I would love it if you could tell me the correct terms for the concepts in the post, or point me in the direction of some reading material. I’m also curious, did you just disagree with the terms, or did you also disagree with the concepts, too? Thanks!
Richard Henage
Karma: 60
I have certain people I categorize as “well-aligned movie watchers” like my brother that I grew up with. We have similar tastes. I find that gets me further than aggregate rating systems.
For some reason, that statement has stuck with me for a while. I finally realized why it doesn’t sit well with me. I agree with your message to some extent, but here are some problems I see with it:
1) Your brother still needs a way to find good movies (you can’t pull each other up by your bootstraps)2) I wonder if you are thinking of movies as a binary “like” or “don’t like”. If your bother’s recommendations provide you a system for only watching movies that you end up liking, that’s a valuable resource. But I see movies as more boundless in how good they can be. Sure, there are movies that I “liked”, for example, Greyhound. I enjoyed it and didn’t have any problems with it. But it didn’t have a big impact on me and wasn’t particularly memorable. I would give that movie a Thumbs Up. Then there are movies like Lord of the Rings, 12 Angry Men, and Memento. These are movies that are very meaningful or amazing to me. I want to watch them many more times throughout my life. I would give them each a Thumbs Up as well, but that doesn’t really do it justice. I could give them a 10⁄10, but that doesn’t quite fit either, since I assume that I’ll eventually find movies I like even more than those ones[1]. So for me, finding someone who has similar preferences to me isn’t enough. I need something that can sort through the hundreds of thousands of movies out there and point me to the ones that I’ll like the most of all of them. If movies are more of a casual thing to you and you’re not trying to optimize your experience, the “like”, “don’t like” system makes sense. Otherwise, I’d like to hear your thoughts so I can further optimize my system (currently, I’m using a spreadsheet that combines data from multiple online sources).
Of course, if your statement “I find that gets me further than aggregate rating systems” really is true, then what I said here doesn’t matter.
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In this way, I like IMDb more than Rotten Tomatoes, since Rotten Tomatoes has 500 movies with a 100% rating, while IMDb has only seven with a 9.0+ rating and none with a 10.0 rating, meaning there’s still room to grow. On a similar note, they have to give Oscars to somebody, so that evidence doesn’t count for as much. If the police had to arrest somebody, they might end up arresting some random homeless person just because he was the most suspicious person they could find. If the Academy chose not to give out Oscars some years, (and some years gave out multiple), it would theoretically increase the trustworthiness of the award.
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The first sentence of that phrasing is great! It makes things much more clear. But:
“i have to pick up Johny from kindergarten”
actually would give the probability of the other kid being a boy a fifty-fifty chance still, I believe. I still think the clearest way to phrase that part of the puzzle is for the narrator to ask the woman “is at least one of your kids a boy?”.
Pager, a nine-year-old Macaque monkey, can play some simple 2D video games, including MindPong, with his Neuralink. These games appear to use the inputs from a single joystick (or the signals from the Neuralink associated with moving a joystick). Here’s Neuralink’s video explaining it. Other companies and devices may have different capabilities.
After reading this post, I decided to use this heuristic for one or two big decisions, which turned out well. That’s not a large sample size, but it’s something. To give a specific example, I decided to travel more on my own, through foreign countries, without a concrete plan of where I would be staying. Another decision was to take on a job that was outside my comfort zone. I have also used it in smaller ways to talk to more people and take more social chances.
If I had to guess, I would say this heuristic works because it leads to new experiences and character growth, which are things that we look back on in a positive way. I think rationalists sometimes disregard courage as a virtue because it can lead to mistakes. This is probably because characters in books often do “courageous” things that would be bad decisions if books were more realistic. However, for most situations that real people encounter, fear is probably not a reliable indicator of a bad decision. Most of the truly bad decisions don’t sound very “scary”, like starting a smoking habit. Ideally, fear should not be a factor in decision-making. However, this is hard to achieve in practice, and it seems to work better to lean into fear-inspiring decisions.
Anyway, thanks for writing a unique and practical post. It’s genuinely improved my life.