LessWrong 2.0 Reader

1. Escaped/circulated earlier than officially reported.
2. False positives.

So, how is that different from JSON? I could take the elevator pitch at JSON.org and change some words to make it about LES:

LES (Loyc Expression Syntax) is a lightweight data-interchange format. It is easy for humans to read and write. It is easy for machines to parse and generate. It is a superset of JSON that looks similar to numerous other programming languages. LES is a text format that is completely language independent but uses conventions that are familiar to programmers of the C-family of languages, including C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Perl, Python, and many others. These properties make LES an excellent data-interchange language, but also a good basis for DSLs and new programming languages.

LES is built on three structures:

• Blah blah blah

I guess JSON had some additional evangelism which LES does not, but I don't know what exactly made it popular. You might say "well, JSON is valid JavaScript" but in practice that's usually not relevant, as it is unsafe to eval() JSON, and it is virtually unheard of to go in the opposite direction and write JavaScript data in JSON style. In practice, JSON is similar to JS but is clearly distinct, just as LES is similar to JS but distinct.

To put it another way: JSON provides data interoperability. It seems like no one has to explain why this is good, it's just understood. So I am puzzled why the same argument for code falls flat, even though I see people gush about things like "homoiconicity" (which LES provides btw) without having to explain why that is good.

P.S. no one disagreed with my arguments at the WebAssembly CG, so don't be too quick to judge my arguments as bad.

Just some random thoughts I had while reading:

Sometimes people lie about circumstances, or secretly contribute to make those circumstances happen. Some of our moral heuristics may have evolved in reaction to this. Why is actively causing harm worse than merely refusing to help? Because it may be easy to create a crisis that you can then "solve" by sacrificing other people.

Also, your inaction sometimes allows other people to act. (The thought experiments assume this never happens, but in reality it sometimes does, and our instincts are shaped by our experience from reality.) If you won't stop your car to take a person to the hospital, maybe someone else will. If you actively run over the person...

One of the reasons I was having trouble with the Reagan example when I was reading this for the first time was that I was interpreting it as

“Reagan will provide federal support for unwed mothers AND cut federal support to local governments” is more probable than “Reagan will provide federal support for unwed mothers AND NOT cut federal support to local governments”.

The fact that in one option one of the the sentences was present and in the other option it wasn't made me think that the fact that it was not present made it implicit that it would NOT happen, when it wasn't the case.

I wonder how common is that line of reasoning.

This may be a bit of a pedantic comment, but I'm a bit confused by how your comment starts:

I've done over 200 hours of research on this topic and have read basically all the sources the article cites. That said, I don't agree with all of the claims.

The "That said, ..." part seems to imply that what follows is surprising. As though the reader expects you to agree with all the claims. But isn't the default presumption that, if you've done a whole bunch of research into some controversial question, that the evidence is mixed?

In other words, when I hear, "I've done over 200 hours of research ... and have read ... all the sources", I think, "Of course you don't agree with all the claims!" And it kind of throws me off that you seem to expect your readers to think that you would agree with all the claims.

Is the presumption that someone would only spend a whole bunch of hours researching these claims if they thought they were highly likely to be true? Or that only an uncritical, conspiracy theory true believer would put in so much time into looking into it?

So when you get in trouble, instead of a laywer, you will call someone with lots of followers on social networks?

Caring about things seems to make you interact with the world in more diverse ways (because you do this in addition to things other people do, not instead of); some of that translates into more experience and better models. But also tribal identity, mindkilling, often refusing to see the reasons why your straightforward solution would not work, and uncritical contrarianism.

Now I think about a group of people I know, who care strongly about improving the world, in the one or two aspects they focus on. They did a few amazing things and gained lots of skills; they publish books, organize big conferences, created a network of like-minded people in other countries; some of their activities are profitable, for others they apply for various grants and often get them, so some of them improve the world as a full-time job. They also believe that covid is a hoax, plus have lots of less fringe but still quite irrational beliefs. However... this depends on how you calculate the "total rationality", but seems to me that their gains in near mode outweigh the losses in far mode, and in some sense I would call them more rational than average population.

Of course I dream about a group that would have all the advantages and none of the disadvantages.

At a personal (as opposed to corporate) level of making these kind of decisions, an important point is that doing a thing could have inherent value in the pleasure it gives. Peeling your own peaches might be worth it, even if the fresh peaches cost more $, and resulted in lower quality, than buying already frozen, if he prefers the (first hour/month) of peeling sufficiently above the next most pleasurable activity.

Also, too, almost everyone is cash constrained, and cannot arbitrarily exchange time for additional $, so using personal labor for a task is a way to turn time into money. Obviously. But it's still important to touch back to reality after an abstract discussion.

How do you reconcile the hypothesis that it escaped from a lab in China with the reports that covid-19 antibodies were found in more than a dozen blood samples taken in Italy in early October 2019, and therefor must have been circulating in Italy in September 2019?

My tutoring typically started with "debugging" student's knowledge. The problems were usually deeper that the student reported, and full solution required fixing the underlying problem first.

For example, suppose the student has a problem with quadratic equations. But after doing some background check, it turns out they are quite confused about what happens when there is a minus sign before the parenthesis. Now of course, if they don't get this right, then no matter how much time you spend explaining quadratic equations, they are going to get half of them wrong whenever the problem starts with something slightly more complicated, that you first need to convert into the standard quadratic equation.

So I kinda imagine the mathematical "tech tree" in my head, and check the previous nodes first, and so on recursively, if necessary. Then gradually build up the correct knowledge.

In school, this would be one student among 20 or 30. There is no time to do this background check with one of them, and definitely not with half of them, no matter how much they need it. Also, you are constrained how much time you can spend at each topic. If it's not enough for some students, well, sucks to be them, but we must move to the next topic.

(Currently, there is a reform in math education that tries to get the fundamentals right, even if it costs somewhat more time at the beginning, because then kids can progress faster, while actually understanding everything. One day I would like to write a post about it on Less Wrong, but I am not a teacher anymore, and my contact with teachers who use this method is limited because of covid.)