I Took the survey and all the extra questions. I could not answer the USA centric school test results, we have a similar system in my country but they cannot be easily converted to eachother.
I’m glad to finally have a BigFive and IQ test that people somewhat agree on using.
I think this is a discussion about what the best order is in which debiasing should occur.
Project management seems to be an implementation of debiasing strategies and they first teach you to make more accurate predictions and then later teach you how to prevent the sunk cost fallacy from not cancelling a failing project.
Because of this i think debiasing should occur in a kind of logical order, one that prevents someone from cancelling all projects due to a good grasp of sunk cost and a bad grasp of utility calculations.
At first i had the same feelings about the article you did.
But then i remembered what my life-coach taught me: “All behaviours start out as “gimmicks”, after some time of training they go from gimmick to part of your natural behaviour and lose their gimmickness”
This was the best lesson i ever learned as refusing to use gimmicks has put me at a serious disadvantage to those people whole naturally learned about the gimmick when they where little children.
Like luke, using gimmicks has been the best thing to happen for my work and private life. (also people who know that im gimmicking appreciate the effort i put into bettering our relationships and actively help me)
I get the feeling a large portion of this story can be classified as learned helplessness.
Several studies(google for cal newport) have shown that base talent has little effect on how good you can be at something, the real variable is deliberate practice, pushing the limits of what you can handle a tiny bit to slowly keep improving. ( obviously your swimming example does have harder limits imposed by the limits of your body, this does not seem to apply to fields outside of sports though and in sports like boxing there are different classes because of the differences in bodies)
When I learned about grade signalling I started making mistakes on purpose to lower my average (which was around 9.5 at the time). That was a terrible tactic in hindsight and it still causes selfdoubt on exams today.
The most important thing i learned from less wrong is “Cause and Effect”.
Since i filled out the poll i would like to say something.
What i think the poll did not take into account is that procrastination seems to be caused by conflicting beliefs. I can completely cure myself from procrastination on one specific subject if i manage to find and correct all the conflicting beliefs. It also helps to allign them with a goal you have, this turns a once procastination inducing task to something you get OCD about doing whenever it pops up.
But thats also a downside, you have to learn the habits of tracking down the conflicting beliefs, and you are likely to procrastinate at learning these new habits (as do I). It’s also a bit depressing to realise you have so many conflicting beliefs,but that effect is outweighed by knowing you CAN fix them some day.
In my experience it can take anywhere from 1 to dozens of belief changes to fix chronic procrastination on a single task. I have noticed some bleeding out effect though, some of the other tasks i used to procrastinate on have become easier to do, but they clearly still have conflicting beliefs of their own.
My point is: Generally you need to attack each individual thing you procrastinate on one by one, so progress is VERY slow. But i would never have gotten to step one without lesswrong and particularly PJ Eby’s http://thinkingthingsdone.com/
Maybe about “how to format knowledge for easy learning” There is an optimal strategy to turning information into something that is easy to learn, but we seem to be limited to a couple of sites discussing it.
The recent Direct Instruction thread suggests there is more to it.
This post made me realize just how important it is to completely integrate the new things you learn.
I have been reading a lot of books and blogs on the subject of students that finish school with honors, but don’t seem to work very hard while doing so. I also met one of those people in person (he finished an entire 4 year curriculum with honors in just 3 months and is now a professor of that content)
It all boils to the same thing: Whatever the textbook is trying to tell you, make sure you integrate that in your life. Only then will you see if you really understood what it was saying and if you are missing any extra information, or if the information in the book is wrong. Once integrated you do not need any extra studying to get an A/10 for the exam.(because you will have recursively updated all your beliefs to include the thing you where supposed to learn)
Some of these books and blogs go into detail on how to how to do this. One of the methods i read was making a doodle of the idea in your notebook. This doodle borrows heavily from your current state of knowledge. An example of what I did: To model the process of taking a raw resource and making it into a profitable end product i drew a mine with rocks coming out, then a table with a chisel on the rock and finally a diamond with a price-tag. I know how diamonds are made so i could use that to represent this process.
There are many more methods, another that i have not yet tried to use is basically making a flashcard.: Question/Evidence/Conclusion http://calnewport.com/blog/2009/04/06/4-weeks-to-a-40-streamline-your-notes/
EDIT: I’m having a hard time explaining what i am trying to say, i will post a new comment or top level post if i manage to figure it out. Basically I’m trying to say that there already well working and documented methods for connecting and updating beliefs in the world of outlier student research.
I think it’s a chicken and egg problem. What luke writes on that page really does work, the page suggests building a set of skills and behaviors. But how does one overcome the akrasia about actually doing what the page suggests? I don’t think we have an answer for that.
I work in the customer support field and this is definately the case, you only ever hear the negatives.
Would you consider turning this knowledge into an actual curriculum that includes practice problems and exams?
I’m thinking of something in the lines of MIT’s free curriculum and Khan Academy’s Math section. I have no problem with still linking to these text books as long as the freely available curriculum made by you or your team fills the gaps and there are plenty of ways to test understanding. I name khan’s math section specifically because it uses that infinite practice problems and 10 in a row signals proficiency and has built in SRS.
Unlike khan however i would want to see mastery of whatever is the current status of the field instead of the low target of a certain school’s exam requirements.
This post made me think about this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FpigqfcvlM
In the video the annoyed person who made it explains how games teach the game mechanics intuitively as opposed to not at all or through a spoken or text tutorial.
I think it would be good if you watched this video and applied the lessons it gives to the game as a whole.
I had this idea that these articles and sequences would help me at winning in life while simultaneously pave the way for a better world and friendly AI. Now seeing these short summaries i am no longer so sure they will help me win.
Ok so i thought about it hard.
Here’s what i think the problem is: I think people who finished school and have diploma’s are chumps who fell for paper-to-prove skills game in a system that is easily gamable and as a result doesn’t actually show anything about your skill.
I guess i’ve made it a point to prove that you don’t need school to get shit done (i have the biggest house, earn the most, best car, etc.. of all my friends and family, it seems i DO care about showing off?)
What i’ve been stumped on for years though, is how to respect being a graduate.
I would like to have this as an interactive application. It’s not always so easy to get into a teacher student situation.
There are applications out there for developing this curriculum in a better way than the regular approach. Like the app these guys are selling http://www.knowledge-values.com/ I use apps like this on a daily basis to create the training content at work.
I don’t need a whole game or anything, something as simple as the math exercises on khan academy will do the trick. And i would prefer each skill told as separately and atomically as possible/logically.
In my limited experience with children i have found that children will only do this when they are being ignored. I have only experienced it once myself and you quickly see the child is teasing you by their eyes and uneasy movement. The benchmark I use is repeating the same question again at a later time, that means they either did not understand or are teasing.
Did i understand correctly that you want us both to review your text and add specific examples that we can think of?
I will do both.
On the text:
I liked it very much, but I don’t think the text works very well for people who do not see rationality as a virtue.
Some problems i see when i try to put on the glasses of my anti-rationality friends:
The use of many in-crowd words and assumed meanings: hypothesis, fallacy, cognitive (non-rationality fan people do not use these words in daily life); What could be done is provide links to your definition. I believe we should keep definitions for these words on the lesswrong wiki because not all dictionaries agree on what all of them mean exactly, or what we mean by them.
I know many people who will deny any claim that they are in some way faulty or that emotions are a bad thing, unfortunately i do not know of a good way to get around this.
I get the feeling that the whole body of text is somewhat on the negative side: “Rationality will protect you from the cold harsh world” is the feeling i get.
On personal experience with applied rationality:
Example1:
I learned on lesswrong how an hypothesis should be used and how to use experimentation to collect evidence for or against it.
Using the scientific method i formed the hypothesis that something in my food was making me have to go to the bathroom all day long (for the past 15 years). So i started keeping a food diary where i noted what i ate at what time and at what time i had to visit the bathroom and if the visit was normal or not.
Eventually a pattern began to form and after about a month of taking notes it became clear that Chili pepper seemed to be the causation, but at this point it could merely be a correlation. (i had once blamed corn, the doctors did not agree but i could clearly see the causation with my irrational eyes, as it turns out i never eat corn without chili pepper, so it was only a correlation)
So i formed a new hypothesis: When I eat chilly i will get into trouble and then ran tests on that. So I removed chilly from my diet completely. (and the problems all went away), then to test i ate a big bowl of hot chili pepper soup, and in no time i was running to the bathroom again.
Example2:
(This one is about school an learning, i will be talking about a level of school similar to highschool. We use a grading system of 1(worst) to 10(best). The type of class i was in is what in the states would be considered a special school/class for gifted children)
When i got to “High School” i quickly found myself being teased about my learning abilities. With the notable exceptions of Excercise/Gym and Handwriting i was a straight 10 student, always had been. (I’m that guy that corrects mistakes in the schoolbook and the teachers explanation)
Although i pretended the teasing didn’t hurt me, i only recently (with the rationality lessons of lesswrong) started to realise that they did hurt.
What happened was that i started to dislike school, getting 10′s made me unpopular so something inside me snapped and i started dumbing down to be more “cool”
I still had 8′s for everything and the teasing stopped.
But then something worse happened. In the 3rd grade of High School they changed the teachers for Math and we got a new one. This teacher was not a teacher. Instead it was a math genius that knew how to get the results/proofs but had no idea why.
I had always relied on learning a concept through the way of asking why, mapping it to my existing knowledge and then integrating it. but this teacher expected me to “guess the teachers password” and learn math like a copyprinter.
I couldn’t do it, quickly i went from an 11 average (i never dumbed down on math) to 2-3 average, not long after i quit school completely and started working for minimum wage.
From that moment on i believed i was unable to learn, the experience shocked me and scared me. I have been unable to study anything since.
Through the lesswrong sequences and advice from regulars on lesswrong i have managed to pinpoint my learned helplessness cause and overcome it. I have learned more than i have in the past 10 years since coming to lesswrong.
Some smaller examples:
I have done a google scholar, and google regular research to figure out what the best oral health strategy is according to the “better” studies (on average they all suck though)
I have picked up my university study that i have been procrastinating on for 5 years and am seeing good progress and most importantly, retention.
I have earned an excellent rating at work for self improvement in communication.
I have earned an excellent rating at work for using my rationality skills to massively improve the quality of questions asked at work. Before we would accept any claim, now we only accept questions that have empirical evidence of adding value.(this went from 60% effectiveness to 94%)
both pages look really spammy, how can i be more sure that i’m not looking at survivor biased individuals, or worse quacks selling snakeoil.
I’m very interested in the physical abilities part but almost everything seems to be bullshit.
I’m disapointed with the new graphic behind the lesswrong logo.
I always used the territory vs the map graphic to explain to people what lesswrong is about.