= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
This is almost certainly a small minority view, but from my perspective as a European based in the Bay Area who may be moving back to Europe next summer, the most important aspect would be geographical proximity to a decent university where staff and faculty can get away with speaking only English.
In response to
Why you should consider buying Bitcoin right now (Jan 2015) if you have high risk tolerance
18 months later its worth about 3x this price. You could sell 1/3 and have no risk, and let the rest ride.
In response to
comment
by
on
Why you should consider buying Bitcoin right now (Jan 2015) if you have high risk tolerance
What do you mean by "no risk"? This sentence seems to imply that your decisions are influenced by the sunk cost fallacy.
Try to imagine an alien who has been teleported into your body, who is trying to optimize your wealth. The fact that the coins were worth a third of their current price 18 months ago would not factor into the alien's decision.
In response to
Open thread, Jun. 13 - Jun. 19, 2016
I see in the "Recent on Rationality Blogs" panel an article entitled "Why EA is new and obvious". I'll take that as a prompt to list my three philosophical complaints abouts EA:
- I believe in causality as a basic moral concept. My ethical system absolutely requires me to avoid hurting people, but is much less adamant about helping people. While some people claim to be indifferent to this distinction, in practice people's revealed moral preferences suggest that they agree with me (certainly the legal system agrees with me).
- I also believe in locality as an ontologically primitive moral issue. I am more morally obligated to my mother than to a random stranger in Africa. Finer gradations are harder to tease out, but I still feel more obligation to a fellow American than to a citizen of another country, ceteris paribus.
- I do not believe a good ethical system should rely on moral exhortation, at least not to the extent that EA does. Such systems will never succeed in solving the free-rider problem. The best strategy to produce ethical behavior is simply to appeal to self-interest, by offering people membership in a community that confers certain benefits, if the person is willing to follow certain rules.
There may be an ethically relevant distinction between a rule that tells you to avoid being the cause of bad things, and a rule that says you should cause good things to happen. However, I am not convinced that causality is relevant to this distinction. As far as I can tell, these two concepts are both about causality. We may be using words differently, do you think you could explain why you think this distinction is about causality?
You are being silly. What makes you believe any contractor would work for 1/3 the standard rate?
It would seem that the existence of such contractors follows logically from the fact that you are able to hire people despite the fact that you require contractors to volunteer 2/3 of their time.
To each his own. Personally, I think that unless you live in a community where most people have tattoos, the most rational decision is to have no tattoos. I believe they close more doors than they open. Maybe I am mistaken, maybe situations were tattoos help you are more common than I think. Please correct me then.
The Economist published a fascinating blog entry where they use evidential decision theory to establish that tattoo removal results in savings to the prison system. See http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2014/08/tattoos-jobs-and-recidivism . Temporally, this blog entry corresponds roughly to the time I lost my respect for the Economist. You can draw your own causal conclusions from this.
In response to
How do you learn Solomonoff Induction?
Solomonoff Induction is uncomputable, and implementing it will not be possible even in principle. It should be understood as an ideal which you should try to approximate, rather than something you can ever implement.
Solomonoff Induction is just bayesian epistemology with a prior determined by information theoretic complexity. As an imperfect agent trying to approximate it, you will get most of your value from simply grokking Bayesian epistemology. After you've done that, you may want to spend some time thinking about the philosophy of science of setting priors based on information theoretic complexity.
In response to
Lesswrong 2016 Survey
[Survey Taken Thread]
By ancient tradition, if you take the survey you may comment saying you have done so here, and people will upvote you and you will get karma.
Let's make these comments a reply to this post. That way we continue the tradition, but keep the discussion a bit cleaner.
But too casual? What does that even mean?
Having glanced at your paper I think "too casual" means "your labels are too flippant" -- e.g. "Doomed". You're showing that you're human and that's a big no-no for a particular kind of people...
By the way, you're entirely too fond of using quoted words ("flip", "transported", "monotonicity", "equal effects", etc.). If the word is not exactly right so that you have to quote it, find a better word (or make a footnote, or something). Frequent word quoting is often perceived as "I was too lazy to find the proper word, here is a hint, you guess what I meant".
Thanks. Good points. Note that many of those words are already established in the literature with same meaning. For the particular example of "doomed", this is the standard term for this concept, and was introduced by Greenland and Robins (1986). I guess I could instead use "response type 1" but the word doomed will be much more effective at pointing to the correct concept, particularly for people who are familiar with the previous literature.
The only new term I introduce is "flip". I also provide a new definition of effect equality, and it therefore seems correct to use quotation marks in the new definition. Perhaps I should remove the quotation marks for everything else since I am using terms that have previously been introduced.
This definition is based on the probability that a person who would otherwise not have been a case “flips” to being a case in response to treatment, and the probably that a non-case flips to being a case.
To me that sentence seems cryptic.
Do you mean probability instead of probably?
Maybe the reviewer considered “flips” as too casual. I think the paper might be easier to read if you either would write flips directly without quotes or choose another word.
What the difference between otherwise not have been a case and non-case?
in my view they mostly show that the reviewers simply didn’t understand what I was saying [...] From my point of view, “understanding” something <i>means</i> that you are able to explain it in a casual language.
If the reviwers don't succeed in understanding what you are saying you might have explained yourself in casual language but still failed.
Do you mean probability instead of probably?
Yes. Thanks for noticing. I changed that sentence after I got the rejection letter (in order to correct a minor error that the reviewers correctly pointed out), and the error was introduced at that time. So that is not what they were referring to.
If the reviewers don't succeed in understanding what you are saying you might have explained yourself in casual language but still failed.
I agree, but I am puzzled by why they would have misunderstood. I spent a lot of effort over several months trying to be as clear as possible. Moreover, the ideas are very simple: The definitions are the only real innovation: Once you have the definitions, the proofs are trivial and could have been written by a high school student. If the reviewers don't understand the basic idea, I will have to substantially update my beliefs about the quality of my writing. This is upsetting because being a bad writer will make it a lot harder to succeed in academia. The primary alternative hypotheses for why they misunderstood are either (1) that they are missing some key fundamental assumption that I take for granted or (2) that they just don't want to understand.
View more: Next
= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d){kind=logo}
Today, I uploaded a sequence of three working papers to my website at https://andershuitfeldt.net/working-papers/
This is an ambitious project that aims to change fundamental things about how epidemiologists and statisticians think about choice of effect measure, effect modification and external validity. A link to an earlier version of this manuscript was posted to Less Wrong half a year ago, the manuscript has since been split into three parts and improved significantly. This work was also presented in poster form at EA Global last month.
I want to give a heads up before you follow the link above: Compared to most methodology papers, the mathematics in these manuscripts is definitely unsophisticated, almost trivial. I do however believe that the arguments support the conclusions, and that those conclusions have important implications for applied statistics and epidemiology.
I would very much appreciate any feedback. I invoke "Crocker's Rules" (see http://sl4.org/crocker.html) for all communication regarding these papers. Briefly, this means that I ask you, as a favor, to please communicate any disagreement as bluntly and directly as possible, without regards to social conventions or to how such directness may affect my personal state of mind.
I have made a standing offer to give a bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue Label to anyone who finds a flaw in the argument that invalidates the paper, and a bottle of 10-year old Single Scotch Malt to anyone who finds a significant but fixable error; or makes a suggestion that substantially improves the manuscript.
If you prefer giving anonymous feedback, this can be done through the link http://www.admonymous.com/effectmeasurepaper .