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I like what you're doing, but I feel like the heresies you propose are too tame.
Here are some more radical heresies to consider:
- Most people are far more bottlenecked on some combination of akrasia and prospective memory, not on the accuracy of their models of the world. Rationalists in particular would be better off devoting effort to actually doing the obvious things than to understanding the world better.
- Self deception is very instrumentally useful a large fraction of real world situations we find ourselves in, and we should use more of it.
- Mormons seem to be especially good at coordinating on good lifestyle choices, so we should all consider becoming Mormon.
- Among groups of 10+ people, it's usually more useful to get everyone all working on implementing the same plan than it is to come up with the best plan.
- Intelligence (of the sort measured by exams and IQ tests) is only moderately important to success.
I generally watch videos I enjoy while doing physical therapy exercises. I didn't conceptualize it as hiding the "reward" from myself as an incentive for exercising; I conceptualize it as making the rather boring, sometimes aversive activity less salient by focusing my attention on something else.
As an example, I find it much easier to hold a plank when I'm focused on the video I'm watching than when I'm just starting at the timer counting down.
I've tried this approach, and although it works well during the early part of the game, in the late game, a single turn can take 5-10 minutes, which is much less helpful as an exercise interlude.
I've found that watching videos I enjoy while doing PT exercises helps. A key component of this strategy was to get a laptop stand with an adjustable angle so that I can position my screen somewhere I can see it (different places depending on how I'm physically positioned for each exercise).
I think the current diversity of music is largely caused by artists' different lived experiences. You feel something, this is important for you, you try to express that via music. As long as AIs don't have anything like "unique experiences" on the scale of humans, I'm not sure if they'll be able to create music that is that diverse (and thus interesting).
If the AI customized it for each listener (and does a good job), then music will reflect the unique experiences of the listeners, which would result in a more diverse range of music than music that only reflects the unique experiences of musicians.
Of course, we could end up in an awkward middle ground where AI only generates variations on a successful pop music formula, and it all becomes a bland mush. But I think in that case, people would just go back to human-generated music on Spotify and YouTube.
I like this collection of concepts, but I feel like I may not be understanding them very well without examples. Do you have any cached examples?
Sure, but that does imply that your marginal utility of money decreases that fast outside that domain.
The assumption that the marginal utility of wealth decreases exponentially doesn't seem justified to me. Why not some other positive-but-decreasing function, such as 1/W (which yield a logarithmic utility function)?
What properties does the utility function need to have for this result to generalize, and are those priorities reasonable to assume?
To pick an uncontroversial example, imagine someone glomerizing in whether the Earth was flat or (approximately) spherical. That would signal that you're the sort of person who considered a spherical Earth to be a plausible hypothesis, which is almost as bad as actually believing it. All reasonable, right-thinking people, on the other hand, know that it's obviously flat and wouldn't even consider such nonsense.
How do you determine where it's ok for her to go barefoot?
I think it's intentional. He's saying that reducing the fee from $23k to $230 would be an improvement.
The FDA used to have a long backlog of drug approval applications due to understaffing. This problem was eventually addressed by the Prescription Drug User Fee Act, which established filling fees for drug approvals and a deadline to review new drug applications. The filling fees were a way to make the cost of additional staffing politically palatable, and are much less than the costs of approval delays.
How does this compare to the costs of making (part of) Antarctica habitable?
Do you have any examples (or likely examples) of this happening?
Spicy food. Plants evolved capsaicin production in order to deter mammals from eating them, yet many humans (myself included) like eating plants specifically because they contain capsaicin.
This post reads as a call to action (or inaction), but it's not clear what you're saying people should do. Can you be more explicit about that?
Normal subcultures don't have infosec requirements, let alone infosec requirements effective enough for intelligence agencies
This link is broken
How would you recommend shorting long-dated bonds? My understanding is that both short selling and individual bond trading have pretty high fees for retail investors.
Anna: Papa, I have a problem: [explains problem in detail]
Me: Is it a problem you can fix?
Anna: Yes! [Fixes problem]
I need to do a better job of asking myself this question.
An important thing that this analysis leaves out is the uncertainty regarding feedback loops. If e.g. warming causes permafrost to melt and release more greenhouse gasses, there is a possibility of a runaway process that results in catastrophic warming. We don't know how bad the tail risks are, and an analysis that looks at the median case doesn't address that issue.
I'd like to know whether deep canvassing actually works.
The deadline to post your blind mode predictions is coming up on the 10th. This weekend is a great time to do them if you haven't yet.
His 80000 interview suggests that he thought the chance of FTX blowing up is something between 1% and 10%. There he gives 50% odds for making more than 50 billion dollars that can be donated to EA causes.
If someone is saying that his action was negative in expectation, do they mean, that Sam Bankman-Fried lied about his expectations? Do they mean that a 10% chance of this happening should have been enough to tilt the expectation to be negative under the ethical assumptions of longtermism that puts most of the utility that's produced in the far future? Are you saying something else?
I wish I had any sort of trustworthy stats about the success rate of things in the reference class of steal from one pool of money in order to cover up losses in another pool of money, in the hope of making (and winning) big bets in the second pool of money to eventually make the first pool of money whole. I would expect the success rate to be very low (I would be extremely surprised if it were as high as 10%, somewhat surprised if it were as high as 1%), but it's also the sort of thing where if you do it successfully, probably nobody finds out.
Do Ponzi schemes ever become solvent again? What about insolvent businesses that are hiding their insolvency?
I think approximately no one audits people's books before accepting money from them. It's one thing to refuse to accept money from a known criminal (or other type of undesirable), but if you insist that the people giving you money prove that they obtained it honestly, then they'll simply give that money to someone else instead.
This is basically a Quirrell moment in real life; a massive proportion of people on LW are deferring their entire worldview to obvious supervillains.
Who are the obvious supervillains that they're deferring their entire worldview to? And who's deferring to them?
If in a job that's important for the war effort, be a stickler for following all rules and official procedures. Escalate decisions so that things don't get done without official input from higher-ups.
The majority rent (I've lived in a few, all of which, including the one I live in now, rented).
I believe the main reasons for this are:
- People who live in rationalist group houses are disproportionately young and live in expensive areas, which makes it hard to buy a house,
- There's a lot of variability in how long people live in rationalist group houses, and
- Figuring out the ownership structure is complicated.
The first point is fairly self-explanatory, but I'll say a bit more about the other two.
There are several sorts of people who choose to live in a rationalist group house:
- People who would rather live in a rationalist group house than live alone or just with a partner/family,
- People who want to live in a rationalist group house until they find a partner and settle down,
- People who thought they wanted to live in a rationalist group house but decided it wasn't for them (often because they find out they're more introverted than they realized or want more control over their living space than a group house offers),
- People who can't afford to live alone so they live in a group house, and given that they need to live with other people, they'd prefer rationalists, and
- People who are moving to or explicitly temporarily living in a particular city (e.g. to study) who want their housing to come with a rationalist-type social circle,
- Partners of rationalists who themselves aren't rationalists, and
- People in the rationalist community who can live in a rationalist house more cheaply or more conveniently than somewhere else (often but not always because a room is temporarily vacant).
Most of these kinds of people aren't going to stick around very long. That's fine; the temporary (a few months to a year) residents of the rationalist group houses I've lived in have generally been positive additions to the house, so I wouldn't want to exclude them.
Because most of the people who might want to live in a rationalist house won't be sticking around that long, it doesn't make sense for everyone to own it. Which brings us to the question of some subset of the residents owning the house.
Last year, a friend and I looked into buying a house together to turn into a group house (where we would rent the rooms out to other residents). Things I learned from that process were (I expect this to vary a lot by geography, and I know very little about New Zealand's housing market):
- It can be hard to find something that matches multiple people's constraints (in terms of price, location, size, features).
- Co-owning a house with someone (other than a spouse) is legally complicated and requires a good contract and a competent lawyer. Especially if there's also a mortgage involved.
- Touring houses is a lot of work.
- Most houses for sale have a lot wrong with them and the permitting process for transforming them to be the way you want is slow and unpredictable.
- Figuring out whether there'd be sufficient interest in a rationalist group house in a particular location is hard.
There were a couple houses that we came close to want to make an offer on (though we still hadn't figured out the legal issues around co-ownership). Then my friend accepted a job offer in another city, which ended that project.
None of this means you shouldn't buy a house for this purpose under the right circumstances. I think those circumstances are:
- Someone in the group has the ability to buy such a house.
- Enough people are interested and have sufficiently legible requirements regarding price, location, size, and amenities.
- The prospective buyer is ok with the house ending up not being a rationalist group house (and either living in themself not as a group house or turning it into a regular rental property).
There's also an asymmetry between gains and losses, partly due to prospect theory, and partly due to decreasing marginal utility. I bet a lot of people would answer differently if they were asked what they would choose if given the choice between receiving the money vs. going back to the way things were before.
I think it depends on whether you think there will be an omicron booster by the time the next variant comes along. If there is, you'll have gotten Covid for nothing.
Abbot flat out denies the FDA’s claim of potential lowered test sensitivity, says their tests are as effective against Omicron as they were against previous variants.
The link here appears to be a mattress ad.
How often do people talk about tradeoffs between multiple sacred values?
This story makes sense for describing how people might believe conspiracy theories because they oppose lockdowns, but I don't think a similar story would apply for opposition to vaccines. Following this line of thinking, I think the sequence of events is:
- Disease breaks out.
- Public health authorities respond to the disease with high-cost preventative measures.
- People respond to those preventative measures by becoming hostile to public health measures.
- People's hostility to public health measures oppose vaccines even though they're much lower cost and much more effective than the measures that led to them becoming hostile to public health measures in the first place.
An important aspect of this is that it involves a tradeoff between a sacred value (preventing death) and a secular value (avoiding restrictions). When it's not socially acceptable to have a frank discussion of the real costs and benefits of various restrictions, it becomes easier for people who oppose the restrictions to pretend that the benefits of the restrictions don't exist (aka the disease isn't real or isn't serious).
Vaccination with three doses is protective against infection by Omicron, but less protective than vaccines were against Delta. As a rule of thumb I am currently acting as if a booster shot is something like 60%-70% protective against infection but I don’t have confidence in that number. The main protection is still against severe disease, hospitalization and death.
Two questions about this:
- Do you mean that a booster is 60-70% effective relative to being "fully" vaccinated but not boosted, or do you mean that being boosted is 60-70% effective relative to being unvaccinated?
- How did you reach this conclusion? Based on the Pfizer press release, I had been treating being boosted as 95% effective (relative to being unvaccinated) since the level of neutralizing antibodies against Omicron with 3 doses was the same as the level against original Covid with 2 doses, and 2 doses were 95% effective against original.
What was the weather like? I like this idea, and I wonder how well it would work under different weather conditions.
Either it’s bad or weird data, or Omicron somehow puts a ton more virus into the wastewater, and then there’s nothing to see here.
If Omicron somehow puts a ton more virus into the wastewater, that tells us something interesting about the virus. Maybe it somehow infects the digestive tract more effectively than other strains.
How should we determine when there's adequate supply? I imagine calling pharmacies and asking "if, hypothetically, I got Covid, would everyone in my household be able to get Paxlovid?" would work very well.
Facebook discussion on this.
Vietnam
If there are specific problems with those regulations, shouldn't a legislator representing a district with a lot of forestry or ranching be able to propose a sensible solution with little opposition?
The default approach is to try to get the attention of the highest-ranking person they can think of, but this runs afoul of the exact mechanism you mention where attention is precious and the higher the rank, the more fierce the competition for it, and the higher the threshold we need to reach to direct them. But I think this is a power-law distribution, which is to say that as you go down the ladder of hierarchy the attention threshold drops rapidly.
To sum up, we can mitigate the attention problem by aiming as low on the totem pole as possible, and providing as explicit an action as possible.
I wonder if, in this context, that would have meant trying to get the attention of Transportation Secretary Buttigieg rather than President Biden. Or the mayor of Long Beach.
Right, but that impacts whether it's actually profitable to build them.
If you buy one, l assume you can't then rent it out at market rate? What restrictions are there on your ability to resell it? I would expect that to massively decrease these units' value to potential buyers.
As long as we're going off on tangents, does anyone know a name for the bias where Oxonians look like they're doing things effortlessly?
I suspect the following is a common psychological failure mode, and I want a term to refer to it:
- See someone doing something amazing and making it look easy
- Try to do something similar (or imagine trying to)
- Realize (or assume) that it's hard and will take a lot of work
- Conclude that because it's easy for the other person and hard for you, you must be bad at it (when actually it's hard for the other person too, but you just don't see the work that they put into it)
- Since you've concluded that it's hard and you're bad at it, you give up
The intuition might also come from whole grains generally being healthier and darker than refined grains. A naive attempt to generalize that might conclude that the darkest part of the bread is the healthiest.
Given the following charts, statistics, and arguments based on those charts and statistics, point out the important flaws in the arguments and state what unjustified conclusions the arguers are trying to cause you to reach.
For wood and charcoal to be expensive, forests don't necessarily need to be depleted. Instead, it can be due to higher transportation costs (wood and charcoal are heavy). As the empire became less secure during and after the crisis of the 3rd century, I would expect long-distance transportation to have become less safe (due to banditry) and therefore more expensive.
The important question about Alaska opening up vaccines to tourists is whether non-Americans will be able to get in.
Regarding betting on inflation, TIPS already exist.
Is the idea to watch it when the event starts or to watch it beforehand?