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B Jacobs
Karma: 443
the best-researched article I know of on gender differences in chess
So I read this article and occasionally checked the sources and while it’s not a bad article by any stretch, the scientific backing is not as strong as they imply. For example they write:
the sexes differ in their -preferences- for competition. As both Kasparov and Repková have intuited, men are simply -more competitive-
With the words “preferences” and “more competitive” being hyperlinks to their source. This implies (especially in the context) a “nature” explanation, but the source doesn’t show that. And that’s another thing, it’s one study. Of course you can link to the same study twice, but it feels a bit icky to do so this close together about the same claim. A link to a study implies you have evidence for your claim, and if your claim has two links a couple words apart a reader will naturally assume you have two studies, which is a much stronger reason to believe someone. I think this is therefore a bit misleading.
I’m also missing some social explanations that an academic/leftwing article would surely have mentioned. Take for example “stereotype threat”, the idea that stereotypes change how people perform. There is a semi-famous study about this in chess: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ejsp.440
The female players in the experiment were misled. They always played against men, but sometimes the researchers would say they were playing against women. When they believed they were playing against a woman their performance would improve even with the exact same opponent (e.g. they would play multiple games against the same man, and they would score better against him when they believed he was a woman). Performance was reduced by 50% when they believed the opponent was a man and they were reminded of the stereotype. To my academic/leftwing brain, this seems like a pretty glaring omission.
Should we abstain from voting? (In nondeterministic elections)
When to join a respectability cascade
Solutions to problems with Bayesianism
Hmmm, I don’t know if that works. There have definitely been times were I (phenomenologically) felt inconsistent preferences at the same time, e.g. I simultaneously want to hang a painting there and not hang a painting there. I do get this a lot more with aesthetic preferences than with other preferences for some reason. I think the proposed solution that we’re multiple agents is quite plausible, but it does have some problems, so that’s why I proposed this solution as a possible alternative.
A (paraconsistent) logic to deal with inconsistent preferences
[Aspiration-based designs] 1. Informal introduction
Resolving moral uncertainty with randomization
I tried a bit of a natural experiment to see if rationalists would be more negative towards an idea if it’s called socialism vs if it’s called it something else. I made two posts that are identical, except one calls it socialism right at the start, and one only reveals I was talking about socialism at the very end (perhaps it would’ve been better if I hadn’t revealed it at all). The former I posted to LW, the latter I posted to the EA forum.
I expected that the comments on LW would be more negative, that I would get more downvotes and gave it a 50% chance the mods wouldn’t even promote it to the frontpage on LW (but would on EA forum).
The comments were more negative on LW. I did get more downvotes, but I also got more upvotes and got more karma overall: (12 karma from 19 votes on EA and 27 karma from 39 votes on LW). Posts tend to get more karma on LW, but the difference is big enough that I consider my prediction to be wrong. Lastly, the LW mods did end up promoting it to the frontpage, but it took a very long time (maybe they had a debate about it).
Overall, while rationalists are more negative towards socialist ideas that are called socialist, they aren’t as negative as I expected and will update accordingly.
EDIT: Nevermind. Over time the positive karma on the EAF grew while the negative karma on LW also increased (to the point that I had to delete it lest I lose my voting power, thanks karma system). Also the mods on the EAF promoted the post almost immediately while on LW it took about a day, long enough to make it sink to the bottom of the feed. So my original hypothesis appears to be correct, both the users and the moderators are more negative towards an idea when it’s called socialism versus when it’s called something else.
Sorry guys. I woke up to another giant batch of new comments and I just don’t have the time or energy to respond to them all with the quality that I would want. My comments were already getting shorter and shorter while my longer, more nuanced comments were getting sniped before I could post them. I’m sure some of you made some excellent points.
I cited controlled experiments, you counter with an observation that I have already responded to in both the post and the comments:
I explained this in this section:
One issue that arises with starting a socialist firms is acquiring initial investing.[27] This is probably because co-ops want to maximize income (wages), not profits. They pursue the interests of their members rather than investors and may sometimes opt to increase wages instead of profits. Capitalist firms on the other hand are explicitly investor owned so investor interests will take priority.
A socialist firm can be more productive and not dominate the economy if it’s hard to start a socialist firm.
The strength of a case depends on the strength of the evidence, not on the number of citations!
You are not engaging with the evidence I cited.
A spot check is supposed to take a number of random sources and check them, not pick the one claim you find most suspicious (that isn’t even about co-ops) and use that to dismiss the entire literature on co-ops.
I cite four different studies that show that the theory doesn’t match the observations, Lao Mein doesn’t cite anything. This is the most extreme version of being a selective skeptic.
I’m not handwaving anything I wrote a whole section about how experiments contradict this and what could explain this:
“Experiments have shown that people randomly allocated to do tasks in groups where they can elect their leaders and/or choose their pay structures are more productive than those who are led by an unelected manager who makes pay choices for them.[20] One study looked at real firms with high levels of worker ownership of shares in the company and found that workers are keener to monitor others, making them more productive than those with low or no ownership of shares and directly contradicting the free rider hypothesis.[21] It turns out there are potential benefits to giving workers control and a stake in the running of the organization they work for. This allows workers to play a key role in decision making and reorient the goals of the organization.[22] One explanation for this phenomenon is that of “localized knowledge”. According to economist Friedrich Hayek, top-down organizers have difficulty harnessing and coordinating around local knowledge, and the policies they write that are the same across a wide range of circumstances don’t account for the “particular circumstances of time and place”.[23] (For examples of this, read Seeing Like a State by political scientist James Scott) Those who make the top-down policies in a traditional company are different to those who have to follow them. In addition, those who manage the company are most often different to those who own the company. These groups have different incentives and accumulate different knowledge. This means that co-ops have two main advantages:
Workers can harness their collective knowledge to make running the firm more effective. Workers can use their voting power to ensure the organization is more aligned with their values. Interestingly enough, I have yet to come across a co-op that uses the state of the art of social choice theory, so they could potentially get a lot lot better.“
My prior is that other things are less effective and you need evidence to show they are more effective not vice versa.
Appeal to presuppositions always feels weird to me. A socialist could just as easily say ‘my priors say the opposite’. In any case, you made a claim of comparison, not me, why is the burden of proof suddenly on me?
Of course. I’m saying it doesn’t even get to make that argument which can sometimes muddy the waters enough to make some odd-seeming causes look at least plausibly effective.
I’m trying to explain the scientific literature on co-ops, not persuade you of some scam.
However, in spot-checking whether the statistics were totally wrong, I found myself struggling with wading through signups and links and long mostly irrelevant articles. Of course some nonzero amount of this is likely to happen with spot-checks but it seemed like the layers of links just made it even worse.
This is dishonest, the vast majority of the sources are primary scientific studies and the few times I do refer to secondary sources it isn’t irrelevant.You did handle it right, especially your deleted comment.
OP to explain what data/model it was based on; the problem is that then OP responded back with repeating the links instead of explaining what he had read in the links
Yeah, because the primary source is right there?! What value would me explaining in my second language bring to the explanation, when you can click on the link and immediately download the primary source?
But anyway, no, this link doesn’t link directly to the study either, it links to a report that links to the study
You can immediately see a button that says “download report” when you click on that link. I wouldn’t call that “digging for sources”.
The wall of text doesn’t really answer my questions about the independence of employee engagement.
Furthermore they suggest that managers have a huge effect on employee engagement, which seems to point to a potential area where this assumption could fail.
It’s not independent, co-ops let you vote on managers which allows productivity to increase.
EDIT: I have apologized to (and thanked) tailcalled via messages, and have added the document as the third source. Once again, thanks for the suggestion.
I’ve already explained why socialists firms wouldn’t necessarily take over the economy even if they were productive in both the post and other comments.
They were not direct links to the study, but instead i direct links to articles that talk about the study, so I had to dig further manually.
It was the second source in the post: [2]The articles are often big and contain lots of specific things that might not be directly relevant to your point of using it in the post.
There was a summary of it on the linked page itself:
Unfortunately, most employees remain disengaged at work. In fact, low engagement alone costs the global economy $7.8 trillion.
Even having opened the study, I’m still left with confusions about the methodology
From the study
Methodology
The primary data in this report come from the Gallup World Poll, through which Gallup has conducted surveys of the world’s adult population, using randomly selected samples, since 2005. The survey is administered annually face to face or by telephone, covering more than 160 countries and areas since its inception. In addition to the World Poll data, Gallup collected extensive random samples of working populations in the United States and Germany; these samples were also added to the dataset.
The target population of the World Poll is the entire civilian, noninstitutionalized, aged-15- and-older population. Gallup’s data in this report reflect the responses of adults, aged-15- and-older, who were employed for any number of hours by an employer.
With some exceptions, all samples are probability-based and nationally representative. Gallup uses data weighting to minimize bias in survey-based estimates; ensure samples are nationally representative for each country; and correct for unequal selection probability, nonresponse and double coverage of landline and mobile phone users when using both mobile phone and landline frames. Gallup also weights its final samples to match the national demographics of each selected country.
Regional findings in this report include data obtained from 2021 to as late as March 2022 (reported as part of 2021 data in this report). To determine percentage point changes for regions, Gallup uses data from 2020 and 2021 from the same countries in each region.
Country-specific findings in “Appendix 1: Country Comparisons” are based on data aggregated from three years of polling (2019, 2020 and 2021 — with several countries’ 2021 data obtained in early 2022). Percentage point changes for countries indicate the differences in percentage points when comparing the average from 2018, 2019 and 2020 with the average from 2019, 2020 and 2021.
Gallup typically surveys 1,000 individuals in each country or area, using a standard set
of core questions that has been translated into the major languages of the respective country. In some countries, Gallup collects oversamples in major cities or areas of special interest. Additionally, in some large countries, such as China and Russia, sample sizes include at least 2,000 adults. In a small number of countries, the sample size is less than 1,000. In this report, Gallup does not provide country-level data (aggregate of 2019, 2020 and 2021 data) or country-level percentage point change data (aggregate of 2018, 2019 and 2020 data) for any country that has an aggregate n size of less than 300.For results based on the total sample of adults globally, the margin of sampling error ranged from ±0.5 percentage points to ±0.7 percentage points at the 95% confidence level. For results based on the total sample of adults in each region, the margin of sampling error ranged from ±0.6 percentage points to ±5.0 percentage points at the 95% confidence level. For results based on the total sample of adults in each country, the margin of sampling error ranged from ±0.5 percentage points to ±8.5 percentage points at the 95% confidence level. All reported margins of sampling error include computed design effects for weighting.
I’m not sure I understand the economics of this. If co-ops have an inherent massive growth advantage, wouldn’t that outweigh the advantage capitalist firms have in giving more dividends to investors? Because while in the short term the capitalist firms would maybe give more to their investors, in the long term the co-ops would grow bigger and therefore have more money to give, even if they allocate a smaller fraction of it?
I never claimed a massive growth advantage:
There seems to be a small increase in companywide productivity[33]
As I said, the meta-analysis’s only show a small growth advantage. If e.g a socialist firm grows with $1000 and a capitalist firm with $900, but the capitalist firm gives the $900 to the investors and the socialist firm gives $500 to both the investors and the employees, the investors can make more money with capitalist firms.
This post does not talk about strength of preferences so this seems a bit off topic. Nevertheless I think this misses some important considerations. You say:
This doesn’t take into account voter suppression. Take for example Texas; from 2012 to 2018, 542 polling places were closed in counties with significant increases in African-American and Latino populations, while counties with fewer minority increases saw only 34 closures.
They also placed restrictions on absentee ballots and limits on drop-off locations. For example; Harris County, which had only one drop-off location for 2.4 million voters.
It’s not so much the strength of preferences that determines who votes, as much as who is systematically discouraged from voting.