Yeah that's totally cool. LW style is different though. Not necessarily in a good way, and this difference might even be why it's less popular than other sites these days. But it's different in that LW doesn't, as far as I have observed, want lots of people from different sides. It wants an almost algorithmic approach to reality, where more colorful language is viewed as disrupting the truth by inflaming tribal parts of your brain.
Everything you're saying is totally reasonable for someone who doesn't understand the very very specific thing LW is trying to...
The style of your blog is very very much at odds with the style of Less Wrong. I would never submit anything here that classified as a cohesive set what 'liberals' think, and then attacked that classification. Writing here should map more to statistical estimation and modeling, where every word and claim is scrutinized, thoughtful, and attempts to avoid invoking needless emotion. That last point is harder to nail down. It is of course possible to have an excitable tone that runs orthogonal to the strict argument, but it's pretty hard to do right.
I do, som...
I thought it was interesting -- and frustrating for you. I haven't invested the time into proving to myself you're right, but in the case that you are I hope you're able to get someone to verify and lend you their credibility.
Why do you think two senior biostats guys would disagree with you if it was obviously wrong? I have worked with enough academics to know that they are far far from infallible, but curious on your analysis of this question.
Coming up with criteria and metrics on the economy is pretty easy
I agree. In fact, I think coming up with criteria and metrics on the economy is profoundly challenging within the US context. We know there are right tail events (inflation, unemployment, etc) that are very strong. But when they are all generally stable, or within the realm of stability, but the variation within demographics and geographies of the US is huge, the value of the metrics can start to dramatically collapse IMO.
This is pretty cool. It reminds me of an article I read on brain surgery recently (https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/03/magazine/karl-ove-knausgaard-on-the-terrible-beauty-of-brain-surgery.html). Where the surgeon keeps the patient awake, and zaps different parts of the brain to see what they map to. They don't even try to pretend they understand the system, but try to map simple correlations.
[Note, after rereading your post my comment is tangential]
I have always been empathetic to the argument, from people first presented with this, that they are different. Understanding how math deals with infinity basically requires having the mathematical structure supporting it already known. I'm not particularly gifted at math, but the first 4 weeks of real analysis really changed the way I think, because it was basically a condensed rapid upload of centuries of collaborative work from some of the smartest men to ever exist right into my brain.
Otherwise,...
Sincere question: Do you think the SSC comments section accomplishes politics while filtering out foam, spittle etc? (or perhaps the comments section there is more robust to simply ignoring bad comments, which isn't the same on a forum?)
Having no moderator experience, I guess there is probably a lot on that end that I don't know.
The things most people are interested in discussing are frowned upon/banned from discussion on LW. That's why they go to SSC. The world has changed in the past 10 years, and the conversational rules and restrictions of 2009 no longer make sense today.
The rationalsphere, if you expand it to include blogs like Marginal Revolution, is one of the few intellectual mechanisms left to disentangle complex information from the clusterf* of modern politics. Not talking about it here through a clear rationalist framework is a tragedy.
Well, different people understand it in different ways. Some are horrible people who understand it in the worst way. Others are great people who understand it in the best way. The entire group is willing to sacrifice clarity and a clear definition, in favor of something sufficiently vague to band together a collective action who overlap on certain dimensions.
I think for that reason though, trying to debate the definition or how it's understood is pointless. Sadly. I don't blame people who think it's a worthy cause anyway, maybe they are right. I personally can't stand associating with movements where the direction isn't clear, but that's just me.
Hey,
I'm gonna give you sort of an unsatisfying answer. I had a similar interest, which resulted in me getting my MSc and working in research at the Fed for a few years, with the goal of sorting it out in my head (ended up going private sector instead of getting a PhD). As far as I have surveyed, there are different models of money, but it's scientifically an unsolved problem. There seems to be a level of complexity that arises as you increase the number of people on a monetary system, increase industries, increase geographical scale, add new countries and...
I think the most dangerous aspect of 'dangerous speech' is it is a shared meme to disregard certain types of arguments off-hand, regardless of how true or false they are. It becomes most dangerous when someone then, for some reason, decides to investigate further and realizes "Hey, some of this stuff is true! And I can't trust anyone anymore."
I think it's fair to argue that elections that are won by a slim margin don't say much of significance about discrete narrative changes in the weeks leading up to the election. That could be false though, if for example we view Trump winning the election as a 'treatment' effect, which gives him a new discrete ability to change the narrative.
But more generally, I think an election such as Brexit does give us a significant story, not necessarily for the week leading up to it, but for the changing preferences of a population in the year or two leading up to it and the invocation of the election itself.
I think there are some serious issues with the methodology and instruments used to measure heuristics & biases, which they didn't fully understand even ten years ago.
Some cognitive biases are robust and well established, like the endowment effect. Then there are the weirder ones, like ego depletion. I think a fundamental challenge with biases is clever researchers first notice them by observing other humans, as well as observing the way that they think, and then they need to try and measure it formally. The endowment effect, or priming, maps pretty wel...
Once that happened, I’d no longer be able to eat chickens. I could apply the same process to all animals, and so by induction I would be unwilling to eat any animal.
This is an interesting way to look at using induction, but I see it more as a willing reprogramming of your brain. In your case, you were able to simulate a case where eating chicken would disgust you (eating a pet) and that gave you impetus to stop eating chicken.
I am a big meat eater. I predict there is a 30-60% chance I would drastically reduce my meat eating if I was forced to run a sla...
I agree with this view. His abuse is more blase, that's definitely true.
Brash man with a working-class NYC disposition: "Obama literally founded ISIS" or "Obama is secretly a Muslim"
Sensible people everywhere recoil and roll their eyes. Understanding why that's absurd is pretty easy. The people who make those arguments aren't exactly an intellectual class, and currently lack an intellectual 'ruling caste.'
Refined person with an articulate tone of voice, and an Ivy league law degree: "Women are oppressed everywhere, and currently m...
I've had a similar experience at [large tech firm]. It was becoming clear that an intersecting project with two teams wasn't working. The challenge though was it was stuck in a rotten equilibrium. Each team's true incentive was distinct and contrary to the other team. Yet the mandate was 'thou shalt have the same incentives.' Everyone kept publicly claiming we had aligned incentives, which you shouldn't have to publicly explain if it's actually true.
A lot of social choice theory guys tried to explain this in the context of voting, and the stability of out...
I think that's what most people who were or want to be part of the rationalist community want to work on now. That's what Scott Alexander does full time with SSC and his comments. Even on LW despite the weird and dated rules, everyone wants to discuss this stuff and work on slowly figuring it out. I don't think anyone really cares how a 22 year old has reinterpreted EY's post on cognitive biases or some new version of AI risk(and I say that having put all my faith in 22 year old engineering kids saving the world).
I'll probably just post on it more now here, and see what happens.
One problem I have with communicating this is that I was only able to pick up on it after lots of academic studying (degree doesn't matter so much as having read and understood the growth of Social Science knowledge and research), and reading blogs of academics who have run into trouble for years.
Whether it's InfoProc on genetic engineering, West Hunter on evolution, SSC on feminism, and so forth.
By time you read all this stuff and it starts coming together in your head, you realize you can't rationally discuss it with other people. If I'm at a party and ...
Your document reads much more like "Rational Politics for Liberals." That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's really clear that you tacitly oppose lots of dissident/alternative/reactionary right views. I'm pretty sympathetic to what you're trying to do, but I see it more as a concerted effort for thoughtful and rational discussion of how to solve the issues of alternative and neoreactionary right beliefs.
I don't think any level of rational calculations of per person terrorism risk will change the 20-50% of Americans who don't want Muslim immi...
That could be part of it. I'd also say what is difficult is putting certain types of ideas into words. When people talk about scientific skepticism, for example, what exactly are they saying? Guys like Andrew Gelman or Scott Alexander (or plenty of other smart folks) are able to look through academic research across domains, and something sticks out to them as wrong. They can then go through and try to identify what claims, or assumptions, or statistics, are misguided. But prior to that there is this hunch or indicator that the author's scientific claim is...
How is a prediction market subsidized by someone with an interest in the information? As far as I'm aware, most of them make money on bid/ask spreads, and can be thought of as a future or Arrow–Debreu security.
As the current institutions stand there are differences. Prediction market sites and the Nasdaq are obviously different in a lot of institutional ways. In prediction markets you can't own companies. But in the more abstract way in which people trade on current information as a prediction, which is eventually realized, they are similar.
For example, ...
I'll half-answer this, since it's sort of a tangent, but the metric I prefer to use is my variation of feeling over time. I don't know if other people are like this (probably), but my mood/emotion impacts my view on politics/policy.
Sometimes when I feel ill or in a bad mood some political event of class A will make me upset and convinced everything will turn out poorly. After I lift weights when I'm on my (perceived) good feeling Testosterone hormones, I feel confident that political event of class A won't be a big deal, and I'm confident in my ability to ...
I wonder what the statistical power of the study was.
With n = ~2000, and dementia rates being relatively low, and there either being no controls or some lame half-missing linear controls (even worse than no control, because it makes you think the control worked), and the treatment being seemingly arbitrary ,I basically am going to assume this is meaningless information.
It's turning an uncontrolled correlation in a low power sample into a causal story of protection.
Anyway, I didn't actually read the paper so maybe I'm being unfair. I somehow doubt that's the case though.
I think you're right that the distinction is typically clear cut and useful to make. What I want to avoid (although I'm not sure I was successful) is simply being nihilistic and making a refined version of the boring argument "what do words even mean?!".
The area I'm interested in is when that distinction grows blurry. Normative arguments always have to embed an accurate representation of reality, and a correct prediction that they will actually work. And positive arguments of reality frequently imply a natural or optimal result.
For example, some...
This also is why I find nearly all university/grad application/acceptance forums to be garbage. Naturally the topics that are discussed are the ones that are shared across the group, when the reality is it is the idiosyncratic aspects that are most up-for-optimization and least discussed.
Your post is very similar to lots of literature on game-theoretic signalling. The seminal paper being this one by a guy called Spence on job-market signalling (http://www.econ.yale.edu/~dirkb/teach/pdf/spence/1973%20job%20market%20signalling.pdf).
Hey, James Miller, you g...
I think this is a great area to explore, and probably one of the areas a rationalist perspective can most help teenagers.
I know as a late teenager, and in my early 20s, my sadness, depression, and anxiety, were part of my identity. It was how I dressed, how I thought of myself, the music I listened to, drugs I took. To take a quote from classic t.v. show 'Bojack Horsemen' I fetishized my own sadness. Breakups felt like a beautiful soul-crushing torture.
As I studied more science, read more, and took more interest in the scientific world, I started viewing m...
It's a stupid question. It wouldn't be too hard to give 10 methodologists this question, then tell them the side to support, and watch them all build great cases. Obviously that's an assertion, I can't imagine evidence then claim it proves me right :P, but I strongly suspect this would be true.
The question is so dumb. Even if they got rid of the business story-line, and abstracted it to pure statistics, it's still stupid. What distribution characterizes it? If they got rid of the business, gave the data, AND gave info on the generative distribution, AND made it a numerical answer... Then I guess it's a fair question, but at that point it's just a pure stats question.
I don't really understand what you're trying to say about homosexuality. I don't want to explore how traditional morality has advantages, because that's a hard question and not something I have any reason to think I'd be all that good at. I do think that morality and tradition is complicated, so we have to be careful not to assume that we can reason through or against certain phenomena.
It's always awkward talking about complex systems involving humans, because either you abstract away from individuals or you never talk about them. It's even more difficult...
Yeah I should have phrased that better. It goes hand-in-hand with your last sentence. Lots of our impulses and feelings are based on a cultural programming that encourages us to build outcomes that's best for society.
I have a close friend for example who just finished his MD/PhD. He makes less money than all his peers who he went to Stanford (much less money) and works way harder hours. While his friends get piles of money and free lunches at Google, he sleeps on a cot in an old hospital with a broken AC unit doing 20 hour shifts. Why?!
Well, it's indisputa...
I want to address your specific points, but let me first clarify what I'm not saying: I'm not saying it's necessarily a bad move, EY might be right that it's good and should be considered. Maybe it's true that the sexual habits of children are unimportant to parents, and if we reach a world where they are no longer considered that would be a better one. It's also probably true that all things constant, laws that forbid this type of prostitution hurt more people than they help by building black markets. I am not disagreeing with him on any of those points. ...
Alright, I think if you and I sat down and talked about the cost vs. benefit of incarceration and the war on drugs, we would be in almost complete agreement. The costs are in equilibrium with benefits, so it's sort of like trying to see where you can save the most utility a year by looking at your financial records: Sure, the more expensive items are more likely to have a high magnitude of savings, but they also could generate more utility. You haven't ever read anything I've written, but I've read your site, so you'll have to take my word on that :)
That m...
I think you're being disingenuous and taking semantic laziness on Sarah's part as a fundamental flaw in the reasoning itself. I think it's fair to say she wasn't trying to dismiss any talk of deterrence as being cartoon villainy (I didn't see a super prefix there? But maybe it was an edit. Doesn't really matter). But was responding to your specific, separate from the argument of her post, comment noting that she wasn't willing to consider the benefits of, in the example you gave, deterrence based rape. Which is different from her considering deterrence in ...
I didn't get that impression. Sarah wasn't stating: Here is a cost vs. benefit of Prisons. She was instead writing about how we could measure the costs of prison. If she doesn't write at all about benefits, there is no reason to infer that she is deliberately leaving them out to be misleading. Actually, I think this sort of inference towards what she is actually trying to say based on what you think she left out is misleading.
Gwern doesn't say anything interesting. He points out that you do, in fact, need to measure benefit for cost vs. benefit. I guess th...
Yeah, fair enough. Everything I know about that event comes from War and Peace and Wikipedia, so I won't argue on any specific ground. Tolstoy's bigger argument that there were lots of hidden, but crucial aspects, that determined the war, at the time, went against the traditional view of the time that it was all a function of Great Men. Or at least that's the impression I have.
Throughout my academic/research experiences in the social sciences and economic forecasting, it's become clear that more complex models, whether it's more variables, dynamics, or nonlinearity, rarely ever perform well. For the vast majority of situations in forecasting, it's incredibly hard to beat a random-walk or an auto-regression (order 1).
There is no proof or explanation of why in an academic textbook, you just pick it up over time. Notable exceptions define entire subfields. The U.S. Term structure of debt is best modeled by using a set of ODEs to f...
+1 for a novel/interesting original post.
I agree the idea that evil/irrationality go hand-in-hand is a commonly held, but silly idea. In a similar vein I see people thinking the line between good/evil is distinct and clear-cut throughout history. If we believe it was a clear distinction historically, it should follow the distinction would be clear today. And who is evil today? Our political opponents, of course (/s).
Not to suggest there weren't better/worse sides in the past, however, I recently read this book 'Human Smoke,' which is a collection of news p...
I read the entire article. What irks me about these type of debates, between a lawyer and a philosopher of ethics, is that they center around creating a consistent 'logical structure' or trying to define the right types of preferences purely from reason.
The author uses lots of lawyer arguments that focus on rhetoric, but are nonsensical. She is 'worse off' in the sense that she would probably prefer to not be disabled. Rationalizing that society would take care of disabled people, for pay (freeing the family from a life of caregiving) only side-steps the i...
I'm going to risk going down a meaningless rabbit hole here of semantic nothingness --
But I still disagree with your distinction, although I do appreciate the point you're making. I view, and think the correct way to view, the human brain as simply a special case of any other computer. You're correct that we have, as a collective species, proven and defined these abstract patterns. Yet even all these patterns are based on observations and rules of reasoning between our mind and the empirical reality. We can use our neurons to generate more sequences in a p...
This.