Suppose you've never tried/done/seen/tasted X before. You want to predict how well you would rate/enjoy X. (X could be as small as a restaurant, or as big as a career choice.) My knee-jerk way to approach this would be "(read about and) imagine doing X, see how much I like...
I read this article in NY magazine, on the coronavirus lab-leak hypothesis. I found it fairly convincing, so I think the chance that SARS-CoV-2 passed through some human laboratory before spreading to people is better than not. But when I tried following up by reading other sources, I found myself...
Very nice piece, and thank you for your service
"cloudy brother of bacteria" should probably be "cloudy broth of bacteria".
Do you understand mathematically what operation we're doing when we say two species or organisms have xx% similar genomes? Each genome is, I guess, several sequences of ATCG, but how do you get a percent similarity for two sequences of different lengths?
The VARIANCE of a random variable seems like one of those ad hoc metrics. I would be very happy for someone to come along and explain why I'm wrong on this. If you want to measure, as Wikipedia says, "how far a set of numbers is spread out from their average value," why use E[ (X - mean)^2 ] instead of E[ |X - mean| ], or more generally E[ |X - mean|^p ]? The best answer I know of is that E[ (X - mean)^2 ] is easier to calculate than those other ones.
Dear CraigMichael,
I am by no means a guru. It seems like you prefer Apollo Creed problems to Clubber Lang problems because you're more able to motivate yourself to do Apollo Creed problems. I feel the same way. I find it exciting to start new projects, and grueling to continue my existing projects. My advice:
If you need to solve a Clubber Lang problem, then in moments of clarity, you should establish habits/systems to solve the Clubber Lang problem that don't require you to be motivated on any given day.
E.g. go for a jog even when you're not feeling motivated to go for a jog, because you set out your jogging clothes and shoes the night before, & you made a program to pay your rival $5 on venmo if you don't log your jog on MapMyRun.com
Wishing you the best,
CTVKenney
Suppose you've never tried/done/seen/tasted X before. You want to predict how well you would rate/enjoy X. (X could be as small as a restaurant, or as big as a career choice.)
My knee-jerk way to approach this would be "(read about and) imagine doing X, see how much I like the thing I'm picturing, and form my prediction based on that." This approach seems to be subject to availability bias. Furthermore, this approach seems to take the inside view on prediction. For these reasons, I'm concerned that my knee-jerk approach will produce bad predictions.
On the other hand, how much you'll like something seems to depend more on 'inside' factors than whether you'll finish a project by a certain date. Does it make sense to throw out introspection entirely, and predict how much you'll like X based only on surveys/star ratings of X?
Money should be able to guarantee that, over several periods of play, you perform not-too-much-worse than an actual expert. Here: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/academic/class/15859-f11/www/notes/lecture16.pdf is a paper about an idealized CS-version of this problem.
With regard to the rootclaim link, I agree that it would be good to try to adapt what they've done to our own beliefs. However, I want to urge some caution with regard to the actual calculation shown on that website. The event to which they give a whopping 81% probability, "the virus was developed during gain-of-function research and was released by accident," is a conjunction of two independent theses. We have to be very cautious about such statements, as pointed out in the Rationality A-Z, here https://www.lesswrong.com/s/5g5TkQTe9rmPS5vvM/p/Yq6aA4M3JKWaQepPJ
I mean to include all the alternatives that involve the virus passing through a laboratory before spreading to humans; so all the options you list are included. There's nothing wrong with asking about the probability of a composite event.
I read this article in NY magazine, on the coronavirus lab-leak hypothesis. I found it fairly convincing, so I think the chance that SARS-CoV-2 passed through some human laboratory before spreading to people is better than not. But when I tried following up by reading other sources, I found myself falling into the trap of trying to just confirm my existing belief. How might we estimate a probability that SARS-CoV-2 passed through a human laboratory at some point before spreading to humans?
A few miscellaneous questions/points (would love it if koreindian responds! Others obviously also welcome to share thoughts ;) )
Let me preface this by stating a couple obvious things that bear repeating when discussing such a touchy subject. People's value is not determined by their physical attractiveness. I wish for the flourishing of all people.
- Have you read Halwani's piece "Racial Sexual Desires", or any of the other literature in applied ethics concerning this topic (e.g. Robin Zheng's paper, Stephen Kershnar's response)? Do you and Halwani just define racism differently, or do you have substantive disagreements?
- Regarding the racial×gender disparities in interracial romantic pairing, what is wrong with the theory that it comes down to
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