Open & Welcome Thread - August 2019

This is an excellent analogy. I think, however, that your (tentative) conclusion is unwarranted.

The question is, what is the “objective” fact that we would want to measure, in the case of happiness? Does it make sense to say that while the self-report-based instruments only measure how happy you feel, what we would actually like to (but don’t know how to) measure is how happy you actually are (by analogy with the strength example)?

But this seems somewhat absurd, doesn’t it? Why?

Because (it seems to me) “happiness” already refers to a subjective phenomenon. “How happy you are” just means “how happy you feel”. There is no underlying objective phenomenon—or, to be more precise, the subjective phenomenon is the objective phenomenon. How happy people feel, is actually what we are trying to measure.

(Now, self-report-based instruments actually are problematic for measuring that, but for different reasons.)

Strong upvote for the quality of the explanation of this idea.

Perhaps also related: gratitude journalling [LW · GW], as a way of avoiding habituating to your general circumstances and seeing yourself within a larger perspective. Cf. the traditional advice to "count your blessings".

Both of these have positivity bias built in, though, so maybe just journalling would make for a more accurate awareness of the state and progress of one's soul.

Related XKCD.

Welcome! :)

The game Go?

Right well that's it. I've published my first post. I've been going round in circles trying to sort the last section and quite frankly I've had enough.....

I thought I'd get it done in a week, it's now been 15 days and since it turns out I have a motto (never knew until I typed it!) I'm gonna just publish and see what happens.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AZC55cWzX6aFngnRN/alignment-and-balance-of-the-human-body-midline-anatomy-and [LW · GW]

Thanks for reading....

I do consider anatomy an important topic that's very neglected. It's a topic where people can publish papers that seem to rediscover muscles that were known 100 years ago.

For the sake of completeness (at least in my head!),

here is my third post:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GNoSxcC9YrCesgpZz/conscious-proprioception-your-sense-of-position-movement-and [LW · GW]

Following on from the 'main muscles of movement [LW · GW]' and the midline anatomical markers [LW · GW] for alignment, consider what you experience when thinking about the position, motion and balance of your body - your sense of proprioception.

I'll be working on a sequence addressing procrastination starting Monday.

Welcome!

I'm not aware of a single sequence on those topics, but you might like to start with these "Akrasia Tactics Reviews" posts which link to different interventions/tricks and where people have reported their efficacy for them.

Akrasia Tactics Review [LW · GW]

Akrasia Tactics Review 2: The Akrasia Strikes Back [LW · GW]

Akrasia Tactics Review 3: The Return of the Akrasia [? · GW]

There have of course been many more posts on Akrasia since then, I'd advise using search (also Google search for "LessWrong Akrasia" for a different algorithm) to hunt around. Sorry about the lack of single Sequence.

An idea I've been thinking about is creating a LW Index (like a book's index, but for the site's content, very similar to tagging) where you could look up Akrasia and find all relevant posts sorted/filtered, etc. as one pleases. This would help retain easy access to our past store of knowledge.

My guess is that taking an ML coursera course is the best next step (or perhaps a ML course taught at your university, if that's a viable option).

More speculatively, it might be a good idea to read a research agenda (e.g. Concrete Problems in AI Safety, the Embedded Agency Sequence [? · GW]), dig into sections that seem interesting, and figure out what you need to know to understand the content and the cited papers. But this probably won't work until you understand the basics of ML (for things like CPAIS) or mathematical logic and Bayesian decision theory (for things like the embedded agency sequence).

(Disclaimer: I'm a financial professional, but I'm not anyone's investment advisor, much less yours.)

You mention diversity as an advantage because it reduces your risk, but this framing is missing the crucial point that you can transmute a portfolio that's 0.5x as risky as your baseline to one that returns twice as much as your baseline. (Wei_Dai mentions this, but obliquely.) The trick is to use leverage, which is not as hard to get (or as expensive, or as complicated) as you think.

To be explicit about it: if you increase the per-dollar riskiness of your portfolio without increasing the per-dollar expected value, then after you leverage it down until it's at the optimal level of risk for your utility function (which you were going to do, right?), you will have lower expected returns.

The relevant question is "how much lower?" (which is precisely to say "how much does it increase your per-dollar risk?"), which I answer in my response to Wei_Dai (nephew to this). The answer turns out to be "very little", but in order to get there, you have to be asking the right question first.

Another important takeaway from this observation is that there is no point in rebalancing a portfolio of stocks with any regularity, which makes hand-made stock portfolios almost as efficient (in hassle and expenses) as index ETFs. Rebalancing is only useful to keep it reasonably diversified and to get rid of stocks that risk reduced liquidity. This is how index ETFs fall short of the mark of what makes them a good idea: a better ETF should stop following a distribution of an index and only use an index as a catalogue of liquid stocks. Given how low TERs get in large funds, this doesn't really matter, and accountability/regulation is easier with keeping to the distribution from an index, but smaller funds could get lower TERs by following this strategy while retaining all benefits (except the crucial marketing benefit of being able to demonstrate how its performance keeps up with an index). For the same reason, cap weighted index ETFs are worse by being less diversified (which actually makes some index ETFs that hold a lot of stocks a bad choice), while equal-weight ETFs are worse by rebalancing all the time (to the point where they can't get a low TER at all).

Aside from that, a very low TER index (that's not too unbalanced due to cap-weighting) is more diversified than a hand-made portfolio with 30 stocks, without losing expected money, so one can use a bit more leverage with it to get a similar risk profile with a bit more expected money (leveraged ETFs are hard to judge, but one could make a portfolio that holds some non-leveraged index ETFs in a role similar to bonds in a conservative allocation, i.e. as lower-risk part, and some self-contained leveraged things in the rest of it).

There might also be tax benefits to how an index handles dividends, getting more expected money than the same stocks (not sure if this happens in the US, or how it depends on tax brackets). Similarly, stocks that pay no dividends might be better for a hand-made portfolio (and there is less hassle with receiving/reinvesting dividends or having to personally declare taxes for them if they are not automatically withheld higher in the chain in your jurisdiction).

you could beat an index fund

(Replying to the phrase, not its apparent meaning in context.) All liquid stocks give the same expected money as each other, and the same as all indices composed of them. Different distributions of stocks will have different actual outcomes, some greater than others. So of course one can beat an index in an actual outcome (this will happen exactly half the time). A single leveraged stock gives more expected money than any non-leveraged index fund (or any non-leveraged stock), yet makes a very poor investment, which illustrates that beating an index in expectation is also not what anyone's after.

Humans are very bad at making random decisions and the policy that you advocate has little to do with randomly buying stocks.

There's zero sum competition between traders (actually it's a bit negative sum, given that trading fees are involved). Some of those traders are hedge funds which complex computer models and highly payed analysts. Those hedge funds can make some money by taking the opposing trade from dumb market participants.

If you believe you have better knowledge about what the price of a stock should be then the hedge funds because you have private information/insights, then you might profit from entering the market. If you think you have worse information then them, you are likely on average losing money to them.

It's worth noting that purely random decisions might be a bit better then index funds as index funds have to buy a lot of stock in predictable times four times each year and there needs to be a market maker that sells them the stocks and that can make a little bit of profit for being the market maker.

Because stocks are close to being priced perfectly, on average you will do about as well as the market does.

I think that's right, but the downside is that your portfolio will have greater volatility/risk for the same average performance, so you'll no longer be on the efficient frontier. However I don't have a good intuition about how costly this actually is in practice, if you only play with 10% of your portfolio.

If you have private information or insights that the market hasn’t priced in (i.e. the efficient market hypothesis isn’t completely true), you could beat an index fund.

I think the problem with this argument is that yes you can beat an index fund if you have private information or insights, but you also need to be no more biased than the people you're trading against, but they may actually be a lot less biased than you are, at least as far as stock trading is concerned, because they're professionals (hence selected for having less bias) and they've had a lot more chances to practice.

(I personally bought some individual stocks when I was younger for reasons similar to ones you list, but they mostly underperformed the market so I stopped.)

I went from being indecisive and procrastinating to being much more decisive. The change happened while I was in the military, and there were two key developments. The first was constant exposure to situations where a decision needed to be made, and suffering the consequences when it wasn't; the second was a better understanding of the relationship between decisions and long-term objectives.

This doesn't map to civilian life perfectly. For example, I am as prone to procrastination as ever when it comes to luxury things or things I consider wasteful; it is really hard to make decisions that amount to setting money on fire for me, and luxuries are unnecessary so no decision is usually the best decision anyway.

There have also been some surprise benefits. The central insight for making sense of Army decisions is that the overriding priority is unity, which winds up meaning that the Army prefers successfully coordinating on a stupid thing to failing to coordinate on a smart one. A decision that leads to failed coordination is always bad. This has been extremely helpful in making sense of any kind of leadership activity, and most importantly is excellent practical guidance in terms of family.

Welcome.

What I was thinking about doing was something like Scott Alexander "comment highlight" posts, where it might make sense to specifically say "here were particularly good shortform comments from the past week". Mostly haven't done it because it was a fair bit of activation effort.