Comment author: kajro 26 July 2012 01:59:47AM 3 points [-]

Someone in the future is going to read one of the social interaction scenes in a Charles Stross novel and marvel at the eerily accurate depiction...

Comment author: moridinamael 24 July 2012 11:22:29PM 3 points [-]

Does anybody have a good Emacs setup they would like to share? I really need to give mine an overhaul, and I'm looking for ideas.

About two weeks ago I implemented Workrave pomodoro timer recommended in a previous rationality diary thread with a 25/5 split. This has been a fantastically good decision.

What's amusing to me is that the pomodoro timer has improved my productivity way out of proportion to what I expected. I'm very prone to investing lots of time and energy into productivity gizmos which ultimately don't pay off. The Workrave timer is very simple and works immediately. I simply find that it's very easy to focus for a 25 minute chunk when I know I'm going to take a 5 minute walk shortly.

Additionally, Nozbe (a GTD implementation) continues to be a good investment. I find myself still failing to sufficiently granularize large tasks. Nozbe ends up not really helping much when it comes to taskifying large projects, but helps a lot with remembering to return emails, remembering to buy birthday cards, acting on important thoughts that happen to hit me in the wrong context, and other inherently "small" items.

META: So, this is probably the third rationality diary entry of mine which mentions Nozbe, and I realize this may be annoying or redundant to other people. From my point of view, I think it's potentially valuable to track how a person uses a tool over time, rather than merely hearing an initial gushing endorsement followed by silence. Do y'all want me to shut up about Nozbe or should I keep providing a record of my experience?

Comment author: kajro 25 July 2012 02:03:49AM *  1 point [-]

If you use org-mode, this is what made my emacs experience reach a whole new level (I literally have every aspect of my life in .org files now - I can tell you what I ate for lunch 7 months ago, which isn't especially useful but really fun to point out).

You don't seem like an emacs newbie though, so you might have already seen the above. Recently I came across this setup, which has an inspiring organization and some very cool ideas which might be useful to you. This guy also wrote org-drill, an awesome SRS implementation for emacs - it even supports incremental reading!

Comment author: mapnoterritory 09 July 2012 10:05:46PM *  0 points [-]

Thumbs up from me for lesswrong-mode!

Comment author: kajro 11 July 2012 01:56:43PM 0 points [-]

I attempted this today but without an API (LW's fork of the reddit codebase looks pretty old) I don't think I can get very far.

Comment author: kajro 09 July 2012 12:12:04AM 5 points [-]

Is there a better way to read Less Wrong?

I know I can put the sequences on my kindle, but I would like to find a way to browse Discussion and Main in a more useable interface (or at least something that I can customize). I really like the threading organization of newsgroups, and I read all of my .rss feeds and mail through Gnus in emacs. I sometimes use the Less Wrong .rss feed in Gnus, but this doesn't allow me to read the comments. Any suggestions?

Also, if any other emacs users are interested, I would love to make a lesswrong-mode package. I'm not a very good lisp hacker, but I think it would be a fun project.

Comment author: MileyCyrus 08 July 2012 08:17:06AM 8 points [-]

If I could travel back and time and show my 18 year old newly deconverted self on thing, it would be Existential Angst Factory. At the time, I was so depressed I was near incompetence. (I failed three of the first five courses I took in college). I thought I was depressed because life had no meaning without religion. In reality, I was depressed because

  • I felt my alienated from my parents.
  • I was physically harming myself.
  • I had low self-esteem.
  • I had no friends besides some high school friends who went to other universities.
  • I was anxious about life after college and was paranoid that I wouldn't be able to afford to pay off my debt.

I went to therapy, which didn't work. I read self-help books, didn't work. I read continental philosophy, which didn't work. The only thing that did work was when my "other problems" started being solved. My relationship with my parents improved. I cut back my self-harm 95%. I received compliments that boosted my self-esteem. I made friends. I graduated with a manageable debt and found a job in Australia that will go a ways to reduce that debt. Now I'm happy, and it had nothing to do with changing my paradigm and everything to do with changing my circumstances. Reading Existential Angst Factory when I was 18 might have shaved off a couple years of misery.

Comment author: kajro 08 July 2012 11:58:15PM 1 point [-]

Being relatively young I get really excited when someone gives advice that they wish they realized earlier (as if I'm privy to some unique and incredibly useful information), but I've now realized the huge plethora of information that I wish I could share with the "me of 2 years ago". After years of reading reddit, hacker news, etc, I must have come across hundreds of similar advice threads, and yet even now I feel like there are just so many things I figured out way too late. Our brains have a horrible self satisfaction mechanism.

Not that this devalues your advice at all (I have similar problems, so I'm incredibly grateful for the link). Just an observation.

In response to Morality open thread
Comment author: FiftyTwo 08 July 2012 10:44:03PM 6 points [-]

I have a pill that will make you a psychopath. You will retain all your intellectual abilities and all understanding of moral theory, but your emotional reactions to others suffering will cease. You will still have the empathy to understand that others are suffering, but you won't feel automatic sympathy for it.

Do you want to take it?

Comment author: kajro 08 July 2012 11:43:53PM 1 point [-]

I guess this would depend on (1) the extent to which unnecessary sympathy effects my daily life and (2) how the consideration of hypothetical events would effect the evolution of my moral system with respect to this new constraint.

The former is negligible to me, but the latter seems potentially dangerous. I don't know exactly how not being a psychopath effects my reasoning, so I don't think I would be comfortable taking the pill. Maybe if I could backup my mind...

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 08 July 2012 08:45:06PM 17 points [-]

"Buddhism IS different. It's the followers who aren’t."

-- A Dust Over India.

Commentary: Reading this made me realize that many religions genuinely are different from each other. Christianity is genuinely different from Judaism, Islam is genuinely different from Christianity, Hinduism is genuinely different from all three. It's religious people who are the same everywhere; not the same as each other, obviously, but drawn from the same distribution. Is this true of atheistic humanists? Of transhumanists? Could you devise an experiment to test whether it was so, would you bet on the results of that experiment? Will they say the same of LessWrongers, someday? And if so, what's the point?

Now that I think on it, though, there might be a case for scientists being drawn from a different distribution, or computer programmers, or for that matter science fiction fans (are those all the same distributions as each other, I wonder?). It's not really hopeless.

Comment author: kajro 08 July 2012 11:25:33PM 1 point [-]

<pseudo-math> You could define equivalence relations on the set of religious people (RP) and the set of atheistic humanists (AH). In most cases, the people in the sets only interact with (or at least influenced by) other members of the same or similar sets. Turn these interactions into operations on members of the set (a,b in RP, a*b = "a makes b feel awkward/scared/unhappy around a" or maybe something based on social relationships between members). These operations would create new "people" whose characteristics are similar to that of the person who has been molded by the defined social interaction(s).

Starting from a certain subset of RP, these operations could possibly generate the entire set of members (i.e a*b = c in RP, where c has the equivalent disposition as someone who has interacted with b under some applicable equivalence relation). Do the same for AH (using the same equivalence relation), and compare the structures. Under different types of interactions between members, this could reveal some interesting group-theoretical properties. Maybe there is a generating set for RP and not for AH if we keep the equivalence relations from getting too specific. </pseudo-math>

I guess what I'm getting at is that the structural elements of a certain set of people could tell us something about the distribution that the set was pulled from, or even invalidate the need to look at the distribution at all. Maybe the structure is even more important; these sets could pull from the same distribution, but the ideologies that formed these sets could result in drastically different results from operations (social interactions or relationships) between members of the set. Or we could see if only the generating members of the set were pulled from the same distribution, but the social interactions between them created a set member not from the original distribution, resulting in the set having to pull from that distribution also.

Anyway, this is probably not coherent or useful at all, but if nothing else it did lead me to the work of Harrison White on mathematical sociology:

A good summary of White's sociological contributions is provided by his former student and collaborator, Ronald Breiger:

... ... (2) models based on equivalences of actors across networks of multiple types of social relation; (3) theorization of social mobility in systems of organizations; (4) a structural theory of social action that emphasizes control, agency, narrative, and identity ...

This was particularly interesting:

For instance, we are told almost daily how the average European or American feels about a topic. It allows social scientists and pundits to make inferences about cause and say “people are angry at the current administration because the economy is doing poorly.” This kind of generalization certainly makes sense, but it does not tell us anything about an individual. This leads to the idea of an idealized individual, something that is the bedrock of modern economics.[6] Most modern economic theories look at social formations, like organizations, as products of individuals all acting in their own best interest.[7]

In response to Morality open thread
Comment author: James_Miller 08 July 2012 05:08:22PM *  -1 points [-]

Love - in increase in her utility causes an increase in your utility.

Hate - in increase in her utility causes a decrease in your utility.

Indifference - a change in her utility has no influence on your utility.

Love = good.
Hate = evil.
Indifference = how almost everyone feels towards almost everyone.

Comment author: kajro 08 July 2012 09:20:02PM 0 points [-]

So the more people that enjoy hurting you (an increase in their utility causing a decrease in your utility), the more evil you become (since you hate a larger number of people)? Did I misinterpret this?

In response to Morality open thread
Comment author: [deleted] 08 July 2012 08:16:23PM 4 points [-]

I have a question: what is akrasia exactly?

Say I have to finish a paper, but I also enjoy wasting time on the internet. All things considered, I decide it would be better for me to finish the paper than for me to waste time on the internet. And yet I waste time on the internet. What's going on there? It can't just be a reflex or a tick: my reflexes aren't that sophisticated. Given how complicated wasting time on the internet is, and that I decidedly enjoy it, it looks like an intentional action, something which is the result of my reasoning. Yet I reasoned that I shouldn't go on the internet, so it can't really be an intentional action. My intention was exactly not to go on the internet.

Maybe I'm just being hypocritical, and I actually value the internet more than finishing a paper?

In response to comment by [deleted] on Morality open thread
Comment author: kajro 08 July 2012 09:01:57PM 2 points [-]

Couldn't it be a primitive reflex that starts a chain of locally intentional actions leading to "browsing the internet"? For example, you don't know what to write next so you alt-tab to the web browser. In itself that isn't a complicated reflex - sometimes I find myself alt-tabbing and not remembering what I was alt-tabbing for. Once you get to your web browser, you start making these locally intentional actions - i.e within the scope of a web browser's functionality - and when you finally realize what you've done it feels like one big intentional action.

Comment author: John_Maxwell_IV 23 June 2012 01:05:22AM 3 points [-]

Hi there!

This might help: http://www.psych.cornell.edu/sec/pubPeople/tdg1/Gilo.Medvec.Sav.pdf

Comment author: kajro 23 June 2012 03:05:46AM 3 points [-]

Is this some kind of LW hazing, linking to academic papers in an introduction thread? (I joke, this looks super interesting).

View more: Next

Powered by Reddit Powered by Reddit