And egoists are almost always consequentialists.
Perplexed
Karma: 5,227
I’m not sure to what claims you are referring. If you mean, for example, the claim that Alicorn is a deontologist, then I should point out that she has publicly confessed. If you mean my implicit claim that Giles is male, then I confess to jumping to that conclusion without sufficient evidence.
Alicorn, a deontologist, wishes that a certain consequence (the salvation of the world) obtain. Whether she is involved in producing that consequence or not.
Giles, presumably a consequentialist, phrases his own wish so as to egoistically place himself at the site of the action.
The juxtaposition carries a certain irony.
I’ve been wondering about this for a while, and find it unclear whether my spiritual side is simply “not actually religion”.
I wonder if you could clarify for me what you mean by “spiritual” in “spiritual side”? I was raised as a Roman Catholic, and to me ‘spiritual’ means the other side of Descartes’s dualism—the non-physical side. So, for example, I learned that the Deity and angels are purely spiritual. But being human, my spiritual side is my immortal soul—which pretty much includes my mind.
I’m pretty sure you (and millions of other people who talk about spirituality) mean something different from this, but I have never been able to figure out what you all mean.
A definition of ‘spiritual’ is preferred, but failing that, could you taboo ‘spiritual’ and say what you meant by ‘spiritual side’ without using the word?
This is basically correct. It is a two-person cooperative game and the ‘classical’ solution is the Nash Bargaining Solution—introduced in the 1950 paper that you cite. Stuart_Armstrong has written several top-level postings on this standard topic in game theory recently. So it is shocking to me that so many people failed to identify the problem and even more shocking that so many of them incorrectly think that it is the ultimatum game.
I have one minor quibble with your solution, and one improvement. The quibble is that it is not necessarily the case that the marginal utility of money is the same for the two players. The Nash bargaining solution is based on maximizing the product of the utility gains—not the money gains.
The improvement follows Rubinstein. If the two parties do not reach agreement today, then they can still reach agreement tomorrow. (This is why it is different from an ultimatum game.) So the threat that each party holds over the other is to delay the (ultimately inevitable) agreement. But although the delay applies to each party (one has a delay in building the house, the other has a delay in receiving and then investing the cash), it may be that the two have different discount factors. The opportunity to build now is worth $500,000 to the one guy, but perhaps he is in such a hurry that the ability to build next year is worth only $400,000. But the other guy may figure that $500,000 next year is worth about $475,000 now. His discount factor is is only about a quarter of that of the eager home-builder. This puts him at a significant advantage in the bargaining—so much so that the solution of the Rubinstein bargaining model is close to $400,000 to be paid for the easement.
Thank you for that. But would you consider the experience positive or negative? :)
It always annoys me when people use acronyms or abbreviations with which I am not familiar. In this case, though, using the LW search gizmo on “SRS” led me quickly to the apparently intended meaning. That doesn’t always happen—“CEV” is a particularly bad example.
… academic movement, whereby we reject closed journals, embrace the open source mentality, and collaborate on up-to-date and awesome wikis on every modern research area.
That sounds rather like Scholarpedia’s plan
Not completely. And working through the fine print of my disagreement here helps to show just how rich the field of possibilities is for an alternative to the current system.
In some ways, Scholarpedia is more closed than the current print journal system. After all, anyone can start a journal—there are journals of intelligent design studies, for example. But it probably would not be possible to get Dr. Izhikevich’s approval for an encyclopedia of ID under the scholarpedia umbrella, nor to get the curator to allow an ID-promoting article into Scholarpedia’s evolution encyclopedia. Scholarpedia promotes open access for readers, but not for authors.
There is also some question of whether Scholarpedia embraces the open source mentality—there is the whole complicated question of derivative works.
Formatting quibble: HTML tags like and don’t work here. Use the editing toolbar for italics and bold in top level posts.
And he also made the point that if we want to take some conscious control, we may need to use a very kludgy pathway—for example, pumping iron before making a sales call so as to increase testosterone levels.
I suspect that what V_N is reacting negatively to is the naive-seeming use of words like “electricity” and “chemicals” in the posting as if they were two powerful, but mysterious brands of magic. But I didn’t see anything objectionable in what the posting actually said.
There is a difference between concept analysis—which ideally ends with words having a useful meaning—and a different, less productive kind of analysis which ideally ends up with words in a discussion having the same meaning that they have outside the discussion.
Philosophers are indeed uniquely trained to conduct the first kind of analysis.
Do you see it as a testable hypothesis[?]
I believe it can be turned into one. For example, as stated, it doesn’t take into account sample or population size. The reductio (N=2) is that it seems to claim the faster of two programmers will be 10x as fast as the slower. There is also a need to clarify and delimit what is meant by task.
You said earlier that a great programmer is good at all types of programming tasks, and program maintenance certainly is a programming task. Why the reversal?
Because you and I meant different things by task. (I meant different types of systems—compilers vs financial vs telephone switching systems for example.) Typing and attending meetings are also programming tasks, but I wouldn’t select them out for measurement and exclude other, more significant tasks when trying to test the 10x hypothesis.
Now this sounds as if you’re defining “productivity” in such a way that it has less to do with “rate of output”. You’ve just ruled out, a priori, any experimental setup in which you hand programmers a fixed design and measure the time taken to implement it, for instance.
Yes, I have. And I think we are wasting time here. It is easy to refute a scientific hypothesis by uncharitably misinterpreting it so that it cannot possibly be true. So I’m sure you will succeed in doing so without my help.
You had asked for assistance and expertise on using R/RStudio. Unfortunately, I have never used them.
maybe R implicitly converts them
Judging from your results, I’m sure you are right.
The bottom line seems to be that the task coefficients do a much better job of predicting the completion time than do the programmer coefficients.
Yes, and if you added some additional tasks into the mix—tasks which took hours or days to complete—then programmer ID would seem to make even less difference. This points out the defect in my suggested data-analysis strategy. A better approach might have been to divide each time by the average time for the task (over all programmers), optionally also taking the log of that, and then exclude the task id as an independent variable. After all, the hypothesis is that Achilles is 10x as fast as the Tortoise, not that he takes ~30 minutes less time regardless of task size.
My reasons for believing the 10x hypothesis are mostly anecdotal. I’ve talked to people who observed Knuth and Harlan Mills in action. I know of the kinds of things accomplished more recently by Torvalds and Hudak. Plus, I have myself observed differences of at least 5x in industrial and college classwork environments.
I looked at the PatMain study. I’m not sure that the tasks there are large enough (roughly 3 hours) to test the 10x hypothesis. Worse, they are program maintenance tasks, and they exclude testing and debugging. My impression is that top programmers achieve their productivity mostly by being better at the design and debugging tasks. That is, they design so that they need less code, and they code so they need dramatically less debugging. So I wouldn’t expect PatMain data to back up the 10x hypothesis.
I think you need one variable per programmer (value 0 or 1), one variable per task (value 0 or 1), and one variable for time taken to complete the task (real number). So, with 8 tasks and 29 programmers, you have 38 (= 29 + 8 + 1) variables, all but 3 of which are zero for each observation. And you have 232 observations.
Since you have 37 independent variables, you will have 37 regression coefficients (each presumable in units of hours) plus one additional parameter that applies to all observations. The results claim that you get a good estimate of the time required for programmer j to complete task k by adding together the j-th programmer coefficient, the k-th task coefficient and the extra parameter.
Some people are better at all types of programming than are lesser mortalsAre you making that claim, or suggesting that this is what the 10x thesis means?
Both.
(Dijkstra once claimed that “the use of COBOL cripples the mind”. If true, it would follow that someone who is a great COBOL programmer would be a poor programmer in other languages.)
Amusingly, that does not follow. A great COBOL programmer completes his COBOL tasks in 1⁄10 the time of lesser folk, and hence becomes 1⁄10 as crippled.
you seem to be assuming …
Where is that implied in what I wrote above?
It appears that I somehow misinterpreted your point and thereby somehow offended you. That was not my intention.
You begin by mentioning the problem of testing the 10x hypothesis, and then switched to the problem of trying to separate out “how variable the time required to complete a task is intrinsically”. That is an odd problem to focus on, and my intuition tells me that it is best approached by identifying that variance as a residual rather than by inventing an ideal thought experiments that measure it directly. But if someone else has better ideas, that is great.
Give one task to N programmers.
Give a different task to the same N programmers.
Repeat #2 several times.
Say to self “I’ll bet the same guy was a super-programmer on all of those tasks. He just is better at programming”.
Repeat #4 several times.
Analyze the data by multiple regression. Independent variables are programmer ids and task ids. Intrinsic variability of tasks falls out of the analysis as unexplained variance, but what you are really interested is relative performance of programmers over all tasks.
Bonus: I don’t think you are confused. But you seem to be assuming that the 10x thesis applies to specific programming tasks (like writing a parser, or a diagram editor, or a pretty-printer). But I think the hypothesis is stronger than that. Some people are better at all types of programming than are lesser mortals. So, you can smooth the noise by aggregating several tasks without losing the 10x signal.
One difference is that “Perplexed” is talking about anger as an individual emotional response …
Uh, no I’m not. I haven’t even mentioned anger. I’m talking about punishment. Which, as a moral realist, I’m claiming is a moral issue. And, given my particular flavor of moral realism, that means that there is a closely related practical issue (involving deterence, etc.).
I am not interested in explaining anger as an instinctive signal that it is time to punish—though I’m sure evolutionary psychologists can do so. I’m far more interested in explaining punishment as a moral and practical response to some particular class of actions—actions that I call “immoral”.
As to what handoflixue is missing, I would say that he probably wasn’t paying attention in school when communism and socialism were defined, or else he missed the fact that exhibitions of political “attitude” are not appreciated here. Compared to that, his suggestion that redistributive taxation is something like the kind of punishment I claimed doesn’t exist, …, well that suggestion seems rather innocent.
You may already be aware of these papers by Andrea Camperio-Ciani. The first one made a pretty big splash a few years back.
Certainly not evolutionary psychology—just good old fashioned genetics (pedigree analysis). And not an explanation of why homosexuality evolved, but a plausible explanation of why natural selection has not ruthlessly eliminated it.
To my mind, the big problem with evolutionary psychology is that it displaces this very straightforward kind of science. It achieves success, not by finding truth, but rather by finding an appealing story. Kinda like religion.
It was you and then Matt_Simpson and then you again. But it seems to have died out now.
Well, gee. Look at all the applause wedrifid has garnered.
Applause lights still work around here, especially if you know your audience.