Aaro Salosensaari
What is the correct amount of self praise? Do you have reasons to believe Isusr has made an incorrect evaluation regarding their aptitude? Do you believe that even if the evaluation is correct that the post is still harmful?
I don’t know if the post is harmful, but in general, “too much self-praise” can be a failure mode that makes argumentative writing less likely to succeed at convincing readers of its arguments.
The following blog post might be of interest to anyone who either claims Dunning-Kruger means that low-skill people think they are highly skilled or claims Dunning-Kruger is not real: http://haines-lab.com/post/2021-01-10-modeling-classic-effects-dunning-kruger/
The author presents the case how D-K is misunderstood, then why one might suspect it is a mathematical artifact from measurement error, but then shows with a model that there is some evidence for Dunning-Kruger effect, as some observed data are reliably explained with an additive perception bias + noise effect (or a non-linear perception distortion effect).
Agreed. The difference is more pronounced in live social situations, and quite easy to quantify in situation such as a proof-heavy mathematics class in college. Many students who have done their work on the problem sets can present a correct solution and if not, usually follow the presented solution. For some, completing the problem sets took more time. Likewise, some people get more out of any spontaneous discussion of the problems. Some relatively rare people would pull out the proofs and points seemingly from thin air: look at the assignment, made some brief notes, and then present their solution intelligibly while talking about it.
However, European Commission seems to defy that rule. The members are nominated by the national governments, yet, they seem not to give unfair advantage to their native countries.
I am uncertain if this is true, or at least, it can be debated. There have been numerous and many complaints of Commission producing decisions and policies that favor some countries.However, such failure mode, if true, is not of the form where individual comissioners favor their native countries, but where the commission as a body adopts stances compatible with overall political power dynamics in the EU.
Also to be considered that national governments do not get to unilaterally appoint their respective comissioners, but must present comissioners that are acceptable to other organs. In monarchies, this would comparable to difference between monarch appointing prime minister at His Majesty’s will, desire and whim, vs monarch being forced to take parliaments opinion into account in appointing the PM so that the appointed government is viable. In analogy “monarch” is national government, “PM” the commissioner-appointee-to-be, “parliament” (in official procedure) the Commission President and the European Parliament (and unofficially, I would not be surprised if there are other considerations).
>So the context of this post is less about religion itself, and more about an overall cluster of ways that rationalists/skeptics/etc could still use to improve their own thinking.
At best, this line sounds like arguing that this thing that looks like fish is not a fish because of its evolutionary history, method of giving birth, and it has this funny nose on top of its head through with it breathes makes it a mammal, thus not fish—in a world where the most salient definition of fish is functional one, “it is a sea-creature that lives in water and we need boats to get to them”.
However, I do not grant that argument holds. I believe what we have here is more of a shark than a whale, which despite the claims to contrary, are today still called fish. Instead of imparting any lessons, it reads more like argument concerning factuality and history of Judaism and Christianity … because most of all its words are spend talking about specific claims about Judaism, Christianity and their history. A comment answering newcomer wondering about “it seems to me that this article is about fishes in water, I’d like to point out something on that matter” with a claim “welcome to forum! this totally-not-a-shark is actually a whale, which is not a fish, so whatever you pointed out is out of context” feels like … incorrect way to defend it.
Incorrect enough why I think it is worth pointing it out 3 years later. But such things happen when 14 year old posts are rotated as recommendations on frontpage.
>And as Duncan is getting at, employment has changed a lot since the term was coined and there’s now a lot more opportunity for jobs and work to be aligned with a person’s personal goals.
I can agree, I am skeptical that this …integratedness(?) is actually a good thing for everyone. From point of view of the old “work vs life” people who valued the life part, it probably looks like them losing if what they get is “your work is supposed to integral part of what you choose to do with your life” but the options of where and what kind of work to do are not that different than they were some decades ago. And even the new^1 options present trade-offs.
Maybe there are some people whose true calling is to found a startup or develop mastery in some particular technology stack or manage projects that create profit for stockholders. However, if the job market environment is shaped by it so that every job expects an applicant whose life goals are integrally aligned to performing the job, it plausibly affects what kind of goals people think are thinkable when they think of their life and careers, because it certainly affects how they present themselves to the hiring committee or people with equivalent power.
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Another point, concerning integration of work in ones life. I found myself thinking of the movie Tokyo Story (Tokyo Monogatari, 1953), which I saw maybe two years ago. While the story is not exactly about jobs, it explores how the modernity (the contemporary, post-WW2, kind of modernity in particular) intersects with the Japanese society through the lenses of single Japanese family. The many characters in the film work various jobs: there is a son who is a physician (the kind of one who does visits and has a private practice), a daughter who is running a beauty saloon (a family business like setup; if the husband did something not affiliated with business, I forget what), and a daughter-in-law who is a menial clerk at a corporate business.
The part where this musing connects to anything, while writing the first part of the comment, I started to think about, what are the personal goals of the physician and the beauty business owner? If I recall, both of them are the kind of person who wants to strive and get forward and upward in their life in Tokyo (this leads to the one of conflicts in the film) and view their jobs integral to that goal. Their jobs are quite integrated to their life in concrete terms, both practice at their homes. Both kind of professions predate the work-life balance, probably. One could replace the beauty saloon with something a bit more traditional, like a restaurant or inn without much difference to their relevance to story, at the very least. The character with clearest difference between time off and time in work is the office clerk. Which actually connects to another plot point. I recommend the movie.
Maybe the big difference comes implied in the “good for the world in ways I care about” angle There is no crusader or activist, someone who seeks to make change in the world instead of making it well within it. Today the doctor would be likely to emphasize how he wants to help people by being a good doctor, the family business would have a thing (natural beauty products that help the environment, powered by solar!), and the big corp would have mission, too. The owner of the corp, several echelons above, might be even serious about it. Nobody goes to found a start-up.
So, I guess my point is that there always have been people who don’t view their work and non-work lives a fundamentally different kind of thing.
1: The newness might be debatable, though. I don’t think starting a technology business because you have skills and ideas is something truly new in the US, I think both Edison and Tesla tried their hands at it and I have read Tesla’s interviews which indicate he thought it was for the betterment of mankind? It would have been with the spirit of the times.
>The Church of England still has bishops that vote in the house of lords.
That is argument for particular church-state relationship. The original claim spoke of entanglement (in the present tense!). For reference, the archbishop of Evangelical-Lutheran Church in Finland has always been appointed by whomever is the head of state since Gustav I Vasa embraced the Protestantism and the church was until recently an official state apparatus and to some extent still is. The Holy See has had negligible effect here since centuries, and some historians maintain that most of the time the influence tended to flow from the state to the Ev. Lut. church than other way around despite the overall symbiosis between the two.
The aspects of political power in such conflicts were not alien to Catholic cardinal Richeliu of France who financed Gustav II Adolf’s war against the Catholic League in Germany while repressing the Huegenots at home.
It is very enlightening to read to the other responses below concerning the history of Confucianism, and I can be convinced China & Confucianism have very different history about the matters we (or I) often pattern-match to religion. And it makes sense that peculiarities of the Taiping rebellion or the CCP’s current positions concerning Catholicism are motivated by them being in contact with European concepts of religion only relatively recently on historical timescales. Yet however:
In my understanding, the conflict between CCP and the Catholic church indicates that the party views Catholicism in terms of national identity and temporal power in ways both different and not so different how Catholicism was viewed in Protestant countries of 17th/18th century. The CCP apparently do not want Catholicism or specifically the Church of Rome’s interpretation to have significant presence in the local thoughtspace, presumably in favor of something else which plausibly serves an analogous role (otherwise there would be no competition about that thoughtspace).
In this case, I find it likely that the parable about fish and water also applies to birds and air: there are both commonalities despite the differences, while water is no air, and the birds have more reason to differentiate the air from the ground. Maybe the Chinese are like more like to rockets in the vacuum of space, but that would take more explaining.
Writing out the argument how there is no entanglement and why the clarity arises (and why linking to Sun Tzu is supposed to back that argument) could possibly help here.
Consequently, the original remark and some of the subsequent discussion reads me to as “booing” all things that get called “religions” and cheering for the Chinese tradition as better for being not a religion.
I sort of believe in something like this, except without the magical bits. It motivates me to vote in elections and follow the laws also when there is no effective enforcement. Maybe it is a consequence of reading Pratchett’s Discworld novels when I was in impressionable age.
My mundane explanation (or rationalization) is a bit difficult to write, but I believe it is because of:
>It gets in people’s minds.
When people believe something, it affects their behavior. Thus memetic phenomena can have real effects.
As an example I feel is related to this, I half-believe that believing in magical rationalizations[1] can also enable good societal outcomes, as long as enough people believe that also other people believe them, and it facilitates trust.
Have you read Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo? It deals with how valuable things and what they do affect people’s behavior, both on the societal scale (how corruption in imaginary South American state of Costaguano seeds more corruption) and personal scale.
[1] “if I vote in the national elections, it somehow makes difference, maybe because then more people like me are encourage to vote in elections” and “if I obey the law of not serving alcohol to underage people when there is no probably harm to them from it, or stop at the traffic signs at deserted street in midnight, the world somehow becomes a better place because world would be better place if more people followed the laws”.
I agree with Phil that this sounds very … counterintuitive. Usually nothing is free, and even with free things there is consequences or some sort of externality.
However, I recently read an argument by a Finnish finance podcaster, who argued while the intuition might be true and government debt system probably is not sustainable and is going to have some kind of messup in long term, not participating may put your country at disadvantage compared to countries who take the “free” money and invest it, and thus have more assets when it all falls down.
I realize this is a 3mo old comment.
>Nor does China entangle religion with politics to the same extent you find in the Christian and Islamic worlds. This makes it easier to think about conflicts. I feel it produces a better understanding of political theory and strategy.
Does not entangle? I thought China is the only country of note around that enforces their version of Catholic church with Chinese characteristics (the translation used by Wikipedia is “Chinese Patriotic Catholic Church”, apparently excommunicated by the pope in Rome). One can discuss how it compares to Church of England’s historical past or more recently, the protestant skepticism about JFK’s Catholicism, but it is kind of remarkable on its own right.
(edit. Thinking about the little bit I do know about Chinese history … Taiping Rebellion?)
Sure, but statements like
>ANNs are built out of neurons. BNNs are built out of neurons too.
are imprecise and possibly imprecise enough to be also incorrect if it turns out that biological neurons do something different than perceptrons that is important. Without making the exact arguments and presenting evidence in what respects the perceptron model is useful, it is quite easy to bake in conclusions along the lines of “this algorithm for ANNs is a good model of biology” in the assumptions “both are built out of neurons”.
Home delivery is way cheaper than it used to be.
I am going to push back a little on this one, and ask for context and numbers?
As some of my older relatives commented when Wolt became popular here, before people started going to supermarkets, it was common for shops to have a delivery / errand boy (this would have been 1950s, and more prevalent before the WW2). It is one thing that strikes out reading biographies; teenage Harpo Marx dropped out from school and did odd jobs as an errand boy; they are ubiquitous part of the background in Anne Frank’s diaries; and so on.
Maybe it was proportionally more expensive (relative to cost of purchase), but on the other hand, from the descriptions it looks like the deliveries were done by teenage/young men who were paid peanuts.
Thanks for writing this, the power to weight statistics are quite interesting. I have an another, longer reply with my own take (edit. comments about the graph, that is) in the works, but while writing it, I started to wonder about a tangential question:
I am saying that many common anti-short-timelines arguments are bogus. They need to do much more than just appeal to the complexity/mysteriousness/efficiency of the brain; they need to argue that some property X is both necessary for TAI and not about to be figured out for AI anytime soon, not even after the HBHL milestone is passed by several orders of magnitude.
I am not super familiar with the state of discussion and literature nowadays, but I was wondering what are these anti-short-timelines arguments that appeal to the general complexity/mysteriousness and how common they are? Are they common in popular discourse, or common among people considered worth taking seriously?
Data efficiency, for example, is already a much more specific feature than handwave-y “human brain is so complex”, and thus as you demonstrate, it becomes much easier to write a more convincing argument from data efficiency than mysterious complexity.
Eventually, yes, it is related to arguments concerning people. But I was curious about what aesthetics remain after I try to abstract away the messy details.
>Is this a closed environment, that supports 100000 cell-generations?
Good question! No. I was envisioning it as a system where a constant population of 100 000 would be viable. (RA pipettes in a constant amount of nutritional fluid every day or something). Now that you asked the question, it might make more sense to investigate this assumption more.
I have a small intuition pump I am working on, and thought maybe others would find it interesting.
Consider a habitat (say, a Petri dish) that in any given moment has maximum carrying capacity for supporting 100 000 units of life (say, cells), and two alternative scenarios.
Scenario A. Initial population of 2 cells grows exponentially, one cell dying but producing two descendants each generation. After the 16th generation, the habitat overflows, and all cells die in overpopulation. The population experienced a total of 262 142 units of flourishing.
Scenario B. More or less stable population of x cells (x << 100 000 units, say, approximately 20) continues for n generations, for total of x * n units of flourishing until the habitat meets its natural demise after n generations.
For some reason or other, I find the scenario B much more appealing even for relatively small numbers of n. For example, while n=100 000 (2 000 000 units of total flourishing) would be obviously better for utilitarian who cares about total equal sum of flourishing units (utilitons), I personally find already meager n=100 (x*n = 2000) sounding better than A.
Maybe this is just because of me assuming that because n=100 is possible, also larger n sounds possible. Or maybe I am utiliton-blind and just think 100 > 17. Or maybe something else.
Background. In a recent discussion with $people, I tried to argue why I find a long term existence of a limited human population much more important than mere potential size of total experienced human flourishing or something more abstract. I have not tried to “figure in” more details, but somethings I have thought about adding in, is various probabilistic scenarios / uncertainty about total carrying capacity. No, I have not read (/remember reading) previous relevant LW posts, if you can think of something useful / relevant, please link it!
Aaro Salosensaari’s Shortform
I agree the non-IID result is quite surprising. Careful reading of the Berry-Esseen gives some insight on the limit behavior. In the IID case, the approximation error is bounded by constants / $\sqrt{n}$ (where constants are proportional to third moment / $\sigma^3$.
The not-IID generalization for n distinct distribution has the bound more or less sum of third moments divided by (sum of sigma^2)^(3/2) times (sum of third moments), which is surprisingly similar to IID special case. My reading of it suggests that if the sigmas / third moments of all n distributions are all bounded below / above some sigma / phi (which of course happens when you pick up any finite number of distributions by hand), the error is again diminishes at rate $1/\sqrt{n}$ if you squint your eyes.
So, I would guess for a series of not-IID distributions to sum into a Gaussian as poorly as possible (while Berry-Esseen still applies), one would have to pick a series of distributions with as wildly small variances and wildly large skews...? And getting rid of the assumptions of CLT/its generalizations gives that the theorem no longer applies.
It gets worse. This isn’t a randomly selected example—it’s specifically selected as a case where reason would have a hard time noticing when and how it’s making things worse.
Well, the history of bringing manioc to Africa is not the only example. Scientific understanding of human nutrition (alongside with disease) had several similar hiccups along the way, several which have been covered in SSC (can’t remember the post titles where):
There was a time when Japanese army lost many lives to beriberi during Russo-Japanese war, thinking it was a transmissible disease, several decades [1] after the one of the first prominent Japanese young scholars with Western medical training discovered it was a deficiency related to nutrition with a classical trial setup in Japanese navy (however, he attributed it—wrongly—to deficiency of nitrogen). It took several decades to identify vitamin B1. [2]
Earlier, there was a time when scurvy was a problem in navies, including the British one, but then British navy (or rather, East India Company) realized citrus fruits were useful preventing scurvy, in 1617 [3]. Unfortunately it didn’t catch on. Then they discovered it again with an actual trial and published the results, in 1740-50s [4]. Unfortunately it again didn’t catch on, and the underlying theory was also as wrong as the others anyway. Finally, against the scientific consensus at the time, the usefulness of citrus was proven by a Navy read admiral in 1795 [5]. Unfortunately they still did not have proper theory why the citrus was supposed to work, so when the Navy managed to switch to using lime juice with minimal vitamin C content [6], then managed reason themselves out of use of citrus, and scurvy was determined as a result of food gone bad [7]. Thus Scott’s Arctic expedition was ill-equipped to prevent scurvy, and soldiers in Gallipoli 1915 also suffered from scurvy.
Story of discovering vitamin D does not involve as dramatic failings, but prior to discovery of UV treatment and discovery of vitamin D, John Snow suggested the cause was adulterated food [8]. Of course, even today one can easily find internet debates about what is “correct” amount of vitamin D supplement if one has not sunlight in winter. Solving B12 deficiency induced anemia appears a true triumph of the science, as a Nobel prize was awarded for dietary recommendation for including liver in the diet [9] before B12 (present in liver) was identified [10].
Some may notice that we have now covered many of the significant vitamins in human diet. I have not even started with the story of Semmelweis.
And anyway, I dislike the whole premise of casting the matter about “being for reason” or “against reason”. The issue with manioc, scurvy, beriberi, and hygiene was that people had unfortunate overconfidence in their per-existing model of reality. With sufficient overconfidence, rationalization or mere “rational speculation”, they could explain how seemingly contradictory experimental results actually fitted in their model, and thus claim the nutrition-based explanations as an unscientific hogwash, until the actual workings of vitamins was discovered. (The article [1] is very instructive about rationalizations Japanese army could come up to dismiss Navy’s apparent success with fighting beriberi: ships were easier to keep clean, beriberi was correlated with spending time on contact with damp ground, etc.)
While looking up food-borne diseases while writing this comment, I was reminded about BSE [11], which is hypothesized to cause vCJD in humans because humans thought it was a good idea to feed dead animals to cattle to improve nutrition (which I suppose it does, barring prion disease). I would view this as a failing from not having a full model what side-effects behavior suggested by the partial model would cause.
On the positive side, sometimes the partial model works well enough: It appears that miasma theory of disease like cholera was the principal motivator for building modern sewage systems. While it is today obvious cholera is not caused by miasma, getting rid of smelly sewage in orderly fashion turned out to be a good idea nevertheless [12].
I am uncertain if I have any proper suggested conclusion, except for that, in general, mistakes of reason are possible and possibly fatal, and social dynamics may prevent proper corrective action for a long time. This is important to keep in mind when making decisions, especially novel and unprecedented, and when evaluating the consequences of action. (The consensus does not necessarily budge easily.)
Maybe a more specific conclusion could be: If one has only evidently partial scientific understanding of some issue, it is very possible acting on it can have unintended consequences. It may even not be obvious where the holes in the scientific understanding are. (Paraphrasing the response to Semmelweis: “We don’t exactly know what causes childbed fever, it manifests in many different organs so it could be several different diseases, but the idea of invisible corpse particles that defy water and soap is simply laughable.”)
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16673750/
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3725862/
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Woodall
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Lind
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Gardner,_1st_Baron_Gardner
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scurvy#19th_century
[7] https://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rickets#History
[9] https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/1934/whipple/facts/
[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_B12#Descriptions_of_deficiency_effects
[11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovine_spongiform_encephalopathy
If this is anecdotal, wouldn’t it be easily explained by some sort of selection bias? Smart ambitious people are much visible than smart, definitely-not-ambitious people (and by definition of “smart”, they have probably better chances at succeeding in their ambitions than equally ambitious less smart people).
Anecdotally, I have met some relatively smart people who are not very ambitious, and I can imagine there could be much smarter people one does not meet except by random chance, because they do not have much ambition. Also anecdotally, I would not be surprised if not-so-ambitious smart people would be content with a “default”, probably mildly successful career path and opportunities for a person like them tend to find.