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Mac comments on Getting better at getting better - Less Wrong Discussion

2 Post author: casebash 03 March 2015 11:12AM

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Comment author: Mac 03 March 2015 08:04:36PM *  1 point [-]

Your comment has a lot of opinion, but not much supporting evidence. I would like to see evidence supporting your following claims:

1.

…I have seen countries (e.g. in Eastern Europe) that formerly had an OK education system and it is getting worse and worse every decade

2.

…largely due to attracting the lowest dregs into teacher positions because the position is underpaid

3.

…spending is constantly cut

4.

…and underrespected

5.

…white man is rich brown man is poor…These heuristics worked in 1970, not anymore.

They don’t? US data indicate otherwise: http://www.businessinsider.com/census-race-income-gap-2014-9

6.

Every time a decent old teacher retires, someone entirely useless fills their place.

7.

Meanwhile children becoming increasingly aggressive, bigger ones beating teachers, parents promising a beating if he does not give better grades

8.

…the rich will pretty please with sugar on top of it not keep cheating on the taxes by buying fake invoices from Tajikistan

9.

…the tax inspectors will pretty please yield to neither bribery nor death threats when they discover it

10.

I mean for example in a low-trust society everybody takes bribes and is corruptible but not because they want to buy nice things, but rather they need savings as they have no idea if they will have an income next year or not.

I estimate that China has very many corrupt officials who are not worried about merely surviving a fluctuation in income: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-02-26/china-s-billionaire-lawmakers-make-u-s-peers-look-like-paupers

Edit: formatting & grammar

Comment author: [deleted] 03 March 2015 08:27:47PM 0 points [-]

I cannot supply those. If you are looking to win something, you won it. If you are looking to participate in a non-competitive collective learning process, this is mainly personal anecdotes, anecdotes from others, and somewhere between opinion and expert opinion. Say, "experienced opinion". These are fairly weak Bayesian evidences. But I don't have stronger ones supporting other hypotheses.

The issue is, my reasoning is usually very motivated. My modus operandi is to feel a strong sense of compassion to help groups of people whose life sucks and simply not accept "don't know" for an answer. Rather, I go for the least badly evidenced helpful hypothesis and explore it. These are the least badly evidenced ones. Not well evidenced ones.

I think it is like two curves meeting on a graph. How strongly you are motivated to help is how weak an evidence you accept for the least badly evidenced hypothesis to explore it. It is like doctors trying a treatment with 5% chance of success to save a dying patient, because there is no better one around.

Comment author: ChristianKl 06 March 2015 03:51:11PM 2 points [-]

The issue is, my reasoning is usually very motivated. My modus operandi is to feel a strong sense of compassion to help groups of people whose life sucks and simply not accept "don't know" for an answer. Rather, I go for the least badly evidenced helpful hypothesis and explore it. These are the least badly evidenced ones.

You don't help people by deluding yourself and have an inaccurate map of reality. Understanding a system in depth is very useful if you want to change it.

Comment author: FrameBenignly 03 March 2015 10:31:15PM 0 points [-]

Personal experience can often be useful, but when reading your original comment I didn't get the impression you were doing a good job separating what you have learned from personal experience and what you're just guessing about. All of it is your least bad evidence, yes, but some of it is a lot worse than others. I think Mac did a good job highlighting some of your claims. What is your degree of confidence in each one individually? How do I compare the likely accuracy of claim 1 vs. claim 10?

Comment author: Mac 03 March 2015 09:51:39PM *  0 points [-]

If you are looking to win something, you won it.

I am not looking to win.

However, I was curious why you made these bold claims, and I think you provided an answer: you have not yet found sufficient evidence to change the opinion you formed from anecdotal accounts. I suggest you search in the following areas to gather more evidence about your claims:

Claim 1 - Educational achievement data

Claims 2, 5, and 8 - Economic data

Claim 3 - Government budget data

Claim 4 - Polls

Claims 2, 6 - Not sure. Change in average IQ scores of those studying to become a teacher?

Claim 7 - Court records

Claim 9 - Investigative reports

Claim 10 - Not sure. Probably an economic paper on this.

Furthermore, you believe that taking any action is better than the current status quo. I cannot say with certainty this isn't true. However, I believe things could be worse, so I don't believe any change is guaranteed to yield an improvement. The patient might not be dying, and an inappropriate treatment could kill him/her.

Edit: formatting again

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