LessWrong 2.0 Reader

It has been some time since the last comment. Are we still discussing now?

I think I have found my crux: If it could be shown that a God belief was founded on a sound epistemology that

• reliably produced good results,
• reliably did not produce bad results.
• And there is enough information available to apply the method.
• And the method indicates that God likely exists.

then I must conclude that God likely exists. (I will also not accept ad-hoc special pleading, like "take my particular God as an axiom" plus whatever method I'm already using.)

So my statement B is

• "Belief in God is not founded on a sound and reliable epistemology. If it were, that would change my mind about A."

Is this also a crux for you? So your statement B would be

• "Belief in God is founded on a sound and reliable epistemology. If it were not, that would change my mind about A."

If so, it is our first double crux. I have to assume that it must be, otherwise, you are disputing one of my conditions and admitting that

• your God belief is not sound and reliable, or
• that we do not have enough information to conclude God exists, or
• you think God is unlikely to exist.

Then the next step would be to find a double crux for statement B.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned natural semantic metalanguage at this point. Research indicates that all humans share a common frame of core concepts. It shouldn't be too surprising if one considers our brains to be similarly engineered.
My question is that, if one cannot describe something, did you , in fact,understand what you were experiencing?

Reading about all the struggles you've had, the much spent time, and the fact that you "want to find an approach that will work for other teachers, other classrooms, other students", it would be great if you could try out a spaced repetition system that's been created specifically for school/classroom use and let me know what you think. The site is https://ankimono.com/school . It's not as feature intensive as Anki, and was created more for the non-tech-savvy. You can reach me via the support email address of the site (I'm the owner).

Anecdote: In late September I put $20 into PredictIt and followed Zvi's advice, focusing on the markets for 2020 Democratic nominee and 2020 presidential winner. I was able to increase my money to $86.08, which after the withdrawal fee is $81.78. Because of the $850 per contract limit, a larger initial investment would not have gained any more money. This took a few hours to set up, so it's not very profitable. But it was fun and informative.

I'm the author of this essay. I don't believe your characterization of it is accurate.

1. You write:

Author advocates biphasic sleep totaling 6.3hr/day.

I don't remember "advocating" biphasic sleep. I link to people I know who were able to adjust to it and I describe my personal experience. In fact, in the essay's conclusion I write:

If you take one thing away from this entire essay, remember this: as long as you feel good, sleeping anywhere between 5 and 8 hours a night seems basically fine for your health

which contradicts your assertion.

2. You write:

Author claims http://jcsm.aasm.org/ViewAbstract.aspx?pid=31409 doesn't support 'smaller testes size for men who sleep less'. It does.

You add quote marks as if you're quoting my essay. I never wrote that this paper doesn't support 'smaller testes size for men who sleep less'. I wrote: "It does not support either of Walker's claims" Here are Walker's claims:

Men who sleep 5 hours a night have significantly smaller testicles than those who sleep 8 hours or more. [from his 2017 talk at Google)

And:

Men who sleep 5 hours a night have significantly smaller testicles than those who sleep 7 hours or more. [from his 2019 TED Talk]

The paper in question finds a correlation between sleep and testicle size. Walker says that the difference between those sleeping 5 and those sleeping 8 hours or more (or 7 hours or more) is "significant", by which he clearly means statistical significance. The paper never examines whether the difference between those two groups is statistically significant. It is true that it found a significant correlation. The paper however does not support either of Walker's claims.

Anticipating comments that say that I'm nitpicking: the testicles thing is indeed nitpicking and it's not important. I included it in one of the last appendices of the essay, mostly out of curiosity at the fact that Walker repeats the exact same phrases word for word in different talks but his numbers change in the process.

Finally, (even though I believe their reading of my essay is wrong), I'm glad that both of the OP's concerns regard things he found in appendices to the essay and not in any of the main parts it.

I disagree. Intuitively, I'd imagine the amount of effort required to find an adequate one from the pool would correlate with the subject's base looks level. (FYI: I loosely define adequate here as a picture that would substantially increase your odds vs the average whatever that is. "Best" doesn't mean anything here to me. I could luck out with an aesthetically pleasing work of art, but if women swipe left, then tough break). I could take thousands of pictures along multiple angles and vantage points but if I'm either ugly or just not photogenic, then tough break..

Indeed, I would pose the opposite question: Why would someone like XoDarap just assume people are oblivious to the power of a good picture when a more charitable interpretation would take into account factors like looks, the pareto principle, photography skills, ethnicity, and general sense of anxiety involved in the whole process of having your picture taken

Imagine being average in looks and new to a city like NYC and having to walk around all day taking selfies in choice locations or going through the wierdness of enlisting a friend just to get ONE good picture. Furthermore, imagine having as your competition the top ~10% of men (lookswise) who as you know receive 90% of the swipe, and that this 10% is likely comprised largely of men who are ethnically white AND have well taken pictures....

To cite one example: Myself. I paid about almost $800 in multiple photography sessions (in studio and outside). I've used that photo-feeler app. I even tried to learn photgraphy on my own. And with all that effort, my results were marginal at best (instead of 500 swipes to get a result... maybe ~450?). The crazy thing about this is that I'm not even ugly.

So the answer is obvious... and this actually makes XoDarap's question almost borderline offensive

Now this doesn't mean that unless one isn't a Stud, that you might as well give up on dating. Rather it requires one to think creatively with a bit of daring to have any success. I had to give up on swiping and turn to a channel nobody would expect for my luck to improve

Thanks for being up for having this conversation in comments! Sorry for the slow response; I just got back to proper internet after several days on an island.

As I've said before, if political solutions were viable then this would have been solved 5+ years ago.

I still think dramatic improvement is possible via the political process for two main reasons:

• The higher rents get, the more pressure there is to fix this. While it wasn't great five years ago, it's much worse now [LW · GW]. As terrible housing policy continues expanding the number of people it affects, it's easier to build support for measures to fix it.

• Housing coalitions are shifting [LW · GW], YIMBY is growing, and the idea that we can make things better by building more is spreading.

I think we should continue trying to build this support.

Find ways to increase the quality of the average grouphouse so more people want to live in them. ... if you found a way to increase the efficiency of a grouphouse bedroom so everything that would usually take 150ft2 can be done in 75ft2 without throwing important considerations under the bus, someone would only need to rent half as much room to maintain the same quality of life

I think this could be a decent solution for many young relatively well off single people without kids, who live primarily digital lives. While this is a demographic we know many people in, it's only a very small slice of the people affected by the housing crisis. Separately, since different people have different preferences and constraints I suspect most people who would have the time, energy, and inclination to build something like this would actually want to customize it more for their situation. Which is fine! Your design can still be useful even if most builders use it as a jumping-off point; you don't need interchangeable parts.

If people really did have generally similar preferences here you could build this in your apartment, and then when you moved you could sell it to the incoming tenant and leave it there. But if you actually tried this, even in a city like SF with tons of people in the target demographic, I expect pretty much everyone would ask you to bring it with you, even if you offered it for free. Similarly, if this were a large improvement over the kinds of loft systems you can already buy from IKEA I would expect you to be able to sell these to the general public, but again I don't think it would be very popular.

Coordinate groups of people to move from NIMBY cities with 10/10 jobs and 10/10 house prices to YIMBY cities with 8/10 jobs but 3/10 house prices.

I think this is likely to lose too much of what people value [LW · GW] about being in those cities.

I'm also not sure where you're getting "8/10 jobs"; I think the benefits of being in the top city for your field are usually much higher than 25%, more like 50% to 300%.

Anti-induction and Self-Reinforcement

Induction is the belief that the more often a pattern happens the more likely it is to continue. Anti-induction is the opposite claim: the more likely a pattern happens the less likely future events are to follow it.

Somehow I seem to have gotten the idea in my head that anti-induction is self-reinforcing. The argument for it is as follows: Suppose we have a game where at each step a screen flashes an A or a B and we try to predict what it will show. Suppose that the screen always flashes A, but the agent initially thinks that the screen is more likely to display B. So it guesses B, observes that it guessed incorrectly and then, if it is an anti-inductive agent will increase it's likelihood that the next symbol will be B because of anti-induction. So in this scenario your confidence that the next symbol will be B, despite the long stream of As, will keep increasing. This particular anti-inductive belief is self-reinforcing.

However, there is a sense in which anti-induction is contradictory - if you observe anti-induction working, then you should update towards it not working in the future. I suppose the distinction here is that we are using anti-induction to update our beliefs on anti-induction and not just our concrete beliefs. And each of these is a valid update rule: in the first we apply this update rule to everything including itself and in the other we apply this update rule to things other than itself. The idea of a rule applying to everything except itself feels suspicious, but is not invalid.

Also, it's not that the anti-inductive belief that B will be next is self-reinforcing. After all, anti-induction given consistent As pushes you towards believing B more and more regardless of what you believe initially. In other words, it's more of an attractor state.

Almost anything Elon Musk touches: online payments, reusable rockets, electric (and some day soon autonomous) vehicles, solar panels, underground tunnels.

Thanks for sharing, I found this helpful. I think this is a valuable lens to have. I think it would be useful for me to also raise a counterpoint: sometimes making concessions simply encourages people to demand more. Of course, this is highly dependent on the actual social dynamics like the attitude of the person who wants the concession and whether you can offer the concession with dignity and without it coming off as submission. But as I said, what you've posted here is definitely a useful lens.