Morendil

Karma: 9,443

Morendil 21 Sep 2009 16:35 UTC
0 points
in reply to: thomblake’s comment on: It’s all in your head-land
That “see also” link appears to be written by someone whose knowledge of Agile is at best skimpy.
What links here?
- Morendil's comment on Proposed New Features for Less Wrong by alyssavance (27 Apr 2010 12:36 UTC; 8 points)

Morendil 21 Sep 2009 17:24 UTC
2 points
in reply to: derefr’s comment on: It’s all in your head-land
“Prototype” isn’t an accurate description of what Agile practitioners do. (To save time in later discussion, note that big-A “Agile” refers to people who self-identify as users of Agile techniques; we could use small-a “agile” to refer to the desirable properties a project is supposed to acquire through use of Agile techniques.)

The term implies something that will be thrown away, whereas an Agile practitioner aims to build very rapidly a skeletal version that will be kept, improved (iteratively) and fleshed out (incrementally).

You’re quite right about it being controversial.

What interest (if any) does this (LW) community have in applying rationality (epistemic and instrumental) to the process of developing software ?

There’s a landmark paper by Parnas et al. on this topic, which starts off with “Most of us like to think of ourselves as rational professionals. However, to many observers, the usual process of designing software appears quite irrational...” The first three sections by themselves make for good reading on the distinction between epistemic and instrumental rationality.

I came across LW mostly by accident—I stumbled onto the series of articles about quantum physics, found myself glued to the screen until I got to the end, then read the primer on Bayes and its follow-up on EY’s site before coming back to sample random sections of LW. I was vaguely aware of Bayes’ theorem previously but the promise of improving my thinking got my attention.

Strategies for software development in general, and Agile in particular, are currently my main area of professional interest. Some of LW’s readership apparently have some interest in developing software that thinks, and this would seem to entail getting real good at developing software in general… but I didn’t find much discussion of that particular topic in my random sampling (and no “software” tag to point me to it if it exists). Hence my question above...

Morendil 23 Sep 2009 8:33 UTC
2 points
on: Ethics as a black box function
Those “three tiers” sound a little bit like another classification I found useful, in Baron’s “Thinking and Deciding”. These are the normative, prescriptive and descriptive questions about thinking and decision making.

Descriptive models account for how people actually decide. Experimental results on biases fit in there. Normative theories are about how we should think; standards by which actual decisions can be evaluated. Expected utility fits in there.

Prescriptive models bridge the gap between the two: they are rules about how we can improve everyday thinking by bringing our decisions closer to what normative theories would advise. They account for the practical concerns of decision making, e.g. in some cases our resources (time, brainpower, etc.) are too limited for an exact computation according to the normative theory.

“Pick[ing] the moral frameworks which are best at justifying [our] ethical intuitions” is discussed at length in Rawls’ Theory of Justice under the term “reflective equilibrium”. It doesn’t require that we hold our “ethical intuitions” as a fixed point; the process of working out (in advance and at leisure) consequences of normative models and comparing them with our intuitions may very well lead us to revise our intutions.

Reflective equilibrium is desirable from a prescriptive standpoint. When we are “in the thick of things” we usually will not have time to work out or moral positions on pen and paper, and will fall back on intuitions and heuristics. It is better to have trained those to yield the decisions we would wish ourselves to make if we could consider the situation in advance.

Morendil 25 Sep 2009 8:59 UTC
0 points
on: Planning Fallacy
I’m still reading through the archives of LW, catching up with where the conversation has been, figuring out what I can expect to learn, what I can expect to contribute. And this comment is as much a note to myself as a it is a tiny part of that conversation. But...

Extended discussion of “agile” or “extreme programming” techniques seems to be too specialized to be relevant to LW. (Although it seems like the general topic of how to write reliable and maintainable code should be a priority for the subset of the LW community who’s interested in working on AIs.)

However, a systematic look at normative, descriptive and prescriptive models of thinking as it applies to planning and executing projects, including biases, heuristics and shortcomings would be very interesting, not just to me but probably to a fair number of LW readers. I mean “projects” here in the broadest possible meaning; “predicting the future by inventing it” to paraphrase Alan Kay. This includes not just the various flavors of “project management” within businesses, but the more general topic of how people formulate projects for themselves, enlist others in their projects, and succeed or fail with those projects.

This post barely scratches the surface of the issues relating to planning, for instance, inasmuch as estimation is not just an individual but also a social phenomenon. Extrapolating from what students to in a task estimation study to the underlying causes of large delays in big projects such as DIA is likely oversimplifying.

The topic map on the Wiki doesn’t suggest that there are many more articles like this one, but I might be missing something. If I am, can someone give me pointers ?

Morendil 28 Sep 2009 8:26 UTC
5 points
on: Your Most Valuable Skill
Of the ones mentioned so far my highest ranking would be learning to learn, saying no, and my first love, programming. Here’s one not mentioned so far:

Consulting, the skill of influencing others at their request. (See e.g. Jerry Weinberg’s Secrets of Consulting.) This has elements of teaching, but is worth more on the market. It relies on broad experience rather than specialized knowledge. It calls for your clients seeing you as a trusted advisor, relying on you not for deep expertise in their own domain but for an outside perspective, at least a little less tainted by internal biases than they are.

A consultant is often simply someone who is “less wrong” than their client, but to deploy this effectively requires a number of sub-skills: empathy, negotiation, listening, flexibility, networking...

Initially I picked up this skill because I was fed up with wasting my programming skills in the service of employers who seemed to systematically mismanage their own projects. (In retrospect that’s not such a good reason to change careers, but that’s how I saw things back then.) I went freelance and focused on helping businesses which wanted to improve their project management and development strategies.
What links here?
- Morendil's comment on Proposed New Features for Less Wrong by alyssavance (27 Apr 2010 12:36 UTC; 8 points)

Morendil 28 Sep 2009 12:13 UTC
0 points
in reply to: PlaidX’s comment on: Your Most Valuable Skill
Recommended reading: Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville.

Morendil 30 Sep 2009 23:10 UTC
2 points
in reply to: PhilGoetz’s comment on: Your Most Valuable Skill
Oh… Long story, because “get a consulting contract” is nothing like a well defined event with a single causal chain leading to it. I’ll try to summarize...

I spent some time out of work and burning through my savings. While I was doing that I “worked” for no pay, organizing the local community of folks interested in the topic I was passionate about (Extreme Programming). This gave me lots of opportunity to network. About two years later, the passion and the networking started paying dividends, just at the time my savings were running out. I landed one small training gig. Then a small consultancy across the Channel (I live in France) funded me to put together a few marketing seminars. I had established enough credibility by then that this convinced one client, then another.

Somewhere in there I parlayed my 10 years’ work experience into a master’s degree in computer science. I also attended lots of conferences, read a fair bit, and generally kept busy even when I wasn’t making money.

Morendil 1 Oct 2009 14:09 UTC
0 points
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: Open Thread: October 2009
There’s a passing mention in George Ainslie’s book on akrasia, /Breakdown of Will/ which struck me as interesting. At the moment I can’t recall just what or where. I’ll dip into it again and see if I find it again.

Morendil 3 Oct 2009 7:19 UTC
1 point
on: Open Thread: October 2009
Bayesian reasoning spotted in the wild at Language Log

Morendil 3 Oct 2009 18:53 UTC
1 point
on: When Willpower Attacks
There are more failure modes of willpower than just acquiring the power to resist urges bequeathed us for good reasons by evolution.

Obsessive-compulsive disorders sound like a good example to study; possibly of willpower taken too far. Most of us have to be reminded to wash our hands before eating, or (in the current period of paranoid fears of swine flu contagion) after sneezing. OCD sufferers don’t need reminding, they must wash their hands several times a day, or check, double-check and triple-check that they have locked their doors before leaving home, and so on.

Ainslie’s analysis of “personal rules” as one of the components of willpower might be relevant here; he mentions “fussiness” as one downside of willpower, and OCD is an extreme of fussiness.

Morendil 4 Oct 2009 4:15 UTC
1 point
on: Arguing “By Definition”
This post prompted me to survey the “Sent” folder of my email archives looking at how I use the phrase “by definition”. I plead guilty to a few illegitimate uses of the sort covered in the post.

There is also at least one type of legitimate usage “outside of math”, which I resort to fairly often. It consists of reminding my interlocutors of some consequences of the definition of a term that we have previously agreed on as a shorthand for some complex intension.

Interestingly, some of the oldest examples are from when I was playing the game of Nomic over email—the game consists of making changes to its own rules, usually by voting on change proposals, and a common type of move consists of making up a definition of this type within a rule, e.g. “A player’s Loudness shall be defined as the number of emails they sent to the list in the past seven days.” The legal effects of a definition contained in a rule are derived from its literal wording, as opposed to its intended meaning, so you can use “by definition” to straigthen out someone who is appealing to an intuitive, but wrong, understanding of a term so defined.

Other examples revolve around “terms of art”, a word that has a special meaning in a given context. In Agile software development, the term “velocity” has a technical definition, which is “the sum of the estimates originally assigned to all features which were fully implemented in the previous iteration”. Novices sometimes overload that with other meanings, such as “how much work to plan for the next iteration”, so they’ll ask questions like “one of my developers is going to take a vacation next month, how much should I lower velocity” ? Then I might remind them that by definition velocity is something observed, not decided upon.

Morendil 5 Oct 2009 7:24 UTC
7 points
on: Dying Outside
Ugh. Deepest sympathies.

Your situation, and your reaction to it, highlight a great advantage of working within a knowledge profession—of identifying as what the LW community calls “rationalists”. When learning about something like that, you can make plans to be not just a passive sufferer of the disease, but a researcher of it from the inside, actively helping in the fight against it.

You can plan to learn all you can about the causes and progression of the disease, and be prepared for your losses as they happen. You can plan to investigate related areas—you mentioned voice synthesis and Brain-Computer Interfaces also come to mind as a field that’s been moving along lately; still quite slow from what I’ve seen, but improving. If you can use BCI to play a video game, it’s not such a big stretch to think of it providing control of, say, a virtual avatar—the name “Second Life” takes an altogether different meaning there. Being a software developer would, at any rate, definitely be handy in that situation.

I didn’t know about voice banking; that’s a fascinating idea, with all sorts of interesting implications (would one want to record non-verbal things like laughter; is there some way to program voice synthesis for singing, etc.). Can you maybe post a link to whoever provides the free service you mentioned ? Especially if they can use financial support.

Best wishes.

Morendil 5 Oct 2009 19:05 UTC
15 points
in reply to: HalFinney’s comment on: Dying Outside
To what extent, if any, did your choice of signing up years ago modify the impact of the bad news ?

From a certain point of view, your diagnosis enhances the value of having purchased the cryonics option. You can be reasonably certain that when the end comes it will be predictable and you will be in an environment that makes suspension and transport easier.

Also I imagine that financing suspension with a life insurance policy becomes a different proposition, financially, after you’ve been diagnosed with ALS.

I’ve been putting it off, myself, for a bunch of reasons including the usual of looking like a very long shot and the social stigma, but mostly because at the moment it’s such a US thing and there is so very little guidance to be had if you live elsewhere (I’m in France). Your example is making me rethink that. I suppose I should just fire off an email to Alcor and CI and see what they can tell me.

Morendil 6 Oct 2009 7:04 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Emile’s comment on: Where are we?
I’m in Paris

Morendil 7 Oct 2009 8:21 UTC
4 points
on: The First Step is to Admit That You Have a Problem
I like the definition given in Gause and Weinberg’s “Are Your Lights On”, a book I’d recommend to anyone thinking about the topics in this post: “A problem is a difference between things as desired and things as perceived.”

Sometimes the resolution involves bringing “things” (i.e. reality) in line with our desires, after we (correctly) perceive it to be different from the desired reality. This will normally involve tasks. (We usually speak of a “project” if we envision many tasks, in particular if they have a hierarchical structure, in particular if we’re aware we don’t know all of the tasks.)

Sometimes too, perhaps more often than we think, the resolution involves bringing our desires in line with reality; or correcting our perceptions, so that the problem is dissolved rather than solved. Not all problem are solved by turning them into tasks, in other words.

An extremely common failure mode of human planners is to jump to solutions, and systematically these are task-solutions. If the first step is to declare that you have a problem, maybe the second step is to frame a problem statement.

Morendil 7 Oct 2009 19:35 UTC
11 points
on: Let them eat cake: Interpersonal Problems vs Tasks
Online dating sites appear to offer a counterexample to the assertion that “society resists better attempts to taskify social interaction (especially dating and mating)”.

Morendil 7 Oct 2009 21:54 UTC
6 points
in reply to: HughRistik’s comment on: Let them eat cake: Interpersonal Problems vs Tasks
Hugh, your complaint as I understand it is that society not only doesn’t provide rituals which turn “dating and mating” into a well defined process with agreed upon rules, but in fact actively resists the demands of people who would use such rituals.

Yet when one researches the question “what are the formalized rituals of dating and mating”, well, there’s plenty of information out there. May I suggest that it would be wortwhile to yourself and to your readers to do the research, and report back on what you found, and then possibly point out any remaining large gaps?

Disclosure: I may not have much to say about dating and mating in general, as I have been out of the dating market for twenty years.

I do have a little experience in deliberately transforming myself (from 2000 onwards) from an introverted geek with no friends into an avid business networker with an excellent reputation. I found excellent procedural information for doing so in a book called “Why Should Extroverts Make All The Money”.

Back around that time I formulated an informal theory that made the parallel between “finding a job through the want ads” and “finding a partner through classifieds”. The gist of the theory was that in both cases there were too many incentives to lie and one would get burned quite easily. The strategy that relied on building up a social network looked a lot more appealing to me, at least in the professional domain.

Even though a website provides an avenue where people can contact each other, what do you do then?

This seems to some extent taskified, Google “speed dating”. My point isn’t that encounters on online dating sites systematically lead to speed dating, but that “society” has come up with at least one taskified version of the supposed “problem” of the first meeting with a prospective date. Speed dating wouldn’t exist if “society” were as reluctant as you say it is to taskify in matters of intimacy.

And if you do end up meeting someone, what do you do?

That rather depends on the specifics of your problem statement. The “problem” of sexual encounters is at least partly taskified (think “oldest profession in the world”)...

Morendil 8 Oct 2009 6:58 UTC
3 points
in reply to: HughRistik’s comment on: Let them eat cake: Interpersonal Problems vs Tasks
You″re right, I have no reason to assume you haven’t done the research. (And I regret bringing up prostitution—not a helpful example.)

I suppose what I want to say really boils down to: I am unconvinced by your assertion that “society” has this attitude you’re describing, and giving more concrete details would help.

Morendil 9 Oct 2009 22:11 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Tyrrell_McAllister’s comment on: I’m Not Saying People Are Stupid
We want to at least distinguish between
- success at practical projects that involve planning over several tasks related by a dependence graph, possibly branching or looping
- talent in some particular domain (e.g. writing fiction, sleuthing, managing people, math, word puzzles)
- skill at memorization, accumulation of theoretical knowledge
- adopting behaviors which enhance or preserve your long-term prospects
Someone lacking the first would be called stupid, someone lacking the last would be called crazy (though we also use the term for mental illnesses, which are a different thing again).

Intelligence seems to be at least somewhat modular (idiot savants being the canonical demonstration). I wonder if there is some classification of biases by which parts of intelligence are affected.

Morendil 12 Oct 2009 9:16 UTC
3 points
on: Link: PRISMs, Gom Jabbars, and Consciousness (Peter Watts)
On that topic, I’d be curious to know how many LWers are familiar with the thesis of the other Jaynes—that is Julian Jaynes, the author of “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind”—and what y’all make of that thesis.