And clearly my children will never get any taller, because there is no statistically-significant difference in their height from one day to the next.
Andrew Vickers, What Is A P-Value, Anyway?
Mark_Eichenlaub
Karma: 638
Should “latest insights” appear in the front page blurb?
Gene Hofstadt: You people. You think money is the answer to every problem.
Don Draper: No, just this particular problem.
Mad Men, “My Old Kentucky Home”
Asked today if the Titanic II could sink, Mr Palmer told reporters: “Of course it will sink if you put a hole in it.”
http://www.smh.com.au/business/clive-palmer-plans-to-build-titanic-ii-20120430-1xtrc.html
This story is not true. Bannister broke 4:00 in May of 1954. The next person to do it was John Landy 46 days later. Bannister’s training partner Chris Chataway did it the next year, as did another British runner. However, I think Bannister and Landy were the only two to do it in 1954. The first American to do it was Don Bowden in 1957.
I found a list for the US here Also a master list of many runners, but difficult to parse.
There were three runners close to the sub-four mile in the early 50′s. The other two were Wes Santee and John Landy. They didn’t race each other while trying to break 4:00 because Santee was American, Bannister British, Landy Australian.
According to Neil Bascomb’s The Perfect Mile, the race to sub-4 was highly publicized, and most people believed that it could in fact be done. There are some quotes from Landy saying that 4:00 was an unbreakable wall, but I believe these were mostly comments from him in dejection after early failures to beat the mark.
Bannister also wrote a memoir about running sub-4. I do not remember the flea story from it. Google books doesn’t return any hits in that book for the word “flea”
Wikipedia says:
The claim that a 4-minute mile was once thought to be impossible by informed observers was and is a widely propagated myth created by sportswriters and debunked by Bannister himself in his memoir, The Four Minute Mile (1955). The reason the myth took hold was that four minutes was a nice round number which was slightly better (1.4 seconds) than the world record for nine years, longer than it probably otherwise would have been because of the effect of World War II in interrupting athletic progress in the combatant countries. The Swedish runners Gunder Hägg and Arne Andersson, in a series of head-to-head races in the period 1942-45, had already lowered the world mile record by 5 seconds to the pre-Bannister record. (See Mile run world record progression.) What is still impressive to knowledgeable track fans is that Bannister ran a four-minute mile on very low-mileage training by modern standards.
The stuff about centuries of buildup and ancient Greece is absurd. In ancient Greece they did not use the mile to measure, and measurements and timekeeping were not accurate enough for this anyway. Wikipedia lists mile records only back to 1855.
If calorie restriction works in humans, should we have observed it already?
I was interested in the context here. Chesterton was referencing Wells’ original belief that the classes would differentiate until the upper class ate the lower class. Wells changed his mind to believe the classes would merge.
The entire book is free on Google Books.
Why do I fantasize about being angry?
I’m breaking the rule a bit by asking about myself here.
Sometimes when I have down time and am daydreaming, especially if I’m walking somewhere or going for a run, I fantasize about someone wronging me (say with a traffic violation), then imagine myself getting angry, yelling at them, and physically beating them up. I think about knocking them down, screaming at them, challenging them to get up, and knocking them down again.
I’ve never acted on such a fantasy. I have no idea how to actually fight someone if I wanted to. It’s very rare that I show anger, and I don’t think I’ve ever punched someone as an adult. But I think about it pretty regularly, and the thoughts disturb me. I have no idea where they come from or why I take pleasure in these sorts of fantasies.
Is this a common thought pattern? Why do people have it?
The last sentence is patronizing, and especially inappropriate in a thread about asking stupid questions.
Thanks. Sometimes I learn a lot from people saying fairly-obvious (in retrospect) things.
In case anyone is curious about this, I guess that Eliezer knew it instantly because each additional data point brings with it a constant amount of information. The log of a probability is the information it contains, so an event with probability .001 has 2.3 times the information of an event of probability .05.
If that’s not intuitive, consider that p=.05 means that you have a .05 chance of seeing the effect by statistical fluke (assuming there’s no real effect present). If your sample size is n times as large, the probability becomes (.05)^n. (Edit: see comments below) To solve
(.05)^n = .001
take logs of both sides and divide to get
n = log(.001)/log(.05)
If you’re trying to choose between two theories and one gives you an excuse for being lazy, the other one is probably right.
Paul Graham “What You’ll Wish You’d Known” http://paulgraham.com/hs.html
I don’t think we can get much more specific without starting to be mistaken.
Paul Graham, “Is It Worth Being Wise?” http://paulgraham.com/wisdom.html
I like the idea. Perhaps we should start a periodic discussion thread where people post midrange goals and get feedback.
wait, that was easier to search than I thought. http://lesswrong.com/lw/kn/torture_vs_dust_specks/
Yes, it is Knuth’s arrow notation.
I once read that 40% of the population is “immune to exercise” and I suspect I’m one of the 0.40.
I’ve been a competitive distance runner for a decade. In that time I’ve watched maybe 100 people join track or cross country teams, and every one who stays on the team more than a month has shown clear improvement, at least at first.
I’ve also known many recreational runners, and there’s a big difference between a median runner on a cross country team and a median recreational runner of the same age and gender. In fact, of the fifty or so recreational runners I’ve talked to in some depth, and thousands I’ve seen at races, I have never met someone who trained themselves independently from the beginning and could beat me at 1500 meters. Meanwhile, I’ve known scores of people who could beat me at that distance, but they all ran on teams or had run on teams in the past.
In my experience, the slowest guys who joined the team and practiced every day would run a mile in about 5:30 after a year, with a median around 5:00, and 4:40 if they kept at it for a few years. For women it was about 7:00 at slowest, median 6:00 and around 5:30 for women who trained for some time. (Talented men and women run much faster; the times I cited are typical for moderately-athletic people. I ran 4:21 and never won anything big.)
Meanwhile, recreational runners I know tell me their bests are about 6:30 median for men and 8:00 for women. I haven’t collected solid data, but the divide is so sharp I’m convinced by personal experience that being on a track or cross country team makes you much faster. This in turn implies that everyone, or almost everyone, is trainable for distance running.
My experience applies mostly to men and women age 15 − 25, so I’m not sure if the same holds for older people. There is also the possibility that only fast people, or only trainable people, would stick around on the teams, but the teams I’ve been on made no cuts and were never top contenders, so the pressure was low. We sometimes had people come in forty pounds overweight and not able to run a mile, and still stick around for the entire season of training. They all improved to the point where they could run nonstop for an hour and run pretty fast for five minutes straight.
The practical advice is that hiring an athletic trainer or joining a team may lead to a significant improvement if you’re having trouble doing it on your own. This specifically applies to running. I don’t know about lifting weights, exercise machines, yoga, walking, etc.
I have always tried to “Build Small Skills in the Right Order”, but I think it has been detrimental or even crippling to my learning process in some cases.
I’m pretty good at math, but I haven’t studied advanced math and would like to begin a program of self-study. I have started a few times, usually reading the first couple of chapters of a high-level calculus book (Apostol or Spivak), or something at a similar level.
I already know calculus well, having used it as a physics major in college and taught it as a private tutor for high school students, but I am not completely familiar with all the subtleties, such as why Taylor series converge and under what conditions. Reviewing calculus before diving into an advanced book on real analysis seems like a good idea because I know I can understand the calculus book, and reading it will prepare me to study more challenging material.
Nonetheless, what usually happens is that I get impatient at the slow progress, bored with the material, and want to jump straight to the more difficult book. If I do, I feel like I am “doing it wrong” by ignoring the small skills, but if I don’t, I wind up abandoning the program of study. I think I would have learned much more than I have by now if instead of a schedule of small skills, I’d simply opened advanced books to whatever section interested me and started plugging away, going back to review as necessary.
Similarly, early when I was a competitive distance runner, I read scores of books and internet forums for advice on training, then designed detailed training programs with careful “periodization” which would gradually build up my total amount and speed of running to the right quantities at the right time of the year. I also had many different gym exercises to do to build all requisite fitness before I could undergo the hardest training.
The result was that I was overly worried about whether my training was “correct”, frequently got worn down or injured, and didn’t perform well. Later, when I stopped worrying about all the small skills involved and simply ran every day for an amount that felt right to me, I improved a lot.
These examples aren’t intended to contradict the advice to build small skills, but to point out that even if a skill is both small and helpful to your larger goals, it is not necessarily the right skill to work on. In one case, the skills I chose were actually too small; in the other they were distracting.
But the atheist, if he retains his composure, can say, “I don’t know, but so what?
or, “I don’t know, but won’t it be interesting to try to find out?”
Maybe I don’t understand the request entirely, but wouldn’t any criticism depend not on the details of the theory, but on how well it works?
The point of a nursing theory is presumably to help nurses do their job. So if you want to know if a nursing theory is good, come up with some metric to measure nurse performance, train some nurses in the theory, and measure their performance compared to a control group.
The theory could be absolutely ridiculous to people looking at it on paper, but that doesn’t matter much if it turns out that it helps people be good nurses.
I’m the author—thanks for the feedback. I think you’re right that a more-topical title could help. Edit: done.
I’m pretty familiar with Ron Maimon, since I use Physics.Stackexchange heavily.
He seems to have other things going on in his life that prevent him from being accepted by the physics community at large, but in terms of pure knowledge of physics he’s really, really good. Every time I’ve read an answer from him that I’m competent to judge, it’s been right, or else if it has a mistake (which is rare) and someone points it out, he thanks them for noticing and corrects his answer.
When crackpots answer physics questions, they consistently steer away from the topic towards whatever their crackpot ideas are. Ron doesn’t do that. Crackpots tend to claim things that are pretty much known to be impossible, and display little depth of understanding or willingness to talk about anything other than their theories. Ron doesn’t do that. He also doesn’t claim that he’s being repressed by the physics establishment. He’ll call professional physicists idiots, but he doesn’t say that they’re trying to hide the truth or suppress his ideas. And when he sees a professional physicist who comes on the site and writes good answers, he generally treats them with respect. He leaves positive feedback on good answers of all sorts. None of this fits in with being a crackpot.
He does get into fights with people about more advanced theoretical stuff that’s over my head. But when he talks about physics that I know, he does it extremely well, and I’ve learned a lot from him. He’s more knowledgeable and insightful than most professional physicists.
The stuff other users mentioned about his bible interests and his profile description is ad hominem.
Anyway, if you are interested in what a professional physicist would say, I’m quasi-professional in that I’m a graduate student. My opinion is that the sequence, so far as I read it, is fine. I haven’t finished reading it, so I didn’t offer a comment before, but so far I haven’t found any significant mistakes (beyond those real but relatively minor ones pointed out on the thread on Phys.SE) The fact that many LessWrongers have read and enjoyed it indicates it’s not too verbose for the target audience.
Edit several people gave feedback indicating that the sequence isn’t as well-received as I indicated. I should have read more of it before commenting.