Comment by ellx on Rationality Quotes August 2011 · 2011-08-07T02:44:26.364Z · LW · GW

could someone please explain this one?

Comment by ellx on Open Thread, February 2011 · 2011-02-10T02:43:35.502Z · LW · GW

It seems to me that on lesswrong there is an overemphasis on status as a human motivator. For example, I think it's possible for a scientist to want to make an important discovery not to gain status in the scientific community but for the beauty of knowledge.

It seems it's a similar situation to the 'if you're a hammer you see all problems as nails' kind of situation, where 'doing it for status' is such a readily thought of thing that it gets over applied.

thoughts?

Comment by ellx on Working hurts less than procrastinating, we fear the twinge of starting · 2011-01-03T00:36:49.770Z · LW · GW

yeah, i was thinking that this could be correctly titled 'the article which tries to convince you to stop reading it'.

Comment by ellx on I didn't want to have to do this but... · 2010-11-27T08:12:20.837Z · LW · GW

is your post missing some of what you intended it to say?

if you wanted someone on lesswrong to know and be able to confirm that this game has rubberband AI then it's obviously very off-topic here

Comment by ellx on Open Thread: July 2010, Part 2 · 2010-07-14T10:30:16.837Z · LW · GW

I'm curious what peoples opinions are of Jeff Hawkins' book 'on intelligence', and specifically the idea that 'intelligence is about prediction'. I'm about halfway through and I'm not convinced, so I was wondering if anybody could point me to further proofs of this or something, cheers

Comment by ellx on Open Thread June 2010, Part 2 · 2010-06-07T11:59:57.434Z · LW · GW

I'd like to hear what people think about calibrating how many ideas you voice versus how confident you are in their accuracy.

For lack of a better example, i recall eliezer saying that new open threads should be made quadanually, once per season, but this doesn't appear to be the optimum amount. Perhaps eliezer misjudged how much activity they would receive and how fast they would fill up or he has a different opinion on how full a thread has to be to make it time for a new thread, but for sake of the example lets assume that eliezer was wrong and that the current one or two threads per month is better than quadanually. Should eliezer have recalibrated his confidence on this and never said it because its chance of being right was too low or would lowering his confidence on ideas be counter productive and is it optimal for people to have confidence in the ideas that they voice even it causes them to say some things which aren't right.

I suppose this is of importance to me because I think I might be better off if i lowered how judgemental i am of people who say things which are wrong and also lowered how judgemental i am of the ideas i have because i might be putting too much weight on people voicing ideas which are wrong.

Comment by ellx on Rationality Quotes: February 2010 · 2010-02-02T05:24:29.260Z · LW · GW

also, don't forget to consider that the cat is conscious and might not like getting hit by pennies :)

Comment by ellx on Play for a Cause · 2010-01-30T03:23:08.358Z · LW · GW

I never really got into playing starcraft because of the primitive interface, i could never really enjoy playing it, but I am into watching korean matches with english commentarys on youtube.

I think that the primitive interface makes the game less enjoyable for me, but doesn't add 'fake difficulty'. I like that its a very difficult game to play well in terms of micro and macro, and then on top of that starcraft is also rich in strategy and 'tradition' (for some reason I like that starcraft is a very old game)