Given at least moderate quality, upvotes correlate much more tightly with accessibility / scope of audience than quality of writing. Remember, the article score isn’t an average of hundreds of scalar ratings—it’s the sum of thousands of ratings of [-1, 0, +1] -- and the default rating of anyone who doesn’t see, doesn’t care about, or doesn’t understand the thrust of a post is 0. If you get a high score, that says more about how many people bothered to process your post than about how many people thought it was the best post ever.
Mass_Driver
Hi Postal_Scale,
I’ve had pervasive apathy before, and it sucks. I’m sorry you’re so bored and frustrated. If you want to be less apathetic, some books I would recommend reading are What Color is Your Parachute?, Flow, and The Renaissance Soul. Parachute can help you identify tasks that you would enjoy working on, Flow can help you identify ways of enjoying otherwise boring experiences that don’t require you to play Carnegie-esque self-cheerleading games, and Renaissance Soul can help you figure out how to balance a shifting array of temporary, conflicting, weakly held recreational interests.
As far as practical techniques, I sometimes fight intense apathy by going for a 60-90 minute walk in no particular direction. I’m able to power it using “anywhere but here” contempt, so it doesn’t necessarily require any positive energy...but I find that after an hour or so I am usually able to identify at least one thing that I care about, and it tends to improve my mood. On the off chance that you really are in a dissertation program right now, you might want to find something concrete and immediate that you can work on for a few hours a week, like Habitat for Humanity, or a 500 piece jigsaw puzzle. I have also been in graduate programs, and if I go for too long without accomplishing something tangible (however irrelevant in the cosmic scheme of things), I forget what accomplishment even feels like, and so I lose motivation to plunge ahead on abstract tasks with real but delayed payoffs.
Best wishes, Mass_Driver
In general I’m very sympathetic to this point of view, and there are some good examples in your post.
One bad example, in my opinion, is Eliezer’s recent procrastination post vs. the survey of “scientific research on procrastination.” I read the chapter, and it appears to mostly cite studies that involved casual surveys, subjective description, and fuzzy labeling. Although there are many valid scientific endeavors that involve nothing but categorization (it is interesting to know how many species of tree frog there are and what they look and sound like even if we do not make any predictions beyond what is observed), categorization should at least be rigorous enough that we can specify what we expect to see with a modicum of precision.
When a biologist says that frogus neonblueicus has neon blue spots and chirps at 500 Hz, she will give you enough information that you can go to Costa Rica and check for yourself whether you have found one of the rare neonblueicus specimens. Although there will be some controversies around the edges, your identification of any particular frog will not correlate with your political biases or personal problems, and repeated observation of the same frog population by a few different researchers will tend to decrease error.
When a psychologist says that procrastinators can be divided into “relaxed” types and “tense-afraid” types, the “science” being done is not merely descriptive, but also horrifyingly vague. What does it mean for a human to be “tense-afraid” when “procrastinating”? The three paragraphs or so of context on the topic give you enough of an idea of what the researcher is saying to conjure up a mental image, but not nearly enough to carve thing-space at the joints.
In my experience, this is a very serious problem in social and human sciences—there are whole subfields where the authors do not know how little they know, and proceed to wax eloquently about all of the empty concepts they have coined. There are other subfields where the researchers suspect that they might not have done very good research, and they cover their tracks with advanced statistics and jargon. After you dig through a few of these booby-trapped caves of wonder, you start to lose, if not respect for scholarship, at least some of the urge to do the moderately hard work of digesting literature reviews yourself on a regular basis. It is dangerous to assume that casually studying the leading textbook in a soft field will usually make you smarter.
That’s an excellent question. The answer depends on exactly what you mean by “better than chance.” If you mean “more than half of those convicted of a crime are guilty of that crime,” then I’d say yes, there is excellent reason to think that they are. Prosecutors usually have access to several times more reports of crime than they can afford to go out and prosecute. Prosecutors are often explicitly or implicitly evaluated on their win ratio—they have strong incentives to pick the ‘easy’ cases where there is abundant evidence that the suspect is guilty. Most defense lawyers will cheerfully concede that the vast majority of their clients are guilty—either the clients admit as much to their lawyers, or the clients insist on implausible stories that don’t pass muster, which the lawyers have to disguise in order to get their clients to go free. Although as a matter of law and rhetoric people are presumed innocent until proven guilty, as a matter of cold statistics, someone who has been lawfully indicted in America is probably more likely to be guilty than innocent. In fact, there are probably so many guilty suspects in Court that the legal system does strictly worse than what social scientists call a “naive predictor”—i.e., just assuming that everyone is guilty. Of course, that wouldn’t be a sustainable policy—prosecutors choose easy cases because they know that they’ll be required to win those cases in a relatively challenging environment. If the rule were that everyone is guilty, prosecutors would start choosing cases based on other criteria, and the percentage of indicted suspects who were actually guilty would go down.
Suppose you survey defense attorneys, and conclude that, say, roughly 80% of indicted suspects are guilty. Could you somehow measure whether the legal system does better than a “mixed strategy predictor” that guessed that a suspect was guilty with probability 0.8 and guessed that a suspect was innocent with probability 0.2? The mixed-strategy predictor would get an accurate result in (0.8) ^ 2 + (0.2) ^ 2 = 68% of the time. To assess whether the legal system is better than a mixed-strategy predictor, you would need to have a way of validating at least a sample of actual cases. I really have no idea how you would start to do that. It’s not clear that self-reported guilt or defense-attorney-assessed guilt will correlate strongly enough with actual guilt that we can figure out which individual cases the legal system gets right and which ones it gets wrong. But if you can’t measure accuracy in individual cases, how do you figure out the system’s overall accuracy rate? It’s not clear that looking at appellate results or DNA exonerations, etc. would help either. A reversal on appeal is no guarantee of innocence, because a sentence can be reversed (a) if the evidence is still strong but not strong enough to remove all reasonable doubt as well as (b) when the prosecution or police have used inappropriate but reliable tactics (such as using high-tech cameras to take pictures of the inside of your home without a warrant).
Finally, there is “better than chance” in the sense of specific forensic techniques being verifiably better than, say, a Ouija board. There are several pretty good techniques, such as document analysis, DNA analysis, electronic tracing, and perhaps even paired-question polygraph testing. Whether or not the system interprets the evidence correctly, a typical trial at least contains sufficient evidence for a rational evaluator to beat chance.
Just read the article. I thought it was very nice! It takes us seriously, it accurately summarizes many of the things that LWers are doing and/or hope to do, and it makes us sound like we’re having a lot of fun while thinking about topics that might be socially useful while not hurting or threatening anyone. How could this possibly be described as trolling? I think the OP should put the link back up—the Observer deserves as much traffic as we can muster, I’d say.
Goodhart’s Law starts some other way. It’s not quite right to say:
Superiors want an undefined goal G.
Mathematically speaking, the problem can’t be that G is undefined. If G were really undefined in any absolute sense, then superiors would be indifferent to all possible outcomes, or would choose their utility function literally at random. That rarely happens.
Instead, the problem could be that G is difficult to articulate. It is “undefined” only in the sense that people have had trouble coming up with an explicit verbal definition for it. i know what I want and how to get it, but I don’t know how to communicate that want to you ex ante. For example, maybe I want you (the night shift manager) to page me (the owner) whenever there’s a decision to make that could affect whether our business keeps a client, but I’ve never taken any business classes and don’t quite have the vocab to say that, so instead I say to only page me if it’s “important.” “Important” is vague, but “important’ is just a map, and the map is not the territory.
Alternatively, the problem could be that G is difficult to commit to. I can define my goal in words just fine today, but I know (or you suspect) that later I will be tempted to evaluate you by some other criterion. For example, I would like to give a raise to whichever police officer does the most to keep his beat safe, and, as a thoughtful and experienced police chief, I know exactly what the difference is between a safe neighborhood and an unsafe neighborhood, and I’m happy to explain it to anyone who’s interested. As one of my employees, though, you can’t verify that I’m actually rewarding people for making neighborhoods safe, and not, say, giving raises to people who bring in the most money for drug busts, or who artificially lower their crime statistics, or who give me a kickback. It might make more sense for me to just announce that I’ll pay people based on hours worked and complaints lodged, because that announcement is more verifiable, and thus more credible, so at least I’ll be viewed as evenhanded.
Finally, as you’ve already pointed out, the problem could be that G is difficult or expensive to measure. Alternative measures of GDP that take into account factors like health, leisure, and environmental quality have gotten pretty good about specifying what health is, and it’s easy enough to pass laws that commit agencies to valuing health in a particular way, but it’s expensive to measure health, especially in any broad sense. A physical is $60; an exercise fitness exam is another $45; an STD test runs about $20; a battery of prophylactic tests for cancer and heart disease and so on is another $100 or so; a mental health exam is another $80, and then you multiply all that by the size of a valid random sample and we’re talking real money. In my opinion, it would be money very, very well spent, but one can understand why GDP—which can be measured just by asking the IRS for a copy of its tax receipts—is such a popular metric. It’s cheap to use.
I once heard a story about the original writer of the Superman Radio Series. He wanted a pay rise, his employers didn’t want to give him one. He decided to end the series with Superman trapped at the bottom of a well, tied down with kryptonite and surrounded by a hundred thousand tanks (or something along these lines). It was a cliffhanger. He then made his salary demands. His employers refused and went round every writer in America, but nobody could work out how the original writer was planning to have Superman escape. Eventually the radio guys had to go back to him and meet his wage demands. The first show of the next series began “Having escaped from the well, Superman hurried to...” There’s a lesson in there somewhere, but I’ve no idea what it is.
-http://writebadlywell.blogspot.com/2010/05/write-yourself-into-corner.html
I would argue that the lesson is that when something valuable is at stake, we should focus on the simplest available solutions to the puzzles we face, rather than on ways to demonstrate our intelligence to ourselves or others.
OK. What’s the purpose of having it be all-consuming? Are you selecting for people who are truly committed? Are there returns to scale? Are you trying to break people out of old habits by denying them time in which to indulge them?
This is merely a semantic stop-sign; it appears wise because it uses modern vocabulary. The structure of the argument is identical to the structure of a neo-Platonist argument that most LW readers would instantly reject:
Before God’s Creation is beyond the universe. Beyond the universe are other Creations. Which Creations? All Creations that God created. What are God’s Creations? They are instantiations of God’s will. What is God’s will? Arbitrary manipulation of Form. And there you’ve reached a final stopping point. Because it isn’t even intelligible to ask why there is Form or why God wills one thing and not another. Form and Will are eternal, and there is nothing beyond or beneath them. More importantly, there is no form from which they derive their pattern because they are their own perfect Form.
It seems to me that educated people should know something about the 13-billion-year prehistory of our species and the basic laws governing the physical and living world, including our bodies and brains. They should grasp the timeline of human history from the dawn of agriculture to the present. They should be exposed to the diversity of human cultures, and the major systems of belief and value with which they have made sense of their lives. They should know about the formative events in human history, including the blunders we can hope not to repeat. They should understand the principles behind democratic governance and the rule of law. They should know how to appreciate works of fiction and art as sources of aesthetic pleasure and as impetuses to reflect on the human condition.
On top of this knowledge, a liberal education should make certain habits of rationality second nature. Educated people should be able to express complex ideas in clear writing and speech. They should appreciate that objective knowledge is a precious commodity, and know how to distinguish vetted fact from superstition, rumor, and unexamined conventional wisdom. They should know how to reason logically and statistically, avoiding the fallacies and biases to which the untutored human mind is vulnerable. They should think causally rather than magically, and know what it takes to distinguish causation from correlation and coincidence. They should be acutely aware of human fallibility, most notably their own, and appreciate that people who disagree with them are not stupid or evil. Accordingly, they should appreciate the value of trying to change minds by persuasion rather than intimidation or demagoguery.
Steven Pinker, The New Republic 9/4/14
I often had a similar experience in grade school; teachers would present a concept for the first time as if they were reviewing it.
So far as I could tell, the teachers were saying the words that allowed them to refresh their memory of how a technique worked, rather than words that would allow someone with no prior experience of the technique to give it a try. E.g., frequent flyers here on LW can say things to each other like “don’t forget to test your ideas,” or “update your probability estimates” and the words have meaning, because they are handles that we have all built and designed to pull on a whole cluster of related memories and skills. But if you said that to someone with little or no exposure to the modern Enlightenment, they wouldn’t be able to follow along unless they could infer all of the intermediate steps from the skeletal verbal outline you’re providing.
I’ve done some occasional tutoring and so on, and my pupils are usually impressed, but all I’m doing is listening to people to find out what they already know, and then explaining the next few steps, one step at a time. It helps me to have an outline or a diagram showing all of the steps that I want the student to be comfortable with, and then we can look at it together and decide what the student will learn next.
Even when I am unable to acknowledge that a subject is hard, I can at least acknowledge that it is made up of many parts, each of which is necessary for mastery, and then make an effort to teach each of those parts.
Maybe, but be very careful not to jump from
a pretty damning fact about the way this whole area of intellectual work is conducted in practice.
to
therefore there is no sense in individual people whose rationality is above-average attempting, in good faith and by way of experiment, to apply some subset of this intellectual work to their actual lives,
which I think is a conclusion that some people might inadvertently draw from your comment.
This is stupid. I’m a theist and I think it’s stupid. I didn’t downvote you because −8 points is probably enough to get the point across, but let me explain what I dislike about your argument.
First, you’re seizing on one small fact that the author didn’t even bring up in order to dismiss an entire article. The article says nothing about how bacterial life evolved; as far as this article is concerned, we can go ahead and agree that God created bacterial life. Your blanket assertion that evolution is “irrelevant to the whole discussion” is rude, and pretty much has things backward—it’s not “Darwinian Evolution” that’s irrelevant to a discussion about how wasps and elephants evolved; it’s bacterial evolution that’s irrelevant. Wasps and elephants are exactly the sort of thing Darwin studied, whereas Darwin barely knew anything and barely said anything about bacteria.
Second, suppose you’re right. Suppose DNA and the molecular machinery that lets it reproduce were intelligently designed by a benevolent, Judeo-Christian God. The problem is that history and biology still show us a world that’s full of apparently unnecessary suffering, inefficiency, and cruelty. Yes, there is a staggering amount of complexity and beauty. So what? Why did God design DNA that He knew would in turn design wasps that eat their prey alive from the inside out? Isn’t that a really, really weird thing for a benevolent, all-powerful God to do? Doesn’t it surprise you that He apparently did that? Doesn’t that surprise lead you to wonder if maybe you got one of your assumptions wrong?
Has anyone tried to put Ferriss’s 4-Hour Workweek plan into practice? If so, did it make you better off than you were a month ago?
EDIT: Ferriss recommends (among other things) that readers invent and market a simple product that can be sold online and manufactured in China, yielding a steady income stream that requires little or no ongoing attention. There are dozens of anecdotes on his website and in his book that basically say “I heard that idea, I tried it, it worked, and now I’m richer and happier.” These anecdotes (if true) indicate that the plan is workable for at least some people. What I don’t see in these anecdotes is people who say “I really didn’t think of myself as an entrepreneur, but I forced myself to slog through the exercises anyway, and then it worked for me!”
So, I’m trying to elicit that latter, more dramatic kind of anecdote from LWers. It would help me decide if most of the value in Ferriss’s advice lies in simply reminding born entrepreneurs that they’re allowed to execute a simple plan, or if Ferriss’s advice can also enable intelligent introverts with no particular grasp of the business world to cast off the shackles of office employment.
In canon, the hardness and thickness of materials are described as stopping spells, especially stunning spells. Hagrid, e.g., is able to resist several Aurors’ stunning spells for a few minutes because of his thick, hard, half-giant hide. No form of cloth or wool clothing is ever described as stopping a magical attack, but Harry can hide behind (presumably granite) gravestones for some time while Death Eaters blast away at them. Toilets, which presumably are not quite as thick or hard as gravestones, are shown as stopping one offensive spell but then exploding.
IMHO wearing metal armor is a brilliantly canonic tactic. The least plausible facet of it is that first years in January, average age 11.5, probably cannot build enough muscle mass to wear a full suit of medieval armor at all, let alone in two weeks. I do not think we have seen evidence that wizards are stronger than ordinary folk, as opposed to more resilient. The captains are described as wearing only metal shirts, but they practice by swinging metal objects on their hands and feet—this is odd.
Don’t you have better things to do than fight a turf war over a blog? Start your own if you think your rules make more sense—the code is mostly open source.
What’s the percent chance that I’m doing it wrong?
Good grief, people. There are conspiracies that need ferreting out, but they do not revolve around generating fake data about the effectiveness of an alpha version of a rationality training camp that was offered for free to a grateful public.
I went to the minicamp, I had a great time, I learned a lot, and I saw shedloads of anecdotal evidence that the teachers are striving to become as effective as possible. I’m sure they will publish their data if and when they have something to say.
Meanwhile, consider re-directing your laudable passion for transparency toward a publicly traded company or a medium-sized city or a research university. Fighting conspiracies is an inherently high-risk activity, both because you might be wrong about the conspiracies’ existence, and because even if the conspiracy exists, you might be defeated by its shadowy and awful powers. Try to make sure the risks you run are justified by an even bigger payoff at the end of the tunnel.
A future light cone is the part of space-time that can be affected by our actions in the present. Its boundaries are defined by the speed of light. If you imagine the Universe as having only two dimensions in space, then the area of space that you can affect 5 years in the future is a circle with a radius of 5 light-years; if you drew many such circles at different points in time, they would look like a cone. To affect a point in space outside your future light cone, you would have to send out some kind of order or projectile or information faster than the speed of light, and current physics says that this is impossible.
1) I agree with the very high-level point that there are lots of rationalist group houses with flat / egalitarian structures, and so it might make sense to try one that’s more authoritarian to see how that works. Sincere kudos to you for forming a concrete experimental plan and discussing it in public.
2) I don’t think I’ve met you or heard of you before, and my first impression of you from your blog post is that you are very hungry for power. Like, you sound like you would really, really enjoy being the chief of a tribe, bossing people around, having people look up to you as their leader, feeling like an alpha male, etc. The main reason this makes me uncomfortable is that I don’t see you owning this desire anywhere in your long post. Like, if you had said, just once, “I think I would enjoy being a leader, and I think you might enjoy being led by me,” I would feel calmer. Instead I’m worried that you have convinced yourself that you are grudgingly stepping up as a leader because it’s necessary and no one else will. If you’re not being fully honest about your motivations for nominating yourself to be an authoritarian leader, what else are you hiding?
3) Your post has a very high ratio of detailed proposals to literature review. I would have liked to see you discuss other group houses in more detail, make reference to articles or books or blog posts about the theory of cohousing and of utopian communities more generally, or otherwise demonstrate that you have done your homework to find out what has worked, what has not worked, and why. None of your proposals sound obviously bad to me, and you’ve clearly put some thought and care into articulating them, but it’s not clear whether your proposals are backed up by research, or whether you’re just reasoning from your armchair.
4) Why should anyone follow you on an epic journey to improve their time management skills if you’re sleep-deprived and behind schedule on writing a blog post? Don’t you need to be more or less in control of your own lifestyle before you can lead others to improve theirs?