All of Adam Zerner's Comments + Replies

I would buy various forms of merch, including clothing. I feel very fond of LessWrong and would find it cool to wear a shirt or something with that brand.

No. DOGE didn't cross my mind. It was most directly inspired by the experience of realizing that I can factor in the journey as well as the destination with my startup.

I think it can generate negative externalities at times. However, I think that in terms of expected value it's usually positive.

In public policy, experimenting is valuable. In particular, it provides a positive externality.

Let's say that a city tests out a somewhat quirky idea like paying NIMBYs to shut up about new housing. If that policy works well, other cities benefit because now they can use and benefit from that approach.

So then, shouldn't there be some sort of subsidy for cities that test out new policy ideas? Isn't it generally a good thing to subsidize things that provide positive externalities?

I'm sure there is a lot to consider. I'm not enough of a public policy person t... (read more)

Pet peeve: when places close before their stated close time. For example, I was just at the library. Their signs say that they close at 6pm. However, they kick people out at 5:45pm. This caught me off guard and caused me to break my focus at a bad time.

The reason that places do this, I assume, is because employees need to leave when their shift ends. In this case with the library, it probably takes 15 minutes or so to get everyone to leave, so they spend the last 15 minutes of their shift shoeing people out. But why not make the official closing time is 5:... (read more)

I wonder how much of that is actually based on science, and how much is just superstition / scams.

In basketball there isn't any certification. Coaches/trainers usually are former players themselves who have had some amount of success, so that points towards them being competent to some extent. There's also the fact that if you don't feel like you're making progress with a coach you can fire them and hire a new one. But I think there is also a reasonably sized risk of the coach lacking competence and certain players sticking with them anyway, for a variety ... (read more)

I was just watching this Andrew Huberman video titled "Train to Gain Energy & Avoid Brain Fog". The interviewee was talking about track athletes and stuff their coaches would have them do.

It made me think back to Anders Ericsson's book Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise. The book is popular for discussing the importance of deliberate practice, but another big takeaway from the book is the importance of receiving coaching. I think that takeaway gets overlooked. Top performers in fields like chess, music and athletics almost universally rece... (read more)

Wow, I just watched this video where Feynman makes an incredible analogy between the rules of chess and the rules of our physical world.

You watch the pieces move and try to figure out the underlying rules. Maybe you come up with a rule about bishops needing to stay on the same color, and that rule lasts a while. But then you realize that there is a deeper rule that explains the rule you've held to be true: bishops can only move diagonally.

I'm butchering the analogy though and am going to stop talking now. Just go watch the video. It's poetic.

One thing to keep in mind is that, from what I understand, ovens are very imprecise so you gotta exercise some judgement when using them. For example, even if you set your oven to 400°F, it might only reach 325°F. Especially if you open the oven to check on the food (that lets out a lot of heat).

I've also heard that when baking on sheet pans, you can get very different results based on how well seasoned your sheet pan is. That shouldn't affect this dish though since the intent is for the top to be the crispy part and that happens via convection rather than conduction. But maybe how high or low you place the baking dish in your oven will affect the crispiness.

As another variation, I wonder how it'd come out if you used a sheet pan instead of a baking dish. I'd think that you'd get more crispy bits because of the increase in surface area of potato that is exposed to heat. Personally I'm a big fan of those crispy bits!

You'd probably need to use multiple sheet pans, but that doesn't seem like much of an inconvenience. You can also vary the crispiness by varying the amount of exposed surface area. Like, even if you use a sheet pan you can still kinda stack the potatoes on top of one another in order to reduce the exposed surface area.

I have not seen that post. Thank you for pointing me to it! I'm not sure when I'll get to it but I added it to my todo list to read and potentially discuss further here.

Scott's take on the relative futility of resolving high-level generators of disagreement (which seems to be beyond Level 7? Not sure) within reasonable timeframes is kind of depressing.

Very interesting! This is actually the topic that I really wanted to get to. I haven't been able to figure out a good way to get a conversation or blog post started on that topic though, and my attempts to do so lead me to writing this (tangential) post.

I could see that happening, but in general, no, I wouldn't expect podcast hosts to already be aware of a substantial subset of arguments from the other side.

My impression is that podcasters do some prep but in general aren't spending many days let alone multiple weeks or months of prep. When you interview a wide variety of people and discuss a wide variety of topics, as many podcasters including the ones I mentioned do, I think that means that hosts will generally not be aware of a substantial subset of arguments from the other side.

For the sake of argument, I'll accept your points about memes, genes, and technology being domains where growth is usually exponential. But even if those points are true, I think we still need an argument that growth is almost always exponential across all/most domains.

The central claim that "almost all growth is exponential growth" is an interesting one. However, I am not really seeing that this post makes an argument for it. It feels more like it is just stating it as a claim.

I would expect an argument to be something like "here is some deep principle that says that growth is almost always in proportion to the thing's current size". And then to give a bunch of examples of this being the case in various domains. (I found the examples in the opening paragraph to be odd. Bike 200 miles a week or never? Huh?) I also think it'd be helpful to point out counterexamples and spend some time commenting on them.

[This contains spoilers for the show The Sopranos.]

In the realm of epistemics, it is a sin to double-count evidence. From One Argument Against An Army:

I talked about a style of reasoning in which not a single contrary argument is allowed, with the result that every non-supporting observation has to be argued away. Here I suggest that when people encounter a contrary argument, they prevent themselves from downshifting their confidence by rehearsing already-known support.

Suppose the country of Freedonia is debating whether its neighbor, Sylvania, is responsi

I spent the day browsing the website of Josh W. Comeau yesterday. He writes educational content about web development. I am in awe.

For so many reasons. The quality of the writing. The clarity of the thinking. The mastery of the subject matter. The metaphors. The analogies. The quality and attention to detail of the website itself. Try zooming in to 300%. It still look gorgeous.

One thing that he's got me thinking about is the place that sound effects and animation have on a website. Previously my opinion was that you should usually just leave 'em out. Focus... (read more)

I just came across That's Not an Abstraction, That's Just a Layer of Indirection on Hacker News today. It makes a very similar point that I make in this post, but adds a very helpful term: indirection. When you have to "open the box", the box serves as an indirection.

When I was a student at Fullstack Academy, a coding bootcamp, they had us all do this (mapping it to the control key), along with a few other changes to such settings like making the key repeat rate faster. I think I got this script from them.

My instinct is that it's not the type of thing to hack at with workarounds without buy in from the LW team.

If there was buy in from them I expect that it wouldn't be much effort to add some sort of functionality. At least not for a version one; iterating on it could definitely take time, but you could hold off on spending that time iterating if there isn't enough interest, so the initial investment wouldn't be high effort.

I think this is a great idea, at least in the distillation aspect.

Thanks!

Having briefer statements of the most important posts would be very useful in growing the rationalist community.

I think you're right, but I think it's also important to think about dilution. Making things lower-effort and more appealing to the masses brings down the walls of the garden, which "dilutes" things inside the garden.

But I'm just saying that this is a consideration. And there are lots of considerations. I feel confused about how to enumerate through them, weigh them, and fig... (read more)

Sometimes when I'm reading old blog posts on LessWrong, like old Sequence posts, I have something that I want to write up as a comment, and I'm never sure where to write that comment.

I could write it on the original post, but if I do that it's unlikely to be seen and to generate conversation. Alternatively, I could write it on my Shortform or on the Open Thread. That would get a reasonable amount of visibility, but... I dunno... something feels defect-y and uncooperative about that for some reason.

I guess what's driving that feeling is probably the thought... (read more)

I would like to see people write high-effort summaries, analyses and distillations of the posts in The Sequences.

When Eliezer wrote the original posts, he was writing one blog post a day for two years. Surely you could do a better job presenting the content that he produced in one day if you, say, took four months applying principles of pedagogy and iterating on it as a side project. I get the sense that more is possible.

This seems like a particularly good project for people who want to write but don't know what to write about. I've talked with a variety o... (read more)

I recently started going through some of Rationality from AI to Zombies again. A big reason why is the fact that there are audio recordings of the posts. It's easy to listen to a post or two as I walk my dog, or a handful of posts instead of some random hour-long podcast that I would otherwise listen to.

I originally read (most of) The Sequences maybe 13 or 14 years ago when I was in college. At various times since then I've made somewhat deliberate efforts to revisit them. Other times I've re-read random posts as opposed to larger collections of posts. Any... (read more)

I assume you mean wearing a helmet while being in a car to reduce the risk of car related injuries and deaths. I actually looked into this and from what I remember, helmets do more harm than good. They have the benefit of protecting you from hitting your head against something but the issue with accidents comes much moreso from the whiplash, and by adding more weight to (the top of) your head, helmets have the cost of making whiplash worse, and this cost outweighs the benefits by a fair amount.

Yes! I've always been a huge believer in this idea that the ease of eating a food is important and underrated. Very underrated.

I'm reminded of this clip of Anthony Bourdain talking about burgers and how people often put slices of bacon on a burger, but that in doing so it makes the burger difficult to eat. Presumably because when you go to take a bite you the whole slice of bacon often ends up sliding off the burger.

Am I making this more enjoyable by adding bacon? Maybe. How should that bacon be introduced into the question? It's an engineer and structural

I've noticed that there's a pretty big difference in the discussion that follows from me showing someone a draft of a post and asking for comments and the discussion in the comments section after I publish a post. The former is richer and more enjoyable whereas the latter doesn't usually result in much back and forth. And I get the sense that this is true for other authors as well.

I guess one important thing might be that with drafts, you're talking to people who you know. But I actually don't suspect that this plays much of a role, at least on LessWrong. ... (read more)

Thanks Marvin! I'm glad to hear that you enjoyed the post and that it was helpful.

Imho your post should be linked to all definitions of the sunk cost fallacy.

I actually think the issue was more akin to the planning fallacy. Like when I'd think to myself "another two months to build this feature and then things will be good", it wasn't so much that I was compelled because of the time I had sunk into the journey, it was more that I genuinely anticipated that the results would be better than they actually were.

It isn't active, sorry. See the update at the top of the post.

See also: https://www.painscience.com/articles/strength-training-frequency.php.

Summary:

Strength training is not only more beneficial for general fitness than most people realize, it isn’t even necessary to spend hours at the gym every week to get those benefits. Almost any amount of it is much better than nothing. While more effort will produce better results, the returns diminish rapidly. Just one or two half hour sessions per week can get most of the results that you’d get from two to three times that much of an investment (and that’s a deliberately cons

Oh I see, that makes sense. In retrospect that is a little obvious that you don't have to choose one or the other :)

So does the choice of which type of fiber to take boil down to the question of the importance of constipation vs microbiome and cholesterol? It's seeming to me like if the former is more important you should take soluble non-fermentable fiber, if the latter is more important you should take soluble fermentable fiber (or eat it in a whole food), and that insoluble fiber is never/rarely the best option.

Funny. I have a Dropbox folder where I store video tours of all the apartments I've ever lived in. Like, I spend a minute or two walking around the apartment and taking a video with my phone.

I'm not sure why, exactly. Partly because it's fun to look back. Partly because I don't want to "lose" something that's been with me for so long.

I suspect that such video tours are more appropriate for a large majority of people. 10 hours and $200-$500 sounds like a lot. And you could always convert the video tour into digital art some time in the future if you find the nostalgia is really hitting you.

Hm. I hear ya. Good point. I'm not sure whether I agree or disagree.

I'm trying to think of an analogy and came up with the following. Imagine you go to McDonalds with some friends and someone comments that their burger would be better if they used prime ribeye for their ground beef.

I guess it's technically true, but something also feels off about it to me that I'm having trouble putting my finger on. Maybe it's that it feels like a moot point to discuss things that would make something better that are also impractical to implement.

I just looked up Gish gallops on Wikipedia. Here's the first paragraph:

The Gish gallop (/ˈɡɪʃ ˈɡæləp/) is a rhetorical technique in which a person in a debate attempts to overwhelm an opponent by abandoning formal debating principles, providing an excessive number of arguments with no regard for the accuracy or strength of those arguments and that are impossible to address adequately in the time allotted to the opponent. Gish galloping prioritizes the quantity of the galloper's arguments at the expense of their quality.

I disagree that focusing on the centr... (read more)

I actually disagree with this. I haven't thought too hard about it and might just not be seeing it, but on first thought I am not really seeing how such evidence would make the post "much stronger".

To elaborate, I like to use Paul Graham's Disagreement Hierarchy as a lens to look through for the question of how strong a post is. In particular, I like to focus pretty hard on the central point (DH6) rather than supporting and tangential points. I think the central point plays a very large role in determining how strong a post is.

Here, my interpretation of th... (read more)

What would it be like for people to not be poor?

I reply:  You wouldn't see people working 60-hour weeks, at jobs where they have to smile and bear it when their bosses abuse them.

I appreciate the concrete, illustrative examples used in this discussion, but I also want to recognize that they are only the beginnings of a "real" answer to the question of what it would be like to not be poor.

In other words, in an attempt to describe what he sees as poverty, I think Eliezer has taken the strategy of pointing to a few points in Thingspace and saying "here a... (read more)

Note that I don't think this dynamic needs to be very conscious on anyone's part. I think that humans instinctively execute good game theory because evolution selected for it, even if the human executing just feels a wordless pull to that kind of behavior.

Yup, exactly. It makes me think back to The Moral Animal by Robert Wright. It's been a while since I read it so take what follows with a grain of salt, because I could be butchering some stuff, but that book makes the argument that this sort of thing goes beyond friendship and into all types of emotions a... (read more)

Why? Because extra information could help me impress them.

I've always been pretty against the idea of trying to impress people on dates.

It risks false positives. Ie. it risks a situation where you succeed at impressing them, go on more dates or have a longer relationship than you otherwise would, and then realize that you aren't compatible and break up. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing but I think it is more often than not.

Impressing your date also reduces the risk of false negatives, which is a good thing. Ie. it helps avoid the scenario where someone ... (read more)

Hm yeah, I feel the same way. Good point.

America's response to covid seems like one example of this.

If I'm remembering correctly from Zvi's blog posts, he criticized the US's policy for being a sort of worst of both worlds middle ground. A strong, decisive requirement to enforce things like masking and distancing might have actually eradicated the virus and thus been worthwhile. But if you're not going to take an aggressive enough stance, you should just forget it: half-hearted mitigation policies don't do enough to "complete the bridge" and so aren't worth the economic and social costs.

It's not ... (read more)

Project idea: virtual water coolers for LessWrong

Previous: Virtual water coolers

Here's an idea: what if there was a virtual water cooler for LessWrong?

• There'd be Zoom chats with three people per chat. Each chat is a virtual water cooler.
• The user journey would begin by the user expressing that they'd like to join a virtual water cooler.
• Once they do, they'd be invited to join one.
• I think it'd make sense to restrict access to users based on karma. Maybe only 100+ karma users are allowed.
• To start, that could be it. In the future you could do some investigation

Update: I tried a few doses of Adderall, up to 15mg. I didn't notice anything.

I was envisioning that you can organize a festival incrementally, investing more time and money into it as you receive more and more validation, and that taking this approach would de-risk it to the point where overall, it's "not that risky".

For example, to start off you can email or message a handful of potential attendees. If they aren't excited by the idea you can stop there, but if they are then you can proceed to start looking into things like cost and logistics. I'm not sure how pragmatic this iterative approach actually is though. What do you think?... (read more)

Virtual watercoolers

As I mentioned in some recent Shortform posts, I recently listened to the Bayesian Conspiracy podcast's episode on the LessOnline festival and it got me thinking.

One thing I think is cool is that Ben Pace was saying how the valuable thing about these festivals isn't the presentations, it's the time spent mingling in between the presentations, and so they decided with LessOnline to just ditch the presentations and make it all about mingling. Which got me thinking about mingling.

It seems plausible to me that such mingling can and should h... (read more)

More dakka with festivals

In the rationality community people are currently excited about the LessOnline festival. Furthermore, my impression is that similar festivals are generally quite successful: people enjoy them, have stimulating discussions, form new relationships, are exposed to new and interesting ideas, express that they got a lot out of it, etc.

So then, this feels to me like a situation where More Dakka applies. Organize more festivals!

How? Who? I dunno, but these seem like questions worth discussing.

Some initial thoughts:

1. Assurance contracts seem

I wish there were more discussion posts on LessWrong.

Right now it feels like it weakly if not moderately violates some sort of cultural norm to publish a discussion post (similar but to a lesser extent on the Shortform). Something low effort of the form "X is a topic I'd like to discuss. A, B and C are a few initial thoughts I have about it. What do you guys think?"

It seems to me like something we should encourage though. Here's how I'm thinking about it. Such "discussion posts" currently happen informally in social circles. Maybe you'll text a friend. May... (read more)

Hm, maybe.

Sometimes it can be a win-win situation. For example, if the call leads to you identifying a problem they're having and solving it in a mutually beneficial way.

But often times that isn't the case. From their perspective, the chances are low enough where, yeah, maybe the cold call just feels spammy and annoying.

I think that cold calls can be worthwhile from behind a veil of ignorance though. That's the barometer I like to use. If I were behind a veil of ignorance, would I endorse the cold call? Some cold calls are well targeted and genuine, in which case I would endorse them from behind a veil of ignorance. Others are spammy and thoughtless, in which case I wouldn't endorse them.

I agree with everything you've said. Let me try to clarify where it is that I think we might be disagreeing.

I am of the opinion that some "narrow problems" are "good candidates" to build "narrow solutions" for but that other "narrow problems" are not good candidates to build "narrow solutions" for and instead really call for being solved as part of an all-in-one solution.

I think you would agree with this. I don't think you would make the argument that all "narrow problems" are "good candidates" to build "narrow solutions" for.

Furthermore, as I argue in the... (read more)

In practice, all-in-one tools always need a significant degree of setup, configuration and customization before they are useful for the customer. Salesforce, for example, requires so much customization, you can make a career out of just doing Salesforce customization.

I can see that being true for all-in-one tools like Salesforce that are intended to be used across industries, but what about all-in-one tools that are more targeted?

For example, Bikedesk is an all-in-one piece of software that is specifically for bike shops and I would guess that the overall ... (read more)

See also Adam Ragusea's podcast episode on the topic.