http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/science-isnt-broken/

This is an interesting article-- it's got an overview of what's currently seen as the problems with replicability and fraud, and some material I haven't seen before about handing the same question to a bunch of scientists, and looking at how they come up with their divergent answers.

However, while I think it's fair to say that science is really hard, the article gets into claiming that scientists aren't especially awful people (probably true), but doesnn't address the hard question of "Given that there's a lot of inaccurate science, how much should we trust specific scientific claims?"

I've been wondering about good new topics for LW, and prediction might be one of them.

The effect of the Zika virus-- and human reactions to it-- on birth rates has the combination of being hard enough to be interesting, not being heavily plowed over by partisans, and having a quantitative outcome.

There's a lot of evidence that Zika causes microcephaly, but this isn't confirmed. There's also some reason to think it increases the rate of miscarriages.

Human reactions cover a wide range, including trying to wipe out the mosquitoes, increasing access to birth control, abortions, asking people to put off having children, creating a less-mosquito-friendly environment....

My assumption is that zika will cease to be a serious problem in not too many years, as more women get the disease and acquire immunity before their child-bearing years, but admittedly, this is assuming that zika (or some other disease with a similar infection pattern) is the problem.

Any other good prediction questions?

I've gotten sufficient evidence from support that voiceofra has been doing retributive downvoting. I've banned them without prior notice because I'm not giving them more chances to downvote.

I'm thinking of something like not letting anyone give more than 5 downvotes/week for content which is more than a month old. The numbers and the time period are tentative-- this isn't my ideal rule. This is probably technically possible. However, my impression is that highly specific rules like that are an invitation to gaming the rules.

I would rather just make spiteful down-voting impossible (or maybe make it expensive) rather than trying to find out who's doing it. Admittedly, putting up barriers to downvoting for past comments doesn't solve the problem of people who down-vote everything, but at least people who downvote current material are easier to notice.

Any thoughts about technical solutions to excessive down-voting of past material?

This is so remarkably sensible I think it deserves its own article.

It's a pdf of the slides from a lecture, and should help with the planning fallacy.

A few highlights: Distinguish between targets and estimates. Don't make estimates before you know very much about the project. Estimates are probability statements. Best assumption is that a new tool or method will lead to productivity loss.

Richard Kennaway has posted about an edit war on the wiki. Richard, thank you.

Unfortunately, I've only used the wiki a little, and don't have a feeling for why the edit history for an article is inaccessible. Is the wiki broken or has someone found a way to hack it? Let it be known that hacking the wiki is something I'll ban for.

VoiceofRa, I'd like to know why you deleted Gleb's article. Presumably you have some reason for why you think it was unsatisfactory.

I'm also notifying tech in the hope of finding out what happened to the edit history.

An audience is switched from clapping on the first and third beats to the second and fourth beats because the pianist added a fifth beat.

I admit I can barely hear what's going on-- the audience sounds better to me after the 40 second mark, but I'm taking what a lot of other people are saying about what happened on trust. Still, I think this gives a different angle on priming research. I'm willing to bet that priming research was based on looking for implausibly small and ridiculous influences so as to get interesting-sounding results rather than looking at what actually changes behavior.

30 minute panel

The first question was why isn't everyone trying to change the world, with the underlying assumption that everyone should be. However, it isn't obviously the case that the world would be better if everyone were trying to change it. For one thing, trying to change the world mostly means trying to change other people. If everyone were trying to do it, this would be a huge drain on everyone's attention. In addition, some people are sufficiently mean and/or stupid that their efforts to change the world make things worse.

At the same time, some efforts to change the world are good, or at least plausible. Is there any way to improve the filter so that we get more ambition from benign people without just saying everyone should try to change the world, even if they're Osama bin Laden?

The discussion of why there's too much duplicated effort in science didn't bring up the problem of funding, which is probably another version of the problem of people not doing enough independent thinking.

There was some discussion of people getting too hooked on competition, which is a way of getting a lot of people pointed at the same goal. 

Link thanks to Clarity

A study found that registering outcomes meant that positive outcomes dropped a lot. The researchers looked at 30 large National Heart Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) funded trials between 1970 and 2000. Of those studies, 17 or 57% showed a significant positive result. They then compared that to 25 similar studies published between 2000 and 2012. Of those, only 2 or 8% were positive. That is a significant drop – from 57% to 8% positive studies."

I also ran across a study which had same intriguing, plausible, nuanced results about the effects of timeouts, reasoning, and compromising on improving children's behavior. How much should I trust it?

There are some long lists of false beliefs that programmers hold. isn't because programmers are especially likely to be more wrong than anyone else, it's just that programming offers a better opportunity than most people get to find out how incomplete their model of the world is.

I'm posting about this here, not just because this information has a decent chance of being both entertaining and useful, but because LWers try to figure things out from relatively simple principles-- who knows what simplifying assumptions might be tripping us up?

The classic (and I think the first) was about names. There have been a few more lists created since then.

Time. And time zones. Crowd-sourced time errors.

Addresses. Possibly more about addresses. I haven't compared the lists.

Gender. This is so short I assume it's seriously incomplete.

Networks. Weirdly, there is no list of falsehoods programmers believe about html (or at least a fast search didn't turn anything up). Don't trust the words in the url.

Distributed computing Build systems.

Poem about character conversion.

I got started on the subject because of this about testing your code, which was posted by Andrew Ducker.

The inaugural New Hampshire Less Wrong meet-up will take place the week of June 29-July 4. I've created a Doodle poll to find out the best date for likely participants. If you are interested in attending, please fill out the poll here: http://doodle.com/4ypehfkvsm7cvf76

The first meeting will be in Manchester, but I'm open to rotating locations throughout NH in the future, especially if people want to host meetings in their homes.

I hope to coordinate crossover meetings with Boston LW, e.g. field trips to Sundays at the Citadel."

*****

I've posted this for Elizabeth Edwards-Appell-- she's confirmed her LW email, but still can't post, not even comments. I've notified tech, but meanwhile, if anyone can help with her posting problem, let me know.