Done.
I think it is somewhat unrealistic to expect individual digit ratios to be accurate to three significant figures (although I understand that two significant figures might be too crude a measure to show effects of smaller size). One can hope that the errors are symmetric and it doesn’t matter.
I have taken the survey.
Kissinger was not rushing to end our conversation that morning, and I had one more message to give him. “Henry, there’s something I would like to tell you, for what it’s worth, something I wish I had been told years ago. You’ve been a consultant for a long time, and you’ve dealt a great deal with top secret information. But you’re about to receive a whole slew of special clearances, maybe fifteen or twenty of them, that are higher than top secret.
“I’ve had a number of these myself, and I’ve known other people who have just acquired them, and I have a pretty good sense of what the effects of receiving these clearances are on a person who didn’t previously know they even existed. And the effects of reading the information that they will make available to you.
“First, you’ll be exhilarated by some of this new information, and by having it all―so much! incredible!―suddenly available to you. But second, almost as fast, you will feel like a fool for having studied, written, talked about these subjects, criticized and analyzed decisions made by presidents for years without having known of the existence of all this information, which presidents and others had and you didn’t, and which must have influenced their decisions in ways you couldn’t even guess. In particular, you’ll feel foolish for having literally rubbed shoulders for over a decade with some officials and consultants who did have access to all this information you didn’t know about and didn’t know they had, and you’ll be stunned that they kept that secret from you so well.
“You will feel like a fool, and that will last for about two weeks. Then, after you’ve started reading all this daily intelligence input and become used to using what amounts to whole libraries of hidden information, which is much more closely held than mere top secret data, you will forget there ever was a time when you didn’t have it, and you’ll be aware only of the fact that you have it now and most others don’t… and that all those other people are fools.
“Over a longer period of time―not too long, but a matter of two or three years―you’ll eventually become aware of the limitations of this information. There is a great deal that it doesn’t tell you, it’s often inaccurate, and it can lead you astray just as much as the New York Times can. But that takes. a while to learn.
“In the meantime it will have become very hard for you to learn from anybody who doesn’t have these clearances. Because you’ll be thinking as you listen to them: ‘What would this man be telling me if he knew what I know? Would he be giving me the same advice, or would it totally change his predictions and recommendations?’ And that mental exercise is so torturous that after a while you give it up and just stop listening. I’ve seen this with my superiors, my colleagues… and with myself.
“You will deal with a person who doesn’t have those clearances only from the point of view of what you want him to believe and what impression you want him to go away with, since you’ll have to lie carefully to him about what you know. In effect, you will have to manipulate him. You’ll give up trying to assess what he has to say. The danger is, you’ll become something like a moron. You’ll become incapable of learning from most people in the world, no matter how much experience they may have in their particular areas that may be much greater than yours.”
It was a speech I had thought through before, one I’d wished someone had once given me, and I’d long hoped to be able to give it to someone who was just about to enter the world of “real” executive secrecy. I ended by saying that I’d long thought of this kind of secret information as something like the potion Circe gave to the wanderers and shipwrecked men who happened on her island, which turned them into swine. They became incapable of human speech and couldn’t help one another to find their way home.
Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers
A few examples:
Accurate timekeeping and strict schedules (a very famous example). Although sundials and water clocks were known since antiquity, they weren’t very accurate and the length of an hour varied with the length of the day. It was rare for an average person to have a strict schedule. Even in monasteries and churches schedules probably could not be very strict, as although clocks did strike hours usually they weren’t very accurate (13th-14th century mechanical clocks had no faces at all, and it wasn’t until late 17th century when they became precise enough to justify regular use of minute hands) and they would likely regularly be reset at local high noon each day. In fact, it was only after the invention of pendulum clock by Christiaan Huygens in 1656 that timekeeping became accurate and independent of the length of the day, however, as late as 1773, towns were content to order clocks without minute hands as they saw no need for them. In 1840 railway time was invented. It was “the first recorded occasion when different local times were synchronised and a single standard time applied. Railway time was progressively taken up by all railway companies in Great Britain over the following two to three years.”. According to wikipedia, 98% of Great Britain’s public clocks were using GMT by 1855. After the industrial revolution and invention of the light bulb, most people have schedules which depend on the official time rather than Sun’s position in the sky.
Historian Roger Ekirch argues that before the industrial revolution the segmented sleep was the dominant form of human slumber in Western civilization and it is a myth that we need eight hours of uninterrupted sleep each night.
Concepts/analogies/metaphors/models that depend on having certain technologies to be understood. Possible examples: the clockwork universe, human mind as a computer. Although in some cases it is not clear whether a certain technology was necessary to inspire the creation of the philosophical concept, or was it simply a very nice example that helped to elucidate an already existing idea.
Historian David Wootton argues that until mid-19th century and the discovery of germ theory physicians did more harm than good to their patients. Nowadays most people expect positive results when they go to the doctor.
Many other inventions changed the landscape of ideas and what is taken for granted (ability to communicate over long distances, ability to store fresh food safely in the fridge (according to a documentary I watched, this was one of the main factors that enabled the growth of cities), large ships, accurate maps with no uncharted territories, etc.).
It think this question is very broad, perhaps too broad.
Since, as you have noted, we have already had a joke thread, perhaps it would have been better to ask for, e.g. funniest rationality quotes or funniest LessWrong comments? Or perhaps make it more specific than the previous thread. For example, some jokes that are thought of as nerdy, math-y or intellectual are actually quite simple, as their reputation as intellectual is based on the subject matter they touch and not on the joke’s “structure” itself (e.g. their humour derives from puns, cultural references, or parodies of the cultural references). In short, these are the jokes that, to paraphrase The Ig Nobel Prize description, make you think, and then laugh. On the other hand, some jokes might have mundane subject matter, but their structure may impress you more than the subject matter itself. These could be called jokes that make you laugh and then think. Obviously, there are many fewer jokes of the latter type. A couple examples that, I think, qualify, both taken from LessWrong comments:
From here
Once there was a miser, who to save money would eat nothing but oatmeal. And what’s more, he would make a great big batch of it at the start of every week, and put it in a drawer, and when he wanted a meal he would slice off a piece and eat it cold; thus he saved on firewood. Now, by the end of the week, the oatmeal would be somewhat moldy and not very appetising; and so to make himself eat it, the miser would take out a bottle of good whiskey, and pour himself a glass, and say “All right, Olai, eat your oatmeal and when you’re done, you can have a dram.” Then he would eat his moldy oatmeal, and when he was done he’d laugh and pour the whiskey back in the bottle, and say “Hah! And you believed that? There’s one born every minute, to be sure!” And thus he had a great savings in whiskey as well.
-- Norwegian folktale.
Another one from here:
““It seems a Christian missionary was visiting with remote Inuit (aka, Eskimo) people in the Arctic, and had explained to this particular man that if one believed in Jesus, one would would go to heaven, while those who didn’t, would go to hell.
The Inuit asked, “What about all the people who have never heard of your Jesus? Are they all going to hell?’
The missionary explained, “No, of course not. God wants you to have a choice. God is a merciful God, he would never send anyone to hell who’d never heard of Jesus.”
The Inuit replied, “So why did you tell me?”
Well, the second one might remind some people a local cultural reference, but it is definitely not a part of the joke itself.
I would also expect that Latvia gives it’s minorities certain rights because it’s legally obliged to do so under EU law that Ukraine didn’t.
This isn’t directly relevant to the discussion, but if Russia were ever to attack Latvia, their excuse would probably precisely be the treatment of ethnic Russians. It is, in fact, a recurring theme in Russian media.
The reason for this is that in order to be eligible for a full citizenship one is required to pass Latvian language competency and Latvian history exams. What is more, Latvia allows dual citizenship, but only if the other citizenship is of a country that belongs to the list that is specified by a law. Russia is not on the list.
Citizens of the former USSR who possess neither Latvian nor other citizenship who live in Latvia are eligible for a non-citizen passport. They are allowed to naturalize provided they pass the aforementioned exams. However, for various reasons many are unwilling (few are unable) to do so. For example, traveling to Russia is easier for a non-citizen than a citizen of Latvia. However, it is easier to work and travel in the Schengen Area if one is a non-citizen of Latvia than a citizen of Russia. Thus some people might find it disadvantageous to choose one citizenship (in their day-to-day lives traveling is more important than having the right to vote).
How such an unusual situation came into existence? If I understand correctly, in early 1990s Latvia desperately tried to avoid breakaway regions, because in 1989 only 49% of the non-Latvian population supported the idea of the independence of Latvia (the number of Latvians supporting the idea made up 93%). It should be noted that, according to wikipedia, such situation is not without a precedent:
Peter Van Elsuwege, a scholar in European law at Ghent University, states that the Latvian law is grounded upon the established legal principle that persons who settle under the rule of an occupying power gain no automatic right to nationality. A number of historic precedents support this, according to Van Elsuwege, most notably the case of Alsace-Lorraine when the French on recovering the territory in 1918 did not grant citizenship to German settlers despite Germany having annexed the territory 47 years earlier in 1871.
However, as you can imagine, the fact that these non-citizens (mostly Russians) do not have voting rights is a target of outrage in Russian media. Furthermore, many ethnic Russians in Latvia watch a lot of it and this results in them having different opinions (about e.g. situation in Ukraine) than ethnic Latvians. However, it is not clear whether they would actually support Russia in the case of armed conflict.
Please note that I’m neither Latvian, nor an expert on Latvian law, therefore the story above may contain some inaccuracies. Still, LW readers might find it helpful for their probability estimates of potential wars and/or other events.
A relatively small group of people with relevant mathematical backgrounds will be authorized to post on the forum, but all discussion on the site will be publicly visible to visitors.
You should note that this policy is different from the policy of perhaps the largest and most successful internet mathematics forum Mathoverflow. Maybe you have already thought about this and decided that this policy will be better. I simply wanted to make a friendly reminder that whenever you want to do things differently from the “industry leader” it is often a good idea to have a clear idea exactly why.
Checking “Enable Anti-Kibitzer” in Preferences already does that.
In an ideal (although not very realistic) scenario LW could have a karma denominated prediction market. However, that would require a lot of work to implement.
A paper “Philosophers’ Biased Judgments Persist Despite Training, Expertise and Reflection” (Eric Schwitzgebel and Fiery Cushman) is available here: http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/Stability-150423.pdf
A few quick thoughts.
You should look into TRIZ, which seems to be related to your idea, albeit it is mostly related to engineering (however, proponents of TRIZ try to apply it to other domains). Basically TRIZ is a collection of common engineering trade-offs that are arranged into a contradiction matrix and a set of advice how to come up with workarounds, called 40 Inventive Principles (How to use it? You are supposed to formulate your problem as a trade-off, find a relevant cell in the contradiction matrix, and look the numbers up in the list of 40 principles). However, taking the outside view, you should note that TRIZ is still relatively unknown outside the former Soviet Union. If it was as useful as it is sometimes claimed to be, wouldn’t it be very popular by now? Or was it cultural barriers that prevented it from spreading? Frankly, I don’t know.
In statistics, there is a well known Bias–variance tradeoff, which affects a wide range of situations. The trade-off between the goodness of fit of the model and its complexity (4th item in your list) is somewhat related (though not identical) to it.
A general pattern. Some trade-offs are due to Berkson’s paradox, because sometimes the situation we have is “prefiltered” by the past, and we can observe negative corellations between variables even though they are not intrinsically negatively correlated. A special case: if we can do both X and Y, but that requires resources and we have a fixed amount of resources, then the decision how much X and how much Y should be done becomes a trade-off.
Closely related example is the trade-off between quantity and quality, e.g. r/K selection theory.
In the 2001 Ukrainian census 17.3% of the population of Ukraine identied as ethnic Russians (58.3% in Crimea) while 77.8% as Ukrainians. However, in 2012, only 50% of respondents consider Ukrainian their native language, 29% - Russian. Moreover, 20% consider both Ukrainian and Russian their mother tongue and 45% usually speak Ukrainian at home, 39% - Russian and 15% - both Ukrainian and Russian (equally).
Russian language seems to have high informal status, since, according to wikipedia
A 2012 study showed that: on the radio, 3.4% of songs are in Ukrainian while 60% are in Russian over 60% of newspapers, 83% of journals and 87% of books are in Russian 28% of TV programs are in Ukrainian, even on state-owned channels.
and business affairs are still mainly dealt with in Russian. Some people even claim that
“There is an established Russian-speaking environment in big cities and it exerts pressure on people,” she claims. “They think that they will not belong to it if they speak Ukrainian.”
and, according to the same article
Sociological surveys show a huge gap between the number of those who speak Ukrainian at home and those who also use it at work and in public. For Kyiv, this is about 50% and 20% accordingly.
At the same time, according to the Constitution, the state language of Ukraine is the Ukrainian language. However, in 2012 the new law gave Russian status of regional language and approved its use in courts and other government institutions in areas where the percentage of Russians exceeds 10%.
As you can see, we can observe the gap between formal status and informal status of Russian in Ukraine. Thus for any language related event there are at least two different interpretations. For example, on February 2014, the new Ukrainian government tried to repeal 2012 language law. While many Ukrainian-speaking Ukrainians saw it as an attempt to finally curtail Russification (in the informal sphere), many Russian speakers “saw the move as more evidence that the antigovernment protests in Kiev that toppled Yanukovich’s government were intent on pressing for a nationalistic agenda.” Obviously, back in 2012 it was Ukrainian speakers who saw the new law as unfairly “narrowing the sphere of use of Ukrainian language” and on February 2014 they thought that it was their chance to reverse it. However, they were far too much in haste, and, even though the acting president vetoed the bill, a backlash among Russian speakers probably made Russia’s military takeover of Crimea much easier.
Although the language isn’t everything, but, according to an opinion poll
among respondents who support Ukraine’s entry into the Customs Union, the vast majority (72%) speak in favor of granting Russian the status of the state language. However, among respondents who support the signing of the free trade zone agreement with the EU, the vast majority (72%) are against bilingualism
Another point made by the same poll shows that it is, at least partially, a matter of personal identity beyond language:
Despite the fact that Ukrainian is mostly spoken by elderly people, young people oppose bilingualism more.
(indeed, it seems that for many Ukrainians this whole EU vs.Customs Union dilemma is more about identity than economics).
But I digress. In short, it seems to me that if Russians were actually being mistreated, their language would not have such a high informal status in Ukraine, which is disproportionate to the share of actual ethnic Russians in Ukrainian population. However, due to the differences between formal, informal public and informal private spheres certain actions (e.g. by the government) can be perceived as unfair by a certain segment of population.
(Disclaimer: I am not a Ukrainian; the story above may contain some inaccuracies. In addition, an actual Ukrainian would be able to tell what exactly are prevailing sentiments now)
I, too, sometimes find that it is easier for me to express certain ideas in English than in my native language. However, I guess, in my case the reason seems to be analogous to the reasons mentioned in Steven Pinker’s article “Why Academics Stink at Writing”. Although it mainly talks about why academics find it difficult to express their ideas in simple words, it seems to me that if one uses predominantly English in certain settings or talking about certain subjects, then the reasons (chunking and functional fixedness) why ideas about these subjects are difficult to express in one’s native language are probably similar.
Scholars lose their moorings in the land of the concrete because of two effects of expertise that have been documented by cognitive psychology. One is called chunking. To work around the limitations of short-term memory, the mind can package ideas into bigger and bigger units, which the psychologist George Miller dubbed “chunks.” As we read and learn, we master a vast number of abstractions, and each becomes a mental unit that we can bring to mind in an instant and share with others by uttering its name. An adult mind that is brimming with chunks is a powerful engine of reason, but it comes at a cost: a failure to communicate with other minds that have not mastered the same chunks.
The amount of abstraction a writer can get away with depends on the expertise of his readership. But divining the chunks that have been mastered by a typical reader requires a gift of clairvoyance with which few of us are blessed. When we are apprentices in our chosen specialty, we join a clique in which, it seems to us, everyone else seems to know so much! And they talk among themselves as if their knowledge were conventional wisdom to every educated person. As we settle into the clique, it becomes our universe. We fail to appreciate that it is a tiny bubble in a multiverse of cliques. When we make first contact with the aliens in other universes and jabber at them in our local code, they cannot understand us without a sci-fi universal translator.
[...]
The second way in which expertise can make our thoughts harder to share is that as we become familiar with something, we think about it more in terms of the use we put it to and less in terms of what it looks like and what it is made of. This transition is called functional fixity. In the textbook experiment, people are given a candle, a book of matches, and a box of thumbtacks, and are asked to attach the candle to the wall so that the wax won’t drip onto the floor. The solution is to dump the thumbtacks out of the box, tack the box to the wall, and stick the candle onto the box. Most people never figure this out because they think of the box as a container for the tacks rather than as a physical object in its own right. The blind spot is called functional fixity because people get fixated on an object’s function and forget its physical makeup.
Now, if you combine functional fixity with chunking, and stir in the curse that hides each one from our awareness, you get an explanation of why specialists use so much idiosyncratic terminology, together with abstractions, metaconcepts, and zombie nouns. They are not trying to bamboozle their readers; it’s just the way they think. The specialists are no longer thinking—and thus no longer writing—about tangible objects, and instead are referring to them by the role those objects play in their daily travails. A psychologist calls the labels true and false “assessment words” because that’s why he put them there—so that the participants in the experiment could assess whether it applied to the preceding sentence. Unfortunately, he left it up to us to figure out what an “assessment word” is.
While scholars package their ideas and abstractions into chunks, in everyday language we package the connotations of words/idioms/expressions into similar implicit chunks that are hard to separate from the word/idiom/expression itself. Direct translation might not preserve all these connotations. It seems to me that while we could try to preserve some connotations that are most relevant in a given situation, we might feel uncomfortable doing so, because losing connotations feels like losing accuracy and precise meaning of what we tried to convey, even in situations where a simple paraphrase could preserve connotations that are actually relevant.
In a professional setting, functional fixedness becomes very important. It is probably the reason why so much professional jargon (outside the Anglosphere) is based on other languages, especially English.
I think that if I didn’t know anything about LessWrong, the first version would be the one that would be more likely to attract my attention. There are a lot of websites that make vague promises that reading them will improve your life. The first version at least gives examples of what exactly this website is about and how exactly it is supposed to be helpful. While the second sentence repels no one, it seems unlikely that it could pique anyone’s curiosity. That might not matter when you personally recommend LW to someone, since your recommendation would presumably be enough to make them think that there is some content behind the vague introduction. It seems to me that we might even have an interesting situation when vague introduction might work better on people who were recommended to check out LessWrong by other people (since it wouldn’t repel them), but I hypothesize that concrete introduction would be better for those who encountered LW accidentally, because while most people wouldn’t read past introduction either way, it is the first version that seems to be the one that is likely to catch at least someone’s attention.
By the way, I am not sure if having what is basically About page as a frontpage is the best way to introduce new readers to LW. Few blogs do that, most put the most recent posts on the frontpage instead. That makes them look less static.
This is known as Berkson’s paradox and it is ubiquitous. A lot of people have written about it and its implications, e.g. Yvain (underlying reasons why anti-correlations arise are very similar).
http://moscow.sci-hub.bz/bd92d5ea3f64a416c7833533324fafbc/hedges2007.pdf
http://sci-hub.org/ is sometimes useful for finding papers
P(A or B) = P(A) + P(B) - P(A and B)
Suppose the actual length of a person’s index finger is 80.5 mm and the actual length of his/her ring finger is 83.5 mm. Then the 2D:4D ratio is 0.964. A measurement error of 0.5 mm is very easy to make, e.g. due to inaccuracy of a photocopier, inaccuracy of a ruler, inexactness of where a finger joins the hand (and even if it wasn’t a vague concept it would still be a problem to pinpoint the precise location of it with a great accuracy) and even differences in muscle tension in fingers at the particular moment of placing a hand in a photocopier. If a person measures his/her index finger as being 80 mm long (0.5 mm shorter) and her/his ring finger as being 84 mm long (0.5 mm longer), then they would obtain 2D:4D ratio of 0.952. Whereas if the length of the index finger is measured to be 81 mm, and the length of the ring finger is 83 mm, then 2D:4D ratio is 0.976. Therefore, the first digit after the decimal point does not vary that much (in the vast majority of all cases it is 9), the third one is basically noise, and even the second one is not that reliable (in an individual case). However, that might still be enough to notice some interesting correlations and if the errors are symmetric it might not even matter that much when all data will be aggregated.
Given the writing style, it seems to me that the author intended this piece to be read as a travelogue (“a trip to a far away land”) rather than an article that tries to explain something to the readers. It is my impression that he does not try to think about the subject matter, he tries to feel it as a traveler who accidentally wandered here. Thus the author writes about his experiences, pays attention to small and idiosyncratic things (instead of trying to analyze anything), short sentences and quick leaps of thought is probably the authors way to give reader a dizzying feeling which, I guess, was what the author was feeling during his trip to an unfamiliar place due to meeting so many people in a short period of time. So, I guess, the author didn’t care that much about whether his travelogue would give magazine’s readers an accurate and insightful understanding of MIRI, CFAR and LessWrong. Instead, he probably cared about conveying his emotions and experiences to his readers.
It seems to me that the author didn’t intend this piece to be thought of as a review of MIRI’s activities. It seems to be as much (or maybe even more) about his trip as it is about the community he visited. Once you put this piece in a travelogue reference class, some of its flaws seem to be simply peculiarities of the writing style that is typical to that genre.