NatashaRostova

Karma: 219

NatashaRostova 13 Feb 2017 23:48 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: What are you surprised people don’t just buy?
This.

NatashaRostova 4 Feb 2017 1:13 UTC
0 points
in reply to: phl43’s comment on: A question about the rules
Yeah that’s totally cool. LW style is different though. Not necessarily in a good way, and this difference might even be why it’s less popular than other sites these days. But it’s different in that LW doesn’t, as far as I have observed, want lots of people from different sides. It wants an almost algorithmic approach to reality, where more colorful language is viewed as disrupting the truth by inflaming tribal parts of your brain.

Everything you’re saying is totally reasonable for someone who doesn’t understand the very very specific thing LW is trying to accomplish, and the idiosyncratic rules of engagement for this site.

Personally I don’t come here as often as other sites in part due to these rules, at times, feeling stringent shrug

NatashaRostova 2 Feb 2017 18:17 UTC
2 points
on: A question about the rules
The style of your blog is very very much at odds with the style of Less Wrong. I would never submit anything here that classified as a cohesive set what ‘liberals’ think, and then attacked that classification. Writing here should map more to statistical estimation and modeling, where every word and claim is scrutinized, thoughtful, and attempts to avoid invoking needless emotion. That last point is harder to nail down. It is of course possible to have an excitable tone that runs orthogonal to the strict argument, but it’s pretty hard to do right.

I do, sometimes, write more in line with the tone you choose on my personal blog, but I wouldn’t ever submit it here. And as I write more and think more, I’ve become increasingly convinced it’s not the best way to think. Trying to be persuasive, methodological, and charitable, is more fun since it’s much more challenging.

You’d have better luck in the reactosphere, which probably gets more readers than LW anyway.

NatashaRostova 25 Jan 2017 5:07 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Anders_H’s comment on: Odds ratios and conditional risk ratios
I thought it was interesting—and frustrating for you. I haven’t invested the time into proving to myself you’re right, but in the case that you are I hope you’re able to get someone to verify and lend you their credibility.

Why do you think two senior biostats guys would disagree with you if it was obviously wrong? I have worked with enough academics to know that they are far far from infallible, but curious on your analysis of this question.

NatashaRostova 24 Jan 2017 20:55 UTC
0 points
in reply to: maxjmartin’s comment on: Metrics to evaluate a Presidency

Coming up with criteria and metrics on the economy is pretty easy

I agree. In fact, I think coming up with criteria and metrics on the economy is profoundly challenging within the US context. We know there are right tail events (inflation, unemployment, etc) that are very strong. But when they are all generally stable, or within the realm of stability, but the variation within demographics and geographies of the US is huge, the value of the metrics can start to dramatically collapse IMO.

NatashaRostova 24 Jan 2017 20:53 UTC
1 point
in reply to: The_Jaded_One’s comment on: Metrics to evaluate a Presidency
It’s hard to think of how one could do a lit review on that without, like, a thousand sources to try and characterize the general scope of the problem.

NatashaRostova 22 Jan 2017 23:03 UTC
2 points
on: Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor?
This is pretty cool. It reminds me of an article I read on brain surgery recently (https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/03/magazine/karl-ove-knausgaard-on-the-terrible-beauty-of-brain-surgery.html). Where the surgeon keeps the patient awake, and zaps different parts of the brain to see what they map to. They don’t even try to pretend they understand the system, but try to map simple correlations.

NatashaRostova 22 Jan 2017 6:50 UTC
1 point
on: 0.999...=1: Another Rationality Litmus Test
[Note, after rereading your post my comment is tangential]

I have always been empathetic to the argument, from people first presented with this, that they are different. Understanding how math deals with infinity basically requires having the mathematical structure supporting it already known. I’m not particularly gifted at math, but the first 4 weeks of real analysis really changed the way I think, because it was basically a condensed rapid upload of centuries of collaborative work from some of the smartest men to ever exist right into my brain.

Otherwise, at least in my experience, we operate in a discrete world that moves through time. So, what I predict is happening, is that when you ask that question to people their best approximation is a discrete world ticking through time.

Is 0.999...=1? Well, each tick of time another set of [0.0...9]’s is added, when the question is finally answered the time stops. You’re then left with some finite number [0.0..01]. In their mind it’s a discrete algo running through time.

The reality that it’s a limit that operates absent of time, instantaneously, is hard to grasp, because it took brilliant men centuries to figure out this profoundly unintuitive result. We understand it because we learned it.

NatashaRostova 20 Jan 2017 18:27 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Thoughts on “Operation Make Less Wrong the single conversational locus”, Month 1
Can we elect a dictator?

NatashaRostova 19 Jan 2017 20:55 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Thoughts on “Operation Make Less Wrong the single conversational locus”, Month 1
Sincere question: Do you think the SSC comments section accomplishes politics while filtering out foam, spittle etc? (or perhaps the comments section there is more robust to simply ignoring bad comments, which isn’t the same on a forum?)

Having no moderator experience, I guess there is probably a lot on that end that I don’t know.

NatashaRostova 19 Jan 2017 19:22 UTC
6 points
on: Thoughts on “Operation Make Less Wrong the single conversational locus”, Month 1
The things most people are interested in discussing are frowned upon/banned from discussion on LW. That’s why they go to SSC. The world has changed in the past 10 years, and the conversational rules and restrictions of 2009 no longer make sense today.

The rationalsphere, if you expand it to include blogs like Marginal Revolution, is one of the few intellectual mechanisms left to disentangle complex information from the clusterf* of modern politics. Not talking about it here through a clear rationalist framework is a tragedy.

NatashaRostova 19 Jan 2017 4:39 UTC
1 point
in reply to: bogus’s comment on: Marginal Revolution Thoughts on Black Lives Matter Movement
Well, different people understand it in different ways. Some are horrible people who understand it in the worst way. Others are great people who understand it in the best way. The entire group is willing to sacrifice clarity and a clear definition, in favor of something sufficiently vague to band together a collective action who overlap on certain dimensions.

I think for that reason though, trying to debate the definition or how it’s understood is pointless. Sadly. I don’t blame people who think it’s a worthy cause anyway, maybe they are right. I personally can’t stand associating with movements where the direction isn’t clear, but that’s just me.

NatashaRostova 18 Jan 2017 22:43 UTC
7 points
on: Project Hufflepuff
Cool.

NatashaRostova 18 Jan 2017 5:44 UTC
13 points
on: The substance of money
Hey,

I’m gonna give you sort of an unsatisfying answer. I had a similar interest, which resulted in me getting my MSc and working in research at the Fed for a few years, with the goal of sorting it out in my head (ended up going private sector instead of getting a PhD). As far as I have surveyed, there are different models of money, but it’s scientifically an unsolved problem. There seems to be a level of complexity that arises as you increase the number of people on a monetary system, increase industries, increase geographical scale, add new countries and exchanges, and add complex financial systems. As this grows, filtering out what and how, exactly, money interacts with these systems, starts to get very messy.

As an example, during the financial crisis, trillions of dollars ‘disappeared.’ They disappeared because they only ever existed because we were borrowing from our future selves, then collectively lost faith in our future selves having that money, so the money ceased to exist today. Is that how a commodity behaves? Well, now we are trying to build classifications for what is and isn’t a commodity. Of course, you could do the same thing on a gold standard if banks were allowed to issue demand deposits, which combined with fractional reserve banking leads to the same thing.

Monetarism, I firmly believe, isn’t something you can reason through intuitively at a casual level. I decided it wasn’t something I wanted to devote my life to, and even though I spent a couple years working daily in the field, I don’t know that I understand that much (although I do know what I don’t know, which definitely counts as real knowledge).

I think monetary economics is sort of a mind-killer, since trying to intuitively reason through monetarism can take you down many very different paths, all of which seemingly arise from an incredibly reasonable set of axioms and inferences. If you ever listen to really clever Austrians or Keynesians discuss their view, it’s incredibly compelling. That sets off alarms in my favorite heuristic of undeterminism, when multiple models of the world fit the data equally well. It’s super common for blogosphere denizens or naive rationalists to try their hand at monetary economics, convinced they’ve stumbled upon some key insight that means all econ professors are wrong.

I will say, while I didn’t leave the fed enamored or anything, a subset of those economists are brilliant and humble. I notice this flawed reasoning so often, where independent researchers, or researchers in another field, will construct elaborate arguments against the most uncharitable readings of economists arguments. Often they won’t have ever spoken to a notable economist in person. They don’t ever have to present to peers, they never have to formalize their arguments mathematically, and they never bother engaging in the more advanced formulations of economic arguments that wind up in journals. Anyway, I’m getting off track here...

While as a rule I don’t think mathematizing things necessarily makes them clearer, I am convinced it’s the right way to proceed in monetary studies. It forces a strict structure, which prevents us from using words to overfit or get lost. Although the field is so complex, and it’s intertwined with historical narratives that aren’t always easily turned into data sets, so that can sometimes make it harder. The math often gets sorta complicated as well.

Of course, the actual monetary economy has real data. Most of which we can’t collect. So the theoretical models are our way of trying to imagine what the structure would look like, even though they aren’t empirical. Which gets to another problem, which is how confident can one be in theoretical economics? Sometimes the assumptions are incredibly robust, but the systems are often very complex.

One place I will say I think many economists act contrary to LW style rationality, is in choosing a side, rather than taking the rational view that there are many sides with equally valid claims to truth, and they should work together to expose what is correct. It has always struck me as being mind-killed when people state “Oh, I’m a neo-Keynsian so I believe XYZ, you’re a non-Keynsian, so you reject ABC” (or whatever). I mean… maybe the Austrians are all right, and they have this unique perception of reality none of the Neo-Keynsian scholars have, because they have some more profoundly true insight into the mesh of reality that is lost on the other econo-plebs… But that doesn’t seem like the most likely scenario to me.

Or maybe Paul Krugman really is right about everything, but still… I doubt it. He was once a smart young man that had some crucial insights on the theoretical mathematical structure behind international trade, which earned him an econ Nobel. I don’t think he’s in tune with empirical realities though. He’s just a genius at imagining some elegant mathematical structure that characterizes an economy which might or might not map to reality, and then convincing himself it’s actually exactly how reality operates. That’s the big mistake, I think.

If you want to take a look down the rabbit hole, I’d suggest reading Milton Friedman’s books on monetary history. Even his detractors tend to agree his insight and clarity on money is absolutely incredible. He also is great at explaining things without too much math, but still using ratios and dataseries in his books when appropriate.

For shorter term stuff, check out John Cochrane’s stuff, he’s my favorite social scientist, (http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/john.cochrane/research/papers/cochrane_policy.pdf, http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/search/label/Monetary%20Policy). His blog—second link—is really great.

NatashaRostova 17 Jan 2017 1:37 UTC
2 points
in reply to: ingive’s comment on: Welcome to Less Wrong! (11th thread, January 2017) (Thread B)
Good luck! I’m looking forward to reading your ebook on 5 easy tips on how to unlock my inner high-IQ potential.

NatashaRostova 15 Jan 2017 23:29 UTC
6 points
in reply to: The_Jaded_One’s comment on: Defusing Hate: A Strategic Communication Guide to Counteract Dangerous Speech
I think the most dangerous aspect of ‘dangerous speech’ is it is a shared meme to disregard certain types of arguments off-hand, regardless of how true or false they are. It becomes most dangerous when someone then, for some reason, decides to investigate further and realizes “Hey, some of this stuff is true! And I can’t trust anyone anymore.”

NatashaRostova 13 Jan 2017 22:39 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Manfred’s comment on: [Error communicating with LW2 server]
As someone who wants more top-notch rationalist politics on LW, without moderators removing it, I think moderators should remove this.

NatashaRostova 13 Jan 2017 22:37 UTC
0 points
in reply to: MrMind’s comment on: Dominic Cummings: how the Brexit referendum was won
I think it’s fair to argue that elections that are won by a slim margin don’t say much of significance about discrete narrative changes in the weeks leading up to the election. That could be false though, if for example we view Trump winning the election as a ‘treatment’ effect, which gives him a new discrete ability to change the narrative.

But more generally, I think an election such as Brexit does give us a significant story, not necessarily for the week leading up to it, but for the changing preferences of a population in the year or two leading up to it and the invocation of the election itself.

NatashaRostova 10 Jan 2017 3:56 UTC
3 points
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: Open thread, Jan. 09 - Jan. 15, 2017
I think there are some serious issues with the methodology and instruments used to measure heuristics & biases, which they didn’t fully understand even ten years ago.

Some cognitive biases are robust and well established, like the endowment effect. Then there are the weirder ones, like ego depletion. I think a fundamental challenge with biases is clever researchers first notice them by observing other humans, as well as observing the way that they think, and then they need to try and measure it formally. The endowment effect, or priming, maps pretty well to a lab. On the other hand, ego depletion is hard to measure in a lab (in any sufficiently extendable way).

I think a lot of people experience, or think they experience, something like ego depletion. Maybe it’s insufficiently described, or a broad classification, or too hard to pin down. So the original researcher noticed it in their experience, and formed a contrived experiment to ‘prove’ it. Everyone agreed with it, not because the statistics were compelling or it was a great research design, but because they all experience, or think they experience, ego depletion.

Then someone replicates it, and it doesn’t replicate, because it’s really hard to measure robustly. I think ego depletion doesn’t work well in a lab, or without some sort of control or intervention, but those are hard things to set up for such a broad and expansive argument. And I guess you could build a survey, but that sucks too.

In the fundamental attribution error, I think that meta analysis is great, in that it shows that these studies suck statistically. They only work if you come to them with the strong prior evidence that “Hey, this seems like something I do to other people, and in the fake examples of attribution error I can think of lots of scenarios where I have done that.” Of course, our memory sucks, so that is a questionable prior, but how questionable is it? In the end I don’t know if it’s real, or only real for some people, or too generalized to be meaningful, or true in some situations but not others, or how other people’s brains work. Probably the original thesis was too nice and tidy: Here is a bias, here is the effect size. Maybe the reality is: Here is a name for a ton of strange correlated tiny biases, which together we classify as ‘fundamental attribution’, but which is incredibly challenging to measure statistically over a sample population in a contrived setting, as the best information to support it seems inextricably tangled up in the recesses of our brains.

(also most heuristics and biases probably do suck, and lack of replication shows the authors were charlatans)

NatashaRostova 9 Jan 2017 20:43 UTC
3 points
on: If I must eat meat, I eat pork

Once that happened, I’d no longer be able to eat chickens. I could apply the same process to all animals, and so by induction I would be unwilling to eat any animal.

This is an interesting way to look at using induction, but I see it more as a willing reprogramming of your brain. In your case, you were able to simulate a case where eating chicken would disgust you (eating a pet) and that gave you impetus to stop eating chicken.

I am a big meat eater. I predict there is a 30-60% chance I would drastically reduce my meat eating if I was forced to run a slaughterhouse for my food, and see the suffering and kill the animals. Every time I wanted meat I’d need to take on the moral burden of killing an animal. If I may try my hand at some pop-historical analysis, I bet this is why past societies frequently held a reverence, often spiritual, with the killing of animals for food.

...And yet, I still eat lots of meat. Probably if someone took me on a tour of kids with malaria in Africa I’d donate more to those charities. Or if I was walked through a Russian sex trafficking brothel, I would support organizations to end those practices. Or if someone made a three hour movie on the tragedy of the homeless person who sleeps by my apartment, documenting their misfortune, I would go out and buy a coat and food and try to help them because it would unlock and develop emotions I don’t currently have.

I sort of know if I went through these simulations it would change my outlook and behavior in life. These are also obviously topics I already am familiar with, but there are surely lots of topics I’m unfamiliar with that would change my view of the world. Of course I can’t have all these experiences, and I’m not sure how I should try to adjust my behavior today on the expectations of how my behaviors would change if I were to have experiences that I’m not going to have, but plausibly could have.

Is it rational for me to eat less meat now, even though I enjoy it and don’t feel guilty, because a plausible counter-factual me who had some experiences I don’t have would tell me to? Or is it rational for me to eat meat because there is no counter-factual me who exists, and as it stands now I enjoy it and don’t feel guilty?