= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
I thought the correct response should be "Is the thing in fact a giant or a windmill?"
Do you consider yourself "objective and wise"?
I'd consider myself puzzled. Unidientified object, is it a threat, a potential asset, some kind of Black Swan? Might need to do something even without positive identification. Will probably need to do something to get a better read on the thing.
In response to
Rationality Quotes: April 2011
When confronting something which may be either a windmill or an evil giant, what question should you be asking?
There are some who ask, "If we do nothing, and that is an evil giant, can we afford to be wrong?" These people consider themselves to be brave and vigilant.
Some ask "If we attack it wrongly, can we afford to pay to replace a windmill?" These people consider themselves cautious and pragmatic.
Still others ask, "With the cost of being wrong so high in either case, shouldn't we always definitively answer the 'windmill vs. giant' question before we act?" And those people consider themselves objective and wise.
But only a tiny few will ask, "Isn't the fact that we're giving equal consideration to the existence of evil giants and windmills a warning sign of insanity in ourselves?"
It's hard to find out what these people consider themselves, because they never get invited to parties.
-- PartiallyClips, "Windmill"
I thought the correct response should be "Is the thing in fact a giant or a windmill?" Rather than considering which way our maps should be biased, what's the actual territory?
I do tech support, and often get responses like "I think so," and I usually respond with "Let's find out."
In response to
Rationality quotes: June 2010
"You rationalize, Keeton. You defend. You reject unpalatable truths, and if you can't reject them outright you trivialize them. Incremental evidence is never enough for you. You hear rumors of Holocaust; you dismiss them. You see evidence of genocide; you insist it can't be so bad. Temperatures rise, glaciers melt—species die—and you blame sunspots and volcanoes. Everyone is like this, but you most of all. You and your Chinese Room. You turn incomprehension into mathematics, you reject the truth without even knowing what it is."
--Jukka Sarasti, rationalist vampire in Peter Watts's Blindsight. Great book on neuroscience and map != territory.
In response to
Open Thread: October 2009
Dual n-back is a game that's supposed to increase your IQ up to 40%. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_n_back#Dual_n-back
Some think the effect is temporary, long-term studies underway. Still, I wouldn't mind having to practice periodically. I've been at it for a few days, might retry the Mensa test in a while. (I washed out at 113 a few years ago) Download link: http://brainworkshop.sourceforge.net/
It seems to make sense. Instead of getting a faster CPU, a cheap and easy fix is get more RAM. In a brain analogy, I've often thought of the "magic number seven," isn't there any way to up that number, have more working memory? Nicholas Negroponte said something like "Perspective is worth 50 IQ points." I think that's a scope fail, but good perspective, being able to hold more of the problem in your head, might be worth about 30 IQ points.
View more: Prev
= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d){kind=logo}
So it's been almost 2 years. Have you taken any IQ tests after practicing?
Sorry, hiatus. No haven't been tested recently, and slacked off on the DNB, it starts to feel monotonous, and frustrating, I couldn't break through D3B. I'll try and pick it up again when I figure out how to get it to work on Ubuntu.