I think the analysis in this post (and the others in the sequence) has all been spot on, but I don't know that it is actually all that useful. I'll try to explain why.
This is how I would steel man Sir Percy's decision process (stipulating that Sir Percy himself might not agree):
...Most bets are offered because the person offering expects to make a profit. And frequently, they are willing to exploit information that only they have, so they can offer bets that will seem reasonable to me but which are actually unfavorable.
When I am offered a bet where there is
...We readily inquire, 'Does he know Greek or Latin?' 'Can he write poetry and prose?' But what matters most is what we put last: 'Has he become better and wiser?' We ought to find out not merely who understands most but who understands best. We work merely to fill the memory, leaving the understanding and the sense of right and wrong empty. Just as birds sometimes go in search of grain, carrying it in their beaks without tasting to stuff it down the beaks of their young, so too do our schoolmasters go foraging for learning in their books and merely lodge it
If (as those of us who make a study of ourselves have been led to do) each man, on hearing a wise maxim immediately looked to see how it properly applied to him, he would find that it was not so much a pithy saying as a whiplash applied to the habitual stupidity of his faculty of judgment. But the counsels of Truth and her precepts are taken to apply to the generality of men, never to oneself; we store them up in our memory not in our manners, which is most stupid and unprofitable.
Michel de Montaigne, Essays, "On habit"
My suggestion would be to add an introduction. There are many more things to be read than time to read. It's incumbent on you as a writer to convince people that what you have to say is worth the time investment. And you need to make that case clearly, convincingly, and concisely right at the beginning.
For this particular article, you need to establish two things:
From your introductory paragraphs, it appears that you have a genuine desire to respond to feedback but are significantly underestimating the degree of change required to do so. Perhaps a good old fashioned dose of Strunk and White would help. Especially this (note both the content and the style):
...Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all
To be even more technical, "Prisoner's Dilemma" is actually used as a generic term in game theory. It refers to the set of two-player games with this kind of payoff matrix (see here). The classic prisoners dilemma also adds in the inability to communicate (as well as a bunch of backstory which isn't relevant to the math), but not all prisoners dilemmas need to follow that pattern.
I was reminded of something similar by AspiringKnitter's post below. There is an event in Science Olympiad called Write It Do It. One person is given a constructed object made out of LEGO, K'Nex, or similar. They write a set of instructions for how to reproduce the object. These are then given to a teammate who hasn't seen the original object, who must use the instructions to reconstruct the original object. Seems fairly simple to adapt to a group setting - you could just split the group into two rooms and have them first write their own instructions and t...
There's a lower-overhead version of the LEGO exercise involving pen and paper: person A draws a design on a piece of paper and hands it to person B, who writes instructions for how to reproduce that shape and hands them to person C, who follows them. Then compare A's output to C's.
Naturally, this can be done in parallel with N people, all of whom start out as As and end up as Cs.
Of course, this kind of depends on A not knowing what's coming, since otherwise A just draws a circle or something.
Another thing you could do is measure in a more granular way - ask for NPS about particular sessions. You could do this after each session or at the end of each day. This would help you narrow down what sessions are and are not working, and why.
You do have to be careful not to overburden people by asking them for too much detailed feedback too frequently, otherwise they'll get survey fatigue and the quality of responses will markedly decline. Hence, I would resist the temptation to ask more than 1-2 questions about any particular session. If there are any that are markedly well/poorly received, you can follow up on those later.
I'd suggest measuring the Net Promoter Score (NPS) (link). It's used in business as a better measure of customer satisfaction than more traditional measures. See here for evidence, sorry for the not-free link.
To interpret, split the responses into 3 groups:
NPS is a really valuable concept. Means and medians are pretty worthless compared to identifying the percentage in each class, and it's sobering to realize that a 6 is a detractor score.
(Personal anecdote: I went to a movie theater, watched a movie, and near the end, during an intense confrontation between the hero and villain, the film broke. I was patient, but when they sent me an email later asking me the NPS question, I gave it a 6. I mean, it wasn't that bad. Then two free movie tickets came in the mail, with a plea to try them out again.
I hadn't real...
I'm having difficulties with your terminology. You've given special meanings to "distinction", "prospect", and "deal" that IMO don't bear any obvious relationship to their common usage ("event" makes more sense). Hence, I don't find those terms helpful in evoking the intended concepts. Seeing "A deal is a distinction over prospects" is roughly as useful to me as seeing "A flim is a fnord over grungas". In both case, I have to keep a cheat-sheet handy to understand what you mean, since I can't rely on an association between word and concept that I've already internalized. Maybe this is accepted terminology that I'm not aware of?
but because it is the standard value, you can be more confident that they didn't "shop around" for the p value that was most convenient for the argument they wanted to make. It's the same reason people like to see quarterly data for a company's performance - if a company is trying to raise capital and reports its earnings for the period "January 6 - April 12", you can bet that there were big expenses on January 5 and April 13 that they'd rather not include. This is much less of a worry if they are using standard accounting periods.
All good points. To clarify, 50% is the marginal tax rate from the OP's system alone. A major reason that effective marginal tax rates can be so high is that programs like (to be US centric) food stamps and Medicaid are means tested, so they phase out or go away entirely as you make more income. If the OP's system would retain those kinds of programs, their contribution to the marginal tax rate would come on top of the 50% cited above.The net effect of enacting this system would depend on which parts of the current bundle of social insurance programs it wo...
I don't think that's quite right. The marginal tax rate is going to be 50% no matter the value of x, given your formula. Your social security payment is half the difference between your income and the x threshold, so each additional dollar you earn below that threshold loses you 0.5 dollars of social security. This is true whether the threshold is $10,000 or $100,000.
You are right, though, that there will be a correspondence between the minimum wage and the level of x. I don't think this is causal, but popular notions about the ideal levels for both the mi...
Interesting idea. It's in the same family as the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Negative Income Tax.
The immediate potential downside I see is that this would effectively institute a very high marginal tax rate on income below 'x'. For every additional dollar that someone who makes less than x earns, they lose 0.5 dollars of social security. That's a 50% implicit marginal tax rate, on top of whatever the official marginal tax rate is. By comparison, the highest marginal tax rate for federal income taxes in the United States is 35%, which is only applied t...
Long-time reader, only occasional commenter. I've been following LW since it was on Overcoming Bias, which I found via Marginal Revolution, which I found via the Freakonomics Blog, which I found when I read and was fascinated by Freakonomics in high school. Reading the sequences, it all clicked and struck me as intuitively true. Although my "mistrust intuition" instinct is a little uncomfortable with that, it all seems to hold up so far.
In the spirit of keeping my identity small I don't strongly identify with too many groups or adjectives. Howeve...
I simply care a lot about the truth and I care comparatively less about what people think (in general and also about me), so I'm often not terribly concerned about sounding agreeable.
Can you clarify this statement? As phrased, it doesn't quite mesh with the rest of your self-description. If you truly did not care about what other people thought, it wouldn't bother you that they think untrue things. A more precise formulation would be that you assign little or no value to untrue beliefs. Furthermore, you assign very little value to any emotions that for ...
I'm surprised that you don't mention the humanities as a really bad case where there is little low-hanging fruit and high ideological content. Take English literature for example. Barrels of ink have been spilled in writing about Hamlet, and genuinely new insights are quite rare. The methods are also about as unsound as you can imagine. Freud is still heavily cited and applied, and postmodern/poststructuralist/deconstructionist writing seems to be accorded higher status the more impossible to read it is.
Ideological interest is also a big problem. This seem...
But it's hard to imagine what an "incorrect" interpretation of Hamlet even looks like, or what the impact of having an incorrect interpretation would be.
Well put. You've concisely stated a heuristic that is very powerful but rarely used where it needs to be.
Be warned: it's actually a source of sadness for me whenever I start asking the question, "if X performed Y badly, what would be the impact?" -- because the conclusion is often "not much, so why does the world create incentives that led to them trying to do Y 'well' in the first place?"
I think you can get some useful insights into the reasons why punishments might differ based on moral luck if you take an ex ante rather than an ex post view. I.e. consider what effect the punishment has in expectation at the time that Alice and Yelena are deciding whether to drive home drunk or not, and how recklessly to drive if they do.
Absent an extremely large and pervasive surveillence system, most incidences of drunk driving will go undetected. In order to acheive optimal deterence of drunk driving, those that do get caught have to be punished much ...
Let me try a Hansonian explanation: conversation is not about exchanging information. It is about defining and reinforcing social bonds and status hierarchies. You don't chit-chat about the weather because you really want to consider how recent local atmospheric patterns relate to long-run trends, you do it to show that you care about the other person. If you actually cared about the weather, you would excuse yourself and consult the nearest meteorologist.
Written communication probably escapes this mechanism - the mental machinery for social interaction is...
You don't chit-chat about the weather because you really want to consider how recent local atmospheric patterns relate to long-run trends, you do it to show that you care about the other person.
No, you chat about the weather because it allows both parties to become comfortable and pick up the pace of the conversation to something more interesting. Full-on conversations don't start in a vacuum. In a worst case scenario, you talk about the weather because it's better than both of you staring at the ground until someone else comes along.
This seems like something that natural conversationalists already do intuitively. They have a broad range of topic about which they can talk comfortably (either because they are knowledgeable about the specific subjects or because they have enough tools to carry on a conversation even in areas with which they are unfamiliar), and they can steer the conversation around these topics until they find one that their counterpart can also talk comfortably about. Bad conversationalists either aren't comfortable talking about many subjects, are bad at transitioning...
You might check out Gary Becker's writings on crime, most famously Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach. He starts from the notion that potential criminals engage in cost-benefit analysis and comes to many of the same conclusions you do.
I agree that applied rationality is important, but I'm not sure that there needs to be another site for that to happen. This recent post, for example, seems like an example of exactly what the OP wants to see. Perhaps what should be done is creating an official "Applied Rationality" tag for all such posts and an easy way to filter them. That way, if a bad scenario happens where new readers more interested in politicized fighting than rationality are drawn to this site because there's a discussion on gun control, they can be easily quarantined. Bu...
Seconded. Or more generally, a framework for how to put together a good reading list, would be extremely helpful.