Belated apologies for cranky tone on this comment.
Done, thanks for the feedback!
I made the mistake I'm talking about---assuming certain things were well-known.
I actually think Liron's slideshow needs a lot of work, but it seems very much like the kind of thing LWers should be trying to do out in the world.
the slideshow was completely useless to me
Yes, of course it was. It was created for teenagers who are utterly unfamiliar with this way of thinking.
its quality was poor
OK. Can you improve it or do better?
Definitely worth reading up. K & T are the intellectual fathers of the entire modern heuristics and biases program. There was some earlier work (e.g. Allais) but from what I hazily recall that work was fairly muddled conceptually.
Funny. I feel like on OB and LW utility theory is generally taken as the air we breathe.
Upvoted for calling your own post "completely wrong"!
Vladimir - "concentrated confusion", "a thousand angry cats": that's exactly the kind of spice that your earlier post needed! :-)
Also fewer function words...
I don't at all disagree that for those who can do it, the CS/math parlay is excellent.
I am very successful in my secret identity life, so no, this is not some kind of grass-is-greener observation; rather, it's an attempt to give practical advice to my younger selves out there. I majored in math and physics, and did well, and am in the world now, and can concretely see the ways that a CS education would have helped me, ways that people less smart than I am think better!
As soon as I graduated with a CS degree I realized I should have been in philosophy the whole time.
I'm comparing CS only to other technical majors.
...CS is not something e
True, but what I want to emphasize is that the CS way of thinking is extremely valuable outside of the software field.
I think the problem is a combination of:
Comparing to Robin's and Eliezer's stuff, the gold standards:
Robin's are generally very short, high-level, and high-density. Easy to read quickly for "what's this about? do I care?" and then reread several times to think carefully about.
Eliezer's are long and lower-density but meticulous and car...
That's because you didn't specify the sequence ahead of time, right?
Groundless or not, if you propoose to run two experiments X and Y, and select outcomes x of experiment X and y of experiment Y before running the experiments, and assign x and y the same probabilities, you have to be equally surprised by x occurring as you are by y occurring, or I'm missing something deep about what you're saying about probabilities. Are you using the word "probability" in a different sense than Jaynes?
This post confused me enormously. I thought I must be missing something, but reading over the comments, this seems to be true for virtually all readers.
What exactly do you mean by "bead jar guess"? "Surprise"? "Actual probability"? Are you making a new point or explaining something existing? Are you purposely being obscure "to make us think"?
I propose replacing this entire post with the following text:
Hey everybody! Read E.T. Jaynes's Probability Theory: The Logic Of Science!
Relatively rational people can form deeply irrational groups, and vice versa.
I would probably take a group with rational institutions but irrational members over a group with irrational institutions but rational members.
Of course, rational people will be better on average at building rational groups, so I would still predict a positive correlation in the experiment.
I was several years away from starting to learn about x-rationality when I met my partner.
Since there seems to be some interest, I'm going to try to collect my thoughts to describe the contribution of x-rationality to my personal life, but this may take considerable time; I've never tried to put it in words, and there's a strong dash of "dancing about architecture" to it.
I wanted to avoid the anecdotes-ain't-data writeoff and to avoid making the post too much about me specifically. Is that a mistake?
I love the word "aspiring." It feels...aspirational. Humble.
I don't like "Less Wronger" or other names that are about the affiliation rather than the thing itself.
A week ago I would have thought this was a silly discussion. As I've thought more about LW's group nature, I've realized that this kind of cultural thing does matter.
It feels group-narcissistic to waste time on this, but the small difference this makes will be magnified over years and hundreds of thousands of repetitions. E.g.: at some point a major news outlet will do an article on OB/LW, and it will repeatedly use whatever the self-moniker is, and impressions of OB/LW will be slightly altered. (Parallel: I can't stop being marginally more negative o...
There are three specific examples linked to; I agree that I could/should have done more.
Judgement Day by Nathaniel Branden. (I think this is the same book as My Years With Ayn Rand.)
Hero becomes Ayn Rand's closest confidant, co-builder of Objectivism, lover; gets drummed out.
Message: every cause wants to be a cult; the enormous power of personal charisma; an excellent antidote for the recalcitrant Objectivist in your life.
I disagree strongly that "the danger of leverage" is the key message of LTCM. The key message for rationalists has to do with the subtle nature of correlation; the key message for risk managers has to do with the importance of liquidity.
"The danger of leverage" also isn't much of a message. That's like saying the message of the Iraq War is "the danger of foreign policy."
Does "popular belief" hold that LTCM wasn't hedged? Anyone who believes that is very far from learning anything from the LTCM story.
Not to focus exclusively on markets, and it's not a book, but this page of a Michael Lewis piece from Portfolio.com is a crucial read (and short!):
I was shocked to learn that when the big Wall Street firms all became public companies, which is arguably the most important precursor event to the current unpleasantness, many people knew this was a terrible idea!
There are at least two parts to the failure message: think carefully about the public ...
What are the best books about the fall of the Roman Empire?
This seems like one of the most important failures in history, and most important to understand.
I just started Peter Heather's book, but haven't read enough to say anything except that the writing is a bit clunky.
A Demon Of Our Own Design by Richard Bookstaber
This book came out two years ago but reads like it was just written.
The lesson is similar to e.g. When Genius Failed but it gets into the grit a bit more and is more detailedly insightful about markets. Bookstaber has worked in markets rather than just writing about them, and it shows.
Dull in spots, but that's fairly standard in books like this, since you can't sell a 130-page book.
I don't buy this account of Enron, which has become the standard fable. There was a lot there that was more like straight-up fraud than smart people overcomplicating things and missing the down-home common sense.
Edit: I agree with the "hiding from reality = downward spiral" part strongly.
Thanks; I had forgotten about that post.
I'd like to understand the precise arguments so that I can understand the limits, so that I can think about Robin and Eliezer's disagreement, so I can get intuition for the Hanson/Cowen statement that "A more detailed analysis says not only that people must ultimately agree, but also that the discussion path of their alternating expressed opinions must follow a random walk." I'm guessing that past the terminology it's not actually that complicated, but I haven't been able to find the four hours to understand all the terminology and structure.
This post feels out of accord with the Virtues. It feels like a debate brief against religion rather than a curious, light, humble, empirical exploration. "On the wrong side of every moral issue in American history"? "Denying the government billions in tax revenue"? This doesn't strike me as the talk of a truthseeker; rather, a polemicist.
Religion is true (vague, but you know what I mean I hope) with a very low odds ratio, perhaps 1-to-100k against? In any case way down in the hazy low probability region where the intuition has a h...
Hm. I'm far from an expert, and it could well be that there are ten times as many anonymous attacks, but off the top of my head I think of WTC '93, the Millenium plot, 9/11, London trains, Madrid trains, Israel suicide bombings, Munich massacre, Iraq beheadings, USS Cole, bombings of US embassies.
Not off the top of my head: Golden Mosque bombing, Tamil Tigers numerous bombings, IRA-related terrorism, etc. Scanning through this I find many more terrorist attacks that were done with a clear political or propaganda purpose.
The fear and hatred of gambling. Contra Tyler Cowen, betting your beliefs is one of the best paths to both individual and group rationality. You should be doing it twice a day, like brushing your teeth. The beliefs that don't get bet get cavities and rot; the beliefs that are unbettable create unbreakable deadlocks that later require ophtalmological intervention. Bet!
Modeling terrorists as trying to kill as many people as possible strikes me as insufficient. In Terror and Consent, Philip Bobbitt models their aims as propagandistic, which feels more like the right angle---hence the focus on inefficient but spectacular killing.
That assumes beginners know what they know, which strikes me as a poor assumption.
That link doesn't work due to the angle brackets.
Rereading some of those old posts it's fascinating to see how much Eliezer's writing has sharpened from then to now!
I can't get the html links to work; can someone help?
To be clear, my comment above isn't meant to be a "charge"! Among other things, Eliezer is exceptionally gifted at making ideas interesting and accessible in a way that Robin isn't at all. I'm looking forward to his book coming out and changing the world.
I personally love his stuff, and think it's great 1) for people that are completely new to these ideas; 2) for people that are fairly advanced and have the ideas deep in their bones.
For people in between, I sometimes feel like his writing presents too much of a glide path---answers too many q...
It's much more than peer pressure. Eliezer, along with the other authors, use a confident, rhythmic, almost biblical style, which is very entertaining and compelling. You don't just learn deep things with EY, you feel like you're learning deep things. Robin Hanson's thought is incredibly deep, but his style is much more open, and I would guess you find his writings not to have this property.
Robin and Eliezer have debated writing style over at OB, and I highly recommend you read that debate, Patrick.
You should also, in my opinion, be very cautious abou...
I should note that if I'm teaching deep things, then I view it as important to make people feel like they're learning deep things, because otherwise, they will still have a hole in their mind for "deep truths" that needs filling, and they will go off and fill their heads with complete nonsense that has been written in a more satisfying style.
Occasionally, well-respected community members could say things that are intentionally false, but persuasive and subtle, a la http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/02/my-favorite-lia.html.
You get points for catching these mistakes. Perhaps you submit your busts privately to some arbiter so others have the same challenge.
Later, the error is revealed and discussed.
This would also have the benefit of causing everyone to read the most-respected members' writings ultra-critically, rather than sitting back and being spoon-fed.
One key thing this idea has is short t...
The phraseology "raise them X" suggests to me inculcating deep, emotional, childhood-locked belief in X. The only X for which that seems supportable is rationality itself.
Raise them many-worlds.
I do a lot of interviewing candidates for jobs, and it's essential to be aware of both those concepts. In working on our hiring process, we discuss both concepts, in words very similar to yours.
I've heard occasional complaints about certain things we do in our interviews, of the form "what does X have to do with being a good Y?!". These complaints invariably come from people who didn't get offers, and give me a warm glow at having made the correct decision.
No idea the extent to which EY's approval upped this, but what I can say is that I was less than half through the post before I jumped to the bottom, voted Up, and looked for any other way to indicate approval.
It's immediately surprising, interesting, obvious-in-retrospect-only, and most importantly, relevant to everyday life. Superb.
I do not think your claim is what you think it is.
I think your claim is that some people mistake the model for the reality, the map for the territory. Of course models are simpler than reality! That's why they're called "models."
Physics seems to have gotten wiser about this. The Newtonians, and later the Copenhagenites, did fall quite hard for this trap (though the Newtonians can be forgiven to some degree!). More recently, however, the undisputed champion physical model, whose predictions hold to 987 digits of accuracy (not really), has the ... (read more)