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What false beliefs have you held and why were you wrong?
What is something you used to believe, preferably something concrete with direct or implied predictions, that you now know was dead wrong. Was your belief rational given what you knew and could know back then, or was it irrational, and why?
Edit: I feel like some of these are getting a bit glib and political. Please try to explain what false assumptions or biases were underlying your beliefs - be introspective - this is LW after all.
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Comments (364)
Transgender people are fundamentally delusional.
This was mostly typical mind fallacy, supported by an argument that rested on an availability heuristic problem, which was this: I'm aware of no record of trans people historically, so the phenomenon was not present; therefore, the prior on being born into a male/female body is overwhelmingly that you are a man/woman (respectively), and you need an enormous amount of evidence to overcome the prior. (This isn't how I would have formulated it at the time; I wasn't familiar with Bayesian terminology and had only intermittently read the sequences, and that in small, scattered chunks.)
Hmm, "delusional" is a bit underspecified.
How about "There's no solid evidence for a gender bit in the brain. While many or most transgender people feel something, explaining that feeling as "I'm an X brain trapped in a non-X body" is essentially a memetic phenomenon. Additionally, genderqueer and non-binary persons are typically participants in a memetic fad."
I think that's what I believe; summarizing this as "trans people are delusional" seems harsh and uncharitable to me, but I can see how someone might say that's exactly what it is. If you think now that the above is obviously wrong, I'm very interested in arguments/evidence.
Well, obviously it's far more complicated than one bit; like most brain features, it's built into the structure of the brain in a somewhat or totally distributed fashion, and through some developmental quirk, some or all of that structure develops in a way inappropriate to their DNA and physical layout. The more complex it is, the more I would expect genderqueer and nonbinary people to be common from increasingly nonstandard configurations of whatever that structure looks like as opposed to fairly limited values it could take on (at least the two).
Most trans people I know felt extremely uncomfortable with their sexual characteristics and assigned gender before ever hearing of the concept of a transsexual person; my ex-boyfriend jokes that he really should have figured it out sooner, given how he would devour literally any media that had crossdressing main characters, and he was raised heavily-Orthodox Jewish where the concept was not at all available. This is a pretty significant obstacle to it being a memetic phenomenon in all/most cases.
I would agree that it's to some degree a memetic fad in the case of nonbinary/genderqueer people; definitely a number of people I know slide around somewhat on the gender spectrum in what seems to be a semi-deliberate act of protest against restrictive gender norms rather than particular pain at being called the gender they were raised as. But there are also nonbinary people whose beliefs are much more deeply held, and who feel intense, crippling emotional pain (i.e. are triggered) when referred to as their raised gender rather than their chosen gender. Generally these people find the opposite binary painful to a significantly lesser extent, which supports the idea that they might be physiologically/neurologically indistinguishable from binary trans people, but they're definitely distinct from the weaker category of nonbinary identification. This is probably a necessary stopping point on the path to the inevitable death of socially-constructed gender.
In short, I think your position, while more reasonable than my past one, is mixing up a couple different phenomena and missing some data, and drawing broad, false conclusions as a result.
I read an article once about the hijra, a third gender in India. What surprised me at the time was that some hijra were adamant that they were not transgender in the western sense, seeing it as foreign and strange, whereas others would have preferred a binary transgender identity had it been available in their culture. So some strongly viewed hijra as what they really wanted to be, but others saw it only as a consolation prize because their culture didn't include the concept of transitioning to the other binary gender.
I walked away from this thinking that the cultural component of gender can't be overlooked. Gender is ultimately a compromise between the individual and categories provided by the culture. I can even imagine, that if one had two very different cultures and were able to completely replicate a particular infant, atom for atom, it's possible in one culture they would identify as male, and in the other as female.
Yes, people tend to have that reaction when faced with something that contradicts some aspect of the identity they've adopted (for whatever reason). I'm pretty sure creationists, for example, have the same reaction to people arguing for evolution.
What do you think that something is that they feel?
Why do you think such a meme would spread or originate, if not due to its truth value?
Probably a lot of different things, for example: revulsion at some of the traditional gender roles and behaviors. Negative emotions about their sexual organs. Intense erotic pleasure while imagining themselves the opposite sex. Anxiety due to not feeling what they think the person of their sex is supposed to feel.
Memes that provide an explanation of one's behavior in terms of one's identity are insanely powerful. They spread because they lead you from from "I don't understand why I'm like this" to "I understand why I'm like this", and the latter feeling is something we all lust for.
The truth value is not especially important to the initial spread of an attractive identity-meme. Consider that "people are born gay" is almost a dogma in the LGBT community and liberal circles, although the available scientific understanding sharply contradicts it. Or recall that the 19th century saw a very potent meme in which gay people self-identified as "the third sex", "a female psyche in a male body". It seems that many gay people in the 19th century really felt very strongly that they have a "female psyche" or a "female soul", similarly to how today many biological-X transgender people feel very strongly that they have a "non-X brain".
That historical example did a lot to persuade me. Do you have any others similar to it?
I used to share your position, but moved away from it. The main reason I did is studies such as the ones mentioned in this article:
http://online.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304854804579234030532617704.
How do you explain such results?
The article is behind a login wall. It would help linking directly to studies instead of a badly accessible article about them.
To guess at the point, we find that obesity within the US has a strong genetic component. On the other hand we find that obesity strongly changes over the time span of decades. The fact that something seems to be genetic within one population seems no good evidence that there are no societal factors involved.
I didn't know there was a login wall. Try this one: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20032-transsexual-differences-caught-on-brain-scan.html#.VEgMHPSTZD0?
The article wasn't mentioning genetics, it was about nMRIs.
The problem with nMRI scans is that if you believe in physicalism, you'd expect every aspect of someone to show up on a sufficiently advanced brain scan. Also, I wonder how many brain regions they tried before finding one that displayed the correct pattern.
Humans are made of both biological and memetic (social) stuff, though. It's famously difficult to ascribe any particular behavior to just one or the other -- the old nature/nurture debate being one aspect of that -- but even if you could, you can't necessarily describe one side of that as more "real" than the other side -- I am both my flesh and its neural activation patterns. One reason I believe most transgender people describe a purely physical (brain) basis is that using the language of desire is severely socially proscribed: it's not viewed as OK to merely say "I want to be a man/woman" the same way someone can say "I want to be an architect", although in both cases a person may simply be looking around at the various roles their society has on offer and finding some desirable than others.
This phenomenon isn't limited to transgender people; even 15 years ago gays and lesbians were viewed more negatively by society, and magazines would run articles about "the gay gene," despite the lack of evidence for its existence. Nowadays, in a much more tolerant culture, you can find people who say that they "choose to be gay." A similar evolution in transgender self-description could happen if society becomes more tolerant.
So, I think this is actually evidence simply that behaviors or accomplishments viewed as highly unusual (either positive or negative) are often ascribed to a physical basis, whereas anything perceived as being in the normal range of human behavior in the culture is seen simply as the individual's choice or self expression. This doesn't actually tell you anything about the cause of the action or desire -- we can't do the kind of experiments that would be necessary to find that out. For all we know, desiring to be a particular gender, or desiring to have a particular occupation are similar mixes of built-in brain organization, body chemistry, psychological imprinting, culture, and both conscious and subconscious weighing given the individual's other abilities and limitations.
How sure are you that it is more common? How do you know?
It appears to me to have moved in the opposite direction.
I'm not sure about that. The being gay/trans is inborn thing was concocted to better fit the mold generated by the blacks' and women's rights movement which relied on arguing that it's wrong to "discriminate" against people for something that's not their fault.
Do you have evidence that it is or is not inherent? For evidence of gayness being inborn there is the digit ratio where if you scroll down to sexual orientation you'll see that lesbians have a lower average digit ratio. This has been suggested to be affected by androgens like testosterone while in the uterus. This is evidence that sexuality is inborn. If true the obvious parallel is that a person can no more change their sexuality than choose to have one finger grow more than the other.
Edit: Having just looked around, It seems there is a long list of differences between homosexual and heterosexual humans. This is very strong evidence that people are born with their sexuality.
Edit 2: is that a downvote for going to close to the realms of politics? I'm still getting used to the conventions around here
The list you mention is not very strong evidence that "people are born with their sexuality". It's a list of correlations of varying quality and effect size that is subject to strong publication bias. More importantly, all of these correlations are perfectly compatible with the possibility that genetic/prenatal factors only partially influence one's sexual orientation rather than completely determine it.
Please read the section on twin studies that opens the Wiki page you referenced. The epidemiological twin studies are probably the strongest evidence we currently have, and they suggest that genetic factors play a role but do not determine sexual orientation.
Thank you, I was not expecting that. It is time to update my beliefs. I knew I had lots that were not based on proper evidence gathering, but I was not expecting such strongly held beliefs to be so easily falsifiable. It would appear I have a ways to go. On the upside I at least now have an intuitive understanding of how being wrong feels exactly like being right whereas before I only had an intellectual understanding. I suspect I shall have to beat myself about the head with that memory
I'm trying to figure out what this implies for the gay/trans rights movement and those pray the gay away camps kids get sent to. I would like to think people should still be able to decide on their own in the absence of judgement or coercion, but I'm less sure now.
What do you mean by this? While you believed that people had no choice about being gay/trans, you didn't seem to be at all bothered by the lack of choice.
With my previous (incorrect) knowledge, attempting to influence someone's sexuality had no redeeming features. Its only effect was to create confusion, self loathing and other negative effects/emotions in adolescents. If, however it can be effected by the environment then there exist situations, possibly controllable situations where children can be systematically influenced to one sexuality or other.
My immediate reaction is that people should still be able to figure it out for themselves, but the situation is less black and white than before. If for example gays turn out to be significantly happier and more productive throughout their life than straight people, does it then become moral to attempt to influence potential homosexuals to increase their changes of becoming gay? The opposite argument also exists if you replace gay with straight in the previous sentence. It is no longer an open and shut case, there exist worlds where the optimal thing to do is morally repugnant to me. It pits my value for autonomy against my value of optimality.
How can you tell?
In particular, what reason do you have to think that Jackercrack's former position was not something like this?
I thought Bush's claims about Iraq's WMD's had been thoroughly discredited, mostly because it was something "everybody new", then I saw this. Turns out ISIS is now taking possession of Saddam's "nonexistent" chemical weapons stockpiles.
This discovery should let you update that Bush was even more dishonest than you previously believed.
That Bush seemed to have no interested in actually cleaning up those weapons when there were US soldiers on the ground in that country shows how little the Bush administration cared about WMDs.
Your conservative revisionism does you no credit. I remember vividly the runup to the invasion because (I have remarked several times in the past) I was shocked at the demagoguery on display and the deep irrationality displayed by the American political system, and the case for invasion was not, in any way, 'Saddam has some corroded chemical weapons left over from our proxy war with Iran'. The case was, 'Saddam has active chemical warfare programs, active biological warfare programs, and most of all, an active nuclear bomb program, which justifies pre-emptive invasion before an American city was hit'. (Remember the aluminum tubes? The yellowcake? The Bush doctrine?) Your link even points this out, of course only to mock this without any explanation of why they seem to now think Bush pushed for an invasion because of some waste dumps. Look at your link! Look at what Cheney said:
How does this match
How does this justify not considering "Bush's claims about Iraq's WMD's ... thoroughly discredited"? (Why were there chemicals weapons there? Because, as the Duelfer report would have told you, that's where Iraq was shipping them for the UN to destroy but the UN decided some were too dangerous to destroy and sealed them away in bunkers, after which the site was razed; maybe not the best move, but understandable at the time. Take a look at the Duelfer report's description of the facility's post-Gulf-War-history and see if it remotely resembles Bush and Cheney's fears, and if it supports the contentions being made by the revisionists that 'really, Saddam had WMDs all along!')
Here Cheney is implying Hussein had 'BW and CW capabilities' and a 'nuclear program', which he might shut down, and then rebuild later. Look at the case GWB himself made in his state of the union address, his own words trying to convince America to invade Iraq because of the clear and present danger its active WMD program in the '90s and 2000s (not leftovers from the 1980s!) posed to America:
I watched this speech live; no one was the slightest bit confused by what Bush meant. There was no subtlety. We all understood that he was saying. If you had told them that 12 years later, the most that could be produced as evidence was what was in your link, we would have been appalled, disgusted, and certainly not have changed our minds to think 'aha, so Bush was right!'
Where's ISIS mobile bio-weapon labs? Where's the anthrax strikes? Have they nuked Tel Aviv yet with Hussein-era nukes? Where are their nuclear scientists running a enrichment plant to purify uranium for a bomb? For that matter, where was the "advanced nuclear weapons development program" when the USA invaded? Are "2,500 corroded chemical rockets" used as IEDs really what Bush meant by "the world's most destructive weapons"?
No, Bush was dead wrong, was proven wrong by the invasion, and links like that merely show a modern version of the Dolchstoss - an incredible desperation of partisan types to rescue, to some degree, one of the greatest strategic failures in American history.
(Seeing this here really astonishes me. I don't understand how this kind of view is possible. This is not a knotty difficult problem like global warming, or a values-based question like gay marriage where facts aren't especially relevant, or conflicting cutting-edge scientific research, or some distant historical event from centuries ago lost in the vapors of time and shifting worldviews: this was something that happened barely 12 years ago, that was documented in pretty much every paper and magazine at extraordinarily tedious length, which was discussed in simple terms that any American could - and most did - understand; you can look up transcripts of official speeches with ease in seconds now, and watch them on YouTube if you prefer; the basic claims were simple and clear - 'Saddam Hussein in 2001 was running multiple active and sophisticated WMD research and development programs with many concrete manifestations' - and the failure of the predictions were widely noted within months of the invasion as the search teams came up flat dry for it, and Bush was heavily criticized for the lack of results long before Iraq became enough of a bloodbath that it became a moot point since the place was now a sunk cost. We have countless in depth books & reporting on exactly how the evidence was trumped up and manipulated and fabricated, and how the war was sold to the public, and so on and so forth. We even understand the Iraqi side of the story and, from his pre-execution interrogations, why Hussein was so desperate to pretend to be much more dangerous than he was and why he didn't cooperate: Baathist Iraq couldn't beat Iran in the first place, and weakened by sanctions, definitely couldn't beat them in the '90s-'00s, and he needed Israel-style uncertainty about his capabilities, assisted by his subordinates fearfully telling him what he wanted to hear. So given all of this is in the historical record and also personal experience of anyone who read a newspaper regularly, how is it I am reading that not just one person but quite a lot of people have managed to convince themselves that Bush was right all along?)
Well, there are some relevant facts, such as whether children raised by gay couples end up less well-adjusted than those raised by straight couples.
Presumably what you mean is whether children raised by gay couples end up less well-adjusted than they would if they weren't raised by gay couples, right?
I mean, to pick an extreme case for clarity: if it turned out that gay couples only ever raised children who would never have been raised by straight couples even if there were no gay couples, then I don't see how the fact you cite is relevant to gay marriage.
Whether that's relevant depends on your values in the first place: are you a harm-based consequentialist?
As it happens, yesterday I took a survey ("Argument Evaluations") on YourMorals.org which asked exactly that question ("how relevant is the argument that 'children raised by gay couples may be harmed' to the morality of gay marriage") and you will be unsurprised to look at the results and see that people differ on what arguments are relevant to the morality of gay marriage:
(Green is me.)
Huh, didn't know so many people believed what you used to. Buddy of mine was on one team that found barrels of the stuff though, and I didn't really follow the news at the time, so I'm biased.
The article seems to indicate that the stockpiles in question were disused well before GWB invaded Iraq, so I don't see how it can un-discredit GWB's WMD claims.
Before coming to LW I intuitively believed in the map/territory distinction (physical realism, if you will). After going through the countless arguments of the type "Is <something> real?" (where <something> can be qualia, consciousness, wavefunction, God or what have you.) I gradually came to the conclusion that the term "real" is both misleading and counterproductive. If a sentence (excepting mathematical statements) cannot be rephrased by replacing "real" or "true" with "accurate", then it is meaningless.
Up next: stop believing in using parentheses so much.
I used to believe that anyone, with hard work, can succeed and I realized that hardwork is no substitute for investment capital and something being on your life path. If its not for you, its just not for you and its important to gut check and know if something is what you REALLY want rather than something you are doing because its a good idea or makes financial sense.
I vaguely recall believing when I was young that there were no real bisexuals, just gays in denial about it.
I used to think acne was unrelated to diet (other than perhaps via direct facial contact with grease).
When law enforcement first started being equipped with tasers, I thought this was a good thing, because they would use nonlethal force on occasions where they would previously have used firearms. It turned out that police continued to use lethal force as before, and instead used tasers in situations where they might actually have talked people down in the past.
I believed that the composition of a rational rotation of a sphere and another rational rotation of a sphere will be rational. (By a rational rotation I mean a rotation of a sphere around some axis which in radians is a rational multiple of pi, and thus will end up putting the sphere back where it started if you apply it enough.) Counterexample: Two 30 degree rotations each around a different axis with the two axies perpendicular to each other. I believed this because I was too used to thinking about the two-dimensional case, where it is trivially true.
Until very recently, I was convinced that it was extremely unlikely that any form of adiabatic quantum computing would have any chance at working at providing speedups, either asymptotically or practically. This belief came to a large extent as what was in retrospect an irrational reaction to the junk and bad hype that has been repeatedly coming from D-Wave. I changed my position when Scott Aaronson made this comment (comment number 25).
More mind-killing territory: Until about 3 days ago, I was convinced that claims that mass shootings were increasing in the US were due purely to media scare tactics and general human tendencies to see things as getting worse. This article made me strongly update against that. Since then, I've seen this response and this one which were both deeply unpersuasive as responses go.
Even more potential mindkilling: Having read more of Slatestarcodex, I've become convinced that he's correct that there really is a substantial fraction of what self-identifies as the "social justice" movement, primarily in an online context, that really is toxic, and that the rest of the left and the serious, sane part of the SJers aren't doing enough to call them out on it. On the flipside, "Gamergate" has convinced me that there's still a very real need for a vocal feminist movement, and that latent misogyny is still pretty common. Edit: To specify what this means in an operational sense, that there are a lot of SJers out there who are making personal attacks or calls for censorship against those with whom they disagree.
I was convinced in 2008 that Obama was going to be good for civil liberties. I don't think I need to discuss in any detail why that was wrong or how I got convinced otherwise, since the reasons should be pretty obvious.
That, and I was convinced that he would be a competent President. I did not expect the the degree of ineptitude that is apparent now.
Can you give examples?
What sort of measure are you using?
I also have a sense Obama has not been an effective President, but I've no idea how to objectively measure that.
I do not understand your sphere rotation example because I can't visualize that 3D example. Any chance someone can help out?
Minus the online bit, this is fully generalizable against any political group, (and a lot of non-political groups as well). Which groups do you choose to lambast for "not calling out toxic members of that group"? Presumably the groups that you don't like. This is the art of politics.
"I don't have a problem with X group, but you have to agree that the subset Y of them are really horrible so lets continue to talk about how horrible they are" is Dark Arts to the max.
I also made this mistake (although, to be fair, on the issue of torture, Obama genuinely was an improvement.)
My current belief is that, rather being grossly mistaken about the character of the former Constitutional law scholar/sponsor of a bill requiring videotaped confessions, I was grossly mistaken in underestimating the corruptive influence of the concentrated power of the executive branch/national security apparatus on anyone who wields it. I no longer think real reform will come from any President of any background; if reform is ever to happen it would require the legislative branch to actually prioritize reigning in the executive branch.
How do you now? The Obama administration continues to ban photographing equipment which was one of the policies to suppress evidence of US torture.
Torture got outlawed in the late Bush administration. People responsible for the torture project had no problem raising in influence within the Obama administration. The Obama administration continues to run black sites.
What is unpersuasive about the responses to Mother Jones?
They're exactly what I thought when I read it. Actually, I had a more specific thought: what changed in 2011 is that they started collecting data live, rather than through archives. Of course, rejecting a data set because it was produced by hand in an ad hoc manner does not give you a replacement data set and thus does not produce an actual analysis. But the Reason link suggests Duwe's data as a replacement. Since he starts with official data and only uses media coverage to fill in details, he isn't subject to temporal bias.
The last 30 years of such claims are not due to anything that happened in 2011.
I used to believe that almost nobody was really interested in anything. This was because (a) I had never been really interested in anything and (b) "Passion" was a mandatory signal, required for getting into college. When I saw people who appeared to be genuinedly interested in things (sports, music, running the school newspaper, building robots, whatever), I assumed they were just better than me at sending the required signals. When I got to college and saw people who continued to appear interested in these things, even though extracurriculars were no longer valuable, I realized I had been wrong.
Probably not too interesting, but after studying physics at university I was pretty sure that the Many-Worlds interpretation of QM was crazy-talk (nobody even really mentioned it at uni). Of course I didn't read Eliezer's sequence on QM (although I read the others). I mean I had a degree in physics and Eliezer didn't.
Then after seeing it over and over again on LW, I actually read this paper to see what it was all about. And I was enlightened. Well, I had a short crisis of faith first, then I was enlightened.
This all could have been avoided if I had read that paper earlier. The lesson is that I can't even trust my fellow physicists :(
How do you know your new belief is more accurate than your old belief?
Hm, because I spend more time researching the issue than I had before? That should count for something, shouldn't it?
Also, I can actually explain things like decoherence without hand-waving now. Looking back there were some gaps in my understanding that I just brushed over. You could say it was a failure of rationality to give as much credence to the Copenhagen interpretation in the first place.
But when you go to many worlds you lose the Born probabilities, doesn't that bother you? The Born probabilities are the actual measurable predictions of the theory.
Many worlds is only simpler as a theory if you don't include a measurement postulate, in which case no one knows how to get Born probabilities.
You can postulate the Born probabilities, but now the theory is exactly as complicated as it was before, so there is no reason to choose many worlds over something like consistent histories.
Nope, MWI is still simpler. The Copenhagen version simply introduces a magical flying spaghetti monster that eats up all the other unobserved configuration spaces faster than light, non-unitarily, etc. That's not really what you would call an "explanation" of the Born probabilities, it's just a magical black box. Many Worlds proponents just say upfront that we don't really know why our experience matches the Born probabilities (and neither does Copenhagen), so it subtracts the FSM from the total complexity. Therefore O(MWI) < O(single-world theories).
I find Eliezer's insistence about Many-Worlds a bit odd, given how much he hammers on "What do you expect differently?". Your expectations from many-worlds are be identical to those from pilot-wave, so....
I'm probably misunderstanding or simplifying his position, e.g. there are definitely calculational and intuition advantages to using one vs the other, but that seems a bit inconsistent to me.
There is at least one situation in which you might expect something different under MWI than under pilot-wave: quantum suicide. If you rig a gun so that it kills you if a photon passes through a half-silvered mirror, then under MWI (and some possibly reasonable assumptions about consciousness) you would expect the photon to never pass through the mirror no matter how many experiments you perform, but under pilot-wave you would expect to be dead after the first few experiments.
I'm not convinced there's a real difference there.
In both cases you expect that in no experiment you observe (and survive) will the gun fire and kill you. In both cases you expect that an independent observer will see the gun fire and kill you about half the time. In both cases you expect that there is some chance that you survive through many experiments (and, I repeat, that in all those you will find that the gun didn't fire or fired in some unintended way or something) -- what actual observable difference is there here?
In the pilot wave theory, the probability that you will witness yourself surviving the experiment after it is performed say 1000 times is really really small. In MWI that probability is close to 1 (provided you consider all future versions of yourself to be "yourself"). So if you witness yourself surviving the experiment after it is performed 1000 times, you should update in favor of MWI over pilot wave theory (if those are the two contenders).
I am skeptical of the existence of any clearly definable sense of "the probability that you will witness yourself surviving the experiment" that (1) yields different answers for Everett and for Bohm, and (2) doesn't have excessively counterintuitive properties (e.g., probabilities not adding up to 1).
Probability that any you looking at the outcome of the experiment after 1000 runs sees you alive? 1, either way. Probability that someone looking from outside sees you alive after 1000 runs? Pretty much indistinguishable from 0, either way.
You only get the "probability 1 of survival" thing out of MWI by effectively conditionalizing on your survival. But you can do that just as well whatever interpretation of QM you happen to be using.
If I find myself alive after 1000 runs of the experiment ... well, what I actually conclude, regardless of preferred interpretation of QM, is that the experiment was set up wrong, or someone sabotaged it, or some hitherto-unsuspected superbeing is messing with things. But if such possibilities are ruled out somehow, I conclude that something staggeringly improbable happened, and I conclude that whether I am using Everett or Bohm. I don't expect to go on living for ever under MWI; the vast majority of my measure doesn't. What I expect is that whatever bits of my wavefunction survive, survive. Which is entirely tautological, and is equivalent to "if I survive, I survive" in a collapse-y interpretation.
Anthropomorphically forcing the world to have particular laws of physics by more effectively killing yourself if it doesn't seems... counter-productive to maximizing how much you know about the world. I'm also not sure how you can avoid disproving MWI by simply going to sleep, if you're going to accept that sort of evidence.
(Plus quantum suicide only has to keep you on the border of death. You can still end up as an eternally suffering almost-dying mentally broken husk of a being. In fact, those outcomes are probably far more likely than the ones where twenty guns misfire twenty times in a row.)
I take Eliezer's position on MWI to be pretty well expressed by this quote from David Wallace:
The central case for Everettianism is that it is just plain old quantum mechanics, approached with the default realist perspective that most of us have no problem adopting for practically every other physical theory.* Every other "interpretation" out there adds on extra posits -- either ontological posits or epistemological posits that one doesn't usually hear when talking about other theories -- in order to solve a problem that doesn't actually exist, the so-called "measurement problem". So it's not just that MWI is simpler than the other theories; it's that the sole motivation for the added complexity in other theories -- the supposed inadequacy of bare quantum theory to account for our observations -- turns out to be bunk.
Suppose someone argued that the general theory of relativity all by itself is inadequate. After all, how does the space-time metric know how to change in the presence of matter? There has to be some transcendent intelligent entity responsible for altering space-time whenever the distribution of energy in the universe changes, so we need to supplement the usual equations of GR with this additional theoretical posit in order to solve this problem. The correct response to this is that the supposed "problem" itself is a mistake stemming from unclear thinking, and that there is no need to posit this additional entity. And since the only motivation for positing this entity's existence was the pseudo-problem we have just rejected, it would be a mistake to believe that the entity exists. Wallace's (and I think Eliezer's) position is that the quantum interpretation debates are just sophisticated versions of this.
* This is not to say that an anti-realist or instrumentalist attitude to scientific theories is a mistake, provided this attitude is a general philosophical position and not motivated by the supposed peculiarities of quantum mechanics. However, many people (e.g. Fuchs and Peres) who advocate instrumentalism about QM aren't motivated by the attractions of instrumentalism per se but rather by a belief that there is something about quantum mechanics specifically that makes realism untenable. This is a mistake, according to Everettians.
You really aren't. His logic is literally "it's simpler, therefore it's right" and "we don't need collapse (or anything else), decoherence is enough". To be fair, plenty of experts in theoretical physics hold the same view, most notably Deutsch and Carroll.
After Sandy Hook, I got angry and convinced guns rights people and the NRA were nuts.
Then I looked at the data for gun deaths in the US and I seem to remember mass shootings are a statistical anomaly. Handguns in 1-on-1 killings are the bulk of the problem.
Then I considered the second amendment and how maybe it's not a terrible idea to have an armed populace should the gov't get corrupt and motivated to oppress. Also, I saw a TED talk that had me convinced income inequality was the cause of gun (and all sorts of) violence, and concluded gun ownership rates (and gun enthusiasm) weren't to blame for anything.
Then I thought an armed populace wouldn't matter against a sufficiently armed gov't. Then I was like, "What do I know about such matters??"
Then I extrapolated this revelation about my ignorance out to include everything, and I recognized I have no idea what to believe about gun rights, or anything else.
Then I went on FB and started arguing with gun enthusiasts, because they seem wrong to all the rational parts of me.
Then back to LW, to sort out my bad epistemological habits...
Guns are bit old school. People should be allowed to have their own tanks and fighter jets by now :)
It always amuses me to watch the optimism of gun fanatics who believe they're preparing themselves to resist with their shotguns against a state that has drones and nukes at its disposal.
Cliven Bundy makes this seem quasi-justified, sadly enough.
Also... Nukes? Useless in this sort of situation.
We have drones and nukes and yet somehow still fighting persisted for a decade in Iraq and Afghanistan. Guerilla warfare is a very real thing.
As for nukes, What would be the point of the united states dropping a nuke on say, a rebellious Chicago? They'd be fucking themselves over. There are plenty of decent arguments one way or the other, but let's not be stupid.
The Syrians and Libyans seem to have done OK for themselves. Iraq and likely Afghanistan were technically wins for our nuclear and drone-armed state, but both were only marginal victories, Iraq was a fairly near run thing, and in neither case were significant defections from the US military a plausible scenario.
They are organized paramilitary groups who buy military-grade weapons and issue them to their soldiers, not random gun toters who fight with personally owned handguns and shotguns.
It seems to me that the main issues in setting up a militia are organization, recruitment and funding. Once you sort that out, acquiring weapons isn't much difficult.
Maybe, but this is the exact opposite of polymath's claim- not that fighting a modern state is so difficult as to be impossible, but that fighting one is sufficiently simple that starting out without any weapons is not a significant handicap.
(The proposed causal impact of gun ownership on rebellion is more guns -> more willingness to actually fight against a dictator (acquiring a weapon is step that will stop many people who would otherwise rebel from doing so) -> more likelihood that government allies defect -> more likelihood that the government falls. I'm not sure if I endorse this, but polymath's claim is definitely wrong.)
(As an aside, this is historically inaccurate: almost all of the weapons in Syria and Libya came either from defections from their official militaries (especially in Libya), or from foreign donors, not from private purchases. However, private purchases were important in Mexico and Ireland.)
I didn't claim that fighting a government is simple. My claim is that the hardest part of fighting a government is forming an organized militia with sufficient funds and personnel. If you manage to do that, then acquiring weapons is probably comparatively easy.
Um, until recently the various Iraqi militants weren't very organized.
Kinda. And until recently they sucked at fighting the government.
Making an open call for interesting papers people may have read arguing for effect (one way or another) of gun legislation on [interesting outcomes]. Gwern, do you know anything, maybe?
No. I don't pay any attention to gun control - too politicized, the data too weak, and too irrelevant to my life to make it worthwhile. (Everyone agrees it's a good idea to be careful with your own guns, and there's little you can do about crime.)
There's an interesting argument in favor of gun rights that the Reds rarely make, because it requires an appeal to concepts from evolutionary psychology and morality. It turns out that humans are much more egalitarian than other primates, who generally organize themselves into strict dominance hierarchies. The explanation for this (according to Jonathan Haidt) is that early humans developed weapons like spears and axes, which made it easier to kill other humans. So it is relatively easy for a larger, stronger alpha male chimp or ape to dominate weaker males, but a human alpha male bully would often end up getting speared by a lower status rival.
Interesting.
One of my (many) irrational iterations of thinking about gun control had me convinced Republicans held such a staunch line on defending gun rights (in part) in order to keep the argument not about economic inequality as a causal driver for all sorts of violence, including guns.
As long as the argument was about he 2nd amendment, assault rifle bans and school shootings, no one would pay attention to the numbers showing strong correlation between gun violence (and violent crime) and disparity in income, and thus no deeper discussion about fiscal/social policy would need to occur.
I don't know about this any more. I want it to be true, because of my Blue team affiliations, but it seems a bit too conspiracy-ish for my liking. (I'm also part of the Anti-Conspiracy Team...which wears a mustard yellow uniform.)
Isn't poverty correlated with race in the U.S.?
I don't think this is true. Gun violence is not just correlated with poverty, it's also correlated with race. And while it may be disadvantageous to Republicans to emphasize how poverty is bad, it may be advantageous to Republicans to emphasize how blacks and Hispanics are bad.
Given that a lot of people suspect Republicans of being racist, it would be extremely disadvantageous for them to openly say bad things about blacks and Hispanics.
It may, however, be advantageous for them to do so subtly.
Race is correlated with poverty, so that's expected. Is there a strong correlation beyond that?
I've heard a theory that violence in the US is correlated being Southern, not with race. Anyone know whether there's anything to this?
violence is correlated with temperature.
Relevant article. Less technical summary by the authors of that paper here. There is some controversy about what the underlying causal mechanism is. See this article.
That sounds pretty similar to the argument that high gun ownership makes makes it more difficult for the government to become tyrannical.
Oh, but they do. “God made every man different; Sam Colt made them equal."
Haha, I stand corrected.
According to someone else's post on here, suicides are the bulk of the problem, provided that you consider suicide a problem.
I consider it a basically unrelated problem.
It's caused by guns. If you're considering gun control, most gun-related deaths are suicide, and you consider suicide to be just as bad as any other form of death, then the most important consideration is suicide.
Robbing people of effective means to die doesn't make suicidal people stop being suicidal. It just forces them to endure whatever unbearable and possibly untreatable pain they are in.
Replace "suicidal" with "suicidally depressed" and I'll agree.
Depression isn't always chronic, and when it is, you aren't depressed the whole time. It doesn't seem clear to me if a depressed person committing suicide is on average a net loss or a net gain.
I suppose I should have made my position more clear in my earlier comment, and said that that could just as well be a cost to gun control.
This sort of testimony strikes me as weak evidence. If you've just failed to kill yourself and don't want to be committed, or have been committed but want to be let out soon, this is exactly what you'd say regardless of truth.
That would explain why you said so to a doctor, but not why you agreed to an interview with reporters and said the same thing there.
Suicide is indeed often an impulsive act, in which the urge must coincide with the means.
Stronger evidence for this claim:
Decrease in suicide rates after a change of policy reducing access to firearms in adolescents: a naturalistic epidemiological study.
Use of army weapons and private firearms for suicide and homicide in the region of Basel, Switzerland.
I don't think suicidality (is there such a word?) is a condition one has or doesn't have. If thoughts of suicide can be induced by literature and communities (see e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copycat_suicide ) then the opposite should also be possible at least in principle.
Taking away one means of simple suicide at least provides a trivial incenvenience for boundary cases.
It's a commonly cited figure that at least 90% of people who commit suicide have a diagnosable mental disorder, and here's a paper that claims the figure is as high as 98%. Of course there could be some tautology in the diagnostic methods, but suicidality itself isn't classified a mental disorder.
It bothers me that this fact is usually interpreted to mean that suicides are the result of poor judgment or a disconnect with reality. Mental illness is a common cause of genuine severe suffering.
It would bother me too if the interpretation was that this is always so. I'm not sure how you could reliably investigate the quality of their judgement concerning suicide. Much of the poor judgement might not be so much the mental disorder itself, but normal hyperbolic discounting combined with severe temporary suffering.
If you assume people won't find another way to kill themselves, and IF you consider suicide to be just as bad, and if you assume gun-related deaths is actually the right metric to judge as to whether or not you want gun control.
I've seen something about this that Google showed me is discussed here. It works out that one in three people who would have killed themselves with gas found another method, and the other two thirds just didn't bother. Ideally I'd find some other statistics along this line, but since I'm lazy and I don't actually care all that much about this issue, I'll just go with that. Accounting for this, and not accounting for people find another way to kill others, there's still a little more suicides caused by guns than homicides.
I think this was a great idea for a post. If LessWrong rationality is worthwhile, then it ought to get lots of replies on concrete facts - not moral preferences, theology, or other unproveables.
I used to believe that embryos pass through periods of development representing earlier evolutionary stages - that there was a period when a human baby was basically a fish, then later an amphibian, and so on. I believed this because my father told me so; he was a doctor (though not an obstetrician), and the information he had given me about other subjects was highly reliable. Most knowledge is second hand - it was highly rational for me to believe him. I now know (also second hand!) that Haeckel's ideas were debunked a long time ago - although they might well have been in a textbook when my father was at medical school.
To me, the lesson is trust, but verify.
I only recently realized that evolution works, for the most part, by changing the processes of embryonic development. There are some exceptions-- things like neoteny and metamorphosis-- but most changes are genetic differences leading to differences in, say, how long a process of growth is allowed to occur in the embryo.
Oh horror. I believed this until right now. Not exactly literally. I never knew Haeckels strong thesis. But from what I had been told (probably as contracted as "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny") I still assumed the linearity part to be true. And I passed this wrong simplification on to my children (probably like your father did). So now I have some damage control to do...
Indirect quotes from the cited Wikipedia article:
False belief: That in the U.S. the death penalty was cheaper than life in prison.
Believing this wasn't rational. I didn't take such basic steps as looking up the costs surrounding executions or life imprisonment. Executions get much more appeals, trials and legal attention.
False belief: That in the U.S. deaths by firearm are generally homicides, not suicides.
Believing this also wasn't rational. I didn't take such basic steps as looking up available death statistics.
Actually, looking through things potentially on the list for me, a lot of them seem to have the following general form:
1: Something is asserted.
2: I think: 'Yeah, that sounds plausible.'
3: I don't bother to look up any data about it, I just move myself to the believe column.
4: Later, someone else reports data about it.
5: I'm surprised that my earlier beliefs were wrong.
I've since became more skeptical of believing things based on just assertions, (I can even recall a recent instance where an assertion popped up on TV which my wife believed, but which I was skeptical of and which upon looking it up we found data didn't support it and that they were massively overstating their case)
But I can definitely recall beliefs that I have had in the past that were fundamentally just assertion based and the followed the above pattern.
I would have expected accidents to lead that metric. A quick check of the actual data says it's negligible. Time to rescind my support for gun lock laws (except perhaps to reduce the likelihood that people purchase guns in the first place).
Being ignorant of certain facts isn't being irrational.
Thinking about this comment reminds me of an important point.
I do have a smartphone in my pocket and I can look up that information in seconds, quicker than I can type this post.
I don't recall exactly when I shifted that belief, but I think it was before I had a smartphone, which means that looking it up would probably take at least minutes, instead of seconds, which may be coloring me thinking now 'I should have just looked up some facts.'
Regardless of the status of beliefs about facts about the U.S. death penalty in particular, I agree there exist certain facts that are worth seconds looking into, that aren't worth minutes looking into (or any other appropriate combination of time increments)
Thanks for bringing this to my attention.
This never occurred to me until now. It's not something I find at all surprising. It's just that I've never heard anyone talk about gun control and suicide, so it wasn't something that I ever considered related to the issue of gun control.
Heh. That's conclusive evidence that you've ever heard only one side of the gun control debate.
The anti-gun side widely uses "gun deaths" numbers which, as you just found out, contain suicides. The pro-gun side subtracts the suicides to get to actual "homicide using a gun" numbers. That's a very early and basic point in the debate.
So the blues, who are in favor of euthanasia, count suicides as a problem, and the reds, who are against it, do not? Ironic.
If you think the average person who kills themselves with a gun is even in the ballpark of the reference class that the word “euthanasia” suggests, your intuition about the latter needs recalibrating.
Or maybe your intuition about the former needs recalibrating.
Blues are not uniformly in favor of euthanasia; I'd call that a Grey cluster belief, largely.
You've just found that a major component of this debate was completely foreign to you. Now you've quickly decided that it's so silly you should make fun of it. Use the Try Harder, Luke.
Most of the debate is foreign to me. I've heard general arguments, but I've never once bothered to look into the numbers. I am not ignorant of the debate because I was irrationally assuming no additional information exists. I am ignorant because I never felt the need to stop being ignorant.
Well most of the arguments I heard against euthanasia are slippery slope arguments that euthanasia will lead to increasingly less voluntary euthanasia.
Well, means matter, as the saying gos: http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/means-matter/
People commit suicide opportunistically, not (generally) in a planned-out way. So it makes sense that Democrats, who favor government interference in life choices for the greater good, support something that reduces your opportunity space for suicide.
Of course, Republicans also support government interference in life choices for the greater good, just for different things (abortion, birth control access, sexual health education access, etc.). Really, it doesn't matter whether the beliefs are consistent, because nobody really thinks about this and few if any people who are debating gun control bring up these topics.
Not really. It's just demagoguery, dark arts. A bigger number is more useful as a heavy blunt object to beat your opponent over the head with.
Believing a proposition X with some probability, without checking it, isn't irrational. I'm very confident that the core of the moon isn't made of cheese, even though no one has ever checked that. The whole point of theorizing is to jump from a limited number of empirical observations to general statements about the world.
I used to think Narwhals were fictional animals. And people telling me they were real were just joking. It wasn't until HS that I was convinced they actually existed. My mental process was like "No way are there aqua unicorns."
Semi-political: I used to believe the correlation between economic freedom and economic growth was much stronger than it is. (I know there is no canonical choice of measurement for either variable). This realization had pretty important consequences for me.
My estimates of public opinion surveys were totally wrong. On almost every issue (sexuality, morality, politics, etc) I was completely wrong about the distribution of beliefs. Given my history of failure in this domain I no longer really on my own "intuitive" estimates of the distribution of group beliefs. Instead I seek explicit surveys.
You were not alone in your narwhal-doubting.
Here is a list of countries ranked by economic freedom:
http://www.heritage.org/index/
The top 10 are all very prosperous countries. In particular, Hong Kong and Singapore are both much richer than surrounding areas. Chile is conspicuously richer than other South American countries. Mauritius is conspicuously richer than other African countries. Ireland is one of the wealthiest countries in Europe.
That site has a nice slightly-interactive map where you can pick out individual components of their "freedom index". Mostly they correlate with prosperity (I have no idea what the actual causal relationships are) ... until you click on "Government Spending" and suddenly it goes exactly the other way round -- the allegedly-worst government spending figures are for the US, Canada and Western Europe, and the allegedly-best are for severely messed up central African countries and China (!) and India.
If they stopped counting government spending as opposed to freedom -- it seems to me only marginally a matter of freedom -- the correlation between "freedom" and prosperity would become even more impressive.
(Note 1. The cynic in me says: Of course that's out of the question because a central part of the reason why the Heritage Foundation exists is to argue for lower government spending and hence lower taxes. If it advocated less forcefully for that, it would become less useful to those who fund it.)
(Note 2. It seems like there are lots of other things that could go into a "freedom index" with about as much reason as government spending. Two examples: longer working hours mean less freedom to do as you please with your time; stronger IP law means less freedom to start a technology-based business, to do as you please with the books and music and software you own, etc. Again, the absence of these things from the Heritage Foundation's "freedom index" seems adequately explained by the interests of the organizations that provide its funding.)
Princess_Stargirl is talking about the correlation with economic growth, which is not going to be the same as the correlation with economic prosperity. This looks like a confusion of a variable with its rate of change.
It is informative to see what happens if I (1) correct this by correlating the economic freedom index with GDP growth, and (2) use as big a sample as is available instead of focusing on particular cases. I copied the freedom ratings from that Heritage web page and real GDP growth rates ("estimates are for the year 2013 unless otherwise indicated") from Wikipedia. The correlation between the freedom index and real GDP growth turns out to be negative: the Pearson correlation coefficient is -0.19 and Spearman's rank correlation coefficient (which allows for nonlinearity) is -0.35. Plotting the data and a loess curve with R's default settings:
Some outliers are evident. Perhaps they're disproportionately skewing the freedom-growth correlation? I take out North Korea (the far left point) and the two lowest points, Cyprus and Central African Republic:
and in fact the freedom-growth correlation sinks further, to -0.38 (Spearman's rank) or -0.30 (Pearson). The main mass of nations hovers around the part of the loess curve which slopes downward.
At this point in time, the correlation between the Heritage Foundation's index of economic freedom and economic growth is unambiguously negative. I suspect this is because being a poor country is associated with low economic freedom but high catch-up growth. What happens if I correlate the freedom index with annualized GDP growth over a longer period, 1990-2007, for which catch-up growth is probably less important?
I now wind up with positive correlations (+0.25 for Spearman, +0.20 for Pearson). Now I throw out the outlying North Korea (the leftmost point), Zimbabwe (the bottommost), and Equatorial Guinea (the topmost).
This has no meaningful effect on the correlations, which become +0.24 (Spearman) and +0.21 (Pearson). Overall, by switching from a more up-to-date growth statistic to a more long-term (and pre-Great Recession and mostly post-Soviet) statistic, I change the sign of the correlation between growth and the Heritage Foundation's assessment of economic freedom.
It's not immediately obvious to me which GDP growth statistic is more appropriate. 2013 growth has the advantages of being more up-to-date and better matching when the Index of Economic Freedom was calculated, but is less representative of each country's long-term economic trajectory. 1990-2007 growth is more representative but also involves comparing 24-year-old data to a recent index; the proper thing to do here would be to use a similarly long-term average of the Index of Economic Freedom, but that's too much like real work.
There is also the question of how to operationalize "economic freedom", but this comment is long enough. I evade that problem here by simply taking the data tables suggested upthread as given, and after doing so the basic conclusion seems to be that the correlation between "economic freedom" and "economic growth" is modest, with its sign sensitive to how one operationalizes growth. (Check my work with my data file.)
[Edited 19/10 to change "Gunea" to "Guinea", and add "after doing so".]
To test this hypothesis, I did a linear regression of overall score, each of the ten subscores and 2013 real GDP growth against the log of 2013 GDP per capita (at parity). I then took the correlation between the residual of 2013 real GDP growth and the residual for each of the scores. Here are the results: overall score -0.04 property rights -0.15 freedom from corruption -0.11 fiscal freedom 0.25 government spending 0.18 business freedom -0.03 labor freedom 0.05 monetary freedom -0.12 trade freedom 0.01 investment freedom -0.18 financial freedom -0.09
These results were approximately opposite of what I expected (I expected minimal correlation for fiscal freedom and government spending and generally positive correlations for everything else). While I'm only somewhat surprised by the government spending and fiscal freedom results, I find the others very confusing. Does anyone have any idea what might be going on?
Your charts graph 1990-2007 economic growth as a function of 2014 economic freedom, 1990 economic freedom, so assuming that correlation is causation here (almost always a dubious assumption), this would indicate that economic growth leads to economic freedom, not the other way around.
Is 1990 economic freedom data available?
On a similar note to narwhals, for a while I assumed that fan death was just a meta-urban legend.
I once believed that six times one is one.
I don't remember how it came up in conversation, but for whatever reason numbers became relevant and I clearly and directly stated my false belief. It was late, we were driving back from a long hard chess tournament, and I evidently wasn't thinking clearly. I said the words "because of course six times one is one." Everyone thought for a second and someone said "no it's not." Predictable reactions occurred from there.
The reason I like the anecdote is because I reacted exactly the same way I would today if someone corrected me when I said that six times one is six. I thought the person who corrected me must be joking; he knows math and couldn't possibly be wrong about something that obvious. A second person said that he's definitely not joking. I thought back to the sequences, specifically the thing about evidence to convince me I'm wrong about basic arithmetic. I ran through some math terminology in my head: of course six times one is one; any number times one is one. That's what a multiplicative identity means. In my head, it was absolutely clear that 6x1=1, this is required for what I know of math to fit together, and anything else is completely logically impossible.
It probably took a good fifteen seconds from me being called out on it before I got appropriately embarrassed.
This anecdote is now my favorite example of the important lesson that from the inside, being wrong feels exactly like being right.
I suspect you were saying six times one, but your brain was thinking of one to the sixth power, which indeed is one.
Except when it doesn't.
I used to believe that Benzin (the German word for petrol/gasoline, with cognates in many continental European languages including my mother tongue) was named after Karl Benz.
I used to think that overweight was caused by slow metabolism, i.e. that generally speaking fat people are people who have slow metabolisms and thin people are people who have fast metabolisms.
I believed this because (1) it is the conventional wisdom; (2) it is consistent with the observation that some people seem to be thin even though they stuff their faces; and (3) it makes sense from a thermodynamic perspective that someone with a slow metabolism would be prone to putting on weight and someone with a fast metabolism would be prone to staying thin.
Putting aside the fact that this belief was wrong, there does seem to be a certain degree of irrationality about it given the observation that people don't vary all that much in terms of body temperature. Therefore they must not vary all that much in terms of metabolism.
I don't think that follows, or at least not without a lot of other explanation, even if you grant that temperature doesn't vary in any significant way between people (which I'm not sure I do). The body has multiple mechanisms for maintaining temperature, of which metabolic rate is only one. It seems entirely plausible to me that people run their metabolisms at different rates and adjust their peripheral vasodilation and sweating rate to balance it all out near 37 C/98 F. Core temperature might vary between people by only a few degrees, but surface temperature varies much more widely.
Do you have a source for the claim that fat people don't generally have slow metabolisms?
I used to think something could rotate around more than one axis at once. Imagine a pipe sitting in space with some jets on it. Two opposing jets on the middle angled tangent to the curve firing equally would set it rotating around the long axis. Two opposing jets on the end angled perpendicularly to the pipe would set it rotating around the short axis. I thought you could do one of these and then the other and get something that was rotating around two axes at once. Then in high school I was writing some kind of space program that had objects and I needed a way to represent their rotations. Each object was fully rigid and had a position (x, y, z), a velocity (dx, dy, dz), and an orientation (ox, oy, oz), but how should I represent rotational velocity? Each one would be a vector (rx, ry, rz), but what order would I apply them in? Did that matter? How did rotational velocities around multiple axes interact? At this point I went to talk to my physics teacher, who explained that there's no list of these velocities and when something would add a new rotation to an object it instead combines with the existing rotational velocity. Which is why gyroscopes work.
I'm curious whether I could have gotten the physics to work out if all rotation was independent, and what else would be different about that world.
Well, for one thing it would be mathematically incoherent.
Actually, rigid rotation is more complicated than you seem to think. While instantaneous rotational velocity (at least in 3 dimensions) is always representable by an axis and an angular velocity, the angular velocity can change even in the absence of torques.
Edit: Also how are you representing orientation as (ox, oy, oz)?
I'm not sure what you mean. You're saying it's not possible to make a coherent mathematical description of a physics system where something rotates around multiple axes? It wouldn't correspond to our world very well, but why are the mathematics impossible?
Yikes! Yes, even the model I ended up with sounds like it didn't represent rotations properly.
This was about a decade ago, so I'm not confident I remember what I did properly. But I think you can represent orientation as a one-time rotation from an initial position. So (ox, oy, oz) are a vector representing an axis with the magnitude indicating how far around that axis it rotates. Does that not work? (It's also possible that I kept orientation as a matrix.)
Rotation is a mathematical concept, not a physical one.
In 4d, an object can rotate about two axes at once. Say the 4 coordinates are w x y z. The w and x coordinates can do the usual rotation, while the y and z coordinates rotate together, perhaps at a different rate. Or instead of 4 real coordinates, take 2 complex coordinates a and b, and have them evolve by (a,b) → (exp(i.r.t).a, exp(i.s.t).b), where t is the time and r and s are speeds.
Not so much a false positive belief but a conspicuous failure to fill the blanks in the world model: I didn't realize that the night sky appears to rotate until I was a teenager reading Carl Sagan's Contact, and came to the part where the character is watching the sky at night and the stars are described as moving slowly along the night. Then it was obvious that of course that's what happens, but this was the first time I'd seen anyone say this aloud, and before that I would've just assumed without thinking that stars stay in the same relative place all night.
When I went to the London meetup, someone mentioned the "punching someone upward in the nose can send the nosebone into the brain and kill them" urban myth, and we all nodded except the one guy who actually bothered to think about it and said "I don't think that can be right, it doesn't make evolutionary sense" or something on those lines. I think, in my case at least, this was "just" a cached thought from childhood, but it was quite humbling how many of us got something so simple so wrong.
I used to believe that altruism was generally faked. This was based on my direct experience (and perhaps some mind projection fallacy), and an assumption that personalities were consistent over time, or perhaps situation - so probably the good old fundamental attribution error. And a default assumption that high schools couldn't really just be terrible, because no-one would allow that to happen. Why did I believe that? I think not appreciating how fallible memory is, and overestimating the engineering of the human reasoning apparatus. Evolution is always stranger than you think.
I used to not believe in quantum mechanics or general relativity, because they were terribly explained. I guess again I was assuming too much good faith on the part of educators. In retrospect if I'd just found a college textbook I'd've straightened myself out a lot sooner than I did. The popular science publishing industry still seems dysfunctional, but presumably there are incentives that I don't appreciate that keep it the way it is.
A single punch can be lethal, so why doesn't a special case (albeit myth) of it make evolutionary sense?
What convinced you otherwise? I think the same person can profess either genuine or faked altruism depending on the situation. Figuring out the proportion of those throughout humanity without some kind of experimental psychology would be quite difficult I think.
Link Human face shaped by millions of years of fighting, study finds
Yes, but weren't human limbs also shaped by millions of years of fighting? I don't think you could determine the outcome of that evolutionary arms race a priori.
A single punch can be lethal, but not with anything like the frequency that you could be subject to this kind of impact - it's an obvious place to punch someone, and very similar to what happens when you fall on your face. We know that skull shape is something that evolution can and does change in relatively short timeframes. There's no "technical debt" explanation, particularly if the claim was that this is something unique to humans.
Mainly moving from a situation in which I faked it to one in which I genuinely enjoyed being altruistic - but also observing changes in I guess how behaviour seemed to change with observation, which seemed to suggest that my peers also underwent the same change.
Wait, did you say myth?
sneaks off to Google
What the hell, Card?
Please define faked.
Done out of conscious self-interest, rather than for moral reasons. (I'm well aware that our moral reasoning was optimized by evolution for self-interest; nevertheless, I think the distinction is real).
I'm not sure the distinction is real.
Do you have any examples?
It's a difference in one's conscious reasoning rather than in one's actions, so my only direct examples are my own and intransmissible. You can infer it from "who you are in the dark" cases where you happened to observe someone who believed they would be unobserved and still did the altruistic thing, but obv. that requires being confident they weren't just playing the game one level higher than you.
Let's say you see someone who gives 25% of their income to the charities GiveWell recommends and says they do this because they think it's the right thing to do. This is enough money that if they're optimizing for your own happiness, social status, long term welfare, or pretty much anything else about them there are almost certainly better ways they could spend it. I guess you could say "they're not being altruistic, they're doing a poor job of acting in their own self-interest" but that seems like a pretty big stretch.
It could have been worse. You could have believed their explanations.
One of the slides of my physiology 102 course consisted of the claim that women blink twice as much as men. I put that as a fact into Anki. Now it turns out that when I google around it isn't true.
In general the heuristic of believing things I'm told in science university lectures isn't completely bad, but it seems that there a category where lectures want to mention interesting facts and then tell students interesting facts that aren't necessarily true.
The belief was minor, but the story is entertaining:
A while ago a guy walked into the bookstore and asked me for a copy of The Art of War—by Machiavelli.
I've developed the habit of being polite when customers are mistaken about details, taking (and often inventing) every possible opportunity to help them save face, so I handed him a copy of Sun Tzu without comment—though you can be sure that internally I was feeling all kinds of smug at the chance to display my superior knowledge of extremely common classic books. He glanced at it and left—mortified, I imagined.
A few months later, I looked it up and discovered that Machiavelli did, in fact, write a treatise called The Art of War.
But that isn't the embarrassing part.
The embarrassing part is that, in the moment I went to check, what I was thinking was not "Hmm, I wonder if I could have been mistaken"; it was "Heh, I wonder if anyone else has made the same mistake as that idiot!" My error was corrected only incidentally—in the course of my efforts to reinforce it.
I wonder what the chances of the guy actually asking for the Machiavelli tract are relative to the chances of him being wrong about the author? When I run into a namespace collision like that, I try to be extremely clear about it precisely so that I don't run into situations like you described -- i.e. "Machiavelli's Art of War, not the one by Sun Tzu".
You're absolutely right. Anyone who knew about the existence of both books would also be aware of the need to clarify which he meant (unless he was deliberately testing me so he could feel smug at his superior knowledge). The chances he was simply mistaken are still pretty good.
Had I considered that possibility, and rejected it on grounds of low prior, maybe I would have been entitled to a Rationality Cookie; but alas, what actually happened was that I didn't think at all.
Wait. "Rationality Cookie" is that a real thing? I can't find it but it sounds like a good idea to train rationality the classical way via quick rewards.
Not that I know of—but it could still work. I hear Eliezer once had some success with M&Ms!
I once believed that most people have a basic understanding of how Solar system works. My belief in humanity shattered when during a discussion with with several graduates of physics (!) I discovered that most of them do not know what is the orbital period of Moon. An impromptu survey revealed that about 8 people from 10 thought it was one day or one week. One knew, one even asked if I want to know sideric or synodic period.
It is about a month, right? I don't really see the importance of that knowledge though, unless you're fighting werewolves. I agree people are dumb, but they're dumb because they don't understand useful ideas like math rather than because they don't remember trivia about everyday phenomena.
I once walked around a university campus convincing people that it's impossible to see the Moon during daylight hours. I think it was about 2/3 who believed me, at least until I pointed up.
I love the example of what causes the phases of the moon, because it's not knowledge that most (modern) people have cached, but figuring it out only requires drawing a bunch of picture and asking questions about them like "What would I see in this configuration?".
For my part, I never realized (or probaly just forgot) there was a pattern between the phases of the moon and the time of the moon's visibility until I did this exercise a few years ago.
Well the Julian months aren't synchronized to the moon despite their origin.
I believed until sometime in high school that the phases of the moon are caused by the shadow of the earth. Don't ask me how I explained the gibbous phase.
...damn. I believed that until just now.
This video contains a Harvard professor claiming something like that at 2:34. Mainly it asks Harvard graduates and local high school students about the reason for seasons.
Oh, that's a good example too for the main thread! I don't remember exactly when I learned that the "eccentric orbit" theory of seasons was wrong (some time around grade 8), but remember how it happened---someone claimed that seasons in South America are flipped from the Northern Hemisphere, and I thought "that's obviously wrong!!", but asking around a bit other people confirmed it.
I guess this is also very similar to Folk Theories of Heat Control---you tend to end up with the simplest model which explains all relevant observations. As long as you only deal with one hemisphere, the eccentric orbit theory mostly works, and it's much easier to remember.
I wonder what this says about how seriously we should take Occam's razor.
I think Occam's razor is best used when you have Model A and Model B, where Model B is identical to Model A except it has one extra idea in it. Comparing different models or different types of models through one's intuitions about simplicity alone is generally a bad idea.
I would like to see a broader sample before you concluded that. If the 10 could hear each other, they could have formed a temporary mistake bandwagon.
I used to believe that no one would loot a large organization (especially in the first world) from the top. It took me a while to realize anyone could want that much money.
The comment has five karma points, so I may not be the only person who had that blind spot. I suspect in my case that having grown up slightly upper middle class contributed to my false belief-- it was a combination of comfort/security with limited ambition.
Could you give an example of someone looting a large organization in the first world?
The terrible CEO of Sears comes to mind.
That link claims that (1) he is incompetent and (2) he is liquidating the company. The two claims are not compatible. Nor does either constitute "looting." Looting is intentional behavior, not incompetence. If you do think liquidating a company is "looting," you could have just said so, rather than linking to an article and letting me figure out the behavior you meant. And there are a lot more examples of liquidation.
I don't think it's reasonable to expect someone who you disagree with about the meaning of a word used in an unusual context to know you disagree with them and mention it in advance.
It's not an unusual context, but that doesn't meant that it means anything beyond negative affect.
The recent history of the state of Illinois.
Before I started tutoring I believed that anyone can learn first year math and science if only they put in the time and effort. Before I went to grad school I believed that I can learn all the advanced math and theoretical physics topics I was interested in. Neither belief survived experimental testing.
Weirdly, I had the exact opposite conversion via tutoring, where "anyone" = "college students."
EDIT: I should clarify, I was a mediocre tutor. However, the head of the tutoring center was incredible. He regularly had people who were failing college algebra and science for non-majors and turned them into chemistry majors. In the sessions where he tried to mentor me, my students were obviously learning more than when I was by myself.
A lower bound on your first claim: Most everyone accepts that there exist people with severe intellectual disability. For many causes, the degree of impairment may range smoothly from severe into the "normal" range, where the bright lines are imposed by functional requirements like living independently or managing health care, and not by any well-defined abstract mental capability.
Could you provide examples of advanced math that you were unable to learn? Why do you think you failed?
derp.
I am interested in this -- what exactly happened? Feel free to reply in private if you wish. Was it the case of:
(a) Morale breaking (this is not meant to be judgmental, this happens very often in graduate school, and certainly happened to me). Morale management is really hard.
(b) You felt lots of people in your program were much faster/smarter than you? (Also very common..)
(c) You felt you could learn [topic], but it would take unreasonably long (e.g. not 4-6 years it takes to get a thesis out)?
(d) You felt that literally you just could not get something, regardless of time investment? Could you give an example of such a topic?
I hit c) for the category theory course in my masters. I managed the first half, more or less, but it felt like it was ramping up exponentially; there were too many new layers of concepts all of which were defined in terms of the previous one, and every new layer meant a percentage slowdown in my ability to work with that concept.
During undergrad I'd been at about the 30th percentile, but only the best half of undergrads go on to do a masters (at least at that particular institution). In retrospect it shouldn't have been a surprise that I was towards the bottom of the class, but it was.
All of the above, but the root cause is limited aptitude. I know you don't believe that, but you probably will the day you hit your own limit.
Music is a good example. You can aspire to play the hardest and most exquisite music pieces with the best, and compose new masterpieces, but without the talent you will not progress much farther than "twinkle twinkle little star" (i'm exaggerating a bit).
Or sports. Not everyone who wants to makes it to the major leagues.
In math and sciences I have frequently observed a really motivated person learning something with extreme effort, doing the exercises, then coming to the next session with half the newly learned skills gone, and having to start nearly from scratch. As a result, the effort which is linear for many is exponential for them. Or worse.
I was in a similar situation. A couple of grad courses were easy, some harder, and one or two nearly impossible for me. I was able to do well enough on them, but it was hell. There would be no way for me to get to the level where I could do research in the area. Yet some other students just kept going, mastering the new material at the same rate as the old. (And others were forced to drop the course or the program long before.)
Think of, say, a high jumper. You can see one barely clearing 2.20 on the technique alone, with no hope of going higher, And you can see someone else doing the same height in a much more sloppy way, clearly able to do a lot better with a better technique. Brains are not much different from muscles. The limits are there, if not clearly visible.
Re your question (d), I have never tried to put enough time myself to test it, but I have tutored an aspired programmer who gave up after realizing he cannot think in the way required (see also 99.5% of programming job candidates fail the FizzBuzz test, though this seems a stretch).
This cannot be right. I have a variant of this (using an excel spreed sheet) on a technical interview for data analysts, which is a pretty low level position (the average candidate has an associates degree and "some knowledge of excel"). 60%-70% of the applicants, with no claimed programming experience, can make an excel sheet do the fizz buzz thing.
There are multiple possible interpretations:
For some reason your candidates have the neccessary ability. Possibly due to pre-selection, job profile, your area, whatever.
Your excel setup leads itself for easier realization of the FizzBuzz test.
Not having programming experience may actually help here as there is no standard solution where you can get stuck.
This is misleading. Bad programmers spend more time interviewing before being hired, thus the pool of job interview candidates is biased towards bad programmers.
It isn't cited + it seems awfully high -> the number is probably exaggerated at some level of intentionality
Even if a bad programmer did 200 times as many interviews as a good programmer, that would mean that about half the programmers can't do FizzBuzz, which is still unsettling.
If your idea of a "bad programmer" is someone who studied programming, but had unimpressive results, then yes, the idea that half the programmers can't do FizzBuzz is unsettling.
However, the set of "bad programmers" also includes crazy people who believe they understand programming without any good reasons; overconfident people who used Excel for a few months and now believe they know everything there is about using computers; etc. It is not so difficult to believe that these people are as numerous as the real programmers.
In other words, instead of a less skilled programmer, imagine a non-programmer with an extreme case of Dunning–Kruger effect.
By the way, I wonder how much this effect is culture-dependent. There seems to be something in the American culture that supports overconfidence, at least in job interviews.
By “programmer” in this context I meant ‘someone who applies for a programming job and makes it to the interview stage’. Which unless they outright lied on their CV means they probably have some kind of certification. In another article I read that more than half of comp sci graduates can't do FizzBuzz.
In a halfway decent world, granting a comp sci degree to someone who can't do FizzBuzz would be punishable as fraud.
If it was true that 99.5% of candidates fail the FizzBuzz test, then someone who passes it is better than 99.5% of the candidates who get to the interview stage, and should be hired immediately for any computer software job they try out for (unless you believe more than 100 people on the average get interviewed before anyone is hired) . The experience in the job market, of people who can pass the test, does not bear this out.
What you're missing is the following insight:
Taken from here.
Taking a quote from somewhere else as a reply always risks the possibility that it doesn't quite fit what it is being used as a reply to.
I was pointing out that the described competence level implies that a competent programmer must be in the top 0.5% of the candidates for the job, not the top 0.5% of all programmers in the world. Of course your quote is in reference to the latter, not the former, and is therefore off point. In fact, your quote says that the former is indeed true, but the latter should not be confused with it.
(Furthermore, the original FizzBuzz reference claims that only 1 out of 200 people can solve FizzBuzz as an interview question, not as something required with each resume. Only hiring 1 out of 200 candidates who submit resumes is a heck of a lot more plausible than only hiring 1 out of 200 candidates who get to the interview stage.)
The quote might not fit perfectly, but the insight does.
And the point of the quote is that this really doesn't say as much as you think. Hence why "99.5% of candidates fail the FizzBuzz test" isn't as implausible as on first glance.
This is accurate for the top companies- as of 2011, Google interviewed over 300 people for each spot filled. Many of these people were plausibly interviewed multiple times, or for multiple positions.
The job market isn't just Google. Is it really true that anyone who can program FizzBuzz will immediately get snapped up by the first place they apply to, if they are not applying to someplace like Google which receives such large numbers of applications? I find it hard to believe that the average accounting company or bank that needs programmers has to do 100 interviews on the average every time it hires one person.
(Furthermore, multiply by how many competent programmers they go through. If they hire on the average 1 out of every 4 competent programmers who applies, that makes it 400 interviews for each new hire.)
You seem to be confusing applicants with people who are given interviews. Typically less than half of applicants even make it to the interview stage- sometimes much, much less than half.
There's also enough evidence out there to say that this level of applicants is common. Starbucks had over a hundred applicants for each position it offered recently; Proctor and Gamble had around 500. This guy also says it's common for programmers.
No, I'm not. From shminux's link: