ChristianKl

Karma: 16,899

ChristianKl 23 Jul 2019 7:42 UTC
2 points

in reply to: Jay Molstad's comment on: Learning to Learn and Navigating Moods
Personally, I have 4 university degrees
What kind of argument are you making here? Having 4 degrees sounds to me like evidence of not knowing what you want and thus wasting a lot of time in a degree that you don’t use afterwards.

ChristianKl 17 Jul 2019 11:54 UTC
11 points

in reply to: Holly_Elmore's comment on: Magic is Dead, Give me Attention
In my own model, people have an emotional need for a certain amount of attention. Once that need however is satisfied, they usually don’t have a strong need for more and thus don’t engage in actions that are just done to get attention.
Interacting with people who do what they are doing just to get attention because they are starved of it instead of having other goals feels shallow.
Another interesting aspect is that in my experience they need for the attention of other people goes down with the ability to give attention to yourself and feel clearly that one exists.

ChristianKl 17 Jul 2019 11:36 UTC
6 points

in reply to: kliv's comment on: How Can Rationalists Join Other Communities Interested in Truth-Seeking?
To list a few communities I would consider to be truth-seeking and with whom I have interacted: Chaos Computer Club, General Semantics, Quantified Self/Biohacking, Radical Honesty, Perceptive Pedagogy, Debating (BPS-based), Wikidata and Skeptics.SE

ChristianKl 17 Jul 2019 7:36 UTC
12 points

on: Intellectual Dark Matter
On interesting collary is that people who press for decisions to be evidence-based are pressing for decision that are made based on information that can be publicly stated. Pushing too strongly for it might damage the intellecutal dark matter.

ChristianKl 17 Jul 2019 7:14 UTC
6 points

in reply to: Chris_Leong's comment on: A Key Power of the President is to Coordinate the Execution of Existing Concrete Plans
There are reason why “create some kind of committee to look into this” is often jokingly referred to as a way to kill a proposal. You can say that about every topic.

ChristianKl 17 Jul 2019 7:06 UTC
2 points

in reply to: romeostevensit's comment on: 87,000 Hours or: Thoughts on Home Ownership
So it’s the average US single-family household.

ChristianKl 16 Jul 2019 11:37 UTC
2 points

on: 87,000 Hours or: Thoughts on Home Ownership
The average person spends about 10 years
Who’s that average person you are talking about and where does that number come from? Are you speaking about the mean time a US citizen spends in their house before moving or are you talking about something else?

ChristianKl 15 Jul 2019 19:03 UTC
2 points

on: Overcoming Akrasia/Procrastination—Volunteers Wanted
I’m interested.

ChristianKl 15 Jul 2019 16:29 UTC
0 points

on: My Conversion from LW to Pragmatism: Steelman
Some think of humans as the “scientific species.”
Downvoted. It’s unclear about what you are referring to. The term doesn’t appear on LW before you used it. Your discussion of it feels a bit like beating strawmen.

ChristianKl 15 Jul 2019 16:12 UTC
2 points

on: The Importance of Goodhart’s Law
Diversity of an ecosystem is a way to reduce the impact of Goodhart’s law. If different universities would use very different G* for their hiring decisions it would be harder for young researchers to optimize for any particular G*.

ChristianKl 15 Jul 2019 16:01 UTC
2 points

on: The Importance of Goodhart’s Law
I don’t see how hierarchical rule is a solution. Hierarchy requires the people at the top of the hierarchy to give order to people at the bottom to achieve certain outcomes and measure whether those outcomes are achieved.

ChristianKl 15 Jul 2019 15:55 UTC
3 points

in reply to: remizidae's comment on: How much background technical knowledge do LW readers have?
Using mental models from one field in another is a way to make intellectual progress. Researchers in econophysics are productive despite their economics problems having nothing directly to do with physics.

ChristianKl 4 Jul 2019 19:35 UTC
1 point

in reply to: mingyuan's comment on: The Competence Myth
Cities do need customers for the products that they export as well. Otherwise they can’t import the food to feed their population.

ChristianKl 2 Jul 2019 8:27 UTC
3 points

on: Instead of “I’m anxious,” try “I feel threatened”
Given the way emotions work there’s a danger of false attributions as rpapp suggests. If I for example show a person with arachnophobia an image of a spider for 20 milliseconds they will feel anxiety but they won’t know why they feel it. The image is enough to trigger the emotional stimulus but it’s not enough to raise to cognitive awareness. The mental processes that produce anxiety are strong enough to match patterns that don’t rise to cognitive attention.
If that person then goes and says “I feel threatened” and tries to reason about why they feel threatened, there’s a good chance that they come up with another reason for why the feeling exists.
Debugging a false reason can still release the negative emotion and help you deal with it, but you shouldn’t take it too seriously. Hold it lightly. It’s similar to how past-life regression can help people deal with emotional issues. It’s a technique that works, but if you take all the information that comes out of it as being literal truth you run into problems.
The correct mental stance is a light one of curiosity and exploration and not one of “I now have to accept the serious reality of how flawed I am”.
In addition I would expect that you will be better able to deal with the feeling if you first feel into the felt sense as taught in Gendlin’s Focusing.
There’s are two emotional ways to react when threatened. One is anger and the other is anxiety. It frequently happens that people suffer from anxiety because they don’t allow themselves to be angry because they want to be a “nice guy” or “nice girl”. David D. Burns sees this need to be nice as one of the pillars of a lot of cases of people have anxiety disorder in When Panic Attacks.

ChristianKl 2 Jul 2019 8:05 UTC
3 points

in reply to: rpapp's comment on: Instead of “I’m anxious,” try “I feel threatened”
From a nomenclature perspective, yes of course, in worry / anxiety or similarly, sadness / depression pairs, the latter ones are meant to refer to the pathologic version of the affect.
That seems surprising to me to read. https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/323454.php suggests that the word anxiety refers to the normal emotion. Sadness also seems to be a word for an emotion. Worry doesn’t seem to me like a word that points to an emotion but a word that points to a mental process (similarly to how feeling threadened is a mental process).
Depression on the other hand isn’t an emotion but a more permanent state of mind. It’s more similar to anxiety disorder.

ChristianKl 2 Jul 2019 7:40 UTC
6 points

in reply to: peleion's comment on: The Competence Myth
imposter syndrome is almost universal among intelligent and high-performing people who are not sociopaths or narcissists
What kind of evidence do you have for that claim?

ChristianKl 2 Jul 2019 7:00 UTC
2 points

in reply to: TheMajor's comment on: The Competence Myth
There are not a lot of CEO of big companies and those who are believed to be competent can draw huge salaries. Even if all the CEO would be competent the total pool of people might be still quite small.
There’s also the interesting question of why we have successful cities that have lifespans of hundreds of years that get a lot less management and why companies that are managed by a CEO fail so often.
Why is the organization form of a city so much more stable?

ChristianKl 1 Jul 2019 20:57 UTC
3 points

in reply to: steven0461's comment on: steven0461′s Shortform Feed
In most domains people don’t make arguments because they either think they aren’t strong or because making the argument would lose them social status.
The cases where an argument carries with it real danger are relatively small, and in most of those cases it should be possible to know that you are in a problematic area. In those cases, you should make arguments first nonpublically with people who you consider to be good judges of whether those arguments should be made publically.

ChristianKl 1 Jul 2019 13:33 UTC
6 points

in reply to: riceissa's comment on: What’s the most “stuck” you’ve been with an argument, that eventually got resolved?
In what way did that got unstuck? Did I miss some news?

ChristianKl 1 Jul 2019 11:16 UTC
2 points

in reply to: Wei_Dai's comment on: What’s the best explanation of intellectual generativity?
If Bell Labs succeeded because there was little social coercion, the Chinese will have a hard time replicating it with their collectivist culture.
Paying researchers based on their ability to publish papers in journals with high impact factor the way the Chinese do seems also a system that creates bad incentives.