Open Thread March 31 - April 7 2014

2 beoShaffer 01 April 2014 01:41AM

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

Terminology point rationality vs rationalism.

0 beoShaffer 08 September 2013 04:42AM

 Rationalism should not be confused with rationality, nor with rationalization.

-Wikipedia article on rationalism 

I frequently see people using rationalism in place of rationality.  Usually other commenters understand them, however I believe that using the word rationality is superior.  The Less Wrong tag line is "A community blog devoted to refining the art of human rationality".  On the other hand, rationalism is the philosophical term for a very different epistemological position. Furthermore, -the -ism suffix has some undesirable connotations.  

Meetup :St.Louis MO: Psycology of memorization, Thiel Fellow James Koppel, and games

0 beoShaffer 07 November 2012 07:26PM

Discussion article for the meetup : Psycology of memorization, Thiel Fellow James Koppel, and games

WHEN: 24 November 2012 02:30:00PM (-0600)

WHERE: St.Louis Mo, Kaldi's Coffee Clayton branch

 

I'm planing to do a presentation with optional exercises on the psychology of memorization with an emphasis on learning names. I plan on focusing on techniques that haven't already received much attention on Less Wrong, but will have materiel on things like SRS prepared in case anyone isn't already familiar with them.
Also, if you'd like to talk to Thiel Fellow and Singularity summit speaker James Koppel now's your chance.  He's told me that will be attending, and since he no longer lives in the St.Louis area you might not get another chance.

I'll also be bringing some games for anyone who wants to stick around after the presentation.  Feel free to bring some of your own.

cross-posted from Less Wrong

-edited for writing style and updated location

 

cross-posted from http://www.meetup.com/lesswrong/

Discussion article for the meetup : Psycology of memorization, Thiel Fellow James Koppel, and games

[link]Mass replication of Psychology articles planed.

25 beoShaffer 18 April 2012 04:13PM

http://chronicle.com/blogs/percolator/is-psychology-about-to-come-undone/29045

The plan is to replicate or fail to replicate all 2008 articles from three major Psychology journals.

ETA: http://openscienceframework.org/ is the homepage of the group behind this.  It's still in Beta, but will eventually include some nifty looking science toolkits in addition to the reproducibility project.

[Link] Bayesian Overconfidence

3 beoShaffer 24 February 2012 11:54PM

I just ran across an interesting working paper by P.J. Healy and D.A. Moore, providing a potenial explanation for several forms of overconfidence.

The abstract:

We study three distinct measures of overconfidence: (1) overestimation of one’s performance, (2) overplacement of one’s performance relative to others, and (3) overprecision in one’s belief about private signals. A new set of exper- iments verifies a strong negative link between overestimation and overprecision that depends crucially on task difficulty (the ‘hard-easy’ effect). We present a simple Bayesian model in which agents are uncertain about the underlying task difficulty. This model correctly predicts the observed regularities. Thus, we capture several observed patterns of overconfidence without assuming any implicit behavioral biases.


Available Here: http://repository.cmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1337&context=tepper

Intuitively it still seems like a perfectly rational agent should be able to factor in the fact the given method will make them overconfident. That said I didn't work through all the math so it's possible I'm missing something, probably something related to bias-varaince trade offs.

[Link] H+ article Rationality Training: Call for a Global Approach

3 beoShaffer 22 February 2012 03:21AM

http://hplusmagazine.com/2012/02/06/rationality-training-call-for-a-global-approach/

Dr.Ziesche calls for more globally accessible rationality training.  He seems supportive of existing efforts, especially us, but thinks it would be nice if rationality training was  easily accessible to people other than educated westerners.  

Startups as a Rationality Test Bed?

6 beoShaffer 22 January 2012 08:50PM

What attributes make a task useful for rationality verification?

After thinking it over I believe I have identified three main components.  The first is that the task should be as grounded in the real world as is possible. The second is that the task should be involve a wide variety of subtasks, preferably ones that involve decision making and/or forecasting.  This will help insure that the effect is from general rationality, rather than from the rationality training helping with domain specific skills.  The third is that there should be clear measure of successes for the task.

As I am not personally involved with the field I could be missing something important, but it seems like founding a successful startup would fulfill all three components.  I propose that investigating the effect of giving startup founders rationality training would be a good basis for an experiment. Unfortunately, I do not know if it would be feasible to run such an experiment in real life.  Thus, I am turning to the LW community to see if the people reading this have any suggestions.

-addendum 

I didn't go into details about exact exprimental methods for a couple of reasons.   Partially because I assumed, apparently incorrectly, that it was obvious that any experiment for testing rationality would be conducted with the best experimental protocols that we could manage.   But mostly, because I thought that it would be good to get feed back on the basic idea of rationally verification + startups ?= good before spending time going into detail about things like control groups, random assignment ect. 

I welcome suggestions along those lines, and given the attention this has received will try to go back and add some of my own ideas when I have time, but wanted to make cleat that I wasn't intending this post as a detailed experimental design.

Also does anyone have any idea why the first part of this post has different spacing from the second?  It's not intentional on my part.

[link] A attempt to reduce Epistemic Viciousness in the martial arts/ an empirical analysis of WSD training.

7 beoShaffer 31 December 2011 07:50PM

http://kojutsukan.blogspot.com/2011/12/womens-self-defence-courses-effective.html

http://kojutsukan.blogspot.com/2011/12/womens-self-defence-effective-or-not-pt.html

 

The linked articles' theoretical topic, the effectiveness of women's self defense(WDS) courses, is not of particular interest to LW. However, they are also a pushback against epistemic viciousness in the martial arts.  The author analyzes WDS courses in the light of actual studies on sexual violence and the effectiveness of various methods of resistance.  They also make several direct references to the problems with martial arts epistemology and some of the causes.  Thus, I recommend them anyone interested in the martial arts and rationality.  For that matter I recommend the entire blog, which is largely about the science of martial arts.

Rationality Verification Opportunity?

0 beoShaffer 15 December 2011 10:11PM

One of the challenges of rationality verification is that most people who are willing to contribute personal data for it are already familiar with the techniques involved.  This makes it difficult to tell if their performance on any form of rationality test is due to their training or their innate abilities.  Does the start of a new sequence present a way around this for that sequence's content?

I believe that it might, and will propose some ideas on how we can take advantage of these opportunities.  But first I would suggest that you try to think through the problem for yourself (I know this is slightly different from what is talked about in that post, but I think the principle holds).

 

 

Did you think through the general problem of rationality verification for new sequences before thinking of any solutions. Did you then think of your own solutions before getting your mind contaminated with mine?  If yes, good.  If no, not so good.

 

If we had good measures of general rationality that could be retaken by the same person multiple times without losing reliability we could simply ask LWers to take them at various intervals and see if they improved after reading the new sequence.  As that is not the case I suspect we would have to create specific measures for each sequence.  It seems that most writers have a decent idea of what benefits they expect people to gain from their sequences' so perhaps they could try to come up with specific measures for the things that their sequences are supposed to improve.  Then before running the sequence main sequence they could put out a call for people to complete these measures and send them in.  They could then collect the data again from people who have read the completed sequence, preferably after they have had enough time to practice the material, but not long enough to have had to many other life changes. The necessity and viability of having additional experimental controls will vary between sequences.  But I think we will generally be fine with a simple before and after picture. 

While there are some time and talent limitations I would be willing to help with creating the measures, collecting and interpreting the data and any other necessary steps.

I declare Crocker's rules on the content and style of this post.  This includes the title.

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