Mark Xu's Shortform

Alternative taxonomy:

• rationalists belonging to Eliezer
• cryopreserved rationalists
• rationalists trained by CFAR
• aspiring rationalists
• rationalists working for MIRI
• legendary rationalists
• metarationalists
• those commenting on this taxonomy
• those that tweet as if they were mad
• Bayesians
• et cetera
• Zvi
• those that from afar look like paperclips

:)

I think there is a community of discord rationalists and tumblr rationalists.

I am a google doc rationalist! (Or I would like to be. Google docs are great.)

What are you using the word "rationalist" to mean? If you just mean "members of any subculture bearing some line of memetic descent from early Less Wrong" (which I don't think deserves the pretentious term rationalist, but putting that aside), why is "communication platform" a useful way to chop up that social grouping? A lot of the same people use Less Wrong and Facebook and Twitter and Discord and Google Docs, and a lot of the people who use the same platform wouldn't be in the same cluster if you were to analyze the graph of what actual conversations people are using these platforms to have.

I'm not sure what to recommend, but a few words that come to mind that might be relevant and help you spark an idea:

• resilient
• robust
• reliable
• antifragile
• high availability
• self healing
• overdetermined

Is the victory bit important in the quotation?

If it's not about the victory/winning, and rather about the path/journey ....

A first draft that springs to mind as I type:

The key to rationality.... is not to chose the label, but to choose to take every opportunity to improve/update your thinking.

(Can't ... stop ... myself ... from commenting: From what I've observed too much ego gets in the way of rational thinking sometimes.)

Why not something along the lines of "your rationality is measured as much by your worst case performance as your average case"?

It seems to me that during the quarantine I eat less than usual; either I am deluding myself, or it is a combination of having less physical activity (such as walking to/from job/lunch/shops/playground), being able to eat whenever I want (so there is no pressure to "eat a lot now, because the next opportunity will be 7 hours later"), making less superstimulating food (using less sugar and salt), and having other ways to get some hedons (e.g. taking a nap). Sometimes I cook a soup, and that's most of my daily food.

And soups are really cheap. You take $1-2 worth of ingredients, cook them in water, add little salt and spices; optionally eat with bread. Bread is cheap, salt is cheap, most spices are cheap (per portion), potatoes, broccoli, carrot, onion, and beans are cheap. Most of these things are like $1 per 1kg.

Okay, soups are not super healthy; cooking destroys vitamins. You should also get some fresh fruits and vegetables. Apples, tomatoes, cucumbers are $1-2 per 1 kg. You should definitely be able to eat healthy food for less than $5 a day.

What is expensive? Chocolate and other sweets, cheese, berries, nuts; I probably forgot something. You shouldn't eat sweets; and you can afford the other things now and then even under $5 a day on average. (It is not an optimal diet; some people recommend eating berries and nuts every day. But still healthier than many people eat, including those who spend more money on food.)

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On the other hand, we usually spend more than $5 per person per day, even during the quarantine. We spend a lot on sweets and cheese. The tastier ones are even more expensive than the basic ones, which are already more expensive than the actually useful food. Instant gratification -- it's addictive! The more stress I have during the day, the more I need something that will improve my mood instantly, even if it's only for a moment.

Poor people probably have more stress, and thus less willpower to resists things full of sugar and salt. (Also alcohol and tobacco. Okay, the last one is technically not food, but still comes from the same budget.)

Very poor people, e.g. the homeless, don't have the place to cook. So many cheapest things are ironically out of their reach. Not having a fridge is also a problem.

Then, I assume many poor people don't have the good skills and habits. Some of them don't have the necessary IQ, some have mental problems, some had shitty upbringing.

There are a few things to keep in mind:

1) The claim that 40 million Americans "deal with hunger" is, um, questionable. Their citation leads to feedingamerica.org, which cites USDA's Household Food Security in the United States report (https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/94849/err-270.pdf?v=963.1). The methodology used is an 11-question survey (18 for households with children), where answering 3 questions in the affirmative marks you as low food security. The questions asked are (naturally) subjective. Even better, the first question is this: “We worried whether our food would run out before we got money to buy more.” Was that often, sometimes, or never true for you in the last 12 months? That's an a real concern to have, but it is not what people are talking about when they say "dealing with hunger". You can be running on a shoestring budget and often worry about whether you'll have enough money for food without ever actually not having enough money for food.

2) A significant percentage of the population has non-trivial issues with executive function. Also, most of the population isn't familiar with "best practices" (in terms of effective life strategies, basic finances, etc). Most people simply don't think about things like this systematically, which is how you get the phenomenon of ~50% of the population not being able to cover a $400 emergency (or whatever those numbers are, they're pretty close). This would be less of an issue if those cultural norms were inherited, but you can't teach something you don't know, and apparently we don't teach Home Economics anymore (not that it'd be sufficient, but it would be better than nothing). This is a subject that deserves a much more in-depth treatment, but I think as a high-level claim this is both close enough to true and sufficient as a cause for what we might observe here. Making an infographic with a rotating course of 10 cheap, easy-to-prepare, relatively healthy, and relatively tasty meals is a great idea, but it'll only be useful to the sorts of people who already know what "meal prep" means. You might catch some stragglers on the margin, but not a lot.

3) The upfront costs are less trivial than they appear if you don't inherit any of the larger items, and remember, 50% of the population can't cover a mid-3-figure emergency. "Basic kitchen equipment" can be had for under $100, but "basic kitchen equipment" doesn't necessarily set you up to prepare food in a "meal prep" kind of way.

It seems like the bottom 20% of the US spends $2216 per year per income earner or ~$6 per day on food. Given that children themselves don't have an income they might spend less then $5 per person for food per day.

People can drown in a river that's on average 1m deep.

I found a reference to "value handshakes" here [LW(p) · GW(p)]:

Your AI doesn't figure out how to do a reasonable "values handshake" with a competitor (where two agents agree to both pursue some appropriate compromise values in order to be Pareto efficient)...

I think it refers to something like this: Imagine that a superintelligent human-friendly AI meets a superintelligent paperclip maximizer, and they both realize their powers are approximately balanced. What should they do?

For humans, "let's fight, and to the victor go the spoils" is the intuitive answer, but the superintelligences can possibly do better. If they fight, they have a 50% chance of achieving nothing, and a 50% chance of winning the universe... minus whatever was sacrificed to Moloch, which could possibly be a lot. If they split the universe to halves, and find out a way how to trust each other, that is better that war. But there is a possibility of even better solution, when both of them would agree on acting as if they were a single superintelligence that values both humans and paperclips equally.

The cooperative solution can be better than a 50% split of the universe, because you could build paperclip factories on places humans care less about, such as uninhabitable planets; or perhaps you could find a way how to introduce paperclips to human environment without reducing the human quality of life. For example, would you mind using paperclips to reinforce the walls of your house? Would you mind if almost all materials used to build stuff for humans contained little paperclips inside? Would you mind living in a simulation implemented on paperclip-shaped circuits? So maybe at the end, humans could get like 70% of the potential utility of the universe, while 70% of potential material would be converted to paperclips.

There are a bunch of explanations of logarithm as length on Arbital.

Example: "when did <person> die?" If I was alive when <person> died, there's a higher chance of me hearing about their death. Thus not having heard of <person> is evidence that they died some time ago.

Technically, it could also be evidence that you are dead, but your ghost cannot move to afterlife, probably because it is too attached to scoring internet points (a fate that awaits many of us, I am afraid).

(epistemic status: just kidding)

Sure. Also, current employees are dis-incented from being truthful about the bad parts. But you're not applying statistics to the results, so that's not terribly important. Such interviews provide limited evidence about goodness of the company. They provide decent evidence about the potential coworkers you're interviewing.

Generally, when you're interviewing employees about a company about whether the company is any good, you're trying to decide whether to work there yourself. And you're evaluating whether any of them seem competent and interesting enough that you can tolerate being near them for any length of time.

update the CDC advises testing for the flu and there's a lot of medical things that cause "flu-like" symptoms. Turns out that "flu-like" symptoms is basically "immune system doing things", which is going to happen with most things your body doesn't like.

Not everybody who has a cold has influenza (the flu) or COVID-19. There are many different viruses that cause influenza-like-illnesses.

Low is relativ. 2% of coindience is still a bunch.

Decision theoretic uncertainty seems easier to deal with, because you’re trying to maximise expected value in each case, just changing what you condition on in calculating the expectation. So you can just take the overall expectation given your different credences in the decision theories