Morendil

• Morendil 3 Apr 2012 6:52 UTC

  83 points

  on: SotW: Be Specific

  her attempt to teach a unit on “Being Specific” didn’t seem to work.

  How specifically did it not work?

  (ETA: I should probably add I’m not being mischievous here; “doesn’t work” is a trigger phrase for me, born out of extensive experience of dealing with useless bug reports. It systematically unpacks into at least two questions, “what behavior were you expecting” and “what did you get instead”.)

  What links here?

  • Morendil's comment on Knowl­edge value = knowl­edge qual­ity × do­main importance by John_Maxwell (16 Apr 2012 12:20 UTC; 4 points)

Rea­son­ing isn’t about logic (it’s about ar­gu­ing)

Diseased dis­ci­plines: the strange case of the in­verted chart

The red pa­per­clip the­ory of status

Causal di­a­grams and soft­ware engineering

De­bate tools: an ex­pe­rience report

Rais­ing the fore­cast­ing wa­ter­line (part 1)

The many faces of status

Rais­ing the waterline

• Morendil 4 Jul 2013 14:13 UTC

  47 points

  on: A New In­ter­pre­ta­tion of the Marsh­mal­low Test

  That’s not a pattern confined to behavioral economics, it’s expected to apply to all of science.

  The technical term for this idea is “underdetermination of scientific theory by evidence”—you don’t make a discovery by running a single experiment, that’s mythologized science. Real science builds up by doing an experiment, abducting to a possible explanation, then painstakingly ruling out all the alternatives (or, very often, the original potential explanation) with further experiments, often taking a very long time. (Even this is a drastically oversimplified view of the “scientific process” but it’ll have to do for this discussion.)

  If there is an issue here, it’s not so much in how scientists are doing their jobs (though in this specific case I’ll admit it seems to be taking a bit long to refine the original result), it’s more one of sensationalistic journalistic reporting of scientific results and uncritical acceptance by the lay public, often leading to herd behavior.

• Morendil 4 Nov 2012 0:10 UTC

  47 points

  on: 2012 Less Wrong Cen­sus/​Survey

  Survey taken while it was in stealth mode. Good to know it’s officially out now!

  A funny thing about the calibration question. Last year I gave myself (IIRC) a 35% probability of having the right answer within the interval asked, and got the answer right. This year I missed by two decades, at 55% confidence. Surprisingly that’s actually progress—the Brier score tells me this year’s is a better result than last year’s.

• Morendil 7 Dec 2012 7:41 UTC

  45 points

  on: 2012 Win­ter Fundraiser for the Sin­gu­lar­ity Institute

  Sent in 100€. Merry Newtonmas!

Hack­ing Less Wrong made easy: Va­grant edition

• Morendil 28 Jan 2012 23:00 UTC

  44 points

  on: The Ne­glected Virtue of Curiosity

  Look, I don’t mind wacky fonts or formatting. But this list of references is a pain in the neck, a usability nightmare, and worse than that.

  Here’s how it looks from a reader’s perspective:

  • I start reading how curiosity “leads us to ask questions”...

  • I notice the superscript 1

  • I notice that the 1 isn’t a hyperlink, I infer that it leads to a footnote

  • I scroll down to the footnotes, losing my place in the main text

  • I locate footnote one, which reads “Peters (1978)”

  • I recognize the terse-citation style

  • I infer that there is a list of references

  • I scroll down to the references, losing my place again

  • I use Cmd-F to find “Peters”, since the list is very long

  • I finally get to the actual information I want: “Effects of anxiety, curiosity”, etc.

  • This still isn’t a hyperlink, so I must look for it manually

  • If I’m really dedicated, I’ll open a new tab, copy the title, and Google it

  Even once I get the hang of what you’re doing here, only the few steps that are inferences will go away; most of the rest of this unnecessary work is still left for me to do.

  You know what the worst part is?

  You show how to do it right in the first goddamn paragraph, the one after the quotation: hyperlinks.

  Don’t use a footnote to lead indirectly to a near-useless chunk of static text which the most dedicated reader can then use to maybe find the article. Link to the fucker directly. That’s how it’s done in this bright new millenium.

  If at all possible, link to a free PDF. I know that in many cases the PDF is still held hostage behind a paywall. Hopefully that will change by and by. The best homage the LW community could pay to the virtue of curiosity would be to “liberate” some of these PDFs and make them available in some sort of public pool, the way you can get many paywalled PDFs for free if you know how to use CiteSeerX, or even just Google. We need some sort of AcademiaBay.

  But anyway, the basic message is: Less Wrong is not a dead tree academic publication. There is nothing to be gained by pretending it is one.

  In passing, I note that you’re making the Peters article say something that doesn’t quite square with what the abstract says. Not only are you needlessly dressing up a trivial observation (“curiosity leads us to ask questions”) in the guise of stuffy academic work—but worse, you aren’t reporting the research’s conclusions faithfully (as far as I can tell by looking at the abstract).

  Have you actually read the full text of Peters 1978?

  ETA: don’t take this as an attack on you personally; I think Luke(prog) is to blame for introducing this broken style of citation to LW in the first place—in any case I wrote to him with basically the above complaints. But this is kind of the straw that breaks this camel’s back, prompting me to comment on it publicly.

Less Wrong Book Club and Study Group

• Morendil 5 Oct 2012 9:42 UTC

  42 points

  on: “Hide com­ments in down­voted threads” is now active

  This opens up a new aspect of downvoting, which I’ve just now tried out, and will describe in the interest of full disclosure: you can “swim up” the chain of comment parents until you find one that is at −3, and by downvoting that cause the entire downthread discussion to be effectively censored.

  Swimming upthread is something I do quite often in the course of trying to understand what sparked a particular controversy—I’m often dismayed to see that these are tangents that had nothing to do with the original question being investigated and not a whole lot to do with rationality.

  This comment by Wei Dai was the trigger for my looking to use this tactic (it felt like it belonged in a low-overall-value discussion of the kind I’d like to see less of), showing up at the top of Recent comments.

  No less than eight levels above was this comment by wedrifid, sitting at −3, with a total of 38 children comments. Downvoting it (without the slightest qualm, given the first non-quoted words were a rhetorical “How dare you” that I strongly prefer not to see around here) did in fact cause Wei Dai’s comment to disappear from Recent. (Here’s the starting point of the whole subthread.)

  So, that’s one (possibly unexpected) consequence of the new rule. Good? Bad? I haven’t formed an opinion yet.

  (Some disclaimers: I have no particular antipathy toward either Wei Dai or wedrifid, nor did I allow myself to develop a particular attachment to either “side” in that particular controversy, given that the appearance of “sides” at all didn’t strike me as particularly productive. I’m aware that my commenting on this may negate the censorship consequences on this particular discussion, but it seemed to me that bringing this out in the open had greater expected value than just quietly censoring one subthread and retaining the power to do it again on other occasions.)

• Morendil 1 Apr 2013 15:21 UTC

  41 points

  on: Open Thread, April 1-15, 2013

  Received word a few days ago that, (unofficially, pending several unresolved questions) my GJP performance is on track to make me eligible for “super forecaster” status (last year these were picked from the top 2%).

  ETA, May 9th: received the official invitation.

• Morendil 1 Oct 2011 16:27 UTC

  41 points

  on: Ra­tion­al­ity Drugs

  “Drug X improves performance measure Y” will in general be an incomplete description of the effects of drug X.

  To be a rationalist is to be the kind of person who mentally adds “among other as yet undiscovered effects” to every single bullet point above.

• Morendil 10 Sep 2010 13:41 UTC

  41 points

  in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: More art, less stink: Tak­ing the PU out of PUA

  But how the hell do you “believe in yourself”? That phrase is opaque to me.

  I take it to mean something like “The time for a lucid appraisal of your own abilities is prior to action, not in the middle of it. Once you find yourself engaged in real-time application of some skill or other, act as if your mastery of that skill isn’t at issue at all, rather than let yourself be distracted by assessments of the likelihood of failure, because they are likely to be self-fulfilling prophecies.”

  You can see why people prefer the short version.

  What links here?

  • AdeleneDawner's comment on Ra­tion­al­ist Horo­scopes: Low-hang­ing util­ity gen­er­a­tor? by AdeleneDawner (20 May 2011 21:02 UTC; 0 points)

• Morendil 26 Dec 2014 19:36 UTC

  38 points

  on: CFAR in 2014: Con­tin­u­ing to climb out of the startup pit, head­ing to­ward a full prototype

  Donated $300. Happy New Year!