heredami comments on Rationality & Low-IQ People - Less Wrong

17 Post author: kokotajlod 02 February 2014 03:11PM

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Comment author: [deleted] 03 February 2014 03:23:58PM *  12 points [-]

Seeing how common akrasia and all that is on LW, I would go as far as to say that many "normal" people are better at instrumental rationality than the people here. If you look at it from the point of view of instrumental rationality, many things here are probably just a waste of time. They might be useful at some point, but focusing on more practical things will very likely be far more useful.

edit. But this is for an individual, I think LW could be really useful for the society as whole. Raising the sanity waterline and popularizing things like effective altruism will be irreplaceably valuable.

Comment author: falenas108 03 February 2014 06:53:02PM 6 points [-]

I think you're underestimating how common akrasia is among the rest of the world. It's just not seen as that bad of a thing if people spend their time off watching TV, eating unhealthily, or spending hours on the internet.

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 03 February 2014 09:18:50PM 8 points [-]

This would be interesting to know: Do we (however we define the "we" group) really have more akrasia, or are we just more aware of it?

Comment author: Emile 03 February 2014 10:07:55PM 7 points [-]

I think others are just more likely to call it "laziness" or "procrastination". The word "Akrasia" seems like some weird lesswrongian turn of language that doesn't really shed much more light.

Comment author: Creutzer 04 February 2014 02:04:40AM 3 points [-]

Actually, I'd argue that it's the word "laziness" that obscures matters. It suggests someone who just doesn't want to work and thinks that's alright, or is at least ambiguous between that and akrasia. And procrastination is specifically postponing things all the time; not all akrasia is like that. You can acratically fail to make use of a one-time opportunity.

Comment author: Emile 04 February 2014 09:09:43AM 3 points [-]

"I hate myself for being lazy" has 36.000 results on google, which suggests some people at least don't think it's alright (i.e. don't use the same definition as you).

But even if the term "Akrasia" was clearer than "lazy" (I agree it may be), you could say:

  • "Akrasia" is clearer than "Laziness" because it has a more precise meaning
  • "Laziness" is clearer than "Akrasia" because much more people know what the word means

I don't really think our use of the word is a problem tho, it's just worth keeping in mind that we're trading off a little bit more precision for being less understandable to the outside world. But that's always going on with jargon.

Comment author: wedrifid 04 February 2014 10:39:50AM -1 points [-]
  • "Akrasia" is clearer than "Laziness" because it has a more precise meaning
  • "Laziness" is clearer than "Akrasia" because much more people know what the word means

Also:

  • "Akrasia" is clearer than "Laziness" because the things people believe about laziness tend are often false and so not what is being referred to.
Comment author: Stabilizer 04 February 2014 01:30:32AM 0 points [-]

But Viliam_Bur is referring to akrasia and all of it's related phenomena.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 February 2014 03:42:57AM 0 points [-]

(however we define the "we" group)

It heavily depends on how we define "we". None, measure implicitly that weighs people by frequency of comments will find that "we" have much worse akrasia than one that doesn't.

Comment author: [deleted] 08 February 2014 10:17:46PM 0 points [-]

As of the last survey 6.4% of LWers were unemployed; how does that compare with people in the same age group (mean 27.4, st.dev. 8.5, quartiles 22, 25 and 31)?

Comment author: gwern 08 February 2014 11:03:04PM *  2 points [-]

With young people, employment numbers are a little tricky. I think it's better to look at >=25yos with college degrees, for which FRED provides a data series from the BLS where the values range from ~1.4% to ~5.4% and currently is 3.3%. Depending on how you interpret the survey responses (only explicit "unemployed" or non-responses too?), LWers in the same group (>=25yo, with a bachelors or higher degree) seem to have ~5-7%:

R> survey2013 <- read.csv("<http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/182368464/lwsurvey/2013.csv>", header=TRUE)
R> age <- survey2013[survey2013$Age>=25,]
R> degree <- function (x) { x!=" " & x!="2 year degree" & x!="High school" & x!="None" }
R> bachelors <- age[sapply(age$Degree, degree),]
R> length(is.na(bachelors$WorkStatus) | bachelors$WorkStatus==" ")
[1] 700
R> sum(!is.na(bachelors$WorkStatus) & bachelors$WorkStatus!=" ")
[1] 691
R> levels(bachelors$WorkStatus)
[1] " " "Academics (on the teaching side)"
[3] "For-profit work" "Government work" [5] "Independently wealthy" "Non-profit work" [7] "Self-employed" "Student" [9] "Unemployed" R> sum(bachelors$WorkStatus=="Unemployed",na.rm=TRUE)
[1] 38
R> sum(bachelors$WorkStatus=="Unemployed" | is.na(bachelors$WorkStatus) | bachelors$WorkStatus==" ")
[1] 47
R> c(38/691, 47/700)
[1] 0.05499 0.06714
R> binom.test(38,691, p=0.033)
Exact binomial test
data: 38 and 691
number of successes = 38, number of trials = 691, p-value = 0.002649
alternative hypothesis: true probability of success is not equal to 0.033
95 percent confidence interval:
0.03921 0.07470
R> binom.test(47,700, p=0.033)
Exact binomial test
data: 47 and 700
number of successes = 47, number of trials = 700, p-value = 6.492e-06
alternative hypothesis: true probability of success is not equal to 0.033
95 percent confidence interval:
0.04975 0.08829

(I wonder if I'm using the best BLS data-series, though; they record a lot of data and there can be subtleties that outsiders don't appreciate.)

Comment author: [deleted] 04 February 2014 12:16:56PM 0 points [-]

If you look at it from the point of view of instrumental rationality, many things here are probably just a waste of time.

As opposed to extremely useful activities "normal" people spend lots on time on such as watching TV?

Comment author: TheAncientGeek 19 March 2014 12:27:35PM 0 points [-]

Being entertained isn't a possible terminal value?

Comment author: [deleted] 30 March 2014 07:21:55AM 1 point [-]

Yes, but that applies to reading LW too, not just to watching TV.

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