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<blockquote> The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is now. </blockquote>
African proverb
[LINK] People are biased against creativity
A lot of people probably saw this on hacker news but I thought I'd share it anyway - People are biased against creative ideas, studies find
To sum up, most people dislike uncertainty so much that they'll reject pretty much anything new, good or not. The article states that "Anti-creativity bias can be so subtle that people are unaware of it, which can interfere with their ability to recognize a creative idea." By "creative idea," I of course mean lawful creativity - the article seems to suggest that at a certain point, every creative suggestion starts to sound about as useful as "let's put pictures of purple unicorns on the wall to help ourselves be more productive," if you're biased enough.
What's a good way to fight this? Obviously solving the problem of being creative is a totally different matter. But I would suggest the usual "if you were a different person injected into your own life to improve things" approach and start by taking every single suggestion seriously and thinking it through as if you were only dealing with the issue for the very first time, and then as time went on, improve at making quick unbiased evaluations of creative ideas.
[LINK] Wired - "New Chip Borrows Brain’s Computing Tricks"
In case anyone's interested,here's an article about new computer chips by IBM which emulate brain functions.
In response to
Cached Phrases
"Fred should really cut back on drinking; he just started seeing someone too; like that's going to last... wait, I don't actually have any reason to think that it wouldn't..."
Do you need an articulated reason? If your subconscious ran the numbers and reported the result without showing you its reasoning, that doesn't mean you should ignore it entirely. Perhaps when you notice predictions like that, you should write them down and see how they do?
Or could it have been an subconscious emotional response like bitterness or jealousy? Those get in the way of clear and rational thinking a lot. I could be totally off on this, of course, since you did say it was a bad example.
More crucially, how many trends almost, but not quite look precisely exponential? Are precisely-exponential trends the tip of a long tail, or an additional local mode?
The logistic curve, for example, is extremely similar to the exponential curve for small values seeing as the latter is y' = ky and the former is y' = ky(1-y). That got Malthus with his whole doomsday arguments about population growth outstripping resources (at least for the time being).
In response to
[LINK} Bayes' Theorem in New York Times
If the book turns out to be good, it could be a good way to "spread the word," seeing as there doesn't seem to be a lot of Bayesian literature for the layman out there
In response to
[SEQ RERUN] Science as Attire
Oh, i'm immediately reminded of the horrific scientific explanation in the movie 2012 that was something like, "The neutrinos are turning on us." Whatever that means.
I think people also invoke science in debates without the accompanying critical thinking skills that are supposed to go along with science, as if it's just a weapon and the more scientific "facts" you know, the better chance you'll have in winning the argument.
"If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence. The origin of myths is explained in this way." --Bertrand Russell
Wiki Clean-up project
I'm a fairly new LW user, as evidenced by my so-far low karma. However, I've previously been familiar with a lot of the ideas talked about here and I've been reading the site for a few weeks. I think that the material here is amazing and often unparalleled on the rest of the web.
However, there's is one...weak point: the wiki. The sequences are a little bit formidable to beginners because of the massive tangle of hyperlinks which connect them together. When I started reading them, I routinely had 10-15 LW tabs open at once. My friends said a similar thing. Thus, I think that it would be helpful to have a reliable source of information where the recursion can sort of "bottom out," if you know what I mean. That should be the wiki.
But it's in a pretty sorry state right now. A lot of the articles are titles-only, a couple sentences long, or just a bunch of links which invariably lead to more links. Maybe I'm blowing this out of proportion, but I think that the wiki is something that could definitely be brought up to par with the (high) quality of the site.
So maybe several members should choose something they know about (or perhaps don't) and then research and write a good entry on it.
Thoughts?
In response to
Looking for proof of conditional probability
Umm...I don't know how rigorous this explanation this is, but it might lead you in the right direction...because if you consider the Venn Diagram with probability spaces A and B, the probability space of A within B is given by the overlap of the two circles, or P(A∩B). Then you get the probability of landing in that space out of all the space in B...as in, the probability that if you choose circle B, you land in the overlap between A and B.
That's probably not what you were looking for, but hope it helps.
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<blockquote> The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is now. </blockquote>
African proverb
Whoops, didn't mean to retract that. The quote is "The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is now." - African proverb