When I was in college, I almost never went to office hours or TA hours… except for one particular class, where the professor was a probably-brilliant guy who was completely incapable of giving a straight explanation or answer to anything. TA hours were packed full; most of the class went, and the TA explained all the stuff the teacher hadn’t.
anna_macdonald
Thanks for the link! I made a (brief, low effort) attempt to find that post earlier, but only came across the census surveys, not the results.
Heck, there’s even one survey respondent who has more kids than I do. Cool beans.
6… 7 if you count my adult step-daughter (who I didn’t really help raise). Ages 12, 11, 9, 7, 5, and 7-months.
My mom was one of 11, my dad one of 4; I am one of 7 myself. It definitely makes having a big family feel more natural.
if we want economics to be a science
I’ve been wondering lately whether it is possible for economics to get a more empirical foundation. Clearly, a serious difficulty in the field is our lack of having a way for doing controlled trials. Does anyone know if anyone has tried bribing people to live in small-towns/enclaves (one to serve as control) for a time to see if we can isolate some effects at small levels that may or may not scale up? Or is this just too ridiculously impractical? (Or just too expensive?)
microeconomics) can and actually does do a lot of controlled trials.
Do you happen to know anywhere I can read simplified (layman-readable) results of some of these?
Psychology has recently been implicated in the “can’t reproduce your results” scandal, suggesting that a lot of the garbage they generate is due, more or less, to pressure to publish, bias towards confirming expectations, and insufficient safeguards. Do microeconomics trials suffer the same problems?
Excellent, thank you!
Found… Database for registering economic controlled trials and a (unpublished?) paper that suggests economic RCTs have more problems than medical trials.
What’s your resolution to the problem of pain?
I’m ok with being proselytized; I don’t think there’s a good solution to the problem that doesn’t depend on either an optimistic interpretation of events or a way-way-higher-than-I-have valuing of free will for its own sake (which may also involve contradictory interpretations of free will.)
I’d say it boils down to the idea that a good God would not allow the kind of suffering that does, in fact, happen.
If you’d feel more comfortable carrying the discussion elsewhere, I’m fine with that. (I haven’t noticed an LW rule against giving out my own email address, but I’m not sure if I’ve looked well enough.)
I was mostly looking for a general indication of which category your response falls into, but sure, I’ll formulate my thoughts/version a little more specifically.
There exists emotional pain, much of which does not have enough redeeming side effects to make it preferable over the option of not experiencing it. A loving being would seek to reduce that pain, within their own physical/emotional limits and capability of doing so. If a being is as ultimate as God is described as, especially if it made the whole system in the first place, then reducing that pain is possible and an all-loving God would have done it.
No, I don’t want to quantify pain. Honestly, I think it takes optimism to look at the variety and extremes of suffering and decide they might all be worth it in some way. Do you have that optimism? What do you think makes the suffering worth it, if so?
Do people who do not do so become unloving beings?
Some caveats—”less than maximally loving” rather than “unloving”, and the aforementioned restriction on “within the being’s physical and emotional limits”—but basically, yes, if you can reduce someone’s suffering and don’t, you’re not loving them as much as you could.
I don’t think this is the crux of the discussion.
What do you think IS the crux of the discussion?
If you are happy doing so I would like to focus on this statement first.
I mean, sure, we can focus on that. But I feel like you’re doing a lot of inquiring as to my position without giving me even a rough idea of your own. Which is a little frustrating, fyi.
from whose perspective must suffering be reduced?
Mine? I’m not really clear what you’re asking. The suffering I want reduced is the suffering experienced from the perspective of the person suffering. I’m the one who’s doing the wanting (although the vast majority of sufferers want their suffering reduced as well). I’m not really a moral objectivist, so it’s my subjective moral-things-that-I-care-about that I’m asking a hypothetical God to live up to.
Ah, the parent defense.
A imposes suffering (not-chase-ball) in order to prevent a greater suffering (hit-by-car); and it is important that A does not have the option to prevent hit-by-car except by imposing not-chase-ball. Because A didn’t create the system in the first place and has outside constraints imposed by reality on A’s options. Thus, within A’s limits, imposing the lesser suffering is the maximally loving option that A has.
Both forms of suffering, not-chase-ball and hit-by-car, would be suffering that is endured by B. In that sense, they’re both from B’s perspective, even though B never experiences hit-by-car, which is the whole point. A is choosing an action which results in less suffering from B’s perspective than B will experience if A chooses otherwise, even if B doesn’t happen to know that.
If you’re using perspective in a different sense, then you’re making a different point that I’m not currently following.
the definition that we have used in the sequence of our problem of pain doesn’t allow for potential suffering—only suffering that is actually experienced
Honestly, I feel like you are playing word games, and I think I’ve lost interest in continuing the conversation.
However, for the other two I ‘just see’ the correct answer. Is this common for other people, or do you have a different split?
For all three questions, the wrong answer comes to my mind first*. But especially in the context of expecting a trick question, I second-guess it and come up with the correct answer fairly quickly.
*In the third question, the actual answer “24” does not come to mind first, but the general sense of “half that number” does. My mind does not actually calculate what half of 48 is before finishing thinking through the problem.
That sounds great.
Out of curiosity, does the glossary include terms that aren’t particularly rationality-related, but which may not be familiar to less-scientifically-interested readers? (Examples: light cones, configuration space).
Hi LWers.
My brothers got me into HPMOR, I started reading a couple sequences, switched over to reading the full Rationality: AI to Zombies, and recently finished that. The last few days, I’ve been browsing around LW semi-randomly, reading posts about starting to apply the concepts and about fighting akrasia.
I’m guessing I’m atypical for an LW reader: I’m a stay-at-home mom. Any others of those on here?