Admitting to being wrong isn't easy, but it's something we want to encourage. So ... were you convinced by someone's arguments lately? Did you realize a heated disagreement was actually a misunderstanding? Here's the place to talk about it!
I ran across this article: The Much Forgotten and Ignored Need to Have Workable Solutions, that might interest some, either for the Rationality or the Effective Altruism aspects. For a very rough summary: Academia (more specifically, the humanities) gives too much credit to describing problems (i.e. complaining) and not enough...
Discussion article for the meetup : Paris Meetup: Saturday, July 11 WHEN: 11 July 2015 02:00:00PM (+0200) WHERE: 51 Rue de Turbigo, 75003 Paris, France The irregular-and-last-minute-schedule Paris Meetup! (as usual, we discuss it on the mailing list first, lesswrong-paris@googlegroups.com) So meet us in front of the Arts & Metiers...
Some moral questions I’ve seen discussed here: * A trolley is about to run over five people, and the only way to prevent that is to push a fat bystander in front of the trolley to stop it. Should I? * Is it better to allow 3^^^3 people to get...
Discussion article for the meetup : Paris Meetup WHEN: 14 February 2015 02:00:00PM (+0100) WHERE: Café des Arts et Métiers, 51 Rue de Turbigo, 75003 Paris France A bit of last minute organization, we had talked about it on our mailing list but hadn't settled on a date. Better late...
Sometimes our minds suddenly "click" and we see a topic in a new light. Or sometimes we think we understand an idea, think it's stupid and ignore attempts to explain it ("yeah, I already know that"), until we suddenly realize that our understanding was wrong. This kind of insight is...
So I have a three-year old kid, and will usually read or tell him a bedtime story. That is a nice opportunity to introduce new concepts, but my capacity for improvisation is limited, especially towards the end of the day. So I'm asking the good people on LessWrong for ideas....
This is a detailed description of my reading and learning workflow. You may find ideas to adopt, or maybe you can tell me what I could be doing differently! Overview I've been using Spaced Repetition on and Off for the past few years, and have built a solid Anki habit...
if I could give them back just ten minutes of their lives, most of them wouldn’t be here.
He's wrong about that. He would need to give them back 10 minutes of their lives, and then keep on giving them back different 10 minutes on a very regular basis.
I disagree. Let's take drivers who got into a serious accident : if you "gave them just back ten minutes" so that they avoided getting into that accident, most of them wouldn't have had another accident later on. It's not as if the world neatly divided into safe drivers, who never have accidents, and unsafe drivers, who have several.
Sure, those kids that got in trouble... (read more)
I ran across this article: The Much Forgotten and Ignored Need to Have Workable Solutions, that might interest some, either for the Rationality or the Effective Altruism aspects.
For a very rough summary: Academia (more specifically, the humanities) gives too much credit to describing problems (i.e. complaining) and not enough on thinking about good solutions, which is the difficult and important part.
Some quotes if you don't want to read the whole thing:
... (read 607 more words →)Of course the biggest assumption of all that is being shown to be inconsistent with actual behaviour is that of rationality – Richard Thaler’s Misbehaving and other behavioural research is showing that people are subject to various biases and often do not make
I mean, roughly, that not only are the two empircally indistinguishable, but that I don't even see a reason to care about whether I'm "in a simulation" or not, and it's not even clear what would qualify as a simulation...
The irregular-and-last-minute-schedule Paris Meetup! (as usual, we discuss it on the mailing list first, lesswrong-paris@googlegroups.com) So meet us in front of the Arts & Metiers this Saturday!
A bug breaks it for me now:
I'm on iPad, any topic I click on redirects me to http://www.omnilibrium.com/topic_mobile.php, which doesn't exist. So I can't even read anything but the titles.
...edit: aaand it's been fixed, thanks Cleonid, that was quick :)
I can't say I ran into it before (whereas "economists think humans are all rational self-interested agents", jeez...)
Pretty neat website you got there!
Knocking through a bunch of exercises every day feels efficient but it's not exactly fun and I put in less time than I should.
I've been reviewing Anki pretty much daily for the past couple of years, and I put in enough time to have all my cards reviewed. What helps:
Alternative implementation: an android widget that posts a "snitch" message somewhere online if ever your phone is unlocked in certain time frames; such that other people can easily see online whether you unlocked your phone in the "forbidden" timeframe.
As far as I can tell, folks either learn everything beyond the mechanics and algorithms of programming from your seniors in the workplace or discover it for themself.
... or from Stack Overflow / Wikipedia, no? When encountering a difficult problem, one can either ask someone more knowledgeable, figure it out himself, or look it up on the internet.
One charitable interpretation is "it's something you learn by doing, not something you learn by reading".
"Art" has a bit of a double meaning, there's the "something that's pretty/pleasing/aesthetic/original/creative", but there's also the "craft" meaning, as in "the art of XXX".
I want to focus on the "art is inherently intuitive and not about breaking things down into components like science" part. My thought is that these people who say this are confusing their map for the territory. They may not know how to deduce what the perfect painting would look like, but that doesn't mean that it's not possible.
Two reactions to this:
1) If someone says something can't be broken into component parts, a... (read more)
Yep, I'm interested!
Some moral questions I’ve seen discussed here:
Yet I spend time and money on my children and parents, that may be “better” spent elsewhere under many moral systems. And if... (read 778 more words →)
A bit of last minute organization, we had talked about it on our mailing list but hadn't settled on a date. Better late than never!
Sometimes our minds suddenly "click" and we see a topic in a new light. Or sometimes we think we understand an idea, think it's stupid and ignore attempts to explain it ("yeah, I already know that"), until we suddenly realize that our understanding was wrong.
This kind of insight is supposedly hard to transmit, but it might be worth a try!
So, what kind of important and valuable insights do you wish you had earlier? Could you try to explain briefly what led to the insight, in a way that might help others get it?
So I have a three-year old kid, and will usually read or tell him a bedtime story.
That is a nice opportunity to introduce new concepts, but my capacity for improvisation is limited, especially towards the end of the day. So I'm asking the good people on LessWrong for ideas. How would you wrap various lesswrongish ideas in a short story a little kid would pay attention to?
I'm mostly interested in the aspects of "practical rationality" that aren't going to be taught at school or in children's books or children's TV shows - so things like Sunk Costs, taking the outside view, wondering which side is true instead of arguing for a side, etc.
Pointers to outside sources of such stories are welcome too!
Edit: actually, if you want to share ideas of games or activities of the same kind, go ahead! :)
This is a detailed description of my reading and learning workflow. You may find ideas to adopt, or maybe you can tell me what I could be doing differently!
I've been using Spaced Repetition on and Off for the past few years, and have built a solid Anki habit this last three months, to the point where now I wonder how I could read books without entering the important points into Anki.
I recommend getting a habit of using Spaced Repetition, it's a small habit that doesn't require too much willpower (it can feel like a game, if done right!), and is useful in the long term.
I have a dozen or so... (read 953 more words →)
The next Paris Meetup will be Sunday, October 6, at the Café des Arts et Métiers opposite the Museum.
Topics: * Welcome new people * Board games * Plan future meetups * Other suggestions? Someone wanted to talk about quantum mechanics...
Reminder: there is the LessWrong France mailing list for discussing and organizing meetups (that for now mostly happen in Paris and Lyon): https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en&fromgroups=#!forum/lesswrong-france
I'm tired of people never, ever, ever, EVER stopping 2 hours to 1) Think of what their goals are 2)Checking if their current path leads to desired goals 3)Correcting course and 4)Creating a system to verify, in the future, whether goals are being achieved. I'm really tired of that. Really.
... so we may want to remind and encourage each other to do so, and exchange tips!
See also: Humans are not automatically strategic, levels of action.
The next Paris Meetup will be Sunday, May 26, at the Café des Arts et Métiers opposite the Museum. We have several guests of honor! Cat should be around, and loup-vaillant is coming up from the south!
I've been the guy religiously arguing for pushing an early version of the product in front of users as soon as possible (as the saying goes, "if you're not ashamed of your first version then you've released too late"), not in order to learn whether it's a good product or not, but to learn details of what needs to be improved but also what doesn't need to be improved (because nobody cares about / notices the "problem").
A related debate has been about how much you should spec out your product before putting it before customers - Big Design Up Front vs. figure stuff out as we go along based on user feedback.... (read more)