Music Video maker and self professed “Fashion Victim” who is hoping to apply Rationality to problems and decisions in my life and career probably by reevaluating and likely building a new set of beliefs that underpins them.
CstineSublime
and I’d actually like a “1000 ships” approach here where more people try to replicate in their own way
How do you reconcile the need to “replicate” scientifically and people trying “in their own way”?
This is an extremely relatable post, in both ways. I often find myself on the other side of the these interactions too and not knowing how to label and describe my awareness of what’s happening without coming across as Larry David from Curb Your Enthusiasm.
You would have multiple copies of any object that would make you sad if you didn’t have it
This seems more directly to be an issue with finances than idiotic thinking. off the top of my head: I’d be pretty devastated if I didn’t have my 30 year old prime lens, but I also can’t afford to buy one, especially because it’s quite rare and prices have gone up since I bought it. A second car is a luxury few can afford. Or am I misunderstanding the point of this list?
Taleb has made available a technical Monograph that parallels that book, and all of his books. You can find it here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.10488
[Question] Are (Motor)sports like F1 a good thing to calibrate estimates against?
[Question] How to best measure if and to what degree you’re too pessimistic or too optimistic?
Long time lurker introducing myself.
I’m a Music Video Maker who is hoping to use Instrumental Rationality towards accomplishing various creative-aesthetic goals and moving forward on my own personal Hamming Question. The Hammertime sequence has been something I’ve been very curious about but unsuccessful in implementing.
I’ll be scribbling shortform notes which might document my grappling with goals. Most of them will be in some way related to the motion picture production or creativity in general. “Questions” as a topic may creep in, it’s one of my favorite topics. Having trained as a documentary filmmaker in a previous life, I have spent a lot of time interviewing people and loved it. I also curate a list of interesting or good questions. I get joy from being asked interesting questions.
I am very surprised that a cursory crtl+f of Anscombe translation of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, while containing a few tracts discussing the use of the phrase “I believe”, doesn’t contain a single instance of “I believe in”.
One instance of his discussion of “I believe” in Part 2, section x explores the phrase, wondering how it distinguishes itself from merely stating a given hypothesis. Analogous to prefixing a statement with “I say...” such as “I say it will rain today” (which recalls the Tractatus distinguishing the expression of a proposition from the proposition itself):“At bottom, when I say ‘I believe . . .’ I am describing my own state of mind—but this description is indirectly an assertion of the fact believed.”—As in certain circumstances I describe a photograph in order to describe the thing it is a photograph of. But then I must also be able to say that the photograph is a good one. So here too: “I believe it’s raining and my belief is reliable, so I have confidence in it.”—In that case my belief would be a kind of sense-impression.
One can mistrust one’s own senses, but not one’s own belief.
If there were a verb meaning ‘to believe falsely’, it would not have any significant first person present indicative.
Does “normie” crossover with “(I’m) just a regular guy/girl”? While they are obviously have highly different connotations, is the central meaning similar?
I tend to assume, owing to Subjectivism and Egocentric Bias, that at times people are more likely to identify as part of the majority (and therefore ‘normie’) than the minority unless they have some specific reason to do so. What further complicates this like a matryoshka doll is not only the differing sociological roles that a person can switch between dozens of times a day (re: the stereotypical Twitter bio “Father. Son. Actuary. Tigers supporter”) but within a minority one might be part of the majority of the minority, or the minority of the minority many times over. Like the classic Emo Phillips joke “Northern Conservative Baptist, or Northern Liberal Baptist” “He said “Northern Conservative Baptist”, I said “me too! Northern Conservative Fundamentalist Baptist...”″ itself a play on “No True-Scotsman”.
I don’t read much sensationalist tabloid, but my impression is that the things that get a lot of attention in the press, is things people can reasonable take either side of.
A cursory glance suggests that it is not the case, take a top story headline on the Australian Daily Mail over the last 7 days: “Miranda, Sydney: Urgent search is launched for missing Bailey Wolf, aged two, who vanished yesterday” it is not reasonable for someone to hope that a two year old who has vanished not be found. This is exactly the kind of thing you’re suggesting AI should be trained on, because of how uniform responses are to this headline. Keep in mind this is one of the most viewed stories, and literally top of the list I found.
I’ve read Scott’s article, but are you trying to understand what get’s attention or what is the nexus or commonly agreed upon moral principles of a society?
I don’t see many particularly exotic finance terms, but I would think a recent edition of Brigham and Ehrhardt’s “Financial Management: Theory and Practice” is probably the most authoritative (but not being available for ‘preview’ on Google Books I haven’t been able to do a quick ctrl+f to see if it uses a sample of terms in that post). However I suspect that even one of those Tony Robbins books on investing will provide you the terminology or even Investopedia.
Is this related to the observation that artists—be they musicians, painters, sculptors—are often very bad at the promotional and ‘business’ side of ‘showbussiness’ and art while artists who are much less self critical about what they release (Tommy Wisseau comes to mind but he’s not a good example) manage to enjoy startling success because of their relentless ability to self promote even what needs a little more ‘polish’?
I am aware there’s a lot of potential elitism embedded in my question but this is a conversation I’ve had many times with people involved in music and fine arts. I can also see how someone might make a parallel to Dunning-Kruger.
No advice only further questions and prompts.
What kind of questions have you been asking people in/who do UXR—why do these seem like the most informative questions to ask? And what is most surprising answer you’ve received, even if it’s not directly related to your bias?
What have you done already to try and at least map out what might be a source of confirmation or social desirability bias?
I’m assuming you see UXR is more socially desirable, in which case without trying to evaluate how true it is—where do you think you picked up this attitude or belief?Do you have a history of making life decisions like career changes on biases rather than the best decision you could with the information you had to hand at the time?
And of course, in the tradition of Focusing, how is your body responding? What are you feeling? What causes and releases tension etc. etc.?
Interesting, when you frame it like that though the hard part is enforcing it. And if I was being pithy I’d say something like: that involves human alignment, not AI
The one problem I have with the experiential Pica analogy is, and I suspect I’m in the minority with this: what happens when I’m not sure or am not aware of any effective means of satisfying an overarching goal or need?
I certainly have a lot of useless hobbies, I’m a compulsive writer/journaller, I amass a lot of word lists, but worst of all was in the past I wasted a few years on a film production that was neither aesthetically nor career-strategically worth the time investment. If you ask me concerning that production “would you do it again?” I’d say “Hell no”. If you ask me do I know what I’d do different, I would say “something else...” without being able to tell you what thing else.
Know of any really good hobbies or ways to spend your free time? I’m in the market and would love to hear them. I think hobby-goodness is probably not normally distributed. My intuition says that the best hobby for a given person is better than all the rest put together.
I am inclined to agree with your intuition. And while I could babble countless exotic hobbies, what are the actual criteria you’re using to evaluate them right now?
I suspected that is the case but wanted to make sure because other items on the list also seemed to be things that, at least in my position, seem like unobtainable luxuries (which abstractly might be related to idiotic judgement—for example “invest in yourself” well there’s infinite ways to try that, I’ve made the mistake of reading many self-help books, but few which pay actual dividends; playing an instrument is an investment—a decent electric bass and amplifier can cost well over a grand).
I’m confused, is the death to discomfort comparison based on the cumulative experience that the loved ones and friends of a person who has died might experience in grief and despair that someone they cared about died? Or are you suggesting that a death is a superlatively uncomfortable event for the individual who is dying?
I can’t see a way of making discomfort to death fungible, at least partly because to experience discomfort requires someone to continue on living.
I’m not sure what actually constitutes the Renaissance? Is just an art movement, or does it describe the totality of what was happening in European courts at the time? Is it just a propagandistic term? However two major trends that are associated with it—linear perspective paintings, and the rediscovery of Greco-Latin Literature both are at least partly indebted to developments in the Middle East.
The Book of Optics by Ibn al-Haytham appears to be particularly important in the developments of painting and the understanding of how light transmits. It contains a rejection of the emission theory of optics (rays come from the eyes) in favour of the intromission theory that light bounces off of objects before entering the eye. And translated into Latin in the late 12th century. I would surmise that it had at least an influence in the popularity and use of Linear Perspective in Renaissance Art.Greco-Latin Literature was preserved, albeit in various translated forms, across the Islamic World and highly popular. As Wikipedia puts it:
The line between Greek scholarship and Arab scholarship in Western Europe was very blurred during the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period. Sometimes the concept of the transmission of Greek Classics is often used to refer to the collective knowledge that was obtained from the Arab and Byzantine Empires, regardless of where the knowledge actually originated.
It is important to note that like the Renaissance itself, this was not some single catalytic moment, but both serial and parallel transmissions that happened over a number of centuries. Most interestingly at first these texts arrived in Europe being translated from some intermediary language like Syriac or Arabic. A Greek classic may have reached early modern Europeans only after being translated into Latin, then Syriac, and back into Latin.
Andalusian scholars began translating from Islamic sources from at least the early 10th century. Gerard of Cremona (1114-1187) set out to learn Arabic so he could read Ptolemy’s Almagest and later translated works of Aristotle, Euclid, Jabir ibn Aflah and Al-Khwarizmi. The Fourth Crusade (1202-1204) eventually facilitated Dutch scholar Willem van Moerbeke coming into contact and translating works of Aristotle, Hero of Alexandria, and Archimedes.
I assume these developments culminated in the artistic trademarks of the Renaissance.
Sensationalist tabloid news stories and other outrage porn are not the opposite. These are actually more of the same. More edge cases. Anything that is divisive have the problem I’m talking about.
Could you explain how are they edge cases if they are the lowest common denominator? Doesn’t that make them the opposite of an edge case? Aren’t they in fact the standard or yardstick necessary to compare against?
Fiction is a better choice.
Why is is it different let alone better choice? Fiction is a single author’s attempt to express their view of the world, including morality, and therefore an edge case. While popular literature is just as common denominator as tabloid journalism, since the author is trying to be commercial.
I wouldn’t mind seeing an annotated narrative or description of what that process of distilling a habit down into the parts which do the cognitive heavy lifting looks like