Far from being the smartest possible biological species, we are probably better thought of as the stupidest possible biological species capable of starting a technological civilization. We filled that niche because we got there first, not because we are in any sense optimally adapted to it.
Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: the Coming Machine Intelligence Revolution, chap. 2
Another possibility is that our intuitive sense of justice is a set of heuristics: moral machinery that’s very useful but far from infallible. We have a taste for punishment. This taste, like all tastes, is subtle and complicated, shaped by a complex mix of genetic, cultural, and idiosyncratic factors. But our taste for punishment is still a taste, implemented by automatic settings and thus limited by its inflexibility. All tastes can be fooled. We fool our taste buds with artificial sweeteners. We fool our sexual appetites with birth control and pornography, both of which supply sexual gratification while doing nothing to spread our genes. Sometimes, however, our tastes make fools of us. Our tastes for fat and sugar make us obese in a world of abundance. Drugs of abuse hijack our reward circuits and destroy people’s lives. To know whether we’re fooling our tastes or whether our tastes are fooling us, we have to step outside the limited perspective of our tastes: To what extent is this thing—diet soda, porn, Nutella, heroin—really serving our bests interests? We should ask the same question about our taste for punishment.
Joshua Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them, New York, 2013, p. 272
You should work to reduce your biases, but to say you have none is a sign that you have many.
Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail — But Some Don’t, New York, 2012, p. 451
P/S/A: You are probably spending too much time looking for yet another possible solution to a problem you want to solve, and too little time making an effort to actually try the possible solutions you are already familiar with. As an example, if you are depressed, stop reading about Seth Roberts’ latest pet theory of circadian oscillators if you haven’t even bothered to seek professional medical advice.
A good rule of thumb to ask yourself in all situations is, “If not now, then when?” Many people delay important habits, work and goals for some hypothetical future. But the future quickly becomes the present and nothing will have changed.
Update: the positions are now filled. See here for the official announcement.
Help wanted: pandemic.metaculus.com project lead
The high interest and proliferation of questions on the novel coronavirus calls for dedicated attention, which led to the formation of pandemic.metaculus.com. Managing it, though, is straining Metaculus’s very limited staff and community moderator team. Contingent on acquisition of funding (which Metaculus is working to secure), Metaculus is looking to bring onboard someone to help manage this project. Components would include:
Managing the pandemic site and question series as a sort of “editor in chief” working with the community moderators (as Tamay does now for Metaculus in general.)
Helping build data products and analyses out of the questions and results.
The above indicates a range of skills including pretty strong understanding of Metaculus, and data analysis capability. Science background would be great, and huge bonus for actual medical knowledge. This is probably a part-time role but full-ish time is also imaginable depending upon the person, the duration, and funding.
If you’re interested, please send a note and CV to jobs@metaculus.com.
I don’t think he is properly described as a “troll”, though I’m puzzled by the high opinion that some folks here appear to have of Moldbug. This is someone who is manifestly not seeking truth honestly, doesn’t write very clearly, often engages in mind-killer disputes, seldom makes claims that can be directly tested or even falsified in principle, and hasn’t made any substantive contributions to any branch of science, philosophy, or mathematics.
So many! Just a few that come to mind: compound interest, observation selection effect, bias, differential technological development, function, present value, correlation, subjective experience, trivial inconvenience, self-amplifying capacity, expectation, etc.
Also, many conceptual distinctions in philosophy are useful: analytic-synthetic, a priori-a posteriori, de re-de dicto, phenomenal-intentional, proximate-ultimate, intrinsic-instrumental, factual-normative, contingent-necessary, etc. Taxonomies of views in a given field, too, can be quite helpful in conceptualizing the relevant boundaries (e.g. Chalmers on views about consciousness or Miller on views in metaethics).
I guess one could say the concept of a useful concept is itself quite useful.
I think it would be valuable to compile a list of estimates of basic epidemiological parameters of the coronavirus, such as incubation rate, doubling times, probability of symptomatic infections, delay from disease onset to death, probability of death among symptomatics, and so on. I find that my inability to model various scenarios accurately is often due to uncertainty about one or more of these parameters (uncertainty relative to what I suspect current expert knowledge to be, which is of course also uncertain to a considerable degree).
Metaculus question: Will the New York Times doxx Scott Alexander?
A passion to make the world a better place is a fine reason to study social psychology. Sometimes, however, researchers let their ideals or their political beliefs cloud their judgment, such as in how they interpret their research findings. Social psychology can only be a science if it puts the pursuit of truth above all other goals. When researchers focus on a topic that is politically charged, such as race relations or whether divorce is bad for children, it is important to be extra careful in making sure that all views (perhaps especially disagreeable ones, or ones that go against established prejudices) are considered and that the conclusions from research are truly warranted.
Roy Baumeister & Brad Bushman, Social Psychology and Human Nature, Belmont, 2008, p. 13
A prima facie argument in favour of the efficacy of prayer is […] to be drawn from the very general use of it. The greater part of mankind, during all the historic ages, has been accustomed to pray for temporal advantages. How vain, it may be urged, must be the reasoning that ventures to oppose this mighty consensus of belief! Not so. The argument of universality either proves too much, or else it is suicidal. It either compels us to admit that the prayers of Pagans, of Fetish worshippers and of Buddhists who turn praying wheels, are recompensed in the same way as those of orthodox believers; or else the general consensus proves that it has no better foundation than the universal tendency of man to gross credulity.
Francis Galton, ‘Statistical Inquiries into the Efficacy of Prayer’, Fortnightly Review, vol. 12, no. 68 (August, 1872), pp. 125–135
I would like to see more posts like Paul Christiano’s My workflow. There are many folks here who are extremely productive (e.g. lukeprog, gwern) and it would be helpful for many of us to have a detailed first-hand account of how such folks manage their time.
I wish to propose for the reader’s favourable consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true.
Bertrand Russell, ‘Introduction’, in Sceptical Essays, London, 1928
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, New York, 2007, p. 133