There may or may not be some legitimate field of inquiry going under the name of semiotics. In grad school a number of years ago, however, I took a (graduate-level) Introduction to Semiotics that was a pretty remarkable hodgepodge of bullshit, along with just enough non-bullshit to make a complete outsider like myself (not at all fluent in the obscurantist discourse of "cultural studies," "critical theory," and the like) feel like maybe the problem was me and not the material. (Later reflection gave me a lot more confidence that the pro...
Phil, you've probably seen this already, but a bunch of proposals for alternative notation systems are collected here. Some of them are basically exactly what you would prefer to be reading. It would be really cool if someone wrote a Lilypond package that could output in some of these systems. (Maybe someone has, I don't know.)
Very true. Staff notation essentially says "Here are the pitches and rhythms, now it's your job to figure out how to make them happen on your instrument." As you point out, a very real alternative to staff notation exists in tablature, which (in general) is any notation system that instead says "Here's what you need to do physically on your instrument. Follow these instructions and the notes will automatically be the right ones—you don't need to worry about what they 'are'."
Tablatures are surprisingly old, apparently going back 700 year...
I didn't have anything really radical in mind. I think it's pretty clear that there's a long-term trend toward high-level music-making relying on notation to a decreasing extent. I have a number of friends who are professional composers, and some of them use notation to write for instruments, while others use electronics and largely don't use notation at all. (The latter group, who compose for video games, movies, etc., are the ones who actually make money at it, so I'm by no means just talking about avant-garde electronic music.) A lot of commercial compo...
Good post and I'll chime in if you don't mind. I teach this stuff for a living and even highly skilled musicians struggle with it in various ways (myself emphatically included).
The main thing I want to say is that there's a reason why essentially all music education consists of many years of rote learning. Obviously, that rote learning works better if it's guided in appropriate directions, but I really don't know of any alternative to what you describe when you say "an orders-of-magnitude-less-efficient mechanism for memorizing note-to-note mappings f...
Yes, it should be clarified. The main ambiguity that I was reacting to is that "art" can mean specifically visual arts or it can mean "the arts," extending to performing and literary arts. As it is, I'm not sure if my profession (scholarship concerning music) is "art" or "other."
In fact (now addressing Yvain again), why is this category called "Profession" instead of "field"? It creates some odd overlap with the previous category of "Work status" which produces a little bit of confusion per my original suggestion and fubarobfusco's reply.
I used to hear something similar in debates over gay marriage:
Gay person: "I only want to have the same right as a straight person: the right to marry the person I love."
Gay marriage opponent: "No no, you already have the same right as a straight person: the right to marry a person of the opposite sex. If you also want the right to marry a person of the same sex, you're asking for extra rights, special privileges just because you're gay. And that simply wouldn't be fair."
Edit: bramflakes beat me to it.
Right. But, when exposed to it, some are drawn in and some run as fast as possible in the opposite direction. The point of the example was that there's a surprisingly large amount of individual variation on what kinds of fundamental sounds and timbres people find most pleasing, and (I cautiously suggest) that appears to be the most innate and least malleable or learnable aspect of a person's response to various kinds of music.
Just a couple of thoughts about this. First, as far as anyone can tell music enjoyment is a remarkably multifaceted phenomenon (and "music" itself is a term that describes a pretty giant range of human behaviors). There's no single reason, or even manageably short list of reasons, why people like it. It seems to be wrapped up in many different physical, neurological, cognitive, emotional, social, and cultural systems, any of which (in any combinations) could be responsible for a certain person's reaction to a certain kind of music. Some of the as...
This is strictly pop-science writing, but there was an interesting piece in the NYT Magazine a couple of years ago about ketosis as a treatment for pediatric epilepsy, where apparently it's extremely effective at controlling seizures in a significant fraction of patients.
I don't think I understand at all what these descriptions of confidence levels are supposed to mean. Do they refer to your confidence in specific pieces of information about the people in the descriptions? Information you heard from those people? What scenario does the business about email addresses envision?
EDIT: Apologies, I now see the parenthetical "(being applied to identity verification, where possible)," which I managed to completely overlook on a first reading. Please ignore the above criticism, but you still might want to make the deciban descriptions more explicit.
Sounds like you have some good, concrete ideas about how to proceed. Contacting professors whose work interests you, to ask about graduate study in their departments and/or labs, is certainly a necessary step.
Throughout academia, we have a rule of thumb: do not ever, ever, spend any of your own money or go into debt for a PhD. That means that any place at which you should give the slightest consideration to doing graduate work should offer you a full waiver of tuition, plus a modest income ("stipend") and health insurance, for the duration of a r...
Thanks for this post. Whatever problems the JTB definition of knowledge may have—the most obvious one of those to LWers probably being the treatment of "knowledge" as a binary condition—the Gettier problem has always struck me as being a truly ridiculous critique, for just the reasons you put forward here.
Scott Lemieux once called this the "my-utopia-versus-your-grubby-reality asymmetry," a delightful turn of phrase which has stuck with me since I read it.
Although Lemieux was talking about something subtly different from, or possibly a subset of, what you're talking about: the practice of describing the benefits of your own preferences as if you could completely and down to the smallest detail redesign the relevant system from scratch, while insisting on subjecting your opponent's preferences to a rigorous "how do we get there from here"...
"That" if you're a grammar Nazi; either one if you're a professional linguist or mere native speaker of English. :)
A big +1 to this and it echoes in many respects my advice here to a similar question. What you hit upon here that I did not do in that comment is the importance of understanding the etiology of one's new belief.
For starters, I'd say it would be best to take advice from people whose careers and accomplishments are to some extent a matter of public record. Then you can evaluate (a) whether they seem to have actually accomplished the things they're trying to teach you to accomplish, and (b) whether they seem to have accomplished those things via the procedure they're encouraging you to follow. If yes to both, then you might proceed further.
In that case, the problem of making good advice seem too easy might come down to a couple of things. First, you want to see a go...
Glad you're doing this and sorry that I do not currently have time to proofread a batch of them myself.
This might be the only time ever that I can mention this without automatically sounding like an asshole, so here goes: Eliezer, whose writing is generally amazingly consistent and well-proofread with respect to style and punctuation, has the habit of using a hyphen, surrounded by single spaces, in place of a dash. He's far from alone in doing this, and it's an entirely reasonable habit to have given that the hyphen is an ASCII character but dashes aren't....
If you want to be a professional biologist (or any professional scientist) you will probably need to get one or more graduate degrees. (There are exceptions to this, but your career possibilities will be more limited.) This complicates matters in some respects and simplifies it in others. Let me mostly focus on ways it simplifies matters.
Well, at the risk of explaining my joke, I only meant to suggest that the opening of the chapter makes it sound like Beck thinks Beethoven's Fifth would have been "famous" and instantly recognizable to Englishmen in 1678. Maybe I should charitably assume that Beck originally had it as "the latest church anthem by Purcell" but his editors made him change it.
The chapter begins with a pretty delightful infelicity, since in 1678 Beethoven's Fifth Symphony was still 130 years away from its premiere. Granted, this is very specialized knowledge available only to professional musicologists like myself and I doubt Beck's publisher can afford my consulting fees.
(I can just imagine the English scientists standing around wondering why this lunatic is inflicting this cacophony on them and looking at them so expectantly.)
The chapter begins with a pretty delightful infelicity, since in 1678 Beethoven's Fifth Symphony was still 130 years away from its premiere.
If Siri made the journey back in time, why are you surprised that an mp3 of Beethoven's 5th made the journey? Siri was created slightly later than Beethoven's 5th.
Somewhat more amazing is that this iPhone has cellular service in the 17th century, and can make video calls to future people. It must be on Verizon.
You know, this is one of those cases (coming out as GLBT would be another one) where we sometimes have to, in essence, parent our parents. Be the patient grownup while they have their temper tantrum, and after they calm down be willing to forgive the hurtful, ridiculous things they said. I think it's more than reasonable to say you'll only talk to her about this when she can be at least calm about it. Encourage her to ask you questions and answer them honestly. Reassure her that nothing about your relationship with her has changed -- she has no need to fee...
Basically, I disagree with this. A few thoughts:
(1) Even if we were all perfectly rational, it'd still take time to research the optimal answer to every question. Why shouldn't I outsource that research to people who are interested in doing it and whose basic viewpoints I trust? [Edit: RomeoStevens already made this point above.]
(2) What's the harm to you from posts on "applied rationality" topics being posted on LW? Don't read or comment on what you aren't interested in. If you prefer posts on the theory and practice of rationality itself, just ...
It's a curiosity stopper in the sense that people don't worry any more about risks from AI when they assume that intelligence correlates with doing the right thing, and that superintelligence would do the right thing all the time.
Stuart is trying to answer a different question, which is "Given that we think that's probably false, what are some good examples that help people to see its falsity?"
I guess I think this is, at best, only part of your true rejection. If there were some visionary artist who wanted to create art that would get thousands of people interested in the SIAI cause, such that donations poured in and some bright mathy kids decided to help solve FAI problems, I have a feeling you'd tell that artist "Go for it, with our gratitude."
(Ahem.)
This would in no way entail converting that person into anything other than a "pure" artist. There would be no need for that person to become the kind of highly flexible SIAI r...
If both your work and your procrastination are computer-based (and isn't that a concise description of all my problems!), Beeminder plus TagTime looks like a pretty promising combination. Beeminder keeps track of personal goal-related data for you, and TagTime is a random sampling-based way of seeing how you spend your computer time. They're put out by (at least some of) the same people, and TagTime can automatically send your data to the relevant Beeminder graph.
NB: TagTime is only available in a developer version right now, which means that I haven't tri...
That's a great song -- I hadn't heard it before and it's satire at its finest.
This is tangential, but I noticed that it's a very literal parody (especially at the beginning) of "I Have Confidence" from The Sound of Music, which (while not exactly a rationalist anthem or anything) is a song about the virtue of shutting up and doing the impossible, when you have to.
Interesting ideas -- I can think of a few more. On the "smart = more moral" side:
This suggests to me that Task #1 is finding ways for people to engage with your ideas without involving a status competition between you and them.
I think this is exactly right. In other words, people who don't yet know how to leave themselves a line of retreat might, at the outset, need us to do it for them.
Wow, that's very interesting. I haven't seen any use of Bayesian methods along similar lines in music theory -- that is, to try to account for otherwise opaque compositional motivations on the part of an individual composer. I look forward to reading the article more closely, thank you for passing it along.
Where Bayes is beginning to crop up more often is in explicitly computational music theory, such as corpus music research and music cognition. I have a colleague who (among other things) develops key-finding algorithms on a large corpus of tonal music, i...
I think how important these criticisms are depends on who the intended audience of the essay is -- which Gwern doesn't really make clear. If it's basically for SIAI's internal research use (as you might think, since they paid for it), tone probably hardly matters at all. The same is largely the case if the intended audience is LW users -- our preference for accessibly, informally written scholarly essays is revealed by our being LW readers. If it's meant as a more outward-facing thing, and meant to impress academics who aren't familiar with SIAI or LW and ...
I wish I could remember where I read this (or even in what academic field). But some academic once wrote that his most acclaimed, most cited papers were always the ones he thought of as mere summaries of existing knowledge. This made a strong impression on me. In most cases when dealing with high-level ideas, very good restatements of previous research are not only valuable, but likely to make those ideas click for some non-trivial number of readers. A few other thoughts:
This seems strongly related to the notion of inferential distance -- we tend to unde
Perhaps you read it here: Explainers Shoot High. Aim Low!:
A few years ago, an eminent scientist once told me how he'd written an explanation of his field aimed at a much lower technical level than usual. He had thought it would be useful to academics outside the field, or even reporters. This ended up being one of his most popular papers within his field, cited more often than anything else he'd written.
Addendum: With his gracious permission: The eminent scientist was Ralph Merkle.
Carrier's book may be seen as the first salvo in that attack, but this makes me wish his case had not been presented in the context of such a parochial and disreputable sub-field of history as Jesus Studies.
Boy, do I ever agree with this. I would love to be able to cite Carrier's work (edit: that is, his methodological program) without appearing to take on the baggage of interest in an area that is simultaneously irrelevant and mindkilling -- that is, in which having opinions might be taken as chiefly an indication of tribalism.
Certainly, to really get ...
I have a grudge against this topic for two reasons. One is that this is how I discovered that the tribal signaling aspect of belief doesn't follow the expected conjunction rules. Among secular Jews,
The other is that people trying to write the phra...
Ok, it's undoubtedly true that de Botton and I share a good many values. But I do insist that his current project strikes me as incredibly misguided if not outright stupid. I would expect him to be quite resistant to an SIAI-like program of answers to the kinds of "philosophical" questions he's asking. He seems to believe that religious leaders, despite basing their teachings on their totally groundless factual claims about reality, are important moral teachers who must be taken with utmost seriousness. And he believes that (for example) Richard ...
It's a nice quote, and correct as far as it goes. "We raise these questions not in order to provide definitive answers, but in order to stimulate questioning" is an annoying trope. However, a few thoughts:
I am very, very wary of wading into anything approaching a debate with you, given my respect for you. But I feel that this comment assumes an unrealistic picture of how time/money tradeoffs work in most people's lives. Most of us do not have direct ways we can translate a couple of spare minutes into the corresponding amount of money, and even if we did, we aren't perfect utilitarians who always make as much money as we possibly can and then donate every remaining penny to the most efficient possible charity. If anyone is that kind of person, they should i...
Thus the disclaimers.
then you should probably consider that "free" time
However, do note that the generalization of that argument would allow a vast number of posts asking for the use of "free time" on various less effective causes. Other matching grants (this one is expiring now, but there will normally be something in the same ballpark), petitions, tasks on Mechanical Turk, and so forth could be summoned.
If there were 100 such posts each month responding to them would clearly on average be a drain on your other activities, requi...
I've done this, and it is as easy as atorm says it is. I've also been the beneficiary of stem cell donation: my mother is currently alive and has a normal life expectancy after receiving a transplant that cured her of leukemia. She would otherwise have died within months of her diagnosis. Some years after her transplant, she was able to correspond with her stem cell donor, who told her that the donation was as simple as going to his local hospital and having his blood drawn. (These days, an agonizing, old-fashioned bone marrow transplant is rarely if ever ...
Well, exactly. That's what I meant when I said that it was very confusing to me, as a young grad student in an outside field, to have a course that assigned Peirce and Lacan side by side with a straight face, evidently taking them equally seriously.