I read Matt Simpson’s description of his intended process, and I have no idea what two “opposed techniques” you are talking about. Would you mind saying a bit more?
ChrisHibbert
My rebuttal to
imagine how much saner the political process would look
is to point at the work of Tullock and Buchanon on Public Choice theory. Basically, the take away is that politicians and bureaucrats respond to incentives. If the voting public were smarter, politicians’ behavior would be different during elections, and the politicians would try to make their behavior in office look different. But they would still have an incentive to look like they were addressing problems rather than an incentive to actually solve them. It’s much harder than 10 IQ points to align those outcomes.
And bureaucrats and middle managers in government would still face the same incentives about obfuscating results, multiplying staffing and budgets, and ensuring that projects and bureaucracies have staying power.
A recent story on PodCastle gives the same message, albeit embedded in a short fantasy story with good economics.
From what I remember of the papers, it was pretty clear (though perhaps not stated explicitly) that AM “happened across” many interesting factoids about math, but it was Lenat’s intervention that declared them important and worth further study. I think your second paragraph implies this, but I wanted it to be explicit.
A reasonable interpretation of AM’s success was that Lenat was able to recognize many important mathematical truths in AM’s meanderings. Lenat never claimed any new discoveries on behalf of AM.
One advantage of the executable is that you don’t lose a record of your previous questions and answers. I think this is crucial, and ought to be included in a webbed version as well. It was annoying that the text entry boxes didn’t let me type in order to enter my guess.
But thanks for writing this version to get us started on the web.
I think most of the wine experts who work on their verbal ability to describe wines are wine reviewers who read other people’s wine reviews. I would guess that that means they develop a common vocabulary. In that sense, I’d presume that they’d be almost as good at recognizing a wine from another expert’s description as their own. Or at least that’s what I’d want to verify in order to see if they were describing something that’s in the wine rather than some idiosyncratic feature that’s salient to one but unnoticed by others.
I think the implications for rationalists who want to train their verbal abilities are obvious, but I’ll say it anyway. If you want to train your verbal abilities so what you say about rationality doesn’t cloud your non-verbal understanding, you have to write about rationality and read what others write about it, and do your best to see that you’re talking about the same thing.
Markets provide information, even if it isn’t the explanatory information that you seem to be looking for. In the standard case, the information is about availability and cost of resources. You don’t get the information behind the predictions about availability, but the predictions themselves have real value.
If you want to find a way to add value, it’s important to understand what the existing value is so you don’t break the underlying mechanism in your attempt to enhance it.
With as much awareness as a footnote or parenthetical would take, the post could have been edited from
as anyone who’s ever fallen for a woman based entirely on her looks can tell you.
to
as anyone who’s ever fallen for someone based entirely on looks can tell you.
without changing the intended meaning one iota, and easily making the entire post more friendly to many who might have felt slighted (or just left out) by the original.
It’s also less visible. Some people are sensitive to each, but the people looking for gender differences can claim that any commenter who has a gender neutral name and stance is adding to the apparent dominance of male viewpoints. Only a few have visibly female names. (There aren’t many visibly male names, but it’s enough given our priors about the on-line population.)
It’s harder to argue that race-neutral names and viewpoints make the racial or ethnic minorities more clearly minorities, since there aren’t enough self-identified of any race or ethnicity to form groupings.
Or have I missed a significant discussion of this in some comment thread?
That penultimate line should say
while for a thematic wiki, the original research is communicated and discussed on the associated blog.
Shouldn’t it?
The Standard PD is set up so there are only two agents and only their choices and values matter. I tend to think of rationality in these dilemmas as being largely a matter of reputation, even when the situation is circumscribed and described as one-shot. Hofstadter’s concept of super-rationality is part of how I think about this. If I have a reputation as someone who cooperates when that’s the game-theoretically optimal thing to do, then it’s more likely that whoever I’ve been partnered with will expect that from me, and cooperate if he understands why that strategy works.
Since it would buttress that reputation, I keep hoping that rationalists, generally, would come to embrace some interpretation of super-rationality, but I keep seeing self-professed rationalists whose choices seem short-sightedly instrumentalist to me.
But this seems to be a completely different situation. Rather than attempting to cooperate with someone who I should assume to be my partner, and who has my interests at heart, I’m asked to play a game with someone who doesn’t reason the way I do, and who explicitly mistrusts my reasoning. In addition, the payoff isn’t to me and the other player, the payoff is to a huge number of uninvolved other people. MBlume seems to want me to think of it in terms of something valuable in my preference ranking, but he’s actually set it up so that it’s not a prisoner’s dilemma, it’s a hostage situation in which I have a clearly superior choice, and an opportunity to try to convince someone whose reasoning is alien to my own.
I defect. I do my best to convince my friend that the stakes are too high to justify declaring his belief in god. So you can get me to defect, but only by setting up a situation in which my allies aren’t sitting on the other side of the bargaining table.
If you’re going to write about this, be sure to account for the fact that many people report successful communication in many different ways. People say that they have found their soul-mate, many of us have similar reactions to particular works of literature and art, etc. People often claim that someone else’s writing expresses an experience or an emotion in fine detail.
Yes, this was valuable. I’ve been using my user page and re-displaying each of the comments to find new comments. Now I’ve added my inbox to my bookmark list of places to check every morning (right after the cartoons.)
No, you understood me. I sidestepped the heart of the question.
This is an example where I believe I know what the right incentives structure of the answer is. But I can’t give any guidance on the root question, since in my example case, (torture) I don’t believe in the efficacy of the immoral act. I don’t think you can procure useful information by torturing someone when time is short. And when time isn’t short, there are better choices.
No, I don’t have a boiled down answer. When I try to think about it, rational/right includes not just the outcome of the current engagement, but the incentives and lessons left behind for the next incident.
Okay, here’s one example I’ve used before: torture. It’s somewhat orthogonal to the question of following orders, but it bears on the issue of setting up incentives for how often breaking the rules is acceptable. I think the law and the practice should be that torture is illegal and punished strictly. If some person is convinced that imminent harm will result if information isn’t extracted from a suspect, and that it’s worth going to jail for a long time in order to prevent the harm, then they are able to (which is not the same as authorized) torture. But it’s always at the cost of personal sacrifice. So, if you think a million people will die from a nuke, and you’re convinced you can actually get information out of someone by immoral and prohibited means (which I think is usually the weakest link in the chain) and you’re willing to give up your life or your liberty in order to prevent it, then go for it.
But don’t ever expect a hero’s welcome for your sacrifice. It’s a bad choice that’s (conceivably) sometimes necessary. The idea that any moral society would authorize the use of torture in routine situations makes me sick.
If I understand you, I think that’s part of what is supposed to happen, though the communication is more lateral than I said at first. In addition to ideas going from the troops to their sergeants and from squad leaders to their commanders, new innovations spread from squad-to-squad.
After D-Day, the tactics required to get through narrow lanes surrounded by hedge rows were developed by individual tank teams, and tank groups picked up successful ideas from each other. In Iraq, methods for detecting ambushes and IEDs weren’t developed at headquarters and promulgated from the top down, they arose as the result of experiment and spread virally.
There may be an advantage to having specialists who are looking for that kind of idea and for ways of spreading it, but I’d go with the modern management practice of empowering everyone and encouraging innovation by everyone who is in contact with the enemy. In business, it’s good for morale, and in most arenas it multiplies the number of brains trying to solve problems and trying to steal good ideas.
I have some opinions on how you guys could more effectively proselytize—but I’m not sure it’s worth my time to speak up.
If you post about things that are interesting to you, we’ll talk about them more.
If you act like you have something valuable to say, we’ll read it and respond. We would all be likely to learn something in the process.
The most valuable part for politicians is understanding that incentives matter, and the ideas of public choice theory, the concept of regulatory capture and the like. These don’t require any facility with numbers. They inform decision making and direct the design of institutions.
I think there’s more contribution from the bottom up in a modern well-functioning military than you realize. One of the obstacles the US military’s trainers face in teaching in other countries is getting officers to listen to their subordinates. In small units, successful leaders listen to their troops, in larger units, officers listen to their subordinates.
But in all those cases, there comes a time when the leader is giving orders, and at that point, the subordinates are trained to follow. The system doesn’t work if it doesn’t insist that the leader gets to decide when it is time to give orders.
But effectiveness comes from leaders who listen since, as you said, there are many more sensors at the edges of the org chart. The Culture is good at many things, but Banks doesn’t show small-unit operations in which the leader gains by listening.
I’m sorry, but the lack of concreteness here makes this sound like an unsubstantiated slam. Would you mind saying what you mean? Which of ESR’s views cause you to say this? what are the components of the particular affective spiral that you believe he has fallen subject to?