I think it's more useful to keep the meaning of "skill" as something like "the ability to do something well", which is what everybody expects you mean when you use the word, and talk instead about better and worse applications of skills. It's not the skill that's context dependent, but how useful or beneficial the application of the skill is in a particular scenario.
When a concept is inherently approximate, it is a waste of time to try to give it a precise definition.
The opposite intellectual sin to wanting to derive everything from fundamental physics is holism which makes too much of the fact that everything is ultimately connected to everything else. Sure, but scientific progress is made by finding where the connections are weak enough to allow separate theories.
I'm the same. Great one-on-one, and extremely awkward when there are two or more other people, which I find to be very exhausting due to the extra conversation dynamics you note. It's also very difficult too when you're the sort of person who likes to periodically be silent for a period in order to think more deeply about what you're talking about -- with more than one other person there, somebody else will just start a new conversation on a new topic to avoid the "dreaded silence".
On the topic of how the site looks in different browsers, and finding out whether the layout is borked on some browsers, you could use http://browsershots.org/.
At the moment though, it fails due to an internal server error when it tries to fetch http://friendly-ai.com/robots.txt. If you fix that, you should be able to easily see how the site looks in a bunch of different browsers on different operating systems.
I also see the FAQ page as broken with 'Questions' in the header appearing overlayed on the #2 and #3 items in the 'contents' list. With Firefox 8 on Linux at default zoom, and zooming down to make the fonts smaller than normal does fix it.
I agree with nyan_sandwich that things would be much improved if the CSS used ems instead of pixels, which are guaranteed to break if users have non-standard fonts or font sizes or their browser happens to have different enough default CSS rules.
It would be an error to suppose that the great discoverer seizes at once upon the truth, or has any unerring method of divining it. In all probability the errors of the great mind exceed in number those of the less vigorous one. Fertility of imagination and abundance of guesses at truth are among the first requisites of discovery; but the erroneous guesses must be many times as numerous as those that prove well founded. The weakest analogies, the most whimsical notions, the most apparently absurd theories, may pass through the teeming brain, and no record remain of more than the hundredth part….
W. Stanley Jevons
Thanks for the explanation. Your explanation accords with what I've heard from my coach and what I've read. What surprised me in your original comment was this sentence in particular:
The first goal was to memorize a massive amount of opening theory and what is known as 'book' knowledge.
That sounded to me like much more than "studying the Ruy Lopez and Queen's Gambit to illustrate basic ideas about central control". It sounded more like "try to memorize every line of every variation of the Ruy Lopez that is in MCO".
In my experience, the main goal of chess coaching and training was to teach you how to act like you were a computer. Any kind of "intuitive" play or even creative play was harshly criticized from a young age. The first goal was to memorize a massive amount of opening theory and what is known as 'book' knowledge. Once a student has a reasonable amount of book knowledge, then you move on to techniques to focus you on calculating quickly.
This hasn't been my experience at all. At what level do you believe that memorization of opening theory is the...
A good way of getting cheap textbooks is to use a price alert service that notifies you when the price of a new or used book drops below a certain price. When you don't need the text in a hurry, and would rather save money and buy used, that works well, because students often want to get rid of a textbook in a hurry and offer it for sale at far below the typical used price for that book. Those deals tend to go pretty quickly though.
Another good idea is to buy the previous edition, especially for texts that have many editions. When the 8th edition of a text...
I think the positive reactions are probably mostly a case of guessing the teacher's password. Perhaps the teacher conveyed a positive impression beforehand, but the default password guessing behavior would probably be to guess "teacher wants us to write about this appreciatively" regardless of whether he said anything additional about the site -- that would be expected for a community blog devoted to refining the art of {rationality, wisdom, justice, aesthetics, ...}.
After having read the comments, I can definitely sympathize with the students. It brought back memories of when I was in the same position in history or English class when we had to read something and write our reaction to it but with little clear direction about what was expected of us or how the teacher would grade, and not really caring about the subject matter. I know the process that produced the comments, and I would probably write the same things in their position, but not out of deficient intelligence or writing skill -- rather, because I don't s...
Do you wear a retainer or any other kind of orthodontic device? I still wear a retainer now and then, and I often get a very severe headache the first night I wear it (I only wear it at night sometimes) if I've forgotten to wear it for a longer period than usual.
Don't know if that's at all relevant to your case, but am throwing it out there just in case.
For anybody else who is as puzzled by "NoVa: NVC" as I was, NVC is, judging from this and a few other references, Non-Violent Communication.
Please spell out an acronym the first time you use it in every article. It takes you 20 seconds to do that, and it took me a couple of frustrating minutes of searching, just as it will take others minutes of searching unless they see my comment.
ETA: thank you for the edits.
Why would it be more likely that you're speaking to a deity than that you are in a simulation speaking to the principal investigator of an experiment or some other non-theistic scenario?
The difficulty I have with this thought experiment is that I can't decide how to distinguish between the hypothesis that there is a deity with whom I'm now conversing, and the many hypotheses that preserve a purely naturalistic universe in which my brain (or a simulation of my brain) is receiving coherent sensory inputs that make it seem like I'm interacting with a deity w...
I'm reading Neuroscience: Exploring the Brain at the moment, and it seems a good textbook for people like me who don't have a hardcore background in biology.
A popular non-textbook on the topic of memory in particular is Kandel's In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind, which I really liked. The following, by the same author, looks very interesting, and has just gone on my future purchase list: Memory: From Mind to Molecules.
I'm curious to hear opinions from more knowledgeable people than me though.
I agree. I was hoping somebody could make a coherent and plausible sounding argument for their position, which seems ridiculous to me. The paper you referenced shows that if you present an extremely simple problem of probability and ask for the answer in terms of a frequency (and not as a single event), AND you present the data in terms of frequencies, AND you also help subjects to construct concrete, visual representations of the frequencies involved by essentially spoon-feeding them the answers with leading questions, THEN most of them will get the corre...
I don't recall any discussion on LW -- and couldn't find any with a quick search -- about the "Great Rationality Debate", which Stanovich summarizes as:
...An important research tradition in the cognitive psychology of reasoning--called the heuristics and biases approach--has firmly established that people’s responses often deviate from the performance considered normative on many reasoning tasks. For example, people assess probabilities incorrectly, they display confirmation bias, they test hypotheses inefficiently, they violate the axioms of util
I interpret the first part as saying that there are no laws of matter other than ones our minds are forced to posit (forced over many generations of constantly improving our models). And the second part is something like "minds are subject [only] to physics", as you said. The second part explains how and why the first part works.
Together, I interpret them as suggesting a reductive physicalist interpretation of mind (in the 19th century!) according to which our law-making is not only about the universe but is itself the universe (or a small piece thereof) operating according to those same laws (or other, deeper laws we have yet to discover).
Much of the heavy lifting is also done by the assignment of numbers and colors to indicate the impact of the experiment on a hypothesis. That's much easier to grok as a whole than plain text. I can also easily make quick judgments from the chart that are much more difficult to do from a review paper, such as "later experiments generally oppose this hypothesis, and only early experiments strongly support it" (among those in the chart, of course).
Nice link. Chess and piano performance were the two examples that came to mind for me before clicking the link.
However, increasing the quality that yields the greatest marginal benefit is not necessarily the same as increasing the minimum of the individual actions (assuming you don't define "minimum quality" in terms of marginal benefit). For example, if the lowest quality action only has a small impact on outcome, there is probably something else it would be more beneficial to improve. Of course, some composite skills probably do have performance proportional to min(indvidual_skill), in which case increasing the minimum would always be most beneficial, but most don't.
...Every truth is a path traced through reality: but among these paths there are some to which we could have given an entirely different turn if our attention had been orientated in a different direction or if we had aimed at another kind of utility; there are some, on the contrary, whose direction is marked out by reality itself: there are some, one might say, which correspond to currents of reality. Doubtless these also depend upon us to a certain extent, for we are free to go against the current or to follow it, and even if we follow it, we can variously
Rat lover here. They're adorable little creatures, and have distinct personalities and quirks. The only shortcoming of rats is that they don't live that long, so you're having to deal with the death of your cherished little friends every 2 or 3 years or so.
For anybody who likes rats or is just curious to learn more about them, I highly recommend the most awesome ratbehavior.org
I actually do use the 'save' feature in reddit. I find it a handy way to distinguish articles that I found especially useful or high-quality, or that I know I'll want to look at again in the future. Maybe I'm an exception though, because I don't use browser bookmarks or any other bookmarking-type service very much.
That functionality still works in lesswrong just as it does in reddit, but there just isn't a link to get to the page that shows all the stuff you've saved, as I noted elsewhere in this thread.
You can 'save' an article by clicking the disk icon above the 'Tags' section below an article.
There's no link anywhere to see articles that you've previously saved, but you can manually go to the following URL to see them: http://lesswrong.com/saved/
It seems like an oversight on the part of the developers that the 'saved' functionality they got for free from the reddit codebase still works correctly, and the saved pages are accessible, but there's nothing in the UI that indicates how to access the page of previously saved articles.
The example "Go is a much better game than chess" is much more likely to confuse, and that was the original phrase I objected to. Sure, if somebody thinks about it carefully, they'll realize it hides a value judgment, but as maybe you're aware, people don't consciously analyze everything they read and hear -- and things that are seen or thought about in passing often influence us in ways we are unaware of. I'm not trying to say there was a crime or anything or that one should never say a statement like "Go is a much better game than chess&qu...
Yes, I should have said that. Thanks.
On the question of "I" statements though, there is a big difference between "Go is a much better game than chess", and "Go has a much larger state space than chess" (or even "Go is a more complex game than chess"). The former is in the same class of statement as "Chocolate ice cream is much better than vanilla ice cream".
What is the benefit of communicating "I prefer Go to Chess" as "Go is a better game than Chess"? It's less clear, less accurate, and it is likely to confuse many people into accepting that it's a statement about the games in general rather than a statement about one person's taste.
Go is a much better game than chess.
You mean, "I like go much more than chess", or "I think chess is a much better game than chess".
Oh, and it's not true that Go lends itself much better to measure progress. Chess has rating systems like the ELO rating system, which measure progress very well.
whois ai-class.com shows Thrun (with his stanford.edu email address) as the registrant and administrative contact, so it seems legit.
What's wrong with coming up with an interesting theoretical construct that has almost zero hope of being implemented? Can't that be a vehicle for improving understanding? I don't see any failing in that. It's not like PhilGoetz was recommending we all start lobbying congress and spreading the word in the media about his idea.
Tegmark's Mathematical universe hypothesis is one answer to what that might mean.