… he shouted down, soaring through the sky.
Mqrius
Karma: 171
Alright, so there seems to be enthusiasm for this. The next step is figuring out the practical details.
How do we create a group study room? The first things that come to mind are a Skype group chat, Google hangouts, and the newly developed browser-to-browser video chat. The latter seems undersupported to me, although I haven’t researched it specifically. Skype group chats require at least 1 person to have a premium account, and I’m not sure if you can make a permanent “room”.
That leaves Google hangouts. Some searching shows that it used to be possible to make a permanent hangout link, but this function was removed. On that same page, Dori, Google Community Manager, offers a workaround. If you create an event years in the future, the hangout link won’t change.
To create a lasting link, go to https://plus.google.com/events and look down at Schedule your next hangout. The Hangout link in the created event (under the date/time) is persistent.
This seems like a reasonable solution. Are there any other video group chat options, beside the 3 I mentioned?
Edit: tsakinis has a fourth option, and immediately put it to use: Tinychat.Should we have a schedule or planning facility, to bridge the time until we get 85 members?
Edit: Shannon suggests that this thread can be used for discussing strategies and experiments.
Eliezer Yudkowsky is worth more than one paperclip.
Since I fixed this, it seems OpenMeetings is stable. It has been running for at least 10 hours, with at some point 8 people in there, all streaming video. There have been a few notes in the chat which I’ll address publically:
I’m not sure if it’s a good idea to redirect people here if tinychat is still better until this gets done correctly
Agreed. The redirection today was only for stresstesting it. If it’s not stable, putting further effort in it is useless. It turns out it’s stable though, so I’ll hack some more at it, and see what I can make of it.
is there a way to make the chat part larger?
&
bah, this chat window should be nr1 priority to fixI’ll have to edit the source code for it. I haven’t been in the source code so far. Difficulty: Easy
I signed up with a username. Why is it not displayed?
It uses the First & Last name as display names. I intend to gut the entire registration form to just ask for username & password, and use the username as a display name. Difficulty: Easy
hm I dont think I can make public rooms
Indeed, only the admin can. However, you can make personal rooms, and then give someone else an invitation link. I can make a few more public rooms, if there’s demand for that?
I don’t like that the no [chat] notifications part, though
Agreed. I don’t know if it’s supported. If it’s not, I, or the devs, will need to add it. Don’t know how difficult that will be.
it is making my computer work a lot harder [compared to tinychat] though
I don’t know if that’s because there was an unusually large amount of people there, or because the video quality is higher than tinychat. I can put a limit on the video resolution you can select, if people want that. Difficulty: Easy
Confusing webcam selection screen
I mentioned that to the devs 2 days ago, they fixed it the same day, and put out a new release candidate. However, running it, it doesn’t work for me. I’ve just notified them, I expect this to be fixed soon.
Right now, the user experience delta to tinychat is: Login form. Manual resizing of every single video required. Loads of buttons and options to get lost in.
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The barrier to entry is much higher than tinychat.Login form will be gutted, I’ll cap video resolution, and the webcam selection will be simpler. That should get the barrier to entry on a similar level as tinychat, while retaining the potential of multiple public rooms and such.
Maybe a common room where people can initially talk about what they intend to work on. (Eliezer says: This needs either strong group norms or built-in limits on talk time to avoid becoming a social chat timesink.)
I discussed this a bit with tsakinis, and I think that we can indeed create group norms that do the following:
Suggest people that are having a (long) discussion to do so in a private room
Welcome new people, find out what they’re working on, and then go off together to do a pomodoro in one of the study rooms
This will mean that someone who joins “just to have a look” will be positively welcomed, and get his first taste of the social work encouragement. The alternative, no lobby room, means that a new person will have to choose between arbitrary study rooms, then “drop in” on people that are working. For someone who’s unsure about the entire thing, this doesn’t help at all.
Indeed, I was wondering about that. For more clarity: it’s a reply to bw’s collapsed comment. It’s not nested since this article was moved from overcomingbias to here, and overcomingbias didn’t have nested comments. You’ll see that a lot in the sequences.
Login form: Gutted
Video resolution: Capped
Chat area height: IncreasedWebcam selection: Eh. The devs changed it, it’s a bit better, but not quite there yet. Maybe they’ll work on it more after the weekend. Edit: It’s fixed! :)
Chat notifications: Haven’t looked into it yet. Edit: Have looked into it, but haven’t figured it out yet.I’ll have it running most of the time. Feel free to look around!
For the programmers, patches are available here: ftp://lesswrong:openmeetings@forecast.student.utwente.nl
I disagree. Instrumental rationality is at least as important as epistemic rationality, akrasia is both one of the largest blocks and one of the most common blocks in daily life, and the survey has shown that co-working is the best tool we have to combat akrasia. Assuming we can make this the nexus of co-working efforts, its place in Main is justified.
It’s an interesting idea, for sure.
For me, though, I really need the coordination part. A global study room where you can come and go wouldn’t work as well for me: it lacks the precommitment I get from agreeing with an individual to work alongside eachother at a specific time and date. I can make the agreement in far mode, and then near mode sticks to it, only if I made the agreement with someone else than myself.
Another thing that popped into my mind when reading this is that you’re trying to create a large joint effort, where everyone involved tends to procrastinate. That might be difficult.
I could imagine a different form of group arising if two individuals start out together, and then add a third at the same time and date, and if that works, keep adding people slowly. This would only work on skype if one person has a paid account, but I guess google hangouts could work.
Edit: An ongoing non-work-intended rationalist hangout would be quite interesting. It might have the same time-sapping risk as #lesswrong on IRC though.
Upvoted for actually testing the theory :)
Obviously, if what you’re actually doing is running a set number of trials in one case and running trials until you reach significance or give up in the second case, you will come up with different results.
I don’t believe this is true. Every individual trial is individual Bayesian evidence, unrelated to the rest of the trials except in the fact that your priors are different. If you run until significance you will have updated to a certain probability, and if you run until you’re bored you’ll also have updated to a certain probability.
Sure, if you run a different amount of trials, you may end up with a different probability. At worst, if you keep going until you’re bored, you may end up with results insignificant for the strict rules of “proof” in Science. But as long as you use Bayesian updating, neither method produces some form of invalid results.
which actually seems fairly obvious in retrospect
Ding ding ding! That’s my hindsight-bias-reminder-heuristic going off. It tells me when I need to check myself for hindsight bias, and goes off on thoughts like “That seems obvious in retrospect” and “I knew that all along.” At the risk of doing your thinking for you, I’d say this is a case of hindsight bias: It wasn’t obvious beforehand, since otherwise you wouldn’t have felt the need to do the test. This means it’s not an obvious concept in the first place, and only becomes clear when you consider it more closely, which you did. Then saying that “it’s obvious in retrospect” has no value, and actually devalues the time you put in.
formatting sucks
Try this:
To make a paragraph where your indentation is preserved and no characters are treated specially, precede each line with (at least) four spaces. This is commonly used for computer program source code.
(From the Comment Formatting Help)
Dang, another one that doesn’t sit well with my planning. I’ll attend at some point, really!
I valued the bit of chatting we did a lot. It creates a community feeling , and helps with actually getting me to work :)
But indeed, some people are distracted by the chatting. Having a “lobby” would work. Then the study room could be quiet most of the time, except when the joint hour-synced Pomodoro finishes. If you want to hang out but aren’t working, you remove yourself from the study room.
These would be simple but effective guidelines, I think.
Am I responsible for my moral choices?
Yes.Is John in front of the burning orphanage responsible for his moral choices?
Also yes.But can I be angry at John-1 if he runs away?
I find that I can’t. Not when my anti-Correspondence bias-heuristics kick in, when I envision his situation, when I realize he is the product of a specific set of understandable environmental factors and psychological factors, which are the product of a specific combination of nature and nurture. Yes, some babies dying is John-1′s fault. But John-1 is the “fault” of his upbringing.I find I can’t be honestly be angry, and I can’t honestly blame, when I have considered this reasoning. I can be sad, sure, but that’s different.
For myself, it doesn’t give me a catch-all excuse. I have a choice, I make it, and I am responsible for making it, even if I am a product of nature and nurture. This agrees with the viewpoint expressed in the article, as far as I understand it.
As for law, these views unfold like this: Most people still need to be punished for transgressions, in order to conserve the law’s pre-commitment that produces the negative expected utility upon transgressions. For some people, there’s also a sense of “justice” involved with it, but that doesn’t come into play for my rational reasoning.
As it turns out, these views are also predicted and recommended as the future of law in the paper that TGGP2 linked. I’ve only read the abstract so far though.
For programmers who are curious about OpenMeeting, I’ve set up a mockup server on my PC. It’s is not entirely stock install, I’ve changed a few configurations to make it more like what we want. No source code changing yet though. You can have a look at it here:
http://forecast.student.utwente.nl:5080/openmeetings/
Go there, wait for a few seconds for it to load, make an account (no verification or anything required), and then you can join the public room. You’ll get a popup for video settings: it shows a black screen initially, even though your cam does work when you hit “Start recording test”. I’ve notified the devs that this is very non-intuitive, and they’ll be changing it.
Instead of joining the public room, you also have the option to make personal rooms, and invite people in with a link.My impression about OpenMeetings:
Pros:Open source
Very customizable, because it’s open source
Doesn’t require a google account
It’s in active development, with an active mailing list on which people reply quickly
Easy to limit rooms, get a room overview, and create new rooms
Cons:
I find the documentation not very intuitive
It needs a server to run on
Screensharing is a bit clunky: You can’t really use it instead of your webcam, as in google hangout. Should be fine for 1-on-1 video chats though.
Compared to Google hangouts:
Pros:Easy to set up
Doesn’t need a server
Supports screensharing
Somewhat customizable: It supports widgets, but I’m not sure to what degree the layout is editable.
Cons:
Needs a google account
Permanent rooms are a bit of a hack (by creating an event far in the future)
Neither is a clear winner. I’ll personally be looking at if it’s easy to change the layout on OpenMeetings. If that’s doable, then it’s already at or beyond the “baseline” level we have with Tinychat.
I believe this is the research you mention? Effort for payment: a tale of two markets
I think money might complicate things: You might want to get paid more for stuff you don’t find that interesting. With trading just time, it feels different. You’d just give the other person X hours of your time, and you get X hours back. It doesn’t matter to you what you do in the X hours you gave away. Perhaps getting money for it also makes it seem like work, instead of a fun, social thing. Then again, maybe it’s a distinction that’s only in my head, so if you can make it work, sure, go for it!
Buying food indeed seems less formal.
I type colemak, but for the test I temporarily swapped back. The E and I are conveniently spaced out in QWERTY, and you only have to locate them once, as Nebu pointed out.
The maximum total energy from PUFA has been a discussion point with DIY Soylent makers as well. The final consensus was that it should definitely be below 10%, and possibly below 4%. The 4% figure comes from The perfect health diet, which uses this as a source:
Angela Liou Y, Innis SM. Dietary linoleic acid has no effect on arachidonic acid, but increases n-6 eicosadienoic acid, and lowers dihomo-gamma-linolenic and eicosapentaenoic acid in plasma of adult men. Prostaglandins, Leukotrienes and Essential Fatty Acids 2009 Apr;80(4):201–6, http://pmid.us/19356914.
I’ve also got a copy hosted at http://forecast.student.utwente.nl/Lesswrong/ but only download that if your university or company legally gives you access to Elsevier content.
For the discussion and links to other relevant papers, see http://discourse.soylent.me/t/optimal-micronutrient-ratios/5049/52 and further posts
For my Soylent, I ended up getting most fats from macadamia oil (mostly Omega-9 aka MUFA) and MCT oil (Medium-chain saturated fat), since they don’t have any negative effects associated with them. Correct me if I’m wrong.
My university has access to the paper. I’ve got it hosted on my server, but you’re only allowed to download it if you have legal access through your university as well. If you have legal access, feel free to click this link:
Here’s a slightly different idea I’ve been toying with: Trading time
The gist of it is this: You make a plan to get together with a friend, and agree to work for 3 hours on whatever project he wants.You also plan a later date and time at which he comes to you and you work together on anything you want. This could be a hobby project, a difficult study topic you can’t quite grasp, or something simple like painting a wall.
The idea is that nearly everything is easier if you do it with someone else, especially for people that tend to procrastinate. Some things are even more efficient per person, such as pair programming. But even if it’s not, doing something non-efficiently is still better than not doing it at all, and usually more fun with someone else. The way I think of it, this is an opportunity to get those things done you’ve been wanting to do all this time, but never get around to.
Ironically, I’ve been meaning to try this out, but haven’t gotten around to it yet :x
Obviously this doesn’t work for everything: it’s hard to do for writing a thesis for example, but plenty of things can be made to work with some creativity, especially if your partner is there in real life. It’s a different concept than what’s expressed in the blog post, which is more like working at the same time instead of working together on the same thing. I’m currently mainly interested in the former, although I wanted to share this idea here since the topics are similar.
Feel free to contact me to get to know eachother! My email is Nuntius.Marii@Gmail.com, and my skype id is m.qrius.