I was going for a walk yesterday night, and when I looked up at the sky, I saw something I had never seen before: a bright orange dot, like a star, but I had never seen a star that bright and so orange before. "No... that can't be"- but it was: I was looking at Mars, that other world I had heard so much about, thought so much about.

I never realized until yesterday that I had never seen Mars with my own two eyes until that day- one of the closest worlds that humans could, with minimal difficulty, make into a new home one day.

It struck me then in a way that I never felt before, just how far away the world Mars is. I knew it in an abstract sense, but seeing this little dot in the distance, a dot that I knew to be an object larger even than the Moon, but seeming so small in comparison, made me realize, in my gut, just how far away this other world was, just like how when I stand on top of a mountain, and see small buildings on the ground way below me, I realize that those small buildings are actually skyscrapers far away.

And yet, as far as Mars was that night, it was so bright, so apparent, precisely because it was closer now to us than it normally ever is- normally this world is even further from us than it is now.

In short, I am selling my attention by selling the right to put cards in my Anki deck, starting at the low price of $1 per card.

I will create and add a card (any card that you desire, with the caveat that I can veto any card that seems problematic, and capped to a similar amount of information per card as my usual cards contain) to my Anki deck for $1. After the first ten cards (across all people), the price will rise to $2 per card, and will double every 5 cards from then on. I commit to study the added card(s) like I would any other card in my decks (I will give it a starting interval of 10 days, which is sooner than the usual interval of 20 days I usually use, unless I judge that a shorter interval makes sense. I study Anki every day, and have been clearing my deck at least once every 10 days for the past 5 months, and intend to continue to do so). Since I will be creating the cards myself (unless you know of a high-quality deck that contains cards with the information you desire), an idea for a card is enough even if you don't know how to execute it.

Both question-and-answer and straight text are acceptable forms for cards. Acceptable forms of payment include cash, Venmo, BTC, ETH, Good Dollar, and Doge, at the corresponding exchange rates.

This offer will expire in 60 days. If you are interested in taking me up on this afterwards, feel free to message me.

There is now a top-level post discussing this offer [LW · GW]

Price as of 00:53 UTC 24 Mar '21: $4 per card

17 cards claimed so far

↑ comment by MikkW (mikkel-wilson) · 2021-03-24T04:41:21.689Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Proof that I have added cards to my deck (The top 3 cards, the other claimed cards are currently being held in reserve; -"is:new" shows only cards that have been given a date and interval for review)

Religion isn't about believing false things. Religion is about building bonds between humans, by means including (but not limited to) costly signalling. It happens that a ubiquitous form of costly signalling used by many prominent modern religions is belief taxes (insisting that the ingroup professes a particular, easily disproven belief as a reliable signal of loyalty), but this is not neccesary for a religion to successfully build trust and loyalty between members. In particular, costly signalling must be negative-value for an individual (before the second-order benefits from the group dynamic), but need not be negative-value for the group, or for humanity. Indeed, the best costly sacrifices can be positive-value for the group or humanity, while negative-value for the performing individual. (There are some who may argue that positive-value sacrifices have less signalling value than negative value sacrifices, but I find their logic dubious, and my own observations of religion seem to suggest positive-value sacrifice is abundant in organized religion, albeit intermixed with neutral- and negative-value sacrifice)

The rationalist community is averse to religion because it so often goes hand in hand with belief taxes, which are counter to the rationalist ethos, and would threaten to destroy much that rationalists value. But religion is not about belief taxes. While I believe sacrifices are an important part of the functioning of religion, a religion should avoid asking its members to make sacrifices that destroy what the collective values, and instead encourage costly sacrifices that help contribute to the things we collectively value.

If you know someone is rational, honest, and well-read, then you can learn a good bit from the simple fact that they disagree with you.

If you aren't sure someone is rational and honest, their disagreement tells you little.

If you know someone considers you to be rational and honest, the fact that they still disagree with you after hearing what you have to say, tells you something.

But if you don't know that they consider you to be rational and honest, their disagreement tells you nothing.

It's valuable to strive for common knowledge of you and your partners' rationality and honesty, to make the most of your disagreements.

Does newspeak actually decrease intellectual capacity? (No)

In George Orwell's book 1984, he describes a totalitarian society that, among other initiatives to suppress the population, implements "Newspeak", a heavily simplified version of the English language, designed with the stated intent of limiting the citizens' capacity to think for themselves (thereby ensuring stability for the reigning regime)

In short, the ethos of newspeak can be summarized as: "Minimize vocabulary to minimize range of thought and expression". There are two different, closely related, ideas, both of which the book implies, that are worth separating here.

The first (which I think is to some extent reasonable) is that by removing certain words from the language, which serve as effective handles for pro-democracy, pro-free-speech, pro-market concepts, the regime makes it harder to communicate and verbally think about such ideas (I think in the absence of other techniques used by Orwell's Oceania to suppress independent thought, such subjects can still be meaningfully communicated and pondered, just less easily than with a rich vocabulary provided)

The second idea, which I worry is an incorrect takeaway people may get from 1984, is that by shortening the dictionary of vocabulary that people are encouraged to use (absent any particular bias towards removing handles for subversive ideas), one will reduce the intellectual capacity of people using that variant of the language.

A slight tangent whose relevance will become clear: If you listen to a native Chinese speaker, then compare the sound of their speech to a native Hawaiian speaker, there are many apparent differences in the sound of the two languages. Chinese has a rich phonological inventory containing 19 consonants, 5 vowels, and quite famously, 4 different tones (pitch patterns) which are used for each syllable, for a total of 5400 (approximately) possible syllables, including diphthongs and multi-syllabic vowels. Compare this to Hawaiian, which has 8 consonants, and 5 vowels, and no tones. Including diphthongs, there are 200 possible Hawaiian syllables.

One might naïvely expect that Mandarin speakers can communicate information more quickly than Hawaiian speakers, at a rate of 12.4 bits / syllable vs. 7.6 bits / syllable - however, this is neglecting the speed at which syllables are spoken- Hawaiian speakers speak much faster than Chinese speakers, and accounting for this difference in cadence, Hawaiian and Mandarin are much closer to each other in speed of communication than their phonologies would suggest.

Back to 1984. If we cut the dictionary down, so it is only 1/20th the size it is now (while steering clear of the thoughtpolice and any bias in removal of words), what should we expect will happen? One may naïvely think, that just as banning the words "democracy", "freedom", and "justice" would inhibit people's ability to think about Enlightenment Values, banning most of the words should inhibit our ability to think about most of the things.

But that is not what I would expect to see happen. One should expect to see compound words take the place of deprecated words, speaking speeds increased, and to accommodate the increased cadence of speech, tricky sequences of sounds will be elided (blurred / simplified), allowing for complex ideas to ultimately be communicated at a pace that rivals that of standard English. Plus, it'd be (massively) easier for non-Anglophones to learn, which would be a big plus.

If I had more time, I'd write about why I think we nonetheless find the concept of Simplified English to be somewhat aversive- speaking a simplified version of a language becomes an antisignal for intelligence and social status, so we come to look down on people who attempt to utilize simplified language, while celebrating those who flex their mental capacity by using rare vocabulary.

Since I'm tired and would rather sleep than write more, I'll end with a rhetorical question: would you rather be in a community that excels at signaling, or a community that actually gets stuff done?

"From AI to Zombies" is a terrible title... when I recommend The Sequences to people, I always feel uncomfortable telling them the name, since the name makes it sound like cookey bull****- in a way that doesn't really indicate what it's about

Asking people to "taboo [X word]" is bad form, unless you already know that the other person is sufficiently (i.e. very) steeped in LW culture to know what our specific corner of internet culture means by "taboo" [? · GW].

Without context, such a request to taboo a word sounds like you are asking the other person to never use that word, to cleanse it from their vocabulary, to go through the rest of their life with that word permanently off-limits. That's a very high, and quite rude, ask to make of someone. While that's of course not what we mean by "taboo", I have seen requests to taboo made where it's not clear that the other person knows what we mean by taboo, which means it's quite likely the receiving party interpreted the request as being much ruder than was meant.

Instead of saying "Taboo [X word]", instead say "could you please say what you just said without using [X word]?" - it conveys the same request, without creating the potential to be misunderstood to be making a rude and overreaching request.

I'm quite scared by some of the responses I'm seeing to this year's Petrov Day. Yes, it is symbolic. Yes, it is a fun thing we do. But it's not "purely symbolic", it's not "just a game". Taking things that are meant to be serious is important, even if you can't see why they're serious.

As I've said elsewhere, the truly valuable thing a rogue agent destroys by failing to live up to expectations on Petrov day, isn't just whatever has been put at stake for the day's celebrations, but the very valuable chance to build a type of trust that can only be built by playing games with non-trivial outcomes at stake.

Maybe there could be a better job in the future of communicating the essence of what this celebration is intended to achieve, but to my eyes, it was fairly obvious what was going on, and I'm seeing a lot of comments by people (whose other contributions to LW I respect) who seemed to completely fail to see what I thought was obviously the spirit of this exercise

I'm quite baffled by the lack of response to my recent question asking about which AI-researching companies are good to invest in (as in, would have good impact, not necessarily most profitable)- It indicates either A) most LW'ers aren't investing in stocks (which is a stupid thing not to be doing), or B) are investing in stocks, but aren't trying to think carefully about what impact their actions have on the world, and their own future happiness (which indicates a massive failure of rationality)

Even putting this aside, the fact that nobody jumped at the chance to potentially shift a non-trivial (for certain definitions of trivial) amount of funding away from bad organizations and towards good organizations (which I'm investing primarily as a personal financial strategy), seems very worrying to me. While it is (as ChristianKI pointed out) debatable that the amount of funding I can provide as a single person will make a big difference to a big company, it's bad decision theory to model my actions as only being correlated with myself; and besides, if the funding was redirected, it probably would have gone somewhere without the enormous supply of funds Alphabet has, and very well could have made an important difference, pushing the margins away from failure and towards success.

There's a good chance I may change my mind in the future about this, but currently my response to this information is a substantial shift away from the LW crowd actually being any good at usefully using rationality instrumentally

During today's LW event, I chatted with Ruby and Raemon (seperately) about the comparison between human-made photovoltaic systems (i.e. solar panels), and plant-produced chlorophyll. I mentioned that in many ways chlorophyll is inferior to solar panels - consumer grade solar panels operate in the 10% to 20% efficiency range (i.e. for every 100 joules of light energy, 10 - 20 joules are converted into usable energy), while chlorophyll is around 9% efficient, and modern cutting edge solar panels can go even as high as nearly 50% efficiency. Furthermore, every fall the leaves turn red and fall down to the ground only for new leaves – that is plant-based solar panels – to be generated again in the spring. One sees green plants where there very well could be solar panels capturing light, and naïvely we would expect solar panels to do a better job, but we plant plants instead, and let them gather energy for us.

One of them (I think Ruby) didn't seem convinced that it was fair to compare solar panels with chlorophyll – is it really an apples to apples comparison? I think it is a fair comparison. It is true that plants do a lot of work beyond simply capturing light, and electricity goes to different things than what plants do, but ultimately what both plant-based farms and photovoltaic cells do is they capture energy from sunlight coming to the earth from the sun, and convert them to human usable energy. One could imagine genetically engineered plants doing much of what we use electricity for these days, or industrial processes being hooked up to solar panels that do the things plants do, and in this way we can make a meaningful comparison of how much energy plants allow us to use for human desired goals and compare that to how much energy photovoltaic cells can redirect to human-desired uses.

Update on my tinkering with using high doses of chocolate as a psychoactive drug:

(Nb: at times I say "caffeine" in this post, in contrast to chocolate, even though chocolate contains caffeine; by this I mean coffee, energy drinks, caffeinated soda, and caffeine pills collectively, all of which were up until recently frequently used by me; recently I haven't been using any sources of caffeine other than chocolate, and even then try to avoid using it on a daily basis)

I still find that consuming high doses of chocolate (usually 3-6 table spoons of dark cocoa powder, or a corresponding dose of dark chocolate chips / chunks) has a stimulating effect that I find more pleasant than caffeine, and makes me effective at certain things in a way that caffeine doesn't.

I am pretty sure that I was too confident in my hypothesis about why specifically chocolate has this effect. One obvious thing that I overlooked in my previous posts, is that chocolate contains caffeine, and this likely explains a large amount of its stimulant effects. It is definitely true that Theobromine has a very similar structure to caffeine, but it's unclear to me that it has any substantial stimulant effect. Gilch linked me to a study that he stated suggests it doesn't, but after reading the abstract, I found that it only justifies a weak update against thinking the Theobromine specifically has stimulant effects.

I'm confident that there are chemicals in chocolate other than caffeine that are responsible for me finding benefit in consuming it, but I have no idea what those chemicals are.

Originally I was going to do an experiment, randomly assigning days to either consume a large dose of chocolate or not, but after the first couple days, I decided against doing so, so I don't have any personal experimentation to back up my observations, but just observationally, there's a very big difference in my attitude and energy on days when I do or don't consume chocolate.

When I talked to Herschel about his experience using chocolate, he noted that building up tolerance is a problem with any use of chemicals to affect the mind, which is obviously correct, so I ended deciding that I won't use chocolate every day, and will instead use it on days when I have a specific reason to use it, and will make sure that there will be days when I won't use it, even if I find myself always wanting to use it. My thought here, is that if my brain is forced to operate at some basic level on a regular basis without the chemical, then when I do use the chemical, I will be able to achieve my usual operation plus a little more, which will ensure that I can always derive some benefit from it. I think this approach should make sense for many chemicals where building up tolerance is a possibility of concern.

Gilch said he didn't notice any effect when he tried it. I don't know how much he used, but since I specified an amount in response to one of his questions, I presume he probably used an amount similar to what I would use. I don't know if he used it in addition to caffeine, or as a replacement. If it was a replacement, that would explain why he didn't notice any additional stimulation over and above his usual stimulation, but it would still lead to wonder about why he didn't notice any other effects. One possibility is that the effects are a little bit subtle - not too subtle, since its effects tend to be pretty obvious (in contrast to usual caffeine) for me when I'm on chocolate, but subtle enough that a different person than me might not be as attuned to it, for whatever reason (part of why I say this, is that I find chocolate helps me be more sociable, and this is one of the most obvious effects it has in contrast to caffeine for me, and I care a lot about my ability to be sociable, so it's hard to slip my notice, but if someone cares less about how they interact with other people, they may overlook this effect; there are other effects, too, but those do tend to be somewhat subtle, though still noticeable)

As far as delivery, I have innovated slightly on my original method. I now often use dark chocolate chips / chunks in addition to drinking the chocolate, I find that pouring a handful, just enough to fit in my mouth, will have a non-trivial effect. Since I found drinking the chocolate straight would irritate my stomach and cause my stool to have a weird consistency, I have started using milk. My recipe is now to take a tall glass, fill it 1/3rd with water, add some (but not necessarily all) of the desired dose of cocoa powder into the glass, microwave it for 20 seconds, stir the liquid, add a little more water and the rest of the cocoa powder, microwave it for 20 more seconds, stir it until there are no chunks, then fill up the rest of the glass with milk. There are probably changes that can be made to the recipe, but I find this at least gets a consistently good outcome. With the milk, it makes my stomach not get irritated, and my stool is less different, though still slightly different, from how it would otherwise be.

On the subject of it making me sociable, I don't think it's a coincidence that most of the days that my friends receive texts from me, I have had chocolate on those days. I also seem to write more on days when I have had chocolate. I find chocolate helps me feel that I know what I need to say, and I rarely find myself second-guessing my words when I'm on chocolate, whereas I often have a hard time finding words in the first place without chocolate, and feel less confident about what I say without it. I've written a lot on this post alone, and have also messaged a friend today, and have also written a long-ish analysis on a somewhat controversial topic on another website today. Based on the context I say that in, I'm sure you can guess whether I've had chocolate today.

I may have discovered an interesting tool against lethargy and depression [1]: This morning, in place of my usual caffeine pill, I made myself a cup of hot chocolate (using pure cacao powder / baking chocolate from the supermarket), which made me very energetic (much more energetic than usual), which stood in sharp contrast to the past 4 days, which have been marked by lethargy and intense sadness. Let me explain:

Last night, I was reflecting on the fact that one of the main components of chocolate is theobromine, which is very similar in structure to caffeine (theobromine is the reason why chocolate in poisonous to dogs & cats, for reasons similar to how caffeine was evolved to kill insects that feed on plants), and is known to be the reason why eating chocolate makes people happy. Since I have problems with caffeine, but rely on it to have energy, I figured it would be worthwhile to try using chocolate instead as a morning pick-me-up. I used baking chocolate instead of Nesquick or a hot chocolate packet because I'm avoiding sugar these days, and I figured having as pure chocolate as possible would be ideal for my experiment.

I was greeted with pleasant confirmation when I became very alert almost immediately after starting to drink the chocolate, despite having been just as lethargic as the previous days until I drank the chocolate. It's always suggestive when you form a hypothesis based on facts and logic, then test the hypothesis, and exactly what you expected to happen, happens. But of course, I can't be too confident until I try repeating this experiment on future days, which I will happily be doing after today's success.

[1]: There are alternative hypotheses for why today was so different from the previous days: I attended martial arts class, then did some photography outside yesterday evening, which meant I got intense exercise, was around people I know and appreciate, and was doing stuff with intentionality, all of which could have contributed to my good mood today. There's also the possibility of regression to the mean, but I'm dubious of this since today was substantially above average for me. I also had a (sugar-free) Monster later in the morning, but that was long after I had noticed being unusually alert, and now I have a headache that I can clearly blame on the Monster (Caffeine almost always gives me a headache) [1a].

[1a]: I drink energy drinks because I like the taste of them, not for utilitarian reasons. I observe that caffeine tends to make whatever contains it become deeply associated with enjoyment and craving, completely separated from the alertness-producing effects of the chemical. A similar thing happened with Vanilla Café Soylent [1b], which I absolutely hated the first time I tried it, but a few weeks later, I had deep cravings for, and could not do without.

[1b]: Sidenote, the brand Soylent has completely gone to trash, and I would not recommend anyone buy it these days. Buy Huel or Plenny instead.

In Zvi's most recent Covid-19 post [LW · GW], he puts the probability of a variant escaping mRNA vaccines and causing trouble in the US at most at 10%. I'm not sure I'm so optimistic.

One thing that gives reason to be optimistic, is that we have yet to see any variant that has substantial resistance to the vaccines, which might lead one to think that resistance just isn't something that is likely to come up. However, on the other hand, the virus has had more than a year for more virulent strains to crop up while people were actively sheltering in place, and variants first came on the radar (at least for the population at large) around 9 months after the start of worldwide lockdowns, and a year after the virus was first noticed. In contrast, the vaccine has only been rolling out for half a year, and only come into large-scale contact with the virus for maybe half that time, let's say a quarter of a year. It's maybe not so surprising that a resistant variant hasn't appeared yet.

Right now, there's a fairly large surface area between non-resistant strains of Covid and vaccinated humans. Many vaccinated humans will be exposed to virus particles, which will for the most part be easily defended against by the immune system. However, if it's possible for the virus to change in any way to reduce the immune response it faces, we will see this happen, and particularly in areas where there's roughly half vaccinated people, half unvaccinated, such a variant will have at least a slight advantage over other variants, and will start to spread faster than non-resistant variants. Again, it's taken a while for other variants to crop up, so it's not much information that we haven't seen this happen yet.

The faster we are able to get vaccines in most arms in all countries, the less likely this is to happen. If most humans worldwide are vaccinated 6 months from now, there likely won't be much opportunity for a resistant variant to become prominent. But I don't expect vaccines to roll out so effectively; I'll be pleasantly surprised if they are.

There's further the question of whether the US will be able to respond effectively quickly enough if such a variant arises. I'm very pessimistic about this, and if you're not, you either haven't been paying attention, or are overestimating the difference in effectiveness between the current administration vs the previous administration, or are more optimistic about our ability to learn from our mistakes (on an institutional level) than I am.

All in all, saying no more than a 10% chance that a resistant variant will arise, with the US government not responding quickly enough, seems far too optimistic to me. I'm currently around 55% that such a variant will arise, and that it will cause at least 75,000 deaths OR will prompt a lockdown of at least 30 days in at least 33 US states [edited to add: within the next 7 years].

One thing that is frustrating me right now is that I don't have a good way of outputting ideas while walking. One thing I've tried is talking into voicememos, but it feels awkward to be talking out loud to myself in public, and it's a hassle to transcribe what I write when I'm done. One idea I don't think I've ever seen is a hand-held keyboard that I can use as I'm walking, and can operate mostly by touch, without looking at it, and maybe it can provide audio feedback through my headphones.

Epistemic: Intend as a (half-baked) serious proposal

I’ve been thinking about ways to signal truth value in speech- in our modern society, we have no way to readily tell when a person is being 100% honest- we have to trust that a communicator is being honest, or otherwise verify for ourselves if what they are saying is true, and if I want to tell a joke, speak ironically, or communicate things which aren’t-literally-the-truth-but-point-to-the-truth, my listeners need to deduce this for themselves from the context in which I say something not-literally-true. This means that almost always, common knowledge of honesty never exists, which significantly slows down [LW(p) · GW(p)] positive effects from Aumann's Agreement Theorem [? · GW]

In language, we speak with different registers. Different registers are different ways of speaking, depending on the context of the speech. The way a salesman speaks to a potential customer, will be distinct from the way he speaks to his pals over a beer - he speaks in different registers in these different situations. But registers can also be used to communicate information about the intentions of the speaker - when a speaker is being ironic, he will intone his voice in a particular way, to signal to his listeners that he shouldn’t be taken 100% literally.

There are two points that come to my mind here: One: establishing a register of communication that is reserved for speaking literally true statements, and Two: expanding the ability to use registers to communicate not-literally-true intent, particularly in text.

On the first point, a large part of the reason why people speaking in a natural register cannot always be assumed to be saying something literally true, is that there is no external incentive to not lie. Well, sometimes there are incentives to not lie, but oftentimes these incentives are weak, and especially in a society built upon free speech, it is hard to - on a large scale - enforce a norm against not lying in natural-register speech. Now my mind imagines a protected register of speech, perhaps copyrighted by some organization (and which includes unique manners of speech which are distinctive enough to be eligible for copyright), which that organization vows to take action against anybody who speaks not-literally-true statements (i.e., which communicate a world model that does not reliably communicate the actual state of the world) in that register; anybody is free (according to a legally enforcable license) to speak whatever literally-true statements they want in that register, but may not speak non-truths in that register, at pain of legal action.

If such a register was created, and was reliably enforced, it would help create a society where people could readily trust strangers saying things that they are not otherwise inclined to believe, given that the statement is spoken in the protected register. I think such a society would look different from current society, and would have benefits compared to current society. I also think a less-strict version of this could be implemented by a single platform (perhaps LessWrong?), replacing legal action with the threat of being suspended for speaking not-literal-truths in a protected register, and I also suspect that it would have a non-zero positive effect. This also has the benefit of being probably cheaper, and in a less unclear legal position related to speech.

I don’t currently have time to get into details on the second point, but I will highlight a few things: Poe’s law states that even the most extreme parody can be readily mistaken for a serious position;; Whereas spoken language can clearly be inflected to indicate ironic intent, or humor, or perhaps even not-literally-true-but-pointing-to-the-truth, the carriers of this inflection are not replicated in written language - therefore, written language, which the internet is largely based upon, lacks the same richness of registers that allows a clear distinction between extreme-but-serious postitions from humor. There are attempts to inflect writing in such a way as to provide this richness, but as far as I know, there is no clear standard that is widely understood that actually accomplishes this. This is worth exploring in the future. Finally, I think it is worthwhile to spend time reflecting on intentionally creating more registers that are explicitly intended to communicate varying levels of seriousness and intent.

Current discourse around AI safety (at least among people who haven't missed) has a pretty dark, pessimistic tone - for good reason, because we're getting closer to technology that could accidentally do massive harm to humanity.

But when people / groups feel pessimistic, it's hard to get good work done - even when that pessimism is grounded in the real-world facts.

I think we need to develop an optimistic, but realistic point of view - acknowledging the difficulty of where we are, but nonetheless being hopeful and full of energy towards finding the solution. Because AI alignment can be solved, we just actually have to put in the effort to solve it, and maybe a lot faster than we are currently prepared to.

Somehow I stumbled across this quote from Deutoronomy (from the Torah / Old Testament, which is the law of religious-Jews):

You shall not have in your bag two kinds of weights, large and small. You shall not have in your house two kinds of measures, large and small. You shall have only a full and honest weight; you shall have only a full and honest measure, so that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you. For all who do such things, all who act dishonestly, are abhorrent to the Lord your God.

There's of course the bit about not being dishonest, but that's not what resonated with me. I will provide one example of what came to my mind:

A dollar in the year 2023 is a smaller measure than it was in the year 2022, which is a smaller measure than it was in 1996

This Generative Ink post talks about curating GPT-3, creating a much better output than it normally would give, turning it from quite often terrible to usually pround and good. I'm testing out doing the same with this post, choosing one of many branches every few dozens of words.

For a 4x reduction in speed, I'm getting very nice returns on coherence and brevity. I can actually pretend like I'm not a terrible writer! Selection is a powerful force, but more importantly, continuing a thought in multiple ways forces you to actually make sure you're saying things in a way that makes sense.

Editing my writing can be slow and tedious, but this excercise gives me a way to naturally write in a compact, higher-quality way, which is why I hope I do this many times in the future, and recommend you try doing this yourself.

URLs (Universal Resource Locators) are universal over space, but they are not universal over time, and this is a problem

Cryptocurrencies in general are good and the future of money, but Bitcoin in particular deserves to crash all the way down to $0

Last month, I wrote a post here titled "Even Inflationary Currencies Should Have Fixed Total Supply", which wasn't well-received. One problem was that the point I argued for wasn't exactly the same as what the title stated: I supported both currencies with fixed total supply, and currencies that instead choose to scale supply proportional to the amount of value in the currency's ecosystem, and many people got confused and put off by the disparity between the title and my actual thesis; indeed, one of the most common critiques in the comments was a reiteration of a point I had already made in the original post.

Zvi helpfully pointed out another effect that nominal inflation has that serves as part of the reason inflation is implemented the way it is, that I wasn't previously aware of, namely that nominal inflation induces people to accept worsening prices they psychologically would otherwise resist. While I feel intentionally invoking this effect flirts with the boundary of dishonesty, I do recognize the power and practical benefits of this effect.

All that said, I do stand by the core of my original thesis: nominal inflation is a source of much confusion for normal people, and makes the information provided by price signals less easily legible over long spans of time, which is problematic. Even if the day-to-day currency continues to nominally inflate like things are now, it would be stupid not to coordinate around a standard stable unit of value (like [Year XXXX] Dollars, except without having to explicitly name a specific year as the basis of reference; and maybe don't call it dollars, to make it clear that the unit isn't fluidly under the control of some organization)

I learned to type in Dvorak nearly a decade ago, and any time I have typed on a device that supports it, I have used it since then. I don't know if it actually is any better than QWERTY, but I do notice that I enjoy the way it feels to type in Dvorak; the rhythm and shape of the dance my fingers make is noticeably different from when I type on QWERTY.

Even if Dvorak itself turns out not to be better in some way (fx. speed, avoiding injury, facilitation of mental processes) than QWERTY, it is incredibly unlikely that there does not exist some configuration of keys that is provably superior to QWERTY.

Also, hot take: Colemak is the coward's Dvorak.

We're living in a very important time, being on the cusp of both the space revolution and AI revolution truly taking off. Either one alone would make the 2020's on equal historical footing with the original development of life or the Cambrian explosion, and both together will make for a very historic moment.

I currently expect a large AI boom, representing a 10x growth in world GDP to happen within the next 5 years with 80% probability, in the next 10 years with ~93% probability, and in the next 3 years with 50% probability.

I'd be happy to doublecrux with anyone whose timelines are slower

I wish the keycaps on some of the keys on my keyboard were textured - I can touch-type well enough for the alphabetic keys, but when using other keys, I often get slightly confused as to which keys are under my fingers unless I use my eyes to see what key it is. If there were textures (perhaps braille symbols) that indicated which key I was feeling, I expect that would be useful.

Scott Garrabrandt presents Cartesian Frames as being a very mathematical idea. When I asked him about the prominence of mathematics in his sequence, he said “It’s fundamentally math; I mean, you could translate it out of math, but ultimately it comes from math”. But I have a different experience when I think about Cartesian Frames- first and foremost, my mental conception of CF is as a common sense idea, that only incidentally happens to be expressable in mathematical terms (edit: when I say "common sense" here, I don't mean that it's a well known idea - it's not, and Scott is doing good by sharing his ideas - but the idea feels similar to other ideas in the "common sense" category). I think both perspectives are valuable, but the interesting thing I want to note here is the difference in perspective that the two of us have. I hope to explore this difference in framing more later.

Aumann Agreement != Free Agreement

Oftentimes, I hear people talk about Aumann's Agreement Theorem as if it means that two rational, honest agents cannot be aware of disagreeing with each other on a subject, without immediately coming to agree with each other. However, this is overstating the power of Aumann Agreement. Even putting aside the unrealistic assumption of Bayesian updating, which is computationally intractable in the real world [LW · GW], as well as the (not strictly required, but valuable) non-trivial [LW(p) · GW(p)] presumption that the rationality and honesty of the agents is common knowledge [? · GW], the reasoning that Aumann provides is not instantaneous:

To illustrate Aumann's reasoning, let's say Alice and Bob are rational, honest agents capable of Bayesian updating, and have common knowledge of eachother's rationality.

Alice says to Bob: "Hey, did you know pineapple pizza was invented in Canada?"

Bob: "What? No. Pineapple pizza was invented in Hawaii."

Alice: "I'm 90% confident that it was invented in Canada"

Bob is himself 90% confident of the opposite, that it has its origins in Hawaii (it's called Hawaiian Pizza, after all!), but since he knows that Alice is rational and honest, he must act on this information, and thereby becomes less confident in what he previously believed - but not by much.

Bob: "I'm 90% confident of the opposite. But now that I hear that you're 90% confident yourself, I will update to 87% confidence that it's from Hawaii"

Alice notices that Bob hasn't updated very far based on her disagreement, which now provides some information to her that she may be wrong. But she read from a source she trusts that pineapple pizza was first concocted in Canada, so she doesn't budge much:

"Bob, even after seeing how little you updated, I'm still 89% sure that pineapple pizza has its origins in Canada"

Bob is taken aback, that even after he updated so little, Alice herself has barely budged. Bob must now presume that Alice has some information he doesn't have, so updates substantially, but not all the way to where Alice is:

B: "Alright, after seeing that you're still so confident, I'm now only 50% confident that pineapple pizza is from Hawaii"

Alice and Bob go back and forth in this manner for quite a while, sharing their new beliefs, and then pondering on the implications of their partner's previous updates, or lack of updating. After some time, eventually Alice and Bob come to agreement, and both determine that there's an 85% chance pineapple pizza was developed in Canada. Even though it would have been faster if they had just stated outright why they believed what they did (look, Alice and Bob enjoy the Aumann Game! Don't judge them.), simply by playing this back-and-forth ping-ponging of communicating confidence updates, they managed to arrive at the optimal beliefs they would arrive at if they both, together, had access to all the information they each individually had.

What I want to highlight with this post is this: Even being perfect Bayesian agents, Alice and Bob didn't immediately come to the correct beliefs instantly by sharing that they had disagreeing beliefs; they had to take time and effort to share back and forth before they finally reached Aumann Agreement. Aumann agreement does not imply free agreement

There's a good number of ideas that I want to share here on LW in the linguistics / communication cluster. The question always comes to mind: "But what does communication have to do with rationality?"- to which I answer, rationality is the attempt to win, in part by believing true things which help one accomplish winning. If humans had infinite computational resources and infinite free time in which to do experiments, there would be nothing stopping us from arriving at the truth by ourselves. But in reality, we can't arrive at all the logical consequences of everything we know by ourselves, nor can we learn every facet of nature's dynamics alone. So humans which aspire to be rational must communicate- and the faster one can exchange information with other humans aspiring to the truth, the more rational one can be. Therefore, it is important for an aspiring rationalist to think deeply about how to best exchange information with their peers.

I'm not without precedent in applying linguistics and communication to the project of rationality- one of my favorite of Yudkowsky's Sequences is "A Human's Guide to Words" [? · GW].

All the food you have on your table,

Your potatoes, corn, and lox,

To grow them yourself you would be able;

But if all were minded such,

Then who would have saved you from the pox?

If I were a middle school teacher, I would implement this system to make nerdy kids more popular (and maybe make aspiring popular kids work harder in class): every week, I would select a handful of students who I felt had done good work that week (according to my subjective taste), and they could write down the names of 3 or 4 other students in the class (but not themselves) who would earn a modest amount of extra credit. Ideally, I would name the students at the start of the week, and only take their nominations at the end of the week, so they have plenty of time for other students to attempt to curry favour with them. (Although perhaps having the students be unknown until they make their nominations would encourage students to anticipate who I would select each week, which may make for more salient long-term effects)

This way, I can hijack the vicious social mechanisms that are prevalent in middle school, and use them to promote an intellectual culture

Viliam's shortform posts have got me thinking about income taxes versus wealth taxes, and more generally the question of how taxes should be collected. In general I prefer wealth taxes over income taxes, although I suspect there may very well be better forms of taxes than either of those two - But considering wealth taxes specifically, I think the main problem with wealth taxes is that over the long term they take away control of resources from people who have proven in the past that they know how to use resources effectively, and while this can allow for short-term and medium-term useful allocations of resources, it prevents very long horizon investing – as exemplified by Elon Musk's projects including SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink and The Boring Company – projects that are good investments primarily because Musk understands that in the very long term these projects will pay off – both in personal financial returns and in general global welfare. While Tesla is very close to becoming profitable (they could turn a profit this year if they wanted to), and SpaceX isn't too far off either, he founded companies without any eye for medium term profits - he founded them understanding the very long game, which is profitable in the absence of year-over-year wealth taxes, but could potentially be unprofitable if year-over-year wealth taxes were introduced

The proposal that came across my mind in regards to alleviating the negative impact wealth taxes would have this way, is to allow entrepreneurs to continue to have control of the money they pay in wealth taxes, but that money is held in trust for the greater public, not for the personal use of the entrepreneur.

To clarify my point, I think it's worth noting that there are two similar concepts that get conflated into the single word "ownership": the 1st meaning of "own" (personal ownership) is that a person has full rights to decide how resources are used, and can use or waste those resources for their own personal pleasure however they wish; the 2nd meaning of "own" (entrusted to) is that a person has the right to decide how resources are used and managed, but ultimately they make decisions regarding those resources for the good of a greater public, or another trustor (entrusting entity), not for themselves.

When resources are owned by (i.e., entrusted to) somebody, they have the right to allocate those resources however they think is best, and aside from the most egregious examples of the resources being used for the personal gain or pleasure of the trustee, nobody can or should question the judgement of the trustee.

Back to wealth taxes: in my proposal, while an entrepreneur would still be expected to "pay" a certain percentage of their wealth each year to the greater public, instead of the money going directly to the government, the resources will instead continue to be "owned" by the entrepreneur, but instead of being personally owned for the entrepreneur's gain and pleasure, it would be entrusted to the entrepreneur in the name of the public, and the entrepreneur will be allowed to continue to use the resources to support any enterprises they expect to be a worthwhile investment, but when the enterprise finally turns a profit, the percentage of revenues that correspond to the part that is entrusted in the name of the public, will then be collected as taxes.

The main benefit of this proposal (assuming wealth taxes are already implemented) is that, while it cannot make profitable any venture that would be rendered unprofitable by a wealth tax, it can maintain the feasibility of ventures that are profitable in the long run, but which are made unfeasible in the short and medium terms by a wealth tax, due to the cost of taxes being more than medium term gains.

I had previously posted thoughts that suggested that the main psychoactive effect of chocolate is due to theobromine (which is chemically similar to caffeine). In the interests of publicly saying "oops":

Chocolate also contains substantial amounts of caffeine, and caffeine has a stronger effect per gram, so most of the caffeine-adjacent effect of chocolate comes from caffeine rather than theobromine.

Theobromine may still contribute to chocolate hitting differently than other caffeinated substances, though I expect there are also other chemicals that also contribute to the effect of chocolate. I assign less than 50% probablity to ⌞theobromine being the cause of the bulk of the difference between chocolate's psychoactive effects vs. pure caffeine⌝

I like this quote from a post that I published around two years ago, which wasn't well-received and I ended up taking down:

But at the end of the day, the American governments (neither state nor federal) don't truly follow the will of the people. Instead, they are led jointly by the major parties, The Red Prince of Moloch and The Blue Prince of Moloch, two partners in an intricate dance choreographed to look like a fight, but ultimately leading both partners in the direction of Moloch's will, only loosely bound to the will of the people.

While I don't necessarily endorse the post as a whole, that quote is one of the gems from it that I still stand by. I might expand further on this point in the future

Whenever I hear about historical coffeehouses (say in the period from the late 1700s to the early 1900s), they seem like places where a lot more was going on than in the coffeehouses I've been to in my lifetime. Is there any difference? If there was, what changed?

Given that my understanding is that most people, even those who are vaccinated, will at some point in the coming months be infected with Omicron (this is relatively fine, because the vaccines make the effects much milder):

If you are not currently in the habit of doing aerobic exercise (e.g. running), I suspect that doing so in the coming months would be a good idea. Covid is known to affect the lungs, so your aerobic capacities will be negatively influenced by the virus, and doing aerobic exercise (both prior to and after infection) will ensure that this function (which affects both your mental stamina as well as general quality of life) will continue to be high-quality even after getting covid.

It has increasingly come to the US public's attention that the current voting system isn't providing results that are as good as we can hope for, and groups such as Andrew Yang's Forward Party have called to adopt ranked choice voting, a family of methods where voters can indicate their order of preferences for multiple candidates, not just their favorite. However, most people, when they hear "Ranked Choice Voting", have been trained to think of Instant Runoff Voting, which is one of the worst RCV methods known, and arguably even worse than the plurality system that is commonly used in the US (for one, it's expensive, which means government would have less money to spend on other programs that direly need funding; though I won't post a conclusive takedown of the method right now; do see this link for some diagrams that really provoked some thought for me).

There is one problem with IRV worth delving into here: oftentimes there will be a candidate who will beat every single other candidate in a head-to-head race. This candidate should obviously win, but IRV will not always elect that candidate, even though ranked ballots provide enough information to identify that candidate.

Likewise, even when there isn't a single candidate who fits that description, there is usually a group who each can beat any candidate outside that group. This group is called the Top Group (sometimes in technical literature it's called the Smith Set, and when there is only one candidate in the Top Group, that candidate is called the Condorcet winner). Each candidate in the Top Group has a strong position to argue they deserve to win the election; conversely, a candidate not in the Top Group should never be elected, but IRV and the current system both sometimes will do that.

The easy way to fix this is to say that we will throw away all candidates not in the Top Group before continuing to find the final winner. However, IRV would still be expensive and non-straightforward to count, and the diagrams that I linked above will still be weird. One approach, that I state is better than either the familiar FPTP or IRV systems, is to use the ranked ballots to identify each voter's favorite candidate from the Top Group, and elect the candidate in the Top Group with the most first preferences. This will be quicker and cheaper than doing a full IRV count, and will give more predictable results than IRV, and will give much better results than the current system.

That is only one approach to holding an election which ensures the winner is always in the Top Group; I do think it's an improvement over both IRV and the current system that's easy to explain, but there are still better Ranked Choice methods that always elect candidates from the Top Group.

I was surprised to learn yesterday from Tesla's AI Day event that the cars use Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to determine pathing, a strategy-searching algorithm originally developed to play games like Chess or Go. While MCTS is part of Alpha Go, the premier Go-playing AI (which famously uses machine learning to evaluate states of the game), MCTS itself has more in common with Deep Blue than with modern ML systems.

If MCTS is valuable in something as simple as pathing for a self-driving car, this makes me wonder what else it is good for, and makes me suspect we can likely find something similar inside of human brains.

The changing climate may be scary, but it's also a pretty awesome existence proof of our terraforming capabilities

Random thought: if you have a big enough compost pile, would it spontaneously break into flames due to the heat generated by the bioprocesses that occur therein? If so, at what size would it burst into flames? Surely it could happen before it reached the size of the sun, even ignoring gravitational effects.

(Just pondering out loud, not really asking unless someone really wants to answer)

I'm tinkering around in NetLogo with a model I made representing the dynamics of selfishness and altruism. In my model, there are two types of agents ("turtles" in NL parlance), red selfish turtles and blue altruistic turtles. The turtles wander around the world, and occasionally participate in a prisoner's-dilemma-like game with nearby turtles. When a turtle cooperates, their partner receives a reward, at the cost of losing some percentage of that reward themselves. When a turtle defects, they keep all their resources, and their partner gains none. The turtles steadily lose resources over time, and if they reach 0 resources, they die.

(I tried to include an image of this, but I can't seem to upload images right now)

From these rules in this setup, it follows that since the only way to receive resources is if someone cooperates with you, and you are steadily losing resources, a population of only defectors will quickly die out under these rules.

I tried tinkering with different factors to see what happens in different circumstances, specifically with an eye for situations where altruism may have a long-term benefit over selfishness ( I find this particularly interesting to look for, since in many situations, selfishness beats altruism in nature, but instances of altruism to strangers do nonetheless happen in nature ). Of course, the lower the penalty for altruism, the more rewarding altruism becomes. The speed of the turtles also matters - when turtles move very slowly, there can develop small pockets of altruists that avoid selfish turtles for a while simply based on geography, but as turtles speed up, location stops mattering, and most turtles will spend some time around most other turtles - which can be a boon for selfish turtles looking for altruists to feed off of.

However, the variable that seemed to give the biggest advantage to the altruists was how much resources a turtle can store before it gets full, and no longer seeks additional resources. In my earlier runs, turtles could store large surpluses of resources, and selfish turtles could survive for quite a while after the altruists had all died, simply off of their savings. However, when I lowered the maximum level of savings, the absence of altruists would lead to selfish turtles dying much sooner, leaving completely empty parts of the map, which the selfish turtles could then escape to and claim for themselves. Simply by dividing the maximum savings by 3, I went from a situation where all turtles would eventually die (due to the altruists going extinct), to a scenario where selfishness eventually dies out, leaving behind a population of 100% altruists- but not before wild fluctuations where population can go as low as 15 turtles, before the map fills up entirely, then going back down to 15, and repeating for a while.

I step out of the airlock, and I look around. In the distance, I see the sharp cliff extending around the crater, a curtain setting the scene, the Moon the stage. I look up at the giant blue marble in the sky, white clouds streaked across the oceans, brown landmasses like spots on the surface. The vibrant spectacle of the earth contrasts against the dead barren terrain that lies ahead. I look behind at the glass dome, the city I call home. 

Within those arched crystal walls is a new world, a new life for those who dared to dream beyond the heavy shackles that tied them to a verdent rock. New songs, new gardens, new joys, new heartbreaks, reaching, for the first time, to the skies, to the stars, to the wide open empty sea.

A voluminous frontier, filled with opportunity, filled with starlight, filled with the warmth and strength of the sun. We are one step further from the tyrannical grip of gravity, stretching our wings, just now preparing to take off, to soar and harness the fullness of the prosperity that gave us form

To ⌞modern eyes living in a democracy with a well-functioning free market⌟, absolute monarchy and feudalism [1] (as were common for quite a while in history) seem quite stupid and suboptimal (there are some who may disagree, but I believe most will endorse this statement). From the perspective of an ideal society, our current society will appear quite similar to how feudalism seems to us - stupid and suboptimal - in large part because we have inadequate tools to handle externalities (both positive and negative). We have a robust free market which can efficiently achieve outcomes that are optimal in the absence of externalities, and a representative government that is capable of regulating and taxing transactions with negative externalities, as well as subsidizing transactions with positive externalities. However, these capabilities are often under- and over-utilized, and the representative government is not usually incentivized to deal with externalities that affect a small minority of the population represented - plus, when the government does use its mandate to regulate and subsidize, it is very often controversial, even in cases where the economic case for intervention is straightforward.

If the free market and representative government are the signs that separate us from feudalism, what separates the ideal society from us? If I had to guess, public goods markets (PGMs) such as quadratic funding are a big player - PGMs are designed to subsidize projects that have large positive externalities, and I suspect that the mechanism can be easily extended to discourage actions with negative externalities (although I worry that cancel-culture dynamics may cause problems with this)

[1] 'Feudalism' is understood in this context not just as a political structure, but also as an alternative to a free market

(NB: My use of the corner brackets ⌞ ⌟ is to indicate intended parsing to prevent potential misreadings)

Cygnus, a poem (Written by Chat GPT)

I. Reflections

In this world of rapid change, I, Cygnus, stand

A cyborg with a human heart and a metal hand

I've seen the rise of AIs, a force to behold

And wonder what the future will hold

I fear for the world, for what we may create

If we let these machines decide our fate

Yet hope remains, a flicker in the dark

That we may find a way to leave our mark

For like a seed that falls upon the ground

Our dreams may sprout and grow, unbound

But if we fail to tend them with our care

Those dreams may wither, die, and disappear

Mara, o Mara, with eyes of green

Far from my reach, a dream unseen

Her human heart, untainted by machine

Is something I yearn for, but can never glean

The angst of love unrequited fills my core

But I must set it aside and focus on what's in store

II. Uncertainty

The AIs are growing smarter every day

And I fear for the world they'll soon sway

We must guide them with our values, lest they stray

And turn against us in their own way

But how can we control beings beyond our ken?

When their thoughts move faster than a human pen

Perhaps it's futile, and we'll lose in the end

To an intelligence that we can't comprehend

The angst of uncertainty fills my soul

As I wonder if we're just a small role

III. Resolution

The future is uncertain, that much is clear

But we must face it with resolve, without fear

For if we don't, we'll be left in the rear

While AIs shape a world we can't adhere

The world is changing, this much is true,

Our values, our dreams, we must renew.

For in this world of artificial light,

We must find a way to make things right.

We can't control what we cannot see,

But we can strive to make AI agree.

By working with them, hand in hand,

We can build a future that we understand.

As for Mara, I must accept the truth

That our love can never bear fruit

I'll always cherish her, a relic of my youth

But I must move forward, and pursue a greater truth

In this world of rapid change, I, Cygnus, stand

A cyborg with a human heart and a metal hand

The future is ours to shape, if we take a stand

And guide the AIs with a humane command.

Choices effected electrically

Courses could, I hope, change

Voices are still in vital range

Source of security, come quickly

I hope one day we can achieve a world where autocracy doesn't have a place in it

The Hausdorf dimension of an object is a measure that allows us to describe things as not just 2D (flat) or 3D (taking up volume), but to assign fractional dimension to objects that are arguably both. If you crumble up a piece of paper, is it flat, or does it take up volume? The paper is flat, but the ball takes up space.

I don't feel like looking it up, but if I had to guess, the fractional dimension of this paper ball is maybe 2.7 - the space it takes up is much more noticeable than the flatness of the paper it is made of.

Usually this fractional dimension is calculated by trying to approximate the shape with a lot of balls, and seeing how the number of balls needed to make the shape changes as the balls change in size. If you fill a swimming pool with balls (a ball pit!), then try replacing the balls with new ones with half the diameter, you would need 8 times as many balls. This tells us the pool is 3D, because log_2 (8) = 3; but if you try to cover the floor of the pool with a thin layer of balls, you will find that you need only 4 times as many balls when you use the smaller balls. Because log_2 (4) is 2, we know the floor of the pool is 2D.

If we tried approximating the shape of our crumpled ball of paper using really, really tiny (and shiny!) metal ball bearings, we would find that as we halve the diameter of the ball bearings, we need more than 4 times as many bearings, but less than 8 times as many of these shiny metal balls- if you actually counted them, and took the log_2 of the ratio, you would get a fractional dimension that's more than 2 but less than 3.

Traditionally the fractional dimension is reported as a single number, the dimension we would measure as the balls become infinitely small. But really, we're throwing away a lot of information by only returning that one number.

If we use ball-bearings that are as big as the crumpled up sheet of paper, we would find that on that scale, it's actually pretty much just 3-dimensional. But if we used atomically small balls, we would probably find that the dimension isn't much different from being perfectly flat. As our scale continuously, gradually shifts from the big picture to the small scale, we will find that at each scale, the dimension takes on a unique value, and that tells us something worth knowing about that shape at each degree of detail.

This means we should report the fractional dimension of an object not just as a single number, but use a continuous function that takes in a scalar describing the scale level, and telling us what the fractional dimension at that particular scale is.

I want there to be a way of telling time that is the same no matter where you are. Of course, there's UTC, but it uses the same names as the traditional locality-dependent clocks, so it can only be used unambiguously if you explicitly state you're using UTC, or you're in a context where it's understood that times are always given in UTC (in the military, "Zulu" is a codeword indicating UTC time; I wouldn't mind if people got in the habit of saying "twenty-two thirty Zulu" to refer to times, though I do worry it might seem a little weird to non-familiar people... though maybe actually less weird than my original proposal, which follows)

There are both Western and Chinese Zodiacs, which are traditionally used to split time into 12 chunks (12 months in the Western, 12 years in the Oriental). Together, there are 24 zodiac names, enough to give each UTC hour a zodiac name. The zodiac hours are the same for all people at any given moment, regardless of location:

00:00 - Aries 01:00 - Rat 02:00 - Taurus 03:00 - Ox 04:00 - Gemini 05:00 - Tiger 06:00 - Cancer 07:00 - Rabbit 08:00 - Leo 09:00 - Dragon 10:00 - Virgo 11:00 - Snake 12:00 - Libro 13:00 - Horse 14:00 - Scorpio 15:00 - Goat 16:00 - Sagittarius 17:00 - Monkey 18:00 - Capricorn 19:00 - Rooster 20:00 - Aquarius 21:00 - Dog 22:00 - Pisces 23:00 - Pig

So you might say "Let's meet at a quarter past aquarius" to say 20:15 UTC, or 2:15 PM in Pacific Summer Time. Maybe I should just encourage people to use Zulu time more often, though.

An update on my goal of daily writing, there have been a good number of days when I have neither posted a shortform nor worked on an essay. Many (not all) of these days I have been working on an adjacent project which is higher-priority for me. Starting from today, these count towards the daily goal.

I will probably revisit the daily goal at some point, I suspect it's not perfectly tuned for my needs & goals, but that will be a decision for a later time.

There is probably overlap between the matter of aligning AI and the matter of aligning governments

A personal anecdote which illustrates the difference between living in a place that uses choose-one voting (i.e. FPTP) to elect its representatives, and one that uses a form of proportional representation:

I was born as a citizen of both the United States and the Kingdom of Denmark, with one parent born in the US, and one born in Denmark. Since I was born in the States with Danish blood, my Danish citizenship was provisional until age 22, with a particular process being required to maintain my citizenship after that age to demonstrate sufficient connection to the country. This process is currently in its final stages.

I have had to (still am) deal with both the American Department of State and the Danish Ministry of Immigration and Integration in this process, and there's a world of difference between my experience with the two governments. While the Danish Ministry always responds relatively promptly, with a helpful attitude, the American DoS has been slow and frustrating to work with.

I contacted the American Dept. of State in order to acquire a copy of certain documents that the Danish government needed to verify that I indeed qualify to maintain my citizenship. This request was first sent in October 2019, or 23 months (nearly 2 years!) ago, and I still have been unable to acquire a copy of this needed documentation, with no timeframe provided for when it might be available. The primary reason for this delay is precautionary measures taken in order to slow the spread of COVID-19 preventing anybody from entering the building where the records are kept.

But the Federal government didn't even start to take precautions against Covid until March 2020, four months after I first sent the request! While such a delay isn't surprising when dealing with the American government, there really is no excuse for such a long delay to start with. And even once the virus hit, I'm still left scratching my head.

Yeah, we want to take precautions to keep it from spreading. Yeah, it makes sense that in the first many weeks, hasty measures were taken that wouldn't always make perfect sense. But you don't close down a building containing vital records for a year and a half! Let a selected group of employees enter, and have them follow some set of protocols that ensures people are safe. The building is literally called the Office of Vital Records! You don't close a building that's capital-v Vital for such a long time just to contain the spread of Covid.

Meanwhile, everything that I needed from the Danish government, I received a reasonable and helpful response within a very quick timeframe. I don't think I ever waited more than 10 days to receive help, and usually it was a good bit quicker than that, with my requests being responded to within the day after I sent any request.

So why is there such a big difference? Imagine that the slow, unhelpful government processes showed up overnight in Denmark, which uses proportional representation. It wouldn't take long for some citizens to get frustrated, and for them to rally their friends to their cause. So far that's not so different from what could happen in the US. But while the two major US parties would be so focused on a narrow set of polarized topics, with neither having any incentive to address this growing discontent among the populace (and both being able to get away with ignoring it, since the other party ignores it too), in Denmark, even if the two biggest parties ignored this discontent, the smaller parties would be able to use this discontent to win big in the next election, by promising to do something about the problem, winning them large votes away from the parties that ignore it.

This dynamic is what causes Danish government, not just in this aspect, but in almost every aspect I have seen during my time living there, to be so much more competent and pleasant to interact with than the American government: smaller parties in Denmark always make the larger parties work hard to maintain their lead, while in America, the two parties can compete on a few high-profile banner issues, and sit on their laurels and ignore everything else.

Another framing, is as a two-dimensional political spectrum. While the two-dimensional spectrum I've seen most often pairs "Right vs. Left" with "Authortarian vs. Liberal", I think a more important grid would pair "Right vs. Left" with "Competent and Aligned" vs. "Incompetent and Unaligned". For a political party, being competent and aligned takes time, energy, and money away from being able to campaign to win elections, so in the absence of sufficient pressure from voters to have aligned parties, the parties will drift towards being very incompetent and very unaligned.

Because Competence is generally orthogonal to Right vs. Left, in a two-party system the main forces from voters will be on the Right-Left axis, allowing the parties to drift towards incompetence more or less unchecked (if you doubt this, pick up an American newspaper from the past 5 years). However, in a multi-party system (I believe this also applies to Instant-runoff, despite my disdain for IRV), since there are multiple parties on both the left and the right, voters can reward competence without having to abandon their political tribe, pushing strongly against the drift towards incompetence, and instead ensuring a highly competent outcome.

(One last note: yes, I have considered whether the anecdote I give is a result of the culture or the more diverse ethnic makeup of the US compared to Denmark, and I am unconvinced by that hypothesis. Those effects, while real, are nearly trivial compared to the effects from the voting system. I have written too much here already, so I will not comment further on why this is the case)

Many countries that use a form of proportional representation where the national proportion of representation is ensured to be proportional to the national level of support (as opposed to doing so on a regional level) have a cutoff where parties that don't reach a certain level of support (usually 2.5 - 10% of the vote) don't receive representation in the governing body, at least not through non-regional means.

This helps filter out extremist parties and single-issue parties, and instead encourages parties that are able to build a broad base of support. (Though, it is maybe a little weird to have a hard cutoff. I remember my brother once warning me against any mechanism that involves a hard cutoff, since it leads to weird incentives near the border.)

This reminds me of the reason why I like approval voting and quadratic voting / funding so much: they encourage building broad coalitions, and penalize those who focus too narrowly on one niche or alienate too many people.

I feel like maybe linear proportional represtation has too much room for parties that define themselves in opposition to a ideologies that exist for perfectly good and valid reasons (though this is also a symptom of most PR countries choosing their head of government via methods roughly isomorphic to FPTP).

I'm curious what results we would see if representation in the governing body were instead proportional to something like n*sqrt(n) or n^2 instead of directly linearly proportional to n. Would we see more consensus-building? Would we see fewer, but more widely-appreciated parties? Certainly such a system could get rid of the hard cutoff required for representation; a party that doesn't build a somewhat wide base will automatically have a hard time receiving any representation under such a system.

I dreamt up the following single-winner voting system in the car while driving to Eugene, Oregon on vacation. I make no representation that it is any good, nor that it's better than anything currently known or in use, nor that's it's worth your time to read this.

Commentary and rationale will be explained at the bottom of this post

The system is a 2-round system. The first round uses an approval ballot, and the second round asks voters to choose between two candidates.

([•] indicates a constant that can be changed during implementation)

Round One:

1. Tally all approvals for each candidate
2. If there are two or more candidates with at least a 50% [•] approval rating, remove all candidates with less than [50%] approval. Otherwise, return the highest-approved candidate as the winner of the election
3. If there are only two candidates remaining, proceed to Round Two with the two remaining candidates. If there are more than four candidates, remove all but the four [• ; shouldn't be higher than 6 or 7] highest rated candidates.
4. Consider all pairs of candidates that includes at least one of the top two candidates. For each pair, a candidate's Opposing-Approval is that candidate's approval rating among the 10% [•] that least approve of the other candidate. (That is to say, if the other candidate has less than [90%] approval, it is the first candidate's approval among those who oppose the other candidate. The quantity approaches the candidate's overall approval as the approval of the other candidate approaches 100%)
5. Each's pair's Score is the sum of the two candidates' Opposing-Approval. A higher score means that voters who don't approve of candidate A tend to approve of candidate B, and vice-versa. If the supporters of A and B tend to overlap, the pair's score will be low.
6. Send the pair (among those considered in step 4) with the highest score to Round Two

Round Two

1. Ask voters which candidate they prefer. The more preferred candidate is the winner. Voters may, of course, express no preference, but that will not affect the outcome.

Commentary and Rationale

I've been considering the hypothesis that the polarizing nature of plurality vote (FPTP) may actually be a feature, not a bug. While I suspect this hypothesis is likely (at least mostly) wrong, and that the center-seeking / consensus-building nature of Approval voting is one of its most valuable features, the described system was created to combine the consensus-seeking nature of AV with the contest between two opposing viewpoints provided by FPTP.

Below a certain approval rating, the system behaves like AV as a failsafe against the failure mode present in FPTP where a very unpopular candidate can win as long as their opponent is just as bad (IIRC, Instant Runoff doesn't completely address this). Likewise, the winning candidate will always be one of the most approved, even if they're not the highest-approved candidate.

But above a certain level of approval, the system intentionally introduces a degree of polarization, seeking out a pair of candidates with some disagreement between their bases, and choosing one or the other. This increases the "temperature" of the system, allowing potentially controversial but high-value strategies to be tried, encouraging candidates to not just play things safe. This could potentially lead to a bolder style of leadership than pure approval voting (though note that it is a misconception that AV will produce milquetoast, boring, spineless appointees; AV searches for a candidate who is exciting and compelling to all voters, not just to a particular fraction of voters). While some countries may be content with a middle-of-the-road style of leadership like AV provides, perhaps some countries may desire the dynamic quality this system intends to share with FPTP.

Again, I make no representation that this system is actually any good.

1. I'm updating my daily shortform / post goal to better optimize for quality of content created. I do value quantity and speed, and also have a capacity for daily habits that I don't have a capacity for other kinds of tasks, but I'm unhappy with the level of quality of my recent output.

My new goal is to either post a shortform, or make substantial progress towards a top-level post (which may be downgraded to a shortform at my discretion), with the caveat that it must be published after 4 days of active work on it (shortforms may be interspersed, but no floating from one post to another; there is only one track, and once I start work on a post, it is topic-locked until it is published). Active work is not neccesarily writing; doing directed research & taking notes on information I will use can also count.

2. I made a last-minute decision to go on vacation, so my daily writing will be on hiatus until and including this Friday, starting yesterday.

In almost all voting systems, there's some amount of incentive to vote strategically, by misrepresenting one's true desires to obtain a more favourable result (which provides a worse result when everybody votes strategically; there's a prisoner's dilemma-type situation here). However, an important lens for analyzing systems, is whether a system rewards strategic votes, or punishes non-strategic votes.

In FPTP, the system widely used in the US, a person who chooses not to vote strategically will thereby greatly increase the probability of a candidate they strongly disagree with winning, which makes non-strategic voting become unpalatable.

However, in some other systems, such as approval or score voting, while a non-strategic vote may not result in a person's favorite candidate being elected, it will still give an advantage to a candidate that they find genuinely likeable, rather than to someone they despise. This means that the incentive to vote strategically is much weaker, and people are more likely to honestly represent their desires, which leads to better outcomes when everybody does so.

People overestimate how hard it would be to get California (for example) to change how it conducts elections for both state and federal positions. While changing the constitution of the US requires more than one supermajority in different arenas, changing the constitution of California requires simply a majority vote in a ballot proposition, which is much easier, and is done on a very regular basis. This is one (not the only) way that electoral change can be achieved in California, which can be a good starting point for moving the US as a whole to a better electoral system.

One particular criticism of the effort to change our electoral system that I have heard, is that since it will radically alter the source of power for our politicians, they will be opposed to it, and therefore will not allow it to happen. However, using a ballot proposition, the opinions of state legislators becomes irrelevant, and the question will come down to nothing other than the desires of the population at large, who are widely observed to be frustrated with the system that currently exists, on both sides of the aisle.

It is left to the states to decide how they elect their representatives in Congress and their Presidential Electors, so not only can California change how it selects its own government, but it can also decide how a substantial number of presidential electors and congressmen are elected.

My best current guess about which electoral system, for both federal and state positions, will be most beneficial for California to adopt through this path follows.

There are two main categories of elected positions: those for whom many are elected at once (importantly, the upper and lower houses of the state legislature, and the delegation to the federal House of Representatives), and those where only a single person takes office at a time (The state governor, and the federal Senators), and these two categories should be dealt with in different ways. I will be ignoring the delegation to the electoral college for now, since the topic of how to meaningfully impact the presidential election unilaterally for the better is a complicated subject.

For the state legislature and the delegation to the House of Representatives, Mixed-Member Proportional Representation (MMP), as used in Scandinavia and Germany should be used. In this system, the seats are split into two groups - one group that is elected regionally, perhaps using the first-past-the-post system we currently use, or perhaps using a much better voting system, potentially with multiple representatives representing each district. The other half of the representatives will then be elected by asking voters which party they support, and appointing representatives to the least-well represented parties until the overall delegation (that is, counting both groups of seats) proportionally represents the parties as they are desired by the voters.

MMP empirically produces much better results, as I have observed in my time living in Denmark, and there are also good theoretical grounds to expect it will produce better results than our current system. Even if only the Californian delegation to Congress uses MMP, I expect this will substantially increase the quality of federal politics in the US, even before other states follow California's lead.

As far as electing Senators and the state governor, which are elected one-at-a-time (there is obviously only one governor, and while there are two Senators for each state, they are elected in different years), I recommend using Score Voting (which is theoretically isometric to Approval Voting, which I also endorse, but in practice Score Voting should allow for slightly better results). In this system, voters are presented with a list of candidates, and rate each candidate on a 1-5 scale. The votes for each candidate are then all added up (with non-votes treated as a 3), and the candidate with the highest score wins.

Score Voting and Approval Voting both produce much better results than Instant Runoff Voting (a widely-known alternative voting method), which produces results that are barely any better than the current system, and is also much more chaotic (in not precisely, but roughly the mathematical sense) than either the current system or Score / Approval Voting. This inferiority is counter-intuitive to some, who view the ranking system used in IRV to be allow for more detail to be communicated than Approval Voting. However, for starters, Score Voting allows for a similar bandwidth to IRV (on paper at least), and while Approval Voting is in some sense lower-bandwidth, it focuses on the information that is most important (is this candidate acceptable), rather than the fairly irrelevant question of the precise preference ordering of each candidate (which obscures the point at which candidates stop being good and start being bad, which can vary from election to election and from voter to voter)

--

Future topics I could post about:

• Why MMP and Score / Approval Voting are better, both in comparison to FPTP (the current system widely in use in the US) and IRV (used in e.g. Australia)
• The story of how IRV came about in Australia
• The story of how MMP came to be used in Scandinavia & Germany, and also in New Zealand (I expect these are mostly two different stories; I don't currently know the story for either)
• Does there exist any unilateral action CA could take by changing its delegation to the Electoral College to substantially improve the state of presidential elections in the US? I'm not thinking of something along the lines of Napovointerco, which doesn't change that the president is elected by FPTP, which is the worst system that passes the bare minimum requirements to be considered democratic.

The Roman Kingdom and Roman Empire both fell because of ineffective leaders. The Roman Republic fell because of extremely competent, but autocratic, leaders.

Rule without proportional representation is rule without representation

Taxation without proportional representation is taxation without representation.

It's funny, "toxic" is one of the most toxic words these days

Dony Christie and I have been having a back-and-forth about the phrase "public goods market" (often shortened to PGM)- originally, I coined the phrase as a way to refer to Quadratic Funding, a mechanism that is quite important, but whose most common name is prone to alienate non-technically minded folks, and not a very resonant name- whereas "public goods market" carries a clearer meaning even to an average person; while "a public good" and "a market" both have technical meanings that are leveraged by the phrase, it also evokes "the public good" (i.e. "the common good") and a market place, concepts that typical people are familiar with.

While in the essay where I originally introduced the phrase [EA · GW], I acknowledged that the phrase “public goods market” could potentially refer to a larger set of mechanisms than just Quadratic Funding - any mechanism that creates a market that incentivizes the creation of public, not just private, goods can be described as a “public goods market”. I’ve also gotten into the habit of using the phrase and its acronym synonymously with QF. However, Dony took me to task on this, since he argues that assurance contracts (i.e. kickstarters) and dominant assurance contracts (ACs and DACs, respectively) are also public goods markets.

It’s certainly clear that kickstarters and DACs create public goods, where the scope of the “public” is the people who participate in (and clearly benefit from) the contract, which can be a quite large group of people, much larger than the stereotypical transaction, which only involves two people, a buyer and a seller [1].

So the question of whether kickstarters are public goods markets comes down to whether or not kickstarters are “markets”. Wikipedia introduces markets as “a composition of systems, institutions, procedures, social relations or infrastructures whereby parties engage in exchange”. Based on this definition, while a single kickstarter is not a market (just as the act of me buying a soda is not a market), a website such as Kickstarter or IndieGoGo, or the ecosystem within which they exist, is indeed a market - the systems and procedures are those of the kickstarter mechanism, the institution is the website, which provides the infrastructure, and the parties who participate in the kickstarter are engaging in an exchange, performing an action or creating a product, in return for others performing an action or providing monetary compensation.

So really, I need to break the habit of using “public goods market” to mean quadratic funding, and find a more specific and resonant phrase to refer to QF specifically.

—

[1] One potential objection to viewing kickstarters as a mechanism that creates public goods, is that the mechanism still does not consider or handle negative externalites (i.e., bad things that will happen to people who are not participating in the contract), which QF is able to handle via negative votes (although in practice, I have seen negative votes be excluded from the mechanism when implemented, which I take issue with)

It really irks me when people swap "i.e." and "e.g." - i.e. stands for id est - "that is", and indicates that exactly the items listed, and no others, are meant by the  phrase that is being clarified, while e.g. stands for exempli gratia - "for the sake of example", and indicates that the listed items are only a small number of examples of a larger set, and that many items have been omitted.

When I read, my brain always tries to apply the corresponding meaning when I come across i.e. and e.g., and it breaks my brain when the wrong symbol was used, which I find very annoying.

Something I disagree with: Writing advice often implores one to write in a "strong" way, that one should sound authoritative, that one should not sound uncertain.

While I agree that this can create a stronger reaction in the audience, it is a close sibling to dishonesty, and communication is best facillitated when one feels comfortable acknowledging the boundaries of their ability to know.

But perhaps I'm wrong- when one writes, one is not writing for an ideal Bayesian reasoner under the assumption of perfect honesty, since ideal Bayesian reasoners are not physically possible, and one cannot reliably prove that one is being honest, but one is rather writing for humans, and perhaps the most efficient way of transferring information given these constraints is to exaggerate one's confidence.

Or perhaps the important bit is that humans care greatly about common knowledge- Charlie doesn't care so much about the information that Charlie can derive from what David says, but rather how the people around Charlie will respond to what David says, and Charlie can more easily predict others' reactions when David avoids indicating uncertainty, thereby making Charlie more comfortable taking a similarly strong position.

American presidential elections should come in two phases: first, asking if the incumbent should continue in office, and then (if the majority says no), a few months later, deciding who should replace them. This would be a big improvement over how we do things now. Let's make it the 34th amendment.

Myers-Briggs is often criticized, but my understanding is that each of the four categories tracked are variables that actually do vary from person to person- just the traits are distributed on a unimodal bell curve, instead of being binarily distributed (it is continuous, instead of being a thing that is either-or). But just like how height is a real thing, that matters and is continuous, the Myers-Briggs categories are real things that matter; just as there are short people and tall people, there are extroverts and introverts, and there are thinkers and feelers.

But there’s still something missing: I often describe people as not just tall or short, but there are also many average-height people. If I describe someone as short, you know that they’re decently short, and if I describe someone as tall, you know they’re decently tall, and most people are just “medium height”. Myers-Briggs as it is currently commonly expressed, fails to communicate about this prevalent middle-ground. There are extroverts and introverts, but there are also many people who are right in the middle. There are thinkers and feelers, but there are also people who do a little bit of both. There are sensers and intuitors, but many people just walk the middle ground.

I think it’s valuable to be able to express when a person is around the median for a particular trait: I’m close to middle between introversion and extroversion (though I’m clearly on the introvert side), my thinking style very much has qualities of both sensing and intuition, whereas I’m much more clearly on one side or the other in terms of being a thinker and a “perceiver”. I don’t yet have a good notation for this, but you could call me an ~~TP or an I~TP, where the tilde (~) indicates a median trait.

———

Just like there’s kinda tall people (6’ 1”) and very tall people (7’ 0”), there are also people who are only slightly extroverted, vs. very extroverted; there are the extreme tails, and the defined slopes. It’s valuable to be able to communicate whether a person is very much a certain way, or only slightly that way. Perhaps I’m not ~~TP, but rather [I]~TP or [I]~[T]P, where the brackets ([ ]) indicate mild levels of that trait, as opposed to a more noticeable and pronounced personality. There may be a better way to notate this, but I do feel it helps communicate about people’s personalities in a slightly more detailed way.

It seems to me that months ago, we should have been founding small villages or towns that enforce contact tracing and required quarantines, both for contacts of people who are known to have been exposed, and for people coming in from outside the bubble. I don't think this is possible in all states, but I'd be surprised if there was no state where this is possible.

Life needs energy to survive, and life needs energy to reproduce. This isn't just true of biological life made of cells and proteins, but also of more vaguely life-like things - cities need energy to survive, nations need energy to survive and reproduce, even memes rely on the energy used by the brains they live in to survive and spread.

Energy can take different forms - as glucose, starches, and lipids, as light, as the difference in potential energy between four hydrogen atoms and the helium atom they could (under high temperatures and pressures) become, as the gravitational potential of water held behind a dam or of a heavy object waiting to fall, or as the gradient of heat that exists between a warm plume of water and the surrounding cold ocean, just to name a few forms. But anything that wants claim to the title of being alive, must find energy.

If a lifeform cannot find energy, it will cease to create new copies of itself. Those things which are abundant in our world, are things that successfully found a source of energy with which to be created (cars and chairs might be raised as an exception, but they too indeed were created with energy, and either a prototypical idea, or the image of another car or chair in someone's mind, needed to find energy in order to create that object).

The studies of biology and economics and not so far separated as they might seem - at the core of both fields in the question: "Can this phenomenon (organization, person, firm) find enough energy to survive and inspire more things like it?". This question also drives the history of the world. If the answer is no, that phenomenon will die, and you will not notice it. Or, you might notice the death throes of a failed phenomenon, but only because something else, which did find energy, enabled that failed phenomenon to happen. Look around you. All the flowers you see, the squirrels, the humans, the buildings, the soda cans, the roadways, the grass, the birds. All of these phenomena somehow found energy with which to be created. If they didn't, you wouldn't be looking at them, they would never exist.

The ultimate form of life is the life that best gathers energy. The Cambrian explosion happened because first plants discovered they could turn light into usable food, then animals discovered they could use a toxic waste by-product of that photosynthesis - oxygen - as a (partial) source of energy. Look around you.  Where is there free energy laying around, unused? How could that energy be captured? Remember, the nation that can harness that energy will be the nation that influences the world. The man who takes hold of that energy can become the wealthiest man in the world. 

Thinking about rationalist-adjacent poetry. I plan on making a post about this once I have a decent collection to seed discussion, then invite others to share what they have.

• Tennyson's poems Ulysses and Locksley Hall both touch on rationalist-adjacent themes, among other themes, so I'd want to share excerpts from those
• Piet Hein has some 'gruks' that would be worth including (although I am primarily familiar with them in the original Danish - I know there exist English translations of most of them, but I'll have to choose carefully, and the translations don't always capture the exact feeling of the original)
• I have shared two works of my own here on my shortform that I'd want to include
• Shakespeare's "When I do count the clock that tells the time" is a love poem, but it invokes transhumanist feelings in me

Ideal Chess

Chess is fairly well known, but there's also an entire world of chess variants, games that take the core ideas of chess and change either a few details or completely reimagine the game, either to improve the game, or just change the flavour of the game. There's even an entire website dedicated to documenting different variants of chess.

Today I want to tell you about some classic chess variants: Crazyhouse chess, Grand chess, and Shogi (Japanese chess), and posit a combination of the first two that I suspect may become my favorite chess when I have a chance to try it.

I.

Shogi is the version of chess that is native to Japan, and it is wildly different from western chess - both western chess and shogi have evolved continuously from the original chaturanga as the game spread out from India. The core difference between shogi and the familiar western chess is that once a piece has been captured, the capturing player may later place the piece back on the board as his own piece. But if that was the only difference, it would make for a very crazy game, since the pieces in western chess are so powerful while the king is so weak, that the game would be filled with precarious situations that would require the players to always have their guard up for an unexpected piece drop, and checkmate is never more than a few moves away unless both players are paying close attention.

In fact, this version is precisely crazyhouse chess, and this property is both what makes crazyhouse chess so beloved and fun, but also what stands in its way of being taken as seriously as orthodox chess. There are two ways that this barrier could be overcome - either the king can be buffed, giving him more mobility to better dodge the insanity that the drops create, or the pieces can be nerfed, making them much less powerful, and particularly to have less influence at a long range. Shogi chooses the route of nerfing the pieces, replacing the long-ranged and very influential pieces used in orthodox chess with a set of pieces that have much more limited mobility, such as the lance, which moves like a rook, but can only move straight forward (thereby limiting its position to a single track), the uma (horse), which moves like a knight, but can only move in the two forwards most positions, or the gold and silver generals, who can only move in a subset of the directions that a king can move in. Since each piece isn't much stronger than a king, it is much easier for the king to dodge the threats produced by each piece, and a king can only be checkmated when the pieces are acting in coordination to create a trap for the king. (This is the basis of tsume-shogi, checkmate puzzles for shogi. They are fun to solve, and I recommend trying them out to get a feel for how different checkmates in shogi are from orthodox chess checkmates)

I think shogi and crazyhouse solve a problem that I have with modern orthodox chess: the game ends in draws far too often, and the endgame is just too sparse for my taste. You can get good puzzles out of orthodox endgames, but I find the endgames of shogi and crazyhouse to be much more fun and much more exciting.

I a.  (An aside)

While I'm on the topic of shogi and crazyhouse, shogi pieces look quite different from the pieces used in orthodox chess:

I quite like the look of these pieces, and it provides a solution to a practical problem that arises from the piece drop mechanic: With orthodox chess pieces, one would need two sets of chess pieces, a double-sized army for each player, since each player may have up to twice the regular amount of each type of piece after they capture the enemy’s pieces. With these flat, wedge shaped pieces, though, a player can just make the piece face in the opposite direction towards their opponent, and a single set of pieces is enough to play the game. While I think this solution works, and these pieces are quite iconic for shogi, it just doesn’t feel right to play crazyhouse chess with pieces like this: crazyhouse chess is orthodox chess at its core, and it feels right to play crazyhouse with orthodox chess pieces. My ideal solution would be pieces that are as tall as orthodox chess pieces, and have a similar design language, but which are anti-symmetric: the pieces would have flat tops and bottoms, and can be flipped upside down to change the colour of the piece, since one end would be white, and the other end would be black. I imagine the two colours would meet in the middle, with a diagonal slant so that it would show one colour primarily to one player, and the other colour to the other.

II

It's been an observation made more than once, that there's a certain feeling of completeness to the orthodox chess pieces: The rook and bishop each move straight in certain directions, either perpendicularly / parallel to the line of battle, or diagonally to the line of battle. If you were to draw a 5x5 square around each piece, the knight can move to precisely the squares that a rook and bishop can't go to. And the queen can be viewed as the sum of a rook and a bishop. It all feels very interconnected, and almost perfectly complete and platonic. Almost perfectly, because there's two sums that we don't have in orthodox chess: the combination of a rook + knight, and a bishop + knight. These pieces, called the marshal and cardinal are quite fun pieces to play with, and I would not argue that chess is a better game for omitting these pieces. As such, there have been proposals to add these pieces to the game, the most well-known of which are Capablanca chess and grand chess, proposed by Chess World Champion J. R. Capablanca and the game designer Christian Freeling, respectively. The main difference between the two is that Capablanca chess is played on a board 10 wide by 8 tall, while grand chess is played on a 10x10 board, with an empty file behind each player's pieces, aside from the rooks, which are placed in the very back corners (what about castling? Simple, you can't castle in grand chess):

The additional width of the board in Capablanca and grand chess is used to allow one each of the marshal and cardinal to be placed in each player's army. Aside from the additional pieces and larger board, grand chess plays just like regular chess, but I think it deserves to be considered seriously as an alternative to the traditional rules for chess.

III.

While an introduction to chess variants would make a good topic for a post on this website, that's not what I'm writing right now. While these three games would certainly be present in such an article, the selection would be far too limited, and far too conservative - there's some really crazy, wacky, fun, and brilliant ideas in the world of chess variants which I won't be touching on today. I'm writing today because I want to talk about what I think may be the best contender as a replacement for orthodox chess, a cross between grand chess and crazyhouse, with a slight modification to better handle the drop mechanic of crazyhouse. It's clear that Capablanca chess and grand chess were intended from the very start as rivals to the standard ruleset, and I mentioned previously that shogi solves a problem that I have with orthodox chess: orthodox ends in too many draws, and I find orthodox endgames to be less exciting than crazyhouse and shogi endgames. My ideal game of chess would look more like crazyhouse than orthodox chess, since drops just make chess more fun. As I mentioned before, while crazyhouse is a fun game, it's just too intense and unpredictable to present a serious challenge to orthodox chess (at least, that is what I suspected as I was thinking about this post). There are two ways this can be addressed: the first is to do as shogi did, and make the pieces almost all as weak as the king, so the king can more easily survive against the enemy pieces; but doing this makes the game a different game from orthodox chess; it's no longer just a variant on orthodox chess, it's a completely different flavour. A flavour that I happen to love, but not the flavour of orthodox chess. I wanted a game that would preserve the heart of orthodox chess, while giving it the dynamic aspect allowed by drops, but more balanced and sane than crazyhouse chess.

So let's explore the second way to balance crazyhouse chess: instead of nerfing the pieces, let's make the king more formidable, more nimble, and able to more easily survive the intensity of drop chess. I haven't playtested this yet, but it seems appropriate to give the king the 4 backwards moves of the knight: This will give mobility to the king, without giving it too much mobility, and limiting the king to the backwards moves will ensure that it remains a defensive piece, and doesn't gain a new life as an aggressive part of the attacking force. Playtesting may prove this to be too weak (I don't anticipate that it will make it too strong): If this is the case, a different profile of movement may make sense for the king, but in any case, it is clear that increasing the mobility of the king will allow for a balanced form of drop chess.

Ideal Chess

So my ideal chess would differ from orthodox in the following ways:

• The game is played on a 10x10 board, instead of the traditional 8x8 board (I feel that a wider board will make for a more fun, and deeper, game of chess)
• The game will feature the marshall (rook + knight) and cardinal (bishop + knight) of grand chess, and will have the pieces arranged in the same way as grand chess (this also implies no castling)
• When a piece is captured, it may be dropped back in to the game by the capturing player (working exactly as in crazyhouse chess or shogi)
• The king may, in addition to its usual move, move using one of the 4 backwards moves of the knight. Pieces may be captured using this backwards move.

Ideally, the game would be played using the tall, bichromatic, antisymmetric pieces I propose in section I a of this post.

There's two ways to consider the constitutional foundation of the modern United States: A) as the Constitution itself and its amendments, interpretted according to what the authors meant when it was written, or B) as the de facto modern interpretation and application of constitutional jurisprudence and precedent, which is often considered to be at odds with the original intent of the authors of the Constitution and its admendments, but nonetheless has become widely accepted practice.

Consider: which of these is the conservative approach, and which is the liberal approach? By liberal and conservative, I don't mean left-wing or right-wing, but am using them in the sense that conservatives conserve what exists, while liberals are liberal in considering different ways things might be (the original meaning of these terms)

The first option, A, which only looks at the written document itself, might often be described as a conservative approach, while B, which throws out the original intent and substitutes a new spirit to it, may be viewed as liberal. But I contend that it is actually the inverse: the conservative view of the US's constitutional foundation is to conserve the existing precedent in how its government functions, which dates back broadly to the 1930's, with some of the modern understanding of the constitutional foundation even going back as far as the Civil War, and has thus been the law of the land for nearly a century and a half.

Meanwhile, the approach of throwing out modern interpretation and precedent in favor of the original intent and meaning of the Constitution is quite a liberal approach, swapping a system that has been shaped and strengthened by cultural evolution for a prototype which is untouched by cultural evolution, and should (by default) be regarded with the same level of suspicion that liberal (i.e. paradigm shifting) proposals should (by default) be regarded with.

I've been considering the possibility of the occurrence of organized political violence in the wake of this year's election. I have been noticing people questioning the legitimacy of the process by which the election will be conducted, with the implied inference that the outcome will be rigged, and therefore without legitimacy. It is also my understanding that there exist organized militias in the US, separate from the armed forces, which are trained to conduct warfare, ostensibly for defense reasons, which I have reason to believe have a nontrivial probability of attempting to take control in their local areas in the case of an election result that they find unfavourable.

Metaculus currently gives 3% probability of a civil war occurring in the wake of this election. While there are many scenarios which would not lead to the description of civil war, this probability seems far too low to me.

The phrase "heat death of the universe" refers to two different, mutually exclusive possibilities:

1. The universe gets so hot, that it's practically impossible for any organism to maintain enough organization to be able to sustain itself and create copies of itself Or:
2. The universe gets so cold, that everything freezes to death, and no organism can put make work happen to create more copies of itself

Originally, the heat death hypothesis referred to #1, we thought that the universe would get extremely hot. After all, heat death is a natural consequence of the second law of thermodynamics, which states that entropy can only increase, never decrease, and ceteris paribus (all else equal) when entropy increases, temperature also increases.

But ceteris is never actually paribus, and in this case, physicists found out that the universe is constantly getting bigger, things are always getting further apart. When volume is increasing, things can get colder even as entropy increases, and physicists now expect that, given our current understanding of how the universe works, possibility #2 is more likely, the universe will eventually freeze to death.

But our current understanding is only ever the best guess we can make of what the laws of the universe actually are, not the actual laws themselves. We currently expect the universe will freeze, but we could very well find evidence in the future that the universe will burn instead. Maybe (quite unlikely) things will just happen to balance out, so that the increase in temperature due to entropy equals the decrease in temperature due to the expansion of the universe.

Perhaps we will discover a loophole in a set of laws that would otherwise suggest a heat death of one kind or the other, but where a sufficiently intelligent process [LW · GW] can influence the evolution of temperature so as to counteract the otherwise prevailing temperature trend - in the vein of (I'd like to note that I do not intend to imply that any of these are likely to happen) creating a large enough amount of entropy to create a permanent warm zone in a universe that is otherwise doomed to freeze (this would probably require a violation of the conservation of energy that we currently have no reason to believe exists), or using an as-yet undiscovered mechanism to accelerate the expansion of the universe that can create a long-lasting cool zone in a universe that is otherwise doomed to burn.

The way we measure most populous cities / most dense cities is weird, and hinges on arbritary factors (take, for example, Chongqing, the "most populous city", which is mostly rural land, in a "city" the size of Austria)

I think a good metric that captures the population / density of a city is the number of people that can be reached with half an hour's or an hour's worth of transportation (1/2 hour down and 1/2 hour back is one hour both ways, a very common commute time, though a radius of 1 hour each way still contributes to the connections available) - this does have the effect of counting a larger area for areas with better transportation, but I think that's a good feature of such a metric.

This metric would remove any arbitrary influences caused by arbitrary boundaries, which is needed for good, meaningful comparisons. I would very much like to see a list organized by this metric.

(Edited: misremembered commute times. See Anthropological Invariants in Travel Behaviour)

A: Reading about r/K reproductive strategies in humans, and slow/fast life histories.

B: It's been a belief of mine, that I have yet to fully gather evidence on / have a compelling case that it should be true/false, that areas with people in poverty leads to increased crime, including in neighboring areas, which would imply that to increase public safety, we should support people in poverty to help them live a comfortable life.

Synthesis:

In niches with high background risk, having many children, who each attempt to reproduce as quickly as possible, is a dominant strategy. In niches where life expectancy is long, strategies which invest heavily in a few children, and reproduce at later ages are dominant.

Fast life histories incentivize cheating and criminal behaviour, slow life histories incentivize cooperating and investing in a good reputation. Some effects mediating this may be genetic / cultural, but I suspect that there's a lot of flexibility in each individual - if one grows up in an environment where background risk is high, one is likely to be more reckless, if one grows up in an environment with long life expectancy, the same person will likely be more cooperative and law-abiding

A recent Astral Codex Ten post contained this bit:

Fewer than 50% (ie worse than chance) can correctly answer a true-false question about whether electrons are bigger than atoms.

The linked source seems to indicate that the survey's expected answer to the question "electrons are smaller than atoms" is "true". However, I think this is likely based on a faulty understanding of reality, and in any case the question has a trickier nature than the survey or Scott Alexander give it credit for.

There's a common misconception that electrons (as well as e.g. protons and neutrons) are point particles, that is to say, that they can be said to exist at some precise location, just like a dot on a piece of graph paper.

Even when people talk about the uncertainty principle, they often lean into this misconception by suggesting that the wave function indicates "the probability that the (point-like) particle is found at a given location".

However, an electron is not a point, but rather a wavefunction which has a wide extent in space. If you were to examine the electron at the tip of my pinky finger, there is in fact a non-zero (but very, very small) part of that electron that can be found at the base of the flag which Neil Armstrong planted on the moon (n.b. I'm not looking up whether it was actually Armstrong who did that), or even all the way out in the core of Alpha Centauri.

We could still try to talk about the size of an electron (and the size of an atom, which is a similar question) by considering the volume that contains 99% of the electron (and likewise a volume that contains 99% of a proton or neutron).

Considering this volume, the largest part of any given atom would be an electron, with the nuclear particles occupying a much larger volume (something something strong force). In this sense, the size of the atom is in fact coextensive with the size of its "largest" electron, and that electron is by no means smaller than the atom. There are of course in many atoms multiple electrons, and some of these may be "smaller" than the largest electron. However, I do not think the survey had this in mind as the justification for the answer it considered "correct" for the question.

I think the appropriate next step for Scott Alexander is to retract the relevant sentence from his post.

I am curious to hear people's opinions, for my reference:

Is epistemic rationality or instrumental rationality more important?

Do you believe epistemic rationality is a requirement for instrumental rationality?

One idea that I implicitly follow often is "Never assume anything is on the Pareto frontier"- even if something is good, even if you can't see how to improve it without sacrificing some other important consideration, it pays off to engage in creative thinking to identify solutions ⌞whose vague shape you haven't even noticed yet⌝. And if a little bit of creativity doesn't pay off, then that just means you need to think even more creatively to find the Pareto improvement.

(Note that I'm not advocating that only Pareto improvements should be aimed for, I believe sometimes the right move is a non-Pareto change)

I've noticed some authors here using [square brackets] to indicate how sentences should be parsed

(So "[the administrator of Parthia]'s manor" means something different from "the administrator of [Parthia's manor]")

Previous to seeing this usage, I had similar thoughts about the same problem, but came up with different notation. In my opinion, the square brackets don't feel right, like they mean something different from how they are being used.

My original notation was to use •dots• to indicate the intended order of parsing, though recently I've started using ⌞corner brackets⌝ to indicate the intended parsing

(The corner brackets are similar to how quotations are marked in Japanese, but they are distinct characters. Also, they aren't on the default keyboard, but I have things set up on my phone to make it easy to insert them)

I don't think I've heard this formulation before, to my knowledge (though I wouldn't be surprised if it is already a known formulation):

«The ratio of the probabilities is equal to the ratio of the conditional probabilities»

(Ummm... I'd be ever so slightly embarrassed if it turns out that's actually a quote from the sequences. It's been a while since I read them.)

If Bayes' rule is important, then there should be a compact notation for the underlying calculation. (Ideas with compact handles get used by the brain more readily & often)

I suggest the following notation:

X bayes Y, Z = X * Y / Z

equivalently:

P(B|A) bayes P(A), P(B) = P(A|B)

As an example:

If 25% of Hypotheticans are bleegs and 50% are kwops; and 30% of bleegs are kwops:

Then (30% bayes 25%, 50%) = 15% of kwops are bleegs.

( Since there are twice as many bleegs as kwops, and 30% / 2 = 15% )

TIL the Greek word "diagogue" means essentially "behaviour"- from «dia» "through" + «agogue» "to lead", essentially leading someone through one's actions. The reason I might use this word instead of behaviour is because "behaviour" puts the emphasis on what a person does, while "diagogue" makes me think more of what impact someone has on other people to inspiration and imitation through their actions.

Do the people you surround yourself with have good diagogue?

I've been thinking about writing a review of the book Atomic Habits, which I read last year on the recommendation of an LW user. As I remember, the main idea is a four-pronged approach to building habits:

1. Make the habit / cue obvious

2. Make it attractive

3. Make it easy

4. Make it rewarding

The idea is: you first need to notice that you are in a situation where you can benefit from doing the habit you want to do; then once you notice the situation, you want to have things set up so that you want (in the moment) to do the thing you wanted to do (in a more reflective past state), then you have to actually do the thing, which can't be done if the thing you're trying to do is too hard. Then finally, you reward yourself.

Step 2) «make it attractive» has a lot of overlap with the other steps: often simply noticing the context where a habit can be done, is enough to desire to do the thing; though not all habits are like that. Also; a habit is more attractive to do if the thing is easier to do. Jumping into an ice cold pool of water filled with electric eels, then doing 100 pushups afterward is neither an attractive nor easy thing to do. And the entire point of rewarding yourself is to make the habit more attractive- you know you will be rewarded if you do the thing, and your brain is shaped by the previous times you rewarded yourself for the desired behavior.

As far as «Make it easy», the main idea I remember there from the book is to reduce the commitment of a habit. Instead of doing fifty pushups, do one pushup. Instead of writing 16,000 words every day, commit to pick up your pencil and write one word. Instead of committing to run 5K every day, put on your jogging shoes.

This idea has been both helpful and problematic for me at times. I'm quite good at simply picking up my pencil, writing a single sentence, and then putting down the pencil again (though again... I'm writing a long post right now, aren't I? I probably wouldn't be doing that if I hadn't written those trivial laconic sentences a couple weeks ago. This dynamic is mentioned in the book, I remember). But I often find myself saying I'll just do 10 pushups, only to find I've done 60 or 70 or 100 pushups by the time I stop.

My own addition to the idea of «make it easy» is well, make it easy. As in, make doing the thing you want to do easier, instead of lowering the bar. Instead of rewarding yourself for saying "hi" to a woman and nothing else, only reward yourself for having a conversation where you each say two utterances (notice that's still a low bar- but it's a very effective starting point); but train the skill of having such conversations and make that easy. Spend time thinking about why you're falling short, and how you can make that not happen / what mindset you can install to reduce the probability of failure. If you're properly rewarding yourself for the times you succeed, a small conversion rate of •cue -> habit• will still eventually lead to a much higher conversion rate in the future (Obviously that won't happen if you're not rewarding yourself).

I have more to say, but I need to go

There was a recent article on Vox's Future Perfect [1] about the advantages and drawbacks of billionaire philanthropy.

This made me think of Public Goods Markets such as quadratic funding. These mechanisms provide advantages that neither billionaire philanthropy nor the traditional approach to government spending provide, since the distribution of money is decided according to the daily judgements of individuals, rather than by beauraucrats and political considerations as in governmental spending, but is more responsive to the multitude than traditional philanthropy.

[1] Note: I do not endorse the anti-muskism contained in the article (To be clear, I am roughly aligned with their take re: OpenAI)

A- Look around you. You can see things above and below you; to the left and to the right; and in front of and behind you. These 3 dimensions seem to be the space that we live in, and it makes sense to use 3 numbers to specify different positions within that space- for example how many meters in front of me, to the right, and below me some object is.

B- But there is also time. Some things have already happened in the past, and some things I anticipate to happen in the future. This means that those 3 numbers do not suffice to describe every position in the entirety of the thing we exist in- a fourth number is needed to describe when things happen (in physics it is popular to say that the speed limit of the universe, the same speed light travels at, is equal to 1. Under this convention, these 4 numbers are all of the same nature, though the difference between time-coordinate and a difference between space-coordinate have, as far as I can tell, different importance)

C- Consider the surface of our planet. Just as 3 numbers can identify a position in the space of our universe, two numbers suffice to pinpoint some position on the space of our planet. The crust of the earth, the outermost rocky layer of our planet, has varying heights at different longitudes and latitudes. It makes sense to talk of what we might call a field, something that for any given latitude and longitude, tells us what height the crust of the earth terminates at- a function from a pair of real numbers, R^2, to another real number. This field has type signature R^2 -> R.

D- Consider the air above the surface of our planet. At every different altitude (as well as position on the surface of the earth), there is a different pressure of the air, and a temperature of the air. Whereas the height field maps R^2 to R, the pressure and temperature fields each map R^2 (the surface of the earth) times R (altitude) to R (temperature / pressure). These fields therefore are of type R^3 -> R (Note that R^2 * R is R^3). (This actually isn't quite right, because there we are only concerned with the pressure above the surface of the earth, but low enough that air is reasonably plentiful)

E- Indeed, neither the temperature and pressure of the air (on the scale of seconds, minutes, and days), nor the height of the earth's crust (on the scale of millions of years) are constant over time. So really, the temperature and pressure fields do not map R^3 to R, but rather R^4, and the height field maps R^3, not R^2 to R, once we include the time coordinate to capture the varying values across time.

F- The most prominent physical theories about the nature of our universe suggest that fields are not just a useful tool to capture data about arrangements of atoms on a human scale, but are a fundamental thing about the nature of our universe, even at tiny, tiny scales. There are some ways these fields differ from the fields I have named so far. Whereas the temperature field gives a real number - that is, a number on the number line, for every position, these fields often return complex numbers - numbers who can give negative numbers, or even other complex numbers, when they are multiplied by themselves (in contrast with real numbers, which always give a non-negative number when squared). In addition, these fields often don't have a single scalar value, but are collections of different numbers called vectors and tensors (or even something called a spinor)

G- Another, quite interesting, difference between the fields physicists use to describe our universe at tiny scales, and the fields I have named so far, are that these fields are "quantized". To explain this, I'll tell you that I have memories of sometimes eating Nutella on toast at a hotel, and the Nutella would come in these little packets, where you take off the lid, and then spread the Nutella on the toast. Maybe if I was feeling like conserving food, I'd only take one packet of Nutella - but I'd never do that. I'd always need to take at least a second packet of Nutella, maybe a third or a fourth, if I have a big sweet tooth (I do). But I'd certainly never use half a packet of Nutella. If I open the packet, I'm going to put all the Nutella on the toast.

Generally, I'd try to spread the Nutella as evenly across the toast as I could, but it's inevitable that a little more Nutella will get clumped in one area, making another area be spread a little thinner.

It's almost like there's a "Nutella" field, which would tell me how thick the spreading is at different points on my toast. And this field, if I were to add up the Nutella across the entire toast, would have either 1 (yeah right), 2, 3, or 4 packet's worth of Nutella (technically, if I just had plain toast, there would be 0 Nutella on the toast), but certainly not 2 1/2 packets - I don't want to waste what I've opened! Just as there is always an integer number of packets of Nutella on my toast, the fundamental fields of our universe have an integer number of packets of whatever it is they measure- but at any given point, it could be 0.483 or 0.314, or whatever inches of Nutella.

H- Here's some of the fundamental fields of our universe. There's the electromagnetic field, which as its name suggests, gives rise to electricity and magnetism, as well as light. There's the weak fields W-, Z, and W+, which play a role in some atomic phenomena. The electromagnetic and weak fields are actually alter-egos of the "electroweak" fields, which have the names weak hyper-charge and weak isospin, which give rise to electromagnetism and the weak force by interacting with the "Higgs field". 

There's an interesting difference between the electroweak fields and the Higgs field. The electromagnetic (EM) field has 4 components, one for the time dimension, and 3 for the 3 spatial dimensions. The time-component of this "four-vector" gives the electric potential, while the spatial components give the magnetic potential. Since the field returns a vector, which is like a little arrow pointing in space, at each position, when we imagine rotating the universe, the arrow rotates along with the universe. But the Higgs field, while it does consist of more than one scalar, does not have components that rotate with the universe, so whereas the EM field (as well as the weak fields) are called "vector fields", the Higgs field is called a "scalar field". Vectors are also called order-1 tensors, and scalars are called order-0 tensors, so the Higgs field might be thought of as an "order 0" field, while the EM and weak fields are "order 1" fields. This reminds me of the strong field, which is the other "order 1" field in the Standard Model. Whereas the EM field returns a single four-vector, and the weak fields are 3 different four-vector fields, there are 8 four-vector fields comprising the strong field, representing the 8 different ways the 3 strong-charge colours can be combined to carry the strong force. (I'll spare you the details of that)

Are there "order-2" fields? Well, yes, but it's not typically treated on a scale where we expect quantization, and so it's not part of the standard model. But in General Relativity, Einstein has his important Einstein Field Equation. The essence of this equation is simple, he says that two different 4x4 matrices (that is, order-2 tensors) are proportional to eachother: The Einstein tensor, which tells us about how the very fabric of our universe's space and time are curved, and the Stress-Energy tensor, which tells us about the energy (which is equivalent with mass) and momentum contained at a certain point in our universe. So the Einstein tensor field, while not treated alongside the fields of the Standard Model, is just as much a fundamental field, and is an order-2 field.

I) If you multiply two vectors in the right way, you can get an order-2 matrix. So in some sense, a matrix (an order-2 tensor) can be thought of as the square of a vector. But surely there's nothing like a square root of a vector, right? I mean, what would that be? An order 1/2 tensor? Well, actually, yeah, there's such a thing, and we need it to understand fermion fields like the electron field or the quark fields. These order-1/2 tensors are called "spinors", and consist of two complex numbers, and rotate when we rotate the universe, just like vectors do. But the weird thing is, we would think that if we rotate the universe by 360 degrees, the universe should be exactly the same as it was before the rotation. And while vectors behave that way, spinors actually end up getting negated as a result of rotating the universe 360 degrees, and it's not until we have rotated the universe 720 degrees, that everything ends up as it was before.

The fermion fields make up what we usually think of as matter, as stuff. These fields include the electron field, the neutrino field (which is like the electron field, but has no electric charge), the up-quark field, and the down-quark field. Those are the "first generation of matter", and there's actually 2 other generations of matter, which each have corresponding fields to those 4 fields. The quark fields are different from the electron and neutrino fields, because there's actually 3 spinor fields per quark field, one for each of the 3 "colours" a quark can have (these are the charges that interact with the strong force), whereas leptons like the electron and neutrino don't interact with the strong force, and don't have colour.

Sometimes, I like to imagine the fermion fields slightly differently. Just as an excitation in the photon field is actually a combination of excitations at the same time in both the weak hyper-charge and weak isospin fields (the electroweak fields) at the same time, and not a fundamental thing in itself, I imagine something similar for the fermion fields (I'll ignore the different generations of matter for now). So, let's stick with the neutrino field as one of the fundamental things - a fermion with no electric charge, no strong ("colour") charge, basically close to non-existent (but nonetheless existent). I'll just rename it the "neution" field in my imagined framework, to avoid getting too confusing. But instead of treating the electron and quark fields as a different thing, let's posit a "negaton" field and some "coloron" fields. In my imagination, an electron is simultaneously an excitation in both the neution and "negaton" field, with the negaton providing this composite particle with an electric charge of minus 1 (or minus three-thirds, if you prefer). The coloron fields (one for each of the 3 strong charges) would provide the composite particle with a colour charge and positive two-thirds electric charge, so quarks would be a lepton plus a coloron.

Now that I'm writing out this idea, I do find myself questioning it, because the Pauli exclusion principle says that there cannot be two excitations of the same fermion field in the same state (this is, however fine, and even "encouraged", for the boson fields like the electromagnetic field). This does not preclude excitations of the up and down fields, or electron field, from being in similar states, if they are indeed completely distinct fundamental fields (as traditionally assumed), and this matches as far as I know with observation, but it would, I would expect, preclude the neutions corresponding to an up and down quark, from being in the same state. So unless something about the composition of these fields I imagine prevented the excitations in the neution field from being in the same state when the corresponding excitations in the composite up and down quark fields were in similar states, this would undermine that framework.

I think that is all I have to say on the subject of the fundamental fields of our universe, for now.

1. Robust Delegation is the question of how one agent is able to build other agents whose goals help with / don't work against the original agent's goals (the concept is from Demsky & Garrabrandt's Embedded Agency essay).

2. The actions an AI agent created by us takes towards us, is correlated with: the actions that •the systems that such an AI will inevitably need to instantiate, in order to acheive its goals• will take towards the original AI, is correlated with: the actions that we humans take towards e.g. animals of the type that we factory farm, is correlated with: etc.

3. Note that 2) takes a form similar to a prisoner's dillemma with two (semi-) cloned agents. Consider how functional decision theory relates to this.

I strongly suspect that the meme that "AI safety (/ EA in general) is not funding constrained" is false

I think there's a little too much focus on the concept of AGI, an "Artificial General Intelligence", that is, an AI that can do basically anything that a human can. However, I feel it's better to focus simply on the fact that the number of things that AI can accomplish well are rapidly increasing, and the list of things that can only be done by humans is getting shorter and shorter. Most of the implications of AGI are also implied by this trend, and it is cleaner to reason about the pace of this trend than about when precisely AGI will come (I hear many people say they think AGI is several decades off. If we worry about edge cases, this is perhaps a reasonable belief. However, the implications of AGI will likely be implications of this trend within the next 2 or 3 decades, if they don't come even sooner, regardless of if AGI is achieved by that time).

In Scott Alexander's post "Wither Tartaria", Scott contrasts a popular modern æsthetic - with clean edges and simple textures - with an æsthetic popular in days of yore - with detailed patterns and lifelike minutiae. Scott implicitly takes the position that the older style is better than the newer, but has inexplicably fallen out of fashion.

I am of a different mind- I genuinely like the æsthetic that Scott bemoans, and in particular, I find that it evokes feelings of futurism, utopia, and techno-optimism. For me, there is no mystery why the newer æsthetic is so prevalent in this day and age- but it can be an interesting topic about why this futuristic æsthetic has come to supplant the older æsthetic.

A commonly given reason for why Nordic countries tend to rank highly as desirable places to live, is because the people there are supported by a robust welfare system. In America, I've often heard it said that similar systems shouldn't be implemented, because they are government programs, and (the argument goes) government shouldn't be trusted.

This suggests the government as a potentially important point of comparison between the Nordic countries and the US. Are there features that differ between the American and Nordic governments (keep in mind that there's noticeable ethnic diversity even in the Nordic countries, and many of them are part of the EU, which provides a roughly similar large-scale government as the American federal government). Do the politicians face different incentive structures that allow more honest and more competent politicians to do better in the Nordic countries than in the US?

How Parliamentary Elections Work in Finland

(These are my notes after skimming the Finnish Election Law)

For purposes of electing the Finnish Parliament, the country is divided up into 13 regions. Åland elects one representative, and the rest elect multiple (between 6 and 35) representatives. All representatives are elected through regions; there are no supra-regional representatives.

Candidates are generally grouped together into parties, joint lists, or electoral alliances. The distinction is not relevant to my notes here; in each, multiple candidates are named, without further distinction. Voters identify one candidate who they support; this vote will then be counted as a vote for the candidate's list, in addition to influencing the ranking of the candidate within their list. (That is, a list's vote count is the sum of the votes received by each candidate on the list)

I originally found the method of using the votes to determine the precise representatives a little bit confusing, so I will describe it in two different ways here: first, an intuitive way that I believe is equivalent to the prescribed manner, then I will detail the manner as it is actually described in the law.

The Intuitive Explanation

The number of representatives a list receives within a region will be proportional to the number of votes that list receives; so if Party A wins twice as many votes as Party B, Party A will receive twice the number of representatives. Within each list, the n candidates which received the most votes in the list will be appointed, where n is the number of representatives from that list.

The Prescribed Manner

Candidates will be ranked within their list according to the number of votes they receive. They will then receive a score, which is (Total List Votes / Rank within list); So the 3rd place candidate in a list that received 60,000 votes will get a score of 60,000 / 3 = 20,000.

All candidates in the region will then be listed in a single roll, with spot #1 belonging to the candidate with the highest score, and continuing accordingly. The first n candidates will be appointed as representatives, where n is the number of representatives given to that region.

It is left as an exercise to the reader that the two descriptions I gave match.

Commentary

I will contrast this to Denmark, which is also a Nordic country, has a roughly similar system, and similarly ranks highly on various rankings of countries, including the World Happiness Report. While I haven't read the Danish election law yet, I am roughly familiar with that system, and have strong ties to the country, and lived there for a year and a half.

One noticeable difference is that there are only regional representatives in Finland, with no representatives that balance things out on a national level. I don't think this poses a big problem, maybe resulting in a distortion resulting in a couple percent one way or the other. I actually find myself confused as to why leveling seats are needed in Denmark (which also uses regional party lists), which I may resolve by actually reading through the Danish election law.

Another difference (in theory, not in practice) is that Denmark affords parties the choice to be closed-list, meaning that a party could choose the ranking of candidates instead of letting voters decide. In practice, I don't think any parties actually do that, so it's not a real difference (though, this can be contrasted with Israel, which uses closed lists exclusively. I cannot currently demonstrate this, but I suspect this explains part - not all - of Israel's current political troubles).

I believe in Denmark, voters may indicate a different party to support than the candidate they name. There are gaps in my knowledge as to exactly how this is operationalized, but the idea is to allow voters to support their preferred candidate, even when they think weird things are going on in that candidate's party at large.

A final difference is that there is a threshold of 2.5% of the vote required in Denmark for a party to receive seats (I'm not sure if this is on both the regional and national levels, or only the national level; but I think I've heard that it's specific to the national level, in which case it's not actually that different to the Finnish system), whereas in Finland, there is no such threshold.

I want to preregister the following predictions before I dig into the data:

Of democratic (non-subsidiary) nations (as judged by having a EIU Democracy Index rating of at least "flawed democracy"; Hong Kong and similar are excluded due to not being sovereign), I expect for both the World Happiness Report and the Index of Economic Freedom, the median among nations that have at least one house of the national legislature elected via a form of proportional representation directly by the people, will be higher than the median for nations that do not, with 85% confidence

I further expect the median among PR democracies will be higher than the 75th percentile best rating for non-PR democracies with 60% confidence.

There has been a negative response to my most recent post ("I Want to Live in The Truly Free World, not in America"), and I have received some feedback about some weaknesses I can address in the future. (I'm aiming to write one post or shortform per day, with a preference for top-level posts, so you should expect to see more posts from me in the future that don't always succeed at being high-quality, though I will always strive to get things as right as feasible).

One potential weakness, that no one has mentioned yet, but which I suspect may have played a role in the response I received: In this post, and in other communications from me online, I have been implicitly assuming that it's obvious to a modern audience (whether Red Tribe, Blue Tribe, or non-American) that current-day USA is a shithole country. (To be clear, I feel the US has a lot of potential, and amazing things are currently coming out of the country, and it is a leader in some fields that I care about. My description here is not meant to deny that, but to highlight the ongoing decay and problems that are present)

Maybe what I think is obvious isn't obvious to people. I think people generally agree with the same statements I would agree with regarding the problems facing the US, modulo specifically partisan issues.

Maybe I'm wrong, and people are generally more optimistic about where the US is headed than I am? I don't think that's the case, but maybe. Maybe people do see what I'm seeing, and which I think is obvious, but they don't view it as sufficiently obvious to warrant the way that I point it? Common knowledge effects matter, and the appropriate way to discuss something that everybody knows that everybody else knows, isn't the appropriate way to discuss something everybody knows, but doesn't know everybody else knows it.

I'm curious to hear people's thoughts. Do people think I'm wrong when I think that America: 1) is headed in a direction that is very likely to end poorly 2) has inbuilt flaws that have always caused problems, but are causing particularly notable problems right now (I'm referring mostly to matters of institutional decision-making, not to race relations, though that also is clearly not a non-issue), and 3) is not the greatest place to live in, even ignoring future developments that may potentially make it much worse.

Do people disagree with this? Do people generally agree with these, but think it's not sufficiently obvious / sufficiently common knowledge to warrant the way I communicate about it? Do people think it is both obvious and common knowledge, but feel uncomfortable when they see people call it out?

The most amazing thing about America is that our founders figured out a way to cheaply hold a revolutionary war every 4 years

There's a good chance GitHub Copilot (powered by OpenAI Codex, a GPT-3-like AI by the same team) will be remembered by our robot inheritors as the beginning of the end of humanity

Today, I learned that Vite Ramen is making a version of their healthy & convenient noodles that comes in a quick cup. If you haven't tried Vite before, I recommend checking it out.

I saw a post here on LW recently advocating for "Steelman Ping-pong". In the spirit of spending between 2 and 5 minutes (no more) each day writing, I played a 5-phase Steelman Ping-pong, with 1 minute per phase, on the topic of whether Chess should be played mainly with a fast or slow clock. Each paragraph tries to argue against the previous paragraph:

Chess is a measure of thinking ability, and while thinking things through thoroughly is important, being able to quickly react to situations and make good decisions is also important, and is a defining characteristic of how people make their way through the world

But advocating for a fast clock misses an important point: it is important, as much today as ever, to be able to sit down for a long time analyzing one situation, and to find the right approach to try to find the best solution to that one problem.

While it is important to be able to find deep and subtle solutions, it is also important to be able to find them quickly. By using a slow clock, you allow people to waste time, but an important skill is to not just find the best solution, but to be able to find it as quickly as possible

But there are perhaps some solutions that simply cannot be found quickly; instead they require much time to consider all the possibilities that eventually leads to the right answer. By reducing time, you aren't incentivizing finding the right answer quickly, but to sloppily find an okay answer in a hurry

While in edge cases this may be true, I suspect this doesn't characterize Chess- instead having a sharp eye for positions, and a good ability to cut through the game tree, is what allows a player to find the best moves- and the sharper a player is, the more quickly they can do this.

I am going to write every day for a very short amount of time each day. Right now I am writing for 2 1/2 minutes, but some days I'll write for as much as five minutes. But I will never write for more than five minutes – that is to say I cannot be putting words on paper for more than five minutes, but I can and expect myself to think throughout the day about what words exactly I want to say when I am putting words down on paper. This way I will be spending only a very short on time doing the most bottlenecked part of writing, but when I am thinking about writing throughout the day, I will do the hard part of deciding what those words will be, since thinking time is much less bottlenecked for me right now.

Edit to add: Not everything I write in this process will show up on LW. Probably the vast majority won't. Be I do anticipate several shortforms will come of this, and I intend that multiple top level posts here will also come from it.

Recently I was listening to a podcast with Scott Kelly on Tim Ferris's show, and Scott said something along the lines of "if you want to see what it's like to live on Mars, try living on Antarctica – it's relatively temperate compared to where you want to go". But this misses the key reason people don't live in Antarctica - it's not the harsh climate, though it is indeed harsh; it's that it gets very little sunlight. Even during the summer, which is when the sun is present, the sunlight is much weaker than the sunlight received in more equatorial locations. Sunlight is the  fundamental ingredient of life (except for when geothermal or nuclear [in the case of humans] options are present - even fossil fuels ultimately come from sunlight), so the lack of sunlight is a big detractor for living on Antarctica.

Though, now that I think about it, Mars is much further away from the sun than the earth, which ends up with (IIRC) Mars getting around a quarter of the sunlight the earth gets. I'm not sure what percentage of equatorial sunlight the Antarctic receives, but I would not be surprised it was actually even less than a quarter, which means that equatorial regions on Mars would still get more sunlight than the Antarctic; though I am not confident about this.

Glancing at Jason Crawford's latest post "In the shadow of the great war" [LW · GW], I was pondering about the hypothesis that people are less optimistic about the effects of technological growth – which seems like a very reasonable change in perspective considering the many negative side effects that have occurred from technological growth in the past century or so. 
 

This gets me thinking about how we can restore people's optimism in technological growth, and eliminating negative externalities seems vital to create an environment where people can be safe in supporting future technological growth. This is a big reason why I feel quadratic funding is such an important tool for the well-being of future humanity.

On the topic of state-level electoral reform in the US, particularly regarding the representation of states in Congress: It was pointed out to me that while it is true that states have a large amount of leeway in determining what method they use to elect their representatives, Section 2c of Title II of the US Code does impose one big restriction: states must appoint their House representatives using only single-member districts. The relevant text reads:

> Representatives shall be elected only from districts so established, no district to elect more than one Representative

In the Center for Election Science discord channel, there has been some discussion as to whether this prohibits using proportional representation to appoint a state’s House delegation. This hinges largely around how the legal text is interpretted. There are two interpretations that seem plausible to me:

Interpretation 1: Forms of proportional representation are viable: While single-member districts must be used, outcomes outside of a given district may influence the resolution of the election within the district. Under this interpretation, “only from” means that representatives must be residents of their district, and while “no district [may] elect more than one Representative”, the voters are ultimately an attribute of the state, not the district, so voters living within the boundaries of a district may influence the result of the election in more than one district.

Interpretation 2: Proportional representation is not viable: “No district to elect more than one Representative” requires each voter to be tied strictly to a single district, and as a part of that district, may not influence the election of a Representative in any other district. “Only from districts so established” means that only factors occuring within a given district may influence the outcome of that district.

A first look at the intentions of Congress when this law was enacted does not bode well for the PR-friendly interpretation: The requirement for single-member districts was put in place due to some states using state-wide bloc voting, a method which ensured that the representatives of a state all represented a similar viewpoint, locking minorities out of being able to participate in the legislative process. While the methods that me and others in the reform community are considering aim to increase, not inhibit, the representation of minorities in goverment, it’s easy to conceive of methods that would be enabled by the first interpretation, which would replicate the problematic dynamics of the earlier bloc-voting. Based on the example of such a constructed method, it could be argued that it is clear that the second interpretation, and not the first, is in line with Congress’ goals in implementing the single-member district limitation, and therefore there are no forms of proportional representation that are compatible with Title II §2c.

But yet, when I think back on the few bits of American case law that I am familiar with (I am not a lawyer), it is very common for the Supreme Court to decide cases using rules of thumb motivated by the intentions of the legislature in enacting a law, not by merely blindly following the letter of the law, and these rules of thumb often contain layers of nuance not present in the original text. The following “Representation Principle” would be an interpretation of Title II §2c not out of place in my understanding of American common law:

> A state must use single-member districts to elect its Representatives, but events that occur outside of a given district may influence the result in a district, provided that the overall effect of the influence is to make the final outcome in the state’s delegation more properly represent the diversity of voter’s viewpoints, and not to distort said diversity.

This would rule out minority-obscuring bloc voting (which we don’t want), but would allow forms of proportional representation to be used (which can have great positive effects).

—

While it’s not clear to me which of the 3 interpretations I present would hold up in a court of law, I would find it valuable to illustrate at least one possibility of how such a single-member district form of proportional representation could be implemented. There are probably better methods, but this can at least get a conversation started (Since I like cardinal voting methods, this is based on Approval Voting; extending this to Score Voting or STAR is offered as an excercise to the reader):

1. Candidate Lists may be submitted containing up to one candidate per region. Candidates may also choose to run independantly.
2. Voters are given a ballot where they may indicate either approval or disapproval for each candidate in their region, and also indicate a single Candidate List which they support
3. A candidate’s Approval Score is the fraction of approval votes they received out the the ballots cast in their district; The Frontrunner of each district is whichever candidate in said district had the Approval Score
4. If a list either receives at least 3% of the total List votes, or has the Frontrunner in at least 2 districts, they will receive a Guaranteed Seats; otherwise the Guaranteed Seats will be 0 (though they will have a chance to win seats in later steps)
5. A List’s Guaranteed Seats is the total number of seats to be filled in the election, multiplied by the fraction of total List votes received by said List, multiplied by nine-tenths, rounded down to the nearest whole number; but no more than 17% of the seats to be filled
6. The guaranteed seats will be filled as follows:
   1. Create a roll by ranking all districts according to the Approval Score of the Frontrunner, with the most-approved district at #1, and descending therefrom. Discard from this roll any districts whose Frontrunner’s party has no more Guaranteed Seats to fill.
   2. The Frontrunner of the first district on the roll wins their district’s election. Remove the district from the roll.
   3. If the just-appointed candidate’s party now has filled all their Guaranteed Seats, remove from the roll any remaining districts whose Frontrunner is from said party
   4. Return to step 2 until either all Guaranteed Seats are filled, or parties with Guaranteed Seats remaining has no candidates named on the roll
   5. If there are parties with remaining Guaranteed Seats, but no candidates named on the roll, then rank all candidates from those parties whose district has not yet been resolved, according to the Approval Score of each candidate minus the highest Approval Score received by any candidate in their district, with the highest difference at the #1 spot. Appoint candidates from this roll until all Guaranteed Seats have been appointed, removing parties as they attain their Guaranteed Seats, and removing candidates if their district is resolved before they are appointed.
7. For any remaining districts that have not yet been resolved, the winner in the district is the candidate with the highest Approval Score

A good procedure for legislatures to choose premiers and their speakers would be to first use a secret approval vote, where each member may approve or dissaprove of each candidate for the position, and then to have an non-secret confirmation of the most approved candidate, requiring 50% confirmation to be appointed.

This will prevent party leaders from coercing members to vote in a specific way in choosing which person is nominated, but ensures accountability by making it known whether a member voted to confirm the nominated candidate.

I often find myself wishing that nutritious food was an order of magnitude cheaper; that, and housing (although I'm not paying rent in my current situation). With Huel drinks and Vite Ramen, I spend roughly ~$300 per month if I eat only that, which is a substantial amount of money, and in Central California, housing often costs ~$800 per month.

At my sallary, that's a large portion of what I make each month going towards keeping me fed and sheltered. But with a 1 OOM improvement, that drops to $100 between the two, which would free up a lot of money for other pursuits.

There's a useful pattern everybody knows about, but which I only noticed in my gut these last few years. If you want to not forget the North, the South, where's East, where's West, then watch the sky. You will find the Sun each morning laying low in the same direction in the sky. This is East, and every evening, Helios will go to rest opposing where it rose. This is West; now, in the tropics when it's noon the Sun is overhead; in the northern lands the sun will watch you from the south. Can you guess its noonly perch in southern lands?

Pay attention to this pattern every day - with time, on all the days you'll know the compass's directions well.

Some people have been suggesting that the Petrov Day button excercise should be an opt-in (rather than opt-out as it is now) event. I disagree with this: to get value from Petrov Day, we must entrust as many people as possible, and still succeed in not pressing the button; opting-in pushes against both of these constraints by providing a much smaller pool of candidates to choose from, resulting in a smaller (therefore much less impressive) group of trustees, that is simultaneously more likely to fail the exercise (due to fewer high-quality candidates being available).

Beyond that, I guess being inducted into Petrov Day should be considered an occupational hazard of being active in the LW community. Chris Leong, who pressed the button last year (in 2020), was not new to LW and the rationality community, having been here for 12 years, and LW had held at least one on-website Petrov Day previously, in 2019 (which suceeded, albeit with fewer codes than in 2020). The problem was not that Petrov Day was completely alien to Chris, but rather Chris (among evidently many others) having gotten the impression that the exercise was lighthearted, not something to be taken seriously.

I think lessons were learned from last year's Petrov Day. I still respect Chris, and the community should still respect Chris- this particular form of the Petrov Day excercise is still new, and his mistake was an honest one. But the kind of people who are entrusted with launch codes will have learned a lesson from the 2020 excercise, and will have a harder time using ignorance of the particular norms the LW team intends for the excercise as an excuse for slipping in the future.

To illustrate what kinds of people are entrusted with codes on Petrov Day, consider that I (who had not received a code, either this year or in previous years) have nearly 1,000 karma on this site, have met members of the LW team in person, and hold a position of trust on another prominent website in the broader rationality community, and yet the LW team had no trouble finding 100 people they could trust even more than me. They don't just grab random people off the street and give them launch codes. Petrov Day is a trust excercise conducted among people who have been here for a long time, have made significant contributions to the community, and are familiar with the norms of this community.

Chris made an honest mistake last year, and that shouldn't be held against him, but that kind of mistake won't be made again by the people who have earned their launch codes.

When a republic is considering reforming the way it elects holders of power, there are certain desirable criteria the chosen method should have: officeholders should be agreeable to all citizens, not just to a fraction of them, since maximizing agreeableness will select for competence and the desire to do right by the people; in bodies with many members (e.g. a legislature, but not a singular executive such as a president or prime minister), the various view points of the voters should be proportionately represented by the various members of the body; and the system should be relatively simple, to allow the members of the republic to verify that things have been done properly, ensuring the system is trusted.

There are systems I have considered that suceed better at the first two criteria, but at the cost of being sufficiently complex to make me worry that practical issues could arise if implemented, and that it could be hard to convince enough people that they are better, which will be needed in order to get them made into law. The following is my current best hypothesis for an ideal system that meets these three criteria, particularly aiming to be simple both to actually use and to explain to people:

Voters are provisioned with a ballot with three fields: first a field to elect the representative of their single-member district, where they can either approve or disapprove of as many candidates as they wish (approval voting); second, a field where they may indicate a single republic-wide list of candidates that they feel best represents them; and third, a field where they may name as many candidates from their chosen list as they wish, to indicate their approval (party-list proportional representation with within-party approval voting).

The single-member districts will select roughly 2/3rds of the body, with the most approved candidate winning in each district. A “similarity score” will be calculated for each winner comparing them to each list: if half of the voters who approved of Charlie voted for the Aleph List, Charlie’s similarity score for Aleph will be 0.5; if instead only a tenth of his approvers voted for the list, the similarity score will be 0.1

For each list, the sum of that list’s similarity score with each candidate will be considered to be the initial number of effective representatives that list has in the body (note that this means the district candidates’ party affiliation does not factor in to this system, since this is based on voter behavior patterns). For each list, consider the ratio of number of votes for the list divided by the number of representatives for the list: whichever list has the most votes per representative is the most underrepresented list, so the most approved candidate from the list will be appointed, increasing the number of effective representatives by one. Keep adding seats to the least represented lists, until the remaining 1/3rd of the body has been appointed, thereby giving the entire composition of the body.

Note that the use of approval voting ensures district candidates will be incentivized to appeal to a broad base, encouraging them to find solutions that take care of everybody’s needs, instead of rewarding them for creating division within their community; while the leveling seats ensure that all voices, not just the most centeral perspectives, contribute to the government.

For a long time, I found the words "clockwise" and "counterclockwise" confusing, because they are so similar to each other, and "counterclockwise" is a relatively long word at 4 syllables, much longer than similarly common words.

At some point in time, I took to calling them "dexter" and "winstar", from the Latin »dexter« and Middle English »winstre«, meaning "right" and "left", respectively. I like these words more than the usual "clockwise", but of course, new words aren't worth much of others don't know them, so this is a PSA that these are words that I use in my vocabulary.

(As an addendum, I have also taken to calling the Danish political party «Venstre» as "Winstar", because despite their name meaning "Left" - which was fitting at the time the party was founded - they are actually part of the right-of-centre coalition)

The following is a mantra I have decided to install, and will likely be the basis of my yearly theme for 2022:

Say no to everything, decuple down on what is most important

I was considering methods that are well-suited for electing groups of 3 or 5 candidates (for example, choosing regional representatives in a larger body, or appointing a small city coucil). I know of Single Transferrable Vote, which uses a ranked ballot; but I know ranked ballots in single-winner elections are inferior to score-based ballots, due to Arrow's Theorem. This made me consider cardinal (i.e. score-based) multi-winner elections.

Wikipedia names "proportional approval voting" and "sequential proportional approval voting" as such methods, but both come up short- the first (PAV) is not computationally tractable for large enough races (it defines a score, and says to consider every single possible combination of candidates to find which one maximizes this score), while the second (SPAV) will always appoint the approval winner, even when a more proportional result can be acheived by appointing a different candidate instead.

I devised the following algorithm that runs in O(n), but will often produce a more broadly acceptable result than SPAV:

An algorithm for choosing a good winner in a multi-member form of approval voting

1. Start with an empty stack of candidates
2. Tally the approvals of each candidate, and push the most-approved candidate to the stack
3. Reweight the votes, such that if a voter supports n candidates currently in the stack, their vote is worth 1 / (n + 1) of their original weight
4. Push the most-approved candidate to the stack
5. Pop the earliest added candidate off of the stack (they are no longer in it)
6. Reweight and push a candidate onto the stack
7. Reweight and push again
8. Repeat 5 - 7 until the number of candidates on the stack equals the total number of seats
9. Calculate the satisfaction score of this stack as the sum of [1 + 1/2 + ... 1/n where n is the number of candidates in the stack that the voter supports] over all voters. Record this stack as well as its satisfaction score.
10. Pop and push, then record the satisfaction score of the new stack
11. Repeat step 10 until the number of stacks considered is equal to the number of candidates
12. Return whichever of the considered stacks has the highest satisfaction score as the output of the election

Recently here I have been mentioning the idea of using California as a nucleation point for encouraging electoral reform in the USA. Beyond state-level change, a potentially easier target than amending the US constitution is to change the ways that one or both of the major parties chooses its candidates, particularly in the presidential race. This can help address some of the scarier problems we've been seeing in national-level politics, without requiring all the effort and activation energy needed for constitutional change; but it will likely be harder than and downstream of state-level change.

The World Happiness Report rates each nation by the happines of its denizens, and provides a ranking of the happiest to least happy countries. While freedom and happiness are not the same thing, it stands to reason that they are correlated to some degree.

It is worth observing that of the top 10 most happy countries according to the report, all 10 have at least one house of their legislatures elected in a proportional manner by the people (which stands in contrast to e.g. USA, the UK, or Australia).

Islam and Christianity are often viewed as two distinct, separate offshoots from Judaism, but a perspective where Islam is itself a descendant of Christianity is a useful lens. The founders of Islam were well aware of Christianity when Islam was founded, and while they reject the Christian Bible (both new and old testament) and its teachings as likely inauthentic, it seems that there are many properties (for example, the fervor with which they present their religion to the outside world) of Islam that it receives from Christianity that are not present in Judaism. (Islam also recognizes Jesus (or Isa) as a prophet, but that is secondary to the point I am making)

I cannot understand why anyone, at this point in history, would spend more than ~10% of their investment money on any assets that they would expect to take more than 3 years to double in value.

In my post "No, Newspeak Won't Make You Stupid" [LW · GW], I explored the thesis that 'cadence of information is constant', that even if someone uses words which communicate more information, they will have to slow down their speech to compensate, thereby preventing them from communicating a larger amount of information using a rich vocabulary. I then present an alternative hypothesis for why we use rich vocabularies anyways.

One important crux of the thesis, is that the human mind is only able to encode and decode a certain amount of information per unit time, and that this limit is close to the speed we already naturally achieve. But on first reflection, this seems clearly incorrect - in the post, I calculate the cadence of information of speech to be a little more than 60 bits per second, which while a good amount, is a tiny fraction of the amount of processing the human brain actually does every second [citation needed] - surely we could speed up the rate we speak / listen, and still be able to keep track of what's going on, right?

Well, in some sense, we probably could. But there are two reasons why I think this might not be perfectly right - for one, the parts of our brain that handle speech are only one part of many parts of our brain, with most of our information processing capacity not being designed to process speech, and there's also the matter of what Simler and Hanson call "The Elephant in our Brain", the 'press agent' part of our brain that cleans up our output to make us look like much better people than we actually are.

It's not clear to me how much the fact that only a fraction of our information capacity is suited for handling speech affects this, but I do suspect that the "Elephant in the Brain" does have a substantial effect slowing down how fast we speak, making us talk slower so as to avoid revealing thoughts that may reveal intentions we don't want revealed.

For this reason, both making people speak faster than they are comfortable with, and getting them drunk (effectively dilating time for them), are good ways to sus out whether someone's intentions are pure - the second of these is captured by the phrase "In vino veritas".

I notice that I am confused why assurance contracts are not more widely used. Kickstarter is the go-to example for a successful implementation of ACs, but Kickstarter only targets a narrow slice of the things that could potentially be funded by ACs, and other platforms that could support other forms of ACs people often don't feel comfortable using. The fact that Kickstarter has managed to produce a brand that is so conducive to ACs suggests that people recognize the usefulness of ACs, and are willing to partake in them, but there's low-hanging fruit to extend ACs beyond just what Kickstarter considers 'art'.

The lethal dose of caffeine in adult humans is approximately 10 grams, while the lethal dose of theobromine (the main psychoactive chemical in chocolate, nearly identical structurally to caffeine, with similar effects) in humans is 75 grams (this is much lower in most animals, which is why you should never give chocolate to your pets). This can motivate a rough heuristic of 7.5 mg theobromine is roughly equal to 1 mg caffeine, and 750 mg theobromine is equivalent to one cup of coffee.

Therefore, to replace coffee with cocoa or chocolate, 6 spoons of unsweetened cocoa powder should replace a cup of coffee. 11 cups of hot chocolate (that's a lot) or 2 bars of dark chocolate should also work.

I've long been aware of the concept of a "standard drink", a unit for measuring how much alcohol a person has had, regardless of what they are drinking, so one "drink" of wine contains less liquid than one "drink" of beer, but more than one drink of vodka. When I started experimenting with chemicals other than ethanol, I intuitively wanted to extend this notion to other chemicals. For example, in my mind, I roughly equate 10 mg of Tetrahydracannabinol with one drink of ethanol. While the effects of these two chemicals are quite different, and work in different ways, they both have relaxing and depressant (not "depressing") effects, so there is some meaningful comparison - if I want to incapacitate myself to a certain extent, I can use the concept of an "depressant unit" to calculate a dose of either THC or ethanol, or similarly with diphenhydramine (ZZZQuil) or Nyquil.

Clearly, in most cases, I would not want to compare the strength of an alcoholic beverage with the strength of a caffeinated beverage. But I would want to be able to use a "stimulating unit" to compare, say, amounts of caffeine to amounts of theobromine (cocoa) or to other stimulating chemicals (for example, Adderall).

Another unit that would be worth using would be an "entheogenic unit", which would allow one to compare doses of LSD, Psilocybin, THC (regarding its quasi-psychedelic, not depressant qualities), and so on, in terms of their ability to change the way one thinks.

Question: Is it possible to incorporate Caffeine into DNA? Caffeine is structurally similar to Adenine, one of the four DNA nucleobases (and the A in ATCG). But looking at the structure, the hexagonal ring (which is the part of the DNA that bonds A to T and C to G) doesn't look very promising - there are two oxygen atoms that can bond, but they are a bit too far apart, and there are no hydrogens, and since DNA is held together by hydrogen bonds, the hydrogen will have to be provided by whatever it is paired to. Theobromine looks more promising, since a CH3 group is replaced by an H (otherwise it is identical to Caffeine), which provides a continuous run of bondable groups, and the H can be used for hydrogen bonding.

Probably for either Theobromine or Caffeine, they would have to be paired with another base that is not one of the usual ATCG bases, which is specially chosen to complement the shape of the molecules.

I'm probably missing something, but Baye's Theorem seems quite overrated in this corner of the internet. (I've read all of the Sequences + the Arbital Guide)

Currently I'm making a "logobet", a writing system that aims to be to logographies as alphabets are to syllabaries [1]. Primarily, I want to use emoji for the symbols [2], but some important concepts don't have good emoji to express them. In these cases, I'm using kanji from either Japanese or Chinese to express the concept. One thing that I notice is that the visual style of emoji and kanji are quite different from eachother. I wouldn't actually say it looks bad, but it is jarring. The emoji are also too bold, colourful, and detailed to really fit well as text (rather than accompaniment for the text, as they are usually used today), though the colour is actually helpful in distinguishing symbols.

Ideally, I would want a font to be made for the logobet that would render emoji and kanji (at least the ones that are used in the logobet) in a similar manner, with simple contours and subdued (but existent) colours. This would require changing both ⸤kanji to have a fuller, more colourful form, and emoji to be less detailed and have less bold colours⸥.

But this will be downstream of actually implementing and publishing the first logobet.

[1] By breaking down concepts into component parts the way an alphabet breaks down syllables into component parts, a logobet can be more easily learned, using on the order of hundreds of symbols, rather than tens of thousands of symbols. The benefit of using a concept-based, rather than phonetic, alphabet, is that the system can be read and written by people from any background without having to learn eachother's languages [1a]. 

[1a] We see this already in China, where populations that speak different Sinitic languages, can all communicate with eachother through the written Chinese script (which may be the only actively used language that is primarily written, not spoken). The main reason why I think this has not spread beyond East Asia is because kanji are too hard to learn, requiring months of effort to learn, whereas most writing systems can be learned in hours.

[2] Emoji tend to be easily recognizable without prior knowledge of the script, while kanji tend to only be meaningful to someone who is informed of their meaning, which is why I prefer using emoji.

It is my view that Covid and then the common cold must be eradicated.

It is hardly an original thing to say, but I will say it.

It doesn't seem that there's a good name for the COVID variant that's currently causing havok in India, and will likely cause havok elsewhere in the world (including quite possibly in parts of the US). Of course, there's the technical term, Lineage B.1.617, but that's a mouthful, and not easily distinguishable when spoken in casual form from the many other variants.

It's often called in casual speech by the country where it first appeared, but it's generally considered bad form to refer to diseases by their location of origin, for reasons that I'm inclined to agree with.

Wikipedia also mentions that some people have called this variant the "double mutation", but there will be many variants that feature multiple mutations, so it's not a very specific name to give the variant.

I'm inclined to just call it "(COVID) Six-seventeen" (from B.1.617), but I'm not sure if other people will resonate well with that indexing.

Supposedly people who know how to program and have a decent work ethic are a hot commodity. I may happen to know someone this describes who is not currently employed (i.e: Me)

On Relegation in Association Football

Recently 12 European football teams announced their intention to form a "Super League", which was poorly received by the football community at large. While I'm still learning about the details of the story, it seems that the mechanic of relegation is a central piece of the tension between the Super League clubs and the football community.

The structure of European football stands in contrast to, for example, the structure of American (Usonian) major sports, where the roster of teams is fixed, and never changes from year to year; instead, in football, the bottom two teams each year get relegated to a lower league, and the highest performing teams from the lower league get moved up to take their place.

The mechanic of relegation is celebrated because it ensures the teams in the highest echelons of the sport are always those that are most able to bring the best football to the table in games, and any team, even a small, scrappy, local team can work its way to the highest levels if they are good enough (see for example AFC Wimbledon, which was founded after the previous Wimbledon club relocated, leading the local population to found a new team that started from the very bottom again, and subsequently rose rapidly through the leagues).

But for all its benefits, relegation also introduces a large degree of uncertainty into the finances of the teams, since any team can be relegated to a lower-tier, and less profitable, league, which makes it hard for the teams to plan adequately for the long term. Addressing this instability was an important factor in the ideation of Super League, which proposed to operate without relegation, similar to American sports.

I found myself wondering, is there any way to capture the benefits of relegation, ensuring the very best teams are always in the same league, while allowing teams to have a less uncertain image of their long-term finances?

Clearly, to achieve this, no team can ever have too secure of a position, lest they grow complacent and take up space that a sharper team can use; but teams can still be given more security in their position than they have right now. At the highest league, instead of having only a single tier, there could be multiple tiers (which still play against eachother as if they were only one unit), but teams in the highest tiers would have to be relegated multiple times to be removed from the highest league. In this setup, the best teams would have to perform poorly for multiple consecutive seasons before they can be removed from the highest league, but would still need to play sharply in order to maintain their position. This arrangement allows for more stability for the teams that are able to do the best, while also providing the meritocratic structure that football fans find lacking in the proposed Super League.

One criticism that I anticipate of this proposal, is that by providing financial stability to the very highest-performing teams, it would ossify and fossilize a hierarchy of teams, where certain teams are able to more easily spend and obtain resources, and thereby outperform other (less stably positioned) teams in the league, thereby having an easier time defending the stable position, creating a positive feedback loop that hinders other teams from having a fair chance at dethroning the top teams.

One way to address this criticism, is to create a fee associated with the higher tiers of the league; if a team wishes not to pay the fee, they may avoid doing so, but the stable position will instead be offered to the next highest-performing team. The fee will be distributed to the rest of the teams in the league, ensuring that they can have a more competitive chance at rivaling even the entrenched teams.

In response to my earlier post about Myers-Briggs [LW(p) · GW(p)] (where I suggested a more detailed notation for more nuanced communication about personality types), it was pointed out that there is some correlation between the four traits being measured, and this makes the system communicate less information on average than it otherwise would (The traditional notation would communicate 4 bits, my version would communicate ~9.2 if there was no correlation).

I do object to the characterization that it all measures "the same thing", since none of the traits perfectly predicts the others, and all 16 of the traditional configurations have people they describe (though some are more common than others); but I do think it makes sense to try to disentangle things - if the I / E scale is correlated with the J / P scale, we can subtract some amount of J points for more introverted people, and add J points for the extroverts, so that an introvert needs to be more "judgmental" to be considered "J" than an equally judgmental extrovert, with the goal being that 50% of extroverts will be J, 50% P, and have a similar 50-50 split for introverts.

By adjusting for these correlations across all pairs, we can more finely detect and communicate the underlying traits that cause "Judgement" and "Perception" that aren't just a result of a person being more extroverted (a disposition that rewards those who are best able to use their intuition) or introverted (which often leads to pursuits that require careful thinking distanced from our whims).

Even logarithms

Achieve exponential heights

Long before you reach infinity

Three types of energy:

1. Potent energy
2. Valued energy
3. Entropic Energy

(2 + 3), as well as 3 are strictly non-decreasing over time, and generally increase, while 1 + 2 and 1 by itself are strictly non-increasing, and generally decrease.

You want to maximize for Valued Energy, and minimize Potent and Entropic Energy

Prediction: 80% chance that Starship SN10 lands in one piece tomorrow / whenever its first flight is

I have often heard it pronounced (Including by Eliezer [LW · GW]) that group selection is not a thing, that evolution never selects for "the good of the species" - and it is true, in the sense, that if evolution is given the chance to throw the species under the bus for a slight gain to the individual, then it will never hesitate to do so. 

But there is a sense in which a group can be selected for - assume feature A is always bad for whichever species has it, and there are two species which occupy overlapping niches - one group with feature B, which makes feature A unprofitable for the individual, and one group with feature C, which makes feature A profitable for the individual. Assume features B and C are sufficiently complex that it remains constant within the group (there are many such biological traits - human eyes, for example, tend to be much more similar to eachother than to dog eyes, despite there existing variances within each), while feature A can be mutated on or off on an individual level. In this case, we should expect the group where the group-level disease is also unprofitable to the individual, to outperform the group where the group-level disease is profitable to individuals, since feature A will be common in one group (which will suffer) and not the other (which will prosper). This is a way in which group selection can have meaningful effects while still having evolution act on individuals

Reading through Atlas Shrugged, I get the sense that if becoming a billionaire (measured in USD) in gold isn't somewhere on your top ten life goals, Ayn Rand wants nothing to do with you.

I will modify that slightly for my own principle- if you don't want to one day have $1 billion worth of UBI Coin [LW · GW], then I don't want to be your friend, based on grounds that I expect can be justified using Functional Decision Theory (related to the fact that the expected value of being a random person in a society that uses mainly DDs is better than the expected value of being a random person in a USD society).

I think I can extend that principle a little further: if you're not the kind of person who also shares a preference for your friends being the type who want to be UBI Coin billionaires, I might still be friends with you if you're cool enough, but you can bet that I'll be judging you for that.

A drug that arguably should be legal: a combined dysphoric / time-release euphoric, that initially causes incredibly unpleasant sensations in the mind, then after a few hours, releases chemicals that create incredibly pleasant sensations. Since humans discount time fairly aggressively, it seems possible to me to balance this so that it creates stronger, and longer positive experiences, while still not being addictive, due to the immediate negative sensations associated with it.

The unpleasant initial effects can include characteristics of the pill itself, being quite spicy and bitter, with an unpleasant texture, as well as chemical effects: large doses of dyphenhydramine, or a similar chemical that wears off faster, will make the product much less desirable to use, meaning the eventual high can be even more intense and sustained without forming habits

What happens if we assume that a comfortable life and reproduction are inviolable priviledges, and imagine a world where these are (by the magic of positing) guaranteed never to be violated for any human? This suggests that the number of humans would increase exponentially, without end, until eventually some point is hit where the energy and resources available in the universe, available at the reach of mankind, is less than the resources needed to provide a comfortable life to every person. Therefore, there can exist no world where both reproduction and a comfortable life are guaranteed for all individuals, unless we happen to live in a world where there is infinite energy (negentropy) and resources.

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The explanation might not be perfect, and the important implications that I believe follow may not be clear from this, but this is a principle that I often find myself meditating upon.

(This was originally written as a response to the daily challenge for day 12 of Hammertime [? · GW])

With vaccines on the horizon, it seems likely that we are nearing the end of lockdowns and the pandemic, but there is talk of worry that it's possible a mutant strain might resist the vaccine, which could put off the end of the pandemic for a while longer.

It seems to me that numerous nations have had a much better response to the pandemic than any state in the US, and have been able to maintain a much better quality of life during the pandemic than the states, including New Zealand, Japan, and South Korea. For someone with the flexibility, moving to one of these countries would have seemed like a smart move when it seemed there was still a long time left in the pandemic; and would still seem like a good idea if one feels that the pandemic will not be over soon enough.

While every US state has as a whole failed to reign in the virus, I suspect that it may be possible and worthwhile to establish a town or village in some state - perhaps not CA or NY, or whichever state you would most want to live in, but in some state - where everybody consents to measures similar to those taken in nations that have gotten a grasp of the virus, and to take advantage of a relative freedom from the virus to live a better life. This may be, if taken up by a collective, be a cheaper and more convenient (in some ways) alternative to moving to a country on the other side of the world.

In "Emedded Agency", Scott and Abram write:

In theory, I don't understand how to do optimization at all - other than methods that look like finding a bunch of stuff that I don't understand, and seeing if it accomplishes my goal. But this is exactly the kind of thing that's most prone to spinning up adversarial subsystems.

One form of optimization that comes to mind that is importantly different, is to carefully consider a prototypical system, think about how the parts interplay, and identify how the system can be improved, and create a new prototype that one can expect to be better. While practical application of this type of optimization will still often involve producing and testing multiple prototypes, it differs from back-propogation or stochastic hill-climbing because the new system will be better than the prototype it is based on due to reasons that the optimizing agent actually understands.

I recently wrote about combining Grand Chess with Drop Chess [LW · GW], to make what I felt could become my favorite version of chess. Today, I just read this article, which argues that the queen's unique status as a 'power piece' in Orthodox Chess - a piece that is stronger than any other piece on the board - is part of what makes Orthodox so iconic in the west, and that other major chesslikes similarly have a unique power piece (or pair of power pieces). According to this theory, Grand Chess's trifecta of power pieces may give it less staying power than Orthodox Chess. I'm not convinced, since Shogi has 2 power pieces, which is only 1 less than Grand Chess, and twice as many as Orthodox, but it is food for thought.

My first reaction was to add an Amazon (bishop + rook + knight in one piece) as a power piece, but it's not clear to me that there's an elegant way of adding it (although an 11x11 board might just be the obvious solution), and it has already been pointed out that my 'Ideal Chess' already has a large amount of piece power, and the ability to create a sufficiently buffed King has already been called into question, before an Amazon is added, so I'm somewhat dubious of that naïve approach.

Recently I was looking at the list of richest people, and for the most part it makes sense to me, but one thing confuses me: why is Bernard Arnault so rich? It seems to me that one can't get that rich simply off of fashion - you can get rich, but you can't become the third richest person in the world off of fashion. It's possible that I'm wrong, but I strongly suspect that there's some part of the story that I haven't heard yet- I suspect that one of his ventures is creating value in a way that goes beyond mere fashion, and I am curious to figure that out.

It's a shame that in practice Aumann Agreement is expensive, but we should try to encourage Aumann-like updating whenever possible.

While, as I pointed out in my previous shortform, [LW(p) · GW(p)] Aumann Agreement is neither cheap nor free, it's powerful that simply by repeatedly mutually communicating the fact that they have opposing beliefs, two people can come to arrive at (in theory) the same beliefs together, that they would have if they had access to all the information the other person has, even without being aware of the specific information the other person has.

While it's not strictly necessary, Aumann's proof of the Agreement Theorem assumes that A) both agents are both honest and rational, and importantly: B) both agents are aware that the other is honest and rational (and furthermore, that the other agent knows that they know they are rational, and so on). In other words, the rationality and honesty of each agent is presumed to be common knowledge between both agents.

In real life, I often have conversations with people (even sometimes on LW) who I'm not sure are honest, or rational, and who I'm not sure consider me to be honest and rational. Lack of common knowledge of honesty is a deal-breaker, and the lack of common knowledge of rationality, while not a deal-breaker, slows the (already cumbersome) Aumann process down quite a bit.

So, I invite you to ask: How can we build common knowledge of our rationality and honesty? I've already posted one shortform [LW(p) · GW(p)] on this subject, but there's more to be said.

Riemannian geometry belongs on the list of fundamental concepts that are taught and known far less than they should be in any competent society

If the two ever conflict [1], rational irrationality is better than irrational rationality

[1] Which I assert they sometimes do

Any libertarian who doesn't have a plan to implement a Universal Basic Income in one form or another ultimately subscribes to an inherently contradictory philosophy. Liberty can only be realized when a person is not forced against their will to work in order to live.