All of jdinkum's Comments + Replies

I wasn't saying to commit to not breaking over the content of a text message, but to commit to not breaking up over the medium of texting.

Even in a two week old relationship, I think it's reasonable to say something like, "Hey, I enjoy hanging out with you, and it seems you feel the same. If you change your mind though, please don't tell me over text or e-mail, just give me a call."

No, no, no. Do not do this. It is bad advice!

First, asking for ANY precommitment not to break up over X is going to be a "major relationship step" and unless you are very experienced with relationships it is not something you ask for during the first two weeks, because there's a decent chance it'll harm or end the relationship.

Second, it's a stupid precommitment to agree to! There's all SORTS of good reasons to break up with someone who texts you, since the content can be basically anything.

Third, any breakup can be blamed on texts / emails, so i... (read more)

I think it'd be helpful to have a small textbox to add a short comment to a poster where I can put "I agree!" or "Fallacious reasoning" or "inappropriate discussion" that only shows up in the poster's view so there is some feedback besides Up/Down, yet doesn't clog up the thread.

I've never seen that function in a forum though, so perhaps the programming is simple.

I just don't understand the downvote/upvote thing, especially if the norm is/should be for broken thoughts.

When I get downvoted (or upvoted), I often don't get a comment explaining why. So it's unclear where I'm broken (or what I'm doing right). That's frustrating and doesn't help me increase my value to the community.

It'd be nice to have downvoters supply a reason why, in order to improve the original.

2drethelin
A downvote without explanation can basically be translated as "Lurk Moar, Noob" When I downvote without explanation it's because I want less of what I'm downvoting AND I don't want the forums to be cluttered with explanations of what should be obvious.

I believe the real issue that B. raised of LW being cold won't be effectively improved by posting "I agree!" replies, but requires some emotional involvement. A response that offers something to the OP, that gives something back.

Like, why do you agree? What are the implications of you agreeing? Or, what thoughts or emotions does the content of the post bring up for you? The response doesn't have to be long, but it should be personal and thoughtful.

A little bit more of that may go a long way towards developing community.

It feels like people are ten thousand times more likely to point out my flaws than to appreciate something I said. Also, there's >next to no emotional relating to one another.

I'm sorry, that sucks. I think you're right and hope this changes. I don't post very often, but when I do in the future, I'll be more aware of this.

0Sarokrae
I tried to read this comment in various tones of voice, but I could only get "patronising", "ironic" or "really creepy". Was that the intention?

You could start off by overtly letting the kids know that "guessing the password" is how their success in school is measured and you're not going to be able to change that reality, but you could introduce "alternative" ways of thinking.

How about a game where each student writes down their answer to a passwordy type question and scores a point for every other student with the same answer. Lowest score wins. But they have to justify their answer.

If a teacher asks the question: "Who discovered America?" The password is: "Chr... (read more)

2ikrase
There is a problem with that: It assumes multiple valid responses and deals too much with what 'discover' or 'america' means. It wouldn't work for the 'Why is this steel plate hotter on the side away from the fire' question. Hermenueutics-like games are risky since I think they teach contrarianness, thinking up unique-non obvious answers w/o regard to correctness. They teach the kind of reason that is rightly accused of being able to argue for atrocities. I think that's a kind of terrible lesson. It might work well to come up with a whole bunch of questions that are not to trick-questiony, but in which guessing the password is spectacularly wrong. For the sciences, a better method might be to set up things where you have to make simple predictions.
6Desrtopa
This sounds like a solution to something, but I think it's a separate problem, and it's also potentially an introduction to another problem. In fields that aren't constrained to a single right answer, students frequently learn to optimize for being interesting and creative over coming up with the best supported answer they can. To quote Dave Barry This sort of thing is good for stretching students' creative muscles, but bad for preparing students to grapple with tasks like "read these arguments for opposing conclusions and try and determine which is actually true, given that we can go out and check the answer objectively," or "Try and figure out whether this proposed design would work."

Sometimes I still marvel about how in most time-travel stories nobody thinks of this

Characters in the novel Pastwatch by Orson Scott Card wrestle with this issue.

While reading the original post I thought of Kahneman's Ted Talk on happiness.

No, but I might exchange the lives of someone elses friends for a billion tons of paperclips.

2[anonymous]
But would you exchange every single person on the planet for 10^18 tons of paperclips?

That's one element in what started my line of thought..I was imagining situations where I would consider the exchange of human lives for non-human objects. How many people's lives would be a fair exchange for a pod of bottlenose dolphins? A West Virginia mountaintop? An entire species of snail?

I think what I'm getting towards is there's a difference between human preferences and human preference for other humans. And by human preferences, I mean my own.

4[anonymous]
That is one objection to Coherent Extrapolated Volition (CEV), i.e. that human values are too diverse. Though the space of possible futures that an AGI could spit out is VERY large compared to the space of futures people would want, even if one takes into consideration the diversity of human values.

I've been trying to work through Torture versus Dustspecks and The Intuitions Behind Utilitarianism and getting stuck...

It seems Values are arational, but there can be an irrational difference between what we believe our values are and what they really are.

0DanArmak
Certainly. We are not transparent to ourselves: we have subconscious and situation-dependent drives; we don't know in advance precisely how we'll respond to hypothetical situations, how much we'll enjoy and value them; we have various biases and inaccurate/fake memory issues which cause us to value things wrongly because we incorrectly remember enjoying them; our conscious selves self-deceive and are deceived by other brain modules; and so on. Moreover, humans don't have well-defined (or definable) utility functions; our different values conflict.

I see I've mistaken the word "inherent" to mean "many people share a term for the existence of humans". Thanks.

If your goal in pursuing writing advice is to increase your audience then my advice: View yourself as an editor not a writer. Your weakness as a writer (IMHO) is verbosity and generality (the two are often related).

Write your next post and when you feel it's ready, then run a word count on it. Rewrite the post to reduce the count by 50%. Post both versions and see what happens.

1DuncanS
Here's what I tend to do. On my first draft of something significant, I don't even worry about style - I concentrate on getting my actual content down on paper in some kind of sensible form. I don't worry about the style because I have more than enough problems getting the content right. In this first draft, I think about structure. What ONE thing am I trying to say? What are the 2-5 sub-points of that one thing? Do these sub-points have any sub-points? Make a tree structure, and if you can't identify the trunk, go away until you can. Then I go back and fix it. Because the content is now in roughly the right place, the second run-through is much easier. But normally that helpful first draft is full of areas where the logical flow can be improved, and the English can be tightened up. I think you're missing this stage out entirely as when looking at your post I can find plenty to do. Here's what five minutes of such attention does to your first para. "When I was 12 I started an email correspondence with a cousin, and we joked and talked about the things going on in our lives. This went on for years. One day, several years in, I read through the archives. It saturated my mind with the details of my life back then. I had the surreal feeling of having traveled back in time - almost becoming again the person I was years ago, with all my old feelings, hopes and concerns." Keep at it - there's plenty enough there for the polishing to be worthwhile.
2FrankAdamek
I've been thinking about this, and I think that is my biggest problem. It actually seems related to the way I talk as well - I often recall over-informing in person. The most recent post is something of a different style, hopefully shorter and easier to read. I look forward to getting feedback.

I think a fair question to ask is, "If you don't use a car, how will you get to places safely?"

There seems to be an unsupported assumption that the alternatives to driving (cycling, walking, public transportation) are SAFER than driving.

On a per-mile travelled basis, what are the risks associated with various forms of transportation (driving, walking, cycling, public bus, public train, etc)? My suspicion is that the danger is (in descending order): cycling, walking, driving, public bus, public train, but I don't know where to go to find evidence.

My point still holds. Most people, myself included, don't have a belief that an egg will spontaneously reform according any laws of physics. To use it as an example of the difference between certainty and likelihood is ineffective.

1JDM
If it were something too open to debate, it would take away from the point. The point is as stated. There is a non-zero probability it will happen, so you shouldn't use "certain", but any reasonable person will act on the belief it isn't going to happen. If he used religion, which is also extremely unlikely to be correct, it would distract from the point.

"The rule that says that the egg won't spontaneously reform and leap back into your hand is merely probabilistic."

This example requires a level of education that doesn't match my belief of the expected audience of this post.

The low importance in the distinction between mathematical certainty and realistic likelihood is valid, but involving quantum probability kills the post for me.

1Nisan
The example doesn't require quantum physics. Just ordinary classical mechanics.

I agree it could be worse as well. But it would have to be much worse, enough to account for the "badness" of WWII itself to be undesirable.

Sorry, I should have been clearer.

I do mean automated trucking. I think that development is less than 30 years away. Self-driving cars are a functioning technology now, the main hurdles (not insignificant ones) being social and legal.

Like most human-replacing technology, where the industry still exists, but is now automated ( modern car factories compared to buggy whip manufacturers), I don't expect trucking to be 100% automated, but the human factor will be reduced significantly the next 30 years.

Vehicles will still need humans to gas, service, deal with ... (read more)

The US government has listed some trends here: http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_203.htm

Manufacturing is clearly out. Services that involve interacting with other humans (health care, teaching) are in.

Personally, I think we've plucked a lot of low hanging fruit. I predict the maturation of some technologies that will make a few fields move towards obsolescence. I expect at major ( >%50) decline in employment for long haul truckers and tax preparers under that maturation. Retail sales will decline in favor of ship-to-home, and obviously some jobs are clear... (read more)

0mwengler
How does retail falling in favor of ship to home lower employment for long-haul truckers? You still have to get the stuff from the ports to the distribution centers. The only thing that cuts down employment for long haul truckers is automated trucks, and that is still a long long way away.

Thanks all for the comments. I didn't actually mean to post this yet (my first original post). I thought I had saved it as a draft and was coming back to flesh it out...and there it was with comments and all.

Despite (or because of??) the terseness of my original post, I received many excellent upvotable replies.

I was going to expound a little more on the two points.

How do I go about defining and achieving realistic goals of parenting? This is the bigger question of the two since I feel more at sea with my 5 year old (also have a 2 year old, who's much &quo... (read more)

8KPier
Can't speak as a parent, but speaking as a child: Read to them. Lots, about everything. Confident readers will find school easier, enjoy learning outside of school, and stop them from associating reading with school and work. Get a set of children's encyclopedias, if you can find good ones. Do science with them. If they ask you how something works, ask them how they could figure it out. My little brother thought heavier things would fall faster: we went outside and tried it. Then we watched the YouTube video of the feather-hammer experiment on the moon. Answer their questions, even when they have a million of them. Better yet, get them to figure out the answers to their own questions. Watch commercials with them, once they're old enough to watch tv. Explain how the commercials try to trick people (this is the easiest way to introduce biases, but don't call them that.) If they've won an argument, tell them so, and tell them why. If you win an argument, tell them why. "Go to bed because I said so" is unhelpful. "Go to bed because when you don't, you're tired the next day and won't have any fun." is helpful. You can (and should) make them go to bed. Don't tell them to "be rational". Show them what it actually looks like. When you make decisions, explain your thought process to them, even if you have to oversimplify. When they make decisions, ask them about theirs. Remember, if you're even thinking about this, you're ahead of 99% of the planet. Kids usually manage to turn out okay.

And extremely common one in my cultural (USA) context is that "being cold" can give you a "cold". According to common wisdom, being out in cold weather with wet hair and no hat will cause you to be infected with a rhinovirus.

The expression encapsulating this is "You'll catch your death!"

When travelling in Eastern Europe, I found a similar attitude towards drafts from a couple locals. The safest was to keep all windows and doors to the outside closed (in a room or car). Opening one portal was frowned on. Two or more (creating airflow) was taboo and would cause sickness.

Prolonged exposure to cold temperatures can weaken the immune system, so the advice is at least helpful, though false.

Please define your use of the word "rich".

1glunkthunker
i was quoting from the original post. In the context i assumed it meant: enough money to not have to worry about needed more money.
3Vladimir_M
jdinkum: That's not a good number to base your calculations on. Getting away with any crime nowadays is extremely difficult if the police and prosecutors are willing to invest significant resources in investigating and prosecuting it. How much they'll be willing to invest heavily depends on all sorts of circumstances, even when it comes to the most serious crimes. In particular, murders and other violent crimes are investigated far more vigorously if committed in a respectable environment, in a way makes high-status people feel unsafe.

You could look at the cost of alcohol as the price you pay to enter a social setting. If you were expected to consume some beverage, and they were all priced the same but exorbitantly, what would you do?

It has not been my experience that someone who doesn't drink stands out in any social setting that I would consider important. If you're getting blank or worse stares, it may be your delivery or it may be you need new social settings.

My recommendation would be to use the question as a platform to engage the questioner and others around. Tell a funny anecdot... (read more)

I've never been good at motivating to exercise on my own. I have been successful by becoming part of a group, like a studio or a team or a dojo. Developing social relationships around exercise helps me.

I also realized I enjoy physical contact and now gravitate towards martial arts.