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I'm starting an experiment today. The program is Everyman: 3 20 min naps at midday, the afternoon and the evening with core sleep gradually decreasing, hopefully to a small number of hours. I have early morning lectures and function well at night, so short of being nocturnal decreasing my core sleep looks the best way to be efficient. Will keep this tread updated with results.
Correcting errors and karma
An easy way to win cheep karma on LW:
- Publicly make a mistake.
- Wait for people to call you on it.
- Publicly retract your errors and promise to improve.
Post 1) gets you negative karma, post 3) gets you positive karma. Anecdotally the net result is generally very positive.
This doesn't seem quite sane. Yes, it is good for us to reward people for changing their minds based on evidence. But it's still better not to have made the error the first time round. At the very least you should get less net karma for changing your mind towards the correct answer than you would for stating the correct thing the first time.
Questions:
Is there an advantage to this signalling-approval-for-updates that outweighs the value of karma as indicator-of-general-correctness-of-posts?
If so then can some other signal of general correctness be devised?
If not then what karma etiquette should we impose to ensure this effect doesn't happen?
Pre-commitment and meta at the Cambridge UK meetup
At today's Cambridge UK meetup I made an observation: It seems that LW meetups are very good at having meta-discussions. But they are not so good at acting effectively on them.
The point of meta discussion is to make object level discussion better. The meta questions aren't themselves interesting and dont automatically produce win. Object level discussions are themselves interesting and do produce win (if not then stop talking about boring things). So if one has a meta discussion it should be such that the improvements made to the object level discussions outweigh the cost of the meta discussion.
I notice we have meta discussions which (like a lot of discussions in LW groups) dont resolve themselves into actions. This means that improvements to the meetups aren't in fact implemented. This is a double fail: first because the object level discussion isn't improved, and second because the unresolved meta took resources away from the body of the meeting.
We could cheaply improve this with the internet. Doodle polls solve the problem of when to schedule a meeting far more efficiently than verbal discussion. Likewise the time-consuming question of "what shall we talk about" can be thought about outside the meeting where there are far fewer constraints on time. Both these problems should be outsourced to the google group and not mentioned in the meeting itself.
A point that was raised is that it is very easy for the group to decide that such and such a thing must be done, that does not automatically translate into the actions of specific people. Someone mentioned the parable of the rabbi raising funds, and we started the following pre-commitment game.
The Napkin
We got out a napkin and Douglas drew a table of "who, what, by when" on it. He was the first to write down a commitment so as to overcome everyone's reluctance to be the first to act. We then went round and asked for commitments that would be made public in front of the group. I'm now posting those commitments online.
- Douglas: "Post a meeting format to discussion" Wednesday midnight
- Paul: "Kahneman AD/BC* example on LW wiki" Thursday midnight
- Paul: "David Styles" Monday midnight
- Adam: "Post this list, post on meta/object interaction" Wednesday midnight
- Jonathan: "Directions to JCR" Tuesday midnight
- Ben: "Keep diary for 1 week, identify biases" next Sunday
*(did I read that right? edit: no I didn't)
The case of Ben is worth commenting on. At the end of the meeting as everyone was walking out the room I made to fold the list away and shouted "last chance to commit to anything if you want to", Ben took this opportunity to sign up when he had not done so before in the meeting. This may be a generally useful technique.
Questions
Those at the meeting: have you completed your task?
What are easy ways to overcome the reluctance of people to be the first to act?
How can we have meta-discussions that are targeted at concrete actions?
In response to
Optimizing Sleep
Update. I've discovered I dont function nearly so well at night as I had anticipated. I was running with core sleep 4-8, after shifting this to 2-6 I can see an improvement.
Also notable features: I can shift the naps around a fair amount, but too much core sleep, or hitting the snooze button after waking from core sleep throws me off for a long time after. The amount of sleep in each session doesn't seem as important in how I feel afterwards as how I wake up. Waking up in the middle of deep sleep going blurg and snoozing for 10 mins is followed by feeling awful. Being in light enough sleep that my phone screen turning back on before the alarm goes off is enough to wake me and then getting straight out of bed is followed by feeling really energetic.
It's incredible how much sleep I'm able to get in the naps. Sometimes schedules mean I can only really afford 10/15 mins, and I feel myself waking up from real sleep after this.
In response to
Meetup : Cambridge UK
I take it the four posts are a mistake?
Sorry, trying to be cunning and failing.
Meetup : Cambridge UK
Discussion article for the meetup : Cambridge UK
Meet at the Great Gate if you dont know where the JCR is. Great Gate is on St. John's Street opposite the bookshop "Heffers". Join the google group at http://groups.google.com/group/cambridgelesswrong
Discussion article for the meetup : Cambridge UK
Meetup : Cambridge UK
Discussion article for the meetup : Cambridge UK
Meet at the Great Gate if you dont know where the JCR is. Great Gate is on St. John's Street opposite the bookshop "Heffers". Join the google group at http://groups.google.com/group/cambridgelesswrong
Discussion article for the meetup : Cambridge UK
Meetup : Cambridge UK
Discussion article for the meetup : Cambridge UK
Meet at the Great Gate if you dont know where the JCR is. Great Gate is on St. John's Street opposite the bookshop "Heffers". Join the google group at http://groups.google.com/group/cambridgelesswrong
Discussion article for the meetup : Cambridge UK
Meetup : Cambridge UK
Discussion article for the meetup : Cambridge UK
Meet at the Great Gate if you dont know where the JCR is. Great Gate is on St. John's Street opposite the bookshop "Heffers". Join the google group at http://groups.google.com/group/cambridgelesswrong
Discussion article for the meetup : Cambridge UK
In response to
comment
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on
Dutch Books and Decision Theory: An Introduction to a Long Conversation
The question that needs answering isn't "What bets do I take?" but "What is the justification for Bayesian epistemology?".
In response to
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by
on
Dutch Books and Decision Theory: An Introduction to a Long Conversation
I'd always thought "What bets do I take" was the justification for Bayesian epistemology. Every policy decision (every decision of any kind) is a statement of the form "I'm prepared to accept these costs to receive these outcomes given these events", this is a bet. If Bayesian epistemology lets you win bets then that's all the justification it could ever need.
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My impression was that the problem with Babbage was largely that he was a terrible manager (like Einstein and many other scientists) and thus failed to deliver what he promised even though it was a reasonable proposition given the tech of the day (as Myhrvold demonstrated).
He was also horrific at politics. Nobody with half a political brain writes this: http://books.google.co.uk/books/reader?id=3bgPAAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader