Daniel_Burfoot

Karma: 4,169

Daniel_Burfoot 26 Jan 2012 3:25 UTC
101 points
on: I’ve had it with those dark rumours about our culture rigorously suppressing opinions
Note that there is a subtler mechanism than brute suppression that puts strict limits on our effective thoughtspace: the culture systematically distracts us from thinking about the deep, important questions by loudly and constantly debating superficial ones. Here are some examples:
- Should the US go to war in Iraq? vs. Should the US have an army?
- Should we pay teachers more? vs. Should public education exist?
- Should healthcare guaranteed by the federal government? vs Should the federal government be disbanded?
- Should we bail out the banks? vs. Should we ban long term banking?
- Should we allow same-sex marriage? vs. Should marriage have any legal relevance?
Notice how the sequence of psychological subterfuge works. First, the culture throws in front of you a gaudy, morally charged question. Then various pundits present their views, using all the manipulative tactics they have developed in a career of professional opinion-swaying. You look around yourself and find all the other primates engaged in a heated debate about the question. Being a social animal, you are inclined to imitate them: you are likely to develop your own position, argue about it publicly, take various stands, etc. Since we reason to argue, you will spend a lot of time thinking about this question. Now you are committed, firstly to your stand on the explicit question, but also to your implicit position that the question itself is well-formulated.

Daniel_Burfoot 1 Apr 2013 13:12 UTC
62 points
on: A Rational Altruist Punch in The Stomach
Robin used a Dirty Math Trick that works on us because we’re not used to dealing with large numbers. He used a large time scale of 12000 years, and assumed exponential growth in wealth at a reasonable rate over that time period. But then for depreciating the value of the wealth due to the fact that the intended recipients might not actually receive it, he used a relatively small linear factor of 1/1000 which seems like it was pulled out of a hat.

It would make more sense to assume that there is some probability every year that the accumulated wealth will be wiped out by civil war, communist takeover, nuclear holocaust, etc etc. Even if this yearly probability were small, applied over a long period of time, it would still counteract the exponential blowup in the value of the wealth. The resulting conclusion would be totally dependent on the probability of calamity: if you use a 0.01% chance of total loss, then you have about a 30% chance of coming out with the big sum mentioned in the article. But if you use a 1% chance, then your likelihood of making it to 12000 years with the money intact is 4e-53.

Daniel_Burfoot 27 Jan 2015 20:34 UTC
56 points
on: CFAR fundraiser far from filled; 4 days remaining
Donated $100.

Daniel_Burfoot 12 Oct 2012 17:57 UTC
40 points
on: Causal Diagrams and Causal Models
After reading this post I was stunned. Now I think the central conclusion is wrong, though I still think it is a great post, and I will go back to being stunned if you convince me the conclusion is correct.

You’ve shown how to identify the correct graph structure from the data. But you’ve erred in assuming that the directed edges of the graph imply causality.

Imagine you did the same analysis, except instead of using O=”overweight” you use W=”wears size 44 or higher pants”. The data would look almost the same. So you would reach an analogous conclusion: that wearing large pants causes one not to exercise. This seems obviously false unless your notion of causality is very different from mine.

In general, I think the following principle holds: inferring causality requires an intervention; it cannot be discovered from observational data alone. A researcher who hypothesized that W causes not-E could round up a bunch of people, have half of them wear big pants, observe the effect of this intervention on exercise rates, and then conclude that there is no causal effect.

Daniel_Burfoot 14 Sep 2010 19:10 UTC
39 points
on: Intellectual Hipsters and Meta-Contrarianism
One element of meta-contrarian reasoning is as follows. Consider a proposition P, that is hard for a layperson to assess. Because of this difficulty, an individual must rely on others for information. Now, a reasonable layperson might look around and listen with an open mind to all the arguments, and choose the one that seems most plausible to assign a probability to P.

The problem is that certain propositions have large corps of people whose professions depend on the proposition being true, but no counterforce of professional critics. So there is a large group of people (priests) who are professionally committed to the proposition “God exists”. The existence of this group causes an obvious bias in the layperson’s decision algorithm. Other groups, like doctors, economists, soldiers, and public school teachers, have similar commitments. Consider the proposition “public education improves national academic achievement.” It could be true, it could be false—it’s an empirical question. But all public school teachers are committed to this proposition, and there are very few people committed to the opposite.

So meta-contrarians explicitly correct for this kind of bias. I don’t necessarily think that the public school proposition is false, but it should be thoroughly examined. I don’t necessarily think that the nation would be safer if we abolished the Army and Marine Corps, but it might be.

Daniel_Burfoot 8 Nov 2011 0:44 UTC
37 points
on: Q&A with new Executive Director of Singularity Institute
Congratulations, but why do you think your comparative advantage lies in being an executive director? Won’t that cut into your time budget for reading, writing, and thinking?

Daniel_Burfoot 9 Dec 2013 20:35 UTC
36 points
on: The Statistician’s Fallacy

Essentially all scientific fields rely heavily on statistics.

This is true in a technical sense but misses a crucial distinction. Hard sciences (basically physics and its relatives), are far less vulnerable to statistical pitfalls because practitioners in those fields have the ability to generate effectively unlimited quantities of data by simply repeating experiments as many times as necessary. This makes statistical reasoning largely irrelevant: in the limit of infinite data, you don’t need to do Bayesian updates because the weight of the prior is insignificant compared to the weight of the observations. Rutherford, for example, did not bother to state a prior probability for the plum pudding model of the atom compared to the planetary model; he just amassed a bunch of experimental data, and showed that the plum pudding model could not explain it. This large-data-generation ability of physics is largely why that field has succeeded in spite of continuing debates and confusion about the fundamentals of statistical philosophy. Researchers in fields like economics, nutrition, and medicine simply cannot obtain data on the same scale that physicists can.

Daniel_Burfoot 24 Nov 2012 17:55 UTC
36 points
on: LW Women- Minimizing the Inferential Distance

Words from my father’s mouth, growing up: “You need to be able to cook and keep a clean house, or what man would want to marry you?”

I assume most people find this statement offensive and objectionable. If you are such a person, can you provide a rational justification for your response? It seems to me that the father is simply making a set of empirical claims about reality, and so at worst the statement is just inaccurate.

Also, imagine a father telling his son “You need to get a good job and learn how to dress well, or else no woman will want to marry you.” Is this statement similarly objectionable? If so, why?
What links here?
- Plasmon's comment on LW Women- Minimizing the Inferential Distance by daenerys (25 Nov 2012 13:57 UTC; 8 points)

Daniel_Burfoot 21 Apr 2009 6:59 UTC
32 points
on: The ideas you’re not ready to post
The Dilbert Challenge: you are working in a company in the world of Dilbert. Your pointy-haired boss comes to you with the following demand:

“One year from today, our most important customer will deliver us a request for a high-quality reliable software system. Your job and the fate of the company depends on being able to develop and deploy that software system within two weeks of receipt of the specifications. Unfortunately we don’t currently know any of the requirements. Get started now.”

I submit that this preposterous demand is really a deep intellectual challenge, the basic form of which arises in many different endeavors. For example, it’s reasonable to believe that at some point in the future, humanity will face an existential threat. Given that we will not know the exact nature of that threat until it’s almost upon us, how can we prepare for it today?

Daniel_Burfoot 4 Dec 2011 0:23 UTC
31 points
on: Rationality Quotes December 2011
In the early 1970′s it cost $7 to buy a share in [Warren Buffett’s] company, and that same share is worth $4,900 today… That makes Buffett a wonderful investor. What makes him the greatest investor of all time is that during a certain period when he thought stocks were grossly overpriced, he sold everything and returned all the money to his partners at a sizable profit to them. The voluntary returning of money that others would gladly pay you to continue to manage is, in my experience, unique in the history of finance.
- Peter Lynch, “One Up on Wall Street”

Daniel_Burfoot 1 Sep 2012 15:57 UTC
29 points
on: Rationality Quotes September 2012
It is now clear to us what, in the year 1812, was the cause of the destruction of the French army. No one will dispute that the cause of the destruction of Napoleon’s French forces was, on the one hand, their advance late in the year, without preparations for a winter march, into the depths of Russia, and, on the other hand, the character that the war took on with the burning of Russian towns and the hatred of the foe aroused in the Russian people. But then not only did no one foresee (what now seems obvious) that this was the only way that could lead to the destruction of an army of eight hundred thousand men, the best in the world and led by the best generals, in conflict with a twice weaker Russian army, inexperienced and led by inexperienced generals; not only did no one foresee this, but all efforts on the part of the Russians were constantly aimed at hindering the one thing that could save Russia, and, on the part of the French, despite Napoleon’s experience and so-called military genius, all efforts were aimed at extending as far as Moscow by the end of summer, that is, at doing the very thing that was to destroy them.
- Leo Tolstoy, “War and Peace”, trans. Pevear and Volokhonsky

Daniel_Burfoot 21 Sep 2015 17:10 UTC
28 points
in reply to: Torgo’s comment on: Open thread, Sep. 21 - Sep. 27, 2015

the two major political parties in the US (...) people think is most likely to reduce existential risk

No comment on the main question, but if you really care about an issue you should try like hell to prevent it from becoming a wedge issue. There’s no longer any meaningful discussion of AGW in the US, because it’s now a wedge issue. Even if you observe a huge correlation between political tribal affiliation and getting the “right answer”, you should never point this out. Once people start to absorb their position on a topic into their self-image, they will never change their minds about it.

Daniel_Burfoot 22 Oct 2011 1:43 UTC
28 points
on: Things you are supposed to like
Phil, I’ll remind you of your own comment:

Incommensurate thoughts: People with different life-experiences are literally incapable of understanding each other...

Analogy: Take some problem domain in which each data point is a 500-dimensional vector. Take a big set of 500D vectors and apply PCA to them to get a new reduced space of 25 dimensions. Store all data in the 25D space, and operate on it in that space.

Two programs exposed to different sets of 500D vectors, which differ in a biased way, will construct different basic vectors during PCA, and so will reduce all vectors in the future into a different 25D space.

In just this way, two people with life experiences that differ in a biased way (due to eg socioeconomic status, country of birth, culture) will construct different underlying compression schemes. You can give them each a text with the same words in it, but the representations that each constructs internally are incommensurate; they exist in different spaces, which introduce different errors.

It seems entirely plausible that a person’s appreciation of a piece of music depends strongly on all the music to which she’s previously been exposed. Two different observers with different music-histories may have very different internal representations of the same piece of new music. A given piece of music may be well-formed or high quality in one representation, but not another.

Daniel_Burfoot 23 May 2010 1:23 UTC
28 points
in reply to: Kevin’s comment on: To signal effectively, use a non-human, non-stoppable enforcer
Eliezer’s point is not that a paperclip maximizer is bad for the universe, it’s that a superintelligent AGI paperclip maximizer is bad for the universe. Clippy’s views here seem actually more similar to Robin’s ideas that there is no reason for beings with radically divergent value systems not to live happily together and negotiate through trade.

Daniel_Burfoot 4 Dec 2011 0:06 UTC
27 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Rationality Quotes December 2011

For your precious sake, once I thought I could die.

It took me a long time to figure out this poem isn’t about a recovering alcoholic.

Daniel_Burfoot 8 Oct 2012 13:21 UTC
26 points
on: Firewalling the Optimal from the Rational

One person who resisted Ronald was Ayn Rand. As one of the young libertarians (Ronald’s friend Murray Rothbard was another) who were invited to her apartment for intellectual discussions, he was cast into oblivion after a difference of opinion about . . . Rachmaninoff. Guests were asked to say who their favorite composers were, and when Rand’s turn came, she said “Rachmaninoff,” with specific reference to his second piano concerto. “Why?” Ronald asked. “Because he was the most rational,” Rand responded. At which Ronald laughed, thinking it must be a joke. He knew that the composer had dedicated that concerto to his psychiatrist — and anyway, rationality had nothing to do with its greatness. But Ronald’s laughter resulted in exile, and the loss of friends who were dear to him.

From an obituary for Ronald Hamowy.
What links here?
- MTGandP's comment on Firewalling the Optimal from the Rational by Eliezer Yudkowsky (1 Nov 2012 20:53 UTC; 0 points)

Link: The Case for Working With Your Hands

Daniel_Burfoot28 May 2009 14:16 UTC

25 points

12 comments1 min readLW link

Daniel_Burfoot 27 Jun 2013 20:58 UTC
25 points
on: Public Service Announcement Collection

don’t buy gold when they tell you to

Don’t buy X when “they” tell you to is good advice for a wide variety of X.

Daniel_Burfoot 3 Aug 2011 3:30 UTC
25 points
on: Rationality Quotes August 2011

It was only toward the middle of the twentieth century that the inhabitants of many European countries came, in general unpleasantly, to the realization that their fate could be influenced directly by intricate and abstruse books of philosophy.

-Czeslaw Milosz, “The Captive Mind” (first sentence)

Daniel_Burfoot 17 Jan 2015 20:16 UTC
24 points
on: … And Everyone Loses Their Minds

in the USA you’re four times more likely to be struck by thunder than by terrorists

Our minds are actually picking up on a valid statistical issue here, which is that the number of people killed by terrorists is much more variable than the number of people killed by lightning. Since lightning strikes are almost completely uncorrelated random events, the distribution of deaths by lightning is governed by the Central Limit Theorem and so is nearly Gaussian. If X people died from lightning in 2014, then it is very unlikely that 2X people will die from lightning in 2015, and astronomically unlikely that 100X people will so die.

In contrast, if X people die from terrorism in 2014, you cannot deduce very much about the probability that 100X people will die from terrorism in 2015. Nassim Taleb would say that lightning deaths happen in Mediocristan while terrorism deaths happen in Extremistan.

Daniel_Burfoot

Link: The Case for Work­ing With Your Hands

Link: The Case for Working With Your Hands