LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Singular Learning Theory is another way of "talking about the breadth of optima" in the same sense that Newton's Universal Law of Gravitation is another way of "talking about Things Falling Down". 

It looks to me as if, of the four "root causes of social relationships becoming more of a lemon market" listed in the OP, only one is actually anything to do with lemon-market-ness as such.

The dynamic in a lemon market is that you have some initial fraction of lemons but it hardly matters what that is because the fraction of lemons quickly increases until there's nothing else, because buyers can't tell what they're getting. It's that last feature that makes the lemon market, not the initial fraction of lemons. And I think three of the four proposed "root causes" are about the initial fraction of lemons, not the difficulty of telling lemons from peaches.

• urbanization: this one does seem to fit: it means that the people you're interacting with are much less likely to be ones you already know about, so you can't tell lemons from peaches.
• drugs: this one is all about there being more lemons, because some people are addicts who just want to steal your stuff.
• MLM schemes: again, this is "more lemons" rather than "less-discernible lemons".
• screens: this is about raising the threshold below which any given potential interaction/relationship becomes a lemon (i.e., worse than the available alternative), so again it's "more lemons" not "less-discernible lemons".

Note that I'm not saying that "drugs", "MLM", and "screens" aren't causes of increased social isolation, only that if they are the way they're doing it isn't quite by making social interactions more of a lemon market. (I think "screens" plausibly is a cause of increased social isolation. I'm not sure I buy that "drugs" and "MLM" are large enough effects to make much difference, but I could be convinced.)

I like the "possible solutions" part of the article better than the section that tries to fit everything into the "lemon market" category, because it engages in more detail with the actual processes involved by actual considering possible scenarios in which acquaintances or friendships begin. When I think about such scenarios in the less-isolated past and compare with the more-isolated present, it doesn't feel to me like "drugs" and "MLM" are much of the difference, which is why I don't find those very plausible explanations.

Most of the weird stuff involving priors comes into being when you want posteriors over a continuous hypothesis space, where you get in trouble because reparametrizing your space changes the form of your prior, so a uniform "natural" prior is really a particular choice of parametrization. Using a discrete hypothesis space avoids big parts of the problem.

Don't forget Wallace !

Yes, beautiful example ! Van Leeuwenhoek was the one-man ASML of the 17th century. In this case, we actually have evidence to the counterfactual impact as other lensmakers trailed van Leeuwenhoek by many decades.

It's plausible that high-precision measurement and fabrication is the key bottleneck in most technological and scientific progress- it's difficult to oversell the importance of van Leeuwenhoek. 

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek made more than 500 optical lenses. He also created at least 25 single-lens microscopes, of differing types, of which only nine have survived. These microscopes were made of silver or copper frames, holding hand-made lenses. Those that have survived are capable of magnification up to 275 times. It is suspected that Van Leeuwenhoek possessed some microscopes that could magnify up to 500 times. Although he has been widely regarded as a dilettante or amateur, his scientific research was of remarkably high quality.^[39]

The single-lens microscopes of Van Leeuwenhoek were relatively small devices, the largest being about 5 cm long.^[40][41] They are used by placing the lens very close in front of the eye. The other side of the microscope had a pin, where the sample was attached in order to stay close to the lens. There were also three screws to move the pin and the sample along three axes: one axis to change the focus, and the two other axes to navigate through the sample.

Van Leeuwenhoek maintained throughout his life that there are aspects of microscope construction "which I only keep for myself", in particular his most critical secret of how he made the lenses.^[42] For many years no one was able to reconstruct Van Leeuwenhoek's design techniques, but in 1957, C. L. Stong used thin glass thread fusing instead of polishing, and successfully created some working samples of a Van Leeuwenhoek design microscope.^[43] Such a method was also discovered independently by A. Mosolov and A. Belkin at the Russian Novosibirsk State Medical Institute.^[44] In May 2021 researchers in the Netherlands published a non-destructive neutron tomography study of a Leeuwenhoek microscope.^[22] One image in particular shows a Stong/Mosolov-type spherical lens with a single short glass stem attached (Fig. 4). Such lenses are created by pulling an extremely thin glass filament, breaking the filament, and briefly fusing the filament end. The nuclear tomography article notes this lens creation method was first devised by Robert Hooke rather than Leeuwenhoek, which is ironic given Hooke's subsequent surprise at Leeuwenhoek's findings.

I don't understand why you need to invoke testosterone. Transgender brain is special, for example, transgender women have immunity to visual illusions. Anecdotally, I have friends with gender identity problems who do not make gender transition because it's costly and they don't have it this hard, they are STEM-level smart and they are not susceptible to visual illusions. So, assuming that this phenomenon exists (I don't quite believe your twitter statistics), it's likely explainable by transwomen innate brain structure.

The other weirdness in your hypothesis is that puberty blockers is a quite recent therapy and it's not ubiquous - most intellectually accomplished transwomen are likely to have standard male puberty. Even low-T male have mindboggingly large amount of testosterone compared to female, which implies really weird dose-dependency between testosterone and IQ in puberty.

There are plenty of stupid and/or distracting behaviors testosterone can push you for without any kind of "chemical brain damage", not only sex. Testosterone is likely to make you seek social status and status-seeking is notoriously incompatible with intellectual pursuits. I don't know my testosterone levels, but I have plenty of concussions due to my tastes for physical activity and I consider myself pretty average, stereotypical male. I suspect that concussions is the first direct source of male brain deterioration and testosterone is related here because it induces risk-seeking. The second and third, I think, smoking and drinking, and non-surpisingly, it's another sort of typical risky teenage male activity.

Applications for this round are now closed! If you are interested in future rounds, you can express interest here: https://airtable.com/appbzbkQ3OwRBaojt/shruJmwbbk07e1i7y 

Very interesting. It sounds like your "third person view from nowhere" vs the "first person view from somewhere" is very similar to something I was thinking about recently. I called them "objectively distinct situations" in contrast with "subjectively distinct situations". My view is that most of the anthropic arguments that "feel wrong" to me are built on trying to make me assign equal probability to all subjectively distinct scenarios, rather than objective ones. eg. A replication machine makes it so there are two of me, then "I" could be either of them, leaving two subjectively distinct cases, even if on the object level there is actual no distinction between "me" being clone A or clone B. [1]

I am very sceptical of this ADT. If you think the time/place you have ended up is unusually important I think that is more likely explained by something like "people decide what is important based on what is going on around them".

[1] My thoughts are here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/v9mdyNBfEE8tsTNLb/subjective-questions-require-subjective-information [LW · GW]

I (to my own surprise) got an "above average" score when I took this test a few years back, which I attribute mostly to the lack of emotional and circumstantial 'noise' in the images. I don't think being able to tell what is being emoted by a professional actor told to display exactly one (1) emotion, with no mediating factors, has much connection with being able to read actual people.

(. . . though a level-2 version with tags like "excited but hesitant" or "proud and angry" or "cheerful; unrelatedly, lowkey seasick" could actually be extremely useful, now I think on it.)

Here are some reflections [LW(p) · GW(p)] I wrote on the work of Grothendieck and relations with his contemporaries & predecessors. 

Take it with a grain of salt - it is probably too deflationary of Grothendieck's work, pushing back on mythical narratives common in certain mathematical circles where Grothendieck is held to be an Christ-like figure. I pushed back on that a little.  Nevertheless, it would probably not be an exaggeration to say that Grothendieck's purely scientific contributions [as opposed to real-life consequences] were comparable to those of Einstein.