All of NatashaRostova's Comments + Replies

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... (read more)

0Lumifer
Colorful language is perfectly fine. It's refusing to reason and to support one's arguments with evidence that is frowned upon.

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... (read more)

0phl43
But, as I explained in the post I published yesterday about what I would like to do with my blog, I don't want it to become an echo chamber. So I don't just want to increase the number of people, I also want to attract intelligent people. I'll probably just post here only things which deal with evidence and I will tone down the language so as not to turn off people. That being said, I think the argument in my piece on hate crimes was perfectly sound and did provide evidence, notwithstanding the abrasive language.

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.

0Anders_H
Good question. I think a lot of this is due to a cultural difference between those of us who have been trained in the modern counterfactual causal framework, and an old generation of methodologists who felt the old framework worked well enough for them and never bothered to learn about counterfactuals.

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.

It's hard to think of how one could do a lit review on that without, like, a thousand sources to try and characterize the general scope of the problem.

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,... (read more)

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.

5Vaniver
I think the SSC comments are pretty bad, but I'm not sure they're any worse on politics than other topics.
4TiffanyAching
FWIW, I was linked to a SSC post today about "race and criminal justice in America" - so, five-alarm hot button topic - and I quickly read through about half of a super-long comments section, and it was great. Plenty of debate, minimal spittle, collaborative and civil, fact-based and in good faith.
3Lumifer
SSC does quite well with politics. I would guess that some of it is because discussion is high-brow, some of it is because other users don't have problems pointing out that someone is an idiot, but mostly because Scott has little compunctions about banning. For example, at some point he basically banned all vocal NRx people because he didn't want SSC to be primarily seen as a neoreactionary forum. SSC also has a fairly user-hostile UI which by now I think is deliberate as Scott doesn't want to shepherd a large community.

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.

2steven0461
I don't think LW is, in fact, capable of talking about politics rationally; if it did, it wouldn't have much influence; and trying will harm its core interests through divisiveness, distraction, drawing bad users, and further reputational damage.
6Viliam
One important difference between LW and SSC: Everyone knows that SSC is Scott's blog. Scott is a dictator, and if he wants to announce his own opinions visibly, he can post them in a separate article, in a way no one else can compete with. It would be difficult to misrepresent Scott's opinions by posting on SSC. LW is a group blog (Eliezer is no longer active here). So in addition to talk about individual users who post here, it also makes sense to ask what does the "hive mind" think, i.e. what is the general consensus here. Especially because we talk here about Aumann agreement theorem, wisdom of crowds, etc. So people can be curious about the "wisdom of the LW crowd". Similarly, when a third party describes SSC, they cannot credibly accuse Scott of what someone else wrote in the comments; the dividing line between Scott and his comentariat is obvious. But it is quite easy to cherry-pick some LW comments and say "this is what the LW community actually believes". There were repeated attempts to create a fake image of what the LW community believes, coming as far as I know from two sources. First, various "SJWs" were offended that some opinions were not banned here, and that some topics were allowed to be discussed calmly. (It doesn't matter whether the problematic opinion was a minority opinion, or even whether it was downvoted. The fact that it wasn't immediately censored is enough to cause outrage.) Second, the neoreactionary community decided to use these accusations as a recruitment tool, and they started spreading a rumor that the rationalist community indeed supports them. There was a time when they tried to make LW about neoreaction, by repeatedly creating discussion threads about themselves. Such as: "Political thread: neoreactionaries, tell me what do you find most rational about neoreaction"; obviously fishing for positive opinions. Then they used such threads as a "proof" that rationalists indeed find neoreaction very rational, etc. -- After some time
0Qiaochu_Yuan
Agreed. I think avoiding politics on LW does more harm than good overall these days, and that people get mindkilled in plenty of other ways even without it. (I personally don't want to talk about politics on LW, but I'm in favor of other people doing so, especially to the extent that it results in political action.)
3Lumifer
To allow the clusterfuck of politics inside you need robust filters against torrents of foam, spittle, and incoherent rage. Generally speaking, this means either wise and active moderation or a full-featured set of tools for the users to curate their own feed/timeline. At the moment LW has neither.

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... (read more)

Good luck! I'm looking forward to reading your ebook on 5 easy tips on how to unlock my inner high-IQ potential.

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."

As someone who wants more top-notch rationalist politics on LW, without moderators removing it, I think moderators should remove this.

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... (read more)

1niceguyanon
Are you saying that cognitive biases like endowment effect and priming map better to lab settings therefore are less susceptible to contrived experiments to prove them like ego depletion? I don't know whether or not these map well to a lab or not, but priming research is one of the major areas under going a replication crisis; not sure about the endowment effect.

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... (read more)

3Jiro
Assuming for the sake of argument that a counterfactual me with a chicken pet would become emotionally attached to it and be unwilling to eat chickens, that still begs the question of whether the counterfactual me is acting rationally or not. Perhaps I'm just recognizing that a counterfactual me is vulnerable to having his thought processes hacked. I could equally well say "a counterfactual me who was kidnapped at birth and raised by Christians would grow up to be a Christian. So I should be a Christian now." Or even "a counterfactual me who joined Scientology out of curiosity would be overcome by Scientology's conditioning and come to actually believe in Scientology, so I should believe in Scientology now."
0Gordon Seidoh Worley
We are all finite beings, so "rational" must be finite approximation of rational, so although there is a question about how far to apply systematic rationality to your thinking, that is itself not a question fully answerable by systematic rationality (although you could do a finite approximation of such an answer). Whether or not your thinking is rational here is not at stake so much as asking how much effort do you want to expend on coming up with an answer and what things you are willing to consider as evidence (counterfactual selves, for example) and how you will weigh them.

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... (read more)

0The_Jaded_One
And most disgusting of all, probably doesn't get counted as a lie. This is the problem I have with Gleb's claim about Trump lying more - the SJWs have found ways of lying that are not technically lies.

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... (read more)

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.

0The_Jaded_One
yeah, you should do. I feel like knowing the key posts and ideas is helpful. For example West Hunter has a wide range of types of posts: some are goofing off and some are really important. Same with gnxp.

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 ... (read more)

2The_Jaded_One
Thanks, that's an interesting perspective! You know it occurs to me that it would be nice to have some kind of guide to all the "forbidden knowledge" that's out there - West Hunter, HBDChick, Infoproc.

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... (read more)

1Decius
The reason why culturally homogenous groups are higher trust is racism. The discussion from both sides needs to be about bad things, and racism is not infinitely bad or even any more inherently bad than inequality is.
0Gleb_Tsipursky
I see the situation right now as more liberals being closer to rational thinking than more conservatives, but it hasn't been the case in the past. I don't know how this document would read if more conservatives were closer to rational thinking. Regarding the Muslim issue, you might want to check out the radio interview I linked in the document. It shows very clearly how I got a conservative talk show host to update toward being nicer to Muslims. If you're interested in participating in this project, email me at gleb [at] intentionalinsights [dot] org
1bogus
For what it's worth, I think "dissident/alternative/reactionary" activists have a lot to learn still about what politics is actually like in the real world. Deliberation and compromise are critically important in real-world politicking, while writing obscure theoretical essays ala Moldbug and other 'neo-reactionary' thinkers is a lot less relevant. (Of course, this failure mode is by no means unique to neo-reactionaries - plenty of radical leftists do the same thing!) And I don't think that even Donald Trump and his 'alt-right' supporters, who are obviously a lot closer to wielding real power, can escape this need for finding good compromises. (Especially in the longer run.) Nitpick - a lot of people really want to believe this. ISTM that they do not care so much about understanding Donald Trump or his constituency, and they're still trying to whitewash the blatant strategic mistakes of the Hillary Clinton campaign.

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... (read more)

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, ... (read more)

2paulfchristiano
I agree with you that there is no difference in kind between the assets traded in existing financial markets and those traded in a prediction market. Existing prediction markets primarily offer amusements to participants, and are run like other gambling sites, with a profit to the market and the average trader losing money. Existing markets may hedge some participants' risk, and in that respect are like a financial market. Around here, prediction markets are usually proposed as an institution for making predictions (following Robin). In that context, someone who wants a prediction subsidizes the market, perhaps by subsidizing a market maker. The traders aren't trading because it's fun or they have a hedging interest, they are doing it because they are getting paid by someone who values the cognitive work they are doing. In some cases this is unnecessary, because someone has a natural interest in influencing the prediction (e.g. if the prediction will determine whether to fire a CEO, then the CEO has a natural interest in ensuring that the prediction is favorable). In this case the decision-maker pays for the cognitive work of the traders by making a slightly suboptimal decision. Manipulative traders pay for the right to influence the decision, and informed traders are compensated by being counterparties to a manipulative trader. I think this is the important distinction between a prediction market and other kinds of markets---in the case of prediction markets, traders make money because someone is willing to pay for the information generated by the market. I agree that this is not the case for existing prediction markets, and so it's not clear if my story is reasonable. But it is clear that there is a difference in kind between the intended use of prediction markets and other financial markets.

Literally the only difference in terms of prediction dynamics is that currently prediction markets include political/non-financial questions, which are only implicitly included in financial markets.

3paulfchristiano
I think of the difference as: a prediction market is subsidized by someone with an interest in the information (or participants who want to influence some decision-maker who will act on the basis of market prices), while a financial market facilitates trade (or as a special case hedges risk).

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 ... (read more)

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.

0satt
Thinking along basically the same lines, I tried to access the actual paper via its DOI link and got redirected to a "Production in progress" page. So we have what looks suspiciously like an embargo!

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... (read more)

0Lumifer
They only have to claim this. Many merely imply this without bothering to provide arguments. And that's precisely the point where the disentangling of the empirical and the normative rears up and shouts: Hold on! What is this "optimal" thing? Optimal for whom, how, and according to which values? I don't think so. Marx thought the proletarian revolution to be inevitable and that is NOT a normative statement. He also thought it to be a good thing which is normative, but those are two different claims. Oh, I think it happens all the time: Should we go eat now or in an hour? Alice: Now. Bob: In an hour. That's a normative disagreement without any sign of different empirics. In more extended normative arguments people usually feel obliged to present a biased picture of the world to support their conclusions, but if you drill down it's not uncommon to find that two different people agree on what the world is, but disagree about the ways it should be... adjusted.

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... (read more)

2James_Miller
Yes, this article I wrote about Valentine's Day: http://www.ideasinactiontv.com/tcs_daily/2003/02/valentines-day-trap.html

Based on their other comments (accusing a post of mine of being 'homophobic' -- nonsensically) , and their username, it's a troll.

You're not saying my post was homophobic, are you? I don't think anyone here has been homophobic, or close.

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... (read more)

4RomeoStevens
Strongly agree. As a teenager, my experience was that so many of the variables that affected my experience were kept from my control that I developed learned helplessness about the rest. Learning about things like locus of control seems like it would have helped me.

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.

2MrMind
I think it's not stupid. Often in real cases and applied rationality you don't have cleanly cooked up priors and distributions. You only have data like the series above, and it's up to you to draw conclusions. Success happens when you are modest in your suppositions and able to change idea based on future evidence.

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... (read more)

0ChristianKl
I think the progressive default is that individuals don't have the burden to lead their sex lives in way their family approves of. When you present "We don't know how their families would react on an aggregate scale" as an argument you question that progressive default. Homosexuality is as good of an example where parents can object to the sexual habits of their children as this example is. I do think it makes sense to follow clearly beneficial social norms for the sake of society as a whole. In this case you don't make any specific case of why the social norm is worth protecting and a huge part of why the norm exists is due reasons that became obsolete with the introduction of birth control. Isn't your whole post about how rationality leads to the violation of the morality that traditions prescribe?

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... (read more)

Good point. I agree. I think the point I was making could be abstracted away from it anyway, so I edited my post accordingly.

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. ... (read more)

1ChristianKl
I'm not saying that there are no parents who care about the fact that their children aren't homosexual or that it's unimportant to them. It seems to me like homosexuality is a much better example if you are sincere about exploring how traditional morality has advantages then deciding how a woman spends single day of her life. Yes, the woman might be more independent if she self funds university then being dependent on her parents funding her but the fact that homosexuals don't pass on their genes to their children mean that parents don't pass on their genes to grandchildren. Instead of being clear and making that argument you talk about weird rationalists who are strange. It seems like you don't treat woman as individual people instead of some general abstract group. It possible that a rationalist woman who reads the post makes the decision that her life is better of if she makes the choice. The post doesn't say that any such woman should make the choice but just raises the awareness about the fact that it's a possible choice. Pointing to possible actions that individuals can take that have the possibility to produce massive value for the person is a good habit. Not being charitable in arguing against and for his simpler and best points is especially problematic given the privacy violation of taking a statement from facebook into a more public forum.

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... (read more)

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 ... (read more)

9gwern
It is a fundamental flaw. A cost is not a benefit, nor is it a profit. This is a hard and fast point, similar to: p-values are not posterior probabilities; probabilities are not utilities; correlations are not causations; maps are not territories; and so on. When Sarah asks This is a great and valid question! I have many strong opinions on the topic, such as the high human cost of the War on Drugs and whether the prison rape epidemic is a good idea. However, it has next to nothing to do with the raw total of how many people are in prison. Because the deterrence tremendously affects everyone else and costs are not benefits. With something like cancer, it is totally reasonable to ask how many people have cancer to estimate an upper bound on the value of researching cancer. If 1m people have skin cancer, this is a good starting point for upper bounding the value of skin cancer research - maybe skin cancer research is totally intractable and it's worth $0, but you can be sure the value is <1m people. And if $1b gets spent on treating skin cancer every year, it's reasonable to suggest that the value must be at least $1b. This is because cancer is a very nicely behaved problem and we do not live in a world where if you cut skin cancer treatment budgets by 50%, the skin cancers might start exploding and infecting everyone in a chain reaction of ever growing Akira-sized cancer blobs causing the collapse of skyscrapers and the end of Western civilization and life as we know it and everyone agrees as they roam the wastelands looking for gasoline that this is very unfortunate and we probably should've not cut the skin cancer budget.

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... (read more)

3gwern
The same person you're saying is being modest and merely examining one part of the problem is the one who dismisses out of hand any talk of deterrence as being (I quote) "cartoon supervillain" thinking. ---------------------------------------- If she really wanted to approach this sensibly, she would've started with it being an explicit cost-benefit approach and compared a widely-agreed-upon inefficiency in the prison system - for example, if she had started with a discussion of the net QALY loss due to incarceration for marijuana-related crimes (which I believe now a majority or near-majority of the USA, and supermajority of LWers and her readers believe should be decriminalized and/or legalized as having minimal social & health costs) and compared that to existing disease death tolls. That would be an interesting, valid, and intellectually relevant comparison. To talk about the system as a whole and dismiss out of hand any discussion of the (huge, enormous, by many orders of magnitude, because it makes it possible for there to be a USA at all with anything approaching its current population size compared to a hunter-gatherer tribal equilibrium) benefits of a working legal system is just plain bizarre. She's not even correct when she tries to excuse her dismissal by saying The current cost of prison in lives is nothing remotely like the marginal profit from shifting to an optimal system, and amusingly, this fallacy is directly addressed by a recent submission: "Costs are not Benefits". Costs are costs - that is all. Saying that you can estimate how much the benefit from optimal criminal justice from how much it currently costs is like saying, 'this random house costs $500k, so the profit from finding the best real estate investment must also be somewhere around $500k!' No, the profit from the optimal decision could be anywhere from -$500k (the Detroit market is in a bubble and you don't want to buy anything because it will soon be worthless after property ta

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.

5Lumifer
Username checks out.

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... (read more)

2moridinamael
Thanks for sharing the essay. I like your framing that thoughts represents attempts to "fit" the nonlinear dynamics of reality. This might actually be a more clarifying phrasing than the more general term "mapping" that I commonly see used. It makes the failure modes more obvious to imagine the brain as a highly intertwined group of neural networks attempting to find some highly compressive, very high R2 "fit" to the data of the world. "Classification" is a task we canonically use neural networks for, and it's not surprising that classification is both fundamental to human thought and potentially highly pathological. Perusing Stove's list of 40 wrong statements, through the lense of "if this statement were the output of an artificial neural network, what would the neural network be doing wrong?", I feel like a lot of them are indeed classification errors. "Three" is a label that is activated by classification circuitry. The neural classification circuitry abstracts "three-ness" from the datastream as a useful compression. I myself have trained a neural network to accurately count the number of balls in a video stream; that neural network has a concept of three-ness. Unlike that particular neural network, humans then introspect on three-ness and get confused about what it is. We get further confused because "three-ness" has other innate properties in the context of mathematics, unlike, say, "duck-ness". We feel like it must be explained beyond just being a useful compression filter. "Three is a real object." "There is no real number three." "Three is an essence." "There is an ideal three which transcends actual triples of objects." Almost any of the statements of the form "Three is ... " fall into this trap of being overinterpretations of a classification scheme. All of the above can probably be corrected by consistently replacing the symbol with the substance and tabooing words, rather than playing syntactic games with symbols.

+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... (read more)

2skeptical_lurker
Choosing to abandon and burn Moscow, while perhaps not strategic brilliance, seems like an impressive willingness to make sacrifices.

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... (read more)

The only downside is it tends to be correlated with an identity that people reject off hand. I know lots of alt-right/paleo-con sites use hatefacts, and sometimes play fast and loose with the term.

PS: Huge fan of your interview series. I've listened to them all!

1James_Miller
Thanks for the positive feedback on my interviews.

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... (read more)

0sen
I don't understand what point you're making with the computer, as we seem to be in complete agreement there. Nothing about the notion of ideals and definitions suggests that computers can't have them or their equivalent. It's obvious enough that computers can represent them, as you demonstrated with your example of natural numbers. It's obvious enough that neurons and synapses can encode these things, and that they can fire in patterned ways based on them because... well that's what neurons do, and neurons seem to be doing to bulk of the heavy lifting as far as thinking goes. Where we disagree is in saying that all concepts that our neurons recognize are equivalent and that they should be reasoned about in the same way. There are clearly some notions that we recognize as being valid only after seeing sufficient evidence. For these notions, I think bayesian reasoning is perfectly well-suited. There are also clearly notions we recognize as being valid for which no evidence is required. For these, I think we need something else. For these notions, only usefulness is required, and sometimes not even that. Bayesian reasoning cannot deal with this second kind because their acceptability has nothing to do with evidence. You argue that this second kind is irrelevant because these things exist solely in people's minds. The problem is that the same concepts recur again and again in many people minds. I think I would agree with you if we only ever had to deal with a physical world in which people's minds did not matter all that much, but that's not the world we live in. If you want to be able to reliably convey your ideas to others, if you want to understand how people think at a more fundamental level, if you want your models to be useful to someone other than yourself, if you want to develop ideas that people will recognize as valid, if you want to generalize ideas that other people have, if you want your thoughts to be integrated with those of a community for mutual benef
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