Thanks. I appreciate your input. I have updated the post and I think that should have fixed the issues you have described.
ScottL
Karma: 604
You are probably right. I would assume that I can also get the post information from this: http://lesswrong.com/r/all/recentposts/ . A graph with this much data probably wouldn’t be useful as it would be too busy. I will look into writing something else to get this data into a usable format.
Edit: Your link only has the main comments, not the discussion ones. I’m not sure what to get all the comment information from.
I’d recommend adding the year to the timestamp, instead of making me read it off the x-axis.
Done
I also did the cumulative chart. I will think about allowing the user to set the dates that are shown on the cumulative chart. It would start with the first comment/post and end with the last, but it would allow you to change the start or end dates if you want.
I combined the above suggestions. While it is scraping the data, it now also has a table showing the last scraped elements posted date, the number of items scraped and the scraped score. This is split into two rows one for comments and one for posts.
Is this purely client-side?
Yes. I hosted it in Github Pages because it’s free. The down side is that it only serves static content.. I might be able to use something like firebase, but I don’t really want to. I will see how easy it is to create a link that allows you to download the data to a csv file.
I don’t think so. See Vaniver’s comment which describes what the site is doing. I don’t know the process, but maybe you can submit a DB request to the trike apps team for this data.
CFAR has all of this material readily available likely in a much more comprehensive and accurate format.
My assumption was that they don’t have this because of time and effort constraints as well as other priorities.
I highly value CFAR as an organisation. I want them to be highly funded and want as many people to attend their workshops as possible. It would upset me to learn that someone had read my compilation and not attended a workshop thinking they had gotten most of the value they could.
The CFAR team are valuable because they are practitioners, experimenters and pioneers, not because of their techniques. That is, they are not valuable because they are hoarding potentially valuable information, but because they are at the frontier and are able to teach their material extremely well. The important question is does my material or yours help with improving the art of rationality and peoples understanding of it. I still think it does, but In retrospect, I think that I should have made it clearer that trying to learn this material by yourself is probably a bad idea.
Point 1 (It’s hard to learn) - I agree. I have added a warning at the top of the post which should help with this problem Point 2 (corruption) - I don’t think this post can be in anyway be a substitute for the workshops, but I think it can still have value as a base or glossary. It is definitely doesn’t provide a kind of framework or common thread of understanding which I think you seem to be saying is very important. Point 3 (idea inoculation) - isn’t this problem (Having seen crappy, distorted versions of the CFAR curriculum) resolved if you check the post to make that what I am saying is accurate and true to what CFAR actually teaches.This one (having attempted to absorb it from text, and failed) may be a reason for me to retract this post, however. Let me know what you think.
Overall. I respect your caution, but I don’t think that having some potential misinformation is as bad as you make it seem. At least if we’re careful.
There will always be obvious benefits to attending an intensive, collaborative workshop with instructors who know what they’re doing, and there will always be people who recognize that the value is worth the cost, particularly given our track record.
I agree with this which I think was your overall point.
I moved the main posts into a separate chart.. It should be less confusing now.
Pressing enter with the box focused didn’t start the scraping. I had to click ‘go’.
Fixed
I’d put main and discussion upvotes on the same scale. (So the ‘main’ y-axis is just 10 times the ‘discussion/comment’ y-axis.) Right now they don’t even have zero in the same place, which is really weird. Maybe also make the scale nonlinear.
I moved main into a separate graph. This should fix the issues.
It’s hard to click-and-drag over the whole width or height of the chart.
I could change it so that you can only zoom in on the yaxis like it is here.
I’m not sure how easy this would be, but I’d appreciate a distinction between meetups and non-meetups. (But I think some meetups are in main and some are in discussion.)
Maybe I will look at that later.
I’d like more context on posts/comments without having to visit them. For posts, the title; for comments, maybe the title of the attached post plus a few words (like in the sidebar). It might be too noisy to put that in the hover box; if so, perhaps if I click, the hover box expands and stays there until the next click, and includes an actual link?
I have updated this. Try it out and let me know what you think.
You don’t actually display total karma anywhere. I had to get it from positive-negative on the pie chart.
I fixed the total chart to have title that shows the total score.
The pie chart doesn’t have a slice for ‘neutral’.
The pie chart is meant to show the total score. Since neutral has 0 score I don’t think it should be in the graph.
I’d also be interested in seeing cumulative karma as a time series
Would that be something like this with the total score moving up and down over time. I would do this by ordering the comment/post scores by their dates.
and 30-day karma as a time series.
Would this be similar to the cumulative chart above, but just for 30 days.
Unofficial Canon on Applied Rationality
Less Wrong Karma Chart Website
I don’t know Ruby, but I think that your code doesn’t work properly. It will count the karma score for every comment on the comments page. This includes the comment that you are replying to. I believe that you should have checked the author name somewhere before you added to the karma HashMap.
If there is not, then I can create something on github pages that should do this. It should be fairly simple to do and would just involve scraping the data in the http://lesswrong.com/user/[specifiedUser]/comments/ pages. I think this is the only way to do it. Let me know what you want and I will look into it. I could probably also include your posts karma and allow you to check how your karma score changes over time.
The book sounds good. I think ultimately there are two things that are important here: the first is teaching her about botany and the second is to instill and build on her drive to want to learn the material or more broadly a problem solving/curious mindset. In my opinion, the second one is more important.
Two pieces of advice:
Forget about the structure. Just think about setting up an environment that will let her explore, play and teach herself. The book is a good start. Maybe, a plant for her room would be a good idea.
Explore with her. The best thing you can do, I reckon, is to take her outside and explore with her. I don’t know much about Botany, but I think it would be cool, as an example, if you picked up a flower and pointed out to her that most people are born with two arms and then asked: “So, would that mean that the amount of petals on this type of flower will all be the same”. Then, no matter what she says you can go to a group of the flowers and let her count the amount of petals to see if they’re the same. Then, you can ask another question: are the buds the same etc.
It looks to me like it’s possible to resist grief, at least to some extent. I think people do it all the time. And I think it’s an error to do so.
It is only an error if it continues on too long. Avoidance in most circumstances is a natural and innate part of the process of dealing with grief.
Avoidance is sometimes an adaptive strategy in coping with adversity and sometimes maladaptive. In the case of bereavement, experiential avoidance usually plays a role in facilitating the healing process. The emotional pain associated with new information that a loved one has died is so severe that people need time interspersed with periods of respite in order to be able to fully acknowledge the unwanted reality. Respite can be achieved using cognitive avoidance, and sometimes by also avoiding contact with triggers of emotion. When avoidance is used adaptively, it facilitates processing of the painful information as well as restoration of the capacity for a satisfying ongoing life. As processing and restoration are achieved, the need for avoidance diminishes and the strategy must be relinquished. If it is not, or if avoidance is over-used in the wake of bereavement, the strategy can backfire. Processing difficult information is impeded rather than facilitated and acute grief is prolonged. (Shear, p. 357)
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I could instead turn my mind to the pain, and look at it in exquisite detail.
This sounds potentially dangerous to me. You could easily retraumatize yourself or deepen your grief by doing this. It is probably best to try to do this when with someone else and also not too early in the grief process. This does not mean that you should never do this, however, as this is something that has to happen eventually.
The feelings from grief have an undulating or wave like motion. There will be times where you can face your feeling and times when you cannot. This is totally fine. It does, however, become important as more time progresses for you to make sense of the loss and find benefit in it, which fortunately often becomes easier as time progresses:
Those who were able to make sense of their loss typically did so by seeing the death as predictable or as a natural condition of life or by suggesting that the death was comprehensible within the context of their religious or spiritual beliefs. On the other hand, those who were able to find benefit in the experience tended to report that they had learned something important from it, about themselves (e.g., that they had the strength to cope with the adversity), about others (e.g., the value of family and relationships), or about the meaning of life (e.g., learned what is important in life). (Davis, C.G., Nolen-Hoeksema, S., & Larson, J. p.570)
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I think the first three so-called “stages of grief”
I don’t think these stages are currently accepted anymore as they are seen to be too rigid. See here for some recent developments on the understanding of grief and bereavement.
It required a choice, every moment, to keep my focus on what hurt rather than on how much it hurt or how unfair things were or any other story that decreased the pain I felt in that moment. And it was tiring to make that decision continuously.
I think the power from this actually comes from the perspective that you are taking on the loss rather than the simple fact that you are thinking about it. For example, I think there was a big benefit from not thinking about how unfair it was.
In summary, I think your post is describing something that should happen in the later stages of the grief process. It might also not be suited for people with avoidant attachment styles. There is no doubt that they are some ways to do it better than others, for example this looks pretty good. My opinion, though, is that if you were trying to find out how to handle grief well, then it would be more important to look at things like what your strategies are: to handle it, to seek help from others for it, to compartmentalise it, to challenge the unhelpful thinking it will induce etc. See here for more.
P.S. can you please add a summary break somewhere in your post.
This sounds awesome and it looks like it is helping you to become less wrong. I have a couple questions. In summary, the idea that it is implemented with word documents sounds cumbersome to me. I wonder if there is a better way to do it:
have you looked into any apps that could do what you are doing with a collection of word documents? If you have, then what is different about your system than the other existing apps.
What would a perfect app implementation be of your Value management system?
have you done much research to create this system because it sounds like the above would be good for a main post if you have. I would like to know about what your set of filters are and what you mean by the framework to set up more frameworks.
I think this is a good point. Despair, which I see as perceived hopelessness, originates in an individual and so it depends on how that individual perceives the situation. Perception is not like receiving a reflection of the world in the mind. It is like meshing together the neural activity from percepts with the existing neural activity ongoing in the brain. The result is that it is context dependent. It is affected by priming and emotions, for example.
I think the advice in this post, essentially embrace despair, isn’t probably that helpful. What do you think about this advice: “Notice despair for it is a signal of hopelessness. It indicates that you may be stuck in a mental rut or that the way that you are viewing a situation may be inducing unnecessary anxiety. In summary, it tells you to rethink how you are trying to solve the problem that you are facing. The first thing you should do is check that it is real. Get advice and talk to others about it. Try to get out of your head. Also, try and find out if it is misattributed. It may be due to low blood sugar or anxiety spilling over from other parts of your life, for example. If you have done this and now know that the despair is real, i.e. resulting from a complex problem that matters to you and that you can’t solve, then try to understand the problem you are facing and your plan to solve it. Once you are happy with the plan then you can embrace the incoming depression. Do not view it as anathema, but instead as your body’s mechanism to move you into the necessary focused and analytical state that you need to be in to be able to solve the complex problem that you are facing”.
Melancholia, mania and severe depression might be a bit different, but with normal episodes I think the upswing is when you are solving problems without issues. The turning point at the top is when you come across a complex problem which matters to you and that you are unable to solve. The downswing and slide into depression is your body’s way of moving into a kind of analytical mode. Like fever is induced to fight infection, depression is induced to fight despair. I think that despair is separate to the depression. It is the perceived lack of control over negative events, we often call it hopelessness. Depression, on the other hand, is the induced state of mind.
The reason why such mood swings as you describe might happen with startup founders, for example, is that they face complex problems that they care deeply about and that have high social costs if they fail at them. The idea I am presenting here gets to be quite complicated in practice because the cause of the depression is the perceived complexity of the problem, perceived ability to solve it and perceived social costs with failing. These all depend on the perceiver and we don’t see the world as it is, we see they world as we are. It is possible that someone might slide into depression because of misttributed emotions, wrong beliefs etc.
Depression might also be too strong a word. Perhaps, ‘sad’ is better. I don’t know. I am referring to ‘depression’ as the down ward sections in your mood swings figure.
I am basing what I wrote above on my understanding of this paper which posits that depression is an evolved stress response mechanism. This claim makes sense if you believe the broaden and build theory. The paper makes the following claims
Complex Problems Trigger Depressed Affect. The analytical rumination (AR) hypothesis proposes that depressed affect is triggered by problems: (1) that are complex (analytically difficult); and (2) that affected fitness in evolutionary environments. [...] One effect of sad or depressed mood is to promote an analytical reasoning style in which greater attention is paid to detail and information is processed more slowly, methodically, thoroughly, and in smaller chunks [...] Complex social problems may be the primary evolutionarily relevant trigger of depression in human beings
Depression coordinates a suite of changes in body systems that promote rumination, the evolved function of which is to analyze the triggering problem. [...]Analysis is time consuming and requires sustained processing, so it is susceptible to disruption, which interferes with problem-solving. Depression induces changes in body systems, producing effects that facilitate analytical rumination by reducing disruption [...]Specifically, depressed affect: (1) activates neurological mechanisms that promote attentional control, which gives problem-related information prioritized access to limited processing resources and makes depressive rumination intrusive, persistent, resistant to distraction, and difficult to suppress; (2) induces anhedonia, which reduces the desire to think about and engage in hedonic activities that could disrupt problem-related processing; and (3) promotes psychomotor changes that reduce exposure to stimuli that could disrupt processing (e.g., desire for social isolation, loss of appetite).
Over evolutionary time, depressive rumination often helped people solve the problems that triggered their episodes [...] Like fever, then, the impairments associated with depression are usually the outcome of adaptive tradeoffs rather than disorder. For instance, because processing resources are limited, a decreased ability to concentrate on other things is a necessary tradeoff that has to be made in order to sustain analysis of a complex, depressogenic problem The fourth claim is that depression reduces accuracy on laboratory tasks because depressive rumination takes up limited processing resources [...]In summary, studies of clinical, subclinical, and experimentally induced depression all show that when given a laboratory task, depressed people ruminate about other things, which takes up limited cognitive resources and interferes with their ability to perform well on the task. It is therefore illegitimate to conclude that depression generally impairs problem-solving from studies showing reduced performance on laboratory tasks. They have nothing to say about how successful depressed people are in solving the problems that they are ruminating about.
In summary, we hypothesize that depression is a stress response mechanism: (1) that is triggered by analytically difficult problems that influence important fitness-related goals; (2) that coordinates changes in body systems to promote sustained analysis of the triggering problem, otherwise known as depressive rumination; (3) that helps people generate and evaluate potential solutions to the triggering problem; and (4) that makes tradeoffs with other goals in order to promote analysis of the triggering problem, including reduced accuracy on laboratory tasks. Collectively, we refer to this suite of claims as the analytical rumination (AR) hypothesis.
This seems pretty good.
It’s probably not that useful to think about this in terms of categories. It would be better to think about what makes a conversation great and to find out what is missing when you end up ‘just chilling out’.
Let me know what you perceive to be the difference in your conversations that work and the ones in which you end up just chilling out.
Here’s some background information to help you out with that. Conversations are a type of speech exchange system that involves turn taking. When you are having your turn, i.e. speaking, this is referred to as holding the conversational floor. A conversation that progresses past the initial stage, referred to as small talk, will have longer turns in which the content is free flowing and natural. One of the main things that differentiate conversation from other speech systems like interviews is that the turns are best when they are somewhat balanced. Conversations thrive when the turns are natural, build on previous turns and allow multiple avenues for future turns.
Based on what you have said, I would presume that your conversations that don’t work tend to involve short turns as you keep asking them questions and they give short answers. When conversations sag and die, it will most likely be because of minimal responses, i.e. short turns, and no free information that the other person can use to take a future turn. In fact, this is how almost all conversations end. That is, with the exchange of ritualistic small turns, e.g. “Ok, cya” → “Yeh, bye”
In general, I think that a good conversationalist is someone who is good at doing conversational work which is all about ensuring that the conversation will continue and that the turns will become more expansive and natural. Some aspects of conversational work include:
Asking questions (preferably open ones which lead to longer turns or follow up questions which show that you’re listening and care)
Providing answers
Introducing new topics
Picking up topics
Telling good stories
Helping good stories
Helping others to be able to ask you questions, i.e. offering lots of free information. For example, if asked what do you do then it is good if you can provide enough information to allow them to expand on what you have said. Don’t just tell them your role, but tell them what you do day to day and why you love it, or don’t.