atucker

Hack­ing on LessWrong Just Got Easier

Just Try It: Quan­tity Trumps Quality

Don’t Fear Failure

Neu­ral Cor­re­lates of Con­scious Access

Foma: Beliefs that Cause Them­selves to be True

• atucker 14 Dec 2010 0:32 UTC

  31 points

  on: What top­ics would you like to see more of on LessWrong?

  Direct advice for young (= precollege) people. They have pretty much their whole life ahead of them, and if you can get to them and give them advice before they start down some potentially limiting major life path/​choice then its a huge gain. I personally want a bit of help with this...

  You could do something yourself, but if you get 2 people to do that same thing then you effectively dedicate 2 more lifetimes to the effort. And doing so doesn’t even eat up that much of your own time.

  What links here?

  • Randaly's comment on Brain­storm­ing: neat stuff we could do on LessWrong by Emile (14 Dec 2010 22:03 UTC; 16 points)

[Story] Rejection

[Ques­tion] What’s your Ele­va­tor Pitch For Ra­tion­al­ity?

• atucker 28 Sep 2012 18:40 UTC

  26 points

  in reply to: JoshuaZ’s comment on: Yale Creates First Self-Aware Robot?

  I don’t at all think that this robot possesses full-blown human-style self-awareness, but, depending on the actual algorithms used in self-recognition, I think it passes the mirror test in a meaningful way.

  For instance, if it learned to recognize itself in the mirror by moving around and noticing really strong correlations between it’s model of it’s own movements and the image it sees, then ultimately concludes that the image is a reflection of itself, then identifies visual changes about itself, then I would say that it has a self-model in a meaningful and important way. It doesn’t contextualize itself in a social setting, or model itself as having emotions, but it is self-representing.

  This robot has a lower amount of self-modeling capability, I would say: http://​​www.youtube.com/​​watch?v=ehno85yI-sA

  It’s able to update a model of itself, but not recognize itself.

  Towards the end of the video, I feel a similar amount to greater amount of sympathy for the robot’s “struggle” as I do for injured crustaceans. I also endorse that level of sympathy, and can’t really think of a meaningful functional difference between the two that puts the crustacean intelligence as being more important.

  If it just took for granted that it was looking at itself, and updated a model of itself, it has some kind of self-model, but it seems less important.

The Pro­tag­o­nist Problem

Anti-Akra­sia Tac­tics Discussion

• atucker 10 Apr 2013 2:34 UTC

  23 points

  in reply to: Qiaochu_Yuan’s comment on: Ex­plicit and tacit rationality

  When evaluating the relationship between success and rationality it seems worth keeping in mind survivorship bias.

  An interesting case is that Will Smith seems likely to be explicitly rational in a way that other people in entertainment don’t talk about—he’ll plan and reflect on various movie-related strategies so that he can get progressively better roles and box office receipts.

  For instance, before he started acting in movies, he and his agent thought about what top-grossing movies all had in common, and then he focused on getting roles in those kinds of movies.

  http://​​www.time.com/​​time/​​magazine/​​article/​​0,9171,1689234,00.html

• atucker 27 Mar 2011 0:18 UTC

  23 points

  in reply to: Oscar_Cunningham’s comment on: Faith and theory

  You’re at a party, and for some reason are arguing about the nature of religion.

  After a few minutes of stereotypical debate, the religionist claims that

  You just have to take it on faith.

  You respond with

  Well, faith is a fairly modern invention. Originally, people thought that their beliefs actually had to correspond with things that they observed in reality. People would convert because their God would lose to someone else’s God in some observable field, or because their rituals were less effective. The way you’re using ‘faith’ is mostly based on some mistranslated Greek words, and only seems to have appeared in response to religion being shown so wrong across the board that the only possible defense is to deny thinking itself.

  Now, the religionist is probably going to be pissed off at you, and isn’t going to change their beliefs. But every agnostic around will entirely lose respect for the “Faith” argument, and maybe turn outright atheist.

  It also would defuse statements like “Humans are wired to have faith.”

• atucker 2 Feb 2011 1:51 UTC

  23 points

  on: Ra­tion­al­ity Quotes: Fe­bru­ary 2011

  Things are only impossible until they’re not.

  -- Jean-Luc Picard

• atucker 24 Dec 2011 9:59 UTC

  22 points

  in reply to: Jayson_Virissimo’s comment on: Spend Money on Ergonomics

  People’s expectations of citations are really high compared to people’s willingness to cite.

  Like, the citing is aversive/​boring enough that it’s currently a major barrier to me continuing to post about consciousness. I would have probably written at least twice as many articles as I did if I didn’t have to cite.

  I really love the well-cited content, but think that we’re definitely losing articles that I’d like to read because they think that they should be citing things.

• atucker 2 Jul 2011 4:50 UTC

  22 points

  in reply to: fubarobfusco’s comment on: [LINK] Char­lie Stross: Federov’s Rapture

  Good historical figure pick, but I think a more similar associative trick would be “Pythagoras was a vegetarian, so modern vegetarians come from an ideology that didn’t believe in irrational numbers and is flawed”.

• atucker 27 Jan 2012 13:58 UTC

  21 points

  on: Fic­tion: LW-in­spired scenelet

  I just can’t think of a good enough story to insert it in, and so I present it on its own for your amusement, even if it does mean I’m likely to lose more karma than I gained from my last post...

  I would like to see a LW in which there is more fiction, and will upvote accordingly.

Blind­sight and Consciousness

• atucker 27 Nov 2016 23:57 UTC

  20 points

  in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: On the im­por­tance of Less Wrong, or an­other sin­gle con­ver­sa­tional locus

  What’s the minimum set of powers (besides ability to kick a user off the site) that would make being a Moderator non-frustrating? One-off feature requests as part of a “restart LW” focus seem easier than trying to guarantee tech support responsiveness.

• atucker 1 Jun 2011 21:26 UTC

  19 points

  on: The Land­mark Fo­rum — a ra­tio­nal­ist’s first impression

  It seems like there are quite a few organizations that are supposed to help you get better at things. (Note: these don’t seem to have arisen independently)

  It seems easier to convince someone that something improves their life than it is to actually help them improve their life. A lot of people say that LGAT and est and whatnot work, but outside sources are more skeptical.

  On the other hand, fitness and PUA groups have objective ways of keeping track of their improvement, and AFAICT have achieved wild success within their domains. Keeping score on how well you’re doing seems to be really important to actually succeeding.