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He uses statistics as a drunkard uses a lamppost: for support, not for illumination.
G.K. Chesterton
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Rationality Quotes: December 2010
Correction: This quote is usually attributed to Andrew Lang. Not sure how I got that wrong.
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Individual Deniability, Statistical Honesty
Also, it occurs to me that this is essentially an application of Bayes' Theorem. In an ordinary survey, the posterior probability (killed leopard|says yes) is 1, which is bad for the farmers, so they lie and therefore decrease the conditional probability (says yes|killed leopard), which is bad for the surveyors. Adding the die roll increases the unconditional probability of saying yes, so that the posterior probability no longer equals the conditional, and they can both get what they want.
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Individual Deniability, Statistical Honesty
The keywords here are "randomized response". There are some interesting variations (from the Wikipedia page):
The sensitive question is worded in two dichotomous alternatives, and chance decides, unknown to the interviewer, which one is to be answered honestly.
Alternative 1: "I have consumed marijuana." Alternative 2: "I have never consumed marijuana." The interviewed are asked to secretly throw a die and answer the first question only if they throw a 6, otherwise the second question.
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Rationality Quotes August 2011
If we want to know where the truth lies in particular cases, we have to look.
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
In response to
Rationality Quotes August 2011
None are so fallible as those who are sure they’re right.
Strunk & White, The Elements of Style
Remember the fraction of people that take $500 for certain over a 15% chance of $1 million?
Wow. I don't think I'd heard that one.
I was very surprised to see that too, to the point of questioning whether the result was real, but apparently it is. (The particular result is on page 10 — and possibly elsewhere, I haven't read it through yet.)
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Interesting. I don't see any problem with bildungsroman. Did you have a similar reaction to Eliezer's Coming of Age posts?
Also, what's wrong with a promotion of polyamory? I definitely think it's an option that will be more optimal for some people than the default of serial monogamy.
Finally, the entirety of The Sequences proclaims "if you do this right, you can be just like me (Eliezer, trained rationalist)." Were you similarly made uncomfortable by that aspect of The Sequences?
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I found the Coming of Age series to be both self-indulgent and quite dull, and I think that it's very difficult to use yourself as an example of vice or virtue without running into one or both of those issues. I also find that I (more-or-less automatically) downgrade an author's ethos by a lot when he's talking about himself as an illustrative example. But for this one, it's the skeeviness factor that dominates — it's just plain creepy to hear about your love life as a source of telling anecdotes. And that's distracting.
Polyamory may be great, but the right way to promote it is not by slipping into a post the implication that it's the endpoint of rational thinking about romance. Which is what this reads as, whether you intended it to or not. If you want to advocate polyamory here (and honestly, I'm not sure that Less Wrong is the right place to do so), you should devote an entire post to it, and set forth clear arguments as to why it's the better option, rather than presuming it in your advice.
The Sequences do not consist of Eliezer promoting himself as a master rationalist, nor do they assume that you already think he is. He argues for certain positions, and the reader comes to believe that he is a good rationalist as a result of being convinced that the positions he holds are rational. The tone of this is much closer to the motivational-seminar pitch of "I turned my life around using these three simple principles", with the additional difficulty that we're just taking your word for your romantic success. It's not credible.
Downvoted.
It's interesting and potentially useful, and I liked some of the links; however, I felt seriously skeeved-out throughout, probably due to the combination of uncomfortably personal authorial bildungsroman (with connotations of "if you do this right, you can be just like me"), and the implied promotion of polyamory. Would work much better if you could remove the autobiographical aspects.
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Also, found the bite-sizing of the lessons made them feel like distractions to be skipped over rather than principles that the anecdotes were illustrating.
Downvoted.
It's interesting and potentially useful, and I liked some of the links; however, I felt seriously skeeved-out throughout, probably due to the combination of uncomfortably personal authorial bildungsroman (with connotations of "if you do this right, you can be just like me"), and the implied promotion of polyamory. Would work much better if you could remove the autobiographical aspects.
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This one really annoys me. It's one of the very few posts of Eliezer's that I've ever downvoted, because it strikes me as both naive and foolish. And I think that's because what Eliezer's proposing here is to pretend that your map is the territory. To take your third-hand model of history (no doubt deeply flawed and horrendously incomplete) and treat it as if it were your actual experience. Not to mention that you just don't have the knowledge he suggests envisioning (how do you know what it actually feels like to change your mind about slavery?) — or the sheer cognitive impossibility of actually making an imaginary runthrough of history.
It's one thing to recommend having historical perspective, and another to pretend that that perspective is actually your own.