Jay

Karma: 393

Jay Jun 12, 2022, 11:58 AM
1 point
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in reply to: Vladimir_Nesov’s comment on: The Mountain Troll
To the extent that I understand what you’re saying, you seem to be arguing for curiosity as a means of developing a detailed, mechanistic (“gears-level” in your term) model of reality. I totally support this, especially for the smart kids. I’m just trying to balance it out with some realism and humility. I’ve known too many people who know that their own area of expertise is incredibly complicated but assume that everything they don’t understand is much simpler. In my experience, a lot of projects fail because a problem that was assumed to be simple turned out not to be.

Jay Jun 12, 2022, 12:43 AM
2 points
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in reply to: Vladimir_Nesov’s comment on: The Mountain Troll
I get your point, and I totally agree that answering a child’s questions can help the kid connect the dots while maintaining the kid’s curiosity. As a pedagogical tool, questions are great.
Having said that, most people’s knowledge of most everything outside their specialties is shallow and brittle. The plastic in my toothbrush is probably the subject of more than 10 Ph.D. dissertations, and the forming processes of another 20. This computer I’m typing on is probably north of 10,000. I personally know a fair amount about how the silicon crystals are grown and refined, have a basic understanding of how the chips are fabricated (I’ve done some fabrication myself), know very little about the packaging, assembly, or software, and know how to use the end product at a decent level. I suspect that worldwide my overall knowledge of computers might be in the top 1% (of some hypothetical reasonable measure). I know very little about medicine, agriculture, nuclear physics, meteorology, or any of a thousand other fields.
Realistically, a very smart* person can learn anything but not everything (or even 1% of everything). They can learn anything given enough time, but literally nobody is given enough time. In practice, we have to take a lot of things on faith, and any reasonable education system will have to work within this limit. Ideally, it would also teach kids that experts in other fields are often right even when it would take them several years to learn why.
*There are also average people who can learn anything that isn’t too complicated and below-average people who can’t learn all that much. Don’t blame me; I didn’t do it.

Jay Jun 11, 2022, 9:06 PM
1 point
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in reply to: nim’s comment on: The Mountain Troll
Being honest, for nearly all people nearly all of the time questioning firmly established ideas is a waste of time at best. If you show a child, say, the periodic table (common versions of which have hundreds of facts), the probability that the child’s questioning will lead to a significant new discovery are less that 1 in a billion* and the probability that they will lead to a useless distraction approach 100%. There are large bodies of highly reliable knowledge in the world, and it takes intelligent people many years to understand them well enough to ask the questions that might actually drive progress. And when people who are less intelligent, less knowledgeable, and/or more prone to motivated reasoning are asking the questions, you can get flat earthers, Qanon, etc.
*Based on the guess that we’ve taught the periodic table to at least a billion kids and it’s never happened yet.

Jay Jun 11, 2022, 12:12 PM
5 points
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on: The Mountain Troll
I think a better way to look at it is that frequentist reasoning is appropriate in certain situations and Bayesian reasoning is appropriate in other situations. Very roughly, frequentist reasoning works well for descriptive statistics and Bayesian reasoning works well for inferential statistics. I believe that Bayesian reasoning is appropriate to use in certain kinds of cases with a probability of (1-delta), where 1 represents the probability of something that has been rationally proven to my satisfaction and delta represents the (hopefully small) probability that I am deluded.

Jay May 11, 2022, 11:14 AM
2 points
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on: Crises Don’t Need Your Software
Wars are an especially nasty type of crisis because there’s an enemy. That enemy will probably attempt to use your software for its own ends. In the case of your refugee heatmap idea, given that the Russians are already massacring civilians, that might look like a Russian artillery commander using it to deliberately target refugees. Alternately, they might target incoming buses to prevent the refugees from getting out of the Ukrainian military’s way and make the Ukrainians spend essential resources on feeding and protecting them.

Jay May 11, 2022, 11:02 AM
1 point
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in reply to: Yair Halberstadt’s comment on: Crises Don’t Need Your Software
Does the Russian military even have the tech dependencies that would make them vulnerable to cyber attacks? I think they’re pretty analog.

Jay Mar 22, 2022, 11:13 AM
2 points
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on: Literature Review For Academic Outsiders: What, How, and Why
I spent about 20 years in academic and industrial research, and my firm belief is that almost nobody spends nearly enough time in the library. There have been hundreds of thousands of scientists before you; it is overwhelmingly likely that your hot new idea has been tried before. The hard part is finding it; science is made up of thousands of tiny communities that rarely talk to each other and use divergent terminology. But if you do the digging, you may find a paper from Egypt in 1983 that describes exactly why your project isn’t working (real example). Finding that paper two weeks into the project is much better than finding it five years later.

Jay Mar 15, 2022, 10:39 PM
1 point
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in reply to: superads91’s comment on: What’s, in your opinion, the real reason for this war?
The US has at least 16 intelligence agencies, but we still went into Iraq.
Oddly, it’s probably easier for Putin to get credible information about Ukraine’s military than about his own. Fewer people have an interest in lying to him about Ukraine.

Jay Mar 14, 2022, 11:13 PM
3 points
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on: What’s, in your opinion, the real reason for this war?
Richard Hanania’s Public Choice Theory and the Illusion of Grand Strategy is worth reading on this general topic, although it’s mostly about the Iraq war.
He doesn’t use these words (that I recall, and I’m only partway through), but the behavior of states is less like rationality and more like autism. What I mean is that states act on internal motivations that are only very weakly coupled to the objective strategic reality.
Putin probably didn’t have access to reliable information about the capabilities of his military vs. Ukraine’s military. How could he? What General would dare tell the Tsar that the Russian army sucks? Who would dare tell the General? I’m sure the soldiers and junior officers knew they had problems, but probably had little idea how their capabilities compared to the Ukrainians’ capabilities.
On the other hand, Putin probably knows as much as anyone about the highest ranks of Russian politics. He sees those people all day, and it’s almost inevitable that they constitute the community that matters to him.

Jay Jan 5, 2022, 12:23 AM
1 point
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in reply to: Pattern’s comment on: How an alien theory of mind might be unlearnable
Re aliens—Fair enough. Some very simple alien, perhaps the Vulcan equivalent of a flatworm, may be well within our capability to understand. Is that really what we’re interested in?
Re machine learning—The data for machine learning is generally some huge corpus. The question is whether we’re even capable of understanding the data in something like the manner the algorithm does. My intuition says no, but it’s an open question.

Jay Jan 4, 2022, 11:53 AM
5 points
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on: How an alien theory of mind might be unlearnable
I’d like to add two pieces of evidence in favor of the weak unlearnability hypothesis:
(1) Humpback whales have songs that can go on for days. Despite decades of study, we don’t really understand what they’re saying.
(2) The output of machine learning algorithms (e.g. Google’s Deep Dream) can be exceedingly counterintuitive to humans.
Whales are our distant cousins and humans created machine learning. We might reasonably suppose that actual aliens, with several billion years of completely independent evolution, might be much harder to understand.

Jay Dec 1, 2021, 11:44 AM
1 point
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in reply to: patrissimo’s comment on: Memetic Hazards in Videogames
We actually do pretty much the opposite of that in the U.S. Student loans have a Federal guarantee, so the incentive is to sign people up for as much education as possible. If they succeed, great. If they fail, they’ll be paying off the loans until they die at which time Uncle Sam will pay the balance. With compounding interest, the ones who fail are the most profitable.

Jay Nov 29, 2021, 11:56 AM
5 points
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on: Why Study Physics?
we don’t have a step-by-step checklist to follow in order to use informal mathematical arguments
If we did, the checklist would define a form and the mathematical arguments would become formal.
Terrence Tao uses the term post-rigorous to describe the sort of argument you’re talking about. It’s one of three stages. In the pre-rigorous stage, concepts are fuzzy and expressed inexactly. In the rigorous stage, concepts are precisely defined in a formal manner. In the post-rigorous stage, concepts are expressed in a fuzzy and inexact way for the sake of efficiency by people who understand them on a rigorous level; key details can be expressed as rigorously as necessary but the irrelevant details of a full proof are omitted.

Jay Nov 29, 2021, 11:42 AM
3 points
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in reply to: Adele Lopez’s comment on: Why Study Physics?
the current generation of physicists seems to have lost the way in some important (but hard to pin down) sense
My impression of physics (1) post-1970-or-so is that it’s lost the balance between theory and experiment that makes science productive. Hypotheses like “superstring theory” or “dark matter” are extremely difficult to test by experiment (through no fault of the physicists’ own). Physicists have tried to to make up for it with improvements in theory, but without experiments bringing discipline to the process it doesn’t quite work.
In one sense, this is good news. Physicists have reached the point where it is extremely difficult to observe a physical phenomenon they can’t predict, which is very similar to saying the project is almost complete.
(1) Here I’m speaking mostly of particle physics. Condensed-matter physics has been much more successful over the past 50 years or so. Other disciplines may vary.

Jay Nov 18, 2021, 11:30 AM
0 points
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on: Why I am no longer driven
I think most of this is just aging, and is normal. I associate that “challenge the world as hard as you can” mentality with testosterone and with teenage boys (who are very high in testosterone). It’s a good mindset to have when you’re starting out and need to make a place for yourself in the world.
At 29, you have (hopefully) established yourself a bit but are still young enough to be attractive to women. Your instincts are probably telling you (through the medium of lowered testosterone) that it’s time to settle down and raise some kids. Circle of life and all that.

Jay Nov 7, 2021, 2:21 PM
3 points
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in reply to: Mahdi Complex’s comment on: Has LessWrong Been Mind-Killed on the Topic of God and Religion?
I should mention that, like many people who were raised religious and lost their faith, I miss it. It was comforting to believe that the world was in good hands and that it all could work out in the end. I had friends at church. Many of them were attractive females.
Losing my religion felt less like an act of will and more like figuring out the answer to a math problem. It wasn’t something I wanted, rather the opposite. I fought it for a while, but there’s no cure for enlightenment. I’ve tried to go back to church, but it just doesn’t work when you don’t believe in it. I no longer see God there, just some schmuck wearing felt.

Jay Nov 7, 2021, 12:59 AM
1 point
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in reply to: Mahdi Complex’s comment on: Has LessWrong Been Mind-Killed on the Topic of God and Religion?
I guess this can take a pretty nasty and irrational form, but I see this continuous with other benign community bonding rituals and pro-social behavior (like Petrov day or the solstice).
I agree, I just think that community bonding rituals have such a strong tendency to lead to ingroup-vs-outgroup conflicts that I am much more skeptical of the whole idea than you seem to be.
Part of this is my perception that generally neither group is entirely right about every issue, and therefore no group I pick will have my wholehearted support. This is acceptable; compromise on less crucial matters is often the price of working toward your most important goals. Having said that, I think it’s important to remember what your important goals are and to periodically ask yourself whether the gains are still worth the compromises. Durkheimian worship is rather directly contrary to this sort of cost-benefit analysis.
Or it could just be that I’m Aspergian, and my normal modes of thinking are highly anti-correlated with religion.

Jay Nov 6, 2021, 5:17 PM
6 points
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on: Has LessWrong Been Mind-Killed on the Topic of God and Religion?
I think most people on LW fall into one of two groups:
- People who were raised in the urban liberal milleu. Religion simply isn’t part of their worldview; their attitude toward it is not even unbelief. For them going to church is like raising alpacas; they are aware that some people do it but they don’t see much value in it, it doesn’t fit into their lifestyles, and it would take a rather long intellectual journey to convince them to do it themselves.
- People who, like me, were raised around religion. As LWers are generally thoughtful people, we have generally considered religion to our satisfaction many years ago. Each of us had a particular journey but I suspect my conclusions are, if not typical, then not highly atypical either:
  - My understanding of neuroscience has convinced me that consciousness is fundamentally dependent on the brain. I don’t believe in an afterlife (cryogenics and mind-uploading ideas notwithstanding).
  - Since I do not expect to face divine judgement, I am not greatly concerned about the existence or nonexistence of God. I think of theology as much like an ant trying to understand presidential politics. Understanding is highly unlikely and the ant has better things to do.
  - The Durkheimian “society worshiping itself” phenomenon is real, common, and by no means limited to religion as traditionally defined. It is often wildly irrational and is pretty much the opposite of what LW aspires to.
If you’re trying to reach the first group, I would recommend trying to bring them into contact with organized religion via some sort of common interest (probably effective altruism). The second group is generally going to be much harder to reach.

Jay Nov 3, 2021, 10:57 AM
8 points
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on: [Book Review] “The Bell Curve” by Charles Murray
Just for context, I’d like to point out that the SAT has been revised and renormed since 1994 (twice IIRC). Current test scores are not straightforwardly comparable to the scores discussed in the book and in the post.

Jay Oct 25, 2021, 10:38 AM
15 points
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on: Postmodern Warfare
One of the most important decisions in war is when to stop. Humans evolved fear to solve this problem; there’s a point at which soldiers will de-escalate the conflict (i.e. flee the battlefield rather than stay and die). However, signalling fear makes you a target so people don’t discuss it candidly. I am concerned that military leaders may, in the calm of the office, design AI that has no provisions for de-escalating conflict; this seems very likely to lead to nuclear war.