Category: Psychology
-
Arguments, hill climbing, the wisdom of the crowds
You ever had an argument which seems to go nowhere, where both sides act like their position is self-evident and obvious, that the other person “is clearly being deliberately obtuse”? I hope that’s common, and not just one of my personal oddities. Ahem. In the current world of machine learning (yes these two things are…
-
Why do some people hate masks?
A bit over two weeks ago, I wrote the following on a nerd forum: I wear masks outside, because sometimes I encounter a bus stop where the entire volume of the bus exits exactly where and when I happen to be walking. Also, a mask, like wearing trousers, is a trivial cost. I still will wear one…
-
Hypothesise first, test later
Brought to you by me noticing that when I watch Kristen Bell playing an awful person in The Good Place, I feel as stressed as when I have to consciously translate to or from German in real-life situations and not just language apps. Idea: System 2 thinking (effortful) is stressful to the mind in the…
-
A life’s work
There are 2.5 billion seconds in a lifetime and (as of December 2018) 7.7 billion humans on the planet. If you fight evil one-on-one, if you refuse to pick your battles, if only 1% of humans are sociopaths, you’ve got 21 waking seconds per opponent — and you’ll be fighting your whole life, from infancy…
-
Brexit as an example of failure to comprehend conditional probabilities
It’s been 2 years 5 months 12 days 12 hours 25 minutes since my first post about Brexit, and I still don’t really know what will happen. Almost everything is conditional probability: “If there’s a hard (no-deal) Brexit, then the traffic jams from Dover, Harwich/Felixstowe, etc. will be about as long as is physically possible…
-
One person’s nit is another’s central pillar
If one person believes something is absolutely incontrovertibly true, then my first (and demonstrably unhelpful) reaction is that even the slightest demonstration of error should demolish the argument. I know this doesn’t work. People don’t make Boolean-logical arguments, they go with gut feelings that act much like Bayesian-logical inferences. If someone says something is incontrovertible,…
-
Unlearnable
How many things are there, which one cannot learn? No matter how much effort is spent trying? I’m aware that things like conscious control of intestinal peristalsis would fit this question (probably… I mean, who would’ve tried?) but I’m not interested in purely autonomous stuff. Assuming the stereotypes are correct, I mean stuff like adults…
-
How would you know whether an A.I. was a person or not?
I did an A-level in Philosophy. (For non UK people, A-levels are a 2-year course that happens after highschool and before university). I did it for fun rather than good grades — I had enough good grades to get into university, and when the other A-levels required my focus, I was fine putting zero further…
Kitsune Software 