I stopped reading the article after I got to "Templeton Foundation". Don't think this is quite what you're thinking it is.
[LINK] Evidence-based giving by Laura and John Arnold Foundation
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323372504578466992305986654.html
Apparently a hedge fundie made 4 billion and is giving most of it away to what the WSJ describes as a "moneyball" approach to giving.
...I'm reading every "pomo-" word in this comment section as "porno-" now. Thanks a lot.
Set double layers of alarms. I've turned off the first one and slept another two hours, way too many times!
In response to
Are coin flips quantum random to my conscious brain-parts?
(unrelated) - I'm confused. Is there a reason why random letters are bolded?
In response to
Suggestion: site-wide taboos
Signalling has an academic definition in economics, for sure. It's used both in an intentional sense ("workers signal their conscientiousness to employers by making their way through a 4-year college degree") and an unintentional sense ("being a high school dropout signals to the employer that a worker is in the bottom 5th percentile")
However, I do think LW uses it in a intellectual hipster sense as well - "Do you really think that, or are you just signalling?". The difference seems to me that instead of jockeying for economic advantage, we are accusing someone of jockeying for social status. Of course, such social jockeying is widespread, simply by dint of human nature. But I suppose we could replace this use of the word with "posturing" or something of the sort.
Excellent post by Yvain... your excerpt really doesn't do it justice.
What is your true decision metric? A look at medicinal chemists
http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2012/11/27/how_do_chemist_think_that_they_judge_compounds.php
Some background: medicinal chemists are responsible for identifying drug candidates, usually by screening large (10^6) libraries of combinatorially generated molecules. Some of these hits turn out to be biologically active, and then it's up to the medicinal chemists to decide whether these hits are false positives or not, and further, to synthesize analogous compounds to see if they can tweak the biological activity of each compound.
It's in this 'synthesizing analogous compounds' step that subjective judgment comes in, with Lipinski's rule of five being the most 'basic' of the heuristics, and with most medicinal chemists adopting more and more complex heuristics. Or, as this paper shows, perhaps they're just deluding themselves and their true metric is something very simple, and after making their decision, they dress it up with fancy post-hoc rationalizations.
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"But as the Arnolds' profile grows, of course, not everyone is a fan of this science of giving, especially since it comes at a cost to the many individuals and local organizations who need direct help now and could benefit from their billions. The answer to the most asked question may not be known for years: Will their plan work?""
I chuckled at this. All of a sudden, people are asking "will it work?", but they never asked the same questions of the charities they regularly donate to.