All of Arkanj3l's Comments + Replies

Ha, if it's any condolence I did delete the account myself three-ish years ago.

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.

2habryka
We still use the account data for spam-detection and a bunch of related things. So that's why we keep the data around. Will restore your account.

Meetup hasn't happened yet. Should the refutations be given on your time frame?

3habryka
It appears that you are somehow commenting as a deleted user. The database suggests your account was deleted during LW 1.0. I don't know the reason for why your account might have been deleted, but I can restore access to it if you want, otherwise I will remove your login privileges.

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... (read more)

Any LW-concept-specific critiques applicable to everyone else?

Do you know what it's like to be stupid?

0Flextechmgmt
To some extent, yes.. When I'm in a lecture hall in college & the professor is talking about theoretical physics, I feel pretty stupid & I'm confused & don't really understand what's going on. So, yes, I guess I do.

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.

0JonahS
There was some discussion of the subject around this thread from 4 years ago (I don't remember exactly where – it could have been in the comments, or in a subsequent post).

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?

1ozziegooen
I actually watched his TED talk last night. Will look more into his stuff. The main issues I'm facing are understanding the math behind combining estimates and actually making the program right now. However, he definitely seems to be one of the top world experts on actually making these kinds of models.

Weirdness is a scarce resource with respect to ourselves? Great! Does that mean that we'd benefit from cooperating such that we all take on different facets of the weirder whole, like different faces of a PR operation?

2Nornagest
People tend to model organizations as agents, and I expect weirdness in an org's public-facing representatives would be more salient than normality. That implies that representatives' weirdness would be taken as cumulative rather than exclusive. So, no.

Man, get out of my brain! I'm basically in all of those.

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... (read more)

1CasioTheSane
No, I'm not even sure how to easily tell if someone is method or problem oriented without at least meeting them and talking to them. If you find any ideas on this please share them with me. That is a very hard problem. This is wild speculation but have you looked at the concept of hormesis? Maybe it's possible to engineer the right conditions under which the brain improves it's abilities on it's own. I think in some cases living organisms can be considered 'functional systems' which adapt as much as possible to maintain function in the face of a stress or challenge. This adaptation is limited in part by overall stress levels, and metabolic rate/energy availability. Focused strategies to overcome these limitations may increase adaptive ability. This may require developing a deeper understanding of both stress and metabolism. Consider a weight lifter that can lift over 1,000lbs, something with probably no evolutionary precedent. They get this way with a combination of very low overall stress, a high nutrient diet that raises the metabolic rate and overall energy availability, a progressively increasing and highly specific stressor, and long rest periods. Perhaps a similar approach could be applied to 'train' improved cognitive abilities? One obvious difference is that our brain is limited in size, so there may be tradeoffs involved when we improve one specific skill or ability. I imagine this idea would sound very naive to neuroscientists. I can't predict the future, but this is a fun question good for more wild speculation. I think genetics will be seen as increasingly less significant, and heritable traits and information will be found encoded in many different molecules and structures in living cells. I also think progressively impaired energy availability (impaired oxidative metabolism) will be viewed as a central phenomena occurring in most degenerative diseases, aging, and failure to adapt to stressors. This simple paradigm will help focus research to unders

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?

4CasioTheSane
Yes, I would still be doing biomedical engineering given what I now know. However, I am driven mostly by curiosity and a desire to answer medical questions- if I worked in another field, I would likely be doing so to support myself while I work on these medical questions in my free time. I am a 'dry lab' bioengineer. If my primary goal was to make a high income, I would instead do software development. 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'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.

0ChristianKl
What does that phrase mean?

What great timing! I've just started investigating the occult and chaos magick (with a 'k') just to see if it works.

2Vulture
I'd love to see a top-level post about this when you're done!

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.

2Benjamin_Todd
Hi, I'd like to clarify that we prioritise people who are optimising around positive impact, not earning to give. If someone takes earning to give seriously, then we view that as a good indicator, but we speak to lots of people who aren't considering earning to give careers. I started writing a response, but decided it would be better to summarise my general thoughts on degree choice and post them on our blog. So see our latest thoughts on how to pick a degree. Insofar as this particular situation goes, I haven't thought about it much, so take this with a pinch of salt. My gut reaction is that CompSci is slightly more impressive than bio engineering, and if it helps you learn to program better, then the skills will be more generally useful. You also say that bio engineering is a major time sink, which I'd see as a count against it. So, my highly uncertain impression is that I'd prefer CompSci. On the other hand, if you'll find it easier and more motivating to study bio engineering and you'll get better grades, then I'd rate that pretty highly (especially if aiming to continue into research).

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.

0ChristianKl
There are companies that you can't start via bootstrapping. I think a lot of expensive medical equipment design is in that class. I would also think that bio/nano tech is in that class. I have taken a semester worth of course on data bases and they didn't tell me anything useful about them. It was mostly impractical theory. The most disturbing thing was that the TA didn't know that a prepare statement in Java prevents you from SQL injections. When it comes to databases the things you have to know are: 1) Try to never query the database directly in a way that allows for SQL injections. 2) Create indexes possible. It can make sense to experiment around with indexes to get optimal speed. 3) There something like transactions. In some settings a database automatically updates when you send it data, in other settings you have to commit or end the transaction. Take a look at Nick Winters startup Skritter. He's doing a spaced repetition learning software for learning Japanese and Chinese Kanji. In contrast to Anki his software allows you to draw the Kanji. As far as cognitive enchancement goes I think learning Kanji is in the ballpark. How much computer science knowledge does that need? Not that much. You need to know how to use a webframework like Django. You need to know javascript, probably something like JQuery, html, css. Some framework for iPhone/Android apps. That's a bunch but you can learn as you go along. It also isn't deep computer science like machine learning and NLP. In Nick Winter case it's interesting that he's a Asian studies minor. That's where he learned that the world needs a better way to learn Kanjis. That's where he felt the pain needed to focus on the idea. I feel similar to the biochemistry that I learned while studying bioinformatics. If you want to produce medicial technology and are already able to program I don't think Biological Engineering is necessarily a bad choice. But I would recommend you to put the knowledge directly into pract

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?

0oooo
To do this your best bet is to talk to large numbers of biomedical engineering alumni. As a data point, you mentioned before that SFU has one of the most respectable biomed engineering programs. As another data point, University of Toronto doesn't allow general stream undergraduate engineers to choose certain specialties requiring that extra bit of intellectual horsepower unless you are able to enter (and survive) the more theoretical Engineering Science program. Biomed Engineering is one of the specialties that falls in this category. I feel the reason that most biomed engineers don't pursue CS-ish careers is because many of them feel that their additional knowledge, training and suffering should be used for more "important" pursuits (grad school, designing life-saving medical devices, etc.). Combined with the general engineering school attitude that their education is more rigorous or harder than probably any other major in university (other than perhaps actuarial), and you have a situation where most engineers freshly graduated (barring Computer Engineers) would view pursuing a CS-ish career as a major step back. However, given your stated interest in other goals (e.g. cognitive science, human cybernetics/enhancements/augmentation), this may not be a bad path to take provided you are mindful of and can navigate the immediate post-graduation job interviews. As others suggested in this thread, it seems that you're probably much more geared towards a startup culture, in which case if you've chosen your electives correctly in 3rd and 4th year you would hopefully have had the chance to focus in on data visualization and/or bioinformatics and show an impressive body of work. If you are motivated enough you may also try to take CS & math courses in the summer, or work on design projects to build up a body of work. Ideally summers would also be taken up with internships also, but at least the studying intensity would be somewhat reduced to allow you to get ahead on o

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... (read more)

2lmm
Getting the actual programming skills is easy if you're smart. Getting the evidence that will lead people to hire you is harder. Large companies tend to go by the book; you will need the qualifications or something unusual like a personal recommendation from someone in the company. Startuppy places it's more about fitting in with the culture and talking/coding well in interview. If that's the kind of job you're after you'll probably be fine as a self-taught programmer if you can perform under interview pressure and you conform to the right stereotype. (it's possible I'm being excessively cynical here)
0ChristianKl
The interest thing on your list is that neither Nick Winter, Cal Newport or Scott Young have jobs at some company. If you take those people as your role model, are you sure you want to focus on the goal of getting a job? I might be a bit biased but I think it easier to do a startup when you can do computer programming.

Note that I still have a timeline of 2-5 months before this plan can fully propogate to my actions. So that's the amount of time I have to research decision-relevant information and be able to pull through towards making my choice.

How do we more reliably ask ourselves the questions in the Useful Questions Repository?

I would love to identify more questions with the theme of "getting your concepts and beliefs closer to tacit reality as possible". I can't think of a better way to say it.

"Who is already occupying the kind of world that I want to be in such that I should go out and interview them?"

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... (read more)

Bagging Soylent: 40min work time, 60min elapsed (first time doing task, setting up. Optimization of manufacturing occurred while I was bagging.)

Doing Laundry: 70 mins total - 40mins washing with two rinse cycles and 30mins drying

Folding Large Laundry Load After Drying: 10 mins, 15 elapsed.

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.

1Rukifellth
I found this to be slightly unsettling when I realized it, though we may be talking about different things.

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

... (read more)

If someone takes notes they would be helpful to upload as well.

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... (read more)

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... (read more)

3MixedNuts
If UFOs are controlled by a non-human intelligence, assuming they'll behave like human schemes is as pointless as assuming they'll behave like natural phenomena. But of course the premise is false and the Major's approach is correct.

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.”

  • “Silver Blaze” (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

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... (read more)

I wanted to save time on doing time estimates of tasks when blocking them into a calendar.

I would recommend editing the post.

0eggman
It seems like Meetup posts are in a different format than regular posts in Main or Discussion, and I wasn't aware of how to edit them.

It would be great to have a repository of task-time estimates, as well as "time until habitual." Setting estimates of how long one needs to practice before a "maintenance event horizon" occurs could aide in my motivation, at least.

I was mainly pointing out that the reliance on information that is accessible by most anybody is a benefit that levels the playing field, so to speak.

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?

1gressettd
Maybe you have a subconscious fear of failure, that compels you to switch to a different project before you can be put to the test? Does it help to anticipate that you will fail in execution, multiple times, but persist until you finish? Have you tried experimenting with the other extreme? Rank your projects. Pick the top project. Forget the others exist until that one is complete. It's extreme, but if you try it once, experience completion, and change the way you think and feel about it, maybe you can then find a better middle ground?

Going down to the bottom of the post for the TL;DR, I was pleasantly surprised to having the need to go back up again.

How could you demonstrate that status is adequate or inadequate as an explanation, in this case? Or any case?

Beware of universal explanations everywhere!

It's times like this where I wish there was a consistently updated dump of meetup summaries available for global use to all meetup organizers at the very least.

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... (read more)

1kpreid
That's interestingly dual to what I have in mind: the core notion is that it shows you one thing to do (as opposed to a list, to avoid excess choice or dismay). And if you want to not-do-that, you have choices such as: * “Just give me another random available item.” * “I can't do that because ___” (add new task as prerequisite; generalizing, this also covers such things as “because I'm not in the right location or at the right time”). * “I don't need to do that”, which implies that you won't do anything which depends on this task, which therefore should cause the system to ask you about the validity of those dependencies. That last option is what sounds similar to what you're doing, but it supposes you've already entered dependency chains all the way up to preferences. Which might be another sort of one-thing the app presents you with: “Why do you want to do this thing you entered previously?” (Which information isn't mandatory, because it should still permit quick entry of simple reminders.) Obviously this has a whole lot of scope, the extreme case becoming a complete “outboard brain” planning system, but I'm hoping that (if I ever get around to programming it) it'll be useful even in a rudimentary form. My notion is that managing dependencies allows avoiding the problem of having a long to-do list which you have to actually look at and consciously reject items for not being something for this exact moment, thus leading to the habit of rejecting all of the items; instead, nearly all of the “list” will be filtered out by some dependency (which ends up being another task, a topic of interest (e.g. a hobby that you only do sometimes), a time, a location, etc.) and you need not ever think about it. That's also the reason why the user interface I imagine defaults to presenting you with exactly one item at a time: each interaction you have with it gives it more data, but there is never a long list or form inviting you to deal with many items, or many fields-to-fi

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.

0[anonymous]
What has aesthetics got to do with HPMOR and AS? Just taboo all the weird terms, and be specific. What are you reading and why?

Has anyone indexed the set of Five-Second Skill posts on Less Wrong? E.g. Get Curious, the Algorithm for Beating Procrastination, Value of Information etc.

Hearing some clear thinking will be a nice refreshment from the being processed in the bowels of cultural academia.

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.

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