I think I’ve been in a similar situation. Last year, I decided that I didn’t like how my happiness fluctuated with events that happened in the outside world. I metaphorically detached myself from the world, so that I didn’t particularly care what happened to my life. It had gotten to the point where the question, “Where do you see yourself in five, ten years?” was not even in the space of thoughts that I entertained. Then, I got a girlfriend (she asked me out), and I was immensely happy for a few months until we broke up. Before the relationship, I wasn’t particularly unhappy, nor was I happy. But the relationship helped me realize that severing yourself from the world leads to a stale existence. You have to learn how to plug yourself back into the world and find a low-volatility way to find happiness from your pursuits.
brilee
Awesome idea! It just so happens that I’ve been thinking about daily goals—for example, “Strike up a conversation with a random person”, or “Remember to project your voice and speak loudly”, or even something as simple as “Smile!”.
The interface for horoscope submission is somewhat awkward—if I want to submit multiple horoscopes, I have to re-type my name/email address each time.
“Communication usually fails, except by accident”—Osmo Wiio
“Communication” here has a different definition from the usual one. I interpreted it as meaning the richness of your internal experiences and the intricate web of associations are conjured in your mind when you say even a single word.
Log-odds (or logits)
Yeah, I was definitely thinking about that. The mathematician in me won out in the end.
It occurs to me that a lot of people have probably thought about this, and they have alternately used base 2, base e, and base 10. Unless we get the entire LW community to standardize on one base, we won’t be able to coherently communicate with one another using log-probabilities, and therefore log-probabilities will stay relegated to the dustbin.
base 2 - advantages, we can talk about N bytes’ worth of evidences.
base e—mathematician’s base
base 10 - common layperson can understand it, advantages with the 9′s and 0′s.
Actually, I think you’re right, log base 10 is probably better. If others agree, I’ll rewrite the article in base 10.
What you’ve described is in fact, exactly the same thing as log-odds—they’re simply separated by a logarithm/exponentiation. Thus, all the multiplications you describe are the counterpart of the additions I describe. I agree, we could work with odds ratio, without taking the logarithm—but using logarithms has the benefit of linearizing the probability space. The distance between 1 L% and 5 L% is the same as the distance between 10 L% and 14 L%, but you wouldn’t know it by looking at 2.72:1 and 150:1 versus 22,000:1 and 1,200,000:1.
I have a very strong competition math background from high school, but my primary field is chemistry.
Article is rewritten in base 10, and I rewrote some of the explanation for Bayesian updates. Enjoy!
I believe it’s a bit of metahumor/sarcasm aimed at this plot device:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MillionToOneChance
“Before enlightenment; chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment; chop wood, carry water.”—Zen saying
A warning that not all hyperrationality is beneficial.
I second that. See my post at http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/8lr/logodds_or_logits/ for a concise summary. Getting the LW survey to use log-odds would go a long way towards getting LW to start using log-odds in normal conversation.
I haven’t learned any general relativity yet, but from what I know of special relativity, it actually makes perfect sense. You start with the assumption that no observation can allow you to deduce where you are or how fast you are moving, and then follow that premise to its logical extremes.
There are things, if you look at them hard enough, you can understand it intuitively, and they cease to be weird.
Quantum mechanics, on the other hand, is one of those things that even if you look at it really, really hard, you still can’t understand it. So no, I think quantum mechanics is the only example you could have used here.
You should work at a fortune cookie company, I’m sure you’d learn some tricks of the trade.
Why is it dark arts only if you do it to adults? I’d say if anything, it’s even darker if you do it to children
I am hesitant, and I think many others may be hesitant to engage in a debate on eugenics, not because it might trigger strong feelings (I think we as a community are capable of setting those aside), but because of the way it might be perceived by casual visitors to the site.
It would be nice if we could get some sort of agreement to ignore political correctness/face the consequences of political incorrectness and engage in what I think would be a very healthy debate.
To be honest, I’ve only ever felt SI/EY/LW’s “arrogance” once, and I think that LW in general is pretty damn awesome. (I realize I’m equating LW with SI, but I don’t really know what SI does)
The one time is while reading through the Free Willhttp://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Free_will page, which I’ve copied here: “One of the easiest hard questions, as millennia-old philosophical dilemmas go. Though this impossible question is fully and completely dissolved on Less Wrong, aspiring reductionists should try to solve it on their own. ”
This smacks strongly of “oh look, there’s a classic stumper, and I’m the ONLY ONE who’s solved it (naa naa naa). If you want to be a true rationalist/join the tribe, you better solve it on your own, too”
I’ve also heard others mention that HP from HPMoR is an unsufferable little twat, which I assume is the same attitude they would have if they were to read LW.
I’ve written some of my thoughts up about the arrogance issue here. The short version is that some people have strongly developed identities as “not one of those pretentious people” and have strong immune responses when encountering intelligence. http://moderndescartes.blogspot.com/2011/07/turn-other-cheek.html
Goddamnit! From the start of the hunt, I was waiting for the HPMoR puzzle to come out, and it turns out you guys were holding it back???
I laughed pretty hard at some of the lines. I’m still solving, I’ll let you know if I managed to get it.
Can we not have corporate advertising on LW? Alternately, I’d be okay with it if, for example, Quixey told their employees to devote 10% of their time to writing high-quality posts on LW.
ROT13
Nyevtug, V tnir hc naq ybbxrq ng gur fbyhgvbaf. Vg gheaf bhg V jnf whfg bar fgrc sebz gur raq, naq V unq rira tbar qbja gur “rnpu punenpgre cebonoyl ercerfragf n pbtavgvir ovnf, nf cre synibegrkg” cngu. Ohg nsgre fpehgvavmvat rnpu punenpgre, V pbhyqa’g cnegvphyneyl frr nal cnggreaf va gur reebef gung gurl znqr, fb V tnir hc ba gung yrnq.
RL’f puncgref ner qryvpvbhfyl zhygvynlrerq va ubj gurl qrzbafgengr gurve gurzr ercrngrqyl, naq lbh cebonoyl pbhyq unir gnxra rknzcyrf qverpgyl sebz gur grkg (v.r. ZpTbantnyy ercrngrqyl znxrf gur shaqnzragny nggevohgvba reebe va puncgre bs gur fnzr anzr)
Jbhyq unir jbexrq zhpu orggre vs lbh unq hfrq yrff bofpher pbtavgvir ovnfrf, naq unq pyhrq gurz va zber fgebatyl, be creuncf n zvk bs irel boivbhf ovnfrf naq zber bofpher barf.
(Joined just to comment!, been stalking for a while)
I find that sightreading music actually works well. If I’m wide awake/alert, I can sightread bach fugues with 4 voices, and I can mentally actively keep track of them simultaneously. On the low end of the scale, I find that I can only concentrate on one voice at a time and my sightreading performance drops significantly. I also play blitz go, but the problem is that you don’t realize then your moves are bad, and it’s only when you review your games the next day it’s obvious that you’ve played bad moves.
Another trick I use is to remember as many tunes, and their names, as possible. (This works better if you’ve listened to and memorized a /lot/ of different songs and are theoretically capable of recalling over a thousand songs). If I’m tired, I usually run into mental blocks when trying to remember how a specific song started.
Re: several people above who said they could monitor their own cognitive state with practice; I’m definitely developing that skill.