I see people make statements of the form, "In my experience with people I encounter, X is correlated with ...". The problem is, there's an excellent chance that the people they deal with are very unrepresentative of the population they want to generalize about, and I rarely see them show...
(Epistemic status: non-expert who's spent about 5 minutes looking into the subject) So, we have more wildfires this year in California, which are once again screwing up the local air quality. As I understand it, there's lots of dry wood accumulating; the fires are bound to happen eventually, and if...
Even if it were 1/10, it might be the most important 1/10. Something like that is in fact plausible: if someone were optimally trying to mostly look factual while pushing a political agenda, they would probably sort statements by ratio of [political benefit of lying] / [expected cost of being caught lying], pick a threshold, and lie whenever that ratio exceeds the threshold; and political benefit, as evaluated by this hypothetical journalist-hack, likely correlates with importance to the reader.
I would put it this way: being vulnerable is a probably-unfortunate side-effect of a means to an end, not an end in itself, and it's usually worth tracking just what end you have in mind. (And, yes, if you had a cost-free alternative means that achieved the same result but didn't make you vulnerable, then that would be an improvement.) For example: "telling someone a secret that would enable them to shame you for it", or "letting yourself rely on someone else to take care of a thing for you [such that if they fell through, it would hurt you]", or "letting yourself care about someone else's judgment of you". There are... (read 479 more words →)
Suggestion for how to pose the first problem: “Imagine that someone places a large number of mirrors around the Earth so that the same sunlight hits the earth as before, but now it lands evenly spread around the earth’s surface instead of hitting the daytime half of the earth.” And, probably: “The mirrors don’t reflect any of Earth’s radiation back onto the earth.”
Protip: replace the “x” in the URL with “xcancel”. Currently works well.
It seems like the move for height would be to make men taller and women shorter? Or to increase the sexually dimorphic difference, and separately pick the optimal average.
An argument in favor of it is, "free association" is inherently a fuzzy human thing, where the process is just thinking for a bit and seeing what you come up with and at some point declaring victory; there is nothing in it that could possibly guarantee correctness. Arguably, anyone who encounters the term should be conscious of this, and therefore notice that it's an inappropriate step in a logical argument that purports to establish high certainty. Perhaps even notice that the term itself is paradoxical: in a logical context, "exhaustion" must be a rigorous process, but "free association" is inherently unrigorous.
I'm not sure if I buy the argument. The author of "The Design of Everyday Things" warns against being too clever with names and assuming that normal people will get the reference you intend. But... I dunno.
Asking Claude for examples
There are languages out there in which the epistemic status is a mandatory part of a sentence ("I've seen", "so I have been told", "I think", etc.)
Is this true? Examples?
Yes, this is absolutely true! These grammatical features are called evidentials or evidentiality markers, and they're mandatory in many languages around the world.
Turkish is a classic example. It has two past tenses that encode evidentiality:
So "geldi" means "he came" (and I witnessed it), while "gelmiş" means "he came" (but I didn't see it—I heard about it or saw evidence of it).
Quechua (Andean languages) has several evidential markers:
Hmmph. If he wants to push people to do more research so that they can make statements without any such qualifiers—or to shut up when they haven't done enough research to have anything useful to say—then I may sympathize. If he wants them to make themselves sound more certain than they are, then I oppose.
Rescue the girl and plan to explain to the wealthy people what happened. Possibly try to bring her with him, for purposes including lending credence to his story.
I see people make statements of the form, "In my experience with people I encounter, X is correlated with ...". The problem is, there's an excellent chance that the people they deal with are very unrepresentative of the population they want to generalize about, and I rarely see them show awareness of the possibility that selection bias has created the effect they're describing.
Scott has written about the strength of social group filter bubbles. But there's a systematic effect I want to highlight: Berkson's paradox. Following Wikipedia's example:
Suppose that people become famous either by being pretty, or by being talented. Let's say these are all-or-nothing, binary traits. Then, among the population of famous... (read 843 more words →)
90% awful idea: "Genetic diversity" in computer programs for resistance to large-scale cyberattacks.
The problem: Once someone has figured out the right security hole in Tesla's software (and, say, broken into a server used to deliver software updates), they can use this to install their malicious code into all 5 million Teslas in the field (or maybe just one model, so perhaps 1 million cars), and probably make them all crash simultaneously and cause a catastrophe.
The solution: There will probably come a point where we can go through the codebase and pick random functions and say, "Claude, write a specification of what this function does", and then "Claude, take this specification and write... (read more)
Pithy sayings are lossily compressed.
(Epistemic status: non-expert who's spent about 5 minutes looking into the subject)
So, we have more wildfires this year in California, which are once again screwing up the local air quality. As I understand it, there's lots of dry wood accumulating; the fires are bound to happen eventually, and if we manage to suppress them for some years, they'll just burn harder when (not if) the blaze finally happens—and we're currently reaping the effects of prior years of fire suppression.
I had a hunch, and googled, and found an article from September 2020 that says:
... (read 206 more words →)This year’s fires in California have already burned through 1.4 million hectares (3.4 million acres) of land, and the fire
This gets subtle. I can think of several cases where journalists sat on what would have been delicious scandals that should be good for a career, for what look like political reasons. That said, if one looks closer, it's plausible that, in each case, they reasoned (plausibly correctly) that it would not have actually been good for their career to publish it, because they would have faced backlash (for political/tribal reasons), and possibly their editors (if applicable) would have refused to allow... (read more)