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[nitpick]
Exchanges are easier to follow if you bold the person speaking.
In response to
Safety can be dangerous
Also, this is technically not correct:
The FDA is supposed to approve new drugs and procedures if the expected benefits outweigh the expected costs. If they actually did this, the number of people saved by new drugs would be roughly equal to the number killed by them
Actually, if the FDA really did this the marginal -- in this case, most-dangerous -- drug approved should kill as many people as it save. But since every drug before that would save more people as it killed, on net there should be more people saved than killed.
In response to
Safety can be dangerous
[libertarian alert]
I'm not sure the drug example is a safety problems per se, it looks more like an incentive problem to me.
If an FDA official approves a bad drug that kills 1000 people/year, he probably gets canned. If he rejects a good drug that would have saved 1000 lives/year...well, no one including him will actually know how many lives it would have saved, and he will take his paycheck home and sleep soundly at night.
Can you come up with an example that doesn't involve government?
In response to
[LINK] People are biased against creativity
The rationalist viewpoint seems to add a key point that is missing in the acutal article: the motivation why people would say they desire creativity. Signalling, of course.
In response to
What Direct Instruction is
Misha, you are spectacularly awesome. =D
I mean, it's aggravating to see things you wrote and go, "But I SAID that! Was everyone just skimming over that part or what?", but as the aphorism runs in the DI world, "If the learner hasn't learned, the teacher hasn't taught", eh? :P
[And until one sees that aphorism as perfectly consistent with "logically faultless communication", one must know that one still hasn't understood the meaning of the technical term.]
I knew I'd make terribly stupid mistakes in miscommunicating this stuff when I started, so I figured it was time to let go of my fear of not having it be perfect in the first place and just start trying.
I should also make sure, when you say it was 1982, do you mean original publication, or that of the copy you got? The second (and most recent) edition is 1991.
Dunno offhand what's different. Never saw the older one myself.
You're right, writing concisely is definitely a learned skill.
I became pretty good at it, but that's only through practice and helpful editors at my college student newspaper and a couple of newspaper internships. If you want to improve your professional writing skills, find a place where you can practice and people will point out your flaws so you can improve. LessWrong can definitely serve that function.
Glad you have a thick skin, glad you could start a useful conversation, and hope to see more of you in the future!
In response to
Human Evil and Muddled Thinking
:The German text of the taped police examination, each page corrected and approved by EIchmann, constitutes a veritable gold mine for a psychologist - provided he is wise enough to understand that the horrible can be not only ludicrous but outright funny. Some of the comedy cannot be conveyed in English, because it lies in Eichmann's heroic fight with the Germna language, which invariably defeats him. It is funny when he speaks, passim, of "winged words" (geflugelte Worte, a Gemran colloquialism of famous quotes from the classics) when we means stock phrases, Redensarten, or slogans, Schlagworte....
Dimly aware of a defect that much have plagued him even in school, he apologized, saying "Officialese [Amtssprache] is my own language. But the point here is that officialese became his language because he was genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliche...
Eichmann's mind was filled to the brim with such statements.....his memory proved to be quite unreliable about what had actually happen; the [reason], of course, was that Eichmann remembered the turning points in his own career rather well, but they did not necessarily correspond to the turning points in the Jewish extermination or, as a matter of fact, with a lot of the turning points in the history....
But the point of the matter is that he had not forgotten a single one of his sentences that at one time or another had served to give him 'elation'. Hence, whenever, during the cross-examination, the judged tried to appeal to his conscience, they were met with 'elation,' and they were outrage and disconcerted when they learned that at his disposal he had a different elating cliche for each period of his life and each of his activities..." (Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt, Chapter III)
In response to
Polyhacking
Interesting. Very vivid insight into how the hacking was accomplished. A question I have from the outside looking in is about motivation, what makes people want to be poly in the first place?
Alicorn, you said that your primary motivation was MBlume. (Or generalized, 'a specific person.') MBlume, what was your primary motivation?
Other poly people please feel free to reply also.
That is helpful, thanks!
Not necessarily these specific examples, but some complex example.
I'm not sure if I would buy a textbook, but I would definitely read a link. Others likely fall into this category.
In response to
A History of Bayes' Theorem
Alan Turing used it to decode the German Enigma cipher and arguably save the Allies from losing the Second World War; the U.S. Navy used it to search for a missing H-bomb and to locate Soviet subs; RAND Corporation used it to assess the likelihood of a nuclear accident; and Harvard and Chicago researchers used it to verify the authorship of the Federalist Papers.
I haven't seen any explanation of how these kinds of things were done, including calculations. Eliezer's Intuitive Explanation is good, of course, but the examples are very basic. Anything that is notable, even if it's just a published paper, would (I presume) involve data sets and more complex calculations. Does anyone have any good links to complex examples where they actually go through the math and make it easy to follow?
(I would like to understand this better; plus my father, a molecular biologist, asked me to explain Bayes' Theorem and how to use it to him.)
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Consider Le Corbusier, Robert Moses, etc. These men combined methods which claimed to be scientific. Corbusier tried to maximize population density; Moses, to maximize road construction.
But they were working in very intricate, complicated systems and ignored the effects that maximizing their favorite metric would have on everything else. They dictated everything from the center and ignored local knowledge.
This is what we call dangerous knowledge.
The failure of these methods -- "the projects" housing inspired by Corbusier, Moses's neighborhood destruction, helped trigger -- as far as I understand -- the current focus on aesthetics and intuition. It's a reaction to that, a "risk-averse" strategy to picking the wrong metrics and trying to maximize/minimize them.
A parallel example might be Robert McNamara and the whiz kids turning into the Best and the Brightest in Vietnam.