All of Nanashi's Comments + Replies

Thanks for the feedback! Some specific notes:

Quartiles are good; I would be curious about deciles as well. Unfortunately my primary data source, the US Bureau of Labor & Statistics, only reports 10th percentile, 25th percentile, median, 75th percentile and 90th percentile. I'm working on creating two different views: the "simple" view which just has a few relevant numbers, and the "full" view which has all the relevant data.

When I mouseover a line on the salary vs. age graph, the numbers are shown with the lowest salary on top.

... (read more)
0[anonymous]
Just wanted to give you a shoutout. This is a great idea! And yes, has valuable non-overlap with 80k. edit 1: forgot to say - if you can find data on the effect of a entering a job, that may be particularly useful. I have yet to come across such a data set, but look for one occasionally. For example, a highschool student may see your data and say wow, an Estimator has it good. Yet, estimators often have to have experience in other construction occupations first. So, if there is data from which you can select the population of high school students who have entered jobs, you can control for those factors.
0Dorikka
Cool, glad to hear of the improvements. Yes, and I think that would work.

I think that this emphasis on explicit, built-from-scratch mathematical proofs runs counter to your previously expressed suggestion that learning via pattern matching is more efficient than learning via explicit reasoning.

I've found that the emphasis on first principles is often symptomatic of someone who is speaking for their own benefit rather than that of their audience. After all, you're making the unwarranted assumption that A.) your audience wants first principles rather than a practical application, and B.) your audience is, for lack of a better wo... (read more)

2JonahS
My focus here was two-fold 1. Learning mathematical proof as a means of learning how to read and listen very carefully. 2. Learning the limits of rigorous reasoning by seeing how hard it is to give arguments that are actually rigorous, as opposed to just having the superficial appearance of rigor. The second point is a part of my case for the first post that you linked.

It's funny you mention that, that feature is actually built into the tool, it's just I hadn't written a user interface for it yet. I got your message as well, let's set up some time to talk.

The roadblock I came up against was how to return results that are useful. Many desirable-at-face-value careers (e.g. Artists, actors, etc.) have pretty high 90th percentile salaries but low average salaries. Is it useful to show people something that's possible albeit unlikely? One implementation I had toyed with was showing the number of people at that position actually making that kind of money.

0[anonymous]
What if you calculated the expected value for each position? That seems like the most accurate representation of what you're actually trying to capture.

Ability to compare multiple jobs simultaneously. Make a note saying the graph will appear once you pick a job, or have it pop up by default on a default job. Center the numerical figures in their cells.

One thing I was thinking about on this note was, comparing the "true cost of post-graduate education", in other words, you choose a job that will require X years of post-grad, and then you choose a job that doesn't. And it will compare lifetime earnings.

Make the list of jobs and/or the list of categories searchable and associate search key

... (read more)
2KnaveOfAllTrades
What I mean is if you have the resources (time, energy, etc.) to do so, consider trying to get the data where the script returned '0' values because the source you used didn't have that bit of data. But make it clear that you've done independent research where you find the figures yourself, so that the user realises it's not from the same dataset. And failing that, e.g. if there just isn't enough info out there to put a figure, state that you looked into it but there isn't enough data. (This lets the user distinguish between 'maybe the data just wasn't in the dataset' versus 'this info doesn't even exist so I shouldn't bother looking for it.) Sure it would again be more resource-intensive, but I was thinking you could figure out yourself which careers are actually related, or ask people in those fields what they actually think are the core parts of their job and which others jobs they'd relate it to.

In my experience, at the under-grad level, the college you go to doesn't really matter (and especially your grades). I know that when I am hiring, I personally spend exactly 2 seconds looking at what school someone went to (and exactly 0 seconds looking at their grades).

It may be different at the post-graduate level though.

0satt
Yes, I suspect the elite-college job premium comes less from that mechanism and more from (1) more-skilled students applying to higher-ranked colleges, (2) unofficial/semi-official cumulative advantage processes whereby current students at elite colleges benefit from past elite-college graduates becoming elites in external social networks, and (3) elite colleges having better official career services like interview practice sessions, job databases, and careers fairs.
0Lumifer
I think the undergrad college matters, but on a three-bucket basis :-) The buckets are (1) the top tier; (2) the very large middle; (3) the bottom of the barrel.

I haven't heard of them before but that looks like good stuff.

7John_Maxwell
There's also Cognito Mentoring, a project Jonah Sinick and Vipul Naik worked on for a while, plus its associated wiki. You can read about why they chose to move on from the project. One idea would be to revive their project and fill gaps in their existing knowledge base with cool tools like this one.

I'm thinking more at the high school level, but I think you are correct.

0James_Miller
In the United States the kind of job you can get is strongly correlated with the college you graduate from and to a lesser extend your college grades, so high school students (especially before they determine what college they will go to) face enormous uncertainty over their future job market value.

I think that's because, when looking at the aggregate of society, it's more efficient to bring people up to the level of semi-proficiency than it is to bring them to the level of expertise. If you have 100,000 hours of training to allocate, you get more bang for your buck to train 50 people to 80% proficiency than it is to train 10 people to the level of an expert.

The flaw, of course, is that "training hours" isn't a finite, discrete resource. Any individual can opt to spend additional time of their own accord if they are truly passionate. The p... (read more)

0ChristianKl
I don't think it's only a matter of training time. Having to learn for an exam requires you to learn the concepts in a few weeks instead of spending two years on it. Quite often people forget things after they wrote the exam. Distributing the learning over a longer time frame allows for deeper integration.
0[anonymous]
Only when they've got some minimal level of guidance, such as our Best Textbooks thread and a dependency graph of subjects.

Although technically you could say that the whole argument begs the question, depending on how you interpret the logic. Because it basically follows the form: "Learning a skill is trivial because you can break a skill down into trivial subskills."

The definition of "fundamentals" differs though, depending on how abstract you get. The more layers of abstraction, the more abstract the fundamentals. If my goal is high-level programming, I don't need to know how to write code on bare metal.

That's why I advocate breaking things down until you reach the level of triviality for you personally. Most people will find, "writing a for-loop" to be trivial, without having to go farther down the rabbit hole. At a certain point, breaking things down too far actually makes things less trivial.

Yes, this this this this this this this. "The capacity of human minds is limited and I'll accept climbing up higher in abstraction levels at the price of forgetting how the lower-level gears turn." If I could upvote this multiple times, I would.

This is the crux of this entire approach. Learn the higher level, applied abstractions. And learn the very basic fundamentals. Forget learning how the lower-level gears turn: just learn the fundamental laws of physics. If you ever need to figure out a lower-level gear, you can just derive it from your knowledge of the fundamentals, combined with your big-picture knowledge of how that gear fits into the overall system.

0estimator
That only works if there are few levels of abstraction; I doubt that you can derive how do programs work at the machine codes level based of your knowledge of physics and high-level programming. Sometimes, gears are so small that you can't even see them on your top level big picture, and sometimes just climbing up one level of abstraction takes enormous effort if you don't know in advance how to do it. I think that you should understand, at least once, how the system works on each level and refresh/deepen that knowledge when you need it.

It sounds like both you and estimator are actually both on the same page: estimator seems to be talking about the "prerequisite" in the sense of, "systematic prerequisite", as in, people say that you should learn X before you learn Y. You seem to be talking about "prerequisite" in the sense that, "skill X is a necessary component of skill Y"

Both of you, however, seem to agree that you should ignore the stuff that is irrelevant to what you are actually trying to accomplish.

0btrettel
This is a good way to put it. I may not have been clear. To use an example, I have a concept map about fluid dynamics that I used in a class I took on turbulence recently. There were a few concepts that I did not understand well at some point, and I wanted to figure out which ones. To be more specific, isotropic tensors are often used in turbulence theory and modeling, but I didn't really understand how to construct isotropic tensors algebraically. It became pretty clear this was something I should learn given the number of links isotropic tensors had to other concepts.

First and foremost, don't bother with Java, it'll be dead in 5 years. (Okay, just kidding, sorta.)

Okay, so jokes aside: what do you want? As in, what do you hope that the world will accomplish before you die? Even if you aren't the one who makes the breakthrough, you still benefit. So, what do you hope that someone, anyone, it could be you, it could be some scientist somewhere else, what do you hope they will do, more than anything else?

You seem to point to things that revolve around life extension, and your thought that current methods aren't going to g... (read more)

2ChristianKl
When Python 2.7 (or gasps 2.6) and even COBOL won't die, Java is going to be around for a long time.
0zslastman
I'd much rather learn C++ for all it's faults, since it meshes so nicely with R and Python, but people keep telling me to learn Java... What I"m referring to in my field specifically is understanding gene regulatory networks. I've become convinced that the only way we're going to get a hold on them is by actually simulating the biochemistry. Searching for higher level abstractions within them just doesn't work that well. This will require lots and lots of experiments, which are currently done by hand, to be automated, and the results to be synthesized into very complex simulations. Humans are too slow, and their minds too small. As for what I want, that's a good question. I'm not particularly enthusiastic about pouring our resources into tiny, high cost, low quality life extensions, which is what I see most of biology like cancer research, doing now (those parts of it that are aren't just furthering careers). I'd be more enthusiastic about improving quality of life for large numbers of people, or averting catastrophic risks.

There's a big difference between the fundamentals, and the low-level practical applications. I think the latter is what estimator is referring to. You can't really make a breakthrough or do real research without a firm grasp of the fundamentals. But you definitely can make a breakthrough in, say, physics, without knowing the exact tensile strength of wood vs. steel. And yet, that type of "Applied Physics" was a pre-requisite at my school for the more advanced fields of physics that I was actually interested in.

0[anonymous]
Oh. Really? Dang.

I go into this in further detail in this post

Defining the success conditions is a critical first step, and you'd be surprised at how many people don't do that. Many people frame their goals as a state-of-being, e.g. "I want to be the fastest runner in the world" rather than a success-condition, e.g. "I want to beat the current world record holder."

Okay, so I made a significant revision of the post. The original ideas are all there, just written in a much less obtuse manner.

  • A much more logical argument is presented at the beginning, along with constraints.
  • "Archetypes" and "Processes" have been replaced by sub-skills and trivial sub-skills.
  • The lengthy discourse on strategy has been replaced by simply sorting your list of trivial sub-skills, which accomplishes the same effect.
  • The "improvement" has been streamlined greatly.
  • Meta-analysis has been removed because it's really a separate subject.

So, after some cursory thought, naturally the part of the system that gives you the most bang for your buck are the first 4 steps. The last 3 steps are designed to help you improve, which is a much slower process than just learning the basics.

So, now to figure out how to recursively apply the the skill of learning a skill quickly to the skill "learning skills quickly".

2Nanashi
Okay, so I made a significant revision of the post. The original ideas are all there, just written in a much less obtuse manner. * A much more logical argument is presented at the beginning, along with constraints. * "Archetypes" and "Processes" have been replaced by sub-skills and trivial sub-skills. * The lengthy discourse on strategy has been replaced by simply sorting your list of trivial sub-skills, which accomplishes the same effect. * The "improvement" has been streamlined greatly. * Meta-analysis has been removed because it's really a separate subject.

As I mentioned in another comment, the difference between this and the "common sense" approach is in what this system does not do.

As for what the 20% of this system that gives you the most bang for your buck? That's a good question. Right now my "safe" answer is that it's dependent on the type of skill you're trying to learn. The trouble is that the common threads among all the skills ("Find the 20% of the skill that yields 80% of the results") doesn't have a lot of practical value. Like telling someone that all they need to do to lose weight is eat less and exercise more.

Let me think about it some more and I'll get back to you.

2Nanashi
So, after some cursory thought, naturally the part of the system that gives you the most bang for your buck are the first 4 steps. The last 3 steps are designed to help you improve, which is a much slower process than just learning the basics. So, now to figure out how to recursively apply the the skill of learning a skill quickly to the skill "learning skills quickly".

Well of course they do. Because these things are necessary to learning a language. This is the 20% that's most efficient. By definition someone who puts in 100% of the effort will be doing what I did.

The efficiency of this approach revolves around what you don't do. You're excising the 80%. I didn't spend long hours learning katakana, hiragana and kanji. I didn't learn the more complex tenses and conjugations. I didn't spend time on vocabulary words that are highly situational. Contrast this to a typical Japanese textbook.

I'll give a more in depth breakdown soon but for now, I'd probably take a similar approach that I took to learning to read Japanese : learn basic sentence structure, learn top 150ish vocabulary words, avoid books written in non-romaji. Practice hearing spoken word by listening to speeches and following their transcriptions. My exception protocol for unrecognized words was to look them up. And for irregular sentence structure, to guess based on context. It worked for watching movies and reading, mostly but as you can tell, yoi kakikomu koto ga dekimasen*. I... (read more)

0estimator
But these are the things pretty much everybody does while learning languages.

Also, when you say "intermediate level language knowledge", what exactly do you mean? One of the key steps is defining exactly what you want to accomplish and why. I don't want to create a whole write-up, only to realize that you and I have two different definitions of "intermediate level language knowledge".

So if you'd tell me the "what" and the "why", I'll do the rest.

0estimator
I meant something like this.

Basketball is an example. I'm about to head home so I'll do the ultra-abbreviated TL;DR version:

  1. Goals: Score points, prevent opponent from scoring points.
  2. Archetypes: Offense (2-point), Offense (3-point), Defense
  3. Process How-To: Googled "how to layup", "how to shoot a 3-pointer", and "how to steal a ball" 3a. Process Failure Points: Missing a shot, getting the ball stolen, missing a pass. 3b. Process Difficulties: Anything involving ball handling or dribbling. Defense.
  4. Exception Protocol: On offense: Pass the ball to a bet
... (read more)

Ha ha, when I first read that, I thought "furriner" was another nickname for Furries and I was very, very confused.

I took your advice as well as estimator's into account and added two paragraphs at the beginning to offer 1. Some research showing that many systems follow a distribution where a small portion of work accounts for a large portion of results, and 2. and explanation as to why it's generalizable.

1estimator
Also, I'd like to compare your system against common sense reasoning baseline. What do you think are the main differences between your approach and usual approaches to skill learning? What will be the difference in actions? I'm asking that because that your guide contains quite long a list of recommendations/actions, while many of them are used (probably intuitively/implicitly) by almost any sensible person. Also, some of the recommendations clearly have more impact than others. So, what happens if we apply the Pareto principle to your learning system? Which 20% are the most important? What is at the core of your approach?
1estimator
Nice, but beware reasoning after you've written the bottom line. As for the actual content, I basically fail to see its area of applicability. For sufficiently complex skills, like say, math, languages or football decision-trees & howto-guides approach will likely fail as too shallow; for isolated skills like changing a tire complex learning approaches are an overkill -- just google it and follow the instructions. Can you elaborate languages example further? Because, you know, learning a bunch of phrases from phrasebook to be able to say a few words in a foreign country is a non-issue. Actually learning language is. How would you apply your system to achieve intermediate-level language knowledge? Any other non-trivial skills learning example would also suffice. What skills have you trained by using your learning system, and how?

That's totally fine, like I said, your post made sense and was consistent with what I've seen.

I still don't really think that stating my qualifications would do much. In this context, it still just seems too much like bragging. "I helped build a multi-million dollar company, I compete in barbecue competitions and consistently place in the top 10% of the field and was sponsored by a major barbecue website, was ranked in the top 100 players in the world for a popular collectible card game, learned how to code with no formal education (and used that know... (read more)

7Lumifer
If I may suggest spending some space on explaining why do you think your experience generalizes -- that is, why do you think that your methods will work for people who are not you.

Bad editing on my part. Ill update the post and include the original here for posterity

Yup, pretty much. To quote myself

TL;DR: The fastest way to learn new skills is to 1. Break it down into enough "recipes" or "how-to" guides that they cover most of what you might encounter, and 2. Figure out how to eloquently ask for help if you don't know what to do.

(Incidentally, the link you posted does not work, it's giving me a 404).

Articles on such topics are notorious for their average bad quality.

That's interesting, I wasn't aware of that reputation. That's good to know and certainly justifies your skepticism.

All that said, I think one can still evaluate your point (and in my case, my Less Wrong post) based on its internal logic and how consistent it is with one's own observations, without needing research to back it up. It would be easy enough to dismiss your own post for the very reasons you cited. Consider the following:

"In general, people new to a community are notor... (read more)

4estimator
I've started commenting here recently, but I'm a long time lurker (>1 year). Also, I was speaking about self-help articles in general, not conditional on whether they are posted on LW -- it makes sense, because pretty much anyone can post on LW. Now I found a somewhat less extreme example of what I think is an OK post on self-help although it doesn't have scientific references, because a) the author told us what actual results he achieved and, more importantly, b) the author explained why he thinks that the advice works in the first place. Personally, I don't find your post consistent with my observations, but it's not my main objection -- my main objection is that throwing an instruction without any justification is a bad practice, especially on such a controversial topic, especially in a rationalist community.

I agree that in some cases, it's better than nothing to include personal achievements (as I did when I was discussing socializing in another thread). I just don't really think that's the case here. I'll say the same thing that I said to estimator: if you genuinely think that my personal achievements would make a difference to you, I'll be glad to tell you.

As for relevant research, well, (and I might be wrong on this) I thought one of the purposes of LW was to produce original content. Again, I might be misinterpreting things here. But if there was research that said, "Such-and-such approach to skill-learning works well", why not just link to that instead of trying to paraphrase it?

Sure, I could, but would that make you any more likely to accept it? Generally I've found that the more someone expounds on their own credentials, the less credible (and likable) they sound.

If my own personal achievements would genuinely make a difference to you personally, then I'd be glad to tell you them. If not, then I don't quite see the point.

1[anonymous]
This is true, particularly because people are different, so if you tell us a lot about yourself, you're telling us comparatively little that applies to, well, us. That's why we often want some kind of organized, even if informal, study on a group of people, particularly a group in it with enough variation that personal uniqueness washes out.

Articles on such topics are notorious for their average bad quality. Reformulating in Bayesian terms, the prior probability of your statements being true is low, so you should provide some proofs or evidence -- or why I (or anyone) should believe you? Have you actually checked if it works? Have you actually checked if it works for somebody else?

I don't think that personal achievements are a bullet-proof argumentation for such an advice. Still, when I read something like this, I'm pretty sure that it contains valuable information, although it is probably a... (read more)

1Jiro
Personal achievements are pretty bad as evidence. But they can still be better than no evidence. (And personal achievements aren't all he asked for. I don't think references to relevant research would have the same problem as personal achievements here.)

Here's an example of this process applied to learning a foreign language:

Define the goal: I want to be able to a. interact and b. converse and c. function in a society that speaks a different language.

Archetypes: Most of the time I spend talking with others in person is spent a. eating/drinking/buying things, b.asking for assistance, c. meeting new people. To break those down into subtypes, I'd say:

  • Ordering food
  • Ordering drinks
  • Buying products
  • Inquiring about a location
  • Need help
  • Asking "small talk" questions
  • Giving "small talk" ans
... (read more)
3estimator
So, taking a look at what you actually propose to do, this reduces to a) learn some phrases from the tourist phrasebook and b) learn the rest of the language while c) avoiding high-stakes situations where you need language knowledge. Reminds me of this.

I definitely agree that you shouldn't be so brief as to not get your point across, I think the level of brevity depends on what your goal is. In this case, he's asking for help. It isn't until 1,500 words in that the two most important questions: "What does he want?" and "Why should I help him?" are answered.

(Besides, he specifically wanted help in communicating things succinctly.)

Not a problem at all. What you're talking about is something I believe in, so I'm glad to help.

Here is the even-further edited version, condensed to 150 words.

I have a lot of evidence that the most effective people in the world have a very specific way of thinking. They use their brain's pattern-matching abilities to process the world, rather than using explicit reasoning.

Our brain can pattern match much more efficiently than it can reason. Most people can recognize a cat very easily. But creating an algorithm to recognize cats is far more difficult. And breakthroughs of any kind are very rarely made via explicit reasoning, but rather through a

... (read more)

Per our email exchange, here is the condensed version that uses only your original writing:

"Our brains' pattern recognition capabilities are far stronger than our ability to reason explicitly. Most people can recognize cats across contexts with little mental exertion. By way of contrast, explicitly constructing a formal algorithm that can consistently cats across contexts requires great scientific ability and cognitive exertion.

Very high level epistemic rationality is about retraining one's brain to be able to see patterns in the evidence in the s

... (read more)
3Richard Korzekwa
I do not think the entire post was too long, but I do think reading the short version first was helpful. It's sort of like reading an abstract before diving into a journal article. If nothing else, it helps people who are uninterested save some time. I'm not convinced this is true, but regardless, what about people who neither agree nor disagree? To a large extent, explaining why your viewpoint is right is exactly the same thing as explaining in detail what your viewpoint is.

While I agree that there's value to being able to state the summary of the viewpoint, I can't help but feel that brevity is the wrong approach to take to this subject in particular. If the point is that effective people reason by examples and seeing patterns rather than by manipulating logical objects and functions, then removing the examples and patterns to just leave logical objects and functions is betraying the point!

Somewhat more generally, yes, there is value in telling people things, but they need to be explained if you want to communicate with people that don't already understand them.

9Nanashi
Here is the even-further edited version, condensed to 150 words. You'll note it very quickly gets to the three main points: * What are you talking about? * Why should we listen to you? * What do you want? Let me know if I summarized any part of your thoughts incorrectly.
7JonahS
Thanks very much, both for the shorted version and for the notes. I added the shorted version at the top of my post.

I'd be glad to offer what help I can. Based on other posts of yours, I would definitely practice brevity. This post is over 1000 words long and easily could be condensed to 250 or less.

Per our email exchange, here is the condensed version that uses only your original writing:

"Our brains' pattern recognition capabilities are far stronger than our ability to reason explicitly. Most people can recognize cats across contexts with little mental exertion. By way of contrast, explicitly constructing a formal algorithm that can consistently cats across contexts requires great scientific ability and cognitive exertion.

Very high level epistemic rationality is about retraining one's brain to be able to see patterns in the evidence in the s

... (read more)

There's a pretty noticeable difference between someone doing something for their own sake and someone doing something for the sake of another. Compare two pretty universal experiences: "Talking to someone who is only interacting with you because they want something" and "Being the recipient of a no-strings-attached favor".

This attitude is universal; it's not specific to business. Everyone has wants and goals, not just business people. What you imagine my life situation to be isn't really very relevant. Unless you live in a solitary confinement, this is applicable to you.

My use of the term "you" when I said "why should you care about other people" (and the rest of the post for that matter) was a stylistic use in the global sense, not personally directed at him.

-1Jiro
The context seems to indicate otherwise.

Thanks for the reply. The part about it being "really easy" was a glib attempt at humor, in the same vein as saying, "Losing weight is really easy: you just stop eating so much and start working out more!" Or "It's easy to quit smoking, just don't smoke!" As with many things in life there's a big gap between knowing what one should do and then actually doing it.

As you said, intellectually accepting something tends to be much easier than emotionally integrating it. I wish I had better advice when it came to that part of things... (read more)

0btrettel
Another example of what you mention in your first paragraph that I've said before: It's easy to break the world record in any running event. Just run faster than the world record holder did! It should be fairly obvious that it's not just a case of running faster. A list of necessary conditions for success is not a solution. (Though it can be a good start.)

If you understand the concept that other people have value, then it sounds like your primary issue is just with the semantic meaning behind "genuinely caring about other people's success". Which is fine, it's an overly complex idea to try to distill into a single sentence and I would expect there to be a fair amount of clarification needed.

But to be clear, it's a semantic disagreement rather than one about the underlying meaning. If I had to be less succinct with my explanation I'd say: "Being confident enough in one's own self-improvement ... (read more)

3Creutzer
Of course it sounds more palatable to other people, but actually it's a completely different attitude from the one you're actually taking! You're just viewing other people's success as a means to what is eventually your own success after all. This is not at all the bizarre universal love and self-abnegation that the initial post suggested to me. I also suspect you might be in a relatively atypical life situation if you manage to leverage this business-like perspective into universal social skills because you can just apply it to practically everyone you meet. But then it might be my own situation that's more atypical. (It's also not clear how "spending time helping you" translates into felicitous interaction - most people I meet don't need and couldn't use my help; but I'm not asking you to explain because I don't think I can use your approach anyway.)

I never said anything about caring about random strangers more than you friends.

0Jiro
Neither did I. (Note the difference between "more than" and "equally with".) You said that he should care about "other people", without you distinguishing between classes of people. This implies that you don't think he cares about other people now. Phrased that way, that implies you think he doesn't care about other people in general, not about non-friend other people. All of your arguments apply to people in general anyway. But he never said that. He cares for some other people (his friends). He just doesn't care for other people equally. EA is weird, and most people don't share belief in it.

Your reluctance is both common and understandable. But it's actually not that difficult to reconcile. Let's talk about this from an egoist perspective. First of all, why should you care about other people? Simple: other people are a potentially valuable resource. Despite protestations otherwise, many smart people labor under the delusion that they are of singular genius and importance, and thus have a very difficult time truly grasping the idea that other people can be as valuable as they themselves are.

Your car, computer, bike, house, appliances, etc. a... (read more)

3Creutzer
The egoistic perspective on people as a resource-to-be-developed doesn't help at all, because it's not what I understand by "genuinely caring about other people's success". It also breaks the analogy with the case of children, because the potential that parents and educators see in children is (hopefully) not the potential to be a useful resource for them later on. I think we're looking at a huge inferential distance between us due to a difference in life situation and probably personality...
4Jiro
It sounds like you're talking about two different things. You're misinterpreting "I don't see why I shouldn't care more about my friends than random people" to be "I don't see why I should care about people at all".

Some quick background: a friend and I run the sales department of a multi-million dollar company. We built that company from the ground up from about 15 clients to 5,000 and counting, and now manage 20+ sales reps.

Contrary to popular opinion, social interaction is really fucking easy. There's one common trait among likable people, (and I don't mean likable in the shitty, salesy sort of way where a person is so outgoing you feel obligated to say you like them, when in fact you think they're a giant turd)). That trait can be easily explained: you truly, ge... (read more)

1query
Thanks for this comment; I don't know about social interaction being really fucking easy, but I agree wholeheartedly with your recommendations for how to see other people. Seeing this modeled in the people around me has had a huge positive impact in my life. I'm surrounded by people who, while not skilled at rationality, continually look for the potential and value in other people and openly strategize about how to nurture that viewpoint. (Of course, it would be even better if they were also skilled rationalists, and I'm trying to add that component into my community life as well.) I'm not sure how many, but I think most people around here are "pro-human" in the sense of thinking every persons life, happiness, and fulfillment is a value to be ultimately pursued (though I make no argument about the opportunity cost of doing so in general at the current time.) Accepting this on an intellectual level is different than emotionally integrating it, and the emotional integration of this has been really fulfilling for me, as well as having the positive impacts on social interaction that you mention. I think the tendency to feel negative toward "baselines" can be seen as an attribution error in light of those values. You may be annoyed/disgusted/confused by the other person's lack of understanding in the moment, but the cause of your response can be seen as conditional to that situation, and you can remind yourself of all the good things you would wish for this person given the ability to make them happen. I'd tentatively recommend anyone finding themselves feeling negative toward "baselines" cultivate a group of people around them who take this view, even if they have bad epistemics. I hear that Unitarian Universalists may be good for this, as they're open to atheists while having some of the same pro-human community values. My recommendation is tentative, since I think other people may respond differently to the trade-off of community epistemics versus nurturing this v
4Creutzer
I'm not sure that something that requires a fundamental way in my values (I'm sorry, but I do not care about most people's success more than myself and I don't see why I should and don't want to; in fact, I think I owe it to my friends to care about them and myself more than about a random stranger) and the acquisition of a delusion (most people are not potential singular geniuses; neither am I, of course) is really the optimal strategy here... But fortunately, there must be other strategies, because lots of people are good at social interaction without having either those values or that delusion.

Given that I'm 29, I think that would be spectacularly bewildering.

Specifically, I planned on imagining what my response would be if I found a message supposedly "from myself" that was transmitted using one of these methods. How likely would I be to truly integrate into my identity this event of which I have no memory?

4ilzolende
I would probably believe something signed with my own PGP key enough to thoroughly investigate it. If I found something packaged with a blood sample I probably would not be willing to pay to check the sample, because I'm a minor and the costs of testing a DNA sample are something like a year of income for me. Since I wouldn't verify the sample I would probably take the message about as seriously as I'd take anything else in my own handwriting with my signature, which is to say I'd put in several hours of effort but not much more unless I found confirming evidence. If I found a video of myself saying things, accompanied by a PGP sig and a PGP-signed transcript, which did not include any subtle signals of coercion that I could have potentially sent, I'd be very confident.
4Richard_Kennaway
Have you ever read your own diary from fifty years previously? :)

Am I going to receive my own message no matter what and the attacker is only going to try to confuse me with another message or messages?

For the sake of this, you can assume you will receive your own message no matter what. An alternate way of phrasing it would be, "Your memories have been wiped. You wake up and you find a message that purports to be from yourself. What would the message need to contain in order for you to be highly confident the message actually did come from yourself."

2[anonymous]
Thank you for the clarification! I think there is no objective solution since it is impossible to transmit a message where a 3rd party may interfere with it and any possibility of encryption (shared key or key exchange) is eliminated by the wipe out of the memory of the receiver. It seems it doesn't matter if it's yourself at both ends since the hacker may even use your dna or any other "biological key" you may use in the first place. The only solution is subjective and that leaves a space for faulty communication. But if you find or have a solution please post it here, it would be very interesting to know!

I edited the post because I forgot to include a key constraint to the problem, which is that an attacker can/will be trying to send you false information from "yourself" so you need a way to distinguish. In this case it's relevant because an attacker could cover you with tattoos before your memories were wiped.

2g_pepper
Yep, I actually realized that was a problem even before your edit, because you asked about signing and verification; this is why I said "partially explored". Still, Memento is IMO a good exploration of someone trying to deal with the issue even if his solution is not fool-proof.

I edited the post because I forgot to include a key constraint to the problem, which is that an attacker can/will be trying to send you false information from "yourself" so you need a way to distinguish. In this case it's relevant because an attacker could create a false message and force you to swallow the key to that message right before your memories were wiped.

You didn't. Sorry, I should have clarified. When I said "this thread" I meant "the comments in general" and not your particular reply.

Note that I said "all the potential security flaws we've discussed here". Not, "any possible security flaw."

This is precisely why I've been annoyed by the direction this thread has taken. If someone wants to talk about potential flaws specific to this tool, I'm all ears. But instead it's mostly been a discussion about all the different ways I could possibly slip a Trojan into this tool.

1Lumifer
I don't believe I ever said anything like that.
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