I appreciate the snippets from EY’s papers, which I don’t read, because it’s interesting to know what he’s writing about more formally. I found the review mostly seemed like stuff I already know, although in returning to it I noticed that it did contain some new terminology around reference classes.
But this:
For example, gender-neutral language can reduce male bias in our associations (Stahlberg et al. 2007). In this spirit, I recommend we retire the phrase “the outside view..”, and instead use phrases like “some outside views...” and “an outside view...”
Is really good. I mean, along with the general recommendation to use multiple reference classes. I guess my point is that the article is made possibly twice as awesome by the inclusion of this part, as it dramatically increases the probability that this will catch on memetically.
Now, many years later, for future observers, it seems important to note that the linked study probably didn’t survive the replication crisis, which makes this paragraph as it stands sadly one of the worst in the essay. I am not confident that this particular study didn’t replicate, since that would require substantially more time investment, but the vast majority of the studies around priming and associative reasoning were really badly flawed, and I expect the above to be no different, and I would advise great caution before taking any studies in its reference class to be worth any more than random anecdotes (and to be substantially less valuable than your own personal anecdotes or unbiased samples of anecdotes from your friends that you’ve bothered to vet and follow up on).
I haven’t been at all diligent about this “the outside view” vs “an outside view” reframing, but I’ll add my own personal anecdote that in general I’ve broadly found these sorts of reframings to be helpful, eg shifting to past tense to say “I’ve tended to be triggered by X” vs “I always get really triggered by X” as a way to feel a sense of self as changing rather than stuck. It generates a whole different meaning.
Thank you for highlighting that passage—by the time the text got to that point, I had already decided that this article wasn’t telling me anything new and had started skimming, and missed that paragraph as a result. It is indeed very good.
In the mathematical theory of Galois representations, a choice of algebraic closure of the rationals and an embedding of this algebraic closure in the complex numbers (e.g. section 5) is usually necessary to frame the background setting, but I never hear “the algebraic closure” or “the embedding,” instead “an algebraic closure” and “an embedding.” Thus I never forget that a choice has to be made and that this choice is not necessarily obvious. This is an example from mathematics where careful language is helpful in tracking background assumptions.
This is an example from mathematics where careful language is helpful in tracking background assumptions.
I wonder how the mathematicians speaking article-free languages deal with it, given that they lack a non-cumbersome linguistic construct to express this potential ambiguity.
I appreciate the snippets from EY’s papers, which I don’t read, because it’s interesting to know what he’s writing about more formally. I found the review mostly seemed like stuff I already know, although in returning to it I noticed that it did contain some new terminology around reference classes.
But this:
Is really good. I mean, along with the general recommendation to use multiple reference classes. I guess my point is that the article is made possibly twice as awesome by the inclusion of this part, as it dramatically increases the probability that this will catch on memetically.
Now, many years later, for future observers, it seems important to note that the linked study probably didn’t survive the replication crisis, which makes this paragraph as it stands sadly one of the worst in the essay. I am not confident that this particular study didn’t replicate, since that would require substantially more time investment, but the vast majority of the studies around priming and associative reasoning were really badly flawed, and I expect the above to be no different, and I would advise great caution before taking any studies in its reference class to be worth any more than random anecdotes (and to be substantially less valuable than your own personal anecdotes or unbiased samples of anecdotes from your friends that you’ve bothered to vet and follow up on).
Appreciating this, and in general appreciating LW as a place where commenting on comments from 7y ago is considered good practice :)
I haven’t been at all diligent about this “the outside view” vs “an outside view” reframing, but I’ll add my own personal anecdote that in general I’ve broadly found these sorts of reframings to be helpful, eg shifting to past tense to say “I’ve tended to be triggered by X” vs “I always get really triggered by X” as a way to feel a sense of self as changing rather than stuck. It generates a whole different meaning.
Thank you for highlighting that passage—by the time the text got to that point, I had already decided that this article wasn’t telling me anything new and had started skimming, and missed that paragraph as a result. It is indeed very good.
In the mathematical theory of Galois representations, a choice of algebraic closure of the rationals and an embedding of this algebraic closure in the complex numbers (e.g. section 5) is usually necessary to frame the background setting, but I never hear “the algebraic closure” or “the embedding,” instead “an algebraic closure” and “an embedding.” Thus I never forget that a choice has to be made and that this choice is not necessarily obvious. This is an example from mathematics where careful language is helpful in tracking background assumptions.
I wonder how the mathematicians speaking article-free languages deal with it, given that they lack a non-cumbersome linguistic construct to express this potential ambiguity.
Thanks for sharing this.