Shalmanese

Karma: 102

Man-with-a-hammer syndrome

ShalmaneseDec 14, 2009, 11:31 AM

15 points

41 comments2 min readLW link

Shalmanese Dec 13, 2009, 2:32 PM
13 points
on: The Amanda Knox Test: How an Hour on the Internet Beats a Year in the Courtroom
Wasn’t there a post here a while back that talked about how anyone positing a confidence of 0.999 on something non-trivial was most likely to be suffering from their own cognitive biases?
What links here?
- Advancing Certainty by komponisto (Jan 18, 2010, 9:51 AM; 44 points)

Shalmanese Dec 10, 2009, 12:38 AM
5 points
on: You Be the Jury: Survey on a Current Event
my somewhat admittedly sketchy reasoning:

I go to the University of Washington where there is considerable interest in the case. Of the people who have only been marginally involved in the case, most believe that Amanda Knox is innocent. Of the people who are interested in the case, many believe she is guilty. There’s an obvious hometown effect here which biases towards innocence so I’m assuming those who look into the case are taking that into account when and still reach a guilty verdict.

Therefore, I assign a 70% probability to Amanda Knox being guilty (+ or − 30%).
What links here?
- Amanda Knox: post mortem by gwern (Oct 20, 2011, 4:10 PM; 48 points)
- komponisto's comment on Hi—I’m new here—some questions by InquilineKea (Nov 15, 2010, 9:49 PM; 0 points)

Shalmanese Oct 1, 2009, 12:55 AM
1 point
on: Intuitive differences: when to agree to disagree
When you encounter a road block, you don’t need to give up. You can simply emulate each other’s intuitions and proceed with as a provisional argument (assuming your world view is true...).

Shalmanese Sep 28, 2009, 3:39 AM
1 point
on: Your Most Valuable Skill
As far as rationality is concerned, it’s achieving the place of what I call “rational ignorance”. An awareness of the limits of your rationality and how you overestimate how rational you are:

http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/the-ego-dilemma/

Shalmanese Sep 12, 2009, 9:25 AM
12 points
on: Let Them Debate College Students
In every debate I’ve heard of, the pro-evolution people believe that the evolution side soundly thrashed the creation side and the pro-creation people believe that the creation side thrashed the evolution side.

This subjectivity over even who won makes debates eminently pointless for convincing anyone of anything.

Shalmanese Aug 28, 2009, 4:08 PM
2 points
on: Mathematical simplicity bias and exponential functions
“All models are wrong, some are useful”—George Box
What links here?
- gwern's comment on Rationality Quotes: July 2010 by komponisto (Jul 2, 2010, 4:59 AM; 3 points)

Shalmanese Aug 21, 2009, 5:41 PM
7 points
in reply to: taw’s comment on: How inevitable was modern human civilization—data
The bias is that we don’t even notice things that occured once. How important is there that we have a moon? That we have a continent that spans east-west? That the K-T impact happened exactly when it did?

There could be a hundred other crucial factors which we never even noticed because nobody thought they were important to the development of civilization.

Shalmanese Aug 21, 2009, 4:37 PM
3 points
on: How inevitable was modern human civilization—data
Our observations are biased because anything that occurs multiple times is very easy to see but something that occurs only once could be completely missed as an essential step towards civilization because we assume it was inevitable.

Shalmanese Jul 18, 2009, 5:08 AM
−3 points
on: Absolute denial for atheists
There is no rational argument against quantum suicide and the truth of it easily tested. The longer you live without knowing about quantum suicide, the less optimal your life will turn out. At the same time, you cannot look to anyone else’s success as social proof for you to do it, you have to be the first.

Shalmanese 1 Jan 2008 13:34 UTC
6 points
on: The Two-Party Swindle
I object to your assertion that football players are paid disproportionate salaries relative to other fields. What does the average football player make? It’s tricky to answer because it depends on who you regard as a football player. If you include everyone in the minor leagues, everyone playing college football, every high school quarterback who seriously considered a footballing career, then the average is quite low because the majority of “football players” make $0.

The reason why top footballers are paid enormous sums of money is because lots of people want to play football and the incentive structure is heavily skewed towards lavishly rewarding a small group of people. There are other fields with similar characteristics like writing. Restricting our sample to just the NFL is like arguing that authors are overpaid based on the average salaries of those on the NYT best sellers list.

Drug dealing is another good example, individual drug kingpins rake in far more than the highest paid football player could even imagine but the average pusher on the street is earning less than they would working minimum wage at McDonalds (“An Economic Analysis of a Drug-Selling Gang’s Finances.” Steven D. Levitt and Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh; Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2000, 115(3), pp. 755-89. http://search.epnet.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bth&an=3474881).