= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
DeVliegendeHollander comments on Getting better at getting better - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (37)
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.
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.
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?
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