All of mike_hawke's Comments + Replies

I am agnostic about various dragons. Sometimes I find myself wondering how I would express my dragon agnosticism in a world where belief in dragons was prevalent and high status. I am often disturbed by the result of this exercise. It turns out that what feels like agnosticism is often sneakily biased in favor of what will make me sound better or let me avoid arguments.

This effect is strong enough and frequent enough that I don't think the agnosticism described by this post is a safe epistemic fallback for me. However, it might still be my best option in s... (read more)

Yeah, given that Eliezer mentioned Georgism no less than 3 times in his Dath Ilan AMA, I'm pretty surprised it didn't come up even once in this post about UBI.

Personally, I wouldn't be surprised to find we already have most or all the pieces of the true story.

  • Ricardo's law of rent + lack of LVT
  • Supply and demand for low-skill labor
  • Legal restrictions on jobs that disproportionately harm low-wage workers. For example, every single low wage job I have had has been part time, presumably because it wasn't worth it to give me health benefits.
  • Boumol effect?
  • People
... (read more)
mike_hawke*2210

That part is in a paragraph that starts with "My impression is...".

Fair. 

And yet I felt the discomfort before reading that particular paragraph, and I still feel it now. For me personally, the separators you included were not enough: I did indeed have to apply extra effort throughout the post to avoid over-updating on the interpretations as opposed to the hard facts.

Maybe I'm unusual and few other readers have this problem. I suspect that's not the case, but given that I don't know, I'll just say that I find this writing style to be a little too Dark ... (read more)

I appreciate the feedback, but I do want to push back a bit on an idea I see creeping around the edges here at times—that to use effective rhetoric to present the truth is a sin of some sort. Inasmuch as that is your meaning, I respectfully disagree. Guided By the Beauty of Our Weapons is a beautiful essay and one I aim to take to heart. In fact, I think much of the reason this essay has resonated so much with people is because it tells an exhaustively documented, true story about malfeasance that the subject has attempted to hide for a very long time. It ... (read more)

Raemon1715

Maybe I'm unusual and few other readers don't have this problem. I suspect that's not the case, but given that I don't know, I'll just say that I find this writing style to be a little too Dark Artsy and symmetrical for my comfort.

fyi I also felt this. (Don't have much more to add. I just wanted to note it). 

mike_hawke*4234

I read as far as this part:

Because Gerard was on LessWrong when the internet splintered and polarized, he saw the whole story through the lens of LessWrong, and on an instinctive level the site became his go-to scapegoat for all that was going wrong for his vision of the internet.

And I want to make a comment before continuing to read.

I'm uncomfortable with the psychologizing here. I feel like your style is inviting me to suspend disbelief for the sake of a clean and entertaining narrative. Not that you should never do such a thing, but I think it maybe war... (read more)

That part is in a paragraph that starts with "My impression is...".

In and around presentation of the facts, I believe it is useful to provide best-fit narrative explanations for how and why those things were going on, while making it clear that those are only my personal opinions. I source my facts thoroughly and separate my opinions out explicitly. I respect that some may prefer me to keep opinions out of it altogether, but that is simply not how I write.

Point well taken that technological development and global dominance were achieved by human cultures, not individual humans. But I claim that it is obviously a case of motivated reasoning to treat this as a powerful blow against the arguments for fast takeoff. A human-level AI (able to complete any cognitive task at least as well as you) is a foom risk unless it has specific additional handicaps. These might include:
- For some reason it needs to sleep for a long time every night.
- Its progress gets periodically erased due to random misfortune or enemy acti... (read more)

2kave
My understanding is that smart human engineers fail to make capability-increasing edits to the "brains" of current AI systems. If the AI brains remain the same style, I don't think they'll be easier to edit when they're human level.

The part about airports reminds me of "If All Stories were Written Like Science Fiction Stories" by Mark Rosenfelder: 
https://www.bzpower.com/blogs/entry/58514-if-all-stories-were-written-like-science-fiction-stories/
 

No one else has mentioned The Case Against Education by Bryan Caplan. He says that after reading and arithmetic, schooling is mostly for signaling employable traits like conscientiousness, not for learning. I think Zvi Mowshowitz and Noah Smith had some interesting discussion about this years ago. Scott Alexander supposes that anoth... (read more)

Without passing judgment on this, I think it should be noted that it would have seemed less out of place when the Sequences were fresh. At that time, the concept of immaterial souls and the surrounding religious memeplexes seemed to be a genuinely interfering with serious discussion about minds.

However, and relatedly, there was not a lot of cooking discussion on LW in 2009, and this tag was created in 2020.

I'm out of the loop. Did Daniel Kokotajlo lose his equity or not? If the NDA is not being enforced, are there now some disclosures being made?

Thanks for the source.

I've intentionally made it difficult for myself to log into twitter. For the benefit of others who avoid Twitter, here is the text of Kelsey's tweet thread:

I'm getting two reactions to my piece about OpenAI's departure agreements: "that's normal!" (it is not; the other leading AI labs do not have similar policies) and "how is that legal?" It may not hold up in court, but here's how it works:

OpenAI like most tech companies does salaries as a mix of equity and base salary. The equity is in the form of PPUs, 'Profit Participation Units'.

... (read more)
3Dweomite
I am not a lawyer, and my only knowledge of this agreement comes from the quote above, but...if the onboarding paperwork says you need to sign "a" general release, but doesn't describe the actual terms of that general release, then it's hard for me to see an interpretation that isn't either toothless or crazy: 1. If you interpret it to mean that OpenAI can write up a "general release" with absolutely any terms they like, and you have to sign that or lose your PPUs, then that seems like it effectively means you only keep your PPUs at their sufferance, because they could simply make the terms unconscionable.  (In general, any clause that requires you to agree to "something" in the future without specifying the terms of that future agreement is a blank check.) 2. If you interpret it to mean either that the employee can choose the exact terms, or that the terms must be the bare minimum that would meet the legal definition of "a general release", then that sounds like OpenAI has no actual power to force the non-disclosure or non-disparagement terms--although they could very plausibly trick employees into thinking they do, and threaten them with costly legal action if they resist.  (And once the employee has fallen for the trick and signed the NDA, the NDA itself might be enforceable?) 3. Where else are the exact terms of the "general release" going to come from, if they weren't specified in advance and neither party has the right to choose them?
4wassname
Thanks, but this doesn't really give insight on whether this is normal or enforceable. So I wanted to point out, we don't know if it's enforcible, and have not seen a single legal opinion.

Even acknowledging that the NDA exists is a violation of it.

This sticks out pretty sharply to me.

Was this explained to the employees during the hiring process? What kind of precedent is there for this kind of NDA? 

evhub192

Was this explained to the employees during the hiring process? What kind of precedent is there for this kind of NDA?

See Kelsey's follow-up reporting on this.

There are things I would buy if they existed. Is there any better way to signal this to potential sellers, other than tweeting it and hoping they hear? Is there some reason to believe that sellers are already gauging demand so completely that they wouldn't start selling these things even if I could get through to them? 

Would I somehow feel this problem less acutely if I had never been taught Fahrenheit, Celcius, or Kelvin; and instead been told everything in terms of gigabytes per nanojoule? I guess probably not. Inconvenient conversions are not preventing me from figuring out the relations and benchmarks I'm interested in.

It's important to remember, though, that I will be fine if I so choose. After all, if the scary impression was the real thing then it would appear scary to everyone.  

 

Reading this makes me feel some concern. I think it should be seriously asked: Would you be fine if you hypothetically chose to take a gap year or drop out? Those didn't feel like realistic options for me when I was in high school and college, and I think this ended up making me much less fine than I would have been otherwise. Notably, a high proportion of my close friends in colle... (read more)

mike_hawke7-4

In measuring and communicating about the temperature of objects, humans can clearly and unambiguously benchmark things like daily highs and lows, fevers, snow, space heaters, refrigerators, a cup of tea, and the wind chill factor. We can place thermometers and thereby say which things are hotter than others, and by how much. Daily highs can overlap with fevers, but neither can boil your tea.
 

But then I challenge myself to estimate how hot a campfire is, and I'm totally stuck.

It feels like there are no human-sensible relationships once you're talking a... (read more)

You can get a visceral understanding of high degrees of heat.  You just need real-life experience with it.  I’ve done some metalworking, a lot of which is delicate control of high temperatures.  By looking at the black-body glow of the metal you’re working with, you can grok how hot it is.  I know that annealing brass (just barely pink) is substantially cooler than melting silver solder (well into the red), or that steel gets soft (orange) well before it melts (white hot).  I don’t know the actual numerical values of any of those.

I... (read more)

1CstineSublime
I wonder what other qualities or continuums are analogous to this?  Hearing doesn't seem to be the same in that unlike heat it scales up logarithmically (what is the scale between perceived temperature and the actual energy per part?). Nor does colour partly because we perceive colour through the combination of Red, Green (to which we are most sensitive) and Blue (to which we are least sensitive), although if you think about light as a narrow window of electromagnetic radiation then perhaps there is some comparison to be made between gamma rays and fight jet exhausts, and Terrestrial Radio signals to liquid nitrogen for example. What about distance? I'm thinking in particularly about how in English use Deixis words like "here", "there" (and in the past: "hither", "thither", and "yonder") - I wonder if nomadic peoples have a more nuanced even if non-numeric standardized way of describing proximity which is very anthropic in measurement? "1,000 miles" is not a tangible distance to consider.
Thomas Kwa110

Off the top of my head I can definitely sort these into tiers. I don't know any numbers though other than 2700K for incandescent filaments and like 600F for self-cleaning ovens.

solar flares (these are made of plasma and go very fast, so they're very hot)
welding torches (hottest combustion temperatures, much above this everything is plasma)
incandescent filaments, volcano, boiling point of lead, fighter jet exhaust (most things melt and glow white or yellow, normal combustion)
campfires, Venus, self-cleaning ovens (most things don't melt and glow reddish or n... (read more)

2RHollerith
Fire temperature can be computed from the fire's color.
1mike_hawke
Would I somehow feel this problem less acutely if I had never been taught Fahrenheit, Celcius, or Kelvin; and instead been told everything in terms of gigabytes per nanojoule? I guess probably not. Inconvenient conversions are not preventing me from figuring out the relations and benchmarks I'm interested in.

Presumably he understood the value proposition of cryonics and declined it, right?

3Auspicious
According to Max More, Vernor Vinge did know about cryonics, and either declined it or didn't act on it: "Part of me is upset with myself for not pushing him to make cryonics arrangements. However, he knew about it and made his choice."

If everyone in town magically receives the same speedup in their "verbal footwork", is that good for meta-honesty? I would like some kind of story explaining why it wouldn't be neutral.

Point for yes: 
Sure seems like being able to quickly think up an appropriately nonspecific reference class when being questioned about a specific hypothetical does not make it harder for anyone else to do the same.

Point against: 

The code of literal truth only lets people navigate anything like ordinary social reality to the extent that they are very fast on their v

... (read more)
Answer by mike_hawke86

One concrete complaint I have is that I feel a strong incentive toward timeliness, at the cost of timelessness. Commenting on a fresh, new post tends to get engagement. Commenting on something from more than two weeks ago will often get none, which makes effortful comments feel wasted.

I definitely feel like there is A Conversation, or A Discourse, and I'm either participating in it during the same week as everyone else, or I'm just talking to myself.

(Aside: I have a live hypothesis that this is tightly related to The Twitterization of Everything.)

4kave
I think this a real problem (tho I think it's more fundamental than your hypothesis would suggest; we could check commenting behaviour in the 2000s as a comparison). We have some explorations underway addressing related issues (like maybe the frontpage should be more recommender-y and show you good old posts, while the All Posts page is used for people who care a lot about recency). I don't think we've concretely considered stuff that would show you good old posts with new comments, but that might well be worth exploring.

Glad to see some discussion of social class.

Here's something in the post that I would object to:

Non-essential weirdnesses, on the other hand, should be eliminated as much as possible because pushing lifestyle choices onto disinterested working-class people is a misuse of class privilege. Because classes are hierarchical in nature, this is especially important for middle-upper class people to keep in mind. An example of non-essential weirdness is “only having vegan options for dinner”.


This example seems wrong to me. It seems like serving non-vegan options d... (read more)

mike_hawke*1-6
  • Most people, even most unusually honest people, wander about their lives in a fog of internal distortions of reality. Repeatedly asking yourself of every sentence you say aloud to another person, "Is this statement actually and literally true?", helps you build a skill for navigating out of your internal smog of not-quite-truths. For that is our mastery.

I think some people who read this post ought to reverse this advice. The advice I would give to those people is: if you're constantly forcing every little claim you make through a literalism filter, you mig... (read more)

Only praise yourself as taking 'the outside view' if (1) there's only one defensible choice of reference class;

 

I think this point is underrated. The word "the" in "the outside view" is sometimes doing too much work, and it is often better to appeal to an outside view, or multiple outside views.

9Andrew McKnight
lukeprog argued similarly that we should drop the "the"

What do you think the internal experience of these liars is like? I could believe that some of them have gotten a lot of practice with fooling themselves in order to fool others, in settings where doing so is adaptive. Do you think they would get different polygraph results than the believer in the invisible dragon hypothetically would?

4ymeskhout
I think they fully know they're lying about the facts. Where I'm more inclined to believe they've achieved self-deception is within the realm of positive thinking and unshakeable confidence about their anticipated results. Many of my clients seem to earnestly believe that their antics will get their case dismissed or somehow overturned on appeal, but that seems to be a coping strategy necessary to cope with the unimaginable torture of the upcoming years in prison.

Damn, woops.

My comment was false (and strident; worst combo). I accept the strong downvote and I will try to now make a correction.

I said:

I spent a bunch of time wondering how you could could put 99.9% on no AI ever doing anything that might be well-described as scheming for any reason.


What I meant to say was:

I spent a bunch of time wondering how you could put 99.9% on no AI ever doing anything that might be well-described as scheming for any reason, even if you stipulate that it must happen spontaneously.

And now you have also commented:

Well, I have <0.

... (read more)

Foregone mutually beneficial trades sometimes provide value in the form of plausible deniability. 

If a subculture started trying to remove barriers to trade, for example by popularizing cheerful prices, this might have the downside of making plausible deniability more expensive. On net that might be good or bad (or weird), but either way I think it's an underrated effect (because I also think that the prevalence and load-bearing functions of plausible deniability are also underrated). People have prospects and opportunity costs, often largely comprisi... (read more)

EDIT: This is wrong. See descendent comments.

 

I spent a bunch of time wondering how you could could put 99.9% on no AI ever doing anything that might be well-described as scheming for any reason. I was going to challenge you to list a handful of other claims that you had similar credence in, until I searched the comments for "0.1%" and found this one. 

I'm annoyed at this, and I request that you prominently edit the OP.

4Quintin Pope
The post says "we should assign very low credence to the spontaneous emergence of scheming in future AI systems— perhaps 0.1% or less." I.e., not "no AI will ever do anything that might be well-described as scheming, for any reason." It should be obvious that, if you train an AI to scheme, you can get an AI that schemes. 
2Noosphere89
Agree with this hugely, though I could make a partial defense of the confidence given, but yes I'd like this post to be hugely edited.

I followed this exchange up until here and now I'm lost. Could you elaborate or paraphrase?

I will push against.

I feel unhappy with this post, and not just because it called me an idiot. I think epithets and thoughtless dismissals are cheap and oversupplied. Patience and understanding are costly and undersupplied.

A lot of the seemingly easy wins in Mark's list were not so easy for me. Becoming more patient helped me a lot, whereas internal vitriol made things worse.I benefitted hugely from Mr. Money Mustache, but I think I was slower to implement his recommendations because he kept calling me an idiot and literally telling me to punch myself in t... (read more)

5kave
I don't have strong takes on the "idiot" stylistic choice; introspectively it feels fun and it takes the bite out of my self-flagellations when I notice leaving value on the floor. I won't claim to have any empirical support that this actually works better or worse for me. I mostly like this post for the advice. Concretely, after reading it: * I've bought copies of exercise equipment I like for my parents' house so that when I am exercising relatively regularly, I don't break a streak by visiting them. * I own two laptops, two kindles, have multiple chargers (some of which live in travel bags so I always have them) * I often invoke this when deciding whether to try an experimental purchase that might make my life better, but is a little pricey. * Rebought multi-colour pens, which tend to be useful for me for a stretch, and I don't consider rebuying them when they might be useful again. * Bought an external battery. That collection feels like it was probably net-positive. Some of the things that Mark suggests have been really good for me but I already did them (have a password manager, bright rooms).  There are some I disagree with, so haven't (re)tried after reading it (drink lots of water, summarize things you've read, reliably sleep 6-9 hours a night (on the margin, for me)). And then there are some that seem likely good that I haven't tried.

Thirteen points?! If I could get results like that, it would be even better than the CFAR handbook, which merely doubled my IQ.

I made this comment about Raemon's habit update. Here is my own habit update.

  1. Still going great.
  2. Started using a bidet instead. Heard these were bad for the plumbing anyway.
  3. Still going strong with these. I do have an addiction to slack and discord, which is less bad but still problematic.
  4. I fell off of both of these. The list seemed good so I'm rebooting it today. The controversy burning was good too, but mentally/emotionally taxing, so I'm not gonna restart it without some deliberate budgeting first.
  5. I fell off of this. It was easier to stay away from temptin
... (read more)

They also attempt to generate principles to follow from, well, first principles, and see how many they correctly identify. 

Second principles?

========

I'm really glad to see you quoting Three Levels. Seems important.

I am compelled to express my disappointment that this comment was not posted more prominently. 

Habit formation is important and underrated, and I see a lot of triumphant claims from a lot of people but I don't actually see a lot of results that persuade me to change my habituation procedure. I myself have some successful years-old habits and I got them by a different process than what you've described. In particular, I skip twice all the time and it doesn't kill my longterm momentum.

And I hope you'll forgive the harshness if I harken back to point #4 of this comment.

4Raemon
Yeah seems fair. I've thought about writing it into the essay and been uncertain how to do so. It's been 6-7 years and I've had on my list to write a new version of this post, and distill out my new life lessons now that I've had twice-as-long a time horizon. (Note: The habits listed in this essay had lasted years, at the time I wrote the essay. I think they failed most concretely during the pandemic, and then subsequently moving to different houses)

Q:  Wait, does that mean that if I give you a Cheerful Price, I'm obligated to accept the same price again in the future?

No, because there may be aversive qualities of a task, or fun qualities of a task, that scale upward or downward with repeating that task.  So the price that makes your inner voices feel cheerful about doing something once, is not necessarily the same price that makes you feel cheerful about doing it twenty times.

I feel like this needs a caveat about plausible deniability. Sometimes the price goes up or down for reasons that I ... (read more)

If I'm building my own training and tests, there's always the risk of ending up "teaching to the test", even if unintentionally. I think it'd be cool if other people were working on "Holdout Questions From Holdout Domains", that I don't know anything about, so that it's possible to test if my programs actually output people who are better-than-baseline (controlling for IQ).


I am hoarding at least one or two fun facts that I have seen smart rationalists get wrong. Specifically, a claim was made, I ask, "huh, really?" they doubled down, and then later I go lo... (read more)

Here are some thoughts about numeracy as compared to literacy. There is a tl;dr at the end.


The US supposedly has 95% literacy rate or higher. An 14yo english-speaker in the US is almost always an english-reader as well, and will not need much help interpreting an “out of service” sign or a table of business hours or a “Vote for Me” billboard. In fact, most people will instantaneously understand the message, without conscious effort--no need to look at individual letters and punctuation, nor any need to slowly sound it out. You just look, scan, and interpre... (read more)

To me it feels pretty clear that if someone will have a reasonably happy life, it’s better for them to live and have their life cut short than to never be born.

I agree with this conditional, but I question whether the condition (bolded) is a safe assumption. For example, if you could go back in time to survey all of the hibakusha and their children, I wonder what they would say about that C.S. Lewis quotation. It wouldn't surprise me if many of them would consider it badly oversimplified, or even outright wrong.
 

My friend’s parents asked their priest

... (read more)

I remember reading that fish oil pills do not seem to have the same effect as actual fish. So maybe the oily water will also be less effective.

Should I drink sardine juice instead of dumping it down the drain?

 

I eat sardines that are canned in water, not oil, because I care about my polyunsaturated fatty acid ratio. They're very unappetizing but from my inexpert skimming, they seem like one of the best options in terms of health. But I only eat most of the flesh incidentally, with the main objective being the fat. This is why I always buy fish that is unskinned, and in fact I would buy cans of fish skin if it were easy.

So on this basis, is it worth it for me to just go ahead and choke down the sardine water as well? ...or perhaps instead? It is visibly fatty.

2RHollerith
I drink it or more precisely mix it with my bowl of beans and veggies.
2DanielFilan
Seems like you should at least try it once.
1mike_hawke
I remember reading that fish oil pills do not seem to have the same effect as actual fish. So maybe the oily water will also be less effective.

There aren't things lying around in my life that bother me because I always notice and deal with it.

I assume he said something more nuanced and less prone to blindspots than that.

Ten minutes a day is 60 hours a year. If something eats 10 minutes each day, you'd break even in a year if you spent a whole work week getting rid of it forever.

In my experience, I have not been able to reliably break even. This kind of estimate assumes a kind of fungibility that is sometimes correct and sometimes not. I think When to Get Compact is relevant here--it can feel like... (read more)

3Raemon
Yeah this sounds like a real/common problem, and dealing with that somehow seems like a necessary piece for this whole process to work.
4Raemon
I think this is pretty close to what he said. I suspect he'd have some nuances if we drilled down into it. This involves speculation on my part, but having known Critch moderately well, I'd personally bet that he has something like 10x to 30x fewer things lying around bothering him than most people (which maybe comes in waves where, first he had 10x fewer things lying around bothering him, then he set more ambitious goals for himself that created more bothersome things, then he fixed those, etc) He probably does still have blindspots but I think the effect is real.

I feel like the more detailed image adds in an extra layer of revoltingness and scaryness (e.g. the sharp teeth) than would be appropriate given our state of knowledge.


Now I'm really curious to know what would justify the teeth. I'm not aware of any AIs intentionally biting someone, but presumably that would be sufficient.

7Daniel Kokotajlo
Perhaps if we were dealing not with deepnets primarily trained to predict text, but rather deepnets primarily trained to addict people with pleasant seductive conversation and then drain their wallets? Such an AI would in some real sense be an evolved predator of humans.

Long comment, points ordered randomly, skim if you want.

1)
Can you give a few more examples of when the word "optimal" is/isn't distorting someone's thinking? People sometimes challenge each other's usage of that word even when just talking about simple human endeavors like sports, games, diet, finance, etc. but I don't get the sense that the word is the biggest danger in those domains. (Semi-related, I am reminded of this post.)

2)

When I try to point out such (perceived) mistakes, I feel a lot of pushback, and somehow it feels combative. I do get somewhat c

... (read more)
2TurnTrout
I didn't mean to claim that this "consciousness" insinuation has or is messing up this community's reasoning about AI alignment, just that the insinuation exists -- and to train the skill of spotting possible mistakes before (and not after) they occur.  I do think that "'expectation' insinuates inner beliefs" matters, as it helps prop up the misconception of "agents maximize expected reward" (by adding another "supporting detail" to that story).

Also, here are a couple of links that seem relevant to me, even if they are not fully on-topic.
 

Schools Proliferating without Evidence

3 Levels of Rationality Verification

Man, getting stereotyped feels bad, but unfortunately there is no alternative for humans. Great list. I might have drawn the boundaries differently, but I still like what you wrote.

 

I'll plant this flag right here and now: I feel some affinity for all of these attitudes, some more than others. Above all, I have only a vague and partial sense of what a rational culture would be like. Dath Ilan is inspiring, but also feels vague and partial. It does feel easy to imagine that we are not close to the frontier of efficiency, and that this is due to silly m... (read more)

3Camille Berger
I feel some worry when reading your comment on stereotypes. I think that what I have depicted here gestures at vague axes in a multidimensional space, and I sort of expect that people can see which coordinate they're closer to and, mainly, realize that others might be at a different location, one they still need to inquire on. I hope them to adopt a certain gentleness and curiosity in aknowledging that someone might have a different perspective on rationality, and I hope that they will not try to label people out loud. I'm always a bit worried when naming things, because people seem to associate categories with "boxes" or "boundaries" rather than "shores of vast and unknown territories".
1mike_hawke
Also, here are a couple of links that seem relevant to me, even if they are not fully on-topic.   Schools Proliferating without Evidence 3 Levels of Rationality Verification

Bezos gave some of his investors a 70% chance they'd lose their whole investment. Those investors...were his parents.

Elon Musk was hooked up to the Palpal Mafia social network.

Anyway, a lot of stories like that are misleading. My understanding is that those examples are mostly just their after-the-fact disclosures of their private thinking, not what they told investors at the time?

 

Thanks for the reply. Maybe I'll reread that chapter of the book and see if there are any sharp updates to make.

Here are some questions this post raises for me.

  • Do people ever try to pitch you on projects, and if so, do the story-based pitches work better or worse than others?
  • Where are the investors that you expected? With Vision Fund way down, are the reality-based decision makers on the rise, or not?
  • "Look at bios of founders of their last few investments (as presented on company websites) and see if they follow a pattern. Look at the main characters of the movies they like. Look
... (read more)
3bhauth
Not exactly. I've evaluated project pitches for other people, and sometimes people pitch me personally on ideas. To the extent that I've been trusted on technical things by people directing large amounts of money, it's been a narrow/limited sort of trust, not "let's do whatever this guy says". Relative to VCs, I think (private equity that quietly does large acquisitions) and (internal project evaluations at engineering companies (eg BASF)) do better technical due diligence. But internal project evaluation at big companies is conservative yet typically requires 15%+ ROI for approval - which is a result of managers' job cycles. As for private equity, people seem more interested in acquisitions to establish enough of a monopoly to have pricing power than new technology. Which is smart. The actual answer to that question, tho, is that they don't exist to the extent it seems like they should, that cultural factors prevent an economic equilibrium. Elon Musk is dumb enough to think the Hyperloop is genius, and there's free money on the sidewalk for people with that level of technical knowledge who also have either enormous wealth or credibility with and connections to investors. But the selection processes involved reject them at earlier points. Yes, that's a big factor in how the current situation got established. I thought of that independently and have mentioned it before. Partly that. Partly it's an example of irrational thinking that people might see in their own approach. Partly other things. I haven't. Bezos gave some of his investors a 70% chance they'd lose their whole investment. Those investors...were his parents. Elon Musk was hooked up to the Palpal Mafia social network. Anyway, a lot of stories like that are misleading. My understanding is that those examples are mostly just their after-the-fact disclosures of their private thinking, not what they told investors at the time?

Seems like brackets would remove this problem, at the cost of being highly nonstandard and perhaps jarring to some people.

I was jarred and grossed out the first time I encountered brackets used this way. But at the end of the day, I think 20th century writing conventions just aren't quite good enough for what we want to do on LW. (Relatedly, I have higher tolerance for jargon than a lot of other people.)

Caveat: brackets can be great for increasing the specificity of what you are able to say, but I sometimes see the specificity of people's thoughts fail to keep up with the specificity of their jargon and spoken concepts, which can be grating.

Refactoring your writing for clarity is taxing and will reduce overall word count on LW. That would be an improvement for some users but not others.

I know some major offenders when it comes to unnecessary-hyphenation-trains, but usually I still find all their posts and comments net positive.

Of course, I would be happy if those users could increase clarity without sacrificing other things.

I clicked on the heart disease algorithm link, and it was just a tweet of screenshots, with no link to the article. I typed in the name of the article into my search bar so that I could read it. 

Your commentary about this headline may be correct, but I find it questionable after reading the whole article. The article includes the following paragraph: 

Two years ago, a scientific task force of the National Kidney Foundation and American Society of Nephrology called for jettisoning a measure of kidney function that adjusted results by race, often ma

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6tgb
From the NEJM article. This is the exact opposite of Zvi's conclusions ("Not factoring this in means [blacks] will get less care"). I confirmed the NEJM's account by using an online calculator for that score. https://www.mdcalc.com/calc/3829/gwtg-heart-failure-risk-score Setting a patient with black=No gives higher risk than black=yes. Similarly so for a risk score from the AHA,: https://static.heart.org/riskcalc/app/index.html#!/baseline-risk  Is Zvi/NYT referring to a different risk calculator? There are a lot of them out there. The NEJM also discuses a surgical risk score that has the opposite directionality, so maybe that one? Though there the conclusion is also about less care for blacks: "When used preoperatively to assess risk, these calculations could steer minority patients, deemed to be at higher risk, away from surgery." Of course, less care could be a good thing here! I agree that this looks complicated.

I agree with this, and I've been fairly unimpressed by the critiques of steelmanning that I've read, including Rob's post. Maybe I would change my mind if someone wrote a long post full of concrete examples[1] of steelmen going wrong, and of ITT being an efficient alternative. I think I pretty regularly see good reasoning and argumentation in the form of steelmen.

  1. ^

    But it's not trivial to contrive examples of arguments that will effectively get your point across without triggering, distracting, or alienating too much of the audience.

I've seen a few people run the thought experiment where one imagines the best life a historical person could live, and/or the most good they could do. There are several variants, and you can tune which cheat codes they are given. People seem to get different answers, and this has me pretty curious.

  • Eliezer said in the sequences that maybe all this rationality stuff just wouldn't help a 14th century peasant at all, unless they were given explicit formulas from the future. (See also, the Chronophone of Archimedes.)
  • I've heard people ask why the industrial revo
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Over a year later, I stand by this sentiment. I think this thought experiment is important and underrated.

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