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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)
I used to be very often surprised by the English language (constantly running into my own false beliefs) and it was frustrating, until I started to read fan fiction. Since then, my attitude changed from 'wow, it's a word' to 'ah well, if t ain't broken, don't fix it'. Not sure if it is a good thing, but it seems to help with communication.
ETA: having just read the article 'Why don't people help others more?', I begin to suspect that donating to charities is actually one of the things that I don't want to do at all, even though I allocate money for it in my budget. I always thought of myself as not stingy, and it turned out I am. Feels... odd.
I once thought UDT may fail on some problems CDT (as I understand it) gets right.
"Jewish" means everybody who doesn't believe in Jesus. Ancient Pagans and contemporary atheists? Kinds of Jews.
I think I formed this belief very young, and I think I had my first conversation about beliefs with a Jew at 15ish, so lot of echo chambering. I updated immediately (and probably turned an interesting shade of red).
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.
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.
Wow thanks, I believed this one until five minutes ago.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's an interesting point. Would you agree that if a person has a higher metabolism, one would expect that under your theory, their skin temperature would be expected to be higher?
That, and/or increased sweating, and/or larger temperature gain between inspired and expired air, or wearing fewer/thinner clothes. There's lots of ways to dump heat.
I would definitely expect someone with a faster metabolism to put out more total net heat, which is measurable with difficulty, and also consume oxygen faster (and produce carbon dioxide faster) which is measurable with some difficulty, but a lot less.
Yes, but that would require much more involved procedures than just taking peoples' temperature. So I will concede that my argument about variation in temperature, which is sort of a back-of-the-envelope way of getting at the problem, is weaker than I had thought.
For a given body-shape, they should. For a given metabolism people with lower surface to volume ratio (ie round people) should have higher skin temperature.
And spherical cows in vacuum should have the highest skin temperature of them all!
I would have to agree with this. I wonder how much of an impact body shape has.
Do you have a source for the claim that fat people don't generally have slow metabolisms?
I assume you mean some kind of formal reference as opposed to common sense arguments or general observations. If so, are you seriously skeptical of the claim? If the answer is "yes," then I will try to dig something up.
I am sceptical of that claim, too.
I don't expect all fat people to have slow metabolisms, but I expect slow metabolism to be more prevalent among fat people as compared to thin people.
For example, there is a correlation between people's metabolism slowing down as they age and people gaining weight as they age (we're talking about the progression from, say, the 20s into the middle age, not old age). I am not ready to pronounce it a causal relationship, but the correlation is there.
That's not quite the claim I was addressing - the claim is that generally speaking, obesity is the result of having a slow metabolism. But anyway, I was able to dig up some evidence:
First, a video which is obviously not a scientific study but still pretty compelling:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KA9AdlhB18o
In this video, a fat girl who believes she is fat because of a "slow metabolism," is tested. It turns out that she has a perfectly normal metabolism but eats a lot more than she realizes.
Here is a similar video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGLwzbvx4S4
Scientific research would seem to indicate that this is pretty typical. i.e. people are fat not because of their "slow metabolism" but because they eat a lot more than they realize:
http://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/NEJM199212313272701
Here is a study which looked at a group of people and determined that the fatter subjects had higher metabolic rates than the thinner ones:
http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/35/3/566.short
If you search, there are a lot of studies like this out there. AFAIK, most (but not all) scientific studies have found that obese people have higher metabolisms than thin people.
My guess is that this is largely because obese people regularly overeat and so their metabolisms rev up a bit in a futile effort to handle the onslaught of calories. There may be a few studies out there which indicate that obese people have slower metabolisms, but I suspect the differences are pretty minor when you look at the real problem: Fat people eat a lot more than they realize, which is something that every study looking at this issue has concluded.
That looks to be a strawman. I am sure you can find on TV, but I am unaware of anyone reasonably serious holding this view.
:shrug: That's what I believed. Anyway, your response is a bit of a True Scotsman argument. If I find 100 people who expressed similar beliefs, you can simply dismiss them as not being "reasonably serious."
Let's do this: How do I know if someone is "reasonably serious" or not?
In the same way saying that no one serious believes in perpetual motion machines is also a True Scotsman argument.
Has adequate knowledge of human physiology and is not trolling :-P
Yes, I would say that it suffers from basically the same same problem. Do you agree that there are people out there who believe, in good faith, that perpetual motion machines are possible? Do you agree that there are people who invest a lot of personal time and energy into constructing perpetual motion machines?
Okay, and if someone asserts or implies that generally speaking obesity is caused by low metabolism, how do I know if they have adequate knowledge of human physiology and are not trolling?
And let's look at the girls in the two videos they linked. Although they did not make general statements about the causes of obesity, they did seem to believe at the beginning that their obesity was caused by slow metabolism, agreed? Would you agree that those two girls were not trolling? And in your opinion, did they have adequate knowledge of human physiology? If not, how do you know it?
In short, are those two girls "reasonably serious"?
Here I mean "serious" in the external-observer sense -- to denote people whom others consider serious = worthy of attention and time. I do NOT mean "serious" in the internal perception sense (as in e.g. "I'm not joking, I'm serious").
This is interesting enough that I'd like to see some more explanation, too.
See my reply to Lumifer above.
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.)
Not in 3 dimensions.
Come to think about it, yes it can.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
Doesn't matter what "they say" in regard to what the right thing to do is, right? It only matters if the act is pure altruism—that is, the giver gets no benefit, or even sacrifices, for the recipient.
My understanding (a la The Selfish Gene) is that the replicating genes of humanity will benefit from even fully anonymous gifts to people we've never met. Altruism is actually self-interested at the gene (or "replicator") level, no matter how purely altruistic (or 'selfless' and 'moral') an action may seen at the level of the organism.
For there to be a real distinction you don't need there to be no benefit to the giver, just less benefit than the giver could have gotten in other ways. Yes, a fully anonymous gift to someone you'll never meet does make you feel good, but because of scope insensitivity the difference between donating 10% and 20% of income has incredibly little benefit to the giver.
If I see someone donate 20% when 10% would have almost the same benefits to them, and that money could instead if spent selfishly buy other things they would have enjoyed a lot, then their claim that they're doing it because it's the right thing to do seems pretty plausible.
(One counter is that if they will be unhappy donating less than they believe they ought to, then there is a real difference between 10% and 20%.)
What do you mean by pure altruism? Is my desire for food pure only if I don't enjoy it?
Selfishness and altruism are phenomenoms that people discuss on the abstraction level of psychology. It makes no sense to talk about the self interest of genes not only because they're the wrong abstraction level, but also because they're not prescient like brains are. The selfish gene is a figure of speech.
Sort of, yes. In the context of my reply, I mean an action to a recipient that is, as I said, no benefit, or even a sacrifice, to the giver.
If a soldier dove on a grenade to save an enemy soldier who'd killed his mother, I'd be impressed in terms of it's apparent altruism...though I could imagine there'd be a Darwinian explanation (even if it doesn't occur to me in the moment.)
I think Dawkins admits 'selfish' was the wrong term to use. But it's helpful to think of a replicator-centric mechanism for evolution, versus anything on the organism level.
So would you consider altruistic pleasure as a benefit?
Sure. I think so. Doesn't evolution make many altruistic actions pleasurable?
What about an environmental or a neurological or a psychological explanation? What's so special about genes as a causative factor?
The main reason for this is because people constantly misunderstand it.
It certainly is the right way to think about evolution, and I also think the figure of speech is nice to have if not misunderstood.
I'd imagine you'd be right. (Sufficient belief in an afterlife might do it.) Though I don't know if I'd rule out the genes.
Nonetheless.
Exactly my thought.
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).
You should reread what I actually said.
Sorry if I was being presumptuous. I was going by your advice to people with low math aptitude to learn more math, here and on SSC. If I confused you with someone else or grossly misrepresented your views, please disregard.
I was talking to one specific person.
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:
The quote does not claim there has been no filtering done before the interview stage. If you read the original source it explicitly states that it is considering all aplicants, not only those who make it to the interview stage: "We get between 100 and 200 [resumes] per opening."
You are confusing two different sources, the one that mentions FizzBuzz and the one in your link. Although both sources use the number 200, they are using it to refer to different things. It is the former (which uses it to refer to interviewees) which I object to, not the latter (which uses it to refer to resumes), except insofar as the latter is used to try to prove the former.
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...
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.
That sounds pretty similar to the argument that high gun ownership makes makes it more difficult for the government to become tyrannical.
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?
There seems to be, although the studies that I've found with a quick search discuss this in terms of poverty having strong predictive value even after controlling for race (which is probably a less politically charged claim.) However, there are a lot of confounders that are not easy to adjust out of such an analysis.
Conversely, race also has strong predictive value after controlling for poverty.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Thank you for your reference. I'm not clear whether this is intended to support or reject this point or just provide additional data.
I referred to the first sentence of your comment. My point was given the statistics "suicidal" could just as well be a shorthand for "severe mental disorder". Such mental disorders are usually chronic.
OK. But suicide => mental disorder doesn't equal mental disorder => suicide. So this doesn't support nor deny the original claim.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ironically it's much more likely that gays are just bisexuals in denial.
Aren't many people prone to acne regardless of diet?
Stats? Source?
About half of people in their 20s and 30s have acne. Acne is caused by a bacterium that breaks down lipids in the skin. I've only seen hyperglycemic diet implicated in making acne worse, but no diet will cure acne. Note that dermatology has a stricter definition for acne than people usually care about for cosmetic reasons.
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.
I do not understand your sphere rotation example because I can't visualize that 3D example. Any chance someone can help out?
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.
I agree that Duwe's point is the closest thing there to a decent argument against MJ's data. But I think the accusation that there data is "cherrypicked" is not reasonably supported. The entire paragraph in Siegel's piece where he argues for this is essentially ignoring that what they are using is what fits closely with the common intuition of what is a mass shooting. The only one which one could plausibly take out of that set is Fort Hood but it doesn't alter the data very much.
Most of Siegel's points are correct but not relevant to the question of increases of shootings. For example, he's correct that there's a serious measuring issue with whether shootings are stopped by others with weapons, and he's also correct that even if the trend identified by MJ is accurate it is still a tiny fraction of total crimes and will remain so, but that's not actually relevant to evaluating the central claim.
What about the methodology of starting with news reports? These have strong biases that probably change by time. And how did they locate decades old news reports? A recency bias is to be expected. (Added: Duwe has a paper about this!)
Their definition is pretty reasonable, except for the part where they make tons of exceptions. The examples they gave of the exceptions that they made sound intuitive, but what about all the exceptions that they didn't talk about? Why didn't they include the Ridgewood Postal murders? Since they don't actually have a consistent rule, it's impossible to decide if they applied it to this case, or if the actual criterion was that it was too old.
Added: I tried spot-checking a few examples from Duwe's book against the MJ list. On pages 115-116 he lists 12 high profile workplace mass shootings. In addition to Ridgewood, they omit Alan Winterbourne and Willie Woods, both very straight-forward examples. If they miss these high profile examples, why would you expect them to reliably find others?
Thinking about this more, I think you are correct. The data is much too spotty to make a strong conclusion.
The last 30 years of such claims are not due to anything that happened in 2011.