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The hardcover price I see on amazon.com is $56.16, Kindle for $50.68. Amazon.fr still has it free, but won't let me buy it from the UK. Amazon.de has it for €50.94. I'm betting this really is a glitch currently in the process of being fixed.
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Free Kindle Textbook: The Cerebellum: Brain for an Implicit Self (FT Press Science)
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Free Kindle Textbook: The Cerebellum: Brain for an Implicit Self (FT Press Science)
Free in Brazil, as well.
In response to
[Link] FreakoStats and CEV
There are analyses on issues such as Abortion, Free Speech ,Capital Punishment and Corporal Punishments on Children ,Immigration, Gay Rights and many more.
Reading those positions and this post has now enlightened me by helping me realize that Liberals happen to be right about everything. We know they are right because smarter people tend to favour Liberal policies. It seems remarkable that they are right about everything except maybe censoring racist and sexist speech. I guess even smart humans make a few mistakes on average.
Since our civilization has consistently marched leftward for oh 200 or so years, we need not worry about uFAI. Our whole society is already working as a CEV machine! I guess it is an emergent property of sticking hundreds of millions of human brains together in a structure they don't fully understand.
The Future's So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades.
If you read the session on Welfare, you'll find it's pretty not liberal. So a mere liberal mistaken position on welfare + censoring certain views on racism and sexism (if some of those happen to be right) could be damning to civilization. Besides, theocracy and totaliarism are not only alive - take Islamic countries, with their huge populational growth - but coming back in a lot of places, like Venezuela or Turkey.
Now, I guess that some Liberal positions such as favoring Gay Rights and Abortions are the more reasonable shoudn't be really surprising among smart people, and I'm sure they're among the majority here, too.
In response to
[Link] FreakoStats and CEV
There are analyses on issues such as Abortion, Free Speech ,Capital Punishment and Corporal Punishments on Children ,Immigration, Gay Rights and many more. The results look good to me personally, and I wouldn't be surprised if they pleased many here too.
I think you are underestimating the share of metacontrarians who probably disagree with many of them. Remember normal neurotypical humans, even very intelligent ones, don't really take ideas that seriously. Ideas as tribal markers work just as well at 120 IQ points as they do at 80, its just that very few ideas can fill this role for both groups.
I think you are underestimating the share of metacontrarians probably disagree with many of them.
If they are contrarians for contrarianism's sake, why would I take them into consideration? Those are the true dangerous ones: in most cases, those people are just autodidacts who when confronted with a true expert, have their theories pretty much discredited.
Take in mind, for instance, Yvain's (who's a student of Medicine) triumphant answers to Hanson on Medicine (so harsh that he regrets on his blog being so incisive), or Kalla724's comment on cryonics which made many people lower their estimates of cryonics being of any worth. And that's because true experts won't take much of their time arguing with those people! It's funny that Hanson himself sometimes complains of 'rational folks' being ignorant about Sociology, which he has a PhD in, or how much he changed his mind on the power of actual Economics after getting a degree on it.
Remember normal neurotypical humans, even very intelligent ones, don't really take ideas that seriously. Ideas as tribal markers work just as well at 120 IQ points as they do at 80, its just that very few ideas can fill this role for both groups.
High-Iq circles are not monolithic: there are many groups they are be part of, on which different ideas would be 'tribal markers'. And there are the people who are intelligent and are not even in high-Iq circles, due to having low income etc. And the analyses, controlled for many variables, many times show clear intellectual trends, turning the fact that people individually are biased not very relevant, really.
In response to
[Link] FreakoStats and CEV
A key problem of most people thinking about policy is I think mind projection fallacy. Is there evidence that intelligent people are significantly better at avoiding it?
If not one should expect intelligent people to make excellent and reasonable policy suggestions that however will fail and produce disturbing (to them) unexpected consequences when implemented because, most people simply won't respond as they assume they will. When planning social norms or laws people of average intelligence have the advantage of having a better model of how regular people will behave.
A key problem of most people thinking about policy is I think mind projection fallacy. Is there evidence that intelligent people are significantly better at avoiding it?
As it has been said, sometimes smart people are pretty prone to some biases almost like anybody else, but even in those cases they're always at least a little better (or 'less bad') than dumb people. And it is the dumb-smart trend, not the percentage, which will point to the better answer. So, no, they need not be significantly better at avoiding certain biases, including mind projection fallacy.
Current IQ tests are pretty meaningless past >160, so as long as this works in the 70-160 range, we're fine.
That we cannot measure intelligence reliably after a certain point does not imply that there are not (infinite?) levels of intelligence after it. There are certainly - at least theoretically - levels of fluid intelligence that correspond to IQs of 170, 180, 300..., and it was in this theoretical sense that I raised my question.
Consider someone dumb but politically opinionated. What problem are they solving? Tribal affiliation, probably. As a by-product, their political actions are practically directed by the leaders of the tribe.
Now consider someone a bit less dumb who happens to have just enough inspiration to try to solve the problem of what actually works, rather than tribal affiliation. I think it entirely reasonable that this slight increase in inspiration can actually reduce the effectiveness of policies advocated, if the problem is confusing. Sure, the tribe leaders aren't going to make great decisions, because they're solving a problem of inter-tribe politics rather than just what works. But it's entirely possible to do worse, and many people will.
So you're going to see strange signals in the data as people become smart enough to question the ordinary, fail, do better, and find new things to question. At no point are you really sure if smart people are solving the same problem better, or just failing at a new and interesting question. You can work out some good guesses, though I guess this would depend on the nitty-gritty of what the signals look like.
Ah! Indeed, without the distributions - from dumb to smart -, one can't be much certain. However, in many (if not all) cases he doesn't merely calculate what the smart vote is. He analyses and interprets it, and in a very artful way (the guy is smart), although sometimes art is not really necessary, e.g. as in an graph of an increasing monotonical dumb-smart function.
Anyway, you do raise an obvious problem: even if a graph dumb-smart represented something like a monotonic function, how would one know that, after a while, eg. at the 300 IQ point, there isn't going to be a radical change?
Results for average people: 70% A, 27% B, 3% C. Results for intelligent people: 50% A, 40% B, 10% C. Possible interpretation: B is the correct answer, because here the difference is largest: 13%.
Wouldn't it make more sense to use odds ratios than probability differences?
Not only it makes more sense, but it is the approach adopted by Zietsman. Please check my answer below.
Thanks, this seems fair.
Is there an example of "politically correct" beliefs? Such as "everything is learned, heredity is a myth". I would suspect intelligent people more prone to this kind of beliefs, because they are associated with education and they require more complex explanation -- both is opportunity to signal intelligence.
It seems most of his analyses are on political opinions, not on matters of fact. The one exception seems to be on the existence of God, where the smart vote was on agnosticism, which is not exactly "politically correct", but would signal intelligence.
Now, some of the political positions are PC, such as support for Gay Rights, for Immigration, and opposition to Death Penalty. The position on welfare state seems very un-PC, though ("doesn’t think is really a state responsibility but is not opposed to some welfare spending so long as the country can afford it"). The total support for abortion doesn't seem PC at all either, at least it isn't in Brazil.
It is important to note that those people were answering a survey, so signalling isn't that strong a factor as it would be if they were talking of their position to, say, their work colleagues.
In response to
[Link] FreakoStats and CEV
An obvious objection would be that smart people would have in many cases common interests
Huh, that's not what I expected. I expected (okay, hoped for) the analogy to politics, where people at different levels of intelligence are actually solving different problems, leading to a breakdown of the assumptions.
How come? If you mean they would solve different problems due to different levels of education, or income, I think the regression analysis was meant to handle those. If you have another thing in mind, I'm afraid I don't understand you.
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Upvoted for clarity.
I think, along with most LWers, that your concerns about qualia and the need for a new ontology are mistaken. But even granting that part of your argument, I don't see why it is problematic to approach the FAI problem through simulation of humans. Yes, you would only be simulating their physical/computational aspects, not the ineffable subjectiveness, but does that loss matter, for the purposes of seeing how the simulations react to different extrapolations and trying to determine CEV? Only if a) the qualia humans experience are related to their concrete biology and not to their computational properties, and b) the relation is two-ways, so the qualia are not epiphenomenal to behavior but affect it causally, and physics as we understand it is not causally closed. But in that case, you would not be able to make a good computational simulation of a human's behavior in the first place!
In conclusion, assuming that faithful computational simulations of human behavior are possible, I don't see how the qualia problem interferes with using them to determine CEV and/or help program FAI. There might be other problems with this line of research (I am not endorsing it) but the simulations not having an epiphenomenal inner aspect that true humans have does not interfere. (In fact, it is good--it means we can use simulations without ethical qualms!)
This seems essentially the same answer as the most upvoted comment on the thread. Yet, you were at -2 just a while ago. I wonder why.