SUGGEST and VOTE: Posts We Want to Read on Less Wrong

(without resorting to dark arts)

I was homeschooled - I should ask my mom about resources she used. It is worth noting that the three of us siblings all became readers, and she provided us with good textbooks to work from. I taught myself algebra and geometry out of a geometry textbook she bought, for instance.

(I think I saw a copy of John Holt's How Children Fail around the house once, to name an author who appeared in a few Rationalty Quotes threads, but I really don't know if that was a significant part of my parents' thinking.)

I'd like to take a stab at writing this one, actually, if no one else is dead set on it. Expect it in the discussion section within forty-eight hours.

EDIT: Status as of 11:56AM EST, Feb 9: The first draft is about 90% completed, but I need to leave it aside and run off to class. I will post it this afternoon, and then revise it (aided by your contributions!) over the remainder of the week.

EDIT EDIT: Posted as of 8:10PM EST.

I'm also planning on writing an article. I'll be focusing on a small number of smart drugs that have the most evidence supporting them. I'll probably be able to write it sometime this week.

Wei_Dai,

We need these four titles as four separate comments. Please post each one separately so they can be voted on separately, and delete this comment, and I will delete my comment here, too.

Also, please put each title in bold.

Thanks!

Responding to Silas's comment about the learning side of the equation. He wrote:

Don't forget the problem from the other side, too: how to detect and bridge inferential distence for knowledge-havers, i.e., how to find the knowledge-gap and convey the information to them. (That was actually the long-delayed article I'm working on, given my success in teaching others and my difficulty in getting others to convey knowledge to me when the roles are reversed.)

(The use of the term "knowledge haver" rather than "teacher" was deliberate.)

Yes, I used the activity oriented "learner" over the institutional role of "student" specifically because I was trying to emphasize general life skills.

I think it says something about our culture that there doesn't appear to be a common term to describe "one who conveys a lesson" but that doesn't have the connotations of "teacher" in that it is something people do for money. When I suggested an article for "teachers" I used the best non-neologism I could think of. Having thought about this some more I'm wondering if I "mentor" might be a better term than "teacher"?

The trick with mentoring is that its a long term process and is less about delivery of pre-specified lessons and more about delivering supplementary insight into the mentee's ongoing currently articulated life processes.

Thinking about the terminological issues, it strikes me that these conceptual framing issues have implications for what kinds of learning/teaching are actually possible. Perhaps a lot of the skills here involve having a realistic model of a normal person's willingness and capacity to learn? Maybe you just can't teach/mentor/tutor very well without long term insight and life-driven discovery of knowledge gaps? Maybe other languages cut the world in better ways? For example there's senpai and kohai in Japanese, but that also carries baggage about organizational status hierarchies rather than transmission of specialist expertise itself.

Don't forget the problem from the other side, too: how to detect and bridge inferential distence for knowledge-havers, i.e., how to find the knowledge-gap and convey the information to them. (That was actually the long-delayed article I'm working on, given my success in teaching others and my difficulty in getting others to convey knowledge to me when the roles are reversed.)

EDIT: Nevermind, I didn't read the discussion before saying that.

(The use of the term "knowledge haver" rather than "teacher" was deliberate.)

Via Alexandros on this post.

duly upvoted

Via XiXiDu on this post.

In short: immersion, SRS and cloze deletion. Screw textbooks, classes and any "this isn't proper material for a learner" elitism.

Learning a language takes 3000-10000 hours with the best techniques (length depending only on how closely related it is to one you already know), half that for decent basic fluency, about 2-4 weeks of intense practice for pub-level conversations. There's no free lunch, but it can be pretty tasty.

Techniques:

1) There is no Immersion like Immersion and Khatzumoto is its prophet. (Slightly kidding, but he's my favorite advocate of the approach and fun to read. And he is absolutely right.)

2) What's cloze deletion? Anki FAQ. Why does it matter? It gives you lots of context around unknown pieces, making them stick better. Also, it's fun.

3) Anki is the best SRS, see the site for an explanation how to use it. At first, you make cards "word -> translation". Then "easy sentence -> translation". Then "easy sentence with cloze-deleted gap" -> "full sentence". Try adding more context, like surrounding sentences in a conversation, audio and so on. Always go "target language -> translation" or "target language -> target language". (Contrasting with Khatz' advice, I'd recommend staying with translations and bilingual material for a long time until you can actually feel how sucky the translation is.)

4) If you like talking more than reading, copy Benny. Otherwise just consume as described.

This might seem a bit Japanese-centric because a) I study it and b) it has the best learning community evar, but this stuff applies to all languages equally. Some esoteric choices (say, dead languages) require some additional tricks to fix specific issues, but essentially it's all the same.

If someone'd like more details, especially for some specific problem, technique or language, just ask. I've been studying languages for about 4-5 years as a main hobby with differing intensity now and have tried pretty much everything that's out there in some form or another. But basically, there are no shortcuts. Do what's fun, imitate relentlessly, use an SRS so you don't forget everything again.

Here is my recommended method, in three complex but well-defined steps:

1. Learn the grammar of the language using an old-fashioned (pre-1960) textbook.

2. Access a large corpus of data (text and speech in the language).

3. Practice using the language with people who know it, and receive feedback.

I don't want true answers to those questions; I want confusion-extinguishing ones.

Do you think this is possible right now? Would this be a joke post that you want to read, or something?

Full content of the actual post:

"I'm not sure."

How to Build a Friendly AI (with Source Code Examples)

I've added this as: "Why Cryonics, Uploading, and Destructive Teleportation Do Not Kill You".

Believe it or not, I actually started an article on this around "17 October 2009" (per the date stamp) and never finished it. (I actually had the more ambitious idea of summarizing every chapter in one article, but figured Chapter 3 would be enough.) Might as well post what I have (formatting and links don't carry over; I've corrected the worst issues) ...

Here I attempt to summarize the points laid out in Gary Drescher's Good and Real: Demystifying Paradoxes from Physics to Ethics (discussed previously on Less Wrong), chapter 3, which explores the apparent flow of time and gives a reductionist account of it. To [...] What follows is a restating of the essential points and the arguments behind them in my own words, which I hope to make faithful to the text. It's long, but a lot shorter than reading the chapter, a lot cheaper than buying the book, and a lot less subjuntively self-defeating than pirating it.

The focus of the chapter is to solve three interrelated paradoxes: If the laws of physics are time-symmetric:

1) Why does entropy increase in only one direction?

2) Why do we perceive a directional flow of time?

3) Why do we remember the past but not the future?

Starting from the first: why does entropy -- the total disorder in the universe -- increase asymmetrically? To answer, start with a simple case: the billiard ball simulation, where balls have a velocity and position and inelastically bounce off each other as per the standard equations predicated on the (time-symmetric) conservation of linear momentum. For a good example of entropy's increase, let's initialize it with a non-uniformity: there will be a few large, fast balls, and many small, slow balls.

What happens? Well, as time goes by, they bounce off each other, and the larger balls transfer their momentum to balls with less. We see the standard increase in entropy as time increases. So if you were to watch a video of the simulation in action, there would be telltale signs of which is the positive and which is the negative direction: in the positive direction, large balls would plow through groups of smaller balls, leaving a "wake" during which it increases their speeds. But if we watch it in reverse, going back to the start, entropy, of course, decreases: highly-ordered wakes spontaneously form before the large balls go into them.

Hence, the asymmetry: entropy increases in only one direction.

The mystery dissolves when you consider what happens when you continue to view the simulation backwards, and proceed through the initial time, onward to t= -1, -2, -3, ... . You see the exact same thing happen going in the direction of negative time from t=0. So, we see our confusion: entropy does not increase in just the positive direction: it increases as you move away from zero, even if that direction isn't positive.

So, we need to reframe our understanding: instead of thinking in terms of positive and negative time directions, we should think in terms of "pastward" and "futureward" directions. Pastward means in the direction of the initial state, and futureward means away from it. Both the sequences t= 1, 2, 3, ... and t= -1, -2, -3, ... go into the future. (Note the parallel here to the reframing of "up" and "down" once your model of the earth goes from flat to round: "down" no longer means a specific vector, but the vector from where you are to the center of the earth. So you change your model of "down" and "up" to "centerward" and "anticenterward" [my terms, not Drescher's], respectively.)

Okay, that gets us a correct statement of the conditions under which entropy increases, but still doesn't say why entropy increases in only the futureward direction. For that, we need to identify what the positive-time futureward direction and the negative-time futureward direction have in common. For one thing, the balls become correlated. Previously (pastwardly), knowing a ball's state did not allow you to infer much about the other balls' states, as the velocities were set independently of one another. But the accumulation of collisions causes the balls to become correlated -- in effect, to share information with each other. [Rephrase to discuss elimination of gradients/exchange of information of all parts of system?...]

Note that the entropy does not need to increase uniformly: this model still permits local islands of lower entropy in the futureward direction, as long as the total entropy still increases. Consider the "wakes" left by the large balls that were mentioned above. In that case, the large balls will "plow" right through the small balls and leave a (low entropy) wake. (Even as they do this, the large balls transfer momentum to the smaller balls and increase total entropy.) The wakes allow you to identify time's direction: a wake is always located where the large ball was in an immediately pastward state. This relationship also implies that wake contains a "record" of sorts, giving physical form to the information in the current timewise state, regarding a pastward state.

This process is similar to what goes on in the brain. Just as wakes are islands of low entropy containing information about pastward states, so too is your brain an island of low entropy containing information about pastward states. (Life forms are already known to be dissipative systems that maintain an island of low entropy at the cost of a counterbalancing increase elsewhere.) [...]

So it's not that "gee, we notice time goes forward, and we notice that entropy happens to always increase". Rather, the increase of entropy determines what we will identify as the future, since any time slice will only contain versions of ourselves with memories of pastward states.

Done.

(In my opinion.)

It would indeed be hard to compress those sequences - and impossible for other sequences, such as those on meta-ethics and quantum physics. But I think it could be done. Some information would have to be lost, but that is okay: it's still there in the original sequence.

The goal would be to lower the barrier of entrance to Less Wrong. Right now the entrance exam is, "Go read the sequences," which is a command to read more words than are in Lord of the Rings. That's insane. We need a better way to welcome newbies into the site.

http://www.gwern.net/Mnemosyne.html might be interesting/helpful for writing that?

This might seem trivial, but I've personally never gotten up the activation energy to actually learn how to use SRS effectively, despite being convinced that I would benefit from doing so.

A short, "Do It Like This"-type post would be most helpful!

Note to self: John Baez seems to be at this again.

On the opposite side, and also worthy of discussion: How NOT to Argue with Religious People, Conspiracy Theorists, and Other People Who Believe Crazy Things.

Obvious prerequisite: replace "How" with "Whether" or "When".

(Bold for consistency with later comments?)

Oops, yes, thanks. I've commented with the titles I provided.

I suggest you leave a comment with a proposed post title for the Drug Heuristics thing you wrote, and see how many up-votes it gets!

Could you explain more what you want, here? 'For Dummies' books are usually on fields for which there is a lot of well-accepted knowledge, but that's not the case with FAI.

Should we be crossing off ones that have already been done?