This resonated with me instantly, thank you!
I now remember, I used to do something similar if I needed to make decisions, even minor decisions, when drunk. I’d say, “what would I think of this decision sober”? If the answer was “it was silly” or “I’d want to do it but be embarrassed” I’d go ahead and do it. But if the answer was “Eek, obviously unsafe”, I’d assume my sober self was right and I was currently overconfident.
For what it’s worth, I quibbled with this at the time, but now I find it an incredibly useful concept. I still wish it had a more transparent name—we always call it “the worst argument in the world”, and can’t remember “noncentral fallacy”, but it’s been really useful to have a name for it at all.
I think this is a useful idea, although I’m not sure how useful this particular example is. FWIW, I definitely remember this from revising maths proofs—each proof had some number of non-obvious steps, and you needed to remember those. Sometimes there was just one, and once you had the first line right, even if there was a lot of work to do afterwards, it was always “simplifying in the obvious way”, so the rest of proof was basically “work it out, don’t memorise it”. Other proofs had LOTS of non-obvious ideas and were a lot harder to remember even if they were short.
FWIW I think of activities that cost time like activities that cost money: I decide how much money/time I want to spend on leisure, and then insist I spend that much, hopefully choosing the best way possible. But I don’t know if that would help other people.
I guess “unknown knowns” are the counterpoint to “unknown unknowns”—things it never occurred to you to consider, but didn’t. Eg. “We completely failed to consider the possibility that the economy would mutate into a continent-sized piano-devouring shrimp, and it turned out we were right to ignore that.”
FWIW, I always struggle to embrace it when I change my mind (“Yay, I’m less wrong!”)
But I admit, I find it hard, “advocating a new point of view” is a lot easier than “admitting I was wrong about a previous point of view”, so maybe striving to do #1 whether or not you’ve done #2 would help change my mind in response to new information a lot quicker?
When he studied which psychological studies were replicatable, and had to choose whether to disbelieve some he’d previously based a lot of work on, Brian Nosek said:
I choose the red pill. That’s what doing science is.
(via ciphergoth on twitter)
I don’t like a lot of things he did, but that’s the second very good advice I’ve heard from Rumsfeld. Maybe I need to start respecting his competence more.
Do we make suggestions here or wait for another post?
A few friends are Anglo-Catholic (ie. members of the Church of England or equivalent, not Roman Catholic, but catholic, I believe similar to Episcopalian in USA?), and not sure if they counted as “Catholic”, “Protestant” or “Other”. It might be good to tweak the names slightly to cover that case. (I can ask for preferred options if it helps.)
https://fbcdn-sphotos-f-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-prn2/1453250_492554064192905_1417321927_n.jpg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Catholicism
I took the survey.
I think most of my answers were the same as last year, although I think my estimates have improved a little, and my hours of internet have gone down, both of which I like.
Many of the questions are considerably cleaned up—much thanks to Yvain and everyone else who helped. It’s very good it has sensible responses for gender. And IIRC, the “family’s religious background” was tidied up a bit. I wonder if anyone can answer “atheist” as religious background? I hesitated over the response, since the last religious observance I know of for sure was G being brought up catholic, but I honestly think living in a protestant (or at least, anglican) culture is a bigger influence on my parents cultural background, so I answered like that.
I have no idea what’s going to happen in the raffle. I answered “cooperate” because I want to encourage cooperating in as many situations as possible, and don’t really care about a slightly-increased chance of < $60.
I emphatically agree with that, and I apologise for choosing a less-than-perfect example.
But when I’m thinking of “ways in which an obviously true statement can be wrong”, I think one of the prominent ways is “having a different definition than the person you’re talking to, but both assuming your definition is universal”. That doesn’t matter if you’re always careful to delineate between “this statement is true according to my internal definition” and “this statement is true according to commonly accepted definitions”, but if you’re 99.99% sure your definition is certain, it’s easy NOT to specify (eg. in the first sentence of the post)
Yeah, that’s interesting.
I agree with Eliezer’s post, but I think that’s a good nitpick. Even if I can’t be that certain about 10,000 statements consecutively because I get tired, I think it’s plausible that there’s 10,000 statements simple arithmetic statements which if I understand, check of my own knowledge, and remember seeing in a list on wikipedia, (which is what I did for 53), that, I’ve only ever been wrong once on. I find it hard to judge the exact amount, but I definitely remember thinking “I thought that was prime but I didn’t really check and I was wrong” but I don’t remember thinking “I checked that statement and then it turned out I was still wrong” for something that simple.
Of course, it’s hard to be much more certain. I don’t know what the chance is that (eg) mathematicians change the definition of prime—that’s pretty unlikely, but similar things have happened before that I thought I was certain of. But rarely.
I think the problem may be what counts as correlated. If I toss two coins and both get heads, that’s probably coincidence. If I toss two coins N times and get HH TT HH HH HH TT HH HH HH HH TT HH HH HH HH HH TT HH TT TT HH then there’s probably a common cause of some sort.
But real life is littered with things that look sort of correlated, like price of X and price of Y both (a) go up over time and (b) shoot up temporarily when the roads are closed, but are not otherwise correlated, and it’s not clear when this should apply (even though I agree it’s a good principle).
Note: this isn’t always right. Anyone giving advice is going to SAY it’s true and non-obvious even if it isn’t. “Don’t fall into temptation” etc etc. But that essay was talking about mistakes which he’d personally often empirically observed and proposed counter-actions to, and he obviously could describe it in much more detail if necessary.
And the fourth largest country of any sort :)
That’s an interesting thought, but it makes me rather uncomfortable.
I think partly, I find it hard to believe the numbers (if I have time I will read the methodology in more detail and possibly be convinced).
And partly, I think there’s a difference between offsetting good things, and offsetting bad things. I think it’s plausible to say “I give this much to charity, or maybe this other charity, or maybe donate more time, or...”. But even though it sort of makes sense from a utilitarian perspective, I think it’s wrong (and most people would agree it’s wrong) to say “I’ll kick this puppy to death because I’m a sadist/a modern artist/whatever, but I’ll give more money to charity afterwards.” Paying someone else to be vegetarian sounds at least as much like the latter as the former to me.
Hm. My answers were:
Anti-procrastination: “This fit with things I’d tried to do before in a small way, but went a lot farther, and I’ve repeatedly come back to it and feel I’ve made intermittent improvements by applying one or another part of it, but not really in a systematic way, so can’t be sure that that’s due to the technique rather than just ascribing any good results I happen to get to this because it sounded good.”
Pomodoro: “I’ve tried something similar before with intermittently good results and would like to do so more than I do. I don’t know whether the trappings of pomodoro significantly improve on that.”
Exercise: “I feel good on the occasions when I exercise, but it doesn’t seem to produce a measurable performance increase—it may halt a performance decrease.”
I decided to fit those into the boxes as best I could rather than write in, but I wasn’t sure.
I agree that the answers to these questions depend on definitions
I think he meant that those questions depend ONLY on definitions.
As in, there’s a lot of interesting real world knowledge that goes in getting a submarine to propel itself, but that now we know that, have, people asking “can a submarine swim” is only interesting in deciding “should the English word ‘swim’ apply to the motion of a submarine, which is somewhat like the motion of swimming, but not entirely”. That example sounds stupid, but people waste a lot of time on the similar case of “think” instead of “swim”.
Anna Salamon and I usually apply the Tarski Method by visualizing a world that is not-how-we’d-like or not-how-we-previously-believed, and ourselves as believing the contrary, and the disaster that would then follow.
I find just that description really, really useful. I knew about the Litany of Tarski (or Diax’s Rake, or believing something just because you wanted it to be true) and have the habit of trying to preemptively prevent it. But that description makes it a lot easier to grok it at a gut level.
And a couple of years later, I’ve not adopted this full-time, but I keep coming back to it and making incremental improvements.