If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
Notes for future OT posters:
1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.
2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one.
3. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.
4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.
A few months ago I started using the Ultimate Geography Anki deck after performing quite abysmally on some silly geography quiz that was doing the rounds on Facebook. I now know where all the damn countries are, like an informed citizen of the world. This has proven itself very useful in a variety of ways, not least of which is in reading other material with a geographical backdrop. For example, the chapter in Guns, Germs and Steel on Africa is much more readable if you know where all the African countries are in relation to one another.
(In the process of doing this, coupled with an international event in Sweden, I've learned that the Scandinavian education systems are much, much better than that of the UK at teaching children about the rest of the world)
The geography deck was particularly easy to slip into because it developed an area I already (weakly) knew about. I'm looking for some new Anki content of a similar nature: a cross-domain-application body of knowledge I probably sort-of know a little bit already, that I can comprehensively improve upon.
Suggestions and anecdotes of similar experiences welcome.
Yep, I find the world a much less confusing place since I learned capitals and location on map. I had (and to some extent still do have) a mental block on geography which was ameliorated by it.
Rundown of positive and negative results:
In a similar but lesser way, I found learning English counties (and to an even lesser extent, Scottish counties) made UK geography a bit less intimidating. I used this deck because it's the only one on the Anki website I found that worked on my old-ass phone; it has a few howlers and throws some cities in there to fuck with you, but I learned to love it.
I suspect that learning the dates of monarchs and Prime Ministers (e.g. of England/UK) would have a similar benefit in contextualising and de-intimidating historical facts, but I never finished those decks and haven't touched them in a while, so never reached the critical mass of knowledge that allowed me to have a good handle on periods of British history. I found it pretty difficult to (for example) keep track of six different Georges and map each to dates, so slow progress put me off. Let me know if you're interested and want to set up a pact, e.g. 'We'll both do at least ten cards from each deck a d...
Is there an existing post on people's tendency to be confused by explanations that don't include a smaller version of what's being explained?
For example, confusion over the fact that "nothing touches" in quantum mechanics seems common. Instead of being satisfied by the fact that the low-level phenomena (repulsive forces and the Pauli exclusion principle) didn't assume the high-level phenomena (intersecting surfaces), people seem to want the low-level phenomena to be an aggregate version of the high-level phenomena. Explaining something without using it is one of the best properties an explanation can have, but people are somehow unsatisfied by such explanations.
Other examples of "but explain(X) doesn't include X!": emotions from biology, particles from waves, computers from solid state physics, life from chemistry.
More controversial examples: free will, identity, [insert basically any other introspective mental concept here].
Examples of the opposite: any axiom/assumption of a theory, billiard balls in Newtonian mechanics, light propagating through the ether, explaining a bar magnet as an aggregation of atom-sized magnets, fluid mechanics using continuous fields instead of particles, love from "God wanted us to have love".
I have uploaded a collection of My Little Pony one-shots called Flashes of Insight to both FIMFiction.net and FanFiction.net. While most of the stories have no particular relevance to LessWrong, "Good Night" draws heavily on ideas I first encountered on this site, and I expect most people here will find it enjoyable. Eliezer Yudkowsky called it "chilling," which, coming from him, I consider a very great compliment.
So, I made two posts sharing potentionally useful heuristics from Bayesianism. So what?
Should I move one of them to Main? On the one hand, these posts "discuss core Less Wrong topics". On the other, I'm honestly not sure that this stuff is awesome enough. But I feel like I should do something, so these things aren't lost (I tried to do a talk about "which useful principles can be reframed in a Bayesian terms" on a Moscow meetup once, and learned that those things weren't very easy to find using site-wide search).
Maybe we need a wiki pa...
I might need some recalibration, but I'm not sure.
I research topics of interest in the media, and I feel frustrated, angry and annoyed about the half-truths and misleading statements that I encounter frequently. The problem is not the feelings, but whether I am 'wrong'. I figure there are two ways that I might be wrong:
(i) Maybe I'm wrong about these half-truths and misleading statements not being necessary. Maybe authors have already considered telling the facts straight and that didn't get the best message out.
(ii) Maybe I'm actually wrong about whether...
My first suggestion would be to look at the incentives of people who write for the media. Their motivations are NOT to "get the best message out". That's not what they're paid for. Nowadays their principal goal is to attract eyeballs and hopefully monetize them by shoving ads into your face. The critical thing to recognize is that their goals and criteria of what constitutes a successful piece do not match your goals and your criteria of what constitutes a successful piece.
The second suggestion would be to consider that writers write for a particular audience and, I think, most of the time you will not be a member of that particular audience. Mass media doesn't write for people like you.
My limited experience with journalists supports this -- when they speak with you, they often already have the outline of the story ready (the nearest existing cliche); they only need a few words they can take out of context and used them to support their bottom line. You can try to educate them, but they don't really listen to you to learn about the topic, they listen to catch some nice keywords.
I recently decided to bite the bullet and started to use the Markdown standard in my plain-text documents (I would have preferred the syntax of txt2tags or Org-mode, but neither of those is nearly as widespread and well-supported). It's proven so useful that I am seriously considering uninstalling LibreOffice. Who needs a WYSIWYG editor when you have readable source code which can be easily converted to an html document? Not to mention that Notepad++ opens instantly, while LibreOffice Writer takes forever.
I highly recommend that anyone who deals with lots ...
For LessWrong meetup organizers: Do you bring in new long term members who are already the stereotypical STEM/intellectual/utilitarian/etc. type? Or do you attract a significant number of people who don't meet that description but nonetheless do become long-term members?
When your delusion runs deep enough, the actual process of joined-up thinking itself is literally your enemy.
Are the European meetups in English or the native language? I'm moving to Germany soon, and would love to attend some closer meetups (Germany/Netherlands/Belgium), iff they are English by default.
Patrick McKenzie explains a bit more why he hates bitcoin:
...My feelings about Bitcoin remind me of a fractal. Its a bad idea, and you zoom in at any part of it and discover new bad ideas, and there is in fact infinite resolution on how bad those ideas get. I have been working on a Why I Dislike Bitcoin For Technical Reasons essay for almost a year and cannot just hit publish because I dont know if ill ever be able to finish it.
Lets talk non-technical reasons.
When will I add support for crypto-currencies? Well, I sell a variety of products and servic
Stanovich draws an interesting distinction between intelligence and rationality, where intelligence, as measured by IQ test, is so to say the strength of an individual's analytical abilities, whereas rationality is this individual's tendency to use these analytical abilities (as opposed to fast and unreliable Systems 1 processes); i.e., his or her tendency to "overcome his or her biases". According to Stanovich, there are large individual differences not only regarding IQ but also regarding rationality, and he is now in the process of constructin...
Many bigshot social scientists during the last century or so were anything but rational (Foucault and Freud are two of many examples), but were able to convince other (equally biased people) that they were.
I understand that bashing Freud is a popular way to signal "rationality" -- more precisely, to signal loyalty to the STEM tribe which is so much higher status than the social sciences tribe -- but it really irritates me because I would bet that most people doing this are merely repeating what they heard from others, building their model completely on other people's strawmans.
Mostly, it feels to me horribly unfair towards Freud as a person, to use him as a textbook example of irrationality. Compared with the science we have today, of course his models (based on armchair reasoning after observing some fuzzy psychological phenomena) are horribly outdated and often plainly wrong. So throw those models away and replace them by better models whenever possible; just like we do in any science! I mostly object to the connotation that Freud was less rational compared with other people living in the same era, working in the same field. Because it seems to me he was actually hig...
(...continued)
The general ability of updating. At the beginning of Freud's career, the state-of-art psychotherapy was hypnosis, which was called "magnetism". Some scientists have discovered that the laws of nature are universal, and some other scientists have jumped to the seemingly obvious conclusion that analogically, all kinds of psychological forces among humans must be the same as the forces which makes magnets attract or repel each other. So Freud learned hyphosis, used it in therapy, and was enthusiastic about it. But later he noticed that it had some negative side effects (female patients frequently falling in love with their doctors, returning to their original symptoms when the love was not reciprocated), and that the positive side effects could also be achieved without hypnosis, simply by talking about the subject (assuming that some conditions were met, such as the patient actually focusing on the subject instead of focusing on their interaction with the doctor; a large part of psychoanalysis is about optimizing for these conditions). The old technique was thrown away because the new one provided better results. Not exactly the "evidence based medicine&qu...
Hi Viliam,
thanks for your interesting and thoughtful response. Possibly I should have used another example. There are other, more clearcut cases in e.g. the postmodernist tradition, but I wanted someone more well-known.
The reason I chose him was not to signal loyalty to the STEM tribe, but rather because he is taken to be a textbook example of irrationality by Popper and Gellner, two of my favourite philosophers. Popper claimed that Freud's theories were unfalsifiable and that for any possible event E, both E and not-E was standardly taken to confirm his theories. This is inconsistent with probability theory, as pointed out in "Conservation of Expected Evidence" (which is a very Popperian post). The reason Freud and his followers (I think that some people have thought that some of his followers were actually worse on this point than Freud) did this mistake (if they did) presumably was confirmation bias (falsificationism can be seen as a tool to counter confirmation bias).
There is a huge literature on whether this claim is actually true. I have read Freud and Gellner's (to my mind very interesting) book on psycho-analysis, as well as some of Popper's texts on the topic, so...
But Greek and post-Greek philosophy and the Abrahamic religions firmly established the idea that humans have a single indivisible ("monadic") soul in all the cultures they pervaded
Which is why one of the mot commonly read Platonic dialogues, The Republic had a famous treatment of the psyche as being three parts with not a little resemblance to the id/ego/superego, and his student Aristotle has a hierarchy of faculties?
The wikipedia article on hyperbolic discounting suggests that hyperbolic discounting could be a winning move under certain types of uncertainty about the rate at which the expected reward will "disappear" before you collect it.
They have a nice mathy example, but intuitively, the longer a reward is observed to stick around, the more confident you should be that the reward will stick actually around for the remaining offset period. Hence the observed preference rehearsal.
The Smoking Lesion problem is
"Susan is debating whether or not to smoke. She knows that smoking is strongly correlated with lung cancer, but only because there is a common cause – a condition that tends to cause both smoking and cancer. Once we fix the presence or absence of this condition, there is no additional correlation between smoking and cancer. Susan prefers smoking without cancer to not smoking without cancer, and prefers smoking with cancer to not smoking with cancer. Should Susan smoke? Is seems clear that she should.”
But now assume that S...
Looking for suggestions:
I'm brainstorming crafts or skills to try out as classes for my library. I'm trying to come up with a list of practical skills that my patrons might be interested in, such as knitting, sewing, scrap-booking, potentially gun maintenance and safety (the local police department sometimes holds classes of this nature).
I'm looking for suggestions of other such skills that might be useful for a library to offer to the general public. These are practical skills classes, so things such as investment or business start-ups are a little outside the scope of what we're looking at providing. At least in this setting.
Any suggestions?
Is there a name for the following pattern?
I seem to run into this a lot lately, but the alternative of assuming I'm correct seems even worse. I'm also often not in a position to ask about the source of their confidence.
Does anyone have experience with Wikipedia's feature to create your own collection of articles in the form of a book? My attempts to create one with formulae and diagrams don't look very nice and I'd like to have great Wikipedia articles ready on my Kindle for offline reading.
No one in their right mind would fix their health issues without consulting a physician, an expert in physical health. Yet we are very willing to do most of our lifes without consulting any other experts, even if we deeply care about most of it. What experts and/or assistants are very worth consulting either in terms of saved time acquiring relevant knowledge, ease of mind or greatly enhanced results? I am thinking along the lines of training alone versus having your physician assess your physical health once a year and contacting the trainer you meet once every month to adjust your exercise routine.
No one in their right mind would fix their health issues without consulting a physician, an expert in physical health.
Quite a lot people do start diets without consulting a physician.
Can someone link to a discussion, or answer a small misconception for me?
We know P(A & B) < P(A). So if you add details to a story, it becomes less plausible. Even though people are more likely to believe it.
However, If I do an experiment, and measure something which is implied by A&B, then I would think "A&B becomes more plausible then A", Because A is more vague then A&B.
But this seems to be a contradiction.
I suppose, to me, adding more details to a story makes the story more plausible if those details imply the evidence. Si...
My sister is interested in environmental charities, a category which Givewell has no recommendations about. Does anyone know of any actually good ones?
What draws her to environmental charities? Concern for animals? Concern for humans? Fighting global warming with its likely negative effects on both?
Before GiveWell/whoever can make a recommendation they need to know what the person wants. The best environmental charity for preventing species extinction is going to be very different than the best one for preventing animal suffering.
My comment in the previous thread.
I'd like to share a finished portion of my "Useful Idea of Truth" video for minor feedback, if people are interested in seeing it. The Sally-Anne task explained.
Let me know what you like, what you don't, and if you think these videos will be worth the time I put into them.
In the context of Pixar's upcoming movie Inside Out, I just discovered the existence of a 1990s sitcom titled Herman's Head. I've watched a few episodes and it's hilarious to see how it represents the battle of agents in the mind. Sometimes they even include mental models of other people. I'm very excited to see how Pixar will do it.
Ignore this. It is a test of embedding images in LessWrong's comments.
I have just set up a tumblr account (coffeespoonsposts)! Any recommendations for good tumblrs?
I am working on the post neoliberal wikipedia article and I wanted to see what people thought should be included. I've pulled together some resources and its something of interest and so I'd like to see what people think should be included including prominent theorists and so on.
You were responding to Stefan. As such, it doesn't matter whether you can imagine a test that works that way; it matters whether his uncertainty over whether the test works includes the possibility of it working that way.
If you don't actually know that they freeze up at the sight of the number 8, and you are 50% likely to produce a test that contains the number 8, then the test has a 50% chance of working, by your own reasoning--actually, it has a 0% or 100% chance of working, but since you are uncertain about whether it works, you can fold the uncertainty into your estimate of how good the test is and claim 50%.