Open Thread, November 16–30, 2012

Details, please!!

Seems to me that companies want high-agency employees, but for sufficiently high values, "high-agency employee" is almost an oxymoron. If a person is very-high-agency, why shouldn't they start their own company and keep all the profit? The mere fact that someone agrees to be your employee suggests that a) they are missing some important skills, and b) they cannot compensate for the missing skills e.g. by paying someone else to do it.

OK, in real life I can imagine reasons why a very-high-agency person would become an employee. Maybe the company has a monopoly, or is willing to pay tons of money. But most probably, the given person is not strategic, and never realized they don't need a boss or they have some emotional problem with being a boss. Finding and employing such person could be a gold mine.

Minor correction: it's 'agency', not 'agenty'.

I just wrote two hundred times ten words like this, on why we should not use sun-colored stuff we pull out of the ground as money. I think I want to hurt myself.

Have you ever wondered what makes a light bright? Lights are bright because they are very hot, and hot things become bright. The hotter something gets, the brighter it will be.

But why are hot things bright? Everything is made up of many very tiny things, and these tiny things are moving. When things are hot, the tiny things move very, very fast, and when they are cool the tiny things move slower.

When the tiny things hit each other, they give off light. The faster they are going when they hit each other, the bluer the light they give off is. When they move faster, they also run into each other more often, so they give off more light. That means that when the tiny things move very, very slowly, the light they give off is too red for you to see.

That means as things get hot, they will become slightly red, then get brighter and turn toward the color of the sun, then get really bright and turn white.

Inside a light there is a long but not wide thing that gets very hot when you run power through it. It gets hot enough to be white and bright enough to light up a room.

Change after I put this up: I have a class that I have to write a twenty hundred word paper for. I am thinking about writing the whole paper like this. That would be a way to show that I don't need to use big words to write a good paper, and I also would not get bored while writing. This is fun.

Lateral inhibition, surprisingly easy:

A brain cell that makes a lot of noise can stop other cells that are close from talking at the same time.

Fourier synthesis, not as easy:

When you hear a sound, little pieces of tight, heavy air or not packed, light air are hitting your ear. The way the inside of your ear moves can be used to figure out what the sound was like and make it again. We build things that are like big ears to make the sounds. The inside of the built ear pushes air so that it's tight and heavy again, instead of like before where the tight, heavy air pushed on your ear.

How far your inside ear part has moved at each moment can be drawn to make lines that goes up and down as it flies right. When a point of the funny line is in the middle, that shows the moments when the inside ear part wasn't moving or was moving between being more pushed inside or more pushed outside.

Given a funny line that shows what a sound was like, we can show how its shadow falls on different directions in the space of slowly changing lines that always look the same after you move along them a little way, or that much again, and so on. To do this though, you have to be able to state the area that lies between the middle line and the line that comes from the funny line times the funny line. Also, the repeating lines have to not have any shadow on each other. How big the shadow is between two funny lines is figured out using the inner-times game with the area finding game. The area has to be nothing.

There are lots of kinds of lines like this that people who study sound can use, but the most often used ones are like the shadows of point going along the side of a ring.

This was fun. For a similar exercise in explaining things with a restricted vocabulary see Guy Steele's lecture "Growing a Language". He begins using only monosyllabic words, introducing new polysyllabic words in terms of monosyllabic and previously defined polysyllabic words.

Don't you mean:

I want to see all the people here write their comments using this. Call it working on making things easier to understand for people who aren't you.

CHANGE MADE AFTER I WROTE THIS THE FIRST TIME: Wow, it's actually making things worse, sort of. Do any people here want to make a thing that helps you see when you're using big words that uses the top 5000 words? Top 10000? In a way that I find funny, this thing that tells you how hard something is to read says that your writing needs you to read like a high school or college student to understand them easily the first time.

I have now written a total of about six thousand words on five fairly concept-heavy subjects (linear algebra, parallax and cepheid variables, the gold standard, the normal distribution/Central Limit Theorem, and complex numbers), There are a couple of observations I would like to make.

Although it's fun, and stylistically appealing, to write as if you were talking to a five-year-old, there are plenty of sentences that would be thought of as "adult"-level sentences which require little to no modification. There are a lot of words in the top 1000 list. Also, there are specific words I find myself trying to use over and over again. "Shape", "triangle" and "measure" crop up a lot as far as subjects with geometric interpretations go. I would be interested in seeing a log of all the forbidden words that crop up across all users.

The stars are very far away. We sometimes figure out how far away the stars are by looking at them from two different places and seeing how high up they are in the sky. We use what we know about three-sided things to learn how far away they are.

The most far-away we can figure out needs two different places to look from that are very far away from each other, or very good man-made eyes in space. On this world we can only use this plan for stars that would take two or three tens of years for their light to reach us (light years), or with very good man-made eyes in space a ten and a half hundred light years, seeing how high up the stars are in the sky when the man-made space-eyes are on different sides of the sun.

Some stars that have died will flash in space. How bright they are and how fast they flash is almost the same no matter where they are, so we can use this to figure out how far away they are, even if they are very, very, very far away. This lets us figure out how far away some of the most far away things in space are.

My social philosophy essay: Problems between people and groups of people can be fixed by using 'philosophy' which is a way of thinking better, by using ways of thinking that are known to work and carefully checking if you've got it right. This can mean checking if the words you are using mean the same things to you and to other people, if you are acting like some things are true but not saying them, or if you have thought of all the things that are made true by the things you say (or think) are true. People and groups of people often think different things are true, or have different ideas of the best way to fix the same problem. We need them to talk to work out why they don't agree and work out the ways we are going to fix the problems.

Describing philosophy was really hard, can anyone give a good definition of rationality (other than "thinking good").

Reminds me of "Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity: In Words of Four Letters or Less".

Say we have many bad things that can happen, and we would like all of them not to happen. For each thing we know the chance that it happens. How can we show that we can avoid every bad thing?

One way is if all the chances are small, and there are not too many bad things. In the worst case, every bad thing happens alone, so that two bad things never happen together. Then to find the chance that a bad thing happens, we could add up all the chances for all the bad things. If this is less than one, then there must be a way for no bad thing to happen.

We can sometimes do better if most of the bad things do not care about each other: if the chance that one bad thing happens only changes because of a few other bad things (one way this can happen is if all the bad things are about dice rolls, and there are only a few bad things about each die). Now if we only add up the chances for the bad things that one bad thing cares about, and this is still small (less than one in four), then we can still avoid all the bad things, no matter how many there are!

Did anyone ever make a thing to write words in which has only the half hundred times one hundred (or hundred times hundred) most used words in it?

I am asking because I want to use this interesting thing for important uses.

I think either the place with the words in the box or the set of agreed-upon ideas we follow when writing in this way should change so that we can bring new words into our shared set of words. I'm so used to being able to do this that not being able to do so makes writing in this way more of a pain than something to enjoy. To show what I mean, I might say that 'to define' means to set out a new word which the person who I'm speaking to might not know, and give them a way of knowing what I mean when I use that word later. That way, I can state ideas with less words: now that I have set out a meaning for the word 'define', the above could be written in a different way as 'I would like to be able to define new words'. In fact, I think that this would be so nice that I might try to define more and more words in an easy to read way until I'm able to write as usual without spending any time taking all of the words I usually use and putting bigger sets of shorter words in their place.

Meta

What are readability calculators basing their levels on? Is there any empirical data about what features of text make it more or less easy to read? Word choice is one thing, but structure and other less obvious things probably also play a part.

Non-permitted words in italics.

Can you describe a complex topic using only the thousand most common english words? It's harder that it looks. Type text in the box below to try it out.

The wording of the challenge is a long way from living within its own constraints.

Numbers can be put in four-sided boxes. Just like you can add and take away alone numbers, and make many times alone numbers, and share alone numbers between alone numbers, you can do things like this (but not just the same) to four-sided boxes of numbers. It is important that boxes of numbers can eat each other. Alone numbers can not eat each other.

Any thing that happens which looks like a straight line on a piece of paper can be made into a box of numbers. This makes boxes of numbers very strong. A big box of numbers can eat a small box of numbers and make another small box of numbers that means something. So a big box of numbers about babies can eat a small box of numbers about all the babies there are now, and make a small box of numbers about all the babies there will be tomorrow. Or a big box of numbers about where things are can eat a small box of numbers that says where one important thing is now, and make a small box of numbers that says where the important thing is tomorrow.

One big box of numbers can eat another big box of numbers (if it's not too big or not too small) and do what that box of numbers does on top of what it did to begin with. So a box of numbers about how many babies are going to be made can eat a box of numbers about what happens to babies after they are made, and say what is going to happen to babies that have not been made yet.

(I should do other things).

A tentative sequence for learning "data science" (inspired by Daniel_Burfoot):

• Statistics One
• Learn to Program: The Fundamentals
• Learn SQL The Hard Way
• Introduction to Data Science
• Machine Learning
• Computing for Data Analysis

What should prospective "data scientists" be learning, and where can they find it?

matt of Conductrics put up a somewhat detailed blog post on learning data science.

SQL, machine learning, statistics, data visualization.

Whenever I see the phrase "data science" I remember Cosma Shalizi's blog posts about data scientists being statisticians who can program and market themselves well. Maybe you can lift something from his stats department's course list?

Sometimes the political opinions can result in direct actions, but that is rather rare today. (I guess it is not like you and your friends are going to volunteer as soldiers for the opposite sides in Gaza.) The biggest "action" most people do is giving their vote. One vote of a few millions... perhaps our brains are not able to work with values like this, so we feel like our friends have at least 5% of the votes each.

But even when the "real" consequences of our opinions are close to zero, social consequences remain. As long as other people are polarized about some issue, you opinion about conflict in Gaza is essentialy a decision to join the "team Israel" or "team Palestine". This choice is absolutely unrelated to the actual people killing each other in the desert. This choice is about whether Joe will consider you an ally, and Jane an enemy, or the other way. With high probability, neither Joe nor Jane are personally related to people killing each other in the desert, and their choices were also based on their preference to be in the same team with some other people. But having made their choice and joined a team, their monkey brains were reprogrammed to feel very emotional about this topic. (Of course their answer would be that X are good people suffering from Y's evil actions -- and if sometime some X hurts some Y, that's just a self-defense or a deserved payback -- and if you don't see it the same way, well then there is something morally wrong about you.)

In some way, calculating the "mindkilling power" of a topic is like calculating a Page Rank of a web page. A web page has high Page Rank if many pages with high Page Rank link to it. And a topic is strongly mindkilling, if many people around you are strongly mindkilled about it. Somewhere it starts with someone having (or expecting to have) real consequences, but later it is mostly about the structure of social networks and relationships between the memes.

Political issues are mindkillers because people tend to incorporate them into their personal identites; however, people often incorporate certain issues more strongly than others. A more general slogan might read "incorporating things into your personal sense of identity is the mindkiller".

Well if there's anything you can do to increase the level of mindkill in politics, it's mix in religion. Are they less polarized on issues like, say, abortion?

I precommit to upvoting and saying positive things about anyone who comments saying they've donated. Hopefully tha will move at least some people to the positive side of the akrasia/altruism balance.

Watson as I understand it is applying pre-existing knowledge. It seems the limiting factor on practical nootropics is the number of good studies rather than applying that data.

[Presumably the next step is to create a Watson for Watson design?]

People have been trying to do social engineering with print for hundreds of years and trying to educate the general populace to the scientific worldview for at least a century, and yet the sanity waterline is still as low as it is. Many intellectual subcultures have published pamphlets with contents that the in-group finds very convincing, yet they generally always end up ignored.

What would the newspaper be doing differently compared to the things that came before?

Why paper, instead of internet? Trivial inconveniences. When someone already has a piece of paper in their hand, it is so easy to start reading it.

I dunno... People often throw away paper that's handed to them for free without even taking more than a glance at it; OTOH, web pages can be shared on Facebook.

Have you ever lived in a place with free newspapers? Nowhere near 10% read them.

Do we want to associate ourselves with the sort of people who hand on leaflets on their beliefs in public places? There's a non-trivial stigma attached.

I'd like to see something which supplies a small daily dose of established science, but you'd probably need a writer who's as engaging as Asimov-- and even then, not that many people are interested.

The writing at Wikipedia tends not to be engaging. Admittedly, I'm generalizing from one example.

I'm not sure that this is a full-time job for just one person. If nothing else, getting advertising is work.

I think the Philadelphia Weekly is a pretty good free paper, but I read most of the articles and ignore the advertising.

I don't think the basic idea is bad, but I'd start with a website-- lower investment, more flexibility, and better feedback about what people read. It would be a better way to find out what actually engages people.

I like Ted Chiang as well. My favorites are Liking What You See and Hell Is the Absence of God.

I think something is very, very wrong with me. Instead of feeling Lovecraftian horror upon reading that, I immediately began trying to think of ways to use Predictors to hack the universe. Here's what I came up with (you may want to try for yourself before reading further):

• I can respond to a light by pushing a button in less than a second.
• It's possible to set up a sensor that will send a signal when the light lights up.
• I can hook the light up to the sensor and hook that sensor up to a processor and its own light, allowing my decision to press the button to become entangled with the processor's state before my observation of the light. I can then cover the light of the Predictor so I only see and respond to a light when the processor decides to show it.
• Trivially, I could set up the processor to only show me a light when there has not been a light from the predictor in at least one second. Since the sum of the time it takes the processor to show the light and the time it takes me to respond to that light, this system is forbidden. This selects for a stable time loop in which, for whatever reason, I don't press the button when I see the light, the processor breaks, or something else happens to disrupt the system (probably not something good for me either).
• I can add a quantum random number generator of some variety into the mix, and have that generate numbers that correspond to possible solutions of a problem. If there was no light in the past second or if a solution is found, the device will light up. This will exclude universes in which no solutions are found.
• I can now implement Quantum Bogosort. More importantly and more practically, I can now solve all problems that have solutions that can be verified in 0.1 s or so, which breaks RSA (I think) and a lot of other cryptography.

That's just what I thought of in the first 5 minutes. I think the Predictors would be insanely dangerous, but primarily for reasons other than driving humans insane.

I also recommend Ted Chiang for SF short stories (I haven't read his novels yet). I really liked Exhalation, which won the 2009 Hugo for best short story.

I think the philosophical point of the story gets muddled by the description of the Predictor as functioning through "a circuit with a negative time delay — it sends a signal back in time." This form of "Prediction" is completely compatible with free will, even with libertarian free will (assuming the concept of libertarian free will is coherent in the first place). It just implies that your freely chosen actions can have effects in the past. The story wold work better with the Predictor monitoring your brain "in real time" and seeing your intention to push the button form before you are aware of it, like in the Libet experiments.

Recommendation seconded. Almost all of Ted Chiang's stories are excellent; I particularly recommend Understand, Division by Zero, and Exhalation.

I've always found it funny how modern society is basically formally libertarian about sex and not nearly anything else.

Some part of my brain tells me that can't be right... and yet I can't think of any actual counterexample.

I've always found it funny how modern society is basically formally libertarian about sex and not nearly anything else.

Are we? Western republics put a large subsidy on long-term heterosexual monogamy. While the law is difficult to enforce, marrying someone without romantic intentions is a felony in the United States.

Age of consent laws are supposed to protect children, but selective enforcement is often based on the sex of the perpetrator. (The sex of the victim doesn't matter as much. Men who sleep with boys generate about as much outrage as men who sleep with girls, while women who sleep with boys generates as much outrage as women who sleep with girls.) Sometimes the age of consent laws themselves are discriminatory. The US Supreme Court has held that because girls risk pregnancy, states can impose gender-based ages of consent even for oral and anal sex. And while we're talking about anal sex, Canada's age of consent is higher for anal sex than vaginal, unless the anal sex is between a husband and wife.

Incest laws are interesting because they contradict the progressive narrative of a widening tolerance for different kinds of consensual sex. Politicians speak of incest as if it were always non-consensual, such as when they defend abortion rights for cases of "rape and incest". But even in cases where consent is recognized, this is not always a legal defence.

Can't forget about prostitution laws.

Polyamory is legal if you don't seek the government subsidy, but local regulations often prohibit too many non-relatives from living together. Actually, any alternative lifestyle can be crushed if it offends the homeowners association.

I don't know if this generalizes across the human race, but the culturally assumed default is that children and teenagers want to be more adventurous than their parents want them to be.

Is lack of adventurousness part of altruism?

A proof is a convincing argument that convinces us to such a degree that we can with its help convince others.

I'm reminded of advice I've seen on when, in the martial arts, you may consider yourself a master: when people come to your students, asking "Please teach us."

Although I disagree with the social concept of mathematical proof. There is something social going on, but there is also something that is not social, but is mathematical, existing independently of ourselves, outside space and time. The latter is the actual proof, without which a statement is not a theorem, and the former is people convincing other people that the latter exists and showing them where it is. Both of these things are called "proofs", and both of them are necessary to the practice of mathematics. The social part depends on the mathematical part for its value, just as prospecting for oil has no value unless, in the end, there is oil where you say there is.

It sounds to me that you (or Uspensky) are trying to define "proof" to mean all good things. Perhaps this come from a belief that mathematics is synonymous with proof. Arguing about definitions is generally bad and one common failure mode is to define all good things together. Have you read Thurston? He found a trade-off between proofs (in the usual sense) and other goals.

I don't understand how Uspensky's definition is different from Eliezer's. Is there some minimum number of people a proof has to convince? Does it have to convince everyone? If I'm the only person in the world, is writing a proof impossible, or trivial? It seems that both definitions are saying that a proof will be considered valid by those people who find it absolutely convincing. And those people who do not find it absolutely convincing will not consider it valid. More importantly, it seems that this is all those two definitions are saying, which is why neither of them is very helpful if we want something more concrete than the colloquial sense of proof.

In other words, MM reads Stuff White People Like and has observations of his own to share. That's, um, cute?

Seriously, signaling status through consumption always works like this; the lower-middle classes flock to the brands advertised as "upper-middle class", which causes the actual upper-middle class to avoid those in order to stand out. Been said before. If MM's social co-processor worked better, he would've known how ubiquitous this knowledge is.

Re: this "art" and its associated scene - it is, of course, a very convenient First World Problem to lay at progressivism's feet, but how is it different from the art scenes of past metropolitan cities, like Edwardian London, or Paris under the 3rd Republic? Does Moldbug imagine that there was much less empty posturing and fashionable nonsense and inane pretensions back then?

He's kinda spoiled in his cosy little bubble.

I don't have any references, but I'll share my view:

The way the particles are actually behaving is part of the territory, the mathematical symbols we use to describe such behavior are part of the map.

And I don't see how this calls the whole idea of reductionism into question. In fact, if the behavior of such particles can be described using a simple mathematical formalism, in my opinion, that is reductionism at its finest. We have reduced the apparently complicated motion of, for example, a dog, into the movement of particles according to simple formulas. Simple mathematically describable behavior patterns, though non-physical (if you insist on categorizing them that way), are not magic.

I feel as if I may be missing the point, because I didn't become confused after reading your questions. Please clarify, if I did miss the point.

The laws are in the map, of course (if it came from mind, it is necessarily of a map). And what we call the 'territory' is a map itself. The map/territory distinction is just a useful analogy for explaining that our models of reality aren't necessarily reality (whatever that actually is). Also, keep in mind that there are many incompatible meanings for 'reductionism'. A lot of LWers (like anonymous1) use it in a way that's not in line with EY, and EY uses it in a way that's not in line with philosophy (which is where I suspect most LWers get their definition of it from).

And if the physical laws are in the map, what represents them in the territory?

Good question. A description is sufficient for execution, but what executes the description?

I think the best way to do this (and to improve the meetup functionality) is to make the meetup notifications have an option to repeat (without posting new posts). Make one meetup post, set it to repeat weekly, and then it stays on the map and doesn't clutter discussion.

I've found a temporary way to accomplish this- the weekdays of 2018 appear to be the same as the weekdays of 2012, and so one Austin meetup post has been continually on the map and continually out of Discussion. I have to edit it every week to reflect the new date, but since it hasn't happened yet it stays up to remind me. (I haven't tested this with having the regular time and then editing a past meetup into a future meetup; I imagine it will work, but be easier to forget.)

All the required math is online, of course. The issue is that different people have different gaps in their math education and many are unable to tell where those gaps start and how to fill them. A useful post/sequence/app would construct the pyramid of the math knowledge and skills required for not being stumped by whatever math is in the sequences, let people test their mastery of each piece, map out the gaps and direct them to the relevant online resources in the suitable order. Not sure how much interest is there among the LWers who are qualified to do such a job.

Depends on the amount of effort you are willing to spend. I have a local Squid caching proxy (maybe privoxy or 3proxy or something else is better for you), I have set up URL rewriting and among other things I block some URL patterns for various reasons. It is not too hard to set up and there are various ways to do this with various proxies.

Most of the rule book is rules for character creation and combat. If you already have your character made up, you can get by with borrowing someone else's book.

What the game's like depends a lot on the Dungeon Master and the adventure he has prepared. It could be a lot of "roleplaying" that consists of your characters talking with NPCs with short bits of combat in between, or it could be a hack-and-slash dungeon crawl in which you kill monsters and take their stuff.

As for a video of people playing, although it's not exactly what you asked for, I'd recommend this.

Edit: What's in the rule book? If you forget the rule book at home, can you get along or do you have to go back for it?

If there's no books at the table, it depends on whether your fellow players are willing to trust you to remember rules neutrally and if the DM is willing to adjudicate where no one can remember. There's also the online version for most of the core rules, although not all the exotic extra classes and stuff.

The rule book is there to resolve conflict, mainly in terms of combat. If you're familiar with the kid's game of cops and robbers, it's to make sure there's no arguments about "Bang! I shot you!" "No, I should you first!". The majority of mechanics are of this nature, and the rest of the book is less rules than a description of a fantasy world for players to build off of and improvise within.

In general it's fairly boisterous, and the communal nature of the game means there aren't a lot of gaps. You can do your thinking during the times other players are talking about their decisions or when the monsters are acting or when the DM is explaining, so if you're playing with people who are experienced there aren't a lot of long pauses. Watching from the sidelines is pretty unexciting because most people, while they put some effort into acting, aren't that great, so if you lack the emotional connection with the characters and situations and achievements it's just not that good.

Re: Shy outcasts. A lot of shy outcasts really enjoy the opportunity to act like NOT shy outcasts. DND is normally played in a safer environment where social experimentation is not just encouraged but pretty much required. Pretty much no one CHOOSES to be a shy outcast so much as they're forced to inhabit that corner of existence by everyone else. Being the center of attention of a bunch of people who you respect and who respect you is a lot more pleasant than being the center of attention of people who are primed to mock and belittle you.

If you're interested in experiencing what an actual D&D session is like without having to actually play in one, there are a number of actual play podcasts that are essentially recordings of peoples sessions on the internet.

My impression, from idly watching sometimes at a science fiction club, is that it's fairly boisterous, and few watch from sidelines (certainly I didn't understand what was happening, although if I had known the rules maybe I would've'd a better chance).

Cross-referencing individual reading lists would yield suggestions for common reads. I feel enthusiastic about being in a book club.

Does anyone possess the skill to scrape lists and automate the process?

I've been using the group to browse peoples' profiles and get recommendations and it's been good great for me for that .

I am probably into engaging in most potential activities in the group.

Thank you gokfar.

What do Goodreads groups usually do?

I don't have a great answer for you, but may be able to point you in the right direction. In economics the market for used goods is known as a "secondary market." This is often used in relation to financial instruments, where the stock market that you trade on is the secondary market, while the primary market is the market for initial public offerings (IPOs) and follow-on offerings. In finance it is widely believed (and I assume there is some support, although I haven't looked specifically) that the a secondary market for a financial instrument is an important factor in establishing it's primary market price, but a healthy secondary market in this case actually serves to increase the price in the primary market, because purchasers will pay a premium for higher liquidity. For example, when a corporation issues new bonds, investors will consider how actively traded the corporations existing shares are when determining their willingness to pay.

I assume that for physical goods the dynamics of the secondary market have a very different impact on the primary market, but a search for "secondary markets" on google scholar should probably turn up a starting point.

I think you will only be able to come up with wrong answers to this question.

Starting with an item that has a strong secondary market, and considering the effect of removing the secondary market, you will almost certainly find a reduction in the value of the primary items as they can't be resold. This will ignore numerous important higher order effects, summarized by saying that let to run to equilibrium in the theoretical absence of a second market, you will have a very different primary product. In the case of cars, if used car markets were destroyed, you would lower the value of existing product offerings, but you would create a new market in extremely inexpensive cars to fill the market formerly filled by used cars. A lot of people would rather buy a 10 year old mercedes than brand new Scion or Smart car, killing the used market will cause Mercedes to reduce what it spends on making its cars durable, and cause a big increase in the sales of new cheap little cars.

Similarly with financial instruments, removing the secondary market in bonds and stocks and such would presumably result in an average shorter maturity term on newly issued bonds, and probably an increased dividend yield on stocks (on average). Ignoring the changes int he financial products available, you might first figure the loss of the secondary market a disaster for the primary producers, but you would then need to consider how these producers would shift the nature of their products and especially, how they would fill with new stock on bonds the demand shifted to new products that used to be filled in the secondary market.

On reflection, it seems unambiguous that a good secondary market is a benefit to consumers, but it seems much harder to figure out whether it is a benefit to producers. But I think it is easy to predict that the answer derived from only first order thinking about the changes going from one to the other will overestimate the destruction of value from the change because it will underestimate the way the mix of newly produced items will be changed to reflect the loss of a secondary market.

Well, one way is to look at shocks to reselling or buying used (new regulation, DRM, etc.) and see how much demand for new products decreases because of the de facto price increase.

Another way might be to think of reselling as a subsidy to buying new - a rebate, if you will. If you can estimate how much a discount would increase sales and the producers' profits, then you can take the average resell price times probability someone will resell and treat that as a discount and figure out from there.

I know I've read economics research on this topic in the past, so you can probably google up some good papers.

Issues/bug reports are tracked on Google Code.

I liked the fact that the author didn't use cognitive bias as an excuse to give up on talking about politics altogether (which seems to be LWian consensus), but instead made demonstrable claims about politics.

EDIT: in response to the previous version of Michaelos' post, I said:

It makes me uncomfortable when LWers say things like:

"Politics is the Mindkiller" appears to be acknowledged as early as the second sentence.

It smacks of, "Oh, look at the unenlightened people finally catching on." Lesswrong didn't invent cognitive science, and "politics is the mindkiller" is just our term for a well-established result of cognitive science. The article is about motivated reasoning, and the author isn't "acknowledging" it, but explaining it.

I think it is named "inventing a fictitious person who holds contradictory beliefs, in order to cast aspersions on one of those beliefs" and is a form of strawman fallacy.

See, e.g. Population Services International.

Some quotes from their web site:

The mission of PSI is to measurably improve the health of poor and vulnerable people in the developing world, principally through social marketing of family planning and health products and services, and health communications.

In 2009 alone, PSI prevented an estimated 3.5 million unintended pregnancies and over 17,000 maternal deaths, and enabled millions of couples to plan their families.

Over the past three decades, PSI has expanded the contraceptive methods in its portfolio from male condoms and oral contraceptives to include injectable contraceptives, intrauterine contraceptive devices (IUD), emergency contraception pills, implants, female condoms, voluntary sterilization, and fertility awareness methods such as the Standard Days Method using Cyclebeads®. PSI’s RH platform has also grown to address maternal mortality through the prevention of post-partum hemorrhage and sepsis, and the prevention of unsafe abortion.

I believe the closest existing thing is the x-risk careers mailing list.

Would it be just a "jobs thread for LW readers", or would the texts themselves be more rational/optimal that usual?

My experience (which is country- and industry-specific) is that job offers are typically very unspecific. Sometimes I read five of them in a row, and I have problem to tell a difference -- to make a prediction that I would expect to be true if I take a job A, and false if I take a job B.

It's "We are a successful growing company. We are looking for highly motivated people. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera" all over again.

A part of this is probably caused by job agencies, posting on behalf of their clients, being intentionally unspecific to prevent a candidate from contacting the employer directly. But I guess inferential distances and signalling (and perhaps outright cheating) also play a significant role.

Could we design a better system that all rational participants would prefer to use? Or is there some inherent conflict, where making things easier for one side would make it less profitable for the other side? (For example if it takes a lot of time for the candidate to find a decent job, they are more likely to take the first decent job offer. But if they get dozen great offers, they can optimize for a highest salary; which would make employers participating in this system pay more than they would outside of the system.)

The problem is how classical logical statements work. The statement "If A then B" more properly translates as "~(A and ~B)".

Thus, we get valid logical statements that look bizarre to humans: "If Paris is the capital of France, then Rome is the capital of Italy" seems untrue in a causal sense (if we changed the capital of France, we would not change the capital of Italy, and vice versa) but it is true in a logical sense, because A is true, B is true, true and ~true is false, and ~false is true.

That example seems just silly, but the problem is the reverse example is disastrous. Notice that, because of the "and," if A is false then it doesn't matter what B is: false and X is false, ~false is true. If I choose the premise "Marseilles is the capital of France," then any B works. "If Marseilles is the capital of France, then I will receive infinite utility" is a true relationship under classical logic, but is clearly not a causal relationship: changing the capital will not grant me infinite utility, and as soon as the capital changes, the logical truth of the sentence will change.

If you have a reasoner that makes decisions, they need to use causal logic, not classical logic, or they'll get tripped up by the word "implication."

To me, it looks like the five-and-ten problem is that the quotation is not the referent. It seems to me that a program reasoning about its utitlity function in the way explained in the article is like a person saying " ' "Snow is white." is true.' is a true statement." The word true cannot coherently have the same meaning in both locations within the sentence.