Nehaveigur

Category: Concepts

  • Causation Does Not Imply Variation

    As everyone knows in the abstract but sometimes forgets in the heat of the moment, correlation does not imply causation. John Cochrane reminds us that in addition, causation does not imply variation. Just because something is causative doesn’t mean it’s particularly important. In my field of genetics, genome-wide association studies…

  • Things Don’t Happen For A Reason

    We want to know why. My career is built around finding the causes for rare diseases. Human genetics, the field I trained and work in, is well suited for this. Germline mutations cause traits and diseases, but never the other way round, which means that human genetics can disentangle correlation…

  • The Algernon Argument

    If there were an intervention that would result in enhanced intelligence, why have we not already evolved that way? The answer is the Algernon argument. Either there’s no simple improvement that’s possible, or there are trade-offs that make such improvements a bad idea. It’s a long blog post but it’s…

  • The Jerk Funnel

    James Steinberg has come up with an interesting concept: There are behaviors and processes that unintentionally result in being surrounded by assholes. Unfortunately, he has called this the Asshole filter, which is confusing as it implies that the behavior filters out assholes. What he actually means is that the behaviour…

  • Computational Irreducibility

    Simple rules can lead to complex outcomes. If those outcomes aren’t predictable in any other way than executing the rules, this is called computational irreducibility. The concept was first proposed by mathematician Stephen Wolfram in his book, A New Kind of Science, which I read early on during my PhD…

  • Two-By-Two Matrices

    Each of the fields I have worked in – computer science, genetics, management consulting, biotechnology – has its own 2×2 matrices. Computer science and medicine have contingency tables (true positives, false positives, true negatives, false negatives), genetics has the Punnett square (Homozygous reference (AA), heterozygous (Aa) in the diagonals, and…

  • Of p Values and Effect Sizes

    Scientists are obsessed with p values, and since I work in a particularly quantitative field, I’m more obsessed than most. When you run a statistical analysis on noisy data, there are several ways to get a statistically significant p value. You could increase your sample size to improve the statistical…

  • Collider Bias

    This is also known as Berkson’s paradox. It arises when there is ascertainment bias in the study design. Here’s an example from Carl T. Bergstrom and Jevin D. West’s book, Calling Bullshit: It seems that when dating there is an inverse correlation between attractiveness and niceness. However, those who are…

  • Strong and Weak Link Problems

    I’ve been a collector and connoisseur of fine concepts for some time now and it doesn’t happen often that I come across one that is entirely new to me, but this happened yesterday. Adam Mastroianni on Experimental History writes about strong and weak link problems, and rather than try to…

  • The Definition of Coherence

    I have previously written about coherence without defining it. In a recent conversation between Jim Rutt and guest Kristian Rönn they talk about Rönn’s book The Darwinian Trap. A good definition of coherence may be any behavior that avoids Darwinian traps. This would make altruism, which can avoid game theoretic…

  • The Art of Interesting

    As a guest on the Jim Rutt Show, philosopher Lorraine Besser recently talked about her book The Art of Interesting. One concept she mentioned has been going around in mind since. There are those that argue that a good life is a pleasurable life, or at least a life without…

  • When to Stop Looking

    Imagine you want to hire someone. In a meeting room, there are eight candidates waiting to be interviewed. You can only interview one of them at a time, and after each interview, you need to decide if you want to offer them the job straight away or if you want…

  • Fermi Calculations

    Many years ago and on a different continent, I used to work for a management consulting firm with offices in all of the world’s major cities. Part of the job was interviewing candidates for entry level consulting positions, and one of the things I liked to ask them was to…

  • The Copernican Principle

    The Copernican Principle was formulated by physicist J. Richard Gott, who when he visited the Berlin wall in 1969 asked how much longer it was going to divide the city. Assuming that the moment when he visited wasn’t special, he reasoned that his arrival was equally likely to fall before…

  • The Precautionary Principle

    Or: Should you really never change a working system? Given an innovation whose future positive and negative impact are uncertain, which position should be taken regarding its adoption? The precautionary principle states that proponents of the innovations should have to prove its harmlessness before it is introduced. That’s because we…

  • Goodhart’s Law

    When a metric becomes a goal, it ceases to be a good metric. In other words, if a system can be gamed, it will be. For example, the advancement of academics being determined by how much they publish creates an incentive to ignore quality and to publish a many low-impact…

  • Reversion to the Mean

    Things tend to even out over time. If something is extraordinarily high or low on first measurement, it will often be closer to the mean the next time it’s measured. Reversion (or regression) to the mean refers to the phenomenon where extreme values in a random variable tend to move…

  • The Encyclopedia of Concepts

    Expertise isn’t easily transferable. Chess grandmasters excel at chess, not International Relations, and surgeons are good at surgery, not juggling. True expertise can only arise in contexts that are repetitive, such as playing a large number of chess games or performing the same surgery over and over. This requires similarity…