michael_b

• michael_b 29 Jan 2015 12:37 UTC

  13 points

  on: Wel­come to Less Wrong! (7th thread, De­cem­ber 2014)

  I discovered lesswrong.com because someone left a printout of an article on the elliptical machine in my gym. I started reading it and have become hooked.

  I’m a formally uneducated computer expert. The lack of formal education makes me a bit insecure, so I obsess over improving my thinking through literature on cognitive dissonance and biases, such as books from the library and also sites like this.

  Nowadays I get paid to be a middle-manager at technology companies. Most of my career has been in Linux system administration as well as functional programming.

  I’m a bit of a health nut. I adopted a whole-food plant-based diet (the “China Study” diet) because it seems most well supported in the literature, although a broad consensus on the topic has not emerged. I base this decision in part on my trust of experts with titles after their names, since I’m too out of my element to read and interpret most of the literature on my own. At the same time I have a personal anecdote that this works well, so those two are enough to convince me for now.

  There are times when I find reading about rational thinking rather sobering. It’s clear that we were born with an irrational, “defective”, brain and that we would be so lucky if we could even make a small dent in improving our decision making. Improvements seem very hard to come by, I worry that all I’m really doing is learning to distrust my beliefs.

  So that’s a nutshell full. How’s everyone else? :)

De­con­struct­ing the rid­dle of ex­pe­rience vs. memory

• michael_b 24 Feb 2015 15:34 UTC

  10 points

  on: Sav­ing for the long term

  (4) I work a normal-ish job, have a normal retirement plan, and save enough to retire at a normal age.

  The point I want to make in this article is that 1, 2, 3 seem way more likely than 4. Which makes me think that long-term saving might not actually be such a good idea.

  Are you sure? Take a look at http://​​firecalc.com/​​

  You plug in your nest egg size and expected cost of living and it will trial it against historical market performance. That is, if you retired the day before the Great Depression and similar events, would your portfolio keep you alive long enough?

  It’s clear if you plan to live a reasonably frugal lifestyle working a normal job you can save up a substantial nest-egg in 10-20 years to float you indefinitely if you’re only a little bit lucky, probably requiring a lot less luck than hoping you strike gold on a startup.

LW’s take on nu­tri­tion?

• michael_b 9 Feb 2015 10:51 UTC

  6 points

  on: Have you changed your mind re­cently?

  After initial success but then several bouts of plantar fascitis, new mystery leg pain and a heaping helping of denial I’ve finally given on up the minimal shoes thing.

  I agree walking around in super comfortable shoes all the time probably makes us puny and weak, but I doubt paleolithic man walked and ran on hard city-grade pavement 50+ miles a week.

• michael_b 3 Feb 2015 18:03 UTC

  4 points

  on: Lifestyle in­ter­ven­tions to in­crease longevity

  Why should we listen to you and not, say, the Harvard School of Public Health ?

  That is, why do you think you did a better job of reading and interpreting the literature and publishing guidelines?

Plane crashes

• michael_b 20 Feb 2015 10:01 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: eternal_neophyte’s comment on: De­con­struct­ing the rid­dle of ex­pe­rience vs. memory

  If I were Kahneman and I had posed that riddle, I would object that the entire point of the thought experiment is to consider the activity as being of no future utility whatsoever.

  Sorry, I don’t follow you. If you were Kahneman you would have posed the riddle differently? Or are you saying that I’m unfairly describing it?

• michael_b 31 Jan 2015 10:29 UTC

  3 points

  on: Is there a ra­tio­nal­ist skill tree yet?

  Great request. Along a similar line, what about a decision tree for evaluating claims?

  1. Are you being asked to think about past decisions, prior beliefs, or intent? Take steps to rule out hindsight bias.

  2. Does the claim challenge prevailing beliefs, possibly alleging conspiracy? Consider confirmation bias.

  ...

  (sorry if this is a FAQ)

• michael_b 29 Jan 2015 16:58 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Wel­come to Less Wrong! (7th thread, De­cem­ber 2014)

  Yes. I spent a lot of time reviewing critiques of The China Study (TCS), including Minger’s. At the end of it I came to the following conclusions.

  1. Nutrition science is extraordinarily nonlinear

  2. I’m definitely not qualified to deconstruct claims made about nutrition

  3. TCS critics don’t seem very qualified either, especially when compared to the qualifications of the people advancing TCS

  4. There’s no larger group of qualified people advancing a radically different approach

  So, those are my reasons. I admit they’re not very satisfying. I’m spoiled by fields where, once you grok the formal proof you can be highly confident that the claim is correct.

  No such luck with something as squishy as nutrition, it would seem.

• michael_b 10 Apr 2015 12:07 UTC

  2 points

  on: 16 types of use­ful predictions

  The more time I spend hanging out with rationalists the less comfortable I am making predictions about anything. It’s kind of becoming a real problem?

  “Do you think you’ll be hungry later?” “Maybe”

  : /​

• michael_b 9 Mar 2015 0:30 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: imuli’s comment on: Plane crashes

  Close. If the accident is completely unexplained, as it often is immediately following an accident, shouldn’t the risk be substantially higher immediately following the accident and then rapidly decay back to baseline as more information becomes available?

• michael_b 2 Mar 2015 21:18 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Adam Zerner’s comment on: Sav­ing for the long term

  Permit me to ramble a bit.

  So, I think I have a bias against startups for getting rich. I think it might be reasonable.

  I’ll relate my personal experience as well as the experiences of three close friends. Around eight years ago, four of us each joined different startups. I quit mine about 3 ¹⁄₂ years in. They’ve remained at theirs. What’s the current status?

  me: I’ve learned that my equity in my startup, which I took at a substantial discount to my salary, is now worth low six figures.

  friend 1: his startup has almost been acquired but the deal sunk in due dilligence. Not in danger of going out of business but not exactly striking gold either. At least not yet.

  friend 2: recently had his startup acquired and he received a low six figure bonus on the condition he stay another two years to ease the transition. It seems like he was cut out of the upside somehow.

  friend 3: nothing close to an exit in sight; the company isn’t failing, but it doesn’t seem like it’s going to strike gold either. It’s slowly growing.

  The low six figures of equity I (now) have might be seen as a positive, but 8 years on and I still can’t sell it, and I had to take low pay and do a ton of work to get it. This is better than most startups, but still not a success.

  In the meantime after I quit my startup I joined an established company and made a high-normal salary + bonuses and am way ahead of the rest of my friends on net worth (we all basically started at zero).

  Two of my friends are only finally now making normal job salaries, but they’re basically burned out at their respective companies and can’t bring themselves to quit because they signed deals where their equity evaporates if they walk away. This is probably the largest danger to joining a startup: what if it drags on forever, and it seems like you could get your payday if you keep hanging on for six more months and this goes on for years and years? Do you think you could just walk away? I think this is loss aversion bias at work.

  Should people work at startups? Absolutely: the experience is outstanding. You will learn a lot, the energy is amazing, and there are seldom better opportunities to feel that you’re making a real difference in the world (at least for awhile). Should people work at startups to get rich? I couldn’t recommend it. It’s probably going to fail, but worse, it might nearly fail and stumble along for years never amounting to anything but tricking you into riding it for longer than you should. Even worse still, it might succeed and you might not have been ninja enough about your contract to ensure you get a fair deal.

  I’m glad I worked at one startup, but I definitely couldn’t have stomached working for, say, 5 startups in a row. The emotional rollercoaster of just one startup was enough.

• michael_b 6 Feb 2015 9:15 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: RomeoStevens’s comment on: Lifestyle in­ter­ven­tions to in­crease longevity

  Sorry for the confusion. I’m picking authorities at random and asking why I should trust you over them, not vouching for any authority in particular. Perhaps I should have asked more bluntly: who are you and why are you qualified to give us health advice?

  No offense. :)

  I am having a hard time finding places I disagree significantly with them.

  More a curiosity than anything: dairy isn’t represented at all on the HSPH’s “healthy eating plate” but is specifically highlighted in your section on nutrition. Why the discrepancy?

• michael_b 3 Feb 2015 23:33 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Anders_H’s comment on: Lifestyle in­ter­ven­tions to in­crease longevity

  Noted. To be clear, the question I’m asking is why is OP a more worthy authority than the rest?

  Why should we listen to OP and not follow, say, the UK’s NHS healthy living guidelines? I hope the answer is better than “because nobody at the NHS is a member of LW”

• michael_b 1 Feb 2015 14:29 UTC

  2 points

  on: Earn­ing to Give vs. Altru­is­tic Ca­reer Choice Revisited

  There’s a bit of a false dichotomy here between ‘earning to give’ and ‘altruistic career’. I’ll talk about one of them which we’ll need to go macro to see. I will also implicitly complain that ‘earning to give’ allows companies to deflect on charitable giving in a way that satisfies individual actors but may result in less charitable giving overall.

  Working on Wall Street and practicing an ‘earning to give’ plan may not be a great way to maximize giving to high-ROI aligned charities.

  I work at an HFT of order 1000 employees. The HFT itself makes no charitable donations. When employees ask about charity the HFT points at their large bonuses and says if a cause is important to you go ahead and donate your (huge) bonus to that cause. The HFT occasionally invites representatives from GiveWell and similar to come talk to us about pledging to donate a portion of our income to high-ROI charities. The bonuses can be big and if you do some multiplication you really can come away with the impression that you and your coworkers are collectively contributing enormous value to charity.

  Is this a fantasy though? I can’t know how everyone spends their bonuses but projecting from intimate discussions with my peer group has led me to believe that most employees, if they do donate, donate token amounts of $500-5000. Usually to more “name brand” causes like MSF or EFF. I’m aware of one person who donates their entire bonus to charity and a handful of others who have taken the GiveWell pledge.

  (Don’t take this as an endorsement of GiveWell or anything, I’m simply holding them up as a symbol of the idea)

  I don’t mean to overstate the progressiveness of the company either. There are also the more familiar Hollywood renditions of Wall Street employees who appear to spend their bonuses on sweet apartments and fancy cars before they’ve even been paid.

  Obviously this is anecdotal. I’m only describing a practice inside of one Wall Street firm. This may not be an accurate picture; it’s frowned upon to discuss compensation with one another so it’s hard to know the amounts at stake. There could be a handful of extremely high earners that secretly plow all of their wealth into high-ROI charities, which would more than make up for all of the modest earners who save their bonuses or take very nice holidays in the tropics.

  (btw, I’m not making an absolute value judgment on how people spend their bonuses, only speaking about how to maximize value to charity)

  Wait, why are we talking about what the entire company does when we’re trying to figure out what individual actors should do? Here’s why.

  All-in, if you can’t make a more valuable altruistic career choice it’s not strictly true that earning to give on Wall Street is the only reasonable alternative. If you could find an organization whose policy is to donate, say, 10% of all profits to charity, that number may be much larger than the discretionary charitable gifts made by employees at an equivalently sized Wall Street firm. If you’re concerned that the company with the 10% policy is donating to the wrong charities, you could consider joining that firm and campaigning to allocate more of the firm’s giving to charities aligned with GiveWell.

• michael_b 29 Jan 2015 22:51 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Wel­come to Less Wrong! (7th thread, De­cem­ber 2014)

  I’m skeptical this is a great strategy for topics in general.

  Nutrition, for example, doesn’t appear to be the kind of topic where you can just learn its axioms and build up an optimal human diet from first principles. It’s far too complicated.

  Instead you need substantial education, training, experience and access, as well as a community that can help you support and refine your ideas. You need to gather evidence, you need to learn how to determine the quality of the evidence you’ve gathered, and you need to propose reasonable stories that fit the evidence.

  Since I haven’t made health and nutrition my career most of these things will be hard or even impossible for me to come by. As such, my confidence in the quality of any amateur conclusions I come to must necessarily be low.

  So, the most reasonable thing for me to do is trust authorities when it comes to nutrition.

• michael_b 29 Jan 2015 17:08 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: pjeby’s comment on: Wel­come to Less Wrong! (7th thread, De­cem­ber 2014)

  http://​​lesswrong.com/​​lw/​​xk/​​continuous_improvement/​​

• michael_b 29 Jan 2015 13:02 UTC

  2 points

  on: Your in­tu­itions are not magic

  The immediately available example supporting your article for me is the relationship between dietary cholesterol and blood cholesterol. There’s high general confusion around this health claim.

  What no doubt compounds the confusion on the issue is that intuitively you might infer that eating zero cholesterol should lower blood cholesterol, or that eating high cholesterol should raise blood cholesterol. Evidence shows this often happens, but not always. There are enough notable outliers that the claim has been defeated in the general mind because it doesn’t support the intuitive story.

  That is, vegans who eat almost no cholesterol containing foods, can have high blood cholesterol. On the flip side, surely everyone has heard of that friend of a friend who eats inf eggs a day and has low blood cholesterol.

  There’s a reasonably interesting story that fits the evidence for the claim that if dietary cholesterol then blood cholesterol, but the nonlinearity of the relationship and also the incidence of intuition defeating cases cloud the issue.

Sys­temic re­view of an­tide­pres­sants vs placebo commentary