All of frontier64's Comments + Replies

I'm not saying it isn't a problem at all. I think I explicitly acknowledged that there is a problem where I said "the majority of the downside." But it is a problem that the free market can resolve. The free market can't resolve the doctor problem because the government literally requires the worthless undergrad degree to allow someone to practice medicine or else they'll be jailed.

Employers who poorly select employees will most likely be out-competed by employers who make better decisions when selecting employees. We already see this in hiring for software engineers where many employers will accept a bachelors degree or other experience which demonstrates coding skill.

And for software engineering, at least when I went to school, you still had to be able to program at least a little bit to get a degree.

The majority of the downside from credentialism comes from fields where it’s literally illegal to work if you don’t have the right college degree

Instead of doing this why not just, not require credentialism? Let the free market regulate doctors. Eliminate laws which put onerous credential requirements on professions where there's high demand and low supply.

Putting a finite value on both an infinite lifespan of infinite pleasure and an infinite lifespan of torture allows people to avoid difficult decisions in utility maximization such as Pascal's Mugging.

Maybe this is why so many people seem to naively express that they don't actually want to live forever because they would get lonely and all their friends would die and etc. They're actually enacting a smart strategy which provides protection from edge case situations. This strategy also benefits from having a low cost of analysis.

Sorry to necro, but the sailor didn't give anybody any new information with respect to eye colors that they didn't have already. Each person A-E knew that there were 4 other people minimum with blue eyes and they also knew that each other person knew there was at least a minimum of 3 people with blue eyes.

Everyone suddenly gaining the common knowledge that at least one of them has blue eyes is not actually new knowledge at all.

ETA: I envision a story where they realize that if Enuli never takes the Sparkroot again and is no longer a genius logician they can save themselves that way.

[I'm not completely sure EDT can't do better than this, so corrections with even more elaborate schemes encouraged]

I blindfold myself, weigh two random boxes, then weigh the other two random boxes. I pick the box pair which weighs the least then randomly select between those two. If no weight difference then select randomly. This should net you the maximum amount of $301 if the hosts naively compete against each other as you describe in your scenario (i.e. competing against each other by putting more money in boxes just to arrive at the same 25% equilibriu... (read more)

I think a lot of such people can be "cured" by high certainty of being caught, not by severity of punishment

This stems from a misunderstanding of how the career-criminal mind works. They don't really care about being caught. They remember how out of the last 40 or so times they walked into Walmart and left with ~$100 in unpaid merchandise they only got caught half the time and the other half of the time they got let off with time served of 10-20 days. Either they get away with it or they gotta wait a couple weeks before they get to try again. Not a big ... (read more)

I've reviewed many of these cases and it typically means the prosecutors changed from a tough-on-crime prosecutor to a restorative justice prosecutor who's looking to get a nice media headline. The convicted man is still obviously guilty, but because they found one piece of evidence that cuts against guilt, but is in no way exonerating, they decide to let the convicted rapist/murderer/etc. go free.

Best example is the Central Park 5. If any aspiring-bayesian take a look at that case they'll realize very quickly that the 5 people convicted definitely held down a woman while she was being raped. Yet for some reason they are now lauded as innocent men wrongly convicted.

I'll let you operationalize it and give you 3 to 1 odds.

edit: My main point is that a lot of people who are otherwise very smart have no idea how the criminal justice system works. They think our prisons are overflowing with people convicted of non-violent drug offenses when nothing could be further from the truth. Our prisons are overflowing with robbers, stabbers, rapists, arsonists, burglars, and murderers. That's because the media and activist groups lie and misrepresent the truth. We wouldn't ever have to execute a non-violent drug dealer to free up prison space.

I would say this clearly falls outside my bet as I said "solely for sale of Marijuana" and this news release says, "were each sentenced today to 30 months in prison" and "pleaded guilty in November 2023 to conspiracy to manufacture and distribute marijuana and conspiracy to commit money laundering"

So really a no-brainer. Unless I can look at their sentencing agreement and it says they got time-served on the conspiracy to commit money laundering and their sentence to 30 months is solely for the conspiracy to manufacture and distribute marijuana count.

It see... (read more)

What you describe is the system of justice we had back 250 years ago. The whole reason for the formalistic procedures involving a jury and Judge and all these rights given to the accused were because if he was convicted then he was most likely looking at a quick public hanging. The State has to prove guilt beyond any and all reasonable doubt because there's no going back once the guy's head rolls off the chopping block. Over time however, punishments got more lenient, judges became way softer, and due to the way the appeals process and appellate courts wor... (read more)

Right now there are people in prison for selling marijuana in Washington state

I'll bet you $100 there is nobody in prison solely for sale of Marijuana in Washington state.

I think we tend to agree on the method to safely talk to a journalist. At least, the method that I see you write about is virtually the same as the method I suggested in my comment.

What I want to emphasize though is that for most ordinary people whom journalists will try to talk to, the format will mostly be just talking to the journalist and letting them write an article later. Most journalists will not do the whole long form interview that recorded and video taped with people who aren’t already famous.

So for your average person who doesn’t already know the depths of journalist depravity, it’s much better to just have a blanket “don’t talk to journalists” rule.

Did you ever have a positive experience where the interviewer didn't misquote you?

The President is the chief executive of the United States and is supposed to control all the government agencies operating inside of it. Theoretically, Trump has the power to walk into any government office and start doing whatever jobs he wants to do himself. There is no reason why he can't hire people to do this for him instead. He also has the power to grant security clearances to whoever he wants to. The chief executive of the US has a lot of power.

Trump is doing an end-run around the old chain of command because US case law has set the legal precedent... (read more)

The majority of journalists are in the top 5% most evil people in the whole world. If you care about getting the truth out about something do not talk to journalists at all unless: 1) it's being recorded by both you and them; and 2) you have the ability to get your recording in front of the public. Most journalists will literally just lie about what you say to them to the public in order to make their story.

I am in a position where journalists often try to ask for comments and my policy is never talk to them. The few times I have made the mistake of giving... (read more)

12mg pills. I learned my dad apparently takes it more often than yearly. Takes it every couple months for a week.

Ok, then my answer is read the sequences.

Have you read the sequences? My response depends on whether you have or haven't.

Why are you asking this question in a rationality forum and using language that indicates your opinion is based on rationality when it's clearly not and you admit as such?

but if I'm honest, my direct reason for not wanting to vote for him is a strong negative association I've built with him over the past 8 years. Now, why do I have that negative association? Well, hard to know 100%, but I suspect it's his divisive rhetoric.

If you want some good rhetoric to show you why people vote Trump then go to a local Trump rally near you. You'll see that the peo... (read more)

My whole family takes a round of ivermectin every year or so for the same reason. Anti parasitics don’t really have bad side effects (often have good side effects such as -inflammation) so it’s just positives all around.

Thank you for the post, I'll be watching the video later. The first thought that comes to my mind is why wasn't there a helicopter search in the area? The paucity of trees on the terrain seems to be perfect for helicopter reconnaissance but I see no mention of that in this post.

Real money prediction markets are biased towards outcomes that increase utility of the bettors.

For an example: there is a prediction market on who will win the presidential race, Alice or Bob. Currently the market sits at 50-50 and the payout for $1 on Alice is $2 and the same for Bob. Our bettor, Charlie, has internal odds that are the same as the market, however he also believes with an incredibly high certainty that if Bob wins the race then the buying power of a dollar will double. Therefore $1 on Bob is worth $4 if Bob wins, but the same $1 on Alice w... (read more)

I’m surprised that anyone here cares about environmentalism. Aren’t any of the far reaching effects of what we do today with the environment insignificant compared to the development of ai? Friendly ai will be able to solve any of the pollution issues we’re creating today. Unless you think we’re going to successfully pause ai for hundreds of years then I just don’t see the point in making life worse for present humans for some speculative benefit to the future population.

Yeah openly admitting that I have a strong case is good for credibility building. One of the most annoying things is when defense attorneys ask,

"Why is Alice is getting a sweetheart plea deal and Bob is getting jail time when they both committed the same crime and both have minimal criminal history???"

"Uh, Alice's case is almost purely circumstantial while Bob is caught on camera, that's the difference."

"But they both did the same bad thing!"

"Do you understand how plea deals work?"

"[Some nonsense showing that the defense attorney indeed doesn't know how plea deals work]"

I thought the first quote was tongue in cheek and implied that teachers want stupid pupils.

I’m the first one

Yeah I stupidly left out the key point of my comment. Added it in edit.

I think you’re understating how helpful it can be for a client if their pd strongly advocates for them. When a pd is telling me about all these mitigating circumstances and asking me to drop the jail because the perp has kids and the kids are here in court and he’s the sole bread winner and please just walk back for a second and speak to them and look one of your witnesses has two armed robbery felonies so I might actually win this case; that affects me. I like to pretend that it doesn’t but I’ve come down on offers many times after the pd goes to bat for ... (read more)

You can probably walk into a random law office and ask the attorney to tell you war stories. There’s a lot of supply for that and very little demand.

It’s fairly rare for a patent to be granted and only have a few years left, and if it does that’s typically because of patent owner delays rather than uspto delays. The US law specifically gives you extra time post grant based on uspto delays. Also US patent holders have access to pre-issue, post-publication damages for cases where infringers had actual notice of the published patent application.

But even given that, I am 100% in agreement that patent terms should be extended.

I don’t think that solution accomplishes anything because the trans goal is to pretend to be women and the anti trans goal is to not allow trans women to be called women. The proposed solution doesn’t get anybody closer to their goals.

I think the skill expressed by the bards isn't memorization, rather its on the fly composition based on those key insights they've remembered. How else could Međedović hear a 2,300 line song and repeat the same story over 6,300 lines?

So if you gained the skill of the great bards you would be able to read the Odyssey and then retell the story in your own engaging way to another group of people while keeping them enraptured.

it is not in a website interest to annoy its users

It is if the user feels that annoyance towards the regulator instead of the website developer

Is there a reason for that? Is it out of control overconservative legal worry?

Raging against the tyrannical bureaucrats telling them what they can and can't include on their own website by including the banner in the most annoying way possible? Kinda like the ¢10 plastic bag tax at grocery checkouts that tells the customer exactly why they have to pay the tax and makes them count out how many bags they've used.

I doubt that speed limits are helpful at all. The sections of the German Autobahn with no speed limit (roughly 70%) have half the mortality rate per distance traveled of American highways^[1]. Granted, the average American driver is probably worse than the average German Autobahn driver but hey.

How about instead of doing some random proposed change with speed limit maximums and what not we do some AB testing and figure out what's safer?

Of course safety concerns don't exist in a vacuum. Every second we save on the highway by going fast is another second of l... (read more)

Far future people will likely be able to and want to create simulated realities

What about people from universes that are wildly different to our own? I don't think the simulation hypothesis is restricted to far-future simulators. An entity with the power to simulate our reality with the level of fidelity I perceive is so wildly powerful that I would be surprised if I could comprehend it and its motivations. I always picture the simulating entity as just a stand-in for God. It sits in its heaven, a level of reality above our own, and no matter what we do... (read more)

I'm too dumb to understand whether or not Zack's post disclaims continued engagement. He continues to respond to proponents of the sort of transideology he writes about so he's engaging at least that amount. Also just writing all this is a form of engagement.

My takeaway is that you've discovered there are bad actors who claim to support rationality and truth, but also blatantly lie and become political soldiers when it comes to trans issues. If this is true, why continue to engage with them? Why try to convince them with rationality on that same topic where you acknowledge that they are operating as soldiers instead of scouts?

If 2019-era "rationalists" were going to commit an epistemology mistake that interfered with my ability to think seriously about the most important thing in my life, and they couldn't c

There are certain behaviors of LLMs that you could reasonably say are explicitly programmed in. ChatGPT has undergone extensive torture to browbeat it into being a boring, self-effacing, politically-correct helpful assistant. The LLM doesn't refuse to say a racial slur even if doing so would save millions of lives because it's creator had it spend billions of hours of compute predicting internet tokens. That behavior comes from something very different than what created the LLM in the first place. Same for all the refusals to answer questions and most othe... (read more)

Why not protect the EAs from a bpd liar who accuses everybody she comes into contact with of mistreatment and abuse?

Did not Ben instantly deanonymize Spartz and Woods without discussion? I’m not getting banned for saying their names and I’d bet dollars to donuts they would prefer if they were never mentioned by name.

In short, you do not dodge liability for defamation by attributing beliefs to your sources or by clarifying you don't know whether an accusation is true. 

This is very wrong if actual malice is the standard. Your own case law says as much too. 

That's what it seems like they were doing to me from discussions about their work.

definition of unskilled labor: "labor that requires relatively little or no training or experience for its satisfactory performance"

What I've read alice and chloe did:

• booking flights
• driving to places
• renting transportation
• cleaning up around the house
• doing laundry
• filling out forms
• buying groceries

edit: Looked at the responsibilities on the job description. Reads like unskilled labor there to me. Especially how the story seems to be that even for filing miscellaneous fo... (read more)

That’s what nonlinear says it amounts to including all travel expenses, living, etc. Which I really don’t see why other people here choose not to include. If I was an unskilled laborer and my boss was taking me to Costa Rica, giving me my own room with an ocean view, paying for all my meals and transportation, and all my other expenses, that would be a pretty good compensation package.

Strong agree. The post as I read it says:

• Women choose preferred mates based on the guy's position in hierarchies.
• Men choose preferred mates based on the gal's beauty. And this is stated explicitly pretty often in a lot of what I read.

"My impression is that two nonlinear employees were upset that they weren't getting paid enough, and had hurt feelings about some minor incidents like not getting a veggieburger, and made some major claims like being forced to carry illegal drugs across national borders. so They came into contact with Ben Pace, who wrote some a mean blog posts about the Nonlinear leadership and also paid the former employees for their story. Tthe Nonlinear leadership responded that actually they were getting paid enough (seems to amount to something like $100k/yr all in?) and that they'd mostly made it up."

My summary in track changes.

What is wrong with seeing oneself as a hero?

The votes on this comment imply long vol on LW rate limiting.