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All of liam_hinzman's Comments + Replies

Is there a website for tracking fads?
Answer by liam_hinzman90

Treendly and Exploding Topics both show terms that are rapidly increasing in Google search volume.

A week ago I was curious to see if many people were cheating on the AP exams - they're online for the first time due to COVID-19. I searched "derivative" on Google Trends and saw that a ton of people were probably cheating due to a spike in search volume exactly when the AP calculus exam started (related searches also indicated what the exam question was).

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2romeostevensit
These are pretty great!
Signaling: Why People Have Conversations
liam_hinzman10

In this situation I like the model of player vs character. In Dungeons and Dragons you create a character sheet with abilities, stats, and motivations. This limits your options and creates preferences for certain actions but as a player you still have choice, and can still do things that are contrary to you "character sheet", it's just less likely that you will do so

I think that evolutionary psychology, specifically signaling in this case, is the reason why people enjoy conversations and it acts as our character sheet - shaping our general p... (read more)

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7titotal
The problem is the shift from saying why a behaviour may have evolved, to saying why people do it now. Why do people enjoy videogames? well, our brains give off the good chemicals when we overcome challenges and succeeded in difficult tasks. This was likely a result of evolution trying to incentive's hunting and gathering and so on, so we could do it more often and provide more food for our offspring. But does that mean that the primary motivation for playing videogames is to provide food for offspring? Obviously not. So yes, it's possible that people evolved to enjoy social bonding because in pre-historic times it helped to form allies. But we live in a vastly different context from hunter-gatherer days. Now we do it for the pure enjoyment, not for the original reason that the enjoyment evolved. This is my primary concern with evopsych in general, to be honest. Looking at evolutionary pressure from the distant past will only tell us how people thought in the distant past, it doesn't tell us how our minds have adapted to our changing context. If we want to know how people think now, we can study how they think now.
Signaling: Why People Have Conversations
liam_hinzman10

I think people information trading, and coordinating are good reasons for why humans evolved language, but I think that signaling gives a stronger explanation for why "casual" conversations happen so often.

Why do you think the signaling interpretation doesn't fully explain why relevance is necessary? Your hypothesis, norms for language evolving for efficiency, makes sense to me but doesn't strike me as being a more important factor than signaling.

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1FactorialCode
That sounds reasonable. I still think there's more going on in casual conversation than signalling, as evidenced by signalling in conversation getting called out as "bragging" or "humble bragging" or "flexing", indicating that people would like you to do less signalling and more of whatever else casual conversation is used for. I think it the best argument against signalling fully explaining relevance is that there are situations where signalling is pointless or impossible, this happens between people who know each other very well as any attempt to signal in those cases would either be pointless or immediately called out. However, relevance is almost a universal property of all conversation and the norm rarely if ever breaks down. (Unless you're dealing with people who are really high, but I would explain this as a consequence of these people no longer being able to keep track of context even if they wanted to.)
Signaling: Why People Have Conversations
liam_hinzman20

I really appreciate the feedback! Agreed with all your points, there's a lot of areas I need to work on to improve my writing.

Signal-wise you come across as what I think of as the good side LW: well reasoned, thoughtful, and intelligent.

Sidenote: I think people (like you) who comment thoughtfully on other people's "content" make the internet a much better place.

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Signaling: Why People Have Conversations
liam_hinzman20

Will add, just finished reading that book. This post was my effort to solidify my main takeaway from The Elephant in the Brain for myself.

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liam_hinzman*50

Growth, Novelty, and Preservation

Note: This was heavily inspired by toonalfrink's recent shortform post

There's this Farnam Street blog post that says "if you can get 1 percent better each day for one year, you’ll end up thirty-seven times better by the time you’re done"

This always seemed a bit unrealistic to me, but until recently I wasn't able to pinpoint why. I think digging into this is important because it's easy to look back 1 year, see how much you've grown, and then extrapolate to your future and thin... (read more)

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8Dagon
No, this is mathematically true. A strict 1% improvement over 365 consecutive cycles is 3778% improvement. Compound interest is really that powerful. No exaggeration there. It's misleading, though. The model doesn't apply to most human improvement. It's almost impossible to improve any metric by 1% in a day, almost impossible to avoid negative growth sometimes, certainly impossible (for any real human) to maintain a rate of improvement - declining marginal return for interventions kicks in quickly. I think it's worth noting decay, but you also need to recognize that novelty is a different dimension than growth in capability. You can have lots of novelty with zero change (neither improvement nor decay) in your likelihood of furthering any goals.