All of mhelvens's Comments + Replies

I want to like this idea, but I'm not sure yet. The process of writing down your own reasoning and assumptions seems incredibly valuable to me. But I wonder how much the framing of this exercise would actually help someone who is already introspective enough to attempt it.

Do you think it could mitigate certain cognitive biases? I can easily imagine different people writing contradictory children's picture books, just as they write contradictory blog-posts. Not because they're lying, but because of confirmation bias.

Also, if you take the framing too literally, there may be the temptation to oversimplify. Your global warming example has a lot of complexity for a children's picture book. :-)

4jessicata
I think the main way this mitigates cognitive biases is by causing someone to worry less about what the things they choose to say reflect on them as a person, and to write more content in a way that makes it easier to identify contradictions or uncertainties (as I did with whether CO2 blocks sunlight). It's hard to realize a contradiction in your implicit beliefs without first making that contradiction explicit. However, this exercise at first only mitigates a subset of the cognitive biases, though it's possible that enough repeated iteration would correct most biases by making them more obvious. The complexity depends on what we mean by "child"; here I'm thinking of 7-12 year olds, who can read books that use the concepts I was using (though I would have to expand the explanation for some parts).

Should we consider a mechanism to reduce conformity bias? For example, we could allow users to blind themselves to (the nature of) existing reactions until they choose to reveal them or react themselves.

Such a mechanism may come with its own drawbacks, of course. And it's possible I'm just overthinking this. But I hadn't seen the idea discussed yet, so I thought I'd bring it up.

Yes, definitely. If we want to be really rigorous about this, Context wouldn't be a mere logical predicate, but a probability mass function of some kind. And we'd want to sort the list by:

But it may not be worth the added complexity. At least not right away. :-)

I think it's unintentional. I don't see how to parse that as a valid English sentence. (Even though it starts out so promising: "And still, it is not 'a', given that ...")

And there are some other errors too:

  • In the following sentence: "here's a look ..." "Here's a look ..."
  • The last and third to last paragraphs don't end with a period.

I'm not aware of any such guide, but it's a good idea. Here are some thoughts on how we might break this down if we ever want to start such a guide:

  • Problems vs. opportunities: This may or may not be a meaningful distinction. They would seem to be two sides of the same coin, as both are concerned with utility-maximizing in a narrow time-window. I bring it up because it may not be intuitive, and may spark some ideas.
  • Context: For completeness sake, as you already brought it up. Who might encounter this problem, and under what circumstances?
  • Problem s
... (read more)
2Pattern
Reward is also based on the probability/frequency of the mishap/opportunity, which may be conditional on personal attributes/group membership.

Oh, I don't think there's a disagreement here. I strong-upvoted the comment I responded to. "We can ban a Nazi because they're a Nazi." is a bad rule.

What I'm trying to add to the conversation (apart from an attempted steel-man of that footnote) is that the actual reason we ban people from communities is not because of what they've done in the past, but what they're likely to do in the future if they stay.

Usually we need to observe someone's actions before we can make such a determination, so it almost always ma... (read more)

You accidentally another word: "We are open to unusual ideas are willing to doubt conventional wisdom."

My most charitable interpretation of footnote 1 is this: It's possible to imagine a profile picture, bio or first post so beyond the pale that the best course of action is to ban that person outright. And if you cannot imagine such a profile picture, bio or first post, then you have a poor imagination.

That would be quite a high bar for me, though. There would have to be overwhelming evidence that this person is going to be a net-negative influence. "They are a self-professed Nazi" would not clear that bar.

2Stuart Anderson
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These are good questions that would need to be answered if it weren't for "and the like", which makes the rule fuzzy again no matter how unambiguously we define "Nazi".

But would this account for a cumulative 8 pairs per person per year? Socks that end up in a sibling's drawer, fall on the floor, are carelessly paired up or lost in the dryer would eventually find their way back to where they belong, so they wouldn't make a difference in the long term.

I can think of several explanations for that number being a bit too high. It seems possible, for example, that Samsung is counting socks that were lost but then found soon after. Why else would their innovative AddWash™ system (a small door to add extra items to an ongoing wash cycle) be proposed as a solution?

But I think I prefer to believe that the average is being upset by a small number of pet ferrets.

5gwern
In terms of sibling effects, they could be large drains. Imagine a sibling who never bothers to buy their own socks but just unconsciously takes one sock too many once in a while. If there's 2 siblings, now the responsible one must buy twice as much socks as they should (because of the hidden drain). Such people would simply show up as rare-purchasers in my survey, and there are quite a few such people. Ones lost in a dryer may be de facto permanently gone: even if you pull the units out a decade later and find them, do you even want to wear them anymore? And what does one do with a mismatched sock? If its mate doesn't show up in a few months, you might toss it or use it for something else entirely, and then should the mate reappear later, now it's a mismatch as well... I certainly don't lose 8 pairs of socks a year, but then, I don't spend $200+ a month on groceries either.

I realize this article is not really about socks. Socks are merely the running example in a discussion about psychology, data mining and yak shaving.

But I have to ask: Do socks really mysteriously disappear? More so than other possessions and enough to cause shortages for a significant number of people? Sure I've thrown socks away when they got worn down, but I don't remember any ever being unaccounted for. It must have happened once or twice, but an average of 8 pairs per person per year? That's baffling.

If those statistics are reliable (an... (read more)

2Richard_Kennaway
Perhaps American washing machines are so badly made that the smallest items of clothing can escape the drum and go down the drain? Either that or it's a bug in the simulation.
5gwern
Samsung says And I think they do get lost. In multi-person households, socks have a tendency to migrate to other people's rooms, flowing along a sock gradient. (I lost a lot of socks to my brother. I know because we labeled them with markers and I'd regularly find them in his drawer.) Sometimes they get physically lost in the dryer. In cluttered households, it's easy for a sock to fall out of the dryer or the basket when you're moving a big load, or fall behind drawers/beds and get lost there. Pet animals can steal them: I've seen ferrets making off with socks to hide in corners (or behind the dryer), and supposedly Siamese cats often have a pica just for socks & woolens. And in some cases, there may be things man was not meant to know. Personally, I think my sock shortage was due more to them wearing out than actually going missing. I'd get rid of them as necessary, but I then didn't buy any replacements.