adamzerner's Shortform

I wish there were more discussion posts on LessWrong.

Right now it feels like it weakly if not moderately violates some sort of cultural norm to publish a discussion post (similar but to a lesser extent on the Shortform). Something low effort of the form "X is a topic I'd like to discuss. A, B and C are a few initial thoughts I have about it. What do you guys think?"

It seems to me like something we should encourage though. Here's how I'm thinking about it. Such "discussion posts" currently happen informally in social circles. Maybe you'll text a friend. Maybe you'll bring it up at a meetup. Maybe you'll post about it in a private Slack group.

But if it's appropriate in those contexts, why shouldn't it be appropriate on LessWrong? Why not benefit from having it be visible to more people? The more eyes you get on it, the better the chance someone has something helpful, insightful, or just generally useful to contribute.

The big downside I see is that it would screw up the post feed. Like when you go to lesswrong.com and see the list of posts, you don't want that list to have a bunch of low quality discussion posts you're not interested in. You don't want to spend time and energy sifting through the noise to find the signal.

But this is easily solved with filters. Authors could mark/categorize/tag their posts as being a low-effort discussion post, and people who don't want to see such posts in their feed can apply a filter to filter these discussion posts out.

Context: I was listening to the Bayesian Conspiracy podcast's episode on LessOnline. Hearing them talk about the sorts of discussions they envision happening there made me think about why that sort of thing doesn't happen more on LessWrong. Like, whatever you'd say to the group of people you're hanging out with at LessOnline, why not publish a quick discussion post about it on LessWrong?

I just learned some important things about indoor air quality after watching Why Air Quality Matters, a presentation by David Heinemeier Hanson, the creator of Ruby on Rails. It seems like something that is both important and under the radar, so I'll brain dump + summarize my takeaways here, but I encourage you to watch the whole thing.

• He said he spent three weeks researching and experimenting with it full time. I place a pretty good amount of trust in his credibility here, based on a) my prior experiences with his work and b) him seeming like he did pretty thorough research.
• It's easy for CO2 levels to build up. We breathe it out and if you're not getting circulation from fresh air, it'll accumulate.
• This has pretty big impacts on your cognitive function. It seems similar to not getting enough sleep. Not getting enough sleep also has a pretty big impact on your cognitive function. And perhaps more importantly, it's something that we are prone to underestimating. It feels like we're only a little bit off, when in reality we're a lot off.
• There are things called volatile organic compounds, aka VOCs. Those are really bad for your health. They come from a variety of sources. Cleaning products and sprays are one. Another is that new car smell, which you don't only get from new cars, you also get it from stuff like new couches.
• In general, when there's new construction, VOCs will be emitted. That's what lead to DHH learning about this. He bought a new house. His wife got sick. It turned out the glue from the wood panels was emitting VOCs and making her sick.
• People in the world of commercial construction know all about this. When a hotel is constructed, they'll wait eg. a whole month, passing up revenue, to let the VOC's fizzle out. But in the world of residential construction, for whatever reason it isn't something people know about.
• If you want to measure stuff like CO2 and VOCs, professional products are expensive, consumer products are usually inaccurate, but Awair is consumer product for $150 that is good.
• If you want to improve indoor air quality, air purifiers are where it's at. They do a good job of it. You could use filters on eg. your air conditioner and stuff, but in practice that doesn't really work. High quality filters make your AC much less effective. Low quality filters are, well, low quality.
• Alen is the brand of air purifier that DHH recommended after testing four brands. I spend about 10-15 minutes researching it. Alen seems to have a great reputation. The Wirecutter doesn't recommend Alen seemingly because you could get similar quality for about half the price.
• I decided to purchase the Alen BreatheSmart 75i today for $769. a) I find it very plausible that you could get similar quality for less money, but since this is about health and it is a long term purchase, I am happy to pay a premium. b) They claim they offer the industry's only lifetime warranty. For a long term purchase, I think that's important, if only due to what it signals.
• I considered purchasing more than one. From their website it seemed like that's what they recommend. But after talking things through with the saleswoman, it didn't seem necessary. The product weighs about 20 pounds and is portable, so we could bring it to the bedroom to purify the bedroom before we go to sleep.
• I currently live in a ~1000sqft apartment and was initially planning on purchasing the 45i instead of the 75i. The 45i is made for 800sqft and 75i 1300sqft. The saleswoman said it's moreso a matter of time than ability. The 45i will eventually purify larger spaces, it'll just take longer. That'd probably be fine for my purposes, but since this is a long term purchase and I don't know what the future holds, I'd rather play it safe.
• The Alen BreatheSmart does have an air quality sensor, but I decided to purchase an Awair as well. a) The Alen doesn't detect CO2 levels. At first I was thinking that I don't really need a CO2 sensor, I could just open the window a few times a day. But ultimately I think that there is value in having the sensor in my office. It sends you a push notification if CO2 levels pass whatever threshold, and I think that'd be a solid step up from me relying on my judgement and presence of mind to open windows. b) My girlfriend has been getting a sore throat at night. I think it's because we've been using the heat more and the heat dries out the air. We used an air purifier last night, but I think it'd be useful to use the Awair to make sure we get the humidity level right. (We do have a Nest thermostat which detects humidity, but it's not in our bedroom.)
• In general, I'm a believer that health and productivity are so important that on the order of hundreds of dollars it isn't worth trying to cut costs.
• Air quality is something you have to pay attention to outside of your house as well. The presentation mentioned a study of coffee shops having poor air quality.
• Older houses have a lot more draft so air quality wasn't as big a problem. But newer homes have less draft. This is good for cutting your electric bill, but bad for air quality.

Added:

• Cooking gives off a significant amount of bad particles, especially if you have a gas stove.
• You are supposed to turn your vent on about five minutes before you start cooking. Most people don't turn it on at all unless it smells.
• Apartment kitchens often have vents that recycle air instead of bringing in fresh air, which isn't what you want.
• If you're using a humidifier, use distilled/filtered water. If you use water from the sink it will add bad particles to the air.
• I've found that random appliances like the dish washer and laundry machines increase VO2 and/or PM2.5 levels.

Update:

• I decided to return my Alen air purifier. a) It doesn't really do anything to reduce CO2 or VO2. b) It does a solid job of reducing PM2.5, but I have found that if I'm having issues with it I resort to opening my window anyway. That may change when it gets hot outside. But I'm planning on buying a house soon, and when I do I'm hoping to install stuff into the HVAC system instead of having a freestanding purifier. And if I do need a freestanding air purifier, it seems to me now that a ~$300 one would make more sense than the ~$800 Alen.
• The Awair I could see not being worth it for some people, but I'm still happy with it. You'd think that you could purchase it, figure out what things trigger your air quality to get screwed up, return the Awair, and moving forward just be careful about opening a window around those triggers. But I've found that random things screw with the air quality that I'm not able to predict. Plus it provides me with a peace of mind that makes me happy.

Project idea: virtual water coolers for LessWrong

Previous: Virtual water coolers [LW(p) · GW(p)]

Here's an idea: what if there was a virtual water cooler for LessWrong?

• There'd be Zoom chats with three people per chat. Each chat is a virtual water cooler.
• The user journey would begin by the user expressing that they'd like to join a virtual water cooler.
• Once they do, they'd be invited to join one.
• I think it'd make sense to restrict access to users based on karma. Maybe only 100+ karma users are allowed.
• To start, that could be it. In the future you could do some investigation into things like how many people there should be per chat.

Seems like an experiment that is both cheap and worthwhile.

If there is interest I'd be happy to create a MVP.

(Related: it could be interesting to abstract this and build a sort of "virtual water cooler platform builder" such that eg. LessWrong could use the builder to build a virtual water cooler platform for LessWrong and OtherCommunity could use the builder to build a virtual water cooler platform for their community.)

In How to Get Startup Ideas, Paul Graham provides the following advice:

Live in the future, then build what's missing.

Something that feels to me like it's present in the future and missing in today's world: OkCupid for friendship.

Think about it. The internet is a thing. Billions and billions of people have cheap and instant access to it. So then, logistics are rarely an obstacle for chatting with people.

The actual obstacle in today's world is matchmaking. How do you find the people to chat with? And similarly, how do you communicate that there is a strong match so that each party is thinking "oh wow this person seems cool, I'd love to chat with them" instead of "this is a random person and I am not optimistic that I'd have a good time talking to them".

This doesn't really feel like such a huge problem though. I mean, assume for a second that you were able to force everyone in the world to spend an hour filling out some sort of OkCupid-like profile, but for friendship and conversation rather than romantic relationships. From there, it seems doable enough to figure out whatever matchmaking algorithm.

I think the issue is moreso getting people to fill out the survey in the first place. There's a chicken-egg problem. Why spend the time filling out the survey when there's few other people on the platform. At such an early stage, you don't actually expect to be matched with someone for whom you're compatible with.

It's definitely a tricky problem. But at the same time, if you "live in the future", do you see this service? I do.

I mean, maybe society is just not functional enough to get it going. That's plausible. But to me, it feels like something where there's just too much demand for it to never emerge. Friendship and conversation are things that are so fundamental, and I think such a platform would do a notably better job at providing each of those things the haphazard, "organic" approach that happens by necessity in today's world. I could even see access to this sort of platform considered a basic human right, given how important meaningful social interaction is.

Every day I check Hacker News. Sometimes a few times, sometimes a few dozen times.

I've always felt guilty about it, like it is a waste of time and I should be doing more productive things. But recently I've been feeling a little better about it. There are things about coding, design, product, management, QA, devops, etc. etc. that feel like they're "in the water" to me, where everyone mostly knows about them. However, I've been running into situations where people turn out to not know about them.

I'm realizing that they're not actually "in the water", and that the reason I know about them is probably because I've been reading random blog posts from the front page of Hacker News every day for 10 years. I probably shouldn't have spent as much time doing this as I have, but I feel good about the fact that I've gotten at least something out of it.

Against "yes and" culture

I sense that in "normie cultures"^[1] directly, explicitly, and unapologetically disagreeing with someone is taboo. It reminds me of the "yes and" from improv comedy.^[2] From Wikipedia:

"Yes, and...", also referred to as "Yes, and..." thinking, is a rule-of-thumb in improvisational comedy that suggests that an improviser should accept what another improviser has stated ("yes") and then expand on that line of thinking ("and").

If you want to disagree with someone, you're supposed to take a "yes and" approach where you say something somewhat agreeable about the other person's statement, and then gently take it in a different direction.

I don't like this norm. From a God's Eye perspective, if we could change it, I think we probably should. Doing so is probably impractical in large groups, but might be worth considering in smaller ones.

(I think this really needs some accompanying examples. However, I'm struggling to come up with ones. At least ones I'm comfortable sharing publicly.)

1. ^{^}

   The US, at least. It's where I live. But I suspect it's like this in most western cultures as well.

2. ^{^}

   See also this Curb Your Enthusiasm clip.

Something frustrating happened to me a week or two ago.

• I was at the vet for my dog.
• The vet assistant (I'm not sure if that's the proper term) asks if I want to put my dog on these two pills, one to protect against heartworm and another to protect against fleas.
• I asked what heartworm is, what fleas are, and what the pros and cons are. (It became clear later in the conversation that she was expecting a yes or no answer from me and perhaps had never been asked before about pros and cons, because she seemed surprised when I asked for them.)
• Iirc, she said something about there not really being any cons (I'm suspicious). For heartworm the dogs can die of it so the pros are strong. For fleas, it's just an annoyance to deal with, not really dangerous.
• I asked how likely it is for my dog to be exposed to fleas given that we're in a city and not eg. a forest.
• The assistant responded with something along the lines of "Ok, so we'll just do the heartworm pill then."
• I clarified something along the lines of "No, that wasn't a rhetorical question. I was actually interested in hearing about the likelihood. I have no clue what it is; I didn't mean to imply that it is low."

I wish that we had a culture of words being used more literally.

I've noticed that there's a pretty big difference in the discussion that follows from me showing someone a draft of a post and asking for comments and the discussion in the comments section after I publish a post. The former is richer and more enjoyable whereas the latter doesn't usually result in much back and forth. And I get the sense that this is true for other authors as well.

I guess one important thing might be that with drafts, you're talking to people who you know. But I actually don't suspect that this plays much of a role, at least on LessWrong. As an anecdote, I've had some incredible conversations with the guy who reviews drafts of posts on LessWrong for free and I had never talked to him previously.

I wonder what it is about drafts. I wonder if it can or should be incorporated into regular posts.

Against difficult reading

I kinda have the instinct that if I'm reading a book or a blog post or something and it's difficult, then I should buckle down, focus, and try to understand it. And that if I don't, it's a failure on my part. It's my responsibility to process and take in the material.

This is especially true for a lot of more important topics. Like, it's easy to clearly communicate what time a restaurant is open -- if you find yourself struggling to understand this, it's probably the fault of the restaurant, not you as the reader -- but for quantum physics or metaethics, those are complicated enough topics such that you can't communicate them clearly, and so if you are reading something on one of those topics and struggling to understand it, it would be unfair to think "this author isn't doing a good enough job". It's easier to think "this is a complicated topic; the writing is reasonable; I need to do a better job of comprehending it".

But recently I've been questioning how true this is. There are three things I've read recently that I've found to be very easy reading, but also covering difficult and important topics.

1. Refactoring UI
2. The Mom Test
3. 1000-Word Philosophy

It's not common for me to find such great writing, but at the same time, it does happen from time to time. I'm just thinking out loud, but maybe I should up my standards and decline to read stuff that is more difficult to read.

Of course, there are a lot of things to consider here. How important is the material? How urgent? Is it fun to buckle down and try to parse difficult material?

I think I just busted a cached thought [LW · GW]. Yay.

I'm 30 years old now and have had achilles tendinitis since I was about 21. Before that I would get my cardio by running 1-3 miles a few times a week, but because of the tendinitis I can't do that anymore.

Knowing that cardio is important, I spent a bunch of time trying different forms of cardio. Nothing has worked though.

• Biking hurts my knees (I have bad knees).
• Swimming gives me headaches.
• Doing the stairs was ok, but kinda hurt my knees.
• Jumping rope is what gave me the tendinitis in the first place.
• Rowing hurts my knees for some reason.
• There are various forms of high intensity stuff like interval training and kettlebells that kinda-sorta work, but that doesn't hit the sort of Zone 2 cardio I'm looking for. Plus it's hard to stay motivated with the high intensity stuff.
• Battle ropes were a creative thing I tried, but I don't really see how to do that in a low-intensity, aerobic, Zone 2 cardio sort of way.

So, I basically gave up and decided that cardio is just "not for me". This belief became cached, and such that whenever the topic of cardio came up and my brain went "huh, maybe I should do cardio", it fetched from the cached and got back a response of "no, you already tried everything and determined that cardio isn't for you".

But then, in my mindless YouTube browsing, I came across this video about Zone 2 training by Peter Attia. Then I started to think about it more. I had a thought that triggered me to bypass the cache.

Peter was talking about how for Zone 2 training, the intensity is such that you can carry out a conversation with someone (the interviewee said he does conference calls when doing this training), but you won't be able to hide the fact that you're exercising. That struck me as very low intensity. So I was like, "Huh, I wonder what that feels like. Maybe at such a low intensity my knees and achilles would be ok."

Then I went downstairs and tried to hit that level of intensity (I targeted a heart rate of ~125), first on the bike, then on the treadmill. I figured out what it felt like, but both hurt my knees and achilles too much. But then the next day I went to the gym and tried to hit that intensity on the stair climber. Fortunately, it was pretty much fine! The pace is extremely slow and comfortable. It even feels good. Almost like a massage for my cardiovascular system if that makes sense. I did 15 minutes and stopped.

Then two days later, today, I just did 60 minutes. My knees and achilles both feel slightly iffy, so my plan is to continue doing 60 minutes 3-4x/week and monitor how I'm feeling. I'm hopeful that at such a low intensity, it'll be ok. I'm also pretty willing to accept a little pain and wear and tear in exchange for the cardio benefits.

6th vs 16th grade logic

I want to write something about 6th grade logic vs 16th grade logic.

I was talking to someone, call them Alice, who works at a big well known company, call it Widget Corp. Widget Corp needs to advertise to hire people. They only advertise on Indeed and Google though.

Alice was telling me that she wants to explore some other channels (LinkedIn, ZipRecruiter, etc.). But in order to do that, Widget Corp needs evidence that advertising on those channels would be cheap enough. They're on a budget and really want to avoid spending money they don't have to, you see.

But that's really, really, Not How This Works. You can't know whether other channels will be cheap enough if you don't give it a shot. And you don't have to spend a lot to "give it a shot". You can spend, idk, $1,000 on a handful of different channels, see what results you get, and go from there. The potential that it proves to be a cheaper acquisition channel justifies the cost.

This is what I'll call 6th grade logic. Meanwhile, Widget Corp has a tough interview process, testing you on what I'll call 16th grade logic. And then on the job they have people apply that 16th grade logic on various analyses.

But that is premature, I say. First make sure that you're applying the 6th grade logic correctly. Then, and only then, move on to 16th grade logic.

I wonder if this has any implications with xrisk stuff. There probably aren't low hanging fruit at the level of 6th grade logic but I wonder [LW(p) · GW(p)] whether there are at the level of, say, 12th grade logic and we're spending too much time banging our heads on really difficult 22nd grade stuff.

I am a web developer. I remember reading some time in these past few weeks that it's good to design a site such that if the user zooms in/out (eg. by pressing cmd+/-), things still look reasonably good. It's like a form of responsive design, except instead of responding to the width of the viewport your design responds to the zoom level.

Anyway, since reading this, I started zooming in a lot more. For example, I just spent some time reading a post here on LessWrong at a 170% zoom level. And it was a lot more comfortable. I've found this to be a helpful little life hack.

Thought: It's better to link to tag pages [? · GW] rather than blog posts. Like Reversed Stupidity Is Not Intelligence [? · GW] instead of Reversed Stupidity Is Not Intelligence [LW · GW].

There is something inspiring about watching this little guy defeat all of the enormous sumo wrestlers. I can't quite put my finger on it though.

Maybe it's the idea of working smart vs working hard. Maybe something related to fencepost security, like how there's something admirable about, instead of trying to climb the super tall fence, just walking around it.

Noticing confusion [? · GW] about the nucleus

In school, you learn about forces. You learn about gravity, and you learn about the electromagnetic force. For the electromagnetic force, you learn about how likes repel and opposites attract. So two positively charged particles close together will repel, whereas a positively and a negatively charged particle will attract.

Then you learn about the atom. It consists of a bunch of protons and a bunch of neutrons bunched up in the middle, and then a bunch of electrons orbiting around the outside. You learn that protons are positively charged, electrons negatively charged, and neutrons have no charge. But if protons are positively charged, how can they all be bunched together like that? Don't like charges repel?

This is a place where people should notice confusion, but they don't. All of the pieces are there.

I didn't notice confusion about this until I learned about the explanation: something called the strong nuclear force. Yes, since likes repel, the electromagnetic force is pushing the protons away from each other. But on the other hand, the strong nuclear force attracts them together, and apparently it's strong enough to overcome the electromagnetic force in this instance.

In retrospect, this makes total sense. Of course the electromagnetic force is repelling those protons, so there's gotta be some other force that is stronger. The only other force we learned about was gravity, but the masses in question are way too small to explain the nucleus being held together. So there's got to be some other force that they haven't taught us about yet that is in play. A force that is very strong and that applies at the nuclear level. Hey, maybe it's even called the strong nuclear force!

"It's not obvious" is a useful critique

I recall hearing "it's not obvious that X" a lot in the rationality community, particularly in Robin Hanson's writing.

Sometimes people make a claim without really explaining it. Actually, this happens a lot of times. Often times the claim is made implicitly. This is fine if that claim is obvious.

But if the claim isn't obvious, then that link in the chain is broken and the whole argument falls apart. Not that it's been proven wrong or anything, just that it needs work. You need to spend the time establishing that claim. That link in the chain. So then, it is useful in these situations to point out when a link in the chain isn't obvious when it was being presumed obvious. I am a fan of "it's not obvious that X".

Why not more specialization and trade?

I can probably make something like $100/hr doing freelance work as a programmer. Yet I'll spend an hour cooking dinner for myself.

Does this make any sense? Imagine if I spent that hour programming instead. I'd have $100. I can spend, say, $20 on dinner, end up with something that is probably much better than what I would cook, and have $80 left over. Isn't that a better use of my time than cooking?

Similarly, sometimes I'll spend an hour cleaning my apartment. I could instead spend that hour making $100, and paying someone maybe $30 to clean my apartment. I'll end up with a cleaner apartment, and an extra $70 in my pocket. So why spend the hour programming instead?

I can think of a few reasons. One is if the act of programming is very unpleasant to me. I already have a full time job as a programmer, and have a side project I'm working on. Maybe, at the margin, spending that extra hour programming is just very unpleasant because I am sick of it. In the dinner example, it'd have to be more unpleasant than having $80 plus a better dinner is pleasant. For me, this very much is not the case.

Another possible reason is that there aren't options available to me to spend a single extra hour programming for $100. For freelance projects, usually they want at least 20 hours/week for multiple months. And there is a pretty large upfront cost to seeking out and finding a project. I wish it weren't like this. I wish it were similar to the flexibility that Uber drivers and other gig economy workers have, where they can easily just spend one extra hour working whenever they want.

Currently I lecture at a coding bootcamp for three hours a week and for $80/hr. This is sort of similar to the flexibility I envision, where it's easy to go from zero hours to three hours a week whenever I want. But I don't have the option of going past three hours, so it isn't that flexible. I could perhaps find similar positions. Maybe I should.

I also wonder whether it would make sense to do longer term things periodically. Like maybe for three months a year, do a freelance project working 20 hours/week. Make 20 * 4 * 3 * 100 = $24,000 and then use that $24k throughout the year for things like dinner and cleaning.

I suspect that it's even more difficult for people in other fields. Like if you are a doctor, you can't really come into the office on a whim and spend an hour seeing patients.

At best this seems very unfortunate. At worst, very inefficient. I'm not sure how it would be done, but I feel like our society would benefit from more flexible work, and more specialization and trade.

The other day Improve your Vocabulary: Stop saying VERY! popped up in my YouTube video feed. I was annoyed.

This idea that you shouldn't use the word "very" has always seemed pretentious to me. What value does it add if you say "extremely" or "incredibly" instead? I guess those words have more emphasis and a different connotation, and can be better fits. I think they're probably a good idea sometimes. But other times people just want to use different words in order to sound smart.

I remember there was a time in elementary school when I was working on a paper with a friend. My job was to write it, and his job was to "fix it up and making it sound good". I remember him going in and changing words like "very", that I had used appropriately, to overly dramatic words like "stupendously". And I remember feeling annoyed at the end result of the paper because it sounded pretentious.

Here I want to argue for something similar to "stop saying very" though. I want to argue for "stop saying think".

Consider the following: "I think the restaurant is still open past 8pm". What does that mean? Are you 20% sure? 60%? 90%? Wouldn't it be useful this ambiguity disappeared?

I'm not saying that "I think" is always ambiguous and bad. Sometimes it's relatively clear from the context that you mean 20% sure, not 90%. Eg. "I thhhhhinkkk it's open past 8pm?" But you're not always so lucky. I find myself in situations where I'm not so lucky often enough. And so it seems like a good idea in general to move away from "I think" and closer to something more precise.

I want to follow up with some good guidelines for what words/phrases you can say in various situations to express different degrees of confidence, as well as some other relevant things, but I am struggling to come up with such guidelines. Because of this, I'm writing this as a shortform rather than a regular post. I'd love to see someone else run with this idea and/or propose such guidelines.

Virtual watercoolers

As I mentioned in some recent Shortform posts, I recently listened to the Bayesian Conspiracy podcast's episode on the LessOnline festival and it got me thinking.

One thing I think is cool is that Ben Pace was saying how the valuable thing about these festivals isn't the presentations, it's the time spent mingling in between the presentations, and so they decided with LessOnline to just ditch the presentations and make it all about mingling. Which got me thinking about mingling.

It seems plausible to me that such mingling can and should happen more online. And I wonder whether an important thing about mingling in the physical world is that, how do I say this, you're just in the same physical space, next to each other, with nothing else you're supposed to be doing, and in fact what you're supposed to be doing is talking to one another.

Well, I guess you're not supposed to be talking to one another. It's also cool if you just want to hang out and sip on a drink or something. It's similar to the office water cooler: it's cool if you're just hanging out drinking some water, but it's also normal to chit chat with your coworkers.

I wonder whether it'd be good to design a virtual watercooler. A digital place that mimicks aspects of the situations I've been describing (festivals, office watercoolers).

1. By being available in the virtual watercooler it's implied that you're pretty available to chit chat with, but it's also cool if you're just hanging out doing something low key like sipping a drink.
2. You shouldn't be doing something more substantial though.
3. The virtual watercooler should be organized around a certain theme. It should attract a certain group of people and filter out people who don't fit in. Just like festivals and office water coolers.

In particular, this feels to me like something that might be worth exploring for LessWrong.

Note: I know that there are various Slack and Discord groups but they don't meet conditions (1) or (2).

Sometimes I think to myself something along these lines:

I could read this post/comment in detail and respond to it, but I expect that others won't put much effort into the discussion and it will fizzle out, and so it isn't worth it for me to put the effort in in the first place.

This presents a sort of coordination problem, and one that would be reasonably easy to solve with some sort of assurance contract-like [? · GW] functionality.

There's a lot to say about whether or not such a thing is worth pursuing, but in short, it seems like trying it out as an experiment would be pretty high-upside and low-cost to try, in such a way that I'm decently confident would be worthwhile.

Using examples of people being stupid

I've noticed that a lot of cool concepts stem from examples of people being stupid. For example, I recently re-read Detached Lever Fallacy [LW · GW] and Beautiful Probability [LW · GW].

Detached Lever Fallacy:

Eventually, the good guys capture an evil alien ship, and go exploring inside it. The captain of the good guys finds the alien bridge, and on the bridge is a lever. "Ah," says the captain, "this must be the lever that makes the ship dematerialize!" So he pries up the control lever and carries it back to his ship, after which his ship can also dematerialize.

Beautiful Probability:

It seems to me that the toolboxers are looking at the sequence of cubes {1, 8, 27, 64, 125, ...} and pointing to the first differences {7, 19, 37, 61, ...} and saying "Look, life isn't always so neat - you've got to adapt to circumstances." And the Bayesians are pointing to the third differences, the underlying stable level {6, 6, 6, 6, 6, ...}. And the critics are saying, "What the heck are you talking about? It's 7, 19, 37 not 6, 6, 6. You are oversimplifying this messy problem; you are too attached to simplicity."

It's not necessarily simple on a surface level. You have to dive deeper than that to find stability.

On the one hand, as a good person who cares about the feelings of others, you don't want to call them out, make them feel stupid, and embarrass them. On the other hand... what if it's in the name of intellectual progress?

Intellectual progress seems like it is more than enough to justify it. Under a veil of ignorance, I'd really, really prefer it.

And yet that doesn't seem to do the trick. I at least still feel awkward using examples from real life in writing and cringe a little when I see others do so.

Closer to the truth vs further along

Consider a proposition P. It is either true or false. The green line represents us believing with 100% confidence that P is true. On the other hand, the red line represents us believing with 100% confidence that P is false.

We start off not knowing anything about P, so we start off at point 0, right at that black line in the middle. Then, we observe data point A. A points towards P being true, so we move upwards towards the green line a moderate amount, and end up at point 1. After that we observe data point B. B is weak evidence against P. We move slightly further from the green line, but still above the black line, and end up at point 2. So on and so forth, until all of the data relevant to P has been observed, and since we are perfect Bayesians, we end up being 100% confident that P is, in fact true.

Now, compare someone at point 3 to someone at point 4. The person at point 3 is closer to the truth, but the person at point 4 is further along.

This is an interesting phenomena to me. The idea of being further along, but also further from the truth. I'm not sure exactly where to take this idea, but two thoughts come to mind.

The first thought is of valleys of bad rationality [? · GW]. As we make incremental progress, it doesn't always make us better off.

The second thought is of how far along I actually am in my beliefs. For example, I am an athiest. But what if I had to debate the smartest theist in the world. Would I win that debate? I think I would, but I'm not actually sure. Perhaps they are further along than me. Perhaps I'm at point 3 and they're at point 7.

More dakka with festivals

In the rationality community people are currently excited about the LessOnline festival. Furthermore, my impression is that similar festivals are generally quite successful: people enjoy them, have stimulating discussions, form new relationships, are exposed to new and interesting ideas, express that they got a lot out of it, etc.

So then, this feels to me like a situation where More Dakka [? · GW] applies. Organize more festivals!

How? Who? I dunno, but these seem like questions worth discussing.

Some initial thoughts:

1. Assurance contracts [? · GW] seem like quite the promising tool.
2. You probably don't need a hero license [LW · GW] to go out and organize a festival.
3. Trying to organize a festival probably isn't risky. It doesn't seem like it'd involve too much time or money.

A line of thought that I want to explore: a lot of times when people appear to be close-minded, they aren't actually being (too) close-minded. This line of thought is very preliminary and unrefined.

It's related to Aumann's Ageement Theorem [? · GW]. If you happen to have two perfectly Bayesian agents who are able to share information, then yes, they will end up agreeing. In practice people aren't 1) perfectly Bayesian or 2) able to share all of their information. I think (2) is a huge problem. A huge reason why it's hard to convince people of things.

Well, I guess what I'm getting at isn't really close-mindedness. It's just... suppose you disagree with someone on something. You list out a bunch of arguments for why the other person is wrong, and why they should adopt your belief. Argument A, B, C, D, E... so on and so forth. It feels like you've listed out so many things, and they're being stubborn in not changing their mind and admitting that you're right. But actually, given the information they have, their often correct in not adopting your belief. Even if they were a perfect Bayesian, your arguments A through E just aren't nearly enough. You'd need perhaps 100, maybe even 1,000 times more arguments to get a perfectly open-minded and Bayesian agent to start from the point where the other person started and end up agreeing with you.

Maybe it's related to the illusion of transparency [? · GW]. There are all of these premises that you are assuming to be true. All of these data points. Subtle life experiences. Stuff like that. All of these things inform your priors. And it's easy to assume that the other person shares the same data informing their priors. But they don't. And so providing these data points is part of your job in arguing for your position. But it is often difficult to realize that this is part of your job.

Wait a minute: I think I'm basically trying to say the same thing as Expecting Short Inferential Distances [LW · GW]. Sigh. Yeah, I think that's pretty much it.

This is a pretty good example of something that happens a lot to me on LessWrong. I have some vague idea about something. Then I realize that someone on LessWrong (frequently Eliezer) has a great blog post about it that does a great job of crystalizing it, articulating it, and filling in the gaps for me. Usually it's a very exciting and satisfying experience. Right now I'm a little a) disappointed in myself for not realizing this to begin with and b) disappointed that I don't actually have a useful new thought to share. I'm also c) a little frustrated that I am experiencing (b).

I think it's generally agreed that pizza and steak (and a bunch of other foods) taste significantly better when they're hot. But even if you serve it hot, usually about halfway through eating, the food cools enough such that it's notably worse because it's not hot enough.

One way to mitigate this is to serve food on a warmed plate. But that doesn't really do too much.

What makes the most sense to me would be to serve smaller portions in multiple courses. Like instead of a 10" pie, serve two 5" pies. Or instead of a 16oz ribeye, divide it into four 4oz ribeyes and cook and serve each separately.

I guess this is what fancy restaurants already do with their multi-course meals though, with each course being a small amount of food. And I suppose the logistics of serving more courses and getting them out at the right time while they're hot is a good deal more difficult logistically. So I guess you need to charge a lot more. Which gets you into fancy restaurant territory.

But then again, lots of expensive, fancy steakhouses will serve a huge 16oz or even 24oz ribeye for $100+. And similarly, even the best pizza places will serve normal-sized pies as opposed to tapas-sized. Seems wrong.

Long text messages

I run into something that I find somewhat frustrating. When I write text messages to people, they're often pretty long. At least relative to the length of other people's text messages. I'll write something like 3-5 paragraphs at times. Or more.

I've had people point this out as being intimidating and a lot to read. That seems odd to me though. If it were an email, it'd be a very normal-ish length, and wouldn't feel intimidating, I suspect. If it were a blog post, it'd be quite short. If it were a Twitter thread, it'd be very normal and not intimidating. If it were a handwritten letter, it'd be on the shorter side.

So then, why does the context of it being a text message make it particularly intimidating when the same amount of words isn't intimidating in other contexts? Possibly because it takes longer to type on a cell phone, but that doesn't explain the phenomena when conversations are happening on Signal or WhatsApp (I kinda consider those all to be "text messages" in my head along with SMS). I also run into it on Slack and Discord.

Words as Bayesian Evidence

Alice: Hi, how are you?

Bob: Good. How are you?

Alice: Actually, I'm not doing so well.

Let me ask you a question. How confident are you that Bob is doing good? Not very confident, right? But why not? After all, Bob did say that he is doing good. And he's not particularly well known for being a liar.

I think the thing here is to view Bob's words as Bayesian evidence [? · GW]. They are evidence of Bob doing good. But how strong is this evidence? And how do we think about such a question?

Let's start with how we think about such a question. I think the typical Bayesian approach is pretty practical here. Ask yourself how likely Bob would say "good" when he is doing good. Ask yourself how likely he would say it when he isn't.

I think most people tend to say "good" if their hedonic state is something like between 10th percentile and 90th. If it's 5-10th percentile my model says people will usually say something like what Alice said: "not doing so well". If it's 0-5th maybe they'll say "I'm actually really struggling". And similarly for 90+ percentile. It depends though. But with this model, I think we can take Bob's claim as some sort of solid evidence that he is, uh, doing fine, and perhaps weak evidence that he is leaning towards actually feeling good. But now looking at Alice, according to my model, it's actually pretty strong evidence that she is not doing well.

Maybe all of this seems obvious to you. If so, good. But why would I write something if it's so obvious? Idk. I just have been finding myself tempted to interpret words literally instead of thinking about how strong they are as Bayesian evidence, and I think that other rationalists/people do this quite often as well.

PS: This is hinted at quite often in HPMoR. Perhaps other rationalist-fic as well. Ie. an exchange like:

Quirrell: [Asks Harry a question]

Harry: [Pauses momentarily]

Quirrell: I see.

Harry: Damn! I basically just told him X by pausing because pausing is strong Bayesian evidence of X.

PPS: This is really just a brain dump. I'd love to see someone write this up better than I did here.

There's a concept I want to think more about: gravy.

Turkey without gravy is good. But adding the gravy... that's like the cherry on top. It takes it from good to great. It's good without the gravy, but the gravy makes it even better.

An example of gravy from my life is starting a successful startup. It's something I want to do, but it is gravy. Even if I never succeed at it, I still have a great life. Eg. by default my life is, say, a 7/10, but succeeding at a startup would be so awesome it'd make it a 10/10. But instead of this happening, my brain pulls a trick: it says "You need to succeed at this. When you do I'll give allow you to feel normal, a 5/10 happiness. But along the way there, I'm going to make you feel 2/10."

Maybe I'm more extreme than average here, but I think that this is a human thing, not a me-thing. It seems to be the norm when people pursue hard goals for them to feel this way. The rule, not the exception.

Squinting

“You should have deduced it yourself, Mr Potter,” Professor Quirrell
said mildly. “You must learn to blur your vision until you can see the forest
obscured by the trees. Anyone who heard the stories about you, and who
did not know that you were the mysterious Boy-Who-Lived, could eas-
ily deduce your ownership of an invisibility cloak. Step back from these
events, blur away their details, and what do we observe? There was a great
rivalry between students, and their competition ended in a perfect tie.
That sort of thing only happens in stories, Mr Potter, and there is one
person in this school who thinks in stories. There was a strange and com-
plicated plot, which you should have realized was uncharacteristic of the
young Slytherin you faced. But there is a person in this school who deals in
plots that elaborate, and his name is not Zabini. And I did warn you that
there was a quadruple agent; you knew that Zabini was at least a triple
agent, and you should have guessed a high chance that it was he. No, I
will not declare the battle invalid. All three of you failed the test, and lost
to your common enemy.”

- HPMoR Chapter 35

I really, really like this idea. Squint. Blur away the details. What do you see?

I just watched the video React's becoming a bit weird. It made me think of squinting.

Squint. Blur away the details. Forget about React. Forget about NextJS. Forget about front end web development, or even software development more generally.

Observe that there is one organization that offers a popular product that has been around for awhile. Observe that there is another organization that is trying, and succeeding, at becoming large and popular, and that depends on the first organizations product. Observe that the second organization is allocating lots and lots of resources towards helping the first organization.

How do you expect the first organization to respond? Well, I would expect them to feel sorta dependent on the second organization. I would expect them to cater somewhat heavily to the second organizations needs. And I would expect both organizations to try to hide the fact that this is happening.

I wish I had more good examples of how to use this skill of squinting. I'd love to see other people write more about it.

As a programmer, compared to other programmers, I am extremely uninterested in improving the speed of web apps I work on. I find that (according to my judgement) it rarely has more than a trivial impact on user experience. On the other hand, I am usually way more interested than others are in things like improving code quality.

I wonder if this has to do with me being very philosophically aligned with Bayesianism. Bayesianism preaches to update your beliefs incrementally, whereas Alternative is a lot more binary. For example, the way scientific experiments work, your p-value either passes the (arbitrary) threshold, or it doesn't, so you either reject the null, or fail to reject the null, a binary outcome.

Perhaps people are frequently disinterested in subjective things like improving code quality or usability because it is hard to get a sort of "statistically significant" amount of evidence to say stuff like "this code quality improvement is having this level of impact", and so people default to "fail to reject the null". On the other hand, a more Bayesian way of thinking about it is to just do your best to make a judgement, and shift your beliefs accordingly.

For things like performance optimization, the results are pretty objective. You can run an analysis and see that eg. rendering was sped up by 75ms, and so you can "reject the null" pretty easily and conclude that there is a real, concrete benefit.

I've had success with something: meal prepping a bunch of food and freezing it.

I want to write a blog post about it -- describing what I've done, discussing it, and recommending it as something that will quite likely be worthwhile for others as well -- but I don't think I'm ready. I did one round of prep that lasted three weeks or so and was a huge success for me, but I don't think that's quite enough "contact with reality". I think there's a risk that, after more "contact with reality", it proves to be not nearly as useful as it currently seems. So yeah, I think I'm gonna wait at least another month or two and see how it's going then.

Why do I think it's working well now though? Previously I've tried meal prepping. Y'know, the type of thing where you cook in bulk on Sunday and have meals for the week. One issue though is that I somehow just never end up with enough food. Only a few days worth of food, maybe. Part of it is because it's hard to genuinely cook that much, but another part of it is not wanting the food to sit in the fridge for too long and go bad. Idk.

Another thing is that the traditional meal prep requires you to cook pretty frequently. Every couple of days. Maybe once a week if you're good enough at it. But I just have a ton of trouble with this. I cook on Sunday. Wednesday rolls around. I notice I'm getting low on the food and need to prep more. I have stuff going on though so I postpone till Thursday. More stuff going on. More postponing. It's Friday. I have something else going on. So I make whip together some pasta (unhealthy). Or go out to eat. Something like that ends up happening. But when I can cook for weeks or months at a time, I dunno, somehow it kinda solves that problem.

I also think there are like real time saving benefits. Ie. cooking 20 portions of chicken doesn't take 2x the time as cooking 10 portions. Maybe it's like 1.3x the time.

And I get into a nice groove when I'm cooking a ton of food. I know I'll be in the kitchen for many hours. I put on some podcasts. Idk. I'm more able to work that way.

There's also something psychologically very nice about knowing that I have weeks and weeks of food in the freezer. In portion-sized containers that I can microwave whenever I want and start eating in minutes.

And, uh, I'm kinda proud of myself for being self-sufficient.

One hangup I previously had was uncertainty about "Can I freeze this ingredient? What about that ingredient?". I think that's a big reason why I never tried cooking crazy amounts of food in bulk and freezing it before. But then I realized, "Y'know what, why don't I just try it? Cook a small portion, freeze it, warm it up, see how it tastes. Google for food safety things. If it works out, try a big portion." In retrospect it's pretty silly that it spent so much time hitting the Think About It button instead of the Try It And See What Happens button.

I've gotta vent a little about communication norms.

My psychiatrist recommended a new drug. I went to take it last night. The pills are absolutely huge and make me gag. But I noticed that the pills look like they can be "unscrewed" and the powder comes out.

So I asked the following question (via chat in this app we use):

For the NAC, the pill is a little big and makes me gag. Is it possible to twist it open and pour the powder on my tongue? Or put it in water and drink it?

The psychiatrist responded:

Yes it seems it may be opened and mixed into food or something like applesauce

The main thing I object to is the language "it seems". Instead, I think "I can confirm" would be more appropriate.

I think that it is -- here and frequently elsewhere -- a mott-and-bailey. The bailey being "yes, I confirm that you can do this" and the mott being "I didn't say it'd definitely be ok, just that it seems like it'd be ok".

Well, that's not quite right. I think it's more subtle than that. If consuming the powder lead to issues, I do think the psychiatrist would take responsibility, and be held responsible if there any sort of legal thing, despite the fact that she used the qualifier "it seems". So I don't think that she consciously was trying to establish a motte that she can retreat to if challenged. Rather, I think it is more subconscious and habitual.

This seems like a bad epistemic habit though. Or, perhaps I should say, I'm pretty confident that it is a bad epistemic habit. I guess I have some work to do in countering it as well.

Here's another example. I listen to the Thinking Basketball podcast. I notice that the cohost frequently uses the qualifier "necessarily". As in, "Myles Turner can't necessarily create his own shot". What he means by that is "Myles Turner isn't very good at creating his own shot". This too I think is mostly habitual and subconscious, as opposed to being a conscious attempt to establish a motte that he can retreat to.

Subtextual politeness

In places like Hacker News and Stack Exchange, there are norms that you should be polite. If you said something impolite and Reddit-like such as "Psh, what a douchebag", you'd get flagged and disciplined.

But that's only one form of impoliteness. What about subtextual impoliteness? I think subtextual impoliteness is important too. Similarly important. And I don't think my views here are unique.

I get why subtextual impoliteness isn't policed though. Perhaps by definition, it's often not totally clear what the subtext behind a statement is. So if you try to warn someone about subtextual impoliteness, they can always retreat to the position that you misinterpreted them (and were uncharitable).

One possible way around this would be to have multiple people vote on what the subtext is, but that sounds pretty messy. I expect it'd lead to a bunch of nasty arguments and animosity.

Another possible way around it is to... ask nicely? Like, "I'm not going to police you, but please be aware of the idea of subtext and try to keep your subtext polite." I don't see that working though. It's an obvious enough thing that it doesn't actually need saying. Plus I get the sense that many communities currently have stuff like this, and they are mostly ignored.

So are we just stuck with no good path forward? Meh, probably. I at least don't see a good path forward.

At least in situations where you have no leverage. In situations like friendships and certain work relationships, if you find someone to be subtextually impolite, you can be less friendly towards them. I think that leverage is a large part of what pushes people to be subtextually polite in the first place (study on politeness in elevators vs cars).

Life decision that actually worked for me: allowing myself to eat out or order food when I'm hungry and pressed for time.

I don't think the stress of frantically trying to get dinner together is worth the costs in time or health. And after listening to this podcast episode, I'm suspect that, I'm not sure how to say this: "being overweight is bad, but like, it's not that bad, and stressing about it is also bad since stress is bad, all of this in such a way where stressing out over being marginally more overweight is worse for your health than being a little more overweight".

Something I do want to actually do though is to have a bunch of meals that I meal prep, freeze, and can warm up easily in the microwave. I want these meals to be healthy and at least somewhat affordable. And when these meals are actually available, I don't really endorse myself eating out or ordering food.

At that point I want to save the eating out for places that are really, really good. Not just kinda good. Good enough to wow you. Definitely better than I can make at home. Eating out is pretty expensive and unhealthy. But on the other hand, I do really, really enjoy it and have lots of great places to eat here in Portland.

I think that, for programmers, having good taste in technologies is a pretty important skill. A little impatience is good too, since it can drive you to move away from bad tools and towards good ones.

These points seem like they should generalize to other fields as well.

Rationalist culture needs some traditions like this.

Inverted interruptions

Imagine that Alice is talking to Bob. She says the following, without pausing.

That house is ugly. You should read Harry Potter. We should get Chinese food.

We can think of it like this. Approach #1:

• At t=1 Alice says "That house is ugly."
• At t=2 Alice says "You should read Harry Potter."
• At t=3 Alice says "We should get Chinese food."

Suppose Bob wants to respond to the comment of "That house is ugly." Due to the lack of pauses, Bob would have to interrupt Alice in order to get that response in. On the other hand, if Alice paused in between each comment, we can consider that Approach #2:

• t=1: Alice says "That house is ugly."
• t=2: Alice pauses.
• t=3: Alice says "You should read Harry Potter."
• t=4: Alice pauses.
• t=5: Alice says "We should get Chinese food."

then Bob wouldn't have to interrupt if he wanted to respond.

Let's call Approach #1 an inverted interruption. It forces the other person to interrupt if they have something to say.

I think inverted interruptions are something to be careful about. Not that they're always bad, just that they should be kept in mind and considered in order to make communication both fun and effective.

Something that I run into, at least in normie culture, is that writing (really) long replies to comments has a connotation of being contentious, or even hostile (example). But what if you have a lot to say? How can you say it without appearing contentious?

I'm not sure. You could try to signal friendliness by using lots of smiley faces and stuff. Or you could be explicit about it and say stuff like "no hard feelings".

Something about that feels distasteful to me though. It shouldn't need to be done.

Also, it sets a tricky precedent. If you start using smiley faces when you are trying to signal friendliness, what happens if next time you avoid the smiley faces? Does that signal contentiousness? Probably. 

Capabilities vs alignment outside of AI

In the field of AI we talk about capabilities vs alignment. I think it is relevant outside of the field of AI though.

I'm thinking back to something I read in Cal Newport's book Digital Minimalism. He talked about how the Amish aren't actually anti-technology. They are happy to adopt technology. They just want to make sure that the technology actually does more good than harm before they adopt it.

And thy have a neat process for this. From what I remember, they first start by researching it. Then have small groups of people experiment with it for some amount of time. Then larger groups. Something like that.

On the other hand, the impression I get is that we (strongly tend towards) assume that an increase in capabilities is automatically a good thing. For example, if there is some advancement made in the field of physics where we better understand subatomic particles the thought process is that this is exciting because down the line that theoretical understanding will lead to cool new technologies that improve our lives. This strikes me as being similar to the planning fallacy though: focusing on the "happy path" where things go the way you want them to go, and failing to think about the scenario where unexpected, bad things happen. Like next-gen nuclear weapons.

Speaking very generally, to me, it is very frequently not obvious whether capabilities improvements are actually aligned with our values and I'm not particularly excited when I hear about advancements in any given field.

Spreading the seed of ideas

A few of my posts actually seem like they've been useful to people. OTOH, a large majority don't.

I don't have a very good ability to discern this from the beginning though. Given this situation, it seems worth "spreading the seed" pretty liberally. The chance of it being a useful idea usually outweighs the chance that it mostly just adds noise for people to sift through. Especially given the fact that the LW team encourages low barriers for posting stuff. Doubly especially as shortform posts. Triply especially given that I personally enjoy writing and sometimes benefit from the feedback of others.

Feels a little counterintuitive though. Or maybe just scary. I'm not a shy person when it comes to this sort of stuff but even for me I hesitate and think "Is this worth posting? Is it gonna be terrible and just add noise?"

I'd guess that I'm maybe 95th percentile or something in terms of how not reluctant I am to post (only 5% of people are less reluctant) and I think I am still too reluctant. I can't think of any examples of people who seem like they should be more reluctant. jefftk [LW · GW] comes to mind as someone who is extremely not reluctant, but even for him I'm totally happy with the almost daily posts and would probably appreciate being exposed to even more of his thoughts.

Notice when trust batteries start off low

The basic idea is that your trust battery is pre-charged at 50% when you’re first hired or start working with someone for the first time. Every interaction you have with your colleagues from that point on then either charges, discharges, or maintains the battery - and as a result, affects how much you enjoy working with them and trust them to do a good job.

The things that influence your trust battery charge vary wildly - whether the other person has done what they said they’ll do, how well you get on with that person, whether your opinions of that person are biased by others you have a high-trust relationship with, and lots more.

— The Trust Battery

I think it's important to note that trust batteries don't always start off at 50%. In fact, starting at 50% is probably pretty rare.

Consider this example: you begin working at a new company, Widget Corp. Widget Corp says that they treat all of their employees as if they were family. That is a very common thing for companies to claim, and yet very few of them actually mean it or anything close to it.

So then, at least in this context, I don't think the trust battery starts off at 50%. I think it starts off at something more like 1%. And when trust batteries are low, you have to do more to persuade, just like how strong priors take more evidence to move.

I feel like this isn't well understood though. I observe a lot of statements similar to "we treat all of our employees like family" without follow-up statements like "we also know that you don't have reason to believe us, and so here is an attempt to provide more evidence and actually be a little bit convincing". Some of the time it's surely because the former statement is some sort of weird simulacra level 3/4 type of thing, but a decent chunk of the time I think it's at level 1/2 and there is a genuine failure to recognize that latter follow-up statement is very much needed.

Covid-era restaurant choice hack: Korean BBQ. Why? Think about it...

They have vents above the tables! Cool, huh? I'm not sure how much that does, but my intuition is that it cuts the risk in half at least.

Science as reversed stupidity

Epistemic status: Babbling. I don't have a good understanding of this, but it seems plausible.

Here is my understanding. Before science was a thing, people would derive ideas by theorizing (or worse, from the bible). It wasn't very rigorous. They would kinda just believe things willy-nilly (I'm exaggerating).

Then science came along and was like, "No! Slow down! You can't do that! You need to have sufficient evidence before you can justifiably believe something like that!" But as Eliezer explains [? · GW], science is too slow. It judges things as pass-fail instead of updating incrementally. It wants to be very sure before it acknowledges something as "backed by science".

I suspect that this attitude stems from reversing the stupidity that preceded science. And now that I think about it, a lot of ideas seem to stem from reversed stupidity. Perhaps we should be on the lookout for this more, and update our beliefs accordingly in the opposite direction.

I was just listening to the Why Buddhism Is True episode of the Rationally Speaking podcast. They were talking about what the goal of meditation is. The interviewee, Robert Wright, explains:

the Buddha said in the first famous sermon, he basically laid out the goal, "Let's try to end suffering."

What an ambitious goal! But let's suppose that it was achieved. What would be the implications?

Well, there are many. But one that stands out to me as particularly important as well as ignored, is that it might be a solution to existential risk. Maybe if people were all happy, maybe they'd be inclined to sit back, take a deep breathe, stop fighting, take their foot off the gas, and start working towards solutions to existential risks.

Just as you can look at an arid terrain and determine what shape a river will one day take by assuming water will obey gravity, so you can look at a civilization and determine what shape its institutions will one day take by assuming people will obey incentives. 

- Scott Alexander, Meditations on Moloch

There's been talk recently about there being a influx of new users to LessWrong and a desire to prevent this influx from harming the signal-to-noise ratio on LessWrong too much. I wonder: what if it costed something like $1 to make an account? Or $1/month? Some trivial amount of money that serves as a filter for unserious people.

From Childhoods of exceptional people:

The importance of tutoring, in its more narrow definition as in actively instructing someone, is tied to a phenomenon known as Bloom’s 2-sigma problem, after the educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom who in the 1980s claimed to have found that tutored students

. . . performed two standard deviations better than students who learn via conventional instructional methods—that is, “the average tutored student was above 98% of the students in the control class.”

Simply put, if you tailor your instruction to a single individual, you can make it fit so much better to their minds, so that the average person, if tutored, would become top two in a class of a hundred. The truth is a little bit more complicated than that (and I recommend Nintil’s systematic review of the research if you want to get into the weeds), but the effect is nevertheless real and big. Tutoring is a more reliable method to impart knowledge than lectures. It is also faster.

I wonder what the implications of this are for AI safety, and EA more generally? How beneficial would it be to invest in making some sort of tutoring ecosystem available to people looking to get into the field, or to advance from where they currently stand?

Nonfiction books should be at the end of the funnel

Books take a long time to read. Maybe 10-20 hours. I think that there are two things that you should almost always do first.

1. Read a summary. This usually gives you the 80/20 and only takes 5-10 minutes. You can usually find a summary by googling around. Derek Sivers and James Clear come to mind as particularly good resources.

2. Listen to a podcast or talk. Nowadays, from what I could tell, authors typically go on a sort of podcast tour before releasing a book in order to promote it. I find that this typically serves as a good ~hour long overview of the important parts of the book. For more prominent authors, sometimes they'll also give a talk - eg. Talks at Google - after releasing.

I've been in pursuit of a good startup idea lately. I went through a long list I had and deleted everything. None were good enough. Finding a good idea is really hard.

One way that I think about it is that a good idea has to be the intersection of a few things.

• For me at least, I want to be able to fail fast. I want to be able to build and test it in a matter of weeks. I don't want to raise venture funding and spend 18 months testing an idea. This is pretty huge actually. If one idea takes 10 days to build and the other takes 10 weeks, well, the burden of proof for the 10 week one is way higher. You could start seven 10 day ideas in 10 weeks.
• I want the demand to be real. It should ideally be a painkiller, not a vitamin. Something people are really itching for, not something that kinda sorta sounds interesting that they think they should consume but aren't super motivated to actually consume it. And I want to feel that way myself. I want to dogfood it. When I went through my list of ideas and really was honest with myself, there weren't any ideas that I actually felt that eager to dogfood.
• There needs to be a plausible path towards acquiring customers. Word of mouth, virality, SEO, ads, influencer marketing, affiliates, TV commercials, whatever. It's possible that a product is quick to build and really satisfies a need, but there isn't a good way to actually get it in front of users. You need a way to get it in front of users.
• Of course, the money part needs to make sense. After listening to a bunch of Indie Hackers episodes, I'm really leaning towards businesses that make money via charging people, not via selling ads or whatever. Hopefully charging high prices, and hopefully targeting businesses (with budgets!) instead of consumers. Unfortunately, unlike Jay Z, I'm not a business, so I don't understand the needs of businesses too well. I've always heard people give the advice of targeting businesses, but founders typically don't understand the needs of businesses well, and I've never heard a good resolution to that dilemma.
• I need to have the skills to build it. Fortunately at this point I'm a pretty solid programmer so there's a lot of web app related things I'm able to build.
• Hopefully there is a path towards expanding and being a big hit, not just a niche side income sort of thing. Although at this stage of my life I'd probably be ok with the latter.

When you add more and more things to the intersection, it actually gets quite small, quite rapidly.

Bayesian traction

A few years ago I worked on [? · GW] a startup called Premium Poker Tools as a solo founder. It is a web app where you can run simulations about poker stuff. Poker players use it to study.

It wouldn't have impressed any investors. Especially early on. Early on I was offering it for free and I only had a handful of users. And it wasn't even growing quickly. This all is the opposite of what investors want to see. They want users. Growth. Revenue.

Why? Because those things are signs. Indicators. Signal. Traction. They point towards an app being a big hit at some point down the road. But they aren't the only indicators. They're just the ones that are easily quantifiable.

What about the fact that I had random people emailing me, thanking me for building it, telling me that it is way better than the other apps and that I should be charging for it? What about the fact that someone messaged me asking how they can donate? What about the fact that Daniel Negreanu -- perhaps the biggest household name in poker -- was using it in one of his YouTube videos?

Those are indicators as well. We can talk about how strong they are. Maybe they're not as strong as the traditional metrics. Then again, maybe they are more strong. Especially something like Negreanu. That's not what I want to talk about here though. Here I just want to make the point that they count. You'd be justified in using them to update your beliefs.

Still, even if they do count, it may be simpler to ignore them. They might be weak enough, at least on average, such that the effort to incorporate them into your beliefs isn't worth the expected gain.

This reminds me of the situation with science. Science says that if a study doesn't get that magical p < 0.05, we throw it in the trash. Why do we do this? Why don't we just update our beliefs a small amount off of p = 0.40, a moderate amount off of p = 0.15 and large amount off of p = 0.01? Well, I don't actually know the answer to that, but I assume that as a social institution, it's just easier to draw a hard line about what counts and what doesn't.

Maybe that's why things work the way they do in startups. Sure, in theory the random emails I got should count as Bayesian evidence and update my beliefs about how much traction I have, but in practice that stuff is usually pretty weak evidence and isn't worth focusing on.

In fact, it's possible that the expected value of incorporating it is negative. That you'd expect it to do you more harm than good. To update your beliefs in the wrong direction, on average. How would that be possible? Bias. Maybe founders are hopelessly biased towards interpreting everything through rosy colored glasses and will inevitably arrive at the conclusion that they're headed to the moon if they are allowed to interpret data like that.

That doesn't feel right to me though. We shouldn't just throw our hands in the air and give up. We should acknowledge the bias and update our beliefs accordingly. For example, you may intuitively feel like that positive feedback you got via email this month is a 4/10 in terms of how strong a signal it is, but you also recognize that you're biased towards thinking it is a strong signal, and so you adjust your belief down from a 4/10 to a 1.5/10. That seems like the proper way to go about it.

Collaboration and the early stages of ideas

Imagine the lifecycle of an idea being some sort of spectrum. At the beginning of the spectrum is the birth of the idea. Further to the right, the idea gets refined some. Perhaps 1/4 the way through the person who has the idea texts some friends about it. Perhaps midway through it is refined enough where a rough draft is shared with some other friends. Perhaps 3/4 the way through a blog post is shared. Then further along, the idea receives more refinement, and maybe a follow up post is made. Perhaps towards the very end, the idea has been vetted and memetically accepted, and someone else ends up writing about it with their own spin and/or explanation.

Or something like that. This is just meant as a rough sketch.

Anyway, I worry that we don't have a good process for that initial 75% of the spectrum. And furthermore, that those initial stages are quite important.

When I say "we" I'm talking partly about the LessWrong community and partly about society at large.

I have some ideas I'll hopefully write about and pursue at some point to help with this. Basically, get the right people connected with each other in some awesome group chats.

I wish more people used threads on platforms like Slack and Discord. And I think the reason to use threads is very similar to the reason why one should aim for modularity when writing software.

Here's an example. I posted this question in the #haskell-beginners Discord channel asking whether it's advisable for someone learning Haskell to use a linter. I got one reply, but it wasn't as a thread. It was a normal message in #haskell-beginners. Between the time I asked the question and got a response, there were probably a couple dozen other messages. So then, I had to read and scroll through those to get to the response I was interested in, and to see if there were any other responses.

Each of the messages were part of a different conversation. I think of it as something like this:

Conversation A; message 1
Conversation A; message 2
Conversation B; message 1
Conversation C; message 1
Conversation A; message 3
Conversation C; message 2
Conversation A; message 4
Conversation B; message 2

There is a linear structure for something that more naturally structured as a tree.

Function Programming Discord server
  #haskell-beginners channel
    Conversation A
      Message 1
      Message 2
      Message 3
      Message 4
    Conversation B
      Message 1
      Message 2
    Conversation C
      Message 1
      Message 2

In writing software, imagine that you have three sub-problems that you need to solve. And imagine if you approached this by doing something like this:

// stuff for sub-problem #1
// stuff for sub-problem #1
// stuff for sub-problem #2
// stuff for sub-problem #3
// stuff for sub-problem #1
// stuff for sub-problem #3
// stuff for sub-problem #1
// stuff for sub-problem #2

We generally prefer to avoid writing code this way. Instead, we prefer to take a more modular approach and do something like this:

solveSubProblemOne();
solveSubProblemTwo();
solveSubProblemThree();

function solveSubProblemOne() {
  ...
}

function solveSubProblemTwo() {
  ...
}

function solveSubProblemThree() {
  ...
}

By writing the code in a modular fashion, you can easily focus on the code related to sub-problem #1 and not have to sift through code that is unrelated to sub-problem #1. On the other hand, the more imperative non-modular version makes it difficult to tell what code is related to what sub-problem.

Similarly, using threads on platforms like Slack and Discord make it easy to see what messages belong to what conversations. 

And like software, the importance of this gets larger as the "codebase" becomes more involved and complex. Imagine a Slack channel with lots and lots of conversations happening simultaneously without threads. That is difficult to manage. But if it's a small channel with only two or three conversations happening simultaneously, that is more manageable.

This is super rough and unrefined, but there's something that I want to think and write about. It's an epistemic failure mode that I think is quite important. It's pretty related to Reversed Stupidity is Not Intelligence [? · GW]. It goes something like this.

You think 1. Alice thinks 2. In your head, you think to yourself:

Gosh, Alice is so dumb. I understand why she thinks 2. It's because A, B, C, D and E. But she just doesn't see F. If she did, she'd think 1 instead of 2.

Then you run into other people being like:

Gosh, Bob is so dumb. I understand why he thinks 1. It's because A, B, C, D, E and F. But he just doesn't see G. If he did, he'd think 2 instead of 1.

I wish I could easily think of good, concrete, real-world examples of this, but I'm failing to right now.

Anyway, I think this failure mode is both very common (amongst the general public, yes, but also amongst rationalists), very tempting, and very harmful.

A big reason why I think it's harmful is because it functions as a sort of conversation halter [LW · GW]. Just an intrapersonal one rather than interpersonal. Like, for traditional conversation halters, you're talking to another person (interpersonal) and they say something that just kinda halts the discussion. But here, I'm trying to point to something that you do in your own inner monologue.

Instead, what I think you should do would be something like steelmanning:

Ok, suppose I'm right that Alice isn't seeing F, and that if she did, she should think 1 instead of 2. Let's push further. What other factors are at play here? Is there a G? An H? An I? What about a J? 

I'd appreciate any conversation and help on this. In whatever form. Examples would be awesome.

When I think about problems like these, I use what feels to me like a natural generalization of the economic idea of efficient markets. The goal is to predict what kinds of efficiency we should expect to exist in realms beyond the marketplace, and what we can deduce from simple observations. For lack of a better term, I will call this kind of thinking inadequacy analysis.

－ https://equilibriabook.com/inadequacy-and-modesty/

I think this is pretty applicable to highly visible blog posts, such as ones that make the home page in popular communities such as LessWrong and Hacker News.

Like, if something makes the front page as one of the top posts, it attracts lots of eyeballs. With lots of eyeballs, you get more prestige and social status for saying something smart. So if a post has lots of attention, I'd expect lots of the smart-things-to-be-said to have been said in the comments.

It's weird that people tend so strongly to be friends with people so close to their age. If you're 30, why are you so much more likely to be friends with another 30 year old than, say, a 45 year old?

There were other lines of logic leading to the same conclusion. Complex machinery was always universal within a sexually reproducing species. If gene B relied on gene A, then A had to be useful on its own, and rise to near-universality in the gene pool on its own, before B would be useful often enough to confer a fitness advantage. Then once B was universal you would get a variant A* that relied on B, and then C that relied on A* and B, then B* that relied on C, until the whole machine would fall apart if you removed a single piece. But it all had to happen incrementally - evolution never looked ahead, evolution would never start promoting B in preparation for A becoming universal later. Evolution was the simple historical fact that, whichever organisms did in fact have the most children, their genes would in fact be more frequent in the next generation. So each piece of a complex machine had to become nearly universal before other pieces in the machine would evolve to depend on its presence.

⎻ HPMoR Chapter 25

I think something sorta similar is true about startups/business.

Say you have an idea for a better version of Craigslist called Bobslist. You have various hypotheses about how Craigslist's UI is bad and can be improved upon. But without lots of postings, no one is going to care. Users care more about products and price than they do about the UI.

This reminds me of the thing with gene A and gene B. Evolution isn't going to promote gene B if gene A isn't already prominent.

If gene B relied on gene A, then A had to be useful on its own, and rise to near-universality in the gene pool on its own, before B would be useful often enough to confer a fitness advantage.

I think Bobslist's nicer UI is like gene B. It relies on there being a comparable number and quality of product listings ("gene A") and won't be promoted by the market before "gene A" becomes prominent.

I wonder if the Facebook algorithm is a good example of the counterintuitive difficulty of alignment (as a more general concept). 

You're trying to figure out the best posts and comments to prioritize in the feed. So you look at things like upvotes, page views and comment replies. But it turns out that that captures things like how much of a demon thread [? · GW] it is. Who would have thought metrics like upvotes and page views could be so... demonic? 

Open mic posts

In stand up comedy, performances are where you present your good jokes and open mics are where you experiment.

Sometimes when you post something on a blog (or Twitter, Facebook, a comment, etc.), you intend for it to be more of a performance. It's material that you have spent time developing, are confident in, etc.

But other times you intend for it to be more of an open mic. It's not obviously horribly or anything, but it's certainly experimental. You think it's plausibly good, but very well might end up being garbage.

Going further, in stand up comedy, there is a phase that comes before open mics. I guess we can call that phase "ideation". Where you come up with your ideas. Maybe that's going for walks. Maybe it's having drinks with your comic friends. Maybe it's talking to your grandma. Who knows? But there's gotta be some period where you're simply ideating. And I don't really see anything analogous to that on LessWrong. It seems like something that should exist though. Maybe it exists right here with the Short Form (and Open Thread)? OnTwitter? Slack and Discord groups? Talking with friends? Even if it does, I wonder if we could do more.

On Stack Overflow you could offer a bounty for a question you ask. You sacrifice some karma in exchange for having your question be more visible to others. Sometimes I wish I could do that on LessWrong.

I'm not sure how it'd work though. Giving the post +N karma? A bounties section? A reward for the top voted comment?

Alignment research backlogs

I was just reading AI alignment researchers don't (seem to) stack [LW · GW] and had the thought that it'd be good to research whether intellectual progress in other fields is "stackable". That's the sort of thing that doesn't take an Einstein level of talent to pursue.

I'm sure other people have similar thoughts: "X seems like something we should do and doesn't take a crazy amount of talent".

What if there was a backlog for this?

I've heard that, to mitigate procrastination, it's good to break tasks down further and further until they become bite-sized chunks. It becomes less daunting to get started. Maybe something similar would apply here with this backlog idea. Especially if it is made clear roughly how long it'd take to complete a given task. And how completing that task fits in to the larger picture and improves it. Etc. etc.

And here's another task: researching whether this backlog idea itself has ever been done before, whether it is actually plausible, etc.

Mustachian Grants

I remember previous discussions that went something like this:

Alice: EA has too much money and not enough places to spend it.

Bob: Why not give grants anyone and everyone who wants to do, for example, alignment research?

Alice: That sets up bad incentives. Malicious actors would seek out those grants and wouldn't do real work. And that'd have various bad downstream effects.

But what if those grants were minimal? What if they were only enough to live out a Mustachian lifestyle?

Well, let's see. A Mustachian lifestyle costs something like $25k/year iirc. But it's not just this years living expenses that matter. I think a lot of people would turn down the grant and go work for Google instead if it was only a few years because they want to set themselves up financially for the future. So what if the grant was $25k/year indefinitely? That could work but also starts to get large enough where people might try to exploit it.

What if there was some sort of house you could live at, commune style? Meals would be provided, there'd be other people there to socialize with, health care would be taken care of, you'd be given a small stipend for miscellaneous spending, etc. I don't see how bad actors would be able to take advantage of that. They'd be living at the same house so if they were taking advantage of it it'd be obvious enough.

Asset ceilings for politicians

A long time when I was a sophomore in college, I remember a certain line of thinking I went through:

• It is important for politicians to be incentivized properly. Currently they are too susceptible to bribery (hard, soft, in between) and other things.
• It is difficult to actually prevent bribes. For example, they may come in the form of "Pass the laws I want passed and instead of handing you a lump sum of money, I'll give you a job that pays $5M/year for the next 30 years after your term is up."
• Since preventing bribes is difficult, you could instead just say that if you're going to be a politician -- a public servant -- you have to live a low income lifestyle from here on out. You and your family. Say, 25th percentile income level. Or Minimally Viable Standard of Living if you want to get more aggressive. The money will be provided to you by the government and you're not allowed to earn your own money elsewhere. If you start driving lamborghinis, we'll know.
• The downside I see is that it might push away talent. But would it? Normally if you pay a lower salary you get less talented employees but for roles like President of the United States of America, or even Senator of Idaho, I think the opportunity for impact would be large enough to get very talented people, and any losses in talent would be made up for reduced susceptibility to bribery.

I often cringe at the ideas of my past selves but this one still seems interesting.

Goodhart's Law [? · GW] seems like a pretty promising analogy for communicating the difficulties of alignment to the general public, particularly those who are in fields like business or politics. They're already familiar with the difficulty and pain associated with trying to get their organization to do X.

When better is apples to oranges

I remember talking to a product designer before. I brought up the idea of me looking for ways to do things more quickly that might be worse for the user. Their response was something along the lines of "I mean, as a designer I'm always going to advocate for whatever is best for the user."

I think that "apples-to-oranges" is a good analogy for what is wrong about that. Here's what I mean.

Suppose there is a form and the design is to have inline validation (nice error messages next to the input fields). And suppose that "global" validation would be simpler (an error message in one place saying "here's what you did wrong"). Inline is better for users, but comparing it straight up to global would be an apples-to-oranges comparison.

Why? Because the inline version takes longer. Suppose the inline version takes two days and the global version takes one.

Here's where the apples-to-oranges analogy comes in: you can't compare something that takes one day to something that takes two days purely on the grounds of user experience. That is apples-to-oranges. For it to be apples-to-apples, you'd have to compare a) inline validation to b) global validation + whatever else that can be done in the second day. In other words, (b) has to include the right-hand side of the plus sign. Without the right-hand side, it is apples-to-oranges.

I was just watching this YouTube video on portable air conditioners. The person is explaining how air conditioners work, and it's pretty hard to follow.

I'm confident that a very large majority of the target audience would also find it hard to follow. And I'm also confident that this would be extremely easy to discover with some low-fi usability testing. Before releasing the video, just spend maybe 20 mins and have a random person watch the video, and er, watch them watch it. Ask them to think out loud, narrating their thought process. Stuff like that.

Moreover, I think that this sort of stuff happens all the time, in many different areas. As another example, I was at a train stop the other day and found the signs confusing. It wasn't clear which side of the tracks were going north and which side were going south. And just like the YouTube video, I think that most/many people would also find it confusing, this would be easy to discover with usability testing, and at least in this case, there's probably some sort of easy solution.

So, yeah: this is my cry into an empty void for the world to incorporate low-fi usability testing into anything and everything. Who knows, maybe someone will hear me.

I think that people should write with more emotion. A lot more emotion!

Emotion is bayesian evidence. It communicates things.

One could also propose making it not full of rants, but I don’t think that would be an improvement. The rants are important. The rants contain data. They reveal Eliezer’s cognitive state and his assessment of the state of play. Not ranting would leave important bits out and give a meaningfully misleading impression.

...

The fact that this is the post we got, as opposed to a different (in many ways better) post, is a reflection of the fact that our Earth is failing to understand what we are facing. It is failing to look the problem in the eye, let alone make real attempts at solutions.

— https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LLRtjkvh9AackwuNB/on-a-list-of-lethalities [LW · GW]

It frustrates me that people don't write with more emotion. Why don't they? Are they uncomfortable being vulnerable? Maybe that's part of it. I think the bigger part is just that it is uncomfortable to deviate from social norms. That's different from the discomfort from vulnerability. If everyone else is trying to be professional and collected and stuff and write more dispassionately, and you are out there getting all excited and angry and intrigued and self-conscious, you'll know that you are going against the grain.

But all of those emotions are useful though. Again, it communicates things. Sure, it is something that can be taken overboard. There is such a thing as expressing too much emotion. But I think we have a ways to go before we get there.

(Am I expressing enough emotion here? Am I being a hypocrite? I'm note sure. I'm probably not doing a great job at expressing emotions here. Which makes me realize that it's probably, to a non-trivial extent, a skill that needs to be practiced. You have to introspect, think about what emotions you are feeling, and think about which of them would be useful to express.)

I wonder whether it would be good to think about blog posts as open journaling.

When you write in a journal, you are writing for yourself and don't expect anyone else to read it. I guess you can call that "closed journaling". In which case "open journaling" would mean that you expect others to read it, and you at least loosely are trying to cater to them.

Well, there are pros and cons to look at here. The main con of treating blog posts as open journaling is that the quality will be lower than a more traditional blog post that is more refined. On the other hand, a big pro is that, relatedly, a wider and more diverse range of posts will get published. We're loosening the filter.

It also may encourage an environment of more collaboration, and people thinking things through together. If someone posts something where they spent a lot of time on it, and I notice something that seems off, I'd probably lean towards assuming that I just didn't understand it, and it is in fact correct. I'd also lean towards assuming that it wouldn't be the best idea to take up peoples time by posting a comment about my feeling that something is off. On the other hand, if I know that a post is more exploratory, I'd lean less strongly towards those assumptions and be more willing to jump in and discuss things.

It seems that there is agreement here on LessWrong that there is a place for this more exploratory style of posting. Not every post needs to be super refined. For less refined posts, there is the shortform, open thread and personal blog posts. So it's not that I'm proposing anything new here. It's just that "open journaling" seems like a cool way to conceptualize this. The idea occurred to me while I was on the train this morning and thinking about it as an "open journal" just inspired me to write up a few ideas that have been swimming around in my head.

Inconsistency as the lesser evil

It bothers me how inconsistent I am. For example, consider covid-risk. I've eaten indoors before. Yet I'll say I only want to get coffee outside, not inside. Is that inconsistent? Probably. Is it the right choice? Let's say it is, for arguments sake. Does the fact that it is inconsistent matter? Hell no!

Well, it matters to the extent that it is a red flag. It should prompt you to have some sort of alarms going off in your head that you are doing something wrong. But the proper response to those alarms is to use that as an opportunity to learn and grow and do better in the future. Not to continue to make bad choices moving forward out of fear that inconsistency is unvirtuous. Yet this fear is a strong one that is often moving. At least for me.

The other day I was walking to pick up some lunch instead of having it delivered. I also had the opportunity to freelance for $100/hr (not always available to me), but I still chose to walk and save myself the delivery fee.

I make similarly irrational decisions about money all the time. There are situations where I feel like other mundane tasks should be outsourced. Eg. I should trade my money for time, and then use that time to make even more money. But I can't bring myself to do it.

Perhaps food is a good example. It often takes me 1-2 hours to "do" dinner. Suppose ordering something saves me $10 relative to what I'd otherwise spend at home. I think my time is worth more than $5-10/hr, and yet I don't order food.

One possible explanation is that I rarely have the opportunity to make extra money with extra free time, eg. by freelancing. But I could work on startups in that free time. That doesn't guarantee me more money, but in terms of expected value, I think it's pretty high. Is there a reason why this type of thinking might be wrong? Variance? I could adjust the utilities based off of some temporal discounting and diminishing marginal utility or whatever, but even after that the EV seems wildly higher than the $5-10/hr I'm saving by cooking.

Here's the other thing: I'm not alone. In fact, I observe that tons and tons of people are in a similar position as me, where they could be trading money for time very profitably but choose not to, especially here on LessWrong.

I wonder whether there is something I am missing. I wonder what is going on here.

Betting is something that I'd like to do more of. As the LessWrong tag [? · GW] explains, it's a useful tool to improve your epistemics.

But finding people to bet with is hard. If I'm willing to bet on X with Y odds and I find someone else eager to, it's probably because they know more than me and I am wrong. So I update my belief and then we can't bet.

But in some situations it works out with a friend, where there is mutual knowledge that we're not being unfair to one another, and just genuinely disagree, and we can make a bet. I wonder how I can do this more often. And I wonder if some sort of platform could be built to enable this to happen in a more widespread manner.

Idea: Athletic jerseys, but for intellectual figures. Eg. "Francis Bacon" on the back, "Science" on the front.

I've always heard of the veil of ignorance being discussed in a... social(?) context: "How would you act if you didn't know what person you would be?". A farmer in China? Stock trader in New York? But I've never heard it discussed in a temporal context: "How would you act if you didn't know what era you would live in?" 2021? 2025? 2125? 3125?

This "temporal veil of ignorance" feels like a useful concept.

I just came across an analogy that seems applicable for AI safety.

AGI is like a super powerful sports car that only has an accelerator, no brake pedal. Such a car is cool. You'd think to yourself:

Nice! This is promising! Now we have to just find ourselves a brake pedal.

You wouldn't just hop in the car and go somewhere. Sure, it's possible that you make it to your destination, but it's pretty unlikely, and certainly isn't worth the risk.

In this analogy, the solution to the alignment problem is the brake pedal, and we really need to find it.

Alice, Bob, and Steve Jobs

In my writing, I usually use the Alice and Bob naming scheme. Alice, Bob, Carol, Dave, Erin, etc. Why? The same reason Steve Jobs wore the same outfit everyday: decision fatigue. I could spend the time thinking of names other than Alice and Bob. It wouldn't be hard. But it's just nice to not have to think about it. It seems like it shouldn't matter, but I find it really convenient.

Epistemic status: Rambly. Perhaps incoherent. That's why this is a shortform post. I'm not really sure how to explain this well. I also sense that this is a topic that is studied by academics and might be a thing already.

I was just listening to Ben Taylor's recent podcast on the top 75 NBA players of all time, and a thought started to crystalize for me that I always have wanted to develop. For people who don't know him (everyone reading this?), his epistemics are quite good. If you want to see good epistemics applied to basketball, read his series of posts on The 40 Best Careers in NBA History.

Anyway, at the beginning of the podcast, Taylor started to talk about something that was bugging him. Previously, on the 50th anniversary of the league in 1996, a bunch of people voted on a list of the top 50 players in NBA history. Now it is the 75th anniversary of the league, so a different set of people voted on the top 75 players in NBA history. The new list basically took the old list of 50 and added 25 new players. But Taylor was saying it probably shouldn't be like this. One reason is because our understanding of the game of basketball has evolved since 1996, so who we thought were the top 50 then probably had some flaws. Also, it's not like the voting body in 1996 was particularly smart. As Taylor nicely puts it, they weren't a bunch of "basketball PhDs (if that were a thing)", they were random journalists, players, and coaches, people who aren't necessarily well qualified to be voting on this. For example, they placed a ton of value on how many points you scored, but not nearly enough value on how efficiently you scored those points.

Later in the podcast they were analyzing various players and the guy he had on as a guest, Cody, said how one player was voted to a lot of all star games. But Taylor said that while this is true, he doesn't really trust the people who voted on all start games back in the 1960s or whenever it was (not that people are good at voting on all star games now). This got me thinking about something. Does it make sense to look at awards like all star games, MVP voting and all NBA team voting (top 15 players in the league basically)? Well, by doing so, you are incorporating the opinion of various other experts. But I see two problems here.

1. How smart are those experts? Sometimes the expert opinion is actually quite flawed, and Taylor makes a good point that here this is the case.

2. In looking at the opinion of those experts, I think that you are committing one of those crimes that can send you to rationalist prison. I think that you are double counting the evidence [LW · GW]! Here's what I mean. I think that for these expert opinions, the experts rely a lot on what the other experts think. For example, in the podcast they were talking about Bob Cousy vs Bill Sharman. Cousy is considered a legend, whereas Sharman is a guy who was very good, but never became a household name. But Taylor was saying how he thinks Sharman might have actually been better than Cousy. But he just couldn't bring himself to actually place Sharman over Cousy in his list. I think part of that is because it is hard to deviate from majority opinion that much. So I think that is an example where you base your opinion on what others think. Not 100%, but some percentage.

But isn't that double counting? As a simplification, imagine that Alice arrives at her opinion without the influence of others, and then Bob's opinion is 50% based on what Alice thinks and 50% based on what his gears level models output. That seems to me like it should count as 1.5 data points, not 2. I think this becomes more apparent as you add more people. Imagine that Carold, Dave and Erin all do the same thing as Bob. Ie. each of them is basing 50% of their opinion on what Alice thinks. Should that count as 5 data points or 3? What if all of them were basing it 99% on what Alice thinks. Should that count as 5 data points or 1.04? You could argue perhaps that 1.04 is too low, but arguing that it is 5 really seems like it is too high. To make the point even more clear, what if there were 99 people who were 99% basing their opinion off of Alice. Would you say, "well, 100 people all believe X, so it's probably true"? No! There's only one person that believes X and 99 people who trust her.

This feels to me like it is actually a pretty important point. In looking at what consensus opinion is, or what the crowd thinks, once you filter out the double counting, it becomes a good deal less strong.

On the other hand, there are other things to think about. For example, if the consensus believes X and you can present good evidence of ~X, but in fact Y, then there is prestige to be gained. And if no one came around and said "Hey! I have evidence of ~X, but in fact Y!", well, absence of evidence is evidence of absence. In worlds where Y is true, given the incentive of prestige, we would expect someone to come around and say it. This depends on the community though. Maybe it's too hard to present evidence. For example, in basketball it's hard to measure the impact of defense. Or maybe the community just isn't smart enough or set up properly to provide the prestige. Eg. if I had a brilliant idea about basketball, I'm not really sure where I can go to present it and receive prestige.

Edit:

Would you say, "well, 100 people all believe X, so it's probably true"? No! There's only one person that believes X and 99 people who trust her.

Well, I guess the fact that so many people trust her means that we should place more weight on her opinion. But saying "I believe X because someone who I have a lot of trust in believes X" is different from saying "I believe X because all 100 people who thought about this also believe X".

I wonder if it would be a good idea groom people from an early age to do AI research. I suspect that it would. Ie identify who the promising children are, and then invest a lot of resources towards grooming them. Tutors, therapists, personal trainers, chefs, nutritionists, etc.

Iirc, there was a story from Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise about some parents that wanted to prove that women can succeed in chess, and raised three daughters doing something sorta similar but to a smaller extent. I think the larger point being made was that if you really groom someone like this, they can achieve incredible things. I also recall hearing things about how the difference in productivity between researchers is tremendous. It's not like one person is producing 80 points of value and someone else 75 and someone else 90. It's many orders of magnitude of difference. Even at the top. If so, maybe we should take shots at grooming more of these top tier researchers.

I suspect that the term "cognitive" is often over/misused.

Let me explain what my understanding of the term is. I think of it as "a disagreement with behaviorism". If you think about how psychology progressed as a field, first there was Freudian stuff that wasn't very scientific. Then behaviorism emerged as a response to that, saying "Hey, you have to actually measure stuff and do things scientifically!" But behaviorists didn't think you could measure what goes on inside someone's head. All you could do is measure what the stimulus is and then how the human responded. Then cognitive people came along and said, "Er, actually, we have some creative ways of measuring what's going on in there." So, the term "cognitive", to me at least, refers very broadly to that stuff that goes on inside someone's head.

Now think about a phrase like "cognitive bias". Does "cognitive" seem appropriate? To me it seems way too broad. Something like "epistemic bias" seems more appropriate.

Everyone hates spam calls. What if a politician campaigned to address little annoyances like this? Seems like it could be a low hanging fruit.

Against "change your mind"

I was just thinking about the phrase "change your mind". It kind of implies that there is some switch that is flipped, which implies that things are binary (I believe X vs I don't believe X). That is incorrect^[1] of course. Probability is in the mind, it is a spectrum, and you update incrementally.