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Whenever someone says "according to my priors, in the absence of evidence we should assume..." I hear "I know nothing about this but that won't stop me pontificating."
I understand that what you're really complaining about is that some people are overconfident in their speculations (which is a fine and good thing to complain about) but the way you've phrased that objection here is a general counterargument against pretty much any statement that doesn't fall within mathematics, including all heuristics, priors, educated guesses, and parsimony intself.
(And the literal meaning of "I know nothing about this but here's my pontification" is very similar to "I have no evidence, but here is my prior assumption". You're just rewording it so it's a low status thing.)
Might be helpful to narrow down the objection a little, to explain where precisely you feel people are commonly overreaching?
In response to
The Pre-Historical Fallacy
While this is obviously true and correct, I find it's too often trotted out as a counterargument against (what seems to me to be) sensible claims about how we should, in the absence of evidence, hold a prior that mimicking what we approximate to be the ancestral environment will generally lead to better results. Too often there is unproductive back-and-forth between the "nature!" and the "naturalistic fallacy!" crowds.
it is foolish to therefore refuse to fly because it is unnatural
It's foolish to refuse altogether of course. Yet, as flying is not ancestral to humans (for which we do have "strong evidence"), you should have a prior expectation for risks and drawbacks - which as it turns out are many: air pressure and quality differences, circadian rhythm disruption, etc. While gene therapy isperhaps going a bit far, you should certainly use pressurized cabins and melatonin, and perhaps make a conscious effort to avoid sitting in your seat for longer than 45 minutes at a stretch.
So there are some relationships where you gain emotional energy from the time you spent with the person? This is different from basic extroversion 'recharging'?
I am very glad I asked this question because I did not realize that was even an option. Thank you very much!
Right - and you should avoid relationships where both people aren't on net gaining energy and time.
Extrovert/introvert "recharching" works because extroverts/introverts by definition like social activities/solitude. The general principle here is that people are recharged by spending time in a manner which they find simultaneously comfortable and engaging ("flow"?). An intellectual is recharged by thinking, an artist is recharged by creating, a romantic by romance, etc.
Beyond the obvious foundation of mutual love and affection, a good relationship is somehow creating or enhancing these dimension of life that you are energized by. On top of that it should ideally actually seem to free up time, as cooperating with a partner to tackle things generally cuts down work load, but even if it doesn't, if you've got the mutual love and mutual energizing in place I'd count it as a win.
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But I normally understand "I'm feminine" to mean "I want to do (list of things)". If someone wants to do those things because doing those things is feminine, they seem to be saying "I want to do these things because it means something which in turn means that I want to do these things"--it's circular.
"I want to do a list of things" includes "I want the people around me to perceive me in a certain way" and "I want to perceive myself a certain way"- which is generally a big drive for clothing, adornments, and body-modification in general.
The previous ones weren't as bad as the Africans one, and I dunno if you appreciate just how big a punishment that is: Watson was not some honorary appointee of Cold Spring Harbor, he practically made that place. (I say practically because the place was around before Watson but he brought it into the modern genetic era.) He was deeply respected in the area. (I went to a genetics summer camp there; one of my other friends was babysat by Watson when she was kid.) To push him out so blatantly... I'd compare it to Sumner but Sumner apparently already had weakened his powerbase considerably and so his ouster wasn't that impressive.
I chose a bad example to illustrate my point. What I wanted to say is that it seems there are plenty of people who say and do absolutely atrocious things and nothing ever happens to them... and then some random well intentioned person wears a t-shirt or makes a joke in poor taste and is eviscerated. My intuition says that it might be a bad strategy for these very minor offenders to back down and submit immediately (which they do presumably because they themselves agree with the steelman of the criticism) rather than going on the offence concerning how they are being treated for a relatively minor indiscretion.
If I were Hunt and a reporter had published a bad joke as though it were a serious comment, I'd be denouncing the reporter for libel. Whereas Hunt just kept digging himself deeper into a hole, apologizing for the comment, and even attempting to defend the comment, rather than attacking the premise of it even being news.
On October 25, 2007, Watson was compelled to retire as chancellor of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on New York's Long Island and from its board of directors
Oh. good catch, didn't read that far. Still though, that's already the fifth political correctness controversy he was in (though one might argue the underlying factor is PC-ness increasing, or something)
In response to
Stupid Questions July 2015
How do you reconcile being transgender with the fact that a lot of our sexual roles are culture-specific? For instance, imagine a MTF who wants to wear a dress. You can't tell this person "stop wearing dresses"; their desire to do so cannot be changed by society telling them no. Yet if they lived in another culture that didn't have dresses at all even for women, we know that when society told them not to wear a dress they would have eagerly gone along with it.
That's a common trans-exclusionary-radical-feminist argument. Wrong because:
1) Would you feel uncomfortable wearing a swastika? Would that send the right message about you? In India swastika is a holy symbol, not a Nazi symbol, the meaning is arbitrary. "Dress" means "I'm feminine" in our culture. It's part of our language.
Suppose in Atlantis, the mouth-sound "love" happens to mean hate and the mouth sound "hate" happens to mean love. It's still acceptable for an English speaking person to want to mouth-sound "I love you" and not "I hate you" even though the meanings of the mouth-sounds are cultural.
2) Things need not be biological to be okay. Culture-induced preferences are valid. (Though, in this case, I think gender expression is probably biological).
In response to
Stupid Questions July 2015
If you have no interest in eventually procreating, is serious dating worth the massive time and emotional investment necessary?
Edit: part of the reason i am asking is for external belief checking
I wouldn't think about it as "dating" in general. It depends on whom you are dating. I think that if you perceive yourself as expending time and emotional energy, rather than acquiring more free time and more emotional energy, then the answer is "no" for that particular person.
This vaguely applies to any investment, doesn't it?
In response to
Open Thread, Jun. 29 - Jul. 5, 2015
One lesson from the Tim Hunt affair: Always make a recording with your smart phone when you give a speech.
You want to be able to proof what you actually said.
Second lesson: Do not apologize, resign, and so on because it only causes the public perception to damn you further.
James Watson has said some unambiguously politically incorrect, unkind, bad and mean things. With respect to the public face, he barely even flinches at backlash: no apology, no resignations, and no real personal consequences whatsoever for his statements.
In contrast, Hunt merely made a joke in poor taste. I wish he had stood his ground and denounced the accusers. Luckily other respected figures are coming to his aid, but that doesn't always happen.
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A prior is a statement of one's knowledge (or to say exactly the same thing with an antonym, a statement of one's ignorance), as expressed before performing an experiment or observation. It stands in contrast to one's posterior, the state of belief after having updated on the evidence obtained. Outside of that context, one's beliefs are not prior to anything, and talking about one's priors is just, well, rewording it so it sounds like a high status thing.
But on reconsideration, I think I'm being unfair in making that response to your post. In the flying example you are talking about things that have been observed that as it happens confirm the stated prior. It's just a thought about the casual use of the word "prior" that has been on my mind for a while.
The way that I've phrased this outside of lesswrong (where people don't typically know what priors are) is: "In the absence of empirical data, things which are evolutionarily novel should be treated as guilty until evidence proves them innocent, whereas things which are evolutionarily familiar should be treated as innocent until evidence proves them guilty."
"Prior" captures the connotation that this is only a provisionary belief until more evidence surfaces in one neat word.