Academian

• AcademianDec 26, 2012, 7:47 AM

  0 points

  in reply to: A1987dM’s comment on: Train Philoso­phers with Pearl and Kah­ne­man, not Plato and Kant

  Do you know the author of that page? If you do, could you try convincing them to include more examples to constrain the interpretation of their abstractions? They seem to have interesting ideas, but my understanding of them currently depends heavily on charitable-interpretation-giving rather than actual confidence that the author has a correct and well-calibrated ideas in mind...

• AcademianDec 23, 2012, 4:52 AM

  6 points

  in reply to: ThisDan’s comment on: Nar­ra­tive, self-image, and self-communication

  This is a straw-manning of the use of narrative, i.e. over-using it. Try steel-manning it, which is the point of the post. For example, take this observation:

  Self-image to me seems like a biased filter to pass data through.

  Indeed. And biased filters are sometimes good; e.g. google “bias variance tradeoff”, or read it about it here or here. In particular, biased estimators are often more accurate than unbiased onces due to having less variance. I think use of narrative schema and other thick concepts as literal examples of this. The trick is using them wisely, instead of always or never.

• AcademianDec 23, 2012, 4:41 AM

  2 points

  in reply to: Viliam_Bur’s comment on: Nar­ra­tive, self-image, and self-communication

  +1 for avoiding rude conversations online :)

• AcademianDec 20, 2012, 2:19 AM

  2 points

  in reply to: lukeprog’s comment on: Nar­ra­tive, self-image, and self-communication

  Thanks! Added.

• AcademianDec 19, 2012, 8:22 PM

  4 points

  in reply to: Vaniver’s comment on: Nar­ra­tive, self-image, and self-communication

  Thanks, fixed! Kept the quotes on “channeling” because of spiritual connotations; Wikipedia and dictionary.com define it in supernatural terms only.

• AcademianDec 19, 2012, 5:12 PM

  4 points

  in reply to: Scott Alexander’s comment on: 2012 Sur­vey Results

  Maybe a plug for the Credence Game too? ;) It’s less in touch with real life than prediction book, but a lot faster.

• AcademianDec 19, 2012, 4:57 PM

  15 points

  in reply to: Vladimir_Nesov’s comment on: Nar­ra­tive, self-image, and self-communication

  This sounds like exactly the kind of failure mode I’m trying to describe. In your “empty identity” scenario, I’d now guess that an image of “selflessness” or “blankness” or something like that would either bias your beliefs about yourself or slow your processing of them. In particular, it might interfere with certain cognitive capacities that other people find natural, obvious, and useful. This is speculation on my part, but to the extent that narrative features are a bottleneck in how our brains process beliefs about ourselves and others, the way you naturally and efficiently represent yourself to yourself may be physically tied up with with the same brain-bits that represent stories.

  My thought here is that it may be better to learn to use that machinery sanely than to not use it… it’s like getting a ridiculously fast software package for analyzing data that makes all sorts of known-to-be-false assumptions about how the data was generated collected. Using it entirely naively is probably bad, as is not using it at all. Knowing that when the package says “X” it’s actually evidence for “Y”, and using it accordingly, is probably best.

Nar­ra­tive, self-image, and self-communication

• AcademianNov 26, 2012, 9:38 AM

  2 points

  in reply to: lukeprog’s comment on: Cre­dence cal­ibra­tion game FAQ

  Yes, Alexei (aka Bent Spoon Games) and I talked about the name recently; to promote its use in university courses teaching Bayesian statistics, we’re sticking with Credence Game. Confidence means something slightly different in statistics, and the game is meant to teach not just calibration, but also the act of measuring belief strength itself. The name update on BSG, and in the app itself as downloaded from there, will happen soon enough.

Cre­dence cal­ibra­tion game FAQ

• AcademianNov 6, 2012, 6:42 AM

  0 points

  in reply to: steven0461’s comment on: Vot­ing is like donat­ing thou­sands of dol­lars to charity

  Irrespective of California, many people even in swing states think voting is silly, so I would hope that they read this post… but regarding California,

  And as it turns out, conditional on polls and other information from right before the election, one would have to assign a very low probability that California will (almost) vote Republican. Also, conditional on California (almost) voting Republican, one would have to assign a very high probability that enough other states will vote Republican to make California’s outcome not matter.

  Thumbs up, except that conclusion here is not to not vote… it’s to either

  1) watch the polls and vote based on proximity to a tie at both the state and federal level,

  or if the time watching the polls is more of a sacrifice to you than the time spent on late-stage voting (can’t vote by mail),

  2) just vote without the poll information.

  Reason: supposing that (a) without the poll information, the EV of voting is high, and (b) finding out the poll results can change your decision, (a+b) implies that the poll results have high VOI. More precisely,

  1/​ (5 million) = Pr(decisive | no info) = Pr(decisive | close poll) Pr(close poll) + Pr(decisive | not-close poll) Pr(not-close poll)

  Since Pr(decisive | not-close poll) is many orders of magnitude closer to 0 than 1/​(5 million), and Pr(close poll) is quite small, say 1/​N, Pr(decisive | close poll) must be on the order of N 1/​(5 million), so the payoff would be N whatever is reported in the post, which would be huge.

  So the conclusion here is that “Voting without poll results is like donating to charity, but adopting the policy of watching the polls and deciding to vote based on proximity to a tie is like donating almost as much to charity, and saves you time, unless you spend more time watching the polls that you would spend to vote.”

• AcademianNov 6, 2012, 3:54 AM

  2 points

  in reply to: John_Maxwell’s comment on: Vot­ing is like donat­ing thou­sands of dol­lars to charity

  It’s worth pointing out that the $100 you “donate” probably goes much, much less far than a $100 donation to an effective charity.

  Yes, this is a very good point, and should be part of the $100 billion dollar estimate at the election outcome value… How much do you think the difference of candidates is worth, in MED$? (marginal effective donation dollars)

  Some interesting comparisons (I don’t claim these are the most interesting, they’re just off the top of my head):

  $100 billion = ¹⁄₃ (100 million) ($1000) = ¹⁄₃ (population of the USA) (marginal cost of saving lives with mosquito nets) and also

  $100 billion = ¹⁄₇₀ (population of the world) (marginal cost of saving lives with mosquito nets)

  It’s actually not obvious to me that the difference in candidates would be much less valuable than these things, but these comparisons do make me personally not want to call MED$100 billion a conservative lower bound.

  Does anyone have any interesting estimates for the difference of election outcomes in MED$?

• AcademianNov 5, 2012, 7:31 PM

  8 points

  in reply to: tim’s comment on: Vot­ing is like donat­ing thou­sands of dol­lars to charity

  Wow, thanks for this! I just changed the title.

Vot­ing is like donat­ing thou­sands of dol­lars to charity

• AcademianOct 12, 2012, 3:14 PM

  10 points

  on: Fire­wal­ling the Op­ti­mal from the Rational

  The deeper danger is in allowing your de facto sense of rationalist community to start being defined by conformity to what people think is merely optimal, rather than the cognitive algorithms and thinking techniques that are supposed to be at the center.

  Thumbs up for this; I might even suggest making it a “tl;dr”. In print, I think sometimes “very short abstraction—concrete examples—moderate-length abstraction” works well.

• AcademianJun 21, 2012, 1:08 AM

  6 points

  in reply to: alyssavance’s comment on: What Would You Like To Read? A Quick Poll

  For me this depends heavily on what you mean by “read”… how it depends:

  I am about 3x more like to browse an academic paper all the way through than a blog post (upon seeing that the title interests me).

  I am about 100x more likely to read every single word of a blog post than an academic paper (upon seeing that the title interest me).

• AcademianMay 16, 2012, 6:41 PM

  8 points

  in reply to: XFrequentist’s comment on: Group ra­tio­nal­ity di­ary, 5/​14/​12

  I am Critch, and am happy you liked my posts :) One of my goals this year is to consolidate my online identities in a satisfactory way, after I have a satisfactory personal website.

• AcademianMay 15, 2012, 9:29 PM

  11 points

  on: Group ra­tio­nal­ity di­ary, 5/​14/​12

  Rationality diary entry:

  Since I’ve learned and experienced so many new things in the past 10 days (prepping for and teaching at minicamp), I’m setting aside this coming weekend for a two day meditation/​prioritization event. This is something I’ve done before, which works extremely well for me (not something I teach with high confidence to others yet, however).

  I expect this will be the most rational and important decision I make this week :)

In­for­ma­tion The­ory vs Harry Pot­ter [LINK]

• AcademianApr 13, 2012, 10:33 PM

  4 points

  on: At­ten­tion con­trol is crit­i­cal for chang­ing/​in­creas­ing/​al­ter­ing motivation

  Huh, I hadn’t heard of CBT until 2007, but your nail biting example is exactly the procedure I made for myself to stop biting my nails in 2003, described in almost the exact words :) Actually, at the very end, my mind would notice the nail-biting reflex before my hand even began to move towards my mouth. It felt awesome, and worked.

  Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy has a highly successful approach for breaking habits, which requires only a very subtle alteration to this process. You notice that you are biting your nails. You immediately focus your attention on what you are doing, and you stop doing it. No rage, no blaming yourself, no negative emotions. You just stop, and you focus all the attention you can on the act of stopping. You move your arm down, focusing your attention on the act of movement, on the feeling of your arm going down, away from your mouth. That’s it. You can go back to whatever you were doing.

  Five minutes later, you notice yourself biting your nails again. You calmly repeat the procedure again.

  By doing this, you are training yourself to perform a new behavior – the “stop and put the hand down” behavior – which is itself triggered by the nail-biting behavior. As you go along, you will get better and better at noticing that you have started to bite your nails. You will also get better and better at stopping and putting your hand down. After a while, this will become semi-automatic; you’ll notice that your hand went to your mouth, a nail touched your tooth, and the hand went back down before you could do anything. Don’t stop training: focus your attention on the “stop and drop” part of the action.

  After a while, the nail-biting simply goes away.