stcredzero

Karma: 595

stcredzero 21 Apr 2009 17:09 UTC
3 points
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism
From what have just said, I surmise that 4chan is a actually a well-tended garden. I could well be a well-tended, thoughtfully organized, subtly organized anarchy garden.

stcredzero 21 Apr 2009 17:30 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Pierre-Andre’s comment on: Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism
I think the “mediocre” vote is really a vote on a post being noise. Instead of just “karma,” one could have four numbers: signal, noise, agree, disagree. You can only vote these numbers up, and you can only vote up one of the 4.

A post would then have two scores: a “signal to noise ratio” and a “agree/disagree” score, which would be a the agrees minus the disagrees. (And actually, the signal to noise ratio would not necessarily be treated as a ratio. Both signal and noise numbers will probably be displayed.)

A vote on agree/disagree would be treated as an implicit upvote on “signal” by the post visibility algorithm.

This would make the karma system harder to game. You can vote “noise” to try and censor a post you disagree with, but then you can’t also disagree with it.

stcredzero 21 Apr 2009 17:47 UTC
0 points
in reply to: MorgannaLeFey’s comment on: Spreading the word?
I suspect the purpose of this site to to attain a high S/N ratio. If you try to introduce rationality to other sites, what you inject there is generally diluted. So to attain a high S/N ratio, you need a site devoted to that purpose.

stcredzero 21 Apr 2009 19:26 UTC
8 points
in reply to: MrHen’s comment on: Evangelical Rationality
There is already a very powerful “non-geeky path to rationality.” It is a strong hook to curiosity and innate emotion.

It’s commonly known as “Follow the Money!”

Investigate the economics of just about anything, and one can figure out the underlying motivations. Also, people’s inherent sense of fairness will often get them incensed about any irrationality involved.

stcredzero 23 Apr 2009 19:45 UTC
6 points
on: Fix it and tell us what you did
″...rationalist-porn for daydreamers...”—exactly what is wrong with this?

For that matter, what would be wrong with ”...rationalist-porn...” or even just ”...porn...”? (Well, to be serious, I would understand objections to LW becoming that.)

Books of military jet-aircraft filled with pictures and stats are compendiums of factual material and are perfectly valid reference materials. That they are also used as “aerospace porn” by a certain fandom are only objectionable insofar as this interferes with their function. (Perhaps by greedy publishers pushing to include so many pictures that content suffers.)

Does my analogy apply to LW?

stcredzero 23 Apr 2009 19:58 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Vladimir_Nesov’s comment on: This Didn’t Have To Happen
I find that my absurdity heuristic gives a strong signal against. Also, we can’t be certain that it will work and we can’t be certain how well it will work. This makes it very hard for me to evaluate as an investment. If I can’t quantify the payoff or the odds, how can I justify the expense?

stcredzero 23 Apr 2009 20:09 UTC
0 points
in reply to: thomblake’s comment on: This Didn’t Have To Happen
It seems almost designed to degenerate into a flame-war concerning cryonics!

stcredzero 23 Apr 2009 20:16 UTC
2 points
in reply to: JulianMorrison’s comment on: Fix it and tell us what you did
How are the two much different? I find that I sometimes regret the countless hours that I’ve devoted to stimulating myself with porn instead of becoming a better musician. Yet I’ve spent far less mental energy regretting my daydreaming, which is about as big a time-sink. I like daydreaming. I don’t regret any of my daydreaming concerning sci-fi topics. And why is it that I don’t think I’ll ever regret all of the time I’ve “wasted” playing music?

stcredzero 24 Apr 2009 17:54 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Alicorn’s comment on: This Didn’t Have To Happen
Economics are key here. What do people have to gain from taking certain actions on you/against you?

Also note that notions of “benevolence” have varied throughout the ages—and it has not been a monotonically increasing function!

There are times and places in this world when a lone drifter would have been—by default—“benevolently” enslaved by the authorities, but where this default action would change to “put to death” several decades later.

How well one is treated always depends on the economic and political power of the group you are associated with. Do our notions of lawful ownership match those of ancient civilizations? They do match in broad outlines, but in terms of specific artifacts, our notions diverge dramatically. If we somehow managed to clone Tutankhamen and recover his mind from the ether and re-implant it, what are the chances he’s going to get all of his stuff back?

stcredzero 25 Apr 2009 4:46 UTC
4 points
in reply to: MrShaggy’s comment on: Rational Groups Kick Ass
From the OP: “Whereas a rational individual is still limited by her individual intelligence, creativity, and charisma, a rational group can promote the single best idea, leader, or method out of hundreds or thousands or millions.”

GIGO. At any given time, the rational group will be limited by their consensus beliefs and mental models. (Indicator of group quality—do their mental models improve over time?) Rationality is just a tool for uncovering truth. I’ve often found that I’ll go to work on a hard problem using rigorous intellectual tools (Mathematics, on which rationality is based) but then I’ll be flummoxed and have to set it aside. Then the answer will pop into my head the next morning as I’m eating breakfast, at which point I’ll use math to validate the intuition I’ve just had.

Sometimes we need to stumble on the truth by accident or other non-rational means. Can rationality help us if we don’t even know the right questions to ask in the first place? I think it’s a powerful tool, not a panacea.

We may well benefit from rationality, but that doesn’t mean all of the answers we seek will come sliding down the chute when we turn the crank on the machine. However, I will say that it is a fantastic filter for revealing which are the wrong answers.

Toyota is an example of a company that utilizes rationality for a competitive edge. Whenever they have an assembly line problem, they go through the “Five Whys” exercise. Ask “why” iteratively five times. Why five? It’s a manageable number, usually enough to get at the real underlying issue, and you have to set some fairly low limit, otherwise employees doing the exercise will keep quitting their jobs and go off to live in the woods to live as philosopher ascetics.

stcredzero 25 Apr 2009 5:01 UTC
−2 points
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: What’s in a name? That which we call a rationalist…
“Nothing made of quarks can be Bayesian.”

This could be the premise for a wicked good hard sci-fi whodunnit!

(The mystery would be revealed by deducing that the murderer would have to have been a perfect Bayesian, thus revealing the one suspect who is not made up of quarks to be guilty.)

Explain?

stcredzero 25 Apr 2009 17:21 UTC
9 points
on: Cached Procrastination
My solution—take breaks only as 15 minute “naps” where I rest and do nothing. I’ll just go and lie down and do nothing. This either refreshes me enough that I can work, or it increases my guilt enough that I can’t help but start working.

stcredzero 30 Apr 2009 12:13 UTC
16 points
in reply to: cousin_it’s comment on: Generalizing From One Example
My experience in my non-academic work life, is that many programmers can’t visualize verbal descriptions of subsystems, but they learn how to make convincing “I got it” noises to mollify their coworkers. It’s not just programmers, it’s all sorts of coworkers. I have no idea how an adult can avoid this pitfall.

stcredzero 30 Apr 2009 12:20 UTC
15 points
in reply to: CronoDAS’s comment on: Generalizing From One Example
There’s a lot of great music that’s gotten into videogames. Anything that people can listen to for hours on end and not get sick of must have some merit.

(Anyhow, the only true measure of taste is what people like years hence. And even supposedly great musicians can be unreliable predictors.)

I think a lack of aural imagination explains a lot of mediocre musicians who are beginners, and who stay beginners, in traditional music. They are only trying to waggle their fingers in the right magical sequence to get the tune to somewhat come out. They’re not hearing the tune in their head and letting it come out.

stcredzero 5 May 2009 17:43 UTC
5 points
in reply to: MrHen’s comment on: Special Status Needs Special Support

I can see a somewhat convincing argument that all religions are fandoms but not one for all fandoms being religions.

That reminds me of this guy’s analysis of the “Objects of Fandom.” (Namely, there has to be something quite good about it, and at the same time, something quite bad.) This applies to just about all religions in spades.

http://plover.net/~bonds/objects.html

stcredzero 7 May 2009 15:10 UTC
28 points
in reply to: MichaelVassar’s comment on: Beware Trivial Inconveniences
Also, penning in sheep is a lot easier than penning in wolves.

In fact, this reminds me of the magnetic traps (Penning traps?) that are used to cool a couple of hundred atoms down to near-absolute zero. There is a potential barrier that keeps most of the atoms inside. Occasionally, one atom is jostled enough to gain enough energy to escape. This has the effect of carrying energy away from the group, cooling it as a whole.

I think the analogy is compelling. An activism that works off of a discontented fringe only serves to strengthen the current regime. To get real change, one needs to energize the populace as a whole, and often the only forces capable of such widespread influence have economic and deep cultural foundations. Both Gandhi and MLK knew this.

I think the Chinese government also knows this, but I am not sure they can exploit this in the long term.

stcredzero 8 May 2009 16:50 UTC
2 points
on: Epistemic vs. Instrumental Rationality: Case of the Leaky Agent
Perhaps this explains why people so often have distorted self-perceptions. For example, in the dating game, an inflated self perception amounts to a higher ‘minimum.’ Perhaps most distorted self-perceptions have evolutionary origins that are based on this mechanism?

stcredzero 18 May 2009 15:17 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Jack’s comment on: Wanting to Want
In any case, I think Occam’s Razor demands that we reject the notion of generalized second-order desires. We can leave that concept out entirely and explain everything as conflicts between first order desires and a generalized desire for consistency and/or resolution. Note that in all the examples, there are conflicting goals. In (1) it’s the desire to stay awake vs. avoiding noxious stimuli. In (2) it’s the desire to stay alive vs. cop another high. In (3) it’s the desire to live up to his upbringing vs. follow his sexual urges.

I’m not even sure that a generalized desire for consistency and/or resolution would be a second-order desire. I think that the feeling of conflict over not being able to decide which speaker to buy is a lot like resolving conflicts between incompatible desires. The only difference is that choosing to buy a speaker is usually morally neutral, but there is societal pressure to choose one option as the “right” one in 2 and 3, and an imperative to preserve one’s life in 1 and 2, so we are steered towards a particular outcome. It may well be only a trick of language that prompts us to say “I want to want X.” I suspect that we could also say, “I want X and I want Y. I cannot have both, and I know I’m supposed to want X. I wish I wasn’t conflicted.” But that is much longer than, “I want to want X.”

stcredzero 18 May 2009 16:17 UTC
0 points
in reply to: pjeby’s comment on: Wanting to Want
Asymmetry between 2nd order and 1st order desires can be explained easily if 2nd order desires didn’t really exist, or if only one specific 2nd order desire existed, namely a desire for resolution. “I want to want X” then just becomes some person’s rationalization about their conflicted situation. I find this idea attractive, because a desire for resolution seems a natural thing for a conscious being to have.

stcredzero 18 May 2009 16:23 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Alicorn’s comment on: Wanting to Want
In case it hasn’t been mentioned, many stores that sell Mountain Dew also stock NoDoz tablets, which you can develop a technique for swallowing whole with water.

I was actually in the position of wanting to develop a tolerance for spicy foods when I was young. I would go to the pantry and treat myself by dosing myself with Tabasco sauce. But I don’t think of that as my “wanting to want KimChee.” I wanted to eat KimChee like my parents and I took steps to achieve that goal.

I don’t think there’s any need for meta-desires at all, except for one: a drive to resolve conflicting desires. And this is arguably also a 1st order desire. There are obvious reasons why we’d evolve such a drive. We can explain away things like wanting to want internal conflict as merely a desire to be someone like Timothy Levitch from “Waking Life.” It also makes sense that one can formulate paradoxical desires that are strongly resistant to resolution, or rationalize to oneself that they are conundrums. But I posit that these are merely ill-formed desires—that if you can’t reduce everything down to conflicting 1st-order desires, you haven’t delved deeply enough.

http://dannyman.toldme.com/2003/11/19/timothy-levitch-waking-life/