I tend to disagree.. I have done some things which I thought was experimenting with but did not come up with any clear conclusion after the experiment and analysis. On rewriting the thesis it turned out there were a lot more implicit assumptions inside the hypothesis that I was not aware of. I think it was a badly designed experiment and it was rather unproductive in retrospective analysis. I suppose one could argue that it brought to light the implicit assumptions and that was a useful result. Somehow(not sure how or why) I find that a low standard to consider something an experiment.
anandjeyahar
This is also the same reason I like Alan Perlis’s quote on programming languages. Paraphrased it reads “There’s no point in learning a new language that doesn’t teach you a new way of thinking.” I equate “the new way of thinking” with maps here.
Mu means “no thing.” Like “quality” it points outside the process of dualistic discrimination. Mu simply says, “no class: not one, not zero, not yes, not no.” It states that the context of the question is such that a yes and a no answer is in error and should not be given. “Unask the question” is what it says.
.… [Somewhere later]
That Mu exists in the natural world investigated by science is evident. […] The dualistic mind tends to think of Mu occurrences in nature as a kind of contextual cheating, or irrelevance, but Mu is found through all scientific investigation, and nature doesn’t cheat, and nature’s answers are never irrelevant. It’s a great mistake, a kind of dishonesty to sweep nature’s Mu answers under the carpet. […]
When your answer to a test is indeterminate it means one of two things: that your test procedures aren’t doing what you think they are or that your understanding of the context of the question needs to be enlarged. Check your tests and restudy the question. Don’t throw away those Mu answers! They’re every bit as vital as the yes and no answers. They’re more vital. They’re the ones you grow on.
--- Robert M Pirsig (Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance.
The hedgehog and the Fox: Hedgehogs “know one big thing” and have a theory about the world; they account for particular events within a coherent framework, bristle with impatience toward those who don’t see things their way, and are confident in their forecasts. They are also especially reluctant to admit error. For hedgehogs, a failed prediction is almost always “off only on timing” or “very nearly right”. They are opinionated and clear, which is exactly what television producers love to see on programs. Two hedgehogs on different sides of an issue, each attacking the idiotic ideas of the adversary, make for a good show. Foxes, by contrast, are complex thinkers. They don’t believe that one big thing drives the march of history (for example they are unlikely to accept the view that Ronald Reagan single-handedly ended the cold war by standing tall against the Soviet Union). Instead the foxes recognize that reality emerges from interactions of many different agents and forces, including blind luck, often producing large and unpredictable outcomes.
~ Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, fast and slow)
Thanks gwern. I was looking for criticism in the reasoning, but you have a point. I’ll clean it up at the earliest opportunity.
Ok May be that misses context. Further down in the text he categories 5 types of deception:
Outright lying and fabrication of evidence
Misdirection
Withholding of information
Equivocation or sharing information in ambiguous ways
Not-correcting others.
Hope that helps
I was disappointed. I thought that Buffett’s time, used to pick good charities, could be far more valuable than his money
I am not sure about this one. Buffett’s skillset in picking very good investments, might not transfer to picking good charities. Or at the very least, he might need to spend some time practicing before getting good? Not to mention validation cycle time on charities vary(am not sure how much more than investments) and Buffett considered his time better spent investing, and not acquiring skill at charity picking?
To function as a Human being, you are forced to accept a minimum level of deception in your life. The more complex and challenging your life the higher this minimum. At any given level of moral and intellectual development, there is an associated minimum level of deception in your life. If you aren’t deceiving others, you are likely deceiving yourself. Or you’re in denial
You can only lower the level of deception in your life through further intellectual and moral development. In other words, you have to earn higher levels of truth in your life.
--- VGRao (Be Slightly evil)
+1 for the very same reason. Reading a HPMOR chapter is a day-long distraction. it simply won’t leave my brain alone for work on the rest of the day.
Very valid and good point(added). I briefly touched on it before too, but mostly had individual practitioners in mind than organized hospitals with administration and support. (India is moving towards a lot more of the organized hospitals model, but IT is non-existent, administration is most seat-in-the-ass jobs)
Ah.… “genuine uncertainty” the term reminds me of “no true scotsman argument”. My point being, there’s an uncertainty reduction before and after the die was rolled, not to say this means, I should update my belief about the die’s rolled/winning value.
Simply put my friend Naomi’s beliefs have been updated and uncertainty in her mind has been eliminated. I think the author was trying to point out that most people conflate the two differences. It definitely is well worded for rhetoric, but not for pedagogy(in Feynman sense).
I don’t know about this idea. For most of my career, I’ve tried to be sidekick in the sense of trying to fulfill someone else’s goals with say a secondary goal of mine that ties in to that primary goal, but it has always ended up in conflicts, where I couldn’t simply bring myself to ignore the hero’s stance/decision(and still work with him/her). Is that a good enough reason to try to be a hero? This post still resonates with me, but that doesn’t mean am about to go around hero’s for whom I can be a sidekick. Majority of the empirical evidence that I’ve (personal experience) accumulated suggests, that won’t really work.
May be the distinction is not as sharp as you think/believe it is?
This is something, I find a lot of people don’t realize(by virtue of never testing their boundaries). It’s not that the universe* has become suddenly maleficient, it was indifferent / mildly maleficient(think increasing entropy rule, if you prefer), we just didn’t realize it and it’s getting harder to ignore.
*-- Edit Clarification: Universe—Humans. (- being set difference here.)
While some parts of me agree with it, there are other parts that set off alarms like: but judges will try to use this as a rationalization for what looks like a kind behaviour(by habit, social proof) instead of trying to evaluate the justness, especially when it looks like it’s complex or is likely to threaten one of their biased beliefs.
Thanks for this one.. It’s been some time since I re-read Douglas Adams , and had forgotten how good he can be. It makes so much sense reading this right after reading “Bind yourself to Reality”. Had good long guffaw out of this one .:-)
Agreed. I always skimmed over that claim and never wondered why. The map vs territory analogy makes a lot of sense. After all the ‘Mu’ is an answer to a question. And the question is based on some map of the territory. Thanks for triggering that series of clicks in my mind. :)
Too big! Seriously, this post contains too many elements to readily reply to in a coherent way.
Is that a problem? I tried to address it with the tl;dr and the conclusion.
I didn’t find it too big. I just found it too bundled up, but that’s probably because the topic is naturally like that. By ‘bundled up’ I mean, I found the article felt as if it interleaves too many concepts without first trying to make them all explicit. That said, am working on an article along lines of (introverts/intrinsic motivation vs extroverts/extrinsic motivation) so i understand the complexity involved.
A few subtleties i think was missed in tech founders’ accents post by Paul Graham and antirez. http://anandjeyahar.com/2013/09/04/accents-and-its-effect-in-the-techfounderstartup-world/ . I am rather emotionally close/involved to the subject, so would be happy to know the gaps and biases in my reasoning any of you point out.
Regards, Anand
Did anybody get hold of that python code by GJM (mentioned in A/N and supposed to be on the official fb page) I went ahead and created a new fb A/C(despite my better judgement) but couldn’t get hold of the code. I want to get and play around the code.
But, as compiler optimizations exploit increasingly recondite properties of the programming language definition, we find ourselves having to program as if the compiler were our ex-wife’s or ex-husband’s divorce lawyer, lest it introduce security bugs into our kernels, as happened with FreeBSD a couple of years back with a function erroneously annotated as noreturn, and as is happening now with bounds checks depending on signed overflow behavior.
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