I didn’t do the engineering, and I didn’t do the math, because I thought I understood what was going on and I thought I made a good rig. But I was wrong. I should have done it.
Jamie Hyneman
Patrick
Karma: 554
Free Tutoring in Math/Programming
If things are nice there is probably a good reason why they are nice: and if you do not know at least one reason for this good fortune, then you still have work to do.
Richard Askey
You can’t signal to rubes
“Thus Aristotle laid it down that a heavy object falls faster than a light one does. The important thing about this idea is not that he was wrong, but that it never occurred to Aristotle to check it.” Albert Szent-Györgyi de Nagyrápolt, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
The definition of limit: “lim x → a f(x) = c ” means for all epsilon > 0, there exists delta > 0 such that for all x, if 0 < |x-a|<delta then |f(x) - c| < epsilon.
The definition of derivative: f’(x) = lim h → 0 (f(x+h) - f(x))/h
That is, for all epsilon > 0, there exists delta > 0 such that for all h, if 0 < |h| < delta then |(f(x+h) - f(x))/h—f’(x)| < epsilon.
At no point do we divide by 0. h never takes on the value 0.
I’ll be providing support in ##patrickclass on freenode.
Avoiding Failure: Fallacy Finding
Ninety per cent of most magic merely consists of knowing one extra fact.
Terry Pratchett
I’m afraid I must disagree kurige, for two reasons. The first is that they smack of false modesty, a way of insuring yourself against the social consequences of failure without actually taking care not to fail. The second is that the use of such terms don’t really convey any new information, and require the use of the passive voice, which is bad style.
“Evidence indicates an increase in ice cream sales” really isn’t good science writing, because the immediate question is “What evidence?”. It’s much better to say “ice cream sales have increased by 15%” and point to the relevant statistics.
Mind Control and Me
Shanghai Less Wrong Meetup April 30th, 2pm
The problem isn’t really lacking citations (after all, Yudkowsky’s posts generally don’t have many citations). The problem is saying “The evidence for X is overwhelming”, while failing to provide any evidence of X. It’s effectively saying “take my word for it”.
With a few brackets it is easy enough to see that 5 + 4 is 9. What is not easy to see is that 5 + 4 is not 6.
Carl Linderholm, Mathematics Made Difficult.
Melbourne Less Wrong Meetup
I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.
Bruce Lee
Coursera Behavioural Neurology Course
Melbourne Less Wrong Meetup for November
Point me to where Luke denied that academia has any advantages over LW. If you’re going to claim that LW is obviously not “the highest-quality relatively-general-interest forum on the web”, it would help your case to provide an obvious counterexample (academic channels themselves are generally not on the web, and LW has some advantages over them, even if the reverse is also true). LW is also not as homogeneous as you appear to believe; plenty of us are academics.
You’re straw-manning here. Not conceding isn’t the same thing as denying. To not concede something, one just has to omit the concession from one’s writing. But this is just quibbling. The real issue is the attitude, or the arrogance, that LW may have with respect to academia. Nobody wants to waste time justifying themselves to a bunch of arrogant amateurs after all.
Anyway, some web channels where academics hang out:
MathOverflow
LambdaTheUltimate
The arXiv
StackExchange
The N-Category Cafe http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/
ScienceBlogs
(Cracked.com probably does a better job of being a smart, general interest forum than Less Wrong, it’s a great deal more popular at least. But being the highest quality popular forum is a bit like being the smartest termite in the world. Specialized forums are where the elite action is.)
Steve Yegge