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
Many religious believers, including (I think) the great majority of Christians, anticipate a future state in which sin and suffering and death will be no more. I'm pretty sure they see this as a good thing, whether they anticipate losing their free will to get it or not.
I've heard arguments that we've already reached that state - think about if you go back in time about two thousand years and describe modern medical technology and lifestyles. (I don't agree with those arguments, mind you, but I do think that such a future state is going to have to be something that we build, not that we are given.
it doesn't seem difficult to envisage ways in which omnipotence in the service of perfect goodness could improve the world substantially.
It's difficult to be certain.
For instance, consider a world exactly like this one except that whenever any cell in any animal's body (human or other) gets into a state that would lead to a malignant tumour, God magically kills it. Boom, no more cancer.
Now I'm imagining a lot of scientists studying and trying to figure out why some cells just mysteriously vanish for no good reason - and this becoming the greatest unsolved question in medical science and taking all the attention of people who might otherwise be figuring out cures for TB or various types of flu. (In this hypothetical universe, they wouldn't know about malignant tumours, of course).
And if someone would otherwise develop a LOT of cancer, then Sudden Cell Vanishing Syndrome could, in itself, become a major problem...
Mind, I'm not saying it's certain that universe would be worse, or even that it's probable. It's just easy to see how that universe could be worse.
For an instance of a very different kind, imagine that one day people who pray actually start getting answers. Consistently. I don't mean obliging answers to petitionary prayers, I mean communication
That would be interesting. And you raise a lot of good points - there would be a lot of positive effects. But, at the same time... I think HPMOR showed quite nicely that sometimes, having a list of instructions with regard to what to do is a good deal less valuable than being able to understand the situation, take responsibility, and do it yourself.
People would still have free will, yes. But how many people would voluntarily abdicate their decision-making processes to simply do what the voice in the sky tells them to do (except the bits where it says "THINK FOR YOURSELVES")?
...this is something which I think would probably be a net benefit. But I can't be certain.
I think your conditions a,b,c are too strict
...very probably.
Perhaps, e.g., a better world is possible that could be created by sustained human effort with everyone working together but won't because actually, in practice, in the world we've got, everyone doesn't work together.
That just means that a better world needs to be designed that can be created under the constraints of not everyone working together. It's a hard problem, but I don't think it's entirely insoluble.
And (this is a point I think is constantly missed) whyever should we treat human nature, as it now is, as a given? Could your god really not have arranged for humanity to be a little nicer and smarter?
That is a good question. I have no good answers for it.
why on earth should we, when considering what better worlds there might be, only consider candidates in which "there are as many criminals and greedy people as in this world"?
...less criminals and greedy people would make things a lot easier, but I'm not quite sure how to arrange that without either (a) reducing free will or (b) mass executions, which could cause other problems.
I've heard arguments that we've already reached that state
Then I suggest that you classify the people making those arguments as Very Silly and don't listen to them in future.
I do think that such a future state is going to have to be something that we build, not that we are given.
You're welcome to think that; my point is simply that if such a thing is possible and desirable then either one can have a better world than this without abrogating free will, or else free will isn't as important as theists often claim it is when confronted with arguments fr...
Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are: