…the question does sometimes haunt me, as to whether in the alternative Everett branches of Earth, we could identify a distinct cluster of “successful” Earths, and we’re not in it.

— This Failing Earth [LW · GW], Eliezer Yudkowsky

Does anyone else wonder similar things about the EA/rationality scene? If we could scan across Tegmark III, would we see large clusters of nearby Earths that have rationality & EA communities that embarrass us and lay bare our own low standards?

Important but frustrating rationalist skill: getting halfway through a comment and then deleting it because you realized it was wrong

I have a strong anti-Twitter attitude. I will now charge rent from this attitude in the form of anticipated experiences.

My attitude:

Twitter is psychotoxic. That is to say, it has a negative influence on one’s mood, habits, personality, reasoning ability, and so on. Using twitter causes people to practice mental behaviors that are corrosive to clear thinking and agency both immediately and longer-term. The easy availability of bite-sized content is eroding people's ability to read longer-form content like blog sequences or books. Twitter deserves the same condemnation that the 24h news cycle gets and much more. I believe that if far fewer people used Twitter, my life would be noticeably better.

I feel my attention being tugged at by the Twitterverse even when I have been away from it for a long time (weeks or longer). This is in part a sensible worry--Twitter does have noticeable effects on the world, and I wish I could do something.

This is a hackneyed pattern, but: Twitter is the 21st century’s tobacco. It is an addictive, next-gen intoxicant.

On a podcast, I heard some guy recommend that you “don’t let Twitter be the background music of your life. When you’re hanging out with your friend, don’t browse twitter while they’re in the bathroom.” I didn’t realize people did that. I think I need to start asking my friends if they are doing this when we hang out, and trying to get them to stop.

The full effects of twitter on individuals and groups is still an open question, slowly being answered by massive, natural experiments.

Anticipations:

In a heathy* future, people will consider the comparison between tobacco and twitter to be basically correct, if somewhat hasty and superficial. We will look back on the present state of affairs with pity, embarrassment, and a bit of queasiness.

The Internet Research Agency was just the beginning and we will hear of ever more numerous and galling examples of social media used to twist people’s minds. In less than 20 years, the dev race between offensive psyops and defensive countermeasures will be well-known, not niche knowledge.

Paul Cristiano has imagined a future in which information from the internet is scrutinized by an AI for harmful/manipulative information before being shown to a user. I strongly anticipate that considerations of this kind will be much more mainstream within the next 20 years. If we are not able to implement direct solutions with AI, I expect that serious, tech-savvy people will cobble together other tools and systems for a partial solution.

Perhaps in the near future, heavy twitter usage will be generally seen as a yellow or orange flag. Consider the thoughts you have when you notice that someone has at least 2 drinks every night, or can’t go a day without a liter of soda, or spends all their time online and never socializes in person (yeah, excluding pandemic conditions, smartass).

“Digital Minimalism” and “attention rebellion” will catch on (the situation is currently so dire that i would be pretty surprised if they don’t) and tech companies will react by trying to build things that people will pay to integrate into their attention-prioritizing lifestyle.

In summary: Twitter is awful and I will be at least moderately surprised if in 15 years it is normal for smart people to endorse having used it today.

*I hate this word. I’m using it here only out of mental sloth and weakness.

I'm looking through some of the posts tagged Practical. I notice that a lot of them, especially the older ones, seem overoptimistic in similar ways. Here are a few of my particular thoughts:

1. Daily interventions need to be usable by busy, tired zombies. Or else they will only be usable by people who already have well-balanced lives (or people with hypomania or something). 
2. Closely related, sometimes people omit cost-benefit analysis entirely, as if their practical intervention pays for itself immediately. Even when an analysis is included, I think it often underrates trivial inconveniences [? · GW] and willpower costs. Some of these things sound so easy and simple, and yet if I'm tired after a day of work, it can feel like a major imposition to defy my automatic, low-effort habits. And it's not just me, when I see the people around me trying out new life hacks, I can often feel the resentment radiating off of them that they have to spend a week's worth of their discretionary willpower on a small expected gain.
3. I perceive some complacency about resource budgeting, specifically around resource sinks that are optimized against you [LW · GW]. It is my guess that if you show someone a way to save time on their chores, a lot of those savings will go toward mindless scrolling.
4. Two and a half weeks is not long enough for you to triumphantly declare that your clever life-hack has permanently upgraded your life. Two and a half years probably is. Experience tells me that biological & behavioral set points are real, and it takes more than a single-sentence summary to convince me that you've permanently altered or outpaced yours.
5. I give special praise to those doing serious experimentation with followups. I'll single out Trivial Inconvenience Day [LW · GW] and Sabbath [LW · GW].

When i’m walking around through my daily life, it helps me to think of myself as a character in a cyberpunk weirdtopia.

• Phone anxiety ruining my nature walk? Yeah that’s cyberpunk, even if it wasn't anticipated by Neuromancer.
• Strolling over to the donut shop for a nice pastry...amid a bungled global health crisis of disputed origin? Yup, that sure counts.
• Detouring down a beautifully verdant neighborhood, past a consecution of strident culture war yard signs, presumably influenced in some part by foreign psyops like the IRA? Definitely cyberpunk.
• Scratching my head over the risks of cryptocurrency hodling vs the risks of pandemic-driven inflation? Cyberpunk af.

Hiro Protagonist, the protagonist of Snow Crash wouldn’t complain about these things; he would go on a sassy, sciencey, poetic monologue about it and appreciate it all for what it was.

New Year’s resolution for 2021: get better at Relinquishment, the Second Virtue.
I’ve already unlocked the power of writing down controversial opinions in private [LW · GW], and even though it's not specifically meant to be a relinquishment exercise, I’m eager to exploit it as one. I’m also eager to try out more tools that make relinquishment easier. I might look for ways to make Leaving a Line of Retreat less effortful and more efficient. Recommendations welcome.

A prairie is qualitatively different than a billiard table or an asteroid belt: If you tried to use basic kinematics and free body diagrams to describe a prairie ecosystem, you would find that most of the interesting action was left unexplained. To handwave away air resistance and viscosity is to handwave away all the birds. To handwave away friction is to handwave away basically every other mobile life form. And I think it only gets worse if you move from a prairie to a rainforest--floating spores, flying snakes, geckos, soft but breakable eggs, all manner of sticky appendages, etc.
Simple dynamics don’t even get you a decent first approximation of these systems unless you zoom way out and take very coarse averages. (“The biomass generally stays within roughly 10m of ground level, because of gravity.” “These tightly coupled populations of predators and prey roughly trace out this orbit in phase space every X time interval.“) (But I'm interested in counterexamples if you have them.)
...
Anyway, this feels related to the fact that we can’t develop good models for human interactions, either descriptive or prescriptive. When I try to do virtue ethics, I find that all my virtues turn to swiss cheese after a day’s worth of exception handling. When I try to take actions based on first principles of game theory I end up feeling like a maladjusted sociopath. When I try to incorporate the good parts of economic/evopsych cynicism into my view of human affairs, I end up with more questions than answers.

For Winter Solstice, I recommend listening to the album "Soon It Will Be Cold Enough to Build Fires" by Emancipator.

Particularly, "Father King" and "Anthem". For me personally, "Father King" is the solstice song.

In measuring and communicating about the temperature of objects, humans can clearly and unambiguously benchmark things like daily highs and lows, fevers, snow, space heaters, refrigerators, a cup of tea, and the wind chill factor. We can place thermometers and thereby say which things are hotter than others, and by how much. Daily highs can overlap with fevers, but neither can boil your tea.
 

But then I challenge myself to estimate how hot a campfire is, and I'm totally stuck.

It feels like there are no human-sensible relationships once you're talking about campfires, self-cleaning ovens, welding torches, incandescent filaments, fighter jet exhaust, solar flares, Venus, Chernobyl reactor #4, the anger of the volcano goddess Pele, fresh fulgurites, or the boiling point of lead. Anything hotter than boiling water has ascended into the magisterium of the Divinely Hot, and nothing more detailed can be said of them by a mortal. If I were omnipotent, omniscient, & invulnerable, then I could put all those things in contact with each other and then watch which way the heat flows. But I am a human, so all I can say is that anything on that list could boil water.

Scott Alexander says "Ezra Klein is great. I know a lot of people throw shade on him for founding Vox. But as Van Gogh said about God creating the world, 'We must not hold it against Him; only a master could make such a mistake'. Ezra is a master[...]"

I've never deliberately perused Klein's output, but I've been fairly...repelled by what little I've seen. But that was some pretty glowing praise from Scott; I must be missing something. Googling "what is ezra klein's best writing" isn't very enlightening, and that kind of search is complicated by the subjective, political nature of the query.

So I ask: what makes EK a master; what am I missing here?

Foregone mutually beneficial trades sometimes provide value in the form of plausible deniability. 

If a subculture started trying to remove barriers to trade, for example by popularizing cheerful [LW · GW] prices, this might have the downside of making plausible deniability more expensive. On net that might be good or bad (or weird [LW · GW]), but either way I think it's an underrated effect (because I also think that the prevalence and load-bearing functions of plausible deniability are also underrated). People have prospects and opportunity costs, often largely comprising things that are more comfortable to leave unsaid.

(Continuing from this comment [LW(p) · GW(p)].)

I'm planting this flag right here and now: the phenomena of social class (putatively distinct from economic class) is very broad, very deep, and anti-inductive. For these reasons, no no one really knows what's going on or has anything close to the full picture. As a rough heuristic, the more well-known and easily changed a class stereotype is, the more likely it is to be out of date. 

I followed a link to an article about how Facebook was used to facilitate a genocide in Myanmar. I got a few paragraphs into it and then thought, "Wait, the New York Times is telling me a scandalous but murky story about Big Tech and world events...and I’m just condensing that as 'known facts of public record.' Isn’t this Gell-Mann amnesia?"

So then I felt myself searching for reasons [? · GW] why the NYT could be trusted more about this kind of thing, but found it difficult to come up with a single specific reason that I actually believed. So then I supposed that it was worth reading anyway, since the basic facts were important, and I wasn’t at that much risk from whatever biased framing the NYT might take. But I realized that I didn't really believe that either--I imagined the future in which I turn out to have been utterly misled by the article, and that hypothetical future felt entirely plausible [? · GW].

So I didn’t read it.

It was an effortful and unrewarding decision, but I endorse it, and I’m hopeful that it will be easier next time. For news stories of this sort, I expect to fall short of my own epistemic standards unless I check 3 or 4 diverse sources. But I didn’t want to do an hour of responsible research, I wanted to spend a leisurely 10 minutes on a single, highly consumable, authoritatively-voiced article and then enjoy the feeling of being informed.

News headlines have measurable, harmful effects on people so I never want them to be shown to me without my explicit consent. But YouTube does not have an option to permanently disable the Breaking News section.

The only solutions to this I know of are:

1. Contort my usage by never opening the main page of YouTube
2. Use uBlock with a custom filter to get rid of the news section.
3. Stop using YouTube

I consider this to be psychotoxic design, plain and simple. The next time I need an example of tech companies doing something bad, I will have to reach no further than this.

https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11825

Schank’s law: “Because people understand by finding in their memories the closest possible match to what they are hearing and use that match as the basis of comprehension, any new idea will be treated as a variant of something the listener has already thought of or heard. Agreement with a new idea means a listener has already had a similar thought and well appreciates that the speaker has recognized his idea. Disagreement means the opposite. Really new ideas are incomprehensible. The good news is that for some people, failure to comprehend is the beginning of understanding. For most, of course, it is the beginning of dismissal.”

What good thing happens if you read The Sequences?
 

• You see repeated examples of rigorous thought about slippery topics, very deliberately setting up the seductive cached answers and then swerving away from them.
• Exposure to a lot of carefully applied Transhumanism. Mostly in Fun Theory but also sprinkled throughout [LW · GW]. The transhumanism is sincere and often emotionally charged, not just smug philosophical gotchas.
• The concepts & jargon are really useful. Yeah, jargon has its downsides, no doubt, but it is still overwhelmingly net positive.
• A thorough argument that you really can live a life that integrates philosophical curiosity, narrative satisfaction, frolicking artistry, vigilant truth-orientation, deep emotion, scientific rigor, and a childlike hope for The Good.
• Deep and unforced optimism. Cynicism about cynicism[1]. Generalized anti-nihilism.
  • Friendly AI is permitted by the laws of physics. This is sufficient reason to try our best, even if it turns out to be too difficult for tiny mortals like us.
  • We're a thousand shards of desire lashed together by evolved kludges. Human-compatible morals & æsthetics exist only in humans, and are not objectively special. So what are you gonna do about it?
  • Unicorns aren't real, there is no god, and no pixies in the garden. But you know what is real? Giant squid. Electric eels. Radiotrophic fungus. Black holes. Volcanoes. Aircraft. Flamethrowers. SCUBA diving. Lightning, rainbows, aurorae. If you really think you could enjoy unicorns and levitation spells, there is no reason why you shouldn't also be able to take joy in the merely real [LW · GW].

[1] Cynical About Cynicism [LW · GW] isn't in the Sequences, but the same general attitude still comes up.

Sometimes I scroll social media (because I am yet weak) and I see rationalists raising Concerns about various news topics and current events.

Here’s a list of concerns and potential actions, including those I see as inadequate.

• Our institutions are losing trustworthiness and competence
  • Shout about the CDC on social media
  • #GhostTheNYT
  • Try to understand what leads to institutional success/failure [LW · GW]
  • Try to advance incentive-compatible systems and social tech that can scale
• Freedom of speech is under attack! Gatekeepers! Reality czar! The Narrative!
  • Take traditional political action
  • Less twitter, more substack
  • Research and post about the economics and logistics of running your own servers.
  • Experiment with ring signatures?
• Social media is harming mental health, undermining individual & group epistemics, and enabling horrible actions in meatspace
  • Complain about it on social media in between dunking on your outgroup.
  • Await humanity’s inexorable slide down the fitness gradients toward memetic collapse [LW · GW].
  • Promote more group activities in your group house. Establish device-free zones.
  • Coordinate to stigmatize doomscrolling, hate-reading, and contempt addiction [LW · GW]. While we’re at it, let’s stigmatize using Twitter at all [LW · GW].
• Large, free, liquid prediction markets cannot exist, supposedly due to the global influence of burdensome US trading regulations.
  • Traditional political action
  • Pay a competent YouTuber to make a really good explanatory video (series) about prediction markets.
  • Write a postmortem on Augur to help future attempts avoid the same pitfalls
  • Research and post about why prediction markets haven’t gotten big even where regulation is looser
  • Start up a competitor to Kalshi, and launch before they do
• Ongoing Uighur atrocity
  • Share an article about it once in a while
  • Take traditional political action, push for substantial international response
  • Make fewer purchases from companies that profit from the abuse of Uighurs

Alright, you lost the double-crux. Now go ahead and bite these bullets. There you g--nope. Oh nonononono ahahahaha no. I'm not handing them to you. No, I'm going to hold them out and you're going to munch on them out of my hand like a docile horse.
There we go, much better.

Point well taken that technological development and global dominance were achieved by human cultures, not individual humans. But I claim that it is obviously a case of motivated reasoning to treat this as a powerful blow against the arguments for fast takeoff. A human-level AI (able to complete any cognitive task at least as well as you) is a foom risk unless it has specific additional handicaps. These might include:
- For some reason it needs to sleep for a long time every night.
- Its progress gets periodically erased due to random misfortune or enemy action.
- It is locked into a bad strategic position, such as having no cognitive privacy from overseers.
- It can't copy itself.
- It can't gain more compute.
- It can't reliably modify itself.

I'll be pretty surprised if we get AI systems that can do any cognitive task that I can do (such as make longterm plans and spontaneously correct my own mistakes without them being pointed out to me) but that can also only improve themselves very slowly. It really seems like, if I were able to easily edit my own brain, then I would be able to increase my abilities across the board, including my ability to increase my abilities.

There are things I would buy if they existed. Is there any better way to signal this to potential sellers, other than tweeting it and hoping they hear? Is there some reason to believe that sellers are already gauging demand so completely that they wouldn't start selling these things even if I could get through to them? 

I've seen a few people run the thought experiment where one imagines the best life a historical person could live, and/or the most good they could do. There are several variants, and you can tune which cheat codes they are given. People seem to get different answers, and this has me pretty curious.

• Eliezer said in the sequences that maybe all this rationality stuff just wouldn't help a 14th century peasant at all, unless they were given explicit formulas from the future. (See also, the Chronophone of Archimedes.)
• I've heard people ask why the industrial revolution didn't happen in China, and whether that was a contingent fluke of history, or a robust result of geography and culture. (I should admit at this point that I haven't read any of the Progress Studies stuff, but I want to.)
• I think Paul or Ajeya or Katja have wondered aloud about what a medieval peasant or alchemist could have done if they had been divinely struck by the spirit of EA and rationality, and people have argued back and forth about how sticky various blockers were. (I would appreciate links if anyone has them.)
• I skimmed that recent post about "Social Dark Matter" and wondered if 1950s America would have been much better if the social dark matter meme had somehow gotten a big edge in the arena of ideas.

I realized that I'm really uncertain about historical trajectories at pretty much every level. I am really unsure whether the Roman empire could have lasted longer and made a few extra major advancements (like steam engines and evolutionary biology). I'm unsure whether a medieval peasant armed with modern textbooks could have made a huge dent in history. And I'm also pretty unsure what it would have taken for 20th century America to have made faster moral progress than it did.

But I do notice that the more recent the alternate history, the less clueless I feel, which is a little motivating^[1]. So here are a few prompts of the top of my head:

1. What advice would you send back to your 10-year-old self if you weren't allowed to give lottery numbers or spoilers about global-scale events?
2. What could your parents or their immediate peers have done differently that would have substantially improved their material circumstances, emotional lives, or moral rectitude? What would have been the costs?
3. Could you get any easy wins if you were allowed to magically advertise one book or article to American intellectuals in the 1950s? (They can be wins of any size: global catastrophic risks, social dark matter, or your own pet peeve.)

1. ^{^}

   Possibly spurious, but this kind of reminds me of Read History of Philosophy Backwards

In this shortform post I will pontificate about some sentiments I sometimes see on twitter. It feels important for me to say, but I can't promise that it will be a good use of any readers' time.

The Fourth Virtue of Rationality is Evenness [LW · GW]. One who wishes to believe says, “Does the evidence permit me to believe?” One who wishes to disbelieve asks, “Does the evidence force me to believe?” Beware lest you place huge burdens of proof only on propositions you dislike, and then defend yourself by saying: “But it is good to be skeptical.” If you attend only to favorable evidence, picking and choosing from your gathered data, then the more data you gather, the less you know. If you are selective about which arguments you inspect for flaws, or how hard you inspect for flaws, then every flaw you learn how to detect makes you that much stupider. If you first write at the bottom of a sheet of paper “And therefore, the sky is green!” it does not matter what arguments you write above it afterward; the conclusion is already written, and it is already correct or already wrong. To be clever in argument is not rationality but rationalization. Intelligence, to be useful, must be used for something other than defeating itself. Listen to hypotheses as they plead their cases before you, but remember that you are not a hypothesis; you are the judge. Therefore do not seek to argue for one side or another, for if you knew your destination, you would already be there.

It's a really nice ideal to strive toward. In my personal experience, it does require a whole lot of striving. And sometimes it seems to have hidden, tragic tradeoffs with things like loyalty, in such a way that the rationalist and EA scenes end up with costly discomforts when it comes to human relations and interpersonal connection. I could go on about the challenges, but the point is that, to me, Evenness is something worthy of seriousness and gravity. Read the following tweets and take a moment to feel your immediate reactions, both positive and negative.

I think the first time I saw these tweets, I think I felt some faint positive affect. It's not a novel sentiment and it doesn't challenge me to become better, but it's still a very nice sentiment. But rereading it later, I feel irritated and triggered. So what's my problem?

The problem is that I don't know anything about Michael Curzi, and I have historically been unimpressed by Eliezer's Evenness on twitter. I think a more virtuous EY would have replied to Curzi saying that it's a really nice ideal to strive toward, but very difficult in practice, and prone to pitfalls--not something to boast about blithely. (Although if I'm imagining a powered up Eliezer, I will tend to imagine him writing blog posts instead of tweets.) 

I mean, if you think that EY's self description here is basically reasonable, that's a crux for me. Maybe he's gotten better in recent years, but in the past when I've read his tweets, they have not added up to an edifice of obvious Evenness. (Either way, I would still find it questionable to tersely grandstand about it on twitter, but not much more questionable than most activity on twitter.) Importantly, this is a shortform post and not a top-level post because I don't feel like putting in the effort to gather and present a bunch of tweets to justify my opinion.

I'm probably just getting triggered by social media itself again. Well, if so then my rationalization right this moment is that EY seemed to be a pretty decent exemplar of a few virtues, including Evenness, when he was writing the sequences and arguing in the comments therein. I think he earned some amount of bragging rights from that, but nowadays he's not keeping the budget balanced. Or to make a much weaker claim: I wouldn't advise anyone to emulate his twitter activity if they wanted to get better at Evenness. (I might, however, have them read the Virtues passage quoted above and then skim EY's twitter just to show just how very strong the temptations of Unevenness are.)

Okay, that was a whole lot of complaining about a couple of random, low-effort tweets. So what? If they hadn't tweeted that, would I feel fine about this? No, this was just the clearest recent example of a bothersome trend I've been seeing for a while. It's passe by now to complain about cheap online virtue signaling, but damn, it seems like a bad sign that people I respect still slip into it so blindly. It's cool and good to hold Evenness up as an ideal, to write about it with the style and reverence of the Twelve Virtues. It's not so cool to simply assert that it's how your own mind works. I think that Curzi and EY are implying basically false things about their tribal impulses and their reliability, and I think this distracts from serious efforts to have correct beliefs.

As usual, I think [LW · GW] a big part of the problem is that social media and mobile devices have altered people's mental and emotional routines. Lots of things have become twitterized (right?) [LW · GW], and the days of patiently writing evenhanded posts for a reliably patient audience are largely behind us.

↑ comment by mike_hawke · 2023-12-24T00:35:41.315Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Now this is more like it.

They deserve sympathy, but also they must be stopped/avoided/distrusted.

This sentiment is common and I wish there was a common and compact way to express it. Notice the dissonance if the conjunction "but" is swapped out for "and".

I assume that the whole flat earth thing will lose its contrarian luster and fall out of style in the next few years. But suppose that's wrong. How soon until there are significant numbers of flat-earther kids enrolling in kindergarten? Will they be like existing fringe religious minorities? Will they mostly be homeschooled? My real best guess is that flat-earthers don't have kids so this won't happen.

Some smart, scrupulous, rational news junkie should write a periodical report on the state of anti-epistemology. I sort of worry that memeplexes, including anti-epistemic ones, have tipping points [LW · GW] whereat they become popular (or dominant) very suddenly. 

As a result the book lacks an intellectual vision. It’s just highly competent in a slick, oversocialized way where little true personality comes out. If the book were a person it’d be like many of the people I met at the elite business school where I briefly studied: smooth, well-oiled bundles of overly appropriate behaviors seemingly dictated by the situation rather than emerging from a strong underlying personality.

(from this Everything Studies post)

I want there to be at least 10 more John Nersts out there. Writing, influencing, telling it like it is. John Nerst is a lighthouse of sincere thought in an ocean of strategic speech and word games.

Ice cream for breakfast with coffee grounds stirred in. Try it.

Talk is cheap. No wait, talk is free. Actually, sometimes talk is cheaper than free--holding your tongue can cost willpower or reputation or understanding.

When you ask an older person, "what do you wish you had known when you were my age?" I think their answer is in large part determined by your framing and phrasing of the question.

Increasing specificity seems to help when people are prone to overly broad answers. "What major mistake were you making in your 30s that you stopped making by your 40s?"
Changing the subject to a different person seems to help too. "What did [some other person] do really right? What is something they think of as a major personal triumph which is better explained by luck?"
Framing questions broadly can give you broad answers, which can help when people are prone to oversimplified explanations. "What are some of the top 15 books that contributed to who you are today?"

Let's start a new trend where you refuse to speak to journalists unless they can guarantee that the final publication will contain a link to your side of the story.

In our scary new memetic fitness landscape, I think I’ve started to develop a default skepticism toward pith and sass. These days, the pithier and sassier something is, the more likely it is to trigger my deception alarms.

When something 240 characters or less sounds really good, it is increasingly likely that this is because it evolved to sound good to me, rather than because it has any deep wholesomeness.

But as always, the truth lies somewhere in the middle can only be seen when considering multiple orthogonal factors, after which projecting onto a single dimension will throw out so much information as to be worse than useless.

“Well if I am the victim of a cult then they must have brainwashed me pretty well, because all of your reasons just sound like shallow insults to me."

This posted 4 times. This was the fourth time.

This posted 4 times. This was the second time.

Here are some thoughts about numeracy as compared to literacy. There is a tl;dr at the end.

The US supposedly has 95% literacy rate or higher. An 14yo english-speaker in the US is almost always an english-reader as well, and will not need much help interpreting an “out of service” sign or a table of business hours or a “Vote for Me” billboard. In fact, most people will instantaneously understand the message, without conscious effort--no need to look at individual letters and punctuation, nor any need to slowly sound it out. You just look, scan, and interpret a sentence in one automatic action. (If anyone knows a good comparison of the bitrates of written sentences vs pictograms, please share.)

I think there is an analogy here with numeracy, and I think there is some depth to the analogy. I think there is a possible world in which a randomly selected 14yo would instantly, automatically have a sense of magnitude when seeing or hearing about about almost anything in the physical world--no need to look up benchmark quantities or slowly compute products and quotients. Most importantly, there would be many more false and misleading claims that would (instantly, involuntarily!) trigger a confused squint from them. You could still mislead them about the cost per wattage of the cool new sustainability technology, or the crime rate in some distant city. But not too much more than you could mislead them about tangible things like the weight of their pets or the cost per calorie of their lunch or the specs of their devices. You could only squeeze so many OoMs of credibility out of them before they squint in confusion [LW · GW] and ask you to give some supporting details. 

Automatic, generalized, quantitative sensitivity of this sort is rare even among college graduates. It’s a little better among STEM graduates, but still not good. I think adulthood is too late to gain this automaticity, the same way it is too late to gain the automatic, unconscious literacy that elementary school kids get.
We grow up hearing stories about medieval castle life that are highly sanitized, idealized, and frankly, modernized, so that we will enjoy hearing them at all. And we like to imagine ourselves in the shoes of knights and royalty, usually not the shoes of serfs. That’s all well and good as far as light-hearted fiction goes, but I think it leads us to systematically underestimate not only the violence and squalor of those conditions, but less-obviously the low-mobility and general constraint of illiteracy. I wonder what it would be like to visit a place with very low literacy (and perhaps where the few existing signs are written in an unfamiliar alphabet). I bet it would be really disorienting. Everything you learn would be propaganda and motivated hearsay, and you would have to automatically assume much worse faith [LW · GW] than in places where information and flows quickly and cheaply. Potato prices are much lower two days south? Well, who claimed that to me, how did they hear it, and what incentives might they have to say it to me? Unfortunately there are no advertisements or PSAs for me to check against. Well, I’m probably not going to make that trip south without some firmer authority.I can imagine this information environment having a lot in common with the schoolyard. 

My point is that it seems easy to erroneously take for granted the dynamics of a 95% literate society, and that things suddenly seem very different even after only a minute of deliberate imagination. It is that size of difference that I think might be possible between our world and an imaginary place where 8-year-olds are trained to become fluent in simple quantities as they are in written english.

Tl;dr: I think widespread literacy and especially widespread fluency is a modern miracle. I think people don't realize what a total lack of numerical fluency there is. I'm not generally fluent in numbers--in general, you can suggest absurd quantities to me and I will not automatically notice the absurdity in the way I will automatically laugh at a sentence construction error on a billboard.

Should I drink sardine juice instead of dumping it down the drain?

I eat sardines that are canned in water, not oil, because I care about my polyunsaturated fatty acid ratio. They're very unappetizing but from my inexpert skimming, they seem like one of the best options in terms of health. But I only eat most of the flesh incidentally, with the main objective being the fat. This is why I always buy fish that is unskinned, and in fact I would buy cans of fish skin if it were easy.

So on this basis, is it worth it for me to just go ahead and choke down the sardine water as well? ...or perhaps instead? It is visibly fatty.

Uh oh, do you really leave the news playing in your living room all the time? Don't you know it's corrosive to your epistemics and agency? Plane crashes are overrated and chronic stress is underrated!

This is pretty much my default attitude, but...SSC once wrote that smoking possibly mitigates schizophrenia, and that "[t]his should be a warning to anyone who’s too quick to tell patients that their coping strategies are maladaptive."
News does have those downsides, just like smoking does cause cancer. But it's good to remember that load-bearing bugs are the rule, not the exception.

Insightful Articles about Politics

Slightly inspired by this post from Julia Galef. I've selected the following posts because they are insightful specifically at the meta-level.

• Partial Narratives
• Argue Politics with Your Best Friends [LW · GW]
• The Enemy Control Ray
• What You Can't Say to a Sympathetic Ear [LW(p) · GW(p)]

What science fiction should I read? Any subgenre.
 

I ask because I'm rereading HPMOR and I just reread Eliezer's posts about memetic collapse [LW · GW] and local validity [LW · GW]. I kinda feel like I'm missing out, but I don't know where to look beyond googling "classic sci fi" or "sci fi cult hits". I like HPJEV as a protagonist and would like to see more of that sort. I'm probably going to reread Ender's Game next in order to scratch the itch a bit.

Here are my idiosyncratic preferences, in case it helps:
My top 5 stories probably include The Martian, Rendezvous with Rama, and Snow Crash. Disappointingly, I haven't found an Asimov story that I've liked very much, and I couldn't even finish Foundation. I thought Neuromancer was okay on net. Ringworld was often tedious but I still remember the sense of awe that some parts gave me and I loved the way the ending came together. I'm planning on reading Dune, but I'm not sure about audiobook vs ebook vs both and I'm concerned about it being dry and tedious. I'm partway through Permutation City, which I find really well-written but kinda depressing. I thought Xenocide was awesome and I pretty much hated Speaker for the Dead.

Don't yum my yuck. My disgust reactions are valid.

The Lizardman Constant shows up in a poll from Tom Scott.

I wonder if the Lizardman Constant is actually constant. I could imagine it changing over time, hypothetically for the same reason that I hear more about Flat Earth theory today than I did 5 years ago. Maybe there ought to be a whole family of parameters--a family which includes unbelievably wacky and fringe but pre-existing theories like Lizardmen, as well as plausible-sounding but freshly fabricated ones like the North Dakota Crash. And it would be nice if they were given labels that are sticky while also remaining relevant/constant over time. Maybe things like the Yes Bot constant, the Calvin Contingent, and so on.

When I allow myself to have inconsistencies in my beliefs and attitudes, I’m just using my brain the way it evolved to work. Accepting that I can’t untangle everything is necessary to make any progress.

When other people let themselves have inconsistencies, it is out of self-serving bias; it is anti-social and they ought to do better. Their persistence in trying to have it both ways causes excess harm.