I took the survey; apparently I get karma for that? :-)
mathnerd314
Karma: 92
17 Rules to Make a Definition that Avoids the 37 Ways of Words Being Wrong
Once upon a time I tried using what I could coin “quicklists”. I took a receipt, turned it over to the back (clear side), and jotted down 5-10 things that I wanted to believe. Then I set a timer for 24 hours and, before that time elapsed, acted as if I believed those things. My experiment was too successful; by the time 24 hours were up I had ended up in a different county, with little recollection of what I’d been doing, and some policemen asking me pointed questions. (I don’t believe any drugs were involved, just sleep deprivation, but I can’t say for certain).
More recently, I rented and saw the film Memento, which explores these techniques in a fictional setting. The concept of short-term forgetting seemed reasonable and the techniques the character uses to work around it are easily adapted in real life. My initial test involved printing out a pamphlet with some dentistry stuff in tiny type (7 12-pt pages shrunk to fit on front-back of 1 page, folded in quarters), and carrying it with me to my dentist appointment. I was able to discuss most of the things from my pamphlet, and it did seem that the level of conversation was raised, but there were many other variables as well so it’s hard to quantify the exact effect.
I’m not certain these techniques actually count as “doublethink”, since the contradiction is between my “internal” beliefs and the beliefs I wrote down, but it does allow some exploration of the possibilities beyond rationality. I can override my system 2 with a piece of paper, and then system 1 follows.
NB: Retrieving your original beliefs after you’ve been going off of the ones from the paper is left as an exercise to the student
I was there 2005-2007.
I just rewrote your post to be about me / Steve Jobs instead of you / Grothendieck, see http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/lpp/a_long_comment/. Maybe you can understand what I mean about the post “mostly not being about math”.
You can always be wrong. Even when it’s theoretically impossible to be wrong, you can still be wrong
You missed the context, which is when someone claims “This can’t be wrong.” Rule #1 clearly states the definition can be wrong. On the other hand, there are different levels of wrongness. Sure, these rules are most likely wrong and incomplete, but they are more correct than having no rules at all. And the reason definitions aren’t the best way to give semantics is because we already have a better semantics, namely the “similarity cluster”. (Map is not the territory, etc.) But forcing someone to give a definition that follows these 17 rules gives you the similarity cluster, and avoids pretty much all of Eliezer’s 37 ways of using words wrongly (See the superscripts!). There might be other ways of using words wrongly, but they’re going to be either obvious or so subtle that nobody can catch them anyway.
As for why I wrote this article, it’s simple: I need definitions of the things on my GTD list (in particular, I need a direct specification of what constitutes a “physical, visible action” for the next-actions list), and I recalled an EY post about definitions which was his 37 ways. But that was all about how to do it wrongly, and one of my tasks is “don’t think negatively”, so I rewrote it. It was and is sitting in my WhatIs:definition zim wiki page. I posted it here to get some commentary and maybe someone checking that I interpreted his points correctly, which I’ve been getting. (Thanks guys! :-))
A prime number n is a number whose only factors are multiplicative units and n*a multiplicative unit (and these two sets are distinct). Typical examples include 2, 3, 5, 7 and 11. Less-typical examples include −2 and 1+i; they are often excluded from consideration in mathematics.
I look at it in terms of efficiency; sites like reddit are simply inefficient ways to communicate. They are good at making random connections and exploring new subject areas, and that is what I use them for: if I have heard of a subject, but don’t know about it, I find a subreddit on the topic and subscribe.
As a tool for discourse, however, there is much to be desired; communication is lossy (many posts are simply not upvoted enough to be seen) and interspersed with noise (unrelated but “viral” posts). Google Reader is almost lossless; it maintains a buffer of all messages for 30 days and then archives them so that they are available in search results but not as unread items. If one reads every feed to its end at least once a month, then no data is lost.
Google Reader thus has the odd effect of making one commit; either you are subscribed to a feed, and read every post of it, or you are not, and never see it anywhere. I have not used Reader for more than a few years, and furthermore haven’t conducted a survey of its users, but I would theorize that Reader users as a whole are more productive/active than non-users as a result. Perhaps it could be a question on the next LessWrong survey.
Indeed, but one of Eliezer’s points was that mathematical objects, e.g. the set of prime numbers, don’t need labels. I can write
without giving it a name at all, or just call it P.
The simple answer is to ask someone else, or better yet a group; if D is small, then D^2 or D^4 will be infinitesimal. However, delusions are “infectious” (see Mass hysteria), so this is not really a good method unless you’re mostly isolated from the main population.
The more complicated answer is to track your beliefs and the evidence for each belief, and then when you get new evidence for a belief, add it to the old evidence and re-evaluate. For example, replacing an old wives’ tale with a peer-reviewed study is (usually) a no-brainer. On the other hand, if you have conflicting peer-reviewed studies, then your confidence in both should decrease and you should go back to the old wives’ tale (which, being old, is probably useful as a belief, regardless of truth value).
Finally, the defeatist answer is that you can’t actually distinguish that you are delusional. With the film Shutter Island in mind, I hope you can see that almost nothing is going to shake delusions; you’ll just rationalize them away regardless. If you keep notes on your beliefs, you’ll dismiss them as being written by someone else. People will either pander to your fantasy or be dismissed as crooks. Every day will be a new one, starting over from your deluded beliefs. In such a situation there’s not much hope for change.
For the record, I disagree with “delusional disorders being quite rare”; I believe D is somewhere between 0.5 and 0.8. Certainly, only 3% of these are “serious”, but I could fill a book with all of the ways people believe something that isn’t true.
Exhibiting symptoms often considered as signs of mental illness. For example, this says 38.6% of general people have hallucinations. This says 40% of general people had paranoid thoughts. Presumably these groups aren’t exactly the same, so there you go: between 0.5 and 0.8 of the general population. You can probably pull together some more studies with similar results for other symptoms.
I don’t have experience with those, but I’ll recommend Graphviz as a free (and useful) alternative. See e.g. http://k0s.org/mozilla/workflow.svg
It sounds like we’re in violent agreement here. I’ve already verified experimentally that writings by mathnerd314_1998 are clear to mathnerd314_2009. My brain doesn’t change that much over time.
Instead, I have two other questions:
can mathnerd314_2014 understand Gunnar_Zarncke_2014 on the same level he understands mathnerd314_1998?
If both mathnerd314_2014 and mathnerd314_2020 independently write down definitions, will they be textually different?
My hypothesis is that #1 is “no”, because internal organization of concepts varies dramatically from person to person, and that #2 is “yes”, because people do change over time.
Well, there’s a tricky thing in mathematics called “the law of excluded middle”. Using the law, you can e.g. prove that a implies b is logically equivalent to (not a) or b. It also lets you do existence proofs by proving it isn’t possible for there to be no examples. So in classical logic every statement is confused with its double negation.
I generally try to use intuitionistic logic though, where a->b is not logically equivalent to anything else and double negations have to be written out. You do have
, but that only goes one direction and results in a weaker statement. If you look at my other reply with an intuitionistic frame of mind, then you’ll see that the “only” is an implication, with no negation in sight.
If you require every word you use to have a definition, and ensure the definitions follow these rules, and then consistently use the words according to their definitions, then it follows that you are using the words correctly and not wrongly.
So I guess that could be the maxims for writing:
know the definition of every word you use
ensure the definitions follow these 17 rules
use words according to their definition
It’s already random; replacing randomness with more randomness doesn’t help except for mixing in new tasks. I went through ~50 tasks today, so it’s not really that bad; just that I feel like some tasks should have more time dedicated. “Is putting animals in captivity an improvement?” is not the sort of question you want to dash off in 2 minutes. (Final answer: list of various animal rights groups).
The real problem is the list keeps growing longer; I’m starting to run into O(n^2) behavior in my text editor. It’s not really designed for handling a FIFO queue. I’ve been staring at TaskWarrior, which might be adapted for doing the things I want.
So more recently I’ve been using a big 6000-line text file, it has all of my TODO’s as well as some URL’s. I randomized the order a while ago and now I just go through them. I’ve stalled on that (actually doing things is hard, particularly when they’re vague things like “post story”), so I might go back to feed reading; I experimented a bit with TinyTinyRSS but Feedly is probably a better choice.
Well, taxation has the threat of violence, in that if you don’t pay your taxes you will eventually be caught and sentenced to jail for tax evasion… hmm, maybe I should do a “The definition of X” series. They should really be wiki pages though, not posts...
Indeed, it’s very depressing. I doubt I’ll ever be able to understand other people, but I do have some hope for internal consistency in my usage (so mathnerd314_February2014 writes things that seem comprehensible to mathnerd314_July2020). I’ve collected my early 1990′s writings and they all sort of “click” into place, in that I understand them well enough to rewrite them word-for-word. Perhaps by writing down definitions for my words I’ll be able to see how the concepts have evolved over time (or that they haven’t changed).
So the rent it pays is something like when you put up a sign “DO NOT DISTURB—AUTOMATED GUN TURRETS INSIDE” on your apartment. It doesn’t change the fact that you have to pay rent, or the dollar amount, but it means you can spend less effort on negotiating late payments, because the landlord will wait just a bit longer before kicking you out.
In terms of anticipation, it’s something like “if I did it over again, I’d still have done the same thing, because my behaviors were dictated by circumstance”. I guess it’s sort of like timeless decision theory.vs causal decision theory; in TDT, you can trust that your past self has modified you to make the correct decision in the future, while a causal decision theorist would not trust such an assumption.
As a former (3-time) MathPath student, I have the feeling I’ve seen you before. I must admit that it’s only a feeling.
As far as Grothendieck goes, I think he is simply channeling Buddhism’s concept of beginner’s mind. Nothing new, really. Most quotes are null-content “yes I’m a human” type things. The main problem I have with your post is that none of it is math-specific; take out the “math” repetition, the few mentions of calculus etc., and it’s simply a generic description of ability.