If this were anywhere but a site dedicated to rationality, I would expect trolls to self-report their karma scores much higher on a survey than they actually are, but that data is pretty staggering. I accept the rejection of the hypothesis, and withdraw my opinion insofar as it applies to this site.
Cakoluchiam
Survey taken: check! Account finally registered: check, please!
I was off by 50%ish on the two estimation questions, but I forgive myself Bayes’ age since I really know nothing about history in “space-of-time” context. The redwood tree on the other hand was a geometry problem for me, more than anything else, and I misjudged its incline by half a degree.
A free full-cast Audiobook of Planecrash is currently in production at https://shows.acast.com/project-lawful-aka-planecrash, using AI-generated voices. It is quite excellent, albeit missing a few of the glowfic-specific elements such as character portraits and reaction tags (posts with no text, only character portraits). I highly recommend it for anyone.
There is a parallel analysis podcast and book club hosted by myself and members of The Bayesian Conspiracy’s discord channel, formerly It Makes Sense If You Understand Decision Theory, now We Want Headbands (in homage to We’ve Got Worm). As we go, I’m sectioning it into shorter Books and Chapters, with somewhat-descriptive titles. The podcast-aligned table of contents and links to the podcasts are available at http://www.imsiyudt.com/
I want to say that my own origin lies in having been raised Unitarian Universalist with the most amazing minister who never invoked “God” as anything more than the common good or interpersonal kindness. I want to believe that UU Sunday school attendance, or, more interesting to me even at that young age, ditching class and sticking through the “adult” section of the worship, where she would give the most awe-inspiringly inspirational sermons, would be enough to awaken any child as a rationalist. Alas, I am fairly certain I was prepared for rationalism even before my family moved to the church while I was in elementary school, and alas, that minister retired all too soon.
Another possibility is the fact that I was raised in a neighborhood co-op, where each afternoon I would spend at the home of a different friend, experiencing their family culture, and the diversity among those households—race, religion, nationality, economic status, orientation, language, profession—instilled an early understanding that any adherence to convention was a matter of choice.
There is one more influence, less grand, perhaps, than the others, but I think perhaps most concrete as an awakening “event”. My grandfather used to visit often when I was young. He liked to play a game with my siblings and me where he would point at an aeroplane flying overhead and declare “there goes a bird!” and my sisters and I would reply “grandpa, that’s a plane!”, and he would point to a squirrel and say “look at that groundhog climbing the tree over there!” and my sisters and I would reply “grampa, that’s a squirrel!”, and so on for all manner of things.
My grandfather also smoked, and from everything I’d learned even at that early age, smoking was bad. One day, I decided to ask my grandfather to quit, because that was what you were supposed to do with bad habits. He told me that he would quit smoking if I would stop being silly and call those little feathery animals that flapped around in the air by their proper name: ‘aeroplane’, and those furry little critters that dug up the garden and left burrow holes all over the park ‘squirrels’.
And I did.
It was a while before I saw my grandfather again, and eventually he came to stay with my family for his final years, but after I resolved to speak his language around him (even if I kept to the “real” terminology elsewhere), I never saw him light another cigarette. I don’t know if he actually quit, and for the sake of the fable, it doesn’t really matter. What I carried from then on was an understanding that there was a clear distinction between fact and fiction and that each has value, but as much as I might enjoy my conversations with my grandfather, and the benefit of humouring his fiction, I needed to place a filter between that and my true model of the world. That is, my curiousity in one (fact or fiction) wouldn’t always suffice for an understanding of the other, but even the existence of a fiction had the potential to influence reality.
As an educator, I recognize this sort of potential in all young children, who create entire worlds of make-believe, complete with their own characters, societies, codes-of-conduct, and even laws of physics, each of which world is kept quite distinct from the others. The point where imagination becomes rationality is the point where the child can recognize, consciously, for any rule in their imagined world, “how is that different from the world we live in?”, and “what else would be different if that were the rule?”, and establish a curiousity about those sorts of inferences. That is, when the child’s fiction genre of choice shifts from Adventure to Speculative.
TROLL TOLL POLICY: Disapprove: 194, 16.4% Approve: 178, 15%
So more people are against than for. Not exactly a mandate for its use.
Hypothesis: those directly affected by the troll policy (trolls) are more likely to have strong disapproval than those unaffected by the troll policy are to have strong approval.
In my opinion, a strong moderation policy should require a plurality vote in the negative (over approval and abstention) to fail a motion to increase security, rather than a direct comparison to the approval. (withdrawn as it applies to LW, whose trolls are apparently less trolly than other sites I’m used to)
That Myers-Briggs test was a lot less thorough than what I remember from a lot of the ones I took online back in TheSpark era. Though, part of me is kind of glad that each of the extra credit questions could be completed in under an hour.
Also, just spent an hour I should have spent sleeping upvoting all the comments that explicitly mentioned taking the test, and a few that were just insightful.
(yelling) Curse you squid-god of time, for reawakening the sleeping demon that is my love for census, long forgotten in the archives of naturalization! (/yelling)
I strongly suspect that a lot of the members of LessWrong have had a non-internet IQ test and will have entered their scores on the census. Those who also took the extra credit internet test and entered their scores to that as well could serve as a sample group for us to make just such an analysis.
Granted, we are likely a biased sample of the population (I suspect a median of somewhere around 125 for both tests), but data is data.
V rfgvzngrq ol nffhzvat gur gerr jnf nobhg gjragl srrg va qvnzrgre (fbzrguvat V erzrzore sebz zl Ylprhz qnlf jvgu pvepn avargl creprag pbasvqrapr), naq unq nobhg na rvtugl-avar qrterr vapyvar (bar qrterr gncre), juvpu V pbhyq rfgvzngr ol bofreivat n inevrgl bs rireterraf va zl ivpvavgl. Sebz gurer, vg jnf fvzcyr gevtbabzrgel.
Any results for the calibration IQ?
On second thought, I have an alternative solution to what it is lampshading, that is the broken suspension of disbelief that after stating that the terms of Quirrell’s contract prevented him and others from investigating Quirrell’s identity, Albus would leave the room, allowing his conspirators to investigate Quirrell’s identity.
This theory sounds incredibly plausible from the perspective of the author wanting to use the lampshade trope, but from the perspective of the reader, that action was completely in-character for Dumbledore and doesn’t actually break suspension of disbelief.
I don’t agree that the first doesn’t count. The Relationship Style question was about preferred style, not current active situation. It could be that 2⁄3 of the polyamorous people just can’t get a date (lord knows I’ve been there). (ETA:) Or, in the case of not looking, don’t want a date right now (somewhere I’ve also been).
It was stated that they should give the obvious answer and that surveys that didn’t follow the rules would be thrown out… but maybe 50% isn’t as obvious as 99.99% of the population thinks it is.
Is there any reason the prompt for the question shouldn’t have explicitly stated “(The obvious answer is the correctly formatted value equivalent to p=0.5 or 50%)”?
A potential error for the second conclusion is that we have incorrectly predicted the nature of consciousness, and the true solution is that one is somehow able to perceive without a physical avatar functioning in the way we expect of a human capable of perception. Thus, “you” are able to experience the branches of the MWI where everyone else perceives you to be dead.
Thanks for the idea. I know he referenced OvercomingBias for a while before LessWrong, and I read a handful of articles there, but I think my sparse interest in following anything, aside from what was crossposted or linked at Yvain’s blog, makes any claim of seniority a potential false representation of my expertise.
This is sort of the inverse problem of the way I counted the start of my last relationship more than a year earlier than my then-partner would. One good thing I can say for weddings (aside from marriage) is that at least they solidify a date to count as anniversary. So, I suppose now that I’ve finally registered an account, I can count today for future anniversaries between myself and LessWrong.
I spent a lot of time analyzing that question and came up with the following solution, which, granted, assumes at least three things, and “only a fool would attempt a plot that was as complicated as possible”, but...
Vs jr nffhzr gung svsgl creprag bs gur urnqnpurf qverpgyl nssrpg jbexvat ubhef, gura gur pbfg bs nal bs gur guerr qehtf vf fvtavsvpnagyl ybjre guna gur bccbeghavgl pbfg bs ybfvat gubfr jbex-ubhef ng zvavzhz jntr. Qeht N, juvyr abg gur zbfg pbfg-rssrpgvir jura pbzcnerq qverpgyl gb Qeht O (be rira P), unf gur terngrfg rssrpg naq fgvyy pbfgf yrff guna gur zna jbhyq znxr va jbex-ubhef tnvarq. Gur pbzcnengvir pbfg bs guvegl-gjb qbyynef naq svsgl pragf sbe gur zber rssrpgvir qeht vf n yvggyr zber guna bar qbyyne cre yrvfher ubhe tnvarq, naq rira fbzrbar fgenccrq sbe pnfu jbhyq nyzbfg pregnvayl cnl n qbyyne gb erzbir na ubhe bs rkpehpvngvat cnva (V’z nffhzvat gur pheerag znexrg sbe cnva cvyyf vf qevira zber ol uvtu fhccyl guna ybj qrznaq).
Edit: xrrc va zvaq gung gur dhrfgvba fnvq “n ybj vapbzr”, abg “harzcyblrq”.
I too had to estimate my time in the community (even though this is my first day posting anything)—I started lurking shortly after Yvain mentioned it in his blog, but he is a prolific enough writer that digging through those archives would be a mind-numbing task. Perhaps there’s someone else who’s done the dirty work for me? (hoping)
I dunno about yours, but my lampshades don’t usually spin, particularly not with a “vroop”.
Hell, if the mathematical universe hypothesis is correct, then somewhere out there in the universe there is, with no intelligent priors, a collection of particles in the form of a computer, simulating a universe containing intelligent entities.
I’m a little surprised that HJPEV didn’t immediately update his probabilities regarding Quirrell’s motives in Azkaban with the new knowledge from Moody that “You’ve got to mean it. You’ve got to want someone dead, and not for the greater good, either.”, which would seem to discredit the Defense Professor’s excuse that “a curse which cannot be blocked and must be dodged is an indispensable tactic.”