I’d just like to say I really admire the level of organization and coordination displayed here. It increases my confidence in MIRI and makes me more likely to donate. Congratulations Malo!
Dias
I recently asked about the ethics of writing articles explaining how people applied the dark arts in practice. Hopefully, such an article would help people resist those dishonest approaches more than it would aid people in employing them.
So here you go: How to Pitch a Growth Stock: Cognitive Bias Edition. I’m not sure of what LW thinks about cross-posting in general, so here is just a highlight:
The key principle here is the conservation of conservativeness. You want an estimate for them that is both very large and sounds conservative. To do this, you take advantage of scope insensitivity and arbitrage between the TAM stage and the company-specific stage. By making the company-specific stages (market share, profit margin, valuation) sufficiently conservative sounding, you can get away with an aggressive TAM [Total Addressable Market] estimate while keeping the whole thing sounding conservative. Scope-insensitivity means you can increase the TAM estimate at a lower cost of conservativeness than you can the company-specific elements, so there are gains from trade.
So once you’ve multiplied your TAM, market share, profit margin and valuation, you come up with an estimate for what this company could be worth in the future. However, you now deny that this is an estimate. Instead, it’s just an idea of the size of the market – you don’t actually expect they’ll reach it. This explicit denial protects you against any accusations of over-optimism, but you’ve successfully primed your audience on a really high number. If market sentiment is a battle between greed and fear, you’ve helped the greed side.
And a crucial subtlety – that valuation that you didn’t make is what the stock might be worth in the future. Because of the time value of money, you would need to discount that back to get to a current valuation. Since it credibly might take 10 years for the market to mature, even with a moderate 10% discount rate your valuation should really take a 61% hit. But by denying it was a valuation, you’ve avoided this step.
What is an epistemic root system, and how can they be dense?
Both respondents give many examples of people being treated very badly/treating others very badly, but it’s not clear what this has to do with misogyny. Just because you’re looking for a pattern and see a bunch of examples that fit the pattern doesn’t mean the pattern had any causal influence. Yes, in these cases they were men being mean to women (except with the grandmother beating up the brother). But if we were on the lookout for men being abusive to other men we’d also have many examples (rather more, according to my copy of Male Violence, ed. John Archer, 2001). Even if men being mean to women say misogynistic things, this doesn’t show they’re doing those actions because they are misogynistic, rather than just matching their rhetoric post hoc to their actions.
Lord Kelvin was wrong but was he pessimistic? He wasn’t saying we could never know the answer, or visit the sun, or anything like that. Yes, he guessed wrongly, and too low, but it doesn’t seem to be the case that ‘underestimating a quantity’ is pessimism. If nothing else, the quantity might be ‘number of babies killed’.
Interesting post.
However, I am sceptical about 9. Many ideas have swept the world though their sheer superiority. Here are some examples from a wide variety of domains:
Limited liability corporations
Sushi
Use of benchmarks (e.g. S&P500) in finance
Washing Machines
Outside of politics, things frequently do succeed purely because they are better. Only in politics does “people don’t like my idea? Better threaten to shoot them” sound like a natural result.
In a small attempt to help, I cross-post all my high-quality LW-relivant posts to LW.
I don’t think MIRI has any reason to take you up on this offer, as responding in this way would elevate the status of your writings. High status entities do not need to respond specifically to low status entities, and when they do, it will be obliquely and non-specifically addressed to the broader class which contains the specific low-status entity. Additionally, it would look mean-spirited to try to ‘kick someone while their down’, especially as this post in some ways resembles a call for a truce. As such, it would be a mistake for MIRI to accept your offer, even before taking into account the resources that would be required. If I was MIRI I would totally ignore this.
Given this, either you have failed to understand what apologizing actually consists in, or are still (perhaps subconsciously) trying to undermine MIRI. At the moment all you offer is the implication that you would continue your disruption were it not for the toll it has taken on your health. Contrition would demand at least a genuine apology—something like “I am sorry for acting badly”—if not actively working to undo the harm you have done.
Fortunately, I think you overestimate the impact you had. Probably your biggest effect was wasting everyone’s time.
Have some third party (or several) that LW would trust hold on to it in secrect.
Nitpick: cryptography solves this much more neatly.
Of course, people could accuse you of having an efficient way of factorising numbers, but if you do karma is going to be the least of anyone’s concerns.
repeat, as I posted at the end of the last Open Thread, probably too late in its life for comments.
I’m planning on running an experiment to test the effects of Modafinil on myself. My plan is to use a three armed study:
Modafinil (probably 50mg as I am quite small)
B12 pill (as active control) or maybe Vitamin D
Passive Control (no placebo)
Each day I will randomly take one of the three options and perform some test. I was thinking of dual-n-back, but do people have any other suggestions?
pick-pocketing
If you add “socially useful” or “not immoral” obviously this is excluded.
rationalists should be more comfortable with lying (at least by omission).
I agree; believing p doesn’t mean you have to tell everyone that p. However, this is made more difficult when other people in the car go around saying “not p, not p!” a lot.
I suppose you could attempt a meta-level argument against the social norm against saying “p”, but this is unlikely to be effective against the worry that just saying “p” is bayesian evidence you’re an evil person.
Suppose I was an unusual moral, unusually insightful used car saleswoman. I have studied the dishonest sales techniques my colleagues use, and because I am unusually wise, worked out the general principles behind them. I think it is plausible that this analysis is new, though I guess it could already exist in an obscure journal.
Is it moral of me to publish this research, or should I practice the virtue of silence?
It might help people resist such techniques.
It might help salesmen employ these immoral techniques better.
Salesmen are more likely to already understand much of the content—vulnerable outsiders would have more to learn
Salesmen are more incentivized to learn from my analysis.
It is quite interesting to read as a purely abstract matter.
I like producing and sharing interesting research.
Obviously the dishonest car salesman is just an example so don’t get too tied up on the efficiency of the second hand car market.
- 4 Nov 2014 0:21 UTC; 20 points) 's comment on Open thread, Nov. 3 - Nov. 9, 2014 by (
1) The study shows that being male is being treated as evidence of being a good applicant. Regardless of the virtues of doing so, it’s not the same as hating women, nor as “apologetics of abusing females”, which is how the second respondent defined it.
2) I was, perhaps unclearly, referring to their examples. The purpose of these threads isn’t (as far as I was aware) for LW women to bring up articles from the literature, it was to share our experiences. I was pointing out that these respondents had perhaps mis-characterised their experiences.
What does it mean to be female? It has to be something such that babies, animals and people in tribal cultures can be classified as female or not. Lets call this property, that baby girls, hens and women in hunter-gatherer tribes share, and baby boys etc. do not, property P. People who identify as female are presumably claiming they have property P, and presumably think this is a substantive claim.
Now, could P be something such that merely believing you had property P, made you have property P? Certainly there are some properties like this:
X has P if and only if ( X has two x chromosomes OR X believes ( X has property P ) )
but I think this is clearly unsatisfactory. For example, it would mean that an ordinary young boy who, upon being taught about gender for the first time, was momentarily mistaken and thought he was female, would instantly become female. And it would mean that transwomen were asserting a disjunction of a falsehood and a weird recursive clause.
There are social-role based alternatives, along the lines of
X has P if and only if ( X wishes to be treated in the typical manner of people with property P )
but this doesn’t work for Tomboys, who wish to be treated broadly like boys but are nonetheless definitely girls. Nor does it work for extreme feminists, who do not wish women (including themselves) to be treated in the typical way women are treated.
Now, whether believing something is sufficient to make it true is of course a separate issue from what is politically prudent of you to say. My guess is that your students would ask you this question have a few motivations:
If you say that the map is not the territory, they can safely reject you as an outdated and uncaring reactionary, and will reject what you say on other subjects.
If you say that believing things makes them true, they can say “even our ultra-conservative republican lecturer agrees”.
My advice to you is to say ‘mu’. Ask your students what they mean by female, or why they are asking. Then you can respond in the correct manner according to their definition, pointing out that if they don’t like the answer, maybe they didn’t really mean that definition.
Regression to the Mean