Hm, not sure what happened to the Washington Post comments. Sorry about that. Here's my guess as to what I was thinking:
The axes are comparing an average (median income) to a total (student loan debt). This is generally a recipe for uninformative comparisons. Worse, the average is both per person and per year. So by itself this tells you little about the debt burden shouldered by a typical member of a generation. For example, you could easily see growth in total debt while individual debt burden fell, depending on the growth in degrees awarded and the
My past occasional blogging included a few exercises that might be of interest. I'm pretty sure #4 is basically an expanded version of something from the Sequences, although I don't recall which post exactly. Others are more open ended. (Along the lines of #5 I've been casually collecting examples of scientific controversy and speculation with relatively clear-cut resolutions for the purposes of giving interested laypeople practice evaluating these things, to the extent that's possible. I don't know if I'll ever get around to ...
I did #4 and #1. Here is what I wrote for each section of #4 (note: this will spoil your ability to do the exercise if you read it).
1. How do you explain these effects?
Seems like a trick question. Like, I have models of the world that feel like they might predict effects 2 and 3, and I can sort of wrangle explanations for 1 and 4, but my split-second reaction is “I’m not sure these are real effects, probably none replicate (though number 2 sounds like it might just be a restatement of a claim I already believe)”.
2. How would you h
Maybe we're talking about different things, but from the page I'm on now where I'm looking at and replying to the discussion of the link (https://www.lesserwrong.com/posts/vhAJ4DBXZukE7SNtq/how-popper-killed-particle-physics/) the only link to the actual article is still gjm's. In particular, the title of the blog post is not a link, although I would have expected it to be. To get to the actual article I have to click on the linkpost title in one of the other post listings (Featured/Frontpage/All). This happens to me for all link posts and for different browsers on both mobile and desktop.
Content note: This is a collection/expansion of stuff I've previously posted about elsewhere. I've gathered it here because it's semi-related to Eliezer's recent posts. It's not meant to be a response to the "inadequacy" toolbox or a claim to ownership of any particular idea, but only one more perspective people may find useful as they're thinking about these things.
For what it's worth, I was another (the other?) person who downvoted the comment in question early (having upvoted the post, mostly for explaining an unfamiliar interesting thing clearly).
Catching up on all this has been a little odd to me. I'm obviously not a culture lord, but also my vote wasn't about this question of "the bar" except (not that I would naturally frame it this way) perhaps as far as I read CoolShirtMcPants as doing something similar to what you said you were doing---"here is my considered position on this, I
Two more thoughts: the above is probably more common in [what I intuitively think of as] "physical" problems where the parameters have some sort of geometric or causal relationship, which is maybe less meaningful for neural networks?
Also, for optimization more broadly, your constraints will give you a way to wind up with many parameters that can't be changed to decrease your function, without requiring a massive coincidence. (The boundary of the feasible region is lower-dimensional.) Again, I guess not something deep learning has to worry about in full generality.
Hm. Thinking of this in terms of the few relevant projects I've worked on, problems with (nominally) 10,000 parameters definitely had plenty of local minima. In retrospect it's easy to see how. Saddles could be arbitrarily long, where many parameters basically become irrelevant depending on where you're standing, and the only way out is effectively restarting. More generally, the parameters were very far from independent. Besides the saddles, for example, you had rough clusters of parameters where you'd want all or none but not half to
I think the main thing I want to say [besides my response to Oliver below] is that this post was not framed in my head as starting a conversation in response to your post, but as gesturing in the direction of some under-emphasized considerations as one contribution in a long-running conversation about rationalist jargon. Of course, I ended up opening with and only taking quotes from you, and now it looks the way it does, i.e. targeting your "bid" but somewhat askew. So that was a mistake, for which I apologize.
Also, I know I basically asked for y
Pretty much agreed. I might go beyond "provisional" to "disposable". I really do take maintaining fluidity and not fooling yourself to be more important/possible than creating common vocabulary or high-level unitary concepts or introspective handles [though I don't introspect verbally, so maybe I would say that]; I really do think the way the community treats words is a good lever for that.
(Of course, this is all very abstract, isn't a full elaboration of what I believe, and certainly has no force of argument. At best, I'
I appreciate your outspokenness on these things. Writing like yours on EA has made me pause after having been resigned for a long time that these communities weren't (and maybe never were) growing towards my idealizations of them. I don't know how much we want the same things, and anyway I'm perhaps too much of an outsider with other commitments these days to make too much noise, but I'll continue to look forward to your posting.
Taking up your framework, I'm not sure how much of what I see is predatory behavior by sociopaths (thoug
(I don't consider this rude at all, and will welcome your post-mulling thoughts should you choose to add them. I can also say more about where I'm coming from when I get the chance.)
Yeah, my autocorrect guessed what he meant easily enough, but I'm convinced. I think I just needed to see someone else say this.
Woah! That sounds very unusual---it might be valuable for you talk about all that explicitly rather than write more like this post (which was presumably generated from your internalization of all that study, but which doesn't go out of its way to show it).
(Also, for what it's worth, I thought the title "Theodicy in Humans" was good---good enough for me to generate an approximation of the post before even reading it, although with slightly different context I'd have expected "theodicy" to be a derogatory analogy. And to bi
Also in favor of not only reserving judgment but ideally deferring exposure until one can seriously evaluate things, You Can't Not Believe Everything You Read; and then there's the mere-exposure effect to worry about, especially from prolific authors or in environments with a lot of repetition. (This is again the weird thing where you have apparently opposite biases which show up in similar situations, and it may not be obvious which direction you'll be taken. In this case I'd guess it depends on one's initial disposition and the l
Venue also matters a lot through the social context it brings. Individual Wordpress blogs often feel like you're saying "this is where my writing lives; by commenting, you're coming into my house", which can be challenging to take lightly -- especially when you're talking about a neighborhood of individual blogs, few of which get regular comments. Meanwhile social media is a weird mix of jokes and personal content with discussion-oriented ideas, where there's an uncertain rudeness in potentially burying someone with attention
I appreciate this perspective! My first instinct is to zoom out from stock phrases to entire ideas or arguments while drafting (when everything is working well, sentences or paragraphs get translated atomically like this), then use 'close reading' as an editing tactic. But you're right that zooming in to find the exact word when stuck on the page can also be very focusing (as it were). And there's a lot of room for interplay between the two approaches, as far as there's even a clean separation between self-expression and self-editing in the first place.
I've started cleaning up and posting some old drafts on my blog. I've drifted away, but some of them may be of interest to people still here. Most directly up this alley so far would be this post recommending people read Trial By Mathematics.
I like this post. I lean towards skepticism about the usefulness of calibration or even accuracy, but I'm glad to find myself mostly in agreement here.
For lots of practical (to me) situations, a little bit of uncertainty goes a long way concerning how I actually decide what to do. It doesn't really matter how much uncertainty, or how well I can estimate the uncertainty. It's better for me to just be generally humble and make contingency plans. It's also easy to imagine that being well-calibrated (or knowing that you are) could actually demolish biases that...
If I can introduce a problem domain that doesn't get a lot of play in these communities but (I think) should:
End-of-life healthcare in the US seems like a huge problem (in terms of cost, honored preferences, and quality of life for many people) that's relatively tractable for its size. The balance probably falls in favor of making things happen rather than researching technical questions, but I'm hoping it still belongs here.
There's a recent IOM report that covers the presently bleak state of affairs and potential ways forward pretty thoroughly. One major ...
You can predict how long tasks/projects will take you (stopwatch and/or calendar time). Even if calibration doesn't generalize, it's potentially useful on its own there. And while you can't quite mass-produce questions/predictions, it's not such a hassle to rack up a lot if you do them in batches. Malcolm Ocean wrote about doing this with a spreadsheet, and I threw together an Android todo-with-predictions app for a similar self experiment.
I measured science and technology output per scientist using four different lists of significant advances, and found that significant advances per scientist declined by 3 to 4 orders of magnitude from 1800 to 2000. During that time, the number of scientific journals has increased by 3 to 4 orders of magnitude, and a reasonable guess is that so did the number of scientists.
I'd be really interested in reading more about this.
Yeah, that happened when I edited a different part from my phone. Thanks, fixed.
See this tumblr post for an example of Ozy expressing dissatisfaction with Scott's lack of charity in his analysis of SJ (specifically in the "Words, Words, Words" post). My impression is that this is a fairly regular occurrence.
You might be right about him not having updated. If anything it seems that his updates on the earlier superweapons discussion have been reverted. I'm not sure I've seen anything comparably charitable from him on the subject since. I don't follow his thoughts on feminism particularly closely, so I could easily be wrong (an...
I wrote down a handful as I was doing this, but not all of them. There were a couple about navigation (where rather than say "well, I don't know where I am, I'll just trust the group" I figured out how I was confused about different positions of landmarks). I avoided overbaking my cookies when the recipe had the wrong time written down. Analytics for a site I run pointed to a recent change causing problems for some people, and I saw the (slight) pattern right away but ignored it until it got caught on my confusion hook. It's also a nice hook for ...
Thanks, I'm glad you liked it!
Did someone link this recently? It seems to have gotten a new burst of votes.
There are concept inventories in a lot of fields, but these vary in quality and usefulness. The most well-known of these is the Force Concept Inventory for first semester mechanics, which basically aims to test how Aristotelian/Newtonian a student's thinking is. Any physicist can point out a dozen problems with it, but it seems to very roughly measure what it claims to measure.
Russ Roberts (host of the podcast EconTalk) likes to talk about the "economic way of thinking" and has written and gathered links about ten key ideas like incentives, marke...
If anyone has already posted any similar posts, then I would really appreciate any links.
Off the top of my head, Swimmer963 wrote about her experiences trying meditation, and I wrote about trying to notice confusion better. Gwern has run more serious self-experiments, and he talks about a bunch of them in the context of value of information here.
I find this idea (or a close relative) a useful guide for resolving a heuristic explanation or judgment into a detailed, causal explanation or consequentialist judgment. If someone draws me a engine cycle that creates infinite work out of finite heat (Question 5), I can say it violates the laws of thermodynamics. Of course their engine really is impossible. But there's still confusion: our explanations remain in tension because something's left unexplained. To fully resolve this confusion, I have to look in detail at their engine cycle, and find the error ...
Yes, that's a good example, thanks.
I've collected some quotes from Beyond Discovery, a series of articles commissioned by the National Academy of Sciences from 1997 to 2003 on paths from basic research to useful technology. My comments there:
...The articles (each around 8 pages) are roughly popular-magazine-level accounts of variable quality, but I learned quite a bit from all of them, particularly from the biology and medicine articles. They're very well written, generally with input from the relevant scientists still living (many of them Nobel laureates). In particular I like the broad vie
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Theory also influences what data you consider in the first place. (Are you looking at your own local weather, global surface temperatures, stratospheric temperatures, ocean temperatures, extreme weather events, Martian climate, polar ice, or the beliefs and behavior of climatologists, and over what time scales and eras?) See also philosophy of science since at least Kuhn on theory-laden observation: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/science-theory-observation/
They address this in footnote 4: they're just deriving that the amplitudes squared should be interpreted as probabilities using quantum mechanics as defined, which includes unitary evolution and all that.
You could try the same thing with a QM variant with different mathematical structure, although you might be interested to know that linear transformations that preserve l^p norm for p other than 2 are boring (generalized permutation matrices). So you wouldn't be able to evolve your orthogonal environmental states into the right combinations of identical en...
I'd add that this kind of misunderstanding is frequently mutual; it's generally not the case that one party is sensitive to tone and the other is immune. The version in which someone takes an expression of feeling as an attempt to shame them into silence or otherwise limit allowable discourse is more or less the same failure mode.
Perhaps I say something, unaware that someone with different experiences and perspective might hear it differently, and it makes you mildly uncomfortable (somewhat like your examples). You try to communicate what you're feeling, p...
I've had a similar experience with wishlists. There are some worthwhile corollaries: rather than follow interesting-looking links as you encounter them, open them in new tabs or add them to a read-later list. Or rather than look up everything you have a passing curiosity about, or switch to whatever task catches your immediate attention, add a note to yourself in your GTD/whatever system. If you're like me, your immediate desire will be satisfied by the knowledge that you'll get to it soon if it's important. And when you get around to reviewing these thing...
I have no idea how likely it is, but an alternative explanation is that the vote counts were first converted to percentages to one decimal place, then someone else converted them back to absolute numbers for this announcement.
Failed theories of superconductivity. My favorite part:
...The second idea proposed in 1932 by Bohr and Kronig was that superconductivity would result from the coherent quantum motion of a lattice of electrons. Given Bloch’s stature in the field, theorists like Niels Bohr where eager to discuss their own ideas with him. In fact Bohr, whose theory for superconductivity was already accepted for publication in the July 1932 issue of the journal “Die Naturwissenschaften”, withdrew his article in the proof stage, because of Bloch’s criticism (see Ref.[20]). Kroni
"Be careful" is another good example of an instruction that doesn't really help. The default interpretation seems to be "move slowly and with intense concentration," which can lead to tunnel vision or a failure to act decisively. How to better cash it out depends on the task, but it's often an improvement to promote situational awareness by frequently asking what you expect to happen next and how it will go wrong. For example, "drive defensively" rather than "drive carefully."
I'm not sure if I agree with this characterization of the current political climate; in any case, that's not the point I'm interested in. I'm also not interested in moral relativism.
As an aside, then, if anyone is interested in the sort of thing Stephenson is possibly referring to, David Foster Wallace's essay E. Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction (1993, two years before The Diamond Age) is a classic. In DFW's version, hypocrisy was the monarch of vices for a time, although discourse was not a matter of simply pointing it out (which still requir...
Is there a consensus on the account of unemployment and inflation F. A. Hayek provides in his Nobel Lecture (1974)? I'm sympathetic to the abstract philosophy-of-science considerations he argues there, but I don't know enough (anything) about economics to say whether he's using that account to substantiate those considerations, or he's using those considerations to obliquely promote a controversial account. Here's an excerpt:
...The theory which has been guiding monetary and financial policy during the last thirty years, and which I contend is largely the pr
He said:
When you play bridge with beginners—when you try to help them out—you give them some general rules to go by. Then they follow the rule and something goes wrong. But if you'd had their hand you wouldn't have played the thing you told them to play, because you'd have seen all the reasons the rule did not apply.
from The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt
We're interested in impact in other contexts as well, but we know less about the subject. We're interested in learning more.
I'd hesitate to call your estimate of the social value you'll generate a lower bound, as you do, if you're not sure about the value of the invisible/conventional work you might be persuading people away from. It seems like most of what you're doing and planning should give a boost to any kind of achievement, but I get the sense that much of the Effective Altruist community underestimates the marginal impact of an exceptional person...
I think that attempting to come up with a verbal formalization of our underlying logic and then doing what that formalization dictates is akin to "playing baseball with verbal probabilities"...
I wonder if the extent to which one thinks in words is anti-correlated with sharing that intuition.
I'm a mostly non-verbal thinker and strongly in favor of your arguments. On the other hand, I once dismissed the idea of emotional vocabulary, feeling that it was superfluous at best, and more likely caused problems via reductive, cookie-cutter introspectio...
I made a related argument recently:
...A theory that doesn’t account for detailed behavior is an approximation, and even in scientific domains, you can find conflicting approximations. When that happens—and if you’re not doing science, it’s “when,” not “if”—if you want to keep using your approximation, you have to use the details of the situation to explain why your approximation is valid. Your best defense against reductio ad absurdum, against Proving Too Much, is casuistry. Expect things to be complex, expect details to matter. Don’t ascribe intention or a
I've been writing more, and posting some of it online since January, hoping to get broader feedback. The four articles I posted here seemed well-received, although they didn't generate much discussion. More have gone up on my personal site, including some self-indulgent fiction. Think Star Maker fanfiction, but only of the pedantic, moralizing parts, not of the wonder-and-terror-inspiring parts.
Most recently, I gathered some thoughts I'd scattered into recent comments and tweets for an essay on "principled" reasoning. It's probably relevant to LW...
Right, it seems kind of strange to declare that you're considering only states of the world in your decisions, but then to treat judgments of right and wrong as an deontological layer on top of that where you consider whether the consequentialist rule was followed correctly. But that does seem to be a mainstream version of consequentialism. As far as I can tell, it mostly leads to convoluted, confused-sounding arguments like the above and the linked talk by Neiladri Sinhababu, but maybe I'm missing something important.
It seems like you have several separate things in mind: readability, information density, arguments masquerading as true causes of beliefs, trustworthiness of "experienced rationalists," and the value of the "main point" vs disclaimers and qualification. Do you have an example post in mind, and specific suggestions for an improved version? I'm not sure if I'm about to respond to you, or just ramble. I understand that it's hard to call someone out without being mean, but these meta discussions seem to go nowhere without specific examples...
Recapitulating something I've written about before:
You should first make a serious effort to formulate both the specific question you want answered, and why you want an answer. It may turn out surprisingly often that you don't need to do all this work to evaluate the study.
Short of becoming an expert yourself, your best bet is then to learn how to talk to people in the field until you can understand what they think about the paper and why—and also how they think and talk about these things. This is roughly what Harry Collins calls &q... (read more)