All of shev's Comments + Replies

shev00

As I said, having high status = people feel the same way they would feel if they owed you something in real life/you were giving them things in real life.

I don't think this is quite right. In my experience, the sensation that someone is higher status than me induces a desperate desire to be validated by them, abstractly. It's not the same as 'gratitude' or anything like that; it's the desire to associate with them in order to acquire a specific pleasurable sensation -- one of group membership, acceptance, and worth.

shev140

Just want to echo: thanks for doing this. This is awesome.

shev40

Your post got me thinking about some stuff I've been dealing with, and I think helped me make some progress on it almost instantly. I don't think the mechanisms are quite the same, but thinking about your experience induced me to have useful realizations about myself. I'll share in case it's useful to someone else:

It sounds like your self-concept issue was rooted in "having a negative model of yourself deeply ingrained", which induced neuroses in your thoughts/behaviors that attempted to compensate for it / search around for ways to convince your... (read more)

shev00

Yeah, that's the exact same conclusion I'm pushing here. That and "you should feel equipped to come to this conclusion even if you're not an expert." I know.. several people, and have seen more online (including in this comment section) who seem okay with "yeah, it's negative one twelfth, isn't that crazy?" and I think that's really not ok.

My friend who's in a physics grad program promised me that it does eventually show up in QFT, and apparently also in nonlinear dynamics. Good enough for me, for now.

shev140

The assumed opinions I'm talking about are not the substance of your argument; they're things like "I think that most of these reactions are not only stupid, but they also show that American liberals inhabit a parallel universe", and what is implied in the use of phrases like 'completely hysterical', 'ridiculous', 'nonsensical', 'proposterous', 'deranged', 'which any moron could have done', 'basically a religion', 'disconnected from reality', 'save the pillar of their faith', etc. You're clearly not interested in discussion of your condemnation ... (read more)

0phl43
Look, if you had just said that my tone makes it unlikely that I'm interested in rational discussion for someone who doesn't know me, I would have conceded that point to you. But it's simply not true that I'm not interested in rational discussion and, crucially, anyone who has read my post can see that it's not true. Indeed, in the note at the end of the post, I say that on the blog where the original version of this post was published, I report a conversation about that post I had with a friend which led to some useful clarifications. I actually report the conversation verbatim and, if you go read it, you will see that it's not only civil and rational, but also fruitful. Now, you may think that, given the tone of the post, people are less likely to read that conversation and you're probably right about that. But it doesn't change the fact that it's not true that I'm clearly not interested in rational discussion and the evidence to the contrary is available to anyone who has read my post. Also, while I agree with you that, by saying the kind of things you quote, I made it less likely that people will read my post,I want to make clear that it doesn't mean they are just false, gratuitous assertions. It's certainly true of some of them, so I'll grant you that, but I don't believe for a second it's true of all. For instance, when I say that Trump's victory led to hysterical reactions in academia, I don't see how any reasonable person who works in academia and understand the meaning of the word "hysterical" could deny it. Of course, we could even argue about this, but that's because as philosophers know, you can always give a seemingly reasonable argument for virtually every claim no matter how absurd. But this doesn't mean that you're being rational. Again, I would have conceded a weaker point, but this is just false. I actually have argued for the claim I'm defending in my post with some of my liberal friends in a non-confrontational way and, not only did it fail to
shev40

It's true that politics is generally discouraged around here. But, also -- I'm the person who commented negatively on your post, and I want to point out that it wasn't going to be well-received, even if politics was okay here. You wrote in a style that assumed a lot of opinions are held by your readers, without justification, and that tends to alienate anyone who disagrees with you. Moreover, you write about those opinions as if they are not just true but obviously true, which tends to additionally infuriate anyone who disagrees with you. So I think your p... (read more)

0phl43
I now understand that people on LW don't like to talk about politics here, and like I said I don't really care about this particular incident, nor do I want to argue that you should change the customs around here. But I want to point out that, as far as the claim I was attacking in my post was concerned, I don't think I was assuming anything controversial to show that it was not supported by the evidence. I'm guessing that's not really what you meant when you said that "[I] wrote in a style that assumed a lot of opinions are held by [my] readers, without justification", but just in case it was, I wanted to make that clear. It matters to me because, although I have a natural tendency to write in a polemical style on political issues, I usually try to give rational and evidence-based arguments in favor of my views, and I think it was also true of the post we are talking about.
shev00

With an opening like

The idea that liberal elites are disconnected from reality has been a major theme of post-election reflections. Nowhere is this more obvious than in academia, where Trump’s victory resulted in completely hysterical reactions.

It's clear that this is written for people who already believe these things. The rest, unsurprisingly, confirms that. I thought LW tried to avoid politics? And, especially, pointless politically-motivated negativity. "liberal-bashing" isn't very interesting, and I don't think there's a point in linki... (read more)

shev50

It doesn't count in the discussions of coloring graphs, such as in the four color map theorem, and that's the kind of math this is most similar to. So you really need to specify.

1Thomas
Okay. The next time I'll be more careful to eliminate any possible ambiguity in advance.
shev40

Are you just wondering what 'pushing' means in this context? Or speculating about the existence of anti-gravity?

I'm pretty sure that this is just interpreting as region of low density as 'pushing' because it 'pulls less' than a region of average density would.

This is similar to how electron 'holes' in a metal's atomic lattice can be treated as positive particles.

0morganism
It appears the article is showing an increase in speed from the low density region, a repulsion, as an addition to the attractors forces. "that our galaxy is not only being pulled, but also pushed. In a new study in the forthcoming issue of Nature Astronomy, they describe a previously unknown, very large region in our extragalactic neighborhood. Largely devoid of galaxies, this void exerts a repelling force on our Local Group of galaxies. “By 3-d mapping the flow of galaxies through space, we found that our Milky Way galaxy is speeding away from a large, previously unidentified region of low density. Because it repels rather than attracts, we call this region the Dipole Repeller,” said Prof. Yehuda Hoffman. “In addition to being pulled towards the known Shapley Concentration, we are also being pushed away from the newly discovered Dipole Repeller. Thus it has become apparent that push and pull are of comparable importance at our location.”
shev40

Don't you think there's some value of doing a more controlled study of it?

shev00

No, because it's not a possibility that when you thought you were doing math in the reals this whole time, you were actually doing math in the surreals. Using a system other than the normal one would need to be stated explicitly.

shev10

You had written

"I really want a group of people that I can trust to be truth seeking and also truth saying. LW had an emphasis for that and rationalists seem to be slipping away from it with "rationality is about winning"."

And I'm saying that LW is about rationality, and rationality is how you optimally do things, and truth-seeking is a side effect. And the truth-seeking stuff in the rationality community that you like is because "a community about rationality" is naturally compelled to participate in truth-seeking, because it... (read more)

0whpearson
So the art of rationality are techniques that we share to help each other "win" in our contexts. The thrust of my argument has been that I think rationality is a two place word. That you need a defined context to be able to talk about what "wins". Why? Results like there is no such thing as a free lunch. If you point me at AIXI as optimal I'll point out that it only says that there is no better algorithm over all problems, but that that is consistent with there being lots of other equally bad algorithms. This would only be by definition. Which I don't think is a necessarily a mathematically sensible definition (all the problems in the world might have sufficient shared context).
shev50

Interleaving isn't really the right way of getting consistent results for summations. Formal methods like Cesaro Summation are the better way of doing things, and give the result 1/2 for that series. There's a pretty good overview on this wiki article about summing 1-2+3-4.. .

shev4-5

I know about Cesaro and Abel summation and vaguely understand analytic continuation and regularization techniques for deriving results from divergent series. And.. I strongly disagree with that last sentence. As, well, explained with this post, I think statements like "1+2+3+...=-1/12" are criminally deceptive.

Valid statements that eliminate the confusion are things like "1+2+3...=-1/12+O(infinity)", or "analytic_continuation(1+2+3+)=-1/12", or "1#2#3=-1/12", where # is a different operation that implies "addit... (read more)

shev20

Well. We should probably distinguish between what rationality is about and what LW/rationalist communities are about. Rationality-the-mental-art is, I think, about "making optimal plays" at whatever you're doing, which leads to winning (I prefer the former because it avoids the problem where you might only win probabilistically, which may mean you never actually win). But the community is definitely not based around "we're each trying to win on our own and maximize our own utility functions" or anything like that. The community is inter... (read more)

0whpearson
Rationalists aren't about rationality? Back in 2007 I don't think there was a split. Maybe we need to rename rationalists if "rationality is winning" is entrenched. LWperson: I'm a rationalist, I really care about AIrisk. PersonWhohasReadSomeRationalityStuff: So you will lie to get whatever you want, why should I think AIrisk is as important as you say and give you money? LWPerson: Sigh... I consider every mental or computational action a "play" because it uses energy and can have a material impact on someones goals. So being more precise in your thinking or modelling is also a 'play' even before you make a play in the actual game. I think you missed my point about evolution. Your version of rationality sounds a lot like fitness in evolution. We don't not what it is but it is whatever it is that survives (wins). So if we look at evolution and the goal is survival, lots of creatures manage to survive while not having great modelling capability. This is because modelling is hard and expensive. Fitness is also not a shared art. Ants telling birds how to be "fit" would not be a productive conversation. I've run out of time again. I shall try and respond to the rest of your post later.
shev20

Interesting, I've never looked closely at these infinitely-long numbers before.

In the first example, It looks like you've described the infinite series 9(1+10+10^2+10^3...), which if you ignore radii of convergence is 9*1/(1-x) evaluated at x=10, giving 9/-9=-1. I assume without checking that this is what Cesaro or Abel summation of that series would give (which is the technical way to get to 1+2+3+4..=-1/12 though I still reject that that's a fair use of the symbols '+' and '=' without qualification).

Re the second part: interesting. Nothing is immediately coming to mind.

4Qiaochu_Yuan
Yes, this is one way of justifying the claim that -1 is the "right" answer, via analytic continuation of the function 9/(1 - x). But there's another arguably more fun way involving making rigorous sense of infinite decimals going to the left in general. Cesaro and Abel summation don't assign a value to either of these series.
shev00

Fixed the typo. Also changed the argument there entirely: I think that the easy reason to assume we're talking about real numbers instead of rationals is just that that's the default when doing math, not because 0.999... looks like a real number due to the decimal representation. Skips the problem entirely.

shev20

Well - I'm still getting the impression that you're misunderstanding the point of the virtues, so I'm not sure I agree that we're talking past each other. The virtues, as I read them, are describing characteristics of rational thought. It is not required that rational thinkers appear to behave rationally to others, or act according to the virtues, at all. Lying very well may be a good, or the best, play in a social situation.

Appearing rational may be a good play. Demonstrating rationality can cause people to trust you and your ability to make good decision... (read more)

2whpearson
Aside: The nub of my problem with rationality as winning is this: I think it important that people believe what I say, so I strive for something close to quaker-ism. So I might lose short term about some of the things I care about. I really want a group of people that I can trust to be truth seeking and also truth saying. LW had an emphasis for that and rationalists seem to be slipping away from it with "rationality is about winning". Throughout evolutionary history we have not seen creatures with better models winning over creature with worse models. Cheap and stupid sometimes in some contexts wins over expensive and smart. If you lie, you do not get accurate argument as they will argue with your lies rather than with your truth. So do you tell the truth to get a better model or do you lie to "win"? There is a the concept of [Energy returned on energy invested. I think there is the same concept for model building if the cost of building models does not pay off in value, then model building is not winning. For we,the educated, wealthy, literate with a vast amount of useful information very easily accessible, the value we can get for the expense paid in doing research (at least up to a certain stage, when the VROVI is low because the low hanging fruit has gone), it makes sense to embody some of the virtues. Unless we start to look too weird because we can not hide it and people stop trusting or relating to us. But for a lot of humanity not connected to the internet the probability of creating valuable models is low (you get spirits/ancestor worship/ etc), so they can win by not doing too much modelling and doing what they know and surviving. So are we talking about "human rationality/winning" or "privileged people rationality/winning"? I'm sorry I've not had enough time to put into this reply, but I think there is value in keeping the conversation flowing.
shev10

Ah, of course, my mistake. I was trying to hand-wave an argument that we should be looking at reals instead of rationals (which isn't inherently true once you already know that 0.999...=1, but seems like it should be before you've determined that). I foolishly didn't think twice about what I had written to see if it made sense.

I still think it's true that "0.999..." compels you to look at the definition of real numbers, not rationals. Just need to figure out a plausible sounding justification for that.

1mwengler
I suppose you might be right for some people. For me, the fact that repeating infinite decimal expansions are rational is deeply deeply ingrained. Since your post is essentially how to square your feelings with what turns out to be mathematically true, you have a lot of room for disagreement as there is no contradiction in different people feeling different ways about the same facts. For me the most fun thing about 0.9999.... is that 1/9 = .11111... and therefore 9x1/9 = 9x.111111..... and this last expression obviously = .99999... You should also do a search on "right" in your post and edit it, you use "right" one time where you really need "write" I think it is "right down" instead of "write down" but I'll let you do the looking.
6Oscar_Cunningham
I think the point is that you're writing down "0.999..." and assuming that that must define a number at all. If you're assuming that every decimal expression gives a number then you must be working with the reals.
shev50

This reminds me of an effect I've noticed a few times:

I observe that in debates, having two (or more) arguments for your case is usually less effective than having one.

For example, if you're trying to convince someone (for some reason) that "yes, global warming is real", you might have two arguments that seem good to you:

  1. scientists almost universally agree that it is real
  2. the graphs of global temperature show very clearly that it is real

But if you actually cite both of these arguments, you start to sound weaker than if you picked one and stu... (read more)

3Bound_up
There's a secondary effect, too, I think, where people partially optimize for preaching to the choir (probably why Christ Myth Theory arguments are as popular as they are even though they flout the mainstream secular consensus), and end up using arguments and a tone that no one could seriously think would be even a little persuasive to actual believers. Those preach-to-the-choir arguments also contribute to this dilution effect. Even the good arguments and the tastefully presented ones pick up some Horns Effect from all the preach-to-the-choir arguments. Everywhere I look, I mostly see atheists creating content designed for atheists, rationalists creating content designed for rationalists, etc., and much less material designed to actually teach or persuade those not already persuaded.
shev60

Thanks! Validation really, really helps with making more. I hope to, though I'm not sure I can churn them out that quickly since I have to wait for an idea to come along.

shev20

That's a good approach for things where there's a 'real answer' out there somewhere. I think it's often the case that there's no good answer. There might be a group of people saying they found a solution, and since there no other solutions they think you should fully buy into theirs and accept whatever nonsensities come packaged with it (for instance, consider how you'd approach the 1+2+3+4+5..=-1/12 proof if you were doing math before calculus existed). I think it's very important to reject seemingly good answers on their own merits even if there isn't a better answer around. indeed, this is one of the processes that can lead to finding a better answer.

shev20

Well, Numberphile says they appear all over physics. That's not actually true. They appear in like two places in physics, both deep inside QFT, mentioned here.

QFT uses a concept called renormalization to drop infinities all over the place, but it's quite sketchy and will probably not appear in whatever final form physics takes when humanity figures it all out. It's advanced stuff and not, imo, worth trying to understand as a layperson (unless you already know quantum mechanics in which case knock yourself out).

0casebash
All I ever covered in university was taking the Scrodinger equation and then quantum physics did whatever that equation said.
shev10

If it helps -- I don't understand what the second half (from the part about Youtube videos onwards) has to do with fighting or optimizing styles.

I also didn't glean what an 'optimizing style' is, so I think the point is lost on me.

Regardless of your laundry list of reasons not to edit your post, you should read "I'm confused about what you wrote" comments, if you believe them to be legitimate criticisms, as a sign that your personal filter on your own writing is not catching certain problems, so you might be highly benefitted by taking it as an o... (read more)

0TheSinceriousOne
This is good detail. Thank you for it. I have made adjustments. Most importantly, to the first paragraph, and a transition before the YouTube paragraph. I'm not reading what you said as a promise to help me iterate, and don't want you to think you're obligated. I have already gotten value as-is. But if you want to compare with the original, it's still unmodified in the copy on my blog for now.
shev10

tbh I haven't figured out how to use Arbital yet. I think it's lacking in the UX department. I wish the front page discriminated by categories or something, because I find myself not caring about anything I'm reading.

shev130

I think you've subtly misinterpreted each of the virtues (not that I think in terms the twelve-virtue list is special; they're just twelve good aspects of rational thought).

The virtues apply to your mental process for parsing and making predictions about the world. They don't exactly match the real-world usages of these terms.

Consider these in the context of winning a game. Let's talk about a real-world game with social elements, to make it harder, rather than something like chess. How about "Suppose you're a small business owner. How do you beat the ... (read more)

0whpearson
I think I agree most of your examples. So I think we maybe talking past each other a bit. My point with going the 12 rationalities was to try and show that what are "winning strategies" is contextual. Lets take one example for I am short of time. But internally willing to be fallible requires showing the external signs of fallibility or lying. If a person is looking for a contractor to do a job and asks some contractors of equal ability how long it will take. If one person say accurately 8-12 weeks (depending on other things going on and acquiring supplies) and another person says 8-10 weeks max, the 8-10 week person might get the job. Because they were more arrogant about their abilities/self-perception (I believe this sort of thing happens all the time in government contracts, with people picking the smallest unrealistic quote). If you are a politician and change your stated beliefs based on evidence you might be accused of flip-flopping. Changing your beliefs a lot is a sign of ignorance and no one wants ignorant leaders. I'll have a think about it. Thanks for the feedback!
0username2
To strengthen your post, scholarship in the educational sense can lead to / enables specialization which is the one surefire way to escape poverty.
shev20

I strongly encourage you to do it. I'm typing up a post right now specifically encouraging people to summarize fields in LW discussion threads as a useful way to contribute, and I think I'm just gonna use this as an example since it's on my mind..

shev10

This is helpful, thanks.

In the "Rationality is about winning" train of thought, I'd guess that anything materially different in post-rationality (tm) would be eventually subsumed into the 'rationality' umbrella if it works, since it would, well, win. The model of it as a social divide seems immediately appealing for making sense of the ecosystem.

shev40

Any chance you could be bothered to write a post explaining what you're talking about, at a survey/overview level?

6JacobLW
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shev60

I disagree. The point is that most comments are comments we want to have around, and so we should encourage them. I know that personally I'm unmotivated to comment, and especially to put more than a couple minutes of work into a comment, because I get the impression that no one cares if I do or not.

shev110

One general suggestion to everyone: upvote more.

It feels a lot more fun to be involved in this kind of community when participating is rewarded. I think we'd benefit by upvoting good posts and comments a lot more often (based on the "do I want this around?" metric, not the "do I agree with this poster" metric). I know that personally, if I got 10-20 upvotes on a decent post or comment, I'd be a lot more motivated to put more time in to make a good one.

I think the appropriate behavior is, when reading a comment thread, to upvote almost e... (read more)

3Qiaochu_Yuan
I'm generally in favor of this. One obstacle is that I don't like putting effort into finding things to upvote; there might be good comments being made on bad top-level posts that I'm ignoring, and I don't particularly want to wade through a bunch of bad top-level posts to find and upvote the best comments on them.
4Lumifer
I think it would be horrible practice. Gold stars for everyone! If the upvotes become really plentiful they would lose most of their value. You'll just establish a higher baseline ("What, my comment didn't get +20? Oh, how unmotivating!")
shev30

I only heard this phrase "postrationality" for the first time a few days ago, maybe because I don't keep up with the rationality-blog-metaverse that well, and I really don't understand it.

All the descriptions I come across when I look for them seem to describe "rationality, plus being willing to talk about human experience too", but I thought the LW-sphere was already into talking about human experience and whatnot. So is it just "we're not comfortable talking about human experience on in the rationalist sphere so we made our own s... (read more)

6drossbucket
I'm not a massive fan of the 'postrationality' label but I do like some of the content, so I thought I'd try and explain why I'm attracted to it. I hope this comment is not too long. I'm not deeply involved but I have spent a lot of time recently reading my way through David Chapman's Meaningness site and commenting there a bit (as 'lk'). One of my minor obsessions is thinking and reading about the role of intuition in maths. (Probably the best example of what I'm thinking of is Thurston's wonderful Proof and Progress in Mathematics.) As Thurston's essay describes, mathematicians make progress using a range of human faculties including not just logical deduction but also spatial and geometric intuition, language, metaphors and associations, and processes occurring in time. Chapman is good on this, whereas a lot of the original Less Wrong content seems to have rather a narrow focus on logic and probabilistic inference. (I think this is less true now.) Mathematical intuition is how I normally approach this subject, but I think this is generally applicable to how we reason about all kinds of topics and come to useful conclusions. There should be a really wide variety of literature to raid for insights here. I'd expect useful contributions from fields such as phenomenology and meditation practice (and some of the 'instrumental rationality' folk wisdom) where there's a focus on introspection of private mental phenomena, and also looking at the same thing from the outside and trying to study how people in a specific field think about problems (apparently this is called 'ethnomethodology'.) There's probably also a fair bit to extract more widely from continental philosophy and pomo literature, which I know little about (I'm aware there's also lots of rubbish). There's another side to the postrationality thing that seems to involve a strong interest in various 'social technologies' and ritual practices, which often shades into what I'll kind-of-uncharitably call LARPing
0JacobLW
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3moridinamael
Obviously different people do things for different reasons, but I infer that a lot of people started identifying as post-rationalist when they felt it was no longer cool to be associated with the rationalist movement. There have been a number of episodes of Internet drama over the last several years, any one of which might be alienating to some subset of people; those people might still like a lot of these ideas, but feel rejected from the "core group" as they perceive it. The natural Schelling point for people who feel rejected by the rationality movement is to try to find a Rationality 2.0 movement that has all the stuff they liked without the stuff they didn't like. This Schelling point seems to be stable regardless of whether Rationality 2.0 has any actual content or clear definition.
shev10

Why do you think there is nothing wrong with your delivery? Multiple people have told you that there was. Is that not evidence that there was? Especially because it's the community's opinions that count, not yours?

shev00

Rude refers to your method of communicating, not the content of what you said. "I mean that you do not know of the subject, and I do. I can explain it, and you might understand" is very rude, and pointlessly so.

Why do you think you know how much game theory I know?

edit: I edited out the "Is English your first language" bit. That was unnecessarily rude.

shev10

I'm not trying to welcome you, I'm trying to explain why your posts were moved to drafts against your will.

I'm not arguing with or talking about Nash's theory. I'm telling you that your posts are low quality and you need to fix that if you want a good response.

My point in the last paragraph is that you are treating everyone like dirt and coming across as repulsive and egotistical.

"You are incorrect" was referring to "No, you can't give me feedback.". Yes, we can. If you're not receptive to feedback, you should probably leave this site.... (read more)

shev00

How could you possibly know what a random person knows of? Why are you so rude?

shev40

Re this post: http://lesswrong.com/lw/ogp/a_proposal_for_a_simpler_solution_to_all_these/

You wrote something provocative but provided no arguments or explanations or examples or anything. That's why it's low-quality. It doesn't matter how good your idea is if you don't bother to do any legwork to show anyone else. I for one have no why your idea would and don't care to do work to figure it out because the only reason I have to do work is that you said so.

Also, you might want to tackle something more concrete than "all these difficult observations and ... (read more)

2gjm
And, more directly, since downvoting is currently disabled.
shev10

I'm not asking for people not to talk about problems they have. I'm just criticizing the specifically extra-insensitive way of doing it in the comment I replied to. There are nicer, less intentionally hurtful ways to say the exact same thing.

shev120

While I think it's fine to call someone out by name if nothing else is working, I think the way you're doing it is unnecessarily antagonistic and seemingly intentionally spiteful or at least utterly un-empathetic, and what you're doing can (and in my opinion ought to) be done empathetically, for cohesion and not hurting people excessively and whatnot.

Giving an excuse about why it's okay that you, specifically, are doing it, and declaring that you're "naming and shaming" on purpose, makes it worse. It's already shaming the person without saying th... (read more)

8FourFire
While I agree with your sentiment, I also care substantially more about the continued success and growth of solstices than about one or two participants of such events being deeply offended. Elo is taking a stand here, which I believe needs to be taken, and few others are due to following the social norms of pre-emptively not offending people. I admit I am confused; is sidestepping around the issue part of Ask or Guess culture?
5Raemon
Yeah. Semi-related: This entire conversation has kind of wanted me to be able to see downvotes and upvotes tracked separately - I feel motivated to downvote the people who seem unnecessarily antagonistic to me, but I also very much want to see the upvotes showing solidarity with the complaint.
shev00

No, markets only work for services whose costs are high enough to participants to care and model their behavior accordingly. In my observation, specifically, these people behave this way for reasons other than their personal comfort, and the costs aren't high enough (or they're not aware that they're high enough) to influence their behavior.

The 'reason to speculate' is that it's interesting to talk about it. That's all.

shev40

I think you get more of that in Texas and the southeast. It (by my observation - very much a stereotype) correlates with driving big trucks, eating big meals, liking steak dinners and soda and big desserts, obesity, not caring about the environment, and taking strong unwavering opinions on things. And with conservatism, but not exclusively.

I distinctly remember driving in my high school band director's car once, maybe a decade ago, and he was blasting the AC at max when it maybe needed to be on the lowest setting, tops -- it seemed to reflect a mindset tha... (read more)

0Osho
The optimal AC setting in terms of comfort is subjective. I don't see any reason to speculate beyond the simple fact that he was hot. I don't think anyone should care about "unnecessary uses of resources"- that's why we have markets.
shev50

Is there an index of everything I ought to read to be 'up-to-date' in the rationalist community? I keep finding new stuff: new ancient LW posts, new bloggers, etc. There's also this on the Wiki, which is useful (but is curiously not what you find when you click on 'all pages' on the wiki; that instead gets a page with 3 articles on it?). But I think that list is probably more than I want - a lot of it is filler/fluff (though I plan to at least skim everything, if I don't burn out).

I just want to be able to make sure, if I try to post something I think is new on here, that it hasn't been talked to death about already.

2MrMind
No, there's no index. The rationalist community is a disapora of people in which everyone keeps producing its own content. It's basically impossible to read everything and be on-par with everyone. I suggest you select a couple of forum (the obvious choices are LW and SSC) and read a bunch of things from there (again, "AI to Zombie" strikes me as the obvious choice).
5NancyLebovitz
I think you're better off raising your topics in open threads, and see whether people tell you a topic's already been covered.
shev00

Thanks, this is useful.

I've been thinking about doing this - I'm trying to learn math (real/complex analysis, abstract algebra) for 'long term retention' as I'm not really using it right now but want to get ahead of learning it later, and struggling with retention of concepts and core proofs.

Do you think it's going to be useful to share decks for this purpose? I feel like there are many benefits to making my own cards and adding them as I progress through the material, and being handed a deck for the whole subject at once will be overwhelming.

0Arthur Milchior
I am going to share my decks when I'm confortable with their quality. They will all be on http://milchior.fr/Anki/ Right now, there is only the deck from Linear Algebra done Right. Both as an anki package and as text In both case, you'll need an LaTeX compiler to see them correctly. Sharing the compiled version of LaTeX seems to be hard for my computer. I don't really know, when I try to export with the media, the programs halts. I do think it is useful to share decks. Because I don't think creating the deck helped me a lot. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure that it's a bas idea to use the deck for parts of the book you didn't read yet. It is why I do advise to suspend the chapter you didn't entirely understood yet. As @Gurkenglas says, automatically suspending chapters could be a useful anki feature in this case. I'm not sure it would be useful for many people in general.
0Gurkenglas
That sounds more like Anki decks need a feature for making what cards are shown tied to what chapter you say you've read up to.
shev60

Here's an opinion on this that I haven't seen voiced yet:

I have trouble being excited about the 'rationalist community' because it turns out it's actually the "AI doomsday cult", and never seems to get very far away from that.

As a person who thinks we have far bigger fish to fry than impending existential AI risk - like problems with how irrational most people everywhere (including us) are, or how divorced rationality is from our political discussions / collective decision making progress, or how climate change or war might destroy our relatively... (read more)

Vaniver210

Being a member of this community seems to requiring buying into the AI-thing, and I don't so I don't feel like a member.

I don't think that it's true that you need to buy into the AI-thing to be a member of the community, and so I think that it seems that way is a problem.

But I think you do need to be able to buy into the non-weirdness of caring about the AI-thing, and that we may need to be somewhat explicit about the difference between those two things.

[This isn't specific to AI; I think this holds for lots of positions. Cryonics is probably an easy one to point at that disproportionately many LWers endorse but is seen as deeply weird by society at large.]

0[anonymous]
If you're going to downvote this, at least say why. (Hm, I just learned that Lesswrong doesn't let you delete comments? That's strange.)
shev10

This is interesting, but I don't understand your questions at end. What simulation theory are you talking about?

By the way, one of your links is broken and should be http://file.scirp.org/pdf/OPJ_2016063013301299.pdf .

Keep in mind that there is a significant seasonal variation in emissions from the sun, such as neutrinos which can easily penetrate into any experimental apparatus on earth. This is simple to rationalize: the sun emits massive numbers of neutrinos, which pass through areas at a shallower angle in the winter and thus have lower flux.

By far the... (read more)

shev00

I double majored in physics and computer science as an undergrad at a pretty good school.

My observation is this:

The computer science students had a much easier time getting jobs, because getting a job with mediocre software engineering experience is pretty easy (in the US in today's market). I did this with undeservedly little effort.

The physics students were, in general, completely capable of putting in 6 months of work to become as employable as the computer science students. I have several friends who majored in things completely non-technical, but by s... (read more)

shev20

I watched #3 again and I'm pretty convinced you're right. It is strange, seeing it totally differently once I have a theory to match.

7garethrees
It's an example of Derren Brown's brilliant use of misdirection. Here you're misdirected as to the whole nature of the trick, and if you start your analysis by asking yourself, "how does he manage to read the woman's mind?" then you've already swallowed the false assumption. You have to take a step back and start from the question, "how does he manage to convince me, the viewer, that he read the woman's mind?"
shev620

I strongly disagree with the approaches usually recommended online, which involve some mixture of sites like CodeAcademy and looking into open source projects and lots of other hard-to-motivate things. Maybe my brain works differently, but those never appealed to me. I can't do book learning and I can't make myself up and dedicate to something I'm not drawn to already. If you're similar, try this instead:

  1. Pick a thing that you have no idea how to make.
  2. Try to make it.

Now, when I say "try"... new programmers often envision just sitting down and... (read more)

3Error
I second this whole post, but especially that part. I would add one more bit: It helps a lot to have a friend who's already a programmer. Not so you can say "teach me how to program", but so you have someone to go to when you don't know what words or phrases you need to Google. IRC channels or newsgroups relevant to the language/library/application you're using can substitute for that but aren't quite as helpful.
2[anonymous]
I work in programming, and I agree with just about everything you said and I want to put my biggest, boldest circle of agreement around this. I don't think I started getting into what seems like a more advanced style of programming knowledge until I received a large enough stack of tedium that I had to automate through. The other key step was realizing something was tedious. If you've only worked on a few things related to a system, then everything seems novel, but if you do the same type of thing over and over again, you'll frequently see a tedious pattern and then you can automate THAT tedium.
shev00

Yeah, it can definitely be done for cheaper. In my case going through college and such I got new frames every year or two (between breaking them or starting to hate the style..). The bigger expense was contacts, which we either didn't have insurance for or it didn't cover, coming out to 100-150/year depending on how often I lost or damaged them.

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