All of Elizabeth's Comments + Replies

I find myself in the opposite position, because math always came very easily to me, and yet I've had a lot of success tutoring it. I think, though, that that largely comes out of my interest in why it worked rather than how, and my ability to make connections that weren't explained to me.

3TobyBartels
I wanted to make almost the same comment. I'm convinced that my interest in logic and foundations makes me better at teaching algebra and calculus, because I'm often thinking anyway about why those "obvious" things work the way that they do. (In particular, why don't algebra textbooks discuss the general logical principle of substitution of equals for equals? I tell beginning students that it's the most important lesson of algebra, but it's not in their book!) It's also important to listen to how the students think about things (both prerequisites, and the errors that they're making now) and adapt my explanations to fit them.

That's precisely what I'm trying to avoid with that particular area of anti-curiosity! Do you know how much time I'd spend on something like that if I started?

Too much anti-curiosity can easily lead to too much comfort, which is why I suggest periodic uncomfortable examination of areas of anti-curiosity.

Yes, if I have emailed someone and typed their name, I will remember it. My problem is that generally I have no reason or means to write the names I'm having trouble remembering.

1MartinB
Simple habit is to start using Names in conversation way more often. It feels a bit unnatural at first, but can help.

I'm pretty sure you'd put me in your 'quick to react' category. I'm the person who remains calm in stressful situations and figures out what to do. I don't think it's a matter of shutting off my internal monologue (my internal monologue never shuts off) but of redirecting it. I tend to be fairly good at thinking about what I want to be thinking about. Useful in a crisis, really bad when I'm procrastinating.

I also tend to be really good at connecting and remembering information, and at taking tests, though, so I'm not sure that the skills are in opposition. I suspect that thinking on your feet and being able to retain and synthesize information are separate skills, but much more effective when put together.

I disagree about people being born "good public speakers." I have no stress symptoms when I speak in front of groups of people. I find it quite comfortable. I have experienced an occasional butterfly if I'm going to be on a stage with lights and everything, but that's more anticipation than anything else. I do get a bit of stage fright singing in front of other people, but that's more a matter of extensive early criticism of my singing than difficulty making a fool of myself in front of a group.

Elizabeth210

Principles for growing long hair:

  • It takes a long time. I've been growing mine for fourteen years, and it was at least seven before it was long enough to be at all remarkable. Growth rates vary, and mine isn't all that fast (4-5 inches a year), but it may be a long time. Don't get fed up and chop it all off.
  • Stop doing damaging things. No more blow-drying or coloring or straightening or curling. Minimize the amount of product you put in. Never tease your hair.
  • Get trims. A half inch trim every three months or so will take off the split ends and mak
... (read more)

It wasn't until a couple of years ago that I first consciously noticed that I was incapable of using other people's names to their faces. I could do it with immediate family, and I could do it in third person "Howard was telling me..." I have since made strenuous efforts to get better at it, but it is still really psychologically difficult. That's also when I realized that it was almost impossible for me to leave a message on an answering machine. I'm working on that one too, but doing so is a serious effort. One of my roommates my freshman year of college had the same issues, but neither of us had a clue why.

1handoflixue
It might help to find a friend you can practice with, for the names - if the issue applies to IM/Skype/etc. as well, then you can probably find a practice partner or two right here. Otherwise, hopefully you have an in-person friend who you'd trust to explain this to, and who can encourage you to refer to them by name frequently :) For answering machines, the same friend can probably help, or you could practice on your own answering machine. I've found that, for most skills, doing really impractical-but-safe practice exercises like this actually really pays off. Even if it doesn't 100% resolve the issue, it still gives you a good foundation to build on, and helps remind you that the activity CAN be safe.
0SRStarin
That does make it difficult to use the techniques I suggested. Some people do not like other people to use their names because they experience it as an attempt to control them emotionally. They feel it invokes automatic parent-child responses that others ought not have access to. I think the number of these folks is very low (I've only met one person who feels this way). But, if he feels that way, it makes sense that there would be people who might be overwhelmed by the emotional burden of invoking such an emotional response. I certainly feel more burdened when I use his name in the first person. I'm not claiming that's what's going on with you. But, your description reminded me of this other person, and we can often gain great insight in hearing something even approximately related to our own difficulties. As for suggestions, I would suggest that a good, small place to start, if you are able, is to repeat a person's name immediately after they introduce themselves to you, and leave it at that. I suspect it will help cement a few more names than you otherwise would have, and it might have less emotional impact on you to have a formulaic circumstance in which you can think of using another person's name with them.
1ShardPhoenix
I sometimes have trouble usings people's names - I think due to fear that I haven't remembered them correctly, even if I'm 95% certain or more. If I don't know the person well it may also seem overly familiar.

Having people spell their names does sometimes help, but also tends to be a bit awkward. I occasionally wish everyone would just get their names tattooed on their foreheads!

They just gave it to me after I'd been there once or twice, but I suspect that if you pointed out that you just want a straight line and asked nicely, they might give it to you. If that is what you want, and have a friend or relative you trust to cut a straight line, it is also one of the few hairstyles that can be trusted to a nonprofessional. Just make sure you get a pair of good sewing scissors first.

Elizabeth173

I am terrible at remembering names. This is bad in itself, but exacerbated by a few factors:

  • I regularly have lengthy conversations with random strangers, and will be able to easily summarize the conversation afterwords, but will have no recollection of their name.

  • I am fairly noticeable and memorable, so even people whose names I have no reason to know will know mine.

  • I am not particularly good with faces either.

This isn't a memory problem, I can quote back conversations or remember long strings of numbers. I often cope by confessing to my weaknes... (read more)

0[anonymous]
I've had good results with flashcards. One side write a person's name, and on the other write conversation details, physical descriptions, and mnemonics for physical descriptions. A few days of reviewing that Michael Jones is a friend of Lisa's who a grad student at Brown studying Fluorochemistry and looks a bit like O'Brian from Star Trek, and you'll probably remember his name (and other tidbits about him too).
2ViEtArmis
I had this problem for a long time, which can be embarrassing doing phone support, especially one with frequent callers that know my name and voice (one of only two men and we have distinct voices and greetings). I started intentionally using callers name's three times in every call and reaped several benefits: 1) I actually remember their names when they call back, 2) I'm better at remembering names having been told only once (even outside of work), and 3) my customer satisfaction scores had a marked and sustained increase.
1TabAtkins
I'm also normally terrible at learning names, but I've learned how to get around it. This may be terribly specific to people who learn like me; if so, I apologize. I have found that I am incredibly focused on learning through actually seeing things written. I am excellent at spelling because I see the written form of words in my head, and even when I can't immediately recall the precise letters, I always have an accurate sense of how many there are (which is often enough to select the correct spelling from a shortlist of plausible alternatives). Given that, I find that I can trivially remember people's names after having emailed them and typed their names.
7sixes_and_sevens
At the beginning of 2010 I made it my mission to remember the names of everyone I was introduced to. I haven't quite managed everyone, but I've gotten pretty close. My technique: when someone tells me their name, I think of something that rhymes with it, and imagine the person in conjunction with the rhyme. I have a general policy of picking the first thing that comes to mind, since that presumably suggests my brain already has some sort of reliable connection between them. For example, when meeting Sam for the first time, I will think of the first rhyme for 'Sam' that comes to mind, which in the case of a recent Sam was 'ham'. I imagine Sam holding some ham, with a big grin on her face (she has quite a striking grin anyway, so this detail just sort of cements it in place). When I next meet Sam, I will have a striking image of her holding some ham with a big grin on her face, which I can then follow back to her name. Over the past year or so I've built up quite a menagerie of associations. All people called Sue are now in a large group of Blue Sues in my head. Anyone called Vicky is covered in something sticky. Anyone called Kate has an expression of hate. Sometimes I have to reach for tenuous rhymes. 'David' was a bit of a tricky one, but I eventually settled on 'shavéd', and imagine Davids to have a partially-shaved scalp. If anything, the more tenuous rhymes are more memorable, because I also have the memory of the difficult rhyme to hang the name off. This does occasionally create some odd effects. Last September, for example, I know I met two people called Amanda, but can only remember one of them. The act of remembering their name has persisted in memory, but actually meeting them hasn't. The most important aspect isn't the actual technique (as there are plenty of other name-remembering techniques out there which presumably work fairly well), but getting into the habit of using it. It doesn't do any good just knowing it; you have to consciously choose to
4[anonymous]
I remember names after I've seen them written in association with the face. I remember unusual names better, because I can ask the person then and there how to spell it. So for anyone with whom I speak rarely, I basically only consistently remember the names of facebook friends. Method: Add people on facebook immediately after meeting them. Then review the RSVP list before going to any events with an events page!
1Alicorn
If there is some metadata about names that you can remember more easily (rhymes with X, name of Y character from fiction, would have been taunted on the playground because of Z) use that. I tend to ask people how to spell their names so I can embed the information as text instead of much-more-slippery-for-me sounds.
Desrtopa110

Thirding the request.

I have sometimes contemplated taking out my frustrations by following people around to learn their names, scrounging up any background material on them that I can get, and then pretending to be an old high school acquaintance of theirs, and watching them squirm as they try to remember me.

I'm not entirely certain people aren't already doing this to me.

SRStarin120

When I started running study groups in college, the training included teaching how to learn student's names. The trick to remembering names is to say the name out loud, with focus on the name and the person at the same time. So, Joachim introduces himself, and you say "Joachim? Nice to meet you, Joachim!" Give the name and face enough time to sink into long term memory. If they don't introduce themselves, ask them their name, simply apologizing if it turns out you've met before.

Then, at the earliest good opportunity, reinforce the name. Using it ... (read more)

0Manfred
Same problem here (exacerbated if not outright caused by the habit of not using peoples' names often), but I can remember peoples' names when really necessary by using a simple trick: Say their name at least once in every phrase you say to them, for at least five minutes worth of you-saying-things. Lots of normal people do this already without even noticing. Without much practice it will be awkward, though, so you can just mention that you're bad at names and turn it into a joke.
0Torben
I second this request. I am good with names of politicians or actors, but terrible with people, I meet IRL.
0SilasBarta
Same situation here, same solutions tried. Also, even if I've known someone for a while, if I don't see them for a long time and then one day spot them, I may have lost memory of the person's named. Not often, but once or twice. What's worse is that there's this woman I had met at a weekly group, and after like 4 weeks and three times of asking her name, I forgot, asked another, more socially adept woman there, and she gave me the wrong name! Argh!

It depends on where you live and what sort of cut you want. My haircuts are ridiculously cheap, because I have long, straight hair and I just want a straight line across the bottom, so they generally charge me the child's price ($10). Fair warning, though, I may get charged less out of sheer novelty, because my hair comes to my knees, or because I always wash my hair at home before going, rather than having them wash it for me there, because my hair is simply too long to be washed in a sink.

I have lots of hair advice, but it is largely limited to very long hair, and thus minimally useful, and not worth using space on. If anyone wants advice on having or growing long hair, I'll be happy to respond.

2handoflixue
I've been interested in growing long hair, and would love to hear advice :)
2Alicorn
Do you have to ask for the child's price or do they just give it to you? My hair doesn't come as far as my knees, but I do have to stand up to get it cut and usually don't want it washed there. (I even brush it myself.)

I don't get instant recall for left and right, but when I was learning to drive, the teacher would say "turn left ahead" and I would automatically turn on the correct blinker, and then have to pause to figure out which way to turn.

Elizabeth590

I don't know if anyone can help me with this, but how do I tell the difference between flirting and friendliness? I grew up in pretty much total social isolation from peers, so neither really ever happened, and when they happen now I can't tell which is which. Also, how do you go from talking to someone at the beginning/end of class (or other activity) to actually being the kind of friends who see each other elsewhere and do activities together?

Edit: Thank you, this is good advice. Does anyone have any advice on how to tell with women? I'm bi, and more interested in women, and they are much harder to read than men on the subject, because women's behavior with female friends is often fairly flirty to begin with.

2pabloernesto
There is a good argument that this is intentional. (See slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/26/conversation-deliberately-skirts-the-border-of-incomprehensibility/)
0therufs
I'm very late to this party, but: Correctly ascertaining others' internal state and responding accordingly is a NEWT-level social skill. It is (at least usually) easier to ascertain your own internal state, specifically as it relates to the particular behaviors of the maybe-flirter, and respond accordingly. Here is how this breaks down for me: "They might be flirting and I like it": -> And they are flirting: continue whatever I was doing, remembering that flirting is no guarantee of any particular outcome -> And they are not: same (such should be the conviction that flirting is no guarantee of any particular outcome.) "They might be flirting and I don't like it": -> And they are flirting: Excuse myself from the situation; ask them to modify behavior if it recurs (or avoid them) -> And they are not flirting: Their take on acceptable platonic interaction makes me uncomfortable, so again excuse/ask/avoid. So, conveniently, it doesn't matter! Of course, it's generally a fine idea to just ask, too, remembering that the given response may not be completely reliable. :)
0zslastman
As someone who has recently gained some, though not much, proficiency in this area, I think part of the problem lies with the question itself. We have been convinced by the media to believe that 'flirting' is a clearly definable mode of interaction that socially competent people have no trouble distinguishing from normal interactions. This is false. In my experience people talk about flirting a lot, but are very seldom able to point to instances of it except when there are very obvious body language cues. Almost all men and most women I know have trouble with this. We nerds I think differ more in how uncomfortable we are with the ambiguity, than in our ability to read the situation. You are not alone. Having a rough road map in your mind does help. Gradual escalation with careful attentiveness to catch signs of discomfort. Just don't take it as an automatic rejection if you see such a sign, it could just mean, 'slow down'. That said, as a hetero guy I might be operating under a different ruleset. You could probably be quite a lot more forward as a woman, due to not sharing a karyotype with 95% of the world's violent criminals.
0TimFreeman
Being in a sexual minority is hard. Some people can estimate sexual orientation from body language (the word is "gaydar"), but I can't (but then I'm straight and married so I don't need to). If you can't, you might want to use a dating site when trying to meet up with women, or use the Internet to find nearby places where bi and lesbian women congregate. I vaguely recall hearing that bars with misspellings in the name are either for gay men or gay women or both. I don't remember which, I don't remember how well defined the convention is, and I don't know if you like bars. (I don't.)
[anonymous]381

It's not always this clear-cut, but if a guy touches you at all while he's talking (brushes your hand, etc.), makes an unusual amount of eye contact, or makes a point of being alone with you, it's flirting. If he's talking or joking about sex, it's more likely to be flirting.

How do you become the kind of friends who see each other outside of class? That used to confuse me SO MUCH. The easiest way to transition from "person I've spoken to" to "actual friend" is to say "You want to get lunch together sometime?" It's also pos... (read more)

0pwno
You'll feel more uneasy when someone's flirting.
coup_eye210

Well, that's the whole idea of flirting - that you can't really tell the difference. If it's clear and upfront, then it's not called flirting anymore, but rather an advance (friendly or more explicit).

You have a lot of uncertainty arising from a simple gesture/look/invitation, and (I believe) this is where all the fun really comes from: dealing with a lot of different scenarios that have very similar initial contexts but have a wide range of possible outcomes, and choosing the outcome you want with so little effort.

I also believe that your ability to tell the difference between one person's flirting and friendliness is strongly influenced by how well you know that person.

MartinB220

http://www.wrongplanet.net/ is a community page for asperger/autism people that contains social descriptions on a level that might be helpful. I do not read too much of it, but maybe it is useful.

kim0231

There often is not any difference at all between flirting and friendliness. People vary very much in their ways. And yet we are supposed to easily tell the difference, with threat of imprisonment for failing.

The main effects I have seen and experienced, is that flirting typically involve more eye contact, and that a lot of people flirt while denying they do it, and refusing to to tell what they would do if they really flirted, and disparaging others for not knowing the difference.

My experience is also that ordinary people are much more direct and clear in the difference between flirting and friendship, while academic people muddle it.

Blueberry190

how do I tell the difference between flirting and friendliness?

Flirting is tinged with sexuality, either explicit or subtle. Maybe a touch on your arm, a wink, or innuendo. A lot of it is context-dependent, as well: for instance, the exact same words and behavior can be flirting when a guy says it to a girl, but not when a guy says it to a guy (the social default is that everyone is straight; this is different in a gay bar, for instance).

Also, how do you go from talking to someone at the beginning/end of class (or other activity) to actually being the

... (read more)

Thanks for the link. I did not know I was folding fitted sheets wrong (generally I take my sheets off the bed, wash them, and put them back on) but Martha Stewart's instructions seem clear and logical.

If you know the alphabet song, the melody naturally (at least to me) separates the alphabet into a few groups: ABCDEFG HIJKLMNOP QRS TUV WX YZ. This may be easier than memorizing divisions.

0komponisto
It's not just you! (And FWIW, it's actually the rhythm: with the exception of W-X, the last letter of each group is held for at least twice as long as any of the others -- four times in the case of LMNO-P.)
1NihilCredo
Today I learnt that the two alphabet songs I was taught in age 7 pre-English aren't at all what American kids learn. (For the record, the slower one went: ABCDEFG HIJKLMN OPQRSTUV WXYZ, while the faster one was: ABCDE FGHIJ KLMNO PQRST UVWXYZ.)

If you don't want to go to a speech therapist, a friend with some linguistics training or a voice (singing) teacher may be able to listen and tell you where to put your tongue, etc.

I, too, have a related problem. I have great difficulty controlling my volume. That is largely hereditary (or nurtured by my family environment), but the real problem is that I can't hear when I'm too loud. There are certain triggers (being excited, interrupted, or in the presence of my mother) but they are not really triggers I can avoid, and I can't see a way to fix it. The obvious solution is to have someone tell me when I'm too loud, but being interrupted for that purpose tends to make me involuntarily louder.

It's both inborn and learned. (Like a musical ear: you get what you get, but you can make it better if you work at it). A bird's eye view is the way to do it, there was an interesting bit on Radiolab recently about languages that rely on dead reckoning, and people keep track of it with a bird's eye map in their heads. If you can figure it out with pencil and paper, do that often. Eventually you will be able to do it without the pencil and paper. If you aren't generally good at mental representations of spatial or visual things, it will take longer.

That wasn't really the nature of the shock. It wasn't that they got their news from conservative sources, or that their beliefs were different from mine. I have no trouble with the concept of people who believe fundamentally different things are desirable. Just because I believe that preserving the environment is desirable, for example, doesn't mean others will. My shock was that they believed in fundamentally different facts. I had difficulty with the difference in belief about what is true, not the difference in what to do about it.

5Perplexed
One reason that there can be such a large divergence in what gets taken as facts is that we are fundamentally not interested in facts. What we are really interested in is truthiness. For example, a bunch of upstate NY Republican school teachers who think that "the reason [the oil] had not been cleaned up already was a conspiracy on the part of President Obama". What a bunch of yahoos! Even though they have master's degrees, they don't realize that one man does not a conspiracy make. Now that was an anecdote with real truthiness.
6Vaniver
The worst place for fact disagreements, in my experience, is discussions about race or sex. I'm having a hard time thinking of subjects that are more murderous to minds.

I think you're right, but suspect I will have more difficulty with the first than with the second. I am honestly curious about almost everything, which is a decent stand-in for spinning lack of knowledge as a personal deficit, but I am very bad at not speaking. I work at it, but I remain someone whose default setting is to babble at random people on the street. I'm better at "tactfully noncommittal" than I used to be, but I'm still pretty bad at it.

3TheOtherDave
(nod) I used to be really bad at it; I'm now only mildly bad at it. As I say, it's a learnable skill. Training the habit of substituting questions for assertions -- genuine questions, ones that don't presuppose a specific answer -- has worked pretty well for me.

I wouldn't expect an intelligent conservative to posit it either. That was the largest part of my shock; not that intelligent people were conservative, but that people I thought intelligent were spouting views that I correlated more closely with "Get your government hands off my Medicare." than with any thoughtful conservative analysis.

That encounter (among others) has changed my beliefs about the beliefs of others, and I do talk to many people of differing views. My most strongly held belief that was shaken, though, was the belief that intel... (read more)

0anonym
It sounds to me like the core of the shock might be due to an overly high estimate of the degree to which apparent intelligence is correlated with rationality (or critical thinking skills and the will to apply them). There are many apparently intelligent people who have poor critical thinking skills and little desire to apply them or to come to the truth.
9TheOtherDave
Being tactfully noncommittal about your own beliefs until you've scoped out the lay of the land is a learnable skill. Unfortunately, it's actually not the most important component. In many communities, it's the shibboleths that will trip you up... things the community tacitly expects all right-thinking people to already have a familiarity with. It's possible to spin one's ignorance of such things as an unfortunate personal deficit that one is eager to have corrected, and that can often overcome the barriers to entry... but it's a lot of work.

I'd like to give it a shot too

I agree with you completely about consumption vs. charity, and had even mentioned the concept in my point about NPR donation guilt.

I also agree that the close number is wildly inaccurate, but even in context it wasn't applied to local charities and it was intended to make the point that multiple factors could and should be considered when picking charities, even when the importance multipliers on some factors are orders of magnitude higher than for other factors.

I hope this clarifies my meaning without defensiveness, because none was meant.

2patrissimo
Ok, great, I'm glad I misunderstood.

Thank you, I do exactly the same thing. I have anxiety about not having started the work but if I can't start the work because to do that I have to stop doing the things distracting me from my anxiety. Sometimes it gets bad enough that I can't even sit still long enough to do the distracting activities, much less anything productive.

Elizabeth120

My point was that it is not any more wrong to spend money on public radio than to spend money on cable tv or a new iPod. Yes, in theory all my money not spent on food and shelter could go to saving children, but you are not going to do that, I am not going to do that, and no one either of us knows is going to do that.

I didn't say that other goals could compete, but there are other goals that can be considered simultaneously. If one charity saves ten children for $100 and another saves nine and accomplishes a few other things, that is not a choice we should make mindlessly. we can't let "saving children become a buzzword that cuts off thought. What if the second charity saves the children from death and gives them some skills that will help them make a living and help their communities? In that case, I would probably choose the second charity. Think of it as a... (read more)

At the risk of provoking defensiveness I will say that it really sounds like you are trying to rationalize your preferences as being rational when they aren't.

I say this because the examples that you were giving (local food kitchen, public radio), when compared to truly efficient charities (save lives, improve health, foster local entrepreneurship), are nothing like "save 9 kids + some other benefits" vs. "save 10 kids and nothing else". It''s more like "save 0.1 kids that you know are in your neighborhood" vs. "save 10 ... (read more)

3shokwave
This is what I had in mind; I just felt that that the "saving childrens' lives" variable would have a multiplier of a few hundred in front of it (because lives are important) and the other variables like "improves their community" would have multipliers of two or three at best. I couldn't think of any other variable that would have a similar multiplier to "child's life".

I just had a conversation with my father on this subject which significantly clarified my thinking, and resolved most of my internal dilemma. The argument put forward in this post is correct, but there is one significant problem. I care about more than just saving children. I also care about how efficiently it is done, what peripheral good a charity is doing in the community by, say, employing locals, and any number of other things. "Children saved" is an important metric and should absolutely be considered, and it is a decision that should b... (read more)

5shokwave
Unless you have a huge "they are in another country" discount on children's lives, or a huge "they are in my community" boost to the other goals, I can't name any goals off the top of my head that can compete with saving children's lives.
Elizabeth260

I find I run into a conundrum on this question, because there is a bias I fear overcompensating for. I know as a human that I am biased to care more about the one person standing in front of me than those ten thousand people starving in India that I'll never meet, but I find it difficult to apply that information. I know that donating money to, say, those malaria nets, will probably save more lives than donating to, say, my local food pantry. By these arguments, it seems that that fact should trump all, and I should donate to those malaria nets.

Howeve... (read more)

3multifoliaterose
Late response, but: (a) The domestic vs. international issue is not clear cut - see, e.g. GiveWell research message board posts by Elie Hassenfeld and by Jason Fehr. More generally, I think that at least at present it's quite unclear which philanthropic efforts are most cost-effective. (b) In regards to see Holden Karnofsky's post Hunger Here vs. Hunger There. (c) In regards to: You might be interested by komponisto's comments to a post that I made which are in similar spirit. See also Holden Karnofsky's Nothing wrong with selfish giving - just don't call it philanthropy and the comments to it.
2DanielLC
I suggest the QALY, or quality-adjusted life year. Yes. Sure you want radio, but they don't want to die. Who says your wants are more important? Could you justify killing people for entertainment? Is this any different?
wedrifid180

Should I feel guilty for donating money to public radio because it doesn't save children? No.

I agree and would go even further. Guilt is a terrible motivator and one that I would does not apply to anything involving charitable contributions. Well except for, say, mugging the aid workers to steal other's contributions. In such cases guilt serves an entirely different and somewhat useful role.

This is a simple question of "What do you want?" If you want to reduce malaria infections buy nets (probably). If you want to save a radio station save a r... (read more)

8Scott Alexander
The first question is hard but not confusing (I'd say "yes" to the developing world example, though); the second question confuses me too and I don't have a good answer. I think this whole "efficient charity" field is working in the tradition of utility theory, where people's desires are treated as givens and the only interesting question is how to maximize achievement of those desires. In that context, if you desire getting nice clothes with strength X, and desire helping other people with strength Y, then you divide your resources accordingly and try to maximize the niceness of the clothes you get with X resources and the number of people you help with Y resources. In that model, "try and help as many people as you can per charity dollar" is about all you can say. This is a terribly oversimplified model, both because desires might be more complicated (your desire might not be to help people, but to help Americans, or to help people who enjoy public radio like you do), and because people are not utilitarian agents and it is possible to change the strength of your desires. A model that takes those into account would have to, among other things, fully understand morality and what it means to "want" something, and I don't fully understand either, though they're both research interests. So this essay is only about how to avoid one particularly obvious mistake that's easy to model in utility theory, and not about how to avoid more important moral and psychological mistakes. On the harder problems, without having much philosophical foundation for doing so, I recommend Giving What We Can

The second point is something that really gets me. It seems to me that rather than feeling bad about donating to one charity rather than a more efficient or more "important" other charity, we should feel bad about spending money on frivolities rather than donating to charity. Nonprofit organizations are forced to compete against each other for slender resources in many ways, including donor dollars -- why can't they compete against things that have less moral value instead? It would be awesome if there were more social pressure to donate to ch... (read more)

I suppose we must quote back Millay: "Euclid alone has looked on beauty bare"

I don't remember believing in Santa Claus. I don't remember how exactly I came to disbelieve. I do remember a conversation with my mother (I can't have been more than five) in which I stated my disbelief and she asked me not to share it with my younger brother, so that he could believe for another year or so. I don't remember any great emotional upheaval. I also don't think my parents went to any particular lengths to preserve the delusion.

0Dreaded_Anomaly
That's similar to my experience, although I think I was six years old rather than five. There was no specific trauma that led to my conclusion; I just decided it was more realistic that my parents were Santa Claus (and the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy) than if these entities actually existed. I asked my mother, she confirmed it, and I continued to play along for the benefit of my younger brother and cousins.

There is a major flaw in your proposal: the bottom 40% would not be in favor. Some of them would be, but there is a demonstrable bias which causes people to be irrationally optimistic about their own future wealth. This bias is a major factor in the Republicans maintaining much of their base, among other things.

However, to answer your question, while I would not favor your proposal, I would favor a tax on all of that top ten percent which would garner the same revenue as your proposal.

-2ugquestions
an increase in tax would only create an increase in product prices as the wealthy try to recoup their losses. This would adversely affect the very people you would be trying to help. The middle class whose support you wold require would also be affected negarive and the proposal would be then over turned. Increasing taxes would not work.
Elizabeth100

This post helped coalesce a number of observations I had made in the past, so I would like to leave aside the debate over whether the examples of politeness are optimal and look at a couple of other points.

One point which I haven't seen much of in comments is the relationship between how well people know each other and how polite they need to be. If people know you well, then they know enough to give you the benefit of the doubt if a comment can be taken multiple ways. If, however, they have only just met you or interact with you mostly in formal setting... (read more)

1Relsqui
This is dead on; if I'd thought of it, I would have written it myself. ;) One thing you're missing, though, is an example of where it is okay to be blunter--with very close friends, with whom you already have an understanding of a certain amount of respect. This doesn't obviate the need for politeness, of course, but it does lower the threshold of importance at which it's okay to be blunt. If I'm in a hurry in a shop, I'll still be polite to the clerk, because they don't know me well enough to know that I'm impatient and stressed, rather than just a jerk. I worry about this less when talking to a close friend who already knows I'm not a jerk. I'm actually not a very good example of this, because my default setting for the courtesy slider is fairly high. I can do this because it comes naturally to me, so it takes very little effort for me to reap the benefits of showing respect to the people around me. It took me a LONG time to realize that this is not true for everyone, i.e. that it is very difficult for some people to understand, remember, or apply these social rules, and therefore only do so in select situations. ETA: ... and this of course doesn't make me better or smarter or more useful than people who have trouble with it. I'm incredibly frustrated with how slowly I think in arguments or debates, and my inability to remember details which help in them. The people I know who aren't good at showing respect in casual conversation tend to be good at these things. Another tradeoff, probably, although I'm not sure why it would be the case. (I know at least one person who's good at both, but I think he's made a conscious effort to be so.)

The single most useful tactic I have for lowering activation costs is playing podcasts and audiobooks on my iPod. It lowers the activation cost for household chores like dishes significantly, and it is particularly effective in lowering activation costs for outdoor exercise. Impending boredom is the highest part of the activation cost for tasks that involve leaving my computer.

The neatness of my bedroom is a fairly reliable barometer of how many papers I have due, and when I first consciously noticed that phenomenon a few years ago, I started to attempt to take advantage of it. However, I have discovered that there are more constraints than just having something more important I should be doing. When I'm procrastinating badly I find it almost impossible to sit still long enough to settle to anything. I can clean or do errands, but I require a podcast to keep me entertained. I had great success getting myself to practice pian... (read more)

0AspiringKnitter
Invest in a treadmill and do everything while walking on it.
Elizabeth110

As someone who spends a lot of time on the student side of those math classes (and as the student in the class who almost always catches those typographical errors), I suspect that there are students who notice the error but don't comment for social reasons (don't want to interrupt, don't want to be a know-it-all, don't want to be publicly erroneous in a correction, etc.). Your solution of giving students problems, while an excellent teaching tool, is not a particularly good test for this phenomenon because it fails to distinguish between students who really do miss the errors because they assume you are right and the students who noticed but didn't speak up, or those who simply weren't paying attention in the first place.

7taryneast
I agree. I think the social-pressure aspect is even more exaggerated in business settings where there are not only no rewards for pointing out errors, but where you are often actively chastised for causing a team-member to lose face.

I would also quite like to play.

  1. Yes, I had registered an account, and had managed ten whole karma points as of this post, of which I am rather proud.
  2. I have been reading through the sequences.
  3. I've found a lot of the biases fascinating, particularly when it comes to testing a hypothesis, and I just finished a sequence on words and definitions, which I quite enjoyed.
  4. I've attempted to refer a couple people, but found that my brother had already found Less Wrong independently (and hadn't told me about it!).

Much of this discussion seems to be people expressing differences in their own internal processes when it comes to visualization, reading, etc. This seems to me to be directly connected with a concept it took me many years to learn and which still feels unnatural to me: not all people think the same way. Even if one assumes that people all have identical brains at birth (which is not true, but useful for the sake of this argument) our brains start with a vast number of connections, and then as we age and gain experience those connections are pruned, so t... (read more)

0David_Gerard
Yep - a.k.a. the typical mind fallacy.

My name is Elizabeth, and I made my way here through "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality," but quickly found myself fascinated. I've been reading intermittently for a few months, and would likely not be posting here today due to an unfortunate personal tendency towards lurking and the sheer daunting nature of the volume and intelligence of discussion, but when I was reading about narrowness I came across a comment I couldn't help responding to, and decided my newfound positive karma score was worth overcoming my trepidation about perman... (read more)

Elizabeth170

The problem with harping on everything is connected is that it is, but good systems are created bottom up instead of top down. You didn't sit down and say "All statistical problems are governed by overarching concept X, which leads to the inference of methods a, b, and c, which in turn lead to these problems." You said, "I have these problems, and certain similarities imply a larger system." It's like biology, Linnaeus did not come up with his classification system out of thin air, he first studied many individual animals and their pr... (read more)

2Peacewise
Seems to me the ideal way for understanding systems is to analyse and then synthesise.