Open thread, March 13 - March 19, 2017

a book about evidence based pregnancy

!!!

Non C-section births have better outcomes.

The devil is in the details: what you control for and what you don't. Compare: "Not being in a hospital bed has better outcomes than being in a hospital bed".

So the take away is that there is good evidence that doulas are effective

Maybe the book cited some, but you didn't show any.

Non C-section births have better outcomes. So you want to avoid it if you can.

This is highly suspicious to me. Do C-sections follow or cause worse outcomes?

In my country the C-sections rate is very high (not sure I can trust my memory on the exact number). We pretty much decided to have our child born in a neighbor country, just to reduce the related risks, even if that included a risk that any medical complication would make the costs skyrocket (because our health insurance system does not like this kind of healthcare shopping).

From what I was told, seems like the most important factor is that C-section is more convenient for the doctor. For example, doctors can choose exact timing, to avoid a situation when two babies decide to get naturally born at exactly the same moment. Or they can make more babies get born during the day, when there is more staff at the hospital, and less during the night. (There are also other ways to artificially influence the timing, and yes, those are used too.) Another factor is that in my country it is more-or-less mandatory for mother during the childbirth to lie on her back... which again is most convenient for the doctor, but also happens to increase some risks associated with childbirth (which can be then conveniently solved by the C-section). If I understand it correctly, the position on the back is more dangerous because the child needs to be pushed uphill (over the tail bone).

What is even worse, when there are too many C-sections, a feedback loop appears -- suddenly people (both the doctors and the patients) need to protect their egos by rationalizing that, actually, C-section is the best way to go. Which in turn further increases the rate of the C-sections, because if "everyone is doing that" then it is "perfectly normal" and certainly "happens for a good reason", and people who think otherwise must obviously be wrong. So now you have mothers expecting to be given C-section, because that's how it is usually done. And you have doctors giving C-sections at a smallest opportunity, because that's what most mothers want them to do.

And communicating this with doctors is almost impossible. When you mention that, they will start lecturing you that sometimes the C-section is necessary to save the baby's or mother's life or health. And when you say "okay, of course in such case I would want you to do it, but if there is no complication, then I don't want you to do that needlessly... I am even willing to pay to extra to compensate for all related inconvenience", then the doctor usually gets offended or treats you like an idiot and says that "of course we are doing that only when it is necessary". Except, comparing statistics across countries shows that somehow, in neighbor countries it is "necessary" in maybe 15% of cases, but in our country it is close to 50%... but of course, for each specific case the doctor can argue that this specific case happened to be an exception where the C-section was necessary. And no, they are not going to allow the mother to give birth in a different position, because that is simply not how things are done, full stop. (Cross the border to the nearest country though, and the local doctors are like "yeah, sure, no problem".)

Generally, comparing medicine across countries can make you mad. Seems like in each country, doctors have a consensus on how things are supposed to be done, and they always claim that their opinions are backed by science. Yet somehow the "science" says sometimes completely opposite things in different countries. (I suspect "science" is a shorthand here for "what they taught me at university, a few decades ago".) And if you look into peer-reviewed journals to find what the science actually says, you will usually get yet another opinion. (Though we noticed the trend that the peer-reviewed journals usually agree more with the "science" of our neighbor country than with the "science" of my country.)

Without claiming that it is directly relevant to the question, let me quote Atul Gawande, from "The Score: How childbirth went industrial"

Yes, he said, many studies did show fabulous results for forceps. But they only showed how well forceps deliveries could go in the hands of highly experienced obstetricians at large hospitals....Forceps deliveries are very difficult to teach—much more difficult than a C-section

Gawande is great. Collect them all. Also, Lewis Thomas.

Or an e-mail. (If you leave the "To:" field empty, there is no risk of sending it accidentally.)

Ha, it's true, good catch. I usually let a long comment ferment some minutes before clicking the 'comment' button. Sometimes I end up deleting the whole thing.

And "domain registration", which many web hosting providers will do for you. You can also start with the domain and then add services such as web sites and email, for instance via Google Domains:

https://domains.google.com/registrar?s=snowsage

I mean, why would I not want a man who agreed to this? It seems so obvious.

Why? Genuine question because no, it is not obvious to me.

Obviously a husband who supports your goals is better than one that doesn't. But if your potential husband doesn't support your goals then they must not value your happiness and fulfilment, in which case your relationship has already failed. There's no possible potential husband who it's a good idea to marry except for the single factor that they don't support your goals. Such a person can't exist. So it's just not a useful decision criterion to ask whether they support your goals; there are other criteria which are strictly better.

When people are plotting, there is going to be an "inner group". And your winning choices are either to join the "inner group" (if you predict it will win) or express disinterest publicly (if you predict it will lose). This is true both in EEA and at high school.

In other environments, people overestimate their importance essentially for two reasons: First, with larger numbers of people in general, each individual matters less. A marginal new ally is more important to a group with ten members, than to a group with thousand members. Second, mere numbers of people matter less than their power. For a high-school clique another average person can be a valuable asset, but a political party some people are orders of magnitude more worth than an average person.

Anyone have any good mind hacks to help stay out of political conversations?

I try to remind myself of (what I believe to be) the big picture. If you are going to participate in online political debates, you essentially have two choices to make: (1) is this going to be a casual opinion expressing, or are you going to play it like a pro? and (2) are you going to present sane opinions, or will you make yourself into a two-dimensional caricature of human being?

I believe that if you are not playing it like a pro, you are just wasting your time, achieving nothing good (neither for you, nor for the world in general). I also believe that unless you are already very famous, presenting sane opinions is a losing strategy (because sane opinions are suboptimal for signalling loyalty to a tribe). Therefore, most likely the only winning strategy for you is in the "insane pro" quadrant. Now the question is whether you are going to do it, or if it seems like too much work and too little fun. For me, laziness usually wins at this point.

To explain, "doing it like a pro" means that instead of commenting on other people's websites or social networks, you will make your own trademarked content. You will post articles on your own website (where you have absolute moderator powers), and where you will build your own personal reader base. (A YouTube channel is also okay, but always have a Plan B in mind if YouTube decides they don't like you; for example because your political opponents decide to spam your videos with fake complaints; that could happen any time and could ruin overnight everything you built.) Do not forget a Patreon link, or some other way to monetize your hard work!

And by "two-dimensional caricature" I mean this: humans are complex, but they enjoy simple solutions. Also, political fans are more likely to punish disagreement than to reward agreement. That means, if you only express your opinion on one issue, and your opinion on that issue is completely black-and-white, congratulations, half of the politically active people will think you are a genius! (The other half will think you are a moron, but that's inevitable.) However, if you express your opinion on ten issues, guess what: only one reader in a thousand will think you are a genius, and the remaining 999 will think you are a moron. (The disagreement on one important topic will hurt them more than the agreement on nine topics will make them happy.) Oh, and if you express arguments both in favor and against something, then everyone is going to think you are a moron. To optimize for reader base size, you must care fanatically strongly about one issue, and not to touch anything else. Of course, you are allowed to have more than one opinion, as long as those opinions are strongly correlated in the population.

So, at this moment I (1) have a specific plan how to do political commenting correctly, and (2) realize that I actually don't want to do it this way, because it's too much work and too little fun. On the other hand, knowing the optimal way, I am now less tempted to do it the obviously suboptimal way.

To overcome the temptation, make the whole idiocy visible to your System 1, so now it will feel repulsive.

I see no issue with engaging in rational political discussion. The key is avoiding the overly tribal arguments that proliferate throughout social media. I think those are a lot like sports arguments - you want to join in just to root for your team. I doubt that it has to do with the kind of social gossip that was used to determine the status hierarchy in our early tribal environments - that still exists in almost the same form as it did then I think.

My first thought is that we can't hit exactly 0 because gur engvb bs gurve nernf vf veengvbany, but we might be able to get arbitrarily close.

What do you mean by

no part of the covering shape may lie outside both polygons.

and by

A shape that leaves a smaller percentage of its own area uncovered is a better solution.

?

I read it.

Which is better, rationalreads.com or rationalfiction.io?

Landau's List.

and a blogpost on hiring those "star players", and the outlooks for the rest...

STEM: Still No Shortage On a myth that just won’t die

https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/stem-still-no-shortage-c6f6eed505c1#.d8prbrkvk

We need more mods in Europe. You used to be a moderator, so why not reclaim that power?

Rubbish.

This sort of technical analysis is usually nonsense. Is there any reason to think this case is better? This person claims a strong track record of predicting market crashes on particular dates. Here's an example from July 2016; he says to look out for trouble in the Dow Jones (1) between 2016-08-26 and 2016-08-30, (2) on 2016-09-26, and (3) on 2016-10-20. No prizes for guessing the outcome: the Dow Jones was just fine on and around all three of those dates.

(That example was the first one I found, by the way. No cherrypicking on my part.)

So I think he's a bullshitter who makes a lot of predictions and then afterwards points to the ones that happened to be somewhere in the vicinity of the truth.

[EDITED to add:]

One reason articles like this call him a "crash guru" is that he allegedly predicted the "flash crash" of August 2015. But let's just look a little more closely at these impressive results (which you can be sure are the ones he quotes to impress journalists):

On July 31, 2015, the chart specialist went on CNBC and warned of a major volatile move to come between Aug. 7 and 18, which turned out to be the so-called “flash crash” of Aug. 24. He also flagged another period to be careful of — Sept. 13 to Sept. 23.

He then went back on CNBC on Aug. 28, 2015, and told viewers there would be a drop on Sept. 14 or 17. A nearly 290-point plunge hit the Dow industrials on Sept. 18; the index proceeded to lose more even ground over several trading days.

Looks good. Until you actually read carefully. This lists three predictions. (1) A major volatile move between the 7th and 18th of August. Allegedly fulfilled by a crash on ... the 24th of August. Nope, sorry, if you quote a particular date range then something happening outside that date range does not count as a correct prediction. (2) A "period to be careful of" between the 13th and 23rd of September. The DJIA was just fine during that period. (3) A drop on the 14th or 17th of September. Allegedly fulfilled by a drop on the 18th. Nope, if you predict specific dates then something on a different date does not count as a correct prediction.

What actually happened: the DJIA was pretty stable through the "major volatile move" period. Then a week later it had a crash which Jadeja didn't predict. Then it was rather volatile for a month or so, a period in which Jadeja mentioned a couple of specific bad dates that were in fact no worse than any others during that volatile period.

So, again, I reckon: bullshitter with no actual predictive ability.

understand human consciousness has a huge expected value

Does it? What do you think would be an expected return of the discovery of the precise mechanics of consciousness? Or what if neuroscience dissolves consciousness?

On #2, I've seen it claimed -- but have no idea how good the science behind it is -- that better than visualizing positive or negative outcomes alone is doing both and paying attention to the contrast. "If I do X, then the result will look like Y. If I don't do X, the result will look like Z. Wow, Y is much better than Z: better get on with doing X".

As a bit of a tangent to 2)

Certainly using visualisation as practice has some evidence (especially high-fidelity visualisation increasing performance at comparable rates to actual practice; one course I've been to advocated for the PETLEPP model in the context of medical procedures/simulation) - in this sense it may help achieving an endeavor but 1. It's got nothing (much) to do with positive visualisation and 2. It feels like its moving the goal-posts by interpreting the 'endeavor' as 'performing better'.

I've definitely also heard people discussing positive and negative visualisation as tools for emotional stabilisation and motivation - although the more persuasive (read: not sounding like new age/low brow self help BS) usually favour using both together or just negative visualisation - see gjm's and Unnamed's posts

1) We still don't know yet. If we are not observing some statistical noise, then it's possible that it's either bimodal (some have it, some don't) or it has a very weak effect.

2) Visualizing only the positive outcome, as far as I know, doesn't work. There's an interesting book about it: Rethinking positive thinking, by G. Oettingen. I've only skimmed it though, and I don't know how sound are the citations.

1. we don't know either way. It seems that believing it exists causes your ego to be depleted though.

2. it probably relates to the original context in which you do the visualisation. You have given one example of a context where conflicting results might come out, there are several similar situations, so it's hard to know. I would feel safe saying that it seems to work some of the time for some people.

I was about to say "Since you never specified that the shape must be a measurable set ..." and link to here, but since you mention the area of the shape, you do (implicitly) require it to have one.

My 2 cents: it's a heap of unproved assumptions, told as if they were Reality 101. It's very clear that it was written with an aim in mind, it meanders and misinterprets until it arrives at the desired conclusion. It's very far from an honest discussion of fundamentals.