I think it's best to restore it, I would have just used my throwaway otherwise and I discovered that I could still log in by a fluke. Although I was enjoying being anonymous while it lasted. Why aren't deleted accounts just taken off of the database entirely? That seems like a holdover from using Reddit as the forum engine.
Your historian friends agreed with the global claim which I believe was fairly well established. From what I've heard talking to the interlocutor hosting this meetup (I am not he), it was *how* you extrapolated to that global claim from a local one that is being taken issue with. Notice that the historian on your blog also believes it is difficult to say to what degree Europe declined during the Dark Ages, although there are many possible markers. Notice that the reddit historian backing you is apologizing for your background rather than providing cor...
Similar in theme is "Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology" by Valentino Braitenberg, in that creating simple systems that aren't goal driven can nonetheless produce behavior that we characterize as emotional or thoughtful, somehow. It's more exploratory and illustrative than principled or conceptual, but should be a good read.
Potential tool leveraging relative pragmatism and honesty of the LW community: "Hot or Not?" or attractiveness-rating app for members, done by the opposite gender, focused on physical attractiveness and specific criticism on what works and what doesn't.
Routes around anxiety/weirdness of doing this IRL, specifically the honest commentary part.
I vouch for Ozzie Estimate.
I take shminux's point to be primarily one of ease, or maybe portability. The need to understand sensitivity in heuristical estimation is a real one, and I also believe that your tools here may be the right approach for a different level of scale than was originally conceived by Fermi. It might be worth clarifying the kinds of decisions that require the level of analysis involved with your method to prevent confusion.
Have you seen the work of Sanjoy Mahajan? Street-Fighting Mathematics, or The Art of Insight in Science and Engineering?
Just found this lecture dump for a course on algorithmic game theory and mechanism design for computer scientists: https://www.cs.duke.edu/courses/fall06/cps296.2/
If you scan the domain with google (i.e. with the 'site:' operator) some important PDFs come up.
If I could change anything, it would be seeking out problem-oriented instead of method-oriented mentors. Scientists and engineers can often be divided into two categories: those who are experts at a given method and look for problems to apply it to, and those who are experts at a given problem and look for tools to attack it with. Both can be productive strategies. I have a problem-oriented perspective, but most of my mentors have been method-oriented and don't understand my unwavering focus on specific seemingly intractable problems.
I definitely get wh...
I voiced interest in making a career switch into BME. Would you still be doing biomedical engineering now if you knew what you now know about it? What would you change and why?
I'm having trouble knowing how well I understand a concept, while learning the concept. I tend to be good at making up consistent verbalizations of why something is, or how something works. However these verbalizations aren't always accurate.
The first strategy against this trend is to simply do more problem sets with better feedback. I'm wondering if we can come up with a supplementary strategy where I can check if I really understand a concept or not.
just ask
It's difficult when the creators are dead, or otherwise unaccessible (like busy hedge fundies). The next best thing are students who were mentored under the creator of the paradigm and are considered experts, but then the same check has to be applied to them on whether or not the ideas can be discussed. Overall I like the approach, it might still be possible to find journals, biographies or interviews with the originator of the viewpoint, as these are likely to contain some form of inquiry.
I have first-degree friends who have worked with 80K and they've said it's unlikely that they would prioritize interviewing me, due to me not directly optimizing for earning-to-give (something which I made clear). I think it's still worth a shot to try and be put in their candidate pool, and I could see if I could get an off-the-record conversation with some of the staff. So we'll see.
That's a good point. How mutually exclusive is the optimization path for being highly employable versus self-employing or bootstrapping? Is it just a question of efficiency of time spent or is there more to it?
How much computer science knowledge is necessary for startups, do you think? I can program and have worked on software modules and have written my own utilities, but I still have a lot to learn conceptually and I still need to survey a wider range of technologies, especially related to databases and web development in the front and back end. That's even excluding some of the trendier hotspots like semantic web, NLP and machine learning.
I'm guessing that computer science majors can often pursue these biomedical-ish sorts of careers, but the reverse is not true (Biomedical Engineers typically don't pursue computer science-ish careers).
I am strongly interested in figuring out if this is true. Do you have any thoughts on how I would do this?
I'm probably underweighing more conservative assessments like this, so I appreciate it.
motivation and self-delusion
I have not collected evidence the directly contradicts statistical assessments regarding the conscientiousness trait. Instead I'm making an inference based off a collection of evidence that I can name. I don't think I've given much consideration to evidence strength yet so working through this will be a good exercise.
For example:
Historically my conscientiousness has been quite low in part due to depression. I've been coming out of that de...
Agreed. Or Oxford for that matter.
Not to conflate my opinion's with shminux's, but I feel like a set of these maps from different hotspots of activity could help provide greater balance to the more implicit parts of Less Wrong's ethos. Consider the problem where those who visit Less Wrong for the first time conflate the above memes as what we consider a "rational" course of action; or consider how derivations of what's rational might depend on a background knowledge in ways that are easy to miss (the kind of biases that "softer" science...
The world is a lot simpler than the human mind can comprehend. The mind endlessly manufactures meanings and reflects with other minds, ignoring reality. Or maybe it enhances it. Not very clear on that part, I'm human as well.
Spaced Repetition is only the beginning. http://bigthink.com/neurobonkers/assessing-the-evidence-for-the-one-thing-you-never-get-taught-in-school-how-to-learn
Here's How to Read - on page 2 there's a table that lists all of what this guy recommends, use that to evaluate if the rest of the document is worth your time. http://pne.people.si.umich.edu/PDF/howtoread.pdf
Also, if you know anyone who has gone to CFAR, start PMing them for the material on Propogating Urges. http://rationality.org/schedule/
...Use some of the best-tested principles in experimental psyc
Adding Carrot - a search engine which takes your query and creates dynamic clusters of websites that form around related concepts. It's like a form of Google's related searches that does the sorting for you. There are also visualizations that it can generate for you that allow proportionality comparisons.
This is an example query for 'rationality' and this one is Explore vs Exploit with a visualization on the side.
I haven't read the article so I could be full of shit, but essentially:
If you have the list of desired things ready, there should be an ETA on the work time necessary for each desired thing as well as confidence on that estimate. Confidence varies with past data and expected competence, e.g. how easily you believe you can debug the feature if you begin to draft it. Or such. Then you have a set of estimates for each implementable feature.
Then you put in time on that feature over the day tracked by some passive monitoring program like ManictTime or something...
From Jacques Vallee, Messengers of Deception...
'Then he posed a question that, obvious as it seems, had not really occurred to me: “What makes you think that UFOs are a scientific problem?”
I replied with something to the effect that a problem was only scientific in the way it was approached, but he would have none of that, and he began lecturing me. First, he said, science had certain rules. For example, it has to assume that the phenomena it is observing is natural in origin rather than artificial and possibly biased. Now the UFO phenomenon could be co...
Gregory (Scotland Yard detective): “Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”
Holmes: “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”
Gregory: “The dog did nothing in the night-time.”
Holmes: “That was the curious incident.”
I'll say that I'm interested in what you have to offer just from the standpoint of novelty and exploration. However, your style doesn't lend itself to brevity and even though thinking out loud is valuable, getting seven pages out has made me lose track of the point.
I'm glad to see that on certain issues we are in intellectual agreement, but your writing style combined with the sheer amount of academic context you are bringing to the field makes any specific understanding very difficult. Although I am cursorily familiar with maybe a fourth of the authors yo...
This is more of a request than a review. My current akrasia problems have to deal with filtering and prioritization. I have a lot of simultaneous "projects" going on. This is to say that I want to do all of them, but usually get trapped in doing busy-work like planning and budgeting and research, instead of building and execution. I switch often which makes switching costs very high.
All of my projects feel very urgent to me. But none of them get done. Thoughts?
preference inference based on the structure of [your] goals
It's nothing too formal - wisdom gleaned from an article here and a blog post there.
Most of us readily have a list of goals that come to mind, but it's likely that they are subgoals and we are unaware of why exactly we do them. So, you keep on asking "What will this goal do for me?" instead of "What will do this goal for me?", creating downwind nodes in your graph until you presumably hit your preferences. In which case you (a) could check your preferences for consistency and...
One day we're going to have to unpack "aesthetic" a bit. I think it's more than just 'oh it feels really nice and fun', but after we used it as applied to HPMOR and Atlas Shrugged - or parable fiction in general - I've been giving it a similar meaning as 'mindset' or 'way of viewing'. It's becoming less clear to me as to how to use the term.
I've been using it in justifications of reading (certain) fiction now, but I want to be careful that I'm not talking about something else, or something that doesn't exist, so my rationality can aim true.
I'd love to cover how to find the exchange rate between opportunities, willingness to pay, and Making your explicit reasoning trustworthy., in that particular order. The latter I wanted to present but it features some pretty masterful rationality, so it might be beyond my capability.
I could lead a small talk on Job-hunt-hacking, but it could wait for next week if my plate is full.
Ha, if it's any condolence I did delete the account myself three-ish years ago.