Your comment is well-received. I'm continuing to to think about it and what this means for finding reliable media sources.
My impression of journalists has always been that they would be fairly idealistic about information and communicating that information to be attracted to their profession. I also imagine that their goals are constantly antagonized by the goals of their bosses, that do want to make money, and probably it is the case that the most successful sell-out or find a good trade-off that is not entirely ideal for them or the critical reader.
I'll ...
I might need some recalibration, but I'm not sure.
I research topics of interest in the media, and I feel frustrated, angry and annoyed about the half-truths and misleading statements that I encounter frequently. The problem is not the feelings, but whether I am 'wrong'. I figure there are two ways that I might be wrong:
(i) Maybe I'm wrong about these half-truths and misleading statements not being necessary. Maybe authors have already considered telling the facts straight and that didn't get the best message out.
(ii) Maybe I'm actually wrong about whether...
My first suggestion would be to look at the incentives of people who write for the media. Their motivations are NOT to "get the best message out". That's not what they're paid for. Nowadays their principal goal is to attract eyeballs and hopefully monetize them by shoving ads into your face. The critical thing to recognize is that their goals and criteria of what constitutes a successful piece do not match your goals and your criteria of what constitutes a successful piece.
The second suggestion would be to consider that writers write for a particular audience and, I think, most of the time you will not be a member of that particular audience. Mass media doesn't write for people like you.
A person infected with Ebola is very contagious during the period they are showing symptoms. The CDC recommends casual contact and droplet precautions.
Note the following description of (casual) contact:
...Casual contact is defined as a) being within approximately 3 feet (1 meter) or within the room or care area for a prolonged period of time (e.g., healthcare personnel, household members) while not wearing recommended personal protective equipment (i.e., droplet and contact precautions–see Infection Prevention and Control Recommendations); or b) having di
I don't believe we disagree on anything. For example, I agree with this:
If you have equal numbers at +4 and +3 and +2, then most of the +4 still may not be the best, but the best is likely to be +4.
Are you talking about relative sample sizes, or absolute?
By 'plenty of points'... I was imagining that we are taking a finite sample from a theoretically infinite population. A person decides on a density that represents 'plenty of points' and then keeps adding to the sample until they have that density up to a certain specified sd.
Interesting post. Well thought out, with an original angle.
In the direction of constructive feedback, consider that the concept of sample size -- while it seems to help with the heuristic explanation -- likely just muddies the water. (We'd still have the effect even if there were plenty of points at all values.)
For example, suppose there were so many people with extreme height some of them also had extreme agility (with infinite sample size, we'd even reliably have that the best players we're also the tallest.) So: some of the tallest people are also the...
I see. I was confused for a while, but in the hypothetical examples I was considering, a link between MMR and autism might be missed (a false negative with 5% probability) but isn't going to found unless it was there (low false positive). Then Vanviver explains, above, that the canonical null-hypothesis framework assumes that random chance will make it look like there is an effect with some probability -- so it is the false positive rate you can tune with your sample size.
I marginally understand this. For example, I can't really zoom out and see why you c...
Which 5%?
No, that 5% is the probability of a false positive, [...]
No, "that" 5% is the probability from my cooked-up example, which was the probability of a false-negative.
You're saying (and Phil says also in several places) that in his example the 5% is the probability of a false positive. I don't disagree, a priori, but I would like to know, how do we know this? This is a necessary component of the full argument that seems to be missing so far.
I don't think that it's necessarily suspicious in that, a priori, I wouldn't have a problem with 60 tests all being negative even though they're all only 95% confident.
The reason being, depending on the nature of the test, the probability of a false negative might indeed be 5% while the probability of a false positive could be tiny. Suppose this is indeed the case and let's consider the two cases that the true answer is either 'positive' or 'negative'.
(A) if the true conclusion is 'positive', any test can yield a negative with 5% probability. (this test wi...
Depending on opportunities in your field, academia may provide favorable amounts of freedom, job security and impact. However, for the quintessential academic, academia is not a calculated optimization but a personality type:
It’s awesome to be supported while you learn and think, if that’s what you wanted to do anyway.
50 comments 50 words or less. #49
I appreciate your responses, thanks. My perspective on understanding a concept was a bit different -- once a concept is owned, I thought, you apply it everywhere and are confused and startled when it doesn't apply. But especially in considering this example I see your point about the difficulty in understanding the concept fully and consistently applying it.
Volume conservation is something we learn through experience that is true -- it's not logically required, and there are probably some interesting materials that violate it at any level of interpretati...
I agree that while not exactly 'volume conservation', this addresses the exact same skill.
If the child gave a good explanation for a problem, there was only a 43 percent chance of his advancing the same explanation when later confronted with the identical problem.
Would you interpret this as meaning the children had not acquired the concept, after all? It seems that if the child actually truly understands the concept that moving things around doesn't change their number, then they wouldn't be inconsistent. (Or is the study demonstrating what I found unintuitive, that children can grasp and then forget a concept?)
What I summarize from the above is that educators have decided that Piaget's theory is not helpful for deciding 'developmentally appropriate practice'. Perhaps because the transitions from one stage to another are fuzzy and overlapping, or because students of a particular age group are not necessarily in step. Furthermore, understanding of a concept is 'multi-dimensional' and there are many ways to approach it, and many ways for a child to think about it, rather than a unique pathway, so that a student might seem more or less advanced depending on how you ...
The basic capability for formal operations sets in much earlier.
I think it depends. The wikipedia page says that the onset is between 11 and 20 years or so.
My aptitude in mathematics was a bit above average when I was 11 years old. Maybe I had already met the criterion for the formal operation stage, despite not doing well in math the first couple years of high school. But something significant happened when I was 17, and it seemed to be a qualitative change in the way I understood mathematics. I also seemed to be developed the ability to excel in Algeb...
Maybe.
When something very similar happened to me (failing Algebra in 9th grade, aptitude suddenly surfacing in 11th), I also thought motivation was really important, but I also noticed my brain working differently. Algebra went from being semi-confused symbol manipulation to understanding what a variable was actually about.
In a simultaneous psychology course, I learned about Piaget's "formal operational stage" and that's what I attributed it to. I think it happens when you're 17 or 18. (Consider/compare with also this data point). So I agreed,...
I though the cartoon was a good example. The tiger convinced the boy that he was smarter than he actually was, with smooth talking.
It seems you are using 'seeming smart' as interchangeable with 'convincing' or 'persuasive'?
However, these are quite independent. Someone can easily convince me of something, without my thinking they are more intelligent than I am, and without convincing me that they are more intelligent than they are.
Consider a 'smooth talker'. I think people generally recognize that these smooth-talkers are more likable and persuasive on any topic, but there is no necessary correlation with having a higher IQ. In fiction, there are extreme examples like Forest Gump (low...
Fluidly using the right jargon, and signaling that you 'know stuff' without sounding like you're trying hard too show that you know stuff, requires a fair amount of intelligence. (Incidentally, an inability to maintain a natural flow of conversation when someone knows a lot of stuff is one way highly intelligent people reveal that their social acuity is not that high. Their IQ may be extremely high, but a five minute interview can often easily identify these things.)
A certain degree of being articulate and appropriately assertive can be trained – I think I...
The outside view is very good to apply, especially in this case where there hasn't been much independent validation and lots of opportunity for confirmation bias. However, I would and do generally trust the assessment someone else makes about the intelligence of someone else. (With the exception of any assessments based on politics or tribe affiliation.) I guess I agree with the OP that intelligence is fairly straightforward to estimate with secondary signals.
I'm not familiar with any charlatans or scammers being successful by pretending to be smarter tha...
I find that I don't agree with this comment, though perhaps if I thought about it more I would..
I often categorize people as 10-points-smarter-than-me, 20-points-smarter-than-me, etc, just naturally as I go about my day, and I'm (currently) fairly confident of my evaluations.
Sometimes I can get a pretty good estimate by speaking with someone for 5 minutes -- but I'm aware this is heavily weighted towards verbal acuity, which is just one dimension. A high verbal acuity for me is a marker of high IQ, though average verbal acuity is not strong evidence eithe...
So it's like the same algorithm operating on different data?
To be clear, just the part about feeling like I'm "me". I think it would feel very different to be an alien, but I expect I would feel the same way about being myself.
On some level of abstraction this is both trivial and meaningless: at the bottom we all are just "particles following the same laws of physics"
I agree about the triviality. Especially for the thesis that we all share one consciousness -- that we are all a physical computation is both obvious and meaningles...
What exactly it means to "feel the same" in this context? The same memories? No. The same plans? No. The same emotions? No.
Memories, plans, emotions and even qualities of what it feels like to be a general or specific human are all aspects I would bundle with an identity's 'situation'. For example, in philosophies that assert there is 'one shared consciousness', they don't mean we all think the same thoughts or have the same plans.
Rather, there would be something in common with specifically the ways it feels on the inside to be an 'I', to be ...
To try steel-manning your perspective, if I'm not misrepresenting it, the idea is that every identity feels the same from the inside, it doesn't matter which one you have or which one is you.
I agree with this.
However (in response to Tenoke below) the situations of identities, and relationships between identities, do matter so it doesn't follow that you can change situations (or kill people) without creating value differences.
Oh, I see you already considered this:
But I'd say that there's a small chance that maybe yes, and that if we understood the right kind of math, it would seem very obvious that not all intuitively possible human experiences are actually mathematically possible.
I think this is very likely, and in fact we don't need to compute what is possible ... What we experience is exactly what is mathematically possible.
So why is our world so orderly? There's a mathematically possible continuation of the world that you seem to be living in, where purple pumpkins are about to start falling from the sky. Or the light we observe coming in from outside our galaxy is suddenly replaced by white noise. Why don't you remember ever seeing anything as obviously disorderly as that?
Who says all of this is mathematically possible? I've read this idea before, and I think it's wrong.
First of all, I think it's very difficult to guess what is mathematically possible. We experience the...
I also discovered I was like this as a teenager -- that I had an extremely malleable identity. I think it was related to being very empathetic -- I just accepted whichever world view the person I was speaking with came with, and I think in my case this might have been related to reading a lot growing up, so that it seemed that a large fraction of my total life experience were the different voices of the different authors that I had read. (Reading seems to require quickly assimilating the world view of whomever is first person.)
I also didn't make much disti...
So that's what I am going to do. I actually ordered an external hard drive, and every few weeks I'll back up my hard drive. The whole thing (no decisions).
I also understand that I don't need to worry about versions -- the external hard drive just saves the latest version.
I also talked to a friend today and found out they backed their data regularly. I was surprised; didn't know regular people did this regularly.
I understood (and my perspective changed quite a bit) as soon as I read about Miller's Law in the exchange you linked. I really like having a handle for the concept (for my own sake, its usefulness is curbed by not being well-known).
I believe the default interpretation of the question you asked is the interpretation that I had (that you were using the Socratic method). The reason for this being the default interpretation is that there is an obvious, intuitive answer. (This question was a good counter-argument, which is why I think it was up-voted.)
... to d...
I'm interested in the choices, and the factors that contribute to those choices, so I asked about them.
If you are specifically interested in the contexts of a person deciding that they do wish, or do not wish, to continue living in the current moment, then my comment wasn't relevant.
However, I interpreted your question as a Socratic challenge to realize that one values immortality because they do not wish to die in the present moment. (I think these are separate systems in some sense, perhaps far versus near).
I don't think this question is a good way to investigate feelings about immortality and death.
This is somewhat related to Yvain's post post about liking versus wanting / The Neuroscience of Pleasure.
While we're alive, we want to keep on living. I recall moments -- locked away for the moment, unreachable --when the idea of death caused feelings of intense terror. But one can also recognize an immutable biological component to this (immutable unless one is depressed or in pain, etc). To circumnavigate this immediate biological feeling about death, it is bett...
I have a Windows machine, but I know there are automatic back-up schedules that can be done. I just don't want to do it... I don't want to think about a complex automatic process or make decisions about scheduling. Trying to pinpoint why ... it feels messy and discontinuous and inconvenient, to keep saving iterations of all my old junk.
(This is a stream of consciousness where I explore why I haven't backed up my data. This proceeds in stages, with evolution to the next stage only because the writing of this comment forced me to keep going. Thus, it's a data point in response to this comment.)
Back up your data, people. It's so easy
Interesting. I have a very dense 'ugh field' around backing up my data, come to think of it. Based on this population of one, it has nothing to do with not trusting the salesperson, or not being aware that my hard drive is going to fail.
... in fact, I know ...
Hmm...I wonder to what extent emigrating a relative 'lot' has formed my ideas about identity. Especially when I was younger, I did not feel like my identity was very robust to abrupt and discordant changes, usually geographic, and just accepted that different parts of my life felt different.
I did enjoy change, exactly as an adventure, and I have no wish to end experience.
However, with a change as discontinuous as cryonics (over time and social networks), I find that I'm not attached to particular components of my identity (such as gender and profession a...
But I wanted to add ... if the daughter of the person from Ohio is also cryonicized and revived (somewhat randomly, I based my identities on the 118th and 88th patients at Alcor, though I don''t know what their professions were, and the 88th patient did have a daughter), I very much hope that the mother-daughter pair may be revived together. That, I think, would be a lot of fun to wake up together and find out what the new world is like.
I think you're going too far when saying it's "no different than any other", but I agree with the core idea - being revived without any of my social connections in an alien world would indeed significantly change "who I am".
Hmm..actually, you have a different point of view.
I feel like I would have the same identity even without my social connections; I would have the specific identity that I currently have if I was revived.
My point was more along the lines it doesn't matter which identity I happened to have -- mine or someone else's...
It's neutral from a point of pleasure vs suffering for the dead person
It forgets opportunity costs. Dying deprive the person of all the future experience (s)he could have, so of a huge amount of pleasure (and potentially suffering too).
I feel like being revived in the future would be a new project I am not yet emotionally committed to.
I think I would be / will be very motivated to extend my life, but when it comes to expending effort to "come back", I realize I feel some relief with just letting my identity go.
The main reason behind this i...
I meant a physical copy.
Would it make a difference, to you, if they rebuilt you in-situ, rather than adjacent?
But I just noticed this set of sentences, so I was incorrect to assume common ideas about identity:
In particular, I find questions about personal identity and consciousness of uploads made from preserved brains confusing,
If it could be done, would you pay $500 for a copy of you to be created tomorrow in a similar but separate alternate reality?(Like an Everette branch that is somewhat close to ours, but faraway enough that you are not already in it?)
Given what we know about identity, etc., this is what you are buying.
Personally, I wouldn't pay five cents.
Unless people that you know and love are also signed up for cryonics? (In which case you ought to sign up, for lots of reasons including keeping them company and supporting their cause.)
Ok, that's a start, thanks. So is he suggesting that the way consciousness carves reality at the joints is special?
...in which case, this carving must be done at the analysis stage, right, not at the perception stage? Because at the perception stage, our senses work just like other (non-conscious) sensors.
And then finally, if he is talking about the way the conscious mind carves reality at the joints, this is processing after we have all the data so why is quantum mechanics relevant? (I imagine that a creature could analyze sensory data in lots of differe...
I think, evidence that the universe was designed with some degree of attention to our well-being. If the universe is unexpectedly kind to us, or if we are especially well taken care of, would be evidence of a loving God.
I'm conflicted about which universe we're in. Things could certainly be worse, but it's also not very good. Is life more tolerable to us than we'd expect by random chance?
But for sure, just look at outcome. It only muddles to consider intention for three reasons:
(1) it is ... (read more)