My point is that signal-to-noise ratio is a metric that rewards mentioning many ideas over exploring the ideas in more detail. For important ideas like specific biases that can be started shortly, I think it’s valuable to explore them in a longer way and signal-to-noise is no good complaint.
ChristianKl
Karma: 18,528
It seems to me hard to explain why an emotion such anger might release itself when the corresponding emotion subagent gets heard in Gendlin’s Focusing if anger is not related to subagents.
but biologically, anger does not exist in any form you or I are familiar with.
That sounds to me like you are calling something anger that is not the kind of thing most people mean when they say anger.
If you burrow a word like anger to talk about something biological and the biological thing is not matching with what people mean with the term, it suggests that you should rather use a new word for the biological thing you want to talk about.
If you look at the admin page, the key person seems to have switched their attention to talking about how bitcoin is crazy.
I’m not sure what “I already know about hindsight bias” is about. Hearing about hindsight bias alone has no use for not getting affected by it. You can express the idea of hinsight bias in a paragraph but that still doesn’t help. What’s important is learning about the idea in a way that actually affects actions. That likely needs hard reflection with the actual content and having multiple examples can be helpful for that.
Survivership and hindsight bias isn’t Talebs central message. To me his central message is about many distributions being fat-tailed. That insight is also resulted in Taleb’s current higher popularity because it lead to him seeing COVID-19 as a serious threat in January.
Even rationality vs irrational are just coarse labels on the emotional tensor across large time scales.
There are cases where the word rationality gets used in such a way but it’s not how the word gets used in this community.
I think you make a mistake when you try to reduce emotions to spikes in neurotransmitters. Interacting with emotions via Gendlin’s Focusing suggests that emotions reflect subagents that are more complex then neurotransmitters. Emotions also seem to come with motorcortex activity as they can be felt to be located in body-parts. Given plausible reports that they can be felt in amputed body-parts as well, a main chunk of the process will be in the motor cortex instead of in the actual part of the body where the emotion is felt.
The fact that you have the possibility of an emotional label to produce a fit in Gendlin’s focusing suggests that “Anger” is more then just a coarse label.
I’m myself neither deeply into machine learning nor into neuroscience. I don’t know of someone who cares about both towards which I could point you. That said, if you have ideas writing them up on LessWrong is likely welcome and might get people to give you valuable feedback.
Signal started out with wanting to build a federalized and interoperable platform but after a while concluded that it’s a bad idea because it siffles the ability to innovate. Email still isn’t end-to-end encrypted by default. I do use Signal to communicate with my friends over using email. I likely wouldn’t if their would be no desktop version of Signal (the breaking change that ended their interoperability).
On the more hopeful side, Protocol Labs does good work with IPFS, OrbitDB, AvionDB and FileCoin. Microsoft providing an open protocol with ION is also good news.
While Wikipedia didn’t have an existential threat from a competitor, they did have the existential threat of the editor retention crisis as gwern describes.
Why do you think such a threat provides no incentive to become less crappy but an external competitior would?
Investors can always use leverage to get higher risk and higher returns if they want.
Looking at fashion might yield a lot of this pattern. You first have high class people dress a certain way. Afterwards lower class people copy the way of dressing and it stops being a high class signal.
When EY started the Singularity Institute he didn’t believe in the massive danger. He only started believing in the danger once he thought more deeply about AGI. I don’t think that Dune is a cause of him starting to believe AGI’s danger.
The abilities of a Mentat to compute seems to be very different from the kind of reasoning that Harry employs.
The search for immortality is one of the main archtypes that you find in plenty of different fiction and sagas.
My bet is that this is probably not a false flag operation, because it would be too risky if the complicated plan fails. [...] strong evidence in my eyes to overcome the priors
There are plenty of book authors who do these kinds of things. Ryan Holiday describes in Trust Me I’m Lying that he did false flag attacks to promote Tucker Max and others. The idea that it’s benefitial PR to do these things is out of the open.
If the letter succeeds, it would drive home the point that showing your opponents to be factually wrong, or even transparently lying, is not going to save you.
It would be possible to claim that the letter is a Sokal type stunt in case the letter actually succeeds.
The reason I haven’t gotten into describing it that much is because it’s not like this is an area where I have a lot of power to influence stuff,
I’m not sure that’s the case. If there’s a well thought out concepts about how to teach scientific thinking to kids there’s a chance that someone else puts it into practice if you openly publish it. You don’t need to personally implement it to have influence.
I think the problem is that newcomer is a relative term. If I have a high-context conversation usually there are people where I think they would have the context to productively join the conversation because of their background and others who wouldn’t be able to productively join.
Given that Newton’s method was to stare at a given problem for a few decades and think about how it interacts with the available data it’s not something that you can simply repeat in school. Newton was also previously exposed to other theory such as Hooke’s law and Kepler’s laws of planetary motion.
What kind of real science do you think children in school could actually do?
When framing the question this way, the first important thing is to start by getting some knowledge of how Newton actually went about his discovery.
From history and philosophy of science we know that different scientists seem to be quite different methods. https://www.quora.com/How-did-Newton-derive-the-universal-law-of-gravitation seems a longer writup, and there’s nothing about Newton making experiments in it.
What makes you think that running experiments was central to Newton’s discoveries about gravity?
I haven’t seen the argument made in LW circles. In some other context I heard: “Taking an IQ test might be good for you because it explains why you are different”. There might be people for whom an authoritative explanation of why they are different is psychologically helpful but it’s not something I would personally value.
The kind of people who are interested in the problems of core math likely do seek a math PhD.
I would expect to the extend that people do groundbreaking work in math without an PhD they are more likely to do it for applied math.
I think that a massive trend of scientific theft would actually make for compelling journalism.
Going counter-narrative might be compelling narrative in the sense that people want to read the story but it’s not a story that a newspaper wants to publish. How many US newspapers tell you that one of the most reputable US investigative-journalists wrote a story that about how the US military didn’t kill Osama bin Laden? It’s a compelling story, but not one that the US media wants to touch as it goes counter-narrative, so he had to publish it outside of the US while the US media mostly ignored it.
To argue for a massive trend you also have to do a lot of work to document every case and therefore open a lot of fights against powerful people.
I also think you’d hear about it through the academic whisper network.
The academic whisper network is not the place where I would expect a lot of talk about how academics rip off non-academics.
If academia is a immoral maze as you suggested in Survival in the immoral maze of college you wouldn’t expect people in academia to talk about it because talking about it gets you shut out for being indiscrete.
I think Nassim Taleb talks about it a bit when he says that a lot of what academics do boils down to teaching birds to fly.
One of Taleb’s examples is the Black–Scholes equation. According to Taleb, the equation was used by traders before Black and Scholes did their work. Black–Scholes work was basically about how when you make a bunch of assumptions that don’t apply to real financial markets you can derive the formula. Afterwards they tanked a headfund, that they capitalized with the reputation they got from a Nobel prize, because they acted as if all those assumptions are true.
There are two things in favor of evolutionary psychology. On the one hand it provides a good source of priors. On the other hand, it produces a community which doesn’t want political correctness interfer with their observations.
Given the methods of antropologists you might expect them to say useful things about courtship but unfortunately, they operate in the sphere of social science while evolutionary psychologists operate in the department of psychology. In social science you would get attacked by feminists for many factual accurate statement that a person like Geoffrey Miller make and thus the topic is shunned by the researchers who care about truth and left to those who care about activism.
In the academic field of evolutionary psychology you have people running studies about what people actually do in our times that are useful.
Do you have an idea of what the infrastructure should be like? Maybe a limit of 1000 karma and then the possibility to write anonymously?