Plasmon comments on Train Philosophers with Pearl and Kahneman, not Plato and Kant - Less Wrong

65 Post author: lukeprog 06 December 2012 12:42AM

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Comment author: Plasmon 04 December 2012 12:13:20PM 5 points [-]

Is this problem limited to philosophy?

Good work in virtually every discipline requires a semi-decent grounding in math (with the possible exception of menial work)

Indeed, the universities teaching such subjects would do well to realize this and make math an integral part of the curriculum in most subjects, as opposed to the tackled-on (or non-existent) math courses they have now.

Comment author: glaucon 04 December 2012 12:48:57PM 7 points [-]

I agree that there is good work to be done with math in all of those fields. But there's plenty of good work in most of them that can be done without math too.

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 04 December 2012 04:59:32PM 6 points [-]

there's plenty of good work in most of them that can be done without math too

Yes. Two caveats:

1) The person doing the good work without math should remember to consult someone with the math skills before publishing their results, if they are trying to say something math-like.

For example, to invent a hypothesis, design an experiment and collect data, the math may be unnecessary. But it becomes necessary at the last step when the experimenter says: "So I did these experiments 10 times: 8 times the results seemed to support my hypothesis, 2 times they did not; therefore... what exactly?"

2) There should be enough people in the given field knowing the math, so when the person from the first example wants to find a colleague with domain knowledge and math skills, they actually find one.

Comment author: magfrump 06 December 2012 06:48:44PM 1 point [-]

I recently went to a linguistics colloquium because the talk was about extending a model of grammatical choice to decision theory on polynomial rings. Even if it wasn't very accessible to linguists, one of the speakers was clearly a mathematician and there are people making these connections.

Comment author: Plasmon 07 December 2012 10:12:18AM 0 points [-]

Yes. From the entirely anecdotal evidence I have gathered on the subject, it would seem that such research is more often being done by outsiders from maths fields who decided to study some linguistics (or other non-maths fields), then by linguists who decided to study some mathematics.

Comment author: Benito 09 December 2012 09:50:44AM 0 points [-]

I think the way that we specialise from the start is unnecessary. From age 4, kids go to one place (or at least have set times) for maths, another for science, another for art, history, and everything else. Knowledge is so intertwined, it would be better if you could be learning all knowledge together, so they complemented each other. Then someone could notice what vision in machine learning, a certain painting from the seventeenth century, a reflexive verb in French and fluid mechanics have in common, and to write a paper under the title 'philosophy' about aesthetics. Or something. It'd just be nice to be able to use knowledge formally the you haven't had to spend twenty years studying.

Comment author: Peterdjones 04 December 2012 12:54:34PM 0 points [-]

It's not going to happen because it would disqualify too many candidates and make courses unpopular. Maths is a huge turn off for a lot of people.

Also, one could argue that history is releant to just about everything. Etc.

Comment author: Plasmon 04 December 2012 01:19:25PM 3 points [-]

It's not going to happen because it would disqualify too many candidates and make courses unpopular. Maths is a huge turn off for a lot of people.

Indeed. This is a bug, not a feature, and alas, it holds these fields back.

Also, one could argue that history is releant to just about everything. Etc.

It is certainly true that history-of-(field) is useful for people doing work in (field). History in general, while useful in general, is less directly useful for a specific field. And indeed, most fields do spend reasonable (or more than reasonable!) amounts of time discussing their own history. Art does this, philosophy does this, even mathematics and physics do this to some extent.

It is true that the argument "one could argue that (some field) is relevant to just about everything and that therefore more of (this field) should be taught" can be made convincingly for many fields, but the fact that it can be made for many fields is not an argument against it, it just means that some field must be prioritized, hopefully on utilitarian grounds.

Comment author: lucidian 04 December 2012 01:31:56PM -1 points [-]

It's not going to happen because it would disqualify too many candidates and make courses unpopular. Maths is a huge turn off for a lot of people.

Indeed. This is a bug, not a feature, and alas, it holds these fields back.

I disagree that this is a bug, not a feature. I think it's useful for fields to contain people with different styles of thinking. The people who are competent at math are probably N types on the MBTI, people who are good at abstract reasoning, but who might be less competent at focusing on empirical data and specific concrete situations. The sciences, especially the social sciences, need people who are good at observing/collecting data, and I would hate to disqualify these people with a math requirement, or relegate them to lower-status because their minds operate in a different (but also useful) way.

(This comment informed by having read this essay earlier this morning.)

Comment author: somervta 04 December 2012 06:35:06PM 3 points [-]

It's not going to happen because it would disqualify too many candidates and make courses unpopular. Maths is a huge turn off for a lot of people.

Indeed. This is a bug, not a feature, and alas, it holds these fields back.

I disagree that this is a bug, not a feature. I think it's useful for fields to contain people with different styles of thinking

I suspect that the negative attitude towards math has less to do with personality type and more to do with the execrable state of mathematics education.

Comment author: Plasmon 04 December 2012 05:57:17PM 2 points [-]

That is an exceedingly optimistic hypothesis.

The people who are competent at math are probably N types on the MBTI, people who are good at abstract reasoning, but who might be less competent at focusing on empirical data and specific concrete situations.

Might be, indeed. This hasn't stopped physics, chemistry, engineering, biology, astronomy, etc. all of which have empirical data and concrete situations, and are chock-a-block with maths.

The sciences, especially the social sciences, need people who are good at observing/collecting data

Indeed they need such people. If you have evidence that the present selection procedures prevalent in the social sciences select for such people, I would be delighted to hear it.

Observing and collecting data is stereotypically something that maths types are good at. Consider google, data science and data mining.

Let me refer to Why is machine learning not used in medical diagnosis?

The top voted answer in the Quora discussion is from a medical student (...) describing the complexity of a diagnostic decision, and claims “the human body is incapable of being defined by any algorithm, no matter how bloody brilliant it is.”

The expert systems in question supposedly outperform human doctors!

The problem with machine learning in medicine is not the machine learning. Machine learning and AI have come a long way since the 80′s, and even then automated systems outperformed doctors in experimental settings.

I hypothesise as follows : the non-mathy fields maintain a group dynamic that causes a certain hostility towards mathematical ideas, even when such ideas are objectively superior. To an extent, this also prevents objective judgement of people's abilities within the field, and steers these fields away from a desirable meritocratic state. We end up with fields that select against mathematical ability (those with mathematical ability flee as soon as they realise that the entire history curriculum does not contain a single course on radiometric dating - I wish I were kidding), and that may not select for other desirable qualities instead.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 05 December 2012 04:06:29AM 1 point [-]

From the essay:

Or to put it more provocatively: The Aspier someone is, the more likely it is that he’ll be an eager utilitarian. (You probably know people like this. Anyone who self-identifies as a ‘utilitarian’ probably has Aspie tendencies — very fluent with abstract concepts, and very eager to apply them to all aspects of life.)

It might be possible to get some information about this from the survey.

Comment author: gwern 05 December 2012 08:41:27PM *  3 points [-]

The utilitarian/autism-spectrum correlation may be true in the general population, but there doesn't seem to be any correlation between self-reported AQ and consequentialism endorsement in the LW population (perhaps because the LW population is already self-selected for either being a consequentialist or coming up with good justifications for non-consequentialism):

R> lw <- read.csv("2012.csv")
R> lwa <- subset(lw, !is.na(AutismScore))
R> levels(lwa$MoralViews)
[1] " " "Accept / lean toward consequentialism"
[3] "Accept / lean toward deontology" "Accept / lean toward virtue ethics"
[5] "Other / no answer"
R> lwa <- subset(lwa, as.character(MoralViews) != " " & as.character(MoralViews) != "Other / no answer")
R> cor.test(lwa$AutismScore, as.integer(lwa$MoralViews))
Pearson's product-moment correlation
data: lwa$AutismScore and as.integer(lwa$MoralViews)
t = 0.1663, df = 289, p-value = 0.868
alternative hypothesis: true correlation is not equal to 0
95 percent confidence interval:
-0.1053 0.1246
sample estimates:
cor
0.009783

(A positive correlation suggests that higher autism scorers were a tad more likely to endorse a higher category, that is, deontology or virtue ethics.)

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 05 December 2012 09:20:26PM 1 point [-]

Thank you for checking.

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