Submitted, answering almost all questions.
The hardest question was choosing a single favorite LW post.
Also, I wasn’t sure if Worm should count as more than one book. (It didn’t end up mattering.)
A scanner + Photoshop makes it significantly easier to measure digit ratios.
Taken, answering all of the questions I was capable of answering. I will be very interested to see the results on some of the new questions. (The shifts on existing questions could also be interesting, but I don’t expect much to change.)
So you might reason, “I’m doing martial arts for the exercise and self-defense benefits… but I could purchase both of those things for less time investment by jogging to work and carrying Mace.” If you listened to your emotional reaction to that proposal, however, you might notice you still feel sad about giving up martial arts even if you were getting the same amount of exercise and self-defense benefits somehow else.
Which probably means you’ve got other reasons for doing martial arts that you haven’t yet explicitly acknowledged—for example, maybe you just think it’s cool. If so, that’s important, and deserves a place in your decisionmaking. Listening for those emotional cues that your explicit reasoning has missed something is a crucial step
This is a great example of how human value is complicated. Optimizing for stated or obvious values can miss unstated or subtler values. Before we can figure out how to get what we want, we have to know what we want. I’m glad CFAR is taking this into account.
If you want to know the way nature works, we looked at it, carefully… that’s the way it looks! You don’t like it… go somewhere else! To another universe! Where the rules are simpler, philosophically more pleasing, more psychologically easy. I can’t help it! OK! If I’m going to tell you honestly what the world looks like to the human beings who have struggled as hard as they can to understand it, I can only tell you what it looks like. And I cannot make it any simpler, I’m not going to do this, I’m not going to simplify it, and I’m not going to fake it. I’m not going to tell you it’s something like a ball bearing inside a spring, it isn’t. So I’m going to tell you what it really is like, and if you don’t like it, that’s too bad.
— Richard Feynman, the QED Lectures at the University of Auckland
But if you look at the average person and ask why they aren’t getting what they want, very rarely do you conclude the issue is that they’re suffering from anchoring, framing effects, the planning fallacy, commitment bias, or any of the other stuff in the sequences.
I very often conclude that people are suffering from the planning fallacy.
I think Quirrell would believe that seeing one’s best friend imprisoned/subjugated/otherwise punished unfairly would have more of an effect than a book, even on Harry. I think he would be right, too.
It turns out, after a few minutes’ contemplation, there was a previous discussion between Quirrell and Harry lurking in the background of this thought. From Chapter 60, The Stanford Prison Experiment, Pt 10: (emphasis added)
There was a pause at this. Then the boy said, “Professor, I have to ask, when you see something all dark and gloomy, doesn’t it ever occur to you to try and improve it somehow? Like, yes, something goes terribly wrong in people’s heads that makes them think it’s great to torture criminals, but that doesn’t mean they’re truly evil inside; and maybe if you taught them the right things, showed them what they were doing wrong, you could change—”
Professor Quirrell laughed, then, and not with the emptiness of before. “Ah, Mr. Potter, sometimes I do forget how very young you are. Sooner you could change the color of the sky.” Another chuckle, this one colder. “And the reason it is easy for you to forgive such fools and think well of them, Mr. Potter, is that you yourself have not been sorely hurt. You will think less fondly of commonplace idiots after the first time their folly costs you something dear. Such as a hundred Galleons from your own pocket, perhaps, rather than the agonizing deaths of a hundred strangers.”
Harry didn’t need a friend in Azkaban to be horrified at it, but visiting it had much more of an impact on him than just hearing about it.
Complex problems have simple, easy to understand wrong answers.
— Grossman’s Law
“If the wonder’s gone when the truth is known, there never was any wonder.” — Gregory House, M.D. (“House” Season 4, Episode 8 “You Don’t Want to Know,” written by Sara Hess)
Rule 34:
The coherent extrapolated volition of humanity includes a term for the set of all possible fetishes.
“Aaron, you always criticize religious people for adhering to their beliefs… but the beliefs you have about evolution, global warming, or the lack of god are just as passionate as any fundamentalist. How are you any better?”
“There’s one big difference. I know what it would take for me to change my mind.”
— Raymond and Aaron, Calamities of Nature
Add functionality to allow previewing of posts and comments. This would allow people to play with formatting without having to post horrible-looking things and then edit them while others might be reading and responding.
Justice is finally served.
Took it. Yvain is a gentleman and a scholar for putting so much time and effort into this.
Just a few comments:
It could be a little clearer that the Calibration IQ question in Section 8 should only be answered by those people who reported an IQ in Section 5.
A GRE score question (as I requested in what is currently the fifth-most-upvoted top-level comment in the survey critiques thread) would have been nice. It was cool to see the Political Compass, AQ test, and iqtest.dk on there, though.