TheOtherDave

Karma: 22,506

TheOtherDave 23 Oct 2014 17:41 UTC
68 points
on: 2014 Less Wrong Census/Survey
Answered. WRT Type of Global Catastrophic Risk, I answered conditioned on greater than 90% of humanity being wiped out before 2100, which I assume is what you meant. If it wasn’t, well, I ruined everything, then.

TheOtherDave 18 Jan 2014 16:54 UTC
66 points
on: Tell Culture
Yeah, absolutely.

Having been raised in a Guess culture and subsequently indoctrinated into a strong Ask culture, I have in the decades since evolved a strong personal version of what you’re calling a Tell methodology here (what I personally think of as a high-context Ask culture).

I first noticed it explicitly in my twenties, upon hearing myself say to a departing guest “I invite you to think about how many times, in your culture, someone has to invite you to take leftovers home before you’re allowed to accept, and then behave as though I’d invited you that many times.” Which caused the entire room to burst into good-natured mockery, but many of them took leftovers.

My experience since has been mixed. It works well within communities where self-awareness is prized, and frequently elicits hostility elsewhere. Ask-culture people tend to appreciate it, Guess-culture people are frequently irritated or offended by my insistence on making explicit what is properly left obscured. (This makes sense to me… I, too, am irritated when people do publicly what I’ve been conditioned to treat as private.)

TheOtherDave 1 Dec 2010 18:50 UTC
64 points
on: Ask and Guess
I was raised in a strong Guess culture, then went to a tech university where Askers predominated, and it took me some years to come to terms with the fact that these are simply incompatible conversational styles and the most effective thing for me to do is understand which style my interlocutor is expecting and use that.

This, amusingly, often leads me to ask people whether they are using Ask rules or Guess rules. Except, of course, in situations where I intuit that asking them would be inappropriate, and I have to guess instead.

Bringing college friends home for dinner was the most wearing version of this. On one occasion I had to explicitly explain to a friend that, for her purposes, it was best to assume that the last piece of chicken was simply unavailable to be eaten, ever, by anyone. (There actually was a method for getting it, but it was an Advanced Guess Culture technique, not readily taught in one session.)

Incidentally, my own experience is that Ask and Guess are sometimes misleading labels for the styles they refer to (though they are conventional).

For example, “Ask” culture is often OK with “So, I’m assuming here that A, B, and C are true; based on that yadda yadda” with the implicit expectation is that someone will correct me if I’m wrong. In “Guess” culture this sort of thing carries the equally implicit expectation that nobody will correct me. Here both groups are guessing, but they guess differently.

“Guess” culture also has an implicit expectation in some cases that you do ask, but that an honest answer is not actually permitted… the answer is constrained by the social rules. For example, growing up if a guest says “Well, we should get going.” the host is obligated to reply “Oh, but we’re having such a good time!” and none of that actually lets you know whether the guest is still welcome or not (or, indeed, whether the guest has any desire to stay or go). (On one occasion, when highly motivated to have a departing guest take leftovers home with her if and only if she actually wanted leftovers, but not knowing her default rules, I ended up saying “So, among your tribe, how many times do I have to repeat an offer to have it count as a genuine offer?”)

And “Guess” culture has all kinds of rules for how you communicate to someone exactly what it is you want them to do without being asked.

TheOtherDave 22 Nov 2013 4:23 UTC
62 points
on: 2013 Less Wrong Census/Survey
Surveyed. Left several questions blank.

Incidentally, while I answered the “akrasia” questions about mental illnesses, therapy, etc. as best I could, it’s perhaps worth noting that most of my answers related to a period of my life after suffering traumatic brain injury that significantly impaired my cognitive function, and therefore might be skewing the results… or maybe not, depending on what the questions were trying to get at

TheOtherDave 1 Jun 2012 15:12 UTC
57 points
in reply to: Oscar_Cunningham’s comment on: Rationality Quotes June 2012
I recall a math teacher in high school explaining that often, in the course of doing a proof, one simply gets stuck and doesn’t know where to go next, and a good thing to do at that point is to switch to working backwards from the conclusion in the general direction of the premise; sometimes the two paths can be made to meet in the middle. Usually this results in a step the two paths join involving doing something completely mystifying, like dividing both sides of an equation by the square root of .78pi.

“Of course, someone is bound to ask why you did that,” he continued. “So you look at them completely deadpan and reply ‘Isn’t it obvious?’”

I have forgotten everything I learned in that class. I remember that anecdote, though.

TheOtherDave 4 Nov 2010 4:05 UTC
56 points
in reply to: Amanojack’s comment on: Righting a Wrong Question
During the first month or so after my stroke, while my nervous system was busily rewiring itself, I experienced all sorts of transient proprioceptic illusions.

One of them amounted to the absence of the feeling of free will… I experienced my arm as doing things that seemed purposeful from the outside, but for which I was aware of no corresponding purpose.

For example, I ate breakfast one morning without experiencing control over my arm. It fed me, just like it always had, but I didn’t feel like I was in control of it.

To give you an idea of how odd this was: at one point my arm put down the food item it was holding to my mouth, and I lay there somewhat puzzled… why wasn’t my arm letting me finish it? Then it picked up a juice carton and brought it to my mouth, and I thought “Oh! It wants me to drink something… yeah, that makes sense.”

It was a creepy experience, somewhat ameliorated by the fact that I could “take control” if I chose to… letting my arm feed me breakfast was a deliberate choice, I was curious about what would happen.

I think that’s what it feels like to not experience myself as having free will, which is I think close enough to your second question.

As for your first question… I think it would feel very much like the way I feel right now.
What links here?

TheOtherDave 19 Jan 2011 17:12 UTC
53 points
in reply to: David_Gerard’s comment on: Evolving to Extinction

really, that was the entire reason

In this spirit, I frequently remind myself, when the difficulties of dealing with other apes are getting to be too much to tolerate, that it’s a problem so hard that we evolved brains capable of maintaining a global technological civilization and figuring out quantum mechanics as a side effect of trying to solve it, and I should maybe cut myself some slack.

TheOtherDave 27 Mar 2013 22:55 UTC
48 points
in reply to: CronoDAS’s comment on: Solved Problems Repository
My only problem with this flow is that it waits far too long before Googling.

TheOtherDave 23 Nov 2013 22:27 UTC
47 points
on: Wait vs Interrupt Culture
I have naturally low Latency of Verbal Response, and was raised in the intersection of several cultures where the normative LVR was negative (that is, you’re expected to start replying just before the other person finishes).

When I experienced minor aphasia due to brain trauma, my LVR ballooned astronomically. This made it impossible to talk to some people… but it also revealed to me that several people I’d known for years and thought of as “quiet” were more than happy to talk to me at length and actually had quite a bit to say.

Since then, I’ve made more of a conscious effort to do some initial “handshaking” in conversations to work out what someone’s natural LVR is, and to match it. (I often fail, but I do try.) I encourage it as a way of expressing interest in what someone has to say, if nothing else.

TheOtherDave 26 Jan 2012 19:16 UTC
46 points
in reply to: Alejandro1’s comment on: Shit Rationalists Say?
I burst out laughing while reading this, so of course my officemates wanted to know what was so funny.

I cannot remember the last time the gulf of inferential distances was so very very wide.

TheOtherDave 7 Dec 2013 21:41 UTC
45 points
on: How to not be a fatalist? Need help from people who care about true beliefs.

Are there powerful arguments to counter fatalism?

How committed are you to countering fatalism with arguments?

For example, if it turned out that you could effectively reduce the temptation towards fatalism by means of a regular exercise program, a healthy diet, socializing more with friends, and/or making noticeable progress on projects you think are important… would that be acceptable, even if none of that provided you with arguments that you could articulate for why fatalism was false?

[META] ‘Rational’ vs ‘Optimized’

TheOtherDave4 Jan 2012 18:58 UTC

44 points

69 comments1 min readLW link

TheOtherDave 28 Sep 2013 16:09 UTC
44 points
on: The Anti-Placebo Effect
The thing that made this most obvious to me was training my dog.

For example, when conditioning her out of a behavior I dislike, my intuitive approach seems to be to monitor the intensity of the behavior… I expect a steady stream of intense performances
BBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBB
to become a stream of less-intense performances
bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb
and then disappear altogether.

But in reality the intensity doesn’t change much, and sometimes it even gets worse. I never get “bbb...” What declines is the frequency. That is,
BBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBB
becomes
BBBBBB_BBBBBBBBB_BBB
which, from my intuitive perspective, is essentially no progress at all… I don’t notice.

And then on the other end, when the behavior is almost extinguished, I get
_____B___B_______B___
which, from my perspective, is an endless series of “oh good, we got rid of this behavior—oh, crap, now it’s back again, just as bad as it ever was! This isn’t working!”

So it really really helped to keep a chart of the frequency of the behavior that I can look back at and realize that actually, we’ve been making steady progress all along, even though it completely doesn’t feel like progress at all.

After my stroke, when I was relearning to walk/talk/think, that strategy was absolutely critical to warding off despair. I charted everything, and it made a huge difference.

TheOtherDave 12 Feb 2011 7:09 UTC
42 points
in reply to: Johnicholas’s comment on: Make your training useful
This is something I thought about a lot while I was recovering from brain damage and thus transiently a lot stupider than I normally am.

A few of mine:
- Stupidity feels like not having enough fingers to hold all of my thoughts in place.
- It feels like being tired all the time, even when I’m not.
- It feels like merging onto the highway when I can’t see all the oncoming traffic.
- It feels like someone’s playing loud distracting music that I can’t hear.
- It feels like riding on a train with square wheels.
What links here?
- saturn's comment on How is your mind different from everyone else’s? by Kaj_Sotala (6 Dec 2011 0:23 UTC; 2 points)
- Dorikka's comment on When to scream “Error!” by Dorikka (26 Feb 2011 19:58 UTC; 0 points)

TheOtherDave 6 Jun 2013 5:48 UTC
41 points
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: Rationality Quotes June 2013
I may be in a somewhat unique position to address this question, as one of the many many many weird transient neurological things that happened to me after my stroke was a period I can best describe as my internal monologue going away.

So I know what it’s like to be the voice in my head, and what it’s like not to be.

And it’s still godawful difficult to describe the difference in words.

One way I can try is this: have you ever experienced the difference between “I know what I’m going to say, and here I am saying it” and “words are coming out of my mouth, and I’m kind of surprised by what I’m hearing myself say”?

If so, I think I can say that losing my “little voice” is similar to that difference.
If not, I suspect the explanation will be just as inaccessible as the phenomenon it purported to explain, but I can try again.

TheOtherDave 3 May 2013 15:18 UTC
39 points
in reply to: CCC’s comment on: Rationality Quotes May 2013

An investigation into the shipyards, and current design paradigms, may be in order...

...as I recommended strenuously before we left dock at the beginning of this mission, since a similar analysis performed then gave approximately 8000:1 odds that before this mission was complete you would do something deeply stupid that got us all killed, no matter how strenuously I tried to instruct you in basic risk factor analysis. That having failed, I gave serious consideration to simply taking over the ship myself, which I estimate will increase by a factor of approximately 3000 the utility created by our missions (even taking into account the reduced “moxie factor”, which is primarily of use during crises a sensible Captain would avoid getting into in the first place). However, I observe that my superiors in the High Command have not taken over Starfleet and the Federation, despite the obvious benefits of such a strategy. At first this led me to 83% confidence that the High Command was in possession of extremely compelling unshared evidence of the value of humanity’s leadership, which at that time led me to update significantly in favor of that view myself. I have since then reduced that confidence to 76%, with a 13% confidence that the High Command has instead been subverted by hostile powers partial to humanity.

TheOtherDave 28 May 2012 4:40 UTC
38 points
on: Avoid inflationary use of terms

You see them everywhere.

Well, you see them in lots of places.

TheOtherDave 26 Jan 2012 16:09 UTC
37 points
in reply to: NancyLebovitz’s comment on: Shit Rationalists Say?
I always think that.

TheOtherDave 2 Dec 2010 3:14 UTC
37 points
in reply to: JStewart’s comment on: Ask and Guess
Ferd’s method works, assuming you can actually manage to help with the dishes (the trick to that is to just start doing it, rather than ask… if you ask, the host is obligated to say “no, of course not,” since it is understood that you don’t actually want to help with the dishes), but the one I had in mind is you take a serving implement, pick up the last piece of chicken, catch the eye of someone else at the table, and offer it to them. They, of course, are obligated to say “No, you take it” (as are you, if someone offers it to you). If you are a guest, or the youngest person at the table, it’s OK to accept at that point. Otherwise, you can look around to the table—with the chicken still on the serving implement in your hand—and ask if anyone else wants it. They all say “no,” of course. Then you can serve yourself.

Which was all way too complicated to explain to someone who was having trouble with the idea that “Oh, can I have the last piece?” was rude by local standards.

TheOtherDave 4 May 2012 17:28 UTC
35 points
in reply to: Alicorn’s comment on: Why do people ____?
Probably.

A friend of mine was once given a physical beating in a context and manner so stressful that it fractured his skull. The silent treatment with the same effect would have had to be extraordinary.

It’s not clear to me what follows from either of those comparisons, beyond the relatively obvious observation that different forms of harm have different types of symptoms.

TheOtherDave

[META] ‘Ra­tional’ vs ‘Op­ti­mized’

[META] ‘Rational’ vs ‘Optimized’