datadataeverywhere

Karma: 784

Intrapersonal negotiation

datadataeverywhere23 Jan 2011 23:02 UTC

34 points

42 comments4 min readLW link

datadataeverywhere 26 Dec 2010 0:04 UTC
22 points
in reply to: DanielLC’s comment on: Efficient Charity: Do Unto Others...
There are much more worthwhile things to do than accuse someone who is making a reasonable and rational effort to better the world and help others do so as well of being insufficiently self-sacrificial.

datadataeverywhere 18 Sep 2010 22:33 UTC
20 points
on: Open Thread, September, 2010-- part 2
I recently mentioned Dempster-Shafer evidentiary theory another thread. I admit, I was surprised to get no replies to that comment.

Is there any interest in a top-level post introducing DST? Bayesianism seems to be cited as a god of reasoning around here, but DST is strictly more powerful, since setting uncertainty to 0 in all DST formulas results in answers identical to what Bayesian probability would give. I would like to introduce Dempster-Shafer here, but only if the audience will find it worthwhile.

datadataeverywhere 26 Dec 2010 7:51 UTC
19 points
2
in reply to: MoreOn’s comment on: Rationalization
I suspect you have a point that I’m missing.

My take is: either the reading was wrong (experimental error of some kind), or it wasn’t wrong. If it wasn’t wrong, then your water was boiling at a 99.5 degrees. There are a number of plausible explanations for the latter; the one that I assign the highest prior to is that you were at an elevation higher than sea level.

So, my answer is in the form of a probability distribution. Give me more evidence, and I will refine it, or demand and answer now, and I will tell you “altitude”, my current most plausible candidate (experimental error is my second candidate, first with how (where in the water) you measured, then with the quality of the thermometer. After that trails things like impurities in the water).

One Chance (a short flash game)

datadataeverywhere14 Dec 2010 22:50 UTC

17 points

48 comments1 min readLW link

datadataeverywhere 28 Jan 2011 23:28 UTC
17 points
in reply to: MBlume’s comment on: Eutopia is Scary
Thanks for elaborating.

On some level, polyamory has always been part of my self-ideal; I have been committed to not being jealous, and to giving my partners whatever freedom they need to be happy. On the other hand, I’ve never felt a need for more than one partner, so for most of my life I’ve been monogamous because it was the norm, even if I made it clear to my partners that they need not be.

Discovering the polyamory community and, almost as importantly, the very term polyamory, representing a thing people could actually do changed that for me, and I’ve been in non-monogamous relationships for about a year and a half now.

However, my confidence has been a bit shaken by the degree to which I’ve seen problems. A girlfriend of about a year started acting very jealous of another girlfriend of about five years. The former has been outspokenly poly and in many relationships for more than seven years, and her self image was tangled up with being poly to the extent that she refused to admit that she was acting out of jealousy. She refused to talk about her feelings (unheard of for her, being a professional counselor), and would only say that she was “over it” and nothing was going to happen again. This ended up poisoning and eventually ending our relationship.

And while I’ve seen examples of this working—two of my other girlfriend’s boyfriends have become good friends of mine (she knows how to pick ’em!)---I’ve also seen several examples of people who aren’t being honest enough with themselves to make it work.

So polyamory, as always, matches both my own ideal of myself, and my idea for how a good relationship should be engineered, as you put it. However, I’m a little dispirited as to how many people can make it work, if the community is already so small that it consists of the people who most desperately believe in it, and they still keep falling down. I’m glad to hear of your continuing success.

datadataeverywhere 9 Sep 2010 18:02 UTC
17 points
in reply to: jimrandomh’s comment on: Humans are not automatically strategic
```
P(micronutrient deficiency) = 0.2
```
I would go as high as 0.3 if you extend to third world countries, but suspect it’s lower among people like ChronoDAS who can afford a variety of food. Either way, it’s good enough.
```
P(micronutrient deficiency|no multivitamin) = 0.8
```
The law of conditional probability indicates that you think that a minimum of 75% of the population takes a multivitamin. I think this is way too high, especially for a population that has a 20% micronutrient deficiency rate.
```
P(micronutrient deficiency|no multivitamin & depressed) = 0.95
```
So the rate of depression among those with micronutrient deficiencies (and who don’t take their vitamins) is about 119% that of the general population? I can buy that, but if it’s that low, then why are you so sure that a micronutrient deficiency is “greatly contributing” to his depression?

I agree that there’s no harm in having CronoDAS gather data or experiment a little, since sulbutiamine seems to have very few negative side effects with recommended doses.

My main reason for brining it up is that I see some very high probabilities tossed about on Less Wrong, and it bothers me when I feel like they’re assigning numbers that they can’t justify. I’m still skeptical about your 95% confidence, but it’s nice to see a break down.

Would you be willing to take a bet at a 2/3rds payoff that CronoDAS has no thiamine deficiency? How about a 1/19th payoff that taking a daily multivitamin wouldn’t significantly alter how he feels?

[EDIT: Revised payoffs in bet to reflect professed certainty]

datadataeverywhere 17 Sep 2010 5:45 UTC
16 points
on: Bayes’ rule =/= Bayesian inference
I see so much on the site about Bayesian probability. Much of my current work uses Dempster-Shafer theory, which I haven’t seen mentioned here.

DST is a generalization of Bayesian probability, and both fuzzy logic and Bayesian inference can be perfectly derived from DST. The most obvious difference is that DST parameterizes confidence, so that a 0.5 prior with no support is treated differently than a 0.5 prior with good support. For my work, the more important aspect is that DST is more forgiving when my sensors lie to me; it handles conflicting evidence more gracefully, as long as its results are correctly interpreted (in my opinion they are less intuitive than strict probabilities).
What links here?
- datadataeverywhere's comment on Open Thread, September, 2010-- part 2 by NancyLebovitz (18 Sep 2010 22:33 UTC; 20 points)

datadataeverywhere 23 Sep 2010 3:55 UTC
15 points
in reply to: mattnewport’s comment on: Let’s make a deal

valuable things are, pretty much by definition, things that someone values enough to pay you to do

Perhaps, but only in an extended sense of the word. What if many people are willing to pay you a lot, but those people don’t [yet] exist? Much important number theory that underlies cryptography (and hence our modern economic institutions) was originally developed by mathematicians at a time when nobody valued that particular product very much.

Likewise, how much are people willing to pay for FAI right now? After the advent of FAI, how much will they say we should have valued those efforts? Equally, right before Clippy destroys humanity, how much will the world’s inhabitants regret not having funded work to prevent that particular event?

EDIT: fixed typos and added a clarifying yet

datadataeverywhere 27 Dec 2010 6:22 UTC
14 points
in reply to: Marius’s comment on: Efficient Charity: Do Unto Others...

If you spend $500 on saving the painting Blue Rigi, [...] it contributes to the education of thousands of British children, many of whom will grow up to create and donate large amounts of wealth/knowledge

Contributes how much? For each child, how much more knowledge do you expect they will create because they saw the original, rather than a facsimile, Blue Rigi? My estimate for this is so close to 0 that I can’t conscience paying even $1 for Blue Rigi, except for aesthetic reasons.

datadataeverywhere 12 Sep 2012 13:04 UTC
13 points
in reply to: NancyLebovitz’s comment on: Checking for the Programming Gear
I’ve taught courses at various levels, and in introductory courses (where there’s no guarantee anyone has seen source code of any form before), I’ve been again and again horrified by students months into the course who “tell” the computer to do something. For instance, in a C program, they might write a comment to the computer instructing it to remember the value of a variable and print it if it changed. “Wishful” programming, as it were.

In fact, I might describe that as the key difference between the people who clearly would never take another programming course, and those that might—wishful thinking. Some never understood their own code and seemed to write it like monkeys armed with a binary classifier (the compiler & runtime, either running their program, or crashing) banging out Shakespeare. These typically never had a clear idea about what “program state” was; instead of seeing their program as data evolving over time, they saw it as a bunch of characters on the screen, and maybe if the right incantations were put on the screen, the right things would happen when they said Go.

Common errors in this category include:
- Infinite loops, because “the loop will obviously be done when it has the value I want”.
- Uninitialized variables, because “it’s obvious what I’m computing, and that you start at X”.
- Calling functions that don’t exist, because, “well, it ought to”.
- NOT calling functions, because “the function is named PrintWhenDone, it should automatically print when the program is done”.
These errors would crop up among a minority of students right up until the class was over. They could be well described by a gut-level belief that computers use natural language; but this only covers 2-6% of students in these courses*, whereas my experience is that less than 50% of students who go into a Computer Science major actually graduate with a Computer Science degree; so I think this is only a small part of what keeps people from programming.

*In three courses, with a roughly 50-person class, there were always 1-3 of these students; I suspect the median is therefore somewhere between 2 and 6%, but perhaps wildly different at another institution and far higher in the general population.

datadataeverywhere 1 Feb 2011 0:46 UTC
13 points
in reply to: Louie’s comment on: Optimal Employment
I had a fairly similar response. I spent $900/mo. on rent when I was making $33k, and I am now spending $600/mo. while making $92k. Obviously whether or not someone spends a constant fraction of their income on housing is an individual decision, just as whether or not someone heads to Australia is.

I’m actually really shocked that you spent more than 95% of a $100k+ income. Even on a $24k student salary I managed to save around $6k/yr., and indulging in all the luxuries I care for I spend less than 35% of my current after-tax pay. I don’t feel like I’ve ever had to “micromanage” my finances or spend more than a few extra minutes a week to do this.

datadataeverywhere 19 Jan 2011 1:54 UTC
12 points
in reply to: Desrtopa’s comment on: Statistical Prediction Rules Out-Perform Expert Human Judgments
I’m most familiar with interviews for programming jobs, where an interview that doesn’t ask the candidate to demonstrate job-specific skills, knowledge and aptitude is nearly worthless. These jobs are also startlingly prone to resume distortion that can make vastly different candidates look similar, especially recent graduates.

Asking for coding samples and calling previous employers, especially if coupled with a request for code solving a new (requested) problem, could potentially replace interviews. However, judging the quality of code still requires a person, so that doesn’t seem to really change things to me.

datadataeverywhere 13 Sep 2010 0:36 UTC
12 points
in reply to: komponisto’s comment on: More art, less stink: Taking the PU out of PUA
I was offended by your original comment, but I don’t want you to think that I translated being offended by your comment into finding you offensive. I’ve certainly found you reasonable, and you haven’t yet seemed intentionally hostile. I don’t by any stretch of the imagination consider you one of those people; if I did, I don’t think I would feel that conversing with you would have any point.

I certainly understand you wanting to be finished with this topic. After being downvoted for nearly all my comments on this thread, I’ve begun to feel very unwelcome here, so I should probably take a break from this topic as well. Also, despite the fact that I feel like I’ve been arguing with you, I don’t feel like you have been involved in making me feel unwelcome.
What links here?
- lmnop's comment on More art, less stink: Taking the PU out of PUA by XFrequentist (13 Sep 2010 2:09 UTC; 0 points)

datadataeverywhere 26 Dec 2010 19:21 UTC
11 points
in reply to: Bo102010’s comment on: Vegetarianism
I’m assuming you mean non-sapient, rather than non-sentient.

I suggest you actually try to work out your break even numbers. Here are mine:

1 human, born into factory farming conditions, killed after 16 years, is about the same as 100 times as many pigs raised in similar conditions until killed at 8 months, for N = 2,400. For chickens killed at 6 weeks, my multiplier is around 20,000, so N = 2,800,000.

Given how much I like meat, I’m willing to subject a perfect stranger to factory-farming conditions for M years in order to be able to eat pork/chicken (produced out of thin air by Omega) for the rest of my life. My M is maybe 3 days. Cruel, but that’s why I don’t get to be the FAI. Although, I might be willing to be tortured in that way for 3 days in order to get a lifetime of meat.

This numerically suggests that I am cruel enough to eat up to 1.2 pigs or up to 1400 chickens during my life, if I can count that as an entire life’s worth of pleasure from eating meat. If we can vat-grow meat within 40 years, this is more than 1kg / week (of chicken), more than I used to eat.

But wouldn’t it be better if I just stopped liking meat? I’ve mostly done that already, and these calculations are based on remembering how much I used to enjoy meat. I’ve eaten meat four times in the last year, and never enjoyed it, so this calculation might not be valid anymore. Still, it offers some excuse for eating chicken, if not pork.
What links here?
- datadataeverywhere's comment on [link] SMBC on utilitarianism and vegatarianism. by mkehrt (17 Oct 2011 17:23 UTC; 6 points)
- datadataeverywhere's comment on Intrapersonal negotiation by datadataeverywhere (24 Jan 2011 3:27 UTC; 2 points)

datadataeverywhere 12 Sep 2010 5:24 UTC
11 points
in reply to: patrissimo’s comment on: Memetic Hazards in Videogames
I agree with everything you said. We should be especially cautious about playing so-called casual games, where the modal player very quickly reaches a plateau beyond which he or she will learn nothing, much less learn anything useful.

The difference of course is that the learning process in Real Life is slooooow. In game X, after 30 hours of play, the modal player may be one or two orders of magnitude better at a given skill (one that is at least somewhat unique to the game) than someone who has been playing for two hours. Some games (e.g., some first-person shooters) require no unique skills; I suspect the skill curve looks similar, but most players are hundreds of hours along it rather than just a few, so the curve appears flatter and the differences proportionally smaller.

Contrast that to life: in mine, the skills I am trying to cultivate are the same ones that I’ve been trying to cultivate for years, and my improvement is sometimes so glacial that I feel doubt as to whether I’m getting better at all. I could just be thousands of hours along similarly shaped curves, but I have certainly reached the point where I no longer see incremental improvement: all I see anymore are occasional insights that discretely improve my abilities.

So, Playey Work is much better for us and for the world at large than Workey Play. The difficulty comes in valuing that value; truly internalizing that need to produce and be valued so that it overwhelms the additional fun that video games offer and will always be able to offer.

I earnestly want to know how to do that. If there’s an optimization that could be applied to humans, I think that eliminating cognitive biases would do less to improve the human condition than increasing the weight we each internally attach to producing value for others. For just me, if I could do that, through meditation or cognitive behavior therapy or hypnosis or whatever, I would finish my dissertation right quick and just as quickly move on to doing the things that I know I want to do, but right now want less than to spend a dozen hours playing another video game.

datadataeverywhere 1 Feb 2011 1:04 UTC
10 points
in reply to: Mycroft65536’s comment on: Optimal Employment
I suspect most people don’t have the self-discipline for it; being “forced” to do something almost every day is a good way for most people to ensure they work on something that has high barriers to productivity (most difficult pursuits), even if they really enjoy it.

Possibly even more importantly, individuals almost never have access to the infrastructure and support systems they need to do really interesting things[1]. How should one go about advancing genetics without a lab? Even a small university didn’t really have the resources I felt I needed to do some of my research, but at my lab they’re not even costly (to me or the lab) to procure. Access to petabyte data sets? Petaflop computers? The marginal cost of granting an additional person access is minimal, but I don’t know of any institutions that grant such access to local bartenders.

[1] Art can mostly be excluded, but not entirely, since some great art is still really expensive to produce.
What links here?
- datadataeverywhere's comment on Optimal Employment by Louie (1 Feb 2011 2:14 UTC; 2 points)

datadataeverywhere 23 Jan 2011 4:25 UTC
10 points
on: Hyperlinks and Less Wrong
I would like more information than the Wired article provides. However, it doesn’t seem to me to support your hypothesis especially well; the studies it mentions (I would say cite, but it doesn’t) seem to be relatively unwilling to make value judgements about web-style content, focusing instead on the fact that we read and process it differently.

Personally, I like hyperlinks a lot. I have often (especially recently) thought that the main problem with textbooks is a lack of hyperlinks. I think hyperlinks can be distracting, but to me a hyperlink says “this is important background knowledge”. If I have it, it’s a little like an annoying pop-up window, but I don’t have the knowledge, that signal is really helpful to me. I also frequently read sites like Wikipedia several links deep, and feel like the mental of cost context switching is more than made up for in being able to learn something the exact moment before it’s necessary to understand whatever else I was about to read. Obviously that’s a difference between us.

One last point: I’ve seen multiple studies that demonstrated that people get information more quickly and more completely from bullet-style lists than from paragraphs. That style of emphasized and chunked information reminds me a bit of hyperlinks; the similarity might be entirely my imagination, but it seems relevant.

datadataeverywhere 17 Sep 2010 5:51 UTC
10 points
in reply to: Cyan’s comment on: Open Thread, September, 2010-- part 2
If you need to whip them into shape, you’re probably not happy with them. If you’re anything like me, showing them to someone else is probably the last thing you want to do.

Solution: you owe me one of the papers by the next open thread. If you don’t work on it, you’ll be sending me whatever you’re so embarrassed about. If you can fix it in time, you won’t have to worry. I don’t have much time right now, but I will read it, so beware.

datadataeverywhere 24 Jan 2011 5:17 UTC
9 points
in reply to: Will_Newsome’s comment on: Intrapersonal negotiation
There are several significant drawbacks to being in a hypomanic state.
1. It’s physically harmful. Sleeping six hours every three days is probably unhealthy by itself, but I sometimes push myself beyond my physical limits in other ways, and end up injuring myself.
2. It’s psychologically dangerous. The longer I spend in a hypomanic state, the more likely it is that I will crash straight into severe depression. Unlike depression, hypomania regresses to the mean, and I’ve never had one last longer than two weeks. I suspect this is mostly physical exhaustion catching up to me.
3. It’s short-sighted. In a hypomanic state, I act in an optimistic near-mode all the time. I don’t plan for the future, I don’t realistically assess risks, and I manage my time (including the new excess) very poorly.
4. It’s not creative. While hypomanic, I don’t think, I just do. I’ve never come up with a worthwhile research idea while in a hypomanic state, although I’ve occasionally thought I have. While I have a huge amount of energy to devote to projects, I’m much more likely to tackle the wrong project because it’s the first one I thought of. I’ve heard people exhibit similar behaviors when using Adderall to boost mental performance.
I’ve heard discussions about the usefulness of alternate states for different kinds of work, and hypomania is useful when I have a specific thing that I am already doing and willing to keep doing, but is too tiring for me to expect to finish in time. I saw a study that indicated people (neurotypicals, without a history of depression) are better at critical thinking when (mildly) depressed. This may be the case for me, but depression is way too severe for me to consider using it as a tool; regardless, I can’t coax my depressed self to do the simplest things, so I don’t know where the motivation would come from.

datadataeverywhere

In­trap­er­sonal negotiation

One Chance (a short flash game)

Intrapersonal negotiation