I feel like this creates more misconceptions than it clears up. It’s very dismissive of something that is really in the early phases of being studied.
neq1
Karma: 382
The primary effect that reading this had on me was the change in state from [owning a cloak hadn’t occurred to me] to [owning a cloak sounds awesome; i am unhappy that i hadn’t thought of it on my own]
I agree. Good point.
The answer to the question “what proportion of phenotypic variability is due to genetic variability?” always has the same answer: “it depends!” What population of environments are you doing this calculation over? A trait can go from close to 0% heritable to close to 100% heritable, depending on the range of environments in the sample. That’s a definition problem. Further, what should we count as ‘genetic’? Gene expression can depend on the environment of the parents, for example (DNA methylation, etc). That’s an environmental inheritance. I just think there is an old way of talking about these things that needs to go away in light of current knowledge.
I agree with you that we still can learn a lot from these studies.
Adoption studies are biased toward the null of no parenting effect, because adoptive parents aren’t randomly selected from the population of potential parents (they often are screened to be similar to biological parents).
Twin studies I think are particularly flawed when it comes to estimating heritability (a term that has an incoherent definition). Twins have a shared pre-natal environment. In some cases, they even share a placenta.
Plus, the whole gene vs. environment discussion is obsolete, in light of the findings of the past decade. Everything is gene-environment interaction.
wait, this isn’t well done satire?
I don’t think the questions even make much sense. We don’t live in the world that we once thought we did, where genotype to phenotype results from DNA->RNA->protein model. The real action is in the switches, which are affected by the environment (and so on).
I’m not opposed to ever using terms like “realist.” I’m opposed to it as it was used in the main post, where people who agree my views are realists, and people who do not are denialists.
It implies that people who reject their claims are not being real. I want to be a realist, but I certainly have seen no evidence that any particular race is more likely to commit unscrupulous acts if you control for environment (if that was even possible). It’s a propaganda term, like ‘[my cause] realist.’
Downvoted for use of the term ‘race realism’ (that’s verbal bullying).
Because if TDT endorsed the action, then other people would be able to deduce that TDT endorsed the action, and that (whether or not it had happened in any particular case) their lives would be in danger in any hospital run by a timeless decision theorist, and then we’d be in much the same boat. Therefore TDT calculates that the correct thing for TDT to output in order to maximize utility is “Don’t kill the traveler,” and thus the doctor doesn’t kill the traveler.
TDT could deduce that people would deduce that TDT would not endorse the action, and therefore TDT is safe to endorse the action. It seems like the gist of this is: (a) i’ve decided that killing the traveler is wrong (based on something other than TDT) and (b) TDT should do the right thing.
I upvoted and like this post. Some of it just strikes me as magical
Genes just aren’t as much of the story as we thought they were. Whether or not a gene increases fitness might depend on whether it is methylated or not, for example. Until recently, we didn’t realize that there could be transgenerational transmittance of DNA methylation patterns due to environmental factors.
And as it turns out, all these predictions are correct.
I think your conclusion is largely correct, but I see a lot of overconfidence here, particularly in the evolutionary psych section. The selish gene theory was a good one, but wrong (see epigenetics).
“The Bridge”. There was one person who survived and said he changed his mind once he was airborne. My recollection of the movie is that most of the people who jumped had been wanting to die for most of their lives. Even their family members seemed at peace with it for that reason.
The first one is flawed, IMO, but not for the reason you gave (and I wouldn’t call it a ‘trick’). The study design is flawed. They should not ask everyone “which is more probable?” People might just assume that the first choice, “Linda is a bank teller” really means “Linda is a bank teller and not active in the feminist movement” (otherwise the second answer would be a subset of the first, which would be highly unusual for a multiple choice survey).
The Soviet Union study has a better design, where people are randomized and only see one option and are asked how probable it is.
You have to realize that a great number of things are discussed in these proceedings that the mind just can’t deal with, people are simply too tired and distracted, and by way of compensation they resort to superstition.
-- Kafka, The Trial
Justice is an artefact of custom. Where customs are unsettled its dictates soon become dated. Ideas of justice are as timeless as fashions in hats.
-John Gray, Straw Dogs
Who has not experienced the chilling memory of the better things? How it creeps over the spirit of one’s current dreams! Like the specter at the banquet it stands, its substanceless eyes viewing with a sad philosophy the make-shift feast.
-Theodore Dreiser, The Titan
If you are not going to do an actual data analysis, then I don’t think there is much point of thinking about Bayes’ rule. You could just reason as follows: “here are my prior beliefs. ooh, here is some new information. i will now adjust my believes, by trying to weigh the old and new data based on how reliable and generalizable i think the information is.” If you want to call epistemology that involves attaching probabilities to beliefs, and updating those probabilities when new information is available, ‘bayesian’ that’s fine. But, unless you have actual data, you are just subjectively weighing evidence as best you can (and not really using Bayes’ rule).
The thing that can be a irritating is when people then act as if that kind of reasoning is what bayesian statisticians do, and not what frequentist statisticians do. In reality, both types of statisticians use Bayes’ rule when it’s appropriate. I don’t think you will find any statisticians who do not consider themselves ‘bayesian’ who disagree with the law of total probability.
If you are actually going to analyze data and use bayesian methods, you would end up with a posterior distribution (not simply a single probability). If you simply report the probability of a belief (and not the entire posterior distribution), you’re not really doing conventional bayesian analysis. So, in general, I find the conventional Less Wrong use of ‘bayesian’ a little odd.