I'd still bet that the majority of people who have a belief that meets all the criteria you suggest are probably wrong about that belief. For example, I think there's a reasonable case that most priests' religious beliefs would met your criteria, and it's clear that most priests are wrong (as long you you take priest to include holy men from all of the world's religions, it must be true).
I won't speak to the usefulness of the quote as a means for generating useful entrepreneurial ideas.
And conversely, things are allowed to just happen Because the Author Says So in fiction. When watching TV, I'll often ask "why didn't person X just do obvious thing Y which would have solved all of their problems for the rest of this episode?", to which my girlfriend's perfectly valid response is "plot reasons" (TV Tropes calls this the Anthropic Principle)
It's not at all obvious to me that the failure mode of not looking for a better move when you've found a good one is more common than the failure mode of spending too long looking for a better move when you've found a good one - in general, I think the consensus is that people who are willing to satisfice actually end up happier with their final decisions than people who spend too long maximising, but I agree that this doesn't apply in all areas, and that there are likely times when this would be useful advice.
In the particular example I gave, if you've al...
It's also not always good advice. Sometimes you should just satisfice. Chess is often one of these times, as you have a clock. If you see something that wins a rook, and spend the rest of your time trying to win a queen, you're not going to win the game.
Serious question - why do you (either CFAR as an organisation or Anna in particular) think in-person workshops are more effective than, eg, writing a book, or making a mooc-style series of online lessons for teaching this stuff? Is it actually more about network building than the content of the workshops themselves? Do you not understand how to teach well enough to be able to do it in video format? Videos are inherently less profitable?
I don't speak for CFAR, but I believe that they wish to develop their product further before actually taking the time to write extensively about it, because the techniques are still being under active development and there's no point in writing a lot about something that may change drastically the next day.
It's also true that a large part of the benefit of the workshops comes from interacting with other participants and instructors and getting immediate feedback, as well as from becoming a part of the community.
The Revelation Principle feels like one of those results that flip flops between trivially obvious and absurdly impossible... I'm currently in an "absurdly powerful" frame of mind.
I guess the principle is mostly useful for impossibility results? Given an arbitrary mechanism, will you usually be able to decompose it to find the associated incentive compatible mechanism?
If only one flower, we seek for nothing farther- what then if two or three, or more? Each successive one is multiple evidence- proof not added to proof,
Hard to tell out of context, but is this claiming that each successive flower is independent evidence? In general, it feels like the reasoner is missing some dependency relationships between bits of evidence here.
I was about 80% sure that 1159 was not prime, based on reading that sentence. It took me <1 minute to confirm this. I can totally be more than 99.99% sure of the primality of any given four-digit number.
In fact, those odds suggest that I'd expect to make one mistake with probability >0.5 if I were to go through a list of all the numbers below 10,000 and classify them as prime or not prime. I think this is ridiculous. I'm quite willing to take a bet at 100 to 1 odds that I can produce an exhaustive list of all the prime numbers below 1,000,000 (which contains no composite numbers), if anyone's willing to stump up at least $10 for the other side of the bet.
How about this as a counter-example? This guy essentially got into Harvard because of one accident with a plagiarised essay when he was a kid (at least, that's the way he tells his story), and is now a member of faculty at Chicago. I think life outcomes might be more path-dependent than we like to admit.
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/504/how-i-got-into-college
One thing that's unambiguous is that many ambitious high schoolers believe that where they go to college matters a great deal. My post is intended to address this audience.
It's possible that I misread, but I interpreted Swimmer963's point as saying exactly this - it really doesn't matter what you do in high school, as long as you get into the college you're aiming to get into. If this is what she meant, I probably agree - I don't think there is any one-semester high school course which can't be entirely learnt by a reasonably bright student in about 1 week of dedicated personal study.
Re inbox zero: this paper seems to suggest it's a waste of time (and my experience concurs). How complicated is your folder structure?
Here are two things we want from an external review:
These two groups (MIRI & outsiders) have wildly different information about risks from AI, and are thus in different positions with respect to how they should respond to external reviews of MIRI's core assumptions.
To illustrate the point, consider two actual events of direct or...
If you want smart kids like the rich folk, you should raise your kids like the rich folk raise their kids.
Is there any reason to believe this is true? I would guess Judith Harris would say no, and she's spent a lot more time thinking about this than I have.
The vast majority of people that show 90% or more correlation with me are concentrated in 2 areas of the world, New York city and California (SF Bay in particular), this is one of the indicators I choose for where I'll try to live.
Maybe you checked, but is it possible that the vast majority of OK Cupid users overall are in SF or NYC? This wouldn't surprise me at all.
Have you read the book?
My suspicion is that over 90% of it's worth is in an additional rule, which isn't one of these: "commit to practising something for 20 hours before starting to apply these principles". My guess - 20 hours of dedicated practice is just way longer than people tend to think it is, and you'd be surprised how much you learn in 20 hours without making an effort to do any of the rest of the 10 things.
Will you able to be able to live near where you work in London? In Glasgow, you will almost certainly be able to afford to live in a nice place in the city centre where you can walk to work. People usually underestimate how much effect a long commute will have on their happiness (see e.g. here).
Also, you might consider trying this. If you're still unsure, chances are the expected value of the two options is pretty close, and you shouldn't worry too much about how you make the decision.
Disclaimer: I am in Glasgow, and would like to increase the population o...
this comment on the recent Reddit thread about intellectual jokes goes one better (and actually made me laugh out loud the first time I read it).
Apologies, I should have made this clearer (and will probably edit the original to do so). Commuting is terrible for the happiness of the commuter. The rest of the post should be interpreted in light of this.
As for the Freakonomics research - it seems quite implausible that the marginal commuter has a bigger impact by taking transit rather than a car (I seem to remember listening to an episode of Freakonomics radio about this discussion, and being disappointed by the lack of marginal analysis).
So, everyone agrees that commuting is terrible for the happiness of the commuter. One thing I've struggled to find much evidence about is how much the method of commute matters. If I get to commute to work in a chauffeur driven limo, is that better than driving myself? What if I live a 10 minute drive/45 minute walk from work, am I better off walking? How does public transport compare to driving?
I suspect the majority of these studies are done in US cities, so mostly cover people who drive to work (with maybe a minority who use transit). I've come across ...
So, since basically everyone in the world is overconfident, you can make them better calibrated just by making them come up with an interval and then doubling it.
What I've never really got is how you become accurately calibrated at the long tails. Are there really people who can consistently give both 90% and 95% confidence intervals? To me those both just feel like "really likely", and the higher the granularity, the harder it gets - note that a 98% confidence interval should probably be twice as wide as a 95% confidence interval. Are there people who have truly internalised this?
I personally like this two player calibration game, which I was introduced to by Paul Christiano at a meetup a couple of years ago:
There's no need to choose a minimum width confidence interval (is there a technical term for that?) e.g. "before 1920" wo...
The specific project I was evaluating had only gotten $800,000 out of the maximum $2m. Its strategy was to purchase the male students iPod Touches, the female students makeovers, manicures, and pedicures at a local beauty parlor, and all students were offered an additional iPod Touch or Makeover, respectively, if they passed the exam at the end of the current year.... only 25% (14/56) of the students targeted by the program had failed the reading exam in the first place.
$800,000/56 students = $14,000 per student. Those are some expensive iPod touches!
See this part of the post:
I described in rigorous detail everything the man had done wrong, put in a strong recommendation to not award him grant money in the future, and suggested that some sort of corruption investigation be conducted to see if he had committed any crimes (23 iPods + 23 Makeovers does not total to $800,000, after all).
(One could argue that these questions should probably be ignored and not investigated in depth - to paraphrase Teller, often magic is simply putting in more effort than any sane person would - but nevertheless, this is how things work for me.)
I can't find a source for this quote (and if it's from a longer interview, I think I'd probably like to read it), possibly because I'm not picking the right words to Google. Do you have a citation?
Googling "teller magic sane" turned up this interview including the quote:
You will be fooled by a trick if it involves more time, money and practice than you (or any other sane onlooker) would be willing to invest.
...that's about the last situation in which I'd expect people to rely on God
Does this cause you to doubt the veracity of the claim in the parent, or to update towards your model of what people rely on God for being wrong? I guess it should probably be both, to some extent. It's just not really clear from your post which you're doing.
I notice that http://www.miri.org is very definitely not a placeholder for a new Singularity Institute page. Have you managed to acquire it?
(miri.com seems as though it should be available, but not exactly entirely appropriate. Maybe better than nothing).
My experience with the GJP suggests that it's not. Some people there, for instance, are on record as assigning a 75% probability to the proposition "The number of registered Syrian conflict refugees reported by the UNHCR will exceed 250,000 at any point before 1 April 2013".
I am a registered participant in one of the Good Judgement Project teams. I have literally no idea what my estimates of the probabilities are for quite a few of the events for which I have 'current' predictions. Depending on what you mean by 'some people', you might just be picking up on the fact that some people just don't care as much about the accuracy of their predictions on GJP as you do.
I don't think it is an accurate reflection of the community. It certainly doesn't reflect my experience with the LW communities in Toronto and Waterloo.
It is also not an accurate depiction of the community in London or Edinburgh (UK). However, I think it is pretty close to exactly what I would expect a tabloid summary of the Berkeley community to look like, based on my personal experience. The communities in Berkeley and NY really are massively different in kind to those pretty much anywhere else in the world (again, from personal experience).
And, as Kevin says, it is remarkably nice - they could have used exactly the same content to write a much more damning piece.
My first thought on reading this was that given that people tend to be overconfident in just about every other area of their lives, I would find it exceedingly surprising if it were in fact the case that people's estimates of their own attractiveness was systematically lower than the estimates of others. I notice that there isn't actually a citation for this claim anywhere in the article.
Indeed, having looked for some evidence, this was the first study I could find that attempted to investigate the claim directly: Mirror, mirror on the wall…: self-percepti... (read more)