I know that sense of the word didn’t even cross my mind. In fact, I even had to google “ableist”. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.
Danny_Hintze
Karma: 177
Hopefully they can spare a few hours! (unless they really are lame. haha). I look forward to meeting you over the summer!
Where would you be coming from?
Yes! Excited to have another one soon.
Mostly just seeing how many people are in the area, getting to know each other, swapping memes, and in large part figuring out what the agenda should be. Is there anything in particular you’d like to do?
Awesome! See you then!
We’ll hopefully have many more!
I believe that if I donate to charity, more will be donated to charity. If I do research in a field, more research will get done in that field. If I start a company, more companies will get started. (All of this in in expectation). This holds even more true for a particularly charity, a particular research program I consider important, or a particular need I think needs to be filled.
Which spill over effect due to your specific involvement will be the largest?
It was absolutely worthwhile. Completely changed my life… all of our lives. In fact, I had one friend who tried to go it alone and who now seriously regrets the decision.
For figuring out what you should be doing, I think that diversity will help greatly. I’ve had many “heavy,” value laden discussions with my friends, and those were made much more productive and insightful by the diverse values we hold. So I think for your goals diversity is going to be very helpful. However, once you figure out what you should be doing, homogeneity has produced the best results for me.
Although I’d like to emphasize that homogeneity can actually help a great deal in working out personal value systems as well. For example, my friend who I am most similar to and I will sometimes intentionally explore different angles of approach to things. It’s kind of like being able to live two lives at once and we’ve learned a great deal from it.
So I guess the general idea is that diversity is good for getting your bearings, but similarity helps you efficiently make your way along that chosen route.
From my experience effectively trying to create a “task-force” out of a highly rational and cohesive group of friends… high homogeneity is going to extremely important if we want to achieve something at a really high level. For example, I have friends who agree with me on everything epistemic (we update the same way), and who have the same general goals as me, but have a slightly different talent set. This results in very different optimal life paths for the each of us, and that makes the “task-force” not really work like a “task-force.” As you said, it’s just much harder to find a project that fully uses diverse talents.
However, people who are homogeneous can perform at an incredible level. This is because two people who have almost exactly the same knowledge, goals, and talents reinforce each other. For example, an artist who works with a programmer might create a beautiful program, but two programmers who dual code can quite possibly outperform the diverse combination just by the sheer increased excellency of execution. My experience with intellectual pursuits certainly indicates that they work more like this, which I would expect. However, even my logistical, technical and creative experiences which I thought would benefit from diversity also seem to work better when everyone is more homogeneous. The coordination problems of diversity seem to overwhelm the benefits in all but very rare cases.
I think this is because even members of a homogeneous group can begin to specialize and search for outside information that is directly relevant to the task at hand. This is functionally very close to the advantage of having diversity in the group (not quite as good, but close). Then the homogeneity allows them to communicate the new information more effectively to each other, and to better harmonize their specialized actions with each other. These advantages more than close the small gap in knowledge and experience they have when compared to a diverse group in the vast majority of typical situations… or so my experience seems to indicate.
Apparently for this as well. http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=Yudkowsiah
Do you think they’d be interested in it?
My friend and I had to catch a bus earlier today, and as we were walking, I thought about this specific post and exercise and realized that since we were under a pretty tight time constraint, it made no sense to walk to the bus, and we should instead run because that increased the probability of making the bus on time. We got to the station, and the bus arrived about 3 minutes later. We arrived where we needed to be with one minute to spare. That’s a pretty big success in my book.
Out of curiosity, can you elaborate a little on the irrationality with sleep cycles? I feel like I might have a very similar problem.
We’re all still students, so odd schedules likely won’t be a problem (at least, for us).
EDIT: What times work well for you?
I’m in Phoenix, would be great to try and have one here.
There is the eventual problem that senior professors spend more and more of their time on administrative work / providing guidance to their lab, rather than doing research themselves. But this isn’t going to be an issue until you get tenure, which is, if you do a post-doc, something like 10-15 years out from starting graduate school.
This might not even be a significant problem when the time does come around. High fluid intelligence only lasts for so long, and thus using more crystallized intelligence later on in life to guide research efforts rather than directly performing research yourself is not a bad strategy if the goal is to optimize for the actual research results.
At the same time however, you might be able to interact with researchers more effectively. For example, you could spend some of those research weeks visiting selected labs and seminars and finding out what’s up. It’s true that this would force you to be conscientious about opportunities and networking, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Networks formed with a very distinct purpose are probably going to outperform those that form more accidentally. You wouldn’t be as tied down as other researchers, which could give you an edge in getting the ideas and experiences you need for your research, while simultaneously making you more valuable to others when necessary (For example, imagine if one of your important research contacts needs two weeks of solid help on something. You could oblige whereas others with less fluid obligations could not.).
Awesome! See you tomorrow.