Yeah. A bit tongue in cheek, utility is to utilon as sin is to sin-on.
It’s like a very immature concept in my head and I’m still trying to map out what’s hiding in there, but it seems useful to me at the moment to figure out what a sin-on is made of and figure out order-of-magnitude type detail about things, as a way of trying to make reasonably consistent choices.
Very much agree. The altruistic version of being a vegetarian warrior maybe looks like developing some fiendish scheme to make meat unpalatable to humans on a large scale. My reason for change is basically just that I recognized this conflict between my thinking and my behavior and it looked fairly, like, hypocritical to me.
Thanks for the helpful links!
Retracted on the basis that I had not read the original thread and I almost certainly misunderstood the underlying question.
Well, your CI does change for the coin, if you observe strange artifacts of construction, or if the tosser has read Jaynes (who describes a way to cheat at coin tossing), or if the coin shows significant bias after lots of tries.
If you doubt this last bit, try a calibration app and look at one of your estimation buckets and ask yourself the same question: is my 70% bucket miscallibrated, or is this an effect of Tyche?
Your example constrains the evidence on the coin, by the convention that is attached to coin metaphors.
The less crappy response is that I like your attempt at illustrating the effects of prior distributions and general uncertainty, and that you should try another variation and see if it works better.
I’ve recently reconciled my behavior with my ethical intuition regarding eating animals, by way of deciding to alter my behavior and do some variation of “don’t eat meat”. I decided on this question long ago but did not act upon it.
I notice that there is very confusing information out there about what one should eat in order to avoid negative health impacts, and would like to read correct and useful articles on the subject, because I strongly desire to not be unhealthy. Do you have suggestions?
I am pragmatic. My intuition says that bone ash used to color certain food products has a relatively low cost (in sin-ons), and that there definitely are places I will make trades against sin-ons.
I also recognize that I would like a reasonably fast process to estimate sin-ons, and suggestions about highly impactful considerations (metabolic efficiency, things that might put various horrors on understandable scales) would be appreciated. Also, I am not sure that sin-ons is the word I am looking for as a measure of this sort of badness.
I have checked with my brain, and my brain has decided that cuteness does not particularly matter to it as a factor. Horse sashimi is delicious.
If you have things to say in favor of eating meat, please share them, and explain it to me as if I am a precocious 8 year old.
Care to share some hypothetical examples of irritating uses of the B word?
So, specifically with respect to “cult’ and “elitist” observations I see, in general, I would like to offer a single observation:
“Tsuyoku naritai” isn’t the motto of someone trying to conform to some sort of weird group norm. It’s not the motto of someone who hates people who have put in less time or effort than himself. It’s the recognition that it is possible to improve, and the estimation that improving is a worthwhile investment.
If your motivation for putting intellectual horsepower into this site isn’t that, I’d love to hear about it, because that previous phrase really resonates with me, and while I can imagine other motivations for being on a site with forums and stuff, I have a hard time thinking that anyone would go grab a copy of Jaynes merely because they wanted to blend in better.
Art of Rationality” is an oxymoron. Art follows (subjective) aesthetic principles; rationality follows (objective) evidence.
Art in the other sense of the word. Think more along the lines of skills and practices.
My guess is that the site is “probably helping people who are trying to improve”, because I would expect some of the materials here to help. I have certainly found a number of materials useful.
But a personal judgement probably helping” isn’t the kind of thing you’d want. It’d be much better to find some way to measure the size of the effect. Not tracking your progress is a bad, bad sign.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/ec2/preventing_discussion_from_being_watered_down_by/, and other articles, I now read, because they are pertinent, and I want to know what sorts of work have been done to figure out how LW is perceived and why.
My apologies, I thought you we referring to how people who do not use this site perceive people using the site, which seemed more likely to be what you were trying to communicate than the alternative.
Yes, the site viewed as a machine does not look like a well-designed rational-people-factory to me, either, unless I’ve missed the part where it’s comparing its output to its input to see how it is performing. People do, however, note cognitive biases and what efforts to work against them have produced, from time to time, and there are other signs that seem consistent with a well-intentioned rational-people-factory.
And, no, not every criticism does. I can only speak for myself, and acknowledge that I have a number of times in the past failed to understand what someone was saying and assumed they were being dumb or somewhat crazy as a result. I sincerely doubt that’s a unique experience.
I don’t know that there is anything to do, or that should be done, about that outside-view problem. Understanding why people think you’re being elitist or crazy doesn’t necessarily help you avoid the label.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/kg/expecting_short_inferential_distances/
There are many calibration tests you can take (there are many articles on this site with links to see if you are over-or-underconfident on various subject tests—search for calibration).
What I don’t know is if there has been some effort to do this across many questions, and compile the results anonymously for LWers.
I caution against jumping quickly to conclusions about “signalling”. Frankly, I suspect you are wrong, and that most of the people here are in fact trying. Some might not be, and are merely looking for sparring matches. Those people are still learning things (albeit perhaps with less efficiency).
As far as “seeming clever”, perhaps as a community it makes sense to advocate people take reasoning tests which do not strongly correlate with IQ, and that people generally do quite poorly on (I’m sure someone has a list, though it may be a relatively short list of tasks), which might have the effect of helping people to see stupid as part of the human condition, and not merely a feature of “non-high-IQ” humans.
Reading something and understanding/implementing it are not quite the same thing. It takes clock time and real effort to change your behavior.
I do not think it is unexpected that a large portion of the population on a site dedicated to writing, teaching, and discussing the skills of rationality is going to be, you know, still very early in the learning, and that some people will have failed to grasp a lesson they think they have grasped, and that others will think others have failed to grasp a lesson that they have failed to grasp, and that you will have people who just like to watch stuff burn.
I’m sure it’s been asked elsewhere, and I liked the estimation questions on the 2013 survey; has there been a more concerted effort to see what being an experienced LWer translates to, in terms of performance on various tasks that, in theory, people using this site are trying to get better at?
I only just understood this reply today. Thank you. (Edit: by which I mean, there are related lessons I learned today)
If considering a new hypothesis fundamentally changes the way you think about priors, and the arguments you used to justify ratios between hypotheses no longer hold, then, yes, you will have to look at the evidence again.
I feel a little odd about calling that process ‘updating’, since I think it’s a little more involved than taking into account a single new piece of evidence.
I’m not familiar with Kim’s touch game, but I did run across a different game that someone came up with to practice applying Bayes theorem, which involved touching people in the shoulder with one of two objects (in the example, it was a coat-hanger, if memory serves), and then testing their ability to update their predictions based on more information about the object they were touched with. I wish I could find that page again, but I haven’t been able to find it again. It might have even been linked off of a LessWrong meetup group.
I’m less concerned with getting people to apply Bayes theorem (which would be GREAT, mind) than I am with getting people to be more comfortable with collecting information, sharing observations, and not getting fixated on personal theories. I’d especially like them to get comfortable with making the jump to making reasoned predictions about hidden properties of objects, given their theories about what an object is, but I’d like to find a way to make that process at least as fun as shaking a box to determine its contents.
The first game was just a deck of cards and a cardboard box large enough to allow the object to be flipped (though one type of flip was not possible in certain orientations). The players were all adults and I consider them to be quite astute; I expect that children could also play, and it could be a useful lesson about how to not get fixated on your own ideas, how to incorporate observations from others, and how to share observations constructively.
The idea came up in a discussion with a friend about how terrible our science classes had been as children, and how learning individual facts was not particularly useful.
Well, hence “historical Jesus”. If I were talking about Jesus mythicists, I would have said that. I ignorantly assume there aren’t that many Jesus mythicist camps fighting each other out over specific theories of mythicism...
I’m actually looking forward to Richard Carrier’s book on that, but I do not expect it to decide mythicism.
Depends on your definition of crackpots. I don’t think most Jesus scholars are crackpots, just most likely overly credulous of their favored theories.
What I’m curious about is if people in these fields that are starved for really decisive evidence still feel compelled to name a >50% confidence theory, or if they are comfortable with the notion that their most-favored hypothesis indicated by the evidence is still probably wrong, and just comparatively much better than the other hypotheses that they have considered.
I think salmon is meat, but it might be one of the less bad things (don’t know), and this is something I’ll deliberately examine if it solves some health stuff.