Notes on Thinking

  This is for notes on thinking. 

Expertise

Steve SailerFeb 6 Perhaps this could be an objective definition of an expert: An expert is somebody who is usually right about a topic too boring for the average person to have a strong opinion about. For example, most practicing tax lawyers are, under this definition, experts on what the IRS will and won't let you deduct on your 1040. They get the various questions right the great majority of the time. But they seldom get nationally famous for their expertise.

On the other hand, topics that huge numbers of people find interesting, such as who will win the Super Bowl, tend to be ones that are hard to predict. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/webmd-and-the-tragedy-of-legible

Men versus Women

 Are women more sympathetic but men more empathetic? Women are more emotional and compassionate, but men are more objective and better able to put themselves in other people's places. 

Thinking in terms of models, and conditional statements generally

Models are conditional statements: If the Assumptions are true, Then the Conclusions are true. Thus, we need to start by thinking about conditional statements. Most people have a lot of trouble with them.

---

Two Conceptions of Teamwork. One way to think of teamwork is as division of labor: I stay near the goalpost, and you go on the offensive. A second way is to think of it as cooperation: we encourage each other in doing our math homework. The first way is male; the second way is female. The female way can be very counterproductive. Rather than having one sentry stay awake from midnight to 4am and the other from 4am to 8am, it has both stay up from midnight to 8am to provide company and encouragement for each other.

---

Beta Testing. Beta testing of products, focus groups, and showing your writing to other people for comment is useful for everyone. It is more important the less intelligent you are, though. This is not just because you make more mistakes. It is also because you are less capable of seeing your work as other people see it. The intelligent person can put himself in the user's place and imagine, from their point of view, how they might be puzzled by how something works or what a piece of writing means. The unintelligent person can only see it from his own point of view.

Note, however, that though intelligence is highly correlated with this kind of empathy-- the kind where you can imagine how the other person feels, whether or not you can feel what they will be feeling-- it is not correlated 100%. Many people are highly intelligent but caught in their own viewpoint. High-functioning autism is an example, though this can be true even for completely non-autistic people. The autistic person just can't see something the way other people do without training himself to do so and then doing so by force of intellect. The narcissist can't either, I think, though I don't know enough about that disorder. And there are intelligent people who are neither narcissist nor autistic but just rigid in their thinking. Indeed, being able to put yourself in someone else's place is closely related to being able to "think outside the box", because it at least means you know how to escape your own box and put yourself in somebody else's.

---

To believe something means to be willing to take action based on it.

What makes people believe in something?

1. Observation. With their own senses, they learn it.

2. Authority. They hear it from somebody they trust. This includes newspapers and books as well as people directly.

3. Reason. They deduce that something must be true.

---

What's Wrong with Social Science and How to Fix It: Reflections After Reading 2578 Papers Sep 11, 2020 by Alvaro de Menard. He says:

Criticizing bad science from an abstract, 10000-foot view is pleasant: you hear about some stuff that doesn't replicate, some methodologies that seem a bit silly. "They should improve their methods", "p-hacking is bad", "we must change the incentives", you declare Zeuslike from your throne in the clouds, and then go on with your day.

But actually diving into the sea of trash that is social science gives you a more tangible perspective, a more visceral revulsion, and perhaps even a sense of Lovecraftian awe at the sheer magnitude of it all: a vast landfill—a great agglomeration of garbage extending as far as the eye can see, effluvious waves crashing and throwing up a foul foam of p=0.049 papers. As you walk up to the diving platform, the deformed attendant hands you a pair of flippers. Noticing your reticence, he gives a subtle nod as if to say: "come on then, jump in".

---

Andrew Gelman says:

Statistics does not require randomness. The three essential elements of statistics are measurement, comparison, and variation. Randomness is one way to supply variation, and it’s one way to model variation, but it’s not necessary. Nor is it necessary to have “true” randomness (of the dice-throwing or urn-sampling variety) in order to have a useful probability model.

---

Suicide of the Liberals in First Things:

In one memorable scene, the hero of ­Solzhenitsyn’s novel November 1916, Colonel Vorotyntsev, finds himself at a social gathering principally of Kadet adherents, where everyone repeats the same progressive pieties. He soon grasps that “each of them knew in advance what the others would say, but that it was imperative for them to meet and hear all over again what they collectively knew. They were all overwhelmingly certain that they were right, yet they needed these exchanges to reinforce their certainty.”

---

From Science:

The size of color vocabulary of an individual varies dramatically across the population. We systematically harnessed this variance and showed that the number of color names one possesses almost perfectly predicts her/his color memorization ability; however, the size of color vocabulary is not related to one’s basic color perception. In addition, it is known that color names are not evenly distributed across the color wheel. We systematically captured this source of variance and showed that color memorization—and not basic color perception—is more accurate for parts of the color wheel described by higher density of color names.

--"Richer color vocabulary is associated with better color memory but not color perception,"

Maryam Hasantash and Arash Afraz. PNAS December 8, 2020

---