I'm Screwtape, also known as Skyler. I'm an aspiring rationalist originally introduced to the community through HPMoR, and I stayed around because the writers here kept improving how I thought. I'm fond of the Rationality As A Martial Art metaphor, new mental tools to make my life better, and meeting people who are strange in ways I find familiar and comfortable. If you're ever in the Boston area, feel free to say hi.
Starting early in 2023, I'm the ACX Meetups Czar. You might also know me from the New York City Rationalist Megameetup, editing the Animorphs: The Reckoning podfic, or being that guy at meetups with a bright bandanna who gets really excited when people bring up indie tabletop roleplaying games.
I recognize that last description might fit more than one person.
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Even if a skill isn't as useful if you're the only one to know it, if the skill is still somewhat useful that can work. I like literacy as an example; crazy good if most people have it, still useful if only you have it, usually obvious pretty quickly if other people don't have it.
Individual and group rationality are pretty relevant here. In a sense, one thing I'm pointing at is a way to bootstrap (some) rationality skills from the easier individual domain in to the harder group domain; focus on places where the same skill is relevant in both arenas. It's also a small argument in favour of following a textbook; mandatory education is one of society's big shots on putting skills in everyone's heads and it might not be worth (making numbers up) a 50% boost to this one classroom overall if it means they happen to miss a particular skill that the rest of society is going to expect everyone to have. Still, that side of things is more tentative.
(One of my favourite questions to ask rationalists is "if you could pick one rationalist skill and make it as common as literacy, what do you pick?")
If I try this again next year I plan to use the exact same text and values on both sides, which hopefully will clear up most of that kind of issue. It doesn't really fix marginal value, but I'm not sure that's fatal to this kind of analysis- I can quote a reasonable price for an apple even though my marginal value of apples drops very fast by the time I hit three digits of apples. I could try and fix this by picking things I think people value vaguely the same but then we miss out on catching scope insensitivity.
11.2% is if I remove the CFAR attendees. 36.8% is if I remove the non-attendees. Possibly this is a backwards way of setting things up but I think it's right?
Say I have a general population and I know how many pushups they can do on average (call this Everyone Average), and I remove everyone who goes to the gym and see how many pushups those remaining can do on average (Call this Gym-Removed Average) and then I go back to the general population again this time removing everyone who doesn't go to the gym (Call this No-Gym-Removed Average.)
This is a confusing label scheme but I don't immediately know what the better one is.
If No-Gym-Removed Average < Gym-Removed Average, then it looks like the gym helps.
(Totally possible I'm screwing something up here still)
but predicted that it was instead about sensitivity to subtle changes in the wording of questions.
If I try this again next year I'm inclined to keep the wording the same instead of trying to be subtle.
Regarding the dutch book numbers: it seems like, for each of the individual-question presentations of that data, you removed the outliers. When performing the dutch book calculations, however, it seems like you keep the outliers in.
Yep. Well, in the individual reports I reported the version with the outliers, and then sometimes did another pass without outliers. I kept all of the entries that answered all the questions for the dutch book calculations, even if they were outliers. I think this is the correct move: if someone's valuations are wild outliers from everyone elses but in a way that multiplies out and gets them back to a 1:1 ratio, then being an outlier isn't a problem.
(Imagine someone who values a laptop at one million bikes, and a bike at equal to one car, and a car at one millionth of a of a laptop. They're almost certainly a wild outlier, and I'm confused as heck, but they are consistent in their values!)
Hrm. I guess what would be helpful here would be a sense of the range; the average briers floated around .20 to .23, and I don't have a sense of whether that's a tight clustering with a bit of noise or a meaningful difference. To use running a mile as a comparison, differences of seconds mostly aren't important (except at high levels) but differences of minutes are, right?
Yeah, I should probably add a bit at the start or end of that section that everything in it is potentially selection effect. I don't know how to look at the thing I'm curious about without that.
Thinking out loud: If you get a random selection of people from the Pushup Club and count how many pushups they can do, then do the same for general population, the difference could be selection effect. People who like doing pushups are more likely to go to pushup club in the first place, and more likely to stick with it. But I can't realistically pay a bunch of Mechanical Turkers to hang out on LessWrong for six years and watch what happens. Presumably there's some approach actual scientists have here, but I don't know what it is. Suggestions welcome.
In the mean time I'm going to add a bit towards the start of the section warning of potential selection effects.
Huh. That article does not have as much information as I want on how that election process works, but I'll swap to William The Conqueror as an example. Thanks for pointing it out.
It's the second example I've had to swap which probably should dock me some kind of points here, though I still feel pretty good about the overall thesis.