LessWrong 2.0 Reader
View: New · Old · TopRestrict date range: Today · This week · This month · Last three months · This year · All time
next page (older posts) →
next page (older posts) →
Isn't singular learning theory basically just another way of talking about the breadth of optima?
romeostevensit on Thoughts on seed oilIf some some pre-modern hominids ate high animal diets, and some populations of humans did, and that continued through history, I wouldn't call that relatively recent. I'm not the same person making the claim that there is overwhelming evidence that saturated fats can't possibly be bad for you. I'm making a much more restricted claim.
kaj_sotala on The Inner Ring by C. S. LewisPrevious LW discussion about the Inner Ring: [1 [LW · GW], 2 [LW · GW]].
kromem on Is being a trans woman +20 IQ?Your hypothesis is ignoring environmental factors. I'd recommend reading over the following paper: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2332858416673617
A few highlights:
Evidence from the nationally representative Early Childhood Longitudinal Study–Kindergarten Class of 1998-1999 (hereafter, ECLS-K:1999) indicated that U.S. boys and girls began kindergarten with similar math proficiency, but disparities in achievement and confidence developed by Grade 3 (Fryer & Levitt, 2010; Ganley & Lubienski, 2016; Husain & Millimet, 2009; Penner & Paret, 2008; Robinson & Lubienski, 2011). [...]
A recent analysis of ECLS-K:1999 data revealed that, in addition to being the largest predictor of later math achievement, early math achievement predicts changes in mathematics confidence and interest during elementary and middle grades (Ganley & Lubienski, 2016). Hence, math achievement in elementary school appears to influence girls’ emerging views of mathematics and their mathematical abilities. This is important because, as Eccles and Wang (2016) found, mathematics ability self-concept helps explain the gender gap in STEM career choices. Examining early gendered patterns in math can shed new light on differences in young girls’ and boys’ school experiences that may shape their later choices and outcomes. [...]
An ECLS-K:1999 study found that teachers rated the math skills of girls lower than those of similarly behaving and performing boys (Robinson-Cimpian et al., 2014b). These results indicated that teachers rated girls on par with similarly achieving boys only if they perceived those girls as working harder and behaving better than those boys. This pattern of differential teacher ratings did not occur in reading or with other underserved groups (e.g., Black and Hispanic students) in math. Therefore, this phenomenon appears to be unique to girls and math. In a follow-up instrumental-variable analysis, teachers’ differential ratings of boys and girls appeared to account for a substantial portion of the growth in gender gaps in math achievement during elementary school (Robinson-Cimpian et al., 2014b).
In a lot of ways the way you are looking at the topic perpetuates a rather unhealthy assumption of underlying biological differences in competency that avoids consideration of contributing environmental privileges and harms.
You can't just hand wave aside the inherent privilege of presenting male during early childhood education in evaluating later STEM performance. Rather than seeing the performance gap of trans women over women presenting that way from birth as a result of a hormonal advantage, it may be that what you are actually ending up measuring is the performance gap resulting from the disadvantage placed upon women due to early education experiences being treated differently from the many trans women who had been presenting as boys during those grades. i.e. Perhaps all women could have been doing quite a lot better in STEM fields if the world treated them the way it treated boys during Kindergarten through early grades and what we need socially isn't hormone prescriptions but serious adjustments to presumptions around gender and biologically driven competencies.
unexpectedvalues on Eric Neyman's ShortformI think that people who work on AI alignment (including me) have generally not put enough thought into the question of whether a world where we build an aligned AI is better by their values than a world where we build an unaligned AI. I'd be interested in hearing people's answers to this question. Or, if you want more specific questions:
No I have not seen a detailed argument about this, just the claim that once centralization goes past a certain point there is no coming back. I would like to see such an argument/investigation as I think it is quite important. "Yuval Harari" does say something similar in "Sapiens"
denkenberger on Thoughts on seed oilI don't have a strong opinion because I think there's huge uncertainty in what is healthy. But for instance, my intuition is that a plant-based meat that had very similar nutritional characteristics as animal meat would be about as healthy (or unhealthy) as the meat itself. The plant-based meat would be ultra-processed. But one could think of the animal meat as being ultra-processed plants, so I guess one could think that that is the reason that animal meat is unhealthy?
simon on Is being a trans woman +20 IQ?I always assumed that, since high IQ is correlated with high openness, the higher openness would be the cause of higher likelihood of becoming trans.
(or, some more general situation where IQ is causing transness more than the other way around., e.g. high scores on IQ tests might be caused to some extent by earnestness/intensity etc., which could also cause more likelihood of becoming trans)
poignardazur on Thoughts on seed oilOr maybe speaking french automatically makes you healthier. I'm gonna choose to believe it's that one.
yanni on This is Water by David Foster WallaceIf you're into podcasts, the Very Bad Wizards guys did an ep on this essay, which I enjoyed: https://verybadwizards.com/episode/episode-227-a-terrible-master-david-foster-wallaces-this-is-water