Posts
Comments
I agree, but I'd lump all of that into "Analyze the circumstances that caused it". Maybe I should've included more external examples like these
This method is interesting to me and I'd like to get into it someday. Personally I keep finding that whenever I decline to write something down, that one thing will come back to bite me a few days later (because I'd forgotten it). Do you find that you're able to mentally keep track of things better than before, even if they're just vaguely in the back of your mind?
Why pay mind to what's correlated with being right, when you have the option of just seeing who's right?
I'm arguing that being right is the same as "holding greater predictive power", so any conversation that's not geared toward "what's the difference in our predictions?" is not about being right, but rather about something else, like "Do I fit the profile of someone who would be right" / "Am I generally intelligent" / "Am I arguing in good faith" etc.
These things are indeed correlated with being right, but aren't you risking Goodharting? What does it really mean to "be right" about things? If you're native to LessWrong you'll probably answer something like, "to accurately anticipate future sensory experiences". Isn't that all you need? Find an opportunity for you and your friend to predict measurably different futures, then see who wins. All the rest is distraction.
And if you predict all the same things, then you have no real disagreement, just semantic differences
Fun to do with names. Patrick - English version of a Latin name, Patricius, which means "noble", referring to the Roman nobility, which was originally composed of the paterfamiliae, the heads of large families. From pater (father), which is Latin but goes back to proto-indo-european. From proto-indo-european pah which means "to protect/shepherd"
Is this an epistemology?
I have experiences, and some interpretations of those experiences allow me to predict future experiences.
I didn't say it was the answer to everything. The original phrasing was "more truthful."
These are tautologies. What is the point you're getting at?
What would it mean for rationality to be "objectively better"? It depends what the objective is. If your objective is "predictive power," then by some definitions you are already a rationalist.
Is your issue that predictive power isn't a good objective, or that there are better methods for prediction than those discussed on this site?
If there existed a paradigm that is more truthful than 'rationality' as you have been taught it, how would you even know?
Easy. Predictive power.
It seems like you have strong feelings about rationality without actually knowing what that word means here
I really like that last bit about chronological cycles of increasing S-level to "win against" the current level, until physical reality smacks us in the face and we reset. Let me try something:
- (Physically) Hard times create S1 men; S1 men create (physically) good times.
- (Physically) Good times create S2 men (because there's free alpha in manipulating S1); S2 men create (socially) hard times (because now you don't know whom to trust about S1 issues)
- (Socially) hard times create S3 men (because tribalism builds/confirms social trust); S3 men create (socially) good times (you have a whole tribe or church or culture war faction that you trust).
- (Socially) good times create S4 men (because there's free alpha in manipulating S3); S4 men create (physically) hard times (because they're disconnected from physical reality).
I'm gonna be lazy and say:
If it comes up tails, you get nothing.
If that ^ is a given premise in this hypothetical, then we know for certain it is not a simulation (because in a simulation, after tails, you'd get something). Therefore the probability of receiving a lollipop here is 0 (unless you receive one for a completely unrelated reason)
The next step will be to write a shell app that takes your prompt, gets the gpt response, and uses gpt to check whether the response was a "graceful refusal" response, and if so, it embeds your original prompt into one of these loophole formats, and tries again, until it gets a "not graceful refusal" response, which it then returns back to you. So the user experience is a bot with no content filters.
EY is right, these safety features are trivial
certain number of heads
Do you mean "certain number of wins"? Number of heads is independent of their guesses, and number of correctly-guessed heads is asking a different question than the original experiment
I was going to say that this week marks the end of the Covid posts being majority Covid content.
My ideal future has Zvi posting nationally renowned journalism on all manner of current events, but all articles have the title "Covid <date>: <tagline>" and only the real fans remember why.
now that the masks are mostly gone except for the subway.
I see only about 60% mask compliance in the NYC subway now. I've been maskless myself in the subway for months - doing my part in the preference cascade
Related theory is that they're planning for a more dangerous disease to be released in the future, either accidentally or on purpose, and they feel the need to perfect their zero-[disease] protocol now. They can't accept a superficial failure with covid because that means accepting a critical failure with the next thing, especially if they're not so good at making vaccines.
Paschal's targeted advertising: How can you be against targeted ads when they're showing you deals that have positive EV for you?
- There's an attention cost with evaluating whether the deal is in fact positive EV. And effective ads will mostly have a higher attention cost - There's a "valley of difficult choices" where the EV is close to zero. Most ads you see are to the left of the valley: strongly negative-EV deals that you don't really consider. But more effective targeted ads will move the needle to the right on average, forcing you to pay more attention to all ads because now their expected ability to give you good deals is higher. (so basically, "with the changes in attention cost, it's not actually positive EV").
- Privacy - most of us value it as a good in itself. We have nothing to hide but we still don't want to show you. We get a bad feeling knowing that some random uncaring stranger knows specific details about us. (so basically, "with the utility cost in privacy, it's not actually positive EV").
- Randomized priorities- sure I do actually want the gardening tools, but I was gonna look at that two weeks from now, after my Florida trip. I have to plan my Florida trip right now. - And then I see the ad for exactly the product I want, and my attention is too hijacked to ignore it. The decisions I have to make in the near future are ordered by priority, and it takes some amount of mental effort to enforce that priority. Targeted ads actively fight that order by taking some random thing I want and asking me to make that decision right now. (so basically, "with the increased willpower needed to enforce decision priority, it's not actually positive EV").
All of this stands against a backdrop of: It's actually really easy for a consumer to take initiative to find the product they want. It's never been easier compare alternate products and get a view of the whole market for something. So this is the era in which we least need companies to take the initiative to find us.
Did I manage to actually convey something meaningful to you or did I just wordcel 5,000 nice-sounding words together? How would you be sure?
I think you can actually judge that by the value/effort balance of the communication.
I see a kind of spectrum between teaching and.. let's call it meditation (as in "meditate on X"), where both can convey meaningful ideas and concepts, but the latter takes much more effort to get anything useful, and yields more random results.
With teaching, I'm probably getting all the intended ideas on my first interpretation, and then it's reliably useful to me. With meditation, I have to bring a lot more effort and ideas myself to try to get something meaningful out of it, and I might still be wrong. You can pick any random sentence and ponder it as a koan, free-associating about it until you feel like you learned or realized something useful. But that'll feel very different from just going on wikipedia and learning something useful.
It is a spectrum though. GPT-3 doesn't give random sentences, but when I play around with it and occasionally find something "useful," it feels more like I'm doing the koan thing (more effortful). Reading good blog posts is much less effortful per value added.
Option two is to point out that they’re talking sense now and acting compatibly with life, and one could not reasonably ask for more than that.
I’m mostly in the second camp. The penalty for being late should not be death, so go and sin no more.
Not sure I agree but I'll have to think about it more.
Simulacrum-2 doesn't mean "saying false things" - sometimes S2 says true things. When you discover that someone's lied to you, do you shame them for saying the false thing, or do you shame them for being on S2 toward you? The latter is a kind of meta-lie that they're always committing, even when they say true things. The meta-lie is "I'm saying this cause it's true, not primarily to manipulate you".
In personal relationships, you can forgive and give people chances to stop being S2 toward you. Or you might even tolerate their being on S2, because you're convinced they really care about you (like an overprotective mom whom you love). But for public figures / "Narrative", might it be acceptable to just say "they told a meta-lie, they still haven't explicitly come clean on that meta-lie, so F them no matter what they say in the future, they blew their chance to ever earn my respect."
Agreed and, a broader point - I notice that authoritarians heavily intersect with "people who can't imagine second-order effects of anything". Theoretically we should see some authoritarians who think through everything at multiple levels and mastermind a better society against all odds, but instead we keep seeing that basic thought process of "X is bad. X requires Y. So let's ban Y, boom everything's solved."
As a mistake theorist I suspect "no second order effects" is a mistake that leads many people in power to unwittingly inflict much misery on their societies.
Plenty of "cruelty is the point" signaling stuff going on too though, as Zvi says.
It’s the middle position, of crippling one’s life without getting the job done properly, that doesn’t add up.
Well, it's larping, right? Charlotte airport lady is playing out a post-apocalyptic fantasy, complete with costume.
I also think that censoring that kind of statement is a reasonable thing to consider doing. But the rules seem to consistently get written in a way that does not differentiate between this and a similar true or good faith statement, and instead give power the ability to censor whatever they dislike.
This sounds to me a lot like "real X has never been tried," so my response is similar to what I'd usually say. This is what real censorship does. Censorship without falsehood is an unstable system bound to eventually reach equilibrium. Why? Because we live in a sufficiently social world that if you have censorship power, you can succeed without being right about the physical world (and why bother being right if it's slightly inconvenient?). Concentrations of social power attract simulacrum-4 players, and if they have enough power they can live whole happy lives without ever facing that rude awakening that the physical world exists.
“I am not seeing this movie because I don’t have to and you can’t make me.”
My thoughts exactly! And maybe it's because I've been reading these posts all along that I find the premise of that movie so exhausting; our institutions aren't set up to adequately handle crisis? No fucking shit. Apparently to many people this is a novel enough revelation that it makes for an interesting movie, which itself is frustrating.
My personal conversations have reflected what Scott said about the actual meaning being garbled. I haven't heard a real answer to this. So it sounds like some kind of "narcissistic ennui porn": Ennui because everything's fucked and we can't do anything about it; Narcissistic because, by being one of the rare few who recognize this, I'm special (never mind that I won't do anything about it); Porn because it's superstimulating and meaningless.
What's extra frustrating is to see it coming out of Hollywood, ie actual power. If you have 100+ million dollars, I don't want to hear about how "those in power won't listen to me about climate change!" Either you're not trying or you suck at being powerful.
Perhaps I can continue to work on transitioning away from a Covid focus towards a focus on things that now matter more, on a variety of fronts.
Thus was born the most simulacrum-1 journalist the world had ever seen. I'd love this.
I've noticed that Australians always start their defense by talking about how low their case counts have been, as if that's the only important metric in all of this. We'd optimize for different things, to say the least.
I think our policies (aside from vaccine supply!) have been consistently better than either the US or UK.
Well, that's why you're happy there and I'm happy here, I guess. Also, I think you "asided" the single most important policy out of them all.
Also, my comment was pretty clearly tongue in cheek. No, I don't actually think the fictional contestants of Squid Game have a better life than you. You took it seriously and wrote a lot in response. You can draw your own conclusions from that.
I am slightly leaning toward the belief that the story about the 11-year-old was a false flag meant to troll the media. It hits a suspicious number of talking points all in a row. But only slightly.
So in Squid Game, an imaginary hyperbolic dystopia where society's rejects face the deliberate disintegration of their humanity, they're allowed to play more childhood games than regular people in Australia in 2021...
Exploration-exploitation is a good model, but it doesn't tell me the personality differences I can expect to see between people who do exploration A vs. exploration B. And, exploitation is a business term and doesn't match up very well with what people are getting psychologically out of setting up comfortable limitations for themselves.
I saw Hoffer's ideas as basically true but needing nuance, because not everybody who's discontent in exactly the way he described will actually join a mass movement. And there's also tremendous variety in "individualists" that he didn't talk much about.
Good point. I'll relay the author's own counter-
If you claim that a concept is not present because it is repressed, you can't lose; it is not a fair game, intellectually, because you always hold the trump card. This type of argument makes psychoanalysis seem unscientific to many people, the fact that its proponents can claim that someone denies one of their concepts because he represses his consciousness of its truth.
But repression is not a magical word for winning arguments. It is a real phenomenon, and we have been able to study many of its workings. This study gives it legitimacy as a scientific concept and makes it a more-or-less dependable ally in our argument. For one thing, there is a growing body of research trying to get at the consciousness of death denied by repression that uses psychological tests such as measuring galvanic skin responses; it strongly suggests that underneath the most bland exterior lurks the universal anxiety, the "worm at the core."
Pro-vax Anti-vaxxer Gang wooo
In general, when I see someone give a whole rant that basically ends with "it's just a sad state of affairs, is all", I assume they're doing some underhanded signaling.
No one ever takes the time to write something out just because "it's sad". The thing they really want said is there in the subtext. "I'm sad because no one's surprised that our institutions suck" subtext: "Our institutions suck and it's really really obvious". But saying the latter is less sophisticated. If you want to make moves in the culture war while keeping plausible deniability, you hide the message in the subtext.
Zvi reveals the absurdity you get when you try to interpret the message at face value.
Yeah, I was pretty bothered a couple years ago when we were doing the "kids in cages" news cycle, and the red tribe people kept saying stuff along the lines of, "it's good that our policy is unpleasant, because it's a deterrent against future infractions".
Any degree of cruelty can be (correctly!) framed as a deterrent. So in general we should be really wary of those kinds of policies.
I believe vaccine mandates are primarily substitutes for destructive alternative restrictions that are worse for freedom, and those who oppose mostly think they are mostly complements that ramp up restrictions of all kinds.
That is definitely a crux, thank you for pointing that out.
or that if you’re vaccinated that’s sufficient protection that you shouldn’t care who else around you is unvaccinated.
This is 100% me. My view is: if your solution requires absolutely everyone to buy in to it - that is, it requires successful coordination across all cultures within the US, or in the world - then you don't have a solution, you have a wish. The wish is for human nature to be fundamentally different from what it is.
Forcing coordination through federal mandates is different, in that it's actually possible. But I see a similar kind of wish here. Re the substitute/complement question above, I believe the hypothetical version of the US government that successfully exercises such control over its citizens' physical bodies and then promptly relinquishes that degree of control, is a US government not run by humans.
I happen to think the vaccine is an actual solution under the strict definition above. As in, I got it, so the pandemic is over for me. The reductions in infection and long-term risk are well documented here, and in my view they're enough to justify taking the (underrated) benefit of no longer worrying about my covid risk (including caring about the vax status of those around me) (obviously I'm still worried about the second-order effects). I've had a really enjoyable summer that was full of social interaction, travel, dating, etc.
Tldr: "Real life" has enough utility that I count my individual vaccination as sufficient risk mitigation to justify it.
What does the $300 plugin do that "classic block" doesn't do? I just edit my posts inside a single classic block, which seems to be identical to the old WordPress editor, including the ability to directly edit the html.
The two sides are both trying to make the mandates look as obnoxious as possible, for different reasons.
This is such a thing, I see it all the time, and it is both completely obvious and apparently not noticed by anybody else.
When your goal is to signal to your side rather than convince the other side, and their goal is to signal rather than be convinced, you get this perverse symbiosis of everybody saying ridiculous things on purpose.
Absolutely, the whole blame-avoidance game would tend to make them over-cautious, but other hazards like regulatory capture (which I'm pretty sure is what happened with nutrition) threaten to make them recklessly wrong (as long as they can still find a way to avoid blame).
Your argument is that food guidelines don't drive outcomes (in America), and also that a particular set of guidelines is correct, because obviously they're driving outcomes (in Vietnam).? This argument is missing a bunch of pieces.
In any case, if you believe the food pyramid is great for Americans, I'm not interested in convincing you otherwise, so feel free to ignore my point.
Also, if one is forced to get a medical procedure that one doesn't want, purely because they didn't have the amount of money that's required for bodily autonomy in their society, then yeah, I would call that "degrading" and a bunch of other stuff. A company is right to mandate what it wants for its employees, but it is not "hyperbolic language" to call some of that treatment degrading.
Am I the only one here who can easily relate to that twitter guy's sentiment? Do rationalists not value the whole "dignity of autonomy" thing as an end in itself?
Here's what Zvi is missing on (D):
I think both that the vaccines are safe and effective based on the evidence, and also that if the evidence did not strongly say they were safe and effective, we wouldn’t be contemplating such policies.
Does "we" refer to the same institutions that got nutrition entirely wrong for decades at a time, both at the micro level (individual foods) and macro level (food groups), whose entirely-wrong takes were taught in schools nationwide? I'm feeling way too much Gel-Mann skepticism here to say "yeah thankfully the powers-that-be will always be correct on vaccines".
The level of pushback we have now is when, scientifically, the case is overwhelming, and if the vaccines were instead not safe but still much safer than not getting vaccinated, we’d not only not make them mandatory, they’d be forbidden.
Pushback is not correlated with scientific viability, but with political messaging. We've passed ineffective/dangerous policies with very little pushback (Patriot Act/NSA), and we've received plenty of pushback on effective policies (blocking travel from China). We cannot rely on pushback to bail us out of stupid object-level decisions. I hate to sound like such a libertarian ideologue, but I'm really not seeing a safer long-term policy than "stop giving govt's (potentially stupid) decisions so much power".
At this point I (and I think most people) assume we will eventually know the origin of covid, with reasons that correctly model the physical world. I'm willing to sit back and wait for the more dedicated researchers to bring that answer to light.
The more pressing question for many of us is - why did "they" try so hard to prevent us from considering the lab hypothesis in the first place? And why did they use shame and guilt-by-association instead of ever telling us some physical facts that refute the lab hypothesis?
Yeah "bad" is like "don't climb the ladder or we get the hose".
People would often reduce their own prize if it means that their opponent's is reduced more.
This tells me we care more about relative status than absolute. See: anyone saying anything remotely critical of capitalism in the 21st century in the United States.
This poll asked people if they did "malicious online activity directed at somebody they didn't know"
You mean the default way to gain status on Twitter?
But yes, pure cruelty does exist. What of the fact that chimpanzees are cruel but have no concept of evil? This tells me maybe cruelty serves a self-interested purpose in dominance-based status hierarchies. If the human bullies don't know that, it wouldn't be the first evolved behavior that humans do without fully knowing why.
Whenever I try to analyze evil, I find banality all the way down.
not just about the probability you think something is true, but an estimate of your confidence, in some quantitative way?
I don't think these are actually different things.
The coin example is misleading. Your confidence in the next toss being heads is exactly the same as any other independent 50% bet. Your confidence that "this is a fair coin", which could be approximated by, say, getting between 45-55 heads in the next 100 tosses, is a different bet and will give a different answer than 50%.
Huh I think the linkpost didn't fully work
Isn't that true of all property though?
Ownership is not an innate property of physical objects. It's just saying that the government will use force etc.
I had that same question. But is there a middle ground, where these companies wouldn't enforce parents during a global emergency, but would expect to profit from the patents once the emergency is over? And that this expectation of delayed profits is a factor in their original decision to innovate?
Love and value your posts as always. One point of contention:
They talk about this later on, saying that conservatives need to have their autonomy respected. People aren’t stupid. Either something is optional, and they have a choice, or it isn’t and they don’t. You can try to send both messages but you’ll fail.
Doesn't this basically deny the entire phenomenon of persuasion? "Pure persuasion", let's call it, where you don't improve the material incentives at all, but nevertheless you get the person to do the thing. I believe this is a skill that exists.
Is the red tribe legitimately afraid of the vaccine, or are they just pissed off at being told where to go and what to do every day for a year? Definitely both, but the latter group will be amenable to persuasion. They have a psychological need that isn't being met, but can be met through a simple message.
Another angle is that a lot of people are motivated by little heroic thoughts, but you need to grant autonomy in order for heroism to exist. If you were masking and distancing and vaccinating only because you were told to by CNN's version of an expert, then you're not really any kind of hero, you're just agreeable, and this distinction is blindingly clear to the red tribe.
So I say tell them it's up to them. Tell them this is America and they can reject the vaccine for the rest of their lives if they want to, but we happen to believe that actual lives will be saved, in expectation, if they get it.
Coercion concern:
Shouldn't we think about the counterfactual where the vaccine is not completely safe and healthy? What happens next time, when the thing is even more tribal-affiliated, such that the tribe in power won't be upfront about the downsides of it? I don't want a world where politics & power incentivize what medical procedures I should/shouldn't get. I'd love to keep those spheres as separate as possible.
And that's where I'm confused - because it's conveniently very possible to keep them separate in this case: the vaccine works on individuals. You don't need sweeping mandates for the whole community in order to get it to work. Everyone can just make a medical decision in their own best interests.
If you think not getting the vaccine is healthier, you should be able to live that experiment, as long as its effect on others is negligible. And likewise, in the possible future where I actually think it's healthier to not do X medical procedure, I hope I can run that experiment without incurring the wrath of politics and power.
your father already knows you got a C-, told you that you’d better not pretend you got a C-,
Second C- should be C+
few will choose to have their wealth made visible to all, because the only advantage it brings is signalling, a thing they won't admit even to themselves that they care about much
"Accountability" is the word normal people use when referring to pursuing success though conspicuous signaling. People already do opt in to "accountability" for different goals they have. I think the main reason they won't do it with wealth is for privacy.
I assume you've read Zvi's Choices are bad?
I'm like you, with the agonizing cost/benefit spreadsheets, and lately I try to remind myself that "choices are bad", which implies that the act of making a choice at all (and moving on) has an inherent positive bias to it, because it frees you from what could become a miserable sunk-cost feedback loop ("I've spent so much time on this already, so I'd really better make the optimal decision now, but to do that I'll need more time...").
Also, I know offhand what my salary comes down to per hour, so I use that as a rule of thumb when deciding how much time to spend on a decision (given how much value is at stake in the decision).
You can't Only ask questions that will support your beliefs.
Questions can't support beliefs. Answers support beliefs (or don't). What exactly are you asking?