[Survey Taken Thread]

By ancient tradition, if you take the survey you may comment saying you have done so here, and people will upvote you and you will get karma.

Let's make these comments a reply to this post. That way we continue the tradition, but keep the discussion a bit cleaner.

I've given those kinds of tests in my decision analysis and my probabilistic analysis courses (for the multiple choice questions). Four choices, logarithmic scoring rule, 100% on the correct answer gives 1 point, 25% on the correct answer gives zero points, and 0% on the correct answer gives negative infinity.

Some students loved it. Some hated it. Many hated it until they realized that e.g. they didn't need 90% of the points to get an A (I was generous on the points-to-grades part of grading).

I did have to be careful; minus infinity meant that on one question you could fail the class. I did have to be sure that it wasn't a mistake, that they actually meant to put a zero on the correct answer.

If you want to try, you might want to try the Brier scoring rule instead of the logarithmic; it has a similar flavor without the minus infinity hassle.

This is the most tantalizing thread on the page.

I'm not sure what "lifetime manic features at age 22 – 23 years" means. Lifetime, or between ages 22 and 23?

But the numbers:

There was a positive association between IQ at age 8 years and lifetime manic features at age 22–23 years (Pearson’s correlation coefficient 0.159 (95% CI 0.120–0.198), P>0.001).

I shall be generous and take the upper end of their range for the correlation, and round it up to c = 0.2.

The shared variance is c^2 = 0.04. That is childhood IQ "explains" (in the technical sense of that word) 4% of the variance of "lifetime manic features at age 22 – 23 years".

For the following calculations I assume, for no reason other than mathematical simplicity, that we are dealing with a bivariate normal distribution. However, I doubt the overall message would be very different for whatever the real distribution is.

The mutual information between the variables, is log2( 1/sqrt(1-c^2) ) = 0.0294 bits.

What can you do with 30 millibits? You might try to use IQ at age 8 to predict "lifetime manic features at age 22 – 23 years". How much will knowing the former narrow your estimate of the latter? The ratio (standard deviation conditional on that information)/(unconditional standard deviation) is sqrt(1-c^2) = 0.980. That is, the spread is 2% smaller.

Suppose you try to predict from IQ at age 8, whether their "manic features" will be above or below the average? By random guessing you will be right 50% of the time. By using that information, you will be right (1/π)acos(−c) of the time = 56%.

Perhaps, if the IQ is really high, the "manic features" will be more significantly above the average? In principle, yes, but in practice, not enough to matter. The probability that an individual has an IQ high enough to be 95% sure that they will be above average for "manic features" is 7.5 x 10^-14. Of course, the bivariate normal approximation cannot be observably accurate so far out, but I think it gives an indication of the scale of the matter.

The mathematics underlying the calculations can be found here. The figures at the end include a scatterplot of what c=0.2 looks like. That was the lowest correlation for which I thought it worth while to include in the tabulations.

Not only the rivers. But also huge tunnels from the sea to the interior cities. like Denver or Munich.

Large container ships may bring goodies deep inside the continents. A whole network of such underground channels would be nice.

How would the app know? You would need some sort of automatic system that scans every parking spot to see if there is a car currently in it.

No, I meant rather what between-different-fields-of-biology observations you might have. It doesn't matter what you study, specifically. It's more like 'but why did those biochists study the impact of gall on probiotics for a whole fortnight of cultivation, if every physiologist knows that the probiotic pill cannot possibly be stuck in the GI tract for so long? thing.' Have you encountered this before?

To return to your original question, on the overt information-exchange layer you see your statement "I am smarter than almost everyone here" as a neutral fact about the world which you believe is true. Now, analyze that statement on the signal-exchange level. What does it imply to hairless bipedal apes?

Thanks.

I'm not as oblivious as it sounds :-).

My mistake was in greatly underestimating the extent to which LWers are like this, given the unusually high IQ and the explicit goal of refining the art of rationality. I thought "these people are different so I don't have to worry about that."

The situation is that not all humans react negatively when someone else says "I'm better than all of you." That's the way almost all humans react, but having a sense of self-worth rooted in relative status is not biologically inevitable. It's possible to rewire status motivations so that they're rooted in the extent to which you're achieving a goal. Empirically, people who learn to do so are much more productive.

My problem was that I didn't know that you didn't know this: I didn't realize that you had no way of knowing that it's biologically possible for somebody to genuinely not care about relative status. I didn't know that you didn't know what Poincare wrote:

Science keeps us in constant relation with something which is greater than ourselves; it offers us a spectacle which is constantly renewing itself and growing always more vast. Behind the great vision it affords us, it leads us to guess at something greater still; this spectacle is a joy to us, but it is a joy in which we forget ourselves and thus it is morally sound.

He who has tasted of this, who has seen, if only from afar, the splendid harmony of the natural laws will be better disposed than another to pay little attention to his petty, egoistic interests. He will have an ideal which he will value more than himself, and that is the only ground on which we can build an ethics. He will work for this ideal without sparing himself and without expecting any of those vulgar rewards which are everything to some persons; and when he has assumed the habit of disinterestedness, this habit will follow him everywhere; his entire life will remain as if flavored with it.

Thank you, I will do it ASAP, I'm just a bit rushed by PhD schedule and some other work that can be done only in summer. Do you have similar observations? It would be great to compile them into a post, because my own experience is based more on literature and less on personal communication, for personal reasons.

I do have something specific in mind (about how plant physiology is often divorced from population research), but I am in a minority here, so it might be more interesting for most people to read about other stuff.