It’s pretty much exactly what it looks like; multicolored pseudonymous suns that tweet funny and strange and sometimes-insightful stuff to each other, relying heavily on rationalist memes. I think the original was Instance Of Class, then other people made a bunch of similar ones because it’s fun, and now it’s a whole Thing. The real identities of the suns aren’t made public.
jamesf
Karma: 349
Reminder that Weird Sun Twitter exists.
(Edited link because Unit Of Selection is apparently deactivated)
I think I’ve been doing something like this for a long time, but imagining the simulated decision-maker as a “Ghost of Agency and Making Things Better” rather than an idealized version of myself. People seemed to find that a lot more confusing than this, though, so I’m going to start describing it this way instead.
“checking the name of the writer Ooookay, this article about appearance is written by a woman. As was expected. It’s probably not worth to read it...”
The best way to get me to actually throw charity out the window, is to imply that I’m likely to throw charity out the window because I explicitly thought a dumb thing relating to your personal characteristics.
It gave me mostly psychological and physiological correlates. I’m interested more in behavioral and social/economic things. I suppose you can get from the former to the latter, though with much less confidence than a directly observed correlation.
Your answer is exactly as glib as it should be, but only because I didn’t really specify what I’m curious about.
Suppose you wanted to find out all the correlates for particular Big Five personality traits. Where would you look, besides the General Social Survey?
Meta: I don’t think questions need to have “[QUESTION]” in the title. That’s what the question mark does.
I’ve pretty much hated it in college, but this might just be because of the way the courses are taught.
This was sort of my experience. Buy the right books and build interesting projects in the time you would be spending on classes, and you’ll probably enjoy it a lot more. You don’t need a degree in computer science to get a job as a software engineer; some experience/projects and the broad, shallow knowledge required to do well in typical interviews (and all those other interviewing skills I suppose) are enough.
You sound like you might enjoy Hacker School, by the way.
The only writing sample of Dorian Nakamoto I’ve seen (an email about model trains) is a mismatch
The writing may have been done by another person. The original story was that Satoshi Nakamoto is an unknown, positive number of people; is that a worse hypothesis now?
Drexler’s Nanosystems is very technical and very fun. The first ~half of the book is interesting physics, and the rest is mind-blowing systems design (molecular manufacturing and nanomechanical computers!).
What does brevity offer you that makes it worthwhile, even when it impedes communication?
Predicting how communication will fail is generally Really Hard, but it’s a good opportunity to refine your models of specific people and groups of people.
A very good post on Ribbonfarm recently: From Cognitive Biases to Institutional Decay.
In totally unrelated news, distributed autonomous economic agents are becoming a Real Thing with Market Capitalization.
Peter Norving was a resident at Hacker School while I was there, and we had a brief discussion about existential risks from AI. He basically told me that he predicts AI won’t surpass humans in intelligence by so much that we won’t be able to coerce it into not ruining everything. It was pretty surprising, if that is what he actually believes.
Most people are primarily interested in things that won’t go very far in making money, and basically everyone likes to do a lot of things they won’t ever get paid for; both are undeniable. “Be interested only in things that do nothing to increase your ability to earn money” is a very good way, indeed just about the best way, to not make money.
Your sarcasm is appreciated :-)
Many of these seem false to me, generally the ones that claim understanding things and curiosity will help you not make money. I think more than half of my free-time reading in the last several years has increased my money-making ability in my expected career (software) to some extent, and a sizable portion of that was probably pretty close to optimal among things I could realistically be doing with that time (admittedly, that is a factor in what I choose to read; practicality appeals to me). My infovorism has made me a good technical communicator, and my exposure to decision sciences and cognitive biases right here on LessWrong over the past few years seem to make up a sizable portion of what people learn in an MBA (granted, those are more about signaling and contacts than knowledge), to say nothing of all the computer science and software engineering and statistics knowledge I’ve accumulated.
One notable counterexample who is not me: Warren Buffett, currently the third wealthiest human.
Warren Buffett says, “I just sit in my office and read all day.”
What does that mean? He estimates that he spends 80 percent of his working day reading and thinking.
“You could hardly find a partnership in which two people settle on reading more hours of the day than in ours,” Charlie Munger commented.
When asked how to get smarter, Buffett once held up stacks of paper and said he “read 500 pages like this every day. That’s how knowledge builds up, like compound interest.”
Basically, a lot of your advice is heavily dependent on your interests. You might accidentally find that you have a ton of valuable technical skills and are an effective communicator with surprisingly good decision-making ability if you read the wrong things for too long.
That’s kind of the idea. I’m more interested in correlations involving self-perceived attractiveness, particularly the holistic one, than correlations involving measured physical attractiveness. It’s a nice proxy for self-esteem.
Anonymity is a bit of a problem, though I suppose a pool of people that are as likely as your average human to know anyone who uses LW could be wrangled with some effort.
I might be willing to call either of those self-quantifying activities. Definitely the first one, if you actually put most activities you do on there rather than just the ones that aren’t habit or important enough to definitely not forget. I think the question could be modified to capture the intent. Let’s see...
Have you ever made an effort to record personal data for future analysis and stuck with it for >1 month? (Y/N)
Quantified Self examples:
Have you attempted and stuck with the recording of personal data for >1 month for any reason? (Y/N)
If so, did you find it useful? (Y/N)
Social media example:
How many hours per week do you think you spend on social media?
Asking about self-perceived attractiveness tells us little about how attractive a person is, but quite a bit about how they see themselves, and I want to learn how that’s correlated with answers to all these other questions.
Maybe the recreational drug use question(s) could be stripped from the public data?
Next survey, I’d be interested in seeing statistics involving:
Recreational drug use
Quantified Self-related activities
Social media use
Self-perceived physical attractiveness on the 1-10 scale
Self-perceived holistic attractiveness on the 1-10 scale
Personal computer’s operating system
Excellent write-up and I look forward to next year’s.
Some of the weird suns are into postrationality, as I would define it, but most of them aren’t. (That, or, they keep their affiliation with postrationality secret, which is plausible enough given their commitment to opsec.)
I would add The Timeless Way of Building to the list of primary texts, Chistopher Alexander has been a huge influence for many of us.