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timtyler comments on Controlling your inner control circuits - Less Wrong
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Comments (146)
This article is quite long. As general feedback, I won't usually bother reading long articles unless they summarise their content up front with an abstract, or something similar. This post starts with more of a teaser. A synopsis at the end would be good as well: tell me three times.
I don't mind the length; I second the "tell me three times".
An observation: PJeby if you really have a self help product that does what it says on the tin for anyone who gives it a fair try, I would argue that the most efficient way of establishing credibility among the Less wrong community would be to convince a highly regarded poster of that fact. To that end I would suggest that offering your product to Eliezer Yudkowsky for free or even paying him to try it in the form of a donation to his singularity institute would be more effective than the back and forth that I see here. It should be possible to establish an mutually satisfactory set of criteria of what constitutes 'really trying it' beforehand to avoid subsequent accusations of bad faith.
What makes you think that that's my goal?
Pjeby: If your goal isn't to convince the less wrong community of the effectiveness of your methodology then I am truly puzzled as to why you post here. If convincing others is not your goal, then what is?
Helping others.
Do you expect anyone to benefit from your expertise if you can't convince them you have it?
pjeby will be more likely to notice this proposition if you post it as a reply to one of his comments, not one of mine.
Nope. The fact that you, personally, experience winning a lottery, doesn't support a theory that playing a lottery is a profitable enterprise.
What? If the odds of the lottery are uncertain, and your sample size is actually one, then surely it should shift your estimate of profitability.
Obviously a larger sample is better, and the degree to which it shifts your estimate will depend on your prior, but to suggest the evidence would be worthless in this instance seems odd.
It's impossible for playing a lottery to be profitable, both before you ever played it, and after you won a million dollars. The tenth decimal place doesn't really matter.
I wonder what's your definition of 'profit'.
True story: when I was a child, I "invested" about 20 rubles in a slot machine. I won about 50 rubles that day and never played slot machines (or any lottery at all) again since then. So:
Assuming that we're using a dictionary definition of the word 'profit', the entire 'series of transactions' with the slot machine was de-facto profitable for me.
It's obvious that to interpret my words correctly (as not being obviously wrong), you need to consider only big (cumulative) profit. And again, even if you did win a million dollars, that still doesn't count, only if you show that you were likely to win a million dollars (even if you didn't).
The only way I can make sense of your comment is to assume that you're defining the word lottery to mean a gamble with negative expected value. In that case, your claim is tautologically correct, but as far as I can tell, largely irrelevant to a situation such as this, where the point is that we don't know the expected value of the gamble and are trying to discover it by looking at evidence of its returns.
That expected value is negative is a state of knowledge. We need careful studies to show whether a technique/medicine/etc is effective precisely because without such a study our state of knowledge shows that the expected value of the technique is negative. At the same time, we expect the new state of knowledge after the study to show that either the technique is useful, or that it's not.
That's one of the traps of woo: you often can't efficiently demonstrate that it's effective, and through intuition probably related to conservation of expected evidence you insist that if you don't have a better method to show its effectiveness, the best available method should be enough, because it's ridiculous to hold the claim to higher standard of proof on one side than on another. But you have to, the prior belief plays its part, the threshold to changing a decision may be too far away to cross by simple arguments. The intuitive thrust of the principle doesn't carry over to expected utility because of the threshold, it may well be that you have a technique for which there is a potential test that could demonstrate that it's effective, but the test is unavailable, and without performing the test the expected value of the technique remains negative.
I don't think the principle of charity generally extends so far as to make people reinterpret you when you don't go to the trouble of phrasing your comments so they don't sound obviously wrong.
If you see a claim that has one interpretation making it obviously wrong and another one sensible, and you expect a sensible claim, it's a simple matter of robust communication to assume the sensible one and ignore the obviously wrong. It's much more likely that the intended message behind the inapt textual transcription wasn't the obviously wrong one, and the content of communication is that unvoiced thought, not the text used to communicate it.
FWIW, the original article on Kaj's blog is formatted in a way that makes it much easier to read/skim than here.