In response to 9/26 is Petrov Day
Comment author: Xodarap 08 September 2015 12:26:34AM 0 points [-]

Does anyone know what Petrov's address is, or any way to reach him?

The Madison, WI effective altruism group would like to write him thank-you letters for our next meetup this Petrov Day.

Comment author: ozziegooen 08 January 2015 04:58:44AM 0 points [-]

Good point

Comment author: Xodarap 26 March 2015 01:48:11PM 0 points [-]

I would use this

Comment author: Squark 05 January 2015 07:03:20PM 0 points [-]

I haven't read the entire post but I believe I solved "infinite ethics" in http://lesswrong.com/lw/jub/updateless_intelligence_metrics_in_the_multiverse/ (by sticking to a bounded utility function with discounts of particular asymptotics resulting from summing over a Solomonoff ensemble).

Comment author: Xodarap 18 January 2015 04:15:38PM 1 point [-]

Thanks. As per theorem 3.2 above you can't have both Pareto and an anonymity constraint. Finite anonymity would add a constant factor to the complexity of the utility vector and hence shouldn't affect the prior, so I assume your method follows the finite anonymity constraint.

As a result, you must be disobeying Pareto? It's not obvious to me why your solution results in this, so I'm bringing it up in case it wasn't obvious to you either. (Or it could be that I'm completely misunderstanding what you are trying to do. Or maybe that you don't think Pareto is actually a reasonable requirement. In any case I think at least one of us is misunderstanding what's going on.)

Comment author: RomeoStevens 01 August 2014 12:44:51AM *  0 points [-]

again look at confidence bounds. Most of the studies you'll find to simply lack the statistical power to make concrete recommendations. Fish seems unambiguously good and shows the largest effect sizes vs vegans (e.g. http://archinte.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleID=1710093), I agree that ovo-lacto evidence is weaker, but I'll maintain that there is slight evidence in favor of it. Given that a diet including fish, eggs, and milk, is much much easier to adhere to it remains something I recommend. Remember that my approach to nutrition in the OP is that effect sizes are small and you should focus your efforts elsewhere.

I do appreciate you taking the time to argue this point, smacking various claims with a hammer is essential.

Comment author: Xodarap 06 September 2014 04:06:30PM 0 points [-]

I agree that ovo-lacto evidence is weaker, but I'll maintain that there is slight evidence in favor of it. Given that a diet including fish, eggs, and milk, is much much easier to adhere to it remains something I recommend. Remember that my approach to nutrition in the OP is that effect sizes are small and you should focus your efforts elsewhere.

At last, we have reached convergence! I disagree slightly (the most recent article you linked again does not find significant differences between vegans and vegetarians as far as I can tell) but I'm fine calling that "slight evidence". The problem was that the OP said:

Ovo-lacto vegetarians live significantly longer than vegans

Which doesn't sound like it's true in either the statistical nor the colloquial sense of the word. Right? So can we just remove that sentence pretty please?

Comment author: RomeoStevens 21 July 2014 05:45:15PM *  -2 points [-]

This overview of studies is a reasonable place to look: http://www.veganhealth.org/articles/dxrates

Note the conclusion: even though several RR's look better for vegans, the data can't yet make a strong case that veganism is actually better than pesc or ovo-lacto vegetarian diets. In particular, 1.0 RR is often within the 95% CI.

This is also worth looking at if I forgot to link it anywhere else: http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/93/1/158.short

Comment author: Xodarap 31 July 2014 02:30:40PM 1 point [-]

Right. So given that we don't actually have any evidence to support claims like "Ovo-lacto vegetarians live significantly longer than vegans" don't you think it makes sense to remove those claims?

Comment author: Emile 03 March 2014 05:33:20PM 1 point [-]

Minor nitpick: on the last table (self-presentation), the two last lines should probably be switched, so that the factors are order from most positive to most negative (-0.17 and -0.14 should be switched).

Comment author: Xodarap 04 March 2014 02:56:05AM 0 points [-]

Thanks, I've fixed this.

Comment author: RomeoStevens 03 March 2014 05:19:54AM 0 points [-]

I guess I completely failed to discuss that the studies I linked to do not constitute the entire set of studies I drew from for the recommendations. I will expand on some of the points when I have time.

Comment author: Xodarap 04 March 2014 01:34:26AM *  2 points [-]

Sounds good.

Just reading the wikipedia page#Health_studies) on eggs seems to indicate that evidence for their health benefits is questionable at best, (and even though you were trying to make the argument that eggs were healthy you couldn't find the evidence to do so at first) so given that you're only mentioning "the largest high level features of a diet that have positive or negative impact", I'm not convinced eggs are worth including at all.

Comment author: JenniferRM 02 March 2014 11:14:01PM *  15 points [-]

The most important caveat is that lab studies find much larger effect sizes than in the field, to the extent that the average field effect for the ingratiating tactics is negative. This is probably due to the fact that lab experiments can be better controlled.

The first sentence seems really important and I'm wondering how to interpret the second. One hypothesis that is consistent with the first sentence is that studies show that in lab environments where arbitrary people are thrown into very short term interactions ingratiation works quite well... but that in the iterated environment of real long term working relationships it is detected and causes more problems than it helps with. Call this the hypothesis that "bullshit only works at first".

The second sentence argues against this hypothesis, but I'm not sure how strongly the second sentence is supported. Is it on-the-spot speculation? Is it the considered opinion of most experts in the field?

If the hypothesis that "bullshit only works at first" is the correct one it suggests that ingratiation should be avoided, or at the very least it suggests that ingratiation should be avoided in relationships that are dissimilar from random short term laboratory interactions. Am I off track here? Is the hypothesis (and its implied behavioral upshot) clearly ruled out by the research you explored and are summarizing? Clarification would be useful :-)

Comment author: Xodarap 03 March 2014 01:07:50AM 3 points [-]

This is a good point.

If you look at tables 8 and 9 from Gordon you can see that once you control for "transparency" (i.e. how obvious the bullshit is) the setting is no longer a significant predictor. So I'm not sure I agree that it's the "iterated" part of real-world interactions which cause this result (it seems likely that you can more easily tell if someone's changing their behavior to follow an experiment if they are a close coworker than a random student, for example), but I think your point about transparency being important is relevant.

Comment author: RomeoStevens 02 March 2014 03:17:25AM *  -1 points [-]

A lot of these studies point to the same small amounts of data. This article for example discusses a new study that again reanalyzes the Adventist study data http://www.nleducation.co.uk/resources/reviews/vegetarians-live-longer-and-healthier/

We don't really have anything better though. And what little evidence we have points towards ovo-lacto and pescatarians having better health.

Comment author: Xodarap 02 March 2014 05:26:35PM *  1 point [-]

And what little evidence we have points towards ovo-lacto and pescatarians having better health

Um, the article you linked seems to say that vegans are healthier:

  • Vegan All-cause mortality: HR 0.72, 95% CI 0.56-0.92
  • Pesco All-cause mortality: HR 0.81, 95% CI 0.69-0.94
  • Lacto-ovo All-cause mortality: HR 0.91, 95% CI 0.82-1
  • [Meat eaters presumably have an HR of 1]

The difference might not be significant, so I don't know that we would call this conclusive proof. But it seems like if you're going to lean one way, it would be towards vegans being healthier.

Especially since "animal products are bad" is a much simpler model than "animal products are bad, except for these few exceptions."

Comment author: ChristianKl 01 March 2014 08:39:06PM 4 points [-]

How do they measure political skills?

Comment author: Xodarap 01 March 2014 09:05:14PM 10 points [-]

From Ng et al.:

Political knowledge and skills included the following two measures: political knowledge (e.g., Chao, O’Leary-Kelly, Wolf, Klein, & Gardner, 1994; Seibert, Kraimer, & Crant, 2001) and supervisor-focused political tactics (e.g., Wayne, Liden, Graf, & Ferris, 1997)

Taking the Chao paper as an example, they look at things like "do you know who the most influential people in your organization are?" and "do you know what to do to get the most desirable work assignments?"

The Wayne paper looked at how frequently people used the tactics I listed in the article.

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