If you define “talent” as a product of your current ability to produce and visualize mental models of complex systems, especially “from nothing”, then it is the most defining factor for the higher maximum awesomeness of programs you can code at present.
This “talent” can be enhanced and self-improved through effort, however, in a very similar manner to making oneself more “luminous”.
Your intuition relating to “innate talent” is wrong. There is nothing innate about any of the “talents” required for programming, other than what generally comes with the package of most human brains. This might be a simple question of wording though, as if you change the words to “inner” talent, I would be more inclined to agree.
Simply put, unless a person is simply incapable of mental change and learning, then they will be able to “learn” and self-adjust into “obtaining” the “talents” required. However, this usually requires much more effort than people (read: the small sample size of the people I know who are not programmers but have attempted to learn how to program, which amounts to eight individuals) are willing to put forth, hence the common misconception that there is this “innate talent” that you simply must have to become a programmer.
Personal experience, most likely. What little I’ve seen / know of his knowledge indicates in-depth mastery of multiple topics that would each have taken five or more years of university courses to learn.
Having learned them all from university courses without special exception being made (that is, taking full-term courses without any skipping of courses or taking more than six courses per term) is highly improbable.
Many of my thought experiments into forming universities or educational institutions in general more geared towards optimized learning (e.g. open-learning systems where each student is at different levels in different subjects, and takes tests when milestones are reached rather than at specific predefined dates) seem to strongly indicate that while many of them would be much better for making more intelligent individuals or letting people learn much faster, the optimal utility-maximizing situation for the “Institutional Governing Body” is the current system. In other words, the individuals in positions of power to change the institutions have much more to gain (at least in the short term on their personal utility scales) in maintaining the current system. All my calculations, estimates and observations so far have consistently been in agreement with this statement, though I suspect a great deal of personal bias is at work here.
Yes, I attempted to infer this when saying that it requires “much more effort”. First, they need to make an effort to be more aware of themselves, then to be able to learn and develop new mental models of their own accord on things of their choosing, in a conscious manner.
Then, they need to, as you say, find out what to learn. This can be achieved through the effort of looking for resources (including “human resources”) that can help you figure it out or give you the right information.
Notice that at every step, there is effort required. You might call it a “meta-effort”, in a sense, since you also need to make the effort of doing effort, but I like to simplify and just say that it’s a lot of effort that most people aren’t willing to make. After all, I’m usually explaining this to the very people who aren’t, in an ultimate play to get them to either start gearing up for a long trek into Better-Person-Hood or give up about becoming a programmer/researcher/etc.
Yes, on that I agree. I suppose I was more disagreeing on the choice of word than on the concept of something being already there in some and lacking in others. The dictionary definitions (referring to Dictionary.com and my old pocket dict) of “innate” all seem utterly inappropriate for this usage.
However, I’ll still nitpick on the point of conscious effort. My “definition” of inner talent is that of an abstract representation of the “source” of the talent in question. An “outer” talent is one where, to explain by example, a person’s genetic profile is directly favorable to athletics by producing the required muscle mass more efficiently with less prodding, and recovering from exercising damage more easily, and so on. By contrast, an “inner” talent is one where synergies, “affinities” in the system, side-routes, or other indirect or invisible. I always fail to find the words to explain complex dynamics where various seemingly-unrelated things converge to the same location to push in the same direction, but that’s about the kind of psychological or physical events I’m trying to refer to with “inner” talents.
Some person will have no particular skill or strength that is directly beneficial towards chopping wood, but once they try, suddenly a bunch of unrelated past experiences or other points about their current self help them catch on quickly to just the right way of holding the axe and establishing their footing and swinging and so on.
What I want to make a point for is that both the processes of awakening an inner talent or slowly going through all the steps from nothing can be either conscious or unconscious. This will depend on many factors that may not be obvious.
Assuming a significantly large distribution of athletes sent by other rational managers, where all athletes are bound to the same rules of random event selection, I would still send the best possible specialist in a single discipline in this case, because without certainty that all other rational managers know certainly that some generalists will be better in everything than other generalists and that each one is confident that theirs is best, I conclude that some of them attempt a gamble of probabilities and send a specialist, and thus I also send a specialist to maximize my chances of winning.
After all, there are higher chances of the event being my athlete’s specialty than there are chances of every single other athlete being less good at it if I pick a generalist, unless the number of possible events is large enough to outweigh the number of athletes. Throw in irrational managers and the possibility of other managers having information unavailable to you, and your father’s argument seems very weak.
Now, of course, I’m probably attacking something that wasn’t meant to be a strong defensible argument. However, I feel very strongly about the point that negative selection is wrong in many contexts it is currently used in (which I support), as well as the point that positive selection is so difficult and utterly impractical in so many cases (which I want to pound into tiny bits of forgotten wrongness).
I’m not sure where I’m going with this, however. I strongly agree with the article’s statements, but my attempts to formulate any further useful thought seem to come up short.
From past experience working in insurance companies, my first guess would be:
Creating clones and spreading them throughout the multiverse to run a battery of tests for risk-susceptibility in a spacetime isolation bubble, and then producing a premium inversely proportional to the expected life-profitability of the clones studied. With typos in the stats and compound rounding errors (always rounding upwards).
Insightful question, if you ask me, though solving for N feels a lot more like a straight up actuary-level math problem than Game Theory to me. My maths above basic calculus is generally foggy, so I’d appreciate any corrections or nitpicks someone more fluent here might have.
Essentially, you have to solve when (odds of having highest result when rolling d20) >= (odds of having highest result when rolling 5d4). To simplify, let’s assume that all players are perfectly rational, and thus at N and higher will all roll 1d20. This still leaves you the problem of calculating N’s odds of rolling higher than you for both rolls, which is a simpler reformulation of the above parentheses.
For any roll result Y, there is (y/20)^N probability that you “win” here, assuming ties count as wins (or at least are preferable to losses). This means that with N=1 (you’re playing against one other person), you will win 52.5% of the time (and so will your opponent, because that 2.5% is for ties) when rolling 1d20.
Your odds of winning naturally decrease if you roll 1d20 such that for N=2 you have 35.875% chances of winning, and so on in a proportional manner since the odds are always even for everyone.
Where it gets more interesting is when you are playing an unfair game where you have to equate your total odds of winning when playing 1d20 vs d20s to those when playing 5d4 vs d20s. Since the math here is kind of foggy and hard to combine into one big formula, I’ve thrown the data at a spreadsheet (to calculate the sum of the odds of any N rolling higher than you for each roll Y multiplied by your odds of obtaining Y), and it turns out that at N=3 the 5d4 roll dips just below the odds of winning with 1d20 by about 0.2%.
However, if we want to compute for xDf die for N, with K possible ways to roll (which was 2 here), then the math yet eludes me. I’ve figured it out or been told what it was several times, but I just can’t seem to ever memorize this when I can only barely remember integration anyway when I don’t use it.
Edit: For those curious, here’s the spreadsheet mentioned above with all the raw data and brute-force formulas.
Yes, that it does, or at least it assumes that the difference is trivial within this decision scheme and the expected utility returns of a specialist are higher than the expected utility of a generalist even when taking second place into account.
Insider’s tip: It is.
Justification: There aren’t enough studies and samples of these populations (long-term-thinking-young-persons-buying-full-permanent-insurance) for them to already have a clear picture of just how much lower the premium should be, and the market here doesn’t appear (to them at least) large (and/or gullible) enough for the infogathering investment to be worth the potential profits.
Thus, some “underwriter” somewhere (probably at the notice of the automated quoting system in use, though) is just going by some “X% off” rule that a bunch of business-people agreed was a good Schelling point (without knowing that it was) at some point in Z Insurance Company’s history, and giving you a premium based on that.
[...] On a meta level, for someone even the idea of “learning” or “improving” or “changing” may be already associated with pain, so they will resist any such process if they notice it. A human mind can be messed up rather easily.
This becomes painfully common (and obvious to any observant third-party that knows these concepts) for subjects that students “are just not made for”, such as large amounts of students that “just don’t get” maths. They’ve been trained in so many ways to associate actual learning (especially the actions taken when attempting to learn a concept) with negativity that it becomes obviously so much more rewarding to just guess the teacher’s password, and so they are positively reinforced into doing everything they can to avoid mental modeling and seek password-guessing through aggregation and correlation of symbol-data. In most cases I’ve observed, they become experts at the skill of subconsciously forming “truth-tables” of teachers’ passwords through brute-force trial-and-error tactics. What’s more, this tactic, which they’ve been trained to do and learned so well and associate so much with positive feedback, often feeds itself into a vicious circle through several possible methods, which makes getting out (or, for that matter, even realizing that it’s there and you need to get out of it) so much more difficult than if that behavior had been blocked immediately when it first appeared.
When I realized that, I’ve started to feel sad for every student I see showing signs of spending hours upon hours studying and memorizing and headsmashing against the same math problems “until they finally understand them”, when in truth they haven’t really gained anything worthwhile (IMO) from the experience.
Is there not already a past sequence/post dealing with the creation of such ambiguities when there are multiple plausible implicit statements inferable from an inexact syntactical construction? I thought I saw something along those lines somewhere yesterday, but I can’t seem to find it by just retracing my steps.
I fail to see how it is untestable. It might be impractical to test, but if the survival of all humans suddenly depended on their future programming skills (e.g. because a dictatorial alien appears and decides to kill off any human they can’t use in their programming slave workshops), it would certainly be tested, as far as I can tell.
I also didn’t really define my usage of the word “effort” very clearly or unambiguously, which is intentional: I’m not in the best position to determine/figure out the exact line at which the scope of the term “effort” should be drawn for the statement to be solid.
The alternative, however, being that a person simply cannot learn and obtain talents, would imply that some individuals have a meta-talent for obtaining talents, as it’s been demonstrated before that people can (and often will in extreme situations or environments) adjust in such a manner. This, to me, seems much more complex than “Everything can be learned, including talents and how to obtain talents”, so by Occam’s Razor I prefer to believe the former.
I would follow the good old principle of least assumptions: It is extremely likely that something else, the nature of which is unknown and difficult to identify within the confines of the stated problem, caused the fever to subside. This merely assumes that your prior is more reliable and that you do not know all the truths of the universe, the latter assumption being de-facto in very much all bayesian reasoning, to my understanding.
From there, you can either be “stubborn” and reject this piece of evidence due to the lack of an unknown amount of unknown data on what other possible causes there could be, or you could be strictly bayesian and update your belief accordingly. Even if you update your beliefs, since the priors of Homeopathy working is already very low, and the prior of you being cured by this specific action is also extremely low when compared to everything else that could possibly have cured you… and since you’re strictly bayesian, you also update other beliefs, such as placebo curing minor ailments, “telepathic-like” thought-curing, self-healing through symbolic action, etc.
All in all, this paints a pretty solid picture of your beliefs towards homeopathy being unchanged, all things considered.
I actually read this as the shot glancing off the curve of the helmet due to angle, but since this seems to be a rational soldier it would indeed be much more elegant to have him use a helmet-stick probe.
Only if there’s discrete timing. If the time elapsed between two 1s can take uncountably many different values...
This is also true of modern computers. This time is merely ignored with various hardware tricks to make sure things happen around the time we want them to happen. What it eventually comes down to is the order in which the inputs arrive at each neuron, regardless of how long it took to get there, and the order in which they come out, regardless of how long they take once sent, which in turn decides the order in which other neurons will get their inputs, and so forth.
You could very easily simulate any brain on an infinitely fast UTM by simply having the algorithm take that into account. (Hell, an infinitely fast UTM could simulate everything about the brain, including external stimuli and quantum effects, so it could be made infinitely accurate to the point of being the brain itself)
To better frame my earlier point, suppose that you flare up six times during a season, and the six times it gets better after having applied “X” method which was statistically shown to be no better than placebo, and after rational analysis you find out that each time you applied method X you were also circumstantially applying method Y at the same time (that is, you’re also applying a placebo, since unless in your entire life you have never been relieved of some ailment by taking a pill, your body/brain will remember the principle and synchronize, just like any other form of positive reinforcement training).
In other words, both P(X-works|cured) and P(Y-works|cured) are raised, but only by half, since statistically they’ve been shown to have the same effect, and thus your priors are that they are equally as likely of being the cure-cause, and while both could be a cure-cause, the cure-cause could also be to have applied both of them. Since those two latter possibilities end up evening out, you divide the posteriors in the two, from my understanding. I might be totally off though, since I haven’t been learning about Bayes’ theorem all that long and I’m very much still a novice in bayesian rationality and probability.
To make a long story short, yes, I would stick to it, because within the presented context there are potentially thousands of X, Y and Z possible cure-causes, so while the likeliness that one of them is a cure is going up really fast each time I cure myself under the same circumstances, only careful framing of said circumstances will allow anyone to really rationally establish which factors become more likely to be truly causal and which are circumstantial (or correlated in another, non-directly-causal fashion).
Since homeopathy almost invariably involves hundreds of other factors, many of which are unknown and some of which we might be completely unaware, it becomes extremely difficult to reliably test for its effectiveness in some circumstances. This is why we assign greater trust in the large-scale double-blind studies, because our own analysis is of lower comparative confidence. At least within the context of this particular sniper example.
I’m fairly certain that that’s because of an approximation of the coincidence factor. After the first shot, which was totally individual and specifically aimed at the helmet, the odds of it being a sniper suddenly shoot right up, but there’s still the odds of a coincidence. Once it happens twice, you end up multiplying the odds of a coincidence and they become ridiculously low.
The thing isn’t that evidence (bullet hits helmet at X distance) is applied twice, but that the second piece of evidence is actually (hit a helmet at X distance twice in a row), which is radically more unlikely if non-sniper, and radically more likely if sniper. The probabilities within the evidence and priors end up multiplying somewhere, which is how you arrive at the conclusion that it’s 98% likely that the remaining enemy is a sniper.
Of course, I’m only myself trying to rationalize and guess at the OP’s intent. I could also very well be wrong in my understanding of how this is supposed to work.
If it did cure allergies 10 times out of 10, and that ALL other possible cure-causes had been eliminated as causal beforehand (including the placebo effect which is inherent to most acts of taking a homoeopathic pill, even when the patient doesn’t believe it’ll work, simply out of subconscious memory of being cured by taking a pill), then yes, the posterior belief in its effectiveness would shoot up.
However, “the body curing itself by wanting to and being willing to even try things we know probably won’t work based on what-ifs alone” is itself a major factor, one that has also been documented.
Par contre, if it did work 10 times out of 10, then I almost definitely would take it again, since it has now been shown to be, at worst, statistically correlated with whatever actually does cure me of my symptoms, whether that’s the homoeopathic treatment or not. While doing that, I would keep attempting to rationally identify the proper causal links between events.
Yes to all of those questions.