tadrinth

• tadrinth 4 Apr 2012 2:08 UTC

  27 points

  on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 13, chap­ter 81

  I’m not sure if anyone has commented on this, but I just noticed it while rereading the Self-Actualization chapters:

  Hermione went to tremendous lengths to be her own person rather than just something of Harry’s, including becoming a general and fighting bullies. Now she has sworn herself into Harry’s service and house forever. That is really sad.

• tadrinth 17 Sep 2014 3:38 UTC

  19 points

  in reply to: ITakeBets’s comment on: Open thread, Septem­ber 15-21, 2014

  Is Austin on the list? I work at a not-evil tech startup called SchoolAdmin that does school admissions software for a mix of public/​private/​charter schools. We’re not hiring devs right now, but that might possibly change since we have a product manager coming in October. The company is REALLY not evil; we’ve had three different people come down with mental or physical health issues, and the president’s mantra has been ‘your job is to get better’ in every case.

  I could possibly also offer a place to crash, I’ve got a futon, a study it could be moved to, and already have cats.

[Recom­men­da­tion] Steven Uni­verse & cryonics

• tadrinth 28 Jan 2019 17:43 UTC

  11 points

  0

  on: Build­ing up to an In­ter­nal Fam­ily Sys­tems model

  I’ve been attempting to use IFS for years without having read much more than brief summaries of it. This post put me on a much firmer footing with it and I was able to much more clearly categorize a bunch of things that have been happening over the past six months or so. Then over the weekend I had a low-level background internal screaming going on, and while my first couple rounds of attempts at resolving it only helped a little, I was finally able to isolate the issue and fix what turned out to be a massive misalignment. I have not felt this aligned in years.

  So thank you very, very much for writing this.

• tadrinth 27 Feb 2012 14:39 UTC

  11 points

  on: Grad School?

  Having a graduate degree somehow makes my resume look less attractive than just having an undergrad.

  In many cases you have to pay PhDs more. If you can find someone who can do the work who doesn’t have a PhD, you save money by hiring them. In many fields, there is much more need for people to do Masters level work than to do PhD level work, so there are more jobs available at the Masters level.

  grad or professional schooling can be more time/​effort/​work than it’s worth.

  A PhD in biology in the program I mastered out of involves working anywhere from 50-80 hours a week, takes 5-6 years, and typically pays around $30k a year at best. If you could have instead made $50k at a real job, graduate school has an opportunity cost of $100-120k.

  Graduate school is bad for you. Most of my friends are in graduate school and they are noticeably less happy and more crazy than they would be otherwise; one friend is going gray at 27 from stress. I was chronically depressed almost the entire time I was in graduate school, and it only went away when I graduated.

  One of my fellow teaching assistants last semester was a first year graduate student, taking two graduate level core curriculum classes, trying to start up his research, and also trying to be a teaching assistant for biostatistics when he had never taken any statistics. Both of my fellow teaching assistants this semester are just getting Masters, but they’re both taking two classes, TAing biostatistics, and trying to finish their Masters theses.

  Do undergraduate research first before making any decisions about graduate school. PhD programs are almost entirely research. You take some classes at the beginning, which weeds out the idiots, and then the entire rest of the program is research. If you don’t thoroughly enjoy research, you will hate graduate school.

  My standard advice is to not do a PhD unless you have to (because the career you want requires one).

• tadrinth 13 Mar 2012 4:07 UTC

  10 points

  in reply to: pedanterrific’s comment on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 10

  Just because every potion in the two textbooks Harry looked at involved magical ingredients doesn’t mean all potions require a magical ingredient. As I read it, Harry found the potion he used in a more obscure book suggested by Prof. McGonnagal or Flitwick, probably something like a wilderness survival guide. Converting acorns into a beacon would be pretty helpful for getting found by search parties.

• tadrinth 13 Jun 2022 22:08 UTC

  8 points

  in reply to: Razied’s comment on: On A List of Lethalities

  This would mean that a hypothetical AI “uniformly” gaining capability on all axes would beat us at math long before it beats us at deception.

  I’m pretty skeptical of this as an assumption.

  If you want an AI to output a useful design for an aligned AI, that design has to be secure, because an aligned-but-insecure AI is not stably aligned, it could be hacked. Ergo, your oracle AI must be using a security mindset at superhuman levels of intelligence. Otherwise the textbook you’ll get out will be beautiful, logical, coherent, and insecure. I don’t see how you could make an AI which has that level of security mindset and isn’t superhumanly capable of deception.

• tadrinth 24 Mar 2012 23:38 UTC

  8 points

  on: Me­mory in the microtubules

  This paper consists of some vague simulations, followed by wild speculation. I’m pretty sure it’s bunk (speaking as a computational/​cell biologist). It would be pretty easy to test, as well, as disrupting microtubules AT ALL would completely destroy memories if he is correct.

• tadrinth 16 Mar 2012 16:42 UTC

  8 points

  in reply to: gwern’s comment on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 10

  Harry comments at some point that “He’d noticed the correlation between the effort Professor Quirrell expended and the time he had to spend ‘resting’.” (74)

  Harry notices after Azkaban that Quirrell looks older (65).

  What I meant was that it seems like Quirrell has spent more and more of his time active using his body as little as possible. Maybe we’ve just seen it more because he’s hid less from Harry? In the most recent battle he talked and made the tiniest possible shrug but otherwise didn’t move at all. When he was grading papers he did it purely by magic as well. Whenever he can let his body sit around and not move, he seems to try to do that.

• tadrinth 13 Mar 2012 4:55 UTC

  8 points

  in reply to: Joshua Hobbes’s comment on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 10

  The terms of the challenge state that she can’t tell anyone about it before or after the duel or it goes to the Wizangamot. So, no, presumably she can’t tell Harry about it.

  Heck, she might have severely injured Draco by accident, rendered basic medical care, and then just left, because she can’t tell anyone. If someone found Draco unconscious and half-dead later, and they figured out Hermione did it and left him, that would look like attempted murder.

• tadrinth 26 Jun 2012 19:13 UTC

  7 points

  on: Group ra­tio­nal­ity di­ary, 6/​25/​12

  Switched to a standing desk at work. I have one at home and I mentioned the idea to my boss. He eventually found a post where the right $22 at IKEA lets you build a desk → standing desk converter. It’s basically an end table with a shelf screwed to the side; since you are making the screw holes yourself, the shelf is at whatever height is ideal for you. He decided to try it out also, along with a few other people, so we shall see how the grand experiment goes.

  It’s been a few hours and I have already discovered that standing for long periods in tennis shoes is not quite the same as standing barefoot. If I don’t adapt, I may need to buy new shoes.

Teach­ing Bayesian statis­tics? Look­ing for ad­vice.

• tadrinth 25 Mar 2012 5:56 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: Alicorn’s comment on: Teach­ing Bayesian statis­tics? Look­ing for ad­vice.

  Email sent!

  I think people would appreciate knowing that they might still have a shot even if they haven’t heard anything. You could maybe ask Eliezer to put a note that you’re still wading through applications in his next HPMOR author’s note. =P Otherwise, I think a mass email would not be too annoying to those who have already heard from you and very much appreciated by those who haven’t.

• tadrinth 25 Mar 2012 5:40 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: othercriteria’s comment on: Teach­ing Bayesian statis­tics? Look­ing for ad­vice.

  I do need to read up on those; Jaynes talks about the implications of Cox’s theorem but doesn’t go into it directly, so I’m only vaguely familiar. Thank you for the reading suggestions. I did plan to talk about those issues in the introduction of the course. Bolstad has an intro section justifying the Bayesian perspective, as well.

  I think I picked that particular set of justifications because educators in general don’t care about mathematical proofs, they care about what will be useful for the students to know how to do; in biology, the point of knowing statistics is to be able to read and write scientific papers, and the vast majority of papers are written using frequentist statistics. Proofs will not convince them; the fact that top professors are using Bayesian methods might.

  My expectation was that I would replace a mediocre frequentist statistics lecturer with an excellent bayesian statistics lecturer within the same class. The class that I TA is taught by multiple professors, and at least one of them teaches from a Bayesian perspective. Professors have ridiculous academic freedom; one professor covers only basic t-tests, while another professor covers everything from linear regressions to the KS test to chi-squared to two-way ANOVA, and it’s still the same course listing. So long as the students aren’t complaining about failing, the university does not care. The students can try to sign up for a different professor, and will do so if they hear another prof is easier, but they still have to take the class, so even harder professors still have full sections (especially if their version has a reputation for being very useful/​educational).

  So, assuming that I would be hired to teach statistics and could choose to teach either frequentist or Bayesian, I see very little point in teaching frequentist. I could also reach vastly more students lecturing than I could via tutoring, probably 80ish vs 10ish.

  I think the students that are interested in learning Bayesian stats should have the option available; I think there are probably a fair number of students who are smart, savvy, and motivated enough to sign up for a stronger stats course but aren’t quite good enough to teach it to themselves.

  I think I would almost rather not teach statistics than teach straight frequentist. I am really sick of teaching kids stuff that I know is suboptimal. I mean, I could do a good job of it, but raising the waterline isn’t worth being miserable.

• tadrinth 16 Mar 2012 6:15 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: shokwave’s comment on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 10

  What evidence is there that H&C isn’t just Quirrell wrapped in an illusion?

  There’s no need for Hermione to have cast the lethal hex. She wins the duel, then the real perpetrator stuns both of them, hexes Draco, and then memory charms Hermione into thinking she did it. However, if that’s the case, unless the perpetrator then used Hermione’s wand to cast the hex, checking what spells her wand had cast would reveal something fishy.

  Why are we proposing the H&C is not clever and powerful?

• tadrinth 12 Apr 2012 0:08 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: MarkusRamikin’s comment on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 15, chap­ter 84

  Wizarding society likes to let people figure out the dangerous secrets for themselves. You don’t tell people the dangerous secrets until they have proven themselves on the easier ones, you don’t tell people the secret of potion invention because they might get turned into cats, etc.

  Of course, Harry can violate that as he pleases if it is just a social convention, and Harry’s guesses at principles seem\ to hold up far better than it seems like it should.

• tadrinth 29 Mar 2012 20:36 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: wedrifid’s comment on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 13, chap­ter 81

  Ah, but Harry doesn’t intend to kill Dementors in particular, he aims to eradicate death itself (destroying them indirectly) and he is NOT confident that he will accomplish that in his lifetime. A Dementor that pisses off Harry dies immediately, while a Dementor that doesn’t will only die if Harry lives long enough to succeed.

• tadrinth 16 Mar 2012 6:30 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: 75th’s comment on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 10

  I’d like to point out that after Azkaban, when Quirrell tries to talk Harry into his next plot, Harry refuses by citing what Hermione and Draco would say. Quirrell sits there and thinks for a really long time, and asks if Harry really cares about what they think. My guess is that right then and there is when Quirrell decides to take them out.

• tadrinth 29 Sep 2017 18:44 UTC

  3 points

  on: Good­hart’s Imperius

  For the specific case of weighing yourself, could you create a scale that only gives the positive reward, not the negative one? Like, it only tells you your weight if it’s lower than yesterday, or better yet if the trend in your weight is downward over the past week? Maybe it displays a cheerful message and plays a soothing sound when you weigh yourself, and it emails you later at random if you’ve been losing weight.

• tadrinth 19 Aug 2013 18:42 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Larks’s comment on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 26, chap­ter 97

  He got Lucius to agree to proposed next steps which we don’t know about and secured an alliance with House Malfoy.

  Also, when he added the bit about exonerating House Malfoy, he showed Lucious one wording, then wrote down his original wording. He might have changed something important, and Lucius might not have noticed.