mstevens

Karma: 837

mstevens 23 Apr 2010 16:22 UTC
13 points
on: Attention Lurkers: Please say hi
Hi!

And a more substantive point I’ve been pondering—if rationality and the techniques discussed here are so good, why aren’t more people doing it? Why don’t I read about multi-billion dollar companies whose success was down to rationalist techniques?

mstevens 7 Jul 2010 15:36 UTC
5 points
on: Open Thread: July 2010
Something I’ve been pondering recently:

This site appears to have two related goals:

a) How to be more rational yourself b) How to promote rationality in others

Some situations appear to trigger a conflict between these two goals—for example, you might wish to persuade someone they’re wrong. You could either make a reasoned, rational argument as to why they’re wrong, or a more rhetorical, emotional argument that might convince many but doesn’t actually justify your position.

One might be more effective in the short term, but you might think the rational argument preferable as a long term education project, for example.

I don’t really have an answer here, I’m just interested in the conflict and what people think.

mstevens 7 Jul 2010 15:54 UTC
4 points
in reply to: RobinZ’s comment on: Open Thread: July 2010
I’ve tried very informal related experiments—often in dealing with people it’s necessary to challenge their assumptions about the world.

a) People’s assumptions often seem to be somewhat subconscious, so there’s significant effort to extract the assumptions they’re making.

b) These assumptions seem to be very core to people’s thinking and they’re extremely resistant to being challenged on them.

My guess is that trying to change people’s methods of thinking would be even more difficult than this.

EDIT: The first version of this I post talked more about challenging people’s methods, I thought about this more and realised it was more assumptions, but didn’t correctly edit everything to fit that. Now corrected.

mstevens 2 Aug 2010 11:03 UTC
2 points
in reply to: sketerpot’s comment on: Open Thread, August 2010
One of these http://thewikireader.com/ with rechargeable batteries and a solar charger could work.

mstevens 2 Aug 2010 11:07 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Yoreth’s comment on: Open Thread, August 2010
I’m tempted to say “a university library” as the short answer. More specifically, whatever I could get from the science and engineering departments. Pick the classic works in each field if you have someone to filter them. Look for stuff that’s more universal than specific to the way we’ve done things—in computing terms, you want The Art of Computer Programming and not The C Programming Language.

In the short term, anything you can find on farming and primitive medicine—all the stuff the better class of survivalist would have on their bookshelf.

mstevens 11 Aug 2010 15:19 UTC
7 points
on: Five-minute rationality techniques
Counter-argument:

“Less Wrong tends toward long articles with a lot of background material. That’s great, but the vast majority of people will never read them. What would be useful for raising the sanity waterline in the general population is a collection of simple-but-useful rationality techniques that you might be able to teach to a reasonably smart person in five minutes or less per technique.”

Possible alternative angle of attack—get people to read longer articles. Promote things that increase attention span, for example. Admittedly, you then need to return to this topic, as you need short simple ways to advocate for whatever you think increases attention span (personally I think meditation looks promising).

mstevens 12 Aug 2010 11:02 UTC
9 points
on: Welcome to Less Wrong! (2010-2011)
Hello!

I think I may have posted on a welcome thread before, but I still consider myself pretty new so saying hi again.

I’ve long thought rational thought is underrated. I find LW very interesting but quite difficult to get into.

Things I’d like to see:

Better introductory content.

Things I find particularly interesting:

Discussion of akrasia and strategies for avoiding it.

Buddhism—is it compatible with rationality? Personally I think some aspects yes, some aspects no.

mstevens 13 Aug 2010 14:03 UTC
0 points
in reply to: David_Allen’s comment on: Welcome to Less Wrong! (2010-2011)
I see some very promising trends in some of the Western Zen stuff, eg Brad Warner ( http://hardcorezen.blogspot.com/)(before anyone says it, I also see big problems with him!)

There’s a lot of dumping of mysticism, and some of the more unfortunate bits like gods and reincarnation.

And there are Buddha quotes like:

“Be lamps unto yourselves. Be refuges unto yourselves. Take yourself no external refuge. Hold fast to the truth as a lamp. Hold fast to the truth as a refuge. ”

(intermediate source http://www.sapphyr.net/buddhist/buddhist-quotes.htm, I’m pretty sure there are primary sources but too lazy to dig them up)

Which I think is very compatible with rationalism.

And a lot of Buddhism seems to me to make nice testable claims “do these things and you will experience a greater frequency of desirable mental states”, for example.

However there’s also other stuff I’m somewhat sympathetic to, but have doubts about, which seem to suggest giving up on rational thought.

mstevens 13 Aug 2010 14:07 UTC
6 points
in reply to: sark’s comment on: Five-minute rationality techniques
There’s room for debate here in my book, but my argument is:
- rational arguments are often complicated and require attention to detail.
- Many people have problems with complicated arguments that require attention to detail.
We can try to deal with this in two ways:
- Making the arguments simpler.
- Dealing with the problem of people not following detailed arguments (thus my earlier comment)
I think both look like promising lines of attack. It is, of course, always desirable to keep arguments as simple as possible.

mstevens 13 Aug 2010 14:24 UTC
3 points
in reply to: mstevens’s comment on: Welcome to Less Wrong! (2010-2011)
Further comments, which I’m making in the safe haven of this topic rather than the wilds of the rest of LW:

I’m moderately sympathetic to all the cryonics / singularity stuff that’s often talked about here, but also suspicious. I haven’t come up with a properly argued response, (or even read all the very long posts about it!), but LW in general gives me a feeling of twisting things to fit already chosen conclusions on these topics.

Cryonics: I view it as a long-shot option with a possible big payoff. The part I have my doubts about is the feeling I get that it’s seen as a particularly good long-shot that’s important to focus on.

Singularity stuff: This has all very possibly been discussed at length in a long post I haven’t read, and I’m quite happy to get references. Two areas of this make me uncomfortable:
- For me a key problem seems to be the rate at which people can adapt to new technologies. I’m sure I’ve seen this raised either in Marooned in Realtime (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marooned_in_Realtime) or in very standard commentary on it, so I’m sure this has been addressed somewhere. This seems likely to me to stop acceleration in technology once we reach the stage of significant change within a human lifetime.
- Someone still has to do all the thinking. Assuming the singularity happens, and as yet undefined entities can solve major problems in short timespans, this will be because they are thinking very fast. They will be operating on a much faster time scale and to them, the apparent rate of progress won’t be much greater. The singularity will only appear to solve all our problems by handwaving from the point of view of the un-accelerated. Which around here seems to be viewed as an unpleasant state of existence, to be escaped as soon as the technology is available.

mstevens 13 Aug 2010 14:28 UTC
0 points
in reply to: sark’s comment on: Five-minute rationality techniques
These people will not yet be very rational (by definition of target audience). Therefore they are likely to judge arguments on emotional grounds.

So I suggest that we need to find short arguments that promote rationality, but make an essentially emotional case for it. Ideally one would find something that overlaps—it persuades at both the emotional and rational levels.

mstevens 14 Feb 2011 13:40 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: Social Necessity of Drinking
In my experience this isn’t true—I’ve often had it queried.

mstevens 16 Feb 2011 12:18 UTC
1 point
in reply to: sabaton’s comment on: Social Necessity of Drinking
There’s a possible confusing factor in my study that I’ve stopped drinking, so many people know me as someone who used to drink. But it still generally seems to trigger confusion and puzzlement.

I’ve also found that drunk people are not actually fun companions when you’re not, which means I’m much less likely to end up in pubs in the first place.

mstevens 14 Mar 2011 10:39 UTC
4 points
on: Tweetable Rationality
Purely for the PR angle, if we can find stuff that works as RATIONALIST HULK it might be more popular.

mstevens 31 Mar 2011 15:57 UTC
15 points
in reply to: taryneast’s comment on: Reflections on rationality a year out
I have heard of it.

I think it’s an awful name, exactly on the grounds of having huge negative baggage. For me, at least, it has strong associations of smug, superior, condescending, and other such qualities.

mstevens 31 Mar 2011 16:04 UTC
4 points
in reply to: ohwilleke’s comment on: Reflections on rationality a year out
On the “spock” front, I dislike the identification of “rational” with “Inhuman”. These, too, are human qualities! However I certainly agree that many people do see this negatively.

There’s an interesting tension in marketing plans—how far can we go in using marketing, which is normally about exploiting irrational responses, in pushing rationality?

If people see rationalists using irrational arguments to push rationality, does it blow our credibility?

mstevens 31 Mar 2011 16:38 UTC
2 points
on: Reading the Sequences before Starting to Post: Costs and Benefits
I started trying to read the squences and found them generally disjointed and difficult to get into. I think I’ve picked up a lot of useful content by reading the site for a few months without commenting much.

I’d like to see the sequence content presented in a more easily accessible form. Perhaps Eliezer’s much talked about book?

(watch me volunteer other people for work...)

mstevens 31 Mar 2011 16:44 UTC
0 points
on: Advice in fighting depression?
Is it very bad being dependent on antidepressants? What would the worrying downsides of dependency be?

Exercise is widely recommended.

As far as I know Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy is the closest to having an evidence base for success, although I couldn’t point you to the studies.

Healthy eating is probably worth an effort, and of course good for all sorts of reasons.

mstevens 11 Apr 2011 15:42 UTC
2 points
on: Do meetups really have to go on the front page?
I too dislike meetups on the front page. I want tasty nutritious content!

mstevens 19 Apr 2011 13:06 UTC
3 points
on: Learned Blankness
I am fascinated by the “bad with computers” kind of learned helplessness.

It gives me a strong feeling there’s some very deep cultural thing going on, but so far I’ve failed to work out what it is.

One theory I have is that it’s some sort of arts/sciences split. but we also observe scientists who are bad with their computers.