I have a meta-question regarding my participation style at LW.
I would like to learn how to contribute more positively to the community, rather than being confused and frustrated with the reactions I get to my posts. Is this a teachable skill? And if so, where would I go to learn it? (So far, I've tried asking here, and on #lesswrong, but I never get anything that I can parse into a consistent or actionable model, other than "less posts like this one".)
Fewer links should have nofollow added to them. Any user with karma more than ~100 should get the benefit of the google-juice in their profile and even in any links they add. There is also benefit for the owners of those linked sites and to web denizens in general---the fact that a LW-er with karma > 100 linked to them is important information.
But beyond that, even the internal links on the front page are nofollow! Certainly links to lesswrong.com and the LW Wiki should not have this tag.
I have a specific question and a generalisation of that question.
Specifically, I have recently considered obtaining and working my way through some maths teacher training materials because I want to be better at explaining mathematical concepts (or any concepts, really) to others. I don't know whether this will actually be a productive use of my time. So, a question to educators: are there general theories and principles of this aspect of education (tuition, explaining stuff, etc.) that I could pick up through reading a book, and experience immediate gains from?
More generally, are there any useful heuristics for determining what subjects do or don't have this characteristic of "core principles with immediate gains"? A few hours of self-defence training raise you considerably above zero hours of self-defence training, and reading How to Win Friends and Influence People gives the reader a lot of immediate practical tips that they can start using. Meanwhile, a lot of academic subjects require a considerably greater investment of time and effort before you can actually do anything with them.
I do have a certain level of skepticism as far as this characteristic is concerned. I'm pretty sure someone who's read a decent popular introduction to economics is equipped with a lot of useful principles, but they're probably also equipped with a lot of oversimplified ideas and a great deal of overconfidence in their understanding of the subject.
because I want to be better at explaining mathematical concepts (or any concepts, really) to others.
I'd suggest looking into effective techniques for tutoring, rather than teaching in general. It's both a more marketable skill, as well as more valuable for explaining things to other people. It may be my personality bias showing, though - I'm much more comfortable in 1 on 1 social situations.
As a strategy, I'd spend a few hours looking at how to evaluate the difference between good and bad tutoring, and then head up to anywhere that needs volunteer tutors and start volunteering.
Bold long-term prediction:
"[I predict] that by 2035, almost no country will be as poor as any of the 35 countries that the World Bank classifies as low-income today, even after adjusting for inflation."
Following up on a precommitment I made in the study hall: I am looking into using the Google Hangouts API for a better study hall. This is also a precommitment to follow up by February 1st with:
- some amount of (possibly small) progress
- a precommitment for the next date to announce progress by
Preliminary notes:
- I have a server I can run stuff from. It's not super powerful, but it can handle some work if we need things beyond what a static hosted app/plugin xml file can provide.
- Ideas for things a Study hall should have are here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/gzm/programming_the_lw_study_hall/ . I suggest moving this to and maintaining ideas, plans, and progress on a wiki page. I precommit to having this done by the next progress report if you (yes, you reading this now, specifically) don't do it.
Preliminary thoughts on ways to use API to implement things we want:
- There is an existing pomodoro app under GPL3 we can use as a base: https://code.google.com/p/pom4us/
- We can mute people: https://developers.google.com/+/hangouts/api/gapi.hangout.av#gapi.hangout.av.setMicrophoneMute
- We can change the layout: https://developers.google.com/+/hangouts/api/gapi.hangout.layout (also make chat pane always visible)
Things I don't see an obvious way to do yet and could use help/eyes with:
- I don't see an obvious way to make some users mods
- I don't see an obvious way to ban users or password protect the hangout
Things I will not be focusing on right now:
- multiple rooms. We'll worry about this after we have a working room, and then only if there is sufficient popularity and demand for additional rooms
- branching (see above)
I don't know how other meetups go, but my local meetup is based on the fact that members of the group volunteer to lead the meetup. (on a week by week basis) The person who volunteers puts in some extra amount of their time to ensure that there is a good topic. These people keep the meetups going, and are doing a service for the rationality community.
These people should not be punished with negative karma. If anything, we should be awarding karma for those people who make meetup posts.
Your complaint is about the fact that there is no separate list of meetups and non-meetup posts, and by down voting meetup posts, you are punishing innocent volunteers.
I think not, unless there are only very specific meetup threads that you don't want to see. E.g. ones with no location in the title.
Any individual meetup thread is very valuable for a small number of people, and indifferent-to-mildly-costly to a large number of people. Votes allow you to express a preference direction but not magnitude, which doesn't actually capture preferences in this case.
Have you posted in the Welcome thread?
tldr: Good food, exercise, frequent stretch breaks, meditation, down time afterwards.
(Reposted from the LW facebook group)
The next LW Brussels meetup will be about morality, and I want to have a bunch of moral dilemmas prepared as conversation-starters. And I mean moral dilemmas that you can't solve with one easy utilitarian calculation. Some in the local community have had little exposure to LW articles, so I'll definitely mention standard trolley problems and "torture vs dust specks", but I'm curious if you have more original ones.
It's fine if some of them use words that should really be tabooed. The discussion will double as a taboo exercise.
A lot of what I came up with revolves around the boundaries of sentience. I.e. on a scale that goes from self-replicating amino acid to transhumans (and includes animals, babies, the heavily mentally handicapped...), where do you place things like "I have a moral responsibility to uplift those to normal human intelligence once the technology is available" or "it's fine if I kill/eat/torture those", and how much of one kind of life you'd be willing to trade off for a superior kind. Do I have a moral responsibility to uplift babies? Uh-
Trading off lives for things whose value is harder to put on the same scale is also interesting. I.e. "will you save this person, or this priceless cultural artifact, or this species near extinction." (Yes, I've seen the SMBC.)
Is Biofeedback crank or a promising area of self improvement? Anyone have a personal experiences with the use of GSR, temperature and heart rate biofeedback devices?
Devices include this one and those under frequently bought together.
More info here.
Any thoughts on doing a reboot of the Irrationality Game, as was done in the following old posts?
http://lesswrong.com/lw/2sl/the_irrationality_game/
http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/df8/irrationality_game_ii_electric_boogaloo
I want to study probability and statistics in a deeper way than the Probability and Statistics course I had to take in the university. The problem is, my mathematical education isn't very good (on the level of Calculus 101). I'm not afraid of math, but so far all the books I could find are either about pure application, with barely any explanations, or they start with a lot of assumptions about my knowledge and introduce reams of unfamiliar notation.
I want a deeper understanding of the basic concepts. Like, mean is an indicator of the central tendency of a sample. Intuitively, it makes sense. But why this particular formula of sum/n? You can apply all kinds of mathematical stuff to the sample. And it's even worse with variance...
Any ideas how to proceed?
Which stimulants/eugeroics have a short (< 3 hours) half-life? I did some research into this. Nicotine and selegiline (~1.5 hours) are the shortest I could find. Methylphenidate comes in next (~3.5 hours), but that's longer than I'd like. I don't particularly like any of these choices for various reasons and am interested in learning about others. Alternatively, if there's a way to significantly reduce the half-life of modafinil, I'd like to hear about that.
I've considered amphetamine, armodafinil, atomoxetine, caffeine, ephedrine, methylphenidate, modafinil, nicotine, pseudoephedrine, and selegiline.
Seems relevant for not interfering with sleep. For example, I can't use modafinil after 11AM because it interferes with my sleep that night if taken later; if I take modafinil or armodafinil at 5PM I might as well just skip the night's sleep. On the other hand, I can use caffeine up to 7/8PM without issue, and nicotine up to 10/11PM. (This is unfortunate because I am a bit of an owl and the evening is precisely when I'd like to be able to use a stimulant.)
I'm thinking of doing a science-overview post on boredom, with the intent of working out how to notice and respond to it. How would I go about finding good existing studies on the subject, noting that I don't have access to university resources and have basically no academic training beyond undergrad level?
(this won't happen soon; it's on my Potential Next Projects list after my current project is completed. This is more so I can get an idea of how feasible or difficult such a project will be for me. I'll probably repeat this request if and when I decide to move forward.)
What examples can you give of books that contain discussions of advanced (graduate or research-level) mathematics, similar to what Greg Egan does in his novels (I suppose the majority of such books are hard sci-fi, though I'm not betting on it)? I'm trying to find out what has already been done in the area.
I'd like to go against Robin Hanson's recommendation and tell people to go see Her. The visual direction is beautiful, as one would expect, and quirks like fashion, advertisements, and art are just jarring enough to remind you that its the future. I found it easy to overlook the 'why don't they just buy an AI and make it write the letters' problems because it isn't really a movie about technology changing us, but how relationships and their endings do.