andrewc

Karma: 78

andrewc 16 Mar 2009 0:05 UTC
11 points
on: On the Care and Feeding of Young Rationalists
Get them reading. Babies love being read to. Introduce them to the beauty of books, and the wonders of the public library system. Then, when they have the tools to navigate the repository of written knowledge, set them loose. Steer a little, but don’t interfere.

andrewc 17 Apr 2009 4:00 UTC
10 points
on: The Trouble With “Good”

pizza is good, seafood is bad

When I say something is good or bad (“yay doggies!”) it’s usually a kind of shorthand:

pizza is good == pizza tastes good and is fun to make and share

seafood is bad == most cheap seafood is reprocessed offcuts and gave me food poisoning once

yay doggies == I find canine companions to be beneficial for my exercise routine, useful for home security and fun to play with.

I suspect when most people use the words ‘good’ and ‘bad’ they are using just this kind of linguistic compression. Or is your point that once a ‘good’ label is assigned we just increment its goodness index and forget the detailed reasoning that led us to it? Sorry, the post was an interesting read but I’m not sure what you want me to conclude.

andrewc 23 Apr 2009 11:11 UTC
6 points
in reply to: Paul Crowley’s comment on: Spreading the word?
A serious question deserves a serious answer so here it is, even though as a peripheral semi-lurker it’s probably not relevant to your program. My motivations for coming here are entertainment on the one hand, and trawling for insights and ideas I can use at work.

I’m a rationalist, but not a Rationalist. I cringe at the idea of a self-identified Rationalist movement or organisation in the same way I cringe at Richard Dawkin’s ‘Bright’ movement. I think there is a danger of a sort of philosophical isolationism where participants forget that rationalism and materialism are alive and well in many scientific professional societies, political organisations, educational institutions and families.

I never said no good would come from the discussion—I sincerely hope you accomplish something worthwhile.

andrewc 26 Mar 2009 4:17 UTC
6 points
on: The Good Bayesian
By definition someone for whom religion or spirituality is intensely personal is going to avoid talking to you about it. The fact that that in all the conversations about religion you have ever had, no-one has declined to participate on those grounds is hardly evidence that these people don’t exist.

Hmmm, methinks you are moderately wrong about religious organisations being on the wrong side of ‘every’ moral issue in American history. You’ve heard of the Quakers—funny hats, oatmeal, social justice and all that.

I just don’t see modern secular churches (ok so maybe you don’t have those in the USA yet...) like the Anglicans as a major force for irrationality. When they bump up against science there are a few protests and then they cede ground, and explain any contradictions between scripture and reality by admitting scripture is mostly just stories.

andrewc 23 Apr 2009 7:49 UTC
5 points
in reply to: Nominull’s comment on: Go Forth and Create the Art!

We’re mostly computer programmers who are looking for something else to read when we should be working.

Guilty has charged. It does seem more productive than tower defense, at any rate. Ciphergoth does have a point that polite discussions about rationality are an end in their own right.

andrewc 3 Jun 2009 4:16 UTC
4 points
in reply to: brian_jaress’s comment on: Rationality quotes—May 2009

… hardly anyone except perhaps Richard Dawkins imagines that by denigrating religion one is advancing science.

--E.T. Jaynes, “Probability Theory”.

andrewc 5 May 2009 7:04 UTC
4 points
in reply to: Alicorn’s comment on: Bead Jar Guesses
I haven’t read Jaynes’s work on the subject, so I couldn’t say.
1. Point your browser at amazon
2. Order ETJ’s book.
3. Wait approx one week for delivery
4. Read it.
I don’t mean to sound gushing but Jayne’s writing on probability theory is the clearest, most grounded, and most entertaining material you will ever read on the subject. Even better than that weird AI dude. Seriously it’s like trying to discuss the apocalypse without reading Revelations...

andrewc 22 Apr 2009 10:55 UTC
4 points
on: The Sin of Underconfidence
Did you write a cost function down for the various debate outcomes? The skew will inform whether overconfidence or underconfidence should be weighted differently.

andrewc 14 Mar 2009 23:25 UTC
4 points
on: Soulless morality
I find your African aid example jarring, and my back of the envelope calculations suggest it is backwards.

Many aid organisations exist that focus their spending on funding education directly, or improving educational infrastructure. Educated children are more likely to escape peasant-hood, and more likely to ensure that their own children are educated. It seems probable to me that the potential net rationality (measured in rations or some such unit) produced from small donations is positive. Assuming we want to maximize humanity’s mean rationality score, this may be an example of comparative advantage at work.

The net value of an extra $50 in my pocket on friday is negative, it will probably be spent on beer, takeaway, maybe a new game I can waste time playing. I already spent all day reading papers and writing code, the chance of me spending that $50 to level up my rationality again is negligible compared to the chance of my $50 hangover cutting into my Saturday morning research time. The net value (in rations) of posting that $50 to Plan or some such organisation to spend it providing primary school education to girls who have a non-zero probability of going on to become biotech researchers is positive.

I’d even be inclined to suggest that the value of a potential small-r rationalist in an intellecutally backward country is higher than a small time fraction of a rationalist in an educated society. You get to decide which of Africa or the States is intellectually more backward...

ac

andrewc 25 Jun 2009 2:40 UTC
3 points
in reply to: thomblake’s comment on: Guilt by Association
In the words of a well known amateur pianist:

If P is true then Q is true Q is true Therefore, P becomes more plausible.

But Annoyance was talking about logic, not plausible reasoning or probability theory, right? In terms of Aristotelian deductive logic the two errors quoted are pretty much equivalent.

andrewc 10 May 2009 9:55 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: Off Topic Thread: May 2009
I choose (b) without the amnesia. Why? Because fuck Ming, that’s why!

Or more seriously, by refusing to play Ming’s bizzare little game you deny him the utility he gets from watching people agonise about what the best choice is. Turn it up to 11, Ming you pussy!

Or maybe I already chose (b) and can’t remember...

andrewc 5 Apr 2009 23:56 UTC
3 points
in reply to: AlanCrowe’s comment on: Why Support the Underdog?
Interesting idea: we support the underdog because if push came to shove we’d have a better chance of besting them than the top dog? There’s a similar problem I remember from a kids brainteaser book. Three hunters are fighting a duel, with rifles, to the death. Each has one bullet. The first hunter has a 100% chance of making a killing shot, the second a 50% chance, the third a 10% chance. What is the inferior hunter’s best strategy?

andrewc 18 Aug 2009 6:04 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Fredrik’s comment on: Singularity Summit 2009 (quick post)
It sounded like sarcasm to mine.

andrewc 17 Jun 2009 7:08 UTC
2 points
on: Ask LessWrong: Human cognitive enhancement now?
I like the staples—they all have their role to play in pushing the brain where you want it to go. Caffeine enhances concentration—my understanding is that continual small does (e.g. drink tea all day) are better than one big hit.

Alcohol mitigates biases against socially acceptable ideas by reducing inhibition. Think spirited debate over a pint, not all night bender. I find I am more receptive to odd ideas after a couple of beers.

THC (the main active agent in marijuana) is good for flashes of inspiration. I find my software designs when baked are brilliantly out of the box (the code itself usually needs a cleanup the next day). A downside is that it can affect short term memory, which reduces your ability to perform mental accounting. Best for working on large sheets of paper or whiteboards, during the planning/design phase of a project. The brain seems to adapt to it—smoke every day and you just think you’re more inspired...

andrewc 29 May 2009 9:25 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Matt_Simpson’s comment on: Do Fandoms Need Awfulness?
I’ve yet to find a bug in the maths, but some people would find the unconventional style of delivery to be monumentally bad for a textbook. Me, I like the conversational, tangent taking, invective filled style, but I can imagine that others associate it with crank-ness.

andrewc 23 Apr 2009 23:31 UTC
2 points
in reply to: William’s comment on: Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism
I’m not sure it’s so clear cut.

They key point is that when you do the p value test you are determining p(data | null_hyp). This is certainly useful to calculate, but doesn’t tell you the whole story about whether your data support any particular non-null hypotheses.

Chapter 17 of E.T. Jaynes’ book provides a lively discussion of the limitations of traditional hypothesis testing, and is accessible enough that you can dive into it without having worked through the rest of the book.

The Cohen article cited below is nice but it’s important to note it doesn’t completely reject the use of null hypotheses or p-values:

.. null hypothesis testing complete with power analysis can be useful if we abandon the rejection of point nil hypotheses and use instead “good-enough” range null hypotheses

andrewc 4 Apr 2009 0:27 UTC
2 points
in reply to: cousin_it’s comment on: Helpless Individuals
More part-time and/or amateur scientists would be a good thing. This is more difficult today because there are fewer projects that one person, or even a handful of people can do on their own.

The canonical examples of ‘big science’ are the humane genome project, particle physics and atmospheric prediction. All three rely on massive international investment in infrastructure, the coordinated contributions of many specialists, and research programs with very long timelines, and where progress is mostly incremental (another bug sequenced, another 0.1 improvement in anomaly correlation, another dB of evidence in favour of some micro-theory).

That’s not to say there are no problems left that a genius in a garage can’t attack, just that it seems to me they are fewer than back in Lord Kelvin’s day, and that the big problems that most of agree we want to solve require massive cooperation: the only effective system we have yet devised for this is via national science agencies.

andrewc 7 Jul 2009 2:30 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Vladimir_Nesov’s comment on: Media bias
That’s not always the case. Plenty of times competent people are called upon to implement a new method, and want to see for themselves the precise steps that the techniques’ discoverer has gone through. I don’t always have time, and it’s not always instructive to have to fill in the blanks.

andrewc 17 Jun 2009 7:03 UTC
1 point
in reply to: taw’s comment on: Ask LessWrong: Human cognitive enhancement now?
Dunno the answer to your question but I noted a recent article that linked low carb diets to reduced mental performance discussed in this random medical publication

andrewc 3 Jun 2009 1:46 UTC
1 point
in reply to: JGWeissman’s comment on: Bioconservative and biomoderate singularitarian positions
I don’t understand your point about levels of abstraction.

The question is: are the ‘tamest’ humans the ones most able to reproduce, and therefore selected for by evolution?

Are the most rockin’ humans the ones most able to reproduce? In the absence of any visible evidence, my answer to both questions is most likely not. Evidence would require a clear definition of tame (or rockin’). We can mostly agree on what a tame fox is but what is a tame human?

It seems to me that essentially random copulation, with some selection/treatment for serious genetic diseases is just fine for maintaining biological humans pretty much as-is. I don’t know enough about mathematical biology to articulate a quantitative argument for this, but I’d like to hear it, for or against.