July 22nd, 2008
Let me first clarify that the word genetic in genetic fallacy does not refer to DNA. It refers to genesis, to the time-ordered chain of causality which leads to an idea. I was first introduced to this fallacy by one of Yudowsky’s posts, which you can read for more information.
The genetic fallacy refers to the act of confusing the historical origins with the justifications for an idea. Yudowsky uses the example of the Kekule formula for benzene - just because Kekule first saw the structure in a dream does not mean it isn’t scientific, because that structure has been subsequently justified by experimental observables.
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It is unfashionable to be openly racist. Those who are racist must hide their motivations and find other reasons to justify their discriminatory behavior. Others, when they see through these ploys, accuse these people of racism.
Personally, I do not much care for making such accusations, because to do so would be to commit the genetic fallacy. If the openly declared reasons are weak, then the argument is weak - to assert that the idea is weak because it was motivated by racism is to appeal to the genetic fallacy, which is dishonest. Ideally, one should stick to attacking the reasons declared, and not be too easily drawn to speculation on intentions.
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July 16th, 2008
Larry Summers on the problem with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac:
What went wrong? The illusion that the companies were doing virtuous work made it impossible to build a political case for serious regulation. When there were social failures the companies always blamed their need to perform for the shareholders. When there were business failures it was always the result of their social obligations.
This is precisely the same type of danger that social entrepreneurs face.
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July 13th, 2008
Harper’s on alternative energy as the bubble which will take over from the housing bubble that is deflating. This is really believable to me, seeing as to how much press and attention has been spent on alternative energy despite the complete absence of any fundamental efficiency milestone. Both the Masdar effort in Abu Dhabi and McKinsey’s carbon supply curve (which doesn’t really emphasize alternative energy, but lives in the same space) come to mind.
Excerpt:
We have learned that the industry in any given bubble must support hundreds or thousands of separate firms financed by not billions but trillions of dollars in new securities that Wall Street will create and sell. Like housing in the late 1990s, this sector of the economy must already be formed and growing even as the previous bubble deflates. For those investing in that sector, legislation guaranteeing favorable tax treatment, along with other protections and advantages for investors, should already be in place or under review. Finally, the industry must be popular, its name on the lips of government policymakers and journalists. It should be familiar to those who watch television news or read newspapers.
There are a number of plausible candidates for the next bubble, but only a few meet all the criteria. Health care must expand to meet the needs of the aging baby boomers, but there is as yet no enabling government legislation to make way for a health-care bubble; the same holds true of the pharmaceutical industry, which could hyperinflate only if the Food and Drug Administration was gutted of its power. A second technology boom—under the rubric “Web 2.0”—is based on improvements to existing technology rather than any new discovery. The capital-intensive biotechnology industry will not inflate, as it requires too much specialized intelligence.
There is one industry that fits the bill: alternative energy, the development of more energy-efficient products, along with viable alternatives to oil, including wind, solar, and geothermal power, along with the use of nuclear energy to produce sustainable oil substitutes, such as liquefied hydrogen from water.
The article goes on to list evidence from the press and ongoing legislation.
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July 9th, 2008
Assume that you live in a culture that, for some reason or another, values having a male heir in the family. Families adopt the strategy of having children until the first male child is born. If the natural sex ratio is 1:1, what is the expected sex ratio in this culture?
It remains at 1:1. Here’s why. Each family has 1 boy. As for females, there is a 50% chance of having no girls, 25% chance of having 1 girl, 12.5% chance of having 2 girls, and so forth. So the average number of girls is (n-1)/2^n summed from n = 1 to infinity.
Therefore just following the strategy above does not change the sex ratio. In fact, it is possible to prove that no stopping strategy would change the sex ratio. Here’s how:
Read the rest of this entry »
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July 4th, 2008
Overcoming Bias: No Evolutions for Corporations or Nanodevices
I have made a serious conceptual mistake, adopting darwinian evolution as the default explanation for almost any generational process for the past ten years. The requirements for darwinian evolution to be effective, as enumerated by Eliezer:
- Entities that replicate
- Substantial variation in their characteristics
- Substantial variation in their reproduction
- Persistent correlation between the characteristics and reproduction
- High-fidelity long-range heritability in characteristics
- Frequent birth of a significant fraction of the breeding population
- And all this remains true through many iterations
are not that easily satisfied.
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June 29th, 2008
It is easy to argue that objects fall at the same speed in vacuum, regardless of mass. Just imagine two identical uniform cubic bricks dropping from a height. Since the two bricks are identical, they drop at the same speed. Now imagine placing the starting bricks closer and closer to each other, until eventually they join up. The resulting brick has twice the mass of the originals, and assuming there is not discontinuity in behaviour, it should also fall at the same rate.
Similarly, imagine an economy with four people in it - a baker, a shoemaker, a farmer and a blacksmith. The four people sell each other goods at prices that result in no savings or loans. Now imagine another world, except it only has 3 people, and the shoemaker and the blacksmith are now the same person - i.e. the shoemaker/blacksmith makes in total the same things as the two people in the first world, and consumes in total the same amount as the two people in the first world. This second situation does not change the standard of living of the baker and the farmer at all, but assuming equal incomes in the first world, income inequality is higher in the second world.
If I am the farmer, should I care that I live in the second world instead of the first?
wikipedia
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June 28th, 2008
I used this travel agency called Feti Travel for my trip Boston to Japan to Singapore to New York. Had agreed to pay $1840, and just received the ticket today with a note from my travel agent Lily Wang explaining how the price was actually $1740. The original price was already the lowest that I found, so this is really exceptional. Turnaround time was really quick, and the service is excellent too. Highly recommended.
http://fetitravel.com/
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June 23rd, 2008
article
Another article, like the one about Japanese engineers, where worrying is done about competing with well-paying finance and consulting jobs. Instead of engineers, the sector of focus here is public service.
But for many Harvard seniors, corporate work represents security. “It’s scary not knowing what you’re going to do,” said Chen Xie, who is joining McKinsey. “A lot of people think, ‘Here’s a plan, let’s just do the safe thing.’ ”
I think young people underestimate the risk that they are capable of withstanding, and at the same time also underestimate the risks that they are taking, so the two generally cancel out. The desire for expression, coupled with a low level of risk adversity, drives investment in uniqueness, which pays off pretty well for society as a whole since diversity has all sorts of positive externalities.
But ultimately those benefits ARE externalities, so even though an activity is productive and “meaningful”, its benefit is not fully captured by the individual. Such channels then get shut down when people do better accounting. Society loses diversity, gets closer to monoculture and as a whole becomes more fragile.
Or does it? Higher education is subversive, in that you rarely get what you are asking for. In that sense, people usually do the right thing for the wrong reasons. In this case, the scenario above says they are doing perhaps a less correct thing, but for the right reason! As far as honesty in advertising goes, cash promises are much more testable and more reliable than vague pictures of “making an impact” and “contributing to humanity”. Those other things almost always require a paternalistic attitude, or faith in some untestable belief system about how the world works. I say it’s the prevalence of beliefs uncoupled with empirical reality that make the world a fragile place.
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June 21st, 2008
LongBets.com
article
The intention of Long Bets is to encourage responsibility in prediction-making (by keeping a public roster of predictions), to encourage long-term thinking (by offering an opportunity to shape a long-term bet), and to sharpen the logic of forecasting (by recording the logic of predictions and bets.)
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Buffett’s bet is an ideal Long Bet. It makes a huge difference to anyone who invests in stocks (as do a large percentage of the US, either directly or indirectly) whether a boring index fund yields as much as fancy private hedge funds. The answer either way would be a huge influential signal. When economist Julian Simon won the famous bet against biologist Paul Ehrlich (Simon betting that the long-term prices of commodity minerals would decrease over ten years; Ehrlich betting they would increase), his win essentially eradicated the argument of resource scarcity from the environmental debate. Environmentalists then shifted their concern to the many other issues needed to foster a healthy environment.
Wikipedia has an interesting article on that last wager mentioned, including analysis on why Ehrlich lost. The main gist of the analysis is that the bet was in economic terms and scarcity leads to price changes only indirectly. There is no question that resources become scarce, but we really sit on deep pools of long-term elasticity, where any long term increase in price pressure pulls miracles out of the pool. For example, public discussion about oil scarcity today is phrased in strange terms - people generally do not mention the vast amounts of more expensive oil which remain untapped, and “oil running out” actually means “oil at today’s prices running out”.
A biologist positing a theory which violates a law of physics is just plain wrong, because the rules of physics exist at a higher level of rigor. Granted this is a rare situation, because biological phenomena are usually too hard to capture in physics terminology, but when it does happen the victor is certain.
The followup: just how fundamental is economics? Sure, it may be based on expired physics concepts, and sometimes takes its assumptions way too seriously, but when compared to most populist ideas like “eating less meat because it is better for the environment”, if conflicts between the two arise, I’d lean heavily towards the economics approach. In this case, I will agree with efforts to price in the externalities of meat, but not be willing to take individual action otherwise since I really enjoy eating meat and highly doubt that it is so bad for the environment that abstaining would be profitable overall.
HT: MR
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June 20th, 2008
I decided to put my old textbooks on amazon today. One sold less than an hour later, McQuarrie’s Physical Chemistry. I bought this book fall 2000 for the first physical chemistry class at UC Irvine - it was my first textbook in quantum mechanics. I remember scribing partition functions from the book into MathCAD to calculate the heat capacity of carbon monoxide, learning linear algebra from the math chapters, pondering for hours about the variational principle, gaining an aversion to perturbation theory, all based on material from this one book. I’ve had the book for eight years, and during the last five it’s sat on my shelf largely ignored. Now it’s gone.
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