LessWrong 2.0 Reader

The visual techniques of TV—cuts, zooms, pans, and sudden noises—all activate the orient response.

Anecdote, but this is most assuredly true. I saw a promotional ad for an upcoming MLB baseball game on TBS. In a mere 25 seconds, I counted over 35 different cuts, cuts between players, cuts between people in the studio, cut after cut after cut. It was strangely exhausting.

Personalization is easy to achieve while keeping the algorithm transparent. Just rank your own viewed/commented posts by most frequent tags, then score past posts based on the tags and pick a quantile based on the mixed upvotes/tags score, possibly with a slider parameter that allows you to adjust which of the two things you want to matter most.

Our sensible Chesterton fences

His biased priors

Their inflexible ideological commitments

In addition to epistemic priors, there are also ontological priors and teleological priors to cross compare, each with their own problems. On top of which, people are even worse at comparing non epistemic priors than they are at comparing epistemic priors. As such, attempts to point out that these are an issue will be seen as a battle tactic: move the argument from a domain in which they have the upper hand (from their perspective) to unfamiliar territory in which you'll have an advantage, and resisted.

You may share the experience I've had that most attempts at discussion don't go anywhere. We mostly repeat our cached knowledge at each other. If two people who are earnestly trying to grok each other's positions drill down for long enough they'll get to a bit of ontology comparison, where it turns out they have different intuitions because they are using different conceptual metaphors for different moving parts of their model. But this takes so long that by the time it happens only a few bits of information get exchanged before one or both parties are too tired to continue. The workaround seems to be that if two people have a working relationship then, over time, they can accrue enough bits to get to real cruxes, and this can occasionally suggest novel research directions.

My main theory of change is therefore to find potentially productive pairings of people faster, and create the conditions under which they can speedrun getting to useful cruxes. Unfortunately, Eli Tyre tried this theory of change and reported that it mostly didn't work, after a bunch of good faith efforts from a bunch of people. I'm not sure what's next. I personally believe more progress could be made if people were trained in consciousness of abstraction (per Korzybski), but this is a sufficiently difficult ask as to fail people's priors on how much effort to spend on novel skills with unclear payoffs. And a theory of change that has a curiosity stopper that halts on "other people should do this thing that they clearly aren't going to do" is also not very useful.

Proofreading comment: 

Please change "folks" to "focus"

Re: no coherent “stable” truth value: indeed. But still… if she wonders out loud “what day is it?” at the very moment she says that, it has an answer. An experimenter who overhears her knows the answer. It seems to me that you “resolve” this tension is that the two of them are technically asking a different question, even though they are using the same words. But still… how surprised should she be if she were to learn that today is Monday? It seems that taking your stance to its conclusion, the answer would be “zero surprise: she knew for sure she would wake up on Monday so no need to be surprised it happened”

And even if she were to learn that the coin landed tails, so she knows that this is just one of a total of two awakenings, she should have zero surprise upon learning the day of the week, since she now knows both awakenings must happen. Which seems to violate conservation of expected evidence, except you already said that the there’s no coherent probabilities here for that particular question, so that’s fine too.

This makes sense, but I’m not used to it. For instance, I’m used to these questions having the same answer:

1. P(today is Monday)?
2. P(today is Monday | the sleep lab gets hit by a tornado)

Yet here, the second question is fine (assuming tornadoes are rare enough that we can ignore the chance of two on consecutive days) while the first makes no sense because we can’t even define “today”

It makes sense but it’s very disorienting, like incompleteness theorem level of disorientation or even more

An idea I've been playing with recently:

Suppose you have some "objective world" space $\Omega$. Then in order to talk about subjective questions, you need a reference frame, which we could think of as the members of a fiber of some function $\omega :I\to \Omega$, for some "interpretation space" $I$.

The interpretations themselves might abstract to some "latent space" $\Lambda$ according to a function $\lambda :I\to \Lambda$. Functions of $\Lambda$ would then be "subjective" (depending on the interpretation they arise from), yet still potentially meaningfully constrained, based on $(\lambda ,\omega )$. In particular if some structure in $\Omega$ lifts homomorphically up through $\omega$ and down through $\lambda$, you get exactly the same structure in $\Lambda$. (And these obviously compose nicely since they're just spans, so far.)

The key question is what kind of space/algebra to preserve. I can find lots of structures that work well for particular abstractions, but it seems like the theory would have to be developed separately for each type of structure, as I don't see any overarching one.

Everyone works for money. Only one person, Mr. Purchaser, spends his money and everyone else just saves theirs forever. Suddenly money got a lot more powerful. Mr. Purchaser has literally all the money in the world and has pretty much infinite power, even if he only has $100k. He can make anyone do whatever he wants by paying them a penny, which is now worth about a million dollars[4].

I don't understand this. What use is money that is never spent? Why would Mr. Purchaser's penny induce me to do anything for him?

[4] Not that they'll ever spend the penny on anything, since they're one of the people who never spends any money, but let's pretend they still have motivation to earn it.

This is a pretence too far. The imaginary world you are describing is incoherent.

Money is the slack in the system of trade that saves us from having to exchange only by barter or informal systems of credit — doing each other good turns, in your terminology. In Adam Smith's words, "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest."

If I imagine a world without any money, but where everyone is somehow able to coordinate and act rationally for the good of all...

If I imagine that, my thoughts run to hive minds in which there are no people as we know them today.

Adam Smith continues: "We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages." A sentence that could have been penned by Dale Carnegie.

There are also people who's job it is to be a lot on the telephone and thus are well-reached by telephone even if they are younger.

Thanks for this piece. I admit I have always had a bit of residual aversion to seed oils that I've struggled to shake.

Having said that, as you're pushing so strongly against seed oils in favour of "processing" as a mechanism for poor health, I think I need to push back a bit.

If you want to be healthier, we know ways you can change your diet that will help: Increase your overall diet “quality”. Eat lots of fruits and vegetables. Avoid processed food. Especially avoid processed meats. 

"Avoid processed food" works very well as a heuristic - far better than anything like the "nutrition pyramid", avoiding saturated fats/sugars or calorie counting etc. But it also seems like something that should annoy people who like clear thinking and taxonomies. 

As you note, "processing" includes hundreds of processes, most of which have no plausible mechanism by which they might harm human health. Articles describing the ultra-processed taxonomy often just list a litany of bad-sounding things without an explanation why they're bad e.g. "mechanically separated meat", "chemical modifications" and "industrial techniques". Most of these are either benign when you think about it (we'd all prefer a strong man wearing a vest separating our meat with his bare hands, but come now...), or so vague as to be uninformative.   

If ultra-processed foods are bad because they contain "hydrogenated oil, modified starch, protein isolate, and high-fructose corn syrup" or "various cosmetic additives for flavour enhancement and colour", then it's these products that are bad, not some mysterious processing! 

If it is some technical part of the processing, like "hydrolysis, hydrogenation, extrusion, moulding, or pre-frying" that's bad, surely we should just identify that rather than lumping everything together? 

If it's some emergent outcome of all these processes, like "hyper-palatability" or "energy density", then that's the problem, not the fact of being "processed". If so we should all stop eating strawberries after they hit a certain deliciousness threshold, and avoid literally any edible oil (because all oil is identically energy-dense). 

But, having said that, I still use this heuristic, and I'm pretty glad I trained myself out of preferring highly-processed food when I was less analytical. 

Good question! I would find it plausible that it would have changed, except maybe if the people you'd call would be in their fifties or older.