David_Allen

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David_Allen3 Nov 2010 19:12 UTC

19 points

9 comments1 min readLW link

David_Allen 9 Sep 2012 23:31 UTC
11 points
in reply to: fubarobfusco’s comment on: Checking for the Programming Gear
The more recent meta-analysis appears to support their initial conclusion.

David_Allen 26 May 2012 4:22 UTC
11 points
on: What is the best programming language?
Is it better to focus on one path, avoiding contamination from others?

Learning multiple programming languages will broaden your perspective and will make you a better and more flexible programmer over time.

Is it better to explore several simultaneously, to make sure you don’t miss the best parts?

If you are new and learning on your own, you should focus on one language at a time. Pick a project to work on and then pick the language you are going to use. I like to code a Mandelbrot set image generator in each language I learn.

Which one results in converting time to dollars the most quickly?

If you make your dollars only from the finished product, then pick the language with the highest productivity for your target platform and problem domain. This will probably be a garbage collecting language with a clean syntax, with a good integrated development environment, and with a large available set of libraries.

Right now this will probably be Python, Java or C#.

If you make your dollars by producing lines of code for a company, then you will want to learn a language that is heavily used. There is generally a large demand for C++, C#, Java, Python, and PHP programmers. Companies in certain domains will focus on other languages like Lisp, Smalltalk and Ada.

Which one most reliably converts you to a higher value programmer over a longer period of time?

No single language will do this in the long run, but you might take temporary advantage of the current rise of Python, or the large install base of Java and C++.

For a broad basic education I suggest:
- Learn a functional language. Haskell is my first choice; Lisp is my second choice.
- Learn an object oriented language. Smalltalk has the best OO representation I have come across.
- Learn a high level imperative language. Based on growth, Python appears to currently be the best choice; Java would be my second choice.
- Learn an assembly language. Your platform of choice.
If you want to do web-related development:
- HTML, CSS, Javascript.
- SQL and relational DB.
- XML, XSD, and XSLT.
- C#.NET, Java, Python or PHP.
If you want to do engineering related development:
- C and C++.
- Perl
- SQL
- Mathematica or Matlab
- for some domains, LabVIEW

David_Allen 14 Mar 2011 21:52 UTC
11 points
on: How I Lost 100 Pounds Using TDT

Utilizing TDT gave me several key abilities that I previously lacked. The most important was realizing that what I chose now would be the same choice I would make at other times under the same circumstances.

This is similar to the mind hack I am working on to bypass my own hyperbolic discounting.

I assume that I will always make the same choice in similar circumstances. I find that this is a very good approximation of my actual behavior.

I determine the potential consequences of the alternatives in relation to my goals. Sometimes it helps me if I specify the consequences in a way that captures an opportunity cost. For example instead of cost in dollars, I’ll consider the cost in terms of new tires for my truck.

I decide what to do—treating the consequences as though they will occur immediately. In practice I only focus on the top one or two consequences for each alternative—based on my current value weighting.

For example, every morning at work I am tempted by the pile of donuts in my office’s cafeteria.

If I ate a donut every day, in a year I could gain an extra 13 pounds (50 work weeks 5 days per week 180 calories per donut / 3500 calories per pound).

These donuts would cost me about $190 (50 work weeks 5 days per week 0.75 dollars per donut).

I could consider more consequences, but these are enough. I don’t want to pay $190 and gain 13 lbs of weight today—just for the enjoyment of the donuts. In fact I would probably pay $190 just to lose 13 lbs right now; forget the donuts.

When I started to implement this approach I discovered that I could engage in automatic behavior that was counter to my choice. For example I would choose to not buy the donut only to get up and walk to the cafeteria. I would reaffirm the choice and yet still select a donut and pay for it. This behavior had almost an alien hand sense to it.

To break those automatic behaviors I found that I could simply stop and refuse to do anything that wasn’t in keeping with my intellectual choice; I would even close my eyes. Every time I had an “urge” and would start to do or to think something, I would stop and check it against my current goal; if it didn’t match I would I would refuse to continue. With repetition this replaced the negative automatic behavior with positive behavior.

David_Allen 29 Nov 2010 23:22 UTC
10 points
in reply to: DanArmak’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 6

If only he’d shut up and calculate, he’d realize that to prevent the largest amount of suffering he should dedicate his life to researching magical means of granting immortality to everyone, like the Philosopher’s Stone.

Granting immortality is not the same as preventing suffering. Maximizing life span may in fact maximize the opportunities for suffering.

Future suffering or death must be discounted to provide a present value. It is more valuable to save a life now than to save a life a year from now, all else being equal.

Harry would also have to consider opportunity costs and the likelihood of success. He knows that dementors can be killed now. Finding an acceptable magical approach to immortality is less certain, and may actually take more time to develop than a non-magical approach. Harry’s optimal approach may be to kill dementors now, research the nature of magic, and to wait for muggle science to find immortality.

David_Allen 6 Jan 2011 17:40 UTC
9 points
in reply to: David_Gerard’s comment on: Possible Cockatrice in written form

I don’t think this post deserves the downvotes it’s getting.

I downvoted it because I would like to see fewer links to crackpot rants.

David_Allen 3 Mar 2011 13:56 UTC
8 points
in reply to: Bo102010’s comment on: Are You a Paralyzed Subordinate Monkey?

By default no one does work unless someone explicitly tells them to.

I suspect that this is largely cultural; a response based on expectations, examples and training.

David_Allen 4 Nov 2010 0:23 UTC
8 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: An apology
I’ve been thinking about karma as a rough measure of community valuation. It is an expression of relative value, judged by answering questions like these:
- Is this post worth the time it takes to read and understand?
- Does this post add value to the community as a whole?
- Can something interesting be learned from this post?
It also appears on LW that this value can be traded on. I have posted in a way that gained down-votes and criticism, but I was left with a sense of net gain. In this case commenters made excellent points helping me to shift my perspective on my topic and helping me to model the LW audience better. I paid for this education with karma (at least for a time). It was worth it.

I have seen other posters spend karma (perhaps unintentionally), gaining knowledge that would otherwise have required them spending time on reading the sequences.

David_Allen 2 Nov 2010 21:49 UTC
8 points
in reply to: PeerInfinity’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 4

Harry became an impossibly superpowered character

One of Harry’s established traits is his highly trained reflex to question his own perceptions, especially under difficult circumstances.

This situation is probably the most extreme that we have seen Harry in. In this context that ability comes across as a super-power, but it is not out-of-character.

David_Allen 13 Aug 2010 0:20 UTC
8 points
on: Welcome to Less Wrong! (2010-2011)
My search began when I realized that I was confused. I was confused by what people did and what they said. I was confused by my responses to other people, how interacting with other people affected me. And I was confused about how I worked. Why I did the things I did, why I felt the way I did, why sometimes things were easy for me, and sometimes they were hard.

I learned very early in my life that I needed to critically analyze what other people told me. Not simply to identify truth or falsehood, but to identify useful messages in lies and harmful messages hidden in apparently truthful statements.

At the age of 11 I taught myself to program on a TRS-80, and in the process I discovered how to learn through play and exploration. Of course I had been learning in this way all along, but this was when I discovered the truth about how I learned. This realization has changed my approach to everything.

Computer programming confused me, so my search continued. By focusing on how I thought about programming, I quickly became very skilled. I learned how to explore problems and dissolve them into useful pieces. I learned how to design and express solutions in many programming languages and environments. I learned the theory of computation and how it is tied to philosophy, logic, mathematics and natural languages.

I worked in industry for 20 years, starting with internships. I’ve worked on large and small systems in low level and high level languages. I’ve done signal processing for engineering systems and developed web interfaces. I’ve worked alone, and in teams. I’ve run software teams launching companies.

Programming still confused me. I was frustrated and confused by how difficult it was to do programming well. In general it is very difficult to implement a simple idea, in a simple way that is simple to use. Even under ideal circumstances and in the best designed system, complexity grows faster than the code base. This dooms many projects to failure.

I am now coming to grips with the true nature of this problem, and with its solution. The problem rests in the nature of knowledge and meaning. The implications extend far beyond computer science and I intend to write articles on this topic for Less Wrong.

A core idea that I am exploring is the context principle. Traditionally, this states that a philosopher should always ask for a word’s meaning in terms of the context in which it is being used, not in isolation.

I’ve redefined this to make it more general: Context creates meaning and in its absence there is no meaning.

And I’ve added the corollary: Domains can only be connected if they have contexts in common. Common contexts provide shared meaning and open a path for communication between disparate domains.
What links here?
- David_Allen's comment on Less Wrong: Open Thread, September 2010 by matt (4 Sep 2010 7:17 UTC; 1 point)

David_Allen 29 May 2012 21:42 UTC
7 points
in reply to: Vladimir_M’s comment on: Review: Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids

However, regardless of all that, it seems to me that buying has some tremendous drawbacks, for which I can’t see comparable upsides under any realistic circumstances.

Before I bought my house I ran the numbers and came to the same conclusion, that home ownership would not maximize my net worth and would increase certain types of risk. As a result I see home ownership as a luxury, not as an investment. I bought my house because I wanted it as a luxury and believed I could manage the risk.

David_Allen 28 Feb 2011 22:27 UTC
7 points
on: Cryptography
I’ve been working on an idea for a community puzzle:

There is a prisoner who is sending encoded messages to people via postal mail. It is believed that he is continuing to run a criminal organization via these letters. The letters are written in an unknown language, and contain a section that is obviously coded.

We assume that the cipher he is using is relatively simple because as a prisoner, he only has pencil and paper to work with.

By law, the letters can be read, but can’t be stopped unless it can be proven that they are being used for criminal purposes. If we can show this, we can also add 30 years to the prisoner’s sentence.

The prisoner has a cellmate who knows or has guessed how the letters are being written, but is only willing to give clues in return for time off his sentence. This cellmate is just as bad as the prisoner in question so we don’t want to reduce his prison time any more than we have to.

To just give us the whole secret the cellmate is demanding 30 years off his time, which would set him free. He is also willing to give us smaller clues for less time off to help us read each part of the letters.

Our task is to decrypt and translate the letters to English, while buying the fewest clues possible from the cellmate.

Ideas on running the game:

A few example letters will be provided to players.

Purchased hints will be published to everybody.

Players are encouraged to collaborate.

Players can post a few questions to the prisoner every day. His lawyer will limit the number and type of the questions. He will be honest about anything that can be verified through public records or by asking his family. He may not answer or may lie about anything he believes can’t be verified. It may not be obvious if he is telling the truth or lying.

If progress isn’t being made on the problem, the prosecutor may become impatient and buy the next clue offered by the cellmate.

David_Allen 6 Feb 2011 16:09 UTC
7 points
on: A bit meta: Do posts come in batches? If so, why?
It is common for random distributions to appear clumpy.

David_Allen 26 Oct 2010 19:47 UTC
7 points
in reply to: PeterS’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 4
When Harry powered up his Patronus, Quirrell was not able to get him to stop verbally. This suggests that Harry is not Imperiused.

David_Allen 9 Feb 2011 20:18 UTC
6 points
in reply to: prase’s comment on: Rational = true?
As Eliezer mentions here:

Jaynes used to recommend that no one ever write out an unconditional probability: That you never, ever write simply P(A), but always write P(A|I), where I is your prior information. I’ll use Q instead of I, for ease of reading, but Jaynes used I. Similarly, one would not write P(A|B) for the posterior probability of A given that we learn B, but rather P(A|B,Q), the probability of A given that we learn B and had background information Q.

David_Allen 16 Dec 2010 19:14 UTC
6 points
in reply to: Vladimir_Nesov’s comment on: Expansion of “Cached thought” wiki entry
I think discussion posts like this one are a good way to highlight wiki entries that need work, and to direct attention to the wiki pages in general.

David_Allen 16 Dec 2010 19:01 UTC
6 points
on: Expansion of “Cached thought” wiki entry
I agree that the entry appears to ignore the positive utility of cached thoughts, but I think what the entry really needs are descriptions with references to primary sources, Wikipedia style. What aspects of “cached thought” are original to Eliezer and what aspects are discussed elsewhere?

If this is more work than you intend to do, then I think a portion of your suggested change would improve the entry.

″Cached thought″ appears to be related to dynamic programming.

You capture this idea nicely with:

″Cached thought‴ also allow for complex problems to be handled with a relatively small number of simple components.

However I am less certain about this:

These problem components when put together only approximate the actual problem, because they are slightly flawed ‴cached thoughts.‴

This statement could generally be applied to all thoughts, not just cached thoughts. In general we tend to reason using models that only approximate reality.

For a cached thought to be currently valid, the model that was used to generate it must be valid within the current context.

Valid conclusions can be reached more quickly with these slightly flawed cached thoughts then without.

I would say that conclusions can be reached more quickly with cached thoughts than without. The validity of the conclusions would be highly context sensitive and I’m not sure you can generally claim anything about it.

David_Allen 6 Jan 2011 17:17 UTC
5 points
on: Possible Cockatrice in written form

I’m reading through it right now, and will provide my feedback when I’m done, likely as a front-page post.

Please don’t bother to post on this. As a whole work, it is a cosmic waste of time to read or discuss. The parts I skimmed rate high on the Crackpot Index and the subjects are better examined by other authors.

If you dig through this mess and find something specific that is interesting, then a discussion area post would probably be appropriate.

David_Allen 16 Dec 2010 19:37 UTC
5 points
in reply to: Vladimir_Nesov’s comment on: Expansion of “Cached thought” wiki entry
I’m suggesting that directed attention can lead to general attention, but perhaps I don’t understand what you mean by general attention.

So, what kind of general attention does the wiki need?

David_Allen 20 Nov 2010 17:14 UTC
5 points
in reply to: Desrtopa’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 5

I wonder if, given the nature of their relationship, Harry’s blood will not actually be useful for Voldemort’s spell?

Perhaps that means that Dumbledore’s blood is required instead.

David_Allen

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