I suspect that your model has been built to serve the hypothesis you started with.
First of all, I'm not sure what measure you're using for "rigorous thought". Is it a binary classification? Are there degrees of rigor? I can infer from some of your examples what kind of pattern you might be picking up on, but if we're going to try and say things like "there's a correlation between rigor and volume of publication", I'd like to at least see a rough operational definition of what you mean by rigor. It may seem obvious to you what you mean,...
Oh, I guess I misunderstood. I read it as "We should survey to determine whether terminal values differ (e.g. 'The tradeoff is not worth it') or whether factual beliefs differ (e.g. 'There is no tradeoff')"
But if we're talking about seeing whether policies actually work as intended, then yes, probably that would involve some kind of intervention. Then again, that kind of thing is done all the time, and properly run, can be low-impact and extremely informative.
What intervention would you suggest to study the incidence of factual versus terminal-value disagreements in opposing sides of a policy decision?
A survey can be a reasonably designed experiment that simply gives us a weaker result than lots of other kinds of experiments.
There are many questions about humans that I would expect to be correlated with the noises humans make when given a few choices and asked to answer honestly. In many cases, that correlation is complicated or not very strong. Nonetheless, it's not nothing, and might be worth doing, especially in the absence of a more-correlated test we can do given our technology, resources, and ethics.
I'd argue that that little one-off comment was less patronizing and more... sarcastic and mean.
Yeah, not all that productive either way. My bad. I apologize.
But I think the larger point stands about how these ideological labels are super leaky and way too schizophrenically defined by way too many people to really even be able to meaningfully say something like "That's not a representative sample of conservatives!", let alone "You probably haven't met people like that, you're just confabulating your memory of them because you hate conservatism"
Because those vectors of argument are insufficiently patronizing, I'm guessing.
But in all seriousness, the "judging memeplexes from their worst members" issue is pretty interesting, because politicized ideologies and really any ideology that someone has a name for and integrates into their identity ("I am a conservative" or "I am a feminist" or "I am an objectivist" or whatever) are really fuzzily defined.
To use the example we're talking about: Is conservatism about traditional values and bolstering the nuclear fami...
Um, I fail to see how people are making and doing less stuff than in previous generations. We've become obsessed with information technology, so a lot of that stuff tends to be things like "A new web application so that everyone can do X better", but it fuels both the economy and academia, so who cares? With things like maker culture, the sheer overwhelming number of kids in their teens and 20s and 30s starting SAAS companies or whatever, and media becoming more distributed than it's ever been in history, we have an absurd amount of productivity going on i...
I'm inclined to agree. Actually I've been convinced for a while that this is a matter of degrees rather than being fully one way or the other (Modules versus learning rules), and am convinced by this article that the brain is more of a ULM than I had previously thought.
Still, when I read that part the alternative hypothesis sprung to mind, so I was curious what the literature had to say about it (Or the post author.)
For e.g. the ferret rewiring experiments, tongue based vision, etc., is a plausible alternative hypothesis that there are more general subtypes of regions that aren't fully specialized but are more interoperable than others?
For example, (Playing devil's advocate here) I could phrase all of the mentioned experiments as "sensory input remapping" among "sensory input processing modules." Similarly, much of the work in BCI interfaces for e.g. controlling cursors or prosthetics could be called "motor control remapping". Have we ev...
Negative, but it may be because of rollover?
But without medicalizing, how can we generate significant-sounding labels for every aspect of our personalities?
How will we write lists of things "you should know" about dealing with (Insert familiar DSM-adjacent descriptor)?
Without a constant stream of important-sounding labels, how will I know what tiny ingroups I belong to? My whole identity might fall apart at the seams!
I would guess that martial arts are so frequently used as a metaphor for things like rationality because their value is in the meta-skills learned by becoming good at them. Someone who becomes a competent martial artist in the modern world is:
Patient enough to practice things they're not good at. Many techniques in effective martial arts require some counter-intuitive use of body mechanics that takes non-trivial practice to get down, and involve a lot of failure before you achieve success. This is also true of a variety of other tasks.
Possessing the fi
I can't say I always find that to be true for myself. There are truths that I wish weren't true, and when I find that I was merely being overly pessimistic, that's usually a good thing. Even though I want my beliefs to reflect reality, that doesn't stop me from sometimes wishing certain beliefs I have weren't true, even if I still think that they are. It's possible that being wrong can be a good thing in and of itself, completely separate from it being good to find out that you're wrong, if you're wrong.
A powerful computer with a bad algorithm or bad information can produce a high volume of bad results that are all internally consistent.
(IQ may not be directly analogous to computing power, but there are a lot of factors that matter more than the author's intelligence when assessing whether a model bears out in reality.)
That is very likely, but you are assuming a large social circle is an unalloyed blessing.
I definitely don't think it is. Too large a social circle can be unwieldy to manage, eating up a ton of someone's time for the sake of a huge variety of shallow and uninteresting relationships, even if somehow every person in said social circle is interesting. I don't mean to imply that everyone should strive to broaden their social circle by any means. There are plenty of people who don't feel socially isolated at all, and there are even plenty of people with the ...
I think it gets a bit more complicated than that because there are feedback loops. The problem is that an expression of the "s/he is dumb" sort is not necessarily a bona fide evaluation of someone's smarts. It may well be (and often is) just an insult -- and insults are more or less fungible.
I definitely don't discount the "sour grapes" scenario as something that probably happens a lot. In fact, I think that a lot of people's assessments of other people's intelligence involve, to put it kindly, subjective judgments along those lines,...
It's less that he finds an argument whose premise is repugnant, and more that he realizes that he doesn't have a good angle of attack for convincing the slavers to not mutilate/kill him at all, but does have one for delaying doing so. I'd argue it's more of a "perfect is the enemy of the good" judgement on his part than a disagreeable argument (After all, Tyrion has gleefully made that clarification to several people before.)
Do you, by any chance, have any data to support that? I am sure there are people for whom it's a problem, I'm not sure it's true in general, even among the nerdy cluster.
Very good point. I don't want to claim it's a statistical tendency without statistics to back it up. Nonetheless, given articles like the OP, it seems like a lot of people in said clusters (Could be self-selecting, e.g. intelligent nerd-cluster-peeps are more likely to blog about it despite not having a higher rate, etc) have a problem that consists of feeling socially isolated, unable ...
I'll admit that there's a bit of strategic overcorrecting inherent in the method I've outlined. That said, it's there for a good reason: First impressions are pretty famously resilient, and especially among certain cultures (Again, math-logic-arcane-cluster is a big one that's relevant to me), there's what I would argue is a clearly pathologically high false-positive rate for detecting "Dumb/Not worth my time".
If you ever have the idealized ceteris paribus form of the "I may only talk to one of two people, I have no solid information on eit...
That's not exactly true. You can volunteer for far less than the minimum wage (Some would say infinitely less) if you want to. What you can't do is employ someone for some non-zero amount of money that's lower than the minimum wage.