https://meet.jit.si/viennarationality
The password is "schmachtenberger"
Sorry for the very late info, the organizer only just posted it (Viliam had asked a couple times without a reply)
I'm not clear on one thing: managers participate in mazes, I presume, because the higher positions pay much better.
But why do corporations pay higher positions much better in the first place? Why do they incentivize the maze like that? Surely they would rather have their managers focus on doing their job than on clawing their way up.
Sure, if the higher positions were paid exactly as much as the lower ones, nobody would want to take them (more responsibility for the same money), but in a maze on the other hand, they're paid so much better that managers will
...I don't think it has to be value on Earth; economic reasons to go to space can also mean creating value in space.
True, but what I'm arguing against here is the point of the post:
there may not be good economic reasons to go to space; therefore space colonisation would be driven by non-economic reasons
I'm arguing that there are good economic reasons to go to space. (There are also good economic reasons to build things that we're not building here on Earth, but that's tangential to the discussion.)
Bridges might not be the most valuable thing you can build with your resources right now, but that's different than just letting the resources go unused
Why would we ever want to stop growing our economy and accomodating ever more people? We have always expanded and organized matter into valuable forms, why would we forever settle for the matter and energy available to us on Earth? We can create so much value with even just the matter inside the Moon or Mercury, let alone Jupiter or the Sun. Why would we pass up on it?
lots of the remote learning stuff does suffer from predicting 2019 instead of 2020
I wouldn't call it a successful prediction anyway—he predicts this to be the normal state of affairs, whereas the current situation is a temporary reaction to extraordinary circumstances
Wow, I haven't read the book so this was the first time encountering the predictions. They were… surprisingly bad, given it's just 20 years. Even adjusting for the fact that predictions tend to be ridiculous in general, this really exceeded all expectations
Iirc this article on climate change made me update notably in the direction of climate change being serious and something worth paying attention to.
Definitely not the first piece of content on climate change I consumed, but maybe first that had a significantly over-the-top alarmist tone to shake me up?
I'm halfway through, so far it's good, I'm glad I picked it up.
First half is about his general vision of transforming politics/governance from current industrial-era party politics to post-industrial, the main point being about the relationship between government and citizen. Currently there is pervasive individualism: you get a welfare check, but nobody has the job of giving a shit about your mental health, development, emotional wellbeing, needs, etc. He proposes overturning the individualist ethos and having society get involved with the wellbeing of it
...The Listening Society by Hanzi Freinacht
The number could easily be infinity; I have no problem imagining that most people have zero positive impact for more than half the years of their careers (even the ones that end up having some positive impact overall)
Sounds very close to what Peterson says
The last thing you should do if you come across a hard-for-you unimportant action is stop looking for other things to do.
I think you can go even more general and say, "don't do unimportant things".
Those are all people who don't really consider cleaning their room important (Alice, if she considered it important, could easily hire a cleaning service with her programmer salary).
I'm not talking about people who don't clean up because they're "pouring energy into something else" or because "putting away dishes is boring" or because they have a physical disability. I'm talking about the people from Katja's post:
‘how can make a big difference to the world, when I can’t make a big difference to that pile of dishes in my sock drawer?’
This sounds to me l
...Sounds good! I think many people would forego the luxury (parking spaces are expensive in cities & for a lot of people the transportation itself is enough), but I can imagine some part of the market being like this
Yes, if you can't do an unimportant thing X, I can't judge whether you'll be able to do important thing Y, because I don't know what the relationship in difficulty is between X and Y.
But if you can't do an easy thing, surely I can judge that you'll have even more of a problem doing a difficult thing.
And there aren't going to be many things in the world easier than cleaning your room or loading the dishwasher, right?
This feels very much like typical mind fallacy. Sure, for me, cleaning my room and loading the dishwasher are extremely easy, mindless things. But I know some people - my boyfriend, for instance - for whom household chores take up an undue amount of mental energy and are near-physically painful to do. On the other hand, he can happily spend hours trying to figure out a complex physics problem (while for me, this takes an undue amount of mental energy and is near-physically painful). Perhaps a more widespread example is reading books. Some people find it re
...Nor is the group, unfortunately
I agree, the "big, vague things" are the bedrock of epistemology, the lens which helps you be more discerning and critical when you read anything else (e.g. those more "hands on" materials) and get more value out of it.
I think that the sequences could be rewritten to half the length and still retain the vast majority of the value, but oh well, this is where we are at the moment with core rationality literature.
HPMOR is especially fun if you've read the original HP.
I mean something like: in the equilibrium, all consumer surplus is extracted by rents.
I'm saying "on aggregate", because it might often not be the case in individual cases; landlords are not capable of doing perfect price discrimination on individual basis, only at the level of something like neighborhoods, roughly speaking (people sort themselves into neighborhoods by income, so the landlords can price-discriminate based on "how affluent a neighborhood you wanna live in"; people also want as short commutes as possible, so you can price-discriminate based
...All work for me. I've had psychedelics a few times.
Also, while watching out for the snow (very prominent once you know what you're looking for, kinda like tinnitus), I noticed how (if you keep your vision still) everything constantly glides/shifts/jerks around a little bit, like when you're really drunk.
If you build more units, more people will move into the city. The equlibrium is one in which the population is on aggregate paying through the nose, one way or another. I don't think there's a good solution that doesn't require a change in the economic system.
we want a broad tax base in general—doubling the size of a tax quadruples its social cost, so it’s better to have lots of small taxes rather than a few big taxes
But why not do taxes that don't have social costs? Taxes on land and land-like assets; taxes that internalize externalities (e.g. carbon taxes); taxes on zero-sum games (e.g. higher education); taxes where the dead-weight loss is intended (e.g. cigarettes).
Does anyone have any opinions about their view that technology overall has been stagnating since the 70s?
From footnote 3:
I wrote this chapter of the series from an intuitive perspective before digging into what the evolutionary scientists say about it.
"I made shit up, then checked the facts later." This made me lol, because that's exactly my impression of Urban's writing.
Searle meant the mechanically performing technician as an analogy for the mechanical, deterministic processes in a computer. You cannot reject Searle by magically introducing computation which is outside of the symbol lookup table, just like in a computer, there is no computation happening outside of the computer's circuits.
Now, the mistake that Searle made was much more trivial and embarrassing. From Wikipedia:
...The question Searle wants to answer is this: does the machine literally "understand" Chinese? Or is it merely simulating the ability to understan
Eat plenty of vegetables.
Notice that this is one of the few things the contradictory nutrition theories all happen to agree about.
…Except all the low-carb, keto, and straight up carnivore diets that are getting increasingly popular :)
Mind if I reeeee real quick?
First let's address the idea that renting is 'throwing money away'. This ignores the opportunity cost of investing extra income and the lump sum of the down payment into a house instead of the stock market.
I have a feeling this explanation is misleading.
Investing in the stock market and in the real estate market are two different things, different risk profiles etc. Correctly, this should read, "This ignores the opportunity cost of investing extra income and the lump sum of the down payment into a house instead of the exact
...When thinking about whether to invest your money into a house or something else, typically you want to decouple that decision from your living situation and see if it still makes sense. Regardless of where I live—given my net worth, does it make sense for $XXX,000 of my investment portfolio to be tied into this specific piece of real estate?
The usual financial justification for owning a house is that you are "naturally short housing." If you expect to live in the same place your whole life, then you'll owe more money when rent goes up. So yo...
I read Feynman, but I don't think he said anything about how the US government explained the withdrawal of top physicists from public space.
Maybe it was the case that "the US military is using top physicists to do something" was not a secret; it only was a secret what exactly they're working on.
In that case this would not be repeatable either, because "the US military is using top AI researchers to do something" is not quite the same level of vague :)
Yeah, you got it right. You wanna take as much as possible from others without getting slaughtered, so you keep track of your status. Not much to it.
You get a whole lot of pathological anxiety and suicide these days because the environment has shifted somewhat, Instagram and billionaires and precarious labor and whatnot. I would like to see the numbers for suicide pre-industrial revolution; I wouldn't expect a lot of them.
Would you expect an evolved species to care about death in the abstract? By what mechanism?
Also,
If you primarily inhabit causal reality (like most people on LessWrong)
You're in a group of people where non-conformity happens to be a social good, no need to posit specialness here. We're all running on the same architecture, some people just didn't have their personality traits and happenstance combine in a way that landed them on LW.
Yeah, I've read that one, and I guess that would let someone who've had the same experience understand what you mean, but not someone who haven't had the experience.
I feel similarly to when I read Valentine's post on kensho—there is clearly something valuable, but I don't have the slightest idea of what it is. (At least unlike with kensho, in this example it is possible to eventually have an objective account to point to, e.g. video.)
I'm so curious about this. I presume there isn't, like, a video example of "vibing"? I'd love to see that
Hah, I was thinking along the same lines as you—I have two pieces of advice that I give to everyone, that would solve most of their problems, at that nobody ever takes: meditate daily, and read the goddamn Sequences. So naturally, I'm gonna write up my own, heavily condensed version of the Sequences, and then my friends will have to read them because it's rude not to read something if your friend wrote it (right?)
My version will sit in my brain for at least a few more years, potentially forever, but I did take a few notes on structure at least. I thought I
...But to the degree that the business cycle is a separate understandable phenomenon, can't investors use that understanding to place bets which make them money while dampening the effect?
The theory can tell you that we're headed for a downturn, but when exactly that will happen is unpredictable, because the system is chaotic and the bubble burst can be triggered by any Schelling point that looks like "uh-oh, time to sell". E.g. Lehmann Brothers. E.g. 9/11.
If you don't know whether the recession is coming in a year or three, that's too much ambiguity to make any money off of it.
As johnswentworth notes, recessions are way worse than what you'd get from a random walk. There is something to be explained.
To his list of theories, I would add Austrian business cycle theory (ABCT), which introduces the notion of the temporal structure of capital and explains e.g. why fluctuations in employment are larger in industries further up the capital pipeline/further away from end consumers (mining, refining) than in industries closer to the consumers (retail, hospitality).
According to ABCT, when the central bank lowers interest rates below the n
...Nice! I find it much more pleasant to read :)
Please read this in the most loving-kindness way possible: every time I see a LW post starting with a paragraph of hedging and self-deprecation (which is about half of them), I feel like taking the author by their shoulders and shaking them violently until they gain some self-confidence.
Let the reader judge for themselves whether the post is misguided, badly structured, or repetitive. I guarantee nothing bad will happen to you if they come to this conclusion themselves. The worst thing that could happen is that Someone On The Internet will think bad things
...It's about not wasting people's time with half-baked ideas.
If you waste someone's time, that's not your responsibility, they decided to come over to your blog and lay their eyes on your …research notes, let's say.
Write immediately and write continuously, as you learn. This will (1) give you practice, so that your writing is much better by the time you have something really good that would deserve good writing, and (2) you get feedback from your friends (if you gently beat it out of them), which will make your progress on your ideas faster.
...If I explain
It's difficult to understand what people mean when they say "meaning", because they're always so mysterious and vague around the term.
It seems to me that most of the time, when people talk about "meaning", they mean the dopamine hit you get when you move towards something that will elevate your social status, e.g. helping others, or sacrificing yourself for the well-being of the tribe/superorganism, or whatever else can be used as a virtue signal. (So, for example, making money for the sake of making money doesn't feel as meaningful as making money under t
...Hm. Yes, rationality gave us such timeless techniques like "think about the problem for at least 5 minutes by the clock", but I'm saying that nothing in the LW canon helps you make sure that what you come up with in those 5 minutes will be useful.
Not to mention, this sounds to me like "trying to solve the problem" rather than "solving the problem" (more precisely, "acting out the role of someone making a dutiful attempt to solve the problem", I'm sure there's a Sequence post about this). I feel like people who want to do X (in the sense of the word "want"
...In what we will call the Good Place system (…) If you take actions with good consequences, you only get those points if your motive was to do good. (…) You lose points for bad actions whether or not you intended to be bad.
See also: Knobe effect. People seem also seem to asymetrically judge whether your action was intentional in the first place.
...In a study published in 2003, Knobe presented passers-by in a Manhattan park with the following scenario. The CEO of a company is sitting in his office when his Vice President of R&D comes in and says, ‘We a
In other words: Rationality (if used well) protects you against shooting your foot off, and almost everyone does shoot their foot off, so if you ask me, all the Rationalists who walk around with both their feet are winning hard at life, but having both feet doesn't automatically make you Jeff Bezos.
I think my views are somewhat similar. Let me crosspost a comment I made in a private conversation a while ago:
...I think the main reason why people are asking "Why aren't Rationalists winning?" is because Rationality was simply being oversold.
Yeah, seems like it. I was thinking: why would you expect rationality to make you exceptionally high status and high income?[1] And I think rationality was sold as general-purpose optimal decision-making, so once you have that, you can reach any goals which are theoretically reachable from your starting point by so
But I don't think there's a good reason to expect rationalists to do better unprompted—to have more unprompted imagination, creativity, to generate strategies—or to notice things better: their blind spots, additional dimensions in the solution space.
I wonder if it would help to build a habit about this. Something like dedicating 15 minutes every day to a rationalist ritual, which would contain tasks like "spend 5 minutes listing your current problem, 5 minutes choosing the most important one, and 5 minutes actually thinking about the problem...
In other words: Rationality (if used well) protects you against shooting your foot off, and almost everyone does shoot their foot off, so if you ask me, all the Rationalists who walk around with both their feet are winning hard at life, but having both feet doesn't automatically make you Jeff Bezos.
Yes, my confusion was indeed about the underlying model of innovation. Intuitively is seems to me that progress on a particular research problem would be a function of how smart {the smartest person working on the problem} is, but then I guess if you have more smart people, you can attack more research problems at once, so I guess the model does make sense 🤔
I skimmed the paper but I still can't understand how von Foerster comes up with the notion that more people = faster technological growth. (Kurzgesagt use the same assumption in their video on "egostic altruism", but they don't explain where they got it from either.) Does someone know how that works?
Hm, I see the widget in Chrome though
I recognize myself very much in the dandelion child description; makes me feel slightly better about not being gifted or a high achiever :)