There’s an anecdote near the beginning of “introduction to psychoanalysis” where he discusses the dreams of arctic explorers, which are almost entirely about food, not about sex, for understandable reasons.
MichaelVassar
Karma: 4,517
It is possible to play both, but difficult, and you can’t play both at once as well as equally smart non-analytical types will play just the social game.
Two examples. Sexual selection and speciation. Nuff’ said.
Yep, but the vast majority of people in a workplace, even those nominally there to deliver technical skills, are there to deliver social skills in reality, and all of the most highly paid people are paid for social skills.
That said, your right, still worth it. Being officially a foreigner is possibly the best approach.
Another reasonable concern has to do with informational flow-through lines. When novel investigation demonstrates that previous claims or perspectives were in error, do we have good ways to change the group consensus?
I spent many hours explaining a sub-set of these criticisms to you in Dolores Park soon after we first met, but it strongly seemed to me that that time was wasted. I appreciate that you want to be lawful in your approach to reason, and thus to engage with disagreement, but my impression was that you do not actually engage with disagreement, you merely want to engage with disagreement, basically, I felt that you believe in your belief in rational inquiry, but that you don’t actually believe in rational inquiry.
I may, of course, be wrong, and I’m not sure how people should respond in such a situation. It strongly seems to me that a) leftist movements tend to collapse in schizm, b) rightist movements tend to converge on generic xenophobic authoritarianism regardless of their associated theory. I’d rather we avoid both of those situations, but the first seems like an inevitable result of not accommodating belief in belief, while the second seems like an inevitable result of accommodating it. My instinct is that the best option is to not accommodate belief in belief and to keep a movement small enough that schizm can be avoided. The worst thing for an epistemic standard is not the person who ignores or denies it, but the person who tries to mostly follow it when doing so feels right or is convenient while not acknowledging that they aren’t following it when it feels weird or inconvenient, as that leads to a community of people with such standards engaging in double-think WRT whether their standards call for weird or inconvenient behavior. OTOH, my best guess is that about 50 people is as far as you can get with my proposed approach.
I think that people following the standards that seem credible to them upon reflection is the best you can hope for. Ideally, upon reflection, bets and experiments will be part of those standards to at least some people. Hopefully, some such groups will congeal into effective trade networks. If one usually reliable algorithm disagrees strongly with others, yes, short term you should probably effectively ignore it, but that can be done via squaring assigned probabilities, taking harmonic or geometric means, etc, not by dropping it, and more importantly, such deviations should be investigated with some urgency.
I think that attempting effectiveness points towards a strong attractor of taking over countries.
I think that this is an effective list of real weak spots. If these problems can’t be fixed, EA won’t do much good.
This is MUCH better than I expected from the title. I strongly agree with essentially the entire post, and many of my qualms about EA are the result of my bringing these points up with, e.g. Nick Beckstead and not seeing them addressed or even acknowledged.
Upvoted for clarity, but fantastically wrong, IMHO. In particular, “I suspect that taking straight averages gives too much weight to the opinions of cranks and crackpots, so that you may want to remove some outliers or give less weight to them. ” seems to me to be unmotivated by epistemology and visibly motivated by conformity.
MetaMed is hopefully moving us towards a world with more rationality in the healthcare professions.
I tend to think that if one can make a for-profit entity, that’s the best sort of vehicle to pursue most tasks, though occasionally, churches or governments have some value too.
My main comment on this is that if self-direction is as important as it appears to be, it would seem to me that ‘become self directed’ really should be everyone’s first priority if they can think of any way to do that. My second comment is that it seems to me that if one is self-directed and seeks appropriate mentorship, the expected value of pursuing a conventional career is very low compared to that of pursuing an entrepreneurial career. Conversely, mentorship or advice that doesn’t account for the critical factor of how self-directed someone is, as well as a few other critical factors such at the disposition to explore options, respond to empirical feedback from the market, etc, is likely to be worse than useless.
The most basic is that as far as I can tell, I had never been hit on while wearing glasses, and that started happening regularly.
You can assume that, but I assure you it’s just not the case. We can debate the details some time in person if you’d like.
There are additional ‘add-ons’ with names like ‘clear view’. The tech changes continually, so do some research before buying it.
Then something is wrong with the generator that your brain uses when trying to be unconventional. Try to figure out what and how to fix it, and tell me if you figure it out, as I have no idea how to do that.
legitimate concerns, but way WAY weaker than the strength of the argument they are set against.
Possibly valuable to talk with Robin Hanson and I for revision to HPMOR!Quirrell decision procedures from the source?