All of wubbles's Comments + Replies

Temporarily: their allies turned on them and Athens soon rebuilt its navy. Ultimately Alexander and Rome ended the whole struggle permanently.

2Lumifer
In which sense? Athens never triumphed over Sparta, they just survived, and you know why? Wikipedia tells you: Doesn't quite match your narrative, does it?

I was considering modifying holidays to make them support these values and remind us of them.

That's correct. But I worry that some projects in the rationalistsphere are about turning our backs on modernity in very strong ways.

Does popularization produce the goods? Lots of people have the background and skill to contribute to this problem who aren't currently in our community and don't have day jobs.

But we are a community that faces a choice about what values we want: insularity and strong group membership, or openness and intellectualism. This seems fairly analogous to me, and after all don't we need strong new ideas to stop the AI apocalypse or improve lives all over the world? Perhaps the Amish vs. liberal German judaism would be a better analogy.

0ChristianKl
Compared to whatever we could likely do, the Athenians were insular. We are connected to the internet and to very much information. We have cheap travel that allows traveling to another continent for a conference and then flying back.

Dysgenesis is worrying, but we have the means to fight it: subsidized egg freezing and childcare, changes to employment culture, and it is a very slow prospect. I don't think that is a correct summary of the essay at all, which is really pointing to a problem with how we think about coordination.

0ChristianKl
We also have CRISPR.
4lmn
Fertility is inversely correlated with income, the problem isn't that people don't have enough money, the problem is that in some sense they don't want children. I think a better approach would be cultural changes that make it high status to have lot's of children. True, his point that Bayesians should be able to overcome these coordination problems by doing X, Y, and Z. Except neither him nor anyone else has should any interest in actually making an effort to do X, Y, and Z.

I am interested! Note that zoning might make this hard, but maybe we could buy adjacent bungalows and reconfigure them. Wasn't the bay supposed to be commune friendly?

4juliawise
N Street Cohousing in Davis CA is a classic example of this. http://nstreetcohousing.org/

The logarithmic scoring rule measures the information carried by the event given your predictions. Reducing its expectation corresponds to reducing the information carried by the event when it arrives.

wubbles100

I was using it to describe my own comment. I'll try to think of a way to make that clearer in the future.

3michaelkeenan
Oh, sorry!
6Kisil
"Comment epistemic status" would work.

Epistemic status: probably BS This could be a causal explanation for why engineers are seen as having poor social skills and the usefullness of ASD traits in engineering. If you aren't sensitive to the productive conversations being bad socially, and so don't disrupt them, you will learn more.

As for salons the fact that a hostess lead the conversation and selected the guests meant that the conversation had to be interesting to her. Those who didn't have anything interesting to say, or disrupted interesting conversations, wouldn't be invited back. Sadly wikipedia doesn't say much about how they were run. They seem to also have selected books to read, which would steer the conversation towards those books.

4michaelkeenan
[I misinterpreted wubbles above; I retract this comment.] I think we should reserve the "epistemic status" thing for authors to describe their own works. Using it to insult a work seems pointlessly snarky. The useful part could be communicated with just "Probably BS" or "I think this is probably BS". Leaving it at that would avoid the useless connotation about the author's thought process, which is unknowable by others.

I'm not sure how much of this was CFAR and x-risk vs. programming and autism. Certainly a lot of the people at the SF meetup were not CFARniks based on my completely unscientific examination of my memory. The community's survival and growth is secondary to X-risk solving now, even if before the goal was to make a community devoted to these arts.

Humans share our values and can generally be overwhelmed with sheer numbers should they not. Making them is unlikely to be dangerous. The same cannot be said for unfriendly AIs. We still have no idea how to make a friendly AI, and it could easily be a century before we begin to have an idea. Even if biology cannot keep up, improving intelligence in the short run will have positive effects on human productivity in the short run, which will get the goal of making a friendly AI closer.

I'm not saying that biological modification will ultimately bring about si... (read more)

5polymathwannabe
5 minutes on any webpage's comment section will prove otherwise.

Look at the cost of IVF: According to http://www.momjunction.com/articles/much-ivf-treatment-cost-india_0074672/ it is $450,000 Rs, which is $6,000 dollars. IVF is a prerequisite for the sort of genetic tampering we are talking about, unless you want to use rabies as a carrier. IVF is widely practiced and has few barriers to entry, making me think it won't get much cheaper. That is a lot of money for many parts of the world. To think this cost will come down in the next 10-20 years significantly requires believing that significant advances in automation of... (read more)

I don't agree with this line of argument. Suppose there are five employes, and they all press the button. Each receives 100 utils, and loses 4, leading to a net gain of 96 each. Why is this not the ethically correct outcome, even for a deontologist?

I can consume text at a rate sometimes as high as 26 words a second. I cannot do that with audio. If we had text-to-speech, I would use it for turning audio into text, and consuming the text. Or the author could use it and produce text, which they could then edit. Frequently when talking we do all sorts of things we don't do when writing: repeat ourselves, use funny turns of phrase, search for words, etc. The bandwidth advantage to the consumer of a small amount of work for the producer makes text continue to be valuable.

As far as diagrams go in technical ... (read more)

wubbles00

What if some policies correlate with kinds of arguments people find appealing? An argument from natural law against the legality of homosexuality is unlikely to convince anyone who doesn't love St. Thomas Aquinas, while the liberty principle won't convince a single Dominican. Then again this is more a problem of ethical foundations than factual arguments, so perhaps by separating values from beliefs you can finesse this difficulty.

wubbles-10

Mordecai Kaplan would be unhappy to hear that commitment to ritual and tradition requires belief . Committing oneself to a hard line to avoid backsliding is justifiable without divine command theory.

4pragmatist
I think the issue is not whether commitment to ritual -- as in, a commitment to go through the motions -- requires belief, it's whether experiencing ritual as beautiful requires belief. I think it's plausible that immersing oneself in the context of the ritual, including the requisite belief set, makes it far more meaningful and awe-inspiring. Merely aesthetic appreciation of ritual may not inspire the same depth of feeling as you would experience if every move in the ritual were wrought with spiritual significance for you. So participating in the tradition without believing may also count as "depriving oneself of beauty". I wouldn't really know, though. I've been a non-believer my entire intellectually aware life, so I have no basis for comparison. I will say that I can't imagine any ritual or tradition driving me into the kind of frenzy you see at some charismatic Pentecostal churches, for instance. But I can't really imagine being driven to the kind of frenzy you see in the average audience for the The Price is Right either, so this may be an issue of personality rather than belief.
wubbles20

Plus, it increases the price of food. The net effect is a transfer of wealth from poor people to agribusiness that grow and process raisins..

wubbles00

However, they seem not to have examined the impact of starting a new political movement or political philosophy in the same way. Even higher variance, potentially even bigger rewards. Institutional change in particular can be extremely difficult to do without a clear mandate, which alliances in existing parties might not give.

2Lumifer
What would be new about it?
wubbles60

I'm not sure I agree with 9. There is a lot of SF out there, and some of it (Roadside Picnic, Stanislaw Lem's works) presents the idea that the universe is inherently uncaring in a very real way. Anthropomorphization is not an inherent feature of the genre, and fiction might enable directly understanding these ideas in a way that argument doesn't make real for some people.

wubbles-10

Donald Rumsfeld, from http://www.defense.gov/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=2636 "Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know."

3satt
Partial repeat.
wubbles20

Ah, I missed that part of the OP. So then I think your argument is correct.

wubbles-20

This doesn't seem right. Let's assume that the stock gives double or nothing, with 51% probability of double. The Kelly Criterion suggests giving 1% of the total payroll in stock. Yes, this neglects the balancing fee. Your argument seems to suggest that we should be all in cash. But the Kelly bet outperforms this.

1gjm
I don't understand: the situation here is one where your only option is to be all in cash or all in the stock. The Kelly criterion only makes sense when you can choose an arbitrary fraction to be in each. (And the Kelly criterion amounts to maximizing E(delta log wealth), which is exactly what I'm proposing. If you have to wager your entire bankroll, any gamble with a nonzero chance of bankrupting you has E(delta log wealth) = -infinity and just sitting on your cash is better.)
wubbles20

The few examples of UN lead responses to invasions that worked typically involved great powers backstopping the response. UN members are reluctant to expend blood and treasure without getting something in return. I think the only time it worked as intended was the Korean war, and that's because Stalin was sitting out for a bit.

wubbles10

Trotskyism is represented in the US by the Spartacist League. The members do not seem well adjusted socially.

wubbles20

The Prime Number Theorem

A group of four people can stand two by two, but a group of five people can only stand five in a line. The number of numbers like five, and not like four, between two numbers, is the number of times you take two times what you had, starting at one, to get between the two numbers if the two numbers are close.

wubbles20

By "Wall Street" I'm including the Buy Side as well as the Sell Side. The big buyside firms like Fidelity and Charles Schwab sell products that most people shouldn't buy. Insurance probably has a better case to buy some actively managed products, or some exotic derivatives, but I don't know why it can't do it itself.

To the extent that finance reallocates risk it can provide a positive utility benefit. However, the very productive businesses have questionable utility. Promoting active trading, picking hot funds etc, all eat into the returns client... (read more)

wubbles30

I think the problem with elite common sense is that it can be hard to determine whose views count. Take for instance the observed behavior of the investing public determined by where they put their assets in contrast with the views of most economists. If you define the elite as the economists, you get a different answer from the elite as people with money. (The biggest mutual funds are not the lowest cost ones, though this gap has narrowed over time, and economists generally prefer lower cost funds very strongly)

1Nick_Beckstead
I agree that it is interesting and possibly important to think about whose views count as "elite." The key question here is, "If a broad coalition of highly trustworthy people were aware of the considerations that I think favor investing in index funds, would they switch to investing in index funds rather than investing in actively managed mutual funds?" I think the answer to this question is Yes. By and large, my sense is that the most trustworthy people who are investing in other ways aren't aware of the considerations in favor of investing in index fund and the strong support for doing so from economists, and would change their minds if they were. One reason I believe this is that I have had conversations with some people like this, convinced them of the evidence I have, and this convinced them to switch to index funds. They did actually switch. In case you missed it, I discuss who counts as "elite" here:
wubbles20

How do we draw the line? Tit-for-Tat is very simple, yet does very well. Arguably before knowing how it performs it could be considered a troll.

Considering this was an experimental tournament, learning how certain strategies perform against others seems far more interesting to me than winning, and I can't imagine any strategy I would label as a troll submission. Even strategies solely designed to be obstacles are valid and valuable contributions, and the fact that random strategies skew the results is a fault of the tournament rules and not of the strategies themselves.

wubbles00

I would have expected a few more metaevaluator bots which clean up the environment to prevent detection. Of course this can be an expensive strategy, and certainly is in programmer time. A metaevaluator bot would have probably broken several recursion detection strategies, or even defining set! out of the language.

wubbles20

Hermione didn't erase her own existence, but implanted false memories to get her parents to go to Australia. Distance did what magic couldn't.

8Intrism
Actually, she did both of those things. And, incidentally, it's the false memories bit that would be impossible in Methods - Hermione, of course, did not spend years to give her parents what are apparently years worth of memories.
wubbles170

I would like to declare the following: I have submitted a program that cooperates only if you would cooperate against CooperateBot. You can of course create a selective defector against it, but that would be a bit tricky, as I am not revealing the source code. Evaluate your submissions accordingly.

3Eliezer Yudkowsky
But surely, good sir, common sense says that you should defect against CooperateBot in order to punish it for cooperating with DefectBot. Also, in modal combat your bot is X=[]Y(CooperateBot) and is easily detected via the test [1](Y(X)<->[]X(CooperateBot)) where [1] denotes provability in T+Con(T), ie [1](Q) = []((~[]F)->Q).
8CoffeeStain
What wubbles actually submitted: A program that defects only if you would cooperate against CooperateBot. Well played.
wubbles00

Yes: all tail-calls are guarantied not to exhaust resources. The precise definition of what is tail is in the spec.

wubbles00

Small business are illiquid. They also have capital requirements that might not fit your investment needs. If you have enough money that these two problems aren't an issue, as well as the skill in finding small business that won't fail and that are on the market, and have the time to supervise them/manage them, then they could be a good investment. But that isn't a lot of people.

wubbles00

Some banks offer money market accounts, or even a savings account might be a good idea.

0[anonymous]
For what it's worth, a money market fund might also be a good idea. It looks like historically, it has been extremely rare for a money market fund to decrease in value.
6wmorgan
I was on the subway the other day and Sovereign Bank had bought up all the ad spots advertising in big print "MONEY MARKET ACCOUNT. 0.6% APY. $100,000 MINIMUM." The interest rate offered on a smaller deposit is presumably less than that, and yet the bank thought this deal would be appealing enough to advertise. This makes a year of "emergency fund" holdings in a money market account approximately worth the change in the couch. I don't see how that's enough of a difference from a checking account to worry about.
wubbles30

Things were a lot worse then everyone knew: Russia almost invaded Yugoslavia, which would have triggered a war according to newly declassified NSA journals, in the 1950's. The Cuban Missile Crisis could easily have gone hot, and several times early warning systems were triggered by accident. Of course, estimating what could have happened is quite hard.

0JonahS
I agree that there were close calls. Nevertheless, things turned out better than I would have guessed, and indeed, probably better than a large fraction of military and civilian people would have guessed.
wubbles80

Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antionus Pius, Marcus Aurelius we all able and capable administrators, and their reign was largely peaceful. But then they were followed by Commodus. Benevolent dictatorship with succession by training and adoption was tried, and so long as it worked it worked. But the one failure was a pretty dramatic one, considered by some to be the start of the fall of the Roman Empire.

wubbles10

Intrade sells fed OMC rate binary options. I think if the market was more liquid, it would absolutely get used to hedge interest rate risks, and as people tend to be long bonds and short rates as a result, there might be a bias towards predicting higher rates as people want the protection. But the total holdings and the degree of hedging would be very opaque. Policy prediction markets could have similar problems.

wubbles00

No, IRA's avoid a tax which the other investments don't, so money in an IRA is worth more than money outside. There is a cost, namely you have restricted access to it.

19eB1
It's worth pointing out that the money you put in there can still be held in a money-market account or similar, and that it acts as an emergency fund because you can withdraw it or take loans against it, subject to modest penalties.
wubbles00

CAPM explains 70% of equity returns, Fama French model 90%, but over the 20th century it's not clear what the Fama-French factors are. I fully agree with your minor quibbles. As for upkeep and worry, yes, risk leads to return. But it is an input, and like any sort of input it should be minimized for a given level of output.

wubbles30

10% is the charitable giving limit. There is another thing to be asked about, and that is the impact of the job. If I were to be a tax lawyer, I would be directly harming the ability of the US government to spend on social welfare programs. If I worked on Wall Street anywhere but Vanguard I would be bilking people out of their life savings, and at Vanguard I wouldn't be making $100 K a year. Someone working as a tobacco farmer to raise money for cancer research has some misplaced priorities.

3CarlShulman
Not in the U.S. (note these are in pre-tax earnings, so they translate into less in foregone consumption than they do in donations made). Regarding this: See this essay:
1Osuniev
THIS. Although I`m unsure about the particulars you mention here, being an European, people and effective altruists need to realize that your job is INSIDE the world you live in. Estimating how much good you're producing is not just about how much money/time you're giving to effective charities, but also how much your way of life is helping/damaging the world.
4Lumifer
You could always go work for the IRS. It employs a lot of tax lawyers. But there's a bigger issue: you think that the work of a (privately employed) tax lawyer intrinsically harms the ability of the US government to spend? That belief has LOTS of issues. I'll start with two: One, why do you think the capability of the US government to spend is an unalloyed good thing? And two, do you happen to know the volume (say, in feet of shelf space) of the current tax laws, regulations, and rulings? I'd recommend you find out and then think about whether any moderately complicated business can comply with them without the help of a tax lawyer. Sigh. First, Vanguard is not part of Wall Street. Second... you really should not believe everything the popular media keeps feeding you.
-2Eugine_Nier
Government social welfare spending is notoriously inefficient. So if your client is at all generous with his money you're coming out ahead. Heck even if he doesn't give to charity but does use the money to invest in productive enterprises, you're probably coming out ahead. And that's before taking into account how you spend your money.
1ESRogs
Do you actually think that a finance professional who donated a significant portion of their income to effective charity would be doing more harm than good? Even given that you can save the life of a child in the developing world for on the order of $2000?
7ESRogs
Where is that 10% number coming from? Looks to me like the limit is at least 20% in the US, and up to 50% for some organizations. (BTW, can someone from MIRI or anyone else tell us if they're a 50% organization?) EDIT: and by the way, that's just the limit on what's tax-deductible. There's no legal limit on how much you can actually give.
wubbles90

Hello, my name is Watson. The username comes from my initials and a Left 4 Dead player attempting to pronounce them. I am a math student at UC Berkeley and a longtime lurker. I've got a post on rational investing, based on the conclusions of years of research by academic economists, but despite lurking I never realized there is a karma limit to post in discussion. I'm interested in just about everything, a dangerous phenomenon.

0Qiaochu_Yuan
Hi Watson! I didn't know you were a Berkeley student. Starting this fall?