glenra

Karma: 167

glenra 11 Apr 2013 18:02 UTC
4 points
in reply to: educationrealist’s comment on: Problems in Education
What makes “higher than 600 on ONE section” a cutoff above which counts as an “eminently respectable” score?

Anyone who claims that teachers are stupid is using propaganda instead of ETS data.

Would you accept “mediocre”? ;-)

glenra 11 Apr 2013 3:58 UTC
10 points
in reply to: mwengler’s comment on: Problems in Education

First, the horrible spelling, grammar, and punctuation leap out at me immediately.

Me too. Good thing they’re not trying to improve writing ability!

I just read that grant in its entirety. I noticed one possible typo, but did not find other bad grammar or spelling.

The VERY FIRST SENTENCE has minor punctuation issues and refers to “Excellence in Leaning (sp) Through Technology”—I refuse to believe that the original Senate bill being referred to failed to spell the word “Learning” correctly in its title. :-)

The second sentence puts a space before the colon for no apparent reason.

“The moneys this school is requesting” ⇒ should probably be “money”, though I’d accept argument to the contrary. “With request to …” ⇒ should probably be “With RESPECT to”

“This shows community support for improvement and a move forward with the support of a technology plan.” ⇒ You can tell what the writer is trying to say, but the writer is not actually saying it; the sentence is just broken.

“Teachers will...learn ho to integrate this technology” ⇒ should be “learn HOW to integrate...”

That’s just the first page, and it’s not even ALL the issues on the first page. Fortunately, the following pages are much better than the abstract page (which was painful). The second page is missing a bunch of hyphens—that’s a problem throughout—but otherwise not too bad.

Third page: “A desired outcome of this project is an increase in tile number of students taking high level science.” ⇒ change “tile number” to “total number” and possibly change “high level” to “high-level”

“By using MBL’s, less time is required” ⇒ change “MBL’s” to “MBLs”—it’s not a possessive.

“The purchase of this equipment would be in support of Colorado economy.” has a missing article; change it to ⇒ “would support THE Colorado economy”

“accommodate this set Up.” ⇒ “setup”.

Under IMPACT: “By obtaining these funds and implementing this program more students will be able to participate in hands on leaning” ⇒ again, it should be LEARNING, not LEANING. Also it’s “hands-on”, not “hands on”

“This science lab will be in place alter the grant period is over.” ⇒ AFTER the grant period, not ALTER.

Much of this suggests a very bad writer—less than 8th-grade level—who is using a spell-checker. But there some other mistakes that seem like the document might have been electronically scanned. For instance, the budget mentions “guides for teachers arid students” ⇒ should obviously be “teachers AND students” but I can’t imagine a human writer accidentally writing “arid” for “and” and “ri” does look an awful lot like “n”.
What links here?
- OrphanWilde's comment on Problems in Education by ThinkOfTheChildren (11 Apr 2013 19:43 UTC; 1 point)

glenra 24 Dec 2012 23:03 UTC
8 points
in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: Ritual Report 2012: Life, Death, Light, Darkness, and Love.

Reciting the litany may or may not actually be useful for this, especially in group settings. I actually lean towards it NOT being that useful, but being harmless and fun.

I thought the Litany worked really well as a running gag, especially with the addition of the meta-litany as a punchline.

If reciting the Litany of Tarski in a group setting is valuable, I desire to BELIEVE that reciting the Litany of Tarski in a group setting is valuable. If reciting the Litany of Tarski in a group setting is NOT valuable, I desire to believe that reciting the Litany of Tarski in a group setting is NOT valuable. Let me not become too attached to beliefs I may not want.

glenra 24 Dec 2011 16:10 UTC
2 points
in reply to: HonoreDB’s comment on: Intellectual Hipsters and Meta-Contrarianism

I remember once saying, “Well, have we ever tried blindly throwing lots of money at the educational system?”

Kansas City was one of the more notable examples of having tried that; it didn’t work out well: http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-298.html

glenra 24 Dec 2011 15:43 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Mercy’s comment on: Intellectual Hipsters and Meta-Contrarianism

I’m struggling to think of any actual examples of this behavior in action

If you’ve ever said or thought “Okay, just for the sake of argument, I’ll assume your point X is correct...” you were holding a position back in reserve.

One typical example is arguing with a religious nut that what he’s saying is incompatible with the teachings in his own holy book. Suppose he wins this argument (unlikely, I know, but bear with me...) and demonstrates that you were mistaken and no, his holy book really does teach that we should burn scientists as witches. Do you immediately conclude that yes, we should burn scientists as witches? No, because you don’t actually hold in high esteem the teachings in his holy book.

glenra 24 Dec 2011 15:15 UTC
2 points
in reply to: prase’s comment on: Against WBE (Whole Brain Emulation)
And we do, in fact, have toys that achieve flight by being bird-shaped and flapping their wings.

glenra 21 Sep 2010 18:11 UTC
13 points
in reply to: Mercy’s comment on: Intellectual Hipsters and Meta-Contrarianism

The number of global warming skeptics who jumped straight from “it’s not happening” to “well we didn’t do it” to “well we can’t do anything about it without doing more harm than good” should also...give us a bit of pause.

Actually, that move is perfectly consistent with real skepticism applied to a complex assertion.

To see why, let’s consider a different argument. Suppose a True Believer says we should punish gays or disallow gay marriage “because God hates homosexuality”. You and I are skeptical that this assertion is rationally defensible so we attack it at what seems like the obvious first link in the logical chain. We say “I doubt that god exists. Prove to me that god exists, and then maybe we’ll consider your argument.” At this point you can divide the positions into:

“god hates X”/god doesn’t exist

Now let us suppose TB actually does it. He does prove that god exists. Does this mean that we skeptics immediately have to accept his entire chain of reasoning? Of course not! We jump to the next weak link. To establish the original claim, one would need to prove god exists and is benevolent and wrote the bible and meant those passages in the way TB interprets as applied to our current situation. Anything less, and the original assertion remains Not Proven.

If any link in the chain fails, we don’t have to accept the compound assertion “God hates X, therefore we should do Y”. We can reasonably express skepticism towards any link that hasn’t been proven until the whole chain is sound. Right?

Now returning to global warming, the larger claim that is implied by saying things like “global warming is real” is “greenhouse gases are warming the globe; this process will cause net-bad outcomes if we do nothing and net-less-bad outcomes (including all costs and opportunity costs) if we do X, therefore we should do X”. The skeptical position is that not all the links in that chain of reasoning are strong and the warmists need to solidify a few weak links. I don’t see how disagreeing over which link in the logical chain is weakest or focusing on the next weak link when one formerly-weak link is strengthened constitutes “sophisticated apologetics”. I would have rather called it “rationalism”.

glenra 7 Jun 2009 5:47 UTC
18 points
0
in reply to: taw’s comment on: The Unfinished Mystery of the Shangri-La Diet
As I understand it, ECA pills that contain actual ephedrine in amounts as high as you used can no longer be sold either in the US or in the EU—even the link you gave is now invalid because they’ve reformulated your pill. (The new Forza has “30 mg of Ephedra Extract” instead of 60 mg of ephedrine HCL; they recommend you take twice as many pills as before to get a similar effect.)

The good news for Americans is that we can still legally buy 25 mg Ephedrine. It can’t be sold with weight-loss/bodybuilding claims but it’s a legal over-the-counter treatment for asthma, if you don’t buy too much of it at one time. So we can make our own ECA stack using three separate pills. I used this stack: 25mg Ephedrine (Vasopro), 200 mg Caffeine (No-Doz) and 325 mg aspirin.

And...it’s working! You were correct to claim real Ephedrine would have a significant appetite suppressant effect—this was immediately apparent the first day I took it. It’d probably be stronger if I doubled the Eph dose to approach what you were taking—I might do that in a bit. It’s too soon to tell whether I’ll reach my long-term goals but things are definitely moving in the right direction!

UPDATE (2009): it’s still working. So far (about 3 months along), my BMI has dropped from 27 to 25.7; bodyfat has dropped from 23% to 20.5%, and weight has dropped from 86kg to ~81 kg.

I’ve been reading all the medical literature I can find on ECA and editing the wikipedia entry. A few things I’ve realized along the way: (1) the aspirin component really isn’t necessary; all that matters is the ephedrine and caffeine. (to the extent that it’s been studied, there’s no clear benefit for most users). (2) It is possible—albeit pretty statistically unlikely—to overdose on ephedrine or ephedra or have bad health effects. When ECA was legal as a supplement there were a great many “adverse effect” reports including perhaps a dozen deaths attributed to it. The FDA banned the sale of ephedra supplements because there was what they regarded as a significant risk associated with it and they didn’t count the fact that it enables easy weight loss as an offsetting benefit.

However, my estimate is that the benefit of this drug far, far outweighs the cost. Every plausible back-of-the-envelope calculation I’ve made says I should keep taking it.

UPDATE (2015): Much like Shangri-La, that initially promising effect of ECA reached a plateau. I didn’t reach my target weight. It seemed like a bad idea to keep taking speed for the indefinite future so I stopped. After I stopped, I regained all the lost weight and then some.

(And as of today my current weight is low once again, but that was accomplished using a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT mechanism which is worth a separate post of its own. No oil or ephedrine were used in the method that ultimately proved successful for me.)

glenra 5 Jun 2009 22:21 UTC
20 points
in reply to: HughRistik’s comment on: Mate selection for the men here

Who is going to teach them all the dating rituals that they missed during adolescence, and give them back the self-confidence that they lost? Society isn’t.

Society used to teach some of this explicitly in the form of cotillion classes. One modern analogue for adults is PUA workshops. I took The Art of Attraction class from Pickup101 a few years ago and found it extremely worthwhile. My favorite part of the class was learning how to improve my body language in various ways. Confidence is a lot about physical behaviour—how to stand, how to walk, how to look at people… The most interesting and persistently useful part was learning how to touch someone one doesn’t know well and have this come across as friendly rather than creepy or awkward. Some people are naturally physically demonstrative—they find it easy to give a reassuring pat on the shoulder or the wrist or the back, or a hug. Most women have this ability; many men don’t. But being able to touch people in an appropriately friendly and comforting way is a physical skill which can be acquired with training and practice. Now that I have had this training, I even find it easier to touch or hug my own parents than before I took the class.

Another option is dance classes—you can learn Salsa at any age. Anything that gives you lots of practice comfortably standing and moving in close physical proximity to members of the opposite gender can’t help but help.

glenra 25 May 2009 2:17 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Roko’s comment on: Changing accepted public opinion and Skynet

Robotics is not advanced enough for a robot to look scary, though military robotics is getting there fast.

Shakey the Robot was funded by DARPA; according to my dad, the grant proposals were usually written in such a way as to imply robot soldiers were right around the corner...in 1967. So it only took about 40 years.

glenra 18 May 2009 15:56 UTC
5 points
in reply to: taw’s comment on: The Unfinished Mystery of the Shangri-La Diet
- I took ECA Extreme which is claimed to contain 25 mg “ephedra extract”, 200mg caffeine, and a few “woo” ingredients. So perhaps I just need a more ephedra-heavy mix.
- I was just about stable in terms of fat, neither increasing nor decreasing.
- Oops, my mistake—my bodyfat percentage is ~23% (measured by electronic resistance scale); my bmi is actually ~27(corrected in the post) . I don’t really care about BMI—I expect that to be on the high side because BMI is a silly measurement and I’m trying for an “athletic” build. But I do want to reduce fat. I’m hoping to get bodyfat below 20%. My bodyfat level is currently in an “acceptable” health range, but I’ve been working on some circus skills (aerial acrobatics) for which it would be a huge advantage if I could be on the low end of acceptable.

glenra 18 May 2009 3:42 UTC
26 points
0
in reply to: taw’s comment on: The Unfinished Mystery of the Shangri-La Diet

There is one way to lose weight[...] - one ECA pill every morning until you’re done.

I’m 86 kg (bmi ~27). I took your advice and tried taking one ECA pill every morning for the last few weeks and...I was gaining weight on it. I think I had a little loss of appetite right at first—along with a feeling of being “wired”—but the effect wore off after a day or two.

One confounding factor is that I normally consume a lot of caffeine (~200 mg) daily in the form of Diet Coke. I cut back a bit on the soda while taking ECA, so the change in my caffeine consumption while taking ECA compared to baseline was quite small—perhaps being a prior caffeine addict renders ECA less effective?

As with Shangri-la, one might conclude any of the following: (a) I just need to take more ECA (b) I just need to stick with it for longer—eventually the effect will kick in (c) It works for some people but not others for as-yet unidentified reasons (d) it doesn’t work, and other factors explain the apparent success in some

glenra 18 May 2009 3:04 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Jaffa_Cakes’s comment on: Share Your Anti-Akrasia Tricks

Let’s have some examples to help those like me get what you’re talking about.

I’ll bite.

“Get (back) in shape” is one of my big specific goals. If I can significantly improve (and then maintain!) my physical condition this year there is a good chance I will have the opportunity to perform in an off-Broadway show. Which would be a significant-to-me artistic achievement—and there’s a looming deadline. One difficulty there is forcing myself to exercise as much as is appropriate to the situation.

“Create and publish my first iPhone application” is another goal. That one really tends to gets off track since it involves using a computer, which means it’s easy to get sidetracked by email or reddit or stackoverflow or lesswrong. I know once I get “in the zone” on that sort of task it’s hard to stop, but I’m not there yet—I’m at the early, frustrating stage of the project.

Also: keeping up and/or improving various artistic skills that might or might not culminate in future public performance… reading technical texts to keep up in my field...that’s probably enough for a start.

glenra 2 May 2009 17:38 UTC
1 point
in reply to: jimrandomh’s comment on: Closet survey #1
I’m unable to find any good statistics on the reliability of weighted dice, but 84% sounds about right.

here is a set of loaded dice for sale that are advertised to roll a seven (6 on one, 1 on the other, I think) 80% of the time.

glenra 29 Apr 2009 16:32 UTC
8 points
in reply to: Jack’s comment on: Closet survey #1
1000 is extremely conservative. Every time you play any game with an element of chance—risk, backgammon, poker, scrabble, blackjack, or even just flipping a coin—the odds against you getting the exact sequence of outcomes you do get will be astronomical. So the limiting factor on how many unbelievable outcomes you perceive in a lifetime is how good you are at recognizing patterns as “unusual”. Somebody who studied numerology or had “lucky numbers” or paid attention to “lucky streaks” would see them all the time.

In the case at hand, that same series of rolls would be just as unlikely if it had happened at the beginning of the game or in the middle or spread throughout the match and hadn’t determined the outcome. Unless there was something special about this particular game that made its outcome matter—perhaps it was being televised, there was a million dollars bet on it, or it was otherwise your last chance to achieve some important outcome—the main thing that makes that sequence of rolls more noteworthy than any other sequence of rolls of equivalent length is selection bias, not degree of unlikeliness.

glenra 29 Apr 2009 16:26 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Fly’s comment on: Closet survey #1
When you say “that is unbelievable control”, you seem to be assuming the exact outcome with trick dice would be exactly and entirely predetermined. But there’s no reason to think that. The trick dice would only have to make winning much more likely to pull your “impossible” odds down into the realm of the possible. What you describe as a die that “occasionally rolled every number except a 1” is what you would expect to see if the “1″ side were weighted a bit—it would often roll a 6, sometimes roll a number adjacent to 6, and never roll 1. Contrariwise, it’s possible that the three dice facing it could have been rigged to do poorly. If a die with the “1” side weighted faced three dice with the 6 side weighted, that could do the trick.

Some amount of dice rigging could make your loss expected or reasonably likely but not guaranteed. And yes, it’s unlikely your friend would (a) weight your dice, (b) waste this ability on a meaningless game of risk, and (c) keep up the act all these years, but it’s not 1-in-100-billion unlikely. People playing little tricks or experimenting on their friends is something that does happen in the world as we know it, therefore it could have happened to you.

Though I like Jack’s explanation too.

glenra 26 Apr 2009 19:54 UTC
3 points
on: The Unfinished Mystery of the Shangri-La Diet
FWIW, one of the reasons Shangri-la didn’t quite work for me at first is that I had acid reflux issues. My reflux belches apparently count as “a taste” and after I started taking Zantac to control them—and also drinking less carbonated soda—it worked much better. Another problem I had is an issue S-L has in common with some other diet systems such as Eat-Stop-Eat—any encouragement to “eat whatever you want” when on the diet/regimen is counterproductive if you’re eating for any reason other than hunger. I sometimes eat due to boredom or stress or habit; S-L won’t stop me from doing that. And it definitely doesn’t help to be parsimonious about the sugar or oil because you’re afraid of calorie consumption—small amounts just don’t work.

What did sort of work for me was to combine S-L with a certain amount of calorie counting—trying to make a conscious effort to cut back net calorie consumption a little, but not too much. To the degree that even that didn’t work, it was mostly a matter of akrasy—the oil is nauseating and unsatisfying in the moment I take it so I often didn’t feel like taking it.

It’s especially hard to come to grips with the idea that even if it works, SL is something you pretty much have to keep doing for the rest of your life. It’s the same problem many people have with antidepressants. You take a treatment and if the treatment works it seems like you’re getting better and then that you’ve gotten better, so you start wondering if you really need to keep taking it. Eventually you fall off the treatment...and lose all the previous gains.

glenra 25 Apr 2009 21:04 UTC
14 points
in reply to: MeToo’s comment on: Closet survey #1
Putting on my magician’s hat for a moment, that sounds like a magic trick to me.

Given your description, the simplest answer consistent with the laws of physics is that another player switched the dice when you weren’t looking. Perhaps you stopped the game briefly to take a restroom break or answer the phone or deal with some other interruption. Your memory tends to edit breaks like that out of the narrative flow, especially if they don’t seem relevant to the story. Somehow, the other player had the opportunity to switch the dice. Dice can be gimmicked in a variety of ways—they could be weighted, shaved, or simply printed with the wrong dot pattern—using a die cup wouldn’t interfere with any of these. You’d played the same opponent before so he knew which type of dice you used; he could have brought fake dice of that type with him, swapped them in during the now-forgotten distraction, and swapped them back later. It’s even possible the two friends were working together to play this joke on you, with one providing the distraction while the other made the switch.

At the moment he looked at you and said “not this time”, the switch had already been made.

glenra 13 Apr 2009 3:00 UTC
0 points
in reply to: CronoDAS’s comment on: Where are we?
Manhattan

glenra 12 Apr 2009 20:28 UTC
4 points
in reply to: DavidNelson’s comment on: Silver Chairs, Paternalism, and Akrasia
The book Licit and Illicit Drugs points out that one of the founders of Johns Hopkins was a heroin addict. Being a doctor, he was able to take it in pill form for many years and nobody was the wiser in terms of his productivity.