Replying toHow do you assess the quality / reliability of a scientific study?

whalesOct 30, 2019

How do you assess the quality / reliability of a scientific study?

Recapitulating something I've written about before:

You should first make a serious effort to formulate both the specific question you want answered, and why you want an answer. It may turn out surprisingly often that you don't need to do all this work to evaluate the study.

Short of becoming an expert yourself, your best bet is then to learn how to talk to people in the field until you can understand what they think about the paper and why—and also how they think and talk about these things. This is roughly what Harry Collins calls "interactional" expertise. (He takes gravitational-wave scientist Joe Weber's late work as an especially vivid example: "I can promise... (read more)

Replying toRationality Exercises Prize of September 2019 ($1,000)

whales6y*

Rationality Exercises Prize of September 2019 ($1,000)

Hm, not sure what happened to the Washington Post comments. Sorry about that. Here's my guess as to what I was thinking:

The axes are comparing an average (median income) to a total (student loan debt). This is generally a recipe for uninformative comparisons. Worse, the average is both per person and per year. So by itself this tells you little about the debt burden shouldered by a typical member of a generation. For example, you could easily see growth in total debt while individual debt burden fell, depending on the growth in degrees awarded and the typical time to pay off debt. If you wanted to make claims about how debt burdens

whales6y

Rationality Exercises Prize of September 2019 ($1,000)

My past occasional blogging included a few exercises that might be of interest. I'm pretty sure #4 is basically an expanded version of something from the Sequences, although I don't recall which post exactly. Others are more open ended. (Along the lines of #5 I've been casually collecting examples of scientific controversy and speculation with relatively clear-cut resolutions for the purposes of giving interested laypeople practice evaluating these things, to the extent that's possible. I don't know if I'll ever get around to writing something up, but if anyone has their own examples, I'd love to hear about them.)

Replying toHow Popper killed Particle Physics

whales8y

How Popper killed Particle Physics

Maybe we're talking about different things, but from the page I'm on now where I'm looking at and replying to the discussion of the link (https://www.lesserwrong.com/posts/vhAJ4DBXZukE7SNtq/how-popper-killed-particle-physics/) the only link to the actual article is still gjm's. In particular, the title of the blog post is not a link, although I would have expected it to be. To get to the actual article I have to click on the linkpost title in one of the other post listings (Featured/Frontpage/All). This happens to me for all link posts and for different browsers on both mobile and desktop.

Paradox and pedagogy

whales

When water freezes, it expands. Thus, my latest invention places a weight on a column of water, then freezes the water to lift the weight, doing work. By using a weight heavy enough that the work done is greater than the energy expenditure to freeze the water, I create a perpetual motion machine.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics tells you that this is impossible. But it tells you so in a non-constructive way. It doesn't say which step is mistaken, what unmentioned physical mechanism is required for its satisfaction, or exactly how it works out mathematically. Even partial explanations—say, water under pressure takes more energy to freeze—aren't completely satisfactory, leaving questions like: Why... (read 1694 more words →)

Replying toNon-market failures: inefficient networks

whales8y

Non-market failures: inefficient networks

Content note: This is a collection/expansion of stuff I've previously posted about elsewhere. I've gathered it here because it's semi-related to Eliezer's recent posts. It's not meant to be a response to the "inadequacy" toolbox or a claim to ownership of any particular idea, but only one more perspective people may find useful as they're thinking about these things.

Non-market failures: inefficient networks

whales

Economics has a rich language for talking about market failures. Situations involving things like externalities, asymmetric information, public goods, or principal-agent problems can all result in room for improvement. In practice these situations haven't turned out to be fully tractable, but they're broadly recognized for what they are. We can at least talk theoretically about what's wrong and how to fix it in a market-failure framework, and sometimes we can use the question "how does this deviate from this idealized mechanism (which we believe brings about the best outcomes)?" to guide effective interventions. But not all failures are market failures—not even all failures concerning allocation of goods and services, broadly construed.

Within organizations,... (read 1579 more words →)

Replying toContinuing the discussion thread from the MTG post

whales8y

Continuing the discussion thread from the MTG post

For what it's worth, I was another (the other?) person who downvoted the comment in question early (having upvoted the post, mostly for explaining an unfamiliar interesting thing clearly).

Catching up on all this has been a little odd to me. I'm obviously not a culture lord, but also my vote wasn't about this question of "the bar" except (not that I would naturally frame it this way) perhaps as far as I read CoolShirtMcPants as doing something similar to what you said you were doing---"here is my considered position on this, I encourage people to try it on and attend to specifically how it might come out as I imply"---and you as

whales8y

LDL 2: Nonconvex Optimization

Two more thoughts: the above is probably more common in [what I intuitively think of as] "physical" problems where the parameters have some sort of geometric or causal relationship, which is maybe less meaningful for neural networks?

Also, for optimization more broadly, your constraints will give you a way to wind up with many parameters that can't be changed to decrease your function, without requiring a massive coincidence. (The boundary of the feasible region is lower-dimensional.) Again, I guess not something deep learning has to worry about in full generality.

Replying toLDL 2: Nonconvex Optimization

whales8y

LDL 2: Nonconvex Optimization

Hm. Thinking of this in terms of the few relevant projects I've worked on, problems with (nominally) 10,000 parameters definitely had plenty of local minima. In retrospect it's easy to see how. Saddles could be arbitrarily long, where many parameters basically become irrelevant depending on where you're standing, and the only way out is effectively restarting. More generally, the parameters were very far from independent. Besides the saddles, for example, you had rough clusters of parameters where you'd want all or none but not half to be (say) small in most situations. In other words, the problem wasn't "really" 10,000-dimensional; we just didn't know how or where to reduce dimensionality. I wonder how common that is.

Replying toAgainst naming things, and so on

whales8y

Against naming things, and so on

I think the main thing I want to say [besides my response to Oliver below] is that this post was not framed in my head as starting a conversation in response to your post, but as gesturing in the direction of some under-emphasized considerations as one contribution in a long-running conversation about rationalist jargon. Of course, I ended up opening with and only taking quotes from you, and now it looks the way it does, i.e. targeting your "bid" but somewhat askew. So that was a mistake, for which I apologize.

Also, I know I basically asked for your "actually a defeater" response, but I really was non-rhetorically hoping people would think about what I was leaning upon and accomplishing (or not) by using the Names that I chose throughout that might not align with their prior ideas about what the Names are for.

Replying toAgainst naming things, and so on

whales8y

Against naming things, and so on

Pretty much agreed. I might go beyond "provisional" to "disposable". I really do take maintaining fluidity and not fooling yourself to be more important/possible than creating common vocabulary or high-level unitary concepts or introspective handles [though I don't introspect verbally, so maybe I would say that]; I really do think the way the community treats words is a good lever for that.

(Of course, this is all very abstract, isn't a full elaboration of what I believe, and certainly has no force of argument. At best, I'm pointing towards a few considerations I could readily abstract out of the sum of my observations, in the hopes that people can recontextualize some of their reading with concerns along these lines.)

I'd also like to see someone try your last suggestion. (If nothing else, I might use it in a fiction project.)

Against naming things, and so on

whales

Recent discussion on naming concepts mostly focuses on arguments in favor, noting only a few caveats, as LW user Conor Moreton in Why and How to Name Things:

What you lose by the proliferation of jargon is ease-of-entry and cross-cultural intelligibility and hard-drive space in the brains of people trying to track all of it.

I think you lose more than that, so I'll try to name [sic] a few more reasons your caution might run deeper.

1. The nomothetic fallacy

Diagnosis isn't a cure, but it can bring a sense of relief untethered from prognosis. You might still have the same symptoms that still need the same treatment, but it feels like a large part

... (read 969 more words →)

Exposition and guidance by analogy

whales

(Below I attempt to reproduce a chart I can't [?] embed, from Models and Analogies in Science by Mary Hesse; I don't know how it will display on all screens, but the source is this image at the top of the cross-post version here.)

At an elementary level we can set up the following correspondences:

WATER WAVES         |       SOUND        |          LIGHT
Produced by motion  | Produced by motion | *Produced by moving
 of water particles |  of gongs, strings |

... (read 1200 more words →)

Unfair outcomes from fair tests

whales

[Summary: Say you use a fair test to predict a quality for which other non-tested factors matter, and then you make a decision based on this prediction. Then people who do worse on the test measure (but not necessarily the other factors) are subject to different error rates, even if you estimate their qualities just as well. If that’s already obvious, great; I additionally try to present the notion of fairness that lets one stop at “the test is fair; all is as it should be” as a somewhat arbitrary line to draw with respect to a broader class of notions of statistical fairness.] [Not sure if this text will appear anywhere in LW 2.0, so this is a test.]

Thinking on the page

whales

“Thinking on the page” is a handle that I’ve found useful in improving my writing (and my introspection more generally). When I write, for the most part, I’m trying to put something that I already feel is true into words. But when I think on the page, the words are getting ahead of my internal sense of what’s true. I’m writing something that just sounds good, or even just something that logically flows from what I’ve already written but has come untethered from my internal sense. It’s kind of a generalized verbal overshadowing.

I don’t think this is challenging only to people who think [of themselves as thinking] non-verbally, considering how much more

... (read 981 more words →)

A self-experiment in training "noticing confusion"

whales

12y

I previously discussed the potential relevance of therapeutic and instructional models of metacognitive training to LW-style rationality skills. As an attempted concrete realization of what this connection could look like, I ran a self-experiment in which I counted instances of noticing confusion. Below I elaborate on the motivation and design of the experiment, then discuss some quantitative results and qualitative reflections.

Background

Self-monitoring as a treatment vehicle in cognitive-behavioral and related therapies can take many forms. In one (to my secondhand understanding), the patient is coached in noticing a physical or mental behavior by identifying examples of the behavior and heuristics for when to watch for it, and by examining the feeling of the... (read 1990 more words →)

Rationality training: academic and clinical perspectives

whales

12y

What can existing research tell us about teaching and learning key rationalist skills? One central idea is the monitoring and adjustment of mental processes, which appears in various forms in the LW community, debiasing research, education research concerning metacognition, and cognitive-behavioral and related therapies. I expect that rationality training can benefit from fully realizing the connections between these fields, which some mainstream research is already beginning to do. In another post, I discuss a self-experiment in noticing confusion based on these ideas.

Debiasing

In Is Rationality Teachable?, Luke noted some promising successes in teaching statistics and logic, and also in the growing body of research on debiasing. The main lines of research consider debiasing... (read 1668 more words →)

Book Review: How Learning Works

whales

12y

As promised, I review and point-by-point summarize How Learning Works: 7 Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching by Susan A. Ambrose, Michael W. Bridges, Michele DiPietro, Marsha C. Lovett, and Marie K. Norman (2010), hereafter HLW as I scratch in futility at the sprawling length of this post.

Review

The authors aim to provide "a bridge between research and practice" for teaching and learning, very much in the spirit of Practical Advice Backed by Deep Theories. They concentrate on widely-supported results that are independent of subject matter and environment, so while the discussion is directed towards instructors in K-12 and college classrooms, there are also implications for essentially anyone in a teaching or learning role.

Let... (read 5051 more words →)

Try more things.

whales

12y

(Cross-posted from my personal site.)

Several months ago I began a list of "things to try," which I share at the bottom of this post. It suggests many mundane, trivial-to-medium-cost changes to lifestyle and routine. Now that I've spent some time with most of them and pursued at least as many more personal items in the same spirit, I'll suggest you do something similar. Why?

Raise the temperature in your optimization algorithm: avoid the trap of doing too much analysis on too little data and escape local optima.
You can think of this as a system for self-improvement; something that operates on a meta level, unlike an object-level goal or technique; something that helps you fail

... (read 2058 more words →)

LESSWRONG
LW

LESSWRONG
LW

whales

Try more things.

A self-experiment in training "noticing confusion"

Book Review: How Learning Works

Rationality training: academic and clinical perspectives

whales

whales

Paradox and pedagogy

Non-market failures: inefficient networks

Against naming things, and so on

Exposition and guidance by analogy

Unfair outcomes from fair tests

Thinking on the page

A self-experiment in training "noticing confusion"

whales

Try more things.

A self-experiment in training "noticing confusion"

Book Review: How Learning Works

Rationality training: academic and clinical perspectives

whales

whales

Paradox and pedagogy

Non-market failures: inefficient networks

Against naming things, and so on

Exposition and guidance by analogy

Unfair outcomes from fair tests

Thinking on the page

A self-experiment in training "noticing confusion"

1. The nomothetic fallacy

Background

Debiasing

Review