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That's pretty much where I am; traditional school, up through college and grad school. I think my poor habits would have been intensified, however, if I had been unschooled.
My apologies. I took "Would you be happier if you were actually working 40 hours a week?" to be sarcasm, since it seemed like Rain had already answered the question. I hope I didn't offend too greatly.
What do you do? Having something to do, and having something asked of one, is far more fulfilling than being asked to do nothing. Eliezer's example of the exhausted peasant comes to mind. Who would actually enjoy doing nothing all day?
On another note, I don't think anyone has ever shut down their computer in the hopes that it would help them find a file.
Not that this matters, but one of my father's friends frequently asks me for computer help. He was rebooting because he was "missing emails". He was also opening the wrong program (he uses webmail in a browser, but was opening outlook express) in order to find them. For some reason, he thought that "they" had changed the interface on him, and didn't realize he was clicking on the wrong icon.
One of my coworkers (like you, at a government job involving software) had occasionally said "you can only read Dinosaur Comics so many times before you have to find an open-source project to start contributing to".
We created a lot of our own work; we were given a lot of leeway to find and fix problems ourselves, even if the problems hadn't actually appeared yet. We were encouraged to find research areas to work on, and use our time to do that as long as it didn't detract from our other duties, which probably only consumed 4-10 hours a week. So, we had license to work as diligently as we wanted, and for the most part on nearly anything we wanted. However, we generally found that most days, we weren't able to be productive for more than 4-6 hours, and ended up spending a lot of time reading webcomics, writing toy programs, and drinking tea in the break room.
I think for most people, 30 hours of high-quality creative work a week is about their limit. I'm sure some people are exceptions, but some of the most productive programmers I know (from FOSS projects I worked on to government jobs I held and even a stint at Microsoft) spend about half their "day" goofing off.
Is your composure of these comments an example of a human manufacturing products?
I still think using sunlight through an organic / metabolic pathway is more efficient form of manufacturing rational discourse than using solar cells and electricity. Unless, of course, you are not human, which might explain your apparent disregard for human utility, but introduces the question of why you are bothering to converse with one.
Using sugar for human consumption is, in a sense, quite wasteful.
I claim, that given sugar, using it for human consumption is one of the least wasteful things to do with it.
This is still inefficient compared to other means of using the same sunlight.
In the future, if there is an option between powering organic people with sugarcane-produced sugar and powering cybernetic people with solar cells, and we can choose to be either organic or cybernetic, then your argument will be valid—assuming there are no other options, which is silly. For right now, people need food. Converting sunlight into other forms of energy in other ways is fine and good, but personally, I would also like to keep growing food for me and my brethren.
though again this is only sugar-to-mechanical efficiency.
This is a big caveat. A typical person burns much more energy maintaining homeostasis than they do in moving. Following that, brain activity is the second-largest energy sink. While athletes can quadruple their caloric requirements (indicating that mechanical energy can become the largest drain on energy), I think calculating energy conversion with your example is suspect.
I'm not sure what this has to do with the thread, although it is interesting. Can you back up your conclusions with some data? Assuming sucrose is metabolized in the Kegg pathway, the energy generated is easily calculable. I haven't found good numbers on combustion engine efficiency for running on sucrose (how does one design such an engine?); my understanding was that even petrol engines have very low efficiencies, but I could be wrong about that.
(or at least not disputing) the general argument
Also, what I was really thinking was you provided an example of a company that makes beans with sugar. Ostensibly, the only reason to add sugar to canned beans is to make them taste better—though that obviously backfired for at least one of their customers.
Thanks, that answers my question, and even provides an anecdote supporting (or at least not disputing) the general argument.
You might be misunderstanding my point, or I might be underestimating how much you dislike sugar.
McDonalds (and most other fast food companies, I assume) puts sugar on their French Fries, though most people aren't aware of this. Likewise, when I make tomato sauces (for pizza or chicken parmesan or whatever), I add about a teaspoon of honey to each quart of sauce, which doesn't make the sauce taste detectably sweet, but does balance out the acidity and makes the overall taste better. In this way, sugar is sometimes salt-like in that it can improve foods at a threshold that doesn't make them taste sweet or salty.
Obviously, many people do love their day job. However, your question is apt, and I have no answer to it---even with regards to myself. I often have struggled with doing the exact same things at work and for myself, and enjoying one but not the other. I think in my case, it is more an issue of pressure and expectations. However, when trying to answer the question of what I should do with my life, it makes things difficult!
Sodium also provides a fairly potent example that superstimulus theory makes more sense than setpoint theory. Salty foods are tasty because they are salty, not because the lack in other nutrients.
The same appears to be true for sugar. Adding sugar to foods generally makes them taste better (even foods that we don't think of as sweet, like french fries and tomato sauce); if setpoint theory was true, we would expect those foods to taste no different as long as haven't significantly altered the nutrient density.
I think that λ-calculus is about as difficult to work with as Turing machines. I think the reason that Turing gets his name in the Church-Turing thesis is that they had two completely different architectures that had the same computational power. When Church proposed that λ-calculus was universal, I think there was a reaction of doubt, and a general feeling that a better way could be found. When Turing came to the same conclusion from a completely different angle, that appeared to verify Church's claim.
I can't back up these claims as well as I'd like. I'm not sure that anyone can backtrace what occurred to see if the community actually felt that way or not; however, from reading papers of the time (and quite a bit thereafter---there was a long period before near-universal acceptance), that is my impression.
Relevant answer to this question here, recently popularized on Hacker News.
I don't have the book you're referring to. Are you essentially going to walk through a solution for this [pdf], or at least to talk about point #10?
This is a Bayesian problem; the Frequentist answer is the same, just more convoluted because they have to say things like "in 95% of similar situations, the estimate of a and b are within d of the real position of the lighthouse". Alternately, a Frequentist, while always ignorant when starting a problem, never begins wrong. In this case, if the chose prior was very unsuitable, the Frequentist more quickly converges to a correct answer.
Sipser's Introduction to the Theory of Computation is a tiny little book with a lot crammed in. It's also quite expensive, and advanced enough to make most CS students hate it. I have to recommend it because I adore it, but why start there, when you can start right now for free on wikipedia? If you like it, look at the references, and think about buying a used or international copy of one book or another.
I echo the reverent tones of RobinZ and wnoise when it comes to The Art of Computer Programming. Those volumes are more broadly applicable, even more expensive, and even more intense. They make an amazing gift for that computer scientist in your life, but I wouldn't recommend them as a starting point.
I agree with everything Emile and AngryParsley said. I program for work and for play, and use Python when I can get away with it. You can be shocked, that like AngryParsley, I will recommend my favorite language!
I have an additional recommendation though: to learn to program, you need to have questions to answer. My favorite source for fun programming problems is ProjectEuler. It's very math-heavy, and it sounds like you might like learning the math as much as learning the programming. Additionally, every problem, once solved, has a forum thread opened where many people post their solutions in many languages. Seeing better solutions to a problem you just solved on your own is a great way to rapidly advance.
You indicated that you had trouble maintaining the behavior of getting daily morning light. Ask someone who 1) likes talking to you, 2) is generally up at that hour, and 3) is free to talk on the phone, to call you most mornings. They can set an alarm on their phone and have a 2 minute chat with you each day.
In my experience if I can pick up the phone (which admittedly can be difficult), the conversation is enough of a distraction and a motivation to get outside, and then inertia is enough to keep me out there.
The reason I chose my father is that he is an early riser, self-employed, and he would like to talk to me more than he gets to. You might not have someone like that in your life, but if you do, it is minimally intrusive to them, and may be a big help to you.
The study concerns how many hours per week were spent volunteering; some was paid, some was not, though presumably a single organization would either pay or not pay volunteers, rather than both. Paid volunteers worked less per week overall.
The study I referenced was not the one I intended to reference, but I have not found the one I most specifically remember. Citing studies is one of the things I most desperately want an eidetic memory for.
To the contrary. If you pay volunteers, they stop enjoying their work. Other similar studies have been done that show that paying people who already enjoy something will sometimes make them stop the activity altogether, or to at least stop doing it without an external incentive.
Edit: AdeleneDawner and thomblake agree with the parent. This may be a counterargument, or just an answer to my earlier question, namely "Are LessWrongers better able to control this irrational impulse?"
Also, don't offer money. External motivators are disincentives. By offering $100, you are attaching a specific worth to the request, and undermining our own intrinsic motivations to help. Since allowing a reward to disincentivize a behavior is irrational, I'm curious how much effect it has on the LessWrong crowd; regardless, I would be surprised if anyone here tried to collect, so I don't see the point.
There is one boot process that works well, which is to contract an overseer. For me, it was my father. I felt embarrassed to be a grown adult asking for his father's oversight, but it helped when I was at my worst. Now, I have him, my roommate, two ex-girlfriends, and my advisor who are all concerned about me and check up with me on a regular basis. I can be honest with them, and if I've stopped taking care of myself, they'll call or even come over to drag me out of bed, feed me, and/or take me for a run.
I have periodically been an immense burden on the people who love me. However, I eventually came to the realization that being miserable, useless, and isolated was harder and more unpleasant for them than being let in on what was wrong with me and being asked to help. I've been a net negative to this world, but for some reason people still care for me, and as long as they do, my best course of action seems to be to let them try to help me. I suspect you have a set of people who would likewise prefer to help you than to watch you suffer.
Feeling less helpless was nearly as good for them as for me. I have a debt to them that I am continuing to increase, because I'm still not healthy or self-sufficient. I don't know if I can ever repay it, but
I partially agree with this. Somewhere along the way, I learned how to learn. I still haven't really learned how to finish. I think these two features would have been dramatically enhanced had I not gone to school. I think a potential problem with self-educated learners (I know two adults who were unschooled) is that they get much better at fulfilling their own needs and tend to suffer when it comes to long-term projects that have value for others.
The unschooled adults I know are both brilliant and creative, and ascribe those traits to their unconventional upbringing. But both of them work as freelance handymen. They like helping others, and would help other people more if they did something else, but short-term projects are all they can manage. They are polymaths that read textbooks and research papers, and one has even developed a machine learning technique that I've urged him to publish. However, when they get bored, they stop. The chance that writing up his results and releasing them would further research is not enough to get him past that obstacle of boredom.
I have long thought that school, as currently practiced, is an abomination. I have yet to come up with a solution that I'm convinced solves its fundamental problems. For a while, I thought that unschooling was the solution, but these two acquaintances changed my mind. What is your opinion, on the right way to teach and learn?
MixedNuts, I'm in a similar position, though perhaps less severely, and more intermittently. I've been diagnosed with bipolar, though I've had difficulty taking my meds. At this point in my life, I'm being supported almost entirely by a network of family, friends, and associates that is working hard to help me be a real person and getting very little in return.
I have one book that has helped me tremendously, "The Depression Cure", by Dr. Ilardi. He claims that depression-spectrum disorders are primarily caused by lifestyle, and that almost everyone can benefit from simple changes. As any book--especially a self-help book---it ought to be read skeptically, and it doesn't introduce any ideas that can't be found in modern psychological research. Rather, it aggregates what in Ilardi's opinion are the most important: exercise works more effectively than SSRIs, etc.
If you really want a copy, and you really can't get one yourself, I will send you one if you can send me your address. It helped me that much. Which is not to say that I am problem free. Still, a 40% reduction in problem behavior, after 6 months, with increasing rather than decreasing results, is a huge deal for me.
Rather, I want to give you your "one trick". It is the easiest rather than the most effective; but it has an immediate effect, which helped me implement the others. Morning sunlight. I don't know where you live; I live in a place where I can comfortably sit outside in the morning even this time of year. Get up as soon as you can after waking, and wake as early in the day as you would ideally like to. Walk around, sit, or lie down in the brightest area outside for half an hour. You can go read studies on why this works, or that debate its efficacy, but for me it helps.
I realize that your post didn't say anything about depression; just lack of willpower. For me, they were tightly intertwined, and they might not be for you. Please try it anyway.
RobinZ ventured a guess that their true objection was not their stated objection; I stated it poorly, but I was offering the same hypothesis with a different true objection--that you were disrupting the flow of the game.
I'm not entirely sure if this makes sense, partially because there is no reason to disguise unhappiness with an unusual order of game play. From what you've said, your friends worked to convince you that their objection was really about which cards were being dealt, and in this instance I think we can believe them. My fallacy was probably one of projection, in that I would have objected in the same instance, but for different reasons. I was also trying to defend their point of view as much as possible, so I was trying to find a rational explanation for it.
I suspect that the real problem is related to the certainty effect. In this case, though no probabilities were altered, there was a new "what-if" introduced into the situation. Now, if they lose (or rather, when all but one of you lose) they will likely retrace the situation and think that if you hadn't cut the deck, they could have won. Which is true, of course, but irrelevant, since it also could have gone the other way. However, the same thought process doesn't occur on winning; people aren't inclined to analyze their successes in the say way that they analyze their failures, even if they are both random events. The negative emotion associated with feeling like a victory is stolen would be enough to preemptively object and prevent that from occurring in the first place.
However, even if what I said above is true, I don't think it really addresses the problem of adjusting their map to match the territory. That's another question entirely.
When you deal Texas Hold'em, do you "burn" cards in the traditional way? Neither I nor most of my friends think that those cards are special, but it's part of the rules of the game. Altering them, even without [suspicion of] malicious intent breaks a ritual associated with the game.
While in this instance, the ritual doesn't protect the integrity of the game, rituals can be very important in getting into and enjoying activities. Humans are badly wired, and Less Wrong readers work hard to control our irrationalities. One arena in which I see less need for that is when our superstitious and pattern-seeking behaviors let us enjoy things more. I have a ritual for making coffee. I enjoy coffee without it, but I can reach a near-euphoric state with it. Faulty wiring, but I see no harm in taking advantage of it.