Quantum Bayesian Networks. Blog :: Joseph Javier Perla. Paul Graham Essays. Disconnecting Distraction. Note: The strategy described at the end of this essay didn't work. It would work for a while, and then I'd gradually find myself using the Internet on my work computer. I'm trying other strategies now, but I think this time I'll wait till I'm sure they work before writing about them. May 2008 Procrastination feeds on distractions. Most people find it uncomfortable just to sit and do nothing; you avoid work by doing something else. So one way to beat procrastination is to starve it of distractions.
Chesterfield described dirt as matter out of place. Television, for example, has after 50 years of refinement reached the point where it's like visual crack. TV is in decline now, but only because people have found even more addictive ways of wasting time. I remember when computers were, for me at least, exclusively for work. After years of carefully avoiding classic time sinks like TV, games, and Usenet, I still managed to fall prey to distraction, because I didn't realize that it evolves. Good and Bad Procrastination. December 2005 The most impressive people I know are all terrible procrastinators. So could it be that procrastination isn't always bad? Most people who write about procrastination write about how to cure it. But this is, strictly speaking, impossible. There are an infinite number of things you could be doing.
No matter what you work on, you're not working on everything else. So the question is not how to avoid procrastination, but how to procrastinate well. There are three variants of procrastination, depending on what you do instead of working on something: you could work on (a) nothing, (b) something less important, or (c) something more important. That's the "absent-minded professor," who forgets to shave, or eat, or even perhaps look where he's going while he's thinking about some interesting question. That's the sense in which the most impressive people I know are all procrastinators.
What's "small stuff? " Good procrastination is avoiding errands to do real work. Coddinghorror.com. How to Get Rich Programming. I originally discovered the fiendishly addictive Tower Defense as a multiplayer game modification for Warcraft III. It's a cooperative game mode where you, and a few other players, are presented with a simple maze. A group of monsters appear at the entrance and trudge methodically toward the exit. Your goal is to destroy the monsters before they reach the exit by constructing attack towers along the borders of the maze. As you kill monsters, you gain cash, which you use to purchase more powerful attack towers and upgrades for your existing towers. I can't explain exactly what makes Tower Defense so addictive, but man, is it ever. I suppose it was inevitable that this new, addictive Tower Defense game mode would jump from the select audience of gamers with gaming-class PCs to simpler Flash implementations everyone can enjoy.
Warning: before clicking on that link, allow me to reiterate: tower defense is addictive! Less Wrong. Less Wrong: The Importance of Saying "Oops" The Generalized Anti-Zombie Principle. Followup to: Zombies! Zombies? "Each problem that I solved became a rule which served afterwards to solve other problems. " —Rene Descartes, Discours de la Methode "Zombies" are putatively beings that are atom-by-atom identical to us, governed by all the same third-party-visible physical laws, except that they are not conscious. Though the philosophy is complicated, the core argument against zombies is simple: When you focus your inward awareness on your inward awareness, soon after your internal narrative (the little voice inside your head that speaks your thoughts) says "I am aware of being aware", and then you say it out loud, and then you type it into a computer keyboard, and create a third-party visible blog post.
Consciousness, whatever it may be—a substance, a process, a name for a confusion—is not epiphenomenal; your mind can catch the inner listener in the act of listening, and say so out loud. It appears to me that in the case above, the answer is yes. This is a large step. Quantum Explanations. I think I must now temporarily digress from the sequence on zombies (which was a digression from the discussion of reductionism, which was a digression from the Mind Projection Fallacy) in order to discuss quantum mechanics. The reasons why this belongs in the middle of a discussion on zombies in the middle of a discussion of reductionism in the middle of a discussion of the Mind Projection Fallacy, will become apparent eventually. It's a sequence that has been weighing on my mind, demanding to be written, for a quite a long time. Years. This seems like a good time to insert it.
I wrote the "Intuitive Explanation of Bayesian Reasoning" because people were complaining that Bayes's Theorem was "counterintuitive"—in fact it was famously counterintuitive—and this did not seem right. I am not a physicist, and physicists famously hate it when non-professional-physicists talk about QM. Besides, as a Bayesian, I don't believe in phenomena that are inherently confusing. Furthermore: Decoherence is Simple. An epistle to the physicists: When I was but a little lad, my father, a Ph.D. physicist, warned me sternly against meddling in the affairs of physicists; he said that it was hopeless to try to comprehend physics without the formal math. Period. No escape clauses. But I had read in Feynman's popular books that if you really understood physics, you ought to be able to explain it to a nonphysicist.
I believed Feynman instead of my father, because Feynman had won the Nobel Prize and my father had not. It was not until later—when I was reading the Feynman Lectures, in fact—that I realized that my father had given me the simple and honest truth. No math = no physics. By vocation I am a Bayesian, not a physicist. The foregoing introduction is so that you don't laugh, and say, "Of course I know what those words mean! " Let's begin with the remark that started me down this whole avenue, of which I have seen several versions; paraphrased, it runs: The original formulation of William of Ockham stated:
Why Quantum? This post is part of the Quantum Physics Sequence. Followup to: Quantum Explanations "Why are you doing these posts on quantum physics? " the one asked me. "Quite a number of reasons," I said. "For one thing," I said, "the many-worlds issue is just about the only case I know of where you can bring the principles of Science and Bayesianism into direct conflict. " "For another thing," I continued, "part of what goes into becoming a rationalist, is learning to live into a counterintuitive world—learning to find things underneath the surface that are unlike the world of surface forms. " "But you're writing about physics, without being a physicist," the one said, "isn't that... a little... " "Yes," I said, "it is, and I felt guilty about it.
"Furthermore," I added, "knowing about many worlds, helps you visualize probabilities as frequencies, which is helpful to many points I want to make. " But would you believe that I had such strong support, if I had not shown it to you in full detail? Finally... Why I'm not more involved with academia. Where Physics Meets Experience. Followup to: Decoherence, Where Philosophy Meets Science Once upon a time, there was an alien species, whose planet hovered in the void of a universe with laws almost like our own. They would have been alien to us, but of course they did not think of themselves as alien. They communicated via rapid flashes of light, rather than sound.
We'll call them the Ebborians. Ebborians reproduce by fission, an adult dividing into two new individuals. They share genetic material, but not through sexual recombination; Ebborian adults swap genetic material with each other. Human DNA is built in a double helix; unzipping the helix a little at a time produces two stretches of single strands of DNA. Ebborians fission their brains, as well as their bodies, by a process something like how human DNA divides. Imagine an Ebborian brain as a flat sheet of paper, computing in a way that is more electrical than chemical—charges flowing down conductive pathways. But I digress from my tale. "But wait! " De'da shrugs.
Crazy Cones. On a long drive across the country this summer I noticed something odd about construction areas. They put out cones to block off an area for construction many hours before the construction actually starts, and take them away many hours after the construction ends. Most of the time you drive by a blocked-off area, there is no construction actually happening there, though there are a lot of travelers delayed by these cones. Now I’m sure they save some time by being able to put out and pick up the cones on some schedule and plan convenient to them, and it would cost more to put out and pick up the cones just before and after the construction.
But I’m also sure that this extra cost would be far far less than the value of the time lost by the delayed travelers. Why do they make such inefficient decisions? Why are governments be so very visibly inefficient, and why don’t voters punish them more for it? Added: A serious WordPress error deleted this post and all 20+ comments!! ShareThis. Pick One: Sick Kids or Look Poor. Katja is on a roll: SODIS is a cheap method of disinfecting water by putting it in the sun.
Like many things, it works better in physics than society, where its effects were not significant, according to a study in PLoS medicine recently…. [In] Rural Bolivia, where the study was done … the children studied usually get diarrhoea four times a year, which causes about fifteen percent of deaths of children under five.
For the poorest quintile in Bolivia the under five death rate is about one in ten of those born alive. … The leader of the study, Daniel Mausezahl, suspects a big reason for this is that lining up water bottles on your roof shows your neighbors that you aren’t rich enough to have more expensive methods of disinfecting water Fascinating as signaling explanations are, this seems incredible. … Perhaps adults are skeptical about effectiveness? The study said: ShareThis Tagged as: Medicine, Status Trackback URL: Machine Learning (Theory)