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summary of "Making Up Opinions" by Robin Hanson
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Simply because the surveyor is asking the question, respondents believe that they should have an opinion about it. For example, researchers have shown that large minorities would provide opinions on countries that don’t exist.
This applies to you too: you have fewer opinions than you express.
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4 arguments against the free market argument (how can companies do harm?)
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1) Imperfect information: e.g. supplements that perhaps have no effect but there's no evidence, or product that does harm but does not need to repeat business with the same consumers
2) Companies that exploit irrationality: e.g. lottery
3) products may advantage the consumer over other people in zero-sum or negative-sum games: e.g. a company that sells software that helps you spam people
4) negative externality: e.g. pollution
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(SSC) Beware the man of one study: summary of the 'minimum wage effects on employment' case study
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There's overwhelming evidence on both sides even with meta-analyses, open letters by economists and economists surveys.
The funnel plot is assymetrical, so probably publication bias on the conservative (opposing minimum wage raise) side.
Anyway the effects probably depend a lot on the context.
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(LW) 2 kinds of rationality, define them
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1) Epistemic rationality: improving the correspondence between your map and the territory
2) Instrumental rationality: achieving your values.
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(LW) def floating belief
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A belief that isn't connected to experience, that lets anything happen (e.g. phlogiston is the source of fire)
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(LW) What is evidence?
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An event happening differently for different possible states of whatever you want to know about
("What is evidence?", Eliezer Yudkowsky, <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6s3xABaXKPdFwA3FS/what-is-evidence">https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6s3xABaXKPdFwA3FS/what-is-evidence</a>)
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(LW) Conservation of expected evidence= (with sentence and proof)
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Whatever the experiment, you can't expect the results to shift your beliefs (on average!) in a particular direction.
P(H) = P(H|E)*P(E) + P(H|~E)*P(~E)
prior probability = expected posterior probability
(<a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/conservation-of-expected-evidence">https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/conservation-of-expected-evidence</a>)
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(LW) Why do cults come back stronger than before, when they experience a major shock (like a prophecy failing to come true)?
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Evaporative Cooling. The more moderate ("highest kinetic energy") members go out, leaving only the extremists together.
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(LW) What is evaporative cooling in social psychology?
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When a group shifts toward more extremism because the more moderate members ("highest kinetic energy") have left.
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(LW) An academic field that stops making active progress tends to become mean. Why?
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Because their role, which was seeking the truth, becomes by substitution guarding the truth.
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(LW) Summary of 'Fallacies of Compression' by Eliezer Yudkowsky
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Our vision of the world compresses the reality into concepts.
It takes genius to realize that a concept should be split into several others
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(LW) What is a real definition?
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A simple boundary in thingspace around regions of unusually high probability density
(<a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yLcuygFfMfrfK8KjF/mutual-information-and-density-in-thingspace">https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yLcuygFfMfrfK8KjF/mutual-information-and-density-in-thingspace</a>)
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def theory of action and theory of change with example of decreasing defense budget (Aaron Schwartz)
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Theory of action: what can you do? If you're a blogger, write a blog post
Theory of change: what makes it happen? It is voted. Why? Because politicians vote for it. Why? Because they think it's going to make them reelected, and because they believe in it. How to make them believe in it? First convince the influential people the politicians trust, etc.
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Summary of "Is Science Stagnant?" (2018, Patrick Collison and Michael Nielsen)
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The speed of scientific progress is stagnant at best. In physics, the golden age is over.
Since investment is ever increasing, it means science is getting less bang for its buck.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/11/diminishing-returns-science/575665/
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Summary of Gwern's summary of "The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT"
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Many people were remarkably accurate in their technological predictions, but just didn't get the timing right. They wasted their money on technologies that needed more time (usually Moore's law) to happen
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Gwern's summary of "The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT": why did Microsoft, Google, Facebook etc succeed when the ideas (OS, search engine, social network) had already a lot of implementations?
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Because of the perfect timing
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obliteration by incorporation =
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at some stage in the development of a science, certain ideas become so universally accepted and commonly used that their contributors are no longer cited =
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Example of obliteration by incorporation
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The double helix structure of DNA: we're not citing Watson & Crick anymore
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Summary of Bostrom's "Vulnerable World Hypothesis"
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We might live in a vulnerable world: in the future we
might find out a way to make nukes in a garage (for instance)
https://nickbostrom.com/papers/vulnerable.pdf
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Summary of OvercomingBias "Against Voter Foresight"
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When a future tech is foreseen too long before it happens, it becomes a subject of heated public debate, which hinders its potential positive aspects.
Ex: the pill wasn't foreseen, and it's better this way
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