I'm enjoying these posts. Each time it's another red pill. Well done!
This is a remarkably good post with which I couldn't have more fully resonated. Thank you!
There's a reason the saying "If you have to ask for the price, it's too expensive for you" exists.
That saying has more to do with poor people not having the purchasing power of rich people and less to do with rich people and their lack of stinginess.
A huge reason why lottery winners go broke is that they don't earn more money
False. Most jackpot winners (and almost all of the ones that go broke), come from the lower and less educated classes. If they were to invest their entire prize in passive investments and live off the annual return...
All [long-term] wealthy people care about price differences. They'd go broke if they didn't (see lottery winners). Even billionaires don't just throw their money around, because their money is still scarce and they want to spend it so as to maximize their expected utility.
Replacing bread with wine doesn't change anything; if a billionaire slightly prefers one type of wine to another, he doesn't arbitrarily pay a ton more for it. He pays the market price.
Alice would probably not want to pay $1,000 for a loaf that she prefers only slightly to the $1 loaf. She'd likely be willing to pay $1.05 or $1.10 for it. And Bob would be willing to pay $2 or $3 or maybe even $4 since he wants it so badly.
Should LessWrong have been more open to political discourse? Might that have boosted popularity during its heyday and helped to offset the exodus of Eliezer and company?
my utility function tells me to
I agree with the first sentence. "Akrasia" is just the brain being [quite reasonably] unsure whether its long-term goals are really worth the effort.
where are the stupids? Half of the population is below the median intelligence, where are they? Where do they work? What kind of jobs do they take?
Clearly you've never worked at a big corporation.
And I still don't understand why would I want to become an ideal utility maximizer.
If you could flip a switch right now that makes you an ideal utility maximizer, you wouldn't do it?
Also worth noting: LWers should be extracting more utility from their money than non-LWers.
But on a baseline day I consume between 1 and 1.5 gallons of water alone, not counting any water in the food I eat, or any other beverages such as almond milk.
That's an absurd amount of water (not from food) to be consuming every day.
I think my "no free will believing self" causes me to model my future self more pessimistically, albeit more accurately, than my "free will believing self" used to.
More specifically, I now pretty much by default see my future self as destined to fail at achieving my current goals due to hyperbolic discounting and, among other things, unexpectedly low willpower striking at random times and lasting for random periods. So, my focus is mainly on continual massive upfront investment during the good times (the rare days when I've got an ab...
Well, you value whatever you're doing instead of going to the gym more than you value saving the world is what I was getting at. People value their own expected utility more than they value societal expected utility, even if most individuals in society would be better off if everyone somehow valued societal expected utility. Seems reasonably likely to me anyways.
Perhaps I misunderstood you; now it seems like you were saying "why do we hyperbolic discount?" or something to that effect.
"I would generalize the question, because the generalization applies broadly - whatever we profess to value, whatever we believe we value, why aren't we expending more time and energy actually creating that value?"
I've always thought it was interesting to think what you would actually do with eternity... You could have kids...like 1,000 >kids. And fall in love every week. And win Nobel Prizes in everything. And travel to the edge of the Universe. Or create >your own Universe and be the God of it. Etc. Etc. There might be thousands of years of novelty in that. Maybe millions. >But the returns are diminishing. Just think of all the amazing stuff we completely ignore and are bored with already.
I understand that boredom is an issue for many people, but I nev...
If a dude's ordering half a dozen hookers to his room, he doesn't mind publicity for it.
The question is, how much of this sentiment among the elderly is based on it being improbable that there will be affordable replacement organs or other "anti-aging" technologies in their lifetimes?
Some of us 20-somethings are trying to decide whether to (A) go into YOLO mode or (B) sacrifice utility for the next 60 years in order to maximize expected utility for the next 1,000.
If you enter into a short sale at time 0 and cover at time T, you get paid interest on your collateral or margin requirement by the lender of the asset. This is called the short rebate or (in the bond market) the repo rate. As the short seller, you'll be required to pay the time T asset price along with lease rate, which is based on the dividends or bond coupons the asset pays out from 0 to T.
So, if no dividends/coupons are paid out, it's theoretically possible for you to profit from selling short despite no change in the underlying asset price.
Makes sense. Thanks for the reply.
If you asked me whether I'd like to live another thousand years (assuming no physical or mental degradation), I'd ask >myself "Why would I want to live 1,000 years?" and, failing to find an answer, decline.
Isn't the obvious answer, "because, assuming your life isn't unbearably bad, living the next 1,000 years has higher expected utility than not living the next 1,000 years?"
Responses like yours confuse me because they seem to confidently imply that the future will be incredibly boring or something. It's possible, but the opposite could also be true. And even if it was unexpectedly bad, you'd still likely be able to opt out at any time.
Significant lifespan extension would change all of our cultural norms so much that it isn't realistic to expect non-nerds to begin to wrap their heads around it in any meaningful way. And they sure as hell can't be expected to change their minds about any of their core beliefs/values, let alone the fact that they don't want to live "forever."
Honestly, do people in the West really think Arabs actually believe 100% of the nonsense they spout?
Yes. Maybe not 100%, but 75-95%.
Well that was one hell of a read. For some reason it reminded me of this old classic by Eliezer. Thanks for sharing.