Without the follow-up report, this is hardly evidence that the theory works. I guess it counts as evidence that the theory is convincing.
ChrisHibbert
The best study I know of that addresses rationality in pro sports is Moneyball, by Michael Lewis. It tells the story of how Billy Beane followed the approaches recommended by people who studied the voluminous statistics on Baseball and pointed to non-standard evaluations of what talents and strategies made a difference in getting to the post-season. It’s relevant for two reasons.
1) It talks about the psychology of players and coaches who found reasons to stick with the tried-and-true, even when non-standard approaches had some evidence in their favor.
2) it talks about the process of re-analyzing the statistics to figure out what aspects of the game matter. Part of this is deciding what the goal is, and part is figuring out what helps you reach the goal. In the case of baseball, Beane agreed with the those who argued that getting to the post-season cost-effectively was the goal. That means figuring out how to win more games over a season, which is more straightforward than figuring out how to win individual games. Cost-effectiveness translates to recruiting players whose value is higher than what other teams are willing to pay. Many unconventional styles of play turned out to be valuable, which led to a team that looked bizarre by accepted standards, but who won consistently but unspectacularly.
edited to use proper LW linking
“and the wisdom to know the difference”
I don’t answer survey questions that ask about race, but if you met me you’d think of me as white male.
I’m more strongly libertarian (but less party affiliated) than the survey allowed me to express.
I have reasonably strong views about morality, but had to look up the terms “Deontology”, “Consequentialism”, and “Value Ethics” in order to decide that of these “consequentialism” probably matches my views better than the others.
Probabilities: 50,30,20,5,0,0,0,10,2,1,20,95.
On “What is the probability that significant global warming is occurring or will soon occur, and is primarily caused by human actions?”, I had to parse several words very carefully, and ended up deciding to read “significant” as “measureable” rather than “consequential”. For consequential, I would have given a smaller value.
I answered all the way to the end of the super bonus questions, and cooperated on the prize question.
I believe that emotions play a big part in thinking clearly, and understanding our emotions would be a helpful step. Would you mind saying more about the time you spend focused on emotions? Are you paying attention to your concrete current or past emotions (i.e. “this is how I’m feeling now”, or “this is how I felt when he said X”), or more theoretical discussions “when someone is in fight-or-flight mode, they’re more likely to Y than when they’re feeling curiosity”?
You also mentioned exercises about exploiting emotional states; would you say more about what CFAR has learned about mindfully getting oneself in particular emotional states?
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.
For many more exercises exploring status behavior (both high and low), see Keith Johnstone’s Impro. (Here’s my review.) Johnstone’s theory of improvisation (and acting in general) is that most of the weight of convincing the audience is carried by relative status distinctions among the actors. He provides a detailed set of exercises for exploring and understanding subtle and extreme differences so actors can be comfortable on stage projecting whatever distinction is called for.
I routinely use “a couple” and “a few” to indicate vague quantities. A few is bigger than a couple, but they overlap. I know that not everyone does this (my S.O., in particular, thinks I’m wrong) but I also know that I’m not nearly alone in this habit.
Yes, certainly, there are circumstances in which “a couple” means exactly two. If I’m talking about some friends, and refer to them as “a couple” rather than “a couple of people”, you’d be justified to think I meant exactly two people with some relationship. But if I say “I’m going to read a couple more pages”, I think you’d be making a mistake to be upset as long as it was between 1.5 and 4 pages. When I say “a few” it might range from 1.7 to 5 or 6 depending on whether we’re talking about potatoes or french fries.
So, to my ears, it could be the 16th century or the mid-18th century, and giving the benefit of the doubt, it’s a reasonable statement.
My most valuable skill I can think of is in the context of being a software developer. I’ve learned to be pretty good at extracting requirements from customers. I often say this is one of the more important skills a software developer can learn. It’s important at all levels of the profession, and is really a gateway skill to performing at a high level.
The reason it’s important and hard to learn is that most of the time, customers don’t know what they want, or they have an idea in their head, but they’re wrong about what will satisfy. Extreme Programming (XP) teaches one approach that lets you get by with less of this skill, and that’s to build something simple that approaches what they say they want, and then keep adding stuff until they’re happy with it. But if the customer is really confused (which happens more often than you might think) then you’ll have started in the wrong direction, and the customer won’t get less confused about what they want.
So it helps to know how to talk to the customer and find out what the real problem is, rather than just what they think the solution might be. It’s also valuable to have good intuitions about features they’re likely to want that they haven’t asked for yet, so you can build in the hooks for those. But if you make too many guesses, you’ll waste time building general support where it’s not needed. So you have to calibrate your guesses as well.
voted up for backing away from the details of the metaphor rather than trying to justify them. Not always an easy choice.
“Two medical researchers use the same treatment independently [...] one had decided beforehand [...] he would stop after treating N=100 patients, [...]. The other [...] decided he would not stop until he had data indicating a rate of cures definitely greater than 60%, [...]. But in fact, both stopped with exactly the same data: n = 100 [patients], r = 70 [cures]. Should we then draw different conclusions from their experiments?”
[...]
If Nature is one way, the likelihood of the data coming out the way we have seen will be one thing. If Nature is another way, the likelihood of the data coming out that way will be something else. But the likelihood of a given state of Nature producing the data we have seen, has nothing to do with the researcher’s private intentions. [...]
The expectations and the stopping rule make a difference. The reason the Monty Hall Puzzle turns out the way it does is that part of the setup is that Monty Hall always opens a different door than you chose. When I tell the story without mentioning that fact, you should get a different answer.
Mostly not. The process of preparing the body for cryonics (even for neuro- or head-only patients) requires pumping preservation chemicals through the bloodstream that are incompatible with donation.
I like the phrase “precedent utilitarianism”. It sounds to utilitarians like you’re joining their camp, while actually pointing out that you’re taking a long-term view of utility, which they usually refuse to do. The important ingredient is paying attention to incentives, which is really the rational response to most questions about morality. Many choices which seem “fairer”, “more just”, or whose alternatives provoke a disgust response don’t take the long-term view into account. If we go around sacrificing every lonely stranger to the highest benefit of others nearby, no one is safe. It’s a tragedy that all those people are sick and will die if they don’t get help, but we don’t make the world less tragic by sacrificing one to save ten every chance we get.
Silly hats are commonly associated with some cults and secret societies, so that’s not particularly a mark in your favor. “not taking yourselves too seriously” is a plus, but neither dress code nor anti-dress code will get you there.
My point wasn’t just that I wouldn’t make a good torturer. It seems to me that ordinary circumstances don’t provide many opportunities for anyone to learn much about torture, (other than from fictional sources). I have little reason to believe that inexperienced torturers would be effective in the time-critical circumstances that seem necessary for any convincing justification of torture. You may believe it, but it’s not convincing to me. So it would be hard to ethically produce trained torturers, and there’s a dearth of evidence on the effectiveness of inexperienced torturers in the circumstances necessary to justify it.
Given that, I think it’s better to take the stance that torture is always unethical. There are conceivable circumstances when it would be the only way to prevent a cataclysm, but they’re neither common, nor easy to prepare for.
And I don’t think I’ve said that it would be ethical, just that individuals would sometimes think it was necessary. I think we are all better off if they have to make that choice without any expectation that we will condone their actions. Otherwise, some will argue that it’s useful to have a course of training in how to perform torture, which would encourage its use even though we don’t have evidence of its usefulness. It seems difficult to produce evidence one way or another on the efficacy of torture without violating the spirit of the Nuremberg Code. I don’t see an ethical way to add to the evidence.
You seem to believe that sufficient evidence exists. Can you point to any?
You wanted an explicit answer to your question. My response is that I would be unhappy that I didn’t have effective tools for finding out the truth. But my unhappiness doesn’t change the facts of the situation. There isn’t always something useful that you can do. When I generalize over all the fictional evidence I’ve been exposed to, it’s too likely that my evidence is wrong as to the identity of the suspect, or he doesn’t have the info I want, or the bomb can’t be disabled anyway. When I try to think of actual circumstances, I don’t come up with examples in which time was short and the information produced was useful. I also can’t imagine myself personally punching, pistol-whipping, pulling fingernails, waterboarding, etc, nor ordering the experienced torturer (who you want me to imagine is under my command) to do so.
Sorry to disappoint you, but I don’t believe the arguments I’ve heard for effectiveness or morality of torture.
If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance: let us ask, “Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number?” No. “Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence?” No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion. --- David Hume
(quoted in Beyond AI by JoSH Hall)
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.
Cooking tainted meat doesn’t denature prions. (They aren’t “alive”, so they can’t be “killed”.) Neither do most biological processes, as you might expect in the normal case of digestion. As the article above mentions, they can persist in the environment for years.
It can take temperatures of several hundred degrees to denature them.
With only two questions about what people believe, I expected to see a matrix showing number of people in each 2-d category. The most interesting result is how do answers to the two questions correlate.
It’s important to realize that this is another myth perpetuated by the media and our ignorance of the statistics. Most startups fail; I think the statistics are that 80% die in the first 5 years. But the ones that get written up in glowing articles are the ones that succeeded. Of course all those founders who struck it rich believed strongly in their ideas, but so did many of those that failed. That irrational belief may be a crucial ingredient for success, but it doesn’t supply a guarantee. Most of the people who held that irrational belief worked for businesses that failed—but they didn’t get their name in the paper, so they’re relatively invisible.