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Comment by gudamor on Stupid Questions August 2015 · 2015-08-06T03:34:00.724Z · LW · GW

I have no idea which of the below are true, or to what extent: 1) They're not off-putting to everyone; you are not the target audience 2) Being off-putting is valuable, as decreasing voter turnout benefits their strategy 3) Being off-putting does not matter, as they remain effective regardless 4a) No one is checking if these are effective 4b) The people who DO check if these are effective have a vested interest in showing they are

If no one is gathering data on the effectiveness, then the next best strategy is to copy your competitor.

Comment by gudamor on Bragging thread August 2015 · 2015-08-06T03:21:11.570Z · LW · GW

Promotion and a raise!

Comment by gudamor on Open Thread, Jul. 27 - Aug 02, 2015 · 2015-08-04T05:33:23.384Z · LW · GW

Instead of real-time directional data, could you improve your sense of direction with training? Something like: estimate North, pull out phone and check, score your estimate, iterate. I imagine this could rapidly be mastered for your typical locations, such that you no longer need to pull out your phone at all.

Comment by gudamor on Open Thread, Jul. 6 - Jul. 12, 2015 · 2015-07-07T02:39:43.479Z · LW · GW

"searching for groups to join that are at least adjacent to my interests." Why limit it even to these? To extend your analogy: if you're about to fall over dead from starvation, you'd accept most any food.

Common hardship is great for quickly cementing group relationships. You could volunteer time at a charity that will throw together a random group of people at sweaty, repetitive work for an afternoon. You could join a sports team and coalesce around hatred of your rivals.

Comment by gudamor on A Federal Judge on Biases in the Criminal Justice System. · 2015-07-06T12:41:32.510Z · LW · GW

Let's cut to the reforms, listed below with their headers.

  1. Require open file discovery.
  2. Adopt standardized, rigorous procedures for dealing with the government’s disclosure obligations
  3. Adopt standardized, rigorous procedures for eyewitness identification.
  4. Video record all suspect interrogations.
  5. Impose strict limits on the use of jailhouse informants.
  6. Adopt rigorous, uniform procedures for certifying expert witnesses and preserving the integrity of the testing process.
  7. Keep adding conviction integrity units.
  8. Establish independent Prosecutorial Integrity Units.

C. Judges

  1. Enter Brady compliance orders in every criminal case.
  2. Engage in a Brady colloquy.
  3. Adopt local rules that require the government to comply with its discovery obligations without the need for motions by the defense.
  4. Condition the admission of expert evidence in criminal cases on the presentation of a proper Daubert showing.
  5. When prosecutors misbehave, don’t keep it a secret.

D. Miscellaneous

  1. Abandon judicial elections.
  2. Abrogate absolute prosecutorial immunity.
  3. Repeal AEDPA § 2254(d).
  4. Treat prosecutorial misconduct as a civil rights violation.
  5. Give criminal defendants the choice of a jury or bench trial.
  6. Conduct in depth studies of exonerations.
  7. Repeal three felonies a day for three years.
Comment by gudamor on Open Thread, Jun. 29 - Jul. 5, 2015 · 2015-07-03T04:33:15.346Z · LW · GW

The other responses are absolutely correct. If they clarified things for you, great! However, you indicated that your intuition wasn't getting you to the correct answer, so let's try to formulate these into a new intuition.

You are starting along a path from left to right. The left side is where you started, and way over on the right side are different outcomes. The 'chances' you mention above are forks in the path, and you are taking each path with some probability.

At the first fork there are two paths, one in which A happened and one in which A did not. The path where A happened is picked 23% of the time. These two paths (A and not A) each branch again at the second fork, one in which B happened and one in which B did not. At this fork, the path where B happened is picked 48% of the time.

Two forkings means there is a total of 4 end points: One for (A, B), one for (A, not B), one for (not A, B), and one for (not A, not B).

The chance of ending up in each endpoint is equal to the product of chances. If A happens with 23% chance and B happens with 48% chance, then both happening is (0.23 times 0.48). The chance of something not happening is (1.00-(chance of happening)). So, (A, not B) is (0.23 times (1.00-0.48)) (not A, B) is ((1.00-0.23) times 0.48) and lastly: (not A, not B) is ((1.00-0.23) times (1.00-0.48))

When you say you want either, you are saying that you consider the (not A, not B) endpoint unacceptable, but that you are satisfied with the other three: (A, B), (A, not B), and (not A, B) are all equally good.

RolfAndreassen is showing that you can find the probability of either A or B by taking a double negative: since the chance of something not happening is (1.00-(chance of happening)), we can take (1.00-(chance I end up in the single bad endpoint)) which is equal to (1.00-(chance I end up at (not A, not B)) = (1.00 - ((1.00-0.23) times (1.00-0.48)))

Sarunas is showing that naively adding the probabilities of A and B returns too large a value. Only by subtracting out the probability of (A, B) can it be corrected.

Intuiting the probabilities as branching paths I found very helpful, especially when you get to situations where the probabilities depend on eachother. See http://www.yudkowsky.net/rational/bayes/ for an example

Hope this helps!

Comment by gudamor on Selecting vs. grooming · 2015-07-02T04:35:03.764Z · LW · GW

Is it better to be a bigger fish in a small pond or to be a member of the most dignified pond? It probably depends on how exactly the above analogy breaks down.

Perhaps the better way to cut these different conclusions is whether competition is within-group or versus other groups.

Comment by gudamor on Solving sleep: just a toe-dipping · 2015-07-02T02:02:59.911Z · LW · GW

The link in source 2 appears to be broken:

2National Sleep Foundation. (2011, March 7). Annual Sleep in America Poll Exploring Connections with Communications Technology Use and Sleep. Retrieved August 17, 2011, from http://www.sleepfoundation.org/article/press-release/annual-sleep-america-poll- exploring-connections-communications-technology-use-.

Comment by gudamor on Group rationality diary for June 22th - July 11th 2015 · 2015-06-26T05:58:26.452Z · LW · GW
  1. Thanks!
  2. 175 will definitely trigger some sort of reevaluation, but I am not planning to toss out my workout routine or attention to what I am eating. By also continuing frequent measurement I hope to avoid bouncing back.
  3. Strongly considering the Fitbit Charge HR due to recommendations from a few friends with them. Do you have any experience on these?
Comment by gudamor on Open Thread, Jun. 22 - Jun. 28, 2015 · 2015-06-26T01:16:27.189Z · LW · GW

I don't know of Sam Altman, so maybe this criticism is wrong, but the quote: "If you join a company, my general advice is to join a company on a breakout trajectory. There are a usually a handful of these at a time, and they are usually identifiable to a smart young person." Absent any guides on how to identify breakout trajectory companies, this advice seems unhelpful. It feels like: "Didn't work for you? You must not have been a smart young person or you would have picked the right company."

Paired with the paragraph below on not letting salary be a factor, I am left with the suspicion that Sam runs what he believes to be a company with a 'breakout trajectory' and pays noncompetitive salaries.

Now to find a way to test that suspicion.

Comment by gudamor on Group rationality diary for June 22th - July 11th 2015 · 2015-06-26T00:55:28.360Z · LW · GW

Chemistry so far. Control theory next.

I had weighed at most 200 and at least 150 pounds since 2007. I set my target at 175 pounds as a 5'10" male.

Absolutely, but I decided that I could not justify it. I travel for work and would prefer not to have the extra weight and space of it.

Comment by gudamor on Group rationality diary for June 22th - July 11th 2015 · 2015-06-23T03:33:21.133Z · LW · GW

I have habitually recorded my weight since February of this year.

This is great because historically "paying attention to my weight" has lead to the desired weight-loss.

Recently I moved beyond reading about Spaced Repetition to actually downloading Anki and creating some notes.

Comment by gudamor on Language Learning and the Dark Arts. · 2015-04-08T05:00:31.074Z · LW · GW

Is there any way you could give yourself a precommitment? You said you want to pass the Chinese proficiency exam by 2017; can you take the time/money to register for it now, ahead of time? If you know that you are already on the hook to take the test "January 16th at 3pm" you would be motivated to not waste that investment.

I have been using Duolingo to learn Spanish. However, I also struggled with practicing as much/as frequently as I wanted. I started minding it using Beeminder's data integration, which has so far kept me consistent.

I think what is benefiting me is the positive reinforcement of Duolingo's "earning points and leveling up, yay!" plus the threat of losing money if I don't meet my targets in Beeminder (even though I do not yet have money pledged to the goal, I know that I would commit to do so after my first derailment).