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ArisKatsaris comments on May 2015 Media Thread - Less Wrong Discussion
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Short Online Texts Thread
Everything is heritable:
Politics/religion:
Statistics/AI/meta-science:
Psychology/biology:
Technology:
Economics:
Philosophy:
Fiction:
God dammit, FINALLY. I am endlessly frustrated by the universal use of placebo effects as the CONTROL GROUP rather than an object of study to be enhanced.
The vegetarian article seems to be saying "because the argument against eating meat is so good, we need to explain the lack of vegetarians by...."
Popular psychology is an easy place to draw conclusions based on assuming that your side is in the right.
The vegetarian article is also notable for demonstrating how many people have no problems pronouncing "I am a vegetarian" while chewing on chicken or fish...
To me the whole problem is fascinating. I can very easily understand the idea of not wanting to kill personally, but how does one jump to not eating pre-killed meat, and especially to things that processed to the point where they don't look like meat at all such as sausage or salami? I mean, I understand that there are a handful of efficient utilitarian altruists who care about what the outcome is for the animal and now how doing the act feels for their own purity, but I would figure most people rate actions based on how they feel. And chewing pepperoni pizza does not feel the same way as a grimy, messy, bloody pig murder. I guess I am just surprised how many people think like utilitarians, caring about the outcome for the animal, instead of what I would think the more natural, namely avoiding to do actions that feel too gruesome but happily enjoying the results if others do them.
Not eating prekilled meat and processed meat allows you to be part of a social movement and gain status. Not killing the meat personally doesn't.
Also, people do things based on how they feel, but don't like to be reminded of that. If the particular rationalization for doing what they feel happens to include an ethical claim, even if it is just a rationalization and they don't understand any theories of ethics, they will avoid a broad enough category to convince themselves that they really are doing it based on ethics.
There's been rumors about this paper for some time before it actually came out. If there's interest I could break it down...
The link goes to:
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/04/the-engineers-lament
Mostly about a rational look at what causes car accidents, and how car companies decide what's safe enough.
The Grumpy Programmer - "RFIDs, Encryption, and Stop Rules... Oh My!" -- A bit rambly in the middle, but an interesting post on trying to get people to look past their cached thoughts.
Stop Rules is really important-- in humans, they're when someone's mind stops working on cognitive material, and if pushed to do so, the person goes into attack/defense mode.
14 Ways Cognitive Biases Hamper Your Diablo Toon
It is actually titled "How Your Mind Screws with You in Games Like Diablo". Not novel material, but novel to see on a gaming website.
While all good points (and the tag is "For Science!") they aren't really doing science. Take the first case, the belief that rapidly clicking Kadala will affect what you get. Is it true or not? You don't know until you test it. It is not true in the idealized world where Kadala has a perfect RNG. But it may or may not be true in the real world where a click triggers a message to the server and, depending on the latency, rapid clicks could tickle some bug involving a race condition or out-of-order messages or something like that.
It's not like Diablo is known to be entirely bug-free :-/ You don't get to say "actually" unless you actually tested it.
And they never claim to be doing science (other than that "For Science" tag, but who would take that seriously on an entertainment website?). They are introducing the idea that our minds have flaws and are full of bias to their audience through highly relatable example material.
I don't know if the Kadala bug is real, and I don't care, that is a tree in the forest. And the article is about the forest. (If the Kadala bug is real, that is just poor fact checking. The lesson on Confirmation Bias still stands.)
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/11/overkill-atul-gawande
Overtesting and overtreatment in American medicine, and what's being done to have more sensible medical treatment.
Recent sequence on mathematical ability and Scott A. being bad at math (or is he?) reminded me of this short story (possibly nonfiction), which I recommend: Bad At Math by Alone a.k.a. The Last Psychiatrist. http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2011/03/bad_at_math.html
Barbie fucks it up again is a short article about how an attempt at feminist Barbie can turn up creepy and sexist.
The piece is hilarious, in a depressing way, and inspiring, as in "inspiring me to write a rational!Barbie fanfic".
Yeah, the Barbie book seems kind of unfortunate. On the other hand, lambdaphagy wrote an also hillarious/depressing post about the criticism of the book: women writing about their experiences in IT is very problematic.