Rats even seem to have IQ of sorts. Truly, our fuzzy little friends are often underestimated.
Rhwawn
Karma: 179
Reminds me of Patton:
No man ever won a war by dying for his country. Wars were won by making the other poor bastard die for his. You don’t win a war by dying for your country.
Downvoted; too reliant on personal anecdote (if we can call such speculation that).
I suggest everyone to think for a moment about the fact that Eliezer somehow created this site, wrote a lot of content people consider useful, and made some decisions about the voting system, which together resulted in a website we like. So perhaps this is some Bayesian evidence that he knows what he is doing.
There’s also plenty of Bayesian evidence he’s not that great at moderation. SL4 was enough of an eventual failure to prompt the creation of OB; OB prompted the creation of LW; he failed to predict that opening up posting would lead to floods of posts like it did for LW; he signally failed to understand that his reaction to Roko’s basilisk was pretty much the worst possible reaction he could engage in, such that even now it’s still coming up in print publications about LWers; and this recent karma stuff isn’t looking much better.
I am reminded strongly of Jimbo Wales. He too helped create a successful community but seemed to do so accidentally as he later supported initiatives that directly undermined what made that community function.
One potential confound is that the rewards may not scale right: the older you are, often the wealthier you are. A kindergartner might be thrilled to defect for $1, while an old person can barely be troubled to stoop for a $1 bill.
It is not as if we have no half-baked evopsych theorizing here; and there’s Hanson, who is particularly guilty. Who can read some of his wilder posts and not regard it was a wee bit discrediting of evopsych?
Unfortunately, neurons are about as efficient in most species—they’re already as optimized as you get. For that and other interesting facts, see http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/06/19/1201895109.abstract
Perhaps it’s the expense? I looked into it very briefly, and apparently professional neurofeedback costs thousands of dollars!
That reduces the value of the example, IMO. Political conspiracy stuff relies on so much contextual material and government records that it’s hard for a foreigner to make a good appraisal of what went on. It would be like a monolingual American trying to make heads or tails of that incident decades ago (whose name escapes me at the moment) where a high-level Communist Party official died in a airplane crash with his family; was it a normal accident, or was he fleeing a failed coup attempt to Russia, as the conspiracy/coverup interpretations went? If you can’t even read Chinese, I have no idea how one could make a even half-decent attempt to judge the incident.
I’d like to hear more about what results you’ve derived from analyzing the data, FWIW.
Downvoted; rather obvious result, as you yourself point out.
Adverse selection is a problem for all kinds of insurance, so I’m not sure that is sufficient to explain a bias against the young in particular.
I don’t know, given the harm bad data collection can do, I’m not sure being a clinical sociopath is much worse.
I think they may be. Weren’t they planning on holding some more contests? It’s been a while.
I think you are being very silly. On the other hand, now I wish one of the SFers would go and establish a geocache at/near that spot...
Upvoted; the math may not be hard, but the curves are still not obvious.
People with Down syndrome are generally very happy, what’s about inducing it?
Don’t quite follow—you mean, ‘Would it be ethical to induce Down syndrome, given that people with Down syndrome are often very happy?’
Well, maybe. On the other hand, my impression is that as much as caregivers may want to deny it, a Down child imposes major costs on everyone around them. Inducing high IQ would not be obviously worse even in the cases where they flame out, would be a lot cheaper, and would pay for itself in inventions and that sort of thing. So there are lots of better alternatives to Down’s, and given a limited population, the optimal number of Down syndrome may be zero.
I think you underestimate simple self-ratings. You could just do those, and yes, there are automated ways. For example, you could turn on a Web browser plugin like RescueTime but disable any blocking functionality—so it’s just tracking time spent. Randomize intervention X for a few months, pull the RescueTime logs, and voila! A (non-blind) randomized experiment.
but being a pure artist usually seems to lead to a very miserable life.
And yet scores of thousands of people still want to do it each year, which suggests that the intangibles must be incredible.
What about Methods of Rationality? September 2011 is mid-way through its upswing. I see no easy way to quantify reviews, though, short of manually going through the thousands on FF.net...