All of AShepard's Comments + Replies

Seconded. Or more generally, a framework for how to put together a good reading list, would be extremely helpful.

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

... (read more)
5So8res
Thanks! I completely agree that "reject bets offered to you by humans" is a decent heuristic that humans seem to use. I also agree that bet-stigma is a large part of the reason people feel they need something other than Bayesianism (which treats every choice as a bet about which available action is best). These points (and others) are covered in the next post. In this post, I'm addressing the argument that there are rational preferences that the Bayesian framework cannot, in principle, capture. This addresses a more general concern as to whether Bayesianism captures the intuitive ideal of 'rationality'. Here I'm claiming that, at least, the MMEU rule is no counter-example. The next post will contain my true rejection of the MMEU rule in particular.

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

... (read more)

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"

5MixedNuts
Does it actually help? My usual reactions are "Ha, yeah, I totally do that. Silly human foibles eh?", "Screw you, anonymous proverb author, just because you don't mention what makes this a least-bad option doesn't make it worse", or "Yeah, that's the problem. Do you have a solution?".

Is there any reason to expect that people who have successfully built communities haven't written books about it, or that their statements about what they did in response to my questions would be preferable to their statements about what they did in their books?

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:

  • Why the reader should care about learning a foreign language. You take this as given, but I submit that it's not as obvious as you might think. It sometimes seems like everyone else in the world
... (read more)

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

... (read more)
6dlthomas
While I don't have anything in particular to recommend in its place, it's perhaps worth noting that the contributors over at Language Log don't think terribly highly of Strunk & White; to paraphrase from my recollection, I think the criticism runs that the authors frequently ignore their own advice, much of which isn't any good anyway.

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.

2DavidAgain
In game theory terms, I'm not sure communication would do much for a one-off prisoner's dilemma.

I’m guessing these are very familiar to most readers here, but let’s cover them briefly just in case.

I, for one, was not familiar with the terms, so I appreciated the explanation.

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... (read more)

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.

  1. "On a scale of 0-10, how likely would you be to recommend the minicamp to a friend or colleague?"
  2. "What is the most important reason for your recommendation?

To interpret, split the responses into 3 groups:

  • 9-10: Promoter - people who will be active advocates.
  • 7-8: Passive - people who are generally positive, but aren't going to do
... (read more)
0[anonymous]
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.
7jsalvatier
Here is the evidence paper.

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... (read more)

3thomblake
Right, I'd forgotten about that. I concur that it is used, and I work in market research sort of.

I think it's just the standard "a thing, another thing, and yet one more additional thing". A common species, of which "lies damned lies, and statistics" is another example.

2orthonormal
But it's a more specific pattern than that: "X, adjective X, and Scientific Term".

This is an odd post. It starts out with a suggestion for how to structure group brainstorming, then veers into an argument for why cannabis use enhances creativity. I think you would be better served splitting those arguments into separate posts.

Addendum: This is apparently a known issue with the LW website.

Off-topic: in a number of places where you've used italics, the spaces separating the italicized words from the rest of the text seems to have been lost (e.g. "helpedanyone at all.") Might just be me though?

2AShepard
Addendum: This is apparently a known issue with the LW website.
0A1987dM
I couldn't see the spaces before logging in but now I can see them. What gives?
0Raemon
Bleah. I fixed a bunch of those, thought I had got them all. Thanks.

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?

0Vaniver
I'm not sure yet how much the terminology will pop up in future articles (one of the pitfalls of posting them as you go). I don't think it will matter much, but if it future posts are unclear point out where the language is problematic and I'll try to make things clearer.

It looks like a couple of footnotes got cut off.

0Raemon
Whoops. I probably won't actually have time to fix them for another few days, but they weren't particularly important. (I had assigned myself a deadline to stick to for this one, and I'm actually not happy with a few areas that I intend to fix later).

Interesting that your debate predictions tend too low. In my debate experience, nearly everyone consistently overestimated their likelihood of winning a given round. This bias tended to increase the better the debaters perceived themselves to be.

5KPier
I think a lot of debaters I know fall into the general trap of believing the things they argue. In a debate round, you have to be focused on the mentality of "I'm winning", or you won't be able to convince the judge of that; I am probably atypical in that I notice that kind of self-deception and apparently overcorrect for it. I've convinced a number of my teammates to try this experiment as well, and most of them follow the trend you noticed.

Upvoted for introducing the very useful term "effective belief".

I think if we tabooed (taboo'd?) "arbitrary", we would all find ourselves in agreement about our actual predictions.

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.

2michaelsullivan
It's still a pretty significant worry. If you know that some fiscal quarter or year will be used to qualify you for something important, it is often possible to arrange for key revenue and expenses to move around the boundaries to suit what you wish to portray in your report.
2wnoise
That's true. Arbitrary means different things, from "not chosen by nature", to "not chosen by an outside standard".

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... (read more)

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... (read more)

1Protagoras
A 50% marginal tax rate would be a dramatic improvement on existing programs; at present, it is not uncommon for getting a job to reduce the net income of someone previously depending on government assistance. And yet most people try very hard to get off government assistance as soon as they can (don't tell me about your worthless cousin who hasn't worked in their adult life; I have one of those, too. But the statistics show them to be much rarer than they appear). The problem with this program isn't that there's a bunch of lazy poor people who would choose not to work and take the smaller income, the problem is that our political system is in the grip of vicious stereotypes about lazy poor people that make it impossible for any program like this to gain widespread support, because of irrational fears that it will end up rewarding lazy poor people. A basic income is, of course, an alternative which would eliminate the 50% marginal tax rate problem. It would obviously be more expensive, if you wished people with no other income to be at the same level as on your proposal, but if we're floating crazy utopian schemes, a wealth tax would be a very promising way to raise quite a lot of additional revenue while having some beneficial incentives. It would encourage wealthy people to sell non-productive or insufficiently productive assets to those who would get more use from them, instead of hoarding them out of laziness or tradition; while there are not a lot of rural aristocrats inefficiently farming vast estates because they like being local lords these days, there do seem to be modern phenomena with some similar features to Adam Smith's favorite example of massive, widespread inefficiency.

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... (read more)

2VijayKrishnan
Agreed. But does this problem not exist in even bigger measure when you have min wage and social security for those unemployed as a result of minimum wage. The social security cannot be equal to the min wage, since otherwise no one would work at min wage. However the social security would presumably be something like 2/3 of min wage to ensure that those who are unemployed are able to have some decent standard of living. And this per your argument would put the implicit tax rate of those earning minimum wage at 67%!

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... (read more)

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 ... (read more)

0Friendly-HI
vs. You're right about the emotions part, but I'm certainly not bashing people as hard as Dr. House and I'm also not gonna take nice delusions of heaven away from poor old granny. Yes, of cause I too care about the emotions of people, depending on the person and the specific circumstances. I'm also usually not the one to open up the conversation on the kind of topics we discuss here, but if people share their opinion I'll often throw my weight in and voice my unusual opinions without too much concern about tiptoeing around sensibilities of -say- the political, religious or the new age types. Of cause I'm not claiming to be a total hardliner, deep within my brain there is such a thing as a calculation taking place about whether or not giving my real opinion to person X Y and Z will result in too much damage for me, others, or our relationship... it's just that I'm less inclined to be agreeable in comparison with others. I'm not claiming to be brain damaged after all, of cause I care as well to some (considerably less than average) extent about social repercussions. Addendum: Agreeableness is also something that is known to rise with progressing age, so it's likely that I will become more agreeable over time, seeing how I'm still just 23. Another factor in agreeableness is impulsiveness, which thankfully diminishes with age - and I'm a fairly impulsive person. Agreeableness isn't just composed of "one thing", it's the result of several interactions.

Downloaded and set up with a couple of Divia's decks. How many decks do you recommend working through at one time? For reference, I'm currently doing one deck on the default settings, which works out to ~40 cards a day (20 new, ~20 review) and takes 5-7 minutes.

0Duke
It depends on how much time you are willing to devote. I spend 0-3 minutes per day on the cognitive biases deck which allows me to spend the additional 17-30 minutes I have allocated for Anki working on the NVC deck, which is massive. I plan to add a spanish vocab deck soon.

I haven't read the post yet, but the title is awesome.

9AlephNeil
A better title would be "nature red in truth and quale"

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... (read more)

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?"

7Vladimir_M
AShepard: Well, I have mentioned history. Other humanities can be anywhere from artsy fields where there isn't even a pretense of any sort of objective insight (not that this necessarily makes them worthless for other purposes), to areas that feature very well researched and thought-out scholarship if ideological issues aren't in the way, and if it's an area that hasn't been already done to death for generations (which is basically my first heuristic). Perhaps surprisingly, it doesn't seem to me that empirical testability is so important. Lousy work can easily be presented with plenty of empirical data carefully arranged and cherry-picked to support it. To recognize the problem in such cases and sort out correct empirical validation from spin and propaganda is often a problem as difficult as sorting out valid from invalid reasoning in less empirically-oriented work.
2Perplexed
Sounds like a good idea until you realize that you are throwing out most math and philosophy with the bathwater. How about accepting either empirical testability or a requirement that all claims be logically proven? (Much of microeconomics and game theory slides in under 'provable' rather than 'testable'. Quite a bit of philosophy fails under both criteria, but some of it approaches 'provable'.)
3Nornagest
I'm not sure that conceptual soundness has any meaning in fields which don't even in principle admit to predictive power or provably correct solutions. It might be possible to imagine a rigorous approach to, say, textual criticism, but in actual practice the work that gets done is approached along aesthetic lines, and the people running humanities departments seem aware of and happy with this. Of course, this wouldn't apply to the related field of social science, and many of its subfields do seem to fail both of Vladimir's tests.

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 ... (read more)

1MatthewW
Further, it's plausible that if you had a 'budget' of N prison places and M police officers for drink-driving deterrence, the most effective way to deploy it would be to arrange for a highish probability of an offender getting a short prison sentence, plus a low probability of getting a long sentence (because we know that a high probability of being caught has a large deterrent effect, and also that people overestimate the significance of a small chance of 'winning the lottery'). So the 'high sentence only if you kill' policy might turn out to be an efficient one (I don't suppose the people who set sentencing policy are really thinking along this lines, though).

You are certainly correct, and I think what you say reinforces the point. Building comfort is a social function rather than an information exchange function, which is why you don't particularly care whether or not your conversation leads to more accurate predictions for tomorrow's weather.

3[anonymous]
These are difficult concepts for those of us who work regularly with meteorological data!

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... (read more)

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... (read more)

2Taure
I think you brush upon a quite important point here: good conversation is less about being good at conversation and more about not being bad at it. People will talk quite happily with someone who is utterly boring, so long as it's not for too long and they've got nothing better to do. People are only really put off a conversation when a person does something odd. Prime among these are non-sequiturs, unusually extreme opinions (especially about topics people normally don't have extreme opinions about), and discussing topics which are generally understood as not being suitable for general conversation (such as topics which are invasive/personal, obscure, or too academic for the context - it's fine to talk intellectually in the appropriate place, but not to strangers at a bar/club).

I'm in. Started reading through it this past winter but stopped. Hopefully this group will provide some motivation.

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... (read more)