Crux

Karma: 652

Crux 7 Mar 2013 6:40 UTC
21 points
on: Boring Advice Repository
I used to forget to brush my teeth a lot, or even when I’d remember I’d shrug it off out of some sort of extreme level of laziness. Here’s how I fixed it: I put my toothbrush in my shower. I brush my teeth in the shower. Saves time, makes it easier to remember, and it’s less boring since I’m multitasking.

Crux 22 Oct 2011 4:53 UTC
19 points
on: Truth & social graces

I have a little kid who is generally quite truthful, innocent enough not to lie in most cases. I noticed recently that when someone asks him, “How are you”, he usually answers in detail because, well, you asked, didn’t you? When I was a teenager I hated people who lied and I tended to ignore these unwritten social rules to the extent I could. I.e. I didn’t ask if I didn’t want to know and people thought I was rude. So, my question is, should I teach him to lie upon these occasions?

It becomes clear that no lying is necessary in this case when you realize that the actual purpose of producing the sequence of sounds “how are you” is often not to request a detailed description of the listener’s current well-being, but only to greet them, foster good-will, show friendship, or something like that.

You must simply know the context. Sometimes the word “box” points to an object; other times to a sport. Similarly, sometimes the phrase “how are you” functions as a request for a detailed etc; other times it’s for something somewhat different.
What links here?
- fortyeridania's comment on Truth & social graces by irrational (23 Oct 2011 13:00 UTC; 6 points)

Crux 10 Feb 2016 22:13 UTC
18 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Open Thread, Feb 8 - Feb 15, 2016
I think everyone would appreciate if you put more effort into your posts.

Crux 7 Mar 2013 6:45 UTC
18 points
on: Boring Advice Repository
If you’re trying to learn a foreign language, get a channel in that language and leave it on in the background, occasionally sitting down to watch for a few mins, for example while eating breakfast. Do this for a year. Improvement doesn’t always have to take effort.

Crux 6 May 2012 21:00 UTC
18 points
in reply to: Raiden’s comment on: No Value
There’s no need to posit some ultimate objective terminal value to explain why you’re terrified of choosing the wrong values.

First of all, if by “choosing the wrong values”, you mean “choosing the wrong terminal values”, then you’re just not making sense, or rather it’s just not clear what you’re trying to communicate. Placing “wrong” next to “terminal values” in a sentence about you choosing what you want your values to be, sounds no different to me than saying, “That ball is square.” I’m not in a position interpret either of those sequences of words.

A course of action can be wrong only by reference to a value. Or to taboo the word “wrong”, a course of action can be incompetent only if you posit a goal the agent is trying to achieve. Driving into a tree at 70 mph is a bad idea for me only because I don’t want to die or get crippled, and I don’t want either of those only because X, and X only because Y, etc., until we reach my terminal value(s). Someone else may be different in this respect.

It’s not possible to choose your terminal values, or rather it just doesn’t even make any sense to say that phrase: “choose your terminal values”. Choosing involves valuing. Once you choose something, you’re choosing it because you think it’s a good way to get something else, but then that something else is by necessity more “terminal” than what you chose. You can’t choose your terminal values; you can only discover them.

With that said, I want to echo the others who mentioned that your situation may be the result of some basic physiological problem or whatever. All too often do people chalk their situation up to their personality, or How Things Are, or something like that, when the situation is extremely malleable, and is no more than the routine, methodical outcome of some basic lifestyle consideration or toxin exposure or whatever.

I’ve been in and out of many states and conditions over my lifetime that felt so urgent, or so profound, or something, but have in the end proven to be nothing more than what I mentioned in the last paragraph: the result of some lame environmental circumstance. For example, depression can be ridiculously severe, and color one’s perception of the world in such an insanely pronounced way, that it seems so out of place to tell them, “Maybe it’s just because you’re not exercising.” But sometimes the solution really is that mundane.

Big effects don’t necessitate big causes. Or more to the point, intense mental states do not require intense events proceeding. As I started off the previous paragraph with, I’ve been in and out of so many of these intense mental states that proved to be lame circuitry misfirings (or whatever), that I have come to take my emotions with a serious grain of salt. I know your mental state isn’t “intense”, so I guess this is starting to sound a little bit centric to my own experiences, but I think the basic message is the same.

Having no values seems like a very boring existence, and Very Boring Existences are undesirable in comparison to exciting ones. This means that you don’t actually have no values, and that saying you have no strong values is nothing more than an idiom. You do have values. So what you must do is figure out how to elicit those values, and maybe there’s some simple physiological problem to blame. Perhaps try improving your lifestyle (e.g., diet, exercise, sleep, toxin avoidance), and/or try getting some sort of basic medical workup where you mention your lack of zest for life and so on?

Hopefully this was somewhat helpful. Good luck, and I hope you stick around Less Wrong!

Crux 1 Oct 2011 0:08 UTC
18 points
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: Who owns LessWrong?
Does this not count as an indirect argument or something?

I for one would be sort of annoyed if somebody announced that due to an alleged unamiable personality of mine they’re declining to debate me, and then in the same public venue proceeded to state that my whole argument was an obvious non-sequitur.

Crux 5 Aug 2013 6:23 UTC
16 points
in reply to: Mark_Friedenbach’s comment on: Crossing the experiments: a baby

If you don’t want to hear about it then go somewhere else.

Isn’t every negative reception in some way pre-emptive? Clearly a single post that’s off topic is easy to just ignore, but if no negative incentive is given, the number of off-topic posts will increase, and if this continues, eventually “go[ing] somewhere else” would be like having to watch your feet at all times to make sure you don’t step on something sharp. It would be too distracting, and would detract heavily from the value of the forum.

Crux 10 Dec 2011 8:06 UTC
15 points
on: Issues with the Litany of Gendlin
As always, it simply depends on your utility function. If you consider avoiding short-term emotional pain as an end in itself, it would of course be in your best interest to engage in various self-deceptive strategies etc.

The users on Less Wrong may well be drastically less likely to have that sort of utility function than the general population, but that doesn’t in any way detract from the obvious fact that a utility function can in fact include an ultimate aversion to short-term emotional pain, and there are in fact an absolute ton of people like that.

So can people stand what’s true because they’re already enduring it? Wait, already enduring what? For somebody like I described above (one who’s goal set contains an ultimate aversion to short-term emotional pain), the emotional pain itself is something to endure.

In other words, avoiding thinking about fact A doesn’t allow you to not endure A (because of course A will be present whether or not you think about it), but there is in fact something that not thinking about it will do, and that’s let you not endure the emotional pain, which may well be extremely important for your utility function.

Tetronian said that the Litany basically says it’s silly to refuse to update your map because you’re afraid of what you may find, for what’s in the territory is already there whether or not you know it. Sure, but for some people the emotions themselves are part of the territory. It’s not that they’re afraid to update their map; it’s that they’re afraid to change one section of the territory (their belief structure) because it may make another section undesirable (their emotional landscape or whatever).

The map/territory distinction has proven useful in a lot of ways, but in this conversation it can only distract, for it has a utility function built right into its core—one incompatible with the one incompatible with the Litany. It breaks down when it encounters a utility function that values what’s in one’s head not necessarily only as an indicator for what’s outside, but also simply for its own sake.

Crux 23 Aug 2013 5:42 UTC
12 points
in reply to: Brillyant’s comment on: Use Your Identity Carefully
Good point. I’ve had months of my life which felt like I had no akrasia, because I didn’t care. The moment I thought to myself “I really need to get this [project that will take a ton of work] done”, it feels like I’m some ridiculous non-agent who can’t make decisions, trapped, unable to remove my hands from the keys, unable to stop reading Reddit, unable to go to sleep so I can wake up early.

I’ve met a thousand people who say they have no motivation issues, but then I notice they’re not exactly doing much in their life that causes akrasia problems. Akrasia is a misfiring of our hardware that happens when you try to do certain tasks; if you don’t do those tasks then you’ve got no akrasia. Doesn’t mean you’re very productive.

Crux 29 Jan 2016 23:26 UTC
11 points
in reply to: Brillyant’s comment on: [Error communicating with LW2 server]
I’ve heard “shadowban” quite a few times. I agree that “hellban” is an odd term.

Crux 26 Sep 2013 0:55 UTC
11 points
in reply to: bokov’s comment on: What makes us think _any_ of our terminal values aren’t based on a misunderstanding of reality?
What do you mean when you say consciousness may be an illusion? It’s happening to you, isn’t it? What other proof do you need? What would a world look like where consciousness is an illusion, vs. one where it isn’t?

Crux 4 May 2012 13:47 UTC
11 points
in reply to: Jack’s comment on: Open Thread, May 1-15, 2012

Claiming Ludwig in the Bayesian camp is really strange and wrong. His mathematician brother Richard, from whom he takes his philosophy of probability, is literally the arch-frequentist of the 20th century.

And Ludwig and Richard themselves were arch enemies. Well only sort of, but they certainly didn’t agree on everything, and the idea that Ludwig simply took his philosophy of probability from his brother couldn’t be further from the truth. Ludwig devoted an entire chapter in his Magnum Opus to uncertainty and probability theory, and I’ve seen it mentioned many times that this chapter could be seen as his response to his brother’s philosophy of probability.

I see what you’re saying in your post, but the confusion stems from the fact that Ludwig did in fact believe that frequency probability, logical positivism, etc., were useful epistemologies in the natural sciences, and led to plenty of advancements etc., but that they were strictly incorrect when extended to “the sciences of human action” (economics and others). “Class probability” is what he called the instances where frequency worked, and “case probability” where it didn’t.

The most concise quote I could find to make my position seem much more plausible:

Only preoccupation with the mathematical treatment could result in the prejudice that probability always means frequency.

And here’s a dump of all the quotes I could find on the topic, reading all of which will make it utterly clear that Ludwig understood the subjectivist nature of probability (emphasis mine, and don’t worry about reading much more than just the emphasized portions unless you want to).

First:

Where there is regularity, statistics could not show anything else than that A is followed in all cases by P and in no case by something different from P. If statistics show that A is in x% of all cases followed by P and in (100 − x)% of all cases by Q, we must assume that a more perfect knowledge will have to split up A into two factors B and C of which the former is regularly followed by P and the latter by Q.

Second:

Quantum mechanics deals with the fact that we do not know how an atom will behave in an individual instance. But we know what patterns of behavior can possibly occur and the proportion in which these patterns really occur. While the perfect form of a causal law is: A “produces” B, there is also a less perfect form: A “produces” C in n% of all cases, D in m% of all cases, and so on. Perhaps it will at a later day be possible to dissolve this A of the less perfect form into a number of disparate elements to each of which a definite “effect” will be assigned according to the perfect form. But whether this will happen or not is of no relevance for the problem of determinism. The imperfect law too is a causal law, although it discloses shortcomings in our knowledge. And because it is a display of a peculiar type both of knowledge and of ignorance, it opens a field for the employment of the calculus of probability. We know, with regard to a definite problem, all about the behavior of the whole class of events, we know that class A will produce definite effects in a known proportion; but all we know about the individual A’s is that they are members of the A class. The mathematical formulation of this mixture of knowledge and ignorance is: We know the probability of the various effects that can possibly be “produced” by an individual A.

Third:

What the neo-indeterminist school of physics fails to see is that the proposition: A produces B in n% of the cases and C in the rest of the cases is, epistemologically, not different from the proposition: A always produces B. The former proposition differs from the latter only in combining in its notion of A two elements, X and Y, which the perfect form of a causal law would have to distinguish. But no question of contingency is raised. Quantum mechanics does not say: The individual atoms behave like customers choosing dishes in a restaurant or voters casting their ballots. It says: The atoms invariably follow a definite pattern. This is also manifested in the fact that what it predicates about atoms contains no reference either to a definite period of time or to a definite location within the universe. One could not deal with the behavior of atoms in general, that is, without reference to time and space, if the individual atom were not inevitably and fully ruled by natural law. We are free to use the term “individual” atom, but we must never ascribe to an “individual” atom individuality in the sense in which this term is applied to men and to historical events.

Fourth:

Calling an event contingent is not to deny that it is the necessary outcome of the preceding state of affairs. It means that we mortal men do not know whether or not it will happen.

Fifth:

For this defective knowledge the calculus of probability provides a presentation in symbols of the mathematical terminology. It neither expands nor deepens nor complements our knowledge. It translates it into mathematical language. Its calculations repeat in algebraic formulas what we knew beforehand. They do not lead to results that would tell us anything about the actual singular events. And, of course, they do not add anything to our knowledge concerning the behavior of the whole class, as this knowledge was already perfect—or was considered perfect—at the very outset of our consideration of the matter.

Sixth:

A statement is probable if our knowledge concerning its content is deficient. We do not know everything which would be required for a definite decision between true and not true. But, on the other hand, we do know something about it; we are in a position to say more than simply non liquet or ignoramus.

Etc. Probability is in the mind. It is subjective, and dependent upon the current state of knowledge of the observer in question. He seems very clear on this matter.

Back to you:

When he says “class probability” he is specifically talking about this. …

They do not lead to results that would tell us anything about the actual singular events.

Which is the the precise opposite of the position of the subjectivist.

Is it? Let’s analyze the full quote:

For this defective knowledge the calculus of probability provides a presentation in symbols of the mathematical terminology. It neither expands nor deepens nor complements our knowledge. It translates it into mathematical language. Its calculations repeat in algebraic formulas what we knew beforehand. They do not lead to results that would tell us anything about the actual singular events. And, of course, they do not add anything to our knowledge concerning the behavior of the whole class, as this knowledge was already perfect—or was considered perfect—at the very outset of our consideration of the matter.

All he’s saying is that taking one’s knowledge of the behavior of a class of events the behavior of the individuals of which one knows nothing, and putting it into mathematical notation, does not magically reveal anything about those individual components.

For example (taken from that Mises Wiki link), if you know approximately how many houses will catch fire per year in a neighborhood, but you don’t know which ones they will be, transforming this knowledge into mathematical probability theory is no more than a potentially more concise way of describing one’s current state of knowledge. It of course cannot add anything to what you already knew.

In fact, this isn’t even relevant to the topic at hand. Believe it or not, some people thought probability theory was magical and could help them win at games of chance. This was him responding to that mysticism. I certainly don’t see how it makes him not a subjectivist on probability theory, especially when the whole analysis is about states of knowledge etc.

Crux 22 Mar 2012 9:02 UTC
11 points
in reply to: XFrequentist’s comment on: Social status hacks from The Improv Wiki
At first I was going to say that those were actually the two examples I didn’t agree with. I was going to ask, “Does it really signal low status to properly manage the inferential distance? Wouldn’t it be the opposite?”

But once I tried going on to writing the next sentence, I realized something. It’s high status to be ahead of somebody in the inferential distance. How often have you witnessed an argument where one person used a bunch of jargon from some science, their opponent asked them to close the inferential distance by defining those terms, and then the first guy acted as if the second had no business in the discussion if he doesn’t even know what those terms mean?

If the goal was simply to communicate one’s ideas, such behavior would be a fundamental incompetence: improper management of the inferential distance. But when the prize isn’t greater understanding, but social status, it can be useful to refuse to define your terms.

Is this what the article had in mind, or what?

Crux 7 Mar 2013 7:10 UTC
10 points
in reply to: shminux’s comment on: Getting myself to eat vegetables
To some people they don’t taste good. Advice for how to self-modify in this respect would perhaps be useful, if you have any.

Crux 3 May 2012 14:09 UTC
10 points
in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: Open Thread, May 1-15, 2012
Far from being batshit crazy, Mises was an eminently reasonable thinker. It’s just that he didn’t do a very good job communicating his epistemological insights (which was understandable, given the insanely difficult nature of explaining what he was trying to get at), but did fine with enough of the economic theory, and thus ended up with a couple generations of followers who extended his economics rather well in plenty of ways, but systematically butchered their interpretation of his epistemological insights.

People compartmentalize, they operate under obstructive identity issues, their beliefs in one area don’t propagate to all others, much of what they say or write is signaling that’s incompatible with epistemic rationality, etc. Many of these are tangled together. Yeah, it’s more than possible for people to say batshit insane things and then turn around and make a bunch of useful insights. The epistemological commentary could almost be seen as signaling team affiliation before actually getting to the useful stuff.

Just consider the kind of people who are bound to become Austrian economists. Anti-authority etc. They have no qualms with breaking from the mainstream in any way whatsoever. They already think most people are completely batshit insane, and that the world is a joke and is going down the tubes. There’s nothing really to constrain them from sounding insane on epistemology. It’s not a red flag to them if everyone seems to disagree.

Forget the epistemology. They’re just parroting confused secondary accounts of the work of a thinker who himself utterly failed in his endeavor to explain where he was coming from on this topic, and they’re parroting it to signal team affiliation, a break from the mainstream, etc. Beliefs don’t always propagate throughout the whole web, especially when they’re less usefully analyzed as “beliefs” and more as mere words spilled for the purpose of signaling something.

If you read enough and listen to enough of the modern Austrian school (which is a tragically hard prospect given how allergic most LW-style rationalists would be to the presentation and style of argumentation), you’ll find that what’s going on in the world, or rather what’s going so wrong in society, will become incredibly clear, and half of everything will fall into place. It’s one of the two major pieces in the puzzle—the other of which may be found on Less Wrong.

Crux 22 Mar 2012 7:33 UTC
10 points
in reply to: drethelin’s comment on: Ontologial Reductionism and Invisible Dragons
Have you ever written an essay about why something you believed to be true wasn’t wrong or bad?

Am I misunderstanding you, or are you seriously saying that spilling a lot of ink to defend something you believe in is (significant) evidence that it’s incorrect?

Learning Mathematics in Context

Crux26 Jan 2016 22:27 UTC

9 points

35 comments1 min readLW link

Crux 22 Mar 2012 18:22 UTC
9 points
in reply to: Will_Newsome’s comment on: Scenario analysis: semi-general AIs

So you do not believe that others’ beliefs are evidence?

It’s sometimes (or even very often) evidence, but not when (1) there’s not even a shred of evidence elsewhere, and (2) there’s a convincing, systematic explanation for how a particular cluster of epistemic vulnerabilities in human brain hardware led to its widespread adoption.

In other words, a large portion of society believing something is evidence only if the memetic market test for the adoption of the idea at hand is intact. But our hardware and factory settings are so ridiculously mal-adapted to the epistemic environment of the modern world that this market test is extremely often utterly broken and useless.

If you want to make use of the societal thoughts on an issue, you must first appraise the health of the market test for the adoption of the ideas. Is it likely that competition in this area of the memetic environment will lead to ever more sound beliefs, or is there a wrench in the system that is bound to lead to a systematic spiral to ever more ridiculous or counterproductive dogmas?

Our hardware is just so riddled with epistemic problems that it would be a huge mistake to consider societal conclusions at face value. If the market test for meme propagation were intact, and the trial-and-error system for weeding out less useful beliefs in favor of more useful ones ran smoothly, large-scale acceptance of a position would of course be plenty of evidence—no further questions asked.

But we live in a different world—one where this trial-and-error system is in utter disrepair in an absolutely staggering number of cases. In such a world, one must always start with the question, “Is the memetic market test intact in this case, or must I go this epistemic journey myself?”

Of course the market test is better or worse from one place to the next, and I hang out here because the Less Wrong community certainly has one of the best belief propagation systems out there. If everybody on here seems to believe something with a lot of conviction, that to me is strong evidence.

In case the point was lost in the length, I should state it concisely. Whether the beliefs of others are evidence is a contextual question. It depends what the market test is, specifically for the propagation of the belief under scrutiny. If there’s reason to believe that the market test is corrupted because of a particular hardware or software vulnerability, then there’s reason to dismiss the widespread acceptance, and declare it no evidence at all.

If you accept all that, this of course brings us to the all-important question of why I think the memetic market test for the propagation of religion is broken enough to explain such widespread adoption despite how epistemically insane I consider it, but I don’t think I need to (try to) answer that. You’ve probably heard it all before on here, in writing on memetics, from Dawkins, etc.

Crux 7 Oct 2011 5:42 UTC
9 points
on: Should I play World of Warcraft?
Depends on your utility function. WoW doesn’t seem to build a significant corpus of micro-skills or anything; it seems of mere transient enjoyment. It’s fun in the moment, but then later you regret having wasted your time. It’s dangerous though, and not simply because it’s a waste of time. Plenty of things are a waste of time, but once you realize that, you quit. WoW is different; it’s addictive super-stimuli.

You were asking what the difference is between being addictive and simply being really, really good. Well here’s an example: being in the midst of an indulge-regret cycle is one way to experience addiction. Think of somebody who eats three donuts each night, but always regrets it the next morning. Or someone who, well, every night stays up way too late playing WoW, and then every morning hates himself for it. Or somebody who whiles away his weekends or evenings playing it, and then always regrets it when at work. The indulge-regret cycle; a species of akrasia.

WoW is addictive for the same reason donuts are; it’s super-stimuli for a certain part of our built-in reward system. It’s hard to resist, yet useful to resist (at least for somebody with a utility function sufficiently similar to mine), because it plays on certain emotions and indicators and not on others. Or it affects one part of our motivational system so strongly that the natural stimuli for other parts becomes boring. And of course natural stimuli for that part gets boring too. And that’s bad because you start picking WoW (or whatever the super-stimuli is), over a ton of stuff of long-term importance. Like activity related to physical or mental health. Or your finances.

We’re built with a reward system that constantly feeds us inherently-compelling information. Taste, emotion, etc. But of course this system gets hijacked left and right in the modern environment. It’s built to motivate us in the moment, but designed to be in a harmony of interests with our future selves. Something is supposed to taste good to make you eat it now, to be healthy later. Not so anymore! Now we have junk food, and that creates a potential conflict of interests among our different selves over time. You want to eat it now, but you’ll regret it later… So you try to summon that precious will-power, but of course that rarely works.

WoW will hijack your reward system, destroy your motivation to do things that in the future you’ll regret having not done, etc. It’s not mind safe. Not for somebody with my utility function, anyway. I wouldn’t touch it with a 10-foot pole.

Sorry this was so rambling.
What links here?
- Crux's comment on Should I play World of Warcraft? by PhilGoetz (8 Oct 2011 0:28 UTC; 0 points)

Crux 4 Oct 2011 2:52 UTC
9 points
in reply to: wedrifid’s comment on: Knox and Sollecito freed
I think I can resolve this. JoshuaZ would almost definitely admit that they were being irrational. What he disagrees with is you going further and calling it disgraceful and evil.

So what’s the difference? He seems to have pinpointed the former term as implying that they’re trying to do harm, and the latter one as adding a whole slew of extra layers of incompetence or idiocy. He argued that they aren’t targeting somebody they think is innocent (thus they’re not “evil”), and that their failure of irrationality was understandable (therefore not “disgraceful”). That’s it.

He disagreed with you by arguing that their behavior isn’t intentionally bad (as “evil” seems to imply), and that it’s much more excusable than what “disgraceful” seems to connote. But you on the other hand seem to be using these terms not to make them sound like they want to harm an innocent person or are stupider than they are, but simply to stress just how destructive this sort of behavior is and can be.

As often is the case, the disagreement seems to boil down to simple miscommunication. If I’m right in my (somewhat cursory) assessment, then there’s no actual difference of opinion, and this is just yet another mundane example of the words getting in the way.

Crux

Learn­ing Math­e­mat­ics in Context

Learning Mathematics in Context