All of Sieben's Comments + Replies

"For mature and well-understood economics such as that of the United States, consensus forecasts are not notably biased or inefficient. In cases where they miss the mark, this can usually be attributed to issues of insufficient information or shocks to the economy."

Maybe it's the allure of alarmism, but aren't we mostly concerned with predicting catastrophe? This is kind of like saying you can predict the weather except for typhoons and floods.

It's fair to assume that a Cryonics company would be set up to endure in the long term. Otherwise they dramatically reduce the number of people willing to sign up. This is different from a startup tech company who does not have to promise its investors and consumers that it will be around for the next 50 years. It's kind of like the opposite of a netflix account. This should give us a lot of hope because even Netflix seems to be pretty robust.

Additionally, just because a company goes out of business doesn't mean that all its capital is thrown away. You li... (read more)

The real problem with "win-more" cards is that they're conditional. Being conditionally good is a common criticism of many magic cards. The advice to new players is simple: think about how likely these conditions are to be met. If they can't make this estimate, copy a more experienced player's opinion.

It's also possible that a "win-more" card is also just a decent card even when you're not winning. For example, if you play MTG now, you'll know that 2 desecration demons on the play against G/R monsters is both very good, and that the second demon is "win more".

So I don't really see a problem with playing "win more" cards. The problem is playing too many conditional cards.

How do you measure arms-race type goods? For example, the world would be better off without any nuclear weapons. However the world is made better off if several reasonable countries can obtain nuclear weapons to serve as deterrents to others using them.

A similar analysis exists for guns.

See Yvain's post on Schelling Fences on Slippery Slopes.

This is not a blanket reason to defend all ideologies against censorship. The analysis of many religions also implicitly assumes that there is no cost to tolerating competing religions, whereas there is a definite cost to hearing out many of the worst political ideologies.

It's almost as if the slippery slope works both ways. If you can't filter anything, your energy is drained by a thousand paper cuts.

You do realize that most people have the same opinion about the Singularity?

I wasn't aware th... (read more)

Therefore it is particularly important that we are able to evaluate all ideas as accurately as we can, and particularly important not to spread lies, etc.

Okay, so, we don't know what the right answer is. But we know what the right answer ISN'T, right? We know that Westboro Baptist Church isn't going to lead the human race into a new golden age. Why not try to limit their influence?

And even if there were some seemingly bad ideas that could, through some twist, actually be good ideas, there are still nonzero costs to considering them. Like if there is a 0... (read more)

Simple examples of playing dirty:

• Someone links a URL but it is broken in an obvious way. If you truly interested in arguing for the sake of argument, you could fix the URL and go to their link. But you could also take the opportunity to complain that they are just wasting your time and aren't really serious.

• Sometimes, there is a finite amount of time or space for your opponents to reply to you in. You can pick arguments whose articulation is economic, but whose rebuttal is not. This puts a huge volumetric burden on them such that they will be unlikely

Addressing the most stupid of opposition's arguments is not an enlightened way of discussion, but it's still way better than manufacturing and spreading widely false statistics.

You seem to be confused. Both of the things you mentioned are examples of "playing dirty".

If the other side played equally dirty, we would see articles like: "Did you know that 95% of violent crimes are committed by Social Justice Warriors?" or "Woman is most likely to get raped at the feminist meeting (therefore, ladies, you should avoid those meeting

Just think about how much more persuasive fighting dirty sounds if the whole fate of the human race hangs in the balance. As is, there is an underlying assumption that we have infinite time to grind down our opposition with passive logical superiority.

I don't understand all the consequentialist arguments against playing dirty. If your only objections are practical, then you're open to subtle dirty maneuvers that have very high payoffs.

A really simple example of this would be to ignore articulate opponents and spend most of your energy publicly destroying the opposition's overzealous lowest-common-denominators. This is actually how most of politics works...

... and also how this conversation seems to be working, since the Scott Alexander side seems more intent on arguing through hyperbole than addressing... (read more)

so it should be emphasised that this is not a Fully General Counterargument against learning anything.

I think it's okay to tell kids that if you're incompetent you'll still do fine in life, because it's true. The function of telling them that the material doesn't matter could be to reduce their anxiety over the obvious tension between valuing coursework and real world pragmatism.

Another takeaway from the argument could be that adults are generally pretty incompetent. Most people don't use math or calculus, but in my experience this hurts them quite a bi... (read more)

The points made seem very vague and trivially true. For example: "Consider homeschooling and online school. Depending on your situation, these may be superior alternatives to regular high school for you." Yes, of course, for the "right situation" homeschooling is good. Kind of like how you shouldn't drink "too much" water or breath "too much" oxygen.

Try giving specific examples of the way the system is bad for them. For example, point out that most adults can't actually do algebra or calculus, and that these skills ... (read more)

Yes, except that I am the only expert on what music I like.

Oh, so you agree there are can be good reasons to discount the "expert" establishment, no matter how much "peer review" or citations they have.

Are we talking about degrees here. I am pretty sure Ive been talking about top level articles. Or can anyone with an IQ above 110 publish one of those?

Yes. But getting a degree is normally a prereq for publishing, and everyone who gets a degree publishes something. And yes, you can publish in the "top" journal articles i... (read more)

Doctors not researchers in the top peer-reviewed papers.....

Researchers who got there because other researchers said they were good. It's circular logic.

Haven't been interested at all in the subject and have never looked into it. And anyway if you are right and they are completely fake and wrong, this would not be general evidence that papers are always as good as coin flips.

It's prima facie evidence. That's all I hoped for. I haven't actually done a SRS of journals by topic and figured out which ones are really BS. But of the subjects I do know ab... (read more)

You do understand that scientist don't just look for correlations but form a bit more complex models than that. Do you seriously think that things like that are not taken into account!?

Yes. You should read the papers. They're garbage.

Remember that study on doctors and how they screwed up the breast cancer Bayesian updating question? Only 15% of them got it right, which is actually surprisingly high.

Okay now how much statistical training do you think people in public health, a department that is a total joke at most universities, have? Because I know ho... (read more)

Wow. This is a pretty far-fetched claim..

This is a pretty solid argument.

My theory is that respected papers are done in a method more resembling the scientific method than coin flip on average and thus they get more accurate results than a coin flip. There, happy?

Thanks for clarifying. I disagree. See the systematic bias/complexity arguments.

I did answer your question - the answer was yes.

Do you really choose your music based on the average opinion of "experts"? Give me a break. Look, if you could randomly draft 20 people who had demon... (read more)

People who eat red meat tend to:

Smoke

Eat cheeseburgers and drink coke

Exercise less

etc etc...

Do you understand why it's not... entirely honest... to blame red meat? It shows up as a statistical correlate. It can be used to identify people at risk for these conditions, but then researchers make a leap and infer a causal relationship.

It's an ideological punchline they can use to get published. And that's all.

Or that information in studies is more accurate than made-up information?

This is exactly my point. Studies on many many subjects may not contain information more useful than coin flip, let alone an educated guess.

All I am advocating is to look for 'respected' studies and look at them. If you don't think that looking at studies 'approved' by the field gives you more accurate information than not doing it I can't really do much.

This is question begging. You have to have a theory about why a "respected" study is likely to be correct. I've alr... (read more)

Yes, there is A LOT of garbage. This is why I am recommending using heuristics such as numbers of citations - to maximize the accuracy of the information. And, yes, peer review is not perfect but compare journals/fields that rely on peer-review to those that do not...

My argument really boils down to 2 things. Researchers being systematically biased (ex: red meat), and researchers having a very low probability of actually knowing the right answer but publishing something that fits some narrow set of data (ex: "advanced" simulation). To be sure,... (read more)

I punched in "red meat" to google scholar.

http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/27/9/2108.short 197 citations - concluding that eating red meat "may" increase your risk of type II diabetes.

http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/82/6/1169.short 173 citations - Shows more "correlations" and "associations" for the "beneficial effect of plant food intake and an adverse effect of meat intake on blood pressure."

As someone who actually does academic research and has spent countless hours reading the fine details of "prestigious" publications, 90% of the material out there is total garbage, and it is difficult to know if a paper is garbage just by reading the abstract. Peer review doesn't help either because review boards are lazy and will never double check any of your actual footwork. They will never read your code, rerun the algorithms you claim you used, etc. A simple glitch can change the sign of your answer, but you typically stop looking for glitch... (read more)