I had two new short fiction pieces published in the last month. First, Third Flatiron released their Only Disconnect anthology including my flash humor piece Email Recovered from Genetech Debris, Lt. Jeffrey Abramowitz Investigating

Second T. Gene Davis's Speculative Blog published The Valediction.

Third Flatiron has published my hard SF short story Net War I in their Spring anthology, The Time It Happened. (Also available from amazon for kindle and paper).

This story is deliberately opaque, but I suspect LessWrong members will be more likely than most to figure out what is really going on.

One kid said to me, “See that bird? What kind of bird is that?” I said, “I haven’t the slightest idea what kind of a bird it is.” He says, “It’s a brown-throated thrush (or something). Your father doesn’t teach you anything!” But it was the opposite. My father had taught me, looking at a bird, he says, “Do you know what that bird is? It’s a brown-throated thrush. But in Portuguese, it’s a Bom da Peida; in Italian, a Chutto Lapittida." He says, "In Chinese, it’s a Chung-long-tah, and in Japanese, it’s a Katano Tekeda, et cetera." He says, "Now you know all the languages you want to know what the name of that bird is, and when when you’re finished with all that," he says, "you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. You’ll only know about humans in different places, and what they call the bird. Well," he says, "let’s look at the bird and what it’s doing."

--Richard Feynman, source. Full video (The above passage happens at about the 7:00 mark in the full version.)

N.B. The transcript provided differs slightly from the video. I have followed the video.

Related to: Replace the Symbol with the Substance

I've noticed in courses I taught that grades tend to reward conscientious students who can "play the game" and do formal manipulations even if they don't really understand what's going on.

Calculus 2 is where I hit the limits of my conceptual abilities. I am very bad at "playing the game" in this way, so I haven't moved beyond that yet.

I think it's wrong to put too much emphasis on a contrast between "playing the game" and "understanding the material", though. My feeling is that if I became better at playing games, paying attention to detail, being more conscientious about my work, then I would also improve my conceptual understanding after a while.

the network you are trusting was likely wrong about a big discovery that NASA claimed to have made

I have no idea exactly what network Kenny trusts how much, but just about everything I read about NASA's alleged discovery was really skeptical about it and said "yeah, this would be amazingly cool if it were true, but don't hold your breath until it's been confirmed by more careful investigation". And, lo, it was not confirmed by more careful investigation, and now everyone thinks it was probably bullshit.

Much the same story for superluminal neutrinos (more so than the arsenic-using life) and CMB polarization due to inflation (less so than the arsenic-using life).

If you want to use google instead of science to "prove me wrong" then I am happy to call you an imbecile as well as misinformed.

-- Jennifer Hibben-White, "My 15-Day-Old Son May Have Measles", 02/11/2015

For example: most men have inner conflicts of values; these conflicts, in most lives, take the form of small irrationalities, petty inconsistencies, mean little evasions, shabby little acts of cowardice, with no crucial moments of choice, no vital issues or great, decisive battles--and they add up to the stagnant, wasted life of a man who has betrayed all his values by the method of a leaking faucet.

--Ayn Rand, The Romantic Manifesto

You have probably actually heard of this study already - it was in the news briefly when the Science article got published in 2010, this is just a rehash.

Anyhow, to some extent this is factor analysis smoke and mirrors - just because there's this nice factor that correlates well with performance on group tasks doesn't mean that the causal mechanism doesn't go through cognitive skills. This is especially obvious in the case of gender, where it seems implausible that women improve average performance just by exuding some sort of aura. They probably do it by using skills that are distributed differently among genders and weren't captured by the study's emotional-perceptiveness test. So as soon as they include number of women in their c-factor, you know it's correlational and not necessarily telling you useful actions to take (e.g. the intervention "get people to talk more equally" has no guarantee of helping, even though equal time spent talking correlates with success).

But, that said, there is this nice factor that correlates well with performance on group tasks, and if one wants a diagnostic test, and your tasks look like those in the study (e.g. brainstorming, within-group bargaining, playing checkers, designing a building), and your participants are drawn from a population similar to college students, it's more valuable to measure social skills than it is IQ.

EDIT: Nor are they discounting intelligence. From the paper:

If c exists, what causes it? Combining the findings of the two studies, the average intelligence of individual group members was moderately correlated with c (r = 0.15, P = 0.04), and so was the intelligence of the highest-scoring team member (r = 0.19, P = 0.008). However, for both studies, c was still a much better predictor of group performance on the criterion tasks than the average or maximum individual intelligence

The correlation coefficients for intelligence are about half to 2/3 those for the social perceptiveness and turn-taking - and also about half to 2/3 what the correlation with IQ is when doing these tasks alone. this is consistent with the hypothesis that when working in groups, less of the variation depends on IQ and more of the variation between groups is due to different levels of social skills.

We next tried to define what characteristics distinguished the smarter teams from the rest, and we were a bit surprised by the answers we got. We gave each volunteer an individual I.Q. test, but teams with higher average I.Q.s didn’t score much higher on our collective intelligence tasks than did teams with lower average I.Q.s. Nor did teams with more extroverted people, or teams whose members reported feeling more motivated to contribute to their group’s success.

Instead, the smartest teams were distinguished by three characteristics.

First, their members contributed more equally to the team’s discussions, rather than letting one or two people dominate the group.

Second, their members scored higher on a test called Reading the Mind in the Eyes, which measures how well people can read complex emotional states from images of faces with only the eyes visible.

Finally, teams with more women outperformed teams with more men. Indeed, it appeared that it was not “diversity” (having equal numbers of men and women) that mattered for a team’s intelligence, but simply having more women. This last effect, however, was partly explained by the fact that women, on average, were better at “mindreading” than men.

--Anita Wooley, Thomas W. Malone. and Christopher Chabris, Why Some Teams Are Smarter Than Others, New York Times, January 16. 2015

You're vastly overstating the criticisms of S. L. A Marshall. He did not just make up his figures. His research was not an invention. He conducted hundreds of interviews with soldiers who had recently been in combat. The U.S. Army found this research quite valuable and uses it to this day. Some people don't like his conclusions, and attempt to dispute them, but usually without attempting to collect actual data that would weigh against Marshall's.

The Wikipedia article's claim that "Professor Roger J. Spiller (Deputy Director of the Combat Studies Institute, US Army Command and General Staff College) demonstrated in his 1988 article, "S.L.A. Marshall and the Ratio of Fire" (RUSI Journal, Winter 1988, pages 63–71), that Marshall had not actually conducted the research upon which he based his ratio-of-fire theory" appears to be false. Spiller's article criticizes Marshall's methodology and points out a number of weaknesses in his later accounts. However it does not claim that the interviews Marshall described did not take place. Rather it suggests that Marshall intentionally or unintentionally sometimes inflated the number of interviews he had conducted, though it still allows for hundreds to have taken place. The RUSI article doesn't seem to be online, (I'll try and see if JSTOR has a copy) but some relevant portions are quoted here.

I agree that Marshall's evidence is not perfect. I'd be interested to see better evidence, and if it came to different conclusions than he did, using better research techniques, then I would update my beliefs accordingly. Until I am see such research, though I am very wary of poorly sourced ad hominem attacks.