a future, more evolved version of myself.
Just kidding.
lessdazed
Karma: 5,841
The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.
--John Maynard Keynes
Nemeth … divided two hundred and sixty-five female undergraduates into teams of five. … The first set of teams got the standard brainstorming spiel, including the no-criticism rules. Other teams were told … “Most studies suggest that you should debate and criticize each other’s ideas.” The rest received no further instructions. …The brainstorming groups slightly outperformed the groups given no instructions, but teams given the debate condition were the most creative by far. On average, they generated twenty per cent more ideas. And after the teams disbanded, … brainstormers and the people given no guidelines produced an average of three additional ideas; the debaters produced seven. …
“There’s this Pollyannaish notion that the most important thing to do when working together is stay positive and get along, to not hurt anyone’s feelings. … Well, that’s just wrong.”
Did they notice that they were possibly changing the amount of offense taken and feelings hurt by criticism, when they told people what was optimal? They told people that criticism was a duty, such that they probably wouldn’t take it as personally, and they found that the group was more creative. But did they measure the amount or nature of criticism given in the groups?
There are many reasons why such a rule could inhibit creativity. I wonder how important each factor is.
That’s advice for the skimming/reading/intensive study of 1,000 papers to get their knowledge, balancing completeness, depth, breadth, and the like.
I want advice on summarizing 100 individual articles, each one fairly completely read, so that many other people can do that and share the results with each other. The thing you do best, rather than the thing lukeprog does best.
deciding who to trust
This can be unpacked/dissolved.
First, I think of people/situation pairs rather than people. Specific situations influence things so much that one loses a lot by trying to think of people more abstractly; there is the danger of the fundamental attribution error.
Some people/situations are wrong more often than others are. Some people/situations lie more to others than others do. Some people/situations lie more to themselves than others do.
Some are more concerned with false positives, others with false negatives.
I also tend to think of people as components of decision making processes, as well as comprised of analogous decision making processes. Science takes advantage of this through the peer review process, which pits credulous humans against each other in attempts to prove each other’s ideas wrong, and it ultimately produces a body of knowledge each piece of which is unlikely to be false. It is the best input for anyone who instead cares about something slightly different, such as what is most likely to be true when false positives and false negatives would be similarly dangerous.
This is the source of my respect for Scott Adams (creator of Dilbert), which I’ve noticed is surprisingly prevalent if irregular among intelligent people I respect who have no particular reason to connect with anything having to do with office work or cubicles. It’s something that people either “get” or “don’t get,” like the orange joke. The man in an incomplete thinker, and many hundreds of millions of people are better decision makers than he, but as a member of a decision making group few could better come up with creative, topical, unique approaches to problems. Pair him with an intelligent, moderately critical mind and one would have a problem solving group better than one of two moderately intelligent and creative people.
Some people/situations produce more signal than others, others a better signal/noise ratio, some only advise when they are confident in their advice, some advise whenever they think it would have marginal gain, etc.
If you have an important decision to make, ask how to make the decision, not who should make it. Set up a person/situation network—even if the only person to trust is yourself (I have seen some research on patterns of decisions better made on a full bladder than an empty one, and vice versa. There is no you, there is only a you/situation (e.g. bladder) pair. Nothing corresponds to you/(no bladder situation, empty, full, or intermediate)! Likewise for decisions that differ dependent on whether or not your facial muscles are in the shape of a smile, etc.
Also, for every aspect of “trust,” beliefs are properly probabilistic; for the chances the person has good intentions, understands how you interpreted their words and actions, knows the right answer, knows they know the right answer, etc.
If you have a specific question you want advice to, asking about it most abstractly to avoid political associations was a great first move. Yet the abstract question is an imprecise summary and function of specific possible worlds. I think continuous rephrasing from more to less abstract might work well, as one could select from among variously abstract advice at different levels of political contamination and idiosyncratic specificity. Going in the other direction wouldn’t work as well, since the political content revealed early would taint later responses.
I think it’s time for a meta-post in which gwern discusses summarizing articles and gives advice.
eminent scientists tend to be
Base rate?
“Advanced Sanity” matches a strong comparative qualifier to a basic trait. While “sanity” has problems, as mentioned below, I think the phrase derives much of its power from its underlying pattern, which can be used in other suggestions.
The Anti-Zombie Conspiracy
Bell?
Practical Anticipation (Institute/Project/Center/etc.)
One friend of mine said that it was confusing not just because he didn’t know why it was relevant, but because the word “Waterline” has no strong positive connotations.
and our votes will be much more noisy
This qualification makes it not the fallacy of gray. If that qualifier was implicit from context above, I simply missed it.
we have different opinions about whether they are true or false.
Probabilistic opinions?
Can you take a set of “unrelated” (the inapplicability of this term to math might make my suggestion worth very little) theorems known to be true or false and give your opinions about the chances they are true?
Also relevant are the costs of type I and type II errors in your paper...and your lives, as these may may have significantly conditioned your reactions to uncertainty.
Consuming no more than 100 kWh of energy (gross, total), answer the following question: …
This doesn’t seem to build the possibly necessary infinite tower of resource restrictions. There has to be a small, finite amount of resources used in the process of answering the question, and verifying that no more resources that that were used for it, and verifying that no more resources were used for the verification, and verifying that no more resources than that were usd for the verification of the verification...
I must know what those secrets are, no matter how much sleep and comfort I might lose.
Quantity of experience: brain-duplication and degrees of consciousness
Think about it.
“We played reference class tennis.”
“Those are just more available to you, not actually more likely.”
“Are you more an aspiring rationalist, ‘aspiring rationalist,’ ‘aspiring’ rationalist, or aspiring ‘rationalist’?”
“The invisible is implied here.”
“Is that a disjunctive or conjunctive event?”
“It seemed hard until I hacked away at the edges.”
“You didn’t time yourself thinking about it before proposing solutions?”
“I have something to protect.”
“Someone should type a transcript of that.”
“I don’t know if that’s still an open problem, I’ve been following the HPMOR thread instead of that one.” (Said to a Philosophy professor about a philosophical problem.)
“Is there a more technical explanation?
“Argument screens off authority.”
“Go ahead and try to ‘other optimize’ me.”
“That’s one of my ugh fields.”
“That’s not a property, it’s a dangling variable.”
“ADBOC.”
Shit and Bullshit Rationalists Don’t Say:
“Gwern hasn’t summarized any research on that.”
“Did Yvain even edit that before posting?”
“What are his/her credentials?”
“That’s absurd!”
“Let’s hope that’s true.”
“I’ve read more papers by Scott Aaronson than just the one.” “Which one?” (Both of these.)
“All I want to know is the net positive or negative votes my comments and posts have received.”
“I don’t have an opinion as to which explanation of Bayes’ theorem I’d recommend.”
As such, “well-meaning troll” is an oxymoron.
Would the sentence “As such, “well-meaning troll” is an oxymoron by definition,” have a different meaning than what you wrote?
I downvoted those comments because they sucked. They were wrong in systematic ways indicative of a killed mind.
People who err on the side of shutting down discussion and debate are commonly known as authoritarian in nature. I don’t think that’s a good thing. I would expect lesswrong to err more on the side of preservation of information, and free speech absolutism, designed for ease of reading and information preservation.
Just look at that snippet. The first sentence is awkwardly worded such that I can’t tell whether he’s committing the bandwagon fallacy, the fallacy of appeal to nature and arguing by definition, or the bandwagon fallacy and the fundamental attribution error. The second sentence is a crude rhetorical appeal. The third sentence wraps the usual total failure to understand that policy debates should not appear one-sided within cringe-worthy phrases pretending the position advocated is nuanced and pragmatic.
I don’t have a policy of downvoting political pieces. I have policy of downvoting crap, and downvoting political comments is just what tends to happen.
we’re likely to be voting for biased reasons.
Downvoted for fallacy of gray, and because I’m feeling ornery today.
My favorite so far.