with a sickening wet crack... and tumbled... and fell again... and hit... and rolled... and fell again... and...

Well, I'm not sure, but I think I'd feel guilty after that. "Auto-flagellation" indeed; Constant thoughts of 'If only I'd been a little faster!', even though everyone who saw the event says, 'A little faster? You can't beat yourself up for not being super-human!'

Unfortunately I have no such brother myself, so I guess I can't be sure.

My own little brother, by contrast... well, he has been diagnosed as psychotic, I'm pretty sure it would be correct to say that he hates me, and I can't honestly deny that I feel he's pretty worthless as a human being.

I don't want him to die (I don't want anyone to die), but if we were ever in a situation together, alone, where I had to decide whether to let him die or take a great risk to my own safety in exchange for a small chance of saving him... the choice is obvious.

And I wouldn't feel guilty about it, I don't think. A little sad and angry at the unfairness and cruelty of the world, but no more than I do when I think about some distant newspaper tragedy.

What do you think?

Complex problems have simple, easy to understand wrong answers.

— Grossman's Law

As a citizen of Houston,

Awesome! Good to see another LW Texan!

I am positively terrified of Waco, although your presence there seems to indicate that there may be some sort of underground vein of rationalism in the area...

Heh, I keep telling the folks here the same thing, that they're overestimating the latent rationalists in the area. For my part, I'm only even here because I got a good job offer a while back and haven't done much to find other jobs/cities since.

The primary sources of latent rationalists would be:

• The Unitarian Universalist church that I visited last Sunday
• White-collar employees at the two aerospace employers (yes, Waco has an aerospace industry), L-3 Communications and SpaceX (yes, SpaceX has operations in Waco)
• The Baylor and community college students that aren't gung-ho churchgoers

Anyway, in the future, maybe the Texas LWers could meet in College Station, which would put the meetup about equidistant from Dallas, Waco, Austin, and Houston. Bonus points for you if you make it to this one, but that is quite a ways to travel.

As a citizen of Houston, I am positively terrified of Waco, although your presence there seems to indicate that there may be some sort of underground vein of rationalism in the area...

Is this from a particular book, or something he said randomly?

"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?"

Douglas Adams

This quote defines my approach to science and philosophy; a phenomenon can be wondrous on its own merit, it need not be magical or extraordinary to have value.

This post rings true for me. I have a pretty overactive guilt reaction, and I think I'm considered to be trustworthy and reliable (except when it comes to group academic projects, as per previous posts!). For example, if I make plans with somebody, even the thought of cancelling makes me feel guilty...so I don't cancel on people. Thus I have a reputation as someone who doesn't cancel. More to do with self-behaviour modification than with overt displays of guilt, and I don't think most people know that the reason why I'm reliable is because I feel guilty if I'm not.

Hi, new here.

I am utterly incapable of forming voluntary mental images, and experience very faint involuntary ones only occasionally, during the hypnagogic state when falling asleep. (I used to practice at manipulating these, but made no headway.) I do experience afterimages, and I must be encoding information in a 'visual format' somewhere, because I can rotate molecular models (for example) in my mind with no problem, and get a very faint disturbance in my visual field when I do so.

Yet I do dream, sometimes quite vividly. Dreams are pretty much the only time I see something purely in my mind. I once experienced bizarre visual hallucinations due to a side-effect of medication, and they struck me as being quite dreamlike.

I suspect that my incapacity for mental imagery was strongly influenced by the fact I was born blind, and had no usable vision until the age of three. However, so far as I know, that doesn't explain my incapacity for other kinds of sensory imagination.

I am a fairly skilled singer, with a good pitch sense, yet I would not say I can 'hear a tune in my head'. Rather my experience is that I 'just know' what intervals sound like, how the tune flows. I can hum or sing it for you from memory, but I cannot 'play it back' in my mind. When I try, what I really end up doing is making motions in my mouth and throat as if I were singing very faintly. It's as if the information is encoded somewhere, but gets decoded only at the point of action. In much the same way, though I can't draw well, I can roughly draw complex shapes from memory - like the outline of the contiguous United States. But I am not aware of experiencing that shape in a visual way in my mind; it is somehow encoded.

I used to believe, as this excellent post says, that my experience was universal and that all talk of 'visual imagery' was metaphor, but I was convinced otherwise by deep conversation with a close friend who is an eidetic imager.