= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
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.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d){kind=logo}
Comments (364)
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.
The way you stated it is actually not wrong, especially if your use of "representing" means "looking like". What is wrong is the much stronger statement that follows, "basically a fish", as opposed to, say, "human embryos pass through a stage where they have slits in their necks resembling gills, though without the same function". I suspect that this is closer to what your father meant.
If this “looks like” this your definition of looking like is much broader than mine.
A better comparison would be to a fish embryo. I don't know if among all the wildly different kinds of fishes there are some whose embryos superficially resemble mammalian ones for a time.
- graffiti in the men's room of the Life Sciences Building, University of California at Santa Cruz
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 can't up-vote this enough. This is such a useful pastern to understand.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Being ignorant of certain facts isn't being irrational.
See Rational ignorance.
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.
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 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).
For some fun examples, see wikipedia's list of common misconceptions, (although several entries seem like misconceptions about misconceptions.)
Up-voted for the parenthetical.
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.
On a similar note to narwhals, for a while I assumed that fan death was just a meta-urban legend.
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".]
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.
I think that when you start reasoning about quantum foundations it should be remembered that you're leaving the boundary of testable physics. This is to say that even if you've concluded that many-worlds is most likely to be correct with your current information, that there should remain a pretty high degree of uncertainty in your conclusion.
It has been shown experimentally long ago that MWI requires full Quantum Gravity, not just Quantum Mechanics (plus Newtonian gravity or General Relativity, or even semi-classical gravity).
EDIT: provided an alternate link (paywalled, sorry).
That link doesn't work for me. Is there somewhere else to get whatever it's intended to link to, or a summary, or something?
I find it very difficult to imagine what could possibly constitute an experimental demonstration that Everettian QM requires full quantum gravity and not QM + some semi-classical treatment of gravity. This isn't code for "I don't believe you" -- just a remark that what you're claiming is really startling, at least to me.
(Well. In some sense any understanding of QM requires full quantum gravity, in that without it we know we don't have a theory that actually describes the real world. But that's as true of any other theory as it is of Everett's.)
I can summarise the basic gist of the paper in relatively non-technical language (other people, please comment if you disagree with what I'm saying here):
Einstein's equation says that the curvature (read geometry) of spacetime is equal to the stress-energy tensor, which basically measures how much mass/energy/momentum there is in a place at a time. However, in quantum mechanics, the universe is in a superposition of states with different distributions of mass. A theory of quantum gravity would therefore say that the universe must therefore be in a superposition of states with different geometries. The alternative is to have semi-classical gravity, where there is only one geometry of spacetime.
The most obvious way to construct a theory of semi-classical gravity is to say that the geometry of spacetime is actually related to the average distribution of mass of all the Everett branches (if you're an Everettian). To test this, you can take a large mass, and put the universe into a superposition of two states: one where you move the large mass to the left, and one where you move the large mass to the right. You then see if your mass is attracted to the mass in the other Everett branch. If semi-classical gravity and the Everett interpretation are right, then both masses should curve spacetime, and that curvature of spacetime should be felt by both of them, so each mass should be attracted to the one in the other Everett branch. If semi-classical gravity or the Everett interpretation are wrong, then the masses shouldn't feel attracted to the ones in the other Everett branch.
The people who wrote this paper did something that was essentially equivalent to the experiment described above, and discovered that the mass was not attracted to the one in the other Everett branch, meaning that semi-classical gravity and the Evererett interpretation can't both be true. They also argue that semi-classical gravity implies the Everett interpretation, and that therefore semi-classical gravity can't be true, although I am suspicious of this argument.
Note that it is possible to do tests for semi-classical gravity that don't rely on the Everett interpretation, although these don't seem to have been done yet (see http://physics.anu.edu.au/projects/project.php?ProjectID=31).
Nice! I find myself wanting to say "no, surely that just means that they refuted one particular sort of semiclassical gravity" but I'm not sure what other sort there might be.
Still, for me the main conclusion is: Yup, semiclassical gravity is wrong, just as we already knew it to be. More specifically, surely no one expects semiclassical gravity to be a good enough approximation in situations where the distribution of mass is made appreciably "different in different branches" (I don't mean to presuppose Everett here, it's just the easiest way to say it). So this experiment is finding that semiclassical gravity isn't a good approximation in situations it was never expected to work well in; blaming that specifically on the Everett interpretation seems perverse.
What does that mean? You can have MWI without Quantum Gravity. It just won't have any gravity.
If I had to guess, I'd say that you mean that you won't be able to get general relativity working just by doing quantum physics on a non-flat spacetime. You have to have the spacetime metric itself vary along different universes. This is true, and it seems pretty obvious. If you didn't do that, then gravity would have to be the same in all universes. But there's another universe where Earth is somewhere else, so the gravitational field obviously has to be moved.
I don't understand. GR describes the metric tensor through the Einstein's equations, relating (the) energy (tensor) and the metric tensor. If you grab yourself an empty universe, then put some stuff in it, then do the incredibly hard math (this step usually goes wrong) out you get a metric tensor. In QM the energy is given in terms of the wave-function. You claim that the observation that the earth's gravity pulls us in the general direction of the earth is inconsistent with the idea of putting the full wavefunction's energy into this equation?
If you look at Schroedinger's equation for one particle, it's easy to generalize it so that the particle is in curved spacetime. The problem is when you get entanglement involved. Normally, for n particles, you do Schroedinger's equation in R^3n, and each triplet corresponds to the coordinates of one particle. You could generalize that to M^n where M is an arbitrary manifold, but that means you'd have to use that manifold for every universe.
You could try running Einstein's field equations on the 3n+1-dimensional configuration space (+1 being time, not an extra space dimension) and running Schroedinger's equation on that. I don't know if that would work. If it does, you didn't get MWI without quantum gravity. You discovered quantum gravity.
Who out there, MWI-adherent or not, seriously thinks that QM is a fundamental rule of nature for everything BUT gravity?
My position here is Knightian uncertainty -- I have no idea whether that's true AND I have no idea what are the chances of it being true.
That's, umm, nice, but I don't see how it helps answer the question since I suspect the number of 'not me!' would be enormous.
Not sure what you are asking, but Everett and many other MWIers certainly thought/think that "the wave function of the universe" is all one needs to know.
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.
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.
Doesn't pilot-wave QM imply literally the exact same calculations happening as for MWI, though?
I sort of got that idea, but if that's true then I'm not sure I see what the difference between them is in the first place. It seems to me that any theory of quantum mechanics which practically differs from MWI must include collapse somewhere.
(Assuming the difference you're looking for is "People don't live in the other branches".)
Pilot-wave QM has all the calculations as MWI for describing the pilot waves. Then there are particles bouncing around the waves. And then there's the waveform collapse that happens whenever the particle actually does something. And if you want to explain entanglement, you have to deal with higher-dimensional pilot waves somehow controlling different particles in parallel so the location of one depends on the location of the other.
The Copenhagen interpretation is QM with some bizarre useless stuff added on. Pilot-wave QM is the Copenhagen interpretation with some bizarre useless stuff added on.
In Bohmian mechanics there is no wavefunction collapse "when the particle actually does something". There is something that the Bohmians call "effective wavefunction collapse", but that is an emergent phenomenon, not a fundamental dynamical process. The math of the theory says that the wavefunction never collapses, but since the particles are always carried on one branch of the wavefunction, you can treat the wavefunction as if it has collapsed to that branch once an observation is made, and the particle position/velocity calculations will still work out. So you can treat the wavefunction as having collapsed for calculational convenience, but in the actual ontology of the theory the wavefunction behaves exactly as it does under MWI.
Right, that's my point. In that case, it's doing the same calculations as MWI and the particles are practically epiphenomenal; ~all observers will find themselves somewhere in the pilot wave.
The Bohmian stance is that the "pilot wave" isn't a real thing, it's a mathematical tool. The stuff that actually exists in the universe is the particles. The pilot wave is just a construct we use to predict how the particles move. So it's a little misleading to say that the particles are epiphenomenal. Ordinarily, when we say that X is epiphenomenal in some theory, we mean that X is causally affected by all the other stuff in the universe but does not itself have any causal effect on any other stuff. The Bohmian position is that there is no other stuff in the universe besides the particles, so it doesn't make really sense to say the particles are epiphenomenal.
Similarly, saying that all observers will find themselves somewhere in the pilot wave is also a bit misleading. It's true that there are mathematical structures within the pilot wave (including in those parts of it that do not carry particles) that correspond to observers. However, since the pilot wave isn't a real thing, those observers don't actually exist. The only observers that exist are the ones made out of particles.
MWI, on the other hand, interprets the wave function as representing a real physical object, so any structures within the wave function correspond to stuff that actually exists in the universe.
This is the part I don't get. How can the pilot wave "not be a real thing" if it's being computed? Is there some sense in which a thing can be real separate from its being computed?
The same way that World of Warcraft isn't real. Computations are in the map not in the territory.
When you talk about the pilot wave "being computed", you are assuming a conception of laws of nature that contemporary advocates of Bohmianism would most likely reject. In what sense do you think the pilot wave is being computed? If you want to know more about how Bohmians conceive of the status of the laws of QM, read the first paper I linked in this comment, or at least its conclusion. Basically, you're supposed to think of Schrodinger's equation as merely an efficient strategy for compressing information about particle interaction.
That isn't how I've heard it. E.g., Wikipedia: "The onyology [...] consists of a configuration [...] and a pilot wave." Bohm's book "The undivided universe" says (I'm going off the Amazon look-inside feature so it's possible that this would be invalidated by more context): "Let us now discuss this ontology in a more systematic way. Its key points are: [...] 2. This particle [sc. an electron -- gjm] is never separate from a new type of quantum field that fundamentally affects it." (The "new type of quantum field" is the wavefunction.) This seems to say in so many words that the wavefunction is as real as the particles in Bohmian mechanics, which seems to me enough to (e.g.) say that "observers" encoded therein are real.
Bohmian mechanics has developed quite a bit since Bohm. Its most significant contemporary defenders are Sheldon Goldstein, Nino Zanghi and Detlef Durr, and they advocate the ontology I described. See, for instance, this paper. From the abstract:
Some other sources for this view.
No, it doesn't. Pilot-wave QM postulates an additional fundamental equation (the guiding equation) that doesn't appear in MWI. It describes how the behavior of the wave function affects the positions of particles.
Okay, so it does some extra calculations. But it still does all the same calculations as MWI?
Yes, it does all the same calculations as MWI plus some more. The only way to empirically distinguish MWI and Bohmianism is through anthropic considerations (like in the quantum suicide experiment discussed elsewhere in this thread).
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.
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.
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.)
It's quite a bit less likely, but if quantum immortality changes the past (when you're on the border of life and death, it's clear the gun didn't misfire), then it would just keep you from running the experiment in the first place.
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.
My own example: I used to be a pretty strong believer in the strong crisis version of peak oil. This was mainly because I was around people who were; I went along with fairly naive trend extrapolation (exponential resource use increase, hard to develop new resources).
Eventually, around 2012 or so after oil prices had spiked then dropped then risen again and shale oil was a thing, I tempered my ideas, and took the much more rational view that oil wouldn't have a crisis-like peak, more a plateau. I believed that extremely high oil prices could drive massive adoption of much more advanced drilling methods. Therefore there would never be a crisis of extraordinary oil scarcity, but we could very well face $200/bbl oil (which we'd learn to live with like $140/bbl oil). But I didn't believe oil would really drop; I was bullish on almost all resource prices and on developing nation growth driving them.
While this was founded in a better understanding of economics and the petroleum industry, it was still grounded in false assumptions of continuing high-pace developing world growth and pessimism about alternative energy. Oil has now plummeted to $80/bbl, which I never expected to see again in my lifetime.
Even without all of that stuff, the price of oil can't predictably rise faster than the market interest rate. If it did, people would stop drilling for oil since it would be worth more if they wait. And taking any conservation efforts beyond that would be a bad idea (ignoring things like global warming), since you'd be better off drilling for oil now and just investing the money.
I think the case where the well has an approximately known size, extraction can be paused at low cost, there is no contract or law obligating "use it or lose it" for mineral rights, the extractor can deal with the lack of cashflow, you're right.
But there are certainly conditions where production can't be varied even if an increase in prices is clearly expected.
I understand that you can't simply stop extracting, but as long as you're allowed to own oil and not drill it you should be fine. If you're having cash flow problems, you can sell the land.
Are there enough "use it or lose it" mineral rights problems to mess with the market?
A lot of the world's oil rights are held by unstable and/or autocratic regimes, who might well prefer to have the wealth in more liquid form.
Same thing here from around 2003 to 2006. I did not see the oil shale boom coming. I found plausible all of the peak oil pundits who argued that oil shale would barely, if at all, have an energy return on energy invested (EROEI) greater than 1, and thus it wouldn't matter how high the price went - the costs would keep pace with the revenue, and it would not be economical to develop it. Of course, those pundits turned out to be wrong.
I remember the day when I really started to doubt peak oil. It was when I saw a TOD article on Toe-to-Heel-Air-Injection for heavy oil and I thought, "By golly, maybe they'll be able to use all of that heavy oil after all...." If I had had any money at the time, rather than being a high school student, I would have put money on heavy oil and oil shale from that point on, and I'd probably be doing pretty well by now...
I wonder whether the failure of Peak Oil should lead to mistrust of fairly abstract arguments, perhaps especially those which lead to desired outcomes.
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.
Physical realism is not the same concept as the map/territory distinction. Korzybski who coined "The map isn't the territory" distinction wanted to get rid of discussing "Is X Y?"
Maybe scientific realism? Not sure. In any case, I prefer the original "the map is not the thing mapped" vs "the map is not the territory" as just as potent but free of ontological baggage.
It's a little less catchy. Being catchy is why it's survived in it's original form.
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.
How long do you think you had the wrong belief? Was it just something that happened in that moment or did you carry that believe around for you for longer?
Just that moment. I definitely didn't follow any of its implications. (Other than "if I say this then people will react as if I said an obvious true thing.")
One of the smartest people in my high school spent a class arguing that a there were 4^20 possibilities for a sequence of 4 amino acids, when in fact it was 20^4. Not quite as elementary as yours, but our brains all play tricks on us.
I once spent about 20 minutes in class trying to justify the claim that a cubic meter of water weighs one ton, not 100 kilograms.
As you may note, this is not a false belief; it's relevant because I spent a significant fraction of this time wracking my brain trying to jog it free to see if I was being dense (pun intended) like you're describing (I have pretty strong reasons to believe I didn't remember this incident backwards as a case of self-justification by retcon)
Wikipedia says there are 500 known amino acids. I take it you were talking about a domain involving fewer potential amino acids?
Presumably the slightly greater than twenty that form the universal basis of biological protein polymers. In other words, the amino acids explicitly coded for by DNA.
The 20 amino acids involved in protein creation.
Except when it doesn't.
I suspect you were saying six times one, but your brain was thinking of one to the sixth power, which indeed is one.
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.
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.
This is a accurate description of a common political behavior.
But recognizing this doesn't mean that all groups must actually have symmetrically malign subgroups, or that the mainstream in every group has the same relationship towards these subgroups. You can support the mainstream positions of both group A and group B, but be more critical of group B due to the existence of a subgroup you consider malign.
Yes of course, and most political (or other) groups are filled to the brim with self criticism. And this is very difficult to confuse with the phenomenon I am describing. In particular, if you only ever talk about how horrible subgroup B is and never suggest ways of improving the movement and you use the same language to describe subgroup B and the movement at large then you are probably engaged in politics and not constructive criticism.
This is a good example of in group criticism. The author calls out members of his political affiliation for making a stupid argument, presents an alternative framework for understanding the issue and moves on.
Repeatedly talking about how horrible subgroup B is not an example of in group criticism.
Meta-level point: out group criticism can be well reasoned and valuable. It is more often a politicized rhetorical weapon. The phenomenon I am describing is usually the latter.
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.
Is it possible that the reason for change was secret information instead of corruption?
Secret information is the tool of corruption.
I don't remember from where the quote is, but "The best way to control somebody is to control his information channels". Especially given that once you're privy to secret information you tend to discount the opinions of others who do not have access to it.
Secret information can explain the change whether it is true or false. We can only guess.
Is there a solution? Keep the president in the dark? Make classified security data public?
What exactly is the problem you want to solve?
Corruption. Am I being vague enough?
Heh. Let me be less vague. The problem is the capture and control of elected officials by the entrenched bureaucracy and associated interests. It's a well-known problem. I am not aware of good non-bloody solutions.
Of course there is also the universal "power corrupts" which doesn't help.
Just out of curiosity, you do realize the reason countries keep information related to national security secret?
Yes, of course, but the point is that there are costs (including non-obvious ones) to keeping a bunch of information secret.
No.
I personally updated on the question the moment Obama got elected and choose his cabinet. If he would have wanted to change something he would have chose a cabinet of people who wanted change. He didn't.
Politics is about people. Making someone like Rahm Emanuel his chief of staff is a clear sign about his intentions.
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.
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.
The last 30 years of such claims are not due to anything that happened in 2011.
Sure, that's certainly a valid point. It doesn't make the people saying this in the 1980s or the 1990s or the 2000s correct in any way shape or form. And it is possible that the media's current claims are completely disconnected from the uptick. The relevant bit is updating that there really has been a statistically significant uptick. (Especially because my priors based on general declining crime rates would have been to if anything suspect the opposite.)
Also, what about you? Did you have this opinion before 2011?
What do you mean? I thought I made that clear. My opinion was well before 2011 and remained my go to comment until I read that article that there was no increase at all and that any claimed increase was purely media hype.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Cliven Bundy makes this seem quasi-justified, sadly enough.
Also... Nukes? Useless in this sort of situation.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Oh, but they do. “God made every man different; Sam Colt made them equal."
Haha, I stand corrected.
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.)
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.
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?
Race is correlated with poverty, so that's expected. Is there a strong correlation beyond that?
Isn't poverty correlated with race in the U.S.?
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.
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?
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).
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.
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:
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 misleading. Bad programmers spend more time interviewing before being hired, thus the pool of job interview candidates is biased towards bad programmers.
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.
Could you provide examples of advanced math that you were unable to learn? Why do you think you failed?
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.
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 recent history of the state of Illinois.
The terrible CEO of Sears comes to mind.
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.
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 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.
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.
...damn. I believed that until just now.
Well the Julian months aren't synchronized to the moon despite their origin.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It could have been worse. You could have believed their explanations.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Wait, did you say myth?
sneaks off to Google
What the hell, Card?
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.
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.
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 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.
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?)
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 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.