Meetup : LessWrong/HPMoR Harvard
Discussion article for the meetup : LessWrong/HPMoR Harvard
Are you a Harvard student who's reading this?
Relocated to Sever 105, since Leverett classroom D is filled.
Cheers, Aaron
Discussion article for the meetup : LessWrong/HPMoR Harvard
Want to help me test my Anki deck creation skills?
I'm interested in trying to make better Anki decks for the LessWrong community, but I want to see how well I can actually do this first. There's a lot of knowledge out there about how to format and create decks, but it's still a decent amount of work, and there are lots of people who would benefit from Anki decks, but who wouldn't make them themselves.
In order to test my deck-creation skills, I'd be willing to do a summary + deck of a chapter or two of a book, then release them to the community for feedback.
I have two questions:
- Who's interested in/willing to evaluate the decks? If there are enough volunteers, I'd also be willing to try different deck-making approaches.
- What book/chapters would people like to see covered? I'm currently thinking of trying to do Eat That Frog or some similar book with a lot of recommendations and useful details. I don't really think that a math-heavy book would be well-suited to this, at least now.
These links are fairly useful/relevant.
http://www.gwern.net/Spaced%20repetition
http://www.supermemo.com/articles/20rules.htm
As a side note: I still do intend to do this, but have been fairly busy with the start of this semester. If there's no progress by March 1st, then you should consider this to be on indefinite pause.
Draft: Get Lucky
Here's a draft of an article that I want to post soon, but I figured I might as well get some feedback before I go ahead. If anyone else has exercises or experience with this I'd love to hear about it.
The popular science article version of the research mentioned can be found here: http://www.richardwiseman.com/resources/The_Luck_Factor.pdf
There's no fundamental propensity to good outcomes, but it looks like Luck is a thing.
There were some experiments done by Richard Wiseman (of 59 seconds fame/recommendation) investigating luck, and they found that there was a statistically significant factor which led to some people being more likely to receive unexpected benefits.
He took two groups of people, one self-proclaimed “very lucky” and the other normal, and asked them to do simple tasks, like to count the number of times a photograph appeared in a newspaper. He didn't tell them was that he had rigged the magazine to have a few convenient conveniences, like a giant sentence telling them that there were 43 photographs, or large text about how if the reader pointed this out to the researchers they could get $250.
Still, to a statistically significant degree, the “lucky” people noticed them more. What gives?
Have you ever missed an important detail because you were focused on something else? Once you're looking for something, you throw out details that fit. If you're looking for things that fit into the steps of a plan, then you're more likely to throw out stuff that's not already included.
If you weren't trying to count the number of times a word appeared, you probably would have caught the sentences. Planning on counting makes you miss details like it already being done for you.
Engineers bump into this sort of problem a lot. How many times have you spent a long time trying to code something before you found out that it was included in a library? Or tried to write a piece of code that doesn't actually wind up being used because what it accomplishes isn't actually needed?
This failure mode is child of lost causes and priming. If you try to do X in order to get G, then you're primed to miss Y even if it's relevant to G. If the bottom line is written, then you're going to leave stuff out.
Insofar as Luck exists, it seems to be the ability to use unexpected but useful information.
Not quite sure how to practice this skill. A few things I've tried:
- Meditation. There are a few mental operations that seem related to letting go of a set of predictions and looking at reality instead. Like, asking how it actually feels to be breathing rather than looking for what you think breathing is like.
- Feel “open” to the possibility of something popping up. I used to find four leaf clovers this way – by walking around occasionally glancing at the grass, and not particularly looking for a four leaf clover, but trusting my brain to draw my attention to it if there is one there and visible.
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You could probably actually walk around outside right now and try this. See what it feels like to notice details.
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Walk around outside and see if any small animals catch your eye. Try to use the feeling of your attention being grabbed more often.
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Look around the room you're in and see if there's anything that you've forgotten about, but is useful.
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When given a plan, ask yourself what kinds of functions or adjectives something could have that would make it useful, without drawing a picture of what that thing is.
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One time at a Rationality Minicamp someone asked if there was a sceptre-like object. Most people said no, and I said yes, even though I didn't know where it was. I was able to quickly find one in the room because I ran the algorithm of “find the cylinder-ish thing in this room” rather than the algorithm of asking myself what cylinder-like things there are, then go get it.
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Meetup : LessWrong Megameetup
Discussion article for the meetup : LessWrong Megameetup
We're holding the second East Coast Megameetup this weekend at the Leverage House in NYC, kindly provided by Geoff and the Leverage Research team.
Contact me at aarondtucker <at> gmail <dot> com for the address, since Geoff doesn't want to post it on the internet.
We'll have semi-focused talks/discussions starting late Saturday afternoon on:
- Nutrition
- Community-building
- What Leverage is doing
- Group Intelligence
- Psychological Frameworks
I'm really looking forward to this, and I hope to see you there! It's a great opportunity to meet the other LWers on your coast.
Discussion article for the meetup : LessWrong Megameetup
East Coast Megameetup II: Request for Talks
One thing that I'd like to see at the next megameetup is a few informal focused discussions on various topics related to the community, like meditation or diet.
People should prepare for them, but I don't think that say, powerpoints would be necessary. Just trying to encourage knowledge transfer.
Anyone on the East Coast interested in giving one? Any things you'd like to see?
Schedule Update: The Megameetup will be held on on the weekend of January 27th or February 4th.
East Coast Megameetup II: Electric Boogalloo
The last East Coast Megameetup was awesome, and people wanted to do another one.
So let's do another one?
Vision:
- Primarily a social event, with some skill transfer
- Meet people within the LW community, make friends, get contacts
- Get people together for our mutual benefit
- Informal focused discussion/teaching, people in the community know a lot about stuff that's useful to know
- Help lone rationalists be part of the community
What I want from you, East Coaster:
- Bring this up at your meetup or mailing list
- Select someone in your meetup group as a point of contact for the group. They should be able to represent and effectively communicate with the rest of the meetup group.
- Have them email me at aarondtucker <at> gmail.com
- You can always arbitrarily designate yourself to be that point of contact to keep things moving, and then figure out with the group who it should actually be.
- Try to figure out if you want to attend.
Anti-Akrasia Tactics Discussion
You should probably read the Anti-Akrasia Tactics Review, if you haven't already. There's lots of useful stuff there, and if it works for you but you haven't read it...
You should totally go read it, implement it, and not come back to this thread until you've internalized your favorite tricks.
Feel free to discuss outcomes here.
Did anything work for you?
Is there anything that should be added?
Note: this is basically a "bump", but I suspect that it's a worthwhile reminder. Downvote me if I'm wrong.
P.S. I'd actually really enjoy feedback on this.
[Request] Feedback on my Writing
I've written some posts.
I'd like to get better at writing posts.
I still have some more material for posts.
I'd like to write it well.
So, would people be willing to critique my work so far?
Particularly helpful-awesome would be pointing out things I did well somewhere that I didn't do well somewhere else. Also nice would be pointing out what I did badly and well.
Crocker's Rules apply.
Miscellaneous:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/7ix/story_rejection/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/80t/thinking_in_bayes_light/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/64t/foma_beliefs_that_cause_themselves_to_be_true/
Consciousness:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/7pm/blindsight_and_consciousness/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/7yr/neural_correlates_of_conscious_access/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/81w/the_protagonist_problem/
Just do it:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/53e/just_try_it_quantity_trumps_quality/
The Protagonist Problem
Global Workspace Theory and its associated Theater Metaphor are empirically plausible, but why should it result in consciousness? Why should globally available information being processed by separate cognitive modules make us talk about being conscious?
Sure, that's how brains see stuff, but why would that make us think that it's happening to anyone? What in the world corresponds to a self?
So far, I've only encountered two threads of thought that try to approach this problem: the Social Cognitive Interface of Kurzban, and the Self-Model theories like those of Metzinger and Damasio.
I’ll be talking about the latter, starting off with what self-models are, and a bit about how they’re constructed. Then I’ll say what a self-model theory is.
Humans as Informational Processing Systems
Questions: What exactly is there for things to happen to? What can perceive things?
Well, bodies exist, and stuff can to happen to them. So let's start there.
Humans have bodies which include informational processing systems called brains. Our brains are causally entangled with the outside world, and are capable of mapping it. Sensory inputs are transformed into neural representations which can then be used in performing adaptive responses to the environment.
In addition to receiving sensory input from our eyes, ears, nose, tongue, skin, etc, we get sensory input about the pH level of our blood, various hormone concentrations, etc. We map not only things about the outside world, but things about our own bodies. Our brain's models of our bodies also include things like limb position.
From the third person, brains are capable of representing the bodies that they're attached to. Humans are information processing systems which, in the process of interacting with the environment, maintain a representation of themselves used by the system for the purposes of the system.
Answers: We exist. We can perceive things. What we see as being our "self" is our brain's representation of ourselves. Generalizably, a "self" is a product of a system representing itself.
Note: I don't mean to assert that human self-modeling accomplished by a single neurological system or module, but I do mean to say that there are a nonzero set of systems which, when taken together, can be elegantly expressed as being part of a self-model which presents information about a person to the person's brain.
Bodily Self Models
Human self-models seem to normally be based on sensory input, but can be separated from it. Your bodily self-model looks a lot like this:

Freaky stuff happens when a body model and sensory inputs don't coincide. Apotemnophilia is a disorder where people want to amputate one of their otherwise healthy limbs, complaining that their body is "overcomplete", or that the limb is "intrusive". They also have very specific and consistent specifications for the amputation that they want, suggesting that the desire comes from a stable trait rather than say, attention seeking. They don't want want to get an amputation, they want a particular amputation. Which sounds pretty strange.
This is distinct from somatoparaphrenia, where a patient denies that a limb is theirs but is fairly apathetic towards it. Somatoparaphrenia is caused by damage to both S1 and the superior parietal lobule, leading to a limb which isn't represented in the self-model, that they don't get sensory input from. Hence, its not theirs and its just sorta hanging out there, but its not particularly distressing or creepy. Apotemnophilia can be described as lacking a limb in the self-model, but continuing to get input from it. Imagine if you felt a bunch of armness coming into your back.
In some sense, your brain also marks this model of the body as being you. I'll talk more about it in another article, but for now just notice that that's important. It's useful to know that our body is in fact ours for planning purposes, etc.
Self Models and Global Availability
This is also naturally explained in terms of self-model theory. A blind person with anosognosia isn't able to see, and doesn't receive visual information, but they still represent themselves as seeing. So when you ask them about it, or they try and plan, they assert that they can still see. When the brain damage leading to blindness and anosognosia occurs, they stop being able to see, but their self-model isn't updated to reflect that.
Blindsight is the reverse case where someone is able to see, but don't represent themselves as seeing.
In both cases, the person's lack of an ability to represent themselves as having particular properties interferes with those properties being referred to by other cognitive modules such as those of speech or planning.
Self-Model Theories of Consciousness
Self-Model Theories hold that we're self aware because we're able to pay attention to ourselves in the same way that we pay attention to other things. You map yourself based on sensory inputs the same way that you map other things, and identify your model as being you.
We think that things are happening to someone because we're able to notice that things are happening to something
That's true of lots of animals though. What makes humans more conscious?
Humans are better at incorporating further processing based on the self-model into the self-model. Animals form representations of and act in the environment, but humans can talk about their representations. Animals represent things, but they don't represent their representation. The lights are on, and somebody's home, but they don't know they're home.
To be continued...
Kurzban, R., & Aktipis, C. A. (2007). Modularity and the social mind: are psychologists too self-ish? Personality and social psychology review : an official journal of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc, 11(2), 131-49. doi:10.1177/1088868306294906
Ramachandran, V. S., Brang, D., McGeoch, P. D., & Rosar, W. (2009). Sexual and food preference in apotemnophilia and anorexia: interactions between “beliefs” and “needs” regulated by two-way connections between body image and limbic structures. Perception, 38(5), 775-777. doi:10.1068/p6350
Meetup : UMD Calibration Games
Discussion article for the meetup : UMD Calibration Games
We're in Terrapin Room A in the Student Involvement Suite, meeting at 5 PM.
We plan to play some calibration games.
Discussion article for the meetup : UMD Calibration Games
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