DIY science seems to ignore prior work. You claim using google is a medieval way of doing science. On the contrary, its a very modern way of science. Medieval science relied on polymaths discovering things for the first time. Gallileo needed his thought experiments to determine such things as the inverse square law and that mass did not impact the acceleration of a falling object (he also reasoned that light was instantaneous, but given the tools at the time it wasn't such an unreasonable conclusion). Nowadays scientists make progress by building on the progress of others, so while it can be useful to develop a critical mind to figure out from first principles how one's fridge functions, you'd be better off using your critical facilties to assess the evidence someone else has collected.
Note that the critical assessment of scientific literature is a non-trivial skill, but a far more valuable one. By myself, doing some work on how to become rich, I might make some decent conclusions, but I have neither the man power nor training to necessarily come to the correct conclusions. If I can accurately assess scientific papers, however, I should be able to discern which papers are closest to reflecting the evidence.
Put it another way: looking up other people's research is scholarship, not science. Scholarship isn't bad. In most fields scholarship is useful, and in technical fields it's a prerequisite to doing science. But -- people should also look at the data directly. If the literature isn't useful (and "how to get rich," for instance, doesn't have an obvious body of sound literature behind it) then unless you look at the data, you'll never know.
And is the literature accurate on more explicitly scientific topics, like global warming? Well, I don't know. To know the answer, I'd have to know more about geophysics myself, be able to assess the data myself, and compare my "DIY science" to the experts and see if they match. Or, I'd have to know something about the trustworthiness of peer-reviewed scientific studies in general -- how likely they are to be true or false -- and use that data to inform how much I trust climate scientists. Either way, to have good evidence to believe or not believe scientists, I'd need data of my own.
The phrase "DIY science" makes it sound like there's some virtue in going it alone. All alone, no help from the establishment. ...
Unlike most university science, DIY Science can actually make you happier, right here and now.
Really? Even if I'm already in the libertarian-atheist-countercultural-hacker-intellectual cluster? I checked two statistics in high school...car crashes were high enough that I chose to drive conservatively, and STI rates were high enough that I chose to make a big deal about condoms, although not so high that I took arguments from STDs for abstinence or monogamy seriously. Since then, I just haven't felt the need to go look at the data as I make personal life choices. I feel like I'm surrounded, socially, by the kind of weirdos who also looked up a couple of statistics in high school, and together we all bring each other's factual assumptions about lifestyle risks and rewards into something approaching the reality zone.
There are, of course, some questions to which I don't know the answer and that would interest me because the answer could help me make choices. But these questions tend to be narrow enough that there's no "Forbes 100" list to use as an objective reference -- I have to go and compile the data myself, which is both more annoying and less reliable. E.g., I don't...
I do care about how one becomes a successful solo practitioner in the field of California consumer law, but they don't exactly have databases about that.
Here's what I do:
Look at the job type you want. Look at professional websites of the people who have the jobs you want. Look at their CV's and see how they got there. If any of that info is expressible in a quantitative form (e.g. percent who went to top ten law schools) tabulate that.
You might notice "Oh, wait, most people who have the job I want have background X that I don't have!" (Different college major or whatever.) That might be evidence that you can't get that job; but before you start worrying, send someone an email and ask "How likely is it for me to get a job like yours with background Y instead of X?" It may be that your background is unusual but not a handicap.
Is it less rigorous than a scientific study? You bet. Is it better than nothing? Much.
If you have access to the attention of lots of professionals, a homemade poll can be very illuminating even if it's informal. For example, this survey about how novelists get published is more informative than most "how to be a writer" advice out there.
Upvoted because data really is important.
People that are above two sigma and have studied relevant math would I think have real gains by taking some of academia with a grain of salt and checking the data to see what they think it says.
An added bonus is that it is also the only way to be rational about things that perhaps our society isn't rational about due to status and moral posturing, a incentive to deceive or just simple widely held biases.
Generally I think the topic could potentially get a better treatment, not because the article is bad, but because it really is that important.
With regards to investigating how people become rich, if you want results that are meaningful and useful, I think you would want to examine, not just what rich people did which resulted in them becoming rich, but what people in the general population are doing, and whether people doing those things in general tend to become rich. If doing the same things doesn't tend to lead to the same results, you can look to see if there are other factors that reliably occur in conjunction with people becoming rich. You need to go this far to be able to predict, not jus...
Or, to take historical cases, Franklin was far more rational than average, but Hitler was far less.
Nonsense. Hitler was far more rational than average - especially before he overused the meth for too long. I suggest your definition of 'rational' is broken.
the Nazis believed many things considered insane even by the average Joe's lowly standards, like "mass-murder is a good thing".
I'm not sure they considered it a good thing, maybe they would have preferred to just ship off all the Jews to Madagascar, the Final Solution was a second-best solution that happened to be cheaper and more practical.
And the "average Joe" you're talking about would have to be a Western one - I suspect in many countries, mass murder of some ethnic groups wouldn't be considered insane by everybody's standards, especially in a war situation - either because they're sitting on some land that's "rightfully ours", or they're more economically successful, or they're not-very-well integrated immigrants, etc.
By the way, Hitler isn't always seen as a Big Bad Guy by the non-Western world, sometimes he's just considered a pretty bad-ass leader like Stalin or Napoleon. When a german friend of mine met her new colleagues at a Chinese univiersity's biology lab, one of them said "Oh, you're German! Like Hitler! Cool! thumbs up". And the Chinese find that the Westerners don't seem that aware of how nasty the Japanese were.
There is also a group "Sons of Korah" who sing remixes of the Psalms. Including Psalm 137. Which builds up to:
Yes, a reward to the one who grabs your babies and smashes their heads on the rocks!
The Sons of Korah version makes it sound a little better:
Blessed is he who destroys your progeny
Still, it is a recent band singing joyously about genocide. (It is a little better given that the Psalm was written by people at a time when they had just been conquered and the same atrocities done to them, crying out to a power for vengeance.)
They are actually really catchy, and most of their songs (and the Psalms themselves) are reasonably poetic.
I've heard estimates that put the total death toll of aftermath of the various wars Genghis Khan waged at ~40 million people. The estimates for all the Mongol conquests go from a low of ~30 to a high of 60 million.
Its mind-boggling to consider that isn't that much better than WW2 (low estimates 40, high estimates 72 million). It just gets ridiculous once we remember that population at that time was somewhere in the 300 to 400 million range.
We would probably have had to go nuclear or biological to get the death toll anywhere near 7,5 to 17% of global population!
And note that there isn't general visceral horror about the Soviet Union, even though it committed mass murder on a grand scale. You can wear or display Soviet stuff without it being taken nearly as badly as if you were wearing or displaying Nazi stuff.
This might get me down voted, but I don't think Hitler hated Jews because he had a misconception or two about them or was a result of a honest mistake, I think he would have at least disliked them strongly anyway. This is probably however not true of most German National socialists at the time.
I also don't think he was ok with getting rid of those tiresome Slavs in the East because he had misconceptions about them, he wanted to get rid of them because they where sitting on land that could be used by his tribe. This particular bit is generally part of a very ancient and in humans very viable value system.
A good way to remind yourself of why indifference of a AI god would be horrifying is the realization that its perfectly possible the Hitler had no real ill will towards Russians or Poles once controlled for his dislike of Communism but that the moral worth of them in his value system just happened to be zero.
Humans can and do have very different value systems.
There are interesting data on hypothermia based on Nazi human experimentation, which are especially interesting because it's impossible to replicate these measurements for obvious reasons. The ethics of using and citing those have been a matter of controversy for decades:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/holocaust/experi02_no.html
Otherwise, however, the human experiments done by Nazi doctors seem to have been scientifically worthless. Mengele in particular was just a particularly cruel dilettante.
For all we know, it's not that unlikely that they were right, or at least that cuddling isn't strictly better than not cuddling (either it doesn't make a difference, or each has consequences we would consider as beneficial and consequences we would consider harmful).
No, actually, we have substantial evidence now that babies need skin-to-skin contact to thrive. Because the maternal instinct is very strong in this direction (for a good reason) the data about what happens to babies who are not cuddled mostly comes from orphanages. It's a very sad answer.
Empirically, we have more impressive instrumental rationalists, such as Peter Thiel, Tyler Cowen and Demis Hassabis coming from the much smaller field of chess than from the much larger field of math (where I think there's only James Simmons). There's also Watizkin, who seems very interesting. It seems to me that math emphasizes excess rigor and a number of other elements which constitute the instrumental rationality equivalent of anti-epistemology, and possibly also that the way in which it is taught emphasizes learning concepts prior to the questions that motivated their creation, which never happens in games. Fischer was probably more insane than any famous insane mathematician I can think of though, and Kasparov does claim the following http://www.new-tradition.org/view-garry-kasparov.php though given his Soviet education, e.g. education in a system which actually did teach a blatantly false version of history, this is more understandable.
At the elite PhD level, the mathematical community encourages a level of rigor, and the analytical philosophy community a level of pseudo-rigor that may even qualify as epistemic anti-epistemology for the typical student, (hence the anomalo...
Empirically, we have more impressive instrumental rationalists, such as Peter Thiel, Tyler Cowen and Demis Hassabis coming from the much smaller field of chess than from the much larger field of math (where I think there's only James Simmons)
Am I missing something? Is Tyler Cowen famous for something other than being a moderately high-status academic economist with a blog? Otherwise, why are you more impressed with him than with leading academic mathematicians, such as Terence Tao?
He also very clearly has a life that is optimized to meet his values
That is every bit as true of Terry as Tyler, and probably more so: Tyler would probably like to be Larry Summers, Milton Friedman, or Paul Krugman, while Terry Tao is pretty much exactly who Terry Tao wants to be.
My interpretation of the disagreement is different: an unwarranted assumption on the part of some that those with academic high status would really prefer something else, but are willing to "settle" for academia; as opposed to academia simply being the best place society currently offers for their values to be pursued. (And yes, academia is "part of society".) I would argue that any picture of the world on which "instrumental rationality" is synonymous with "financial/political success" is more confused than mine.
As for influence, see the USQ affair. Terry Tao can influence when he wants. I'm sure he could get a NY Times column (or certainly a LA Times column) if he wanted one.
Terry may have more fun than Tyler, since he's smarter and can access more fun, but I think it's VERY unlikely that after spending a year like Tyler does he'd go back to his life.
Even if that was true (and I think komponisto is more likely to be correct here), I'm not sure it would support your conclusion, since Terry might also not want to go back to his life after being wireheaded for a year but that doesn't mean not wanting to be wireheaded is a miscalculation.
Overall I'm surprised that you are so confident about what goals/values other people would have if they didn't miscalculate, when I'm not even sure what goals/values I should have. If you think you have some real insights that others are missing, you probably need to give a systematic explanation to bridge the inferential gaps, instead of arguing via these comments.
" Google the list of the Forbes 400.
Go through each of the biographies for people on the list (or the first 200, or the first 100, or whatever is a large enough sample).
Write down how they got rich.
Summarize the data above: How do most rich people get rich?
Actually looking at data is simple, easy, and straightforward, and yet almost no one actually does it."
Won't that incur in the "not seeing the cemetery" fallacy?
Yes -- I agree, though the article focused a bit more on somewhat intangibles[1] for me. Try to apply science to daily life. Rather than wondering and walking away or leaving it in the realm of unknowable -- try to figure out how you might find out.
While the article does cultivate a similar approach, I think just applying these sorts of things to immediate daily life might be a more immediate way to visualize how the scientific method (and rationality in general) can be effective. Some that have happened to me:
What's wrong with my computer? How can I fix x?
Oh, man. Just getting people to think of their computer as being a constructed device amenable to prediction, rather than a malevolent box of evil out to make their life a misery, would be a major advance.
(As a sysadmin, I know that computers are actually in fact malevolent boxes of evil out to make your life a misery, and dealing with them is mostly a matter of who has the bigger spanner. But we want to start the masses gently.)
Sometimes, questions get so politically loaded that you have to get tricky. To name a perennial favorite: Is global warming happening, and if it is, how much damage will it cause? It doesn't matter how much funding the NSF or some other agency gives this question, because the answers are already pre-determined; "yes" and "a lot" if you're a Blue, and "no" and "not much" if you're a Green.
At this point, I have to object... the one thing that guarantees lasting fame to a scientist is to successfully overthrow a wid...
Is global warming happening, and if it is, how much damage will it cause? It doesn't matter how much funding the NSF or some other agency gives this question, because the answers are already pre-determined.
I don't care if a lot of people want to form opinions on the question for stupid reasons. That doesn't mean that science can't be done. I'm not sure if you disagree. If you're just being fatalistic about the likelihood of political policy being correctly influenced by science in this case, then I sympathize.
Actually looking at data is simple, easy, and straightforward, and yet almost no one actually does it. Here's another one: Adjusted for inflation, what is the average, long-term appreciation of the stock market? Here's the historical Dow Jones index, and here's an inflation calculator. Try it and see!
Be careful here:
The DJIA index excludes dividends, which historically produce about half of the total return.
The US market was the top performing stock market of the 1900s. So you are looking at a very unrepresentative sample of 1.
Several markets we
Generally a good idea. Doing science yourself and focusing on data instead of intuition seems likely to yield results but there are serious limitations.
...Instead of Googling or asking someone else, we can apply the scientific method of actually looking at the data, and seeing what it says. Who are some rich people? How did they get rich? Where can we find information on rich people? The simplest technique, the one that I used when answering this question, is:
- Google the list of the Forbes 400.
- Go through each of the biographies for people on the list (or
is rationality an effective means of achieving goals?
Yes, by definition. (Maybe you want an 'epistemic' in there.)
It looks to me like chess is an excellent way to learn a rare and important part of rationality, but becoming a chess grandmaster is a terribly irrational life decision for almost everyone due to the intense competition and low rewards. Also, at world champion levels, many skills, especially intellectual skills, probably rely on biological abnormalities which correlate highly with autism, psychosis, etc. Also, extreme privilege and fame, especially at a young age, is very often a cause of functional insanity. I suspect that this includes the privilege of growing up with modern 'magical and opaque' technologies.
suspect that this includes the privilege of growing up with modern 'magical and opaque' technologies.
Please unpack this term. My kids have a Wii; should I be scared?
In the nerd community, we have lots of warm, fuzzy associations around 'science'. And, of course, science is indeed awesome. But, seeing how awesome science is, shouldn't we try to have more of it in our lives? When was the last time we did an experiment to test a theory?
Here, I will try to introduce a technique which I have found to be very useful. It is based on the classical scientific method, but I call it "DIY Science", to distinguish it from university science. The point of DIY Science is that science is not that hard to do, and can be used to answer practical questions as well as abstract ones. Particle physics looks hard to do, since you need expensive, massive accelerators and magnets and stuff. However, fortunately, some of the fields in which it is easiest to do science are some of the most practical and interesting. Anyone smart and rational can start doing science right now, from their home computer.
One of the key ingredients of DIY Science is to discard the more useless trappings of university science, for these frequently do more harm than good. Science doesn't need journals and universities. Science doesn't need beakers and test tubes. Science doesn't need p < 0.05, although I have found p-tests to be occasionally useful. The point of science is not to conform to these stereotypes of academia, but to discover something you didn't know before. (To our detriment, this is the opposite of how science is taught, as noted by Paul Graham: "So hackers start original, and get good, and scientists start good, and get original.")
Instead, as an simple first example, consider this question:
- I want to get rich, or to be specific, have a net worth of over $100M USD. How do people get rich?
Here, we have an opportunity: We don't know something, and we want to find out what it is. To answer this question, our first intuition might be to Google "how do people get rich?". This isn't a horrible method, but by just asking someone else, we are not doing any science. Googling or asking a friend isn't the scientific method; it's the medieval method. (In medieval times, we would just have gone to the Church and asked, and the Church would have replied, "Pray diligently to the LORD and have faith, and you will be prosperous." Different people, same thing.)
In fields like physics, where lots of science is already being done by others, this will probably be OK. However, what if the question isn't about physics, like most questions people ask? Then, when you ask Google or a friend, you wind up with complete nonsense like this, which is the first Google result for "how do people get rich". Most people don't know how to use science, so that sort of nonsense is what most people believe about the world, which is why Western civilization is in such a mess right now.
Instead of Googling or asking someone else, we can apply the scientific method of actually looking at the data, and seeing what it says. Who are some rich people? How did they get rich? Where can we find information on rich people? The simplest technique, the one that I used when answering this question, is:
- Google the list of the Forbes 400.
- Go through each of the biographies for people on the list (or the first 200, or the first 100, or whatever is a large enough sample).
- Write down how they got rich.
- Summarize the data above: How do most rich people get rich?
Actually looking at data is simple, easy, and straightforward, and yet almost no one actually does it. Here's another one: Adjusted for inflation, what is the average, long-term appreciation of the stock market? Here's the historical Dow Jones index, and here's an inflation calculator. Try it and see!
The underlying principle here is very simple: Want to know whether something is true? Go look at the data and see. Look at the numbers. Look at the results. Look at a sample. JFDI.
For another simple example, one that I haven't done myself: It is a common perception that lottery players are stupid. But is it actually true? Is stupidity what causes people to play the lottery? It's easy enough to find out: look up a bunch of lottery winners, and see how smart they are. What jobs do they work in? What degrees do they have? What about compared with the average American population? What do they have in common?
There are an infinite number of these sorts of questions. How accurate are food expiration dates? How important is it to wear a helmet on a bike? How likely are STD infections? How many Americans are college graduates? Dropouts? What about high-income Americans?
Unlike most university science, DIY Science can actually make you happier, right here and now. One particularly useful group of questions, for instance, concerns things that people worry about. How likely are they, really? What are the expected consequences? What does the data say? For example, when I was younger, when I got a cold, I used to worry that it was actually some serious disease. Then, I looked up the numbers, and found out that virtually no one my age (10-25) got sick enough to have a high chance of dying. Most people worry too much - what things do you worry about that make you unhappy? What do the data say about them?
Or, suppose you want to save money to buy something expensive. The usual way people do this is, they take their income, subtract all of their necessary monthly expenses, and then figure that whatever is left over is how much they can save. Trouble is, people's necessities grow to match whatever their income is, even if their income is $2,000,000. If you get used to something, you start seeing it as "necessary", because you can't imagine life without it. How do you know if you really do need something? Use science! Try, just for a day, not using one thing with those monthly payments attached- electricity, phone, Internet, car, cable TV, satellite radio, what have you.
Of course, it isn't always easy, because sometimes people try to fool everyone. For instance, intelligence is distributed on a bell curve. Everyone knows that... right? As it turns out, the only reason IQ scores fit a bell curve, is because IQ is defined as a bell-curve-shaped statistic! Now, after the lie has been exposed, come the interesting questions: How is intelligence actually distributed? How could we find out? What measurements could we use?
Sometimes, questions get so politically loaded that you have to get tricky. To name a perennial favorite: Is global warming happening, and if it is, how much damage will it cause? It doesn't matter how much funding the NSF or some other agency gives this question, because the answers are already pre-determined; "yes" and "a lot" if you're a Blue, and "no" and "not much" if you're a Green. Peter Thiel, SIAI's largest donor, sums it up very nicely:
"There’s a degree to which it is just a status and political-correctness issue. The debates are for the most part not about the policies or about the ideas, but what is cool, what is trendy. Take something like the climate-change debate. I think it’s an important question, and I think it’s actually quite hard to figure out what the science is. It might be something for us to worry about. But I think there’s actually no debate at all — there’s no attempt to understand the science. It’s mostly moral posturing of one form or another.
Beyond the posturing, it’s a form of cowardice that’s very much linked to political correctness, where it’s not fashionable or not cool to offer dissenting opinions."
So, how do we really find out? Which evidence can we use? Where can we find it?
In exploring DIY Science, we ought to question everything, even things that we know (or think we know) to be true. "Common knowledge" is such a bad guide that false things float around for decades, all the time. Consider Wikipedia's List of Common Misconceptions. Reading through the whole thing, how many did you think were true? And these are the small set of things for which we have undeniable proof!
To name something which I do believe to be true: do men and women have the same average intelligence? They do, but how do we know that? Present studies can't be trusted, because the field is too politicized. You have to also look at pre-1970 studies, which indeed show agreement with modern ones. (Of course, past studies aren't always right, but agreement across many different time periods is fairly strong evidence.)
Or, to look at the subject of this blog: is rationality an effective means of achieving goals? To what extent? How do we know that? Well, on one side, what statistics I can find show that atheists make more than Christians. But they also show that Jews have higher incomes than atheists. Should we all convert to Judaism? Or, to take historical cases, Franklin was far more rational than average, but Hitler was far less. Clearly, more analysis is needed here.
One idea might be to look at what top chess players do: chess is a very objective metric, the players all have the same goals (to win the game), and the game is purely about mental decision-making. How rational are Garry Kasparov and Bobby Fisher? What about the top few hundred players worldwide? I don't have any clue what this will find, just a wild guess.
I say all this on this blog, to some extent, because thinking about the data is not the only component of rationality; in order to have rational beliefs, one must also gather lots of data, and specifically, data about the problem one is trying to solve. No one in ancient Greece, no matter how well they thought, could have a good understanding of particle physics, because they didn't have any data on how particles behaved. Fortunately, with the Internet and online ordering of everything under the sun, data is very easy to collect. So- forward, in the name of Science!