Posts
Comments
If percentages placed on incorrect answers are included then you get 50:25:25:0 giving more points than 50:50:0:0 when the answer is A which I think people might find hard to swallow.
It seems to me like a good lesson.
It seems to me like it's a coin toss between A and B (C and D are impossible) is validly scored less well then A is twice as likely as B and A is twice as likely as C.
Is the quadratic scoring rule essentially the Briers score that Tetlock uses? If so, I think that's worth noting in your post given that many readers here are likely familiar with Tetlock's work.
I think neuroeconomics is behavorial economics for people with fMRI fetish. Even when the name points in the right direction it's not about application of economical models to neuroscience.
Which post from Ozy do you mean?
If someone were to say rationality was great at figuring out whether liberalism or conservatism was better, I would agree that this is the sort of thing rationality should be able to do, in principle.
I think the best answer would be that rationality 101 is tabooing terms and not having the discussion on the level of "is liberalism or conservatism better".
OpenPhil does invest money into individual political decisions such as prison reform and I would count them to be part of our rationalist project.
The CFAR staff frequently makes the point that they don't want to give their handbook to outsiders, because attending a CFAR workshop is radically different then reading the handbook and they don't want idea inoculation and people to think that the workshop is similar to just reading the handbook.
Given that RSI is an acronym that has already a fixed meaning, adding a new meaning is likely going to be confusing for a lot of readers.
It seems that in many cases ideas don't just need arguments in their favor but also explanation/model building to be useful to others.
In general, live mostly within "social reality" where the only question is "is this weird/acceptable" and never "is this true/false".
It seems to me like people who primarily think in terms of weird/acceptable never join the rationality in the first place. Or do you believe that our community has taught people who used to think in those terms to think otherwise?
If rationalists are trying to do therapy, they are competing with a field of tens of thousands of PhD-level practitioners with all the resources of the academic and health systems who have worked on the problem for decades.
Part of the "resources" is working inside a bureaucratic system where it's necessary to spend a lot of time jumping through hoops. There's another large chunk of time invested in intellectual analysis. Most of the people inside academia spend relatively little time in deliberate practice to build skills to do intervention. It's not surprising to me to have outsiders outperform academia by a large margin.
There seem to be two different questions:
1) Does self-improvement approaches work?
2) Is rationalist self-improvement superior over other approaches.
Let me start with the second issue.
Rob writes further down that the idea of TABs/implementation intentions was crystallized in 1999. It might be true for academia, but I don't the concept is very different from the way "anchor" is used in NLP two decades earlier.
I would even think that the older NLP concepts are further developed. Both in terms of modeling behavior (book: The EMPRINT Method) and in terms of creating the new behavior (book: Know How: Guided Programs for Inventing Your Own Best Future).
I don't think the part work that is done in NLP is fundamentally different then the Internal Double Crux that CFAR teaches. There are plenty of other self help frameworks that have their own way to do part work as well.
The rationalist community has a habit of valuing clarity and epistemic rigor that the NLP community unfortunately doesn't have and there are cases where epistemic rigor is translating into better outcomes in cases where it's easy to delude yourself.
I do believe that (1) is true but I don't have good public evidence for that claim.
You had a situation where the amount of people who died from cancer were roughly the same in the US and Europe.
At the same time the US started diagnosis earlier and had a higher rate of curing people who are diagnosed with cancer. This does suggest that women got diagnosed in the US with cancer while they wouldn't have been in Europe with lower testing rates but where whether or not they are treated had in the end little effect on mortality due to breast cancer.
If someone is good at making treatment decisions then he should get better outcomes if he gets more testing data. The fact that this didn't seem to happen suggests a problem with the decision making of the cancer doctors.
It's not definite but at the same time I don't see evidence that the doctors are actually good at making decisions.
That's irrelevant to the question of whether interventions such as reading the sequences or going to a CFAR workshop improve peoples outcomes.
It's useful for this discussion to see "rationalist self improvement" as being about the current techniques instead of playing motte-and-bailey.
Another example: doctors fail miserably on the Bayes mammogram problem, but usually handle actual breast cancer diagnosis okay.
If doctors would be good at breast cancer diagnosis, the US wouldn't have upped the age where testing is done under the Obama administration.
We live in a world where doctors created so many unnecessary operations after they did their diagnosis, that we decided we should do less testing.
Most of the communication within a field like Rolfing is through in-person events and not through the written word.
Recently, the Fascia Research Congress brought people across different disciplines of body work together. The congress resulted in the book Fascia: The Tensional Network of the Human Body which provides a good overview about plenty of different paradigms.
As far as the underlying anatomy goes, fascia seems to be central.
Anatomy Trains by Thomas W. Myers is a good anatomy book by a Rolfer that's written for a broader audience.
It seems to me like you judge traditions to be muddy without knowing anything about them and their developed bodies of knowledge.
Why should I believe that the concepts that you came up are less muddy then let's say the concepts of Rolfing about how to create physical alignment that were refined over decades by Ida Rolf who learned from Korzybski about how to use language well in Esalen and later by other people in other places?
It seems to me like you consider conscious proprioception something important that has little description in mainstream writings and then mix all kind of different perspectives on the subject together.
From my perspective there are a bunch of different traditions that have their own views on the subject and I don't think it's useful to muddy all the different ways together.
Have you stopped drinking it sometime for two weeks and noticed that you had less energy afterwards?
I'm curious about what you think the price of the device would be if a company would sit down and mass produce it. If you had a kickstarter with 10,000 minimum orders, what would the price for the device be? What would be the running costs?
If you have answers that are specific to a timescale I'm happy to hear them.
A and B aren't the only choices. You don't need to show a watertight meta-analysis to state why you believe what you believe and be explicit about your uncertainty.
Caffeine stops surpression of neural activity. That's likely leading to more activity. At the same time there's some evidence that points at caffeine being positive for lifespan like https://www.aarp.org/health/healthy-living/info-2018/coffee-longevity-health-benefits.html and https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3922918/ .
There are different ways to consume caffeine. A lot of people consume caffeine as part of their morning routine. It's useful to know whether or not that increases productivity even when there are also other ways to consume caffeine.
It would be a form of bribery but it seems that bribery always exists. It might take less direct ways but when there's money looking to influence behavior that money generally finds a way to be spend.
It seems to me like the field of History and Philosophy of Science does look at why scientific ideas spread and they usually don't answer it with "the idea was simply true".
I find it unlikely that you couldn't capture reviewers in a system where advertising was banned. Inviting a reviewer to an all-experience paid trade show in the Maldives isn't advertising.
If you want a trustworthy review that isn't paid for by affiliate commissions you currently have the choice to go to ConsumerReports and pay for their subscription.
How do you know?
Exercise increases the size of individual muscle cells but not their number. When muscle cells die it doesn't replenish them.
If I understand your model, then you would predict that the facial muscle activity of older people is similar to that of younger people?
If this would be an effective model of wrinkles, why does giving a people botox seem to remove wrinkles?
Christian-advocacy groups always have very little influence on what happens within education departments in universities. Deconstructionist thought on the other hand has a lot of influence within those departments.
It would be a big problem for the career of a professor in an education department to argue that more creationism has to be taught in science classes. On the other hand today a professor in an education department who would argue that there are only two genders would get massive problems.
If you take the outside view there are plenty of cultural conflicts that end very bloody. From the outside view it's possible that a social force gets weaker but it's also possible that it gets stronger and goes on to project more power.
New Atheism vs. fundamentalist religion isn't even a good comparison because neither of those camps had a lot of institutions behind them.
Reasonable-if-flawed posts about political issues have no place on LessWrong. Given that politics is problematic it's worthwhile to discourage people from posting low quality political posts on LessWrong and there's nothing shameful about discouraging such posts.
The behavior of discouraging has little to do with outgroup toleration.
Something has to come next.
What comes next might be a version that's even more radical.
It might be that nobody gets a degree in education without professing allegiance to SJ and those teachers then go to bring SJ into all the subject at school.
SJ is more then an online phenomena. It's also a fight for the control of various institutions and I see little reason that the people you won power will suddenly let it go.
DuckDuckGo isn't a big player but there are other companies with massive investment into search like Baidu and Microsoft.
There are some articles about Bing winning in blind tests against Google like https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-new-blind-test-shows-users-still-prefer-bings-results-over-googles/ .
Is there a reason you only want tech companies or academic research projects and not government sources like the NSA?
I don't think anything about Scott's thesis indicates that it's easy for Social Justice to be replaced. That movement has social dynamics that drive people to take more extreme positions and not express dissent that don't exist in the same way in New Atheism.
If that's the argument then the failure to make that argument explicitly points towards the post being badly written. It's not a defense of the post.
When steelmanning I think it would be helpful to start with defining the claim you want to steelman. Steelmanning is about starting with a claim and then arguing for it.
It isn't about engaging a topic and trying to dig up an uncontroversial claim that might be held by some people.
Having the head in a bad position can put pressure on your airways. There's more pressure on the airways when the upper cervical vertebrae are in flexion then when they are in extension. Bad pillow height can also lead to pressure on the airways.
At the last LWCW I snored the first night. After a conversation with one of the room mates I focused on not flexing the top of the spine the next night and having a better pillow height and I didn't snore the second night.
Given the reports from people who sleep with me when I'm at my home, I don't snore at home. I had reports of me snoring at another event where I stayed overnight this summer.
Sleep apnea doesn't seem to always coincide with snoring but I think pressure from the top vertebrae being in flexion could affect both.
What you said sounded like you assume putting effort into a photo shoot is important for quality and the belief that things are necessary makes it more effortful.
Simply taking pictures at a high rate where many will be rubbish and picking the best ones to test on PhotoFeeler takes less effort.
To write a comment on this website I can click on "reply", then write my text and click "submit". On Wikipedia I would have to click on "edit" then find the right section to reply to. Once I have found it I have to decide on the right combination of * and : to put in front of my reply. After I wrote my comment I have to sign it by writing ~~~~. After jumping through those hoops I can click on "publish" (a recent change because user research suggested people were confused by "save").
Then if I'm lucky my post is published. If I'm unlucky I have to deal with a merge conflict. It's hard for me to see Wikipedia here as user-friendly.
This creates a pressure where some discussion about Wiki editing get pushed to Facebook or Telegram groups that are more user-friendly to use because it takes a lot less effort to write a new message.
When it comes to menus you have a left side menus. You have the menus on the left and right side on the top of the article. Then you have the top menu on the right side. It's not clear to a new user why "related changes" is somewhere completely different then "history".
More importantly the kind of results that A/B testing reveals are often not as obvious but there effects accumulate. The fact that Wikipedia lost editors over the last decade is for me a sign that they weren't effective at evolving software that people actually want to use to contribute.
As far as I understand eating before sleep raises your pulse as more blood has to flow through your intestines and thus usually leads to less deep sleep.
It might damage your sleep in a way that leads you to be less rested the next morning even through you don't notice that you had trouble entering sleep.
It might be useful to be more clear about what kind of food to eat when you find that eating something is good.
Personally, I can eat a bit of soup before going to bed without producing much spike in heart-rate.
What metric do you use to determine it works to eat right before bed?
The amount of information that a dating profile provides doesn't allow someone to really strongly want you for deep reasons. In most cases people it will just be a sign of the person thinking that they don't have that many choices for pursuing a partner that looks better on paper.
Empirically, as a trend across the industry, this has turned out to be false. “Design by A/B test” has dramaticallyeroded the quality of UI/UX design over the last 10-15 years.
At the first glance this seems to me like "everything was better in the past". It seems to me like a website that's stuck in how things were done in the past like Wikipedia which doesn't do any A/B tests loses in usability compared to more modern websites that are highly optimized.
In the company where I work we don't have A/B test and plenty of changes are made for reasons of internal company politics and as a result the users still suffer from bad UI changes.
Why is that the case? Sleep apnea seems to be defined as a period with lower oxygen saturation in the blood with should be possible to be measured at home as well.
I have some experiences that suggest that I'm more likely to snore when I'm not sleeping in my own comfortable bed. It might be that the in-lab sleep test induces the sleep apnea on it's own and isn't representative of normal sleep.
Just like daters don't optimize their photo's with photo-feelers people writing job applications in countries where the job application has a photo don't optimize the photo either.
It seems to me like most people have a strange relationship to photo's that is irrelevant from any concerns about dating.
When self identity is attached to a given problem it's emotionally harder to think sanely about it.
Regarding pictures, I think you underestimate the effort required.
You need to get a phone or camera capable of taking good-looking picture, you need someone that is semi-competent at shooting, you need nice looking clothes and a good-enough looking background. These are all things that need to be planned/accounted for. It also takes time.
This is wrong. This summer I got some pictures taken from a professional photographer with professional equipment.
I put them on Tinder and then got less matches. A while later I put my new photo's on PhotoFeeler and it turns out they indeed score less then my old picture that was taken by having someone simply holding my mobile phone with a setting where it made 1 picture per second and then mining the resulting photo pool for the best photo's with PhotoFeeler.
This response is quite interesting as the exchange is basically:
OP: Why aren't people doing strategy A for area O to persue goal X.
You: Because doing strategy B for area O is very effortful.
it's better for the general success of the tribe when everyone has a kid
Group selection arguments are generally lose in data driven evolutionary analysis.
If you have a kid with a person who has a lot of resources because they have the attractive characteristic of having a lot of social status and your mate passes down genes that make the child healthier and stronger, you are more likely to ultimately pass down your genes.