What this suggests is that the oft touted connection between altruistic behavior and intelligence may have a root in self preservation. Intelligent people are much more capable of serious undetected dishonesty and so have to make obvious sacrifices against violence, crime, impoliteness, etc. to make up for it.
Economist Scott Sumner at Econlog praised heavily Yudkowsky and the quantum physics sequence, and applies lessons from it to economics. Excerpts:
...I've recently been working my way through a long set of 2008 blog posts by Eliezer Yudkowsky. It starts with an attempt to make quantum mechanics seem "normal," and then branches out into some interesting essays on philosophy and science. I'm nowhere near as smart as Yudkowsky, so I can't offer any opinion on the science he discusses, but when the posts touched on epistemological issues his views hit h
Garth Zietsman, who according to himself, "Scored an IQ of 185 on the Mega27 and has a degree in psychology and statistics and 25 years experience in psychometrics and statistics", proposed the statistical concept of The Smart Vote , which seems to resemble your "Mildly extrapolate elite opinion". There are many applications of his idea to relevant topics on his blog.
It's not choosing the most popular answer among the smart people in any (aggregation of) poll(s), but comparing the proportion of the most to the less intelligent in any an...
A blog connected to the NYT also linked to the interview.
Mr. Legg noted in a 2011 Q&A with the LessWrong blog that technology and artificial intelligence could have negative consequences for humanity.
What about Drescher's Good and Real: Demystifying Paradoxes from Physics to Ethics? Eliezer said it's "pratically Less Wrong in book form."
Is there an actual history of people complaining about 'creepy behavior' in LW meetups? Or is this just one of those blank-statey attempts to explain the gender ratio in High-IQ communities due to some form of discrimination, without any evidence?
Ultrasummary of abilities: Very good English command, goals that either pro-technology or pro-effective giving, minimally rational, somewhat rich (there is a niche of people who work to feel fulfilled more than for money, in Brazil, this correlates strongly with good english skills and all the abilities social class can buy)
(emphasis added)
Is this acceptable now? I suspected some would practice such discrimination privately, but to proclaim it publicly and to expect it to be seen as a fair requirement surprises me.
If you read the session on Welfare, you'll find it's pretty not liberal. So a mere liberal mistaken position on welfare + censoring certain views on racism and sexism (if some of those happen to be right) could be damning to civilization. Besides, theocracy and totaliarism are not only alive - take Islamic countries, with their huge populational growth - but coming back in a lot of places, like Venezuela or Turkey.
Now, I guess that some Liberal positions such as favoring Gay Rights and Abortions are the more reasonable shoudn't be really surprising among smart people, and I'm sure they're among the majority here, too.
I think you are underestimating the share of metacontrarians probably disagree with many of them.
If they are contrarians for contrarianism's sake, why would I take them into consideration? Those are the true dangerous ones: in most cases, those people are just autodidacts who when confronted with a true expert, have their theories pretty much discredited.
Take in mind, for instance, Yvain's (who's a student of Medicine) triumphant answers to Hanson on Medicine (so harsh that he regrets on his blog being so incisive), or Kalla724's comment on cryonics whi...
If they are contrarians for contrarianism's sake, why would I take them into consideration?
I'm just informing you of your audience on LW! Not saying they are right. :)
But I am saying that intelligent people, like to show off their intelligence, this is very obvious on LessWrong. It is no less obvious when you pick up a newspaper or talk at the water cooler about politics. Intelligent people are contrarians. Having different opinions from less intelligent individuals is a great way to distinguish yourself form them. Intellectual fashion seems very much...
A key problem of most people thinking about policy is I think mind projection fallacy. Is there evidence that intelligent people are significantly better at avoiding it?
As it has been said, sometimes smart people are pretty prone to some biases almost like anybody else, but even in those cases they're always at least a little better (or 'less bad') than dumb people. And it is the dumb-smart trend, not the percentage, which will point to the better answer. So, no, they need not be significantly better at avoiding certain biases, including mind projection fallacy.
That we cannot measure intelligence reliably after a certain point does not imply that there are not (infinite?) levels of intelligence after it. There are certainly - at least theoretically - levels of fluid intelligence that correspond to IQs of 170, 180, 300..., and it was in this theoretical sense that I raised my question.
Ah! Indeed, without the distributions - from dumb to smart -, one can't be much certain. However, in many (if not all) cases he doesn't merely calculate what the smart vote is. He analyses and interprets it, and in a very artful way (the guy is smart), although sometimes art is not really necessary, e.g. as in an graph of an increasing monotonical dumb-smart function.
Anyway, you do raise an obvious problem: even if a graph dumb-smart represented something like a monotonic function, how would one know that, after a while, eg. at the 300 IQ point, there isn't going to be a radical change?
It seems most of his analyses are on political opinions, not on matters of fact. The one exception seems to be on the existence of God, where the smart vote was on agnosticism, which is not exactly "politically correct", but would signal intelligence.
Now, some of the political positions are PC, such as support for Gay Rights, for Immigration, and opposition to Death Penalty. The position on welfare state seems very un-PC, though ("doesn’t think is really a state responsibility but is not opposed to some welfare spending so long as the countr...
Thank you for your interest in the matter.
1) I think even in your example model, the answer chosen by the method would still be C, the correct conclusion, for, as the author says, "The percentage of smart and dull groups choosing each answer is compared and the largest ratio of the smart to dull percentages is the Smart Vote."(emphasis added) As you see, it's not the difference (a subtraction) that matters, but the ratio: A = 50/70 ~ 0.71 B = 40/27 ~ 1.6 C = 10/3 ~ 3.3 Thus, C > B > A.
2) and 3) I don't grok totally Regression Analysi...
I've changed my mind on whether Cosma Shalizi believes that P=NP. I thought he did, upon reading "Whether there are any such problems, that is whether P=NP, is not known, but it sure seems like it.", at his blog, only to discover after emailing him that he made a typo. I've also learned not to bet with people with such PredictionBook stats, and specially not as much as $100.00.
On Will_Newsome's profile, one sees a link to his blog, Computational Theology, where it is possible to have an idea of how he thinks, or what kind of reasoning is behind this whole stuff. I wasn't impressed, although I would not be able to do better myself (at least at this point).
The quote is actually considered by the end of the article:
"To paraphrase G.K. Chesterton, Scooby Doo has value not because it shows us that there are monsters, but because it shows us that those monsters are just the products of evil people who want to make us too afraid to see through their lies, and goes a step further by giving us a blueprint that shows exactly how to defeat them".
What about this:
"Q. So of course there’s been a whole slew of research showing that we are quite irrational and prone to errors in our thinking. Has there been research to help us be more rational?-T
A. Yes, of course, many have tried. I don’t believe that self-help is likely to succeed, though it is a pretty good idea to slow down when the stakes are high. (And even the value of that advice has been questioned.) Improving decision-making is more likely to work in organizations (together with Olivier Sibony and Dan Lovallo, I published an attempt in that direction in the Harvard Business Review in June 2011.)"
Hi, everyone! I'm Filipe, 21, from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. I've dropped out of Chemical Engineering in the 4th semester, and restarted College after one year off with Mathematics, from scratch. I thought redoing the basic subjects, if I worked hard through them, would be a good idea. It probably would, but so far I've studied those subjects with the same sloppiness of before, heheh. Now I'm one semester off College, due to depression, obsessive thoughts and some suicidal tendecies. Some of this is related to a deconversion from Christianity at age of 18: I...
Hi, everyone! I'm Filipe, 21, from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. I've dropped out Chemical Engineering in the 4th semester, and restarted College after one year off, with Mathematics, from scratch. I thought redoing the basic subjects, if I worked hard through them, would be a good idea. It probably would, but so far I've studied those subjects with the same sloppiness of before, heheh. Now I'm six semesters off College, due to depression, obsessive thoughts, and some suicidal tendecies. Some of this is related to a deconversion from Christianity at age of 18: I was really devout, and lived for the religion. My father is a pastor and all my family continues to be serious about Christianity, and I'
I turned a an automatic .str transcription into a more or less coherent transcription. Corrections welcome:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1e85zhh8qROTyE_0oaKdU7hhEyZcQqKzG3z0YRGeBZzc