All of anandjeyahar's Comments + Replies

Perfect timing.. I had run into my therapist at a mutual event and had panicked.. Was wondering why? and how do I deal with similar situation in the future.. (it's very likely to happen again, as we have quite a bit in common and are in the same city).

4Seth Herd
Your therapist isn't supposed to be your friend outside of therapy, so it's a bit awkward for them, too. They're supposed to just say hi without acknowledging the therapist relationship (in case you don't want to), then move on. I don't think there are very strict rules on this, but there are definitely rules about not taking advantage of that privileged relationship, so they generally steer well clear of friendships with active clients to safeguard their license and reputation.

Very valid and good point(added). I briefly touched on it before too, but mostly had individual practitioners in mind than organized hospitals with administration and support. (India is moving towards a lot more of the organized hospitals model, but IT is non-existent, administration is most seat-in-the-ass jobs)

This is enough of a problem for small medical practices in the US that it outweighs a good bedside manner and confidence in the doctor's medical ability.

I am confident that this has a large effect on the success of an individual practice; it may fall under the general heading of business advice for the individual practitioner. Even for a single-doctor office, a good secretary and record system will be key to success.

This information comes chiefly from experience of and interviews with specialists (dermatology and gynaecology) in the US.

Thanks that's clearer.. will update...

Unreliable memory.. but here's a less opinionated, and closer to original sounding one.. although the source is dodgy.

And she felt hungry. And that also made no sense. The stomach was a bag for digesting food. It wasn't supposed to issue commands. The Auditors could survive quite well by exchanging molecules with their surroundings and making use of any local source of energy. That was a fact.

Try telling that to the stomach. She could feel it. It was sitting there, grumbling. She was being harassed by her internal organs. Why the ... why the. . why had they copied internal organs? Yuerkkk.

Frome here.

5silentbob
Note from the future: I asked a bunch of LLMs for Terry Pratchett quotes on the human stomach, and while there's no guarantee any of them are actual non-hallucinated quotes (in different conversations I got many different ones while no single one came up twice), I think they're all pretty good: "All he knew was that his stomach had just started investigating some of the more revolutionary options available to it." "The stomach is smarter than the mind, which is why it likes to make all the important decisions." "His stomach was making the kind of noises that normally precede the arrival of a self-propelled meal." "His stomach felt like it was trying to digest a live weasel while attempting to escape through his boots." "The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it. And the trouble with having an empty stomach is that it wants food all the time." “The stomach is an essential part of the nervous system. It tells the brain what it wants far more clearly than the brain manages to tell it.” "The human stomach is an amazing thing. It can stretch to accommodate all sorts of things. In theory, anyway. It just doesn’t appreciate it when you try to prove it."

I think Terry Pratchett makes this point well, in "The thief of time". Can't find the exact quote, but here goes my paraphrasing from memory

"Human beings make decisions by committee. The stomach has a mind of its, own and wants to put food in the mouth.

0anandjeyahar
Unreliable memory.. but here's a less opinionated, and closer to original sounding one.. although the source is dodgy. Try telling that to the stomach. She could feel it. It was sitting there, grumbling. She was being harassed by her internal organs. Why the ... why the. . why had they copied internal organs? Yuerkkk. Frome here.

I disagree. I'm not sure it's provable(maybe in professional poker players??), but if you've played the bet a lot of times, you could have come up with cues* about whether your friend has got the same roll(or number on the die) as the last time or not.

  • -- not sure how verbalizable or not it is .(which implies harder to teach to someone else).
1Davidmanheim
So you should update after you see that she rolled some number, and saw her reaction - but this says nothing about updating again because she wrote the number down,

OK, so "there could be cases where it is rational to update." How would you do so?

(I can't understand what an update could reasonably change. You aren't going to make the probability of any particular side more than 1/6, so what is the new probability?)

I don't know either. I can make up a scenario, based on a series of die throws, history of win-losses and guesses based on that, but that would simply be conjecture, and still may not produce a reasonable process. However, this discussion reminded me of a scene in HPMOR. (The scene where HP's critic part judges that Miss Camblebunker was not a Doctor, but an actor. (After Bellatrix is broken out of prison.))

0Davidmanheim
My claim is that you can't come up with such a conjecture where it makes sense to change the probability away from 1/6. That is why you should not update.

What does it mean to have uncertainty reduction taking place outside of the frame of reference of the person being asked for a decision?

You're assuming humans are rational(as in the AI definition of a rational agent). We're not. So this knowledge that other person knows something for sure, that we don't know about, colours/biases one's judgement.

I am not saying one should update their beliefs based on another person knowing or not knowing, but that we do anyway, as part of perception. I would argue, that we should be learning to notice the confusion be... (read more)

0Davidmanheim
OK, so "there could be cases where it is rational to update." How would you do so? (I can't understand what an update could reasonably change. You aren't going to make the probability of any particular side more than 1/6, so what is the new probability?)

Ah.... "genuine uncertainty" the term reminds me of "no true scotsman argument". My point being, there's an uncertainty reduction before and after the die was rolled, not to say this means, I should update my belief about the die's rolled/winning value.

Simply put my friend Naomi's beliefs have been updated and uncertainty in her mind has been eliminated. I think the author was trying to point out that most people conflate the two differences. It definitely is well worded for rhetoric, but not for pedagogy(in Feynman sense).

0Davidmanheim
What does it mean to have uncertainty reduction taking place outside of the frame of reference of the person being asked for a decision? In other terms, the discussion would have been the same if they replaced Naomi with a camera that is automatically used to take a picture.

I don't know about this idea. For most of my career, I've tried to be sidekick in the sense of trying to fulfill someone else's goals with say a secondary goal of mine that ties in to that primary goal, but it has always ended up in conflicts, where I couldn't simply bring myself to ignore the hero's stance/decision(and still work with him/her). Is that a good enough reason to try to be a hero? This post still resonates with me, but that doesn't mean am about to go around hero's for whom I can be a sidekick. Majority of the empirical evidence that I've (personal experience) accumulated suggests, that won't really work.

May be the distinction is not as sharp as you think/believe it is?

[This comment is no longer endorsed by its author]Reply

You are right. I was guilty of repeating from memory an oversimplified quote. The wikipedia page points out that it was misworded quote by Rudolf Clausius. Thanks for pointing out.

This is something, I find a lot of people don't realize(by virtue of never testing their boundaries). It's not that the universe* has become suddenly maleficient, it was indifferent / mildly maleficient(think increasing entropy rule, if you prefer), we just didn't realize it and it's getting harder to ignore.

*-- Edit Clarification: Universe - Humans. (- being set difference here.)

327chaos
The increasing entropy rule seems irrelevant, as planet Earth is not a closed system.

There is a good case to be made that this one remaining true "why"-question, which does not reduce to merely some one-level-lower description, is actually ill-formed and doesn't make sense.

Am Douglas Adams on this one. 42 is the answer, we don't know the question. Seriously, though I've gotten to a stage where I don't wonder much about the one 'why' axiom anymore*. Thanks for the clarification though.

*-- Used to wonder some 10 years ago though.

eventually the truth/reality/answer is indifferent to the phrasing of the question (as why/how). I do think phrasing it as how makes it easier to answer(in the instrumental sense) than why. Also what is the exception, am not aware of it, please point me.

1Kawoomba
"Why are you in the hospital?" - "Because I was injured when a car hit me." "Why did the car hit you?" - "Because the driver was drunk and I was standing at the intersection." "Why was the driver drunk?" and "Why were you standing at the intersection?" and so on and so forth. Every "why" question about something occurring in the natural world is answered by going one (or more) levels down in the granularity, describing one high-level phenomenon via its components, typically lower-level phenomena. This isn't unlike deriving one corollary from another. You're climbing back* the derivation tree towards the axioms, so to speak. It's the same in any system, the math analogy would be if someone asked you "why does this corollary hold", which you'd answer by tracing it back to the nearest theorem. Then "why does this theorem hold" would be answered by describing its lower-level* lemmata. Back we go, ever towards the axioms. All these are more aptly described as "how"-questions, "how" is the scientific question, since what we're doing is finding descriptions, not reasons, in some sense. Of course you could just solve such distinctions via dictionary and then in daily usage use "why" and "how" interchangeably, which is fine. But it's illuminating to notice the underlying logic. Which leaves as the only truly distinct "why"-question the "why those axioms?", which in the real world is typically phrased as "why anything at all?". Krauss tries to reduce that to a "how" question in A Universe From Nothing, as does the Tegmark multiverse, which doesn't work except snuggling in one more descriptive layer in front of the axioms. There is a good case to be made that this one remaining true "why"-question, which does not reduce to merely some one-level-lower description, is actually ill-formed and doesn't make sense. The territory just provides us with evidence, the model we build to compress that evidence implicitly surmises the existence of underlying axioms in the territory

Ah.. a compiled program running on limited computing resources(memory, cpu etc..). I kinda think the metaphor assumes that implicitly. Perhaps it results in a leaky abstraction for most others(i.e: not working with computers), but i don't really see it as a problem.

Agree 'how' is more accurate than why.

But, as compiler optimizations exploit increasingly recondite properties of the programming language definition, we find ourselves having to program as if the compiler were our ex-wife’s or ex-husband’s divorce lawyer, lest it introduce security bugs into our kernels, as happened with FreeBSD a couple of years back with a function erroneously annotated as noreturn, and as is happening now with bounds checks depending on signed overflow behavior.

Hacker new comment

This worked out good enough. We played the Guess the number principle game, tried the wason card test, and planned for future meetup ideas. Here's a set of pics. https://plus.google.com/photos/110235589351841913894/albums/6084556792473790881?banner=pwa . *

  • -- I haven't named/tagged anyone, but if you're still uncomfortable with public sharing pics, let me know on the mailing list.

but it seems to be almost exactly 1, possibly slightly higher. (I am unambiguously male, which makes me wonder if my methodology is bad) Well I had a similar problem(tried to measure with tape directly next & parallel to the fingers) and instead drew the outline of my spread out palm on a sheet of paper and got 1.01.

This is also the same reason I like Alan Perlis's quote on programming languages. Paraphrased it reads "There's no point in learning a new language that doesn't teach you a new way of thinking." I equate "the new way of thinking" with maps here.

Changed to Nov.15th. I won't be checking this page often. If you want to discuss the actual dates do it on the meetup site link above.

0AshwinV
having trouble accessing that page.. maybe it's the office settings, ill go home and try again...

Can we take these discussions to meetup. Am happy to change dates, as it works for me, but last time there was a mess up due to continuous mess-ups.

0anandjeyahar
Changed to Nov.15th. I won't be checking this page often. If you want to discuss the actual dates do it on the meetup site link above.

Couldn't find a bangalore specific group so started a google group and a meetup group. Here are the links below. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/bangalore-lesswrongers.

http://www.meetup.com/Bangalore-LessWrongers-Meetup/. Have also scheduled a first meetup for Nov. 14th. Let's see how many turn up.

The only part I object to what you wrote is emotions shouldn't interfere with cognition. I think they already are a part of cognition and it's a bit like calling "quantum physics is weird". Perhaps you meant "emotions shouldn't interfere with rationality" in which case I'll observe that it doesn't seem to be a popular view around lesswrong. Also observe, I used to believe that emotions should be ignored, but later came to the conclusion that it's a way too heavy-handed strategy for the modern world of complex systems. I'll try to conj... (read more)

1Robin
This is an ideal which Objectivists believe in, but it is difficult/impossible to actually achieve. I've noticed that as I've gotten older, emotions interfere with my cognition less and less and I am happy about that. You can define cognition how you wish, but given the number of people who see it as separate from emotion it's probably worth having a backup definition in case you want to talk to those people. RE: emotions, affect, moods. I do think that emotions should be considered when making rational decisions, but they are not the tools by which we come to decisions, here's an example. If you want to build a house to shelter your family, your emotional connection to your family is not a tool you will use to build the house. It's important to have a strong motivation to do something, but that motivation is not a tool. You'll still need hammers, drills, etc to build the house. I believe we can and should use drugs (I include naturally occurring hormones) to modify our emotions in order to better achieve our goals.

While some parts of me agree with it, there are other parts that set off alarms like: but judges will try to use this as a rationalization for what looks like a kind behaviour(by habit, social proof) instead of trying to evaluate the justness, especially when it looks like it's complex or is likely to threaten one of their biased beliefs.

Oh well nobody showed up.. Guess nobody was interested. If am wrong someone else post another meetup. Thanks. Cya.. Anand

Besides, Am hoping people will be interested in meeting regularly. So let's see later(say next month then)

Sure.. As of now, I am hoping we can have something ongoing on a monthly basis at the very least. I'll set up a meetup account based on how it turns out this saturday. 21st. Perhaps you could make it?

1AshwinV
Still currently in Delhi mate. Doesnt look like i'll be done before July. Monthly basis sounds good, I could probably make it for all, or at least most, of those..

Hi, I am going ahead with the saturday evening schedule.

Sorry dude. There are other people who are interested and I can't change it now. We can meetup personally, though not sure what will come out of that.

1askulkarni
Okey-doke.

As regards to the actual agenda, We can have two parts.

  1. A rationality game (First thought like this http://acritch.com/credence-game/, or this http://rationality.org/calibration/) or something else.
  2. Ideas/feedback about what each of us want to get out this lesswrong meetups. (Personally, right now am looking forward to learning how to introduce rational thinking in more aspects of my thinking).

Hi, Let's change that date to June 21st evening 5:30 PM. There is a coffee shop inside leela palace. It's called "Lavazza". Let's meet there. I'll post my contacts 3-4 days before the meetup. Comment/reply if you have trouble with that date.

1askulkarni
Sorry for the late reply. I am out of town on the 21st. How about some weekday between 23 and 27 June?

@Anand: Cool.. Let me check out the rationality meetup guide.. I'll look out for activity/agenda planning for a group of under 10.

1askulkarni
Can you edit the post and change the meetup date to sometime before the 27th, please?

Am not sure I follow your comment. I think I get the basic gist of it and I agree with it, but I gotta ask. Did you really mean ostend(or was it a typo?)?. I can't really find it as a word in m-w.com or on google.

0tristanhaze
Yep, what The Ancient Geek said. Sorry I didn't reply in a timely way - I'm not a regular user. I'm glad you basically agree, and pardon me for using such a recherche word (did I just do it again?) needlessly. Philosophical training can do that to you; you get a bit blind to how certain words are, while they could be part of the general intellectual culture, actually only used in very specific circles. (I think 'precisification' is another example of this. I used it with an intelligent nerd friend recently and, while of course he understood it - it's self explanatory - he thought it was terrible, and probably thought I just made it up.) Hope you look at Wittgenstein!
0TheAncientGeek
As in ostention, basically pointing, or a verbal substitute.

But then the problem is not having the shared experience. If they did, they would just need to apply an arbitrary label,

Yes.. If they had the shared experience, they would just need to apply an arbitrary label, however given how we learn language(by association based on how they are used by people around us on what we see as objective events/experiences), I am not too confident the labels will match even after having the shared experience. My previous comment assumes this, but did not make it explicit. And I derive the

The reason why the thing can't

... (read more)

And this seems like a situation described in the text. -- But then the problem is not having the shared experience.

I tend to think of language as a symbolic system to denote/share/communicate these experiences with other brains. Ofcourse, there's the inherent challenge of seldom two experiences are same.(Even if it is an experiment on electrons). It's one of the reason, one of my sci-fi favourite scenario is brain-brain interfaces, that figure some way to interpret and transfer the empirical heuristic rules about a probability distribution(of any giv... (read more)

I tend to disagree.. I have done some things which I thought was experimenting with but did not come up with any clear conclusion after the experiment and analysis. On rewriting the thesis it turned out there were a lot more implicit assumptions inside the hypothesis that I was not aware of. I think it was a badly designed experiment and it was rather unproductive in retrospective analysis. I suppose one could argue that it brought to light the implicit assumptions and that was a useful result. Somehow(not sure how or why) I find that a low standard to consider something an experiment.

Thanks for this one.. It's been some time since I re-read Douglas Adams , and had forgotten how good he can be. It makes so much sense reading this right after reading "Bind yourself to Reality". Had good long guffaw out of this one .:-)

Cool.. Am in Bangalore though. And not sure about my plans for Dec. 15th, as am between jobs. Will make it if I can though.

I had come across this link, when I was looking to start a meetup in bangalore. http://lesswrong.com/lw/crs/how_to_run_a_successful_less_wrong_meetup/

I was disappointed. I thought that Buffett's time, used to pick good charities, could be far more valuable than his money

I am not sure about this one. Buffett's skillset in picking very good investments, might not transfer to picking good charities. Or at the very least, he might need to spend some time practicing before getting good? Not to mention validation cycle time on charities vary(am not sure how much more than investments) and Buffett considered his time better spent investing, and not acquiring skill at charity picking?

Agree the animal metaphor doesn't help very well. I have some stereotype for fox (cunningness, slyness, trickster etc...), but draw a blank for hedgehog.

As to whether the dichotomy is real, well I think it's a useful model to question one's judgement. A better question would be is it more useful than say "system1 vs system2 " model (or pick another model.).

In a less regular, or low-validity, environment, the heuristics of judgement are invoked. System 1 is often able to produce quick answers to difficult questions by substitution, creating coherence where there is none. The question that is answered is not the one that was intended, but the answer is produced quickly and may be sufficiently plausible to pass the lax and lenient review of System 2. You may want to forecast the commercial future of a company, for example, and believe that this is what you are judging, while in fact your evaluation is dominated... (read more)

The hedgehog and the Fox: Hedgehogs "know one big thing" and have a theory about the world; they account for particular events within a coherent framework, bristle with impatience toward those who don't see things their way, and are confident in their forecasts. They are also especially reluctant to admit error. For hedgehogs, a failed prediction is almost always "off only on timing" or "very nearly right". They are opinionated and clear, which is exactly what television producers love to see on programs. Two hedgehogs on... (read more)

0lmm
Is the animal metaphor helpful? I don't think of either stereotype when I hear "fox" or "hedgehog". For that matter, is the dichotomy real?
6Shmi
Fox News: brought to you by a bunch of Hedgehogs.

Agreed. I always skimmed over that claim and never wondered why. The map vs territory analogy makes a lot of sense. After all the 'Mu' is an answer to a question. And the question is based on some map of the territory. Thanks for triggering that series of clicks in my mind. :)

Too big! Seriously, this post contains too many elements to readily reply to in a coherent way.

Is that a problem? I tried to address it with the tl;dr and the conclusion.

I didn't find it too big. I just found it too bundled up, but that's probably because the topic is naturally like that. By 'bundled up' I mean, I found the article felt as if it interleaves too many concepts without first trying to make them all explicit. That said, am working on an article along lines of (introverts/intrinsic motivation vs extroverts/extrinsic motivation) so i understand the complexity involved.

0Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg)
Thanks for the heads up.

I've heard, from some of the world's best artists, notions ranging from "magic" to "perfection" to "muse" to "God."

Elizabeth Gilbert presents a reasonably practical justification for the use of such a concept. See [here] (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86x-u-tz0MA). Warning: TED talk and generous use of "reasonable"

Mu means "no thing." Like "quality" it points outside the process of dualistic discrimination. Mu simply says, "no class: not one, not zero, not yes, not no." It states that the context of the question is such that a yes and a no answer is in error and should not be given. "Unask the question" is what it says.

.... [Somewhere later]

That Mu exists in the natural world investigated by science is evident. […] The dualistic mind tends to think of Mu occurrences in nature as a kind of contextual cheating, or irrelevance,... (read more)

Shmi110

That Mu exists in the natural world investigated by science is evident.

That's a bad way of phrasing it. "Mu" is about maps, not territories. What is "evident" is that some models do not result in testable predictions (answerable questions). The rest of the quote is pretty good.

4Vaniver
You only need one > character at the beginning of a paragraph (but you do need another one at the beginning of the next paragraph). If you'd like to have a quote as many lines, you need to make each its own paragraph by hitting return twice in between lines of text.

It is tempting but false to regard adopting someone else's beliefs as a favor to them, and rationality as a matter of fairness, of equal compromise. Therefore it is written "Do not believe you do others a favor if you accept their arguments; the favour is to you." -- Eliezer Yudkowsky

Ok May be that misses context. Further down in the text he categories 5 types of deception:

  1. Outright lying and fabrication of evidence
  2. Misdirection
  3. Withholding of information
  4. Equivocation or sharing information in ambiguous ways
  5. Not-correcting others.

Hope that helps

2JQuinton
This reminds me of a previous rationality quote:
8Lumifer
Oh Dear Lord
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