All of Bobertron's Comments + Replies
Suppose X is the case. When you say "X" your opposite will believe Y, which is wrong. So, even though "X" is the truth, you should not say it.
Your new idea as I understand it: Suppose saying "Z" will let your opposite will believe X. So, even though saying "Z" is, technically, lying, you should say "Z" because the listener will come to have a true believe.
(I'm sorry if I misunderstood you or you think I'm being uncharitable. But even if I misunderstood I think others might misunderstand in a similar way, so...
When playing around in the sandbox, simpleton always bet copy cat (using default values put a population of only simpleton and copycat). I don't understand why.
"Just being stupid" and "just doing the wrong thing" are rarely helpful views
I agree. What I means was something like: If the OP describes a skill, then the first problem (the kid that wants to be a writer) is so very easy to solve, that I feel I'm not learning much about how that skill works. The second problem (Carol) seems too hard for me. I doubt it's actually solvable using the described skill.
I think this misses the point, and damages your "should" center
Potentially, yes. I'm deliberately proposing something that ...
Interesting article. Here is the problem I have: In the first example, "spelling ocean correctly" and "I'll be a successful writer" clearly have nothing to do with each other, so they shouldn't be in a bucket together and the kid is just being stupid. At least on first glance, that's totally different from Carol's situation. I'm tempted to say that "I should not try full force on the startup" and "there is a fatal flaw in the startup" should be in a bucket, because I believe "if there is a fatal flaw in the star...
Here are some things that I, as an infrequent reader, find annoying about the LW interface.
- The split between main and discussion doesn't make any sense to me. I always browse /r/all. I think there shouldn't be such a distinction.
- My feed is filled with notices about meetups in faraway places that are pretty much guaranteed to be irrelevant to me.
- I find the most recent open thread to be pretty difficult to find on the side bar. For a minute I thought it just wasn't there. I'd like it if the recent open thread and rationality quotes were sticked at the top of r/discussion.
I don't get this (and I don't get Benquo's OP either. I don't really know any statistics. Only some basic probability theory.).
"the process has a 95% chance of generating a confidence interval that contains the true mean". I understand this to mean that if I run the process 100 times, 95 times the resulting CI contains the true mean. Therefore, if I look at random CI amongst those 100 there is a 95% chance that the CI contains the true mean.
"Effective self-care" or "effective well-being".
Okay. The "effective"-part in Effective Altruism" refers to the tool (rationality). "Altruism" refers to the values. The cool thing about "Effective Altruism", compared to rationality (like in LW or CFAR), is that it's specific enough that it allows a community to work on relatively concrete problems. EA is mostly about the global poor, animal welfare, existential risk and a few others.
What I'd imagine "Effective self-care" would be about is su...
None of this is a much my strongly held beliefs as my attempt to find flaw with the "nuclear blackmail" argument.
I don't understand. Could you correct the grammar mistakes or rephrase that?
The way I understand the argument isn't that the status quo in the level B game is perfect. It isn't that Trump is a bad choice because his level B strategy is taking too much risk and therefore bad. I understand the argument as saying: "Trump doesn't even realize that there is a level B game going on and even when he finds out he will be unfit to play in that game".
As I understand it you are criticizing Yudkowski's ideology. But MrMind wants to hear our opinion on whether or not Scott and Yudkowski's reasoning was sound, given their ideologies.
I've read it those two books after LW. Assuming you have read the sequences: It wasn't a total waste, but from my memory I would recommend What Intelligence Tests Miss only if you have an interest specifically in psychology, IQ or the heuristics and biases field. I would not recommend it simply because you have a casual interest in rationality and philosophy ("LW-type stuff") or if you've read other books about heuristics and biases. The Robot's Rebellion is a little more speculative and therefore more interesting, Robot's Rebellion and What Intelligence Test Miss also have a significant overlap in covered material.
I haven't read "Good and Real" or "Thinking, Fast and Slow" yet, because I think that I won't learn something new as a long term Less Wrong reader. In the case of "Good and Real" part seems to be about physics and I don't think I have the physics background to profit from hat (I feel a refresher on high school physics would be more appropirate for me). In the case of "Thinking, Fast and Slow" I have already read books by Keith Stanovich (What Intelligence Tests Miss and The Robot's Rebellion) and some chapters of academic books edited by Kahneman.
Does anyone think those two books are still worth my time?
Me, too! I've taken the survey and would like to receive some free internet points.
"Verständnis" seems totally wrong to me. It's from the verb "verstehen" (to understand, to comprehend). It usually means "understanding" ("meinem Verständnis nach" -> "according to my understanding"). Maybe if you use it in a sentence?
I think "Vermutung" (and it's synonyms) is pretty much what I was looking for. Maybe it's even better than "belief" in some ways, since "belief" suggests a higher degree of confidence than "Vermutung" does.
"unterstützen" (to...
A different German speaker here.
In English you have a whole cloud of related words: mind, brain, soul, I, self, consciousness, intelligence. I don't think it's much of a problem that German does not have perfect match for "mind". The "mind-body-Problem" would be "Leib-Seele-Problem", where "seele" would usually be translated as "soul". The German wikipedia page for philosophy of mind does use the English word "mind" once to distinguish that meaning for "Geist" from a different concept fr...
I intuitively feel that there really are objective morals (or: objective mathematics, actual free will, tables and chairs, minds).
Therefore, there really are objective morals (etc.).
"Morals" is just a word. But unlike some other words, it's not 100% clear to me what it means. There is no physical entity that "morals" clearly refers to. There is no agreed upon list of axioms that define what "morals" is. That's why, to me, "there are objective morals" doesn't feel entirely like a factual statement.
I might jus...
Naruto is the opposite of Tsuioku Naritai. It's the story of "everyone had something to protect and practiced like mad, but none of it made a huge difference and most everyone would have been about as powerful anyway
But the series clearly wants to be "Tsuioku Naritai". The good guys all value hard work. Maybe the show is hypocritical, then.
I'm not sure if the message that sticks with the people who watch Naruto is what the characters say (work hard) or how the show actually develops (be born special).
I actually really like that you have to spend a resource to learn new information and that the score is dependent on luck. I.e. you use limited resources to optimize the gamble you are making. That seems like a very good description of how life works, only, it's all transparent and quantified in your game.
Some suggestions:
- In the tutorial, why do I first get to read a description of a picture and then I'm presented with the picture? Obviously, it should be the other way around.
- You should be able to progress the text by mouse.
- It should be easier to disti
change your mind, get a cookie
admitting you're wrong = winning/learning
conservation of expected evidence (add formula)
The path to truth is a random walk
discussions are random walks
what is true is already so
rationality: outcomes > rituals of thought
what can be destroyed by truth, should be
update beliefs incrementally
beliefs should pay rent
the cat 's alive, curiosity got framed
optimize everything
delta knowledge = surprise
minimize future surprise
A diagram like this with some actual data e.g. about P(autism|vaccine) or P(violence|video games).
A matrix repre...
I really like "The facts don't know whose side they're on", though the other two might require less wrong knowledge.
following up to my own post: I was sceptical because the examples AshwinV provided were examples that lend themselves to punishing oneself and using guilt, shame etc. But by flipping the title of the post to "Make good habits the heroes" all that criticism becomes irrelevant and AshwinV's idea remains the same. I think that is very related to the idea of identity, which has been discussed previously here on lesswrong. Use Your Identity Carefully is a good an relevant example.
First, your markup is broken. I can see the link-syntax, instead of the links. Also, the firs link is to an article by Phil Goetz, not Eliezer Yudkowsky.
Now about the actual content. I'm all for trying to use one's natural tendencies, instead of just trying to compensate for them. But I'm critical of the concrete examples you gave. What you are trying to do seems to be to motivate yourself through shame and guilt. And no one seems to be in favour of that. Some reasons why I think it's a bad idea:
- I believe you train yourself to be judgemental, not just ab
I've heard of the controversy. I think it was mentioned in a link post on slatestarcodex, and obviously on GiveWell's blog.
the community seems to be comprehensively inept, poor at marketing, extremely insular, methodologically unsophisticated but meticulous, transparent and well-intentioned
I find it stylistically strange to have a long list of negative adjectives end with two positive ones (transparent and well-intentioned are good things, right?) without any explanation. Wouldn't one say something like "These things suck:...., but on the good si...
Great! Works so far.
Sounds nice. Making predictions about personal events makes more sense to me than predicting e.g. elections or sport events (beauce a) I don't know anything about it, and b) I don't care about it). But I don't like the idea of making them (all) public, like on prediction book. Though a PredictionBook integration sounds like an obvious fancy feature.
And I liked what I saw the one second I could use the app ;-)
After installing, it crashed pressing "save" on the first prediction. Now it chrashed right on startup. I get to see the app for a moment,...
Sounds like it's the same or similar to what some modern practicing stoics do.
No, your real friend is the one you helped. The friend that helps you in a counterfactual situation where you are in trouble is just in your head, not real. Your counterfactual friend helps you, but in return you help your real friend. The benefit you get is that once you really are in trouble, the future version of your friend is similar enough to the counterfactual friend that he really will help you. The better you know your friend, the likelier this is.
I'm not saying that that isn't a bit silly. But I think it's coherent. In fact it might be just a geeky way to describe how people often think in reality.
I just read a book on behavior and that's the kind of thing I would expect to read in that book: Attention is generally a reinforcer. Swearing can be reinforced by attention. When you stop paying attention to swearing, swearing stops (extinction). Of course that will only stop the child from swearing when talking to you, not when it's in school.
For the Greman speakers this is the introductory paragraph I already wrote for the blog: [...]
I'm not much of a writer, and this might not be the final version, but I still like giving advice.
I'd really like to see some citations and references here. Are all those opinions based only on you own observations or also from things you have read? Since I don't have children, I'm not interested in the answer to that question, but your readers will be.
...Werte, die während der Kindheit anerzogen wurden, werden während der Pubertät auch durch die natürliche Gehi
I was wondering why. It doesn't seem all that useful, unless you are abnormally bad at color perception or you have a job or hobby that somehow needs good color perception (something in art or design?). I suppose it's fun and interesting to see how well that kind of thing can be trained, and how it changes your experience, but I was wondering if there was more to it.
I have written about this on LW in the past.
Can you tell me something about your color perception deck? Are you trying to train yourself to be better at distinguising (and naming?) colours for some reason?
I like the animation and the voice, but I dislike the text. I don't need it and it really distracts from the animations. And if I did need to read along with what you say, I think YT has a subtitle feature that would be much less distracting and could be turned off. I suppose I've seen videos using the style you attempt here, but I'm not sure I like then, either, and they typically use text only, while you also use pictures.
Oh, and I suppose you would be faster in producing those videos if you were to give up on the text.
There is this idea (I think it's a stoic one) that's supposed to show that no one ever has anything to worry. It goes like this:
Either you can do something about it, in which case you don't have to worry, you just do it. Or there is nothing you can do, then you can simply accept the inevitabel
It throws out the possiblility that you don't know whether you can do anything (and what precisely) or not. As I see it, worry is precisely the (sometimes maladaptive) attempt to answer that.
Every calse dichotomy is another example for this failure mode (if I understood you correctly).
The idea that it's a habit is, in a way, boring, true.
But when I read that industriousness and creativity can be learned like described in the learned industriousness wikipedia article, I was quite surprised. So the iedea isn't boring to me at all.
I know it's just an example, but concerning
I find it hard to do something I consider worthwhile while on a spring break
maybe you have learned to be lazy on spring break? I mean, the theory that it's a habit seems more prosaic to me than being tired or something about "activasion energy".
Such a person would probably strongly [missing verb?] rationality, rationalists, and the complex of ideas surrounding rationality, for probably understandable reasons
Since I kind of like your comment, I'd liked to know how that sentence should have sounded. Strongly dislike, hate, mistrust?
The "A=a" stands for the event that the random variable A takes on the value a. It's another notation for the set {ω ∈ Ω | A(ω) = a}, where Ω is your probability space and A is a random variable (a mapping from Ω to something else, often R^n).
Okay, maybe you know that, but I just want to point out that there is nothing vague about the "A=a" notation. It's entirely rigorous.
Societies often punish people that refuse to help. Why not consider people that break the law as defectors?
In fact, that would be an alternative (and my preferred) way to fix you second and third objection to value ethics. Consider everyone who breaks the laws and norms within your community as a defector. Where I live, torture is illegal and most people think it's wrong to push the fat man, so pushing the fat man is (something like) breaking a norm.
Have you read Whose Utilitarianism?? Not sure if it addresses any of your concerns, but it's good and about utilitarianism.
So I'm still a defector and society would do well to defect against me in proportion
Which, of course, they wouldn't do. They wouldn't have much sympathy for the guy sitting one bear repellant, who chose not to help. In fact, refusing to help can be illegal.
I suppose in your terms, you could say that the guy-sitting-on-the-repellant is a defector, therefore it's okay to defect against him.
Ok, I didn't understand the post. Like you are saying that the blue lines don't have any direktion, and then you go on to paint (directed) arrows over it.. Is this by mistake? Did you want to make the green arrows double directed or something like that? I suppose that not only does the blue line not have a direction, it also doesn't have an order? E.g. could you have written from top to bottom "Psychology Physiology Chemistry Morality Physics Neuroscience"? It's clearly no accident that you wrote those "sets of things that exist" in tha...
As I understand it, a bodhisattva also enters niravana eventually, so I don't see the hypocrisy.
Keeping money for yourself can be thought of as a [small] charity
Oh, interesting. I assumed the reason I keep anything beyond the bare minimum to myself is that I'm irrationally keeping my own happiness and the well-being of strangers as two separate, incomparable things. I probably prefer to see myself as irrational compared to seeing myself as selfish.
The concept I was thinking of (but didn't quite remember) when I wrote the comment was Purchase Fuzzies and Utilons Separately.
Most people set aside an amount of money they spend an charity, and an amount they spend on their own enjoyment. It seems to me that whatever reasoning is behind splitting money between charity and yourself, can also support splitting money between multiple charities.
Ergo, if you're risk-averse, you aren't a rational agent. Is that correct?
Reading that ZFC has countable models spooked me. How can uncountable sets exist and an axiomatization of set-theory have a countable model? For a fraction of a second it made me doubt mathematics was real. For a few seconds after that I was thinking of giving up on understanding maths, or at least logic. Then I realized that there had to be a trick about it that made everything make sense again.
I think that fits what I've read about worry.
From Chapter nine of "Resilience–How to Survive and Thrive in Any Situation A Teach Yourself Guide (Teach Yourself: Relationships & Self-Help) by Donald Robertson":
...When we worry, we perceive danger, feel anxious, and naturally try to problem-solve in order to remove the perceived threat and achieve a sense of safety. As long as we believe future problems are threatening and remain unsolved there’s a tendency for our attention to automatically return to them as ‘unfinished business’, which partial
I understand your post to be about difficult truths related to politics, but you don't actually give examples (except "what Trump has said is 'emotionally true'") and the same idea applies to simplifications of complex material in science etc. I just happened upon an example from a site teaching drawing in perspective (source):
... (read more)