All of Bo102010's Comments + Replies

Others have made these points, but here are my top comments:

• The site was best when there was a new, high-quality post from a respected community member every day or two.
• The ban on politics means that a lot of interesting discussion migrates elsewhere, e.g. to Scott's blog.
• The site's current structure - posts vs. comments seems dated. I'd like to try something like discourse.org?

It requires some status and a consistent record of not being a jerk to do this (or to convince yourself to do this), but: "[Big Talker] has been talking for 2 hours, and [Small Talker] hasn't really had much opportunity to talk about [thing Small Talker does]. Mind if we hear from [Small Talker] for a bit? "

Reading SSC brings back the feeling I got when I first discovered Less Wrong (right after the split with Overcoming Bias, when there were still sequences being posted). Here's this extremely intelligent and articulate guy, posting very insightful things on topics I didn't even know I was interested in -- and he's doing it pretty regularly!

I like what Less Wrong has evolved into in the post-Sequences era, but reading Less Wrong today produces a very different feeling from when it did early on.

I enjoyed the episode also. The show is consistently solid, which is quite impressive - I don't think there's been an episode that's really low quality. The peaks aren't very high, but there are no valleys to speak of...

There a laughable P vs. NP-themed episode in a previous season in which mathematicians use their proof to hack computers, but other than that the episode was watchable.

Great post!

Others have mentioned the HPMOR-style "take a poll of different aspects of your personality," which I have found to be entertaining and useful.

I'd also like to endorse the method for troubleshooting. I got the idea from Ridiculous Fish's blog post from 3 years ago.

When I have a technical problem I'm stuck on, I try to ask myself "What would someone who's smarter than me do?" This is really just "imagine a parody version of person x and see if that causes you to think about the problem in a different way."

I like to c... (read more)

I am reluctantly someone who pretty much doesn't care about what happens after I die. This is a position I that I don't necessarily endorse, and if I could easily self-modify into the sort of person who did care I would.

I don't think this makes me a monster. I basically behave the same way as people who claim they do care about what happens after they die. That is, I have plans for what happens to my assets if I die. I have life insurance ("free" through work) that pays to my wife if I die. I wouldn't take a billion dollars on the condition that ... (read more)

10 people said "Drug C: reduces the number of headaches per year from 100 to 60. It costs $100 per year" over "Drug B: reduces the number of headaches per year from 100 to 50. It costs $100 per year" on CFAR question #4...

I said "Drug A: reduces the number of headaches per year from 100 to 30. It costs $350 per year" personally. I think there's a case for B, maybe, but who picks C?

Not to mention that any candidate up to the task likely has more lucrative alternatives...

I'm genuinely curious why hg00's amended comment is now even more downvoted? And why my advice is also? Generally I take downvotes to mean "Would not like to read more of such comments at Less Wrong," but I'm a little puzzled at these.

I didn't think it was quite fair that your comment was downvoted to -2, but then I read the sentence "When women feel desperate, they cry about it."

While I think your comment was overall constructive to the discussion, that kind of thing is a turnoff. I assume you meant it in the best possible way, but I would encourage you to avoid that particular construction in the future.

Great stuff! My wife and I married at the St. Louis Science Center in the middle of the day in a 30 second ceremony. We were in front of a wall painted with e = m * c^2 . Afterward we went to see a dinosaur exhibit.

I saw someone reading The Selfish Gene on an airplane the other day, and a similar thought came to mind. I thought, "Ah, I should say hello to this person when we get off the plane. Failing that, give the official rationalist nod of affirmation. Go science!" (I missed the person leaving while trying to get to my book bag in the overhead compartment).

After, I decided that I would have had a similar urge to express my admiration to anyone I saw reading any Dawkins book, except the God Delusion. I'm happy to have a conversation with a fellow science lover. Not nearly as much with a fellow God hater.

Project Euler problem 384. I thought I'd be able to crack it in an afternoon, but a couple week's later I'm still stumped. I finally moved to another problem in the hopes of being able to return to 384 with fresh eyes, but no joy just yet.

I'm not sure if there's a lesson to learn from the failure, except that to do a good estimate about how much work something will take often itself requires a bit of work.

Yeah. It pains me to say that I understand the principle, but that I always seem to be able to convince myself that just this once I should go ahead and knock out some other semi-trivial task outside of normal working hours. Later it seems obvious that I have not internalized the lessons of Micro 101.

I think there's some ego-stoking going on - "I am the only person who can be relied upon to complete this task properly! Step aside, mortals, and I will wow you with my productivity."

How to fix it? Cthulhoo's comment below seems like a good start - I... (read more)

Delegating tasks. At work we're now short-staffed, and I've had to pick up work from a couple people.

Unfortunately, the principle of comparative advantage says that I should focus on the tasks where I'm most effective. Where I run into trouble is handing things off when I need to do just that. What if the other person screws it up, or worse, does it really inefficiently?

It makes my skin crawl to think of people bumbling around in Excel for 3 hours on a task I could complete in 1, so much so that I end up working on easy-but-time-consuming stuff when I should be at home looking at things on the Internet.

Physics and recreational mathematics + computer science improved my mental abilities.

I took Physics for Engineers as a freshman in college. It's clear in retrospect that this class was designed to accomplish several things:

• Force students who breezed through high school with little effort to work hard to maintain a good grade.

• Weed out the students who don't have the intellectual firepower or stamina for engineering.

• Teach a particular problem solving methodology. To get decent marks on a problem set, you had to always draw a diagram, always start with

Really? I felt like Dan GIlbert's book was a bad attempt at writing a Dave Barry book, with some good and entertaining science thrown in. I enjoyed the book, but every paragraph seemed to have a joke shoe-horned in.

However, when I consulted the text to find an example, I couldn't readily find one. Which is amusing, as part of the book deals with how inaccurate impressions can form lasting memories.

Still, I think lukeprog should aspire to a level higher than Gilbert.

One mistake I noticed when tutoring a high school student was what I might call "failure to take seriously the rules."

We were studying Geometry, and many times the student would make a big assumption (e.g. the angle is 90 degrees) without noting or questioning whether it was true.

When I'd ask him about it, he would say "Look at it, it must be 90 degrees!" or "If it's 90 degrees, then I can solve this other part over here and be finished." When I'd explain "You can't assume it's 90 degrees," or "You're assuming w... (read more)

Ehrman's books are all good.

Is Loftus's second book better than "Why I Became An Atheist"? I read that and came out thinking: (a) he is an unsympathetic character, (b) he spends his time in intellectual gutters for no reason, and (c) my goodness these sophisticated arguments for Christianity that he thoroughly engages are stupid.

Sounds like my post from 2009, Misleading the Witness, perhaps?

Voting for the Christian / "Christian" half is open - see Leah's site.

I had fun figuring these out. Once it's done I'd be interested to see what criteria LW users used to determine someone's real beliefs...

I asked Leah about participating in her test. I think I will find it challenging the emulate a Christian's viewpoint, instead of mocking it.

That is, normally when I've examined Christian thought, I've approached it from the pretense "let me see where this fails."

I'm interested to see if I can construct an argument that I myself as an atheist would find at least superficially compelling - that is, I want to avoid doing what pretty much every popular Christianity book does.

Your first paragraph adequately summarizes the sequel to this book as well.

In the end, every programming language, no matter how pure and pretty, gets turns into a bunch of loads, stores, and gotos...

I find that there's a lot of good techniques to be learned from FP, but the supposed mathematical purity of it kind of bores me.

(http://docs.python.org/py3k/howto/functional.html) has some nice tricks in Python.

I used to have a hobby of reading Christian apologetics to get a better understanding of how the other side lives. I got some useful insights from this, e.g. Donald Miler's Blue Like Jazz was eye-opening for me in that it helped me understand better the psychology of religious faith. However, most books were a slog and I eventually found more entertaining uses for my time.

Today I saw that a workmate of mine was reading Lee Strobel's The Case For Faith earlier. My policy is to not discuss politics or religion at work, so I didn't bring it up there.

I hadn't ... (read more)

Would a patient thus do better to research his or her symptoms online before going to the doctor's office, and then insisting on the treatment provided?

If so is there a good place to do this research? Are there good websites that are usually informed with up-to-date research on a variety of topics? I haven't had a health issue that's needed such research in recent memory, but if I did I would probably type my symptoms into Google alongside technical sounding words like "incidence," "epidemiology," and "differential diagnosis."

I think Eliezer's point is that it could be evolutionary and not cultural.

The interesting thing is that you can become a leader by just telling people to do stuff, and then they comply.

When I was getting ready to graduate from high school, I started applying for scholarships from different organizations and to universities. A large fraction of the applications had a section like "Write an essay on why you want to exercise leadership."

At the time I concluded that "leadership" was a new buzzword that everyone had to make some reference to in order to qualify for anything. I dutifully wrote some meaningless essays about leadership. Then when I went to school and heard more and more about leadership,the more I thought my ... (read more)

I agree in some sense, but disagree in another. I am fast at Excel. I don't need to use to mouse, look at the menus, or pause to find anything I'm looking for, because I've internalized the keyboard shortcuts and created quick macros for the things I need to do. People get a little flustered when they see me work in Excel because it looks like it's magically doing stuff, but it just comes from lots and lots of repetition.

Contrast this with a proper database, where I need to figure out some way to load the data in, make sure my query accounts for every plac... (read more)

I started last June and am at 196 solved currently.

I'd had a "Computer science for electrical engineers" course in school, which discussed data structures and algorithms from a high level (the usual sorting algorithm discussion, implementing a linked list, that kind of thing), but nothing too in-depth. I've had various experience in programming before PE.

In solving PE problems I've mostly used Wikipedia and Mathworld for research, and sometimes I'll Google for lecture notes on a relevant topic.

I've used the Python skills I've picked up from PE in my job already. I think I could function in a more... (read more)

I don't drink (and never have).

For (1), when asked why I don't drink, I say "I don't know. I don't smoke either." People seem to recognize that some people just don't like to smoke, and that this type of thing carries over to other voluntary activities.

When I get a disdainful look or am being chided for being a stick in the mud, I steel myself by remembering Richard Feynmann's wife's exhortation: "What do you care what other people think?"

It's been mentioned here on Less Wrong before, but I'll recommend it again - Project Euler. It's a set of 300+ math problems that are to be solved by designing an algorithm to run in under a minute.

Getting into Project Euler last summer is likely the best move I've ever made to improve my programming skills. I'm not a programmer, but coding skills come in handy in lots of places, so I started working through the PE problems as means of learning Python.

Since I started I've replaced almost all my casual reading with research into algorithms and math, and I'v... (read more)

I've got another one that's about to be relevant to me. What should you do in order to be an effective manager?

I am an engineer and will soon be "in charge" of another engineer. I have had a couple bosses with various good and bad qualities, and obviously I want to emulate the good qualities and avoid the bad ones.

Is there a good procedure to begin being an effective supervisor of technical people? There is a vast of array of books and websites on management, but I think there's a very low rationality quotient.

I recently found myself thinking about this same topic. I have figured some of these out by trial and error, but feel that some formal training would have been useful (others I have not encountered):

• How should you interact with a police officer - what are your obligations, your rights, and how should you conduct yourself?

• If you want to move from one residence to another, what steps should you take? If you are credentialed in one state and want to move to another, what do you do?

• If you get into a minor car accident, what should you do? What about a ma

I find it somewhat troubling that my flip reply to your comment has netted me more karma than any of my other recent contributions.

Downvoted because I don't think I want to see more comments like it.

I like the numeric approach. However, something seems off, and I think it's that you're conflating the cost of saving a human life with the value of a human life.

Your question is interesting, though. If Omega gives you the choice of N dollars or giving 10,000 chickens a perfect chicken life,at what N do you pick the money?

Like I said earlier, I eat meat only rarely. I don't hate chickens or anything, but I don't think the welfare of non-sentient beings weighs very heavily on the scales of justice.

If the choice is between factory-farm torturing a human and factory-farming N farm animals, I pick very large N again.

If Omega asks me how many meals of meat I'd replace with non-meat meals to save one human, I'd give up all of mine. I don't like hamburgers that much anyway.

What if you put numbers to it?

If Omega offered you the choice between one saving human's life and giving N chickens a long, perfect, chicken life on Planet Chicken, at what value of N would you pick the chickens?

Assuming none of the N animals are particularly special to any sentient being, for me it's well north of 10^9.

I would pick a smaller N for animals like dolphins, dogs (again, not talking about animals that are special to people), elephants, etc., due to their intelligence. But in general, for animals typically used for their meat, N is high enough that it doesn't affect my decision whether to eat meat.

I eat meat only occasionally, giving weight to your reasons (2) and (3), but not (1). I think it takes quite a few farm animal deaths to add up to a papercut to a human, morality-wise.

I do find it quite interesting to see how people react when you say you don't eat meat. I'm from the midwest, and often get reactions like:

• "Wuss."

• "I am going to make you eat meat."

• "What about protein, huh?"

I don't quite understand why people are offended by my dietary choices that don't affect them at all, but I've come to think it's som... (read more)

As an atheist and a capitalist, I find it quite satisfying that capitalism has largely displaced religion in one of Christianity's most important holidays. I have no problem celebrating that!

I get that feeling with bad grammar as well, but only if it's really bad.

I get a feeling not unlike watching an extremely embarrassing situation play out on a TV show when I hear purported explanations of Creationism, crystal energy, homeopathy, Team Blue economic theory, Team Red social preferences...

I like this idea too, but I suspect it would be quickly hijacked - it's easier to bug your instructor until she lets you have a better grade than to study. Ask most "tough graders" how their student reviews compare to "easy graders."

This is a fair point. I would note, however, that eviction typically requires repeated notification, and opportunities for you modify your behavior before encountering violence.

Contrast with how your local sheriff can bust down your door in the middle of the night, shoot your dogs, destroy your property, and arrest you merely for suspecting you of possessing marijuana. And then be praised for it even if you are innocent.

It does matter if one has guns (or SWAT teams) and the other relies on non-violent persuasion.

Wasn't there a somewhat well-publicized "spate" of suicides at a large French telecom a while back? I remember the explanation being the same - the number observed was just about what you'd expect for an employer of that size.

ETA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/France_Telecom

If I were defending cryonics, I would say that a small chance of immortality beats sure death hands-down.

It sounds like Pascal's Wager (small chance at success, potentially infinite payoff), but it doesn't fail for the same reasons Pascal's Wager does (Pascal's gambit for one religion would work just as well for any other one.) - discussed here a while back.

Quit posting on this subject. Please. I didn't downvote you, but I will downvote any more posts on the topic by anyone.

I find this line of thinking also applies to past versions of myself - if I stumble upon an insight that seems obvious, I think, "why didn't I notice this before?" where "I" = "past versions of myself."

When you figure something out, there's got to be a first time.