Why is this comment retracted?

It seems like we suck at using scales "from one to ten". Video game reviews nearly always give a 7-10 rating. Competitions with scores from judges seem to always give numbers between eight and ten, unless you crash or fall, and get a five or six. If I tell someone my mood is a 5/10, they seem to think I'm having a bad day. That is, we seem to compress things into the last few numbers of the scale. Does anybody know why this happens? Possible explanations that come to mind include:

• People are scoring with reference to the high end, where "nothing is wrong", and they do not want to label things as more than two or three points worse than perfect

• People are thinking in terms of grades, where 75% is a C. People think most things are not worse than a C grade (or maybe this is just another example of the pattern I'm seeing)

• I'm succumbing to confirmation bias and this isn't a real pattern

This doesn't really tell us a lot about how people predict others' success. The information has been intentionally limited to a very high degree. It's basically asking the test participants "This individual usually scores an 87. What do you expect her to score next time?" All of the interactions that could potentially create bias has been artificially stripped away by the experiment.

This means that participants are forced by the experimental setup to use Outside View, when they could easily be fooled into taking the Inside View and being swayed by perceptions of the student's diligence, charisma, etc. The subject would probably be more optimistic than average about themselves, but the others' predictions might not be nearly as accurate if you gave them more interaction with the subject.

In baseball prediction, it has been demonstrated that a simple weighted average with an age factor is nearly the best predictor of future performance. Watching the games and getting to know the players in most cases makes prediction worse. [I can't easily find a citation for this, but I think it came originally from articles at baseballprospectus.com]

This really just leaves us with "use outside view to predict performance," which is useful but not necessarily novel.

Yeah I find these three pronged trade-offs fairly interesting. I think it's wrong to say "choose two"; for example, you could always choose to be somewhere in the middle if you consider the space to be a triangle.

Do you know of the word for a three pronged trade-off?

I was recently linked to this Wired article from a few months back on new results in the Bohmian interpretation of Quantum Mechanics: http://www.wired.com/2014/06/the-new-quantum-reality/

Should we be taking this seriously? The ability to duplicate the double slit experiment at classical scale is pretty impressive.

Or maybe this is still just wishful thinking trying to escape the weirdnesses of the Copenhagen and Many Worlds interpretations.

The most standard business tradeoff is Cheap vs Fast vs Good, which typically you're only supposed to be able to get two of.

Does anyone have experience with Inositol? It was mentioned recently on one of the better parts of the website no one should ever go to, and I just picked up a bottle of it. It seems like it might help with pretty much anything and doesn't have any downsides . . . which makes me a bit suspicious.

In some sense I think General Intelligence may contain Rationality. We're just playing definition games here, but I think my definitions match the general LW/Rationality Community usage.

A an agent which perfectly plays a solved game ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solved_game ) is perfectly rational. But its intelligence is limited, because it can only accept a limited type of inputs, the states of a tic-tac-toe board, for instance.

We can certainly point to people who are extremely intelligent but quite irrational in some respects--but if you increased their rationality without making any other changes I think we would also say that they became more intelligent. If you examine their actions, you should expect to see that they are acting rationally in most areas, but have some spheres where rationality fails them.

This is because, in my definition at least:

Intelligence = Rationality + Other Stuff

So rationality is one component of a larger concept of Intelligence.

General Intelligence is the ability of an agent to take inputs from the world, compare it to a preferred state of the world (goals), and take actions that make that state of the world more likely to occur.

Rationality is how accurate and precise that agent is, relative to its goals and resources.

General Intelligence includes this, but also has concerns such as - being able to accept a wide variety of inputs - having lots of processing power - using that processing power efficiently

I don't know if this covers it 100%, but this seems like it matches general usage to me.

While this is true, there can be a distinction between a character with flaws and a character who is extremely irritating to read about. And this is one of those judgement calls where The Audience is Always Right; it seems very reasonable to stop reading a story if the protagonist noticeably irritates you.

In general, commentary to the effect of "you should like this thing" is not very useful, especially if you are trying to figure out why someone reacted negatively.

(These discussions in which one group has an overwhelmingly strong "squick" or "ew" reaction and another group does not are fascinating to me, not least of all because they seem to pop up quite frequently here, e.g. about Eliezer's OKCupid profile and NYC cuddle piles. Both sides spew huge amounts of ink explaining their emotional reactions, and yet there never seems to be any actual sharing of understanding. In the interests of trying harder...I was also very aggravated by the first few chapters of HPMOR, and would be happy to discuss it calmly here.)