All of pure-awesome's Comments + Replies

My masters degree involved a good bit of category theory. Personally, I don't see how it has any use outside of mathematics. (Note 'maths' includes 'mathematical logic' - so it's still a broad field of applicability).

I am highly motivated to be persuaded otherwise, and hence will be watching this series of posts with keen interest.

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I am not a working mathematician, and have not published any papers. My masters thesis involved a lot of category theory - but only relatively simple category-theoretic conce... (read more)

I find that what helps for me is re-writing maths as I'm learning it.

When I glance at an equation or formula (especially an unfamiliar one), I usually can't take it in because my mind is trying to glance it all at once. I have to force myself to scan it slowly, either by re-writing it, writing out its definition, or by (holding a ruler under it) and scanning one symbol at a time.

Then again, I'm currently studying a postgraduate degree in maths and I'm not someone who's ever considered themselves 'bad at math'.

This comment resonates with me. I am also a Christian-turned-Atheist.

When something bad happens, or I feel in danger, or I don't know what to do, usually I want to send up a prayer. Then I have to catch myself and remember that yeah, that's not going to help.

yeah, that's not going to help

It won't help the situation, but it might help you to better handle the situation. The useful thing about "prayer" isn't that it actually calls down any outside help, but that it forces you to clarify your own thoughts regarding what you want and what would be useful... in much the same way that problem solving is made easier by explaining the problem to somebody else.

Verbal communication forces you to serialize your thoughts, to disassemble what may be a vague or complex structure of interconnecting impulses, i... (read more)

last paragraph teaches false lesson on cleverness

What exactly do you believe the false lesson to be and why do you think it's false?

I interpreted it as meaning one should take into account your prior for whether someone with a gambling machine is telling the truth about how the machine works.

0Sophronius
Hm, a fair point, I did not take the context into account. My objection there is based on my belief that Less Wrong over-emphasizes cleverness, as opposed to what Yudkowsky calls 'winning'. I see too many people come up with clever ways to justify their existing beliefs, or being contrarian purely to sound clever, and I think it's terribly harmful.

So much for "the map is not the territory", I guess.

That's a useful template and in some cases the advice...

This may vary somewhat with the audience and I believe the claim...

Note, that I did notice the change. I do think that to facilitate proper understanding of a sentence, 'but' should be used slightly differently from 'and', even if both are technically correct.

So, Viliam_Bur, do I understand correctly?

You are saying the major tradeoff isn't between:

  • Speak 'bluntly' in situation X
  • Speak 'politely' in situation X

It is between:

  • Speak 'bluntly' in every situation (default)
  • Invest effort to learn to speak more 'politely'

(The costs-benefit calculation is a long-term one performed over all potential situations, not a short-term one performed over each specific situation)

I agree; this makes sense to me.


In certain cases, bluntness can be useful. However, by this I mean it can be useful if you are able to let pe... (read more)

2Viliam_Bur
No, I was saying that a good long-term solution is not helpful in a short term. Let's suppose that I completely agree with you that politeness is always the best solution. But to reach that level of politeness, a person starting from my position would have to visit therapy, then a social skill course, a presentation skill course, a diplomacy course, and this all would take at least two years. As a good rationalists I immediately join the therapy and book the courses. But how am I going to solve all the situations during those two years? It does not help me to know that two years later I will have a perfect solution for a situation that is happening now. Therefore, during those two years, I may solve the situations bluntly, when I think it is better than not speaking at all.

I also recall reading 'and', if not in that book then in one on a similar topic.

I believe the basic format for using 'and' is: "I believe X is good, and it could be even better if you did Y".

Contrast:

  • "Your speech was good, but consider using more specific examples"
  • "Your speech was good. However, it could be improved with more specific examples."
  • "Your speech was good. Yet I think that using more specific examples would improve it."
  • "Your speech was good, and I think you could increase the impact even further
... (read more)
0wedrifid
That's a useful template and in some cases the advice goes as far as to explicitly advocate just replacing 'but' with 'and' even when it is barely grammatical. This may vary somewhat with the audience and I believe the claim that most typical humans will either not notice or care about the improved tone than the impaired syntax. Mind you the particularly logically minded will also not mind the arbitrary change since 'and' does technically fit correctly in every case that 'but' fits, albeit with rather different connotations.

I'm not sure Twelve Virtues of Rationality is the best place to start. To be honest, I was a bit confused reading it the first time, and it only made sense to me after I had spent some time on lesswrong getting used to Eliezer's writing-style.

For myself (as I know it was for many others), I got here via Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. I'd say it's a great place to start many people off, but perhaps not the majority. Along with that, what got me convinced to start reading lesswrong was my interest in biases and importantly being convinced that ... (read more)

Relevant to this topic: Keith Johnstone's 'Masks'. It would be better to read the relevant section in his book "Impro" for the whole story (I got it at my university library) but this collection of quotes followed by this video should give enough of an introduction.

The idea is that while the people wear these masks, they are able to become a character with a personality different from the actor's original. The actor doesn't feel as if they are controlling the character. That being said, it doesn't happen immediately: It can take a few sessions f... (read more)

Ok, thanks for clarifying. It actually makes a lot more sense for you to be sarcastic and I read it that way at first. I only got confused once I started considering the non-sarcastic possibility.

As an example of illusion of transparency: On first reading, I interpretred your phrase 'highly-trustworthy-looking site' as sarcastic. Since it's a Webster's site, I'm going to guess that you were not intending to be sarcastic?

7arundelo
-- Wikipedia
8UnclGhost
I think I did mean to be sarcastic, since it doesn't seem to be actually affiliated with the publishers of Webster's dictionary and the design of the site looks generally sketchy, but coming back to my comment now, you make a good point.

Yes, I don't think Joseph's intention was to get Archimedes to understand a Rubix cube. I believe his intention was to get Archimedes to play with 'trivial toys' and so he thought talking about Rubix cubes might do the trick.

The problem is not that they come up with a hypothesis too early, it's that they stop too early without testing examples that are not supposed to work. In most cases people are given as many opportunities to test as they'd like, yet they are confident in their answer after only testing one or two cases (all of which came up positive).

The trick is that you should come up with one or more hypotheses as soon as you can (maybe without announcing them), but test both cases which do and don't confirm it, and be prepared to change your hypothesis if you are proven wrong.

1AndyC
If it requires a round-trip of human speech through a professor (and thus the requisition of the attention of the entire class) then you can hardly say they are given as many opportunities to test as they'd like. A person of functioning social intelligence certainly has no more than 20 such round-trips available consecutively, and less conservatively even 4 might be pushing it for many. Give them a computer program to interact with and then you can say they have as many opportunities to test as they'd like.

The problem is not that they are trying examples which confirm their hypothesis it's that they are trying only those examples which test their hypothesis.

The article focuses on testing examples which don't work because people don't do this enough. Searching for positive examples is (as you argue) a neccessary part of testing a hypothesis, and people seem to have no problem applying this. What people fail to do is to search for the negative as well.

Both positive and negative examples are, I'd say, equally important, but people's focus is completely imbalanced.

I believe CronoDAS was referring to overcast days when they said the sky is sometimes white.

1A1987dM
Yes, I was talking about his claim that “the sky is black about half the time”; I didn't touch his claim that “it's pretty common for it to be white”. EDIT: Okay, failed reading comprehension of my own comment.

The context here is a human dealing with a human. Thus it can be considered a useful heuristic to think "will what I write/say cause someone to lose social status?" and depending on the reply that your brain returns, judge whether it could be considered offensive (since this might prove to be a more accurate means of judging offense than trying to do so directly).

Naturally, if you were actually trying to develop an artificial intelligence that needed to refrain from offending people, it probably wouldn't be as easy as just 'calculating the objective status change' and basing the response on that.

"I wish I could believe that no one could possibly believe in belief in belief in belief..."

You wish you could believe Eliezer? Is this a dliberate stroke of irony or a subconcious hint at the fact that you do have an empathic understanding of the thought processes behind tailoring your own beliefs?

8hannahelisabeth
I think the idea behind this is that he wishes reality played out in such a way that, to a rational observer, it would engender belief. It's a roundabout way of saying "I wish reality were such that..."