curious_straight_ca
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User ID: 1845
Motte and bailey - motte is "top-down designed by experts", bailey is "designed by experts". Yes, experts aren't Yahweh himself who writes the inerrant Law in an instant. But many experts did intentionally design the systems, and then, yes, as in every other field, modify them when they seemed to fail. Just like mechanical engineers do. The Chief Economist at Google was, in fact, hired due to his deep understanding of specific areas of microeconomics, and used that knowledge to design (of course in an iterative way!) google's ad auctions, which was very profitable for google. I entirely fail to see how this is different from hiring a mechanical engineer. I think the general distaste for "experts" is incredibly confused - some of them are bad, but they're not all bad, aside from in fields like psychology or social science - and that's just those fields being bad, not experts being bad.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
I mean, the US justice system has problems. The South African justice system also has problems. Not the same problems. Is it so informative to discuss issues or lost faith generally? The US justice system mostly works, and you can tell because you don't have to bribe police every time they pull you over and you don't have your business seized by the state when it gets too big. Collapsing all grievances into a vague sense of 'everything sux' isn't useful
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
And most of the trust in them is misplaced
I don't think this is true. Another example of 'trusting the experts' is trusting that the judge in your legal case is fair and not corrupt. Another is trusting that the wikipedia article you just read is accurate.
Yes data would fix things if it existed.
I think the 'bad experts' would manage to interpret the publicly-available data in exactly the terrible ways they currently do, and not be able to tell the difference?
I was under the impression people didn't really try replicating these studies because they assumed they were done correctly
Well, they didn't try to adversarially replicate them. But there were plenty of replications in the sense of studies on the same thing that also got positive results.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Well, that one is because al three are highly correlated with mild autism.
Mildly autistic bio women don't seem to have the same attraction to e.g. rust that trans women do, once you account for the percent of the population they are. I think this is reasonable evidence against trans women having the same psychological inclinations as bio women,.
Another thing to think about, along the original line: Biological women have a strong innate desire to be around and care for children, one you can both see in choice of occupation and just casual observation, and I don't see that at all in trans women.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
I'm referring to the people who design the market mechanisms, and design the laws to adjudicate disputes within them, and (a thousand other things). Those are, obviously, experts.
In reality, we also see that companies do not in fact hire economists to set their prices, but use other methods, like trial and error, because that beats the experts.
Consider the chief economist at google, who they hired to design their advertising auctions, among other things. Amazon also has a chief economist. Microecon is actually a strong field with good theory and empirical work!
I think this is a really stupid dispute in general. A lot of so-called "experts" are absolutely awful, and this includes quite a few economists, most psychologists and social theorists, and so on. But a lot of experts are just smart people who exist in useful intellectual and practical traditions and contribute a lot to society. Does it even make sense to condemn both in the same way?
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Anything can be taken to an extreme, sure.
A lot of important decisions are made on the basis of expert claims!
The difference is that industry is creating a functioning product, social workers aren't
No I agree social workers r mostly bad, I'm just saying that they're an example of why more public data won't fix anything.
It did happen in psychology, this is where the name "replication crisis" comes from.
I mean, there were decades of terribly done pseudoreplications until the replication crisis.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Another is the very act of expert-trusting, we'd have a lot less problems if there was a lot more distrust
And a lot more problems? What should a 95Iq person do when their doctor says they have cancer and need to take pills that'll make them feel terrible?
They don't need to, their work is constantly being verified with data from mines, foundries, factories, and refineries.
Right, but there are a lot of teachers and social workers and (bad) economists who think they're verifying the work of other academics, but aren't, they're just very confused. Public data wouldn't change that.
There's ways to detect that, and it will come out during replication. Experimental fields aren't such a big deal anyway, since they are, in fact experimental - the field itself tells you not to take the results very seriously.
That didn't happen in psychology though, because everyone was faking and publication biasing etc.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
It's the scientific consensus? So?
The (very broad) review I linked itself links to other reviews that go into the evidence for why nutrition was a component.
The gentry is about the same height as the wealthier craftsmen. Also, what you said sounded like the difference in height between people now and then comes to malnutrition, and to my knowledge that simply cannot by supported. The aristocrats wouldn't be just a few centimeters above average, if that was the case, they would be towering giants.
I imagine it saturates, you can't become a giant today by eating 4kcal/day. And I think some of the growth stunting was caused by disease.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
On a population wide scale? Could you give some links to it?
... no, individual evidence from n95 wearers tested under controlled conditions, which is why it was phrased like that.
The proper way to do this thing is to publish all the steps necessary to reproduce the results, with input data so that anyone can actually attempt it themselves.
I agree that is much better, and think it should be ~ mandatory for all publicly funded research. I just strongly disagree that this is related to why people distrust experts, or even why some subfields of experts are constantly catastrophically wrong.
So we have raw data for 10 years ago, or something?
Specifically, slowness in adapting to modern conditions. Publishing all your data wasn't feasible before the internet, and government and sometimes academic research norms are still stuck in the 20th century.
No, I'm not. Most of academia relies on trust, rather than verification.
Materials scientists and chemists don't publish their raw data either! But those fields are, to a significant extent, more trustworthy than social science. And plenty of shoddy econ research is done on public data, but is worthless because what they do with it sucks.
We trust researchers to not pull dishonest tricks to get their papers published (either for it's own sake because of "publish or perish", or because they're pushing an agenda), and we trust the reviewers to ask hard questions about the research. At this point it is basically proven they do neither. Publishing input data would allow external verification, but it is purposely not done.
You can still just fake your data? Faking your data well in experimental fields isn't actually hard.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
It's the scientific consensus? This is a review on the topic.
In regard to your specific objection, a recent study found that those in higher social classes were taller: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8516076/
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
European farmers were not vegans, idk where you got this idea from.
Vegan? I said their diets relied on grain, and that they had many more health problems than modern people, as demonstrated by lower heights caused by stunted growth.
The US doesn't make anime, but USians watch anime, so they aren't poorer by your standard. I don't like the current state of western media, but that's not super relevant to the point.
The mayor of NYC blames it on immigration
Yeah, he's wrong, Eric Adams is twitter famous for saying a ton of funny contradictory incoherent things.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Ah yes, because those are the people who get criticized the most when people attack "the experts".
I mean, you all were criticizing the CPI (published by the BLS) and more broadly the economy, which clearly falls into the public portion of the financial system?
If memory serves that's because there was no data the mask mandates was based on, and the idea that vaccines prevented transmission was an outright lie. That's worse!
This a very confusing sentence. There was overwhelming data that n95 masks significantly reduced exposure to viral particles, and that cloth masks reduced exposure a bit. There was substantial data that n95 masks could prevent transmission of other viruses. There were plenty of existing studies about this, and while most of those studies didn't publish their data, the data wouldn't have helped you interpret the studies better, the flaws are in interpretation, methodology, etc, not private data. Mandating cloth masks was straightforwardly stupid. Mandating n95 masks or better masks might've worked, if rapid trials were run initially to make sure they actually reduced transmission, idk. That vaccines prevented transmission wasn't an outright lie, I believe the initial studies did show a reduction in transmission. I think people were genuinely incorrect and had poor processes for coming to the correct conclusion - which is still damnable if you're in power, because it's your duty to be correct, but it's not an outright lie. It's also arguable that transmission rates increased as the virus mutated. Also, the cochrane review that claimed masks don't prevent transmission ever was wrong, I think. https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-3486610/v1
We don't have access to the raw data, and we don't have access to the algorithm that produces the output.
We do have access to most of the algorithm that produces the output - the BLS publishes their methodology for the CPI with a lot of detail on their website. I think mostly the reason we don't have access to the raw data is bureaucratic slowness.
There was a similar story during COVID with a simulation used to argue for lockdowns, that no one got to see until after the lockdowns were in effect, end which ended up being a buggy clusterfuck, and even though they published the code, I think they never published the input data
I think you're very confused about the relevance of publishing the input data to the broader issues with experts being wrong. Yes, that study was terrible. The terribleness was in the code they published and the wy they interpreted it, not the input data.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
The 'financial system', and the other social systems, not so much.
I think stock markets, commodity markets, corporate and contract law, insurance, banking, accounting, and thousands of individual facets of modern economic practice and culture are technically complicated and quite important to the functioning of the modern economy? And they're definitely built and maintained by "experts". (Some of) the field of economics, too, is quite relevant to modern business, and also has a lot of experts.
Other social systems are important too! Courts / the law, for instance, are kind of a core case of "thing maintained by experts", they're the highest authority and last resort conflict-resolvers, and the entire system only works because lawyers and especially judges being inculcated into taking the law seriously by the last generation of judges and lawyers.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
There's a discord?
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Trans women are a lot more interested in men than cis men. I'm ... not entirely sure what the actual percentages of interest in cis men vs cis women are, wasn't able to find a survey, and I don't really expect the trans individuals i'm friends with's experiences to generalize at all.
Scott's claim, I think, brushes against a lot of the right ideas while also being mostly wrong, imo. Like, why would the discomfort be so narrowly focused on gender? I think that smart and self-driven people are naturally more vulnerable to - or more active explorers of - whatever tendencies the material and social circumstances create in humans. And I'm not really sure what to think of 'autism' in very smart people, is it really the same thing as autism in normal-iq people?
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
A lot of them are using it, to great effect. The flat piece of nanoscale-patterned silicon you're using to post, the network of private businesses and public law that makes up the 'financial system' that structures your economic activity, and a thousand other omnipresent social systems have been built by hundreds of thousands of those 'experts'. And they all work pretty well, and are complicated as hell! Even when you can intuitively tell something's wrong with one of them, that does not imply they're wrong or lying specifically about the first thing that comes to mind, e.g. inflation or how productive the economy is.
The reason people are using personal anecdotes is they are not given access to the same data the "experts" are, so any comparison between the two is inherently disingenuous from the start.
I strongly disagree? I'm strongly for making more data used for research public (as in, free to download from github or wherever), but, like, there wasn't any secret data that mask or vaccine advocates were making decisions off of that we didn't have access to. And there were a small minority of experts, people at Harvard or similar, who fought the covid consensus the entire time. Do you have an example in mind here?
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
@benjaminikuta is trivially correct here, though. Someone with a 'gender identity' of female is going to wear feminine clothing more, more likely to fuck guys, etc. I agree with you that the causal pathways for biological female vs trans female doing those things are different, but there are clearly characteristics that many trans women share with cis women and not with cis men.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
I mean, the rationalist community, or the programming community, or similar, have a ton more trans women than trans men, and a ton more men than women. How does one square this with the claim that trans women have the biological / psychological inclinations that women do?
I don't think socialization makes sense here. Because the differences are starker than other things that are more obviously socialized, like 'actually having a career in tech'. A randomly chosen rationalist is a lot more likely to be a trans woman than a random person employed as a programmer. A lot more employees of a FAANG are (biologically) female than 'authors of popular open source projects' are (biologically) female This is what you'd expect if socialization was pushing women to do things like 'code' more than they naturally* would, while smart weird men tend to transition and be into rationalism and coding more than usual.
* "Human nature" is socially contingent. Also, it's imo good to force women to code and do stem stuff a lot more than they would 'naturally'.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Uh, 400 years ago we were subsistence farmers. Which famously leads to malnutrition and stunted growth, as we can see with height rising in europe over the last centuries. People raised on non-organic lentils and meat are mostly substantially healthier than farmers who ate organic nongmo grain.
Entertainment is cheaper? Are the 2020s versions of Lord of the Rings equivalent to the 2000s? Are the 2010-20s versions of Star Wars equivalent to the previous ones?
Star Wars and LOTR are still available, and in fact cheaper. And we have anime now!
Does $1 million spent in real estate in SF or NYC give you the same quality of life than 20 years ago?
Yes which is bad but that has a specific identifiable cause (pervasive land use restrictions) rather than the economy being bad.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
The experts are wrong a lot. But, for almost everyone in the general population, and for many people here, your vague guesses and anecdotal impressions are a lot worse. It takes effort, discipline, and raw intelligence to do better! It's reasonable to not trust that everything's going great just because the economy numbers are up! But you shouldn't just jump from 'my costs feel higher than a few years ago' to 'clearly experts are wrong', dig deeper!
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
The 2S stands for two-spirit, a claimed historical version of being nonbinary / a third gender. The acronym "LGBTQIA2S+" was created by pro-lgbt people, as opposed to M/P, but in this case it's presumably used sarcastically.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
A related, broader question: Say I want the answer to the question "what's the best serious book/books about "? What's the best way to do that? Google works fine, is something better?
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Hmm. Intuitively, I do not think that'll get you much of the health benefits of frequent exercise. No straining muscles, no increased heart rate, no natural stresses on bones and connective tissue, etc. Just a guess.
In one sense you're right, but his implication is that different people have different (and arguably more or less correct) preferences about when to spend money, or personal discount rates, and that his personal discount rate is much lower than usual, in that he's willing to let it sit for a long time and enjoy it later.
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