The left's ascendance in western countries over a period of a couple centuries in no way implies that the it is destined to control the future.
To be fair, western civilization is the best candidate for a singularity of some kind, and if anyone's values got preserved (by an FAI or just high-tech conquering all opposition) it would probably be whoever fooms first (unless we all die instead.)
It's not just this particular case that bothers me; I've experienced this before and want to know how to access the whole of the snippet text. The Wayback machine does not creep extensively enough to solve this problem. If you require specific site information please pm me. Thank you.
AIs haven't demonstrated that they can learn to do anything the hard way
The tasks pointed out so far (driving, knitting, sports) all have a huge mechanical component, where a body and its parts (the wheels of the car, the needle, whatever actuators your athletes have) are steered to make certain motions. Tasks like that use control theory, maybe with a learned kinematic model, and some reinforcement learning.
But that's a shallow representation of those tasks. There is much more to each of them than the motions. For instance with real car driving, you want a ton of sensors like accelerometers and cameras on your vehicle, because the state of a car is much higher than, say, the length a hydraulic piston has been extended, and so you need much more data to establish what state the car is in and what changes you need to put the car in a better state, so that it's not rocking horribly on a gravel road or running over shrubs and pedestrians, et cetera. Having lots of sensors means you want high dimensional sensor fusion, which means a fancy probabilistic model. Also, the state of the car can depend on weird abstract properties of the environment, like the shape of squiggly black lines on a metal sign you passes a few minutes ago. So you also want machine vision algorithms that can recognize percepts in the wild that match prior learned patters like "15 mph when children are present".
And that's just the kind of math you want for an AI to know what is happening outside. It doesn't account for guessing a 3d map of solid things in the world, things that you don't want to crash into, or planning paths through a labyrinthine city, or not swerving so hard that your passengers get whiplash.
I think some of that complexity might be being looked over, since all of the tasks mentioned are so very mechanical on the surface of things.
For simple mechanical problems, I think it's absolutely fair to say that AI has learned to do things the hard way. We have AI math that lets robots learn the shapes of their bodies, or that let them flail around trying different motor activation strategies until they find one that moves the robot forward efficiently. Or this toy robotics task, the acrobot, you might have seen before: 1. Robots can learn motions like that given a reward function that favors standing upright.
You might say, as people often do, with merit, that the robot isn't being creative, it's just executing a programmed algorithm. This argument proves too much, because it doesn't allow "real creativity" for psuedo-deterministic system like humans, but it still has a shred of truth. A robot that learns to control its motors doesn't learn to learn to control its motors. It doesn't study the math of control theory or the physics of kinematics or the engineering of building cheap, robust power transfer systems.
This is not a buck that can be passed indefinitely. At some point, it is right and proper to say the source of AI's power is humans, since AI are not writing themselves into existence out of the aether. But it is a buck that can be passes a few times. This is one major sense in which current AI is narrow. Not that AI can't do much - you can read pages and reams of citations of successful AI applications. Even if you look at the AI industry as a whole today, I think it should rightly be called Narrow, since AI, by which I basically mean the sum total of written algorithms and software, doesn't have a reflective ability to apply its intelligence toward increasing its intelligence, looking back to mathematics and physics and values (of which it has little because the world is dragging its feet on preference modelling) to figure out how to make good things happen.
Anyway, robotics has some cute examples of "learning the hard way". But I've been hinting at a much large space of problem domains and and problem solving methods. What other tasks are there, in broad strokes, and how much of existent problem solving techniques proceed, how shall we say, searching through a huge space of candidate solutions - a space which the programmer barely constrained by building in his own clever ideas?
I'm not going to write what kinds of problems exist. That's a fine topic for academic curiosity, and is probably relevant to quantifying which problem domains are low hanging fruit for human-designed algorithms and which are more difficult for us to solve - those merciful bottlenecks that's we'll slowly chip away at till we reach an intelligence explosion that ruins the galaxy absent urgent work in preference modelling. But I don't think the space of problems, those that are interesting to humans and non-trivial to computers, is very important to characterize for the general audience that might be reading this comment. I've already hinted at some of its structure with mentions of machine learning and path finding. Many other kinds of reasoning, planning, designing surely come to mind given a little thought.
What I would like to point out is that, once we leave robotics and explore other kinds of "things learned the hard way", human intuitions about agency go a little fuzzy. When AI doesn't have a conventional body, with joints and motors and sensors or with squishy muscles and contractile proteins and retinas, or whatever, it's not as easy to see that there's a "person" there, something that humans reason about using our built in Theory of Mind circuitry, rather than something inanimate.
When an AI doesn't have a body, and isn't stumbling around the floor and stacking blocks and smiling when you wave, when instead candidate solutions can be examined symbolically in computer memory, and design can be as simple as randomly casting about around a formally specified search space until it lands on the Pareto frontier....When that happens, it looks much less to an external human observer that there is a "person" "learning" "things". And this naive perspective is grossly inaccurate, because it is the algorithms and not the smiles that are formidable.
Hm. Long comment. I should say something poignant now. Summary: 1) Many "mechanical" problems are really cross domain problems with lots of hidden complications. 2) AI can learn things the hard way, really they can. 3) But keep in mind that learning to solve problems doesn't always look like a body gathering knowledge and experimenting in the real world.
Saving for retirement makes sense even if you don't expect to retire provided that you can access the retirement funds for other purposes, and that the laws of your country are such that this is still an advantaged position. In the United States and some other countries, saving for retirement is investing to maximize your long-term income and wealth potential.
Saving for retirement makes more sense, not less, if there will be radical life extension. Do you want to work for 650 years? or work for 50 and play for 600? (Feel free to define "play" as choosing more fulfilling but less lucrative work.)
Most importantly, saving for retirement makes a heck of a lot of sense if you don't place 100% certainty on uploading or the singularity by the relevant date when you'd otherwise retire. Or you aren't sure the singularity will actually eliminate the need for money and capital. For instance, what if uploading is possible, but costs $2 million a person in 2013 dollars? A magical singularity genie that grants everyone a cycle of infinite wish spells would be awesome, but it is not a retirement plan.
I agree that "x C* y, and y P z. Therefore, x C* z" is wildly unintuitive, causes problems, and is just plainly wrong. But...
...
...actually, looking back, you're right. I apologise; I misread the definition of C* (I read w P y instead of y P w).
I'm going to have to look through it again before I can comment further.
I completely agree that those two are the relevant questions. So is there a good evidence for either of them?
All I found was anecdotal evidence that intelligent children of educated parents seem to fare better with unschooling than average children at school. And we would both agree that such evidence is irrelevant. (At best, it is evidence that unschooling is not completely destructive. But the claims in favor of unschooling seem to be stronger than that.)
[best friend] is also magical and has power over the weather, or at least making it sunny on a rainy day. Her mother and I have both attempted to gently stimulate skepticism on this point. (Said best friend has a somewhat troubled family life and I suspect is claiming to be magical to feel power over her life, so we're happy to be gentle over this one.)
Can you force your computer to do anything? Can the computer refuse to do what you want? Of course the computer can crash. Does that count as refusing to obey your commands?
If you don't think the computer has the free will to refuse your commands, why do you think you do? Because your brain runs on neurons and the computer runs on silicon?
There are many ways to influence other people that don't have something to do with adjusting incentives. Just look into the psychology literature.
The ability to refuse needs the knowledge that someone tries to influence you. On example: Andrew Berwick put a lot of effort into people trying to read his book. He studied the way ideas spread on the internet. Conspiracy theorists do a lot to spread certain idea. Andrew knew that conspiracy theorist like to talk about Freemasons.
Andrew then went to four freemasons meetings and put Freemason images on his facebook account. As a result all of the conspiracy theory people had their Freemason story when Andrew committed his terrorist act.
No one of the conspiracy folks got the idea that those images were specifically crafted to play them because the conspiracy folks don't think that someone would treat them in that way.
The couldn't refuse in a meaningful sense because they were ignorant.
Apples to oranges. The relevant questions are:
1) Does an intelligent child of educated parents who invest a lot of time and expose the child to their values get better results by unschooling than an intelligent child of educated parents who invest a lot of time and expose the child to their values gets by school?
2) Does an average child of average parents with average attention from their parents get better results by unschooling than an an average child of average parents with average attention from parents gets by school?
The answers to these two questions are not necessarily the same.
How much are these estimates influenced by a hindsight bias; by a knowledge that during the last century the American economy was able to provide this growth, but many other countries' economies were ruined at some moment. -- What would happen if someone tried this early retirement idea 100 ago by investing half of their income into Russian market and taking away only 4% per year? How about Germany?
Even if I believe that within the next 50 years some markets will safely provide 4% annual growth, what is the probability that USA will be in that set, and how would you derive this probability from an outside view?
And for a totally different view: http://www.thersa.org/events/audio-and-past-events/2013/time-reborn-a-new-theory-of-time-a-new-view-of-the-world
What is the best existing evidence for unschooling?
To me it seems based on the premise that children, when left alone, become automatically strategic. Which is not a new idea; J.J.Rousseau already made this popular centuries ago (and provided some fictional evidence).
Here is an alternative hypothesis: Children outside of (elementary, high) school do on average significantly worse than their peers in schools, ceteris paribus. But there are also other factors beyond school contributing to education, which means that an intelligent child of educated parents who invest a lot of time and expose the child to their values can get better results by unschooling than an average child of average parents with average attention from parents gets by school.
Condition 3 was a more traditional DG utilizing the same
population and currency and offering anonymity in a manner very
similar to that employed by Hoffman and colleagues (Hoffman et al.,
1994). Individuals waiting alone at a bus stop within a block of a
casino in Las Vegas, Nevada were approached and asked if they
wished to participate in a study that would involve them receiving
some money. If they agreed, they were then consented only to the DG
portion of the study and not the questionnaire (this was because the
participants in Conditions 1 and 2 were unaware of the $10 payment
when they made their donation decisions). In this experiment,
participants were handed two envelopes, a yellow envelope with
the word “KEEP” on it, and a white envelope with the word “GIVE” on
it. They were then given $20 worth of chips as well as six fake chips.
The chips were handed to them in a small chip-holder box with a
divider in the middle and “FAKE” written on one side and “REAL”
written on the other. While the researcher's back was turned, they
divided the real chips between the two envelopes as they desired, and
then distributed the fake chips between the two envelopes so as to
make them feel roughly the same. **In this way, the researcher
remained totally unaware as to the composition of the chips in the
donation envelope.** It was explained to them that the chips in the
“GIVE” envelope were to be recorded by a separate research assistant
at a later date and handed out to a random individual waiting at a bus
stop. They were to take those in the “KEEP” envelope home with them.
I think this renders your story a bit less plausible, since apparently the subject isn't having face-to-face contact with anyone who learns their choice.
(Disclaimer: I was just skimming over the paper and happened to see this bit--in the same way I made you seem wrong by finding this, someone else may make me seem wrong by reading the entire paper or the DG literature in depth. Unknown unknowns and whatnot.)
This is a 4% withdrawal rate, and should last you forever. If you want to go even safer (the Trinity Study suggests that 4% is plenty safe) go with 3% and multiple your expenses by 33.
According to The 4 Percent Rule is Not Safe in a Low-Yield World, the 4% withdraw rate was calculated to have a 6% failure probability over 30 years using historical data. Using today's lower interest rates to recompute, the failure probability over 30 years is now 57%.
I like it a lot! I'm very much in favor of expanding Lesswrong into practical horizons.
However...Quick Suggestion: Change the title. Call it something more descriptive, such as the "Frugal Finance".
1) "Rational" should be reserved as a technical term and should not be used to mean "Whatever I, the writer, think is best." As other users have pointed out, "rationality" is not very descriptive, overused, and functions as applause light on this forum. "Frugal Finance" or similar tells the reader exactly what s/he is getting.
2) There are many other things that the LW flavor of "rationalist" would do financially other than retire early - such as donate to charity (low, low price of $2300/child-life-saved or less!), support loved ones, or to start up a business. They would still find your advice useful (since your advice presumably conserves lots of spare capital) but not necessarily for the goal that you propose in the title.
I would certainly have objection. I would just make sure my objection wasn't on the fragile grounds of moral objection. Moral objection is fragile because there is no collective or objective definition to it. Using subjective morals to object to it would be like making-up rules to a game you never asked to play with me.
It'll be healthier and more enjoyable just to eat actual food
I tried that. It didn't work.
Could you be more speciifc? (In particular with respect to macronutrient ratios, and whether you've ever been in ketosis and confirmed it with a blood or urine test.) I have a strong prior against people having tried all the things, even if they've tried to try them, since some of the strategies are easy to do incorrectly without realizing it.
Simple answer: No, time doesn’t exist. Barbour is correct. On the platonic (universal) level (the fundamental level of reality), all is timeless.
The appearance of time is a consequence of partitioning reality into cellular automata: when things take on the appearance of cellular automata they will seem to behave like systems; that it is say, they will seem to have inputs, produce outputs, and processing. Sentience too is closely tied to time, and indeed (as I realized long ago and stated on both wta-talk and ‘Overcoming Bias’), consciousness itself can be considered a special case of the illusion of time; it arises from a coarse-graining of our self-models due our limited introspective capacities. Just as a fundamental ignorance or ‘smearing’ of physical microscopic properties gives rise to thermodynamic properties, so too, lack of complete knowledge about all our internal goals produces the illusion of qualia.
So what am I saying in short? Reality at the deepest level is continuous; on that level it’s timeless; but mentally partitioning reality to create a discrete model (cellular automa) results in the illusion of time. Ergo, qualia is a special case of this illusion, whereby goal-directed computational systems (cellular automata with goal systems) are further coarse-grained, and there is corresponding uncertainties in the internal goals of these systems (the smearing or blurring of internal goals manifests as ontologies/categorizations/qualia).
"Doesn't cost anything to run" is silly. If maintaining the ecoysystem was free, we'd do it because most people prefer there to be one rather than not. Maintaining the ecosystem trades off against all sorts of other things we want, and if we have to give them up to maintain it, that's what it costs to run.
I can imagine plenty of situations where passively being sad and not going out and attempting to be productive are safer. Maybe depression is an alternative to cabin fever? Long hard winters are easier to survive if you're too depressed to go out and possibly freeze to death and instead stay in your cave/yurt eating the most easily accessible saved food. That would explain the evolutionary value of Seasonal Affective Disorder.
This is an issue with efforts to encourage replication and critique of dubious studies: in addition to wasting a lot of resources replicating false positives, you have to cite the paper you're critiquing, which boosts its standing in mechanical academic merit assessments like those used in much UK science funding.
Elharo, I'm interested in reading your sequence topics in inverse proportion to how usual it is to find them in the literature.
So I'd love to hear your thoughts on spouses, number of incomes and other topics with magnitudes ranging 7 to eight figures that no one talks about (to my knowledge).
I would not love that much read about compound interest, tax advantages etc...
So here is the interesting thing. While I agree with others that you should optimize for hard data and equations, I don't think you should select for hard data and equations, because the topics were more hard data exist are exactly those in which your efforts would be unnecessary. But then again, you'll be shot with all the arrows people have been shooting me in many of my longer texts here, where I usually delve into territory where adjacent data exists, and make extrapolations from that data into unexplored territory.
As I see it you have 4 avenues:
1)Write about stuff where hard data already exists and be counterfactually irrelevant, have a lot of work, and be mildly praised.
2)Write about the areas where available content is not a lot, and be downshot by many who will claim you have no data to back your advice. On the other hand you will be counterfactually relevant and praised by a small majority.
3)Write all of it, and be downshot because of the non-backed parts, and downshot on the backed parts for re-writing what is already out there. Newcomers, and the small majority above will still like it, but hardcore LW won't.
4)Be awesome, and be praised by your awesomeness.
If you evaluate 4 as out of the way, for whichever reason, I would go for 2, and be as far away from 3 as I can, because it is frustrating.
Also, about the book, I wouldn't buy it even for $1.00 . Nowadays I'll only buy a book if I know I want to mark it with a pen, read it outside after my cell runs out of bateries or if the author is one of my heroes.
We are drowning in an information ocean, and I am firmly convinced that for the same reason I don't pay for alcohol because I know I drink so rarely that I can afford to drink only when somehow I'm being given drinks, I never (99%) need to pay for written knowledge again. Not because I don't read, but because with a large certainty, everything I want to read has an equivalent (itself included) available online, instantly, and free.
The first three metrics seem like they could even more strongly encourage sexy bogus findings by giving the general public more of a role
Reference manager data could have the same effect, despite reference managers being disproportionately used by researchers rather than laypeople.
Using myself as an example, I sometimes save interesting articles about psychology, medicine, epidemiology and such that I stumble on, even though I'm not officially in any of those fields. If a lot of researchers are like me in this respect (admittedly a big if) then sexy, bogus papers in popular generalist journals stand a good chance of bubbling to the top of Mendeley/Zotero/etc. rankings.
Come to think of it, a handful of the papers I've put in my Mendeley database are there because I think they're crap, and I want to keep a record of them! This raises the comical possibility of papers scoring highly on altmetrics because scientists are doubtful of them!
(jmmcd points out that PageRanking users might help, although even that'd rely on strongly weighted researchers being less prone to the behaviours I'm talking about.)
Also see Michael Nielsen's ideas in Reinventing Discovery.
I'll answer here too since I'm doing something similar. I'm a 25 year old software engineer and make about $140k/year before taxes. I live on about $35k, donate some money on top of that, and invest the rest.
1) I try to keep my large recurring monthly obligations low, but I spend pretty freely on smaller things. I live in a city but keep my rent cheap by living with 4 roommates. I don't own a car - I bike, walk, and take public transit, and occasionally use a zip car. All together my housing and transportation costs come out to about $750/month. I spend plenty of money though at restaurants, gyms, and Amazon.
2) I already know that I enjoy living relatively frugally. I have everything I need and lots of the things I want. I don't think I'd be any happier if I spent more money. I'm not sure I'd enjoy not working, but I figure it can't hurt to have the freedom to stop whenever I want, or do "work" that doesn't generate income. If I decide I really want a full-time job, I will probably choose to work and then donate all my income.
3) According to Mr Money Mustache I'm on track to retire at around 36 years old (11 years from now).
I guess don't really see how "utils" encourages this mistake nor am I sure it is that common. I mean, the idea that most, if not all goods are not linear is 101-level stuff.
I don't understand this comment. I'm assuming the linearity of a good refers to whether its utility is a linear function of how many of it you have? In that sense, this is unrelated; this is a much broader issue, having nothing to do with how the utility of something varies with having multiple of it.
Although I suppose it is related in that, if "linear good" means u(kx)=ku(x) (where here u(x) means the utility of having x of the good), then no good can be linear in that strong sense, because the equation isn't even meaningful! Edit: But, as I should have realized earlier, this is really a silly equation to consider in the first place, as it's the difference u(x)-u(0) you really care about, not u(x) itself...
It is a bad idea to artificially increase the apparent distance between the work done here on decision theory and the work done elsewhere. There is way too much of that already. It makes for bad press and is phyg-like.
I don't think this does increase the distance in any substantial way.
It's not a breaking change (like, say, putting functions on the right, or declaring electrons to be positive). It's not very-similar-but-slightly-different in a way that would cause confusion (like using tau instead of 2*pi, or using Delta(z) instead of Gamma(z+1)). It's not replacing any key term that someone would be searching for (like using "meager" instead of "first category", or "false hit" instead of "type I error", or "computably enumerable" instead of "recursively enumerable"). It is a direct translation, of a term that people won't be searching for and isn't even strictly necessary, in a way that's quickly transparent and nearly self-explanatory. I am honestly having trouble imagining a less obtrusive change. So I don't think this is putting any substantial distance there, let alone approaching phyg status.
FYI, I started a Computer Science B.S. with a concentration in Software Engineering on Monday of this week at ASU. My startup is doing well enough that I was able to quit my night-job, but I keep seeing (what appears to be) low-hanging fruit that could be exploited with software applications in my industry, so I figure getting a degree should put me in a good enough position to know whether these apps are feasible and if they are how to go about getting them developed (plus, I love logic and missed school). PM me if you want to collaborate or compare notes.
Like you said, that is a very conservative estimate, but entirely accurate. If we experience a horrible depression which gives me no investment returns for 20 years, I still will be able to retire at age 43.
The rule of thumb is that you need (Current_Expenses x 25). This is a 4% withdrawal rate, and should last you forever. If you want to go even safer (the Trinity Study suggests that 4% is plenty safe) go with 3% and multiple your expenses by 33.
Implication: You must save 25 dollars or so for each dollar you spend. So you go out and earn an extra 25 dollars, or figure out how to spend one dollar less.
Depends. Who I marry will be the biggest determiner of success. If my future spouse is not only on board, but shares the vision for EER, then our combined incomes and shared expenses will actually make things go quicker. If my spouse is uncooperative, then all my effort may very well be for nil. Both ERE and MMM have spouses who not only supported their endeavor, but adopted it themselves. Not surprising, non-consumerist people tend not to group with consumers.
As for kids, there is also great variation. You will obviously need to save additional money to feed, clothe and care for your children. ERE is childless, but MMM and Mrs. MM decided to first retire then start a family. It worked out pretty good for them; they avoided expensive daycare costs, and their child grew up in a home where both the mother and father were active, full-time caretakers. MMM has several articles about having a child post-EER.
The topic is intelligence. Some people have superhuman (well, more than 99.99% of humans) intelligence, and we are generally not afraid of them. We expect them to have ascended to the higher reaches of the Kohlberg hierarchy. There doesn't seem to be a problem of Unfriendly Natural Intelligence. We don't kill off smart people on the basis that they might be a threat. We don't refuse people education on the grounds that we don't know what they will do with all that dangerous knowledge. (There may have been societies that worked that way, but they don't seem to be around any more).
Excellent questions: 1) There has been adjustments, such as cutting out fast foods and eating/drinking out. Also, I delayed purchasing a new computer by a few months (paid with my tax refund). Also, I am stingy with using my car, and I am more apt to carpooling whenever I do go out (a generally rare occasion). I have cut out alot of impulse purchases. For instance, I would buy a $1 package of gummy worms around four times a week. Gone. Lastly, I pack a lunch for work each day. Nothing too big, just several small habit changes. This lead to aot of excess cash. It became really easy to do these changes since I transferred my cash at the beginning of the month, and forced myself to live on the remainder. All these changes have been for the better, and I have not notice a real decrease in happiness or satisfaction. It would be pretty ridiculous to expect my satisfaction to go down because of less fast food and candy in my life.
2) I do not know for sure that I will enjoy not working, and I can certainly see having "mini-retirements" of Tim Ferriss. As of current, I do not have any particular attachment to my jobs now. This may change in the future, and I hope it does. Post-retirement, I do not plan on sitting on my butt watching TV, going to the golf course each day, or moving to Florida and sipping alcoholic beverages on the beach. I will have projects to do (I would like to build a house, exercise more frequently, and run a psychology laboratory) and if I receive income for those things, I will be glad to. Most importantly, I hope to have a wife and children one day, and I hope that I will prefer to spend time with them over working.
3) This is pretty murky. I am currently severely underemployed, and in a recovering economy. I am completing a course in webdesign, then doing another one for programming, and that will translate into new career opportunities. I may move, and have my expenses go up, I will pay my student loans ahead of schedule, and lower my expenses considerably. And I may get into a serious relationship and start a family. That may slow it down, but if my potential spouse shares my vision, we may wait on children and in fact may speed up the timeline to retirement.
All together, I think my income will outpace my expenses. One of the links above, here, gives a straight forward chart comparing your savings rate to the number of years till you are able to retire (presuming average returns, and living off the interest alone, not touching the principal at all). I am at 65%, putting me at 10.5 years, or 34 years old. I think my expenses will end up increasing in the shorter term, then my income will catch up, before my student loans drop out of my life forever, freeing up another $500 or so a month. My ideal situation would a 75-80% savings rate, allowing me to retire before I'm 30.
All said I think I will retire by age 35 with 65% confidence, age 30 with 10% confidence and age 40 with 80% confidence. My income prospects in the next year and my spouse are the biggest factors in determining my success.
- Any improvement will be supported by good researchers but opposed by poor ones, the latter outnumber the former.
Only if the poor researches actually anticipate doing worse under the new system. It's possible that a system could be better for everyone (e.g. if it required less grant-proposal-writing and more science-doing).
Yes, but the next line mentioned PageRank, which is designed to deal with those types of issues. Lots of inward links doesn't mean much unless the people (or papers, or whatever, depending on the semantics of the graph) linking to you are themselves highly ranked.
It is now possible to use the web to measure the quality and impact of an academic output via alternative metrics (altmetrics) such as
How many people downloaded it
How much it has been discussed on Twitter
How many websites link to it
The caliber of the scientists who have recommended it
How many people have saved it in a reference manager like Mendeley or Zotero
All of these except for number 4 are just as susceptible if not more so to optimizing for interestingness or controversy over soundness of research.
Agreed that improved incentives for truth-seeking would improve details across the board, while local procedural patches would tend to be circumvented.
alternative metrics (altmetrics) such as How many people downloaded it How much it has been discussed on Twitter How many websites link to it The caliber of the scientists who have recommended it How many people have saved it in a reference manager like Mendeley or Zotero
The first three metrics seem like they could even more strongly encourage sexy bogus findings by giving the general public more of a role: the science press seem to respond strongly to press releases and unsubstantiated findings, as do website hits (I say this based on the "most emailed" and "most read" categories at the NYTimes science section).
[EDITED to add: Jonah's comment used to say just "No, thanks", which I completely misunderstood.]
I may possibly be mistaking your tone, but if I'm not then I think you are probably making a wrong assumption about the sort of article it is (which is kinda understandable given its title, if you aren't familiar with Scott Alexander's taste in blogpost titles).
Would it help if I mention that the author of the article is also the author of what I think is still the most-upvoted thing ever to hit the Less Wrong front page, and the second-highest-karma person on LW? He's sensible and insightful and very funny, and if you glanced at the URL and thought "oh no, a conspiracist loon" then you should look again: it's not that sort of thing at all.
On an object level your point seems persuasive, but my prior is still that it's not a big issue, because I haven't seen other people highlight this forcibly before. Are you familiar with some discussion of it?
There have been many proposals where just diverting a few percent of worldwide GDP would eliminate global warming. Among them, adoption of renewables and nuclear power.
I mean actionable proposals for effective altruist types. I support adoption of renewables and nuclear power, but I don't know what I or my friends can do to encourage it in a cost-effective way.
[Edit: I'd add that I think that what you describe falls under the category of "tail risk." I haven't heard this issue discussed, and It would be great if you were to write up a detailed account of your view, with citations.]
I've found the opposite. I will occasionally listen to audiobooks while driving or working out, but even with accelerated audio I read 2-3 times faster than audio can do.
Also, reading allows control of the pace. Certain sections are denser than others, and with a book you can slow down through those parts without losing pace on the filler.
A few issues that come to mind.
1. Any improvement will be supported by good researchers but opposed by poor ones, the latter outnumber the former.
2. Changing the means of apportioning stature does not eliminate the incentives to aim for broad appeal.
3. Goodheart's Law.
Without outright asking or commenting, people can still subconsciously judge, especially in certain situations or social groups.
For example, I am the president of my chapter of my fraternity. Some people interested don't drink. While for the most part people look past the not drinking, there are some activities or events where drinking is common. We have had some non-drinkers still enjoy themselves, some have been scared away as a result of said activities.
I think an equal precursor to the idea of being judged for not drinking is how you handle being around others who are. If you can still enjoy yourself without the alcohol, in a lot of cases being judged for it is in your imagination. If you sit there awkwardly in the corner sober while everyone else is having a good time, the judgement is very real. It's just not entirely for the reason you think.
Fair points, though there is in fact a lot of disagreement about what are the basic relata of the causal relation: see the SEP entry for example. When we apply causation to entities (which we can sometimes do, as in your example) then "A causes B" probably means something like "at least one event in which A is involved is a cause of every event in which B is involved".
On counterexamples to "what causes the whole, causes the part" : possibly an even stronger counterexample considers just one of the atoms in the cake. However, we must be careful here: it is only some temporal part of the egg (or of the atom) which is part of the cake; the eggs/atoms in their full temporal entirety are NOT parts of the cake in its full temporal entirety. We could perhaps treat the relevant temporal part ("egg mixed into cake" or "atom within cake") as an "entity" in its own right, but then it does seem that by making the cake, I am a cause of all the events which involve that particular "entity" (since I put the egg/atom into the cake in the first place).
In any case, note that the most recent version of the argument doesn't actually need to assume this "cause-whole => cause-part" applies to C, since it only ever uses the constructed relation C* instead. The conclusion is still interesting, since if nothing C*s the entity g, then nothing Cs it either, and if g causes some whole of which each entity is a part, that is still an interesting property of g. The argument makes no assumptions on whether C is reflexive or not.
On A3, I'm not totally sure of the circumstances in which we can aggregate entities together and treat them as parts of a single entity, but if the entities are causally related (and particularly if they are causally-related in an odd way, like an endless chain), then it does make some sort of sense to do this aggregation. After all, we immediately want to ask the question "How could there be an endless chain?" a question which does treat the "chain" as some sort of an entity to be explained. If entities are not causally related (they are in different universes), lumping them together seems much less natural.
Finally, on the "maximal entity" approach, CCC I believe discussed this in the original thread before I lifted here, and he seems to find it theologically interesting.
I suppose 'extremely dangerous' is subjective, but I'm confident in my usage of the term. It has been demonstrated that relationships between species are held in an extremely delicate balance. Extinction of one species can lead to another, which can lead to the blowing-up of a population of another (because it lost a major predator), which can lead to the extinction of others.
In fact we have been observing such fluctuations in the present. We have seen many species suddenly collapse, while others blow up with devastating results (algae blooms). And this is just with a few percent biodiversity loss, let alone 30%.
But the larger point is that we simply don't know what will happen. The relationships between species are very complex. It's possible that the entire food chain that we depend on will collapse (for example, if pollinating insects went instinct). It's also possible that loss of biodiversity will have little effect on humans. We are extremely ignorant about it - but that's no excuse to continue doing it.
"This is easier said than done. Do you have proposals?"
There have been many proposals where just diverting a few percent of worldwide GDP would eliminate global warming. Among them, adoption of renewables and nuclear power.
Even if people think there is enormous value in living long and happy lives, it is still coherent to acknowledge that there might be existences that are not worth living. The facts seem to point towards this being the case for the vast majority of wild animals. I'm just pointing out the obvious conclusion.
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