woodside

Karma: 256

woodside 4 Dec 2014 20:26 UTC
36 points
in reply to: 27chaos’s comment on: Rationality Quotes December 2014
If I could convince Aubrey de Grey to cut off his beard it would increase everyones expected longevity more than any other accomplishment I’m capable of.

woodside 19 Feb 2013 11:01 UTC
9 points
on: Learning critical thinking: a personal example
Your interaction with your teachers is very similar to my experiences training more junior officers to stand “Officer of the Deck” on submarines (Officer of the Deck is the position ultimately in charge of everything having to do with the boat, internally and externally. Think of the role Picard or Riker assume when they sit in the “Captain’s Chair” on the bridge in Star Trek. In real life people sleep and do other stuff so officers more junior than the CO/XO take on that role most of the time).

A lot of the same second guessing and reluctance to make decisions happens when people are training for this position. One small thing that makes a big difference in my experience is telling my students explicitly at the outset that I expect them to make decisions for themselves but I’ll stop them if they’re about to do something dangerous or horribly wrong. If one of the officers does something that’s suboptimal but otherwise ok I’ll let him see it through and we’ll talk about it later. Even if your instructors haven’t told you this explicitly I’d bet that they have a similar mindset. If you just internalize the fact that you’ll be stopped before you do something extremely bad it might go a long way towards letting you relax enough to practice making quick judgements and acting on them.

Obviously if an instructor isn’t around to stop you this advice is terrible.

woodside 5 Feb 2013 10:38 UTC
1 point
in reply to: FiftyTwo’s comment on: Open Thread, February 1-14, 2013
1 billion dollars earmarked for whole brain simulation makes it seem a lot more likely that we’ll brute force a naive version of AI well before we have the ability to prove any kind of friendliness. If that AI is seeded by the simulated brain of an actual human though… who knows. I’d like to think that if it were my brain and at some point I became singularity-scale intelligent that I wouldn’t create a horrible future for humanity (by our present day perspective) but it’s pretty hard to claim that with any confidence.

woodside 3 Feb 2013 7:59 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg) ’s comment on: Rationality Quotes February 2013
There hasn’t been a lot of money spent researching it, but meta-analysis of the studies that have been conducted show that on average there is no placebo effect.

woodside 3 Feb 2013 7:53 UTC
9 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Rationality Quotes February 2013
Because you’re a human, not a butterfly. It seems like an animal that used a cognitive filter that defaulted to the latter case would take a pretty severe fitness hit.

woodside 3 Feb 2013 6:42 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Kingoftheinternet’s comment on: Rationality Quotes February 2013
This idea is primarily why I’m skeptical of the effectiveness of institutions like the federal reserve (despite not being a subject matter expert). It seems pretty clear that in order to be effective the leadership has to be comprised of people that are not only exceptionally brilliant, but exceptionally benevolent as well.

woodside 13 Jan 2013 17:35 UTC
15 points
in reply to: dclayh’s comment on: Closet survey #1
I’m curious about your personal experiences with physical pain. What is the most painful thing you’ve experienced and what was the duration?

I’m sympathetic to your preference in the abstract, I just think you might be surprised at how little pain you’re actually willing to endure once it’s happening (not a slight against you, I think people in general overestimate what degree of physical pain they can handle as a function of the stakes involved, based largely on anecdotal and second hand experience from my time in the military).

At the risk of being overly morbid, I have high confidence (>95%) that I could have you begging for death inside of an hour if that were my goal (don’t worry, it’s certainly not). An unfriendly AI capable of keeping you alive for eternity just to torture you would be capable of making you experience worse pain than anyone ever has in the history of our species so far. I believe you that you might sign a piece of paper to pre-commit to an eternity of torture vice simple death. I just think you’d be very very upset about that decision. Probably less than 5 minutes into it.

woodside 13 Jan 2013 7:47 UTC
8 points
in reply to: katydee’s comment on: Don’t Build Fallout Shelters
I wasn’t one of the downvoters, but I’ll hazard a guess.
- pursuing personal-level solutions for society-level hazards is highly inefficient.
Viscerally for me, this immediately flags as not being right. I might not understand what you mean by that statement though. It’s very difficult to make an impact on the probability of society-level hazards occuring, one way or the other, so if you think there’s a non-trivial chance of one of them occuring a personal-level solution seems like the obvious choice.
- I assumed, perhaps wrongly, that that was a given on this site, given previous discussions here. There’s probably an argument to be made that all such actions are merely purchasing fuzzies and that protecting yourself is purchasing utilons, but I’d like to think that we’re better than that.
I think you’re significantly overestimating the uniformity of LW readers. The high-impact posters seem to have similar ethical views but I imagine most of the readers arrive here through an interest in transhumanism. On the scale from pathological philanthropists to being indifferent to the whole world burning if it doesn’t include you subjectively experiencing it I bet the average reader is a lot closer to the latter than you would like. I certainly am. I care on an abstract, intellectual level, but it’s very very difficult for me to be emotionally impacted by possible futures that don’t include me. I think a lot of people downvote when you make assumpions about them (that turn out to be incorrect).

That being said, I don’t have a problem with anything you wrote.

woodside 3 Jan 2013 11:01 UTC
10 points
on: Rationality Quotes January 2013
It’s not easy to find rap lyrics that are appropriate to be posted here. Here’s an attempt.

Son, remember when you fight to be free

To see things how they are and not how you like em to be

Cause even when the world is falling on top of me

Pessimism is an emotion, not a philosophy

Knowing what’s wrong doesn’t imply that you right

And its another, when you suffer to apply it in life

But I’m no rookie

And I’m never gonna make the same mistake twice pussy
- Immortal Technique “Mistakes”

woodside 26 Nov 2012 19:35 UTC
20 points
in reply to: thomblake’s comment on: LW Women- Minimizing the Inferential Distance
For those that don’t want to do a google search, MLP:FiM = My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (I had to look it up)

Is this one of those kid shows that adults watch these days? A show that a decent fraction of male LW readers know enough about to “ruminate on”?

I already have to navigate through my social world with the handicap of counting a work of Harry Potter fanfiction among my favorite books. If I end up owning seasons of My Little Pony because of this site I’m going to be very upset.

woodside 26 Nov 2012 6:54 UTC
25 points
in reply to: daenerys’s comment on: LW Women- Minimizing the Inferential Distance
I can see the point the author is trying to make in the story about having to be gentle with girls, but I think I’d be conflicted about it if I had a son. Later in life there are severe social and legal consequences for a man that is too rough with women and I’d hate to set my kid up for failure.

I realize there is a difference between “playing rough” and abuse but there can be grey areas at the border. There are many situations were I would physically subdue a man (both playful and serious) but not a woman, partly for fear of causing harm but mainly because of the social blowback and potential for getting arrested.

I might be overly sensitive to this line of thinking because I have a military background, but I think teaching a son that he should behave as if girls and boys are the same physically is sub-optimal (in terms of setting him up for success and long-term hapiness).

woodside 15 Nov 2012 10:42 UTC
2 points
on: Signalling fallacies: Implication vs. Inference
To me this just seems like a disconnect between the way language is parsed by the speaker and the listener. When I hear somebody say “Atlas Shrugged is the greatest book ever written” I don’t take it as the speaker’s literal belief, because almost nobody means such a statement in that way.

woodside 12 Nov 2012 15:38 UTC
1 point
on: Digging the Bull’s Horn
It would probably be useful to compile a list of times in the past that coming out the other side of the bull’s horn was worth it. If you’re trying to find a common thread.

What immediately comes to mind as an obvious example is Newtonian physics. There was a period in the history of science where it looked like we had figured out almost everything worth knowing in this field. That turned out not to be the case in a big way. There were clues that there might be a deeper, more general theory in the inconsistencies in observational data at the time and it seems like this would be a good place to start.

What fields are there that seem like they are mostly figured out but with a few nagging inconsistencies? Continuing the physics theme, the standard model does a heck of a job but there is still dark matter/energy and gravity to figure out. It’s clear from the number of top level minds devoted to studying these things that people already think this horn is worth bulldozing through though. It’s not that people don’t think it’s worth digging, it’s just really hard.

Maybe there are fields that are similarly saturated theory wise but have inconsistencies that aren’t being thought about a lot?

woodside 5 Nov 2012 12:02 UTC
3 points
in reply to: wedrifid’s comment on: Voting is like donating thousands of dollars to charity
Thank you for the detailed response. Lots of interesting ideas that I’ll definitely read through in detail later on when I have more time.

I do think I meant something different by the term ‘noise’ than the way you read it but I’m not convinced it will matter in the end. You seem to be using noise to cover the case where voters make their decisions arbitrarily because they lack preferences. I was trying to make the point that the average forced voter might be little better than random at actually identifying the candidate that would lead to the greatest fulfillment of his preferences.

woodside 5 Nov 2012 7:27 UTC
11 points
in reply to: wedrifid’s comment on: Voting is like donating thousands of dollars to charity
What evidence is there that compulsory voting wouldn’t just add noise to the selection process? This seems like the obvious outcome to me.

woodside 4 Nov 2012 10:30 UTC
45 points
on: 2012 Less Wrong Census/Survey
Took it.

My browser was unable to copy/past most of the links which led to less than initially intended participation on my part. For instance, I took the big 5 quiz because the address was easy to glance at and type into another tab but didn’t take other surveys/tests in the bonus question sections because i didn’t feel like tabbing back and forth to get the web address correct.

woodside 10 Sep 2012 21:08 UTC
0 points
in reply to: pjeby’s comment on: Who Wants To Start An Important Startup?
I haven’t but I’ll check it out, I’m about to go on a 20 hour plane trip.

woodside 10 Sep 2012 21:03 UTC
0 points
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: Rationality Quotes September 2012
I took the quote as a call to explore. Don’t just be satisfied with learning things other people have figured out, try to creatively venture into the unknown yourself.

woodside 5 Sep 2012 0:37 UTC
−7 points
on: Rationality Quotes September 2012
If you are not lost, then you’re at a place someone has already found… What’s the use of being in mapped territory?
- Junot Diaz
A different perspective on a phrase our community holds near and dear

woodside 23 Aug 2012 9:33 UTC
0 points
in reply to: EphemeralNight’s comment on: Rational Romantic Relationships, Part 1: Relationship Styles and Attraction Basics
Retracted. I had written some brutally honest advice but realized after reading a bit more that you know a lot of people on here in person, so I’ll PM instead.