All of Arshuni's Comments + Replies

0[anonymous]
I like the way you think and feel.
1Elo
heh. No, but thank you for your concern.

Which psychological findings have great practical implications, if they are indeed true?

Overjustification comes to mind, as an example.

On a related note: if it is true, does that suggest that, as far as we take the diminishing utility of money for granted, by using extrinsic rewards, we are reducing the number of extreme performers? (in so far as we can't keep giving exponential rewards, and money/tokens/what have you motivates in proportion to their utility) I have seen it argued, that if you are not doing well enough to be expecting a non-interrupted str... (read more)

2Jurily
Psychology produces useful information at the same rate as Christianity. If you want practical results, learn hypnosis.
0knb
I think the positional qualities of money compensate for this somewhat. People still work hard because they want to keep ahead of their neighbor/coworker.
0ChristianKl
Paying people is complex. Companies often pay their employees often market wages and don't pay to optimize motivation. Even when it comes to optimizing motivation fairness perception matters a lot. If stereotype threat is a force that exists there are likely variables that make it stronger or weaker. A HR deparment of a company might want to introduce policies that weaken it's negative effect and use possible positive effects. At Google they got people to cancel training courses instead of no-showing by reminded people of the group image of Google and being googly. They positively used the stereotype of Googlers.

I use org-drill, which, AFAIK, does not collect such data.

What skills are overwhelmingly easier to learn in institutionalized context?

(e.g math wouldn't count, because even if motivation is circumvented as an issue in institutions, you should be theoretically to study everything at home. Neither would necessarily the handling of some kind of lab equipment, if there was some clear documentation available for you, and (assuming that you took the efforts to remember it) if the transfer to practice was straightforward (so pushing buttons and changing settings would be straightforward, while the precise motions of carving a specific kind of motive into wood would be less so))

-1Lumifer
Heh.
0Fluttershy
In practice, learning to handle certain lab equipment outside of an institutional context is sometimes hard because it's much easier to break expensive stuff if you don't have someone looking over your work the first few times you do something. Of course, you qualified your above statement quite well, so you haven't said anything incorrect. :)

I honestly don't know. I would say quite much, but it does not feel like that: I do not review all my cards at one time in the day (I have notifications periodically nagging me if there are still due cards, so I don't forget, and they aren't too much bother) Another nice trick is to make more, smaller decks. When I see that there are 120 cards in one deck for review, I am not that ecstatic about that. If those same cards are split into 4 decks with 30-30 cars, I don't even think about it. Generally, 20 cards are play, they don't even register, and 80 seems to be the other end, that starts to feel a bit too much. (And the actual number of cards never changed)

If I somehow miss a day, though, that can make things indeed messy.

0eeuuah
How do you get notifications only if there are still due cards? I would like this
0ChristianKl
Anki has good statistics so it shouldn't be hard to get the number of daily time spent on reviewing cards. The fact that you don't know is suprising to me as I frequently check the Anki stats. Care to elaborate?

For BodyParts3D, there is a wikimedia category for a good few animations (it's the place I actually first met it). (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Animations_using_BodyParts3D_polygon_data) You can download whole categories with (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Imker_%28batch_download%29).. For how well does that category cover the desired items, I don't know.

Tangentially related: I have found the ease of creating cards one of the most important factors determining the speed at which I learn. For example in anatomy, I started with making cards from a photographic atlas, but this took way too long. (I still desire to make cards from them, since they use actual photos, not simple schematics). For the later, I had to manually cut out the images, and extract the labeling. In contrast, what I ended up using was Gray's Anatomy for Students Flash Cards. It's a 817 page book, with most of it in being alternating pages... (read more)

0ChristianKl
It seems like your approach would create a lot of cards. How much time to you spend per day reviewing your cards?
0ChristianKl
I'm still at organizing my way to deal with the information. One example: ---------------------------------------- Card 1: Front: [anatomy] cubiti/joint.latin(Between Humeris and Radius) Back (typing): Articulatio Humeroradialis +Image ---------------------------------------- Card2: Front: [anatomy] holonym.latin(Articulatio Humeroradialis) Back (typing): Articulatio cubiti +Image ---------------------------------------- Card 3/4/5: Front: [anatomy] cubiti/joint.latin(Image1/2/3) Back (typing): Articulatio Humeroradialis ---------------------------------------- As far as images go I think 3D programs are the way to go. BodyParts3D is a promising project as it comes with an open license but unfortunately it's not complete and it's UI isn't user-friendly. BioDigital is my other source but unfortunately it has a closed license that prevents sharing of the finished deck. While we are at the topic of the ontology of anatomy, what's wrong with the English language to have polysemy in "arm" and have it mean both the whole arm and the upper arm?
4tanagrabeast
You know, I had a start-up idea along these lines recently: something that would combine SRS with social bookmarking. Example: I'm slowly-but-steadily working my way through Learn You a Haskell for Great Good. I have it on good authority that few people make it as far as I have. I feel like the only reason I can do it is because I stop to make cards for terms, concepts, and many of the examples. I take days or weeks away from the book between sessions while I let those facts firm up in my head, and then I resume. While I hold that there is real value to making cards yourself when this involves putting things into your own words, making a high-quality card is also a time-consuming chore that is just as much about formatting. I've often wished, as I read, that I had a browser extension that would let me pluck pre-made cards out of a side-bar that went with the passage I was reading -- cards by one of the thousands of people that have no doubt come before me in that chapter. You can see how this might work. People could build karma when others copy their cards. Site creators might create their own cards as a way to help readers and boost traffic, or pay bounties of some kind to others who make them. You could browse other cards by the writers of cards you've cloned, and all cards would have automatic links to the sites they go with -- getting around a big problem with imported cards, which is that they are shorn from their creation context. Monetization? Maybe ads in the corner of the side-bar or something. Maybe partnerships with popular for-pay learning sites. There are no doubt some thorny copyright issues at play though, and the overall potential market is probably pretty small.

What non-english content do you consume?

I want to try out a new system I came up with: a 'trickle' system, with some kind of interesting, but short text landing in my email box(/or comparable) each day, the words the text uses automatically compared to the list of words I already know, and the disjunction automatically queried from wiktionary and made into one sided flashcards. (reason being: I realized I cared for receptive abilities, but not so much for being able to express my thoughts in a different language. If it was a free action, great, but I feel like it usually is not.) And these words learned BEFORE reading the text. (as to avoid having too many breaks in the flow)

1Strangeattractor
I watch the Quebec French version of The Voice, called La Voix https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=la+voix I also listen to some french language podcasts, such as those from the CBC (SRC in French), and sometimes I'll watch documentaries in other languages, such as NHK documentaries in Japanese.

Handle it without too much damage.

Distance, I don't really know. When I think about living in the same city, I instinctively think about my city, which allows for getting from one point to another relatively fast. Like, less than 15 minutes.

I think you can usually buy land in the same general area, so I would go as far as to say 'in really comfortable walking distance'.

But how one's feelings change as the distance increases would be worth going into more.

Parenting/Housing

I have been playing with the thought of instead of buying a house for a big family, maybe I should buy a small land/house for me and my potential fiancee, and seperate lands/houses for my children.

At what age would you be confident that your child could handle living alone-ish?

I plan to have a large family (this is coming from a childless person, so make of it what you will, but I am entertaining the idea of double digits...so what this means in practice, is that their number probably won't be bottlenecked by my willingness, and thus, the ... (read more)

0James_Miller
Lots of kids wouldn't want to live alone even at an age at which they safely could.
0ChristianKl
I would assume that most guys who have such an idea and propose it to their wife wouldn't have the wife accept the idea.
5Gunnar_Zarncke
Christopher Alexander's Towns Buildings Construction has a treasure trove of advice for your case. Applicable patterns that come to mind: * House for a small family * Intimacy gradient (rooms more distant from the entrance should be smaller and more intimate * Couples Realm * Connected Play and Children's Realm (the basic pattern is that all rooms/areas used by children basically (should) form a contiguous realm - simply because that's what will inevitably happen anyway. You will recognize it by the toys littering this connected area) * Sleeping to the East * Teenager's Cottage (this might be the minimum of what you might intend/do) * House a for a single Person * House for a couple * Home Workshop * Master and Apprentice * Teenagers Society * Public Outdoor Room (space between buildings should form 'outdoor rooms' with recognizable sides and 'doors/windows' instead of just gaps between buildings) * Adventure Playground See here for a list of the patterns: https://www.patternlanguage.com/apl/aplsummary.htm
4Elo
mostly worth adding: it depends on the kid. My brother moved out of home at age 16 and it was an excellent choice. My sister was 21, I stayed till 24. This was also a good choice. I started learning to manage assets when I was 13. I could have started sooner. I was doing things on my own from 18. With power comes responsibility. It's a great idea to give someone their own space; so long as you are sure they are responsible enough not to wire electronics badly; or start a fire. I would suggest a certain level of adult-ness is required to not accidentally kill one's self. given that we live in the age of big metal things on wheels that you control with your fingers to take you across the country, and electron flows in our streets that can kill people in a blink. flammable gas flowing around the place too, sharp objects (and weapons available generally), the ability to play music loud enough to deafen ourselves by accident... Just to name a few. Now I have no reason to think that bright lw-kids will suffer risk to their health like that; but if they are self-raising they might not have the right guidance to get it right first time. By all means people should make mistakes; but only mistakes that don't kill, or seriously wound you in the process. Those mistakes are the good ones that we can learn from.
7NancyLebovitz
I think this sounds like a very cool idea, but I have some questions about potential difficulties. My first thought was that this sounds expensive. Have you checked on the costs vs. your resources, admitting that both of them will be estimates? Are you planning on adopting if it looks like you're not likely to have that many biological descendants? Have you thought about how to teach your children housekeeping and home maintenance, both the facts and the habits?
8Viliam
You have no children yet, and you are planning double digits. Let's assume that means 10 children, and that there will be 2 years intervals between their births, and they will stay with you till about 20. That means it will be 40 years later when the last child flies out of the nest. Also, you might want to provide a backup solution for children who fails to become financially independent at 20. If you are going to build a big house, I would probably try making it modular -- to build it in a way that if in the future you build two or three internal walls, you will effectively split the house into two or three independent households. Each of them with its own kitchen, bathroom, etc. (With so many people, you will need multiple bathrooms anyway. So you just have to place them strategically.) So you could later split the house, keep one of the parts, and provide other parts to some of your children -- or if they are not interested, you can rent of sell them to someone else. (Also this provides you an alternative if you later decide you actually don't want so many children.)
5gjm
Depending on where you are, the limiting factor might be not your willingness to let your children live on their own, but your legal right to do so.
4Dagon
There are multiple stages or degrees of "living alone", and it's very difficult to satisfy all of them without a number of physical moves that you can't buy space very far in advance. a) shared room with parents b) shared room with siblings c) separate space/room, shared meal preparation and amenities d) separate house/apartment, walking distance for many shared meals and events e) separate household, rare visits f) separate household, moving through it's own phases a-e. It's hard to know when each of these phases will become appropriate to an individual, nor the individual preferences for variation in distance and specifics of house. Also, building a house is harder than you think.
0ChristianKl
Do you mean the age where the child wants to live alone or the age where they could handle it without too much damage? How much distance between the houses are you talking about?

Self-promotion

Should I just apply the counter-signalling model?

Sometimes you can win so big, that you need not say anything. Other times, you DO need to say something to be noticed. The problem is, nobody exactly LIKES a braggart. The question is, how do you find an appropriate weighting between these two? Does this change if you've already managed to win big in one different field?

2NancyLebovitz
For what it's worth, Nassim Taleb and Eric Raymond both do quite a bit of bragging, and they both have fan bases. I don't know about Taleb, but Eric also has friends. I'm not sure what it takes to make this work.
0Viliam
Depending on situation, you might ask (or even hire) someone else to do the bragging on your behalf. Have someone else say "You should all pay attention to Arshuni, the most awesome person in the world!", then act like "Oh, you are embarassing me, I am just an ordinary person", then have them list your specific achievements like "Arshuni is always so adorably humble, but in fact he achieved X, Y, and Z, isn't that awesome?", and then you conclude it like "I think anyone could have done the same thing (there are many other people who have Nobel price, too), and I also wouldn't be able to do it without a bit of luck and a lot of help from my good friends (not that I am bragging about also having great social skills)... but please let's change the topic now, and focus on the original issue of our meeting here..." Must be done with some tact, and adjusted for specific culture or subculture, but I think many successful people do this. I think the typical solutions are (a) have allies who do this service for you, and in return you do it for them on a different day; or (b) hire professionals: art critics, or PR agencies; in addition to money, you could also pay them by flattery or sex.

Unsolicited advice/interventions

You can really save someone a lot of time, effort, or pain. Or help them improve.

OTOH, sometimes you ARE wrong, unsolicited advice does not always come across well, and... well, you probably gave them advice because you care about them, but also, being the guy who always knows better (whether true or not, rarely matters) does not help your relationship.

I think giving advice only if asked, and otherwise, rewarding good behavior is A solution. But for example non-alcoholist me thinks I would prefer people to take a more interventionist approach, if I were to regularly take drinking to an excess.

0ChristianKl
A good first step isn't to give advice but to start asking questions about the issue and listen empathically.

Revenge. It does not often come up in my life.

I think the supposed best strategy would be to be known to be a vengeful person, who ruins you if you cross him, but only if it is really a valid reason, so people are not afraid to enter a social relationship with you. (only hating for the right reasons)

OTOH, do people actually differentiate at this level? If I hear someone dealt sweet revenge, I am not sure my next question is necessarily going to be 'was it for the right reason?'

0ChristianKl
When it comes to revenge I would focus more on what's good for my own emotional health than about how it looks like to outsiders. Don't invest too much effort into image management. Having good emotional health results in many situations where you look good without you having to manage your image.

In telling stories about acquaintances, should I be explicit with names? It helps follow the story, makes it more personal, and follow up stories paint a better overall picture. On introductions, 'Oh, I've heard a lot about you!' is great, too. On the other hand, sometimes you end up telling stories that may be slightly embarrassing for some concerned. In being explicit with their names, you may end up making the recipient less likely to open up to you (or I would assume so: I don't remember if I ever decided to be less open to someone merely because tha... (read more)

0username2
Ask yourself why you are telling a story. If what you want is to share a good story, don't tell their names. If you want to inform a listener about specific actions of a person, say, to warn them, then you have to tell their names
0ChristianKl
It depends on the context. Do you think the person would want their name associated with the story? Have you heard the context in a confidential setting? How confidential is the setting in which you are speaking? If I'm talking to my girlfriend I try to use names for most stories that aren't confidential. If I'm talking to strangers I will less likely use names for sensitive stories. If I'm talking on the LW I don't use any names for stories I tell unless the person in question signaled they are okay with the story being public. I don't use the name of my girlfriend in this paragraph.
4NancyLebovitz
If names are needed to keep a story clear, you can use made-up names.
4Viliam
Depending on what level you are playing at. The safe strategy is to mention specific people only if the story reflects unilaterally positively on them. Because even if you think the story reflects on average positively for them, you are at risk that they will calculate the averages differently than you (e.g. the embarassing part may be their very sensitive spot), or more likely, that the story may reach them in a modified form, where the embarassing parts are remembered and exaggerated, while the positive parts are left out. But still the person will say that 'this is the story you told them', and upon confrontation it will be awkward to explain that "yeah, I kinda said that, but not exactly like this, and also I said this and that" when the target person is already angry at you. Generally, you should assume that 'the world is smaller than you expect', that is, once in a while you will learn afterwards that two random people actually know each other. Most of the time this is not the case, but when it is, it could come costly.
0Elo
I have tried with or without names; for me it would depend how close I am to the person I am telling the story to. And depend if the 3rd party is known in positive/negative light. i.e. story that involves an ex to a current partner. I think you might be over thinking this because for the most part it doesn't matter, however if you are developing a rule of thumb; if a story gives positive credit - name the person, if not positive, skip the name.

Specific examples go here (add yours), so they can be discussed separately

0Arshuni
Self-promotion Should I just apply the counter-signalling model? Sometimes you can win so big, that you need not say anything. Other times, you DO need to say something to be noticed. The problem is, nobody exactly LIKES a braggart. The question is, how do you find an appropriate weighting between these two? Does this change if you've already managed to win big in one different field?
0Arshuni
Unsolicited advice/interventions You can really save someone a lot of time, effort, or pain. Or help them improve. OTOH, sometimes you ARE wrong, unsolicited advice does not always come across well, and... well, you probably gave them advice because you care about them, but also, being the guy who always knows better (whether true or not, rarely matters) does not help your relationship. I think giving advice only if asked, and otherwise, rewarding good behavior is A solution. But for example non-alcoholist me thinks I would prefer people to take a more interventionist approach, if I were to regularly take drinking to an excess.
0Arshuni
Revenge. It does not often come up in my life. I think the supposed best strategy would be to be known to be a vengeful person, who ruins you if you cross him, but only if it is really a valid reason, so people are not afraid to enter a social relationship with you. (only hating for the right reasons) OTOH, do people actually differentiate at this level? If I hear someone dealt sweet revenge, I am not sure my next question is necessarily going to be 'was it for the right reason?'
0Arshuni
In telling stories about acquaintances, should I be explicit with names? It helps follow the story, makes it more personal, and follow up stories paint a better overall picture. On introductions, 'Oh, I've heard a lot about you!' is great, too. On the other hand, sometimes you end up telling stories that may be slightly embarrassing for some concerned. In being explicit with their names, you may end up making the recipient less likely to open up to you (or I would assume so: I don't remember if I ever decided to be less open to someone merely because that, even after being surprised by hearing a story back from a third person. OTOH, I did definitely think deeply about my relationship with people who have a habit of shit-talking people behind their backs.) Any other considerations? Which would you consider more appropriate?

Oftentimes, I am confused because I didn't lock in my algorithm. This makes my behavior incongruent.

2Elo
This is a complicated post and was confusing to work out; you should consider more instructions. something like: "I am looking for advice on a few times where I seem to follow various existing algorithms that should lead to success in different circumstances. But sometimes the general advice conflicts with itself. I have formatted the sub-posts to this one with - general area; then specific question; then an example."
0Arshuni
Specific examples go here (add yours), so they can be discussed separately

I found the structure of your website interesting. Are those flashcards there? How well do they work for really internalizing things?

5SquirrelInHell
That website is just an auto-generated snapshot from a system I use on my phone. The way I use it on my part is that it prompts me at various intervals to do one of 2 things: * evaluate my track record regarding a given trigger, * predict situations in which it might be relevant in the future and plan what I'll do then. And yes, at least the way I use this, it is great at making me internalize things. It is so great in fact, that I can't tell anyone about it, because they would laugh at me. This includes you of course. Let me just mention that most things I add to this system actually become fully, subconsciously internalized the moment I add them to the system. Like in, before the system prompts me about it even once. If you don't believe me, well, I wouldn't believe myself either. The only other report of this happening to other people from LW-sphere I've seen is here: http://agentyduck.blogspot.jp/2014/02/lobs-theorem-cured-my-social-anxiety.html The difference is, I'm doing it with hundreds of things and it predictably works instantly in around 80% of cases.

How many of you guys keep a journal? How many of you would like to? What do you specifically write down?

I feel like it should help, but I have trouble coming up with a structure with which it could: Opening up a journal, with separate sections for work done, (and TODOs for the future, and how these two diverged), exercise, and others seems more useful than one with a massed 'Dear Diary' format.

5gabrielrecc
I keep a daily journal. Beginning of day: Two things that I'm grateful for. End of day: Two things that went well that day, two things that could have gone better. Each "thing" is usually only a sentence or few long. I find that going back through the end-of-day sentences every so often is useful for doing 80-20 analyses to find out what seems to be bringing me the most happiness / dissatisfaction (at least as judged by my end-of-day assessments).
6Pfft
I write down one line (about 80 characters) about what things I did each day. Originally I intended to write down "accomplishments" in order to incentivise myself into being more accomplished, but it has since morphed into also being a record of notable things that happened, and a lot of free-form whining over how bad certain days are. It's kindof nice to be able to go back and figure out when exactly something in the past happens, or generally reminisce about what was going on some years ago.
4Elo
I wrote this on the topic - might help with the habit of keeping a book - http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/mpz/making_notes_an_instrumental_rationality_process/
3Gunnar_Zarncke
Poll for it! [pollid:1132] Please take journal to mean anything that contains personal information, insights or the like. A slip box of articles you read and commented on might already count.

https://osf.io/hy58n/

There is the data. I am not sure what was the final criterion for the report, but sorting by P.value.R seems to have 33 findings with p under 0.05. (Maybe I misremembered the number?... also, I am unsure for what a p value of 0 is supposed to mean.) I didn't go too deep into what all the different columns represent, but there seems to be one with descriptions of the findings.

I want to make a desktop map application of my city, kinda like Paradox Interactive's games. My city is 280 km^2, and I would like it at a street level detail. I want to be able to just overlay multiple layers of different maps. What I have in mind is displaying predicted tram locations, purchasing power maps, and pretty much any information I can find on one map, and combining these at will, with a reasonable speed (and I would much prefer it to be seamless, like in a game, and not displaying white spots at the edges while it is loading)

Does anyone know of some toolset for such?

0MrMind
Autocad Map 3D is also something you want to look into, as it's used exactly for this purpose (I almost do this as a job). For speed though, you need quite a capable machine.
0ChristianKl
OpenStreetMap provides data that can be used more widely than the Google data.
0Lumifer
Google Maps (which, I think Google Earth was folded into, but in case it wasn't you actually want Google Earth). Alternatively, if you want your own app, look into Open Street Map and their tools.

Replication crisis: does anyone know of a list of solid, replicated findings in the social sciences? (all I know is that there were 36 in the report by Open Science Collaboration, and those are the ones I can easily find)

0Brillyant
What are the 36 solid, replicated findings?

Does it make a difference if an organism reproduces in multiple smaller populations versus one larger, if the number of offspring at generation one is held constant? (score is determined by the number of offspring and their relatedness, so the standard game)

Smaller populations are more prone to genetic drift, but in both directions, right?

Does this change somehow if the populations are connected, with different rates of flow depending on the direction?

For example, in humans, migration to the capitals (and in general, urbanization) happens way more often t... (read more)