Open Thread September 2018

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I've been thinking a lot lately about where I want to live long-term. I'm currently in Madison Wi, which is really nice, but kinda small and has an unfortunately hot/humid summer. Financially I can live pretty much anywhere I want, except maybe Monaco.

Things I want, not in order of importance:

1. A nice house. In an ideal world, the house would house several of my closest friends, be walkable to parks, shops, and restaurants, and be close enough to other friends that they drop by regularly. I am also very interested in running a public space or a semi-public space adjacent or close to the house, possibly a makerspace, possibly a cafe, or something else. This is one of the reasons it's not instantly obvious that I should move to Berkeley or Manhattan or something. I'm financially well-off but there's like, an order of magnitude in difference in cost of having a nice big place to live. On the other hand, I'm also pretty flexible about living in apartment or something, but for the long term I much prefer having a space I own and can modify and build up to become better and better over the years.

2. People. My best friend and one of my partners lives in Madison at the moment, but most everyone else I like to spend time with or who wants to spend time with me seems to live on one of the coasts or are scattered elsewhere. This is the aspect for which Berkeley is the most obvious winner: I know a ton of rationalists, like meeting new ones and rat-adjacents, and in general like having social situations that I don't personally have to seek out or plan. In the Bay Area, there are tons of regular events that I can go to without having to do the leg-work myself. In addition, there are millions of other people in places like the bay area and NYC of varying kinds and personalities.

3. Climate: I'm big, and while I'm losing weight I still get hot and sweaty very easily. My ideal place in terms of year round climate is the Faroe Islands, where it stays between 33 and 55 degrees Fahrenheit year round in the capitol city. I'd like a place where I can walk around without wanting to die for much of the year. The Bay Area is pretty good for this, but still tends to make me sweaty in the afternoons, especially if I'm walking around the hilly parts of San Francisco. At this point I'm pretty resigned to this, but it's still a factor in where-to-live tradeoffs. I also really enjoy having Seasons, love Autumn and Spring, so places that are as similar all year round as the bay are less preferable in that respect.

4. Walkability/transitability. This one is pretty standard. I like being able to go cool places without having to spend hours in traffic or hassle hugely to park my car.

5. Culture: I like living in a place that has lots of little cafes and bookstores and restaurants that are around, as well as museums and bars and live music and stuff. To a lesser extent I care about the culture of the kinds of people who live in the city, but in practice I'm going to end up mostly hanging out with small subcultures anyway.

6. Something one could summarize as Coolness/Importance: I like the idea of being involved in Big, World-changing Things, despite being very lazy. Places like Manhattan, Hollywood, SF, etc. are attractive at least partially because I can see and potentially participate in important cultural events and shifts. This is one of the things I could conceivably do in Madison but, like assembling a friend group of like-minded people from eg grad students, would be a lot of work.

7. The classic things like low-crime and not too smelly/loud would be good but I can mitigate most of these by living in nicer parts of places. Still, not a zero-factor.

8. I like the idea of being a locally medium-to-high status person whose place people like to visit and who people talk to when they want introductions, as a sort of community nexus type thing. This obviously trades off against moving to places where such people already exist.

One of the options I'm considering is buying a big house in Madison and setting it up something like REACH or the Blackpool EA hotel, and trying to lure rationalists to come live here, as well as making it an outreachy type place for local potential rats. The plus side is I'd get to stay in the city I know like, the downside is it would be a lot more work and potentially not even achieve the kind of life I want. But if I succeed in creating a mini-hub, I'll get to have pretty much all I want for like, 1/10 the cost of moving to SF. Another option is to nominally stay in Madison, but travel 2-3 months out of the year, probably in deepest winter/summer.

I'm looking for input like: direct recommendations for specific cities in ways I probably haven't considered, people who specifically like me commenting that they want me to live in their city, case studies/reports of people who have moved and think they're similar enough to me to give me good input, comparisons from people who have lived in multiple Big Cities as to which are Better, and whatever else people feel like mentioning. Also I want horror stories of living in Manhattan, SF, Berkeley, LA, and Seattle (this is my current shortlist).

Thanks in advance!

I think it would be benefitial to always link the last open thread in a new open thread in the main text.

Seems like some other people want to bring back the Sabbath.

Folk values -- the qualities of the "I love science" crowd as contrasted to the qualities of actual, exceptional scientists -- matter too. The common folk outnumber the epic heroes.

This holds true even if you believe that everyone can become an epic hero! People need to know, rather than guess and hope, that walking the path to becoming an epic hero might look and feel rather different than doing active epic heroing. In theory one ought to be able to derive the appropriate instrumental goals from the terminal goal, but in practice people very frequently mess this up.

The general crowd has a different job than the inner circle, and treating this difference as orthogonal propagates fewer errors than treating it as a matter of degree.

Folk rationality needs to strongly protect against infohazards until one gets a chance to develop less vulnerable internal habits. Folk rationality needs to celebrate successfully satisficing goals and identifying picas rather than going for hard optimization because amateur min-maxing just spawns Goodhart [LW · GW] demons every which way. Folk rationality needs to prize keeping social commitments and good conflict mediation tools; it needs to honor social workers straightforwardly addressing social or resource problems. Folk rationality needs luminosity [LW · GW], and therapy. Folk rationality should also have civic duty of proactive personal data collection, cheering on replications, participating in RCTs, and not ghosting or lizardmanning surveys... because science needs to get done d'arvit.

Interested in cruxing

The EU seems to get rid of the habit of changing the clocks around twice a year, in an exercise of listening to public feedback.

He said that the decision was taken after a vast majority of EU citizens — primarily from Germany — who took part in a survey on the issue called for an end to biannual clock changes.

Massive support for halting daylight saving time

Over 80 percent of respondents supported abolishing changing the clocks in summer and winter in a survey that ran between July 4 and August 16, according to media reports on the results.

It's interesting that the EU seems to be able to coordinate currently on an issue like this where the right answer is more or less obvious but where the coordination problem is massive.

Do we have other similar problems with obvious answers that are just a matter of getting enough people coordinated?

I remember reading on LessWrong about a study a while back that compared trained psychologists to lay-people and found that the trained psychologists didn't do any better. Does anybody know the study or LessWrong post?

Eliezer made this attempt at naming a large number computable by a small Turing machine. What I'm wondering is exactly what axioms we need to use in order to prove that this Turning machine does indeed halt. The description of the Turing machine uses a large cardinal axiom ("there exists an I0 rank-into-rank cardinal"), but I don't think that assuming this cardinal is enough to prove that the machine halts. Is it enough to assume that this axiom is consistent? Or is something stronger needed?

Happy Petrov Day!

I'm a bit confused by the rationalWiki. Is that maintained by anyone? I saw page for EY, and it seemed either be genuinely harsh/scathing/dismissive, or a poorly executed inside joke.

I think given that we seem to have settled on Open Threads being stickied, we can get rid of the first bullet point.

How do people organize their long ongoing research projects (academic or otherwise)? I do a lot of these but think I would benefit from more of a system than I have right now.

Just finished reading Yuval Noah Harari's new book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. Primary reaction: even if you already know all the things being presented in the book, it is worth a read just because of the clarity into the discussion the book offers.

This article seems to have some bearing on decision theory, but I don't know enough about it or quantum mechanics to say what that bearing might be.

I'd be interested to know others' take on the article.

Should the mind projection fallacy actually be considered a fallacy? It seems like being unable to imagine a scenario where something is possible is in fact Bayesian evidence that it is impossible, but only weak Bayesian evidence. Being unable to imagine a scenario where 2+2=5, for instance, could be considered evidence that 2+2 ever equaling 5 is impossible.