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Nope. "67 out of 103 workers surveyed said they were less happy than they were 20 years ago" would be data. "Workers are getting unhappier" is not data. "Taking the number of job descriptions and their inflation-adjusted hourly wages from the 7 factories in table C, a log regression shows 0.8^(average $/hr) ~ number of job descriptions)" would be data. "The division of labor decreases wages" is not data. There is no data [was "there are no economic numbers"] in Marx's writings. He did not provide empirical evidence for any of his claims. (This is a common fault among intellectual descendants of Hegel.)
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comment
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on
Is altruistic deception really necessary? Social activism and the free market
In response to
comment
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on
Is altruistic deception really necessary? Social activism and the free market
I agree that Marxism is a bad theory of history and of economics, but it simply isn't that case that Marx didn't rely on data in his work. His work (and, perhaps to an even greater extend, Engel's work) is chock-full of data that confirms his theory. This is actually one of the examples Popper uses to demonstrate the uselessness of data-theory fit as a demarcation criterion for science. Confirmation is simply too easy to come by (especially, when you are more or less avoiding places where disconfirming data is likely to show up).
In response to
Open Thread, Feb 8 - Feb 15, 2016
Pearl has a new book out: Causal Inference in Statistics: A Primer (with Glymour and Jewell also as authors), already available on Kindle and paperback coming out the 26th. You can find the Table of Contents and chapter previews here.
At 150 pages, 4 chapters, and with homework exercises, this looks like the introductory causality work that I've wanted to exist for a few years.
Just ordered it. Thank you.
EDIT: Paperback isn't expected to ship until 3/8/2016.
In response to
Religious and Rational?
Finally got a chance to start an account. Sorry for the delay. I've enjoyed reading the comments and there are some very good point raised. I realize now that trust in sensory experience was not the strongest argument. What I was hoping for with it was to show an example of faith that secular people can relate to. It does not seem like it landed so I may have to keep thinking about what those might be. Realizing that there is not going to be anything directly analogous to religious faith. I wonder if something like "faith in the scientific method to help understand the world" might better illustrate the point I was going for?
It may help to point out which conception of faith you have in mind. For example:
- faith as a feeling of existential confidence
- faith as knowledge of specific truths, revealed by God
- faith as belief that God exists
- faith as belief in (trust in) God
- faith as practical commitment beyond the evidence to one's belief that God exists
- faith as practical commitment without belief
- faith as hoping—or acting in the hope that—the God who saves exists
- etc...
In response to
[Stub] The problem with Chesterton's Fence
...the common practice of taking down Chesterton fences is a process which seems well established and has a decent track record...
How are you measuring this?
In response to
Neo-reactionaries, why are you neo-reactionary?
I thought up a second way to explain this.
I discovered outright lying, not just incompetence, in several areas of the social sciences. This lead me to try and figure out the drivers of corruption of the social sciences. Eventually I hit upon "scientism" being used to manufacture consent in democratic societies. I also discovered how scientific governance as exists in the form of modern technocracy was a sham used by the powerful to eliminate possible rivals, under the pretense of empowering the weak. The key thinker explaining this dynamic is Bertrand de Jouvenel.
I eventually came to the opinion that this same drive for deception, one could call it the "ingsoc" drive, isn't a strange feature just of Communism and Nazism but was present in FDR's regime as well. It metastized universally in the 20th century. Epistemically liberal democracies were no healthier than the other two major forms of mass opinion derived legitimacy.
This lead me to the conclusion that my priors on political theory, economics, culture and ethics had been spiked in a nasty and systematic way. Then I went through a long process of taking the priors of peoples living before the age of mass consent being considered the golden standard for political legitimacy and started updating them one step at a time going through history up until the present era. A key step in this process was the writing of Thomas Carlyle.
Mencius Moldbug was a useful companion in this process, but the source material he draws on is even more powerful. It takes longer to read tho.
I agree that the political beliefs of citizens living in democratic societies come about via a process that we have no reason to believe is truth-tracking, but why should past thinkers such as Carlyle be much better? By what measure has he been shown to be a reliable guide on political/sociological questions?
In response to
Crazy Ideas Thread, December 2015
Circus arts should be a required subject in school. That way, people will be able to get attention without shooting anyone.
Insofar as attention is zero sum, making circus arts mandatory would not make those that are at risk of commiting violence more able to get attention. For that to work, you would have to encourage the relatively violent-prone to learn circus arts and discourage the relatively non-violent-prone.
In response to
Rationality Quotes July 2011
When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?
John Maynard Keynes
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Recent updates to gwern.net (2014-2015)
Did you do anything clever to demonstrate that the survey award recipient was really chosen randomly?
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Personally I think that Eliezer Yudkowsky should find a different co-author since Sam Harris isn't related to AI or AGI in any way and I am not sure how much can he contribute.
If the book was targeting AI researchers I would agree that Harris is a poor choice. On the other hand, if the goal is to reach a popular audience, you could do much worse than someone who is very well known in the mainstream media and has a proven track record of writing best selling books.