Open thread, Dec. 19 - Dec. 25, 2016

Have a karma, sir / madam / genderfluid person.

factually incorrect conclusions [...] $30k [...] 21x the global average. That just seems implausible.

Did you scroll down to the "Methodology" section? They explain that they are using the median, not the mean; I don't find it at all implausible that the median might be rather a lot lower than the mean. (And I think they are right to use the median in preference to the mean.)

GWWC has a page about median GDP. It unfortunately doesn't say exactly what they think the global median income is, nor how they calculated it, and even the lowest of the several figures there -- $2k, not stated explicitly but implicit in something they say near the start -- would make the factor 15x rather than 21x.

So I agree that they're doing something fishy with their numbers, I don't think it's quite as fishy as you suggest, and I think maybe someone should contact them and ask them just what their global median income figure is and where it comes from.

The GWWC numbers reflect global median income, which is $2,920 per capita, and not the mean income. It makes sense to use the median to think about global poverty, because the mean is mostly dependent on the global rich. When Bill Gates walks into a bar, the mean income of the bar patrons shoots up but the median barely budges. When a group of broke Africans goes into the bar, both the mean and the median drop.

A more basic problem is that "rich" generally refers to wealth and they are talking about incomes.

What exactly is income is also subject to discussion, but I don't think that dividing GDP by population will give you a right number.

Many Westerners are extremely rich by world standards, but many more aren't.

This is probably false.

The correct version would be something like: even poor countries contain a few insanely rich people (e.g. Kim Jong-un), and if you don't care about how a typical person in such country lives, but only mechanically calculate the GDP per capita (i.e. assume that Kim Jong-un has fairly distributed his wealth among all citizens), it may seem their situation is actually not that bad... probably still worse than yours, but at least not extremely.

Perfectly clear, and probably in most contexts less likely to elicit off-by-one errors. The only confusing things I can see are:

• Maybe someone might think you just meant the first decade of the 1900s?
• Similarly, is "the 2000s" a century or a decade or a millennium? (This and the previous problem are solved by using e.g., "19xx", but that's probably only clear in written language.)
• This style (it seems to me) is more common with older stuff (e.g., the 1800s and 1700s), so someone might do a double-take at "the 1900s", thinking it sounds longer ago than it is.
• There's also the thing of how the twentieth century is, if we're being pedantic, not the years 1900 through 1999, but the years 1901 through 2000.

I find it confusing as well: the century already has a different name and the decade does not, so it's natural to assume "the 1900s" refers to the decade.

Also, I guess technically "the 1900s" includes 1900 but not 2000 and "the 20th century" includes 2000 but not 1900.

My first intuitive reaction would be to interpret "the 1900s" as early XX century. I would not expect, say, the 80s and the 90s to be part of "the 1900s".

With this change, you could no longer say "now that we've found the fourth object, we finally have four objects". You'd have to remember to say "now that we've found the third object, we finally have four objects" which seems to be a new opportunity to make off-by-one error. It's not clear to me that you'd be fixing more errors than you're introducing. I echo WhySpace's request for more examples of things you're trying to fix with this change.

A friend of mine at university made the following observations about this.

• The word "first" has no connection with the number 1; it's originally the same word as "foremost". So "first" should be the ordinal corresponding to 0.
• The word "second" has no connection with the number 2; it's from the Latin secundus meaning "following". So "second" should be the ordinal corresponding to 1.
• But "third" and later ordinals are actually derived from the cardinates "three" and up.
• So we have a gap at 2 which needs a new ordinal. He proposed "twifth". So: first, second, twifth, third, fourth, etc.

off-by-one errors would go away.

I always have to consciously adjust for off-by-one errors, so this sounded appealing at first. (In the same way that Tau is appealing.)

However, after a bit of thought, I'm unable to come up with an example where this would help. Usually, the issue is that the 7th thru 10th seats aren't actually 10-7=3 seats, but 4 seats. (the 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th seats).

Calling them the 6th thru 9th seats doesn't solve this. Can someone give an example of what it does solve, outside of timekeeping? (i.e., anything that counting time in beats wouldn't solve?)

An interesting demonstration of the arbitrariness of ordinal numbers is that Romans didn't count like we do. They counted sheep like us, but they counted days differently. Our modern calendar goes from the year -1 to the year +1 and you seem to propose going from -0 to +0. But the Roman calendar went from the day -2 to the day +1. Similarly, when the Greeks told them to put in a leap day "every fourth year" they put one in every third year.

Like you said, would never happen, but you aren't wrong that it'd be better.

Most stuff that a person thinks up is better than the stuff that just kind of develops from people bumping into each other, the hard part is getting everyone to agree to change over.

I think you missed out

• Trolls. Those who want to torment or infuriate people who take a topic seriously.

As Dagon said, this is troll heaven. From straight shock trolling to concern trolling. If you launch and 4chan hears about it, it would have a field day with it :-/

When creating a new website like this the goal should be to release a minimal viable product. The assumption that those three categories of people are rare doesn't mean that you can't find them for your minimum viable product.

The YC advice is to focus on creating a great product for a small audience instead of creating an okay product for a large audience.

I guess you just kind of learn by experience when to not trust yourself. For example, I avoid writing late at night, because I know it usually comes out too emotional, even though I don't notice it at the time. For me it works better to come up with cool ideas at night and then write them up in the morning. Also when drawing I pay extra attention to symmetry, because I know that I'm a bit blind to symmetry flaws in my own drawings. Maybe something similar could work for politics.

How do you deal with noticing you've been mindkilled?

When I realize that my emotions are about whether I am winning or losing a debate, as opposed to... uhm... the feeling of exploration. When it becomes about the social feedback (looking at other people instead of looking at the territory), instead of exploring various possible paths. When it seems like the multiple possible paths are not even there.

Worst (and also the typical) case is that I notice this only afterwards, when the debate is over. Best case is that I notice it in the middle of a (typically online) debate, and then I lift my fingers from the keyboard and take a short walk (often taking some water to drink). Sometimes I just erase the unfinished comment, and close the browser tab -- and this is sometimes more difficult than it should be.

Afterwards, I try to (1) calm down, then (2) think about what I should have said instead, and (3) find someone rational and ask them "at this moment my opinion on the topic is X, does it seem like a sane opinion to you?". The answer is often "approximately yes, but I would also add Y and Z", then I think about it, and maybe update somewhat.

Note that I don't try to get necessarily to a perfect agreement with the other rational person, more like to remain in -- what would be a wannabe-rationalist's equivalent of "Overton window"? -- something like "you may seem a bit miscalibrated to me, but not in a way/degree that makes me suspect your sanity" or "we have approximately the same model of the world, just with more emphasis on different parts".

My private opinion is usually something that all political groups would consider a heresy, and it usually admits that each of them has a point about something but blows it out of proportions. That doesn't mean that I pretend to be wise and neutral; I may agree with one side on 90% and other side on 10%; or it's not even about percents, but more like "they are right about this specific detail, they just put it into completely wrong context and thus draw completely wrong conclusions" or "these are doing it mostly right, but then suddenly here they have a huge blind spot and go batshit crazy when anyone touches it, what a pity".

It seems to me that a good thing against mindkilling is to remind yourself, whenever people discuss some group, that the group consists of multiple individuals, each of them different than the others. And that any statement someone says is possibly true about some members, and false about some members. Not as a dogmatic conclusion, but more like a reasonable "null hypothesis".

Well how do you deal with noticing some other error or that you've fallen prey to some other bias? What is different in 'tribalism' that makes it so distressing?

I'll half-answer this, since it's sort of a tangent, but the metric I prefer to use is my variation of feeling over time. I don't know if other people are like this (probably), but my mood/emotion impacts my view on politics/policy.

Sometimes when I feel ill or in a bad mood some political event of class A will make me upset and convinced everything will turn out poorly. After I lift weights when I'm on my (perceived) good feeling Testosterone hormones, I feel confident that political event of class A won't be a big deal, and I'm confident in my ability to persevere. Usually I take this variance in my prediction of the future as evidence I'm being mind-killed.

Another strategy, if reading one or two articles on a topic you already know a fair amount on makes you feel strong emotions and strongly change your prediction of the future, you might be mind-killed.

A final strategy I tried was subscribing to different political meme pages on FB (libertarian, Ann Coulter-ish, Alt-right, progressive), and I'd notice how I sometimes would slowly change my view based on which ones I was looking at. I know admitting to subconsciously changing political views based on political memes is about as embarrassing as saying you went and bought a Taco Bell meal because of a Taco Bell commercial -- but as far as I can tell we are very perceptible to this stuff, even the stupidest memes. (Sometimes even if I hate them, I start substituting them deep in my mind for the 'other sides' actual argument).

Anyway, those are a few of my tactics.

Another wish for the "LW 2.0": automating this.

Something like: a user can have a list of "reviewers", which are simply the people who can see the articles in the draft section. Everything else can be communicated using the existing channels (requests for reviewers, requests to become a reviewer, announcements that there is a new content to be reviewed, feedback). This actually could be relatively simple.

I am willing.

RSS feed: Not yet. Will add a +1 to that bug.

Arbital Slack is probably the best place currently.

I don't know if Raymond Arnold did another print run of his Solstice Eve book this year, but he may still have some from previous years. If you get a copy of the Bay Area solstice program from Brent Dill or Marie La that should get you almost everything, because it's mostly 'old' songs and readings. (Brienne and Kenzi gave speeches that were original, but I think that was it?)

I think that "Introduction to economic analysis" by Preston McAfee fits the bill.
I love that book: it's ideology free and treats economics as a branch of mathematics, constructing a model of the market and then analyzing various extensions to said model. It's only limit is that it's mostly about microeconomics, but in that area is one of the best.
Oh, and it's available for free.

Can someone recommend a book on Economics basics with the same level of force and completion as a Jaynes/Drescher/Pearl/Nozick/Dawes?

I mean, with powerful freeing laws (I feel like this is exactly analogous to EY's requiredism in the free will sequence) that can let my imagination wander without fear of fooling myself too much.

David Friedman's book on Price Theory is just what you're looking for. Assuming you want an intro text that's not too formal and math-based (similar to Jaynes/Drescher/etc.).

I like Sam Bowles's Microeconomics: Behavior, Institutions, and Evolution for introducing some of the behavioral econ and evolutionary game theory material. It isn't good as a first text, but would go well with either McAfee's or Friedman's text. The exposition is great although you should look elsewhere for exercises.

Jaynes/Drescher/Pearl/Nozick/Dawes

I don't want to sound dumb, but who are these people and what did they write?

Delete button

I don't think there's a German AI Safety charity at the moment but that might change in the near future given the current efforts to get an AI Safety community in Berlin going.