fezziwig

Karma: 861

fezziwig 13 May 2015 7:29 UTC
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in reply to: VoiceOfRa’s comment on: Rationality Quotes Thread May 2015
I’m not sure what to make of this quote. It is better to be ignorant than to believe the wrong thing; ignorance is much easier to identify and fix.

Or maybe he’s saying that the fear of contamination is unjustified? That doesn’t seem accurate either.

EDIT: My bad, it’s Steve Sailer, I read the article and of course he was talking about racial bias, not biases generally.

fezziwig 4 May 2015 10:00 UTC
10 points
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on: Is Scott Alexander bad at math?
To be great at anything creative, you must have both skill and taste. Painting, music, programming—every art I’ve ever studied, or even heard of, has worked this way. You need the technical skill to create, and the eye that decides what’s worth trying, and worth keeping.

You’ve made a good case that math, like music, requires taste for true greatness. And you’ve persuaded me that Scott Alexander has it. But you also seem to be saying that math doesn’t have a skill component, in the sense I mean here, and I do not find that part of your argument persuasive.

fezziwig 7 Apr 2015 16:02 UTC
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in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: How has lesswrong changed your life?
I’m a professional programmer and I know Haskell, but I’ve only ever written one real Haskell program (an AI for double-move chess). Nevertheless I recommend it. All I can tell you is that if you master it—I mean really master it, not learn to write Python in Haskell—then your Python programming will reach a new level as well. You will be able to solve problems that once seemed intractable, which you’d persuade your product manager to scope out.

It used to be that you could get this effect by learning Lisp, but I don’t think that works anymore; too many of Lisp’s good ideas have since been taken up by more ordinary languages.

fezziwig 27 Mar 2015 21:08 UTC
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in reply to: Val’s comment on: Defeating the Villain
The problems you’re describing don’t sound like “failure to make plans for after the villain is defeated” so much as “failure to accurately assess whether your target is a villain or not”. I think Zubon’s point is that even after you’ve found a real live villain and come up with a workable plan to defeat him, you’re still not done.

fezziwig 27 Mar 2015 15:00 UTC
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in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Open thread, Mar. 23 - Mar. 31, 2015
Yes, I agree. That’s why I like the analogy to composition: most of the songs you might write, if you were sampling at random from song-space, are terrible. So we don’t sample randomly: our search through song-space is guided by our own reactions and a great body of accumulated theory and lore. But despite that, the consensus on which songs are the best, and on how to write them, is very loose.

(Actually it’s worse, I think composition is somewhat anti-inductive, but that’s outside the scope of this thread)

My experience is that naming is similar. There are some concrete tricks you can learn—do read the C2 wiki if you don’t already—and there’s a little bit of theory, some of which I tried to share insofar as I understand it. But naming is communication, communication requires empathy, and empathy is a two-place word: you can’t have empathy in the abstract, you can only have empathy for someone.

It might help to see a concrete example of this tension. I don’t endorse everything in this essay. But it’s a long-form example of a man grappling with the problem I’ve tried to describe.

fezziwig 25 Mar 2015 22:16 UTC
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in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Open thread, Mar. 23 - Mar. 31, 2015
Code Complete has a section on this. But we don’t have a precise understanding of what a “good name” is, for the same reason that we don’t have a precise understanding of what a “good song” is: the goodness of a name is measured by its effect on its reader.

So I think the high-level principle, if you want to do a good job naming things in your program, is to model your intended reader as precisely as you can. What do they know about the problem domain? What programming conventions are they familiar with? Why are they reading your program—what matters to them? These concerns will inform your formatting and commenting style as well.

When you draw these distinctions you will exclude some people. That’s normal. You shouldn’t feel badly about that, any more than Thomas Mann felt bad that Chinese speakers had to learn German before they could read Der Zauberberg. If your work is influential enough, someone will translate or annotate it. And unlike a novel, most programs are read only by a small circle anyway.

If you want concrete advice instead of philosophy, this c2 page includes some useful tips.

fezziwig 25 Mar 2015 21:58 UTC
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in reply to: skeptical_lurker’s comment on: [POLITICS] Jihadism and a new kind of existential threat
I suspect that the point was that the typical Muslim, insofar as there is such a thing, is not an arab. The founder was an arab, the Muslims on American TV are almost all arabs, but in the modern world the two concepts are less related than one might think.

fezziwig 25 Mar 2015 21:37 UTC
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in reply to: skeptical_lurker’s comment on: [POLITICS] Jihadism and a new kind of existential threat

I read that the quiverfull movement has around a 20% retention rate. Of course, given exponential growth that doesn’t buy all that more time.

Typo? If each pair of Quiverfull parents produces 8 children, and ⁸⁄₅ = 1.6 of those grow up to become Quiverfull themselves, then the movement needs to proselytize aggressively just to hit replacement.

Also, anecdotally, my friends who are true-believer evangelicals don’t think the demographic strategy is going to work; they think they’re losing too many to the world.

fezziwig 14 Mar 2015 13:53 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: anon895’s comment on: How to deal with someone in a LessWrong meeting being creepy
Almost nobody has heard of Less Wrong or Eliezer. There’s a mean article on RationalWiki (though honestly it doesn’t look that mean anymore), there’s a hostile thread on DarkLordPotter, but almost nobody has heard of those, either. This was even more true two years ago.

I’m not wedrifid. But I suspect his point is that, outside of a few incredibly narrow sub-sub-cultures, nobody knows anything about Less Wrong and no one who knows you personally will judge you by your connection to it, no matter how public or overt.

fezziwig 12 Mar 2015 0:17 UTC
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in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, March 2015, chapter 119
Oh, sorry, my mistake.

fezziwig 11 Mar 2015 21:09 UTC
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in reply to: Izeinwinter’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, March 2015, chapter 119
How do we know the crisis was war, and not (for example) people gradually reinventing the arts with which the Atlanteans destroyed themselves?

fezziwig 11 Mar 2015 2:40 UTC
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in reply to: Transfuturist’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, March 2015, chapter 119
http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2015/03/a-quick-informal-post-on-yudkowskys.html

I think “stupid” is a little strong, personally. But I like the canon ending better.

fezziwig 11 Mar 2015 2:09 UTC
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in reply to: gerryblog’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, March 2015, chapter 119
Conditional on it being nominated at all, I think it would definitely beat No Award. Have a look at the raw stats from 2013 and 2014; for Best Novel, No Award gets crushed by everything. In 2014, for example, No Award got 88 votes out of 3587 ballots. In a world where MOR made it into the top 5 for Best Novel, it can definitely do better than that.

(Okay, yes, it happened to Vox Day, but that was for Novella, or maybe Novellette, whichever).

EDIT: On re-reading, I think this is a little misleading. The Hugo uses preference voting, so it’s possible for No Award to beat some particular candidate even if almost nobody picked it in the first round of voting. You can see this in the data but my summary was too casual.

But like most other commenters, I don’t think we do live in that world.

fezziwig 10 Mar 2015 23:34 UTC
26 points
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in reply to: falenas108’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, March 2015, chapter 119
Man, that’s beautiful. What does Bellatrix Black want most, that Harry can offer?

She wants Tom Riddle to love her.

fezziwig 10 Mar 2015 19:55 UTC
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in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, March 2015, chapter 119
Are you interested in making more bets of this type?

fezziwig 10 Mar 2015 19:49 UTC
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in reply to: Mperv’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, March 2015, chapter 114 + chapter 115
Resonance. He doesn’t dare involve himself with Harry’s magic in any way.

fezziwig 9 Mar 2015 14:43 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: ShardPhoenix’s comment on: Open thread, Mar. 9 - Mar. 15, 2015
I think you have the right idea, but it’s a mistake to conflate “needs a big corpus of data” and “needs lots of hardware”. Hardware helps, the faster the training goes the more experiments you can do, but a lot of the time the gating factor is the corpus itself.

For example, if you’re trying to train a neural net to solve the “does this photo contain a bird?” problem, you need a bunch of photos which vary at random on the bird/not-bird axis, and you need human raters to go through and tag each photo as bird/not-bird. There are many ways to lose here. For example, your variable of interest might be correlated to something boring (maybe all the bird photos were taken in the morning, and all the not-bird photos were taken in the afternoon), or your raters have to spend a lot of time with each photo (imagine you want to do beak detection, instead of just bird/not-bird: then your raters have to attach a bunch of metadata to each training image, describing the beak position in each bird photo).

fezziwig 4 Mar 2015 16:05 UTC
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in reply to: Vaniver’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, March 2015, chapter 114 + chapter 115
I thought so too, after the troll. I’ve changed my mind.

Or, did you mean that we knew that it was for practice at keeping things transfigured thirty chapters ago? If so, I just missed it.

fezziwig 4 Mar 2015 3:52 UTC
6 points
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on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, March 2015, chapter 114 + chapter 115
And now we really know why Harry had to carry around his father’s rock. For practice:

And meanwhile, just like magic hadn’t defined a Transfigured unicorn as dead for purposes of setting off wards, Voldemort’s horcruxes wouldn’t define a Transfigured Voldemort as dead and try to bring him back.

That was the hope, anyway.

Harry’s scar twinged one last time when the steel ring went on his pinky finger, holding the tiny green emerald in contact with his skin. Then his scar subsided, and did not hurt again.

fezziwig 4 Mar 2015 3:40 UTC
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in reply to: Velorien’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, March 2015, chapter 114 + chapter 115
Is it really that much better than being the hero who defeated Voldemort once, though? Putting on Hermione does seem pretty mean, but I think it’s a very in-character sort of mistake, especially after the kind of day he’s had.