What false beliefs have you held and why were you wrong?

Wikipedia says there are 500 known amino acids. I take it you were talking about a domain involving fewer potential amino acids?

I once spent about 20 minutes in class trying to justify the claim that a cubic meter of water weighs one ton, not 100 kilograms.

As you may note, this is not a false belief; it's relevant because I spent a significant fraction of this time wracking my brain trying to jog it free to see if I was being dense (pun intended) like you're describing (I have pretty strong reasons to believe I didn't remember this incident backwards as a case of self-justification by retcon)

Just that moment. I definitely didn't follow any of its implications. (Other than "if I say this then people will react as if I said an obvious true thing.")

You're absolutely right. Anyone who knew about the existence of both books would also be aware of the need to clarify which he meant (unless he was deliberately testing me so he could feel smug at his superior knowledge). The chances he was simply mistaken are still pretty good.

Had I considered that possibility, and rejected it on grounds of low prior, maybe I would have been entitled to a Rationality Cookie; but alas, what actually happened was that I didn't think at all.

All of the above, but the root cause is limited aptitude. I know you don't believe that, but you probably will the day you hit your own limit.

Music is a good example. You can aspire to play the hardest and most exquisite music pieces with the best, and compose new masterpieces, but without the talent you will not progress much farther than "twinkle twinkle little star" (i'm exaggerating a bit).

Or sports. Not everyone who wants to makes it to the major leagues.

In math and sciences I have frequently observed a really motivated person learning something with extreme effort, doing the exercises, then coming to the next session with half the newly learned skills gone, and having to start nearly from scratch. As a result, the effort which is linear for many is exponential for them. Or worse.

I was in a similar situation. A couple of grad courses were easy, some harder, and one or two nearly impossible for me. I was able to do well enough on them, but it was hell. There would be no way for me to get to the level where I could do research in the area. Yet some other students just kept going, mastering the new material at the same rate as the old. (And others were forced to drop the course or the program long before.)

Think of, say, a high jumper. You can see one barely clearing 2.20 on the technique alone, with no hope of going higher, And you can see someone else doing the same height in a much more sloppy way, clearly able to do a lot better with a better technique. Brains are not much different from muscles. The limits are there, if not clearly visible.

Re your question (d), I have never tried to put enough time myself to test it, but I have tutored an aspired programmer who gave up after realizing he cannot think in the way required (see also 99.5% of programming job candidates fail the FizzBuzz test, though this seems a stretch).

I hit c) for the category theory course in my masters. I managed the first half, more or less, but it felt like it was ramping up exponentially; there were too many new layers of concepts all of which were defined in terms of the previous one, and every new layer meant a percentage slowdown in my ability to work with that concept.

During undergrad I'd been at about the 30th percentile, but only the best half of undergrads go on to do a masters (at least at that particular institution). In retrospect it shouldn't have been a surprise that I was towards the bottom of the class, but it was.

derp.

correlation between economic freedom and economic growth was much stronger than it is

Here is a list of countries ranked by economic freedom:

http://www.heritage.org/index/

The top 10 are all very prosperous countries. In particular, [...]

Princess_Stargirl is talking about the correlation with economic growth, which is not going to be the same as the correlation with economic prosperity. This looks like a confusion of a variable with its rate of change.

It is informative to see what happens if I (1) correct this by correlating the economic freedom index with GDP growth, and (2) use as big a sample as is available instead of focusing on particular cases. I copied the freedom ratings from that Heritage web page and real GDP growth rates ("estimates are for the year 2013 unless otherwise indicated") from Wikipedia. The correlation between the freedom index and real GDP growth turns out to be negative: the Pearson correlation coefficient is -0.19 and Spearman's rank correlation coefficient (which allows for nonlinearity) is -0.35. Plotting the data and a loess curve with R's default settings:

Some outliers are evident. Perhaps they're disproportionately skewing the freedom-growth correlation? I take out North Korea (the far left point) and the two lowest points, Cyprus and Central African Republic:

and in fact the freedom-growth correlation sinks further, to -0.38 (Spearman's rank) or -0.30 (Pearson). The main mass of nations hovers around the part of the loess curve which slopes downward.

At this point in time, the correlation between the Heritage Foundation's index of economic freedom and economic growth is unambiguously negative. I suspect this is because being a poor country is associated with low economic freedom but high catch-up growth. What happens if I correlate the freedom index with annualized GDP growth over a longer period, 1990-2007, for which catch-up growth is probably less important?

I now wind up with positive correlations (+0.25 for Spearman, +0.20 for Pearson). Now I throw out the outlying North Korea (the leftmost point), Zimbabwe (the bottommost), and Equatorial Guinea (the topmost).

This has no meaningful effect on the correlations, which become +0.24 (Spearman) and +0.21 (Pearson). Overall, by switching from a more up-to-date growth statistic to a more long-term (and pre-Great Recession and mostly post-Soviet) statistic, I change the sign of the correlation between growth and the Heritage Foundation's assessment of economic freedom.

It's not immediately obvious to me which GDP growth statistic is more appropriate. 2013 growth has the advantages of being more up-to-date and better matching when the Index of Economic Freedom was calculated, but is less representative of each country's long-term economic trajectory. 1990-2007 growth is more representative but also involves comparing 24-year-old data to a recent index; the proper thing to do here would be to use a similarly long-term average of the Index of Economic Freedom, but that's too much like real work.

There is also the question of how to operationalize "economic freedom", but this comment is long enough. I evade that problem here by simply taking the data tables suggested upthread as given, and after doing so the basic conclusion seems to be that the correlation between "economic freedom" and "economic growth" is modest, with its sign sensitive to how one operationalizes growth. (Check my work with my data file.)

[Edited 19/10 to change "Gunea" to "Guinea", and add "after doing so".]

That site has a nice slightly-interactive map where you can pick out individual components of their "freedom index". Mostly they correlate with prosperity (I have no idea what the actual causal relationships are) ... until you click on "Government Spending" and suddenly it goes exactly the other way round -- the allegedly-worst government spending figures are for the US, Canada and Western Europe, and the allegedly-best are for severely messed up central African countries and China (!) and India.

If they stopped counting government spending as opposed to freedom -- it seems to me only marginally a matter of freedom -- the correlation between "freedom" and prosperity would become even more impressive.

(Note 1. The cynic in me says: Of course that's out of the question because a central part of the reason why the Heritage Foundation exists is to argue for lower government spending and hence lower taxes. If it advocated less forcefully for that, it would become less useful to those who fund it.)

(Note 2. It seems like there are lots of other things that could go into a "freedom index" with about as much reason as government spending. Two examples: longer working hours mean less freedom to do as you please with your time; stronger IP law means less freedom to start a technology-based business, to do as you please with the books and music and software you own, etc. Again, the absence of these things from the Heritage Foundation's "freedom index" seems adequately explained by the interests of the organizations that provide its funding.)

It's just that I've never heard anyone talk about gun control and suicide, so it wasn't something that I ever considered related to the issue of gun control.

Heh. That's conclusive evidence that you've ever heard only one side of the gun control debate.

The anti-gun side widely uses "gun deaths" numbers which, as you just found out, contain suicides. The pro-gun side subtracts the suicides to get to actual "homicide using a gun" numbers. That's a very early and basic point in the debate.

Thinking about this comment reminds me of an important point.

I do have a smartphone in my pocket and I can look up that information in seconds, quicker than I can type this post.

I don't recall exactly when I shifted that belief, but I think it was before I had a smartphone, which means that looking it up would probably take at least minutes, instead of seconds, which may be coloring me thinking now 'I should have just looked up some facts.'

Regardless of the status of beliefs about facts about the U.S. death penalty in particular, I agree there exist certain facts that are worth seconds looking into, that aren't worth minutes looking into (or any other appropriate combination of time increments)

Thanks for bringing this to my attention.

See Rational ignorance.

I think the case where the well has an approximately known size, extraction can be paused at low cost, there is no contract or law obligating "use it or lose it" for mineral rights, the extractor can deal with the lack of cashflow, you're right.

But there are certainly conditions where production can't be varied even if an increase in prices is clearly expected.

I wonder whether the failure of Peak Oil should lead to mistrust of fairly abstract arguments, perhaps especially those which lead to desired outcomes.

...damn. I believed that until just now.

This video contains a Harvard professor claiming something like that at 2:34. Mainly it asks Harvard graduates and local high school students about the reason for seasons.

Which groups do you choose to lambast for "not calling out toxic members of that group"? Presumably the groups that you don't like.

This is a accurate description of a common political behavior.

But recognizing this doesn't mean that all groups must actually have symmetrically malign subgroups, or that the mainstream in every group has the same relationship towards these subgroups. You can support the mainstream positions of both group A and group B, but be more critical of group B due to the existence of a subgroup you consider malign.

I also made this mistake (although, to be fair, on the issue of torture, Obama genuinely was an improvement.)

How do you now? The Obama administration continues to ban photographing equipment which was one of the policies to suppress evidence of US torture.

Torture got outlawed in the late Bush administration. People responsible for the torture project had no problem raising in influence within the Obama administration. The Obama administration continues to run black sites.

I was grossly mistaken in underestimating the corruptive influence of the concentrated power of the executive branch/national security apparatus on anyone who wields it.

Is it possible that the reason for change was secret information instead of corruption?

I did not expect the the degree of ineptitude that is apparent now.

Can you give examples?

What sort of measure are you using?

I also have a sense Obama has not been an effective President, but I've no idea how to objectively measure that.

What is unpersuasive about the responses to Mother Jones?

I agree that Duwe's point is the closest thing there to a decent argument against MJ's data. But I think the accusation that there data is "cherrypicked" is not reasonably supported. The entire paragraph in Siegel's piece where he argues for this is essentially ignoring that what they are using is what fits closely with the common intuition of what is a mass shooting. The only one which one could plausibly take out of that set is Fort Hood but it doesn't alter the data very much.

Most of Siegel's points are correct but not relevant to the question of increases of shootings. For example, he's correct that there's a serious measuring issue with whether shootings are stopped by others with weapons, and he's also correct that even if the trend identified by MJ is accurate it is still a tiny fraction of total crimes and will remain so, but that's not actually relevant to evaluating the central claim.

Sure, that's certainly a valid point. It doesn't make the people saying this in the 1980s or the 1990s or the 2000s correct in any way shape or form. And it is possible that the media's current claims are completely disconnected from the uptick. The relevant bit is updating that there really has been a statistically significant uptick. (Especially because my priors based on general declining crime rates would have been to if anything suspect the opposite.)

I take Eliezer's position on MWI to be pretty well expressed by this quote from David Wallace:

[...] there is no quantum measurement problem.

I do not mean by this that the apparent paradoxes of quantum mechanics arise because we fail to recognize 'that quantum theory does not represent physical reality' (Fuchs and Peres 2000a). Quantum theory describes reality just fine, like any other scientific theory worth taking seriously: describing (and explaining) reality is what the scientific enterprise is about...

What I mean is that there is actually no conflict between the dynamics and ontology of (unitary) quantum theory and our empirical observations. We thought there was originally, because the theory is subtle, complicated and highly unintutive, and because our early attempts to understand it and to relate it to empirical data promote high-level concepts like 'observation' and 'measurement' to the level of basic posits and confused the issue.

The central case for Everettianism is that it is just plain old quantum mechanics, approached with the default realist perspective that most of us have no problem adopting for practically every other physical theory.* Every other "interpretation" out there adds on extra posits -- either ontological posits or epistemological posits that one doesn't usually hear when talking about other theories -- in order to solve a problem that doesn't actually exist, the so-called "measurement problem". So it's not just that MWI is simpler than the other theories; it's that the sole motivation for the added complexity in other theories -- the supposed inadequacy of bare quantum theory to account for our observations -- turns out to be bunk.

Suppose someone argued that the general theory of relativity all by itself is inadequate. After all, how does the space-time metric know how to change in the presence of matter? There has to be some transcendent intelligent entity responsible for altering space-time whenever the distribution of energy in the universe changes, so we need to supplement the usual equations of GR with this additional theoretical posit in order to solve this problem. The correct response to this is that the supposed "problem" itself is a mistake stemming from unclear thinking, and that there is no need to posit this additional entity. And since the only motivation for positing this entity's existence was the pseudo-problem we have just rejected, it would be a mistake to believe that the entity exists. Wallace's (and I think Eliezer's) position is that the quantum interpretation debates are just sophisticated versions of this.

* This is not to say that an anti-realist or instrumentalist attitude to scientific theories is a mistake, provided this attitude is a general philosophical position and not motivated by the supposed peculiarities of quantum mechanics. However, many people (e.g. Fuchs and Peres) who advocate instrumentalism about QM aren't motivated by the attractions of instrumentalism per se but rather by a belief that there is something about quantum mechanics specifically that makes realism untenable. This is a mistake, according to Everettians.

I'm probably misunderstanding or simplifying his position

You really aren't. His logic is literally "it's simpler, therefore it's right" and "we don't need collapse (or anything else), decoherence is enough". To be fair, plenty of experts in theoretical physics hold the same view, most notably Deutsch and Carroll.

There is at least one situation in which you might expect something different under MWI than under pilot-wave: quantum suicide. If you rig a gun so that it kills you if a photon passes through a half-silvered mirror, then under MWI (and some possibly reasonable assumptions about consciousness) you would expect the photon to never pass through the mirror no matter how many experiments you perform, but under pilot-wave you would expect to be dead after the first few experiments.

Hm, because I spend more time researching the issue than I had before? That should count for something, shouldn't it?

Also, I can actually explain things like decoherence without hand-waving now. Looking back there were some gaps in my understanding that I just brushed over. You could say it was a failure of rationality to give as much credence to the Copenhagen interpretation in the first place.

you're leaving the boundary of testable physics

It has been shown experimentally long ago that MWI requires full Quantum Gravity, not just Quantum Mechanics (plus Newtonian gravity or General Relativity, or even semi-classical gravity).

EDIT: provided an alternate link (paywalled, sorry).

If this “looks like” this your definition of looking like is much broader than mine.

A single punch can be lethal, so why doesn't a special case (albeit myth) of it make evolutionary sense?

A single punch can be lethal, but not with anything like the frequency that you could be subject to this kind of impact - it's an obvious place to punch someone, and very similar to what happens when you fall on your face. We know that skull shape is something that evolution can and does change in relatively short timeframes. There's no "technical debt" explanation, particularly if the claim was that this is something unique to humans.

What convinced you otherwise? I think the same person can profess either genuine or faked altruism depending on the situation.

Mainly moving from a situation in which I faked it to one in which I genuinely enjoyed being altruistic - but also observing changes in I guess how behaviour seemed to change with observation, which seemed to suggest that my peers also underwent the same change.

Link Human face shaped by millions of years of fighting, study finds

Done out of conscious self-interest, rather than for moral reasons. (I'm well aware that our moral reasoning was optimized by evolution for self-interest; nevertheless, I think the distinction is real).

The terrible CEO of Sears comes to mind.

The recent history of the state of Illinois.

One could call any CEO salary greater 100 times worker salary looting. Note that CEOs salary is not just market demand and supply but to a large part power gaming.

ADDED: I note that this is down-voted, but don't understand why. It was solely intended as one example as requested. I understand that very high CEO salalary is neither unusual nor (mostly) condered unethical. But one could see it as such. Where went my reasoning wrong?

Aren't many people prone to acne regardless of diet?

About half of people in their 20s and 30s have acne. Acne is caused by a bacterium that breaks down lipids in the skin. I've only seen hyperglycemic diet implicated in making acne worse, but no diet will cure acne. Note that dermatology has a stricter definition for acne than people usually care about for cosmetic reasons.

that the Reds rarely make

Oh, but they do. “God made every man different; Sam Colt made them equal."

The explanation for this (according to Jonathan Haidt) is that early humans developed weapons like spears and axes, which made it easier to kill other humans. So it is relatively easy for a larger, stronger alpha male chimp or ape to dominate weaker males, but a human alpha male bully would often end up getting speared by a lower status rival.

That sounds pretty similar to the argument that high gun ownership makes makes it more difficult for the government to become tyrannical.

Interesting.

One of my (many) irrational iterations of thinking about gun control had me convinced Republicans held such a staunch line on defending gun rights (in part) in order to keep the argument not about economic inequality as a causal driver for all sorts of violence, including guns.

As long as the argument was about he 2nd amendment, assault rifle bans and school shootings, no one would pay attention to the numbers showing strong correlation between gun violence (and violent crime) and disparity in income, and thus no deeper discussion about fiscal/social policy would need to occur.

I don't know about this any more. I want it to be true, because of my Blue team affiliations, but it seems a bit too conspiracy-ish for my liking. (I'm also part of the Anti-Conspiracy Team...which wears a mustard yellow uniform.)

I consider it a basically unrelated problem.

No. I don't pay any attention to gun control - too politicized, the data too weak, and too irrelevant to my life to make it worthwhile. (Everyone agrees it's a good idea to be careful with your own guns, and there's little you can do about crime.)

It always amuses me to watch the optimism of gun fanatics who believe they're preparing themselves to resist with their shotguns against a state that has drones and nukes at its disposal.

Maybe scientific realism? Not sure. In any case, I prefer the original "the map is not the thing mapped" vs "the map is not the territory" as just as potent but free of ontological baggage.

Well, obviously it's far more complicated than one bit; like most brain features, it's built into the structure of the brain in a somewhat or totally distributed fashion, and through some developmental quirk, some or all of that structure develops in a way inappropriate to their DNA and physical layout. The more complex it is, the more I would expect genderqueer and nonbinary people to be common from increasingly nonstandard configurations of whatever that structure looks like as opposed to fairly limited values it could take on (at least the two).

Most trans people I know felt extremely uncomfortable with their sexual characteristics and assigned gender before ever hearing of the concept of a transsexual person; my ex-boyfriend jokes that he really should have figured it out sooner, given how he would devour literally any media that had crossdressing main characters, and he was raised heavily-Orthodox Jewish where the concept was not at all available. This is a pretty significant obstacle to it being a memetic phenomenon in all/most cases.

I would agree that it's to some degree a memetic fad in the case of nonbinary/genderqueer people; definitely a number of people I know slide around somewhat on the gender spectrum in what seems to be a semi-deliberate act of protest against restrictive gender norms rather than particular pain at being called the gender they were raised as. But there are also nonbinary people whose beliefs are much more deeply held, and who feel intense, crippling emotional pain (i.e. are triggered) when referred to as their raised gender rather than their chosen gender. Generally these people find the opposite binary painful to a significantly lesser extent, which supports the idea that they might be physiologically/neurologically indistinguishable from binary trans people, but they're definitely distinct from the weaker category of nonbinary identification. This is probably a necessary stopping point on the path to the inevitable death of socially-constructed gender.

In short, I think your position, while more reasonable than my past one, is mixing up a couple different phenomena and missing some data, and drawing broad, false conclusions as a result.

What do you think that something is that they feel?

Why do you think such a meme would spread or originate, if not due to its truth value?

Humans are made of both biological and memetic (social) stuff, though. It's famously difficult to ascribe any particular behavior to just one or the other -- the old nature/nurture debate being one aspect of that -- but even if you could, you can't necessarily describe one side of that as more "real" than the other side -- I am both my flesh and its neural activation patterns. One reason I believe most transgender people describe a purely physical (brain) basis is that using the language of desire is severely socially proscribed: it's not viewed as OK to merely say "I want to be a man/woman" the same way someone can say "I want to be an architect", although in both cases a person may simply be looking around at the various roles their society has on offer and finding some desirable than others.

This phenomenon isn't limited to transgender people; even 15 years ago gays and lesbians were viewed more negatively by society, and magazines would run articles about "the gay gene," despite the lack of evidence for its existence. Nowadays, in a much more tolerant culture, you can find people who say that they "choose to be gay." A similar evolution in transgender self-description could happen if society becomes more tolerant.

So, I think this is actually evidence simply that behaviors or accomplishments viewed as highly unusual (either positive or negative) are often ascribed to a physical basis, whereas anything perceived as being in the normal range of human behavior in the culture is seen simply as the individual's choice or self expression. This doesn't actually tell you anything about the cause of the action or desire -- we can't do the kind of experiments that would be necessary to find that out. For all we know, desiring to be a particular gender, or desiring to have a particular occupation are similar mixes of built-in brain organization, body chemistry, psychological imprinting, culture, and both conscious and subconscious weighing given the individual's other abilities and limitations.

it would be mathematically incoherent.

I'm not sure what you mean. You're saying it's not possible to make a coherent mathematical description of a physics system where something rotates around multiple axes? It wouldn't correspond to our world very well, but why are the mathematics impossible?

the angular velocity can change even in the absence of torques.

Yikes! Yes, even the model I ended up with sounds like it didn't represent rotations properly.

Also how are you representing orientation as (ox, oy, oz)?

This was about a decade ago, so I'm not confident I remember what I did properly. But I think you can represent orientation as a one-time rotation from an initial position. So (ox, oy, oz) are a vector representing an axis with the magnitude indicating how far around that axis it rotates. Does that not work? (It's also possible that I kept orientation as a matrix.)

Do you have a source for the claim that fat people don't generally have slow metabolisms?

I assume you mean some kind of formal reference as opposed to common sense arguments or general observations. If so, are you seriously skeptical of the claim? If the answer is "yes," then I will try to dig something up.

Core temperature might vary between people by only a few degrees, but surface temperature varies much more widely.

That's an interesting point. Would you agree that if a person has a higher metabolism, one would expect that under your theory, their skin temperature would be expected to be higher?

(Seeing this here really astonishes me. I don't understand how this kind of view is possible. This is not a knotty difficult problem like global warming, or a values-based question like gay marriage where facts aren't especially relevant, or conflicting cutting-edge scientific research, or some distant historical event from centuries ago lost in the vapors of time and shifting worldviews: this was something that happened barely 12 years ago, that was documented in pretty much every paper and magazine at extraordinarily tedious length, which was discussed in simple terms that any American could - and most did - understand; you can look up transcripts of official speeches with ease in seconds now, and watch them on YouTube if you prefer; the basic claims were simple and clear - 'Saddam Hussein in 2001 was running multiple active and sophisticated WMD research and development programs with many concrete manifestations' - and the failure of the predictions were widely noted within months of the invasion as the search teams came up flat dry for it, and Bush was heavily criticized for the lack of results long before Iraq became enough of a bloodbath that it became a moot point since the place was now a sunk cost. We have countless in depth books & reporting on exactly how the evidence was trumped up and manipulated and fabricated, and how the war was sold to the public, and so on and so forth. We even understand the Iraqi side of the story and, from his pre-execution interrogations, why Hussein was so desperate to pretend to be much more dangerous than he was and why he didn't cooperate: Baathist Iraq couldn't beat Iran in the first place, and weakened by sanctions, definitely couldn't beat them in the '90s-'00s, and he needed Israel-style uncertainty about his capabilities, assisted by his subordinates fearfully telling him what he wanted to hear. So given all of this is in the historical record and also personal experience of anyone who read a newspaper regularly, how is it I am reading that not just one person but quite a lot of people have managed to convince themselves that Bush was right all along?)