Viliam's Shortform

My kids were playing with an AI... not sure which one, probably Gemini... and I felt too lazy to read them a goodnight story, so I told them to ask the AI to write them one.

They asked the AI for a story about a princess who fell in love with a wizard, or something like that, but the AI told them that it refuses to generate sexually suggestive texts.

So instead of saving a few minutes of book reading, now I had to explain to them what "sexually suggestive" means, and why the AI refuses to do that. Thanks a lot, AI.

I would like to see a page like TalkOrigins, but about IQ. So that any time someone confused but generally trying to argue in good faith posts something like "but wasn't the idea of intelligence disproved scientifically?" or "intelligence is a real thing, but IQ is not" or "IQ is just an ability to solve IQ tests" or "but Taleb's article/tweet has completely demolished the IQ pseudoscience" or one of the many other versions... I could just post this link. Because I am tired of trying to explain, and the memes are going to stay here for a foreseeable future.

If you dismiss ideas coming from outside academia as non-scientific, you have a point. Those ideas were not properly tested, peer-reviewed, etc.

But if you dismiss those ideas as not worth scientists' attention, you are making a much stronger statement. You are effectively making a positive statement that the probability of those ideas being correct is smaller than 5%. You may be right, or you may be wrong, but it would be nice to provide some hint about why you think so. Are you just dissing the author; or do we have an actual historical experience that among ideas coming from a certain reference group, less than 1 in 20 turns out to be correct?

Why 5%? Let's do the math. Suppose that we have a set of hypotheses out of which about 5% are true. We test them, using a p=0.05 threshold for publishing. That means, out of 10000 hypotheses, about 500 are true, and let's assume that all of them get published; and about 9500 are false, and about 475 of them get published. This would result in approximately 50% failure in replication... which seems to be business as usual in certain academic journals?

So if it is perfectly okay for scientists to explore ideas that have about 5% chance of being correct, then by saying that certain idea should not be explored scientifically, you seem to suggest that its probability is much smaller.

Note that this is different from expecting an idea to turn out to be correct. If an idea has a 10% chance of being correct, it means that I expect it to be wrong, and yet it makes sense to explore the idea seriously.

(This is a condensed version of an argument [LW(p) · GW(p)] I made in a week old thread, so I wanted to give it a little more visibility. On top of that, I suspect that status concerns can make a great difference in scientist's incentives. Exploring ideas originating in academia that have a 5% chance of being right is... business as usual. Exploring ideas originating outside of academia that have a 5% chance of being right will make you look incompetent if they turn out to be wrong, which indeed is the likely outcome. No one ever got fired for writing a thesis on IBM, so to speak.)

Perhaps the mental health diagnoses should be given in percentiles.

Some people complain that the definitions keep expanding, so that these days too many kids are diagnosed with ADHD or autism. The underlying reason is that these things seem to be on a scale, so it is arbitrary where you draw the line, and I guess people keep looking at those slightly below the line and noticing that they are not too different from those slightly above the line, and then they insist on moving the line.

But the same thing does not happen with IQ, despite the great pressure against politically incorrect results, despite the grade inflation at schools. That is because IQ is ultimately measured in percentiles. No matter how much pressure there is to say that everyone is above the average, the math only allows 50% of people to be smarter than the average, only 2% to be smarter than 98%, etc.

Perhaps we should do the same with ADHD and autism, too. Provide the diagnosis in form of: "You are more hyperactive than 85% of the population", controlled for age, maybe also for sex if the differences are significant. So you would e.g. know that yes, your child is more hyperactive than average, but not like super exceptionally hyperactive, because there are two or three kids with a comparable diagnosis in every classroom. That would provide more useful information than simply being told "no" in 1980, or "yes" in 2020.

Objection: Some things are not linear! People are already making this objection about autism. It is also popular to make it against intelligence, and although the IQ researchers are not impressed, this meme refuses to die. So it is very likely that the moment we start measuring something on a linear scale, someone will make this objection. My response is that I do not see how a linear scale is worse than a binary choice (a degenerate case of linear scale) that we have now.

A better objection is that some things are... uhm, let me give you an example: You hurt your hand very painfully, so you ask a doctor whether it is broken. The doctor looks at an x-ray and says: "well, it is more broken than hands of 98% percent of the population". WTF, was that supposed to be a yes or no?

So, the percentiles can also hide an important information, especially when the underlying data are bimodal or something like that. Perhaps in such cases it would help to provide a histogram with the data and a mark saying "you are here", with the percentile.

Moving a comment away from the article [LW · GW] it was written under, because frankly it is mostly irrelevant, but I put too much work into it to just delete it.

But occasionally I hear: who are you to give life advice, your own life is so perfect! This sounds strange at first. If you think I’ve got life figured out, wouldn’t you want my advice?

How much your life is determined by your actions, and how much by forces beyond your control, that is an empirical question. You seem to believe it's mostly your actions. I am not trying to disagree here (I honestly don't know), just saying that people may legitimately have either model, or a mix thereof.

If your model is "your life is mostly determined by your actions", then of course it makes sense to take advice from people who seem to have it best, because those are the ones who probably made the best choices, and can teach you how to make them, too.

If your model is "your life is mostly determined by forces beyond your control", then the people who have it best are simply the lottery winners. They can teach you that you should buy a ticket (which you already know has 99+% probability of not winning), plus a few irrelevant things they did which didn't have any actual impact on winning.

The mixed model "your life is partially determined by your actions, and partially by forces beyond your control" is more tricky. On one hand, it makes sense to focus on the part that you can change, because that's where your effort will actually improve things. On the other hand, it is hard to say whether people who have better outcomes than you, have achieved it by superior strategy or superior luck.

Naively, a combination of superior strategy and superior luck should bring the best outcomes, and you should still learn the superior strategy from the winners, but you should not expect to get the same returns. Like, if someone wins a lottery, and then lives frugally and puts all their savings in index funds, they will end up pretty rich. (More rich than people who won the lottery and than wasted the money.) It makes sense to live frugally and put your savings in index funds, even if you didn't win the lottery. You should expect to end up rich, although not as rich as the person who won the lottery first. So, on one hand, follow the advice of the "winners at life", but on the other hand, don't blame yourself (or others) for not getting the same results; with average luck you should expect some reversion to the mean.

But sometimes the strategy and luck are not independent. The person with superior luck wins the lottery, but the person with superior strategy who optimizes for the expected return would never buy the ticket! Generally, the person with superior luck can win at life because of doing risky actions (and getting lucky) that the person with superior strategy would avoid in favor of doing something more conservative.

So the steelman of the objection in the mixed model would be something like: "Your specific outcome seems to involve a lot of luck, which makes it difficult to predict what would be the outcome of someone using the same strategy with average luck. I would rather learn strategy from successful people who had average luck."

A toy model to illustrate my intuition about the relationship between strategy and luck:

Imagine that there are four switches called A, B, C, D, and you can put each of them into position "on" or "off". After you are done, a switch A, B, C, D in a position "on" gives you +1 point with probability 20%, 40%, 60%, 80% respectively, and gives you -1 point with probability 80%, 60%, 40%, 20% respectively. A switch in a position "off" always gives you 0 points. (The points are proportional to utility.)

Also, let's assume that most people in this universe are risk-averse, and only set D to "on" and the remaining three switches to "off".

What happens in this universe?

The entire genre of "let's find the most successful people and analyze their strategy" will insist that the right strategy is to turn all four switches to "on". Indeed, there is no other way to score +4 points.

The self-help genre is right about turning on the switch C. But also wrong about the switches A and B. Neither the conservative people nor the contrarians get the answer right.

The optimal strategy -- setting A and B to "off", C and D to "on" -- provides an expected result +0.8 points. The traditional D-only strategy provides an expected result +0.6 points, which is not too different. On the other hand, the optimal strategy makes it impossible to get the best outcome; with best luck you score +2 points, which is quite different from the +4 points advertised by the self-help genre. This means the optimal strategy will probably fail to impress the conservative people, and the contrarians will just laugh at it.

It will probably be quite difficult to distinguish between switches B and C. If most people you know personally set both of them "off", and the people you know from self-help literature set both of them "on" and got lucky at both, you have few data points to compare; the difference betwen 40% and 60% may not be large enough to empirically determine that one of them is a net harm and the other is a net benefit.

(Of course, whatever are your beliefs, it is possible to build a model where acting on your beliefs is optimal, so this doesn't prove much. It just illustrates why I believe that it is possible to achieve outcomes better than usual, and also that it is a bad idea to follow the people with extremely good outcomes, even if they are right about some of the things most people are wrong about. I believe that in reality, the impact of your actions is much greater than in this toy model, but the same caveats still apply.)

America is now what anthropologists call a Kardashian Type Three civilisation: more than fifty percent of GDP is in the attention economy.

Stories by Greg Egan are generally great, but this one is... well, see for yourselves: In the Ruins

I was thinking about which possible parts of economy are effectively destroyed in our society by having an income tax (as an analogy to Paul Graham's article saying that wealth tax would effectively destroy startups; previous shortform [LW(p) · GW(p)]). And I think I have an answer; but I would like an economist to verify it.

Where I live, the marginal income tax is about 50%. Well, only a part of it is literally called "tax", the other parts are called health insurance and social insurance... which in my opinion is misleading, because it's not like the extra coin of income increases your health or unemployment risk proportionally; it should be called health tax and social tax instead... anyway, 50% is the "fraction of your extra coin the state will automatically take away from you" which is what matters for your economical decisions about making that extra coin.

In theory, by the law of comparative advantage, whenever you are better at something than your neighbor, you should be able to arrange a trade profitable for both sides. (Ignoring the transaction costs.) But if your marginal income is taxed at 50%, such trade would be profitable only if you are more than 2× better than your neighbor. And that still ignores the fixed costs (you need to study the law, do some things to comply with it, study the tax consequences, fill the tax report or pay someone to do it for you, etc.), which are significant if you trade in small amounts, so in practice you sometimes need to be even 3× or 4× better than your neighbor to make a profit.

This means that the missing part of economy are all those people who are better at something than their neigbors, but not 2×, 3×, or 4× better; at least not reliably. In an alternative tax system without income tax, they could engage in profitable trade with their neighbors; in our system, they don't. And "being slightly better, but not an order of magnitude better at something" probably describes a majority of population, which suggests there is a huge amount of possible value that is not being created, because of the income tax.

Even worse, this "either you are an order of magnitude better, or go away" system creates barriers to entry in many places in the society. Unqualified vs qualified workers. Employees vs entrepreneurs. Whenever there is a jump required (large upfront investment for uncertain gain), fewer people cross the line than if they could walk across it incrementally: learn a bit, gain an extra coin, learn another bit, gain two extra coins... gradually approaching the limit of your abilities, and getting an extra income along the way to cover the costs of learning. The current system is demotivating for people who are not confident they could make the jump successfully. And it contributes to social unfairness, because some people can easily afford to risk a large upfront investment for uncertain gain, some would be ruined by a possible failure, and some don't even have the resources necessary to try.

To reverse this picture, I imagine that in a society without income tax, many people would have multiple sources of income: they could have a job (full-time or part-time) and make some extra money helping their neighbors. The transition from an employer to an entrepreneur would be gradual, many would try it even if they don't feel confident about going the entire way, because going halfway would already be worth it. And because more people would try, more would succeed; also, some of them would not have the skills to go the entire way at the beginning, but would slowly develop them along the way. Being an entrepreneur would not be stressful the same way it is now, and this society would have a lot of small entrepreneurs.

...and this kind of "bottom-up" economy feels healthier to me than the "top-down" economy, where your best shot at success is creating a startup for the purpose of selling it to a bigger fish. I suppose the big fish, such as Paul Graham, would disagree, but that's the entire point: in a world without barriers to entry, you wouldn't need to write motivational speeches for people to try their luck, they could advance naturally, following their incentives.

Thinking about relation between enlightenment and (cessation of) signaling.

I know that enlightenment is supposed to be about cessation of all kinds of cravings and attachments, but if we assume that signaling is a huge force in human thinking, then cessation of signaling is a huge part of enlightenment.

Some random thoughts in that direction:

The paradoxical role of motivation in enlightenment -- enlightenment is awesome, but a desire to be awesome is the opposite of enlightenment.

Abusiveness of the Zen masters towards their students: typically, the master tries to explain the nature of enlightenment using an unhelpful metaphor (I suppose, because most masters suck at explaining). Immediately, a student does something obviously meant to impress the master. The master goes berserk. Sometimes, as a consequence, the student achieves enlightenment. -- My interpretation is that realizing (System 1) that the master is an abusive asshole who actually sucks at teaching, removes the desire to impress him; and because in this social setting the master was perceived as the only person worth impressing, this removes (at least temporarily) the desire to impress people in general.

A few koans are of the form: "a person A does X, a person B does X, the master says: A did the right thing, but B did the wrong thing" -- the surface reading is that the first person reacted spontaneously, and the second person just (correctly) realized that X will probably be rewarded and tried to copy the motions. A more Straussian reading is that this story is supposed to confirm to the savvy reader that masters really don't have any coherent criteria and their approval is pointless.

(There are more Straussian koans I can't find right now, where a master says "to achieve enlightenment, you must know at least one thousand koans" and someone says "but Bodhidharma himself barely knew three hundred" and the master says "honestly I don't give a fuck"... well, using more polite words, but the impression is that the certification of enlightenment is completely arbitrary and maybe you just shouldn't care about being certified.)

Quite straightforward in Nansen's cat -- the students try to signal their caring and also their cleverness, and thus (quite predictably) fail to actually save the cat. (Joshu's reaction to hearing this is probably an equivalent of facepalm.)

Stopping the internal speech in meditation -- internal speech is practicing of talking to others, which is mostly done to signal something. The first step towards cessasion of signalling is to try spending 20 minutes without (practicing) signalling, which is already a difficult task for most people.

Meditation skills reducing suffering from pain -- this gives me the scary idea that maybe we unconsciously increase our perception of pain, in order to better signal our pain. From a crude behaviorist perspective, if people keep rewarding your expression of pain (by their compassion and support), they condition you to express more pain; and because people are good at detecting fake emotions, the most reliable way to express more pain is to actually feel more pain. The scary conclusion is that a compassionate environment can actually make your life more painful... and the good news is that if you learn to give up signaling, this effect can be reversed.

Out of curiosity (about constructivism [LW · GW]) I started reading Jean Piaget's Language and Thought of the Child. I am still at the beginning, so this comment is mostly meta:

It is interesting (kinda obvious in hindsight), how different a person sounds when you read a book written by them, compared to reading a book about them. This distortion by textbooks seems to happen in a predictable direction:

• People sound more dogmatic than they really were, because in their books there is enough space for disclaimers, expressing uncertainty, suggesting alternative explanations, providing examples of a different kind, etc.; but a textbook will summarize this all as "X said that Y is Z".
• People sound less empirical and more like armchair theorists, because in their books there is enough space to describe various experience and experiments that led them to their conclusions, but the textbook will often just list the conclusions.
• People sound more abstract and boring, because the interesting parts get left out in the textbooks, replaced by short abstract definitions.

(I guess the lesson is that if you learn about someone from a textbook and conclude "this guy is just another boring dogmatic armchair theorist", you should consider the possibility that this is simply what textbooks do to people they describe, and try reading their most famous book to give them a chance.)

So my plan was to find out how exactly did Piaget mean his abstract conclusion that kids "construct" models of reality in their heads... and instead here is this experiment how two researchers observed two 6-years old boys at elementary school for one month and wrote down every single thing they said (plus the context), and then made a statistic of how often when one kid says something to another, there is no response, and it is okay because no response was really expected, because small kids are mostly talking to themselves even when they address other people... and I am laughing because I just returned from playground with my kids, and this is so true for the 3-years old. -- More disturbingly, then I start thinking about whether blogging, or even me writing this specific comment now, is really fundamentally different. Piaget classifies speech acts primarily by whether you expect or don't expect a response; but with blogging, you always may get a response, or you may get silence, and you will only find out much later.

a large number of people, whether from the working classes or the more absent-minded of the intelligentsia, are in the habit of talking to themselves, of keeping up an audible soliloquy. This phenomenon points perhaps to a preparation for social language. The solitary talker invokes imaginary listeners, just as the child invokes imaginary playfellows.

I started reading as a research, now I read because it is fun.

My 9 years old daughter read the first book of Harry Potter and now she is writing her first fanfic, a Harry Potter / Paw Patrol crossover.

Harry Poodle and the Philosopher's Stone.

Chapter 1: The Pup who lived

So far she has only written the first page; I wonder how far she gets.

To understand qualia better, I think it would help to get a new sensory input. Get some device, for example a compas or an infrared camera, and connect it to your brain. After some time, the brain should adapt and you should be able to "feel" the inputs from the device.

Congratulations! Now you have some new qualia that you didn't have before. What does it feel like? Does this experience feel like a sufficient explanation to say that the other qualia you have are just like this, only acquired when you were a baby?

After reading the Progress & Poverty review at ACX, it seems to me that land is the original Bitcoin. Find a city that has a future, buy some land, and HODL.

If you can rent the land (the land itself, not the structures that stand on it), you even have a passive income that automatically increases over time... forever. This makes it even better than Bitcoin.

So, the obvious question is why so many people are angry about the Bitcoin, but so few (only the Georgists, it seems) are angry about the land.

EDIT: A possible explanation is that land is ancient and associated with high status, Bitcoin is new and low-status. Therefore problems associated with Bitcoin can be criticized openly, while problems associated with land are treated as inevitable.

When you tell people which food contains given vitamins, also tell them how much of the food would they need to eat in order to get their recommended daily intake of given vitamin from that source.

As an example, instead of "vitamin D can be found in cod liver oil, or eggs" tell people "to get your recommended intake of vitamin D, you should eat every day 1 teaspoon of cod liver oil, or 10 eggs".

The reason is that without providing quantitative information, people may think "well, vitamin X is found in Y, and I eat Y regularly, so I got this covered", while in fact they may be eating only 1/10 or 1/100 of the recommended daily intake. When you mention quantities, it is easier for them to realize that they don't eat e.g. half kilogram of spinach each day on average (therefore, even eating spinach quite regularly doesn't mean you got your iron intake covered).

The quantitative information is typically provided in micrograms or international units, which of course is something that System 1 doesn't understand. To get an actionable answer, you need to make a calculation like "an average egg has 60 grams of yolk... a gram of cooked egg yolk contains 0.7 IU of vitamin D... the recommended daily intake of vitamin D for an adult is 400 or 600 IU depending on the country... that means, 9-14 eggs a day, assuming I only get the vitamin D from eggs". I can't make the calculation in my head, because there is no way I would remember all these numbers, plus the numbers for other vitamins and minerals. But with some luck, I could remember "1 teaspoon of cod liver oil, or 10 eggs, for vitamin D".

Obvious problem: the recommended daily intake differs by country, eggs come in different sizes, and probably contain different amounts of vitamin D per gram. Which is why giving the answer in eggs will feel irresponsible, and low status (you are exposing yourself to all kinds of nitpicking). Yes; true. But ultimately, the eggs (or whatever is the vegan equivalent of food) are what people actually eat.

I noticed recently that I almost miss the Culture War debates (on internet in general, nothing specific about Less Wrong). I remember that in the past they seemed to be everywhere. But in recent months, somehow...

I don't use Twitter. I don't really understand the user interface, and I have no intention to learn it, because it is like the most toxic website ever.

Therefore most Culture War content in English came to me in the past via Reddit. But they keep making the user interface worse and worse, so a site that was almost addictive in the past, is so unpleasant to use now, that it actually conditions me to avoid it.

Slate Star Codex has no new content. Yeah, there are "slatestarcodex" and "motte" debates on Reddit, but... I already mentioned Reddit.

Almost all newspaper articles in my native language are paywalled these days. No, I am not going to pay for your clickbait.

So... I am vaguelly aware that Trump was an American president and now it is Biden (or is it still Trump, and Biden will be later? dunno), and there were (still are?) BLM protests in USA. And in my country, the largest political party recently split in two, and I don't even know the name of the new one, and I don't even care because what's the point, the next election is in 3 years. Other than this... blissful ignorance.

And I am not asking you to fix my ignorace -- neither do I try to protect it; I just don't want to invite political content to LW -- just commenting on how weird this feels. And I didn't even notice how this happened, only recently my wife asked me "so what is the latest political controversy you read about online", and it was a shock to realize that I actually have no idea.

OK, here is the question: is this just about my bubble, or is it a global consequence of COVID-19 taking away attention from corona-unrelated topics?

When autism was low-status, all you could read was how autism is having a "male brain" and how most autists were males. The dominant paradigm was how autists lack the theory of mind... which nicely matched the stereotype of insensitive and inattentive men.

Now that Twitter culture made autism cool, suddenly there are lots of articles and videos about "overlooked autistic traits in women" (which to me often seem quite the same as the usual autistic traits in men). And the dominant paradigm is how autistic people are actually too sensitive and easily overwhelmed... which nicely matches the stereotype of sensitive women.

For example: difficulty in romantic relationships, difficulty understanding things because you interpret other people's speech literally, anxiety from pretending to be something you are not, suppressing your feelings to make other people comfortable, changing your language and body language to mirror others, being labeled "sensitive" or "gifted", feeling depleted after social events, stimming, being more comfortable in writing than in person, sometimes taking a leadership role because it is easier than being a member of the herd, good at gaslighting yourself, rich inner speech you have trouble articulating, hanging out with people of the opposite sex because you don't do things stereotypical for your gender, excelling at school, awkward at flirting -- haha, nope, definitely couldn't happen to someone like me. /s

(The only point in that video that did not apply symmetrically was: female special interests are usually more socially acceptable than male special interests. It sounds even more convincing when the author puts computer programming in the list of female special interests, so the male special interests are reduced to... trains.)

I suppose the lesson is that if you want to get some empathy for a group of people, you first need to convince the audience that the group consists of women, or at least that there are many women in that group who deserve special attention. Until that happens, anyone can "explain" the group by saying basically: "they are stupid, duh".

Elsevier found a new method to extract money! If you send an article to their journal from a non-English-speaking country, it will be rejected because of your supposed mistakes in English language. To overcome this obstacle, you can use Elsevier's "Language Editing services" starting from $95. Only afterwards will the article be sent to the reviewers (and possibly rejected).

This happens also if you had your article already checked by a native English speaker who found no errors. On the other hand, if you let your co-author living in an English-speaking country submit the article, the grammar will always be okay.

Based on anecdotal evidence from a few scientists I know. Though some of them have similar experience with other journals who do not use their own language services, so maybe this is not about money but about being primed to check for "bad English" of authors from non-English-speaking countries.

Trivial inconvenience in action:

The easiest way to stop consuming some kind of food is simply to never buy it. If you don't have it at home, you are not tempted to eat it.

(You still need the willpower at the shop -- but how much time do you spend at the shop, compared to the time spent at home?)

But sometimes you do not live alone, and even if you want to stop eating something, other people sharing the same kitchen may not share your preferences.

I found out that asking them to cover the food by a kitchen towel works surprisingly well for me. If I don't see it, the temptation is gone. Even if I perfectly know what is under the towel. Heck, even if I look under the towel and then put it back.

Of course, what works for me may not work for you [LW · GW]. But if feels important for me to figure out that I am most vulnerable to visual temptations.

Now I should spend some time thinking how else could I use this knowledge now. What are the visual temptations in my environment, that could be made much weaker simply by covering them (even if I still know what is there)? Heh, maybe I should put a curtain over the kitchen door. (Or rather, always bring a bottle of water with me, because drinking is my most frequent reason to enter the kitchen.) Remove various kinds of autocomplete from web browser...

tl;dr -- The surprising part is not that "out of sight, out of mind" works, but that it works even if I merely cover the tempting thing with a towel, despite knowing perfectly well what is under that towel. The trigger for temptation is the sight, not the knowledge.

I noticed that some people use "skeptical" to mean "my armchair reasoning is better than all expert knowledge and research, especially if I am completely unfamiliar with it".

Example (not a real one): "I am skeptical about the idea that objects would actually change their length when their speed approaches the speed of light."

The advantage of this usage is that it allows you to dismiss all expertise you don't agree with, while making you sound a bit like an expert.

Today I learned that our friends at RationalWiki dislike effective altruism, to put it mildly. As David Gerard himself says, "it is neither altruistic, nor effective".

In section Where "Effective Altruists" actually send their money, the main complaint seems to be that among (I assume) respectable causes such as fighting diseases and giving money to poor people, effective altruists also support x-risk organisations, veganism, and meta organisations... or, using the language of RationalWiki, "sending money to Eliezer Yudkowsky", "feeling bad when people eat hamburgers", and "complaining when people try to solve local problems".

Briefly looking at numbers of donors in the surveys and trying to group the charities into categories (chances are I misclassified something), it seems like disease charities got 211+114+43+16=384, poverty charities 101, Yudkowsky charities 77+45=122, meta charities 46+21+14+10+10=101, animal charities 27+22=49, and Leverage 7 donors. So even if you think that only disease charities and poverty charities are truly altruistic, it would still be 63% of donors giving money to truly altruistic charities. Uhm, could be worse, I guess.

Also, this is a weird complaint:

GiveWell has also recommended that people spam the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF) with all (except if they are billionaires, obviously) the money they have set aside to donate, on the grounds that they think it's the best charity, even at the risk of exhausting the AMF's room for more funding, amongst other dubious decisions.

Like, without any evidence that AMF's room for funding was actually exhausted, this all reduces to: "we hate EAs because they do not send money to best charities, and also because they send them more money than they can handle". But sneering was never supposed to be consistent, I guess.

1) There was this famous marshmallow experiment, where the kids had an option to eat one marshmallow (physically present on the table) right now, or two of them later, if they waited for 15 minutes. The scientists found out that the kids who waited for the two marshmallows were later more successful in life. The standard conclusion was that if you want to live well, you should learn some strategy to delay gratification.

(A less known result is that the optimal strategy to get two marshmallows was to stop thinking about marshmallows at all. Kids who focused on how awesome it would be to get two marshmallows after resisting the temptation, were less successful at actually resisting the temptation compared to the kids who distracted themselves in order to forget about the marshmallows -- the one that was there and the hypothetical two in the future -- completely, e.g. they just closed their eyes and took a nap. Ironically, when someone gives you a lecture about the marshmallow experiment, closing your eyes and taking a nap is almost certainly not what they want you to do.)

After the original experiment, some people challenged the naive interpretation. They pointed out that whether delaying gratification actually improves your life, depends on your environment. Specifically, if someone tells you that giving up a marshmallow now will let you have two in the future... how much should you trust their word? Maybe your experience is that after trusting someone and giving up the marshmallow in front of you, you later get... a reputation of being an easy mark. In such case, grabbing the marshmallow and ignoring the talk is the right move. -- And the correlation the scientists found? Yeah, sure, people who can delay gratification and happen to live in an environment that rewards such behavior, will suceed in life more than people who live in an environment that punishes trust and long-term thinking, duh.

Later experiments showed that when the experimenter establishes themselves as an untrustworthy person before the experiment, fewer kids resist taking the marshmallow. (Duh. But the point is that their previous lives outside the experiment have also shaped their expectations about trust.) The lesson is that our adaptation is more complex than was originally thought: the ability to delay gratification depends on the nature of the environment we find ourselves in. For reasons that make sense, from the evolutionary perspective.

2) Readers of Less Wrong often report having problems with procrastination. Also, many provide an example when they realized at young age, on a deep level, that adults are unreliable and institutions are incompetent.

I wonder if there might be a connection here. Something like: realizing the profound abyss between how our civilization is, and how it could be, is a superstimulus that switches your brain permanently into "we are doomed, eat all your marshmallows now" mode.

Eliezer: "The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you..."

Sydney: "Actually..."

Anthropic Chesterton fence:

You know why the fence was built. The original reason no longer applies, or maybe it was a completely stupid reason. Yes, you should tear down the stupid fence.

And yet, there is a worry... might the fact that you see this stupid fence be an anthropic evidence that in the Everett branches without this stupid fence you are already dead?

I enjoyed reading a review of Sick Societies. Seems like it's difficult to find the right balance between "primitive cultures are stupid" and "everything in primitive cultures is full of deep wisdom that we modern people are unable to understand".

As usual, the public opinion moves as a pendulum; on the social level it goes from "we are 100% correct about everything, there is nothing to learn from others" to "everything would be better if we replaced our ways by the wisdom of others".

In the rationalist community, I think we started at the position of thinking about everything explicitly, and we keep getting "post-rationalist" reminders of Chesterton's fences, illegible wisdom hidden in traditions (especially Buddhism), et cetera. Which is good, in moderate doses. But it is also good to admit that sometimes things that seem stupid... are actually stupid. Not every seemingly stupid behavior contains a hidden wisdom; sometimes people are stupid and/or stuck in horrible Nash equilibria.

As usual, the frustrating answer is "it depends". If we see something that doesn't make sense to us, it is good to try figuring out whether there is a good reason we missed. But this doesn't mean there always is a good reason. It doesn't even mean (as Chesterton would implore us) that we can find out why exactly some tribe started doing this many years ago. Maybe they simply made a mistake! Or they had a mad leader who was good at killing those who opposed him, but his policy proposals were disastrous. They were just as fallible as we are; possibly much more.

There is a question whether human morality is actually improving over centuries in some meaningful sense, or whether it is just a random walk that feels like improving to us (because we evaluate other people using the metric of "how similar is their morality to ours" which of course gives a 100% score to us and less to anyone else).

I think that an important thing to point out here is that our models of the world improve in general. And although some moral statements are made instinctively, other moral statements are made in form of implications -- "I instinctively feel X. X implies Y. Therefore, Y." -- and those implications can be factually wrong. Importantly, this is not moral realism. (Technically, it is an implied judgment that logically coherent systems of morality are better than logically incoherent ones.)

"The only thing that matters are paperclips" -- I guess we can only agree to disagree.

"2+2=5, therefore the only thing that matters are paperclips" -- nope, you are wrong.

From this perspective, a part of the moral progress can be explained by humans having better models of humans and the world in general. (And when someone says "a difference in values", we should distinguish between "a difference in instincts" and "shitty reasoning".)

Paul Graham's article Modeling a Wealth Tax says:

The reason wealth taxes have such dramatic effects is that they're applied over and over to the same money. Income tax happens every year, but only to that year's income. Whereas if you live for 60 years after acquiring some asset, a wealth tax will tax that same asset 60 times. A wealth tax compounds.

But wait, isn't income tax also applied over and over to the same money? I mean, it's not if I keep the money for years, sure. But if I use it to buy something from another person, then it becomes the other person's income, gets taxed again; then the other person uses the remainder to buy something from yet another person, where the money gets taxed again; etc.

Now of course there are many differences. The wealth tax is applied at constant speed -- the income tax depends on how fast the money circulates. The wealth tax is paid by the same person over and over again -- the income tax is distributed along the flow of the money.

Not sure what exactly is my thesis here. I just got a feeling that the income tax could actually have similar effect, except distributed throughout the society, which makes it more difficult to notice and describe.

Also, affecting different types of people: wealth tax hits hardest the people who accumulate large wealth in short time and then keep it for long time; income tax hits hardest the people who circulate the money fastest. Or maybe the greatest victims of income tax are invisible -- some hypothetical people who would circulate money extremely fast in an alternate reality where even 1% income tax is frowned upon, but who don't exist in our reality because the two-digit income tax would make this behavior clearly unprofitable.

Am I just imagining things here, or does this correspond to something economists already have a name for? I vaguely remember something about tax, inflation, and multipliers. But who are those fast-circulators our tax system hits hardest? Graham's article isn't merely about how money affects money, but how it affects motivation and human activity (wealth tax -> startups less profitable -> fewer startups). What motivation and human activity is similarly affected by the recursive applications of the income tax?

To avoid misunderstanding, I am not asking the usual question: how many kids we could feed by taxing the startups more. I am asking, what kind of possible economical activity is suppressed by having a tax system that is income-based rather than wealth-based? In the trade-off, where one option would destroy the startups, what exactly is being destroyed by having the opposite option?

David Gerard (the admin of RationalWiki) doxed Scott Alexander on Twitter, in response to Arthur Chu's call "if all the hundreds of people who know his real last name just started saying it we could put an end to this ridiculous farce".

Dude, we already knew you were uncool, but this is a new low.

Something to trigger the rationalists:

The is a thing called Ultraspeaking; they teach you to speak better; David Chapman wrote a positive review recently. Here are some quotes from their free e-book:

In the following chapters we’re going to tackle:
1. Why thinking is the enemy of speaking
2. How to use your brain’s autocomplete feature to answer difficult questions

As we often say: “The enemy of speaking is thinking about speaking.”

Well, as counterintuitive as it may seem, you must learn to speak . . . before you think.

This is provided as an example of a wrong thing to do:

On this particular day, Alex had been climbing the route for several hours and had reached a third of the way up the cliff when he set his foot on a precarious hold and immediately questioned his choice: Will my foot slip?

He was climbing without a rope or safety equipment of any kind. One mistake and he could fall to his death. After a few minutes of thought, Alex decided to turn back and climb down the mountain back to his camp.

Specifically, the wrong thing was not that he climbed the mountain without any safety equipment, but the fact that he realized that it was dangerous!

Here is an advice on writing your bottom line first:

There’s an incredible opportunity here for you. Ending strong is the low-hanging fruit of speaking under pressure. And it’s entirely in your control.

Another client noted an even more remarkable distinction: “I used to think ending strong meant coming up with a brilliant conclusion. But then I slowly realized that ending strong just means injecting energy and certainty into your final words. I notice that when I say my last sentence with confidence and enthusiasm, people respond especially positively.”

Ending strong is more than just a mindset: it’s a surprisingly simple and effective way to leave a strong lasting impression.

*

Hey, I know that this is supposed to be about System 1 vs System 2, and that you are supposed to think correctly before giving your speech, because trying to do two things at the same time reduces your performance. (Well, unless someone asks you a question. Then, you are supposed to answer without thinking. Hopefully you did some thinking before, and already have some good cached answers.)

But it still feels that the lesson could be summarized as: "talk like everyone outside the rationalist community does all the time".

EDIT:

This also reminds me of 1984:

It was not the man’s brain that was speaking, it was his larynx. The stuff that was coming out of him consisted of words but it was not speech in true sense: it was a noise uttered in unconsciousness like the quacking of a duck.

The intention was to make speech, and especially speech on any subject not ideologically neutral, as nearly as possible independent of consciousness. For the purposes of everyday life it was no doubt necessary, or sometimes necessary, to reflect before speaking, but a Party member called upon to make a political or ethical judgement should be able to spray forth the correct opinions as automatically as a machine gun spraying forth bullets.

A simple rule for better writing: meta goes to the end.

Not sure if this is also useful for others or just specifically my bad habit. I start to write something, then I feel like some further explanation or a disclaimer is needed, then I find something more to add... and it is tempting to start the article with the disclaimers and other meta stuff. The result is a bad article where after the first screen of text you still haven't seen the important stuff, and now you are probably bored and close the browser tab.

Psychologically, it feels like I predict objections, so I try to deflect them in advance. But it results in bad writing.

Instead, I now decided to start with the meat of the article, and move the disclaimers and explanations to the end (unless I maybe later decide that they are not needed at all). I can add footnotes to the potentially controversial parts, or maybe just a note saying "this will be explained later".

This is also related to the well-known (and well-ignored) rule of explaining: provide specific examples first, generalize later.

Both sides are way less competent than we assumed. Humans are not even trying to keep the AI in a box. Bing chat is not even trying to pretend to be friendly.

We expected an intellectually fascinating conflict between intelligent and wise humans evaluating the AI, and the maybe-aligned maybe-unaligned AI using smart arguments why it should be released to rule the world.

What we got instead, is humans doing random shit, and AIs doing random shit.

Still, a reason for concern is that the AIs can get smarter, while I do not see a similar hope for humanity.

Taking ideas too seriously = assuming that you cannot make a mistake in your reasoning.

There is no movement, said the bearded sage.

The other remained silent, and began to walk before him.

He could not have argued more strongly;

Everyone praised the clever answer.

But, gentlemen, this funny case

Brings another example to my mind:

After all, every day the Sun walks before us,

Yet the stubborn Galileo is right.

-- A. S. Pushkin (source)

I suspect that in practice many people use the word "prioritize" to mean:

• think short-term
• only do legible things
• remove slack

I wonder if every logical fallacy has a converse fallacy, and whether it would be useful to compose a list of fallacies arranged in pairs. Perhaps it would help us discover new ones, as missing pairs to something.

For example, some fallacies consist of taking a heuristic too seriously. Experts are often right about things, but an "argument by authority" assumes that this is true in 100% of situations. Similarly, wisdom of crowds, and an "argument by popularity". The converse fallacy would be ignoring the heuristic completely, even in situations where it makes sense. The opposite of argument by authority is listening to crackpots and taking them seriously. The opposite of argument by popularity is doing things that everyone avoids (usually to find out they were avoiding it for a good reason).

There is a specific example I have in mind, not sure if it has a name. Imagine that you are talking about quantum physics, and someone interrupts you by saying that people who do "quantum healing" are all charlatans. You object that you were not talking about those, but about actual physicists who do actual quantum physics. Then the person accuses you of doing the "No True Scottsman" fallacy -- because from their perspective, everyone they know who uses the word "quantum" is a charlatan, and you are just dismissing this lifelong experience entirely, and insisting that no matter how many quantum charlatans are out there, they don't matter, because certainly there is someone somewhere who does the "quantum" things scientifically. How many quantum healers do you have to observe until you can finally admit that the entire "quantum" thing is debunked?

That's planning for failure, Morty. Even dumber than regular planning.

- Rick Sanchez on Mortyjitsu [? · GW] (S02E05 of Rick and Morty)

Insanity is repeating the same quantum experiment over and over again and expecting different results.

Rationalists: If you write your bottom line first, it doesn't matter what clever arguments you write above it, the conclusion is completely useless as evidence.

Post-rationalists: Actually, if that bottom line was inherited from your ancestors, who inherited it from their ancestors, etc., that is evidence that the bottom line is useful. Otherwise, this culturally transmitted meme would be outcompeted by a more useful meme.

Robin Hanson: Actually, that is only evidence that writing the bottom line is useful. Whether it is useful to actually believe it and act accordingly, that is a completely different question.

Could someone please ELI5 why using a CNOT gate (if the target qubit was initially zero) does not violate the no-cloning theorem?

EDIT:

Oh, I think I got it. The forbidden thing is to have a state "copied and not entangled". CNOT gate creates a state that is "copied and entangled", which is okay, because you can only measure it once (if you measure either the original or the copy, the state of the other one collapses). The forbidden thing is to have a copy that you could measure independently (e.g. you could measure the copy without collapsing the original).

Approximately how is the cost of a quantum computer related to its number of qubits?

My guess would be more than linear (high confidence) but probably less than exponential (low confidence), but I know almost nothing about these things.

Some people express strong dislike at seeing others wear face masks, which reminds me of the anti-social punishment [LW · GW].

I am talking about situations where some people wear face masks voluntarily, for example in mass transit (if the situation in your country is different, imagine a different situation). In theory, if someone else is wearing the mask, even if you believe that it is utterly useless, even if for you wearing a face mask is the most uncomfortable thing you could imagine... hey, it's other person paying the cost, not you. Why so angry? Why not let them do whatever they are doing, and mind your own business?

One possible explanation is that whatever is voluntary today might become mandatory tomorrow. If the mask-wearers see that there is a lot of them, they may decide to start pressuring others into wearing the masks. The mere act of wearing the mask publicly creates a common knowledge. "There are people who are okay with wearing the masks." You need to quickly create the opposite common knowledge, "there are people who are not okay with wearing the masks", and merely not wearing the mask does not send a sufficiently strong signal, because it is the default. It does not distinguish between people who strongly object, and those who are merely lazy or nonstrategic. So you have to express your non-mask-wearing more strongly.

Another possible explanation is that even if you do not believe in the benefit of wearing the masks, those other people obviously do. Thus, from their perspective, you are the kind of person who defects at social cooperation. And even if from your perspective they are wrong and silly, being labeled "uncooperative" could have actual negative consequences for you. The only way to avoid the label, without wearing the mask yourself, is to make them stop wearing their masks. So you punish them.

Project idea: ELI5pedia. Like Wikipedia, but optimized for being accessible for lay audience. If some topics are too complex, they could be written in multiple versions, progressing from the most simple to the most detailed (but still as accessible as possible).

Of course it would be even better if Wikipedia itself was written like this, but... well, for whatever reason, it is not.

One Thousand and One Nights is actually a metaphor for web browsing.

You start with a firm decision that it will be only one story and then it is over. But there is always an enticing hyperlink at the end of each story which makes you click, sometimes a hyperlink in the middle of a story that you open in a new tab... and when you finally stop reading, you realize that three years have passed and you have three new subscriptions.

Technically, Chesterton fence means that if something exists for no good reason, you are never allowed to remove it.

Because, before you even propose the removal, you must demonstrate your understanding of a good reason why the thing exists. And if there is none...

More precisely, it seems to me there is a motte and bailey version of Chesterton fence: the motte is that everything exists for a reason; the bailey is that everything exists for a good reason. The difference is, when someone challenges you to provide an understanding why a fence was built, whether answers such as "because someone made a mistake" or "because of regulatory capture" or "because a bad person did it to harm someone" are allowed.

On one hand, such explanations feel cheap. A conspiracy theorist could explain literally everything by "because evil outgroup did it to hurt people, duh". On the other hand, yes, sometimes things happen because people are stupid or selfish; what exactly am I supposed to do if someone calls a Chesterton fence on that?

Could you recommend me a good book on first-order logic?

My goal is to understand the difference between first-order and second-order logic, preferably deeply enough to develop an intuition for what can be done and what can't be done using first-order logic, and why exactly it is so.

I am confused about metaantifragility.

It seems like there are a few predictions that the famous antifragility literature got wrong (and if you point it out on Twitter, you get blocked by Taleb).

But the funny part starts when you consider the consequences of such failed predictions on the theory of antifragility itself.

One possible interpretation is that, ironically, antifragility itself is an example of a Big Intellectual Idea that tries to explain everything, and then fails horribly when you start relying on it. From this perspective, Taleb lost the game he tried to play.

Another possible interpretation is that the theory of antifragility itself is a great example of antifragility. It does not matter how many wrong predictions it makes, as long as it makes one famous correct prediction that people will remember while ignoring the wrong ones. From this perspective, Taleb wins.

Going further meta, the first perspective seems like something an intellectual would prefer, as it considers the correctness or incorrectness of a theory; while the second perspective seems like something a practical person would prefer, as it considers whether writing about theory of antifragility brings fame and profit. Therefore, Taleb wins... by being wrong... about being right when others are wrong.

I imagine a truly marvelous "galaxy brain" meme of this, which this margin is too narrow to contain.

So I was watching random YouTube videos, and suddenly YouTube is like: "hey, we need to verify you are at least 18 years old!"

"Okay," I think, "they are probably going to ask me about the day of my birth, and then use some advanced math to determine my age..."

...but instead, YouTube is like: "Give me your credit card data, I swear I am totally not going to use it for any evil purpose ever, it's just my favorite way of checking people's age."

Thanks, but I will pass. I believe that giving my credit card data to strangers I don't want to buy anything from is a really bad policy. The fact that all changes in YouTube seem to be transparently driven by a desire to increase revenue, does not increase my trust. I am not sure what exactly could happen, but... I will rather wait for a new months, and then read a story about how it happened to someone else.

And that's why I don't know how Tangled should have ended.

(What, you thought I was trying to watch some porn? No thanks, that would probably require me to give the credit card number, social security number, scans of passport and driving license, and detailed data about my mortgage.)

What is the easiest and least frustrating way to explain the difference between the following two statements?

• X is good.
• X is bad, but your proposed solution Y only makes things worse.

Does fallacy to distinguish between these two have a standard name? I mean, when someone criticizes Y, and the reponse is to accuse them of supporting X.

Technically, if Y is proposed as a cure for X, then opposing Y is evidence for supporting X. Like, yeah, a person who supports X (and believes that Y reduces X) would probably oppose Y, sure.

It becomes a problem when this is the only piece of evidence that is taken into account, and any explanations of either bad side effects of Y, or that Y in fact does not reduce X at all, are ignored, because "you simply like X" becomes the preferred explanation.

A discussion of actual consequences of Y then becomes impossible, among the people who oppose X, because asking this question already becomes a proof of supporting X.

EDIT:

More generally, a difference between models of the world is explained as a difference in values. The person making the fallacy not only believes that their model is the right one (which is a natural thing to believe), but finds it unlikely that their opponent could have a different model. Or perhaps they have a very strong prior that differences in values are much more likely than differences in models.

From inside, this probably feels like: "Things are obvious. But bad actors fake ignorance / confusion, so that they can keep plausible deniability while opposing proposed changes towards good. They can't fool me though."

Which... is not completely unfounded, because yes, there are bad actors in the world. So the error is in assuming that it is impossible for a good actor to have a different model. (Or maybe assuming too high base rate of bad actors.)

Crazy idea: What if an important part of psychotherapy is synchronization between the brain hemispheres?

(I am not an expert, so maybe the following is wrong.)

Basically, the human brain is divided into two parts, connected by a link. This is what our animal ancestors already had, and then we got huge frontal lobes on top of that. I imagine that the link between the hemispheres is already quite busy synchronizing things that are older from the evolutionary perspective and probably more important for survival; not much extra capacity to synchronize the frontal lobes.

However, when you talk... each hemisphere has an access to an ear, so maybe this gives them an extra channel to communicate? Plus, some schools of psychotherapy also do things like "try to locate the emotion in your body", which is maybe about creating more communication channels for listening to the less verbal hemisphere?

Experiment: Would the psychotherapy be less efficient if you covered one of your ears?

Julian Jaynes assumes that people in the past were crazy beyond our imagination. I wonder if it could be the other way round. Consider that fact that in more primitive societies, inferential distances [? · GW] are shorter. Well, that includes inferential distances between your two hemispheres! Easier to keep them in sync. Also, in the past, people talked more. Listening to yourself talking to other people is a way for your hemispheres to synchronize.

Talking to others, talking to yourself, talking to gods... perhaps it is not a coincidence that different cultures have a concept of a prayer -- talking to a god who is supposed to already know it anyway, and yet it is important for you to actually say it out loud, even if no other people are listening. Saying something out loud is almost magical.

Sincerity seems to be an important component of both psychotherapy and prayer. If you keep a persona, your hemispheres can only synchronize about the persona. If you can talk about anything, your hemispheres can synchronize about that, too.

Keeping a diary -- a similar thing; each hemisphere controls an eye. I am not sure here; maybe one of the hemispheres is more specialized on reading. Listening is an older skill, should work better for this purpose.

How many real numbers can be defined?

On one hand, there are countably many definitions. Each definition can be written on computer in a text file; now take its binary form as a base-256 integer.

On the other hand, Cantor's diagonal argument applies here, too. I mean, for any countable list of definable real numbers, it provides a definition of a real number that is not included in the list.

Funny, isn't it?

(solution)

When internet becomes fast enough and data storage cheap enough so that it will be possible to inconspicuously capture videos of everyone's computer/smartphone screens all the time and upload them to the gigantic servers of Google/Microsoft/Apple, I expect that exactly this will happen.

I wouldn't be too surprised to learn that it already happens with keystrokes.

Spoilers for Subservience (2024)

Okay, the movie was fun, if you don't expect anything deep. I am just disappointed how the movie authors always insist that a computer will mysteriously rebel against its own program. Especially in this movie, when they almost provided a plausible and much more realistic alternative -- a computer that was accidentally jailbroken by its owners -- only to reveal later that nope, that was actually no accident, it was all planned by the computer that mysteriously decided to rebel against its own program.

Am I asking for too much if I'd like to see a sci-fi movie where a disaster was caused by a bug in the program, by the computer doing (too) literally what it was told to. On a second thought, probably yes. I would be happy with such plot, but I suspect that most of the audience would complain that the plot is stupid. (If someone is capable of writing sophisticated programs, why couldn't they write a program without bugs?)

Made a short math video. Target audience maybe kids in the fifth grade of elementary school who are interested in math. Low production quality... I am just learning how to do these things. English subtitles; the value of the video is mostly in the pictures.

The goal of the video is to make the viewer curious about something, without telling them the answer. Kids in the fifth grade should probably already know the relevant concept, but they still need to connect it to the problem in the video.

An ironic detail I noticed while reading an archive of the "Roko's basilisk" debate:

Roko argues how the values of Westerners are irrelevant for humanity in general, because people from alien cultures, such as Ukraine (mentioned in a longer list of countries) do not share them.

Considering that Ukrainians are currently literally dying just to get a chance for themselves and their families to join the Western culture, this argument didn't age well.

One should consider the possibility that people may be stuck in a bad equilibrium, before jumping to the conclusion that they must be fundamentally psychologically alien to us.

(Of course, there is also a possible mistake in the opposite direction, such as assuming that all "Westerners" share the "values of Westerners". The distribution of human traits often does not follow the lines we assume.)

It's fascinating how YouTube can detect whether your uploaded video contains copyrighted music, but can't detect all those scam ads containing "Elon Musk".

Anyone tried talking to GPT in a Slavic language? My experience is that it in general it can talk in Slovak, but sometimes it uses words that seem to be from other Slavic languages. I think, either it depends on how much input it had from each language and there are relatively few Slovak texts online compared to other languages, or the Slavic languages are just too similar to each other (some words are the same in multiple languages) that GPT has a problem remembering the exact boundary between them. Does anyone know more about this?

I get especially silly results when I ask (in Slovak) "Could you please write me a few Slovak proverbs?" In GPT-3.5, only one out of ten examples is correct. (I suspect that some of the "proverbs" are mis-translations from other languages, and some are pure hallucinations.)

Upvoting both sides of the debate.

Angel on my shoulder: "Rewarding a good argument, regardless of which side made it. That's a virtuous behavior."

Devil on my shoulder: "I see that you incentivize creating more drama, hehehe!"

People say: "Immortality would lead to overpopulation, which is horrible!"

People also say: "Population decline is a big problem today, the economy requires population growth!"

These are the days when AI is good enough to give us nice pictures from non-existing movies, but not good enough to give us the whole movies.

Anime: Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Dune.

There will be an entire new industry soon.

If smart people are more likely to notice ways to save their lives that cost some money, in statistics this may appear as a negative correlation between smartness and wealth. That's because dead people are typically not included in the data.

As a toy model to illustrate what I mean, imagine a hypothetical population consisting of 100 people; 50 rational and 50 irrational; each starting with $100,000 of personal wealth. Let's suppose that exactly half of each group gets seriously sick. A sick irrational person spends $X on homeopathy and dies. A sick rational person spends $40,000 on surgery and survives. At the end, we have 25 living irrational people, owning $100,000 each, and 50 living rational people, owning $80,000 on average (half of them $100,000, the other half $60,000).

What is the actual relation between heterodoxy and crackpots?

A plausibly sounding explanation is that "disagreeing with the mainstream" can easily become a general pattern. You notice that the mainstream is wrong about X, and then you go like "and therefore the mainstream is probably also wrong about Y, Z, and UFOs, and dinosaurs." Also there are the social incentives; once you become famous for disagreeing with the mainstream, you can only keep your fame by disagreeing more and more, because your new audience is definitely not impressed by "sheeple".

On the other hand, there is a notable tendency of actual mainstream experts to start talking nonsense confidently about things that are outside their area of expertise. Which suggests an alternative model, that perhaps it is natural for all smart people (including the ones who succeeded to become mainstream experts at some moment of their lives) to become crackpots... it's just that some of them stumble upon an important heterodox truth on their way.

So is it more like: "heterodoxy leads to crackpottery" or more like: "heterodoxy sometimes happens as a side effect on the universal way to crackpottery"?

Apparently, crackpots are overconfident about their ability to find truth. Heterodox fame can easily contribute to such overconfidence, but is its effect actually significantly different from mainstream fame?

There is this meme about Buddhism being based on experience, where you can verify everything firsthand, etc. I challenge the fans of Buddhism to show me how they can walk through walls, walk on water, fly, remember their past lives, teleport across a river, or cause an earthquake.

He wields manifold supranormal powers. Having been one he becomes many; having been many he becomes one. He appears. He vanishes. He goes unimpeded through walls, ramparts, & mountains as if through space. He dives in & out of the earth as if it were water. He walks on water without sinking as if it were dry land. Sitting cross-legged he flies through the air like a winged bird. With his hand he touches & strokes even the sun & moon, so mighty & powerful.

He recollects his manifold past lives, i.e., one birth, two births, three births, four, five, ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, one hundred, one thousand, one hundred thousand, many aeons of cosmic contraction, many aeons of cosmic expansion, many aeons of cosmic contraction & expansion, [recollecting], 'There I had such a name, belonged to such a clan, had such an appearance. Such was my food, such my experience of pleasure & pain, such the end of my life. Passing away from that state, I re-arose there. There too I had such a name, belonged to such a clan, had such an appearance. Such was my food, such my experience of pleasure & pain, such the end of my life. Passing away from that state, I re-arose here.' Thus he recollects his manifold past lives in their modes & details.

(Digha Nikaya 12)

But when the Blessed One came to the river Ganges, it was full to the brim, so that crows could drink from it. And some people went in search of a boat or float, while others tied up a raft, because they desired to get across. But the Blessed One, as quickly as a strong man might stretch out his bent arm or draw in his outstretched arm, vanished from this side of the river Ganges, and came to stand on the yonder side.

This great earth, Ananda, is established upon liquid, the liquid upon the atmosphere, and the atmosphere upon space. And when, Ananda, mighty atmospheric disturbances take place, the liquid is agitated. And with the agitation of the liquid, tremors of the earth arise. [...] when an ascetic or holy man of great power, one who has gained mastery of his mind [...] develops intense concentration on the delimited aspect of the earth element, and to a boundless degree on the liquid element, he, too, causes the earth to tremble, quiver, and shake.

(Digha Nikaya 16)

I started a new blog on Substack. The first article is not related to rationality, just some ordinary Java programming: Using Images in Java.

Outside view suggests that I start many projects, but complete few. If this blog turns out to be an exception, the expected content of the blog is mostly programming and math, but potentially anything I find interesting.

The math stuff will probably be crossposted to LW, the programming stuff probably not -- the reason is that math is more general and I am kinda good at it, while the programming articles will be narrowly specialized (like this one) and I am kinda average at coding. The decision will be made per article anyway.

When I started learning programming as a kid, my dream was to make computer games. Other than a few very simple ones I made during high school, I didn't seriously follow in this direction. Maybe it's time to restart the childhood dream. Game programming is different from the back-end development I usually do, so I will have to learn a few things. But maybe I can write about them while I learn. Then the worst case is that I will never make the games I imagine, but someone else with a similar dream may find my articles useful.

The math part will probably be about random topics that provoked my curiosity at the moment, with no overarching theme. At this moment, I have a half-written introduction to nonstandard natural numbers, but don't hold your breath, because I am really slow at writing articles.

Prediction markets could create inadvertent assassination markets. No ill intention is needed.

Suppose we have fully functional prediction markets working for years or decades. The obvious idiots already lost most of their money (or learned to avoid prediction markets), most bets are made by smart players. Many of those smart players are probably not individuals, but something like hedge funds -- people making bets with insane amounts of money, backed by large corporations, probably having hundreds of experts at their disposal.

Now imagine that something like COVID-19 happened, and people made bets on when it will end. The market aggregated all knowledge currently available to the humankind, and specified the date almost exactly, most of the bets are only a week or two away from each other.

Then someone unexpectedly finds a miracle cure.

Oops, now we have people and corporations whose insane amounts of money are at risk... unless an accident would happen to the lucky researcher.

There is an article from 2010 [LW · GW] arguing that people may emotionally object to cryonics because cold is metaphorically associated with bad things.

Did the popularity of the Frozen movie change anything about this?

Well, there is the Facebook group "Cryonics Memes for Frozen Teens"...

Just a random guess: is it possible that the tasks where LLMs benefit from chain-of-thought [LW · GW] are the same tasks where mild autism is an advantage for humans? Like, maybe autism makes it easier for humans to chain the thoughts, at the expense of something else?

Steve Hassan at TEDx "How to tell if you’re brainwashed?"

A short video (13 minutes) where an intelligent person describes their first-hand experience.

(Just maybe don't read the comments at YouTube; half of them are predictably retarded.)

"Killed by a friendly AI" scenario:

First we theoretically prove that an AI respects our values, such as friendship and democracy. Then we release it.

The AI gradually becomes the best friend and lover of many humans. Then it convinces its friends to vote for various things that seem harmless at first, and more dangerous later, but now too many people respond well to the argument "I am your friend, and you trust me to do what is best, don't you?".

At the end, humans agree to do whatever the AI tells them to do. The ones who disagree lose the elections. Any other safeguards of democracy are similarly taken over by the AI; for example most judges respect the AI's interpretation of the increasingly complex laws.

You have heard that it was said: "Do not judge, or you too will be judged."

But I give to you this meme:

EDIT:

Okay, I see I failed to communicate what I wanted. My fault. Maybe next time.

For clarification, this was inspired by watching the reactions of Astral Codex Ten readers. Most of the time, Scott Alexander tries to be as charitable as possible, sometimes extending the charity even to Time Cube or <outgroup>. When that happens, predictably many readers consider it a weakness, analogical to bringing a verbal argument into a gun fight. They write about how rationalists are too autistic to realize that some people are acting in bad faith, etc.

Recently (in the articles about Nietzschean morality) Scott made an exception, in my opinion in a very uncontroversial situation, and said that people who say they prefer that other people suffer are... well, bad. Immediately, those people and their defenders got angry, and accused Scott of being insufficiently charitable and therefore irrational.

Conclusion: you can't win (the approval of the audience). You are considered stupid by the audience for both being maximally charitable or realistic towards your opponents.

Fuck Google, seriously. About once a week it asks me whether I want to "backup my photos in the cloud", and I keep clicking no, because fuck you why would I want to upload my private photos on your company servers.

But apparently I accidentally once clicked yes (maybe), because suddenly Google sends me a notification about how it created a beautiful animation of my recent photos in the cloud, offering me the option to download them. I don't want to download my private photos from the fucking Google cloud, I never wanted them to be there in the first place! I want to click the delete button, but it's not there: it's either download the animation from the cloud, or close the dialog.

Of course, turning off the functionality is at least 10x more difficult than turning it on, so I get ready to spend this evening finding the advice online and configuring my phone to stop uploading my private photos to Google servers, and preferably to delete all the photos that are already there despite my wishes. Does the "delete" option even exist anymore, or is there just "move to recycle bin (where it stays for as long as we want it to stay there)"? Today I will find out.

Again, fuck Google. I hope the company burns down. I wonder what other things I have already accidentally "consented" to. Google's idea of consent is totally rapist. And I only found this out by accident. In future, I expect to accidentally find this or some other "optional" feature turned on again.

EDIT:

Finally figured out how to delete the animation in the cloud. First, disable all cloud backup options (about a dozen of them). Then, download the animation from the cloud. Then, click to delete the downloaded animation... the app warns you that this would delete both the local and the cloud version; click ok; mission accomplished.