All of rule_and_line's Comments + Replies

Ah! That sounds like a great one!

So, folks like Chris Ferguson are presumably doing both activities (judging how much evidence as well as accurately translating brain estimates to numerical estimates).

But if I go find a consistently successful poker player who does not translate brain estimates to numerical estimates, then I could see how that person does on calibration exercises. That sounds like a fun experiment. Now I just need to get the grant money ...

Sidenote, but how would I narrow down to the successful poker players who don't translate brain es... (read more)

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter — tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther... And one fine morning —

• The Great Gatsby

I always liked Fitzgerald's portrayal of what Something to Protect feels like.

Happy New Year's resolutions, all.

I'm having difficulty replacing your quotation with its referent. Could you describe an activity I could do that would demonstrate that I was judging how much evidence I have on a given issue?

Hey, that's me! I also didn't think we had other LWers down here. PM sent, let's meet up after the holidays.

I thought of the idea that maybe the human decision maker has multiple utility functions that when you try to combine them into one function some parts of the original functions don't necessarily translate well... sounds like the "shards of desire" are actually a bunch of different utility functions.

I hereby request a research-filled thread of what to do when you feel like you're in this situation, which I believe has been called "welfare economics" in the literature.

It sounds like you're measuring your success by the impact you have on the person you are directly communicating with.

What happens if you measure success by your impact on the rest of your audience?

Interesting position! I can't speak for James, but I want to engage with this. Let's pretend, for the scope of this thread, that I made the statement about the proper role of skepticism.

I'm happy to endorse your wording. I agree it's more precise to talk about "claims" than "things" in this context.

Quick communication check. When you say "increased" you're implying at least two distinct levels of skepticism. From your assertion, I gather that difficult-to-measure claims like "there exist good leaders, people who ca... (read more)

[S]kepticism should be directed at things that are actually untrue rather than things that are difficult to measure.

-- Bill James, American baseball writer and statistician.

The last question was asked for the first time, half in jest, on May 21, 2061 ...

Thank you. Heuristics like these are, I think, the meta-skill I'm trying to learn at the same time.

Thanks for sharing your experience!

In case you or any other LWers would find these interesting, here are some resources I've enjoyed:

• Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast This is what got me hooked on history in the first place. [Edit: I see you mentioned this in the comments! Well ... seconded!]
• Philip Tetlock's Expert Political Judgment book Really anything that Tetlock has done (I think some LWers are involved in his Good Judgment Project). For my money, this is the steelman against using geopolitical insight for forecasting purposes.

I personally ... (read more)

Done! Wish I had had a scanner handy going in, I'm curious about the digit ratio.

I'm curious about this "liquid water is wet" statement. Obviously I agree, but for the sake of argument, could you taboo "is" and tell me the statement again? I'm trying to understand how your algorithm feels from the inside.

If you're curious how to quantify fractions of statements, you might enjoy this puzzle I heard once. Suppose you're an ecological researcher and you need to know the number of fish in a large lake. How would you get a handle on that number?

After describing

blind certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn't even know he's locked up.

David Foster Wallace continues

The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as

There is a real joy in doing mathematics, in learning ways of thinking that explain and organize and simplify. One can feel this joy discovering new mathematics, rediscovering old mathematics, learning a way of thinking from a person or text, or finding a new way to explain or to view an old mathematical structure.

This inner motivation might lead us to think that we do mathematics solely for its own sake. That’s not true: the social setting is extremely important. We are inspired by other people, we seek appreciation by other people, and we like to help

Could you give this some more context? My reaction was to downvote.

The word "only" gives me vibes like "language exerts a trivial or insignificant influence on our consciousness". I don't know any of Kroetz's plays, but given that he is a playwright I feel like I'm getting the wrong vibe.

I'm only familiar with open source tools, but git will do this with "git diff --word-diff FILE1 FILE2" and Emacs diff has the "ediff-toggle-autorefine" command. IMO you still need to insert line breaks before they become useful.

GNU has wdiff though I've never used it: https://www.gnu.org/software/wdiff/ (update: the git command above seems to do the same thing)

I'm still looking for an online diff tool that makes the word-level differences obvious. That would be ideal here (my web skills are too weak to make it happen this month).

Is there a convenient place to see just what changed from the old to the new?

Online diff tools aren't usefully handling the paragraphs when I copy-paste, and my solution of download -> insert line breaks -> run through my favorite diff program is probably inconvenient for most.

This is the most forceful version I've seen (assumed it had been posted before, discovered it probably hasn't, won't start a new thread since it's too similar):

But by definition, there can’t be any particular feeling associated with simply being wrong. Indeed, the whole reason it’s possible to be wrong is that, while it is happening, you are oblivious to it. When you are simply going about your business in a state you will later decide was delusional, you have no idea of it whatsoever. You are like the coyote in the Road Runner cartoons, after he has

I'm more an outsider than a regular participant here on LW, but I have been boning up on rhetoric for work. I'm thrown by this in a lot of ways.

I notice that I'm confused.

Good for private rationality, bad for public rhetoric? What does your diagram of the argument's structure look like?

As for me, I want this as the most important conclusion in the summary.

But in fact most goals are dangerous when an AI becomes powerful

I don't get that, because the evidence for this statement comes after it and later on it is restated in a diluted form.

goals that s

To what nugget of rationality does this point?

The idea that a self-imposed external constraint on action can actually enhance our freedom by releasing us from predictable and undesirable internal constraints is not an obvious one. It is hard to be Ulysses.

-- Reid Hastie & Robyn Dawes (Rational Choice in an Uncertain World)

The "Ulysses" reference is to the famous Ulysses pact in the Odyssey.

While I don't read scientific literature that much, I do make formal predictions pretty often. Typically any time I notice something I'm interested in that will be easy to check in the future.

Will I get to bed on time today? Will I be early for the meeting tomorrow? Etc.

I second the anecdotal evidence that this is a "live" exercise. Sidenote: it took me way too long to realize I needed to write all my predictions down. I spent a few weeks thinking I was completely excellent at predicting things.

I endorse (with the possibly-expected caveat about Wilson score ranking).

Unfortunately, I can't (don't know how to?) hack the LW backend. Is that something I can look into?

I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.

-- Oliver Cromwell

Previously posted two years ago. I'm curious if some things bear repeating. Is there any accepted timeframe for duplicates?

That's an interesting prediction. Have you tried it? Can you predict what you'd do after filling the notebook?

In my imagination, I'd probably wind up in one of two states:

• Feeling tricked and asking myself "What was the point of that?"
• Feeling accomplished and waiting for the next instruction.