Posts
Comments
It's funny to see the "left/right" slant debate in the comments. I thought we were past that. Who cares what Team each statement is a soldier for? They're all pretty good examples of the noncentral fallacy, and the further discussion about Schelling fences addressed almost all of my few objections while reading them. I've actually had those "taxation is theft" and "imprisonment is kidnapping" conversations with people, because they've never even considered the similarities.
My only remaining objection is that the word "racism" has gotten overloaded, but to me, affirmative action is central to systemic racism. The defining feature of the category is collective judgement based on race (rather than individual merit), and affirmative action fits. When I object to it emotionally, I am not objecting because I'm using the same emotions I have towards the actions of the KKK, I'm objecting because I'm disgusted when race makes its way into law.
Has anyone else run into the issue where they don't really want to rest - they just want to do different work?
When I try a rest day, I immediately just want to play a strategy video game. I have an urge to study, improve, learn, etc. That's literally what my mind always goes to. I don't really want to rest, I want to work, it just seems clear that, deep down, I don't think the work I do on normal days is worthwhile.
Alright I see one crux here.
Bush and Obama governed almost identically, despite the "heated" election between Obama and Romney/McCain. It seems like what we have is essentially a uniparty with two WWE faces for the public, and they execute mostly Kayfabe performances that all lead to the same outcome in the end.
It appeared, from the media reaction to Trump, that the uniparty was actually threatened by him. This is why I think it's more likely in this election, rather than previous elections, that there was more of an effort to rig on one side than there was on the other.
I do find myself confused: Trump himself seems relatively incompetent, and his first term didn't seem all that threatening to the establishment (despite the rhetoric). Even with this confusion, though, I still think the difference between Trump and "Republican candidate X" is significant.
Also, I intentionally didn't refute your point about "as fair as any other election." I completely understand that idea; no one here is claiming nothing nefarious ever happens, it's just a matter of degree and impact.
I think there are significant differences between this post and the run of the mill leftist drivel you see somewhere like reddit. This post is well written and coherent, and, as such, invites discussion. I've also seen the author respond to opposing comments with real counter-arguments, rather than random ad hominems and fallacies.
Also, while politics is certainly the mind-killer, I personally enjoy the occasional political article where we get to discuss it with LessWrong's forum features and LessWrong's audience. There's a chance of actually having my mind changed, and the new agree/disagree feature, as distinct from upvote/downvote, makes this kind of thing possible.
I will agree, though, that it's not the same class as the typical post. I can feel my own mind being killed by my own political bias trying to engage with this, as I'm sure others can as well, but I still want to try. Maybe some sort of compromise with a political and non-political section would be useful.
It was the mechanism and order of the counting which differentiated this election from others. The counts continued long into the night, and into the following days. It was the first election with substantial mail in voting, adding many new attack vectors for fraud.
At about 2am on election night, Trump was a -190 favorite, so not huge, but definitely expected to win. It was certainly unlikely that there were enough votes in the deep blue areas that had yet to be counted to swing the election, although it was no where near prohibitively unlikely.
Then there were the tens of anecdotal reports of various fraudulent or suspicious behaviors at polling and counting sites. To determine what update, if any, these provide, we'd need to know the base rate for them: would there be this many reports for any election where there was sufficient scrutiny? It's very possible, but it's also possible this one really was worse.
So those are the updates. Again, it's unclear how large they are, but they are there.
I can't think of a position I hold for which the election being rigged/sound is actually a crux, other than "I think 99% probability the election was sound is too high," which is why I objected. As far as "roughly as fair as any other election," it's possible, but as the first election with widespread mail in voting, it's certainly reasonable that it wasn't.
I do want to stress though, I really don't care whether or not the election was rigged. What I'm interested is where people get these really high priors that elections are sound and fair. Everyone is assuming a base rate of rigging that is so low so as to ignore everything that transpired.
It seemed like the second we started actually looking at the election mechanics, there were fraud reports and suspicious activity everywhere, and now I have no idea what to make of election integrity as a whole. There seem to be tens or hundreds of relatively trivial attack surfaces, and especially in non-federal elections, where voting and counting take place in far fewer locations, and far less people vote, it seems very likely some results are fake.
The Trump section makes a few assumptions that aren't defended. They might be right, they might be wrong, but even the most basic counterarguments aren't addressed.
First, you call questioning the election "overthrowing democracy," which implies that questioning it wasn't in any way justified. What's your prior that an election is sound? This is a genuine question; I'm not sure what's appropriate. Many, many elections throughout human history have been various degrees of rigged. I have no idea what prior to use, and I have no idea what level of fraud/questionable behavior occurs every election, so it's hard to analyze both the prior and the update. That said, you're ascribing bad faith to anyone questioning the results, when most of those truly believe the democratically chosen vote was different. Rigged elections that the media covers up are an equally valid way to abolish democracy, and you provided just as much defense of that claim as you did of yours (none).
If anything, what happened with Gore and Bush in '08 was more egregious than this, and that didn't destroy the republic, at least not to the point of property rights vanishing. Contested elections are par for the course for as long as we're using this ridiculous half the people hate every president system.
Second, you act like leaving NATO is authoritarian in some way. If anything, leaving NATO would create more decentralized control over the globe, not more centralized control of it. If it weren't for NATO, Ukraine and Russian wouldn't be at war right now. I could be wrong about those things, but that's not the point. The point is that, if you want to change the mind of someone like me, this claim about the US being in NATO being universally good has to be defended.
Third, your reference to "despite having a minority of the popular vote;" are we still doing this? Why should California and New York City govern the entire country? The electoral college is a necessary compromise for making the bad system of voting a little less bad.
Lastly, there's a very visceral reaction on the "new right" to race based ideology. So much of Trump's support comes from what we'll call the "Joe Rogan Internet" (and offshoots like Jordan Peterson, Daily Wire, etc), and that entire apparatus is extremely sensitive to and against racial superiority ideology. So perhaps far-righters in the US could swing some sort of class based change up, instead of using race, the way the communists did, but far-right racially motivated ideology has so little power in the US it's laughable.
Again, I'm open to having my mind changed on any of these. The issue is that they're cruxes, and they weren't addressed in the piece at all.
This is a super interesting take. I'll keep it in mind if I dig into the history of monetary systems again.
A classic example of the typical mind fallacy: everyone has an internal monologue.
Actually, no, they don't: https://irisreading.com/how-do-i-know-if-i-have-an-inner-monologue/
I'd expect nearly every LW'er talks to themselves, likely constantly. I certainly believed everyone had an inner monologue for most of my life, until the idea that people don't started spreading around the internet a few years ago. Both parties were shocked that the other existed (myself included).
It makes me wonder just how many other things are out there like this.
This 1000x.
Related is replacing the naive idea that "money corrupts" with the truer "money makes you more of what you are."
Most people's inherent corruption and selfishness is reigned in by a lack of power. Money allows it to come out. The nice thing about (ideal) capitalism is that only hard working, risk taking, creative people end up with power, which leads to more hard work, more risk taking, and more creativity.
It's the people who acquire money through other means that end up "corrupted" by it, even though they're really just showing who they were all along.
I think my inability to image form like this is why I've always been so bad at chess.
I can really only hold an image of one word in my mind. If I want to read "God" on the top, I completely lose the second and third rows. I can also write in "Gas" in the first column and read it (barely), but the second I add the second word, everything gets blurred (abstractly). The information just... isn't there.
Despite this, I'm extremely good at mental rotations... which seems strange because it's also visual imagery. Somehow, I'm a lot better at holding a shape in my mind and rotating it, than I am at holding a grid in my mind and writing on it.
Growing up always being told how smart I was, it was kind of jarring to be so bad at a simple intelligence task like visual imagery. Chess gave me the hint - in every other game, I'd be trivially top 20% or so after just learning the rules, but in chess, I had to grind for like a 1500 ELO, and just auto-piloting, I can't even play at a 1200 level consistently.
Good life lesson I guess though.
I like getting it to write funny stuff based on it's left leaning, mainstream slant. So "Write me an article: We need to talk about the racism problem with pennies."
It's amazing. You should try it.
How are these the same thing?
- believing data which turns out to be wrong
- asserting that people are conspiring to cause some bad outcome
Some studies say masks work, some don't. If you incorrectly evaluate the evidence and believe that they don't work... how is that related to accusing people of conspiring? You've just analyzed the evidence wrong, but you haven't made any claims relating to any people, or plans, or schemes.
Do you think it's worth actually memorizing a few actual references? I.e. - Study by X done in X year, instead of just "other studies."
It often seems like "other studies disagree" is only one small step above just asserting it.
This is coming from someone who (as you know) makes this assert-contrarian-without-sources faux pas all the time.
Conspiracy =/= wrong + contrarian. That's an issue with the current Overton window. Conspiracy used to mean people conspiring.
So there's a difference between "carbs bad" - which is probably just wrong and contrarian, and "cereal companies colluded to convince you meat and fat are unhealthy, so you'd eat their sugar cereal," which is a conspiracy theory.
The reason conspiracy theories are typically (rightly) ridiculed is that they tack on a whole bunch of non Occam's Razor propositions to a theory, without the accompanying evidence. The conspiracy from cereal companies is one possible explanation for why meat/fat were incorrectly demonized, but it requires more evidence to assert than just "fat and meat have been incorrectly demonized."
All this is to say - he's not a conspiracy theorist, even with the carbs/fat thing. He might be wrong and contrarian (I also believe carbs are fine, so I believe he is), but to call it "conspiracy" is incorrect.
No that's expressly NOT what he's saying. For example - obesity is dangerous. Everybody thinks obesity is dangerous, and they're correct.
He's just saying that some of the public wisdom seems totally wrong. That [everybody thinks it] has turned out to be much weaker evidence than he originally thought, though still evidence in favor, and certainly not evidence against.
Gold used physical-world trade for a long long time, it did not (and still does not) self-host ownership transfers.
You're right, it's not identical. However, monetary supply was decided via proof-of-work. Chain of ownership and custody was not. I was referring to monetary policy here, but that is an important distinction.
There's no intrinsic value behind it (that is, no industrial use and no government demanding their taxes/payments in that form)
The use of gold in electronics makes it a worse form of money, not better. The fact that you have to put money in your phone to make it work is very economically awkward.
As for intrinsic value - no currency has intrinsic value. It's a network of people who agree something has value in order to animate trade.
Bitcoin's value proposition is that it functions as a unit of account/store of value better than any other currency right now, incentivizing people to store value and account in it. Right now, it's store of value is there. Unit of account may be close, and medium of exchange seems a ways off, if it does, in fact, get there. That's the value proposition - better money, thereby causing better economic coordination.
The question of whether a currency is inflationary or deflationary for any given period of time is pretty small
I hadn't considered this. I guess we'd also expect the rate of economy fluctuation to increase, like everything else does. It's quite possible we'll see a technology better than Bitcoin, or even something stranger, like successful friendly AI obviating the need for money, within a century. Still, I think that if the claims of deflationary death spirals from history are accurate (which I do suspect they aren't), then it makes sense to ask this question, even in the short-ish term.
If I trust my body to tell me when it's tired, I'll work all night until about 8-9am, and then go to sleep.
Are there things you do to get your body's natural sense to actually match up to reality? Turning down the lights or altering the temperature?
My body literally doesn't send sleep signals. It might send vague fatigue signals at some points, but without actual effort, I would literally stay up all night, every night.
The only exception is on days when I'm already very sleep deprived. Say I slept 2 hours and then worked a 10 hour day. That night, I'll fall asleep at 9-10 without any effort, but that's the rare exception.
Okay but I just don't agree.
Let each black box have some probability to kill you, uniformly chosen from a set of possible probabilities. Let's start with a simple one: that probability is 0 or 1.
The a prior chance to kill you is .5.
After the box doesn't kill you, you update, and now the chance is 0.
What about if we use a uniform distribution from [0,1)? Some boxes are .3 to kill you, others .78.
Far more of the experiences of not dying are from the low p-kill boxes than from the high p-kill ones. When people select the same box, instead of a new one, after not being killed, that brings the average kill rate of selected boxes down. Run this experiment for long enough, and the only boxes still being selected are the extremely low p-kill boxes that haven't killed all their subjects yet.
This time, could you make a stronger objection, that's more directly addressed at my counter-example?
Replace thief with a black box that either explodes and kills you, or doesn't. It has some chance to kill you, but you don't know what that chance is.
I was put in a room with black-box-one 5 times. Each time it didn't explode.
Now, I have a choice: I can go back in the room with black-box-one, or I can go to a room with black-box-two.
I'll take black-box-one, based on prior evidence.
Your Latex didn't quite work.
Also, here's three quick examples for anyone still wondering exactly how this works. Remember that the chance of flipping tails until a given digit in the binary expansion, then flipping heads, is where n is the digit number (1/2 for the first digit after the decimal, 1/4 for the second, etc).
My chance to land on the 1 with a heads is exactly .
My chance to land on a 1 with my first heads is
My chance to land on a 1 with my first heads is
The only semi-tough part is doing the base 2 long division to get from your fraction to a binary decimal, but you can just use an online calculator for that. The coolest part is that your expected number of flips is 2, because you stop after one heads.
Since reading the sequences, I've made much more accurate predictions about the world.
Both the guiding principle of making beliefs pay rent in anticipated experience, as well as the tools by which to acquire those accurate beliefs, have worked for me.
So at an object level, I disagree with your claim. Also, if you're going to introduce topics like "meta-rationality" and "nebulosity" as part of your disagreement, you kind of have to defend them. You can't just link a word salad and expect people to engage. The first thing I'm looking for is a quick, one or two paragraph summary of the idea so I can decide whether it's worth it to pursue further.
I think it's appropriate to draw some better lines through concept space for apocalyptic predictions, when determining a base rate, than just "here's an apocalyptic prediction and a date." They aren't all created equal.
Herbert W Armstrong is on this list 4 times... each time with a new incorrect prediction. So you're counting this guy who took 4 guesses, all wrong, as 4 independent samples on which we should form a base rate.
And by using this guy in the base rate, you're implying Eliezer's prediction is in the same general class as Armstrong's, which is a stretch to say the least.
A pretty simple class distinction is: how accurate are other predictions the person has made? How has Eliezer's prediction record been? How have his AI timeline predictions been?
I don't know the answers to these questions, maybe they really have been bad, but I'm assuming they're pretty good. If that's the case, then clearly Eliezer's prediction doesn't deserve to classified with the predictions listed on that page.
I've also noticed those tendencies, not in the community but in myself.
Selfishness. Classification of people as "normies." Mental health instability. Machiavellianism.
But...
They get stronger as I look at the world like a rationalist. You read books like Elephant in the Brain and find yourself staring at a truth you don't want to see. I wish God were real. I wish I were still a Christian with those guardrails erected to prevent me from seeing the true nature of the world.
But the more I look, the more like it looks like a non-moral, brutally unfair, unforgiving stochastic game we're all forced to play for... no real reason?
Obviously I'd like to me mentally healthier, more loving and selfless, etc, but... I don't know. I can't lie to myself. I'm stuck in between losing my old flawed, factually inaccurate philosophies, but not really having something better to replace them with yet. Just staring into the abyss of the amoral world and getting lost. I suspect most new rationalists are also in that space.
Counterpoint:
I'm at a local convenient store. A thief routinely robs me. He points a gun at me, threatens me, but never shoots, even when I push back a little. At this point, it's kind of like we both know what's happening, even though, technically, there's a chance of physical danger.
Had this guy shot me, I wouldn't be alive to reason about his next visit.
Now consider a different thief comes in, also armed. What is my probability of getting shot, as compared with the first thief?
Much, much, higher with the second thief. My past experiences with the first thief act as evidence towards the update that I'm less likely to be shot. With this new thief, I don't have that evidence, so my probability of being shot is just the based rate based on my read of the situation.
I believe updating on the non-fatal encounters with the first thief is correct, and it seems to me analogous to updating on the sun not having exploded. Thoughts?
Off topic, but I'd just like to say this "good/bad comment" vs "I agree/disagree" voting distinction is amazing.
It allows us to separate our feeling on the content of the comment from our feeling on the appropriateness of the comment in the discussion. We can vote to disagree with a post without insulting the user for posting it. On reddit, this is sorely lacking, and it's one (of many) reasons every sub is an unproductive circle jerk.
I upvoted both of your comments, while also voting to disagree. Thanks for posting them. What a great innovation to stimulate discussion.
I feel the same way. I like talking with people on here, but in almost every subject I have nothing substantive to contribute; I'm just a consumer.
I wish there were a broader, reddit-style aspect to this site for more ordinary posts. They don't have to be about Kim Kardashian or anything, but just regular economics, the current bank runs, Bitcoin, lifestyle/fitness/nutrition stuff, interesting links. You know, minus the reddit toxicity and religious zealotry in every subreddit.
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe having the majority of the sub dedicated to AI alignment really is the way to go. It's just... I'm not smart enough, nor do I have the resources to meaningfully help on that front, and I suspect there are many like me in the IQ 130-145 range who absolutely love finally finding a community they can relate to, but don't have the 160+ IQ to really break ground on alignment research.
Unless I'm selling us regular geniuses short, but I don't think I am (sadly).
I agree that the block subsidy is a large economic driver of mining right now. I don't understand why Bitcoiners seem so convinced there will be a smooth transition from block subsidy to voluntary fee as the halvings continue. Is there literally any evidence that the fee market will work? Isn't it pure conjecture? I'd really like an answer on that one.
As for L2 scaling, yeah I don't believe LN in it's current form is all that usable. Lots of smart people believe its getting there, though, so without doing object level analysis for myself I tend to think L2 will ultimately succeed. Again, though, I haven't seen a high quality back and forth about this between two smart, well informed, people, which is definitely concerning.
The one major disagreement we have is that "proof-of-work has no advantages over proof-of-stake." These two consensus mechanisms are entirely different. Proof-of-work requires staking a resource that is external to the network. This is critical, as it means that, were the network to fork, you can only stake your energy on one of the two new chains. In contrast, under proof-of-stake, your stake is duplicated in a fork.
I'm not really sure I understand your objection. If the L2 improvements are well funded, then the underlying asset would still be at the center of a future payment network.
L2 is the innovation. The idea behind the protocol is that innovation happens on top of L1, because that's a far less risky way to innovate.
There's certainly a question of whether L2 built on top of L1 can actually scale enough to succeed, but that doesn't seem to be what you're saying. Everyone invested in the Bitcoin space has an incentive to increase the functionality of Bitcoin as a whole. I'm not understanding the issue with L1 staying constant.
Yeah this is worrisome for me as well. It also appears that human beings are more objectively rational with their money under slight inflationary pressure, because that slight pressure offsets the irrational loss aversion we all have hard wired into our brains.
It seems like Bitcoin with a small, permanent, inflation rate would function much better as a long term, stable, secure, monetary system than this deflationary one we have. The inflation is paid out to the miners, as a fee for maintaining the network security, rather than to autocrat grifters like it is now. It's a perfect economic give and take.
The current system is very awkward. I'm holding Bitcoin, but I'm not paying the miners to secure it in any way. I should be paying a small amount of that wealth to the people securing it, because I'm benefiting from its security.
It's difficult, because 80-90% of Bitcoiners are religious zealots, rather than Bayesian. It's a new religion, and it certainly has a lot of good things going for it, so it'd be a shame if the zealotry dooms it in the end.
No, it's not obvious; it's a perfectly legitimate question. Here's the Howie test, the criteria established by the Supreme Court for security classification:
- An investment of money
- In a common enterprise
- A reasonable expectation of profit
- Derived from the efforts of others
Bitcoin's biggest difference from other Crypto securities are #2 and #4. Bitcoin is common, but it's not exactly an "enterprise." There's no organization or group working on it in an attempt to increase it's value, the way, for example, the Ethereum foundation attempts to increase the economic value of ETH. There are the core devs, but the authority they have to actually change the software is much, much lower, requiring massive agreement across the board from miners and nodes.
And for #4, while it is the miners efforts that create security for the network, it's not as direct as the members of other crypto projects actively working, for profit, on the software. The profit comes from Bitcoin's increasing network of users who decide to store their economic value in it, not because it's becoming a more and more useful piece of software as people improve it (like, say, what happens in a traditional equity like google or microsoft).
Even still, it's certainly murky.
Gary Gensler has stated Bitcoin alone is a commodity a few times: https://www.coindesk.com/layer2/2022/06/28/secs-gensler-reiterates-bitcoin-alone-is-a-commodity-is-he-right/
The main thing... Who exactly would be required to register Bitcoin with the SEC? Who would file the S1 disclosure with Bitcoin? Who would the SEC sue if "Bitcoin" was an unregistered security? There was no IPO (well, ICO I guess). There's no foundation. There are no stakeholders; since Bitcoin is PoW.
In principle, AI regulation sounds like the type of coordination problem that governments were designed to solve.
In practice… I once saw a clip of a US senator bringing in a snowball from outside the building to show that global warming wasn’t real. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg (pun intended) for the pretty egregious level of, i don’t even know what to call it, childishness I guess, of lots of the people in power.
And that’s just the incompetence side, not even mentioning the grift side.
With the current state of our legal institutions, I’m not sure we’d actually be better off with any regulation. I could be wrong, but I highly doubt there’d be a net benefit, and wouldn’t be surprised if it ends up actually benefitting the worst actors.
I can’t even imagine what a conversation trying to explain alignment tax to a legal body would look like.
So update as of November 23rd, 2022...
FTX is bankrupt, with at least an $8 billion hole on their balance sheet. Customer funds gone, many people lost 6 and even 7 figure balances.
So... what were those odds on "FTX.com losses a substantial amount of user funds" again?
The more info that comes out, the more it looks like the entire thing was fraudulent from the beginning. They even have a software back-door that allows them to transfer funds without alerting auditors, which it looks like they used many times with FTX customer deposits.
Additionally...
Celsius: bankrupt.
BlockFi: bankrupt.
Voyager: bankrupt.
3 arrows capital: bankrupt.
Terra Luna: worthless.
Genesis: likely bankrupt.
Digital currency group: ???
Obviously this is hindsight, but you should STRONGLY update, because it looks like the counter-party risks were well over 10%. In fact, many were even calling SBF and FTX fraudulent well before it came to light and blew up, but people didn't really listen.
We all need to strongly update on this. I know I have.
I'd also encourage you to consider what happens if/when the SEC decides to finally label every "crypto" except Bitcoin a security, and force them to file S1 disclosures. This process will likely be greatly accelerated by the FTX debacle. I suspect MANY of these "projects" will completely fall out of favor, being out competed by better securities like Google and Apple. Their current price merely reflects their regulatory arbitrage, which will end.
Agree 100%.
It always derails me a bit, and then I realize it's a gender neutral singular and move on. "They" has been adopted for this purpose, and my brain is used to understanding "they" as gender neutral singular. Sure, it's overloaded, but it's not that big a deal, and it has the momentum on it's side.
Here's a good one:
Inflation is good because give everyone money / inflation is bad, deflation is good / small inflation may be necessary to offset human loss aversion
One that really irks me is compound noun with a pronoun usage:
Always "Me and X" / Always "X and I" / "X and I" for an subject and "X and me" for an object
The second one is being smart enough to know that "Me and X went to the store" is improper because you're using "Me" in a subject, but not smart enough to know how to fix it, and instead just replacing "Me and X" with "X and I" one for one in every sentence.
What makes my blood run hot (and gives me that "like to argue it" high, I think) is that the middle section are trying to signal they're "above the peons" by using "he and I" like a sophisticate, when in reality they are just using different improper grammar, and doing so just as often as the peons they want to be above. Even worse, the other mid-wit contrarians actually accept this signal of how sophisticated everyone is talking.
I don't think this should bother me so much, but it does.
I agree. Here are some predictions:
- Masks mandated on airplanes on January 1st, 2023 - 80%.
- Masks mandated in schools in blue counties in California on January 1st, 2023 - 60%
- Anthony Fauci will not say anything along the lines of, "Paxlovid works, so the risk of disease is now far lower than the costs of anti-social measures, and they should be stopped." by Dec 31, 2024 - 95%
Note that the formula listed in the article is the Kelly formula for when you lose 100% of your stake if you lose the bet, which isn't always the case.
The Kelly formula is derived from the starting point of:
Essentially, after a sufficiently large number of n wagers, you expect to have won pn times and lost (1-p)n times. Each time, your previous bankroll is multiplied, either by (1 + b*wager) if you won, or by (1 - a*wager) if you lost.
Often, a = 1. Sports betting, poker tournament, etc - if you lose your bet, you lose your entire wager.
Sometimes, though it isn't: For something like an investment with a stop-loss, for example, the downside risk could be something like 20% instead of 100%.
If you leave it as "a" instead of assuming a=1, you end up dividing that first term by it:
I love how one of the paragraphs in here is essentially:
"Buy bitcoin, not investment advice."
In all seriousness, though, what makes you believe you have an edge over the market, when it comes to the crypto crash due to Omicron? Everyone in the market is trying to price in the risk of Omicron, why do you think you can do it better?
I certainly believe Omicron poses essentially zero risk to bitcoin, and so if the market is pricing in such a risk, I'd like to buy, but is it actually justified to believe my appropriation of the risk is more accurate than the market's as a whole?
Would you mind clearly articulating where you think your edge is?
Me:
- Sees news stories about Omicron popping up
- I wonder if Zvi's written a breakdown yet?
- Checks LW
- Zvi published on Nov 26
Zvi, you're an absolute legend. Thanks for getting these out so fast. If it weren't for your write-ups, I have no idea where I would go for anything even remotely resembling a minimally biased, rational review of the current evidence.
"A witty saying proves nothing." How ironic. I love it.
As long as the reputation doctor had committed to publishing the results regardless of what he found, then, yes, the data has equal evidential weight.
However, the story seems to imply he would have continued testing indefinitely until he got it right, and if he didn't, he would have faded into obscurity.
The issue here is that we must SEE the data in the possible world where he has a 58% cure rate with N=1000 (kept trying, kept trying, kept trying, eventually published), if we are to accept his 70/100 results in this world.
If, on the other hand, we would only see the 70/100, but wouldn't have seen the 580/1000, then the 70/100 does not carry the same weight as the other doctor's 70/100.
Imagine a world where the true success rate is 58%. We have 1000 biased researchers all doing the experiment and not publishing when they get 580/1000. The few who get lucky and get a 70/100 publish, leading to the 70%+ success rate results being very over-represented in the data we see.
I tried to read that link. I really did. I "read" like 10 paragraphs, and skimmed further down than that... but I gave up.
I'm interested in what you have to say. Mind providing a summary in... well punctuated, concise English?
Just reading the first section of this article exposed how much I emotionally enjoy having just my one hypothesis. It never occurred to me until now that, even though my held hypothesis is almost always justified, the fact that I no longer hold alternatives in focus is suboptimal.
That lack of focus on the other hypotheses feels good though... when my models of the world are accurate, it makes me very happy, so I don't like entertaining the possibility that it's some sort of long tail random event.
Anyway, might as well start unwinding the problem now, so here it goes... (this is going to hurt).
Here are three alternative Bitcoin hypotheses I'm going to watch out for:
- Governments have the power to crush Bitcoin whenever they want, but many actors in government own it, so they're holding off. Once it becomes a real threat, those actors will sell, and then the bans will come.
- I'm wrong about the way assets and store of value work, and Bitcoin will never truly compete with gold, real estate, stock indexes, or bonds as a long term store of value.
- I'm wrong about the network effect of Bitcoin, the value of true decentralization, and the superiority of proof of work. Proof of stake coins will replace Bitcoin long term.
This shouldn't have been painful to write, but it was. As a mid 20s American having their wealth constantly plundered by the state, Bitcoin gives real hope for the future.
Even though I truly believe these hypotheses are less likely than Bitcoin succeeding, the truth is, the reason I don't consider them is because I really, really don't want them to be true, not because their probability is so low that they aren't worth the mental effort.
Have you defended the claim that child vaccinations are helpful? I’ve seen two concerns:
- Like chickenpox, covid is much more dangerous as an adult. It may be safer for kids to be infected as kids, rather than delaying infection with vaccination until adulthood.
- The risk of severe effect to kids is so low that the risks of the vaccine are no longer trivial by comparison.
Would like to know your thoughts.
On the long covid thing - if loss of smell counts, then I wouldn’t be surprised if it was close to 50% that had symptoms a few months out (though the other aspects of that part still do seem nonsensical).
For me, my brother, and my cousin, taste took 1-2 months to recover, and smell took more like 6. All athletic mid 20s males.
I'm fairly certain Elizer ended with "the choice is obvious" to spark discussion, and not because it's actually obvious, but let me go ahead and justify that - this is not an obvious choice, even though there is a clear, correct answer (torture).
There are a few very natural intuitions that we have to analyze and dispel in order to get off the dust specks.
1.) The negative utility of a dust speck rounds down to 0.
If that's the case, 3^^^3*0 = 0, and the torture is worse. The issue with this is two fold.
First, why does it have to be torture on the other side of the equation? If dust speck rounds down to 0, then why can't it be someone spraining their ankle? Or even lightly slapping someone on the wrist? Once we're committed to rounding dust specks to 0, all of the sudden, we are forced to pick the other side of the equation, regardless of how small it is.
This, then, exposes our rounding fallacy. The dust speck's negative utility is not zero, it's just really really small, but when we then apply that really, really small downside to a really, really large number of people, all of the sudden the fact that it is certainly nonzero becomes very relevant. It's just that we need to pick a counter-option that isn't so negative as to blind us with emotional response (like torture does) in order to realize that fact.
The more broad version of the mistake of rounding dust specks to 0 is that it implies there exists some threshold under which all things are of equal utility - they all round down to 0. Where is this threshold? Literally right at dust specks? They round to 0, but something slightly worse than a dust speck doesn't? Or is it a little higher than dust specks?
Regardless, we need only analyze a problem like this on the border of our "rounds to zero" and "doesn't round to zero" utility in order to see the absurdity in this proposition.
2.) What if it's not the absolute utility, but the gap, relative to torture, which causes specks to round to zero?
This second attempt is more promising, but, again, on further analysis falls apart.
One of the best ways to bypass the traditional pitfalls in single choice decisions is to pretend that you're making the choice many times, instead of just once. By doing so, we can close this subjective gap, and end up at an apples-to-apples (or in this case, torture-to-torture) comparison.
We've already established that dust specks do not round down to zero, in an absolute sense, so all I need to do is ask you to make the choice enough times that the 3^^^3 people are essentially being tortured for 50 years.
Specifically, this number of times:
(torture's badness) / (dust specks' badness)
Once you've made the choice that many times, guess what, 3^^^3 people are being tortured for 50 years by dust specs.
If you'd picked the torture every time, (# of choices) people are being tortured for 50 years.
Do you think that the torture is 3^^^3 times worse than the dust speck? (If so, there would be the same amount of people being tortured either way.) I can just change it to make it 40 years of torture instead, or 1 year of torture. Or I can make the dust speck a little less bad.
The thing is, your desire to pick the dust specks doesn't come from rationally asserting that it's 3^^^3 less bad than torture. No matter what you think the factor is, I can always pick numbers that'll make you choose the torture, and your intuition is always going to hate it.
3.) You can't calculate utility with a linear combination. Even if the sum of the dust specks is more negative, the torture is still worse, because it's so much worse for that one person.
Let me be a little more clear about what I mean here. Imagine this choice:
- One person tortured for 10 hours.
- 601 people tortured for 1 minute.
It's very reasonable to pick option #2 here. Even though it's an extra minute of torture, you could argue that utility is not linear in this case - being tortured for 1 minute isn't really that bad, and you can get over it, but being tortured for 10 hours is likely to break a person.
That's fine - your utility function doesn't have to be a strictly linear function with respect to the inputs, but, critically, it is still a function.
You might be tempted to say something along the lines of "I evaluate utility based on avoiding the worst outcome for a single person, rather than based on total utility (therefore I can pick the dust specks)."
The problem is, no matter how how much proportionally less bad you think 1 minute of torture is than 10 hours, I can still always pick a number that causes you to pick the 10 hour option.
What if I change it to 1000 people instead of 601? What about 10,000? What about 3^^^3?
All of the sudden it's clear that picking to avoid the worst possible outcome for a single person is an incoherent intuition - that would force you to torture 3^^^3 people for 9 hours instead of 1 person for 10 hours.
The non-obvious answer is therefore torture.
The dust specks do not round down to zero. The gap between the dust specks and the torture doesn't cause the dust specks to round down to zero, either. You must multiply, and account for the multiplicity of the dust specks, lest you be forced to choose saving one person from -100 from saving hundreds from -99. Even if you discount the multiplicity and don't linearly sum the costs, again, treating them as 0 leads to incoherence, so there is still some cumulative effect.
Therefore, you've gotta go torture, as much as your intuition hates it.
tl;dr - Shut up and multiply.
They are emergency authorized for verifying prior infection, though. As far as I can tell, they constitute medical proof of natural immunity in some capacity, but the test itself can't tell you to what extent that natural immunity is protective.
However, the studies I looked at on natural immunity show it seems to be about 80% effective at preventing infection, median 7 months after infection (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33844963/), so that + an anti-body test to confirm I really had it seems sufficient.
My employer is being flexible and has agreed to accept proof of past exposure and anti body response. I’m writing up a page or so to explain the protective nature of nature immunity, and I’m asking around places like here to try to get my facts straight.
Requiring anti body testing as an alternative to vaccine passport at least helps restore a little liberty without sacrificing safety.
Thanks for the analysis. I read the whole thing, and there’s one thing i was hoping for answers on that i didn’t see:
What’s the current data suggest for the interplay between natural immunity and vaccination? Should someone wait until their antibody numbers are down to a certain level before being vaccinated, similar to spacing out vaccine doses by 6 months?
Also, another element of the “war” seems to be the lack of any recognition of natural immunity: mainstream discussions never ever mention it when talking about “the unvaccinated,” large swathes of with are likely people who didn’t bother because they’ve had the disease.
Would love to see some analysis at the awesomely detailed level you’ve provided concerning natural immunity and antibody testing.
I think this is actually a case where the status quo bias shines, and the natural pull towards conservatism may be warranted.
Do we have any way of reasonably predicting the social effects of curing unrequited love? What if it’s serving some behavioral or mating function that’s critical to the social order?
I don’t think it’s appropriate to casually mess with complex systems like human mating, getting rid of something as widespread as unrequited love because it’s uncomfortable. That seems dangerous, and it seems like caution is the correct approach with systems that broad.