Demosthenes

Karma: 108

Demosthenes Mar 23, 2009, 4:35 PM
12 points
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: Cached Selves
It may be time for a good Style vs Content Debate; first commenter to scream false dilemma gets a prize

Demosthenes Mar 22, 2009, 11:15 PM
2 points
in reply to: Scott Alexander’s comment on: When Truth Isn’t Enough
Speaking of themes; I guess one thing that bothered me about this post (many of your other posts are very good) is that this post doesn’t seem to serve a point; questioning assumptions is often brought up on OB and LW and asking others to be more precise in describing their assumptions is also very common. Any connection to positivism here seems very tenuous; criticizing positivism has little or no impact on soft-positivism.

I feel that there are many other OB and LW posts that would address this issue more effectively and it might be better to just make this page an index of them as opposed to a full post.

That said, there is no way to easily recognize a lot of the themes here and LW in particular runs the risk of just becoming a repository of the same things over and over again.

Are we really refining the art of human rationality here?

Demosthenes Mar 22, 2009, 10:57 PM
7 points
in reply to: Liron’s comment on: Cached Selves
This is the first post I’ve seen that seems to really fit Less Wrong’s mission of “refining the art of human rationality”

This post clearly spells out some issues, links them to research and presents possible solutions. I hope that more posts in the future take this form.

This post also nicely outlines the problem of one’s ability to really doubt themselves constantly at the appropriate level. I think these two points present a big challenge to the mission of leading a rational life:

3c. Reframe your past behavior as having occurred in a different context, and as not bearing on today’s decisions. Or add context cues to trick your brain into regarding today’s decision as belonging to a different category than past decisions. This is, for example, part of how conversion experiences can help people change their behavior. (For a cheap hack, try traveling.)

3d. More specifically, visualize your life as something you just inherited from someone else; ignore sunk words as you would aspire to ignore sunk costs.

How someone could do enough compartmentalizing of their identity to pull of either of these tasks escapes me.

Demosthenes Mar 22, 2009, 10:19 PM
5 points
in reply to: Anatoly_Vorobey’s comment on: When Truth Isn’t Enough
This post just appeared at Language log and has this to say:

Language Log could devote a thousand posts to the project of underlining and elaborating the ways in which grammar does not protect us against misunderstanding the sound of an uttered name, and logic does not protect us against what we say having double meaning. Come to think of it, the thousand posts may already have been written: there are over 5,500 old posts searchable here and already over 1,200 new ones on the present server searchable here.

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1258

Asking others to clarify their assumptions is good, but translating them into positivist language might not be as precise as it sounds

Demosthenes Mar 21, 2009, 4:17 AM
4 points
in reply to: SoullessAutomaton’s comment on: Why Our Kind Can’t Cooperate
I think your caution is warranted, the fact that you can see the other people in the synagogue who don’t stand up could be very hurtful to the nonparticipants. Highlighting individual donors or small groups is a good way to show public support without giving away to much information about your membership’s participation as a whole.

If you are interested in more rigorous studies (we did ours in excel), you might want to try Dean Karlan’s “Does Price Matter in Charitable Giving? Evidence from a Large-Scale Natural Field Experiment ” http://karlan.yale.edu/p/MatchingGrant.pdf

I will try to dig up some other papers online

Demosthenes Mar 20, 2009, 6:10 PM
2 points
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: Rationalist Poetry Fans, Unite!
Putting a double space after each line should break it; I had the same problem with poetry.

test
lines
here

Demosthenes Mar 20, 2009, 4:22 PM
10 points
in reply to: SoullessAutomaton’s comment on: Why Our Kind Can’t Cooperate
I’ve worked for a number of non profits and in analysis of our direct mailings, we would get a better response from a mailing that included one of two things
1. A single testimonial mentioning the amount that some person gave
2. Some sort of comment about the group average (listeners are making pledges of $150 this season)
This is one of the reasons that some types of nonprofits choose to create levels of giving; my guess is that it is gaming these common level of giving ideas by creating artificial norms of participation. Note You can base your levels on actual evidence and not just round numbers! (plus inflation, right?)

We also generally found that people respond well to the idea of a matching donation (which is rational since your gift is now worth more).

I do believe that anonymous fund raising removes information about community participation that is very valuable to potential donors. Part of making a donation is responding the signal that you are not the only one sending a check to a hopeless office somewhere.

Anonymous polls might be a good idea, but especially among rational types, you might want the individual testimony: you get to see some of the reasoning!

I think the synagogue in the story picked up on these ideas and used them effectively. But the nice thing about raising money through direct mailing and the internet is that you can run experiments!

Demosthenes Mar 20, 2009, 4:10 PM
1 point
in reply to: Benya’s comment on: Issues, Bugs, and Requested Features
I think other people have said it, but Slashdot has one of the best commenting structures around.

Different values for different categories (funny, insightful etc....), anonymous posting, reputation, very clear thread structure. All sorts of fun stuff

Demosthenes Mar 20, 2009, 3:54 AM
6 points
on: How to Not Lose an Argument
American Rhetoric is an incredible site and there are some real gems that aspire to rational persuasion with some flair.

http://www.americanrhetoric.com/top100speechesall.html

Malcolm X’s “Ballot or the Bullet” navigates the fact that he is black, widely regarded as dangerous and Muslim all at once while urging people to put these things aside and think about his plans and their outcomes. He does a first rate job of tailoring his rhetoric to increase your emotional desire to think and not react.

Milton Friedman is another person to watch live. He gets a bad rap from people who don’t watch him, but if you have ever heard him speak, he excels at softly thinking through positions with the listener while still taking bold positions.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfdRpyfEmBE&feature=player_embedded

They said it best in Howard Stern Private Parts:

“I want to hear what he’ll say next.”

Gladwell is probably the best for presenting fact and figures in speeches. You might not like his numbers or rigor, but his presentatoon methods are top notch, often focused on challenging his listeners beliefs with academic research:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6204900041349106153&ei=YRTDSerTM4qIqwLbn9yuCw&q=Gladwell&hl=en

Demosthenes Mar 19, 2009, 2:57 PM
11 points
on: Rationalist Fiction
“If You Give a Mouse a Cookie”

A good primer on chaos theory for youth?

“Rendezvous with Rama”

Why have a plot when gradual discovery with expository dialogue will do.

“Contact” -Sagan

More scientific method

“The Diamond Age” -Stephenson

This book even has long discussions of computing

“Sideways Stories from Wayside School”

Anything with jokes is going to be about logic at some point.

“Of Human Bondage” -Maugham

This book has a famous scene where the Phillip goes to Paris to study art; you get the impression that he isn’t very good at painting and as time goes on he starts to recognize that his fellow students are not great painters either. After two years, he gradually builds up the courage to have one of his instructors look at all of his work and let him know whether or not he can achieve his goal of becoming great painter. After he receives a negative verdict he commits to a new life plan.

Demosthenes Mar 17, 2009, 5:30 PM
10 points
in reply to: Scott Alexander’s comment on: The “Spot the Fakes” Test
Setting up this sort of experiment, especially in regard to poetry or other humanities topics, seems to be the overwhelming barrier.

We can take at face value that “Malley’s” poems were created from phrases of a limited length selected at random (whatever that really means in this case) and then arranged in a random manner.

This setup would allow us to say that some modernist critics cannot distinguish a modernist poem written by a single person (although with possible allusions and cribbings) from one constructed with phrases less than a specified length from a specific pool of literature.

From what I have found on the affair, it is hard to see if there was much experimental design at all (a criticism that Sokal can share in):

“So, in a series of mischievous creative fugues, they gleaned lines from here and there, even from the American Armed Forces guide to mosquito infestation, and put it together in what they perceived to be a brilliant imitation of the new poetic genre. They dubbed the poet Ern Malley and to avoid the publishers seeking contact with him, they said that, like Keats, he had died young. They then invented his sister, Ethel, who “discovered” the poetry and decided to send it to Harris to judge it for literary merit.” -(http://www.ernmalley.com/text_only.html)

In this specific case, we are stuck with two people who seemed to intentionally create a spoof of modernist poetry which is not a terrible representation of the genre. For a progressive journal to publishing something that was designed to make a strong attempt at passing as modernist poetry using the new technique of collage seems completely appropriate.

Does this seem like an adequate control poem for an experiment of this sort:

====

Night Piece

The swung torch scatters seeds
In the umbelliferous dark
And a frog makes guttural comment
On the naked and trespassing
Nymph of the lake.

The symbols were evident,
Though on park-gates
The iron birds looked disapproval
With rusty invidious beaks.

Among the water-lilies
A splash—white foam in the dark!
And you lay sobbing then
Upon my trembling intuitive arm

I suspect that a randomly generated poem from a large amount of source material would look significantly different. I tried out some google poem generators (which are probably not acceptable for this sort of experiment either), and the results weren’t as nice http://shawnrider.com/google/index.php?query=modernism&Submit=generate+poem

In the end, problems with authorship and creation by collage are two of the widely recognized features of modernist poetry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernist_poetry_in_English. The hoax seems to prove that some of modernist poetry’s techniques are indeed effective.

I think your point about intentionally created spoofs like Nathicana coming out as good poetry drives home the point that these sorts of parodies aren’t necessarily a good example of control poem construction.

Making these sorts of critiques brings in the distinction between being rational vs rationalizing http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/09/rationalization.html. If you already have a point you want to prove and proceed to construct a method whereby you’ll prove it, it isn’t truly rational. If you spend a long time working on experimental design and becoming curious about how these methods (structural analysis of myths or modernist poetry) succeed/fail vs a random smattering of words and ideas, then you can build some rational knowledge on the matter.

While I like the idea of the spot the fakes test, I think it would be difficult to come up with good examples where the experimental design really leads to interesting conclusions with the scope of the project.