Note that there’s an Anti-Akrasia technique in here waiting to happen: If you can increase the delay of a rewarding but unproductive task that otherwise has no delay at all then you reduce your motivation to do it.
Internet browsing comes to mind. I think the XKCD author has done something to this effect (check out the comic’s comment here: http://xkcd.com/862/). To quip, he wrote a script that made his computer freeze for thirty seconds every time he opened unwanted material.
Agreed. Or Oxford for that matter.
Not to conflate my opinion’s with shminux’s, but I feel like a set of these maps from different hotspots of activity could help provide greater balance to the more implicit parts of Less Wrong’s ethos. Consider the problem where those who visit Less Wrong for the first time conflate the above memes as what we consider a “rational” course of action; or consider how derivations of what’s rational might depend on a background knowledge in ways that are easy to miss (the kind of biases that “softer” sciences may attempt to track). It’s only possible to think what we have basis for in our memories, as per the availability heuristic. This could lead Less Wrong members to confuse the instrumental with the rational, similarly with the optimum and the rational.
It could also be possible to identify other potential “hotspots” for rationality communities if their culture follows a similar pattern. I imagine Minneapolis could be a city with such potential, for example, due to its youth population and tech firm presence.
Pleasant coincidence: I’ve had exactly the same thoughts and have been communicating them to some heads of education in my old school. I doubt they’re going to go for it; also, I’d rather become a stronger rationalist first before I evangelize certain aspects of Less Wrong.
The IB can seem quite bureaucratic at times. At least, they try to be. My understanding is that teachers go through a collective standardization process via IB-led conferences. It’s not very effective. At my school, there were four ToK teachers who taught four wildly different curricula, and it reflected in our grades. It helps to have a teacher who really gets what it’s all about as they’d be more open to getting material from Less Wrong.
Contacting the IB themselves can feel like a pipdream; but, since they really have no way of enforcing curricula content on the teacher level (at least in my school) then it’s the teachers that may need convincing more than their superiors.
Element of note: ToK did suck. The class I was in contained more opinion voicing rather than analyzing, and a majority found it painful, or didn’t say anything at all.
The world is a lot simpler than the human mind can comprehend. The mind endlessly manufactures meanings and reflects with other minds, ignoring reality. Or maybe it enhances it. Not very clear on that part, I’m human as well.
37 ways that words can be wrong is a sort of meta-post that is meant to tie together other posts, so I wouldn’t use it as an example unless you’re implying that all of them go uncited or completely unresearched.
I circumvent this algorithim with Ritalin. Takes care of all the steps simoultaneously.
Your historian friends agreed with the global claim which I believe was fairly well established. From what I’ve heard talking to the interlocutor hosting this meetup (I am not he), it was *how* you extrapolated to that global claim from a local one that is being taken issue with. Notice that the historian on your blog also believes it is difficult to say to what degree Europe declined during the Dark Ages, although there are many possible markers. Notice that the reddit historian backing you is apologizing for your background rather than providing corroborative concrete evidence related to the structure of your argument. The Dominican Friar thing is nice and it’s understandable why you wouldn’t quote a private email, but it’s of course possible that they would make a similar mistake and taken without detail, it definitely seems like a pithy authority appeal.
As far as this meetup goes, from my discussions with the interlocutor, I’d expect mainly methodological criticisms, and criticisms of the rhetorical moves used to waive the limitations of the methodology. These are not the same as criticisms of the goals of SSC, or even the goals of a particular post. The substitutes recommended will be deeper reading of primary and secondary sources instead of *only* using SSC as a source (being that it’s tertiary and pop-sci), at the very least.
Maybe these criticisms once brought to light won’t be enough to brand you as a “pseudo-intellectual”, but people who do not take these kinds of criticisms into account will read your disclaimers against your expertise, yet would still be left with the inability to understand how these affect the soundness of your claims, because supposedly, they too, are not domain experts. I think such refutations, if valid and pondered, could be educational and sanity-raising for everyone in the SSC blogosphere.
MBlume’s analogy (way back) of how we’re cartographers has struck me as a cool one. Cartographer to me carries the same kind of weight as Alchemist would. Here are some names based on that trope.
Mind Charts
Internal Compass
Mental Cartography
Map is Territory
I hope someone does better than I can at using this theme.
This will last longer than you think.
Could an easy way to implement this hack, at least temporarily, be to read things upside down?
More on quick sensory disruptions later...
I voiced interest in making a career switch into BME. Would you still be doing biomedical engineering now if you knew what you now know about it? What would you change and why?
Spaced Repetition is only the beginning. http://bigthink.com/neurobonkers/assessing-the-evidence-for-the-one-thing-you-never-get-taught-in-school-how-to-learn
Here’s How to Read—on page 2 there’s a table that lists all of what this guy recommends, use that to evaluate if the rest of the document is worth your time. http://pne.people.si.umich.edu/PDF/howtoread.pdf
Also, if you know anyone who has gone to CFAR, start PMing them for the material on Propogating Urges. http://rationality.org/schedule/
Use some of the best-tested principles in experimental psychology to reinforce the behaviors you want to want, and avoid punishing yourself for doing things you want to do again. Pay attention to the immediate rewards and punishments you’re already doling out to yourself without noticing. If you always feel anxious when you think of a slow-moving project, you may be training yourself not to think about it at all. Connect the intermediate steps toward your goal to your natural enthusiasm for the result.
What you’re doing to make reading papers fun is apparently something that Andrew Critch is very very good at, so keep it up, Critch Jr.
How could you demonstrate that status is adequate or inadequate as an explanation, in this case? Or any case?
Beware of universal explanations everywhere!
’Then he posed a question that, obvious as it seems, had not really occurred to me: “What makes you think that UFOs are a scientific problem?”
I replied with something to the effect that a problem was only scientific in the way it was approached, but he would have none of that, and he began lecturing me. First, he said, science had certain rules. For example, it has to assume that the phenomena it is observing is natural in origin rather than artificial and possibly biased. Now the UFO phenomenon could be controlled by alien beings. “If it is,” added the Major, “then the study of it doesn’t belong to science. It belongs to Intelligence.” Meaning counterespionage. And that, he pointed out, was his domain. *
“Now, in the field of counterespionage, the rules are completely different.” He drew a simple diagram in my notebook. “You are a scientist. In science there is no concept of the ‘price’ of information. Suppose I gave you 95 per cent of the data concerning a phenomenon. You’re happy because you know 95 per cent of the phenomenon. Not so in intelligence. If I get 95 per cent of the data, I know that this is the ‘cheap’ part of the information. I still need the other 5 percent, but I will have to pay a much higher price to get it. You see, Hitler had 95 per cent of the information about the landing in Normandy. But he had the wrong 95 percent!”
“Are you saying that the UFO data we us to compile statistics and to find patterns with computers are useless?” I asked. “Might we be spinning our magnetic tapes endlessly discovering spurious laws?”
“It all depends on how the team on the other side thinks. If they know what they’re doing, there will be so many cutouts between you and them that you won’t have the slightest chance of tracing your way to the truth. Not by following up sightings and throwing them into a computer. They will keep feeding you the information they want you to process. What is the only source of data about the UFO phenomenon? It is the UFOs themselves!”
Some things were beginning to make a lot of sense. “If you’re right, what can I do? It seems that research on the phenomenon is hopeless, then. I might as well dump my computer into a river.”
“Not necessarily, but you should try a different approach. First you should work entirely outside of the organized UFO groups; they are infiltrated by the same official agencies they are trying to influence, and they propagate any rumour anyone wants to have circulated. In Intelligence circles, people like that are historical necessities. We call them ‘useful idiots’. When you’ve worked long enough for Uncle Sam, you know he is involved in a lot of strange things. The data these groups get is biased at the source, but they play a useful role.
“Second, you should look for the irrational, the bizarre, the elements that do not fit...Have you ever felt that you were getting close to something that didn’t seem to fit any rational pattern yet gave you a strong impression that it was significant?”′