Billy has the chance to study abroad in Australia for a year, and he’s so mixed up about it, he can barely think straight.
Outside View—can anyone imagine a satisfying ending to this story that doesn’t have Billy going to Australia?
bentarm
Karma: 1,809
meh, scratch that, I misremembered the quote as “most people disagree with you”…
I’d still bet that the majority of people who have a belief that meets all the criteria you suggest are probably wrong about that belief. For example, I think there’s a reasonable case that most priests’ religious beliefs would met your criteria, and it’s clear that most priests are wrong (as long you you take priest to include holy men from all of the world’s religions, it must be true).
I won’t speak to the usefulness of the quote as a means for generating useful entrepreneurial ideas.
And conversely, things are allowed to just happen Because the Author Says So in fiction. When watching TV, I’ll often ask “why didn’t person X just do obvious thing Y which would have solved all of their problems for the rest of this episode?”, to which my girlfriend’s perfectly valid response is “plot reasons” (TV Tropes calls this the Anthropic Principle)
This seems to be the sort of cue that is much more reliable in fiction than in real life. In real life, not everything that happens has to be foreshadowed.
We’re meeting up at 3pm on Sunday in Glasgow. It’s not exactly planned as an hpmor wrap party (the organiser didn’t even know hpmor was being updated again), but I expect well end up discussing hpmor, and any readers would be welcome.
It’s not at all obvious to me that the failure mode of not looking for a better move when you’ve found a good one is more common than the failure mode of spending too long looking for a better move when you’ve found a good one—in general, I think the consensus is that people who are willing to satisfice actually end up happier with their final decisions than people who spend too long maximising, but I agree that this doesn’t apply in all areas, and that there are likely times when this would be useful advice.
In the particular example I gave, if you’ve already found a move that wins a rook, then it’s all-but irrelevant if you’re missing a better move that wins a queen, as winning a rook is already equivalent to winning the game, but there are obviously degrees of this (it’s obviously not irrelevant if you settle for winning a pawn and miss checkmate). This suggests you should be careful how you define a “satisficing” solution, but not necessarily that satisficing is a bad strategy (in the extreme, if your “good move” is a forced checkmate, then it’s obviously a waste of time to look for a “better move”, whatever that might mean).
- Lasker may have said this, but it also pre-dates him: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmanuel_Lasker#Quotations
It’s also not always good advice. Sometimes you should just satisfice. Chess is often one of these times, as you have a clock. If you see something that wins a rook, and spend the rest of your time trying to win a queen, you’re not going to win the game.
Serious question—why do you (either CFAR as an organisation or Anna in particular) think in-person workshops are more effective than, eg, writing a book, or making a mooc-style series of online lessons for teaching this stuff? Is it actually more about network building than the content of the workshops themselves? Do you not understand how to teach well enough to be able to do it in video format? Videos are inherently less profitable?
We will be organising another one relatively soon. If you pm me your email address, I’ll include you in hype discussion
Just to be absolutely explicit, if you can’t come, but would be interested in coming to a future meet up in Glasgow, please post here so we know you exist.
Meetup : Glasgow (Scotland) Meetup
Did the survey. I don’t know what cisgender means, but I assume that’s me, as I’m definitely not transgender...
The Revelation Principle feels like one of those results that flip flops between trivially obvious and absurdly impossible… I’m currently in an “absurdly powerful” frame of mind.
I guess the principle is mostly useful for impossibility results? Given an arbitrary mechanism, will you usually be able to decompose it to find the associated incentive compatible mechanism?
I’m not sure I get this—If you’re not allowed to compare apples to oranges, how do you decide which to eat? Is that the point this quote is trying to make?
If only one flower, we seek for nothing farther- what then if two or three, or more? Each successive one is multiple evidence- proof not added to proof,
Hard to tell out of context, but is this claiming that each successive flower is independent evidence? In general, it feels like the reasoner is missing some dependency relationships between bits of evidence here.
I was about 80% sure that 1159 was not prime, based on reading that sentence. It took me <1 minute to confirm this. I can totally be more than 99.99% sure of the primality of any given four-digit number.
In fact, those odds suggest that I’d expect to make one mistake with probability >0.5 if I were to go through a list of all the numbers below 10,000 and classify them as prime or not prime. I think this is ridiculous. I’m quite willing to take a bet at 100 to 1 odds that I can produce an exhaustive list of all the prime numbers below 1,000,000 (which contains no composite numbers), if anyone’s willing to stump up at least $10 for the other side of the bet.
To be honest, no. There really isn’t much more to it than is contained in the sixteen words above, or listening to one of Kaufman’s TedX talks.
The First 20 Hours (Josh Kaufman):
Practice something for 20 hours, and you’ll learn a lot. Don’t worry about feeling stupid/clumsy.
My first thought on reading this was that given that people tend to be overconfident in just about every other area of their lives, I would find it exceedingly surprising if it were in fact the case that people’s estimates of their own attractiveness was systematically lower than the estimates of others. I notice that there isn’t actually a citation for this claim anywhere in the article.
Indeed, having looked for some evidence, this was the first study I could find that attempted to investigate the claim directly: Mirror, mirror on the wall…: self-perception of facial beauty versus judgement by others.. To quote the abstract:
In other words, the phenomenon that you “explain” in this article is literally the opposite of the truth, at least for the people in that study.
Your strength as a rationalist is your ability to be more confused by fiction than by reality. Yes, surely some people under-estimate their own attractiveness, but if the explanation for this is cognitive biases which are present in everyone, how do we explain the people in this study who make exactly the opposite error? If you are equally good at explaining any outcome, you have zero knowledge, etc, etc.