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No they’re not interchangeable. They are all designed with each other in mind, along the spectrum, to maximize profits under constraints, and the reality of rivalrousness is one reason to not simply try to run at 100% capacity every instant.
I can't tell what this paragraph is responding to. What are "they"?
You explained they popped up from the ground. Those are just about the most excludable toilets in existence!
Okay I do feel a bit silly for missing this... but I also still maintain that "allows everyone or no one to use" is a stretch when it comes to excludability. (Like, if the reason we're talking about it is "can the free market provide this service at a profit", then we care about "can the provider limit access to people who are paying for it". If they can't do that, do we care that they can turn the service off during the day and on at night?)
Overall it still seems like you want to use words in a way that I think is unhelpful.
Idk, I think my reaction here is that you're defining terms far more broadly than is actually going to be helpful in practice. Like, excludability and rivalry are spectrums in multiple dimensions, and if we're going to treat them as binaries then sure, we could say anything with a hint of them counts in the "yes" bin, but... I think for most purposes,
- "occasionally, someone else arrives at the parking lot at the same time as me, and then I have to spend a minute or so waiting for the pay-and-display meter"
is closer to
- "other people using the parking lot doesn't affect me"
than it is to
- "when I get to the parking lot there are often no spaces at all"
I wouldn't even say that: bathrooms are highly rivalrous and this is why they need to be so overbuilt in terms of capacity. While working at a cinema, did you never notice the lines for the womens' bathroom vs the mens' bathroom once a big movie let out? And that like 99% of the time the bathrooms were completely empty?
My memory is we didn't often have that problem, but it was over ten years ago so dunno.
I'd say part of why they're (generally in my experience) low-rivalrous is because they're overbuilt. They (generally in my experience) have enough capacity that people typically don't have to wait, and when they do have to wait they don't have to wait long. There are exceptions (during the interval at a theatre), but it still seems to me that most bathrooms (as they actually exist, and not hypothetical other bathrooms that had been built with less capacity) are low-rivalrous.
None of your examples are a counterexample. All of them are excludable, and you explain how and that the operators choose not to.
I'm willing to concede on the ones that could be pay gated but aren't, though I still think "how easy is it to install a pay gate" matters.
But did you miss my example of the pop-up urinals? I did not explain how those are excludable, and I maintain that they're not.
Thing I've been wrong about for a long time: I remembered that the rocket equation "is exponential", but I thought it was exponential in dry mass. It's not, it's linear in dry mass and exponential in Δv.
This explains a lot of times where I've been reading SF and was mildly surprised at how cavalier people seemed to be about payload, like allowing astronauts to have personal items.
Sorry, I didn't see this notification until after - did you find us?
I agree that econ 101 models are sometimes incorrect or inapplicable. But
I don’t know how much that additional cost is, but seemingly less than the benefit, because three months later, the whole of Germany wants to introduce this card. The introduction has to be delayed by some legal issues, and then a few counties want to introduce it independently. So popular is this special card!
The argument here seems to be that the card must satisfy a cost-benefit analysis or it wouldn't be so popular, and I don't buy that either.
Ah, I can sometimes make fridays but not tomorrow. Hope it goes well.
they turn a C/G base pair to an A/T, or vice versa.
Can they also turn it into a G/C or a T/A? I wasn't sure if this was an example or a "this is the only edit they do". Or I might just be misunderstanding and this question is wrong.
I think Ben's proposal is: between rounds, it takes a while to split the whole deck into suits, all hearts in one pile and all spades in another and so on. Instead you can just pick out four hearts, and four spades, and so on, and remove 0/2/2/4 cards from those piles, and shuffle the rest back into the deck. But no matter how you shuffle, I don't think you can do that without leaking information.
The Gap Cycle by Stephen R. Donaldson
I think I've read this twice, in my early teens and early twenties, and loved it both times. But I'm now 34 and can't talk about it in depth. I think past-me especially liked the grimness and was impressed at how characters seemed to be doing things for internally motivated reasons. (IIRC Donaldson calls this giving characters "dignity". I feel like since then I've picked up another term for it that's temporarily slipped my mind.)
I still think A Dark and Hungry God Arises and This Day All Gods Die are excellent book titles.
A caveat is that back then I also loved Donaldson's Thomas Covenant books, and I think that by my mid-twenties I enjoyed them but not so much. So plausibly I'd like the Gap Cycle less now than then too? But I want to re-read.
Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer
I once saw a conversation that went something like: "I don't find writing quality in sci-fi that important." / "You clearly haven't read Too Like the Lightning".
I wasn't sure if the second person meant TLTL's writing is good or bad. Having read TLTL, both interpretations seemed plausible. (They meant good.)
I found it very difficult to get through this book, except that the last few chapters were kind of gripping. That was enough to get me to read the next one, which was hard to get through again. Ultimately I read the whole series, and I'm not sure how much I enjoyed the process of reading it. But they're some of my favorite books to have read, and I can imagine myself re-reading them.
Crystal trilogy by Max Harms
I enjoyed this but don't have much to say. As an AI safety parable it seemed plausible enough; I hadn't previously seen aliens like that; I occasionally thought some of the writing was amateurish in a way I couldn't put my finger on, but that wasn't a big deal.
just make 4 piles of 4 cards from each suit and remove from those
I don't think you can do this because at least one person will see which cards are in those piles, and then seeing those cards in game will give them more info than they're supposed to have. E.g. if they see 9h in one of the piles and then 9h in game, they know hearts isn't the 8-card suit.
(The rules as written are unclear on this. But I assume that you're meant to remove cards at random from the suits, rather than having e.g. A-8 in one suit, A-Q in one, and A-10 in the other two. If you did that then getting dealt the Q or J would be a dead giveaway.)
I think Causality would be good for this. Levels have their full state visible from the start, and there's no randomness. There's a relatively small number of mechanics to learn, though I worry that some of them (particularly around details of movement, like "what will an astronaut do when they can't move forward any more?") might be "there are multiple equally good guesses here" which seems suboptimal.
Actually, there's one detail of state that I'm not sure is visible, in some levels:
When you come out of a portal, which way do you face? I think there's probably a consistent rule for this but I'm not sure, I could believe that in some levels you just have to try it to see.
they are by definition rivalrous ("the consumption of a good or service by one person diminishes the ability of another person to consume the same good or service"), as only one person in a stall at a time, and the timeframe doesn't matter to this point.
Why does timeframe not matter? If there's a pay-and-display parking lot, with enough spaces for everyone, but only one ticket machine, would you say this is rivalrous because only one person can be using the ticket machine at once?
Bathrooms aren't zero rivalrous, but they seem fairly low-rivalrous to me. (There are some people for whom bathroom use is more urgent, making bathrooms more rivalrous, e.g. pregnant people and those with certain disabilities. My understanding is these people sometimes get access to extra bathrooms that the rest of us don't.)
(As for dirtiness, all I can say is that the public bathrooms I've used tend to be somewhere between "just fine" and "unpleasant but bearable". I did once have to clean shit from the toilet walls in the cinema where I used to work, but I believe it's literally once in my life I've encountered that. Obviously people will have very different experiences here.)
they are extremely excludable: "Excludability refers to the characteristic of a good or service that allows its provider to prevent some people from using it."
Depends on details. London has some street urinals that afaict pop up at night, they have no locks or even walls, they're nonexcludable. Some are "open to everyone the attendant decides to let in", and some are "open to everyone with a credit card", and these seem just straightforwardly excludable. Other bathrooms can be locked but have no attendant and no means of accepting payment, so they're either "open to everyone" or "closed to everyone", and calling that "excludable" feels like a stretch to me. I suppose you could say that you could install a pay gate so it's "excludable but currently choosing not to exclude people", but then it depends how easy it is to install one of them.
So I guess Stuart is named for John Stuart Mill and Milton for Milton Friedman, but what about Carla (is CARLA an acronym?) and Victoria (Tori?)?
Note that to the extent this is true, it suggests verification is even harder than John thinks.
In any case, where is this hedging discussion happening?
I've seen and taken part in discussions about hedging on LW, but the thing that made me write this comment was a conversation on Duncan Sabien's facebook.
What things are over-discussed?
Interesting question, but nothing comes to mind.
A thing that feels under-discussed when it comes to hedging is, hedging doesn't just have to be swapping from "X" to "I believe X". You can say "the sky looks blue" or "wikipedia says the sky is blue" or "rumor has it the sky is blue" or "IIRC the sky is blue" or "if I did the math right, the sky is blue".
I for one welcome our new AI overlord whom I unwittingly helped install. Otherwise I'd need to feel conflicted about my actions this weekend.
I still have questions about one of the puzzles. Will the solutions be made available somewhere (ideally in a format where people can try them unspoiled first), or should I just ask?
Ah, thanks, I see now. You're saying that even if it's written with the small end before the big end according to the way the words flow, the direction of eye scanning and of mentally parsing and of giving a name to the number is still big end before small end? Similarly I might write a single word sdrawkcab in English text but the reader would still read it first-letter-to-last-letter.
Curious, when handwriting, what order do you write in?
Even better, Daniel then get to keep his equity
I missed this part?
Isn't this showing that Hebrew and Arabic write numbers little-endian? Surely big-versus-little-endian isn't about left-to-right or right-to-left, it's about how numbers flow relative to word reading order.
Ask me about the 2019 NYC Solstice Afterparty sometime if you want a minor ops horror story.
Consider yourself asked.
(I confess I have no idea how to interpret the agree-votes on this.)
Yeah, I was wrong to suggest/assume that the definition is original to you and not the way it's defined in other communities that I just am not familiar with.
It still seems like you're making the core mistake I was trying to point at, which is asserting that a word means something different than what other people mean by it; rather than acknowledging that sometimes words have different meanings in different contexts.
Like, people are talking about what sort of toppings should be on a donut and how large the hole should be, and you're chiming in to say you came around on donuts when you realized that instead of being ring-shaped with toppings they're ball-shaped with fillings. You didn't come around on donuts. You just discovered that even though you don't like ring donuts, you do like filled donuts, a related but different baked good.
I only came around on faith once I realized it was just Latin for trust, and specifically trust in the world to be just as it is.
This really just seems to me like you're asserting that what a word "really means" is some weird new definition that ~no one else means when they say the word.
(I don't know Latin. Nevertheless I am extremely confident that the word "faith" in Latin does not specifically refer to the concept of "trust in the world to be just as it is".)
Also now running as an in-progress youtube short series. (I haven't read the original.)
"It seems a lot of our pills cause vomiting as a side-effect?"
"Yeah, the company knows about it but it's tricky to fix."
"How so? Our competitors don't have this problem, and we make basically the same products, right?"
"Right, no, it's a corporate structure issue."
"?"
"If a pill does too much or too little of something, we have a group of clever people whose job it is to care about that and to reformulate it slightly to improve it. If it doesn't kill enough pain, the analgesic division will step in. If it causes clotting, the anticoagulant folks have a look. If it makes your bones brittle, it'll be the antiosteoporosises. You see? But if it causes vomiting-"
"Right, yeah. There's no one to take ownership of the problem, because-"
"There is no antiemetics division."
Oh, huh. Searle's original Chinese room paper (first eight pages) doesn't say machines can't think.
"OK, but could a digital computer think?"
If by "digital computer" we mean anything at all that has a level of description where it can correctly be described as the instantiation of a computer program, then again the answer is, of course, yes, since we are the instantiations of any number of computer programs, and we can think.
"But could something think, understand, and so on solely in virtue of being a computer with the right sort of program? Could instantiating a program, the right program of course, by itself be a sufficient condition of understanding?"
This I think is the right question to ask, though it is usually confused with one or more of the earlier questions, and the answer to it is no.
"Why not?"
Because the formal symbol manipulations by themselves don't have any intentionality; they are quite meaningless; they aren't even symbol manipulations, since the symbols don't symbolize anything. In the linguistic jargon, they have only a syntax but no semantics. Such intentionality as computers appear to have is solely in the minds of those who program them and those who use them, those who send in the input and those who interpret the output.
I can't say I really understand what he's trying to say, but it's different from what I thought it was.
Yeah. It's still possible to program in such a way that that works, and it's always been possible to program in such a way that it doesn't work. But prepared statements make it easier to program in such a way that it doesn't work, by allowing the programmer to pass executable code (which is probably directly embedded as a literal in their application language) separately from the parameters (which may be user-supplied).
(I could imagine a SQL implementation forbidding all strings directly embedded in queries, and requiring them to be passed through prepared statements or a similar mechanism. That still wouldn't make these attacks outright impossible, but it would be an added layer of security.)
A large majority of empirical evidence reported in leading economics journals is potentially misleading. Results reported to be statistically significant are about as likely to be misleading as not (falsely positive) and statistically nonsignificant results are much more likely to be misleading (falsely negative). We also compare observational to experimental research and find that the quality of experimental economic evidence is notably higher.
I'm confused by this "falsely negative". Like, without that, that part sounds like it's saying something like
when a result is reported as "we observed a small effect here, but it wasn't statistically significant", then more often than not, there's no real effect there
but that's a false positive. If they're saying it's a false negative, it suggests something like
when a result is reported as statistically insignificant, that makes it sound like there's no effect there, but more often than not there actually is an effect
...but that's (a) not a natural reading of that part and (b) surely not true.
Were SQL a better language this wouldn’t be possible, all the command strings would separated somehow
SQL does support prepared statements which forbid injection. Maybe you're thinking of something stronger than this? I'm not sure how long they've been around for, but wikipedia's list of SQL injection examples only has two since 2015 which hints that SQL injection is much less common than it used to be.
(Pedantic clarification: dunno if this is in any SQL standard, but it looks like every SQL implementation I can think of supports them.)
Planet Money #902 (28 Mar 2019): The Phoebus Cartel
Listened to this one a few weeks ago and don't remember most of it. But half the episode was about the phoebus cartel, a case of planned obsolesence when lightbulb manufacturers decided that no light bulb should be allowed to last more than 1000 hours.
Writing this for Gell-Mann amnesia reasons: in the episode someone says there was no benefit to consumers from this, but I'd recently seen a technology connections episode on the subject saying that longer lasting incandescent light bulbs are less energy efficient (i.e. more heat less light) for physics reasons, to the extent that they could easily be more expensive over their lifetime. Seems like an important caveat that PM missed!
The other half was about psychological obsolesence, where manufacturers make long-lasting goods like cars cosmetically different to convince you you need a new one.
Planet Money #1717 (9 Feb 2024): A Lawsuit for your broken heart
Keith met woman, fell in love, got married, had kids. She helped with his BMX company and she'd post sickeningly cute things on facebook about how she had the best family.
Then Keith saw some very messages she was exchanging with some other guy (from him: «do you like how tall I am», «show me a bikini pic», that kind of thing). He got mad, called him, said «never fucking talk to my wife again» and thought that would be the end of it.
It was not the end of it. She had affair, they got divorced. A bit later he was catching up with an old school friend who'd been in a similar situation, and she told him she was suing the woman her husband had cheated with. You can do that?
These are heartbalm laws and they're kind of archaic. In the past if a woman got engaged and the man broke things off, she could be ruined, so she got to sue him for breach of promise. There's also seduction, where she could sue someone for lying her into bed. And criminal conversation, which is adultery. And the one relevant to the show, alienation of affections, where you can sue someone for damaging your marriage.
Most states have abolished these, partly because public perception moved towards women using these in ways that were unpopular, this is where the term "gold digger" took off. There were also a bunch of famous people who got sued.
But a few states still have alienation of affections, including North Carolina, which is where most of the suits are. Possibly because that's where most of the legal experts in them are.
Keith presents evidence that his marriage would otherwise have been happy: the sickeningly cute facebook posts, messages between him and his ex, messages from her to her girlfriends saying the marriage would have been fine if not for this other guy. (She subsequently married him.)
And because marriage is in part an economic arrangement, his lawyer also talks about the work that the ex had been doing for the company, and all the unpaid labor she was doing like childcare and washing dishes. The hosts point out it's kinda weird that Keith is suing some other guy for the unpaid labor his ex wife used to do. But that's what's happening, and Keith wins the suit and is awarded $8 million.
Other guy files for bankruptcy. Keith probably won't get anything from him, and still owes his lawyers thousands of dollars in fees. But he says it was worth it.
Nice!
Wikipedia says his mission began on 08/29/1498 and ended on 01/07/1499 (so about 3 months).
It looks like this is just one leg of the return journey. In total the outward journey was about 10 months and the return was about 11, and both spent 3+ months without landing.
Hm, do you want to go into more depth? Intuitively I agree this is obviously distortionary, but I'm finding it awkward to think through the details of the distortion.
One thing that comes to mind is "if the market is at 10% but you think 5% is "correct" according to what seems like the spirit of the question, you're going to expect that the market just doesn't get resolved, so why bother betting it down". But I feel like there's probably more than that. (E: oh, the dynomight essay linked above mentions this one as well.)
Thanks! Yeah, I think that's making the same basic point with a different focus.
And that makes me more confident in changing the title, so doing that now. (Original title: "Conditional prediction markets are, specifically, conditioned on the thing happening".)
Maybe a pithier title would be "Conditional prediction markets are evidential, not causal"?
The problem was so common that shipowners and governments assumed a 50% death rate from scurvy for their sailors on any major voyage.
Sticking my neck out: roll to disbelieve that 50% of sailors on major voyages died in general, let alone specifically of scurvy.
Ways to change the claim that I'd find much more believable:
- 50% of those who got scurvy died of it
- A 50% death rate was considered plausible, and the possibility was planned for, but it wasn't common
- "Major voyage" here is a much smaller category than I expect; think Magellan rather than Columbus.
Note that in general there's no contradiction between
"X is a very not-Y trait, in fact just about the least Y trait there is"
And
"Nevertheless, one can be X and also overall very Y"
Planet Money: The Maine Potato War
The standard potato today is the russet, mostly associated with Idaho and Washington, but in the... 70s? 80s?... it was some other kind from Maine.
These potatos were sold on the New York Mercantile Exchange, and in particular you could buy and sell futures there. Futures are good for hedging, farmers could lock in the price early to avoid risk of a crash, and buyers could lock it in early to avoid risk of a rise. You could also just speculate, with no intention of ever seeing a potato. Speculators are generally good for markets because they put a bunch of money in there which helps them flow better.
The big Western potato farmers didn't like that Maine potatos were on the exchange, because it gave them an advantage. So one year they entered the market with like a million dollars worth of contracts. (I vaguely recall that these were buy contracts, but I think it fits better with the rest of the story if they were sell.) Trading is weird for the year, and when things finally play out after close date, the Western farmers collectively owe the market millions of pounds of Maine potatoes, possibly more than existed in the entire state of Maine.
They try to get around it by offering russet potatoes instead, but buyers say no dice. So in the end they just default. They have to pay back the buyers plus pay heavy fines. I think banned from the exchange for a bit? Short term expensive for them.
But long term very good for them! Markets don't like defaults, so the Maine potatoes are removed from the exchange a bit later.
I think he is using the argument as a soldier.
I see. That's not a sense I pick up on myself, but I suppose it's not worth litigating.
To be clear, skimming my previous posts, I don't see anything that I don't endorse when it comes to literary criticism. Like, if I've said something that you agree with most of the time, but disagree with for literary criticism, then we likely disagree. (Though of course there may be subtleties e.g. in the way that I think something applies when the topic is literary criticism.)
You mention that “awesome” and “terrible” are very subjective words, unlike “blue”, and this is relevant. I agree. Similarly, media criticism is very subjective, unlike dress colors.
Media criticism can be very subjective, but it doesn't have to be. "I love Star Wars" is more subjective than "Star Wars is great" is more subjective than "Star Wars is a technical masterpiece of the art of filmmaking" is more subjective than "Star Wars is a book about a young boy who goes to wizard school". And as I said above:
I’m comfortable with “Luke is a Jedi”, and I think it’s importantly different from, say, “Yoda is wise” or “the Death Star is indestructible” or “the Emperor has been defeated once and for all”.
And I think the ways it’s different are similar to the differences between claims about base-level reality like “Tim Cook is a CEO” versus “the Dalai Lama is wise” or “the Titanic is unsinkable” or “Napoleon has been defeated once and for all”.
Planet money #904 (6 Apr 2019): Joke Theft
Meg is an Internet comedian. After a picture of Kanye kissing Kim at some ceremony, she photoshopped it to be a pic of Kanye kissing Kanye. It went viral. But her own tweet only got a couple hundred likes. Most of the viral came from an Instagram account called Fuck Jerry which has 14 million followers and reposted it without credit.
And Fuck Jerry does that a lot, and gets a lot of ad money, including from Comedy Central who should know better than to support someone who keeps stealing from comedians. So that made Meg kinda mad.
Stand up comedy started after the death of vaudeville. At first it was just throwing out one-liner after one-liner, the jokes didn't have much effort put into them so no one really cared if you stole them. Later the acts and the jokes got more sophisticated and comedians did care.
You can copyright a joke, but it costs $35 to register, it can't be too short, and just changing the wording gets around it. This is partly to stop stuff like "don't you hate it when..." from being taken out of the commons. A comedy lawyer couldn't find any case of one stand up comedian suing another for joke theft.
What do they do instead? A comedian gives three strategies.
- Violence: every time you steal one of my jokes, I'll damage your car.
- Warnings: if you as a friend of the comic see a known joke thief in the audience, write a message on a napkin and have the waitress deliver it to the comic who can then finish early or avoid using their more precious material. (Robin Williams was a known joke thief. He said he just absorbed stuff and couldn't remember where it was from. Comedian says Robin once stole one from him, but at least when he called him out he cut him a cheque. It said "sorry for the inconvenience", not "sorry for stealing". But it was $200 which was a lot of money in the mid 80s.)
- Organizing: get venues to blacklist them.
Meg makes a campaign "fuck Fuck Jerry" trying to get people to unfollow. A bunch of famous comedians join in (I think Amy Schumer was mentioned). It works at least a bit, they lose 300,000 followers. That doesn't sound like much, maybe there was more?
PM speaks to Elliot who is behind Fuck Jerry. He considers himself a curator, not thief. He wishes people would know he's not a bad person. PM is not very sympathetic. He says he now asks for permission; Meg says that's not enough. He says he's thinking of starting to pay; PM says it's unclear how that would work but it's a bold thing to put on the air.
Thanks for replying. I’m going to leave aside non-fictional examples (“The Dress”) because I intended to discuss literary criticism.
So uh. Fair enough but I don't think anything else in your comment hinged on examples being drawn from literary criticism rather than reality? And I like the dress as an example a lot, so I think I'm gonna keep using it.
I’m not sure exactly what you mean, see Taboo “Outside View”. My best guess is that you mean that “X seems Y to me” implies my independent impression, not deferring to the views of others, whereas “X is Y” doesn’t.
From a quick skim, I'd say many of the things in both the inside-view and outside-view lists there could fit. Like if I say "the dress looks white to me but I think it's actually blue", some ways this could fit inside/outside view:
- Inside is one model available to me (visual appearance), outside is all-things-considered (wikipedia).
- Inside is my personal guess, outside is taking a poll (most people think it's blue, they're probably right).
- Inside is my initial guess, outside is reference class forecasting (I have a weird visual processing bug and most things that look white to me turn out to be blue).
If so, I don’t think I am missing this.
I don't really know how to reply to this, because it seems to me that you listed "acknowledging or changing social reality", I said "I think you're missing inside versus outside view", and you're saying "I don't think I am missing that" and elaborating on the social reality thing. I claim the two are different, and if they seem the same to you, I don't really know where to proceed from there.
Again, I don’t think I am missing this. I agree that “X seems Y to me” implies something like a gut reaction or a hot take. I think this is because “X seems Y to me” expresses lower confidence than “X is Y”, and someone reporting a gut reaction or a hot take would have lower confidence than someone who has studied the text at length and sought input from other authorities.
I think you have causality backwards here. I'd buy "it seems low confidence because it suggests a gut reaction" (though I'm not gonna rule out that there's more going on). I don't buy "it suggests a gut reaction because it seems low confidence".
So I claim the gut-reaction thing is more specific than the low-confidence thing.
Well, that isn’t his stated goal.
Right. Very loosely speaking, Eliezer said to do it because it was kind to authors; Zack objected because it was opposed to truth; I replied that in fact it's pro-truth. (And as you point out, Eliezer had already explained that it's pro-truth, differently but compatibly with my own explanation.)
Yudkowsky doesn’t advise critics to say: “mileage varied, I thought character X seemed clever to me”, he doesn’t say “please don’t tell me what good things the author was thinking unless the author plainly came out and said so”.
Well, I can't speak for Eliezer, and what Eliezer thinks is less important than what's true. For myself, I think both of those would be good advice for the purpose of saying true and informative things; neutral advice for the purpose of being kind to authors.
Given the one-sided application of the advice, I don’t take it very seriously.
I'm not sure what you mean by not taking it very seriously.
Applying a rule in one situation is either good advice for some purpose, or it's not. Applying a rule in another situation is either good advice for some purpose, or it's not. If someone advises applying the rule in one situation, and says nothing about another situation... so what?
My vague sense here is that you think he has hidden motives? Like "the fact that he advises it in this situation and not that situation tells us... something"? But:
- I don't think his motives are hidden. He's pretty explicitly talking about how to be kind to authors, and the rule helps that purpose more in one situation than another.
- You can just decide for yourself what your purposes are and whether it's good advice for them in any given situation. If he makes arguments that are only relevant to purposes you don't share, you can ignore them. If he makes bad arguments you can point them out and/or ignore them. If he makes good arguments that generalize further than he takes them, in ways that you endorse but you think he wouldn't, you can follow the generalization anyway.
I claim that this text would not be more true and informative with “mileage varies, I think x seems y to me”. What do you think?
Eliezer described it as his opinion before saying it, and to me that does the same work.
If it weren't flagged as opinion, then yes, I think a "seems" or "to me" or something would make it slightly more true and informative. Not loads in this case - "awesome" and "terrible" are already very subjective words, unlike "blue" or "indestructible".
This feels like the type of conversation that takes a lot of time and doesn't help anyone much. So after this I'm gonna try to limit myself to two more effortful replies to you in this thread.
Fair enough! I did indeed miss that.
Hm, I think I'm maybe somewhat equivocating between "the dress looks blue to me" as a statement about my state of mind and as a statement about the dress.
Like I think this distinction could be unpacked and it would be fine, I'd still endorse what I'm getting at above. But I haven't unpacked it as much as would be good.
Two differences I think you're missing:
- "seems to me" suggests inside view, "is" suggests outside view.
- "seems to me" gestures vaguely at my model, "is" doesn't. This is clearer with the dress; if I think it's blue, "it looks blue to me" tells you why I think that, while "it's blue" doesn't distinguish between "I looked at the photo" and "I read about it on wikipedia and apparently someone tracked down the original dress and it was blue". With "X seemed stupid to me", it's a vaguer gesture, but I think something like "this was my gut reaction, maybe I thought about it for a few minutes". (If someone has spoken with the author and the author agrees "oops yeah that was stupid of X, they should instead have...", then "X was stupid" seems a lot more justifiable to me.)
In the specific case of responses to fiction there is no base reality, so we can’t write “x is y” and mean it literally. All these things are about how the fictional character seems. Still, I would write “Luke is a Jedi” not “Luke seems to be a Jedi”.
Eh... so I don't claim to fully understand what's going on when we talk about fictional universes. But still, I'm comfortable with "Luke is a Jedi", and I think it's importantly different from, say, "Yoda is wise" or "the Death Star is indestructible" or "the Emperor has been defeated once and for all".
And I think the ways it's different are similar to the differences between claims about base-level reality like "Tim Cook is a CEO" versus "the Dalai Lama is wise" or "the Titanic is unsinkable" or "Napoleon has been defeated once and for all".
Nod, in that hypothetical I think you would have done nothing wrong.
I think the "obviously" is still false. Or, I guess there are four ways we might read this:
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"It is obvious to me, and should be obvious to you, that in general, talking about my own research interests does not violate these norms": I disagree, in general it can violate them.
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"It is obvious to me, but not necessarily to you, that in general...": I disagree for the same reason.
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"It is obvious to me, and should be obvious to you, that in this specific case, talking about my own research interests does not violate these norms": it's not obvious to the reader based on the information presented in the post.
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"It is obvious to me, but not necessarily to you, that in this specific case...": okay sure.
To me (1) is the most natural and (4) is the least natural reading, but I suppose you might have meant (4).
...not that this particularly matters. But it does seem to me like an example of you failing to track the distinction between what-is and what-seems-to-you, relevant to our other thread here.
You probably don’t care about how it seems to me; you care about how it is.
Indeed, and as I argued above, a person who reliably tracks the distinction between what-is and what-seems-to-them tells me more about what-is than a person who doesn't.
I mean, I suppose that if someone happened to know that the dress was blue, and told me "the dress looks white to me" without saying "...but it's actually blue", that would be misleading on the subject of the color of the dress. But I think less misleading, and a less common failure mode, than a person who doesn't know that the dress is blue, who tells me "the dress is white" because that's how it looks to them.
I mean, in the specific case of the colors of objects in photographs, I think correspondence between what-is and what-seems is sufficiently high not to worry about it most of the time. The dress was famous in part because it's unusual. If you know that different people see the dress as different colors, and you don't know what's going on, then (according to me and, I claim, according to sensible rationalist discourse norms) you should say "it looks white to me" rather than "it's white". But if you have no reason to think there's anything unusual about this particular photograph of a dress that looks white to you, then whatever.
But I think this correspondence is significantly lower between "X was stupid" and "X seemed stupid". And so in this case, it seems to me that being careful to make the distinction:
- Makes you better at saying true things;
- Increases the information content of your words, on both the subjects what-is and what-seems-to-you;
- Is kinder to authors.
Alyssa Vance goes into an epic, truly epic, amount of detail to debunk the implications of the ‘sexless epidemic’ and of this famous graph in particular
Link seems to be missing?
as the (let’s face it bad, but watchable if you don’t care, and worth watching if you need to learn this and other important related lessons) movie Ghosted illustrates
Note, wikipedia lists three movies named Ghosted. I guess you probably mean the 2023 one?
But ... "I thought X seemed Y to me"[20] and "X is Y" do not mean the same thing!
And it seems to me that in the type of comment Eliezer's referring to, "X seemed stupid to me" is more often correct than "X was stupid".
Argument for this: it's unlikely that someone would say "X seemed stupid to me" if X actually didn't seem stupid to them, so it's almost always true when said; whereas I think it's quite common to misjudge whether X was actually stupid.
("X was stupid, they should have just used the grabthar device." / "Did you miss the part three chapters back [published eight months ago] where that got disabled?")
So we might expect that "more often true ⇒ less information content". We could rewrite "X was stupid" to "this story contained the letter E" and that would more often be true, too. But I don't think that holds, because
- "X seemed stupid" is not almost-always true, unlike "this story contained the letter E";
- But if someone said "X was stupid" I think it's almost-always also the case that X seemed stupid to them;
- And in fact people don't reliably track this distinction.
I think people track it more than zero, to be clear. But if I see someone say "X was stupid", two prominent hypotheses are:
- This person reliably tracks the distinction between "X was stupid" and "X seemed stupid", and in this case they have sufficient confidence to make the stronger claim.
- This person does not reliably track that distinction.
And even on LessWrong, (2) is sufficiently common that in practice I often just rewrite the was-claim to the seemed-claim in my head.
(Actually, I think I'm imperfect at this. I think as a rule of thumb, the "was" claim updates me further than is warranted in the direction that X was stupid. My guess is that this kind of failure is pretty common. But that's separate from a claim about information content of people's words.)
So I think Eliezer is giving good advice for "how to be good at saying true and informative things", as well as good advice for "how to discuss an author's work in a way that leaves them motivated to keep writing".