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Red Light Green Light

jamessevedge.com

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Re: Red Light Green Light

#91

Post by atulatul »

QuadrupleA wrote: post #87

Sorry to be a curmudgeon, it's a poetic little story - but isn't the takeaway a little banal? "Different people have different perspectives." Well sure. "Consider things from others' viewpoints." Of course. I don't know, it rings a little of management-ese, or something overpaid consultants might present in the boardroom that gets everybody nodding their head and feeling like they've received great wisdom, but is a l…

> "Consider things from others' viewpoints." Of course.

Difficult to do, isn't it?

Re: Red Light Green Light

#92

Post by jedberg »

My four year old just did this to me yesterday. I went through an intersection and he said, "daddy you just went through a red light". I got freaked out because it was an empty intersection but then I saw someone else go through and realized it was looking out the side window!

Re: Red Light Green Light

#93

Post by bruce511 »

QuadrupleA wrote: post #87

Sorry to be a curmudgeon, it's a poetic little story - but isn't the takeaway a little banal? "Different people have different perspectives." Well sure. "Consider things from others' viewpoints." Of course. I don't know, it rings a little of management-ese, or something overpaid consultants might present in the boardroom that gets everybody nodding their head and feeling like they've received great wisdom, but is a l…

You're not wrong, but this ability is not common. Our viewpoint is the core to many fundamental issues, which makes us "both right" which leads to endless arguments because we're both optimising for different things.

A really good example is how one "hears" the news. Some people hear "how this affects me", others hear "how this affects everyone else". There's talk of a minimum wage increase, do you think "yay, more money for them", or do you think "my taxes are going to go up to pay for this."

You see this disconnect every time a customer is upset with a business. They imagine that a business optimises for the customer, whereas a business optimises for the business.

Like when a business is acquired and disappears. Users see this as bad, but owners see it as "I got paid".

Re: Red Light Green Light

#94

Post by iforgotpassword »

whoisburbansky wrote: post #90
QuadrupleA wrote: post #87

Sorry to be a curmudgeon, it's a poetic little story - but isn't the takeaway a little banal? "Different people have different perspectives." Well sure. "Consider things from others' viewpoints." Of course. I don't know, it rings a little of management-ese, or something overpaid consultants might present in the boardroom that gets everybody nodding their head and feeling like they've received great wisdom, but is a l…

I mean, it’s obvious in retrospect. If you’re the type of person who read the first half of this story and immediately went “Ah, I know what the problem is, the kid’s looking at the other signal!” then kudos to you for not needing this advice ever again, but I suspect the vast majority of folks could do with being reminded of common sense things from time to time.

> If you’re the type of person who read the first half of this story and immediately went “Ah, I know what the problem is, the kid’s looking at the other signal!”

I'm that person! :)

But admittedly only because a friend experienced a similar thing when she worked as a kindergarten teacher for three months in Bolivia; a few days in she had a conversation with a little girl who seemed very bright to her in general, but then they talked about how you properly cross the street, and when she asked the girl about traffic lights, she insisted you walk when it's red.

Turned out the town they were in didn't have signals for pedestrians, and since the signals for traffic are positioned like in Europe (ie not the other side of the junction) you had to check the signal for the cars and start walking when it turns red.

Re: Red Light Green Light

#95

Post by jmharvey »

gmiller123456 wrote: post #66

As a kid my mom ran out of gas several times, and it was always on the same road, which had a gravel shoulder. We'd be riding along, she'd pull off into (what I call "the rocks"), the car would stop and she'd say "we're out of gas". Since the car was moving along fine before pulling off the road, and I had no concept of how cars worked, I made the connection that pulling into "the rocks" caused the car to run out of…

Earlier today I mentioned to my first grader that when I was a kid we didn't have an ice maker in our freezer, and we just used ice cube trays, instead. He sat there for a minute, stumped, and finally asked, "so what made the freezer cold?"

It took me a minute to figure out what he meant, but finally I realized that he thought the way our freezer worked was that we had a machine that made ice, and the freezer was cold because it was full of ice. It's really easy to reverse cause and effect when you can't see what's happening.

Re: Red Light Green Light

#96

Post by dxdm »

hug wrote: post #60
aeternum wrote: post #15

Similar things happen surprisingly often in companies. Many intense arguments can be diffused by first being specific about what we agree upon. Just to add to this, one strategy from the rationalist community that I rarely see practiced is to 'taboo' certain words. For example if two engineers are arguing about a solution not being scalable, taboo the word scalable. They both re-explain their POV without using the wo…

Tangentially related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aumann%27s_agreement_theorem

This seems quite impractical for the real world, since it assumes perfect knowledge, perfect communication and, above all, rationality.

Re: Red Light Green Light

#98

Post by noisy_boy »

I developed a habit of looking at the cross traffic light to be "ready" for the upcoming green. I thought I was being smart and then I started noticing other people doing the same. Now I think just looking at the light directly is the totally fine obvious thing to do instead of this over-eagerness.

Re: Red Light Green Light

#99

Post by NhanH »

kovek wrote: post #85
aeternum wrote: post #15

Similar things happen surprisingly often in companies. Many intense arguments can be diffused by first being specific about what we agree upon. Just to add to this, one strategy from the rationalist community that I rarely see practiced is to 'taboo' certain words. For example if two engineers are arguing about a solution not being scalable, taboo the word scalable. They both re-explain their POV without using the wo…

This might not be the right place to ask.. How to find value from LessWrong? I see people derive value from it, but when I visit it, it’s not obvious

Read "The sequences" [0], may be the Harry Potter and method of rationality book.

For lesswrong (and the Rationalist community in general), I've found that their "broad stroke idea" is what brings the most value. The more in-depth discussions bringing those ideas to specific topics is intriguing to read, but probably much less valuable for daily life.

[0]: https://www.lesswrong.com/rationality

Re: Red Light Green Light

#100

Post by skrebbel »

aeternum wrote: post #15

Similar things happen surprisingly often in companies. Many intense arguments can be diffused by first being specific about what we agree upon. Just to add to this, one strategy from the rationalist community that I rarely see practiced is to 'taboo' certain words. For example if two engineers are arguing about a solution not being scalable, taboo the word scalable. They both re-explain their POV without using the wo…

A great word to taboo in hardware tech is "performance".

I once witnessed a very heated argument among a group of programmers discussing some code on a microcontroller. Half of them thought the performance was abysmal. The other half thought the performance was great. To everybody it was obvious to see what the performance was, why were the other half being so bone-headed about it?

Turned out the first group were trained mechanical engineers, the second were trained software engineers. For the first group, "performance" meant how closely the motion of the device attached to the microcontroller tracked the optimal path. I.e. the performance of the function approximation that the microcontroller code was doing. To the second group, it meant how fast the code ran. This was completely irrelevant to the first group, since as long as it managed to run 1000 times per second (which it easily did), nobody cared how many nanoseconds there were to spare each cycle. Why are you even talking about that? The performance is shit, we need to improve it and who cares if it takes a few more CPU cycles.

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