othercriteria

Seconding all of gjm's criticisms, and adding another point.

The sostenuto (middle) pedal was invented in 1844. The sustain (right) pedal has been around roughly as long as the piano itself, since piano technique is pretty much unthinkable without it.

The explanation by owencb is what I was trying to address. To be explicit about when the offset is being added, I'm suggesting replacing your log1p(x) ≣ log(1 + x) transformation with log(c + x) for c=10 or c=100.

If the choice of log-dollars is just for presentation, it doesn't matter too much. But in a lesswrong-ish context, log-dollars also have connotations of things like the Kelly criterion, where it is taken completely seriously that there's more of a difference between $0 and $1 than between $1 and $3^^^3.

Given that at least 25% of respondents listed $0 in charity, the offset you add to the charity ($1 if I understand log1p correctly) seems like it could have a large effect on your conclusions. You may want to do some sensitivity checks by raising the offset to, say, $10 or $100 or something else where a respondent might round their giving down to $0 and see if anything changes.

Curtis Yarvin, who looked to Mars for tips and tricks on writing a "tiny, diamond-perfect kernel" for a programming environment.

The Rasch model does not hate truth, nor does it love truth, but the truth if made out of items which it can use for something else.

Not, it's much more akin to Dennett's "Where Am I?" or to becoming meguca.

This seems like a good occasion to quote the twist reveal in Orson Scott Card's Dogwalker:

We stood there in his empty place, his shabby empty hovel that was ten times better than anywhere we ever lived, and Doggy says to me, real quiet, he says, "What was it? What did I do wrong? I thought I was like Hunt, I thought I never made a single mistake in this job. in this one job."

And that was it, right then I knew. Not a week before, not when it would do any good. Right then I finally knew it all, knew what Hunt had done. Jesse Hunt never made mista

This seems cool but I have a nagging suspicion that this reduces to greater generality and a handful of sentences if you use conditional expectation of the utility function and the Radon-Nikodym theorem?

Noun phrases that are insufficiently abstract.

echo chambers [...] where meaningless duckspeak is endlessly repeated

Imagine how intolerable NRx would be if it were to acquire one of these. Fortunately, their ideas are too extreme for 4chan, even, so I have no idea where such a forum would be hosted.

How meaningful is the "independent" criterion given the heavy overlaps in works cited and what I imagine must be a fairly recent academic MRCA among all the researchers involved?

stupid problem

embarrassingly simple math since forever

I should have been years ahead of my peers

momentary lack of algebraic insight ("I could solve this in an instant if only I could get rid of that radical")

for which I've had the intuitions since before 11th grade when they began teaching it to us

Sorry to jump from object-level to meta-level here but it seems pretty clear that the problem here is not just about math. Your subjective assessments of how difficult these topics are is inconsistent with how well you report you are doing at them. A... (read more)

It's been a while since I've thought about how to learn ecology, but maybe check out Ben Bolker's Ecological Models and Data in R? It would also be a decent way to start to learn how to do statistics with R.

That is important destination but maybe too subtle a starting point.

Start with ecological models for inter-species interactions (predation, competition, mutualism, etc.) where there are more examples and the patterns are simpler, starker, and more intuitive. Roughly, death processes may depend on all involved populations but birth processes depend on each species separately. Then move to natural selection and evolution, intra-species interactions, where the birth processes for each genotype may depend on populations of all the different genotypes, and death processes depend on the phenotypes of all the different populations.

The conscientiousness/akrasia interactions are also fascinating, but even harder to measure. There's a serious missing-not-at-random censoring effect going on for people too conscientious to leave off digit ratio but too akrasic to do the measurement. I nearly fell into this bucket.

do what gwern does

Or do the complete opposite.

The impression I get of gwern is that he reads widely, thinks creatively, and experiments frequently, so he is constantly confronted with hypotheses that he has encountered or has generated. His use of statistics is generally confirmatory, in that he's using data to filter out unjustified hypotheses so he can further research or explore or theorize about the remaining ones.

Another thing you can do with data is exploratory data analysis, using statistics to pull out interesting patterns for further considerat... (read more)

No idea. Factor analysis is the standard tool to see that some instrument (fancy work for ability) is not unitary. It's worth learning about anyways, if it's not in your toolbox.

Some people like to layer trousers

A simple way to do this is flannel-lined jeans. The version of these made by L.L. Bean have worked well for me. They trade off a bit of extra bulkiness for substantially greater warmth and mildly improved wind protection. Random forum searches suggest that the fleece-lined ones are even warmer, but you lose the cool plaid patterning on the rolled up cuffs.

A not quite nit-picking critique of this phenomenon is that it's treating a complex cluster of abilities as a unitary one.

In some of the (non-Olympic!) distance races I've run, it's seemed to me that I just couldn't move my legs any faster than they were going. In others, I've felt great except for a side stitch that made me feel like I'd vomit if I pushed myself harder. And in still others, I couldn't pull in enough air to make my muscles do what I wanted. In the latter case, I'd definitely notice the lower oxygen levels but in the former cases, maybe I w... (read more)

Seconding a lot of calef's observations.

If the new topic you want to learn is "extended behavior networks", then maybe this is your best bet. But if you really want to learn about something like AI or ML or the design of agents that behave reasonably by the standards of some utility-like theory, then this is probably a bad choice. A quick search in Google Scholar (if you're not using this, or some equivalent, making this a step before going to the hivemind is a good idea) suggests that extended behavior networks are backwater-y. If the idea of a ... (read more)