I have never understood what music teachers mean when they say things like this.
Maybe you will find my definitions, which relate to the physical properties of the sound, helpful.
As for your two other terms, those are harder to define. "Round" I would have trouble understanding too... but I think in the context of a choir, it might mean a note sung by holding your mouth in a round 'O' shape rather than by stretching it vertically or horizontally. The shape of your mouth changes the overtones, even when you're singing the same note.
As for "purple", even t...
Are there people who instinctively know what a 'bright sound' is yet don't automatically visualise such sounds as being brightly coloured? Or who instinctively know what a 'hammering note' is without feeling any physical pain when they hear one?
Yes, I am an example of both such types of people. However, this is not because I think of those words as arbitrary, but because I associate those words with different concepts. I'll elaborate on that.
But first, I'll say the difficulty I have with your question: I'm not sure where to draw the line between "having...
As an alternative to switching away from WordPress entirely, you could switch to a third-party blog post editor that integrates with WordPress.
The only third-party blog post editor I know of is MarsEdit ($50), which only runs on macOS. I tried out MarsEdit once by writing a few drafts in its WYSISYG mode, and that went fine, but I can’t attest to the quality of its other features like publishing a post or editing in Markdown.
I don’t personally find keeping secrets a significant enough hardship to be worth asking people to tell me fewer secrets. I just asked a friend of mine, and they feel the same as me.
My hypothesis is that you feel differently because you hear a lot more secrets, and each additional secret carries an additional mental burden to not reveal it. Perhaps when you know too many secrets, you have a greater meta-challenge of separating them from each other and remembering which groups each secret can and cannot be discussed with.
What are the factors behind one’s me...
The True Prisoner’s Dilemma is another post in this genre of “explaining game theory problems intuitively”.
Thanks. Link updated and wrong claim removed.
For transparency, this was the original sentence:
One can’t link to sections within a PDF, but the paper is on page 4 of the PDF (page 8 if you include front matter).
There’s a formatting error in this part of the post:
Clone the two repos:
git clone https://github.com/LessWrong2/Lesswrong2 git clone https://github.com/LessWrong2/Vulcan.git
It should be a code block so that the newline is preserved. That makes it easier to notice that you have to clone two repos:
Clone the two repos:
git clone https://github.com/LessWrong2/Lesswrong2 git clone https://github.com/LessWrong2/Vulcan.git
Also, I found this description confusing:
...If you are creating a branch for an existing issue, use this naming schema: branchTitle[iss
I took the survey.
I’m not sure if reformatting the home page would have made any difference for Nancy’s friend. Was she on the home page, or the Google search page for “less wrong”?
Welcome to Less Wrong
lesswrong.com/ ▾
Less Wrong is an online community for people who want to apply the discovery of biases like the conjunction fallacy, the affect heuristic, and scope insensitivity ...
Google quotes that sentence out of context, so its wording is especially important.
The old introduction may be obscure, but at least it is informative. A visitor can follow the links …
I can’t tell from Nancy’s anecdote, but it is possible that her friend couldn’t follow the links on the home page, because she was actually on the Google search page:
Welcome to Less Wrong
lesswrong.com/ ▾
Less Wrong is an online community for people who want to apply the discovery of biases like the conjunction fallacy, the affect heuristic, and scope insensitivity ...
The sentence’s wording without links is important because Google quotes it in plainte...
Writing on Less Wrong makes it easier to reach a large audience. New personal blogs would have trouble getting readers unless they were advertised in strategic places.
On my midterm exam in my college class Computer and Networking Security, I scored 88%, the highest in the class. About 18 other students took the test, and the mean of our scores was 62%. The exam will be graded on a curve, so my score is probably equivalent to A+.
I was the second-to-last student to finish the exam. This surprised me at the time, but now I think it must have been because I took more time to thoroughly think about the questions and show my work. On the other hand, I studied very little – only for 20 minutes, right before the exam. I am thankful that that turned out to be enough, and proud that I skimmed the slides effectively enough and paid enough attention in class that that’s all I needed.
One transportation option many people would not think of is an adult kick scooter. Kick scooters are most useful for speeding up trips of short distances, up to a few miles, on sidewalks and across roads. As of my research a few months ago, the cheapest one that would fit a non-short adult was the Razor A5 Lux Scooter, which currently costs $100.
The main advantage of a kick scooter is that unlike a bicycle, you can legally and more safely ride them on the sidewalk, so you don’t have to focus as much on navigating car or pedestrian traffic. Compared to othe...
I took the survey. Though I can’t remember my SAT score, which I know I put on the last survey – I wish I had saved my answers last year.
You are probably one of the few people who can identify an exact year when you forgot your SAT scores.
All morals are axioms, not theorems, and thus all moral claims are tautological.
Whatever morals we choose, we are driven to choose them by the morals we already have – the ones we were born with and raised to have. We did not get our morals from an objective external source. So no matter what your morals, if you condemn someone else by them, your condemnation will be tautoligcal.
A better slogan for that purpose might simply be "Politics makes for bad examples". Straight to the point. It needs explanation, just like the "mind-killer" slogan, but after the explanation it is easy to remember the reasoning behind it.
PredictionBook might help with measuring improvement, in a limited way. You can use it to measure how often your predictions are correct, and whether you are getting better over time. And you could theoretically ask LW-ers and non-LW-ers to make some predictions on PredictionBook, and then compare their accuracy to see if Less Wrong helped. Making accurate predictions of likelihood is a real skill that certainly has the possibility to be very useful – though it depends on what you’re predicting.
“If only there were irrational people somewhere, insidiously believing stupid things, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and mock them. But the line dividing rationality and irrationality cuts through the mind of every human being. And who is willing to mock a piece of his own mind?”
(With apologies to Solzhenitsyn).
– Said Achmiz, in a comment on Slate Star Codex’s post “The Cowpox of Doubt”
I would think the difference is that sociable people feel comfortable even in a less formal gathering, when you don’t know of anyone you would particularly like to talk to and nobody has asked you to talk. Even in such a situation, a sociable person could find something interesting to do, involving other people, and be reasonably confident that they are not being rude or boring, and end up enjoying whatever they find to do.
I took the survey.
I chose to Defect on the monetary reward prize question. Why?
Link to the story: Friendship is Optimal. Though I wouldn’t call the story as a whole a horror story; rather, it has some fridge horror. And it is particularly horrifying to those interested in the singularity, rather than to rationalists in general.
7. … I think of several things related to work that I really want to remember … as I'm trying to fall asleep …
I use my smartphone (Android) in cases similar to this, though it’s not usually work-related stuff that I think of. I have the sound recording app WAVE Recorder in my dock / quick launch area. If I want to note something for later with the minimum of fuss, it’s easy to unlock my phone, open the app, hit record, and briefly describe whatever it is that I thought of (or hum it, if it’s a piece of music). Then I just hit stop and lock the phone aga...
The flaw in the argument is simply that it assumes E(X/Y) > 1 implies that E(X) > E(Y).
I didn’t understand this sentence very well at first, because the inequality on the right is two steps removed from the one on the left. I find this version clearer:
The flaw in the argument is simply that it assumes E(X/Y) > 1 implies that E(X) / E(Y) > 1. (If E(X) / E(Y) > 1, that would imply that E(X) > E(Y).)
A hypothetical based on an amalgamation of my own experiences during a co-op:
...You work as a programmer at a company that writes websites with the programming languages VBScript and VB.Net. You have learned enough about those languages to do your job, but you think the Ruby language is much more efficient, and you write your personal programming projects in Ruby. You occasionally go to meetings in your city for Ruby programmers, which talk about new Ruby-related technologies and techniques.
You are nearing the deadline for the new feature you were assigned
Yvain posted a follow-up post, “Extreme Mnemonics”, on his own blog. Readers have posted many comments.
For one thing, I try not to read many in-progress fanfics. I’ve been burned so many times by starting to read a story and finding out that it’s abandoned that I rarely start reading new incomplete stories – at least with an expectation of them being finished. That means I don’t have to remember so many things at once – when I finish reading one fanfiction, I can forget it. Even if it’s incomplete, I usually don’t try to check back on it unless it has a fast update schedule – I leave it for later, knowing I’ll eventually look at my Favorites list again and ...
A variant of this question was discussed on Mathematics Stack Exchange. The top answer has a good explanation of the nature of this question – “vg'f n zhygvcyr-pubvpr inevnag […] bs gur pynffvpny yvne cnenqbk” (un-ROT13).
The presence of so many Kyon: Big Damn Hero files in the repo is kind of confusing. Especially kbdh_trope_list.txt, which looked interesting, but then confused me in that it didn’t talk about Trust in God. If possible, you should remove the KBDH files from the repo.
If you want to keep those files around to use as references, you could move them into a separate folder out of the repo. Or keep them in your working copy but not commit them, with the help of a .gitignore file. Or at least move the files to their own folder so we don’t have to figure out which story each file belongs to.
You could also call this “sieze the Schelling point”. You’re setting a Schelling fence for making the change between “the maximal probability moment” and “right after that” – if you slide past the Schelling fence, you can expect you will fail to make the change, and that encourages you to make the change now.
Indeed. To give an example, I currently have a bad habit of often being late for my first class of the day (in college). It’s a 50-minute long math lecture. When I’m late, I might arrive outside the classroom 15 minute after class has started. Standing outside, before I go in, I have an urge to skip the class entirely to avoid the embarassment of entering and sitting down in the middle of lecture, which would slightly disrupt class and draw the professor’s attention to my lateness. But when I gather my courage and enter anyway, I’m usually glad that I did, because I learn useful things in the remaining 35 minutes of class.
A book that greatly improved my code was Clean Code by Robert C. Martin. It helped me understand things such as when code comments are appropriate and how to split code into well-factored functions. The book’s main flaw is that it’s sometimes hard to tell which of its advice is Java-specific and which is widely applicable. But I definitely still recommend it.
The author wrote another book, The Clean Coder, which is also about improving as a programmer. It’s not about coding well – it’s “a code of conduct for professional programmers”, and talks about things...
When creating such a general algorithm, we must keep a human limitation in mind: subconscious, unsystemized thought. A practical algorithm must account for and exploit it.
There are two types of subconscious thought that an algorithm has to deal with. One is the top-level type that is part of being a human. It is only our subconscious that can fire off the process of choosing to apply a certain conscious algorithm. We won’t even start running our algorithm if we don’t notice that it applies in this situation, or if we don’t remember it, or if we feel bored ...
I would call the “systems” you describe “algorithms”.
Looking at your examples, I see that your two “lists of tips” are slightly different. The first list is a combination of tips (aim for 22-30 workers) and facts about the situation (workers mine minerals; that’s how things work). The facts describe the problem you are designing an algorithm to solve. The tips describe solutions you would like your algorithm to aim for when those tips are applicable, but they are general goals, not specific actions. Your second list has no facts, only tips. And those tips ...
A link to the xkcd comic Working that was mentioned. Note that the comic also has bonus text in the image’s tooltip.
Yes, I often notice this same morphing of how people look in my memory. After briefly meeting a new person and then leaving them, I often try to remember their face and find the details slipping through my mental grasp, until I’m imagining someone else, such as a classmate from high school, who I’m more familiar with and who looks a bit like the new person. When this happens, I think to myself, “oh, it’s happened again, I’ve forgotten what they look like already”.
I took the survey.
One thing I was unsure about: the appropriate answer to the question “Referrals: How did you find out about Less Wrong?”. I answered “Referred by a link on another blog”. But I actually investigated and discovered Less Wrong after seeing a bunch of links to it on Hacker News. Hacker News is really a link aggregation site or social news site, not a blog. But I thought that that answer was better than choosing “Other” and writing in “link from an aggregation site”.
Link to translation: “N tbyq fgne vs lbh qrpbqrq guvf cneg.” through ROT13
Yes, I know it kind of ruins the point.
A decision matrix is a very simple tool that can give an overview of an argument. Points for and against each alternative have positive and negative values.
However, if those values themselves depend on other calculations, or are interdependent, the decision matrix provides no way to display that, so it is not a complete modelling language.
My unfinished outline-form notes on solving Pascal’s Mugging:
This solution doesn’t work. Why? Because I pledge that if anyone fails to accept a “Pascal’s Mugging style trade-off with full knowledge of the problem, then I will slowly torture to death 3^^^^3 sentient minds”. I’ve just canceled out your pledge.
You could say all your allies take the same pledge as you, and you have more allies than me, but that’s getting too far into the practicalities of our lives and too far away from a general solution. A general solution can’t assume that the person considering whether to accept a Mugging will have heard either of o...
My answer: Attributing causation is part of our human instincts. We are born with some desire to do it. We may develop that skill by reflecting on it during our lifetime.
(How did we humans develop that instinct? Evolution, probably. Humans who had mutated to reason about causality died less – for instance, they might have avoided drinking from a body of water after seeing something poisonous put in, because they reasoned that the poison addition would cause the water to be poisonous.)
I was able to download a copy from http://www.manyebooks.org/download/The_Strategy_of_Conflict.html, which links to http://www.en8848.com.cn/d/file/soft/Nonfiction/Obooks/201012/8bbb35724dcac415a5ecd74a62b2ba97.rar as the actual download link. That version is a 4.8 MB PDF file. It has equivalent image quality to the 17.4 MB PDF file hosted by Alicorn and is a smaller file.
I agree. Specifically, they were probably ponifying the title of the book Permutation City by Greg Egan.