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Turning the thermostat up extra-high does not make it get warm faster.
Ok. I confess that this one more than any of the others makes me seriously worry about how good my theory of mind is. How do they think their heating systems work?
Couldn't it just be an erroneous application of (an intuited version of) Newton's law of cooling, which says that heat transfer is linearly proportional to heat difference? They assume that the thermostat temperature is setting the temperature of the heating element, and then apply their intuited Newton's Law.
Seems pretty rational to me.
Real analysis is the first thing that comes to mind. Linear algebra is the second thing.
Lately I've been thinking about if and how learning math can improve one's thinking in seemingly unrelated areas. I should be able to report on my findings in a year or two.
Lately I've been thinking about if and how learning math can improve one's thinking in seemingly unrelated areas.
This seems like a classic example of the standard fallacious defense of undirected research (that it might and sometimes does create serendipitous results)?
Yes, learning something useless/nonexistent might help you learn useful things about stuff that exists, but it seems awfully implausible that it helps you learn more useful things about existence than studying the useful and the existing. Doing the latter will also improve your thinking in seemingly unrelated areas...while having the benefit of not being useless.
If instead of learning the clever tricks of combinatorics as an undergraduate, I had learned useful math like statistics or algorithms, I think I would have had just as much mental exercise benefit and gotten a lot more value.
I agree with you completely about consumption vs. charity, and had even mentioned the concept in my point about NPR donation guilt.
I also agree that the close number is wildly inaccurate, but even in context it wasn't applied to local charities and it was intended to make the point that multiple factors could and should be considered when picking charities, even when the importance multipliers on some factors are orders of magnitude higher than for other factors.
I hope this clarifies my meaning without defensiveness, because none was meant.
Ok, great, I'm glad I misunderstood.
This is Holden Karnofsky, the co-Executive Director of GiveWell, which is referenced in the top-level article and elsewhere on this thread.
I think there is an important difference between discussing the marginal impact of a blood donation and the marginal impact of a vote. When it comes to blood donations, it is possible for everyone to simultaneously follow the rule: "Give blood only when the supply of donations is low enough that an additional donation would have high expected impact", with a reasonable outcome. It is not possible for everyone to behave this way in elections: no voter is able to consider the existing distribution of votes before casting their own.
I am only casually familiar with TDT/UDT, but it seems to me that that "Give blood only when the supply of donations is low enough that an additional donation would have high expected impact" should get about the same amount of credit under TDT/UDT as giving blood, and thus the extra impact of actually giving blood (as opposed to following that rule) is small regardless of what decision theory one is using.
I bring this up because the discussion of marginal blood donations is parallel to analysis GiveWell often does of the marginal impact of donations. We do everything we can to understand the marginal (not average) impact of a donation and recommend organizations on this basis, and we believe this is a very important and unique element of what we offer (more on this issue). We try to push donors to underfunded charities and away from overfunded ones, and I do not think the validity of this depends on any controversial (even controversial-within-Less-Wrong) view on decision theory, though I am open to arguments that it does.
Completely agree with your general point on marginal analysis (although I'm a TDT skeptic), and am a fan of GiveWell, but this is trivially wrong:
It is not possible for everyone to behave this way in elections: no voter is able to consider the existing distribution of votes before casting their own.
This seems to assume away information about the size of the electorate as well as any predictive power about the outcome. Surely the marginal benefit of a Presidential vote in a small swing state is massively higher than in a large solidly Democratic state, for example. And in addition to historical results, there is polling data in advance of the election to improve predictions.
Besides this being theoretically true, we can see it empirically from the spending patterns of both Presidential campaigns and political parties on Congressional races. They allocate money to the states / races where they believe it will do the most marginal good, which is often a very inequal distribution. Thus they do, in fact "consider the existing distribution of votes before casting" their advertising dollars.
I didn't say that other goals could compete, but there are other goals that can be considered simultaneously. If one charity saves ten children for $100 and another saves nine and accomplishes a few other things, that is not a choice we should make mindlessly. we can't let "saving children become a buzzword that cuts off thought. What if the second charity saves the children from death and gives them some skills that will help them make a living and help their communities? In that case, I would probably choose the second charity. Think of it as a linear algebra problem, with numerous parameters with different weights. You end up with an optimal solution for all variables together rather than for a single variable alone. Just because saving children is the most heavily weighted variable doesn't mean that it is the only one.
At the risk of provoking defensiveness I will say that it really sounds like you are trying to rationalize your preferences as being rational when they aren't.
I say this because the examples that you were giving (local food kitchen, public radio), when compared to truly efficient charities (save lives, improve health, foster local entrepreneurship), are nothing like "save 9 kids + some other benefits" vs. "save 10 kids and nothing else". It''s more like "save 0.1 kids that you know are in your neighborhood" vs. "save 10 kids that you will never meet" (and that's probably an overestimate on the local option). Your choice of a close number is suspicious because it is so wrong and so appealing (by justifying the giving that makes you happy).
The amount of happiness that you create through local first world charities is orders of magnitude less than third world charities. Therefore, if you are choosing local first world charities that help "malnourished" kids who are fabulously nourished by third world standards, we can infer that the weight you put on "saving the lives of children" (and with it, "maximizing human quality-adjusted life years") is basically zero. Therefore, you are almost certainly buying warm fuzzies. That's consumption, not charity. I'm all for consumption, I just don't like people pretending that it's charity so they can tick their mental "give to charity" box and move on.
I agree extremely on the issue of procrastination not being restful, this is a standard theme in modern productivity writing. Procrastination (like reading blogs / tweets / etc) is a sort of worst of both worlds, it is neither useful nor restful, it passes the time and avoids immediate pain without providing pleasure or renewal.
That's why The Energy Project, Pomodoro, Zen Habits, etc. recommend that you schedule renewal breaks into your day - at a minimum midmorning, lunch, and midafternoon. I think the deliberate practice literature recommends breaks every 90 minutes. Taking a walk outside & exercise are oft-recommended, but really, just being conscious of the goal of renewal and experimenting to find things that will work is all you need. It's helped me be more productive.
Social conversations with co-workers are also good, but it's important that they be relaxed & guilt-free. One of the secrets of renewal is that it works much better if accepted as a need, for some reason guilty renewal doesn't renew. Renewal requires relaxation while guilt prevents it, something like that.
Glad to hear that you're learning (and writing about) basic productivity hacks like this, LW will get its instrumental rationality black belt yet :).
References:
http://zenhabits.net/take-lots-of-breaks-to-get-more-done/ http://www.theenergyproject.com/search/node/renewal
In response to
Tallinn-Evans $125,000 Singularity Challenge
Wow, SIAI has succeeded in monetizing Less Wrong by selling karma points. This is either a totally awesome blunder into success or sheer Slytherin genius.
This depends heavily on the definition of "useless".
Learning math sure isn't useless, and it seems to mostly consist of thinking about useless or nonexistent things.
most major Enlightenment figures who thought about these issues would argue strongly that this distinction is not a preference.
Possible. I didn't check the literature before posting that tweet. Anyway I think both encodings are possible to some extent. "You can't derive ought from is" is a belief. "People should distinguish between beliefs and preferences" is a preference.
Not all entities comply with attempts to reason formally about them. For instance, a human who feels insulted may bite you.
This refers to a possible difficulty of introspection.
Learning math sure isn't useless, and it seems to mostly consist of thinking about useless or nonexistent things.
I learned a lot of math (undergraduate major), and while it entertained me, it has been almost completely useless in my life. And the forms of math I believe to be most useful and wish I'd learned instead (statistics) are useful because they are so directly applicable to the real world.
What useful math have you learned that doesn't involve reference to useful or existent things?
In response to
New Year's Resolutions
I worry that new year's resolutions are a Schelling point for failed self-improvement that, by using a fundamentally flawed approach, tend to fail and then discourage people from future attempts at positive change.
Can we try to switch to the meme of "Annual retreat & reflect about one's life, goals, and habits", rather than these so frequently failed "resolutions", whose very name implies that the solution is more "resolve", and thus the problem is insufficient "resolve", rather than insufficient experimentation, knowledge about habit formation, realism about achievable change, or any of the other numerous actual reasons?
I mean, it's 2010, and we know we lose weight through hacks, not the application of more willpower - same goes for anything else.
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I think a large contingent on LW would be more interested in what an optimal employment scenario looks like after graduating with a high-value degree. I know I am.
Step 0: Get a time machine Step 1: Go back in time and tell yourself not to waste time on a degree, but to go invent Google or Facebook or something useful Step 2: Profit!