Agreed, and we have well-meaning conservatives like Ben Shapiro taking marriage and monogamy as almost an unfalsifiable good, and then using it as a starting point for their entire political philosophy. Maybe he's right, but I wish realistic post-birth-control norms were actually part of the overton window.
I think much of the difficulty comes from the fact that past systems-of-the-world, the unexamined normalcies that functioned only in silence, were de facto authored by evolution, so they were haphazard patchworks that worked, but without object level understanding, which makes them particualrly tricky to replace.
Take ancient fermentation rituals. They very well may break down when a child asks "why do we have to bury the fish?" or "why bury it this long?" or "why do we have to let it sit for 4 months now?"
The elder doesn't know the answer. All he knows is ...
I'm single because my current location is amazing in every way except its density of young, childless people. I have met somewhere between 300-1000 people over the last 4 years, and of those, 8 have been women between the ages of 20-30.
Most are 40+ parents, the rest are those parents' kids. The sad truth (I think), is that I simply have to move if I want to date.
Same. It would take incredible effort to find one person I reasonably connect with each year.
So much of this is just location. I've met 100s of people over the last few years. Nearly all either over 40 with kids, or those kids. I've connected with many, maybe 10%, on a pretty good level. That doesn't help with dating at all.
I just really, really don't want it to be the case that he only answer is: move to NY, SF, or Seattle, becuase I really like it here.
As someone who's gambled professionally, I believe the (Chesterton's) fence around betting for normies exists because most bets are essentially scams, which is why I'm entirely okay knocking it down for LWers. Let me elaborate.
Probability is complicated and abstract. Not only that, human intuition is really bad at it. Nearly all "bets" throughout our modern history have not been the kind of skin-in-the-game prediction competition we're praising on lesswrong - they've been predatory. One person who understands probability using emotional and logical minipul...
You could be hypothyroid. What's your morning body temperature?
I've had the exact same experience. Chores like that are the exact kind of thing your brain says "nope" to (forcefully) when you don't have enough energy available. I've had this symptom for most of my life, and it's gone away during the times I've been healthiest.
This - small chores seeming entirely awful - was positively correlated with all my other symptoms: insomina, depression, acne, brain fog, idopathic fatigue, and breathlessness under exertion (much more than normal). They all arr...
Shout out to Karl Marx for correctly identifying many issues with what he called capitalism, but providing a compeltely inaccurate hypothesis as to the root cause of those issues.
This is a perfectly reasonable question. No one wants to be fat, so it follows that no highly competent individual will be fat.
Turns out, it's just a very difficult problem, and that degree of difficulty also varies greatly between people. It's far more difficult for certain individuals than for others.
No one really knows why, yet. If they did, we'd all be thin and healthy again.
Agreed with this objection. And the "low caloric density" thing is, imo, just flat out wrong, especially if you're an athlete.
Saturated fats couldn't reasonably have made us less sexy or infertile. Modern chronic disease makes you less sexy and infertile.
That's a reasonable hypothesis, but what about all the other chronic health conditions skyrocketing?
Depression, anxiety, cancer, age-related macular degeneration, arthritis, Alzheimer's, autism, ADHD, period pain, early onset puberty, infertility, chronic fatigue syndrome, etc, etc, etc?
Weight is just the one we talk about, because we can see the lack of health on your body, and it looks unsexy, so you pay a social cost for it. This conversation, though, really isn't about body-weight, or even body fat, but rather chronic disease as a whole. Obesity is just one such disease, or maybe even symptom, rather than a disease in and of itself.
Agreed. The idea that foods with "low caloric density" are healthier is thrown in at the end as something we know for sure. That's... not accurate at all. Not even a little bit accurate. I actually think the totality of the evidence leans the other way, but like with seed oils, it's extremely mixed.
It's funny to see the "left/right" slant debate in the comments. I thought we were past that. Who cares what Team each statement is a soldier for? They're all pretty good examples of the noncentral fallacy, and the further discussion about Schelling fences addressed almost all of my few objections while reading them. I've actually had those "taxation is theft" and "imprisonment is kidnapping" conversations with people, because they've never even considered the similarities.
My only remaining objection is that the word "racism" has gotten overloaded, but to ...
Has anyone else run into the issue where they don't really want to rest - they just want to do different work?
When I try a rest day, I immediately just want to play a strategy video game. I have an urge to study, improve, learn, etc. That's literally what my mind always goes to. I don't really want to rest, I want to work, it just seems clear that, deep down, I don't think the work I do on normal days is worthwhile.
Alright I see one crux here.
Bush and Obama governed almost identically, despite the "heated" election between Obama and Romney/McCain. It seems like what we have is essentially a uniparty with two WWE faces for the public, and they execute mostly Kayfabe performances that all lead to the same outcome in the end.
It appeared, from the media reaction to Trump, that the uniparty was actually threatened by him. This is why I think it's more likely in this election, rather than previous elections, that there was more of an effort to rig on one side than there wa...
I think there are significant differences between this post and the run of the mill leftist drivel you see somewhere like reddit. This post is well written and coherent, and, as such, invites discussion. I've also seen the author respond to opposing comments with real counter-arguments, rather than random ad hominems and fallacies.
Also, while politics is certainly the mind-killer, I personally enjoy the occasional political article where we get to discuss it with LessWrong's forum features and LessWrong's audience. There's a chance of actually having my mi...
It was the mechanism and order of the counting which differentiated this election from others. The counts continued long into the night, and into the following days. It was the first election with substantial mail in voting, adding many new attack vectors for fraud.
At about 2am on election night, Trump was a -190 favorite, so not huge, but definitely expected to win. It was certainly unlikely that there were enough votes in the deep blue areas that had yet to be counted to swing the election, although it was no where near prohibitively unlikely.
Then there ...
The Trump section makes a few assumptions that aren't defended. They might be right, they might be wrong, but even the most basic counterarguments aren't addressed.
First, you call questioning the election "overthrowing democracy," which implies that questioning it wasn't in any way justified. What's your prior that an election is sound? This is a genuine question; I'm not sure what's appropriate. Many, many elections throughout human history have been various degrees of rigged. I have no idea what prior to use, and I have no idea what level of fraud/questi...
This is a super interesting take. I'll keep it in mind if I dig into the history of monetary systems again.
A classic example of the typical mind fallacy: everyone has an internal monologue.
Actually, no, they don't: https://irisreading.com/how-do-i-know-if-i-have-an-inner-monologue/
I'd expect nearly every LW'er talks to themselves, likely constantly. I certainly believed everyone had an inner monologue for most of my life, until the idea that people don't started spreading around the internet a few years ago. Both parties were shocked that the other existed (myself included).
It makes me wonder just how many other things are out there like this.
This 1000x.
Related is replacing the naive idea that "money corrupts" with the truer "money makes you more of what you are."
Most people's inherent corruption and selfishness is reigned in by a lack of power. Money allows it to come out. The nice thing about (ideal) capitalism is that only hard working, risk taking, creative people end up with power, which leads to more hard work, more risk taking, and more creativity.
It's the people who acquire money through other means that end up "corrupted" by it, even though they're really just showing who they were all along.
I think my inability to image form like this is why I've always been so bad at chess.
I can really only hold an image of one word in my mind. If I want to read "God" on the top, I completely lose the second and third rows. I can also write in "Gas" in the first column and read it (barely), but the second I add the second word, everything gets blurred (abstractly). The information just... isn't there.
Despite this, I'm extremely good at mental rotations... which seems strange because it's also visual imagery. Somehow, I'm a lot better at holding a shape...
I like getting it to write funny stuff based on it's left leaning, mainstream slant. So "Write me an article: We need to talk about the racism problem with pennies."
It's amazing. You should try it.
How are these the same thing?
Some studies say masks work, some don't. If you incorrectly evaluate the evidence and believe that they don't work... how is that related to accusing people of conspiring? You've just analyzed the evidence wrong, but you haven't made any claims relating to any people, or plans, or schemes.
Do you think it's worth actually memorizing a few actual references? I.e. - Study by X done in X year, instead of just "other studies."
It often seems like "other studies disagree" is only one small step above just asserting it.
This is coming from someone who (as you know) makes this assert-contrarian-without-sources faux pas all the time.
Conspiracy =/= wrong + contrarian. That's an issue with the current Overton window. Conspiracy used to mean people conspiring.
So there's a difference between "carbs bad" - which is probably just wrong and contrarian, and "cereal companies colluded to convince you meat and fat are unhealthy, so you'd eat their sugar cereal," which is a conspiracy theory.
The reason conspiracy theories are typically (rightly) ridiculed is that they tack on a whole bunch of non Occam's Razor propositions to a theory, without the accompanying evidence. The conspiracy from cerea...
No that's expressly NOT what he's saying. For example - obesity is dangerous. Everybody thinks obesity is dangerous, and they're correct.
He's just saying that some of the public wisdom seems totally wrong. That [everybody thinks it] has turned out to be much weaker evidence than he originally thought, though still evidence in favor, and certainly not evidence against.
Gold used physical-world trade for a long long time, it did not (and still does not) self-host ownership transfers.
You're right, it's not identical. However, monetary supply was decided via proof-of-work. Chain of ownership and custody was not. I was referring to monetary policy here, but that is an important distinction.
There's no intrinsic value behind it (that is, no industrial use and no government demanding their taxes/payments in that form)
The use of gold in electronics makes it a worse form of money, not better. The fact that you have to put m...
If I trust my body to tell me when it's tired, I'll work all night until about 8-9am, and then go to sleep.
Are there things you do to get your body's natural sense to actually match up to reality? Turning down the lights or altering the temperature?
My body literally doesn't send sleep signals. It might send vague fatigue signals at some points, but without actual effort, I would literally stay up all night, every night.
The only exception is on days when I'm already very sleep deprived. Say I slept 2 hours and then worked a 10 hour day. That night, I'll fall asleep at 9-10 without any effort, but that's the rare exception.
Okay but I just don't agree.
Let each black box have some probability to kill you, uniformly chosen from a set of possible probabilities. Let's start with a simple one: that probability is 0 or 1.
The a prior chance to kill you is .5.
After the box doesn't kill you, you update, and now the chance is 0.
What about if we use a uniform distribution from [0,1)? Some boxes are .3 to kill you, others .78.
Far more of the experiences of not dying are from the low p-kill boxes than from the high p-kill ones. When people select the same box, instead of a new...
Replace thief with a black box that either explodes and kills you, or doesn't. It has some chance to kill you, but you don't know what that chance is.
I was put in a room with black-box-one 5 times. Each time it didn't explode.
Now, I have a choice: I can go back in the room with black-box-one, or I can go to a room with black-box-two.
I'll take black-box-one, based on prior evidence.
Your Latex didn't quite work.
Also, here's three quick examples for anyone still wondering exactly how this works. Remember that the chance of flipping tails until a given digit in the binary expansion, then flipping heads, is where n is the digit number (1/2 for the first digit after the decimal, 1/4 for the second, etc).
My chance to land on the 1 with a heads is exactly .
My chance to land on a 1 with my first heads is
My chance to land on a 1 with my first heads is&nbs...
Since reading the sequences, I've made much more accurate predictions about the world.
Both the guiding principle of making beliefs pay rent in anticipated experience, as well as the tools by which to acquire those accurate beliefs, have worked for me.
So at an object level, I disagree with your claim. Also, if you're going to introduce topics like "meta-rationality" and "nebulosity" as part of your disagreement, you kind of have to defend them. You can't just link a word salad and expect people to engage. The first thing I'm looking for is a quick, one or two paragraph summary of the idea so I can decide whether it's worth it to pursue further.
I think it's appropriate to draw some better lines through concept space for apocalyptic predictions, when determining a base rate, than just "here's an apocalyptic prediction and a date." They aren't all created equal.
Herbert W Armstrong is on this list 4 times... each time with a new incorrect prediction. So you're counting this guy who took 4 guesses, all wrong, as 4 independent samples on which we should form a base rate.
And by using this guy in the base rate, you're implying Eliezer's prediction is in the same general class as Armstrong's, which is a ...
I've also noticed those tendencies, not in the community but in myself.
Selfishness. Classification of people as "normies." Mental health instability. Machiavellianism.
But...
They get stronger as I look at the world like a rationalist. You read books like Elephant in the Brain and find yourself staring at a truth you don't want to see. I wish God were real. I wish I were still a Christian with those guardrails erected to prevent me from seeing the true nature of the world.
But the more I look, the more like it looks like a non-moral, brutally unfair, unforgiv...
good news on the moral front: prosocial moral intuitions are in fact a winning strategy long term. we're in a bit of a mess short term. but, solidarity and co-protection are good strategies; radical transparency can be an extremely effective move; mutual aid has always been a factor of evolution; the best real life game theory strategies tend to look like reputational generous tit for tat with semirandom forgiveness, eg in evolutionary game theory simulations; etc. Moral realism is probably true but extremely hard to compute. If we had a successful co-prot...
Counterpoint:
I'm at a local convenient store. A thief routinely robs me. He points a gun at me, threatens me, but never shoots, even when I push back a little. At this point, it's kind of like we both know what's happening, even though, technically, there's a chance of physical danger.
Had this guy shot me, I wouldn't be alive to reason about his next visit.
Now consider a different thief comes in, also armed. What is my probability of getting shot, as compared with the first thief?
Much, much, higher with the second thief. My past experiences with the first ...
Off topic, but I'd just like to say this "good/bad comment" vs "I agree/disagree" voting distinction is amazing.
It allows us to separate our feeling on the content of the comment from our feeling on the appropriateness of the comment in the discussion. We can vote to disagree with a post without insulting the user for posting it. On reddit, this is sorely lacking, and it's one (of many) reasons every sub is an unproductive circle jerk.
I upvoted both of your comments, while also voting to disagree. Thanks for posting them. What a great innovation to stimulate discussion.
I feel the same way. I like talking with people on here, but in almost every subject I have nothing substantive to contribute; I'm just a consumer.
I wish there were a broader, reddit-style aspect to this site for more ordinary posts. They don't have to be about Kim Kardashian or anything, but just regular economics, the current bank runs, Bitcoin, lifestyle/fitness/nutrition stuff, interesting links. You know, minus the reddit toxicity and religious zealotry in every subreddit.
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe having the majority of the sub dedicated to AI alignment ...
I agree that the block subsidy is a large economic driver of mining right now. I don't understand why Bitcoiners seem so convinced there will be a smooth transition from block subsidy to voluntary fee as the halvings continue. Is there literally any evidence that the fee market will work? Isn't it pure conjecture? I'd really like an answer on that one.
As for L2 scaling, yeah I don't believe LN in it's current form is all that usable. Lots of smart people believe its getting there, though, so without doing object level analysis for myself I tend to think L2...
I'm not really sure I understand your objection. If the L2 improvements are well funded, then the underlying asset would still be at the center of a future payment network.
L2 is the innovation. The idea behind the protocol is that innovation happens on top of L1, because that's a far less risky way to innovate.
There's certainly a question of whether L2 built on top of L1 can actually scale enough to succeed, but that doesn't seem to be what you're saying. Everyone invested in the Bitcoin space has an incentive to increase the functionality of Bitcoin as a whole. I'm not understanding the issue with L1 staying constant.
Yeah this is worrisome for me as well. It also appears that human beings are more objectively rational with their money under slight inflationary pressure, because that slight pressure offsets the irrational loss aversion we all have hard wired into our brains.
It seems like Bitcoin with a small, permanent, inflation rate would function much better as a long term, stable, secure, monetary system than this deflationary one we have. The inflation is paid out to the miners, as a fee for maintaining the network security, rather than to autocrat grifters like it...
No, it's not obvious; it's a perfectly legitimate question. Here's the Howie test, the criteria established by the Supreme Court for security classification:
Bitcoin's biggest difference from other Crypto securities are #2 and #4. Bitcoin is common, but it's not exactly an "enterprise." There's no organization or group working on it in an attempt to increase it's value, the way, for example, the Ethereum foundation attempts to increase the economi...
In principle, AI regulation sounds like the type of coordination problem that governments were designed to solve.
In practice… I once saw a clip of a US senator bringing in a snowball from outside the building to show that global warming wasn’t real. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg (pun intended) for the pretty egregious level of, i don’t even know what to call it, childishness I guess, of lots of the people in power.
And that’s just the incompetence side, not even mentioning the grift side.
With the current state of our legal institutions, I’m not sur...
So update as of November 23rd, 2022...
FTX is bankrupt, with at least an $8 billion hole on their balance sheet. Customer funds gone, many people lost 6 and even 7 figure balances.
So... what were those odds on "FTX.com losses a substantial amount of user funds" again?
The more info that comes out, the more it looks like the entire thing was fraudulent from the beginning. They even have a software back-door that allows them to transfer funds without alerting auditors, which it looks like they used many times with FTX customer deposits.
Additionally...
Cel...
Agree 100%.
It always derails me a bit, and then I realize it's a gender neutral singular and move on. "They" has been adopted for this purpose, and my brain is used to understanding "they" as gender neutral singular. Sure, it's overloaded, but it's not that big a deal, and it has the momentum on it's side.
Here's a good one:
Inflation is good because give everyone money / inflation is bad, deflation is good / small inflation may be necessary to offset human loss aversion
One that really irks me is compound noun with a pronoun usage:
Always "Me and X" / Always "X and I" / "X and I" for an subject and "X and me" for an object
The second one is being smart enough to know that "Me and X went to the store" is improper because you're using "Me" in a subject, but not smart enough to know how to fix it, and instead just replacing "Me and X" with "X and I" one for one in every sentence.
What makes my blood run hot (and gives me that "like to argue it" high, I think) is that the middle section are trying to signal they're "...
I agree. Here are some predictions:
Note that the formula listed in the article is the Kelly formula for when you lose 100% of your stake if you lose the bet, which isn't always the case.
The Kelly formula is derived from the starting point of:
Essentially, after a sufficiently large number of n wagers, you expect to have won pn times and lost (1-p)n times. Each time, your previous bankroll is multiplied, either by (1 + b*wager) if you won, or by (1 - a*wager) if you lost.
Often, a = 1. Sports betting, poker tournament, etc - if you lose your bet, ...
“Twitter, I mean X” in 2045 had me dying. So did the California red tape part. Awesome job.