All of fburnaby's Comments + Replies

Hmm. Yeah, I agree with you. But booze loosens something up for me. It turns something in my social brain on high. This is not the same thing as confidence, so my wording was bad.

I have a suspicion that your option number 2 is already baked pretty deep into actual humans' psychologies.

I read and identified with and commented on your post a year and a half ago. I just wanted to say I'm glad to know that you're feeling more ambitious now. And thanks for sharing. I haven't solved these same problems for myself nearly to the same extent, so learning about your recent experiences is extremely valuable for me.

0Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg)
Went back and read your comment-I remember that! It sounded like you weren't doing too badly at the time, externally at least. Then again, I've never dealt with depression as a side effect of aiming for goals that were too hard. Massive anxiety, crying in the washroom at work, not sleeping, yes, but never the ongoing invades-your-whole-life apathy of clinical depression. I can always tell myself "if you keep banging your head on this seemingly insurmountable problem, sooner or later you'll get past it" because it always has in the past, probably because I can bang my head on something for quite a long time when most people might otherwise give up. Example: despite plenty of anxiety and feelings-of-inadequacy, I have stuck with taekwondo longer than everyone else who started at the same time as me, and will probably get my black belt next summer. The one example is swimming, where I stopped banging my head on the specific problem of getting faster, and then a large part of me took this as evidence that I was a failure with no willpower, while the rest of me went off and became a local expert on teaching swimming to kids. I still think it's a useful skill to be able to work on a problem out of habit, repeatedly, without necessarily spending much time thinking about it once the initial exploration-and-decision is done. Helps with the frustration and inadequacy part.

Why Opium produces sleep: ... Because there is in it a dormitive power.

Moliere, Le Malade Imaginere (1673), Act III, sc. iii.

A lesson here is that if you ask "Why X?" then any answer of the form "Because " is not actually progress toward understanding.

I agree. The best cogs understand their role in the machine, which requires intimate understanding of the machine as a whole. AND they can feel what's going on as it happens.

If you didn't manage to notice your retinal blind spot or the mechanisms by which you conjugate verbs in your native tongue, what are the chances that you aren't at least a little mistaken about your true goals and desires and how best to achieve them?

Even though I'm very familiar and comfortable with your thesis, I found that sentence striking.

1fowlertm
Striking good or striking bad?

I had exactly the same reaction. I believe (though have extremely small data number of data points) that offering a number instead of asking for one would be taken as low-status. On the other hand, I doubt that the balance between having a proposition accepted or denied is often that delicate. Presumably in most cases, by the time you're considering exchanging information, she or he has already made up their minds enough that such a small faux-pas wouldn't matter much.

I identified very strongly with your article. I feel exactly the same way and suspect the same things are going on in my brain when I hear really bad feminist arguments. They're somehow more annoying than really bad (even worse!) gender regressive arguments.

This has lead me to question whether I should indulge myself in making my contrarian, actually-gender-progressive, arguments against what I perceive as mainstream opinion (feminism). Feminism really isn't nearly as mainstream as it feels to me. I'm just privileged as a member of the intellectual progres... (read more)

-2MugaSofer
At risk of sounding tautological, that depends on whether it's the right thing to do. If you have identified a systematic bias, try to remove it, then reevaluate your choices. You may still make he same ones; you cannot deduce reality from your bias. But you cannot know that if you're still biased.

doesn't follow politics / political junkie / avoids talking about politics due to mind-killing

It's funny. I've seen that movie five times or so. But I watched it again a few days ago, and that line struck me, too. Never stood out before.

If you are an American perhaps it stood out this time because of all the recent discussion of gun control.

That definitely makes it clear what your intention is.

I'm male and (I think) I tend to apply negative selection when deciding.

It seems that Vaniver and pnrjulius have assumed that you're having trouble picking good dates. If, instead, you are worried about getting picked (or accepted) for dates, then maybe you're on to something. I'd be interested in knowing whether the majority of people accept dates based on a positive or a negative selection process. It may need to be broken down by gender.

(I have a hypothesis that I won't share yet, in case it influences results)

2Dreaded_Anomaly
Viliam_Bur describes my thought process correctly. I'm faltering on the first step, finding a woman whom I would be interested in dating. I think part of this is due to what I now recognize to be too many criteria ruling out people who might otherwise be appealing. (I've certainly had people tell me I'm too picky before, but it took a comparison to undergraduate admissions for the underlying nature of the problem to become apparent.) Worrying about getting picked or accepted is a different step entirely.
0fburnaby
I'm male and (I think) I tend to apply negative selection when deciding.

Is there sufficient interest in starting a meetup in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada? If so, chime in!

I read that comment as: "I think it's actually doing better than most (in staying self-aware and not being as socially naive)". Not that it's doing better than Marxists or others in actually changing the world. They obviously did a lot more in that regard than LessWrong ever has (or likely ever will).

I agree that being "approachable" might play in the dynamic, too. Needing help may attract others who can thereby raise their own status by helping you.

5John_Maxwell
I remember reading that getting someone to help you is a better way to make friends with them than helping them. (Although this may be due to consistency effects.)

I'm just speculating at random now, but the idea has popped into my head so I'll share.

We're adapted to function in small tribes where status may be very absolute and worth guarding on the one hand, and cooperation/helping each-other necessary very frequently. Our modern situation isn't quite the same - I'm completely self-sufficient in the sense that I can participate in formal and impersonal business activities and then purchase anything I need. Most of my friends are the same - if we're out, we pay our own tabs; if we're having a bad day, we try not to... (read more)

0John_Maxwell
Or you could be programmed to act that way because you're a loner. You don't have much in the way of connections or credibility, so asking for favors out of the blue is a recipe for failure.

It definitely feels status-lowering to me when I ask for help. Consequently, I very rarely ask for help. However, I've noticed that my friends who do ask for help or do other things that feel status-lowering to me (especially "over-sharing" their feelings) also have more friends and more active social lives than I do.

0dlthomas
That "those activities are not actually status lowering" is certainly a potential explanation of what you observe, although it raises the question of why you (and so many others, it seems) interpret them to be. There are doubtless other explanations, however; off the top of my head: "having higher status for other reasons, the friends in question feel more able to engage in status lowering acts."

Yes. The art of Googling can be pretty difficult, and a few brains are still smarter (though less broadly knowledgeable, perhaps) than Google, at this point in time.

If I was a strong moral realist, I'd also believe that an AI should be able to just "figure it out". I wonder instead if exposure to the field of AI reserach, where cost functions and methods of solution are pretty orthogonal would help alleviate the moral realism?

Or simple ideas have all sorts of implications that naturally follow, but which most readers need to have teased out for them.

Be suspicious of overly bold claims in evolutionary psychology - check and mostly agreed, though see Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea for something that might slightly re-inflate the idea of good ev-psych.

But I don't see how your suggestion to think about minds as "lined slates" follows. It seems to not follow even more after having read your argument. What reason do be have to think that our minds have evolved to be very flexible general learning processes? Your argument makes me imagine my mind as the opposite - after reading your argument, o... (read more)

5Dmytry
A randomly wired network still can have different number of short range vs long range connections, vertical vs horizontal connections etc. Brain is not randomly wired; it consists of cortical columns - a basic unit replicated over the brain - and some of the wiring is very specific. The axons can very accurately find their destinations. Different areas of brain can be built with different parameters of the network organisation. There are good reasons not to adopt tabula rasa - blank slate - that's why i propose the slates prepared for specific work, in minor ways. We certainly can evolve different fur on different parts of our bodies - and so we can evolve different network properties in different areas of brain. But if you want to link specific sets of neurons in specific ways from the DNA to build a circuit that performs an evolved function - all chances are you can not do that, as there isn't any genes which express just in those neurons. The lined slate example is to make it clear that I am not arguing in favour of complete 'tabula rasa'. With regards to our brains being learning machines, the neuroplasticity is good evidence that parts of brain can learn the tasks not originally intended, at the levels of performance close to the normal, suggesting only minor innate specialization.

I believe that and agree that it's gotta be a major factor in driving god-belief and other types of animism (it's one of the brain-holes I'm talking about). Yet, religion seems to be a superset -- and sometimes a large one -- of god-belief. There's seemingly more to explain. There are likely several other brain-holes involved here.

There was so much talk of "religion-shaped holes" in the brain in those comments! Shouldn't it be pretty obvious to people who are aware of the "meme" concept that religions are brain-hole shaped and not the other way around?

Of course it's ok if a rocket-ship fills a certain brain-hole in a similar way the religion does - rocket ships are benign. It's naming one or several of those holes "religion-shaped" that seems to have a dark-artsy kind of effect and turn us all stupid.

3advancedatheist
Actually we have theory-of-mind shaped holes in the brain. I don't have an iPhone, and I haven't seen a live demonstration of the Siri app yet, but the commercials and videos about Siri I've seen on YouTube show that it doesn't take much to trick the theory of mind into treating Siri as a person. Gods make me think of Siri-like apps. People attribute the theory of mind to their "god apps," and they try to communicate with these apps through worship, prayer, the study of obscure scriptures and the infliction of self-harm, as David Hume describes in my post below.

To add some credence to your recommendations: since actually understanding the logic of stable strategies, I feel much less frustrated by the examples cited by Bakkot than I used to when I assumed they were the result of evil. I also view them as problems to be solved, not enemies to scorn. This really truly seems like an improved disposition being caused by understanding.

Thought to be fair, my actions have been changed much less than my dispositions have. Such understanding has, at most, impacted my behaviours which I associate with far-mode: how I vote, argue and make life decisions. My leisure activities, smoking habits, purchasing habits haven't changed.

It didn't bother me. Though this may just be beacause I'm already habituated to ignoring it after having read many journal articles.

My first-year courses in engineering (in Canada) made basic use of calculus without assuming any real understanding of it. By second-year, the calculus was assumed and for linear ODE's and similar. Third-year, we moved to Laplace and Fourier transforms and the final year finally started to get into applications and standards and "real" things.

I've always wondered how different other engineering school curricula are.

1[anonymous]
Also canadian engineering school. First year we learned calculus but did not use it. Second year we learned even more calculus (up to PDEs, inear alg, and vector calc), but still didn't use it. Calculus started being assumed in third year. We suggested to the school that they make more of an effort to use the skills that they teach between classes, so this might change soon.

Yes, I agree that this seems like a good thing to try for both dreaming and rationalization! I've recently gotten myself a notebook for at home, just for doodling ideas about the things I'm reading. It might be a good idea just to try and expand that to dreaming, rationalization and other things too, just to see what comes out. To provide myself more reliable access to an "outside view" of myself.

I haven't remembered a dream in years. There are three that I have had in my life which I can recount even a bit of (all of which were nightmares, interestingly). I'm pretty sure that I have them all the time because I sometimes wake up with strange images in my head. But these images disappear very quickly and I can't tell someone what I was dreaming about even minutes after waking.

I notice that I sometimes catch myself rationalizing in simple ways, like offering some justification for a shortcoming that I have. But I notice also that I can only think of ... (read more)

7Viliam_Bur
Experiment: Bring a pen and paper to your bed, and when you wake up, the first thing you do (seriously the first; a minute of delay can make a huge difference) write what you remember. If you don't remember the beginning, just quickly start writing from the part you remember. If any idea comes to your head during writing, just make a small note (two-three words) and continue writing. Do this every day, at least 5 days in sequence. Why do I suggest this? My case may be different, but after I wake up and think about something else, I usually forget what my dream was, even forget that I had a dream at all. I would swear that I rarely dream, but when I did this experiment, I had a dream every night (and if I woke up many times during the night, there was a different dream each time). Without the writing I wouldn't even notice. Even the written record seems suspicious -- I read about a dream, and I remember "yeah, I had a dream like this maybe a month ago", then I look at the date and see it was yesterday! So my experience is that my memory is absolutely unreliable in this area. Also, this may be a coincidence, but when I remember a dream, it is usually a bad dream, because it makes me think about it when I wake up. EDIT: Now I realized a similar experiment with rationalization could be useful. :D

Once the demands of acting - and hence deciding - in a time-pressured world are factored into our vision of rational thought, we get a model of the mind vastly unlike the model typically (and dimly) imagined by rationalists in the in the great tradition of Descartes, Leibniz and Kant.

Daniel Dennett, Elbow Room, (Control and Self-Control)

As a nerd, I have a (usually socially unacceptable) impulse to offer 16 possible ways that some plan could go wrong. It's fun, and on occasion useful. It seems very possible to me that your impression of "the state of bioethics" comes from a selection effect, where bioethecists show off their coolest objections to an obviously good thing.

Actually, in engineering school, I learned the same notion -- "shoot lame puppies early". It's a good plan to look for every possible (for a reasonably narrow definition of "possible") way you... (read more)

When I'm there, I feel like working and when I'm anywhere else, I don't. I haven't ever stopped to try and figure out what it is about the place, but I've assumed that someone must be thinking about it.

If you'd like to have some guesses:

  • it's a very sterile environment with no distractions
  • I feel pressure to demonstrate that I'm working right this second, which may help me stay in near-mode

(One necessity for all this to work is, of course, that my goals be related to furthering my career and to accomplishing and learning stuff that's positively correlated to my employer's goals.)

My workplace seems, at times, to be well-designed to align my urges and goals for me.

(also: Congratulations, Anna and Carl on your wedding!)

1[anonymous]
How so?

Doing things just to signal your status is a basic social skill and not something to be ashamed of.

Yes, but what I'm trying to get at is that if we started assigning status to people who actually accomplish things, we'd all start ... accomplishing more things!

You don't necessarily lose status by admitting that you do things that people only do to prove how high status they are.

Interestingly, this seems to only apply in rationalist communities. While I think it's a good norm for encouraging truth-seeking, it seems bad for winning to let each-other off the hook too easily.

1wedrifid
I wouldn't say that. It applies in a significant proportion of communities with a self help emphasis and the overwhelming majority of those that are focused on dating. There isn't any letting each other off the hook involved. Doing things just to signal your status is a basic social skill and not something to be ashamed of.

It seems most common to mix those two modes as convenient.

What about getting some tech/science savvy public-relations practitioners involved? Understanding and interacting effectively with the relevant publics might just be a skill worthy of dedicated consideration and more careful management.

I found this was a common theme in good engineering courses. The whole course would boiled down to three or four new concepts. By the time the final came around, it just felt like thinking hard about common sense even though at the beginning of the term, everything had seemed counter-intuitive.

I'm weaker still, I think. I need the person who's depending on me to be close by.

When I was graduating from high school, I was warned a lot that when I go to university: "your grades will tend to drop a letter grade". When I mentioned that I was going to study engineering, I was additionally told that "half of you will flunk out or drop out in the first year". I very self-consciously tried to manage my expectations about how good my grades should be, trying to find a reasonable goal that was (1) achievable so that I wouldn't get stressed out, but still (2) sufficiently "ambitious" so that I'd be sure to gr... (read more)

Oh, man. The fatal event in my failed study of engineering was getting 99% on a first-year dynamics exam. I'd reduced the semester to a page of notes, then the page to a quarter page, then the quarter page to four equations [which of course I can't remember now - this was 1988], which it seems had been the point of the entire semester. I then proceeded to ace it. (Got a sign wrong in one problem, hence 99%.) This was absolutely fatal to doing well henceforth, since I had no idea how I'd managed to do that well except showing up at lectures and usually doing my homework.

Having seen many concerns about the low salary/skill ratio: it seems like about the same situation that I had for my graduate degree. I took half the salary for a job that was (by my estimate at the time) twice as cool as the alternatives. In that light, the position seems like quite a good deal, as most grad students don't earn that much. If you expect to experience side-benefits from this job, such as benefiting from increased rationality, or having cool stories to tell people about your interesting job, then this seems like a good deal.

1bbarth
Most grad students work half time! We pay ~$45k/yr full time rate (so most students get around $28k/yr) plus insurance and tuition. How much is a cool story worth?

Trying it in the world definitely deserves some karma. I'll take this as a reminder to stay alert for situations when it's useful and practice it diligently.

I can't imagine what the arguments are in support of "church doesn't advance your goals". What are they?

I know all sorts of arguments that "churches lead to all sorts of horrible political-social effects" and ones about "churches ruin some particular lives (imagine some closeted, self-hating homosexual who would have been happy in a secular background)", but if you get something from going to church, and it's your goal to do so... that seems very straight-forward.

0Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg)
It's more like "you think going to church advances your goals, but you're wrong because you haven't taken into account the fact that going to church with irrational people makes you more irrational/insane." I guess it's a reasonable assumption that one of my goals is to become more rational, given that I'm on LW, but apparently people don't give me the benefit of the doubt for having thought about that already on my own, and made a decision one way or another.

In your LW articles, you come off as both charismatic and intelligent. You have interesting insights, you're willing and able to post your thoughts (and they're frequently even not-in-sync with the general LW zeigeist), you use lots of engaging personal examples... Are you sure you're not being humble or maintaining a wrong self-image for some other reason?

2Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg)
I think my intelligence is above average (general population average, not LW average), but that's not at all the same thing as being intelligent enough to be a good physicist...although I think that may not be my true rejection, and I'm going to try and spend some more time finding out what my true rejection is. Also, LW is an entirely written forum and I'm very confident in writing, and have a lot of experience. I'm not as good a public speaker: I don't have as much practice, and there's the added challenge of not having time to sit staring at a screen for five minutes trying to decide if my argument is phrased unclearly and I need to fix it. So stuff comes out a lot less elegantly when I'm saying it to people, and I tend to say "um" and "uh" a lot, or sound a bit incoherent because my brain isn't running at the same rate as my mouth.

I have a friend who frequently cuts into a conversation with the phrase: "you're right, but..." and then tells you why you're oh so very wrong. His body language admits no sarcasm (how he does this, I don't know) while he says it. In fact, I think I'm the only one of our mutual friends who has noticed his frequent use of this trick.

But it works a lot!

1John_Maxwell
I've gotten into the habit of saying "I agree, [insert restatement or consequence of person's position that makes it clear how absurd it is]." Tends to make people laugh, as I'm clearly being sarcastic but in a pretty friendly way. Could be a way to get the benefits of this technique without being so dark artsy.
0Bill_McGrath
Damnit, I could have tried that out earlier today. Noted for future reference.

Wow. I've been testing this technique out today, and it's been working like magic. Instant level up.

[anonymous]330

I've seen that subtle rhetorical technique used in person, as well; once I caught what the guy was doing - which is harder than it sounds, since it was done eerily well - I could only stand grinning & nodding in stunned amazement. The gentlemen he HAD been arguing with - who WAS wrong, let me be totally clear - was also grinning and nodding, so at least I wasn't out of place.

Then I watched the two of them pick apart the original assertion for about ten straight minutes, like they were the best of friends.

It was the verbal equivalent of something beyon... (read more)

Either they even each-other out, or people think we're crazy and self-contradictory?

1Armok_GoB
Sounds worth trying!
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