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Open thread, August 4 - 10, 2014
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Comments (307)
I wrote a userscript / Chrome extension / zero-installation bookmarklet to make finding recent comments over at Slate Star Codex a lot easier. Observe screenshots. I'll also post this next time SSC has a new open thread (unless Yvain happens to notice this).
Great idea and nicely done! It also had the additional benefit of constituting my very first interaction with javascript because I needed to modify somethings. (Specifically, avoid the use of localStorage.)
This looks excellent.
In your open thread inbox, less wrong comments have the options "context" and "report" (in that order), whereas private messages have "report" and "reply" (in that order). Many times I've accidentally pressed "report" on a private message, and fortunately caught myself before continuing.
I'd suggest reversing the order of "report" and "reply", so that they fit with the comments options.
Right, that's my tiny suggestion for this month :-)
I wrote a userscript to add a delay and checkbox reading "I swear by all I hold sacred that this comment supports the collective search for truth to the very best of my abilities." before allowing you to comment on LW. Done in response to a comment by army1987 here.
Edit: per NancyLebovitz and ChristianKl below, solicitations for alternative default messages are welcomed.
"To the very best of my abilities" seems excessive to me, or at least I seem to do reasonably well with "according to the amount of work I'm willing to put in, and based on pretty good habits".
I'm not even sure what I could do to improve my posting much. I could be more careful to not post when I'm tired or angry, and that probably makes sense to institute as a habit. On the other hand, that's getting rid of some of the dubious posting, which is not the same thing as improving the average or the best posts.
Even when I'd only been here a few weeks, your posting had already caught my eye as unusually mindful & civil, and nothing since has changed my impression that you're far better than most of us at conversing in good faith and with equanimity.
Given the recent discussion about how rituals can give the appearance of cultishness, it's probably not good time to bring that up at the moment ;)
Testing this...
Does anyone know if something urgent has been going on with MIRI, other than the Effective Altruism Summit? I am a job application candidate -- I have no idea about my status as one. But I was promised a chat today, days ago, and nothing was arranged regarding time or medium. Now it is the end of the day. I sent my application weeks ago and have been in contact with 3 of the employees who seem to work on the management side of things. This is a bit frustrating. Ironically, I applied as Office Manager, and hope that (if hired) I would be doing my best to take care of these things -- putting things on a calendar, working to help create a protocol for 'rejecting' or 'accepting' or 'deferring' employee applications, etc. Have other people had similar, disorganized correspondences with MIRI? Or have they mostly been organized, suggesting that I take this experience as a sure sign of rejection?
Yes.
Apparently, in the days leading up to the Effective Altruism Summit, there was a conference on Artificial Intelligence keeping the research associates out of town. The source is my friend interning at the MIRI right now. So, anyway they might have been even busier than you thought. I hope this has cleared up now.
Still haven't heard anything back from them in any sort of way. But thanks for making their circumstances even more clear!
Heard back & talked with them. My personal issue is now resolved.
Oblique request made without any explanation: can anyone provide examples of beliefs that are incontrovertibly incorrect, but which intelligent people will nonetheless arrive at quite reasonably through armchair-theorising?
I am trying to think up non-politicised, non-controversial examples, yet every one I come up with is a reliable flame-war magnet.
ETA: I am trying to reason about disputes where on the one hand you have an intelligent, thoughtful person who has very expertly reasoned themselves into a naive but understandable position p, and on the other hand, you have an individual who possesses a body of knowledge that makes a strong case for the naivety of p.
What kind of ps exist, and do they have common characteristics? All I can come up with are politically controversial ps, but I'm starting my search from a politically-controversial starting point. The motivating example for this line of reasoning is so controversial that I'm not touching it with a shitty-stick.
Mathematical arguments happen all the time over whether 0.99999...=1 but I'm not sure if that's interesting enough to count for what you want.
I thought about this on & off over the last couple of days and came up with more candidates than you can shake a shitty stick at. Some of these are somewhat political or controversial, but I don't think any are reliable flame-war magnets. I expect some'll ring your cherries more than others, but since I can't tell which, I'll post 'em all and let you decide.
The answer to the Sleeping Beauty puzzle is obviously 1/2.
Rational behaviour, being rational, entails Pareto optimal results.
Food availability sets a hard limit on the number of kids people can have, so when people have more food they have more kids.
Truth is an absolute defence against a libel accusation.
If a statistical effect is so small that a sample of several thousand is insufficient to reliably observe it, the effect's too small to matter.
Controlling for an auxiliary variable, or matching on that variable, never worsens the bias of an estimate of a causal effect.
Human nature being as brutish as it is, most people are quite willing to be violent, and their attempts at violence are usually competent.
In the increasingly fast-paced and tightly connected United States, residential mobility is higher than ever.
The immediate cause of death from cancer is most often organ failure, due to infiltration or obstruction by spreading tumours.
Aumann's agreement theorem means rationalists may never agree to disagree.
Friction, being a form of dissipation, plays no role in explaining how wings generate lift.
Seasons occur because Earth's distance from the Sun changes during Earth's annual orbit.
Beneficial mutations always evolve to fixation.
Multiple discovery is rare & anomalous.
The words "male" & "female" are cognates.
Given the rise of online piracy, the ridiculous cost of tickets, and the ever-growing convenience of other forms of entertainment, cinema box office receipts must be going down & down.
Looking at voting in an election from the perspective of timeless decision theory, my voting decision is probably correlated and indeed logically linked with that of thousands of people relatively likely to agree with my politics. This could raise the chance of my influencing an election above negligibility, and I should vote accordingly.
The countries with the highest female life expectancies are approaching a physiologically fixed hard limit of 65 — sorry, 70 — sorry, 80 — sorry, 85 years.
The answer to the Sleeping Beauty puzzle is obviously 1/3.
Language in general might be a rich source of these, between false etymologies, false cognates, false friends, and eggcorns.
Thanks for that list. I believed (or at least, assigned a probability greater than 0.5 to) about five of those.
Thanks for this. These are all really good.
Now I just need to think of another 21 and I'll have enough for a philosophy article!
... don't they? (in the long run)
No, they don't -- look at contemporary Western countries and their birth rates.
Oh yes I know that, I just meant in the long-long run. This voluntary limiting of birth rates can't last for obvious evolutionary reasons.
I have no idea about the "long-long" run :-)
The limiting of birth rates can last for a very long time as long as you stay at replacement rates. I don't think "obvious evolutionary reasons" apply to humans any more, it's not likely another species will outcompete us by breeding faster.
Any genes that make people defect by having more children are going to be (and are currently being) positively selected.
Besides, reducing birthrates to replacement isn't anything near a universal phenomenon, see the Mormons and Amish.
It's got nothing to do with another species out-competing us - competition between humans is more than enough.
This observation should be true throughout the history of the human race, and yet the birth rates in the developed countries did fall off the cliff...
This happened barely half a generational cycle ago. Give evolution time.
So what's your prediction for what will happen when?
And animals don't breed well in captivity.
Until they do.
In the "long-long run", given ad hoc reproductive patterns, yeah, I'd expect evolution to ratchet average human fertility higher & higher until much of humanity slammed into the Malthusian limit, at which point "when people have more food they have more kids" would become true.
Nonetheless, it isn't true today, it's unlikely to be true for the next few centuries unless WWIII kicks off, and may never come to pass (humanity might snuff itself out of existence before we go Malthusian, or the threat of Malthusian Assured Destruction might compel humanity to enforce involuntary fertility limits). So here in 2014 I rate the idea incontrovertibly false.
Most drug new drugs fail clinical trials.
Intelligent people make theories about how a drug is supposed to work and think it would help to cure some illness. Then when the drug is brought into clinical trials more than 90% of new drugs still fail to live up to the theoretical promise that the drug held.
A fun one which came up recently on IRC: everyone thinks that how your parents raise you is incredibly important, this is so obvious it doesn't need any proof and is universal common sense (how could influencing and teaching a person from scratch to 18 years old not have deep and profound effects on them?), and you can find extended discussions of the best way to raise kids from Plato's Republic to Rousseau's Emile to Spock.
Except twin studies consistently estimate that the influence of 'shared environment' (the home) is small or near-zero for many traits compared to genetics and randomness/nonshared-environment.
If you want to predict whether someone will be a smoker or smart, it doesn't matter whether they're raised by smokers or not (to borrow an example from The Nurture Assumption*); it just matters whether their biological parents were smokers and whether they get unlucky.
This is so deeply counterintuitive and unexpected that even people who are generally familiar with the relevant topics like IQ or twin studies typically don't know about this or disbelieve it.
(Another example is probably folk physics: Newtonian motion is true, experimentally confirmed, mathematically logical, and completely unintuitive and took millennia to be developed after the start of mechanics.)
* Rich's citation is to Rowe 1994, The Limits of Family Influence: Genes, Experience, and Behavior; from pg204:
Old epi jungle saying: "the causal null is generally true."
'Shh, kemo sabe - you hear that?' 'No; the jungle is silent tonight.' 'Yes. The silence of the p-values. A wild publication bias stalks us. We must be cautious'.
This is quite possibly the most comforting scientific result ever for me as a parent, by the way.
Whereas for me, it's horrifying, given that my ex-spouse turned out to be an astonishingly horrible person.
I seem to recall Yvain posting a link to something he referred to as the beginnings of a possible rebuttal to The Nurture Assumption; I suppose I shall have to hang my hopes on that.
It may or may not be comforting to reflect that your ex-spouse is probably less horrible than s/he seems to you. (Just on general outside-view principles; I have no knowledge of your situation or your ex.)
You feared more than you hoped, eh?
As Protagoras points out here there are systematic problems with twin studies.
There are problems, but I don't think they are large, I think they are brought up mostly for ideological reasons (Shalizi is not an unbiased source and has a very big axe to grind), and a lot of the problems also cut the other way. For example, measurement error can reduce estimates of heritability a great deal, as we see in twin studies which correct for it and as predicted get higher heritability estimates, like "Not by Twins Alone: Using the Extended Family Design to Investigate Genetic Influence on Political Beliefs", Hatemi et al 2010 (this study, incidentally, also addresses the claim that twins may have special environments compared to their non-twin siblings and that will bias results, which has been claimed by people who dislike twin studies; there's no a priori reason to think this, and Hatemi finds no evidence for it, yet they had claimed it).
Do you mean more by this than that he has very strong opinions on this topic? I would guess you do -- that you mean there's something pushing him towards the opinions he has, that isn't the way it is because those opinions are right. But what?
I believe his political views are somewhere between way to the left of the Democratic Party and socialism. He dislikes the entire field of intelligence research in psychology because it's ideologically inconvenient. He criticises anything that he can find to criticise about it. Think of him as Stephen Jay Gould, but much smarter and more honest.
See, this is a place where the US is different from Europe. Because over here (at least in the bit of Europe I'm in), being "somewhere to the right of socialism" isn't thought of as the kind of crazy extremism that ipso facto makes someone dangerously biased and axe-grindy.
Now, of course politics is what it is, and affiliation with even the most moderate and reasonable political position can make otherwise sensible people completely blind to what's obvious to others. So the fact that being almost (but not quite) a socialist looks to me like a perfectly normal and sensible position is perfectly compatible with Shalizi being made nuts by it. But to me "he's somewhere to the left of Barack Obama" doesn't look on its own like something that makes someone a biased source and explains what their problem is.
Being an extremist by local standards may be more relevant than actual beliefs.
Yup, that's a good point. (Though it depends on what "local" means. I have the impression that academics in the US tend to be leftier than the population at large.)
Shalizi is somewhere around Marxism in politics. This makes his writings on intelligence very frustrating, but on the other hand, it also means he can write very interesting things on economics at times - his essay on Red Plenty is the most interesting thing I've ever seen on economics & computational complexity. Horses for courses.
Shalizi states at least part of his position as follows:
and on the same page says these things:
and
I have to say that none of this sounds very Marxist to me. Shalizi apparently finds revolutions dishonourable; the most notable attempts at (nominally) Marxist states, the USSR and the PRC, he criticizes in very strong terms; he wants most prices to be set by markets (at least this is how I interpret what he says on that page and others it links to).
Oh, here's another bit of evidence:
followed in the next paragraph by
which seems to me to imply, in particular, that Shalizi doesn't consider himself "a Marxist, even a revisionist one".
He's certainly a leftist, certainly considers himself a socialist, but he seems quite some way from Marxism. (And further still from, e.g., any position taken by the USSR or the PRC.)
How about this?
Not that I think pigeon-holing him is very useful for determining his views on economics or politics, let alone IQ.
Suggests that Marxism is an idea Shalizi is "receptive to" but not (at least to me) that he's actually a Marxist as such.
Does having political views that approximate Marxism imply irrationally-derived views on intelligence? I don't see why it should, but this may simply be a matter of ignorance or oversight on my part.
I am not an expert on Marx but would be unsurprised to hear that he made a bunch of claims that are ill-supported by evidence and have strong implications about intelligence -- say, that The Proletariat is in no way inferior in capabilities, even statistically, to The Bourgeoisie. But to me "somewhere around Marxism in politics" doesn't mean any kind of commitment to believing everything Marx wrote. It isn't obvious to me why someone couldn't hold pretty much any halfway-reasonable opinions about intelligence, while still thinking that it is morally preferable for workers to own the businesses they work for and the equipment they use, that we would collectively be better off with much much more redistribution of wealth than we currently have (or even with the outright abolition of individual property), etc.
In another comment I've given my reasons for doubting that Shalizi is even "somewhere around Marxism in politics". But even if I'm wrong about that, I'm not aware of prior commitments he has that would make him unable to think rationally about intelligence.
Of course it needn't be a matter of prior commitments as such. It could, e.g., be that he is immersed in generally-very-leftist thought (this being either a cause or a consequence of his own leftishness), and that since for whatever reason there's substantial correlation between being a leftist and having one set of views about intelligence rather than another, Shalizi has just absorbed a typically-leftist position on intelligence by osmosis. But, again, the fact that he could have doesn't mean he actually has.
I think the guts of what you're claiming is: Shalizi's views on intelligence are a consequence of his political views; either his political views are not arrived at rationally, or the way his political views have given rise to his views on intelligence are not rational, or both. -- That could well be true, but so far what you've given evidence for is simply that he holds one particular set of political views. How do you get from there to the stronger claim about the relationship between his views on the two topics?
At least part of it was reading his 'Statistical Myth' essay, being skeptical of the apparent argument for some of the reasons Dalliard would lay out at length years later, reading all the positive discussions of it by people I was unsure understood either psychometrics or Shalizi's essay (which he helpfully links), and then reading a followup dialogue http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/495.html where - at least, this is how it reads to me - he carefully covers his ass, walks back his claims, and quietly concedes a lot of key points. At that point, I started to seriously wonder if Shalizi could be trusted on this topic; his constant invocation of Stephen Jay Gould (who should be infamous by this point) and his gullible swallowing of 'deliberate practice' as more important than any other factor which since has been pretty convincingly debunked (both on display in the dialogue) merely reinforce my impression and the link to Gould (Shalizi's chief comment on Gould's Mismeasure of Man is apparently solely "I do not recommend this for the simple reason that I read it in 1988, when I was fourteen. I remember it as a very good book, for whatever that's worth."; no word on whether he is bothered by Gould's fraud) suggests it's partially ideological. Another revealing page: http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/notebooks/iq.html I can understand disrecommending Rushton, but disrecommending Jensen who invented a lot of the field and whose foes even admire him? Recommending a journalist from 1922? Recommending some priming bullshit? (Where's the fierce methodologist statistician when you need him...?) There's one consistent criterion he applies: if it's against IQ and anything to do with it, he recommends it, and if it's for it, he disrecommends it. Apparently only foes of it ever have any of the truth.
Informative. Thanks! Though I must admit that my reaction to the pages of Shalizi that you cite isn't the same as yours.
What is IRC?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_relay_chat
Get off my lawn
So... does it mean that it's completely irrelevant who adopted Harry Potter, because the results would be the same anyway?
Or is the correct model something like: abuse can change things to worse, but any non-abusive parenting simply means the child will grow up determined by their genes? That is, we have a biologically set "destiny", and all the environment can do is either help us reach this destiny or somehow cripple us halfway (by abuse, by lack of nutrition, etc.).
In an home environment within the normal range for a population, the home environment will matter little in a predictable sense on many traits compared to the genetic legacy, and random events/choices/biological-events/accidents/etc. There are some traits it will matter a lot on, and in a causal sense, the home environment may determine various important outcomes but not in a way that is predictable or easily measured. The other category of 'nonshared environment' is often bigger than the genetic legacy, so speaking of a biologically set destiny is misleading: biologically influenced would be a better phrase.
Has this been demonstrated for home environments in the developing world or sub-middle class home environments in the developed world? My prior understanding was that it had not been.
There are serious restriction of range problems with the literature. I believe that there is one small French adoption study with unrestricted range which produced 1 sigma IQ difference between the bottom and top buckets (deciles?) of adopting families.
I wonder if this what Shalizi alludes to when he says that IQ is closer to that of the adoptive parents than that of the biological parents.
(Both references describe the same study.) Capron & Duyme found 38 French children placed for adoption before age 2, 20 of them to parents with very high socioeconomic status (operationalized as having 14-23 years of education and working a profession) and 18 to parents with very low socioeconomic status (unskilled & semi-skilled labourers or farmers, with 5-8 years of education). When the kids took the WISC-R IQ test, those adopted into the high-SES families had a mean IQ of 111.6, while those in the low-SES families had a mean IQ of 100.0, for a difference of 0.77 sigma.
Thanks!
In the context of IQ I've seen it claimed that normal variation in parenting doesn't do much, but extreme abuse can still have a substantial effect. So parenting quality would only make a difference at the tails of the parenting quality distribution, but there it would make quite a difference.
In "No Two Alike" Harris argues that the biggest non-shared environment personality determinant is peer group. So Harry Potter style "Lock him up in a closet with no friends" would actually have a huge effect.
And it should be noted that parents do have control over peer group: where to live, public school vs. private school vs. homeschooling, getting children to join things, etc. So parenting still matters even if it's all down to genetics and non-shared environment.
Also, has anyone investigated whether the proper response to publicized social-science answers/theories/whatever you want to call them is to assume they're true or just wait for them to be rejected? That is: how many publicized social-science answers [the same question could be asked for diet-advice answers conflicting with pre-nutrition-studies received wisdom, etc.] were later rejected? It could well be that the right thing to do in general is stick with common sense...
Exactly! If you have something to protect as a parent, then after hearing "parents are unimportant, the important stuff is some non-genetic X" the obvious reaction is: "Okay, so how can I influence X?" (Instead of saying: "Okay, then it's not my fault, whatever.")
For example, if I want my children to be non-smokers, and I learn that whether I am smoking or not has much smaller impact than whether my children's friends are smoking... the obvious next question is: What can I do to increase the probability that my children's friends will be non-smokers? There are many indirect methods like choosing the place to live, choosing the school, choosing free-time activities, etc. I would just like to have more data on what smoking correlates with; where should I send my children and where should I prevent them from going, so that even if they "naturally" pick their peer group in that place, they will more likely pick non-smokers. (Replace non-smoking with whatever is your parenting goal.)
Shortly, when I read "parenting" in a study, I mentally translate it as: "what an average, non-strategic parent does". That's not the same as: "what a parent could do".
I'd generalize that to something like
which is wrong at least twice over (publication bias and correlation-causation confusion) but is, I suspect, an implicit assumption made by lots of people who only made it to the first stage of traditional rationality (and reason along the lines of "normal people are full of crap, scientists are smarter and do SCIENCE!, so all I need to do to be correct is regurgitate what I find in scientific journals").
Then don't.
I point is more that if you only have theory and no empiric evidence, then it's likely that you are wrong. That doesn't mean that having a bit of empiric evidence automatically means that you are right.
I also would put more emphasis on having empiric feedback loops than at scientific publications. Publications are just one way of feedback. There a lot to be learned about psychology by really paying attention on other people with whom you interact.
If I interact with a person who has a phobia of spider and solve the issue and afterwards put a spider on his arm and the person doesn't freak out, I have my empiric feedback. I don't need a paper to tell me that the person doesn't have a phobia anymore.
Yes, I agree. To clarify, I was neither condoning the belief in my bullet point, nor accusing you of believing it. I just wanted to tip my hat to you for inspiring my example with yours.
I doubt it is possible to find non-controversial examples of anything, and especially of things plausible enough to be believed by intelligent non-experts, outside of the hard sciences.
If this is true, the only plausible examples would be such as "an infinity cannot be larger than another infinity", "time flows uniformly regardless of the observer", "biological species have unchanging essences", and other intuitively plausible statements unquestionably contradicted by modern hard sciences.
If a plane is on a conveyor belt going at the same speed in the opposite direction, will it take off?
I remember reading this in other places I don't remember, and it seems to inspire furious arguments despite being non-political and not very controversial.
That reminds me of the question of whether hot water freezes faster than cold water.
Would wrong scientific theories qualify? E.g. phlogiston or aether.
Downwind faster than the wind. See seven pages of posts here for examples of people getting it wrong.
Kant was famously wrong when he claimed that space had to be flat.
As discussed previously, this exact claim seems suspiciously absent from the first Critique.
I agree that Kant doesn't seem to have ever considered non-euclidean geometry, and thus can't really be said to be making an argument that space is flat. If we could drop an explanation of general relativity, he'd probably come to terms with it. On the other hand, he just assumes that two straight lines can only intersect once, and that this describes space, which seems pretty much what he was accused of.
I don't see this in the quoted passage. He's trying to illustrate the nature of propositions in geometry, and doesn't appear to be arguing that the parallel postulate is universally true. "Take, for example," is not exactly assertive.
Also, have a care: those two paragraphs are not consecutive in the Critique.
That's a tall order. I'll try:
Noticing that people who are the best in any sport practice the most and concluding that being good at a sport is simply a matter of practice and determination. Tabula Rasa in general.
The supply-demand model of minimum wage? Is this political? I'm not saying minimum wage is good or bad, just that the supply-demand model can't settle the question yet people learning about economics tend to be easily convinced by the simple explanation.
That thermodynamics proves that weight loss + maintenance is simply a matter of diet and exercise (this is more Yudkowsky's fight than mine).
This isn't very interesting, but I used to believe that the rules about checkmate didn't really change the nature of chess. Some of the forbidden moves - moving into check, or failing to move out if possible - are always a mistake, so if you just played until someone captured the king, the game would only be different in cases where someone made an obvious mistake.
But if you can't move, the game ends in stalemate. So forbidding you to move into check means that some games end in draws, where capture-the-king would have a victor.
(This is still armchair theorising on my part.)
If your twin's going away for 20 years to fly around space at close to the speed of light, they'll be 20 years older when they come back.
A spinning gyroscope, when pushed, will react in a way that makes sense.
If another nation can't do anything as well as your nation, there is no self-serving reason to trade with them.
You shouldn't bother switching in the Monty Hall problem
The sun moves across the sky because it's moving.
EDIT Corrected all statements to be false
Does it have to be something from the modern day? Because there are tons of historical examples.
There are many beliefs that people will arrive at through armchair theorizing, but only until they are corrected. If you came up with the idea that the Earth was flat a long time ago, nobody would correct you. If you did that today, someone would correct you; indeed, society is so full of round-Earth information that it's hard for anyone to not have heard of the refutation before coming up with the idea, unless they're a young child.
Does that count as something arrived at through armchair theorizing? People would, after all, come up with it by armchair theorizing if they lived in a vacuum. They did come up with it through armchair theorizing back when they did live in a vacuum.
That's why there are tons of historical examples and not so many modern examples. A modern example has to be something where the refutation is well known by experts, but the refutation hasn't made it down to the common person, because if the refutation did make it down to the common person that would inhibit them from coming up with the armchair theory in the first place.
(For historical examples,
Something from the modern day, yes. The people arriving at the naive belief, and the people with the ability to demonstrate its incorrect status, should coexist.
Sorry to keep going on this, but would looking at a historical example of a group of intelligent people arriving at a naive belief, even though there was plenty of evidence available at the time that this is a naive belief work?
Possibly, yes. I'd love to hear whatever you've got in mind.
Why not also spend an equally amount of time searching for examples that prove the opposite of the point you're trying to make? Or are you speaking to an audience that doesn't agree this is possible in principle?
Edit: Might Newtonian physics be an example?
When I was ~16, I came up with group selection to explain traits like altruism.
Bell's spaceship paradox.
According to Bell, he surveyed his colleagues at CERN (clearly a group of intelligent, qualified people) about this question, and most of them got it wrong. Although, to be fair, the conflict here is not between expert reasoning and domain knowledge, since the physicists at CERN presumably possessed all the knowledge you need (basic special relativity, really) to get the right answer.
Generalising from 'plane on a treadmill'; a lot of incorrect answers to physics problems and misconceptions of physics in general. For any given problem or phenomenon, one can guess a hundred different fake explanations, numbers, or outcomes using different combinations of passwords like 'because of Newton's Nth law', 'because of drag', 'because of air resistance', 'but this is unphysical so it must be false' etc. For the vast majority of people, the only way to narrow down which explanations could be correct is to already know the answer or perform physical experiments, since most people don't have a good enough physical intuition to know in advance what types of physical arguments go through, so should be in a state of epistemic learned helplessness with respect to physics.
I have a strange request. Without consulting some external source, can you please briefly define "learned helplessness" as you've used it in this context, and (privately, if you like) share it with me? I promise I'll explain at some later date.
There will probably be holes and not quite capture exactly what I mean, but I'll take a shot. Let me know if this is not rigorous or detailed enough and I'll take another stab, or if you have any other follow-up. I have answered this immediately, without changing tab, so the only contamination is saccading my LW inbox beforing clicking through to your comment, the titles of other tabs, etc. which look (as one would expect) to be irrelevant.
Helplessness about topic X - One is not able to attain a knowably stable and confident opinion about X given the amount of effort one is prepared to put in or the limits of one's knowledge or expertise etc. One's lack of knowledge of X includes lack of knowledge about the kinds of arguments or methods that tend to work in X, lack of experience spotting crackpot or amateur claims about X, and lack of general knowledge of X that would allow one to notice one's confusion at false basic claims and reject them. One is unable to distinguish between ballsy amateurs and experts.
Learned helplessness about X - The helplessness is learned from experience of X; much like the sheep in Animal Farm, one gets opinion whiplash on some matter of X that makes one realise that one knows so little about X that one can be argued into any opinion about it.
(This has ended up more like a bunch of arbitrary properties pointing to the sense of learned helplessness rather than a slick definition. Is it suitable for your purposes, or should I try harder to cut to the essence?)
Rant about learned helplessness in physics: Puzzles in physics, or challenges to predict the outcome of a situation or experiment, often seem like they have many different possible explanations leading to a variety of very different answers, with the merit of these explanations not being distinguishable except to those who have done lots of physics and seen lots of tricks, and maybe even then maybe you just need to already know the answer before you can pick the correct answer.
Moreover, one eventually learns that the explanations at a given level of physics instruction are probably technically wrong in that they are simplified (though I guess less so as one progresses).
Moreover moreover, one eventually becomes smart enough to see that the instructors do not actually even spot their leaps in logic. (For example, it never seemed to occur to any of my instructors that there's no reason you can't have negative wavenumbers when looking at wavefunctions in basic quantum. It turns out that when I run the numbers, everything rescales since the wavefunction bijects between -n and n and one normalizes the wavefunction anyway, so that it doesn't matter, but one could only know this for sure after reasoning it out and justifying discarding the negative wavenumbers. It basically seemed like the instructors saw an 'n' in sin(n*pi/L) or whatever and their brain took it as a natural number without any cognitive reflection that the letter could have just as easily been a k or z or something, and to check that the notation was justified by the referent having to be a natural.)
Moreover, it takes a high level of philosophical ability to reason about physics thought experiments and their standards of proof. Take the 'directly downwind faster than the wind' problem. The argument goes back and forth, and, like the sheep, at every point the side that's speaking seems to be winning. Terry Tao comes along and says it's possible, and people link to videos of carts with propellers apparently going downwind faster than the wind and wheels with rubber bands attached allegedly proving it. But beyond deferring to his general hard sciences problem-solving ability, one has no inside view way to verify Tao's solution; what are the standards of proof for a thought experiment? After all, maybe the contraptions in the video only work (assuming they do work as claimed, which isn't assured) because of slight side-to-side effects rather than directly down wind or some other property of the test conditions implicitly forbidden by the thought experiment.
Since any physical experiment for a physics thought experiment will have additional variables, one needs some way to distinguish relevant and irrelevant variables. Is the thought experiment the limit as extraneous variables become negligible, or is there a discontinuity? What if different sets of variables give rise to different limits? How does anyone ever know what the 'correct' answer is to an idealised physics thought experiment of a situation that never actually arises? Etc.
Thanks for that. The whole response is interesting.
I ask because up until quite recently I was labouring under a wonky definition of "learned helplessness" that revolved around strategic self-handicapping.
An example would be people who foster a characteristic of technical incompetence, to the point where they refuse to click next-next-finish on a noddy software installer. Every time they exhibit their technical incompetence, they're reinforced in this behaviour by someone taking the "hard" task away from them. Hence their "helplessness" is "learned".
It wasn't until recently that I came across an accurate definition in a book on reinforcement training. I'm pretty sure I've had "learned helplessness" in my lexicon for over a decade, and I've never seen it used in a context that challenged my definition, or used it in a way that aroused suspicion. It's worth noting that I probably picked up my definition through observing feminist discussions. Trying a mental find-and-replace on ten years' conversations is kind of weird.
I am also now bereft of a term for what I thought "learned helplessness" was. Analogous ideas come up in game theory, but there's no snappy self-contained way available to me for expressing it.
Good chance you've seen both of these before, but:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness and http://squid314.livejournal.com/350090.html
Damn, if only someone had created a thread for that, ho ho ho
Strategic incompetence?
I'm not sure if maybe Schelling uses a specific name (self-sabotage?) for that kind of thing?
Schelling does talk about strategic self-sabotage, but it captures a lot of deliberated behaviour that isn't implied in my fake definition.
Also interesting to note, I have read that Epistemic Learned Helplessness blog entry before, and my fake definition is sufficiently consistent with it that it doesn't stand out as obviously incorrect.
Now picturing a Venn diagram with three overlapping circles labelled "epistemic learned helplessness", "what psychologists call 'learned helplessness'", and "what sixes_and_sevens calls 'learned helplessness'"!
Making up a term for this..."reinforced helplessness"? (I dunno whether it'd generalize to cover the rest of what you formerly meant by "learned helplessness".)
The sun revolves around the earth.
The earth revolving around the sun was also armchair reasoning, and refuted by empirical data like the lack of observable parallax of stars. Geocentrism is a pretty interesting historical example because of this: the Greeks reached the wrong conclusion with right arguments. Another example in the opposite direction: the Atomists were right about matter basically being divided up into very tiny discrete units moving in a void, but could you really say any of their armchair arguments about that were right?
Atoms can actually be divided into parts, so it's not clear that the atomists where right. If you would tell some atomist about quantum states, I would doubt that they would find that to be a valid example of what they mean with "atom".
The atomists were more right than the alternatives: the world is not made of continuously divisible bone substances, which are bone no matter how finely you divide them, nor is it continuous mixtures of fire or water or apeiron.
I recently learned that chocolate contain significant amount of coffeine. 100g chocolate contain roughly as much as a cup of black tea. As a result I updated in the direction of not eating chocolate directly before going to bed.
I don't know whether the information is new to everyone, but it was interesting for me.
Besides caffeine, there's also theobromine.
FWIW, I did some reading of studies and it seems that kinds of tea vary too much in caffeine content for classifying by preparation method to be a meaningful indication of caffeine content, and there's some question about how l-theanine plays a role. It's probably better to say 'a cup of tea'.
Here is some data on tea caffeine content.
Anecdotally, I know a person who drinks a lot of "regular" black tea (Ceylon/Assam), but doesn't drink Darjeeling tea because it gets her jittery and too-much-caffeine-shaky.
Yeah, that was one of the studies I read on the topic. (The key part is "Caffeine concentrations in white, green, and black teas ranged from 14 to 61 mg per serving (6 or 8 oz) with no observable trend in caffeine concentration due to the variety of tea.", although they bought mostly black teas and not many white/green or any oolongs; but the other studies don't show a clear trend either.)
Caffeine's a strong drug for me, except I have a huge tolerance now because I consume so much coffee. One night a few years ago, after I had quit caffeine for about a month, I was picking away at a bag of chocolate almonds while doing homework, and after a few hours I noticed that I felt pretty much euphoric. So yeah, this is good info to have if you're trying to get off caffeine.
A thought I've had floating around for a few years now.
With the Internet, it's a lot easier to self-study than ever before. This changes the landscape. Money is much less of a limiting factor, and things like time, motivation, and availability of learning material are now more important. It occurs to me that the last is greatly language-dependent. If the only language you speak is spoken by five million other people, you might as well not have the Internet at all. But even if you speak a major language, the material you'll be getting is greatly inferior in quantity, and probably quality, to material available to English speakers. Just checking stats for Wikipedia, the English version is many times larger than other versions and scores much better on all indices. For newer things like MOOCS and Quora, the gap is even larger, and a counterpart often doesn't even exist (Based on my experiences with Korean, my native language).
Could this spark a significant education gap between English speakers and non-speakers? Since learning through the web has only recently become competitive with traditional methods of learning, we shouldn't expect to see the bulk of the effects for at least a decade or so.
Given that most of the important scientific papers are in English there already a gap between people who can speak English and people who don't. I don't think that you can get a good position in a Western business these days if you can't speak any English.
I was thinking more in terms of nations. The top few percent of any country can already speak English and have all the resources necessary for learning. The education the rest get is largely determined by the quality of their country's educational system. MOOCs disrupt this pattern.
I personally didn't learn my English in the formal education system of Germany but on the internet.
I think that countries like Korea, China or Japan don't really provide students with much free time to learn English on their own or use MOOCs.
And ability to learn.
The greater the gap, the greater the incentive for non-speakers to narrow the gap by becoming speakers.
Yes, but only if the gap is known to exist.
I've never tried to fnord something before, did I do it right?
Frankenstein's monster doomsayers overwhelmed by Terminator's Skynet become ever-more clever singularity singularity the technological singularity idea that has taken on a life of its own techno-utopians wealthy middle-aged men singularity as their best chance of immortality Singularitarians prepared to go to extremes to stay alive for long enough to benefit from a benevolent super-artificial intelligence a man-made god that grants transcendence doomsayers the techno-dystopians Apocalypsarians equally convinced super-intelligent AI no interest in curing cancer or old age or ending poverty malevolently or maybe just accidentally bring about the end of human civilisation Hollywood Golem Frankenstein's monster Skynet and the Matrix fascinated by the old story man plays god and then things go horribly wrong singularity chain reaction even the smartest humans cannot possibly comprehend how it works out of control singularity technological singularity cautious and prepared optimistic obsessively worried by a hypothesised existential risk a sequence of big ifs risk while not impossible is improbable worrying unnecessarily we're falling into a trap fallacy taking our eyes off other risks none of this has brought about the end of civilisation a huge gulf obsessing about the risk of super-intelligent AI cautious and prepared we should be worrying about present-day AI rather than future super-intelligent AI.
Artificial intelligence will not turn into a Frankenstein's monster, Alan Winfield, Observer, Sunday 10 August 2014
Quoted in full from here:
I see the broad point Waytz is making, but the ranty delivery is pretty silly. Why is the doctor's act not selfless? It certainly appears to be motivated by altruism (even if that altruism is misguided, from a utilitarian perspective). Having a non-utilitarian moral code is not the same thing as selfishness.
Second, the anger in that comment seems to have more to do with a distaste for deontological altruistic gestures than anything else. I really doubt Waytz would be as mad if the doctor had simply decided that he had had enough of working in the medical profession and decided to open a bistro instead.
Source, it's from back in 2002
Not sure if this belongs here, but not sure where else it should go.
Many pages on the internet disappear, returning 404's when looking for them (especially older pages). The material I found on LW and OB is of such great quality that I would really hate it if a part of the pages here also disappeared (as in became harder to access for me). I am not sure if this is in any part realistic, but the thought does bother me. So I was hoping to somehow make a local backup of LW/OB, downloading all pages to a hard drive. There are other reasons for wanting this same thing: I am frequently in regions without internet access, and also this might finally allow me to organise the posts (the categories on LW leave much to be desired, the closest thing to a good structure I found is the chronological list on OB, which seems to be absent on LW?).
So my triple question: should I be worried about pages disappearing (probably not too much), would it still be a good idea to try to make a local backup (probably yes, storage is cheap and I think it would be useful for me personally to have LW offline, even only the older posts) and how does one go about this?
You might be interested in reading Gwern's page on Archiving URLs and Link Rot
Pages here are disappearing - someone's been going through the archive deleting posts they don't like. (c.f. [1] versus [2].) (The post is still slightly available, but the 152 comments are no longer associated with it.) So get archiving sooner rather than later.
Non-conventional thinking here, feel free to tell me why this is wrong/stupid/dangerous.
I am young and healthy, and when I catch a cold, I think " cool, when I recover immune system +1." I take this one step further though, when I don't get sick for a long time, I start to hope I get sick because I want to exercise my immune system. I know this might sound obviously wrong but can we just discuss why exactly?
My priors tell me that actively avoiding any germs and people to prevent getting sick is unhealthy. So I have lived my life not avoiding germs but also not asking people to cough on me either. But is there room to optimize? I caught something pretty nasty that lasted a month, and I am sure I got it from being at a large music festival breathing hot breathy air, but better now than catching that strain of what ever it was, when I am 70 right? And I don't mean I want to catch a serious case of pneumonia and potentially die, I mean what if there was a way to catch a strain of the common cold every now and then deliberately.
Maybe, but I don't think you can find out -- the data is too noisy and the variance is too big.
Besides, of course, the better your immune system gets, the more rarely will you get sick with infectious diseases...
There are over 100 strains of the common cold. If you gain immunity to one, this will not significantly decrease your chance of catching a cold in the far future. On the other hand, good hygiene will significantly decrease your chance of being infected by most contagious diseases.
He's not talking about gaining immunity in the vaccination sense. He's talking about developing a better, stronger immune system.
It's at least plausible that people become less vulnerable to colds as they get older.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/06/science/can-immunity-to-the-common-cold-come-with-age.html?_r=0
The catch I'd expect here is for the marginal immunological benefit from an extra cold to be less than the marginal cost of suffering an extra cold, although a priori I'm not sure which way a cost-benefit analysis would go.
It'd depend on how well colds help your immune system fight other diseases; the expected marginal number of colds prevented per extra cold suffered; the risk of longer-term side effects of colds; how the cost of getting sick changes with age (which you mentioned); the chance that you'll mistakenly catch something else (like influenza) if you try to catch someone else's cold; and the doloric cost of suffering through a cold. One might have to trawl through epidemiology papers to put usable numbers on these.
Consuming probiotics (or even specks of dirt picked up from the ground) might be easier & safer.
Your immune system is already being subjected to constant demands by the simple fact that you don't live in a quarantine bunker. Let it do its job. Intentional germ-seeking is reckless.
As a person living very far away from west Africa, how worried should I be about the current Ebola outbreak?
No, You're Not Going To Get Ebola
Sorry, realized I don't feel comfortable commenting on such a high-profile topic. Will wait a few minutes and then delete this comment (just to make sure there are no replies.)
(Not in any way an expert; just going by what I've heard elsewhere.) I think the answer probably depends substantially on how much you care about the welfare of West Africans. It is very unlikely to have any impact to speak of in the US or Western Europe, for instance.
TL;DR: Ebola is very hard to transmit person to person. Don't think flu, think STDs.
Ebola isn't airborne, so breathing the same air, being on the same plane as an Ebola case will not give you Ebola. It doesn't spread quite like STDs, but it does require getting an infected person's bodily fluids (urine, semen, blood, and vomit) mixed up in your bodily fluids or in contact with a mucous membrane.
So, don't sex up your recently returned Peace Corps friend who's been feeling a little fluish, and you should be a-ok.
A person infected with Ebola is very contagious during the period they are showing symptoms. The CDC recommends casual contact and droplet precautions.
Note the following description of (casual) contact:
(Much more contagious than an STD.)
But Lumifer is also correct. People without symptoms are not contagious, and people with symptoms are conspicuous (e.g. Patrick Sawyer was very conspicuous when he infected staff and healthcare workers in Nigeria) and unlikely to be ambulatory. The probability of a given person in West Africa being infected is very small (2000 cases divided by approximately 20 million people in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia) and the probability of a given person outside this area being infected is truly negligible. If we cannot contain the virus in the area, there will be a lot of time between the observation of a burning 'ember' (or 10 or 20) and any change in these probabilities -- plenty of time to handle and douse out any further hotspots that form.
The worst case scenario in my mind is that it continues unchecked in West Africa or takes hold in more underdeveloped countries. This scenario would mean more unacceptable suffering and would also mean the outbreak gets harder and harder to squash and contain, increasing the risk to all countries.
We need to douse it while it is relatively small -- I feel so frustrated when I hear there are hospitals in these regions without supplies such as protective gear. What is the problem? Rich countries should be dropping supplies already.
Um. Given that an epidemic is actually happening and given that more than one doctor attending Ebola patients got infected, I'm not sure that "very hard" is the right term here.
Having said that, if you don't live in West Africa your chances of getting Ebola are pretty close to zero. You should be much more afraid of lightning strikes, for example.
There is a common idea in the “critical thinking”/"traditional rationality" community that (roughly) you should, when exposed to an argument, either identify a problem with it or come to believe the argument’s conclusion. From a Bayesian framework, however, this idea seems clearly flawed. When presented with an argument for a certain conclusion, my failure to spot a flaw in the argument might be explained by either the argument’s being sound or by my inability to identify flawed arguments. So the degree to which I should update in either direction depends on my corresponding prior beliefs. In particular, if I have independent evidence that the argument’s conclusion is false and that my skills for detecting flaws in arguments are imperfect, it seems perfectly legitimate to say, “Look, your argument appears sound to me, but given what I know, both about the matter at hand and about my own cognitive abilities, it is much more likely that there’s a flaw in your argument which I cannot detect than that its conclusion is true.” Yet it is extremely rare to see LW folk or other rationalists say things like this. Why is this so?
This idea seems like a manifestation of epistemic learned helplessness.
Because the case where you are entirely wedded to a particular conclusion and want to just ignore the contrary evidence would look awfully similar...
In fact that case is just a special case of the former with you having bad priors.
Not quite, your priors might be good. We're talking here about ignoring evidence and that's a separate issue from whether your priors are adequate or not.
I say things like this a lot in contexts where I know there are experts, but I have put no effort into learning which are the reliable ones. So when someone asserts something about (a) nutritional science (b) Biblical translation nuances (c) assorted other things in this category, I tend to say, "I really don't have the relevant background to evaluate your argument, and it's not a field I'm planning to do the legwork to understand very well."
In my experience there are LW people who would in such cases simply declare that they won't be convinced of the topic at hand and suggest to change the subject.
I particularly remember a conversation at the LW community camp about geopolitics where a person simply declared that they aren't able to evaluate arguments on the matter and therefore won't be convinced.
A similar situation that used to happen frequently to me in real life, was when the argument was too long, too complex, used information that I couldn't verify... or ever could, but the verification would take a lot of time... something like: "There is this 1000 pages long book containing complex philosophical arguments and information from non-mainstream but cited sources, which totally proves that my religion is correct." And there is nothing obviously incorrect within the first five pages. But I am certainly not going to read it all. And the other person tries to use my self-image of an intelligent person against me, insisting that I should promise that I will read the whole book and then debate about it (which is supposedly the rational thing to do in such situation: hey, here is the evidence, you just refuse to look at it), or else I am not really intelligent.
And in such situations I just waved my hands and said -- well, I guess you just have to consider me unintelligent -- and went away.
I didn't think about how to formalize this properly. It was just this: I recognize the trap, and refuse to walk inside. If it happened to me these days, I could probably try explaining my reaction in Bayesian terms, but it would be still socially awkward. I mean, in the case of religion, the true answer would show that I believe my opponent is either dishonest or stupid (which is why I expect him to give me false arguments); which is not a nice thing to say to people. And yeah, it seems similar to ignoring evidence for irrational reasons.
Nothing, including rationality, requires you to look at ALL evidence that you could possibly access. Among other things, your time is both finite and valuable.
I actually do say things like this pretty frequently, though I haven't had the opportunity to do so on LW yet.
How to Work with "Stupid" People
The hypothesis is that people frequently underestimate the intelligence of those they work with. The article suggests some ways people could get the wrong impression, and some strategies for improving communications and relationships. It all seems very plausible.
However, the author doesn't offer any examples, and the comments are full of complaints about unchangeably stupid coworkers.
I believe I had the opposite problem most of my life. I was taught to be humble, to never believe I am better than anyone else, et cetera. Nice political slogans, and probably I should publicly pretend to believe it. But there is a problem that I have a lot of data of people doing stupid things, and I need some explanation. And of course, if I forbid myself to use the potentially correct explanation, then I am pushing myself towards the incorrect ones.
Sometimes the problem is that I didn't understand something, so the seemingly stupid behavior wasn't actually stupid, it was me not understanding something. Yes, sometimes this happens, so it is reasonable to consider this hypothesis seriously. But oftentimes, even after careful exploration, the stupid behavior is stupid. When people keep saying that 2+2=5, it could mean they have secret mathematical knowledge unknown to you; but it is more likely that they are simply wrong.
But the worse problem is that refusing to believe in other people's stupidity deprives you of wisdom of "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." Not believing in stupidity can make you paranoid, because if those people don't do stupid things because of stupidity, then they must have some purpose doing it. And if it's a stupid thing that happens to harm you, it means they hate you, or at least don't mind when you are harmed. Ignorance starts to seem like strategical plausible deniability.
I had to overcome my upbringing and say to myself: "Viliam, your IQ is at least four sigma over the average, so when many people seem retarded to you, even many university-educated people, that's because they really are retarded, compared with you. They are usually not passively aggressive; they are trying to do their best, their best is just often very unimpressive to you (but probably impressive in their own eyes, and in eyes of their peers). You are expecting from them more than they can realistically provide; and they often even don't understand what you are saying. And they live in their world, where they are the norm; you are the exception. And it will never change, so you better get used to it, otherwise you prepare yourself for a lifetime of disappointment."
From that moment, when I see someone doing something stupid, I consider a hypothesis "maybe that's the best their intelligence allows them to do". And suddenly, I am not angry at most people around me. They are nice people, they are just not my equals, and it's not their fault. Often they have a knowledge that I don't have, and I can learn from them. (Intelligence does not equal knowledge.) But also, they often do something completely stupid that likely doesn't seem stupid in their eyes. I should not assume that everything they do makes sense. I should not expect them to able to understand everything I am trying to explain; I can try, but I shouldn't become too involved in it; sometimes I have to give up and accept some stupidity as a part of my environment.
The proper way to work with stupid people is to realize their limitations and don't blame them for not being what you want them to be. (Of course you should always check whether your estimates are correct. But they are not always wrong.)
That blog post assumes that actual stupidity is never the "real" problem. I beg to disagree.
Or does it?
This seems to mean exactly "maybe they are stupid after all", but expressed using a different set of words.
(I would guess that the author at some point adopted "never think that someone is stupid" as a deontological rule, and then unintentionally evolved a different set of words to be able to think about stupidity without triggering the filter...)
You're right. I'm sure that actual stupidity is sometimes the real problem. On the other hand, it would surprise me if it's always the real problem. At that point, the question becomes how much effort is worth putting in.
I think purely from a fundamental attribution error point of view we should expect the average "stupid" person we encounter to be less stupid than they seem.
(which is not to say stupidity doesn't exist of course, just that we might tend to overestimate its prevalence)
I guess the other question would be, are there any biases that might lead us to underestimate someone's stupidity? Illusion of transparency, perhaps, or the halo effect? I still think we're on net biased against thinking other people are as smart as us.
Sex appeal, of course :-D
Are you saying that charlatans and cranks don't exist or at least never manage to obtain any followers?
Anybody have any advice on how to successfully implement doublethink?
Once upon a time I tried using what I could coin "quicklists". I took a receipt, turned it over to the back (clear side), and jotted down 5-10 things that I wanted to believe. Then I set a timer for 24 hours and, before that time elapsed, acted as if I believed those things. My experiment was too successful; by the time 24 hours were up I had ended up in a different county, with little recollection of what I'd been doing, and some policemen asking me pointed questions. (I don't believe any drugs were involved, just sleep deprivation, but I can't say for certain).
More recently, I rented and saw the film Memento, which explores these techniques in a fictional setting. The concept of short-term forgetting seemed reasonable and the techniques the character uses to work around it are easily adapted in real life. My initial test involved printing out a pamphlet with some dentistry stuff in tiny type (7 12-pt pages shrunk to fit on front-back of 1 page, folded in quarters), and carrying it with me to my dentist appointment. I was able to discuss most of the things from my pamphlet, and it did seem that the level of conversation was raised, but there were many other variables as well so it's hard to quantify the exact effect.
I'm not certain these techniques actually count as "doublethink", since the contradiction is between my "internal" beliefs and the beliefs I wrote down, but it does allow some exploration of the possibilities beyond rationality. I can override my system 2 with a piece of paper, and then system 1 follows.
NB: Retrieving your original beliefs after you've been going off of the ones from the paper is left as an exercise to the student
I would like to read more about this. Would you consider writing it up?
I have been considering finding a group of writers/artists to associate with in order to both provide me a catalyst for self-improvement and a set of peers who are serious about their work. I have several friends who are "into" writing or comics or whatever other medium, but most of them are as "into" it as the time between video games, drinking, and staying up late to binge Dexter episodes allows.
We have a whole sequences here on LessWrong about the Craft and the Community. So I don't feel the need to provide some bits of anecdotal evidence for why I think having a community for your craft is a good idea.
Instead, I'll just ask, to the writers: how have you found a community for your craft/have you bothered?
I put writing online for free and siphoned off spare HPMoR fans until I had enough fanbase to maintain my own stable of beta readers, set of tumblr tags, and modestly populated forum. This is more how I cultivated a fandom than a set of colleagues, but some of the people I collected this way also cowrite with me and most of them are available to spur me along.
On the limits of rationality given flawed minds —
There is some fraction of the human species that suffers from florid delusions, due to schizophrenia, paraphrenia, mania, or other mental illnesses. Let's call this fraction D. By a self-sampling assumption, any person has a D chance of being a person who is suffering from delusions. D is markedly greater than one in seven billion, since delusional disorders are reported; there is at least one living human suffering from delusions.
Given any sufficiently interesting set of priors, there are some possible beliefs that have a less than D chance of being true. For instance, Ptolemaic geocentrism seems to me to have a less than D chance of being true. So does the assertion "space aliens are intervening in my life to cause me suffering as an experiment."
If I believe that a belief B has a < D chance of being true, and then I receive what I think is strong evidence supporting B, how can I distinguish the cases "B is true, despite my previous belief that it is quite unlikely" and "I have developed a delusional disorder, despite delusional disorders being quite rare"?
For you to rule out a belief (e.g. geocentrism) as totally unbelievable, not only does it have to be less likely than insanity, it has to be less likely than insanity that looks like rational evidence for geocentrism.
You can test yourself for other symptoms of delusions - and one might think "but I can be deluded about those too," but you can think of it like requiring your insanity to be more and more specific and complicated, and therefore less likely.
The relevant number is probably not D (the fraction of people who suffer from delusions) but a smaller number D0 (the fraction of people who suffer from this particular kind of delusion). In fact, not D0 but the probably-larger-in-this-context number D1 (the fraction of people in situations like yours before this happened who suffer from the particular delusion in question).
On the other hand, something like the original D is also relevant: the fraction of people-like-you whose reasoning processes are disturbed in a way that would make you unable to evaluate the available evidence (including, e.g., your knowledge of D1) correctly.
Aside from those quibbles, some other things you can do (mostly already mentioned by others here):
The simple answer is to ask someone else, or better yet a group; if D is small, then D^2 or D^4 will be infinitesimal. However, delusions are "infectious" (see Mass hysteria), so this is not really a good method unless you're mostly isolated from the main population.
The more complicated answer is to track your beliefs and the evidence for each belief, and then when you get new evidence for a belief, add it to the old evidence and re-evaluate. For example, replacing an old wives' tale with a peer-reviewed study is (usually) a no-brainer. On the other hand, if you have conflicting peer-reviewed studies, then your confidence in both should decrease and you should go back to the old wives' tale (which, being old, is probably useful as a belief, regardless of truth value).
Finally, the defeatist answer is that you can't actually distinguish that you are delusional. With the film Shutter Island in mind, I hope you can see that almost nothing is going to shake delusions; you'll just rationalize them away regardless. If you keep notes on your beliefs, you'll dismiss them as being written by someone else. People will either pander to your fantasy or be dismissed as crooks. Every day will be a new one, starting over from your deluded beliefs. In such a situation there's not much hope for change.
For the record, I disagree with "delusional disorders being quite rare"; I believe D is somewhere between 0.5 and 0.8. Certainly, only 3% of these are "serious", but I could fill a book with all of the ways people believe something that isn't true.
Given replication rates of scientific studies a single study might not be enough. Single studies that go against your intuition are not enough reason to update. Especially if you only read the abstract.
No need to get people to wash their hands before you do a business deal with them.
What sort of beliefs are you talking about here? Are you classifying simply being wrong about something as a "delusional disorder"?
Exhibiting symptoms often considered as signs of mental illness. For example, this says 38.6% of general people have hallucinations. This says 40% of general people had paranoid thoughts. Presumably these groups aren't exactly the same, so there you go: between 0.5 and 0.8 of the general population. You can probably pull together some more studies with similar results for other symptoms.
The basic idea is to talk about your belief in detail with a trusted friend that you consider sane.
Writing your own thought processes down in a diary also helps to be better able to evaluate it.
What it means to be statistically educated, a list by the American Statistical Association. Not half bad.
Anchoring in marathon runners.
That's a pretty cool histogram in figure 2.
Thought that people (particularly in the UK) might be interested to see this, a blog from one of the broadsheets on Bostrom's Superintelligence
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/tomchiversscience/100282568/a-robot-thats-smarter-than-us-theres-one-big-problem-with-that/
Another attempt at a sleep sensor, currently funded on Kickstarter.
I've been looking for tools to help organize complex arguments and systems into diagrams, and ran into Flying Logic and Southbeach modeller. Could anyone here with experience using these comment on their value?
I don't have experience with those, but I'll recommend Graphviz as a free (and useful) alternative. See e.g. http://k0s.org/mozilla/workflow.svg
And UnBBayes does computational analyses, similar to Flying Logic, except it uses Bayesian probability.
Suppose you wanted to find out all the correlates for particular Big Five personality traits. Where would you look, besides the General Social Survey?
Would 'Google Scholar' be too glib an answer here?
It gave me mostly psychological and physiological correlates. I'm interested more in behavioral and social/economic things. I suppose you can get from the former to the latter, though with much less confidence than a directly observed correlation.
Your answer is exactly as glib as it should be, but only because I didn't really specify what I'm curious about.
Another piece of potentially useful information that may be new to some folks here: sleeping more ~7.5 hours is associated to a higher mortality risk (and the risk is comparable to sleeping less than ~5 hours).
Relevant literature reviews:
Cappuccio FP, D'Elia L, Strazzullo P, et al. Sleep duration and all-cause mortality: a systematic review and meta-analysis of prospective studies. Sleep 2010;33(5):585-592.
Grandner MA, Hale L, Moore M, et al . Mortality associated with short sleep duration: the evidence, the possible mechanisms, and the future. Sleep Med Rev 2010;14(3):191-203.
Grandner MA, Drummond SP. Who are the long sleepers? Towards an understanding of the mortality relationship. Sleep Med Rev. Oct 2007;11(5):341–60.
I don't find these results to be of much value. There's a long history of various sleep-duration correlations turning out to be confounds from various diseases and conditions (as your quote discusses), so there's more than usual reason to minimize the possibility of causation, and if you do that, why would anyone care about the results? I don't think a predictive relationship is much good for say retirement planning or diagnosing your health from your measured sleep. And on the other hand, there's plenty of experimental studies on sleep deprivation, chronic or acute, affecting mental and physical health, which overrides these extremely dubious correlates. It's not a fair fight.
Yes, my primary reason for posting these studies was actually to elicit a discussion about the kinds of conclusions we may or may not be entitled to draw from them (though I failed to make this clear in my original comment). I would like to have a better epistemic framework for drawing inferences from correlational studies, and it is unclear to me whether the sheer (apparent) poor track-record of correlational studies when assessed in light of subsequent experiments is enough to dismiss them altogether as sources of evidence for causal hypotheses. And if we do accept that sometimes correlational studies are evidentially causally relevant, can we identify an explicit set of conditions that need to obtain for that to be the case, or are these grounds so elusive that we can only rely on subjective judgment and intuition?
New open thread
Oh, dear.
Harry Potter And The Cryptocurrency of Stars
I'm at Otakon 2014, and there was a panel today about philosophy and videogames. The description read like Less Wrongese. I couldn't get in (it was full) but I'm wondering if anyone here was responsible for it.
A history of anime fandom
I'm not vouching for this, but it sounds plausible.
Is there a way to see if I can vote both ways?
A month or so ago I started to get errors saying I can't downvote. I don't really care that much (it's not me that's gaining from my vote), but if I can't downvote I want to make sure I don't upvote so I don't bias things.
Your downvotes are limited by your karma (I think it's four downvotes to a karma point). I don't think you will meaningfully bias anything if you continue to upvote things you like while accumulating enough karma to downvote again.
That they are, even when everything works perfectly. There was also an error a while ago that gave the same error message to (some?) people who were not at their limit.
Yeah it's the principle. I guess I'll just try a down before I up going forward. Thanks Al
I had those too. It stopped rather quickly.
Physics puzzle: Being exposed to cold air while the wind is blowing causes more heat loss/feels colder than simply being exposed to still cold air.
So, if the ambient air temperature is above body temperature, and ignoring the effects of evaporation, would a high wind cause more heat gain/feel warmer than still hot air?
Yes, though ignoring the effects of evaporation is ignoring a major factor.
Yes, it's how hair dryers work.
Yes. Your body would try to cool your face exposed to hot air by circulating more blood through it, creating a temperature gradient through the surface layer. Consequently, the air nearest your face would be colder than ambient. A wind would blow away the cooler air, resulting in the air with ambient temperature touching your skin. Of course, in reality humidity and sweating are major factors, negating the above analysis.
Yes. This happens sometimes in a really wet Sauna.
But conditions in which you actually feel this also kill you in less than a day. You need to lose about 100 W of heat in order to keep a stable body temperature, and moving air only feels hotter than still air if you are gaining heat from the air.
What is the general opinion on neurofeedback? Apparently there is scientific evidence pointing to its efficacy, but have there been controlled studies showing greater benefit to neurofeedback over traditional methods if they are known?
I have done a lot of neurofeedback. It's more of an art than a science right now. I think there have been many studies that have shown some benefit, although I don't know if any are long-term. But the studies might not be of much value since there is so much variation in treatment since it is supposed to be customized for your brain. The first step is going to a neurofeedback provider and having him or her look at your qEEG to see how your brain differs from a typical persons' brain. Ideally for treatment, you would say I have this problem, and the provider would say, yes this is due to your having ... and with 20 sessions we can probably improve you. Although I am not a medical doctor, I would strongly advise anyone who can afford it to try neurufeedback before they try drugs such as anti-depressants.
Does anyone have any experience or thoughts regarding Cal Newport's "Study Hacks" blog, or his books? I'm trying to get an idea of how reliable his advice is before, saying, reading his book about college, or reading all of the blog archives.
Some LW discussions of his books: A summary and broad points of agreement and disagreement with Cal Newport's book on high school extracurriculars, Book Review: So Good They Can’t Ignore You, by Cal Newport, The failed simulation effect and its implications for the optimization of extracurricular activities.
Cognito Mentoring refer to him a fair bit, and often in mild agreement. Check their blog and wiki.
Scicast: I mentioned this last open thread, but it was late in the month and got buried. Who here participates on scicast? I'm there under this name. It would be good to get a tally of how much LW prescience there is and how we as a group are doing. So if you're there, sound off