mwengler

Karma: 2,442

mwengler 21 Aug 2011 14:33 UTC
47 points
in reply to: Will_Newsome’s comment on: Please do not downvote every comment or post someone has ever made as a retaliation tactic.
This is news. In a reversal of the usual order of things, your karma got run over by your dogma.

mwengler 27 Dec 2011 16:35 UTC
37 points
on: If You Were Brilliant When You Were Ten...
My own experiences I consider a brilliant corrective for being really smart at the age of 10. I was always praised for my brilliance at young ages, from the neighbor man talking to me telling me “talking to you is not like talking to any other 12 year old” to the special class I was put in that required an IQ test to get in, skimmed the top 2% of the school district in to a special class in a remote school that met at different school hours to make busses available.

One great thing was to make a friend who was at least as smart as me, but way more unconventional. He applied to Caltech and to MIT (he said as his safety school) and that was it.

But the real corrective is to go to a great academic school. My freshman year at Swarthmore was the hardest academic year I had after 4th grade. Being around other smart 1%’ers is the way to go, to get a little normal or integrated. Bell Labs research area as a technician working for nobel prize winners and Caltech for graduate school planted me firmly in the middle of my peer group.

Also, read Feynman. Not his physics books necessarily but everything else. I was lucky enough to sit in the Physics Lecture every week with Feynman for a few years. He asked questions when he didn’t understand things. I even got to tell him something that he admitted wasn’t trivial when I was a 2nd year graduate student. (It was that photons in a waveguide have a finite rest mass, whereas it is only photons in free space that have zero rest mass and travel at the speed of light.)

If you are always the smartest guy in the room, chances are you have not worked hard enough to find the right room.

mwengler 9 Apr 2013 17:23 UTC
29 points
on: Problems in Education
My top candidates for what is up here are: 1) fabrication as part of a social experiment on how credulous we are 2) fabrication by a sociopath with a very odd idea of self-entertainment 3) incredibly erroneous interpretation of what is going on by a crank

But it is SO full of red flags that I would be surprised if it is not intentional. Call it 66% chance it is intentional hoax.

And it is so far from the mark of a true post that I would be very surprised if it had more than a glancing connection to the truth, call it 95% that it is barely connected to actual facts.

I have kids in California public schools. I have read, over the years, many critiques of public schools and public funding generally. As bad as things are, they are quite obviously nowhere near as bad as this article suggests in the schools my kids have gone to and are now going to. Further, I am quite good friends with a long time teacher, administrator, and union officer in NYC. I by no means share her respect for the union and DO believe documented horror stories of “turkey farms” where truly impossibly bad teachers are stored while being paid rather than following the more expensive process of firing them. I do believe other horror stories. But I can tell you for sure, while things are not amazingly wonderful in California public schools, they are simply not even vaguely close to that bad in many real Calfifornia schools I am exposed to.

So at bare minimum, if there is any truth to the allegations in the original post, the idea that these things are universal, or at least pervasive in American public schools is wrong.

Next argument: many of us reading this board, and even being taken in by this post, went through the American public school system ourselves, and by my standards, (I’m 55) many of you went through quite recently. Many of us, I dare say, were in advanced classes. Does the OP fit even vaguely with what you saw with your own eyes? It is miles from my 40 year old experiences.

Next, there is a thriving critique of publicschools in this country. With the amount of negative attention public education has drawn, is it really plausible that NONE of this critique has discovered the depths of waste and stupidity described as routine by this post? It is not plausible to me.

Next, public spending and public education tends to be a pretty open process. If these are Government grants, there is a crap load of information that has to be public.

Finally, to make such extreme claims with absolutely NO linkage to any source other than the post itself, would require remarkable naivete about how an intelligent audience should perceive claims like this, an innocence which is belied by the beautiful craftsmanship of the post itself. Really, EVERY program discussed needs to be obfuscated? No agency involved can be mentioned?

I googled “black men ipad education grant” hit nothing similar to the OP claimed program.

The real question is how long before the trap is sprung and we are told we were naive to believe this at all and we are really no better than birthers and creationists when the story fits our fears. I think it is better than 50% we will get such a message, but we’ll see.

mwengler 27 Nov 2012 14:24 UTC
29 points
on: [META] Retributive downvoting: Why?
An alternative would be to recognize that an upvote and a downvote are more orthogonal than opposite. A post or comment with 20 upvotes and 30 downvotes is clearly a very different post than one with 0 upvotes and 10 downvotes. A user with 2000 upvotes and 1500 downvotes is clearly a very different user than a user with 25 upvotes and 500 downvotes. If lesswrong simply reported upvote and downvote tallys side by side rather than netting them, a lot more information about posts, comments, and users would be available to readers. The current system is incapable of distinguishing between morons, trolls, intelligent newbies, and valuable and intelligent gadflies. Reporting positive and negative votes separately would help a lot.

mwengler 29 Apr 2013 15:26 UTC
27 points
on: New report: Intelligence Explosion Microeconomics
Just a thought on chess playing. Rather than looking at an extreme like Kasparov vs the world, it would be interesting to me to have teams of two, three, and four players of well-known individual ranking. These teams could then play many games against individuals and against each other. The effective ranking of the teams could be determined from their results. In this way, some sense of “how much smarter” a team is than the individual members could be determined. Ideally, the team would not be ranked until it had had significant experience playing as a team. We are interested in what a team could accomplish, and no strong reason to think it would take less time to optimize a team than to optimize an individual.

Along the same lines, teams could be developed to take IQ and other GI correlated tests to see how much smarter a few people together are than a single human. Would the results have implications for optimal AI design?

mwengler 3 Dec 2012 19:27 UTC
26 points
in reply to: Kaj_Sotala’s comment on: Open Thread, December 1-15, 2012
I’m 55 and I think the present is more shocking now than it was in the 1970s and 1980s. For me, the 70s and 80s were about presaging modern times. I think the first time I could look up the card catalog at my local library, ~1986 on gopher, I began to believe viscerally that all this internet stuff and computers was going to seriously matter SOON. Within a few months of that I saw my first webpage and that literally (by which of course I mean figuratively) knocked me in to the next century. I was flabbergasted.

Part of what was so shocking about being shocked was that it was, in some wierd sense, exactly what I expected. I had played with hypercard on macs years earlier and the early web was just essentially a networked extension of that. In my science fiction youth, I had always known or believed that knowledge would be ubiquitously available. I could summarize as saying there were no electronics in Star Trek (the original) that seemed unreasonable, from talking computers, big displays, tricorders and communicators. To me, faster-than-light travel, intelligent species all over the universe that looked and acted like made-up humans, and the transporter all seemed unreasonable.

Maybe what was shocking about the webpage is that it was so GORGEOUS. I saw it on a biggish Sun workstation screen. Text was crisp and proportionally spaced black type on white background. Pictures were colorful and vibrant. hyper-text links worked really fast. The impact of actually seeing it was overwhelming compared to just believing that someday it would be there.

As a 55 year old it feels to me like we are careening towards a singularity. The depth of processing power and sensor varieties that can be used in smartphones has barely begun to be explored. Meanwhile, these continue to get more powerful, more beautiful, and with more sensors available. Google autodrive cars: of course all those ideas about building guidewires and special things into the roads is dopey. At least its dopey if you don’t have to, and google shows you don’t.

Years ago when looking at biotech I commented wonderingly to my equal-aged frriend: isn’t it amazing to think that we could be among the last generation to die. My only consolation in knowing I will probably not make it until the singularity is that the way these things go, it will probably be delayed until 2091 anyway so I won’t just miss it by a little. And meanwhile, it doesn’t take much to enjoy the sled ride down the event horizon as the proto-singularity continues to wind itself up.

Live long and prosper, my friends.

Quantum Joint Configuration article: need help from physicists

mwengler22 Dec 2010 18:32 UTC

25 points

10 comments2 min readLW link

mwengler 2 Feb 2011 20:14 UTC
25 points
in reply to: billswift’s comment on: Rationality Quotes: February 2011
Better to teach the child the difference between programming a computer, proving a theorem, and writing an essay.

mwengler 23 Jan 2013 23:24 UTC
24 points
on: LW anchoring experiment: maybe
I would really appreciate a very brief statement of your conclusions. My apologies, but I don’t feel like shoveling through your analysis just to find out whether there is an effect, a weak effect, a backwards effect, or whatever.

mwengler 29 Nov 2014 16:37 UTC
23 points
on: When the uncertainty about the model is higher than the uncertainty in the model
The “model” you never name for the stock price distribution is a normal or Gaussian distribution. You point out that this model fails spectacularly to predict the highest variability point 20 sigma event. What you don’t point out that this model fails to predict even the 5 sigma events.

Looking at the plot of “Daily Changes in the Dow,” we see it is plotted over fewer than 95 years. Each trading year has a little less than 260 trading days in it. So plotted should be at most 24,000 daily changes. For a normal distribution, a 1/24000 event, the biggest event we would expect to happen once on this whole graph, would be somewhere between 4 and 4.5 sigma.

But instead of seeing one, or close to one 4.5 sigma or higher events in 24,000 daily changes, we see about 28 by my rough count looking at the graph. The data starts in 1915. By 1922 we have seen 5 “1 in100 years” events.

My point being: by 1922, we know the model that daily changes in the stock market fit a normal or gaussian distribution is just pure crap. We don’t need to wait 70 years for 20 sigma event to know the model isn’t just wrong, it is stupid. We suspect this fact within the first year or two of data, and we know with high reliability that the model is garbage by 1922.

What I don’t understand is why anybody rational would ever state the data fits a normal distribution, in the trivially obvious event that even within a few hundred events, we see an overwhelmingly obvious excess of large daily changes from what a normal distribution would predict.

One need not go to a mathematically well-described alternative distribution to produce a much better prediction of how often 20 sigma events will actually occur. Simply plotting the histogram of daily changes will show the tail probability falling off much more slowly than a normal distribution predicts. Before the 20 sigma event occurs, one might by estimating from the actual distribution of changes underestimate its probably by a factor of a few (or not, I have not done the exercise on this data), but one will not have underestimated it by tens of orders of magnitude.

There is no “uncertainty” in modeling daily stock market changes as normally (or log-normally) distributed. One can look at just the first few 100 points in the measured data, to be CERTAIN that a normal or a log-normal distribution is simply wrong.

mwengler 4 Dec 2013 17:54 UTC
23 points
in reply to: satt’s comment on: Rationality Quotes December 2013
Working with a top secret clearance has made me much more aware of how different hardball power reality is than it is presented. Just as one might consider a predilection towards conspiracies a bias, I think I came in to that job with a bias AGAINST conspiracies. I liked believing the world is a fair place where all sorts of tricky evil secret stuff “just wouldn’t be done.”

I now think (> 50% probability) that the bulk of society is coddled in a belief that things are fair and the world works in a warmish fuzzish way, but that the interactions especially between states and non-state power organizations (terrorists in common usage) is essentially without rules. If you can concieve of a way to get an advantage, it will be R&D’d and if it is workable it will be used.

I figure with just above 50% probability JFK was lone-assasinated purely on the basis that in 50 years with so much attention something would have broken, probably, if there was more to break. It would not matter to me much if it turned out to be a conspiracy of some sort, even if it was covered up, it would be par for the course in my current world view, either way.

Meaning I would be careful imputing too much superiority to myself over Russel, Sagan and/or Kerry purely on the basis of thinking JFK was lone-assasinated.

mwengler 6 Aug 2013 14:30 UTC
23 points
in reply to: Luke_A_Somers’s comment on: Crossing the experiments: a baby
I was out in front of my house with my 3 year old. She looked up and said “train.”

She was referring to the train horn she was hearing from about 4 miles away in Encinitas. She said this before my own brain had tossed my own hearing of this in to /dev/null, so I got to hear what that train horn sounds like from 4 miles away in a coastal town in the early evening.

That baby has been creating beauty in my life for more than 16 years and she is only 15.5 years old. Most recently I have been teaching her to drive, pushing all sorts of behaviors down in to her cerebellum so that her conscious mind can worry about pedestrians and cars stopping suddenly in front of her. Happily for me, it is hard for me to imagine more fun or exciting tasks than teaching her to drive.

mwengler 19 Jul 2012 14:07 UTC
23 points
on: The Problem Of Apostasy

More importantly, concerning Less Wrong itself, should we try to distance ourselves from atheism and anti-religiousness as such? Is this baggage too inconvenient, or is it too much a part of what we stand for?

I think it would be a mistake to distance ourselves from these. A tool the religious use is to pretend disagreement with them is crazy. Countering this idea is CENTRAL to rationality. Being afraid of being sent to hell for eternity is no more “evidence” that god exists than is being afraid of tigers evidence that there is one in your back yard. A central reason why the scientific method has succeeded so remarkably is that it automatically enforces the rule that just because you want something to be true doesn’t make it true, and indeed is not even evidence for its truth. If anything, it is evidence that you need to be more skeptical of the idea if you want to get it right to counteract your own bias.

In my opinion, the best advantages rationality can gain is a totally reasonable intelligent well spoken blond woman wearing sleeveless dresses smiling and explaining with devastating clarity just how much sense atheism makes. The reason this makes the mullahs want to spit at her and kill her is because it is a threat to what they are selling, which is precisely why rationalists should keep doing it.

mwengler 19 Jul 2012 15:11 UTC
22 points
in reply to: Raw_Power’s comment on: The Problem Of Apostasy
I am a “typical” american grew up in New York. When I was 18 and my sister was 17, my sister and I visited my father for a few weeks who was working in Esfahan. The shah was still in charge, it was the late 1970s.

My sister was a beautiful young woman with blond hair. Despite being warned by other non-Iranians that when we went in to see Esfahan she should dress modestly, she went out in a sleeveless dress because it was warm and sunny. Angry old men spat at her (at least one anyway) and the young men brushed up against her and copped feels.

The idea that you can manage the strong sexual and social urges men feel in the presence of attractive women by keeping the women uneducated, locked away, and covered when they are out is ludicrous, wasteful of more than half of the human resources a society has, plus pretty crappy for the women. Providing even the slightest respect towards this call for “modesty” is a strategic mistake. Well, maybe the slightest respect, an attractive dress wtih a moderate amount of cleavage showing is a better idea than a thong and a push-up bra for our rationality spokesmodel.

Plus I enjoy being oddly specific. It feels livelier to me than stilted generalities.

mwengler 12 Jul 2014 16:52 UTC
21 points
on: Too good to be true

A friend recently posted a link on his Facebook page to an informational graphic about the alleged link between the MMR vaccine and autism. It said, if I recall correctly, that out of 60 studies on the matter, not one had indicated a link.

Presumably, with 95% confidence.

OK so I got interested in this strong claim Phil is making and went to look at the original study he is critiquing so strenuously.

But there is no link to that original study or infographic or whatever.

I don’t think there is any value to a strenuous criticism of a study or result when there is no link to that study in the critique.

mwengler 9 Jul 2014 14:53 UTC
21 points
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: Consider giving an explanation for your deletion this time around. “Harry Yudkowsky and the Methods of Postrationality: Chapter One: Em Dashes Colons and Ellipses, Littérateurs Go Wild”

Your decision seems very obviously wrong to me.

I believe there are well-known human biases involving humans trying to evaluate things which mention them by name.

Could you be subject to that kind of thing?

mwengler 9 Jan 2012 21:05 UTC
20 points
in reply to: James_Miller’s comment on: Dead Child Currency
As a matter of pedagogy, I think you would be better off telling them how many children had to die so you could have your house, or your car, or your last vacation. What you are doing seems too much to me like singling someone out for embarassment which I would imagine would alienate many students rendering you relatively useless as a teacher.

mwengler 10 Nov 2012 0:00 UTC
19 points
in reply to: JonathanLivengood’s comment on: XKCD—Frequentist vs. Bayesians
Because the stupider the prediction is that somebody is making, the harder it is to get them to put their money where their mouth is. The Bayesian is hoping that $50 is a price the other guy is willing to pay to signal his affiliation with the other non-Bayesians.

mwengler 10 Dec 2013 0:55 UTC
18 points
in reply to: shminux’s comment on: Personal examples of semantic stopsigns
One of Feynman’s stories is about trying to get a NASA manager to quantify the risk that the liquid-fueled shuttle rocket would explode during a launch. After initially claiming zero, he finally allowed it might be “epsilon.” “Now we are getting somewhere” Feynman happily exclaimed. “What is epsilon equal to?”

Some of Feynman’s best stories are about running through semantic stop signs.

mwengler 13 May 2013 15:47 UTC
18 points
on: The autopilot problem: driving without experience
The complacency and deskilling are a feature, not a bug. The less I have to learn to get from place to place, the more attention I have for other things that can’t be automated (yet).

Attributing to a GPS faillure a woman driving 900 miles to croatia when she intended to drive 38 miles within Belgium is naive. Most likely she put the wrong address in, possibly with the help of autocomplete, possibly not. But crazy, drug-addled, and or senile people have been winding up hundreds of miles from where they thought they were for a long time before there were any GPS satellites in orbit. Actual GPS errors in my experience take you to a street behind your inou tended destination, or direct you to streets that are closed. And these errors fall off quickly as the expert system becomes, well, more expert. The GPS navigation app errors tend to be small, bringing you near where you need to go but then requiring some intelligence to realize how to fix the error the system has made. Meanwhile, I drove two hours out of my way on vacation in Florida, an error I could not have possibly made to that extent if I had had the GPS navigation systems I now use all the time.

Automated cars WILL be blamed for all sorts of problems including deaths. The unwashed innumerates will tell detailed stories about how they went wrong and be unmoved by the overall statistics of a system which will cause FEWER deaths per mile driven than do humans. Some of those deaths will occur in ways that after-the-fact innumerates, and other elements of the infotainment industry known as democracy, will tell wonderful anecdotes about them. There may even be congressional hearings and court cases. The idea that a few deaths that MIGHT have been avoided under the old regime is literally a small price to pay for an overall lower death rate will be too complex a concept to get legs in the infotainment industry.

But in the long run, the nerds will win, and economically useful automation will be broadly adopted. We don’t know how to grow our own food or build our own houses anymore and we’ve gotten over that. We’ll get over this too and the innumerate infotainment industry known as democracy will move on to its next stupidity.

mwengler

Quan­tum Joint Con­figu­ra­tion ar­ti­cle: need help from physicists

Quantum Joint Configuration article: need help from physicists