All of Morendil's Comments + Replies

Ruling this prediction as wrong. (Only three years late, but who's counting.)

By now this looks rather unlikely in the original time-frame, even though there are still encouraging hints from time to time.

Me, as well.

(Edit: looking at Internet Archive's cached snapshots, all of them that I checked look that way to me too.)

(Edit2: it has looked that way to others as well for quite some time. I wouldn't worry about it.)

2gjm
Certainly not worth worrying about. It seems just to be a consequence of the article being deleted. But I wonder why it was deleted.

I'm seeing similarities between this and Goldratt's "Evaporating Cloud". You might find it worthwhile to read up on applications of EC in the literature on Theory of Constraints, if you haven't already.

Does that mean Main is no longer deprecated?

3Vaniver
Until we fix 593, yes.

I realize I haven't given a direct answer yet, so here it is: I'm in, if I'm wanted, and if some of the changes discussed here take place. (What it would take to get me onboard is, at the least, an explicit editorial policy and people in charge of enforcing it.)

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There was a sudden exodus of talent, which reduced posting frequency, and took the wind out of the sails.

I'd be wary of post hoc ergo propter hoc in this context. You might also have expected that by leaving for other projects these posters would create a vacuum for others to fill. It could be worth looking at why that didn't happen.

One interesting thing is that at one point post-Eliezer, there were two "rising stars" on LW who were regularly producing lots of fascinating content: lukeprog and So8res. Both stopped regularly posting here some time after they were recruited by MIRI and their priorities shifted.

Yes, and this would be a general trend - affecting all community blogs to some extent. I was looking for an explanation for the downfall of LessWrong specifically, but I suppose it's also interesting to consider general trends.

Would you say that LessWrong is particularly prone to this effect, and if so because of what properties?

Specifically, I think that LW declined from its peak by losing its top bloggers to new projects. Eliezer went to do AI research full-time at MIRI, Anna started running CFAR, various others started to work on those two organizations or others (I went to work at MetaMed). There was a sudden exodus of talent, which reduced posting frequency, and took the wind out of the sails.

One trend I dislike is that highly competent people invariably stop hanging out with the less-high-status, less-accomplished, often younger, members of their group. VIPs have a strong ... (read more)

This feels like a good start but one that needs significant improvement too.

For instance, I'm wondering how much of the situation Anna laments is a result of LW lacking an explicit editorial policy. I for one never quite felt sure what was or wasn't relevant for LW - what had a shot at being promoted - and the few posts I wrote here had a tentative aspect to them because of this. I can't yet articulate why I stopped posting, but it may have had something to do with my writing a bunch of substantive posts that were never promoted to Main.

If you look at the ... (read more)

Agree that a lot more clarity would help.

Assuming Viliam's comment on the troll is accurate, that's probably sufficient to explain the decline: http://lesswrong.com/lw/o5z/on_the_importance_of_less_wrong_or_another_single/di2n

We have lately ceased to have a "single conversation" in this way.

Can we hope to address this without understanding why it happened?

What are y'all's theories of why it happened?

#1: the general move of the internet away from blogs and forums and towards social media.

In particular, there seems to be a mental move that people make, that I've seen people write about quite frequently, of wanting to avoid the more "official"-seeming forms of online discussion, and towards more informal places. From blogging to FB, from FB to Tumblr and Twitter, and thence to Snapchat and other stuff I'm too old for. Basically, people say that they're intimidated to talk on the more official, public channels. I get a sense of people feeling h... (read more)

6SatvikBeri
My theory is that the main things that matter are content and enforcement of strong intellectual norms, and both degraded around the time a few major high-status members of the community mostly stopped posting (e.g. Eliezer and Yvain.) The problem with lack of content is obvious, the problem with lack of enforcement is that most discussions are not very good, and it takes a significant amount of feedback to make them better. But it's hard for people to get away with giving subtle criticism unless they're already a high-status member of a community, and upvotes/downvotes are just not sufficiently granular.

Absolutely - so don't be insincere in the setup. If you think "no way", say "no way".

Yup. I learned the business version of this early in my consulting career. One of my consultant buddies, David Schmaltz, calls it a "Dedication Test". It's a small habit with huge positive effects.

Donated $300. Happy New Year!

Where in that (long) post does he say that?

4gjm
In the paragraph beginning "The most obvious thing". But it is worth reading the paragraphs that follow. He says it's "perfectly reasonable" to reject that argument on the basis that the "hard problem" (as Chalmers calls it) is mere sophistry -- that being roughly what I think most people here on LW would be inclined to do. But he objects to the combination of (1) doing that with (2) saying that some theory in neuroscience will solve the "hard problem". That seems to me like a reasonable objection, but I'm not sure his diagnosis is correct; I suspect at least some of the people he's objecting to actually (1) say that the "hard problem" is mere sophistry but (2) say that some theory in neuroscience gives an answer to the question "what is consciousness?" that doesn't involve that sort of sophistry; an answer not to the question "what is this further extra thing that constitutes consciousness, above and beyond people's behaviour and how their brains work?" but to "what exactly is it about people's behaviour and how their brains work that constitutes this thing we call consciousness?". He goes on to accept that this sort of question is reasonable, and in fact that's the question he focuses on in the rest of what he writes.

Would appreciate an explanation from whoever downvoted the parent.

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You might also want to hire (or otherwise team up with) people who publish designs on sites like RedBubble or Threadless.

1Gleb_Tsipursky
Yup, right now I'm more concerned with getting the style right for those Less Wrongers who have a certain sense of what they want, and then figure out how to achieve that outcome. One thing at a time :-)

Form and content are not that easily separated. For instance, I like #15 (a bit), because the typography fits the message.

Instead, I'd suggest you focus on design that reinforces, ideally in a humorous way, the message of the slogan.

I feel strongly that "Please Provide an Example" ought to have the word "example" consist of hairy green ball things, in homage to Fenyman's famous explanation of how he would debug math or physics claim by turning abstract concepts into imagined examples.

"I notice I am confused" could play on a classic "magnifier" icon in the word "notice", and jumble up the letters of "cnfosued", or mess up their typography.

0Morendil
Would appreciate an explanation from whoever downvoted the parent.
1Gleb_Tsipursky
Oh, nice ideas, thanks!
0Gleb_Tsipursky
Please help optimize the designs of the t-shirts - more in this post. Thanks!
2Lumifer
Evidence should be relevant to the claim. The claim was "[not] good for blood flow in the finger". The original claim before that was that "[w]earing a ring is not particularly practical". None of these two claims seem to be anywhere close to to reality.

What I suspect is happening, based on (just now) clicking the same link twice in a row and going once to a 404, then the next time to the intended page: one of the Web servers in the site's load balancing rotation is misconfigured, and systematically throwing errors.

You might want to ask them to look into it.

0Gleb_Tsipursky
Ah, alright, thanks for letting me know, I'll let them know. Appreciate you looking into this!
0Gleb_Tsipursky
Great, thanks for letting me know!

"Glad To Change My Mind" goes to a 404 page.

-2Gleb_Tsipursky
Please help optimize the designs of the t-shirts - more in this post. Thanks!
0Gleb_Tsipursky
Strange, I clicked on it, and it went to the actual page for me. Regardless, I edited it and re-added the link. Here's another link to the same place, please try it and see if it goes to the right place for you.

"Just because many believe in something doesn't make it true - the opposite, actually." (This from Googling the too-short excerpt and reading a bit of the surrounding text.) He spoils it by excepting two domains, religion and politics.

0Good_Burning_Plastic
Ahem.

For six months straight I've kept up a routine of coding a little bit - 10 lines, two lines, just a refactoring - every single day. In the process I've picked up some fluency in the new(ish) language Elm, functional programming in general and functional reactive programming in particular.

2[anonymous]
That's a really cool approach to learning programming. Keep it up!

Awesome, thanks! (ETA) I have the figures already from a secondary source, so that's OK.

4VincentYu
Here. Sorry about the horrible format; I didn't see a better way to download the content or print the page. In addition, I couldn't access the figures.

Cool! Where do you work?

For a while now I've also taken part in the Good Judgment Project prediction contests, since Season 2 as a "super-forecaster". I've scaled back my involvement this year for various reasons. But I do know that they're working on a commercial offering; depending on what you're looking to do, this may or may not be relevant to your efforts...

I'd welcome any suggestions for how to find collaborators.

Keep posting the material here. Post to Main. Don't worry about it not being polished enough: you'll get plenty of feedback. Ignore feedback that isn't useful to you.

To put this in some perspective, they're mostly doing it because the Brits did it first.

Still, having any recognition and awareness that there is a problem there is heartening. We're just getting started here; last I heard, the good old habits were still in force, i.e. of starting software efforts with price tags expressed in hundred million euro multiples, letting them run for a while, then scrapping them as not even worth deploying.

Procurement is one of the big culprits here; a classic case of lost purposes. Ostensibly to save money, departments give a l... (read more)

0[anonymous]
I remember when I was taught PRINCE2 project management one guest teacher came from the British police. I ended up not using much of it, mostly because my projects are typically so that I am the team and the cost is my salary. So not very big. However one big idea I learned is that projects are supposed to be a triangle, where the PM is hovering between / above customers and vendors. Typically, when for example a consulting company is implementing a software for a customer company, they will have two PMs on both sides. So there is no real neutral arbiter of disputes. If this could be fixed, such as using freelancers as neutral arbiters, I could go back to the consulting world, as there would be no more of the bitter, unproductive fights that I fled from. Without a neutral arbiter it is often like "you signed a fixed price contract, now implement it for that price even if it seems to take 3x as much work" vs. "okay, fuckers, but then we will implement the spec literally without a care if it is really useful" and it ends up being bad for everybody.
Morendil240
  • A couple months ago I started learning the Elm programming language, and to make things interesting I resolved to push one non-empty code commit to GitHub every single day (ideally also non-trivial, but not everyone's definition of "trivial" will match mine). I'm now on day 67 of that streak, having written six proto-games (playable here if you're so inclined, though they're not hugely entertaining). So far the habit has resisted a new job and a ten-day vacation. I've also been keeping a daily journal since Feb 21.

  • Used my 3D printer (Prusa i3)

... (read more)
0jacob_cannell
Seriously - that's a thing? Je ne parle vouz francais, but I just had to up my regard for the french government.

there are a lot of studies backing up that claim

Post links to three?

0joaolkf
Can't do. Search keywords as cortisol dominance rank status uncertainty.

This continues to be a puzzling topic...

My most recent explicit thought about this had to to with teamwork: it's become a commonplace that "conflict in a team isn't actually bad", and I was thinking that conflict per se may not be counterproductive, but I would certainly view engaging in dominance contests as a waste of time all around.

When I coach teams I often consciously adopt (and advocate for others in a similar position) a "low posture" - a cluster of heuristics, really, such as "I'm happy to help the group work through a pro... (read more)

Morendil160

I've just run my first half-marathon, coming in with an official time of 2h0m44s, close enough to my 2h objective that I'll call it a win.

Also this month, I reached a first milestone in writing video games using FRP (Functional Reactive Programming) in the Elm language, coding a proto-game that reproduces the basic gameplay of "The Company of Myself".

4pangel
Congratulations!

Is there any reason you couldn't email back saying something along the lines of "I'd appreciate your pointing out what specific weaknesses made you rule out my application, so that I can improve to become a stronger candidate for later or for other similar companies, and possibly so that I can send candidates your way that better fit the profile?"

6Adam Zerner
I figured that they're really busy and don't have time to address that. Like if they did have time, I figure that they would have addressed it in the rejection email. Plus, I feel pretty confident that it's because they don't think I'm as smart as the other candidates. But you're the second person to recommend this, so perhaps I'm wrong in my assumptions. So I'm going to send them an email doing what you say.
9AnnaSalamon
Thanks! We appreciate it a lot; and happy new year to you!
Morendil310

Ran 21k for the first time, within a few seconds of 2h. Reasonable grounds to hope for a sub-2h finishing time in the half-marathon I'm signed up for this coming March 8.

Interestingly this article offers a QUALY-based economic estimate, but for some weird reasons plucks a wild ass guess as to the average number of years of life lost as a result of medical errors - ten years, with not the slightest justification. Of course this leads to a largish estimate of total impact.

This other article updates the estimates of annual deaths in the US to 400,000 with a lower bound of 210,000. This may be the result of misapplying an estimate of what fraction of adverse events are preventable - this was estimated on the overall sample (in... (read more)

Now that running regularly, for fitness and to keep my weight down, is a well established habit, I've signed up to run a half-marathon next March. (Not without a twinge of sadness, thinking of Hal Finney.)

Instead of just going out for a run on sundays and the occasional weekday, I'm now "following a training plan", that is, running workouts with specific targets, using a heart rate monitor, and so on. It makes some interesting differences and I've learned a few things.

One aspect of keeping fit that I'm still somewhat failing at, despite much self... (read more)

Suggestion: start a new discussion thread titled something like "European Rationality Solstice Ritual". That will be a start. I'm based in France, experienced at the logistics of running unconferences and community meetings, willing to help.

It seems to me that every successfully organized event has at least one specific person who is the "soul" of the event. No matter how many additional people promise to help, this one is the one who will do most of the work, because they will take the heroic responsibility to fix all things that can go wrong. Other people will usually do the limited part they agreed to help with, and perhaps something more if they are nagged enough. But there has to be someone who continuously inspects everything, and does the nagging. In other words, a manager wh... (read more)

Haga, William J. "Perils of professionalism." Management Quarterly (1974): 3-10.

9VincentYu
Unfortunately, my university library reports that they have exhausted all possible sources and no library was able to supply this paper.
5VincentYu
Requested.

Donating "for free" is now down to 25 STR, about a nickel. (Sent to MIRI.)

Also, your Facebook account is only considered valid if you allow Stellar access to your photos.

3KnaveOfAllTrades
Thanks. I've edited the post pointing to lukeprog's more recent post about the matching drive, since I'd consider this one fully obsolete now the Stellar offer is so low.

(2011) Costa, AC. and Anderson, NR., Measuring trust in teams: development and validation of a multi-faceted measure of formative and reflexive indicators of team trust, European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology 20 (1) : 119- 154

or in a pinch

(2003) Costa, AC., Work team trust and effectiveness, Personnel Review 32 (5) : 605- 622

7VincentYu
* [1] * [2]

You're very likely right, I misinterpreted.

Any progress with this? I'm probably going to hang out briefly with the NYC group when I visit there in August.

2KnaveOfAllTrades
It's been stalled for a while, partly because a month after this post I got busy with university away from London so wasn't around to take the lead on this. (I was never planning to move in on a permanent basis for a while due to university, but was/am interested in the times I'm not away e.g. the summer, and would like this to succeed even if I don't directly benefit in the short-term.) I'll be back in London in time for this Sunday's meetup, so I might mention it then, even if only to see why it didn't happen. But if it goes ahead in future, it will probably be better if someone permanently in London (and maybe looking to move in sooner and permanently) took the lead on coordinating interested parties to meetup, discuss expectations, and do viewings. But I still might be able to help from the side.
Morendil210

This isn't strictly speaking "this month", but more "since the last time this thread was around", perhaps three or four months. (ETA: actually, the last such I took part in was October '13.)

Built a 3D printer from a kit. Learnt enough G-Code and OpenScad to be dangerous. Designed a few parts of my own, including some that replaced original parts.

Lost about 6 kilos from my max weight. Anecdotally, what seems to have worked in my case was eating lots more vegs, liberal amounts of meat, and about half my previous quantity of carbs. Also in... (read more)

0Gunnar_Zarncke
You could have created the 'Monthly' bragging thread if you had a suitable opportunity.
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