If you do experiments and you're always right, then you aren't getting enough information out of those experiments. You want your experiment to be like the flip of a coin: You have no idea if it is going to come up heads or tails. You want to not know what the results are going to be.

-- Peter Norvig, in an interview about being wrong. When I saw this, I thought it sounded a lot like entropy pruning in decision trees, where you don't even bother asking questions that won't make you update your probability estimates significantly. Then I remembered that Norvig was the co-author of the AI textbook that I had learned about decision trees from. Interesting interview.

I don't post things like this because I think they're right, I post them because I think they are interesting. The geometry of TV signals and box springs causing cancer on the left sides of people's bodies in Western countries...that's a clever bit of hypothesizing, right or wrong.

In this case, an organization I know nothing about (Vetenskap och Folkbildning from Sweden) says that Olle Johansson, one of the researchers who came up with the box spring hypothesis, is a quack. In fact, he was "Misleader of the year" in 2004. What does this mean in terms of his work on box springs and cancer? I have no idea. All I know is that on one side you've got Olle Johansson, Scientific American, and the peer-reviewed journal (Pathophysiology) in which Johansson's hypothesis was published. And on the other side, there's Vetenskap och Folkbildning, a number of commenters on the SciAm post, and a bunch of people in my inbox. Who's right? Who knows. It's a fine opportunity to remain skeptical.

-- Jason Kottke

It seems like there's at least some interesting in doing something to deal with helping people to develop posting skills through a means other than simply writing lots of articles and bombarding the community with them. The editorial system seems like it has a lot of promising aspects.

The main thing is, it seems more valuable to implement a weak system than to simply talk about implementing a stronger system so whether the editorial system is the best that can be done depends on whether the people in charge of the community are interested in implementing it.

If they turn out to not be, I still wonder whether there's a few people out there that can volunteer to help make posts better and a few people who can volunteer to not bombard LW but instead to develop their skills in a quieter way (nb: that doesn't refer to anyone in particular except, potentially, myself). Personally, I still think that would be useful, even if suboptimal.

Does the lack of a response from EY imply that he's not interested in that sort of change and, if so, is it EY who would be the one to make the decision?

Since you are essentially asking for feedback, WrongBot, I will chime in with my opinion: you are nowhere near able to use evolutionary arguments to arrive at correct conclusions about human behavior.

There is no shame in that since creating evolutionary arguments about human behavior is one of the human endeavors most demmanding of rationality skills, in particular the skill of staying free from motivated cognition.

This place (and OB before it and SL4 before OB) is very special in that deleted: a significant fraction :deleted some of the participants are rational enough to succeed at that task and similar tasks, and I would humbly point out to you and the people who have been voting you up and Michael Vassar down, that if the ratio of good argumentation and good conclusions to poor ones gets low enough for long enough the people you want to learn from will stop reading, and no one will be able to learn anything about advanced rationality here.

I had a houseguest for a few days recently, a long-time reader who has only written a handful of comments, and I commented to him that the quality of discussion on LW is worse than it has ever been, and his reply was, "Well, yeah if you are talking about WrongBot."

I hope my being open with my perceptions has not caused you unnecessary pain.

Kuro5hin had an editorial system, where all posts started out in a special section where they were separate and only visible to logged in users. Commenters would label their comments as either "topical" or "editorial", and all editorial comments would be deleted when the post left editing; and votes cast during editing would determine where the post went (front page, less prominent section, or deleted).

Unfortunately, most of the busy smart people only looked at the posts after editing, while the trolls and people with too much free time managed the edit queue, eventually destroying the quality of the site and driving the good users away. It might be possible to salvage that model somehow, though.

We upvote much more than we downvote - just look at the mean comment and post scores. Also, the number of downvotes a user can make is capped at their karma.

Reading Michael Vassar's comments on WrongBot's article (http://lesswrong.com/lw/2i6/forager_anthropology/2c7s?c=1&context=1#2c7s) made me feel that the current technique of learning how to write a LW post isn't very efficient (read lots of LW, write a post, wait for lots of comments, try to figure out how their issues could be resolved, write another post etc - it uses up lots of the writer's time and lot's of the commentors time).

I was wondering whether there might be a more focused way of doing this. Ie. A short term workshop, a few writers who have been promoted offer to give feedback to a few writers who are struggling to develop the necessary rigour etc by providing a faster feedback cycle, the ability to redraft an article rather than having to start totally afresh and just general advice.

Some people may not feel that this is very beneficial - there's no need for writing to LW to be made easier (in fact, possibly the opposite) but first off, I'm not talking about making writing for LW easier, I'm talking about making more of the writing of a higher quality. And secondly, I certainly learn a lot better given a chance to interact on that extra level. I think learning to write at an LW level is an excellent way of achieving LW aim of helping people to think at that level.

I'm a long time lurker but I haven't even really commented before because I find it hard to jump to that next level of understanding that enables me to communicate anything of value. I wonder if there are others who feel the same or a similar way.

Good idea? Bad idea?

If the world had, to date, persisted under a poor political / economic system with only a few similarities to the ideal one, you would be able to say the same thing.

It's reasonable to imagine that there was some sort of "natural selection" of economic systems and that the one that emerged is relatively close to ideal.

The anthropic principle is relevant here.

And yes I read the rest of the article, and I don't think it recovered from this error.

I'm open to suggestions for how I might improve the introduction to the article to make the article more palatable.

Apart from they both need a fair amount of computer science to predict their capabilities and dangers?

Call your research institute something like the Institute for the prevention of Advanced Computational Threats, and have separate divisions for robotics and FAI. Gain the trust of the average scientist/technology aware person by doing a good job on robotics and they are more likely to trust you when it comes to FAI.

It wouldn't be hard to manufacture a half-bra. They already have bras that clasp in front and ones that clasp in the back; there is no obvious structural reason why they couldn't make one that does both and then sell the parts separately. In fact, based on the sorts of bras that already exist, it wouldn't be that hard to have a bunch of bins of detached bra parts that could be assembled in any fashion desired. There are bras with detachable straps, too, so there's clearly no structural reason they have to be permanently affixed and therefore no reason they couldn't be swapped out consumer-side for preferred versions. Most women wear bras that do not fit because there are so many things that need to be right and custom-made ones run into the hundreds of dollars. But it seems an obvious market failure that I can't go into a store, pick out a left cup and a right cup and the straps of my choice, and walk out with something that will work better for me than anything I could find in Target without significant extra expense.

It wouldn't surprise me. It's cosmetically expected that asymmetries like that be corrected for the visual benefit of others (and for the purpose of making clothes fit) with fills or some other sort of padding. That's also the suggestion I've tended to get when I've expressed a wish for half-bras.