Maelin

• Maelin 4 Nov 2012 8:10 UTC

  52 points

  on: 2012 Less Wrong Cen­sus/​Survey

  Done. I did all of the extra credit except the Myers-Briggs. The IQ test was the most interesting but three or four questions towards the ends were frustratingly difficult and refused to yield their secrets to me; even now I can feel lingering annoyance at the fact that I eventually gave up on them instead of wrestling with them for longer. Oh well.

• Maelin 19 Jan 2012 1:30 UTC

  40 points

  in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: The Sin­gu­lar­ity In­sti­tute’s Ar­ro­gance Problem

  For someone who knows how to program, learning LaTeX to a perfectly serviceable level should take at most one day’s worth of effort, and most likely it would be spread diffusely throughout the using process, with maybe a couple of hours’ dedicated introduction to begin with.

  It is quite possible that, considering the effort required to find an editor and organise for that editor to edit an entire paper into LaTeX, compared with the effort required to write the paper in LaTeX in the first place, the additional effort cost of learning LaTeX may in fact pay for itself after less than one whole paper. It’s very unlikely that it would take more than two.

• Maelin 26 May 2010 19:56 UTC

  27 points

  in reply to: LauraABJ’s comment on: On En­joy­ing Disagree­able Company

  Can somebody nonpartisan give us the Cliff’s Notes of the whole mess? I tried reading it. Then I tried skimming it. It seems to rely on some whole pre-existing unpleasant dynamic between several commenters of which I am currently blissfully unaware, and it also looks quite seriously dull.

  It also looks pretty damn childish, despite having lots of fun mature-sounding rationalist words. A silly playground arguments is still a silly playground argument.

  Are we really going to do this kind of thing on LessWrong now? Nothing is going to turn away non-committed members quite like a huge load of tedious, irrelevent drama on a front page post. I myself am, at this moment, feeling a moderate urge to say “welp, looks like LW has gone to shit now, oh well, thanks internet drama,” and I’ve been lurking here since the OB days.

  It would take a lot of evidence to convince me that this shitstorm is going to end up being productive.

• Maelin 17 Apr 2011 8:18 UTC

  25 points

  on: Offense ver­sus harm minimization

  This is an interesting post, but Yvain, your made-up pronouns hurt my head. Every time I come to one it disrupts my reading flow and feels like my train of thought crashes into a brick wall. It genuinely makes the post more difficult and less pleasant to read for me. Couldn’t you just flip a coin for each new character you reference and give them male or female pronouns based on that?

[Cry­on­ics News] Aus­tralian cry­on­ics startup: Sta­sis Sys­tems Aus­tralia update

• Maelin 12 Jan 2012 1:31 UTC

  19 points

  in reply to: thomblake’s comment on: What jobs are safe in an au­to­mated fu­ture?

  I predict that the transition period between modern capitalism and post-capitalism will be very awkward and uncomfortable, as the number of jobs that it is economical for a human to perform slowly shrinks and shrinks, putting more people in unemployment. Assuming no singularity beforehand, the point at which we collectively decide that everyone gets a good quality of life provided for them without having to work for it will probably come long after the point at which it is warranted.

• Maelin 11 Apr 2011 5:18 UTC

  18 points

  in reply to: curi’s comment on: [Er­ror com­mu­ni­cat­ing with LW2 server]

  But this is nullified in the colour die experiment of Tversky and Kahneman, as detailed in the Conjunction Fallacy article, as linked by HonoreDB in a comment in this very topic, as so far unaddressed by you.

  Consider a regular six-sided die with four green faces and two red faces. The die will be rolled 20 times and the sequences of greens (G) and reds (R) will be recorded. You are asked to select one sequence, from a set of three, and you will win $25 if the sequence you chose appears on successive rolls of the die. Please check the sequence of greens and reds on which you prefer to bet.

  1. RGRRR

  2. GRGRRR

  3. GRRRRR

  65% still chose sequence 2 despite it being a conjunction of sequence 1 with another event. There was actual money on the line if the students chose a winning sequence. There is no plausible way that the students could have misinterpreted this question because of ambiguous understandings of phrases involving “probability”.

  I find your claim that people interpret “which is more probable” as asking something other than which is more probable to be dubious at best, but it completely fails to explain the above study result.

• Maelin 29 May 2012 5:23 UTC

  17 points

  in reply to: Grognor’s comment on: When None Dare Urge Res­traint, pt. 2

  I know this image is pretty much pure applause light and no substance, but I think it might serve as a great talking point to post on Facebook for all my less rational friends.

• Maelin 29 Jun 2012 8:13 UTC

  16 points

  on: Nash Equil­ibria and Schel­ling Points

  This is a minor quibble, but while reading I got stuck at this point:

  And since John Nash (remember that movie A Beautiful Mind?) proved that every game has at least one,

  followed by a description of a game that didn’t seem to have a Nash equilibrium and confirming text “Here there is no pure Nash equilibrium.” and “So every option has someone regretting their choice, and there is no simple Nash equilibrium. What do you do?”

  I kept re-reading this section, trying to work out how to reconcile these statements since it seemed like you have just offered an irrefutable counterexample to John Nash’s theorem. It could use a bit of clarification (maybe something like “This game does have a Nash equilibrium, but one that is a little more subtle” or something similar.

  Other than that I’m finding this sequence excellent so far.

• Maelin 7 Apr 2011 11:11 UTC

  16 points

  in reply to: Dorikka’s comment on: First Waco, Texas LW Meetup, 4/​09, 1PM

  Yeah, wow. What the hell, guys. Stop undermining my naive belief that LW is a place free from shitty internet drama. There’s only so much evidence I can ignore.

• Maelin 31 May 2012 7:36 UTC

  15 points

  on: Only say ‘ra­tio­nal’ when you can’t elimi­nate the word

  Similarly, you can eliminate the sentence ‘rational’ from almost any sentence in which it appears. “It’s rational to believe the sky is blue”, “It’s true that the sky is blue”, and “The sky is blue”, all convey exactly the same information about what color you think the sky is—no more, no less.

  I might be missing the point of this paragraph, but it seems to me that “it’s rational to believe the sky is blue” and “the sky is blue” do not convey the same information. I can conceive of situations in which it is rational to believe the sky is blue, and yet the sky is not blue. For example, the sky is green, but superintelligent alien pranksters install undetected nanotech devices into my optic and auditory nerves/​brain, altering my perceptions and memories so that I see the green sky as blue, and hear (read) the word “blue” where other people have actually said (written) the word “green” when describing the sky.

  Under these circumstances, all my evidence would indicate the sky is blue—and so it would be rational to believe that the sky is blue. And yet the sky is not blue. But the first statement doesn’t feel like I am generalising over cognitive algorithms in the sense I took from the big paragraph.

  Am I missing or misinterpreting something?

• Maelin 14 Feb 2012 7:03 UTC

  15 points

  in reply to: Risto_Saarelma’s comment on: Ra­tion­al­ity Quotes Fe­bru­ary 2012

  Yvain’s post The Apologist and the Revolutionary from a couple of years ago had some fascinating and mind-boggling discussion of other bizarre things that result from particular brain damage.

• Maelin 3 Nov 2011 3:54 UTC

  15 points

  in reply to: atorm’s comment on: The Ma­jor­ity Is Always Wrong

  I was raised with the metric system and I have to agree with your sentiment. Metric lacks convenient human-sized units. Decimeters are maybe acceptable for lengths, but few people use them. I myself often use feet and inches to describe human-sized objects just because they are more convenient. But as soon as I have to do any kind of work with a quantity beyond pure description, I will swap to metric.

• Maelin 3 Jul 2012 2:27 UTC

  13 points

  on: Less Wrong Product & Ser­vice Recommendations

  Tasker (Android app)

  Lets you automate many activities on an Android phone. You define a context based on various conditions (e.g. connected to a Wifi network, using certain cell towers, phone spatially oriented a certain way) and various actions to perform upon entering and exiting that context. You can set variables and condition upon them, there is flow control for actions, customisable home screen widgets and shortcuts, and many other neat functions.

  Some examples of tasks I use /​ am pondering:

  • When my phone is on any of the cell towers around my house, it switches the wifi on (to connect to my home network)

  • When the phone connects to my home network, it sends a magic packet to my PC and turns it on—but only if I am getting home at a time when I’m likely to want to use the PC (varies depending on day). But it only does this if it has been disconnected for at least half an hour (in case the connection drops out momentarily overnight)

  • When my phone disconnects from my car’s Bluetooth hands free kit, it waits two minutes and then switches the Bluetooth antenna off.

  • When my phone is connected to its charger and turned face-down overnight (how I leave it next to my bed), it engages silent mode until 08:30am

  • A toggle button on my home screens, that switches my phone to silent and turns network-level call forwarding on (for when I am at work/​movies/​etc)

  There’s a wiki with lots of downloadable setups you can experiment with for neat results.

• Maelin 31 May 2012 3:52 UTC

  13 points

  in reply to: beoShaffer’s comment on: When None Dare Urge Res­traint, pt. 2

  Not by me! One friend immediately replied, describing living forever as an ‘unbelievably horrible concept’. An argument developed in which he claimed to be opposed to medicine in general because it results in overpopulation. A few friends who are LW readers and/​or transhumanists joined in and it grew a bit one-sided. I tried to inoffensively explain that his arguments seemed to be neglecting the fact that the other human problems we have (which would be exacerbated by cured aging) might also be solvable, failed at the ‘inoffensive’ part, and he got angry at me for thinking I knew what he was thinking better than he did and then abandoned the thread. Afterwards a few of the people who’ve ‘already seen the light’ discussed a few interesting points about the topic, like hard limits on energy consumption/​use, etc.

  I’ll take partial blame—I didn’t work hard enough to maintain civility, in my own posts or in the atmosphere in general. I have previously argued with this person about life extension etc and found that he pattern matches very promptly into the ‘typical’ opposer—who summons up every problem they can connect to the idea immediately without any thought for plausibility or relevance.

  Overall it was a bit of a disappointment but some friends who I don’t think would have been exposed to the idea much otherwise did put some ‘likes’ on a few comments, which is heartening.

• Maelin 8 Nov 2012 7:05 UTC

  12 points

  on: PROPOSAL: LessWrong for Teenagers

  I think this is a good idea. I wish LW had existed when I was a teenager; maybe I could have got started on the path to enlightenment earlier, instead of spending more than half a decade as one of those smirking, sarcastic, self-congratulatory Atheists that now make me cringe. But it does seem likely that LW could be intimidating to teenagers, and this seems to me to be a demographic we should be trying to reach.

  Perhaps we could make an effort to produce some more accessible, entry-level posts that provide a gentler introduction to the material of the sequences and LW community memes, without assumed prereading, as part of this...

Cry­on­ics in Aus­tralia: How do you ac­tu­ally do it?

• Maelin 28 Nov 2012 13:49 UTC

  9 points

  on: Group ra­tio­nal­ity di­ary, 11/​28/​12

  For 9 days now I have set up my computer as a makeshift standing desk, using a pair of $10 Ikea coffee tables on top of my actual desk, and two $3 rubber mats and some cardboard to stand on. I have an appallingly sedentary lifestyle and often catch myself sitting at my desk with a terrible slumped posture, so I’m hoping to catch back problems before they occur, and also exert a bit more energy just day-to-day.

  Each day my feet take a little longer to begin hurting, but they still hurt a lot by bed time. I have to take a few breaks to the couch to watch TV through the day to get by. I am planning to set up something more serious so I can put a stool at the desk and sit down from time to time without disrupting my usual activities (at the moment I don’t own a stool, and there’s nowhere for my legs to fit under the desk in any case).

  Currently the only things preventing me from taking the desk down right now and just waiting until I have sorted a better solution are 1) my feet don’t start to hurt until the end of the day, when I usually can’t be bothered rearranging everything, and 2) I’m worried that without the driving force of aching feet every day I won’t feel compelled to go through with arranging a better solution.

• Maelin 21 Jun 2012 4:10 UTC

  9 points

  in reply to: alyssavance’s comment on: What Would You Like To Read? A Quick Poll

  I would at least make one comment saying “Vote in the options below” and then have the options as replies to it. Specify that any discussion should occur outside of that thread. The way it is now, the various poll options are scattered haphazardly throughout the comments and are hard to find.

  You should also include an extra reply as a karma sink, so people can balance out the upvotes with downvotes. Not having a karma sink actually gave me a note of reluctance to vote in the poll, which suggests including one will remove one barrier to participation.

• Maelin 22 May 2012 5:05 UTC

  9 points

  on: Group ra­tio­nal­ity di­ary, 5/​21/​12

  A couple of months ago I tried a modafinil tablet when I had to do one of the many assignments I have for my current course (studying to be a high school maths/​science/​IT teacher). I have developed huge, unbearable ugh fields with the assignments for this course because they require me to write lots and lots of bullshit, which I am quite good at but despise doing.

  Anyway, at the advice of another LW member I made a to-do list before I took the modafinil, and I found that I powered through the assignment without even feeling like a break. It took longer than expected (as usual) and I didn’t end up accomplishing anything else on the list, but I found I felt really positive and switched-on the whole time. I didn’t use modafinil again for a while.

  So the other day, after a friend cajoled me for not experimenting again, I tried it out once more for a different context—this time playing a board game (Small World) at a friend’s place. I was curious to see if it would have any effects in a social context. Unfortunately this time I didn’t really notice any change at all, and afterwards I asked a couple of friends if I’d seemed different in any way and they hadn’t noticed anything either.

  So I’m now thinking about trying some testing. I’ve debated buying a capsuling machine and making some placebo capsules but it seems like grinding and capsuling would be a lot of effort; someone suggested I could just just encase the pills in peanut butter or nutella or similar and swallow them that way. I have two housemates who could easily help me set up a double blind test.

  Any advice?

  What links here?

  • Maelin's comment on Group ra­tio­nal­ity di­ary, 6/​25/​12 by cata (2 Jul 2012 6:04 UTC; 2 points)