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Perfect timing.. I had run into my therapist at a mutual event and had panicked.. Was wondering why? and how do I deal with similar situation in the future.. (it's very likely to happen again, as we have quite a bit in common and are in the same city).
Very valid and good point(added). I briefly touched on it before too, but mostly had individual practitioners in mind than organized hospitals with administration and support. (India is moving towards a lot more of the organized hospitals model, but IT is non-existent, administration is most seat-in-the-ass jobs)
Thanks that's clearer.. will update...
Dates changed.. See http://www.meetup.com/Bangalore-LessWrongers-Meetup/events/221944253/
Unreliable memory.. but here's a less opinionated, and closer to original sounding one.. although the source is dodgy.
And she felt hungry. And that also made no sense. The stomach was a bag for digesting food. It wasn't supposed to issue commands. The Auditors could survive quite well by exchanging molecules with their surroundings and making use of any local source of energy. That was a fact.
Try telling that to the stomach. She could feel it. It was sitting there, grumbling. She was being harassed by her internal organs. Why the ... why the. . why had they copied internal organs? Yuerkkk.
Frome here.
I think Terry Pratchett makes this point well, in "The thief of time". Can't find the exact quote, but here goes my paraphrasing from memory
"Human beings make decisions by committee. The stomach has a mind of its, own and wants to put food in the mouth.
I disagree. I'm not sure it's provable(maybe in professional poker players??), but if you've played the bet a lot of times, you could have come up with cues* about whether your friend has got the same roll(or number on the die) as the last time or not.
- -- not sure how verbalizable or not it is .(which implies harder to teach to someone else).
OK, so "there could be cases where it is rational to update." How would you do so?
(I can't understand what an update could reasonably change. You aren't going to make the probability of any particular side more than 1/6, so what is the new probability?)
I don't know either. I can make up a scenario, based on a series of die throws, history of win-losses and guesses based on that, but that would simply be conjecture, and still may not produce a reasonable process. However, this discussion reminded me of a scene in HPMOR. (The scene where HP's critic part judges that Miss Camblebunker was not a Doctor, but an actor. (After Bellatrix is broken out of prison.))
What does it mean to have uncertainty reduction taking place outside of the frame of reference of the person being asked for a decision?
You're assuming humans are rational(as in the AI definition of a rational agent). We're not. So this knowledge that other person knows something for sure, that we don't know about, colours/biases one's judgement.
I am not saying one should update their beliefs based on another person knowing or not knowing, but that we do anyway, as part of perception. I would argue, that we should be learning to notice the confusion between the rational side of us vs the perceptive side which notes (the other agent's) confidence/lack there of. I know it is a hand-wavy explanation, but my point stands nevertheless. I agree with the OP that one shouldn't update their beliefs on the basis of Naomi/camera having no certainty about the outcome(of coin toss). Simply say that if it is Naomi, there could be cases where it is rational to update, though hard to actually observe/be-aware of these updations and therefore, safer to not update.
Ah.... "genuine uncertainty" the term reminds me of "no true scotsman argument". My point being, there's an uncertainty reduction before and after the die was rolled, not to say this means, I should update my belief about the die's rolled/winning value.
Simply put my friend Naomi's beliefs have been updated and uncertainty in her mind has been eliminated. I think the author was trying to point out that most people conflate the two differences. It definitely is well worded for rhetoric, but not for pedagogy(in Feynman sense).
I don't know about this idea. For most of my career, I've tried to be sidekick in the sense of trying to fulfill someone else's goals with say a secondary goal of mine that ties in to that primary goal, but it has always ended up in conflicts, where I couldn't simply bring myself to ignore the hero's stance/decision(and still work with him/her). Is that a good enough reason to try to be a hero? This post still resonates with me, but that doesn't mean am about to go around hero's for whom I can be a sidekick. Majority of the empirical evidence that I've (personal experience) accumulated suggests, that won't really work.
May be the distinction is not as sharp as you think/believe it is?
You are right. I was guilty of repeating from memory an oversimplified quote. The wikipedia page points out that it was misworded quote by Rudolf Clausius. Thanks for pointing out.
This is something, I find a lot of people don't realize(by virtue of never testing their boundaries). It's not that the universe* has become suddenly maleficient, it was indifferent / mildly maleficient(think increasing entropy rule, if you prefer), we just didn't realize it and it's getting harder to ignore.
*-- Edit Clarification: Universe - Humans. (- being set difference here.)
There is a good case to be made that this one remaining true "why"-question, which does not reduce to merely some one-level-lower description, is actually ill-formed and doesn't make sense.
Am Douglas Adams on this one. 42 is the answer, we don't know the question. Seriously, though I've gotten to a stage where I don't wonder much about the one 'why' axiom anymore*. Thanks for the clarification though.
*-- Used to wonder some 10 years ago though.
eventually the truth/reality/answer is indifferent to the phrasing of the question (as why/how). I do think phrasing it as how makes it easier to answer(in the instrumental sense) than why. Also what is the exception, am not aware of it, please point me.
Ah.. a compiled program running on limited computing resources(memory, cpu etc..). I kinda think the metaphor assumes that implicitly. Perhaps it results in a leaky abstraction for most others(i.e: not working with computers), but i don't really see it as a problem.
Agree 'how' is more accurate than why.
But, as compiler optimizations exploit increasingly recondite properties of the programming language definition, we find ourselves having to program as if the compiler were our ex-wife’s or ex-husband’s divorce lawyer, lest it introduce security bugs into our kernels, as happened with FreeBSD a couple of years back with a function erroneously annotated as noreturn, and as is happening now with bounds checks depending on signed overflow behavior.
This worked out good enough. We played the Guess the number principle game, tried the wason card test, and planned for future meetup ideas. Here's a set of pics. https://plus.google.com/photos/110235589351841913894/albums/6084556792473790881?banner=pwa . *
- -- I haven't named/tagged anyone, but if you're still uncomfortable with public sharing pics, let me know on the mailing list.
but it seems to be almost exactly 1, possibly slightly higher. (I am unambiguously male, which makes me wonder if my methodology is bad) Well I had a similar problem(tried to measure with tape directly next & parallel to the fingers) and instead drew the outline of my spread out palm on a sheet of paper and got 1.01.
This is also the same reason I like Alan Perlis's quote on programming languages. Paraphrased it reads "There's no point in learning a new language that doesn't teach you a new way of thinking." I equate "the new way of thinking" with maps here.
Changed to Nov.15th. I won't be checking this page often. If you want to discuss the actual dates do it on the meetup site link above.
Can we take these discussions to meetup. Am happy to change dates, as it works for me, but last time there was a mess up due to continuous mess-ups.
Couldn't find a bangalore specific group so started a google group and a meetup group. Here are the links below. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/bangalore-lesswrongers.
http://www.meetup.com/Bangalore-LessWrongers-Meetup/. Have also scheduled a first meetup for Nov. 14th. Let's see how many turn up.
The only part I object to what you wrote is emotions shouldn't interfere with cognition. I think they already are a part of cognition and it's a bit like calling "quantum physics is weird". Perhaps you meant "emotions shouldn't interfere with rationality" in which case I'll observe that it doesn't seem to be a popular view around lesswrong. Also observe, I used to believe that emotions should be ignored, but later came to the conclusion that it's a way too heavy-handed strategy for the modern world of complex systems. I'll try to conjecture further, by saying, cog, psychologists tend to classify emotion, affect, and moods differently. AFAIK, it's based on the temporal duration it exists with short - long in order of emotion, mood, affect. My conjecture is emotions can and should be ignored, mood can be ignored ( but not necessarily should) and affect should not be ignored, while rational decision-making.
While some parts of me agree with it, there are other parts that set off alarms like: but judges will try to use this as a rationalization for what looks like a kind behaviour(by habit, social proof) instead of trying to evaluate the justness, especially when it looks like it's complex or is likely to threaten one of their biased beliefs.
Oh well nobody showed up.. Guess nobody was interested. If am wrong someone else post another meetup. Thanks. Cya.. Anand
Ok anybody here yet?
Besides, Am hoping people will be interested in meeting regularly. So let's see later(say next month then)
Sure.. As of now, I am hoping we can have something ongoing on a monthly basis at the very least. I'll set up a meetup account based on how it turns out this saturday. 21st. Perhaps you could make it?
Hi, I am going ahead with the saturday evening schedule.
Sorry dude. There are other people who are interested and I can't change it now. We can meetup personally, though not sure what will come out of that.
As regards to the actual agenda, We can have two parts.
- A rationality game (First thought like this http://acritch.com/credence-game/, or this http://rationality.org/calibration/) or something else.
- Ideas/feedback about what each of us want to get out this lesswrong meetups. (Personally, right now am looking forward to learning how to introduce rational thinking in more aspects of my thinking).
Hi, Let's change that date to June 21st evening 5:30 PM. There is a coffee shop inside leela palace. It's called "Lavazza". Let's meet there. I'll post my contacts 3-4 days before the meetup. Comment/reply if you have trouble with that date.
@Anand: Cool.. Let me check out the rationality meetup guide.. I'll look out for activity/agenda planning for a group of under 10.
Am not sure I follow your comment. I think I get the basic gist of it and I agree with it, but I gotta ask. Did you really mean ostend(or was it a typo?)?. I can't really find it as a word in m-w.com or on google.
But then the problem is not having the shared experience. If they did, they would just need to apply an arbitrary label,
Yes.. If they had the shared experience, they would just need to apply an arbitrary label, however given how we learn language(by association based on how they are used by people around us on what we see as objective events/experiences), I am not too confident the labels will match even after having the shared experience. My previous comment assumes this, but did not make it explicit. And I derive the
The reason why the thing can't be expressed is that it's too definite for language
quote from that assumption. I may be wrong about the assumption (since it seems to be more of a thought experiment than a practical experiment at the moment) but nevertheless I assign fairly high probability/confidence on that.
And this seems like a situation described in the text. -- But then the problem is not having the shared experience.
I tend to think of language as a symbolic system to denote/share/communicate these experiences with other brains. Ofcourse, there's the inherent challenge of seldom two experiences are same.(Even if it is an experiment on electrons). It's one of the reason, one of my sci-fi favourite scenario is brain-brain interfaces, that figure some way to interpret and transfer the empirical heuristic rules about a probability distribution(of any given event) one person has to another. Or may be am just being too idealistic about people always having such heuristics in their heads. (even if they are not aware of it) . :-)
I tend to disagree.. I have done some things which I thought was experimenting with but did not come up with any clear conclusion after the experiment and analysis. On rewriting the thesis it turned out there were a lot more implicit assumptions inside the hypothesis that I was not aware of. I think it was a badly designed experiment and it was rather unproductive in retrospective analysis. I suppose one could argue that it brought to light the implicit assumptions and that was a useful result. Somehow(not sure how or why) I find that a low standard to consider something an experiment.
Thanks for this one.. It's been some time since I re-read Douglas Adams , and had forgotten how good he can be. It makes so much sense reading this right after reading "Bind yourself to Reality". Had good long guffaw out of this one .:-)
Cool.. Am in Bangalore though. And not sure about my plans for Dec. 15th, as am between jobs. Will make it if I can though.
I had come across this link, when I was looking to start a meetup in bangalore. http://lesswrong.com/lw/crs/how_to_run_a_successful_less_wrong_meetup/
I was disappointed. I thought that Buffett's time, used to pick good charities, could be far more valuable than his money
I am not sure about this one. Buffett's skillset in picking very good investments, might not transfer to picking good charities. Or at the very least, he might need to spend some time practicing before getting good? Not to mention validation cycle time on charities vary(am not sure how much more than investments) and Buffett considered his time better spent investing, and not acquiring skill at charity picking?
Agree the animal metaphor doesn't help very well. I have some stereotype for fox (cunningness, slyness, trickster etc...), but draw a blank for hedgehog.
As to whether the dichotomy is real, well I think it's a useful model to question one's judgement. A better question would be is it more useful than say "system1 vs system2 " model (or pick another model.).
In a less regular, or low-validity, environment, the heuristics of judgement are invoked. System 1 is often able to produce quick answers to difficult questions by substitution, creating coherence where there is none. The question that is answered is not the one that was intended, but the answer is produced quickly and may be sufficiently plausible to pass the lax and lenient review of System 2. You may want to forecast the commercial future of a company, for example, and believe that this is what you are judging, while in fact your evaluation is dominated by your impressions of the energy and competence of its current executives. Because substitution occurs automatically, you often do not know the origin of a judgement that you (your System 2) endorse and adopt. If it is the only one that comes to mind, it may be subjectively undistinguishable from valid judgements that you make with expert confidence. This is why subjective confidence is not a good diagnostic of accuracy: judgements that answer the wrong question can also be made with high confidence.
~Daniel Kahneman (Thinking fast and slow)
The hedgehog and the Fox: Hedgehogs "know one big thing" and have a theory about the world; they account for particular events within a coherent framework, bristle with impatience toward those who don't see things their way, and are confident in their forecasts. They are also especially reluctant to admit error. For hedgehogs, a failed prediction is almost always "off only on timing" or "very nearly right". They are opinionated and clear, which is exactly what television producers love to see on programs. Two hedgehogs on different sides of an issue, each attacking the idiotic ideas of the adversary, make for a good show. Foxes, by contrast, are complex thinkers. They don't believe that one big thing drives the march of history (for example they are unlikely to accept the view that Ronald Reagan single-handedly ended the cold war by standing tall against the Soviet Union). Instead the foxes recognize that reality emerges from interactions of many different agents and forces, including blind luck, often producing large and unpredictable outcomes.
~ Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, fast and slow)
Agreed. I always skimmed over that claim and never wondered why. The map vs territory analogy makes a lot of sense. After all the 'Mu' is an answer to a question. And the question is based on some map of the territory. Thanks for triggering that series of clicks in my mind. :)
Too big! Seriously, this post contains too many elements to readily reply to in a coherent way.
Is that a problem? I tried to address it with the tl;dr and the conclusion.
I didn't find it too big. I just found it too bundled up, but that's probably because the topic is naturally like that. By 'bundled up' I mean, I found the article felt as if it interleaves too many concepts without first trying to make them all explicit. That said, am working on an article along lines of (introverts/intrinsic motivation vs extroverts/extrinsic motivation) so i understand the complexity involved.
I've heard, from some of the world's best artists, notions ranging from "magic" to "perfection" to "muse" to "God."
Elizabeth Gilbert presents a reasonably practical justification for the use of such a concept. See [here] (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86x-u-tz0MA). Warning: TED talk and generous use of "reasonable"
Mu means "no thing." Like "quality" it points outside the process of dualistic discrimination. Mu simply says, "no class: not one, not zero, not yes, not no." It states that the context of the question is such that a yes and a no answer is in error and should not be given. "Unask the question" is what it says.
.... [Somewhere later]
That Mu exists in the natural world investigated by science is evident. […] The dualistic mind tends to think of Mu occurrences in nature as a kind of contextual cheating, or irrelevance, but Mu is found through all scientific investigation, and nature doesn't cheat, and nature's answers are never irrelevant. It's a great mistake, a kind of dishonesty to sweep nature's Mu answers under the carpet. […]
When your answer to a test is indeterminate it means one of two things: that your test procedures aren't doing what you think they are or that your understanding of the context of the question needs to be enlarged. Check your tests and restudy the question. Don't throw away those Mu answers! They're every bit as vital as the yes and no answers. They're more vital. They're the ones you grow on.
--- Robert M Pirsig (Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance.
It is tempting but false to regard adopting someone else's beliefs as a favor to them, and rationality as a matter of fairness, of equal compromise. Therefore it is written "Do not believe you do others a favor if you accept their arguments; the favour is to you." -- Eliezer Yudkowsky
Ok May be that misses context. Further down in the text he categories 5 types of deception:
- Outright lying and fabrication of evidence
- Misdirection
- Withholding of information
- Equivocation or sharing information in ambiguous ways
- Not-correcting others.
Hope that helps