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All of B Jacobs's Comments + Replies

This post does not talk about strength of preferences so this seems a bit off topic. Nevertheless I think this misses some important considerations. You say:

the probability that one would actually go ahead and vote in a race does correlate with the strength of one's preferences. So, perhaps, this is indeed working as intended.

This doesn't take into account voter suppression. Take for example Texas; from 2012 to 2018, 542 polling places were closed in counties with significant increases in African-American and Latino populations, while counties with fewer m... (read more)

Reliable Sources: The Story of David Gerard

B Jacobs6mo-2-2

the best-researched article I know of on gender differences in chess

So I read this article and occasionally checked the sources and while it's not a bad article by any stretch, the scientific backing is not as strong as they imply. For example they write:

the sexes differ in their -preferences- for competition. As both Kasparov and Repková have intuited, men are simply -more competitive-

With the words "preferences" and "more competitive" being hyperlinks to their source. This implies (especially in the context) a "nature" explanation, but the source doesn't... (read more)

A (paraconsistent) logic to deal with inconsistent preferences

B Jacobs9mo10

Hmmm, I don't know if that works. There have definitely been times were I (phenomenologically) felt inconsistent preferences at the same time, e.g. I simultaneously want to hang a painting there and not hang a painting there. I do get this a lot more with aesthetic preferences than with other preferences for some reason. I think the proposed solution that we're multiple agents is quite plausible, but it does have some problems, so that's why I proposed this solution as a possible alternative.

Bob Jacobs's Shortform

B Jacobs2y*60

I tried a bit of a natural experiment to see if rationalists would be more negative towards an idea if it's called socialism vs if it's called it something else. I made two posts that are identical, except one calls it socialism right at the start, and one only reveals I was talking about socialism at the very end (perhaps it would've been better if I hadn't revealed it at all). The former I posted to LW, the latter I posted to the EA forum.

I expected that the comments on LW would be more negative, that I would get more downvotes and gave it a 50% chance t... (read more)

Viliam2y100

My problem with calling things "socialist" is that the word is typically used in a motte-and-bailey fashion: "seizing the means of production, centralized planning" vs "cooperating, helping each other". (Talking about the latter, but in a way that makes an applause light of the former.) This is analogical to "religion" meaning either "following the commandments in ancient books literally, obeying religious leaders" or "perceiving beauty in the universe, helping each other". Neither socialists not christians have invented the concept of human cooperation.

Mo... (read more)

2Dagon2y

I was one of the downvotes you predicted, but I didn't react as negatively as I expected to. I suspect I'd have been roughly as critical of "democratization" - it's a word that can mean many many different things, and the article, while long and somewhat interesting, didn't actually match either title. Fun experiment, and mostly I'm surprised that there's so little overlap between the sites that nobody pointed out the duplicate, which should have been a crosspost.

3Raemon2y

Just wanted to say I think this was an interesting experiment to run. (I’m not sure I think the data here is clean enough to directly imply anything, since among other things EAF and LW have different audiences. But, still think this was a neat test of the mods)

B Jacobs2y30

Sorry guys. I woke up to another giant batch of new comments and I just don't have the time or energy to respond to them all with the quality that I would want. My comments were already getting shorter and shorter while my longer, more nuanced comments were getting sniped before I could post them. I'm sure some of you made some excellent points.

B Jacobs2y-1-1

I cited controlled experiments, you counter with an observation that I have already responded to in both the post and the comments:

I explained this in this section:
One issue that arises with starting a socialist firms is acquiring initial investing.^[27] This is probably because co-ops want to maximize income (wages), not profits. They pursue the interests of their members rather than investors and may sometimes opt to increase wages instead of profits. Capitalist firms on the other hand are explicitly investor owned so investor interests wil

... (read more)

B Jacobs2y30

A spot check is supposed to take a number of random sources and check them, not pick the one claim you find most suspicious (that isn't even about co-ops) and use that to dismiss the entire literature on co-ops.

3tailcalled2y

There seem to be three parts to this objections: 1. I did not spot-check sufficiently many claims 2. I filtered the claim to spot-check based on being the most suspicious 3. I did not filter the claims based on being about co-ops With regards to point 1, I agree that I cannot know your accuracy very precisely without doing more checks, but the problem is that each check takes time and there are a lot of posts on the internet to read, so I have to limit how much I search. With regards to point 2, it's not that I spot-checked the most suspicious one, rather it's that I spot-checked the first suspicious one. This is still a filter on suspiciousness, but a much weaker one. I think some filter on suspiciousness is appropriate since suspicious claims are also the ones I can learn the most from if they turn out to be true, as claims become suspicious through a combination of being unlikely and having big implications. With regards to point 3, if you put much more effort into verifying the accuracy of your claims about co-ops than your claims about other stuff, then your accuracy on co-ops might not be that correlated with your accuracy on other stuff, and I ought to do a spot-check specifically on your claims about co-ops. I don't know if that is true. If it is true, it might also be helpful to mention it as a disclaimer in the post so people know what claims to mostly focus on. So it's not so much that I'm dismissing the entire literature on co-ops. (Or well, I would generally dismiss any social science that I haven't done some surface checks of. But that's different from my comments here.) It's more that I'm dismissing your literature review of the literature.

B Jacobs2y32

I cite four different studies that show that the theory doesn't match the observations, Lao Mein doesn't cite anything. This is the most extreme version of being a selective skeptic.

-1Aiyen2y

He cites the observation that socialized firms have not taken over the economy. That's clearly true and clearly relevant. Your response was that you'd already explained why socialized firms might not take over even if they were productive. What were those reasons again? Reviewing your post, it looks like it might be the difficulty of gaining investment and brain drain from the most productive workers leaving, but both of those reasons would be strong arguments against socialization. Rose Wrist's ideas for gaining investment anyway are interesting, but until socialized firms actually do raise enough funding to compete, saying that they theoretically maybe can sounds remarkably hollow. The point of evidence is to see things that are more likely under one hypothesis than another. In the world where socialized firms are better, I do not expect to see them failing to take over. In the world where they are not, I do expect that it's possible to generate arbitrarily long lists of pro-socialism citations. The strength of a case depends on the strength of the evidence, not on the number of citations!

B Jacobs2y32

I’m not handwaving anything I wrote a whole section about how experiments contradict this and what could explain this:

“Experiments have shown that people randomly allocated to do tasks in groups where they can elect their leaders and/or choose their pay structures are more productive than those who are led by an unelected manager who makes pay choices for them.[20] One study looked at real firms with high levels of worker ownership of shares in the company and found that workers are keener to monitor others, making them more productive than those with low ... (read more)

-3Aiyen2y

The specific handwave I'm referring to is Amartya Sen's. "In the case of the free rider hypothesis, these 'rational fools' act based on such a narrow conception of self-interest that they don't take into account the obviously damaging long-term consequences of their behavior, both to the firm and ultimately to themselves. Normal, reasonable people - who are different to rational economic man - are usually happy to put efforts into a collective endeavor that will deliver benefits for them in the long run, even if that means foregoing some short-term gains." This sounds like it would predict that people reliably cooperate on prisoner's dilemmas, and pick stag in stag hunts. In reality, of course, that's not a thing! Cooperation exists, but tends to require coordination mechanisms. Worse, it sounds like it's advocating an incoherent decision theory. While there are certainly times where it's wise to make a choice that isn't the best in the most narrow, myopic possible sense (Newcomb's problem is the obvious example, or superrationality dynamics), that's very different than putting efforts into collective endeavor in the hopes of collective success. The evidence you cite is interesting, though Lao Mein's evidence suggests it isn't a slam dunk. But Sen is committing a fallacy here, and the same fallacy as was often used in support of socialist regimes. As such, it's a valid answer to tailcalled's question.

B Jacobs2y*-11

My prior is that other things are less effective and you need evidence to show they are more effective not vice versa.

Appeal to presuppositions always feels weird to me. A socialist could just as easily say 'my priors say the opposite'. In any case, you made a claim of comparison, not me, why is the burden of proof suddenly on me?

Of course. I'm saying it doesn't even get to make that argument which can sometimes muddy the waters enough to make some odd-seeming causes look at least plausibly effective.

I'm trying to explain the scientific literature on co-ops, not persuade you of some scam.

B Jacobs2y1-2

However, in spot-checking whether the statistics were totally wrong, I found myself struggling with wading through signups and links and long mostly irrelevant articles. Of course some nonzero amount of this is likely to happen with spot-checks but it seemed like the layers of links just made it even worse.

This is dishonest, the vast majority of the sources are primary scientific studies and the few times I do refer to secondary sources it isn't irrelevant.

You did handle it right, especially your deleted comment.

OP to explain what data/model it was based o

... (read more)

2tailcalled2y

I wasn't talking about the vast majority of the sources, I was talking about source 3, which turned into source 2, which turned into some other source that I had to find myself. My deleted comment was nearly identical to one of the non-deleted comments. It's just that I realized there was a problem with one of my comments after posting it and I needed to take some time to look at it. The problem is that the primary source does not seem credible without additional information.

B Jacobs2y*10

But anyway, no, this link doesn't link directly to the study either, it links to a report that links to the study

You can immediately see a button that says "download report" when you click on that link. I wouldn't call that "digging for sources".

The wall of text doesn't really answer my questions about the independence of employee engagement.

Furthermore they suggest that managers have a huge effect on employee engagement, which seems to point to a potential area where this assumption could fail.

It's not independent, co-ops let you vote on managers which al... (read more)

4tailcalled2y

I have downloaded the report. When I searched for keywords from the sentence "This is not only terrible for the workers but also for the economy, since businesses with engaged workers have 23% higher profit, while employees who are not engaged cost the world $7.8 trillion in lost productivity, equal to 11% of global GDP." in the report, the main section that appeared was this: The other potentially relevant section that appeared was this: Neither of these sections give any idea of how Gallup came to the conclusion, but the link in the first section contains a link to a different document that probably forms the foundation/primary source for their analysis. I mean if the independence of employee engagement doesn't hold, then the causal inference doesn't go through, and you can't infer that engagement has this much effect on productivity... ... however this sounds like a different form of independence than the one I brought up.

B Jacobs2y10

I've already explained why socialists firms wouldn't necessarily take over the economy even if they were productive in both the post and other comments.

B Jacobs2y20

They were not direct links to the study, but instead i direct links to articles that talk about the study, so I had to dig further manually.

It was the second source in the post: ^[2]

The articles are often big and contain lots of specific things that might not be directly relevant to your point of using it in the post.

There was a summary of it on the linked page itself:

Unfortunately, most employees remain disengaged at work. In fact, low engagement alone costs the global economy $7.8 trillion.

Even having opened the study, I'm still left wit

... (read more)

2tailcalled2y

Oh I think one confusing factor was the footnote placement. But anyway, no, this link doesn't link directly to the study either, it links to a report that links to the study. I had to go through additional links to find this document which appears to be the original source with the actual analysis. The wall of text doesn't really answer my questions about the independence of employee engagement. Ah sorry, that's my mixup between the effects of employee engagement vs effects of co-opts.

B Jacobs2y21

There's just no way that things like this are remotely as effective as say GiveWell causes

Do you have any evidence for this?

and it barely even has longtermist points

Not all EA's are longtermists.

1Tenoke2y

My prior is that other things are less effective and you need evidence to show they are more effective not vice versa. Of course. I'm saying it doesn't even get to make that argument which can sometimes muddy the waters enough to make some odd-seeming causes look at least plausibly effective.

B Jacobs2y4-1

What data and model are these estimates of the causal effects of it based on?

You can find my sources in the references section. This was based on a gallup study

Another thing that confuses me is why socialist firms need special support and don't naturally come to dominate the economy. You seem to attribute this to owners extracting value, but that seems short-sighted; presumably if you have an economy with a mixture of socialist and non-socialist firms, and the socialist firms are much more productive, they would grow quicker and become dominant over time.

I... (read more)

2tailcalled2y

The issue is basically friction. There were several things that made your links difficult to use: * They were not direct links to the study, but instead i direct links to articles that talk about the study, so I had to dig further manually. * The articles are often big and contain lots of specific things that might not be directly relevant to your point of using it in the post. * Even having opened the study, I'm still left with confusions about the methodology. It looks to me like they basically just correlated employee engagement with productivity. This is valid if employee engagement varies in a way that is uncorrelated with other factors that have a big effect on productivity, but they don't seem to justify that assumption and it doesn't seem anecdotally sensible to me. Furthermore they suggest that managers have a huge effect on employee engagement, which seems to point to a potential area where this assumption could fail. I would like to see a factor analysis containing employee engagement and a bunch of other variables before I believe it to be reasonably independent of other factors. Now, these are questions I could study myself, so why put the burden on you? I'd say friction and scale: If everyone reading your article studies this themselves, then it is a lot of duplicated work. Meanwhile if you did the work, e.g. making sure to link directly instead of indirectly to the studies you've read, and making sure to also link to factor analyses demonstrating independence or whatever else is assumed, then the work would be only performed once, and the results of the work would be available to everyone reading the article. I'm not sure I understand the economics of this. If co-ops have an inherent massive growth advantage, wouldn't that outweigh the advantage capitalist firms have in giving more dividends to investors? Because while in the short term the capitalist firms would maybe give more to their investors, in the long term the co-ops would grow bigger

Bob Jacobs's Shortform

B Jacobs3y70

I have a Mnemonic device for checking whether a model is Gears-like or not.
G E A R S:

Does a variable Generate Empirical Anticipations?

Can a variable be Rederived?

Is a variable hard to Substitute?

B Jacobs4y*10

There's evidence in the form of observations of events outside the cartesian boundary. There's evidence in internal process of reasoning, whose nature depends on the mind.

My previous comment said:

both empirical and tautological evidence

With "empirical evidence" I meant "evidence in the form of observations of events outside the cartesian boundary" and with "tautological argument" I meant "evidence in internal process of reasoning, whose nature depends on the mind".

When doing math, evidence comes up more as a guide to intuition than anything explicitly cons

... (read more)

2Vladimir_Nesov4y

We have two examples of what "evidence" could mean here: mathematical proofs and physical events (things happening in a certain place at a certain time). You can study proofs. And you can study physics. There are hardly any arguments where these two different things are predictably interchangeable, so using the same word for them is a problem. Consider the statement "evidence exists". Making it specific for our two examples, we get "proofs exist" and "physical events exist". I'm not aware of a good use for these statements (it's not at all clear what they could possibly mean).

B Jacobs4y10

I meant both empirical and tautological evidence, so general information that indicates whether a belief is more or less valid. When you say that you can keep track of truth, why do you believe you can? What is that truth based on, evidence?

2Vladimir_Nesov4y

There's evidence in the form of observations of events outside the cartesian boundary. There's evidence in internal process of reasoning, whose nature depends on the mind. When doing math, evidence comes up more as a guide to intuition than anything explicitly considered. There are also metamathematical notions of evidence, rendering something evidence-like clear. Hence the question. To figure things out, it's necessary to be specific. It's impossible to figure out a large vague idea all at the same time, but some of its particular incarnations might be tractable.