Superforecaster, social science, metascience, data science. USA & Canada.
On Twitter or BlueSky you’d find me @thatMikeBishop
Mike Bishop
Karma: 659
I’d like to share introductory level posts as widely as possible. There are only three with this tag. Can people nominate more of these posts, perhaps messaging the author to encourage them to tag their post “introduction.”
We should link to, stumble on, etc. accessible posts as much as possible. The sequences are great, but intimidating for many people.
Added: Are there more refined tags we’d like to use to indicate who the articles are appropriate for?
Seeking examples of people smarter than me who got hung up
Resources don’t become scarce overnight. It happens a little more slowly, the price of the scarce resource rises. People find ways to use it more efficiently; they find or invent substitutes.
Nor would unprecedented levels of resource scarcity be likely to lead to a war between major powers. Our political systems may be imperfect, but the logic of mutually assured destruction would be clear and compelling even to the general public.
This postmortem is so impressive. Someone should collect all the pandemic related postmortems. I’d be particularly interested in those written by people in the field (broadly construed).
CronoDAS! You are trapped in a bad equilibrium, but there is no reason to believe you will be trapped in it forever. It is obvious to me that you are a thoughtful and intelligent individual. I would bet my life on the fact that you have false self-limiting beliefs. Keep experimenting in life and one day you will realize you’ve left that bad equilibrium.
I believe that some improvements in rationality have negative consequences which outweigh their positive ones.
That said, it might be easy to make too much of this. I agree that, on average, marginal improvements in rationality lead to far superior outcomes for individuals and society.
I know I’m not teaching Robin anything, but it should be noted that meta-analyses often fail to overcome publication selection biases.
Is there a reason you can’t just redefine utility to capture the value of freedom?
I think more of our beliefs are bead jar guesses than we realize, but because of assorted insidious psychological tendencies, we don’t recognize that and we hold onto them tighter than baseless suppositions deserve. [said Alicorn in the original]
If someone wants to do the work of linking the fairly abstract discussion here to how we think about making decisions in the real world, I think we would all benefit greatly.
Could we get polls, and an easy way to analyze the poll data? e.g. remove anonymous votes. Remove votes by people below a karma cutoff, etc.
Robin was kind enough not to say what overemphasizing the heroic individual rationalist implies about our true motivations.
I am hoping to learn the population standard deviation for the AS quotient. No luck so far, but this paper has the following info: 100 people suspected of having Asperger’s took the test, and then were evaluated by two clinicians using the DSM-IV criteria. The 73 subsequently diagnosed with Asperger’s had a mean of 36.62 and std. dev. of 6.63. The 27 not diagnosed had a mean of 26.22 and std. dev. of 9.39. Needless to say, one should interpret these numbers carefully because of the selection into the study, and due to variation across clinicians in coming to the same diagnosis.
the self-satisfaction of doing a good deed may fade relatively quickly, while the strengthened commitment to do-gooding persists for longer. That actually fits with Baumeister’s view of willpower. He’s argued that willpower is like a muscle: when used it tires in the short term but is strengthened for the the long term.
This point significantly undermines the conclusion of the original post.
Pornography may reduce rape though I haven’t investigated the methodology too thoroughly. If true, it is certainly another sign that lack of sexual satisfaction is a big problem.
The heroin metaphor certainly entails exaggeration, but I’m undecided as to whether that makes it inappropriate. Do you have a proposed substitute?
There is a really interesting discussion/debate about Pearl’s and Rubin’s approaches to causal inference going on at Andrew Gelman’s Blog. Part One. Part two. Part three.
Pearl is contributing in the comments.
More detail would be wonderful!
But building skyscrapers (and high-density cities more generally) is the most environmentally sustainable thing we can do. http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/10/the-lorax-was-wrong-skyscrapers-are-green/
Your main point, however, is right on.
“The solution: turn them into rationalists.”
You don’t say how to accomplish this. Would it require (or at least benefit greatly from) institutional change?
Are there cognitive scientists creating tests like this? If not, why not?
This is interesting, but I fear that the authors and the media are over-interpreting the data. There is a whole lot of research that basically goes from “the same area of the brain lights up!” to a shaky conclusion.