David_J_Balan

Karma: 274

A Valuable Asset in Your Intellectual Portfolio is Not the Same as a Good Guide

David_J_Balan21 Aug 2011 21:29 UTC

7 points

8 comments1 min readLW link

David_J_Balan 21 Aug 2011 18:44 UTC
0 points
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: A Valuable Asset in Your Intellectual Portfolio is Not the Same as a Good Guide
The point is that these are two very different kinds of valuable advisers, but the distinction is often missed.

And while I do think in real life there is something of a dichotomy between “people whose final judgment I trust on questions like X,” and “people whose final judgment I don’t trust but who I still want to hear what they have to say,” I think a similar point could be made with more than two categories.

David_J_Balan 21 Aug 2011 17:57 UTC
9 points
on: Why We Can’t Take Expected Value Estimates Literally (Even When They’re Unbiased)
I think other commenters have had a similar idea, but here’s one way to say it.

It seems to me that the proposition you are attacking is not exactly the one you think you are attacking. I think you think you are attacking the proposition “charitable donations should be directed to the highest EV use, regardless of the uncertainty around the EV, as long as the EV estimate is unbiased,” when the proposition you are really attacking is “the analysis generating some of these very uncertain, but very high EV effect estimates is flawed, and the true EVs are in fact a great deal lower than those people claim.”

The question of whether we should always be risk neutral with respect to the number of lives saved by charity is an interesting and difficult one (one that I would be interested to know what Holden thinks about). But this post is not about that difficult philosophical question, but simply about the technical question of whether the EV estimates that various people are basing themselves on are any good.

David_J_Balan 21 Aug 2011 17:37 UTC
1 point
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: A Valuable Asset in Your Intellectual Portfolio is Not the Same as a Good Guide
I take your point to be that I have taken something that is really a matter of degree “how much weight should I give to the opinion of this or that person?” and turned it into something dichotomous “is this person a good guide for me or not?” Here is my response.

Let’s start by imagining that you can only hear the final opinions of the different advisers, and cannot discuss with them their arguments or evidence relating to the different elements of the question. In that case, the final opinion of anyone who has a valuable insight into any element of the question ought, all else equal, to move the needle for you at least a little bit. But it may be only a very little bit, and it can perfectly well be zero. In the Chicago School example, there are categories of firm conduct that Chicago people think should basically always be permitted, but that people like me think should sometimes be permitted and sometimes not. In those cases, merely knowing the final opinion of a Chicago person about a particular variety of conduct helps me not at all. Another way to get from “X’s opinion should move you a very little bit” to “X’s opinion should move you not at all” by throwing in a small fixed cost of the consultation.

But regardless of whether the adviser’s final opinion moves you not at all or a little bit, the point is that there can still be a lot of value in hearing their arguments/evidence on particular points. If there are things that firms do that Chicago people think should always be permitted, but that people like me think should sometimes be permitted and sometimes not, the arguments/evidence of Chicago people on specific elements of the question might be of great value in helping me figure out which ones are which. And so the original point remains: the existence of valuable advisers who are not good guides.

I don’t think this phenomenon is rare at all. I think in economics alone there are many insights in many fields that are now regarded to be extremely valuable for clarifying elements of big questions, but whose originators combined those insights with a great deal of wrongness, arrived at wrong final conclusions, and nevertheless were heeded on the final questions based on their insight into the specific elements.

David_J_Balan 15 Sep 2010 2:53 UTC
2 points
on: Something’s Wrong
Nice. I particularly liked the dig at Rooseveltian machismo. Of course it’s possible to go too far in the opposite direction too. Some related thoughts here.

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/05/doubting_thomas.html

David_J_Balan 15 Sep 2010 2:31 UTC
3 points
on: Intellectual Hipsters and Meta-Contrarianism
There is a neat paper on this by Feltovich, Harbaugh, and To called “Too Cool for School? Signaling and Countersignaling.”

http://www.jstor.org/pss/3087478

David_J_Balan 26 Apr 2010 18:45 UTC
0 points
on: Ureshiku Naritai
Fantastic.

David_J_Balan 26 Apr 2010 18:27 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Alicorn’s comment on: Ureshiku Naritai
A Hassidic Jew was willing to eat pumpkin bread baked in your kitchen?

David_J_Balan 1 Mar 2010 3:54 UTC
0 points
in reply to: David_J_Balan’s comment on: The Last Days of the Singularity Challenge
I see ciphergoth already made my first point. Sorry about that.

David_J_Balan 1 Mar 2010 1:29 UTC
−6 points
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: What is Bayesianism?
I vote for malice with regard to Katrina. It’s not that there were political gains to be had from that particular disaster happening but the then-government decided to let it happen anyway out of malice. It’s that their generally malicious political ideology was on balance a very successful one, but had as one of its weaknesses that it sometimes led to this kind of politically-harmful disaster.

David_J_Balan 1 Mar 2010 1:18 UTC
4 points
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: The Last Days of the Singularity Challenge
Landsburg’s argument is sound, and I mostly follow it and occasionally try to sell others on it. But I can think of one exception, which is if the political power of an organization that you support depends on the number of members it has. So for example I pay membership dues to one organization that is not my main charity because I want them to be able to claim one more member.

And there is one place that I think Landsburg gets it plain wrong. He says*:

To please diverse stockholders, corporations tend to diversify their giving, often through the United Way. For individuals, by contrast, it really is quite impossible to justify that level of diversity. Surely among the hundreds of United Way recipients there are some you consider worthier than others. That means you can target your charity more effectively by bypassing the United Way.

But if you think that the United Way comes tolerably close to sharing your values, but you think that they have better information than you do about relative needs and competencies across different organizations, then it makes perfect sense to donate to them, doesn’t it?

*http://www.slate.com/id/77619/

David_J_Balan 1 Mar 2010 1:03 UTC
0 points
on: “Outside View!” as Conversation-Halter
It’s a bit off topic, but I’ve been meaning to ask Eliezer this for a while. I think I get the basic logic behind “FOOM.” If a brain as smart as ours could evolve from pretty much nothing, then it seems likely that sooner or later (and I have not the slightest idea whether it will be sooner or later) we should be able to use the smarts we have to design a mind that is smarter. And if we can make a mind smarter than ours, it seems likely that that mind should be able to make one smarter than it, and so on. And this process should be pretty explosive, at least for a while, so that in pretty short order the smartest minds around will be way more than a match for us, which is why it’s so important that it be baked into the process from the beginning that it proceed in a way that we will regard as friendly.

But it seems to me that this qualitative argument works equally well whether “explosive” means “box in someone’s basement to Unchallenged Lord and Master of the Universe Forever and Ever” before anyone else knows about it or can do anything about it, or it means “different people/groups will innovate and and borrow/steal each others’ innovations over a period of many years, at the end of which where we end up will depend only a little on the contribution of the people who started the ball rolling.” And if that’s right, doesn’t it follow that what really matters is not the correctness of the FOOM argument (which seems correct to me), but rather the estimate of how big the exponent is in the exponential growth is likely to be? Is this (and much of your disagreement with Robin Hanson) just a disagreement over an estimate of a number? Does that disagreement stand any chance of being anywhere near resolved with available evidence?

David_J_Balan 23 Feb 2010 15:33 UTC
2 points
in reply to: MichaelVassar’s comment on: Babies and Bunnies: A Caution About Evo-Psych
I don’t think I understand. The hypothesis says that we evolved to find human babies cute because people who find babies cute are more likely to take care of them and then they’ll reproduce and propagate those genes. I guess there’s no strong reason why that necessarily means that we have to find human babies cuter than anything else: if the “appreciating cuteness” faculty happened for some random reason to glom extra hard onto bunnies there probably there wouldn’t be any very strong selective pressure against it (though as Alicorn points out, there would probably be some slight pressure). Is that what you mean?

David_J_Balan 23 Feb 2010 4:07 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: Babies and Bunnies: A Caution About Evo-Psych
What does the hypothesis predict?

David_J_Balan 19 Feb 2010 3:31 UTC
4 points
on: Things You Can’t Countersignal
There is a very nice and closely related paper with the excellent title “Too Cool for School? Signaling and Countersignaling,” summarized here:

http://www.zhongwen.com/cs/index.html

Somebody I know once conjectured that this story might not work if there were a continuum of types instead of discrete types. I don’t know if anyone has ever worked that out.

David_J_Balan 18 Feb 2010 18:06 UTC
6 points
in reply to: RobinHanson’s comment on: Hayekian Prediction Markets?
In the original post, I said regarding our sole conversation on the subject that I can reall:

“I asked Robin Hanson about this once at lunch a few years ago, and we had an interesting chat about it, along with some other George Mason folks. I won’t try to summarize everyone’s positions here (I’d feel obligated to ask their permission before I’d even try), but suffice it to say that I don’t think he foreswore the Hayekian idea entirely as an argument in favor of prediction markets.”

Then I added:

“And there is a quote by him here that seems to embrace it. In any case, I’d be interested to know what he thinks about it.”

That sentence had a link to an article that contained the quote in my comment above. Taken all together, does that really strike you as me “attibuting overly strong claims” to you? It sure doesn’t strike me that way. I pointed out that you’ve said some things that seem to lean in a pretty “Hayekian” direction, explicitly acknowledged that I’m not certain to what extent you are making those kinds of claims on behalf of prediction markets (I’m still not), and asking you to clarify. If you think that’s a debating tactic, then you and I have very different ideas of what a debating tactic is.

David_J_Balan 16 Feb 2010 23:53 UTC
2 points
in reply to: RobinHanson’s comment on: Hayekian Prediction Markets?
In the absence of decisive empirical evidence, the amount of credence to give to a particular prediction method (whether absolutely or relative to alternative methods) depends in part on what theoretical claims are being made for it, and on how well-supported those claims are. The articles that I linked to don’t just say that prediction markets do reasonbly well in aggregating information, or that they do better than the alternatives. Rather, they make explicit reference to Hayek’s famous argument which, as I understand it, involves a strong claim of incorporating lots of tiny pieces of information held locally by individuals. And without leaning too hard on a single quote, one of those articles seems to have you agreeing:

Hanson has suggested that prediction markets “can be used to aggregate information from any [italics added] given set of participants.”

I think there is a fairly clear question here of just how strong an absolute “Hayeakian information aggregation” claim you are making.

David_J_Balan 16 Feb 2010 18:57 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Stuart_Armstrong’s comment on: Hayekian Prediction Markets?
The comparison in the post wasn’t between prediction market prices and stock market prices, it was between prediction market prices and ordinary prices for goods and services. I hadn’t thought about it before, but it seems to me that the points made in the post about prediction markets apply to stock markets as well.

Note that this isn’t an argument that prediction markets (or normal stock markets) don’t work. It’s an argument about whether they have this particular “Hayekian” virtue.

David_J_Balan 16 Feb 2010 16:07 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: You’re Entitled to Arguments, But Not (That Particular) Proof
Agreed

David_J_Balan 16 Feb 2010 5:30 UTC
5 points
on: You’re Entitled to Arguments, But Not (That Particular) Proof
The basic point here is a good one, and it’s obviously right as it applies to evolution and very likely to AGW as well, though I know very little about that and rely entirely on the fact of the scientific consensus in forming my opinion. But at the same time it is important to keep in mind that just because someone has worked hard and offered you the best evidence that they could be reasonably expected to muster under current circumstances, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they have come anywhere near proving the case.

David_J_Balan

A Valuable As­set in Your In­tel­lec­tual Port­fo­lio is Not the Same as a Good Guide

A Valuable Asset in Your Intellectual Portfolio is Not the Same as a Good Guide