Microsoft Outlook Business Contact Manager provides ways forward to utilising prediction. Within its Task scheduling one has opportunity to estimate what percentage of the set task is already completed. Also how long the task will take is estimated by the user.
I find B.C.M highly useful for focusing prediction and task achievement.
Hi people, I just wanted to say thank you to the LessWrong community for exposing me to the concept of “bayesian probability”. Apparently human motor programs function in a bayesian way, with each movement prior predicted including predicted sensory feedback of said movement, which enables a comparison of prediction with perceived reality. Pretty cool.
Learned of the observational evidence supporting random practice over blocked practiced as they relate to motor learning and retention, 14/5/2015.
Wrote a new lesson plan for my squash juniors, based upon the aforementioned idea of random practice, which I offer freely to LW.
Squash training, psuedorandom
Serve from right
Move to t
Chase own ball
Serve from left
Chase own ball
Throw ball with left hand to front wall right side
Play forehand drop shot
Move to T
Gather ball
Move to t
Throw ball to front wall, left side
Play backhand drop shot
Move to t
1 push-up
Gather ball
Move to t
Throw ball to left wall softly.
Play a backhand drive deep
1 squat
Gather ball
Move to t
Throw ball to right wall softly
Play a forehand drive deep
1 lunge
Gather ball
Rest, drink, provoke THINK.
Move to front left court with ball n racket.
Play a backhand cross court, like a serve.
Move to t
Do a split step jump
Gather ball
Move to front right
Play a backhand cross court, like a serve.
Move to t
1 situp
Gather ball
Move to front right.
Play a forehand cross court, like a serve.
Move to t
1 one legged swan pose, 5 seconds
Gather ball
Move to front left
Play a forehand cross court, like a serve
Move to t
Balance racket on one finger, 5 seconds.
Gather ball
Move to t
Throw ball to right wall softly with non racket hand
Play forehand boast
Move to t
Gather ball
Move to t
Throw ball to left wall softly
Play backhand boast
Move to t
Do right side plank, 5 seconds.
Gather ball
Move to t
Do left side plank, 5 seconds.
Rest, drink, provoke THINK.
NOTE TIME TO DO 59 tasks. Repeat
Implemented an approximation of the above program in today’s session, after explaining why the changes are occurring. I observed that the young athletes were more enthused.
tomme, welcome to lesswrong, gday I’m Peacewise.
re
I used to believe that Santa is real
Fair crack mate, “Santa” is a standard fiction/lie perpetrated by society and parents, hardly something to be used as evidence of a “faulty brain”. In fact its more likely to be evidence that your brain was and is functioning in a developmentally normal state.
I suggest you reconsider your position on fiction, since you state
so I would rather make sure it’s accurate, truthful, useful knowledge
there is indeed plenty of accurate, truthful and useful knowledge within the realm of fiction. Shakespeare has plenty of accurate and useful knowledge about the human condition, just to give you one counter example. “Out damned spot, out ” by lady Macbeth is an example of how murder and the guilt caused by the act of murder affects the human mind. (Macbeth, Act 5, scene 1.) Lady Macbeth cannot get the imagined blood stains off her hands after committing murder.
Humans are subjective creatures, by experimenting with fiction you’ll be looking into the human condition, by avoiding fiction you are dismissing a large subset of truth—for truth is subjective as well as objective.
Seems to me that rationalism as a living ideal is a slippery slope with a positive outcome. Once someone takes the initial steps to use rationalism, they then seek to learn more about rationalism, they practice it more and they become more effective and efficient at utilising it. That looks like a slippery slope to me, but obviously one that has a different outcome type than a traditional negative outcome orientated slippery slope.
Well done, you’ve rephrased S.M.A.R.T.E.R goal setting into you’re own language… and that’s cool, cause that’s a part of learning.
Do you recall this line in the Matrix?
MORPHEUS: I told you that I can only show you the door. You have to step through it.
Thats what i hoped would be understood by the previous, one can lead a horse to water but one cant make it drink.
I played Alpha Centauri for a few weeks back when it came out, ended up going back to Civilisation, more out of habit I suppose than anything else. These days I’m playing Civilisation IV Beyond the Sword.
What is interesting about being taught optimizer thinking within a computer game is that if that thinking stays within the game, then it’s not real world applicable as optimal. If however one stops playing the game and then takes the learned strategies applicable in the real world, into the real world—then gaming is useful, otherwise gaming is just entertainment. I love gaming, don’t get me wrong—it’s just that (simplistically) x hours of gaming translates into x hours of missed revenue/earnings in the real world, or x hours of real world knowledge unlearned.
What is quite interesting when reconsidering the original hypothesis of ABrook, is the taking into consideration of outsiders.
If outsiders strongly associate rationality with LW and LW is negatively perceived, then the original hypothesis has some weight.
Fortunately we have an outsider… that’s me, and,
I do have some negative perceptions of LW, yet more fortunately for rationality a negative perception of LW is that I do not strongly associate LW with rationality. I presume some will appreciate the beautiful irony of this construct and further appreciate and then avoid the infinite spirals it produces.
In my judgement ABrooks was not trolling, and instead raised a point of view that experience on LW encouraged me to consider.
I think it is true that some members of LW, on some occasions do believe they are justified in expressing contempt for the beliefs of outsiders, sometimes this is done without expressing the justification, on other occasions the justification has been expressed and refuted yet the contempt remains and on yet other occasions the justification is reasonable. I leave the other branches of the scenario for the community to express at their convenience.
I don’t however consider the LW community on the whole to be toxic to rationality as one cannot and shouldn’t judge an entire community based upon isolated actions of a potential unrepresentative sample. I think the statement
Less Wrong is just a community that is on the whole, and despite it’s best efforts and intentions, toxic to rationality
Is false, yet as one can see in my 2nd paragraph in this post, a change of the numbers from “on the whole” to “some members, some of the time” supports that the gist of the hypothesis deserves consideration, despite that I believe the original hypothesis is false.
Possibly a more succinct description of the issue under discussion is when an individuals self serving bias meets a groups group serving bias. The individual being an outsider.
When one considers that an aim of LW is the removal of biases, labelling a presentation of a possible group serving bias as a “troll” is not in the spirit—or vibe if you prefer—of LW. I do understand why one would want to not waste time on something as obviously false as the original hypothesis, yet I think that the updated hypothesis deserves consideration from members of the community.
But why that seed in this conversation?
To assist in debiasing the ageism that was being expressed in the conversation.
that are a thousand years ahead of western science.
What was the motivation behind this addition? Was it positive?
The motivation was to plant a seed… motivated by the +2 on my comment.
In my experience debiasing others who have strongly held opinions is far more effort than it’s worth, a better road seems to be to facilitate them debiasing themselves. Plant the seed and move on, coming back to assess and perhaps water it later on. I don’t try to cut down their tree… as it were. http://lesswrong.com/lw/7ep/practical_debiasing/5ah1?context=1#5ah1
TimS, I’m glad we agree on several points, extinction and positive reinforcement of children. I wonder why these methods are espoused for children, yet tend to be used less for “competent adults”. Thanks for planting the seed that I might be overgeneralizing the point a bit, I’ll keep an eye on that.
I am reminded that saying “X is wrong” to an adult with a belief is ineffective in many circumstances, most notably the circumstance were the belief is a preconception, based in emotion or more specifically an irrational belief. Is this not one consequence of bias? That a person, in some cases/topics, won’t update their beliefs and indeed strengthen their belief in the counterargument against the updating. Presumably you’ve read http://lesswrong.com/lw/he/knowing_about_biases_can_hurt_people/ Which alludes to how knowledge of bias can be used dismissively, i.e. an irrational use of a rationale.
“Why logical argument has never been successful at changing prejudices, beliefs, emotions or perceptions. Why these things can be changed only through perception.” De Bono, “I am right, you are wrong”. De Bono discusses this extensively.
If the belief is rational, and perhaps that’s one component of what you consider a “competent adult”, the adult could be more open to updating the fact/knowledge—yet even this situation has a wealth of counter examples, such that there is a term for it—belief perseverance.
In my experience unsolicited advice is rarely accepted regardless of its utility and veracity. Perhaps I communicate with many closed minds, or perhaps I am merely experiencing the availability heuristic in context of our discussion.
I’d like to attend via skype if someone cares to plonk an ipad or other skype activated device on the desk. my skype name is peace.wise and I live in Mount Barker, south australia.
Please contact me via LW before attempting to have me as a skype contact. I reject all skype contacts from people I don’t know as a matter of course.
Thanks for the post on negativity Vaniver. I wouldn’t go bungee jumping if it had a 5% failure rate.
Mostly in discouraging behavior...
That viewpoint can be considered as based upon Skinners model of Behaviourism, it’s been shown to be less effective for learning than being positive.
Makes sense—we tend to remember what we are emotionally engaged in and what is reinforced. When the negativity is associated with the 5%, what is reinforced is that a person is “wrong”, that’s associated with feelings of low self efficacy and tends to discourage (most) people from the topic. When that happens they regress—not progress, they tend to get even more wrong next time as they’ve not stayed engaged in the topic.
...As well, an important rationality skill is updating on valuable information from sources you dislike; dealing with negativity in safer circumstances may help people learn to better deal with negativity in less safe circumstances.
I agree that an important skill is to update ones information, however the discouragement that is provoked by negativity isn’t efficient in evoking updating. Confident people update their information, people who aren’t attacked have no need to defend and so they remain open, openess is the key attitude for updating information. Negativity destroys and/or minimizes confidence which contributes to closing a mind.
What negativity does, in context of learning, is to encourage secrecy, resentment, avoidance and close mindedness. Again this stuff is all known as a consequence of punishment, which is what negativity—as discouraging behaviour is associated with.
Apparently a more effective way forward is to model the behaviour that one wants to encourage and ignore the behaviour one wants to discourage—extinction.
thomblake, consider a high distinction as an A+ grade. Perhaps as along the lines of Newtonian Mechanics. It’s mostly right.
Sure, if you’re running in debate mode and thinking in terms of ‘sides’ or ‘us versus them’ and trying to ‘win’, then that might be something to do. Solution: don’t do that in the first place.
Indeed, a valuable point. So what’s up with the score keeping system of LW then. It encourages thinking in terms of sides and competition. −1, not my side, +1 my side. −1 lost, +1 won.
Don’t worry, everything you believe is almost certainly wrong—don’t expect to find yourself in the 95% correct state any time soon. We’re running on corrupted hardware in the first place, and nowhere near the end of science. We can reduce hardly any of our high-level concepts to their physical working parts.
lol. Fair enough. I would place the 95% not on some unknown scale of what is absolutely true—that science doesn’t yet know, but instead on the relative scale of what science currently knows. Does that make a difference to your point?
First, fix those too.
Yep, tough to become self less, yet still place enough value upon oneself to not be a door mat. Rudyard Kiplings “If” shows a pathway.
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you. If all men count with you, but none too much. http://www.kipling.org.uk/poems_if.htm
Eastern philosophy also has approaches—that are a thousand years ahead of western science.
Vaniver. Mate. I accept that you believe
It seeks to minimize arrogance and maximize doubt.
but I dispute that it achieves those. I believe instead that it maximises arrogance and maximises doubt in the others point of view, and in maximising doubt in the other persons view we minimize our doubt in our own view.
The belief that it’s difficult to be completely right, encourages people to look for that gap that is “wrong” and then drive a wedge into it and expand it until it’s all that’s being talked about.
If 95% is correct and 5% is wrong, criticising the 5% is a means to hurting the person—they have after all gotten 95% correct. It’s not rational to discount peoples feelings by focusing upon their error and ignoring their correctness. It’s destructive, it breaks people. Sure some few thrive on that kind of struggle—most don’t, again this is proven stuff. And I’m not going to post 10 freeking sources on that—all that’s doing for me is wasting my time and providing more opportunity for others to confirm their bias by fighting against it. If someone wants to find that information it’s out there.
When you (or anyone else) got a high distinction for a unit or assignment or exam, was that a moment to go, fuck—didn’t remember that a pre ganglionic fibre doesn’t look anything like a post gangleoic nerve (aka ds9), or was it a moment to leap for joy and go, you little ripper I got 95%!
I agree negativity has its uses, often it’s about “piss off” and go away, leave me alone; sometimes that’s useful, but you’ll note that those fall on the arrogant side of emotions—that of self. (this will get a wedge driven in it too, heck I could drive one in, but it remains somewhat true).
Vaniver, I’d consider it a positive discussion to talk about negativity. Would you mind explaining to me where “negativity has its uses”.
And to show that I consider the
It seeks to minimize arrogance and maximize doubt.
viewpoint.
Yeh, ok I get that, when we apply the concept to ourselves then we are minimizing our arrogance and maximizing our doubt. And that’ll work. We’ll second guess ourselves, we’ll edit our posts, and re edit, and check our dictionaries and quote our sources and these are all useful things. They keep us honest. But what about when we apply those concepts to others—as is our tendency due to the self serving bias and the group serving bias?
thanks for the link paper-machine, that’s quite a reasonable policy.
If I wasn’t downvoted to such a degree that I have no opportunity to downvote, I might consider implementing it. I’ll certainly use the concept to more thoroughly mitigate my annoyance about those unable to follow argument.
I’ll up vote you in accordance with my policy. Which is that if a person says a single useful thing, regardless of the rest of their post, I’ll give it a +1.
My reasoning for this policy is twofold. I reject the negativity that is encouraged by criticism and it’s aim of proving or showing that some one is wrong, rather than proving oneself right. I accept that when one focuses upon the positive, or worthwhile components of someone’s beliefs/actions/arguments one creates a valuable synergy that encourages a pathway towards truth and understanding.
Sometimes I don’t implement my own policy, but hey, it’s all a work in progress.
On reflection the sites name “lesswrong” really should have set off an alarm bell. I’m not interested particularly in being lesswrong. I am interested in being moreright.
Positive psychology and educational psychology have shown that positivity contributes more readily to learning than negativity.
Being rational is a component of religion, though the hard core atheist rejects that fact.
I once lightly unpacked the story of genesis and related it to more modern theories of cosmology and biology. Considering the resources available to the author of Genesis, it turns out to be quite effective. Sure it’s way off, don’t get me wrong, but how many thousand years ago was it written, how’d they work it out? Thousands of years ago, and some of it is still congruent with modern science.
I’ll provide a link in a pm if you request.
re compartmentalization question about ‘jinxing’.
I have some experience and knowledge in this subject from a sports science perspective.
It’s commonly accepted within sport psychology that first, negativity, is associated with predicting low chances of success, and secondly that those who do display negativity and predict low chance of success decrease their own performance.
For example, a well coached basketball player at the free throw line would be aware that saying “I’m going to miss this free throw” increases their chances of missing the free throw. Note now that “well coached” implies including psychological training as a component of a wider training program.
One source for you compartmentalization, to dig a little deeper is...
“Krane and Williams concluded that a certain psychological profile appears to be correlated with peak performance for most athletes. More specifically, this ideal mind/body state consists of the following: (a) feelings of high self-confidence and expectations of success, (b) being energized yet relaxed, (c) feeling in control,(d) being totally concentrated, (e) having a keen focus on the present task, (f) having positive attitudes and thoughts about performance, and (g) being strongly determined and committed. Conversely, the mental state typically associated with poorer performances in sport seems to be marked by feelings of self-doubt, lacking concentration, being distracted, being overly focused on the competition outcome or score, and feeling overly or under aroused. While acknowledging that this ideal mind/body state is highly idiosyncratic, Krane and Williams concluded that for most athletes, the presence of the right mental and emotional state just described is associated with them performing to their potential.” Harmison, R. J. (2006). Peak performance in sport: Identifying ideal performance states and developing athletes’ psychological skills. Professional Psychology: Research and Practice, 37(3), 233-243. doi: 10.1037/0735-7028.37.3.233