(For the record for when people I know find this post—I have not actually overcome the inertia and signed up. This is largely due to the fact that my living relatives are likely to have control over the disposition of my remains, so there is little point in signing up for cryonics unless I can get up the nerve to talk to them about it.)
gwillen
As an interesting anecdote, I was schooled in a completely traditional fashion, and yet I never really learned to finish either. I did learn to learn, but I did it through a combination of schooling and self-teaching. But all the self-teaching was in addition to a completely standard course of American schooling, up through a Bachelor’s degree in computer science.
There is something I find very satisfying about this answer. Possibly this is related to the fact that I like to think of people-over-time as being a succession of distinct, but closely related, identities.
When my friends and I had learned about the Doppler effect, we were all at Level 1, maybe with minor inroads into Level 2. The problem? I classified that as “not understanding”, while my friends called it “complete understanding”.
I had a friend express frustration with me once, because we would have conversations about some subjects she felt she understood, in which I would say things like “I don’t understand X”, and then proceed to demonstrate what she felt was a better understanding than she had. I think it felt to her like I was “sandbagging” when claiming I didn’t understand things, whereas I was merely expressing that I was somewhere between levels 1 and 2 and was unsatisfied with it.
- 14 Jul 2010 15:29 UTC; 2 points) 's comment on Open Thread June 2010, Part 3 by (
I also failed to identify it as a joke, so perhaps you were too subtle. :-) Thanks for the clarification.
I’m already a bit late to be commenting here, but I would suggest that people who are interested in further thought experiments along these lines read Egan’s /Permutation City/. I don’t totally agree with how the author answers his own thought experiments, but the experiments themselves are very closely related to the topic of the post.
I think the key insight here is that you get a limited number of bits, in design space, to bridge between things that have already been shown to work, and things that have yet to be shown to do so.
For purposes of Gall’s law, we are interested in the number of bits of design that went into the space shuttle without ever having been previously shown to work. So you have to subtract off the complexity of “the idea of an airplane”, which we already had, and of the solid fuel booster rockets, which we already knew how to build; and also of any subassembly which got built and tested successfully in a lab first—but perhaps leaving some bits or fraction of a bit to account for the unknown environment when using them on the real shuttle, versus in the lab.
I suffer from this severely and pervasively, and was already aware of that before reading this post. So I just wanted to comment that your post fits spot-on with my experience. I tend to develop ugh fields around projects at work when I get stuck on them for awhile, and get emails from people asking when they will be done, and start to fear getting email about them at all, and then about thinking about them, and so on.
I have also gone through periods of ’ugh’ness centered on my voicemail box and my email inbox, each time when I knew or suspected they contained items likely to make me feel shittier about myself for whatever reason (e.g. reminding me about some thing I was in the process of failing to get done.)
I agree with the commenter who said that your English is more than good enough to post here. I almost certainly wouldn’t have realized you are a non-native speaker if you hadn’t mentioned it in your comment.
“I don’t quite grasp the relevance of being competent enough in any language but English to the matter in hand.”
I believe the point that RichardKennaway was making was this one, which I’ve heard before: Many English speakers do not know, or are not fluent in, any other languages. We therefore should not feel entitled to criticize the English skills of someone who took the effort to become fluent in English as a second language.
Also, your English skills are quite good. :-)
“Besides, after spending a time on a simple comment, thoughts begin to race in my head that maybe, perhaps, it wouldn’t really be something that the other people couldn’t conclude or know on their own”
I definitely have this problem too. I end up posting maybe half the comments I write.
Hello! Fancy meeting you here.
Well, the Ugh Field around emails doesn’t start as being about email; it starts as being about some specific item in the inbox. But then as I avoid checking email for days in order to avoid looking at that item (and more from the same party), I start to realize that there are probably now other important things in the inbox that I haven’t seen, since I haven’t been reading it; and I probably don’t want to read those either, especially since I’m probably now late in replying to them.
And so on.
I’m not sure I count as a lurker, but I’ll stop in and say hi anyway.
About me: I have a BS in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University; now I work for a tech company, writing software and babysitting servers.
Has there been a ‘what is your exoshell’ thread on LW yet? Would it be appropriate to have one? In the purest definition, mine is pretty small (a thousand lines of Perl or so), but if you include ‘software you communicate with’, which I think I do, it grows rather large, to include most of what’s running on my server.
I have seen this comment many times recently. It would perhaps be good if the posting box suggested doing this, or even insisted on it for posts over a certain size.
‘Terrorism’ is strong, but it is a pet peeve of mine when people present knowledge they know is contentious as though it were obvious, so this did annoy me considerably and lower my opinion of the poster. (I am more or less neutral on the question of whether it is good advice or not; I do not go to bars, so it does not affect me.)
I’ll be there! I shall look forward to meeting some of you. :-)
I am interested in this. Was it ever written?
I just want to express my disagreement with the other two replies to this comment. Yes, in a vacuum, it’s true that scaling and translating utility functions doesn’t have any effect. But as soon as you start trying to compare them across individuals—which is exactly what we were doing in the relevant part of the post—it seems to me that scaling and translation behave just like this comment describes.
I won’t try to judge the original statement, but I do think that people believing cryonics to be a scam is a serious problem—much more serious than I would have believed. I have talked to some friends (very bright friends with computer science backgrounds, in the process of getting college degrees) about the idea, and a shockingly large number of them seemed quite certain that Alcor was a scam. I managed to dissuade maybe one of those, but in the process I think I convinced at least one more that I was a sucker.