one important thing about me
sometimes i say i have no time and then need to do something important. and then do something that doesn’t seem time-critical. the one thing with me, though, is that when i do have some ideas, i HAVE to write them down because otherwise i’ll forget them (which is one of my big fears). not only do i forget them, but then i remember that i had the idea, so then i waste hours trying to search for whatever idea i used to have that i really liked in myself.
List of hypotheses I once considered crazy, but now which i see as having points
this will be updated with time. i’m trying to make this list so that i can make more accurate predictions in the future. this is related to the Calibrated Probability Assessment - a test to assess one’s overconfidence/underconfidence.
research ideas i proposed that were later independently proposed (and worked out) by someone else
- habitable exoplanets around evolved stars due to sun shields (and their detectability) – independently proposed by Ray Pierrehumbert
- I once emailed the Wild Dolphin Project, suggesting that they crowdsource their dolphin videos so that the public could decode dolphin communication for once and for all. I didn’t get a reply, but a later idea along the same vein came up several months later (http://www.whale.fm)
- Could we get more measurements of conditions below sea ice if we simply attached sensors to penguins, seals, fish, and whales? (didn’t know it was already done by the time I asked the question)
ideas i was initially resistant to, but later accepted:
- paleolithic diet (i used to be strongly pro-vegetarian). but now the evidence for some implementations for this is pretty compelling. refined grains are a much bigger threat to health
- vegetarians might actually live no longer than non-vegetarians (once you control for SES and health habits). but meat still has several risks not found in plant food (just that these risks aren’t strong enough to affect statistical measurements to a level of significance) – methionine, pesticide accumulation from food chain
- that grammar/punctuation/capitalization really doesn’t matter.
- that standardized tests matter a lot less than i used to believe. and same with grades
- connection between gum health/tooth decay *and* heart disease (seriously, it sounds so crazy, but it’s true due to inflammation getting into the rest of the body). A crazier (but still possibly true) connection might be sun exposure and inflammation (even exposure to UVA rays can cause inflammation that could possibly spread)
- that there is nothing morally wrong with drugs, sex, or having outside non-academic interests
- panspermia (the credibility of it anyways, though it still might not have happened in this solar system). asteroid that made the dinosaurs extinct collided so hard that it ejected debris from Earth that went *so far* that it went HALFWAY to the moon and back (but 10% of the material went off into space – seriously increasing my posterior probability that panspermia actually might have happened)
ideas i was resistant to probably due to assumptions I had shared with the rest of society + my intrinsic skepticism of wishful thinking (even though they were ideas that were highly compatible with my belief system+personality), but later accepted. in other words, in favor of wishful thinking, but so contrary to expectation that i corrected for that wishful thinking.
- crowdsourcing
- Wikipedia
- aubrey de gray’s SENS (his implementation may be wishful thinking, but the basic science is not)
- unschooling
- best way to prevent skin aging: avoid the Sun. See picture at http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-best-way-for-a-woman-in-her-40s-to-make-her-skin-look-younger/answer/Alex-K-Chen
- penguin intelligence (especially gentoo penguins, wow)
- some of PETA’s arguments (they said not to eat fish due to mercury). i thought they were using lame arguments to bolster their claims. but turns out, that argument has a lot of legitimacy. same thing with PETA and arguing that animals are often contaminated with fecal matter + pesticides. not saying that i support what they do (i’m indifferent)
- UW Academy
- low conscientiousness + high intelligence => high creativity
- getting a laptop in college was super-beneficial to me (because i didn’t get one freshman year, and the end result was that i ALWAYS slept in the physics/astro building because i was addicted to the internet, and there is no way to control that now)
somewhat crazy ideas (inconclusive evidence)
- that increased education funding does not necessarily imply better outcomes.
crazy ideas i proposed that later turned out to actually *have* points: (even though i didn’t even believe them when i first stated them). in many cases, i just wanted some way to merge two things together even though i thought they weren’t really mergeable. but actually they were more than i thought
- in 8th grade, i proselytized vegetarianism. anyways, i wanted to think of justifications for vegetarianism that didn’t involve animal rights (since they’re more likely to convince people). anyways, the methane from all these cows was the justification i thought about. back then, i thought the effect was minimal so i thought that i was making an ingenuous argument. well, as i found out several years later, their contribution actually can be pretty significant..
- using CAM3 to model exoplanetary atmospheres
- rogue planets, stable atmospheres, and their ability to be detected. i proposed that idea in my meeting with kasting (well actually i only asked about his interest in rogue planets). anyways, i didn’t think that the chances of achieving a significant result were high. but 6 months later, a paper comes out showing that significant results might actually be possible (both with rogue planets+life ) and rogue planets+detectability
- parallel computing for exoplanets. okay, so i sometimes just say random things just to integrate my interests together even though it’s wishful thinking. and i said that in my meeting with kasting. but as it turns out, parallel computing is necessary for 3D exoplanet modelling
- the idea that wikipedia and facebook would both massively expand way back in 2005 (in 2005, they both seemed crazy. in 2010, EVERYONE knows their merits)
- cascadia subduction zone and methane clathrates
- global warming and increased variability in wintertime temperatures (vs variability in temperatures elsewhere)
- SETI@Home for climate simulations (where user actually sees the output his computer generated): an idea i proposed – then i found out that someone had already implemented the idea
- putting sensors on animals for the sake of making earth science measurements (cheaply too!)
- computer games for making friends/socializing with ppl
- pre-calculus in 9th grade summer even though i was lazy and skeptical that i was ready for 10th grade calc (turns out that it was WELL worth it)
- self-studying 4 APs in 10th grade
- PBio 504
- putting in unnecessary things in emails/posts for the 1 in 1000 chance that the reader actually MIGHT find it extremely interesting and mention something completely unexpected (sometimes it’s even a potential goldmine)
- benefits of video games+internet culture (turns out that talking about video games+internet culture is an excellent way to meet nerds)
- also, proposing certain controversial ideas online. the truth is, some people are more likely to spend more time online than others, and many who do spend more time online are also simultaneously more receptive to those controversial ideas than average. so it’s funny
-cloud computing (had thought of that, didn’t know the name at the time)
-hoarding EVERYTHING from my past life: turns out that psychology research shows that old people get much happier when put in environments that resembled their childhood pasts (i’ll cite it alter). also, i did not anticipate the age of digitization (which slowed down the accumulation of material, and which may someday mean that i can just digitize my papers and no longer have to keep them)
not ONLY that, but it can actually be a REALLY good socialization tool. 40 years from now, all your same-age peers will wax nostalgic for their pasts and will immensely thank you for hoarding everything too! You don’t even have to show them the items in real life – just take a picture and send it to them. just look at all these nostalgia posts that get high numbers of upvotes on reddit
crazy ideas i kind of believed in (didn’t independently propose) that ultimately turned out to have some points
cell phones and possible negative health effects
endosymbiosis more prevalent than suspected
things i failed to do due to failures in self-control (even though failures in self-control really benefited me in the end)
- become cherub/angel at AoKH
- create a geocities website better than the one i originally planned
- make any effort to write essays for AP Euro/AP World
- most of my failures in self-study (other than the failures to self-study math)
- my failures to be a good friend in some cases (i guess i really needed some time to myself, and it was better than a horrifically messy breakup later, with more time consumed and more time spent away from studying)
- leave CC for once and for all once i got in UW Academy (well, turns out that almost all my internet friends came from my activity on CC well beyond the point when i really should have stopped posting there)
-not interact with the younger acad kids (well, turns out that it’s not so embarrassing to associate with them)
- not troll (turns out that there are signalling benefits to trolling, and it results in more-compatible friendships later on)
- ALL sins actually have potential benefits precisely due to signalling [they are signals to people who are potentially extremely compatible with you since they forgive your sins and even see possible benefits in them]. and this is more possible on the internet
weird things i did that somehow *did* have benefits in the end (benefits that i could not have ever anticipated at that time):
- spamming my Internet name everywhere (with VERY surprising benefits – first of all, i made new friends after a year when i lost all my friends [because the new friends internet-stalked me and thus i was in a position to talk to them without seeming creepy]. and second of all, i can google anything i posted on the internet, making it much easier to find articles i read/ideas i proposed several years ago)
- trolling CC/other places: surprisingly, it’s an excellent way to meet people who are really compatible with me (it happened both in CC and with UW academy) – since people who like trolls are more likely to tolerate other things i do too
- hanging out with assholes: turns out that it is important to know what they do too. because their private convos do happen among others too, and it’s important to get a sense of what people are doing
- paying for discover magazine and scientific american just so that i could show off (even though i was too lazy to read them in 8th grade). but whatever. even though i barely read them, a single discover magazine article i did read ended up paying MASSIVE dividends in the end (one about glycemic index, and another about aubrey de gray)
- paying clint $15 to get a website host that i never ended up creating or using (whatever, through that i got access to the fusionmatrix forums and saw a random comment neff made about summer classes at UW. through that i learned about summer stretch, making that an INCREDIBLY good investment in itself)
- paying for a gaming computer (even after i stopped playing games, the extra RAM+CPU power was necessary for all my academic work in the 2010-2011 year)
things that *really* surprised me (in favor of my wishful thinking, contrary to expectations):
be close friends with some of the smartest people in the nation (even though those friendships ultimately failed, but whatever)
extremely high intelligence of people on BOTH CC AND heavengames
ideas i strongly believed in that really did work out in the end (despite people’s skepticism) [in favor of wishful thinking, in accordance with expectation]:
the thing with the ADD drugs
ideas i predicted that turned out to have good points in the end (no prevalent skepticism at time of proposal)
- that keas were among the smartest parrots (predicted 2006, verified 2010)
- astrophysics+earth science are REAL goldmines, and also the fields most tolerant to people like me. and where i have the most potential for advancement.
jumping on the bandwagon VERY early (before most)
facebook, wikipedia, glycemic index, calorie restriction
my failed predictions when i strongly believed in them
- i really need to dig up my history. but basically, most of them happened with social interactions (i overestimated the extent with which people would put up with me)
- i predicted that there was nothing wrong with slouching despite parental nagging. turns out that there is
biggest regrets
- not getting laptop first year of college
- staring at math books and trying to go through their proofs and getting NOTHING out of them (because concepts are more important)
22 June, 2011 14:23
if I have to pay $4 for 1 hour of work saved, then it’s totally worth it if I can do a clinical/psychology trial that pays me $10/hour – and that’s generally a lower limit for the psychology trials that carry zero risk – some of the clinical trials are still super low risk [they just seem high-risk to uneducated laymen] and pay even better
24 May, 2011 20:36
Well, truth is, a lot of things cost money because you have to motivate people to do them.
But once you bring in robots (or cyborg animals – yes – they *do* exist, and may be FAR cheaper because they can reproduce and sustain themselves), you don’t have to keep paying them to do work, and the cost of extracting resources is only limited to the cost of building them/keeping them alive/fueling them. In other words, you can get them to pick up all sorts of random scraps (or to dig through garbage heaps)
2 May, 2011 21:29
we need a better way to measure grit
grit – is persistence and determination.
but yet, what if one is uneven? one can have grit that can fail for a SINGLE week. this can result in the COMPLETE failure of an ENTIRE quarter. but in the long-scheme of things, if you fail for a single week, you haven’t lost much at all.
i don’t think that anyone can deny that i have grit, if they look at my transcript. rather, my unevenness is what’s obvious in my transcript. the thing is, i don’t think any researcher has managed to disentangle the evenness of someone’s grit. I can be determined to do something over the timescale of years, and ultimately reach it (whereas others would give up – yes – including those who can retain an amazing consistency in “grit” for a quarter, without ever wavering. But I am very capable of failing more than others are, even though I would eventually succeed if given more time.
In other words… It’s ENTIRELY possible that PersonA has the grit to do something for 6 years, even if he may not have the grit to carry it CONSISTENTLY for 3 months without breaks. Meanwhile, personB may have the grit to CONSISTENTLY do it for 2 years (WITHOUT breaks), but be without the grit to carry it on for 6 entire years.
And of course, the question is, which matters more for success? Truth is, that personB’s style makes the person more vulnerable to burnout. It’s also a common style among those who feel pressured, but this often hurts creativity
thing is, people often DO plan out breaks. But the thing is, it really is often difficult to anticipate when you need a break. You generally need breaks when you hit dead-ends, after all, and it’s impossible to project when you’ll hit a dead-end.
an interesting “paradox”
smart people are better at distinguishing the "gems" from the "bullshit" in less credible sources. In less credible sources, you can find real gems that you can’t find anywhere else (because there will be ideas that haven’t been well-researched or confirmed). But at the same time, they *look* stupid whenever they read the less credible sources because it’s usually only the less intelligent who even believe in most of the things that are less credible. of course, "less credible" is open to interpretation. a place like cracked.com or autoadmit looks "uncredible" to the unguided observer. but both sites also contain true gems that you really can’t find on any more "legit" site
16 April, 2011 13:06
Wow, I’m so amazed.
I entertained an alternative hypothesis about something, and everything fell into place.
The sad thing is that it took me THIS long to entertain it. and it was NOT a difficult hypothesis to entertain at all. Yet, it just conflicted with some WEIRD belief of mine, a belief that wasn’t EVEN strong. The truth is, that I eventually assumed the STRONGER version of the belief – the version i was more reluctant to accept (and ALSO the version that was more absurd to begin with – i was also
EMBARRASSED to believe that i could think or even BELIEVE such thoughts). this stronger version then later turned into a WEAKER version of the same hypothesis (by WEAKER, I mean that the basic ASSUMPTIONS of it were weaker). And everything then really DID fall into place. I need to note this. Damn it, this could explain one reason why crazier people CAN be more creative. you know, crazy things like dyson spheres and all that. EVEN the discovery of benzene’s chemical structure may have started out with a brief attempt to simply entertain that extremely crazy hypothesis.
29 January, 2011 20:43
How do you operationalize a measurement anyways?
byX on Saturday, January 29, 2011 at 2:15pm
First of all, you have to define your output. It can be a scalar, a vector, or a tensor.
Of course, you can simply determine which criteria are relevant and output these criteria as yet another vector of relevant criteria. That preserves information, and is the most useful metric for people who are attuned to comparing the specific facets of this criteria.
Or you can apply a metric (a distance metric such as the 2-norm – but it can also be a p-norm or a Hamming Distance or whatever) and output a score as a scalar value.
And you can assign different weights to each criteria (there are many different ways to weight, not all as simple as the case where the coefficients of the weights all sum up to 1). This, of course, presupposes that the criteria take the form of scalar quantities. Sometimes, the relevant criteria is more complex than that.
And like what the NRC did with its grad program rankings, you can produce multiple outputs (R and S criterion). Actually the NRC did something more complicated than that. For the R criteria, it asked professors which schools are most prestigious. Then it looked at the criteria characteristic of more prestigious schools, and ranked schools according to which ones had the “highest amount” of the criteria that were most prevalent in the more prestigious schools. Then for the S criteria, it simply asked professors which criteria were most important, and ranked schools according to how much they contained desirable criteria. And of course, users can rank schools in any order they want to simply by assigning weights to each value (although I think this is the simple case where all coefficients sum up to 1). In terms of validity, I’d trust the S metric over the R metric since it is less suspect to cognitive biases. [1]
This, of course, is what’s already done and well-known. There are other ways of operationalizing output too. What’s often neglected – are the effects of the 2nd-order interactions. Maybe there’s a way to use 2nd-order interactions to operationalize output (maybe there are ways that they are already done).
Of course, even 2nd-order interactions are not enough. 2nd-order interactions tend to be commutative (in order words, order does not matter). However, there are situations where the order of the 2nd (and higher) order interactions does matter.
And then, of course, you also have geometric relationships to consider. Geometric relationships may be as simple as taking the “distance” between two criteria (in order words, a scalar value that’s the output of some metric). Or they could be more complex.
And another relationship too: probabilities. Every measurement is uncertain and these uncertainties may also have to be included in our operationalization.
Also, weights are not simply scalars. Weights can also be functions. They can be functions of time, or functions of the particular person, or whatever. These multidimensional weights must still sum to 1, so when the weight of one goes up, the weight of the others goes down.
Also, even scalar outputs are not necessarily scalars. Rather, they can be outputs of probability distributions (again, I was quite impressed with the uncertainty range/confidence interval outputs of the NRC rankings)
Maybe studying ways to *operationalize* things is already a domain of intense interdisciplinary interest.
==
Anyways, some examples:
The DSM-IV is fundamentally flawed. Of course, every
operationalization is flawed – some are still good enough to do what they do despite being flawed. And why is that? Because in order to get diagnosed with some condition, you must only fulfill at least X of Y different criteria. There’s absolutely nothing about the magnitude of each symptom, or the environmental-dependence of each symptom, or the interactions each symptom can have with each other.
Furthermore, each operationalization (or definition, really) should take in parameters to specify potential environmental-dependence (the operationalization may have VERY LITTLE change when you vary the parameters, OR it could change SIGNIFICANTLY when you vary the parameters). I believe that people are currently systematically underestimating the environmental-dependence of many of their definitions/operationalizations. You can also call these parameters “relevance parameters”, since they depend on the person who’s processing them.
[1] This dichotomy is actually VERY useful for other fields too. For example – rating which forumers are the funniest in a forum
==
Skepticism regarding coarse mechanisms
by X on Saturday, January 29, 2011 at 1:46pm
I like trying to elucidate neurobiological/cognitive/behavioral mechanisms at a finer structure. Coarse mechanisms are often less robust (we don’t know how they really interact, and in the presence of a DIFFERENT environment, then the preconditions of these mechanisms may uncouple – we may not even know the preconditions of these mechanisms). The reason is this: necessary conditions are inclusive of BOTH preconditions and the GEOMETRY+combinatorial arrangements of these preconditions – where these preconditions are with respect to each other. This is a good reason to be skeptical of the utility of measuring things that we only measure coarsely, such as IQ, since we still don’t know the GEOMETRY+combinatorial arrangements of the preconditions of high IQ (that being said, I still do believe most of the correlations in this particular environment)
In other words, having all the preconditions is not sufficient to explain the mechanism. You have to have the preconditions *arranged* in the *right* way – both geometrically and combinatorially (inclusive of order effects, where the preconditions have to be
temporally/spatially arranged in the right way – not just withe each other – but also with the rest of the environment).
==
If the mechanism preserves itself even *after* we have updated information of its finer structure, then yes, we can update our posterior probability of the mechanism applying.
==
Now, how is research in the finer mechanisms done? Is it more likely than others to be Kuhnian normal science or Kuhnian revolutionary science? Studying combinatorial/geometric interactions can be *very* analytically (and computationally) intensive.
What’s also interesting: finer mechanisms tend to be more general. Even though finer = smaller scale. But it often takes large numbers of measurements before someone has enough data to elucidate the finer mechanism.
Best way to prevent Adderall-induced neurotoxicity
i actually had suspected it for a while.
but the best way to prevent the neurotoxic effects of adderall is to take BOTH adderall and ritalin together!
haha
(that’s because VMAT-2 disruption is the primary reason why adderall is neurotoxic. and adderall’s effect on VMAT-2 is the exact opposite of ritalin’s effects on VMAT-2).
at least this is how i should use my leftover adderall (although this would mean A LOT of stimulation).
I’m not even joking =P (although it’s probably best to halve one’s normal dose of each then)
http://www.aapsj.org/view.asp?art=aapsj080248#B11
http://jpet.aspetjournals.org/content/304/3/1181.abstract
It has been hypothesized that high-dose methamphetamine treatment rapidly redistributes cytoplasmic dopamine within nerve terminals, leading to intraneuronal reactive oxygen species formation and well characterized persistent dopamine deficits. We and others have reported that in addition to this persistent damage,
methamphetamine treatment rapidly decreases vesicular dopamine uptake, as assessed in purified vesicles prepared from treated rats; a phenomenon that may contribute to aberrant intraneuronal dopamine redistribution proposedly caused by the stimulant. Interestingly, post-treatment with dopamine transporter inhibitors protect against the persistent dopamine deficits caused by methamphetamine; however, mechanisms underlying this phenomenon have not been elucidated. Also of interest are findings that dopamine transporter inhibitors, including methylphenidate, rapidly increase 1) vesicular dopamine uptake, 2) vesicular monoamine transporter-2 (VMAT-2) ligand binding, and 3) VMAT-2 immunoreactivity in a vesicular subcellular fraction prepared from treated rats. Therefore, we hypothesized that
methylphenidate post-treatment might protect against the persistent striatal dopamine deficits caused by methamphetamine by rapidly affecting VMAT-2 and vesicular dopamine content. Results reveal that methylphenidate post-treatment both prevents the persistent dopamine deficits and reverses the acute decreases in vesicular dopamine uptake and VMAT-2 ligand binding caused by methamphetamine treatment. In addition, methylphenidate post-treatment reverses the acute decreases in vesicular dopamine content caused by methamphetamine treatment. Taken together, these findings suggest that methylphenidate prevents persistent methamphetamine-induced dopamine deficits by redistributing vesicles and the associated VMAT-2 protein and presumably affecting dopamine sequestration. These findings not only provide insight into the neurotoxic effects of methamphetamine but also mechanisms underlying dopamine neurodegenerative disorders, including Parkinson’s disease.
8 January, 2011 18:16
Also posted here: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/3ol/is_there_a_way_to_quantify_the_relationship/
Okay, so maybe you could say this.
Suppose you have an index I. I could be a list of items in belief-space (or a person’s map). So I could have these items (believes in evolution, believes in free will, believes that he will get energy from eating food, etc..) Of course, in order to make this argument more rigorous, we must make the beliefs finer.
For now, we can assume the non-existence of a priori knowledge. In other words, facts they may not explicitly know, but would explicitly deduce simply by using the knowledge they already have.
Now, maybe Person1 has a map in j-space with values of (0,0,0.2,0.5,0,1,…), corresponding to the degree of his belief in items in index I. So the first value of 0 corresponds to his total disbelief in evolution, the second corresponds to total disbelief in free will, and so on.
Person2 has a map in k-space with values of (0,0,0.2,0.5,0,0.8, NaN, 0, 1, …), corresponding to the degree of his belief in everything in the world. Now, I include a value of NaN in his map, because the NaN could correspond to an item in index I that he has never encountered. Maybe there’s a way to quantify NaN, which might make it possible for Person1 and Person2 to both have maps in the same n-space (which might make it more possible to compare their mutual information using traditional math methods).
Furthermore, Person1′s map is a function of time, as is Person2′s map. Their maps evolve over time since they learn new information, change their beliefs, and forget information. Person1′s map can expand from j-space to (j+n)th space, as he forms new beliefs on new items. Once you apply a distance metric to their beliefs, you might be able to map them on a grid, to compare their beliefs with each other. A distance metric with a scalar value, for example, would map their beliefs to a 1D axis (this is what political tests often do). A distance metric can also output a vector value (much like what a MBTI personality test could do) to a value in j-space. If you simply took the difference between the two maps, you cold also output a vector value that could be mapped to a space whose dimension is equal to the dimension of the original map (assuming that the two maps have the same dimension, of course).
Anyways, here is my question: Is there a better way to quantify this? Has anyone else thought of this? Of course, we could use a distance metric to compare their distances with respect to each other (of course, a Euclidean metric could be used if they have maps in the same n-space.
==
As an alternative question, are there metrics that could compare the distance between a map in j-space with a map in k-space (even if j is not equal to k)? I know that you have p-norms that correspond to some absolute scalar value when you apply the p-norms to a matrix. But this is sort of difference. And could mutual information be considered a metric?
post I made at LessWrong
0InquilineKea07 January 2011 09:19AM
So in terms of the "map" and "territory" analogy, the goal of rationality is to make our map correspond more closely with the territory. This comes in two forms – (a) area and (b) accuracy. Person A could have a larger map than person B, even if A’s map might be less accurate than B’s map. There are ways to increase the area of the territory – often by testing things in the boundary value conditions of the territory. I often like asking boundary value/possibility space questions like "well, what might happen to the atmosphere of a rogue planet as time approaches infinity?", since I feel like they might give us additional insight about the robustness of planetary atmosphere models across different environments (and also, the possibility that I might be wrong makes me more motivated to actually spend additional effort to test/calibrate my model more than I otherwise would test/calibrate it). My intense curiosity with these highly theoretical questions often puzzles the experts in the field though, since they feel like these questions aren’t empirically verifiable (so they are considered less "interesting"). I also like to study other things that many academics aren’t necessarily comfortable with studying (perhaps since it is harder to be empirically rigorous), such as the possible social outcomes that could spring out of a radical social experiment. When you’re concerned with maintaining the accuracy of your map, it may come at the sacrifice of dA/dt, where A is area (so your Area increases more slowly with time).
I also feel that social breaching experiments are another interesting way of increasing the volume of my "map", since they help me test the robustness of my social models in situations that people are unaccustomed to. Hackers often perform these sorts of experiments to test the robustness of security systems (in fact, a low level of potentially embarrassing hacking is probably optimal when it comes to ensuring that the security system remains robust – although it’s entirely possible that even then, people may pay too much attention to certain models of hacking, causing potentially malicious hackers to dream up of new models of hacking).
With possibility space, you could code up the conditions of the environment in a k-dimensional space such as (1,0,0,1,0,…), where 1 indicates the existence of some variable in a particular environment, and 0 indicates the absence of such variable. We can then use Huffman Coding to indicate the frequency of the combination of each set of conditions in the set of environments we most frequently encounter (so then, less probable environments would have longer Huffman codes, or higher values of entropy/information).
As we know from Taleb’s book "The Black Swan", many people frequently underestimate the prevalence of "long tail" events (which are often part of the unrealized portion of possibility space, and have longer Huffman codes). This causes them to over-rely on Gaussian distributions even in situations where the Gaussian distributions may be inappropriate, and it is often said that this was one of the factors behind the recent financial crisis.
Now, what does this investigation of possibility space allow us to do? It allows us to re-examine the robustness of our formal system – how sensitive or flexible our system is with respect to continuing its duties in the face of perturbations in the environment we believe it’s applicable for. We often have a tendency to overestimate the consistency of the environment. But if we consistently try to test the boundary conditions, we might be able to better estimate the "map" that corresponds to the "territory" of different (or potentially novel) environments that exist in possibility space, but not yet in realized possibility space.
The thing is, though, that many people have a habitual tendency to avoid exploring boundary conditions. The fact is, that the space of realized events is always far smaller than the entirety of possibility space, and it is usually impractical to explore all of possibility space. Since our time is limited, and the payoffs of exploring the unrealized portions of possibility space uncertain (and often time-delayed, and also subject to hyperbolic time-discounting, especially when the payoffs may come only after a single person’s lifetime), people often don’t explore these portions of possibility space (although life extension, combined with various creative approaches to decrease people’s time preference, might change the incentives). Furthermore, we cannot empirically verify unrealized portions of possibility space using the traditional scientific method. Bayesian methods may be more appropriate, but even then, people may be susceptible to plugging the wrong values into the Bayesian formula (again, perhaps due to over-assuming continuity in environmental conditions). As in my original example about hacking, it is way too easy for the designers of security systems to use the wrong Bayesian priors when they are being observed by potential hackers, who may have an idea about ways that take advantage of the values of these Bayesian priors.
8 December, 2010 12:04
sometimes, if someone wants X legalized, he would be rational to vote against reduced penalties of X. So his preference might be Legalize > reduced penalties > harsh penalties
Since the harsh penalties are often what motivate others to legalize X (even though they still don’t approve of X). Their preference might be Reduced penalties > legalize > harsh penalties. Many of them would vote against legalization if people agreed on reduced penalties of X first.
21 November, 2010 13:28
It’s possible that academic achievement is highly heritable for factors totally unrelated to intelligence. And executive function is *far* easier to improve than intelligence.
And holy crap – I’ve just realized – a lot of measurement tests (that might be used for IQ tests) measure executive function (or maybe just indirectly measure them – does anyone know if ADD negatively affects IQ for reasons unrelated to intelligence?). It’s entirely possible that much of the correlation between IQ and genetics could be attributed to the heritability of executive function. This could be somewhat good news for those who don’t want their intelligence to be imprisoned by their genes (as executive function is easier to "correct" than intelligence).
Posted by: Simfish InquilineKea (simfish) | May 16, 2008 4:28 AM
Thoughts on IQ (I should expand this)
Note: I *do* believe that IQ scores measure something. The fact is that you can’t deny their high heritability of 0.8 with parental IQ, so SOMETHING must have been inherited. The real question is how well IQ scores actually explain performance in the real world, and whether they explain performance better for some groups than other groups (in particular, I would expect that IQ scores are less predictive of performance in areas of high environmental variability *and* among non-neurotypicals [especially those with autism, ADHD, or
schizophrenia])
Okay, some facts about IQ that need to bear mentioning:
- Just because you have an IQ of 130 doesn’t mean that your IQ is actually 130. The fact is, if everyone retook the test 2-3 times (and many people DO take the test multiple times and the institution will usually take the best score they got), then a person with IQ scores of 120, 123, and 130 could say that his IQ is 130, and a person with IQ scores of 129,129, and 129 can only say that his IQ is 129. If 2.6% of the population got an IQ of over 130 on a particular IQ test, then MORE THAN 2.6% of the population can claim to have an IQ of over 130 simply because some people will score higher than 130 on some tests but not others. I’m not sure how high people’s test scores usually vary though (my impression is that it isn’t very high, except possibly among certain severe ADHD sufferers). If you took their *average* score, it would probably be a better metric, but it would then discount the people whose IQs have improved after studying (and yes, there are some people who can improve their IQ scores after studying – in fact – I have not seen anything saying that none of the subskills are not improvable – other than perhaps reaction time). And just because you’ve improved after 4 months of studying doesn’t mean that your IQ is lower than other people with the same IQ score as you (since they may have started out doing things that tend to improve IQ scores. Vocabulary, in particular, is prominent on the verbal component of IQ tests, and is extremely improvable, even though many people don’t improve their vocabulary even after months of studying)
Furthermore, some people are naturally more prone to stupid mistakes than others, and some people may not even have the motivation to do their best on IQ tests.
I’m not saying that these degrade the validity of IQ tests. Personally, I think these factors don’t affect IQ distributions by much in THIS environment, but if IQ tests were used instead of SAT tests for college admissions, then it may create a systematic bias in favor of certain groups that study harder. In PARTICULAR, what puzzles me the MOST is why many people DON’T score higher on the Verbal SAT after retakes EVEN THOUGH the Verbal SAT was 50% vocabulary before its last revision (and vocabulary is DEFINITELY improvable). Also, this creates a systematic bias in favor of people who easily memorize definitions.
- According to CTY, people must be at least in the 99.5th percentile to get into its programs (since students have to qualify through a proxy for IQ first, and then score in a certain percentile on the SAT). That corresponds to an IQ of ~140. Having met many people who have gone to CTY programs, I’ll definitely say that they’re much smarter than average, but not necessarily at the level of 140 (or the 99.5th percentile). Furthermore, people’s IQs will saturate at a certain age, so some people’s IQ might saturate at age 13 whereas other IQs might saturate at age 16. The MOST extreme example of this: 6 month olds chimpanzees are actually SMARTER than 6 month old humans (simply because chimps mature faster). I’m quite sure that 6 month old crows are even SMARTER (because they mature even faster). The amount of material 6 month old crows learn and process would EASILY put 6 month old humans to shame.
- Fluid IQ increases to the age of around 16, after which it starts to gradually decline. ALSO, since females mature earlier than males, there is some evidence that their IQs also peak earlier than males. Furthermore, the correlation between parental IQ and child IQ increases monotonically with age to around 0.8 in adulthood. This means that childhood IQ scores (and many have last taken it in childhood) cannot be taken as authoritative.
- Since environmental factors contribute MORE to IQ in childhood than adulthood, we may actually estimate that CTY students (most of whom probably have been exposed to far more enriching behavior than average) will probably regress towards the mean once they become adults.
- Furthermore, IQ at a certain age is compared to ALL people of a certain age. The problem is that people’s IQs all decline at different rates (the brain definitely starts shrinking in one’s 20s), and this decline is often highly dependent on environmental factors such as nutrition (basically, diabetes and high blood glucose means higher decline) and cardiovascular health (more efficient hearts will pump more blood to the brain and slow the decline in IQ). Plus, decline is also dependent on genetic factors. So, an athletic person with consistently low blood glucose levels could EASILY have an age-16 IQ of 120 and an age-50 IQ of 150, simply because his IQ didn’t decline as fast as most people his age.
- Also, IQ scores fail to predict academic performance among Aspies. More of my thoughts here: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/346/iq_scores_fail_to_predict_academic_performance_in/
13 November, 2010 14:34
Note: this post is high on philosophical jargon. There are nice wikipedia (and stanford encyclopedia of philosophy) entries on b-theory, deep ecology, total utility, and utilitarianism.
Hypothesis: Assume b-theory of time *and* assume deep ecology *and* assume utilitarianism (as applied to deep ecology)
If you subscribe to the b-theory of time (which most philosophers of science see to do), then the “deep ecology” conception of environmentalism is flawed.
The reason being that life will inevitably be extinguished. But despite that, the Earth has still enjoyed several billion years of life (life without human intervention). Sure, many habitats are currently being destroyed. But the environment will only be destroyed for a very small portion of time compared to the total amount of time that life has enjoyed without human intervention (and according to the b-theory of time, the present is no more “significant” than the past). In fact, this will be true even if life continues on earth for 1 more billion years (and fact is, life as we know it cannot continue for more than ~1 billion years, because by then, the Sun’s luminosity will be sufficiently high enough to boil away the earth’s oceans). By then, human technology will be the only way to ensure that life will continue.
Okay sure, a deep ecologist might want to maximize the total utility of the biosphere (and argue that reducing human activity will reduce it, even though the total impact of human activity will still only be limited to a very small fraction of the total utility of the biosphere integrated over time dating back to 4.6 billion years ago). After all, f(t) = U(t)*(4*10^9 + 1000) is still bigger than f(t) = U(t)*4*10^9. So conclusion: if you subscribe to all three theories, your total impact will be very small (unless you can find a way to migrate Earth’s biosphere into another stellar system before the Sun goes red giant). In any case, if the hypothesis (heat death of the universe) holds [and the evidence for that outcome seems to be rather high], then the impact of any person will be very limited.
Of course, his judgment of total utility is subjective [it depends on how much you weigh factors such as biomass, the well-being of "sentient" creatures, and other factors].
Also, this does in no way argue against environmentalism if you’re an environmentalist due to human concerns. There are many valid reasons for that. It also doesn’t argue against deep ecology *without* the b-theory of time. Most people do not view the present as less significant to the past. It’s antithetical to human survival, after all. The philosophically unsophisticated may, for example, weigh the well-being of charismatic creatures higher than that of uncharismatic creatures. They may also weigh certain intervals of time with higher importance than other intervals of time. Many implications of utilitarianism, in any case, go against people’s moral intuitions.
==
The b-theory of time also brings up interesting new ways to analyze utilitarianism. Since again, the present is no more “significant” than the past. In any case, assuming b-theory of time, you can then analyze total utility by integrating the total sum of “utility” (experienced by all sentient beings) over time (you can then divide it by the total number of individuals [each weighted by their level of sentience] if you wish).
1 November, 2010 18:53
there are consequences of granting someone (P1) increased authority to do X.
you may favor "do X" over "no action". but when you grant P1 increased authority to do X, you also risk having P1 do action X2.
and your preference ranking might be along the lines of X > no action > X2. In which case you may decide not to grant P1 increased authority.
This is sort of like what Evan Bayh said when he said that he would not support granting Bush the authority to do something to Iran. He said that he would probably vote for the proposal in other cases, but not when Bush was in office (because "we cannot trust this administration")
1 November, 2010 00:20
okay, I’m going to comment on something.
Gustave Gilbert once compiled a list of the IQs of Nazi leaders who were indicted in the Nuremberg Trials. The IQs are listed on a easily-googleable wikipedia page. Anyways, he does make adjustments to each leader’s IQ based on age (i.e. he predicts someone’s IQ at his mental peak, so a 70 year old’s raw scores would translate into a higher IQ than a 20 year old’s raw scores). The problem with this reasoning is that fluid IQs don’t decline at similar rates. Some people decline faster than others. It’s affected by mental exercise and overall health. So someone might be at the 95th percentile in intelligence among fellow 70-year olds, but he might have been at, say, the 70th percentile in intelligence when he was 35. Anyways, I think this is something that deserves more invesgiation.
Partial Catharsis (deeply thoughtful)
You can’t force change. you have to adopt it slowly over time (and when you’re not even actively thinking about it – in fact – your very resistance to change makes it very unpleasant to actively think about it). For example, I sometimes think about trying to be less reluctant to express positive emotions to other people without feeling like I’m killing myself for masking myself in an aura of dishonesty. I can’t actively think about changing myself this way – I have to unconsciously effect this change over time – so gradually that I don’t even notice it. That way, it becomes the new default state and while I’m still resistant to say that I *want* to do that – I’ve adopted a new default state that is hard to reverse, so this resistance doesn’t even matter that much anymore. Sometimes, introduction to a different environment helps, since it’s an environment where you have no history and also since you don’t have to actively think about changing yourself (since you’re new and free to construct another identity)
This is true with being a "better" person. I don’t *want* to actively think about being a better person. If I tell myself that I should be a "better" person, I get upset because I then start introducing a bunch of counterarguments about how I’m inherently misanthropic (I always tell myself that whenever I’m hurt or embarrassed since it lessens the pain by giving me the illusion that I can fight back too), about how it’s embarrassing/dishonest for me to say such things (given that I said such things in the past and didn’t really mean them since I was really trying to impress people instead), how I perceive society as unfair to me and how it doesn’t deserve better treatment from me if it’s unfair (comparisons to starving African children don’t work even if true – that’s why psychologists never use those comparisons). But anyways – I can try to do it more *subconsciously* and it can sort of become a new default state even though I hate saying that I want to be a "better" person.
Or how I finally decided not to act so Aspie anymore. I used to be so proud of being Aspie (so convinced of its merits after reading many biographies of scientists) that I wanted everyone to accept me for my idiosyncrasies and social blindness (and if they didn’t, they were "intolerant"). How did I do that? I did it insidiously (without realizing it). It really started with my interest in psychology. Once I got really into it, all human behavior became interesting, and there was then no excuse for me to be blind to human signals (since they revealed much about psychology). That, and psychology finally convinced me to do what’s most compatible with my personality (as personality is largely stable for life), which meant that I stopped trying to adopt the persona of the scientist who did nothing but study all day. It wasn’t just that, of course – social rejection also caused it as I always cared a lot about what people thought of me. Lack of self-control, too, since Urbandictionary and Encyclopedia Dramatica finally intro’ed me to much of pop culture.
Anyways, the truth is that you have to adapt after you feel like you’ve been wronged (doesn’t matter whose fault it was, but most scenarios really are partially one person’s fault and partially the other person’s fault too – simple breakdowns in communication [often a reluctance to express one's true thoughts due to fear of repercussions/judging], for example, can be the fault of both, even if not morally "wrong"). The issue many people take with adapting to a setback, of course, is that they’re not even willing to change themselves after they feel like they’ve been wronged. It feels unfair to them – to make concessions to society/people when one has already suffered from forced concessions (especially when there are people who have been "wronged" in similar ways but received more support/recovered more quickly). And that’s why this change is often so painful. It’s *especially* painful when they discuss the issue with someone else who ends up sympathizing with the other side (which can broaden the scope of one’s anger towards humanity/society) – of course, this is why counseling can often prevent incidents. Sometimes, books or forum posts can also help a lot (although their discovery is often hit and miss).
==
It is true that some pain is necessary for self-development. But at the same time, the pain must not stunt self-exploration in the way that school often does. More importantly, pain is difficult to cope with when it comes from multiple dimensions at once (when that happens, people fall apart, although many can adapt by withdrawing from school for a quarter or two). Many who say that "pain is necessary for self-development" will use this argument to argue for *a lot* of unnecessary practices (especially school’s rigidity and also denying people the opportunity to explore what they’re most compatible with) that end up stunting personal growth *and* predisposing the person to depression and anxiety disorders that may permanently halt someone’s initiative and well-being. I still haven’t forgiven much of the pain I experienced from school/parents, since it was an authoritarian type of pain that didn’t do me any good (some of the pain might have been necessary, but much of it was not – an unschooled student would still face pain from many directions, but would have more freedom to find ways to creatively cope with it). Of course, different people are different, and a course that works for one person will not be optimal for another person.
==
So in short, people can be incredibly weak. That still doesn’t mean that they’re impossible to deal with – that just means that creative indirect approaches must be used (combined with patience, although infinite patience does discourage change). Of course, enhanced understanding of psychology (and human nature) will help with developing the best hypotheses for getting around this – for getting around how incredibly weak a lot of people are.
==
A short addendum: Sometimes, tasks giving people the illusion of control help. People break down when they feel like they cannot control anything, causing levels of stress that devastate the body as much as smoking does. The problem with such tasks, of course, is that they can be extremely addicting. Obviously, computer games are on my mind (there are alternatives, too, but computer games are easiest since they’re very immersive, involve significant learning for the first few weeks, and can be played from start by people of all skill levels). But not everyone’s equally predisposed to computer game addiction. It helps if the game has a single-player component and if it isn’t a MMORPG.
Starcraft 2 vs Age of Empires 2
Yeah, I know, this comparison seems absurd. That’s because the two games are over 10 years apart. But it so happens that they’re the only two RTS’s that I’ve really played in depth, since crappy video cards (and parental issues) in between prevented me from playing any games after Age of Empires 2 (which I will refer as AoK). Plus, more appropriate comparisons would be between Starcraft 1 and 2, or between Starcraft and some other modern game. Anyways, a lot of HGers might like this analysis.
EDIT: I’ve tried a bit of Warcraft 3 now and it appears that many of Starcraft 2′s changes were already implemented in Warcraft 3. Although Warcraft 3 has less of the AoK feel to it (due to heroes, scattered formations, and smaller army sizes in general). I’ve tried AoE3 a little but not extensively – AoE3 is sort of a mix between the two – it’s less configurable than AoK but games do tend to last longer than Starcraft 2 games. It also fixes much of the problems with end-game trash unit spamming. But many people don’t record games since recording a game always imposes an uncomfortable delay period at the beginning of the game.
In a sense, it’s also an exposure to modern gaming from someone who hasn’t really played many games since ones released in 2000.
Anyways, features Starcraft 2 has that AoK doesn’t have:
- When your ally resigns, you get all their resources and can control all their units. I’ve long dreamed of such a feature in AoK, and I know it wasn’t implemented in AoE 3 either. This makes games *a lot* less unfair whenever someone resigns early (in fact, AoK games were often long, so a 4v4 frequently guaranteed that someone would have to go, completely changing the gameplay dynamics).
- Players are paired up by skill (so pretty much everyone should average around a 50/50 win/loss ratio). Obviously, below-average players tend to like this and above-average players probably tend to dislike this.
- Automated matchmaking (which does draw players away from custom games). It’s sort of nice when the game is very active, but not as nice when the game becomes less active.
- You can see all the individual details of someone else’s profile (which is really nice for immersion). Games are automatically rated (rather than in AoK when they’re automatically unrated – this is different for the new Voobly service for AOK though)
- Replays show APM (actions per minute). Not the best measures of skill, but they are good proxies. And they also show whether or not you can most improve through being faster or being smarter. Obviously this was a feature that was even in Starcraft 1
- Pressing a ctrl-number twice centers the screen on the unit.
- “Spells”/special abilities that you can give units. Admittedly, I’m not the best at micro so I tend to think that they disadvantage me. But they still make the game more interesting. I think AoE3 had some of those.
- When players are eliminated, they can continue to stay in the game and chat to their allies (and even command their ally’s units if their allies allow it)
- Games are faster (there’s no 10 minute build-up period that is the same ALL the time, thus wasting at least 10 minutes of each and every game – unless you play on Deathmath or “high resources”)
- Some units count more towards population/housing limit than others. Although in AoK, the population limit was *frequently* reached, while it isn’t very frequently reached in starcraft 2. But after Empire Earth, most RTS games had large units contibute more to the limit than others.
- There aren’t resources that run out more quickly than others. So there’s no end-game trash-unit spammage like there was in AoK (unless people created lots of trade carts)
- Fewer civilizations, but they’re significantly different from each other. This is pretty interesting and I’ll admit that overall it isn’t a plus or a minus. But *right now*, everyone is knowing that the three civs are unbalanced, since Terran always outclasses Zerg. In AoK, all the civilizations were pretty well balanced, except for Mayans vs. Goths and Aztecs in water maps.
- Allows you to select and copy conversations to the clipboard where it can be archived with a clipboard monitoring utility (important for me since I love reading conversations I’ve had years ago)
- Autosaves all games by default (I don’t like having to ask people to record game all the time)
Things AOK has that Starcraft 2 doesn’t have:
- Doesn’t allow you to customize your own hotkeys. My middle mouse buton becomes effectively useless.
- Doesn’t allow game modes other than 4v4, 3v3, 2v2, 1v1, or 4-player FFA. The fondest gaming memories I have are of diplomacy/”shimo”-style games I played with AoKHers which were FFAs where you could ally/unally anyone at will. 2v2v2v2′s are also quite interesting. I’m a cognitive psychology junkie, so those game modes (with all the additional decisions you have to make considering who to ally/unally) make the game more intensely interesting.
- No random maps. All the maps are the same over and over again. And the map is always revealed. I’m not the best player around, so I admit that it’s “easier” on me when the maps are the same and when they’re all revealed. It sure makes rushing a lot easier, too (especially tower rushing where placement is vital). But it also makes people more prone to “fixed action patterns” since they know the map configuration by heart. At AoK, you always had to adapt since you never knew how the map would look like.
- No Ctrl-B for barracks, Ctrl-U for university, etc, or automatic ctrl-X for any random building X… You can use your own Ctrl 0-9 hotkeys for them but they take away from hotkeys you could use for units (although I’ll admit that even with this system, I”m not using up all the control groups). EDIT: I’ve just noticed that SC2′s hotkeys are all designed so that only the left-hand is needed for them (so that the right-hand is freed for mouse usage). You use Ctrl-E for probe instead of Ctrl-P (like in SC1), for example. This increases the learning curve and creates some opportunities for confusion (especially if you’re playing other RTS games in which case your “mental mapping” might confuse you).
- No ability to customize starting resources,population limit, wolf aggressiveness, or all those other special settings that could make for interesting permutations of game rules.
- Pure elimination/conquest. No regicide, no wonder/relic victories. Doesn’t make for a variety of game modes like what I’ve tried out in the AoKH forum parties (which were SO fun).
- Spies. Granted, Starcraft 2 will make you automatically lose if everyone on your team loses all their buildings even if you have units still lying around. Which prevents straggler hunts. But still, stragglers can sometimes make the final moments of the game more interesting, especially if they’re dark templars. Besides, the conversations at the end of the game (when people are hunting out stragglers, or “roachers”) are often at their most exciting and Starcraft 2 doesn’t even allow conversations at the end of the game.
- No extensive system of custom scenarios. Seriously, custom scenarios are where AoK excelled (this may be a function of the community as well). I have never seen a game with as many successful custom scenarios. Even AoM and AoE3 hardly had any compared to AoK. And for AOK, this is especialy impressive since it came before Web 2.0.
- The sheer variety of maps that Age of Empires 2 really has.
- No LAN (not a problem for me since I never had AoK LAN parties)
- No joining games by IP address
- Custom games. You can’t make games private only to AoKHers or members of a certain community. And there are none of those interesting pre-game convos you had on the MSN Gaming Zone client (no MSN Gaming Zone chatrooms either, which were often funny in their own ways back in AoK’s prime, anyways). And you can’t choose what sort of game to join either.
Things I don’t really care about:
- Graphics (I really don’t care).
In summary, Starcraft 2 is far less customizable than AOK ever was. It gives you *far* less choice. You pretty much always have to play by standard settings in Starcraft 2. While oversocialization often restricted the options effectively available to those who played AoK (since everyone considered “high resources” to be unique only to n00b-only games),some of the AoKH forum parties at my forum really played around with those settings, which made the game really fun and interesting even once I got bored of playing with the “zoners” (which was the somewhat-disparaging term us AoKHers applied to the random people in the MSN Gaming Zone).
In some ways, this is a reflection of how games may have evolved in the last 10 years. Newer games seem to be more “constructed” than “open”. Even Spore didn’t seem to be very open (even though you could create all sorts of creatures, the type of creature you constructed ultimately had almost no impact on the mid-later stages of the game).
Plus, since maps are far more consistent in Starcraft II, it allows for less uncertainty and more fixed action patterns (and less randomness).
Still, Starcraft 2 doesn’t have some of the things that ultimately drove me out of AoK (namely, the consistent 10-15 minute period of starting up, the possibility that one side’s allies would resign and completely tip the balance, making for an unbalanced game, and the end-game spamming of trash units). And the community (since AoK’s community ultimately started confining itself to Green Arabia and Land Nomad by 2006, but this was largely a function of AoK’s age by that point). Of course, I think that these things have also been addressed in other RTS games.
Starcraft 2 games also play much faster. There aren’t that many mineral patches as there are resources (or trade carts) in AoK. While this is often welcome for many of the most common games, it also reduces the number of intensely interesting/memorable games there are. In short, you lose less time from the games that end up sucking, but you also get fewer of the really nice moments. The problem with 8 player “epic” games in AoK, though, was that many of these games went out of sync. And while these games could be restored, many players often left before they got restored (even in AoKH’s forum parties). Furthermore, recorded games of restored OOS games don’t work.
If you really like playing with a certain community (which makes the diplomacy a lot more interesting since everyone knows everyone else and everyone else’s rough skill level, and where people are more open to trying different settings), AoK really is the preferable game. But I guess if you’re not in a certain special community, Starcraft 2 has its advantages. Another thing is that AoK is a lot more time-consuming than Starcraft 2 – in what you have to do to set up the game, in how long it takes to start up, and in how games can get drawn out. So I have less time than I used to have (as does practically everyone else who isn’t a tween), which is a plus for Starcraft 2. Still, if I had infinite time and AoK was still in its prime, AoK is still a lot funner.
14 July, 2010 18:07
someday i will grab my more insightful posts from HG/INTL/PF/CC/etc and actually make copies of them somewhere here.
14 July, 2010 18:06
What’s the value of a forum, anyways? Especially if it’s one of many forums on a certain subject?
I was lucky in choosing age of kings heaven as one age of empires 2 forum out of many. It wasn’t necessarily the obvious choice back when I was active there, but now I realize that I was lucky. Now it’s influence is higher than any other age of empires 2 website (simply since all the other ones have died and their archives have permanently vanished). But also because the community, for whatever reason, happens to be more intelligent than the communities of many others. As TheShadowDawn once remarked, it was a community of mostly amateur players. But this community of mostly amateur players resulted in a community of fun (the forum parties at Agincourt) rather than of competition.
And why do I go to physics forums, among all other science forums? This is harder to justify. Physics Forums is obviously the first that came, and the most active among them. But I certainly wonder if there is a more non-arbitrary criteria for me to go there.
Of course, also, there’s forums vs IRC.
There’s no reason not to go to several different forums. But when one is not heavily engaged in the forum, one pretty much "defaults" to the default forum that one has always gone to.
“take risks in life”: an analysis of the quote
so, a cliche quote. Of course it has its merits. People often overestimate the costs of failure – the cost of failure is often unpleasant, but can result in intense self-development.
But, there are *some* times that the quote doesn’t apply. because the people who succeeded while taking *real* risks – are the only people who end up giving such advice. so they’re an unrepresentative sample. But we must also realize, that, of course, the people who failed might end up in another field and give the same advice, too => in a sense, almost everyone could succeed and still give that advice.
obviously developing interests/cultural references is the best way to bond with people (even childhood ones can be particularly powerful). hell, i’m not even sure if google reader is a waste of time. a lot of the things i read are very cultural. internet culture. and this helps you win friends with nerds. it’s like the elegant literature/poetry/whatever of the early 1900s.
in fact, internet culture is a lot better for winning *useful* friends than most other forms of culture. if you define *useful* as those who are technically savvy and into CS and what nerds do.
even SIM games helped me bond with chantal (since she asked me if i played those games since i mentioned them on my profile). of course the best ones to develop are those that are known to people who are particularly compatible with you (hence why I need to be very acquainted with nerdy cultural references like some computer games, xkcd, and some forums). even some 4chan and urbandictionary help.
5 July, 2010 13:46
Most psychological research focuses on the correlations between two variables. so they show things like "more sleep = better grades" or "friends = happiness"
but of course, such correlations DO NOT WORK for everyone. in fact, the *exceptions* are often the most interesting. Look at the data points, and look at the groups of people with less sleep and good grades (see what they have – their examples are often interesting too – see what’s so special about them). Look at the group of people without friends and high happiness (see what’s so special about them too). Also, see if they’re in a different environment, too.
Look at the people with "high achievement" but low IQ. See what’s so special about them.
but i don’t think the psychology research journals will care about this
I’ve created a lot of things now
how does performance correlate with effort?
technically it’s just a function of efficiency. But we can definitely analyze efficiency. (a) Sometimes efficiency is 0. (b)Sometimes efficiency is 0 *and* the person learns something that might be useful (but still ends up not performing any better). (c) And then efficiency can be > 0.
(b) is often common in math assignments and programming assignments. and essays too.
math assignments: it’s easy to see why. you chose the wrong approach. or you dont know how to really solve the problem. in either case you might learn some skills that might be useful later.
in essays, you can spend hours and hours researching the topic and still get absolutely nothing done because you chose the wrong main point at first. if your main point sucks, you might want to change your main point. but that is often difficult when you’ve already spent so much effort in researching your main point. but you might learn a few things about defending your arguments well (in fact, it takes better arguments to defend poorly chosen main points, although sometimes this results in considerable loss of intellectual honesty (aka creating BS).
programming assignments: sort of a mix between essays and math assignments
29 June, 2010 16:49
a lot of companies (facebook, google) are building a lot of servers in oregon, presumably to take advantage of the cheap hydroelectricity there.
they don’t seem to realize the risks of a massive earthquake there. and that there’s a 38% chance that a huge one will hit mid-South Oregon in the next 50 years.
28 June, 2010 12:29
an assumption that’s often made (but possibly not always right): do intelligent people tend to follow things that are more empirically right than less intelligent people?
take dieting, for example. it’s well known that education and weight are inversely correlated. are more intelligent people more likely to pursue the weight loss strategies that are more empirically right? (they also have more money, but that may not be the main factor).
some things like self-control conflict though. also poor self-control may lead to IQ-decreasing behaviors.
the free market really contains an assumption – that people are primarily motivated by money. of course we know that they can be motivated by other things, and that there are creative ways to motivate them that may have nothing to do with money.
of course this does not mean that the assumption is a bad assumption, for it is probably the only assumption that would work for most jobs. but there are other possible incentives, and one should not be discouraged from seeking them out
and in fact, i think that when robots become widespread and most labor becomes unnecessary, the fundamental nature of money will completely change. It will then be more about resources than about the time/pain it takes to produce things. And since digital data is effectively resource-free, a lot of digital data would become effectively free (although digital data is also the creative type of data that is hard for robots to produce)
another way of getting information about things:
if A -> B and C -> B, then sometimes learning about C-> B can give you lots of information on the A->B mechanism, especially if C and A act in similar ways.
e.g. adderall (A) might cause heart damage (B), and heartbreak (C) can also cause heart damage. But I learned that C->B is generally not permanent, helping me believe that A->B is not permanent either. Because C->B and A->B are mediated through similar mechanisms (aka catecholamine increases)
highly successful people of low-conscientiousness are often paradoxically more restrictive in what they do (and often more asocial) than the highly successful of higher-conscientiousness. ones with low-conscientiousness are often carried away by things like computer games, facebook, IM, and forums. so they oftentimes must completely banish themselves from the above activities (which often makes them look even more conscientious to outside observers)
(you can also replace low-conscientiousness with “prone to ADD”)
those with high intelligence probably have very high variance in the amount of work they put in. on the one hand, they often recognize that putting in work is often necessary for desirable social outcomes given the constraints of the school environment (and they are more likely to identify those outcomes as desirable). and some of them also find work so rewarding (since they don’t have to struggle with it as much) that they end up putting in extra effort. but on the other hand, they often need to spend less time to do the same amount of work as others, and this often results in less time spent on work (especially if they realize that there are other ways of getting a desirable social outcome)
when describing someone’s judgment, you’re often describing his qualities that can’t easily “fit” under any other quality.
but what are those qualities?
- whether he has a significance threshold – if he discerns/identifies (aka judges) the things that are more relevant than others. often relevant as people have to deal with being contacted about things that may be outside his jurisdiction, in which he must possess the judgment to forward the message to another person P2 who holds jurisdiction over how to deal with the message
- basic time management/ability to prioritize. while this is also highly dependent on a not-easily-malleable self-control, judgment is often just as important, if not more important
- propensity of not getting into trouble
- knowing when to act, when not to act, and when to act to a limited extent while contacting others who may be more qualified to act in the case. this is similar to “knowing what you know and knowing what you don’t know”. or self-awareness
- quickly identifying situations before they arise and setting up the situation’s environment in a way such that one is well-prepared to deal with it later even if one runs into obstacles or if one isn’t able to focus as well on the problem for whatever reason. e.g. realizing that one may have times when one has attention lapses and trying to set up the problem in a way such that one can solve it with near-perfect accuracy even when one is tired/groggy/has attention lapses. or being prepared if the object breaks or if one needs more time than originally thought
- resistance to common cognitive biases (list on wiki)
- having a good sense of “effectiveness” (or having a good sense of predicting the outcome of the action and of how predicting the limitations of one’s predictions) and of how “effectiveness” can change if one acts earlier or later
- performing all of the above without “unreasonable” amounts of dependence on others, and without investing “unreasonable” amounts of time
i guess empathy attempts really do count as conscious empathy. you may mis-guess a person’s perspective, but it makes you more inclined to really appreciate a person’s perspective. but it also shows the other person that you really do care. because most people don’t even try to be empathetic.
there’s conscious empathy and subconscious empathy. the subconscious empathy is naturally feeling what the other person is feeling (this is what the aspie has trouble in). but with conscious empathy, the aspie has no trouble.
30 April, 2010 08:02
Who are the candidates for 21st century Einsteins/Darwins? (inspired by an autoadmit thread).
Although I think being active in last few decades of 20th century counts, since it’s hard to think of late 20th century Einsteins/Darwins.
My candidates: Edward O. Wilson (more Darwin than Einstein though), Herbert Simon
19 April, 2010 00:38
also posted at heavengames
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So as we all know, the remote extreme North in the US is quite conservative and Republican-supporting. (by "remote" I mean Alaska, Idaho, Montana, and North Dakota). Although Vermont/Maine/New Hampshire could fit in there as well, their climates are not as extreme as those of the aforementioned regions, and their population densities are higher.
But what I find interesting is this: The Yukon Territory and Northwest Territories consistently support liberals. In Sweden, the Northern parts are also the most liberal. The same goes for the United Kingdom (although this is probably since the conservatives are least receptive to increased Scottish autonomy). I also looked at Finland and Japan, where statistics are somewhat more ambiguous (Northern Finland is dominated by a minority group, so they would be expected to be more liberal).
So why is that the case? I know that a lot of anti-Democratic sentiment in the northwestern US is due to the environmental policies of the Democratic Party (even though they tend to be quite libertarian on social issues). But maybe the liberal parties in the other countries seem to have more significant support for labor issues than they do for environmental issues? (since I would presume that a significant amount of the employment in northern territories has to do with resource extraction, as it is one of the only "profitable" ways to live in the extreme remote North). Environmental issues tend to be most prominent in areas where there are still significant areas of government ownership/wilderness, and labor issues also tend to be prominent as extraction industries also tend to be the most dangerous ones.
Thinking of it more though, the northern US (minus Alaska) is still mild enough for farming/ranching of some sort. The other areas I mentioned (minus the UK, Hokkadio), however, are probably way too cold for farming (or anything other than resource extraction). Ranching interests, in particular, are particularly supportive of Republicans here.
Of course, there are rugged individualists too, but they tend to be the minority (although they do explain why those states also voted for Nader in the highest percentages back in 2000).
18 April, 2010 16:42
if beta amyloid is produced in response to infection, then maybe infection increases the risks of alzheimer’s
is rigor really desirable?
the fact is that there are always scientific crackpots who publish non-rigorous scientific data. But they should not be prevented from investigating such hypotheses. Their hypotheses need to simply be put under review. And now, such review is far easier than ever, simply because the Internet allows for such reviews. It’s just that the current review websites, like arxiv.org, are not as navigable and user-friendly as websites like Amazon or Yelp
The fact is, that science was not always rigorous. 21st century standards of rigor were not possible in the 19th century. The 19th century certainly saw the formation of many false hypotheses, but it also saw the formation of many of the best hypotheses there ever were.
Rigor often constrains imagination/innovation. It gets to the point where people are discouraged from seeking radical hypotheses. And false hypotheses are not always useless. They are often the best learning experiences that anyone can have, and motivate (in the author) a very close examination of the evidence (much closer than he would examine if he were correct and others defended it for him).
But unfortunately, many people forget what it was like when they were children and their curiosities were unguided by rigor. many hypotheses of childhood, furthermore, were already developed by some other scientist, and it is often difficult for an older person to encourage a young student’s ideas that were already proposed by another person.
And when people say that America has issues with attracting student motivation in the sciences, the obsession with rigor is one thing that needs to be examined.
rarely trusting official advice
So I rarely put much trust in the advice that “official websites” give. More informal places, like College Confidential (although the mods are making it more formal, and possibly less useful), provide far more useful information than any college admissions officer is willing to give They must be politically correct (in that they must cater to all interests), which makes them only give the obvious advice. Having lots of extracurriculars is “politically correct” for some reason, and so every college urges each student to get them. Working hard in school is also “politically correct”, even though a student may do much better if he sacrifices grades for competitions (it should be noted that some professors in grad school *do* say that sacrificing grades for research is a good idea, but rarely will the “official” grad school advice websites say that).
With federal government websites, it’s often worse. Following the USDA food pyramid is an excellent way to become diabetic (the bottom of the food pyramid = diabetes-inducing foods). Meat is completely unnecessary for a healthy diet. But the USDA has to cater to the farm and pig interests. It does this to be “politically correct”. Now, the USDA certainly isn’t catering to the vegetarian interests. But “politically correct” simply means that it caters to whatever interests seem to hold more influence. After all, there are always people who oppose whatever happens to be “politically correct”, but their voices do not hold as much influence.
which methods of archival do u use wrt deleted websites?
and deleted topics/posts/threads/anything?
i have lots of techniques. google cache, firefox cache (make sure to go on offline mode!) [or even use multiple instances of reload every, although i dont do that], boardreader, caches from MSN and Yahoo (tho they rarely work), sometimes archive.org, lazarus formrecovery, and clipcache (I often copy/paste things). and i’ve gotten used to the practice of saving things instead of bookmarking them. which i am so glad of doing, whenever i look at, say, the bookmarks i made in 2006.
of course, if i anticipate that a site may be deleted soon, i quickly use downthemall or winhttrack (whatever is more convenient). though robots.txt is much more common than it used to be which makes winhttrack useless for a lot of them. but then i created a program that concatenates topic indexes (after using the batch processing feature of downthemall to save an entire list of topics) so then i can use downthemall on the entire concatenated forum and then save every thread that has ever existed.
of course renaming masks are important. but *name*.*ext* and *text*.*ext* have seemed sufficient for everything so far.
2010 allows for archival through iMacros. It can go through the Javascript that httrack/downthemall can’t automatically click on. and it also can go through password protected webpages that httrack is usually bad at getting through. the issue is deep mirroring though (it can probably mirror things one at a time but not simultaneously).
The Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery – Microsoft Research
So basically, the two main paradigms used to be experiment and theory. Then in the 1950s came simulations, and now we have data-intensive scientific discovery. Some ppl have recently written programs that can derive physical formulas from massive amounts of data. Such methods can produce true results without an a priori basis for scientific discovery, which runs counter to the scientific method.
As an interesting article says:
The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete
This is not to say that the scientific method is irrelevant. It isn’t, and data-intensive scientific discovery still needs a priori hypotheses for efficient algorithms that don’t take forever to run. But it does mean that it may be easier for people to develop weaker a priori hypotheses that can serve as the basis of algorithms, or one could, say, try a simulation run at a smaller data set that could produce a conclusion that can serve as the hypothesis of a larger data set.
Anyways, statisticians have long been known to get small amounts of data from large amounts of noise. I’ve talked to a number of professors about this, and they all seem to agree that it comes from statistical techniques. As a New York Times article says, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/06/te…y/06stats.html.
Anyways, the science of the future contains sensors with very high resolution, an ability to distribute the sensors in such a way that they can show representative samples (and also an exponential increase in sensors), the exponential growth in storage space per unit of hard drive, and the exponential growth in processing speed as follows Moore’s Law (although this growth will certainly asymptote in the next few decades). This, of course, allows for the possibility of a data deluge. Then comes the algorithms. Regular science will not be obsolete, but rather, be supplemented. The scope of it might possibly change.
Then there’s neural networks and artificial intelligence. Technically neural networks are a subset of artificial intelligence, but I like to separate the two out. I think one point of discussion in the future will be this: how different is data mining/machine learning – how different is it from AI? And are the current statistical heuristics merely primitive means of artificial intelligence? In fact, crowdsourcing (giving the “masses” a means of knowledge creation/discovery – wikipedia is an excellent example, as is anything user-created) is a sort of artificial intelligence – a sort of distributed artificial intelligence.
So the point of this thread? I’m thinking that the great scientific discoveries of the future will have disproportionate influence (relative to the past) from data mining/pattern recognition. Algorithms, in particular, will also be important (those, too, are probably just a subset of AI). So the aspiring scientist may be wisest to study those fields in particular. And then s/he may be well prepared for any particular field.
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some more links:
edited out, post did not pass threshold of significance to be included here
There are two fundamental ways of learning
(a) general to specific
(b) specific to general (e.g. case studies)
Scientific hypotheses (general) are motivated by experiments (specific). With data, one can hypothesize a trend and see the general hypotheses
One can also try this process mathematically, as specific results can motivate a hypothesis of the general structure, which can then be proved.
Which way is faster? It depends on person. It might be plausible that learning styles are “bunk” and that smarter students are more efficient through learning of type (a), but it’s also quite plausible that this is not true (for one thing, learning is dependent on both intelligence and motivation/interest, and the motivation/interest component can make type b learning more efficient even for geniuses). I, for one, learn best through the “specific to general” method. As such, I believe that I learn math best when it’s motivated by physical phenomena (in other words, learning math “along the way of doing science”) than when pursuing math first and then learning science (which is what I did, which didn’t work as well as I hoped, especially since it killed my motivation). As I’m quite familiar with the climate trends of specific localities, I also learn the generalities of climate best through case studies.
And then after learning the applications of this math field, one is more motivated to learn the specifics of the math behind the math, and one even has more physical intuition through this learning route. It actually means something when one learns through the second route.
It is also true, however, that route (b) can be taken too far, as is evident in the “discovery-based” math curricula, which generally produce poor results. When one is self-motivated, route (b) can be especially rewarding, but the selection of case studies is important, as an improper selection of case studies can result in a very minute exploration of the general structure (it is also true that very few textbooks are written in a way as to make route (b) most exciting to learn about). Generally textbooks present their material as ends, not as means to an end (except in the crappy discovery-based math textbooks). However, one can most certainly learn calculus through physics (especially div/grad/curl), and linear algebra through its applications, and a very smart (or lucky) person can design such a curriculum that would work for many people (it is much easier to design such curriculums for oneself than it is for a wide variety of personalities).
Nonetheless, route (b) is often stultifying. In fact, I sometimes feel impatient and feel like I’d rather learn the math first. A person’s temperament may vary from time to time, and find type a rewarding at some types, and type b rewarding at other times.
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learning how it’s done vs why it’s done: what’s the optimal order of learning these things
in grade school, you’re taught how it’s done. why it’s gone come later
in college, opposite happens. but sometimes it’s a lot more confusing that way. and requires absorption of more details and multistep processes
what is optimal? it obviously depends from person to person. it’s more “natural” to learn how it’s done first. but it’s only “natural” for phenomena that are discovered through hypothesis->observation or derivation. However, it’s not “natural” for phenomena that are discovered through serendipity, in which one learns the result/how to get it before one learns why the result is the way it is. and in some cases, like quantum mechanics, one may never learn why it is the way it is. of course, it feels more “natural” and “satisfying” to learn how it’s done, and promotes habits that are helpful to further discovery, but learning the process AFTER learning the result is ALSO curiosity-satisfying, and does not necessarily lead to the sense of “helplessness” that could allegedly come after learning the result first time after time. That “helplessness” could come, but if one has internalized both approaches, then it is far from inevitable, and then learning the result before the explanation can be faster and more efficient.
But in the end, it depends on person and context. Sometimes I feel more stifled when I learn result before explanation; sometimes I feel more stifled when I learn explanation before result. It is much easier to trick oneself into thinking that one has learned the material if one has only learned the result (without learning the explanation); it is also easier to forget the material if one has only learned the result (but learning the explanation along with the result shouldn’t take too much more time); and learning only the result is also less challenging (so familiarity with the process carries better “signalling” value and makes one more absorbed into the process so that one internalizes it better ). But again, once one has learned BOTH the process and the result, then the signalling value/internalization value is irrelevant. The only point of relevance is when one has learned one but not the other (which can happen, especially when people are lazy, slow, or time-constrained), or when one has partially learned one and learned another more (although this is very common). So perhaps in an environment where one has partially learned one and learned another more, then learning the process first may be more optimal, especially when people forget easily and quickly. But when one learns things completely, then the order should not matter much (or the order should depend on how much time more time one spends doing it one way vs how much time one spends doing it the opposite way; or on how rewarding the two orders are relative to each other)
so one thing ive always wondered: in pharmacology, is the dose/mg really valid? this assumes that the extra cells (fat or muscle cells) have equal uptake of the drug as all other cells do, AND that blood vessel growth is proportional to weight growth. but i dont think this assumption is totally valid. more fat might spring up new blood vessels, but what is the extra volume of all these blood vessels? well, fat tends to grow on “layers”. fat tends to distribute itself throughout the periphery of the body, so the blood vessel networks on the outer periphery have more surface area to unit volume? (as in, it’s the sort of thing that has a high surface area to volume ratio). so that would make blood vessels from fat cells act in a way that overrepresents the blood vessel growth from fat growth. of course there is an opposite trend too – the blood vessels from new fat cells are just new blood vessels, but they’re not major new blood vessels – there’s a fixed amount of blood vessel mass in every person of some arbitrary height.
there’s another assumption to – that new blood vessel growth will trigger the production of plasma + blood cells that increases in proportion to increased blood vessel growth
why is trend data so important?
because the majority of the literature is in the past, and of that past, most of it will not be in the recent past. trends are the best way to inform the continual applicability of the past literature
model of scientific research
normal science: adding entries to the database of scientific knowledge (entries are categorized and analyzed according to current rules)
revolutionary science: change the rules. or design a totally different new system of rules that makes the entries in the database more consistent with each other.
there are several levels of normal science. a researcher/principal investigator can allocate most of the “normal science” work to graduate students/others as he can usually expect them to follow the procedures of normal science. occasionally the researcher chooses to look at the data more closely/examine the data, as specific instances can provide “schema/prototypes” to help clarify theory (and make the theory more salient and comprehensible)
Also, the “4 paradigms” – theory, experiment, simulations, data mining/pattern recognition. technically the latter two can be considered subsets of experiments. But at the same time, they also share some characteristics with theory. there’s a new computer program that can derive physical laws from mass datasets. how does one categorize that? it’s clearly the fourth paradigm, but at the same time, it creates theory (and theory is inspired by the desire to find a model/equation to make the data consistent). simulations can be analyzed too (simulations are pretty much experiments – the only difference is that simulations do not have to conform to the real world). in fact, a lot of the “normal science work” consists of the analysis of simulation output, as many simulations are ad hoc and haven’t been independently investigated by numerous people.
Also, we now know that crowdsourcing can also inspire research (usually through categorization/data mining/etc). Some sorts of crowdsourcing were implicitly used in empirical research (e.g. many fossils are not discovered by people who are actively looking for them – they just accidentally dig them up). now crowdsourcing is more active (galaxy identification, etc).
Technically, there are other important steps to further research too. developing the infrastructure of research (through engineers and programmers). a lot of the infrastructure is general and must be converted to scientific uses.
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Methods of scientific research:
- using alternative paradigm to investigate data. sometimes alternative paradigm describes data better; sometimes data is described equally well by multiple paradigms/interpretations
- development of infrastructure (and integration thereof). matlab, python modules, toolkits, etc.
- run simulations, see if simulation outputs confirm paradigm
- lit reviews (they get the most citations!)
- structure of object, structure of object’s interactions
Personality Psychology:
- Comparing self-assessments with external assessments, assess both wrt accuracy
Psychopharmacology:
- Compare one drug’s effects in adolescence to its effects in adulthood
- bioavailability/pharmokinetics/toxicology/etc. anything on its spec sheet
- effects of metabolites
- effects on other disorders
- possible chronic effects
CS:
- two systems are developed independently from each other. often research (the lowly kind assigned to undergrads) is to link up the systems with each other (by making them able to communicate with each other [directly or through output files/reading output files], or by individually converting the code in one system to the code in another system. )
- rewriting code so that it can be run by parallel/distributed processes
working memory
science tests generally show that most g-related measurements (like working memory) increase up to age 14 and then decline. Also, the size of the brain grows until age 14 and then starts shrinking (I would think that it shrinks slowly at first and then at faster rates once one grows older)
What I find interesting is the digit span test. here, we see that young chimpanzees outperform college students. This is one of the tests where abilities increase up to age 5ish and then decline.
Other g-related measurements also increase to a certain age and then decrease. The age of peak measurement might vary according to test.
So this brings up a lot of questions. First of all, why do some of them peak out at very young ages? (aka why do they decline so early?) Surely it’s before the impact of aging-related effects.
==
Anyways, there are a bunch of g-factors for a lot of things. You can make them as specific or as general as you want to. Like, g-factors for RTS games, FPS games, all games, sports, etc. Some of these g-factors are formed of more malleable components than the g-factors of IQ tests; other g-factors are formed of more heritable components than the g-factors of IQ tests. Many also show a peak at a certain age, and then a decline.
10/24/2008: (as that dude once said, Nothing in biology can be understood except under the light of evolution). in other subjects you have “motivations”; in biology you have “selection pressure”. ya. And in chemistry you have “most stable structure” which corresponds to “lowest energy level” or if u want to get really theoretical (statistical mechanics) you have entropy and “which permutation is MOST likely”. so that’s the motivation for chemistry. the motivation for physics is something like that too – statistical mechanics. HAHA. nothing in physics can be understood except under the light of statistical mechanics. SAME FOR CHEMISTRY!! and for biology it’s the same too! cuz evolution is really statistical mechanics. And then what of math? nothing in math can be understood except under the light of the arbitrariness of the axioms lol. that’s right! okay. and then what else? oh yeah social sciences. those are really just huge amounts of data. which all reduce down to statistical mechanics at the end. because in the end, the vast majority of permutations will be permutations of the heat death of the universe anyways
common “key words”/distinctions/tradeoffs
- mathematically rigorous vs. intuitive (many physicists sacrifice mathematical rigor for intuition; opposite for mathematicians)
- ad hoc (okay I wrote this some time ago but have to dig it back up)
- “clever” solution vs “messy” one. It is often the case that a “clever” solution is the easiest solution to understand and use (once dreamed up), but also the solution with the most “genius” to dream up.
- “lucky”. example: nyquist sampling: one can make a perfect reconstruction if “lucky”. statistics often tries to control against such luck. Otherwise people are prone to overgeneralizing from freak accidents (that could be “luck” or “unluck”)
- axioms/assumptions, rules of logic/operators, …
- “elegant”. see wikipedia entry for “mathematical elegance”
- (in talent recognition) tradeoff between creativity and risk. high creativity is often associated with higher risk. risk is often associated with
- (in evolutionary biology) tradeoffs are numerous. mammals and birds are rarely poisonous since they usually have the mobility (from being warm-blooded) and intelligence to quickly kill prey (or escape) without relying on poisons. One must wonder how many animals manage to “hold in” poison without the poison affecting their own tissues
- (in military history): Military history is often popularized as the celebration of “genius” that uses consistently clever strategems used by the winning side. Sometimes it almost seems as if the winning side had near-perfect information of the motives of the losing side. But information is very rarely perfect. Sometimes people have survived due to gambles. Yet some people have survived through repeated gambles. Of course, there will always be winners even in the repeated gambles, and the winners will be the most recognized (no matter how unrepresentative they are of reality, no matter how a perfect system [under limited information] would fail most of the time if it took the same decisions). Though those who make the “best” decisions out of imperfect information will be disproportionately represented among the victors.
- (in economics): tradeoff between fairness and efficiency. Might add that democracy is deliberately inefficient. Fitness-wise, a “perfect” autocracy will have “higher utility” than any democracy. But “perfect autocracies” often degenerate to “catastrophic autocracies”. Why is that? Imperfect information of successors. Also senility (or personality changes) with increasing age, and the failure to adopt what increases utility the most (often since people are psychologically predisposed to be stubborn and include axioms that involve more than the definition of utility – but also – means to maximize utility that aren’t the best means to maximize utility in a different environment)
- (in optimization): optimization, by definition, involves tradeoffs. In fact, the combination of optimization and evolutionary algorithms would probably explain the existence of all of the above
- Environment1, environment2, …, environment n. Person1, person2, …, person n. Interestingly, personality psychology has a major flaw – people can be drastically different in different environments – but their environment happens to be so integrated with the environments of others that they effectively stay in environments that are of limited “distance” from any other arbitrary environment. Their personalities can changed when released into environments whose characteristics entail sufficiently “high” distance from the characteristics from the union (or intersection? both might work) of other environments (e.g. stanford prison experiment). If i had to put a bet though, I would still put in a common “personality factor” through all environments.
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Multiple categories:
- inhibitory neurotransmitters/excitatory neurotransmitters. it is really the receptors that determine whether they are inhibitory/excitatory.
- where do nonlinearities in biology come from? delayed rectifiers (of K+ current), thresholds (is it a bifurcation?). all “thresholds” are a different in magnitude and not of quality, but some may seem like a difference in quality, however, it is all probabilistic. the “threshold” of no return may just be a sharp increase in slope. theoretically speaking, one can create a representation of energy and matter across space-time, which would reduce everything into a difference of quantity (the differences between the coordinates would be the only difference of quality, since the values of one set of coordinates do not have to be absolutely correlated with the values of another set of coordinates)
-
- there is no conservation law for acids/bases.
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other random thoughts (I won’t categorize for now):
- economics is the study of incentives, of which money is only a subset of all possible incentives. Freakonomics really brings this distinction to light.
- with massively increased energy, the price of energy will be cheaper, which will make it more economical to transmutate elements. Possibly including elements that could be transmutated into rare earth elements.
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distinctions that aren’t as stark as they seem:
- adaptionism vs. punctuated equilibrium. a recent paper has put in support for the “punctuated equilibrium” theory of genetic variation. i would intuitively find that it makes more sense – it just happens that I used to be more sympathetic to the sociobiologists (who also happen to be right on a lot of things).
-
common inequalities that seem like equalities
- neat != organized. one can be organized and still be a mess. having things on the floor may be one way to prioritize the most important things (as long as one is careful not to turn the mess into a disorganized one)
- self-centered != reluctant to share. a self-centered person can be incredibly generous in sharing things – after all – this makes him more well-known to others
- unconscientious != doesn’t work hard. the unconscientious often have to work harder to achieve the same results as the naturally conscientious
- nice != unselfish. being nice is actually incredibly useful in getting people to do things for oneself. it just happens that selfishness tends to be correlated with lower levels of self-control and higher levels of meanness
Science News
science news: (more recent first)
(more @ http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/gnxpforum/ )
My selection tends to be strongly biased along the lines of neuroscience, genetics, astrophysics, transhumanism, and animal behavior
edited: now i think i’m going to put up links. if a link’s dead, better to just keep it since ppl can google it elsewhere
2010:
Battle of the bugs leaves humans as collateral damage
diabetes => twice rate of memory loss in 5 years
video games do not make MOST people more violent (only those with low agreeableness, high neuroticism, low conscientiousness)
Nature promotes vitality in people, study finds
the media finds life on titan. sort of…
Dolphins Use Diplomacy in Their Communication, Biologists Find
children abandon egalitarianism and develop meritocratic attitudes as they enter adolescence (after age 12)
People with Asperger’s less likely to see purpose behind the events in their lives
Astronomers discover ‘defiant’ new supernova
Anti-aging supplements may be best taken not too late in life
Odds 1-in-3 for Northwest Mega-Quake Within 50 Years
Pollutants Risk Factors For Type 2 Diabetes
Only Processed Meat Boosts Diabetes And Heart Disease
Ravens Console Each Other After Fights
JPL Diagnosing Voyager 2 data 8.6 billion miles from Earth
Gulf Coast May Be Permanently Changed by Oil Spill
Specific odors that represent food or indicate danger are capable of altering an animal’s lifespan and physiological profile by activating a small number of highly specialized sensory neurons
fruits/vegetables do not lower risk of cancer (except among heavy smokers/drinkers)
Self Esteem Peaks At Age 60
Early Earth absorbed more sunlight — no extreme greenhouse needed to keep water wet (also, another hypo: the fractal haze)
Exotic “Electroweak” Star Predicted
Elite Few Can Multitask Driving And Cell Phone
cracked: 5 Creepy Ways Video Games Are Trying to Get You Addicted (one of the best cracked articles ever, even if unrelated to science news)
First Microbes Colonized Land by Using Fat For Protection
A new 3-D map of the interstellar gas within 300 parsecs from the sun
Brain dopamine receptor density correlates with social status
“Super Earth” May Really Be New Planet Type: Super-Io
Dolphins Smarter, More Self-Aware than Previously Realized (in fact, >> chimpanzees)
Thorium, the Next Nuclear Fuel?
2009:
thorium nuclear reactors > uranium
voyager 2 finds that magnetic field just outside solar system is larger than anticipated (explaining why the local interstellar cloud still exists). direction of B is different than anticipated
octopuses use coconut shells as tools
fructose definitively shown to increase abdominal fat
sleep deprivation => orexin => beta amyloid => alzheimer’s
small amounts of beta amyloid necessary for memory
physically fit => higher IQ
2008: dual-n-back => higher fluid IQ
electroweak stars
“time-keeping” neurons discovered
“harm” ratings of drug users closely parallel “harm ratings” of researchers (in the lancet)
mostly vegetarian spider
more bisphenol a dangers
amphetamine use in adolescence may impair adult working memory
birds in captivity lose hippocampal mass
infections possibly responsible for most cancers
distant earthquakes can weaken faults thousands of miles away
removing abdominal fat improves biomarkers associated with “syndrome x”
hazardous air pollution inside tunnels
Obese older people have smaller brains than non-obese old people. (also overweight = 4% smaller; obese = 8% smaller)
social rejection causes pain similar to physical pain (interesting how this ties into swearing => pain relief)
stressed rats settle in routines and don’t try innovative solutions
very low carb diet (+high protein) => arteriosclerosis
Our moral thermostat – why being good can give people license to misbehave
swearing => pain relief
Calorie restriction => extended lifespan in rhesus macaques + total prevention of diabetes
Seagulls eating LIVING whale tissue
Betelgeuse with reduced size
16 year old has the physiological+mental age of a toddler, has never aged since then
london taxi drivers may have larger hippocampus, but at expense of spatial ability in some subtests (cuz brain region allocation may crowd out allocation of other things)
6-minutes of intensive exercise sufficient to replicate benefits of regular exercise
body remembers high lvls of glucose for 2 weeks
Feb 2009:
Kepler planet-finding mission launched
NASA assigns priority to Europa mission
US CO2 satellite fails to launch
US satellite collides w/ Russian satellite
slow earthquakes in pacific northwest are synchronized with shear stress (or something i forgot)
Jan 2009:
google earth used by swiss police to find marijuana field
The radiative forcing potential of different climate geoengineering options
cassini affirms liquid hydrocarbons and hydrocarbon rain on titan’s lakes – but questions arise as to where the hydrocarbons come from (since there’s only enough to last for 10 million years)
birds survived dinosaur extinctions possibly due to larger brains
Global Warming Irreversible, NOAA Scientist Finds
Eat less, remember more
omega-6s might not contribute to inflammation (too much speculation based solely on its contribution to arachidonic acid)
Scientists Rank Global Cooling Hacks
dolphins use elaborate rituals to prepare cuttlefish
“There was a graded association with average sleep duration: participants with less than 7 hours of sleep were 2.94 times…more likely to develop a cold than those with 8 hours or more of sleep. “
At M.I.T., Large Lectures Are Going the Way of the Blackboard
For Fats, Longer May Not Be Better
Elderly may have higher blood pressure in cold weather
Rats prefer Manhattan topology to New Orleans topology
Pelicans falling “off” the sky along the West coast
“A lot of the world’s e-waste is exported to Guiyu, China, where peasants heat circuit boards over coal fires to recover lead (a 15″ computer monitor can pack up to 7 lbs. of Pb), while others use acid to burn off bits of gold.”
Bush signs unprecedented ocean protection bill
Brain Scans Show Some Remain Deeply In Love For Decades
[NYT] Charles Murray: Should the Obama Generation Drop Out?
2008:
Killer Raven Swarms Attacking Farm Animals
- Hobbyists are trying genetic engineering at home
- scientists say anti-cousin marriage laws outdated
- nature editorial: it is perfectly acceptable for people to use drugs to cognitively enhance themselves
- study: over 5 yr period, 34% of those with < 5 hrs of sleep/day developed calcified plaques in their arteries. 7% of control group with normal sleep did. 11% of people with slightly less sleep did.
- when u feel sleepy – parts of ur brain have already fallen asleep
- oceans acidifying 10x faster than previously thought
- amoeba can form multicellular organisms of hetereogenous genotypes (although they want similar genotypes). usually there are 4 living cells for every dead cell
- extinct penguin discovered through DNA analysis (not through fossils) – 500 yrs extinct
- cognitive distance. other people, greater distances, greater temporal distances, tasks requiring more self-control => all are cogntively distant. the stroop test helps measure this.
- Long-term memories may be preserved in neurons by a process called DNA methylation
- mineral kingdom has co-evolved with life
- exercise pill
- photosynthetic slug
- http://www.plosgenetics.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pgen.1000271 (Gene Regulation in Primates Evolves under Tissue-Specific Selection Pressures:)
- myelin deteriorates after age 39
- Rats check their own knowledge before taking a test
- Group Bragging Betrays Insecurity, Study Shows
- “Spinner dolphins have long been known for their teamwork in capturing prey but a new study using high-tech acoustics has found that their synchronization is even more complex than scientists realized and likely evolved as a strategy to maximize their energy intake.”
- “The means by which proteins provide a ‘border control’ service, allowing cells to take up chemicals and substances from their surroundings, whilst keeping others out, is revealed in unprecedented molecular detail for the first time, in the journal Science.”
- “The human intestine detects potential poisons passing into it – and may take action to reduce the harm they cause.”
- aspies are more rational in a particular game theory-based game
- “Religiosity Curbs Teen Marijuana Use By Half, National Study Finds”
- “Cell Protein Suppresses Pain Eight Times More Effectively Than Morphine”
- “Are the elites more polarized? Yes!”
- “Antisocial Kids Have Less Cortisol In Stressful Situations”
- only 68 molecular building blocks are used to construct these four fundamental components of cells: the nucleic acids (DNA and RNA), proteins, glycans and lipids,’
- bisphenol-A => diabetes
- magpies recognize themselves in mirrors
- rhea has rings!
- more evidence of calorie restriction working; more evidence of vitamin D helping; more evidence that vitamin C and E don’t in megadoses
2007:
- elephants recognize themselves in mirrors
- chimps hunt with spears
data sets i’d like to request sometime
- # of scientists per year (for various countries)
- % of Soviet GDP directed towards science
for individual countries in time periods like WWII:
- % of GDP available to foreign occupier (an interesting question although highly variable – depends on leniency of surrender conditions and presence/absence of individual events that may trigger widespread resentment)
- % of population willing to fight/be drafted in war of foreign occupier
- political orientations of subnational entities (for example, are territories that border a potentially hostile nation more conservative? [inasmuch as conservatism is associated with pro-military/pro-security policies]
curiosity expansion?
so there are the moments in life when i feel listless and bored. certainly when i don’t have the energy or time to do anything intellectually stimulating, but also when i don’t want to squander away more time. so perhaps there are opportunities for me to explore my curiosity (or in other words, find new local (and even possibly global) maxima in search space.
and hm, maybe i’ll make a list of ways to explore it
- look up the author of each book i find interesting. if especially bored, google the author’s name
- look up the wikipedia, amazon, and other pages of such author
- look up the publisher or series of the book
- use a different OS (use different linux distros too), web browsers, applications, etc. dont do it too much (at least at the point where it starts to significantly compromise on one’s ability to get familiar with the program’s settings/programming language’s libraries/etc)
- learn a new language (cliche lolz. probably more desirable for non-info-geeks).
- wikipedia lists/categories. those are excellent.
Thoughts on the external world
I’ll just post some here. All of these are hypotheses and by no means convictions.
- People with Asperger’s Syndrome don’t really have a higher IQ than average. They’re said to have higher IQ – probably since the ones with below-average IQ are tagged with full-blown autism.
- Mental conceptual structures (relatively inflexible after formation) often categorize a lot of things that wouldn’t be coupled with each other in another environment. For example, conservatives often tag teacher unions, environmentalists, and other Democrats together with each other – even though their association with the Democrats is really just a developmental coincidence
Yes, I know I’m extremely mediocre in most of the things I do – I just like to try a lot of things out to see how they work (without investing too much time into them)
psh, there’s a better term for this: lifehacks. and I’m still quite immature. i’m developing my own, but I better keep them in my own private file before sharing them like this
coupling
often, an advantage/disadvantage analysis carries fundamental unspoken assumptions – assumptions of coupling. just because things couple with each other in this environment doesn’t mean that they’ll always couple with each other, and some types of coupling are much more vulnerable to to different environments than other types of coupling. Couplings based on the demographic characteristics of ppl who share two totally divergent views – those couplings are especially vulnerable. meanwhile, there are some couplings that must follow from the fundamental laws of the universe.
most couplings in macroscopic social phenomenon, however, are generally vulnerable to different environments. example below.
“
okay, well living simply != reducing energy usage/money spent.
after all you can live off someone’s inheritance (where inheritance is non-monetary property) and save just as much energy/CO2, PLUS live non-simply.
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also the ironic thing I guess is that people in manhattan contribute less net CO2 per capita than people in other cities. even though manhattan isn’t really simple – people are just more efficient there (e.g. higher population densities means less wasted on transportation or heating/lighting up near-empty rooms).
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Yeah, I guess living simply is also compatible with living simply *at home* but with a gas-guzzling car that spews out lots of CO2 just because you live far away from civilization and must spew that CO2 out whenever you visit civilization.
the internet is weird cuz it’s both non-simple AND it might ultimately help reduce CO2 emissions (if you start replacing transportation costs with things you do online)”
blehhh this failed
- because i’m too lazy to effectively allocate attention between my blogs
- also because i come off as overly academic and uninteresting here. even if i’m less embarrassing here than my other blog.
blehblehblehbleh.
sometime i’ll find a website to post all my interests on, I suppose.
philosophy and allocation
some branches of philosophy (esp. ethics) may be largely influenced by examining the ways to allocate properties like moral status. Others are largely influenced by allocation of resources (after all you can’t maximize a single property with mere allocations – why is, say, art more important than pure science? and how much money should we allocate to each? what are their relative importances to each other and what determines such relative importances?). Then others are largely influenced by
a new research proposal
you know how people assume homogenity when homogenity doesn’t in fact exist? oftentimes homogenity is a fairly accurate approximation for MOST cases, but it may not be one for some cases.
How is the calorie content in food measured? Not by feeding animals with it (after all, they go through dif. routes), bur rather, through external analysis. But then we assume that calories are absorbed equally efficiently from every food source – this may be far from the case in fact.
this may have applications to other fields too
methodology vs. learning facts
it’s kind of related to treating symptoms and treating the root causes
teaching kids to learn a subject through things like colorful posters and projects isn’t going to help them later (since they aren’t going to be designing colorful posters later). They may PRESENT what they’ve learned through posters, but those posters are likely to fall under the domain of computers, not handwriting.
Does it help them retain the info better than if they just learned the facts straight? There isn’t an iota of proof in it. And sure it might motivate some more than others, but that doesn’t justify forcing everyone in the same class to learn by the same means.
It’s possible that learning by that means could potentially help students learn by helping them do similar things that could help them in the future (transfer) but we can’t prove this
That being said though, there are some specific ways to help students learn info that ISN’T going to help them learn info later, but would at least help them learn VITAL information better than an approach that they would have to use later (but such an approach would be less aided)
the scope of your attention span
varies a lot.
usually my attention scope (and scope of memory) is so limited that I can only think of a few specific chunks of info without trying to find a general underlying trend that could potentially categorize them all under specific rules that would facilitate further discovery and categorization.
but there are a few times when i feel more inspired. i must capture those moments and identify them (and prepare for myself when I have such moments)
If you’re trying to measure the correlations of tests, you have to measure the correlation of that test with knowledge specific to the person (or in some cases to a person’s capability)
but your measurements are biased by several factors. (a) that your tests are so similar to tests that are used to “determine” the people who may be given resources that others wouldn’t get in such a way that it partially measures accessibility to such resources rather than intrinsic talent, (b) that your tests are so similar to tests used for institution admissions that they end up measuring what the institution ends up teaching you rather than intrinsic talent. But actually even subject based tests (when idealized) tend to capture not only subject-based knowledge, but also a variety of other factors that tend to produce that subject-based knowledge [a person who learns the subject material in 1 year is not equal to one who learns it in 5 years]. Of course this becomes less of a problem if you measure other factors in addition to the test.
agents of creativity:
1: government
2: corporations
3: individuals
Ways to incentivize creativity: (external motivation assumed)
government: accountability to taxpayers by means of elections
corporations: profits
individuals: profits, recognition by others and the opposite sex
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elements of theories are judged by:
- how well they explain examples IN a particular domain (we can also debate how general this domain is)
- this domain has examples, counterexamples, and motivating examples
-
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what makes for a good judge?
- the problem is “goodness” depends on what you desire. a lot of times, what is desired isn’t explicitly stated (often because it would contain too much info that’s open to ambiguous interpretation)
- there are many possible systems – you can compare two sucky systems with one ending up better than the other
- think of the big picture – not just of the laws and customs
stable activities and the J curve
I previously commented on the difference between “intrinsic” behavior and “externally motivated” behavior, with the consideration that “externally motivated” behavior can only come through some form of evangelicism, which could include coercion (psychological or physical). Of course, sometimes it is difficult to measure which form of behavior is desirable but when one tries to change the behavior of another, it’s usually a form of external motivation to change an intrinsic behavior.
In any case, we can say that intrinsic behavior is behavior that falls under a steady state. Externally motivated behavior can also fall under a steady state (but you cannot 100% convince a person that the NEW behavior will necessarily be a steady state for HIM). Of course, this steady state also explains why some intrinsic behavior can be less efficient than externally motivated behavior (and why people may have convictions in the efficacy of their intrinsic behavior [and thus resistant to modifying their behavior to another desirable behavior with a more potentially stable "stable state"])
on the below post
One of the problems with libertarianism is that discrimination may be a “stable” strategy in a libertarian state. As in, when the government does not prevent private companies from discriminating, it’s possible for those companies to discriminate against the “colored”. Even though one argument in favor of the free market holds that companies have a natural interest in serving the “colored”, the problem is that oftentimes when discrimination is rampant, the “colored” are especially poor in which case such companies wouldn’t increase their profits by much if they alone tried to end discrimination (moreover it’s safe to say that the dominant group’s prejudices may make it less likely to go to a company that serves the “colored”). “Separate but equal” systems are a stable state because they provide services to all (while non-dominant persons who are bold enough to try to take advantage of the services exclusive to the dominant group would drive away members of the dominant group – thus potentially reducing profits for companies producing services to the dominant group. In this case the government may have to intervene. Moreover, people have an intrinsic propensity towards discrimination but they also have a propensity towards non-discrimination and mere exposure may make it more likely for some members of dominant groups to accept the presence of members of non-dominant groups (often when initially under non-intrinsic motivation-induced-by-observation)
Behavioral measurement and artificial modification
So inspections can measure either intrinsic or artifically motivated behavior.
IQ tests can measure either intrinsic intelligence or artificially motivated IQ-test studying.
Knowledge tests can measure either intrinsic knowledge or knowledge gained artificially.
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All three measurements are designed to test intrinsic qualities (inspections = rule conformance, IQ tests = intelligence, knowledge = breadth of knowledge). But all can be affected by behaviors artificially suited to affect results but not intrinsic qualities.
Getting answers for the test prior to the test may ensure that you get a 100%, but then the test fails to test the breadth of your intrinsic knowledge. Probabilistically, if you relied only on intrinsic knowledge, you would have to be *extremely* lucky to get extremely high marks on a test when you only know, say, 50% of the material and all of it happened to appear on the test (but not the other 50%). But most people do NOT encounter such situations.
Inspections: they must be unpredictable because if you intrinsically do something “undesirable”, then you face an increased risk of getting caught. But if you learn about inspection patterns ahead of time, then they end up sampling your artificially motivated behavior rather than your intrinsic behavior and such samples become useless.
more on discernment
It’s kind of like when you get to know people well, they oftentimes grant you privileges special to you and not to others (this is often a result of signal value – “competent + reliable” people for any field are a mere subset of all possible people who could be paired with the field, but with the exception of a population where people are inclined to be enthusiastic about things they suck at, the granting of such privileges is usually a response to a signal that carries correlative meaning (since the enthusiastic are more likely than average to be “competent/reliable” for the field).
(this may be true for all fields where appreciation is proportional to time spent – or fields where people tend to be internally motivated [oftentimes those where recognition is uncommon] – this may not apply for fields like political offices where many people are enthusiastic and where enthusiasm may be far less correlative with “competency”.
So commenting on the below post, I think some profs in some fields would be convinced (that it would be best for your own education) if you asked them for solution manuals for problems to do on your own as long as you kept them to yourself [in cases of perfect discernment when you can perfectly discern between when to do a problem and when you probably should look up the solution]
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Another thing: gaps in knowledge. A lot of people use a person’s ability to recollect a certain fact as representative of the person’s knowledge of other areas of the field. Recollections of some facts are sometimes sufficient enough to show that you understand something – for example – recollections of the theorems of vector calculus are usually sufficient to show that you have a basic understanding of vector calculus (unless you happened to be a “rare in this population” individual who happened to memorize without comprehension). Sometimes they’re also necessary – an inability to do calculus betrays an inability to do a lot of fields (although there are some amazing counterexamples – for example – dyscalculia – a difficulty with arithmetic – doesn’t always come with diminished intelligence – the authors of “origins of mathematics” recollect a patient who was able to do physical chemistry without knowing how to add!)
When it comes to specific facts, the signal value of whether you know “fact” or not is often dependent on the percentage of the population who go through a particular educational system/curriculum (and also dependent on a small percentage of people who self-study out of non-traditional books). Of course most facts are related to others and so an inability to recite one fact will usually betray an inability to recite other facts in the area (although this is just probability – there will be gaps in every person’s knowledge, and some people will have gaps totally different from those of others)
Ideal discernment with perfect knowledge
Is of course never attained.
If you had perfect knowledge of your beliefs, then artificial constraints are useless. Artificial constraints include retirement accounts that don’t accumulate interest and the prevention of student access to full solution manuals and teaching materials.
It is probably true that a subset of students will learn better if they had access to both teaching materials and full solution manuals. In fact, access to full solution manuals is the basis behind a lot of self-study programs (and it’s quite possibly true that a number of students with access to them do learn better with them than without them). But policies are directed towards the vast majority of students and the variability of the behavior of them during the periods they’re most likely to pursue the subject of interest. It is obvious that a person’s impulse control varies throughout the day and that a person at consistently peak impulse control is probably able to discern between what’s best for himself and what isn’t best for himself given perfect knowledge of what he finds perfectly appropriate and what he doesn’t find perfectly appropriate. But consistently perfect impulse control is rare and so people, even with perfect knowledge of the long-term benefit functions of their various actions, are oftentimes physically unable to select what’s best for them at all times.
(there is a difference between the keywords “select” and “discern”.) “select” in this context implies perfect knowledge with failures of impulse control. “discern” in this context implies imperfect knowledge.
So for example, most people realize that they have to save for retirement. They intellectually are able to discern between desirable long-term savings behavior and undesirable long-term savings behavior. Yet they cannot always select what’s best for them due to failures of impulse control and so artificial policies are sometimes needed in the context of perfect knowledge.
(but here what is perfect knowledge? Perfect knowledge at every give time implies that one pursues the action most conducive to one’s own sustainable welfare). But we can at least say that people can have perfect knowledge at peak moments of impulse control but imperfect knowledge when their impulse control fails (as in, “I think I’ll be happiest for the long-run if I just buy this one more thing/I’ll look at this solution to this one problem” during a impulse control failure.)
word count: 389
research priorities
It so happens that there is a potentially infinite amount of research you can conduct on any subject. Yes, this includes subjects such as football games, computer games, reading habits, library-using habits, blogging habits, and so on. It just happens that there are some issues that academic researchers find more interesting than others at the particular time (such “interesting” issues are socially determined, although they may not be completely arbitrary as at any given time there are some activities that influence the behaviors of a substantial number of people and other activities that do not influence such behaviors).But we can apply the “natural” vs. “experiential” analysis again here. Oftentimes the easiest research to do is the research that is on subjects that have already been analyzed. After all, comparisons and verifications are easier on such subjects. However, this alone does not make such subjects as more worthwhile research pursuits than other subjects. There are some fields that are more “stable” than others, stability being determined by the history and depth of research in the field.It should also be noted that this applies to math and science research. A lot of subjects actually publish papers on theoretical math – but different fields of theoretical math. Even psychology professors write papers on theoretical math – just on equations they find more applicable to their immediate problems than theoretical math professors do (after all, there are a potentially infinite number of functions one can analyze). Much theoretical math progress has come out of those alternate fields. Physicists with string theory, population geneticists with Fischer tests, etc.
what’s “naturally” optimal vs. what’s “experientially” optimal
Goal: (Basically this addresses the question “why do you choose action X rather than action Y when you haven’t given equal consideration to both of them?” action Y may be more optimal for you in the long run than action X, even if action X happens to be more locally optimal for you)
As it stands, most people are fairly more or less aware of their strategies optimal for a given goal. However, they frequently fail to distinguish between what’s naturally optimal for them as compared to what’s experientially optimal for them. There is quite a huge distinction between the two. Sometimes the differences between what’s naturally optimal and what’s experientially optimal aren’t that great – strategies are not inflexible and so people’s range of behavior is variable even within the context of each strategy. Nonetheless, strategies are often built on the result of “stable states” that come out of environmentally-influenced bifurcations.
Human nature and environmental constraints are not infinitely flexible and so there are usually strategies that are naturally optimal for realistic phenotypes and environments, even if they may not be optimal for extreme environments or completely different phenotypes.
For example, many people are overly socialized in such a way that they believe that they learn best from lectures as compared to self-study. What often happens, though, is that they don’t even pre-study before lectures. And what often comes out of pre-study is the realization that one can continue pre-studying and then one discovers that one’s lectures are actually useless beyond preparing for ad hoc exams. In this way, what’s “naturally” optimal for a lot of people isself-study, but what’s “experientially” optimal for them happens to be lecture-based learning – as they’ve been socialized to learning from lectures and so they realize their maximum benefit per unit of time [at any given time] by continuing to learn from lectures (as it takes time to develop experience through self-study). “Natural” optimality is only possible to measure if people have equal opportunity to be exposed to both styles of learning. Even then, one has to consider that the resources of one’s youth are different from the resources of one’s later ages. Self-study is a more sustainable learning style than lecture-based learning since you can self-study anything at any time.
Similarly, many people are socialized to type fastest on QWERTY keyboards rather than Dvorak ones. However, Dvorak keyboards are customized to ensure fast typing speeds, whereas Qwerty keyboards are not customized to ensure fast typing speeds. Yet it takes time to get used to type on Qwerty keyboards – a lot of time. And so what’s experientially optimal for most people is to continue typing on Qwerty keyboards even though it’s naturally optimal for them to type on Dvorak ones. One must also consider that in the time being, qwerty typing ability is more sustainable than Dvorak typing ability since one must use qwerty keyboards away from home.
In the same case, we’re socialized to do a lot of things that aren’t necessary (we’re socialized to do what’s “locally” optimal rather than what’s “naturally” optimal). Such as…
- Eating meat and refined grains (when there are plenty of vegetarian foods that taste great). You don’t need to be an animal rights activist to realize that meat is extremely inefficient resource-wise.
- Sleeping on beds mounted on bedframes. Like seriously, you can just put the mattress on the floor
- Communicating academic information by the spoken form rather than the written form. Yes personal information is oftentimes communicated better with body language. But body language is useless when it comes to academic content – especially content delivered for lectures. Written information is archivable, distributable, and retrievable in the future.
- Showering daily. While some people must shower daily (for the purpose of smelling “clean”), others can go for days without showering and still smell “clean”).
- Participating in price-habituated activities that replace price-sensitized one
(read Rachlin’s “Science of Self-Control” for explanation). In fact my theory is pretty much another version of his primrose path (although it’s on a more global level)
list of abstract quantifiers
scientific intuition
overloading
mathematical maturity
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_horizon
maximization given constraints (useful in both math and RL)
auto-parse
operationalizing intelligence
so there probably IS such a thing as social intelligence
intelligence consists of the ability to “select from a number of possible configurations of items that one then (through intelligence) finds most appropriate for one’s given environment and task”. Creativity consists of the ability to generate such possible configurations of items. Creativity demands intelligence since the generation of such configurations is not random.
Social intelligence demands selecting the social responses most appropriate for a given social situation (assuming that one desires to be socially tactful of course).
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Better def: As the word “intelligence” is a pretty loaded term (although perhaps most people agree on their basic conceptions of intelligence – disagreements tend to arise over issues of “multiple intelligences” and such).
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Here’s my definition:
Creativity seems to be based on the capacity to imagine unique possibilities based on the perceptual environment one lives in (and intelligence is based on the capacity to judge the actions most conducive to a “desired outcome”. (a perceptual environment is inclusive of hallucinations). Creativity/intelligence only involve the possession of capacity, not the acting upon of such capacity. In biological organisms, of course, the possession of capacity is closely tied into the acting upon of such capacity, for the acting upon of such capacity helps develop the possession of capacity (from an evolutionarily point of view).
Intelligence is highly conducive to creativity since it allows one to “select” the “most appropriate” possibilities that one imagines – and to “use” those possibilities to achieve a “desired outcome”. It is possible to be intelligent without being creative, as one can still be a perfect judge without being creative. It is also possible to be creative without being intelligent (in a sense, the “infinite monkey typewriter” is creative if not intelligent). It seems that traditional definitions of creativity do incorporate elements of intelligence – as creative individuals are able to produce possibilities that “fit” in the environment – rather than possibilities that involve random number generators. An intelligent animal is able to use its sensory information to produce actions most appropriate to its desires in its particular perceptual environment (for example, an intelligent orca is able to use its sensory information to imagine the actions most likely to capture and eat a seal – a seal that happens to be on an iceberg. It has to be able to judge which actions are more likely to produce results in its particular environment).
Of course, there is also “learning speed”. Is there a logical connection between learning speed and intelligence? Or do they happen to be highly correlated in humans but not necessarily in other organisms or machines? Bear in mind that intelligence is useless without accumulated knowledge and so it makes sense from an adaptive standpoint for intelligence and learning speed to have high correlation with each other.
So in this case, there is (a) learning speed and (b) creativity. It’s possible that one can learn fast without being creative. Or one can lose all ability to form new memories (but can still be creative or rely on one’s stockpile of memories). In this, intelligence is perhaps defined by the ability to judge from what one learns or creates.
An intelligent organism is intelligent irrespective of its environment, and it may act in ways that are unlikely to produce desired results in a completely different environment (especially if the new environment has no patterns whatsoever – or if the organism happens to be hallucinating). However, in MOST cases, we can effectively define intelligence as the capacity to envision cause-and-effect in a particular environment.
There is definitely space for “multiple intelligences” (in the human brain, it may happen that the “multiple intelligences” happen to be correlated with one factor g – but this may just be an accident of evolution if anything). One can be analytically intelligent but not socially intelligent, in that one is able to select the “most appropriate” actions for a desired analytical outcome but totally unable to select the “most appropriate” actions for a desired social outcome.
So what is intelligence? I’m trying to arrive at a good definition of it.
it involves finding patterns in the world and drawing inferences at it.
HOWEVER, it does not mean getting a good grip at cause and effect in the world (in the strictest sense). an intelligent organism is intelligent irrespective of its environment, and it may be totally misled to causation in a completely different environment (especially if the new environment has no patterns whatsoever), in which case the below definition of intelligence becomes an ad hoc definition of intelligence relative to environment.Okay I think I have one. HAVING THE CAPACITY TO IMAGINE unique possibilities in one’s space of memory (that allows perceptual sensory access of one’s own imagination) that are based on the environment that one views and THEN POSSESSING THE CAPACITY to IMAGINE the decisions that one makes WITHIN one’s PERCEPTUAL ENVIRONMENT. (a perceptual environment is INCLUSIVE of hallucinations). Also imagination ONLY involves the possession of CAPACITY, not the ACTING UPON of SUCH CAPACITY. (it is only an adaptive function that people tend to define intelligence by means of behavior – since evolutionarily speaking, there are few organs without functions that are related to the organism’s decisions)hm
I would suggest that, at its crux, ‘intelligence’ is the faculty of understanding the relationship between cause and effect. In practice, intelligence often involves making a choice from among several options by drawing upon experience to make judgments about likely consequences. The efficiency with which an animal can apply its past to shape its own future in ways desirable to itself is thus an index of intelligence. In evolutionary terms, the intelligence of animals can be measured and compared in terms of speed (how long it takes to make decisions) and adaptive fitness (the number of copies of an animal’s genes that survive into future generations as a result of the sum-total of its decisions). The faster and more adaptively an animal can make such decisions, the more intelligent it is.
a very interesting word
February 27, 2008, 11:35 pm
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math [edit] Beauty in method
Mathematicians describe an especially pleasing method of proof as elegant. Depending on context, this may mean:
- A proof that uses a minimum of additional assumptions or previous results.
- A proof that is unusually succinct.
- A proof that derives a result in a surprising way (e.g., from an apparently unrelated theorem or collection of theorems.)
- A proof that is based on new and original insights.
- A method of proof that can be easily generalized to solve a family of similar problems.
In the search for an elegant proof, mathematicians often look for different independent ways to prove a result—the first proof that is found may not be the best. The theorem for which the greatest number of different proofs have been discovered is possibly the Pythagorean theorem, with hundreds of proofs having been published.1 Another theorem that has been proved in many different ways is the theorem of quadratic reciprocity—Carl Friedrich Gauss alone published eight different proofs of this theorem.
Conversely, results that are logically correct but involve laborious calculations, over-elaborate methods, very conventional approaches, or that rely on a large number of particularly powerful axioms or previous results are not usually considered to be elegant, and may be called ugly or clumsy. This is perhaps related to the notion of Occam’s Razor.
most extremely fundamental tidbits of reasoning
February 27, 2008, 11:34 pm
Filed under:
thoughts …that anyone should read.
Necessary words to *viscerally* appreciate the significance of:
plausibility argument (vs inductive, deductive, etc).
ad hoc
necessary and sufficient
top down/bottom up
possibility space
normative/prescriptive/descriptive
consequentialism
decrease inhibition
connotation/denotation
generation: (intentional/methodical), procedural, random
variation/(natural || artificial) selection
limits of human appreciation/emotions. you can’t get past “furious” or “gracious” in civilization III
idealism
“qualification”
selective/discernment. If you can discern, you can be selective. Selective is often good in the case of drugs (selective drugs produce desirable effects) and it allows you to narrow down to a list of potentially compatible people/tasks.
synchronization
relative contribution estimation/disagreement
operationalize
instrumental vs. intrinsic value (and communicability of instrumental vs. intrinsic values) to others
Impulse control:
-> impulses that go away when you don’t satisfy them
=> impulses that won’t go away when you don’t satisfy but you ca cave into later without consequences (e-mail)
=> impulses that actually must be fulfilled
other terms not as vitally important:
transfer and supposed transfer
extrapolation and overextrapolation
recognition/appreciation (the significance of action X in context Y)
laissez-faire
convince
axiom
prima facie (this explains more than you’d imagine – it’s why people dislike spoilers even though they’ll learn what the spoilers are for the vast majority of their lifetime anyways)
overgeneralization
general/idiosyncrasies
non-redundant stimuli
information content of idiosyncratic fields vs. information content of more general fields
talent identification, do we need to hurt students int he process, and identification of mistakes in the process
correspondence theory of truth
ambiguous terms to question meaning of:
maturity
natural/artificial distinction
(this has to be kept short and concise precisely because it is intended for a mass audience)
=> All forms of media are designed to appeal to human nature. Human nature is not particularly malleable. While there are some ideas and movements that can change people in such a way that they’re more receptive to the ideas/movements, the MOST successful movements/ideas will be the ones that conform to the POTENTIAL biases/interests of the PRESENT population.
=> there is no intrinsic value to educational credentials like GPA and test scores. Their value comes ONLY from statistics – that is – from a pool of people you know *very little* about, the best ways to select the most compatible students is to rely *only* on those statistics, but from a group of people you know much more about, statistics become useless.
=> if you try to apply a prescriptive rule to a group of people, you must consider the success of the prescriptive rule in a group of people who are desirably and easily *educated* to follow it, and the success of the prescriptive rule in a more realistic situation – when many people are *not* educated to follow it.
=> there are three vital traits of any theory
a) generating hypotheses/models
b) being perceptive about the world
c) analyzing things to their fundamentals
=> As Dave Barry said, people go to college to study the works of “Austen, Shakespeare, Plato, Aristotle, Lincoln, etc.” All for who that matter, never graduated from college.
=> You will learn the vast majority of material by yourself. You will not learn it in a formal course.
=> Convictions are useless when you consider consequences, not merely actions. Some actions may be more likely than others to lead to DESIRABLE consequences, but NO action will necessarily lead to a desired consequence in ALL possible environments
=> Thus, older people will often have convictions that may be appropriate for a previous time, but not necessarily for a later time when the chain of causation is so different that the same action may lead to a totally different chain of causation, one that is undesirable
=> Some actions may be totally useless without catalysts, but they can be extremely effective with the presence of a vital catalyst.
=> Many social policies or directives are predicated upon the assumption that people cannot be trusted to find the most appropriate sources of information themselves/discern between what’s best for themselves and what isn’t best for themselves. Some socially controversial behaviors (pirating software, using performance-enhancing drugs for tests) may best be discouraged at the societal level, but may also best come without total prohibitions on use. Good prohibitions are restrictions that allow in the people who are most able to discern between what’s best for themselves and what isn’t. However, such prohibitions must be invulnerable to loopholes.
=> Information acquisition consists of motivation, attention (+attentional allocation), processing, and memory. There can be failures at ANY of those stages
=> Learning “how a process came to be” does not always guarantee that the process will act as according to “intentions”. (“intentions” does not only include human intentions, we can also think of the “intentions” of selfish genes). However, more often than not, it will act as according to supposed “intentions”
=> There are many possible chance-configurations of the world, of any society, of any system. There are fundamentals, namely, the laws of physics. But even then, the laws of physics are not necessarily fundamental relative to
=> There are different levels of appreciation for each body of material. There is also a fundamental difference between visceral appreciation and intellectual appreciation. some authors try to strive for books that appeal to audiences of different levels (that have diferent levels of appreciation).
=> there is often a lag time between intellectual appreciation and visceral appreciation. Sometimes, the lag time is effectively infinity
=> It is unadvisable for most people to value actions over outcomes. There is no intrinsic goodness/badness to most actions, if you are consequentialist.
=> respect archival
=> don’t sacrifice research for coursework (immediate feedback in research)
is it better to modify behavior or to appeal to intrinsics of people?
is it okat to be machiavellian so long as you don’t hurt anyone/potentially hurt anyone in the process?
standards of “potentiall” differ from person to person.
general/specific:
abstract algebra/ algebra, number fielkd, linear algebra
HR diagram/individual stars
“” theory “”
from an information theoretic POV, is extinction undesirable?
artificial selection: games like spore
spore: so exciting since it is the LEAST ad hoc software in the world
=> (biased but interesting) The anti-monopolization of knowledge that the Internet provides will help kick professionals out of the picture. It will be recognized that
then, people, when they have excellent skills in (a) searching for all
the knowledge they needed and in (cool.gif out of that huge morass of
knowledge, separating the (1) relevant and (2) accurate knowledge from
the knowledge that is BS or irrelevant to their needs. They will not
need a professional intermediary to get what they need. Instead, they
can hire smart agents (robots, by the way), that can negotiate with
online services to get what they need. The results of a genetic test
can be stored into an online database. A smart robotic agent fetches
data from that online database into a drugstore, to test for potential
drugs that the person’s body may be allergic to. It also tests for
levels of Cytochrome P450 enzymes. Those lacking the enzymes needed to
digest one drug can thus switch to another drug.
With this, who needs health professionals? Those who lack the means to
(1) search through the knowledge and (2) hire out smart agents to find
which knowledge is best for them.
useful norms
1: check wikipedia history. Liberally.
2: google site:.edu, use || operator, etc.
OHMYGODTHISISSOFUNNY
What does the + next to my name mean?
Currently Active Users
17 (1 members & 16 guests)
Simfish+
on that list?
It means you’re on your own buddy list.
meh
I need to learn some Perl (or Python) and some C (or Java)
is object oriented programming useful for science?
February 21, 2008, 7:11 pm
Filed under:
education This ties in with discernment theory:
Ideally, you should not take a class to review. You should be able to discern between what you’re strong at and what you’re weak at, and work on your weak spots at your own pace. But if you have no willingness to discern, then it may be better for you to take a class to review.
February 21, 2008, 6:54 pm
Filed under:
thoughts Frankly, you must care about what others think. Not specifically of you, but of your ideas. And yes, specifically about you if you have to convince them that you’re “useful”.
Other than in math (which is special in that you can convince anyone of anything because of shared logical axioms), all other fields of knowledge have branches whose vigor is determined by how convincing their evidence is to their practitioners.
Arguments by probability must hold once arguments by certainty fail.
Moreover when you believe you act rationally and believe others appreciate that you act rationally or not, you have to ask some questions. Not everyone thinks too much. Those who don’t think too much are a lot less likely to take your arguments into full consideration and thus, it is often important to attach (addendums that make the argument appeal to human nature) along with your argument. Such addendums often convince people that “product x” is best for their needs. They are not fair as they give an advantage to those with the best understanding of human nature. Math is the only meritocratic system as it is based on shared axioms and is much less prone to abuse (relative to other fields) by people who have an uncanny talent for manipulating human nature (finding things that people react positively to).
observations
All visceral feelings (especially the more complex of them) take time to develop – they are rarely instantly realized.
list of nifty computer tricks
February 17, 2008, 8:59 pm
Filed under:
computer Using the potential of DownThemAll:
=> rich-text copying: if filters are too unselective, just copy region of text you want to copy, paste it in Gmail, and this will allow you to downthemall the things you want to download.
=> the batch file processing is powerful used in conjunction with windows search (or google indexing service): that’s how you can search in a webpage offline
==
Posted by: Simfish Jun 19 2007, 11:48 AM
Copied from Adobe Acrobat:
The seminal paper of Ding et al.[
4
] showed that the seven-
repeat (7R) allele of the human dopamine receptor D4
(DRD4) gene, which has been associated and linked to
susceptibility to develop ADHD, is a young variant. How-
ever, the authors also demonstrated that it has been subject
to advantageous selective pressure, because genetic
parameters such as linkage disequilibrium (LD) extension
and variability strongly deviate from the expectation pro-
vided by Kimura’s neutral model of molecular evolution
[
29
]. These results were corroborated in a second study
from the same research group [
5
], which found a high
incidence of DRD4 7R allele variants and a significant
extensive LD around the 7R allele, suggesting positive
selection [
5
]. Other studies performed on additional genes
showed that allelic variants, conferring susceptibility to
ADHD, are very frequent in the population (see
Table 1
).
Comparing the frequency of these susceptibility variants
throughout populations distributed worldwide using
ALFRED (allele frequency database), a resource of gene
frequency data on human populations [
30
], we can see the
following:
=> (copying this into newline.html)
The seminal paper of Ding et al.[ 4 ] showed that the seven- repeat
(7R) allele of the human dopamine receptor D4 (DRD4) gene, which has
been associated and linked to susceptibility to develop ADHD, is a
young variant. How- ever, the authors also demonstrated that it has
been subject to advantageous selective pressure, because genetic
parameters such as linkage disequilibrium (LD) extension and
variability strongly deviate from the expectation pro- vided by
Kimura’s neutral model of molecular evolution [ 29 ]. These results
were corroborated in a second study from the same research group [ 5
], which found a high incidence of DRD4 7R allele variants and a
significant extensive LD around the 7R allele, suggesting positive
selection [ 5 ]. Other studies performed on additional genes showed
that allelic variants, conferring susceptibility to ADHD, are very
frequent in the population (see Table 1 ). Comparing the frequency of
these susceptibility variants throughout populations distributed
worldwide using ALFRED (allele frequency database), a resource of gene
frequency data on human populations [ 30 ], we can see the following:
==
List of nifty computer tricks:
what’s described above
++
perfectcore convert jpg to txt file, link to image from there (in UBB code)
++
My idea of using DOwnThemAll to brute force into a page that works
++
Downloading HeavenGames and College Confidential with Httrack (using
mirroring depth of 2) – this requires inputting the URLs of ALL forum
topic indices
++ Kornshell
++
Re: Okay, so how do you get past the filters for Wikipedia?
Greetings.
First, you must open up notepad and type in “command.com” (and nothing
else). Save this file as command.bat. Find the file and open it up,
and now you have the command prompt, which is usually blocked by the
school. If not, forget the above and read the everything from this
sentence below. Next, find the address of the site you want to access.
Remember it and type the following into command prompt:
ping wikipedia.org
For maximum efficiency and inconspicuousness, type in the simplest
address that will give you the website. Now, you will get a number, in
the form “abc.def.ghi.jkl”. Remember this number and type it into your
address bar in the browser, and hence, you have the website,
unblocked.
This works for any website.
Posted by: Simfish Oct 27 2007, 07:50 PM
converting relative URLs to absolute URLs
Share
4:40am Tuesday, Oct 23 | Edit Note | Delete
it’s really THIS easy
open html file with NOTEPAD OF ALL THINGS, then use replace all function
<a href=”showthread.php?
<a href=”http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?
so now EVERYTHING is expressed in terms of absolute URL
also I FINALLY know how to do things
===
http://www.sciencedirect.com.offcampus.lib.washington.edu/science/journals
secured article at
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6WMD-4MD2TFH-4&_user=10&_coverDate=04%2F07%2F2007&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=64774e8a817d749155d55bc4004793b6
Then log onto uw netid account and then
http://www.sciencedirect.com.offcampus.lib.washington.edu/ + remaining
URL of place u want to go to after “washington.edu“
| XX XX <simfish@gmail.com> |
Tue, Nov 27, 2007 at 12:49 AM |
|
To: Sim Fish <simfish@gmail.com>
|
| InquilineKea |
11-18-2007 04:09 AM |
A way to search for your posts in ascending order
You could click on the search button (search.php), but I know A LOT of people who are totally oblivious to the feature (people are lazy). So I found another way
Go to http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/search.php and view page source. Then go to your own profile and notice how the query URL is constructed. For my posts, “find all thread started by InquilineKea” URLs to http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/…r=InquilineKea . So notice the variables and the values of their variables. Go view the page source for search.php and Ctrl-F for variables like “starteronly” and “showposts” to see what their possible values are. Then Ctrl-F “ascending” and look for its associated variable. It looks like the variable is order, with possible values “ascending” and “descending”. Then append &value=ascending& of &value=descending& to your search query, and you shall get a way to directly URL to your posts in either ascending order or descending order. Nifty trick for those too lazy to use search.php.
So my threads in ascending order: (by appending &value=ascending&). You can do this for threads and posts in any forum. you can also try modifying other variables using the method i just described (and then direct linking to people, instead of having them go through search.php)
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/…r=InquilineKea
==
| InquilineKea |
11-18-2007 04:21 AM |
Wow, new discovery!!!!!!!!!!!! (this is actually the MORE USEFUL PART for those who already use search.php)
<legend>Find Posts from</legend> <div style=”padding:3px”> <select name=”searchdate” style=”width:150px”> <option value=”0″ selected=”selected”>Any Date</option> <option value=”lastvisit” >Your Last Visit</option> <option value=”1″ >Yesterday</option> <option value=”7″ >A Week Ago</option> <option value=”14″ >2 Weeks Ago</option> <option value=”30″ >A Month Ago</option> <option value=”90″ >3 Months Ago</option> <option value=”180″ >6 Months Ago</option> <option value=”365″ >A Year Ago</option>
&searchdate=[ANY NUMBER X]&, which makes you able to search for your posts STARTING FROM MORE THAN A YEAR AGO, or ANY NUMBER OF DAYS IN BETWEEN
for posts only, do &showposts=1&
talk.collegeconfidential.com/search.php?do=process&showposts=1&searchdate=1050& order=ascending&starteronly=1&exactname=1&searchus er=simfish
=>
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/…us er=simfish
(so this is 1050days ago for the posts of my old account), when &searchdate=1050&
|
|
| XX XX <simfish@gmail.com> |
Sat, Dec 1, 2007 at 5:58 PM |
|
To: Sim Fish <simfish@gmail.com>
|
| AoKH OD moved => all threads to HG.
But links to AoKH OD threads still have their AOKH URLs.
So in the last part of the URL, change it to heavengames.com, and then change the forum number from (forum number it was at AOKH) to (forum number it is |
|
“The term Papuan languages refers to those languages of the western Pacific which are neither Austronesian nor Australian. That is, the term is defined negatively and does not imply a linguistic relationship.”
hm I find that phrase profoundly interesting. “defined negatively”. how many of our definitions are defined as such?
==
At 2,017 m, it is one of the five tallest peaks in China Proper.
I’ll have to thank EVERY SINGLE person who has ever talked with me. Through talking with them I gain better models of reality. There are so many isolated quotes from isolated conversations that I’ve learned a lot from – that I use to build up my model of the world. Whether the interactions were positive or negative, I’ve learned something out of all of them.
I’ve just realized.
It IS something with attention span that is the root of my problems.
HOWEVER, I know that it is something with top-down processing that can change my problems because I can ALWAYS concentrate very well during tests.
Maybe I’ll finally get somewhere! I’m not that unintelligent. Actually my reasoning skills have really helped me.
whenever sleeping or napping in a public area and u dont want ur backpack to get stolen just tape duct tape around the item and your arm or something
hm i just realized
i tend to edit pages by selecting all and then replacing original text with new text.
this could result in my deletion of a really valuable page…
if you invest effort into something, will it _usually_ mean that you will necessarily get something out of it? (given that if you have no aptitude for it whatsoever you’d eventually get frustrated and realize that you’re not getting anything?)
Not necessarily. you could potentially have no aptitude for it and not realize it for many years. but this depends on fields that tolerate a wide range of responses and those that don’t. i wonder if this applies to mathematics. you could read a huge number of books and spend a lot of time in the subject without understanding anything. but then will you eventually realize it? or will you continue reading, still believing that you have some potential?
copyright claims are effectively useless unless there is a potential for punishment
right now we expect everything to be under copyright because the vast majority of useful information was produced in the 20th and 21st centuries, when copyright hasn’t expired yet. But then what of the far future? (once when copyright claims dating back to the digital era FINALLY start to expire?) In this case, perhaps we’d have HUGE amounts of information and photos that we can have just for free in the far future.
concerning interactions with other people
February 9, 2008, 12:40 pm
Filed under:
main
people like interacting with other people in such a way thatlists of grievances make a lot more sense when they’re based on normative/deontological arguments rather than utilitarian ones
==
“
you can justify anything after you’ve firmly established your belief in it, even if it happens to be wrong.still, i seem convinced that i can’t socialize with most people and seem to have developed pretty strong reasons (to myself anyways) why i can’t.a lot of socially awkward people desire social interaction and don’t know how to interact with others. some mange to succeed. some never succeed. i don’t know. everyone plays some role in your life. you need people in different roles. you need people to entertain you, but you don’t need too many of them. you need someone to get jealous of. you need a scapegoat or someone to throw things on. you need an antisocial academic superstar at your school. they’re all fun to talk about. hm. i guess i fall under some roles better than others (wrt most people).
synchronization isn’t always mutual. sometimes it’s unidirectional. one person can amuse everyone else even if he has no pleasure in trying to amuse everyone else, even if he doesn’t know that he’s amusing other people. he just happens to perform actions that happen to synchronize with the range of behaviors that others happen to positively respond to.
actually this formulation is a _very_ good formulation i’ve defined, since now i precisely know what i desire when i try to make friends (and i also precisely know why i can’t get along with a lot of people who share my interests). and also why i happen to use some interests as proxies to measure synchronization (or some behaviors as proxies). hm.
sometimes i’m reluctant to do things for other people. or with other people. disagreements arise up from (a) differences between [confidence one has in one’s predictions] and [someone else’s confidence in one’s predictions] or [the things that happen to come out in reality] and (b) the estimation of the relative contribution of various parameters that come in the determination of an observed outcome. [versus someone else’s estimation of the relative contribution of such parameters, or those observed in reality ]
but really, why do people make computer games? why are reviews made for them? it’s all based on synchronization.
why do i socialize with nerds? because it’s easier to synchronize with them than it is with “normal” people who depend on implicit (non-explicit) parameters for synchronization. or maybe it’s just that (SOME of them) are more likely to implicitly synchronize with me than “normal” people (maybe their means at finding the appropriate actions (to elicit positive/desired reactions) in a context are different than the mans normal people use).
the vast majority of messages are communicated implicitly and it’s up to the person to figure out the best way to act in a certain context [to determine the actions most likely to elicit positive/desired responses] BASED on his/her interpretation of such messages and whether he/she senses them or not. even texts contain hidden meanings – so it’s up to the person to figure out hidden meanings/motivations behind texts.
are there different MEANS to determine what are the best actions appropriate in a given context? yes. you can use logical reasoning or you can use reasoning based on a comparison of the person with other people (both of whom potentially have similar reactions to a given event).
==
maybe the best test of synchronization would just be for me to explicitly tell people when i “strongly” feel that they’ve said something i really liked (even if i have no animated response to what they said), and ask others to do the same for me. i could also explicitly tell people when i “strongly” feel that they’ve said something that synchronized with what i disliked (but this only applies to people who have a very strong desire to interact with me).
=
EDIT: April 1, 2008:
Responding to advice: if paired up with my current strategy, your suggestions would make them all more likely to be jointly sufficient towards a goal.
credibility arguments::
“they pay so much $$ for these”, “professionally designed”, “you get feedback”
The capacity to remember what you tell other people in the past may actually be quite important (some people seem to lack this).
Ben golub’s quote on why he finds sakky awkward
reflections on reasoning
February 9, 2008, 12:39 pm
Filed under:
main February 9, 2008 – 11:59 am
It appears that most fundamental disagreements center around…
(a) estimation of relative contributions and
(b) generality
(c) what works for one system does not apply to system2 under different constraints
(d) projection estimates
(e) can people discern what’s best for them in all possible cases, or do they need to be guided by ppl policies
(f) estimate of relative weights of what one VALUES
If I propose this idea anywhere, it will be heavily criticized. People will think that their ideas will be SUPERIOR to this idea just because their ideas have been used for more people (and more teaching styles). But they cannot PROVE that their ideas will be superior to this idea, ESPECIALLY for a particular person. We really don’t know which idea is superior. What we do know is this – my idea is based on self-study and flexibility so the costs of my idea are very low (and if one ends up learning nothing, one ends up learning nothing without too much time lost).
==
Do most social policies (and advice) fundamentally lay on discernment” – or the lack of trust in people’s ability to discern? If people were able to discern what’s best for themselves each and every time, then policies would be useless. Policies are by definition, measures to encourage a number of people to achieve a desired aim. Generic advice is based on the assumption that people often can’t discern between alternatives to truly decide what’s best for them (and so it lays on the assumption that it is better for them to take the suggested route – which would work most of the time). this is often right.Artificial vs. natural barriers: It’s important to discern between the two. Artificial barriers prevent people from reaching their potential. This is sometimes desirable, as you don’t want people to reach their potential of medication toxicity – that’s why you set artificial barriers to medication dosages. Other times they provide a good means of actually motivating people (or setting a guideline for them – as artificially set barriers are WELL-DEFINED, unlike natural barriers). This also has some roots in discernment – artificial barriers would be useless if people had perfect information and perfect ability to discern – but they don’t have such ability. Of course artificial barriers in other cases truly do prevent people from reaching their potential (for example, their potential to, say, learn calculus at age 14).
==
People like to share their scores after tests. I used to do that too, until I started doing badly on some of them. And then I’d still share if I did okay (but I’m now starting to avoid sharing for all cases until my work ethics are stronger). Clearly, test scores carry an aura of objectivity that nothing else can carry (even if tests have their flaws and can’t measure everything, blahblahblah).You can always argue to someone else “if I had done X I would have done better on the test.” Could you actually convince anyone of the legitimacy of such assertion? Is it worth convincing that person?Moreover, in ANY sample, there are a group of people who could improve a lot more too. To say that you could have improved your test scores significantly (to the exclusion of others) is to be unfair to them. Perhaps some can actually improve much more than others (given that they have larger “potential ability” to “realized ability” gaps. But convincing yourself of such counterfactuals is far less difficult than convicning others of the validity of the counterfactual. That said, the end justifies the means. People retake the SATs, and while most people barely improve, there are a small number of people who do have reason to expect significant improvements.
==
discernment theory
basically in cases where self-control isn’t a major factor, i should trust my ability to discern between when action x is preferable and when action y is preferable. it is rare that action x should always be preferable to action y when one HAS the ability to discern.for example – going to lecture. going to lectures for all classes all the time can result in tremendous frustration with some lectures – but skipping lectures for all classes all the time is extremely dangerous (and can result in you missing out on certain good lectures). meh. this is an interesting case though. taking 4-5 hardcore math classes at a time is an extremely dangerous move and should one be done if one has thoroughly pre-studied at least 2 of them.
==
the question with ANY system is this:can you TRUST people to be able to discern between what’s BEST for them and what isn’t BEST for them PRIMA FACIE?
And which systems work for the greatest possible number of people while allowing opportunities for people who wish to pursue alternative routes?
And which types of people are more likely to be enhanced by exploring multiple systems at a cost of efficiency, and which types of people are likely to suffer efficiency losses at such a rate that they would be well-advised to pursue a single system?
I just added this to my facebook interests:
“the coincidental correlations between certain probability distributions + combinatorial systems (wrt certain alphabets) and the real world, arbitrary lines that are inserted into those combinatorial systems (perhaps facilitated by the observation that patterns in combinatorial systems tend to indirectly enhance the survival of similar patterns in such systems)”
patents are often given to arbitrary systems that somehow are thought by (someone) to have correlation with the POTENTIAL interests of the population at large.
If you can change the system, change the systemif you cannot change the system, flee the system
if you cannot flee the system, adapt to the system and wait for opportunities to change it (or for the system to be changed)
if you cannot facilitate or forsee the change of the system, adapt to it and treat it as an effective absolute
if you cannot adapt to it, use any means necessary to get out via legal means
if you absolutely cannot use any means necessary to get out via legal means, get out via illegal means
if you cannot even use illegal means to get out, die.
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==
textbook logic:
math notes
February 9, 2008, 12:38 pm
Filed under:
main,
math
Ratio test: if converges to a number < 1, then function decreases as an exponential. if converges to 0, then function decreases faster than exponential.if converges to 1, decreases slower than exponential.
lagrange’s theorem: GIVEN group and subgroups, figure out order of subgroups partial converse: sylow’s theorem, GIVEN groups, there EXIST subgroups
abstract algebra
January 13, 2008, 5:11 pm
Filed under:
math dummit foote prove that a+bSqrt[-5] is not euclidean domain merely by proving it is not PID. (sufficient but not necessary)
all euclidean domains must be PIDs.
http://www.math.ucsb.edu/~mckernan/Teaching/05-06/Winter/220B/l_3.pdf
info theory
January 10, 2008, 3:17 pm
Filed under:
math The fundamental assumption in the paper is that the source information is ergodic. With this
assumption, the paper proved the AEP property and capacity theorems. Therefore, one curiosity
is arisen that “what happens if the source is not ergodic?”. If the information is not ergodic, it
is reducible or periodic. If AEP property holds with this source(not ergodic), shannon’s capacity
theorem also satis¯es in this case because capacity theorem is not based on ergodic source but on
AEP property. Therefore, to ¯nd a source that is not ergodic and holds AEP property is one of
meaningful works. Following example is one of these sources.
Definition A stochastic process is said to be stationary if the joint
distribution of any subset of the sequence of random variables is invariant
with respect to shifts in the time index; that is,
Pr{X1 = x1,X2 = x2, . . . , Xn = xn}
= Pr{X1+l = x1,X2+l = x2, . . . , Xn+l = xn} (4.1)
for every n and every shift l and for all x1, x2, . . . , xn ∈ X.
i’d switch the first and third bullets in most cases (i.e. unless the system was really trampling on my rights).
oh yeah, i impulsively added the third bullet.yeah (3) should come before (2). good point about “changing the system takes time and effort”. Maybe I should just put in “change the system at a reasonable price.” In the case that changing it doesn’t take much effort, then it’s the preferred direction. But sometimes SWITCHING to another system is the preferred method. It then depends on the relative differences between the opportunity costs of switching and the opportunity costs of actually changing (and the probability of success for both)
