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What Developmental Milestones Are You Missing?
- lordnacho 11y agoSeems to me numbers 3 and 4 are quite unlikely to develop unless you studied statistics. Something like the Monty Hall problem is unobvious to most people I've met. Heck even phds discuss it. Conditional probability is really tricky and counterintuitive. The other example is this old error, which is attributed to doctors (for some reason): You have a test which is 99 % accurate (will show the correct status) for presence of some illness. 1/1M people have the actual illness. You find someone with a positive score. What's the chance they have it? Well actually not as high as you think.
- roel_v 11y agoCould you show how much it is?
- dsp1234 11y agoTotally not a statistician, but I'll give it a shot. For the sake of the argument: test accuracy: exactly 99.0% accurate disease incidence: exactly 1 in 1 million Calculation: For the sake of simple calculations, let's assume we test exactly 1 million people. tests positive = (1 * 0.99) + (999999 * 0.01) tests positive = (.99) + (9999.99) tests positive = 10000.98 We'll round up for the sake of argument to 10,001 positive results. And we know that only 1 person (remember that we're testing 1 million people) is actually sick. We have 1 actual sick in 10 thousand positives tests. So the probability that the positive test that is right in front of you is actually a truly sick person are 1 in 10 thousand.
- pif 11y agoBeware, you are making a strong assumption: that the test's accuracy is the same regarding false negatives and false positives. For example, a test may not find enough "anomaly" in an ill person to trigger the positive, thus yielding a false negative; at the same time, it may as well never find any "anomaly" in a sane person, and as a consequence never give any false positive. Back to your example, it's obvious that a test with a 0.01 probability to give a false positive is completely useless for an illness that affects 1e-6 of people.
- zdkl 11y agoSpot the domain-specific knowledge :) While true in the real world this wasn't part of the problem as written above!
- dspeyer 11y agoActual descriptions of medical tests routinely give both rates. They often call them "sensitivity" and "specificity". Good luck remembering which is which. But if only one rate is given, that indicates they're equal. If they're not, then it's reasonable to describe the documentation as incorrect.
- aidenn0 11y agoI have no trouble remembering which is which, as "sensitivity" is used in a way quite similar to its everyday use.
- akrolsmir 11y agoAbout 0.01%, or 1 in 10,000. Consider a population of 100M people, of which 100 would have the illness. Of them, 99% = 99 would test positive and 1% = 1 would test negative. For the other 99,999,900 healthy people, 99% = 98,999,901 would test negative and 1% = 999,999 would test positive. In total, 99 + 999,999 people would test positive. Given that a person tests positive, then, there is only a 99 / (99 + 999,999) ~= 0.01% chance that person has the illness.
- pif 11y agoYour answer is as problematic as dsp1234's one.
- akrolsmir 11y agoFor sure, this assumes that false positive rate = false negative rate = 1%, but it suffices to illustrate how a highly accurate test can produce misleading results. A solution would be repeated retesting, as the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th consecutive positive test results would lead to 0.01%, 1%, 50%, and 99% chances. (Each additional positive test reduces the false positives by 100-fold, whereas the ill patients are very likely to get continually positive results.)
- adrianN 11y agoOnly if your tests are all independent. Doing the same test twice probably doesn't buy you anything.
- paulojreis 11y agoMaybe my Bayesian stats are rusty, but wouldn't you need to clarify what "accurate" means to get a correct answer here? i.e. tell us if, by accurate, you mean sensitivity or specificity. EDIT: Oh, never mind. Just noticed you specifically say 99% for the presence. :)
- tomp 11y agoThe main reason Monty Hall is non-intuitive is that the shift in probability is rather small (relatively. To make it more intuitive, we can simply make the shift in probability absurdly high! Imagine you have 1000 doors, behind one there is a car and behind others, there are goats. You pick one door. The show host opens all other 998 doors, except yours and another door, revealing only goats. Do you think it's more likely the car is behind your door or behind the other unclosed door?
- zdkl 11y agoP('My Door') = P('Any other Door')?
- purplelobster 11y agoThe problem is in the phrasing, and you're actually not improving on it. The way you explain the problem, it would still be 50/50. What changes the situation is that the show host CANNOT open the door with the car in it. The way you phrase it, it's not clear that the show host has any information that the participant doesn't have, but he does.
- tomp 11y agoYes, I guess making that explicit would make it even more obvious.
- benmmurphy 11y agoHe does kind of improve on it. You do have information about whether the host knows which door the car is behind. If the host does not know which door the car is behind he just did something very unlikely so you should update your model based on this information. Assuming you have reasonable priors about the distribution of whether the host has information about the car then after he did what he did it is very likely he has information about where the car is. Though actually I don't think you can then use this information to answer the question because it is tainted with the assumption that the car is not behind your door. :(
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- jusssi 11y ago> You find someone with a positive score. What's the chance they have it? Did you remember to consider the really tricky and counterintuitive conditional probability for this? P('has the rare illness' | 'is at doctor's appointment with at least partially matching set of symptoms') Assuming here that the doctor isn't just testing everyone for the rare illness.
- ZeroGravitas 11y agoA lot of these errors are more in the confusing phrasing or unstated assumptions. In Monty Hall the ambiguity is around whether the host is randomly opening doors or not. With the doctor example, they'd normally only face that question when they've ordered a test for someone, so the probability is much higher. The other classic 'unintuitive' result is the prisoners dilemma, because people have emotional bonds to colleagues and if the break them those emotions can lead to revenge and retribution. These have to be ignored in the classic formulation, but recast it as a drug deal or spy exchange and it makes more sense to people.
- kevinnk 11y agoAt least the way I've heard it, the doctor problem is given as an answer to the question "Why don't we test everyone for HIV/cancer/horrible disease X?" See for example the discussions people had when the American Cancer Society recommended that women with average cancer risk delay their first mammogram to age 45.
- ZeroGravitas 11y agoIt's relevant to that question, but it's also cited regularly as an example of how "even doctors can't do stats". Which, like most people, they probably can't. But asking someone with lots of experience with a situation, a question about a superficially, but not actually, similar situation adds another level of confusion beyond inability to work out the numbers logically.
- ajuc 11y agoThinking in probabilities is certainly posssible without formal training, and I'd argue most people do it, just cutting the corners and not actually doing the math. Example calculation that I (and every other kid) did every day after shool: - it takes 40 minutes on foot to get to home, buses go every 20 minutes on average, and get you there in 10 minutes, but sometimes they are late and sometimes some bus is broken and you will have to wait even 40 minutes - it takes 20 minutes on foot to get to the next bus stop, so if you go on foot you may miss the bus if it goes when you're too far from both bus stops Depending if there are people on the bus stop (so there was no bus recently), and if you see buses going the other way (so you will wait at most 20 minutes) - it makes less or more sense to wait instead of going on foot. But take into account that if you went out not directly after classes - the bus stop may be empty even if there were no buses recently. It even makes you pay (with time or ticket money) for miscalculations :)
- eli_gottlieb 11y agoThere's indeed a paper showing that's roughly what's going on: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.69.2578 http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.69.2... >Human perception and memory are often explained as optimal statistical inferences, informed by accurate prior probabilities. In contrast, cognitive judgments are usually viewed as following error-prone heuristics, insensitive to priors. We examined the optimality of human cognition in a more realistic context than typical laboratory studies, asking people to make predictions about the duration or extent of everyday phenomena such as human life spans and the box-office take of movies. Our results suggest that everyday cognitive judgments follow the same optimal statistical principles as perception and memory, and reveal a close correspondence between people’s implicit probabilistic models and the statistics of the world.
- roel_v 11y agoI"m trying to understand the fundamental concept he's describing - how are the examples different from 'rational thought'? Or are they that, in a way? And is the conclusion then (bringing the first and second parts together) that one can only develop this through being taught? But then, don't the same arguments that applied to the politics example apply to mysticists? And isn't that epistemological relativity all the way down?
- dools 11y agoReminds me of the 7 transformations of leadership https://hbr.org/2005/04/seven-transformations-of-leadership https://hbr.org/2005/04/seven-transformations-of-leadership
- SilasX 11y agoThe milestone about understanding trade offs really resonated with me. I had been using (what I call) the "Scylla-Charybdis Heuristic": -Don't trust any model that implies X is too low unless it's also capable of detecting when X would be too high I've been frustrated by how people can fail this for X=the minimum wage, immigration, ease of getting public assistance (just to show that it's across the spectrum), as well as less political issues like "approaching strangers" or "trying to persuade after a rejection". There is a very common mentality out there that cannot admit to any downsides to a favored policy. I had often attributed this to "well, they have to be wary of tripping others' poor heuristics", but this may itself be the #1 fallacy Alexander mentions! It can just as well be that the person cannot think in terms of trsdeoffs.
- widforss 11y agoI tend to avoid people who comes up with simple solutions based on their ideology. Folks who are honest about not having a simple solution makes a much more intelligent impression on me. Does this comment make me a hypocrite?
- ionised 11y agoWhat about situations where a simple solution would be the most effective and appropriate? Would you be averse to it just because it is simple?
- reacweb 11y agoThe solution may be simple, but the reasoning to justify that it is the most effective is probably not.
- widforss 11y agoI would say that it would depend. I'm primarily thinking of big picture political questions, and in that general area I feel that simple answers are mostly flawed answers. However, in engineering, I apply the *nix philosophy of less is more. But this post isn't very technical.
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- calcsam 11y agoScott makes a lot of good points, but frames them in a very Less Wrong kind of way, when the key to development or growth is always being able to think more clearly. You could pick any number of other developmental milestones in other categories, for children, teenagers, or adults. In the ethical bucket, children begin to recognize of abstract rules as system of dispute resolution ('he should go first because he got there first'), develop a concept of fairness, etc In the social / emotional bucket, adolescents begin desiring independence and feel peer pressure much more acutely. Is there any reason to believe that theory-of-mind-relevant developmental psychology is more important than the other parts?
- TeMPOraL 11y agoI think you're reading too much into that post. I don't see any place where Scott makes this particular type of development as the most important one. It's simply the one he decided to focus his today's blog post on.
- dsfsdfd 11y ago1 and 2 were a gotcha for me for many years...
- duncanawoods 11y agoIMHO LW grossly overstates the importance of statistical thinking. If you have a job making decisions for groups then statistics matters greatly but in our personal lives, genuinely statistical problems are so rare compared to the huge number of decisions we actually face. Most of our decisions are characterised by uncertainty, uniqueness and an absence of data. Real-world rationality is less like mathematics and more like system design where we weave together plans and strategies. For example using contingency planning - a rational buyer ensures the seller has a good return policy rather than trying to use Baye's rule to analyse their past purchase experiences. IMHO the overlooked core of rationality is creativity - you have to imagine possibilities and invent plans. Its only when you reduce decision-making to math problems that math seems so important.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoPersonally I always understood LW's focus on statistical thinking as something similar to what math classes do, from times table to solving integrals - what matters is that a) you have the understanding of underlying concepts which makes you think in a particular way, and b) training / learning caches some operations in your head which lets you use new models of thinking that you otherwise would not be able to (e.g. memorizing times table serves just to make most calculations feasible to do in head or on paper in reasonable time). You don't have to do a perfect Bayesian updates in your daily life - just understanding how the thing works + little training lets you not fall into obvious traps when learning new evidence.
- mtanski 11y agoAgreed. Having seen other try the statistical approach to making many of life's decisions I have concluded that it's somewhere between futile and or worse self deception. It might work things that happen over and over again like deciding which route to take to work. You can accumulate enough useful data to do that. Many new and large decisions by their nature do not have that data and then you're stuck looking for proxies for it based on other's data (experiences) and that rarely applies to your circumstances. An example of this would be moving to SV, you prob don't have your own data points so you're relying on data of others (friends, people on the internets) but it's unlikley that that will have a bearing on how you feel about it once your there.
- TerryADavis 11y agoyer a retard-nigger.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoI'm gonna add - understanding feedback loops. A lot is written about economics and politics by people who don't seem to get that one, and those discussions are mostly pointless. Myself I understood it only after control theory course in university, though now I recognize that high-school level chemistry teaches it too (chemical equilibrium). After you grok it you start to see how incentives can feed one another and that it's perfectly reasonable for a bad system to exist in which there is no single actor to assign blame to (compare: is television stupid because people are dumb, or are people dumb because TV is stupid?).
- chipsy 11y agoI've had the experience of understanding feedback loops perfectly well but still feeling inclined to blame a "big bad" for most ills. I had trouble developing an ethical basis for my actions because I swing across the political aisle very readily based on utilitarian arguments, but simultaneously feel tons of empathy for others and thus want to be in collaboration with everyone I meet. Thus I swept through the gamut of political thought, radical in various ways at various times, moderate at others. Working through that meant gaining a better distinction of the self from the system. I explicitly use a virtue ethics mode for my immediate surroundings and everyday behaviors(i behave in the way in which i feel the least guilt), and then a utilitarian mode when I have to make a decision affecting potentially large groups(e.g. my voting decisions tend to be less selfish and more model-based). This keeps my priorities healthy because it stops me from pointing to an inappropriate "scale" of thinking for the situation.
- djhn 11y ago> whether the listener needs the piece, already has the piece, or just plain lacks the socket that the piece is supposed to snap into. This is very relevant to how we think about education, communication, information design and propagation. The combination of this SSC and the linked David Chapman piece are very good. They explained and formalized quite a few concepts that have seemed like weird nebulous glitches in the matrix to me. And not only did it make some things click into place, it expanded the amount of places things could click into.
- klunger 11y agoThere are some good ideas in here. But, the discussion of "primitive cultures" is so problematic that it undermines my ability to take him seriously.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago> But, the discussion of "primitive cultures" is so problematic that it undermines my ability to take him seriously. Consider then that maybe it's a flaw in your ability to #1 - "to distinguish “the things my brain tells me” from “reality”". Especially that there's little "discussion" of "primitive cultures" there, just a list of factual observations about them made by various people.
- Lewton 11y agoIt's impressive that you could get yourself to write that comment without irony about a blog post promoting rationality "I almost learned something about rationality from reading this! But I will irrationally dismiss this person because reasons"
- klunger 11y agoThe notion of "primitive" cultures, societies, religions etc. has not been taken seriously by anthropologists for decades. His whole argument hinges on theories of cultural relativism from the late 19th and early 20th century. So, yeah, I am going to dismiss arguments that are based on analogies to discredited ideas.
- eli_gottlieb 11y agoThe funny thing was that African tribesmen refusing to talk about things they've never seen before was actually some pretty clear thinking on the part of the Africans, confronting very confused thinking on the part of the anthropologists.
- vlehto 11y agoBut where does he end up with the "primitive cultures"? To me it looks like it was just imaginary concept used as a tool. Once you understand that development of cognitive abilities are related to environment and that they are not necessarily "levels", you can forget the whole idea of "primitive cultures". This is prime example why one should sometimes "entertain a thought without accepting it".
- bakhy 11y agoreally interesting read. the only thing that bugs me, with this text, and the whole rationalist world-view, is how human emotion sometimes becomes a thing to be ashamed of. something beneath a hypothesized "true", "correct" condition. like, the part about recognizing that other people have different minds, different motives, and thus reach different conclusions - on one hand i agree that it is a matter of personal development, and that many people are just plain jerks (sometimes, myself included). but on the other hand, the political examples given in the text seem like a normal emotional response. isn't it simply hard trying to think for everyone, understand everyone all the time? is it even possible? particularly when the issue is something that, for whatever reason, you feel personally. it is not automatically a sign of retarded cognitive development if you just simply got tired. rationalism sometimes seems so, well, christian - we are all filthy sinners by default.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago> the only thing that bugs me, with this text, and the whole rationalist world-view, is how human emotion sometimes becomes a thing to be ashamed of. something beneath a hypothesized "true", "correct" condition. The "rationalist world-view" is just noticing that (per #1) what brain tells you and what the world really is are two different things, therefore your emotions may or may not be properly aligned with reality (btw. this is also the primary insight of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy). Emotions are just like opinions, but in different part of the brain - you want to have ones that correspond to reality. "Contrary to the stereotype, rationality doesn't mean denying emotion. When emotion is appropriate to the reality of the situation, it should be embraced; only when emotion isn't appropriate should it be suppressed." - http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Emotion http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Emotion
- bakhy 11y agoOK, but let's take again the political example - there is a confounding social factor there. i think it is common to regard a concession, in the eyes of the public, as defeat. this drives many people to shout their positions, and disregard rational counterarguments, resorting to personal attacks (like the "democrats are pro-crime" claim). even if those people are in fact perfectly reasonable otherwise... the political example is really insufficiently explained by bringing in just cognitive development. now, generally, from experience, i have the impression that higher mental skills often translate simply into a higher capability of producing more elaborate rationalizations of positions that a person would have held anyway, positions which are rooted in emotions. pointing out rational counterarguments can in many situations only go so far. in fact, i have many times had an easier time discussing with people one might call primitive, since you get to the truth of their motives very quickly, and with respectful approach to people's feelings, a lot can be achieved. with very rational people it's sometimes really difficult to break through the layers of rationalizations. i'm not saying that rationalism is bad, or that the author (or you) like to go around calling people retards :D i just feels that despite best intentions it can lead to disregard for emotion, even though in many cases emotion is the ultimate relevant "reality of the situation". we can and must make ourselves better, but we can never stop being people.
- kailuowang 11y agoI dont see these as hard milestones that requires the amount of effort suggested by the article. To me, it all comes down to strict logical thinking. Take the last milestone of understanding tradeoffs as an example, if you are good at identifying logic jumps in an argument (or the validity), you will be good at understanding tradeoffs. Because you can't be logical to think "something has a downside and thus I shouldn't pick it."
- manish_gill 11y agoSorry but can't take anything associated with Lesswrong even remotely seriously. To call them a cult isn't an exaggeration.
- ajkjk 11y agoWhy?
- lifeisstillgood 11y agoThis suggests another role for government - to break a system out of a local peak (forgotten term) or sub-optimal Nash equilibrium Interesting
- spmowo 11y agoThe forgotten term you're looking for is 'local optimum'.
- Symmetry 11y agoThat's something that might work in theory and has at times but it has a very mixed track record. If the new equilibrium the government enforces turns out to be worse it can be even harder to leave it and it can be hard for politicians to admit they were wrong.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoThat's basically the role of the government. It's a solution to coordination problems, which are in themselves those local optimas you're thinking about.
- JoachimSchipper 11y agoIf you can stomach it, you'll really like "Meditations on Moloch", by the same author. (Its readable description of multipolar traps is good, but I imagine it's hard to see at once if you haven't been following the author for a while. In any case, the AI connection at the end is tenuous.)
- Agathos 11y agoSo if I catch you in an error, I can not only call you on that but now I can imply that your are developmentally stunted as well? Sounds like fun! Let me try: The Post argues that because the Democrats support gun control and protest police, they are becoming the “pro-crime party”. Actually, the Republican-leaning columnist Ed Rogers argues this. If Scott Alexander were a fully developed adult, he would recognize that individual columnists' views may not align with those of the paper. If indeed "the paper" can even be said to have a single point of view.
- mrob 11y agoThat depends on exactly how the column was labeled. Newspapers as corporations endorse the views of their columnists by default. For the view to be attributed soley to the columnist there has to be something calling it out specifically as a personal view.
- delinka 11y ago2. Ability to model other people as having really different mind-designs I believe not learning this is a problem in the communities within which I grew up. Bible belt, rural ... The reinforcement of "we should all think/believe/do the same things" seems to come from a lack of exposure to any people or ideas from outside the community; from "isolationism" one could say.
- johncolanduoni 11y agoI think the other extreme of elitist intellectuals has exactly the same problem; the understand that people have different mind-designs, but thats because their minds are wrong.
- vlehto 11y agoI think it's typical for people to divide other people into two categories. The ones who function just like me, and enemies who are nothing like me. You find that phenomena in surprising places. I'd claim that nobody is completely immune.
- will_pseudonym 11y ago"There are two types of people in this world. People who divide the world into two types, and those who don't."
- vlehto 11y agoGood catch. :) I was thinking about Judith Butler. Philosophist, gender theorist and published author. I read her "Gender Trouble" to a bout halfway. It occurred to me that she might not really recognize that some women might be genuinely straight. It explained the tone of the book bit too well. Also my queer ex-roommate also expected everybody appearing straight to just be closeted. These are individuals who really should understand that sexuality comes in all colors of rainbow.
- zamalek 11y agoAnecdotal and worthless information but someone might find it interesting. > he gets the thing, where “the thing” is a hard-to-describe ability to understand that other people are going to go down as many levels to defend their self-consistent values as you will to defend yours. It think it boils down to anger. I can't recall what causes it (the basal ganglia if I'm not mistaken); at birth we have "biological firmware" that protects our internal mental state - part of which is our belief system. When our internal state is challenged a flight or fight response is invoked. Hypothesis 1: this means that the anger or irrational response to a challenge of beliefs could be a biological disposition. Hypothesis 2: if you still have any semblance of neuroplasticity it might be possible to 'unwire' or 'reflash' this primitive "firmware". I've been attempting to do this over a few years: killing off that primitive part of my brain by proactively seeking out conversation with intelligent people who are opposed to my beliefs: mostly bigots. I have anecdotal evidence that it might be working (although it can't be quantified or proven in any way) - mostly by observing this flight or fight response in others when I have none.
- vlehto 11y agoIt's called "cognitive dissonance". If someone passionately disagrees with you, accusing him of cognitive dissonance works always. So you can assume high ground by being right and being capable of seeing the motivations of the other party. (Or it might be that your opponent actually passionately disagrees. But lets not talk about that.)
- zamalek 11y ago> cognitive dissonance Very, very close to what was referring to. As I recall there is a biological reason underpinning effects like cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias (Freudian Denial in general). I could just be remembering things incorrectly and you may have hit the nail on the head.
- teekert 11y ago"Ability to think probabilistically" I think that is really powerfull, the ability to think in a Bayesian way, to not label something as one thing or the other but to accept fully, that as things stand now, something can be 70% A and 30% B. This does not even have to collide with objectivist views as the thing is either A or B but, based on all the information you have you can only be 70% sure it is A. New information may well lead to to a new 20% A, 70% B, 10% something else. I tend to judge people by their ability to do this. Never enter a discussion unwilling to change your mind is one of my mantra's. I'm also fully aware I break it often by the way. I have often seen two experimental situations with highly overlapping histograms for one parameter and then have a colleague ask: "So where do we draw the line for positive/negative?" I always say: "We don't. We call the sample that is exactly in the middle 50% positive, 50% negative and we have said everything we can about said sample given the 1 dimensional information we have." What's cool for the Dune fans, this seems to me to be exactly what Bene Geserit witches and mentats do. Ingest proofs, take tiny, tiny hints, combine them in a Bayesian manner, produce a likelihood of truth for a certain hypothesis... Perhaps I'm over-interpreting (and projecting) ;)
- dmichulke 11y agoThis entails the ability to change one's mind as in "previously, I would have done this but given the new evidence now I favor that" - something often seen as weakness in politicians.
- kabouseng 11y agoNot just in politicians... "Hmmm I think this bug will take a week to fix" Gets fixed in two days. "So why were you wrong in your estimate?" or even worse, now your estimates gets discounted next time. And the same holds true if it happens the other way round.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoIt sadly means unwashed masses, including your administration and your bosses, are hostile to rationality, and to their own peril. But we all know that.
- vlehto 11y ago>2. Ability to model other people as having really different mind-designs I got recently very good lesson about this while learning about MBTI.[1] It's really not too scientifically rigorous model. But it shows you how some people could function in fundamentally different way than you. And there is people who subscribe to each of the 16 categories. The Big Five is more statistically valid. But it is lacking in the potential to explain world from different points of view. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers%E2%80%93Briggs_Type_Indicator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers%E2%80%93Briggs_Type_Indi...
- gohrt 11y agoSSC writing is so rambling and confusing. Someone could have a great career in condensing SSC blog posts into concise, readable essays, not steeped in LW arcana.
- SilasX 11y agoThanks for the idea!