Belated apologies for cranky tone on this comment.
talisman
Karma: 235
Done, thanks for the feedback!
I made the mistake I’m talking about—assuming certain things were well-known.
I actually think Liron’s slideshow needs a lot of work, but it seems very much like the kind of thing LWers should be trying to do out in the world.
the slideshow was completely useless to me
Yes, of course it was. It was created for teenagers who are utterly unfamiliar with this way of thinking.
its quality was poor
OK. Can you improve it or do better?
Definitely worth reading up. K & T are the intellectual fathers of the entire modern heuristics and biases program. There was some earlier work (e.g. Allais) but from what I hazily recall that work was fairly muddled conceptually.
Funny. I feel like on OB and LW utility theory is generally taken as the air we breathe.
No One Knows Stuff
Upvoted for calling your own post “completely wrong”!
Vladimir—“concentrated confusion”, “a thousand angry cats”: that’s exactly the kind of spice that your earlier post needed! :-)
Also fewer function words...
Let me add to the chorus of “you rock!” This is a nice piece of work. I don’t know how you got the chance to present to a group of young people about this stuff, but kudos also to whoever gave you that opportunity.
Some have pointed out potential improvements. This seems like a solid way for anyone interested to add a quantum of effort to the cause—improve the presentation a bit, and post your improved version somewhere. (Where?)
I don’t at all disagree that for those who can do it, the CS/math parlay is excellent.
I am very successful in my secret identity life, so no, this is not some kind of grass-is-greener observation; rather, it’s an attempt to give practical advice to my younger selves out there. I majored in math and physics, and did well, and am in the world now, and can concretely see the ways that a CS education would have helped me, ways that people less smart than I am think better!
As soon as I graduated with a CS degree I realized I should have been in philosophy the whole time.
I’m comparing CS only to other technical majors.
CS is not something everyone can fall in love with and think about in the shower and over lunch and drifting off to sleep.
I’m not proposing CS as an academic discipline, but as a discipline for training the mind for work in the world.
Do I know the intricate details of every reader’s intellectual life? Do I claim that everyone who’s currently majoring in math or econ drop it and switch to CS?
To quote Robin:
[S]harp people … distinguish themselves by not assuming more than needed to keep the conversation going.
True, but what I want to emphasize is that the CS way of thinking is extremely valuable outside of the software field.
I think the problem is a combination of:
length
density of ideas too low —long section resummarizing old posts
prose hard to read, feels somehow flat —try using shorter paragraphs, varying sentence lengths, using more tangible words and examples
Comparing to Robin’s and Eliezer’s stuff, the gold standards:
Robin’s are generally very short, high-level, and high-density. Easy to read quickly for “what’s this about? do I care?” and then reread several times to think carefully about.
Eliezer’s are long and lower-density but meticulous and carefully arranged so that the ideas build brick on brick (and also offset length with effective, dramatic prose).
I would suggest trying to write this post Robin-style and see how it comes out: present your key points in as strong, terse and efficient a way as you can, even if you lose some people. Writing long posts seems harder.
Also, try pulling out some individual sentences and reading them out of context. Just to grab one almost at random: “Contamination by Priming is a problem that relates to the process of implicitly introducing the facts in the attended data set.” Pretty inscrutable.
Compare to Anna Salomon’s description of the same thing: “To sum up the principle briefly: your brain builds you up a self-image. You are the kind of person who says, and does… whatever it is your brain remembers you saying and doing.” Even though hers is longer in words, the concepts are clearer and more explicit. The text is bouncier and has more places for the mind to grab onto.
Hope that helps? Good luck!
On the Fence? Major in CS
That’s because you didn’t specify the sequence ahead of time, right?
Groundless or not, if you propoose to run two experiments X and Y, and select outcomes x of experiment X and y of experiment Y before running the experiments, and assign x and y the same probabilities, you have to be equally surprised by x occurring as you are by y occurring, or I’m missing something deep about what you’re saying about probabilities. Are you using the word “probability” in a different sense than Jaynes?
This post confused me enormously. I thought I must be missing something, but reading over the comments, this seems to be true for virtually all readers.
What exactly do you mean by “bead jar guess”? “Surprise”? “Actual probability”? Are you making a new point or explaining something existing? Are you purposely being obscure “to make us think”?
I propose replacing this entire post with the following text:
Hey everybody! Read E.T. Jaynes’s Probability Theory: The Logic Of Science!
Relatively rational people can form deeply irrational groups, and vice versa.
I would probably take a group with rational institutions but irrational members over a group with irrational institutions but rational members.
Of course, rational people will be better on average at building rational groups, so I would still predict a positive correlation in the experiment.
I was several years away from starting to learn about x-rationality when I met my partner.
Since there seems to be some interest, I’m going to try to collect my thoughts to describe the contribution of x-rationality to my personal life, but this may take considerable time; I’ve never tried to put it in words, and there’s a strong dash of “dancing about architecture” to it.
I do not think your claim is what you think it is.
I think your claim is that some people mistake the model for the reality, the map for the territory. Of course models are simpler than reality! That’s why they’re called “models.”
Physics seems to have gotten wiser about this. The Newtonians, and later the Copenhagenites, did fall quite hard for this trap (though the Newtonians can be forgiven to some degree!). More recently, however, the undisputed champion physical model, whose predictions hold to 987 digits of accuracy (not really), has the humble name “The Standard Model,” and it’s clear that no one thinks it’s the ultimate true nature of reality.
Can you give specific examples of people making big mistakes from map/territory confusion? The closest thing I can think of offhand is the Stern Report, which tries to make economic calculations a century from now based on our current best climate+social+political+economic models.