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Sorry, this was an useless post so now it's gone
Metamed went out of business recently.
We may do a staggered release for the print version. Splitting up the eBook might have given people headaches because of all the clickable links between different parts of the book.
Ah, I didn't realize you were also doing a print version.
I'm very surprised you guys are releasing them all at once rather than releasing them on a year or something. That seems like it would generate more interest.
Also, I'm sort of disappointed that they were not more substantially edited. When I show the sequences to other people, people often complain a lot about the examples being terrible and more offensive than necessary even if they agree with the argument. But I get that that would require a lot of work.
I'd suggest you start with the "Three Languages of Politics" - see e.g. podcast here example review here. Alternatively, It's all about how to be meta-rational about politics, spotting your own biases, and the way we frame our language in political discussion. In other words, very less-wrong stuff.
I agree he is ideological in the sense that he has priors for understanding new events. We all do. I disagree that he is ideological in the sense that he fails Ideological Turing Tests, but YMMV.
Two months later, he reemerged at his own domain, promising to avoid a particular kind of discourse, one aimed at closing the minds of those on one’s own side. Although Kling was never among the worst offenders on this score, one could indeed sense a shift in his tone. He prioritized framing his opponents’ positions in the most favorable light, and he developed a framework for understanding political issues from progressive, conservative, and libertarian perspectives.
Hey that sounds pretty good! This was precisely my problem with him on EconLog. My ideology match his a lot, but I was irritated because he seemed to make okay, but not especially good arguments for things I agreed with and seemed to frame things in unnecessarily charged ways. He often framed things in a very libertarian way (in a Three Languages of Politics sense, which seems like it has a pretty cool idea), and I'm glad he does that a lot less!
His book sounds interesting.
In response to
Who are your favorite "hidden rationalists"?
I would highly recommend Arnold Kling, both for his excellent blog, and his most recent book, which has been occasionally discussed on this site. Not everything he writes is necessarily "lesswrongish", mind you, but most of it is.
I'm surprised, I followed him on econlog for a long long time, but usually found him too ideological for my tastes (even though I lean pretty libertarian) and just not that interesting. What are some of your favorites?
How do you figure out what is best? I used the "sort by customer rating" function on Amazon when I bought my first set of household goods with decent results.
The standard advice for the best quality/price tradeoff seems to be Victorinox knives with the fibrox handle.
Perhaps one way to improve the measurement would be to structure the question in terms of preference rather than direct measurement
This is a really cool idea. But even preference has issues. For example, I like contra dance (a kind of social dancing) a lot, and have a good time when I go. The feel in the moment is one of my favorite things. If you asked me, "would you rather be contra dancing" I would usually say yes. But if you look at my behavior, I don't actually go that often anymore, even when I do have free time. How do you tell the difference between me irrationally underconsuming something I enjoy vs me overestimating how much I enjoy it in posed comparisions?
For certain formulations of this, that objection seems irrelevant. Imagine that instead of a 1-10 scale, you had a ranked list of activities (or sets of activities).
In order to get a better handle on the problem, I’d like to try walking through the mechanics of a how a vote by moral parliament might work. I don’t claim to be doing anything new here, I just want to describe the parliament in more detail to make sure I understand it, and so that it’s easier to reason about.
Here's the setup I have in mind:
- let's suppose we've already allocated delegates to moral theories, and we've ended up with 100 members of parliament, MP_1 through MP_100
- these MP's will vote on 10 bills B_1 through B_10 that will each either pass or fail by majority vote
- each MP M_m has a utility score for each bill B_b passing U_m,b (and assigns zero utility to the bill failing, so if they'd rather the bill fail, U_m,b is negative)
- the votes will take place on each bill in order from B_1 to B_10, and this order is known to all MP's
- all MP's know each other's utility scores
Each MP wants to maximize the utility of the results according to their own scores, and they can engage in negotiation before the voting starts to accomplish this.
Does this seem to others like a reasonable description of how the parliamentary vote might work? Any suggestions for improvements to the description?
If others agree that this description is unobjectionable, I'd like to move on to discussing negotiating strategies the MP's might use, the properties these strategies might have, and whether there are restrictions that might be useful to place on negotiating strategies. But I'll wait to see if others think I'm missing any important considerations first.
Remember there's no such thing as zero utility. You can assign an arbitrarily bad value to failing to resolve, but it seems a bit arbitrary.
Is there some way to rephrase this without bothering with the parliament analogy at all? For example, how about just having each moral theory assign the available actions a "goodness number" (basically expected utility). Normalize the goodness numbers somehow, then just take the weighted average across moral theories to decide what to do.
If we normalize by dividing each moral theory's answers by its biggest-magnitude answer, (only closed sets of actions allowed :) ) I think this regenerates the described behavior, though I'm not sure. Obviously this cuts out "human-ish" behavior of parliament members, but I think that's a feature, since they don't exist.
I think the key benefit of the parliamentary model is that the members will vote trade in order to maximize their expectation.
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Bjelakovic G, Gluud LL, Nikolova D, Whitfield K, Wetterslev J, Simonetti RG, Bjelakovic M, Gluud C. Vitamin D supplementation for prevention of mortality in adults. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 2014, Issue 1. Art. No.: CD007470. DOI: 10.1002/14651858.CD007470.pub3.
Does anyone know if Cochrane publishes the data they use in their meta analysis? I have a suspicion that meta analysis generally does not make good use of the available data. In their vitamin D analysis, they have shockingly large confidence intervals compared to the amount of data they have. I'd like to check that theory.
It turns out Cochrane does provide their data. Very nice of them.
Also, at least in this case my own metanalysis based on their data perfectly replicated their results. The inefficiency I thought was there was not there.