All of BoilingLeadBath's Comments + Replies

There's a (very reasonable at this time, I think) emphasis in this high-preformance day and evening lighting on trying to match natual brightness and spectrum.

Have you come accross any good data or models for late-day/early dusk?

I ask because while there's a lot of good data and models for mid-day solar illumination, I don't know enough to know how much to trust them towards the end of the day (which I suspect is not really the designed use case), nevermind stuff after sunset—and there's over an hour between sunset and astronomical dusk.

(But yes, for midda... (read more)

1Richard Korzekwa
This is a good question. I have not looked, and the closest thing I have done is to measure the color temperature and intensity according to my camera for direct sunlight just before sunset (seems to be about 2700K, 1900lx). I would think that you could get a decent estimate using SMARTS if you adapted the input file to a ray going through a lot more atmosphere, but I'm not sure. I haven't looked at the code and it might do something like make approximations that only work for short path lengths or low optical densities or something.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a community which did more poorly (than it might do otherwise) because it’s members understood each other’s points too well.

So I don’t recommend worrying about writing too clearly, but rather to either balance your time against the group’s (per considerations like my above points) or to run yourself against some sort of constraint(s), like time pressure or the upper bound of how much you can care.

Even if there was no reluctance to asking questions on the part of the readership, the cost of the question-and-response loop would still be very high. For those who write due to a desire to move a group forwards, the following observations of mine may be motivating:

  1. Each question consumes some of a limited supply of (something like) discussion threadcount and bandwidth, decreasing the range and depth of the consideration given the other aspects of a topic.

  2. The resolution of each loop takes time; the full version of the original topic is not completely

... (read more)
1Charlie Steiner
Sure. But this mostly proves that there is some upper limit, not where it is. And the existence of benefits to explanation (helps the community, often provides interesting ideas), show that there's some lower limit but not where it is. It's sort of a Laffer curve situation. So, of course, by symmetry, people should be spending 50% of their time explaining :P

With silver trading at $230/lb and steel going for somewhere in the neighborhood of .90 per pound (the range representing Chinese bulk commodity thru US small commercial quantity structural shapes), it would appear that the price ratio hasn’t changed much. (They are both metals...)

I am not a historian or an economist, but it seems better to compare steel to food: in 1500ish England, 8 pennies gets you 2 bushels of grain (i.e. 100 lbs; 3 month’s porridge)... or one axe head (1-2 lbs steel). (Though note that 16th century food prices are “weird” - it’s

... (read more)

If the actual utility you receive as a function of the total "payout" of your "investments" has diminishing marginal returns, then the character of the portfolio to maximize expected utility depends upon the failure correlations between the investment options.

IE, in the case that the utility function is sufficiently convex to payout and the various investments all fail independently of each other, a strategy of investing in only the highest yield and lowest risk choices is not optimal: a small investment in a middling investment decreas... (read more)

There's some concern in the other comments about the aesthetics of this solution, and some call for a pre-built solution from an installation-labor perspective.

For those people, I suggest getting a "High Bay LED light". These are really bright hanging light fixtures... most rooms would be well served by 1-2 them, which come in two shapes: round "UFO" and "linear". I think they look pretty good, as the need to have good heat-sinking capabilities makes them one of the few products where even the budget producers have to use... (read more)

Motivation means the same thing as "tactile ambition", so using the new phrase is a bad idea.

We hear self-reports - or at least legends - of people "motivated" by far-mode concerns, so I think it can be credibly said that the public conception of "motivation" allows for both the visceral and immediate "motivated not to touch the stove again, lest they get burnt" and the abstract and far-off "motivated to increase revenues in the coming decade".

Lionhearted's term expressly forbids far-mode concerns - it... (read more)

2lionhearted (Sebastian Marshall)
Interesting way of putting it. It seems to me ambition differs slightly from motivation — ambition, I think, often includes some medium-intensity negative emotion with it — but, insightful take here.

I'm pretty sure you are correct that honesty is a sort of signaling thing, but I do not find it possible to "join in the signaling when it is useful" - it seems to me that evidence as to the honesty / dishonesty of a person usually accumulates slowly, so you more-or-less have to pick a strategy and stick to it. (My personal experience is that I have a hard time getting people to believe the things I say even when I'm ~100% honest, and that my persuasiveness goes down hill rapidly if I dial that back.)

Finally, I think you're not w
... (read more)
2Dagon
Yes, intentional signaling is hard, and the easiest way to do it is to just be honest most of the time. I follow and recommend this (though I do NOT recommend truthful-but-misleading linguistic games in most cases, and don't make much moral distinction between that and lying. It is more deniable, so more convenient signaling). But I don't hesitate to diverge when it's clearly positive-value. To be clear, I recommend meta-lie-ing to the gestapo as well. Claim that I've gone further down the road since they read my blogs and taken a vow of absolute object-level truth. Claim that I've discovered meta-meta-truth, which prevents withholding information even if not asked, and confess some other minor crime instead. Whatever it takes to get them to leave.

To paraphrase adamzerner...

My impression is that the expected cost of using this technique online - the probability of it backfiring multiplied by the average cost in the case that it does - is low.

While most of my communication experience is from my past role as a moderator of a youth-dominated engineering forum, and so is somewhat unusual, I believe that the expected value is in fact highly positive.

I think this is mostly because:

  • It's a pretty cheap technique to implement - you can simply paraphrase the person you are responding to, rather than dir

... (read more)
0Adam Zerner
That's a great way of wording it. I had been trying to think about how to word it in terms of expected value, but my thoughts were too jumbled to post. Thank you for clarifying!

If anyone else is interested in them, I'm willing to score, count, and/or categorize the responses to the "Changes in Routine" and "What Different" questions.

However, I've started to try and develop a scheme for the former... and I've hit twenty different categories (counting subcategories) and will probably end up with 5-10 more if I don't prune them down.

What sort of things do you think might be interesting to look for?

(Though I haven't started to do work on paper, the latter seems like a much simpler problem. However, if you have tho... (read more)

As a possibility, buying current beach-front property is consistent with believing in global warming if you also believe that it is hard enough to predict where the new beach-front will be that it is cheaper (say, per future-discounted year of residence) to buy property on the current beach and then at the new location of the beach, than it is to buy any combination of properties today.

The inheritance question is actually rather different, as it is about buying beach-front-property-futures in the present.

I suspect that, while it is a legitimate distinction, dividing these skill-rankings into life domains:

A) Confuses what I feel to be your main (or at least, old) idea of agency, which focuses on the habit of intentionally improving situations, with the domain-specific knowledge required to be successful in improving a situation.

Mostly, I don't like the idea of redefining the word agency to be the product of domain-skills, generic rationality skills, and the habit of using rationality in that domain... because that's the same thing as succeeding in that dom... (read more)

2Gleb_Tsipursky
Regarding point A: Based on our experience at Columbus Rationality, I think that having people think specifically about various life domains helps analyze and improve those life areas. My take is that habitual application of rationality is only one aspect of agency as such. I believe tha to know where to apply one's rationality skills to improve the situation, it is vital to have a framework of thinking about specific life domains. Regarding point B: I think your criticism is appropriate here, and that's why I presented the article as the start of a research project, not the definitive conclusion. The case study of yourself with the game you brought up is exactly the kind of response that will help build up further case studies and provide fruitful ground for further research that will enable a more fine-grained understanding of various life domains and agency in various ones.