Why does the edge of a shadow sometimes appear to shift when another shadow gets close to it?
Details: I was in front of a window. The edge of a chair cast a shadow on the floor from the window light. When I moved such that the shadow of my arm got very close to the shadow of the chair, part of the edge of the chair's shadow was "pulled towards" the shadow being cast by my arm. The shadow of my arms didn't appear to move. My arm was closer to the sun than the chair.
How does "calmness" work? Calmness in this context means that a person has an easy-going view on life, is likely to be free of stress and whatever you feel when there's chilly wind in a fall evening and you're sitting feeling tranquil (tranquility sounds like a good word)
I'm just like that (although people often tell me they think I'm feeling something else) and I wonder how does it work?
Another point of interest to me is what separates true tranquility from x-induced tranquility? I had a conversation with a coworker and she said that people who use this-and-that to feel better are trying to escape/deny something. I half-agree with it because it does make sense (although that feels a little bit like substance abuse) and half-disagree because I don't want to make judgements. I've smoked some but were also drinking alcohol at the same time and was told it's "the same high" so I don't know how smoking feels (or know how it feel, or maybe it depends on what you smoked, etc. My sample isn't exactly impressive.
So, my questions are: What makes people calm & cool? (tranquility is a way to describe it) What separates people who are naturally calm & cool from those who use other methods to achieve it?
Oh, and how stupid is this question?
Tip for research: In personality psychology, the tendency to experience negative emotions is usually called neuroticism.
Woody Allen on time discounting and path-dependent preferences:
In my next life I want to live my life backwards. You start out dead and get that out of the way. Then you wake up in an old people's home feeling better every day. You get kicked out for being too healthy, go collect your pension, and then when you start work, you get a gold watch and a party on your first day. You work for 40 years until you're young enough to enjoy your retirement. You party, drink alcohol, and are generally promiscuous, then you are ready for high school. You then go to primary school, you become a kid, you play. You have no responsibilities, you become a baby until you are born. And then you spend your last 9 months floating in luxurious spa-like conditions with central heating and room service on tap, larger quarters every day and then Voila! You finish off as an orgasm!
The rationality gloss is that a naive model of discounting future events implies a preference for ordering experiences by decreasing utility. But often this ordering is quite unappealing!
A related example (attributed to Gregory Bateson):
If the hangover preceded the binge, drunkenness would be considered a virtue and not a vice.
So, along that same thread, I noticed inefficiencies in my IQ test taking skills (as I outlined in my original question), which prompted me to query you guys for any tips for improvement.
... but a key point of my post is that context-free abstract pattern recognition ability is innate and can't be learned :-). You can learn how to answer standard Raven's matrices type questions, by learning patterns used to construct the items, but the skills built aren't transferable – if given a different kind of test of context-free abstract pattern recognition ability, you would do no better than you would now. It is possible to improve a great deal as a mathematical thinker, but trying to build this sort of skill is not the way to do it.
"Context-free abstract pattern recognition" can be partially resolved into more legible subcomponents, some of which can be learned, and some of which can't.
So working memory is one such component, and is often theorized as a big pathway for (intuitively defined) general human intelligence. It doesn't look you can train working memory in a way that generalizes to increased performance on all tasks that involve working memory (although there's some controversy about this). And as with other traits, increased performance on formal measurements of working memory might not translate to the real-world outcomes associated with higher untrained working memory.
At the same time, it seems that the universe must come packaged with a distribution over patterns, and so learning a few common patterns might transfer fairly well. The Raven pattern is XOR, a basic boolean function. The continued fraction is self-similarity, which is an interesting pattern (meta-pattern?), because while people already recognize trivial self-similarity (invariance, repetition), it look like people can be successfully taught to look for more complicated recurrences in math and CS classes.
This is how I understand it:
Generally, I think I agree with this. The question is, how specifically high is the level where people are trying to do "the right thing". Here I can imagine that people who didn't have experience with (conventionally called) evil people, can underestimate the necessary level of abstraction.
For some people, in their model of the world, "the right thing" includes e.g. torturing the nonbelievers. Not only because of some reasons that we could consider palatable -- for example, when someone burns a witch, we could say "well, in their model of the world, the witch is able to bring a lot of human suffering, and probably already did, so... while I think their model of the world is stupid, I can on the abstract level empathise with the concept of 'doing the right thing by killing someone who causes a lot of suffering'." No, this is actually very shallow thinking; something that naive people imagine, and that expert Dark Arts religious apologists like Chesterton make them believe. This is not a credible model of a religious fanatic.
For a credible model one has to go yet a few levels deeper. One has to imagine someone who would torture the nonbeliever because he believes that torturing nonbelievers per se is a good thing. Not because of some consequentialist reasoning based on wrong models... this is trying to push our thinking into someone else's head. No, there are people who believe that torturing nonbelievers is intrinsically the right thing. To explain why, it would be like to explain why having an orgasm is pleasant. It obviously is, that's the whole answer. This is how some true believers think, whether they are Nazis, Communists, Muslims, Christians, etc. They may also have some rationalization for why the stuff they consider right will have good (from their point of view) consequences, for example burning the heretics may appease the angry God. But those are just rationalizations. Some people burn heretics because burning the heretics is the right thing to do. Tell them they are wrong, and they will consider you insane.
And yes, one level higher, both these people and the happy hippies of San Francisco are trying to do the right thing.
Maybe the values are not all in the mind. Some values are on level of feelings, associations, reflexes. Orgasm is good because because it feels good. Eating chocolate feels good. Hearing a lullaby feels good. With the right kind of upbringing, the idea of burning the heretic will feel good. Not because we have a specific "heretic burning" sense receptor, but because the parts of the brain containing the idea of burning the heretics were connected by neural pathways to the pleasure centers, just like all associations are created. Given some upbringing, values like this can be hardwired. (The human hardware is not read-only. Associations in human brain develop as we live.) People from different cultures and subcultures can be wired differently, so they may perceive as inherently pleasant the things we abhor, and vice versa. They may feel genuine discomfort from the idea of not burning the heretic.
So what does this mean? Did "doing the right thing" become completely meaningless? Can it predict anything; explain any observation? I don't think it is completely meaningless. Specifically, I believe that some cultures require more brainwashing, some less. (Although I have no specific methodology for measuring the amount of brainwashing. Even the environment can be a component of brainwashing; what exactly would a "neutral" environment look like?) Some cultures are more reflectively coherent than others. Some cultures promote better models of reality. Giving better information and more intelligence to humans would destroy many cultures. It's just... the predictions of this hypothesis are less straightforward than a naive reader would imagine.
Not because we have a specific "heretic burning" sense receptor, but because the parts of the brain containing the idea of burning the heretics were connected by neural pathways to the pleasure centers, just like all associations are created.
There is almost certainly hardware support for punishment behavior, albeit that which can be executed with very little high level conceptual understanding, as you note. Even more, it doesn't always require a "belief that X is right": It can simply happen, when everyone else is throwing stones, that a person may throw stones too, and the high level belief of person that they are "trying to do the right thing" is formed after the behavior has already happened, or in (hardware-embedded) anticipation of a hypothetical future demand to justify their behavior.
Outliers are interesting, but I'm not sure they are often useful examples. I suspect the focus on outliers is more due to a certain insecurity among specialists, which is exactly the last thing 99.9% of the people struggling to understand or enjoy mathematics need further exposure to.
Perhaps within mathematics, progress really is so dominated by the elite that it seems natural to worry so much about elites. I don't know either way. But in most other fields, and in the everyday strength of society, there seems to be a decent potential from moving everyone else just a few notches in mathematical comfort.
Naturally, people rise to the level of their ability for any given level of pedagogic incompetence, and so it would be equally useless to blame people for not figuring out on their own how to maximize their own ability (whatever that may be), unless we can provide reasonably concrete advice.
How do you get a high verbal IQ, boundary-testing, 10-year-old child not to swear? Saying "don't swear" causes him to gleefully list words asking if they count as swear words. Telling him a word counts as profanity causes him to ask why that specific word is bad. Saying a word doesn't count causes him to use it extra amounts if he perceives it is bad, and he will happily combine different "legal" words trying to come up with something offensive. All of this is made more difficult by the binding constraint that you absolutely must make sure he doesn't say certain words at school, so in terms of marginal deterrence you need the highest punishment for him saying these words.
Is he bullying or insulting people? Does he lack the machinery to detect social disapproval? Either situation would require specialized advice.
There is an option to only display only comments above a certain threshold. I tried to use a positive threshold (5 votes) but it doesn't seem to work.
As an aside, I still find it much easier to sift through LW for good content, relative to other broad-domain sites. While I'm glad the ecosystem has diversified, it has become harder to find e.g. the good comments on a SSC piece, or to separate the wheat from the chaff on social media or single-author blogs.
Does anyone have any tips or advice on how to handle anger and frustration? Particularly anger and frustration from dealing with stupid people. I try to just keep reminding myself that it's simply an optimization problem.
Do you mean in casual social situations? Or is this people doing stupid things that directly harm you (e.g an incompetent coworker you still need to rely on; a roommate that keeps destroying stuff)?
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Note: This post raises a concern about the treatment of depression.
If we treat depression with something like medication, should we be worried about people getting stuck in bad local optima, because they no longer feel bad enough that the pain of changing environments seems small by comparison? For example, consider someone in a bad relationship, or an unsuitable job, or with a flawed philosophic outlook, or whatever. The risk is that you alleviate some of the pain signal stemming from the lover/job/ideology, and so the patient never feels enough pressure to fix the lover/job/ideology.
Also, I'm pretty confident that the medical profession has thought about this in detail, but I've been spinning my wheels trying to find the right search terms. Does anyone know where to look, or have other recommendations?