Hard agree that “general ed” requirements are in fact “insulting obedience tests that are wholly inferior to my free reading and blogging”
I’ve an acquaintance who went to Brandeis, then transferred to Columbia, in pursuit of even one room full of students who authentically sought knowledge. Alas, he was utterly disappointed.
College doesn’t really focus on education, and if that’s what you most care about, you’re on track by pursuing ideas based on your own intellectual tastes.
PaulBecon
Karma: 21
I went to a Jesuit high school in the ’80′s. There were some priests who were, in the language of the day, “flaming” homosexuals. They ran the choir and theater programs, and it seemed pretty obvious that if they were outside the priesthood, they would have been gay. One of my classmates later became a priest, and he’s openly out to another alum who’s gay.
While this is anecdata, there was a wide river of Denial, usu assuming someone “couldn’t be gay” if they had taken the vow of celibacy. The Church’s sex negativity makes any open discussion nearly impossible, and it’s a hard pitch to heterosexuals that they should foreswear sex for their entire life.
Paul Pilgram, SJ, our principal, was later exposed as a pedophile, although he was not considered one of the “flamers” at our HS
This post is well over a decade old, yet no one noticed that in 1984, Winston actually writes that “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two makes four. If that is granted, all else follows.”
And in being tortured, he grants that 2+2 = 5
Eliezer has introduced a different sum, which makes the same point, but it’s not from Orwell’s 1984
Sharing Aaron Swartz’s review from 2011
″Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality by Eliezer YudkowskyThis is a book whose title still makes me laugh and yet it may just turn out to be one of the greatest books ever written. The writing is shockingly good, the plotting is some of the best in all of literature, and the stories are simply pure genius. I fear this book may never get the accolades it deserves, because it’s too hard to look past the silly name and publishing model, but I hope you, dear reader, are wiser than that! A must-read.
As it says at the beginning, you really need to give it a couple chapters to get started before passing judgment — the first bunch are quite silly and it doesn’t seem worth sticking with until you’ve gotten past them.”
So glad you’ve come over to share your updated experience.
And I was one of the 30MM who shared the huge chart of biases way back.
I was a student in the tradition of Heuristics & Biases when I studied at Stanford, so long ago that Amos Tversky was still alive. Both Kahneman & Tversky explicitly doubted that knowing about biases could enable us to overcome the ‘fast thoughts’ that generate an immediate interpretation. I’ve heard both of them compare biases to optical illusions, which don’t go away when you realize they are illusions.
Hamming Questions are core to some exercises in CFAR workshops.
Personally, I’ve never been motivated by setting goals. Once they are fixed, the removal of exploration and the single mindedness of optimization are fatal to sustaining my interest.
I don’t know if CFAR has ever clicked into the resistance that comes up when people are confronted with the question of what is the work of greatest significance that one could possibly do.
At least in my dissertation research, I found people were more reluctant to set goals for the things that most mattered to them. My interpretation was that it was a way to evade the possibility of discovering you’ve failed at something really meaningful. This was called “The Delmore Effect”, as it was robustly observed that people had explicit and well-structured goals for lower priority ambitions, but less articulate, more sketchy ideas for pursuing the activities most important to their identity
I’d never heard the phrase “fist pump” before, but apparently it is an alternative with a slightly different hand arrangement than “fist bump.” Given how close the sounds b/p are, I may have been collapsing numerous occasions of hearing “pump” mapping it to “bump”
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/28/magazine/who-made-that-fist-bump.html
Excellent ideas. I (hormetic) just re-tweeted my admiration for “pick directions, not goals”
My dissertation examined why people hesitate to explicitly articulate goals for the domains that matter most. Because a goal has a definite failure state, it can motivate exertion to avoid failure.
Upstream of that motivation, however, we don’t want to expose ourselves to the risk of failure. The more important some domain is, the more threatening it will be to encounter evidence of having failed. I observed that people (erm, Stanford undergrads) were least articulate about goals when the domain was very important. I labeled this “The Delmore Effect,” to describe the robust decay in goal articulation as something was of increasing importance. Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20160317034318/http://www-psych.stanford.edu/~wit/PhDraft.pdf
Unless the identical twin sisters marry identical brother twins, the preferential love for their own husband would distinguish their feelings for their own children
I’m in! One suggestion. The URL for registering has de minimis info, https://www.havenbookings.space/events/Duncon
Ideally, that page should link to this one to help contextualize what’s in the can
Rashomon (Kurosawa in Japanese) epistemics of 5 people who share an experience but have disjoint recollections
The Atlantic (gift link) just published on the profound problems with Behavioral Econ: https://t.co/4yUTLoAVse
in 2015 a Nature paper literally titled “Undecidability of the spectral gap” showed that an important physical quantity—the difference in energy between ground state and the initial excited state of a material—is formally undecidable. It is also triggered by recursion (basically, they encode questions about spectral gaps into spectral gaps). [Quoted from Erik Hoel’s 2024 post on Consciousness as a Godel Sentence]
Hope to make it for these topics. First met Eliezer when he spoke at PARC: “Think Crazy: Heuristics, Biases, and the New Science of Human Error” (2009) I told EY that I was the “kind of psychologist who can’t help people”, but he pointed to this community as having been greatly helped by research psychologists.
Scott’s piece on Behavioral Econ was published after the first post-Covid meetup at UCBerkeley in ’21. Since it’s my field (experimental psych re-branded to BE once Kahneman won the Nobel), he asked me at the picnic if I would take a look at this piece in draft.
Never compare your work to another writer’s. My own failure to follow this maxim caused me considerable distress. Scott’s weekend writeup was so typically thorough & penetrating, teaching me details I’d never learned at Stanford. But I will not compare his post to the schmatta I cobbled to earn my PhD.
Not all skills should be mastered, since many involve the practice of dark patterns.
Mastering the skills of an executioner/hit man/torturer/etc would require practice, which isn’t good.
Many social skills do push the Pareto frontier out, by enabling coordination & effective Coasean transfers between parties.
Some current practitioners of skillful social management have used their powers to manipulate, mislead, and maliciously channel hostility instigated by their own evil intentions.