All of metastable's Comments + Replies

No I do not like working with people. I would aim for surgery or radiology for this reason.

While the stereotypical surgeon may be gruff/demanding/efficient/decisive, most surgeons are required to work in and even lead teams. The profession selects for aggressiveness and confidence, not for loners (though there are obviously some in any profession). Medical training prior to specialization will be exceptionally challenging if you dislike working with people.

Pathology might be a medical specialty where you were able to indulge your love of biology while w... (read more)

Or, in the opposite case, declaring that your once-over the text has revealed what believers "really" believe.

So very much this.

Good points, all. Fiendfyre seems robust.

I might counter that most combat magic, even the adult sort, seems to be line-of-sight, which is a huge handicap. It also seems to be very inaccurate. If Harry & Co can literally dodge Deatheaters on foot and brooms, supersonic jets and HALO insertions are going to be really hard to target. Not to mention artillery shells in flight. And Wizards seem weirdly resistant to (biased against?) using magical heavy weapons or fire team tactics. They have a real duelist mentality.

But the ability to erase from time does really trump. I concede.

You don't actually need a specific major to go to med school. You just need the pre-reqs, a pretty straightforward sequence of mostly-science that you can cram inside most majors. Bio majors are usually the easiest way to do this.

As I mention elsewhere in the thread, med school is usually debt-funded and costs you earning years in your twenties. And your per-hour income is sometimes surprisingly low.

still isn't obvious

Not sure what to say. There's finance and there's finance. HYPS and maybe two or three others have pipelines for pushing kids to the banks and hedge funds at the very top. And yes, I mean undergrad. The fourth or fifth of each class that goes into finance isn't doing it to sell mutual funds in mid-sized cities. Many bail after a few years, but those who stay in can easily become millionaires, and some do it before their former classmates in med school finish their residencies.

ETA: you're right that it's bogus to compare top-of-the-line finance to average physician. I should have said "The average Stanford-educated physician makes far less over his lifetime than he could applying the same horsepower and hours worked to, say, finance."

OP is going to Stanford, so a career at GS, Deutsche Bank, JPM, or Bridgewater is a realistic possiblity in a way it simply isn't at 99.9% of schools.

Edit to add: WRT networking, it's kind of a suitcase word. Lots of people talk about it. I am sceptical that public speaking and improv classes are the best places to meet the best networking prospects, though they might be excellent for meeting interesting people. Athletes typically do better than the mean at Stanford-type schools in terms of career earnings, despite lower HS GPAs and test scores. If you're not currently a recruited athlete, you might still be able to walk on to the crew team or ultimate team.

If you're interested in maximizing income, I would rule out pre-med. It's sub-optimal preparation for any career except medicine, and medicine is sub-optimal for income. A few reasons:

Salaries are essentially capped by reimbursement rates and man-hours. The best surgeon in the world isn't going to make more than a few million a year doing elective surgeries twelve hours a day year round.

The things that generate the most income for rich people with MD's, patents and start-ups and C-suite gigs, don't require the MD credential. There are better stepladders.... (read more)

This is plausible to me, too. I've had very productive friends with very different rhythms.

But I suspect far more people believe they operate best staying up late and sleeping late than actually do. There's a reason day shifts frequently outperform night shifts given the same equipment. And we know a lot of people suffer health-wise on night shift.

I agree, though it's always been interesting to me how the tiniest details of clothing become much clearer signals when eveybody's almost the same. Other military practices that I think conserve your energy for what's important:

-Daily, routinized exercise. Done in a way that very few people are deciding what comes next.

-Maximum use of daylight hours

-Minimized high-risk projects outside of workplace (paternalistic health care, insurance, and in many cases, housing and continuing education.)

Thanks for the link. It's a nice summary of the state of research a few years back, and anybody who's interested in the topic should read it.

It is probably even more interesting to me because it tacks pretty hard away from the conclusions some people have drawn in this thread. The authors clearly did not believe that the well-attested differences in IQ testing across ethnic groups could be ascribed to genetic factors.

A lot of the current research focuses on "trust" inside groups. This is not exactly double-blinded climate controlled stuff, as you might expect, just brave and smart social psychologists doing their best. I find it highly plausible and confirmatory of many centuries of non-scientific observations about insularity. Disclaimer: I AM NOT SAYING DISTRUST OF PEOPLE OF OTHER BELIEF SYSTEMS IS GOOD, JUST THAT IT HAPPENS.

Atheism associated with lack of "trustworthiness signals" by believers.

Religious in-group trust and cooperation is higher.

I ... (read more)

I'd love the world to be more biased in favour of my own highest stat

You can re-allocate some of that to Charisma if you work really hard (stand-up comedy is a learned skill) and if you have a British or Australian accent you get +1 just by coming to North America and talking. Provided you haven't already maxed it, Strength is highly trainable, as are Dexterity and Constitution. Even HP, up till about 30 when bone density stops accumulating. Wisdom is extremely trainable, and there's some evidence the world's biased that direction, so I'd throw points there when in doubt.

why is the relevant disadvantaged class "black people"

As far as it goes, I'm in favor of preserving opportunities for all sorts of people to work, because it's humanizing and it makes people happy. We're all in favor of that, right?

But I also don't think there's been historic, organized pressure to keep low-IQ people from finding useful labor, and while such people deserve the protection of the law, it's not illuminating to compare their plight to a group of people who were denied the ability to find employment they were very capable of using... (read more)

I would be very surprised if IQ correlates at .6 with, say, wealth or income. Parental wealth and income possibly correlate no more than 0.5 to childrens' incomes, and it would be frankly remarkable for IQ to be (1) transmitted intergenerationally to a large degree, and (2) more closely correlated to financial outcomes than one's parent's financial outcomes, since your parents often give you not only your genes, but your inheritance/early support, financial assumptions, and first set of career contacts.

The complexity of software is an essential property, not an accidental one. Hence, descriptions of a software entity that abstract away its complexity often abstract away its essence.

Fred P. Brooks, No Silver Bullet

Yeah, I feel these objections, and I don't think your heuristic is bad. I would say, though, and I hold no brief for CFAR, never having donated or attended a workshop, that there is another heuristic possibly worth considering: generally more valuable products are not free. There are many exceptions to this, and it is possible for sellers to counterhack this common heuristic by using higher prices to falsely signal higher quality to consumers. But the heuristic is not worthless, it just has to be applied carefully.

Ah. I read that one as a reference to the tendency to let tribal affiliation trump realistic evaluation of outcomes.

A demonstration of the gray fallacy. The opinions of Ariel Castro are not equidistant from the truth with those of the rest of society, and we don't find the truth by finding a middle ground between his claims and those of everybody else.

Even if this were true, it would not follow that there is no countervailing incentive to remove barriers to employment for disadvantaged classes of people. Is it not possible that society has an interest in broad employment, especially among people disadvantaged by such tests? Two thoughts:

1) IQ tests have a history of being used deliberately to weed out applicants of certain races. This was not an incidental effect: it was the entire purpose of the test, much like literacy tests for voting. The odds of them being used this way again, were changes made in ... (read more)

I said it was conceivable but unlikely. You disagree?

If you look at the history of law, philosophical arguments end up influencing legal arguments all the time.

I absolutely agree. It is conceivable that in the future, arguments could change the courts' regard for this doctrine. But it is unlikely. The law has been in place for fifty years, and the doctrine has seen a ton of challenges in court.

This is a somewhat fundamentalist view of the law, and I am guessing many federal judges at all levels, and regulatory bodies of technical experts, would add something to your definition. I agree with you that the statutory basis for these court rulings is very clear.

But it's also pretty clear that the doctrine of disparate impact, which is what he asked about, has been clarified and nuanced through litigation of those statutes. My point was that over many decades, the courts have not overturned this doctrine due to any philosophical objections of litigants.

Thanks! Do consequentialist kind of port the first axiom (completeness) from the VN-M utility theorem, changing it from decision theory to meta-ethics?

And for others, to put my original question another way: before we start comparing utilons or utility functions, insofar as consequentialists begin with moral intuitions and reason the existence of utility, is one of their starting intuitions that all moral questions have correct answers? Or am I just making this up? And has anybody written about this?

To put that in one popular context: in the Trolley Switc... (read more)

Are you asking rhetorically?

The American legal justification for the disparate impact doctrine, and for declaring race a protected category, is the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and the legislative justification for that was a history of massive mistreatment of individuals based on skin color.

I gather from the thrust of arguments in this thread that you may be strongly opposed to government protection of racial minorities in the United States, and that you may not believe that racial bigotry is--or possibly even was--a problem that needed legal redress. It is wo... (read more)

Fair enough. For "main debate" please read "pertinent legal question."

I'm pretty sure the courts have allowed that IQ-like tests are acceptable in many situations for many types of employment. It's not a hypothetical. I guess I'm saying the question of the "validity of the tests" is a red herring, even if it's an ideological hot potato. I think the main debate these days is not at all about the validity of the tests, it's a debate over business necessity versus disparate impact.

Do consequentialists generally hold as axiomatic that there must be a morally preferable choice (or conceivably multiple equally preferable choices) in a given situation? If so, could somebody point me to a deeper discussion of this axiom (it probably has a name, which I don't know.)

Actually, the legal rationale for restricting the use of such tests in certain kinds of hiring is not that they're invalid. If you proved to the courts that they were "valid," meaning an accurate reflection of crystallized intelligence/abstract reasoning/g/whatever, this would not undermine the central legal argument against them, which is that they produce disparate impacts on protected classes.

But Naaman was wroth, and went away...And his servants came near, and spake unto him, and said, My father, if the prophet had bid thee do some great thing, wouldest thou not have done it? how much rather then, when he saith to thee, Wash, and be clean?

2 Kings 5: 11-13

What's the goal of rationalism as a movement?

I'd like to hear more about possibilities in China, if you've got more. Everything I've read lately suggests that they've extensively overbuilt their infrastructure, much of it with bad debt, in the rush to create urban jobs. And it seems like they're teetering on the edge of a land-development bubble, and that urbanization has already started slowing. But they do get rights-of-way trivially, as you say, and they're geographically a lot more like the US than Europe.

Most Native American cultures felt awesome about killing enemies in battle.

Weren't you just saying there's a lot of mythologizing of the NA past?

Did you know there are specific Navajo rituals designed to cleanse warriors returning from war before they re-enter the community, to prevent their violence from infecting the community? And that these rituals have counterparts in cultures around the world, and are of interest to modern trauma researchers?

It is helpful to separate desirable status as a successful warrior from desire for war. It is very common ... (read more)

Like I said, I really am sure you can refute these! That is beside the point. I doubt very much you can show that your refutations are what people actually believe about the texts.

I am not arguing the text is true. I am not even arguing that a certain interpretation of the text is correct. I am pointing out that people believe certain interpretations of the text.

This is not like arguing with William Lane Craig about creationism. This is like trying to tell William Lane Craig that nobody believes in creationism.

We may have reached the point of diminishing returns. Arguments are soldiers. Mine need a vacation. Enjoy your day.

Mmmm. Clicked the wrong reply button. Sorry....

Which means that many doctrinal authorities are capable of making stuff up.

Friend, I'm assuming you believe all/most of religion is made up anyway, right? I mean, you might think some of it was made up sincerely and some was made up cynically. But you know with an extraordinarily high degree of certainty it's all made up. Right? So who cares who made it up. It's there. Some people take it seriously.

It doesn't threaten non-theism at all to concede that religions define their own interpretations and belief systems. This concession is actually the bread an... (read more)

No, though I've seen small-scale family farms ensure that their stock live pleasantly and are slaughtered humanely, and I myself have tried to make sure food animals I've killed died quickly and painlessly.

Mileage will vary. There are a lot of true horror stories about farming and ranching, and they're not all from industrial feedlots.

A minimal investment of time would convince anybody willing to be convinced that at the very least there are many doctrinal authorities on record in every large strain of western monotheism against cruelty to animals, and that these authorities adduce evidence from ancient holy texts to support their pronouncements. Feel free to disagree with Aquinas, eastern patriarchs, a large body of hadiths, and many rabbinical rulings about the faiths they represent. There is a hermeneutical constellation of belief systems that posits texts speaking for themselves wit... (read more)

It's people who live in cities who join PETA.

The developed world is thoroughly urbanized. Des Moines is as far from animals as Manhattan. I think what you mean is that a certain politique ascendant on both coasts is much more likely to purchase animal rights as an expansion pack. Which is not to pre-judge the add-on, but to say it has very little to do with the size of your skyscrapers.

That said, I'm not disputing at all that modern agribusiness commodifies animals and that many of today's farmers and ranchers are pretty insulated from the things they ... (read more)

I guess I'm not cynical?

People have to eat. It's consistent to feel that animal life has value but to know that your tribe needs meat, and to prioritize the second over the first. The fact that you value an animal life doesn't mean you value it above all else. And the fact that humans wiped out the Giant Sloth/Mammoth/whatever only necessitates that we were really good hunters. It says nothing about our motivations.

Also, I think you would find it really hard to disentangle cuteness from empathy, if that's what you're trying to do.

fit your utility function to your friends and decide what is best for them based on that, rather than letting them to their own alien utility functions and helping them to get what they really want rather than what you think they should want.

The definition of want here is ambiguous, and that makes this is a little hard to parse. How are you defining "want" with respect to "utility function"? Do you mean to make them equivalent?

If by "want" you mean desire in accord with their appropriately calibrated utility functions, then... (read more)

Most people in time and space have considered it strange to take the well-being of non-humans into account

I think this is wrong in an interesting way: it's an Industrial Age blind spot. Only people who've never hunted or herded and buy their meat wrapped in plastic have never thought about animal welfare. Many indigenous hunting cultures ask forgiveness when taking food animals. Countless cultures have taboos about killing certain animals. Many animal species' names translate to "people of the __." As far as I can tell, all major religions co... (read more)

There are many indigenous cultures (with some hunters still around today) who ask forgiveness upon killing food animals. And history's full of bear cults, and animal species with names that translate into "people of the _," and taboos on harming various animals. I think the notion that humans have mostly only cared for the concerns of humans is the product of an industrial-age blind spot: only people who've never hunted or husbanded, and eat their meat from the slaughterhouse, have never thought about animal welfare.

1) Same reason muskets trump trained knights and longbowmen. Even though heavy plate was actually effective against primitive firearms, and longbows worked more reliably and with excellent range, you could kit out a peasant with an arquebus for much less than the cost of mounting and armoring a knight, and a fraction of the training (you had to train for years to be able to fight effectively in mail or on horseback and drawing a longbow was an elite skill that required extreme muscle hypertrophy. It took a few hours to learn how to operate your firearm, a... (read more)

Is it inconceivable that this could ever be the case?

Yes, I meant cryonics. Thanks.

You realize best and better are subjective in this case, right? I mean, you could maybe make an argument about "higher-level" being objective, but you're never going to win that fight. People will just walk away, which is the higher-level response.

EDSBS and Power and Bulk focus on college football and powerlifting, respectively. TNC's Horde pulls in commentary on everything from the Thirty Years War to Egypt's current conflict. They all shade into occasional discussions of Poetry and the Human Condition. I'm not a co... (read more)

So, I do, and it's informed by religion, but I'll try to phrase it as LW-friendly as possible: to free somebody else of claims I have against them.

It's not an emotional state I enter or something self-centered (the "I refuse to ruminate about what you did to me" pop song thing), though sometimes it produces the same effects. The psychological benefits are secondary, even though they're very strong for me. I usually feel much more free and much more peaceful when I've forgiven someone, but forgiveness causes my state of mind, not vice versa. It's... (read more)

As a lone question, it could be, but the point of his post is that even stipulating utilitarianism it does not follow that you or I should maximize the utils of Mr. Utility Monster.

I'm asking whether "gut judgments" are accurate, and how accurate they are.

I have very little experience with WoW, so it's interesting to hear how deliberate and reasoned a high-level raid is. I have a little experience with sports, combat, and combat sports.

It's pretty surprising that our brains handle abstractions as well as they do. It's not at all surprising that they can process and integrate sensory information as fast as they can, because that trait is crucial to survival for most animals.

When Kevin Durant fakes a pass and then shoots... (read more)