benkuhn

Karma: 2,715

benkuhn 10 Mar 2014 22:26 UTC
55 points
0
on: A vote against spaced repetition
Good information! This is really more “a vote against flashcards” than “a vote against spaced repetition”, though, at least given your concrete issues with flashcards. Spaced repetition is an algorithm for figuring out when to review material that you want to memorize; flashcards are one thing that spaced repetition is applied to, because it’s easy to stick flashcards in a computer. As far as I know, no matter what object-level mnemonic devices you’re using, spaced repetition is still strictly better than “when I feel like I’m forgetting” or “right before a test” or any of the other obvious review strategies, if you can deal with the cognitive load of scheduling things, or get a computer to do it for you.

Is there space for some sort of SRS that allows for input of the more helpful types of memorizations that you listed (pictures, venn diagrams, etc.)?

benkuhn 6 Jan 2014 2:41 UTC
29 points
in reply to: bramflakes’s comment on: [LINK] Why I’m not on the Rationalist Masterlist
Really? Do you really think everyone who comes off as irrational based on a blog post of theirs that you read shouldn’t be here? (There would be nobody left for you to talk to!) Or are you annoyed at this particular person because they said mean things about a group that contains you?

“This is what motivated cognition looks like. If someone cannot take criticism of their in-group without launching an ad-hominem attack on the critic, then they should not be in a rationalist community.”

That sword cuts both ways.

benkuhn 2 Mar 2014 23:55 UTC
26 points
on: Proportional Giving
Proportional giving was designed for people who didn’t even necessarily want to be intrinsically motivated to give money (e.g. paying taxes or perhaps tithing to a church). If you want to raise money from such people, proportional donation aligns the incentives much better than threshold.

That said, there are a couple reasons why it’s still useful for effective altruists:
- The thing you mentioned about near mode.
- As you get older, you gain more ability to buy utility at good prices: for instance, kids become increasingly expensive as they age.
- It sets a norm that’s easier for people to follow. For instance, fewer people would join Giving What We Can if the pledge were “give everything above $X” instead of “give 10% of your income”.
- It’s more inclusive. Not everyone can give away everything above (e.g.) US$36k. A lot more people can give away 10% of income.
Nevertheless, many effective altruists (e.g. Toby Ord) do practice the fixed-income approach.

benkuhn 30 Dec 2013 3:04 UTC
26 points
on: Cognito Mentoring: An advising service for intellectually curious students
I had an 11-email correspondence with Jonah and Vipul about course selection. I’m a junior at Harvard and was worried that I was hitting diminishing marginal returns to courses taken—I haven’t been able to find very good non-technical courses and I’m hitting diminishing marginal returns to technical ones.

Jonah and Vipul looked through the Harvard course catalog and gave me several specific course recommendations according to the goals and criteria I gave them, as well as several more general pointers—try to take more graduate-level courses, consider intellectual history as an especially helpful subfield of the humanities, some economics can be learned fairly well through self-study, etc. (with supporting details and reasoning, not just assertions). They responded very quickly, asked a bunch of good clarifying questions, and their advice was quite detailed and seems good, though I won’t get to put any of it into practice until school starts back up again in a few weeks. Overall I’m quite pleased with their advising so far, though I can’t speak to their results yet with confidence.
What links here?
- benkuhn's comment on Cognito Mentoring: An advising service for intellectually curious students by JonahS (28 Dec 2013 5:40 UTC; 16 points)

benkuhn 27 Nov 2019 5:13 UTC
22 points
on: Could someone please start a bright home lighting company?
I’m one of the friends mentioned. Here’s some more anecdata, most importantly including what I think is the current easiest way to try a lumenator (requiring only one fixture instead of huge numbers of bulbs):
I don’t have seasonal depression, but after spending a winter in a tropical country, it was extremely noticeable that it’s harder for me to focus and I have less willpower when it’s dark out (which now starts at 4:15). I bought an extremely bright light and put it right next to my desk, in my peripheral vision while I work. It was an immediate and very noticeable improvement; I estimate it buys me 30-120 minutes of focus per day, depending on how overcast it is.
You can see a before-and-after here, although my phone camera’s dynamic range is not good enough to really capture the difference.
Everyone who has visited my house since I got the lightbulb has remarked on how nice it feels, which I was initially surprised by since the bulb is 5600k and not particularly high-CRI.
My current setup is honestly kinda crappy (but still amazing). I’m working on a much nicer DIY version, but in the mean time, here’s the stuff I bought:
- 250-watt corn bulb (~= 40 60w-equivalent bulbs; $100)
  - This bulb has a pretty loud fan (~50db at close range); if you don’t like noise, you can buy two of the 120-watt version.
- this E39 fixture ($15)
  - the clamp is too weak to hold the bulb, but you can jerry-rig a support by embedding the socket into the styrofoam packaging that the light comes in :P
  - Also if you use this you’ll need to turn it off and on by unplugging as there is no switch on the fixture.
- these E39 to E26 adapters ($10 for 4)
  - buy if you want to put in an overhead light or traditional lamp
  - note that the bulb does not fit well in many fixtures because it is very large and heavy
(Amazon links are affiliate so I can see whether they are useful to people)

benkuhn 13 Dec 2020 18:47 UTC
21 points
in reply to: Matt Goldenberg’s comment on: To listen well, get curious
Yes, and I think the different words were useful!
You’re repeating / elaborating on things that are in the post, but were not particularly emphasized. I didn’t emphasize them because I’ve personally had the “deeply internalized felt sense of how easy it is for humans to misunderstand each-other” that you describe for a long time, and only more recently got the “be curious” part, and so I emphasized that because it was the missing piece for me (and didn’t totally realize the degree to which the other part was load-bearing / could be the missing piece for others).

benkuhn 24 Sep 2013 18:39 UTC
20 points
in reply to: palladias’s comment on: Open Thread, September 23-29, 2013
An iteration of this class was one of the high points of the May 2013 CFAR retreat for me. It was extraordinarily helpful in helping me get over various aversions, be less reactive and more agenty about my actions, and generally enjoy life more. For instance, I gained the ability to enjoy, or substantially increased my enjoyment of, several activities I didn’t particularly like, including:
- improv games
- additional types of social dance
- conversations with strangers
- public speaking
It also helped substantially with CFAR’s comfort zone expansion exercises. Highly recommended.

benkuhn 5 Dec 2013 5:12 UTC
18 points
on: December Monthly Bragging Thread
- organized a talk by Peter Singer that exposed 300+ Harvard students to effective altruism
- organized an effective altruist group on campus to the point where fifteen of us are running fundraiser for GiveWell’s top charities (compared to 2-3 people hanging around and talking last semester)
- wrote a fairly well-received post here
- successfully applied for a number of internships in order to get more information about job prospects in finance
- wrote somewhere in the neighborhood of 20,000 words of blog/essays/math

benkuhn 28 Dec 2013 5:40 UTC
16 points
in reply to: Gvaerg’s comment on: Cognito Mentoring: An advising service for intellectually curious students
I’m taking them up on their offer right now. I’ll report back when I’m done. EDIT: here.

benkuhn 28 Jul 2020 11:32 UTC
15 points
on: Developmental Stages of GPTs
I’m confused about the “because I could not stop for death” example. You cite it as an example of GPT-3 developing “the sense of going somewhere, at least on the topic level,” but it seems to have just memorized the Dickinson poem word for word; the completion looks identical to the original poem except for some punctuation.
(To be fair to GPT-3, I also never remember where Dickinson puts her em dashes.)

benkuhn 11 Aug 2013 23:23 UTC
15 points
on: What Bayesianism taught me
Maybe this wasn’t your intent, but framing this post as a rebuttal of Chapman doesn’t seem right to me. His main point isn’t “Bayesianism isn’t useful”—more like “the Less Wrong memeplex has an unjustified fetish for Bayes’ Rule” which still seems pretty true.

benkuhn 2 Dec 2013 0:02 UTC
14 points
in reply to: CarlShulman’s comment on: A critique of effective altruism
Hmm. I didn’t interpret a hypothetical apostasy as the fiercest critique, but rather the best critique—i.e. weight the arguments not by “badness if true” but by something like badness times plausibility.

But you may be right that I unconsciously biased myself towards arguments that were easier to solve by tweaking the EA movement’s direction. For instance, I should probably have included a section about measurability bias, which does seem plausibly quite bad.

benkuhn 20 Mar 2014 0:57 UTC
13 points
on: Effective Altruism Summit 2014
Definitely attend this if you can! I went last year and it was an amazing experience. Highly, highly recommended. (Yes, even more highly than donating the price of tickets to your favorite effective charity.)

EDIT: also, feel free to ask me stuff about the participant experience, either here or by private message.

benkuhn 6 Mar 2014 19:11 UTC
12 points
on: [LINK] Latinus rationalior ist.
Nitpick: Lingua latina rationalior est.

benkuhn 12 Dec 2013 23:29 UTC
12 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Luck I: Finding White Swans
Also,

in your wallet

“in thy wallet”

and you may soon find your opportunity

“and thou mayst soon find thy opportunity”

What would you do

“What wouldst thou do”

benkuhn 31 Oct 2013 3:11 UTC
12 points
in reply to: Vaniver’s comment on: Democracy and rationality
Funnily enough, I asked Amartya Sen and Eric Maskin about this earlier today, in addition to a similarly extensive reading list. You definitely have your quantifiers backwards.

You claim that Arrow’s dictatorship criterion is “for all preferences, there exists some k such that the social preference is voter k’s preference”. In fact, the criterion is the stronger statement that “there exists some k such that for all preferences, the social preference is voter k’s preference”.

If you read the proof on Wikipedia carefully, you’ll notice that it proves that:

Pivotal Voter dictates society’s decision for B over C. That is, we show that no matter how the rest of society votes, if Pivotal Voter ranks B over C, then that is the societal outcome.

(Note the order of the quantifiers). They then show

There can be at most one dictator.

benkuhn 24 Dec 2020 15:38 UTC
11 points
in reply to: ThomasJ’s comment on: My favorite essays of life advice
I don’t think founder/investor class conflict makes that much sense as an explanation for that. It’s easy to imagine a world in which investors wanted their money returned when the team updates downwards on their likelihood of success. (In fact, that sometimes happens! I don’t know whether Sam would do that but my guess is only if the founders want to give up.)
I also don’t think at least Sam glorifies pivots or ignores opportunity cost. For instance the first lecture from his startup course:
And pivots are supposed to be great, the more pivots the better. So this isn’t totally wrong, things do evolve in ways you can’t totally predict.… But the pendulum has swung way out of whack. A bad idea is still bad and the pivot-happy world we’re in today feels suboptimal.… There are exceptions, of course, but most great companies start with a great idea, not a pivot.… [I]f you look at the track record of pivots, they don’t become big companies. I myself used to believe ideas didn’t matter that much, but I’m very sure that’s wrong now.
---
More generally, I agree that this claim clashes strongly with some rationalists’ worldviews, and it’s plausible that it just increases the variance of outcomes and not the mean. But given that outcomes are power-law distributed (mean is proportional to variance!), the number of people endorsing it from on top of a giant pile of utility, and the perhaps surprisingly low number of highly successful rationalists, I’d recommend rationalists treat it with curiosity instead of dismissiveness.

benkuhn 12 Jul 2015 3:23 UTC
10 points
in reply to: Jiro’s comment on: Effective Altruism from XYZ perspective

Every time I pay for electricity for my computer rather than sending the money to a third world peasant is, according to EA, a failure to maximize utility.

I’m sad that people still think EAers endorse such a naive and short-time-horizon type of optimizing utility. It would obviously not optimize any reasonable utility function over a reasonable timeframe for you to stop paying for electricity for your computer.

More generally, I think most EAers have a much more sophisticated understanding of their values, and the psychology of optimizing them, than you give them credit for. As far as I know, nobody who identifies with EA routinely makes individual decisions between personal purchases and donating. Instead, most people allocate a “charity budget” periodically and make sure they feel ok about both the charity budget and the amount they spend on themselves. Very few people, if any, cut personal spending to the point where they have to worry about, e.g., electricity bills.

benkuhn 12 Jul 2014 1:14 UTC
10 points
on: Too good to be true
In your “critiquing bias” section you allege that ³⁄₄₃ studies supporting a link is “still surprisingly low”. This is wrong; it is actually surprisingly high. If B ~ Binom(43, 0.05), then P(B > 2) ~= 0.36.*

*As calculated by the following Python code:
```
from scipy.stats import binom
b = binom(43, 0.05)
p_less_than_3 = sum(b.pmf(i) for i in [0,1,2])
print 1 - p_less_than_3
```

benkuhn 17 Apr 2014 1:34 UTC
10 points
in reply to: shminux’s comment on: Open Thread April 16 - April 22, 2014
I’d beware conflating “interpersonal skills” with “playing politics.” For CEO at least (and probably CTO as well), there are other important factors in job performance than raw engineering talent. The subtext of your comment is that the companies you mention were somehow duped into promoting these bad engineers to executive roles, but they might have just decided that their CEO/CTO needed to be good at managing or recruiting or negotiating, and the star engineer team lead didn’t have those skills.

Second, I think that the “playing politics” part is true at some organizations but not at others. Perhaps this is an instance of All Debates are Bravery Debates.

My model is something like: having passable interpersonal/communication skills is pretty much a no-brainer, but beyond that there are firms where it just doesn’t make that much of a difference, because they’re sufficiently good at figuring out who actually deserves credit for what that they can select harder for engineering ability than for politics. However, there are other organizations where this is definitely not the case.