= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Good lord. I thought I had set LW to tell me when someone replied; having not received any email I assumed this post had been ignored. 0__o
-Robin
Gun Control: How would we know?
I don't know how to keep this topic away from http://lesswrong.com/lw/gw/politics_is_the_mindkiller/ , so I'm just going to exhort everyone to try to keep this about rationality and not about politics as usual. I myself have strong opinions here, which I'm deliberately squelching.
So I got to thinking about the issue of gun control in the wake of a recent school shooting in the US, specifically from the POV of minimizing presumed-innocents getting randomly shot. Please limit discussion to that *specific* issue, or we'll be here all year.
My question is not so much "Is strict gun control or lots of guns better for us [in the sole context of minimizing presumed-innocents getting randomly shot]?", although I'm certainly interested in knowing the answer to that, but I think if that was answerable we as a culture wouldn't still be arguing about it.
Let's try a different question, though: how would we know?
That is, what non-magical statistical evidence could someone give that would actually settle the question reasonably well (let's say, at about the same level as "smoking causes cancer", or so)?
As a first pass I looked at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate and I noted that the US, which is famously kind of all about the guns, has significantly higher rates than other first-world countries. I had gone into this with a deliberate desire to win, in the less wrong sense, so I accepted that this strongly speaks against my personal beliefs (my default stance is that all teachers should have concealed carry permits and mandatory shooting range time requirements), and was about to update (well, utterly obliterate) those beliefs, when I went "Now, hold on. In the context of first world countries, the US has relatively lax gun control, and we seem to rather enjoy killing each other. How do I know those are causally related, though? Is it not just as likely that, for example, we have all the homicidally crazy people, and that that leads to both of those things? It doesn't seem to be the case that, say, in the UK, you have large-scale secret hoarding of guns; if that was the case, they'd be closer to use in gun-related homicides, I would think. But just because it didn't happen in the UK doesn't mean it wouldn't happen here."
At that point I realized that I don't know, even in theory, how to tell what the answer to my question is, or what evidence would be strong evidence for one position or the other. I am not strong enough as a rationalist or a statistician.
So, I thought I'd ask LW, which is full of people better at those things than I am. :)
Have at.
-Robin
In response to
Empirical Sleep Time
I'm thinking that it should be possible to decide when to sleep based on reduced performance.
It certainly is!
Can anyone suggest a tool for that purpose? Perhaps some reaction time testing software?
Double N-back seems to be precisely what you're looking for. It effectively tests how long a sequence of information you can keep in your mind, and how accurate you can be about recalling the sequence. Being tired impacts your DNB performance, and is a marker for the kind of "reduced performance" you're looking to avoid.
Accounting for training effects aside, the way you'd work this is to test yourself on a DNB regime every hour or so. When your results start to drop, you entertain the hypothesis that you're tired; if the next hour is further down still, you decide you're tired to the point of reduced performance and you go to sleep.
(That is a rule of thumb calculation; you can get Bayesian if you want)
That's exactly the sort of thing I had in mind, thank you! I'll try it.
-Robin
In response to
Empirical Sleep Time
Good and bad sleep accumulate over days. Thus moment by moment measures of productivity are of limited use and any experiment has to compare extended periods of time, a week at the least, probably better a month. The very widely held consensus in the field is that you should go to sleep at the same time every night and wake up without an alarm. This should be the control for any experiment.
If only I had that option. :) If you know how to explain this to my 8 month olds, please do let me know. :)
I appreciate the info about the ideal there; I'm going to keep it in mind. But it's simply not reasonable for me right now.
My focus and attention are much better late at night, so I tend to stay up as late as I can stand, to get more done. Unfortunately, with babies around, both when I wake up in the morning and when in the evening I can start focusing on the things I want to work on are entirely random. Hence wanting to get as much effective time out of the late night as I can, hence the original question.
Obviously, performance does degrade if one stays up long enough; I simply want to have something better than "I'm passing out in my chair" as a hint that I should give up and go to bed.
-Robin
In response to
Empirical Sleep Time
This would have been better in an open thread.
If you mean I should have put it in the "main" tab rather than the "discussion" tab: I thought that was, essentially, for coherent essays, rather than Q-and-A. If that's not what you meant, please explain?
-Robin
In response to
Empirical Sleep Time
I would think there would be too many confounding variables, and the best you could do is find some testable proxy for performance.
You could just buy a Zeo.
Unless I'm misunderstanding, a lot of what the Zeo does is select a wake time that matches one's sleep cycle. I have twin infants; the time(s) at which I am awoken are entirely out of my control. :D Also, I don't use an alarm, and haven't in many years; as such I awake at what I assume is the right point of my sleep cycle (when allowed to wake naturally, which doesn't much happen anymore).
If I'm misunderstanding, feel free to elaborate; the copy on Amazon at least is pretty inspecific.
Generally speaking, though, I don't have a serious problem with sleep debt or effective sleep or anything; my main sleep problem is staying up so late that I'm ineffective and hence wasting my time, but I do generally get enough sleep to compensate so that I'm OK in the morning.
-Robin
In response to
Empirical Sleep Time
Is your problem determining when to go to sleep, or actually making yourself go to sleep when you think you should for optimal effectiveness?
Given external evidence that my performance is reduced, I don't think getting myself to go to sleep will be a significant problem. My issue is usually the belief that I'm still getting useful stuff done, and actively resisting sleep on that basis; evidence to the contrary is something I think I would treat as real data.
Empirical Sleep Time
I'm thinking that it should be possible to decide when to sleep based on reduced performance.
Can anyone suggest a tool for that purpose? Perhaps some reaction time testing software?
I guess I would have to track myself during the day to make a baseline, which is fine.
But without some sort of test I end up staying up way pass effectiveness, which is a waste of my time.
-Robin
the Russian roulette of "any day a fond memory could disappear" is to horrible for me
You do realize this is true to a surprisingly large degree even for perfectly healthy human brains right?
Of course, but I can help preserve the memories I choose by remembering them, reinforcing the connections. I dunno about Alzheimer's, but with, say, CJD, anything could disappear at any time, reinforced or not. It's not the same, to me.
-Robin
= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d){kind=logo}
If gun control arguments make me want to shoot myself, does that just prove their point? by Yvain
"No one else has tried this." -- I have, actually, which is why this post is here. :D </smartass>
Thanks for the great link, that's the sort of thing I was wanting to see.
-Robin