faul_sname comments on Helpless Individuals - Less Wrong

42 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 30 March 2009 11:10AM

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Comment author: faul_sname 17 September 2012 05:23:46PM 0 points [-]

Do you think that a marginal dollar that is allocated to research on, for example, the synthesis of conductive plastics increases or decreases the signal:noise ratio? What fields do you think would have a marginal output of less than $1 of value generated per dollar you invest?

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 17 September 2012 06:31:48PM 5 points [-]

Mostly fields which are producing lots of "statistically significant" results and no universal generalizations (where "This happens to everyone with gene X" is a universal generalization even if not everyone has gene X). Conductive plastics doesn't sound too bad because you can tell whether or not a plastic conducts pretty clearly.