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You made the following explicit claim (emphasis added):

The first one was when incels and Jordan Peterson demanded that women have sex with them to prevent mass murders.

You provided the following links, neither of which mention Jordan Peterson:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://forward.com/schmooze/4...

You mention 'Robin Hanson's blog' but did not provide any link. Assuming you meant the following link from one of the articles, it does not mention Jordan Peterson either:

http://www.overcomingbias.com/...

So you have not provided any citation where Jordan Peterson is even mentioned, let alone that he specifically "demanded that women have sex with them to prevent mass murders". Apparently your sources refer to "incels" for the first part of your claim, but the second part is unsubstantiated by the citations:

Jordan Peterson demanded that women have sex with them to prevent mass murders.

One could assert in a similar manner that "Donald Trump and PopeRatzo bragged about grabbing women by the pussy" and cite cnn.com with the same level of evidence you as what you had provided: i.e. absolutely none for the second party mentioned, who is never mentioned in any of the linked sources.

So do you have any actual evidence -- specifically an unabridged direct quote of him for the full context -- that Jordan Peterson "demanded that women have sex with [him] to prevent mass murders"?

A few of the "expert" ones I frequent:

Economics/Social Science:
Econlong
Marginal Revolution
The Money Illusion
Overcoming Bias
Bronte Capital - More short selling fund/capital management than economics

Law
Volokh Conspiracy (Now tied into the Washington Post)

Writing/Fantasy/SF
According to Hoyt
Mad Genius Club
Come Let Us Reason Together (more politics than writing)

Whatever you love doing, do more of it. Then just be sensitive, and maybe a little aggressive, about pursuing leads that naturally arise from your avocation

But first, read this article: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2013/12/rejection-via-advice.html

This is somewhat like a story of a world where kids can buy nukes for $1 each at drug stores, and then a few kids use nukes to dig a fun cave to explore, after which all the world’s nukes are accidentally misplaced, end of story. Might make an interesting story, but bizarre as a projection of a world with $1 nukes sold at drug stores.

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2014/01/her-isnt-realistic.html#sthash.m9uOR6Cg.dpuf

There are a number of interesting arguments that you're right, and that politics isn't about policy. If you came to that position on your own, you'll probably find the link interesting. (If not, you've probably already seen it...)

Post citing lots of "studies say" references, but can't find the actual studies: So yes, the basic claims above do weakly check out, at least for the construction industry. But basic questions still remain: How solid is the data here, does this apply to all industries, and does it apply to our most productive workers?

Later post that does cite studies: So averaging over many construction projects, and including long-run exhaustion effects, total product tends to be highest at sixty hours of work per week. This leaves plenty of room for higher hours-per-week peaks 1) for especially hardy individuals, and 2) in less physically demanding industries.

Post citing lots of "studies say" references, but can't find the actual studies: So yes, the basic claims above do weakly check out, at least for the construction industry. But basic questions still remain: How solid is the data here, does this apply to all industries, and does it apply to our most productive workers?

Later post that does cite studies: So averaging over many construction projects, and including long-run exhaustion effects, total product tends to be highest at sixty hours of work per week. This leaves plenty of room for higher hours-per-week peaks 1) for especially hardy individuals, and 2) in less physically demanding industries.

Until the first person has been woken up from cryonic "sleep", I think it is silly to have any kind of confidence in it. But everything will be wonderful when the cargo comes, right?

Simply making a comparison to a cargo cult might be rhetorically fun but it doesn't actually help. First, almost no one is claiming that they have high confidence in cryonics. Indeed, most proponents of cryonics estimate fairly low chances of it working. For example, Robin Hanson estimates around a 5% chance that cryonics will actually work http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/03/break-cryonics-down.html. Indeed, when proponents have low confidence like this, claiming that there's a cargo cult mentality fails pretty miserably. Note that just because part of a technology hasn't been fully developed doesn't mean we can't make estimates about the technologies viability in the future. To use a fairly silly example, the largest hard drives today are a few terabytes. I can confidently predict that there will be 40 terabyte hard drives even though no one has made them yet. Note that cryonics proponents aren't claiming that we are anywhere near the tech level we need today. The primary claim is that from what we understand of the brain, the relevant information is preserved close to completely intact in cryonic preservation. That's the central claim. If one agrees that that is likely, it becomes highly likely that we'll eventually reach the tech level to be able to repair that functionality.

You wouldn't expect liability insurance to go down, but you would expect comprehensive, since it covers the cost of an uninsured driver colliding with you.

All else being equal, yes. It might have been masked by rate increases due to other things like inflation, though. Usually the price of goods and services goes up steadily over time, so a moderate cost saving might be reflected in a longer period until the next price increase, rather than an actual price decrease.

Emergency medical treatment is provided (ambulances sent, ER admissions) absent any method of payment. Therefore the cost for the people who cannot pay their bills gets spread out to those who can. Therefore, some amount of insurance is just as justifiable for healthcare.

Well, it's not quite the same, since conceivably you could also just not require emergency rooms to treat patients without payment. But if you're going to require that they be treated, then yes, the same rationale applies to limited mandatory health insurance as applies to mandatory liability insurance.

Or people who feel that it is cheaper (the stitch in time method) that allowing poor people to wait until they need to go to the hospital.

My understanding is that prevention often costs more than treatment, so I don't think this is obviously correct as a general rule. In some cases, doubtless.

Good god, then it's even WORSE!

For an example, check out these numnuts.

There is no "rationalism," there are only imaginations of rationalism -- and those imaginations are generally pretty poor stuff for the soul.

The idea is that if you look and act like a smug selfish conniving snivling jerk that spends his (and it's generally his) time coming up with mathematical theologies of social networks and bayesian systems, that you're somehow more "rational." Dios, it's gross.

Seriously here, though:

The problem is the ends. Rationality can never be for just itself; Rationality is always towards some purpose. And what purpose would one orient their rationality to? Well, a lot of people think that money and power are the ultimate purposes, so they judge themselves and others by how far they get in this "rational" persuit. Then there are other people who say, "Well, actually, the goal is some equitable distribution of power and influence (and what have you,)" and so there you end up with liberal philosophies or efforts to make the middle class swell or what have you.

Would-be "Rationalists" need to identify what they live for, which will not in-itself be a "rational" thing. It won't defy reason or logic or what have you, but it won't be derivable or even based in reason or logic. It'll be an imaginary thing, or an imaginary society, or an imaginary world, or an imaginary person, most likely -- but an imaginary thing worth loving.

The athiests I know all have comic books in their back pockets. They should just fess up where their hearts are, rather than hiding behind the facad of "rationality."

(1) Based on the standard rules of statistical acceptance, a study only has to reach requires a 95% confidence level. That means that 1 in every 20 identical studies will produce a false positive merely by chance. When you have an area of study in which thousands of studies have been done over decades you end up with hundreds of studies reporting positive results just by chance.

(2) Statistical meta analysis of studies is largely nonsense unless your talking about a field in which nearly identical studies are done over and over again. Usually, when these meta studies hit the media you find they they equally weight to every study regardless of presumed rigor of the studies. In this case, the gold standard is the Swedish study that followed tens of thousands of people over decades. How to you compare that to a study that just data mined a few hundred medical records?

You also need to consider publication bias.

Find a link between cancer and cell phones? That's a publication.

Didn't find anything? Not so interesting, might not bother.

Interestingly it's not impossible to detect a publication bias, would be interesting to try that approach on these studies.

You're right, my tone was too strident. Just heard this post-scarcity sillyness too often. I actually agree with you about solar and wind except I insert "I really really hope" before "almost all our energy will come from renewables".

To prove to yourself that technological adaptations don't always come fast enough to bail us out, imagine that for some reason oil jumps to $500/barrel tomorrow (terrorist attacks on refineries, all-out nuclear war in the Middle East, etc). Will there be enough time for everyone to switch over from gasoline fuel and feedstocks? Hell no. There is some irreducible period of time needed to upgrade the electric grid, build wind/solar/nuke installations, and reorganize our entire manufacturing and goods distribution network. During that period we will have riots, blackouts, unemployment, and food shortages. If the crisis lasts long enough, the infrastructure (what's left of it) will eventually be almost entirely independent of oil, partly because we have retooled to renewable energy and partly because we have retooled to the now cheap and abundant human/animal labor, giving up on energy-intensive technologies (automation and mass production in general, including the manufacture of wind turbines and especially solar panels). I don't know how to predict the percentage contribution of these two causes of reduced demand for oil, but I want to know, because that is the difference between a technotopia and a dark age.

Trends are funny things-- they find unexpected ways to develop. Especially if we mechanically follow them without understanding why they appear exponential. If past performance was a guaranteed predictor of future outcomes, nobody would ever lose money on the stock market.

I guess I'm just not content to sit back and let The Market and R&D work their magic. I need to understand what the actual likelihood is that we will win our race against Malthus yet again. Until I do, I must put some of my effort into preparing for and mitigating the effects of the most likely civilizational risks (and thus making a small contribution to that very race).

PS: In the long run, things don't look good for exponential growth of any sort. You might want to read this post by Robin Hanson: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/09/limits-to-growth.html. He is the last guy you'd expect to take Malthus seriously, but apparently Robin's intellectual integrity and ability to do the math has dragged him kicking and screaming to this repugnant conclusion. Not that I'm saying technotopia is not a worthy goal-- it's the only worthy goal, but we should go into it with our eyes open to the fact that the odds are stacked against us and we don't necesserily have a lot of time.

the experience of consciousness cannot be a result of "software", nor "hardware" -- it cannot be the result of atoms, molecules, and electrons. Isn't that obvious to anyone else?

Well, it's "obvious" to creationists that DNA is too complex to have arisen without supernatural intervention. If I am ignorant about a phenomenon, that is a fact about my own state of mind, not a fact about the phenomenon itself. Even if your theory of extra dimensions is correct, consciousness would still be a result of the interactions of atoms; they'd just be interacting in ways that were previously unknown.

Well, it's not that simple. I was recently reading the work of Eliezer Yudkowsky who has convincing reasons why "randomness hath no power". His point is basically that success of an algorithm depends on its *non*-random exploitation of knowledge of the search space. Any apparent success of randomness is due to the fact that the algorithm lacks enough information to make a better guess, so any method of choosing will, on average, do just as well. Or to put it differently, if your randomness-using algorithm isn't working well, does it make sense to try to improve it by drawing from a *more* random source, like thermal noise?

(Aside: The other way Yudkowsky allows that randomness can be helpful if it's to prevent an opponent from being able to make inferences about you, such as in cryptography. More generally, it helps any time you want to destroy the "mutual information" between two variables so as to isolate one specific effect. As I like to put it, "Randomness is like poison: yes, it can help you, but only if you feed it to someone *else*.)

In the case of evolutionary algorithms, Yudkowsky argues that the success is not due to the small amount of randomness it uses, but to the large amount that it *doesn't*. Whatever evolutionary algorithm you're referring to, a huge part of it is how it selects candidates ("genes") according to a fitness function, a very non-random feature.

You said that the randomness is necessary to avoid being trapped in a local optimum. But it isn't the randomness that keeps you out of the local optimum; it's the fact that you're making a huge change to the candidate that moves it to a different "domain of attraction".

The success of evolutionary algorithms, then, is due to the extent to which it exploits knowledge of the structure of the search space, not to randomness. In cases where this assumption about the search space is wrong, they fail miserably. For example, if the problem you're attacking is to guess a secret number within a certain range, where only one answer is any better than the others, then no amount of cross-breeding, selection, mutuation, splicing, etc. will help.

Anyway, I didn't mean to pounce on you, I just wanted to give the other side.

The resulting AI would tile the solar system with tiny smiling faces.

This is analgous to the way in QM the details are not predictcable till you look, and when you do the details of other things not simultaneously observed can change at a distance.

See http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/05/collapse-postul.html

Back when people didn't know about macroscopic decoherence aka many-worlds - before it occurred to anyone that the laws deduced with such precision for microscopic physics, might apply universally at all levels - what did people think was going on?

The initial reasoning seems to have gone something like:

"When my calculations showed an amplitude of -1/3i for this photon to get absorbed, my experimental statistics showed that the photon was absorbed around 107 times out of 1000, which is a good fit to 1/9, the square of the modulus."

to

"The amplitude is the probability (by way of the squared modulus)."

to

"Once you measure something and know it didn't happen, its probability goes to zero."

Read literally, this implies that knowledge itself - or even conscious awareness - causes the collapse. Which was in fact the form of the theory put forth by Werner Heisenberg!

[...]

If collapse actually worked the way its adherents say it does, it would be:

1. The only non-linear evolution in all of quantum mechanics.
2. The only non-unitary evolution in all of quantum mechanics.
3. The only non-differentiable (in fact, discontinuous) phenomenon in all of quantum mechanics.
4. The only phenomenon in all of quantum mechanics that is non-local in the configuration space.
5. The only phenomenon in all of physics that violates CPT symmetry.
6. The only phenomenon in all of physics that violates Liouville's Theorem (has a many-to-one mapping from initial conditions to outcomes).
7. The only phenomenon in all of physics that is acausal / non-deterministic / inherently random.
8. The only phenomenon in all of physics that is non-local in spacetime and propagates an influence faster than light.

These are good tips. I would also suggest reading Eliezer Yudkowsky's post the Oxford based blog: http://www.overcomingbias.com/. Read them in chronological order. They'll makes more sense.

He writes criticism of the different AI approaches that is really worth reading. He'll tell you that you should read books by E.T. Jaynes and Judea Pearl. I highly recommend reading Jaynes before doing any probabilistic modeling. There is even a free draft of his book online.

Please remember the quantum demonstration that whether a quantum packet is a particle or a wave depends on how you measure it.

No, it doesn't. Sometimes, matter behaves like we expect a wave to. Sometimes, it behaves like we expect a particle to. It's just convenient to think of its behavior that way, because waves and particles are things we understand.

There was a good quantum explanation linked from Slashdot (I think) a while ago. I think he has finished the series of explanations at this point - they're quite good, but quantum can be very difficult to understand.

And, now that we've reached about -10 offtopic, I think I'll stop writing.

I think the "free will is oncompatible with determinism" argument misunderstands how time works. Everything is fully determined in history. From a viewpoint outside of our time, past and future are equally "visible". Time as a flow of events is just an illusion of human perception, so arguing from that perspective is like arguing about what flavor of ice cream tastes best.

I'm not sure I buy into that. I recall once seeing some argument that some anti-particles experience time backwards, though I'm sure it's not as simple as that. As to time travel I don't know enough of the theory behind that.

Either way even if we can go back and forth without changing the present that doesn't necessarily make the universe deterministic (though the universe would need some cool acrobatics to allow that), just because I can play a tape and watch who wins a game doesn't mean the game was fixed.

"Arguing about the definition of a word" and "arguing about the idea behind the word" - the same? Different? Welcome to theory of language! :)

Re point 1 - I've always seen this as "eaing the menu" (as do many physicists). It's a useful and predictive model, but there's no reason to think the universe knows what it means for "someone" to "observe" an event. It's goofey, and not the good kind.

You mean "eating the menu" ? (I always double check spelling when using quotes :) )

AFAIK an "observer" is anything that interacts with a potential configuration of the particle, though I don't know quantum as well as I should.

I've yet to see a good description of point 2 that was anything beyond "put a black and a white marble in a bag; pick one; examine it later; it's white, so you instantly know the other is black". Not very interesting. Until someone has a practical method to force the decision post-hoc, it's just BS (the model says this should be possible, but most scientific models are full of holes that you work around when using them).

You mean you don't like the thought experiment from a practical perspective, or a theoretical one?

Or in other words, synchronicity (common prior cause) doesn't violate causality, and so it isn't profound. It's easy to turn on a light buld here and on th moon and the same instant without any information traveling faster than light, after all.

I think that's the idea. Take two bags, put in a white marble, than a black marble on top, than separate them.

We don't know if the bag is large enough that the marbles can change order inside.

Later, when they're separated pull the top a marble from each. If you get the same colour marble from each than the bags are deterministic, if they don't match than the bag allowed them to shuffle.

It's a little hard to grasp (unfortunately a somewhat fundamental quality of quantum) but this explains how forcing can work.
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/04/configurations.html

The problem is that he doesn't see the bias because its just every natural to think that way.

Agreed. A great site that I found for helping me to see and try and overcome my biases is overcomingbias.com Mostly the editors Robin Hanson and Eliezer Yudkowsky post, but I've seen posts by others. Most of the things on there are thought provoking and well written.

From their welcome page:

How can we obtain beliefs closer to reality?[...] We want to avoid, or at least minimize, the startling systematic mistakes that science is discovering. If we know the common patterns of error or self-deception, maybe we can work around them ourselves, or build social structures for smarter groups. We know we aren't perfect, and can't be perfect, but trying is better than not trying.

>> "two quantum channels with zero capacity can carry information"
> Feynman once said that nobody understands quantum mechanics, and this is why.

No. Nobody "understands" quantum mechanics because it is illogical. It is chock full of applications of the mind projection fallacy, starting with its premises and going all the way to the conclusions (some of which just happen to be correct for other reasons).

what is the best way to encourage and teach someone to maintain a healthy dose of skepticism?

"Between today until the class right before finals, it is my intention to work into each of my lectures ... one lie. Your job, as students, among other things, is to try and catch me in the Lie of the Day." And thus began our ten-week course.

This was an insidiously brilliant technique to focus our attention - by offering an open invitation for students to challenge his statements, he transmitted lessons that lasted far beyond the immediate subject matter and taught us to constantly checksum new statements and claims with what we already accept as fact. Early in the quarter, the Lie of the Day was usually obvious - immediately triggering a forest of raised hands to challenge the falsehood. Dr. K would smile, draw a line through that section of the board, and utter his trademark phrase "Very good! In fact, the opposite is true. Moving on ... "

(absence of evidence is not evidence of absence)

Absence of proof is not proof of absence. In logic, A->B, "A implies B", is not equivalent to ~A->~B, "not-A implies not-B".

But in probability theory, absence of evidence is always evidence of absence. If E is a binary event and P(H|E) > P(H), "seeing E increases the probability of H"; then P(H|~E) < P(H), "failure to observe E decreases the probability of H". P(H) is a weighted mix of P(H|E) and P(H|~E), and necessarily lies between the two.

...The secular interpretations of science have been getting the predictions right for several hundreds of years.....

Really? Can you give me at a few examples or even only one, of any such predictions have come true?

The oldest book in the Bible is the book of Job. Therein we are told that the Earth is spherical and suspended upon nothing. This is completely contrary to the prevailing scientific opinions that were considered politically correct, millennia ago, when this was written. In that same book we are told about ocean currents many centuries before Maury explored the seven seas, discovering and charging these. God talks to Job and gives him a science quiz which he flunked. Some of the questions God asked still have not been answered by any scientists even today.

Millenia? We didn't really have the modern scientific method until around the 17th or 18th centuries (though some greeks did some calculations to figure out the circumference in 240BC). As to predictions, well we had the orbits of planets that have held up pretty well (once the church stopped threatening people), a lot of Darwin's predictions held up, DaVinci didn't do bad (getting flight and such). Coming to modern stuff where we've really started to nail the scientific method we've had some crazy predictions in many fields, particularly physics that turned out to be dead on.

The bible on the other hand, with a spherical earth, apparently predicted something that if not common knowledge, still wasn't exactly out of the mainstream. As to the other bits I don't really have the inclination to research them.

Regardless, computers, heart transplants, space flight. These came from scientists, not priests. Mankind spent millenia following religion and was living in the dark ages. A few centuries with a bit of scientific method and we were walking on the moon. I think it's pretty clear which one produces results.

Carbon dating and all other radioactive dating methods make the underlying assumption that these processes are invariant over large periods of time. This may or may not be a reasonable assumption, but it is an assumption, that is a belief nevertheless. There is no way to prove that these processes have always been what we measure them to be today. Science has made many what were at the time thought to be reasonable assumptions, but in the end these turned out to be wrong.

The reality is that evolutionists tend to split human creations and natural creation. No evolutionist would ever attribute a 747 airplane to any process other than that originating in a mind, but then turn around and try to convince themselves and others that a single cell, being far more complicated than any airplane or other human device, came about by spontaneous, natural processes NOT involving careful thought and planning.

Creationists on the other hand, do not split reality, but attribute human as well as natural creations to processes that first occurred in a mind, carefully thinking and planning a product or living creature.

There's also the fact we can see evolution occurring quite elegantly in practise.

Did you read the "observed instances of evolution" link?

Anytime a person admits even tentatively, that there might be a Creator God after all, may then begin to think about his or her relationship to this perhaps existing God. Because many people do not wish to go there, they will adhere to and rationalize a worldview to that specifically excludes God from their consciousness.

Hmm, I can clearly see you've never met an atheist.

It might help you to read this bit on the difference between rationality and rationalization.

Having radioactive decay rates change for no reason, without any evidence to support that, inserting a god into evolution where we can see it work quite fine without one.

You can make excuses all day to support

This would be a good time to bring up that Richard Dawkins thinks there's a greater than 1% chance that earth life was designed by an intelligence.

So, do you think he advocates spending money on this idea, or does he just not understand the concept of probability? ;-)

The Logical Fallacy of Generalization from Fictional Evidence

"Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."
- Carl Sagan

A lack of sabotage doesn't prove that no Fifth Column exists. Absence of proof is not proof of absence. In logic, A->B, "A implies B", is not equivalent to ~A->~B, "not-A implies not-B".

But in probability theory, absence of evidence is always evidence of absence. If E is a binary event and P(H|E) > P(H), "seeing E increases the probability of H"; then P(H|~E) < P(H), "failure to observe E decreases the probability of H". P(H) is a weighted mix of P(H|E) and P(H|~E), and necessarily lies between the two.

I would also like to point out that science, as we know it today, was developed by people that believed in a creator. Many were deeply religious.

People can be religious and have wonderful scientific mind that seeks to unlock the mysteries of the world we live in.

$80 per household spent on health care will give you a much greater ROI than 80$ spent on TVs.

That is far from clear. There are indications that the marginal value of health care spending is roughly zero. (On the other hand, research might be more productive).

But that's only if the return you're looking for is public welfare and not corporate enrichment.

People actually do enjoy watching TV.

You don't have to be an expert in a field to be reasonably literate in it. I'm not an expert in rocketry and my physics is horribly weak, but I know why you can't turn around a ballistic missile in midflight — which is more than a certain POTUS could claim. This is the same guy who thought we could and should put a missile shield around North America that would make nuclear weapons "impotent and obsolete". In that case, lack of knowledge and lack of judgment went hand in hand.

WRT to the value of knowledge in judgement I think this is a useful, though slightly tangential, read (an excellent blog btw), specifically this exert (note that "Foxes" are essentially uncertain generalists while "Hedgehogs" are overconfident specialists)

One rather bizarre result relates to an experiment where Tetlock asked experts to also make predictions far from their field of expertise. Among Foxes, as we might expect, experts do better than the "dilettantes" who are going outside their field. But among Hedgehogs, the results are reversed! Hedgehogs actually do worse in their own fields where they are supposed experts than when they are forced to make predictions in other areas.

My general thought with that excerpt is that specific knowledge isn't as big an asset as you'd expect in making a decision about a subject, a willingness to learn and an open mind really dwarfs the effect of knowledge in that area.

Of course if a candidate does have science knowledge that is a very good sign, not necessarily because they'll make better science conditions but because it's a sign of curiosity and general "foxiness" which suggests they'll make good decisions in general.

You might consider C&R to have "foreign policy experience", but they showed a horrible lack of knowledge of conditions in the Middle East. Worse, they shut down anybody in the executive branch that disputed their scenario of Iraq magically transforming itself into a modern democracy as soon as the Bathist dictatorship was decapitated. Nobody with any judgment would have trusted them with that much power. Alas, the president was even more ignorant and ideological than they were. Perhaps if he had been made to answer some real questions about conditions in the middle east instead of being allowed to spout crap about the "Axis of Evil", we'd have avoided this quagmire.

From a previous article on the hedgehog vs. fox thing "The hedgehog is said to know one thing and know it well. He sees events and trends in terms of his big idea, and aggressively extends it into new realms. Hedgehogs tend to be confident in the applicability of their fundamental concepts and impatient with those who "do not get it"." That seems to describe Bush and friends pretty well. Essentially I believe they know a lot about Iraq and the middle east, far more than either of us, but because of their judgement in general either of us would probably make far better decisions about Iraq. Back when they first started talking about invading I didn't know much about Shia vs. Sunni, but I could sure tell you that when you invade a country in an unstable part of the world, like Iraq, you're going to get some local factions duking it out.

Note another interesting analysis I saw a while back (though I don't think it was based on an actual study) noted that for Presidents there wasn't much correlation between foreign policy experience before being elected and the quality of their foreign policy decisions while in office.

About the ancient link: no feat of memory here. There's a discussion elsewhere on Joss Whedon's new TV show, where I argue that Firefly was killed by a conspiracy of network hacks. I remembered the previous Joss Whedon story because I submitted and also becaus

You don't have to be an expert in a field to be reasonably literate in it. I'm not an expert in rocketry and my physics is horribly weak, but I know why you can't turn around a ballistic missile in midflight — which is more than a certain POTUS could claim. This is the same guy who thought we could and should put a missile shield around North America that would make nuclear weapons "impotent and obsolete". In that case, lack of knowledge and lack of judgment went hand in hand.

WRT to the value of knowledge in judgement I think this is a useful, though slightly tangential, read (an excellent blog btw), specifically this exert (note that "Foxes" are essentially uncertain generalists while "Hedgehogs" are overconfident specialists)

One rather bizarre result relates to an experiment where Tetlock asked experts to also make predictions far from their field of expertise. Among Foxes, as we might expect, experts do better than the "dilettantes" who are going outside their field. But among Hedgehogs, the results are reversed! Hedgehogs actually do worse in their own fields where they are supposed experts than when they are forced to make predictions in other areas.

My general thought with that excerpt is that specific knowledge isn't as big an asset as you'd expect in making a decision about a subject, a willingness to learn and an open mind really dwarfs the effect of knowledge in that area.

Of course if a candidate does have science knowledge that is a very good sign, not necessarily because they'll make better science conditions but because it's a sign of curiosity and general "foxiness" which suggests they'll make good decisions in general.

You might consider C&R to have "foreign policy experience", but they showed a horrible lack of knowledge of conditions in the Middle East. Worse, they shut down anybody in the executive branch that disputed their scenario of Iraq magically transforming itself into a modern democracy as soon as the Bathist dictatorship was decapitated. Nobody with any judgment would have trusted them with that much power. Alas, the president was even more ignorant and ideological than they were. Perhaps if he had been made to answer some real questions about conditions in the middle east instead of being allowed to spout crap about the "Axis of Evil", we'd have avoided this quagmire.

From a previous article on the hedgehog vs. fox thing "The hedgehog is said to know one thing and know it well. He sees events and trends in terms of his big idea, and aggressively extends it into new realms. Hedgehogs tend to be confident in the applicability of their fundamental concepts and impatient with those who "do not get it"." That seems to describe Bush and friends pretty well. Essentially I believe they know a lot about Iraq and the middle east, far more than either of us, but because of their judgement in general either of us would probably make far better decisions about Iraq. Back when they first started talking about invading I didn't know much about Shia vs. Sunni, but I could sure tell you that when you invade a country in an unstable part of the world, like Iraq, you're going to get some local factions duking it out.

Note another interesting analysis I saw a while back (though I don't think it was based on an actual study) noted that for Presidents there wasn't much correlation between foreign policy experience before being elected and the quality of their foreign policy decisions while in office.

About the ancient link: no feat of memory here. There's a discussion elsewhere on Joss Whedon's new TV show, where I argue that Firefly was killed by a conspiracy of network hacks. I remembered the previous Joss Whedon story because I submitted and also becaus

That is expected.

Yes. Everything is expected when your theory explains nothing. If it takes 50 more years to pass the Turing Test, hey, that was expected. If it takes 100, hey, that was expected. If it takes 1000, hey, that was expected.

So yeah, we perfectly understand exactly the necessary and sufficient conditions for a brain to work ... er, except we haven't gotten any results working under that assumption.

Your argument is like suggesting that because man has not yet walked on Mars, that that is somehow evidence or an argument that man cannot walk on Mars. Obviously an invalid argument. They are two difficult engineering problems.

It would be an invalid argument if it was asserted as an absolute logical necessity. The more we understand, the weaker such evidence would be. There's more to scientific reasoning than pure deduction; there's also Bayesian inference, which you might want to brush up on. Once you do, you can make sense of this:

The probability of not having created even a small ("insect-like") brain, given that our understanding of brain workings is complete, is very low.

emergence

Wikipedia has a good article on emergent behavior.

Let's try to read me in context if we could. I didn't say

"emergence"

I didn't even say

"What is emergence?"

I certainly didn't say,

"Fill me in on what I need to know to use the latest buzzwords."

I asked a very specific question, and there was a reason I phrased it that way. The prompt was:

"how does the reference to emergence change the meaning of what you said?"

And what did he say?

"I read the properties of human behaviour to function perfectly well inside a "computer" mapped on top of neural networks as mapped on top of chemistry mapped on top of physics, with the emergent behaviour of the overall system optimizing for reproduction in a context that is slightly different from the present one."

The question, then, is how the idea conveyed there, differed from the idea that would be conveyed by:

"I read the properties of human behaviour to function perfectly well inside a "computer" mapped on top of neural networks as mapped on top of chemistry mapped on top of physics, with the behaviour of the overall system optimizing for reproduction in a context that is slightly different from the present one."

And before you say, "the difference is that emergent behaviour has properties that do not exist at lower levels, while non-emergent behavior has properties that do exist at all lower levels":

a) his explanation did not hinge on such a distinction
b) under that explanation, everything is emergent and therefore the explanatory power is nil

(Just to subdue your gut reaction, this guy who advocates Strong AI and believes the Turing Test will be passed, makes the same critique of "emergence".)

And before you reply, remember that he did not claim to "prove" this. He said

Right, I know, because heaven forbid we blatantly misread what someone said.

We actually beleive, now, that we need various consumer goods to survive,

Prizes rather than grants; there was even a story on in this the New York Times within the last couple of weeks! I found out about this via the economist Robin Hanson on the Overcoming Bias blog. One advantage, and just one advantage of many, to offering a prize like this is that more money than the prize amount is spent on the research – there is a small but very real chance that some unknown and relatively disconnected person, spending a relatively small amount of money, will find a solution and claim the prize. From that perspective, the $25 million is worth more than $25 million; think of it as akin to a matching donation in a charity drive.

Your odds of being framed and sent to prison are greater than 1 in a 100 over a lifetime

That's a rather extraordinary claim. Do you have extraordinary evidence to back it up with?

I don't think the distinction between advertising and information is as clear as you (and many others here) like to make it. For example, if I want to inform people about a product that a reasonable person actually might want, how do I present it? Should I present the information in dull, black and white text? Should I spell-check it? Anything beyond the minimum to convey the information would have to be classified as advertising, but it's hard to see how that necessarily makes it bad.

With that in mind, I agree that much of the justification for advertising has withered away with the internet. Community-run sites are much better at helping you figure out what exactly you want, and search engines are much better and finding the various ways to satisfy that particular want. For this reason, advertising has run into a sort of public goods problem: Once they convince you that, (just to grab a random example) fishing is fun, in order to get you to buy their fishing products, you can immediately turn around and find all existing discount fishing supply stores, and thus not have to buy from someone who had to pay for that advertisement. (Parallel to intellectual property there.) And this problem has long existed, but has been amplified by the internet.

Advertising has been a difficult problem for economists. Specifically, if it's really pure waste, why don't people systematically discount their estimations of the quality of products that had to be advertised, since this takes away from what can be devoted to making the product better? Here is a brief summary of the theories. (And a great blog generally.) To that, you can add my theory, that adverising signals that they have money to burn, and thus will be able to afford the judgment if you ever sue them regarding their product.

He should start here(if he is even a little serious): Some Claims Are Just Too Extraordinary. A selection:

"If a ship landed in my yard and LGMs stepped out, I'd push past their literature and try to find the cable that dropped the saucer on my roses. Lack of a cable or any significant burning to the flowers, I'd then grab a hammer and start knocking about in the ship till I was convinced that nothing said "Intel Inside." Then when I discovered a "Flux Capacitor" type thing I would finally stop and say, "Hey, cool gadget!" Assuming the universal benevolence of the LGMs, I'd yank it out and demand from the nearest "Grey" (they are the tall nice ones), "where the hell did this come from?" Greys don't talk, they communicate via telepathy, so I'd ignore the voice inside my head. Then stepping outside the saucer and sitting in a lawn chair, I'd throw pebbles at the aliens till I was sure they were solid. Then I'd look down at the "Flux Capacitor" and make sure it hadn't morphed into my bird feeder. Finally, with proof in my hand and aliens sitting on my deck (they'd be offered beers, though I've heard that they absorb energy like a plant) I'd grab my cell phone and tell my doctor that I'm having a serious manic episode with full-blown visual hallucinations." -- Peter K. Bertine, on the Extropian mailing list

I'd have to strongly disagree. First of all, in my experience, the intellectual quality of bloggers really puts syndicated columnists to shame. (I'm talking about the upper end of them -- no doubt you can find lots of bad quality.) They can write much more and link to the basis for their claims. If anything is in error, they'll typically have comment and trackback capability so others can instantly expose them. Rarely will columnists deign to defend their assertions. After reading blogs for a few years, I checked back to some of the syndicated columns I had read (this is what I had in mind) and just marveled at how intellectually shallow they were. In contrast, check out this list of some of the blogs I read:

http://econlog.econlib.org/
http://www.overcomingbias.com/
http://www.economist.com/debate/freeexchange/
http://www.janegalt.net/
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/
http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/
http://patrick.net/wp/

Several of those are professors. Now, tell me they're not more refined than the columns you'd read in the paper.