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MondSemmel comments on 2013 Survey Results - Less Wrong
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Comments (558)
Thanks for taking the time to conduct and then analyze this survey!
What surprised me:
What disappointed me:
And a comment at the end:
Given that LW explicitly tries to exclude politics from discussion (and for reasons I find compelling), what makes you expect differently?
Incorporating LW debiasing techniques into daily life will necessarily be significantly harder than just reading the Sequences, and even those have only been read by a relatively small proportion of posters...
"Time online per week seems plausible from personal experience, but I didn't expect the average to be so high."
I personally spend an average of 50 hours a week online.
That's because, by profession, I am a web-developer.
The percentage of LessWrong members in IT is clearly higher than that of the average population.
I postulate that the higher number of other IT geeks (who, like me, are also likely spending high numbers of hours online per week) is pushing up the average to a level that seems, to you, to be surprisingly high.
With only 500 people responding to the IQ question, it is entirely possible that this is simply a selection effect. I.e. only people with high IQ test themselves or report their score while lower IQ people keep quiet.
There's nothing necessarily wrong with this. You are assuming that feminism is purely a matter of personal preference, incorrectly I feel. If you reduce feminism to simply asking "should women have the right to vote" then you should in fact find a correlation between that and "is there such a thing as global warming", because the correct answer in each case is yes.
Not saying I am necessarily in favour of modern day feminism, but it does bother me that people simply assume that social issues are independent of fact. This sounds like "everyone is entitled to their opinion" nonsense to me.
What I find more surprising is that there is no correlation between IQ and political beliefs whatsoever. I suspect that this is simply because the significance level is too strict to find anything.
With this, on the other hand, I agree completely.
I've heard GMOs described as the left equivalent for global warming-- maybe there should be a question about GMOs on next survey.
There is a question about it. It's the existential thread that's most feared among Lesswrongers. Bioengineered pandemics are a thread due to gene manipulated organisms.
If that's not what you want to know, how would you word your question?
I took "bioengineered" to imply 'deliberately' and "pandemic" to imply 'contagious', and in any event fear of > 90% of humans dying by 2100 is far from the only possible reason to oppose GMOs.
I didn't advocate that it's the only reason. That's why I asked for a more precise question.
If the tools that you need to genmanipulate organisms are widely available it's much easier to deliberately produce a pandemic.
It's possible to make a bacteria immune to antibiotica by just giving them antibiotica and making not manipulating the genes directly. On the other hand I think that people fear bioengineered pandemics because they expect stronger capabilities in regards to manipulating organisms in the future.
Is it, though? I did a quick fact check on this, and found this article which seems to say it is more split down the middle (for as much as US politicians are representative, anyway). It also highlights political divides for other topics.
It's a pity that some people here are so anti-politics (not entirely unjustified, but still). I think polling people here on issues which are traditionally right or left wing but which have clear-cut correct answers to them would make for quite a nice test of rationality.
Are you quite sure about that? Any examples outside of young earth / creationists?
Am I sure that some political questions have clear cut answers? Well, yes... of course. Just because someone points at a factual question and says "that's political!" doesn't magically cause that question to fall into a special subcategory of questions that can never be answered. That just seems really obvious to me.
It's much harder to give examples that everyone here will agree on of course, and which won't cause another of those stupid block-downvoting sprees, but I can give it a try:
-My school gym teacher once tried to tell me that there is literally no difference between boys and girls except for what's between their legs. I have heard similar claims from gender studies classes. That counts as obviously false, surely?
-A guy in college tried to convince me that literally any child could be raised to be Mozart. More generally, the whole "blank slate" notion where people claim that genes don't matter at all. Can we all agree that this is false? Regardless of whether you see yourself as left or right or up or down?
-Women should be allowed to apply for the same jobs as men. Surely even people who think that women are less intelligent than men on average should agree with this? Even though in the past it was a hot-button issue?
-People should be allowed to do in their bedroom whatever they want as long as it doesn't harm anyone. Is this contentious? It shouldn't be.
Do you agree that the above list gives some examples of political questions that every rational person should nonetheless agree with?
But you can always find harm if you allow for feelings of disgust, or take into account competition in sexual markets (i.e. if having sex with X is a substitute for having sex with Y then Y might be harmed if someone is allowed to have sex with X.)
Ok, that's a fair enough point. Sure, feelings do matter. However, I generally distinguish between genuine terminal preferences and mere surface emotions. The reason for this is that often it is easier/better to change your feelings than for other people to change their behaviour. For example, if I strongly dislike the name James Miller, you probably won't change your name to take my feelings into account.
(At the risk of saying something political: This is the same reason I don't like political correctness very much. I feel that it allows people to frame political discourse purely by being offended.)
I think it's more likely he was misusing the word “literally”/wearing belief as attire (in technical terms, bullshitting) than he actually really believed that. After all I guess he could tell boys and girl apart without looking between their legs, couldn't he?
It's wrong on a biological level. From my physiology lecture: Woman blink twice as much as men. The have less water in their bodies.
So you are claiming either: "Children are no people" or "Pedophilia should be legal". I don't think any of those claims has societal approval let alone is a clear-cut issue.
But even if you switch the statement to the standard: "Consenting adults should be allowed to do in their bedroom whatever they want as long as it doesn't harm anyone" The phrases consenting (can someone with >1.0 promille alcohol consent?) and harm (emotional harm exists and not going tested for STD's and having unprotected sex has the potential to harm) are open to debate.
The maximal effect of a strong cognitive intervention might very will bring the average person to Mozart levels. We know relatively little about doing strong intervention to improve human mental performance.
But genes to matter.
It depends on what roles. If a movie producer casts actors for a specific role, gender usually matters a big deal.
A bit more controversial but I think there are cases where it's useful for men to come together in an environment where they don't have to signal stuff to females.
I'd expect them to assert that paedophilia does harm. That's the obvious resolution.
Actually I'm under the impression that the ‘standard’ resolution is not about the “harm” part but about the “want” part: it's assumed that people below a certain age can't want sex, to the point that said age is called the age of consent and sex with people younger than that is called a term which suggests it's considered a subset of sex with people who don't want it.
(I'm neither endorsing nor mocking this, just describing it.)
I think your impression is mistaken.
Nope. It is assumed that people below a certain age cannot give informed consent. In other words, they are assumed to be not capable of good decisions and to be not responsible for the consequences. What they want is irrelevant. If you're below the appropriate age of consent, you cannot sign a valid contract, for example.
Below the age of consent you basically lack the legal capacity to agree to something.
Court are not supposed to investigate whether the child is emotionally harmed by the experience but whether he or she is under a certain age threshold. You could certainly imagine a legal system where psychologists are always asked whether a given child is harmed by having sex instead of a legal system that makes the decision through an age criteria.
I think a more reasonable argument for the age boundary isn't that every child gets harmed but that most get harmed and that having a law that forbids that behavior is preventing a lot of children from getting harmed.
I don't think you are a bad person to arguing that we should have a system that focuses on the amount of harm done instead of focusing on an arbitrary age boundary but that's not the system we have that's backed by societal consensus.
We also don't put anybody in prison for having sex with a 19-year old breaking her heart and watching as they commit suicide. We would judge a case like that as a tragedy but we wouldn't legally charge the responsible person with anything.
The concept of consent is pretty important for our present system. Even in cases where no harm is done we take a breach of consent seriously.
Well, I suppose Sophronius could argue that pedophilia should be legal, after all many things (especially related to sex) that were once socially unacceptable are now considered normal.
Even if he thinks that it should be legal, it's no position where it's likely that everyone will agree. Sophronius wanted to find examples where everyone can agree.
No, he was listing political, i.e., controversial, questions with clear cut answers. I don't know what Sophronius considers clear cut.
Including as basso singers? ;-)
(As you worded your sentence, I would agree with it, but I would also add "But employers should be allowed to not hire them.")
The standard reply to this is that many people hurt themselves by their choices, and that justifies intervention. (Even if we hastily add an "else" after "anyone," note that hurting yourself hurts anyone who cares about you, and thus the set of acts which harm no one is potentially empty.)
No, I don't. To explain why, let me point out that you list of four questions neatly divides into two halves.
Your first two questions are empirically testable questions about what reality is. As such they are answerable by the usual scienc-y means and a rational person will have to accept the answers.
Your last two questions are value-based questions about what should be. They are not answerable by science and the answers are culturally determined. It is perfectly possible to be very rational and at the same time believe that, say, homosexuality is a great evil.
Rationality does not determine values.
The question “should people be allowed to do in their bedroom whatever they want as long as it doesn't harm [directly] anyone [else]?” (extra words added to address Vaniver's point) can be split into two: “which states of the world would allowing people to do in their bedroom etc. result in?”, and “which states of the world are good?”
Now, it's been claimed that most disagreements about policies are about the former and all neurologically healthy people would agree about the latter if they thought about it clearly enough -- which would make Sophronius's claim below kind-of sort-of correct -- but I'm no longer sure of that.
First, I don't think this claim is true. Second, I'm not sure what "neurologically healthy" means. I know a lot of people I would call NOT neurotypical. And, of course, labeling people mentally sick for disagreeing with the society's prevailing mores was not rare in history.
This is what you are missing. The simple fact that someone disagrees does not mean they are mentally sick or have fundamentally different value systems. It could equally well mean that either they or the "prevailing social mores" are simply mistaken. People have been known to claim that 51 is a prime number, and not because they actually disagree about what makes a number prime, but just because they were confused at the time.
It's not reasonable to take people's claims that "by 'should' I mean that X maximises utility for everyone" or "by 'should' I mean that I want X" at face value, because people don't have access to or actually use logical definitions of the everyday words they use, they "know it when they see it" instead.
If "should" has a meaning, then those two questions can be correctly and incorrectly answered with respect to the particular sense of "should" employed by Sophronius in the text. It would be more accurate to say that you can be very rational and still disapprove of homosexuality (as disapproval is an attitude, as opposed to a propositional statement).
Maybe. But that's a personal "should", specific to a particular individual and not binding on anyone else.
Sophronius asserts that values (and so "should"s) can be right or wrong without specifying a referent, just unconditionally right or wrong the way physics laws work.
What does this mean, "not binding"? What is a personal "should"? Is that the same as a personal "blue"?
We seem to disagree on a fundamental level. I reject your notion of a strict fact-value distinction: I posit to you that all statements are either reducible to factual matters or else they are meaningless as a matter of logical necessity. Rationality indeed does not determine values, in the same way that rationality does not determine cheese, but questions about morality and cheese should both be answered in a rational and factual manner all the same.
If someone tells me that they grew up in a culture where they were taught that eating cheese is a sin, then I'm sorry to be so blunt about it (ok, not really) but their culture is stupid and wrong.
Interesting. That's a rather basic and low-level disagreement.
So, let's take a look at Alice and Bob. Alice says "I like the color green! We should paint all the buildings in town green!". Bob says "I like the color blue! We should paint all the buildings in town blue!". Are these statements meaningless? Or are they reducible to factual matters?
By the way, your position was quite popular historically. The Roman Catholic church was (and still is) a big proponent.
I cannot speak for Sophronius of course, but here is one possible answer. It may be that morality is "objective" in the sense that Eliezer tried to defend in the metaethics sequence. Roughly, when someone says X is good they mean that X is part of of a loosely defined set of things that make humans flourish, and by virtue of the psychological unity of mankind we can be reasonably confident that this is a more-or-less well-defined set and that if humans were perfectly informed and rational they would end up agreeing about which things are in it, as the CEV proposal assumes.
Then we can confidently say that both Alice and Bob in your example are objectively mistaken (it is completely implausible that CEV is achieved by painting all buildings the color that Alice or Bob happens to like subjectively the most, as opposed to leaving the decision to the free market, or perhaps careful science-based urban planning done by a FAI). We can also confidently say that some real-world expressions of values (e.g. "Heretics should be burned at the stake", which was popular a few hundred years ago) are false. Others are more debatable. In particular, the last two examples in Sophronius' list are cases where I am reasonably confident that his answers are the correct ones, but not as close to 100%-epsilon probability as I am on the examples I gave above.
These statements are not meaningless. They are reducible to factual matters. "I like the colour blue" is a factual statement about Bob's preferences which are themselves reducible to the physical locations of atoms in the universe (specifically Bob's brain). Presumably Bob is correct in his assertion, but if I know Bob well enough I might point out that he absolutely detests everything that is the colour blue even though he honestly believes he likes the colour blue. The statement would be false in that case.
Furthermore, the statement "We should paint all the buildings in town blue!" follows logically from his previous statement about his preferences regarding blueness. Certainly, the more people are found to prefer blueness over greenness, the more evidence this provides in favour of the claim "We should paint all the buildings in town blue!" which is itself reducible to "A large number of people including myself prefer for the buildings in this town to be blue, and I therefore favour painting them in this colour!"
Contrast the above with the statement "I like blue, therefore we should all have cheese", which is also a should claim but which can be rejected as illogical. This should make it clear that should statements are not all equally valid, and that they are subject to logical rigour just like any other claim.
In all of these cases, the people breaking with the conclusion you presumably believe to be obvious often do so because they believe the existing research to be hopelessly corrupt. This is of course a rather extraordinary statement, and I'm pretty sure they'd be wrong about it (that is, as sure as I can be with a casual knowledge of each field and a decent grasp of statistics), but bad science isn't exactly unheard of. Given the right set of priors, I can see a rational person holding each of these opinions at least for a time.
In the latter two, they might additionally have different standards for "should" than you're used to.
I would have gone for "slavery is bad"
While we're here, there may be questions about animal testing, alternative medicine, gun control, euthanasia, and marijuana legalization. (I'm not saying that the left is wrong about all of these.)
I object to GMOs, but I object to GMOs not because of fears that they may be unnoticed health hazards, but rather because they are often used to apply DRM and patents to food, and applying DRM and patents to food has the disadvantages of applying DRM and patents to computer software. Except it's much worse since 1) you can do without World of Warcraft, but you can't do without food, and 2) traditional methods of producing food involve copying and organisms used for food normally copy themselves.
ISTR I've read farmers have preferred to buy seeds from specialized companies rather than planting their own from the previous harvest since decades before the first commercial GMO was introduced.
Yes, but they wouldn't be sued out of existence IF they had to keep their own.
Good point.
It seems that should make you object to certain aspects of the Western legal system.
Given your reasoning I don't understand why you object to GMOs but don't object on the same grounds to, say, music and videos which gave us DMCA, etc.
I object to DRM and patents on entertainment as well. (You can't actually patent music and videos, but software is subject to software patents and I do object to those.)
If you're asking why I don't object to entertainment as a class, it's because of practical considerations--there is quite a bit of entertainment without DRM, small scale infringers are much harder to catch for entertainment, much entertainment is not patented, and while entertainment is copyrighted, it does not normally copy itself and copying is not a routine part of how one uses it in the same way that producing and saving seeds is of using seeds. Furthermore, pretty much all GMO organisms are produced by large companies who encourage DRM and patents. There are plenty of producers of entertainment who have no interest in such things, even if they do end up using DVDs with CSS.
What do you think of golden rice?
I don't object to it except insofar as it's used as a loss leader for companies' other GMO products which are subject to DRM and patents.
My issue with GMOs is basically the same one Taleb describes in this quote.
To me it has always sounded right. I'm MENSA-level (at least according to the test the local MENSA association gave me) and LessWrong is the first forum I ever encountered where I've considered myself below-average -- where I've found not just one or two but several people who can think faster and deeper than me.
Below average or simply not exceptional? I'm certainly not exceptional here but I don't think I'm particularly below average. I suppose it depends on how you weight the average.
Same for me.
"The overconfidence data hurts, but as someone pointed out in the comments, it's hard to ask a question which isn't misunderstood."
I interpreted this poor level of calibration more to the fact that it's easier to read about what you should be doing than to actually go and practice the skill and get better at it.
I'm one of the people who have never used spaced repetition, though I've heard of it. I don't doubt it works, but what do you actually need to remember nowadays? I'd probably use it if I was learning a new language (which I don't really plan to do anytime soon)... What other skills work nicely with spaced repetition?
I just don't feel the need to remember things when I have google / wikipedia on my phone.
Isn't there anything you already know but wouldn't like to forget? SRS is for keeping your precious memory storage, not necessarily for learning new stuff. There are probably a lot of things that wouldn't even cross your mind to google if they were erased by time. Googling could also waste time compared to storing memories if you have to do it often enough (roughly 5 minutes in your lifetime per fact).
In my experience anything you can write into brief flashcards. Some simple facts can work as handles for broader concepts once you've learned them. You could even record triggers for episodic memories that are important to you.
Yeah, that's pretty much the problem. Not really. I.e. there are stuff I know that would be inconvenient to forget, because I use this knowledge every day. But since I already use it every day, SR seems unnecessary.
Things I don't use every day are not essential - the cost of looking them up is minuscule since it happens rarely.
I suppose a plausible use case would be birth dates of family members, if I didn't have google calendar to remind me when needed.
Edit: another use case that comes to mind would be names. I'm pretty bad with names (though I've recently begun to suspect that probably I'm as bad with remembering names as anyone else, I just fail to pay attention when people introduce themselves). But asking to take someone's picture 'so that I can put it on a flashcard' seems awkward. Facebook to the rescue, I guess?
(though I don't really meet that many people, so again - possibly not worth the effort in maintaining such a system)
I don't know what you work on, but many fields include bodies of loosely connected facts that you could in principle look up, but which you'd be much more efficient if you just memorized. In programming this might mean functions in a particular library that you're working with (the C++ STL, for example). In chemistry, it might be organic reactions. The signs of medical conditions might be another example, or identities related to a particular branch of mathematics.
SRS would be well suited to maintaining any of these bodies of knowledge.
I'm a software dev.
Right. I guess I somewhat do 'spaced repetition' here, just by the fact that every time I interact with a particular library I'm reminded of its function. But that is incidental - I don't really care about remembering libraries that I don't use, and those that I use regularly I don't need SR to maintain.
I suppose medical conditions looks more plausible as a use case - you really need to remember a large set of facts, any of which is actually used very rarely. But that still doesn't seem useful to me personally - I can think of no dataset that'd be worth the effort.
I guess I should just assume I'm an outlier there, and simply keep SR in mind in case I ever find myself needing it.
I've used SRS to learn programming theory that I otherwise had trouble keeping straight in my head. I've made cards for design patterns, levels of database normalization, fiddly elements of C++ referencing syntax, etc.
Do you have your design pattern cards formatted in a way that are likely to be useful for other people?
They're mostly copy-and-pasted descriptions from wikipedia, tweaked with added info from Design Patterns. I'm not sure they'd be very useful to other people. I used them to help prepare for an interview, so when I was doing my cards I'd describe them out loud, then check the description, then pop open the book to clarify anything I wasn't sure on.
edit: And I'd do the reverse, naming the pattern based on the description.