I took the survey. Though I can’t remember my SAT score, which I know I put on the last survey – I wish I had saved my answers last year.
roryokane
I took the survey.
One thing I was unsure about: the appropriate answer to the question “Referrals: How did you find out about Less Wrong?”. I answered “Referred by a link on another blog”. But I actually investigated and discovered Less Wrong after seeing a bunch of links to it on Hacker News. Hacker News is really a link aggregation site or social news site, not a blog. But I thought that that answer was better than choosing “Other” and writing in “link from an aggregation site”.
I would call the “systems” you describe “algorithms”.
Looking at your examples, I see that your two “lists of tips” are slightly different. The first list is a combination of tips (aim for 22-30 workers) and facts about the situation (workers mine minerals; that’s how things work). The facts describe the problem you are designing an algorithm to solve. The tips describe solutions you would like your algorithm to aim for when those tips are applicable, but they are general goals, not specific actions. Your second list has no facts, only tips. And those tips are already expressed in the form of if-then statements (actions) that would be part (but just a part) of a larger algorithm.
“If only there were irrational people somewhere, insidiously believing stupid things, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and mock them. But the line dividing rationality and irrationality cuts through the mind of every human being. And who is willing to mock a piece of his own mind?”
(With apologies to Solzhenitsyn).
– Said Achmiz, in a comment on Slate Star Codex’s post “The Cowpox of Doubt”
When creating such a general algorithm, we must keep a human limitation in mind: subconscious, unsystemized thought. A practical algorithm must account for and exploit it.
There are two types of subconscious thought that an algorithm has to deal with. One is the top-level type that is part of being a human. It is only our subconscious that can fire off the process of choosing to apply a certain conscious algorithm. We won’t even start running our algorithm if we don’t notice that it applies in this situation, or if we don’t remember it, or if we feel bored by the thought of it. So our algorithm has to be friendly to our subconscious in these ways. Splitting the algorithm into multiple algorithms for different situations may be one way of accomplishing that.
The other type of subconscious thought is black-box function calls to our subconscious that our algorithm explicitly uses. This includes steps like like “choose which of these possibilities feels more likely” or “choose the option that looks like the most important”. We would call subconscious functions instead of well-defined sub-algorithms because they are much faster, and time is valuable. I suppose we just have to use our judgement to decide whether a subroutine should be ran explicitly or in our subconscious. (Try not to let the algorithm get stuck recursively calculating whether the time spent calculating the answer consciously instead of subconsciously would be worth the better answer.)
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.
Aumann Agreement by Combat
A hypothetical based on an amalgamation of my own experiences during a co-op:
You work as a programmer at a company that writes websites with the programming languages VBScript and VB.Net. You have learned enough about those languages to do your job, but you think the Ruby language is much more efficient, and you write your personal programming projects in Ruby. You occasionally go to meetings in your city for Ruby programmers, which talk about new Ruby-related technologies and techniques.
You are nearing the deadline for the new feature you were assigned to write. You had promised you would get the web page looking good in all browsers by today’s followup meeting about that feature. Fifteen minutes before the meeting, you realize that you forget to test in Internet Explorer 8. You open it in IE8 and find that the web page looks all messed up. You spend fifteen rushed minutes frantically looking up the problem you see and trying out code fixes, and you manage to fix the problem just before the meeting.
It’s just you, the technical lead, and the project manager at the meeting. You explain that you’ve finished your feature, and he nods, congratulates you, and makes note of that in his project tracker. Then he tells you what he wants you to work on next: an XML Reformatter. The XML documents used internally in one of the company’s products are poorly formatted and organized, with incorrect indentation and XML elements in random order. He suggests that you talk to the technical lead about how to get started, and leaves the meeting.
This project sounds like something that will be run only once – a one-time project. You have worked with XML in Ruby before, and are excited at the idea of being able to use your Ruby expertise in this project. You suggest to the technical lead that you write this program in Ruby.
“Hmm… no, I don’t think we should use Ruby for this project. We’re going to be using this program for a long time – running it periodically on our XML files. And all of our other programmers know VB.Net. We should write it in VB.Net, because I am pretty sure that another programmer is going to have to make a change to your program at some point.”
If you’re not thinking straight, at this point, you might complain, “I could write this program so much faster in Ruby. We should use Ruby anyway.” Yet that does not address the technical lead’s point, and ignores the fact that one of your assumptions has been revealed to be wrong.
If you are aware enough of your emotions to notice that you’re still on adrenaline from your last-minute fix, you might instead think, I don’t like the sound of missing this chance to use Ruby, but I might not be thinking straight. I’ll just accept that reasoning for now, and go back and talk to the technical lead in his office later if I think of a good argument against that point.
This is a contrived example. It is based on my experiences, but I exaggerate the situation and “your” behavior. Since I had to make many changes to the real situation to make an example that was somewhat believable, that would indicate that the specific tip you quoted isn’t applicable very often – in my life, at least.
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.
I took the survey.
I chose to Defect on the monetary reward prize question. Why?
I realized that the prize money is probably contributed by Yvain. And if $60-or-less were to be distributed between a random Less Wrong member and Yvain, I would rather as much of it as possible go to Yvain. This is because I know Yvain is smart and writes interesting posts, so the money could help him to contribute something to the world that another could not. Answering Defect lowers the amount of prize money, making Yvain keep more of it.
Also, I would rather I have the $60-or-less than anyone other Less Wrong member, and answering Defect gets me a bigger chance of that happening.
Edit: pgbh had the same reasoning.
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”.
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 …”.
Are there people who instinctively know what a ‘bright sound’ is yet don’t automatically visualise such sounds as being brightly coloured? Or who instinctively know what a ‘hammering note’ is without feeling any physical pain when they hear one?
Yes, I am an example of both such types of people. However, this is not because I think of those words as arbitrary, but because I associate those words with different concepts. I’ll elaborate on that.
But first, I’ll say the difficulty I have with your question: I’m not sure where to draw the line between “having synesthesia” and “being able to understand metaphors”. For example, think of the non-musical metaphors “sweet” to describe someone who is kind (rather than a sugary flavor) or “tortuous” to describe an indirect chain of logic (rather than a winding river). Does one need synesthesia to understand those metaphors?
Perhaps the difference between synesthesia and metaphors is whether the relation is arbitrary. If that’s the case, I would call all of those terms metaphor, not synesthesia: I can define all those terms you mentioned with reasoning by analogy about properties of the waveform.
For some reason, the terms about passages you listed make me think harder to understand, just like when a work of literature uses a metaphor, while the terms about notes you mentioned (except for “split”) seem so common that I’ve mentally added them as an alternative meaning in my dictionary.
My definitions of those terms about passages:
“Flowing”: I find myself thinking of a river that keeps flowing. Matching this to passages my music teachers have described as “flowing”, I define “flowing” music as music where notes are constantly played at a fairly regular pace, without long pauses or sudden volume changes.
“Full of energy”: to me, this means music that would take a lot of energy to play on instruments, or music that builds energy in the listener. Loud music with a hard beat would count, as would music with many notes played quickly.
“Treacly”: I haven’t heard this used to describe music before, but I can quickly guess the intent: music with notes played slowly and without sudden volume changes. This is by analogy to a high-viscosity liquid being poured out of a container.
My definitions of those terms about notes:
“Hard”: with a quick attack on the note’s envelope. By analogy, when touching a hard surface, you feel resistance quickly.
“Soft”: with a slow attack. The inverse reasoning as for “hard”.
“Bright”: sounds made up of mostly high frequencies (treble). High notes are more easily distinguishable to the ear than low notes, just like bright lights are more easily distinguishable to the eye than dim lights. But in my mind, I don’t think of bright lights when this term is used; I immediately think of a high-pitched note.
“Split”: that’s a new term to me. But I could imagine it meaning a note split across two or more frequencies, so the note sounds like a chord—in other words, a note with an overtone. Another possible meaning could be a note that cuts off and then plays again quickly, as if someone drew a rectangle for note on a digital piano roll and then split the rectangle into two pieces.
“Hammering”: as a piano player, this makes me think of the felt-wrapped hammers inside a piano. So I think of those hammers “hammering” the strings of the piano quickly, producing a repeated note. I suppose the meaning of “hammering” as hitting repeatedly rather than hitting once is arbitrary, and is derived from the same arbitrary meaning of “hammering” as “using a construction hammer to hit repeatedly”.
- 21 Dec 2020 5:53 UTC; 3 points) 's comment on Gauging the conscious experience of LessWrong by (
Writing on Less Wrong makes it easier to reach a large audience. New personal blogs would have trouble getting readers unless they were advertised in strategic places.
Yvain posted a follow-up post, “Extreme Mnemonics”, on his own blog. Readers have posted many comments.
A link to the xkcd comic Working that was mentioned. Note that the comic also has bonus text in the image’s tooltip.
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.
I agree. Specifically, they were probably ponifying the title of the book Permutation City by Greg Egan.
On my midterm exam in my college class Computer and Networking Security, I scored 88%, the highest in the class. About 18 other students took the test, and the mean of our scores was 62%. The exam will be graded on a curve, so my score is probably equivalent to A+.
I was the second-to-last student to finish the exam. This surprised me at the time, but now I think it must have been because I took more time to thoroughly think about the questions and show my work. On the other hand, I studied very little – only for 20 minutes, right before the exam. I am thankful that that turned out to be enough, and proud that I skimmed the slides effectively enough and paid enough attention in class that that’s all I needed.
I took the survey.