My name is Elizabeth, and I made my way here through “Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality,” but quickly found myself fascinated. I’ve been reading intermittently for a few months, and would likely not be posting here today due to an unfortunate personal tendency towards lurking and the sheer daunting nature of the volume and intelligence of discussion, but when I was reading about narrowness I came across a comment I couldn’t help responding to, and decided my newfound positive karma score was worth overcoming my trepidation about permanent records.
I’ve most recently been reading about the nature of words and definitions, which is a topic of particular interest to me. I really like it when a post walks me through a set of ideas that I sort of half knew, but never really codified, and I like it even better when it’s something I had never thought of, or which changes how I think of things. Some of the posts about biases were particularly effective in that regard. I hope to be a productive part of the discussion.
Elizabeth
Much of this discussion seems to be people expressing differences in their own internal processes when it comes to visualization, reading, etc. This seems to me to be directly connected with a concept it took me many years to learn and which still feels unnatural to me: not all people think the same way. Even if one assumes that people all have identical brains at birth (which is not true, but useful for the sake of this argument) our brains start with a vast number of connections, and then as we age and gain experience those connections are pruned, so that we retain only the connections we use. The parts of our brain we use to process specific types of data would then be reinforced to process that data in the future, and our thinking would diverge.
This is a topic particularly prone to argument because whether or not other people think the same way we do is a difficult concept to think about, but the comments on this article are strong evidence that people at least perceive their mental processes differently. I cannot think of a good experiment to validate our different internal perceptions, but I think it would be overhasty to try to denounce other people’s perceptions of how they process certain data such as visualizations.
I personally cannot picture my mother’s face. I cannot picture my childhood bedroom. I can describe them in my head with words, but that is all. I can, however, rearrange the furniture in a room in my head and be sure that it will fit, or perceive the three dimensional shape described by a calculus problem. It feels to me like proprioception. I cannot say that with certainty, as I don’t have a test for it, but the evidence of my own perceptions, and the evidence of, for example, the visualize-a-tiger experiment (in which some people had visualized it down to the stripes and others were taken aback by the question), both contribute to my belief that the parts of my brain I use to perceive certain data are not necessarily the same as yours, and that different mental abilities, such as visualization, are found at different strengths in different people.
Yes, I had registered an account, and had managed ten whole karma points as of this post, of which I am rather proud.
I have been reading through the sequences.
I’ve found a lot of the biases fascinating, particularly when it comes to testing a hypothesis, and I just finished a sequence on words and definitions, which I quite enjoyed.
I’ve attempted to refer a couple people, but found that my brother had already found Less Wrong independently (and hadn’t told me about it!).
I would also quite like to play.
As someone who spends a lot of time on the student side of those math classes (and as the student in the class who almost always catches those typographical errors), I suspect that there are students who notice the error but don’t comment for social reasons (don’t want to interrupt, don’t want to be a know-it-all, don’t want to be publicly erroneous in a correction, etc.). Your solution of giving students problems, while an excellent teaching tool, is not a particularly good test for this phenomenon because it fails to distinguish between students who really do miss the errors because they assume you are right and the students who noticed but didn’t speak up, or those who simply weren’t paying attention in the first place.
The neatness of my bedroom is a fairly reliable barometer of how many papers I have due, and when I first consciously noticed that phenomenon a few years ago, I started to attempt to take advantage of it. However, I have discovered that there are more constraints than just having something more important I should be doing. When I’m procrastinating badly I find it almost impossible to sit still long enough to settle to anything. I can clean or do errands, but I require a podcast to keep me entertained. I had great success getting myself to practice piano, and indeed achieved daily practice for the better part of six months, but piano also had the advantage of being something I could effectively practice in ten minute bursts, rather than requiring a more sustained effort, and it involves movement. Sitting still becomes such a great effort of willpower that I can’t accomplish anything, even fun projects or reading fiction. If anyone has suggestions for overcoming that particular hurdle, I suspect it would help my procrastination significantly.
The single most useful tactic I have for lowering activation costs is playing podcasts and audiobooks on my iPod. It lowers the activation cost for household chores like dishes significantly, and it is particularly effective in lowering activation costs for outdoor exercise. Impending boredom is the highest part of the activation cost for tasks that involve leaving my computer.
This post helped coalesce a number of observations I had made in the past, so I would like to leave aside the debate over whether the examples of politeness are optimal and look at a couple of other points.
One point which I haven’t seen much of in comments is the relationship between how well people know each other and how polite they need to be. If people know you well, then they know enough to give you the benefit of the doubt if a comment can be taken multiple ways. If, however, they have only just met you or interact with you mostly in formal settings, that extra bit of politeness can go a very long way.
A little politeness is particularly effective when dealing with people who are being paid to do something for you, such as waiters or salespeople, or with people in bureaucracies from whom you need something. While it is not strictly necessary to be polite in these cases, it will often get you better service.
Unless you have a particularly close-knit workplace, that is also an arena where a little extra politeness is a good idea. You certainly don’t want to offend your boss, and your coworkers will likely react better to constructive criticism than straight criticism.
The last, and most overlooked, of the areas where social niceties are important is the internet. Here, not only are you often talking to people who don’t know you well, but they are also deprived of tone of voice and facial expressions, which provide important clues about intent. A comment which would be perfectly polite with a pleasant smile can seem downright rude in plain text.
Another point is that Less Wrong is not a place without social codes, it simply has it’s own. Whether these codes are more rational than standard social mores is irrelevant when it comes to dealing with people who don’t know them. Social codes are another type of language, and the most important factor in communication with language is speaking a common tongue. If the lojbanists succeeded in creating a perfect, logical, utilitarian language, the fact remains that it would not be particularly useful in ordering a milkshake at McDonald’s. When someone butchers the English language, even if I did understand what they meant to say, I am bothered, and it affects my impression of their statement. This holds true for politeness as well.
There is a major flaw in your proposal: the bottom 40% would not be in favor. Some of them would be, but there is a demonstrable bias which causes people to be irrationally optimistic about their own future wealth. This bias is a major factor in the Republicans maintaining much of their base, among other things.
However, to answer your question, while I would not favor your proposal, I would favor a tax on all of that top ten percent which would garner the same revenue as your proposal.
I don’t remember believing in Santa Claus. I don’t remember how exactly I came to disbelieve. I do remember a conversation with my mother (I can’t have been more than five) in which I stated my disbelief and she asked me not to share it with my younger brother, so that he could believe for another year or so. I don’t remember any great emotional upheaval. I also don’t think my parents went to any particular lengths to preserve the delusion.
I suppose we must quote back Millay: “Euclid alone has looked on beauty bare”
I find I run into a conundrum on this question, because there is a bias I fear overcompensating for. I know as a human that I am biased to care more about the one person standing in front of me than those ten thousand people starving in India that I’ll never meet, but I find it difficult to apply that information. I know that donating money to, say, those malaria nets, will probably save more lives than donating to, say, my local food pantry. By these arguments, it seems that that fact should trump all, and I should donate to those malaria nets.
However, I know that my local food pantry is an organization that feeds people who really need food, that it has virtually no overhead, and that there are children who would be malnourished without it. I also know that there are people all over the world who will contribute to malaria nets, but it is highly unlikely that anyone outside my community will contribute to my local food pantry.
I agree that it is vitally important to think carefully about how we spend our charity money, and I understand that the difficulty I am having with this topic is an indication that I need to think more deeply on it, but I keep coming up against two basic issues.
There is no simple metric for “most good done.” What if one disease costs little to prevent death, but leaves survivors crippled, while another costs much more to prevent death but leaves people healthy? Should I donate to the first, and burden the communities with many cripples, or to the second, and let people die? With food and medical care costing more in the developed world, should I only donate to help those in the undeveloped world, where my dollar will go farther?
Should I feel guilty for donating money to public radio because it doesn’t save children? No. My purpose in donating money to public radio is to keep my favorite shows on the air, and my donations do that very efficiently. Yes, the money could go to save children, but so could the money I use to pay my cable bill. I should perhaps not consider it as charity the way I do a donation that saves children, but I should not feel guilty. If I have $500 allocated for entertainment and $500 allocated for charity, perhaps it should come out of the former. However, it would be disingenuous to say that donations for more frivolous causes, such as saving artwork, could be donated to better causes, such as malaria nets, unless we also point out that what we spent on our fancy dinner or our new dress or going to the movies could also be thus allocated.
I just had a conversation with my father on this subject which significantly clarified my thinking, and resolved most of my internal dilemma. The argument put forward in this post is correct, but there is one significant problem. I care about more than just saving children. I also care about how efficiently it is done, what peripheral good a charity is doing in the community by, say, employing locals, and any number of other things. “Children saved” is an important metric and should absolutely be considered, and it is a decision that should be made carefully, but it is not the only metric to consider. We should spend our money efficiently, but we first need to clarify our goals in order to do so, and “saving children” is not necessarily our only goal, even in cases where it is primary.
I didn’t say that other goals could compete, but there are other goals that can be considered simultaneously. If one charity saves ten children for $100 and another saves nine and accomplishes a few other things, that is not a choice we should make mindlessly. we can’t let “saving children become a buzzword that cuts off thought. What if the second charity saves the children from death and gives them some skills that will help them make a living and help their communities? In that case, I would probably choose the second charity. Think of it as a linear algebra problem, with numerous parameters with different weights. You end up with an optimal solution for all variables together rather than for a single variable alone. Just because saving children is the most heavily weighted variable doesn’t mean that it is the only one.
My point was that it is not any more wrong to spend money on public radio than to spend money on cable tv or a new iPod. Yes, in theory all my money not spent on food and shelter could go to saving children, but you are not going to do that, I am not going to do that, and no one either of us knows is going to do that.
Thank you, I do exactly the same thing. I have anxiety about not having started the work but if I can’t start the work because to do that I have to stop doing the things distracting me from my anxiety. Sometimes it gets bad enough that I can’t even sit still long enough to do the distracting activities, much less anything productive.
I agree with you completely about consumption vs. charity, and had even mentioned the concept in my point about NPR donation guilt.
I also agree that the close number is wildly inaccurate, but even in context it wasn’t applied to local charities and it was intended to make the point that multiple factors could and should be considered when picking charities, even when the importance multipliers on some factors are orders of magnitude higher than for other factors.
I hope this clarifies my meaning without defensiveness, because none was meant.
I’d like to give it a shot too
The problem with harping on everything is connected is that it is, but good systems are created bottom up instead of top down. You didn’t sit down and say “All statistical problems are governed by overarching concept X, which leads to the inference of methods a, b, and c, which in turn lead to these problems.” You said, “I have these problems, and certain similarities imply a larger system.” It’s like biology, Linnaeus did not come up with his classification system out of thin air, he first studied many individual animals and their properties and only subsequently noticed similarities and differences which he could classify. Narrowness is where we need to start, because it gives us the building blocks for broader ideas.