christina

• christina 6 Feb 2012 3:43 UTC

  22 points

  on: Which Col­lege Ma­jor?

  The most important question you’ve asked here is:

  “Should I care more about making money or doing something that I have a “passion” for?”

  And my answer is: You should care about both, approximately equally.

  I would advise that you don’t ever choose something that makes you want to gouge your eyes out with a metal fork just because the average yearly salary is six or seven figures. Most likely the result will not be anything like what you are visualizing (eg. early retirement, actually having time to enjoy your money, reasonable mental and physical health...) . I suspect this kind of choice tends to lead either to dropping out of your major, and thus losing both time and money, or to far too much agony when you do enter the workforce. The more interest and enjoyment you get from your chosen field, the better. In a similar vein, be wary of fields that sound cool or tolerable if you have very little idea of what the work in them is actually like. If you have some familiarity with doing whatever is done in your chosen field, that helps a lot. I majored in Computer Science, but I had been programming as a hobby for many years before that, so I already kind of knew how I felt about it. I knew about the frustrating parts, but also knew that overall I enjoy it immensely. I would definitely recommend considering which hobbies you enjoy most when you think about what you want to major in.

  On the other hand, I would not ignore the importance of money. Please consider: how much would you like to have the independence to make your own decisions, because your money is your own? For me, this was very important, so I was unwilling to go into a field where the average (the mode, not the mean or median) salary was small, or where money seemed to be very unreliably distributed. For example, some fields have a few very prominent successes who make crazy amounts of money and a large number of talented, hardworking individuals who make almost nothing. Do not assume you will be one of the few prominent successes, regardless of your talent or ability to work hard. Also consider how important financial security is to you. Even if you are well off now, circumstances can change. So try to choose something where you will be able to put some of your money aside into savings (I think the amounts most people advise for this always sound a bit low...). When I was younger, there were times that money was extremely tight for my family—I knew that wasn’t how I wanted to live once I was an adult, because it always felt so financially insecure. On the other hand, some people thrive on very little money, so you will need to consider how much your temperament matches mine. This is not to say I didn’t take great pride in spending as little money as possible—but this was largely because I wanted the number in my savings account to be as large as possible. Because I did take this into consideration, I don’t currently have to worry about money or debt, which is rather nice.

  So, that’s my advice. Hope you found that helpful in some way. It did at least work for me. I have a career that I can actually enjoy doing, and I don’t have to live in poverty.

• christina 4 Sep 2011 4:37 UTC

  19 points

  on: What is the most ra­tio­nal view of Peak Oil and its near term con­se­quences?

  You do a fairly good job of presenting a rational argument here, but you do have some arguments that seem firmly rooted in your emotional response, rather than an attempt to explore the facts.

  Your especially rational points are 1-4. This is irrespective of whether they are right or wrong—we have some ability to factually verify or disprove these points. In order to explore your biases, you might want to start by linking to some articles supporting your statements and some refuting them and then discussing why you believe one over the other. Choose articles that avoid excessive strident language(when possible) and make numerous factual statements that can be independently verified. Then it might be easier for you and others to determine what parts of your beliefs are strongly biased.

  For example(emphasis mine):

  1. Politicians are powerless, so promise general feel-good nonsense like “energy independence”.Nobody even tries to tackle the problem.

  This statement seems to be more about how you feel about the problem than a statement that can be independently verified. How easy is it to get people to agree what feel-good nonsense even is? Does it predominantly come from those personable people you disagree with? The connotation of this word is going to overshadow any denotation. And how would you evaluate if someone tried to tackle a problem, regardless of whether they succeeded? It’s hard enough to get people to agree on facts—it’s even harder to get them to agree on emotion-laden statements that are difficult or impossible to verify.

• christina 22 Aug 2011 5:53 UTC

  15 points

  on: Re­mind Phys­i­cal­ists They’re Physicalists

  I’ve decided to upvote your article for presenting a concise summary of this topic and also, very importantly, including links to the full pdfs of the academic articles Weisberg et al. (2008) and McCabe & Castel (2008) which you used to support your argument. This is not always possible, but I think is always to be commended when it is.

  However, having now read both of these articles in their entirety, I would like to point out what I believe to be an important omission in your summary of the Weisberg et al. (2008) article.

  First, you state:

  And yet, Yale cognitive science students rated the ‘with neuroscience’ explanations as more satisfying than the regular explanations.

  You also state:

  Somehow I suspect people who chose to study cognition as information processing are less likely than average to believe the mind runs on magic.

  You conclude with:

  Sometimes even physicalists need to be reminded — with concrete reductionistic details — that they are physicalists.

  However, I obtain an entirely different conclusion from this article. First, I shall summarize what I believe to be the salient points of Weisberg et al. (2008):

  • Novices (ie. those who had not chosen to study neuroscience), found good explanations satisfying and bad explanations to be unimpressive. Add useless neuroscience and what happens? Good explanations remained pretty much just as good but bad explanations suddenly looked a whole lot better. As stated in the article:

  Post hoc tests revealed that although the ratings for good explanations were not different without neuroscience (M = 0.86, SE = 0.11) than with neuroscience (M = 0.90, SE = 0.16), ratings for bad explanations were significantly lower for explanations without neuroscience (M = −0.73, SE = 0.14) than explanations with neuroscience (M = 0.16, SE = 0.16)

  • Sadly, students who chose to study neuroscience were only impressed if given explanations actually containing neuroscience, despite the fact that these additional frills were worthless:

  Unlike the novices, the students judged that both good explanations and bad explanations were significantly more satisfying when they contained neuroscience, but the bad explanations were judged to have improved more dramatically, based on a comparison of the differences in ratings between explanations with and without neuroscience [t(21) = 2.98, p < .01]

  • Thankfully, neuroscience experts were not fooled. Bad explanations were still rated as bad. Also, the good explanations were rated as worse when the neuroscience information was included:

  Good explanations with neuroscience (M = −0.22, SE = 0.21) were rated as significantly less satisfying than good explanations without neuroscience [M = 0.41, SE = 0.13; F(1, 46) = 8.5, p < .01]. There was no change in ratings for the bad explanations (without neuroscience M = −1.07, SE = 0.19; with neuroscience M = −0.87, SE = 0.21).

  I think the problem is not that the neuroscience students needed to be reminded that the mind does not run on magic. I would instead say that they give too much value to the explanatory power of neuroscience, even when superior explanations exist. I do not think this is surprising given that these are people who are: a.) fairly untrained and b.) have chosen to study neuroscience, and therefore are more likely than the general population to have a highly favorable impression of it.

  The conclusion I would draw from this article is that irrelevant neuroscience information should generally not be included unless you feel your argument is shoddy and your main intent is to convince novices that you are right. Only neuroscience students are more impressed with the addition of useless neuroscience in any explanation, and they are presumably not a large portion of the general population. I am certainly not confident that this result can be generalized to anyone with any passing interest in neuroscience, or anyone who wants to be a rationalist. Also, neuroscience experts will really not be impressed with the addition of such irrelevant frills. This says to me that the best way to promote the proper understanding of the way our minds work is to never include neuroscience information unless it logically adds value to an argument and to train students in specialized fields like neuroscience to value logic above the appearance of something being about neuroscience. Apparently, this happens already, since experts seem to hate the useless neuroscience information so badly that it taints even the good explanations in their eyes.

  In regards to McCabe & Castel (2008), I wonder if people simply feel the concrete brain image is more comprehensible to them that the abstract graphs (both the simple and complex ones). It may even be that it takes them less time to understand the intent of the brain scan images because of this, therefore they like them better. I wonder if other images that also concretely demonstrate an effect would be rated higher than ones that don’t. Also, perhaps the brain information is preferred because it conveys more information than the bar graph and but is also easier to grasp than the complex graph.

• christina 4 Sep 2011 3:55 UTC

  13 points

  in reply to: Logos01’s comment on: What is the most ra­tio­nal view of Peak Oil and its near term con­se­quences?

  Downvoted as I disagree that this answer is the most rational view, Logos, nor does this kind of response encourage rational discussion. This is irrespective of whether I agree or disagree with your argument that peak oil hasn’t occurred. Your first response sought to refute the specific statements the article made, and in general you did a fairly good job of putting up a rational argument (once again irrespective of whether the refutations are correct or incorrect). When your arguments are factual, they can be verified or refuted.

  On the other hand, when your arguments contain no specific information that can be verified or refuted, and instead contain words designed to maximize for emotional effect rather than informational value, they cannot be called rational. Please see below for the words here that I feel especially stand out in this regard(emphasis mine):

  That it’s fear-mongering, being exploited by an array of political and social agencies with sometimes conflicting agendas in order to exploit the ‘risability’ of the common person to fear in order to achieve their various goals through persuading the population.

• christina 4 Sep 2011 5:35 UTC

  12 points

  in reply to: Logos01’s comment on: What is the most ra­tio­nal view of Peak Oil and its near term con­se­quences?

  I do not believe emotional comments are inherently irrational. As all of us experience emotion, almost any comment we make is emotional, in that it elicits certain emotions from both ourselves and others. However, not all emotional comments are rational. I still do not believe that your last comment on what to think of peak oil was rational ( I also disagree that the term agenda used in that context is not emotionally charged, but this topic may be more subjective than the other and is less central to my point, so I won’t discuss it further here).

  Your last comment about peak oil being fear-mongering is not supported by your previous statements. Your previous statements support peak oil not being true. Your last statement has nothing to do with this, as far as I’m concerned, and is considerably more complex to work out the truth or falsehood of. The idea of a political or social institution saying that peak oil is true because they wish to exploit common people for their own disparate agendas has nothing to do with whether or not peak oil is true. Consider:

  1. Peak oil is true and political and social institutions say that it is true, because they a.) believe it is true, b.) want to exploit other people, or c.) both.

  2. Peak oil is false and political and social institutions say that it is true, because they a.) believe it is true, b.) want to exploit other people, or c.) both.

  I assume you are asserting 2b with your statement about fear-mongering, whereas your previous post put forth arguments that only support the statement in 2 that ‘Peak oil is false’. I also feel that the connotation for fear-mongering used in such contexts is likely to produce either rapid agreement or disagreement.

  My question is—which is more important to you, proving that peak oil is false, or proving what the motivations of various unrelated politicians and social organizations are? Do not mistake my criticism of your statement for a belief that fear is never used in politics. I just don’t see how it at all helps your attempt to prove that peak oil is not true. See statements 1 and 2 above for my reasoning of why the first does not necessarily follow from the second. I think a more rational statement made after giving supporting arguments that peak oil is false would be something along the lines of ‘don’t worry about it and show others it is not true so they can devote their resources to solving things that are actually problems’.

  EDIT: changed some erratic capitalizations and one ‘denotation for fear-mongering’ to ‘connotation for fear-mongering’ to more correctly express my meaning in that part.

• christina 30 Aug 2011 5:32 UTC

  10 points

  on: Wel­come to Less Wrong! (2010-2011)

  There’s a welcome page? I hadn’t noticed. I suppose I could give a few details about myself. I’ve been posting here for a little less than two months now.

  On Me

  I am a software engineer in my late twenties. I enjoy reading fantasy and science fiction novels, as well as books about physics, mathematics, biology, astronomy, and many other topics. I play no sports, but I bicycle nearly every day. I also enjoy programming, writing, photography, cooking, drawing, winning videogames, and working out mathematical equations for topics of interest.

  On How I Found the Site

  I occasionally like to peruse David Brin’s blog, and wondered while reading a post how it was he came to recommend a Harry Potter fanfiction. So, David Brin’s Blog-> HPMOR-> Less Wrong. I then proceeded to lurk and find out what was being discussed to get some context for the message board discussions. Eventually, I decided to see what would happen if I started posting comments.

  So far, I’ve enjoyed the discussion on this site. I think there’s a lot to think about here, which exercises my hobby of pondering the nature of society, life, and the universe in general.

• christina 29 Jul 2011 7:02 UTC

  10 points

  in reply to: MixedNuts’s comment on: On the un­pop­u­lar­ity of cry­on­ics: life sucks, but at least then you die

  I wouldn’t disagree. I stated above that I find cryonics also more plausible than mummification as a life extension strategy, and I think I might place mummification as more plausible than placing a fried egg over someone’s grave. After all, a significantly advanced civiization could perhaps extract enough information from a combination of the person’s genetic material, remaining belongings, and statistical analysis that you could perhaps genetically engineer something close to their original body with it and then add memories sort of like what you think they might have had. I’m pretty sure the fried egg wouldn’t be nearly as helpful. My main objection to cryonics is that I do not find it currently plausible enough to pursue given the fact that it is costly, other possibilities exist, and I do not have sufficient evidence of benefit.

  On a completely unrelated note, could you tell me how you made that wonderful link of yours? I would be most appreciative if I, too, could have magical linking powers.

• christina 29 Aug 2011 6:45 UTC

  8 points

  in reply to: lukeprog’s comment on: Polyhacking

  Upvoted since I feel this post significantly improves several aspects of your previous post including sounding less self-righteous. It also benefits from mentioning the idea of polyamory earlier and going into more details about it. I read a single article on polyamory four or five years ago and didn’t really see it mentioned much at all again until I visited this site. A lot of people will have no idea what this is, and some might confuse the word with polygamy.

What Longevity Re­search Most Ex­cites You?

• christina 6 Nov 2011 20:13 UTC

  7 points

  in reply to: lessdazed’s comment on: Ra­tional Ro­man­tic Re­la­tion­ships, Part 1: Re­la­tion­ship Styles and At­trac­tion Basics

  Factual incorrectness is not the only objection a person could have to something. In many cases, people present what they believe to be the facts and then give their response to those facts. For example, someone says that Amy is 80 years old. They could then decide:

  1.) Amy should be treated with unquestioning respect—they want to live in a society that respects their elders.

  2.) Suggest that Amy should treat her children with unquestioning respect since they will have to take care of her.

  3.) Say that Amy should be accorded respect, but not unquestioning respect because their preference is to treat others in an egalitarian way.

  4.) Any number of other things.

  You could then have objections to either the fact they stated (if it is not true), or to preferences they stated (if yours differ), or to both. Preferences can reference facts, especially if they are contingent on facts to achieve other, more central, preferences. And so sometimes you can use facts to show that someone’s preferences are not in accordance with their core preferences. But a person’s core preferences only convey a fact about the person holding them, not a fact about the world. The world has no preference about what happens to us. Only we do.

• christina 25 Sep 2011 5:30 UTC

  7 points

  in reply to: tenshiko’s comment on: Knowl­edge is Worth Pay­ing For

  Actually, from what I have seen, sellers have been very eager to eliminate this problem. In many of the stores near where I live, you can buy gift cards for various online sellers in addition to brick-and-mortar ones. For example, in my nearby grocery store, we have Amazon gift cards, Kindle gift cards, Ebay gift cards, and just the other day I saw one entire side of a gift card rack decked out in Facebook gift cards. Though Barnes and Noble and Best Buy both have brick and mortar stores, their gift cards allow you to purchase at either the store or the website.

  I don’t know how many other places have this kind of availability, but if you can buy a $10, $25, $50, or $100 gift card for an online store, that opens up a variety of possibilities for online purchasing. Especially if, like Amazon, the vendor allows you to use more than one of their gift cards. Of course, this approach does seem to limit you to larger companies, but still allows a variety of web purchases.

  Also, online purchases from any vendor are possible for young adults who have a debit card with a credit card logo, though some may not prefer to make purchases this way.

• christina 4 Sep 2011 9:23 UTC

  7 points

  in reply to: sam0345’s comment on: Gen­der differ­ences in spa­tial rea­son­ing ap­pear to be nurture

  What is the point of this statement?

• christina 30 Jul 2011 7:50 UTC

  7 points

  in reply to: MixedNuts’s comment on: On the un­pop­u­lar­ity of cry­on­ics: life sucks, but at least then you die

  Thanks! Upvoted since your responses are highly relevant to my questions.

  I’m first looking at the arguments for the science of cryonics that Alcor gives. I do not have much expectation that I can judge all their claims to be valid or invalid yet, but I will give my general impression of the 3 main premises they present on their site here:

  1.) Life can be stopped and restarted if cell structure and chemistry are preserved sufficiently well.

  Arguments for this are point are based on currently verified procedures such as reviving people after their heart stops, people being revived long after drowning in cold water, freezing embryos, etc. I assume this is the reason you say “cryonics works” based on the history of medicine. I would change this to say that the likeliehood of cryonics working is greater in the universe we live in, because we can now revive people that would once have been irretrievably dead, so it is not inconceivable that people could be revived in the future from some states that would be considered irretrievably dead today. I have no disagreement with this point. I would note that the ‘some’ in the previous sentence is important since it means that it likely matters what strategy is used.

  2) Vitrification (not freezing) can preserve biological structure very well.

  This is an interesting argument and not one that I was previously aware of, nor of the fact that kidneys have been usable after vitrification or that a cat brain briefly regained EEG capability after vitrification. I thought the pictures were very helpful in showing the structural improvements Alcor says have been accomplished in this procedure, and this increases my confidence that this procedure could preserve information. I will need to look into this determine in more detail what we know about this process. Alcor is pretty clear that the toxicity of the procedure prevents brains from being revived this way today, so I definitely want to try to understand that aspect a little more. It is good to know that the process has improved in preserving visual structure over time, however.

  3) Methods for repairing structure at the molecular level can now be foreseen.

  True, although I’m not sure if this is an argument so much for cryonics in particular as for finding the most successful strategy for preserving information about that structure in some way. Cryonics may or may not be the best way to accomplish this, and if the best way is mutually exclusive to this method, I think that would be an important piece of information in making the most rational decision.

  I will need to look at the other articles some more in the future. I skimmed over them but have not yet had the time to think them over and formulate a response. Thanks for responding to my questions about the available research in the field, the costs, and the opportunity cost.

• christina 29 Jul 2011 10:07 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: MixedNuts’s comment on: On the un­pop­u­lar­ity of cry­on­ics: life sucks, but at least then you die

  Thanks for the very helpful commenting instructions! Magical markup powers unlocked! I have upvoted your very useful info on this.

  As for pitting cryonics against a chthonic fried egg, I’m not sure that proves that cryonics has a decent chance of working, just that it is not completely implausible. I would be more interested in hearing more about what research has been done in this field, although I understand that is a time consuming task and I don’t expect for you to do any research in that area for me (although of course no objections if you wish to).

  I am curious why you think it is the best bet given the cost. For example, it probably makes sense as a strategy for someone who is a.) reasonably wealthy and b.) knows they are likely to die very soon, but that’s because the opportunity cost will be greatly lower for such a person. Since they already have the money, they wouldn’t have to sacrifice as much in their (certain) current life to try cryonics for an (uncertain) future life. Also, being about to die very soon makes the opportunity cost of giving up investigation of other options considerably lower.

  Still, I don’t think everyone has the same opportunity costs since not everyone lives the same life. I think learning a lot more about life extension is my best possible option, which should then be followed by investing accordingly. I think your comment reflects the feeling that cryonics has an image problem, and I would agree with that. I also don’t think it should have as much of an image problem as it does, even though I currently don’t have any reason to believe it will be overwhelmingly successful. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with trying whatever seems to be the best option given your own opportunity costs.

• christina 10 Jul 2011 7:18 UTC

  6 points

  on: Think­ing with­out words?

  I think this is an interesting question. What is it that you want to be able to think of non-verbally? Some of the replies discuss using this to perform mathematical manipulations. Is this your primary goal, or is it something else? What is it you want to process faster? Also, does this mean you want to be able to visualize more, or that you want to somehow think of things in an abstract but still completely non-verbal way (abstract meaning nothing that you could see, hear, touch, taste, or smell)? I may have some input for the first, but not really for the second (at least, not that I know of—the only things I can’t see, hear, smell, taste or touch that clearly exist in my thoughts are my emotions, though these are often also imbued with linguistic and visual associations).

  Being able to visualize doesn’t necessarily require cutting off your word-thinking abilities at all. I know this because I think of a lot of things both visually and in words and symbols and tend to swap between the two interchangeably. This is actually my natural mode of thought. Whether you can adopt my approach may depend on how your mental architecture works. On the other hand, maybe it is possible to learn how to adopt this approach even if your mind doesn’t currently work this way, much like people can train to improve their memorization skills. I don’t currently know how easy or hard that is, but I like the approach of trying to change something to see if it works. As I understand it, some people are very good at visualization and some never think in pictures at all and are even surprised to learn that some people do. Some people can play songs in their head, and some people can’t (I can do this, though I have no special musical ability). I know that I often use visualization both when I am doing math and writing novels, and also when I’m just daydreaming. On the other hand, I will sometimes both see and hear words and symbols in my head in addition to or instead of visuals.

  What is the current way that your mind works? Are all of your thoughts in your personal voice, like hearing yourself speak inside your head, or are some annotated with pictures, sounds, smells, etc? People have very different ways of naturally thinking about things, so I’d need to know more to write a more detailed response to your question. I would also be immensely interested to know what kind of thinking styles people have here.

• christina 27 Sep 2011 7:29 UTC

  5 points

  on: Con­cepts Don’t Work That Way

  Upvoted for being clear, concise, and easy to read.

• christina 3 Sep 2011 4:35 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: Bugmaster’s comment on: On the un­pop­u­lar­ity of cry­on­ics: life sucks, but at least then you die

  SENS stands for Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence. Being acronym-challenged myself, I certainly understand the occasional agonies involved in working an unfamiliar one out.

• christina 29 Aug 2011 5:44 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: Jack’s comment on: Polyhacking

  Maybe because the culture tries to influence men into not depending on their wife’s family for money? An example of vows made in some Indian weddings:

  During kanyadaan, the bride’s parents give their daughter away in marriage. The groom makes three promises – to be just (dharma), earn sufficiently to support his family, (artha) and love his wife (kama).

  Of course, this kind of expectation is hardly unique to one culture. My thinking is that many cultures that encourage women marrying up will encourage men marrying down. In a culture that encouraged women to marry down, men would likely be encouraged to marry up.

• christina 15 Aug 2011 7:30 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: lukeprog’s comment on: Re­mind Phys­i­cal­ists They’re Physicalists

  But if it can be used to explain both true and false hypotheses, it will be used to do both. If you are trying to convince people to be more rational, you should probably first convince them that ‘explanations’ that don’t explain anything are not to be trusted.

• christina 29 Jul 2011 10:09 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: nshepperd’s comment on: On the un­pop­u­lar­ity of cry­on­ics: life sucks, but at least then you die

  Thanks! I’m glad people are being so helpful with this.