So, I think I've... not really 'unlocked an achievement', I guess, but hit a milestone of some sort: my first mockery in an academic publication. From the PhD thesis "Effectiveness of n-back cognitive training: quantitative and qualitative aspects", Vladimír Marček ("polar") 2014:
...Now, considering this lack of clarity about IQ itself, how can the public make sense of improving IQ studies? Even more so, when research on the topic is considered a “swamp” even by experts in the field? The simple answer is it can’t. As a layman in psychology, hopefully you can tolerate the feeling of not knowing or acknowledging that we do not have enough evidence and wait and learn on the go. If you can’t tolerate the unknown you’ll probably pick your favorite study and fall prey to biased media coverage, or your friendly neighborhood intellectual, who has all the knowledge, intelligence, and especially confidence and time to argue about his opinions.
This happened repeatedly in the “Dual N-back, Brain Training & Intelligence” discussion group during my participant observation. This group, according to its owner Paul Hoskinson, has around 2500 members, from which 900 subscribed
Making the news today is MIT taking down all Walter Lewin videos (most now, some at the end of the term) as a result of their investigation into sexual harassment allegations. This seems like a gross and unprecedented overreaction (a rough equivalent of removing all Bill Cosby videos), so I would estimate that this decision will be partially or fully reversed within 1 year, with probability of 75%.
In our ridiculous societal climate, if you're not the chief inquisitor you'll be the target of the next shitstorm yourself, #MIThateswomen. You're mostly getting punished for underreacting, so you err on the side of overreacting.
If you can't beat'em, join'em. If they are crazy, the best way to be safe is to (pretend to) lead them (unless you can avoid them, which wasn't an option).
This seems like a gross and unprecedented overreaction
Welcome to the brave new world. Blood and games, keeps us busy from dealing with the issues that matter.
Last week I was going to ask if anyone had recommendations for nerd-friendly resources on public relations. Then I remembered where I was, and went "ha ha ha!"
This was possibly unfair.
Out of the many people who read Less Wrong, it feels like one or two of them should be able to recommend a good entry point for any given subject. We've got physics, mathematics, statistics, computer science, et al covered, but other areas don't enjoy the same coverage.
It does seem to me that if there were someone on Less Wrong with a background in PR (or constitutional law, or the Yugoslav conflict, or whatever), they'd probably have some ideas about what material other Less Wrongers might find accessible or valuable. With that in mind, does anyone want to volunteer an unusual-for-LW academic or professional background we can mine for information?
At the Less Wrong meetup yesterday we played the Less Wrong Name Game. You may know the regular Name Game by another name. It involves all players having the name of a celebrity, historical figure, fictional character, etc., attached to their forehead. The identity of each figure is not known to the player labelled with it, and they must deduce this identity by asking a series of yes/no questions. In the Less Wrong variant, we gave each other identities from the Less Wrong memeplex/ideosphere.
We played this fairly late on at the meetup when we were down to six attendees. Our identities were Peter Singer, Aubrey de Grey, Yvain, Moloch, Philip Tetlock and The Sorting Hat.
This was fun, informative and pleasantly in-groupish. That said, when labelling someone else, I'd suggest being very sure that they've heard of the person you're assigning to them. We now know quite a few obscure facts about Philip Tetlock.
Harper's Magazine seems to be featuring LW, among others, in its January 2015 issue in the article "Come With Us if You Want to Live: Among the apocalyptic libertarians of Silicon Valley" (apparently features Vassar, MIRI, and LW survey stats).
It's paywalled, there don't yet seem to be any copies floating around, and I can't get it through my university proxy or Libgen. Can anyone get a copy?
Further thoughts on Imaginary Expertise...
I'm currently studying a final-year undergrad course in the mathematical underpinnings of statistics. This course has three prerequisite courses, all of which have the word "statistics" or "statistical" in the title. While the term has obviously come up beforehand, it was only a couple of chapters ago that we were given a formal definition for what a "statistic" is, (in the context of parameter sufficiency).
It occurred to me that if someone was ignorantly mouthing off about statistics, and you wanted to shut them up, you could do a lot worse than to ask "so, what exactly is a statistic?"
I've noticed beforehand that "so what exactly is money?" has a similar effect for economics pseudo-blowhards, and "so what exactly are numbers?" for maths. It's worth noting that these questions aren't even the central questions of those disciplines, (insofar as such broad categories have central questions), and they don't necessarily have canonical answers, but completely blanking on them seems indicative of immature understanding.
I've now taken to coming up with variants of these for different disciplines I think I know about.
completely blanking on them seems indicative of immature understanding.
Or of question ambiguity. If the word exists on many layers, and they're not sure which one you're asking about, they might get stuck there. I notice that I mostly agree with your questions (a 'statistic' and 'money' are both fairly crisp ideas that have a clear use in their respective fields, and so even just pointing at what they're used for is a decent definition), but that bramflake's suggestions all seem problematic.
Physics: "what is energy?"
I am a graduate student of physics and I am inclined to say that I now know even less about what energy is.
These seem pretty easy to answer even for a non-expert.
It is variously said that we share 99% of our genes with a chimpanzee, 95% of our genes with a random human, and 50% of our genes with a sibling. Explain how these can all be true statements.
I recently started reading up on the standard approaches to epistemology. Much of the primary discussion seems to be focused on the question "what constitutes knowledge?". The basic definition used to be that to count as knowledge it needs to be a belief, it needs to be justified, and it needs to be true. But there's the Gettier Problem which points out that there are cases that satisfy the above criteria but which we wouldn't normally consider "knowledge". Numerous alternative "theories of knowledge" have been proposed, new counter-examples have been pointed out, philosophers have split into competing camps (each under its own "-ism" title), and hundreds if not thousands of papers have been published on this topic.
But I'm totally confused. It sounds like they're just arguing about basically arbitrary definitions. So agree on a definition and get on with it. Or define different types of knowledge if that suits you better. And if that doesn't perfectly capture everything we might mean by the word "knowledge", what difference does it make? If they'd taboo the word "knowledge" would there be anything left to discuss?
I assume I'm just missing something. But if in fact they could just taboo the term and get on with more important discussions, then could someone please explain to me why so many highly intelligent, extremely thoughtful philosophers have spent so much time on a (seemingly) ridiculous discussion?
SIA/anthropics strike again? "Fantastically Wrong: The Scientist Who Thought 22 Trillion Aliens Live in Our Solar System":
...Here’s what [Thomas] Dick figured. At the time, there were an average of 280 people per square mile in England. And because he thought every surface of our universe bears life, it would naturally occur at roughly the same population density. So from comets and asteroids to the rings of Saturn, if you knew how big something was, you could guess how many beings live there. Thus, Jupiter would be the most populated object in the solar system, with 7 trillion beings. The least populated would be Vesta, the second largest asteroid in the asteroid belt, tallying just 64 million.
Dick, you see, was a very religious man, but also a voracious scientist, one of the last of the so-called natural theologists, who looked for signs of God’s influence in nature. For Dick, it simply did not make sense for God to have created the cosmos just to have it sit around unoccupied. There must be creatures out there capable of enjoying its beauty, because God wants all his work appreciated. In his book Celestial Scenery...
...You might think that living on other worlds might b
In the spirit of asking personal questions on Less Wrong I'd be pleased if some of the community's brainpower could be directed in my direction. (It's a minor problem.)
After about a year of being unemployed, I found a job (hooray), but it's not a job I want to do for a long time. This means looking for a new job, but due to the long and unpredictable hours of my current job I'm left without time to look for a new job. The time away from the job is spend, in decreasing order: sleeping, quality time with girlfriend, internet, food and personal entertainment/projects. As it stands, I don't feel like I can touch either of the non-work activities without going insane, or at least not to an extent where I can shave of an hour to allocate to looking for a new job (I know from previous experience that doing it for less than an hour doesn't result in anything) without going insane.
Current options (I can see):
23andMe/SNPs: so I recently decided I might as well get around to getting my own data since the price has not dropped much for a while and I figured out how to work around the state restrictions. I now have my raw SNP data, and I'll be posting some random notes soonish. Does anyone have any ideas for what to do with this data?
I have a question about a seemingly complex social issue, so I'm interested if anyone has any insights.
Do protests actually work? Are e.g. the Ferguson/police crime protests a good way of attacking the problem? They seem to me to have a high cost, to be deflecting from the actual problem, and not enough sustained effort by people who care to push through to actual social change in the U.S.
I'm seeing a doctor in two weeks, in an attempt to obtain some sort of something to attack my chronic akrasia (chronic in the sense that it appears to get worse over time). Bloodtesting is planned. Aside from thyroid hormone, iron and testosterone, is there anything specific I should ask about? If I get the chance to bring up alternatives (I.E. citing uncooperative sleep to try and aim for a -afinil), are there any in particular I should focus on?
For the record, I tried Focalin briefly in 2010, followed by Prozac. The Focalin appeared to help with focus bu...
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