All of michael_vassar2's Comments + Replies

Good point. Largely depends on how many 'fundamentals' investors there are in debt relative to 'speculative' investors.

In some disciplines, like working in an Amazon warehouse, intrinsic motivation is low and both cheating and legitimate but zero sum efforts are unlikely. There, ever greater competition for economic and social rewards generate ever better results. In other domains, like the creation of knowledge and especially the evaluation of knowledge, intrinsic motivation is relatively strong, cheating is easy or likely to succeed or zero sum situations are the default. In those domains, competition leads to the displacement of necessary activities by highly optimiz... (read more)

Sometimes tribalism leads to the loss of gains from trade, so reality will down-regulate it. At other times it leads to gains through coalitionally resource capture. When the latter is occurring, greater 'mental health', in a biological sense, will lead to increased tribalism. We can use 'mental health' as a euphemism for 'being autistic' but doing so won't change fitness gradients. If tribalism was actually unhealthy, it would be lost by evolution like any other complex adaptation.

If we want less tribalism, or simply more gains from trade, the thing t... (read more)

The consensus would converge on it being fake news. No downside to being wrong, so prediction makes would agree with this consensus.

People with professional skills relevant to evaluating the claims who denied the data would rapidly rise to the top of their professions.

6DanielFilan
Wouldn't you expect this info to show up in market interest rates, since you can lose a lot on 6-year loans if you're wrong about whether the apocalypse is showing up?

I'm pretty certain that I can pass the ITT for both law and tool thinking, but it's complicated because undwrneath Tool Thinking is the belief that there are things about thinking that need to be concealed, which implies that it will generally oppose an accurate account of it's actual beliefs. In Law Thinking, every truth reveals every other truth and concealment is impossible in theory and impractical in the long term in practice. If things need to be concealed, it's important to oppose the possibility of inference.

2Paul5
Why do you think this? By "things about thinking", do you mean like, the criteria for deciding which tool to use? If so: I think people do sometimes deploy toolbox-thinking in cases where they want to conceal why exactly they chose one tool over another. Lots of ethical debates go this way. But more often, it's about complexity rather than concealment: we choose our tools based on a myriad of small, nebulous, overlapping patterns, learned from diverse sources, some difficult to express in words, and the collective mass of them too large to communicate.

Wasn't your old rule officially "don't lie to someone unless you would also feel good about slashing their tires given the opportunity?" Or something very close to that? That already solves the standard Kantean problems.

Hazard160

This chunk felt like the biggest difference between meta-honesty and "tire slash":

Harry shook his head. "No," said Harry, "because then if we weren't enemies, you would still never really be able to trust what I say even assuming me to abide by my code of honesty. You would have to worry that maybe I secretly thought you were an enemy and didn't tell you.

If I'm following the old rule, you probably want to know in what situations I'd feel good slashing your tires. If I actually felt okay slashing your tires, I&#... (read more)

7Rob Bensinger
The quotation is from Black Belt Bayesian:

Why doesn't any monochromatic light not on the natural spectrum of an element do it? Or rather, any cluster of nearby frequencies to accommodate redshift.

2paulfchristiano
Just needs to be bright enough to see. I think I'm convinced that at ~1x galaxy you can do it easily, owing to the 1000x factor from using the mass of the stars rather than letting them burn. But not as clear for 1/1000. If there were a single point source with weird spectrum, halfway across the universe and outside of any galaxy, about as bright as a galaxy, would we reliably notice it?
1Charlie Steiner
Sure, you could try to cover the sky with lasers whose frequencies encode some mathematical fact. I think we might notice such a thing in the course of doing regular redshift measurements.

Also, NVC is more like passive aggressive communication than explicit communication.

2jimmy
Only if forced.

And then, you know, Phillip came and conquered the Spartans...

9lionhearted (Sebastian Marshall)
Did he? I'm under the impression that Macedon conquered all of Greece except Sparta — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_II_of_Macedon#Later_campaigns_(346%E2%80%93336_BC) "With key Greek city-states in submission, Philip II turned to Sparta; he sent them a message: "If I win this war, you will be slaves forever." In another version, he warned: "You are advised to submit without further delay, for if I bring my army into your land, I will destroy your farms, slay your people, and raze your city." According to both accounts, the Spartans' laconic reply was one word: "If". Philip II and Alexander both chose to leave Sparta alone."

I bought 200 BTC and lost them in a hack. Later bought 50 ether and kept them in a wallet, so I still have those. In light of that, I'd say security was pretty important!

4PeterBorah
Security is great! I love security. I recommend hardware wallets if you're storing a non-trivial amount of crypto. But the question is about what someone should do when it's 2011 and they want to buy $10 worth of Bitcoin as a (+EV) lottery ticket. My claim is that, if your goal is "have some Bitcoin", then the options go like this: "Buy Bitcoin + implement security best practices" > "Buy Bitcoin without worrying about security" > "Don't buy Bitcoin" It's great if you can get the first one, but it's irrational to let the existence of the first strategy push you into the third strategy. The second strategy ends up with "maybe some Bitcoin", which is more Bitcoin then "definitely no Bitcoin".

It seems casually obvious that raccoons and crows engage in deliberate thought. Possibly hunting spiders and octopods do. Also obvious at this point that we have more processing power available than hunting spiders.
Everything biology does has an explanation as concise as the algorithmic complexity of the genome, which isn't obviously intractable for understanding at all of the relevant levels of description.

I really wish you would give his argument for the claim that we (even plausibly) have all the pieces, Lahwran. I would also love to see an abridged transcript of a discourse wherein the two of you reached a double-crux. My best guess is that Lahwran is thinking of 'only integrating existing systems' as a triviality which can be automated by the market rather than what it actually is, a higher-level instance of the design problem.

That said, the idea that thinking has been tried seems so insane to me that I may be failing to steelman it accurately.

I'm not influenced by him, but his (and Gary Marcus') approach seems like common sense to me. It seems likely that Sarah's ability to track ideology to its philosophical roots can contribute to Tenenbaum's and Marcus' abilities to present their perspectives compellingly to people with more philosophical and less technical bent who have the relatively high trust in consensus which tends to accompany technical ability but which is the opposite of Thiel's effective investment strategies.

FWIW, https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26794 is the best actual argument I have seen for deep learning being a qualitative new capability, but it looks like the capability "analogy/metaphor" not the capability 'awareness' or 'deliberate thought'.

1sarahconstantin
Yep, I'd agree on both counts.

It seems to me that Kaj is saying that he didn't know this after reading the Sequences. In light of that, it's not repetition. It's very possible that this post still didn't convey the content that he was trying to convey to you, the tacit knowledge drawn from books and life outside of LW. To me, the post seems novel, but also vulnerable to not being taken literally. I feel that if it was taken literally and then exceptions were enumerated, elucidating patterns would appear. In light of that, I'll start in a new post.

Please spell this one out.

8Conor Moreton
I mean, I was mainly reiterating the point you make in your final paragraph. It's something like, I can imagine a sort of pessimistic, cynical perspective in which the idea that we can ever transcend false impressions of just universes is laughable, and awareness of this dynamic (and skill at exploiting it) simply becomes a part of the toolkit, and you hope that good people are more aware and more skilled because it's a symmetric weapon that makes winners win more and losers lose harder. Or you could imagine someone with actual optimism that broken systems can be done away with entirely, and who thinks it's worthwhile to spend significant capital (both social or otherwise) to make sure that no one ever forgets that it's unjust and no one can get away with acting as if it is, while maybe also doing their best to try various experiments at installing new modes of understanding. There seems to be a trap, wherein it's always easy to postpone changing the overall world order, because in any given instance, with any given set of limited goals, it's usually better to work within the system as-is and use realism and pragmatism and so forth. But on a policy level that just props the thing up forever. What I'm not sure about is what balance to strike, at a policy level, between using the levers and knobs that the universe and the culture have provided, and trying to carve new control features into the existing system. Alas, I had no clear or interesting thoughts, just the above expansion on the question you'd already gestured toward.

Just a reminder that police haven't always been a part of 'government', and that 'law' has a history of existence independent of 'government'. During historic times, most of the population of the world has usually been owned and farmed, but most of the people who have ever lived have not lived that way. Also, most of the actual history of the world, as measured by what gets recorded, has not been the history of owned and farmed populations, but rather, the history of free populations, in frontier territories like the US

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Philosophy does a lot of different things. Good and Real is trying to correct some confusions which people tend to have early in their lives, as is someone like Hume or Descartes. Something like Nietzsche or Aristotle is aiming at somewhat older people in a lower trust context. Not smarter or wiser, but in more adult situations. Kant is partially trying to support and influence a political order. Deleuze is trying to take one down. Foucault is essential reading for understanding how contemporary institutions violate the principles that justify them a

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Possibly stop trying to save the world *in cities where 'save the world TM' is an established 'personal narrative' and where terminal PoMo makes it impossible to express propositions as anything but your 'personal narrative'*.

WRT screens, I'm inspired to suggest, that there may be a difference between using software produced commercially and software produced non-commercially. If there was an open-source version of the Kindle, I'd be much more confidently on-board for it. One thing about books is that traditional publishing really was a different thing from other industries, and to was a great extent a public trust, done for reasons other than profit. I LOVE Amazon, and before it, Borders and Barnes and Nobel, in terms of their short-term effects, but in the long t

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7Zvi
I like the idea of banning all interaction with advertising/communications, and I definitely noticed that the Kindle Fire showing you advertisements on the login screen for things that aren't books made it take on a radically different tone than older Kindles that don't do that, to the extent that I end up not using it. I notice I make the distinction between friendly and unfriendly advertising: Friendly offers you information you likely want in a cooperative way, such as previews before a movie. They're totally advertisements and we know this, but they're appropriate and fun and part of the ritual of going to the movies, although still clearly not Shabbistic. Then they added regular advertisements and that was clearly unfriendly. This comment suggests choosing principles based on broad incentive effects, such as small publisher over Amazon, which to me is very distinct from choosing based on what their attitude is towards you. So one could say that free software is friendly and commercial software is unfriendly, in the my-experience-with-it sense, and you'd have some correlation but in my experience not that much, and/or you could argue that it is good to encourage free software. Doing the collective action thing on a non-personal scale, as opposed to things that encourage good things locally among your friends and community, seems like a different mission and agenda, and so something to keep distinct from Sabbath - one should favor things with good effects in general, all the time, rather than placing additional burden upon one-self on your day of rest. I'd also agree with the general principle that subjecting yourself to communications is a cost we tend to underestimate, and thus we would be wise to have additional principles or rules that make us correct for that bias.

I'd like to try to figure out together what could make it and subsequent posts clearer.

8Zvi
I agree that the core point is valuable and that this post is difficult to parse. I am confident I got it, but I have a lot of unfair advantages doing that, and it still required reflection. My diagnosis is that this post assumes a lot of knowledge, both of concepts and terms, that are not reasonable to assume. In some cases links are provided, but in some cases they aren't, and the links at best sort of get you off the hook here. The title is a huge hint to what is going on here, but the logic and terms involved need to be much more explicit. I saw similar problems with your first main page post; it is clear that you overestimate what concepts and ideas readers are familiar with (even those who know a lot, often are missing any given thing, myself included), and how easily people can follow your logic. I think that the better version of this post is roughly twice as long as this one. (Note that this is not the general mistake people make, most people need to tighten things up, but this particular author making the opposite of a typical mistake should be entirely unsurprising.)

The end of the USSR was sort-of this situation in reverse, with government employees continuing to do their jobs for years after there was anyone to pay them and eventually stopping when they were no longer in a position to continue.

Part of the issue is a bias toward skepticism, part is a bias toward seeing the role of language as discursive rather than active. In the idealized situation, one can cleanly separate the discursive speech of the trial from the active speech of the judge's or jury's final decision, but there are also times when one simply takes a vocal action without any prior discourse, for instance, shouting 'Stop' based on one's own type two error laden perception. Doing this is a form of aggression, an attempt to control the group's beha

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My guess is that 'Slack' reads differently in social and material reality. Maya is, in a sense, signaling infinite slack, but in a manner which actually consumes any possible reserve of slack. I think a careful reading of Rao shows that sacrificing the thing for the representation of the thing is what he refers to as 'creating social capital'.

In this case, I think it's worth being very VERY curious as to how that judge got in there in the first place. It's also probably worth eventually doing psychological research in order to classify types of judge, in case they aren't all the same. Do mathematicians above a certain caliber all possess internal judges with a common standard for proof? How does this phenomenon relate to actual judges?

In general, I would expect a person following this advice to, in the average case, diverge from the process of creating a map in correspondence

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1abramdemski
You make an interesting point. For many people (but not for me), it seems the judge explicitly speaks in the voice of one of their parents. Certainly I think the judge is serving a group-coordination role. It manages outward-facing justifiability. Hence, I associate the judge with crony beliefs. I interpret you as saying that if the judge didn't handle those, they could start getting everywhere -- and also that the judge may be associated with other benefits, as in the case of mathematical reasoning. I have actually done away with the judge at times, one time lasting a whole week. I would use the same language as before for social coordination purposes, but it wouldn't carry the same meaning -- for example, "I feel bad about X" would mean "I wish X could have happened without giving anything else up", but carry no feeling of conflict in my mind; normally, it would mean "I am feeling conflicted about my policy around X". So, from that perspective I expect that getting rid of the judge tends to make one more epistemically coherent and less prone to bend thoughts toward social consensus. The social-coordination role of the judge then has to be replaced with other strategies. On the other hand, your hypothesis doesn't seem absurd to me.

Build a seed AI seems like something that would translate into a religious proposal to me. Discover God perhaps? Might it work better if proposed by someone who didn't understand the implications of AGI? Would discussion of MNT translate ad the suggestion of miniaturizing Hiero's engine and the Antikythera mechanism, or scaling them up? The rules of this game really don't seem clear enough. We need to get feedback from Archimedes on what he's hearing. Personally, I strongly suspect that when it comes to ethical and political ideas the Ancient Greeks wi... (read more)