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Will_Newsome comments on Rationality quotes: October 2010 - Less Wrong
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Hm, how about...
Beliefs are justified by their Solomonoff-nature. That is the core of Bayesianism. Science is bookkeeping.
It bothers me that "bookkeeping" is given a disparaging tone.
That's because it's easy to misvalue assets if you're disconnected from the production process. So when you have specialized bookkeepers, others will typcially see them as ignorant of the true value of the assets, and associate this with bookkeeping per se, rather than bookkeeping with a screwy incentive structure and/or knowledge flows. Because this is the context in which most people interface with accountants, they tend to be associated with misvaluing assets. And thus:
"Beancounters didn't think a soldier's life was worth 300 [thousand dollars]." -- Batman Begins
Edit: Sorry, I forgot to translate all that: P(observe "accountant" | believe accountant misvalued assets) > P(observe "accountant" | ~believe accountant misvalued assets)
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...reason #7 I love LessWrong: when they want to improve audience comprehension, people have to translate from English to mathematical formulas instead of the reverse.
If I could just recruit another equally capabler soldier for $ 299,000 or less with no ill consequences, then this seems like a shut up and multiply situation that accountants are trained for.
Hell, from a utilitarian perspective, if I saved a single soldier with that money instead of feeding and housing let's say, 300 African children for 10 years, then I made a stupid decision.
I think the accountant got things just about right.
Good point, bad example -- that's probably a case where accountants have the best knowledge of the costs of losing a soldier, and the generals are best capable of communicating it. The military also provides a certain payout to the family for a death.
Still, I find it hard to believe that there aren't some US soldiers for which it's worth spending 300k for the level of protection that a high-tech kevlar bodysuit provides. Special Forces goes to pretty insane lengths to provide protection, although perhaps the $300k unit cost would only be with a bulk discount, etc.
(Of course, it's fictional evidence anyway...)
Usually military personnel who have received expensive enough training to justify that are called officers, but there are definitely some exceptions. I wouldn't disagree.
And, now that you mention it, I could imagine the pay out being expensive enough that not paying the money would flatly irrational, but I don't know the number.
I don't either, but the most it could save would be the soldier's life value times the current risk of death (i.e. assume the bodysuit prevents all deaths), not the full life value. And, although Lucius Fox is potrayed as a smart man, the context makes it seem like he was comparing $300k to the cost of a life, without adjusting for the chance that it would actually save the life.
That isn't a counterargument. "Officer" is a (category of) rank, not a job description. A whole lot of actual military "action" work is in fact performed by officers, particularly if it involves high levels of skill. (For example, pilots are usually officers.)
Yes, they are. But I've never heard a pilot called a soldier. This goes for most jobs performed by people in the O Ranks.
I am using Soldier to be interchangeable with Enlisted Man since I've seen and heard it used that way myself.
I assumed it was used that way in context, but maybe it wasn't.
No, "soldier", at least in U.S. military jargon, means "member of the Army" (as opposed to the other services). The Army chief-of-staff, a four-star general, will refer to themselves as a "soldier".
This is very insightful. Upvoted.
Perhaps because it is easy to ritualize bookkeeping? I think to remember that is to keep within the spirit of the twelfth virtue, the void.
I've never met an accountant I didn't like. The nice thing about bookkeeping is that you have to make your sums come out right.
Nor have I. (But I haven't met enough accountants for this to mean much either way.)
I also thoroughly approve of all kinds of bookkeeping, related to science or otherwise. In particular I praise anyone else who takes care of it (so that I don't have to!)
I see it as disparaging because I regard it as something a computer ought to be doing. If a human is doing bookkeeping and they aren't doing it for a reason like 'to practice' or 'to understand better', then something is very wrong.
Just because something is a job for computers does not mean that it's not a critical job.
Maintaining a nuclear core at a constant temperature is a very critical job, but I would regard as a dystopia any world where all cores are so maintained by a human and not a microcontroller.
We are in agreement on that. My point is that the quote "everything else [in scientific rigor] is bookkeeping" conveys the idea that it's not important, not that it isn't a human's job.
"Testing" needs to be replaced with a new term if you are moving to that level.
Changed to 'justified' 'cuz that's the first thing that came to mind...
That works. I was tossing up "evaluated" or "weighed" but nothing sprung to mind that was a clear winner.