I have an inchoate thought I hope someone can seize and articulate.
There is nothing wrong with political posts as such, they are just correlated with flawed thinking, particularly not-even-wrong statements and the conjunction fallacy.
I see people object to political posts and I typically think: the way they phrased that objection seems wrong to me. I can see specific problems with the thought pattern in the post, and I can see how the political nature of the subject matter may have obscured them from the speaker, but I can’t see a single influence directly from political to inappropriate that doesn’t pass through intermediate nodes that are flaws in their own right.
it seems to have some relevance to rationality
Don’t worry, every source is a fine primary source, even if it is a poor secondary source.
To ensure
These words are a sign that you are about to try and patch a wish.
Democracy seems absolutely insane when dealing with any other serious problem in life
Advantages of democracy:
a) people feel they can achieve their goals through peaceful persuasion, so there are fewer and less violent revolutions
b) smooth transition between regimes
Not advantages of democracy:
a) dealing with serious problems in life
any other factor besides scientific competence
Saying “the killing curse” does not kill. To kill, one must say “Avada Kedavra”. You cannot select for scientific competence, only “scientific competence”, those who succeed according to whatever normalizing proxy there is (almost certainly one involving status and human judgement, rather than just the flaws of being able to game a mechanical system).
Those who are experts at are not experts on, and I fear for the rationality of those who trust p-values.
I see people object to political posts and I typically think: the way they phrased that objection seems wrong to me. I can see specific problems with the thought pattern in the post, and I can see how the political nature of the subject matter may have obscured them from the speaker, but I can’t see a single influence directly from political to inappropriate that doesn’t pass through intermediate nodes that are flaws in their own right.
“Don’t post political posts on LW” is an ethical injunction, which is to say: a political post is likely to have problems, I can confidently predict this without seeing the post or knowing what those problems are; furthermore, if upon reading to post I don’t see any problems with it, a much more likely explanation is that this is because I’m missing them due to agreeing with it than because there are no problems with the post. Thus having a blanket “no politics” rule is better then attempting to disqualify political posts by pointing to the specific problems they have, which will only drag us further into mind-killing territory.
But I’d say that posts with exactly one problem are fine for LW and correctable. The problems arise when politics causes someone to make at least five or so errors in a few sentences, and then the idea is so confounded that it is hard to tell which three errors attributed to him constitutes a charitable reading or best reconstruction of something resembling the original idea.
One should be possible to tell when one’s political opponents are making only one error—if one can find such a case to begin with.
If I were writing something like this for LW, I would include something like:
The person which we should consider to have the highest scientific competence, is the person who’s log(P(what-happened_1) ° P(what-happened_2 | what-happened_1) ° … ° P(what-happened_ N | all the stuff that happened)) is least negative. Your scientific competence is measured in bits (or decibels if you like) We should record any gambler’s score, and only use the bets of those gamblers with something like the top 0.0001 records to actually determine policy institution.
also, you said:
Don’t worry, every source is a fine primary source, even if it is a poor secondary source.
I don’t understand, but I’m intrigued.
Advantages of democracy: a) people feel they can achieve their goals through peaceful persuasion, so there are fewer and less violent revolutions b) smooth transition between regimes
P( People achieving their goals through peaceful persuasion. I Democracy ) may be greater than P(People achieving their goals through peaceful persuasion.), and maybe greater than 50%, but that doesn’t mean P(Democracy | People achieving their goals through peaceful persuasion.) isn’t less than 0.001. Democracy is a sufficient cause, not a necessary cause, for the advantages you listed, which I agree are by and large representative. In fact, I predict with something around 75% hit or miss 10%, that impressively Bayesian scientists could achieve both, settling disputes by peaceful and rational means, and transitioning policies in the optimal way, better than any publicly elected group of officials, or policies.
A congress man that votes for one thousand policies that save millions of lives and generate billions for the GDP and suggests one hundred of them him/herself, would make just as much money on average as a congress man who votes for one thousand policies that kill millions of people and creates billions in national debt. The wage of a congress man is significantly close to, if not completely independent of their betting, i.e., voting, record. The scoring system does not reward calibration or discrimination; it encourages charisma beyond all else, and also to some degree publicly perceived merit (though it probably plays a smaller role than you would think, specially if you heard reported reasons for subjects’ voting decisions). And publicly perceived merit is probably even more independent of log(P(what happened)) for a given official, than wage.
This is the silliness Sciencearchy seeks to correct. To the point of using the actual Log(P(what happened)) to score bets if need be. Establishing tests for success and failure of a given specific policy isn’t that hard (try it), but finding a genral method by which to establish the test given any policy is much harder. But if it;s easy in the specific case there must be some general rule we are applying. As an example: to see if socializing health care worked, do some sampling to find the average quality and quantity of treatment, before socialization, and after. If it increased, pay those who bet on in favor, if it decreases or stays the same, pay those who bet against. Only institute a policy if those with “scientific competence” greater than some thresh hold, are betting disproportionately in favor, or against. This would ensure that anyone can bet; anyone with the right skills can gain political power; and only those with the right skills can gain political power. They will not be given any sort of wage besides that which they win, or secondary income. And, of course, it would be completely illegal for third party interest groups to bribe top score players. Any donation given to betters in favor, must be given proportionately to betters against as well, otherwise it is bribery. You may invest in successful gamblers, but if their Log(P(what happened)) shoots down out of no where right after a private investment, they’ll be investigated, and will loose their power by virtue of the scoring system threshold. Mind you, this does not establish some goal for the entirety of the council of top gamblers to reach, they can always increase their expected payoff.
My prediction is that as the top record gamblers’ log(P(what happened))s get higher, as they do in every other game, the methods they use to achieve this, will look more and more like the scientific method, i.e., selecting from empirically testable hypotheses (predictions about policies’ results in this case) with the aid of mathematical rigor (decision theory, and probability most likely).
It seems to me that I establish this suggestion in my post decently, but no one seems to have commented on it positive or negative. Did I leave it out; not make it memorable enough; overcrowd with two many concepts? I’d like to know what you cats think.
It’s hard to write the above in a way I feel comfortable passing out to people who aren’t LWers. The OP was my first last first draft attempt. One day I’ll get around to giving my formal reasons for promoting sciencearchy (if the name sucks I’ll change it, i’m just used to it), but for now I think I can give an intuitivish formulation of my position, without the use of log(P(whathappened)) and a general Bayesian background.
Certainly. It is an empirical question; one that you would want a history/political science major as a colleague in, but not to run entirely.
I majored in history, and I wouldn’t be surprised if my approach of emphasizing stability rather than problem solving was common among people with similar educations. Rather than have government solve problems, I am concerned with having government not collapse into anarchy or civil war and wait for people to invent useful things so human progress goes steadily upward. I can see why political scientists would want their field to be about more than not failing, since there is so much potential for government to do good, and good governments are so much better than average or poor ones. Even a mid-sized nation has not just more resources than a bunch of major charities combined, but other legal advantages and advantages of sovereignty as well.
primary source
Basically, if you are wrong about what is rational, all can learn from any mistake and use the essay and thinking behind it, rather than political systems, as the basis of a rationality discussion.
P( People achieving their goals through peaceful persuasion. I Democracy )
I carefully said people “felt” persuasion would work that mattered directly. If people really can achieve their goals peacefully but think they can’t, they will not be peaceful. If people really cannot but think they can, they will be peaceful. And peace is good.
congress man
That’s one word, congressman, which is important because female Representatives vary on whether they prefer to be called congressman, congresswoman or congressperson. Males prefer congressman or congressperson.
average quality and quantity of treatment
I don’t think it’s that simple. I think the US has poor average health outcomes per dollar spent because of diminishing returns and wealth disparities. In other words, if another country spends $10,000 on two people with a disease, and the US has one individual buy $30,000 worth of care and another $2,000, the US may have worse average care per dollar simply because treating the second American left low-hanging fruit and it was hard to productively spend the last $20,000 on the first person, even if all marginal dollars were spent as well as possible. There are also questions of which system best incentivises new discoveries: recall that the recent malaria vaccine was thought to quite possibly work before the recent study was conducted but was not mass produced and distributed because it was (correctly) thought worthwhile to make sure in such cases with double blind experiments in the field. This was an example of sacrificing lives for research efficiency/money/the unit of caring.
Possibly. I was thinking more of something like not enough time spent on suggestion relative to others. But I wouldn’t doubt it. I expected this Post to be bad (though admittedly not such a huge fail). Most of the time when I suck at thinking, and I notice it, it’s got something to do with proposing solutions too early.
I don’t think it’s that simple.
Probably isn’t. But it is simple enough to be a practically approachable statistical problem.
That’s one word,
Lol, I suck. I’ll leave it the same as personal punishment.
if you are wrong about what is rational, all can learn from any mistake and use the essay and thinking behind it, rather than political systems, as the basis of a rationality discussion.
Gotcha
If people really cannot but think they can, they will be peaceful.
“Can’t x”, and “Will x” or “Did x”, are contradictory. But I hear what you are saying, I think. Attitude is an extremely important factor, if not the most important factor, in how brutally people handle their political differences.
But if people who were not politicians, could feel as confident about their work, as they do about the work of their doctors and nurses, then I don’t think we would have to worry nearly as much about how we are going to settle our political disagreements. The experts are on it. They’ll figure out the best way for us all to get what we want available. But then again a doctor will rarely if ever benefit from not giving you proper treatment; politicians benefit from not instituting the best policy constantly with a diverse range of creative cons.
Of course, public opinion certainly does affect what policies are likely to succeed, and to find public opinion you need randomized polls (much like democracy except not self selecting), but you need more than that too. Information independent of public opinion. However, if you can convince your neighbors to write down “socialist” in next year’s census, successful gamblers will notice this and exploit it for all it is worth.
It seems intuitive to me (and I realize that isn’t much) that a society where we use a betting market to dictate policy, would be very conducive to rational political debate, in both elite and hobbyist gamblers. Peace is good; and obviously, political scientists would produce more peace than democratically elected officials. But so would almost any other group that was rewarded for increasing happiness. Not war means more peace. More peace means more happy. More happy means more reward.
It’s lesswrong; will you ever find a higher density of Bayesians? We know P-values don’t account for P(H|~E), P(H|E), P(E) or P(H). P(E|H) is not enough information to determine your proper probability assignment to H, given you see E, and P(E|H) is all a P-value tells you.
I have an inchoate thought I hope someone can seize and articulate.
There is nothing wrong with political posts as such, they are just correlated with flawed thinking, particularly not-even-wrong statements and the conjunction fallacy.
I see people object to political posts and I typically think: the way they phrased that objection seems wrong to me. I can see specific problems with the thought pattern in the post, and I can see how the political nature of the subject matter may have obscured them from the speaker, but I can’t see a single influence directly from political to inappropriate that doesn’t pass through intermediate nodes that are flaws in their own right.
Don’t worry, every source is a fine primary source, even if it is a poor secondary source.
These words are a sign that you are about to try and patch a wish.
Advantages of democracy: a) people feel they can achieve their goals through peaceful persuasion, so there are fewer and less violent revolutions b) smooth transition between regimes
Not advantages of democracy: a) dealing with serious problems in life
Saying “the killing curse” does not kill. To kill, one must say “Avada Kedavra”. You cannot select for scientific competence, only “scientific competence”, those who succeed according to whatever normalizing proxy there is (almost certainly one involving status and human judgement, rather than just the flaws of being able to game a mechanical system).
Those who are experts at are not experts on, and I fear for the rationality of those who trust p-values.
“Don’t post political posts on LW” is an ethical injunction, which is to say: a political post is likely to have problems, I can confidently predict this without seeing the post or knowing what those problems are; furthermore, if upon reading to post I don’t see any problems with it, a much more likely explanation is that this is because I’m missing them due to agreeing with it than because there are no problems with the post. Thus having a blanket “no politics” rule is better then attempting to disqualify political posts by pointing to the specific problems they have, which will only drag us further into mind-killing territory.
Very good.
But I’d say that posts with exactly one problem are fine for LW and correctable. The problems arise when politics causes someone to make at least five or so errors in a few sentences, and then the idea is so confounded that it is hard to tell which three errors attributed to him constitutes a charitable reading or best reconstruction of something resembling the original idea.
One should be possible to tell when one’s political opponents are making only one error—if one can find such a case to begin with.
If I were writing something like this for LW, I would include something like:
also, you said:
I don’t understand, but I’m intrigued.
P( People achieving their goals through peaceful persuasion. I Democracy ) may be greater than P(People achieving their goals through peaceful persuasion.), and maybe greater than 50%, but that doesn’t mean P(Democracy | People achieving their goals through peaceful persuasion.) isn’t less than 0.001. Democracy is a sufficient cause, not a necessary cause, for the advantages you listed, which I agree are by and large representative. In fact, I predict with something around 75% hit or miss 10%, that impressively Bayesian scientists could achieve both, settling disputes by peaceful and rational means, and transitioning policies in the optimal way, better than any publicly elected group of officials, or policies.
A congress man that votes for one thousand policies that save millions of lives and generate billions for the GDP and suggests one hundred of them him/herself, would make just as much money on average as a congress man who votes for one thousand policies that kill millions of people and creates billions in national debt. The wage of a congress man is significantly close to, if not completely independent of their betting, i.e., voting, record. The scoring system does not reward calibration or discrimination; it encourages charisma beyond all else, and also to some degree publicly perceived merit (though it probably plays a smaller role than you would think, specially if you heard reported reasons for subjects’ voting decisions). And publicly perceived merit is probably even more independent of log(P(what happened)) for a given official, than wage.
This is the silliness Sciencearchy seeks to correct. To the point of using the actual Log(P(what happened)) to score bets if need be. Establishing tests for success and failure of a given specific policy isn’t that hard (try it), but finding a genral method by which to establish the test given any policy is much harder. But if it;s easy in the specific case there must be some general rule we are applying. As an example: to see if socializing health care worked, do some sampling to find the average quality and quantity of treatment, before socialization, and after. If it increased, pay those who bet on in favor, if it decreases or stays the same, pay those who bet against. Only institute a policy if those with “scientific competence” greater than some thresh hold, are betting disproportionately in favor, or against. This would ensure that anyone can bet; anyone with the right skills can gain political power; and only those with the right skills can gain political power. They will not be given any sort of wage besides that which they win, or secondary income. And, of course, it would be completely illegal for third party interest groups to bribe top score players. Any donation given to betters in favor, must be given proportionately to betters against as well, otherwise it is bribery. You may invest in successful gamblers, but if their Log(P(what happened)) shoots down out of no where right after a private investment, they’ll be investigated, and will loose their power by virtue of the scoring system threshold. Mind you, this does not establish some goal for the entirety of the council of top gamblers to reach, they can always increase their expected payoff.
My prediction is that as the top record gamblers’ log(P(what happened))s get higher, as they do in every other game, the methods they use to achieve this, will look more and more like the scientific method, i.e., selecting from empirically testable hypotheses (predictions about policies’ results in this case) with the aid of mathematical rigor (decision theory, and probability most likely).
It seems to me that I establish this suggestion in my post decently, but no one seems to have commented on it positive or negative. Did I leave it out; not make it memorable enough; overcrowd with two many concepts? I’d like to know what you cats think.
It’s hard to write the above in a way I feel comfortable passing out to people who aren’t LWers. The OP was my first last first draft attempt. One day I’ll get around to giving my formal reasons for promoting sciencearchy (if the name sucks I’ll change it, i’m just used to it), but for now I think I can give an intuitivish formulation of my position, without the use of log(P(whathappened)) and a general Bayesian background.
I majored in history, and I wouldn’t be surprised if my approach of emphasizing stability rather than problem solving was common among people with similar educations. Rather than have government solve problems, I am concerned with having government not collapse into anarchy or civil war and wait for people to invent useful things so human progress goes steadily upward. I can see why political scientists would want their field to be about more than not failing, since there is so much potential for government to do good, and good governments are so much better than average or poor ones. Even a mid-sized nation has not just more resources than a bunch of major charities combined, but other legal advantages and advantages of sovereignty as well.
Basically, if you are wrong about what is rational, all can learn from any mistake and use the essay and thinking behind it, rather than political systems, as the basis of a rationality discussion.
I carefully said people “felt” persuasion would work that mattered directly. If people really can achieve their goals peacefully but think they can’t, they will not be peaceful. If people really cannot but think they can, they will be peaceful. And peace is good.
That’s one word, congressman, which is important because female Representatives vary on whether they prefer to be called congressman, congresswoman or congressperson. Males prefer congressman or congressperson.
I don’t think it’s that simple. I think the US has poor average health outcomes per dollar spent because of diminishing returns and wealth disparities. In other words, if another country spends $10,000 on two people with a disease, and the US has one individual buy $30,000 worth of care and another $2,000, the US may have worse average care per dollar simply because treating the second American left low-hanging fruit and it was hard to productively spend the last $20,000 on the first person, even if all marginal dollars were spent as well as possible. There are also questions of which system best incentivises new discoveries: recall that the recent malaria vaccine was thought to quite possibly work before the recent study was conducted but was not mass produced and distributed because it was (correctly) thought worthwhile to make sure in such cases with double blind experiments in the field. This was an example of sacrificing lives for research efficiency/money/the unit of caring.
Is that the same as proposing solutions early?
Possibly. I was thinking more of something like not enough time spent on suggestion relative to others. But I wouldn’t doubt it. I expected this Post to be bad (though admittedly not such a huge fail). Most of the time when I suck at thinking, and I notice it, it’s got something to do with proposing solutions too early.
Probably isn’t. But it is simple enough to be a practically approachable statistical problem.
Lol, I suck. I’ll leave it the same as personal punishment.
Gotcha
“Can’t x”, and “Will x” or “Did x”, are contradictory. But I hear what you are saying, I think. Attitude is an extremely important factor, if not the most important factor, in how brutally people handle their political differences.
But if people who were not politicians, could feel as confident about their work, as they do about the work of their doctors and nurses, then I don’t think we would have to worry nearly as much about how we are going to settle our political disagreements. The experts are on it. They’ll figure out the best way for us all to get what we want available. But then again a doctor will rarely if ever benefit from not giving you proper treatment; politicians benefit from not instituting the best policy constantly with a diverse range of creative cons.
Of course, public opinion certainly does affect what policies are likely to succeed, and to find public opinion you need randomized polls (much like democracy except not self selecting), but you need more than that too. Information independent of public opinion. However, if you can convince your neighbors to write down “socialist” in next year’s census, successful gamblers will notice this and exploit it for all it is worth.
It seems intuitive to me (and I realize that isn’t much) that a society where we use a betting market to dictate policy, would be very conducive to rational political debate, in both elite and hobbyist gamblers. Peace is good; and obviously, political scientists would produce more peace than democratically elected officials. But so would almost any other group that was rewarded for increasing happiness. Not war means more peace. More peace means more happy. More happy means more reward.
For improving to a Pareto optimum yes, but probably not for choosing among them.
It’s lesswrong; will you ever find a higher density of Bayesians? We know P-values don’t account for P(H|~E), P(H|E), P(E) or P(H). P(E|H) is not enough information to determine your proper probability assignment to H, given you see E, and P(E|H) is all a P-value tells you.