"I just don't have enough data to make a decision."
"Yes, you do. What you don't have is enough data for you not to have to make one"
http://old.onefte.com/2011/03/08/you-have-a-decision-to-make/
"Do what you love" / "Follow your passion" is dangerous and destructive career advice. We tend to hear it from (a) Highly successful people who (b) Have become successful doing what they love. The problem is that we do NOT hear from people who have failed to become successful by doing what they love. Particularly pernicious problem in tournament-style fields with a few big winners & lots of losers: media, athletics, startups. Better career advice may be "Do what contributes" -- focus on the beneficial value created for other people vs just one's own ego. People who contribute the most are often the most satisfied with what they do -- and in fields with high renumeration, make the most $. Perhaps difficult advice since requires focus on others vs oneself -- perhaps bad fit with endemic narcissism in modern culture? Requires delayed gratification -- may toil for many years to get the payoff of contributing value to the world, vs short-term happiness.
It looks like that ANY advice from highly successful people might be dangerous, since they are only a small minority of those, who also tried those same things. Most of them much less successfully.
In reply to both Nancy and Thomas:
"For Taleb, then, the question why someone was a success in the financial marketplace was vexing. Taleb could do the arithmetic in his head. Suppose that there were ten thousand investment managers out there, which is not an outlandish number, and that every year half of them, entirely by chance, made money and half of them, entirely by chance, lost money. And suppose that every year the losers were tossed out, and the game replayed with those who remained. At the end of five years, there would be three hundred and thirteen people who had made money in every one of those years, and after ten years there would be nine people who had made money every single year in a row, all out of pure luck. Niederhoffer, like Buffett and Soros, was a brilliant man. He had a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago. He had pioneered the idea that through close mathematical analysis of patterns in the market an investor could identify profitable anomalies. But who was to say that he wasn’t one of those lucky nine? And who was to say that in the eleventh year Niederhoffer would be one of the unlucky ones, who suddenly lost it all, who suddenly, as they say on Wall Street, “blew up”?
-Malcom Gladwell
A magician named Derren Brown made a whole program about horse racing to illustrate the point of the above story. It's kinda interesting, but wastes more time than reading the story above.
“The root of all superstition is that men observe when a thing hits, but not when it misses"
-- Francis Bacon
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/5741-the-root-of-all-superstition-is-that-men-observe-when
The quote is true to Bacon's thought, and its expression much improved in the repetition. Here is the nearest to it I can find in Bacon's works on Gutenberg:
For this purpose, let us consider the false appearances that are imposed upon us by the general nature of the mind, beholding them in an example or two; as first, in that instance which is the root of all superstition, namely, that to the nature of the mind of all men it is consonant for the affirmative or active to affect more than the negative or privative. So that a few times hitting or presence countervails ofttimes failing or absence, as was well answered by Diagoras to him that showed him in Neptune's temple the great number of pictures of such as had escaped shipwreck, and had paid their vows to Neptune, saying, "Advise now, you that think it folly to invocate Neptune in tempest." "Yea, but," saith Diagoras, "where are they painted that are drowned?"
Francis Bacon, "The Advancement of Learning"
But in some form or another, a lot of people believe that there are only easy truths and impossible truths left. They tend not to believe in hard truths that can be solved with technology.
Pretty much all fundamentalists think this way. Take religious fundamentalism, for example. There are lots of easy truths that even kids know. And then there are the mysteries of God, which can’t be explained. In between—the zone of hard truths—is heresy. Environmental fundamentalism works the same way. The easy truth is that we must protect the environment. Beyond that, Mother Nature knows best, and she cannot be questioned. There’s even a market version of this, too. The value of things is set by the market. Even a child can look up stock prices. Prices are easy truths. But those truths must be accepted, not questioned. The market knows far more than you could ever know. Even Einstein couldn’t outguess God, Nature, or Market.
As somewhat of a libertarian, I tend to fall into that last group. I have to keep reminding myself that if nobody could outguess the market, then there'd be no money in trying to outguess the market, so only fools would enter it, and it would be easy to outguess.
I have to keep reminding myself that if nobody could outguess the market, then there'd be no money in trying to outguess the market, so only fools would enter it, and it would be easy to outguess.
There is the old joke about a student and a professor of economics walking on campus. The student notices a $20 bill lying on the sidewalk and starts to pick it up when the professor stops him. "Don't bother," the professor says, "it's fake. If it were real someone already would have picked it up".
That joke got less funny the first time I picked up a Christian tract disguised as a $20 bill. It got a lot less funny the second.
Three Bayesians walk into a bar: a) what's the probability that this is a joke? b) what's the probability that one of the three is a Rabbi? c) given that one of the three is a Rabbi, what's the probability that this is a joke?
--Sorry, no cite. I got this from someone who said they'd been seeing it on twitter.
Let your aim be to come at truth, not to conquer your opponent. So you never shall be at a loss in losing the argument, and gaining a new discovery.
Arthur Martine, quoted by Daniel Dennett
It tells a lot about the way our brains are built that you have to consciously remind yourself of this in the course of the argument and it doesn't really come naturally.
DON’T RESPOND TO IDIOTS.
...
Arguing with idiots has the game-theoretic structure of a dollar-auction. Whoever gets in the last argument wins. Add to this the asymmetry that someone with low epistemic standarts can make up some nonsense argument in five minutes, while it takes you an hour to prove that it is nonsense. At which point the other guy will make up some new nonsense.
edit: If you decide to reply, please read the original comment on SSC for context.
Though I am glad not everyone followed this advice with regards to me, when I was (more of) an idiot. I owe those patient, sympathetic, tolerant people a great deal.
Maybe so, but this also assumes that you're good at determining who's an idiot. Many people are not, but think they are. So you need to consider that if you make a policy of "don't argue with idiots" widespread, it will be adopted by people with imperfect idiot-detectors. (And I'm pretty sure that many common LW positions would be considered idiocy in the larger world.)
Consider also that "don't argue with idiots" has much of the same superficial appeal as "allow the government to censor idiots". The ACLU defends Nazis for a reason, even though they're pretty obviously idiots: any measures taken against idiots will be taken against everyone else, too.
(And I'm pretty sure that many common LW positions would be considered idiocy in the larger world.)
Having come from there, the general perception is that LW-ers and our positions are not idiots, but instead the kind of deluded crackpot nonsense smart people make up to believe in. Of course, that's largely for the more abstruse stuff, as people in the outside world will either grudgingly admit the uses of Bayesian reasoning and debiasing or just fail to understand what they are.
A large part of the problem is that all the lessons of Traditional Rationality teach to guard against actually arriving to conclusions before amassing what I think one Sequence post called "mountains of evidence". The strength and stridency with which LW believes and believes in certain things fail a "smell test" for overconfidence, even though the really smelly things (like, for example, cryonics) are usually actively debated on LW itself (I recall reading in this year's survey that the mean LW-er believes cryonics has a 14% chance of working, which is lower than people with less rationality training estimate).
So in contradistinction to Traditional Rationality (as practiced by almost...
Consider also that "don't argue with idiots" has much of the same superficial appeal as "allow the government to censor idiots".
The former has a fair amount of appeal for me and the latter I would find appalling and consider to be descent into totalitarianism. I don't think this comparison works.
Really? I feel the same way as Lumifer and asusmed that this was the obvious, default reaction. Damned typical-mind fallacy.
I do like the old "Never argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience" maxim :-)
To know what questions may reasonably be asked is already a great and necessary proof of sagacity and insight. For if a question is absurd in itself and calls for an answer where none is required, it not only brings shame on the propounder of the question, but may betray an incautious listener into absurd answers, thus presenting, as the ancients said, the ludicrous spectacle of one man milking a he-goat and the other holding a sieve underneath.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (trans. Norman Kemp Smith), p. A58/B82.
Kant seems to have one of the first systematic question dissolvers:
...Philosophers have never lacked zest for criticizing their predecessors. Aristotle was not always kind to Plato. Scholastics wrangled with unexcelled vigor. The new philosophy of the 17th century was frankly rude about the selfsame schoolmen. But all that is criticism of someone else. Kant began something new. He turned criticism into self-reflection. He didn’t just create the critical philosophy. He made philosophy critical of philosophy itself.
There are two ways in which to criticize a proposal, doctrine, or dogma. One is to argue that it is false. Another is to argue that it is not even a candidate for truth or falsehood. Call the former denial, the latter undoing. Most older philosophical criticism is in the denial mode. When Leibniz took issue with Locke in the Nouveaux Essais, he was denying some of the things that Locke had said. He took for granted that they were true-or-false. In fact, false. Kant’s transcendental dialectic, in contrast, argues that a whole series of antinomies arise because we think that there are true-or-false answers to a gamut of questions. There are none. The theses, antitheses, and q
It is perplexing, but amusing to observe people getting extremely excited about things you don't care about; it is sinister to watch them ignore things you believe are fundamental.
Taleb, Aphorisms.
Every time a mosquito dies, the world becomes a better place.
From Wikipedia "Various species of mosquitoes are estimated to transmit various types of disease to more than 700 million people annually in Africa, South America, Central America, Mexico, Russia, and much of Asia, with millions of resultant deaths. At least two million people annually die of these diseases, and the morbidity rates are many times higher still."
Related: let's eliminate species of mosquitoes that bite humans.
The irony of commitment is that it’s deeply liberating — in work, in play, in love. The act frees you from the tyranny of your internal critic, from the fear that likes to dress itself up and parade around like rational hesitation. To commit is to remove your head as the barrier to your life.
-- Anne Morris
Three Bayesians walk into a bar: a) what's the probability that this is a joke? b) what's the probability that one of the three is a Rabbi? c) given that one of the three is a Rabbi, what's the probability that this is a joke? (c)
According to the base rate there is an evidence that this is a joke about Russia national team or Suarez bite
Prisca iuvent alios: ego me nunc denique natum gratulor
Let others praise ancient times; I am glad I was born in these.
-- Ovid
"My ambition is to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book - what everyone else does not say in a book."
-Nietszche
Relevant to bounded cognition and consequentialism:
"It is better to be just than to be kind, but only good judges can be just; let those who cannot be just be kind."
-- Loyal to the Group of Seventeen, The Citadel of the Autarch, Gene Wolfe
C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success
-- Dennis Ritchie, The Development of the C language
He's saying that one does not need to do a perfect job to win. A common failure mode is to spend ages worrying about the details while someone else's good-enough quick hack takes over the world. It's quite a resonant quote for programmers.
C and Unix obliterated their technically superior rivals. There's a whole tradition of worrying about why this happened in the still extant LISP community which was one of the principal losers. Look up 'Worse is Better' if you're interested in the details.
C was a major improvement on the languages of the day: COBOL, Fortran, and plain assembly. Unlike any of those, it was at the same time fully portable, supported structured programming, and allowed freeform text.
But I don't think programmers would have embraced LISP even if its performance was as good as the other languages. For the same reasons programmers don't embrace LISP-derived languages today. It is an empirical fact that the great majority of programmers, particularly the less-than-brilliant ones, dislike pure functional programming.
On Confidence levels inside and outside an argument:
Thorstein Frode relates of this meeting, that there was an inhabited district in Hising which had sometimes belonged to Norway, and sometimes to Gautland. The kings came to the agreement between themselves that they would cast lots by the dice to determine who should have this property, and that he who threw the highest should have the district. The Swedish king threw two sixes, and said King Olaf need scarcely throw. He replied, while shaking the dice in his hand, "Although there be two sixes on the dice, it would be easy, sire, for God Almighty to let them turn up in my favour." Then he threw, and had sixes also. Now the Swedish king threw again, and had again two sixes. Olaf king of Norway then threw, and had six upon one dice, and the other split in two, so as to make seven eyes in all upon it; and the district was adjudged to the king of Norway.
I think the idea is something like: the probability of rolling 12 on fair 2d6 is 1/36, but the probability of fair dice being used when kings gamble for territory is far lower.
What about fanfictional evidence?
More seriously, shouldn't it be "don't update on fictional evidence as if it were true"?
Certainly it's reasonable for a story to make us reconsider our beliefs.
The eleventh thesis on Feuerbach is engraved on Marx’s tombstone in Highgate Cemetery. It reads: ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is, to change it’ (T 158). This is generally read as a statement to the effect that philosophy is unimportant; revolutionary activity is what matters. It means nothing of the sort. What Marx is saying is that the problems of philosophy cannot be solved by passive interpretation of the world as it is, but only by remoulding the world to resolve the philosophical contradictions inherent in it. It is to solve philosophical problems that we must change the world.
-- Peter Singer, Marx: A Very Short Introduction
No, the second clearly implies that the speaker simply doesn't hold with Enlightenment principles, empiricism, and all that "judicious study of discernible reality" crap. That speaker clearly prefers to just act, not out of rational calculation towards a goal, but because acting is manly and awesome. This is why people have such vicious contempt for that speaker: not only is he not acting rationally on behalf of others, he doesn't even care about acting rationally on his own behalf, and he had the big guns.
..."Focus on the future productivity of the asset you are considering. [...] If you instead focus on the prospective price change of a contemplated purchase, you are speculating. There is nothing improper about that. I know, however, that I am unable to speculate successfully, and I am skeptical of those who claim sustained success at doing so. Half of all coin-flippers will win their first toss; none of those winners has an expectation of profit if he continues to play the game. And the fact that a given asset has appreciated in the recent past is neve
...The Patrician took a sip of his beer. "I have told this to few people, gentlemen, and I suspect never will again, but one day when I was a young boy on holiday in Uberwald I was walking along the bank of a stream when I saw a mother otter with her cubs. A very endearing sight, I'm sure you will agree, and even as I watched, the mother otter dived into the water and came up with a plump salmon, which she subdued and dragged on to a half-submerged log. As she ate it, while of course it was still alive, the body split and I remember to this day the swee
I will follow the good side right to the fire, but not into it if I can help it.
Michel de Montaigne, Essais, Book III.
Thinking that all individuals pursue "selfish" interest is equivalent to assuming that all random variables have zero covariance.
Taleb, Aphorisms
Chance is always powerful. Let your hook always be cast; in the pool where you least expect it, there will be fish
-- Ovid
http://izquotes.com/quote/140231
Don't know the original. Anyone? Quidquid in latine dictum sit, altum videtur, and all that.
The trick to following someone without getting caught is to follow somebody who doesn’t think they’re being followed. This is how I learned to follow people, and over the course of an entire school year, I learned fascinating secrets about complete strangers I followed for hours on end. It made me wonder who knew my secrets, on the days I thought I was walking with no one behind me.
-- Lemony Snicket, All The Wrong Questions, Book 2, When Did You See Her Last?, Chapter Seven
Universities have been progressing from providing scholarship for a small fee into selling degrees at a large cost.
This is the natural evolution of every enterprise under the curse of success: from making a good into selling the good, into progressively selling what looks like the good, then going bust after they run out of suckers and the story repeats itself ... (The cheapest to deliver effect: "successful" cheese artisans end up hiring managers and progress into making rubber that looks like cheese, replaced by artisans who in turn become "successful"…).
I'd love to see Taleb actually prove his assertion here, rather than expecting his readers' cynicism and bitterness to do the work of evidence.
I suspect that the root of the problem goes to the fact that the universities are supposed to be both centers of research and teaching institutions.
In my estimation (having worked at several universities of various size and prestige, and more recently having consulted at all sorts of businesses) the problem is a common problem in a lot of American business/government since the 1970s/80s- the rise of professional management.
At large flagship U down the street from my house, professor labor costs have dropped markedly (the trend has been to replace tenure track lines with adjuncts and grad students as well as to increase grant overhead. In the science departments, many professors turn a net profit because grant overhead is larger than their salary costs). Enrollment is way up, tuition is way, way up. A drive to leverage university held patents has created massive profits for the university (with some absurdity along the way- a professor tried to start a company only to get a cease and desist order from a semi-conductor company. The university had sold the rights to his research to the semi-conductor company.)
And yet- the university finds itself on the verge of bankruptcy...
At private companies the bureaucracy is constrained by market pressures
I disagree- you'd be amazed how inefficient you can be and still be profitable. Lots of very large companies are being strangled by their bureaucracy even while remaining at least somewhat profitable (generally the existence of a huge company is all-in-itself a barrier to entry for competitors). I've worked for a surprising number of companies that have the basic problem of "I used to be very profitable, but now I find I'm slightly less profitable despite selling more products at higher margins." Even worse, I've seen attempts to solve the problem derailed by the same management apparatus.
A former boss was fond of blaming MBAs. He had a saying something along the lines of- the core problem with MBAs is the idea that you can good at "business" without being good at any particular business. MBAs march in, say "we need to quantify these decisions" and add a ton of process (which invites the managers in). A decade later, they notice that despite generally better conditions they aren't as profitable, they higher some big data consultants to come in and we say things like "you are spending $x+100 dollars to better quantify decisions that are only worth $x, and thats not even counting all the time you waste for all the paperwork that the process requires."
I would be interested to know how well documented this "curse of success" is? Is it studied in the economic literature? When do corporations, nations, firms, individuals suffer from this curse, when do they not? When do entire industries--like universities-- suffer from the curse? When do they survive and recover? When do they go completely bust? It seems possible to find examples going both ways, so I'm guessing there's something more subtle going on.
...Darwin apparently originated the concept of lumpers and splitters. Both lumping and splitting are enormously useful for thinking about reality — and it’s even more useful to understand that you can do either depending upon the circumstances and your needs — but as the Troublesome Inheritance brouhaha shows a lot of people who think they are really smart can’t handle F. Scott Fitzgerald’s challenge of holding two ideas at once (e.g., lumping and splitting) and still function.
In general, Wade’s critics have a hard time dealing with complexity (in other word
It ain't what we don't know that causes trouble, it's what we know that just ain't so.
David Deutsch, claiming the authority of an "unknown sage" http://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/oct/03/philosophy-artificial-intelligence
So, what does intuitionism suggest instead of the definition of a proposition as a truth value ? Put differently, what does the form of assertion A : prop mean ?
Definition 1. A proposition is defined by laying down what counts as a cause of the proposition.
With this definition in place, it is natural to define truth of a proposition in the following way.
Definition 2. A proposition is true if it has a cause.
-- Johan George Granstrom, Treatise on Intuitionistic Type Theory
Every person who has skin in the game knows sort of what is bullshit and what is not, since our capacities to rationalize —and those of bureaucrats and economists —are way too narrow for the complexity of the world we face, with its complex interactions. And survival is a stamp of statistical validity, while rationalization and narratives are the road to the cemetery.
Financial inequalities are ephemeral, one crash away from reallocation; inequalities of status & academobureaucrat "elite" are there to stay
I read it as saying that people have many interests in common, so pursuing "selfish" interests can also be altruistic to some extent.
If that is the intended reading, then it's an example of sounding wise while saying nothing.
Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are: