Mercurial

• Mercurial 13 May 2011 0:35 UTC

  11 points

  on: Wel­come to Less Wrong! (2010-2011)

  Greetings!

  I drafted what is apparently too long an introduction to fit into a comment. Rather than try to work out how to rewrite the whole thing to fit into some unknown maximum length, I’ll break it up into parts.

  PART 1:

  Greetings!

  I’ve been lurking since early 2010. I’ll finally take the plunge and actually engage with the community here.

  I’m a Ph.D. student in math education. It’s a terribly named field, it would seem; everyone seems to think at first that this means I’m training to either (a) teach math or (b) prepare future math teachers. It’s actually better thought of as a subfield of psychology that focuses on mathematical cognition as well as on teaching and learning.

  I grew up in a transhumanist household. My father signed us all up for cryonics when I was about five years old, I think it was. At the time I was just starting to realize that if death is inevitable for others, then that might mean that death is inevitable for me. I remember going up to my mother and father in the kitchen and asking, “Am I going to die someday?” They looked at me and said, “No, we’re signing all of us up for cryonics. That means if we die, they’ll just bring us back.” I remember being so excited about signing the life insurance policy that I misspelled my name. On the way out of the insurance agent’s office I asked “Does this mean I’m immortal now?” I literally leaped and squealed with excitement when they said yes.

  In retrospect, I can recognize that as a tremendously defining point in my psychological development. Most people I’ve known who have signed up for cryonics know the feeling of an immense weight they didn’t even know about being lifted once everything is finalized. Although I know better than to trust my memory, I do recall learning over the course of a few days before that event how to “wear” that weight before I finally asked my family about it. I took my being signed up for cryonics as blanket permission to cast that weight off by just assuming that I would live forever. I do realize now that they were oversimplifying things, but I think it still had a very powerful effect on the basic makeup of my psyche: whereas everyone else seems to have to learn how to recognize and let go of the burden of mortality, It has never been meaningfully real to me.

  Unfortunately, I can see now how that gave me permission to be complacent in a lot of important areas through most of my life. If you know that you and your closest loved ones are immortal and that anyone else can become immortal if they so choose, there’s no sense of urgency to do what you can to end death. Instead, the only real danger as far as I could tell was deathism, since that mental poison would permanently and needlessly have the net effect of making people commit suicide. But even then, my concern wasn’t that deathism might halt immortalist efforts; my concern had always been that individuals I care about might needlessly choose to die because of this ubiquitous mental disease. That was always a sad possibility, but on a core emotional level I felt confident that mortality would be obliterated in my lifetime and that the people I most cared about—mainly my family—would be there with me one way or another. So no real problems, right?

  When you think this way, it makes some rationalizations way too easy. I missed a lot of opportunities in my teens because I didn’t have hardly any courage to do what others thought might be a bad idea or even much self-awareness to decide on a sense of purpose (although I don’t think I knew enough to have any idea how to define a purpose without baseless recursion). So instead of saying something like:

  I’m scared, and that’s making me flinch, which isn’t a good way to make decisions. If I went ahead anyway, what would it be like for me looking back at this decision a year later? If I follow the flinch, how would I feel about that a year later?

  ...I would say something more like this:

  Oh, I’ll just go this easier route. If I don’t like where that path leads me, I can always backtrack and correct course in fifty years or so. There’s always more time.

  The problem was that until relatively recently, I didn’t apply the metacognitive effort needed to recognize what this necessarily must do to my life as a general algorithm. It actively discourages ever reflecting carefully even on major life decisions. And that’s ignoring the issue that immortality isn’t guaranteed even to transhuman cryonicists.

  That said, I’m immensely grateful I never “caught” the deep terror of mortality. The basic emotional sense of okayness wasn’t the problem at all; the problem was that it made too many stupid things too easy for me to rationalize, and I simply hadn’t been raised with the right kind of metacognition to counter that stupidity. From what I’ve been able to learn and observe, it seems that metacognition is much easier to teach than is a basic emotional sense that the future will be okay.

  I can say, however, that if it hadn’t been for Eliezer and Less Wrong, I probably would still be making the same stupid mistake.

  (Continued...)

  What links here?

  • Mercurial's comment on Wel­come to Less Wrong! (2010-2011) by orthonormal (13 May 2011 0:35 UTC; 15 points)

• Mercurial 13 May 2011 0:35 UTC

  15 points

  in reply to: Mercurial’s comment on: Wel­come to Less Wrong! (2010-2011)

  PART 2 (part 1 here):

  I had the pleasure of meeting Eliezer in January 2010 at a conference for young cryonicists. At the time I thought he was just a really sharp Enneagram type Five who had a lot of clever arguments for a materialist worldview. Well, I guess I still think that’s true in a way! But at the time I didn’t put much stock in materialism for a few different reasons:

  • I’ve had a number of experiences that most self-proclaimed skeptics insist are a priori impossible and that therefore I must be either lying or deluded. I could pinpoint some phenomena I was probably deluded about, and I suspect there are still some, but I’ve had some experiences that usually get classified as “paranormal” that are just way too specific, unusual, and verified to be chance best as I can tell. And I’m under the impression that these effects are pretty well-known and scientifically well-verified, even if I have no clue how to reconcile them with the laws of physics. But I’ve found that arguing with most die-hard materialists about these things is about as fruitful as trying to converse with creationists about biology. They know they’re right, and as far as they’re concerned, one either agrees with them or is just stupid/​deluded/​foolish/​thinking wishfully/​worthless/​bad. I don’t have much patience for conversation with people who are more interested in proving that I’m wrong than they are in discovering the truth.

  • It seemed to me that the hard problem of consciousness probably came from assuming materialism. Since it’s such a confusing problem and I was pretty sure that we can be more confident that we experience than that experience is a result of something more basic, it seemed to me sensible to consider that consciousness might the foundation from which the laws of physics emerge. (Yes, I’m aware that this sounds very much like a common confusion about quantum mechanics, but what I was thinking at the time was more basic than that. I was distinguishing between consciousness and the conscious mind. I’m not so sure anymore that this makes sense, though, since the mind is responsible for structuring experience, and I’m not sure what consciousness without an object (i.e. being conscious without being conscious of something) would mean.) But even if consciousness weren’t the foundation, I was pretty sure at the time that materialism didn’t have even an in-principle plausible approach to the hard problem. At the time, that seemed like a pretty basic issue since, without exception, all of our evidence that materialism is consistent comes from conscious experience (or at least I lack the imagination to know how we could possibly have evidence we use and know that we can trust but that we aren’t aware of!).

  But I’ve always tried to cultivate a willingness to be wrong even if I haven’t always been as good at that as I would like. So when it became clear to me that Eliezer scoffed at the idea that the hard problem of consciousness might be fundamentally different than other scientific challenges, I asked him if he’d be willing to explain to me what his take was on the matter. He pointed me toward his zombie sequence) since he understandably didn’t want to take the time to explain something he had already put effort into writing down.

  About a month later, I finally read that sequence. That had the interesting effect of undermining a lot of mystical thinking that had taken refuge behind the hard problem of consciousness, so I was really intrigued to read what else Eliezer had put together here. For reasons that would quite a while for me to explain, I quickly became really hesitant to read more than a small handful of LW articles at a time, and I wasn’t sure I really wanted to become part of the community here. So I just sort of watched from the sidelines for a long time, occasionally seeing something about “Friendly AI” and “existential risk” and other similar snippets.

  So I eventually started looking into those things.

  I learned that there’s a great deal of hunger for help in these areas.

  And I realized that I had been an utter fool.

  I have sat complacently on the sidelines entirely too long. It has become clear to me that we need less preparation and more action. So I am now stepping up to take action.

  I’m here to do what I can henceforth for the future. I’m starting by plugging into the community here and continuing to refine my rationality to what extent I can, in the aim of solving what heady problems I can. (One that’s still close to my heart is finding effective ways of eradicating deathism. I’ve actually encountered some surprisingly promising directions on this.) Once I’ve had a chance to attend at least one of the meetups (as I had to abandon the one after Anna’s talk for personal reasons), I hope to encourage some regular meetups in the San Diego area (at least as long as I don’t drive everyone here nuts!). Beyond that, I’ll have to see where this goes; I’m not sure any of what I’ve just named is the most strategic boon I can offer, but it’s a start and it seems very likely to quickly steer me in the best direction.

  Of course, suggestions are welcome. I’m interested in doing what I can to eradicate the horror of death and exalt a wonderful future, and if that means I need to change course drastically, so be it.

  I look forward to working with all of you.

  Thank you for reading!

  What links here?

  • Mercurial's comment on Wel­come to Less Wrong! (2010-2011) by orthonormal (13 May 2011 0:35 UTC; 11 points)

• Mercurial 15 May 2011 0:15 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Rain’s comment on: Peo­ple who want to save the world

  Praise for right action! Thanks for doing this!

• Mercurial 17 May 2011 17:20 UTC

  5 points

  on: Ra­tion­al­ity Boot Camp

  I think that making the effort for something like this is just marvelous! This kind of intensity is really critical for meaningfully changing how someone thinks in the long run, and ten weeks of intense socializing with others concerned about existential risk with subsequent intermittent reinforcement is more than enough to create long-term loyalty to the cause, so to speak.

  I echo Vaniver’s concerns, though I imagine many of these issues will get hammered out in the course of just doing it once. I’m commenting because I want to raise awareness of a problem that is usually harder to notice in most educational contexts (and I notice only because I’ve been explicitly trained to notice it):

  We’re going to run A/​B tests on you, and track the results to find out which training activities work best, and begin the tradition of evidence-based rationality training.

  I think this is wonderful! I also think this is extremely dangerous.

  I’ll preface my explanation with a warning that I’m going to touch on some politically charged topics. It has generally been my experience that most people have many of the same strongly held opinions about education, like that teachers will teach better if they know more about the subject they’re teaching. If I say something you strongly disagree with, do let me know; I like to discover when I’m wrong and appreciate such opportunities when provided to me. But let me know after pausing a moment to reflect on how you know that I’m wrong. I know that it can be really challenging for me not to just rehearse arguments on topics that I feel really emotionally charged by, and I imagine others often feel the same way.

  The reason I say this evidence-based education is dangerous is because it’s one of those things that has a rational interpretation but is usually an applause light in disguise. The most blatant example in the USA I know of is No Child Left Behind (NCLB). NCLB was based on the idea that we need objective measures for education, and that once we have those objective measures we can enforce a kind of accountability. The model came from corporations in which the bottom line—profit—could be used as a hard-and-fast measure of success, and individual modules (e.g. stores) could be rewarded or punished based on profit in order to motivate them to generate more profit.

  There have been scores of arguments about whether this analogy is appropriate for education, but for the present case I don’t think that matters in the slightest. The point I’d like to draw your attention to is the “objective measures” part. This is done through standardized testing in reading and mathematics. The huge, overwhelmingly crippling problem with this approach is that these tests are never, ever calibrated for what we actually care about.

  I think one of the main reasons for this is that it’s actually quite difficult to go past one’s initial impression of what’s important in order to actually define what one cares about. For instance, it’s usually assumed that problem-solving ability is a standard measure of mathematical skill. However, there are other tremendously important aspects of math proficiency that problem-solving never touches, like problem-identification (i.e. recognizing how to convert an actual real-world problem you’re facing into a mathematical model that looks more like a word problem) and complex-pattern-recognition (e.g. realizing that all that knowledge about the Law of Large Numbers and variance can generate very helpful investing insights). And that’s ignoring the artifact that multiple-choice tests aren’t necessarily even testing students’ ability to solve previously-well-defined-and-tidy problems.

  I think rationality is, in many ways, a lot more complicated than math. I also suspect that it modularizes in some ways, so that skill with question-dissolving might not bear at all on the ability to change one’s behavior, or perhaps even on the ability to notice confusion in real-time. This makes me worried about how SIAI is defining the goals of rationality training. Giving someone a confusing problem with tempting easy-but-wrong answers and seeing how they do would be a great test for potential FAI researchers, but that probably wouldn’t test what you’re looking for if you’re trying to train people to be excellent at swaying public opinion through social skills. And furthermore, do the tests actually test rationality, even in modularized form?

  Bear in mind that A/​B-style testing is based on a hard-scientific model of checking options such as when determining to what degree new drug X affects physiological property Y. But notice that “being and staying healthy” is a vastly more complicated challenge than, say, reducing mucus production from a cold because the former is understood much better in terms of messy human experience than it is in terms of specific, measurable parameters; hence the existence of people who are healthy by current medical measures but who just don’t feel well. In the same way, I suspect that rationality is complicated enough that someone who’s able to pass a battery of rationality tests might still turn out to be missing something you care about.

  Of course, I don’t advocate skipping tests altogether due to a lack of certainty that the tests will always capture what you’re looking for. But I do think that there’s plenty of precedent to be worried that one’s tests might have very little if anything to do with what one cares about simply because the tests seem like they really should measure what you care about. The failure to check against this possibility is one of the reasons that math education is so abysmally horrid in the United States.

  Has SIAI guarded against this concern? If so, might I ask how?

• Mercurial 18 May 2011 1:38 UTC

  0 points

  on: South­ern Cal­ifor­nia Meetup May 21, Weekly Irv­ine Mee­tups on Wednesdays

  I should be there this Saturday. I’ll have to miss the Wednesday ones, though. Irvine is a bit expensive a drive for me to do regularly.

  Is anyone coming from around San Diego who would like to carpool?

• Mercurial 18 May 2011 22:05 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: JGWeissman’s comment on: South­ern Cal­ifor­nia Meetup May 21, Weekly Irv­ine Mee­tups on Wednesdays

  Maybe you or Jennifer can organize weekly meetups in San Diego.

  I’m in the process of doing that. I’m looking up possible locales. I should have some solid info about that by Saturday.

• Mercurial 24 May 2011 0:31 UTC

  3 points

  on: Analo­gies and learning

  Two points come to mind that you might find interesting.

  First, Myers-Briggs uses four dimensions to describe personality, based loosely on Jung’s system. One dimension in particular, namely Sensing versus iNtuiting, describes (among other things) the inclination to prefer the general rule first (as iNtuitives do) or specific examples first (as Sensates do). Intuitives tends to baffle Sensates by describing high-level abstractions and often forgetting to ground them in examples at all, which can make Sensates look like simpletons to the iNtuitives in question.

  If that sounds like it might fit, you could try making a point of starting with examples when talking to this particular lady. I usually find that Sensates follow a lot more easily if I start with examples and then label the appropriate parts of the example as needed.

  (If that’s not quite what you’re talking about, then my apologies for taking this on an irrelevant tangent!)

  Second, this point:

  Someone fully understanding a concept ought to be able to use that understanding as a guide to understand analogous unfamiliar topics.

  ...refers to something that in education research (and I think in psychology?) is known as transfer. I’m not deeply familiar with the transfer literature, but I do know enough to say that “fully understanding a concept” ends up functioning a little like a “no true Scotsman” argument in this context. Analogies aren’t in the environment; they’re part of how we as intelligent beings perceive similarities in our environment. The fact is that someone can understand a concept perfectly well but utterly fail to notice its analogous application in instances that might be downright obvious to someone else. This is a huge problem in education because we often don’t notice when we’re assuming that students will “obviously get” some critical part of the lesson; the only reason they’d “obviously get” it is that it’s obvious to us.

  To learn more about the history of transfer research and/​or some modern approaches to this, I’d suggest looking up some of Dr. Joanne Lobato’s work on “actor-oriented transfer”. (That’s just a bit outside my specialty, so I’m not sure which specific papers to recommend. Sorry!)

• Mercurial 24 May 2011 12:35 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: Antisuji’s comment on: In­fer­ring Our Desires

  My impression is that lukeprog is interweaving material on the overjustification effect and the introspection illusion. The introspection illusion helps to explain why we’re not aware of the overjustification effect in ourselves.

• Mercurial 24 May 2011 17:00 UTC

  2 points

  on: So­cial Profi­ciency of a Ra­tion­al­ist and a Scholar

  I’ve often found Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People to provide effective guidelines. He didn’t do any scientific studies as far as I know, but he claims to have based his material on the behaviors of those who were interpersonally effective throughout history and then tweaked it for effectiveness in the course of several years of teaching it in seminars. I’ve seen it work wonders in situations that I thought were likely to go south quickly otherwise. And his material on being a good conversationalist definitely works marvelously in my experience—even if I don’t always remember to apply it!

  I’ve also found some personality typing systems to be immensely useful. I personally lean mostly on Riso & Hudon’s Enneagram with occasional adjustments using the four dimensions of Myers-Briggs, though I’ve recently started looking into the Big Five due to a recommendation from a recent meet-up. (I can’t tell as yet whether the Big Five is actually useful at all in the way the Enneagram and Myers-Briggs are.) There’s something jaw-droppingly spectacular when you suddenly realize how to decode someone’s personality enough to know a few magical phrases that dissolve conflict or open that person right up, or at least understand why they got so upset about something you didn’t think was at all relevant.

• Mercurial 7 Jun 2011 15:37 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: prase’s comment on: Mean­ings of Math­e­mat­i­cal Truths

  For example I can use multiplication only for calculating areas of rectangles; if so, I would probably hold that “5x3” means “area of a rectangle whose sides measure 5 and 3“, and “there is a real number which multiplied by itself equals two” means “there is a square of area 2”.

  Or I can mean “if I add together five groups of three apples each, I would find fifteen objects”.

  As a quick aside, I think these two interpretations are actually the same thing in disguise. Areas as measurements have units attached to the numbers. Specifically, the units are squares whose sides measure one “unit length”. So when you’re looking at a rectangle that measures 5x3, you’re noting that there are five groups of three squares (or three groups of five squares, depending on how you want to interpret the roles of the factors). Otherwise it’s hard to see why the area would be a result of multiplying the lengths of the sides.

  I think perhaps a better example would be the difference between partitive and quotative division. Partitive (“equal-sharing”) says “I have X things to divide equally between N groups. How many things does each group get?” Quotative (“measurement” or “repeated subtraction”) says “I have X things, and I want to make sure that each group gets N of those things. How many groups will there be?” This is the source of not a small amount of confusion for children who are taught only the partitive interpretation and are given a jumble of partitive and quotative division word problems. It’s not immediately obvious why these two different ideas would result in the same numerical computation; it’s actually a result of the commutativity of multiplication and the fact that division is inverse multiplication. So there’s a deep structure here that’s invisible even to participants that still guides their activities and understanding.

  Math is exact in the sense that once the rules of inference are given there is no freedom but to follow them, and unobjectionable in the sense that it is futile to dispute the axioms. Any axiomatic system is like that.

  I agree that axiomatic systems are like that, but I don’t think the essence of math is axiomatic. That’s one method by which people explore mathematics. But there are others, and they dominate at least as much as the axiomatic method.

  For instance, Walter Rudin’s book Real and Complex Analysis goes through a marvelously clean and well-organized axiomatic-style exposé of measure theory and Lebesgue integration. But I remember struggling with several of my classmates while going through that class trying to make sense of what is “really going on”. If math were just axiomatic, there wouldn’t be anything left to ask once we had recognized that the proofs really do prove the theorems in question. But there’s still a sense of there being something left to understand, and it certainly seems to go beyond matters of classification.

  What finally made it all “click” for me was Henri Lebesgue’s own description of his integral. I can’t seem to find the original quote, but in short he provided an analogy of being a shopkeeper counting your revenue at the end of the day. One way, akin to the Riemann integral, is to count the money in the order in which it was received and add it up as you go. The second, akin to Lebesgue integration, is to sort the money by value - $1 bills, $5 bills, etc. - and then count how many are in each pile (i.e. the measure of the piles). This suddenly made everything we were doing make tremendously more sense to me; for instance, I could see how the proofs were conceived, even though my insight didn’t actually change anything about how I perceived the axiomatic logic of the proofs.

  The fact that some people saw this without Lebesgue’s analogy is beside the point. The point is that there’s an extra something that seems to need to be added in order to feel like the material is understood.

  I’m going to some lengths to point this out because the idea of math as perfect and axiomatic just isn’t the mathematics that humans practice or know. It can look that way, but the truth seems to be more complicated than that.

• Mercurial 7 Jun 2011 16:19 UTC

  2 points

  on: Mean­ings of Math­e­mat­i­cal Truths

  I think it’s dangerously easy to get lost in contemplating the “true nature” of mathematics. Math gives some very strong subjective impressions about its nature, such as that its truths are eternal and universal. And like any strong subjective impression, this feeling lends itself to the mind projection fallacy. That isn’t to say that these impressions are wrong, but that even if and when they’re right we tend to trust them for the wrong reasons. And, thus, we don’t notice when those impressions really are wrong.

  I don’t claim to have a complete answer to this conundrum. I do, however, see many key pieces that seem to go a long way to dispelling this confusion.

  First, as just an empirical observation, it seems that mathematical objects are reifications. If you watch little kids learning how to add, they go through a predictable sequence of development. First they count out objects, put them together, and then count the whole collection:

  Here’s one, two, three, four, five. And here’s one, two three. That’s, um, one, two three, four, five, six, seven, eight!

  After a while of doing this—and “a while” can be a surprisingly long time—they realize that they can compress the first quantity by jumping to the end:

  Here’s one, two, three, four, five. And here’s one, two, three. So that one is five, and then six, seven, eight!

  After doing this for a while, they start to think about the process of counting “one, two, three, four, five” in terms of the final state (“five”). This lets them manipulate the process as an object.

  Ah, but once this happens, this triggers the parietal cortex to apply the idea of object permanence to “five”. Suddenly there’s this sense that “five” is there even when the child doesn’t see it. And behold, the eternal entity 5 as a mathematical object is born in the child’s mind.

  We’re so used to thinking this way that we don’t really see it in ourselves anymore. But it’s still there and shows up in oddities in how we think about even basic math. For instance, what does it mean to add 5 and 3? You put 5 and 3 together… somehow… and suddenly an 8 pops out of nowhere. What happened to 5 and 3? If we pause and think about it, we can make sense of it with visualizations or other mental tricks, but there’s this slight-of-hand we do to ourselves before we pause to think about that process in which we treat 5 and 3 as objects but don’t think to ask how they combine to create the object 8. They just “merge” somehow, and a whole entity—not just a composite, but something thought of as an object—appears.

  What really seems to be going on is that we have a built-in capacity from birth to subitize quantities less than 4, and then we build on those in order to perform rituals of ordered synchronization of movement and speech. This is why children find it so important to actually touch the objects they’re counting as they’re speaking the magic words “one, two, three...”. This is also the best current explanation I’m aware of for the seemingly unrelated symptoms of Gerstmann syndrome: when people can no longer distinguish between their fingers, they don’t have the proprioceptive bind to the verbal counting ritual that’s needed to understand numbers greater than three. After a while, the parietal cortex provides a shortcut to dealing with familiar processes by treating the end-state as an object that can stand in for having done the process.

  So it might very well be that mathematical truths are not so much “encoded in reality” as that our descriptions of these truths are embodied characterizations of the world. It might be that they seem eternal as an accidental side-effect of our using our parietal cortices to simplify computations. They’re seemingly universal because the universe we’re capable of experiencing is the one in which our bodies work—and notice that in places where our bodies do not work normally (e.g. dreams), mathematics doesn’t seem to work quite so well either.

  I’m taking the time to point this out because it’s way too easy to waste tremendous amounts of time wondering about where mathematics “is”. Even if there’s some objective essence of math that is somehow lurking within and guiding the physical world unseen, the question remains as to how we, with our physical brains and bodies, can come to understand those truths. We can’t understand some semi-Platonic Idea in its raw form; we have to use the material tools from which we are constructed in order to model those ideas. Therefore, the only mathematics we can ever possibly know about is that which is governed by the structure of our minds. This makes the origin of mathematics really a question of psychology, not philosophy—which is thankful because psychology has the blessing of being empirical!

• Mercurial 7 Jun 2011 16:27 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: prase’s comment on: Mean­ings of Math­e­mat­i­cal Truths

  Maybe even easier example is the commutativity of multiplication itself.

  That’s a good point! I avoided that example because there’s a pretty easy and convincing “proof” of the commutativity of multiplication, namely that turning a rectangle on its side doesn’t change how many things constitute it So, it doesn’t matter whether you count how many are in each row and then count how many rows there are, or if you do that with columns instead.

  I think it’s terribly sad that they don’t encourage children to notice that or something like it. But there are a lot of things about education I find terribly sad and that I’m doing my damnest to fix.

  But that doesn’t seem much relevant to the question of truth of mathematical theorems. Whatever intuitive thought had lead to its discovery, people will agree that it is valid iff there is a formal proof.

  Agreed, though there’s no objective definition of what constitutes a “formal proof”. Despite what it might seem like from the outside, there’s no one axiomatic system and deductive set of rules to which all subfields of mathematics pay homage.

• Mercurial 7 Jun 2011 16:51 UTC

  3 points

  on: What are you work­ing on? June 2011

  • Most of my time is focused on finishing a dissertation in mathematics education (read: psychology with a focus on mathematical cognition). I have my data collected and large chunks of it analyzed, and my results are pretty clear right now. My next step is to put together a presentation on this material for an informal dissertation committee meeting so I can get their feedback on my methodology and progress. I started working on this dissertation in part because I wanted to fix the way math is taught, although in retrospect this was probably not the most efficient way to do it. That said, at this stage it’s definitely worth my time to finish it, and with it I’ll have some resources (both the Ph.D. and a professorship) with which to work on fixing education in general, not just math.

  • I’m digging into locations for regular LW meetups in San Diego, CA. I don’t know if there’s enough interest this far south; there might just be two of us. But I know a number of people down here who would be quite interested in rationality training, I’m sure. Right now I have a few promising places available and just need to follow up on a few emails to get the ball rolling. (One of those is to Anna, so I’m posting this in part to undermine my inclination to get to this in the vague land of “later”.)

  • I’m training my intuitions for physics with the book Thinking Physics. After this I intent to read Feynman’s Lectures on Physics, and from there I might start looking through junior-level textbooks. This emerged due to it being pointed out at a recent LW meetup that my understanding for why certain Aikido moves work is actually utter balderdash, which means that I’ve been terribly overconfident in my intuitions about physics for many years. Also, I’ve always loved physics, so it’s just a pleasure to work on this. Finally, Epstein’s book is helping me to work on developing the habit of sticking with a difficult problem until I come up with a good answer and have beaten on that answer against all the weak points I can find; this is making me go through the book pretty slowly, but I’m gaining much more from doing this than I would by zipping through. (As an aside, if someone knows of a book that’s comparable to Epstein’s but for chemistry, please let me know! And if there’s one for math, I’d like to take a look at it to see how they do it.)

  • I’m working on mastering lucid dreaming. There are a wide number of reasons for this and I’d rather not dig into all of them at the moment. The short version is that dreams seem to be a major gateway for accessing parts of the mind that are very difficult to safely access otherwise. Furthermore, the process of developing lucid dreaming skills helps with day-to-day skills like concentration. Finally, lucid dreaming is just a tremendous amount of fun!

  • I’m working my way through the Sequences. I’m somewhere past the halfway point, I think. I’ve read the four core ones and am around halfway through the quantum physics sequence.

  I’ve a question, by the way. You mention:

  Focus on projects that you have recently made progress on, not projects that you’re thinking about doing but haven’t started, those are for a different thread.

  Which thread is that?

• Mercurial 10 Jun 2011 17:03 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: arundelo’s comment on: What are you work­ing on? June 2011

  It sounds like you have a more efficient way in mind. If so, could you summarize it?

  Sure. As I pull together details I actually plan on posing them to the LW community here so get feedback and poll for interest.

  I suspect that a semi-grassroots approach is more likely to affect education in a positive way than any educational research is at this point. I’m inclined to start a school of sorts that will freely throw out outdated assumptions about education and actually apply what we know from research, updating its practices as new findings come out.

  If everything goes perfectly (!), this would have three effects:

  • It would create a tiny group of graduates who would be very competent in practical ways (basic rationality, knowing how to learn effectively, having economic savvy, knowing how to have rich and well-managed relationships with others, etc.). I have a fair amount of personal anecdotal evidence that suggests that one key component of this, mindfulness, can be made to be infectious at will at least in part. If that turns out to be as reliable as I’ve personally found it to be and have seen in those I’ve taught so far, then this generation of graduates would have pretty impressive leadership skills despite there being relatively few of them. So, in terms of raising the sanity waterline, this seems to me to have a promising payoff despite being assuredly pretty small.

  • If this works even half as well as the research and my personal experience suggest, the idea of this educational method might spread, at least in part. Should interest build, I’d do what I could at that point to make the exact methods by which the school does what it does available along with the reasons why it works so that others can emulate it. (I plan on being open about it from the beginning, but I know that openness and accessibility are very different things so some work would have to go into creating manuals spelling out the core principles and examples of implementation for people who aren’t me.) This stands a chance of affecting already-extant schools, or it might spread more like Montessori schools have.

  • Finally, as per a suggestion Carl Shulman kindly offered me, this could also be a hub for training teachers. There’s a learning curve to get over with applying effective educational measures because munchkin-like hacks on learning are often very counterintuitive at first and look almost nothing like the examples of teaching and learning that most of us grew up with. So, in addition to being a school for young students (I’m currently thinking high school), it would be a college for teachers to get a kind of certification in proven educational methods.

  None of this actually requires the Ph.D. It’s typical in my field for Ph.D.s to do a bunch of research and engage in political jockeying to try to get some bureaucrat to listen to the results of research. I don’t think that’s ever going to have a relevant impact. However, since I’m going to get my doctorate anyway, I’ll also use this as an opportunity to run ongoing experiments to continually improve our educational methods and our teacher training methods.

  lucid dreaming

  Fun stuff. I started doing this sometime between 8 and 12 years old after reading about it in a book. On two or three occasions I’ve remained conscious all the way through a nap.

  That’s pretty impressive! I’ve done that just once. Most of my lucid dreams are during my last sleep cycle before I wake up.

• Mercurial 15 Jun 2011 12:27 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Eugine_Nier’s comment on: New York Times on Ar­gu­ments and Evolu­tion [link]

  … otherwise we would have evolved to not listen to what anyone else says.

  That’s a death sentence for a great ape. All the great apes form tribes as one of their primary survival strategies. It could simply be that evolution didn’t make ignoring others’ arguments an option any more than simply ignoring dominance contests could retain one’s status in the pecking order.

• Mercurial 16 Jun 2011 13:26 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: ShardPhoenix’s comment on: New York Times on Ar­gu­ments and Evolu­tion [link]

  ...arguments must ultimately be backed by greater correctness...

  I’d certainly like to think so! I’m just suspicious of that intuition, especially in myself. The subjective impression that reasoning is for truth-seeking could be because it is. However, if it’s not, as the lead article suggests, then we’d still be under the impression that our reasoning is in pursuit of truth and that those who disagree with us are willfully ignoring the truth. So we can’t use that intuition as a guide to tell us about what’s the case in this situation.

  It’s also worth noting that people generally aren’t convinced by true arguments. They’re usually convinced instead by peer pressure and repetition. Presenting a really crushing (!) argument that leaves no logical wiggle room left over can actually make the person who initially disagreed become more certain of their initial position and become resentful toward you. That really makes no sense if reason is supposed to be for truth-pursuit—but it makes a lot of sense if arguments are more about dominance than determining what’s real.

• Mercurial 14 Jul 2011 15:20 UTC

  1 point

  on: De­fault­ing to not notic­ing the meetup list

  The main problem for me is that the “nearest meetups” section just isn’t useful. The nearest one to me on the list is quite literally on the other side of the continent.

  The funny thing is, I happen to know that there are some very close meetups coming up. There’s one weekly about a two-hours’ drive from me in Irvine. That one doesn’t appear on the splash page, but one in the Bay Area (about 8 hours away) does, which means that the “nearest meetups” list doesn’t actually have much to do with spatial proximity (or if it does, it’s not in a way I personally have been clever enough to find useful).

  It seems to me that if there’s going to be a prominent list of meetups, it needs to involve at least one of three properties in order to be useful to readers:

  • It ranks the largest meetups. This might require setting up some kind of RSVP system so that the website has some ballpark idea of how many are coming. It would also need to do something to account for people who are regulars at regular meetups vs. people who show up just once to one particular meetup.

  • It ranks the meetups that occur next (i.e. temporal proximity). I’d argue that this one alone wouldn’t be very useful, but in tandem with the others could be a boon. (I think a system calendar would do this much, much better, though.)

  • It ranks the meetups by spatial proximity. (I think this this being planned, yes?)

  Otherwise it just looks like a random list to me. What good is it for me to know about a meetup in Tortuga, DC, Cambridge, Australia, and India? I guess if I were traveling widely that might be nice to know about, but if I were traveling widely I would be more careful to look up details of what occurs when rather than just relying on a sidebar that, apparently, excludes several more local options.

  I think it would be really helpful if there were some kind of standard submission form for meetups so that the system knows when and where each one is as well as how frequently recurring (with options to adjust times to account for changes, kind of like Google Calendar does with recurring appointments).

  I should be quick to add, by the way, that it’s really clear that the programming team has put a lot of work into this site and have given it a lot of thought. Sorry if I seem at all unappreciative. Thank you for all you’ve done and continue to do!

• Mercurial 14 Jul 2011 15:43 UTC

  3 points

  on: Diet Ad­vice?

  Might I ask how old you are? The reason I ask is that I’ve encountered quite a number of cases of people who abuse the living bajeezis out of their bodies but don’t show any significant symptoms for many years due to sheer youth. The kind of damage that accumulates in those cases is often more subtle than blood work necessarily shows. If you’re in your late 20s or so, this is less likely to be a factor.

Meetup in San Diego, CA, USA

I’m bro­ken...?