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Thanks; that is useful to know. I'm going to add a note asking other people if they have the same experience because that will make a big difference to me going forward.
habryka, if you're inclined to invest more time in this: did you have the same experience with https://acesounderglass.com/2019/10/24/epistemic-spot-check-the-fate-of-rome-round-2/ (which I just now realize never went up on LW)? Trying to narrow down if it's the book or the format.
Yes, this seems like a good guideline, although I can't immediately formalize how I detect curiosity. Vague list of things this made me think of:
- I think this is a better guideline for books than scientific articles, which are heavily constrained by academic social and funding norms.
- One good sign is if *I* feel curious in a concrete way when I read the book. What I mean by concrete is...
- e.g. Fate of Rome had a ton of very specific claims about how climate worked and how historical climate conditions could be known. I spent a lot of time trying to verify these and even though I ultimately found them insufficiently supported, there was a concreteness that I still give positive marks for.
- In contrast my most recently written epistemic spot check (not yet published), I spent a long time on several claims along the lines of "Pre-industrial Britain had a more favorable legal climate for entrepreneurship than continental Europe". I don't recall the author giving any specifics on what he meant by "more favorable", nor how he determined it was true. Investigating felt like a slog because I wasn't even sure what I was looking for.
- I worry I'm being unfair here because maybe if I'd found lots of other useful sources I'd be rating the original book better. But when I investigated I found there wasn't even a consensus on whether Britain had a strong or weak patent system.
- Moralizing around conclusions tends to inhibit genuine curiosity in me, although it can loop around to spite curiosity (e.g., Carol Dweck).
if there are two similar papers from way in the past that you found via Google Scholar and one of them has 10x the citations of the other, take that into account.
This seems great for figuring out the consensus in a field, but not for identifying when the consensus is wrong.
One tactic I like to use is "how do they know this?", and asking myself or investigating if it's possible for their answer to demonstrate the thing they're claiming.
A lot of work doesn't tell you. Those aren't necessarily wrong, because they might have a good answer they're not incentivized to share, but at a minimum it's going to make it hard to learn from the work.
A lot of work claims to tell you, but when you look they are lying. For example, when I investigated the claim humans could do 4 hours of thought-work per day, I looked up the paper's citations, and found they referred to experiments of busy work. Even if those studies were valid, they couldn't possibly prove anything about thought-work. I consider "pretending to have sources and reasons" a worse sin than "not giving a source or reason"
More ambiguously, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how much we could tell and at what resolution from ice core data. I still don't have a great answer on this for the time period I was interested in. But I learned enough to know that the amount of certainty the book I was reading (The Fate of Rome) was presenting data as more clear cut than it was.
On the other end, The Fall of Rome spends a lot of time explaining why pottery is useful in establishing economic and especially trade status of an area/era. This was pretty hard to verify from external sources because it's original research from the author, but it absolutely makes sense and produces a lot of claims and predictions that could be disproved. Moreover, none of the criticism I fond of Fall of Rome addressed his points on pottery- no one was saying "well I looked at Roman pottery and think the quality stayed constant through the 600s".
This seems like you're defining "depriving half the population of agency" as not requiring or being violence
I guess one thing you might be able to do is to check arguments, as opposed to statements of facts
First, let me say I think that would be interesting to experiment with. But the reasons to be dubious are more interesting, so I'm going to spend more time on those.
This can definitely rule people out. I don't think it can totally rule people in, because there's always a risk someone made a sound argument based on faulty assumptions. In fact this is a large, sticky genre that I'm very worried about
But assuming that was solved, there's something I find harder to express that might be at the core of why I'm doing this... I don't want to collect a bunch of other people's arguments I can apply as tools, and be confused if two of them conflict. I want a gears-level model of the world such that, if I was left with amnesia on an intellectual deserted island, I could re-derive my beliefs. Argument-checking as I conceive of it now more does the former. I can't explain why, exactly what I'm picturing when I say argument checking or what kind if amnesia I mean, but there's something there. My primary interest with argument-checking would be to find a way to engage with arguments in a way that develops that amnesia-proof knowledge.
How are you defining society and progress?
I've found Anki really terrible for learning, even for simple things like vocabulary; what it does is help me remember things I've already at least half-learned.
We have a round running now, it closes on the 27th. Instructions are here. There are prizes of up to $65 per question, and it also helps us out for the planned BIG tournament later.
Thanks, that's what I was going for :)
You can see all the past ESCs at https://acesounderglass.com/tag/epistemicspotcheck/ . The current top post is about upcoming changes in the system.
This is fantastic, and I imagine hard to write. Thank you for sharing.
Data point: I bounced off the physical system after making four cards, but fell in love with Roam almost immediately. It's only been 6 days so I don't know if it will last.
Zettelkasten sounds great, but I'm worried there are other things that would sound equally great if I'd heard of them and I'm privileging the one I've heard of. To that end, I'm asking people to report other systems they've used here.
My report based on 15 hours of research on this topic.
Looks like what I'm calling accuracy ISO calls "trueness", and ISO!accuracy is a combination of trueness and precision.
I would just like to complain about how many bullseye diagrams I looked at where the "low accuracy" picture averaged to about the bullseye, because the creator had randomly spewed dots and the average location of an image is in fact its center.
Some examples are where people care more about fairness, such as criminal sentencing and enterprise software pricing.
However you're right that implicit in the question was "without new information appearing", although you'd want the answer to update the same way every time the same new information appeared.
Last edit... Do you listen to any German language music or watch German language movies/shows?
No, because my goal is reading only.
Sure. These are the first 5 that came up on Anki that I didn't know
erreicht/reached
Sie hatten das Haus erreicht/They had reached the house
gefährliche/dangerous
Sie begeben sich auf eine gefährliche Reise/They began a dangerous journey
bedrohlich/threatening
vorgestellt/imagined
aber es ist weitaus düsterer und bedrohlicher als Quentin es sich je vorgestellt hatte/ but it is much darker and more threatening than Quentin had ever imagined
bereit/ready
Aber dazu war er noch nicht bereit/But he was not yet ready.
It's chance that no nouns came up, I have just as much trouble with them.
It's more that I have my favorite novel half memorized and that can count as the context in the sentence "figuring it out from context", and I don't have any history book memorized the same way.
I can envision history books being as fun as The Magicians (which is why I want the ability to read them), but can't identify the interesting ones ahead of time. I think the transition step is reading the same history book in English and German, which I've identified some candidates for.
Lang-8 looks incredible, thank you.
Right now I'm reading my favorite adult novel. The goal is to read history books that haven't been translated into English.
it's a 95% confidence interval for where the actual probability lies.
They were both made with draw.io. I don't know what algorithm habryka followed, but from the outside it looks like he arranged factors into tiers, put the uncaused causes at the top and the final effects at the bottom, and filled in layers between such that a member of layer N only had influences in layers < N. This isn't perfect though- several things in layer 2 are uncaused causes.
- I have the opposite observation on abuse in poly vs mono relationships. I'm interested in discussing further but I think that requires naming names and I don't want to do so in a public forum, so maybe we should discuss offline.
- Davis said harmful and habryka said abusive, which aren't synonymous. It's entirely possible for poly to lead to a lower chance any particular relationship is abusive, and yet raise the total amount of harm-done-by-relationships in a person or community.
It feels educational to show the horrific first draft of that diagram. Thanks to habryka for making it at all readable.
<a href="https://ibb.co/S5gYmy4"><img src="https://i.ibb.co/QpVSHQ3/Colocation-Productivity-Model.png" alt="Colocation-Productivity-Model" border="0"></a><br /><a target='_blank' href='https://freeonlinedice.com/'>dice sim</a><br />
It feels educational to show the horrific first draft of that diagram. Thanks to habryka for making it at all readable.
This seems highly related to Chris Olah's Research Debt.
only charges people if you respond to their email
This doesn't seem to solve the problem, which is compensating someone for the attention to evaluate if your email is worth responding to. If I'm sending a substantive response, I'm probably glad I got the e-mail.
I assume this is done to keep people from soliciting lots of email solely for the money, but it doesn't solve that problem, since you can always send a pro-forma response.
This feels very similar to the debate on the MTG color system a while ago, which went (as half-remembered some time so much later I don't remember how long it's been, and it's since been deleted):
A: [proposal of personality sorting system.]
B: [statement/argument that personality sorting systems are typically useless-to-harmful]
A: but this doesn't respond to my particular personality system.
I'm sympathetic to B (equivalent to jonhswentworth) here. If members of category X are generally useless-to-harmful, it's unfair and anti-truth to disallow incorporating that knowledge into your evaluations of an X. On the other hand, A could have provided rich evidence of why their particular system was good, and B could have made the exact same statement, and it would still be true. If there are ever exceptions to the rule of "category X is useless-to-harmful", you need to have a system for identifying them
[I'm going to keep talking about this in the MTG case because I think a specific case is easier to read that "category X", and it's less loaded for me than talking about my own piece, if the correspondences aren't obvious let me know and I can clarify]
A partial solution would be for B to outline not only why they're skeptical of personality systems, but why, and what specific things would increase their estimation of a particular system. This is a lot to ask, which is a tax on this particular form of criticism. But if the problem is as described there's a lot of utility in writing it up once, well, and linking to it as necessary.
@johnswentworth, if you're up for it I think for this and other reasons there's a lot of value in doing a full post on your general principle (with a link to this discussion). People clearly want to talk about it, and it seems valuable for it to have its own, easily-discoverable, space instead of being hidden behind my post. I would also like to resolve the general principle before discussing how to apply it to this post, which is one reason I've held back on participating in this sub-thread.
I looked into this and found Deep Work's backing disappointing (although 4 hours isn't disproven either).
I don't know anyone who claims taxes should be only proportional to wealth or income. There are those who say it should be super-linear with income or wealth (tax the rich even more than their proportion of income), and those who say not to tax based on wealth or income, but on consumption (my preference) or the hyper-pragmatic "tax everyone, we need the money". And of course many more nuanced variations.
I am confused why you are bringing this up. I see how the fact that there are multiple kinds of taxes and they are sometimes marginally increasing changes my points about taxes or power.
Fixed, thank you for pointing this out.
I'm having trouble responding because I don't understand your cruxes.
I likewise don't think that most blame goes to people had power but failed to stop a harm - it goes to people who were active in the harm ( ideally; but often people who are active near the harm, even if not causal.https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YRgMCXMbkKBZgMz4M/asymmetric-justice ).
Are you arguing that in practice people blame the nearest person rather than the most powerful, or that this is theoretically or optimal, or some third thing? Because I agree that that's what happens, my argument is that it is wrong. If you disagree, can you share your cruxes for why I am wrong/something else is correct?
eg the Wells Fargo employees should be judged less harshly.
I go back and forth on this, and I think the answer might depend on exactly what question you're asking. If what you want to know is "how do we get Wells Fargo to stop defrauding customers?", the answer is obviously to focus on executives, not entry level employees. But if the question is "Do I want to go into business with Dave, who defrauded customers as part of his role as a teller at Wells Fargo? Or Jill, who sliced and diced her data to get her paper count up"? That answer is going to depend a lot on particulars and context.
People who feel defensive have a harder time thinking in truthseeking mode rather than "keep myself safe" mode. But, it also seems plausibly-true that if you naively reinforce feelings of defensiveness they get stronger. i.e. if you make saying "I'm feeling defensive" a get out of jail free card, people will use it, intentionally or no.
As someone who's been a large proponent of the "consider feelings of safety" POV, I want to loudly acknowledge that this is a thing, and it is damaging to all parties.
I don't have a good solution to this. One possibility is insisting on things that facilitate safety even if everyone is saying they're fine.
Having good and correct norms on Less Wrong
This seems to assume there is one correct set of norms for all conversations. That would be really surprising to me. Do you think there's one set that is Always Correct, or that the switching costs outweigh the gains from tailored norms?
If someone is building a ship, and someone criticizes the ship for being unsafe, but this criticism is suppressed, that would result in optimism bias at a social scale, since it leads people to falsely believe the ship is safer than it actually is.
This seems to assume that absent suppression of criticism, people's perceptions would be accurate.
NATO has pushed member states (minus America) to specialize their militaries.
Can you say more about this? Who is specializing in what?
Ah, that makes sense. Thanks for explaining.
they aren't any more expensive than they used to be, they just get allocated a share of the profits from R&D ventures that're highly profitable overall.
Did you mean "allocated a share of the costs"? If not, I am confused by that sentence.
Tax as in "a heavy demand", not "a charge usually of money imposed by authority on persons or property for public purposes".
Competence might get rewarded - or it might get you singled out and ostracised
That seems incorrect to me. Competence gets more valued as you live close to the edge. People will tolerate the charming incompetent less when eating depends on him getting it right.
is there a reason you're anchoring at 4 hours in particular?
Interesting, thanks.
a number of noble prize winning scientists have had IQs that would not even qualify them for Mensa, an organization who's members must have a measured IQ of at least 132, a number that put's you in the upper 2 percentile of the population.
Did he adjust for the Flynn effect?
I can't tell if you're saying eating meat is worse than faking data to you personally, or for a hypothetical academic, could you clarify? And if it is a position you personally hold, can you explain your moral calculus?
I'm not 100% confident in this, but many people cite heart rate variability as a sign of high PSNS activity, especially when the heart rate itself is not elevated.
My personal experience is that physical and intellectual labor come out of almost entirely different pools. I'm curious if anyone experiences differently.
I do think it's possible that willpower to push yourself in either comes from a shared pool, but since I also think willpower is borrowing future productivity, optimum productivity over long periods of time uses very little.
Update to the update: the book is focused on manual labor, which faces different limits than thought work.