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Prediction: Government regulations greatly reduce economic growth. Trump, with the help of the Republican Congress, is going to significantly cut regulations and this is going to supercharge economic growth allowing Trump to win reelection in a true landslide.
Do you want to put a probability on that? Also, break it down into a bunch of steps. Be precise. Include timelines.
Has anything like that every happened in the entire history of the world? In four years? For example, most of what Reagan is credited with doing to the economy was either done by Carter or in Reagan's second term.
Why do you believe that federal regulations are a significant portion of the total?
Has anything like that every happened in the entire history of the world
Yes, China after Mao.
It might not just be federal regulations. For example, if Republicans passed a freedom to build law that allowed landowners to quickly get permission to build we would see a massive construction boom.
Derek Parfit (author of "Reasons and Persons", a very influential work of analytic philosophy much of which is concerned with questions of personal identity and which comes up with decidedly LW-ish answers to most of its questions) has died. (He actually died a few weeks ago, but I only just heard of it, and I haven't seen his death mentioned on LW.)
A few years ago I used to be a hothead. Whenever anyone said anything, I’d think of a way to disagree. I’d push back hard if something didn’t fit my world-view.
It’s like I had to be first with an opinion – as if being first meant something. But what it really meant was that I wasn’t thinking hard enough about the problem. The faster you react, the less you think. Not always, but often.
Hi everyone,
I'm a PhD candidate at Cornell, where I work on logic and philosophy of science. I learned about Less Wrong from Slate Star Codex and someone I used to date told me she really liked it. I recently started a blog where I plan to post my thoughts about random topics: http://necpluribusimpar.net. For instance, I wrote a post (http://necpluribusimpar.net/slavery-and-capitalism/) against the widely held but false belief that much of the US wealth derives from slavery and that without slavery the industrial revolution wouldn't have happened, as well ...
How do you weight the opinion of people whose arguments you do not accept? Say you have 10 friends who all believe with 99% confidence in proposition A. You ask them why they believe A, and the arguments they produce seem completely bogus or incoherent to you. But perhaps they have strong intuitive or aesthetic reasons to believe A, which they simply cannot articulate. Should you update in favor of A or not?
I'm curious if anybody here frequents retraction watch enough to address this concern I have.
I find articles here very effective at announcing retractions and making testimonies from lead figures in investigations a frequent fallback, but rarely do you get to see the nuts and bolts of the investigations being discussed. For example, "How were the journals misleading?" or "What evidence was or was not analyzed, and how did the journal's analysis deviate from correct protocol?" are questions I often ask myself as I read, followed by an ur...
In a crack of time between doing my last data analysis for my PhD and writing my thesis, I couldn't stop myself from churning out a brief sparsely-sourced astrobiology blog post in which I argue that the limited lifespan of planetary geospheres and the decay of star formation rates means that even though the vast majority of star-years are in the distant future around long-lived small stars, we are still a typical observer in that we are occurring less than 15 billion years into an apparently open-ended universe.
https://thegreatatuin.wordpress.com/2017/01/29/on-the-death-of-planets/
I think either you're misunderstanding the paper, or I'm misunderstanding you. (Or of course both.) The point isn't that scientists should be looking at consensus instead of actually doing science; of course they shouldn't. It's that for someone who isn't an expert in the field and isn't in a position to do their own research, the opinions of those who are experts and have done their own research are very useful information. (In cases -- such as this one -- where there is near unanimity among the experts, I think the only reasonable options are "accep...
I'm new to writing resumes and am currently writing one for an internship application. I don't know if trying to optimize for uniqueness or quirkiness comes at significant social costs, or if there are many benefits. If anyone is good at this sort of thing (listing / bragging skills), general tips would be very welcome.
Several state attorneys general have initiated them.
Could you give some examples? I'm failing to find any instances where any such action has actually been brought.
What I can find is an investigation by several state AGs into ExxonMobil, which appears to be focusing on what EM's management knew about climate change; there's some suggestion that they're now digging into possible misrepresentations of how big oil reserves are, presumably with a view to arguing that they misled investors. Note that investigating what Exxon management knew about climate cha...
OK, and how is this distinction supposed to manifest in practice?
One distinction is that someone accused under (2) could defend themselves by showing that they genuinely didn't believe anyone was paying attention to their expression of disbelief in global warming, whereas that defence presumably wouldn't be open to them under (1).
[..] in any case when (2) happens who exactly will be forbidden to assert that global worming isn't real? Does it matter if [...]?
Since it suffices to give one operationalizable difference between (1) & (2) for gjm's cl...
Catholic theologians are experts in what the Roman Catholic Church believes. If you claim that the RCC isn't really trinitarian, then "bullshit, look at what all the Catholic theologians say" is a perfectly good response.
They claim (or at least let's suppose arguendo that they do) to be experts on the actual facts about God. It turns out they're wrong about that. So ... is their situation nicely parallel to that of climate scientists?
Why, no. Look at all the people in the world who claim to be God-experts and have studied long and hard, got fancy...
Suggestion to sticky the welcome thread. Stickying the welcome thread to the sidebar would encourage participation/comments/content. And perhaps in the future add emphasis on communication norms to the thread, specifically that negative reception and/or lack of reception is more obvious on LessWrong – So have thick skin and do not take it personal. I'd imagine that quality control will be what it has always been, critical comments.
I have just read a debate about whether high-IQ kids should be allowed to attend special schools, and the debate was predictable. So I used this as an opportunity to summarize the arguments against "smart segregation". (The arguments in favor of it seem quite straightforward: better education, less bullying, social and professional company of equals.) Here are the results; please tell me if some frequently-made argument is missing.
Note: different arguments here contradict each other, which is okay, because they are typically not made by the same ...
Thoughts on punching nazis? I can't really wrap my head around why there are so many people who think it's 100% ok to punch nazis. Not sure if discussion about this has happened elsewhere (if so please direct me!) . For the purposes of this discussion let's ignore whether or not the alt-right counts as Nazism and speak only about a hypothetical Nazi ideological group.
I understand to some extent the argument that reasonable discussion with Nazis is almost certainly futile and that they are perhaps a danger to others, however my main concerns with punching ...
some clothing, e.g., high heels, is rather impractical
I beg to disagree. To speak of practicality you need to have a specific goal in mind. High heels are very impractical for running, but they are quite practical for attracting the attention of a potential mate.
Do continue trying to put words into my mouth. That's absolutely going to convince me that it's worth responding to you with good arguments.
Note that the people doing the prosecution haven't presented any evidence of "promulgation of assertions that global warming isn't real in order to gain an unfair competitive advantage in a marketplace" beyond the fact that the people in question are asserting that global warming isn't real.
Are there in fact any such prosecutions yet? (I don't think there are, but maybe there are and I missed them.)
Does it matter if they believe it is in fact not real, does it matter if they have evidence?
Yes, because the proposed prosecutions are under la...
I think that "tribal bias" is the norm, not the exception, and accusing someone of having their reasoning messed with, to some extent, by tribal biases is a little like accusing them of having shit that stinks. I'd much rather hold off and only criticize people when they deal with visible bias poorly, and It's legitimately hard enough to see your own tribal biases and how they affect your thinking that I'm a little hesitant to accuse someone of being blatantly dishonest because they don't see and correct for what looks like a bias to me. Especial...
I upvoted you because I think your explanation of Lumifer's point there is correct and needed to be said.
However, I'd like to comment on this bit:
Given that gjm has just demonstrated that (3) is false, I'm inclined to believe the real reason for your bias is that you belong to a tribe where agreeing with gjm's conclusion is high status.
I don't think this is fair to take away gjm's entire reputation based on one disagreement or even one confirmed counterexample.
I also think it's premature to conclude that satt is biased here due to tribal beliefs, beca...
We have satellite temperature data since the late 70s. Before that, yes, there is opportunity for shenanigans.
Economic growth basically means that workers get more productive. Less hours of work means more output. GDP growth is not really possible without making workers more efficient.
It's interesting how in the last years the old luddie arguments got revived. The idea that automation means that there won't be any jobs anymore get's more and more popular.
Does anyone have an electronic copy of the Oxford Handbook of Metamemory that they're willing to share?
Are there any forums explicitly about how to think about and act to best make humanity survive its future?
Our consensus is pretty unalterably "Build an AI God".
Kinda. The LW's position is "We will make a God, how do we make sure He likes us?"
The first part I feel like I’ve already addressed and haven’t seen a response to (the difference between staking active claims vs speaking from a place that you choose to draw (perhaps fallacious) inferences from and then treat as if they’re active claims).
The second part is interesting though. It’s pretty darn answerable to me! I didn’t realize that you thought that I might hear an answer that perfectly paces my views and then just outright lie “nope, that’s not it!”. If that’s something you think I could even conceivably do, I’m baffled as to why you’d be putting energy into interacting with me!
But yes, it does place the responsibility on me of deciding whether you understand my pov and reporting honestly on the matter. And yes, not all people will want to be completely honest on the matter. And yes, I realize that you don’t have reason to be convinced that I will be, and that’s okay.
However, it would be very stupid of me not to be. I can hide away in my head for as long as I want, and if no matter how hard you try, and no matter how obvious the signs become, if I’m willing to ignore them all I can believe my believies for as long as I want and pretend that I’m some sort of wise guru on the mountain top, and that everyone else just lacks my wisdom. You’re right, if I want to hide from the truth and never give you the opportunity to convince me that I’m wrong, I can. And that would be bad.
But I don’t see what solution you have to this, as if the inferential distance is larger than you realize, then your method of “then explain what it is that I allegedly didn't understand” can’t work because if you’re still expecting a short inferential distance then you will have to either conclude that I’m speaking gibberish or that I’m wrong - even if I’m not.
It’s like the “double crux” thing. We’re working our way down the letters, and you’re saying “if you think I don’t understand your pov you should explain where I’m wrong!” and I’m saying “if I thought that you would be able to judge what I’m saying without other hidden disagreements predictably leading to faulty judgements, then I would agree that is a good idea”. I can’t just believe it’s a good idea when I don’t, and yes, that looks the same as “I’m unwilling to stick my neck out because I secretly know I’m wrong”. However, it’s a necessary thing whenever the inferential distance is larger than one party expects, or when one party believes it to be so (and if you don’t believe that I believe that it is… I guess I’d be interested in hearing why). We can’t shortcut the process by pointing at it being “unanswerable”. It is what it is.
It’d be nice if this weren’t ever an issue, but ultimately I think it’s fine because there’s no free lunch. If I feel cognitive dissonance and don’t admit that you have a point, it tends to show, and that would make me look bad. If it doesn’t show somehow, I still fail to convince anyone of anything. I still fail to give anyone any reason to believe I’m some wise guru on the mountaintop even if I really really want them to believe that. It’s not going to work, because I’m not doing anything to distinguish myself from that poser that has nothing interesting to say.
If I want to actually be able to claim status, and not retreat to some hut muttering at how all the meanies won’t give me the status that I deserve, I have to actually stick my neck out and say something useful and falsifiable at some point. I get that - which is why I keep making the distinction between actively staking claims and refusing to accept false presuppositions.
The thing is, my first priority is actually being right. My second priority is making sure that I don’t give people a reason to falsely conclude that I’m wrong and that I am unaware of or/unable to deal with the fact that they think that. My third priority is that I actually get to speak on the object level and be useful. I’m on step two now. You seem to be acting as if it’s impossible to be on step two honestly and that I must be trying to hide from engagement if I am not yet ready to move on to step three with you. I don’t know what else to tell you. I don’t agree.
If you don’t want to automatically accept that I see things you don’t (and that these things are hard to clearly communicate to someone with your views), then that’s fine. I certainly don’t insist that you accept that I do. Heck, I encourage skepticism. However, I’m not really sure how you can know that I don’t, and it seems like you should probably make room for both possibilities if you want to have a productive conversation with me (and it’s fine if you don’t).
The main test that I use in distinguishing between wise old men on mountain tops and charlatans is whether my doubt in them provokes cognitive signs of cognitive dissonance - but there are both false positives and false negatives there. A second test I use is to see whether this guy has any real world results that impress me. A fourth is to see whether I can get him to say anything useful to me. A fourth test is whether there are in fact times that I end up eventually seeing things his way on my own.
It’s not always easy, and I’ve realized again and again that even foolish people are wiser than I give them credit for, so at this point I’m really hesitant to rule that out so that I can actively deny their implicit claim to status. I prefer to just not actively grant them, and say something like “yes, you might be really wise, but I can’t see that you’re not a clown, and until I do I’m going to have to assign a higher probability to the latter. If you can give me some indication that you’re not a clown, I would appreciate that, and I understand that if you don’t it is no proof that you are”.