waveman

Karma: 1,707

waveman 6 Dec 2010 6:51 UTC
15 points
in reply to: Constant2’s comment on: Guessing the Teacher’s Password
W Edwards Deming pointed out in the 1950s, in his books about quality management, the folly of combining measuring for the purpose of improvement with measurement for the purpose of remunerating people. If you do this, the whole measurement process is corrupted—“you get what you measure”. Almost invariably however the two forms of measurement are combined because it seems more efficient. As I speak, ambulances are waiting for many hours idle outside my local hospital for a spare bed for their patients, because if the hospital tells them to go to another hospital the hospital gets demerits for failing to have a bed available. If they make them wait, no such demerits are given.

Later, psychologists found that when you externally reward and punish people for doing things, any other intrinsic rewards from the activity tend to be extinguished. Thus (in part) the contrast between the 5 year old who is brimming with enthusiasm for learning and the resentful 14 year old who does as little at possible at school.

Maria Montessori found that if you place children consistently at the sweet spot of learning, where they have to make some effort but it is not discouragingly difficult, they remain enthusiastic and learn rapidly. Micro-tests occur all the time in Montessori classrooms to assess progress. Mainly the tests involve a self-assessment that this activity is boring now so I will move to the next one.

waveman 6 Dec 2010 9:12 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Doug_S.2’s comment on: Think Like Reality

Does anyone have a book they can recommend that explains the actual math of quantum mechanics?

You could try “The structure and interpretation of quantum mechanics” by R I G Hughes or “The Interpretation of quantum mechanics” by Roland Omnes. Either has enough math to articulate the problem.

I also really liked “Quantum mechanics and experience” by David Z Albert—it was this book that led me to realize that many-worlds is obviously true (as it now seems to me). Albert himself does not believe in many-worlds but he explains it really well.

I’m now working through the university physics texts because none of the above cover relativistic QM. They physics texts though are—to a man—in the “shut up and calculate” school of thought. It is claimed that many a promising physicist has disappeared down the rat-hole of the philosophical interpretation of QM.

You may also enjoy “A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down” by Robert Laughlin. He argues that so-called fundamental physics is just the lowest layer of emergent froth that we are able to see. Quantum Field Theory shows that “empty space” is full of stuff for example.

waveman 1 Jan 2011 2:12 UTC
0 points
in reply to: CronoDAS’s comment on: Reason as memetic immune disorder

I suspect that, if the Christianity of the fourteenth century, or the Judaism of the first century, were to be faithfully reproduced today, it would be equally horrifying.

Yes. The original poster’s statements about the benign nature and gentleness of early Christianity do not reflect its history eg death penalty for those who refuse to convert, burned all the books they could find, later on the slaughter of tens of thousands in Jerusalem during the crusades.

waveman 2 Jan 2011 3:41 UTC
0 points
on: Help Me Plan My Education?
You may need first to revert back to thinking about what are your goals in life. Spend a couple of days on this. What really gets you excited, what do you really want that’s important?

Then work forward to subjects.

Depending on your priorities:

For making money consider: Accounting 101 (it really helps to be able to read a company’s books), Economics (though you may be able to get away with reading Adam Smith and a standard modern text instead), MBA type stuff (as seen in the portable MBA), Sales and Marketing, Project Management.

Practical no matter what you do: a decent course on risk management (that does nt ignore black swans and unknown unknowns) and one on statistics focused on how you use and abuse stats. Psychology with an emphasis on human non-rationality.

Hard subjects: It can be useful to have tough subjects on your CV eg Math, Physics, Philosophy excluding post-modernism/feminism. Good also for your brain.

Hot areas in the next 20 years: Artificial Intelligence, Molecular Biology, Genetics, Robotics, Nanotechnology.

Computer Programming 101. The risk here is picking a softball course that teaches you nothing, or finding you have no aptitude and cannot do it. read the essay “The Camel Has Two Humps” for more details—see http://www.eis.mdx.ac.uk/research/PhDArea/saeed/paper1.pdf .

If you don’t know history that can be very useful especially ancient history.

waveman 16 Jan 2011 23:49 UTC
10 points
on: The annoyingness of New Atheists: declaring God Dead makes you a Complete Monster?

On of the things that irritate them the most is the phrase “God is Dead”. A phrase that is obviously meaningless in a literal sense...

What Nietzsche was saying when he said “Gott ist tod!” was not what most people think.

He first made the obvious point that modern science and in particular evolution made God redundant and belief in supernatural beings was not longer credible.

At the time (mid C19) many people had lost their belief in God but continued to act as though nothing had changed. That is, they continued to act as Christians but had no basis for doing so.

Nietzsche’s real point was that the non-existence of God is a big deal and that we need to take the implications of this seriously. He was not merely saying what everyone knew (there is no God) but that we need to forge a new morality that is not based on discredited and useless religious ideas.

This idea can be relevant in discussions with theists. Just telling the story of what Nietzsche was saying is very powerful, because it takes as a given that religious belief does not make sense now that Darwin has done away with the argument from design. The discussion can turn to the real question: given no God, what do we do with our lives?

waveman 17 Jan 2011 0:18 UTC
3 points
on: Tell Your Rationalist Origin Story
On one account, our rational brains exist to provide convincing rationalizations for our actions for the benefit of other people. Often the stories we tell ourselves are a lot of cobblers.

E.g. We invaded Iraq to the Iraqui people can be free, or to get rid of the weapons of mass destruction (not because of their oil!).

I will try to tell the true story of my conversion from religion.

I was about 12 years old. My parents were forcing me to be ‘confirmed’. As part of this I had to make various affirmations. At that age my brain, incited by various hormones, was waking up from the slumber of childhood and beginning to feel the need for autonomy. My reaction was simple: my parents had the power, through threats and violence, to force me to do what they wanted, but they could not control what I believed. I still remember the moment of ‘confirmation’ - I said the words but I did not believe them.

From that time on, I thought of myself as an atheist, but I retained a fascination for religion. Some of my best friends are religious to the point of having theology degrees.

It was only when I read Nietzsche that I realized that, like most people who thought of themselves as atheists, I had not really shaken off Christianity. One thing about Christianity that proved hard to shake off was the notion that feelings can be sinful/evil.

A year reading pre- and non- Christian writings has helped to remedy that somewhat. Read Homer and see what a different world we live in post-Christianity.

waveman 15 Feb 2011 9:47 UTC
61 points
on: Some Heuristics for Evaluating the Soundness of the Academic Mainstream in Unfamiliar Fields
If you are going to suggest that academic climate research is not up to scratch, you need to do more than post links to pages that link to non-academic articles. Saying “you can find lots on google scholar” is not that same as actually pointing to the alleged sub-standard research.

For a long time I too was somewhat skeptical about global warming. I recognized the risk that researchers would exaggerate the problem in order to obtain more funding.

What I chose to do to resolve the matter was to deep dive into a few often-raised skeptic arguments using my knowledge of physics as a starting point, and learning whatever I needed to learn along the way (it took a while). The result was that the academic researchers won 6-0 6-0 6-0 in three sets (to use a tennis score analogy). Most striking to me was the dishonesty and lack of substance on the “skeptic” side. There was just no “there” there.

The topics I looked into were: accuracy of the climate temperature record, alleged natural causes explaining the recent heating, the alleged saturation of the atmospheric CO2 infra-red wavelengths, and the claim that the CO2 that is emitted by man is absorbed very quickly.

In retrospect I became aware that my ‘skepticism’ was fulled in large part by deliberate misinformation campaigns in the grand tradition of tobacco, asbestos, HFCs, DDT etc. The same techniques, and even many of the same PR firms are involved. As one tobacco executive said “Our product is doubt”.

An article about assessing the soundness of the academic mainstream would benefit from also discussing the ways in which the message from, and even the research done in, academia is corrupted and distorted by commercial interests. Economics is a case in point, but it is a big issue also in drug research and other aspects of medicine.

Another thing I have noticed in looking into various areas of academic research is just how much research in every field I looked at is inconclusive, inconsequential, flawed or subtly biased (look up “desk drawer bias” for example).

Edit: fixed a few typos.

Edit: good article by the way, very well reasoned.

waveman 18 Feb 2011 8:16 UTC
6 points
on: Scholarship and DIY Science
One set of heuristics I use...

“You claim to be an expert. Can you
1. Explain things that are not explicable in other ways (where the explanation is simpler than the result)?
2. Fix broken things so they work again?
3. Design and/or build things or perform procedures that have unusually useful results?
4. Predict the future (with predictions documented in advance)?
5. Do you test your theories empirically (-1 if the standard of truth is simple ‘consensus’)?”
As a case study, consider economics. I would give economists ⁰⁄₅ on this test. Freudian psychoanalysis would also get minus 1 out of 5.

On global warming, on my reading I would give the received wisdom ⁴⁄₅ and the sceptics ⁰⁄₅.

waveman 19 Feb 2011 8:09 UTC
1 point
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Scholarship and DIY Science
I was thinking mostly of macro-economics, but here goes:

1: For example, microecon explains prices, essentially correctly, as arising out of supply and demand.

Actually only in certain quite limited contexts. For example it has very little success in explaining prices in asset markets. In situations of monopoly or oligopoly it has little explanatory power—game theory is more relevant.

The situations of perfect competition, and perfect free knowledge of price and quality it does work but such situations are rarer than most economists seem to think.

Any even worse, blindness to the limitations of their theories leads to an inability to see the facts eg the unwillingness to notice market bubbles.

[good] Advice such as opening foreign trade.

The theory behind this basically assumes a static form of comparative advantage, that all players are time discounting profit maximizers, etc. Again economists are blind to the failure of free trade when its consequences are adverse eg the deskilling of the US workforce and the jobs that are never coming back, and when the assumptions are not met eg when countries employ protectionist policies strategically in support of objectives that go beyond time-discounting profit maximization.

4: Economists can easily predict the results of various policies, such as, to give one instance, price controls.

Economic theory would have us believe that price controls cause a mismatch between supply and demand and the development of shortages. This is often not the case eg when suppliers are making profits in excess of their costs.

More generally economics as it is practised is generally blind to unmet assumptions, distributional effects, institutional effects and irrational behavior.

waveman 19 Feb 2011 8:26 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Vladimir_M’s comment on: Some Heuristics for Evaluating the Soundness of the Academic Mainstream in Unfamiliar Fields
Yes.

My daughter works in molecular biology, and she has noted that every paper / grant application is full of hope and promise of a cure to cancer or some other dread disease. Sometimes this hope and promise is significantly exaggerated.

It is very depressing, even in fields where the science is absolutely rock-solid, to read the nonsense that comes from the periphery. Read Deepak Chopra on Quantum Mechanics for example.

waveman 14 Mar 2011 22:46 UTC
7 points
on: Being a teacher
I taught my daughter to swim after well over a year’s worth of “professional” swim training had seemingly achieved very little.

The approach I used worked well. I tried to teach her one skill at a time—like the Montessori method.

Learning to swim is hard because you have to do several things at once or you start to drown.

So, contrary to dogma, I got her some flippers and a floating vest. Her first task was to work out how to move around. Because of the floating vest she did not have to worry about keeping afloat. Because of the flippers she found learning to get around by kicking quite easy.

I progressively let down the vest over a period of a few visits. She progressively learned to leverage her “getting around” skills into “staying afloat” skills.

I then showed her how to swim in various styles ie dog paddling, breast stroke, then freestyle with head out of the water, then freestyle with proper breathing.

Eventually we took off the flippers and after a short adjustment, she could swim! All in less than a month. It was amazing to see after all those swimming lessons.

I would love to find a similar way to teach riding a bicycle. You can easily take learning to pedal offline. Steering plus balancing seem to be tightly coupled though, and the way you have to turn is very unintuitive thus hard to learn.

Teaching requires that you take all your implicit procedural knowledge and turn it into explicit declarative knowledge. In effect you have to reverse-engineer your skill.

When I was teaching my daughter French, she said “French is so dumb—why do they have all those irregular verbs?”. So I took her through a few irregular English verbs. She had learned them all without explicitly realizing the fact that many common English verbs are irregular.

waveman 15 Mar 2011 9:58 UTC
4 points
in reply to: Arthur_B.’s comment on: Markets are Anti-Inductive
Last point, arbitrages are costly and often risky (the information available is not certain). You may not have more information than other people, but you may be less risk averse or you may be able to arbitrage at a lower cost.

There is a googleable paper “the limits of arbitrage” by Shleifer which explains this concept in detail. Well worth the read

[From the original article] To get an excess return—a return that pays premium interest over the going rate for that level of riskiness—you need to know something that other market participants don’t, or they will rush in and bid up whatever you’re buying (or bid down whatever you’re selling) until the returns match prevailing rates.

There are other ways to get an excess return. They are all hard to do. Here is a partial list.
- Exploit (or serve) someone else’s need for liquidity. People buying in Japan now may be doing this.
- Taxation arbitrage. Provide trades that allow someone else to improve their after-tax position eg splitting a bond into coupon payments (tax-free to a non-profit) and capital gains (taxable at a concessional rate to other people).
- Exploit agency problems. Eg If you can take the other side of a trade from someone who is trying to massage short term earnings regardless of longer term impact you can win. One example of this is trend following, where you mostly lose, but occasionally win big. The other side of the trade is the counter-trend trader, who wins month after month (and gets big bonuses for doing so), then their employer has a big loss. But hey, the trader already got his bonuses.
- Exploit large numbers of stupid people such as dot.com investors. Sometimes there are so many of them they overwhelm the smart money. By getting your timing right you can exploit them. George Soros does this a lot.
- Exploit impatience. See Shleifer’s article referenced above. For a fund manager, to win in the long term is useless, because his investors pulled their money long ago and his fund was closed down.

waveman 15 Mar 2011 10:04 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Michael_E_Sullivan2’s comment on: Markets are Anti-Inductive

IMO, a fair amount of the profit in the highest flying risk arbitrage schemes is based on leveraging with the bankruptcy put.

Yes! Selling insurance, but with no capital to back it up.

If these people were smart they would take money off the table as they go. But the trouble is that they starting drinking their own kool-aid. Eg Long Term Capital Management.

waveman 15 Mar 2011 10:07 UTC
9 points
in reply to: Alexei_Turchin’s comment on: Markets are Anti-Inductive
There are some pretty smart traders. But there is also a lot of dumb money.

The classic example of this was Peter Lynch, a legendary stock trader. His fund ( Magellan) outperformed the market greatly, especially in the early years. But if you weight his returns by the capital in his fund, it actually underperformed.

What this means is that the investors in his fund managed to more than completely negate his stock-picking skill by adversely timing their entries and exits from his fund. Amazing!

waveman 18 Mar 2011 4:35 UTC
3 points
on: How to Be Happy
This is the best thing I’ve seen on lesswrong. Thank you!

waveman 18 Mar 2011 5:21 UTC
13 points
on: What comes before rationality
If she had the sort of childhood you describe, her problems are not with her apparatus of rational thinking, but with her emotional brain. If the problem is not with her cognitive apparatus, it cannot be solved there.

It is very common for people who had toxic childhoods to become very interested in psychology. See for example Alice Miller’s book “The Drama of the Gifted Child” which explains that children who grow up in toxic environments often become psychologically “gifted” out of necessity, and end up as psychologists.

Unfortunately while they may gain knowledge, it usually does not help. It does not help any more than knowing that you are frightened of dogs because several dogs bit you as a child. This insight does not solve the problem.

What to do?

Psychotherapy has a very poor track record. There are some good therapists and many poor ones. A lot of therapists are themselves the walking wounded. Irvin Yalom seems to be one of the good ones—see for example “The Gift of Therapy” for how it can work.

Time is a slow and ineffective healer. Many people go to their graves still terribly wounded.

One reason people with traumatic childhood seem to end up in bad relationships is that they feel compelled to replay the experiences until they solve them.

Successful therapy seems to involve replaying the experiences and reprogramming the emotional mind with new ways of processing the experience.

The problem is that often the person cannot actually go back to the original experiences in their full intensity because they were too traumatic. If the person can go back and reprocess the original experiences emotionally, they are likely to have a moment of realization and restructure their emotional reactions. The rational work follows this and is usually relatively simple.

EMDR is one technique that can help in this regard. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_movement_desensitization_and_reprocessing . The eye movement technique mutes the overwhelming intensity of the experience, allowing the adult brain to reprocess the traumatic events and deal with them with the full resources of the adult brain.

A technique is in some ways quite similar is Ed Seykota’s Trading Tribe process. This was developed to help traders deal with the intense psychological challenges of trading, such as 60% drawdowns, and losing 10% of your net worth in 15 minutes. I personally have had a few major breakthroughs with this process. As with EMDR the focus is on providing a means for the person to fully experience the original traumatic events and reprocess them.

waveman 18 Mar 2011 23:22 UTC

1 point

on: Melbourne meetup

Which Melbourne? If it’s Melbourne Australia I am interested.

Or it could be

Antarctica

* Mount Melbourne

Canada

* Melbourne, Nova Scotia

England

* Melbourne, Derbyshire
* Melbourne, East Riding of Yorkshire
* Melbourn, Cambridgeshire

United States

* Melbourne, Arkansas
* Melbourne, California
* Melbourne, Florida
* Melbourne, Iowa
* Melbourne, Kentucky
* Royal Melbourne (Chicago), a neighborhood in Chicago, Illinois

waveman 22 Mar 2011 10:12 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Benoit_Essiambre’s comment on: Avoiding Your Belief’s Real Weak Points

multiple universes… I’m sure there exists some kind of physical explanation

It is well explained in “Quantum Mechanics and Experience” by David Z. Albert.

Essential the many worlds theory works like this (on one interpretation):

There is really one universe. It is the deterministic world of the wave function. Our apparent universe is actually just a projection of that deterministic wave function. There is no collapse of the wave function, it just seems like there is, due to decoherence.

If you imaging a movie screen showing two different stories at once, there is just one movie, but each of the characters in each story behave as if they are aware of their story. In our world, decoherence is what creates the multiple stories.

At least one survey of physicists found MW was the most popular interpretation of QM; at worst it is mainstream.

waveman 22 Mar 2011 10:17 UTC
5 points
in reply to: jonvon’s comment on: Avoiding Your Belief’s Real Weak Points

giving up Christianity was my way of selling everything i had to find the pearl of great price

It’s very hard to do. I gave up Christianity 39 years ago and I’m still finding large chunks of it floating around in my brain. This was the point of “God is dead”—people no longer believed in God but unconsciously carry on as if it were still true.

waveman 1 Apr 2011 22:22 UTC
0 points
on: Melbourne meetup
OK see you there

waveman aka Tim Josling