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I like and agree with this post, but want to caution that a 2019 paper, Does Apologizing Work? An Empirical Test of the Conventional Wisdom, studied a couple of examples of people saying something politically controversial, and found that apologizing either had no effect or made things worse. I suspect (hope?) that this harmful-apology effect is limited to moral outrage scandals, but that those cases are unusual.
[F]uture research should investigate the extent to which circumstances make it more or less helpful to apologize for a controversial statement. It may be that the effect was greater in the Summers example because Rand Paul is a well-known political figure. It also might be the case that the key difference lies in the fact that Summers apologized for a statement expressing a belief in a theory that can be tested empirically, while Paul had originally been criticized for giving a normative opinion. Finally, Summers gave reasons for his defense, while Paul went on the attack when questioned about his comments, perhaps unfairly implying that the controversy was the result of a partisan witch-hunt. More research is needed before conclusions can be drawn about when apologies have no effect, and when they increase or reduce the desire on the part of observers to punish the embroiled figure.
Except Iran. Why is a theocracy the only country capable of being rational about this?
I've heard that the 1980s economic sanctions were so severe that Iran didn't have dialysis machines, so they desperately needed other treatment options for kidney disease.
However, having more kidney donors, while a boost in overall QALY equivalent to donating a few thousand dollars, is more than likely to harm people who need kidney transplants in the long run...your donation of a single kidney is buying a few mediocre years of life, in exchange for taking away a few million dollars of the table from any company developing “the proper way” of doing this.
Use the reversal test: if preventing the treatment of kidney disease saves lives, could we save even more lives by inflicting new cases of kidney disease?
test test test test
Unfortunately the legal system doesn't reflect this.
This claim seemed worth checking, especially since there are multiple legal systems and it would be awful to discourage people from saving lives in one jurisdiction based on the flaws of another, so I looked into it briefly.
From my quick investigation, I think that being sued for providing medical assistance is not a serious concern in the USA, Canada, and the UK (and probably not in most other places but I didn't read much about other places)[1]. Laws protecting rescuers from lawsuits exist in many jurisdictions; they're called Good Samaritan laws.
I tried to find cases of people being sued for providing medical attention. There was an edge case in California in 2008 when someone caused a paralyzing spine injury to someone when pulling them from their car after an accident, believing that the car might explode[2]. The court ruled that this may have been (intended to be) emergency aid, but it wasn't medical aid, which is what California's Good Samaritan law specified, so the paralyzed person was allowed to sue the attempted rescuer. In response to this incident, California passed a new law stating that "no person who in good faith, and not for compensation, renders emergency medical or nonmedical care at the scene of an emergency shall be liable for any civil damages resulting from any act or omission".
If you're worried about being sued for helping in an emergency, look up Good Samaritan laws in your area. The Wikipedia page on Good Samaritan laws might be a good place to start.
[1] I'm aware of a famous incident in China in 2011 when no-one provided assistance to a dying toddler, because they were afraid of being sued. China passed a Good Samaritan law in response to that incident, so it's probably fine to attempt rescue in China now.
[2] I've looked into whether cars explode (separately, a while ago), and concluded that that's not a serious risk after an accident. If a car crashes in precisely the right way (such as falling off a cliff and landing on a protrusion that violently stabs the fuel tank) then it can explode in the initial accident. But an explosion after an accident is exceedingly unlikely, I concluded. A fire after an accident can spread, but I expect that a rescuer can easily evade a car fire if one appears, so I wouldn't be afraid of approaching a damaged car.
Looks like it's fixed on the EA Forum version but not the LW version.
> the class of "rationalist/rationalist-adjacent" SMEs in AI safety,
What's an SME?
That's fair about wheat import/exports – I don't quite follow this guy's estimate of only a 75% reduction in wheat exports from Ukraine and Russia, and plausibly it could be a lot worse.
The phosphate problem must depend on elasticity of phosphate supply (and a little of demand, though I checked and less than 10% of phosphate is used for non-agricultural industry, so there's probably not a lot that can be substituted from other uses). I found conflicting accounts of whether Russia was the largest phosphate exporter, but like wheat, it's not the largest phosphate producer. It produces about 13 million tons of phosphate, 5.6% of the world total, so I don't find that immediately alarming – maybe it's not too hard to increase phosphate mining by 5%? I wasn't able to quickly find out how much of Russia's production that it exports. I also couldn't quickly find anyone giving an estimate of phosphate supply elasticity.
This paper says "Between 1961 and 2014 there have been two instances when the global phosphate rock prices spiked, in mid-1970s and 2007–2008 (Fig. 3a). Both events are linked to an economic trigger. The first instance was during the first oil crisis, and it was driven by the increase in energy prices (Mew, 2016). The second one is attributed to a combination of oil price increase, higher labour costs and insufficient mining capacity (Scholz et al., 2014)."
This chart shows up-to-date phosphate prices. It would be the one to watch to see how bad the phosphate shortage is getting. It shows a big spike in 2008 – about three times the current price. I don't remember phosphate shortages in 2008 news, nor mass starvation, so I think we're probably okay with prices under three times the current price.
Articles about the fall in wheat exports face another Molochian problem. The ones that say that a massive decrease in grain exports will lead to famine are shared widely. Articles that include the context that most wheat is produced and consumed locally, so exports are a small proportion of global wheat production, are boring articles about boring price movements, so they aren't shared widely.
World grain production is 760 million tons per year. Russia exports 35 million tons per year (4.6% of total wheat production), and Ukraine exports 24 million tons (3.2% of total production). Losing three quarters of those exports will be a supply shock of the size we see about once or twice a decade (though it's usually due to a drought).
(btw I'm not accusing Eric Raymond of alarmism; I thought the grain decrease was a big deal too, until I happened across a Twitter thread explaining the details. Update: I found the thread – it's by a crop scientist. I'm not sure why her figure for Russian wheat as a percentage of world production is lower than what I found.)
Dominic Cummings, a UK politician, seems to have detailed models of what goes wrong in bureaucracies. Apologies that this excerpt is long; the original essay is much, much longer still:
I won’t go into details (unless they leak in which case I’ll clarify) but in a nutshell, something very important that the DfE had contracted was completely botched. Like opening Russian matrioshki, each meeting revealed a new absurdity and after seeing dozens of such episodes I now knew what would happen. First, I knew that the official who had signed the contract would have signed a stupid contract. Second, I knew that the contract had been signed three years earlier so the official would have long gone and the new people would shrug and say ‘not me’. (When I insisted that a particular inquiry into a cockup be pursued to a senior official in another department who’d left DfE, so mad was I at this trick, there was a panicked reaction: ‘we can’t go around demanding answers from officials who’ve moved, Dominic, where would it all end?!’)
Third, I knew that their bosses would all have changed too, so they could also say ‘very regrettable, but of course I wasn’t here then’. Fourth, I knew that EU procurement rules would be partly responsible for complicating everything unnecessarily. Fifth, I knew that some officials would instinctively cover it up while a tiny number would push for a serious ‘lessons learned’ exercise and get nowhere. Sixth, I had to make a decision about how hard to push for an internal investigation or use it as leverage to force officials to do something else I wanted done (‘SoS might be persuaded not to pursue this too hard, but we are very keen that X happens’, where X is something important and much resisted). Seventh, I knew that the first version of the scale of the problem would not be right and all the numbers would be wrong.
This time there was an added twist – the DfE had used (at the direction of the Cabinet Office, officials said) an EU Framework that actually forbade the DfE from clawing back the money from the company that had screwed up. This I had not predicted, it was a new twist though not a surprising one. ‘How many other contracts have been signed under this EU Framework which stop us from clawing back money?’ ‘Err, we’ll get back to you…’
Some people who make blunders like those described above are then deemed by the HR system to be ‘priority movers’. This means that a) they are regarded as among the worst performers but also means b) they have to be interviewed for new jobs ahead of people who are better qualified. It is a very bizarre system, made more bizarre by the fact that there are great efforts to keep it hidden from ministers and the outside world. These people float around in the HR system, both dead and alive, removed from ‘full time employee’ lists but still employed, like Gogol’s Dead Souls. ‘We need someone to do SEN funding.’ ‘Ahh, what about Y, they could do it.’ ‘But Y has been a rubbish press officer all his life, he’d be a disaster!’ ‘Yes, but it would be one less priority mover on my books.’
...
Ministers have little experience in well-managed complex organisations and their education and training does not fill this huge gap. Even most of the ones who have good motives – and there are many, though they struggle to advance – have a fundamental problem of scale. The apex of the political system is full of people who have never managed employees on the scale of 102 people or budgets on the scale of 106 pounds, yet their job is to reshape bureaucracies on scales of 104 (DfE) – 106 (NHS) employees and 1010-1011 pounds. The scale of their experience of management is therefore often at least 104 off from what they are trying to control. Some unusual people can make jumps like this. Most cannot.
...
Large bureaucracies, including political parties, operate with very predictable dynamics. They have big problems with defining goals, selecting and promoting people, misaligned incentives, misaligned timescales, a failure of ‘information aggregation’, and a lack of competition (in normal environments). These problems produce two symptoms: a) errors are not admitted and b) the fast adaptation needed to cope with complexity does not happen. More fundamentally, unlike in successful entities, there is no focus of talented and motivated people on important problems. People externally ask questions like ‘how could X go wrong?’, assuming that millions are spent on X so everyone must be thinking about X, but the inquiries usually reveal that nobody senior was thinking about X – they spent their time on endless trivia, or actually stopping people working on X.These dynamics are well-understood but are very hard to change. Bureaucratic institutions tend to change significantly only in the event of catastrophic failure (e.g. 1914, 1929, 1945, 1989) – catastrophes that they themselves often contribute to. However, these dynamics are so deep that even predictable failures that lead to significant loss of life can often leave bureaucracies largely untouched other than a soon-forgotten media frenzy.
Goals. First, in political institutions, it is usually much harder than in science or business to formulate and agree clear goals like ‘make a profit’ or ‘search for a new particle within these parameters’. Often, the official public definition of the goal is not even properly defined or is so vague as to be useless. This problem is entangled with the problem of incentives (below) – often defining goals wisely is disincentivised. Often in politics, officially stated goals are, taken literally, nonsensical and could not possibly be serious but are worded to sound vaguely friendly (e.g. ‘this must never happen again’, which I must have deleted dozens of times from draft documents).
Feeling embattled is one of two sources of identity that the book mentions, the other being pride. Re-reading just now, I see that her examples of identity through pride were also embattled ones (formula/breast-feeding activists, cryptocurrency proponents, polyamorists), but it doesn't seem necessary, so patriot and gymbro identities fit in the pride category.
That screenshot is the Robinhood UI, so looks like he uses Robinhood.
Interesting post! It makes me much more interested in trying the game. I didn't follow this sentence though:
If you also let them keep their money, you are told the plauge has spread throughout Greece.
Whose money is this? What's its connection to the plague spreading?
Robin Hanson wrote about similar experiments in 2010.
It seems that extreme generosity can be regarded as establishing an undesirable behavior standard. His post suggests a workaround, if your productivity/generosity greatly exceeds others: under-report your output and give credit to others.
Not OP, but you might like Spencer Greenberg's list of 23 general purpose techniques for solving challenging problems.
All the handymen I know are extremely intelligent
This is google-able - I found this chart. It's probably imperfect, but from a brief glance at the source I'd trust it more than anecdote or my own experience.
The answer to, "What idiot did this!?" is almost always, "A smart, well-intentioned person making tradeoffs you hadn't even considered." - Jason Specland
Debates didn't work because... well, it's a very complicated problem.
I'd love to hear about this in more detail. What have you learned about the problem? Do you know what good solutions would look like, but they're too hard or expensive to implement? Or have you learned that it isn't feasible?
Thank you!
I hope someone can help me find a blog post or webpage that I've seen before but can't find: it's someone describing a power law of scientists. There's a top level who have drastically more output than the level below, who are drastically more productive than the level below that. There's only a few at the top level, and a few hundred at level 2, and a few thousand at level 3. I think he mentions one scientist being level 0.5 - notably more productive than almost anyone else. It was on a relatively unstyled website, maybe Scott Aaronson's.
Anyone familiar with that?
That sounds like Aella, who wrote about taking acid every week for a year. Here's her reddit post about it; it includes some art she made, and one poem.
Oh, sorry!
[I misinterpreted wubbles above; I retract this comment.]
I think we should reserve the "epistemic status" thing for authors to describe their own works. Using it to insult a work seems pointlessly snarky. The useful part could be communicated with just "Probably BS" or "I think this is probably BS". Leaving it at that would avoid the useless connotation about the author's thought process, which is unknowable by others.
This is probably not the biggest annoyance, but it's recurring and it affects a lot of people (especially the approximately 9% with hyperacusis): many buses and garbage trucks have horrible screeching brakes. This is bad in general, but especially bad at 7am before I want to be awake.
Presumably it can be solved with some kind of regular maintenance. I doubt municipalities are interested in spending that money, but if somehow the affected residents could coordinate to pay (maybe with some kind of crowdfunding), and someone would organize the whole thing, then something could be done.
Not what you were asking for, but: have you encountered Eliezer's list of sleep interventions? It's the last section of this author's note at HPMOR. There might be a different helpful intervention there.
Should we worry that if Trump supports eradicating mosquitoes, that will cause Trump opponents to oppose it?
It looks like you're going to https://rationality.org rather than http://rationality.org. CFAR doesn't have a SSL certificate (but maybe should get one through Let's Encrypt).
Yes, you'd want to use the International Crime Victims Survey. It's the standard way to compare crime rates between countries.
The anti-vax thing is one of the hardest cases. More often, people are just accidentally wrong. Like this exchange at Hacker News, which had checkable claims like:
- "The UK is a much more violent society than the US, statistically"
- "There are dozens of U.S. cities with higher per capita murder rates than London or any other city in the UK"
- "Murder rates are higher in the US, but murder is a small fraction of violent crime. All other violent crime is much more common in the UK than in the US."
There would also be a useful effect for observers. That Hacker News discussion contained no citations, so no-one was convinced and I doubt any observers knew what to think. But if a fact-checker bot was noting which claims were true and which weren't, then observers would know which claims were correct (or rather, which claims were consistent with official statistics).
If these fact-checkers were extremely common, it could still help anti-vaccine people. If you're against vaccines, but you've seen the fact-checker bot be correct 99 other times, then you might give credence to its claims.
I'd prefer the framing that it's not a fact-checker, but rather an inconsistency-detector. Rather than "this bot detected the claim that vaccines cause autism, which is wrong", it'd say "this bot detected the claim that vaccines cause autism, which is in conflict with the view held by The Lancet, one of the world's most prominent medical journals". Or in 1930, it might have reported "this bot detected the claim that continents drift, which is in conflict with the scientific consensus of leading geology journals".
It would still be helpful to have automatic fact-checking of simple statements. Consider this Hacker News thread - two people are arguing about crime rates in the UK and USA. Someone says "The UK is a much more violent society than the US" and they argue about that, neither providing citations. That might be simple enough that natural language processing could parse it and check it against various interpretations of it. For example, one could imagine a bot that notices when people are arguing over something like that (whether on the internet or in a national election. It would provide useful relevant statistics, like the total violent crime rates in each country, or the murder rate, or whatever it thinks is relevant. If it were an ongoing software project, the programmers could notice when it's upvoted and downvoted, and improve it.
This comment seems aggressive and rude, so I doubt it will be persuasive to Lukas. As Yvain wrote in How To Not Lose An Argument, we should beware of status effects during arguments. If Lukas agrees with you now, then Lukas agrees he is a weasel-word-using rationalizing entitled infantile fake-victim, which is very difficult to accept. Without the insults, Lukas would have had the opportunity to make an easier update - that he misunderstood, or the text was unclear, or that he'd prefer Dias to have clarified but reasonable people could disagree, or something like that.
80,000 Hours has investigated the expected effects of changing the world through party politics.
Summary:
This is a very high-potential, though very competitive and high-risk path that can enable you to make a big difference through improving the operation of government and promoting important ideas. If you’re highly able, could tolerate being in the public eye and think you could develop a strong interest in politics, then we recommend learning more about this career to test your suitability.
Fair enough. My thinking is that voting has severe effects on others, while one's choice of consumer product mostly affects oneself. Maybe a particular well-marketed beer can make one feel strong and virile; a well-marketed approach to foreign policy might do the same, but with worse consequences for others.
My thinking with that - not that I've thought about it very hard or actually endorse this beyond "interesting crazy idea" - was that one's emotions about a product can genuinely affect one's enjoyment of it.
Maybe a certain food or other product is designed to evoke a cowboy's frontier life, or an archetypal grandmother's cooking, or something like that. Music would help create that association. Overall the effect might still be pernicious but I'm not sure about that.
Ban music in political campaign advertisements. Music has no logical or factual content, and only adds emotional bias.
Here's an example of an ad with music intended to give two different emotional tones (optimistic/patriotic in the first six seconds, then sinister in the rest).
This strikes me as careful cherrypicking of "absurd" results to pick only the non-absurd "absurd" ones...not all absurd conclusions from the past turned out to be okay in hindsight
I don't think Ozy is claiming that all absurd conclusions are correct. Rather, Ozy claims that some absurd conclusions are correct. When you just need an existence proof, there's no cherry-picking - you just pick your example/s and you're done.
People who say "it is okay if my moral reasoning produces absurd results" generally don't personally think "that sounds absurd, but I'll accept it anyway"
Maybe they should! My impression is that Ozy does.
Go tell a vegetarian that he should support exterminating all wildlife to end wild animal suffering, and see what response you get
Ozy's a vegetarian, and their position on wild animal suffering is:
short version:
wild animal suffering v bad
currently unfixable because we don’t understand the environment well enough yet to not destroy everything
am much more sympathetic to wild-animal antinatalism than human antinatalism but am still not convinced
Seems pretty open to absurdity to me.
Rejecting reasoning that produces absurd results even if we can't find a flaw in the reasoning is an important way we avoid errors
I'd prefer the framing of applying an absurdity penalty to one's estimated probability, rather than "rejecting" it in a binary way, but yes: absurdity could be a useful thing to weight in one's estimated probability of a conclusion being correct.
Efficient Outrage Hypothesis: if you're hearing about it, it's probably already a dogpile. The return on marginal outrage will be low or negative.
-- Egregore Peck (source)
If your moral reasoning doesn’t produce conclusions that seem absurd on the face of it… why are you bothering? I want to be the sort of person who would have come up with the absurd conclusion that slavery is wrong, or the absurd conclusion that women should have rights, or the absurd conclusion that sodomy shouldn’t be illegal.
-- Ozy Frantz (source)
Please note that Rational Attire was not run by MIRI. It was always completely separate from MIRI.
Maybe one could influence malfunctioning government-run services to behave better. If some DMV office or post office is notoriously slow or broken, one could send a letter with official letterhead saying that your constituents are complaining and you'd like to speak to the manager to find out what the problem is. Then actually find out what the problem is, have them work out a plan to solve it, and report back to you on their progress. If necessary, mention that there's currently a big push in the Senate to cut back for poorly-performing services.
You are not the king of your brain. You are the creepy guy standing next to the king going "a most judicious choice, sire".
Mason Hartman made a great typographic meme of this at Pretty Rational.
Catharine G. Evans (aristophy):
This immortal galactic supermind is a stub. You can help expand it by providing the proper technology and averting human extinction.
Some of the people who earn thousands of times your income don't deserve it, which is bad; and some of them do, which is worse.
Our collective delusion that we can fix most problems appears to be one of the many problems that we cannot fix.
Being bad at math does not make you good at art.
Aaron Haspel (sorry, can't find the link):
A grudging willingness to admit error does not suffice; you have to cultivate a taste for it
Mason Hartman made a typographic meme of this at Pretty Rational.
Aaron Haspel (sorry, can't find the link):
There is no universally acclaimed institution with a more dismal track record than marrying for love.