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Comments (307)
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.
That's interesting. Would you say that your English ability is typical of what an intelligent German speaker could attain through the Internet?
For Koreans, learning English well enough to comfortably learn in it is extremely difficult short of living in an English speaking country for multiple years at a young age. I hear that the Japanese also have this problem.
I knew that it's easier for speakers of European languages to learn English than for East Asian languages, but your ability is way above what I thought would be feasible without spending insane amounts of time on English.
If you are typical, well that explains why RichardKennaway belowmentioned choosing to learn English as if it were a minor thing. You see, I have this perception of English as a "really hard thing" that takes years to get mediocre at. And I believe this is the common view among East Asians.
The important category is probably speakers of germanic languages; Italians and Russians probably don't get as big of an advantage.
I strongly suspect that they're still a lot better off than native speakers of (say) Mandarin or Korean or Japanese. To be more specific: I suspect German is somewhat better for this purpose than Italian, which in turn is substantially better than Russian, which in turn is substantially better than Hungarian, which in turn is substantially better than Mandarin.
I would guess (but don't know enough for my guess to be worth much) that the gap between Hungarian and Mandarin is substantially the largest of the ones above, and that one could find other languages that would slot into that gap while maintaining the "substantially better" progression.
Agreed.
I don't think the writing system would account for that much of a difference, since learning the Latin Alphabet is something everybody is doing anyway, and it's not much extra work (compared to grammar and vocabulary). I still suspect Hungarian-speakers might find English easier because of closer cultural assumptions and background.
I recall reading a news article that claimed that the difference between the kids who play a lot of video games and spend a lot of time on the English-speaking Internet, and the kids who do not, is very obvious in the English classes of most Finnish schools these days. Basically the avid gamers get top grades without even trying much.
My personal experience was similar - I learned very little English in school that I wouldn't already have learned from video games, books, and the English-speaking Internet before that.
That said, this doesn't contradict the "it takes years to become good" idea - it did take us years, we just had pretty much our entire childhoods to practice.
I probably do spend insane amounts of time on the English internet. An amount of time that a Japanese student simply couldn't because he's to busy keeping up with the extensive school curriculum in the Japan. East Asians tend to spend a lot of time to drill children to perform well on standardized tests with doesn't leave much time for things like learning English.
Another issue is that a lot of the language teaching of English in East Asia is simply highly inefficient. That will change with various internet elearning projects.
An outlier would be Singapore where as Wikipedia suggest: "The English language is now the most medium form of communication among students from primary school to university."
I've seen them spend a lot of time drilling for standardized English tests, but those tests miss a lot of things, and quite a few students do well on those tests but can't have a conversation in English. Or know what "staunch", "bristle", and "bulwark" mean, but not "bullshit".
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.
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
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.
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.
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.)
Did you see any data on natural variability -- that is, compare the caffeine content in tea from two different bushes on the same planation; from different plantations (on different soils, different altitude, etc.)?
What makes tea white/green/oolong/black is just post-harvest thermal processing and it seems likely that the caffeine content is determined at the plant level.
Don't think so. It'd be a good study to run, but a bit challenging: even if you buy from a specific plantation, I think they tend to blend or mix leaves from various bushes, so getting the leaves would be more of a challenge than normal.
I thought that they were also usually harvested at different times through the year?
You mean that tea intended to become, say, white, is harvested at different time than tea intended to become black? I don't think that's the case. As far as I know the major difference is what you harvest, but that expresses itself as quality of the tea, not whether it is white or oolong or black. For the top teas you harvest the bud at the tip of the branch and one or two immature leaves next to it (which often look silverish because of fine hairs on these leaves), such teas are known as "tippy". Cheaper teas harvest full-grown leaves. There might well be the difference in caffeine content between the two, but it's not a green/black difference, it's a good tea vs lousy tea difference.
Darjeeling is unusual in that it has two specific harvesting seasons (called "first flush" and "second flush") but both are used to make black (well, kinda-black) tea.
White tea is harvested early and immature. Black/oolong/green is a matter of post-processing.
White tea has huge variance in caffeine across varieties. Both tails of the distribution are white.
Can you provide a link for that assertion? The post-harvesting processing of white tea is quite different from that of green, not to mention black. Also, I believe that while white tea requires top-quality leaves (the bud + 1-2 young leaves) and other teas don't, the top quality greens, oolongs, and blacks use the same "immature" leaves as white.
The average difference between different cups of tea are probably greater than the differences between different kinds of black tea. I don't see how using a wider category is helpful for giving people an idea about how much caffeine a bar of chocolate happens to have.
A cup of black tea is an amount that the average person wouldn't drink right before bed. If you have a better metric for given people a meaningful idea about the amount of caffeine in chocolate feel free to suggest one.
And I don't see why you should make distinctions which don't make a difference, and engage in false precision.
And they would drink a cup of white tea, green tea, or oolong tea right before bed?
I already did: 'a cup of tea'.
There are various kind of herbal tea that don't have any coffeine in them and I do drink them before going to bed.
Yes, but people don't usually mean herbal teas or tisanes when they say 'tea'.
That depends very much on the people with whom you interact.
Caffeinated tea, then?
100g of pure chocolate is a lot. I normally eat 25g of 85% chocolate. That's probably an upper bound on a typical serving, diluted by other ingredients. For people who do not otherwise consume caffeine, it's a powerful dose, but for people who drink coffee every morning, it's probably not much.
Added: 25g of pure chocolate has about 10mg of caffeine, about the same as 25g of liquid coffee.
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.
Does it have to be something from the modern day? Because there are tons of 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.
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,
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.
Would wrong scientific theories qualify? E.g. phlogiston or aether.
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.
You feared more than you hoped, eh?
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.)
What is IRC?
Get off my lawn
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_relay_chat
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ah, okay.
How about "human beings only use 10% of their brains"? Not political, not flamebait, but possibly also "a lot of people say it and sounds plausible" rather than armchair theorizing. "Everyone should drink eight glasses of water a day" is probably in the same category.
I looked through Wikipedia's list of common misconceptions for anything that people might arise independently in lots of people through reasonable reflection, rather than just "facts" that sneak into the public consciousness, but none of them really qualify.
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).
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.
That "0.99999...." represents a concept that evaluates to 1 is a question of notation, not mathematics. 0.99999... does not inherently equal 1; rather, by convention, it is understood to mean 1. The debate is not about the territory, it is about what the symbols on the map mean.
Where does one draw the line, if at all? "1+1 does no inherently equal 2; rather, by convention, it is understood to mean 2. The debate is not about the territory, it is about what the symbols on the map mean." It seems to me like that--very 'mysteriously'--people who understand real analysis never complain "But 0.999... doesn't equal 1"; sufficient mathematical literacy seems to kill any such impulse, which seems very telling to me.
Exactly. The arguments about whether 0.99999.... = 1 are lacking a crucial item: a rigorous definition of what "0.9999..." refers to. The argument isn't "Is the limit as n goes to infinity of sum from 1 to n of 9*10^-n equal to 1?" It's "Here's a sequence of symbols. Should we assign this sequence of symbols the value of 1, or not?" Which is just a silly argument to have. If someone says "I don't believe that 0.9999.... = 1", the correct response (unless they have sufficient real analysis background) is not "Well, here's a proof that of that claim", it's "Well, there are various axioms and definitions that lead to that being treated as being equal to 1".
It's not. The "0.999... doesn't equal 1" meme is largely crackpottery, and promotes amateur overconfidence and (arguably) mathematical illiteracy.
Terms are precious real estate, and their interpretations really are valuable. Our thought processes and belief networks are sticky; if someone has a crap interpretation of a term, then it will at best cause unnecessary friction in using it (e.g. if you define the natural numbers to include -1,...,-10 and have to retranslate theorems because of this), and at worst one will lose track of the translation between interpretations and end up propagating false statements ("2^n can sometimes be less than 2 for n natural")
It would be an accurate response (even if not the most pragmatic or tactful) to say, "Sorry, when you pin down what's meant precisely, it turns out to be a much more useful convention to define the proposition 0.999...=1 such that it is true, and you basically have to perform mental gymnastics to try to justify any usage where it's not true. There are technically alternative schemas where this could fail or be incoherent or whatever, but unless you go several years into studying math (and even then maybe only if you become a logician or model theorist or something), those are not what you'll be encountering."
One could define 'marble' to mean 'nucleotide'. But I think that somebody who looked down on a geneticist for complaining about people using 'marble' as if it means 'nucleotide', and who said it was a silly argument as if the geneticist and the person who invented the new definition were Just As Bad As Each Other, would be mistaken, and I would suspect they were more interested in signalling their Cleverness via relativist metacontrarianism than getting their hands dirty figuring out the empirical question of which definitions are useful in which contexts.
Actually, I could imagine you reading that comment and feeling it still misses your point that 0.999... is undefined or has different definitions or senses in amateur discussions. In that case, I would point to the idea that one can makes propositions about a primitive concept that turn out to be false about the mature form of it. One could make claims about evidence, causality, free will, knowledge, numbers, gravity, light, etc. that would be true under one primitive sense and false under another. Then minutes or days or month or years or centuries or millennia later it turns out that the claims were false about the correct definition.
It would be a sin of rationality to assume that, since there was a controversy over definitions, and some definitions proved the claim and some disproved it, that no side was more right than another. One should study examples of where people made correct claims about fuzzy concepts, to see what we might learn in our own lives about how these things resolve. Were there hints that the people who turned out to be incorrect ignored? Did they fail to notice their confusion? Telltale features of the problem that favoured a different interpretation? etc.
A lot (in fact, all of them that don't involve a rigorous treatment of infinite series) of the "proofs" that it does equal 1 are fallacious, and so the refusal to accept them is actually a reasonable response.
You seem to making an assertion about me in your last paragraph, but doing so very obliquely. Your analogy is not very good, as people do not try to argue that one can logically prove that "marble" does not mean "nucleotide", they just say that it is defined otherwise.
If we're analogizing ".9999... = 1" to "marble doesn't mean't nucleotide", then "
Apologies for that. I don't think that that specific failure mode is particularly likely in your case, but it seems plausible to me that other people thinking in that way has shifted the terms of discourse such that that form of linguistic relativism is seen as high-status by a lot of smart people. I am more mentioning it to highlight the potential failure mode; if part of why you hold your position is that it seems like the kind of position that smart people would hold, but I can account for those smart people holding it in terms of metacontrarianism, then that partially screens off that reason for endorsing the smart people's argument.
It looks like you submitted your comment before you meant to, so I shall probably await its completion before commenting on the rest.
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
They will. I think you mean: If your twin flies through space at close to the speed of light and arrives back 20 years later, they'll be 20 years older when they come back. That one's false.
Reversed polarity on a few statements. Thanks.
Your first statement is still correct.
To be more explicit: What is needed to make the statement interestingly wrong is for the two 20-year figures to be in different reference frames. If your twin does something for 20 years, then they will be 20 years older; but if they do something for what you experience as 20 years they may not be.
Rephrased to more explicitly place "for 20 years" in the earth's reference frame.
I think you may have expressed this one the wrong way around; the way you've phrased it ("can make you better off") is the surprising truth, not the surprising untruth.
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.
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?
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's a great example. If I recall, people who get worked up about it generally feel that the answer is obvious and the other side is stupid for not understanding the argument.
That's different though. The Plane on a Treadmill started with somebody specifying some physically impossible conditions, and then the furious arguments were between people stating the implication of the stated conditions on one side and people talking about the real world on the other hand.
That reminds me of the question of whether hot water freezes faster than cold water.
Same speed with respect to what? This sound kind of like the tree-in-a-forest one.
As I remember the problem, the plane's wheels are supposed to be frictionless so that their rotation is uncoupled from the rest of the plane's motion. Hence the speed of the conveyor belt is irrelevant and the plane always takes off. Now, if you had a helicopter on a turntable...
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".
You could say the same of Dalton.
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.
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.)
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.
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 this. These are all really good.
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?
Based on that data, I think a blanket suggestion that everybody should sleep 8 hours isn't warranted. It seems that some people with illnesses or who are exposed to other stressors need 8 hours.
I would advocate that everybody sleeps enough to be fully rested instead of trying to sleep a specific number of hours that some authority considers to be right for the average person.
I think the same goes for daily water consumption. Optimize values like that in a way that makes you feel good on a daily basis instead of targeting a value that seems to be optimal for the average person.
What are your grounds for making this recommendation? The parallel suggestion that everyone should eat enough to feel fully satisfied doesn't seem like a recipe for optimal health, so why think things should be different with sleep? Indeed, the analogy between food and sleep is drawn explicitly in one of the papers I cited, and it seems that a "wisdom of nature" heuristic (due to "changed tradeoffs"; see Bostrom & Sandberg, sect. 2) might support a policy of moderation in both food and sleep. Although this is all admittedly very speculative.
Years of thinking about the issue that aren't easily compressed.
In general alarm clocks don't seem to be healthy devices. The idea of habitually breaking sleep at a random point of the sleep circle doesn't seem good.
Let's say we look at a person who needs 8 hours of sleep to feel fully rested. The person has health issue X. When we solve X than they only need 7 hours of sleep. The obvious way isn't to wake up the person after 7 hours of sleep but to actually fix X.
That idea of sleep seems to both reflect the research that forcibly cutting peoples sleep in a way that leads to sleep deprivation is bad. It also explains why the people who sleep 8 hours on average die earlier than the people who sleep 7 hours.
If I get a cold my body needs additional sleep during that time. I have a hard time imagine that cutting that sleep needs away is healthy.
If we look at eating I also think similar things are true. There not much evidence that forced dieting is healthy. Fixing underlying issues seems to be preferable over forcibly limiting food consumption.
While we are at the topic of sleep and mortality it's worth pointing out that sleeping pills are very harmful to health.
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.
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?
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.
Awfully similar, but not identical.
In the first case, you have independent evidence that the conclusion is false, so you're basically saying "If I considered your arguments in isolation, I would be convinced of your conclusion, but here are several pieces of external evidence which contradict your conclusion. I trust this external evidence more than I trust my ability to evaluate arguments."
In the second case, you're saying "I have already concluded that your conclusion is false because I have concluded that mine is true. I think it's more likely that there is a flaw in your conclusion that I can't detect than that there is a flaw in the reasoning that led to my conclusion."
The person in the first case is far more likely to respond with "I don't know" in response to the question of "So what do you think the real answer is, then?" In our culture (both outside, and, to a lesser but still significant degree inside LW), there is a stigma against arguing against a hypothesis without providing an alternative hypothesis. An exception is the argument of the form "If Y is true, how do you explain X?" which is quite common. Unfortunately, this form of argument is used extensively by people who are, as you say, entirely wedded to a particular conclusion, so using it makes you seem like one of those people and therefore less credible, especially in the eyes of LWers.
Rereading your comment, I see that there are two ways to interpret it. The first is "Rationalists do not use this form of argument because it makes them look like people who are wedded to a particular conclusion." The second is "Rationalists do not use this form of argument because it is flawed -- they see that anyone who is wedded to a particular conclusion can use it to avoid updating on evidence." I agree with the first interpretation, but not the second -- that form of argument can be valid, but reduces the credibility of the person using it in the eyes of other rationalists.
I actually do say things like this pretty frequently, though I haven't had the opportunity to do so on LW yet.
Because that ends the discussion. I think a lot of people around here just enjoy debating arguments (certainly I do).
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.
That was probably me. I don't think I handled the situation particularly gracefully, but I really didn't want to continue that conversation, and I couldn't see whether the person in question was wearing a crocker's rules tag.
I don't remember my actual words, but I think I wasn't trying to go for "nothing could possibly convince me", so much as "nothing said in this conversation could convince me".
It's still more graceful than the "I think you are wrong based on my heuristics but I can't tell you where you are wrong" that Pablo Stafforini advocates.
This idea seems like a manifestation of epistemic learned helplessness.
Related link: Peter van Inwagen's article Is it wrong everywhere, always, and for everyone, to believe anything on insufficient evidence?. van Inwagen suggests not, on the grounds that if it were then no philosopher could ever continue believing something firmly when there are other smarter equally well informed philosophers who strongly disagree. I find this argument less compelling than van Inwagen does.
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."
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'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
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.
Cognito Mentoring refer to him a fair bit, and often in mild agreement. Check their blog and wiki.
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.
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"?
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.
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.
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.
Enough for what? My question is whether my hair stylist saying "Shaving makes the hair grow back thicker." is more reliable than http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ar.1090370405/abstract. In general, the scientists have put more thought into their answer and have conducted actual experiments, so they are more reliable. I might revise that opinion if I find evidence of bias, such as a study being funded by a corporation that finds favorable results for their product, but in my line of life such studies are rare.
I find that in most cases I simply don't have an intuition. What's the population of India? I can't tell you, I'd have to look it up. In the rare cases where I do have some idea of the answer, I can delve back into my memory and recreate the evidence for that idea, then combine it with the study; the update happens regardless of how much I trust the study. I suppose that a well-written anecdote might beat a low-powered statistical study, but again such cases are rare (more often than not they are studying two different phenomena).
I wash my hands after shaking theirs, as soon as convenient. Or else I just take some ibuprofen after I get sick. (Not certain what you were trying to get at here...)
Humans are biased to overrate bad human behavior as a cause for mistakes. The decent thing is to orient yourself on whether similar studies replicate.
Regardless every publish-or-perish paper has an inherent bias to find spectacular results.
Let's say wearning red every day.
Thinking that those Israeli judges don't give people parole because they don't have enough sugar in their blood right before mealtime. Going and giving every judge a candy before hearing every case to make it fair isn't warranted.
That's fixable by training Fermi estimates.
It's a reference to the controversy about whether washing your hands primes you to be more moral. It's a experimental social science result that failed to replicate.
If a crocodile bites off your hand, it's generally your fault. If the hurricane hits your house and kills you, it's your fault for not evacuating fast enough. In general, most causes are attributed to humans, because that allows actually considering alternatives. If you just attributed everything to, say, God, then it doesn't give any ideas. I take this a step further: everything is my fault. So if I hear about someone else doing something stupid, I try to figure out how I could have stopped them from doing it. My time and ability are limited in scope, so I usually conclude they were too far away to help (space-like separation), but this has given useful results on a few occasions (mostly when something I'm involved in goes wrong).
Not really, since the replication is more likely to fail than the original study (due to inexperience), and is subject to less peer-review scrutiny (because it's a replication). See http://wjh.harvard.edu/~jmitchel/writing/failed_science.htm. The correct thing to consider is followup work of any kind; for example, if a researcher has a long line of publications all saying the same thing in different experiments, or if it's widely cited as a building block of someone's theory, or if there's a book on it.
Right, people only publish their successes. There are so many failures that it's not worth mentioning or considering them. But they don't need to be "spectacular", just successful. Perhaps you are confusing publishing at all, even in e.g. a blog post, with publishing in "prestigious" journals, which indeed only publish "spectacular" results; looking at only those would give you a biased view, certainly, but as soon as you expand your field of view to "all information everywhere" then that bias (mostly) goes away, and the real problem is finding anything at all.
So the study there links red to aggression; I don't want to be aggressive all the time, so why should I wear red all the time? For example, I don't want a red car because I don't want to get pulled over by the cops all the time. Similarly for most results; they're very limited in scope, of the form "if X then Y" or even "X associate with Y". Many times, Y is irrelevant, so I don't need to even consider X.
Sure, but if I'm involved with a case then I'll be sure to try to get it heard after lunchtime, and offer the judge some candy if I can get away with it.
You can memorize populations or memorize the Fermi factors and how to combine them, but the point stands regardless; you still have to remember something.
Ah, social science. I need to take more courses in statistics before I can comment... so far I have been sticking to the biology/chemistry/physics side of things (where statistics are rare and the effects are obvious from inspection).
Conflating whether or not you could do something to stop them with finding truth makes it harder to have an accurate view of whether or not the result is true.
Accepting reality for what it is helps to have an accurate perception of reality. Only once you understand the territory should you go out and try to change things. If you do the second step before the first you mess up your epistemology. You fall for a bunch of human biases evolved for finding out whether the neighboring tribe might attack your tribe that aren't useful for clear understanding of todays complex world.
I spoke about incentives. Researchers have an incentive to publish in prestigious journals and optimize their research practices for doing so. The case with blogs isn't much different. Successful bloggers write polarizing posts that get people talking and engage with the story even there would be a way to be more accurate and less polarizing. The incentives go towards "spectual".
Scott H Young whom I respect and who's a nice fellow wrote his post against spaced repetition and still know recommends now in a later post the usage of Anki for learning vocabulary.
It's not about remembering it's about being able to make estimates even when you aren't sure. And you can calibrate your error intervals.
Aggression is not the central word. Status and dominance also appear. People do a bunch of things to appear higher status.
One of the studies in question suggested that it makes woman more attracted to you measured by the physical distance in conversation. Another one suggest that attraction based on photo ratings.
I actually did the comparison on hotOrNot. I tested a blue shirt against a red shirt. Photoshopped so nothing besides the color with different. For my photo blue scored more attractive than red despite the studies saying that red is the color that raises attractiveness.
The replication rates for cancer biology seem to be even worse than for psychology if you trust the Amgen researchers who could only replicate 6 of 55 landmark studies that they tried to replicate.
Probably a minor point, but were both the red and blue shirts photoshopped? If one of them was an actual photo, it might have looked more natural (color reflected on to your face) than the other.
In this case no, the blue was the original you are right that this might have screwed with the results. HotOrNot internal algorithms were also a bit opaque.
But to be fair the setup of the original study wasn't natural either. The color in those studies has the color of the border of the photo.
If I wanted to repeat the experiment I would like to it on Amazon Mechanical turk. At the moment I don't really have the spare money for projects like that but maybe someone else on LW cares enough to dress in an attractive way and wants to optimize and has the money.
The whole thing might also work good for a blogger willing to a bit of cash to write an interesting post.
Especially for online dating like Tinder, photo optimisation through empiric measurement of photos can increase success rates a bit.
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 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.
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):
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 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.
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.
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 ;)
"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.
Testing this...
Nope, doesn't seem to work. (I am probably doing something wrong as I never used Greasemonkey before.)
Just tested this on a clean FF profile, so it's almost certainly something on your end. Did you successfully install the script? You should've gotten an image which looks something like this, and if you go to Greasemonkey's menu while on a LW thread, you should be able to see it in the list of scripts run for that page. Also, note that you have to refresh/load a new page for it to show up after installation.
Oh, and it only works for new comments, not new posts. It should look something like this, and similarly for replies.
ETA: helpful debugging info: if you can, let me know what page it's not working on, and let me know if there's any errors in the developer console (shift-control-K or command-option-K for windows and Mac respectively).
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).
This looks excellent.
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.)
I'm curious what you used instead (cookies?), or did you just make a historyless version? Also, why did you need that? localStorage isn't exactly a new feature (hell, IE has supported it since version 8, I think).
It appears that my Firefox profile has some security features that mess with localStorage in a way that I don't understand. I used Greasemonkey's GM_[sg]etValue instead. (Important and maybe obvious, but not to me: their use has to be desclared with @grant in the UserScript preamble.)
Thanks a million!
I tried downloading it by clicking on "install the extension", but it doesn't seem to get to my browser (Chrome). Am I missing something?.
"Install the extension" is a link bringing you to the chrome web store, where you can install it by clicking in the upper-right. The link is this, in case it's Github giving you trouble somehow.
If the Chrome web store isn't recognizing that you're running Chrome, that's probably not a thing I can fix, though you could try saving this link as something.user.js, opening chrome://extensions, and dragging the file onto the window.
Thank you. That worked. I never would have guessed that an icon which simply had the word "free" on it was the download button.
Would it be worth your while to do this for LW? It makes me crazy that the purple edges for new comments are irretrievably lost if the page is downloaded again.
As a person living very far away from west Africa, how worried should I be about the current Ebola outbreak?
(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.
No, You're Not Going To Get Ebola
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.
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.
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.
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 frequent a sci-fi fan club in my city and from that group emerged a tiny writing workshop (6 members currently). The couple of guys who came up with the idea had heard that I wrote some small stuff and won a local contest, and thus I got invited. Every two Sundays we meet via Skype to comment on the stories that we've posted to our FB group since the last meeting. It has been helpful for me; we've agreed to be brutally honest with one another.
I was once part of an online community on sffworld writing forum. There were regular posters like on any forum and there was also a small workshop (6-8 people) and each week two people would submit something for the rest of the group to read and provide feedback on. It was motivating and fun.
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.
Another attempt at a sleep sensor, currently funded on Kickstarter.
Oh, dear.
Harry Potter And The Cryptocurrency of Stars
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/
Anchoring in marathon runners.
That's a pretty cool histogram in figure 2.
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?
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. 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.
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.
Yeah it's the principle. I guess I'll just try a down before I up going forward. Thanks Al
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 :-)