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o prevent yourself from being able to learn skill y and to invent rationalizations for why skill y is either useless or something only bad people would want to learn it s another example of a game theoretic situation where being less capable is an advantage which will come as no surprise if you ve read schelling note that you have to be at least somewhat selfish to not want to learn y in order to gain this sort of advantage coalitions are always made better off when their individual members gain new knowledge and skills even if those individual members are made worse off what s really interesting is that people who fail to learn skill y aren t the only game theoretic agents there are other players and those among them who do have skill y are able to at least subconsciously notice the costs imposed among them by people who don t which means that people who know skill y will get angry at people who don t and invent rationalizations and harangues and the other usual social moves for getting people to do things so they don t have to be the only ones it seems like a lot of game theoretic equilibria end up in basically the situation of the brightly colored poisonous frogs with a substantial portion of mimic frogs who have no poison at all posted by grognor at 3 13 am 3 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest tags nonsensical rambling 2017 01 09 superstitions as evolved objects it s common to mock superstitions to display one s skeptic cred but it s a mistake because they are chesterton fences it s bad luck to walk under a ladder no okay it s not bad luck but ladders are dangerous it s bad luck to open an umbrella indoors or more accurately it s inconsiderate because open umbrellas are deceptively difficult to handle indoors and you re pretty likely to bump into someone or knock over a lamp a fifteen minute training course on umbrella safety and etiquette wouldn t be a waste of time seven years of bad luck for breaking a mirror not really sure about this one but who wants broken mirrors mirrors are probably pretty hard to make i ve heard that in some islamic countries it is traditional to touch food only with the right hand and reserve the left hand for disgusting activities like wiping the ass for years i thought this was some sort of unprincipled discrimination but somehow i spontaneously saw the purpose one day it makes perfect sense to use only one hand for eating in a world where you can t wash your hands right before every meal the practice makes enough sense to me that i do it cultures exist in a world of slow meticulous selection pressures like organisms they must adapt to them to survive this is the basic tenet of the study of cultural evolution it s a small insight to realize that superstitions are part of culture and thus also subject to and created by those pressures my hope with this article is that it produces a baader meinhof effect in you for a little while so that when next you see someone call some habit a superstition you can think about whether or not there s a pretty obvious purpose like in the above four examples but there may be a purpose even if you can t think of one for reasons articulated here and in much more depth and generality here posted by grognor at 1 13 pm 1 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest 2016 12 18 the thought to which all thoughts eventually return as if it were the bottom of the cognitive bowl see also the monster i wish my mind were larger certainly it is larger than most people s during manic episodes it feels like i can fit entire other human minds inside my own and maybe that is not entirely mere arrogance b ut it s not enough it will never be enough life is not graded on a curve i can t fit in all the concepts can t work tirelessly and efficiently and self improvingly how is so weak and imperfect a creature as individual man isolated and wretched shorn from community ejected from egregore and unable to assimilate supposed to make the world a better place it would be hard enough if i were some competent ubermensch unsurpassed in self control and diligence but i am a languid slovenly slob barely able to brush my teeth or shower again and again i return to this thought i can t escape multidimensional metasphex posted by grognor at 4 01 am 3 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest 2016 12 10 reason 21 066 reason to distrust all scientific studies originally posted november 21 2016 i see a lot of people claiming that jobs are good for people because jobs give life more meaning they point to studies showing that people are happier when employed than unemployed even when controlling for just giving people money needless to say i haven t read any of these because i am not in the habit of filling my brain with motivated bullshit now first of all really do you expect me to believe that someone who cleans toilets for a living is happier than they would be if they didn t have to do that that s retarded but more importantly this motivated reasoning is failling to take into account that not having a job gets you yelled at all the time get a job people yell at mendicants they really do that all the time and it s not just yelling the whole american culture is infused with an ethos that being unemployed makes you worth less that you re not earning your keep that you don t deserve to exist unless you re a child woman i ve spent years unemployed before and i ll be unemployed again probably soon my quality of life is easily lower having to work all the time than not work sucks this is the most obvious thing in the world which is one reason everyone wants to get counterintuitiveness points for pretending it doesn t but the bigger reason as far as i can tell the reason it s achieved memetic fixation is that people who have jobs really hate them and resent people who are able to get away without having them and resolve the cognitive dissonance by telling themselves that jobs are actually good no posted by grognor at 12 02 am 0 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest tags rationality ergonomics originally posted october 24 2016 look at these fucking buttons i have to hit these buttons many times per day always with the same overworked left thumb they are terrible buttons and i have a mild repetitive strain injury as a result i don t understand this steering wheel is in a 2013 vehicle but the problem of making buttons that are nice to press even thousands of times a day every day was solved by video game manufacturers in the late 1970s do engineers who make vehicles think about ergonomics at all does anyone other than video game console manufacturers look at this beautiful goddamn artifact look at it it actually looks like it was made by people who have hands for people who have hands even my unusually large and hammy doom fists can comfortably hold this and play with it for hours the nintendo gamecube controller is the finest nonliving thing i have ever held how i miss it i don t know anything about ergonomics in practice but it s like architecture in how prevalent it is affecting humans always and everywhere the only book i ve even heard of about it is the design of everyday things which popularized the useful concept of affordance hopefully i can at least listen to the audiobook some day i play video games on my prematurely aging laptop with a logitech f310 it s no gamecube controller but i can still use it for any amount of time without any pain whatsoever you could literally rip off a piece of the steering wheel and put the controller in megas xlr style and create a much nicer experience if i had a lot more experience at diy engineering and i owned the truck i drive i might just have tried something like that because it would be cool well bye posted by grognor at 12 00 am 0 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest tags nonsensical rambling 2016 12 09 umeshism originally posted october 23 2016 you should probably read scott aaronson s post umeshisms before reading this post concentrate on the higher order bits back in the day this sentence took me a long time to understand and nobody would explain it when i asked so this is what it means look at the following number 1 2 345 67 8 all it means is something obvious which is that the underlined digit is a lot more important than the bolded one if you want to make a big difference to what the number represents you need to change the digits closer to the underlined one than to the bold one as an aside you might consider something like ___________________________________________12345678 in order to think a little more scope sensitively about impact magnitudes try to make the question mark digit positive if you want the number to increase i m writing this for three reasons first because i used to think umeshisms had achieved memetic fixation but when i talk to people about them they ve almost never heard of it i googled it just now and was sort of shocked to find it has only 29 results second because when i tell people about umeshisms and give examples statements like if you ve never been arrested you re not doing enough interesting things or if you ve never broken a bone you re not doing enough dangerous physical activity they don t seem to get it trying to come up with their own examples they fail something counterintuitive about the idea that a successful strategy includes nonzero probability of unimportant bad things happening pop quiz is if you ve never falsified an umeshism you re not being badass enough an umeshism answer at end of post third because i want to explain the umeshism mindset as distinct from umeshisms the type of aphorism i don t want this post to be a repository of umeshisms though it d be super cool if someone made one like quotedb or the erstwhile limerickdb where people could submit and vote on them umeshism is so named like pragmatism stoicism or agnosticism not in the philosophical school sense but in the state of mind sense don t sweat the small stuff is umeshism but so is sweat the big stuff effective altruism is umeshism applied to doing material good rejection therapy is for getting your system 1 to be more umeshic in the context of asking for things the hamming questions translate to why aren t you being more umeshistic from richard hamming s you and your research over on the other side of the dining hall was a chemistry table i had worked with one of the fellows dave mccall furthermore he was courting our secretary at the time i went over and said do you mind if i join you they can t say no so i started eating with them for a while and i started asking what are the important problems of your field and after a week or so what important problems are you working on and after some more time i came in one day and said if what you are doing is not important and if you don t think it is going to lead to something important why are you at bell labs working on it i wasn t welcomed after that i had to find somebody else to eat with that was in the spring umeshism is prioritization it s caring more about more important things than about less important things it doesn t mean caring a lot or a little in full generality it means caring in the right order it means not spending all your time on social media if you have anything useful to do but it also means not spending all your time setting up intricate systems to prevent you from wasting your time what distinguishes umeshism from just naively trying to be more efficient is deliberately letting avoidable bad things happen as part of the overall strategy because the harm from those things is outweighed by the cost of preventing all of them what s the correct number taking resource tradeoffs into account of deaths by electrocution per year in the united states i don t know what the specific number is but it s not zero if you understand everything you read you re reading too carefully though i must say that if you never notice any misunderstandings you re not reading nearly carefully enough if you don t get it yet here are some good blog posts that explain it focus on the higher order bits and why we should err in both directions answer to quiz no posted by grognor at 11 57 pm 0 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest tags rationality mindlists originally published july 12 2016 lists are really really appealing for some reason perhaps because they are so simple and orderly and thus memorable peter mcintyre wrote an article listicle is the pejorative called 52 concepts to add to your cognitive toolkit despite being written in pandersome newspeak it s really good i endorse it most of those concepts are essential to thinking and if you don t know any you should familiarize yourself post haste i cannot emphasize this enough fluency in these concepts is by my account an adulthood developmental stage no such listicle could ever be complete and to my reckoning the most important omissions are selection effects near far thinking perverse incentives map and territory principle of charity steelmanning use vs mention distinction belief vs alief seemingly trivial inconveniences ugh fields just world thinking ooda loop chunking signal to noise ratio the tails come apart legibility intuition pumps wow a list so shiny so nice very compelling some of these concepts are monster topics that take weeks to understand others take less than an hour caveat emptor i am fascinated by the concept of a cognitive toolkit or conceptual ontology or insight collection or conceptual vocabulary or whatever you want to call it it should probably be on a list of essential concepts the fascinating thing is that it seems to comprise a list of concepts like the way you think is partially embedded by something as simple as a communicable list of ideas the vocabulary metaphor for the conceptual ontology helped me realize something important earlier i had the minor insight that the set of words you can use is much smaller than the set of words you can recognize the same is true for concepts to understand other people s thinking you only need to be able to recognize the chunked concepts involved but to think you have to be able to use these concepts which requires practice pen and paper exercises and spaced repetition thereof might help i nearly put spaced repetition in my above list but worried it would start to become a list of all the concepts i know and utilize like did you know spaced repetition helps all kinds of knowledge not just declarative god damn son richard feynman attributed much of his research success to using a different box of tools it makes sense exploring in a different way than everyone who has come before is probably a prerequisite for finding new things it seems to me that humans even the brightest mostly think the same thoughts over and over in the same ways and have only a few to...