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Re-reading Rationality From AI To Zombies
Reflections on Premium Poker Tools

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Thanks Marvin! I'm glad to hear that you enjoyed the post and that it was helpful.

Imho your post should be linked to all definitions of the sunk cost fallacy.

I actually think the issue was more akin to the planning fallacy. Like when I'd think to myself "another two months to build this feature and then things will be good", it wasn't so much that I was compelled because of the time I had sunk into the journey, it was more that I genuinely anticipated that the results would be better than they actually were.

It isn't active, sorry. See the update at the top of the post.

See also: https://www.painscience.com/articles/strength-training-frequency.php.

Summary:

Strength training is not only more beneficial for general fitness than most people realize, it isn’t even necessary to spend hours at the gym every week to get those benefits. Almost any amount of it is much better than nothing. While more effort will produce better results, the returns diminish rapidly. Just one or two half hour sessions per week can get most of the results that you’d get from two to three times that much of an investment (and that’s a deliberately conservative estimate). This is broadly true of any form of exercise, but especially so with strength training. In a world where virtually everything in health and fitness is controversial, this is actually fairly settled science.

Oh I see, that makes sense. In retrospect that is a little obvious that you don't have to choose one or the other :)

So does the choice of which type of fiber to take boil down to the question of the importance of constipation vs microbiome and cholesterol? It's seeming to me like if the former is more important you should take soluble non-fermentable fiber, if the latter is more important you should take soluble fermentable fiber (or eat it in a whole food), and that insoluble fiber is never/rarely the best option.

Funny. I have a Dropbox folder where I store video tours of all the apartments I've ever lived in. Like, I spend a minute or two walking around the apartment and taking a video with my phone.

I'm not sure why, exactly. Partly because it's fun to look back. Partly because I don't want to "lose" something that's been with me for so long.

I suspect that such video tours are more appropriate for a large majority of people. 10 hours and $200-$500 sounds like a lot. And you could always convert the video tour into digital art some time in the future if you find the nostalgia is really hitting you.

Hm. I hear ya. Good point. I'm not sure whether I agree or disagree.

I'm trying to think of an analogy and came up with the following. Imagine you go to McDonalds with some friends and someone comments that their burger would be better if they used prime ribeye for their ground beef.

I guess it's technically true, but something also feels off about it to me that I'm having trouble putting my finger on. Maybe it's that it feels like a moot point to discuss things that would make something better that are also impractical to implement.

I just looked up Gish gallops on Wikipedia. Here's the first paragraph:

The Gish gallop (/ˈɡɪʃ ˈɡæləp/) is a rhetorical technique in which a person in a debate attempts to overwhelm an opponent by abandoning formal debating principles, providing an excessive number of arguments with no regard for the accuracy or strength of those arguments and that are impossible to address adequately in the time allotted to the opponent. Gish galloping prioritizes the quantity of the galloper's arguments at the expense of their quality.

I disagree that focusing on the central point is a recipe for Gish gallops and that it leads to Schrodinger's importance.

Well, I think that it in combination with a bunch of other poor epistemic norms it might be a recipe for those things, but a) not by itself and b) I think the norms would have to be pretty poor. Like, I don't expect that you need 10/10 level epistemic norms in the presence of focusing on the central point to shield from those failure modes, I think you just need something more like 3/10 level epistemic norms. Here on LessWrong I think our epistemic norms are strong enough where focusing on the central point doesn't put us at risk of things like Gish gallops and Schrodinger's importance.

I actually disagree with this. I haven't thought too hard about it and might just not be seeing it, but on first thought I am not really seeing how such evidence would make the post "much stronger".

To elaborate, I like to use Paul Graham's Disagreement Hierarchy as a lens to look through for the question of how strong a post is. In particular, I like to focus pretty hard on the central point (DH6) rather than supporting and tangential points. I think the central point plays a very large role in determining how strong a post is.

Here, my interpretation of the central point(s) is something like this:

  1. Poverty is largely determined by the weakest link in the chain.
  2. Anoxan is a helpful example to illustrate this.
  3. It's not too clear what drives poverty today, and so it's not too clear that UBI would meaningfully reduce poverty.

I thought the post did a nice job of making those central points. Sure, something like a survey of the research in positive psychology could provide more support for point #1, for example, but I dunno, I found the sort of intuitive argument for point #1 to be pretty strong, I'm pretty persuaded by it, and so I don't think I'd update too hard in response to the survey of positive psychology research.

Another thing I think about when asking myself how strong I think a post is is how "far along" it is. Is it an off the cuff conversation starter? An informal write up of something that's been moderately refined? A formal write up of something that has been significantly refined?

I think this post was somewhere towards the beginning of the spectrum (note: it was originally a tweet, not a LessWrong post). So then, for things like citations supporting empirical claims, I don't think it's reasonable to expect very much from the author, and so I lean away from viewing the lack of citations as something that (meaningfully) weakens the post.

What would it be like for people to not be poor?

I reply:  You wouldn't see people working 60-hour weeks, at jobs where they have to smile and bear it when their bosses abuse them.

I appreciate the concrete, illustrative examples used in this discussion, but I also want to recognize that they are only the beginnings of a "real" answer to the question of what it would be like to not be poor.

In other words, in an attempt to describe what he sees as poverty, I think Eliezer has taken the strategy of pointing to a few points in Thingspace and saying "here are some points; the stuff over here around these points is roughly what I'm trying to gesture at". He hasn't taken too much of a stab at drawing the boundaries. I'd like to take a small stab at drawing some boundaries.

It seems to me that poverty is about QALYs. Let's wave our hands a bit and say that QALYs are a function of 1) the "cards you're dealt" and 2) how you "play your hand". With that, I think that we can think about poverty as happening when someone is dealt cards that make it "difficult" for them to have "enough" QALYs.

This happens in our world when you have to spend 40 hours a week smiling and bearing it. It happens in Anoxan when you take shallow breaths to conserve oxygen for your kids. And it happened to hunter-gatherers in times of scarcity.

There are many circumstances that can make it difficult to live a happy life. And as Eliezer calls out, it is quite possible for one "bad apple circumstance", like an Anoxan resident not having enough oxygen, to spoil the bunch. For you to enjoy abundance in a lot of areas but scarcity in one/few other areas, and for the scarcity to be enough to drive poverty despite the abundance. I suppose then that poverty is driven in large part by the strength of the "weakest link".

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