"end of the world" images make me wonder if Dall-E thinks the world is flat
Interesting. Though I think extremes represent fewer degrees of freedom; where certain traits/characteristics dominate, and heuristics can better model behaviour. The "typical" person has all the different traits pushing/pulling, and so fewer variables you can ignore. i.e. the typical person might be more representative of hard-mode.
I think identifying the blind spots of the typical AI engineer/architect is an interesting and potentially important goal. Though I'm not sure I follow the reasoning behind identifying the opposite as the path to "modeling the desires of the typical person."?
...I think investigating this would be of interest to people working in AI alignment and whose ultimate goal and whose ultimate goal is improving the condition of humanity in general. Understanding the needs and wants of the subset of humans most unlike themselves would likely help in modeling the desires
So trying to see what effect immigration has on inflation is fundamentally misguided - if immigration increases supply, which one might think would reduce prices, it's entirely possible that the government will react by creating more money, undoing this effect, since they can now do so without inflation going up.
This remains my primary question i.e. I definitely wouldn't think immigration is the only thing that creates inflation. But if we think its possible that immigration can impact price, then understanding if and how it could create "inflationary pres...
Heuristics explain some of the failure to predict emergent behaviours. Much of Engineering relies on "perfect is the enemy of good" thinking. But, extremely tiny errors and costs, especially the non-fungible types, compound and interfere at scale. One lesson may be that as our capacity to model and build complex systems improves, we simultaneously reduce the number of heuristics employed.
Material physical systems do use thresholds, but they don't completely ignore tiny values (eg. neurotransmitter molecules don't just disappear at low potential levels).
What is being lost is related to your intuition in the earlier comment:
if the market is 49.9 / 50.1 in millions of dollars, then you can be fairly confident that 50% is the "right" price.
Without knowing how many people of the "I've studied this subject, and still don't think a reasonable prediction is possible" variety didn't participate in the market, it's very hard to place any trust in it being the "right" price.
This is similar to the "pundit" problem where you are only hearing from the most opinionated people. If 60 nutritionist are on TV and writing p...
All these indicators are definitely useful for a market observer. And betting on these indicators would make for an interesting derivatives market - especially on higher volume questions. The issue I was referring to is that all these indicators are still only based on traders who felt certain enough to bet on the market.
Say 100 people who have researched East-Asian geopolitics saw the question "Will China invade Taiwan this year?". 20 did not feel confident enough to place a bet. Of the remaining 80 people, 20 bet small amounts because of their lack...
First, I want to dispute the statement that a 50% is uninformative. It can be very informative depending on value of the outcomes.
Yes, absolutely. 50% can be incredibly useful. Unfortunately, it also represents the "I don't know" calibration option in most prediction markets. A market at 50% for "Will we discover a civilization ending asteroid in the next 50 years?" would be cause for much concern.
Is the market really saying that discovering this asteroid is essentially a coin flip with 1:1 odds? More likely it just represents the entire ...
I think there is a certain "cost amnesia" that sets in after a "good" decision? Even for fairly large costs. So the "indistinguishability blindness" is often a cognitive response to maintain the image of a good decision rather than determined by hard numbers.
Regardless, this is likely entering speculation territory. It's something I'd noticed in my own life as well as in policy decisions i.e. a negative reaction to talking about fairly large costs because net-benefits were still positive.
Your final conclusion here appears to be - Do not expect your new pleasures to replace the old.
Yes. And thank you! I'm glad you enjoyed it.
One of my goals was to also apply "Do not expect your new pleasures to replace the old" to other types of decision making. It was a critique of using net-benefit analysis on non-fungible costs. The benefits of a policy don't replace its harms and costs. Tradeoffs are not the same thing as substitution.
Every tradeoff between non-fungibles incurs a debt, and net-benefit hides that behind a single positiv...
If you can make the product 1000 times better by increasing the cost by 0.0001 times you probably should do it.
Yes - this is not an argument against making that tradeoff. This is an argument for not treating that tradeoff as a substitue i.e. fungible. Fungibility implies two things are essentially interchangeable and each of whose parts is indistinguishable from another part.
Your weighting or prioritizing didn't lead to a substitution. You incurred a debt every time you prioritized one category over another. Not all debt is bad, some debt...
Could you elaborate? The point was that desires are not always fungible - they don't neatly add up or cancel out to give you a single satisfaction score. Your decision making math would still pick the suburb because its convenience value outweighs its lack of restaurants. But you don't suddenly stop caring about restaurants because of that. Convenience isn't fungible with it.
I've added an EDIT in the post towards the end that I think responds to this
> costs and benefits MUST be converted to a single comparable value.
Yes. And now, what should the decision process look like? For monetary decisions, this is easy - money is fungible, so one can use addition/subtraction. But for costs and benefits which are not fungible, can we come up with a decision process, and make sense of our reaction to that decision?
There are two elements to this. The first is purely one of framing - the resulting decision is the same. The second arises from the framing - where the outcome necessitates more decisions. To d...
Much of the analysis hinges on this, so I think it needs to thought through more deeply. I would argue that the odds of Putin "being overthrown and jailed or killed" are higher if he gives the order to use nukes, than if he accepts "Vietnam".
The NATO response to nukes would be catastrophic. Any remaining support from China/India would disappear. Further, the w... (read more)