LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Norvid on Twitter made the apt point that we will need to see the actual private data before we can really judge. Not unusual for lucky people to backrationalize their luck as a sure win.

you don't think it's "snobbish or discriminatory" to pretend it's something more because you count yourself among its users?

Fair point. I had already provided special justification for it but I agree with your reasoning, so I'll leave it out. Thanks for the example.

I think number of neurons in neocortex (or even more prefrontal cortex - but unfortunately i didn't quickly find how big the orca prefrontal cortex is - though I'd guess it to still be significantly bigger than for humans) is a much much better proxy for intelligence of species than brain size (or encephalization quotient). (E.g. see the wikipedia list linked in my question here [LW · GW].)

(Also see here [LW(p) · GW(p)]. There are more examples, e.g. a Blue and yellow macaw has 1.9 billion, whereas brown bears have only 250million.)

But yeah there are other considerations too, which is why I am only at 50% that orcas could do science significantly better than humans if they tried.

On one hand, I feel a bit skeptical that some dude outperformed approximately every other pollster and analyst by having a correct inside-view belief about how existing pollster were messing up, especially given that he won't share the surveys.  On the other hand, this sort of result is straightforwardly predicted by Inadequate Equilibria, where an entire industry had the affordance to be arbitrarily deficient in what most people would think was their primary value-add, because they had no incentive to accuracy (skin in the game), and as soon as someone with an edge could make outsized returns on it (via real-money prediction markets), they outperformed all the experts.

On net I think I'm still <50% that he had a correct belief about the size of Trump's advantage that was justified by the evidence he had available to him, but even being directionally-correct would have been sufficient to get outsized returns a lot of the time, so at that point I'm quibbling with his bet sizing rather than the direction of the bet.

Fwiw I didn't find the post hostile. 

I'm assuming "natural abstraction" is also a scalar property. Reading this paragraph, I refactored the concept in my mind to "some abstractions tend to be cheaper to abstract than others. agents will converge to using cheaper abstractions. Many cheapness properties generalize reasonably well across agents/observation-systems/environments, but, all of those could in theory come apart."

And the Strong NAH would be "cheap-to-abstract-ness will be very punctuated, or something" (i.e. you might expect less of a smooth gradient of cheapnesses across abstractions)

I think Tsvi has a point that empathy towards a group that has some good-but-puzzling views and some clearly-bad views is a tricky thing to manage internally.

I think an easier step in this direction is to approach the problem more analytically. This is why I feel such affection for the Intellectual Turing Test. You can undertake the challenge of fully understanding some else's viewpoint without needing to emotionally commit to it. It can be a purely intellectual challenge. Sometimes, as I try to write an ITt for a view I feel is overall incorrect I sneer at the view a bit in my head. I don't endorse that, I think ideally one approaches the exercise in an emotionally neutral way. Nevertheless, it is a much easier step from being strongly set against a view to trying to tackle the challenge of fully understanding it. Going the further step to empathy for (parts of) the other view is a much harder further step to take.

Agreed on the examples of natural abstractions. I held a couple abstraction examples in my mind (e.g. atom, food, agent) while reading the post and found that it never really managed to attack these truly very general (dare I say natural) abstractions.

Yep, these are good points. Appreciate you engaging in such good faith. Would still like to bet if you're down.

It’s not necessary for each person to personally identify the best minds on all topics and exclusively defer to them. It’s more a heuristic of deferring to the people those you trust most defer to on specific topics, and calibrating your confidence according to your own level of ability to parse who to trust and who not to.

But really these are two separate issues: how to exercise judgment in deciding who to trust, and the causes of research being “memetic.” I still say research is memetic not because mediocre researchers are blithely kicking around nonsense ideas that take on an exaggerated life of their own, but mainly because of politics and business ramifications of the research.

The idea that wine is good for you is memetic both because of its way of poking at “established wisdom” and because the alcohol industry sponsors research in that direction.

Similar for implicit bias tests, which are a whole little industry of their own.

Clinical trials represent decades of investment in a therapeutic strategy. Even if an informed person would be skeptical that current Alzheimer’s approaches are the way to go, businesses that have invested in it are best served by gambling on another try and hoping to turn a profit. So they’re incentivized to keep plugging the idea that their strategy really is striking at the root of the disease.