Bob Jacobs's Shortform

I know LessWrong has become less humorous over the years, but this idea popped into my head when I made my bounty comment [LW(p) · GW(p)] and I couldn't stop myself from making it. Feel free to downvote this shortform if you want the site to remain a super serious forum. For the rest of you: here is my wanted poster for the reference class problem [LW · GW]. Please solve it, it keeps me up at night.

I have a Mnemonic device for checking whether a model is Gears-like [? · GW] or not.
G E A R S:

Does a variable Generate Empirical Anticipations?

Can a variable be Rederived?

Is a variable hard to Substitute?

I was writing a post about how you can get more fuzzies (=personal happiness) out of your altruism, but decided that it would be better as a shortform. I know the general advice is to purchase your fuzzies and utilons separately [LW · GW] but if you're going to do altruism anyway, and there are ways to increase your happiness of doing so without sacrificing altruistic output, then I would argue you should try to increase that happiness. After all, if altruism makes you miserable you're less likely to do it in the future and if it makes you happy you will be more likely to do it in the future (and personal happiness is obviously good in general).

The most obvious way to do it is with conditioning e.g giving yourself a cookie, doing a handpump motion every time you donate etc. Since there's already a boatload of stuff written about conditioning I won't expand on it further. I then wanted to adapt the tips from Lukeprog's the science of winning at life [? · GW] to this particular topic, but I don't really have anything to add so you can probably just read it and apply it to doing altruism.

The only purely original thing I wanted to advice is to diversify your altruistic output. I found out there have already been defenses made in favor of this concept but I would like to give additional arguments. The primary one being that it will keep you personally emotionally engaged with different parts of the world. When you invest something (e.g time/money) into a cause you become more emotionally attached to said cause. So someone who only donates to malaria bednets will (on average) be less emotionally invested into deworming even though these are both equally important projects. While I know on an intellectual level that donating 50 dollars to malaria bednets is better than donating 25 dollars, it will emotionally both feel like a small drop in the ocean. When advancements in the cause get made I get to feel fuzzies that I contributed, but crucially these won't be twice as warm if I donated twice as much. But if I donate to separate causes (e.g bednets and deworming) then for every advancement/milestone I will get to feel fuzzies from these two different causes (so twice as much).

This will lessen the chance of you becoming a victim of the bandwagon effect (of a particular cause) or becoming victim of the sunk-cost fallacy (if a cause you thought was effective turns out to be not very effective after all). This will also keep your worldview broad instead of either becoming depressed if your singular cause doesn't advance or becoming ignorant of the world at large. So if you do diversify then every victory in the other causes creates more happiness for you, allowing you to align yourself much better with the worlds needs.

I tried a bit of a natural experiment to see if rationalists would be more negative towards an idea if it's called socialism vs if it's called it something else. I made two posts that are identical, except one calls it socialism right at the start, and one only reveals I was talking about socialism at the very end (perhaps it would've been better if I hadn't revealed it at all). The former I posted to LW, the latter I posted to the EA forum.

I expected that the comments on LW would be more negative, that I would get more downvotes and gave it a 50% chance the mods wouldn't even promote it to the frontpage on LW (but would on EA forum).

The comments were more negative on LW. I did get more downvotes, but I also got more upvotes and got more karma overall: (12 karma from 19 votes on EA and 27 karma from 39 votes on LW). Posts tend to get more karma on LW, but the difference is big enough that I consider my prediction to be wrong. Lastly, the LW mods did end up promoting it to the frontpage, but it took a very long time (maybe they had a debate about it).

Overall, while rationalists are more negative towards socialist ideas that are called socialist, they aren’t as negative as I expected and will update accordingly.

Continuing my streak of hating on terms this community loves [LW · GW].

I hate the term 'Motte-and-bailey'. Not because the fallacy itself is bad, but because you are essentially indirectly accusing your interlocutor of switching definitions on purpose. In my experience this is almost always an accident, but even if it wasn't, you still shouldn't immediately brand your interlocutor as malicious. I propose we use the term 'defiswitchion' (combining 'definition' and 'switch') since it is actually descriptive and easier to understand for people who hear it for the first time and you are not indirectly accusing your interlocutor of using dirty debate tactics.

I just realized that coherence value theory can actually be read as a warning for inadequate equilibria in your worldview. If you are losing epistemic value because a new (but more accurate) belief doesn't fit with your old beliefs then you have to reject it, meaning you can get stuck with an imperfect belief system (e.g a religion). In other words: coherentism works better if you have slack in your belief system [LW · GW] (this is one of my favorite LW posts, highly recommended).

The concepts of Unitarism, Centralization, Authoritarianism and top-down seem to be all conveying the same thing, but when you look closely you start to notice the small differences. Why then do we think these concepts are similar? Because implementing them has the same effect: high-risk and high-reward.

We tend to think that authoritarianism etc are inherently bad, but that's only because the ways you can screw up a situation vastly outnumber the ways in which you can improve a situation. When Scott Alexander talks about an AI overlord taking away your freedom, many people get squeamish. But while the worst dystopias will be top-down, so will the best utopias. Identifying yourself as being inherently pro big-government or anti big-government seems rather counterproductive. It might be better to ask yourself what is this particular top-down system doing in this specific moment in time and temporarily choose a position on the pro-anti scale, even if people accuse you of having no ideology (you don't need to have an ideology for everything as long as you have an underlying philosophy).

With climate change getting worse by the day we need to switch to sustainable energy sources sooner rather than later. The new Molten salt reactors are small, clean and safe, but still carry the stigma of nuclear energy. Since these reactors (like others) can use old nuclear waste as a fuel source, I suggest we rebrand them to "Nuclear Waste Eaters" and give them (or a company that makes them) a logo in the vein of this quick sketch I made: https://postimg.cc/jWy3PtjJ

Hopefully a rebranding to "thing getting rid of the thing you hate, also did you know it's clean and safe" will get people more motivated for these kinds of energy sources.

This is a short argument against subjective idealism. Since I don't think there are (m)any subjective idealist on this site I've decided to make it a shortform rather than a full post.

We don't know how big reality really is. Most people agree that it isn't smaller than the things you perceive, because if I have perception of something the perception exists. Subjective Idealism says that only the perceptions are real and the things outside of our perception don't exist:

But if you're not infinitely certain [LW · GW] that subjective idealism is correct, then you have to at least assign some probability that a different model of reality (e.g your perception + one other category of things exists) is true:

But of course there are many other types of models that could also be true:

In fact the other models outnumber subjective idealism infinity to one, making it seem more probable that things outside your immediate perception exist.

(I don't think this argument is particularly strong in itself, but it could be used to strengthen other arguments.)

QALY is an imperfect metric because (among other things) an action that has an immediately apparent positive effect, might have far off negative effects. I might e.g cure the disease of someone who's actions lead directly to world war 3. I could argue that we should use qaly's (or something similar to qaly's) as the standard metric for a countries succes instead of gdp, but just like with gdp you are missing the far future values.

One metric I could think of is that we calculate a country's increase in it's citizens immediately apparent qaly's without pretending we can calculate all the ripple effects. Instead we divide this number by the countries ecological footprint. But there are metrics for other far off risks too. Like nuclear weapon yield or percentage of gdp spent on the development of autonomous weapons. I'm also not sure how good QALY's are at measuring mental health. Should things like leisure, social connections and inequality get their own metric. How do we balance them all?

I've tried to make some sort of justifiable metric for myself, but it's just too complex, time consuming and above my capabilities. Anyone got a better systems?

This design has become so ubiquitous for atheist groups that it has become the unofficial symbol for atheism. I think the design is very pretty, but I still don't like it. When people ask me why I think atheism isn't a religion I can say that atheism doesn't have rituals, symbols, doctrines etc. When there is a symbol for atheism that weakens this argument significantly. I get that many people who are leaving religion want to find a new ingroup, but I would prefer it if they used the symbol of secular humanism instead of this one.