billswift

Karma: 2,011

billswift 21 Sep 2012 19:13 UTC
4 points
in reply to: asr’s comment on: Any existential risk angles to the US presidential election?

I think fictional evidence isn’t terribly convincing.

Indeed. Try Hans-Herman Hoppe’s Democracy: The God that Failed or Graham’s The Case Against Democracy. Neither is all that convincing that monarchy is much better than democracy, but they make a decent case that it is at least marginally better. Note that Hoppe’s book obviously started as a collection of articles, it is seriously repetitive. Both books are short and fairly easy reads.

billswift 10 Sep 2012 20:19 UTC
1 point
in reply to: cata’s comment on: Elitism isn’t necessary for refining rationality.
You are grossly over-simplifying anti-intellectualism, some streams of which are extremely valuable. Your claim only fits the “thalamic anti-intellectual”, one of at least five broad types Eric Raymond discusses.

The most important and useful to society is the “epistemic-skeptical anti-intellectual. His complaint is that intellectuals are too prone to overestimate their own cleverness and attempt to commit society to vast utopian schemes that invariably end badly.” Of course lefties who want to change society to fit their theories try to smear them with claims like yours, but:

Because it’s extremely difficult to make people like F. A. Hayek or Thomas Sowell look stupid enough to be thalamic or totalitarian enough to be totalizers, the usual form of dishonest attack intellectuals use against epistemic skeptics is to accuse them of being traditionalists covertly intent on preserving some existing set of power relationships. Every libertarian who has ever been accused of conservatism knows about this one up close and personal.

And:

“If “intellectuals” really want to understand and defeat anti-intellectualism, they need to start by looking in the mirror. They have brought this hostility on themselves by serving their own civilization so poorly. Until they face that fact, and abandon their neo-clericalist presumptions, “anti-intellectualism” will continue to get not only more intense, but more deserved.”

billswift 10 Sep 2012 20:06 UTC
0 points
in reply to: NancyLebovitz’s comment on: Elitism isn’t necessary for refining rationality.

I only recently ran into a good simple explanation for Bayes—that the more detailed a prediction becomes, the less likely it is to be true.

That looks like a good way of explaining the conjunction and narrative fallacies, too. They could easily be looked at as adding details to a simpler argument. I wonder what other fallacies could be “generalized” similarly?

One thing I think we should be working on is a way of organizing the mass of fallacies and heuristics. There are too many to keep straight without some sort of organizing principles.

billswift 8 Sep 2012 18:42 UTC
4 points
on: Integrated Method for Policy Making Using Argument Modelling and Computer Assisted Text Analysis
Go to Google Scholar and search on “argument maps” and “argument diagram”, you’ll get plenty of hits.

billswift 8 Sep 2012 14:56 UTC
5 points
on: [link] One-question survey from Robin Hanson
The survey is ended and he has posted the results, A Survey Question.

billswift 5 Sep 2012 14:15 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Morendil’s comment on: “Pickled Stewberries!” in HPMoR, Omake #3
Another possibility I saw, though it probably wasn’t intended, is that both pickled and stewed are slang for drunk; maybe they are really powerful fruits.

billswift 2 Sep 2012 15:15 UTC
12 points
on: How to tell apart science from pseudo-science in a field you don’t know ?
You might find this useful, it isn’t a source of papers, it is first-hand accounts by autistics and what life and other people were like to them. This one, Don’t Mourn For Us, is probably the best general description. A quote from it:

You try to relate to your autistic child, and the child doesn’t respond. He doesn’t see you; you can’t reach her; there’s no getting through. That’s the hardest thing to deal with, isn’t it? The only thing is, it isn’t true.

Look at it again: You try to relate as parent to child, using your own understanding of normal children, your own feelings about parenthood, your own experiences and intuitions about relationships. And the child doesn’t respond in any way you can recognize as being part of that system.

That does not mean the child is incapable of relating at all. It only means you’re assuming a shared system, a shared understanding of signals and meanings, that the child in fact does not share. It’s as if you tried to have an intimate conversation with someone who has no comprehension of your language. Of course the person won’t understand what you’re talking about, won’t respond in the way you expect, and may well find the whole interaction confusing and unpleasant.

The best single source I know of is Tony Attwood’s Complete Guide to Asperger’s Syndrome.

As a more general response to your title, you need to learn more about the science, and especially pay attention to how the ideas in the field hang together. A less effective method is to consider how well what you are reading relates to what you already know to be true; unfortunately a lot of real science cannot pass this latter test unless you already know a lot of science.

billswift 2 Sep 2012 14:42 UTC
0 points
in reply to: wedrifid’s comment on: Open Thread, September 1-15, 2012
Not really. If you look at a periodic table, the vast majority actually are metals.

billswift 2 Sep 2012 14:30 UTC
−2 points
in reply to: blogospheroid’s comment on: Open Thread, September 1-15, 2012
The world (including brains) is strictly deterministic. The only source of our mental contents are our genetics and what we are “taught” by our environments (and the interactions between them). The only significant difference between rat and human brains for the purpose of uploading should be the greater capacity and more complex interactions supported by human brains.

billswift 30 Aug 2012 20:32 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Stuart_Armstrong’s comment on: Counterfactual resiliency test for non-causal models
At least for the three examples you cited, I seem to remember them bring called approximations, not “correct”.

billswift 30 Aug 2012 1:54 UTC
2 points
on: What’s the Value of Information?
My comment from July 5, “Go Bayes! So if you just make your priors big enough, you never have to change your mind.”, was rather snarky, but it illustrates a real problem. If your priors are not reasonably accurate, it takes a lot of new information and updating to get it straightened out. That is one reason a lot of introductions to Bayes rule use medical decision making which has reasonably well-established base-rates (priors) to begin with.

billswift 30 Aug 2012 1:45 UTC
4 points
on: [SEQ RERUN] My Best and Worst Mistake
Off-topic, but in the context of “best mistake”, here is John Ringo’s definition of serendipity from The Last Centurion:

We were saved by serendipity. (Which is a term meaning “I fucked up but things came out better than if I hadn’t.”)

billswift 30 Aug 2012 1:35 UTC
3 points
on: Benefits of Calorie Restriction Linked To Other Factors
Derek Lowe also commented on the studies. Repeating my comment there:

So the comparison of the two experiments shows that underfeeding results in life extension over monkeys that over-eat, but not over monkeys that eat a normal diet. Where is the surprise there?

ADDED: I just noticed the paragraph here is missing a key bit of information needed to make sense of my comment. The WNPRC experiment, which found positive results from calorie restriction, fed their controls ad libitum, as much as they wanted to eat. The newer NIA experiment fed the controls a standard, healthy diet, and found no effect of diet restriction.

billswift 28 Aug 2012 2:59 UTC
4 points
in reply to: kilobug’s comment on: What is the evidence in favor of paleo?
1. Evolution doesn’t stop. We have continued to evolve, adapting to new environments, including foods.

billswift 27 Aug 2012 1:49 UTC
0 points
in reply to: wattsd’s comment on: [Draft] Productive Use of Heuristics and Biases
I don’t disagree with anything in this comment, I was just pointing out that “deliberate practice” has several requirements, including practice being separate from execution, that makes it less usable, or even totally unusable, for some areas, such as decision making and choosing. The other main requirements are that it has a specific goal, should not be enjoyable and, as you pointed out, that is is challenging. Another thing, that is not part of the original requirements but is encompassed by them, is that you are not practicing when you are in “flow”.

billswift 27 Aug 2012 0:31 UTC
0 points
in reply to: wattsd’s comment on: [Draft] Productive Use of Heuristics and Biases
Some places, the “deliberate practice” idea breaks down, choosing and decision making is one of them. There is no way to “practice” them except by actually making chooses and decisions; separating practice from normal execution is not possible.

billswift 25 Aug 2012 23:43 UTC
0 points
in reply to: MileyCyrus’s comment on: What are useful skills to learn at university?
Colleges have a breadth requirement; one source I read suggested using that to take a writing heavy course in history or philosophy that requires lots of short papers in order to improve your writing.

billswift 25 Aug 2012 2:50 UTC
0 points
in reply to: jimrandomh’s comment on: Completeness of simulations
Except that if the simulation really is accurate, his response should be already taken into account. Reality is deterministic, an adequately accurate and detailed program should be able to predict exactly. Human free will relies on the fact that our behavior has too many influences to be predicted by any past or current means. Currently, we can’t even define all of the influences.

billswift 23 Aug 2012 13:42 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Dolores1984’s comment on: Heading off a near-term AGI arms race
You add a parallel module to solve the new issue and a supervisory module to arbitrate between them. There are more elaborate systems that could likely work better for many particular situations, but even this simple system suggests there is little substance to your criticism. See Minsky’s Society of Mind, or some papers on modularity in evolutionary psych, for more details.

billswift 23 Aug 2012 13:32 UTC
0 points
in reply to: atucker’s comment on: Heading off a near-term AGI arms race
The reason for expanding a narrow AI is the same for a tool agent not staying restricted; the narrow domain they are designed to function in is embedded in the complexity of the real world. Eventually someone is going to realize that the agent/AI can provide better service if they understand more about how their jobs fit into the broader concerns of their passengers/users/customers and decide to do something about it.