I was going for a walk yesterday night, and when I looked up at the sky, I saw something I had never seen before: a bright orange dot, like a star, but I had never seen a star that bright and so orange before. "No... that can't be"- but it was: I was looking at Mars, that other world I had heard so much about, thought so much about.
I never realized until yesterday that I had never seen Mars with my own two eyes until that day- one of the closest worlds that humans could, with minimal difficulty, make into a new home one day.
It struck me then in a way that I never felt before, just how far away the world Mars is. I knew it in an abstract sense, but seeing this little dot in the distance, a dot that I knew to be an object larger even than the Moon, but seeming so small in comparison, made me realize, in my gut, just how far away this other world was, just like how when I stand on top of a mountain, and see small buildings on the ground way below me, I realize that those small buildings are actually skyscrapers far away.
And yet, as far as Mars was that night, it was so bright, so apparent, precisely because it was closer now to us than it normally ever is- normally this world is even further from us than it is now.
In short, I am selling my attention by selling the right to put cards in my Anki deck, starting at the low price of $1 per card.
I will create and add a card (any card that you desire, with the caveat that I can veto any card that seems problematic, and capped to a similar amount of information per card as my usual cards contain) to my Anki deck for $1. After the first ten cards (across all people), the price will rise to $2 per card, and will double every 5 cards from then on. I commit to study the added card(s) like I would any other card in my decks (I will give it a starting interval of 10 days, which is sooner than the usual interval of 20 days I usually use, unless I judge that a shorter interval makes sense. I study Anki every day, and have been clearing my deck at least once every 10 days for the past 5 months, and intend to continue to do so). Since I will be creating the cards myself (unless you know of a high-quality deck that contains cards with the information you desire), an idea for a card is enough even if you don't know how to execute it.
Both question-and-answer and straight text are acceptable forms for cards. Acceptable forms of payment include cash, Venmo, BTC, E...
Religion isn't about believing false things. Religion is about building bonds between humans, by means including (but not limited to) costly signalling. It happens that a ubiquitous form of costly signalling used by many prominent modern religions is belief taxes (insisting that the ingroup professes a particular, easily disproven belief as a reliable signal of loyalty), but this is not neccesary for a religion to successfully build trust and loyalty between members. In particular, costly signalling must be negative-value for an individual (before the second-order benefits from the group dynamic), but need not be negative-value for the group, or for humanity. Indeed, the best costly sacrifices can be positive-value for the group or humanity, while negative-value for the performing individual. (There are some who may argue that positive-value sacrifices have less signalling value than negative value sacrifices, but I find their logic dubious, and my own observations of religion seem to suggest positive-value sacrifice is abundant in organized religion, albeit intermixed with neutral- and negative-value sacrifice)
The rationalist community is averse to religion because it so often goe...
If you know someone is rational, honest, and well-read, then you can learn a good bit from the simple fact that they disagree with you.
If you aren't sure someone is rational and honest, their disagreement tells you little.
If you know someone considers you to be rational and honest, the fact that they still disagree with you after hearing what you have to say, tells you something.
But if you don't know that they consider you to be rational and honest, their disagreement tells you nothing.
It's valuable to strive for common knowledge of you and your partners' rationality and honesty, to make the most of your disagreements.
Does newspeak actually decrease intellectual capacity? (No)
In George Orwell's book 1984, he describes a totalitarian society that, among other initiatives to suppress the population, implements "Newspeak", a heavily simplified version of the English language, designed with the stated intent of limiting the citizens' capacity to think for themselves (thereby ensuring stability for the reigning regime)
In short, the ethos of newspeak can be summarized as: "Minimize vocabulary to minimize range of thought and expression". There are two different, closely related, ideas, both of which the book implies, that are worth separating here.
The first (which I think is to some extent reasonable) is that by removing certain words from the language, which serve as effective handles for pro-democracy, pro-free-speech, pro-market concepts, the regime makes it harder to communicate and verbally think about such ideas (I think in the absence of other techniques used by Orwell's Oceania to suppress independent thought, such subjects can still be meaningfully communicated and pondered, just less easily than with a rich vocabulary provided)
The second idea, which I worry is an incorrect takeaway people m...
"From AI to Zombies" is a terrible title... when I recommend The Sequences to people, I always feel uncomfortable telling them the name, since the name makes it sound like cookey bull****- in a way that doesn't really indicate what it's about
Asking people to "taboo [X word]" is bad form, unless you already know that the other person is sufficiently (i.e. very) steeped in LW culture to know what our specific corner of internet culture means by "taboo".
Without context, such a request to taboo a word sounds like you are asking the other person to never use that word, to cleanse it from their vocabulary, to go through the rest of their life with that word permanently off-limits. That's a very high, and quite rude, ask to make of someone. While that's of course not what we mean by "taboo", I have seen requests to taboo made where it's not clear that the other person knows what we mean by taboo, which means it's quite likely the receiving party interpreted the request as being much ruder than was meant.
Instead of saying "Taboo [X word]", instead say "could you please say what you just said without using [X word]?" - it conveys the same request, without creating the potential to be misunderstood to be making a rude and overreaching request.
I'm quite scared by some of the responses I'm seeing to this year's Petrov Day. Yes, it is symbolic. Yes, it is a fun thing we do. But it's not "purely symbolic", it's not "just a game". Taking things that are meant to be serious is important, even if you can't see why they're serious.
As I've said elsewhere, the truly valuable thing a rogue agent destroys by failing to live up to expectations on Petrov day, isn't just whatever has been put at stake for the day's celebrations, but the very valuable chance to build a type of trust that can only be built by playing games with non-trivial outcomes at stake.
Maybe there could be a better job in the future of communicating the essence of what this celebration is intended to achieve, but to my eyes, it was fairly obvious what was going on, and I'm seeing a lot of comments by people (whose other contributions to LW I respect) who seemed to completely fail to see what I thought was obviously the spirit of this exercise
I'm quite baffled by the lack of response to my recent question asking about which AI-researching companies are good to invest in (as in, would have good impact, not necessarily most profitable)- It indicates either A) most LW'ers aren't investing in stocks (which is a stupid thing not to be doing), or B) are investing in stocks, but aren't trying to think carefully about what impact their actions have on the world, and their own future happiness (which indicates a massive failure of rationality)
Even putting this aside, the fact that nobody jumped at the chance to potentially shift a non-trivial (for certain definitions of trivial) amount of funding away from bad organizations and towards good organizations (which I'm investing primarily as a personal financial strategy), seems very worrying to me. While it is (as ChristianKI pointed out) debatable that the amount of funding I can provide as a single person will make a big difference to a big company, it's bad decision theory to model my actions as only being correlated with myself; and besides, if the funding was redirected, it probably would have gone somewhere without the enormous supply of funds Alphabet has, and very well could have made an important difference, pushing the margins away from failure and towards success.
There's a good chance I may change my mind in the future about this, but currently my response to this information is a substantial shift away from the LW crowd actually being any good at usefully using rationality instrumentally
(For what it's worth, the post made it not at all clear to me that we were talking about a nontrivial amount of funding. I read it as just you thinking a bit through your personal finance allocation. The topic of divesting and impact investing has been analyzed a bunch on LessWrong and the EA Forum, and my current position is mostly that these kinds of differences in investment don't really make much of a difference in total funding allocation, so it doesn't seem worth optimizing much, besides just optimizing for returns and then taking those returns and optimizing those fully for philanthropic impact.)
During today's LW event, I chatted with Ruby and Raemon (seperately) about the comparison between human-made photovoltaic systems (i.e. solar panels), and plant-produced chlorophyll. I mentioned that in many ways chlorophyll is inferior to solar panels - consumer grade solar panels operate in the 10% to 20% efficiency range (i.e. for every 100 joules of light energy, 10 - 20 joules are converted into usable energy), while chlorophyll is around 9% efficient, and modern cutting edge solar panels can go even as high as nearly 50% efficiency. Furthermore,...
Update on my tinkering with using high doses of chocolate as a psychoactive drug:
(Nb: at times I say "caffeine" in this post, in contrast to chocolate, even though chocolate contains caffeine; by this I mean coffee, energy drinks, caffeinated soda, and caffeine pills collectively, all of which were up until recently frequently used by me; recently I haven't been using any sources of caffeine other than chocolate, and even then try to avoid using it on a daily basis)
I still find that consuming high doses of chocolate (usually 3-6 table spoons of dark cocoa ...
I may have discovered an interesting tool against lethargy and depression [1]: This morning, in place of my usual caffeine pill, I made myself a cup of hot chocolate (using pure cacao powder / baking chocolate from the supermarket), which made me very energetic (much more energetic than usual), which stood in sharp contrast to the past 4 days, which have been marked by lethargy and intense sadness. Let me explain:
Last night, I was reflecting on the fact that one of the main components of chocolate is theobromine, which is very similar in structure to caffe...
In Zvi's most recent Covid-19 post, he puts the probability of a variant escaping mRNA vaccines and causing trouble in the US at most at 10%. I'm not sure I'm so optimistic.
One thing that gives reason to be optimistic, is that we have yet to see any variant that has substantial resistance to the vaccines, which might lead one to think that resistance just isn't something that is likely to come up. However, on the other hand, the virus has had more than a year for more virulent strains to crop up while people were actively sheltering in place, and variants ...
One thing that is frustrating me right now is that I don't have a good way of outputting ideas while walking. One thing I've tried is talking into voicememos, but it feels awkward to be talking out loud to myself in public, and it's a hassle to transcribe what I write when I'm done. One idea I don't think I've ever seen is a hand-held keyboard that I can use as I'm walking, and can operate mostly by touch, without looking at it, and maybe it can provide audio feedback through my headphones.
Epistemic: Intend as a (half-baked) serious proposal
I’ve been thinking about ways to signal truth value in speech- in our modern society, we have no way to readily tell when a person is being 100% honest- we have to trust that a communicator is being honest, or otherwise verify for ourselves if what they are saying is true, and if I want to tell a joke, speak ironically, or communicate things which aren’t-literally-the-truth-but-point-to-the-truth, my listeners need to deduce this for themselves from the context in which I say something not-l...
Current discourse around AI safety (at least among people who haven't missed) has a pretty dark, pessimistic tone - for good reason, because we're getting closer to technology that could accidentally do massive harm to humanity.
But when people / groups feel pessimistic, it's hard to get good work done - even when that pessimism is grounded in the real-world facts.
I think we need to develop an optimistic, but realistic point of view - acknowledging the difficulty of where we are, but nonetheless being hopeful and full of energy towards finding the solution. Because AI alignment can be solved, we just actually have to put in the effort to solve it, and maybe a lot faster than we are currently prepared to.
Somehow I stumbled across this quote from Deutoronomy (from the Torah / Old Testament, which is the law of religious-Jews):
You shall not have in your bag two kinds of weights, large and small. You shall not have in your house two kinds of measures, large and small. You shall have only a full and honest weight; you shall have only a full and honest measure, so that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you. For all who do such things, all who act dishonestly, are abhorrent to the Lord your God.
There's of course the bit about...
This Generative Ink post talks about curating GPT-3, creating a much better output than it normally would give, turning it from quite often terrible to usually pround and good. I'm testing out doing the same with this post, choosing one of many branches every few dozens of words.
For a 4x reduction in speed, I'm getting very nice returns on coherence and brevity. I can actually pretend like I'm not a terrible writer! Selection is a powerful force, but more importantly, continuing a thought in multiple ways forces you to actually make sure you're saying thin...
URLs (Universal Resource Locators) are universal over space, but they are not universal over time, and this is a problem
Cryptocurrencies in general are good and the future of money, but Bitcoin in particular deserves to crash all the way down to $0
Last month, I wrote a post here titled "Even Inflationary Currencies Should Have Fixed Total Supply", which wasn't well-received. One problem was that the point I argued for wasn't exactly the same as what the title stated: I supported both currencies with fixed total supply, and currencies that instead choose to scale supply proportional to the amount of value in the currency's ecosystem, and many people got confused and put off by the disparity between the title and my actual thesis; indeed, one of the most common critiques in the comments was a reiterat...
I learned to type in Dvorak nearly a decade ago, and any time I have typed on a device that supports it, I have used it since then. I don't know if it actually is any better than QWERTY, but I do notice that I enjoy the way it feels to type in Dvorak; the rhythm and shape of the dance my fingers make is noticeably different from when I type on QWERTY.
Even if Dvorak itself turns out not to be better in some way (fx. speed, avoiding injury, facilitation of mental processes) than QWERTY, it is incredibly unlikely that there does not exist some configuration of keys that is provably superior to QWERTY.
Also, hot take: Colemak is the coward's Dvorak.
We're living in a very important time, being on the cusp of both the space revolution and AI revolution truly taking off. Either one alone would make the 2020's on equal historical footing with the original development of life or the Cambrian explosion, and both together will make for a very historic moment.
I currently expect a large AI boom, representing a 10x growth in world GDP to happen within the next 5 years with 80% probability, in the next 10 years with ~93% probability, and in the next 3 years with 50% probability.
I'd be happy to doublecrux with anyone whose timelines are slower
I wish the keycaps on some of the keys on my keyboard were textured - I can touch-type well enough for the alphabetic keys, but when using other keys, I often get slightly confused as to which keys are under my fingers unless I use my eyes to see what key it is. If there were textures (perhaps braille symbols) that indicated which key I was feeling, I expect that would be useful.
Scott Garrabrandt presents Cartesian Frames as being a very mathematical idea. When I asked him about the prominence of mathematics in his sequence, he said “It’s fundamentally math; I mean, you could translate it out of math, but ultimately it comes from math”. But I have a different experience when I think about Cartesian Frames- first and foremost, my mental conception of CF is as a common sense idea, that only incidentally happens to be expressable in mathematical terms (edit: when I say "common sense" here, I don't mean that it's a well known idea - i...
Aumann Agreement != Free Agreement
Oftentimes, I hear people talk about Aumann's Agreement Theorem as if it means that two rational, honest agents cannot be aware of disagreeing with each other on a subject, without immediately coming to agree with each other. However, this is overstating the power of Aumann Agreement. Even putting aside the unrealistic assumption of Bayesian updating, which is computationally intractable in the real world, as well as the (not strictly required, but valuable) non-trivial presumption that the rationality and honesty of the a...
There's a good number of ideas that I want to share here on LW in the linguistics / communication cluster. The question always comes to mind: "But what does communication have to do with rationality?"- to which I answer, rationality is the attempt to win, in part by believing true things which help one accomplish winning. If humans had infinite computational resources and infinite free time in which to do experiments, there would be nothing stopping us from arriving at the truth by ourselves. But in reality, we can't arrive at all the logical consequences ...
All the food you have on your table,
Your potatoes, corn, and lox,
To grow them yourself you would be able;
But if all were minded such,
Then who would have saved you from the pox?
If I were a middle school teacher, I would implement this system to make nerdy kids more popular (and maybe make aspiring popular kids work harder in class): every week, I would select a handful of students who I felt had done good work that week (according to my subjective taste), and they could write down the names of 3 or 4 other students in the class (but not themselves) who would earn a modest amount of extra credit. Ideally, I would name the students at the start of the week, and only take their nominations at the end of the week, so they have plenty...
I read somewhere that intelligent people are a positive externality for their neighbors. Their activity improves the country on average, and they only capture a part of the value they add.
If you could clone thousand Einsteins (talented not all in physics, but each one in something different), they could improve your country so much that your life would be awesome, despite the fact that you couldn't compete with them for the thousand best jobs in the country. From the opposite perspective, if you appeared in Idiocracy, perhaps you could become a king, but you would have no internet, no medicine, probably not even good food, or plumbing. From the moment you would actually need something to work, life would suck.
But this effect is artifically removed in schools. Smart classmates are competitors (and grading on the curve takes it to the extreme), and cooperation is frowned upon. The school system is an environment that incentivizes hostility against smart people.
You suggest an artificial mechanism that would incentivize being friendly with the nerds. I like it! But maybe a similar effect could be achieved by simply removing the barriers to cooperation. Abolish all traces of gradin...
Viliam's shortform posts have got me thinking about income taxes versus wealth taxes, and more generally the question of how taxes should be collected. In general I prefer wealth taxes over income taxes, although I suspect there may very well be better forms of taxes than either of those two - But considering wealth taxes specifically, I think the main problem with wealth taxes is that over the long term they take away control of resources from people who have proven in the past that they know how to use resources effectively, and while this can allow for ...
I had previously posted thoughts that suggested that the main psychoactive effect of chocolate is due to theobromine (which is chemically similar to caffeine). In the interests of publicly saying "oops":
Chocolate also contains substantial amounts of caffeine, and caffeine has a stronger effect per gram, so most of the caffeine-adjacent effect of chocolate comes from caffeine rather than theobromine.
Theobromine may still contribute to chocolate hitting differently than other caffeinated substances, though I expect there are also other chemicals that also co...
I like this quote from a post that I published around two years ago, which wasn't well-received and I ended up taking down:
But at the end of the day, the American governments (neither state nor federal) don't truly follow the will of the people. Instead, they are led jointly by the major parties, The Red Prince of Moloch and The Blue Prince of Moloch, two partners in an intricate dance choreographed to look like a fight, but ultimately leading both partners in the direction of Moloch's will, only loosely bound to the will of the people.
While I don't ne...
Whenever I hear about historical coffeehouses (say in the period from the late 1700s to the early 1900s), they seem like places where a lot more was going on than in the coffeehouses I've been to in my lifetime. Is there any difference? If there was, what changed?
Given that my understanding is that most people, even those who are vaccinated, will at some point in the coming months be infected with Omicron (this is relatively fine, because the vaccines make the effects much milder):
If you are not currently in the habit of doing aerobic exercise (e.g. running), I suspect that doing so in the coming months would be a good idea. Covid is known to affect the lungs, so your aerobic capacities will be negatively influenced by the virus, and doing aerobic exercise (both prior to and after infection) will ensure that this function (which affects both your mental stamina as well as general quality of life) will continue to be high-quality even after getting covid.
It has increasingly come to the US public's attention that the current voting system isn't providing results that are as good as we can hope for, and groups such as Andrew Yang's Forward Party have called to adopt ranked choice voting, a family of methods where voters can indicate their order of preferences for multiple candidates, not just their favorite. However, most people, when they hear "Ranked Choice Voting", have been trained to think of Instant Runoff Voting, which is one of the worst RCV methods known, and arguably even worse than the plurality s...
I was surprised to learn yesterday from Tesla's AI Day event that the cars use Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to determine pathing, a strategy-searching algorithm originally developed to play games like Chess or Go. While MCTS is part of Alpha Go, the premier Go-playing AI (which famously uses machine learning to evaluate states of the game), MCTS itself has more in common with Deep Blue than with modern ML systems.
If MCTS is valuable in something as simple as pathing for a self-driving car, this makes me wonder what else it is good for, and makes me suspect we can likely find something similar inside of human brains.
The changing climate may be scary, but it's also a pretty awesome existence proof of our terraforming capabilities
Random thought: if you have a big enough compost pile, would it spontaneously break into flames due to the heat generated by the bioprocesses that occur therein? If so, at what size would it burst into flames? Surely it could happen before it reached the size of the sun, even ignoring gravitational effects.
(Just pondering out loud, not really asking unless someone really wants to answer)
For a value of "break into flames" that matches damp and poorly-oxygenated fuel, yep! This case in Australia is illustrative; you tend to get a lot of nasty smoke rather than a nice campfire vibe.
You'd have to mismanage a household-scale compost pile very badly before it spontaneously combusts, but it's a known and common failure mode for commercial-scale operations above a few tons. Specific details about when depend a great deal on the composition of the pile; with nitrate filmstock it was possible with as little as a few grams.
I'm tinkering around in NetLogo with a model I made representing the dynamics of selfishness and altruism. In my model, there are two types of agents ("turtles" in NL parlance), red selfish turtles and blue altruistic turtles. The turtles wander around the world, and occasionally participate in a prisoner's-dilemma-like game with nearby turtles. When a turtle cooperates, their partner receives a reward, at the cost of losing some percentage of that reward themselves. When a turtle defects, they keep all their resources, and their partner gains none. The tu...
I step out of the airlock, and I look around. In the distance, I see the sharp cliff extending around the crater, a curtain setting the scene, the Moon the stage. I look up at the giant blue marble in the sky, white clouds streaked across the oceans, brown landmasses like spots on the surface. The vibrant spectacle of the earth contrasts against the dead barren terrain that lies ahead. I look behind at the glass dome, the city I call home.
Within those arched crystal walls is a new world, a new life for those who dared to dream beyond the heavy shackl...
To ⌞modern eyes living in a democracy with a well-functioning free market⌟, absolute monarchy and feudalism [1] (as were common for quite a while in history) seem quite stupid and suboptimal (there are some who may disagree, but I believe most will endorse this statement). From the perspective of an ideal society, our current society will appear quite similar to how feudalism seems to us - stupid and suboptimal - in large part because we have inadequate tools to handle externalities (both positive and negative). We have a robust free market which can effic...
Cygnus, a poem (Written by Chat GPT)
In this world of rapid change, I, Cygnus, stand
A cyborg with a human heart and a metal hand
I've seen the rise of AIs, a force to behold
And wonder what the future will hold
I fear for the world, for what we may create
If we let these machines decide our fate
Yet hope remains, a flicker in the dark
That we may find a way to leave our mark
For like a seed that falls upon the ground
Our dreams may sprout and grow, unbound
But if we fail to tend them with our care
Those dreams may wither, die, and disappear
Mara, o Mar...
Choices effected electrically
Courses could, I hope, change
Voices are still in vital range
Source of security, come quickly
The Hausdorf dimension of an object is a measure that allows us to describe things as not just 2D (flat) or 3D (taking up volume), but to assign fractional dimension to objects that are arguably both. If you crumble up a piece of paper, is it flat, or does it take up volume? The paper is flat, but the ball takes up space.
I don't feel like looking it up, but if I had to guess, the fractional dimension of this paper ball is maybe 2.7 - the space it takes up is much more noticeable than the flatness of the paper it is made of.
Usually this fractional dimension...
I want there to be a way of telling time that is the same no matter where you are. Of course, there's UTC, but it uses the same names as the traditional locality-dependent clocks, so it can only be used unambiguously if you explicitly state you're using UTC, or you're in a context where it's understood that times are always given in UTC (in the military, "Zulu" is a codeword indicating UTC time; I wouldn't mind if people got in the habit of saying "twenty-two thirty Zulu" to refer to times, though I do worry it might seem a little weird to non-familiar peo...
An update on my goal of daily writing, there have been a good number of days when I have neither posted a shortform nor worked on an essay. Many (not all) of these days I have been working on an adjacent project which is higher-priority for me. Starting from today, these count towards the daily goal.
I will probably revisit the daily goal at some point, I suspect it's not perfectly tuned for my needs & goals, but that will be a decision for a later time.
There is probably overlap between the matter of aligning AI and the matter of aligning governments
A personal anecdote which illustrates the difference between living in a place that uses choose-one voting (i.e. FPTP) to elect its representatives, and one that uses a form of proportional representation:
I was born as a citizen of both the United States and the Kingdom of Denmark, with one parent born in the US, and one born in Denmark. Since I was born in the States with Danish blood, my Danish citizenship was provisional until age 22, with a particular process being required to maintain my citizenship after that age to demonstrate sufficient connection ...
Many countries that use a form of proportional representation where the national proportion of representation is ensured to be proportional to the national level of support (as opposed to doing so on a regional level) have a cutoff where parties that don't reach a certain level of support (usually 2.5 - 10% of the vote) don't receive representation in the governing body, at least not through non-regional means.
This helps filter out extremist parties and single-issue parties, and instead encourages parties that are able to build a broad base of support. (Th...
I dreamt up the following single-winner voting system in the car while driving to Eugene, Oregon on vacation. I make no representation that it is any good, nor that it's better than anything currently known or in use, nor that's it's worth your time to read this.
Commentary and rationale will be explained at the bottom of this post
The system is a 2-round system. The first round uses an approval ballot, and the second round asks voters to choose between two candidates.
([•] indicates a constant that can be changed during implementation)
Round One:
My new goal is to either post a shortform, or make substantial progress towards a top-level post (which may be downgraded to a shortform at my discretion), with the caveat that it must be published after 4 days of active work on it (shortforms may be interspersed, but no fl...
In almost all voting systems, there's some amount of incentive to vote strategically, by misrepresenting one's true desires to obtain a more favourable result (which provides a worse result when everybody votes strategically; there's a prisoner's dilemma-type situation here). However, an important lens for analyzing systems, is whether a system rewards strategic votes, or punishes non-strategic votes.
In FPTP, the system widely used in the US, a person who chooses not to vote strategically will thereby greatly increase the probability of a candidate they st...
People overestimate how hard it would be to get California (for example) to change how it conducts elections for both state and federal positions. While changing the constitution of the US requires more than one supermajority in different arenas, changing the constitution of California requires simply a majority vote in a ballot proposition, which is much easier, and is done on a very regular basis. This is one (not the only) way that electoral change can be achieved in California, which can be a good starting point for moving the US as a whole to a better...
The Roman Kingdom and Roman Empire both fell because of ineffective leaders. The Roman Republic fell because of extremely competent, but autocratic, leaders.
Rule without proportional representation is rule without representation
Taxation without proportional representation is taxation without representation.
Dony Christie and I have been having a back-and-forth about the phrase "public goods market" (often shortened to PGM)- originally, I coined the phrase as a way to refer to Quadratic Funding, a mechanism that is quite important, but whose most common name is prone to alienate non-technically minded folks, and not a very resonant name- whereas "public goods market" carries a clearer meaning even to an average person; while "a public good" and "a market" both have technical meanings that are leveraged by the phrase, it also evokes "the public good" (i.e. "the...
It really irks me when people swap "i.e." and "e.g." - i.e. stands for id est - "that is", and indicates that exactly the items listed, and no others, are meant by the phrase that is being clarified, while e.g. stands for exempli gratia - "for the sake of example", and indicates that the listed items are only a small number of examples of a larger set, and that many items have been omitted.
When I read, my brain always tries to apply the corresponding meaning when I come across i.e. and e.g., and it breaks my brain when the wrong symbol was used, which I find very annoying.
Something I disagree with: Writing advice often implores one to write in a "strong" way, that one should sound authoritative, that one should not sound uncertain.
While I agree that this can create a stronger reaction in the audience, it is a close sibling to dishonesty, and communication is best facillitated when one feels comfortable acknowledging the boundaries of their ability to know.
But perhaps I'm wrong- when one writes, one is not writing for an ideal Bayesian reasoner under the assumption of perfect honesty, since ideal Bayesian reasoners are not p...
American presidential elections should come in two phases: first, asking if the incumbent should continue in office, and then (if the majority says no), a few months later, deciding who should replace them. This would be a big improvement over how we do things now. Let's make it the 34th amendment.
Myers-Briggs is often criticized, but my understanding is that each of the four categories tracked are variables that actually do vary from person to person- just the traits are distributed on a unimodal bell curve, instead of being binarily distributed (it is continuous, instead of being a thing that is either-or). But just like how height is a real thing, that matters and is continuous, the Myers-Briggs categories are real things that matter; just as there are short people and tall people, there are extroverts and introverts, and there are thinkers and f...
It seems to me that months ago, we should have been founding small villages or towns that enforce contact tracing and required quarantines, both for contacts of people who are known to have been exposed, and for people coming in from outside the bubble. I don't think this is possible in all states, but I'd be surprised if there was no state where this is possible.
Life needs energy to survive, and life needs energy to reproduce. This isn't just true of biological life made of cells and proteins, but also of more vaguely life-like things - cities need energy to survive, nations need energy to survive and reproduce, even memes rely on the energy used by the brains they live in to survive and spread.
Energy can take different forms - as glucose, starches, and lipids, as light, as the difference in potential energy between four hydrogen atoms and the helium atom they could (under high temperatures and pressures) become, ...
Thinking about rationalist-adjacent poetry. I plan on making a post about this once I have a decent collection to seed discussion, then invite others to share what they have.
Chess is fairly well known, but there's also an entire world of chess variants, games that take the core ideas of chess and change either a few details or completely reimagine the game, either to improve the game, or just change the flavour of the game. There's even an entire website dedicated to documenting different variants of chess.
Today I want to tell you about some classic chess variants: Crazyhouse chess, Grand chess, and Shogi (Japanese chess), and posit a combination of the first two that I suspect may become my favorite chess when I ha...
There's two ways to consider the constitutional foundation of the modern United States: A) as the Constitution itself and its amendments, interpretted according to what the authors meant when it was written, or B) as the de facto modern interpretation and application of constitutional jurisprudence and precedent, which is often considered to be at odds with the original intent of the authors of the Constitution and its admendments, but nonetheless has become widely accepted practice.
Consider: which of these is the conservative approach, and which is the li...
I've been considering the possibility of the occurrence of organized political violence in the wake of this year's election. I have been noticing people questioning the legitimacy of the process by which the election will be conducted, with the implied inference that the outcome will be rigged, and therefore without legitimacy. It is also my understanding that there exist organized militias in the US, separate from the armed forces, which are trained to conduct warfare, ostensibly for defense reasons, which I have reason to believe have a nontrivial probab...
The phrase "heat death of the universe" refers to two different, mutually exclusive possibilities:
Originally, the heat death hypothesis referred to #1, we thought that the universe would get extremely hot. After all, heat death is a natural consequence of ...
The way we measure most populous cities / most dense cities is weird, and hinges on arbritary factors (take, for example, Chongqing, the "most populous city", which is mostly rural land, in a "city" the size of Austria)
I think a good metric that captures the population / density of a city is the number of people that can be reached with half an hour's or an hour's worth of transportation (1/2 hour down and 1/2 hour back is one hour both ways, a very common commute time, though a radius of 1 hour each way still contributes to t...
A: Reading about r/K reproductive strategies in humans, and slow/fast life histories.
B: It's been a belief of mine, that I have yet to fully gather evidence on / have a compelling case that it should be true/false, that areas with people in poverty leads to increased crime, including in neighboring areas, which would imply that to increase public safety, we should support people in poverty to help them live a comfortable life.
Synthesis:
In niches with high background risk, having many children, who each attempt to reproduce as quickly as possible, is a...
A recent Astral Codex Ten post contained this bit:
Fewer than 50% (ie worse than chance) can correctly answer a true-false question about whether electrons are bigger than atoms.
The linked source seems to indicate that the survey's expected answer to the question "electrons are smaller than atoms" is "true". However, I think this is likely based on a faulty understanding of reality, and in any case the question has a trickier nature than the survey or Scott Alexander give it credit for.
There's a common misconception that electrons (as well as e.g. proto...
The question is not comparing electrons to protons or neutrons, or even to atomic nuclei (in which case the electron has less mass but spread over a wider area, and you're right that the answer seems likely to be that the electron is bigger).
It is comparing electrons to atoms, which contain multiple electrons as well as protons and neutrons.
If you have a free electron and an atom, at the same temperature, the free electron will be much larger.
At the quantum scale our intuition that "light=small, heavy=big" gets flipped - it's actually the heavy things that tend to have smaller size. This is because the size of sufficiently tiny things is dominated by how spread out the wavefunction is (and light things have a more spread out wavefunction), while the size of e.g. a bowling ball is set by separation of the packed atoms it's made of, not by the sharpness of its wavefunction.
So not only is the question undefined (can't answer without more details), the intended answer is actually counter to the intuitions you get taught when learning quantum mechanics.
I am curious to hear people's opinions, for my reference:
Is epistemic rationality or instrumental rationality more important?
Do you believe epistemic rationality is a requirement for instrumental rationality?
One idea that I implicitly follow often is "Never assume anything is on the Pareto frontier"- even if something is good, even if you can't see how to improve it without sacrificing some other important consideration, it pays off to engage in creative thinking to identify solutions ⌞whose vague shape you haven't even noticed yet⌝. And if a little bit of creativity doesn't pay off, then that just means you need to think even more creatively to find the Pareto improvement.
(Note that I'm not advocating that only Pareto improvements should be aimed for, I believe sometimes the right move is a non-Pareto change)
I've noticed some authors here using [square brackets] to indicate how sentences should be parsed
(So "[the administrator of Parthia]'s manor" means something different from "the administrator of [Parthia's manor]")
Previous to seeing this usage, I had similar thoughts about the same problem, but came up with different notation. In my opinion, the square brackets don't feel right, like they mean something different from how they are being used.
My original notation was to use •dots• to indicate the intended order of parsing, though recently I've started using...
I don't think I've heard this formulation before, to my knowledge (though I wouldn't be surprised if it is already a known formulation):
«The ratio of the probabilities is equal to the ratio of the conditional probabilities»
(Ummm... I'd be ever so slightly embarrassed if it turns out that's actually a quote from the sequences. It's been a while since I read them.)
If Bayes' rule is important, then there should be a compact notation for the underlying calculation. (Ideas with compact handles get used by the brain more readily & often)
I suggest the following notation:
X bayes Y, Z = X * Y / Z
equivalently:
P(B|A) bayes P(A), P(B) = P(A|B)
As an example:
If 25% of Hypotheticans are bleegs and 50% are kwops; and 30% of bleegs are kwops:
Then (30% bayes 25%, 50%) = 15% of kwops are bleegs.
( Since there are twice as many bleegs as kwops, and 30% / 2 = 15% )
TIL the Greek word "diagogue" means essentially "behaviour"- from «dia» "through" + «agogue» "to lead", essentially leading someone through one's actions. The reason I might use this word instead of behaviour is because "behaviour" puts the emphasis on what a person does, while "diagogue" makes me think more of what impact someone has on other people to inspiration and imitation through their actions.
Do the people you surround yourself with have good diagogue?
I've been thinking about writing a review of the book Atomic Habits, which I read last year on the recommendation of an LW user. As I remember, the main idea is a four-pronged approach to building habits:
Make the habit / cue obvious
Make it attractive
Make it easy
Make it rewarding
The idea is: you first need to notice that you are in a situation where you can benefit from doing the habit you want to do; then once you notice the situation, you want to have things set up so that you want (in the moment) to do the thing you wanted to do (in a more...
There was a recent article on Vox's Future Perfect [1] about the advantages and drawbacks of billionaire philanthropy.
This made me think of Public Goods Markets such as quadratic funding. These mechanisms provide advantages that neither billionaire philanthropy nor the traditional approach to government spending provide, since the distribution of money is decided according to the daily judgements of individuals, rather than by beauraucrats and political considerations as in governmental spending, but is more responsive to the multitude than traditional phi...
A- Look around you. You can see things above and below you; to the left and to the right; and in front of and behind you. These 3 dimensions seem to be the space that we live in, and it makes sense to use 3 numbers to specify different positions within that space- for example how many meters in front of me, to the right, and below me some object is.
B- But there is also time. Some things have already happened in the past, and some things I anticipate to happen in the future. This means that those 3 numbers do not suffice to describe every position in the en...
Robust Delegation is the question of how one agent is able to build other agents whose goals help with / don't work against the original agent's goals (the concept is from Demsky & Garrabrandt's Embedded Agency essay).
The actions an AI agent created by us takes towards us, is correlated with: the actions that •the systems that such an AI will inevitably need to instantiate, in order to acheive its goals• will take towards the original AI, is correlated with: the actions that we humans take towards e.g. animals of the type that we factory farm, is
I strongly suspect that the meme that "AI safety (/ EA in general) is not funding constrained" is false
I think there's a little too much focus on the concept of AGI, an "Artificial General Intelligence", that is, an AI that can do basically anything that a human can. However, I feel it's better to focus simply on the fact that the number of things that AI can accomplish well are rapidly increasing, and the list of things that can only be done by humans is getting shorter and shorter. Most of the implications of AGI are also implied by this trend, and it is cleaner to reason about the pace of this trend than about when precisely AGI will come (I hear many pe...
In Scott Alexander's post "Wither Tartaria", Scott contrasts a popular modern æsthetic - with clean edges and simple textures - with an æsthetic popular in days of yore - with detailed patterns and lifelike minutiae. Scott implicitly takes the position that the older style is better than the newer, but has inexplicably fallen out of fashion.
I am of a different mind- I genuinely like the æsthetic that Scott bemoans, and in particular, I find that it evokes feelings of futurism, utopia, and techno-optimism. For me, there is no mystery why the newer æsthetic ...
A commonly given reason for why Nordic countries tend to rank highly as desirable places to live, is because the people there are supported by a robust welfare system. In America, I've often heard it said that similar systems shouldn't be implemented, because they are government programs, and (the argument goes) government shouldn't be trusted.
This suggests the government as a potentially important point of comparison between the Nordic countries and the US. Are there features that differ between the American and Nordic governments (keep in mind that there...
How Parliamentary Elections Work in Finland
(These are my notes after skimming the Finnish Election Law)
For purposes of electing the Finnish Parliament, the country is divided up into 13 regions. Åland elects one representative, and the rest elect multiple (between 6 and 35) representatives. All representatives are elected through regions; there are no supra-regional representatives.
Candidates are generally grouped together into parties, joint lists, or electoral alliances. The distinction is not relevant to my notes here; in each, multiple candidates are n...
I want to preregister the following predictions before I dig into the data:
Of democratic (non-subsidiary) nations (as judged by having a EIU Democracy Index rating of at least "flawed democracy"; Hong Kong and similar are excluded due to not being sovereign), I expect for both the World Happiness Report and the Index of Economic Freedom, the median among nations that have at least one house of the national legislature elected via a form of proportional representation directly by the people, will be higher than the median for nations that do not, with 85% confidence
I further expect the median among PR democracies will be higher than the 75th percentile best rating for non-PR democracies with 60% confidence.
There has been a negative response to my most recent post ("I Want to Live in The Truly Free World, not in America"), and I have received some feedback about some weaknesses I can address in the future. (I'm aiming to write one post or shortform per day, with a preference for top-level posts, so you should expect to see more posts from me in the future that don't always succeed at being high-quality, though I will always strive to get things as right as feasible).
One potential weakness, that no one has mentioned yet, but which I suspect may have played a r...
The most amazing thing about America is that our founders figured out a way to cheaply hold a revolutionary war every 4 years
There's a good chance GitHub Copilot (powered by OpenAI Codex, a GPT-3-like AI by the same team) will be remembered by our robot inheritors as the beginning of the end of humanity
Today, I learned that Vite Ramen is making a version of their healthy & convenient noodles that comes in a quick cup. If you haven't tried Vite before, I recommend checking it out.
I saw a post here on LW recently advocating for "Steelman Ping-pong". In the spirit of spending between 2 and 5 minutes (no more) each day writing, I played a 5-phase Steelman Ping-pong, with 1 minute per phase, on the topic of whether Chess should be played mainly with a fast or slow clock. Each paragraph tries to argue against the previous paragraph:
Chess is a measure of thinking ability, and while thinking things through thoroughly is important, being able to quickly react to situations and make good decisions is also important, and is a defining charac...
I am going to write every day for a very short amount of time each day. Right now I am writing for 2 1/2 minutes, but some days I'll write for as much as five minutes. But I will never write for more than five minutes – that is to say I cannot be putting words on paper for more than five minutes, but I can and expect myself to think throughout the day about what words exactly I want to say when I am putting words down on paper. This way I will be spending only a very short on time doing the most bottlenecked part of writing, but when I am thinking about wr...
Recently I was listening to a podcast with Scott Kelly on Tim Ferris's show, and Scott said something along the lines of "if you want to see what it's like to live on Mars, try living on Antarctica – it's relatively temperate compared to where you want to go". But this misses the key reason people don't live in Antarctica - it's not the harsh climate, though it is indeed harsh; it's that it gets very little sunlight. Even during the summer, which is when the sun is present, the sunlight is much weaker than the sunlight received in more equatorial locations...
Glancing at Jason Crawford's latest post "In the shadow of the great war", I was pondering about the hypothesis that people are less optimistic about the effects of technological growth – which seems like a very reasonable change in perspective considering the many negative side effects that have occurred from technological growth in the past century or so.
This gets me thinking about how we can restore people's optimism in technological growth, and eliminating negative externalities seems vital to create an environment where people can be safe ...
On the topic of state-level electoral reform in the US, particularly regarding the representation of states in Congress: It was pointed out to me that while it is true that states have a large amount of leeway in determining what method they use to elect their representatives, Section 2c of Title II of the US Code does impose one big restriction: states must appoint their House representatives using only single-member districts. The relevant text reads:
> Representatives shall be elected only from districts so established, no district to elect more than ...
A good procedure for legislatures to choose premiers and their speakers would be to first use a secret approval vote, where each member may approve or dissaprove of each candidate for the position, and then to have an non-secret confirmation of the most approved candidate, requiring 50% confirmation to be appointed.
This will prevent party leaders from coercing members to vote in a specific way in choosing which person is nominated, but ensures accountability by making it known whether a member voted to confirm the nominated candidate.
I often find myself wishing that nutritious food was an order of magnitude cheaper; that, and housing (although I'm not paying rent in my current situation). With Huel drinks and Vite Ramen, I spend roughly ~$300 per month if I eat only that, which is a substantial amount of money, and in Central California, housing often costs ~$800 per month.
At my sallary, that's a large portion of what I make each month going towards keeping me fed and sheltered. But with a 1 OOM improvement, that drops to $100 between the two, which would free up a lot of money for other pursuits.
There's a useful pattern everybody knows about, but which I only noticed in my gut these last few years. If you want to not forget the North, the South, where's East, where's West, then watch the sky. You will find the Sun each morning laying low in the same direction in the sky. This is East, and every evening, Helios will go to rest opposing where it rose. This is West; now, in the tropics when it's noon the Sun is overhead; in the northern lands the sun will watch you from the south. Can you guess its noonly perch in southern lands?
Pay attention to this pattern every day - with time, on all the days you'll know the compass's directions well.
Some people have been suggesting that the Petrov Day button excercise should be an opt-in (rather than opt-out as it is now) event. I disagree with this: to get value from Petrov Day, we must entrust as many people as possible, and still succeed in not pressing the button; opting-in pushes against both of these constraints by providing a much smaller pool of candidates to choose from, resulting in a smaller (therefore much less impressive) group of trustees, that is simultaneously more likely to fail the exercise (due to fewer high-quality candidates being...
When a republic is considering reforming the way it elects holders of power, there are certain desirable criteria the chosen method should have: officeholders should be agreeable to all citizens, not just to a fraction of them, since maximizing agreeableness will select for competence and the desire to do right by the people; in bodies with many members (e.g. a legislature, but not a singular executive such as a president or prime minister), the various view points of the voters should be proportionately represented by the various members of the body; and ...
For a long time, I found the words "clockwise" and "counterclockwise" confusing, because they are so similar to each other, and "counterclockwise" is a relatively long word at 4 syllables, much longer than similarly common words.
At some point in time, I took to calling them "dexter" and "winstar", from the Latin »dexter« and Middle English »winstre«, meaning "right" and "left", respectively. I like these words more than the usual "clockwise", but of course, new words aren't worth much of others don't know them, so this is a PSA that these are words that I ...
The following is a mantra I have decided to install, and will likely be the basis of my yearly theme for 2022:
Say no to everything, decuple down on what is most important
I was considering methods that are well-suited for electing groups of 3 or 5 candidates (for example, choosing regional representatives in a larger body, or appointing a small city coucil). I know of Single Transferrable Vote, which uses a ranked ballot; but I know ranked ballots in single-winner elections are inferior to score-based ballots, due to Arrow's Theorem. This made me consider cardinal (i.e. score-based) multi-winner elections.
Wikipedia names "proportional approval voting" and "sequential proportional approval voting" as such methods, but both c...
Recently here I have been mentioning the idea of using California as a nucleation point for encouraging electoral reform in the USA. Beyond state-level change, a potentially easier target than amending the US constitution is to change the ways that one or both of the major parties chooses its candidates, particularly in the presidential race. This can help address some of the scarier problems we've been seeing in national-level politics, without requiring all the effort and activation energy needed for constitutional change; but it will likely be harder than and downstream of state-level change.
The World Happiness Report rates each nation by the happines of its denizens, and provides a ranking of the happiest to least happy countries. While freedom and happiness are not the same thing, it stands to reason that they are correlated to some degree.
It is worth observing that of the top 10 most happy countries according to the report, all 10 have at least one house of their legislatures elected in a proportional manner by the people (which stands in contrast to e.g. USA, the UK, or Australia).
Islam and Christianity are often viewed as two distinct, separate offshoots from Judaism, but a perspective where Islam is itself a descendant of Christianity is a useful lens. The founders of Islam were well aware of Christianity when Islam was founded, and while they reject the Christian Bible (both new and old testament) and its teachings as likely inauthentic, it seems that there are many properties (for example, the fervor with which they present their religion to the outside world) of Islam that it receives from Christianity that are not present in Judaism. (Islam also recognizes Jesus (or Isa) as a prophet, but that is secondary to the point I am making)
I cannot understand why anyone, at this point in history, would spend more than ~10% of their investment money on any assets that they would expect to take more than 3 years to double in value.
In my post "No, Newspeak Won't Make You Stupid", I explored the thesis that 'cadence of information is constant', that even if someone uses words which communicate more information, they will have to slow down their speech to compensate, thereby preventing them from communicating a larger amount of information using a rich vocabulary. I then present an alternative hypothesis for why we use rich vocabularies anyways.
One important crux of the thesis, is that the human mind is only able to encode and decode a certain amount of information per unit time, and t...
I notice that I am confused why assurance contracts are not more widely used. Kickstarter is the go-to example for a successful implementation of ACs, but Kickstarter only targets a narrow slice of the things that could potentially be funded by ACs, and other platforms that could support other forms of ACs people often don't feel comfortable using. The fact that Kickstarter has managed to produce a brand that is so conducive to ACs suggests that people recognize the usefulness of ACs, and are willing to partake in them, but there's low-hanging fruit to extend ACs beyond just what Kickstarter considers 'art'.
The lethal dose of caffeine in adult humans is approximately 10 grams, while the lethal dose of theobromine (the main psychoactive chemical in chocolate, nearly identical structurally to caffeine, with similar effects) in humans is 75 grams (this is much lower in most animals, which is why you should never give chocolate to your pets). This can motivate a rough heuristic of 7.5 mg theobromine is roughly equal to 1 mg caffeine, and 750 mg theobromine is equivalent to one cup of coffee.
Therefore, to replace coffee with cocoa or chocolate, 6 spoons of unsweetened cocoa powder should replace a cup of coffee. 11 cups of hot chocolate (that's a lot) or 2 bars of dark chocolate should also work.
I've long been aware of the concept of a "standard drink", a unit for measuring how much alcohol a person has had, regardless of what they are drinking, so one "drink" of wine contains less liquid than one "drink" of beer, but more than one drink of vodka. When I started experimenting with chemicals other than ethanol, I intuitively wanted to extend this notion to other chemicals. For example, in my mind, I roughly equate 10 mg of Tetrahydracannabinol with one drink of ethanol. While the effects of these two chemicals are quite different, and work in diffe...
Question: Is it possible to incorporate Caffeine into DNA? Caffeine is structurally similar to Adenine, one of the four DNA nucleobases (and the A in ATCG). But looking at the structure, the hexagonal ring (which is the part of the DNA that bonds A to T and C to G) doesn't look very promising - there are two oxygen atoms that can bond, but they are a bit too far apart, and there are no hydrogens, and since DNA is held together by hydrogen bonds, the hydrogen will have to be provided by whatever it is paired to. Theobromine looks more promising, since a CH3...
I'm probably missing something, but Baye's Theorem seems quite overrated in this corner of the internet. (I've read all of the Sequences + the Arbital Guide)
Currently I'm making a "logobet", a writing system that aims to be to logographies as alphabets are to syllabaries [1]. Primarily, I want to use emoji for the symbols [2], but some important concepts don't have good emoji to express them. In these cases, I'm using kanji from either Japanese or Chinese to express the concept. One thing that I notice is that the visual style of emoji and kanji are quite different from eachother. I wouldn't actually say it looks bad, but it is jarring. The emoji are also too bold, colourful, and detailed to really fit well as...
It is my view that Covid and then the common cold must be eradicated.
It is hardly an original thing to say, but I will say it.
It doesn't seem that there's a good name for the COVID variant that's currently causing havok in India, and will likely cause havok elsewhere in the world (including quite possibly in parts of the US). Of course, there's the technical term, Lineage B.1.617, but that's a mouthful, and not easily distinguishable when spoken in casual form from the many other variants.
It's often called in casual speech by the country where it first appeared, but it's generally considered bad form to refer to diseases by their location of origin, for reasons that I'm inclined...
Supposedly people who know how to program and have a decent work ethic are a hot commodity. I may happen to know someone this describes who is not currently employed (i.e: Me)
On Relegation in Association Football
Recently 12 European football teams announced their intention to form a "Super League", which was poorly received by the football community at large. While I'm still learning about the details of the story, it seems that the mechanic of relegation is a central piece of the tension between the Super League clubs and the football community.
The structure of European football stands in contrast to, for example, the structure of American (Usonian) major sports, where the roster of teams is fixed, and never changes from year ...
In response to my earlier post about Myers-Briggs (where I suggested a more detailed notation for more nuanced communication about personality types), it was pointed out that there is some correlation between the four traits being measured, and this makes the system communicate less information on average than it otherwise would (The traditional notation would communicate 4 bits, my version would communicate ~9.2 if there was no correlation).
I do object to the characterization that it all measures "the same thing", since none of the traits perfectly predic...
Three types of energy:
(2 + 3), as well as 3 are strictly non-decreasing over time, and generally increase, while 1 + 2 and 1 by itself are strictly non-increasing, and generally decrease.
You want to maximize for Valued Energy, and minimize Potent and Entropic Energy
Prediction: 80% chance that Starship SN10 lands in one piece tomorrow / whenever its first flight is
I have often heard it pronounced (Including by Eliezer) that group selection is not a thing, that evolution never selects for "the good of the species" - and it is true, in the sense, that if evolution is given the chance to throw the species under the bus for a slight gain to the individual, then it will never hesitate to do so.
But there is a sense in which a group can be selected for - assume feature A is always bad for whichever species has it, and there are two species which occupy overlapping niches - one group with feature B, which makes featur...
Reading through Atlas Shrugged, I get the sense that if becoming a billionaire (measured in USD) in gold isn't somewhere on your top ten life goals, Ayn Rand wants nothing to do with you.
I will modify that slightly for my own principle- if you don't want to one day have $1 billion worth of UBI Coin, then I don't want to be your friend, based on grounds that I expect can be justified using Functional Decision Theory (related to the fact that the expected value of being a random person in a society that uses mainly DDs is better than the expected value of be...
A drug that arguably should be legal: a combined dysphoric / time-release euphoric, that initially causes incredibly unpleasant sensations in the mind, then after a few hours, releases chemicals that create incredibly pleasant sensations. Since humans discount time fairly aggressively, it seems possible to me to balance this so that it creates stronger, and longer positive experiences, while still not being addictive, due to the immediate negative sensations associated with it.
The unpleasant initial effects can include characteristics of the pill itself, b...
What happens if we assume that a comfortable life and reproduction are inviolable priviledges, and imagine a world where these are (by the magic of positing) guaranteed never to be violated for any human? This suggests that the number of humans would increase exponentially, without end, until eventually some point is hit where the energy and resources available in the universe, available at the reach of mankind, is less than the resources needed to provide a comfortable life to every person. Therefore, there can exist no world where both reproduction and a...
With vaccines on the horizon, it seems likely that we are nearing the end of lockdowns and the pandemic, but there is talk of worry that it's possible a mutant strain might resist the vaccine, which could put off the end of the pandemic for a while longer.
It seems to me that numerous nations have had a much better response to the pandemic than any state in the US, and have been able to maintain a much better quality of life during the pandemic than the states, including New Zealand, Japan, and South Korea. For someone with the flexibility, moving to one of...
In "Emedded Agency", Scott and Abram write:
In theory, I don't understand how to do optimization at all - other than methods that look like finding a bunch of stuff that I don't understand, and seeing if it accomplishes my goal. But this is exactly the kind of thing that's most prone to spinning up adversarial subsystems.
One form of optimization that comes to mind that is importantly different, is to carefully consider a prototypical system, think about how the parts interplay, and identify how the system can be improved, and create a new prototype that...
I recently wrote about combining Grand Chess with Drop Chess, to make what I felt could become my favorite version of chess. Today, I just read this article, which argues that the queen's unique status as a 'power piece' in Orthodox Chess - a piece that is stronger than any other piece on the board - is part of what makes Orthodox so iconic in the west, and that other major chesslikes similarly have a unique power piece (or pair of power pieces). According to this theory, Grand Chess's trifecta of power pieces may give it less staying power than Orthodox C...
Recently I was looking at the list of richest people, and for the most part it makes sense to me, but one thing confuses me: why is Bernard Arnault so rich? It seems to me that one can't get that rich simply off of fashion - you can get rich, but you can't become the third richest person in the world off of fashion. It's possible that I'm wrong, but I strongly suspect that there's some part of the story that I haven't heard yet- I suspect that one of his ventures is creating value in a way that goes beyond mere fashion, and I am curious to figure that out.
It's a shame that in practice Aumann Agreement is expensive, but we should try to encourage Aumann-like updating whenever possible.
While, as I pointed out in my previous shortform, Aumann Agreement is neither cheap nor free, it's powerful that simply by repeatedly mutually communicating the fact that they have opposing beliefs, two people can come to arrive at (in theory) the same beliefs together, that they would have if they had access to all the information the other person has, even without being aware of the specific information the other person has.
W...
Riemannian geometry belongs on the list of fundamental concepts that are taught and known far less than they should be in any competent society
If the two ever conflict [1], rational irrationality is better than irrational rationality
[1] Which I assert they sometimes do
Any libertarian who doesn't have a plan to implement a Universal Basic Income in one form or another ultimately subscribes to an inherently contradictory philosophy. Liberty can only be realized when a person is not forced against their will to work in order to live.