Open thread, Dec. 19 - Dec. 25, 2016

Random Note: Since the push to put more content on here, I actually have been checking more frequently. I'm looking now maybe every three weeks instead of every three months, which is nothing compared to the daily checking when I was active and the site was active, but is at least more on my radar.

Just some positive reinforcement for all yall.

3MrMind8y

Have a karma, sir / madam / genderfluid person.

[-]Daniel_Burfoot8y70

In general, I admire EAs' intellectual and ethical seriousness. But part of the EA worldview bothers me: the idea that all Westerners are by definition rich and therefore should feel an obligation to donate a lot of money to charities to help poorer countries.

In some cases this worldview leads to factually incorrect conclusions. For example, I entered $30K, with a 1-person household in the US, into GWWC's How Rich Are You? calculator. The calculator told me my income is 21x the global average. That just seems implausible. According to Wikipedia, global G... (read more)

[-]gjm8y140

factually incorrect conclusions [...] $30k [...] 21x the global average. That just seems implausible.

Did you scroll down to the "Methodology" section? They explain that they are using the median, not the mean; I don't find it at all implausible that the median might be rather a lot lower than the mean. (And I think they are right to use the median in preference to the mean.)

GWWC has a page about median GDP. It unfortunately doesn't say exactly what they think the global median income is, nor how they calculated it, and even the lowest of the several figures there -- $2k, not stated explicitly but implicit in something they say near the start -- would make the factor 15x rather than 21x.

So I agree that they're doing something fishy with their numbers, I don't think it's quite as fishy as you suggest, and I think maybe someone should contact them and ask them just what their global median income figure is and where it comes from.

2Daniel_Burfoot8y

Okay, fair point, but it's a little bit misleading given that the infographic explicitly says "your income is more than 21 times the global average".

7gjm8y

The median is just as good an average as the mean.

[-]Lumifer8y100

That highly depends on your definition of "average". In the normal, even academic, speech "average" means arithmetic mean. The median is a location parameter of a distribution (together with the mean and the mode).

3gjm8y

In a great deal of "normal" speech, I'm not convinced "average" has a well enough defined meaning to say that it means specifically the arithmetic mean or the median or any other particular average. Sure, the median is a location parameter of a distribution. ... Well, actually, I think this is imprecise. When you have a family of distributions that's closed under translation, you can parameterize them by a location parameter (and if necessary some other parameters), and you might happen to take the location parameter to equal the median (which might or might not equal the mean and/or the mode). But the median is meaningful outside the context of distributions with location parameters. Anyway, let's stipulate that "the median is a location parameter of a distribution". So what? You surely can't be saying that that means the word "average" shouldn't be used of it, since -- as you even said -- the mean is equally "a location parameter of a distribution". Perhaps you mean that the median is a location parameter and nothing else; that it has no interest or importance beyond its use as a location parameter. But that's obviously false. (I agree that "the average" means the arithmetic mean much more often than it means any other specific measure of central tendency. I think it would be better if GWWC had said "median" rather than "average", and more generally I think it would be better if almost all uses of "average" -- especially those referring to some actual calculation -- said explicitly what sort of average was meant. But I don't think it is wrong to use the word "average" to mean the median, especially when you're explicit about doing so.)

0Douglas_Knight8y

Do you, or are you just being agreeable? I think the majority of usage is a vague confusion between median and mode. Maybe it means mean more than any other precise meaning, but most of the time it definitely doesn't mean mean.

0gjm8y

Yes, I really do think that, but I think you may have misunderstood what that is :-). I agree (with you) that most of the time the word "average" doesn't denote any specific kind of, er, average. And I agree that, in so far as people using it that way have any specific idea in mind, that idea probably has more of "median" and "mode" in it than of "arithmetic mean". But I think when it does denote something specific it's much more often the arithmetic mean than anything else. And that's what I was saying.

0Douglas_Knight8y

"Specific" isn't very specific. If you use it so narrowly as to only include examples where people have actually done a calculation, it means mean more than it means anything else, but not "much more often." But I think that there are a lot of broader meanings of "specific" under which mean loses.

0gjm8y

Maybe, but they happen not to be the meaning of "specific" I was using when I wrote the words in question. (Of course you needn't care about that. The author is dead, etc.)

0Lumifer8y

It's incomplete. You don't need to have a distribution to have a median -- all you need is a set of numbers. Why, but I am saying this! Are you saying the word "average" means "a location parameter of a distribution"? I wonder how many people can you find to agree with that. If you are being explicit, "median" is a perfectly fine word. Shorter than "average", too.

1gjm8y

There must be a misunderstanding. "That", in what I wrote, is the fact (kinda) that the median is a location parameter. This fact is also true of the mean. Therefore, "that" cannot be justification for not calling the median "average" unless it is also justification for not calling the mean "average". But your whole argument is that the mean should be called "average" and the median shouldn't. No (and I don't really understand how you could get that idea from anything I wrote). I am saying: * The word "average" is used in a variety of ways. I'd much prefer to see it used much less, and more specific terms used instead. * When it is used with a specific meaning, it is (as you say) usually used to mean the arithmetic mean but (I say) it can also legitimately be used to mean other measures of central tendency. * One should say which one. * (I didn't say this, but:) I don't claim to have a precise definition of the characteristics a thing should have for it to be reasonable to call it an average. In practice, since children are taught in school -- at least where I come from -- that "the" "three" averages are the mean, the median and the mode, it is probably best to avoid the term for other kinds of average unless there's an especially strong reason. As I already said, in these exact words: I think it would be better if GWWC had said "median" rather than "average". But the question isn't whether "median" is a good word to use -- we are agreed that it is -- but whether "average" is a legitimate word to use. I say it is; you have offered no actual grounds for disagreeing with that. Do you disagree, or are you just arguing for the sake of arguing?

0Lumifer8y

Yes, I think so. We seem to have persistent difficulties in being clear to each other. Your line of reasoning looks to me like this: We can call small felines (mean) pussycats (average). The small felines are mammals (location parameters). Ninjas (medians) are also mammals. Therefore we can can call ninjas pussycats. Yes, and I thought I was pretty explicit about that: I wasn't taught in school that there are three averages. To me "average" is a colloquial term for the mean with the implied handwaviness of "something something middle, we don't care to specify precisely". I do not think that that the word "average" should be used in the meaning of "median" (or "mode").

0gjm8y

No. I am not saying "We can call ninjas pussycats because they are mammals". I am saying "The fact that ninjas are mammals is not a reason not to call them pussycats". There are other reasons for not calling ninjas pussycats, and those (not the fact that ninjas are mammals) are why we shouldn't call ninjas pussycats. Which is why I was puzzled that you wrote "In normal, even academic, speech, 'pussycat' means Felis catus. A ninja is a mammal (as is a dog or cat)." And you didn't state any actual reasons for not calling ninjas pussycats. Fair enough; I was and my 10-year-old daughter was. (For the avoidance of doubt, I am not saying "... and therefore that is the correct usage" but "... which tells us something about how the term is likely to be understood by generally informed readers without specialist knowledge of statistics". Of course schools in different places may do different things.) Here's the Shorter Oxford[1]. Its meaning I is an older but obscure one to do with shipping. (I promise the bits I have omitted don't change the meaning or implications of what I quoted.) That word "medial", as defined in the same dictionary, has the same double use: it can mean specifically "equal to the arithmetic mean" but can also mean "typical", "central", "kinda in the middle", etc. As a further indication of how the word is used casually by a mathematically literate writer, here's an extract from Darrell Huff's famous "How to lie with statistics": This sort of usage really isn't uncommon, and it's why I think saying "average" when you mean the median (or even, for nice unimodal distributions, the mode) is reasonable -- at least if, as GWWC did, you say somewhere what sort of average you are using. [1] For the avoidance of doubt: Not because I think dictionaries determine meanings, but because good dictionaries record actual usages; the SOED is a very good dictionary.

1ChristianKl8y

The problem is that if you write for a general audience many people might not know what median means. I think in the average person the words that are chosen make the person think of the right concept. I think that the "average person" think's that the "average citizen of the world" has a "average income".

2Lumifer8y

People who don't know what median is will certainly understand "average" as "sum up all the incomes and divide by the number of people". Under the assumption that your audience doesn't know what a median is, using the word "average" to refer to median would be deliberately misleading.

1ChristianKl8y

If I speak of what the "average person on the street" thinks then the word average doesn't equal "sum/amount". The word is understand to point to to a quality that's not defined by a fixed mathematical formula. It takes math training for people to associate the word with the fixed. In our statistics for bioinformatics class the general idea that they taught us was that it's usually a bad idea to use the straight arithmetic mean as is, as using it means one measurement errors can throw of your whole data set. Data-cleaning is usually needed to get useful statistics. When I see the word average I don't associate it with a specific formula but with 'we want to know a statistics that represents "the middle" of a data set'. A middle that's appropriately calculated for the context in question. In think that's the sense that most people who are not well educated in math use. They don't focus on a specific formula.

0Lumifer8y

The notion that the GWWC calculator is firmly aimed at mathematical illiterates has the slight problem that they put a note right there which says "We use equivalised income" with a Wikipedia link. So you are saying they bothered to explain "equivalised" but didn't bother to explain "average"?

0ChristianKl8y

I think it's quite obvious which what's meant with "average", if you talk about the fact that many people are poor. On the other hand it's less obvious what's meant with income.

0Good_Burning_Plastic8y

Not to me it isn't. I would normally take it to mean the total divided by the number of people, not the 50th percentile.

2Viliam8y

In my experience, most articles comparing income use median, because that's the value that makes more sense in this context.

0Lumifer8y

This is true. For skewed distributions (and the income distribution is quite skewed) mean and median are different and if you have to choose you pick the one that serves your purposes better. For the comparisons of population well-being the median is, indeed, the preferred metric.

0[anonymous]8y

If you demand a definition from the median user, the definition would be the mean. But the actual usage is closer to the median or mode.

0ChristianKl8y

In mathematical speech it doesn't. As far as normal speech I'm not sure. If you ask a group of people how much the average wealth of the people in a bar changes when Bill Gates walks into a city of 10,000 citzens, I'm not sure that a majority will tell you that the average wealth shoot up a great deal.

1Lumifer8y

Would you like to go ask Wolfram Alpha about it?

3ChristianKl8y

My math books and stat classes used to define average as the hypernym of mean and mode. Wikipedia has the same terminology. Wolfram Alpha says that it assumes you mean the "arithmetic mean". It's likely useful to make that assumption but that doesn't mean it's the only way.

1arundelo8y

Today I learned the words "hypernym" and "hyponym"! (Wikipedia: "Hyponymy and hypernymy"; oxforddictionaries dot com: "hypernym", "hypernymy", "hyponym", "hyponymy".)

2ChristianKl8y

Related useful words are meronym and holonym.

0Good_Burning_Plastic8y

But saying "the global average" suggests a meaning of "average" such that there is only one of. So it cannot generically mean "measure of central tendency" there.

0Lumifer8y

English Wikipedia says: Basically it says that "average" is not a mathematical or statistical term but means "arithmetic mean" which is the proper expression to use in math/stat context.

3Jacob Falkovich8y

The GWWC numbers reflect global median income, which is $2,920 per capita, and not the mean income. It makes sense to use the median to think about global poverty, because the mean is mostly dependent on the global rich. When Bill Gates walks into a bar, the mean income of the bar patrons shoots up but the median barely budges. When a group of broke Africans goes into the bar, both the mean and the median drop.

1Lumifer8y

The GWWC's How Rich Are You? calculator operates with household income. The global median household income is $9,733 -- see your own link.

0Daniel_Burfoot8y

That number still only gives a factor of 10x compared to $30K.

1Lumifer8y

A more basic problem is that "rich" generally refers to wealth and they are talking about incomes. What exactly is income is also subject to discussion, but I don't think that dividing GDP by population will give you a right number.

4Jacob Falkovich8y

Income is actually a more sensible measure because it gives a better idea of your "lifetime wealth", the total amount of stuff you could ever buy, than your current wealth. A lot of stupid talk about inequality uses wealth statistics that include debt, which gives you all the "Trump is richer that 37% of America households" bullshit articles. A young lawyer with $100,000 in student debt is richer in all meaningful senses than a hobo with $20 in his pocket, but not if you count "cash wealth + debt". And since it's really really hard to measure someone's actual wealth, which includes things like the present value of education in future earnings, income is a reasonable proxy.

5bogus8y

Consumption is an even better measure, since people tend to smooth it both over time (e.g. by saving or taking loans as appropriate) and across individuals in any given social group (by engaging in informal social insurance, especially in poorer countries with no formalized welfare provision).

2Jacob Falkovich8y

That's a good point, but not very useful for GWWC. What was your consumption last year? It would take people a while to figure it out, but almost everyone knows their income off the top of their heads. GWWC's goal is to make a salient point that westerners are rich. An American making $30,000 a year doesn't feel rich, but they actually are rich, rich enough to improve many lives of the global poor without a serious deduction in their standard of living. Income and consumption (relative to other humans) rarely differ from each other enough to change that conclusion.

2Lumifer8y

Correct. Notice the goal: to make a point. Notice what it is not: to gain understanding by exploring the complexities of "wealth".

2Lumifer8y

I disagree. I don't think it gives you a better idea of your "lifetime wealth" either. Income is basically the first derivative of wealth and tends change, a lot. So how about the same lawyer pre-graduation, when he was a law school student? His income was negative at that point. You need to define "wealth" better before you go there.

1Viliam8y

This is probably false. The correct version would be something like: even poor countries contain a few insanely rich people (e.g. Kim Jong-un), and if you don't care about how a typical person in such country lives, but only mechanically calculate the GDP per capita (i.e. assume that Kim Jong-un has fairly distributed his wealth among all citizens), it may seem their situation is actually not that bad... probably still worse than yours, but at least not extremely.

[-]NancyLebovitz8y60

In the hopes of making things easier for me, I've been referring to centuries by their number range-- "the 1900's" rather than "the twentieth century". I've gotten one piece of feedback from someone who found it confusing, but how clear is it to most people who are reading this?

4arundelo8y

Perfectly clear, and probably in most contexts less likely to elicit off-by-one errors. The only confusing things I can see are: * Maybe someone might think you just meant the first decade of the 1900s? * Similarly, is "the 2000s" a century or a decade or a millennium? (This and the previous problem are solved by using e.g., "19xx", but that's probably only clear in written language.) * This style (it seems to me) is more common with older stuff (e.g., the 1800s and 1700s), so someone might do a double-take at "the 1900s", thinking it sounds longer ago than it is. * There's also the thing of how the twentieth century is, if we're being pedantic, not the years 1900 through 1999, but the years 1901 through 2000.

0NancyLebovitz8y

The person who was confused was so used to "the nth century" that "the xx00s" didn't register as the same thing.

1steven04618y

I find it confusing as well: the century already has a different name and the decade does not, so it's natural to assume "the 1900s" refers to the decade. Also, I guess technically "the 1900s" includes 1900 but not 2000 and "the 20th century" includes 2000 but not 1900.

1Lumifer8y

My first intuitive reaction would be to interpret "the 1900s" as early XX century. I would not expect, say, the 80s and the 90s to be part of "the 1900s".

0NancyLebovitz8y

I wonder if that reaction can be avoided by saying something like "all the 1900s".

1Lumifer8y

I think my brain latches onto associations with 00s (2000s) and 90s (1990s) and that makes "the 1900s" a bit disorienting. On the other hand phrases like "the 1700s" are fine, so you not technically wrong in using the expression, it's just... awkwardly associative.

[-]cousin_it8y50

A few days ago I had a crazy idea that counting numbers (first, second, etc) should start with zeroth instead of first. Not only would that help with teaching programming, but also many real world confusions and off-by-one errors would go away. Compare this:

The first year of the third millennium begins at 2001/01/01 00:00:00

to this:

The zeroth year of the 2nd millennium begins at 2000/00/00 00:00:00

Of course that would never happen, but as a thought experiment, I rest my case :-)

[-]Wei Dai8y140

With this change, you could no longer say "now that we've found the fourth object, we finally have four objects". You'd have to remember to say "now that we've found the third object, we finally have four objects" which seems to be a new opportunity to make off-by-one error. It's not clear to me that you'd be fixing more errors than you're introducing. I echo WhySpace's request for more examples of things you're trying to fix with this change.

0Pfft8y

Yes, there will always be some off-by-one errors, so the best we can hope for is to pick the convention that creates less of them. That said, the fact that most programming languages choose the zero-based convention seems to suggest that that's the best one. There's also the revealed word of our prophet Dijkstra: EWD83 - Why numbering should start at zero.

2Lumifer8y

The fact that humans count "one, two, three..." and not "zero, one, two..." does suggest that there is a best one and it's not zero-based.

0cousin_it8y

Replied to WhySpace, curious what you think.

[-]gjm8y110

A friend of mine at university made the following observations about this.

The word "first" has no connection with the number 1; it's originally the same word as "foremost". So "first" should be the ordinal corresponding to 0.
The word "second" has no connection with the number 2; it's from the Latin secundus meaning "following". So "second" should be the ordinal corresponding to 1.
But "third" and later ordinals are actually derived from the cardinates "three" and up.
So we have a gap at 2 which needs a new ordinal. He proposed "twifth". So: first, second, twifth, third, fourth, etc.

0cousin_it8y

Yeah, that's a great upgrade to my idea. Using "twenty-second" for the ordinal following twentieth makes a lot of sense.

0gjm8y

Sarcasm is difficult to assess in online discussions, so I hope you will forgive me if I paraphrase what I think you're actually saying as follows: "That's a bloody stupid idea, because if you say 0->first, 1->second then you also need to say 21->twenty-second and that would be incredibly confusing and annoying, so if we switched to zero-based ordinals we definitely should not do that." (I'm only ~95% sure you don't mean it seriously.) I do not think that counting "first, second, twifth, third, ..." implies also counting "..., nineteenth, twentieth, twenty-second, ..." or "..., nineteenth, twenty-first, twenty-second, ..."; one may reasonably be moved more strongly by etymology in some cases than in others. I think we are all very much used to using "first" for the, er, initial item in an enumeration and "second" for the one after it, which is the real reason why the etymological argument has what force it does; the strength of association between ordinal number and position decreases as one moves further down the list, and is entirely gone by the time we're into the twenties, and analogy is powerful but not that powerful. I am not particularly endorsing my friend's proposal, in any case. I'm ambivalent about its actual merits, and in any case I'm not actually going to start numbering ordinals from zero outside mathematics and programming. Mostly, I think it's amusing. ... But if I were persuaded, it would probably be because by some means currently inconceivable to me the whole anglophone world had been persuaded to rethink its numerical terminology. In that case, I suppose it would be worth considering redefining the "Xty-second" words for consistency.

5komponisto8y

I think that's way overconfident. I think the context implies at most a 50% chance of sarcasm. (Sarcasm, that is, relative to the first comment -- I'm suggesting, in other words, that cousin_it's degree of seriousness did not change much between the two comments.)

4gjm8y

Evidently you were right. Have an upvote.

0cousin_it8y

No, I was completely serious and I really like your friend's idea. Sorry if that came across as sarcasm. As for twentieth vs twenty-first, I think it's better to keep twentieth, unless you also change the cardinal twenty to twenty-zero, which doesn't seem useful. So nineteenth, twentieth, twenty-second, twenty-twifth, etc.

0gjm8y

My apologies for the misunderstanding. I agree that (conditional on doing all this stuff) you wouldn't want "twenty-first" corresponding to 20 even if you had "twenty-second" corresponding to 21.

3WhySpace_duplicate0.92616921290755278y

I always have to consciously adjust for off-by-one errors, so this sounded appealing at first. (In the same way that Tau is appealing.) However, after a bit of thought, I'm unable to come up with an example where this would help. Usually, the issue is that the 7th thru 10th seats aren't actually 10-7=3 seats, but 4 seats. (the 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th seats). Calling them the 6th thru 9th seats doesn't solve this. Can someone give an example of what it does solve, outside of timekeeping? (i.e., anything that counting time in beats wouldn't solve?)

1cousin_it8y

Some inconsistencies with one-based counting: * The first ten things have one-digit numbers, except the last one which has a two-digit number. * The second ten things have numbers starting with 1, except the last one which starts with 2. * The first thing in the first ten things has number 01, so "first" means simultaneously 0 and 1. All of those go away with zero-based counting. Also zero-based counting has many benefits for programming: * The first memory address is all zeroes, not 00000001. * The first grid cell originates at (0, 0), not (1, 1). * The idioms a[i / n], a[i % n], a[i * n + j] don't work as well with one-based counting. I think the underlying reason for all of those is the way modular arithmetic works. If a and b are positive integers, then the possible results of both a / b (integer division) and a % b (modulus) range from 0 rather than 1. Since digits in a number, indices in a sequence, etc. are often defined by these operations, zero-based counting feels more natural. As to your problem, it can be solved by consistently using half-open ranges, which is another good idea that works well with mine :-)

1bogus8y

Of course they're three seats. "10th" is not a seat, it's a fencepost! If you want "the 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th seats" you should say 7th thru 11th.

0komponisto8y

You should say "7th to 11th"; "thru" (i.e. "through") specifically implies inclusion of the right endpoint. (Although unfortunately, "to" doesn't likewise specifically imply exclusion.)

0[anonymous]8y

The main examples to me are timekeeping, modular arithmetic, and memory addressing. The first moment of time, the first modulus and the first memory address are all 0. It seems harder to come up with natural examples where the first something is 1. Your problem would be solved by using half-open ranges everywhere, which is another good idea that works well with mine.

2Douglas_Knight8y

An interesting demonstration of the arbitrariness of ordinal numbers is that Romans didn't count like we do. They counted sheep like us, but they counted days differently. Our modern calendar goes from the year -1 to the year +1 and you seem to propose going from -0 to +0. But the Roman calendar went from the day -2 to the day +1. Similarly, when the Greeks told them to put in a leap day "every fourth year" they put one in every third year.

0WalterL8y

Like you said, would never happen, but you aren't wrong that it'd be better. Most stuff that a person thinks up is better than the stuff that just kind of develops from people bumping into each other, the hard part is getting everyone to agree to change over.

[-]borismus8y40

(If I had two karma points, I'd start its own thread on the topic, but I'm a lurker and I don't.)

I'm working (on the side) on a website that enables 1-on-1 conversations on a controversial topic, with someone of the opposing view. You are shown a list of topics, and asked what your opinion is on them ("I don't know" is an option). Then you are matched to another party that answered differently. You then start a text-based chat with them. Everything is anonymous (your name and avatar are auto-generated).

I am hoping that this could be a tool to red... (read more)

9Dagon8y

I think you missed out * Trolls. Those who want to torment or infuriate people who take a topic seriously.

4RowanE8y

I'll add a datapoint to that and say an anonymous site like that is would tempt me enough to actively go and troll even though I'm not usually inclined towards trolling. Although I picture it getting so immediately overwhelmed by trolls that the fun would disappear; "pissing in an ocean of piss" as 4chan calls it.

0borismus8y

I was hoping that the 1-on-1 nature of the service would deter trolls. Their efforts won't scale very well. Valid?

2ChristianKl8y

Have you done research into other 1-on-1 chats services for anonymous participants and see whether those services have a problem with trolls?

2Dagon8y

Doubtful. Troll efforts scale better than thoughtful discussion efforts. One troll can easily open multiple windows and surf for the easiest targets, and can get a lot of attention from a low-effort interaction.

2Lumifer8y

As Dagon said, this is troll heaven. From straight shock trolling to concern trolling. If you launch and 4chan hears about it, it would have a field day with it :-/

2ChristianKl8y

When creating a new website like this the goal should be to release a minimal viable product. The assumption that those three categories of people are rare doesn't mean that you can't find them for your minimum viable product. The YC advice is to focus on creating a great product for a small audience instead of creating an okay product for a large audience.

[-]Error8y30

How do you deal with noticing you've been mindkilled?

I recently did something I regret, and on reflection I note that the impetus was probably anti-Purple sentiment.

(ironically, I managed to simultaneously demonstrate some epic hypocrisy; I was inveighing against mindkilling anti-Orange sentiment at the time)

This bothers me. I've done what I can to repair the error, but it still bothers me. I assume it's not an uncommon experience, though. Thoughts?

2cousin_it8y

I guess you just kind of learn by experience when to not trust yourself. For example, I avoid writing late at night, because I know it usually comes out too emotional, even though I don't notice it at the time. For me it works better to come up with cool ideas at night and then write them up in the morning. Also when drawing I pay extra attention to symmetry, because I know that I'm a bit blind to symmetry flaws in my own drawings. Maybe something similar could work for politics.

0Viliam8y

When I realize that my emotions are about whether I am winning or losing a debate, as opposed to... uhm... the feeling of exploration. When it becomes about the social feedback (looking at other people instead of looking at the territory), instead of exploring various possible paths. When it seems like the multiple possible paths are not even there. Worst (and also the typical) case is that I notice this only afterwards, when the debate is over. Best case is that I notice it in the middle of a (typically online) debate, and then I lift my fingers from the keyboard and take a short walk (often taking some water to drink). Sometimes I just erase the unfinished comment, and close the browser tab -- and this is sometimes more difficult than it should be. Afterwards, I try to (1) calm down, then (2) think about what I should have said instead, and (3) find someone rational and ask them "at this moment my opinion on the topic is X, does it seem like a sane opinion to you?". The answer is often "approximately yes, but I would also add Y and Z", then I think about it, and maybe update somewhat. Note that I don't try to get necessarily to a perfect agreement with the other rational person, more like to remain in -- what would be a wannabe-rationalist's equivalent of "Overton window"? -- something like "you may seem a bit miscalibrated to me, but not in a way/degree that makes me suspect your sanity" or "we have approximately the same model of the world, just with more emphasis on different parts". My private opinion is usually something that all political groups would consider a heresy, and it usually admits that each of them has a point about something but blows it out of proportions. That doesn't mean that I pretend to be wise and neutral; I may agree with one side on 90% and other side on 10%; or it's not even about percents, but more like "they are right about this specific detail, they just put it into completely wrong context and thus draw completely wrong conclusi

0MrMind8y

Well how do you deal with noticing some other error or that you've fallen prey to some other bias? What is different in 'tribalism' that makes it so distressing?

0NatashaRostova8y

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 persevere. Usually I take this variance in my prediction of the future as evidence I'm being mind-killed. Another strategy, if reading one or two articles on a topic you already know a fair amount on makes you feel strong emotions and strongly change your prediction of the future, you might be mind-killed. A final strategy I tried was subscribing to different political meme pages on FB (libertarian, Ann Coulter-ish, Alt-right, progressive), and I'd notice how I sometimes would slowly change my view based on which ones I was looking at. I know admitting to subconsciously changing political views based on political memes is about as embarrassing as saying you went and bought a Taco Bell meal because of a Taco Bell commercial -- but as far as I can tell we are very perceptible to this stuff, even the stupidest memes. (Sometimes even if I hate them, I start substituting them deep in my mind for the 'other sides' actual argument). Anyway, those are a few of my tactics.

[-]MrMind8y20

I won't be able to create a new open thread on Monday 26th... some early bird needs to volunteer. Thanks!

[-]Elo8y20

Looking for proof readers for my next Rat/LW draft post (and generally more comments on drafts before I publish). Please reply here or PM me if you are interested in volunteering.

Edit - willing to swap draft reading capabilities.

2Viliam8y

Another wish for the "LW 2.0": automating this. Something like: a user can have a list of "reviewers", which are simply the people who can see the articles in the draft section. Everything else can be communicated using the existing channels (requests for reviewers, requests to become a reviewer, announcements that there is a new content to be reviewed, feedback). This actually could be relatively simple.

0ChristianKl8y

I am willing.

[-]Error8y20

Are there recordings or streams of the LW secular solstice celebrations? I've wanted to go, but there are none in my area.

[-]Vaniver8y20

Moved "Flinching away from truth" is often about protecting the epistemology to Main.

[-]scarcegreengrass8y10

Does arbital.com have an RSS feed?

Does arbital.com have a place to ask meta questions like these?

3plex8y

RSS feed: Not yet. Will add a +1 to that bug. Arbital Slack is probably the best place currently.

[-]NancyLebovitz8y10

Is a text for the Solstice Celebration available?

0Vaniver8y

I don't know if Raymond Arnold did another print run of his Solstice Eve book this year, but he may still have some from previous years. If you get a copy of the Bay Area solstice program from Brent Dill or Marie La that should get you almost everything, because it's mostly 'old' songs and readings. (Brienne and Kenzi gave speeches that were original, but I think that was it?)

[-]a gently pricked vein8y10

Can someone recommend a book on Economics basics with the same level of force and completion as a Jaynes/Drescher/Pearl/Nozick/Dawes?

I mean, with powerful freeing laws (I feel like this is exactly analogous to EY's requiredism in the free will sequence) that can let my imagination wander without fear of fooling myself too much.

I realize that this may be asking for too much given the nature of the field, but anything that is close will do.

2MrMind8y

I think that "Introduction to economic analysis" by Preston McAfee fits the bill. I love that book: it's ideology free and treats economics as a branch of mathematics, constructing a model of the market and then analyzing various extensions to said model. It's only limit is that it's mostly about microeconomics, but in that area is one of the best. Oh, and it's available for free.

0bogus8y

A solid choice after the David Friedman text. I didn't mention it earlier because it strikes me as a bit too mathy and theoretical for the novice reader. D. Friedman's Price Theory just does a better job as an intro text IMHO, and in fact the author also wrote a very good pop-sci book (Hidden Order).

2bogus8y

David Friedman's book on Price Theory is just what you're looking for. Assuming you want an intro text that's not too formal and math-based (similar to Jaynes/Drescher/etc.).

0username28y

I like Sam Bowles's Microeconomics: Behavior, Institutions, and Evolution for introducing some of the behavioral econ and evolutionary game theory material. It isn't good as a first text, but would go well with either McAfee's or Friedman's text. The exposition is great although you should look elsewhere for exercises.

0username28y

I don't want to sound dumb, but who are these people and what did they write?

0MrMind8y

Jaynes wrote "Probability theory - the logic of science" - THE text for objective Bayesianism (and an inspiration to the early Yudkowsky) Drescher wrote "Good and real", a compendium of philosophy that is basically LessWrong in a book. Pearl wrote "Causality", an influential text for Timeless Decision Theory, about how to construct causal models with Bayesian networks. Nozick and Dawes are outside of my knowledge though, I don't think they are as 'canon' as the first three.

[-]Bot_duplicate0.29098518216051168y00

I have been looking for articles discussing to what extent terminal values change. This question is important, as changing terminal values are generally very harmful to their accomplishment, as explained here for AI under "Basic AI drives".

This article says that some values change. This paper suggests that there are core values that are unlikely to change. However, neither of these articles say whether the values they examined are terminal values, and I'm not knowledgeable enough about psychology to determine if they are.

Any relevant thoughts or ... (read more)

[-][anonymous]8y00

Hi, this is Romashka. I would like admins to delete my account (can't find the button myself) for personal reasons (basically, I'm going to meet some new people and feel uncomfortable about the personal details I have shared here.) If anybody needs to find me, Vaniver and raydora have my e-mail. I'll probably re-register someday.

Thank you all very much for being here,

Mary

6James_Blair8y

Delete button

2[anonymous]8y

Thanks!

[-][anonymous]8y00

Long-form astrobiology posts likely on hold until April due to the constant rolling crisis that is finishing up my PhD and writing my thesis (I have been attached to the microscope or bioreactor for ~50 of the last 72 hours).

May bang out one or two quick thinly sourced things when the itch hits. In the mean time, have a fun paper from Nature Communications arguing that some ancient (~3.6 billion year old) Martian hydrothermal deposits examined by the Spirit rover are not inconsistent with an origin via microbial action in a hot spring environment and are ... (read more)

[-]siIver8y00

Does anyone by chance know a good German charity that deals with AI Safety, or if not X-Risks, or if not climate change? I need one to back with amazon smile-- for international use I was able to choose Miri, which is great, but for German use apparently you have to choose a German charity.

0ChristianKl8y

I don't think there's a German AI Safety charity at the moment but that might change in the near future given the current efforts to get an AI Safety community in Berlin going.

[-][anonymous]8y00

(If I had two karma points, I'd start its own thread on the topic, but I'm a lurker and I don't.)

I am hoping that this could be a tool to red... (read more)

[This comment is no longer endorsed by its author]Reply

Moderation Log

106Comments