Hi all, Mostly lurker, I very rarely post, mostly just read the excellent posts here. I'm a Filipino, which means I am a citizen of the Republic of the Philippines. My annual salary, before taxes, is about $20,000 (USA dollars). I work at an IC development company (12 years at...
Consider the following statement: two heads are better than one. It seems obvious to me that several rationalists working together can, effectively, bring more precious brainpower to bear on a problem, than one rationalist working alone (otherwise, what would be the point of having a Less Wrong forum community? You...
Re: underestimating tech salaries, thanks for the corrections; I may have discounted similar information before because even senior software developers I know personally locally are <$30,000/yr, and "start at $100,000/yr" sounded much too good (this is retrospectively obviously a bad heuristic and I will now strive to do better). In retrospect, checking the salaries of relatives who migrated to the USA should have corrected this.
re: moving to 1st-world country as a goal, my wife has this as a goal (FWIW it's a common goal for a sizable fraction (which I haven't researched) of Filipinos, which should indicate just how lousy Philippines is), not so much mine. I personally feel that... (read 583 more words →)
Hmm, yes, my wife is suggesting Singapore too (she has relatives there, although I'd prefer not to impose). I've also suggested Canada. My wife wants it "nearby", so maybe I'll consider Singapore, Taiwan, and Australia more.
Re: geopolitical situation of China, I hope you're right ^^.
Thanks for the reply, I'll consider your advice more!
re: English, fluent writer, my spoken English is sometimes halting (it's not like I can go back and edit my vocal utterances, unlike in "written" English on a computer). re: Scheme, I'm not so sure if a Schemer would say I "contributed" to the Scheme language with SRFI-110 - there's significant resistance against indent-based syntaxes - but I know a few implementations have picked up SRFI-105 (Guile at least, I think a few others).
Hi all,
Mostly lurker, I very rarely post, mostly just read the excellent posts here.
I'm a Filipino, which means I am a citizen of the Republic of the Philippines. My annual salary, before taxes, is about $20,000 (USA dollars). I work at an IC development company (12 years at this company), developing the logic parts of LCD display drivers. My understanding is that the median US salary for this kind of job is about $80,000 -> $100,000 a year. This is a fucking worthless third world country, so the government eats up about ~30% of my salary and converts it to lousy service, rich government officials, bad roadworks, long commute times, and a... (read 925 more words →)
Jonvon, there is only one human superpower. It makes us what we are. It is our ability to think. Rationality trains this superpower, like martial arts trains a human body. It is not that some people are born with the power and others are not. Everyone has a brain. Not everyone tries to train it. Not everyone realizes that intelligence is the only superpower they will ever have, and so they seek other magics, spells and sorceries, as if any magic wand could ever be as powerful or as precious or as significant as a brain.
I prefer "disputation arena" because "group thinking" is too close to "groupthinking".
Is there a better term for "techniques for discussing things so that lots of thinking people can give their input and get a single coherent set of probabilities for what are the best possible choices for action" other than "disputation arena" or "group thinking technique"?
I do want to be precise, and "disputation arena" sounded kewl, but whatever.
Okay, so that's a sub-goal that I didn't think about. I will think about this a little more.
Still, assuming that group exists and needs to do some thinking together, I think techniques like Delphi are fine.
Anyway, I assumed that LW's groups are more cohesive and willing to cooperate in thinking exercises in groups (this is what I was thinking when I said "This makes it not only desirable to find ways to effectively get groups of rationalists to think together, but also increasingly necessary."), but apparently it's not as cohesive as I thought.
I suppose that works for pre-scientific, pre-rational thinking: back when you couldn't do a thing about nature, but you could do a thing about that schmuck looking at you funny.
However, now, as humanity's power grows, we can actually do something about nature: we can learn to predict earthquakes, build structures strong enough against calamity, vaccinate against pestilence, etc etc.
So the bias, I suppose, arises from evolution being too slow for human progress.
On 18 December 2012 09:13:14PM, user "aronwall" replied "yes" to the question "So you're saying that if the evidence goes against you, you are going to stop being a Christian and self-identify as atheist (note that we do not capitalize that word)?". This comment is to ensure that user "aronwall" shall not be able to disavow this reply; please ignore it otherwise.
shrug it's best practice at a particular time and place, but is it the best practice at all times and places?
I'll grant that the procedure "tell all participants: 'hold off on proposing solutions'" is a good procedure in general, but is it the best procedure under all circumstances? How about enforcing the "hold off" part, rather than just saying it to participants? (cref. NGT's silent idea generation).
Consider the following statement: two heads are better than one.
It seems obvious to me that several rationalists working together can, effectively, bring more precious brainpower to bear on a problem, than one rationalist working alone (otherwise, what would be the point of having a Less Wrong forum community? You might as well just leave it as a curated community blog and excise the discussion forums.). Further, due to various efforts (HPMOR especially) it appears that LW is inevitably growing. This makes it not only desirable to find ways to effectively get groups of rationalists to think together, but also increasingly necessary.
It is also desirable that methods of getting groups to think should... (read 3131 more words →)
Somebody suggested that people in LessWrong may be interested in my resume, and may be able to hire, so I updated my website on github.io to include my resume.
https://amkg.github.io/alan-resume.pdf