Mercurial

• MercurialSep 6, 2011, 10:23 PM

  0 points

  in reply to: Mercurial’s comment on: What is the most ra­tio­nal view of Peak Oil and its near term con­se­quences?

  I think this was downvoted. Would whoever downvoted this please explain why?

• MercurialSep 6, 2011, 10:21 PM

  2 points

  in reply to: KPier’s comment on: What is the most ra­tio­nal view of Peak Oil and its near term con­se­quences?

  I agree that a data-driven discussion on Peak Oil from a rationalist perspective would be a very good thing, although I don’t think the data supports your concerns (see here and here).

  I actually don’t know what the data say. I’ve encountered gobs of blatantly contradictory information about this topic, much of which claims to be objective data. Most of the debate about whether Peak Oil is really a problem seems to come down to name-calling. I’ve personally found truth to be insanely opaque when a debate reaches that point.

  That said, I would love it if the concerns I mentioned turned out to be balderdash! But that makes me inclined to be a little extra-careful of evidence that just happens to make my wishes seem more true.

  If I did a lot more research and spoke to some people I know in the energy forecasting business, would an article about peak oil as existential risk be something people would want on LessWrong?

  Yes! I would love that. Please!

• MercurialSep 4, 2011, 5:34 PM

  5 points

  in reply to: KPier’s comment on: What is the most ra­tio­nal view of Peak Oil and its near term con­se­quences?

  Upvoted for this comment:

  Additional details weigh down hypotheses. The more steps your argument requires, the less probable it’s correct. None of your 15 things seem obviously objectionable to me, but any argument that requires 15 steps to be correct is unlikely.

  I’ve been a bit concerned about Peak Oil for a while now and, as with many politically hot topics, it’s hard to find objective facts or rational analyses in the din of Greens and Blues screaming at each other. I very much appreciate you (and others!) stepping in to point out what a rational analysis requires rather than specifically arguing for one side versus another.

  I disagree with the second comment on pragmatic grounds, though:

  I doubt the marginal utility of you specifically worrying about it is greater than the marginal utility of worrying about FAI, or any other neglected existential risk.

  I’m not aware that the Peak Oil debate has really been resolved for rationalists. That makes it a neglected existential risk (specifically a “crunch”) in my mind.

  If Peak Oil really turns out to be a problem, there won’t be an FAI crisis. There won’t be enough power to run any computer that can go FOOM. Even if there’s some possible alternative energy source that might be able to replace oil in theory, part of the concern with Peak Oil is that we’ve already run out of time to replace the energy infrastructure. I honestly don’t know if this is true, but I don’t know that it’s false either and I’m not aware of anyone who has conclusively answered this concern from a rational point of view.

  The main concern of Peak Oil doesn’t need so many hypotheses to point out a source of concern (noting that I don’t know how true each of these points are):

  • The production pattern of individual oil fields, and the rate of oil field discovery, makes it reasonable to conclude that there should be a global peak in oil production (or maybe a bumpy plateau, but there should still be a decline at the other end wherein we have basically exhausted usable oil).

  • We either have passed that midpoint or will do so very soon (i.e., within the next few years). (Note: Most people who are concerned about this seem to think we already passed it around 2005 to 2007.)

  • Practically everything in our modern world is driven by oil—sometimes literally (e.g., gas-powered vehicles), but in many ways not (e.g., fertilizer, lubricant for machines). Were oil to vanish fairly abruptly, some Very Bad Things would happen (akin to mass starvation, places like LA and Las Vegas becoming totally unlivable, breakdowns in transportation and communication across long distances, etc.).

  • Oil is so energy-dense that nearly all alternatives fall short of being realistic replacements. Most of them don’t produce energy quickly enough, and even if there are some that do it’s still debatable whether we have enough energy left to replace our energy infrastructure to maintain our current level of civilization.

  • Our main source of electricity is coal rather than oil, but coal is going through a similar peaking problem. (Note: Many people screaming about Peak Oil miss this point.)

  Again, I don’t know if any of these points are true. But they strike me as individually reasonable, and together they hint at a crunch. I think many of DavidPlumpton’s other points are perhaps unnecessarily specific (e.g., the nature of the resulting food crisis) in the same way that specifying a paperclip-maximizer (as opposed to, say, a GAI Roomba) is unnecessarily detailed to point out the FAI problem. The point is that if Peak Oil is a real concern, then by some mechanism our heavy reliance on vast amounts of energy is going to cause a general collapse in civilization from which we may very well not recover for several million years.

  We might not agree with whether DavidPlumpton’s presentation of the problem (or mine, for that matter) is the most rational. However, I do think that it’s important to recognize this as a viable existential risk, and at least from where I stand there does seem to be reason to take it at least as seriously as we do the FAI problem. At the very least, I think it’s worthwhile for us to rationally work out at least the rough likelihood of Peak Oil being a problem since we’re one of the painfully few communities who are likely to do so (as most others are obsessed with just shouting out applause lights on this topic).

• MercurialAug 31, 2011, 5:22 PM

  24 points

  in reply to: FiftyTwo’s comment on: Scien­tifi­cally op­ti­miz­ing ed­u­ca­tion: Hard prob­lem, or solved prob­lem? In­tro­duc­ing the The­ory of Direct Instruction

  Is the thesis that the majority of teachers and education employees are engaged in an active conspiracy to prevent the introduction of new teaching methods?

  I can’t speak in sweeping generality here, but I can speak from my own experience. (I’m finishing a dissertation in educational research and bump into this pretty frequently.)

  Teachers who have been “in the trenches” for any appreciable length of time (say, 5+ years) have developed some sense of what is necessary from a pragmatic point of view. They’re usually extremely well-intentioned toward the children, and often for that reason they resist a lot of the suggestions brought to them from educational research. There’s this sense that education researchers are too ivory-tower to know how things really happen in a classroom. There are exceptions, but they’re actually quite rare.

  However, not all education researchers are naive about this issue. I know of many who were teachers in public schools for a decade or so before they moved on to research to do something about the mess they personally encountered. They’re able to build face-to-face rapport more readily with teachers. But that’s simply not good enough to convince teachers as a collective to try something new, even if the pragmatics of how to do it are spelled out in excruciating detail. They seem to resist change purely because it’s change, especially if it interferes with their personal emotional impressions of what it means to teach (which, unfortunately, were instilled more by accidental impressions than by training or rational scrutiny).

  In addition to this challenge, a painfully large portion of education researchers don’t apply reasonable scientific methods. The majority of articles I’ve encountered in this field amount to philosophical commentary, which is often based on spotty evidence that to me would constitute preliminary research. So surprise surprise, a lot of the reform suggestions being proposed are saturated in cognitive biases that no one seems to be at all aware of let alone make any effort to account for. And, thus, most “well-researched” reform suggestions really don’t work in classrooms! So on the rare occasions that teachers are willing to try something radically new based on a new theory (or are required to by fiat), in most cases it doesn’t make much of a difference at best.

  And this is ignoring the fact that researchers frequently forget about (or never consider!) the inferential distance teachers have to traverse to even understand what they’re supposed to do let alone do it well enough to teach. The “New Math” of the 1960s was a spectacular failure both because the theory behind it was psychologically and neurologically bankrupt and also because the teachers weren’t able to implement the original idea anyway.

  So no, I don’t think it’s a conspiracy. I think it’s more that teachers are tired of having people try to mechanize their profession as though it didn’t require any skill to interact with children, especially since the vast majority of attempts to do so that they’ve encountered failed dramatically—often because the reform wouldn’t have worked anyway, but often because it was implemented very poorly due to undertraining the teachers in the first place.

• MercurialAug 20, 2011, 1:45 AM

  0 points

  in reply to: gwern’s comment on: Good re­source for mar­ket­ing re­search?

  Ah, this does look quite valuable! It’s not quite what i was looking for, but it’ll be helpful nonetheless. Thanks!

• MercurialAug 19, 2011, 10:31 PM

  3 points

  in reply to: Oscar_Cunningham’s comment on: Good re­source for mar­ket­ing re­search?

  Hah! That’s pretty clever!

  The thing is, most businesses fail. I keep hearing slightly different statistics on this, but roughly speaking, any given random American business has somewhere around a 98% chance of failing in the first five years. This means that if you are trying to start a business and you listen to others who are trying to start a business and you hear the same kinds of thoughts and business strategies from them as you are using, the chances are extremely good your business will fail.

  In other words, common sense is utter trash for starting a business that works. Pragmatic sense is important, I’m pretty sure, but common sense is entrepreneurial poison. So if we “try to get people to pay [us] for stuff” using our naive intuition, we will probably just lose the business game.

  So, what to use instead of naive intuition?

  I really don’t know!

• MercurialAug 19, 2011, 10:19 PM

  0 points

  in reply to: Vaniver’s comment on: Good re­source for mar­ket­ing re­search?

  What state do you live in /​ want to set up the school in?

  I’m currently in California. I doubt this is where I’ll set up the first school, though, since my wife and I aren’t really comfortable here. (We’re here only because I’m finishing my Ph.D. down here.)

  It seems like emailing someone at a charter school association for your state might get you partially where you need to go.

  Yep, that’s on my to-do list. Thanks for the suggestion!

  My concern is that I could totally see existing charter schools thinking they’re doing well (or at least surviving) because of their “focus on excellence” or their “guaranteed method of college preparation” or this or that, but have it turn out that their marvelous common sense missed the fact that, say, the people geographically near the school with money happen to like blue and the school’s logo has a lot of blue in it. And stupidly, the blue probably matters more than the college preparation.

  Gerber’s suggestion for getting at this kind of info (what he calls “psychographics”) is to put out a poll to the people in one’s intended demographic and ask things like, “What brand of computer do you prefer?” and “What brand of toothpaste do you use?” Then backtrack by looking at the advertising methods of the things they indicated that they actually buy in order to get a hint about what kind of subconscious influence actually “generate a ‘buy’ response”. (Unsurprisingly, it’s useless to ask people what color most encourages them to try a product. They tend to claim no color does that to them despite statistical evidence to the contrary.)

  Because I’m interested in doing something quite a bit different than what many charter schools do, I could easily get skewered by listening to their advice but have it turn out that they had absolutely no clue why they were actually successful. If it’s something they take for granted but I end up changing, that could be a problem.

  So while I agree that talking to charter schools is a really great starting point, I can see where I’ll need to do at least a little bit of my own research. I’m just hoping I won’t have to reinvent the research methods on top of actually conducting it.

Good re­source for mar­ket­ing re­search?

• MercurialAug 10, 2011, 6:08 PM

  2 points

  in reply to: Micaiah_Chang’s comment on: Meetup : San Diego so­cial meet-up

  Also, I think the lack of speakers for the projector should be in the original post too; just in case someone wants to show a video too and for some ~mysterious~ reason the laptop speakers aren’t loud enough.

  Ah, good point! I had totally forgotten about that. Thank you! I’ll edit that point in.

• MercurialAug 9, 2011, 7:42 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: Mercurial’s comment on: San Diego Meetup?

  Done.

• MercurialAug 9, 2011, 7:39 PM

  1 point

  on: San Diego Meetup?

  Your wish is granted!

Meetup : San Diego so­cial meet-up

• MercurialAug 9, 2011, 7:27 PM

  0 points

  in reply to: JGWeissman’s comment on: San Diego Meetup?

  Noted! I’m checking in with the same place as last time. I’ll make some calls and then post a meetup for presumably the 14th.

• MercurialAug 9, 2011, 7:27 PM

  0 points

  in reply to: wuthefwasthat’s comment on: San Diego Meetup?

  There isn’t really a “usually” as yet. We just had our first monthly meetup, and the locale worked out nicely (except that the VGA cable for the projector was apparently missing).

  And yes, it’s fine that you don’t visit the site often and don’t post often. I don’t really, either, and I poked around semi-casually for about a year before I made my first post. Last time there were some people there who had learned about Less Wrong for the first time that day!

• MercurialAug 6, 2011, 7:27 PM

  14 points

  on: Why are cer­tain trends so pre­cisely ex­po­nen­tial?

  Any time the current growth rate depends linearly on the size of the current population, you get exponential growth.

  For instance, given effectively boundless food, the number of bacteria will double every regular time period because, in that time period, each bacterium can split into more.

  Similarly, human populations grow exponentially (up to environmental bounds like food supply, war, etc.) because after roughly twenty years, humans beget more humans. With a population as gargantuan as Earth’s, that growth rate is practically continuous.

  Kurzweil’s argument is that this applies to many technological industries, too. Faster, more powerful computers make it easier and faster to design the next technological generation. Thus when you measure computing power with any one well-defined scale like transistor count, you’ll find that the growth rate depends on the current number. Ergo, exponential.

  I’m not sure what’s going on with the GDP, but if it’s really keeping so nicely to an exponential curve like that, then I’d expect it means that the growth in GDP depends primarily on the current GDP and that it has been this way for a very long time.

  I don’t know whether this is what’s really going on. As others here have pointed out, there might be some biases playing a role here. And as I suspect has been beaten to death here before, Kurzweil hides a number of dubious assumptions about market forces and human creativity in his projections. But I do know that if you really, honestly have a strongly exponential growth pattern, it’s most likely that you’ll find some reason why the growth rate depends on the current population.

• MercurialAug 4, 2011, 4:49 PM

  6 points

  in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Marti­ne­naite and Tave­nier on cryonics

  (I have a similar problem with the “well, it’s better than cremation” argument, which seems to be little more than an applause light.)

  I’m sure there are some people out there who use the argument that way. As I’ve normally heard it, though, it’s definitely not merely an applause light. As far as I know, we currently know of no feasible way even in principle to reverse death after cremation or long-term decay. However, we do know some ways that, in principle, we should be able to reverse freezing damage. We might turn out to be totally mistaken about that, but according to our current best information it seems very likely that we can save more of a person with future technology that is already in the pipeline provided the person is cryonically preserved.

  Ergo, based on our current understanding, cryonics is better than cremation. Even if it poisons every cell in my body, at least the cells are there and can be examined in principle to reconstruct me. That’s very hard to do with dead bones or ashes.

  The only serious argument I can see being formed against cryonics is something that demonstrates that the likelihood of it working is so trivially better than cremation or burial that it doesn’t justify the increased cost. This would require a very intense array of evidence against any future technology, including ones we haven’t thought of yet, ever being able to reverse damage that must be done in order to enact cryonics on a human being. Either that, or show that some likely future technology will make reversing cremation or burial easier than reversing cryonic suspension.

  I can see why this can look like an applause light. In this case, though, I think that’s a result of summarizing something with a lot of passion behind it in one sentence.

  That said, I’m heavily biased in favor of cryonics. If I’m missing some serious reason I should doubt it, I endeavor to be all ears!

• MercurialAug 1, 2011, 3:22 AM

  2 points

  on: Meetup : First San Diego, CA, USA meetup

  Thank you everyone! And a special thanks to JenniferRM for kindly providing a mailing list sign-up and nametags! Wonderful turnout, wonderful conversations. Thank you one and all, and we’ll see you in a month if not sooner!

• MercurialJul 24, 2011, 6:04 PM

  14 points

  on: Devel­op­ing Empathy

  The standard technique is “put yourself in their shoes,” which works for me. However, this doesn’t always work with people completely different from myself, because I can’t imagine reacting the way they are.

  My impression is that virtually all of empathy comes down to refining precisely this skill. I suspect that when we find there’s someone whose perspective we cannot understand, we’re encountering a limitation to our empathic strength just like our inability to lift a heavy weight indicates a limitation in our physical strength.

  I think How to Win Friends and Influence People is fantastic in this regard. Carnegie’s thesis is that all people have a deep desire to feel important, and giving them that feeling is to everyone’s benefit.

  Another resource I’ve found helpful is An Open Heart by the Dalai Lama. The farther you go into the book, the weirder it gets, concluding (if I recall correctly) with a description of how praying to infinitely many Buddhas from infinitely many parallel universes will help you in your pursuit of enlightenment. But before it gets really alien and weird with its Mahayana cosmology, it’s really quite a pragmatic guide to becoming happier and more empathic through the cultivation of compassion.

  I’ve personally gotten a great deal out of the Riso/​Hudson system for the Enneagram. It describes nine personality types in a way that many people find insanely insightful (and in a falsifiable way, I should add). One of the most dramatic insights I got from working with this system was just how incredibly different other people really are, and in what ways. This helps a huge amount with understanding others’ reactions when they’re so completely alien to our own motivations. The main problem with the Enneagram is that it has a huge learning curve; usually certain people leap to mind as you read the detail descriptions of certain types, and one type in particular tends to give the reader an “I’ve been caught” sort of feeling, but to get more detailed insight than that into the types usually takes a long time—and trying really hard to get through that learning curve quickly can actually make it take longer for many people (and, I would predict, especially for the Ennea-type that tends to be attracted to Less Wrong).

  But in my entirely non-expert opinion, I think pretty much all of developing empathy comes down to: (1) recognizing that what others do is always sensible to them and (2) being sincerely interested in the way in which what they’re doing is sensible to them. I would just add that it’s really important that this be done in a non-judging way. It’s fine to decide that others are daft and reject the reasoning they use to see some behavior or belief or what-not as sensible, but that doesn’t help you at all to understand the world as they experience it. Really understanding others’ perspectives requires being open to seeing the world that way, even if you later reject that vision when no longer donning it.

  Disclaimer: The above is based on my personal experiences plus a general impression I’ve gotten from various research articles I’ve read. The fact that this has been working nicely for me has put my “seek out biases in this area” to-do pretty low on my priority list. I could be completely off my rocker here. If so, please let me know!

• MercurialJul 17, 2011, 3:09 AM

  2 points

  in reply to: JGWeissman’s comment on: Meetup : First San Diego, CA, USA meetup

  Thanks for noting that!

Meetup : First San Diego, CA, USA meetup