nhaliday + generalization   67

Carryover vs “Far Transfer” | West Hunter
It used to be thought that studying certain subjects ( like Latin) made you better at learning others, or smarter generally – “They supple the mind, sir; they render it pliant and receptive.” This doesn’t appear to be the case, certainly not for Latin – although it seems to me that math can help you understand other subjects?

A different question: to what extent does being (some flavor of) crazy, or crazy about one subject, or being really painfully wrong about some subject, predict how likely you are to be wrong on other things? We know that someone can be strange, downright crazy, or utterly unsound on some topic and still do good mathematics… but that is not the same as saying that there is no statistical tendency for people on crazy-train A to be more likely to be wrong about subject B. What do the data suggest?
west-hunter  scitariat  discussion  reflection  learning  thinking  neurons  intelligence  generalization  math  abstraction  truth  prudence  correlation  psychology  cog-psych  education  quotes  aphorism  foreign-lang  mediterranean  the-classics  contiguity-proximity 
6 weeks ago by nhaliday
Measures of cultural distance - Marginal REVOLUTION
A new paper with many authors — most prominently Joseph Henrich — tries to measure the cultural gaps between different countries.  I am reproducing a few of their results (see pp.36-37 for more), noting that higher numbers represent higher gaps:


Overall the numbers show much greater cultural distance of other nations from China than from the United States, a significant and under-discussed problem for China. For instance, the United States is about as culturally close to Hong Kong as China is.

[ed.: Japan is closer to the US than China. Interesting. I'd like to see some data based on something other than self-reported values though.]

the study:
Beyond WEIRD Psychology: Measuring and Mapping Scales of Cultural and Psychological Distance: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3259613
We present a new tool that provides a means to measure the psychological and cultural distance between two societies and create a distance scale with any population as the point of comparison. Since psychological data is dominated by samples drawn from the United States or other WEIRD nations, this tool provides a “WEIRD scale” to assist researchers in systematically extending the existing database of psychological phenomena to more diverse and globally representative samples. As the extreme WEIRDness of the literature begins to dissolve, the tool will become more useful for designing, planning, and justifying a wide range of comparative psychological projects. We have made our code available and developed an online application for creating other scales (including the “Sino scale” also presented in this paper). We discuss regional diversity within nations showing the relative homogeneity of the United States. Finally, we use these scales to predict various psychological outcomes.
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7 weeks ago by nhaliday
Why is Google Translate so bad for Latin? A longish answer. : latin
> All it does its correlate sequences of up to five consecutive words in texts that have been manually translated into two or more languages.
That sort of system ought to be perfect for a dead language, though. Dump all the Cicero, Livy, Lucretius, Vergil, and Oxford Latin Course into a database and we're good.

We're not exactly inundated with brand new Latin to translate.
What makes you think that the Google folks haven't done so and used that to create the language models they use?
> That sort of system ought to be perfect for a dead language, though.
Perhaps. But it will be bad at translating novel English sentences to Latin.
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june 2019 by nhaliday
One week of bugs








For more on my perspective on testing, there's this.

Everything's broken and nobody's upset: https://www.hanselman.com/blog/EverythingsBrokenAndNobodysUpset.aspx






This combination is clearly a recipe for disaster.



Preventing the Collapse of Civilization [video]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19945452
- Jonathan Blow

NB: DevGAMM is a game industry conference

- hardware driving most gains, not software
- *list of bugs he's encountered recently*:
- knowledge of trivia becomes more than general, deep knowledge
may 2019 by nhaliday
OSF | Near and Far Transfer in Cognitive Training: A Second-Order Meta- Analysis
In Models 1 (k = 99) and 2 (k = 119), we investigated the impact of working-memory training on near-transfer (i.e., memory) and far-transfer (e.g., reasoning, speed, and language) measures, respectively, and whether it is mediated by the type of population. Model 3 (k = 233) extended Model 2 by adding six meta-analyses assessing the far-transfer effects of other cognitive-training programs (video-games, music, chess, and exergames). Model 1 showed that working-memory training does induce near transfer, and that the size of this effect is moderated by the type of population. By contrast, Models 2 and 3 highlighted that far-transfer effects are small or null.
study  preprint  psychology  cog-psych  intelligence  generalization  dimensionality  psych-architecture  intervention  enhancement  practice 
february 2019 by nhaliday
Which benchmark programs are faster? | Computer Language Benchmarks Game
includes Scala

very outdated but more languages: https://web.archive.org/web/20110401183159/http://shootout.alioth.debian.org:80/

OCaml seems to offer the best tradeoff of performance vs parsimony (Haskell not so much :/)
old official: https://web.archive.org/web/20130731195711/http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/code-used-time-used-shapes.php
Haskell does better here

other PL benchmarks:
BF 2.0:
Kotlin, C++ (GCC), Rust < Nim, D (GDC,LDC), Go, MLton < Crystal, Go (GCC), C# (.NET Core), Scala, Java, OCaml < D (DMD) < C# Mono < Javascript V8 < F# Mono, Javascript Node, Haskell (MArray) << LuaJIT << Python PyPy < Haskell < Racket <<< Python << Python3
C++ (GCC) << Crystal < Rust, D (GDC), Go (GCC) < Nim, D (LDC) << C# (.NET Core) < MLton << Kotlin << OCaml << Scala, Java << D (DMD) << Go << C# Mono << Javascript Node << Haskell (MArray) << LuaJIT < Python PyPy << F# Mono <<< Racket
C++, Rust, Java w/ custom non-stdlib code < Python PyPy < C# .Net Core < Javscript Node < Go, unoptimized C++ (no -O2) << PHP << Java << Python3 << Python
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december 2018 by nhaliday
The Hanson-Yudkowsky AI-Foom Debate - Machine Intelligence Research Institute
How Deviant Recent AI Progress Lumpiness?: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2018/03/how-deviant-recent-ai-progress-lumpiness.html
I seem to disagree with most people working on artificial intelligence (AI) risk. While with them I expect rapid change once AI is powerful enough to replace most all human workers, I expect this change to be spread across the world, not concentrated in one main localized AI system. The efforts of AI risk folks to design AI systems whose values won’t drift might stop global AI value drift if there is just one main AI system. But doing so in a world of many AI systems at similar abilities levels requires strong global governance of AI systems, which is a tall order anytime soon. Their continued focus on preventing single system drift suggests that they expect a single main AI system.

The main reason that I understand to expect relatively local AI progress is if AI progress is unusually lumpy, i.e., arriving in unusually fewer larger packages rather than in the usual many smaller packages. If one AI team finds a big lump, it might jump way ahead of the other teams.

However, we have a vast literature on the lumpiness of research and innovation more generally, which clearly says that usually most of the value in innovation is found in many small innovations. We have also so far seen this in computer science (CS) and AI. Even if there have been historical examples where much value was found in particular big innovations, such as nuclear weapons or the origin of humans.

Apparently many people associated with AI risk, including the star machine learning (ML) researchers that they often idolize, find it intuitively plausible that AI and ML progress is exceptionally lumpy. Such researchers often say, “My project is ‘huge’, and will soon do it all!” A decade ago my ex-co-blogger Eliezer Yudkowsky and I argued here on this blog about our differing estimates of AI progress lumpiness. He recently offered Alpha Go Zero as evidence of AI lumpiness:


In this post, let me give another example (beyond two big lumps in a row) of what could change my mind. I offer a clear observable indicator, for which data should have available now: deviant citation lumpiness in recent ML research. One standard measure of research impact is citations; bigger lumpier developments gain more citations that smaller ones. And it turns out that the lumpiness of citations is remarkably constant across research fields! See this March 3 paper in Science:

I Still Don’t Get Foom: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2014/07/30855.html
All of which makes it look like I’m the one with the problem; everyone else gets it. Even so, I’m gonna try to explain my problem again, in the hope that someone can explain where I’m going wrong. Here goes.

“Intelligence” just means an ability to do mental/calculation tasks, averaged over many tasks. I’ve always found it plausible that machines will continue to do more kinds of mental tasks better, and eventually be better at pretty much all of them. But what I’ve found it hard to accept is a “local explosion.” This is where a single machine, built by a single project using only a tiny fraction of world resources, goes in a short time (e.g., weeks) from being so weak that it is usually beat by a single human with the usual tools, to so powerful that it easily takes over the entire world. Yes, smarter machines may greatly increase overall economic growth rates, and yes such growth may be uneven. But this degree of unevenness seems implausibly extreme. Let me explain.

If we count by economic value, humans now do most of the mental tasks worth doing. Evolution has given us a brain chock-full of useful well-honed modules. And the fact that most mental tasks require the use of many modules is enough to explain why some of us are smarter than others. (There’d be a common “g” factor in task performance even with independent module variation.) Our modules aren’t that different from those of other primates, but because ours are different enough to allow lots of cultural transmission of innovation, we’ve out-competed other primates handily.

We’ve had computers for over seventy years, and have slowly build up libraries of software modules for them. Like brains, computers do mental tasks by combining modules. An important mental task is software innovation: improving these modules, adding new ones, and finding new ways to combine them. Ideas for new modules are sometimes inspired by the modules we see in our brains. When an innovation team finds an improvement, they usually sell access to it, which gives them resources for new projects, and lets others take advantage of their innovation.


In Bostrom’s graph above the line for an initially small project and system has a much higher slope, which means that it becomes in a short time vastly better at software innovation. Better than the entire rest of the world put together. And my key question is: how could it plausibly do that? Since the rest of the world is already trying the best it can to usefully innovate, and to abstract to promote such innovation, what exactly gives one small project such a huge advantage to let it innovate so much faster?


In fact, most software innovation seems to be driven by hardware advances, instead of innovator creativity. Apparently, good ideas are available but must usually wait until hardware is cheap enough to support them.

Yes, sometimes architectural choices have wider impacts. But I was an artificial intelligence researcher for nine years, ending twenty years ago, and I never saw an architecture choice make a huge difference, relative to other reasonable architecture choices. For most big systems, overall architecture matters a lot less than getting lots of detail right. Researchers have long wandered the space of architectures, mostly rediscovering variations on what others found before.

Some hope that a small project could be much better at innovation because it specializes in that topic, and much better understands new theoretical insights into the basic nature of innovation or intelligence. But I don’t think those are actually topics where one can usefully specialize much, or where we’ll find much useful new theory. To be much better at learning, the project would instead have to be much better at hundreds of specific kinds of learning. Which is very hard to do in a small project.

What does Bostrom say? Alas, not much. He distinguishes several advantages of digital over human minds, but all software shares those advantages. Bostrom also distinguishes five paths: better software, brain emulation (i.e., ems), biological enhancement of humans, brain-computer interfaces, and better human organizations. He doesn’t think interfaces would work, and sees organizations and better biology as only playing supporting roles.


Similarly, while you might imagine someday standing in awe in front of a super intelligence that embodies all the power of a new age, superintelligence just isn’t the sort of thing that one project could invent. As “intelligence” is just the name we give to being better at many mental tasks by using many good mental modules, there’s no one place to improve it. So I can’t see a plausible way one project could increase its intelligence vastly faster than could the rest of the world.

Takeoff speeds: https://sideways-view.com/2018/02/24/takeoff-speeds/
Futurists have argued for years about whether the development of AGI will look more like a breakthrough within a small group (“fast takeoff”), or a continuous acceleration distributed across the broader economy or a large firm (“slow takeoff”).

I currently think a slow takeoff is significantly more likely. This post explains some of my reasoning and why I think it matters. Mostly the post lists arguments I often hear for a fast takeoff and explains why I don’t find them compelling.

(Note: this is not a post about whether an intelligence explosion will occur. That seems very likely to me. Quantitatively I expect it to go along these lines. So e.g. while I disagree with many of the claims and assumptions in Intelligence Explosion Microeconomics, I don’t disagree with the central thesis or with most of the arguments.)
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april 2018 by nhaliday
Information Processing: Mathematical Theory of Deep Neural Networks (Princeton workshop)
"Recently, long-past-due theoretical results have begun to emerge. These results, and those that will follow in their wake, will begin to shed light on the properties of large, adaptive, distributed learning architectures, and stand to revolutionize how computer science and neuroscience understand these systems."
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january 2018 by nhaliday
Genome-wide association analysis identifies 30 new susceptibility loci for schizophrenia | Nature Genetics
We conducted a genome-wide association study (GWAS) with replication in 36,180 Chinese individuals and performed further transancestry meta-analyses with data from the Psychiatry Genomics Consortium (PGC2). Approximately 95% of the genome-wide significant (GWS) index alleles (or their proxies) from the PGC2 study were overrepresented in Chinese schizophrenia cases, including ∼50% that achieved nominal significance and ∼75% that continued to be GWS in the transancestry analysis. The Chinese-only analysis identified seven GWS loci; three of these also were GWS in the transancestry analyses, which identified 109 GWS loci, thus yielding a total of 113 GWS loci (30 novel) in at least one of these analyses. We observed improvements in the fine-mapping resolution at many susceptibility loci. Our results provide several lines of evidence supporting candidate genes at many loci and highlight some pathways for further research. Together, our findings provide novel insight into the genetic architecture and biological etiology of schizophrenia.
study  biodet  behavioral-gen  psychiatry  disease  GWAS  china  asia  race  generalization  genetics  replication 
november 2017 by nhaliday
The weirdest people in the world?
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november 2017 by nhaliday
New Theory Cracks Open the Black Box of Deep Learning | Quanta Magazine

sounds like he's just talking about autoencoders?
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september 2017 by nhaliday
trees are harlequins, words are harlequins — bayes: a kinda-sorta masterpost
lol, gwern: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/6ghsxf/biweekly_rational_feed/diqr0rq/
> What sort of person thinks “oh yeah, my beliefs about these coefficients correspond to a Gaussian with variance 2.5″? And what if I do cross-validation, like I always do, and find that variance 200 works better for the problem? Was the other person wrong? But how could they have known?
> ...Even ignoring the mode vs. mean issue, I have never met anyone who could tell whether their beliefs were normally distributed vs. Laplace distributed. Have you?
I must have spent too much time in Bayesland because both those strike me as very easy and I often think them! My beliefs usually are Laplace distributed when it comes to things like genetics (it makes me very sad to see GWASes with flat priors), and my Gaussian coefficients are actually a variance of 0.70 (assuming standardized variables w.l.o.g.) as is consistent with field-wide meta-analyses indicating that d>1 is pretty rare.
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august 2017 by nhaliday
Econometric Modeling as Junk Science
The Credibility Revolution in Empirical Economics: How Better Research Design Is Taking the Con out of Econometrics: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.24.2.3

On data, experiments, incentives and highly unconvincing research – papers and hot beverages: https://papersandhotbeverages.wordpress.com/2015/10/31/on-data-experiments-incentives-and-highly-unconvincing-research/
In my view, it has just to do with the fact that academia is a peer monitored organization. In the case of (bad) data collection papers, issues related to measurement are typically boring. They are relegated to appendices, no one really has an incentive to monitor it seriously. The problem is similar in formal theory: no one really goes through the algebra in detail, but it is in principle feasible to do it, and, actually, sometimes these errors are detected. If discussing the algebra of a proof is almost unthinkable in a seminar, going into the details of data collection, measurement and aggregation is not only hard to imagine, but probably intrinsically infeasible.

Something different happens for the experimentalist people. As I was saying, I feel we have come to a point in which many papers are evaluated based on the cleverness and originality of the research design (“Using the World Cup qualifiers as an instrument for patriotism!? Woaw! how cool/crazy is that! I wish I had had that idea”). The sexiness of the identification strategy has too often become a goal in itself. When your peers monitor you paying more attention to the originality of the identification strategy than to the research question, you probably have an incentive to mine reality for ever crazier discontinuities. It is true methodologists have been criticized in the past for analogous reasons, such as being guided by the desire to increase mathematical complexity without a clear benefit. But, if you work with pure formal theory or statistical theory, your work is not meant to immediately answer question about the real world, but instead to serve other researchers in their quest. This is something that can, in general, not be said of applied CI work.

This post should have been entitled “Zombies who only think of their next cool IV fix”
massive lust for quasi-natural experiments, regression discontinuities
barely matters if the effects are not all that big
I suppose even the best of things must reach their decadent phase; methodological innov. to manias……

Following this "collapse of small-N social psych results" business, where do I predict econ will collapse? I see two main contenders.
One is lab studies. I dallied with these a few years ago in a Kenya lab. We ran several pilots of N=200 to figure out the best way to treat
and to measure the outcome. Every pilot gave us a different stat sig result. I could have written six papers concluding different things.
I gave up more skeptical of these lab studies than ever before. The second contender is the long run impacts literature in economic history
We should be very suspicious since we never see a paper showing that a historical event had no effect on modern day institutions or dvpt.
On the one hand I find these studies fun, fascinating, and probably true in a broad sense. They usually reinforce a widely believed history
argument with interesting data and a cute empirical strategy. But I don't think anyone believes the standard errors. There's probably a HUGE
problem of nonsignificant results staying in the file drawer. Also, there are probably data problems that don't get revealed, as we see with
the recent Piketty paper (http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/10/pikettys-data-reliable.html). So I take that literature with a vat of salt, even if I enjoy and admire the works
I used to think field experiments would show little consistency in results across place. That external validity concerns would be fatal.
In fact the results across different samples and places have proven surprisingly similar across places, and added a lot to general theory
Last, I've come to believe there is no such thing as a useful instrumental variable. The ones that actually meet the exclusion restriction
are so weird & particular that the local treatment effect is likely far different from the average treatment effect in non-transparent ways.
Most of the other IVs don't plausibly meet the e clue ion restriction. I mean, we should be concerned when the IV estimate is always 10x
larger than the OLS coefficient. This I find myself much more persuaded by simple natural experiments that use OLS, diff in diff, or
discontinuities, alongside randomized trials.

What do others think are the cliffs in economics?
PS All of these apply to political science too. Though I have a special extra target in poli sci: survey experiments! A few are good. I like
Dan Corstange's work. But it feels like 60% of dissertations these days are experiments buried in a survey instrument that measure small
changes in response. These at least have large N. But these are just uncontrolled labs, with negligible external validity in my mind.
The good ones are good. This method has its uses. But it's being way over-applied. More people have to make big and risky investments in big
natural and field experiments. Time to raise expectations and ambitions. This expectation bar, not technical ability, is the big advantage
economists have over political scientists when they compete in the same space.
(Ok. So are there any friends and colleagues I haven't insulted this morning? Let me know and I'll try my best to fix it with a screed)

Most papers that employ Differences-in-Differences estimation (DD) use many years of data and focus on serially correlated outcomes but ignore that the resulting standard errors are inconsistent. To illustrate the severity of this issue, we randomly generate placebo laws in state-level data on female wages from the Current Population Survey. For each law, we use OLS to compute the DD estimate of its “effect” as well as the standard error of this estimate. These conventional DD standard errors severely understate the standard deviation of the estimators: we find an “effect” significant at the 5 percent level for up to 45 percent of the placebo interventions. We use Monte Carlo simulations to investigate how well existing methods help solve this problem. Econometric corrections that place a specific parametric form on the time-series process do not perform well. Bootstrap (taking into account the auto-correlation of the data) works well when the number of states is large enough. Two corrections based on asymptotic approximation of the variance-covariance matrix work well for moderate numbers of states and one correction that collapses the time series information into a “pre” and “post” period and explicitly takes into account the effective sample size works well even for small numbers of states.

‘METRICS MONDAY: 2SLS–CHRONICLE OF A DEATH FORETOLD: http://marcfbellemare.com/wordpress/12733
As it turns out, Young finds that
1. Conventional tests tend to overreject the null hypothesis that the 2SLS coefficient is equal to zero.
3. The 99-percent confidence intervals (CIs) of those 2SLS estimates include the OLS point estimate over 90 of the time. They include the full OLS 99-percent CI over 75 percent of the time.
4. 2SLS estimates are extremely sensitive to outliers. Removing simply one outlying cluster or observation, almost half of 2SLS results become insignificant. Things get worse when removing two outlying clusters or observations, as over 60 percent of 2SLS results then become insignificant.
5. Using a Durbin-Wu-Hausman test, less than 15 percent of regressions can reject the null that OLS estimates are unbiased at the 1-percent level.
6. 2SLS has considerably higher mean squared error than OLS.
7. In one third to one half of published results, the null that the IVs are totally irrelevant cannot be rejected, and so the correlation between the endogenous variable(s) and the IVs is due to finite sample correlation between them.
8. Finally, fewer than 10 percent of 2SLS estimates reject instrument irrelevance and the absence of OLS bias at the 1-percent level using a Durbin-Wu-Hausman test. It gets much worse–fewer than 5 percent–if you add in the requirement that the 2SLS CI that excludes the OLS estimate.

Methods Matter: P-Hacking and Causal Inference in Economics*: http://ftp.iza.org/dp11796.pdf
Applying multiple methods to 13,440 hypothesis tests reported in 25 top economics journals in 2015, we show that selective publication and p-hacking is a substantial problem in research employing DID and (in particular) IV. RCT and RDD are much less problematic. Almost 25% of claims of marginally significant results in IV papers are misleading.

Ever since I learned social science is completely fake, I've had a lot more time to do stuff that matters, like deadlifting and reading about Mediterranean haplogroups
Wait, so, from fakest to realest IV>DD>RCT>RDD? That totally matches my impression.

Great (not completely new but still good to have it in one place) discussion of RCTs and inference in economics by Deaton, my favorite sentences (more general than just about RCT) below
Randomization in the tropics revisited: a theme and eleven variations: https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/deaton/files/deaton_randomization_revisited_v3_2019.pdf
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june 2017 by nhaliday
Validation is a Galilean enterprise
We contend that Frey's analyses actually have little bearing on the external validity of the PGG. Evidence from recent experiments using modified versions of the PGG and stringent comprehension checks indicate that individual differences in people's tendencies to contribute to the public good are better explained by individual differences in participants' comprehension of the game's payoff structure than by individual differences in cooperativeness (Burton-Chellew, El Mouden, & West, 2016). For example, only free riders reliably understand right away that complete defection maximizes one's own payoff, regardless of how much other participants contribute. This difference in comprehension alone explains the so-called free riders' low PGG contributions. These recent results also provide a new interpretation of why conditional cooperators often contribute generously in early rounds, and then less in later rounds (Fischbacher et al., 2001). Fischbacher et al. (2001) attribute the relatively high contributions in the early rounds to cooperativeness and the subsequent decline in contributions to conditional cooperators' frustration with free riders. In reality, the decline in cooperation observed over the course of PGGs occurs because so-called conditional cooperators initially believe that their payoff-maximizing decision depends on whether others contribute, but eventually learn that contributing never benefits the contributor (Burton-Chellew, Nax, & West, 2015). Because contributions in the PGG do not actually reflect cooperativeness, there is no real-world cooperative setting to which inferences about contributions in the PGG can generalize.
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june 2017 by nhaliday
Genomic analysis of family data reveals additional genetic effects on intelligence and personality | bioRxiv
Using Extended Genealogy to Estimate Components of Heritability for 23 Quantitative and Dichotomous Traits: http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1003520
Pedigree- and SNP-Associated Genetics and Recent Environment are the Major Contributors to Anthropometric and Cardiometabolic Trait Variation: http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1005804

Missing Heritability – found?: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2017/02/09/missing-heritability-found/
There is an interesting new paper out on genetics and IQ. The claim is that they have found the missing heritability – in rare variants, generally different in each family.

Some of the variants, the ones we find with GWAS, are fairly common and fitness-neutral: the variant that slightly increases IQ confers the same fitness (or very close to the same) as the one that slightly decreases IQ – presumably because of other effects it has. If this weren’t the case, it would be impossible for both of the variants to remain common.

The rare variants that affect IQ will generally decrease IQ – and since pleiotropy is the norm, usually they’ll be deleterious in other ways as well. Genetic load.

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2017/06/06/happy-families-are-all-alike-every-unhappy-family-is-unhappy-in-its-own-way/


see also comment at: https://pinboard.in/u:nhaliday/b:a6ab4034b0d0

So the big implication here is that it's better than I had dared hope - like Yang/Visscher/Hsu have argued, the old GCTA estimate of ~0.3 is indeed a rather loose lower bound on additive genetic variants, and the rest of the missing heritability is just the relatively uncommon additive variants (ie <1% frequency), and so, like Yang demonstrated with height, using much more comprehensive imputation of SNP scores or using whole-genomes will be able to explain almost all of the genetic contribution. In other words, with better imputation panels, we can go back and squeeze out better polygenic scores from old GWASes, new GWASes will be able to reach and break the 0.3 upper bound, and eventually we can feasibly predict 0.5-0.8. Between the expanding sample sizes from biobanks, the still-falling price of whole genomes, the gradual development of better regression methods (informative priors, biological annotation information, networks, genetic correlations), and better imputation, the future of GWAS polygenic scores is bright. Which obviously will be extremely helpful for embryo selection/genome synthesis.

The argument that this supports mutation-selection balance is weaker but plausible. I hope that it's true, because if that's why there is so much genetic variation in intelligence, then that strongly encourages genetic engineering - there is no good reason or Chesterton fence for intelligence variants being non-fixed, it's just that evolution is too slow to purge the constantly-accumulating bad variants. And we can do better.

The surprising implications of familial association in disease risk: https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.00014
As Greg Cochran has pointed out, this probably isn’t going to work. There are a few genes like BRCA1 (which makes you more likely to get breast and ovarian cancer) that we can detect and might affect treatment, but an awful lot of disease turns out to be just the result of random chance and deleterious mutation. This means that you can’t easily tailor disease treatment to people’s genes, because everybody is fucked up in their own special way. If Johnny is schizophrenic because of 100 random errors in the genes that code for his neurons, and Jack is schizophrenic because of 100 other random errors, there’s very little way to test a drug to work for either of them- they’re the only one in the world, most likely, with that specific pattern of errors. This is, presumably why the incidence of schizophrenia and autism rises in populations when dads get older- more random errors in sperm formation mean more random errors in the baby’s genes, and more things that go wrong down the line.

The looming crisis in human genetics: http://www.economist.com/node/14742737
Some awkward news ahead
- Geoffrey Miller


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june 2017 by nhaliday
- the genetic book of the dead [Dawkins]
- complementarity [Frank Wilczek]
- relative information
- effective theory [Lisa Randall]
- affordances [Dennett]
- spontaneous symmetry breaking
- relatedly, equipoise [Nicholas Christakis]
- case-based reasoning
- population reasoning (eg, common law)
- criticality [Cesar Hidalgo]
- Haldan's law of the right size (!SCALE!)
- polygenic scores
- non-ergodic
- ansatz
- state [Aaronson]: http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3075
- transfer learning
- effect size
- satisficing
- scaling
- the breeder's equation [Greg Cochran]
- impedance matching

- reciprocal altruism
- life history [Plomin]
- intellectual honesty [Sam Harris]
- coalitional instinct (interesting claim: building coalitions around "rationality" actually makes it more difficult to update on new evidence as it makes you look like a bad person, eg, the Cathedral)
basically same: https://twitter.com/ortoiseortoise/status/903682354367143936

more: https://www.edge.org/conversation/john_tooby-coalitional-instincts

interesting timing. how woke is this dude?
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may 2017 by nhaliday
Faces in the Clouds | West Hunter
This was a typical Iraq story: somehow, we had developed an approach to intelligence that reliably produced fantastically wrong answers, at vast expense. What so special about Iraq? Nothing, probably – except that we acquired ground truth.

Those weren’t leads, any more than there are really faces in the clouds. They were excuses to sell articles, raise money, and finally one extra argument in favor of a pointless war. Without a hard fact or two, it’s all vapor, useless.

Our tactical intelligence was fine in the Gulf War, but that doesn’t mean that the military, or worse yet the people who make and influence decisions had any sense, then or now.

For example, I have long had an amateur interest in these things, and I got the impression, in the summer of 1990, that Saddam Hussein was about to invade Kuwait. I was telling everyone at work that Saddam was about to invade, till they got bored with it. This was about two weeks before it actually happened. I remember thinking about making a few investments based on that possible event, but never got around to, partly because I was really sleepy, since we had a month-old baby girl at home.

As I recall, the “threat officer” at the CIA warned about this, but since the higher-ups ignored him, his being correct embarrassed them, so he was demoted.

The tactical situation was as favorable as it ever gets, and most of it was known. We had near-perfect intelligence:: satellite recon, JSTARS, etc Complete air domination, everything from Warthogs to F-15s. . Months to get ready. A huge qualitative weapons superiority. For example, our tanks outranged theirs by about a factor of two, had computer-controlled aiming, better armor, infrared sights, etc etc etc etc. I counted something like 13 separate war-winning advantages at the time, and that count was obviously incomplete.. And one more: Arabs make terrible soldiers, generally, and Iraqis were among the worst.

But I think that most of the decisionmakers didn’t realize how easy it would be – at all – and I’ve never seen any sign that Colin Powell did either. He’s a “C” student type – not smart. Schwartzkopf may have understood what was going on: for all I know he was another Manstein, but you can’t show how good you are when you beat a patzer.

For me it was a hobby – I was doing adaptive optics at the time in Colorado Springs. All I knew about particular military moves was from the newspapers, but my reasoning went like this:

A. Kuwait had a lot of oil. Worth stealing, if you could get away with it.

B. Kuwait was militarily impotent and had no defense treaty with anyone. Most people found Kuwaitis annoying.

C. Iraq owed Kuwait something like 30 billion dollars, and was generally deep in debt due to the long conflict with Iran

D. I figured that there was a fair chance that the Iraqi accusations of Kuwaiti slant drilling were true

E. There were widely reported Iraqi troop movements towards Kuwait

F. Most important was my evaluation of Saddam, from watching the long war with Iran. I thought that Saddam was a particular combination of cocky and stupid, the sort of guy to do something like this. At the time I did not know about April Glaspie’s, shall we say, poorly chosen comments.
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april 2017 by nhaliday
Educational Romanticism & Economic Development | pseudoerasmus


Did Nations that Boosted Education Grow Faster?: http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/10/did_nations_tha.html
On average, no relationship. The trendline points down slightly, but for the time being let's just call it a draw. It's a well-known fact that countries that started the 1960's with high education levels grew faster (example), but this graph is about something different. This graph shows that countries that increased their education levels did not grow faster.

Where has all the education gone?: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=




The Case Against Education: What's Taking So Long, Bryan Caplan: http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2015/03/the_case_agains_9.html

The World Might Be Better Off Without College for Everyone: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/01/whats-college-good-for/546590/
Students don't seem to be getting much out of higher education.
- Bryan Caplan

College: Capital or Signal?: http://www.economicmanblog.com/2017/02/25/college-capital-or-signal/
After his review of the literature, Caplan concludes that roughly 80% of the earnings effect from college comes from signalling, with only 20% the result of skill building. Put this together with his earlier observations about the private returns to college education, along with its exploding cost, and Caplan thinks that the social returns are negative. The policy implications of this will come as very bitter medicine for friends of Bernie Sanders.

Doubting the Null Hypothesis: http://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/doubting-the-null-hypothesis/

Is higher education/college in the US more about skill-building or about signaling?: https://www.quora.com/Is-higher-education-college-in-the-US-more-about-skill-building-or-about-signaling
ballpark: 50% signaling, 30% selection, 20% addition to human capital
more signaling in art history, more human capital in engineering, more selection in philosophy

Econ Duel! Is Education Signaling or Skill Building?: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/03/econ-duel-is-education-signaling-or-skill-building.html
Marginal Revolution University has a brand new feature, Econ Duel! Our first Econ Duel features Tyler and me debating the question, Is education more about signaling or skill building?

Against Tulip Subsidies: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/06/06/against-tulip-subsidies/




Most American public school kids are low-income; about half are non-white; most are fairly low skilled academically. For most American kids, the majority of the waking hours they spend not engaged with electronic media are at school; the majority of their in-person relationships are at school; the most important relationships they have with an adult who is not their parent is with their teacher. For their parents, the most important in-person source of community is also their kids’ school. Young people need adult mirrors, models, mentors, and in an earlier era these might have been provided by extended families, but in our own era this all falls upon schools.

Caplan gestures towards work and earlier labor force participation as alternatives to school for many if not all kids. And I empathize: the years that I would point to as making me who I am were ones where I was working, not studying. But they were years spent working in schools, as a teacher or assistant. If schools did not exist, is there an alternative that we genuinely believe would arise to draw young people into the life of their community?


It is not an accident that the state that spends the least on education is Utah, where the LDS church can take up some of the slack for schools, while next door Wyoming spends almost the most of any state at $16,000 per student. Education is now the one surviving binding principle of the society as a whole, the one black box everyone will agree to, and so while you can press for less subsidization of education by government, and for privatization of costs, as Caplan does, there’s really nothing people can substitute for it. This is partially about signaling, sure, but it’s also because outside of schools and a few religious enclaves our society is but a darkling plain beset by winds.

This doesn’t mean that we should leave Caplan’s critique on the shelf. Much of education is focused on an insane, zero-sum race for finite rewards. Much of schooling does push kids, parents, schools, and school systems towards a solution ad absurdum, where anything less than 100 percent of kids headed to a doctorate and the big coding job in the sky is a sign of failure of everyone concerned.

But let’s approach this with an eye towards the limits of the possible and the reality of diminishing returns.

The real reason the left would support Moander: the usual reason. because he’s an enemy.







You just explained the Credo quia absurdum doctrine. I always wondered if it was nonsense. It is not.

What Catholics believe: https://theweek.com/articles/781925/what-catholics-believe
We believe all of these things, fantastical as they may sound, and we believe them for what we consider good reasons, well attested by history, consistent with the most exacting standards of logic. We will profess them in this place of wrath and tears until the extraordinary event referenced above, for which men and women have hoped and prayed for nearly 2,000 years, comes to pass.

According to Caplan, employers are looking for conformity, conscientiousness, and intelligence. They use completion of high school, or completion of college as a sign of conformity and conscientiousness. College certainly looks as if it’s mostly signaling, and it’s hugely expensive signaling, in terms of college costs and foregone earnings.

But inserting conformity into the merit function is tricky: things become important signals… because they’re important signals. Otherwise useful actions are contraindicated because they’re “not done”. For example, test scores convey useful information. They could help show that an applicant is smart even though he attended a mediocre school – the same role they play in college admissions. But employers seldom request test scores, and although applicants may provide them, few do. Caplan says ” The word on the street… [more]
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april 2017 by nhaliday
How Universal Is the Big Five? Testing the Five-Factor Model of Personality Variation Among Forager–Farmers in the Bolivian Amazon
We failed to find robust support for the FFM, based on tests of (a) internal consistency of items expected to segregate into the Big Five factors, (b) response stability of the Big Five, (c) external validity of the Big Five with respect to observed behavior, (d) factor structure according to exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis, and (e) similarity with a U.S. target structure based on Procrustes rotation analysis.


We argue that Tsimane personality variation displays 2 principal factors that may reflect socioecological characteristics common to small-scale societies. We offer evolutionary perspectives on why the structure of personality variation may not be invariant across human societies.

Niche diversity can explain cross-cultural differences in personality structure: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-019-0730-3.epdf?author_access_token=OePuGOtdzdnQNlUm-C2oidRgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0PAovoNXZmNaZE03-rNo0RKOI7i7PG10G8tISp-_6W5yDqI3sDx0WdZZuk2ekMJbzGZtJ7_XsMUy0k4UGpsNDt9NHMarkg3dmAWt-Ttawxu1g%3D%3D
Cross-cultural studies have challenged this view, finding that less-complex societies exhibit stronger covaria-tion among behavioural characteristics, resulting in fewer derived personality factors. To explain these results, we propose the niche diversity hypothesis, in which a greater diversity of social and ecological niches elicits a broader range of multi-variate behavioural profiles and, hence, lower trait covariance in a population.
This work provides a general explanation for population differences in personality structure in both humans and other animals and suggests a substantial reimagining of personality research: instead of reifying statistical descriptions of manifest personality structures, research should focus more on modelling their underlying causes.

sounds obvious but actually kinda interesting
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february 2017 by nhaliday
Difference between off-policy and on-policy learning - Cross Validated
The reason that Q-learning is off-policy is that it updates its Q-values using the Q-value of the next state s′ and the greedy action a′. In other words, it estimates the return (total discounted future reward) for state-action pairs assuming a greedy policy were followed despite the fact that it's not following a greedy policy.

The reason that SARSA is on-policy is that it updates its Q-values using the Q-value of the next state s′ and the current policy's action a″. It estimates the return for state-action pairs assuming the current policy continues to be followed.

The distinction disappears if the current policy is a greedy policy. However, such an agent would not be good since it never explores.
q-n-a  overflow  machine-learning  acm  reinforcement  confusion  jargon  generalization  nibble  definition  greedy  comparison 
february 2017 by nhaliday
teaching - Intuitive explanation for dividing by $n-1$ when calculating standard deviation? - Cross Validated
The standard deviation calculated with a divisor of n-1 is a standard deviation calculated from the sample as an estimate of the standard deviation of the population from which the sample was drawn. Because the observed values fall, on average, closer to the sample mean than to the population mean, the standard deviation which is calculated using deviations from the sample mean underestimates the desired standard deviation of the population. Using n-1 instead of n as the divisor corrects for that by making the result a little bit bigger.

Note that the correction has a larger proportional effect when n is small than when it is large, which is what we want because when n is larger the sample mean is likely to be a good estimator of the population mean.


A common one is that the definition of variance (of a distribution) is the second moment recentered around a known, definite mean, whereas the estimator uses an estimated mean. This loss of a degree of freedom (given the mean, you can reconstitute the dataset with knowledge of just n−1 of the data values) requires the use of n−1 rather than nn to "adjust" the result.
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january 2017 by nhaliday
Effects of cognitive training on the structure of intelligence
Targeted cognitive training, such as n-back or speed of processing training, in the hopes of raising intelligence is of great theoretical and practical importance. The most important theoretical contribution, however, is not about the malleability of intelligence. Instead, I argue the most important and novel theoretical contribution is understanding the causal structure of intelligence. The structure of intelligence, most often taken as a hierarchical factor structure, necessarily prohibits transfer from subfactors back up to intelligence. If this is the true structure, targeted cognitive training interventions will fail to increase intelligence not because intelligence is immutable, but simply because there is no causal connection between, say, working memory and intelligence. Seeing the structure of intelligence for what it is, a causal measurement model, allows us to focus testing on the presence and absence of causal links. If we can increase subfactors without transfer to other facets, we may be confirming the correct causal structure more than testing malleability. Such a blending into experimental psychometrics is a strong theoretical pursuit.
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january 2017 by nhaliday
Spatial Ability for STEM Domains: Aligning Over 50 Years of Cumulative Psychological Knowledge Solidifies Its Importance
1. "Compared to students in the control group, students in the training group showed larger improvements in spatial skills despite extremely high spatial skills prior to training."
2. "We found large gender differences in spatial skills prior to training, as many other researchers have. However, these gender differences were narrowed after training."
3. "Students in the training group had one-third of a letter grade higher GPA in a challenging calculus-based physics course."
4. "None of these training improvements lasted over eight to ten months."

I wonder if continuous training could be useful at all and provide any transfer

What Innovations Have We Already Lost?: The Importance of Identifying and Developing Spatial Talent: http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-44385-0_6

Technical innovation and spatial ability: http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2013/07/technical-innovation-and-spatial-ability.html

Early spatial reasoning predicts later creativity and innovation, especially in STEM fields: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/07/130715070347.htm
Confirming previous research, the data revealed that participants' mathematical and verbal reasoning scores on the SAT at age 13 predicted their scholarly publications and patents 30 years later.

But spatial ability at 13 yielded additional predictive power, suggesting that early spatial ability contributes in a unique way to later creative and scholarly outcomes, especially in STEM domains.
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december 2016 by nhaliday
The History of the Cross Section of Stock Returns
bad methodology (data snooping) generating fake market failures

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december 2016 by nhaliday
Science Policy | West Hunter
If my 23andme profile revealed that I was the last of the Plantagenets (as some suspect), and therefore rightfully King of the United States and Defender of Mexico, and I asked you for a general view of the right approach to science and technology – where the most promise is, what should be done, etc – what would you say?

genetically personalized medicine: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2016/12/08/science-policy/#comment-85698
I have no idea how personalized medicine is supposed to work. Suppose that we sequence your entire genome, and then we intend to tailor a therapeutic approach to your genome.

How do we test it? By trying it on a bunch of genetically similar people? The more genetic details we take into account, the smaller that class is. It could easily become so small that it would be difficult to recruit enough people for a reasonable statistical trial. Second, the more details we take into account, the smaller the class that benefits from the whole testing process – which as far as I can see, is just as expensive as conventional Phasei/II etc trials.

What am I missing?

Now if you are a forethoughtful trillionaire, sure: you manufacture lots of clones just to test therapies you might someday need, and cost is no object.

I think I can see ways you could make it work tho [edit: what did I mean by this?...damnit]
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december 2016 by nhaliday
Bottoming Out – arg min blog
Now, I’ve been hammering the point in my previous posts that saddle points are not what makes non-convex optimization difficult. Here, when specializing to deep learning, even local minima are not getting in my way. Deep neural nets are just very easy to minimize.
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june 2016 by nhaliday

bundles : abstractacademeacmpatterns

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