NatashaRostova

• NatashaRostovaJan 9, 2017, 1:49 AM

  1 point

  in reply to: The_Jaded_One’s comment on: [Er­ror com­mu­ni­cat­ing with LW2 server]

  I agree with this view. His abuse is more blase, that’s definitely true.

  Brash man with a working-class NYC disposition: “Obama literally founded ISIS” or “Obama is secretly a Muslim”

  Sensible people everywhere recoil and roll their eyes. Understanding why that’s absurd is pretty easy. The people who make those arguments aren’t exactly an intellectual class, and currently lack an intellectual ‘ruling caste.’

  Refined person with an articulate tone of voice, and an Ivy league law degree: “Women are oppressed everywhere, and currently make 70 cents on the dollar of what a man makes.”

  Not horrific, stated by a well-educated person. Sounds reasonable, based on ‘real research.’ Comes from a sense of seemingly genuine concern and outrage for an injustice.

  I used to take the stance that the first was much worse, as it is more brash and shameless. I’m not sure anymore how to measure these two against each other. I have, absolutely without a doubt, been mind-killed on this specific topic, because I personally hate charlatan lawyers who think they have the right to tell me how to live my life.

• NatashaRostovaJan 8, 2017, 11:46 PM

  0 points

  on: Against Com­pro­mise, or, De­cid­ing as a Team with­out Suc­comb­ing to Entropy

  I’ve had a similar experience at [large tech firm]. It was becoming clear that an intersecting project with two teams wasn’t working. The challenge though was it was stuck in a rotten equilibrium. Each team’s true incentive was distinct and contrary to the other team. Yet the mandate was ‘thou shalt have the same incentives.’ Everyone kept publicly claiming we had aligned incentives, which you shouldn’t have to publicly explain if it’s actually true.

  A lot of social choice theory guys tried to explain this in the context of voting, and the stability of outcomes. Arrow’s impossibility theorem can be resolved if you have a dictator. In the end a strong and smart leader can solve so many issues of indecisiveness, and can take ownership of directing the deliberation, and adjusting for variables no one else owns (e.g. the cost of time in making a decision).

  Still, I remember thinking about this all while intersecting teams were making obviously bad choices, and thinking that the best way out would just be to make someone sovereign and let them choose.

  Leadership gets weird though. Despite all this theory and analysis over group choice dynamics, there is this transformative property of a great leader that seems to inspire people to buy into their vision and work incredibly hard. I don’t understand how that works though, other than some handwaving and ‘psychology.’

• NatashaRostovaJan 8, 2017, 11:16 PM

  5 points

  in reply to: The_Jaded_One’s comment on: Ra­tion­al­ity Con­sid­ered Harm­ful (In Poli­tics)

  I think that’s what most people who were or want to be part of the rationalist community want to work on now. That’s what Scott Alexander does full time with SSC and his comments. Even on LW despite the weird and dated rules, everyone wants to discuss this stuff and work on slowly figuring it out. I don’t think anyone really cares how a 22 year old has reinterpreted EY’s post on cognitive biases or some new version of AI risk(and I say that having put all my faith in 22 year old engineering kids saving the world).

  I’ll probably just post on it more now here, and see what happens.

• NatashaRostovaJan 8, 2017, 10:56 PM

  5 points

  on: Ra­tion­al­ity Con­sid­ered Harm­ful (In Poli­tics)

  One problem I have with communicating this is that I was only able to pick up on it after lots of academic studying (degree doesn’t matter so much as having read and understood the growth of Social Science knowledge and research), and reading blogs of academics who have run into trouble for years.

  Whether it’s InfoProc on genetic engineering, West Hunter on evolution, SSC on feminism, and so forth.

  By time you read all this stuff and it starts coming together in your head, you realize you can’t rationally discuss it with other people. If I’m at a party and someone mentions they are a feminist, I’m definitely not going to mention I’m an anti-feminist (or try to explain why I think the entire idea of flippant ‘ism identification’ is broken). Or even outside a party, it’s a heavy discussion to bring up for no real gain.

  There is no nice starting position, or clear argument on why rationality is often harmful in politics without contemporary and historical examples. It takes hours of conversations with close friends who are willing to have their mind changed, simply to explain that there is this entire world that no one is allowed to discuss. I have friends who get so frustrated by this, they decide to go full Alt-Right or Neoreaction, which I think is also a mistake.

  One nice place to start though is in the past, where the institutions that many people view today as the most rational and truthful were completely wrong. That can at lease plant a seed of doubt. This interview with 20th century journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, who traveled through the Soviet Union during the Holodomor, is one of my favorites: (http://​​www.ukrweekly.com/​​old/​​archive/​​1983/​​228321.shtml)

  Shortly before Mr. Muggeridge’s articles appeared in the Guardian, the Soviet authorities declared Ukraine out of bounds to reporters and set about concealing the destruction they had wreaked. Prominent statesmen, writers and journalists—among them French Prime Minister Edouard Herriot, George Bernard Shaw and Walter Duranty of The New York Times—were enlisted in the campaign of misinformation.

  Or point to guys like Walter Duranty (https://​​en.wikipedia.org/​​wiki/​​Walter_Duranty).

  The problem though is unlike lots of EY-Rationality-Facts, you can’t learn why rationality is often harmful in politics without loads of examples throughout time. And unlike cognitive biases, it’s really hard to shortly explain.

• NatashaRostovaJan 8, 2017, 10:36 PM

  4 points

  on: [Er­ror com­mu­ni­cat­ing with LW2 server]

  Your document reads much more like “Rational Politics for Liberals.” That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s really clear that you tacitly oppose lots of dissident/​alternative/​reactionary right views. I’m pretty sympathetic to what you’re trying to do, but I see it more as a concerted effort for thoughtful and rational discussion of how to solve the issues of alternative and neoreactionary right beliefs.

  I don’t think any level of rational calculations of per person terrorism risk will change the 20-50% of Americans who don’t want Muslim immigration. Terrorism is the nicest and cleanest, discrete and emotionally actionable issue to focus around. The impression I get is more that many people prefer or like their own culture, and want to live in a culture with homogenous groups of people. There is at least enough research on the fact that homogenous groups are higher-trust and safer, to make the preference to exclude sufficiently different people as something that could be rational, or debatable in a rationalist framework (disclosure: I don’t think people are necessarily irrational for having ingroup preferences or outsider-anxiety).

  I have spent a lot of time trying to think about how we can reconcile these worldviews between the in-group preference and the more universalist/​progressive political model. It’s really hard, maybe impossible. Right now the intellectuals of each group (read: not the meme spammers) can’t even honestly discuss the issues. Their views are so beyond the pale of one another, that they can’t even find a shared platform to say a thing. Maybe one goal would be to get the intellectuals of both groups to take a stand against pointless meme arguments.

  I’m not a huge fan of Ezra Klein, but his interview with Tyler Cowen gets at this (http://​​marginalrevolution.com/​​marginalrevolution/​​2016/​​10/​​conversation-ezra-klein-2.html). KLEIN: I strongly agree. We do not have a language for demographic anxiety that is not a language that is about racism. And we need one. I really believe this, and I believe it’s been a problem, particularly this year. It is clear, the evidence is clear. Donald Trump is not about “economic anxiety.”

  I think a true rational politics project would work on developing this ‘language for demographic anxiety.’ If we can imagine a slightly better pundit news discussion:

  Interviewer: We have Guest1 and Guest2. Guest1 prefers a more homogenous culture, which he argues is higher trust. Guest2 believes that the evolution of our culture as we know it has succeeded because we bring in different groups of people. Guest 1: Great to be here, I have lots of respect for Guest2, but I think we need to focus on bringing highly educated people who match on our core cultural dimensions. Guest 2: There is more than simply education, over time we have seen [previous groups] slowly absorb into America, and add their own cultural strategies into our melting pot.

  ...or something like that. Right now that conversation cannot happen. Or at least it can’t happen without faux and real outrage, accusations of racism, and so forth. And in saying all this, it’s probably clear where my political preferences rest. It’s a testament to the challenge of this endeavor that any individuals model of what a ‘Rational Politics Project’ would look like secretly embeds the political views of its author.

• NatashaRostovaDec 30, 2016, 2:13 AM

  0 points

  in reply to: chaosmage’s comment on: How do you iden­tify com­plex sys­tems?

  That could be part of it. I’d also say what is difficult is putting certain types of ideas into words. When people talk about scientific skepticism, for example, what exactly are they saying? Guys like Andrew Gelman or Scott Alexander (or plenty of other smart folks) are able to look through academic research across domains, and something sticks out to them as wrong. They can then go through and try to identify what claims, or assumptions, or statistics, are misguided. But prior to that there is this hunch or indicator that the author’s scientific claim is off. They seem to develop this hunch by having a well developed heuristic of what is too complex to casually know, and what isn’t.

  You see the same thing in economic forecasting, or medicine, where over a long time skilled people start to develop a hunch for when something is off. I think part of this hunch is knowing what is knowable, and what is beyond the pale.

  As a slightly contrived example, growing up I was more of a naive rationalist. In my late teen years I learned that almost everything I was taught about drugs was a lie. Not just scheduled drugs, but nootropics as well. My dad is a physician and told me without knowing any of the research, and having read less than me, that it’s generally a bad idea to take drugs you don’t need. He had no real argument, it was something he’d picked up over years of practicing medicine: Take as few drugs and as few treatments as possible, unless necessary.

  Even though there is tons of research on medicine, it’s hard to codify and explain the way certain clever established practitioners evaluate when we can rely on our inputs to lead to our desired outputs. These hunches are nonlinear and chaotic, which makes measuring them formally incredibly challenging. I’m probably bringing up medicine as an example due to the recent posts on depression networks from Slate Star Codex, where we also see Scott is getting an intuition or understanding of how these complex systems interact, and when and why the related research or classifications is misguided.

How do you iden­tify com­plex sys­tems?

• NatashaRostovaDec 23, 2016, 9:33 PM

  0 points

  in reply to: paulfchristiano’s comment on: Ideas for Next Gen­er­a­tion Pre­dic­tion Technologies

  How is a prediction market subsidized by someone with an interest in the information? As far as I’m aware, most of them make money on bid/​ask spreads, and can be thought of as a future or Arrow–Debreu security.

  As the current institutions stand there are differences. Prediction market sites and the Nasdaq are obviously different in a lot of institutional ways. In prediction markets you can’t own companies. But in the more abstract way in which people trade on current information as a prediction, which is eventually realized, they are similar.

  For example, a corporate bond is going to make a series of payments to the holder over its maturity. Market makers can strip off these payments and sell them as bespoke securities, so you could buy the rights to a single payment on debt from company X in 12 months. If you’d like, people can then write binary options on those such that they receive everything or nothing based on a specified strike price.

  In the general security there is lots of information and dynamics, but with the right derivatives structure you can break it up into a state of a series of binary predictions.

  The dynamic structure behind prediction markets and financial markets as trading current values built on models of future expectations is very similar, and I think identical.

• NatashaRostovaDec 21, 2016, 1:20 AM

  0 points

  in reply to: ozziegooen’s comment on: Ideas for Next Gen­er­a­tion Pre­dic­tion Technologies

  Literally the only difference in terms of prediction dynamics is that currently prediction markets include political/​non-financial questions, which are only implicitly included in financial markets.

• NatashaRostovaDec 20, 2016, 1:10 AM

  0 points

  in reply to: Error’s comment on: Open thread, Dec. 19 - Dec. 25, 2016

  I’ll half-answer this, since it’s sort of a tangent, but the metric I prefer to use is my variation of feeling over time. I don’t know if other people are like this (probably), but my mood/​emotion impacts my view on politics/​policy.

  Sometimes when I feel ill or in a bad mood some political event of class A will make me upset and convinced everything will turn out poorly. After I lift weights when I’m on my (perceived) good feeling Testosterone hormones, I feel confident that political event of class A won’t be a big deal, and I’m confident in my ability to persevere. Usually I take this variance in my prediction of the future as evidence I’m being mind-killed.

  Another strategy, if reading one or two articles on a topic you already know a fair amount on makes you feel strong emotions and strongly change your prediction of the future, you might be mind-killed.

  A final strategy I tried was subscribing to different political meme pages on FB (libertarian, Ann Coulter-ish, Alt-right, progressive), and I’d notice how I sometimes would slowly change my view based on which ones I was looking at. I know admitting to subconsciously changing political views based on political memes is about as embarrassing as saying you went and bought a Taco Bell meal because of a Taco Bell commercial—but as far as I can tell we are very perceptible to this stuff, even the stupidest memes. (Sometimes even if I hate them, I start substituting them deep in my mind for the ‘other sides’ actual argument).

  Anyway, those are a few of my tactics.

• NatashaRostovaDec 17, 2016, 11:56 PM

  2 points

  on: Fre­quent sauna bathing pro­tects men against dementia

  I wonder what the statistical power of the study was.

  With n = ~2000, and dementia rates being relatively low, and there either being no controls or some lame half-missing linear controls (even worse than no control, because it makes you think the control worked), and the treatment being seemingly arbitrary ,I basically am going to assume this is meaningless information.

  It’s turning an uncontrolled correlation in a low power sample into a causal story of protection.

  Anyway, I didn’t actually read the paper so maybe I’m being unfair. I somehow doubt that’s the case though.

• NatashaRostovaDec 16, 2016, 5:50 PM

  0 points

  in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Pos­i­tive vs. Nor­ma­tive Rationality

  I think you’re right that the distinction is typically clear cut and useful to make. What I want to avoid (although I’m not sure I was successful) is simply being nihilistic and making a refined version of the boring argument “what do words even mean?!”.

  The area I’m interested in is when that distinction grows blurry. Normative arguments always have to embed an accurate representation of reality, and a correct prediction that they will actually work. And positive arguments of reality frequently imply a natural or optimal result.

  For example, some guy like Marx says “I’ve been thinking for a few decades, I have predicted the optimal state of human interaction. This map of the world clearly suggests we should move towards it.” He then writes a manifesto to encourage it. The normative part of his argument seems to come trivially from the positive explanation of the world. So to that extent it’s not like I can agree with his positive argument, but think his normative takes it too far, they are both equally wrong in the same way.

  Or another way to say it, I think it’s very rare that people share the same positive view of the world, but disagree normatively. Our normative disagreements often always come from a different map of the world, not from the same map but different preferences. Obviously I can’t prove, or even test this, so I’m posting it here as an uncertain though. Not something I’m going to strongly defend. I know Aumann sort of proved it with his agreement theorem, well he modeled two Bayesian agents. So everything his model can’t explain could be called normative I guess?

  In reality it’s still a useful distinction. As I said, I don’t want to be annoyingly nihilistic or anything.

  Note: Will read the rest of that paper later. Looks very interesting and relevant though, so thanks for sharing.

Pos­i­tive vs. Nor­ma­tive Rationality

• NatashaRostovaDec 14, 2016, 3:12 AM

  3 points

  0

  on: The Par­tial Con­trol Fallacy

  This also is why I find nearly all university/​grad application/​acceptance forums to be garbage. Naturally the topics that are discussed are the ones that are shared across the group, when the reality is it is the idiosyncratic aspects that are most up-for-optimization and least discussed.

  Your post is very similar to lots of literature on game-theoretic signalling. The seminal paper being this one by a guy called Spence on job-market signalling (http://​​www.econ.yale.edu/​​~dirkb/​​teach/​​pdf/​​spence/​​1973%20job%20market%20signalling.pdf).

  Hey, James Miller, you got any other good game theory signalling papers to recommend :P?

  Please do read the first 2-3 paragraphs, since I think you’ll really like it, even if taking an hour out of your life to read the game/​set theory notation isn’t on your list of priorities (unless you’ve already read this paper, which while unlikely, I don’t want to assume you haven’t!).

• NatashaRostovaDec 13, 2016, 9:31 PM

  5 points

  in reply to: HungryHobo’s comment on: [Er­ror com­mu­ni­cat­ing with LW2 server]

  Based on their other comments (accusing a post of mine of being ‘homophobic’—nonsensically) , and their username, it’s a troll.

• NatashaRostovaDec 13, 2016, 8:43 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: ImScared’s comment on: Tra­di­tions and Ra­tion­al­ity.

  You’re not saying my post was homophobic, are you? I don’t think anyone here has been homophobic, or close.

• NatashaRostovaDec 13, 2016, 4:15 AM

  6 points

  on: Sane Think­ing about Men­tal Problems

  I think this is a great area to explore, and probably one of the areas a rationalist perspective can most help teenagers.

  I know as a late teenager, and in my early 20s, my sadness, depression, and anxiety, were part of my identity. It was how I dressed, how I thought of myself, the music I listened to, drugs I took. To take a quote from classic t.v. show ‘Bojack Horsemen’ I fetishized my own sadness. Breakups felt like a beautiful soul-crushing torture.

  As I studied more science, read more, and took more interest in the scientific world, I started viewing my interactions with my own emotions in a more evolutionary and scientific view. I was less interested in my ‘artistic sadness’ and saw it more as a sort of depressing failure of my brain and evolution—one which I could try to hack by exercise and eating well.

  I wish someone had explained to me that as a man there were special hacks I could use, like lifting weights, testosterone, boxing, fighting, and other activities that I’m programmed to find rewarding. Particularly as a guy who was nerdier growing up, I never realized that passing on sports wasn’t just a personal choice, but could seriously hurt my own personal development and confidence.

• NatashaRostovaDec 12, 2016, 10:39 PM

  0 points

  in reply to: siIver’s comment on: Open thread, Dec. 12 - Dec. 18, 2016

  It’s a stupid question. It wouldn’t be too hard to give 10 methodologists this question, then tell them the side to support, and watch them all build great cases. Obviously that’s an assertion, I can’t imagine evidence then claim it proves me right :P, but I strongly suspect this would be true.

  The question is so dumb. Even if they got rid of the business story-line, and abstracted it to pure statistics, it’s still stupid. What distribution characterizes it? If they got rid of the business, gave the data, AND gave info on the generative distribution, AND made it a numerical answer… Then I guess it’s a fair question, but at that point it’s just a pure stats question.

• NatashaRostovaDec 10, 2016, 9:16 PM

  0 points

  in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Tra­di­tions and Ra­tion­al­ity.

  I don’t really understand what you’re trying to say about homosexuality. I don’t want to explore how traditional morality has advantages, because that’s a hard question and not something I have any reason to think I’d be all that good at. I do think that morality and tradition is complicated, so we have to be careful not to assume that we can reason through or against certain phenomena.

  It’s always awkward talking about complex systems involving humans, because either you abstract away from individuals or you never talk about them. It’s even more difficult when trying to discuss why an individual should/​shouldn’t take some self-interested action based on how other people may react, based on other peoples traditional views, which may be sensible or may be insane. Over time we enter an equilibrium based on the costs/​benefits an abstract community places on certain actions. So, I think, the question becomes are individuals responsible for trying to keep a good equilibrium in place? And is it possible to easily predict how shifts will change the equilibrium for better or worse? I don’t know the answer to that, or that there even is an answer.

  I get the point you’re making, and it’s an important one that I did not address, and thinking back I should have thought about it and admitted I don’t know the answer. That at the individual level people should weight their own cost/​benefit with respect to their own life, not as part of some abstract group.

  To your final point, I edited my post based on Daniel’s comment to remove the facebook link. I didn’t see it as a privacy violation, but since people think it’s bad etiquette I’m happy to adjust.

• NatashaRostovaDec 10, 2016, 8:21 PM

  4 points

  in reply to: whpearson’s comment on: Tra­di­tions and Ra­tion­al­ity.

  Yeah I should have phrased that better. It goes hand-in-hand with your last sentence. Lots of our impulses and feelings are based on a cultural programming that encourages us to build outcomes that’s best for society.

  I have a close friend for example who just finished his MD/​PhD. He makes less money than all his peers who he went to Stanford (much less money) and works way harder hours. While his friends get piles of money and free lunches at Google, he sleeps on a cot in an old hospital with a broken AC unit doing 20 hour shifts. Why?!

  Well, it’s indisputable that his job is more prestigious. An MD/​PhD at a top hospital in the world doing cancer research? That’s about as high as you can go in terms of societal respect and prestige. We all were raised to understand his sacrifice, and as a result by entering that field he gets this ‘bonus payment.’ That bonus payment encourages our best and brightest to do really shitty things. Here we are able to decompose and understand why that’s happening. Still, when he made the choice to get his MD/​PhD I suspect he felt it was an individual choice, and it was, but it was also guided by this greater way society rewards him.

  So why do women (and families) not want to go into or encourage prostitution? Surely they will get some benefit from it, but they avoid it because society places a huge cost in terms of shame/​disappointment/​self-hate. Now, maybe this is an outdated societal cost we’re building, and it’s time to try to get rid of it. That could totally be the case. But it could also be the case that this cost is serving a purpose that isn’t obvious to us. You give one example that it could lead to more objectification, which societally we decide is bad.