zaph

• zaph 3 Dec 2012 20:36 UTC

  0 points

  on: What are you work­ing on? De­cem­ber 2012

  I’m working on adding elements to a report at work that does data visualization on a large scale (the data set is about 1 million data points; it’s really not all that impressive of a subject matter, but I can’t be terribly specific). The report has all of the “easy” elements I need in it, but now I’m trying to add in the harder elements. My ultimate end goal would be to add in the more complicated data along with system parameters, so I can get a handle on how parameter changes affect the output. I’d love to see Bayes nets and the like make a triumphant entrance at some point. But near as I can tell, I’d be the local expert on all of that, and anything I know about that subject matter I mostly picked up from here.

• zaph 3 Dec 2012 14:04 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: nigerweiss’s comment on: [Link] Con­test­ing the “Na­ture” Of Con­for­mity: What Mil­gram and Zim­bardo’s Stud­ies Really Show

  I believe the article the OP points to is actually more about how system 2 is being engaged in these systems, and is therefore not “blind obedience”, i.e. a simple heuristic being engaged. From the conclusion:

  On the other hand, it ignores the evidence that those who do heed authority in doing evil do so knowingly not blindly, >actively not passively, creatively not automatically. They do so out of belief not by nature, out of choice not by necessity. >In short, they should be seen—and judged—as engaged followers not as blind conformists

  Equally, what is shocking about Milgram’s experiments is that rather than being distressed by their actions, participants >could be led to construe them as “service” in the cause of “goodness.”

  At root, the fundamental point is that tyranny does not flourish because perpetrators are helpless and ignorant of their >actions. It flourishes because they actively identify with those who promote vicious acts as virtuous [49]. It is this >conviction that steels participants to do their dirty work and that makes them work energetically and creatively to ensure >its success. Moreover, this work is something for which they actively wish to be held accountable—so long as it secures >the approbation of those in power.

  To put words into their mouth, I believe they are arguing that people’s system 2′s are overriding the “don’t hurt people” heuristic of system 1, as opposed to system 2 analysis being overridden by a simple obedience heuristic.

• zaph 3 Dec 2012 13:07 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Viliam_Bur’s comment on: [Link] The Worst-Run Big City in the U.S.

  I’m leery of organizations providing their own statistics on how effective they are, which may just be another form of lobbying and propaganda. I’d lean towards carving out from the budget a group that independently assesses effectiveness of each of the organizations. It’s admittedly imperfect, but it would be more impartial than what seems to be in place now, and agencies wouldn’t necessarily be at a disadvantage for lacking their own internal measurement tools. That still leaves the problem of choosing the right metrics. Something simple like budget percentages and ratios would be a good place to start. There are a lot of hard-to-compare types of services out there; after school programs aren’t like Meals on Wheels programs. It’s hard to come up outcome based metrics to say which service is better than another when there’s so many different categories. Adopting something along the lines of the financial ratings at Charity Navigator could at least get everyone on the same page for controlling costs at their organizations.

• zaph 30 Nov 2012 15:41 UTC

  7 points

  in reply to: Sabiola’s comment on: LW Women- Min­i­miz­ing the In­fer­en­tial Distance

  Moreover, no woman is ever going to be drawn to that, at least that I’ve ever heard. So it doesn’t make sense as a grossly misguided pick-up strategy. Thinking about it and reading the thread, the more I think something along the lines of the Berne Games People Play dynamic is at work. It’s the most charitable reading you can give to the behavior at least; the jerks taking part in this are getting some kind of attention from the woman they’re targeting, even though it’s negative attention. Still extremely hurtful behavior, but I can believe (or at least kid myself into believing) that men can gain insight into the behavior, realize what’s going on, and stop doing it.

  One of the more humiliating moments of my adult life was when two guys were making lewd comments to a female friend of mine across a parking lot. I felt absolutely helpless (I’ll be blunt, they were far away and it was obvious they would kick my a__), and I can only imagine what my friend went through. She weathered it, but I’m sure that came at some cost to her psyche that women spend to much time and effort bearing. I can only say it’s in the best interests of men and women if this was all curtailed.

• zaph 28 Nov 2012 14:44 UTC

  8 points

  in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: LW Women- Min­i­miz­ing the In­fer­en­tial Distance

  “Its importance is not merely the individual Games, but the idea of what a Game is and why people Play them.”

  From Berne: “Because there is so little opportunity for intimacy in daily life, and because some forms of intimacy (especially if intense) are psychologically impossible for most people, the bulk of the time in serious social life is taken up with playing games. Hence games are both necessary and desirable, and the only problem at issue is whether the games played by an individual offer the best yield for him.”

  So, you can debate the validity, but my take on the Berne-ian view would be that the game Catcall is the attempt to create a social boost for males by gaining a female’s (albeit negative) attention.

• zaph 8 Nov 2012 22:55 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Kaj_Sotala’s comment on: [LINK] Was In­trade be­ing ma­nipu­lated?

  Thanks, I corrected that.

• zaph 8 Nov 2012 13:36 UTC

  2 points

  on: [LINK] Was In­trade be­ing ma­nipu­lated?

  I think this explanation from Wiblin* is most likely: “Nonetheless, I think this is more likely tha[t] a broad pool of Intrade participants [were] being enthusiastic about Romney against all the evidence, and [were] unaware that they could get better odds elsewhere.” Is there enough evidence to investigate whether something more sinister is at work? I certainly don’t know the details on Intrade and other similar markets, but perhaps there should be more stringent transparency rules to prevent potential manipulations.

  Implications: What has always struck me as difficult for prediction markets is the fact that they aren’t pricing an underlying “thing”; they’re pricing uncertainty itself. Even in a futures or options market, there is an underlying right to purchase at a specific price, even if that right is useless due to the current price of the commodity or stock being lower. While the options or futures contract has a potential value on a certain date, there isn’t anything of value being bought and sold on a prediction market. It’s just bets based on information that everyone will know on a specific date. So to me, all the pluses you get from other markets that pertain to large groups grappling over how to price good don’t apply to prediction markets, because there aren’t any underlying assets to price. To me, markets do a good job of rationally arriving at prices because of the constant negotiations and comparisons going on for the underlying assets. People make predictions on where market prices will go, but to me that isn’t the same as these being prediction markets. The implication of all this is that for me it’s not surprising to hear that there was such a large arbitrage potential between the prediction markets. I’m not such a believer in the efficient market hypothesis to believe that there isn’t arbitrage potential in asset markets, but I would predict that these are fewer and smaller than there would be in prediction markets. I don’t see this as an unsolvable problem, but to me it shows what prediction markets are good for, which is to keep people honest in their premises and expectations. Take a global warming discussion with a AGW proponent on one side and an AGW skeptic on another. Sans a prediction market, either person could make as dire or as rosy a claim as they like; once they start putting real money on the line, both will likely become more interested in accuracy. If all prediction markets did was to routinely get people to adhere to rational discussion (and thus adhere to Aumann’s agreement theorem), arenas such as public policy would improve immensely. So, it doesn’t matter that the Intrade bets didn’t reflect the best of odds; that just means one of the rational actors hadn’t fully adjusted yet; once their account was debited, once would assume that they were in agreement now with the party on the other end of the bet.

  *Corrected

• zaph 5 Nov 2012 18:09 UTC

  0 points

  on: Causal Di­a­grams and Causal Models

  I’ve been enjoying this series so far, and I found this article to be particularly helpful. I did have a minor suggestion. The turnstile and the logical negation symbols were called out, and I thought it might be useful to explicitly breakdown the probability distribution equation. The current Less Wrong audience had little problem with it, certainly, but if you were showing it to someone new to this for the first time, they might not be acquainted with it. I was thinking something along the lines of this from stattrek:

  “Generally, statisticians use a capital letter to represent a random variable and a lower-case letter, to represent one of its values. For example,

  X represents the random variable X.
  P(X) represents the probability of X.
  P(X = x) refers to the probability that the random variable X is equal to a particular value, denoted by x. As an example, P(X = 1) refers to the probability that the random variable X is equal to 1."
  

  (from http://​​stattrek.com/​​probability-distributions/​​probability-distribution.aspx)

  Also, page 2 of A Student’s Guide to Maxwell’s Equations does a great job of diagramming Gauss’ law for electrical fields, and I think it would be helpful if this were available to breakdown the right half of the equation, with the beginning reader seeing a breakdown of the equation.

  http://​​books.google.com/​​books?id=I-x1MLny6y8C&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

  If this all was set aside in the footnote, the overall continuity of the article wouldn’t be affected, and someone who might be intimidated at first by equations might see that these aren’t so bad. With just a bit of exposition, more readers might be able to follow along with the entire argument, which I think could be introduced to someone with very little background.

• zaph 26 Oct 2011 14:39 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: jhuffman’s comment on: Life is Good, More Life is Better

  That’s true, my original statement is too broad. To your point, that people are skeptical of cryonics in general, I am in complete agreement, and that’s what I was trying to get at in my final point.

• zaph 14 Oct 2011 15:07 UTC

  2 points

  on: Life is Good, More Life is Better

  I would disagree with the proposition that people are in any way actually OK with death. I don’t think the problem is that people are at peace with death too much; instead, it’s an issue that people are so afraid of death that they don’t talk or even think realistically about it at all. The quotes you listed above sound like people were speaking hypothetically; if they were in an actual situation where their life was medically threatened but an intervention would likely save them I’m sure they would take the intervention without much consideration (barring depression). Instead, I believe the fear of death is so great, rational thinking about it is pushed aside. It’s worse than Stockholm Syndrome, it’s learned helplessness. People don’t buy cryonics plans for the same reason they don’t buy life insurance in the first place or even write a will, in that they’re procrastinating in putting together concrete plans for something that makes them feel extremely uncomfortable.

  The cryonics specific sales pitch doesn’t have any happy early adopters running around saying “Thank Hanson I signed up! A cure was right around the corner, just 3 years away from being on the open market. If I hadn’t enrolled I’d be...DEAD!” We’re obviously not at that point yet, but if a Peter Thiel (to pull a name out of the air) were to use cryonics and successfully return to the land of the thawed, a hypothetical would become an actual, and people would become much more interested.

• zaph 26 Apr 2011 18:09 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: fubarobfusco’s comment on: Con­se­quen­tial­ism FAQ

  That’s an interesting link to Rorty; I’ll have to read it again in some more detail. I really appreciated this quote:

  We have come to see that the only lesson of either history or anthropology is our extraordinary malleability. We are coming to think of ourselves as the flexible, protean, self-shaping, animal rather than as the rational animal or the cruel animal.

  That really seems to hit it for me. That flexibility, the sense that we can step beyond being warlike, or even calculating, seems to be critical to what morals are all about. I don’t want to make it sound like I’m against a generally moral culture, where happiness is optimized (or some other value I like personally). I just don’t think moral philosophizing would get us there. I’ll have to read up more on the moral sentiments approach. I have read some of Rorty’s papers, but not his major works. I would be interested to see these ideas of his paired with meme theory. Describing moral sentiment as a meme that enters a positive feedback loop where groups that have it survive longer than ones that don’t seems very plausible to me.

  I’ll have to think more about your PETA question. I think it goes beyond sympathy. I don’t know how to test the positions though. I don’t think viewing chickens as being equally morally significant would lead to a much better world (for humans—chickens are a different matter). Even with the moral sentiment view, I don’t see how each side could come to a clear resolution.

• zaph 26 Apr 2011 13:36 UTC

  2 points

  on: Con­se­quen­tial­ism FAQ

  This isn’t so much a critique against consequentialism as the attempt at creating objective moral systems in general. I would love for the world to follow a particular moral order (namely mine). But there are people who, for what I would see as being completely sane reasons, disagree with me. On the edges, I have no problem writing mass murderers off as being insane. Beyond that, though, in the murky middle, there are a number of moral issues (and how is that dividing line drawn? Is it moral to have anything above a sustenance level meal if others are starving i the world, for instance?) that I see as leading only to endless argument. This doesn’t indicate one of the sides is being disingenuous, just that they have different values that cannot be simultaneously optimized. The Roman gladiator post by another commenter is an example. I view the Romans as PETA members would view me. I have justifications for my actions, as I’m sure Romans had for their actions. That’s just the nature of the human condition. Academic moral philosophizing always comes across to me as trying to unearth a cosmic grading scale, even if there isn’t a cosmic grader.

• zaph 26 Apr 2011 10:00 UTC

  12 points

  in reply to: Scott Alexander’s comment on: What is Me­taethics?

  Couldn’t that just be due to a higher number of total votes (both up an down) for the OP? I would assume fewer people read each comment, and downvoters may have decided to only weigh in on the OP. A hypothetical controversial post could have a karma of 8, with 10 downvotes negating 10 upvotes, and a supportive comment could have 9 upvotes due to half of the upvotes of the first post giving it their vote. The comment has higher karma, but lower volatility, so to speak.

• zaph 25 Apr 2011 19:15 UTC

  3 points

  on: Mini-camp on Ra­tion­al­ity, Awe­some­ness, and Ex­is­ten­tial Risk (May 28 through June 4, 2011)

  I won’t be attending*, but just out of curiosity, what did you have in mind for the social effectiveness curriculum? Any particular authors that you recommend for things like body language, communication, etc.?

  *Due to life constraints, but it sounds very interesting!

• zaph 22 Apr 2011 14:23 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Alicorn’s comment on: Pos­si­ble per­sonal im­pli­ca­tions of the Is­raeli Hunger-Pro­ba­tion study

  Thank you, very much appreciated.

• zaph 22 Apr 2011 13:20 UTC

  7 points

  in reply to: falenas108’s comment on: Pos­si­ble per­sonal im­pli­ca­tions of the Is­raeli Hunger-Pro­ba­tion study

  Prior to reading that one study, I would be in complete agreement. After, though, I’m not so sure. Really for any job where routine judgements are being made, I would have just naturally assume that habit would take over. That’s why the study was jarring for me; it really does seem to demonstrate that at different times, supposedly expert decision makers came to different conclusions based on their physiology. Now, it could be that legal issues are more based on personal opinion and biases, and really don’t rely on making decisions based on rational standards. My thinking, though, is that these are two domains (medicine and law) that share the common element of making a decision based on certain pre-established criteria.

Pos­si­ble per­sonal im­pli­ca­tions of the Is­raeli Hunger-Pro­ba­tion study

• zaph 20 Apr 2011 14:04 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: dugancm’s comment on: Learned Blankness

  Thirded, especially because I have daughter on the way!

• zaph 19 Apr 2011 18:56 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: lukeprog’s comment on: Build Small Skills in the Right Order

  But you have to take a Scientologist class to join? You couldn’t just join a Toastmasters somewhere else and then show up, for instance?

• zaph 14 Apr 2011 17:36 UTC

  1 point

  on: Three con­sis­tent po­si­tions for computationalists

  I guess the only quibble I would have, and I don’t know that it really changes your critique much, is that I wrote that neurons would be some sort of gate equivalent. I wouldn’t say that neurons have a simple gate model (that they’re simply an AND or an XOR, for instance). But I do see them as being in some sense Boolean. Anyway, I would just try to clarify my fairly short answer to say that I believe that computation can always be broken down into smaller Boolean steps, and these steps could be rendered in many different media.

  Computationality in any fashion needs to be reified by physics doesn’t it? Otherwise it wouldn’t exist. Now, I would say it’s an emergent feature; physics doesn’t need to provide anything beyond what is provided for anything else to explain it. Maybe that’s the point of contention?