I consider that I understand an equation when I can predict the properties of its solutions, without actually solving it.
-- Paul Dirac
if we want economics to be a science, we have to recognize that it is not ok for macroeconomists to hole up in separate camps, one that supports its version of the geocentric model of the solar system and another that supports the heliocentric model. As scientists, we have to hold ourselves to a standard that requires us to reach a consensus about which model is right, and then to move on to other questions.
The alternative to science is academic politics, where persistent disagreement is encouraged as a way to create distinctive sub-group identities.
--Paul Romer, NYU, "My Paper “Mathiness in the Theory of Economic Growth”
What if everyone knows that all the models are flawed, but the geocentric model makes the best predictions in one sub-domain, and the heliocentric model in another?
Then the most important question for any model would be what domains it's good at.
For example: one model approximates the population as infinite, so it gets decent predictions when the number of agents in each category exceeds five (this is rare).
These requirements to apply the model should be the first thing taught about the model.
In 1736 I lost one of my sons, a fine boy of four years old, by the small-pox, taken in the common way. I long regretted bitterly, and still regret that I had not given it to him by inoculation. This I mention for the sake of parents who omit that operation, on the supposition that they should never forgive themselves if a child died under it; my example showing that the regret may be the same either way, and that, therefore, the safer should be chosen.
Ben Franklin
Our ideal in crafting an argument is a skeptical but friendly audience, suitable to the context. A skeptical audience is questioning of our observations, not swayed by emotional appeals, but not so skeptical as to be dismissive. The ideal audience is curious; humble, but not stupid. It is an idealized version of ourselves at our best,
Max Shron, Thinking with Data, O'Reily 2014
It would be nice to think that you can trust powerful people who are aware that power corrupts. But this turns out not to be the case.
What I’m objecting to here is the idea—encouraged, I fear, by lots and lots of statistics textbooks, including my own, that you can routinely learn eternal truths about human nature via these little tabletop experiments.
Andrew Gelman, The aching desire for regular scientific breakthroughs
“Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.”
As a rule, news is a distraction from worthy intellectual pursuits.
-- Bryan Caplan, expanded here
...I believe in articulate discussion (in monologue or dialogue) of how one solves problems, of why one goofed that one, of what gaps or deformations exist in one's knowledge and of what could be done about it. I shall defend this belief against two quite distinct objections. One objection says: "it's impossible to verbalize; problems are solved by intuitive acts of insight and these cannot be articulated." The other objection says: "it's bad to verbalize; remember the centipede who was paralyzed when the toad asked which leg came after which.
...I sought good judgment mostly by collecting instances of bad judgment, then pondering ways to avoid such outcomes... I became so avid a collector of instances of bad judgment that I paid no attention to boundaries between professional territories. After all, why should I search for some tiny, unimportant, hard-to-find new stupidity in my own field when some large, important, easy-to-find stupidity was just over the fence in the other fellow's professional territory? Besides, I could already see that real-world problems didn't neatly lie within territoria
That sounds clever, but is it actually anywhere near true?
I went to the Wikipedia "timeline of science" page and sampled a bunch of 20th-century advances. Maybe about 10. Not one of them had anything to do with anyone being forced to change fields.
I have no idea who Peter Borden is (nor for that matter any idea whether he actually said it: "Most quotations on the internet are made up" -- Abraham Lincoln) but I would at this point suspect him of being too ready to believe things merely because they sound good.
The barriers are not erected which can say to aspiring talents and industry, 'Thus far and no farther.'
Ludwig van Beethoven
Literature and Music in the Atlantic World, 1767-1867
In an important sense, scientific knowledge does not exist at all until it has been submitted to the scientific community for criticism and empirical testing by others.
Keith E. Stanovich in How to Think Straight About Psychology
...I am suggesting that we move too quickly to the view that rationalism is always an assault on the romantic soul, that it is a symptom of anxiety about our own madly passionate natures, or that it is a flight from love. Instead, rationalism may have its adaptive side, one that seeks to reinforce the ego structures needed to experience the passionate intensity of human emotions. It is possible to see rationalism not as an escape from romanticism, not as a defensive maneuver to protect the self from the excesses of desire, but instead as an effort to master,
...I recommend that before setting out to beat the market, you worry about whether you’ll be able to do as well as the market. The typical investor does worse than the market averages, usually due to buying more when the market is high than when it is low. Take a few minutes to imagine that you will be influenced by the mood of other investors to be pessimistic when the market has been doing poorly, and optimistic when the market has been doing well. Also imagine that you will have more money available to invest when the market is high than when it is low. I
Three of the most important [aspects of science] are that (1) science employs methods of systematic empiricism; (2) it aims for knowledge that is publicly verifiable; and (3) it seeks problems that are empirically solvable and that yield testable theories.
Keith E. Stanovich in How to Think Straight About Psychology
A man who lies to himself is often the first to take offense. It sometimes feels very good to take offense, doesn't it? And surely he knows that no one has offended him, and that he himself has invented the offense and told lies just for the beauty of it, that he has exaggerated for the sake of effect, that he has picked on a word and made a mountain out of a pea -- he knows all of that, and still he is the first to take offense, he likes feeling offended, it gives him great pleasure, and thus he reaches the point of real hostility
"The Brothers Karamazov", Dostoyevsky
...In computer science, a problem is said to have optimal substructure if an optimal solution can be constructed efficiently from optimal solutions of its subproblems. This property is used to determine the usefulness of dynamic programming and greedy algorithms for a problem.[1]
Typically, a greedy algorithm is used to solve a problem with optimal substructure if it can be proved by induction that this is optimal at each step.[1] Otherwise, provided the problem exhibits overlapping subproblems as well, dynamic programming is used. If there are no appropriate
...if the Taj Mahal happens to be made of white tiles held to brown granite by tan grotte, there is nothing to prevent you from affirming that the Taj Mahal is white and the Taj Mahal is brown and the Taj Mahal is tan, and claiming both tan and brown to lie in the area of significance space we’ve marked as ‘nonwhite’—”
“Wait a second: Part of the Taj Mahal is white, and part of the Taj Mahal is brown, and part of the Taj Mahal is—”
“The solution’s even simpler than that. You see, just like ‘white,’ the words ‘Taj Mahal’ have a range of significance that ext
But maybe making everyone equal is not what we are looking for. Maybe we are looking for bringing everyone up, and everyone doing the best they can do, rather than only bringing up those at the lower end.
Tomorrow is the busiest day of the week -
Originally read in the rescuetime website inside my account.
The free-market system has salient flaws and hidden benefits. All other systems have hidden flaws and salient benefits.
We really have to think of reasoning the way we think of romance, it takes two to tango. There has to be a communication.
Daniel Dennett in TAM 2014 - Panel: Can Rationality Be Taught?
The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.
Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower.
-- Karl Marx, in A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right
Before seeing this I thought you rejected all priors based on Kolmogorov complexity, as that seemed like the only way to save your position. (From what you said before you've read at least some of what Eliezer wrote on the difficulty of writing an AGI program. Hopefully you've read about the way that an incautious designer could create levers which do nothing, since the human brain is inclined to underestimate its own complexity.)
While guessing is clearly risky, it seems like you're relying on the idea that a program to simulate the right kind of "omnipotent, omniscient being" would necessarily show it creating our laws of physics. Otherwise it would appear absurd to compare the complexity of the omni-being to that of physics alone. (It also sounds like you're talking about a fundamentally mental entity, not a kind of local tyrant existing within physics.) But you haven't derived any of our physics from even a more specific theistic hypothesis, nor did the many intelligent people who thought about the logical implications of God in the Middle Ages! Do you actually think they just failed to come up with QM or thermodynamics because they didn't think about God enough?
Earlie...
People condition on information that isn’t true.
Andrew Gelman, "The belief was so strong that it trumped the evidence before them."
I am not saying we should discard our intuitions about relative outrage, but we ought to look at them more closely rather than just riding them to a quick conclusion.
Tyler Cowen, "Just How Guilty Is Volkswagon?"
...investors (index funds, diversified mutual funds, whatever) who own shares in multiple companies in the same industry cause those companies to compete with each other less vigorously. These investors want to maximize the profits of the industry, not the individual firm, and fierce competition is not in their interests. So -- the theory goes -- managers increasingly manage in the interests of those investors, leading to less competition, higher prices for consumers and a host of other problems. Posner and Weyl blame institutional investors for income inequ
investors (index funds, diversified mutual funds, whatever) who own shares in multiple companies in the same industry cause those companies to compete with each other less vigorously. These investors want to maximize the profits of the industry, not the individual firm, and fierce competition is not in their interests. So -- the theory goes -- managers increasingly manage in the interests of those investors, leading to less competition, higher prices for consumers and a host of other problems. Posner and Weyl blame institutional investors for income inequality. Elhauge blames them for runaway executive pay, and for the rise in corporate profits unaccompanied by economic growth and investment.
None of this has much to do with voting. Shareholder voting just isn't very important; it's not like shareholders get to vote on airline ticket prices or route decisions. If you think that institutional investors are causing managers to stop competing, there are more plausible mechanisms for that than voting. Just leaving managers alone, for instance, probably itself tends toward anti-competitiveness: If shareholders don't pester management, they will probably compete less hard, just because that is easier. "Voting with their feet" is another: If shareholders invest indifferently in both the best and the fourth-best firm in an industry, that will keep up the fourth-best firm's stock price and lower the best's, reducing incentives to be the best. Or there is just fiduciary duty: Managers may want to do what's in their shareholders' best interests because that is what they are supposed to be doing. Even if the shareholders don't actively force them to.
...
Should companies be managed as a self-contained unit, maximizing the value of their own shares for their shareholders? Or should they be managed as part of a marketplace influenced by modern portfolio theory, maximizing the value of their -- mostly diversified -- shareholders' overall investments?
More abstractly, this is a fight over how to conceive of corporate capitalism. The old-fashioned way of thinking is organized around distinct companies. Company X is its own thing; its managers should dislike the managers of Company Y, its workers should dislike the workers of Company Y, its consumers should dislike the products of Company Y and its shareholders should dislike the shareholders of Company Y. And all of them should like each other: They're all in it together, down at Company X, against the world.
The modern way of thinking abstracts shareholders away from their companies : Company X isn't Company X, it's just a beta, a collection of risk factors that deserve a certain weight in your portfolio. Shareholders have no emotional connection to any particular company. They follow investing best practices, seeking diversification and shareholder-friendly governance and efficient capital allocation and maximum risk-adjusted return. And by abandoning individual companies, shareholders attain a certain class consciousness, pushing all companies to do what is right for the shareholder class, rather than pushing each company to do what is right for itself. This is the dominant line of thinking in modern finance. You can see why some people find it scary.
Now, for myself, I wouldn't ban index funds. Most of my money is in index funds. I am willing to believe that sometimes managers act anticompetitively because they think it's in shareholders' best interests, but the evidence of the magnitude of the problem seems a bit thin, and I think that the well-established benefits of diversification outweigh the still uncertain costs.
Index Funds, first posted by Lumifer (thanks)
Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are: