michaelkeenan

Karma: 1,355

michaelkeenan Mar 13, 2017, 9:15 PM
2 points
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in reply to: satt’s comment on: Open thread, March 13 - March 19, 2017
Thank you!

michaelkeenan Mar 13, 2017, 6:02 PM
1 point
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on: Open thread, March 13 - March 19, 2017
I hope someone can help me find a blog post or webpage that I’ve seen before but can’t find: it’s someone describing a power law of scientists. There’s a top level who have drastically more output than the level below, who are drastically more productive than the level below that. There’s only a few at the top level, and a few hundred at level 2, and a few thousand at level 3. I think he mentions one scientist being level 0.5 - notably more productive than almost anyone else. It was on a relatively unstyled website, maybe Scott Aaronson’s.

Anyone familiar with that?

michaelkeenan Feb 28, 2017, 5:15 PM
0 points
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in reply to: Bound_up’s comment on: Stupid Questions February 2017
That sounds like Aella, who wrote about taking acid every week for a year. Here’s her reddit post about it; it includes some art she made, and one poem.

michaelkeenan Dec 30, 2016, 8:06 PM
3 points
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in reply to: wubbles’s comment on: The engineer and the diplomat
Oh, sorry!

michaelkeenan Dec 29, 2016, 5:02 AM
4 points
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in reply to: wubbles’s comment on: The engineer and the diplomat
[I misinterpreted wubbles above; I retract this comment.]

I think we should reserve the “epistemic status” thing for authors to describe their own works. Using it to insult a work seems pointlessly snarky. The useful part could be communicated with just “Probably BS” or “I think this is probably BS”. Leaving it at that would avoid the useless connotation about the author’s thought process, which is unknowable by others.

michaelkeenan Oct 26, 2016, 12:10 AM
2 points
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on: What’s the most annoying part of your life/job?
This is probably not the biggest annoyance, but it’s recurring and it affects a lot of people (especially the approximately 9% with hyperacusis): many buses and garbage trucks have horrible screeching brakes. This is bad in general, but especially bad at 7am before I want to be awake.

Presumably it can be solved with some kind of regular maintenance. I doubt municipalities are interested in spending that money, but if somehow the affected residents could coordinate to pay (maybe with some kind of crowdfunding), and someone would organize the whole thing, then something could be done.

michaelkeenan Oct 26, 2016, 12:06 AM
2 points
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in reply to: James_Miller’s comment on: What’s the most annoying part of your life/job?
Not what you were asking for, but: have you encountered Eliezer’s list of sleep interventions? It’s the last section of this author’s note at HPMOR. There might be a different helpful intervention there.

michaelkeenan Aug 7, 2016, 4:33 PM
6 points
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on: Now is the time to eliminate mosquitoes
Should we worry that if Trump supports eradicating mosquitoes, that will cause Trump opponents to oppose it?

michaelkeenan Dec 8, 2015, 11:16 PM
6 points
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in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Open thread, December 7-13, 2015
It looks like you’re going to https://rationality.org rather than http://rationality.org. CFAR doesn’t have a SSL certificate (but maybe should get one through Let’s Encrypt).

michaelkeenan Oct 29, 2015, 3:20 AM
1 point
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in reply to: VoiceOfRa’s comment on: ClearerThinking’s Fact-Checking 2.0
Yes, you’d want to use the International Crime Victims Survey. It’s the standard way to compare crime rates between countries.

michaelkeenan Oct 29, 2015, 3:19 AM
0 points
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in reply to: VoiceOfRa’s comment on: ClearerThinking’s Fact-Checking 2.0
The anti-vax thing is one of the hardest cases. More often, people are just accidentally wrong. Like this exchange at Hacker News, which had checkable claims like:
- “The UK is a much more violent society than the US, statistically”
- “There are dozens of U.S. cities with higher per capita murder rates than London or any other city in the UK”
- “Murder rates are higher in the US, but murder is a small fraction of violent crime. All other violent crime is much more common in the UK than in the US.”
There would also be a useful effect for observers. That Hacker News discussion contained no citations, so no-one was convinced and I doubt any observers knew what to think. But if a fact-checker bot was noting which claims were true and which weren’t, then observers would know which claims were correct (or rather, which claims were consistent with official statistics).

If these fact-checkers were extremely common, it could still help anti-vaccine people. If you’re against vaccines, but you’ve seen the fact-checker bot be correct 99 other times, then you might give credence to its claims.

michaelkeenan Oct 26, 2015, 11:23 PM
3 points
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in reply to: VoiceOfRa’s comment on: ClearerThinking’s Fact-Checking 2.0
I’d prefer the framing that it’s not a fact-checker, but rather an inconsistency-detector. Rather than “this bot detected the claim that vaccines cause autism, which is wrong”, it’d say “this bot detected the claim that vaccines cause autism, which is in conflict with the view held by The Lancet, one of the world’s most prominent medical journals”. Or in 1930, it might have reported “this bot detected the claim that continents drift, which is in conflict with the scientific consensus of leading geology journals”.

michaelkeenan Oct 26, 2015, 11:22 PM
1 point
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in reply to: pico’s comment on: ClearerThinking’s Fact-Checking 2.0
It would still be helpful to have automatic fact-checking of simple statements. Consider this Hacker News thread—two people are arguing about crime rates in the UK and USA. Someone says “The UK is a much more violent society than the US” and they argue about that, neither providing citations. That might be simple enough that natural language processing could parse it and check it against various interpretations of it. For example, one could imagine a bot that notices when people are arguing over something like that (whether on the internet or in a national election. It would provide useful relevant statistics, like the total violent crime rates in each country, or the murder rate, or whatever it thinks is relevant. If it were an ongoing software project, the programmers could notice when it’s upvoted and downvoted, and improve it.

michaelkeenan Oct 26, 2015, 10:49 PM
14 points
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in reply to: OrphanWilde’s comment on: The Triumph of Humanity Chart
This comment seems aggressive and rude, so I doubt it will be persuasive to Lukas. As Yvain wrote in How To Not Lose An Argument, we should beware of status effects during arguments. If Lukas agrees with you now, then Lukas agrees he is a weasel-word-using rationalizing entitled infantile fake-victim, which is very difficult to accept. Without the insults, Lukas would have had the opportunity to make an easier update—that he misunderstood, or the text was unclear, or that he’d prefer Dias to have clarified but reasonable people could disagree, or something like that.

michaelkeenan Aug 14, 2015, 6:08 AM
4 points
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on: Politics: an undervalued opportunity to change the world?
80,000 Hours has investigated the expected effects of changing the world through party politics.

Summary:

This is a very high-potential, though very competitive and high-risk path that can enable you to make a big difference through improving the operation of government and promoting important ideas. If you’re highly able, could tolerate being in the public eye and think you could develop a strong interest in politics, then we recommend learning more about this career to test your suitability.

michaelkeenan Jul 10, 2015, 9:33 PM
8 points
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in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: Crazy Ideas Thread
Fair enough. My thinking is that voting has severe effects on others, while one’s choice of consumer product mostly affects oneself. Maybe a particular well-marketed beer can make one feel strong and virile; a well-marketed approach to foreign policy might do the same, but with worse consequences for others.

michaelkeenan Jul 10, 2015, 12:14 AM
4 points
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in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: Crazy Ideas Thread
My thinking with that—not that I’ve thought about it very hard or actually endorse this beyond “interesting crazy idea”—was that one’s emotions about a product can genuinely affect one’s enjoyment of it.

Maybe a certain food or other product is designed to evoke a cowboy’s frontier life, or an archetypal grandmother’s cooking, or something like that. Music would help create that association. Overall the effect might still be pernicious but I’m not sure about that.

michaelkeenan Jul 9, 2015, 5:22 PM
24 points
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on: Crazy Ideas Thread
Ban music in political campaign advertisements. Music has no logical or factual content, and only adds emotional bias.

Here’s an example of an ad with music intended to give two different emotional tones (optimistic/patriotic in the first six seconds, then sinister in the rest).

michaelkeenan Jul 1, 2015, 7:07 PM
6 points
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in reply to: Jiro’s comment on: Rationality Quotes Thread July 2015
This strikes me as careful cherrypicking of “absurd” results to pick only the non-absurd “absurd” ones...not all absurd conclusions from the past turned out to be okay in hindsight

I don’t think Ozy is claiming that all absurd conclusions are correct. Rather, Ozy claims that some absurd conclusions are correct. When you just need an existence proof, there’s no cherry-picking—you just pick your example/s and you’re done.

People who say “it is okay if my moral reasoning produces absurd results” generally don’t personally think “that sounds absurd, but I’ll accept it anyway”

Maybe they should! My impression is that Ozy does.

Go tell a vegetarian that he should support exterminating all wildlife to end wild animal suffering, and see what response you get

Ozy’s a vegetarian, and their position on wild animal suffering is:
short version:
- wild animal suffering v bad
- currently unfixable because we don’t understand the environment well enough yet to not destroy everything
- am much more sympathetic to wild-animal antinatalism than human antinatalism but am still not convinced
Seems pretty open to absurdity to me.

Rejecting reasoning that produces absurd results even if we can’t find a flaw in the reasoning is an important way we avoid errors

I’d prefer the framing of applying an absurdity penalty to one’s estimated probability, rather than “rejecting” it in a binary way, but yes: absurdity could be a useful thing to weight in one’s estimated probability of a conclusion being correct.

michaelkeenan Jul 1, 2015, 1:58 PM
30 points
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on: Rationality Quotes Thread July 2015

Efficient Outrage Hypothesis: if you’re hearing about it, it’s probably already a dogpile. The return on marginal outrage will be low or negative.

-- Egregore Peck (source)