Excellent article. Do you happen to know of any evidence based research on cholesterol? Mine just came back at:
Whole Cholesterol 242
Triglycerides 73
HDL 55
LDL 172
and my doctor wants to have a talk with me about lowering my cholesterol. I'm already doing all of the easy things so I suspect he will want to put me on drugs.
I think the evidence for the effectiveness of statins is very convincing. The absolute risk reduction from statins will depend primarily on your individual baseline risk of coronary disease. From the information you have provided, I don't think your baseline risk is extraordinarily high, but it is also not negligible.
You will have to make a trade-off where the important considerations are (1) how bothered you are by the side-effects, (2) what absolute risk reduction you expect based on your individual baseline risk, (3) the marginal price (in terms of side effects) that you are willing to pay for slightly better chance at avoiding a heart attack. I am not going to tell you how to make that trade-off, but I would consider giving the medications a try simply because it is the only way to get information on whether you get any side effects, and if so, whether you find them tolerable.
(I am not licensed to practice medicine in the United States or on the internet, and this comment does not constitute medical advise)
John Ioannidis has written a very insightful and entertaining article about the current state of the movement which calls itself "Evidence-Based Medicine". The paper is available ahead of print at http://www.jclinepi.com/article/S0895-4356(16)00147-5/pdf.
As far as I can tell there is currently no paywall, that may change later, send me an e-mail if you are unable to access it.
Retractionwatch interviews John about the paper here: http://retractionwatch.com/2016/03/16/evidence-based-medicine-has-been-hijacked-a-confession-from-john-ioannidis/
(Full disclosure: John Ioannidis is a co-director of the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford (METRICS), where I am an employee. I am posting this not in an effort to promote METRICS, but because I believe the links will be of interest to the community)
I'd give people the ability to do multiple regressions in their head. Because I want to be able to do multiple regression in my head.
Why do you want to be able to do that? Do you mean that you want to be able to look at a spreadsheet and move around numbers in your head until you know what the parameter estimates are? If you have access to a statistical software package, this would not give you the ability to do anything you couldn't have done otherwise. However, that is obvious, so I am going to assume you are more interested in groking some part of the underlying the epistemic process. But if that is indeed your goal, the ability to do the parameter estimation in your head seems like a very low priority, almost more of a party trick than actually useful.
DALYs are just a special case of QALYs for which there is very good weighting data available (from the WHO), because they're linked to well-defined medical conditions and disabilities. Of course one could imagine other, non-health-related interventions that would affect QALYs, but these outcomes are also harder to measure.
I disagree with this. In my opinion QALYs are much superior to DALYs for reasons that are inherent to how the measures are defined. I wrote a Tumblr post in response to Slatestarscratchpad a few weeks ago, see http://dooperator.tumblr.com/post/137005888794/can-you-give-me-a-or-two-good-article-on-why .
How about asking "What is the single most important change that would make you want to participate more frequently on Less Wrong?"
This question would probably not be useful for the census itself, but it seems like a great opportunity to brainstorm..
I run the Less Wrong meetup group in Palo Alto. After we announced the events at Meetup.com, we often get a lot of guests who are interested in rationality but who have not read the LW sequences. I have an idea for a introductory session where we have the participants do a sorting exercise. Therefore, I am interested in getting 3D printed versions of rubes, bleggs and other items references in this post.
Does anyone have any thoughts on how to do this cheaply? Is there sufficient interest in this to get a kickstarter running? I expect that these items may be of interest to other Less Wrong meetup groups, and possibly to CFAR workshops and/or schools?
Less Wrong doesn't seem "overgrown" to me. It actually seems dried out and dying because the culture is so negative people don't want to post here. I believe Eliezer has talked about how whenever he posted something on LW, the comments would be full of people trying to find anything wrong with it.
Here's an example of what I think makes LessWrong unappealing. User Clarity wrote an interesting discussion level post about his mistakes as an investor/gambler and it was downvoted to oblivion. Shouldn't people be encouraged to discuss their failures as they relate to rationality? Do we really want to discourage this? No one even bothered to explain why they downvoted.
All discussion in Less Wrong 2.0 is seen explicitly as an attempt to exchange information for the purpose of reaching Aumann agreement. In order to facilitate this goal, communication must be precise. Therefore, all users agree to abide by Crocker's Rules for all communication that takes place on the website.
I think trying to impose strict new censorship rules and social control over communication is more likely to deal the death blow to this website than to help it. LessWrong really needs an injection of positive energy and purpose. In the absence of this, I expect LW to continue to decline.
Less Wrong doesn't seem "overgrown" to me. It actually seems dried out and dying because the culture is so negative people don't want to post here. I believe Eliezer has talked about how whenever he posted something on LW, the comments would be full of people trying to find anything wrong with it.
"Overgrown" was probably a bad analogy, I tried too hard to reference the idea of well-kept gardens. What I was trying to say is that there are too many hostile elements who are making this website an unwelcoming place, by unnecessary criticism, ad hominem attacks and downvotes; and that those elements should have been removed from the community earlier. I actually think we agree on this.
I think trying to impose strict new censorship rules and social control over communication is more likely to deal the death blow to this website than to help it. LessWrong really needs an injection of positive energy and purpose. In the absence of this, I expect LW to continue to decline.
OK, from reading this and other comments I accept that this was the weakest part of my post. Also, after re-reading the Wiki entry on Crocker's rule, I don't think I intended to suggest anything quite that extreme. Crocker's rules say that rudeness is acceptable simply in order to provide a precise and accurate signal of annoyance. This is certainly not what I had in mind.
I apologize for my incorrect usage of the term "Crocker's rules", and I recognize that this was probably not a good idea. I hope someone can come up with a policy that achieves the objectives I had in mind when I wrote that sentence.
Thanks for thinking this through.
A few questions:
Would there be a way for people who already maintain blogs elsewhere to cross-post to their LW subdomain? (Would this even be desirable?)
Do you envision LW2 continuing to include applied rationality type posts? Does that work with "everything should work towards Aumann agreement"?
users may not repeatedly bring up the same controversial discussion outside of their original context
How could we track this, other than relying on mods to be like "ugh, this poster again"?
professionally edited rationality journal
Woah. Is this really a thing that MIRI could (resources permitting) just like ... do?
Would there be a way for people who already maintain blogs elsewhere to cross-post to their LW subdomain? (Would this even be desirable?)
We would have to discuss this with people who run blogs elsewhere to find out what solutions would work for them. My preferred solution would be for people to import their old blog posts, and then redirect their domain to the LW subdomain. I do not know whether outside bloggers would find this acceptable. In some cases we may also have to consider the question of advertisement revenues.
Do you envision LW2 continuing to include applied rationality type posts? Does that work with "everything should work towards Aumann agreement"?
My apologies, I did not intend to declare that posts about applied rationality should be avoided. I guess my phrasing reveals my bias towards the "epistemic" part of this community rather than the "instrumental" side. My personal preference is to shift the community focus back towards epistemic rationality, but that is a separate discussion which I did not intend to raise here. The community should discuss this separately.
users may not repeatedly bring up the same controversial discussion outside of their original context
How could we track this, other than relying on mods to be like "ugh, this poster again"?
There would have to be some moderator discretion on this issue. My personal view is that we should err on the side of allowing most content. This language was intended for extreme cases where the community consensus is clear that a line has been crossed, such as Eugine, AdvancedAtheist or Jim Donald.
professionally edited rationality journal
Woah. Is this really a thing that MIRI could (resources permitting) just like ... do?
Yes, they can certainly do this if they have the resources. Initially, academics may not take the journal seriously and it definitely will not be indexed in academic databases. If the quality is sufficiently high, it is conceivable that this may change.
(tl;dr: In this post, I make some concrete suggestions for LessWrong 2.0.)
Less Wrong 2.0
A few months ago, Vaniver posted some ideas about how to reinvigorate Less Wrong. Based on comments in that thread and based on personal discussions I have had with other members of the community, I believe there are several different views on why Less Wrong is dying. The following are among the most popular hypotheses:
(1) Pacifism has caused our previously well-kept garden to become overgrown
(2) The aversion to politics has caused a lot of interesting political discussions to move away from the website
(3) People prefer posting to their personal blogs.
With this background, I suggest the following policies for Less Wrong 2.0. This should be seen only as a starting point for discussion about the ideal way to implement a rationality forum. Most likely, some of my ideas are counterproductive. If anyone has better suggestions, please post them to the comments.
Moderation Policy:
There are four levels of users:
Personal Blogs:
Other Ideas:
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Three days ago, I went through a traditional rite of passage for junior academics: I received my first rejection letter on a paper submitted for peer review. After I received the rejection letter, I forwarded the paper to two top professors in my field, who both confirmed that the basic arguments seem to be correct and important. Several top faculty members have told me they believe the paper will eventually be published in a top journal, so I am actually feeling more confident about the paper than before it got rejected.
I am also very frustrated with the peer review system. The reviewers found some minor errors, and some of their other comments were helpful in the sense that they reveal which parts of the paper are most likely to be misunderstood. However, on the whole, the comments do not change my belief in the soundness of the idea, and in my view they mostly show that the reviewers simply didn’t understand what I was saying.
One comment does stand out, and I’ve spent a lot of energy today thinking about its implications: Reviewer 3 points out that my language is “too casual”. I would have had no problem accepting criticism that my language is ambiguous, imprecise, overly complicated, grammatically wrong or idiomatically weird. But too casual? What does that even mean? I have trouble interpreting the sentence to mean anything other than an allegation that I fail at a signaling game where the objective is to demonstrate impressiveness by using an artificially dense and obfuscating academic language.
From my point of view, “understanding” something <i>means</i> that you are able to explain it in a casual language. When I write a paper, my only objective is to allow the reader to understand what my conclusions are and how I reached them. My choice of language is optimized only for those objectives, and I fail to understand how it is even possible for it to be “too casual”.
Today, I feel very pessimistic about the state of academia and the institution of peer review. I feel stronger allegiance to the rationality movement than ever, as my ideological allies in what seems like a struggle about what it means to do science. I believe it was Tyler Cowen or Alex Tabarrok who pointed out that the true inheritors of intellectuals like Adam Smith are not people publishing in academic journals, but bloggers who write in a causal language. I can’t find the quote but today it rings more true than ever.
I understand that I am interpreting the reviewers choice of words in a way that is strongly influenced both by my disappointment in being rejected, and by my pre-existing frustration with the state of academia and peer review. I would very much appreciate if anybody could steelman the sentence “the writing is too casual”, or otherwise help me reach a less biased understanding of what just happened.
The paper is available at https://rebootingepidemiology.files.wordpress.com/2016/03/effect-measure-paper-0317162.pdf . I am willing to send a link to the reviewers’ comments by private message to anybody who is interested in seeing it.