Right, I'm really not asking for all that much, imo. PB has put forward this hypothesis, that those who are successful in business are exceptional in a specific skillset, and that skillset spills over into many areas of life. This seems reasonable. I'm not even asking him to detail every aspect of that skillset or anything. I'm just asking him, essentially, how does he know this, and can he give me some idea of the magnitude of this exceptionality? Because in my day to day life, knowing that CEOs are better than me at making critical decisions is essentially useless unless I have some sense of HOW MUCH better than me they are. If I know that you are, on average, very slightly better than me at making this decision, but I also know for a fact that I've spent a fair amount of time thinking about this specific decision and you likely havent, I'm a huge favorite over you. In this specific spot. If I know that you are, on average, MASSIVELY better than me at making this decision, then it is essentially irrelevant how much time I've spent thinking about it....you are still going to crush me, day in and day out.

I dont honestly have much emotional stake in this either way. Like PB accurately points out, I put my life in the hands of experts every single day without batting an eye. I'm more than willing to cede some of my decision-making to people who have demonstrated they are better than me at it. This applies to sports, but it applies to everything. I just want him to recognize that it is ESSENTIAL to know how LARGE their edge is, and hopefully he can provide me with some sort of evidence (preferable) or some set of anecdotes (questionable) that illustrate the magnitude, not just some reasonable-sounding arguments that show the presence, of this ability.

just in case phone booth passes his next ''wisdom test'' i will voluntarily fail mine.

yes, your priors should favor the hypothesis that their evidence gathering and decision-making algorithms are better than yours at outputting behaviors that satisfy the myriad objectives of their profession. this is especially true when their job is highly sought after (CEOs, football coaches, wealthy business owners, etc.).

there are very few decisions in any complicated social game that can be isolated from the other decisions of the game. objectives are never clearly defined or stable (defining sub-goals often changes them - life is fun!). payoffs are unknown and dynamic (same problem). real-life games are tough. as a handy example, what are the objectives of this sentence and the next? how well am i achieving those objectives? how did my decision to try to satisfy those objectives effect the probability of my convincing you that your line of questioning is wrongheaded (the meta-objective of selecting objectives is part of the game)? in all seriousness, just how would you go about answering those questions ''scientifically''? how would trying to mathematicalize the situation aid your understanding? i'd guess the answer to the very last question is, ''it wouldnt; it would actually make you less likely to understand whats going on''.

i know you love science and all but lots of phenomena are not specific or straightforward enough to be precisely discussed or modelled. that's just the way it is.

empirical validation of what, exactly? here's another example.

sometimes my goal when chatting with my girlfriend is to make her laugh. i'm merely OK at it. if a comedian were kibbitzing i'd hear a lot of, ''that would have been funnier IF..'' and he'd usually be right. my joke-making is sub-optimal. but guess what? i make jokes within the context of the much bigger Relationship Game. in that game i want her to be horny for me all the time and to bake me cookies whenever i want. if i was insanely funny it would change everything. conversations would evolve differently, her expectations would change, and the ''payoff matrices'' of other interaction types would be drastically altered. it would not surprise me if waking up much funnier would actually make me a less competent boyfriend given my general dispositions and talents. in any case, it would change things, and there is no way of knowing that those changes would be for the better. thus, naively following the comedian's (bf amateur) advice could just as easily make me a worse bf as better a bf (i cannot meaningfully evaluate the prob distribution; i am not an expert at self-improvement within this context and so i plead ignorance)

in short, when the winners of complicated games appear unwilling or unable to learn a straightforward procedure for solving a set of frequently encountered problem when they have the incentives and the brains to do so, you're missing something.

wwtf is going on in here

AGx19,
Phone Booth is trying to win an argument via word bomb.

VV,

i told myself i wasn't going to post in this thread again, but here I am. sick example with the girlfriend/comedy stuff.

I don't, however, agree with this: "in short, when the winners of complicated games appear unwilling or unable to learn a straightforward procedure for solving a set of frequently encountered problem when they have the incentives and the brains to do so, you're missing something." this is the logic i objected to at the outset, and i think it's the point that vhawk is trying to make, namely that i am more than willing to admit there are people more capable than i, but how much more capable do they have to be for this to be largely a true statement? i objected to it on the grounds that it is fundamentally panglossian - it assumes human fallibility isn't a concern, and that in a very real sense, we live in the best of all possible worlds. i just don't believe that to be true - not without evidence beyond conjecture, at least.

VV, you make a good point: coaches are suboptimal wrt 4th down calls, but being suboptimal there is probably optimal, overall. we can still complain about it and hope that the culture of our own team changes before that of the rest of the league, so that we gain an advantage, but it's not necessarily a sign that the coach is incompetant.

another example: i'm the player/manager of a good C league softball team. last year we got a new player who is just a freak - he's friends with one of our guys, but no one else knew him prior to his joining. he's the best pitcher i know of, can run, can throw, and hits the ball 350 ft on command. like he is definitely over 90% to hit a homerun when he wants to. he is far and away the best player on the team. when he tries not to hit a homerun he is probably about 60% to get on base (there is a homerun limit and he is prone to the accidental homerun), which is approximately the OBP of the rest of the team.

I think he should bat 5th - because i think that's the spot where homerun situations come up the most in softball (we get between 2 and 5 homeruns depending on where we play). you're likely to come up with more outs and more guys on base batting 5th compared to batting 4th. but he is always a little bit offended that he's not hitting 4th - because 4th is the traditional homerun spot in baseball (because there are more outs in baseball). i try to explain to him but he doesn't get it. no one else on my team gets it either save for about 2 guys. while i'm pretty sure i'm right, and that batting him 5th gains us a small amount of EV all else equal, it's not worth it for me to insist on it because it's bad for morale.

But....thats really not "the way it is." I'm not sure why both you and Phone Booth continue to do this, but very few things in life are digital, yes/no propositions. Just about everything is a spectrum. There is no such category as "straightforward enough to be discussed or modeled" which things either fit into or do not. And if there were, then likely it would be an empty set. Instead we simply model it to greater or lesser precision, not "precise/not precise," and then we adjust our behavior accordingly. I'm not sure why you resist the quantification of this so hard. If I didnt know better I'd think it was because you dont actually HAVE any evidence. But if thats true, its nothing to be embarrassed about, its probably hard to gather. But you dont need to pretend that, even in PRINCIPLE, this is somehow not a matter for evidence or science. Thats silly.
Empirical validation of their superiority over me. You've made the claim that those that are successful at some specific goal have skills that make them successful at other things, like critical decision-making. I'm asking you how you know this. What I'm hoping you give me as an answer is some set of experiments or data, testing these people at tasks unrelated to their jobs but that illustrate their superior ability at making critical decisions. What I'm AFRAID you are going to give me is "CEOs are successful, and the way you know they are successful is that they are CEOs."
Ok? This doesnt really address anything I'm saying. I understand that there are goals, and meta-goals, and meta-meta-goals. That doesnt change the fact that, in order to use advice, we need some method of determining who is competent to provide that advice, and how STRONGLY we should consider that advice. To use your example....all you've done is prove that the comedian will satisfy your goal, but not your meta-goal. Ok. Are you claiming that there is no one who could satisfy your meta-goal? Of course not, any CEO should be able to! (I kid.) But seriously, someone should be better than you at satisfying your meta-goal, so I dont know why any of us care about the comedian. If NO ONE is capable of satisfying your meta-goal better than you....well, then I think this is a pretty terrible hypothetical, because it doesnt do much to support PB's overall theme that CEOs are better than me at making decisions.
Sure. I understand that this is a PART of what PB was talking about. But its not the part I've been asking him about at all. I've already conceded the point that BB and CEOs know more than me about solving these kinds of problems. I'm asking a different question....a question that actually has UTILITY to me in my daily life. The reason you are missing it is the same reason your answer doesnt satisfy me in the first paragraph: you continue to treat everything like a digital proposition, either "they know something I dont" or "they dont." This does not reflect any sort of reality that I've experienced. Instead, they know things to varying degrees that are more or less difficult for me to consider.

When my friend Mike says something that seems wrong to me, then there is probably something I'm missing...but Mike is just BARELY smarter than me, so all it really means is he's spent 5 minutes thinking about it, and I havent. Basically, its the equivalent of one of those puzzles where you have to remove X matchsticks to make Y boxes or something. I know, from collecting empiric data about my friend Mike, that with a couple minutes consideration I will "catch up" to him and be able to solve most problems he can solve. So, I get to make a decision: blindly accept Mike's solution, or spend a couple of minutes figuring out if he is right. This is awesome, because sometimes I do one and sometimes the other.

Now, if Christopher Langan says something that seems wrong to me, there is CERTAINLY something I'm missing....but he is so massively smarter than me, that I will likely NEVER figure out what it is. Maybe after years of study and contemplation, but its no lock. In that situation, there is basically no reason for me to question him, because its a waste of time and energy to question him. I'm better off just listening.

Thats the spectrum. Everyone falls somewhere inside that spectrum. There are no discrete categories along this spectrum. So, you can, hopefully, see how the question of WHETHER there are people who are better than me at making these kinds of decisions is essentially a trivial one. The question of HOW MUCH BETTER they are is a far more important question....and its also entirely a scientific, empiric one.

It's a cognitive problem. I'm not even arguing for appeals to authority, but rather arguing against appeals to your untrained intuition. If you're also untrained at meta-cognitive tasks such as figuring out which experts are trustworthy, which intuitive thoughts are trustworthy, which thoughts are wasteful, etc, then it sucks that you'll arrive at wrong answers regardless but no one promised you life was easy.


Why is it verifiable? If it is, why don't you verify it?


I think the problem here is that you guys seem to think that epistemologically, it's more important to answer a given question as correctly and as rigorously as possible than it is to ask the right questions. Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way - you can have the capacity to correctly answer every question, but if you keep asking the wrong questions, you wouldn't get anywhere - no truth can withstand the rigorous questioning of a zealot who's determined to avoid it. Anything you don't want to believe, you can question its rigor until you reach a metaphysical impasse and anything you want to believe, you can accept without questioning. This happens to be my other argument - that success is about allocation of cognitive capacity towards answering meaningful questions, which often has little to do with the ability to answer any given simple question correctly.

In short, I'm not saying that I've answered your questions rigorously, but rather that that you're asking the wrong questions. Your questions are irrelevant. Do you guys believe that quantifying the edge of experts - what does that even mean? - would help your everyday decision making skills? Does that tell you how much time you should spend obsessing over Belichick's or other head coaches' potential mistakes? If this is so important, you must have done this quantification for other classes of experts on whom you rely all the time? Can you share the results? If you haven't, why are you asking now? What changed your mind? Or was it, as I already explained, an instance of faux rigor where statements you don't want to believe, no matter how reasonable or effectively equivalent to things you alreay believe, are held up to an impossibly strict standard?

Everything you know - you either learned from others or derived from personal experiences that are framed based on things you learned from others. If you can't trust experts in a general sense, you can't trust yourself either. On things that you haven't had time to think about in great detail, you're always trusting others.


I wouldn't go quite this far in the sense that we've become better and will become even better at rigorously modeling things. Of course, even when things can be rigorously modeled, it's often a bad idea because 1) it's a waste of time; 2) our intuitive modeling capacity is far greater than our explicit modeling capacity; and 3) demand for rigor is often abused as a defense mechanism. There are very good reasons why people who are extremely good at rigorous thinking are often no good at life.



This is not panglossian because you're also fallible. You guys are too focused on the fallibility of experts without considering your own. My point was not: never question the experts, but rather if you find yourself disagreeing with the experts and feel the need to resolve this disagreement, be more inclined to question yourself than the experts.

his whole "I need to know EXACTLY how much better they are than me before I can trust them" mindset is quite hilarious. You're not the center of the epistemlogical universe.


This is way better evidence than any contrived experiment.


Right. That bit is much more obvious from your strenuous line of reasoning.


This is strange. There's probably more evidence that Belichick is good at making football decisions than your friend Mike is good at anything.


Why do you blindly accept that Christopher Langan is smarter than you? What evidence do you have? I'd argue that unless one can appreciate the brilliance of some of his writing, one should naturally be suspicious of his cognitive abilities.


In terms of their jobs, they are a lot better. And you're not competent enough to understand why and how. It's like a 2-year old trying to figure out whether the person on TV speaks good English or not. That's not how you learn - you blindly accept and imitate first, and when you develop competence, you get to judge. As for their general life skills, yes they are probably a lot better too. Unless you get to that level (or develop strong meta-cognitive skils that allow you to judge with having those specific skills), you won't be able to understand why and how much better they are.

Btw, you appear to have caused some confusion here. VanVeen was largely addressing the question of, are successful people more competent at most aspects of their jobs than you would be. You're now sidetracking into the less relevant question of whether CEOs are simply better at all kinds of random things than you are. Both are true, but the former is much more obvious than the latter. It's highly disingenuous to go from "I'm not sure if I should question experts' decisions so I need to know their edge" to "how much more capable are they than I in a neutral context" because the latter has nothing to do with the former. You wouldn't blindly trust Durrr's chess moves, nor would you blindly trust Obama's high-stakes poker analysis. Unless you got some of those CEOs to give you general life advice that you're not sure if you should follow, quantification of their edge outside of their jobs is an academic question.

If you did, he would be dead and beaten by now....

Um. Can vanveen and phone booth join forces and please write a book about just what's really going on in most social interactions?

can you imagine how long a book by phone booth would be?

a ha! the clue!

I believe Phone Booth has already written a couple of books... most recently:

Ctr-F: Karate Kid returned no results. I think you're off the mark.

I think it would end up about 1400 pages, would delineate a bunch of trivially true things that no one (not even VanVeen or PB) adhere to rigorously, and would be justified with some handwaving and a paucity of the data required to bridge the gap from coffee-shop conjecture to real-world, life applicability.

In short, NY Times best-seller.

Hmm, except for the length, sounds like Gladwell.

lol thats exactly what I had in mind when I wrote that

I think Phone Booth needs to read "Fooled by Randomness."

Man, thats a MUCH better comparison than Gladwell, thats EXACTLY who PB reminds me of. In basically every way.

Just a littel FYI, I personally find reading one paragraph out of every 15, following this with some sort of debatable accusation that may or may not have been implied, and then returning to my regular life until other regs say funny things typically yields the highest expected utility.

This goes against my gut instinct, but you are a pro, so I'm just gonna go with it.

The Art and Zen of Internet Trolling coming 3Q 2k10

sure it's been said, but it doesn't surprise me that the majority of 2p2'ers agree with the call being that this is a website that is centered around poker and other casino games.

Don't you leave yourself more outs by punting the football.

Going for it = 1 out with 1 card to come

Punting = at least 6 outs with 1 card to come

You should apologize to everyone for this.

nh

It's a bad call and it's not even close. People destroyed Barry Switzer for this exact thing. In college that isn't a bad call, but in the NFL it clearly is.