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Comment by hernan7 | Hacker News Reader

35 pointshernan724 comments

Ecclesiastes 9:11

  I have seen something else under the sun:
  The race is not to the swift
  or the battle to the strong,
  nor does food come to the wise
  or wealth to the brilliant
  or favor to the learned;
  but time and chance happen to them all.

You know, people told me that living forever will be boring.

Then I pointed out that people, well, forget. That they can't possibly remember everything. I also knew that memories are quite unreliable and fictional.(I often fabricated memories about where I left my keys, which is often indistinguishable from true memories in my mind)

Of course, somebody suggest that we should build more reliable memories for longer lifespan, and another suggests that there will be so much to learn for a really long time so we won't get bored living a long life.

Eee...memory in a human doesn't work the same as memory in a computer (which your sortof illustrated with your car keys example).

It's not like your brain just deletes entire memories; your brain simply does not work that way.

You'd never have a second first kiss, or a second time learning how to ride a bike, or a time when you got to fall in love with your wife again...you wouldn't forget about having kids, and get to experience raising them again.

Just as exploring the river-bed near my childhood home isn't exciting to me anymore (sadly), you'd have to be continually seeking out new experiences in order to get that positive you're-doing-something-new feedback from your brain.

> It's not like your brain just deletes entire memories; your brain simply does not work that way.

A brain, like any arrangement of atoms, can only hold so many bits of information. The more you cram in there the more degraded older and less intense memories get until you can't recall more than a vague feeling, and eventually nothing at all. Probably one could hold a few memories close to heart and be able to avoid forgetting them, but anything you didn't continually refresh would be gone after the first few hundred years. Often, "forgotten" memories are still hanging around but have nothing to trigger them, but those too must disappear eventually to make room for new stuff.

Or, rather than talking in vague terms like "forever" versus "longer lifespan", or "forgetting" versus "reliable memory", we could quantify exactly what we want, and then treat it as an optimization problem (specifically, of the integral of the (memory of choices made + potential for remaining choices) curve over your lifetime.) http://lesswrong.com/lw/xy/the_fun_theory_sequence/

You know, people told me that living forever will be boring.

We can face that when we start to see pathology reports saying the patient died of boredom.

That's a really good point! You'd get to re-discover all the cool stuff... thanks :)

A site which was a real celebration of Dunning-Kruger would have user-moderated debates with Karma. The scores would be fictionalized so that every user thinks they are a standard deviation above average.

What a strange site. It's like, the author takes all the social science research from 1997 to 2007 and just presents it a little more poorly than it was originally presented and editorializes it. Like, everything he writes is almost correct, but then he writes his own assumptions into it that were never in the original research - and sometimes, wrong.

Wait, wait, maybe the blog itself is a joke and a play on the Dunning-Kruger effect - maybe he's aware of the fact that he's not as smart as he thinks, and he's bastardizing social science in an ironic way. Perhaps, in fact, this is the next evolution of art. That must be it.

Edit: Kidding aside, most of the concepts he references are interesting, but he does a poor job of it. The biggest problem is he mixes his own examples in a blog post with actual research without differentiating between the two. So you're going to get some bad, unproven conjectures along with your pop science if you read here. If you like the general topics he's writing on though, just google the names of the concepts he covers in a post and check the top results in Google or the citations in Wikipedia - it is interesting stuff, it's just presented rather poorly on this fellow's blog.

> If you like the general topics he's writing on though, just google the names of the concepts he covers in a post and check the top results in Google or the citations in Wikipedia

Right, that's the idea. He's writing to persuade (people that these things are interesting, and worthy of study), not to inform.

I was rather annoyed by the assertion of irrationality in this post's second example (engineer or lawyer):

http://youarenotsosmart.com/2010/05/28/representative-heuris...

Doesn't Bayes have a say in the matter? What if I believed that few engineers hung around country clubs but many lawyers chose such a lifestyle? It would more likely that the person described was a lawyer. What if the facts presented included "passed the bar exam on the first try"? Wouldn't we suspect this person to be an attorney?

Those who do not believe the world is just, have a reason to live for: Lets make the world just!

I don't know whether or not that reasoning is based on some wiring in our brain..

instead of linking to the entire blog can you link to the specific post you are trying to highlight please.

and here it is. but the other reads are pretty good as well.

http://youarenotsosmart.com/2010/05/11/the-dunning-kruger-ef...

The Dunning-Kruger effect is about mis-rating yourself with respect to a known field, such as one's abilities in reasoning, grammar and humor compared to the average distributions of skill in that area (the original areas studied).

This article talks about things completely unrelated, such as misjuding one's own skill at Street Fighter because one is unaware that a hardcore scene in that game even exists. If that scene did not exist, the hypothetical amateur Street Fighter player would be none the wiser--yet he would no longer be "misjudging" himself due to his own "incompetence".

It looks like the author himself is suffering the Dunning-Kruger effect, spouting pop psychology nonsense in an authoritative tone.

Well, you're right to criticize the author's post, at least.

Newer research shows that, for easy tasks, the better you are at it, the most likely you are to accurately assess your abilities. For hard tasks, though, it is the least talented who are best able to assess their level of skill.

This conflicts with the original Dunning-Kruger hypothesis which said that the most talented generally would be more accurate overall.

So the example of thinking you're some kind of Street Fighter badass because you're undefeated in your neighborhood is a highly likely scenario, but it's not the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Even less appropriate an example of the Dunning-Kruger effect would be a prize-winning journalist (the author) making some slight errors in a blog post, which is what you claim in your last sentence.

Hypothetically, though, an internet commenter who thinks he is a psychology expert but then goes to make an even worse mistake in his attempt to pedantically correct the original author, might be.

A bit like cracked.com. Not as funny.

Am so.

youarenotsogoodathavingasenseofhumor.com

Whoosh recursion?

Triple whoosh recursion?

Halt!

Hammertime.

(I'm conflicted by this thread. Ironic? Not ironic?)

Not ironic, not funny, not much of anything.

You're right, not much of anything. I can't even pinpoint what I thought was or was not ironic. But in my defense I was trying to stop the silly recursion jokes with a "halt" or risk a halting problem since every following joke would be unfunny. And since the theme seemed to be "jokes that weren't funny," I had to add a "hammertime" from the infamous meme.

Anyway. Lame lame lame. I hereby disown my involvement.

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