Oh, it’s not a topic-specific behavior. Every time I go too far down a chain of reasoning (“too far” meaning as few as three causal relationships), sometimes people start complaining that I’m giving too much thought to it, and imply they are unable to follow the arguments. I’m just not surrounded by a lot of people that like long and intricate discussions.
(Funnily, both my parents are the type that get tired listening to complex reasoning, and I turned out the complete opposite.)
I prefer the practice-based approach too, but from my position theoretical approaches are cheaper and much more available, if slower and rather tedious. In school they taught us that the only way to get better in an area is to do extra homework, and frankly my methods haven’t improved much since. My usual way is to take an exercise book and solve everything in it, if that counts for practice; other than that, I only have the internet and a very limited budget.
You’re interested in a lot of things, and trying to catch up with what you feel you should know, which is wonderful. What do you do with your time? Are you working? College?
Senior year in high school. Right now I have 49 vacation days left, after which school will start, studying will get replaced with busywork and my learning rates will have no choice but to fall dramatically. So now I’m trying to maximize studying time while I still can… It’s all kind of backwards, isn’t it?
I’m afraid all of this is not really applicable to me… My country isn’t Western enough for such a wide range of opportunities. Here, institutes for higher education range from almost acceptable (state universities) to degree factories (basically all private colleges). Studying abroad in a Western country costs, per semester, somewhere between half and thrice my parents’ yearly income. On top of everything, my grades would have to be impeccable and my performances worthy of national recognition for a foreign college to want me as a student so much as to step over the money issue and cover my whole tuition. (They’re not, not by a long shot.)
Thanks for the support, in any case...
Thanks! Anyway, there’s the internet to compensate for that. The wide range of online forums built around ideas of varied intellectual depth means you even get to choose your difficulty level...
You seem to be working on the assumption that imbuing science with an aura of mysteriousness, at the expense of availability of knowledge, would somehow attract more enthusiasts than it would repel. Or, in other words, that there are more people whose main reason for not being into science is an (inaccurate) idea of it as a dry, boring, completely un-mystical pursuit, than there are scientifically-inclined people that would become frustrated with the cultishness and the secrecy and eventually quit, in the eventuality of a scenario like the one you proposed.
This seems quite unlikely to me, and I’ll explain why.
For the most part it’s a feeling that the scenario you came up with is pandering to the wrong audience. Consider the present state of things. Science is more or less out in the open, if you have the resources (mental, financial, time) to learn; a large majority of people is apathetic about science even after (presumably) having had encounters with it at various points during their education; some people that have probably had about the same encounters with science have gotten enthusiastic about it, and obviously did not need any science cults to get them to pursue it. Your thought experiment seems to be designed to attract more of the first.
First there’s the concern about whether that “untapped” audience really has the potential to bring contributions that match the effort spent with attracting them. These people have been exposed to science already—and it had no effect on their interests! In this case, do you think they’d really join a mathematics “cult” for the equations, and not for the social standing or need to adhere to a group? If not, then do they hold promise as potential thinkers?
As for the second category of people, those who wouldn’t need any of that bullshit social incentives anyway, like I said, the unavailability of knowledge might be a disincentive. Science is hard enough as it is. It takes years and years to gather a decent enough body of knowledge in order to actually get to make advances in your own field; introducing silly social rituals along the way won’t speed up the learning process. Moreover, there’s the danger of not getting your message across in the first place, of it not reaching all of the people that could have been interested. So, all in all, bad idea.
Of course, I know you meant this more as speculation than anything; the premise just seemed faulty to me.
My experience with a forum that has adopted this policy to an extreme in the last couple of years was that whenever local social norms strongly prescribe against any behavior that falls short of active niceness, the result is a suffocating atmosphere accompanied by a severe decline in content quality (because attempts to set higher standards are perceived as “rude” towards the people lowering the standard). (If that matters, the forum was themed around game graphics creations.) “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything” was probably their most oft-cited slogan. There were multiple suggestions of basically making it socially taboo to post your stuff in a picture thread without praising recently posted creations, and some posters made it a habit of theirs to make entire posts consisting of thanking 15-20 people individually and telling them how much they loved their creations. The overall group rationality could have benefited from moving away from this extreme of niceness, in my estimation.
Fortunately, LW is in no danger of ending up like that any time soon. In fact, what is most refreshing about discussion going on here is that it’s low in both active niceness and active meanness. There’s this third category, entirely distinct from the other two (in fact, in a way, completely off the spectrum), that is characterized by neutrality, or reluctance to make either positive or negative general assessments of the other users or to express either appreciation or contempt. It is my belief that, overall, it is better to strive for this sort of neutrality than to try to move the community in the direction of either niceness or meanness (particularly when neutrality approximates the initial state).
The dangers of a tendency towards meanness are obvious, so I’m not going to bother with those; my main concern is that excessive pressure towards active niceness makes for a bad user experience for the less naturally empathetic folks (the kind experienced by people required to plaster a big smile on their face for the customers) and shoves completely unrelated things into the discussion, especially things that have the potential to stir up drama.
A lot of what we consider to be polite behavior is really just a series of strategies for assuring the other party that yes, we come in peace; no, we’re not trying to claim higher status; yes, their needs, desires, and fundamental rights as a human being are taken into consideration, their contributions are valued and their emotional needs are attended to, plus an inordinate number of similar claims. If the goal at hand is to send forward a purely factual message on an unrelated topic in the most efficient way possible, all of this becomes diplomatic filler which can and should be cut down upon. Honestly, I can’t see why we’d bother with all that unless the priors for the other party being hostile are abnormally high.
(Disclaimer: Again, I’m not suggesting that LW has any chances of ending up so far along the “niceness as community norm” axis. My perception of this community is that it is very balanced in that regard, and has thus reached an optimum (although I will not contradict any experienced member who says otherwise). The main point of this post was to elaborate on the problems of warm-fuzzy-prioritizing communities in general.)
A single person seems less likely to be capable of carrying out this sort of project than a group of people. Posting an invitation to contribute on a message board for people who are interested in rationality couldn’t be a bad idea. And if the OP wanted to undertake this by themselves, as you suggest, they wouldn’t have asked for help.
It’s perfectly understandable that you may have legitimate reasons for not getting involved into this, what with the rest of your projects, but if you’re going to say “don’t count on me”, at least don’t say it in a way that suggests you expect most people to not be interested in contributing.
Why? In comparison to the rest of the lesson titles, this sort of rhetorical embellishment seems excessive. I at least don’t expect people to be put off by a title such as “Intro to Applied Rationality” or something similar. (But then again, that’s because I wouldn’t be put off by it… Possible mind projection fallacy.)
I have tried alternating 30 minutes of work with 30 minutes of play, with the aid of an alarm clock that let me know when it was time to quit whatever I was doing, and it worked pretty nicely. I have confidence in my ability to sustain such a schedule habitually without finding it particularly unpleasant. (I have tried schedules with higher work-to-play ratios and shorter “play” intervals, and I got burnout.)
I have just printed a 30-day table that is meant to be filled in with data on my study habits. My goal is set to 5 exercise pages / day; I have rows for each day and columns for”I did 5 pages (or more)”, “I did less”, “I did none”. Every day I have to tick the option that corresponds to my activity level that day. The table would also show the days when I had completely neglected the goal, not even bothering to tick an option, so that I would also gather data on how long I can sustain my interest in my goal.
I have noticed an increase in my ability to reason well under strong emotions. Granted, my emotional state does influence my optimism/pessimism levels, but the way I reason using these more or less optimistic premises approaches my rationality level in a neutral state of mind. I have the intuition that this is symptomatic of the general improvement in my ability to recognize flawed thinking; once you learn to do it well, you can’t help doing it no matter your mood. Then again, some might have different experiences.
I have begun recognizing instances of the planning fallacy in my own thinking. Tried to do a layperson’s version of reference class forecasting; found out that realistic estimates point to guaranteed failure. No wonder my mind tended to flinch away from it; it’s like not just knowing you’re going to fail, but having to live with the disappointment for months before it would actually happen. Now I know I either dramatically improve my productivity or start to get used to the idea of failing my final exams. The problem is, I might be irrationally optimistic about my ability to improve my productivity; I’m not unlikely to say to myself, “Don’t worry, things are looking pretty gloomy right now, but rest assured you will begin to work much more in response to this sense of urgency!” and then just confidently pile up responsibilities on my future self while not doing much in the meantime. While the fact that I have gone from zero effort to some effort over the course of this summer gives me a reason to believe this is not impossible, I can’t say I trust myself to make this leap.
I have begun riding my bike to school for a change. (It wasn’t a very welcome change, since the main motivator was that public transportation was getting much too expensive.) The school is far away enough so that I get loads of intense physical exercise from one trip, and not doing it would mean that I’d either miss classes or get stuck with my bike far from home. It’s difficult, physically demanding, and I arrive to school soaked in sweat, but at least I don’t have to pay anything and I’m getting my share of exercising.
(Note: my main goal is getting better at math. When I talk about work or exercises, I mean whatever math topics I’m currently working on.)
Forgive me (I haven’t watched the show), but isn’t it a sitcom? There are obvious reasons for real people to want to make themselves more rational… not so much for screenwriters to want to make their characters more rational. Comedies are neither about showcasing characters to serve as models for good thinking, nor about making the characters win more, or spreading the message that they won because of their rationality; they’re about making people laugh.
As I understand the show, its humor relies on scientific / “nerdy” mindsets, habits and quirks (mis)applied to everyday life; the point is that even smart people can be stupid in some ways or not understand very basic things. If the characters stopped making their silly mistakes, used better cognitive algorithms and won more in various aspects of their lives, the show would be way less funny.
I used to go on Khan Academy pretty often earlier this year, but now I usually learn by means of a textbook + writing down exercises in a notebook. Earned 2 Sun Badges and about 350k energy points so far, if you’re interested in hearing about some measure of progress.
It’s absolutely awesome for high school students, but it doesn’t look like it can help much past the freshman or sophomore year in college. (Then again, what the heck do I know?) If LessWrongers are, on average, as good at math as I estimate them to be, then only the youngest of us can derive much benefit from it.
Is what you said true even if you go into a field, or choose a major, that relies heavily on advanced math? That was what I was trying to get at. If people do much more complicated math on a daily basis, presumably they have already mastered all math topics at a high school level, unless the skills they use are much narrower than that (which, of course, might very well be true).
That is one of the many ways of doing it. I see no reason for assuming it should be the only one, or that there’s something broken, to be fixed, in media creations who try to achieve humor in a different way.
“Look! That one guy can write a super-rational character, and have him fail at many things, and make it all funny! Why isn’t this other randomly selected writer doing it similarly?” This is my interpretation of your line of reasoning. See what’s wrong with it?
brings up more interesting results than the other, which is lazy, cheap, mean, and cruel.
These properties—“interesting”, “lazy”, “cheap”, “mean”, “cruel”—they look like objective properties assigned to actual things, but the only actual information you’re giving me here is that you have generally positive feelings about one of them and generally negative feelings about the other. So here’s a random consumer, you, that wants all fictional media of the type to be homogeneous on the exact content-related qualities that make him prefer one example of such media to the other.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with having preferences, and acting on them, but you’re neither the only, nor the most important consumer on the market. You can’t legitimately argue that everybody who doesn’t share your preferences for LW-style rationalist characters should not be catered to.
Oh, and by the way, all else being equal, the fact that something takes more work than the alternatives has never an argument in favor of that something.
But there are alternatives. He has just pointed out one. Failing that, he could of course try his hand to produce media tailored to his own tastes (easier said than done, I know, I know). But what I observe is that the OP has taken this one show and complained about some feature of it… as though it were a bug. I see no reason to believe, with equal probability, he wouldn’t do the same to any other show in the genre.
Methinks you’re focusing too much of your energy against something that is really not all that bad. If your real issue with the show is that it doesn’t portray your pet group in as favorable a light that you think it deserves, it might serve your interest more to attack a target that is actually at the root of the problem. Like the ubiquity of promotion of values along the lines of “money, sex and status”, with absolutely no thought given to intelligence and personal development, for example. Or internet bullying and hatefests. You know, pick your battles.
The way I understand it, the show is not aimed at the general audience (because it would leave them scratching their heads at all the various references), nor at people with a serious scientific background (because they can do better than TBBT), but rather at pop science enthusiasts, who are supposed to get group identification points from understanding the concepts being discussed, but also to laugh at the collective perceived flaws of a sort of people that they’re familiar with. Kind of like self-identified Forever Alones saving pictures of the Socially Awkward Penguin internet meme, and being amused rather than embarrassed when they recognize themselves in the text. If it had been meant to get people to laugh at nerds rather than to get nerds to laugh at themselves, it would have been a different show altogether.
If you want to compare TBBT to HPMoR, to avoid any future misunderstandings I would start by saying that I don’t agree that the latter really has that much artistic merit. Sure, Yudkowsky is a good writer at the micro level (sentence, paragraph) -- publishably good, even --, but at the macro level he fails more spectacularly than many more inexperienced and untalented writers. If you look at the whole story, it is a mess. He overestimates the reasonable word-count-to-fictional-time-frame ratio by about an order of magnitude, takes the story to where it would never ever take itself, does not appreciate the value of subtlety in conveying one’s message through fictional devices, and generally does not seem to be able or willing to think synthetically about the story.
Moreover—and this is what’s most relevant to this discussion—it lacks the sort of self-awareness that is needed for good comedy. Many of MoR!Harry’s flaws and mistakes, other than the ones that are specifically intended to portray one’s transition from “traditional rationality” to LW-style rationality (in other words, the parts of Yudkowsky’s intellectual past that he himself currently rejects), come off as getting tacit (or not-so-tacit) endorsement from the author, because MoR!Harry is an author avatar for Yudkowsky, and what he doesn’t see as wrong with himself, cannot see as wrong with his characters. This is something that doesn’t seem to exist in TBBT and other similar works. And it is something that puts them in a category above MoR, at least on this aspect.
Finally, you say you’re motivated by moral considerations, but it’s at least equally likely that it’s just that you see a group you identify with being portrayed in a way you don’t approve of, or in which you don’t see yourself, and stand up for your group’s public image. You perceive the portrayal as a strawman that exists for opponents to be able to kick it down to low status, and would like a portrayal in which your group of choice is high-status. Whether it really is meant like that, that’s probably more accurately judged by people without an emotional investment in their identity, and who wouldn’t therefore be incentivized to make it seem worse than it actually is, to gain more debate ammo against the opponent in the form of sympathy points from bystanders. I don’t mean to be less charitable than the situation asks for, but I need to explain to myself what seems to me to be an overblown response laden with emotional investment.
On the other hand, conspicuous lack of effort can also have signaling purposes—you might want to convey the message that you’re so skilled that you don’t even need to put effort into it for the results to be worthy of recognition. “Try-hards” and “wannabes” generally have a pejorative sense.
In any case, what does the first clause (technically, the first two) have to do with the second? Even given that you’re right about what humor is about, if you put more effort into signaling spare brainpower through humor and the results are not better than someone else’s, what positive thing does this say about you? You’d just be that guy who has to read joke lists to entertain people at the party, and it’s probably not the sort of thing you’d want to brag about. In status-competitive environments, people don’t give you pats on the back just for trying.
But I haven’t even watched the show! I’m not motivated to argue because I have something to defend (other than a preference for neat arguments). The point was that it just seemed too nitpicky to single out one example of media for not having enough of something you like, unless you could generalize that criticism to the whole genre, in which case there remains no alternative for people who have different preferences. And that’s just not economically reasonable.
You look at the whole market, understand that your kind not being catered to is a problem of the market as a whole and not of individual works that do cater to other market segments (or of the entire collection of such individual works), and find other not-A-fans and see whether there are more people among them who are interested in / good at producing stuff you like.
’Twas about time that I decided to officially join. I discovered LessWrong in the autumn of 2010, and so far I felt reluctant to actually contribute—most people here have far more illustrious backgrounds. But I figured that there are sufficiently few ways in which I could show myself as a total ignoramus in an intro post, right?
I don’t consider my gender, age and nationality to be a relevant part of my identity, so instead I’d start by saying I’m INTP. Extreme I (to the point of schizoid personality disorder), extreme T. Usually I have this big internal conflict going on between the part of me that wishes to appear as a wholly rational genius and the other part, who has read enough psychology and LW (you guys definitely deserve credit for this) to know I’m bullshitting myself big time.
My educational background so far is modest, a fact for which procrastination is the main culprit. I’m currently working on catching up with high school level math… so far I’ve only reviewed trigonometry, so I’m afraid I won’t be able to participate in more technical discussions around here. Aside from a few Khan Academy videos, I’m still ignorant about probability; I did try to solve that cancer probability problem though, and when put like that into a word problem, I used Bayes’ theorem intuitively. (Funny thing is, I still don’t understand the magic behind it, even if I can apply it.) I know no programming beyond really elementary C++ algorithms; I have a pretty good grasp of high school physics, minus relativity and QM. I am seeking to do everything in my power to correct these shortcomings, and when/if I achieve results, I’ll be happy to post my findings about motivation & procrastination on LW, if anyone is interested.
That which I have in common with the rest of this community is a love for rational, intelligent and productive discussions. I’m hugely disappointed with the overwhelming majority of internet and RL debates. Many times I’ve found myself trying to be the voice of reason and pointing out flaws in people’s reasoning, even when I agreed with the core idea, only to have them tell me that I’m being too analytical and that I should… what… close off my mind and stop noticing mistakes, right? So I come here seeking discussions with people who would listen to reason and facilitate intellectually fruitful debates.
I’m very eager to help spread the knowledge about cognitive biases and educate people in the art of good reasoning.
I’m also interested (although not necessarily well-versed, as mentioned above) in most topics people here are interested in—everything concerning mathematics and science, as well as philosophy and the mind (which are, by comparison, my two strongest points).
There are quite a few ways in which I don’t fit the typical LW mold, though, and I’m mentioning this so that I find out whether any of these are going to be problematic in our interaction.
For one, I’m not particularly interested in AI and transhumanism. Not opposed to, just indifferent. The only related topic which interests me is life extension research. In the eventuality that some people might try to change my mind about this from the get-go, as I’ve seen some do with other newbies, I know you probably have some very good arguments for your position, but hopefully nobody’s going to mind one less potential AI enthusiast. My interests are spread thin enough as they are.
I seem to be significantly more left-leaning than the majority of folks here. I’m decidedly not dogmatic about it, though, and on occasion I speak out against heavily ideological discourse even when it has a central message that I agree with.
Kind of clueless and mathematically illiterate at this moment.
This has to be getting rather long, so I’ll stop here, hoping that I’ve said everything that I believed to be relevant to an intro post.