Through HPMoR, like many others, although it was quite delayed. After being referred to Methods of Rationality from another forum and falling in love with it, I thought, hey, why not check out this guy’s other stuff? I started with The Simple Truth, and to be honest it didn’t grab me. So for months and months I just had a bookmark for this site and an idea that I should probably check it out, maybe, someday, eventually. Finally, for no reason that I can remember, I went back to the site and started reading the “How to Change Your Mind” sequence. From then on, I was hooked.
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Karma: 738
Only the wisdom of the crowds reference stuck out to me—I thought sunk cost was a perfectly reasonable thing to bring up, and anchoring wasn’t just reasonable but actually useful, in that I hadn’t really thought of drawing in that way before.
I think anyone who finds themselves fully agreeing with this article (in particular the assertion that teachers “can not abolish human difference”) owes it to themselves to read MindSet by Carol Dweck (or at least familiarize themselves with her research; I actually didn’t like the book that much). She argues that in almost all cases, initial differences in intelligence among children can be virtually erased by fostering a “growth” rather than “fixed” mindset (definitions here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindset_(book) )
The basic idea is that while we do have some amount of inborn talent (intelligence say), this is merely a starting point and can (easily) be improved upon. The problem is, we implicitly teach kids the fixed mindset (that their level of talent/intelligence can’t be changed) when they’re young, and as a result they sort themselves neatly into tiers based on their initial level of intelligence, and then stay that way. In this manner teaching the fixed mindset seems to be a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts—we tell kids they can’t get any smarter than they are, and as a result they don’t even try.
Thus the mindset theory explains the phenomenon of “dumb/smart kids growing up into dumb/smart adults” equally well as assuming that fixed talent actually exists. Moreover, research has shown that adopting the growth mindset causes increases in performance, productivity, grades, etc. - in short, it actually makes people smarter. This works whether you do it subconsciously (ie, priming experiment subjects with growth mindset ideas) or consciously (ie, actually telling people about the mindset concept and pushing them towards a growth mindset). There are a lot of really dramatic results given in the book that can’t be explained at all assuming fixed levels of talent.
That’s a good point, I’m not sure that any research shows long-term convergence among students. I may have overstated the point. I guess what I was thinking was that in the long run, all students would improve so much as to make any initial differences unimportant (which may or may not be the case, but it can’t be assumed)
Edit: yeah, I can’t seem to fix the link, the bracket at the end seems to be screwing it up. Anyone know how to fix it?
This is way way old I know, but I thought I’d give a contrasting viewpoint. I too produce no natural testosterone. I noticed something was off around age 16 and started getting injections at age 17, I think. My pubertal development was more gradual, probably taking about a year and half or so. I noticed no significant personality changes during that time or since (other than being horny all the time, of course), and definitely no increase in aggression (I started as a very passive person if you want a baseline). I don’t think my physique changed that much (I was very skinny before taking testosterone and I still am), but I had a significant growth spurt. I got the occasional pimple, but no acne. Honestly the whole transition was very smooth and didn’t cause me any trouble whatsoever—leading me to theorize at the time that late teens might actually be a better time to go through puberty, because one is cognitively more able to handle the abrupt changes. The above seems to argue against that though.
Incidentally, my testosterone dose at the moment gives me a peak level that’s on the high end of normal. So I don’t think it’s a case of me not getting “enough” testosterone to make me aggressive, unless the effect only shows up for extremely high levels.
I’d be interested in this. Feel free to pm me with anything you’d like me to read.
I honestly don’t know what to think of Rossi. He could be genuine, he could just be a scam artist. Certainly he’s exhibited behaviour in the past that I would associate with scam artists—continually promising definitive proof is “just around the corner”, and then not delivering. On the other hand, if cold fusion is really real, it obviously raises the probability that he’s genuine.
Not being very knowledgeable about the economy, this is one of the things I hoped to ask LessWrong. The best ROI would probably be “whatever startup first commercializes a cold fusion device.” Lacking that specific knowledge, though, I don’t know. Shorting oil companies?
You seem to be correct about Swartz, sorry. I was confusing him with Peter Hagelstein. I should probably just remove the MIT references—I think the video stands well on its own.
Edit: also, yes, I admit the websites do not look great. Points against for sure. The data is pretty convincing though.
Interesting. See, this is the kind of thing I was looking for.
Well, my probability has gone down quite a bit, obviously. I didn’t know about the failed replication that OrphanWilde linked; if I had, it might have been enough to stop me from writing the whole thing up. That being said, my probability is still high enough to be in the “this is interesting” range. I’ll be keeping an eye out for cold fusion news. I certainly won’t be making any investments based on the assumption that it’s real.
In my defense, I mostly considered Rossi to be irrelevant to the question I was looking into (whether cold fusion exists or not). As such, I didn’t investigate him very thoroughly, and so gave a non-committal response above. On the other hand, I had heard about his previous scams (only in passing, but still), and that probably should have been enough for me to discount him.
However, I will say one thing—if this works, someone should be making money off it. I don’t care if it wont replicate; if it works consistently for you then you can use it to build a profitable business, which seems like it should make skeptics think again as well as producing profit.
I do agree with this line of reasoning to a certain extent, but it isn’t necessarily true. One could imagine a scenario where the experiment was reproducible enough to be convincing (say, it works 75% of the time), but wasn’t reproducible enough to be commercially viable (which might require 99% reliability or something). Alternatively, someone could be getting consistent excess heat at a level too low to be of use to anyone.
No, I didn’t delete it. It went down to −3 karma, which apparently hides it on the discussion page. That’s how I’m assuming it works anyway, given that it reappeared as soon as it went back up to −2. Incidentally, it now seems to be attracting random cold fusion “enthusiasts” from the greater internet, which was not my intention.
Thanks!
Depends, do you work at a university or research institution, or have access to one? The scientific database Web of Science has an author search function, and it can give you a full citation report for any scientist in the database with a bunch of useful info, including h-index.
Okay, so having read through the paper and looked at reactions on the internet, my opinion is that the work looks solid, with no obvious flaws in their methodology. It seems likely that the device was outputting the amount of heat that they measured (or more). However, some critics have pointed out a possible loophole in the measurement of the input power. The claim (if I understand it correctly) is that Rossi could have been feeding in extra current at a low frequency (DC) that apparently could have been missed by the power meter the scientists used to measure the input power. I don’t know enough about the instrument or these kinds of experiments to comment on how likely this is. Another claim being made is that he could have been using radio waves to wirelessly transfer energy to inductive coils within the device, supplying the measured excess heat. Again, not my area of expertise, but it sounds plausible. Mind you there’s no evidence that he did do either of these things, but given his history it’s certainly a possibility.
Interesting stuff. I’ll be keeping an eye out for further news.
I was going to write a post describing why I didn’t find your argument compelling, but then I realized that I would find it perfectly compelling if the estimate for $/life saved had gone up to say, $10 million. So apparently my true rejection of your argument isn’t what I was going to write—it’s that I just don’t find the difference between $200 and $2000 to be that significant.
Very interested in this sequence. Over the past several months I’ve been systematically reading through all of EY’s posts chronologically, with a sort of vague notion that when I was done, I would sit down, take some of the insights I had gained, and start trying to, you know, improve my life. By the time I had finally finished my read-through, a number of things had crystallized, but by far the most obvious and glaring problem was that I had a fixed mindset (as opposed to growth). Actually, I don’t know if EY ever touched on that topic directly, but in any case this site introduced me to the concept (and man, did I see myself reflected in the description of fixed mindset people, it was kind of scary).
Anyway, all this to say that this sequence interests me because a) I’d like to know how to draw better, and b) drawing seems like a perfect test case for trying to break out of the fixed mindset - before I would have assumed that I just didn’t have the talent for drawing, but now it occurs to me that (who’da thunk it?) perhaps I could get better if I practiced it. So for me, at least, this sequence is very much related to rationality. Thanks, and keep it up!