Rationality quotes time! 

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"Finally, a study that backs up everything I've always said about confirmation bias." -Kslane, Twitter

Link

Most of the Headlines from a Mathematically Literate World. An example:

Our World: Hollywood Breaks Box Office Records with Explosions, Rising Stars.

Mathematically Literate World: Hollywood Breaks Box Office Records with Inflation, Rising Population.

More of these gems, for the lazy:

Our World: Firm’s Meteoric Rise Explained by Daring Strategy, Bold Leadership

Mathematically Literate World: Firm’s Meteoric Rise Explained by Good Luck, Selection Bias

Our World: One Dead in Shark Attack; See Tips for Shark Safety Inside

Mathematically Literate World: One Dead in Tragic, Highly Unlikely Event; See Tips for Something Useful Inside

Our World: Poll Finds 2016 Candidates Neck and Neck

Mathematically Literate World: Poll Finds 2016 Predictions Futile, Absurd

Mathematically and Economically Literate World: Rapid economic growth in India and China create record sales for low marginal cost information goods that achieve cross-cultural appeal by, for example, playing to base pleasures by displaying explosions and beautiful actors.

8MTGandP10y
In case anyone's curious, here are the highest-grossing films, adjusted for inflation.
7Vaniver10y
Notice the number of political digs among the clear ones.
3Luke_A_Somers10y
Looks to me like around 4, with one of them being of no particular partisan orientation. Okay, what's special about that number, that I should notice it? Seems about what one would expect for a list of that length. A bit low, frankly.
2Vaniver10y
The number doesn't seem as important as the habit of noticing political digs, regardless of whether or not you agree with them.
3Luke_A_Somers10y
Okay. I was just wondering why you said 'number' there.

By the middle of the seventeenth century it had come to be understood that the world was enclosed in a sea of air, much as the greater part of it was covered by water. A scientist of the period, Francesco Lana, contended that a lighter-than-air ship could float upon this sea, and he suggested how such a ship might be built. He was unable to put his invention to a practical test, but he saw only one reason why it might not work:

". . . that God will never suffer this Invention to take effect, because of the many consequencies which may disturb the Civil Government of men. For who sees not, that no City can be secure against attack, since our Ship may at any time be placed directly over it, and descending down may discharge Souldiers; the same would happen to private Houses, and Ships on the Sea: for our Ship descending out of the Air to the sails of Sea-Ships, it may cut their Ropes, yea without descending by casting Grapples it may over-set them, kill their men, burn their Ships by artificial Fire works and Fire-balls. And this they may do not only to Ships but to great Buildings, Castles, Cities, with such security that they which cast these things down from a height out of

... (read more)

He had predicted modern air warfare in surprisingly accurate detail—with its paratroopers and its strafing and bombing.

Not really relevant, but this seems like an overstatement. Paratroopers and bombing I can see, but strafing doesn't seem to be mentioned, and I'm not aware that using airborne grapples to overturn ships has ever happened (my understanding is that the weight ratios wouldn't cooperate).

He also seems to be predicting that only one side in any given conflict will have airships, and assuming that everyone else will just keep doing what they were doing before instead of developing strategies and technologies to defend against this new threat.

5HungryHippo10y
As to your last paragraph: yes, Lana could have imagined the future "one step further" by considering what would have happened when both sides of a war acquire these flying ships. In this respect, his "error" in considering only one of the two sides seems similar to one of Sun Tzu which goes something like: What happens when both you and your enemy "know the enemy and know yourself". How can neither of you not fear the result of a hundred battles? However, consider also The Bomber Will Always Get Through, some 300 years later, as a counterpoint to "develop new strategies to defend against this new threat".
7Vaniver10y
Two interpretations jump to mind: the first is that 'fear' is interpreted as uncertainty, the second is that mutually fully informed agents could do enough damage to each other that war between them is senseless, and thus there are no battles.
2AndHisHorse10y
Alternately, I interpreted it as saying that war between two such agents will always be a stalemate, with both sides gingerly risking pawns and trading minor victories which, while never leading to substantial success, do not lead to crushing defeat, either. Of course, your second interpretation is much more applicable in the general case of two sides which are not evenly matched, in which case the weaker one will accept their defeat (either by surrendering or deciding to go out in a defiant but hopeless battle), in which case your first interpretation comes into play.
5philh10y
I note that people on the ground did develop new strategies to defend against planes. Radar and antiaircraft guns and those balloon things to take them down, bomb shelters to make them less lethal. I wonder how many WWII bombers would it take to land a single bomb on DC? The bombers also evolved, of course (I guess now it would be "the missile will always get through"), and my understanding is that defense hasn't kept up with offense. But a race with a clear victor isn't the same thing as no race at all.

There are tens of thousands of professional money managers. Statistically, a handful of them have been successful by pure chance. Which ones? I don't know, but I bet a few are famous.

The market doesn't care how much you paid for a stock. Or your house. Or what you think is a "fair" price.

Professional investors have better information and faster computers than you do. You will never beat them short-term trading. Don't even try.

The book Where Are the Customers' Yachts? was written in 1940, and most still haven't figured out that financial advisors don't have their best interest at heart.

The low-cost index fund is one of the most useful financial inventions in history. Boring but beautiful.

Highlights from "50 Unfortunate Truths About Investing" by Morgan Housel.

5pianoforte61110y
More of the people reading this comment are likely to hire a financial advisor than try to become an investor. With that in mind I'd like to hear more about why financial advisors don't have our best interests at heart. I took a personal finance course in college that was 95% telling us how to create and execute financial plans and 5% telling us that in practice you should just hire a financial advisor. The former is to ensure that you know if your financial advisor knows what he's talking about. Is this actually bad advice?

With that in mind I'd like to hear more about why financial advisors don't have our best interests at heart.

In my experience, quite a few money managers generate a lot more fees then they strictly need to. Even some index funds will churn/rebalance more than necessary in order to generate a fee. When you consider the oft-cited statistic that very few managers outperform the market, and add in the fact that many they do eat the entire much of the surplus with fees, it becomes optimal to buy a good index rather than hire a financial adviser.

The problem with hiring advisers of all kinds is that you are hiring someone because they know more than you- which means you run the risk of them using their knowledge to rip you off.

0pianoforte61110y
Financial advisors aren't exactly the same as money managers. They aren't just there for advice on investing. They are there to help you create a financial plan, create financial goals, tell you how much you need to spend and save in order to meet those goals and if they are good, make sure you know when you are failing in those goals. At least in theory. Ergo, index funds aren't exactly a replacement for financial advisors. I accept that if you just want to invest then index funds might be your best bet. Moreover, even if I understand index funds and the basic of personal finance, it might still be a good idea to hire an advisor. I think that after many years of school, I understand the principles of how to learn a new subject effectively. Yet it is still far more productive for me to take a class than to try to self study a topic. This isn't true for everyone (see Scott H Young) but its true for me. Having a structured environment keeps me on track. I suspect that managing my finances will be similar.
0James_Miller10y
Probably good advice, although for middle class Americans you don't really need a financial advisor if you understand index funds and the tax benefits of pensions.
5hyporational10y
I'd be interested in some guesstimations on how much luck it would take to be Warren Buffett, for example. Survivorship bias in finance is often employed as a just so story.
6James_Miller10y
Less than you think given that he was able to cheaply borrow money through his insurance company.
1hyporational10y
Can you think of any investor billionaires who seem to have become rich mostly by chance? I suppose they'd have to be people who were already rich and didn't have to make many decisions to become even richer.
7Desrtopa10y
How would you distinguish an investor billionaire who became rich by chance from one who chose wisely, after the fact? If you have access to information regarding how they made their investment decisions, you should be able to tell them apart, but in most cases that information probably isn't available. One of Jon Ronson's books (probably Lost At Sea, but I've since returned it to the library and no longer have it for reference,) features interviews with individuals at levels of income on steps of about five times apart, and one of those individuals, whose wealth was not in the billions, but was in the hundreds of millions, had made his wealth because a college friend introduced him to one of the founders of.... some major online corporation, possibly Amazon, so that he could provide startup money which he'd received from his father's business. So his acquisition of his wealth was largely effortless and due to chance by his own admission. I don't know to what extent this is normal for very wealthy people, but his perception seemed to be that it was quite common.
1hyporational10y
Assess how many decisions they had to make to get there. Did they make a couple of large successful investments, or many smaller successful investments? My point exactly. Fewer decisions to make by flipping a coin to become even richer, less chance of losing your money. There are fewer billionaires than millionaires who got there that way, because the initial money needed is harder to come by. I wonder if one could become a successful investor by studying people who made their fortune gradually.
1Desrtopa10y
Just because someone made their money through many small investments though, doesn't mean that they didn't make their money by luck. You'd have to be quite lucky, but then, there are quite a lot of people involved with the opportunity to get lucky. Also, even a "smaller investment" in a business that grows explosively can be sufficient to produce considerable wealth. Suppose that of an investor's investments, 49 out of 50 fail or stagnate, but the remaining one grows in value by 100,000%. Overall, the investor has multiplied their investment twenty times. It's not necessary for an investor to usually pick right, just to occasionally pick very right. This is the principle that Paul Graham works by in funding startups.
2hyporational10y
Of course it doesn't, are we speaking in certainties now? That's not "people who make their fortune gradually". Don't learn from people who hit for every 20 misses. That depends on how much money they have in the first place and how often "occasionally" means. Also if this is a generally successful strategy, then obviously they are not just lucky.
0Desrtopa10y
Since what we're examining is the set of investors who're already rich, then the fact that a strategy has a low prior likelihood of working by chance doesn't tell us that the investor probably didn't achieve their success by chance, if there are enough people trying the strategy. It's a successful strategy for those who are able to make large winners a significant fraction of their total investments, and this is something that could conceivably be achieved by intelligent selection or by luck.
0[anonymous]10y
You missed the part I edited.
0hyporational10y
Would you say the same of successful neurosurgeons? Your argument is missing something.
4Desrtopa10y
I would say the comment isn't relevant with respect to neurosurgeons, because there isn't a large body of people attempting neurosurgery, most of whom are unsucessful. One can become rich through investment through frequent failure and occasional large success, but to be successful in neurosurgery, your success must be consistent. Successful neurosurgeons stand out among regular neurosurgeons for extra-consistent success out of a field where consistent success is already the standard.

One can become rich through investment through frequent failure and occasional large success

Only provided you have a large initial pool of capital.

If you don't, the first few failures will knock you out at which point you stop playing the game and the future potential large success never gets realized.

1Desrtopa10y
You can start with a small pool of capital and keep it up if you're lucky with something among your first investments. I can only speculate on how many people are in a position to experience this though, so I don't know how likely that it is that anyone ends up rich by luck by that avenue.
0[anonymous]10y
Thanks. That's a useful distinction.
0AshwinV10y
This isnt hitting directly at the crux of this conflict, but I wanted to make this recommendation to you since you mentioned this strategy of 49 companies outta 50 failing... you oughtta check out this book called the black swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. It deals with small events having large impacts and how difficult it is to foresee some of these events. Also, he reasons that these events seem very predictable with hindsight. I think it will add significant value to this discussion thread
5James_Miller10y
I'm not able to distinguish chance from skill for investors like George Soros.
-1Lumifer10y
What exactly do you mean by "by chance"? I am quite sure that the subset of people who invest by consulting a high-quality random generator is pretty small.
0hyporational10y
That we should probably ask from the quoted or the provider of the quote. If you can think of an interesting way to steelman it, please let me know.
1passive_fist10y
The question is: luck in what, specifically? Luck in every single trade? Luck in that first trade that made him big money? Luck in being exposed to trade at such a young age? Luck in being born at the right place, right time? Luck in having a specific set of genes that, say, gives him a high intelligence? If you say "all of the above", then being Warren Buffet is pure luck, and since there is only one Warren Buffet in 7 billion people, the maximum likelihood estimate for the probability of having enough luck to be Warren Buffet is about 1/7,000,000,000. This answer probably doesn't help at all, I'm just trying to point out some of the difficulties in guesstimation :)
3hyporational10y
I'd venture a guess luck/chance in this context means winning against the odds, making decisions that should have negative or zero/little expected utility given the available information and becoming rich in spite of that. Is luck really this difficult a concept?
0scav10y
Yes?
-2bobn10y
This is virtually a verbatim quote something my father told me 30+ years ago.

When I was a young untenured professor of philosophy, I once received a visit from a colleague from the Comparative Literature Department, an eminent and fashionable literary theorist, who wanted some help from me. I was flattered to be asked, and did my best to oblige, but the drift of his questions about various philosophical topics was strangely perplexing to me. For quite a while we were getting nowhere, until finally he managed to make clear to me what he had come for. He wanted "an epistemology," he said. An epistemology. Every self-respecting literary theorist had to sport an epistemology that season, it seems, and without one he felt naked, so he had come to me for an epistemology to wear--it was the very next fashion, he was sure, and he wanted the dernier cri in epistemologies. It didn't matter to him that it be sound, or defensible, or (as one might as well say) true; it just had to be new and different and stylish. Accessorize, my good fellow, or be overlooked at the party.

  • Daniel Dennett

Example of professing a belief - here, belief is a fashion statement, or something fun to whip out at parties, not a thing that actually constrains anticipation.

I wonder what the story would sound like if told from the perspective of the literary theorist. Perhaps a story about how philosophers like to go on and on about truth and rationality, but when pressed by a relatively intelligent interlocutor, can't even supply you with something as basic as a theory of knowledge?

3Desrtopa10y
I'm not sure why a literary theorist would expect a theory of knowledge to be particularly basic, if they did they'd probably feel equipped to come up with one themself.
5Jayson_Virissimo10y
Basic to the field of philosophy (it is supposed to be in their domain after all, like criticism is supposed to be the domain of literary theorists), not basic as in trivial for non-experts.

If one were to fault a philosopher for not being able to generate something basic in that sense, I'd think one would also have to fault physicists for not yet having generated a Theory of Everything. A generalized theory of knowledge would be fundamental within philosophy, but that doesn't equate to being easy to generate, or impossible to work without (if it were, after all, nobody else ought to be able to get any work done without it either.)

2TheAncientGeek10y
"So what's it all about then, Bertie?"
1alex_zag_al10y
I think an epistemology is something a literary theorist in particular has special need of. One thing you can do with an epistemology is recognize meaningless or unknowable claims. I mean, I don't know much about literary theory. But I expect my belief that literary theorists need to know epistemology is common here. I mean, one of the (older) posts uses a literature professor as an example of someone trapped by a meaningless claim (No Logical Positivist, I). As for "an" epistemology, yes, there are a plurality of them. Of which one (or more?) is Bayesian epistemology. Imagine if Dennet taught the literary theorist that, don't you think he'd do better literary theory? Don't you think he'd avoid traps that other theorists fall into, of arguing the meaningless or unknowable?
3Ben Pace10y
You seem to miss Dennett's point: the guy wasn't there because he cared about having a good epistemology, an accurate theory of the world - it's merely what everyone else is doing at the minute, and so he's doing it too.
5alex_zag_al10y
He was there because at the time, you needed an epistemology to be taken seriously as a literary theorist. Good. Literary theorists probably need epistemologies. What I'm saying is maybe this fashion, as Dennett calls it, is functional. Maybe it's popular for a very good reason. The way falsifiability is popular in science, for example.. Can't it be a good thing that the theorist is responding to a pressure in his field? ... not really... if he's not actually motivated by the additional rightness you can get with a theory of knowledge, then, why would he choose a good theory of knowledge instead of a cool one? I think I see what you're saying now.
3Ben Pace10y
Yes, that's what this line is about: Also, saying that literary theorists need good epistemologies because it's crucial to their job is... Something you should offer a fair bit of evidence for. I don't see the relationship at all - other than the general use of believing true over false things.
4alex_zag_al10y
... I completely missed that line when I read the quote. This is embarrassing. And I don't have a fair bit of evidence for it, all I have is * literary theorists are pretty smart and apparently they thought it was necessary * an epistemology is good for recognizing meaningless or unknowable claims, and from the little I've seen of literary theory a lot of the claims looked like that on the surface that was enough to make me think it was possible that Daniel Dannett was just being a jerk. Because I missed the part of the quote about how the literary theorist didn't care about getting the right epistemology. I thought he was just making fun of the literary theorist for responding to pressure within his field, because it looked to him like following a fashion. Again. Not something I still believe. It's because I missed that part of the quote.
1ChristianKl10y
I don't know whether an epistemology can be true or false. A literature professor might ask: What happens when you see Hamlet in terms of Dennett"s epistemology as opposed to the epistemology of Aristotele? If you want to ask that question it doesn't matter whether the epistemologies are true. It makes sense that the professor focuses on understanding the epistemology of Daniel Dennett instead of trying to understand which epistemology is true. An literature professor doesn't try to understand the epistemology of God, the one true epistemology. He tries to understand the epistemology of authors. Daniel Dennett happens to be an important author and his epistemology seems worthy of analysis.

I don't know whether an epistemology can be true or false.

That's because "true" or "false" are aspects of maps, and epistemologies aren't maps - they're mapmaking tools.

You don't judge tools based on their truth or falsehood; you judge them based on their usefulness towards a certain purpose.

In humans' case, I think that an epistemology's job is to act as a bridge between our naive map-making and the world - that is, an epistemology's usefulness is measured by how well humans can use it to generate maps of their territory, and how well the maps it generates conform to their territory when read by humans. (Where "territory" can mean something as bare and ephemeral as raw qualia, barring any deeper assertion of the epistemology in question).

1ChristianKl10y
Yes. To the extend that's your paradigm Dennett's truth centered paradigm is misguided.
0Richard_Kennaway10y
And if you want to ask the question of whether a yeti could defeat a Mongolian death worm it doesn't matter whether they exist. What is the purpose of seeing Hamlet in terms of this or that epistemology?
0simplicio10y
The same purpose as reading Hamlet in the first place; aesthetic enjoyment & intellectual exercise.
-2Ben Pace10y
Sounds like you've got a funny epistemology... Try reading The Useful Idea of Truth.
8khafra10y
A recipe for making a cake cannot exactly be true or false; you need additional criteria like a claim, "when followed exactly, this recipe will produce something most people consider to be a delicious cake." Without a precise claim, there's room for reasonable disagreement whether the recipe should be optimized for usability by the average individual or for perfect results from a master baker; what exactly constitutes a "delicious cake," etc. (The Useful Idea of Truth tackles the second question only).
0TheOtherDave10y
Of course, for this particular claim to make any cake recipe in the real world true, we must understand "followed exactly" to include making a whole bunch of correct assumptions about how to do many things that are implied but not specified by the recipe (just to pick one example, when told to preheat my oven to 350 degrees, I'm expected to infer Farenheit, or at least whoever calibrated my oven's temperature dial is expected to have done so). Of course, many people have no difficulty in practice making cakes by following recipes, precisely because in fact we do routinely make those assumptions. And I'm not sure how that process is any different from what I'm doing when, if asked whether a recipe is true or false, I assume an interpretive frame similar to the additional criteria you say we need. That is, faced with that question, I infer additional criteria like "following this recipe conventionally will produce a conventionally acceptable cake" whether the criteria are there or not, just like when faced with the instruction to set my oven to 350 I assume Farenheit rather than Celsius. Inferring the additional criterion is itself conventional. So I would say that "A recipe for making a cake cannot exactly be true or false" is true denotationally but implies falsehoods; in practice, there seem to be conventional ways of casting a cake recipe to a Boolean type. So I guess the question is, are there similarly conventional ways of casting an epistemology to a Boolean? You seem to be suggesting otherwise, though you don't precisely say so.
0lmm10y
In my experience even the best cake recipes are not entirely reliable; the best you can coerce them to is an odds ratio. And since individual chefs have their own preferred recipes, it's exceedingly hard to tell the difference between a bad recipe favoured by a good chef, and vice versa. I would suspect the same of epistemologies.
0TheOtherDave10y
I agree with all of this except "exceedingly hard." It's not that hard to tell the difference between a recipe an average person can reliably make a tasty cake with (aka a "good recipe") and one they can't (aka a "bad recipe") -- just ask a bunch of average people to follow the recipe and see what happens.
0Said Achmiz10y
No comment on epistemologies, but (as someone who regularly bakes cakes) I must object to your views on cake. It would be quite a stretch, I think, to say that cakes may usefully be classified as "good" and "bad", or "tasty" and "not tasty". Individual preferences are one reason, of course. Regional/cultural/etc. preferences are another. What threshold of "acceptability" (for any meaning of the word) you accept for your cake is yet another. How many people are "most people" is yet another. In many of these things, there are both gradations (which do not, themselves, threaten the good/bad distinction, only force it into a continuous variable instead of a binary one) and sharper categories of ways in which a cake may or may not be acceptable (which do). For instance, a cake may be "bad" by being inedible by nearly anyone (you mistook salt for sugar); it may be bad by being a bland, sugary superstimulus, good-tasting but lacking in interesting flavor (you ruined or omitted the more delicate flavor-granting ingredients); it may be bad by being unacceptably and avoidably unhealthy (many forms of buttercream tend toward this); it may be bad by failing to satisfy the criteria of its design (you set out to make a red velvet cake, but the result was merely a chocolate cake with buttercream frosting and red food coloring). And that's not even getting into the quality of a recipe! One may make a cake by following either of two (or more) recipes that differ from each other far more than their versions of the finished product will! Recipes may differ by difficulty of execution; by difficulty of acquiring ingredients; by sensitivity to variation in conditions of preparation; and by other factors. And what is an "average person", anyway? Do we judge a recipe by how reliably it makes a "good" (see above) cake when followed by someone with little or no knowledge of baking? Or by an experienced, though non-professional, home baker? Does "average" refer to general intelligence and
0TheOtherDave10y
Yes, I agree with all of this.
0lmm10y
Fair - I meant more at the margin, it's hard to tell the difference between a quite good chef with a very good recipe and vice versa. Likewise there are many obviously bad epistemologies, but the ones that are still in serious contention, that successful philosophers use, will all be at least pretty good.
0TheOtherDave10y
Mm. How do we recognize a successful philosopher?
0[anonymous]10y
Good question! How would you go about answering that?
0TheOtherDave10y
In this context, I'd probably say a successful philosopher is one who discerns truths that weren't previously known. (This is not unique to philosophers.)

It's hard enough to overcome one's own misconceptions without having to think about how to get the resulting ideas past other people's. I worry that if I wrote to persuade, I'd start to shy away unconsciously from ideas I knew would be hard to sell. When I notice something surprising, it's usually very faint at first. There's nothing more than a slight stirring of discomfort. I don't want anything to get in the way of noticing it consciously.

Visit with your predecessors from previous Administrations. They know the ropes and can help you see around some corners. Try to make original mistakes, rather than needlessly repeating theirs.

Donald Rumsfeld

I don't like a lot of things he did, but that's the second very good advice I've heard from Rumsfeld. Maybe I need to start respecting his competence more.

The "known knowns" quote got made fun of a lot, but I think it's really good out of context:

"There are known knowns; there are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns; that is to say, there are things that we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns – there are things we do not know we don't know."

Also, every time I think of that I try to picture the elusive category of "unknown knowns" but I can't ever think of an example.

I guess "unknown knowns" are the counterpoint to "unknown unknowns" -- things it never occurred to you to consider, but didn't. Eg. "We completely failed to consider the possibility that the economy would mutate into a continent-sized piano-devouring shrimp, and it turned out we were right to ignore that."

We completely failed to consider the possibility that the economy would mutate into a continent-sized piano-devouring shrimp, and it turned out we were right to ignore that.

That's a survivor bias.

Things that we know that we don't know we know? I run into these all the time... last night, for example, I realized that I knew the English word for the little plastic cylinders at the end of a shoelace. (I discovered this when someone asked me what an 'aglet' was.) I'd had no idea.

3hyporational10y
An aglet... beautiful. I probably have a larger vocabulary in English than in Finnish by now. Lots of unknown knowns there I bet.
2TheOtherDave10y
I cannot for the life of me remember why I know that word.
1Roxolan10y
It's also a speed-boosting item in the video game Terraria. (I did not know the meaning of the word until now.)
0sixes_and_sevens10y
It was a minor plot point in a Terry Pratchett novel. Could that be it?
0TheOtherDave10y
I don't think I've ever read any Pratchett novels, but I might well have read a summary or discussion of the relevant one.
0sixes_and_sevens10y
It was a pretty minor plot point, so that probably isn't it.
2Ishaan10y
I'm going to guess you have at one point watched this "Phineas and Ferb" episode, and then forgot it. There's a song and the chorus is "A-G-L-E-T don't forget it". If that's how it happened, it's pretty amusing, because one of the running gags was that Candace kept going on about how there was absolutely no need for anyone to know the word aglet, and she became frustrated when it started catching on everywhere.
3TheOtherDave10y
My brain has, in the intervening weeks, offered up a memory of learning the word "aglet" from a Reader's Digest vocabulary quiz in my childhood. That said, your explanation is much better than mind, despite being false, so I'm tempted to accept it as the official story of why I know the word "aglet". On this site, I really ought to be downvoted for that sentiment, I suppose.
1BlueSun10y
Yes but as soon as you thought of it it becomes a known known :)
6TheOtherDave10y
True, much as unknown unknowns become known unknowns. That said, I can infer from how often I come across them (converting them in the process) that there's a large store of them remaining unconverted.
4Zando10y
I figure "unknown knowns" covers a huge category of its own: willful ignorance. All those things that are pretty obvious (e.g. the absence of the Dragon in the garage) but that many people, including Rumsfeld apparently, choose to ignore or "unknow".
0Randy_M10y
Information that was relevant and available but not considered at the time of decision making I'd consider unknown knowns.
0[anonymous]10y
A patient comes to visit you with weird symptoms, and you suddenly remember this rare disease you once read in a book and had forgotten about that perfectly fits them. The patient really just has an unusual form that you've never learned, of a common disease. You correctly medicate the rare disease, and the patient dies. Now you realize you have no idea why the patient died, so you request an autopsy.
8FiftyTwo10y
Its much easier to generate good advice than to follow it.
4NancyLebovitz10y
I'm also fond of Rumsfeld quotes He's oversimplifying-- was it necessary to go to war then?-- but it's still worth thinking about whether a criticism is based on what's actually possible.
1roland10y
What's the first one?
0[anonymous]10y
Probably the "unknown unknowns" bit. (Although, on reflection, that's not quite advice.) And also already mentioned.

In every way that people, firms, or governments act and plan, they are making implicit forecasts about the future.

-The Economist

0[anonymous]10y
It might be my hindsight bias acting again, but wasn't this kinda obvious? I thought the discipline of economics was based on this assumption.

"A problem well put, is half solved." - John Dewey

You know what they say - "Asking once will bring you temporary shame, whereas not doing so will bring you permanent shame".

They also say "Answering a question will make you feel superior for a while, whereas not doing so will give you a lifelong sense of superiority".

Scott Aaronson after looking into the JFK assassination conspiracy evidence:

Before I started reading, if someone forced me to guess, maybe I would’ve assigned a ~10% probability to some sort of conspiracy. Now, though, I’d place the JFK conspiracy hypothesis firmly in Moon-landings-were-faked, Twin-Towers-collapsed-from-the-inside territory. Or to put it differently, “Oswald as lone, crazed assassin” has been added to my large class of “sanity-complete” propositions: propositions defined by the property that if I doubt any one of them, then there’s scarcely any part of the historical record that I shouldn’t doubt.

Huh, I didn't know Bertrand Russell, Carl Sagan & John Kerry were JFK truthers (for want of a more precise term). That's kind of interesting. (I don't mean to imply that's particularly good evidence for a JFK assassination conspiracy. Scientists, philosophers & politicians are about as good as the rest of us at getting things outside their speciality wrong. I really do just mean that it's mildly interesting.)

That post nicely demonstrates some useful heuristics. Point 11 = "Hug the Query". Point 12 = "Proving Too Much". Point 14 = "Burdensome Details". Point 18 = "cock-up before conspiracy". Point 20 uses a rule of thumb I recognize but haven't seen named anywhere yet: beware of rejecting a reasonably complete, orthodox theory in favour of a contrarian theory merely because contrarians claim to have piled up an assortment of anomalous "details that don’t add up in the official account".

Working with a top secret clearance has made me much more aware of how different hardball power reality is than it is presented. Just as one might consider a predilection towards conspiracies a bias, I think I came in to that job with a bias AGAINST conspiracies. I liked believing the world is a fair place where all sorts of tricky evil secret stuff "just wouldn't be done."

I now think (> 50% probability) that the bulk of society is coddled in a belief that things are fair and the world works in a warmish fuzzish way, but that the interactions especially between states and non-state power organizations (terrorists in common usage) is essentially without rules. If you can concieve of a way to get an advantage, it will be R&D'd and if it is workable it will be used.

I figure with just above 50% probability JFK was lone-assasinated purely on the basis that in 50 years with so much attention something would have broken, probably, if there was more to break. It would not matter to me much if it turned out to be a conspiracy of some sort, even if it was covered up, it would be par for the course in my current world view, either way.

Meaning I would be careful imputing too much superiority to myself over Russel, Sagan and/or Kerry purely on the basis of thinking JFK was lone-assasinated.

0satt10y
Yes, of course. Russell & Sagan's intellectual achievements tower over mine, whether or not they called the JFK assassination wrongly. That's a real bias too, I reckon. I think of it sometimes when I see someone putting too much weight on a weak anti-conspiracy theory heuristic.
1JoshuaZ10y
Both Sagan and Russell were despite their general bastions of rationality, both heavily influenced by their left-wing political environments. I find it surprising still despite that, but not very surprising.
-1simplicio10y
Maybe nothing, but it's strange that Aaronson identifies "sanity" primarily or significantly with buying into the bulk of the historical record. Does sanity really require being approximately right about history?
2David_Gerard10y
It's not clear from your comment if you're just replying to the quoted bit, or if you read the entire original post and its comments (where Aaronson engages with commenters).
0linkhyrule510y
No - but it does require that you recognize that "There is a very thorough conspiracy that has convinced the entire known world of falsehoods about events as recent as 50 years ago" is significantly less likely than "The majority of the historical record is true."

Mike nodded. He wasn't really surprised, though. One of the things he'd come to learn since the Ring of Fire, all the way down to the marrow of his bones, was that if the ancestors of twentieth-century human beings didn't do something that seemed logical, it was probably because it wasn't actually logical at all, once you understood everything involved. So it turned out that such notorious military numbskulls as Ulysses S. Grant, Robert E. Lee, Phil Sheridan, Stonewall Jackson, William Tecumseh Sherman and all the rest of them hadn't actually been idiots after all. It was easy for twentieth-century professors to proclaim loftily that Civil War generals had insisted on continuing with line formations despite the advent of the Minié ball-armed rifled musket because the dimwits simply hadn't noticed that the guns were accurate for several hundred yards. When—cluck; cluck—they should obviously have adopted the skirmishing tactics of twentieth-century infantry.

But it turned out, when put to a ruthless seventeenth-century Swedish general's test in his very rigorous notion of field exercises, that those professors of a later era had apparently never tried to stand their ground when caval

... (read more)

Saying "everyone is equally to blame" is great if you want to sound reasonable and paint yourself as a moderate voice in a debate, but it doesn't really work if you actually want to be correct.

From a commenter called "ThisIsMyRealName" over at Slate

6Vaniver10y
See also Pretending to Be Wise.
4DanielLC10y
I don't think that's quite right. Assigning blame isn't about being correct. It's about figuring out how to prevent the problem from being repeated. Once you know who is at fault and how, you know what to warn them not to do in order to keep it from being repeated.
2JQuinton10y
Even still, saying everyone is equally to blame doesn't actually figure out how to prevent the problem from being repeated.
0Eugine_Nier10y
It's also about counter-factually preventing the problem, UDT-style.
0Acidmind10y
As blame is a social construct that can be used to modify behavior and status, blame assignment can be a constructive way of preventing unwanted consequenses. At least in part.
0Sanji10y
Then again negative reinforcement doesn't work quite as well as positive reinforcement, and is sometimes counterproductive? The Power of Reinforcement It implies that in there all over the place but never outright states it. EDIT: Assuming that blame is being used as operent conditioning, which is the impression I got.

All appearances to the contrary, the managers involved in this debacle aren't dumb. But they come from a background -- law and politics -- where arguments often take the place of reality, and plausibility can be as good as, or better than, truth.

What engineers know that lawyers and politicians often don't is that in the world of things, as opposed to people, there's no escaping the sharp teeth of reality. But in law, and especially politics, inconvenient facts are merely inconvenient, something to be rationalized away.

Glenn Reynolds

Said the engineer to the engineers.

9Eugine_Nier10y
Well, Glenn Reynolds is a law professor.
4simplicio10y
Fair enough, heh. But I wouldn't want to idealize the epistemic purity of engineering. Amusingly in this context, often engineering decisions are based more on precedent than science (has somebody else done things this way?), and it sometimes happens that there is a "bottom line" for which evidence is post hoc deduced (e.g., by relaxing the stringency of assumptions in a model in order to get the "right" answer). Granted, such rationalizations usually affect risks only at the margin, but still... I guess the bottom line is that engineering is not just science but also aesthetics, economics, and group coordination. To the extent that those things involve cognitive biases et cetera, engineering does too.
2Remontoire10y
I disagree. Unless we are talking about sofware engineering then it seems to me that what you select is based on previous projects but the choices themselves are based on tested scientific models with predictive power.
1simplicio10y
To clarify; the use of precedent in engineering is not objectionable (on the contrary, it is quite sensible); it merely runs counter to this popular idea that engineers are forever deciding everything via Science. You seem to be saying that any engineering precedent must ultimately be based on a scientific model somebody used in the past. Well, maybe... if you're willing to call "we tried it this way and it seemed to work" a scientific model, then okay.
1Xenocles10y
Every subsequent use of an engineering technique could be seen as a scientific experiment testing the validity of an abstract principle. It's just that by the time a principle gets to the engineering phase these experiments are no longer interesting - or they had better not be, anyway. (It would be very interesting if a bridge failed because the gravitational constant over that particular span of river were higher than in the rest of the known universe, for instance.) Science explores the phenomenon and develops the principle. Engineering exploits the principle and provides a degree of diverse and rigorous demonstration of it. Edited to add: This process does not always occur in this order.
0Eugine_Nier10y
Precedent is evidence that "doing things this way" works. This is generally a better basis then new, and hence speculative, science. Especially when the price of getting it wrong is frequently high.
2simplicio10y
As I was saying to Remontoire, I wholly agree. But (a) precendent is not "Science", unless you want to be very semantically generous, and (b) precedent is one primary method by which the law does its "rationalization", which the OP was attacking.
1A1987dM10y
(You put the closing quotation mark one word too early.)

The most important professions in the modern world may be the most reviled: advertiser, salesperson, lawyer, and financial trader. What these professions have in common is extending useful social interactions far beyond the tribe-sized groups we were evolved to inhabit (most often characterized by the Dunbar number). This commonly involves activities that fly in the face of our tribal moral instincts.

Nick Szabo

Interestingly, advertiser, lawyers, and financial traders all have in common that they are agents who play zero-sum or almost zero-sum games on behalf of someone. People who represent big interests in these games are compensated well, because of the logic of the game: so much is at stake that you want to have the best person representing you, so these people's services are bid up. But there is still the feeling that the game is wasteful, though perhaps unavoidably so.

Also, problematically for first sentence, I don't think many people would necessarily come up with the four professions named, especially "advertiser" and "salesperson", if asked to name the most important professions in the modern world, and some important professions, like "scientist", are widely valorized, while others, like "engineer", are at the least not reviled.

Interestingly, advertiser, lawyers, and financial traders all have in common that they are agents who play zero-sum or almost zero-sum games on behalf of someone.

Not nearly as much as you think, the game is in a sense locally zero sum, but it greatly benefits the wider system if the right person wins. Hint: consider what would happen if court cases or the resource allocation problems implicit in stock trading were decided by coin flips.

Also contrast with warriors, they really do engage in almost zero-sum games on behalf of someone else, and their game is much less optimized to increase the odds of the right side wining, and yet they're generally considered valiant heroes. The reason being that they were necessary even in the tribal period, so our instincts have evolved to take them into account.

-1A1987dM10y
By whom?
7Richard_Kennaway10y
By everyone throughout history who has enjoyed stories of valiant heroes. Were you really asking a question here?
3A1987dM10y
I think Eugine Nier was talking about real-world warriors, not stories. (I don't think all the people who enjoy watching HIMYM for the Barney Stinson character also have positive attitudes towards real-world PUAs, I know at least one person (namely myself) who enjoyed playing Carmageddon but is generally horrified by real-world serious violence for frivolous purposes, etc.) IME people who worship warriors as heroes tend to come from the right-wing/theist/low-Openness/nationalist cluster, and there are plenty of people from the other ‘side’ who condemn them as murderers (or pity them as slaves, as the case may be) instead. And the people who dislike advertisers, lawyers, and financial traders for playing zero-sum games are more likely to be from the latter cluster, so fewer people may be inconsistent than Eugine Nier realizes
4Richard_Kennaway10y
I had in mind real figures, and mythologised versions of them. Shakespeare's Henry V, for example. I'm not sure what this has to do with it, as people who commit real-world serious violence for frivolous purposes are not regarded as valiant heroes, even in war. Eugine said "they're generally considered valiant heroes". What process led to your fingers typing "worship"? This looks like pure politics devoid of rational content. Perhaps I am reading too much into this, but it sounds to me that "right-wing/theist/low-Openness/nationalist" is a way of implying "therefore they don't count, because they're wrong/stupid/ignorant/malicious/brain-damaged/subhuman/Republican", and "side" is in quotes because where you stand doesn't feel to you like a "side", it feels like reality itself. Are the entrails leading me astray? How big is this "plenty"? America still has a huge military, and I haven't heard of any mainstream agitation for shutting it down as a gang of murderers and slaves, which would be the consequence of actually believing that. In fact, I rather doubt that any country anywhere, ever, has had any substantial movement for disbanding its military on these grounds.
2A1987dM10y
And yet it's fun to watch people who commit fictional serious violence for frivolous purposes. So what's fun to watch isn't a terribly reliable way of telling what's considered good. I'll try to reword my post to avoid those connotations. Anyway, “right-wing/theist/low-Openness/nationalist” was supposed to imply "not the whole of humanity, and therefore I wouldn't assume Bundle_Gerbe is from that cluster without any evidence other that they are human", and by “‘side’” I meant something roughly like "each of the two regions of ideologyspace you get when you split it by the sign of the first principal component". I don't have statistics, but probably around 50% of my high-school classmates. (More recent social circles of mine aren't unbiased samples.) Never been to the US and don't know much about it, so I won't say anything except... doesn't it still have (say) 95-year-long copyright too? Are you treating non-mainstream groups the way you accused me of treating right-wing/theist/low-Openness/nationalist groups? As for the “slaves” part, well, conscription was recently abolished in my country (two years before I was supposed to be drafted, lucky me!). And whereas there aren't that many people who propose to disband the military altogether (which is a much stronger position than not thinking soldiers are heroes), pacifism doesn't seem exceedingly rare to me.
3adbge10y
It's possible there is a bit of a cultural disconnect here. I live in the United States and soldiers are treated with a great deal of respect, often receiving discounts on meals and other services. Here's a Reddit thread where former military talk about "soldier worship." We also have a couple national holidays honoring service people. On these days, it's common for there to be parades and for ex-military members to speak at schools. I'm uncertain how common this knowledge is outside of the US, so apologies if this is obvious, but I think it would be fair to characterize soldiers in the United States as "generally considered valiant heroes," especially among e.g. World War II veterans who fought at the Normandy landings.
2Nornagest10y
I'm not sure I'd say "heroes"; soldiering's definitely a respected profession, but as far as I can tell that respect doesn't approach worship. Familiarity probably has a lot to do with this: with about half a percent of the population on duty and many more retired, almost everyone in the States knows a soldier or a sailor or a Marine fairly well. Pretty hard to worship someone that, let's say, shared your first cigarette with you when you were both thirteen. There's also a bit of a rural/urban divide, though. Servicepeople receive noticeably more respect in my hometown (of a few thousand people) than my current city (100,000 people, part of a contiguous urban area containing millions).
-6Eugine_Nier10y
9passive_fist10y
Why the focus on advertisers and salespeople? I mean, if you're just talking about extending 'useful' social interactions, policemen do that too. So do company managers and military officers. There are lots of lines of work where people interact with a large number of people on a daily basis. Drug dealers would be another example. Yet such professions need not act in a way that is psychopathic (except maybe drug dealers, but they, too, often build friendships and trust with their clients).

Note: When treating mental patients who think they’re Samson, cut their hair before putting them in the locked ward.

--Fred Clark

Lovecraft sipped his tea, obviously framing his answer carefully. "One doesn't have to believe in Santa Claus to recognize that people will exchange presents at Christmas time. One doesn't have to believe in Yog Sothoth, the Eater of Souls, to realize how people will act who do hold that belief. It is not my intent, in any of my writings, to provide information that will lead even one unbalanced reader to try experiments that will result in the loss of human life."

— Wilson and Shea, Illuminatus!

7hyporational10y
That's a great way to make them lose their trust in medical professionals indefinitely. It's probably not a good idea to reinforce their delusions, either.
4Alejandro110y
Fair point, and I don't mean to endorse the quote as psychiatric advice (nor do I believe the quote was intended as such). I took is as an amusing expression of a general principle, that people with deluded beliefs may be quite rational in following the consequences of those beliefs, which should be taken into account when dealing with them.
5hyporational10y
I didn't think you endorsed it, but if an analogy is problematic, then the principle it's trying to express might be too.
0DanielLC10y
Is the point to keep them from injuring themselves while trying to break the walls down?
3Alejandro110y
The quote in its original context:
2Eliezer Yudkowsky10y
Doesn't this only allow 'patients' who correctly think they have superpowers to escape? How is this a net improvement in holding only patients who are actually insane?

How is this a net improvement in holding only patients who are actually insane?

A patient who believes they are Samson inaccurately believes they have a weakness: their hair being cut. By cutting their hair, you trigger their imaginary weakness, which decreases the amount that they resist, and thus you do not have to pin them down with orderlies.

0Desrtopa10y
On the other hand, a patient who believes they are Samson may resist having their hair cut quite forcefully, at least if you do it while they're conscious. A non-superpowered individual struggling to prevent someone from wielding scissors about their head may be quite a bit more of a liability than a non-superpowered individual struggling against facilities built to contain crazy people.
3Vaniver10y
And... problem solved! Whew, that was easy. (Also, why scissors, and not an electric razor? Way safer for everyone involved.)
3Desrtopa10y
If I were going to cut the hair of a patient who believed they were Samson, I would definitely want to do it when they were sedated, but then, a patient who believed they were Samson who had their hair cut in their sleep might be highly aggrieved and become aggressive in response. (Keep in mind that the biblical Samson physically destroyed the building in which he was being contained, at the cost of his own life, when he entreated God to return his strength for a final act of vengeance after he was betrayed and had his hair cut.)
5Vaniver10y
Actually, his hair had regrown at that point- his captors thought that he was powerless because they had blinded him after Delilah delivered him to them, and apparently Delilah never told them the real secret to his strength.
4Desrtopa10y
His hair had regrown, but he still had to pray to God to restore his lost strength, because cutting it at all broke his vows as a Nazirite.
0[anonymous]10y
That would be nothing that medication doesn't temporarily fix, no need to render the patient unconscious. I wouldn't endorse this hair cutting approach, really.
[-][anonymous]10y110

Think of PCP-driven berserkers flipping cars with their mere, ordinary human strength, fully unleashed without regard to injury or death, and you've got some notion of the problem posed by a delusional man who thinks he's Samson.

Presumably in the same spirit, when treating mental patients who think they're Superman, expose them to glowing yellow rocks. That said, does this sort of thing actually work in real life?

3hyporational10y
Reinforcing their beliefs might work for making them even more insane.
2TheOtherDave10y
Honestly, it would surprise me if either of those strategies worked (or failed) as one might naively expect, since I mostly expect pathological delusions to involve some seriously atypical connections between observations and conclusions. But I bet there's people on LW with experience in the field, or at least who have read up on case studies.

Do you have evidence that car flipping really happens?

1ialdabaoth10y
There is at least evidence that people who think they are Samson can tear out the bars of their windows to escape a mental ward.
2hyporational10y
That evidence seems to be hearsay, so really weak. Must have been weak bars too.
3Jayson_Virissimo10y
I used to have a wrestling coach that used the very un-PC term "retard strength" to refer to the ability of an opponent to apply lots of force from angles you wouldn't think they could a priori (as a compliment, not a slur).

This was what made the fall of Iothiah so disastrous. <...> Strategically, the loss of Iothiah was little more than a nuisance.

Symbolically, however…

The crisis she faced was a crisis in confidence, nothing more, nothing less. The less her subjects believed in the Empire, the less some would sacrifice, the more others would resist. It was almost arithmetic. The balance was wobbling, and all the world watched to see which way the sand would spill. She had made a resolution to act as if she believed to spite all those who doubted her as much as anything else, and paradoxically, they had all started believing with her. It was a lesson Kellhus had drummed into her countless times and one she resolved never to forget again.

To know is to have power over the world; to believe is to have power over men.

Scott R. Bakker, The White-Luck Warrior

http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/11/26/welcome-to-the-era-of-big-replication/

When he studied which psychological studies were replicatable, and had to choose whether to disbelieve some he'd previously based a lot of work on, Brian Nosek said:

I choose the red pill. That's what doing science is.

(via ciphergoth on twitter)

6mwengler10y
Which one is the red pill again?

MORPHEUS: You take the blue pill and the story ends. You wake in your bed and you believe whatever you want to believe.

MORPHEUS: You take the red pill and you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.

From The Matrix Original Script (the wording is slightly different in the movie).

As a side note, never take pills from strange people in empty werehouses who found you on the internet.

That depends, how were their reviews on Silk Road? :P

6simplicio10y
Especially not in werehouses, no.

I'm wary of being in werehouses at all. They could turn back to people at any time!

One of the last of the many legendary contests won by the British philosopher A. J. Ayer was his encounter with Mike Tyson in 1987. As related by Ben Rogers in ”A. J. Ayer: A Life,” Ayer — small, frail, slight as a sparrow and then 77 years old — was entertaining a group of models at a New York party when a girl ran in screaming that her friend was being assaulted in a bedroom. The parties involved turned out to be Tyson and Naomi Campbell.

”Do you know who … I am?” Tyson asked in disbelief when Ayer urged him to desist: ”I’m the heavyweight champion of the world.”

”And I am the former Wykeham professor of logic,” Ayer answered politely. ”We are both pre-eminent in our field. I suggest that we talk about this like rational men.”

So they did, while Campbell slipped away.

[Via] (http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/12/24/reviews/001224.24spurlit.html)

Impressive, but it does have a pretty dramatic possible failure state where Tyson's response is "I suggest we settle this by punching each other." (In deed if not in word.)

I think the cleverness is in the violation of Tyson's expectations about how the encounter will go. Ayer went off script and that seems to have nonplussed Tyson.

And so philosophyboxing was born.

8Viliam_Bur10y
Relevant for LW: Could superhumanly strong AI box its way out of the box?
3blacktrance10y
How good would a boxing AI be at Newcomb's Problem?
1Armok_GoB10y
Impossibly good, since the placement of money is dependent on if the boxes are removed, not the money in them. So, smash both boxes, take the money in them, only remove the one box thus making sure there was money in both.

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better. -Samuel Beckett

2mwengler10y
They do not move.

We see things not as they are but as we are, ...

- G. T. W. Patrick

4Rob Bensinger10y
We see things not as they are, but as they make us be.

Why, because I cannot help feeling that you are now saying what is not quite consistent or accordant with what you were saying at first about rhetoric. And I am afraid to point this out to you, lest you should think that I have some animosity against you, and that I speak, not for the sake of discovering the truth, but from jealousy of you.

Now if you are one of my sort, I should like to cross-examine you, but if not I will let you alone. And what is my sort? you will ask. I am one of those who are very willing to be refuted if I say anything which is not true, and very willing to refute any one else who says what is not true, and quite as ready to be refuted as to refute-I for I hold that this is the greater gain of the two, just as the gain is greater of being cured of a very great evil than of curing another.

--Socrates in Gorgias (Paragraph break mine, to make it slightly less of a wall of text. This has shown up before, in a somewhat different form.)

A classic illustration of how to use (and how to not use) conditional probabilities:

"'Her foot,' says the journal, 'was small- so are thousands of feet. Her garter is no proof whatever- nor is her shoe- for shoes and garters are sold in packages. The same may be said of the flowers in her hat. One thing upon which M. Beauvais strongly insists is, that the clasp on the garter found had been set back to take it in. This amounts to nothing; for most women find it proper to take a pair of garters home and, fit them to the size of the limbs they are to encircle, rather than to try them in the store where they purchase.'

Here it is difficult to suppose the reasoner in earnest. Had M. Beauvais, in his search for the body of Marie, discovered a corpse corresponding in general size and appearance to the missing girl, he would have been warranted (without reference to the question of habiliment at all) in forming an opinion that his search had been successful. If, in addition to the point of general size and contour, he had found upon the arm a peculiar hairy appearance which he had observed upon the living Marie, his opinion might have been justly strengthened; and the increase of pos

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4bentarm10y
Hard to tell out of context, but is this claiming that each successive flower is independent evidence? In general, it feels like the reasoner is missing some dependency relationships between bits of evidence here.
0Alejandro110y
The story does not make clear whether Beauvais had seen the arrangement of flowers on the living Marie's hat, or just knew that she used to wear these approximate kind of flowers. If the former, finding all the flowers together is certainly much stronger evidence that the corpse is Marie than finding just one (even though they are not strictly independent). If the latter, then Dupin's reasoning indeed seems fallacious on this particular point, though not on the more general one of whether the identification of the corpse is beyond reasonable doubt.

3.1.3.1 (Exercise) Have prices actually risen? Economists generally agree that the meaning of “prices have risen” is that you would prefer past prices to current prices. What makes this challenging is that the set of available products change over time. Cars have gone up significantly in price, but are also more reliable. Would you be better off with your current income in 1913 than today? You would be very rich with current average income in 1913, but not have access to modern medicine, television, electronics, refrigeration, highways, and many other technologies. If you made $40,000 annually in 1913, how would you live and what would you buy? (Do some research.)

-- R. Preston McAfee, Introduction to Economic Analysis

3mwengler10y
A 100 page comic book cost me $0.25 US in 1970 or so, it is a few US$ now. A 12 oz soft drink cold in a deli was about $0.10, it is more usually $1.00 now. A gallon of gasoline $0.29, now about $4.50. Not a single one of these is of notably better quality now than it was then, I'd say they are directly comparable and are quite different enough in nominal price so that there can be no doubt. Sorry not to go all the way back to 1913, but I was 13 years old in 1970 so it was easier to use what I could remember.
7Eugine_Nier10y
Nitpick: well the gasoline no longer has lead in it.
4mwengler10y
counter-nitpick because of government regulations about mixing with ethanol the current gallon has fewer watt-hours in it.
2Desrtopa10y
A few dollars? 100 page comic books in the U.S. these days usually sell for upwards of $20. But comics are really another case where the product itself isn't directly comparable between time periods.The market has shrunk tremendously, so they try to make up the difference in volume by selling high quality "glossies" rather than the old low quality "pulps," for a larger profit margin per sale. In terms of physical quality of materials, it absolutely is better than what you'd buy in the 1970's, although arguably the quality of the materials doesn't have much to do with how entertaining the contents are. The writing is also completely different, since comics today target a very different age demographic than they did a few decades ago.
2Jiro10y
Any comic book fan could tell you why comic books went up in price. It has to do with 1) the collapse of the newsstand market and the decrease in readership, and 2) having to give creators better pay/royalties. (It sometimes gets blamed on the paper stock, which isn't really true). (And you probably didn't mean to say 100 pages. There were 100 page comics then and there still are now, but they cost 50 cents. Typical size of a comic book is 32 pages.) It's also pretty obvious that gasoline has gone up in price for reasons that are not just general increase in prices.
3mwengler10y
The typical size comic books were $0.12 when I started buying them. I have no idea what they cost now. And yet despite its uniqueness, it doesn't really deviate from the trend that everything else follows. Go figure. I could have thrown in college tuition, about $2870 in 1974 when I started at Swarthmore College, currently $44,368. You still get a professor standing in front of the room for the same number of hours per semester.
7Jiro10y
You can't legitimately cherry pick a few examples where prices went up faster than inflation and then, when called on it, cherry pick yet another example where prices went up faster than inflation. The examples are still cherry-picked; like comics and gasoline, college education is something else whose price went up unusually fast, and again for well-known reasons having nothing to do with the rise in prices in general.
0mwengler10y
If you are going to tell me what i can and can't do, then please let me return the favor. You can't effectively counter a list of prices of items whose quality is the same in the 70s and the 10s but whos price is quite different without giving at least a few examples whos price goes in the other direction. It simply doesn't make sense to challenge my methodology as cherry picking, which it was not, without doing the minimum amount of work it would require to check to see if you have any case at all by discovering even one item whos quality has not changed much between the 70s and the 10s but whos price has decreased. T-shirts? cardboard boxes? soft-serve ice cream from a truck? A bus ride across a city? You have probably literally a million things you could choose from to check their prices and you don't bother finding even one? It makes more sense in a discussion like this, if you realize I am right to just accept that and to not make arguments against me that have the form of sensible concerns but lack the content. I'm not cherry picking examples. I'm remembering my trips to the store and library on bicycle when I was 12 years old and other trips I took around that age, and what the prices were. A slice of pizza was $0.25. There is simply NOTHING in my recollection that was more expensive then than it is now, not even cherries.
1A1987dM10y
...he said, on the Internet.
1Jiro10y
You can do anything you want, it just wouldn't be a legitimate argument. You're either cherry-picking examples, or by coincidence you're picking cherry-pickable examples. I can't read your mind, and if you indeed chose the examples for that reason, it's just a coincidence that you chose examples that are very inapt. But they're still inapt. Comic books specifically, as well your other examples of gasoline and college educations, have gone up in price a lot for well-understood reasons that are unrelated to the fact that things in general go up in price. That slice of pizza is only "more expensive" because of inflation. Same for your T-shirts and bus rides. And if all you're saying is that prices have gone up according to inflation, then of course they have. But by the standards of the post you were replying to, and almost anyone else, that means that pizza hasn't gone up in price at all--that was about price compared to income and income has gone up because of inflation too, so prices have not increased relative to income. .>You have probably literally a million things you could choose from to check their prices and you don't bother finding even one? That million things only went up in price because of inflation, which doesn't count. Comic books (and gas and college) are different because they have gone up faster than inflation, and thus really are "more expensive", but they're more expensive for specific reasons.
0A1987dM10y
You misread it. Eugine is right.
-3Eugine_Nier10y
I believe the original quote was talking about prices unadjusted for inflation.
3Jiro10y
I don't think it makes sense either with or without inflation. My first reaction that it was adjusted for inflation, since 40000 is probably below the family income of most people here. On the other hand, most people's income is less than 40000 in 1913 dollars. On the gripping hand, the question doesn't really make much sense if you don't adjust for inflation. "Cars have gone up significantly in price, but are also more reliable." If you don't adjust for inflation, then while the question produces the author's desired result when applied to 1913, it fails in other situations--for instance, with the price of a car today I could buy seven cars in 1963. Cars are not so much more reliable than 1963 cars to make up for such a difference, and in order to conclude the author's point that cars are a better bargain now than in the past you have to take inflation into account. At any rate, comic books, gasoline, and college educations are known cases where something went up in price faster than inflation.
2Nornagest10y
I don't read the original quote as an argument against the standard idea of inflation, but rather as a suggestion to additionally factor in changes in quality when discussing changes in price. It's clear from looking at commodity prices that inflation has occurred; gas might be a bad example, but things like timber, steel, rice probably aren't. But most consumer goods are not commodities in this sense, and 1913 or 1970 prices for them are not as directly comparable to those of modern goods. In some cases the comparison seems to clearly favor either past or contemporary goods -- I might prefer 1970 kitchen appliances or comic books, but I'd definitely prefer contemporary radios or TVs. In others it's more of a wash -- adjusted for inflation, a 2013 Ford Focus costs about twice as much as a 1970 Ford Maverick, but it's got about twice the engine power and more interior room, and it's far safer and more reliable. (At a guess, incidentally, I'd say that $40000 was chosen because it's close to the median household income in the US.)
4snafoo10y
College tuition inflation is often talked about but rarely dealt with sensibly. To understand the nature and extent of college tuition inflation, it's important to understand 1. Looking at the sticker price isn't comparing apples to apples. Aid has gone up drastically. It's never been cheaper for a kid from a poor family to get an education. Although a lot of the increases at state schools relate to decreasing funding, a huge amount of them at private schools (and a lesser extent at state schools) is their financial aid programs. Tuition has become more progressive and we're comparing the top prices. 2. Running a college is about as labor-intensive as it ever has been, which is to say, very. Prices in all labor-intensive stuff have gone up faster than CPI. There has been a real increase, but it's not all real and it's not all for the reasons a lot of people assume.
-1Eugine_Nier10y
But if you're middle class the price has gone up and may be unaffordable. And the ratio of administrators to professors has also exploded.
0snafoo10y
My basic point was just the fact that the numbers we compare have nothing to do with each other. (The really don't.) The number of administrators, as traditionally defined, has changed little, though the number of professional staff has increased a lot. The biggest increase has been the growth of IT, though it goes beyond that. The part of this which is IT-related is somewhat mirrored by most other labor-intensive stuff.

"Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering others is strength, mastering yourself is true power."

-Lao Tzu (c.604 - 531 B.C.)

Expressed in pictures rather than words, but a great example of how to respond to humanity-threatening calamities:

http://www.kiwisbybeat.com/minus37.html?Bonjour

Sidenote: Almost every Minus comic is wonderful, and there aren't that many of them (you can read the whole series in an hour).

6Eliezer Yudkowsky10y
I printed this up and hung it on my wall for a while. Before anyone gets worried about what that indicates, the girl in the comic is a reality warper and could get away with it. Never found a good enough image of Akemi Homura changing her eyes, though.
2aarongertler10y
I recently bought a print of the same comic from the author. They are still being sold: http://www.kiwisbybeat.com/store.html#minus
0[anonymous]10y
This one seems reasonably nice. Would you rather the soul gem shimmered?
0linkhyrule510y
Why that image, if I may? (Have a hypothesis and would like to test it.)

Is your hypothesis, "Eliezer wants to save the world from doom, and this picture is inspirational."? If so, I think you nailed it.

4Adam Zerner10y
It's probably because I'm not familiar with Minus, but I don't understand what the girl did that is admirable. If she's normal, Mestroyer's comment addresses why it isn't admirable. If she has superpowers, destroying the meteor is completely effortless for her, making her action simply a decision of saving humanity over letting it die, which mostly anyone would make.
4cody-bryce10y
Cool comic, though a repeat http://lesswrong.com/lw/2o3/rationality_quotes_september_2010/2juu
4Mestroyer10y
The girl with the bat is trying to try. It's symbolic defiance, not a proper response to a humanity-threatening calamity. Granted defiance is a better attitude than the attitudes of the people shivering in fear, praying, smiling and holding up "Welcome to Earth!" signs, looting and pillaging, sitting around mellow-ly and talking and doing nothing, and standing in lines and holding hands. But that girl is still going to die and so will the rest of humanity. Maybe you can argue that she doesn't know it won't work, but there are kinds of virtue a rationalist should not aspire to, and that includes the kind that you can only have by being ignorant of things.

The girl with the bat, in the context of the comic, is actually basically omnipotent.

Not only is she entirely capable of destroying the asteroid and eliminating whatever threat it represents using a baseball bat, given the content of the other comics, I think there's actually a reasonable chance that she consciously or subconsciously created the asteroid in the first place to give herself something to do.

3Mestroyer10y
Actually now that you mention it, I remember hearing that in a previous discussion of the comic. And what you say makes her despicable, instead of courageous but irrational. Am I strategically forgetting things to make better stories? (shudder).

Minus is about as despicable as any ordinary child of seven or so would be if they were also omnipotent.

Which is to say she's kind of horrifying, but not with any sort of deliberation involved.

9Eliezer Yudkowsky10y
Not to mention the applicable Riddle of Kyon.
3Fyrius10y
I'm thankful this TV tropes page helpfully provided a synopsis of your fanfic for context. I wouldn't have understood you without it. (Is the conditional probability that a given person had read all your fanfics, given that she visits LessWrong, high enough to overcome the low prior probability that a given person has read all your fanfics?)
2MugaSofer10y
She's a reality warper - thus, taking action that appears pointless to the uninformed observer (such as yourself), but is in fact an extremely effective method of saving the world. Not sure if that's the intention in linking to it, but...
0lmm10y
When you've exhausted the options, obtained enough evidence to realize you'll get more utilons by enjoying your last few moments than by genuinely trying to stop it, what then? I think the best, most rational thing to do is to be as awesome as possible in your final moments, and she's doing that.
4linkhyrule510y
Slightly ruined by the fact that, well, given minus, I'm really more worried about the meteor...
2DanielLC10y
Are you saying that you should respond by being omnipotent?

No one makes the wrong decisions for reasons they think are wrong. The more clever the man, as the Nroni were fond of saying, the more apt he was to make a fool of himself. We all argue ourselves into our mistakes.

Scott R. Bakker, The White-Luck Warrior

9Xenocles10y
This is a good take, but I think I like the Feynman better (which I have to assume has appeared months and months ago): "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool." From a different angle, there's also the Heinlein: "Your enemy is never a villain in his own eyes. Keep this in mind; it may offer a way to make him your friend. If not, you can kill him without hate — and quickly."
2WingedViper10y
I guess we could just add most of the "Prince of Nothing" and the "The Aspect-Emperor" Series by Scott R. Bakker to the LessWrong quotes ;-) By the way, is there a reading list that we can add them to?
1Nornagest10y
The most recent reading list, as such, that I know of is XiXiDu's, and it's quite old (though still fairly comprehensive) and no longer being updated. Its fiction section is also fairly light. Your best bet might be adding a review in one of the monthly media threads, the most recent of which is here.

A cucumber is bitter--throw it away. There are briars in the path--turn aside from them. This is enough. Do not add, "And why were such things put into the world?"

--Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 8.50

If you get one bitter cucumber, asking for its cause may be a waste of time. But if you get a lot of bitter cucumbers, spending some time on changing that might give net positive utility.

4DanielLC10y
Why not? It can be useful to know whether they were placed there by a benevolent god or a blind idiot god.

One shouldn't compare apples to oranges. But it's fair to say both are food.

--Scott Adams

9shminux10y
Your link is to the site, not to the blog post http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/the_mythical_49/
2napieed10y
Thanks. Fixed.
2bentarm10y
I'm not sure I get this - If you're not allowed to compare apples to oranges, how do you decide which to eat? Is that the point this quote is trying to make?
3hyporational10y
It's a common English expression that has nothing to do with food.

If you find yourself taken unawares by someone you thought you knew, recall that the character revealed is as much your own as otherwise. When it comes to Men and their myriad, mercenary natures, revelation always comes in twos.

– Managoras, Ode to the Long-Lived Fool

Scott R. Bakker, The White-Luck Warrior

8BT_Uytya10y
Another good fictional epigraph from the same book:

Everybody's a complex person. Everybody. Everybody's nuanced. -Jack Abramoff

3hyporational10y
A wave hitting a rock is complex, so is a vegetable on life support. What's the context?

Not sure, actually, dude was a corrupt lobbyist, so presumably he was emphasizing that he had his reasons for the stuff he got up to.

I like it as a reminder that everyone is their own story's protagonist. Its easy for me to view someone as the jerk who cut in front of the traffic, but presumably their own narrative includes a compelling reason for their seemingly antisocial behavior.

2satt10y
— Adam Cadre
[-][anonymous]10y70

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways: the point, however, is to change it.”

-- Karl Marx

"We evolve beyond the person we were a minute before! Little by little, we advance a bit further with each revolution. That's how a drill works!!"

-- Shimon the Digger

7Eugine_Nier10y
Or rather we change little by little. Remember that while every improvement is a change, not every change is an improvement.
-10[anonymous]10y
0Larks10y
Approximately 100 million deaths later, philosophers vowed to go back to just interpreting.
-6[anonymous]10y

But the campaign against the backwardness of the masses in this matter of religion, must be conducted with patience and considerateness, as well as with energy and perseverance. The credulous crowd is extremely sensitive to anything which hurts its feelings. To thrust atheism upon the masses, and in conjunction therewith to interfere forcibly with religious practices and to make mock of the objects of popular reverence, would not assist but would hinder the campaign against religion. If the church were to be persecuted, it would win sympathy among the mas

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“It’s easy to put your head down and just work on what you think needs to be done. It’s a lot harder to pull your head up and ask why.” - Rework

“What does a fish know about the water in which he swims?” - Albert Einstein

Sort of a well known quote, but it's not here, and it's amazing, so I figured I'd submit it.

"The bigger the problem, the bigger the opportunity." - Vinod Khosla

8Viliam_Bur10y
Seems like a just-world fallacy. The cost:benefit ratio of problems is not fixed.
3Adam Zerner10y
I guess what matters in a problem is size * solvability. Solvability may be variable, but bigger problems do necessarily mean more room for improvement. Even though it doesn't account for solvability, I still think it's a good quote. Most people become very accustomed to the way things are, even if they're bad, and never think to change them. This quote reverses that mindset, by getting you to think in terms of opportunity. Once you get over that hump, then you could think about solvability. The real point is that the hump is very important to get over, and this quote is pretty effective in getting you over it.

Nevertheless, the problem of meandering is certain to re-emerge once we learn how to make machines that examine themselves to formulate their own new problems. Questioning one's own "top-level" goals always reveals the paradox-oscillation of ultimate purpose. How could one decide that a goal is worthwhile -- unless one already knew what it is that is worthwhile? How could one decide when a question is properly answered -- unless one knows how to answer that question itself? Parents dread such problems and enjoin kids to not take them seriously.

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“I have thought for a long time now that if, some day, the increasing efficiency for the technique of destruction finally causes our species to disappear from the earth, it will not be cruelty that will be responsible for our extinction and still less, of course, the indignation that cruelty awakens and the reprisals and vengeance that it brings upon itself…but the docility, the lack of responsibility of the modern man, his base subservient acceptance of every common decree. The horrors that we have seen, the still greater horrors we shall presently see, a... (read more)

1mwengler10y
I think this quote is sentimentally motivated inaccuracy. It relies upon the romantic notion that if the docile masses were to arise that they would be morally superior to those that do already choose to lead men. I think this thought of Bernanos does not arise from any sort of evidence at all, and that if there is any evidence about what happens when previously docile men rise to power it is that they behave very much like men in power have always behaved in the past, that there is no particularly great wisdom they bring with them on rising. I am thinking in particular of the rise of the communists in Russia and China and more recently the governments that have arisen in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Egypt.
0Lumifer10y
Interesting. I read no such implication in this quote. I see it as a lament that "rebels, insubordinate, untamable men" are basically bred out of the population that becomes more and more sheeple. And the "docile masses" will not revolt opening the way for highly repressive societies.
0mwengler10y
From the original quote: These common decrees are coming from men, not the docile masses but the small minority of leaderly men. Where is the existential threat in the common decrees of leaderly men as opposed to the hypothetical actions the masses of docile men would take if they were not docile? I understand neither why one expects an existential threat from the decrees of leaderly men nor why one expects that threat to be countered by the hypothetical actions of docile men made counterfactually non-docile. Or rather I don't understand these as things for which there is evidence. An apparently relatively docile Chinese population seems to have done OK under a repressive communist government, certainly not seeming to come close to anything that was an existential threat. So how is a repressive society an existential threat?
0Lumifer10y
Hm. Let me try to offer a hypothesis. I am not sure I believe it myself, but I'll throw it out for evaluation. I think that the existential threat of repressive societies has to do with expected variation. Societies where general population provides strong inputs into the political process tend to be less adventurous and more mundane. It's decision-making by committee and committees rarely make unexpected, radical decisions. Regression to the mean is the rule and keeps things contained. Autocratic societies, on the other hand, don't have these built-in brakes. Small ruling elites are subject to less constraints and can take off into strange directions some of which are dangerous. In particular, small elites see much less problems with killing large numbers of people (compared to more-or-less democratic societies) in pursuit of goals they find worthy. Now, this is not saying that autocratic societies are "bad" and democratic ones are "good". What this hypothesis asserts is that the the range of behavior of autocratic societies will be wider than that of democratic societies. P.S. And that, of course, is speaking just of existential threat and not about which society it's better to live in.
0DeevGrape10y
Hmm, that's a good point. I can see how this might seem like a romantic/Marxist/anti-elite sentiment. When I read it, I was thinking almost exclusively in terms of existential risk, the connection being that the end of the world (by, for instance, Unfriendly AI) won't be brought about by a cruel mad scientist, but more likely by normal people trying to make economic and scientific advances without concern for the potential consequences. Sorry if the quote doesn't communicate that very clearly.
0Nornagest10y
That might say more about how populist movements tend to work than about the character of the docile masses, to use your phrase, when raised to power. It's rather uncommon for first-generation revolutionary leaders to come from the lower social classes: Stalin is an exception, but he's the only one I can think of among famous communists, and in any case he arguably belonged to the second generation of his revolution. Lenin, Trotsky, and Mao all emerged from upper middle-class backgrounds, roughly speaking, although their exact circumstances differed. Fidel Castro came from an upper-class family.

"I have a complete listing of this universe's source code," says Ching. "I'm theoretically omnipotent. It's just a matter of time."

-- Fine Structure

-3Eugine_Nier10y
Shouldn't that be "omniscient"?
6RolfAndreassen10y
Nope. Firstly, code is not data. Secondly, in the physics of the fic, access to the source code enables you to install informational machinery in your brain, which can modify the universe in essentially arbitrary ways, because the universe is asserted to consist of a long series of statements like "there is a proton at location (x, y, z)" and so on.
0Luke_A_Somers10y
A complete listing of the code is different from ability to change it, let alone feed the modified code back into the active interpreter (I'm going to guess that it's not a compiled language in this case). I suppose Ching also had this ability?
2RolfAndreassen10y
He did, yes, as I outlined in the parent of your post. Perhaps the quote needed a bit more context, but it's hard to find a pithy explanation of the background information. That aside, I suggest that a full listing of the source code of the universe you're running in is the maximum potence you're likely to get, no matter which specific hacks it allows.
2Luke_A_Somers10y
How the frell did I miss that? Seriously. WTF. Out of fic, though, I doubt that knowing the laws of the universe immediately leads to 'maximum potence'. There are hard engineering problems.

(potential spoilers removed, so if this dialogue doesn't make sense, be assured that it makes sense in context)

"Just wait," Zsoronga said. "Something auspicious will happen. Some twist will keep you here, where you can discharge your fate! Wait and see."

"And what if they know?" Sorweel finally asked, voicing the one alternative they had passed over in silence.

"They don't know."

"But wh-"

"They don't know."

Zsoronga, Sorweel was beginning to realize, possessed the enviable ability to yoke

... (read more)

So all these dire warnings about Internet-of-Things — well, they are a good sign for the industry in some ways. It’s emotional, it’s plaintive — it’s like you’re about to kiss somebody for the first time, and they suddenly look at you all big-eyed and tremulous and ask if you’re going to hurt them.

The only honest answer is OF COURSE you’re going to hurt them, at least some, and on occasion, but not on purpose and, what the hell, if it’s any good they’ll get over it! But nobody’s gonna scrape it down to that level of raw honesty, except for marriage counse

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If we work around this assumption of being cis as the default… like, for example, if we stop thinking about the fact that as an abstract, general question a random human being is much more likely to be cis than trans, and instead consider the question in terms of whether, given everything we observe in ourselves, and everything we feel, and how strong our feelings are about this question of gender, which (cis or trans) is more likely for us… if we consider “is it really all that likely that I’m just a cis person who has somehow managed to convince myself

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Given that this quote essentially advises ignoring priors, I don't see what's so Bayesian about it.

Would you mind explicitly stating the prior that it's advising to ignore?

if we stop thinking about the fact that as an abstract, general question a random human being is much more likely to be cis than trans

That said, it could also be taken as advising you not to double-count your priors by using them to discount the evidence. Imagine you've drawn a ball from an urn, and the ball looks blue to you — but your priors say that 99% of the balls in that urn are red. How much time do you want to spend questioning the validity of your color vision or the lighting before you consider that you drew a rare ball?

-3simplicio10y
Is cis or trans identity really something that is truth-apt (& therefore in the purview of probability)? It seems to be a combination of self-description of feelings, plus chosen group affiliation. The self-description of feelings is presumably more or less infallible, and the group affiliation is stipulated by the individual.

Well, it's possible to be wrong about your own feelings. The question that matters is "later, after transitioning, would I feel better or worse than I do now", which isn't necessarily infallibly correlated to your current feelings.

-9Eugine_Nier10y
5hyporational10y
Thanks for the ManU fan example, it helped. If we reformulate the gender identity question as "will my future self be happy if I make permanent decisions based on my current perceived identity?", we get something that makes more sense to assess probabilistically. I guess the ManU fan case could be reformulated in a similar way, but I can't imagine how the real life scenario would look like.
0hyporational10y
Could you explain what you mean by this via an easier to grasp concept than gender identity, preferably in a way that preserves relevance to identity?
5simplicio10y
Sure. Does it make sense for an individual to think about the probability that they (themselves) are a Manchester United fan? I say it doesn't, really. If you (a) like ManU in some sense, and (b) are willing to call yourself a ManU fan, you are a ManU fan.

I say it doesn't, really. If you (a) like ManU in some sense, and (b) are willing to call yourself a ManU fan, you are a ManU fan.

And yet there are plenty of sports fans that question the legitimacy of other fans, based on accidental characteristics.

I.e., "You can't be an Auburn fan, you're a goddamn Yankee!"

Which, in essence, is the same problem I think: there's all sorts of semantic and pragmatic meaning attached to concepts like gender (and fandom!) that exist outside of the mind of the individually engendered or fanatic person, which cause other people to feel that their own meaning is being betrayed by that person. In a weird way, I think this is part of a failure to keep one's identity small - when people include potentially falsifiable beliefs-about-the-world/beliefs-about-others in their own identity, they risk having that identity thrown into crisis whenever those beliefs are challenged.

6Nornagest10y
Well, in some sense, obviously, you can identify as whatever you please. But it's a rare identity that carries no implications about the world or at least how you react to it. To run with the example, I expect there are a number of imperfectly correlated reasons you might call yourself a Manchester United fan: you might for example feel more excited -- a physical, measurable response -- when watching ManU games than games ManU isn't involved in, or you might be involved with the club's fan community. Generally, however, these are going to be statements about the state of the world, not purely arbitrary stances. To the extent that it makes sense to talk about the legitimacy of an identity, it might be said to refer to how closely that identity maps to these evidences. That's not to say that a good litmus test exists in every particular case, though.
0ialdabaoth10y
That's one interpretation. Another interpretation is that "trans identity" is a symptom of a diseased mind and culture, whereas a normal and healthy understanding of gender would understand that it's simply the correct cultural roles assigned to each sex - either as part of a Schelling point necessitated by our need for roles and divisions of duty, or as part of inherent biological differences. Each interpretation is entangled with a particular world-view and a particular political position, so it becomes very difficult to extract true facts from bald assertions.
3VAuroch10y
Trans people are more likely than normal to reject the usual role for their birth gender, but being trans is very separate from gender role. Or at least, all the trans people I know, and at least most they know, consider it to be so.
0hylleddin10y
Until recently, there were a lot of trans people who had this interpretation of gender and the associated world-view, but just thought their minds had their identified gender's biological characteristics so they fit better there. See "Harry Benjamin Syndrome". Though I'll warn you that it mostly fell out of favor before the modern internet, so there isn't much information on it online.
8VAuroch10y
The prior probability for a person being cis is obviously much higher than the prior for trans; looking at it one way, this quote is advising ignoring that prior. Of course, looked at another way, it's specifically noting that there should be a large complexity penalty for the hypothesis "I’m just a cis person who has somehow managed to convince myself that I’m trans to the point that I’m having this kind of crisis" relative to the hypothesis "I'm trans". And also implicitly using the reversal test.
-6Eugine_Nier10y
-7Eugine_Nier10y
8VAuroch10y
The other way of reading the quote is that it's emphasizing the huge complexity penalty which should be assessed on "I’m just a cis person who has somehow managed to convince myself that I’m trans to the point that I’m having this kind of crisis" and nodding in the direction of the reversal test. And emphasizing that part of the argument makes it look pretty good.
4A1987dM10y
I took it to be about using posteriors rather than priors (i.e., P(X is trans | X is wondering whether they're trans) != P(X is trans)), but I know I steelman writers on the Internet too much.
3hyporational10y
There's such a thing as too much steelmanning?
4Lumifer10y
Yes. There is far too much idiocy in the world to spend time and effort on trying to make it look presentable.
2A1987dM10y
OTOH the result of doing that is sometimes just plain awesome.
1Roxolan10y
This link is dead (possibly because the blog has been hidden then re-opened in the interval). Could you please update it?
2A1987dM10y
Done.
0Lumifer10y
That's not steelmanning, that's having fun and having fun is awesome :-)
0hyporational10y
I think an argument has to have some value going for it in the first place to make it presentable by steelmanning and the idea is to preserve the gist of what someone was trying to communicate. Batshit crazy just won't compute no matter how much you patch it with duct tape, and making a whole new argument from scratch (like reading the Bible or Mein Kampf metaphorically) doesn't count as steelmanning, I think. Definitions, definitions...
6Lumifer10y
It's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem. Steelmanning is an attempt to see if there is some rational core that can be salvaged from a bad argument by making all conditions and assumptions for it as favorable as possible -- in a way you can't decide whether an argument is worth steelmanning until you have steelmanned it. But I guess it's possible just to have two thresholds: one (low) for even trying to steelman, and one (higher) for checking whether the steelmanned version makes any sense.
2Luke_A_Somers10y
... by manipulating conditions and assumptions? No. Just like strawmanning, it's actually going in and changing the content of the argument.
0hyporational10y
By manipulating conditions and assumptions that are not explicitly stated?
2A1987dM10y
Yes? (OK, well, maybe I'm not going that far.)
2arborealhominid10y
Good point; I hadn't really thought about it that way! I had interpreted it as reminding you to update your probability estimates based on observed evidence.

"Nothing can kill me because I am already dead."

-- Zombie Neitzsche

[This comment is no longer endorsed by its author]Reply

If we could achieve eternal life through the clever use of linguistic ambiguity, then post-structuralist continental philosophers would have defeated death long ago. What would the world be like, I wonder, if all forms of cleverness were useful? A candidate for weirdtopia, probably.

An average teenager today, if he or she could time-travel back to 1950, would have had an IQ of 118. If the teenager went back to 1910, he or she would have had an IQ of 130, besting 98 percent of his or her contemporaries. Yes, you read that right: if we take the Flynn Effect at face value, a typical person today is smarter than 98 percent of the people in the good old days of 1910. To state it in an even more jarring way, a typical person of 1910, if time-transported forward to the present, would have a mean IQ of 70, which is at the border of mental re

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That's only if we take the Flynn effect at face value. No one does, because the implications are nonsense.

Go back in time and the average intelligence will be lower, but that's only because of a longer tail on the lower end of the distribution (the usual suspects: nutrition, lead poisoning, child abuse, iodine deficiency ...). On the smarter end, it's relatively unchanged because of diminishing returns.

The Flynn effect has many proposed, non mutually-exlusive causes, but an actual secular increase in real brain horsepower is not among the big ones.

0CronoDAS10y
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything_Bad_Is_Good_for_You
4private_messaging10y
Unfortunately, the progression seem to have ended or even reversed .
1bramflakes10y
Reviews cite lack of hard evidence for the claims made, and as private_messaging said, the effect is slowing in developed countries (though the impact of immigration is difficult to assess).

Not a very good one, though. Most of the ancients that people pay attention to these days are the ones who were well-fed and well-read; it's strongly suspected much of the Flynn effect is population-wide increases in those two variables (as well as similar things like reduced disease load).

4Randaly10y
You mean well-fed in the sense of "not starving," but that doesn't imply "well-fed" in the sense of eating a healthy diet. There's reason to think that upper-class Romans would have been even more damaged by lead poisoning than the poor, and there's good evidence that even emperors were deficient in iodine.

I have a historian standing next to me right now who says the lead poisoning story is BS and people who propagate it should be shot/severely eye-rolled at. He says that:

-Romans did drink lead-sweetened wine but
-only lower class romans did so because they could not afford better
-lead-sweetened wine continued to be drunk up until the 18th century
-While some people undoubtedly died, saying it caused the fall of the Roman Empire is a ridiculous just-so story
-particularly because the sweetener was used centuries before and after the fall with no increasing usage leading up to the fall
-and the eastern Roman empire continued to exist for another thousand years anyway.

1Eliezer Yudkowsky10y
But they weren't consuming huge amounts of unstable polyunsaturated fats from vegetable oils, either.
0A1987dM10y
They were, and who said they're bad anyway?
0Eliezer Yudkowsky10y
Olive oil is only 10% PUFA and I doubt they were getting 10% of calories from olive oil. Benefits of PUFA are at much lower doses, or in the case of Omega-3 making up for huge O3/O6 imbalances.
4private_messaging10y
Yeah. The raise is not a simple shift of the entire curve. Though, this resonates with another topic: there's a lot of people today living in conditions vastly inferior to Americans or Europeans of 1910, mostly in Africa, scoring about the same on the IQ tests as western folks from the 1910 supposedly did. I see a plenty of people both accept the Flynn effect (whenever thinking about their superiority to people of the past) and think that said IQ gap is caused by inherently lower abilities (whenever thinking about their superiority to people of other races).
0James_Miller10y
If true then why has it been acting on white Americans post 1960?
3Vaniver10y
If I remember correctly, researchers suspect that there was significantly decreased lead exposure around that time. I personally prefer to think of it as the Flynn Result rather than the Flynn Effect, because the second seems too much like the Flynn Cause. There are a bunch of reasons why measured IQs could increase, and some of them are there sometimes and not other times, and the measured increase fluctuates accordingly.
6CronoDAS10y
And I know more math than Newton, too! (Maybe not Euler, but definitely Newton.)
1Armok_GoB10y
And there are far more modern people, of which a greater proportion is producing long-lasting informational stuff like quotes/metaphors/articles/books. I haven't run the number, but I expect there is more total "literally value" (whatever that means) produced, say, last year in fanfiction alone, that in all text written pre- industrial revolution. By orders of magnitude.
2A1987dM10y
Relevant (see also followup)
1KnaveOfAllTrades10y
Depends what you mean by 'know more math'. In a sense, anybody as fast as you who spent more time studying knows more than you, for how could it be any other way? But that could be because they have more depth in some areas whereas you might have a broader purview. (E.g. you might know more high-level theory about algebraic curves but lose to Newton on a details-oriented question on most cubic curves.)
6CronoDAS10y
It takes a lot less time to learn calculus from a textbook than it does to invent it; it would presumably be accurate to say that Einstein knew more physics than Newton. I don't know if there are any problems in my 3-semester introductory calculus textbook that Newton would have choked on, but he'd definitely have a problem the first time he saw a complex number, let alone something like "e^(a+bi)= a cos(b) + ai sin (b)" that dates to Euler.
0KnaveOfAllTrades10y
Ahhh yeah I forgot discovery was a thing. I guess even going through the process to invent something is its own kind of learning, but that seems tenuous with respect to the original intent of what you said. Edit: But I think there is a meaningful sense (even if not the only one) in which, say, Euclid or Archimedes probably know more classical geometry than you. And perhaps its meaning comes from their internalisation of a greater depth (even if you could use a theorem prover or theory to quickly derive all their knowledge), which would make those deeper facts accessible to their intuition when solving other problems or developing theory.
-1private_messaging10y
For much smaller values of "know", probably. With google at your disposal, all the math is at your fingertips, but that doesn't mean you know how to solve a problem which doesn't come with keywords to search for. Same applies to typical declarative knowledge.
1CronoDAS10y
More specifically I mean that Newton couldn't pass the finals of many of the undergraduate math courses I took, because the math needed to solve the problems wouldn't have been invented yet.
1private_messaging10y
What I mean is that facing a somewhat difficult problem in applied mathematics which arose naturally in some broader context, most undergraduates are not able to actually pinpoint the relevant methods that they know. (At the same time people like Newton were unusually able to do that). It's very apparent in e.g. programming contests, that the subset of what people can identify as applicable (without hints) is usually much smaller than the set of what they know.
0CronoDAS10y
Indeed. Being able to pass a math test and being able to use the math in a real-world context are two different things.
-1Pfft10y
The "average American teenager" definitely also could not pass those finals. I rather doubt that there are any math problems at all which an average american teenager could solve and Newton could not, even if they are handpicked to use "recent" math.
0CronoDAS10y
Possible counterexample: x^2 + 1 = 0 Newton didn't believe in the square root of minus one.

The danger of reading financial & other news (or econobullshit) is that things that don't make sense at all start making sense to you after progressive immersion.

Nassim Taleb

7Eliezer Yudkowsky10y
After years of reading econblogs, I now understand that the Federal Reserve is not creating enough money. I don't actually think that understanding is a bad thing.
3A1987dM10y
I can see why inflation can be good for a smallish economy, but the US dollar is widely used as a reserve currency by foreigners, and if they no longer trusted it to stay hard they'd probably switch to gold or Swiss francs or bitcoins or whatnot and... I dunno what would happen, but I kinda doubt it would be nice. (I hardly know anything about macroeconomics, so I'm very likely missing something.) Nice example of metacontrarianism, BTW: “why don't they just print more money” is something uneducated people often come up with, and most literate people realize there are problems with that, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's wrong.
4satt10y
I think the missing bits here are that (1) creating money needn't necessarily raise inflation, and (2) modest increases in US inflation are unlikely to trigger a mass flight from the US dollar.
0satt10y
Interpreting the quotation charitably, it doesn't say that everything you'd learn from news ("or econobullshit") would be nonsense. It just means some of it would be.
-1Eugine_Nier10y
Only if the Federal Reserve is in fact not creating enough money.
4A1987dM10y
“Progressive” as in ‘gradual’ or as in ‘left-wing’? If the former, how is that a danger? I mean, the same is true about general relativity or quantum field theory.

I will attempt to fix the quote:

The danger of reading financial & other news is that things that are wrong and crazy start seeming to make sense after you're immersed in them.

8mwengler10y
The danger of reading quotes like this is the message that some field is wrong and crazy is delivered as an aside when it is an hypothesis worthy of a great amount of questioning that is almost certainly largely incorrect.
6ChristianKl10y
He means gradual. If you look to long at random distribution and listen to people who are in the narration business to frame the random distribution you will start seeing patterns that don't exist.
3Luke_A_Somers10y
No, those things do in fact make sense. They simply aren't intuitive.

If you're good at something, never do it for free.

--The Joker

The Dark Knight (2008)

I'm good at blowing bubbles with bubble gum. I have yet to charge anyone for doing it.

I suppose you could say that as long as I gain pleasure from blowing bubbles I'm not doing it "for free" but that makes the statement very trivial. Under normal interpretations of "for free", the statement is wrong because there's no demand from anyone else that I blow bubbles.

I'd correct that statement to "if you're good at something, never do it under market value", which raises the possibility that I would still do for free things like blowing bubbles that have no market value.

I'm good at blowing bubbles with bubble gum. I have yet to charge anyone for doing it.

Gum bubble fetish camming?

3Xenocles10y
"I'm good at blowing bubbles with bubble gum. I have yet to charge anyone for doing it." I think it's implied that this only applies when there is a demand for the service. Were you to find that there's a large audience for your displays, I bet you'd at least pass the hat around before doing another one.
2snafoo10y
The quote is a good one, and not because it's true.
2NancyLebovitz10y
Is the Joker's advice supposed to be sensible enough that it's worth analyzing?
3Jiro10y
What he said was proposed as a rationalist quote, which presumes a level of sensibility.
3AndHisHorse10y
Well, the Joker is supposed to be portrayed a sort of an anti-romantic - he doesn't believe in the nobility of the people, he doesn't believe in the existence of some transcendent morality - he accepts the world as being without supernatural meaning, and instead imposes his own. So while he's absolutely bonkers, I wouldn't be surprised if the writers put a few pearls of uncommon wisdom in the dialogue, even if it was just to make him seem nuttier. Also, it might be worth analyzing just for the fun of it. That's why I visit this thread.

I don't see the Ledger Joker as irrational, merely insane. It's just his morality and ethics that are horrible. As far as reaching his goals, he is extremely (unrealistically) competent. You don't flawlessly account for every move your opponents make, in advance, for 98% of your visible career, by being totally irrational.

3Lethalmud10y
Unless you have plot armor.
2VAuroch10y
Since his primary goal is to make Batman kill him, it's hard to say he has plot armor.
2gwern10y
Perhaps we should call it 'irony armor'?
2Torello10y
I think most things have a certain type of market value, just measured using varying currencies. As a kid, did you ever blow a big bubble and your friends were jealous? You "earned" some status points. As an adult, you can leverage this "zero-demand" skill next time you're in line next to a kid at the airport. I think it would be possible to imagine a context where many such skills can earn you non-monetary rewards.
5A1987dM10y
Yes, but “for free” normally means ‘not for money’, or at least ‘not for tangible goods’. If you take it to mean ‘for no reason at all, not even the fun of it’ it becomes nearly meaningless.