= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Background: lukeprog wrote this post about articles he wouldn't have the time to write, and the first one on the list was something I was confident about, and so I decided to write a post on it. (As a grad student in operations research, practical decision theory is what I spend most of my time thinking about.)
Amusingly enough, I had the most trouble working in his 'classic example.' Decision analysis tends to be hinged on Bayesian assumptions often referred to as "small world"- that is, your model is complete and unbiased (If you knew there was a bias in your model, you'd incorporate that into your model and it would be unbiased!). Choosing a career is more of a search problem, though- specifying what options you have is probably more difficult than picking from them. You can still use the VoI concept- but mostly for deciding when to stop accumulating new information. Before you've done your first research, you can't predict the results of your research very well, and so it's rather hard to put a number on how valuable looking into potential careers is.
There seems to be a lot of interest in abstract decision theory, but is there interest in more practical decision analysis? That's the sort of thing I suspect I could write a useful primer on, whereas I find it hard to care about, say, Sleeping Beauty.
= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d){kind=logo}
One that I realized quite quickly, I have an uncomfortably strong level of empathy. Or more accurately, a strong discomfort towards emotional disharmony in others. The strongest is in strong arguments or social awkwardness. I can barely stand to watch those intentionally awkward scenes in sitcoms and movies.
I have a preternatural ability to see what others are trying to say. This comes out in two ways. One, if someone is talking to me, and they make an error, my brain will autotranslate. So if they said brother and meant father, I will hear what they meant. Sometimes I don't notice this translation until they point out an error they made. And then I'll be able to recall specifically what they said. The other way it comes out is I can spot miscommunication very easily. If two people are having a "who's on first" moment, I'll see exactly where the confusion is, and what needs to be said to fix it. It's awesome and weird.
Both of the previous items cause me to have a natural urge to resolve any conflict going on, trying to act as mediator.
Like some here, I think I have mild number synethesia. Mental math sometimes has a visual component, with numbers splitting and merging. Additionally, numbers...um....look a certain way. So the number 15 looks really 3-ish and really 5-ish. It's also a very sturdy, compact number (because it fits into 60 so well.) The lower numbers also have an aesthetic, usually based on how divisible they are or how common a divisor they are. So, 2,3,4,12,60 are all pretty but 31 or 57 are ugly. Higher numbers blur a bit for me. This may be a heuristic for how easily my mind manipulates those numbers.
Also, and with the main population I feel like an oddity for this, I derive significant pleasure from completing math problems. I imagine many others here do too.
I also had an uncomfortably strong level of empathy specifically towards people doing something that would make me uncomfortable, in a social sense. When I watched someone talking and embarrassing themselves in class for example, it felt like my insides were trying to escape my skin.
This actually went away after watching all of the seasons of The Office (the American version).
However, I'm pretty sure I feel an abnormally low amount of empathy for other emotional states in other people (both positive and negative, this was unaffected by watching The Office)