https://www.facebook.com/mike.plotz https://twitter.com/hyponymous
Antisuji
I took the survey. Thanks for putting this together, Yvain!
I chose DEFECT: CFAR/MIRI can keep their money. Furthermore, if I win I precommit to refusing payment and donating $120 * (1 - X) to MIRI, where X is the proportion of people who answer COOPERATE. I humbly suggest that others do the same.
While it’s probably justified to correct for the sampling bias in prevalence statistics, it’s worth pointing out that sexual partners are not sampled uniformly: the prevalence of a given STD will potentially be higher in the population of likely partners than in the general population.
I released my first game to the App Store on Oct 1. It’s a dual n-back game with a rhythm component called Double Dynamo. (Previously mentioned in the July what are you working on thread.)
In the spirit of The Best Textbooks on Every Subject, which book would you say is the best introduction to drawing and which two specific books that you’ve read/used is it superior to, and why?
Me: “Our patient’s blood pressure dropped a bit.”
Her: “Yeah, it did. What do you want to do about it?”
Me: “I, uh, I don’t know… Should I increase the vasopressors?”
[...]
This conversation sounds like a textbook example of guessing the teacher’s password and it sounds like your preceptor is trying to tell you that the role you are taking — that of the student who is trying to figure out the “right” answer, which the teacher knows but is withholding — is inappropriate to the situation. Obviously this is not my domain of expertise, but I would suggest that any time you want to ask a “should I” question, you should instead be saying something like “I’m going to increase the vasopressors. Does that sound reasonable?” As you become more confident in your decisions you can leave off the second part.
Only say ‘rational’ when you can’t eliminate the word
This is good advice for most words.
There are actually a couple of rather good points behind this statement, if perhaps not clearly expressed, and I say this as a regular, even religious, user of Anki. The first point is that there is significant overhead to (1) determining whether a given idea is worthy of memorization, (2) formulating the idea into a memorizable set of facts, and (3) entering those facts into your Anki deck. In my experience reviewing the facts is the cheap and easy part, whereas the initial steps are time-consuming and tiring, and the cost is entirely up-front.
The second point is that exposure to ideas often follows the pattern of spaced repetition naturally, because the idea is part of the zeitgeist. Arguably this is a superior way to learn many things for a number of reasons. For example, it avoids the problem of your mental model overfitting the identically repeating stimuli.
The existing karma system does a good job of addressing the first two possibilities, but the last three cases are still pretty hard to distinguish. Kaj_Sotala seems to be talking about cases 4 and 5, more or less.
As long as we’re talking about a technical solution, it seems like the relevant dimension that Kaj is talking about is difficulty/understandability as opposed to agreement or general quality, and I can imagine a few different solutions to this[1]. That said, I’m not convinced that this would tell you the information you’re after, since readers who have a strong technical background will be more likely to read difficult, technical posts and may vote them as relatively easy to understand. And the situation is the same with less technical readers and easier posts.
The third case could be addressed to a certain extent just by tracking number of views and displaying that somewhere. Maybe also with summary statistics like (upvotes—downvotes) / views. Views could be triggered when a post is clicked on, voted on, or just visible for greater than, say, 10 seconds, which will produce some false positives and false negatives but might be better than nothing.
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[1] E.g. two new voting buttons (“too basic”, “too difficult”), a larger set of radio buttons, or a slider. Not sure what the icons would be, but maybe something like “1,2,3” for basic and integral signs for difficult.
Working on an iOS (and hopefully Android) game based on the dual n-back task. I’m about a week and a half in and I’m still evaluating frameworks, but over the last 3 days I’ve built a working proof of concept in the Sparrow Framework which is iOS only. Over the next few days I’m going to port the proof of concept to cocos2d-x and make a final determination on technology by the end of the week.
PM me if you’re interested in beta testing. I expect to have a playable and hopefully fun prototype (about 75% feature-complete) in about 3 weeks.
For some context, this is not an idle side project: I recently quit my job at a large game company to pursue this project, and I have several years’ experience in the industry. I will be working solo and full-time on the game at least for the next 3-4 months, which is about how long I expect development to take to the point of completion. I plan on outsourcing the music — if you have any suggestions in this area, suggest away! I am well aware of the planning fallacy and Hofstadter’s law, so feel free to take my estimates with a grain of salt, but please note that I do have experience estimating the cost of software projects and I think I am reasonably well-calibrated in this area.
Also, this is not just another Jaeggi or Brain Workshop clone; I am aiming for super-tight gameplay and mainstream appeal.
- 2 Jul 2013 17:14 UTC; 12 points) 's comment on What are you working on? July 2013 by (
- Stats Advice on a New N-back Game by 29 May 2013 21:44 UTC; 7 points) (
- 20 Feb 2013 0:38 UTC; 6 points) 's comment on Open thread, February 15-28, 2013 by (
A little while back I read a Language Log post on this, one of Mark Liberman’s breakfast experiments. He looks at differences in switch timing, which I think is the same as what you’re calling LSV, between male and female speakers in a large corpus of telephone conversations.
Or, for that matter, making organ donation opt out rather than opt in.
This sort of optimization is a pretty foundational concept for software engineers. These are things that have helped my career as a software engineer and made me more effective in my job (not exactly the same thing, but related!):
Basics
Touch typing. This should go without saying, but I’ve worked with people who hunt and peck and it’s painful to watch. But you don’t have to type really fast to get most of the benefit, since other bottlenecks will start to dominate. In my experience a pokey 50 WPM is more than sufficient.
More Advanced Mechanics
Gain fluency in a powerful shell, a good text editor, and an expressive “scripting” language
Learn a modern version control system such as git
Set up an environment that works for you and keep improving it – this is very much along the lines of Nick5a1′s systems mindset. Keep your dotfiles in version control.
Don’t repeat yourself. Learn to refactor code to remove unnecessary duplication.
Keep configuration decisions out of code
Understand dependencies among different pieces of code and know a few strategies for simplifying them (the pub/sub or event bus pattern, dependency injection, etc.)
Know how to deal with asynchronous operations using both callbacks and promises – NodeSchool has a great tutorial for server-side JavaScript.
Soft Skills
Keep a todo list (I keep my own, or you can get really good with your issue tracker)
Keep a log of things you’ve done (bonus if you can generate the log automatically from your todo list)
Keep notes on how you solved tricky problems
Understand your role (you’re not a designer or product manager, but you need to know what they care about to work with them effectively)
prioritize the product, then others’ goals, then your own (this is usually the most effective way of furthering your goals)
insist on regular one-on-one meetings with your manager
before answering a question find out why the question was asked
Non-paywall article here.
For me the best quote came at 50:45: “You are a system that constantly confuses itself with the content of its own self-model.”
I thought it was an excessive number of notes too at first, and balked at the scrolling. And then I came up with a solution that’s almost as good as if the notes were hyperlinked, and now I’m kicking myself a little bit for not thinking of this sooner:
Open the article in a new tab next to this one. Scroll down to the footnotes in the new tab and stay with the main text in the old one.
Hopefully this will save one or two people some time and annoyance when faced with similarly noted text.
I read the article earlier today and for me the most interesting part was the following. It lends credence to one of the fundamental ideas of LW, that deliberate study of biases can lead to good results.
In one project, 256 members of a health-insurance plan were invited to classes stressing the importance of exercise. Half the participants received an extra lesson on the theories of habit formation (the structure of the habit loop) and were asked to identify cues and rewards that might help them develop exercise routines.
The results were dramatic. Over the next four months, those participants who deliberately identified cues and rewards spent twice as much time exercising as their peers. Other studies have yielded similar results.
People likely don’t comment on your clothing because it is literally unremarkable. In my experience, people will comment on clothing that stands out, though negative comments generally only come from those close to me (and these are the comments that are most helpful for improvement, hard as they are to take). In fact, if I don’t get positive comments about an article of clothing that I expect to be complimented on I take that as evidence that it doesn’t look good on me. It’s possible that no one among your close friends or family pays attention to clothing or knows much about it; if this is the case it will be helpful to find someone who is knowledgeable who you feel comfortable asking for advice.
One of the best places to get feedback is the store where you’re shopping. The people who work there might give you good advice since they should know their product, but be careful: they often work on commission, so you’ll need a good bullshit detector. It can be better to ask your fellow customers, and it turns out that this is a perfectly socially acceptable thing to do as long as you’re polite and not pushy. Also, their answers are more likely to be honest than if you asked someone you know about clothing you already own, since they won’t have to worry about making you feel bad. I have had good results with questions like “do you think this fits me?” or “does this style work for me?” As always, take into account what kind of person they are (or present themselves as) when you hear their feedback and weight it appropriately.
Another thing that I do that may have increased the amount of feedback I get is that if I see someone I work with wearing an article of clothing that I like, I compliment them. This has become a normal thing to do at my (mostly male) workplace, and so my coworkers are more likely to compliment me. I hesitate to speculate on causality, but I think there is a little. I also sometimes compliment people I don’t know on their clothing in cafes or even on the street, but that’s mostly just an ongoing effort to be more social.
Finally, go to a LW meetup and find someone with fashion sense (if you can) and talk to them. They are far more likely than the average person to follow something close to Crocker’s rules.
As mentioned here, here, and here, I’ve been working on a new iOS (and eventually Android) game based on Dual N-Back, called Double Dynamo (also on Facebook ).
I just got the background music working last week, which was trickier than it sounds — I needed to play multiple tracks back to back without a gap while syncing the gameplay to the beat of the music. I’m halfway through writing a technical post on my blog on how I got it working, so watch this space....
The other part of the project is figuring out a marketing strategy, which is for me at least as challenging as the design and implementation aspects. My background is firmly on the technical side.
I’ve talked about why I’m doing this project in previous comments, but briefly, I consider it a stepping stone to larger things, a way to build a reputation as an indie developer, and also something to add to my portfolio that I can point to and say “I did that”. Which is something I can’t really do right now even after 7+ years in games. Also, I’ve already learned far more about game development than I would have working in a larger studio.
- 4 Oct 2013 17:54 UTC; 30 points) 's comment on October Monthly Bragging Thread by (
This doesn’t look right: http://screencast.com/t/qpRGihBG
The raw data says there are 13 votes for “0” and 20 votes for “1″.
I took it, on a Saturday night, and scored 7 on Extroversion. Pardon me while I step out to go to a party.