All of mathnerd314's Comments + Replies

So the rent it pays is something like when you put up a sign "DO NOT DISTURB - AUTOMATED GUN TURRETS INSIDE" on your apartment. It doesn't change the fact that you have to pay rent, or the dollar amount, but it means you can spend less effort on negotiating late payments, because the landlord will wait just a bit longer before kicking you out.

In terms of anticipation, it's something like "if I did it over again, I'd still have done the same thing, because my behaviors were dictated by circumstance". I guess it's sort of like timeless de... (read more)

I don't think it's pretending. They are both human, after all. Explaining away the difference in statements as situational bias (math is unpopular, so Grothendeick perceived it as hard; business is popular, so Jobs perceived it as easy) does not seem irrational to me. If we dissolve the question of blame, then why should praise be any different?

I think you've pinpointed the difficulty I ran into before I decided to just post it; Grothendieck was self-effacing, while Jobs was self-aggrandizing, and there isn't really enough in common for Jobs to say something that would present him in the same light as Grothendieck. Even the quotes I did have, from other people, were kind of stretching the bounds of credulity (e.g., the Samsung quote is preceded by 'the consumer perspective is that...', and then he goes on to talk about re-marketing android as being better than apple). I guess was trying to compensate for the 'worse-than-average effect' by using a different industry, but there should be a better/quicker way to recalibrate your self-image.

Steve Jobs, and life/death in general. Nothing too serious, just a prompt for discussion.

My post was not really designed to be followed, but more to use the collective makeup of LW as a human computational cluster / search engine / associative memory. I actually got a real response (ChristianKI), which I'm very happy about. I guess SolveIt can ban me if he really wants. (A guy named 'SolveIt'. People make themselves less human supposedly to benefit others - is it artificial intelligence or just people pretending they're intelligent? is gwern a robot? o_O)

The last paragraph was just brain-dumping my expectations for the conference. I was a bit ... (read more)

I was there 2005-2007.

I just rewrote your post to be about me / Steve Jobs instead of you / Grothendieck, see http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/lpp/a_long_comment/. Maybe you can understand what I mean about the post "mostly not being about math".

As a former (3-time) MathPath student, I have the feeling I've seen you before. I must admit that it's only a feeling.

As far as Grothendieck goes, I think he is simply channeling Buddhism's concept of beginner's mind. Nothing new, really. Most quotes are null-content "yes I'm a human" type things. The main problem I have with your post is that none of it is math-specific; take out the "math" repetition, the few mentions of calculus etc., and it's simply a generic description of ability.

And UnBBayes does computational analyses, similar to Flying Logic, except it uses Bayesian probability.

There not good evidence for the claim that reading a list of a bunch of biases improves your decision making ability. See Eliezers discussion on the hindsight bias: http://lesswrong.com/lw/il/hindsight_bias/

I checked that the procedure accounts for the biases. Hindsight bias is avoided by computing uncertainty using a regression analysis. Availability bias is avoided by using a large database with random sampling. Etc. I haven't gone through all of them, but so far the biases I've looked at can't affect the decision outcome because the human isn't direc... (read more)

The problem is that you assume that you know the relevant biases.

Wikipedia has a list; I've checked a few of them, and the rest are on my TODO list. I have that page watched so if there's a new bias I'll know.

There are often cases where you don't know why someone screws up. There are domains where it's easier to get knowledge about how much people screw up than understanding the reasons behind screwups.

Information is produced regardless, and often recorded (see e.g. Gwern's Mistakes page). So long as I myself don't screw up, which, assuming that I a... (read more)

Conflating whether or not you could do something to stop them with finding truth makes it harder to have an accurate view of whether or not the result is true. Accepting reality for what it is helps to have an accurate perception of reality.

I'm not certain where you see conflation. I have separate storage areas for things to think about, evidence, actions, and risk/reward evaluations. They interact as described here. Things I hear about go into the "things to think about" list.

Only once you understand the territory should you go out and try

For example, I don't want a red car because I don't want to get pulled over by the cops all the time.

The car story appears to be a myth nowadays, but that could just be due to the increased use of radar guns and better police training. Radar guns were introduced around the 1950's so all of their policemen quotes are too recent to tell.

I thought I had written all I could. What sort of things should I add?

Once upon a time I tried using what I could coin "quicklists". I took a receipt, turned it over to the back (clear side), and jotted down 5-10 things that I wanted to believe. Then I set a timer for 24 hours and, before that time elapsed, acted as if I believed those things. My experiment was too successful; by the time 24 hours were up I had ended up in a different county, with little recollection of what I'd been doing, and some policemen asking me pointed questions. (I don't believe any drugs were involved, just sleep deprivation, but I can't ... (read more)

Humans are biased to overrate bad human behavior as a cause for mistakes.

If a crocodile bites off your hand, it's generally your fault. If the hurricane hits your house and kills you, it's your fault for not evacuating fast enough. In general, most causes are attributed to humans, because that allows actually considering alternatives. If you just attributed everything to, say, God, then it doesn't give any ideas. I take this a step further: everything is my fault. So if I hear about someone else doing something stupid, I try to figure out how I could ha... (read more)

Exhibiting symptoms often considered as signs of mental illness. For example, this says 38.6% of general people have hallucinations. This says 40% of general people had paranoid thoughts. Presumably these groups aren't exactly the same, so there you go: between 0.5 and 0.8 of the general population. You can probably pull together some more studies with similar results for other symptoms.

Given replication rates of scientific studies a single study might not be enough.

Enough for what? My question is whether my hair stylist saying "Shaving makes the hair grow back thicker." is more reliable than http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ar.1090370405/abstract. In general, the scientists have put more thought into their answer and have conducted actual experiments, so they are more reliable. I might revise that opinion if I find evidence of bias, such as a study being funded by a corporation that finds favorable results for thei... (read more)

I don't have experience with those, but I'll recommend Graphviz as a free (and useful) alternative. See e.g. http://k0s.org/mozilla/workflow.svg

The simple answer is to ask someone else, or better yet a group; if D is small, then D^2 or D^4 will be infinitesimal. However, delusions are "infectious" (see Mass hysteria), so this is not really a good method unless you're mostly isolated from the main population.

The more complicated answer is to track your beliefs and the evidence for each belief, and then when you get new evidence for a belief, add it to the old evidence and re-evaluate. For example, replacing an old wives' tale with a peer-reviewed study is (usually) a no-brainer. On the ot... (read more)

It's already random; replacing randomness with more randomness doesn't help except for mixing in new tasks. I went through ~50 tasks today, so it's not really that bad; just that I feel like some tasks should have more time dedicated. "Is putting animals in captivity an improvement?" is not the sort of question you want to dash off in 2 minutes. (Final answer: list of various animal rights groups).

The real problem is the list keeps growing longer; I'm starting to run into O(n^2) behavior in my text editor. It's not really designed for handling a FIFO queue. I've been staring at TaskWarrior, which might be adapted for doing the things I want.

So more recently I've been using a big 6000-line text file, it has all of my TODO's as well as some URL's. I randomized the order a while ago and now I just go through them. I've stalled on that (actually doing things is hard, particularly when they're vague things like "post story"), so I might go back to feed reading; I experimented a bit with TinyTinyRSS but Feedly is probably a better choice.

Well, taxation has the threat of violence, in that if you don't pay your taxes you will eventually be caught and sentenced to jail for tax evasion... hmm, maybe I should do a "The definition of X" series. They should really be wiki pages though, not posts...

It sounds like we're in violent agreement here. I've already verified experimentally that writings by mathnerd314_1998 are clear to mathnerd314_2009. My brain doesn't change that much over time.

Instead, I have two other questions:

1. can mathnerd314_2014 understand Gunnar_Zarncke_2014 on the same level he understands mathnerd314_1998?

2. If both mathnerd314_2014 and mathnerd314_2020 independently write down definitions, will they be textually different?

My hypothesis is that #1 is "no", because internal organization of concepts varies dramatically from person to person, and that #2 is "yes", because people do change over time.

Well, there's a tricky thing in mathematics called "the law of excluded middle". Using the law, you can e.g. prove that a implies b is logically equivalent to (not a) or b. It also lets you do existence proofs by proving it isn't possible for there to be no examples. So in classical logic every statement is confused with its double negation.

I generally try to use intuitionistic logic though, where a->b is not logically equivalent to anything else and double negations have to be written out. You do have , but that only goes one direction and re... (read more)

Indeed, it's very depressing. I doubt I'll ever be able to understand other people, but I do have some hope for internal consistency in my usage (so mathnerd314_February2014 writes things that seem comprehensible to mathnerd314_July2020). I've collected my early 1990's writings and they all sort of "click" into place, in that I understand them well enough to rewrite them word-for-word. Perhaps by writing down definitions for my words I'll be able to see how the concepts have evolved over time (or that they haven't changed).

You can always be wrong. Even when it's theoretically impossible to be wrong, you can still be wrong

You missed the context, which is when someone claims "This can't be wrong." Rule #1 clearly states the definition can be wrong. On the other hand, there are different levels of wrongness. Sure, these rules are most likely wrong and incomplete, but they are more correct than having no rules at all. And the reason definitions aren't the best way to give semantics is because we already have a better semantics, namely the "similarity cluster&qu... (read more)

Indeed, but one of Eliezer's points was that mathematical objects, e.g. the set of prime numbers, don't need labels. I can write without giving it a name at all, or just call it P.

If you require every word you use to have a definition, and ensure the definitions follow these rules, and then consistently use the words according to their definitions, then it follows that you are using the words correctly and not wrongly.

So I guess that could be the maxims for writing:

• know the definition of every word you use

• ensure the definitions follow these 17 rules

• use words according to their definition

A prime number n is a number whose only factors are multiplicative units and n*a multiplicative unit (and these two sets are distinct). Typical examples include 2, 3, 5, 7 and 11. Less-typical examples include -2 and 1+i; they are often excluded from consideration in mathematics.

I took the survey; apparently I get karma for that? :-)

I look at it in terms of efficiency; sites like reddit are simply inefficient ways to communicate. They are good at making random connections and exploring new subject areas, and that is what I use them for: if I have heard of a subject, but don't know about it, I find a subreddit on the topic and subscribe.

As a tool for discourse, however, there is much to be desired; communication is lossy (many posts are simply not upvoted enough to be seen) and interspersed with noise (unrelated but "viral" posts). Google Reader is almost lossless; it maintai... (read more)