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I pay loads of attention to my positive karma percentage
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.
In response to
Open Thread August 31 - September 6
Someone changed the password on the Username public throwaway account. It's a shame a troll finally got to it after several years.
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?
Group Rationality Diary, August 30 - September 12
This is the public group rationality diary for August 30th - September 12th, 2015. It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:
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Established a useful new habit
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Obtained new evidence that made you change your mind about some belief
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Decided to behave in a different way in some set of situations
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Optimized some part of a common routine or cached behavior
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Consciously changed your emotions or affect with respect to something
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Consciously pursued new valuable information about something that could make a big difference in your life
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Learned something new about your beliefs, behavior, or life that surprised you
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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.
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.
In response to
Instrumental Rationality Questions Thread
Any thoughts about how to move from small talk to more interesting topics?
Pick something from the context that has potential to lead to an interesting conversation, and start talking a little more passionately about it. Alternately, splinter the group into one-on-one conversations.
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transferred control of my burgeoning potential criminal enterprise to someone else who can run it as a legitimate, prosocial thing. Many sunk costs and social inhibitions were overcome
identified that fluctuations in my mental state accompany drops in my LessWrong karma. I post crazy when I am crazy. It's a new helpful indicator for me.
identified my interests. My interests are summarisable as the 10 S's: Sex, Sleep, Safety, Sanction, Sanity, Sanitation, Swap, Study, Salad and Stretching. Isn't it odd that I can describe them with 10S's?
started a new diet to cope with gastrointestinal issues
become transparent about my schedule and things I do so I'm accountable and transparent.
*maittaining inbox zero and sms zero with a turnaround of about 1 day. Gotta do that for today just now!
*made progress in networking with potential research collaborators (set up several meetings)
*stopped attending classes (I don't have the attention span to learn in lectures but I go for the social validation and habit)
met a girl, asked her out, got a date
stopped replying to txt messages from girl I kinda like but has issues that would be difficult to surmount
stopped watching those terrible motivational things I used to, or all that junky music!
avoiding female friend who's a total bitch to people are aren't around her (but not me?) and says it's because they probably bitch about us but I think she's wrong
hanging out with this hottie in my classes instead. She's got a boyfriend but she's so cute!
got an appointment with a neuropsychologist
got moved to weekly appointments with psychologist since I was batshit insane over the last week or so (and lost half my LW karma!)
ALMOST decided to give my psychologist the name of this account which would probably be good for my treatment, but extremely shameful to me. Really ambivalent about this one. Could come back to bite me...
*eating healthy, sleeping earlier most days, exercising regularly and being less OCD about toilet seats and used clothes
turned down meeting a friend after he wasted my time the previous day
told a friend I miss her checking up on me and she said it made her day but then she wanted to meet and suddenly know that she's interested in me again I don't want her but said I wanted to meet her anyway even without weird unfair conditions like I used to make
met vice-president of a major political party and he took me contact details down after I jokingly expressed interest in an area related to something I work in. Maybe I'll get a cool policy gig! Or maybe I'll ruin my future because I'm hardcore partisan in the eyes of some now probably (even though I don't really care for ideologies or parties, it's just pragmatic for my personal gain and interests).
I thought you said you had a wife?...