= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
dreeves comments on 2011 Less Wrong Census / Survey - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (694)
I took the survey and I agree with some other comments about the difficulty of assigning probabilities to distant events. I decided to just round to either 0 or 1% for a few things. I hope "0" won't be interpreted as literally zero.
Something bugs me about the IQ question. It's easy to call sour grapes on those complaining about that metric but it seems like such a poor proxy for what matters, namely, making awesome stuff happen. Not denying a correlation, just that I think we can do much better. Even income in dollars might be a better proxy despite the obvious problems with that.
Rest easy - it was stated that it meant epsilon.
I think income in dollars is a much worse proxy for most things that matter than IQ, because it depends so much on age and career choice and where you live and so forth. And how do you know that what Yvain was after was a measure of "making awesome stuff happen"?
I think “age and career choice and where you live and so forth” also correlate with “making awesome stuff happen”, and in very similar ways. OTOH, I think IQ is probably a decent predictor of “making awesome stuff happen” among people with same “age and career choice and where you live and so forth”.
Age is correlated in two different ways with making awesome stuff happen. (1) There's presumably some peak period of life in which you're more likely to do awesome things. (2) The likelihood of having made something awesome happen is monotonically increasing with age. If Yvain were wanting to measure awesomeness -- and let me repeat that I see no particular reason to assume that was his goal -- then #1 would be of some interest. But what you get by looking at income is more like #2.
Career choice is certainly correlated both with making awesome things happen and with income. But, again, in different ways. For instance, if you're a very clever technically-inclined new graduate wanting to get rich, then finance and law are pretty good choices of career. Both offer, especially if you're both good and lucky, the opportunity to get hold of very large amounts of money. But if those are careers that tend to produce a lot of awesomeness, I seem to have failed to notice. (Handwavy explanation: To get a lot of money, you need to do things that others find very valuable. You can do that by creating new value, which is hard; or by steering value towards the people who pay you, which is often easier. When someone working in finance makes his clients rich, it's usually mostly at other people's expense: to buy low and sell high, you require others to sell low and buy high. Law is somewhat similar, though I think it tends to be more about steering anti-value away from your clients.)
There are people in law who are making awesome things happen, but they are not getting paid anywhere close to as much for it as the ones who are doing standard things for deep-pocketed clients.
For that matter, there are people in finance who are making awesome things happen - if we want a particularly PC example, Grameen Bank
True, I was just thinking that something that correlates (loosely) with "having made awesome stuff happen" might be better than something that correlates with "has one of multiple skills that contribute to the hypothetical ability to make awesome stuff happen".
As for whether "making awesome stuff happen" is the right underlying metric... what else?
Well, for instance, given that Less Wrong is all about thinking better, there might be some interest in knowing something about (so to speak) the raw thinking power of the participants.