NGR?
fiddlemath
Karma: 1,287
Certainly!
On the other hand, this is at someone’s apartment, and I know that might be an odd way to first meet folks. If you prefer, the next meetup will probably be at a coffee shop; in general, I’ll schedule meetups in public places at least once a month.
Then again, if you’re interested, and unfazed by the setting, then feel free to drop in!
Meetup : Madison: Rough Numbers
I agree connotatively, but disagree denotatively. The version for LessWrongians might go a little more like this:
When you feel overconstrained, question your constraints, make peace with the consequences of breaking them, and attend your options, not your panic.
In particular, in situations where your panic at fearful outcomes is worse than one of those outcomes, just accept that outcome instead of accepting the panic.
I’m anti-impulsive by default. In the face of new things to try or do or see, saying no is easy, saying yes is hard. I usually enjoy new experiences when I have them, and I crave them in general, but I have to steel myself to have them. I’m afraid of doing things wrong because they’re new, I’m afraid of looking silly because I don’t know what I’m doing, I’m afraid of doing things suboptimally, or paying too much, or spending too much time at something, and so on and so on. Reflectively, I endorse none of these fears to the degree I have them. And so:
Awkward and fresh beats comfortable and stale.
I run this in my head, and get some distance from those little fears, and that often suffices to do awesome things.
Meetup : Madison: Probability Calibration
Has anyone had experiences in which similar reasoning was useful?
I suspect it is, and often, for someone with this mental habit. I lack this habit, so I don’t easily know what opportunities I’ve missed. I’d like to teach the habit to myself and others, but I will need a handful of motivating cases.
I’d run screaming from a talk on “using frangibility.”
Since I can’t reply to two people at once: I’ve been using melatonin, and auto-shutdown at midnight, and getting more exercise, and I am finally getting some traction on falling asleep before 1am every night. Can make these things work.
It would just be an argument over the definition of “I”. Here, tabooing “I” is probably a useful exercise.
As it’s a year after attending last year’s minicamp, I’ve slowed down the pace that I attempt new optimizations to only one or two things at a time. :) Still, sharing more widely is a good idea. Every morning, for the next few weeks (necessarily barring next week), my morning routine will be as follows:
Wake up at 7:30am. Do not touch the bed.
Don my contacts, and some morning clothes. Do not touch the bed.
Go make coffee. Do not place my forehead on the countertop.
Sit on my little porch, with coffee, and write in my journal for at least 15 minutes, or until I’ve stopped having more things to write down.
If writing has spawned todo items, add those. (Only boot my computer in a plain terminal; do not load the GUI or connect to the network.)
If writing has spawned items to add to my deck of “things to focus on”, go ahead and make those cards.
Do not touch the bed.
If it’s a Monday, Wednesday, or Friday, go running.
Shower.
Going to do this, every morning, until it’s habit. Going to do a couple of hours of research before noon, every morning. Going to have more time.
Closely related, and well-written: Errors vs. Bugs.
The Phantom Tollbooth is enjoyably mind-opening, if handed to a child at about the right age. It’s very light-hearted, but is liable to instill thinking about thinking. I read it when I was 10, and again at 12, and again at 14, and again at 16, getting deeper appreciation each time.
Also, I suspect the Tiffany Aching books are ideal—but I’m a huge Discworld fan, ymmv.
Side, side note: I disagree with this comment, but only after some reflection. I don’t want to make it invisible, because the conversation it provokes is actually useful.
Thumbs-up vs. thumbs-down leaves no room to say “interesting but wrong.”
This link is now dead; the Wayback Machine says the text was this:
Very little of what goes on among human beings, very little of what goes on in so limited an activity as a game, is merely conventional (done solely for convenience). In baseball, it is merely conventional for the home team to take the field first or for an umpire to stand behind the catcher rather than behind the pitcher (which might be safer). In the former instance it is convenient to have such a matter routinely settled one way or the other; in the latter instance it must have been more convenient for the task at hand, e.g., it permits greater accuracy in calling pitches, and positions an official so that he is on top of the plays at home plate and faces him so that his line of sight crosses those of the other umpires. More or less analogous advantages will recommend, say, the Gerber convention in bridge. But it can seem that really all of the rules of a game, each act it consists of, is conventional. There is no necessity in permitting three strikes instead of two or four; in dealing thirteen cards rather than twelve or fifteen. -- What would one have in mind here? That two or four are just as good? Meaning what? That it would not alter the essence of the game to have it so? But from what position is this supposed to be claimed? By someone who does or does not know what “the essence of the game” is? -- e.g., that it contains passages which are duels between pitcher and batter, that “getting a hit,” “drawing a walk,” and “striking a batter out” must have certain ranges of difficulty. It is such matters that the “convention” of permitting three strikes is in service of. So a justification for saying that a different practice is “just as good” or “better” is that it is found just as good or better (by those who know and care about the activity). But is the whole game in service of anything? I think one may say : It is in service of the human capacity, or necessity, for play; because what can be played, and what play can be watched with that avidity, while not determinable a priori, is contingent upon the given capacities for human play, and for avidity. (It should not be surprising that what is necessary is contingent upon something. Necessaries are means.) It is perhaps not derivable from the measurements of a baseball diamond and of the average velocities of batted basseballs and of the average times human beings can run various short distances, that 90 feet is the best distance for setting up an essential recurrent crisis in the structure of a baseball game, e.g., at which the run and the throw to first take long enough to be followed lucidly, and are often completed within a familiar split second of one another; but seeing what happens at just these distances will sometimes strike one as a discovery of the a priori. But also of the utterly contingent. There is no necessity that human capacities should train to just these proportions; but just these proportions reveal the limits of those capacities. Without those limits, we would not have knowsn the possibilities.
Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason. pp 119-120
This smells true to me, but I don’t have any examples at hand. Do you?
This would be especially useful here, as specific examples would make it easier to think about strategies to avoid this, and maybe see if we’re doing something systematically badly.
Meetup : Monday Madison Meetup
Large-pattern juggling. Takes a lot of practice from everybody, though—well more than most social dance.
I also thought this, and have thus been leery about how enthusiastically I promote it.
Do you have examples in mind? I’d very much like them—those would be highly valuable places to double-check assumptions.