Douglas_Knight

Replying toMy journey to the microwave alternate timeline

My journey to the microwave alternate timeline

The idea of coating the bottom of the pan with tin oxide reminds me of attaching iron to the bottom of a pan to make it work with induction stoves. Microwaves are more flexible in that you could put the tin oxide in an arbitrary shape, such as a wok, while induction requires the ferrous component to be close to the "burner," but induction stoves seem like a pretty good compromise, covering the advantages you mention.

Does Smith talk about any device with a complicated distribution of receivers? I recently encountered a sandwich press that goes in the microwave. This could be unfolded to lie flat, but I think it was intended to be microwaved folded, heating both sides of the sandwich. What else exists? When I search "microwave accessories" I just find things that don't absorb microwaves. Is there some other search term? Related products on amazon leads to what seem to be modern microwave skillets, largely flat.

Replying toThe optimal age to freeze eggs is 19

Douglas_Knight8d

The optimal age to freeze eggs is 19

Yes, if you're going to freeze eggs or embryos, the earlier the better. But what are the tradeoffs between those two choices? Eggs postpone the future choice of sperm, while embryos freeze better. You can put these in the same units: at what age does the yield from freezing embryos at that age match the yield from freezing eggs at age 20?

Replying toDoes Pentagon Pizza Theory Work?

Douglas_Knight24d

Does Pentagon Pizza Theory Work?

Let Nitter scrape for you. 1 2 3

Replying toBackyard cat fight shows Schelling points preexist language

Douglas_Knight24d

Backyard cat fight shows Schelling points preexist language

Most of the time people say "Schelling point" they mean this. Maybe it would be better to call it a Schelling fence, but even that post claims that it is a Schelling point. I suspect that you can reframe it to make it true Schelling point, such as the participants coordinating to approximate the real game by a smaller tractable game, but I'm not sure.

Replying toCollege Was Not That Terrible Now That I'm Not That Crazy

Douglas_Knight1mo

College Was Not That Terrible Now That I'm Not That Crazy

I wanted to take measure theory in college, but my advisor talked me out of it, saying that it is an old, ossified field where writers play games of streamlining their proofs. They seek too much generality and defer applications to later courses. That complaint could apply more generally, that introductory graduate classes are bad because they have captive audiences, but it seems to me much worse in analysis than other fields of mathematics. What is the point of measure theory? Archimedes gave a rigorous delta-epsilon proof that if there is a coherent notion of measure, then the area of a circle is πr². But how do you know that you don't... (read more)

Replying toCollege Was Not That Terrible Now That I'm Not That Crazy

Douglas_Knight1mo

College Was Not That Terrible Now That I'm Not That Crazy

Could you say more about taste? How fast can you evaluate the taste of a book? If it's fast, could you check whether there was a trajectory over the 12 editions?

showcasing the fearsome technicality of the topic in excruciatingly detailed estimates (proofs involving chains of inequalities, typically ending on "< ε").

That sounds bad. The ultimate proof is a chain of inequalities, but just presenting it is bad compared to deriving it.

Replying toCollege Was Not That Terrible Now That I'm Not That Crazy

Douglas_Knight1mo

College Was Not That Terrible Now That I'm Not That Crazy

“I wish we had the education system they have in Doorways in the Sand,” I said... “Did you know, there’s a new Heinlein? The Number of the Beast. And he’s borrowed the idea of that education system, where you study all those different things and sign up and graduate when you have enough credits in everything, and you can keep taking courses forever if you want, but he doesn’t acknowledge Zelazny anywhere.”

Wim laughed. “That’s what they really do in America,” he said.

— Jo Walton, Among Others

Replying toThe unreasonable deepness of number theory

Douglas_Knight1mo

The unreasonable deepness of number theory

I found this Terry Tao blog post helpful. In particular, this paragraph,

It is difficult to prove that no conspiracy between the primes exist. However, it is not entirely impossible, because we have been able to exploit two important phenomena. The first is that there is often a “all or nothing dichotomy” (somewhat resembling the zero-one laws in probability) regarding conspiracies: in the asymptotic limit, the primes can either conspire totally (or more precisely, anti-conspire totally) with a multiplicative function, or fail to conspire at all, but there is no middle ground. (In the language of Dirichlet series, this is reflected in the fact that zeroes of a meromorphic function can have order

Douglas_Knight2mo

Most successful entrepreneurship is unproductive

Yes, if we accept your ifs, we conclude that the new business is net negative. This really happens and some new businesses really are net negative (although I think negligible compared to negative externalities). But why think your assumptions are normal? Why think that the fixed cost of the business is larger than the time savings of the closer customers? Why expect no price competition, no price sensitivity?

There is a standard analysis of competition. If you reject it, it would be good to address it, rather than ignoring it. The standard analysis is that competition reduces prices. The first order effect of reducing prices is a transfer from producer surplus to consumer... (read more)

Replying toYou Can Just Buy Far-UVC

Douglas_Knight2mo

You Can Just Buy Far-UVC

Putting lamps in ducts is not very different from putting filters in ducts; but with the downside that I'm a lot more worried about fraudulent lamps than filters. I guess it's easy to retrofit a lamp into a duct, whereas a filter slows the air; but you probably already have a system designed with a filter.

The point of lamps is to use them in an open room where they cover the whole volume continuously.

Carl Zimmer's Air-Borne is framed as an ironic tragedy about the prewar theory of airborne infection being accepted in biological war, but not in public health, the worst of both worlds. Is this so surprising? Perhaps it is just incentives. Perhaps both sides just made the assumption that would make their task easier, with no connection to reality. Less cynically, the people designing biological weapons don't need to care what is common in nature, just what is possible. These ideas came to me reading Nicholson Baker's Baseless, a cynical book uninterested in whether biological weapons actually work. He is so angry about people attempting biological weapons that he is willing to print... (read more)

Someone just told me that the solution to conflicting experiments is more experiments. Taken literally this is wrong: more experiments just means more conflict. What we need are fewer experiments. We need to get rid of the bad experiments.

Why expect that future experiments will be better? Maybe if the experimenters read the past experiments, they could learn from them. Well, maybe, but maybe if you read the experiments today, you could figure out which ones are bad today. If you don't read the experiments today and don't bother to judge which ones are better, what incentive is there for future experimenters to make better experiments, rather than accumulating conflict?

Self-driving cars are famously bad at left turns. That is, they're inhumanly slow. But the goal is not human-like performance. Maybe the self-driving cars are doing the right thing; super-human patience is not a difficult task for computers. But once you've decided that you're going to wait a long time to make left turns, you should change your routing algorithm to avoid left turns. UPS stopped making left turns in 2004. Why is Google/Waymo still making them? In 2016, Google's other W-driving subsidiary reduced left turns. Maybe they just reduced Waze lefts down to Maps lefts, but even so, it should make this parameter salient. Or maybe they do avoid left turns,... (read more)

Robin Hanson tweets:

Many expect to see a correlation between cynicism, thinking that low motives drive behavior, and pessimism, thinking the future will be bleak. I defy this, being both cynical and optimistic. But I'm curious; is this correlation real, and if so why? If not, why expect it?

I am skeptical that most people have beliefs and, in particular, I'm skeptical that these terms are for describing beliefs.

Taking these definitions as given, what do they predict? An outside view extrapolation of the future from the present should not depend too much on understanding how the present works, only whether it works and how it has changed in the past. If we live in... (read more)

What is calculus? Who invented it? I don't mean Newton vs Leibniz, but Newton vs Archimedes.

If it is the ability of calculate certain things, Archimedes calculated many of those things. If it is a single particular theorem, the obvious candidate is the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus, connecting tangents to areas, due to Isaac Barrows, Newton's mentor.

I sometimes see people claiming that Newton bequeathed us a black box which was a giant step forward and now people learn it in high school and can do everything Newton could do. This is wildly wrong, but it is a natural benchmark to measure learning. If you believe that about calculus, or any other tool, you... (read more)

I see many people say that we should have done vaccine challenge trials, that would have been so much quicker. But we did challenge trials. They were "approved" in September and actually begun in February. If you want fast trials, it makes just as much sense to demand that the regulators run regular trials fast. There is much more to gain on that front.

The actual efficacy trials only took about 2 months* that would have been saved by challenge trials. Most of the time was spent not studying vaccines, but waiting for approval to move on to the next step of the trial, just as all a year was spent waiting for... (read more)

Hypothesis: "Flatten the curve" took off because it allows people to participate without 1. signaling they care what happens to them. 2. think things will get bad or 3. think bad things are preventable.
— Elizabeth

Georgism

I'm going to write some things about Georgism, prompted by the review of George in the SSC contest. I had a pretty positive view of Georgism before, but had a pretty negative reaction to the review. I have not read George, but it gave me an impression of monomania. It is implausible that land is the root of all evil: of the Irish famine, the 19th century Depression, and modern urban dysfunction. I had first heard of Georgism and LVT for the coordination of modern cities, but I never gave much thought to what it was originally about.

I expect to write a bunch of comments as replies to this comment, which will serve to keep them together. I want multiple comments mainly because I expect to write them on different days and don't want one to prevent the publication of the other. For good or for ill, this will avoid bridging topics.

Recently I've run across several people offhandedly offering disclaimers that they've never personally checked that the earth is round. I've never thought to check either, but a moment's reflection reveals that I've traveled far enough, both north-south and east-west that the curvature is obvious.

Time zones are a measure of the curvature of the earth. When I travel from New York to California, I know that noon has changed, trusting only my wristwatch. In fact, it was pretty clear to my circadian rhythm. Or just make a phone call to someone you trust on the other coast. Most of the time I don't discuss sunlight on such calls, but it has come up.

I've... (read more)

The essence of systems thinking: Every persistent biological or cultural structure exists because of a positive feedback loop. Sometimes it’s hard to see. But to understand the structure, you must understand the loop.

— Kevin Simler

Elaboration:

Positive loops by themselves are unstable, yes, and both are needed for stability, but positive loops are primary. Without a positive loop, there would be nothing for a negative loop to stabilize.

Does NYT have policies?

Douglas_Knight

Does the New York Times have written policies? Does it publish them? Have they leaked?

Here is a list of six public documents. Most interesting are the Ethical Journalism Guidebook/Handbook and the Guidelines on [Our] Integrity. The first mentions three documents: (A) "the Newsroom Integrity Statement, promulgated in 1999"; is this the Guidelines linked above? (B) "the Policy on Confidential Sources, issued in 2004," archived here. Do they still publish it? and (C) "the Rules of the Road," which sounds like a private document not specific to journalism.

Are there other private written policies? Have they leaked? Are there rumors about them?

I don't mean to imply that policies are an unalloyed good. At some level of detail or disorganization, people simply don't learn them. I have a largely unjustified intuition that lying is bad and lying about policies is particularly bad, seeming to exist to diffuse responsibility.

Douglas_Knight's Shortform

Douglas_Knight

This is a special post for quick takes (aka "shortform"). Only the owner can create top-level comments.

Perception of the Concrete vs Statistical: Corruption

Douglas_Knight

10y

People react to statistics very differently than they react to concrete examples, even though statistical generalities mean that there exist many concrete examples. Of course there are systematic differences between generalities and individual examples. For example, a concrete example might not be representative. Indeed, it probably is not representative for the very reason that it is at hand. But there are many other ways that people react differently that seem to me worthy of study.

I will compare two stories of political corruption, one statistical and one concrete that seem to me to have had rather different responses. It wouldn’t terribly surprise me if people had failed to believe one or the other.... (read 361 more words →)

Would you notice if science died?

Douglas_Knight

10y

Would you notice if science died?

Science is a big deal. It would be worth knowing if it stalled, regressed, or died out, whether the body of knowledge or the techniques for generating more knowledge. You could practice by reviewing history and looking for times and places where it stumbled. In this exercise you have the advantage of hindsight, but the disadvantage of much less direct access to the raw data of the scientific practice of the time. But regardless of how it compares to the real task, this is practice. This is an opportunity to test theories and methods before committing to them. There is a limited amount of history to practice... (read 508 more words →)

Actually existing prediction markets?

Douglas_Knight

10y

What public prediction markets exist in the world today? Have you used one recently?

What attributes do they have that should make us trust them or not, such as liquidity and transaction costs? Do they distort the tails? Which are usable by Americans?

This post is just a request for information. I don’t have much to say.

Intrade used to be the dominant market, but it is gone, opening up this question. The most popular question on prediction markets has been the US Presidential election. If a prediction market wants to get off the ground, it should start with this question. Since the campaign is gearing up, markets that hope to fill the vacuum should... (read 472 more words →)

The Cold War divided Science

Douglas_Knight

12y

What can we learn about science from the divide during the Cold War?

I have one example in mind: America held that coal and oil were fossil fuels, the stored energy of the sun, while the Soviets held that they were the result of geologic forces applied to primordial methane.

At least one side is thoroughly wrong. This isn't a politically charged topic like sociology, or even biology, but a physical science where people are supposed to agree on the answers. This isn't a matter of research priorities, where one side doesn't care enough to figure things out, but a topic that both sides saw to be of great importance, and where they both... (read 263 more words →)

Games People Play

Douglas_Knight

15y

Game theory is great if you know what game you're playing. All this talk of Diplomacy reminds me of this memory of Adam Cadre:

I remember that in my ninth grade history class, the teacher had us play a game that was supposed to demonstrate how shifting alliances work. He divided the class into seven groups — dubbed Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Austria and Russia — and, every few minutes, declared a "battle" between two of the countries. Then there was a negotiation period, during which we all were supposed to walk around the room making deals. Whichever warring country collected the most allies would win the battle and a certain number

... (read 391 more words →)

LESSWRONG
LW

LESSWRONG
LW

The Cold War divided Science

Does NYT have policies?

Actually existing prediction markets?

Games People Play

Douglas_Knight

Does NYT have policies?

Douglas_Knight's Shortform

Perception of the Concrete vs Statistical: Corruption

Would you notice if science died?

Actually existing prediction markets?

The Cold War divided Science

Games People Play

Douglas_Knight

The Cold War divided Science

Does NYT have policies?

Actually existing prediction markets?

Games People Play

Douglas_Knight

Does NYT have policies?

Douglas_Knight's Shortform

Perception of the Concrete vs Statistical: Corruption

Would you notice if science died?

Actually existing prediction markets?

The Cold War divided Science

Games People Play