roryokane

Karma: 403

roryokane 14 Aug 2010 1:38 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: Five-minute rationality techniques
I don’t see how that is a system crasher sentence. I think I can successfully parse it as “I must succeed in agreeing with you more”. Yes, it takes a while to figure out the meaning because turning each negative into a positive is a separate step, but there is a meaning in the end, unlike the sentence about Russia.

roryokane 14 Aug 2010 9:31 UTC
8 points
on: Welcome to Less Wrong! (2010-2011)
Hi, I’m Rory O’Kane. I’ve been reading Less Wrong for a few months. I first came across it a year or two ago, when a Hacker News comment linked to the AI-in-a-box experiment description. I followed some links from that and liked each Less Wrong post I read. A few more times in the next months, I stumbled across a random comment or article pointing to a Less Wrong post that I also enjoyed, until I finally decided to read the About page and see just what Less Wrong was all about anyway. Every so often, I came to the site, read posts, and followed links from those posts. In this way I read most of the sequences, but not in the order listed on the wiki.

I have been programming computers since I was 7 and I like math too, so articles about how to think logically naturally interested me. I’ve been reading and loving Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality – I’ve recently noticed many more of the stupid actions characters in stories do, and HPatMoR has helped satisfy my want for a story in which characters generally don’t do such obviously stupid actions. (There are examples of such actions in, for instance, the magical girl anime CardCaptor Sakura, in which the main character Sakura just accepts that she has to collect all of the magic cards without asking their magical guardian how the cards were created and who created them, or what the meaning behind a certain recurring dream is, or how magic works, or what this upcoming doom he keeps hinting about is.) I’m in college right now taking a Computer Science degree, about to start my sophomore year. I’m currently trying to figure out what the elements of the best possible programming language would be, hoping I can eventually write a language or tool to ease my frustration at the redundancy of C++, which we must program our assignments in.

A note about the welcome post:

A note for theists: you will find LW overtly atheist. […] This isn’t groupthink; we really, truly have given full consideration to theistic claims and found them to be false.

I don’t really like the use of “we” here. I, too, am atheist, but I would guess that there are probably some people new to this site who are atheist but who have not yet really “given full consideration to theistic claims”. I would revise the sentence to “In general, this isn’t groupthink; most of us really, truly have given full consideration …”.

roryokane 22 Aug 2010 23:00 UTC
0 points
on: Newcomb’s Problem and Regret of Rationality
What this is really saying is “if something impossible (according to your current theory of the world) actually happens, then rather than insisting it’s impossible and ignoring it, you should revise your theory to say that’s possible”. In this case, the impossible thing is reverse causality; since we are told of evidence that reverse causality has happened in the form of 100 successful previous experiments, we must revise our theory to accept that reverse causality actually can happen. This would lead us to the conclusion that we should take one box. Alternatively, we could decide that our supposed evidence is untrustworthy and that we are being lied to when we are told that Omega made 100 successful predictions – we might think that this problem describes a nonsensical, impossible situation, similarly to if we were told that there was a barber who shaves everyone who does not shave themself.

roryokane 23 Nov 2010 6:32 UTC
7 points
on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 5
The answer to Harry’s question at the end of Chapter 60, “Why am I not like the other children my own age?”, is, of course, that he is the protagonist of a story, and therefore he must do interesting things to amuse the readers. It would be pretty cool if he actually realized that and started considering in his decisions the likelihood that this story will have a happy ending and the likelihood that he will be killed off as a result of a minor accident as opposed to an epic duel with Voldemort. It would be really hard to write, though, and Harry would naturally be cautious about thinking he’s in a story, to protect against being Wrong Genre Savvy, so we are unlikely to see this.

roryokane 11 Feb 2011 2:41 UTC
18 points
in reply to: CronoDAS’s comment on: Procedural Knowledge Gaps
Many of the instructions on this thread would fit well on wikiHow. It would be better to put them there than on Less Wrong Wiki or a new site because wikiHow is already known by more people as a source of information on basic things.

roryokane 12 Feb 2011 1:58 UTC
1 point
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: Rationality Quotes: February 2011
Can you give some examples of when that has happened? I’m having trouble of thinking of any. The widespread use of computers seems to have been a great success, on the whole.

roryokane 12 Feb 2011 2:15 UTC
0 points
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: Rationality Quotes: February 2011
I know you didn’t mention computers; it was just the first example that came to mind. It seemed like if the quote would apply to anything, it would apply to computers most of all, but it didn’t. But good points about electricity and about being computers being too recent.

roryokane 23 May 2011 1:45 UTC
0 points
on: Official Less Wrong Redesign: Call for Suggestions
Make comment permalink pages more visually distinct from article pages. Right now, if a person visits a link to a comment, it looks like it’s just a really short article with a single comment (perhaps with children). Only after closer inspection do I see that the text of the article starts with “You are viewing a comment permalink”, and the article title starts with “[Somebody] comments on”. The linked comment is highlighted in yellow, but this is not enough to signal to me that it is supposed to be the main content – it could simply mean it is a “hot” or “featured” comment.

One factor contributing to this confusion is that the light grey bar with Comments, Save, Report, etc. is above the comment. The grey bar is usually a footer at the bottom of the article, implying that whatever follows is less important reading. I think on comment permalink pages, the grey bar should be below the comment itself, or given a different look from on article pages. I think more changes are necessary for the comment permalink page to display its comment in the most useful, organized, and readable way, but that’s a start.

roryokane 3 Jun 2011 16:21 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Nic_Smith’s comment on: Teachable Rationality Skills
For those who haven’t heard of that term: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Epistemic_hygiene

roryokane 1 Sep 2011 3:35 UTC
4 points
on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 8
The play referenced in Chapter 75 refers to the webcomic Ow, My Sanity!.

The relevant paragraph of Chapter 75, for convenience of comparison and search:

“Oh,” said the third-year girl, “I was thinking of that really romantic one where there’s this very nice, sweet boy who makes a Floo call, only he mispronounces his destination and stumbles out into this room full of Dark Wizards who are performing a forbidden ritual that should’ve stayed forever lost to time, and they’re sacrificing seven victims in order to unseal this ancient horror which is supposed to grant someone a wish if it’s freed, so of course the boy’s presence interrupts the ritual, and as the horror is eating all the Dark Wizards and everyone is dying the boy’s last thought is that he wishes he could’ve had a girlfriend, and the next thing you know the boy is lying in the lap of this beautiful woman whose eyes are burning with a dreadful light, only she doesn’t understand anything about being human so the boy always has to stop her eating people. This is just like that play, only you’re the boy and Harry Potter is the girl!”

roryokane 2 Nov 2011 3:26 UTC
0 points
in reply to: J_Taylor’s comment on: Better Disagreement
I personally don’t really care whether posts have quotations at the top or not, but could you clarify why you don’t like those quotations? Is it something to do with appeal to authority being a fallacy?

roryokane 11 Nov 2011 1:43 UTC
6 points
on: 2011 Less Wrong Census / Survey
I took the survey. I left most of the probability estimation questions blank because I feel very uncertain about any number I imagine entering.

roryokane 24 Dec 2011 9:32 UTC
2 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: What is your rationality blind spot?
When I think of something I want to record quickly, and my computer isn’t at hand, I just record it as a text note or voice memo on my phone. (I have a dumbphone, but it still has voice memo capabilities.) I keep my phone by my bed when I sleep, and have Voice Memos set to a shortcut on the phone, so if I wake up with a thought, It’s really easy to record it. I haven’t actually re-listened to any of the ideas, since I know none of them are urgent, but just knowing that the thought is safely recorded and that I could theoretically continue working on it later is enough for me to relax and stop worrying about it. (I also back up the recordings to my computer occasionally for further peace of mind.)

roryokane 25 Dec 2011 11:20 UTC
12 points
on: [Link] Correlation Graphs Reveal Shocking Information
I don’t think these are very good examples. Those lines hardly look correlated, let alone casually related. I once read an article with a much better example, but I can’t find it now. It first talked about how if you looked through enough examples you could find any correlation, and then showed a very closely correlated graph of the stock market versus something about Venus, like its surface temperature or distance from the sun or something.

You can easily generate correlation examples with Google Correlate, such as how AppleWorks is causing the decline of the Japanese language.

roryokane 12 Apr 2012 0:34 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Anubhav’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality predictions
Though rarely updated, PredictionBook is open source. So at least you don’t have to wait for the creators to fix it, if you know how to code. I wrote up an Issue for this bug, describing some starting points for fixing it.

roryokane 12 Apr 2012 1:41 UTC
5 points
in reply to: pnrjulius’s comment on: Fictional Bias
There are such illusions that aren’t: link (via Ironic Sans). These illusions appeared in the April 1971 issue of New Scientist magazine.

roryokane 21 Sep 2012 6:17 UTC
2 points
on: Policy Debates Should Not Appear One-Sided
Alternate title: “debates should acknowledge tradeoffs”. I think that mnemonic is more helpful.

Longer summary: “Debates should acknowledge tradeoffs. Don’t rationalize away apparent good points for the other side; it’s okay and normal for the other side to have some good points. Presumably, those points just won’t be strong enough in total to overwhelm yours in total. (Also, acknowledging tradeoffs is easier if you don’t think of the debate in terms of ‘your side’ and ‘their side’.)”

roryokane 23 Sep 2012 3:16 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Kaj_Sotala’s comment on: Less Wrong Polls in Comments
The solution on Mathematics Stack Exchange

roryokane 23 Sep 2012 4:05 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Alicorn’s comment on: Less Wrong Polls in Comments
Indeed it is. A Google search for “Pinky Pie” autocorrects to “Pinkie Pie”, while the inverse is not true. The first result in either case is a wiki article on “Pinkie Pie”.

roryokane 1 Oct 2012 9:59 UTC
9 points
on: Schelling fences on slippery slopes
After I read Wikipedia’s article on Schelling points (a.k.a. “focal points”), this article made much more sense. I recommend reading it – it’s only three paragraphs at the moment.

In short, a Schelling point is a point that everybody agrees is an “obvious” cutoff point. That knowledge helped me understand this article’s point that Schelling points make good fences to precommit to because you can’t justify moving the fence anywhere else later – the other points are not nearly as “obvious”.