http://www.nature.com/news/google-reveals-secret-test-of-ai-bot-to-beat-top-go-players-1.21253
shev
Karma: 349
While I think it’s fine to call someone out by name if nothing else is working, I think the way you’re doing it is unnecessarily antagonistic and seemingly intentionally spiteful or at least utterly un-empathetic, and what you’re doing can (and in my opinion ought to) be done empathetically, for cohesion and not hurting people excessively and whatnot.
Giving an excuse about why it’s okay that you, specifically, are doing it, and declaring that you’re “naming and shaming” on purpose, makes it worse. It’s already shaming the person without saying that you’re very aware that it is; you ought to be taking a “I’m sorry I have to do this” tone instead of a “I’m immune to repercussions, so I’m gonna make sure this stings extra!” tone.
At least, this is how it would work in the several relatively typical (American) social groups that I’m familiar with.
No, markets only work for services whose costs are high enough to participants to care and model their behavior accordingly. In my observation, specifically, these people behave this way for reasons other than their personal comfort, and the costs aren’t high enough (or they’re not aware that they’re high enough) to influence their behavior.
The ‘reason to speculate’ is that it’s interesting to talk about it. That’s all.
I think you get more of that in Texas and the southeast. It (by my observation—very much a stereotype) correlates with driving big trucks, eating big meals, liking steak dinners and soda and big desserts, obesity, not caring about the environment, and taking strong unwavering opinions on things. And with conservatism, but not exclusively.
I distinctly remember driving in my high school band director’s car once, maybe a decade ago, and he was blasting the AC at max when it maybe needed to be on the lowest setting, tops—it seemed to reflect a mindset that “I want to get cold NOW” when it’s hot, to the point of overreaction. Maybe a mindset that—if the sun is bright and on my face, I need a lot of cold air, even if the rest of me doesn’t need it? Or maybe, ‘it feels hot in the world so I want a lot of cold air’. Certainly there was no realization that it was excessive, and he didn’t seem bothered by the unnecessary use of resources. I’ve noticed this same mindset a lot ever since, and I still don’t understand it.
Is there an index of everything I ought to read to be ‘up-to-date’ in the rationalist community? I keep finding new stuff: new ancient LW posts, new bloggers, etc. There’s also this on the Wiki, which is useful (but is curiously not what you find when you click on ‘all pages’ on the wiki; that instead gets a page with 3 articles on it?). But I think that list is probably more than I want—a lot of it is filler/fluff (though I plan to at least skim everything, if I don’t burn out).
I just want to be able to make sure, if I try to post something I think is new on here, that it hasn’t been talked to death about already.
Thanks, this is useful.
I’ve been thinking about doing this—I’m trying to learn math (real/complex analysis, abstract algebra) for ‘long term retention’ as I’m not really using it right now but want to get ahead of learning it later, and struggling with retention of concepts and core proofs.
Do you think it’s going to be useful to share decks for this purpose? I feel like there are many benefits to making my own cards and adding them as I progress through the material, and being handed a deck for the whole subject at once will be overwhelming.
Here’s an opinion on this that I haven’t seen voiced yet:
I have trouble being excited about the ‘rationalist community’ because it turns out it’s actually the “AI doomsday cult”, and never seems to get very far away from that.
As a person who thinks we have far bigger fish to fry than impending existential AI risk—like problems with how irrational most people everywhere (including us) are, or how divorced rationality is from our political discussions / collective decision making progress, or how climate change or war might destroy our relatively-peaceful global state before AI even exists—I find that I have little desire to try to contribute here. Being a member of this community seems to requiring buying into the AI-thing, and I don’t so I don’t feel like a member.
(I’m not saying that AI stuff shouldn’t be discussed. I’d like it to dominate the discussion a lot less.)
I think this community would have an easier time keeping members, not alienating potential members, and getting more useful discussion done, if the discussions were more located around rationality and effectiveness in general, instead of the esteemed founder’s pet obsession.
This is interesting, but I don’t understand your questions at end. What simulation theory are you talking about?
By the way, one of your links is broken and should be http://file.scirp.org/pdf/OPJ_2016063013301299.pdf .
Keep in mind that there is a significant seasonal variation in emissions from the sun, such as neutrinos which can easily penetrate into any experimental apparatus on earth. This is simple to rationalize: the sun emits massive numbers of neutrinos, which pass through areas at a shallower angle in the winter and thus have lower flux.
By far the first thing to rule out would be neutrinos affecting nuclear decay, before we start wondering about dark matter or anything like that. Everyone in the business has thought of this, of course: http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2008/oct/02/the-mystery-of-the-varying-nuclear-decay .
Occam’s razor would suggest you should be extremely skeptical of any suggestion that it’s more likely that something besides neutrinos is responsible for this effect, even if the mechanism hasn’t been figured out yet.
I double majored in physics and computer science as an undergrad at a pretty good school.
My observation is this:
The computer science students had a much easier time getting jobs, because getting a job with mediocre software engineering experience is pretty easy (in the US in today’s market). I did this with undeservedly little effort.
The physics students were, in general, completely capable of putting in 6 months of work to become as employable as the computer science students. I have several friends who majored in things completely non-technical, but by spending a few months learning to program were able to get employed in the field. The physics students from my classes were easily smart enough to do this, though most did not.
To maximize the ease of getting a job while in physics, take a few programming courses on the side. If you apply yourself and are reasonably talented it should be doable.
I think the ‘right’ approach (for maximizing happiness and effectiveness) is to major in what you find the most enjoyable and do the due diligence to become employable on the side. And maximize any synergies between the two (do programming in physics internships, etc).
I watched #3 again and I’m pretty convinced you’re right. It is strange, seeing it totally differently once I have a theory to match.
I strongly disagree with the approaches usually recommended online, which involve some mixture of sites like CodeAcademy and looking into open source projects and lots of other hard-to-motivate things. Maybe my brain works differently, but those never appealed to me. I can’t do book learning and I can’t make myself up and dedicate to something I’m not drawn to already. If you’re similar, try this instead:
Pick a thing that you have no idea how to make.
Try to make it.
Now, when I say “try”… new programmers often envision just sitting down and writing, but when they try it they realize they have no idea how to do anything. Their mistake is that, actually, sitting down and knowing what to do is just not what coding is like. I always surprise people who are learning to code with this fact: when I’m writing code in any language other than my main ones (Java, mostly..), I google something approximately once every two minutes. I spend most of my time searching for how to do even the most basic things. When it’s time to actually make something work, it’s usually just a few minutes of coding after much more time spent learning.
You should try to make the “minimum viable product” of whatever you want to make first.
If it’s a game, get a screen showing—try to do it in less than an hour. Don’t get sidetracked by anything else; get the screen up. Then get a character moving with arrow keys. Don’t touch anything until you have a baseline you can iterate on, because every change you make should be immediately reflected in the product. Until you can see quick results from your hard work you’re not going to get sucked in.
If it’s a website or a product, get the server running in less than an hour. Pick a framework and a platform and go—don’t get caught on the details. Setting up websites is secretly easy (python -m SimpleHTTPServer !) but if you’ve never done it you won’t know that. If you need one set up a database right after. Get started quickly. It’s possible with almost every architecture if you just search for cheat sheets and quick-start guides and stuff. You can fix your mistakes later, or start again if something goes wrong.
If you do something tedious, automate it. I have a shell script that copies some Javascript libraries and Html/JS templates into a new Dropbox folder and starts a server running there so I can go from naming my project to having an iterable prototype with some common elements I always reuse in less than five minutes. That gets me off the ground much faster and in less than 50 lines of script.
If you like algorithms or math or whatever, sure, do Project Euler or join TopCoder—those are fun. The competition will inspire some people to be fantastic at coding, which is great. I never got sucked in for some reason, even though I’m really competitive.
If you use open source stuff, sure, take a look at that. I’m only motivated to fix things that I find lacking in tools that I use, which in practice has never lead to my contributing to open source. Rather I find myself making clones of closed software so I can add features to it..
Oh, and start using Git early on. It’s pretty great. Github is neat too and it basically acts as a resume if you go into programming, which is neat. But remember—setting it up is secretly easy, even if you have no idea what you’re doing. Somehow things you don’t understand are off-putting until you look back and realize how simple they were.
Hmm, that’s all that comes to mind for now. Hope it helps.
Yeah, it can definitely be done for cheaper. In my case going through college and such I got new frames every year or two (between breaking them or starting to hate the style..). The bigger expense was contacts, which we either didn’t have insurance for or it didn’t cover, coming out to 100-150/year depending on how often I lost or damaged them.
I’ve never been to a Seattle meetup but I mean to come to this. Maybe a good way to get in the habit.
But if you would spend 2500$ over ten years of glasses- and contacts-wearing—which is very possible, especially if you’re prone to breaking them—then it pays for itself already. Or twenty years, whatever, ignoring alternative ways to invest that money. Add in more for the massive convenience of not having to deal with glasses and contacts, too.
This is why I’m going in for a LASIK pre-op next week. I’m certain it will improve my quality of life appreciably and save me money over the long term to boot.
I just want to point out that I think the phrase “cached identity” is extremely apt.
Regardless of whether cold fusion is possible (who knows), and regardless of whether I am qualified to think it is possible (moderately so), and regardless of whether I think it possible (I certainly don’t think anyone has managed it), I would never be convinced by this post.
You seem to think your argument is pretty convincing. Suppose it is. Suppose 99% of laypeople who have no idea if cold fusion is real believe it. Or 100%, or whatever. That has no bearing on whether cold fusion is real or whether I should believe it to be real from your post.
I would believe cold fusion is true on the word of others if they were experts (in nuclear physics). Your argument can convince any number of laypersons, but if it can’t convince a significant portion of experts (and there’s no reason it would, since it’s just appeals to authority and very unconvincing hearsay) then I have no interest in it.
Well, that’s the point. It’s absurd.
Several points:
For many of the things he writes about, we can take his clout and background as evidence that his insight is ‘real’. It doesn’t have to explained via careful science to be true. I think the fact that Paul Graham is saying something, for certain subjects, makes it highly likely to be very-mostly-correct. I’ll happily believe it to a high degree unless I have reason not to. I believe the evidence that they’re mostly-correct is that he wrote them, and the evidence that things he writes are mostly-correct is that they have been so in the past and that he’s intelligent and moreover consistently intelligent, so we have little expectation of a given essay suddenly floundering into bullshit.
His insight and way of thinking can be useful even if they are unreal. I mean—I’m sure every essay on that list makes points that can be argued to death or outright refuted by a sufficiently committed pedant. But they still have value. We think in heuristics anyway, for the most part, so it’s valuable to glean heuristics from smart people and to see how they think and how their heuristics work (or don’t work).
Empirical evidence would not really improve many of these essays. For one thing, filling an essay with detailed evidence that isn’t necessary for the reader to believe it would probably detract from the quality of the essay. And many of his points are opinions or perspectives. They shouldn’t or can’t be highly factual. They would become false if they were made hard-and-fast.
I was pretty pleased with myself for discovering that. It—sorta works. I still find myself going to Reddit, but so far it’s still “feeling” less addictive (which is really hard to quantify or describe). Now I’m finding myself just clicking to websites more looking for something, rather than specifically clicking links. I’ve been sleeping badly lately, though, and I find that my brain is a lot more vulnerable to my Internet addiction when I haven’t slept well—so it’s not a good comparison to my norm.
Incidentally, if anyone wanted me to I could certainly make the extension work on other browsers. It’s the simplest thing ever, it just injects 7 clauses of CSS into Reddit pages. I thought about making it mess with other websites I used (hackernews, mostly) but I decided they weren’t as much of a problem and it was better to keep it single-purpose for now.
I’m not asking for people not to talk about problems they have. I’m just criticizing the specifically extra-insensitive way of doing it in the comment I replied to. There are nicer, less intentionally hurtful ways to say the exact same thing.