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shminux comments on What false beliefs have you held and why were you wrong? - Less Wrong Discussion
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I believed that the composition of a rational rotation of a sphere and another rational rotation of a sphere will be rational. (By a rational rotation I mean a rotation of a sphere around some axis which in radians is a rational multiple of pi, and thus will end up putting the sphere back where it started if you apply it enough.) Counterexample: Two 30 degree rotations each around a different axis with the two axies perpendicular to each other. I believed this because I was too used to thinking about the two-dimensional case, where it is trivially true.
Until very recently, I was convinced that it was extremely unlikely that any form of adiabatic quantum computing would have any chance at working at providing speedups, either asymptotically or practically. This belief came to a large extent as what was in retrospect an irrational reaction to the junk and bad hype that has been repeatedly coming from D-Wave. I changed my position when Scott Aaronson made this comment (comment number 25).
More mind-killing territory: Until about 3 days ago, I was convinced that claims that mass shootings were increasing in the US were due purely to media scare tactics and general human tendencies to see things as getting worse. This article made me strongly update against that. Since then, I've seen this response and this one which were both deeply unpersuasive as responses go.
Even more potential mindkilling: Having read more of Slatestarcodex, I've become convinced that he's correct that there really is a substantial fraction of what self-identifies as the "social justice" movement, primarily in an online context, that really is toxic, and that the rest of the left and the serious, sane part of the SJers aren't doing enough to call them out on it. On the flipside, "Gamergate" has convinced me that there's still a very real need for a vocal feminist movement, and that latent misogyny is still pretty common. Edit: To specify what this means in an operational sense, that there are a lot of SJers out there who are making personal attacks or calls for censorship against those with whom they disagree.
I was convinced in 2008 that Obama was going to be good for civil liberties. I don't think I need to discuss in any detail why that was wrong or how I got convinced otherwise, since the reasons should be pretty obvious.
That, and I was convinced that he would be a competent President. I did not expect the the degree of ineptitude that is apparent now.
Can you give examples?
What sort of measure are you using?
I also have a sense Obama has not been an effective President, but I've no idea how to objectively measure that.
Obamacare, an excellent idea and long overdue, but implemented and deployed in the worst way possible, is a typical example. The Ebola crisis response is another. Handling of the Snowden affair... Take almost any issue, political or economic, international or domestic, and it has been botched pretty bad, not out of malice, but out of incompetence. Well, maybe the Quantitative Easing is an exception, I am not qualified to judge.
In my view, it's always so hard to tell what was truly "botched". Further, how can we know what level of influence the President has in such cases where something actually was botched? Regardless of what someone's politics are, the federal gov't and all the agencies that are somehow intertwined with it is huge, and I'm not sure to what extent one man's incompetence has much to do with avoiding apparent gaffes that show up in the media.
Obamacare is a strange example of Obama's incompetence, I think. I mean, they tried to roll out a hotly controversial brand new program in a nation of 300+ million people. It seems very likely in my view such a rollout would be loudly criticized for it's flaws no matter how well it went. And it's so early... might be a huge success or a big failure... no clue.
Ebola is another one I'm not sure about—How can we know what good looks like? And how can we tie that to Obama? Something like Ebola dominates the news cycle for x days/weeks and it seems to become evidence that things were botched; evidence that the guy in charge blew it. I mean reasonably, what could Barack Obama do about the spread of the Ebola virus? He listens to his expert advisers and makes a decision. Then some huge chain of command takes over, with possible weak links and mistakes poised to happen from the President down to the doctors and researchers on the front lines. Certainly possible it's the President's fault, but it seems unlikely.
Anyway, it seems to happen to both Reds and Blues. Make it political and try to tear down the other guy's heroes and leaders.
Compare his performance with other presidents.
All the "botches" suggested above are one-off affairs, there are no similar episodes to compare to.
Are you saying earlier presidents never had opportunities to botch things?
For any president, you can write down a list of bad things that happened, or policy initiatives that did not turn out well. But it's hard to know if that is due to the sitting president being unusually bad, or just the circumstances being unusually bad. E.g. Obamacare has various flaws compared to an ideal health care system, and it would have been better if the websites had worked on schedule. But on the other hand Obama actually managed to pass some kind of universal health care (something that illustrious names like Clinton and Ted Kennedy had tried and failed). So does that mean that Obama is a bad health-care reformer, or an exceptionally good one? It's hard to know, because we can't contrafactually plonk down Abraham Lincoln in the 2008 White House chair and see how he will perform.
The key problem is that it's worse then the system that was in place before.
How?
Lots of variables. And what sort of objective measure would you use?
http://www.vox.com/2014/5/20/5732208/the-green-lantern-theory-of-the-presidency-explained
Summary: The President doesn't have all that much freedom to control the government. The office was designed that way.
I agree that there is very little direct power. However, the President has a lot of power in picking the executives running various governmental departments. And staffing them with competent administrators and not political appointees is the most important way the President can influence decision making without actually having to make the day-to-day decisions. This is a pretty standard advice to middle and upper management. Obama failed miserably in this. Sibelius and Napolitano are classic examples of obvious incompetence, I'm sure you can name many more. On the other hand, Frieden appeared very competent... until last month. So there is that. And whoever advised Obama on how to deal with Snowden should never be allowed to advise again.