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All of B_Frank's Comments + Replies

Contests vs. Real World Problems
B_Frank40

We might say there are two kinds of "responsibility." School teaches people to be responsible to authority; the other kind is being responsible for eventual outcomes (such as truthfulness) by asking questions and challenging authority.

An example would be something I read recently about the institutional mindset held by journalists at newspapers: older editors and managers are practically begging young reporters for new ideas... the problem is the type of people who go to work for a newspapers now tend to want responsibilities (and security) give... (read more)

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Cached Selves
B_Frank50

How can you tell whether one's self might be getting hijacked or if it's getting rescued from a past hijacking?

E.g. I've been a long-time OB reader but took a couple of months off (part of a broader tactic to free myself of a possible RSS info addiction, and also to build some more connections with local people & issues via Twitter). I brought OB back into my daily reading list last week, read a few of Robin's posts and wondered where Eliezer was at...

Now I find myself here at LW, articulating thoughts to myself as I read and catch up, feeling impell... (read more)

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0JenniferRM
I think you've stated a major part of the solution at the end of your own post in the form of a question. That is: seek objective measures to help discriminate between options. A lot of specific cognitive biases are related to framing effects where some idea becomes anchored in a person's mind and is subsequently adjusted until it feels "good enough". A nice way to cut through this, where feasible, is to seek some common numerical basis for discriminating between options and independently estimating their value. Investments and bets are the standard place for this. If you don't want to drop down to dollars per minute or a similarly banal measure you could specify more abstract goals. For example, you could aim to "practice thinking clearly and at length" as one goal, but another might be "exposure to novel trends". Then compare each course of action against the goals and try to figure out what kind of "reading diet" would accomplish your specified need the best. Its distinctly possible that if you took this more systematic approach you'd realize some totally different plan would makes a lot more sense... certain kinds of learning might work better if you visit a library with a clever plan for consciously exploratory reading, but other goals might lead you to meetup.com to find local people you could relate to in a much more personally nourishing way. In line with the original post, seeing yourself as someone who stops to attempt "objective valuations" before committing to a plan would probably be a useful "positive habit" to cultivate that might help to cut through some of the fog inherent to impulse driven behavior :-)
BHTV: Yudkowsky & Adam Frank on "religious experience"
B_Frank30

I'm not sure who you're addressing this to.

It appeared to me that "squeezing out the cultural juices" was precisely what Eliezer was doing when he talked about the Old Testament, the kind of society it originated in, the way people have always tried to irrationally defend religious beliefs, and the process by which science has repeatedly devastated those defenses.

Freeing ourselves from beliefs doesn't mean ridding the world of all of the related literature and artifacts. I've never heard anybody advocate the complete elimination of all knowledge ... (read more)

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