Craig_Heldreth

Karma: 619

Craig_Heldreth 14 Jun 2010 23:34 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Morendil’s comment on: Less Wrong Book Club and Study Group
Thank you very much for initiating this Morendil. I have lurked at LessWrong since Day #1 and came very close to getting an account several times before and submitting comments. This is my first one. I have studied Jaynes for years and spent many hours reading in the book and also his physics papers archived on the Jaynes website.

I look forward to some Probability Theory centered discussion and hope to contribute.

I am in Houston, Texas, USA.

Craig_Heldreth 16 Jun 2010 18:17 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Morendil’s comment on: Book Club Update and Chapter 1

What do you make of Jaynes’ observation that plausible inference is concerned with logical connections, and must be carefully distinguished from physical causation?

His example of the rain at 10:30 implying clouds at 10:15 with any physical causation going in the other direction is clear. And I appreciate his polemic that limiting yourself to reasoning based upon physical cause and effect is dull and impractical. He was a physicist and the ideal of physicists is to discover previously unknown natural laws of cause and effect, which made him a bit eccentric within his own community and so we get the tone in there of pleading. It is a minor distraction in the midst of great material.

57 participants should make for a sustained critical mass even with heavy attrition.

Craig_Heldreth 18 Jun 2010 15:33 UTC
3 points
on: Rationality quotes: June 2010
“The Master said, Yu, shall I tell you what knowledge is? When you know a thing, to know that you know it, and when you do not know a thing, to recognize that you do not know it. That is knowledge.”

Analects of Confucius (Wayley’s translation.)

(This quotation is an epigram to chapter 1 of Harold Jeffreys’ Scientific Inference, 1957, Cambridge University Press.)

Craig_Heldreth 12 Jul 2010 14:28 UTC
9 points
on: What Intelligence Tests Miss: The psychology of rational thought
Was there some sort of prioritization of what bias needs to be attacked hardest to spare us the most damage?

I would speculate when the investigations are finished we will find the BP spill was caused by human error; the biases displayed in making the bad decision were foremost either herd instincts, not wanting to rock the boat, or some very similar cognitively distorted error made by a group of people who all have very high IQ’s.

I also think George Bush 2 is a poor example. He is a performer and part of his schtick is not being an uppity intellectual wanker.

Craig_Heldreth 28 Jul 2010 12:36 UTC
7 points
on: Alien parasite technical guy
My favorite illustration of Libet’s work is the behavior of a top tennis player returning serve. If you ever get a chance to sit close when a guy like Nadal or Federer is playing, I recommend observing this feature as closely as possible. There is literally no time to react to where the ball is going. There are some back envelope calculations (by Libet and many others) that the reaction time is shorter than conscious thought processing time, but my opinion is the pro returning serve can sense from his own behavioral synchronization with the server the direction the serve will be going before the server’s racquet strikes the ball.

Craig_Heldreth 28 Jul 2010 12:57 UTC
9 points
on: Forager Anthropology
I found an excellent counterpoint to the Pinker Evo Psych claims is in Evolution in Four Dimensions by Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb. They present a picture which is much more complicated than what Pinker presents in such books as How the Mind Works and they provide some specific critiques to his claims. The feature which struck me is how measured these books are in their claims. At no point do Jablonka and Lamb criticize the Pinker viewpoint as being absurd or ridiculous; they merely think it is exaggerated.

Evolution is extremely complicated and extensive quantitative lab results only exist for bacteria, nematodes, fruit flies, and mice. Many fascinating results remain to be discovered within the lifespan of currently active biologists.

Craig_Heldreth 28 Jul 2010 18:17 UTC
0 points
in reply to: PhilGoetz’s comment on: Alien parasite technical guy
Yes. What intense training can do is move the bulk of the neuron message passing down into the reflex circuits—the ganglia that do things like reflex your lower leg when your doctor taps your kneecap with his little rubber hammer. This would be interesting to try and decouple from the part of the movement mechanics where you are engaged in a type of dance with your opponent, and you are anticipating and the nervous system signal processing is ongoing before the arbitrary time zero of when an observer can detect the event to begin happening.

Craig_Heldreth 28 Jul 2010 23:31 UTC
8 points
in reply to: WrongBot’s comment on: Forager Anthropology
I have looked at this particular linguist fairly close in the last month. This began when I put a post on my blog which lifted a particularly stupid quotation out of any context from Tooby and Cosmides book Adapted mind. I took a cheap shot at one of the contributors, and decided that if I was going to post such a thing on my blog I had to perform at least a little diligence.

I read How the mind works very closely looking for a similarly stupid quotation I could lift out and score off of. I could not find one. Pinker measures his statements in that book very careful, in spite of numerous instances of loose argument. For example at one point he states that King Solomon had a harem of 700 wives and concubines. If you want to get picky, there is no historical record of any such thing, or even of any specific person such as King Solomon who is discussed at length in the Jewish and Christian scriptures. So, although there is a blatant falsehood, he does not make any inferences from it; instead he uses it as an illustration of what he wants the reader to conclude about the arguments which he does make. In that particular book his argumentation is not demonstrably fallacious as far as I could tell (and I was looking pretty close for exactly that.)

I get the impression he is fond of making statements that appeal to college students in his classrooms, even if he is not appealing to their better nature and good judgment. When he gives more informal talks that is bound to show. He is an interesting hybrid between a scientist (long list peer-reviewed sound method works) and a charlatan. He is a star, so he can make his own rules as long as he isn’t writing a submission for the Journal of Linguistics.

Craig_Heldreth 29 Jul 2010 23:49 UTC
3 points
in reply to: MichaelVassar’s comment on: Forager Anthropology
Fair enough; I take back charlatan. Would you go for grandstanding? Or perhaps sophistry?

People said the same thing about Carl Sagan but in Sagan’s case I believe that criticism was unfair. He was enthusiastic about stuff which merited his enthusiasm. Compare the style of Pinker; this is remarkable stuff (freaking evolution man—five billion years ago our ancestors had one cell) and no grandstanding is necessary. It’s like Horowitz performing a concert with Liberace staging.

Craig_Heldreth 7 Aug 2010 22:34 UTC
4 points
in reply to: SeventhNadir’s comment on: Bloggingheads: Robert Wright and Eliezer Yudkowsky
The reason Wright got bent out of shape (my theory): Eliezer seemed to imply the communal mind theory is Wright’s wishful thinking. This seems a little simplistic. I do believe Wright is a little disingenuous, but it is a little more subtle than that. It appears to me he thinks he has an idea that can be used to wean millions of the religious faithful to a more sensible position, and he is trying to market it. And he would sort of like to have it both ways. With hard edged science folk he can say all that with a wink because we are sophisticated and we get it. And the rubes can all swallow it hook line sinker.

I forget the exact term Eliezer used that seemed to set him off. It was something like wishing or hoping or rooting-for. Then Wright’s speech got loud and fast and confused and his blood pressure went up. He seemed to feel like he was being accused of acting in bad faith when he was claiming to try to be helpful.

Maybe Wright’s friends thought he did great under fire?

Craig_Heldreth 11 Aug 2010 15:24 UTC
5 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Book Recommendations
His books and his one day graphics class are both excellent. There is some noise in the signal. The best part of his class:

he has a first edition of Galileo’s first “natural philosophy” book and he has one of the employees at the venue (after donning white linen gloves) pass the book before the face of each student for fifteen seconds. The book is open to a particularly ingenious use of graphics by Galileo. He uses a number of Galileo examples in the books and in his class.

Also he has a hilarious demo on the misuse of powerpoint.

The worst part of the class: he has a bunch of slides showing off the metal sculptures (fifteen or twenty) that dot his huge Connecticut home site. If you are apathetic toward the aesthetics of modern art, your eyes will glaze over and you may be wondering what the numbers on financial statements are.

His treatment of the misuse of technical data presentation leading to the NASA space shuttle disasters is a classic in biased wrong reasoning.

Craig_Heldreth 12 Aug 2010 15:07 UTC
9 points
on: Welcome to Less Wrong! (2010-2011)
Hi all.

I have lurked on Less Wrong since Day 0. I found Overcoming Bias from Economics blogs I used to follow closely (Marginal Revolution, &c.) I now have my toe in the water here, having been unable to resist joining the Jaynes Probabiity Language of Science study group.

I came to Rationalism firstly by way of Physics and Mathematics, secondly by way of Philosophy. In college I used to do my problem sets in the Philosophy section of the library and my break time was devoted to Plato and to Aristotle and to Hume and the rest of those dead white guys.

After college in California I moved to the Gulf Coast and to do seismic for the oil industry. I have been using AI algorithms since 1992, which have a large number of seismic applications. If anybody is interested, I could point you to some references which have presentations and source material which compare with any I have seen.

I am also interested in applications of AI for finance and quantitative and technical analysis of asset and commodities prices. At this point I am near to a complete ignoramus on this subject and am keen to listen to and learn from anybody with a similar interest.

My mentor in spirit is Richard Feynman and I am trying to follow his advice as closely as possible. First, solve easy problems. Then keep working and keep solving harder and harder problems. Eventually you may find you have solved a problem that nobody has solved yet!

Craig_Heldreth 13 Aug 2010 12:38 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Daniel_Burfoot’s comment on: Welcome to Less Wrong! (2010-2011)

Me too, but why would someone who knows something about AI applications for finance and quantitative analysis teach anyone else about the subject?

Teaching and learning do not have to be restricted to one direction. Two heads might be better than one! Have you ever heard a college course Teaching Assistant tell you he learned more from classes where he TA’d than from most classes where he was a student?

Craig_Heldreth 15 Aug 2010 13:09 UTC
3 points
on: Open Thread, August 2010
John Baez This Week’s Finds in Mathematical Physics has its 300th and last entry. He is moving to wordpress and Azimuth. He states he wants to concentrate on futures, and has upcoming interviews with:

Tim Palmer on climate modeling and predictability, Thomas Fischbacher on sustainability and permaculture, and Eliezer Yudkowsky on artificial intelligence and the art of rationality. A Google search returns no matches for Fischbacher + site:lesswrong.com and no hits for Palmer +.

That link to Fischbacher that Baez gives has a presentation on cognitive distortions and public policy which I found quite good.

Craig_Heldreth 16 Aug 2010 1:07 UTC
1 point
in reply to: James_Miller’s comment on: Open Thread, August 2010-- part 2
This is a special case of a well known process in social science circles since at least the 1950′s: role playing. It became popular after the work of Fritz Perls (a psychotherapist who started out in drama), who would have the patient do things such as play their mother or father (or tyrannical trauma family character of choice) to try and broaden their understanding of their life story and memory. It can be a very powerful technique. I have been in group psychotherapy sessions where people scream, bawl, and many other visceral responses get displayed.

In 1983 Robert Anton Wilson published a book, Prometheus Unbound which was ostensibly a self-help book for making your thinking more rational, specifically for destroying dogmas. This book is little more than one recipe after another for exercises of this type; for example, be a neo-Nazi for a week.

The mechanics is to learn by exposing yourself to that great universe of unknown-unknowns. My personal experience is sometimes they can be helpful, but it is really hard to know beforehand if they will be worth the time. I have benefited from some of these things; I have wasted time doing some.

Craig_Heldreth 2 Sep 2010 17:59 UTC
18 points
on: Rationality quotes: September 2010
It is often said that experiments should be made without preconceived ideas. This is impossible.

--Henri Poincare, Science and Hypothesis.

Craig_Heldreth 13 Sep 2010 18:17 UTC
11 points
on: More art, less stink: Taking the PU out of PUA
I have a contribution to this topic, and I have a comment.

First, the contribution. I lurk on PUA and similar forums. I am interested in it as an application of Neurolinguistic Programming, which I sometimes see mentioned. The wikipedia page on Seduction Community does correctly describe the modern edition of these activities as beginning with the NLP trainer Ross Jeffries. I have never seen it mentioned anywhere on the internet that Jeffries was not a successful NLP trainer. Everybody in the NLP community I have discussed him with (who expressed an opinion) said that Jeffries was not only an unsuccessful NLP trainer, but he was a crappy one.

I have written up a very short beginner’s how-to for NLP on my blog if anybody is interested.

Second, I have a comment more specific to this post. I see a reductio ad absurdum here, which I have not seen mentioned in the thread yet. Robin Hanson has mentioned it on Overcoming Bias. To join a PUA group is to signal to people that you are not yet getting the sex satisfaction you want, which is a signal of low status. I may have other reasons for refusing to publicly associate with these guys, but that reason alone is sufficient for me. I would extend that to participation with anyone trying to apply PUA skills in different contexts. To me it is taboo in public. It is not a Winner’s Script.

Scott Adams may be a great comic writer, but he is not a Psychologist, Social Psychologist, or Sociologist. His list is interesting, but I cannot give it any weight. I have never seen a man who could make any room he enters his bitch. I have known a couple who thought they could, and it was mostly tedious to see them succeed and always hilarious to see them fail.

I recently did some research on this topic. The best source I found was in the context of Social Network Theory, by the Sociologist Nan Lin. He and a bunch of his graduate students have documented dozens of man years of research on quantifying social capital and breaking down what it is made up of. Some of it is similar to the items in this thread—things like playing golf, &c. One thing that surprised me is this: for people with technical jobs—programmers, engineers, research scientists—very few of these things matter at all. You only need two things to possess social capital in technical fields: first you need to be aware of current political and business news (like look at the Google News front page and business page daily); and second you need to know at least three good restaurants to eat at in your neighborhood and at least three good restaurants to eat at in your office’s neighborhood. And that is all.

There are some other related topics to this which I found in my Social Network Theory research earlier this year which I summarized on my blog here, which some may find useful or interesting.

Craig_Heldreth 13 Sep 2010 21:11 UTC
9 points
in reply to: CronoDAS’s comment on: More art, less stink: Taking the PU out of PUA

If you want to succeed in engineering management

This is a different topic. I am talking about social capital for low-level grunt engineers. Low-level grunt engineer is not chopped liver. Many of us make good dough.

Lin and his co-workers put around forty man-years into their research project. I have not seen anything else quite like it. The Dilbert principles and the Peter principle and Putt’s law are more anecdotal than data and statistics driven. The Sociologists who do Social Network Theory do measurements and calculations whenever possible.

Craig_Heldreth 15 Sep 2010 20:10 UTC
7 points
on: Intelligence Amplification Open Thread
In the Foucault Reader, Michel Foucault claims his greatest trick is an old one called hypomnemata. The last time I googled on hypomnemata, all the top hits were explicit Foucault references.

The hypomnema or hypomnemata are similar to diaries (or weblogs even), except they are not written one time and maybe never looked at again. They are to be reread and rewritten over and over for the writer’s education and work and progress. I have been doing a bunch of this for years and it is only since November of 2008 that I have established a system that I am confident of using daily and feel that the pages will continue to contain useful information for years. Every page is dated and numbered. I now have close to 1900 pages with this dating/numbering scheme. Foucault claims this is a great idea and I don’t know about that, but so far I like it just fine. It does keep ideas that I like to think about from sinking too far down the stack through neglect into oblivion.

After five years it is reviewed one last time and then tossed into the dumpster.

Craig_Heldreth 15 Sep 2010 23:30 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Craig_Heldreth’s comment on: Intelligence Amplification Open Thread
OK a couple more details.

My system is not that complicated and very much resembles what I was doing seven or eight years ago, which was close to plain-vanilla journaling. Now I use printer paper, which I line myself with microsoft word in alternating colors: tan-lavender-orange-light green-rose-light blue-gray. There are fifteen pages per color. At any given time I carry with me sixty pages; the fifteen in the active queue and the filled three previous sets. Right now my active pile goes back to the 23 rd of August. The first thing written on every new page is the date and this date’s page number in the top right corner.

When I fill up the current active set (of fifteen pages), I carefully read the set that will go upside down on the stack of a thousand pages or so on my bedroom floor. Some stuff will get copied onto a new fresh sheet to keep in the current active bin. Other stuff will get circled in red, starred, or otherwise annotated as something I would like to be able to review, or to find fairly fast. I use a lot of cartoon drawings and glyphs and diagrams and graphs.

I personally find it easier to find stuff out of hardcopy because keyword searches only work if you can remember the keyword and how to spell most of it. Depending on what I am looking for, I can scan through up to ten or fifteen pages in a minute; also, if it takes me a long time to find something and I have to search through a lot, I always find at least one pleasant surprise by happy happenstance.

JenniferRM, I looked at those links and some of it is intriguing. I do not log everything and am not interested in a complete map of every thought I think. What I am after is to refine and rewrite and connect my very best thoughts. This is the sense I read Foucault’s discussion of the hypomnemata. If you are interested in looking at this, you can find it on page 364 of the 1st edition of the Foucalt Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow, Pantheon Books. Foucault is generally thought of as intimidating, but I find this book very approachable. Rabinow has done a careful job presenting his version of Foucault, and it is a different guy than you see in the originals. There is always humor in Foucault, but in Rabinow’s presentation there is a sense that the humor is a mask for a deep underlying sadness, like Smokey Robinson’s “Tears of a clown when there is no one around” character.

In any case, the man was a tornado of a scholar in terms of his ability to dig into library stacks and extract original connections from the overabundance of material waiting there for anybody with the exploratory instincts of people such as Michel Foucault, and when he talks about his methods, that is something which is worth attending to closely. The section on the hypomnemata is in the context of Rabinow interviewing him specifically on the topic of his methods.
What links here?
- Craig_Heldreth's comment on Meditations on first philosophy by Craig_Heldreth (19 Jan 2011 18:03 UTC; 2 points)