Another instance I recently noticed, and reacted moderately strongly against, was this post and its comments, where there is the implicit assumption that voting (for political candidates) is voluntary, and the discussion makes no consideration of compulsory voting.
The main reason I reacted against it was that the assumption was implicit, (mainly since nature of the discussion is not relevant to systems with compulsory voting).
I think that trying to increase your working memory is a high-effort low-benefit avenue to learn to drive (although it might have benefits elsewhere). Many many people have learnt to drive without having to do such things, so I’m (statistically) sure you can too.
I think a better method would be to leverage how the brain works, i.e. “practice makes perfect”. I learnt in 2 stages:
learn the mechanics of moving the car around (acceleration, steering, changing gears (in a manual car), using the turn signal etc) until they become almost automatic actions, e.g. when coming up to a corner you think “use the signal” (and just do it) rather than “a corner… what do I do? … use the signal … where’s the lever? … which way do I push it?”. This is best done in quiet areas, such a mostly empty car park (I don’t know where you are so I’m not sure how feasible this is).
introduce the other bits of driving, like other cars, traffic lights, having to navigate somewhere, gradually. So start with light traffic and build up. Start with the teacher prompting every turn you have to make so you don’t have to think about longer term directions, and then (in areas you know well) have this ease off to something like “past the ” or “go home”.
And practise, practise, practise.
(EDIT: correcting formatting)
Oh, I had no idea that it was that low. I’d though most of europe used compulsory voting.
Although, according to the wikipedia article, there are an additional 21 countries that have compulsory voting but don’t enforce it. Which suggests that there are at least 2 billion people who live in a system with some sort of compulsory voting, and a bit under 400 million have enforced compulsory voting (I checked the populations of some of the countries).
(For what it’s worth, I’m in Australia (with compulsory voting), so that would have contributed to my reaction.)
I think the problem is the definitely not the language. From the original post:
Presuming the US by default when it is assumed that no country name needs to be given.
Expecting reader familiarity with US-specific cultural concepts.
A tendency to focus on the US first and foremost when talking about worldwide problems and scenarios.
Expecting people to self-modify to “correct” these is wrong, although I don’t think you were suggesting this.
(EDIT: read “wrong” as “unreasonable”)
Hmmm… on reflection, “wrong” is too strong.
I was thinking that it was that people would have to self-modify to adopt US culture. But, actually thinking about what was being said (thanks, MixedNuts) and what I quoted indicates that it was just self-modifying to become familiar with the concepts.
I still think this is unreasonable, due to, for example, the amount of effort it would take to get decent coverage across all areas of the culture, i.e. it’s much easier for US users to make a few annotations (“in the USA”, or “governor of Massachusetts”, to increase googleability at least).
OTOH, I’m not sure what’s wrong with self-modifying to not be annoyed when American users have GetDefaultCountry() return “USA”.
Nothing, I was thinking about the issue in the wrong way and so I have ameliorated my response accordingly.
The code for Less Wrong is open source so you could use the exact same software as Less Wrong, and there are some instructions on how to get it running, however they might be hard to execute without programming knowledge. Also, getting that accessable on the internet requires having access to webserver, not just having a blog on another website.
That would be one way to get all the features of Less Wrong. Unfortunately, I can’t think of any less technical ways off the top of my head.
It looks a lot like wordle.
There is an rss feed for the message inbox. Although, I can only subscribe to it using Firefox’s builtin mechanism, not the external RSS reader I use.
ETA: I presume it relates to the authentication cookies LW uses to identify whose inbox to show, which Firefox has access to (since I’m logged on), but the external reader doesn’t.
Bayesian postmodernism also seems like a reasonable way of describing this idea. Although, I feel that the explanation you give is still overly technical. (I think the biggest example is talking about “prior” without explanation, as well as “probability distribution”).
On a editing note, I can’t parse this sentence:
The hard part is, of course knowing what the hell your prior actually is, to more useful specificity than “everything you think you know about everything.”
Ah, that sentence makes sense, I just couldn’t work out the syntax (“specificity” just didn’t seem to fit in). My problem, not yours :)
I didn’t explain it clearly at all, but the point I was trying to make was that there is quite a bit of “technical” language/jargon which acts as a stopsign (and/or induces blankness). “Prior” doesn’t really fit into this category, but “probability distribution” does, and the Wikipedia article (probably) doesn’t really help people from your target audience.
I would suggest removing the term completely (or maybe having the technical term in a parenthetical statement) e.g.
The prior is not a number, but a measurement of the probability of each of a spectrum of possible alternatives
Do you have access to a smartphone (and permission to use it)? There are many implementations of dual n-back for the popular mobile operating systems. (I can’t try any of those applications, so I cannot offer any advice on which ones are good/bad)
ETA: gwern’s FAQ explores dual n-back well (and some lists some other mental exercises towards the bottom).
Where’s EY?
(More seriously: that image looks much nicer)
Thanks!
How does it not work? e.g. doesn’t do anything, or scrolls to a random spot.
Hmmm, I have an tiny idea what might be happening, but I haven’t been able to reproduce it yet, so I’m unwilling to dive in and change things.
If that bug occurs to you (or anyone else) again, could you post a link to the specific comment(s) it occurs on? Thanks!
Thank you for that! Unfortunately, I can’t reproduce your bug (and it’s not what I thought it might be): I went through and added the “new comment” marker to those comments and their children, to try to simulate the circumstances, but everything worked fine for me. I’ll update the script to include some logging (EDIT: done).
Has it happened on any other pages?
Nice! Thanks for the effort nonetheless.
As bcoburn said, the point of this post appears to be to highlight the large inferential distance between mainstream thinking and many settled issues on LW. It doesn’t appear to be trying to refute the LW attitudes. Furthermore:
[the list of points are] deliberately phrased to incite kneejerk disagreement and ugh-fields
It is trying to list them as they might be seen by outsiders in the least convenient possible world (and/or real world).
Another source of free audiobooks is LibriVox which is building (i.e. recording) a catalog of free & public domain audiobooks. It is all volunteer work so I’m sure there is varying quality, but the few I have listened to have been quite good. However, the catalog is limited to works out of copyright (or under an appropriately permissive license), so newer material is rare, but many of the “classics” are there.