palladias

Imi­ta­tion is the Sincer­est Form of Argument

• palladias 24 Oct 2014 14:37 UTC

  93 points

  on: 2014 Less Wrong Cen­sus/​Survey

  I took the survey. Out of curiosity (too late to change now) what should I have answered if I’m not my father’s first child, but I’m the first child he had with my mom? (There are kids from my dad’s first marriage, but I didn’t grow up with them).

  I went with “no older siblings” since I assumed this was a question about socialization (or maybe even about uterine environment) but not siring. But I’d like to know for next year.

False Friends and Tone Policing

• palladias 19 Feb 2014 15:48 UTC

  56 points

  on: Open Thread for Fe­bru­ary 18-24 2014

  A simple reframe that helped jumpstart my creativity:

  My cookie dough froze in the fridge, so I couldn’t pry it out of the bowl to carry with me to bake at a party. I tried to get it out, but didn’t succeed, and had basically resigned myself to schlepping the bowl on the metro.

  But then I paused and posed the question to myself: “If something important depended on me getting this dough out, what would I try?”

  I immediately covered the top of the bowl, ran the base under lukewarm to warm water, popped it out, wrapped it up, and went on my way.

Four Tips for Public Speaking

• palladias 12 Dec 2013 5:25 UTC

  51 points

  on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 28, chap­ter 99-101

  “Tell me, son of Lily, do the Muggles in their wisdom say that soon the skies will be empty?”

  Interesting tie-in to:

  “HE IS HERE. THE ONE WHO WILL TEAR APART THE VERY STARS IN HEAVEN. HE IS HERE. HE IS THE END OF THE WORLD.”

  So the centaur and Trelawney seem to be reading from the same playbook. Any guesses to who the centaur approached sixteen years ago and what lines he crossed? Seems like a plausible time to be Lily, no? Could possibly be the payoff to this from Chapter 1:

  ″...And I begged her to use some of that magic on me so that I could be pretty too, even if I couldn’t have her magic, at least I could be pretty.”
  Tears were gathering in Petunia’s eyes.
  “And Lily would tell me no, and make up the most ridiculous excuses, like the world would end if she were nice to her sister, or a centaur told her not to – the most ridiculous things, and I hated her for it.”

• palladias 4 Nov 2012 0:13 UTC

  48 points

  on: 2012 Less Wrong Cen­sus/​Survey

  Done!

Fight­ing Bi­ases and Bad Habits like Boggarts

• palladias 11 Apr 2013 2:12 UTC

  45 points

  on: Post Re­quest Thread

  I’ve done some public speaking coaching and could outline the four highest-value tips I know, if this would be helpful

  What links here?

  • Four Tips for Public Speaking by palladias (15 Apr 2013 14:56 UTC; 55 points)

• palladias 31 Mar 2015 13:54 UTC

  43 points

  on: Open thread, Apr. 01 - Apr. 05, 2015

  I’ve just started a job as a news writer at FiveThirtyEight (author archive here), I’m really looking forward to this, and I’d love for folks to think of me as a possibly-summonable research person. If you have a question/​dataset/​etc related to American news, send me an email (leahDOTlibrescoATgmailDOTcom) and I may wind up researching it and covering it.

• palladias 22 Nov 2013 16:43 UTC

  43 points

  on: 2013 Less Wrong Cen­sus/​Survey

  Taken the survey!

Change Con­texts to Im­prove Arguments

• palladias 2 Oct 2012 19:52 UTC

  41 points

  on: Ra­tion­al­ity Quotes Oc­to­ber 2012

  “You’re saying I’ll get used to being a warlock, or whatever it is that I am.”
  “You’ve always been what you are. That’s not new. What you’ll get used to is knowing it.”

  Jem and Tessa, Clockwork Angel by Cassandra Clare

Any­one know of em­piri­cally driven lob­by­ing efforts?

• palladias 2 Jul 2013 2:41 UTC

  34 points

  in reply to: Intrism’s comment on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 20, chap­ter 90

  Also, limiting Harry’s access to knowledge (warning off the other profs, warding the books, etc) makes Quirrell the sole conduit for advanced knowledge for Harry. (Or at least limits the competition). And Quirrell implied to Harry that he was at his nearly-unrestricted service. That gives Quirrell more access to Harry’s thought processes (by the questions he asks) and more capacity to steer his choices.

  As to what he’s steering them toward, he pushed Harry off of new spells, which makes me wonder if he has an old one in mind. There was talk about rituals of sacrifice here (the blood-to-fire) and generally recently (Tracy Davis’s invocation). It’s possible that there’s some ritual that Quirrell would like Harry to perform, not for what it manifests, but for the changes it makes to the caster.

• palladias 2 Jul 2013 2:17 UTC

  33 points

  on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 20, chap­ter 90

  I loved this:

  That’s not how responsibility works, Professor.” Harry’s voice was patient, like he was explaining things to a child who was certain not to understand. He wasn’t looking at her anymore, just staring off at the wall to her right side. “When you do a fault analysis, there’s no point in assigning fault to a part of the system you can’t change afterward, it’s like stepping off a cliff and blaming gravity. Gravity isn’t going to change next time. There’s no point in trying to allocate responsibility to people who aren’t going to alter their actions. Once you look at it from that perspective, you realize that allocating blame never helps anything unless you blame yourself, because you’re the only one whose actions you can change by putting blame there. That’s why Dumbledore has his room full of broken wands. He understands that part, at least.

  Does anyone else run into the problem of frequently giving this advice to yourself and finding it useful, but struggling to find a non-awful way to convey it to other people? I don’t want to get them to self-flagellate, but to look for what leverage they have and not worry as much about what it totally outside of their control. Stoicism seems like the main way people hit on this idea of responsibility in my social circle.

• palladias 30 May 2013 0:51 UTC

  33 points

  in reply to: gothgirl420666’s comment on: To be­come more ra­tio­nal, rinse your left ear with cold water

  That would indeed briefly diminish my optimism.

• palladias 17 Dec 2012 15:51 UTC

  32 points

  on: Open Thread, De­cem­ber 16-31, 2012

  This weekend I staged a Les Mis “One Day More” flashmob in our train station with about 20 people. (I’m Javert).

  I realized I had been wishing that a flashmob would happen, and finally wised up and realized I should just do it myself. I think most of us underestimate how willing people are to go along with wacky plans, as long as they don’t have to have any logistical responsibilities. It also helped to set point people for a couple different social circles to recruit (alums, work colleagues, an improv group, church friends). This has definitely lowered my reticence to stage other public spectacles.

• palladias 1 Aug 2013 21:53 UTC

  31 points

  on: Group Ra­tion­al­ity Diary, Au­gust 1-15

  It’s a small thing, but a friend and I were having coffee in a park, and he offered me the rest of his muffin, since he was full. I didn’t really want it, and we looked guiltily at it for a bit before spiking it into the garbage can, yelling “Take that, Sunk Cost Fallacy!” and doing a brief high five/​victory dance.

  It’s nice to have a social network that gives you positive feedback for spotting and short-circuiting biases.

• palladias 9 Feb 2015 15:20 UTC

  30 points

  on: How to learn soft skills

  I’d nominate C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters as a soft skills book, that gives your System 1 a lot of vivid, specific ways human thinking goes wrong to chew on and find ways out of.

  One of my favorite examples is this passage which made a big impression on my System 1 about things that do bore me but I nonetheless get sucked into. (Context note: Screwtape Letters is written as a series of letters from a senior devil to a junior tempter about how to lead human lives astray)

  You will find that anything or nothing is sufficient to attract his wandering attention. You no longer need a good book, which he really likes, to keep him from his prayers or his work or his sleep; a column of advertisements in yesterday’s paper will do. You can make him waste his time not only in conversation he enjoys with people whom he likes, but also in conversations with those he cares nothing about, on subjects that bore him. You can make him do nothing at all for long periods. You can keep him up late at night, not roistering, but staring at a dead fire in a cold room. All the healthy and outgoing activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited and nothing given in return, so that at last he may say...‘I now see that I spent most my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked.’

  For me, thinking of this passage (and the horror of coming to say “I now see that I have spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked”) helps me feel very motivated to snap out of boring, sterile activities. It makes the consequences clearer, and, it gives the action of closing the site/​app/​etc a sense of thrilling defiance.