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The irony that you mention in the last paragraph reminds me of another LW post that was already on my mind while reading this one: Slack matters more than any outcome. It points at the funny way that systems fight back in predictable-yet-in-practice-unexpected ways, all the way up and all the way down, and is I think an attempt at a more precise expression of the kind of Green wisdom referred to around "harmony with the Way of Things".
[as our oldest sees it] Sentences are things we build together, rather than a way for different people to share their own perspectives with each other.
I've gone through a huge growth arc as an adult in recognizing the extent to which (especially in really good conversations) sentences are things we build together. Not that we don't have different perspectives, but when conversation is really flowing, it makes way more sense to view it as "our collective mind is thinking" and not "I am transmitting information to you, then getting information back" etc.
(When we're more at odds with someone, whether adversarial or just conflict with a loved one, it can be more like the transmit mode, and sometimes (tho not always) it seems to work best if we can get into the co-thinking mode again. Though there's not a hack for that—it's a deep trust-dancing puzzle!)
The 2nd half of this video is about this collective mind thing: https://youtu.be/G3vcXZPlsDc
Probably be grounded in more than one social group. Even being part of two different high-intensity groups seems like it should reduce the dynamics here a lot.
Worked well for me!
Eric Chisholm likes to phrase this principle as "the secret to cults is to be in at least two of them".
My guess is that part of what's going on here is that in certain ways attempting to optimize for coordination is at greater risk for goodhart than other things. To take an example from the post to its limit, the freelancer who invests 100% in selling their services and 0% in being skilled at them or providing them is a fraud. But also the freelancer who invests 100% in skills but 0% in selling is out of business.
So there's a need for some sort of dynamic balance.
But my guess is that for whatever reasons (documented in Moral Mazes no doubt) certain kinds of organizations put pressure on the managers to go all the way in one direction, rather than finding that balance.
The "sometimes" bit here is key. It's my impression that people who insist that "people are just like LLMs" are basically telling you that they spend most/all of their time in conversations that are on autopilot, rather than ones where someone actually means or intends something.
Great post. A few typos that weren't worth commenting to mention ("LMM" instead of "LLM") but I felt like it was worth noting that
In our ‘casual’ or ‘actually thinking’ mode
probably wants to be "causal".
I overall like what you're trying to point at here — you're raising a real and important concern about what's happening with the weakening of protection from random angry people in a wide range of places including tenure, due to cultural shifts and changes in media (eg social media).
At the same time, the Rainbowland example is a terrible example for making this point here. Or at least, making it in the way you describe. As jaspax and ChristianKI note, "it's about accepting people" obfuscates the meaning of the song that was why it got banned, one that many people agree with.
It's totally plausible to me, given what I've seen of people being afraid of children being exposed to trans ideology, that the school administrators themselves banned the song as part of doing their job to create a good learning environment for kids, no cowtowing to angry complainer required. I agree that banning kids wanting to sing the song is not useful and perhaps counterproductive, but if ordinary people getting upset about it seems absurd to you then I suspect you're out of touch with what a substantial and growing fraction of people think, including many people "on the left" and some trans people: we need to keep trans ideology out of schools in order to keep kids safe & sane. Not because trans people aren't real or deserve respect, but because kids are getting memed not just into accepting people but into positions like "it's not cool to be straight" which is non-acceptance and a dumb reason for experimental medical treatments. From this perspective, Rainbowland looks like a song that's ostensibly about motivation & discipline but is subtextually about how cool it is to be anorexic.
But most people who think this are being quiet because they don't want to attract the very attacks you're talking about here, from the small minority of hostile vindictive people! I only recently got enough clarity on the subject, sense of importance, and sense that I'm not alone with my sense of things, that I decided it was important to voice my relatively boring view that's somehow controversial.
I resonate a lot with this, and it makes me feel slightly less alone.
I've started making some videos where I rant about products that fail to achieve the main thing they're designed to do, and get worse with successive iterations and I've found a few appreciative commenters:
Rant successful, it made someone else feel like they weren't alone
And part of my experience of the importance of ranting about it, even if nobody appreciates it, is that it keeps me from forgetting my homeland, to use your metaphor.
My most recent published blog post had in the 2nd paragraph "I bet there’s nobody reading this who has never used a phrase like..." and this article made me think it would be kind to change it.
Then I searched your facebook posts and you have indeed used the phrase, so in this case at least you aren't nobody. But I'm still changing the post.
(The phrase is "part of me", which if any of my friends were to somehow have never once used I wouldn't have been surprised to discover it you.)
Right, yeah. And that (eventually) requires input of food into the person, but in principle they could be in a physically closed system that already has food & air in it... although that's sort of beside the point. And isn't that different from someone meditating for a few hours between meals. The energy is already in the system for now, and it can use that to untangle adaptive entropy.
Huh, reading this I noticed that counterintuitively, alignment requires letting go of the outcome. Like, what defines a non-aligned AI (not an enemy-aligned one but one that doesn't align to any human value) is its tendency to keep forcing the thing it's forcing rather than returning to some deeper sense of what matters.
Humans do the same thing when they pursue a goal while having lost touch with what matters, and depending on how it shows up we call it "goodharting" or "lost purposes". The mere fact that we can identify the existence of goodharting and so on indicates that we have some ability to tell what's important to us, that's separate from whatever we're "optimizing" for. It seems to me like this is the "listening" you're talking about.
And so unalignment can refer both to a person who isn't listening to all parts of themselves, and to eg corporations that aren't listening to people who are trying to raise concerns about the ethics of the company's behavior.
The question of where an AI would get its true source of "what matters" from seems like a bit of a puzzle. One answer would be to have it "listen to the humans" but that seems to miss the part where the AI needs to itself be able to tell the difference between actually listening to the humans and goodharting on "listen to the humans".
Maybe instead of "shut up and do the impossible" we need "listen, and do the impossible" 😆
Sort of flips where the agency needs to point.
This "it gets worse if you try to deal with it" isn't necessarily true in every case. In this way adaptive entropy is actually unlike thermodynamic entropy: it's possible to reduce adaptive entropy within a closed system.
Actually naming whether this bolded part is true would require defining what "closed" means in the context of an adaptive system—it's clearly different than a closed system in the physical sense, since all adaptive systems have to be open in order to live.
This is great and I'm looking forward to your book.
Some adjacent ideas:
I feel like I've been appreciating the nature of wisdom (as you describe it here) increasingly much over the past couple of years. One thing this has led me to is looking at tautologies, where the sentence in some sense makes no claim but directs your attention to something that's self-evident once you look. For example, "the people you spend time with will end up being the people you've spent time with".
In 2017, I wrote an article about transcending regret, and a few years later I shared it with a friend and said:
at the time I wrote this, I hadn't gotten the insight as deep into my bones as I now have, & I still have much further to go
but the insight is still legit
& the articulation is good
& your integration will be yours anyway no matter how well I had it integrated when I wrote it
This feels like sort a dual of the sazen, and also maybe relates to the comment Kaj made about experiences that are hard to point at verbally even once you have experienced them.
Huh—it suddenly struck me that Peter Singer is doing the exact same thing in the drowning child thought experiment, by the way, as Tyler Alterman points out beautifully in Effective altruism in the garden of ends. He takes for granted that the frame of "moral obligation" is relevant to why someone might save the child, then uses our intuitions towards saving the child to suggest that we agree with him about this obligation being present and relevant, then he uses logic to argue that this obligation applies elsewhere too. All of that is totally explicit and rational within that frame, but he chose the frame.
In both cases, everyone agrees about what actually happens (a child dies, or doesn't; you contribute, or you don't).
In both cases, everyone agrees because within the frame that has been presented there is no difference! Meanwhile there is a difference in many other useful frames! And this choice of frame is NOT, as far as I can recall, explicit. Rather than recall, let me actually just go check... watching this video, he doesn't use the phrase "moral obligation", but asks "[if I walked past,] would I have done something wrong?". This interactive version offers a forced choice "do you have a moral obligation to rescue the child?"
In both cases, the question assumes the frame, and is not explicit about the arbitrariness of doing so. So yes, he is explicit about setting the zero point, but focusing on that part of the move obscures the larger inexplicit move he's making beforehand.
Ah this comment from facebook also feels relevant:
Sam Harris’ argument style reminds me very much of the man that trained me, and the example of fire smoke negatively affecting health is a great zero point to contest. Sam has slipped in a zero point of physical health being the only form of health which matters. Or at least the highest. One would have to argue against his zero point, that there are other values which can be measured in terms of health greater than mere physical health associated with fire. Psychological, familial, and social immediately come to mind. Further, in the case of Sam, famed for his epistemological intransigence, one would likely have to argue against his zero point of what constitutes rationality itself in order to further one’s position that physical health is very often a secondary value, as this sort of argument follows more a conversational arrangement of complex interdependent factors, than the straight rigorous logic Sam seemingly prefers
A lot of what's going on here is primarily frame control—setting the relevant scale on which a particular zero is then made salient. And that is not being done in the nice explicit friendly way.
He's not casting the sneaky dark-arts version of the spell
Sam Harris here is not casting a sneaky version of Tare Detrimens, but he's maybe (intentionally or not, benevolently or malevolently) casting a sneaky version of Fenestra Imperium.
Broadly an overall point that makes sense and feels good to me.
Something feels off or at least oversimplified to me in some of the cases, particularly these two lines of thinking:
There's no substantive disagreement between me and critics-of-my-blocking-policy about the difficulties that this imposes—the way it makes certain conversations tricky or impossible, the way it creates little gaps and blind spots in discussion and consensus.
&
As far as I could tell, both I and the admin team agreed about its absolute size; there were no disagreements about things like e.g. "broken links to previously written essays are a pain and a shame."
I found myself not actually trusting that there was "no disagreement about" about the nature or size in these cases. Maybe I would if I had more data about each situation, but something about how it's being written about raises suspicion for me. It's not per se than I think there was disagreement, but that I think the apparent agreement was on the level of the objective details (broken links etc) but that you didn't know how each other felt about it or what it meant to each other, and that if you'd more thoroughly seen the world through each others' eyes, it wouldn't seem like "zero point" is the relevant frame here.
One attempt to point at that:
It seems to me that without straightforward scales on which to measure things, or even getting clear on exactly what the units are, "setting the zero point" isn't even a real move that's available (intentionally or not) and I would expect people discussing in good faith to nonetheless end up with differences as a result of those.
Taking the latter case in particular, it seem likely to me (at least based on what you've written) that the LW admins were mostly tracking something like a sense of betrayal of expectations that people would have about LW as an ever-growing web of wisdom, and that feeling of betrayal is their units. And you're measuring something more on the level of "how much wisdom is on LW?" And from those two scales, two different natural zero points emerge:
- in removing the posts, LW goes from zero betrayal of the expectation of posts by default sticking around to more than zero betrayal of the expectation of posts sticking around
- in removing the posts, LW goes from more-than-zero wisdom on it from everybody's posts to less-than-before-but-still-more-than-zero wisdom on it with everybody's posts minus the Conor Moreton series (and in the meantime there was some more-than-zero temporary wisdom from those posts having gone up at all)
I noticed I ended up flipping the scales here, such that both are just zero-to-more-than-zero, even though one is more-than-zero of an unwanted thing. Not sure if that's incidental or relevant. Sometimes I've found in orienting to situations like this, one finds that there's only ever presence of something, never absence.
I'm not totally satisfied with this articulation but maybe it's a starting point for us to pick out whatever structure I'm noticing here.
No particular tips about Hamming Circles proper—I've run them a couple times but don't feel like I grokked how to run them well—but I'll put out that I've had some success with running longer events oriented towards Hamming Problems, shaped more like "here's 5 hours, broken into 25min pomodoros where you focus on making actual tangible progress towards something that's stuck, then during 5min breaks check in with a partner about how your focus is going".
Which on reflection is actually very similar to how the online goal-crafting intensives I've been running for years are structured, except with coaches instead of a buddy.
They feel like different-but-related thing to me. I would say that colorblindness can be simply that you haven't learned to differentiate some aspects of reality. A blindspot is not just something you can't see but a way in which you're actively hiding from yourself the fact that you can't see it. That's how I use the term "blindspot", which is perhaps downstream of Val / Michael Smith's "Metacognitive Blindspots" presentations (at eg the 2014 alumni reunion iirc, I forget where/when else). "Colorblindness" doesn't cut it for that meaning, so it's not the metaphor I want when I reach for "blindspot".
Having said that, it's a cool metaphor for this different thing, and I can see the temptation to stretch "blindspot" to cover it. Both look kinda similar from the outside if you try to give someone feedback about the thing they're not seeing. I'd say that if someone just has a colorblindness and no blindspot, they would tend to respond more curiously and you'd be able to make some headway starting to point out the dimension and how things vary along it. If someone has a blindspot, trying to talk with them about the thing they're not seeing will feel weird. You'll keep saying things and the conversation will sort of circle around the thing you're trying to point at, or it may feel hard to even put the thing into words while trying to translate it into the other person's frame, or hard to even stay in touch with the thing yourself while talking with the other person.
A lot of what you're pointing at here reminds me of an idea I had for illustrating how the brain hemispheres work (based on Iain McGilchrist's new model, not the old debunked models from the 60s). I had an image of a comic or something depicting the two hemispheres as hiking partners, the left hemisphere (LH) with its face buried in the map and the right hemisphere (RH) looking around at the territory. And there could be a series of short stories showing how if they're not able to talk to each other they can get in various confusions, but how if they are able to coordinate effectively then the RH can help the LH update the map, and the LH's map can help make sense of the fully-detailed reality of the territory.
"Pre-conceptual intimacy" seems to point very much at the RH's way of attending to the world in general. A quote from a twitter thread of mine, paraphrasing McGilchrist: "whatever we experience comes to us first – it “presences” to us in unpreconceived freshness – in the RHem"
I've found understanding the nature of the brain hemispheres to be one of the most useful models I've taken in over the last few years, particularly for improving my relationship between map & territory and noticing how my attention affects what I experience. So I'd highly recommend it to you Logan and anyone who's interested in these questions you're exploring.
Ways Of Attending is a great short intro but costs $20 which is silly given that it's basically a long essay, like 30 pages. I've written a thorough summary of it (about half the length of the whole book) in this twitter thread. (I've also written a bit about it in this LW comment about how people are confused when they're saying "system 1" & "system 2") Then there's also The Master and his Emissary, his longer book with a couple thousand citations.
Awesome, let me know what you think of it!
I've just updated Complice to give it primitive support for FVP directly!
A user sent me this article and asked about some changes to Complice that would make it easier to use FVP. I took a different approach than he suggested (creating a filter to only show starred actions) but I came up with something that I think works substantially better.
First I added a new hotkey (d) to mark a dot next to an intention in your list, which is sort of the bare minimum needed to implement FVP or Mark Forster's other systems, which people have tried using the star ★ feature for. So select an intention with the arrow keys or j/k, then press d to dot it. Pressing d again clears the dot.
Then it became clear that the usual assumption Complice makes about your "next action" (that it's the top item on today's list that you haven't yet done) is completely backwards for Forster mode. So I changed it so that if you've put dots next to any intentions, it'll treat the lowest dotted item on the list (that you haven't done yet) as your next action.
Then I made sure that that algorithm worked on the backend too so that this same next action is used for the new tab page extension as well.
I've added some styles to visually diminish the items between the dotted ones, since those sort of aren't in consideration. I'm intending to make a mode where it hides those altogether, but that's a larger project at this point.
There are still a few other improvements to make, like clearly disambiguating between "do" mode and "prioritize" mode, and at the moment the UI doesn't guide you through the process whatsoever so you need to already know how you're using the dots, by eg reading this guide above.
If anyone has used other systems by Mark Forster and can comment on which are compatible or incompatible with what I've done so far, that would be great. I know he has dozens but I've barely dabbled with them at all. And of course I'm also interested in hearing other ways that this system could be improved.
If you're new to Complice, know that it's very opinionated about a few things, and one of them is that you start with a fresh list every day. That's not likely to change anytime soon, which technically goes against FVP but ultimately seems compatible with what Will describes above where he starts fresh about daily. And it has tons of other people features for tracking progress towards specific goals, and doing daily-weekly-monthly reviews based on what you've worked on in those periods.
I've been asked to self-review this post as part of the 2020 review. I pretty clearly still stand by it given that I was willing to crosspost it from my own blog 5 years after I originally wrote it. But having said that, I've had some new insights since mid-2020, so let me take a moment and re-read the post and make sure it doesn't now strike me as fatally confused...
...yeah, no, it's good! I made a couple of small formatting and phrasing edits just now but it's otherwise ready to go from my perspective.
The post is sort of weirdly contextual in that it's partially attempting to clarify something someone else wrote and respond to critiques of how that thing was received. I'd want to have it reviewed for editing by someone who didn't read any of the original posts to make sure it stands on its own (which the post itself notes it was intended to do!)
(We also may want to check in with Logan-formally-known-as-Brienne whether they want to be renamed and repronouned; I'll leave that to the editors.)
The first section prompted me to want to share this piece by David Chapman, "The Court of Values and the Bureau of Boringness", which semi-satirically suggests splitting democracy into two types of vote, of which each citizen must pick one in any given election. One actually makes policy for roads and industry and so on, the other makes claims about some cultural issue. The idea is that this would allow the crazy to not get in the way of getting enough attention on the decisions that are settled enough to be non-controversial but not actually precisely answered. Not likely to work as described, but I've found it inspirational for thinking about how we might be more sane collectively while having pockets of crazy.
Appreciating you pointing out via those first two quotes that some of these dimensions are pointing at someone being submissive rather than sovereign+respectful (not attached to these words).
Feels weird that I missed that when I was reading the draft, actually. Bullet points 2-5 of the "someone isn't doing frame control" list still seem solid to me. On reflection, I actually think bullet 1 is actually completely misleading, because someone frame controlling can also do a bunch of these things, particularly if they have a victim energy as in Raemon's comment.
This also feels off:
They don’t laugh nervously, don’t give tiny signals that they are malleable and interested in conforming to your opinion or worldview.
I might try to steelman it as:
They can't laugh at themselves, and don't seem to give signals that they are interested in learning from you and seeing the world through your eyes.
Yes. (Likewise in Malcolm culture!)
My main approach to this is to focus on honoring distrust:
"I can't personally trust that this is not frame control, so to honor myself, I need to [get out of the situation / let you know that's my experience / etc]".
As with anything, this can also get weaponized depending on the tone & implicature with which it's said, but the precise meaning here points at encouraging a given person to really honor their own frame and their own experience and distrust, while not making any claims that anyone else can agree or disagree with.
Like, if I can't trust that something isn't functioning as frame control, then I can't trust that. You might be able to trust that it's fine, but that doesn't contradict my not being able to trust that, since we're coming from different backgrounds (this itself is pointing at respecting others frames). Then maybe you can share some evidence that will allow me to relax as well, but if you share your evidence and I'm still tense, then I'm still tense and that's okay.
I'd edit "victims" to "weak" in the second header, since I think that expresses your point way clearer. You're not just pointing at the common-ish (& true!) refrains of "abusers are traumatized" or "abusers were once victims" but more specifically "abusers may be doing a bunch of frame control from the role of weak & vulnerable person".
Glad to have helped your blergness snap into place—not taking it personally. I share your concerns here in the specific case and in the general case re the word "knowledge"! And that people understanding the difference between "common knowledge" and other things is important.
More accurately maybe I could say "this matches what I understand to be the widespread model of Leverage known by dozens of people to be held among those dozens"
Some of it I observed directly or was told it by Leverage folks myself though, so "rumor" doesn't feel like an adequate descriptor from my vantage point.
I like this a lot, both the videos as a demonstration and the articulation & examples of unique and idiosyncratic skills like this. Have noticed this more the last few years, and my impression is they're remarkably common if you allow for very subtle ones.
I will say though that I'm a bit confused about "cup-stacking" as a metaphor (or name) only insofar as it seems like exactly the opposite of the thing you're trying to point at, with respect to both:
- "unconsciously/accidentally developed"
- "can't control when to use it / notice when one is using it"
Would also add that the compulsion to use the skills in certain ways may be separate from the skill! Unlocking the Emotional Brain suggests that what's going on is the person has both a skill and a compulsion to use it in a particular way (in order to feel safe) and the compulsion may be miscalibrated to their current situation, and that it's possible to recalibrate and ease off the compulsion while retaining the non-naivety that the skill (including the perceptiveness involved) grants.
facts that are more-or-less "common knowledge" among people who spent time socially adjacent to Leverage
Yup, sounds right. As someone who visited the rationality community in the bay a bunch in 2013-2018, almost nothing listed in the bullet points was a surprise to me, and off-hand I can think of dozens of other people who I would assume also know almost everything written above. (I'm sure there are more such people, that I haven't met or wouldn't remember.)
I don't have anything in particular to say about the implications of these facts, just seemed worth mentioning this thing re common knowledge.
(The main thing I hadn't heard about was the sexual relationships bullet point.)
The flu did mutate and stick around mightily, but annual flu deaths are an order of magnitude lower than COVID.
Maybe this is what you're already saying, but I want to highlight something specific:
My understanding is this isn't about the virus mutating to become less deadly, but more because endemic viruses encounter non-naive immune systems, which is true for flus but not for sars-ncov-2 (so far). T-cells have basically lifetime memory I think (longer than antibodies?). This is similar to how european diseases were so devastating to indigenous folk (and I think vice versa in one case?) because of naive immune systems.
And this prepared defense effect might be stronger for people who actually got sick than folks who got the vaccine (I feel like I saw this somewhere but am very unsure) but in either case the odds of this being worse than the flu are now pretty low and it seems to me vaccinated folks should at this point treat covid roughly like the flu—get a shot now and then, and don't visit your grandparents if you think you might have it, but otherwise don't worry about it.
I'm getting much of this from this source, which bases its reasoning on various claims I'm not qualified to assess. Would love to hear others thoughts: Why COVID-19 Is Here to Stay, and Why You Shouldn’t Worry About It
Oh huh I completely skimmed past that on first read & didn't even notice it, but revisiting it after seeing this comment, I also find it off-putting. Could capture most of the good and none of the bad with something more like "Buckle up, you have no idea what you're in for!" which feels (appropriately) like an invitation to a wild tour, rather than a "you fucked up."
Feels weird being told to shut up when I hadn't said anything.
I appreciate you trying to write this up, but as other commenters have noted, there's no contradiction here in the first place and you appear to have missed the point.
As far as I can tell, if you understand Yudkowsky's point, Zvi's follows directly. {No evidence of X} = {evidence of not-X}, but the speech act of claiming "There is no evidence of X" only occurs when there is some evidence worth claiming doesn't count as evidence.
And Yudkowsky's point also points out that essentially "no evidence" is not just vague but in virtually all cases just completely misleading. It would be better to say "the absence of any photographs or eyewitness accounts is evidence that this story was fabricated."
There is evidence for and evidence against but there is no "no evidence".
Well, apparently I decided to write this up as its own post.
Yeah not quite Australia but closer to Australia than to what we've had. The border has been nearly closed to all except citizens and close partners. Canada has forced 14-day quarantines for everyone entering, and fined a guy $500k for stopping to sightsee on his way to Alaska. One weird thing is that while the land border basically only lets citizens go into their country (with rare exceptions), I gather that Canadians can fly to the US, but not the reverse. So returning Canadians would be a major source of infections.
I think sane policy would have increased returning quarantine to 3 weeks to be safe, and enforced it quite strictly. Then pour tons of resources into contact tracing as well.
🇨🇦 Tiny Canada update: we've now vaccinated 10 doses per 100 people, and since we're officially doing first doses first in most cases, that's nearly 10% of the population vaccinated. The territories, that have almost nobody in them, are like half-vaccinated already.
Interestingly, while we're way behind the USA on administering vaccine doses (they're at 37 doses per 100 people), we've already soared way past the "more people vaccinated than ever tested positive" figure because we had fewer people test positive in the first place. From a timeline perspective though, that unfortunately means we're even further from herd immunity than being so behind on vaccines would imply.
Nevermind, this update became not-tiny and I made it its own post:
🇨🇦 Canada Covid Update: thinking out loud
This is a good point, and suggests that the bigger issue was whatever caused anyone to publish anything saying there seemed to be an association between the vaccines and blood clots in the first place.
Guessing that that varies by location—I've heard of online classrooms where you're not allowed to have your video off nearly all day.
But even if it's all as you describe, one answer for how virtual classes might still be worse is that for kids whose home situations are abusive or neglectful, it makes a meaningful positive difference to get to be around teachers and other kids outside their home.
🇨🇦 Canada update: we are WAY behind on vaccines (2.7% of population) and the bottleneck is very clear: we don't have the doses.
The "why" is also becoming a bit more clear: we never even tried to create a big manufacturing plant for it last year and instead just tried to partner with everybody, including a deal with China that was announced last May and started going sideways 3 days later but we're just finding out now that it completely fell through and is a nonstarter! Wtf.
A couple articles to read on that front:
- Canada-China vaccine collaboration began to fall apart days after Ottawa announced clinical trials (Globe & Mail)
- LILLEY: Britain's vaccine success the path Canada should have followed (Toronto Sun)
Not sure what we can do about any of that now though, unlike the USA where Zvi points at many obvious mistakes being made in the present, or choice points around approvals.
Meanwhile cases continue to trend downward (restrictions are mostly working) but there's no reason I'm aware of to think we aren't still going to gradually see growth of the UK strains and others.
Here's a longer update I wrote awhile ago: Covid Canada Jan25: low & slow
News: This article lays out roughly why Canada is way behind on vaccines—no attempt was even made last year to ramp up manufacturing capacity in Canada, instead just a bunch of partnerships, including one with China that completely fell through (other sources (eg globe & mail) have speculated that it may have fallen through in part because China is still grumpy at Canada for arresting the Huawei exec 2 years ago, but that's unclear).
LILLEY: Britain's vaccine success the path Canada should have followed
Something missing from the top-level post: why stagnation.
I'll just put out that one of the tiny things that most gave me a sense of "fuck" in relation to stagnation was reading an essay written in 1972 that was lamenting the "publish or perish" phenomenon. I had previously assumed that that term was way more recent, and that people were trying to fix it but it would just take a few years. To realize it was 50 years old was kinda crushing honestly.
Here's google ngrams showing how common the phrase "publish or perish" was in books through the last 200 years. It was coined in the 30s and took off in the 60s, peaking in 1968. Interesting & relevant timing!
I don't have the detailed knowledge needed to flesh this out, but it occurred to me that there might be a structure of an argument someone could make that would be shaped something like "we got a lot of meaningful changes in the last 70 years, but they didn't create as many nonlinear tipping points as in the previous industrial revolutions."
Fwiw, flying cars probably wouldn't hit any such tipping point, though self-driving cars probably would.
Widespread nuclear energy might've meant little concern about global warming at this point, but solar & wind have been trucking along slowly enough that there's tons of concern.
I think the internet is doing something important for the possibility of running your own 1-2 person business, which is a meaningful tipping point. There are various other tipping points happening as a result of computers and the internet, which is why I think it stands out as @jasoncrawford's only named revolutionary technologies.
Anyway, hoping someone can steelman this for me, considering the nonlinear cascades in each era & from each technology, and seeing whether there's indeed something different about pre-1970 and after. I'm not confident there is, to be clear, but I have some intuition that says this might be part of what people are seeing.
Prompted by your comment, when I wrote more stuff last night, I made it standalone:
Covid Canada Jan25: low & slow
Appreciating you chiming in. That's a great point about how different rural communities are doing different. I kind of had the impression some rural areas in the prairies were doing bad, but I didn't off-hand have a sense of where or why. Your rough sketch with vague notions is helpful on that front.
I drove across the country on the way out to BC a couple months ago, and it's indeed hard to imagine the farming areas in the south half of the prairies having much covid spread, whereas it makes sense that resource-extraction areas would for the 2 reasons you describe. That plus exponentials/nonlinearities seems sufficient to explain most of the discrepancy, maybe.
Huh yeah, weird. It's like, what are they waiting for with AstraZeneca?
It is worth noting that I think ~40,000 doses per day is according to plan at this phase, a plan which calls for like a million doses a week as of the start of April. Which sounds like a lot but is still way too slow! (A million a day would be awesome.) But the failure to ramp up continues to be a failure of intending to ramp up, it seems. I'll be quite concerned if we fail to ramp up to even the unambitious levels planned for April. I don't know to what extent useful prep is happening to ensure that we're ready to go hard once we get more doses.
🇨🇦 People liked my Canada update last week, so here's another one. I thought I wouldn't have much to say but apparently I wrote some stuff!
I made it its own post for better linkability. I'm honestly not sure if that's better, but that's what I did.
Covid Canada Jan25: low & slow
🇨🇦 For those who read these updates but are in Canada, I've done a little research into how things are going here and it seems that we're actually doing an okay job of distributing the vaccines we have, but we don't have nearly enough yet to immunize the population. From CBC:
Using the intuitive distribution-to-administration time-delay framing in another comment by Unnamed... where the USA's shortfall is 17 days, Canada's got as short as 3 days this week!
That yellow curve above looks like an exponential that'll reach our 38M population in just 6-7 weeks (doubling weekly) but based on the actual news I'm reading, the plans are not nearly that ambitious. Unlike in the USA where people are panicking and flailing and trying to seem ambitious and failing hard, it seems like Canadian leaders are just acting like planning to immunize everyone by September is a reasonable thing to do, and we're doing okay at that plan. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
A few details:
- Like the USA, there's been discussion of "equitable" allocation of vaccines here, but I'm not really complaining about that as long as the shots are rapidly going into arms, which they do seem to be.
- There were also very few vaccines over xmas here -_-
- Pfizer is having to delay some of their deliveries to Canada (and other countries getting shipments from Europe factory) as well, for some logistical reason I haven't investigated in depth.
- Starting in April, the Canadian government is aiming for rolling out vaccines at 1M/week. That's a lot compared to our current "0.5M in the last month" but it still doesn't immunize the whole population until sometime in September or October (which is also what Trudeau had generally pointed at a few days ago, I believe).
- We have now purchased 80M vaccines though, enough for 2 shots for everybody, they're just... not ready yet.
- Shoppers Drug Mart president says Canada's pharmacies could administer 2.5M to 3M/week but nobody has been in touch with them to help them plan how to help.
Would be nice if the USA could send us some of the vaccines they don't know what to do with, as it seems they've got enough extra for half of our population. Or you know, if Pfizer would just send us some that is slated for the USA until the USA figures out how to use what they've got.
Here are two tracking sites I've been using:
This was a profoundly impactful post and definitely belongs in the review. It prompted me and many others to dive deep into understanding how emotional learnings have coherence and to actually engage in dialogue with them rather than insisting they don't make sense. I've linked this post to people more than probably any other LessWrong post (50-100 times) as it is an excellent summary and introduction to the topic. It works well as a teaser for the full book as well as a standalone resource.
The post makes both conceptual and pragmatic claims. I haven't exactly crosschecked the models although they do seem compatible with other models I've read. I did read the whole book and it seemed pretty sound and based in part on relevant neuroscience. There's a kind of meeting-in-the-middle thing there where the neuroscience is quite low-level and therapy is quite high-level. I think it'll be cool to see the middle layers fleshed out a bit.
Just because your brain uses Bayes' theorem at the neural level and at higher levels of abstraction, doesn't mean that you consciously know what all of its priors & models are!
And it seems the brain's basic organization is set up to prevent people from calmly arguing against emotionally intense evidence without understanding it—which makes a lot of sense if you think about it. And it also makes sense that your brain would be able to update under the right circumstances.
I've tested the pragmatic claims personally, by doing the therapeutic reconsolidation process using both Coherence Therapy methods & other methods, both on myself & working with others. I've found that these methods indeed find coherent underlying structures (eg the same basic structures using different introspective methods, that relate and are consistent) and that accessing those emotional truths and bringing them in contact with contradictory evidence indeed causes them to update, and once updated there's no longer a sense of needing to argue with yourself. It doesn't take effort to embody the new knowing.
I guess on another level I'd say that I have the sense that the emotional coherence framework has something important to say about the nature of knowing. It frames all of the perspectives held by conscious and unconscious schemas as "knowings". The knowings are partial, but this frame (as opposed to "belief") really respects the first-person experience of what it means to believe something - you don't think of it as a belief, or something you "think", it just feels true. So inasmuch as all knowing about the world is partial, there's a lot to be gained by recognizing that you know things that contradict other things you know. It's already true, whether you acknowledge it or not.
This framework has profound implications for rational thinking, communication & feedback, topics like akrasia, and there's a lot of followup work to be done in exploring those implications.
Haven't even gotten to the rest of this yet but already want to say I think this initial summary is incorrect. I'll have to do some re-reading to discern the extent to which I think that's a mis-reading on your part, a mis-characterization on Kaj's part, or the result of ambiguity on the original authors part, but regardless: the summary at the start of this post, quoted below, seems to me to be completely the opposite of the actual basis of Coherence Therapy (speaking as someone who has read UtEB, several other Coherence Therapy books, done half a dozen sessions with a Coherence Therapist)
it presents a model of the brain where your problems are mostly caused by incorrect emotional beliefs (bad guys). The solution to your problems is to develop or discover a correct emotional belief (good guy) that contradicts your incorrect beliefs, then force your brain to recognize the contradiction at an emotional level. This causes your brain to automatically resolve the conflict and destroy the incorrect belief, so you can live happily ever after.
How I would characterize this is that the problems are caused by partially correct but incomplete beliefs who are not bad guys but good guys within their own limited frame. The solution to your problems is to find data in your own experience that is compartmentalized from the part of your cognition holding the incomplete belief, and bring it into contact with that part, so that your system as a whole can assess all of the data and synthesize it into a new belief that is more complete (although still surely could be even more complete).
The strategy you're describing is ultimately isomorphic to the kind of strategy that coherence therapists call counteractive, which is the opposite of how emotional reconsolidation actually works. This process can't be forced, in the same way you can't force someone to agree with you no matter how much evidence you shove in their face.
The thing that changed and allowed me to actually start updating more efficiently was that I actually started believing that all parts of me are pretty smart. I started believing this because I started actually listening to myself and realised that these parts of me weren’t saying the ‘obviously wrong’ things I thought they were saying.
Yeah this is huge. I've had some similar insights myself the last few months and I now think it's one of the most important things that people can do. Which of course requires listening to the parts of you that think the other parts are stupid or silly, as well! And the parts of you that think that thinking about yourself as having parts is weird. Etc.
My new mantra for this is: May I integrate everything that wants to be integrated, as it wants to be integrated.
The thing that changed and allowed me to actually start updating more efficiently was that I actually started believing that all parts of me are pretty smart. I started believing this because I started actually listening to myself and realised that these parts of me weren’t saying the ‘obviously wrong’ things I thought they were saying.
Yeah this is huge. I've had some similar insights myself the last few months and I now think it's one of the most important things that people can do. Which of course requires listening to the parts of you that think the other parts are stupid or silly, as well! And the parts of you that think that thinking about yourself as having parts is weird. Etc.
My new mantra for this is: May I integrate everything that wants to be integrated, as it wants to be integrated.