lucidian

I suspect you're aware of this already, but you are basically describing E-Prime.

Highly recommend kazerad, for Scott-level insights about human behavior. Here's his analysis of 4chan's anonymous culture. Here's another insightful essay of his. And a post on memetics. And these aren't necessarily the best posts I've read by him, just the three I happened to find first.

By the way, I'm really averse to the label "hidden rationalists". It's like complimenting people by saying "secretly a member of our ingroup, but just doesn't know it yet". Which simultaneously presupposes the person would want to be a member of o... (read more)

Here are the ten I thought of:

• decorations for your house/apartment
• a musical instrument
• lessons for the musical instrument
• nice speakers (right now I just have computer speakers and they suck)
• camping equipment
• instruction books for crafts you want to learn (I'm thinking stuff like knitting, sewing etc.)
• materials for those crafts
• gas money / money for motels, so you can take a random road trip to a place you've never been before
• gym membership
• yoga classes (or martial arts or whatever)

Also I totally second whoever said "nice kitchen knives".... (read more)

Read more things that agree with what you want to believe. Avoid content that disagrees with it or criticizes it.

I don't have an answer, but I would like to second this request.

This post demonstrates a common failure of LessWrong thinking, where it is assumed that there is one right answer to something, when in fact this might not be the case. There may be many "right ways" for a single person to think about how much to give to charity. There may be different "right ways" for different people, especially if those people have different utility functions.

I think you probably know this, I am just picking on the wording, because I think that this wording nudges us towards thinking about these kinds of questions in an unhelpful way.

I think that we should have fewer meta posts like this. We spend too much time trying to optimize our use of this website, and not enough time actually just using the website.

Thanks for this post! I also spend far too much time worrying about inconsequential decisions, and it wouldn't surprise me if this is a common problem on LessWrong. In some sense, I think that rationality actually puts us at risk for this kind of decision anxiety, because rationality teaches us to look at every situation and ask, "Why am I doing it this way? Is there a different way I could do it that would be better?" By focusing on improving our lives, we end up overthinking our decisions. And we tend to frame these things as optimization ... (read more)

I think it's worth including inference on the list of things that make machine learning difficult. The more complicated your model is, the more computationally difficult it will be to do inference in it, meaning that researchers often have to limit themselves to a much simpler model than they'd actually prefer to use, in order to make inference actually tractable.

Analogies are pervasive in thought. I was under the impression that cognitive scientists basically agree that a large portion of our thought is analogical, and that we would be completely lost without our capacity for analogy? But perhaps I've only been exposed to a narrow subsection of cognitive science, and there are many other cognitive scientists who disagree? Dunno.

But anyway I find it useful to think of analogy in terms of hierarchical modeling. Suppose you have a bunch of categories, but you don't see any relation between them. So maybe you kno... (read more)

I'm also reading this book, and I'm actually finding it profoundly unimpressive. Basically it's a 500-page collection of examples, with very little theoretical content. The worst thing, though, is that its hypothesis seems to fundamentally undermine itself. Hofstadter and Sander claim that concepts and analogy are the same phenomenon. But they also say that concepts are very flexible, non-rigid things, and that we expand and contract their boundaries whenever it's convenient for reasoning, and that we do this by making analogies between the original co... (read more)

Potluck means we bring our own food and then share it? Is there a list of what people are bringing, to avoid duplicates?

Oh hey, this is convenient, I just got to Sydney yesterday and you guys have a meetup tonight. =) I'll probably attend. (I'm in town for three months, visiting from the United States.)

I have an ulterior motive for attending: I am looking for housing near Macquarie University for the next three months. I don't suppose anyone here has a room for rent, or knows of a good place to stay? (Sorry if this is the wrong place to ask about such things!)

That's what I'm wondering.

Sure, but that understanding is very specific to our culture. It's only recently that we've come to see procreation as "recreation" - something unnecessary that we do for personal fulfillment.

Many people don't hold jobs just to avoid being poor. It's also a duty to society. If you can't support yourself, then you're a burden on society and its infrastructure.

Similarly, having children was once thought of as a duty to society. I read an article about this recently: http://www.artofmanliness.com/2014/03/03/the-3-ps-of-manhood-procreate/

Anyway, ... (read more)

To construct a friendly AI, you need to be able to make vague concepts crystal clear, cutting reality at the joints when those joints are obscure and fractal - and them implement a system that implements that cut.

Strongly disagree. The whole point of Bayesian reasoning is that it allows us to deal with uncertainty. And one huge source of uncertainty is that we don't have precise understandings of the concepts we use. When we first learn a new concept, we have a ton of uncertainty about its location in thingspace. As we collect more data (either thro... (read more)

I can't help but think that some of this has to do with feminism, at least in the case of girl teenagers. I hear a lot of people emphasizing that having children is a choice, and it's not for everyone. People are constantly saying things like "Having children is a huge responsibility and you have to think very carefully whether you want to do it." The people saying this seem to have a sense that they're counterbalancing societal pressures that say everyone should have children, or that women should focus on raising kids instead of having a car... (read more)

Thanks!

Cog sci question about how words are organized in our minds.

So, I'm a native English speaker, and for the last ~1.5 years, I've been studying Finnish as a second language. I was making very slow progress on vocabulary, though, so a couple days ago I downloaded Anki and moved all my vocab lists over to there. These vocab lists basically just contained random words I had encountered on the internet and felt like writing down; a lot of them were for abstract concepts and random things that probably won't come up in conversation, like "archipelago"... (read more)

Hmm. If you want to know how Bayesian models of cognition work, this paper might be a good place to start, but I haven't read it yet: "Bayesian Models of Cognition", by Griffiths, Kemp, and Tenenbaum.

I'm taking a philosophy class right now on Bayesian models of cognition, and we've read a few papers critiquing Bayesian approaches: "Bayesian Fundamentalism or Enlightenment?", by Jones and Love "Bayesian Just-So Stories in Psychology and Neuroscience", by Bowers and Davis Iirc, it's the latter that discusses the unfalsifiabilit... (read more)