sketerpot

Karma: 3,460

sketerpot 22 Mar 2009 17:01 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Annoyance’s comment on: Just a reminder: Scientists are, technically, people.
Generalizations, ahoy! That being said,

High INT, low WIS.

And sometimes way-too-high CHA. If you’re naive and looking for wisdom, it’s too easy to listen to someone talking nonsense about philosophy and be completely taken in. Witness the success of the irritatingly wrong postmodern thinking which holds that science is just another cultural opinion with no more validity than any other. If that were true then transistors would work about as well as rain dances or ancient Hindu theurgy, and yet people continue to spread the meme.

sketerpot 22 Mar 2009 17:07 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Scott Alexander’s comment on: Just a reminder: Scientists are, technically, people.

The one real worry I have about scientists is that they’re too personally invested.

I have this same worry about a lot of bioethicists. Their whole shtick is telling scientists what they are and aren’t allowed to do, and getting public support for their own actions. That’s a recipe for fearmongering and being more restrictive than they should be in order to justify their own existence.

Obviously there are ethical decisions to be made in the field of biology, and it would probably be nice to have people who specialize in hashing out those issues, but the way the system is being set up seems dangerously dependent on—and compliant to—unfounded public fears.

sketerpot 22 Mar 2009 21:19 UTC
8 points
in reply to: pjeby’s comment on: Rationalist Fiction
That’s nitpicking. Of course the story is contrived. If you can think of a more plausible premise that would have had the same visceral punch and been easy enough to understand, speak now.

The point of the story is that sometimes there’s just no good way out of a situation, and the thing to do is face up to this and deal with reality on its own terms. Safety labels and supply closets are only incidental to this message. It could just as well apply to ugly tribal wars, or to medical triage, or to the fact that few things worth doing are perfectly safe.

sketerpot 22 Mar 2009 21:24 UTC
1 point
in reply to: MichaelVassar’s comment on: Rationalist Fiction
We can do both, though. Does the benefit of including a spoiler in a discussion outweigh the harm of imposing a spoiler on someone?

sketerpot 22 Mar 2009 21:41 UTC
9 points
in reply to: Paul Crowley’s comment on: How to Not Lose an Argument
It’s unobtrusive and it has a decent chance of actually catching on, unlike any alternative I’ve ever heard of. There’s something to be said for practicality.

sketerpot 26 Mar 2009 6:06 UTC
4 points
in reply to: Blue’s comment on: Open Thread: March 2009
I took a brief look at that book. The author seems to be saying “There just has to be quantum magic in the brain somewhere”, and then he goes looking for places he could plausibly imagine some. He’s trying to justify what he wants to believe.

sketerpot 27 Mar 2009 19:29 UTC
7 points
in reply to: Roko’s comment on: Can Humanism Match Religion’s Output?

I don’t want to become a “cleaning up this world”-bot. I have my own goals and aims in life, and they are distinct from the goal of “producing as much positive utility for humanity” as possible. I’d rather spend £99 out of every £100 on myself than give it to a random poor person in the third world, because I am more important than s/he is (more important in the subjective, antirealist sense).

Hey, that’s fine. You certainly don’t have to try to justify your basic utility function. But for people who want to do more to help the rest of the world (even if we prioritize ourselves first), it can be hard just to get ourselves to act rationally in pursuit of this goal. That’s the issue at hand.

sketerpot 27 Mar 2009 19:45 UTC
13 points
on: Can Humanism Match Religion’s Output?
We should not underestimate the power of rational thinking for getting the most out of each charity dollar (or unit of effort). Maybe you’ve heard of charities that give people’s old clothes to poor parts of Africa; while this makes people feel good, it has flooded the markets with dirt-cheap clothing, destroying the local textile industry and contributing to the very poverty that the well-meaning donors seek to alleviate.

This is what impresses me about groups like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation: they focus on things that are less glamorous but probably more useful, like providing basic financial services in poor areas, or doing R&D on how to make good public health cheaper. This is the kind of thing that can make a difference in the long term, and lead to exponentially growing ripple effects. Charity can be a lot more effective if you spend your resources with your head, not your heart.

sketerpot 29 Mar 2009 19:21 UTC
2 points
on: On Seeking a Shortening of the Way
There are shortcuts. For example, when you hear someone speaking in emphatic generalities in front of a cheering crowd, it should tell you to be extra careful. When somebody pulls out the Bible as justification for something, it’s reasonable to lower your expectation of that person being right. If a certain level of rationality is to become automatic, there had darn well better be short cuts.

sketerpot 30 Mar 2009 17:48 UTC
2 points
in reply to: SaulGlasman’s comment on: Deliberate and spontaneous creativity
Moderate amounts of alcohol can reliably induce such a state in me. I’ve been writing down alcohol-induced ideas for a while now, and mine are uniformly pretty good when I examine them the next day.

sketerpot 24 Apr 2009 5:47 UTC
5 points
in reply to: William’s comment on: Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism
I’ve seen it happen, actually. I went to a Christian youth forum looking for some shooting-fish-in-a-barrel debating fun, and over time I noticed that a handful of rationalists gradually came to dominate discussion, to the point where the majority would avoid making ridiculous statements in order to avoid being called out on it.

A few bright, articulate people who can type fast are surprisingly effective. If LW ever invades some other forum, that forum will either get out the banhammer or be overrun.

sketerpot 9 Jun 2009 23:09 UTC
0 points
in reply to: dclayh’s comment on: Probability distributions and writing style

Now obviously the most complete answer here would be to say “our data are decribed by a Gaussian of mean X and st. dev. Y”, but people don’t frequently do that in informal contexts, so how do you reduce it to one claim with one confidence?

My rule of thumb is to say I’m about 95% sure that the true value is within two standard deviations of the mean. It’s usually a pretty good compromise, easy to reason with intuitively (try it!), and if your readers actually care about this you can always tack on a little parenthetical note that says “(Gaussian distribution, mean = X, std. dev. = Y)”. Or stick it in a footnote, or whatever you can manage without terrifying your readers.

sketerpot 27 Jun 2009 3:00 UTC
5 points
in reply to: SoullessAutomaton’s comment on: The Great Brain is Located Externally
This is the blessing and curse of all really interesting wikis. They make it easy and fun to build up a large collection of miscellaneous knowledge about some subjects. There has got to be some way to apply this more generally to education.

sketerpot 7 Jul 2009 23:33 UTC
12 points
in reply to: matt’s comment on: Media bias
I just listened to 20 minutes of lecture in about 15 minutes of real time, and I had an epiphany: the conventional college lecture is now dead to me. It’s still shuffling around a little, but believe me it’s dead. Here are some advantages of moving the lectures proper to online video and holding just the discussion/help sessions in person:
1. The ability to tempo shift. Holy hell this is awesome. I’ve had terribly boring classes that actually would have been tolerable if only they had been conducted at roughly twice the speed, and even more interesting classes would have been much improved by an extra 50% more speed, preferably along with the ability to continuously vary the amount of tempo shift. The key here is that the lecture goes fast enough to keep your brain turned on; few things are more demoralizing than helplessly wishing you could fall asleep in class.
2. If the lectures include (say) PDF slides with timing information to synchronize them with the video, things get even better. You can stick in links to web pages, or you can jump around to relevant sections in the video, and generally just have a grand nonlinear time. It’s the Wikipedia effect: chasing interesting information around the vast space of human knowledge is a profoundly effective way of learning.
3. The marginal costs of making the lectures available publicly are tiny. The rising tide of access to education is guaranteed to uplift humanity as a whole, even if Joe Average doesn’t notice.
4. Good lecturers can drive out bad ones. Who hasn’t sat in a boring lecture that was taught better by someone else? That’s only necessary because class sizes are traditionally limited by the number of warm bodies you can cram into one room.
5. The learning is available whenever you want it. That flexibility also means that nobody is riding your ass to get you to keep up with your studying, but I’m sure that that service can be provided separately.
By the way, does anybody know a good source of interesting audio lectures with RSS feeds that I can give to PodShifter? I’ve been looking around iTunes University, and they’ve got a lot of good stuff, but trying to get an RSS URL from them is like trying to tape weasels to a wall: so irritatingly difficult that you start to wonder why you even tried. The pedagogical revolution needs to get easier, comrades!

sketerpot 17 Jul 2009 4:05 UTC
1 point
in reply to: MBlume’s comment on: Absolute denial for atheists
Pleasure is pleasure, whether it comes from a taste you naturally enjoy or from your brain associating alcohol intoxication with Champagne drinking. I think much of my taste for wine (preferably red and “dry”) also comes from the knowledge that I’m putting some alcohol into my system, but it tastes decent and it’s a pleasant experience for me, so what of it?

sketerpot 17 Jul 2009 4:10 UTC
13 points
in reply to: Roko’s comment on: Absolute denial for atheists
Fully General Counterargument.

sketerpot 17 Jul 2009 4:19 UTC
21 points
in reply to: nerzhin’s comment on: Absolute denial for atheists
I’d be a pretty sucky rationalist if I didn’t get an itchy feeling when I hear a false dichotomy. Therefore, let’s try some other options:

3) “I’m a rationalist” = “I earnestly try to be more rational than I would otherwise be.”

4) “I’m a rationalist” = “I think that syllogisms are pretty neat, and I’m really good at proving that Socrates is mortal. ;-)”

sketerpot 17 Jul 2009 23:45 UTC
1 point
in reply to: whpearson’s comment on: The Popularization Bias
There are an awful lot of caveats that apply to the No Free Lunch theorem. Is it really very applicable in practice? If you’re just going to use it as a hand-wave concept, I think it’s more honest to use TANSTAAFL and make your lack of rigorous mathematical backing clear.

So, can anybody list a few lessons we can draw from the NFL theorem?

sketerpot 21 Jul 2009 19:01 UTC
3 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Shut Up And Guess
Given that people can be genetically predisposed to such emergent things as hating homosexuality (how would you make a neural net do that?),

It seems pretty easy to me. Wire a man up with the following instinctual responses:
```
Woman + sex => attraction
Man   + sex => squick
```
It’s not too far from there to an outright hatred of homosexuality, if you don’t think too hard about it and you don’t have the rational defenses to make this a non-issue. This is one of the benefits of rationalism, by the way: defense against miscellaneous harmful bullshit.

sketerpot 21 Jul 2009 19:13 UTC
1 point
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Shut Up And Guess
Guessing, if you have no idea which way to guess is more likely, will not have quite the same result as leaving questions blank. Leaving questions blank will add 0 to your score, while guessing will add a mostly-Gaussian random variable with a mean of 0. The math of this is kind of fun:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_walk

And of course, the central limit theorem is colossally important:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_limit_theorem