Comment author: ChristianKl 30 June 2015 12:05:50AM 0 points [-]

It might be that I have gotten to cynic but if you measure 6 variables it's more likely that one of them get a statistical significant result then if you first turn those 6 variables into 2 variables via PCA.

My project gives a proof of concept for what I'm talking about in the context of social psychology. I've never seen such an application. So no, it's not just the realization that it could be applied, it's also giving a proof of concept: that's why it took ~1500 hours rather than ~10 hours.

That probably where there's something I don't understand. I don't understand why the analysis took ~1500 hours. Spending that much time with a dataset also instinctively triggers "fishing expedition" in my head. I don't know to what extend that's warranted.

I'm not sure that you have shown that it makes more sense to interpret that factor individual preference is about intelligence and sincerity than that it's about the value of fun.

As far as I can see it could also be that fun&physical attractiveness is simply more valued.

So I'd strongly encourage you to pursue your ideas more. I've been looking some at the General Social Survey data, where I haven't yet found something highly nontrivial (maybe I'm looking at the data the wrong way, or maybe it's just not a good dataset for this). I'd be happy to share my code with you / a cleaned form of the data, if you're interested in exploring factors for political labels.

In the case of the spending effort on the GSS I can't envision what success looks like. It's straightforward to find PCR factors but I don't know how to put them to good use.

A more interesting project would be to explore LW's ideological landscape. It would be very interested in how various rationalist beliefs interact with each other. Does seeing yourself as an "aspiring rationalist" correlates to beliefs on UFAI risk?

Having a project that searches where the main dimensions of disagreement in this community would be valuable. Maybe 300 questions that are answered on a Likert scale. Maybe 150 rationality questions, 100 big 5 questions and 50 autism questions.

Comment author: JonahSinick 30 June 2015 05:25:04AM 0 points [-]

It might be that I have gotten to cynic but if you measure 6 variables it's more likely that one of them get a statistical significant result then if you first turn those 6 variables into 2 variables via PCA.

Yes, this is the point :-)

Comment author: Pentashagon 30 June 2015 04:03:17AM 5 points [-]

I was disturbed by what I saw, but I didn't realize that math academia is actually functioning as a cult

I'm sure you're aware that the word "cult" is a strong claim that requires a lot of evidence, but I'd also issue a friendly warning that to me at least it immediately set off my "crank" alarm bells. I've seen too many Usenet posters who are sure they have a P=/!=NP proof, or a proof that set theory is false, or etc. who ultimately claim that because "the mathematical elite" are a cult that no one will listen to them. A cult generally engages in active suppression, often defamation, and not simply exclusion. Do you have evidence of legitimate mathematical results or research being hidden/withdrawn from journals or publicly derided, or is it more of an old boy's club that's hard for outsiders to participate in and that plays petty politics to the damage of the science?

Grothendieck's problems look to be political and interpersonal. Perelman's also. I think it's one thing to claim that mathematical institutions are no more rational than any other politicized body, and quite another to claim that it's a cult. Or maybe most social behavior is too cult-like. If so; perhaps don't single out mathematics.

I've seen a lot of people develop serious mental health problems in connection with their experiences in academia.

I question the direction of causation. Historically many great mathematicians have been mentally and socially atypical and ended up not making much sense with their later writings. Either mathematics has always had an institutional problem or mathematicians have always had an incidence of mental difficulties (or a combination of both; but I would expect one to dominate).

Especially in Thurston's On Proof and Progress in Mathematics I can appreciate the problem of trying to grok specialized areas of mathematics. The terminology and symbology is opaque to the uninitiated. It reminds me of section 1 of the Metamath Book which expresses similar unhappiness with the state of knowledge between specialist fields of mathematics and the general difficulty of learning mathematics. I had hoped that Metamath would become more popular and tie various subfields together through unifying theories and definitions, but as far as I can tell it languishes as a hobbyist project for a few dedicated mathematicians.

Comment author: JonahSinick 30 June 2015 05:22:04AM 2 points [-]

I'm sure you're aware that the word "cult" is a strong claim that requires a lot of evidence, but I'd also issue a friendly warning that to me at least it immediately set off my "crank" alarm bells.

Thanks, yeah, people have been telling me that I need to be more careful in how I frame things. :-)

Do you have evidence of legitimate mathematical results or research being hidden/withdrawn from journals or publicly derided, or is it more of an old boy's club that's hard for outsiders to participate in and that plays petty politics to the damage of the science?

The latter, but note that that's not necessarily less damaging than active suppression would be.

Or maybe most social behavior is too cult-like. If so; perhaps don't single out mathematics.

Yes, this is what I believe. The math community is just unusually salient to me, but I should phrase things more carefully.

I question the direction of causation. Historically many great mathematicians have been mentally and socially atypical and ended up not making much sense with their later writings. Either mathematics has always had an institutional problem or mathematicians have always had an incidence of mental difficulties (or a combination of both; but I would expect one to dominate).

Most of the people who I have in mind did have preexisting difficulties. I meant something like "relative to a counterfactual where academia was serving its intended function." People of very high intellectual curiosity sometimes approach academia believing that it will be an oasis and find this not to be at all the case, and that the structures in place are in fact hostile to them.

This is not what the government should be supporting with taxpayer dollars.

Especially in Thurston's On Proof and Progress in Mathematics I can appreciate the problem of trying to grok specialized areas of mathematics.

What are your own interests?

Comment author: ChristianKl 30 June 2015 12:05:50AM 0 points [-]

It might be that I have gotten to cynic but if you measure 6 variables it's more likely that one of them get a statistical significant result then if you first turn those 6 variables into 2 variables via PCA.

My project gives a proof of concept for what I'm talking about in the context of social psychology. I've never seen such an application. So no, it's not just the realization that it could be applied, it's also giving a proof of concept: that's why it took ~1500 hours rather than ~10 hours.

That probably where there's something I don't understand. I don't understand why the analysis took ~1500 hours. Spending that much time with a dataset also instinctively triggers "fishing expedition" in my head. I don't know to what extend that's warranted.

I'm not sure that you have shown that it makes more sense to interpret that factor individual preference is about intelligence and sincerity than that it's about the value of fun.

As far as I can see it could also be that fun&physical attractiveness is simply more valued.

So I'd strongly encourage you to pursue your ideas more. I've been looking some at the General Social Survey data, where I haven't yet found something highly nontrivial (maybe I'm looking at the data the wrong way, or maybe it's just not a good dataset for this). I'd be happy to share my code with you / a cleaned form of the data, if you're interested in exploring factors for political labels.

In the case of the spending effort on the GSS I can't envision what success looks like. It's straightforward to find PCR factors but I don't know how to put them to good use.

A more interesting project would be to explore LW's ideological landscape. It would be very interested in how various rationalist beliefs interact with each other. Does seeing yourself as an "aspiring rationalist" correlates to beliefs on UFAI risk?

Having a project that searches where the main dimensions of disagreement in this community would be valuable. Maybe 300 questions that are answered on a Likert scale. Maybe 150 rationality questions, 100 big 5 questions and 50 autism questions.

Comment author: JonahSinick 30 June 2015 05:01:31AM 0 points [-]

That probably where there's something I don't understand. I don't understand why the analysis took ~1500 hours. Spending that much time with a dataset also instinctively triggers "fishing expedition" in my head. I don't know to what extend that's warranted.

The issue of multiple hypothesis testing is precisely why it took 1500 hours :-). I was dealing with the general question "how can you find the most interesting generalizable patterns in a human interpretable data set?" It'll take me a long time to externalize what I learned.

For now I'll just remark that dimensionality reduction reduces concerns around multiple hypothesis testing. If you have a cluster of variables A and a cluster of features B and you suspect that there's some relationship between the variables A and the variables B, you can do PCA on the two clusters separately, then look at correlations between the first few principal components rather than looking at all pairwise correlations between variables in A and variables in B.

A more interesting project would be to explore LW's ideological landscape. It would be very interested in how various rationalist beliefs interact with each other. Does seeing yourself as an "aspiring rationalist" correlates to beliefs on UFAI risk?

There is the 2014 LW survey data, which is interesting, even if less substantive than what you have in mind. I have an unfinished project that I'm doing with it (got bogged down in cleaning it to make it nicely readable).

Comment author: [deleted] 28 June 2015 07:32:50PM 0 points [-]

Quite frankly, I find the norms in academia very creepy: I've seen a lot of people develop serious mental health problems in connection with their experiences in academia. It's hard to see it from the inside: I was disturbed by what I saw, but I didn't realize that math academia is actually functioning as a cult, based on retrospective impressions, and in fact by implicit consensus of the best mathematicians of the world (I can give references if you'd like) .

I've only been in CS academia, and wouldn't call that a cult. I would call it, like most of the rest of academia, a deeply dysfunctional industry in which to work, but that's the fault of the academic career and funding structure. CS is even relatively healthy by comparison to much of the rest.

How much of our impression of mathematics as a creepy, mental-health-harming cult comes from pure stereotyping?

In response to comment by [deleted] on Beyond Statistics 101
Comment author: JonahSinick 29 June 2015 07:35:01AM 0 points [-]

I don't have direct exposure to CS academia, which, as you comment, is known to be healthier :-). I was speaking in broad brushstrokes , I'll qualify my claims and impressions more carefully later.

Comment author: ZoltanBerrigomo 29 June 2015 06:15:17AM *  2 points [-]

The links you give are extremely interesting, but, unless I am missing something, it seems that they fall short of justifying your earlier statement that math academia functions as a cult. I wonder if you would be willing to elaborate further on that?

Comment author: JonahSinick 29 June 2015 07:30:37AM *  1 point [-]

I'll be writing more about this later.

The most scary thing to me is that the most mathematically talented students are often turned off by what they see in math classes, even at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Math serves as a backbone for the sciences, so this may badly undercutting scientific innovation at a societal level.

I honestly think that it would be an improvement on the status quo to stop teaching math classes entirely. Thurston characterized his early math education as follows:

I hated much of what was taught as mathematics in my early schooling, and I often received poor grades. I now view many of these early lessons as anti-math: they actively tried to discourage independent thought. One was supposed to follow an established pattern with mechanical precision, put answers inside boxes, and "show your work," that is, reject mental insights and alternative approaches.

I think that this characterizes math classes even at the graduate level, only at a higher level of abstraction. The classes essentially never offer students exposure to free-form mathematical exploration, which is what it takes to make major scientific discoveries with significant quantitative components.

Comment author: [deleted] 28 June 2015 07:10:24PM 3 points [-]

I think in this case we have to taboo the term "LWers" ;-). This community has many pieces in it, and two large parts of the original core are "techno-libertarian Overcoming Bias readers with many very non-mainstream beliefs that they claim are much more rational than anyone else's beliefs" and "the SL4 mailing list wearing suits and trying to act professional enough that they might actually accomplish their Shock Level Four dreams."

On the other hand, in the process of the site's growth, it has eventually come to encompass those two demographics plus, to some limited extent, almost everyone who's willing to assent that science, statistical reasoning, and the neuro/cognitive sciences actually really work and should be taken seriously. With special emphasis on statistical reasoning and cognitive sciences.

So the core demographic consists of Very Unusual People, but the periphery demographics, who now make up most of the community, consist of only Mildly Unusual People.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Beyond Statistics 101
Comment author: JonahSinick 29 June 2015 07:18:41AM 0 points [-]

Yes, this seems like a fair assessment o the situation. Thanks for disentangling the issues. I'll be more precise in the future.

Comment author: Mirzhan_Irkegulov 28 June 2015 07:49:41PM 0 points [-]

In my experience there's an issue of Less Wrongers being unusually emotionally damaged (e.g. relative to academics) and this gives rise to a lot of problems in the community.

I think you're just projecting.

Comment author: JonahSinick 29 June 2015 07:16:56AM 1 point [-]

I'm speaking based on many interactions with many members of the community. I don't think this is true of everybody, but I have seen a difference at the group level.

Comment author: Will_Sawin 27 June 2015 11:29:34PM 1 point [-]

Thank you for all these interesting references. I enjoyed reading all of them, and rereading in Thurston's case.

Do people pathologize Grothendieck as having gone crazy? I mostly think people think of him as being a little bit strange. The story I heard was that because of philosophical disagreements with military funding and personal conflicts with other mathematicians he left the community and was more or less refusing to speak to anyone about mathematics, and people were sad about this and wished he would come back.

Comment author: JonahSinick 28 June 2015 12:47:25AM *  3 points [-]

Do people pathologize Grothendieck as having gone crazy?

His contribution of math is too great for people to have explicitly adopted a stance that was too unfavorable to him, and many mathematicians did in fact miss him a lot. But as Perelman said:

Of course, there are many mathematicians who are more or less honest. But almost all of them are conformists. They are more or less honest, but they tolerate those who are not honest." He has also said that "It is not people who break ethical standards who are regarded as aliens. It is people like me who are isolated.

If pressed, many mathematicians downplay the role of those who behaved unethically toward him and the failure of the community to give him a job in favor of a narrative "poor guy, it's so sad that he developed mental health problems."

Comment author: minusdash 27 June 2015 01:46:24AM *  0 points [-]

I don't really understand what you mean about math academia. Those references would be appreciated.

Comment author: JonahSinick 27 June 2015 02:02:48AM *  8 points [-]

The top 3 answers to the MathOverflow question Which mathematicians have influenced you the most? are Alexander Grothendieck, Mikhail Gromov, and Bill Thurston. Each of these have expressed serious concerns about the community.

  • Grothendieck was actually effectively excommunicated by the mathematical community and then was pathologized as having gone crazy. See pages 37-40 of David Ruelle's book A Mathematician's Brain.

  • Gromov expresses strong sympathy for Grigory Perelman having left the mathematical community starting on page 110 of Perfect Rigor. (You can search for "Gromov" in the pdf to see all of his remarks on the subject.)

  • Thurston made very apt criticisms of the mathematical community in his essay On Proof and Progress In Mathematics. See especially the beginning of Section 3: "How is mathematical understanding communicated?" Terry Tao endorses Thurston's essay in his obituary of Thurston. But the community has essentially ignored Thurston's remarks: one almost never hears people talk about the points that Thurston raises.

Comment author: [deleted] 26 June 2015 11:24:53PM 2 points [-]

There are other people involved in the community who you might find even more credible. For example: (a) Paul Christiano who was an international math olympiad medalist, wrote a 50 page paper on quantum computational complexity with Scott Aaronson as an undergraduate at MIT, and is a theoretical CS grad student at Berkeley. (b) Jacob Steinhardt, a Hertz graduate fellow who does machine learning research under Percy Liang at Stanford.

Of course, Christiano tends to issue disclaimers with his MIRI-branded AGI safety work, explicitly stating that he does not believe in alarmist UFAI scenarios. Which is fine, in itself, but it does show how people expect someone associated with these communities to sound.

And Jacob Steinhardt hasn't exactly endorsed any "Twilight Zone" community norms or propaganda views. Errr, is there a term for "things everyone in a group thinks everyone else believes, whether or not they actually do"?

In response to comment by [deleted] on Beyond Statistics 101
Comment author: JonahSinick 27 June 2015 01:50:52AM 3 points [-]

I'm not claiming otherwise: I'm merely saying that Paul and Jacob don't dismiss LWers out of hand as obviously crazy, and have in fact found the community to be worthwhile enough to have participated substantially.

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