emr

Karma: 536

emr Feb 8, 2015, 5:26 AM
2 points
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Open Thread, Feb. 2 - Feb 8, 2015
We should probably concern ourselves with fatality rates (serious disability rates probably tracks this). Because of differences in average speed, I expect the typical rural accident to be much more severe.

emr Feb 7, 2015, 1:51 AM
5 points
in reply to: cleonid’s comment on: Have you changed your mind recently?
Political beliefs can cluster with more consequential behaviors than voting. For example, consider the relationship between views on economic policy and the appeal of different careers (or fields of academic study). Or political views and religious behaviors. Or the subjective appeal of living in Texas vs San Francisco. Knowing humans, there probably isn’t a clear direction of cause-and-effect.

Anecdotally, I’ve changed my political views recently, and I’m surprised by the breadth of the associated cluster of beliefs (some of which are non-socially consequential) that shifted at the same time.

emr Feb 5, 2015, 3:40 AM
14 points
on: Don’t estimate your creative intelligence by your critical intelligence
Maps and territories. A noisy signal can still be understood, and the marginal cost of suppressing noise can become steep. Even mathematical proofs are often first communicated in a logically correct but “noisy” form, and simplified later.

I struggle with over-qualifying, to the point where my writing takes too long or is too hard for other people to understand. I actually wonder if prolific writers are selected for a certain lack of guilt, whereas I often feel like a scrupulous person, almost guilty for not addressing every little subtlety.

The collapse into the trivial is usually good news! The trivial is just the accurately concise, which depends on the power of your background knowledge. I’m a huge fan of SlateStarCodex, but sometimes I reach the end of a 10,000 word essay and wonder “Why did he just say APPLY META-LEVEL RATIONALITY CONCEPT TO TOPIC X?”, but that’s only trivial if you share the right background, while his audience is very broad.

emr Feb 4, 2015, 9:51 PM
1 point
in reply to: mkf’s comment on: Open Thread, Feb. 2 - Feb 8, 2015
While we’re here: How do real-world incentive structures interact with the EMH?

In the same way that “No one was ever fired for buying IBM”, is it true that “No one was ever fired for selling when everyone else was”? And would that mean someone without these external social incentives will have an edge on the market? For example, what about a rule like “put money into an index fund whenever the market went down for X consecutive days and everyone is sufficiently gloomy”?

emr Feb 4, 2015, 9:09 PM
2 points
on: Open Thread, Feb. 2 - Feb 8, 2015
How can you learn to calibrate long term predictions, when it takes so long to get feedback?

emr Feb 3, 2015, 4:32 AM
5 points
in reply to: Vaniver’s comment on: Rationality Quotes Thread February 2015

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.

-- Emerson, Self-Reliance

Perhaps these are two prescriptions for two different patients: The fox and the hedgehog!

emr Feb 3, 2015, 4:21 AM
6 points
in reply to: Epictetus’s comment on: Rationality Quotes Thread February 2015
You can model uncertain parameters within a model as random variables, and then run a large number of simulations to get a distribution of outcomes.

Modeling uncertainty between models (of which guessing the distribution of an uncertain parameter is an example) is harder to handle formally. But overall, it’s not difficult to improve on the naive guess-the-exact-values-and-predict method.

emr Feb 2, 2015, 11:50 PM
8 points
on: Open Thread, Feb. 2 - Feb 8, 2015
A thought about heritability and malleability:

The heritability of height has increased, because the nutritional environment has become more uniform. To be very specific, “more equal” means both that people have more similar sets of options, and that they exercise similar preferences among these options.

This is interesting, because the increased heritability has coincided exactly with an increased importance of environmental factors from a decision making standpoint. In other words, a contemporary parent picking from {underfeed kids, don’t underfeed kids} can exert more influence over the absolute height of their children than a parent with only the option to underfeed. Of course, modern parents overwhelming opt for the same choice. At the same time, these parent don’t have much influence on the relative height advantage of their child, given a uniformity in options and preferences in the population.

This can happen whenever options and preferences are aligned in a population. For example, no matter how heritable a positive trait is, it will usually be trivial to influence it … in a downward direction. So if you’re looking at a twin study on something like subjective well-being, I’ve found it clarifying to explicitly note the options and preference available to the population. I’m currently reading up on positive psychology, and I keep seeing, even from domain experts, statements like, “X percentage of your happiness is genetically determined”, as if the population they studied were picking actions at random.

emr Feb 2, 2015, 8:39 PM
2 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Open Thread, Feb. 2 - Feb 8, 2015
Yes. Richer states can afford to transfer more wealth. We see this in the size of modern (domestic) welfare states, which could not have been shouldered even a century ago.

emr Feb 2, 2015, 5:06 PM
15 points
in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: Open Thread, Feb. 2 - Feb 8, 2015

All the advice on resisting video games and the like (internet blockers, social support) has been on using tricks of one sort or another to restrict the act, not the desire.

Some advice is about substitution, i.e. you identify the emotional need driving a stubborn behavior, and find a more approved behavior than satisfies the same need.

emr Feb 2, 2015, 5:00 PM
3 points
in reply to: MathiasZaman’s comment on: Open Thread, Feb. 2 - Feb 8, 2015

On the other hand: So fucking what? You know how the world becomes a better place? By people doing things that are difficult and thankless because those things need to be done. The world doesn’t become a better place by people sitting around waiting for the brief moment of inspiration in which they sorta want to solve a local problem.

Historical, isn’t that exactly how the world became a better place? Better technology and better institutions are the ingredients of reduced suffering, and both of these see to have developed by people pursuing solutions to their own (very local) problems, like how to make money and how to stop the government from abusing you. Even scientists who work far upstream of any application seem to be more motivated by curiosity and fame than a desire to reduce global suffering.

Of course, modern wealth disparities may have changed the situation. But we should be clear, if we think that we’ve entered a new historical phase in which the largest future reductions in suffering are going to come from globally-altruistic motivations.

emr Jan 31, 2015, 7:40 PM
2 points
in reply to: Jan_Rzymkowski’s comment on: Open thread, Jan. 26 - Feb. 1, 2015
In principle, absolutely.

In practice, trying to fit many observed instances to to a curved utility-money curve will result in an implausibly sharp curve. So unless the TV purchase amounts to a large chunk of your income, this probably won’t match the behavior.

Rabin has a nice example of this for risk aversion, showing that someone who wasn’t happy taking a −100:110 coin flip due to a utility-money curve would have an irrationally large risk aversion for larger amounts.

emr Jan 27, 2015, 10:07 PM
5 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Immortality: A Practical Guide
I value (high quality) personal notes, which I see as a informal “literature review”.

As with a normal literature review: If I’m already familiar with the topic, I’ll skim for aspects I’ve overlooked, for any new developments, and for any conclusions that differ from my own. If I’m not familiar with the topic, I use the overview to estimate the value of doing my own research, or just to glean the easiest information and call it good. These are valuable because I don’t want to spend time monitoring new updates to a field, I want to double check that I haven’t reached any weird conclusion without knowing that it’s weird, and I don’t want to bother making a gazillion queries and screening out all the crap if I trust someone else to do so. And a well constructed bibliography alone can be very valuable.

For this post, I thought most of the sections were good. Yes, the section on needing money wasn’t informative, but I treated it as a signpost saying “hey you, if you’ve never thought about it, maybe you should run some numbers on what that third liver is going to cost you”, in the same way that the sentence on sleep apnea was just there to point out that snoring might be taken seriously (which many people don’t know).

To be honest, I skipped the nutrition section because I was already know that the field is a mess outside of some relatively clear conclusions, (on things like trans fat, vegetables > candy). I like a good set of notes should communicate “this consensus is absolutely solid” vs “this is the mainstream consensus, but here are some credible detractors and everyone admits that we don’t understand it as well as we’d like” vs “there is no real consensus”.

emr Jan 27, 2015, 7:38 PM
0 points
in reply to: gjm’s comment on: Maximizing Your Donations via a Job
Is this correct?

afaik, a typical equity package (at a large public company) is worth 1-2x the annual salary, but is spread over several years. So you get something like Base+(Base1.3)/4 per year, not Base + Base1.3 every year. So a more typical package might be 150-200k average annual compensation, (which is matches the estimates for total compensation on glassdoor). It seems very unlikely that the median compensation for programmers in the Bay Area is at all close to 300k (although the upper few percent might certainly make that amount).

emr Jan 27, 2015, 12:43 AM
6 points
in reply to: passive_fist’s comment on: Open thread, Jan. 26 - Feb. 1, 2015
(I hope this doesn’t sound condescending) but do you mean Latex, or LyX specifically? Latex itself seems almost humorously field-dependent: everywhere in the hard sciences and nowhere in business.

emr Jan 27, 2015, 12:37 AM
5 points
on: Immortality: A Practical Guide

Infections are responsible for 6% of cancer deaths in developed nations.

You (demographically typical LW reader) may want to look into the HPV vaccine, (and post what you find!) I thought there was no cost-effective-benefit to vaccinating males or older women, but this seems to be wrong. A few credible sources have argued for young men and older women to receive the vaccine.

Some medical tests can also increase exposure to radiation.

Note that dosage varies widely by procedure. This link gives some estimates. They say yearly background dose is about 3mSv. A dental x-ray is quoted at 0.005 mSv, while an abdominal CT scan is 10 mSv, and a few procedures are even higher.

emr Jan 26, 2015, 7:13 PM
0 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Open thread, Jan. 26 - Feb. 1, 2015
EDIT: The neighboring comment here, raises the same point (using the same type of example!). I wouldn’t have posted this duplicate comment if I had caught this in time.

I’m also confused about the debate.

Isn’t the “thing that hasn’t happened yet” always an anticipated experience? (Even if we use a linguistic shorthand like “the dice roll is 6 with probability .5″.)

Suppose Alice tells Bob she has rolled the dice, but in reality she waits until after Bob has already done his calculations and secretly rolls the dice right before Bob walks in the room. Could Bob have any valid complaint about this?

Once you translate into anticipated experiences of some observer in some situation, it seems like the difference between the two camps is about the general leniency with which we grant that the observer can make additional assumptions about their situation. But I don’t see how you can opt out of assuming something: Any framing of the P(“sun will rise tomorrow”) problem has to implicitly specify a model, even if it’s the infinite-coin-flip model.

emr Jan 26, 2015, 4:48 AM
20 points
in reply to: JoshuaZ’s comment on: Open thread, Jan. 26 - Feb. 1, 2015
Basic game theory: Nash equilibriums and the idea of evolutionary game theory.

An unbelievable number of human problems map onto the property that a particular Nash equilibrium or evolutionarily stable strategy isn’t guaranteed to be socially desirable (or even Pareto-efficient, or even when compared only to other Nash equilibrium).

Likewise, you really can’t do non-trivial consequentialist reasoning without accounting for the impact of your proposed strategy on the strategies of other agents.

Once you’ve seen the patterns, you can avoid painstakingly deriving or arguing for the general picture over and over again, which probably consumes about a third of all policy and ethics debate. And more critically, you can avoid missing the importance of interlocking strategies in cases where it does matter: Another third of public debate is reserved for wondering why people are acting in the way that the actions of other people encourage them to act; or for helpfully suggesting that some group should move unilaterally along a moral gradient, and then blindly assuming that this will lead to a happier equilibrium once everything adjusts.

emr Jan 22, 2015, 4:38 PM
0 points
in reply to: Douglas_Knight’s comment on: LINK: Diseases not sufficiently researched
Oops! Thanks for catching that.

emr Jan 22, 2015, 8:22 AM
7 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Open thread, Jan. 19 - Jan. 25, 2015
I think the term “oppression olympics” is needlessly charged.

But it is a good question: Under what conditions will someone voice a complaint, and about what?

We learn early on that voicing certain complaints results in social punishment, even when those complaints are “valid” according to the stated moral aspirations of the community. If memory holds, the process of learning which complaints can be voiced is painful.

But at the same time, not all superficially negative self-disclosures are a true social loss: Signaling affliction seems to have been a subcultural strategy for quite a while, nowadays in teenagers, but we also have famous references to the over-the-top displays of grief and penitence from ancient (Judeo-Christian) cultures. And of course, complaints can also result in support, or can play a role in political games.

So there’s a cost-benefit happening somewhere in the system, which we might hope to be reasonably specific about.

To touch on some controversies: There’s a big push to reduce the dissonance between what we publicly accept as grounds for complaint and what we actually punish people for complaining about. Accepting for the moment that our stated principles are okay (which is where I expect you might disagree), this can still go wrong several ways:
1. People may mistake the aspiration for reality e.g. we tell kids they should complain about bullying and feel like we’re making progress, but then we allow the system to punish kids just as harshly as ever after their disclosure, because we can’t or won’t change it.
2. Or we feel that offering non-complaint-based advice is perpetuating or accepting a discrepancy between “valid complaints” and “effective complaints”, e.g. the outcry when someone suggests a concrete way to avoid being sexually assaulted, or voices a concern about “victim mentality” (the mistake of thinking that complaining is more effective than it really is, often because everyone is only pretending that we are going to take complaints more seriously now)
3. The project is eaten by political concerns e.g. we find ourselves debating exactly which groups get to participate in the new glasnost of complaining about complaint-hypocrisy.
4. A group becomes unable to exclude to bad actors who cloak themselves in the new language of moral progress. Social justice groups, who are very concerned with unfair exclusion, have this problem to a non-trivial degree.
The “Oppression olympics” is mostly point 3, with a bit of point 4. I’m actually far more concerned with points 1 and 2.