All of ErioirE's Comments + Replies

This is made more difficult because a large portion of those running trials do not do the data management and/or analysis in-house, instead outsourcing those tasks to CROs (Contract Research Organizations). Inter-organization communication barriers certainly don't make the disconnect any easier to resolve.

I was an observer for the conversations that (I suspect) contributed to your opinion here. My perspective is that it seems in large part differences in communication style preferences, rather than object-level disagreements. He seems to enjoy the catharsis of being able to emphatically state positions that are non-politically correct in general discourse, which is a sentiment I understand. I don't recall him responding with anything I would classify as insults or vitriol, though those are to some degree subjective. 
One person's insult is another's fri... (read more)

Has someone made Manifold markets for these predictions? (As of writing this comment I have not found any and I would rather not do it myself since I don't typically keep tabs on those respective metrics.)

People wouldn’t let there be things constantly competing for their attention, so the future won’t be like that, he says.

Sufficiently absurd news is indistinguishable from satire? Approximate corollary to "sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from news"

Oops, I was unclear^[1], when I said "all algorithmic feed platforms" I was referring to those with opaque large-scale engagement-incentivized algorithms. Merely having an algorithmically parsed feed was not the sole load-bearing attribute.
Platforms like this aren't directly dependent on mass engagement in the same way e.g. no ad revenue, enforcing minimum standards of quality etc.
If it ever became big enough/moderation policies changed enough I would have to find other sites.
In it's current state I don't mind LessWrong's feed. The rate of content generatio... (read more)

A few years ago I distanced myself from all algorithmic feed platforms and I've certainly found it to be worth it. A few Discord servers and some forums like LW are effectively my "social media" and they are quite sufficient for the purpose.

This was interesting, but I notice I'm confused about what the goal was. 
I'm also confused why anyone would want any more numbers pre/sufix-ing their username than the minimum required to claim one that hasn't been taken.

Necessity may be the mother of invention, but at this point we're pretty sure the father was Laziness.

For complex topics on which I do not have deep knowledge E.G. AI Alignment, I find my opinion is easily swayed by any sufficiently well-written, plausible-sounding argument. And so I recognize that I do not have the necessary knowledge and perspective to add value to the discussion and I purposefully avoid making any confident claims on the subject until if and when I decide to dedicate significant effort to closing the inferential distance.

In a similar vein how does Spirulina look? I hear it is very efficient in terms of protein per sq meter per year compared to using the same space to raise grazing animals.

I've had similar experiences. 
For me personally, in cases where:

• The Technical Truth is not my business: go ahead and lie to me and/or omit sensitive details if possible.
• — is a much more complex thing that I likely don't have the foundational understanding to grasp: tell me a portion and then check for comprehension, if I fail that just say some vague 'it's complicated' and give me some ideas of what to study if I really want to know.
• — would probably be disturbing for me to know and I am not likely to be negatively affected by not knowing: You can lie

This seems like a somewhat difficult use case for LLMs. It may be a mistake to think of them as a database of the *entire contents* of the training data. Perhaps instead think of them as compressed amalgamations of the the general patterns in the training data? I'm not terribly surprised that random obscure quotes can get optimized away.

We should have a game where we create a list of interesting questions and then have a few notable writers here answer them, but then also generate some responses from LLMs (with prompts tailored to getting a less-obviously AI response).
Writers would get points for how well they fool people and it has all sorts of fun mind games like 
"This has an AI-smelling mistake, but is it the human faking a mistake they know an AI might make?"

Government is also reliant on its citizens to not violently protest, which would happen if it got to the point you describe.

The idealist in me hopes that eventually those with massive gains in productivity/wealth from automating everything would want to start doing things for the good of humanity™, right? 
...Hopefully that point is long before large scale starvation.

Unfortunately, when dealing with tasks such as software development it is nowhere near as linear as that. 

The meta-tasks of each additional dev needing to be brought up to speed on the intricacies of the project, as well as lost efficiency from poor communication/waiting on others to finish things means you usually get diminishing (or even inverse) returns from adding more people to the project.
See: The Mythical Man Month

I would love to see it happen. It'd be nice to have more stuff in the air removing Co2 and absorbing sunlight. 
I'm curious, what got you thinking of floating algae?

I would estimate the relative difficulty of
[colonizing Himalayan mountain slopes vs free-floating (pelagic?) life at a similar altitude] to that of
[adapting to the salinity of the Great Salt Lake, vs that of the Dead Sea]. The former can support brine shrimp and microorganisms, the latter only microorganisms. Equivalently, the slopes can support simple multicellular life on down, while in t... (read more)

While I cannot say that such an organism is impossible, here are a couple obstacles that it would need to overcome:

• Sparse nutrient availability - In the ocean, phytoplankton growth is primarily gated by the available nutrients in the water column (particularly phosphates, nitrates and iron compounds, in addition to oxygen iirc). Air has significantly less capacity to transport nutrients compared to how nutrients in the ocean can be both dissolved in water and present in particulate matter.
• Sub-optimal temperatures - Even at the equator, the atmospheric temp

Another useful heuristic is that electrical devices that have been UL listed^[1] are typically better quality than ones without. This is particularly relevant for cheap/disposable items like light bulbs where the cheapest ones tend to expire long before the expected lifetime of the actual LED. (I'm looking at you 'bargain' Walmart LEDs that died after less than a year of regular use!)

Note that UL is a for-profit organization. I have never heard anything bad about it but perverse incentives could create conflicts of interest in any number of ways in the... (read more)

I may have distracted from the point by using the race field as my example, my point was primarily to show how deviating from controlled terminology is a waste of time and money.

Allowing more possible choices is not always better in clinical trials. The more data you have, the more degrees of freedom you have in the data and the more spurious correlations you are going to pick up.

Controlled terminology outline what standard terms are available to be used for a particular field. Studies are not required to put all available terms in the dropdown. For instan... (read more)

Vestigial products and policies also tend to have an 'immune response', generated when parties who benefit^[1] from the status quo actively resist attempts to change it. For example violin bow manufacturers could hypothetically fear lower sales if synthetic bows captured a greater market share, due to them not needing to be replaced as frequently.

1. ^{^}

   or even believe they benefit

A couple minor edit suggestions:
Footnote [1] seems to have a missed "opportunity" after "every" in:

 I can't help but notice people using these terms at every, no matter

To me, an individual's own inability to notice an exceedingly clear absence of any foundational body of knowledge behind anyone's particular persuasion tactics is much more representative of that particular individual's level of understanding with regards to persuasion itself.

To put it bluntly, this statement feels like several related sentences were put into a hydraulic press and... (read more)

This seems like a useful and accurate overview of the general state of data utilization in many organizations.

In my work as a software engineer at a clinical research company, I'm frequently able to watch as my coworkers struggle to convince our clients (companies running clinical trials) that yes, it is critical to make sure all of available data entry options are locked to industry standardized terms FROM THE BEGINNING else they will be adding thousands of hours of data cleaning on the tail end of the study.

An example of an obstacle to this: Clinicians r... (read more)

Strange variant of Monte Hall problem I managed to confuse myself with:
You are presented with the three doors but do not know if you will have a chance to switch later. You know the host can decide to open one of the losing doors and give you the opportunity to switch or not, and does not wish to give away the prize.

If the player chooses the correct door first he is incentivized to open one and give you the option to switch, but since the player is informed of the rules that may convince the player not to switch.
If the player chooses an incorrect door firs... (read more)

I don't think most of us mind clickbait so much as clickbait-and-switch, where the content is not what the headline promises. In this case, the 'bait' headline was more or less justified so I don't mind.

Because absent their monopoly on certain types of advertising, competitors could offer the same value for much less. In retrospect I suppose the actual problem is then the monopoly power not strictly the effort from the seller or lack thereof. I'll add to the OP to reflect that/cross out what I no longer endorse.

I don't agree with your labor theory of value - there are many complex and individual valuations that are quite valid.  One can easily argue that the limited resource of buyer attention is worth a fair bit of money to secure, and the percentage-of-sale is just a nice way of charging more to people with more money.

I could be convinced to have a more nuanced understanding. I'm confident I have not read enough of the writing on the topic. What would you recommend?

We might be able to package this up into a nice tidy term and call it "volume insensitivity". See also: The un-intuitiveness of the square-cube law in regards to scaling things up or down.

I find I'm much less adept at first person three dimensional video games than two dimensional ones. This may have more to do with how in e.g. platformers, everything that can effect the player is in your field of view. Not so in three dimensional games where you can get, say, stabbed in the back and never so much as glimpse what got you. Hollow Knight is a much easier gam... (read more)

The National Association of Realtors is a rent-seeking organization. This is because commissions should be strictly proportional to the amount of work required for the specific task able to change with market forces rather than an arbitrary percentage of the value of a particular property, since the effort needed to sell a property is not necessarily proportional to the value of said property.

I'm disgusted that they've managed to make a percentage of property value the accepted norm for commissions. How were people suckered into that rather than demanding per-hour rates?

Edited to reflect insight gained from comments.

The 'live under a rock' strategy has been quite effective for me. I stopped following most political commentary sources several years ago and I've never regretted it.

I avoid political conversations among my family and coworkers because the overwhelming majority are strongly religious and conservative. With beliefs so different from mine discussion is not likely to be productive nor pleasant.

I see, I suppose I interpreted 'scaling' a bit less generally. In that case I agree.

Also I just noticed you mentioned flywheels, which are one of my favorite pieces of technology. I long for someone to make a phone with a flywheel battery as a meme/gag gift.

This has parallels with how the factory-building game Factorio presents things. The thing that makes Factorio fun^[1] is how it abstracts away those pesky prohibitively complex nuances of manufacturing & automation so that everything can feasibly be automated quickly and scaled ad infinitum. For example: 

• The conveyor belts run on magic (they don't require any power, which isn't really explained considering every other electrical thing in the game requires pseudo-realistic levels of electrical input.)
• The assembling machines (essentially Autofac

Obviously, there would need to be a lot of scaling before it would make sense to internally produce computer chips.

More than mere scaling, this would require equipment orders of magnitude more precise and the necessary ultra-clean environment and all the minutiae those entail. Microchip manufacturing is Hard.

Interesting. I prefer working on smaller projects where I do the entire thing myself from start to finish. This is mostly because I don't particularly enjoy familiarizing myself with somebody else's code.
Although if I get stuck I will ask my fellow devs for input, and I enjoy showing them whatever cool thing I did once it's polished.

At my current workplace I fill the role of ad hoc programmer, where I'm the guy to ask if somebody needs some small tedious thing automated or parsed I'm the one who can get it done quickly.

I also don't prefer making software i... (read more)

Very cool analysis!

A more natural way might be to say that in this world, there is no sampling-with-replacement, there is only sampling-without-replacement.

That is nicer. I don't have enough background in statistics to have fully internalized the regular terms for things. I end up tabooing myself and using more words than necessary.

There are probably weird consequences in thermodynamics & physics from these hidden variables too, but I'm not sure what.

That's why I hedged with "Assuming it doesn't break causality or similarly hazardous anti-fun effects".... (read more)

So if you're aware of Gambler's Verity and try to study it, then it cancels itself out!

This is fantastic!

I'm not sure the best way conflicting expectations could resolve. It could be a flat vote or have magnitude proportional to the amount of observations...Or even based on relative emotional investment! What could possibly go wrong?

Other good effects: nobody expects to get cancer, so I guess it doesn't happen?  

Things happen exactly as in reality except the existence of expectation applies a base-rate multiplier. So there would be more disease because e.g. hypochondriacs would be more likely than normal to contract disease.

There are many ways conflicting expectations could resolve, I'm not sure which would make the most sense. It could be a flat vote or have magnitude proportional to the amount of observations.

If it was advantageous to use structures of those inside cells for reactions somehow, then some organisms would already do that.

Not necessarily. The space of advantageous biologically possible structural configurations seems to me to be intuitively larger than the space of useful configurations currently known to be in use. 
In order for a structure to be evolutionarily feasible, it must not only be advantageous but also there must be a path of individually beneficial (or at minimum not harmful) small steps in between it and currently existing structur... (read more)

Haha makes sense. I wasn't sure what the demographic distribution was likely to be.

You're right, "objectively" doesn't fit as well in that statement as I thought.

That is how I intended 'convincing' to be interpreted.

For almost every category of X, you'll be judged hard for your preferences, even if you didn't consciously choose any of them.

It depends on if X is a demographic/group or a variable. "I don't want to date people who are [uneducated/from a drastically different cultural background]" sounds a lot less politically correct than "I want to date people with whom I estimate a high probability of mutual relationship satisfaction." be... (read more)

The rule "90% of everything is garbage" applies, but recent moral values are rejecting any sorts of hierarchies, even between functional and dysfunctional countries, cultures, cities, religions, values, etc.

When society suppresses attempts to evaluate concepts or situations as objectively better or worse than alternatives, is it any surprise that polarization increases? 
If there are no commonly agreed upon benchmarks to calibrate against it becomes a war of whoever can shout loudest/most convincingly.

I think a significant contributing factor that makes 'simple' questions in some contexts prohibitively difficult to answer is the lack of True Availability of the information being requested.

In this case, I'm defining True Availability^[1] as the requested content being already prepared and organized into the correct format and grouped together, needing no further processing other than finding it. Conditional Availability would be when you know how to obtain the information, but it requires some degree of processing and filtering to be ready for consum... (read more)

As a software developer who works on object-level automation every day, I'm intimidated by the difficulty of attempting to definitively quantify 'profit from automated tasks' in a useful way.

For example, how do we define 'automation'? "A task that formerly needed to be done by a human that now doesn't need to be"? A printing press is automation by some interpretations of that insufficient definition.

Some changes in efficiency also have similar effects on productivity without being 'automation' (although much less scalable), for example a user that becomes ... (read more)

I'm in a similar situation. I have very little self control with sweets/candy if I have them available. I can far more easily stop myself from buying them in the first place.
If I allow myself to buy a bag of candy I've already lost and I will consume all of it in a matter of hours/days.

How much of the developed world's economy is devoted to aesthetic personalization of products rather than accomplishing the essential functions of [product here]?
I am not saying aesthetics or personalization are 'bad', however I suspect that if the cost were quantified and demonstrated to people along with examples of more productive things that could be done with that money, many people might prefer forgoing some of our more wasteful things.

Example:
The cost of having thousands of different styles of sink faucet, instead of a small number of highly efficie... (read more)

There's soft skills in "communicating to others without hurting them", (i.e. "tact")

What about the situation in which:

• One has highly religious relatives who are somewhat less cognitively functional that oneself
• You wish you could help them have a map more closely coupled to reality
• You are confident that you have a good chance of convincing them of reality, but not that the knowledge would actually be a net gain for them to have, since:
• They are so invested in their beliefs that the realization of falsehood might do irreparable psychological damage

Yes, but it thankfully for me only lasted a couple of hours and they didn't start keeping track until near the end.

I had a very similar experience as a teenager after a mild concussion from falling on ice. According to my family, I would 'reboot' every few minutes and ask the same few questions exactly. It got burdensome enough that they put up a note on the inside of my bedroom door with something along the lines of:
"You are having amnesia"
"You hit your head and got a mild concussion"
"You've already been to the ER, they said you're likely to be fine after a few hours and it is safe to sleep."

The entire experience was (reportedly) very stressful to me due to disorientation.

Yes.

For example: The common saying, "Anything worth doing is worth doing [well/poorly]" needs more qualifiers. As it is, the opposite respective advice can often be just as useful. I.E. not very.

Better V1: "The cost/utility ratio of beneficial actions at minimum cost are often less favorable than they would be with greater investment."

Better V2: "If an action is beneficial, a flawed attempt may be preferable to none at all."

However, these are too wordy to be pithy and in pop culture transmission accuracy is generally sacrificed in favor of catchiness.