I like computational complexity fun facts and pearl milk tea.
csvoss
Karma: 120
Don’t live in the Bay Area yet but am very much in favor.
I have taken the survey.
I am still super, super grateful for the existence of this website. I have noticed tangible improvement over the last month alone; one of my friends has described my current level of Chinese literacy as “terrifying”.
Thank you!
I resonate with a lot of this, and it’s really reassuring to hear that this is a common human experience. In particular, I’ve been choosing amongst job options lately, and I notice that I grieve for the choices I’ve passed over: I imagine the futures that could have been. For a while, I tried to ignore the pain—avoid confronting the fact that I could only choose one of a few possible futures—by prolonging the decision. And I found that, with time, I came to confront the true state of the world, and that at that point I had a better understanding of who I am and what matters to me.
Great read!
Having skimmed this post and the Less Wrong Slack wiki page, I had to really look to figure out what my Next Action for signing up to the Slack channel would be (I infer that it is to PM you my email address). Consider adding that information as a sentence in bold at the top of this page and/or the wiki page?
This is awesome, thanks for doing this!
This continues to be by far the most effective (for me) Chinese study tool I have come across. Nice work, and thanks for sharing it with us!
Yeah, that’s my point: This is the translation I had been making, myself, and I had to realize that it wasn’t correct.
The path to rationality is not the path where the evidence chooses the beliefs. The path to rationality is one without beliefs. On the path to rationality, there are only probabilities.
I realized something the other day. I don’t believe in cryonics.†
But, I believe that cryonics has a chance of working, a small chance.
If I’m ever asked “Do you believe in cryonics?”, I’m going to be careful to respond accurately.
† (By this, I mean that I believe cryonics has a less than 50% chance of working.)
Yeah, your guess is as good as mine.
Another thing: If you’re looking for more text to use for your site, I would certainly enjoy being able to study off of the HPMoR Mandarin Chinese translation. :)
(You should probably ask the authors for permission, though.)
Awesome, thank you! I’m in the same boat, wanting to learn Chinese.
I’m waiting impatiently for Duolingo to support Mandarin, but in the meantime, I’ve been doing spaced repetition practice for reading and vocabulary via Memrise (https://www.memrise.com/). Memrise also contains a whole bunch of flashcard sets about pretty much everything, and allows you to create your own.
Huh, the screenshot reminds me of this thing that /r/hpmor ended up developing.
Woah, I like this idea.
I made a memory palace once; it contains a grand entrance hall, and within that entrance hall is a filing cabinet, and within that filling cabinet is a piece of paper with pictures about what I did on the day I made the memory palace. It’s got remarkable fidelity, but it’s useless unless I put something in it other than, well, that filing cabinet.
What would be a good way for us, as a group, to start creating a standardized memory palace? It would be cool to do this collaboratively somehow.
Thanks!
Discussing “humility” and “arrogance” is difficult without careful definitions. I was thinking about this recently; this is how I would like to define them.
Whenever I end up feeling like I have been arrogant, it is because I underestimated someone else’s abilities, and I ended up surprised by what they were capable of. If humility is the opposite of arrogance, then humility is the ability to accept, as your prior, that somebody you meet just might end up being more wise or more accomplished than you. To be arrogant is to fail to realize that you might have something to learn from other people.
(These definitions of arrogance and humility thus only relate to mental habits, not to social behaviors.)
Note how this makes humility valuable—if you expect everyone around you to be dumb and inferior and not worth learning from, if you don’t give others the chance to prove you otherwise, you’re going to miss out on everything that you could be learning from them. I wouldn’t expect your putative arrogant academic to have very many fruitful collaborations.
So yes, I would say that arrogance is bad intellectual hygiene—it’s having the wrong priors about the people around you.
Note also that it’s also possible to be unfair to oneself in this way. Impostor syndrome should not be confused for humility. High self-esteem should not be confused for arrogance.
… I realize only after writing all of this that there’s also intellectual arrogance and intellectual humility; it seems that they can be modeled the same way, but with ideas instead of people.
But, above all, there is the conviction that the pursuit of truth, whether in the minute structure of the atom or in the vast system of the stars, is a bond transcending human differences.
-- Arthur Eddington, “The Future of International Science”, as quoted in An Expedition to Heal the Wounds of War: the 1919 Eclipse Expedition and Eddington as Quaker Adventurer
I couldn’t attend this year, but I loved the album and I’m really looking forward to it next year!
Okay. Good thing I submitted “Atheist and not spiritual”, then!
I guess that makes sense. When I hear “Atheist but spiritual” my first response tends to be “Sure, I would appreciate songs and rituals about the wonders of science and the awe-inspiring nature of the universe. That’s spirituality, right?”—and my first response tends not to be “Oh, right, I guess there technically could be people who believe in supernatural stuff that’s not gods.” Perhaps because I tend to forget such beliefs exist...
Is there anywhere I can read an explanation of (or anyone who can explain) the distinction between “Atheist but spiritual” and “Atheist and not spiritual”?
Wow, this is pretty.