All of randomwalker's Comments + Replies

Thanks for the information! That does look pretty damning for dual n-back. As for creatine, I'm not vegetarian but my meat consumption is lower than average, especially when I'm not weight training. At any rate, I stopped taking it after a couple of months because I decided the unknown long-term health risk from increased renal stress wasn't worth it.

It's funny you linked to my post on prizes, which brought me here, because I'm actually very interested in spaced repetition. In fact just a couple of weeks ago I mentioned it's potentially worth millions of dollars to me: http://arvindn.livejournal.com/132233.html

You guys need to get more rational about the value and importance of what you're doing in this community. You're arguing over trivial amounts of money here. I'd say that any post that's good enough to get voted up to the main page is worth tens of thousands of dollars to mankind. Easily.

I'm putti... (read more)

0Bongo
Note that posts aren't voted up to anywhere; they're promoted by editors.
2gwern
! You're Arvind? I had no idea. Gosh, the past few days have been interesting for me - first Piotr Wozniak tells me he's incrementally reading 8 articles mentioning or by me, then Danny Hillis replies to a comment of mine over at the Technium, and now here's Arvind Narayanan. On one hand, I agree - if a main page post improves one high-value person's time, that alone is probably a few tens of thousands' worth. The other part of me is cynically remarking that Wozniak and psychologists in general have been advocating spaced repetition for the last >2 decades / centuries (respectively), the research is unassailable, and yet... So what's the marginal return on another literature survey? A few comments: * You mention creatine on your blog. Creatine only works in specific demographics; I don't know whether they include you. * You mention dual n-back; the results seem to keep getting weaker since Jaeggi 2008, and Jaeggi 2011 seems extremely weak. I used to be extremely enthusiastic, but as the studies keep coming in... At this point, I'm not sure how much time is worth putting into DNB for just the WM benefits. Probably not much past D5B though.

The problem with this blog is that you occasionally say amazingly insightful things but the majority of your posts, like this one, say something blindingly obvious in a painfully verbose way. But then it could be that some of the things that are amazingly insightful to me are blindingly obvious to someone else, and vice versa. Oh well.

0[anonymous]
The real problem is that these things are not blindingly obvious to everyone. LW is a means of fixing this, at least for its target audience.

I think "Shut up and Multiply" would be a good tagline for this blog, and a nice slogan for us anti-bias types in general!

I think you can still have probabilities sum to 1: probability 1 would be the theoretical limit of probability reaching infinite certitude. Just like you can integrate over the entire real line, i.e -∞ to ∞ even though those numbers don't actually exist.

Hi, I'm a lurker on this site. I think this is a brilliant idea. I've just set up a wiki at http://scratchpad.wikia.com/wiki/The_Simple_Math_of_Everything

Please go forth and edit!

Note: I am not the administrator; I have no special privileges. More info on that page.