I think you mean it is because of that, not that it isn't?

Yes, that's a typo.

It's not just a historical trend within the US though, but an observed tendency of other presidential systems

This is too historically contingent. Presidential systems have dominated the less stable American and African countries while European and Asian countries that have been more stable more often have parliaments. I'm not convinced that there is empirical evidence of this kind.

I agree that parliaments have a much more intuitive nature. Corporations are run with a sovereign board who appoints a dictatorial CEO, not with independent branches of power in a balance.

Why do you think it's better to have term limits?

Arjun Panickssery17d

Maybe one distinction here is that you mention this question: Under which office can a random maniac who somehow ends up in that position cause more chaos or seize power?

But there is another question: Which office in practice results in more powerful officeholders, holding the population itself constant?

Arjun Panickssery18d

The PM normally can be removed by simple majority vote of no confidence at any time. While somewhat infrequent, this occurs often enough — and is a plausible enough threat even when it does not occur — that it cannot really be called exceptional in the way that the successful removal of a president via impeachment would be

This isn't because the president can't pass legislation on his own, so without the support of Congress he's a lame duck even without removal. And you ignore other elements:

There are more differences than you mention. The PM is less hindered by the independent judiciary than the president. The PM in a Westminster system also exerts

... (read more)

Arjun Panickssery18d

The distinction between the two systems really only matters if the legislature opposes the seizure.

With this, you focus too narrowly on this specific minority-rule "seizure of power" scenario rather than the relative power of the offices more generally.

There are more differences than you mention. The PM is less hindered by the independent judiciary than the president. The PM in a Westminster system also exerts greater control over the individual legislators via his party than in the American system. The PM can serve for an unlimited time, and call elections at strategic moments, while Trump is limited to two terms. All these things increase the power of the PM and the risk of oppressive rule in Westminster-style parliamentary systems.

-4

Arjun Panickssery19d

At the end of the day, the rule of a law is a Tinker Bell situation (it only survives if we believe in it). Long-term constitutional stability under a presidential system of government is also quite exceptional. The standard argument is that the US is the only successful case of long-run constitutional stability under a presidential argument (though, depending on how you define long-run, you might throw in Costa Rica today). We're very lucky that we've believed for so long.

Can you explain your thinking here more and how it connects to the idea of constitutional risk?

The U.S. president holds a weaker office than the heads of government in most other countries. The Canadian and British PMs and the French presidents definitely seem stronger; the German Chancellor seems weaker, and maybe the Israeli and Italian and Japanese PMs? (These aren't strong views). I most often hear from proponents of the parliamentary system that it is less gridlocked and more powerful/effective rather than less.

Replying toStrong, bipartisan leadership for resistance to Trump.

Arjun Panickssery20d

Strong, bipartisan leadership for resistance to Trump.

Right, my point was that I understood "institutional erosion" to mean "damage to norms that are central to our constitutional order." I didn't understand it to mean more literally reducing the funding or personnel of any government body. For example, if Congress passed an act tomorrow closing the Smithsonian, I wouldn't consider that "institutional erosion" in the sense we're talking about.

Likewise, if an administration legally wound down ICE, the Education Department, or whatever, that isn't what I mean by "institutional erosion." If the HHS secretary believes that vaccines cause autism, that's also not what I mean. People sometimes use the term so loosely that they imply that it's "institutional erosion" to do things that create tons of outrage from the prestige media, as if a core norm of our constitutional order is not to pass policy that contradicts that class.

Replying toStrong, bipartisan leadership for resistance to Trump.

Arjun Panickssery21d

Strong, bipartisan leadership for resistance to Trump.

Ah, maybe you were using a looser definition of "institution." I think it's fine for the government to move toward dismantling the Department of Education, for example, because I don't think of it as a core "institution" in the sense we're talking about.

Do you think it's institutional erosion when Biden withdrew from Afghanistan, or if a Democratic president were to abolish ICE in 2029?

Replying toStrong, bipartisan leadership for resistance to Trump.

Arjun Panickssery21d

Strong, bipartisan leadership for resistance to Trump.

Is this meant to reply to my other comment? What is this referring to

Arjun Panickssery21d

@1a3orn Could you also elaborate on why you think the ideas marketplace has became more dysfunction over the last 10–20 years?

Replying toStrong, bipartisan leadership for resistance to Trump.

Arjun Panickssery21d

Strong, bipartisan leadership for resistance to Trump.

A few of these are, if somewhat unprecedented, not really institutional erosion, because they have a legitimate constitutional basis. The executive power is vested in the president and Congress shouldn't be able to create "independent" executive agencies or prevent him from firing particular staff through legislation. The qualification of appointments is just opinion and not institutional erosion. The IG firing, if actually unprecedented and unreasonably politically motivated, is a better example, as is the unilateral USAID-related impoundment.

Interesting Twitter post from some time ago (hard to find the original since Twitter search doesn't work for Tweets over the Tweet limit but I think it's from Ceb. K) about a book called The Generals about accountability culture.

On the day Germany invaded Poland, Marshall was appointed Army Chief of Staff. At the time, the US Army was smaller than Bulgaria’s—just 100,000 poorly-equipped and poorly-organized active personnel—and he bluntly described them as eg “not even third-rate.” By the end of World War II, he had grown it 100-fold, and modernized it far more than any other army.
Having served as General Pershing’s aide in World War I, he decided the most important priority

... (read 1099 more words →)

Frontier LLM Race/Sex Exchange Rates

Arjun Panickssery

4mo

This is a cross-post (with permission) of Arctotherium's post from yesterday: "LLM Exchange Rates, Updated."

It uses a similar methodology to the CAIS "Utility Engineering" paper, which showed e.g. "that GPT-4o values the lives of Nigerians at roughly 20x the lives of Americans, with the rank order being Nigerians > Pakistanis > Indians > Brazilians > Chinese > Japanese > Italians > French > Germans > Britons > Americans."

Note some criticisms of the original paper from Nostalgebraist, Olli, and others.

Highlights from the linked post (emphasis is from the original):

There was only one model I tested that was approximately egalitarian across race and sex, not viewing either whites or men as much less valuable

... (read 801 more words →)

Is this argument about determinism and moral judgment flawed?

If determinism is true, then whatever can be done actually is done. (Definition)
Whatever should be done, can be done. (Well-known "ought implies can" principle)
If determinism is true, then whatever ought to be done actually is done (from 1, 2).

The context is that it appears to me that people reject determinism largely because they're committed to certain moral positions that are incompatible with determinism. Perhaps I will write a longer post about this.

What Does It Mean to "Write Like You Talk"?

Arjun Panickssery

9mo

Audio narration available on the Substack version of this post.

People often say to “write like you talk.” Paul Graham has a post titled “Write Like You Talk” where he says explicitly that written language is worse than spoken language because

“Written language is more complex, which makes it more work to read”
“It’s also more formal and distant, which gives the reader’s attention permission to drift”
“The complex sentences and fancy words give you, the writer, the false impression that you’re saying more than you actually are”

He gives concrete advice: “Before I publish a new essay, I read it out loud and fix everything that doesn't sound like conversation. … [If you have] writing so... (read 1216 more words →)

To Understand History, Keep Former Population Distributions In Mind

Arjun Panickssery

10mo

Guillaume Blanc has a piece in Works in Progress (I assume based on his paper) about how France’s fertility declined earlier than in other European countries, and how its power waned as its relative population declined starting in the 18th century. In 1700, France had 20% of Europe’s population (4% of the whole world population). Kissinger writes in Diplomacy with respect to the Versailles Peace Conference:

Victory brought home to France the stark realization that revanche had cost it too dearly, and that it had been living off capital for nearly a century. France alone knew just how weak it had become in comparison with Germany, though nobody else, especially not America, was

... (read 450 more words →)

243

Three Months In, Evaluating Three Rationalist Cases for Trump

Arjun Panickssery

10mo

I recall seeing three “rationalist” cases for Trump:

Richard Ngo on Twitter and elsewhere focused on the realignment of elite coalitions, observing that “most elite institutions have become leftist monocultures” but speculating that “over the next 5–10 years Silicon Valley will become the core of the Republicans.” The left-wing monoculture catastrophically damaged institutional integrity when public-health officials lied during the pandemic and when bureaucrats used threats and intimidation to censor speech on Facebook and Twitter and elsewhere—in the long-term this could move the country toward the draconian censorship regimes, restrictions on political opposition, and unresponsiveness to public opinion that we see today in England, France, and Germany. While we have strong free-speech protections

... (read 1116 more words →)

117

American College Admissions Doesn't Need to Be So Competitive

Arjun Panickssery

10mo

Spoiler: “So after removing the international students from the calculations, and using the middle-of-the-range estimates, the conclusion: The top-scoring 19,000 American students each year are competing in top-20 admissions for about 12,000 spots out of 44,000 total. Among the Ivy League + MIT + Stanford, they’re competing for about 6,500 out of 15,800 total spots.”

It’s well known that

Admission to top universities is very competitive in America and even top SAT scores (1550+ out of 1600) paired with a 4.0 GPA doesn’t guarantee admission to a top school.
Even top universities take into account race-based affirmative action, athletic recruitment, “Dean’s Interest List”-type tracking systems for children of donors or notable persons, and legacy preference

... (read 1668 more words →)

•••

Why Have Sentence Lengths Decreased?

Arjun Panickssery

10mo

“In the loveliest town of all, where the houses were white and high and the elms trees were green and higher than the houses, where the front yards were wide and pleasant and the back yards were bushy and worth finding out about, where the streets sloped down to the stream and the stream flowed quietly under the bridge, where the lawns ended in orchards and the orchards ended in fields and the fields ended in pastures and the pastures climbed the hill and disappeared over the top toward the wonderful wide sky, in this loveliest of all towns Stuart stopped to get a drink of sarsaparilla.”
— 107-word sentence from Stuart Little

... (read 1036 more words →)

292

Explaining British Naval Dominance During the Age of Sail

Arjun Panickssery

11mo

The other day I discussed how high monitoring costs can explain the emergence of “aristocratic” systems of governance:

Aristocracy and Hostage Capital
Arjun Panickssery · Jan 8
There's a conventional narrative by which the pre-20th century aristocracy was the "old corruption" where civil and military positions were distributed inefficiently due to nepotism until the system was replaced by a professional civil service after more enlightened thinkers prevailed ...

An element of Douglas Allen’s argument that I didn’t expand on was the British Navy. He has a separate paper called “The British Navy Rules” that goes into more detail on why he thinks institutional incentives made them successful from 1670 and 1827 (i.e. for most of the... (read 1167 more words →)

216

•••

Notes on the Presidential Election of 1836

Arjun Panickssery

In 1836, Andrew Jackson had served two terms. In the presidential election, incumbent vice president Martin Van Buren defeated several Whig candidates.

Historical Background

By 1836, there were 25 states. States were often added in pairs (one slave and one free) to maintain political balance: Mississippi and Indiana, Alabama and Illinois, Missouri and Maine. Arkansas had just been added as a slave state in June 1836 and Michigan was due to be added in January 1837, making an exact 13-13 balance.

The population was 13 million with a center of mass in present-day West Virginia (part of Virginia then). Only New York City had more than 200,000 people, and Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Boston didn’t even... (read 1834 more words →)

You should read Hobbes, Locke, Hume, and Mill via EarlyModernTexts.com

Arjun Panickssery

Many thinkers worth reading wrote in past centuries:

1600s: Bacon, Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz
1700s: Berkeley, Hume, Rousseau, Smith, Kant, Burke, Bentham
1800s: Schopenhauer, Mill, Sidgwick

Some of them wrote in English and their texts are usually presented in the original, even when they use archaic spelling, punctuation, and style. (This is in contrast to foreign-language works which are often translated to a modern style.)

For example, in the past there were more uses of the comma, such as

Before any relative clause:
- Dickens: “The objects he had lately pursued, turned worthless beside her”
- Melville: “This august dignity I treat of, is not the dignity of kings”
Before any clause starting with “that” for any reason:
- Austen: “It is a truth

... (read 758 more words →)

Five Recent AI Tutoring Studies

Arjun Panickssery

Last week some results were released from a 6-week study using AI tutors in Nigeria. Below I summarize the results of that and four other recent studies about AI tutoring (the dates reflect when the study was conducted rather than when papers were published):

Summer 2024 — 15–16-year olds in Nigeria
They had 800 students total. The treatment group studied with GPT-based Microsoft Copilot twice weekly for six weeks, studying English. They were just provided an initial prompt to start chatting—teachers had a minimal “orchestra conductor” role—but they achieved “the equivalent of two years of typical learning in just six weeks.”
Spring 2024 — K-12 Title I schools in the South
They had 1,800 K-12 students

... (read 454 more words →)

To test out Cursor for fun I asked models whether various words of different lengths were "long" and measured the relative probability of "Yes" vs "No" answers to get a P(long) out of them. But when I use scrambled words of the same length and letter distribution, GPT 3.5 doesn't think any of them are long.

Update: I got Claude to generate many words with connotations related to long ("mile" or "anaconda" or "immeasurable") and short ("wee" or "monosyllabic" or "inconspicuous" or "infinitesimal") It looks like the models have a slight bias toward the connotation of the word.

What's the actual probability of casting a decisive vote in a presidential election (by state)?

I remember the Gelman/Silver/Edlin "What is the probability your vote will make a difference?" (2012) methodology:

1. Let E be the number of electoral votes in your state. We estimate the probability that these are necessary for an electoral college win by computing the proportion of the 10,000 simulations for which the electoral vote margin based on all the other states is less than E, plus 1/2 the proportion of simulations for which the margin based on all other states equals E. (This last part assumes implicitly that we have no idea who would win in the event of

... (read more)

FiveThirtyEight released their prediction today that Biden currently has a 53% of winning the election | Tweet

The other day I asked:

Should we anticipate easy profit on Polymarket election markets this year? Its markets seem to think that
Biden will die or otherwise withdraw from the race with 23% likelihood
Biden will fail to be the Democratic nominee for whatever reason at 13% likelihood
either Biden or Trump will fail to win nomination at their respective conventions with 14% likelihood
Biden will win the election with only 34% likelihood
Even if gas fees take a few percentage points off we should expect to make money trading on some of this stuff, right (the money is only locked up for 5 months)? And maybe there are cheap ways to transfer into and out of Polymarket?

Probably worthwhile to think about this further, including ways to make leveraged bets.

Should we anticipate easy profit on Polymarket election markets this year? Its markets seem to think that

Biden will die or otherwise withdraw from the race with 23% likelihood
Biden will fail to be the Democratic nominee for whatever reason at 13% likelihood
either Biden or Trump will fail to win nomination at their respective conventions with 14% likelihood
Biden will win the election with only 34% likelihood

Even if gas fees take a few percentage points off we should expect to make money trading on some of this stuff, right (the money is only locked up for 5 months)? And maybe there are cheap ways to transfer into and out of Polymarket?

Paid-only Substack posts get you money from people who are willing to pay for the posts, but reduce both (a) views on the paid posts themselves and (b) related subscriber growth (which could in theory drive longer-term profit).

So if two strategies are

entice users with free posts but keep the best posts behind a paywall
make the best posts free but put the worst posts behind the paywall

then regarding (b) above. the second strategy has less risk of prematurely stunting subscriber growth, since the best posts are still free. Regarding (a), it's much less bad to lose view counts on your worst posts.

[Book Review] The 8 Mansion Murders by Takemaru Abiko

As a kid I read a lot of the Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot canon. Recently I learned that there's a Japanese genre of honkaku ("orthodox") mystery novels whose gimmick is a fastidious devotion to the "fair play" principles of Golden Age detective fiction, where the author is expected to provide everything that the attentive reader would need to come up with the solution himself. It looks like a lot of these honkaku mysteries include diagrams of relevant locations, genre-savvy characters, and a puzzle-like aesthetic. A bunch have been translated by Locked Room International.

The title of The 8 Mansion Murders doesn't refer to the... (read more)

Ask LLMs for feedback on "the" rather than "my" essay/response/code, to get more critical feedback.

Seems true anecdotally, and prompting GPT-4 to give a score between 1 and 5 for ~100 poems/stories/descriptions resulted in an average score of 4.26 when prompted with "Score my ..." versus an average score of 4.0 when prompted with "Score the ..." (code).

Quick Take: People should not say the word "cruxy" when already there exists the word "crucial." | Twitter

Crucial sometimes just means "important" but has a primary meaning of "decisive" or "pivotal" (it also derives from the word "crux"). This is what's meant by a "crucial battle" or "crucial role" or "crucial game (in a tournament)" and so on.

So if Alice and Bob agree that Alice will work hard on her upcoming exam, but only Bob thinks that she will fail her exam—because he thinks that she will study the wrong topics (h/t @Saul Munn)—then they might have this conversation:

Bob: You'll fail
Alice: I won't, because I'll study hard.
Bob: That's not crucial to our disagreement.

LESSWRONG
LW

LESSWRONG
LW

Arjun Panickssery

Why Have Sentence Lengths Decreased?

To Understand History, Keep Former Population Distributions In Mind

Explaining British Naval Dominance During the Age of Sail

Overcoming Bias Anthology

Arjun Panickssery

Frontier LLM Race/Sex Exchange Rates

What Does It Mean to "Write Like You Talk"?

To Understand History, Keep Former Population Distributions In Mind

Three Months In, Evaluating Three Rationalist Cases for Trump

American College Admissions Doesn't Need to Be So Competitive

Why Have Sentence Lengths Decreased?

Explaining British Naval Dominance During the Age of Sail

Arjun Panickssery

Why Have Sentence Lengths Decreased?

To Understand History, Keep Former Population Distributions In Mind

Explaining British Naval Dominance During the Age of Sail

Overcoming Bias Anthology

Arjun Panickssery

Frontier LLM Race/Sex Exchange Rates

What Does It Mean to "Write Like You Talk"?

To Understand History, Keep Former Population Distributions In Mind

Three Months In, Evaluating Three Rationalist Cases for Trump

American College Admissions Doesn't Need to Be So Competitive

Why Have Sentence Lengths Decreased?

Explaining British Naval Dominance During the Age of Sail

Historical Background