MondSemmel

Karma: 3,145

MondSemmel 29 Jul 2013 8:40 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg) ’s comment on: Making Rationality General-Interest
Kids definitely have more time, but otherwise they don’t necessarily learn languages easier. Or at least, secondary languages.

MondSemmel 2 Aug 2013 16:50 UTC
8 points
on: Welcome to Less Wrong! (6th thread, July 2013)
Hi! My name is Tobias. I’m from Munich in Germany, male, 24 years old, and currently doing a Master’s degree in physics at LMU Munich. I’m doing okay to good in my studies, but I still struggle with procrastination in particular (though things have gotten better) and low motivation. In particular, while I like physics in the abstract, I don’t particularly enjoy the reality of studying physics at a university. Most importantly, I’m totally unambitious, and not satisfied with that. I’ll be finished with my studies in ~1.5h years, so I’m currently trying to plan what to do afterwards.

I first came upon Less Wrong when a friend of mine recommended HPMoR to me in ~11/2012. A while ago, I decided I’d use my current semester holidays to benefit from the resources and community on Less Wrong, and to find something genuinely useful to do in life. Any suggestions?

For instance, x-risk already sounds interesting, though I’m nowhere good enough at math to even consider MIRI research a valid option. Is there room for mortals anywhere in the broader field of x-risk reduction?

In a related question, do you have any ideas for topics of interest to e.g. transhumanists, which could be suited for a Master’s or PhD thesis in physics, and for which finding a supervisor does not sound straight out impossible?

Basically, if you were in my position and had ~2 months to decide on a plan/goal/cause/short-term trajectory to maximize your impact in life (whatever that means), what would you do?

Considering my interest in the natural sciences, I guess I’d call myself an (anspiring?) epistemic rationalist. So far, I haven’t had much success with instrumental rationalism though, considering my persisting problems with issues like procrastination or perfectionism. On the other hand, this year I finally managed to overcome 8+ years of sleeping issues by finally attacking the problem in what I would call a rational, comprehensive manner. (I will read the sequence The Science of Winning at Life next.)

I intend to read all the sequences eventually; so far, I’ve only read How to Actually Change Your Mind, The Map and the Territory, and Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions.

MondSemmel 2 Aug 2013 16:55 UTC
7 points
on: Welcome to Less Wrong! (6th thread, July 2013)
[Meta comment: In the welcome post, the links to the open threads link to two different tags, with different time dates. This is confusing. One of them hasn’t been updated since 10/2011. If you fix this, you might have to do the same in the template for creating new welcome threads. Also, I think the same issue exists elsewhere on the site, e.g. in the Less Wrong FAQ.]

MondSemmel 12 Aug 2013 9:19 UTC
4 points
in reply to: gothgirl420666’s comment on: What Bayesianism taught me

I’ve noticed that people seem to have their minds blown by the sequences, not really learn all that much more by spending a few years in the rationality scene, and then go back to read the sequences and wonder how they could have ever found them anything but obvious.

What happens when they reach this post?

Another Anki deck for Less Wrong content

MondSemmel22 Aug 2013 19:31 UTC

25 points

5 comments1 min readLW link

MondSemmel 23 Aug 2013 7:49 UTC
0 points
in reply to: hackerkiba’s comment on: Another Anki deck for Less Wrong content
Thanks for mentioning this. Many posts in the sequences I’ve read so far, especially those concerning biases, seemed interesting, but not necessarily useful: I don’t really see how to apply that knowledge to my own life. And when debiasing techniques are suggested, they often sound prohibitively expensive in terms of willpower. That said, I’ve also read quite a few posts of whose eventual usefulness I am reasonably confident. Off the top of my head, the sequence Joy in the Merely Real seemed really beneficial to me—if only because it gave me a strong argument to read more textbooks.

MondSemmel 20 Sep 2013 15:17 UTC
0 points
on: Fundamental Doubts
One of the benefits I’ve drawn from Less Wrong so far—via posts like The Simple Truth—is more solid foundations for my beliefs. Since I study physics, I wasn’t particularly worried about philosophical arguments against the scientific method anymore—science seemed to work, after all—but of those doubts that remained, many more still got (apparently) dispelled or dissolved.

That said, I never had doubts that fundamental. Could anybody really live that way? I don’t have a coherent mental model for such a situation. Take Mad-Eye Moody in HPMoR with his constant paranoia, as in “Unless, of course, that’s what they want you to think.”—could such a character really function in the real world? Could they eat food without starving themselves to death out of paranoia? If you are paranoid about both X → Y and X → ~Y, how do you decide whether to do Y or ~Y? (It seems more plausible to me that Moody doesn’t actually exhibit doubts that fundamental, than that he or anyone else could function properly despite those doubts.)

MondSemmel 3 Oct 2013 14:14 UTC
0 points
on: Meetup : LW Munich Meetup in October
Hi there! I’m a German physics student at LMU Munich and might be interested in the meetup. It’s just...I’m shy, have never been to any kind of meetup, and have no idea what to expect. So...what can I expect? How many people typically show up? How many showed up last time?

And I read there might be a Facebook group—if there is, how can I join it?

EDIT: Found and joined the Facebook group here. I’ll participate.

MondSemmel 2 Dec 2013 17:16 UTC
19 points
on: 2013 Less Wrong Census/Survey
Answered the survey, including the bonus questions. Took me 32 min altogether. Comments:

How many people are aware of their IQs? I’m from Germany and have never taken an IQ test. Is knowing about one’s IQ common enough in the US that not making that question a bonus question made sense?

There were quite a few questions (e.g. estimate weekly internet consumption, estimate how often you read about ideas for self-improvement) which felt pointless—how could you possibly get accurate estimates from people, given how ambiguous these questions were, and how difficult these estimates are?

The money question: After I failed to come up with a unique passphrase, I chose cooperate and left the rest blank. This kind of stuff tempts my perfectionism, and that’s a lose-lose situation for me.

MondSemmel 13 Dec 2013 18:05 UTC
1 point
in reply to: lukeprog’s comment on: Book Summary: Willpower by Baumeister, Tierney
For those interested, that blog post has two follow-up posts which criticize the part of the theory claiming that the resource depleted during ego-depletion is glucose: Glucose Is Not Willpower Fuel and Should You Consume Sugar to Improve Your Self-Control?.

With all that, ego-depletion theory really looks well beyond shaky. The author of these posts also claims we still have no actual working theory of fatigue.

MondSemmel 29 Dec 2013 16:31 UTC
41 points
on: Why CFAR?
Donated 40€. I was going to donate to MIRI or CFAR, and chose CFAR due to this Facebook discussion.

MondSemmel 30 Dec 2013 13:06 UTC
0 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: How to Beat Procrastination
(It’s hardly relevant to the parent comment, but the Shinzen Young interview linked above is behind a paywall nowadays. But it can still be read here.)

MondSemmel 4 Jan 2014 12:29 UTC
−2 points
in reply to: shminux’s comment on: Initial Thoughts on Personally Finding a High-Impact Career
This advice sounds like ‘do what you’re passionate about’, which conflicts with the research done by 80k hours, though. See here and here.

These posts are well worth reading for anyone struggling with said advice, e.g. because they aren’t passionate about anything. To paraphrase (though this doesn’t do the 80k hours posts justice): Find something which is valuable and which you’re likely to be good at, and you’ll grow to enjoy it, too.

MondSemmel 7 Jan 2014 16:41 UTC
4 points
on: How habits work and how you may control them
Book summaries are always appreciated, but I don’t understand your high praise of the book. I was disappointed with it for several reasons:
- I wanted a book on how to change habits. In fact, my edition has the subtitle “Why we do what we do and how to change”. I didn’t really get much of that. There’s abstract theory and even seemingly concrete advice, but I never got said advice to work.
- I hated the book’s structure, which required grinding through filler stories to get at interspersed facts. Most of these stories have hardly anything to do with habits.
- To fit these stories into the book, the author uses terrible, strained metaphors like ‘social habits’ or ‘organizational habits’ over and over. The latter should have been left out. So I consider a huge chunk of the book to be useless.
- Without all the waffling, the author could have made his points in half the space. Tangents lead to tangents-within-tangents. Low information density. Not zero, but low.

MondSemmel 17 Jan 2014 14:20 UTC
4 points
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: Things I Wish They’d Taught Me When I Was Younger: Why Money Is Awesome
Right. The post is also a bit unstructured, but lack of truly awesome examples was my main problem with it, too.

The main everyday example given was house cleaning. But that seems like such a stereotypical example that I wonder a) whether people actually do find it sufficiently awesome to hire people to clean their houses, and b) if it’s the only example of its kind.

EDIT: Some other comments suggest CFAR workshops as an awesome expense. I have no first-hand experience with them, but that sounds plausible to me.

MondSemmel 19 Jan 2014 12:59 UTC
15 points
on: 2013 Survey Results
Thanks for taking the time to conduct and then analyze this survey!

What surprised me:
- Average IQ seemed insane to me. Thanks for dealing extensively with that objection.
- Time online per week seems plausible from personal experience, but I didn’t expect the average to be so high.
- The overconfidence data hurts, but as someone pointed out in the comments, it’s hard to ask a question which isn’t misunderstood.
What disappointed me:
- Even I was disappointed by the correlations between P(significant man-made global warming) vs. e.g. taxation/feminism/etc. Most other correlations were between values, but this one was between one’s values and an empirical question. Truly Blue/Green. On the topic of politics in general, see below.
- People, use spaced repetition! It’s been studied academically and been shown to work brilliantly; it’s really easy to incorporate in your daily life in comparison to most other LW material etc… Well, I’m comparatively disappointed with these numbers, though I assume they are still far higher than in most other communities.
And a comment at the end:

“We are doing terribly at avoiding Blue/Green politics, people.”

Given that LW explicitly tries to exclude politics from discussion (and for reasons I find compelling), what makes you expect differently?

Incorporating LW debiasing techniques into daily life will necessarily be significantly harder than just reading the Sequences, and even those have only been read by a relatively small proportion of posters...

MondSemmel 19 Jan 2014 18:34 UTC
1 point
on: How to Become a 1000 Year Old Vampire
Feedback: This essay includes a few suggestions which might be valuable to pursue or do, but I downvoted the essay mainly for pulling numbers out of nowhere throughout the post.

Saying boosts your productivity or life experience or awesomeness by factor Y is something I expect from self-help books (for a horrible example thereof, see the book Eat That Frog), not from Less Wrong.

MondSemmel 20 Jan 2014 13:24 UTC
1 point
in reply to: lucidfox’s comment on: Generalizing From One Example
The delicious irony of Yvain (alias Scott) possibly committing a True Scotsman fallacy...

MondSemmel 24 Jan 2014 12:19 UTC
5 points
1
on: Reason as memetic immune disorder

Christianity was pacifist at the start, as it arose in a conquered people. When the Romans adopted it, it didn’t make them any more militaristic than they already were.

But conversely, Christianity became a lot more militaristic when it became the state religion. Listen e.g. to Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History podcast Thor’s Angels (free as of 01/2014; 4h long).

I have a theory that “radical Islam” is not native Islam, but Westernized Islam.

-> What about e.g. the fatwa over Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, or blasphemy laws, or whatever? This theory doesn’t seem consistent with already known facts.

MondSemmel 24 Jan 2014 14:30 UTC
2 points
on: Book Review: How Learning Works
Thank you for writing this summary! You must have put a lot of effort into this.

I’m not a teacher, so I don’t know whether I’ll every use any of this, though. That said, I have younger siblings—maybe some of these ideas can help me explain stuff to them better.

It covers important points that HLW addresses only indirectly or that it inexplicably leaves out entirely (spaced repetition, testing, and generation effects, for example).

Argh!