Programmer, rationalist, chess player, father, altruist.
cata
Karma: 2,769
It kind of weirds me out that this post has such a high karma score. It’s a fun read, and maybe it will help some Wikipedia admins get their house in order, but I don’t like “we good guys are being wronged by the bad outsider” content on LessWrong. No offense to Trace who is a great writer and clearly worked hard putting all this together.
It seems like this is a place where “controversial” and “taboo” diverge in meaning. The politician would notice that the sentence was about a taboo topic and bounce off, but that’s probably totally unconnected to whether or not it would be controversial among people who know anything about genetics or intelligence and are actually expressing a belief. For example, they would bounce off regardless of whether the number in the sentence was 1%, 50%, or 90%.
I thought the sequels were far better than the first book. But I have seen people with the opposite opinion.
[Question] Karma votes: blind to or accounting for score?
How did you like your trip in the end?
It definitely depends. I think there are lots of people for which there are lots of domains of information for which they are highly trustworthy in realtime conversation. For example, if I am working as a programmer, and I talk to my smart, productive coworker and ask him some normal questions about the system he built recently, I expect him to be highly confident and well calibrated on what he knows. Or if I talk to my friend with a physics PhD and ask him some question like what makes there be friction, I expect him to be highly confident and well calibrated. Certainly he isn’t likely to say something confident and then I look on Wikipedia and he was totally wrong.
In general I take more seriously what people say if
They are a person who has a source of information that could be good about the thing they are saying.
They are a person who is capable of saying they don’t know instead of bullshitting me, when they don’t know. And in general they respect the value of expressing uncertainty.
The thing they are saying could be something that is easier to actually know and understand and remember, instead of super hard. For example, maybe it is part of a kind of consistent gears-level model of some domain, so if they forgot or got it mixed up, they may notice their error.
I hope you don’t feel dumb! What could be smarter than sitting around thinking up good ideas, writing about them, and getting a bunch of people to work together to figure out what to make of them? It seems like the most smart possible behavior!
It seems like the students think that eliminating the distractions wouldn’t improve how much they learn in class. That sounds ridiculous to me, but public school classrooms are a weird environment that already aren’t really set up well to teach anyone anything, so maybe it could be true. Is it credible?
As a non-physicist I kind of had the idea that the reason I was taught Newtonian mechanics in high school was that it was assumed I wasn’t going to have the time, motivation, or brainpower to learn some kind of fancy, real university version of it, so the alternate idea that it’s useful for intuition-building of the concepts is novel and interesting to me.
Learning piano I have been pretty skeptical about the importance of learning to read sheet music fluently. All piano players culturally seem to insist that it’s very important, but my sense is that it’s some kind of weird bias. If you tell piano players that you should hear it in your head and play it expressively, they will start saying stuff about, what if you don’t already know what it’s supposed to sound like, how will you figure it out, and they don’t like “I will go listen to it” as an answer.
So far, I am not very fluent at reading, so maybe I just don’t get it yet.
Why you should learn a musical instrument
Why is it bad to have wealth inequality by age? Basically everyone gets to be every age, so there’s nothing “unfair” about it.
I still don’t get why you are even considering finishing the degree, even though you clearly tried to explain it to me. Taking eight college classes is a lot of work actually? “Why not” doesn’t really seem to cover it. How is doing a “terrible” commute several times per week for two semesters and spending many hours per week a low cost?
You sort of imply that someone is judging you for not having the degree but you didn’t give any examples of actually being judged.
If you really really want to prove to yourself that you can do it, or if you really want to learn more math (I agree that taking college courses seems like a fine way to learn more math) then I understand, but based on your post it’s not clear to me.
That just sounds great, thanks.
How’s the childcare situation looking? Last I heard it wasn’t clear and the organizers were seeing how much interest there was in it.
This isn’t quite what you asked for, but I did feel a related switch.
When I was a kid, I thought that probably people in positions of power were smart people working towards smart goals under difficult constraints that made their actions sometimes look foolish to me, who knew little. Then there was a specific moment in my early 20s, when the political topic of the day was the design of Obamacare, and so if you followed the news, you would see all the day-to-day arguments between legislators and policy analysts about what would go in the legislation and why. And the things they said about it were so transparently stupid and so irredeemably ridiculous, that it completely cured me of the idea that they were the thing I said up above. It was clear to me that it was just a bunch of people who weren’t really experts on the economics of healthcare or anything, and they weren’t even aspiring to be experts. They were just doing and saying whatever sort of superficially seemed like it would further their career.
So now I definitely have no internal dissonance about trusting myself to make decisions about what work to do, because I don’t take seriously the idea that someone else would be making any better decision, unless it’s some specific person that I have specific evidence about.
I am surprised by this, for example. Can you give examples of some of your controversial takes on any issues? I am wondering if you just do not have very controversial takes.
Controversial is obviously relative to the audience, but I have lots of opinionated beliefs that might make various audiences mad at me. Some different flavors include
I am roughly a total utilitarian, which involves lots of beliefs about what actions are moral that all kinds of people might strongly disagree with. For example, I don’t agree that inequality is intrinsically bad.
I roughly agree with (my understanding of) Zack Davis’s arguments about the superiority of cluster-of-traits-based definitions of gender words, rather than self-ID based definitions, which I am sure would make many trans people mad.
I think it’s ridiculous for suicide to be illegal and marginal efforts to increase the availability of suicide seem great.
I frequently criticize my coworkers’ ideas of what to work on as being bad or not worth doing.
Stuff like correlation between IQ and ethnicity is a bit more controversial, but my takes are usually much more controversial than that. I often wonder what would have happened if the US had wiped out USSR’s main cities post WW2 and established global hegemony (wipe out any nation that doesn’t submit, maintain nuclear monopoly). I have genuine respect and admiration for people like hitler or the unabomber, more than for a lot of the people I see around me, despite disagreeing with their object level opinions (I’m not a nazi or an anarchoprimitivist).
I am not very knowledgeable about or interested in history or social science, so I have less strong opinions about things like this, and don’t talk about them very often. For example, my opinion about IQ and ethnicity is that the obvious group differences seem to obviously suggest some kind of genetic difference, but I know psychologists have some complicated statistical argument for why that may not be the case, so therefore I don’t know.
I note, however, that I can’t think of the last time before now that I have ever been in a conversation where it seemed like my views on IQ and ethnic groups were relevant, so I don’t have a problem with pissing people off by expressing them. Is this different for you? How do you end up in discussions about it with people who will then be offended when you say your opinion? Is it some kind of thing where you participate in social media conversations about it which then broadcast your opinions to basically random people? (I don’t use any platform like that.)
Do you expect to ever become at all famous in your life?
Definitely not. It sounds very annoying. I am not altruistic enough to want to do something that involves being substantially famous.
I can send a list of examples of people whose lives have been ruined by this. Do you claim I am misjudging the probability this happens to me personally?
Probably, if it’s a big consideration to you. I think it seems like a tail risk that isn’t very substantial, unless your life depends on the approval of others in a somewhat atypical way. (Perhaps it does, if your life involves being famous.)
Do you have actual experience in bio security? I doubt most people in EA circles or even many academics would provide you with any of the funding or connections required to work in bio security if this is your current stance on the matter.
No, I just quoted this because it was the example you gave. I know little about biosecurity and I don’t intend my remarks to extend to “infohazard” kinds of information. Perhaps you know things about the biosecurity nonprofit world that I don’t. However, I know something about the kinds of things that some EA grantmakers like SFF consider, and I don’t see why being the kind of person who speaks their mind about controversial beliefs would make them less likely to fund you.
I am 37 and I am a partially retired programmer after a ~20 year career. I basically try to maximize clarity while obeying normal politeness norms, prioritizing clarity and honesty over politeness where the topic is important (e.g. delivering actionable criticism or bad news.) I would say that during my career I received very strong evidence that this is an effective communication style for working well with others. For example, I have had numerous coworkers spontaneously tell me that they respected my straightforwardness, and seek out my feedback on what they were thinking. I have also had coworkers who were hurt by my criticism, but the balance seems clear to me.
I certainly have no “hot takes which I feel uncomfortable sharing with people around me”, nor would I ever “assume...whatever they [I] tell anyone could eventually end up being broadcasted by a famous person on the internet”, which sounds pathologically anxious. I don’t start random arguments with random people unbidden, because that’s impolite, but I would not consider concealing my beliefs about something true and important.
My comparative advantage in the world is my ability to make and fix practical things. If I aspired to be a professional persuader, or a political operator in a large organization, and I was talented at persuasion and manipulation, maybe I would behave differently. But I wouldn’t behave differently if I were to “run a research nonprofit working on biosecurity” for example.
I think most people who regularly conceal or lie about their beliefs are doing so because of emotional anxiety and conflict avoidance that is not based on a sober judgment of the consequences. If they reflected on the fact that they know well who in their lives is straightforward and trustworthy, and who is an untrustworthy bullshitter, then they would realize that it’s a huge benefit to join the first category, and typically disproportionate to any risk. I have the good fortune to naturally be not very socially anxious, leading me to a better path.
Lucas Watson, who co-wrote Hanano Puzzle 2, just published an exceptional new game, I Wanna Lockpick, which I would put in your tier 1.
One thing which I really enjoyed about it is that it uses its mechanics to build interesting puzzles in all of the different puzzle categories above, and mixes them freely, so it feels like there is a nice variety of kinds of thinking involved.
Do you believe the result about priming people with a $1500 bill and a $150 bill? That pattern matches perfectly to an infinite list of priming research that failed to replicate, so by default I would assume it is probably wrong.
The one about people scoring better after harvest makes a lot more sense since, like, it’s a real difference and not some priming thing, so I am not as skeptical about that.