JQuinton

Karma: 1,311

JQuinton 10 Jun 2015 17:01 UTC
−2 points
on: When does heritable low fitness need to be explained?
Being a man greatly reduces reproductive fitness, compared to the reproductive success of women. E.g., at age 12, for example, the death rate for boys is 46 percent higher than the rate for girls. And there are probably other factors that add to less reproductive success among males besides death. Being both gay and male doesn’t seem like that much of a difference.

JQuinton 13 May 2015 16:15 UTC
4 points
on: Wild Moral Dilemmas
Most of the moral dilemmas I face in real life I’ve never read about in ethics or philosophy classes. Most of my real world experiences are more along the lines of decision theory/prisoner’s dilemmas.

So for example, if someone has wronged me, what does moral philosophy say I should do? I’m not sure because I don’t really know where to look or even if this question has been answered; to my knowledge it’s never been addressed in any philosophy or ethics undergrad courses I took.

But from a prisoner’s dilemma point of view, I have to juggle whether I should cooperate (let it slide) or defect (retaliate). If I let it slide, then I might be sending the signal that I’m a cooperate bot and future agents will think they can take advantage of me. But if I retaliate, then this might descend into an infinite loop of defect bot behavior. And from either of those nodes, I have to take into account the degree to which I cooperate or defect.

JQuinton 13 May 2015 13:53 UTC
33 points
on: LW should go into mainstream academia ?
A lot of LW content is based on stuff already in academia.

JQuinton 6 May 2015 17:01 UTC
5 points
in reply to: 75th’s comment on: Open Thread, May 4 - May 10, 2015
Here’s my half-baked idea.

Since the world is becoming safer, we have less real threats to prevent general ennui and so petty status games start to take on more importance.

Saying “Everyone Is Biased” May Create Bias

JQuinton5 May 2015 15:31 UTC

22 points

12 comments1 min readLW link

JQuinton 21 Apr 2015 17:49 UTC
7 points
in reply to: sixes_and_sevens’s comment on: Open Thread, Apr. 20 - Apr. 26, 2015
Slightly off topic, but I both program and play guitar and for the longest time I was wondering why I was getting an overwhelming feeling of the two bleeding into each other. While playing guitar, it would “feel” like I was also coding. Eventually I figured out that the common thread is probably the general task of algorithm optimization.

There’s no way for me to tell if programming made me a better guitar player or vice versa.

JQuinton 10 Apr 2015 20:39 UTC
4 points
on: Cognitive Bias Mnemonics
It might be a more valuable use of cognitive resources to recognize where bias in general comes from.

Rote memory tasks are good for trying to, say, guess the teacher’s password. But it’s a lot more efficient if you know what cognitive biases feel like and correct for that feeling ahead of time. In general, anytime something just feels right, you should trust but verify. Hindsight bias feels right when we look at things that already happened. Confirmation bias feels right when we see information that confirms what we already believe. Motivated skepticism feels right when we encounter information that challenges our beliefs. It feels wrong to argue against our ingroup.

As an example of what I mean: I knew a mathematics grad student for a while. Once I asked him (because I had forgotten) what the quadratic equation was. Surely, he’s in grad school for math and memorized all of that stuff right? Wrong. He didn’t know, but he did know how to derive it from (I’m guessing) certain principles in math. He re-figured it out and showed it to me.

JQuinton 4 Mar 2015 18:10 UTC
17 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Stupid Questions March 2015
I think the “everybody” is really an American-centric thing. As far as I can tell, all of the New Atheist types are non-European, or who focus most of their polemics on American audiences.

I’ve never lived in Europe, but this was my experience growing up in the US:
- “You don’t believe in Jesus/God? I must not have raised you right”
- “You’ve treated me better than all of my previous boyfriends/girlfriends, but you don’t believe in Jesus so I’m breaking up with you”
- “You’re new to the area? Where did you move from? Oh, Nowhereville, Alabahoma? I’m from Otherplace, Nevexico. So what church do you go to?”
- “How come you’re not going to the prayer breakfast/luncheon?”
- “You didn’t get the job/your car broke down/lost your wallet/etc.? Don’t worry, god has a plan for you”
- “Can you believe these scientists and their evolution/global warming/sciency science talk? They’ll say anything to reject god, right? My pastor says XYZ so therefore it’s true”
I’ve lived in a lot of places in the US and in my experience the places where this sort of stuff doesn’t happen are mainly large cities like NYC or San Francisco. And even then, it has to be the parts of those cities that are leaning on the more affluent side of things. It’s not just a USA Bible-Belt phenomenon… I’ve actually never lived in or visited the Bible Belt so it must be a lot worse there.

JQuinton 21 Jan 2015 21:07 UTC
0 points
on: … And Everyone Loses Their Minds
Seems like the same sort of bias reference class as the status quo bias.

JQuinton 2 Jan 2015 22:53 UTC
2 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Rationality Quotes December 2014

Non-agents simply don’t fit the definition of “god”

This is false. Not only does the LW wiki have a definition of “god” that is a non-agent, the study of theology points one to numerous gods that people believe in that are non-agents. There’s a reason that many of the popular monotheisms refer to their god as a personal god; it stands in contrast to the heresy of a non-personal (i.e., non-agent) god.

JQuinton 16 Dec 2014 17:53 UTC
6 points
in reply to: jsteinhardt’s comment on: Open thread, Dec. 15 - Dec. 21, 2014
Yes, when I was in high school, I would do about 20 push ups as soon as I got out of bed. After that, my heartrate is a bit too high to go back to bed. Of course, after a while the 20 push ups would get easy so I would increase the number until I was doing about 50-70.

JQuinton 16 Dec 2014 2:32 UTC
17 points
on: Rationality Quotes December 2014
“They, instead, commit the fundamental attribution error, which is if something good happens, it’s because I’m a genius. If something bad happens, it’s because someone’s an idiot or I didn’t get the resources or the market moved. … What we’ve seen is that the people who are the most successful here, who we want to hire, will have a fierce position. They’ll argue like hell. They’ll be zealots about their point of view. But then you say, ‘here’s a new fact,’ and they’ll go, ‘Oh, well, that changes things; you’re right.’”
- Why Google doesn’t care about hiring top graduates

JQuinton 8 Dec 2014 20:11 UTC
3 points
on: Stupid Questions December 2014
Looking for some people to refute this recently hair-brained idea I came up with.

The time period from the advent of the industrial revolution to the so-called digital revolution was about 150 − 200 years. Even though computers were being used around WWII, widespread computer use didn’t start to shake things up until 1990 or so. I would imagine that AI would constitute a similar fundamental shift in how we live our lives. So would it be a reasonable extrapolation to think that widespread AI would be about 150 − 200 years after the beginning of the information age?

JQuinton 26 Nov 2014 18:53 UTC
13 points
on: Rationality Quotes November 2014

I was at this entrepreneur dinner and I met Melissa, and she’s this brilliant, amazing entrepreneur. She was like, “Everyone I know wants me to write a book but I don’t have time and I’m not a good writer and publishing is this awful process … can you help me?” So, of course — I’d like to think that I’m not an elitist snob but of course I am — and I start lecturing her about hard work and writing and the writer’s life and all this shit and she rolls her fuckin’ eyes. And I’m like, “what?” and she’s like, “Are you an entrepreneur? I’m an entrepreneur, too, and in my job I have to solve problems. Can you solve my problem or are you just going to lecture me about hard work?”

Tucker Max

JQuinton 18 Nov 2014 22:25 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Brillyant’s comment on: Open thread, Nov. 17 - Nov. 23, 2014
I think I understand what you’re talking about.

I didn’t get internet access until I was almost in my 20s. So I grew up with certain talents where friends/family would consistently tell me that I was the best at what I did. Nowadays, you can go to online discussion boards where people who are the best of the best in field X congregate and see just how “average” you are in that bigger pond.

Though I was good enough to get into specialized high school/colleges for that, I chose not to go that route. I’m guessing that the same sort of seeing how average I was in that larger pond where everyone is at the top of their game would have happened anyway had I gone to those specialized schools.

JQuinton 17 Nov 2014 21:32 UTC
17 points
on: Is this dark arts and if it, is it justified?
HPMOR is something that appeals to System 1 (an engaging story/narrative) to advertize for rationality. So I don’t think appealing to System 1 per se implicates you as a dark arts practicioner.

JQuinton 10 Nov 2014 17:37 UTC
0 points
on: Open thread, Nov. 10 - Nov. 16, 2014
A friend of mine recently succumbed to using the base rate fallacy in a line of argumentation. I tried to explain that it was a base rate fallacy, but he just replied that the base rate is actually pretty high. The argument was him basically saying something equivalent to “If I had a disease that had a 1 in a million chance of survival and I survived it, it’s not because I was the 1 in a million, it’s because it was due to god’s intervention”. So I tried to point out that either his (subjective) base rate is wrong or his (subjective) conditional probability is wrong. Here’s the math that I used, let me know if I did anything wrong:

Let’s assume that the prior probability for aliens is 99%. The probability of surviving the disease given that aliens cured it is 100%. And of course, the probability of surviving the disease at all is 1 out of a million, or 0.0001%.
- Pr(Aliens | Survived) = Pr(Survived | Aliens) x Pr(Aliens) / Pr(Survived)
- Pr(Aliens | Survived) = 100% x 99% / 0.0001%
- Pr(Aliens | Survived) = 1.00 * .99 / .000001
- Pr(Aliens | Survived) = .99 / .000001
- Pr(Aliens | Survived) = 990,000 or 99,000,000%
There’s a 99,000,000% chance that aliens exist!! But… this is probability theory, and here probabilities can only add up to 100%. Meaning that if we end up with some result that is over 100% or under 0% something in our numbers is wrong.

The Total Probability Theorem is the denominator for Bayes Theorem. In this aliens instance, that is the probability of surviving the disease without alien intervention, which is 1 out of a million. The Total Probability Theorem, meaning 1 out of a million in this case, is also equal to Pr(Survived | Aliens) x Pr(Aliens) + Pr(Survived | Some Other Cause) x Pr(Some Other Cause):
- 1 in a million = Pr(Survived | Aliens) x Pr(Aliens) + Pr(Survived | Some Other Cause) x Pr(Some Other Cause)
- 0.0001% = 100% x 99% + ??? x 1%
- 0.0001% = 99% + 1%*???
If we want to find ???, in this case it would be Pr(Survived | Some Other Cause), we need to solve for ??? just like we would in any basic algebra course to find x. In this case, our formula is 0.000001 = 0.99 + 0.01x.

If we solve for x, it is −98.999, or −9899%. Meaning that Pr(Survived | Some Other Cause) is −9899%. Again, a number that is outside the range of allowable probabilistic values. This means that there is something wrong with our input. Either the 1 in a million is wrong, the base rate of alien existence being 99% is wrong, or the 100% conditional probability that you would survive your 1 in a million disease due to alien intervention is wrong. The 1 in a million is already set, so either the base rate or conditional probabilities are wrong. And this is why that sort of “I could only have beaten the odds on this disease due to aliens” (or magic, or alternative medicine, or homeopathy, or Chthulu, or...) reasoning is wrong.

Again, remember the base rate. And you can’t cheat by trying to jack up the base rate or you’ll skew some other data unintentionally. Probability is like mass; it has to be conserved.

JQuinton 29 Oct 2014 15:04 UTC
38 points
on: 2014 Less Wrong Census/Survey
Took it.

This is my second year taking the survey. I wish I remembered what my answers were last year so I could see how I’ve changed.

JQuinton 21 Oct 2014 20:34 UTC
3 points
on: In the grim darkness of the far future there is only war continued by other means
I don’t think PvE is necessarily scientific knowledge. It’s more like experience (to expound on the analogy further). While we’re currently in one environment—Earth—it might be possible for us to explore other environments in the future. But, like the analogy proposes, it would take an enormous amount of manhours/manpower to actually reach this new content.

JQuinton 21 Oct 2014 18:18 UTC
4 points
on: Rationality Quotes October 2014
This is a quote from memory from one of my professors in grad school:
Last quarble, the shanklefaxes ulugled the flurxurs. The flurxurs needed ulugled because they were mofoxiliating, which caused amaliaxas in the hurble-flurble. The shakletfaxes domonoxed a wokuflok who ulugles flurxurs, because wokuflok nuxioses less than iliox nuxioses.
1. When did the shaklefaxes ulugle the flurxurs?
2. Why did the shaklefaxes ulugle the flurxurs?
3. Who did they get to ulugle the flurxurs?
4. If you were the shaklefaxes, would you have your ulugled flurxurs? Why or why not?
5. Would you domonox a wokuflok who ulugles flurxurs instead of an iliox? Why or why not?
Notice how if you only memorize things, you can reasonably answer the first three questions but not the last two. But if you actually understand things, you can answer all five. Instead of memorizing things, you will get a lot further in life if you actually understand the reasoning behind them.

JQuinton

Say­ing “Every­one Is Bi­ased” May Create Bias

Saying “Everyone Is Biased” May Create Bias