All of aa.oswald's Comments + Replies

Another strategy which I have tried is this: get a cat. I'm not kidding. They act as a forcing function for many of the things you describe, Alex. They are a regular social commitment (they must be fed!), and they offer an incentive to go to sleep early (because you will not be allowed to sleep late). They also maintain control through time changes, at least with daylight savings, because the time does not change for them. The sun in the sky and their own cat circadian rhythm moves them.

They externalize the human-animal in the brain into something manageable (and managing). 

This reminds me of the new Foundation television series, where the show-makers are required to show us supersmart people- Hari Seldon and his protege can literally predict the grand movements of society- and they do it by waving around CGI dots. I think its Type-2 geniusing.

Good call out. I don't know how contagious Covid/Delta is with children, but my intuition is that it is less contagious, which means your clarification is good news. 

The UK still has vaccination rates just around 50%, and we can assume that they focused on the elderly first. The control system is first and foremost about preventing hospitals from being swamped and causing politicians to have a bad press day, so with most of the most likely to die off the table, case counts and hospitalization counts will have to be much higher. 

Since May, the UK has seen its cases go up ~7x, its hospitalizations go up ~2x, and deaths hover around the same level (maybe they've gone 2x? hard to tell). To have US 2020 Summer Surge le... (read more)

8gjm
To clarify that 50% figure: According to [official figures](https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/vaccinations) -- see "Vaccination uptake, by report date" -- about 63% of the eligible population in the UK has had two vaccine doses, and about 85% have had two. But it's about 50% of the whole population, including infants and children, and infants and children are not being vaccinated. So far as I can tell, the UK government's intention is just to let every schoolchild in the UK get COVID-19. At least, there's no serious plan to start vaccinating them any time soon, and in the face of rapidly increasing case numbers in schools I'm hearing much more "... so we have to find a way to let schools send fewer pupils home when cases occur, to keep children in school" than "... so we have to get stricter about sending pupils home when cases occur, to reduce the spread". It's just as well children seem to be less badly harmed than adults by getting COVID-19. (Though they are certainly not guaranteed no serious harm, and given the enormous numbers of children likely to get it I suspect the absolute number of cases of serious harm will be pretty large.)

For personal finance, I have found and recommend reddit's /r/personalfinance to be a great boon. Their flowchart is essentially "correct". 

My initial reaction to this comment was that tungsten rods are science fiction and that we don't have the capabilities or willingness to put the rods in space... but it now occurs to me that Starship makes the possibility of tungsten rods much more believable. 

Jason does have a post where he briefly tackles the low-hanging fruit hypothesis [here]. It isn't 100% compelling, but the idea is that there are "multiple orchards" and we go through one after another. The conceit doesn't include the possibility of "barren earth orchards" though. 

I definitely agree that the idea of unconstrained "invention" is not well supported in society, but the hypothesis makes me go "huh?"

Science discovers new knowledge; invention creates useful machines, chemicals, processes, or other products; and business produces and distributes these products in a scalable, self-sustaining way.

Is the place you use the word "invention" not engineering? For most types of engineering, undergrad students are taught science for two years (it is new knowledge to them), they're taught how to usefully apply that knowledge for a y... (read more)

6jasoncrawford
All (most?) invention is engineering, but a lot of engineering is not invention. Boeing employs many airplane engineers, but they don't really invent new planes. Facebook employs many software engineers but isn't inventing much in software. Both are doing product development engineering—which is fine and something the world certainly needs a lot of, but it's not the same thing. I think anyone who wanted to be an inventor would train as an engineer. So the education/training part of the inventor career path is there. But it falls apart after university.

I like the note that titles are a "nominally-infinite resource" because there is a limit to them. Namely, they're sticky. With Zuckerberg's org, if he really, really, really needs to inflate a person's title, he can do it. He has the option to pull an Andreessen if he needs to, but the opposite isn't true. 

2ryan_b
That's an interesting point; I wonder if there is a broader correlation between higher simulacra levels and narrowing options like this. Intuitively it feels like the opposite should be the case; I had vaguely felt like the point of going up a level was to get more options. But then, that doesn't make any acknowledgement of the object level options.
6ChristianKl
This is an interesting observation. I'm curious to what extend it generalizes to it being hard for people to move from level 4 back to level 3. 

Destiny Disrupted was critical history reading for me, and helped break me out of a Eurocentric viewing of the world before college. I've tried very, very hard to find a history book from Chinese, Russian, or Indian authors that has the same insider's point of view but written in accessible, plain English. 

Aside from wanting to read similar books about other cultures/civilizations, I am reminded that it seemed a bit steeped in "post-9/11ism". 

5lsusr
China: A History by John Keay provides an equivalent insider's view of China. It is written in accessible, plain English. I too looked for Russian and Indian books of the same vein but could not find any.

Are there examples of Kaj's writing that you find particularly salient/useful? 

2Matt Goldenberg
Just took a look at his top posts, this one was pretty great: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mELQFMi9egPn5EAjK/my-attempt-to-explain-looking-insight-meditation-and

Why new year's predictions? Why not new day's predictions, or new week's predictions?

In general, it is easier to make a list of predictions and gauge uncertainty at one time. It takes a lot of effort, and so is generally done sparingly. The beginning of the calendar year makes a good Schelling point to do that work, especially given that there are lots of other "new year" rituals it folds into. 

Couldn't you do better? Should you carry notebooks with you everywhere all the time, prepared to write predictions? Should you use an interval timer to force y

... (read more)
1karlkeefer
https://predictionbook.com/ has a skeleton that could be extended with prompts for belief updates. It already has prompts for adjudication of your previous predictions.

I would say that Sneer Culture is a subset of "scornporn". Sneer Culture is generally about "X licensing" whereas scornporn is about "Contempt generating content that makes you feel higher on the social hierarchy." 

I wonder if that is because /r/TTC couldn't figured out how to differentiate cringe from irony and post-irony, or if it just got big enough that /r/all converted it ?

Ferris is probably coming from a place of the LINDY Effect- why read new books, when books that are older definitively are more useful because if they hadn't been useful they wouldn't have lasted as long.

New content and timely content is more of a bet than a sure thing.

3ChristianKl
Tim Ferriss (two s) does lay out his reasons in the linked post, so there's not really a reason to speculate.

I guess the question is "how much of people choosing one mode of transit over another is caused by innumeracy?" Planes are several times less risky than cars, but planes are also highly, highly regulated. If you took those regulations away, let anybody who wants to build and fly a plane, and then completely remove the TSA prechecks, you lower the cost of the planes, lower the non-travel time commitment, and presumably raise the risk of flying.

But would it beat a car? Would they reach equilibrium?

Answer by aa.oswald20

Well, obviously Covid wouldn't have happened. People would drive less, take public transit (especially planes) more (alternatively, planes would be massively deregulated and become incredibly cheap to fly). People who feel even a bit sick would wear masks.

I would imagine that this type of numeracy would extend into the personal realm to include things like personal finance and personal productivity. They would cook their own meals more, eat healthier, and possibly buy less luxury goods.

They would push for the end of coal plants (24 deaths per TWh compared ... (read more)

1TAG
People should take planes because they are safe, and airlines should be deregulated, and deregulation won't affect safety?

I just want to say that any good mechanical engineer designing a new system with some tolerances and known limitations but making use of novel gears, like on a rocket engine, will probably be running those gears through finite element analysis

That indicates to me that the "lowest-level component in a model" question is not just "what makes a good model" but "what is the lowest-level component I can get away with".  

8philh
On what I take to be a related note, I recently enjoyed a short essay on, I guess, the gears of gears.

Paul Graham also has a recent essay exhorting his readers to produce content.

Most people don't even reach the stage of making something they're embarrassed by, let alone continue past it. They're too frightened even to start.

Content creation has two ends: the reward for doing it, and the punishment for doing it*. You've outlined the reasons to do it above, Jacobian, but it seems like you haven't tackled the punishment for doing it? (Maybe I've missed another blog post). The Big Yud's concept of "hero licensing" comes into play here: a little voice inside p... (read more)

One of the heuristics you see in the business world that attempt to get at this is the "5 Whys?" It's very easy to look at some graph- stock value, sales, whatever- and create a just-so answer for why something is the way it is. It's a lot harder but more useful to go ahead and interrogate the just-so answer again. 

Of course, the hardness of doing a "5 Whys?" exercise is also the reason that nobody does it unless they're getting paid to or they've joined an online cult of critical thinking. 

Answer by aa.oswald90

When a person changes their way of thinking radically, it is normal for them to want to tell everybody about them. This happens even if the change is what people here might consider irrational- think becoming religious. There's even a Wikitionary phrase for it, "passion of a convert".

So, the first thing I would say to your anger phase is, "Don't worry, you'll get over it."

If you want to speed up getting over it, it might be useful to practice two things. The first is to really focus on personal improvement and realize you're still a newb. The second is to ... (read more)

4Emiya
That's a relief. Yeah, I usually try to think like that, what I felt lately was more like... finding out that your calculus professor doesn't actually know how to do calculus in one case, and finding that the freshmen in a scientific faculty can't actually manage to understand simple Aristotelian logic...  Usually I get most of my annoyance from listening to supposed experts who are making evident mistakes, or from listening to people who are particularly stupid.   A really... sobering way to look at it, thank you.  I had been trying to be as smart as I could for years even before finding rationality, but finding something that good, which jumpstarted my accuracy and intelligence a lot, was sheer luck. Also I didn't really do anything to be born with an above average intelligence, I didn't do anything to be grown in a home where education was highly valued, so I guess that even trying to be smarter isn't such of an obvious idea to have. I guess we could call it the self-made man fallacy, if you saw hard work working for you you feel like everyone else ought to just try and it would work as well for them too, but you don't notice the strokes of luck you had or that you still had an advantage to start with.  And I knew all this stuff already, but... I don't know, I guess I still felt as if certain things were so obvious than anyone not figuring those out wouldn't have any excuses, since those things I always knew, so I've allowed my emotional response to be shaped by how this feels from the inside.    Your friend isn't the kind of people I'd have got mad at, at least if I knew what you know about the things that trapped her into staying... which I just realised it's the correspondence bias word for word.  If I can't see why people are missing the obvious truth (though I don't consider dropping religion as obvious, I know it can be pretty hard) I might just not know enough about how they learned to think or what harmful meme got their cognition before I met

One thing to consider is not just the effect that lighting has on you, but what it has on others. For example, when I think of the quality of different friends and family members' houses, one of the defining components is how and how well they are lit. My aunt with giant windows and balanced, bright lights easily beats out my friend who has two reading lamps and a kitchen light that get turned on during game nights. 

One thing I would ask, Richard, is how do you manage your lights? My current set up has me turn on four different pairs of lights across ... (read more)

3Alex_Altair
I've been using this multi-plug remote controller set for several years, and it's great. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00DQELHBS/
4Richard Korzekwa
I agree that it can be hard to manage a large number of fixtures. I know that other people have come up with more clever solutions than I have, but one thing that I have found helps is to plug as many lights as is practical into the same outlet, and use a remote like this one from IKEA: https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/tradfri-control-outlet-kit-70364803/ (I'll add this to the article)

I don't know why I enjoy link posts so much, especially Gwern's, Scott's, and Jake Seliger's. Tyler Cowen's daily linkposts are good as well. I think it's because they're curated and often have things that are so bizarre and interesting (here Gwern's Blueberry Earth link is in that category) that I can send the links in them to random friends and harvest some stolen internet valor. 

Yeah, that's exactly what I'm saying. Ads are, at the very most basic, just broadcasts of information with the intention of changing some behavior. Prosperity requires different actors in the economy to do what is most efficient, but often it isn't efficient for actors to actually go and track down their own suppliers. Instead, suppliers go and track down their buyers by broadcasting ads.

The Internet has certainly changed that: my search history and browsing history effectively broadcast to suppliers, "I need a new car", and then the algorithms present me ... (read more)

Haha, it is definitely both. There's nothing to advertise! But there's nothing to advertise because the activities that benefit from advertising are illegal! 

2ckai
Ah, I was looking at your comment in the other direction, do ads cause prosperity or are ads correlated with prosperity (and having a hard time forming a model that ads cause prosperity while not finding ads being correlated with prosperity significant, really).  But I guess you were saying more that ads are a sign of prosperity and so even if they're annoying it's better than living somewhere that isn't prosperous enough for ads?

I would encourage Katja to try to flip some of these negatives of advertising on their head. After all, the growth of advertising is directly related to the greatest of human prosperity ever. The two are connected. For me, personally, the farthest I have ever been from public, corporate advertising was when I toured Havana, Cuba. 

2ckai
Do you consider this connection to be correlation or causation?

80k has changed the general plan that they push (People took "earning to give" too seriously). This post here is probably the article that you're looking for with regards to "what should I do now?"

Answer by aa.oswald40

I would like to see lukeprogs happiness sequences updated for 2020

Honestly, I would like to see this for pretty much any pop-science psychology book that trends in the rationality sphere. 

Answer by aa.oswald80

Contagion is a hard science fiction story about a world stopping virus, and it got every single social phenomena correct. 

1McP82
That movie had been recommended to me several times, but I never got around to watch it; I guess if there's a moment to do so, it'd be now.
1Ben Pace
Huh? My recollection was that it didn’t model any of the disinformation campaigns or denial of its threat by governments. My vague recollection (from like 8 years ago) is that it was a series of vignettes of people caring a lot about not getting infected and being careful. Again, not very representative. Edit: Fair enough, seems I misremembered.
2Raemon
Huh, I hadn't even thought to consider contagion as science fiction (by the time I watched it was just called "reality")