Regrettably my meager Python skills are not yet up to the task.
Zack_M_Davis(Zack M. Davis)
Karma: 15,119
Group underrepresenatation isn’t even necessary, either. A more general form of the argument carries as long as you agree that “[fiction] isn’t a completed project[;] [s]topping the production of fiction in its tracks now would leave us with a corpus of stories that” is suboptimal in some way.
Cf. DH7
I’ll PM you.
Re the culture piece: you make some important points, but the “Let’s ban new books” thing seems rather self-undermining. If you’re going to ban new books, why not ban new blog comments, too? The observation that we have more culture than anyone can know what to do with is hardly original, and your phrasing can’t have been the best, so why did you spend all that time writing this piece, when you could have been making money?
My answer to this entire dilemma is just to say that culture isn’t about economic consumption: I guess that was entirely your point , but I’m taking a different attitude about it. Writing has been made into a commodity, but writing as such is a means of communication between people. To say that I should not write is to say that I should not speak, and even the least educated and cultured among us says something now and again, so to say that I should not speak is to say that I should not live. Why should I live, when we already have billions of people already?---because I want to. I don’t care if nothing I do has global, world-shaking effects; I don’t care it’s all been known and done before (if not here then somewhere across the many worlds); I want to know; I want to do—this particular conjunction of traits and ideas wants to know and do, even if lots of other superficially similar conjunctions have already known and done many superficially similar things.
I think that society ought not discourage the production of new novels, not because we need more novels around (you’re right; we don’t), but because I want to live in a world where everyone writes a good novel. No one’s life is exactly bitwise identical to someone else’s (or they’d really be the same person anyway), so everyone must have something to say that hasn’t already been said in exactly the same way. So let’s explore the space; the project is by no means complete. Yes, this means that a lot of crap will get written, but I still think it’s more fun this way than tiling the galaxy with James Joyce. But de gustibus non est.
(Also, is my phrasing that bad? I thought I wrote it pretty well. :()
Well, I’m glad you wrote it, but I’m not the one complaining that we produce too much text.
if it were, we would expect there to be a lifetime-length canon optimizing your esthetics-per-work count, with occasional tweaks (deletions & additions) by specialists when some work is realized to not be very good or just exceeded by some unincluded work.
I think you’re underestimating long tail effects. There is a sense in which we can say that some authors are much better than some others, but people have extremely specific tastes, too: no one canon will suffice, not even canons for particular genres and subgenres. Consider that I like the particular philosophical style of Greg Egan; giving me a list of top “hard science fiction” won’t help me. Or consider that one of my favorite short stories ever is Scott Aaronson’s “On Self-Delusion and Bounded Rationality.” Now, Scott Aaronson isn’t a professional fiction writer; I don’t even think that story was even conventionally published in an official fiction venue; it’s not going in any accepted canon. But why should I care? It’s going in my canon. Or consider that there’s a lot of work on very specific topics that I have reason to believe doesn’t exist. So I’ll have to create it. Even if most of you wouldn’t understand or wouldn’t care; well, I’m not living for your sake. Some clever person updated Warhol, you know: “In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.”
So this would fall under the ‘externalities’ category—people writing novels become better people for it?
Um, sure, although I’d phrase it differently. It’s not so much “doing this stuff will make you a better person” as much as, “the entire point of this being-a-person business is doing stuff, and it might as well be this as not.”
It makes the corpus more complete, if nothing else. Of course we don’t want to write all possible books; that’s just the useless Library of Babel. But that’s physically impossible anyway; within the range that we can apprehend, I’m inclined to say that more books about more topics is better.
But aren’t smart people just more fun to be around? Superiority is boring.
It did, but outside the disability activism area is itself a very large space that different people will be familiar with different parts of. There is no common culture; it’s almost surprising the extent to which we (think we) can even talk to each other.
This pill would put me into the bottom 30% of the population IQ-wise (I’m guessing, does anyone have the actual numbers?
In the scenario as specified, I think you’re in the 72nd percentile. The half of the population originally with <100 IQ jumps up to <130 IQ (still below you), and you’re still above the people in the 110-130 group who were also denied the drug.
Have you looked at how well the current bottom 30% does?
On an absolute scale, they’re doing fine.
Your passion is admirable, but you would seem to have much more to learn before you are ready to make your greatest contribution. (As do we all, of course.) For instance, the mathematical community at large actually does consider zero to be a number; this is not really in contention.
But I love this place. I still have to go back and research half of this very post to decode what is actually being said,
Here at Less Wrong, we prefer focused, previously-researched posts: probably this partially explains the downvotes you’ve been getting. Have you considered getting your own blog? Keep studying, and I hope to see your work in the future.
The statistics show that people with degrees on average earn more than those who don’t, if that’s of interest to you.
Correlation is not causation. Graduates as a group are smarter and more ambitious than nongraduates. The question is not whether people with a degree do better; the question is what the degree itself is buying you, if you’re already a smart ambitious person who knows how to study.
Most jobs largely consist of being forced to do some assignment that you feel isn’t worth your time. - you’re not going to be escaping that by dropping out.
I can’t speak for all people or all jobs, but in my experience, there’s a certain dignity and autonomy in paid work that I never got out of school. After quitting University, I worked in a supermarket for nineteen months. Sure, it was low-paying, low-status, and largely boring, but I was much happier at the store, and I think a big reason for this was that I had a function other than simply to obey. At University, I had spent a lot of time worrying that I wasn’t following the professor’s instructions exactly to the letter, and being terrified that this made me a bad person. Whereas at the store, it didn’t matter so much if I incidentally broke a dozen company rules in the course of doing my job, because what mattered was that the books were balanced and the customers were happy. It’s not so bad, nominally having a boss, as long as there’s some optimization criterion other than garnering the boss’s approval: you can tell if you couldn’t solve a customer’s problem, or if the safe is fifty dollars short, or if the latte you made is too foamy. And when the time comes, you can clock out, and walk to the library, with no one to tell you what to study. Kind of idyllic, really.
I feel like I could learn all the facts my classes teach on Wikipedia in a tenth of the time—though procedural knowledge is another matter, of course.
Take it from me (as a dropout-cum-autodidact in a world where personal identity is not ontologically fundamental, I’m fractionally one of your future selves), that procedural knowledge is really, really important. It’s just too easy to fall into the trap of “Oh, I’m a smart person who reads books and Wikipedia; I’m fine just the way I am.” Maybe you can do better than most college grads, simply by virtue of being smart and continuing to read things, but life (unlike many schools) is not graded on a curve. There are so many levels above you, that you’re in mortal danger of missing out on entirely if you think you can get it all from Wikipedia, if you ever let yourself believe that you’re safe at your current level. If you think school isn’t worth your time, that’s great, quit. But know that you don’t have to be just another dropout who likes to read; you can quit and hold yourself to a higher standard.
You want to learn math? Here’s what I do. Get textbooks. Get out a piece of paper, and divide it into two columns. Read or skim the textbooks. Take notes; feel free to copy down large passages verbatim (I have a special form of quotation marks for verbatim quotes). If a statement seems confusing, maybe try to work it out yourself. Work exercises. If you get curious about something, make up your own problem and try to work it out yourself. Four-hundred ninety-three pieces of paper later, I can say with confidence that my past self knew nothing about math. I didn’t know what I was missing, could not have known in advance what it would feel like, to not just accept as a brute fact a linear transformation is invertible iff its determinant is nonzero, but to start to see these as manifestations of the same thing. (Because—obviously—since the determinant is the product of the eigenvalues, it serves as a measure of how the transformation distorts area; if the determinant is zero, it means you’ve lost a dimension in the mapping, so you can’t reverse it. But it wouldn’t have been “obvious” if I had only read the Wikipedia article.)
forces conspired to make me not succeed.
Forces don’t conspire; they’re not that smart.
Were you by any chance using Axler?
Mostly Bretscher, but checking out Axler’s vicious anti-deteminant screed the other month certainly influenced my comment.
Everyone has a gender, and gender affects a person’s thinking style, desires and determination of fairness in assessing behaviors between genders.
\winces* So, I agree* that no one is competent and everyone has an agenda, but it’s not as if everyone sides with “their” sex.
Well, I am not sure if unbiased people can exist regarding the issue but the closest thing I could think of was Less Wrong.
No, historically we suck at this, too. Got any decision theory questions?
And while we’re at it, it should really be an em dash, not a hyphen.
You’re probably thinking of “A Rational Argument” or “Back Up and Ask Whether, Not Why”.
The last paragraph of “Back Up” seems fairly explicit.
… “Singularity Writing Advice” points six and seven?
Hence this new account.
ADDENDUM: I mean, unless we have some name-change feature that I just couldn’t find.
SECOND ADDENDUM: To anyone reading this on my userpage, you might be interested in my older comments.