I don't recall ever doing that.

Do you leave the votes stand because you remember/re-invent your original reason for upvoting, or because something along the lines of "well, I must've had a good reason at the time"?

It seems to me like "books are slower to produce than online material, so they're higher quality" would belong to the class of statements that are true on average but close to meaningless in practice. There's enormous variance in the quality of both digital and printed texts, and whether you absorb more good or bad material depends more on which digital/print sources you seek out than on whether you prefer digital or print sources overall.

It seems to me, based on purely anecdotal experience, that people in this community are unusually prone to feeling that they're stupid if they do badly at something. Scott Adams' The Illusion of Winning might help counteract becoming too easily demotivated.

Let's say that you and I decide to play pool. We agree to play eight-ball, best of five games. Our perception is that what follows is a contest to see who will do something called winning.

But I don't see it that way. I always imagine the outcome of eight-ball to be predetermined, to about 95% certainty, based on who has practiced that specific skill the most over his lifetime. The remaining 5% is mostly luck, and playing a best of five series eliminates most of the luck too.

I've spent a ridiculous number of hours playing pool, mostly as a kid. I'm not proud of that fact. Almost any other activity would have been more useful. As a result of my wasted youth, years later I can beat 99% of the public at eight-ball. But I can't enjoy that sort of so-called victory. It doesn't feel like "winning" anything.

It feels as meaningful as if my opponent and I had kept logs of the hours we each had spent playing pool over our lifetimes and simply compared. It feels redundant to play the actual games.

I see the same thing with tennis, golf, music, and just about any other skill, at least at non-professional levels. And research supports the obvious, that practice is the main determinant of success in a particular field.

As a practical matter, you can't keep logs of all the hours you have spent practicing various skills. And I wonder how that affects our perception of what it takes to be a so-called winner. We focus on the contest instead of the practice because the contest is easy to measure and the practice is not.

Complicating our perceptions is professional sports. The whole point of professional athletics is assembling freaks of nature into teams and pitting them against other freaks of nature. Practice is obviously important in professional sports, but it won't make you taller. I suspect that professional sports demotivate viewers by sending the accidental message that success is determined by genetics.

My recommendation is to introduce eight-ball into school curricula, but in a specific way. Each kid would be required to keep a log of hours spent practicing on his own time, and there would be no minimum requirement. Some kids could practice zero hours if they had no interest or access to a pool table. At the end of the school year, the entire class would compete in a tournament, and they would compare their results with how many hours they spent practicing. I think that would make real the connection between practice and results, in a way that regular schoolwork and sports do not. That would teach them that winning happens before the game starts.

Yes, I know that schools will never assign eight-ball for homework. But maybe there is some kid-friendly way to teach the same lesson.

ETA: I don't mean to say that talent doesn't matter: things such as intelligence matter more than Adams gives them credit for, AFAIK. But I've noticed in many people (myself included) a definite tendency to overvalue intelligence relative to practice.

I read the idea, but it seemed to have basically the same flaw as Pascal's wager does. On that ground alone it seemed like it shouldn't be a mental risk to anyone, but it could be that I missed some part of the argument. (Didn't save the post.)

Neuroskeptic's Help, I'm Being Regressed to the Mean is the clearest explanation of regression to the mean that I've seen so far.

Seriously, Omega is not just counterfactual, he is impossible. Why do you guys keep asking us to believe so many impossible things before breakfast?

Omega is not obviously impossible: in theory, someone could scan your brain and simulate how you react in a specific situation. If you're already an upload and running as pure code, this is even easier.

The question is particularly relevant when trying to develop a decision theory for artificial intelligences: there's nothing impossible about the notion of two adversarial AIs having acquired each others' source codes and basing their actions on how a simulated copy of the other would react. If you presume that this scenario is possible, and there seems to be no reason to assume that it wouldn't be, then developing a decision theory capable of handling this situation is an important part of building an AI.

Most people do not systematically go through every statement that some particular person has made. If someone has heard primarily negative things about somebody else, then that reduces the chance of them even bothering to look at the person's other writings. This is quite rational behavior, since there are a lot of people out there and one's time is limited.

Cryonics was one topic and the problem there wasn't that it was uncredible but that it was uncool.

[insert the obvious bad pun here]

I'm somewhat frustrated by the frequent posts warning us about the dangers of Ev. Psych reasoning. (It seems like we average at least one of these per month).

I checked the list of posts tagged with evpsych, and there weren't all that many posts about the dangers of evpsych. Nor do I remember seeing many.

Part of the reason why I wrote the post was precisely because there seems to be a lot of support for evpsych on the site, but little criticism. I'm not saying evpsych is necessarily wrong or useless, but people should at least be aware of what the criticisms are.

I should have made it more clear in the post that the primary target of the post was not professional, academic evolutionary psychology. Rather, I was primarily cautioning amateurs (such as LW regulars) about some of the caveats involved in evpsych and noting the rigor required for good theories. While the post does also serve as a warning to be cautious about sloppy research (or sloppy science journalism) that doesn't seem to be taking these issues into account, I don't question the claim that the people doing serious evpsych are aware of all the issues I mentioned, and are probably taking them into account.

Could you give an example of someone making this error?

My wording was probably a bit too strong. Anyway, I'll try to look up some examples once I wake up.

Ah, but why do women have less strength, and men have more? See the excerpts from David Geary's Male, Female here arguing that greater male strength is related to sexual selection. (The mere fact that females have the babies isn't enough, because many monogamous primates exhibit minimal dimorphism.)

We know that there were different selection pressures on men and women. It doesn't make sense to believe that these selection pressures were strong enough to change body morphology, but somehow had no effect on psychology and behavior. That would be "neck-down Darwinism."

Huh. This is an excellent point; I'm now updating in favor of an increased probability for mental sex differences.

I think your post could use a couple citations for this claim. Off the top of my head, this claim may be true for some traits, but I've also seen evidence that it is false for others.

I was thinking of a study mentioned in one of Buss' textbooks, which I unfortunately don't have at hand right now. I will look up the exact citation.

So, just because we see a certain sort of variation, it doesn't necessarily strike down the hypothesis of universal, or quasi-universal, evolved human predispositions.

Right. I should have been clearer on this, too. I did not mean to argue that the variation would disprove an evolutionary or biological basis for these traits. Instead, I was using it as a caution against making too many assumptions of specific individuals.

It may have been a bit misplaced in this post, as it's more of a general caveat about psychological research than a criticism of evpsych in particular: not many results in psychology are truly universal in that you couldn't find individuals who were counterexamples. I should possibly remove it and make it into its own post.