I put an estimate on one calibration question that I knew was wrong. In hindsight I shouldn’t have done that. The mistake: I don’t know what bone is the longest in the body, but I knew that. So I put down a random answer for that question. But then I felt like it would be cheating on the calibration to put 0% after an intentionally wrong answer, so I put a higher number that wasn’t accurate. My mistake, but other people might have done something similar.
I want the political questions to measure the importance of an issue on next year’s survey.
27chaos
Karma: 741
The truth comes as conqueror only because we have lost the art of receiving it as guest.
“I’ve never been certain whether the moral of the Icarus story should only be, as is generally accepted, ‘don’t try to fly too high,’ or whether it might also be thought of as ’forget the wax and feathers, and do a better job on the wings.”
Science has this in common with art, that the most ordinary, everyday thing appears to it as something entirely new and attractive, as if metamorphosed by witchcraft and now seen for the first time. Life is worth living, says art, the beautiful temptress; life is worth knowing, says science.
Nietzsche, Homer and Classical Philology, http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Homer_and_Classical_Philology
I know that all revolutions must have ideologies to spur them on. That in the heat of conflict these ideologies tend to be smelted into rigid dogmas claiming exclusive possession of the truth, and the keys to paradise, is tragic. Dogma is the enemy of human freedom. Dogma must be watched for and apprehended at every turn and twist of the revolutionary movement. The human spirit glows from that small inner light of doubt whether we are right, while those who believe with complete certainty that they possess the right are dark inside and darken the world outside with cruelty, pain, and injustice.
Saul Alinsky, in his Rules for Radicals.
The key to avoiding rivalries is to introduce a new pole, which mediates your relationship to the antagonist. For me this pole is often Scripture. I renounce my claim to be thoroughly aligned with the pole of Scripture and refocus my attention on it, using it to mediate my relationship with the antagonistic party. Alternatively, I focus on a non-aggressive third party. You may notice that this same pattern is observed in the UK parliamentary system of the House of Commons, for instance. MPs don’t directly address each other: all of their interactions are mediated by and addressed to a non-aggressive, non-partisan third party – the Speaker. This serves to dampen antagonisms and decrease the tendency to fall into rivalry. In a conversation where such a ‘Speaker’ figure is lacking, you need mentally to establish and situate yourself relative to one. For me, the peaceful lurker or eavesdropper, Christ, or the Scripture can all serve in such a role. As I engage directly with this peaceful party and my relationship with the aggressive party becomes mediated by this party, I find it so much easier to retain my calm.
The world of to-day attaches a large importance to mental independence, or thinking for oneself; yet the manner in which these things are cultivated is very partial. In some matters we are, perhaps too independent (for we need to think socially as well as to act socially); but in other matters we are not independent enough; we are hardly independent at all. For we always interpret mental independence as being independence of old things. But if the mind is to stand in a real loneliness and liberty, and judge mere time and mere circumstances, and all the wasting things of this world, if the mind is really a strong and emancipated judge of things unbribed and unbrowbeaten, it must assert its superiority, not merely to old things, but to new things.
It must forsee the old age of things still in a strenuous infancy. It must stand by the tombstone of the babe unborn. It must treat the twentieth century as it treats the twelfth, as something which by its own nature has already had an end. A free man must not only be free from the past; a free man must be free from the future. He must be ready to face the rising and increasing thing, and to judge it by immortal tests. It is a very poor mark of courage, in comparison, that we are ready to strike at ancient wrongs. Our courage shall be tested by whether we are ready to strike at youthful and full-blooded wrongs; wrongs that have all their life before them, wrongs that are as sanguine as the sunrise, and as fresh as the flowers.
G.K. Chesterton, http://platitudesundone.blogspot.com/2015/09/the-world-of-to-day-attaches-large.html
k
The simple view is that medicine exists to fight death and disease, and that is, of course, its most basic task. Death is the enemy. But the enemy has superior forces. Eventually, it wins. And in a war that you cannot win, you don’t want a general who fights to the point of total annihilation. You don’t want Custer. You want Robert E. Lee, someone who knows how to fight for territory that can be won and how to surrender it when it can’t, someone who understands that the damage is greatest if all you do is battle to the bitter end.
Most often, these days, medicine seems to supply neither Custers nor Lees. We are increasingly the generals who march the soldiers onward, saying all the while, “You let me know when you want to stop.” All-out treatment, we tell the incurably ill, is a train you can get off at any time—just say when. But for most patients and their families we are asking too much. They remain riven by doubt and fear and desperation; some are deluded by a fantasy of what medical science can achieve. Our responsibility, in medicine, is to deal with human beings as they are. People only die once. They have no experience to draw on. They need doctors and nurses who are willing to have the hard discussions and say what they have seen, who will help people prepare for what is to come—and escape a warehoused oblivion that few really want.
Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End.
This seems like a mathematical write up of a very simple idea. I dislike papers such as this. The theory itself could have been described in one sentence, and nothing other than the theory itself is presented here. No evidence of the theory’s empirical value, no discussion of what the actual leakage ratio is or what barriers to Friendliness remain. A lot of math used as mere ornamentation.
I think a better title would be Dark Arts: A Case Study. I came here expecting a lesson in how to use the Dark Arts. But a lesson should consist of more than just pointing out an example, broader arguments and suggestions need to be made.
It is not here because the book is important; it’s here because it describes an example of a deceptive persuasive technique.
You talk a lot about Steiner’s use of the deceptive technique, but not a lot about the technique in general. I feel it would be better if you talked about the technique in general, how to recognize when it’s drawing you in, other cases where it is used, things like that. A specific instance of Dark Arts by itself is not a noteworthy occurrence, the Dark Arts are used all the time across the planet.
Is arguing worth it? If so, when and when not? Also, how do I become less arrogant?
At root, our work suggests that creativity in science appears to be a nearly universal phenomenon of two extremes. At one extreme is conventionality and at the other is novelty. Curiously, notable advances in science appear most closely linked not with efforts along one boundary or the other but with efforts that reach toward both frontiers.
Mukherjee et. al, Atypical Combinations and Scientific Impact.
That’s not literally true. It’s just booing irrational people. Which is appropriate for Ozy on zher own blog, but not for this thread of useful quotes.
Reminder: the downvote button is not a disagreement button. Knock it off, whoever you are.
I believe in articulate discussion (in monologue or dialogue) of how one solves problems, of why one goofed that one, of what gaps or deformations exist in one’s knowledge and of what could be done about it. I shall defend this belief against two quite distinct objections. One objection says: “it’s impossible to verbalize; problems are solved by intuitive acts of insight and these cannot be articulated.” The other objection says: “it’s bad to verbalize; remember the centipede who was paralyzed when the toad asked which leg came after which.”
J.S. Bruner tells us (in his book Towards a Theory of Instruction) that he finds words and diagrams “impotent” in getting a child to ride a bicycle. But while his evidence shows (at best) that some words and diagrams are impotent, he suggests the conclusion that all words and diagrams are impotent. The interesting conjecture is this: the impotence of words and diagrams used by Bruner is explicable by Bruner’s cultual origins; the vocabulary and conceptual framework of classical psychology is simply inadequate for the description of such dynamic processes as riding a bicycle. To push the rhetoric further, I suspect that if Bruner tried to write a program to make an IBM 360 drive a radio controlled motorcycle, he would have to conclude (for the sake of consistency) that the order code of the 360 was impotent for this task. Now, in our laboratory we have studied how people balance bicycles and more complicated devices such as unicycles and circus balls. There is nothing complex or mysterious or undescribable about these processes. We can describe them in a non-impotent way provided that a suitable descriptive system has been set up in advance. Key components of the descriptive system rest on concepts like: the idea of a “first order” or “linear” theory in which control variables can be assumed to act independently; or the idea of feedback.
A fundamental problem for the theory of mathematical education is to identify and name the concepts needed to enable the beginner to discuss in mathematical thinking in a clear articulate way.
-- Seymour Papert, distinguished mathematician, educator, computer scientist, and AI researcher, in his 1971 essay “Teaching Children to be Mathematicians vs. Teaching about Mathematics”.
The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die. As well the minds which are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be mind.
Nietzsche in Daybreak: Reflections on Moral Prejudice.
http://www.lexido.com/EBOOK_TEXTS/DAYBREAK_.aspx?S=156
I wasn’t aware of this quote at the time, but similar views were influential in my deconversion from Christianity. I decided that if I believed in God, that meant I needn’t be afraid to subject that belief to fair tests of evidence or argumentation. In hindsight, I’m very grateful this was my view, unlike so many others I was lucky enough to avoid getting stuck in a stagnated belief system.
I now try to randomly change my priors every now and then, to the extent that I am able. I figure that either they’ll repair themselves over time, or they weren’t worth having in the first place. This means that I am less likely to get trapped in models at local maxima or to become stuck within any biasing cognitive finger traps. In addition to its utility as a tool, this emotionally involves a quite enjoyable sense of freedom for me. I don’t have to be afraid of losing the truth, because reality is consilient. I highly recommend this technique for everyone here.
I actually think you’re a good communicator (at least when writing). Don’t forget that LessWrong tends to nitpick, and don’t fall into the trap of aiming at perfection by trying to make everyone happy. Keep in mind that commenters almost always tend to be more negative than the average reader, people who like or are indifferent to your ideas will generally not comment. Instead of worrying about minimizing the amount of bad reactions or misinterpretations your posts will cause, focus on maximizing the amount of good reactions and insightful realizations they will cause, even if you get less feedback on the second. “Premature optimization is the root of all evil.”
Obviously it’s fine to worry a little about bad reactions. But if you’re calling yourself a bad communicator I think that’s a sign you’re worrying far too much, because I find myself nodding along with your posts about 10x more than I find myself wondering what you’re trying to say. Most “good communicators” are harder for me to understand than you, so I think you deserve to give yourself a better label.
Maybe we need you to start a new sequence: On Innate Social Ability.
While I agree with much of this, I dislike how we’re getting tips about random fields on this site now.
Saul Alinsky, in his Rules for Radicals.
This one hit home for me. Got a haircut yesterday. :P