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?"
All the options you explicitly list imply disrespect
Well, the one I'm actually proposing doesn't, but I guess you mean the others do. I'm not sure they exactly do, though I certainly didn't make any effort to frame them in tactfully respect-maximizing terms; in any case, it's certainly not far off to say they all imply disrespect. I agree that there are situations in which you can't explain something without preparation without any disrespect to the other guy being called for; but that's because what happened was
rather than, say,
When what happens is that you begin by making your argument and then start saying: nope, you didn't understand it -- and when your reaction to a good-faith attempt at dealing with the alleged misunderstanding is anything other than "oh, OK, let me try to explain more clearly" -- I think it does imply something like disrespect; at least, as much like disrespect as those options I listed above. Because what you're saying is: you had something to say that you thought was appropriate for your audience, and not the sort of thing that needed advance warning that it was extra-subtle; but now you've found that I don't understand it and (you at least suspect) I'm not likely to understand it even if you explain it.
That is, it means that something about me renders me unlikely -- even when this is locally the sole goal of the discussion, and I have made it clear that I am prepared to go to substantial lengths to seem mutual understanding -- to be able to understand this thing that you want to say, and that you earlier thought was a reasonable thing to say without laying a load of preparatory groundwork.
Is there a reason you haven't addressed the possibility that [...] my disinterest [...] isn't predicated on me concluding that you're stupid/blinkered/crazy/otherwise-unworthy-of-respect?
See above for why I haven't considered it likely; the reason I haven't (given that) addressed it is that there's never time to address everything.
If there is a specific hypothesis in this class that you would like us to entertain, perhaps you should consider saying what it is.
The thing is, that does presuppose that my belief that [...] is wrong.
No, it presupposes that it could be wrong. (I would say it carries less presumption that it's wrong than your last several comments in this thread carry presumption that it's right.) The idea is: It could be wrong, in which case giving it a go will bring immediate benefit; it could be wrong but we could be (mutually) reasonable enough to see that it's right when we give it a go and that doesn't work, in which case giving it a go will get us past the meta-level stuff about whether I'm likely to be unable to understand. Or, of course, it could go the other way.
I'm not sure what your plan is for dealing with the possibility of object-level blind spots
When one is suspected, look at it up close and see whether it really is one. Which, y'know, is what I'm suggesting here.
if you're writing all these words because you actually want to know how the heck I see it [...] I expect it to take a decent amount of work
What I was hoping to know, in the first instance, is what I have allegedly misunderstood in what you wrote before. You know, where you said things of the form "your description doesn't even contain my actual reason for saying X" -- which I took, for reasons that still look solid to me, to indicate that you had already given your actual reason.
If the only way for you to explain all my serious misunderstandings of what you wrote is for you to write an effortful lengthy essay about your general view ... well, I expect it would be interesting. But on the face of it that seems like more effort than it should actually take. And if the reason why it should take all that effort is that, in essence, I have (at least in your opinion) understood so little of your position that there's no point trying to correct me rather than trying again from scratch at much greater length then I honestly don't know why you're still in this discussion.
I'm sure I'd have a bunch of questions on how you see things, if you'd have any interest in explaining your perspective
I am happy to answer questions. I've had it pretty much up to here (you'll have to imagine a suitable gesture) with meta-level discussion about what either of us may or may not be capable of understanding, though, so if the questions you want to ask are about what you think of me or what I think of you or what I think you think I think you think I am capable of understanding, then let's give that a miss.
rather than, say, jimmy says "so I have a rather complicated and subtle argument to make, so I'm going to have to begin with some preliminaries*.
I suppose I could have said “so I have a rather complicated and subtle argument to make. I would have to begin with some preliminaries and it would end up being kinda long and take a lot of work, so I’m not sure it’s worth it unless you really want to hear it”, and in a lot of ways I expect that would have gone better. I probably will end up doing this next time.
However in a couple key ways, it wouldn’t ha...
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, then it goes here.
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