Posts

Las Vegas – ACX Meetups Everywhere Spring 2024 2024-03-30T11:19:13.556Z
Las Vegas, Nevada, USA – ACX Meetups Everywhere Fall 2023 2023-08-25T23:41:44.834Z
Las Vegas, Nevada, USA – ACX Meetups Everywhere Spring 2023 2023-04-10T22:12:32.937Z
Las Vegas, NV – ACX Meetups Everywhere 2022 2022-08-24T23:00:51.875Z
ACX Meetups Everywhere: Vegas 2022-08-17T00:22:55.405Z
Vegas ACX/SSC/LW meetup 2022-03-18T02:33:57.529Z
Food manufacturers are out to get you 2022-03-13T19:36:06.273Z
Las Vegas, NV – ACX Meetups Everywhere 2021 2021-08-23T08:53:50.224Z

Comments

Comment by jwray on Failures in Kindness · 2024-07-30T03:36:25.537Z · LW · GW

prices are one of the best mechanisms for communicating the strength of preferences, but perhaps among friends you want a separate made-up currency with a more equal distribution. Daniel Reeves just bites the bullet and uses dollars though:  https://messymatters.com/tv/

Comment by jwray on Failures in Kindness · 2024-07-22T23:42:48.062Z · LW · GW

Re computational unkindness, optimizing solely for what one person wants is easy.  The complexity mostly arises from the picker trying to satisfy others' implicit preferences that they pretend not to have for the sake of being "flexible".

Comment by jwray on Ends Don't Justify Means (Among Humans) · 2022-11-19T16:42:04.617Z · LW · GW

If our corrupted hardware can't be trusted to compute the consequences in a specific case, it probably also can't be trusted to compute the consequences of a general rule.  All our derivations of deontological rules will be tilted in the direction of self interest or tribalism or unexamined disgust responses, not some galaxy-brained evaluation of the consequences of applying the rule to all possible situations.

Russell conjugation:  I have deontological guardrails, you have customs, he has ancient taboos.

[edit: related Scott post which I endorse in spite of what I said above:  https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/23/in-favor-of-niceness-community-and-civilization/]

Comment by jwray on St. Louis Meetup - London Tea Room · 2022-03-01T06:01:21.663Z · LW · GW

Is there somewhere I can sign up to get notified of all the future St Louis meetups?

Comment by jwray on Newcomb's Grandfather · 2022-02-02T03:32:32.247Z · LW · GW

Suppose my decision algorithm is:  I obtain the source code of Omega and run its prediction algorithm to determine what it predicts I will do, and then do the opposite of that.

This would be kind of like the proof that the halting problem is non-computable.

Comment by jwray on Newcomb's Grandfather · 2022-02-02T03:28:52.465Z · LW · GW

Certainly perfect prediction is impossible in some cases.  Look at the halting problem in computer science.

Comment by jwray on Let's Rename Ourselves The "Metacognitive Movement" · 2022-01-16T17:46:10.883Z · LW · GW
Comment by jwray on You have a set amount of "weirdness points". Spend them wisely. · 2022-01-16T03:27:06.570Z · LW · GW

This seems like a subset of point #7 here (https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/02/20/writing-advice/)

7. Figure out who you’re trying to convince, then use the right tribal signals

I would define weirdness as emitting signals that the tribe recognizes as "other" but not "enemy".  Emitting enough of the in-group signals may counteract that.

This is also reminiscent of John Gottman's empirical research on married couples where he found they were much more likely to split if the ratio of positive to negative interactions was less than 5 to 1.

Comment by jwray on The Point of Trade · 2021-07-07T06:33:59.991Z · LW · GW

Intertemporal arbitrage: buying corn when there's a bumper crop and selling it when there's a drought.  How do we get rid of that?   Either time travel or giving everyone lots of storage space and prior knowledge of all the goods he will ever need and their future abundance/scarcity time series.

Price signals arising from trade are also an incentive for consuming less of / producing more of scarce things to make them less scarce.  Without the incentives of prices we'd need some other way of enforcing rationing of the finite capacity of the iron mines and communicating each person's marginal utility for iron.  A borg hivemind.

Comment by jwray on MIRI location optimization (and related topics) discussion · 2021-05-29T20:49:26.151Z · LW · GW

Bellingham was also one of my top finalists for a personal move after I spent dozens of hours poring over statistics and maps.   I used a tool on city-data.com that works like a stock screener for cities.

http://www.city-data.com/advanced/search.php#body?fips=0&csize=a&sc=10&sd=1&states=ALL&near=&nam_crit1=5195&b5195=20000&e5195=MAX&i5195=1&nam_crit2=1033&b1033=20000&e1033=MAX&i1033=1&nam_crit3=5900&b5900=MIN&e5900=5&i5900=1&nam_crit4=4048&b4048=MIN&e4048=45&i4048=1&nam_crit5=983&b983=1&e983=MAX&i983=1&nam_crit6=6532&b6532=1&e6532=MAX&i6532=1&nam_crit7=4036&b4036=MIN&e4036=502000&i4036=1&nam_crit8=507&b507=MIN&e507=85&i507=1&nam_crit9=5269&b5269=80&e5269=MAX&i5269=1&nam_crit10=6612&b6612=5&e6612=MAX&i6612=1&ps=20&p=0

Comment by jwray on Is there any plausible mechanisms for why taking an mRNA vaccine might be undesirable for a young healthy adult? · 2021-04-15T05:40:43.303Z · LW · GW

I thought of a second potential problem in my layman armchair.  Every cell that a virus infects, it kills (when the cell dies, the new viruses pop out).  But what if the mRNA for a single protein just messes up a cell, without killing it?   Possibly worse than just killing it.

Comment by jwray on Is there any plausible mechanisms for why taking an mRNA vaccine might be undesirable for a young healthy adult? · 2021-04-15T05:38:07.841Z · LW · GW

The mRNA tricks your cells into making a spike protein

The alternative is the live adenovirus vector, which tricks your cells into making a spike protein PLUS all the other proteins that make up the adenovirus.

So it seems like the former probably can't be any worse unless it "infects" different types of cells.