I watched ‘Oz the Great and Powerful’. I really liked the pro-innovation / science-inventory / mind-over-might themes.
oliverbeatson
Karma: 212
Really good idea. Would attend.
This sounds pretty awesome. Sadly nothing LW seemed to be going on in NY when I visited earlier in the month (sadly no-one married me so I’m back in the UK), but I’m excited to hear about an active musical-participatory branch of Less Wrongers.
I’m a pianist/performer currently undergoing a painful transition to composer/lyricist. I’d like to write musicals to broadcast various rationalist, effective altruist, existential crisis and pro-open borders messages, probably delineated to some degree. I’d like to get in touch with people who do similar things!
Is this open mic night popular? What are people’s experience of the intersection between music and rationality?
Also, it helped to realize that my current state has seven billion years of universe behind it. I can change for the better, but whatever is wrong isn’t some intrinsic personal defect, and it isn’t all my mother’s fault either.
File under “warm-fuzzy pseudo-platitudes that don’t set off my thoroughly-trained self-dishonesty detector”; a near-empty category!
I can relate to this a lot, and I’d find it very useful to see how someone else monologues about it. Just to take another step meta here, a framework for doing the sort of thing (‘re-calibration’?) you want to do in itself would be a useful akrasia-kick for people who for whatever reason haven’t gotten to the stage of automating how to get out of the inefficiency slump.
Regina Spektor, I’ve been discovering her stuff over the last few months and I’ve reached the point where I know roughly all of it. As I think is expected in this thread, all I can really offer here is possibility that blog-reading choices vaguely correlate with musical preferences. Her lyrics are pretty non-inane, especially upon repeated listening. Her variance of musical style is pleasing to me, makes it fun to play and listen to. Nothing especially Less Wrong-y, but I might be forgetting something. Though I don’t think I know any composer at all who’s (consistently) Less Wrong-y. She has a wild imagination and has written songs about being robots. She’s one of those artists whose discography is a tapestry of varied and wonderful worlds that I can never really appreciate unless I’m in the process of listening to it, always a process of both rediscovery and familiarity. (She often writes in the first-person as non-Regina people, from fiction, the bible, or anonymous people; more than half of her songs are probably from the perspective of a different person). There are also lots of moments in her various songs that strike me in the right way, that capture some complex emotion I had never put into words, which gives her songs a sense of salience and intelligence. Some especially enjoyable songs: Us very uplifting, makes you think; Call Them Brothers the man singing is her husband, I like the eeriness; The Party, uplifting, pretty; All the Rowboats, she makes cute noises, quite fast. Back of a Truck, from her unusually jazzy first album.
Disclosure: I play and especially like piano so appear to be skewed towards liking such artists.
Just me, or is this like the most convincing article on this subject? Certainly it has the best verbal illustration of the theory. Very neat.
+1 for
In general, tautologies aren’t cause for concern
This would have been a useful phrase during philosophy classes.
You’re welcome :) yes, in that sense it does confer (by confer I mean involuntarily foist upon you) a handful of learning opportunities, especially as you grow up with a wider view of gender-stuff. I’m not certain I’d go back in time and choose the norm, for the variety having an extra order of weirdness.
Though fitting in with weirdness never seemed like it’d be a huge problem with Less Wrong.
I totally will, thank you.
Darn! If only I were a female androphile, rather than a male one… I eagerly await the day this post reads “large group of female rationalists now requires gay-best-friend figure for company, dialogue about hair and SAVING the WORLD”.
This is a really neat idea, yay for propagating relationships that wouldn’t otherwise have occurred.
Oh dear god don’t change the title. It scans fine...
Update!
So, yeah, I overestimated the extent to which I could override a certain lack of intrinsic desire to do things, in addition to having been a little depressed in the first week. I ended up completing 14 of the possible 30 tasks, while failing those that were on average grander undertakings, that would have been diving into hierarchical chunks instead of linear ones. Although I missed some easy ones too, ‘go swimming’, ‘use new sewing machine’.
To improve this, I think I should in advance plan out what sub-tasks each individual task requires, to make the actual task have a smaller at-the-time-of-getting-down-to-doing-it motivational barrier. If there were some cloud web application that could do this (similar to Mind Map software but more convenient to use) that would be useful (I’d been developing one myself but—ironically—lost the motivation).
In total, it was an interesting experiment that would do better with modifications which could probably be enacted fairly easily, and efficiently if done online. I’m not sure of any current social-commitment website that has the flexbility to have let me manage this on my preferred terms. This is something perhaps to look at. I would like to try this again in the future with modifications.
I haven’t read a wide plethora of fiction so I might have lower standards, but I enjoyed/am enjoying them (currently half way through the 3rd, skipped the 1st due to having watched the film, may not return to it). I’ve read a significant amount of the sequences and didn’t feel like the books interact negatively with rationality ideas; the heroine is fairly lucid and has fewer than average dogmas, so isn’t annoying in that respect.
I had a good time and enjoyed the conversation. I appreciate the effort everyone took to come out and be interesting!
Does anyone have any plans to draw up the cognitive biases hierarchy that was suggested? (Maybe a collaborative Google Documents drawing would be useful for this.) Given I’d find use in such a diagram myself, I’m not in a position to start one. At a later stage I could throw together some html and javascript to present the diagram as a web page, possibly with interactivity to reveal more detail on examples, the experiments, counter-heuristics and citations, etc.
On the subject of Italy but sadly not of this meetup, I am in Florence and Milan for 5th to the 12th of June: the former for the first half of my trip, and the latter for the second. I hope something Italian takes off in the meantime!
Was thinking of applying, I already work 40 hours a week and am unsure how easily I could do a further 20. Seems like it would be useful sort of thing in the future if I’m freelancing or travelling. Shame about the current hour limit.
True, especially on the last point. It still feels like there’s a large philosophical knowledge-set to convey before their Patronus fails reliably for the right reason. I see what you mean though. Maybe the habit (mental) necessarily built into the Patronus charm would be harder to override more than temporarily due to the strength in habit, or at least without genuinely shifting how that person conceptualises all the relevant stuff.
I thought that was odd: that they would actually have to understand, and not just be told that Dementors are death. Like in the same way that under-confidence in your ability to perform a physical action actually undermines your ability to do it, which should be relatable if you’ve ever tried to back-flip on a trampoline or forced yourself to perform an action in spite of an anticipation of pain or great displeasure—but so long as you expect being able to do it, you can still do it. But if someone just said ‘Dementors are death’, you’d cast your animal patronus just fine so long as you didn’t grok it. Which made me suspicious of Harry’s possible tactic in the Wizengamot.
Did anyone encounter a good response to this comment?
Well done! Awesome idea. Will be thinking of ways I can contribute as well as attend.