KnaveOfAllTrades

Karma: 1,060

KnaveOfAllTrades 8 Aug 2015 22:23 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: David_Bolin’s comment on: Does Probability Theory Require Deductive or Merely Boolean Omniscience?
Why can’t the deduction be the evidence? If I start with a 50-50 prior that 4 is prime, I can then use the subsequent observation that I’ve found a factor to update downwards. This feels like it relies on the reasoner’s embedding though, so maybe it’s cheating, but it’s not clear and non-confusing to me why it doesn’t count.

KnaveOfAllTrades 8 Aug 2015 21:57 UTC
11 points
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on: Tell me what hat to buy
Begin here and read up to part 5 inclusive. On the margin, getting a basic day-in, day-out wardrobe of nice well-fitting jeans/chinos (maybe chino or cargo shorts if you live in a hot place) and t-shirts is far more valuable when you start approaching fashion than hats. Hats are a flair that come after everything else in the outfit you’re wearing them with. Maybe you want to just spend a few hours one-off choosing a hat and don’t want to think about all the precursors. But that can actually make you backslide. If you look at their advice about hats, you’ll see that pork pies and fedoras are recommended, but it’s well-known how badly a fedora can backfire if you aren’t very careful.

(For example, I’m still in the ‘trying new t-shirts/shirts/jeans/chinos/shoes with an occasional jumper purchase’ phase after about a year, 18 months. Still haven’t even got to shorts. You might progress faster if you do shops more often or have a higher shopping budget. But suffice to say hats are a long way in.)

There is a known phenomenon of guys walking around with a fedora or brimmed hat or whatever with a poorly coordinated outfit, dirty clothes, odour, bad fit, etc. basically not having the basics down before going intermediate. In these cases you will lose points with a lot of people because they will cringe or think you’re trying to compensate. You may or may not have been engaging in similar thinking when making this thread, but watch out for that failure mode.

Supplementary reading and good to get a yay or nay before buying something, or to get recommendations within a type of garment: /r/malefashionadvice/

Fashionability and going for safety helmets/caps might be divergent strategies though. If you were purely optimizing the former, what I say above might be relevant. If the latter, just getting some Crasches and calling it a day might be enough.

KnaveOfAllTrades 2 Jun 2015 3:36 UTC
2 points
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on: The value of learning mathematical proof
Yes!! I’ve also independently come to the conclusion that basic real analysis seems important for these sorts of general lessons. In fact I suspect that seeing the reals constructed synthetically, or the Peano --> Integers --> Rationals --> Dedekind cuts construction, or some similar rigorous construction of an intuitively ‘obvious’ concept, is probably a big boost in accessing the upper echelons of philosophical ability. Until you’ve really seen how axioms work and broken some intuitive thing down to the level that you can see how a computer could verify your proofs (at least in principle), I kind of feel like you haven’t done the work to really understand the concepts of proof or definition or seen a really fully reduction of a thing to basic terms.

KnaveOfAllTrades 1 Jun 2015 23:53 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Nanashi’s comment on: Salary charts & Projection tool

What specifically did you mean here?

What I mean is if you have the resources (time, energy, etc.) to do so, consider trying to get the data where the script returned ‘0’ values because the source you used didn’t have that bit of data. But make it clear that you’ve done independent research where you find the figures yourself, so that the user realises it’s not from the same dataset. And failing that, e.g. if there just isn’t enough info out there to put a figure, state that you looked into it but there isn’t enough data. (This lets the user distinguish between ‘maybe the data just wasn’t in the dataset’ versus ’this info doesn’t even exist so I shouldn’t bother looking for it.)

I think the big problem with trying to determine “related jobs” is that, more often than not, in the actual job market, the relationship between similar jobs is in name only.

Sure it would again be more resource-intensive, but I was thinking you could figure out yourself which careers are actually related, or ask people in those fields what they actually think are the core parts of their job and which others jobs they’d relate it to.

KnaveOfAllTrades 1 Jun 2015 19:17 UTC
2 points
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on: Salary charts & Projection tool
I like the graph that shows salary progression at every age. Often career advice just gives you the average entry figure and the average and peak senior figures, which kinda seems predicated upon the ‘Career for life’ mentality which locks people into professions they dislike. Suggestions, to do or not do with as you see fit, no reply necessary:

Ability to compare multiple jobs simultaneously. Make a note saying the graph will appear once you pick a job, or have it pop up by default on a default job. Center the numerical figures in their cells.

Make the list of jobs and/or the list of categories searchable and associate search keywords to jobs. For example, if I want to find ‘Professor’, it seems to come under postsecondary teachers, which wouldn’t have been something I would have thought of without trawling the list of educators, but I would have found it if I could search by ‘Professor’ and get the result returned.

‘Actuaries’, ‘Statisticians’, ‘Mathematicians’ seem to have a duplicate entries. Check database for other duplicates by querying for where job names coincide. Have the graph update to say which job you’re currently looking at, so the user can be sure it’s updated. When hovering on the graph, have the box say e.g. ‘Age 40’ rather than just ’40′ to make it obvious what ‘40’ refers to. When hovering on the graph, have the order of the figures in the box correspond to the order on the graph, i.e. give the upper, then median, then bottom figures rather than opposite as it currently is. Track down the figures where you don’t have data, or establish that there is not enough data, and let the user know which is the case so they know the provenance of researched or omitted figures.

In general, I think a lot of the time the user will want to come in from an angle of having relatively specific jobs in mind and going from there, rather than working from broad categories to increasingly specific jobs. I’m not immediately sure if or how this should cash out into specific suggestions, though. But maybe something to bear in mind while you’re developing the product. Perhaps you could have a mode like the current one and a ‘wandering’ mode where you start with a specific job then have it compared and linked to related or similar jobs (where the relational and similarity data would have to be put into the database somehow). Maybe a graph interface with nodes?

KnaveOfAllTrades 1 Jun 2015 18:49 UTC
16 points
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on: Taking the reins at MIRI
Thanks to Luke for his exceptional stewardship during his tenure! You’ll be awesome at GiveWell!

And Nate you’re amazing for taking a level and stepping up to the plate in such a short period of time. It always sounded to me like Luke’s shoes would be hard for a successor to fill, but seeing him hand over to you I mysteriously find that worry is distinctly absent! :)

KnaveOfAllTrades 31 May 2015 23:54 UTC
1 point
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on: Realistic epistemic expectations
I used to have an adage to the effect that if you walk away from an argument feeling like you’ve processed it before a month has passed, you’re probably kidding yourself. I’m not sure I would take such a strong line nowadays, but it’s a useful prompt to bear in mind. Might or might not be related to another thing I sometimes say, that it takes at least a month to even begin establishing a habit. While a perfect reasoner might consider all hypotheses in advance or be able to use past data to test new hypotheses, in practice it seems to me that being on the lookout for evidence for or against a new idea is often necessary to give the idea a fair shake, which feels like a very specific case of noticing (namely, noticing when incoming information bears on some new idea you heard and updating).

KnaveOfAllTrades 14 Apr 2015 10:20 UTC
11 points
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on: Translating bad advice
This premise sounds interesting, but I feel like concrete examples would really help me be sure I understand

KnaveOfAllTrades 18 Mar 2015 2:17 UTC
8 points
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on: Identity and quining in UDT
I didn’t follow everything in the post, but it seems like the motivating problem is that UDT fails in an anti-Newcomb problem defined in terms of the UDT agent. But this sounds a lot like a fully general counterargument against decision algorithms; for any algorithm, we can form a decision problem that penalizes exactly that and only that agent. Take any algorithm running on a physical computer and place it in a world where we specify, as an axiom, that any physical instantiation of that algorithm is blasted by a proton beam as soon as it begins to run, before it can act. This makes any algorithm look bad, but this is just a no free lunch argument that every algorithm seems to fail in some worlds, especially ones where the deck is stacked against the algorithm by defining it to lose.

A decision process ‘failing’ in some worlds is a problem only if there exists some other decision process that does not suffer analogously. (Possible open problem: What do we mean by analogous failure or an analogously stacked world?)

Of course, it’s possible this objection is headed off later in the post where I start to lose the train of thought.

KnaveOfAllTrades 1 Nov 2014 22:44 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: kalium’s comment on: Stupid Questions (10/27/2014)
I wondered about this too before I tried it. I thought I had a higher-than-average risk of being very sensitive to my own perspirations/sheddings. But I haven’t detected any significant problems on this front after trying it. It goes both ways: Now I know that I’m not very sensitive to my own trouser sweat, it means I can wear trousers longer after they’ve been washed (i.e. exposed to potentially irritant laundry products), which possibly reduces the risk of skin problems from the laundry products (another problem that I think I have a higher-than-average chance of having; the two aren’t mutually exclusive).

(Insert disclaimer about this maybe being very dependent on lots of factors, e.g. maybe I’ll move to another city with an imperceptibly different climate and get screwed over by wearing jeans for more than a day.)

KnaveOfAllTrades 1 Nov 2014 22:34 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: Steven_Bukal’s comment on: Stupid Questions (10/27/2014)
Not sure if it’s in addition to what you’re thinking of or it is what you’re thinking of, but Tommy Hilfiger ‘never’ ‘washes his Levis’. I heard this and confirmed with a fashion- and clothing-conscious friend that they (the friend) had tried it. I used to wash jeans and chinos after a few consecutive days of wearing them. For the past five or six weeks I’ve been trying out the ‘no wash’ approach. I wore one pair of jeans for about thirty five days (maybe split into two periods of continuous wearing) and washed them probably once or never during that time. So far as I could tell they did not smell anywhere near enough to be offensive, and I only stopped wearing them because I got too small for them. This included doing some form of exercise like pushups, circuits, or timed runs at the track in the jeans (and then not showering for a few hours afterwards) on most days.

After those jeans I’ve been wearing the same pair of chinos for eight days and they seem to be fine. It’s worth giving a try to see if it works for you too, in your circumstances. It is very plausible that climate, bathing frequency, sensitivity to own sweat, sensitivity to laundry products, underpants use etc. provide enough variation between people that doing it is a no-brainer for some and not doing it is probably right for others.

During this period, before showering each night, I take the trousers off, shake them off, then (assuming I don’t have any reason to think the outside of them had accumulated much ickiness during that day) drape them inside out over a chair, which hopefully lets them air out and let moisture evaporate off. (In fact, I now do this with most of my clothes, and it seems like it might indeed make them smell fresher for longer.)

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=tommy+hilfiger+wash+jeans http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2459720/Tommy-Hilfiger-thinks-crazy-throw-jeans-laundry-wear.html

KnaveOfAllTrades 30 Oct 2014 10:04 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: skeptical_lurker’s comment on: Meetup : Bath: Introduction and PredictionBook
Thanks for reminding me to do a meetup report! I’ve added it at the end of the announcement for this Sunday’s meetup. Let me know in the comments there whether you think you can still make it this weekend.

KnaveOfAllTrades 12 Oct 2014 9:08 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: skeptical_lurker’s comment on: Meetup : Bath: Introduction and PredictionBook
Currently expecting at fewest two others with joint probability >70%, so I’ll still do the original day. But I’ll bear the next week in mind; we might do two weeks in a row.

KnaveOfAllTrades 24 Sep 2014 12:42 UTC
−1 points
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in reply to: Shmi’s comment on: Inquiry into community standards
You more-or-less said, “gwern is imperfect but net-positive. So deal with it. Not everyone can be perfect.”. I think such a response, in reply to someone who feels bullied by a senior members and worries the community is/will close ranks, is not the best course of action, and in fact is better off not being made. Even assuming your comment was not a deontological imperative, but rather a shorthand for a heuristic argument, I am very uncertain as to what heuristic you are suggesting and why you think it’s a good heuristic.

Even if you ignored all that and rewrote your original comment differently, that might be sufficient to make headway.

Does that make things clearer? If this line of inquiry also seems too unweildy to begin replying to, can you go up meta levels and suggest a way to proceed?

KnaveOfAllTrades 24 Sep 2014 12:30 UTC
0 points
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in reply to: Dentin’s comment on: Inquiry into community standards
I’m not sure exactly which parts you’re referring to, so can you quote the parts you find odd or by which you are confused?

KnaveOfAllTrades 24 Sep 2014 12:14 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: drethelin’s comment on: Inquiry into community standards

Those aren’t weird deontological rules and you’re just throwing in those words to describe those phrases as boo lights. MOST things people say aren’t meant as strict rules, but as contextual and limited responses to the conversation at hand.

There is a very particular mental process of deontological thinking that epistemic rationalists should train themselves to defuse, in which an argument is basically short-circuited by a magic, invalid step. If the mental process that actually takes place in someone’s head is, ‘This person criticised a net-positive figure. Therefore, they must be belittled’, and that’s as far as their ability to justify actually goes, that seems like the kind of thinking an epistemic rationalist would want to be alerted to and detrain, if it’s taking place subconsciously.

You’re proposing the alternative that shminux could justify it further but is using it as a shorthand, and that I’m confusing that omission for an absence of recursive justification. The bare bones of shminux’s comment would be “gwern is imperfect but hugely net positive. So deal with it. Not everyone can be perfect.” If that’s not deontological thinking, then it remains such a general heuristic argument, bare of any specific details of the case at hand, that it’s a crappy comment to make to someone who feels that they’ve been bullied by a senior member and is probably worried the community will close ranks. It’s not just a matter of ‘What is the most charitable interpretation of shminux’s comment’, it’s also e.g. ‘What is the distribution over interpretations that would actually occur to someone who feels bullied and aggrieved?’

It looks like I’m making a fully general counterargument against arguments by calling anything short of a computer-verifiable argument deontological. It looks like you’re making a fully general counterargument against accusations of deontological argument.

Your point (3) is an example of a recurring thing where I question a particular comment someone makes to a post, and then someone comes along and makes a bunch of arguments about why the original poster is in fact an idiot or defector or whatever and gets a bunch of upvotes by (intentional or otherwise) sleight of hand; they look like they’re refuting my comment, but all they’ve done is justify general skepticism of the original poster, rather than a specific justification of the response that I questioned. It introduces a false dichotomy between belittling the original poster and ‘opening the floodgates’, and (intentionally or otherwise) makes me look like the naive idiot who wants to open the floodgates and the other person like the heroic, gritty defender of the forum. When all I was saying was that being mean in that specific way isn’t the best thing from a consequentialist perspective. Specifically:

You can’t treat everyone who complains about being bullied by the community seriously.

This is the false dichotomy. You are (intentionally or otherwise) completely misrepresenting what I’m saying. It looks to me like I got rounded off in your mind to ‘naive person who thinks all claims of bullying deontologically have to be taken seriously’, which is what annoyed you. You should be more careful when interpreting in future in such situations.

That’s like auto-cooperating in a world full of potential defectors.

Or I’m not using a deontological or generalised heuristic, and I’m just making the specific claim that the exact response from this exact person in this exact case was not great. Apply your own skepticism of assumptions of deontology to me, if you will insist they be applied to shminux.

It creates an incentive to punish anyone you dislike by starting a thread about how mean they are to you

It’s not obvious to me that this slippery slope is slippery enough to justify the specific response in this specific case.

and also has a chilling effect on conversation in general.

If I’m correct and shminux’s reply was inappropriate, then that also has a chilling effect on those who have grievances. Additionally, I found shminux’s reply and the amount of support it originally had very off-putting. I knew that I’d have to take a long time responding to it to try to point out what was wrong with it, and risk downvotes and obnoxious responses to do so. Then I found that some of the responses I did actually get (including yours) made me feel emotionally disgusted enough, and seemed so fundamentally crappy down several inferential layers, that it took me this long to respond and even begin to be able to roughly convey my position. I say this not as a definitive assertion that nobody should have challenged me, but to point out that you only mentioned the chilling effects on the accused without mentioning the effects on the accuser and other community members.

Despite the rudeness, Gwern’s replies in the linked conversation were lengthy and tried to convey information and thoughts. I’ve seen plenty of examples of people afraid to talk because they might offend someone online, and I don’t really want the threshold for being punished for rudeness to be that low on Lesswrong.

This seems very far away from my specific criticisms of shminux’s comment.

Point (4) also does not connect to the specifics of shminux’s comment.

Point (5) is defused by the obsevation that I was not defending ThisSpaceAvailable’s post, but rather was criticising shminux’s comment on the grounds that there are better responses than shminux’s to the post. I find it extremely telling that you then state there are much better ways to make Less Wrong less rude, when you failed to understand that my comment was saying to shminux that there are much better ways of responding to a post like this than making a comment that pattern-matches extremely strongly to closing ranks around a senior community member. I.e. the form of your (5) is similar to the form of my comment, yet you missed what my comment was saying, and this seems like significant evidence to me that you were mindkilled by my comment.

KnaveOfAllTrades 24 Sep 2014 11:22 UTC
−8 points
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in reply to: Salemicus’s comment on: Street action “Stop existential risks!”, Union square, San Francisco, September 27, 2014 at 2:00 PM
Whoever downvoted my earlier comment (or this one), please explain your downvote.

I think my comment was on-point, truthful...

If you’re claiming that you claiming these attributes justifies your post, I note it’s circular reasoning. Otherwise, onto the next:

...pithy...

Even in conjunction with the other attributes you list, I’m not sure that pith is even close to being a good thing more often than not. See ciphergoth’s post on never being sarcastic

...and not overly rude...

It took me up to now to figure out a plausible (though not necessarily probable), non-insulting interpretation of your comment. Originally it came across as you calling the original poster laughable and naive, and belittling them for being an unsuccessful campaigner. I also originally thought you were laughing at their advocacy of immortality because you are against immortality, but I now think that that might have been me misinterpreting to an extent you couldn’t have reasonably avoided.

I genuinely think the post is hilarious, because it shows so many cognitive biases in service of “rationalism.”

This is a justification for your comment being truthful, not for it being useful.

The poster claims he wants to reduce X-risk. But his proposed solution is to stand in the street with placards saying “Stop Existential Risks!” And then magically a solution appears, because of “awareness.” What would we say about, for example, a malaria charity that used such a tactic?

This comes across to me as you pattern-matching the original poster to the Clueless Activist stereotype and then being discharitable to them retroactively because of that pattern match. Omitting the details of how street activism and awareness-raising causes good outcomes is not the same as there not being any mechanism by which it would work. This feels like it should be immediately obvious if you were trying at all to be empathetic or trying to identify non-crazy interpretations of the original post.

What would we say about, for example, a malaria charity that used such a tactic?

Effective Altruists wouldn’t respond like you did to someone suggesting street activism just because it pattern-matches to stereotypical clueless non-effective altruism. EA’s don’t belittle conventional interventions.

More to the point your third bullet point doesn’t constitute a valid argument for making your comment. Even if the original poster is proposing a magical non-effective intervention, you haven’t shown why this is significant evidence in favour of your actual comment, rather than just for not taking their proposal too seriously. This argumentative omission seems to be a recurring theme to me when I question someone who belittles a new or inexperienced user; it’s easy to mock a new user or make an inexperienced user seem silly, and get upvotes because that rhetorical sleight of hand makes it look like you’ve actually justified your specific response to them, when all you’ve done is justify general skepticism of their suggestion.

I seem to recall that policy debates shouldn’t appear one-sided. Yet all his slogans are ridiculous. Consider, for example, “Prevent Global Catastrophe!” Do you think that people who don’t take existential risks are in favour of global catastrophe? What does it even mean to say there is a 50% chance of a global catastrophe?

As above.

Perhaps the funniest part is that the poster has already organised street actions for immortality. Presumably, he must believe that those made great strides to solving the problem of immortality(!!!), which is why he’s now using the same tactics to tackle existential risk more generally...

Unless you have significant specific knowledge of the effectiveness of street action, this collapses down to ‘My prior belief, pending further information, is that street action is ineffective.’ Which conspicuously isn’t a justification (beyond being weak heuristic evidence) for your actual comment rather than general skepticism.

But in another way, his street actions for immortality were presumably successful, because they made the participants (at Burning Man, no less!) feel good about themselves, and superior to the rest of the common flock. So the second part of my comment was a double-edged sword.

Insomuch as your comment was self-effacing and potentially supportive, you did not communicate that clearly.

I could go on. Ultimately, if you make a ridiculous post, you can’t expect people not to laugh.

This is a linguistically Clever argument that wins rhetorical points but is extremely non-obvious, particularly in the context of Less Wrong. Again this fails to specifically justify your comment rather than having the reaction of laughing at the post (but not necessarily commenting to that effect).

With all these points, I can make lots of guessesd at what the filled-out form of your argument would be, but I have lots of uncertainty over interpretations and it would be a lot more efficient if you spelled out your arguments.

KnaveOfAllTrades 21 Sep 2014 14:43 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Salemicus’s comment on: Street action “Stop existential risks!”, Union square, San Francisco, September 27, 2014 at 2:00 PM
Whoever downvoted this comment, please explain your downvote.

turchin’s proposed action makes me uneasy, but how would you justify this comment? Generally such comments are discouraged here, and you would’ve been downvoted into oblivion if you’d made such a response to a proposal that weren’t so one-sidedly rejected by Less Wrong. What’s the relevant difference that justifies your comment in this case, or do you think such comments are generally okay here, or do you think you over-reacted?

KnaveOfAllTrades 20 Sep 2014 15:59 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: satt’s comment on: You’re Entitled to Everyone’s Opinion
Oops, I didn’t actually read 7 and assumed it was public opinion had grown more positive. Given the two choices actually presented, I’d say 7 more likely.

Edit: Relative credences (not necessarily probabilities since I’m conditioning on there being significant effect sizes), generated naively trying not to worry too much about second-guessing how you distributed intuitive and counterintuitive results:

1:07 : 33:67
2:08 : 33:67
3:09 : 67:33
4:10 : 40:60
5:11 : 45:55
6:12 : 85:15

KnaveOfAllTrades 19 Sep 2014 7:57 UTC
5 points
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in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: What It’s Like to Notice Things

In another project spaced repetition project I used Anki to learn to distinguish color that he didn’t distinguish beforehand.

I think I managed to do this when learning flags, with Chad and Romania. It seemed like I got to the point where I could reliably distinguish their flags on my phone, whereas when I started, I did no better than chance. I did consciously explain this to somebody else as something interesting, but now that I think about it, I failed to find it as interesting as I should have, because the idea that seeing a card a few times on Anki can increase my phenomenal granularity or decrease the amount of phenomenal data that my brain throws away, is pretty amazing.