Mark_Eichenlaub

Karma: 638

Mark_Eichenlaub 1 Sep 2010 18:05 UTC
6 points
on: Rationality quotes: September 2010
“The things with which we concern ourselves in science appear in myriad forms, and with a multitude of attributes. For example, if we stand on the shore and look at the sea, we see the water, the waves breaking, the foam, the sloshing motion of the water, the sounds, the air, the winds and the clouds, the sun and the blue sky, and light; there is sand and there are rocks of various hardness and permanence, color and texture. There are animals and seaweed, hunger and disease, and the observer on the beach; there may be even happiness and thought. Any other spot in nature has a similar variety of things and influences. It is always as complicated as that, no matter where it is. Curiosity demands that we ask questions, that we try to put things together and try to understand this multitude of aspects as perhaps resulting from the action of a relatively small number of elemental things and forces acting in an infinite variety of combinations.”

Richard Feynman “The Feynman Lectures on Physics”, section 2-1

Mark_Eichenlaub 4 Sep 2010 18:31 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Snowyowl’s comment on: Frugality and working from finite data

But a photon emitted by object A would not be going fast enough to outrace the >expansion of space, and would never reach B. So B would never obtain any >information about A if they are flying apart faster than light.

I think that was the point, but since the expansion is accelerating this was not always the case.

A and B are retreating faster than light now (in our reference frame), so the light they are emitting now will not reach each other.

However, the A and B are far apart, say 5 billion light years. 5 billion years ago A and B were receding more slowly—perhaps half the speed of light, so the light emitted 5 billion years ago from A is now reaching B. Hence, B currently sees light from A.

Five billion years in the future this will not be the case. Sometime in the next 5 billion years B will observe A to redshift all the way to zero and wink out.

Mark_Eichenlaub 6 Sep 2010 1:53 UTC
14 points
on: Something’s Wrong

But the atheist, if he retains his composure, can say, “I don’t know, but so what?

or, “I don’t know, but won’t it be interesting to try to find out?”

Mark_Eichenlaub 15 Sep 2010 11:59 UTC
10 points
on: The Affect Heuristic, Sentiment, and Art
Suppose this post were written so
It self-illustrated: take a doe
Peaceful and quiet in a field of grass
About to get shot in the ash
Tree grove it calls its home
By a hunter on the roam
But the doe is lucky as ever can be
The hunter, that morning, had just watched “Bambi”.

The example take a double life
One strand explicit, the other rife
With self-reference
What’s your preference?

Does this comment make you bored?
Is it obvious and hackneyed, its conceit absurd?
Wedged in between so many others
I know that if I had my druthers
I’d skip it, or rip it, in general stand up it
But I cannot ignore its rhyming couplet.

You might say that it’s gimmicky.
I don’t mind; in that sense, it mimics me.

Mark_Eichenlaub 8 Feb 2011 11:57 UTC
16 points
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: Procedural Knowledge Gaps

I once read that 40% of the population is “immune to exercise” and I suspect I’m one of the 0.40.

I’ve been a competitive distance runner for a decade. In that time I’ve watched maybe 100 people join track or cross country teams, and every one who stays on the team more than a month has shown clear improvement, at least at first.

I’ve also known many recreational runners, and there’s a big difference between a median runner on a cross country team and a median recreational runner of the same age and gender. In fact, of the fifty or so recreational runners I’ve talked to in some depth, and thousands I’ve seen at races, I have never met someone who trained themselves independently from the beginning and could beat me at 1500 meters. Meanwhile, I’ve known scores of people who could beat me at that distance, but they all ran on teams or had run on teams in the past.

In my experience, the slowest guys who joined the team and practiced every day would run a mile in about 5:30 after a year, with a median around 5:00, and 4:40 if they kept at it for a few years. For women it was about 7:00 at slowest, median 6:00 and around 5:30 for women who trained for some time. (Talented men and women run much faster; the times I cited are typical for moderately-athletic people. I ran 4:21 and never won anything big.)

Meanwhile, recreational runners I know tell me their bests are about 6:30 median for men and 8:00 for women. I haven’t collected solid data, but the divide is so sharp I’m convinced by personal experience that being on a track or cross country team makes you much faster. This in turn implies that everyone, or almost everyone, is trainable for distance running.

My experience applies mostly to men and women age 15 − 25, so I’m not sure if the same holds for older people. There is also the possibility that only fast people, or only trainable people, would stick around on the teams, but the teams I’ve been on made no cuts and were never top contenders, so the pressure was low. We sometimes had people come in forty pounds overweight and not able to run a mile, and still stick around for the entire season of training. They all improved to the point where they could run nonstop for an hour and run pretty fast for five minutes straight.

The practical advice is that hiring an athletic trainer or joining a team may lead to a significant improvement if you’re having trouble doing it on your own. This specifically applies to running. I don’t know about lifting weights, exercise machines, yoga, walking, etc.

Mark_Eichenlaub 8 Feb 2011 21:37 UTC
3 points
in reply to: orthonormal’s comment on: Procedural Knowledge Gaps
Are you suggesting that people join track teams because they have the capacity to improve at running? Maybe a third of those people had no prior experience with running and could not have known whether they would improve.

Or are you suggesting that people who don’t improve quit in less than a month? I can’t really answer that, except that it seems unlikely that all the people with no inborn ability to improve are also the people who will give up on something in less than a month.

Mark_Eichenlaub 9 Feb 2011 4:35 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Jonathan_Graehl’s comment on: Procedural Knowledge Gaps
No, I’m not sure how strong the selection effects are. In fact it’s seems certain that some selection effects exist, and I don’t know how to estimate them. But the signal is so strong that I didn’t think selection effects could explain all of it. It might be an interesting question to investigate. Presumably there are studies done on making out-of-shape people exercise. Military recruiting and training could also provide a lot of data.

Mark_Eichenlaub 20 Mar 2011 5:22 UTC
4 points
in reply to: JoshuaZ’s comment on: Being a teacher

I’m waiting for someone to construct an example where one has adjectives in pairs that exhibit non-transitive order.

To me, a “solitary blue Smurf” is the color blue, but a “blue, solitary Smurf” is sad.

From The Night Before Christmas

“He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf,”

versus

“He was chubby and plump, a right old jolly elf,”

The original doesn’t make me think that Saint Nick is literally old. It’s more like the “old” in “good old boys” (which is another example; compare to “old good boys”). The transposition seems to change the literal meaning. If you permute some more, you can wind up with nonsense—“an old jolly right elf”, “an old right jolly elf”, etc.

As another example, I would have a different idea of what’s being said if someone pointed out to me a “sweaty hot runner” versus a “hot sweaty runner”. The first makes me think the runner is sexually attractive, but the second doesn’t.

Mark_Eichenlaub 20 Mar 2011 5:43 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Alicorn’s comment on: Being a teacher
Ah, yes. That sounds right.

Mark_Eichenlaub 21 Mar 2011 7:14 UTC
2 points
in reply to: JoshuaZ’s comment on: Being a teacher
First, I guess I should clear up that we’re talking about commutativity, not transitivity.

I think it is an example of non-commutativity. It’s exactly the same words with the order switched, and the meaning changes. However, you’re also right to point out that the meaning of the word “hot” is changing even though the word itself is not.

Here’s an example of non-commutativity in which the words’ individual meanings stay the same, but the overall meaning changes.

“I remember my good first attempt.”

“I remember my first good attempt.”

Mark_Eichenlaub 30 Mar 2011 11:07 UTC
0 points
in reply to: JoshuaZ’s comment on: Being a teacher
Oh, I see. Sorry I missed the point. I don’t have any examples of examples of that.

Mark_Eichenlaub 19 Apr 2011 8:58 UTC
14 points
on: Build Small Skills in the Right Order
I have always tried to “Build Small Skills in the Right Order”, but I think it has been detrimental or even crippling to my learning process in some cases.

I’m pretty good at math, but I haven’t studied advanced math and would like to begin a program of self-study. I have started a few times, usually reading the first couple of chapters of a high-level calculus book (Apostol or Spivak), or something at a similar level.

I already know calculus well, having used it as a physics major in college and taught it as a private tutor for high school students, but I am not completely familiar with all the subtleties, such as why Taylor series converge and under what conditions. Reviewing calculus before diving into an advanced book on real analysis seems like a good idea because I know I can understand the calculus book, and reading it will prepare me to study more challenging material.

Nonetheless, what usually happens is that I get impatient at the slow progress, bored with the material, and want to jump straight to the more difficult book. If I do, I feel like I am “doing it wrong” by ignoring the small skills, but if I don’t, I wind up abandoning the program of study. I think I would have learned much more than I have by now if instead of a schedule of small skills, I’d simply opened advanced books to whatever section interested me and started plugging away, going back to review as necessary.

Similarly, early when I was a competitive distance runner, I read scores of books and internet forums for advice on training, then designed detailed training programs with careful “periodization” which would gradually build up my total amount and speed of running to the right quantities at the right time of the year. I also had many different gym exercises to do to build all requisite fitness before I could undergo the hardest training.

The result was that I was overly worried about whether my training was “correct”, frequently got worn down or injured, and didn’t perform well. Later, when I stopped worrying about all the small skills involved and simply ran every day for an amount that felt right to me, I improved a lot.

These examples aren’t intended to contradict the advice to build small skills, but to point out that even if a skill is both small and helpful to your larger goals, it is not necessarily the right skill to work on. In one case, the skills I chose were actually too small; in the other they were distracting.

Mark_Eichenlaub 18 Sep 2011 23:02 UTC
1 point
on: Meetup : BALTIMORE: Anyone wanna meet up?
I missed this announcement earlier, but I’d be interested in a meetup in the future. I’m on the Homewood campus of Hopkins, right by that cafe.

Mark_Eichenlaub 2 Nov 2011 5:52 UTC
4 points
in reply to: pragmatist’s comment on: 2011 Less Wrong Census / Survey
GRE quantitative scores are not useful for high-IQ estimates because 6% of people get perfect scores.

A perfect GRE verbal score is roughly the 99.8th percentile, as can be inferred from the charts in this pdf: http://www.ets.org/Media/Tests/GRE/pdf/994994.pdf It shows that the percent of people with a perfect scores varies between less than 0.1% and 1.5%, depending on field, but it is usually 0.1% or 0.2%. (The 1.5% field was philosophy.) Because many non-native English speakers take the test, it’s likely that one ought to adjust that percentile a bit lower.

That’s among people applying to grad school, which is a higher-IQ group than the general population, but not by so much that 99.8th percentile among grad school applicants correlates to the 99.996th percentile among the general population, as that site (http://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/GREIQ.aspx) claims. That would be impossible assuming more than one in fifty people in the applies to grad school.

If we attribute a perfect GRE score to the 99.8th percentile, then looking up that percentile on the chart on the same page, we get an IQ score >142 for 1600 on the GRE.

Mark_Eichenlaub 4 Nov 2011 9:12 UTC
0 points
in reply to: dbaupp’s comment on: 2011 Less Wrong Census / Survey
thanks

Mark_Eichenlaub 2 Dec 2011 11:57 UTC
6 points
on: Announcing the Quantified Health Prize
The contest asks for “A recommendation list that tells people what they should do based on their situation, without any additional information or explanation. Keep it as short as possible, but no shorter.”

Are there limits on the sorts of recommendations that are considered acceptable? For example, could one recommend no mineral supplementation? Alternatively, instead of recommending mineral quantities, could the paper recommend a procedure of personal experimentation saying, “take mineral A and monitor the results with process A’, then adjust according to criteria A*, then take mineral B and monitor the results using criteria B’...”

Mark_Eichenlaub 13 Jan 2012 21:18 UTC
34 points
in reply to: Grif’s comment on: Can the Chain Still Hold You?
This story is not true. Bannister broke 4:00 in May of 1954. The next person to do it was John Landy 46 days later. Bannister’s training partner Chris Chataway did it the next year, as did another British runner. However, I think Bannister and Landy were the only two to do it in 1954. The first American to do it was Don Bowden in 1957.

I found a list for the US here Also a master list of many runners, but difficult to parse.

There were three runners close to the sub-four mile in the early 50′s. The other two were Wes Santee and John Landy. They didn’t race each other while trying to break 4:00 because Santee was American, Bannister British, Landy Australian.

According to Neil Bascomb’s The Perfect Mile, the race to sub-4 was highly publicized, and most people believed that it could in fact be done. There are some quotes from Landy saying that 4:00 was an unbreakable wall, but I believe these were mostly comments from him in dejection after early failures to beat the mark.

Bannister also wrote a memoir about running sub-4. I do not remember the flea story from it. Google books doesn’t return any hits in that book for the word “flea”

Wikipedia says:

The claim that a 4-minute mile was once thought to be impossible by informed observers was and is a widely propagated myth created by sportswriters and debunked by Bannister himself in his memoir, The Four Minute Mile (1955). The reason the myth took hold was that four minutes was a nice round number which was slightly better (1.4 seconds) than the world record for nine years, longer than it probably otherwise would have been because of the effect of World War II in interrupting athletic progress in the combatant countries. The Swedish runners Gunder Hägg and Arne Andersson, in a series of head-to-head races in the period 1942-45, had already lowered the world mile record by 5 seconds to the pre-Bannister record. (See Mile run world record progression.) What is still impressive to knowledgeable track fans is that Bannister ran a four-minute mile on very low-mileage training by modern standards.

The stuff about centuries of buildup and ancient Greece is absurd. In ancient Greece they did not use the mile to measure, and measurements and timekeeping were not accurate enough for this anyway. Wikipedia lists mile records only back to 1855.

Mark_Eichenlaub 18 Jan 2012 9:14 UTC
2 points
on: Leveling Up in Rationality: A Personal Journey
I am curious: when someone says they are happy, how do you judge the credibility of the claim?

There are certainly a lot of reasons to trust Luke’s judgment. His other claims are verifiable, and given the nature of his message and the community he’s delivering it to, he probably feels a strong desire both to tell the truth and to understand the truth about himself.

Nonetheless, I suspect there are far more people who claim to be happy than who really are, essentially due to belief in belief. What are some tests? For example, are there people known to have high emotional intelligence who know Luke well and think he exhibits high happiness levels?

I hope this doesn’t come off as a personal questioning of Luke in particular. It seems like a difficult problem in general, but nonetheless an important one if I want to study what people have to say about happiness.

Mark_Eichenlaub 1 Feb 2012 20:24 UTC
29 points
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: Rationality Quotes February 2012
I was interested in the context here. Chesterton was referencing Wells’ original belief that the classes would differentiate until the upper class ate the lower class. Wells changed his mind to believe the classes would merge.

The entire book is free on Google Books.

Mark_Eichenlaub 2 Feb 2012 23:43 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Douglas_Knight’s comment on: Question on math in “A Technical Explanation of Technical Explanation”
Thanks. I realize now I calculated those numbers I cited while leaving out the payoff from the .3 option since it wasn’t changing, then forgot to add it back in. Strange what Wikipedia says when there was this counterexample. If I have some time later I’ll check through the sources linked in the article.