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Someone changed the password on the Username public throwaway account. It's a shame a troll finally got to it after several years.
In response to
Open Thread August 31 - September 6
I actually meant to ask at some point whether the Username account would have protection against people changing passwords willy-nilly, but I didn't because, you know... information hazards and all that. Didn't want to give people the idea. But now that it's happened, I suppose I could ask retrospectively: how come nobody ensured some protection against that?
In response to
Should there be more people on the leaderboard?
My impression is that prolific posters show up on the Top Contributors list more often than low-post-count, high-karma posters. And, of course, worst of all they don't get ranked by positive karma percentage, or by karma per post. Somebody posting a good article in Main seems to be a less common cause of showing up on the list than high output.
For that reason, I don't see it as having a positive motivational effect either. I pay loads of attention to my positive karma percentage, none at all to karma in absolute terms. If I wanted to be on the list, my best bet would be to chime in on everything no matter how low-value my opinion actually is – which appears to be a poor and occasionally frustrating use of my time. Quality, not quantity.
In response to
Group Rationality Diary, August 30 - September 12
Might have gotten better at calibration. I've been bookmarking about 55 items of various prices on a wishlist, and wanted to figure out their total price. I could have made an Excel document with all the prices, but I lazed out of it and assumed their average price was 400 (of my local currency), and computed a total from that. Eventually I did make the spreadsheet. Lo and behold, the calculated average really was 400.48! It's probably my most accurate estimation to date. (Sure enough, n=1, but other instances of calibration haven't been so accurate as to be this memorable.)
Now, to actually get to earn the money for that total price...
How do you measure accuracy separately?
A more accurate impression is basically always one that notices more mistakes. Besides, after some time passes every flaw in my performance becomes painfully obvious to me, most likely because the piece is no longer in my recent memory and therefore probably no longer subject to this unconscious attempt to gloss over mistakes.
And of course, after a while, you just develop an intuition for this kind of thing.
In response to
Group Rationality Diary, August 30 - September 12
Bias in action: I practice my singing by doing voice recordings with my phone and then listening to them for feedback. (2 years and going, the improvement has been tremendous, I went from ashamed to somewhat proud of my singing voice.) I've been noticing myself physically clench up while listening to pieces of particularly... uncertain quality. It's a state of muscle tension that tends to accompany a mental state of defensiveness about my performance. As if I'm exerting effort in an attempt to squeeze every drop of appreciation from my perception. I certainly don't mean to get so insecure about it that I have to dupe myself into liking what I hear, but it happens outside of my control.
I notice this most of the time, and reminding myself to relax muscularly usually helps with perceiving the quality of my practice more accurately.
Does anyone else get this in various other contexts?
In response to
Manhood of Humanity
Assuming you're doing the book justice and it really can be summarized as such, it comes off as an instance of the STEM mindset overstepping its boundaries. Did the author have any familiarity with the social sciences? I understand that the whole idea was to import the hard-science paradigm into the study of how to ensure the success of societies, but I've read scientifically-minded commentaries on society that didn't seem this... off. It's like he doesn't even know how the other side of academia approaches the matter, which I find hard to believe given that he wrote a book on essentially their subject matter. I mean come on, he thinks mechanical engineers are relevant to basically any discipline and role in society.
Moreover, the perspective of the book is, if I can call it so, pan-STEM and that appears to render individual contributions from all sciences useless. You can make use of evolutionary biology to understand matters such as human sexuality and morality. You can employ cybernetics to design and improve social networks. You can use math to get precise answers to problems in micro- and macroeconomics. You can analyse biomolecules in the brain to draw inferences about how the mind works and how to alleviate its pathologies. But what baffles me is how, by viewing society through all of the sciences, you can negate the insights derived from any of them, and abandon all of social science on the way.
To give a few examples of what I mean when I say the author sounds like he doesn't know his Social Sciences 101: dividing people by class into the rich, the poor, and the intellectuals is not so much a categorization as it is a trivial game of "odd one out"; the analogy human:cube::animal:square is so bad it's not even wrong, and there was no point in bringing up dimensionality here aside from pushing this strange notion of "time-binding"; related, saying that humans are animals is not a category error, it's a truth yet not exploited to its full capacity; knowledge of nature and science is not a remedy from, but orthogonal to, the failure modes of capitalism and socialism; chapter 9 is totally not how you build institutions; ethics changes less than one may think; economics is mostly not a study of transgenerational endeavours; prehistory is not just like history but older, etc.
Maybe it's the age of the book, and maybe it sounded insightful at its time, but going by this summary, to a modern reader it might justifiably sound sophomoric. Then again, I haven't read it and do not know exactly what the author claims in the book.
and the fact that youth is basically never an indicator of "savvy"
In the area of computers, particularly things related to computers that appeared relatively recently and which youths are more inclined to use, it often is such an indicator.
Hence the qualifier "basically". I'm aware of a few exceptions related to products marketed to the 18-25 (or even 18-35) age range.
In response to
Group rationality diary for July 12th - August 1st 2015
Well, that's quite the coincidence – so did I! My German has been in need of revision for many years, and I was pretty surprised to see just how much I had forgotten. Also signed up for a project on teaching my own language through English; waiting to see what comes out of it.
In response to
Open Thread - Aug 24 - Aug 30
I feel guilty that I'm not using facebook, something that might be pretty exclusive to our generations, where the next version may be less amenable to such gaming, to use it to do something BIG - like start the next arab spring, or push products to sell, or become a politician and advertise on it using my youthful savvy. Can anybody pass on some advice?
This whole subthread stinks of Dunning-Kruger. Youthful savvy? Cultish following? Guilt about not using Facebook? Putting internet sales on par with a revolutionary movement spanning several countries? That doesn't sound like you know what you're talking about.
I don't know exactly who you're supposed to persuade, but your track record so far on LessWrong shows that you barely manage to break even with your karma, and that you lack the level of self-awareness of a socially well-adapted person. Whoever you successfully persuade would have to be even more oblivious than you, which is saying something. Given what you said here you'd use Facebook for, I for one am glad neither I nor you are using it.
I don't mean for this to be a pointless ad hominem attack; the reason I'm responding this way is for you to take this as a prompter that you need to get out of your own head and think more clearly about matters involving yourself, or how you come off as. Because the way you think about this whole business is a huge red flag. The fact that self-promoters, salesmen, and slacktivists on FB tend to piss off people more than anything else, and the fact that youth is basically never an indicator of "savvy" are two things that should be obvious to everyone who has even a modicum of experience with the internet or life in general.
... Just out of curiosity, how old are you?
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I've seen a suggestion in a comment here that you don't want your positive karma percentage to be near 100%, because it indicates you are being consumed by the hive mind.
That's something you might want to go by. Not me. I don't thrive in controversy nearly as much as you. The topics on which LessWrongers go hivemind-y about can very easily be sidestepped without incurring downvotes; medium to low karma percentages more often indicate that the poster has a penchant for getting himself into every controversial shit the site has to offer.