Estimation

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How to Change Your Mind

My third guest post for Applied Sentience is up!

http://appliedsentience.com/2014/07/25/2038/

This one wasn’t very original, but I thought it turned out well. Essentially, I took some of Less Wrong’s fantastic material on How to Actually Change Your Mind, then threw in some examples from my own experience. Plus, you get some fun mental training exercises to go along with the stories!

Credit goes to Paul Chiari, editor extraordinaire, for the photos and captions.

 

Here’s an excerpt:

From the ages of 13-16, I spent a lot of time arguing with people on this political forum. I changed my mind a few times in the process, but by the time I left the site, I was pretty sure I’d found the “correct” side of every major political issue, even though I never had that thought explicitly.

If you’d asked me: “Do you actually think you’re right about everything?” I would have answered no. But if you’d asked “What are some things youactually think you might be wrong about?” I’d have stared at you for a while and then started to mope. (At least, that’s what happened whenever I asked myself that question.)

 

If you can only click one link from the guest post, make it “Steelmanning”, by Chana Messinger. It’s much more fun to argue with people when you pretend their arguments are better than they really are, as opposed to worse.

(It’s also a relief when other people show you the same courtesy.)

 

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How My First Name Got Me Into Yale. Maybe.

If you’re reading this because of the title: Hooray, it worked!
 
Anyway, click-bait aside, I’m starting this post half-convinced that first-letter-of-name discrimination is a real issue that deserves attention.
 
In the following investigation, I will attempt to uncover whether names that start with the letter “A” are more common at Yale than they ought to be. This isn’t as ridiculous a premise as it sounds–thanks to the “implicit egotism” effect, our names can have a surprising impact on where we end up in life. (Though these results are still highly contentious.)
 
I won’t give away the result here, but you can skip to the bottom of the page for my conclusion.
 

Introduction 

Two years ago, I began to notice that there are a lot of “A” names at Yale. I’d count the names in any room where I knew most of them (ignoring my own), and the average was about one in eight.
 
There are 26 letters, so this seems excessive. On the other hand, three of those letters are Q, X, and Z. Plus, a lot of parents might pick the first name in the baby book just to get it over with, like mine did. 
 
(Just kidding, Mom and Dad! I think.)

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The Words of Our Lives

Summary: We write a lot of words, and our words may serve as the truest expression of our personalities after we’re dead, if we keep them in a safe place. It might also be nice to have our present-day words around when we’re older.

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After we are dead, information about ourselves will continue to exist.

Some of this information won’t last very long; our bodies disappear quickly, rotting or burning to ash. But we’ve gotten rather good at keeping the rest of it stored in various places and formats.

How we look and sound, for example. YouTube features footage of tens of millions of people moving/speaking/singing, and many families keep home videos of some kind. Then there’s an entire universe of still photographs—both photos taken of us and photos we’ve taken of other things. And we’ll have electronic medical records, possibly even entire sequenced genomes, to testify to the physical facts of our existence.

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Sex and Relationships at Yale

Warning: The title of this piece is officially my first attempt at search-engine bait. I might actually catch one this time. But I’ll have to kill it quickly, before it chews off its own leg trying to escape. Anyway…

Sex.

Now that I have your attention, I’m going to talk about sex. And relationships. Mostly relationships. You see, the New York Times decided to investigate, thoroughly and at great length, the sex lives of female students at the University of Pennsylvania.

They did their homework. 60 interviews, with as diverse a slice of the female student body as possible, is nothing to sneeze at. I believe that the quotes they used were more or less representative of the responses received. I believe that the sourcing of Susan Patton made sense and was helpful in putting that whole Princeton debacle in context.

Most of all, I believe that the shapely bare leg in the cover photo will certainly lead to more clicks. I’ll keep that strategy in my notes.

A shapely bear leg. I’m sorry.

I don’t have the time or inclination to comment on the entire piece. There are issues of sexual violence and the nature of college pre-professional life and whether it’s a good idea to marry in college at all that have been explored elsewhere to an extent well beyond what I could hope to achieve in this post.

But I did spend last night talking over the article with a good friend from Yale, and another good friend from the University of Delaware, and hearing their thoughts on hooking up — or not — in college got my gears turning, and a graduate from the time before Yale had women asked my opinion, so I wrote him a letter, which has been adapted below. Take it as one student’s opinion, based on two years of firsthand experience and a collection of secondhand and thirdhand stories.

Note: Strong opinions ahead. Please don’t get angry if you disagree, unless getting angry will make you feel better, in which case, go ahead. You can yell at me if you want, but I’d also love to hear the reasons you think I’m wrong. My mind is open.

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