The problem with using hyperreals for utility is that unless you also use them for probabilities only the most infinite utilities actually affect your decision.
To use your example if U(snuggle) = ω and U(chocolate bar) = 1. Then you might as well say that U(snuggle) = 1 and U(chocolate bar) = 0 since tiny probabilities of getting a snuggle will always override any considerations related to chocolate bars.
Very easy to do by default if you haven’t done enough historical reading—especially of primary source—when you don’t realize that what comes natural to you is not the nature of the universe.
Probably because he was responding to people who were arguing that these things were inappropriate in a republic.
I understand that even a single study indicating a connection would immediately be seized on by anti-vaccination activists. (I’ve even seen them manage to take a study that indicated no connection, copy a graph in that study that indicated no connection, and write an analysis claiming it proved a connection.) Out there in the real world, maybe it’s good to suppress any such studies. Maybe.
Well in light of how the modern scientific processes produces a bias against contrary views the activists’ seizing on any studies drawing contrary conclusions appears to be rational. To put it another way if the process is strongly biased against studies that reach contrarian conclusions, any study reaching a contrarian conclusion that survives the process is much stronger evidence than a study that reaches the mainstream conclusion.
Before you ask, this does also apply to hiring someone based on college education, but there’s not much we can do about that,
Yes there is, we can pass laws making it illegal to hire on the basis of college degrees (possibly with an exemption for degrees directly relevant to the job).
and at least you can decide to go get a college education.
You can’t decide to get accepted by an elite college.
It’s hard to decide to do better on IQ tests or to not be black.
Another way to phrase this statement is that there is less motivation to engage in costly signaling. Thus there is less deadweight signaling loss and hence more resources available to utility production.
Most people don’t think that utilons are linear with job-productivity-years; for instance, having one person out of 100 permanently unemployed is worse than having every person in the 100 lose 1% of the years they would otherwise have worked.
This calculation completely neglects the utility generating function of productivity.
The amusing thing is that Mitchel’s argument proves much more than he wants it to prove.
Because experiments can be undermined by a vast number of practical mistakes, the likeliest explanation for any failed replication will always be that the replicator bungled something along the way. Unless direct replications are conducted by flawless experimenters, nothing interesting can be learned from them.
Notice that the above argument applies just as well to the original experiment being replicated.
I would venture to guess that the crappy state of science in e.g. China is just due to the weak institutions/high corruption levels in their society. If you think you can get away with dumping plastic in milk, a little data faking is the least of your problems.
That explains China and Russia/USSR, it doesn’t explain Japan and Taiwan.
If I had to choose between black people getting the kind of jobs they got when discrimination against them was permitted, and signalling, I’d decide the signalling is less costly,
You do realize the signaling, at least in the US, currently involves taking out student loans under terms that boarder on debt peonage.
You’re argument essentially amounts to arguing that we should give people with low skills make-work jobs in order to increase utility.
Unless the increase is infinite, it is still possible for the loss in utility from high variance to outweigh the gain in utility from increased productivity.
This only works if the main contribution to utility from working consists of the personal fulfillment of the worker rather than the benefits generated by the work.
we supposedly evolve whole new instincts, whose morphological complexity (in terms of wiring adjustments in the brain), if innate, would be comparable to entire new organs, if not higher.
[citation please]
I meant can you site a specific example of an evolutionary psychologist proposing an evolved instinct “whose morphological complexity (in terms of wiring adjustments in the brain), if innate, would be comparable to entire new organs, if not higher”. The wikipedia article doesn’t seem to include any.
Looking at the criticism at best some are valid criticisms of a few stupid evolutionary explanations that some people cite, e.g., the claim that homosexuality is adaptive. Most are, however, either simply incoherent like the “Disjunction and grain problems” section, based on false premises like the “ethnocentrism” section, or straw men like the section on “rape”.
Part of it is that different parts of the states have different ideas about how the state should be governed.
That has more to do with the fact that air travel is commoditized than the price of inputs.
They’re somehow below any detection, and work absolutely identical to what learning works like.
And what do you think learning looks like? You seem to be envisioning some kind of blank slate priorless learning. The problem is that learning without priors is logically incoherent. Now that we’ve established that our brains have built in priors, why is it implausible that it said priors were the results of evolution? In fact, it would be implausible for them not to be.
Now consider the evopsych innate module explanation for improved performance on Wason selection task when it’s specified verbally in terms of social rules, just to pick a specific and common example. (How the hell would such a module even interface to a bunch of learned language circuitry? That’s a question which would have to be answered first).
The same way the hunger module interfaces with the learned language circuitry when someone tells you there is cake in the fridge.
Also the “Wason module” if you want to call it that is a submodule of the ethics/social rules module, which is why it only gets involved on social rules type problems. Are you trying to argue that it’s implausible that the social rules module interfaces with learned language circuitry?
Now that we’ve established that our brains have built in priors, why is it implausible that it said priors were the results of evolution? In fact, it would be implausible for them not to be.
It’s not C. Elegans. It is individual-specific which neuron groups end up learning a concept. And genome is not a blueprint, there’s no short way to create a gene that would target a specific region even on the location basis.
So your claim is that each human’s priors are assigned not by genetics, but randomly? (according to some distribution?). I don’t even see how to phrase your position coherently.
In humans there’s no gene controlling specifically the strength of a specific synapse any place in neocortex,
But there are genes that control how strong synapses are under what conditions, and there are genes that control the conditions in different parts of the neocotrex.
and if you wanted to genetically engineer an alteration to a specific synapse of your choice you would have to set up an incredibly complex framework for expressing that gene in just that specific neuron and affecting that specific synapse.
Or he could, you know, try tweaking a bunch of genes and see which ones produced effects close to the effect he wanted. Then try more similar tweaks to those and see which get him closer.
There’s the root of the problem, really: environment drives evolution of genes, genes interact with neurobiology, neurobiology gives rise to psychology.
Just because there are many intermediate steps in the causal diagram from genes to psychology doesn’t mean that much of psychology isn’t based on genes.
To use an analogy to a computer, I would argue that studying the properties of neurons will get you about as far in understanding psychology as studying the properties of circuits will get you in understanding software.
Robb’s link goes to Miri’s blog and not the specific post. As such I was going through the history looking for the post in question. Most of Miri’s blog posts consist of her getting horribly mind-killed about gender issues, with the occasional post on a topic not related to gender which shows that she is perfectly capable of better quality thought when not being mind-killed.
You still need a theory, a.k.a., a prior on the kind of data you expect to be compressing. Otherwise you run into the No Free Lunch Theorem.