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Zian
Calling 911 or your local emergency number is also a good default action because the call taker should be trained to walk you through some of the things the post described.
Don’t be afraid of creating duplicate 911 calls for something like a big fire or car crash. Merging duplicates and rapidly closing out unnecessary calls is the communications center’s job, not yours.
Expect to be asked for a description of the problem and your location. Don’t worry if you don’t know an exact address. You may also be asked for your phone number.
It is also OK to indicate that you are uncertain about something such as whether or not the patient is breathing.
FYI, the Waveform article promotes the use of the Kruithof curve but that relationship between lumens and preference could not be replicated by a study from 1990 (https://doi.org/10.1177%2F096032719002200102).
Chapter 5 of a 2005 thesis (“Human lighting demands : healthy lighting in an office environment”) from TU/e has specific recommendations for brightness, contrast, etc. Its DOI is 10.6100/IR594257 (https://doi.org/10.6100/IR594257).
Full citation: Aries, M. B. C. (2005). Human lighting demands : healthy lighting in an office environment. [Phd Thesis 1 (Research TU/e / Graduation TU/e), Built Environment]. Technische Universiteit Eindhoven. https://doi.org/10.6100/IR594257
I’m both up voting you and commenting because I used to live (more than 4 years) and continue to monitor (in a very real time way) the DFW Metroplex. Then, I moved to Southern California, so I’ve kind of made the MIRI move in reverse.
Beware of motivated reasoning when it comes to things in TX that you think will change for the better soon. For example, if you had listed Dallas as a possibility, I would be warning against counting on improved DART service.
If you find a positive attribute in a particular area of Austin, make sure the other positive and negative attributes about Austin still apply; things can be quite different as you move around the state. Administrative boundaries (e.g. School attendance boundaries) may surprise you.
Strongly recommend looking into sources of expected life expectancy and healthcare costs for all locations being considered.
I took the survey a few days ago and ran into trouble trying to answer the IQ test-related questions (IQ/SAT/ACT/etc.) because I would have to dig around for the answers to those questions and that required more effort than I wanted to spend on a survey.
The instructions for entering percents was also a bit confusing.
Other than that, the survey was well designed. I really appreciated how clear you were about where it was OK to stop and that it was fine to leave things blank.
At work, one of our customers is known to be “unique”/”challenging”. The customers normally talk to a person (let’s call this the middle person) who used to work in the customers’ field and translates their requests for software developers. The customer had gone through >3 e-mail rounds with the middle person and I as we tried to build an item to her liking.
After the last e-mail complaint, I printed out all of the e-mails related to the topic, all of the example cases she pointed at, and tried to figure out what state of mind would make her so frustrated and have so much trouble getting us to do what she wants as opposed to simply taking each e-mail at face value. I made one more tweak to the product, e-mailed the middle person, and held my breath.
This happened about 2 weeks ago.
My company hasn’t received any more e-mails about the product so it seems to be a great success.
I post this anecdote here because the idea of approaching the problem like that was almost certainly taken from HPMoR. Quote is below:
Harry kept his expression blank, and realized one second too late that it might as well have been a signed confession. Professor Quirrell didn’t care what your expression looked like, he cared which states of mind made it likely.
Caution: This probably only works if the person you’re modeling is sane.
I went to the emergency room instead of trying to just last out a chest pain + allergic reaction at home like I have in the past.
I used the time travel technique from HPMOR. Blurb at the bottom.
Pro: Still alive
Con: Really hard to do in moments of crises; I was only able to do this after about 15 minutes of time spent driving home (and then I U-turned to go to the hospital).
Blurb:
He’d wished then to fall back just a few minutes in time and change something, anything before it was too late...
And then it had turned out to not be too late after all.
Wish granted.
You couldn’t change history. But you could get it right to start with. Do something differently the first time around.
If anyone wants to dig further into commercial contracts, there’s the “Uniform Commercial Code” which is like a big software library that most people have basically agreed to implement in the same way across different programming languages.
Hi there!
I found HPMoR via TVTropes and then found LessWrong via HPMoR. I decided to hang around after reading the explanation of Bayes Theorem on Eliezer’s personal site and finding it quite nice. Also, it matched up with how I thought of Bayes’s theorem. You could say that I got attracted to LW by confirmation bias. :)
On a more useful note, I got interested in rationality/etc. through a somewhat convoluted path. I got introduced to Bayes Theorem via Paul Graham when I built a website filter for a science fair project.
My reading material also contributed heavily. I’ve also always been a fast and constant reader so discovering the (FREE!) interlibrary loan offered by the University of California was a boon. Major nonfiction books that affected me were cognitive science stuff (especially Dan Ariely) and books on how things/processes/systems work I distinctly recall re-re-re-checking out a book on landfills and waste management in elementary school because it was long enough to be somewhat thorough and had enough photos to be interesting. Major fiction influences include books by Thornton Burgess, the Redwall series, and David Brin. I got introduced to the concept of fanfiction by the Redwall Online Community and spent many years in related activities so it wasn’t too much of a leap for me to take HPMoR seriously. Getting keyword matches between Ariely and HPMoR kept me hooked, never mind the bit about arbitraging gold and silver, which I can’t believe Harry hasn’t tried doing by now.
Another thing that helped me take the ideas in Less Wrong seriously was my constant desire to re-examine by beliefs. For example, I’ve always been interested in the ideas in Christian apologetics.
As for where I started at LW, I can’t really say. I know I read stuff that confirmed what I already knew like things about the Planning Fallacy. The first bit of new material was probably Mysterious Answers (and those in its sequence).
I’m trying out Bayes Theorem with a simple example and getting really strange results.
p(disease A given that a patient has disease B) = p(b|a)p(a) / p(b)
p(disease B given existing diagnosis of disease A) = 0.21
p(A) = 0.07
p(B) = 0.01
I get 1.47 or 147%. I know that the answer can’t be >=100% because there are patients with A and not B.
Where am I going wrong?
I had a distinctly probabilistic experience at a doctor’s office today.
Condition X has a “gold standard” way to diagnose it (my doctor described it as being almost 100%) but is very expensive (time, effort, and money). It is also not feasible while everyone is staying at home.
However, at the end of the visit, I had given him enough information to make a “clinical” diagnoses (from a statistically & clinically validated questionnaire, descriptions of alternative explanations that have been ruled out, etc) and start treating it.
In hindsight, I can see the probability mass clumping together over the years until there is a pile on X.
I’m thankful to Less Wrong-style thinking for making me comfortable enough with uncertainty to accept this outcome . The doctor may not have pulled out a calculator but this feels like “shut up and multiply” & “make beliefs pay rent”.
Thanks for posting this article here. Sometimes it feels like I got into this rationality stuff too late or only after a lot of people scattered away.
(I hope no one minds that this comment doesn’t talk about the article’s contents.)
This week, I noticed that a medical textbook (Principles and Practice of Sleep Medicine) explicitly described Bayes Theorem in the first pages of a chapter about diagnostic tests. It went on to describe how strongly you should update your beliefs based on various symptoms/tests (e.g. “Presence of daytime headache” means you should update __this hard__ towards having a sleep problem but if you don’t have a headache, you should update __different amount__ in the other direction).
I thought it was neat that this type of thinking is being used in medicine’s textbook orthodoxy.
As anecdotal support for “constantly tasting everything”, I offer my high school scientific calculator. After one year of 2 hrs per day of chemistry class, its crevices around the display had a permanent collection of precipitate.
I suspect that even without intentionally tasting things, nearly everything in a lab is ingested as an aerosol. It would be unsurprising if months of such exposure led someone to develop a hunch about a molecule.
Wow, that’s a bit strongly worded.
I’m going to have to figure out why the journal article gave those figures. Maybe I should send your comment to the authors...
But then he’d lose the Strunk and White allusion.
https://wildfire.cr.usgs.gov/firehistory/viewer/viewer.htm may help for historical information.
It was a bit troublesome to figure out if the donation would be tax deductible because the word “deductible” isn’t used anywhere at the page you linked to (http://rationality.org/fundraiser2013/). In fact, I almost gave up.
Fortunately, if you go to http://rationality.org/donate/, CFAR says they’re a 501(c)(3) organization although I’m not sure how I’d verify that… And since the IRS has very big teeth, maybe I should figure that out first.
In addition, for this sort of minor question, doing a full blown Skype conversation probably isn’t appropriate but I don’t see any alternate ways to get in touch with CFAR on either http://rationality.org/fundraiser2013/ or http://rationality.org/donate/ (except for sending a letter).
Update:
I found the form 990 at http://990finder.foundationcenter.org/990results.aspx?990_type=&fn=&st=&zp=&ei=453100226&fy=&action=Find but now I’m really worried because it looks like CFAR lost all its key staff. I don’t see the secretary, treasurer, or president from the 2012 filing listed at http://rationality.org/about/.
I would like to think that CFAR will do a terrific job but confirmation bias is already tilting my opinion so it seems that donating money without seriously thinking about the perils of an organization that can’t retain key staff is unwise.
I might be able to help build the site due to the following bits from my past:
Javascript/XHTML/etc. experience
WAMP/LAMP/ASP .NET experience
Coordinated >20 people across multiple time zones using web forums/online chat
Ran a website with a chatroom and used it to hold meetings
Slight obsession with user interfaces (built web applications/desktop applications)
Downside:
Due to personal things, I don’t have the time to lead or contribute -hugely- to this effort.
Ideas:
Keep the project management side of things relatively transparent (perhaps using Github, SourceForge, or at least keeping the spec in a wiki).
Have a public bug tracker.
- 17 Mar 2013 22:04 UTC; 1 point) 's comment on Programming the LW Study Hall by (
I’m don’t think the universe is obliged to follow any “high level narratives”. I’m afraid I don’t understand how thinking of events in these terms is helpful.
Since utilions are a unit of caring and Less Wrong (the website) has helped me immensely in making the transition from a somewhat despondent college graduate to a software engineer job with an annual salary + benefits, is there any way I can donate some dollars towards the site’s upkeep?
Failing that, and as a more immediate measure, I extend my sincere thanks to everyone on Less Wrong, especially Eliezer Yudkowsky and his works HPMOR & An Intuitive Explanation of Bayes’ Theorem for enlightening me.
On a more useful note, it appears that the Java applets at http://www.yudkowsky.net/rational/bayes are now blocked by the current version of the Oracle Java Runtime Environment for Windows.