221–230 of 232 posts
It's the rule of excluded middle misapplied to everyhing. When you think you have to decide an argument is either completely true or completely false, while in reality no argument is.
> When you think you have to decide an argument is either completely true or completely false, while in reality no argument is. Hmm, that sounds suspiciously like an argument that is either completely true or completely false...
After spending many years studying philosophy I think that the right approach is that you don’t need to come to any conclusions about anything. Aristotle often started with common peoples’ viewpoints on any given topic, along with looking at what experts thought and built his own ideas from there, and of course was very successful with his methodology. Arguments are interesting and obviously some are more correct tha…
To speak to this directly in a scientific setting I find one of the most beneficial thing I can do when exploring a new domain is to NOT read works first. But instead to first ponder how I would go about solving the problem, maybe do some naive attempts, and THEN read. An iterative cycle of this becomes successful because of a few typical outcomes: you spend more time but generally come away with a deep understanding…
https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/8691/in-what-...
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While Scott does make errors, I've found he works hard to avoid making them and forthright when he does (e.g., not everyone has a Mistakes page in the main navigation bar of their site[1]) What you're missing in your example is that, in context, the state-sponsored violence he's talking about is "against one's own people" (e.g., he also refers to it as a "reign of terror" a few times, like those of Robespierre, Stali…
> he works hard to avoid making them He does so when he sees that there is a potential mistake to be made, yes. But he doesn't seem to me to work hard at all at questioning things that he appears to think are too obvious to need questioning. And yet those things are where he makes the egregious mistakes. > forthright when he does Yes, I agree with this: once he recognizes he's made a mistake, he's much better than mo…
> I’ve heard a few good arguments in this direction before, things like how engineering trains you to have a very black-and-white right-or-wrong view of the world based on a few simple formulae, Whenever the rationalist writers start talking about engineering, programming, or machine learning in technical terms I have a sudden Gell-Mann Amnesia realization that these people's primary domain is writing and pontificati…
> I don't know any engineers who would characterize the world as being simply defined by "a few simple formulae" I'm an electrical engineer. The Standard Model of particle physics governs literally all of existence, minus gravity, and it can fit on a single page [1]. Gravity is another few equations that can also squeeze onto that same page. This is a set of fairly simple formulae compared to the unbelievable complex…
Can this model explain why we have yet another war in the middle east (which is part of existence), and also why education in certain fields seems to decrease one's curiosity in the cause of such events and whether they can be reduced or eliminated?
Maybe gravity isn't the only thing missing from the model... If there was something else missing, is there anything contained within the model that would allow one to detect such a situation, or at least think about the possibility?
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Flipping the script a bit: As a senior developer, avoid cultivating learned helplessness. You can push back on this in a couple ways: 1) Instead of answering questions, give a nudge to where the solution is documented ("Hey I'm swamped, but I'd recommend checking X for more info. If you haven't read through X yet, that's a good resource to skim"). Keep tabs on how much your junior team members are expected to know, n…
This is just all excellent. There are a lot of strange attitudes elsewhere in this comment section, ones that I don’t recognize from good senior engineers. Good ones realize that a lot of their job is improving the whole team. If junior engineers are constantly asking trivial questions, maybe they need to be taught to learn!
Whole lot of misinformation and red herrings on the internet these days, intended to lead the unwary astray
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To speak to this directly in a scientific setting I find one of the most beneficial thing I can do when exploring a new domain is to NOT read works first. But instead to first ponder how I would go about solving the problem, maybe do some naive attempts, and THEN read. An iterative cycle of this becomes successful because of a few typical outcomes: you spend more time but generally come away with a deep understanding…
Sounds were quite familiar to this anecdote from Feynman about his learning path: https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/8691/in-what-...
>I don’t think I’m overselling myself too much to expect that I could argue circles around the average uneducated person. Like I mean that on most topics, I could demolish their position and make them look like an idiot. Reduce them to some form of “Look, everything you say fits together and I can’t explain why you’re wrong, I just know you are!” Or, more plausibly, “Shut up I don’t want to talk about this!” > And th…
Scott has an uncanny ability to cherry-pick facts, usually absurd ones to paint funny narratives. He even wrote a whole fiction book based on the concept, a universe that actually runs on Kabbalah. Here's a short self-contained chapter that showcases this:
https://unsongbook.com/interlude-%D7%AA-trump/
It's totally believable that Scott could use this skill with serious facts in a serious argument, and befuddle almost anyone. Doesn't make him smarter or more right, just very persuasive in this narrow method.
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Not sure if your comment is positive or sarcastic. Are you familiar with Scott Alexander's writings?
Yeah, I read some of his essays. I like some of the ones where he stayed in his area of expertise, like "Ontology Of Psychiatric Conditions: Taxometrics" ( https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/ontology-of-psychiatric-con... ). The other ones I've read are big fancy word salad unfortunately. Can you recommend others like the series I linked above?
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> It's a matter of very serious dispute if you were to read people who are actually on the left, or who live outside the USA. Ah, that old standby "No True Scotsman". Sorry, not buying it. > The stated policies of the US Democratic Party barely correspond to those of leftist parties worldwide. No political party's stated policies can be taken seriously, since political parties, on immense amounts of historical eviden…
No, it's like saying that Walden Pond is not an ocean because it doesn't have quite as much water in it as the Atlantic or Pacific.
In fact, historically speaking, even the US Republican party today is closer to the Atlantic Ocean than Walden Pond in terms of leftism. What today's US Republicans consider "conservative" would have been considered so far left as to be radical to the US Republicans of the late 19th century.
This article talks about learned helplessness in a learning context. I talked about it in a work context, and the two could be linked. I think social media is training people for everything to be quick, but learning + work aren't necessarily quick. > This insistence on constant availability disrupts the essence of focused work. Rather than encouraging employees to tackle complex problems independently, there’s a tren…
This just has not been my experience at all. I've never had a problem with a junior asking too many questions. Never. I have, however, had issues with them not asking enough questions.
Even if you write off the latter as ~free, the former is a significant benefit to someone familiarizing themselves with a new environment, and even someone walking the junior person through the process of reasoning through how to get there probably won't cover the same benefits as they might have experienced doing it themselves because they likely don't think exactly the same way.
Of course, it's an immediate versus long term tradeoff too, and a personal tradeoff for when to ask, and with how many people tend to just refuse to ask questions because they've been trained to think this makes them look bad, it probably makes sense to aggressively incentivize asking by default, but there are benefits to spending time on a problem yourself if you have enough tools to bootstrap your way into more understanding, and I have met enough people who never understood things more than just how to lookup the answer from someone knowledgable to think this isn't something to also be concerned about.