Gwern Facts Thread
Because we already have an Eliezer Yudkowsky one and this website is awesome.
Found in Yvain's blog post:
Doesn't this mean that I must be wrong about its excellent safety profile? No. See for example Gwern's research on the subject. About half the people reading this paragraph are going to say "Wait, don't the FDA and the entire decision-making apparatus of the United States government have more data and credibility than one guy with a website?" The other half of the people know Gwern.
Come on, Gwern deserves more than a favorable comparison to the FDA.
I know several people who have more credibility than the "FDA and the entire decision-making apparatus of the United States government", at least when it comes to drugs. Not because I know so many cool folks, but because drug regulation is a paramount example of government irrationality.
Gwern's reality marble, Unlimited Essay Works, is the original, of which Unlimited Blade Works is a mere copy.
I went on an interview with Google. They told me that if I was hired, I'd be working on a unique innovation. When I asked what it was, they told me "We want to make an app that will search this guy named Gwern."
In the right-hand navigation bar of the site, there is a "Tags" box which lists the most popular post tags. This box has a feature whereby the tags are rendered in a font size proportional to their frequency of occurrence.
Over time, the attribution of the "sequence_reruns" tag to sequence rerun posts has made this feature inoperative: because it's the single most used tag, and no other tag even comes close in frequency, every tag is now rendered at precisely the same font size except for "sequence_reruns".
I had no idea it had already been reported, but I see it's been corrected now.
No, it hasn't. There are two different tag clouds, one for Main and one for Discussion. It's the Discussion one that faces the problem.
You should edit your original comment to indicate this, so that other people don't think it has been corrected.
Today my 16yo son asked a classmate for a confidence interval on his grade at their latest assignment, after giving one of his own. That's after all 3 of my kids attended a workshop I gave (mixed in with adults, 20 total) on calibrated probability statements and scoring.
Never mind that he gave a 90% interval and missed (due to getting full marks), I'm inordinately proud of him for actually applying the lessons.
I just want to double check something with LWers.
Incest among adults is also sex between consenting adults. At least some such relationships are happy ones. Most arguments against incest are arguments where the bottom line is already written since they are made by people who just don't want to admit they are plain grossed out by it. Not only the motivation, but many of the arguments are basically the same as arguments in favour of homophobia. If the person has an identity centred on fighting "bigotry" cognitive dissonance hilarity ensues.
Bonus round: Arguments against incestuous couples having children is a fundamentally eugenicist argument. Applying it like a consequentalist results in concluding many other kinds of couples should be discouraged just as much (perhaps even with imprisonment since that is the price of discovered incest in many countries) or incest being legalized.
German incest couple lose rights ruling
The ECHR said the main basis of punishment for incestuous relationships was “the protection of marriage and the family”, and because it blurs family roles.
It also noted “the risk of significant damage” to children born of such a relationship.
Incest among adults is also sex between consenting adults.
True, but that's largely a noncentral fallacy.
Most arguments against incest are arguments where the bottom line is already written since they are made by people who just don't want to admit they are plain grossed out by it.
If I'm grossed out by it, why am I watching lesbian incest hentai? :-)
Not only the motivation, but many of the arguments are basically the same as arguments in favour of homophobia. If the person's has an identity centred on fighting "bigotry" cognitive dissonance hilarity ensues.
Agreed. But not all the arguments are basically the same. Some of the arguments are more like the "teachers shouldn't date their students" argument and the "psychologists shouldn't date their patients" or even "50-year olds shouldn't date 20-year olds" argument, and reflect on the likely unhealthy effects of power-imbalance.
The power-imbalance in intergenerational incest is obvious. In intragenerational incest it can of course be significantly less clear; especially in cases like the German couple where the siblings only met during adulthood.
...Bonus round: Arguments against ince
So, Yvain posted a blog post recently. I was disappointed. I'm posting about it here because I'll have an easier time following a conversation about my thoughts here than in livejournal comments. I will note that he claims the post is, at most, 60% serious, but that seems at least ten thousand times too high.
A major supporting claim is that if modafinil were legal, it would become expected, and everything would be harder to match the increased ability of humans to be productive.
So the religious people flunk out, everyone else has to work much harder, and in the end no student gains. Arguably future patients might gain from having better trained doctors, but I think this wildly overestimates the usefulness of the medical education system.
A parable:
In the Old Country, the people once did not know of iodine. It was not illegal, but only a very specific kind of geek would eat dried seaweed carried long miles on the backs of beasts and men. One day, a stranger came to the village, preaching of this mysterious substance, claiming that its consumption would make all men cleverer.
The elders convened and discussed this 'boon,' if you could call it that. If one man is cleverer, he profit...
What is his main proposition? He has a model of the world in which enormous amounts of energy and money are being spent running a rat race where the satisfaction only comes from winning it, not from running it, and meanwhile there are numerous places where just a small fraction of that energy and money could be spent, creating great and lasting benefits. His proposition is that in the current situation, modafinil is known mostly to a minority which includes people working on some of those important neglected matters, but if modafinil becomes as well known as Prozac or Viagra, its main consequence will be that the rats in the rat race will all run faster, with no net benefit.
Your comments imply that you disagree with this model, but you need to say where and why.
I think that Yvain's thoughts on the matter are poisoned by working in a poisoned field. Would doctors be better if they studied 16 hours a day, instead of 10? Some, but not much. Perhaps people would live a bit longer- but better for everyone to adopt intermittent fasting than to slightly improve the quality of doctors.
But why only give modafinil to studying medical students, and not those who hold lives in their tiring hands instead of books? Given the hideous prevalence of medical errors, and their known association to fatigue, I would far prefer a doctor chemically warded against fatigue to one without such armor.
(I might agree that financiers all turning to modafinil would not noticeably improve the world, and make them worse off- but, truly, he made his example doctors?)
Few engineers, scientists, or programmers that I know would give voice to the complaint that others might work harder. Their whole fields are suffused with positive externalities. When the other groups in my field discover more truths, I am enlightened by their work. When an engineer designs a better device, I am the richer for it. When a programmer writes more and better code, the world hums along more smoot...
Given the hideous prevalence of medical errors, and their known association to fatigue, I would far prefer a doctor chemically warded against fatigue to one without such armor.
No, the new equilibrium would be 96-hour shifts, with doctors to their physical limits and making as many errors (modulo differences in attention at constant fatigue induced by modafinil, if any).
That's a very long winded way of objecting to Yvain's model of the American economy as largely zero-sum games (eg. poker). If the village is a static economy with fixed output... Then sure, modafinil is fairly questionable. But this story is a way of asserting it is not with hypothetical examples.
Of course, it's not obvious that iodine is necessarily a good thing. Malthusian models come to mind: if intelligence has no effect on subsistence wage, then it can have no effect on per capita wealth and so any effects are redistributional, and if you want to argue it's a good thing you need to appeal to extra things like quality of life... which actually probably would affect subsistence wage since now you don't need so much wages, your quality of life has been improved. Intelligence might come with a one-time increase in wealth, which of course simply causes the population to expand and that the temporarily-increased-per-capita-wealth will eventually fall back down to equilibrium as people reproduce more. :)
"It was a bit sloppy essay of Yvain - cool idea, kinda weak execution" is what I might say if he had posted it to Main instead of his blog.
I disapprove of this thread on the principle that people should be able to idly speculate on their own blog without being harangued elsewhere.
I disapprove of your use of parables to smuggle in your economic hypotheses, rather than arguing for them competently and clearly.
I disapprove of your commentary, because I agree with wedrifid here:
(Claiming to have) mind read negative beliefs and motives in others then declaring them publicly tends to be frowned upon. Certainly it is frowned upon me.
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.