All of adbge's Comments + Replies

adbge00

Another consideration: earworms. I find getting a song stuck in my head to be somewhat aversive.

Edgar Allan Poe puts it this way:

It is quite a common thing to be thus annoyed with the ringing in our ears, or rather in our memories, of the burthen of some ordinary song, or some unimpressive snatches from an opera. Nor will we be the less tormented if the song in itself be good, or the opera air meritorious.

0Luke_A_Somers
It takes about a minute for something bad to annoy me. It takes multiple days for something good to annoy me.
adbge290

Here's a sampling of the best in my RSS reader:

  • Scott Aaronson, theoretical computer science/physics
  • Tyler Cowen, economics, Cowen is good about sharing surprising info
  • Lambda the Ultimate, programming language theory
  • John Baez, "from math to physics to earth science and biology, computer science and the technologies of today and tomorrow," plus stuff on catastrophic risk w.r.t. climate change.
  • Jeremy Kun, computer science mostly
  • The n-Category Cafe, "A group blog on math, physics and philosophy"
  • Andrew Gelman, pointing out bad statis
... (read more)
1labachevskij
I have to admit the intersection with my feed list is most definitely non-empty: I'd add Good Math Bad Math, mathematics, computer science and, sometimes, recipes and playlists.
adbge70

Forty-five individuals (22 couples and 1 widowed person) living in arranged marriages in India completed questionnaires measuring marital satisfaction and wellness. The data were compared with existing data on individuals in the United States living in marriages of choice. Differences were found in importance of marital characteristics, but no differences in satisfaction were found. Differences were also found in 9 of 19 wellness scales between the 2 groups. Implications for further research are considered.

Source.

Results from the analyses revealed tha

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adbge200

While I agree that depressives should try CBT, I've begun to think some of the enthusiasm is misplaced, especially when contrasted with the scrutiny antidepressants receive. Yvain has written about this before:

The AJP article above is interesting because as far as I know it’s the largest study ever to compare Freudian and cognitive-behavioral therapies. It examined both psychodynamic therapy (a streamlined, shorter-term version of Freudian psychoanalysis) and cognitive behavioral therapy on 341 depressed patients. It found – using a statistic called non

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1Pablo
For those who want to try CBT, I've made available Burn's book together with an Anki deck and a Google Form here. I share Yvain's skepticism, though. Insofar as there are reasons for experimenting with CBT, they seem to mostly derive from the comparatively low health, time and money costs of trying it for a while, and the benefits of using the knowledge gained during that trial period to make a decision about whether to try it for longer.
9Stabilizer
In psychotherapy, this is known as the Dodo bird verdict.
3JonahS
Thanks for the link to Yvain's article. The meta-analyses that I found comparing the efficacy of CBT and usual therapy didn't show CBT to be superior, with the possible exception of long-term effects. The points that I raise in favor of CBT are the potential for low-cost and the absence of a need to find a therapist who's a good match.
adbge00

Awesome, thanks so much!

Happy to help!

If you were to recommend one of these resources to begin with, which would it be?

I like both Project Euler and 99 Haskell problems a lot. They're great for building success spirals.

adbge50
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0JMiller
Awesome, thanks so much! If you were to recommend one of these resources to begin with, which would it be?
adbge10

If the statement that the test says that you are a normal human like everybody else triggers you, that has meaning.

I wouldn't read too much into such a reaction. It seems to be a fairly common thing, resulting in the creation of a uniqueness-seeking scale in psychology. There is some support for a "need for uniqueness" as a human universal, with a review here.

From my notes on the Handbook of Positive Psychology:

As predicted, the students who were told that they were mod- erately similar to other respondents reported more positive moods th

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0ChristianKl
The fact that something is common doesn't mean that it's healthy. In general people who are strongly triggered by the assertion that they are normal might engage in behavior that cuts them off from their fellow humans in order to feel more unique. There are a bunch of people who make uncommon clothing choices and then complain when they draw attention by strangers when walking in public. When I personally walk around in Vibrams (which I got 3 years ago) I do it welcoming attention by strangers. I have no issues with practicing my dance turns in public while waiting for a train which is not standard behavior but I don't do it out of a desire to prove that I'm unique, practicing the dance turns is about practicing the dance turns regardless of who's looking. If you engage in a bunch activity to either prove that your normal or to prove that you are special, than you aren't doing what's most beneficial for your other goals.
adbge20

It sounds like you're saying that my aversion to failing at something else is irrational. Would you mind pointing out the error in my reasoning? (This sort of exchange is basically cognitive behavioral therapy, btw.)

Many of the things that you have said are characteristic of the sort of disordered thinking that goes hand-in-hand with depression. The book Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy covers some of them. You may want to try reading it (if you have not already) so that you will be able to recognize thoughts typical among the depressed. (I find some... (read more)

0ricketybridge
I am thoroughly familiar with Feeling Good and feel that I can argue circles around it. My original statement (that I'll fail at everything) is an example of "overgeneralization" and "fortune telling." But this sounds to me like just a way of stating the problem of induction: nothing can ever be certain or generalized because we don't know what we don't know etc. etc. However, science itself basically rests on induction. If I drop a steel ball (from the surface of this planet), will it float, even if I think positively really hard? No. It won't. Our reason makes conclusions based on past evidence. If past evidence suggests that attempts lead to failure, why ISN'T it reasonable to assume that future attempts will lead to failure? Yes, the variables will be different, I guess, but it's still a gamble. If you think I should give it a go anyway, then you may as well advise me to buy lottery tickets, imo. And I just can't dredge up the sufficient motivation to pursue something with chances like that. Kind of funny that you suggest blaming external forces instead of taking personal responsibility, but okay. I would say the latter is the case for me: I did not master the sufficient skill set, even after ten years or whatever. The people who are successful in my field do so MUCH earlier. So, okay, I didn't master the right skill set. I don't see how that's supposed to make me feel any better. It doesn't change my shitty situation. And it only makes me question, well why didn't I? I wanted to; I attempted to. Clearly, I did something wrong. I either don't have sufficient talent at my field or talent at learning to have mastered those skills. But those are innate and permanent traits, which you (and many others) apparently consider invalid, which I don't really get, but I'll accept it for the moment. So due to non-innate and temporary faults, I failed to achieve my objectives. Again, how is this supposed to make me feel better? Because I'm supposed to believe those faults h
2wedrifid
I've noticed that this kind of formulation of a prediction is defective for the purpose of calibration on things like predictionbook. If, instead the prediction was "Amanda Knox will be lose the appeals process AND Amanda Knox will be extradited", to complement your other question then the predictions continue to mean what predictionbook intends them to mean and if people answer both predictions then they have also provident the conditional prediction information.
1komponisto
This is ambiguous, of course; technically, the "appeal" level is what just happened. The next stage is a second "appeal", at the Supreme Court. (Italian terminology actually uses two different words for the two stages, but they both translate as "appeal" in English.) Again, to be technically correct, what would happen is that the finding of guilt by the appeals court (the thing that just happened) would be confirmed by the Supreme Court. ...because if you're talking about practicalities instead of legal formalisms, what actually happened was that Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito were found guilty by the Italian Supreme Court last March.
adbge30

It seems to me that we're less interested in perfect programs and more interested in programs that are good enough, and there are plenty of those, e.g. some cryptographic software, the mars rover and the Apollo systems, life-critical systems generally, telecom stuff. Of course, there are many notable failures, too.

adbge40

Does anyone have an idea of the prerequisites necessary for Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms or Introduction to Economic Analysis?

3Stabilizer
Skimming through these two textbooks, it seems that: 1) Information Theory... would go down a lot easier if you are already comfortable with probability theory. Nothing fancy, but being able to solve basic "balls and urns" problems, which require some knowledge of combinatorics. Also, knowledge of linear algebra would help a lot. 2) ...Economic Analysis seems to require comfort with calculus. Comfort with reading, manipulating and understanding graphs---similar to the kind you encounter in Newtonian kinematics---would also go a long way.
adbge00

I think the paper you're thinking of is Kahneman et al's A survey method for characterizing daily life experience: The day reconstruction method.

Notably,

In Table 1, taking care of one's children ranks just above the least enjoyable activities of working, housework, and commuting.

On the other hand, having children also harms marital satisfaction. See, for example, here.

adbge140

If it turns out that the whole MIRI/LessWrong memeplex is massively confused, what would that look like?

A few that come to mind:

  • Some religious framework being basically correct. Humans having souls, an afterlife, etc.
  • Antinatalism as the correct moral framework.
  • Romantic ideas of the ancestral environment are correct and what feels like progress is actually things getting worse.
  • The danger of existential risk peaked with the cold war and further technological advances will only hasten the decline.
adbge00

I thought the same thing and went to dig up the original. Here it is:

One common illustration is called Transplant. Imagine that each of five patients in a hospital will die without an organ transplant. The patient in Room 1 needs a heart, the patient in Room 2 needs a liver, the patient in Room 3 needs a kidney, and so on. The person in Room 6 is in the hospital for routine tests. Luckily (for them, not for him!), his tissue is compatible with the other five patients, and a specialist is available to transplant his organs into the other five. This operat

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9solipsist
This situation seems different for me for two reason: Off-topic way: Killing the "donor" is bad for similar reasons as 2-boxing the Newcomb problem is bad. If doctors killed random patients then patients wouldn't go to hospitals and medicine would collapse. IMO the supposedly utilitarian answer to the transplant problem is not really utilitarian. On-topic way: The surgeons transplant organs to save lives, not to make babies. Saving lives and making lives seem very different to me, but I'm not sure why (or if) they differ from a utilitarian perspective.
adbge00

Going under anesthesia is a similar discontinuity in subjective experience, along with sleep, situations where people are technically dead for a few moments and then brought back to life, coma patients, and so on.

I don't personally regard any of these as the death of one person followed by the resurrection of a new person with identical memories, so I also reject the sort of reasoning that says cryogenic resurrection, mind uploading, and Star Trek-style transportation is death.

Eliezer has a post here about similar concerns. It's perhaps of interest to note... (read more)

3[anonymous]
Yes, that post still reflects my views. I should point out again that sleep and many forms of anesthesia don't stop operation of the brain, they just halt the creation of new memories so people don't remember. That's why, for example, some surgery patients end up with PTSD from waking up on the table, even if they don't remember. Other cases like temporary (clinical) death and revival also aren't useful comparisons. Even if the body is dying, the heart and breathing stops, etc., there are still neural computations going on from which identity is derived. The irrecoverable disassociation of the particle interactions underlying consciousness probably takes a while - hours or more, unless there is violent physical damage to the brain. Eventually the brain state fully reverts to random interactions and identity is destroyed, but clinical revival becomes impossible well before then. Cryonics is more of a weird edge case ... we don't know enough now to say with any certainty whether cryonics patients have crossed that red line or not with respect to destruction of identity.
adbge70

There is what Wikipedia calls interference theory, which is when the act of learning new, similar information throws a wrench into the recall of the old information. For example, I never used to have any trouble with the word iniquitous before I learned the word invidious, but now I get them mixed up.

adbge170

The U.S. Department of Justice has a special report, Violent Victimization Committed by Strangers, 1993-2010:

In 2010, males experienced violent victimizations by strangers at nearly twice the rate of females (figure 2). The rate of violence against males by strangers was 9.5 victimizations per 1,000 males in 2010 compared to 4.7 victimizations per 1,000 females.

It goes on to say that the disparity seems to be shrinking, with crime against men falling more rapidly than crime against women.

adbge70

Not suicide rates, but Wikipedia has some information along similar lines here.

6hyporational
Thanks. Going just by that article, it looks like later studies show more promising results. This could be because psychiatrists have become better at recognizing individuals who benefit from surgery, but that's just speculation on my part. I bet surgical techniques have improved too.
adbge30

Never been to the US and don't know much about it

It's possible there is a bit of a cultural disconnect here. I live in the United States and soldiers are treated with a great deal of respect, often receiving discounts on meals and other services. Here's a Reddit thread where former military talk about "soldier worship." We also have a couple national holidays honoring service people. On these days, it's common for there to be parades and for ex-military members to speak at schools.

I'm uncertain how common this knowledge is outside of the US,... (read more)

2Nornagest
I'm not sure I'd say "heroes"; soldiering's definitely a respected profession, but as far as I can tell that respect doesn't approach worship. Familiarity probably has a lot to do with this: with about half a percent of the population on duty and many more retired, almost everyone in the States knows a soldier or a sailor or a Marine fairly well. Pretty hard to worship someone that, let's say, shared your first cigarette with you when you were both thirteen. There's also a bit of a rural/urban divide, though. Servicepeople receive noticeably more respect in my hometown (of a few thousand people) than my current city (100,000 people, part of a contiguous urban area containing millions).
adbge40

This passage by Grothendieck (source) seems potentially relevant:

What my experience of mathematical work has taught me again and again, is that the proof always springs from the insight, and not the other way round – and that the insight itself has its source, first and fore- most, in a delicate and obstinate feeling of the relevant entities and concepts and their mutual relations. The guiding thread is the inner coherence of the image which gradually emerges from the mist, as well as its consonance with what is known or foreshadowed from other sources –

... (read more)
adbge510

Surveyed, requesting free internet points.