Or a warning that the Zen notion of enlightenment won’t let you automate menial tasks you dislike.
sixes_and_sevens
This is a surprisingly interesting question that I will probably now fail to do justice to.
If one of my male work colleagues expressed a desire to be a woman, and went through the process of trying to authentically look and behave like one, it would be weird, but it wouldn’t be unprecedented. I have other work colleagues who are female. They communicate, socialise and locomote in essentially the same fashion. In the grand scheme of things it wouldn’t be that much of a difference. Society would not collapse if every Steve became a Stacey and every Stacey became a Steve.
If one of my work colleagues expressed a desire to be a zebra, and went through the process of trying to authentically look and behave like one, that would be a problem. My workplace makes no accomodation for zebras. They’d have trouble with both the stairs and the lift. They couldn’t read the employee handbook. They don’t have knowledge of technical infrastructure, and even if they did, they lack the faculties for me to ask them to help me fix a server.
Zebras are not people. We can’t collaborate with them as entities of legally equal status for mutual benefit. We don’t even collaborate with them as entities of legally unequal status because they’re not all that useful. Our society has no zebras in it.
If you say “I’m a zebra on the inside” while chilling with a Frappé in Starbucks, wearing shoes and telling the time and distinguishing human facial features, you’re not performing zebrahood in the same way a transsexual performs another gender. You’re just someone who says they’re a zebra. Society doesn’t have a way to accept that sort of person.
It’s my understanding that Marcus Aurelius no longer voices this opinion.
How I pattern-match this post:
“Here is an unsolved problem from a domain I hold no expertise in. The fact it is not solved suggests that not enough effort is being applied to it. More effort should be applied to it. I am somehow more clever than the people in this domain for noticing this. After all, how hard could it be?”
Experience teaches me that the base rate for holding and expressing this sentiment, and being correct about it, is incredibly low.
- 30 Jun 2016 21:07 UTC; 2 points) 's comment on Market Failure: Sugar-free Tums by (
Just a meta-comment for admins. The “Sequence Reruns” tag in the discussion section is now so common relative to the other tags, it’s forced all the others in the tag cloud in the sidebar to the same relative size. That seems to be defeating the point a bit.
- 1 Oct 2012 10:22 UTC; 4 points) 's comment on Open Thread, October 1-15, 2012 by (
I recently remarked that the phrase “that doesn’t seem obvious to me” is good at getting people to reassess their stated beliefs without antagonising them into a defensive position, and as such it was on my list of “magic phrases”. More recently I’ve been using “can you give a specific example?” for the same purpose.
What expressions or turns of phrase do you find particularly useful in encouraging others, or yourself, to think to a higher standard?
- 2 Jul 2013 13:03 UTC; 5 points) 's comment on Open Thread, July 1-15, 2013 by (
[Transcript from video, hence long and choppy]
I think the way the battle lines are drawn in the world we live in, the battle lines typically fall in terms of ‘what are your conclusions?’ Like: are you a republican; are you a democrat; are you a libertarian; are you a socialist? And the more I think about it, this strikes me as extremely odd.
Why should the battle lines be drawn in terms of conclusions? Another way of drawing the battle lines would be, say, in terms of how people think. So if I take someone like Matt [Yglesias?], who’s one of the commenters—I read Matt’s blog all the time. Matt, I think, would agree that he and I disagree on a lot of issues. Not on everything, but we disagree a lot. We disagree every day. We sort of write back and forth to each other and to others, and even if we don’t call each other by name, we’re, like, disagreeing in public every day.
But at the same time when I read Matt I have this feeling like ‘if I were a progressive, this is the argument I would make’. I feel that way when I read Matt. There’s other writers, like when I read Paul Krugman, I don’t feel that way. I don’t think if I were progressive I would argue like Paul Krugman.
So this method of thinking in common, there’s this question, should I be emotionally, intellectually, whatever, more allied to people with whom I share conclusions, or with whom I share a certain method of thinking? And when I disagree with Matt, which is frequently, I feel like I can always figure out very quickly where we disagree. There’s something about the framework we have in common. And that, to me, seems like a powerful commonality. So in general I’m interested in getting people to explore, or re-explore, what are our true commonalities with other people?
-- Tyler Cowen from a talk on on neurodiversity
Well, since that whole mind-killer business is already way over the horizon...
It can’t be uncommon for people on here to look at their elected representatives and think “that doesn’t seem like a very high bar to clear”. It may be that I’m missing something, but the one elected official I personally know is, to put it bluntly, an uncharismatic tool with no relevant background. I wouldn’t trust him as a stooge. Even if it was the safest seat in the country, it’s bewildering to me that no-one else is there in his place.
Why don’t more people like us (for some conception of “us” that may or may not be coherent) stand for public office? Here are some hypotheses:
They do, and I’m misinformed
STEM backgrounds are anti-correlated with public office because:
they have higher earning potential in the private sector
they systematically lack relevant skills, or the ability to recognise these skills
they are systematically located in large centres of industry, which attract more dedicated and competent competition in political spheres
They’re too cynical to be politically active
There is a secret undercurrent of heavily politically-active people on Less Wrong who don’t discuss it because of prevailing mind-killer social norms
Other suggestions (or counter-assertions, or gentle mockery) welcome.
Better bra sizing.
It’s an idea I’ve been kicking around for a few days. The technical and marketing-based obstacles towards getting it to work have turned me off pursuing it, but I figured it was worth sharing.
I work with operational databases for a luxury fashion retailer, and bra sizing as it currently exists (back size + cup size) makes absolutely no sense. I will sometimes ask female friends to explain how the size given for a garment can possibly be of any use in determining comfort and fit. Their answer: it doesn’t.
Their actual answer tends to be a rant about inconsistency between product ranges and how contemporary bra sizing is next to useless. A couple have been both eloquent and insightful. A few times a year I’ll have an idea I get excited about turning into some sort of web-based service, and in spite of its silly-sounding nature, this one is easily the one that’s had the most philanthropic weight behind it.
The idea: a website containing a comprehensive list of commercially available bras. Users sign up, locate bras they own (or have tried on) and rate them along various measures of comfort/fit/support, etc. The service then locates clusters of users with similar preferences to them (exact method of analysis still up for debate, but a few likely candidates stand out), and suggests specific sizes and ranges that would meet their needs.
There are three sides to this. The first is users getting the service described above. The second is the option to license out the size/fit data to interested third parties, such as manufacturers and retailers, which would probably be the most sizeable revenue stream. The third is the possibility of using the data to produce a better sizing scheme that more accurately tackles the real-world problem.
I see two main problems with the idea. The first is encouraging user uptake (convincing women to spend time inputting details about their underwear into a website). The second, which is related, is giving them incentive to do so without the recommendation algorithm in place. I have no idea if k-NN or spectral partitioning or probabilistic classifiers or regression analysis will be any good at all in carving up the data appropriately, and I won’t know until I get a sizeable set of data to develop against. There’d need to be an existing service provision for the users to encourage them to sign up and provide the data before the interesting work even begins. An existing comprehensive list of commercially available bras complete with a flat non-super-stats-enhanced rating system might be enough to get the ball rolling.
I should reiterate that I’m unlikely to pursue this idea. While I have a background in web dev, data analysis and technical fashion retail, I’m far from an expert in any of them. Still, if anyone wants to convince me otherwise, give me more reasons why it’s a bad idea, or steal it outright, please go ahead.
You’ll notice that he made sure no-one went in the room for several hours, during which he had his Time-Turner unlocked. He then went in there himself.
A word from a cranky tech professional: unless you are personally capable of making a change to a system, make no assumptions as to how easy or hard it is to implement.
My previous job consisted of a lot of disaster contingency planning. Every three months I’d write a document that would be needed in the event of the deaths of me and a significant number of my work colleagues, only for it to be destroyed three months later and replaced with another one.
None of those documents were ever opened while I was at that company, (or else this is an incredibly spooky comment), but none of them were wasteful either. The knowledge that they wouldn’t be needed was only available in retrospect, and the potential cost of losing the core technical staff was enormous.
As we discovered on the London Google Group, I can talk at length about common pitfalls of group living, but a lot of that is based on experience rather than any kind of good theoretical understanding. Here are a few broad observations that stand out.
Coordination starts getting hard when you have more than three people in a household. Up until that point, it’s relatively plain sailing unless you have wildly different expectations.
Arguments (especially ongoing ones) generally happen because of a disparity between what people agreed to and what people think is fair. Having all “official” household agreements written down somewhere with a set renegotiation date can help to offset this.
Most disputes between otherwise-civilised people sharing living space are about cleanliness. Hiring a cleaner can eliminate a lot of resentment.
Having a regular forum to discuss the household and air grievances-in-waiting works surprisingly well. Agreeing, for example, to convene on the first Monday of every month to talk about things that need doing, repairs, issues, expenses, upcoming visitors, etc.
Organise money and payments to involve as few transactions as possible. How this is best accomplished will depend on the setup in question, but dividing up expenses between multiple parties can be a highly counterintuitive process. With multiple people paying multiple bills, you can wind up with accidental change-raising scenarios. You never want to be in the position of not knowing who any given debt or credit belongs to.
I think a running theme with these is that people often believe bonds of friendship are sufficient motivators to get everyone to cooperate well in a household. In reality, there are legitimate coordination and cooperation problems that upscale poorly, and instigating formal mechanisms for things can take the pressure off the social bonds. Some of my best domestic relationships were under mercenary convenience arrangements with relative strangers. When you don’t have to worry about showing how great a friend you are, it’s much easier to get along.
I’ve made a moderately bold decision that I haven’t started to regret yet: I’m going to read an undergrad textbook on every subject I claim to be interested in. My main hope for this is mapping out my own ignorance. It’s extremely annoying when armchair-experts talk erroneously about subjects from a position of imaginary authority, and I don’t wish to be one of those people. It should produce a useful line of demarcation: if I haven’t read an undergrad textbook in a subject, I’m definitely unqualified to say what that subject does and does not contain.
If nothing else, it will at least teach me what I’m genuinely interested in, and what I only claim to be interested in.
(Also, yes, I’ve seen Luke’s best-textbooks-on-every-subject post from two years ago.)
There’s a type of advice I’ve observed which I’m having trouble categorising into the above: advice which is valuable, but which has a prerequisite level of competence or understanding before you can use it.
I’ve been swing dancing for about four and a half years, and I’ve taken a lot of classes and workshops in it. There are several common pieces of advice that get thrown around by teachers: “keep your feet under you”, “dance into the floor”, “engage your core”… they’re generally referring to how something feels when you’re doing it, which has a reasonable margin for subjectivity, so some people will hear advice like that and think “oh, yeah, that makes sense”, while others will hear it and think “well where else would my feet be? Over me?”
Good instructors find a way to give you the bodily experience without giving you misinterpretable verbal advice. “Engage your core” can mean different things to different people. There’s a reasonable amount of crossover between the swing dance community and the circus skills community, and when an aerial acrobat hears “engage your core”, they tense up like they’re about to be thrown, which is not what’s meant in the dance context. But if someone says “imagine you’ve got a sword stuck point-first in your navel, and you have to keep that sword horizontal”, that’s quite a specific piece of advice which directly addresses what is meant.
Sometimes you’re just not ready for a piece of advice. Earlier this year at a weekend-long event, a well-respected and reputable instructor said something in a workshop. I can’t remember his exact wording, but in my notes for the class I wrote “the tension and compression you feel in your hands is a consequence of your bodies moving, not a cause”. I thought about this over the rest of the weekend and it completely blew my mind and made me revise huge chunks of how I thought the dance mechanically worked. If I’d heard it two years ago, my response to it would probably have been a lot less productive.
Sometimes you’ll be working on something, and you’ll notice a physical experience you’d previously not paid attention to, and a piece of advice you heard in a class months or even years ago will suddenly make sense. This doesn’t necessarily just happen once with any given piece of advice. The simple and seemingly-obvious imperative of “dance to the music” is one that you can get a lot of repeated use out of at different levels of experience. When you’re starting out, it means “just move in time to the music, OK?” A little later on, it means “fit the phrasing of your movements to the structure of the music”. A little later still, it means “take inspiration from the features of the music. If the clarinet does something twiddly, maybe you can do something twiddly to complement it in your movements.” At the moment, for me, it means something quite ridiculously art-wanky that I’d be mildly embarrassed about sharing, but in another six months I’ll probably peel away another layer of “dance to the music”, and it’ll give me a whole extra take on the words.
I seem to have taken this opportunity to talk at length about swing dancing, (a perennial hazard), but this general idea of advice which sits on prerequisite knowledge or experience is one I see elsewhere. Less-Wrong-flavoured advice like “your strength as a rationalist is to be more confused by fiction than by reality” feels a lot like “keep your feet under you”. “Go meta”, much like “dance to the music”, has different levels of subtletly and meaning. Less Wrong buzzword expressions sometimes feel like thing people are throwing around because they’re available to do so, but when someone uses one to get to an important central point of an issue, when they nail it, it’s genuinely illuminatory.
My only major issue with it is that posts on the main or discussion page no longer show the number of comments they’ve received, or even that they’ve received new comments. Being able to tell this at a glance was an extremely useful ability.
Upgrading barely-satisfactory household goods to better versions. Many such goods are bequeathed or obtained when the user can’t afford better, and never replaced once they’re in a position to do so.
Example #1: laundry apparatus. When I was younger and poorer I bought the cheapest laundry basket and airer I could get. They weren’t very good, but I laboured with them for over a decade because they were satisfactory. A replacement set in my 30s cost me less than I would even notice spending, and vastly improved my laundry workflow and throughput.
Example #2: kitchen knives. It’s alarming to me how many people think a bread knife and one other miscellaneous sharp knife constitutes a fully-equipped kitchen. If you spend any appreciable amount of time preparing food, and you only own one straight-edged kitchen knife you don’t know the name of, you’re almost certainly making life harder for yourself. Buy an inexpensive 5-piece block set and experiment with each type of knife on different foodstuffs.
Recently I have been thinking about imaginary expertise. It seems remarkably easy for human brains to conflate “I know more about this subject than most people” with “I know a lot about this subject”. LessWrongers read widely over many areas, and as a result I think we are more vulnerable to doing this.
It’s easy for a legitimate expert to spot imaginary expertise in action, but do principles exist to identify it, both in ourselves and others, if we ourselves aren’t experts? Here are a few candidates for spotting imaginary expertise. I invite you to suggest your own.
Rules and Tips vs Principles
At some point, a complex idea from [topic] was distilled down into a simple piece of advice for neonates. One of those neonates took it as gospel, and told all their friends how this advice formed the fundamental basis of [topic]. Examples include “if someone touches their nose, they’re lying” and “never end a sentence with a preposition”.If someone offers a rule like this, but can’t articulate a principled basis for why it exists, I tend to assume they’re an imaginary expert on the subject. If I can’t offer a principled basis for any such rule I provide myself, I should probably go away and do some research.
Grandstanding over esoteric terminology
I’ve noticed that, when addressing a lay audience, experts in fields I’m familiar with rarely invoke esoteric terminology unless they have to. Imaginary experts, on the other hand, seem to throw around the most obscure terminology they know, often outside of a context where it makes sense.I suspect being on the receiving end of this feels like Getting Eulered, and dishing it out feels like “I’m going to say something that makes you feel stupid”.
Heterodoxy
I have observed that imaginary experts often buy into the crackpot narrative to some extent, whereby established experts in the field are all wrong, or misguided, or slaves to an intellectually-bankrupt paradigm. This conveniently insulates the imaginary expert from criticism over not having read important orthodox material on the subject: why should they waste their time reading such worthless material?In others, this probably rings crackpot-bells. In oneself, this is presumably much more difficult to notice, and falls into the wider problem of figuring out which fields of inquiry have value. If we have strong views on an established field of study we’ve never directly engaged in, we should probably subject those views to scrutiny.
- 8 Dec 2014 1:25 UTC; 12 points) 's comment on Open thread, Dec. 8 - Dec. 15, 2014 by (
- 9 Feb 2015 23:19 UTC; 7 points) 's comment on Bragging Thread February 2015 by (
A few months ago I started using the Ultimate Geography Anki deck after performing quite abysmally on some silly geography quiz that was doing the rounds on Facebook. I now know where all the damn countries are, like an informed citizen of the world. This has proven itself very useful in a variety of ways, not least of which is in reading other material with a geographical backdrop. For example, the chapter in Guns, Germs and Steel on Africa is much more readable if you know where all the African countries are in relation to one another.
(In the process of doing this, coupled with an international event in Sweden, I’ve learned that the Scandinavian education systems are much, much better than that of the UK at teaching children about the rest of the world)
The geography deck was particularly easy to slip into because it developed an area I already (weakly) knew about. I’m looking for some new Anki content of a similar nature: a cross-domain-application body of knowledge I probably sort-of know a little bit already, that I can comprehensively improve upon.
Suggestions and anecdotes of similar experiences welcome.
- 22 Sep 2014 11:19 UTC; 10 points) 's comment on Open thread, September 22-28, 2014 by (
- 24 Sep 2014 23:45 UTC; 2 points) 's comment on Open thread, September 22-28, 2014 by (
Done. The basilisk question was really interesting.
Welp, gotta go and destroy all humans now...