What's the most frequently useful thing you've learned on OB - not the most memorable or most valuable, but the thing you use most often? What influences your behavior, factors in more than one decision? Please give a concrete example if you can. This isn't limited to archetypally "mundane" activities: if your daily life involves difficult research or arguing with philosophers, go ahead and describe that too.
Continue reading "The Most Frequently Useful Thing" at Less Wrong »
Followup to: The Most Important Thing You Learned
What's the most frequently useful thing you've learned on OB - not the most memorable or most valuable, but the thing you use most often? What influences your behavior, factors in more than one decision? Please give a concrete example if you can. This isn't limited to archetypally "mundane" activities: if your daily life involves difficult research or arguing with philosophers, go ahead and describe that too.
Priors as Mathematical Objects: prior is not something arbitrary, a state of lack-of-knowledge, nor can sufficient evidence turn arbitrary prior into precise belief. Prior is the whole algorithm of what to do with evidence, and bad prior can easily turn evidence into stupidity.
P.S. I wonder if this post was downvoted exclusively because of Eliezer's administrative remark, and not because of its content.
Vlad, if you're going to do this, at least do it as replies to your original comment!
My current plan does still call for me to write a rationality book - at some point, and despite all delays - which means I have to decide what goes in the book, and what doesn't. Obviously the vast majority of my OB content can't go into the book, because there's so much of it.
So let me ask - what was the one thing you learned from my posts on Overcoming Bias, that stands out as most important in your mind? If you like, you can also list your numbers 2 and 3, but it will be understood that any upvotes on the comment are just agreeing with the #1, not the others. If it was striking enough that you remember the exact post where you "got it", include that information. If you think the most important thing is for me to rewrite a post from Robin Hanson or another contributor, go ahead and say so. To avoid recency effects, you might want to take a quick glance at this list of all my OB posts before naming anything from just the last month - on the other hand, if you can't remember it even after a year, then it's probably not the most important thing.
Please also distinguish this question from "What was the most frequently useful thing you learned, and how did you use it?" and "What one thing has to go into the book that would (actually) make you buy a copy of that book for someone else you know?" I'll ask those on Saturday and Sunday.
PS: Do please think of your answer before you read the others' comments, of course.
How rational was your transition to rationality? A sudden transition seems more suspicious, as that looks a lot like the sudden transitions humans tend to make between social groups. After all, there is usually little social benefit to sitting between social groups; social rewards come more to those firmly within one group or another. A gradual transition, on the other hand, seems more plausibly to match the more steady rate at which relevant info arrives on such topics. How much more relevant info could you really have obtained via one story or essay? Whatever your conscious thoughts, if you had a sudden transition I'm guessing that was your subconsious mind thinking something like "Yes, this looks like a good social group to join."
I feel that perhaps you are being too cynical. There's such a thing as an insight snapping into place and recoding a lot of old information.
And there's such a thing as force building up for a long time against resistance, and then the resistance breaking; this is not sane, per se, but it's how I would describe my own sharp transition in 2003. I certainly don't think you could describe that as joining a social group.
Actually, I'd think there would be a lot of sources for sharp mental transitions. Just having to choose locally a preference between A and B will generate sharp transitions whenever A < B swaps to B > A and that means other things have to follow.
Added a post scriptum, see above.
To break up the awkward silence at the start of a recent Overcoming Bias meetup, I asked everyone present to tell their rationalist origin story - a key event or fact that played a role in their becoming rationalists. This worked surprisingly well.
I think I've already told enough of my own origin story on Overcoming Bias: how I was digging in my parents' yard as a kid and found a tarnished silver amulet inscribed with Bayes's Theorem, and how I wore it to bed that night and dreamed of a woman in white, holding a leather-bound book called Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases (eds. D. Kahneman, P. Slovic, and A. Tversky, 1982)... but there's no need to go into that again.
So, seriously... how did you originally go down that road?
Continue reading "Tell Your Rationalist Origin Story" at Less Wrong »
[Edit: Issues, Bugs, and Requested Features should be tracked at Google Code, not here -- matt, 2010-04-23]
Less Wrong is still under construction. Please post any bugs or issues with Less Wrong to this thread. Try to keep each comment thread a clean discussion of each bug or issue.
Requested features... sure, go ahead, but bear in mind we may not be able to implement for a while.
Are you sure "rationalist" is a good label here? It suggests the claim that you are rational, or at least more rational than most. "Rational" has so many associations that go beyond truth-seeking.
We need some kind of word that means "seeker after less wrongness", and refers pragmatically to a group of people who go around discussing epistemic hygiene and actually worrying about how to think and whether their beliefs are correct. I know of no shorter and clearer alternative than "rationalist". There are some words I'm willing to try to rescue, and this is one of them.
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As far back as I can remember I have wanted to be a scientist and to walk the path of rationality. What comes to me as a watershed moment was when I was 15 or 16 an my very Christian Grandfather came to visit. He told me that since I had a very scientific mind, he was giving me a scientific gift. It was a thin book with a title something like "Scientific Proof of the Bible".
Afterwards I remember sitting for what felt like hours in my room, staring at the closed book. "What if I was wrong?" I kept asking myself with dread. What if there really was scientific proof of the existence of God and what I had always taken to be the nonsense of the Bible? What if going to church and praying really WERE things I should be doing? If so, how could I justify not going. What was the guiding principal of my life, anyway?
In the end, I decided, my guiding principal was "Truth at any cost." If I was wrong, I wanted to KNOW I was wrong, and I would deal accordingly. So, I picked up the book and started reading, and within a few minutes I was laughing in relief as there wasn't a cogent argument or scientific proof, or even the slightest bit of rationality in the entire thing.
But my Grandfather had given me a great gift, although not the one he thought. From then on, I was willing to lose arguments since my desire was to know the actual truth, and not to merely have the comfort of thinking I was right. That, as they say, has made all the difference.
I've just got to say awwww to this one.