All of michaelkeenan's Comments + Replies
Except Iran. Why is a theocracy the only country capable of being rational about this?
I've heard that the 1980s economic sanctions were so severe that Iran didn't have dialysis machines, so they desperately needed other treatment options for kidney disease.
However, having more kidney donors, while a boost in overall QALY equivalent to donating a few thousand dollars, is more than likely to harm people who need kidney transplants in the long run...your donation of a single kidney is buying a few mediocre years of life, in exchange for taking away a few million dollars of the table from any company developing “the proper way” of doing this.
Use the reversal test: if preventing the treatment of kidney disease saves lives, could we save even more lives by inflicting new cases of kidney disease?
test test test test
Unfortunately the legal system doesn't reflect this.
This claim seemed worth checking, especially since there are multiple legal systems and it would be awful to discourage people from saving lives in one jurisdiction based on the flaws of another, so I looked into it briefly.
From my quick investigation, I think that being sued for providing medical assistance is not a serious concern in the USA, Canada, and the UK (and probably not in most other places but I didn't read much about other places)[1]. Laws protecting rescuers from lawsuits exist in many...
In many countries it may even be a reverse!
For example in Poland you have a duty to help another person and NOT doing so will get you sued by the state, exemption being of course if said help cannot be performed without endangering yourself as non-professional rescuer’s safety always comes first in order to not end up with more dead bodies obviously.
Courts will almost always assume that at one point in life - at school, in boy/girl scouts, when doing your driving license, in myriad of other places - you have gone through basic training and so there’s no de...
Looks like it's fixed on the EA Forum version but not the LW version.
> the class of "rationalist/rationalist-adjacent" SMEs in AI safety,
What's an SME?
That's fair about wheat import/exports – I don't quite follow this guy's estimate of only a 75% reduction in wheat exports from Ukraine and Russia, and plausibly it could be a lot worse.
The phosphate problem must depend on elasticity of phosphate supply (and a little of demand, though I checked and less than 10% of phosphate is used for non-agricultural industry, so there's probably not a lot that can be substituted from other uses). I found conflicting accounts of whether Russia was the largest phosphate exporter, but like wheat, it's not the largest phos...
Articles about the fall in wheat exports face another Molochian problem. The ones that say that a massive decrease in grain exports will lead to famine are shared widely. Articles that include the context that most wheat is produced and consumed locally, so exports are a small proportion of global wheat production, are boring articles about boring price movements, so they aren't shared widely.
World grain production is 760 million tons per year. Russia exports 35 million tons per year (4.6% of total wheat production), and Ukraine exports 24 million tons (3....
I've tried to double check. Global production of wheat and exports by Russia and Ukraine, according to FAO:
2019, in 1000 tonnes, amounts to 6.9%, very much the same numbers as you've got.
Those are interesting figures and I thank you for them, but I think they underpredict the impact.
First, there's no reason to believe we'll keep as much as a quarter of Russian and Ukrainian wheat production. Peter Zeihan says Ukraine will be a net wheat importer for some years, and I've found him to be pretty careful and non-alarmist about claims like that.
Second, don't forget the phosphate problem. As long as Russia can't sell its phosphate because it's been sanctioned out of SWIFT etc., 40% of the normal feedstock for fertilizers is out of play. This i...
Dominic Cummings, a UK politician, seems to have detailed models of what goes wrong in bureaucracies. Apologies that this excerpt is long; the original essay is much, much longer still:
...I won’t go into details (unless they leak in which case I’ll clarify) but in a nutshell, something very important that the DfE had contracted was completely botched. Like opening Russian matrioshki, each meeting revealed a new absurdity and after seeing dozens of such episodes I now knew what would happen. First, I knew that the official who had signed the contract woul
Feeling embattled is one of two sources of identity that the book mentions, the other being pride. Re-reading just now, I see that her examples of identity through pride were also embattled ones (formula/breast-feeding activists, cryptocurrency proponents, polyamorists), but it doesn't seem necessary, so patriot and gymbro identities fit in the pride category.
That screenshot is the Robinhood UI, so looks like he uses Robinhood.
Interesting post! It makes me much more interested in trying the game. I didn't follow this sentence though:
If you also let them keep their money, you are told the plauge has spread throughout Greece.
Whose money is this? What's its connection to the plague spreading?
Robin Hanson wrote about similar experiments in 2010.
It seems that extreme generosity can be regarded as establishing an undesirable behavior standard. His post suggests a workaround, if your productivity/generosity greatly exceeds others: under-report your output and give credit to others.
Not OP, but you might like Spencer Greenberg's list of 23 general purpose techniques for solving challenging problems.
All the handymen I know are extremely intelligent
This is google-able - I found this chart. It's probably imperfect, but from a brief glance at the source I'd trust it more than anecdote or my own experience.
The answer to, "What idiot did this!?" is almost always, "A smart, well-intentioned person making tradeoffs you hadn't even considered." - Jason Specland
Debates didn't work because... well, it's a very complicated problem.
I'd love to hear about this in more detail. What have you learned about the problem? Do you know what good solutions would look like, but they're too hard or expensive to implement? Or have you learned that it isn't feasible?
Here is my person take on why it's complicated:
When you ask someone if they would like a debate platform and describe all the features and content it'll have, they go: "Hell yeah I'd love that!" And it took me a while to realize that what they are imagining is someone else writing all the content and doing all the heavy lifting. Then they would come along, read some of it, and may be leave a comment or two. And basically everyone is like that: they want it, but they are not willing to put in the work. And I don't blame them, because I'm not willi...
Thank you!
I hope someone can help me find a blog post or webpage that I've seen before but can't find: it's someone describing a power law of scientists. There's a top level who have drastically more output than the level below, who are drastically more productive than the level below that. There's only a few at the top level, and a few hundred at level 2, and a few thousand at level 3. I think he mentions one scientist being level 0.5 - notably more productive than almost anyone else. It was on a relatively unstyled website, maybe Scott Aaronson's.
Anyone familiar with that?
That sounds like Aella, who wrote about taking acid every week for a year. Here's her reddit post about it; it includes some art she made, and one poem.
Oh, sorry!
[I misinterpreted wubbles above; I retract this comment.]
I think we should reserve the "epistemic status" thing for authors to describe their own works. Using it to insult a work seems pointlessly snarky. The useful part could be communicated with just "Probably BS" or "I think this is probably BS". Leaving it at that would avoid the useless connotation about the author's thought process, which is unknowable by others.
I was using it to describe my own comment. I'll try to think of a way to make that clearer in the future.
This is probably not the biggest annoyance, but it's recurring and it affects a lot of people (especially the approximately 9% with hyperacusis): many buses and garbage trucks have horrible screeching brakes. This is bad in general, but especially bad at 7am before I want to be awake.
Presumably it can be solved with some kind of regular maintenance. I doubt municipalities are interested in spending that money, but if somehow the affected residents could coordinate to pay (maybe with some kind of crowdfunding), and someone would organize the whole thing, then something could be done.
Not what you were asking for, but: have you encountered Eliezer's list of sleep interventions? It's the last section of this author's note at HPMOR. There might be a different helpful intervention there.
Should we worry that if Trump supports eradicating mosquitoes, that will cause Trump opponents to oppose it?
It looks like you're going to https://rationality.org rather than http://rationality.org. CFAR doesn't have a SSL certificate (but maybe should get one through Let's Encrypt).
Yes, you'd want to use the International Crime Victims Survey. It's the standard way to compare crime rates between countries.
The anti-vax thing is one of the hardest cases. More often, people are just accidentally wrong. Like this exchange at Hacker News, which had checkable claims like:
- "The UK is a much more violent society than the US, statistically"
- "There are dozens of U.S. cities with higher per capita murder rates than London or any other city in the UK"
- "Murder rates are higher in the US, but murder is a small fraction of violent crime. All other violent crime is much more common in the UK than in the US."
There would also be a useful effe...
I'd prefer the framing that it's not a fact-checker, but rather an inconsistency-detector. Rather than "this bot detected the claim that vaccines cause autism, which is wrong", it'd say "this bot detected the claim that vaccines cause autism, which is in conflict with the view held by The Lancet, one of the world's most prominent medical journals". Or in 1930, it might have reported "this bot detected the claim that continents drift, which is in conflict with the scientific consensus of leading geology journals".
It would still be helpful to have automatic fact-checking of simple statements. Consider this Hacker News thread - two people are arguing about crime rates in the UK and USA. Someone says "The UK is a much more violent society than the US" and they argue about that, neither providing citations. That might be simple enough that natural language processing could parse it and check it against various interpretations of it. For example, one could imagine a bot that notices when people are arguing over something like that (whether on the internet or i...
This comment seems aggressive and rude, so I doubt it will be persuasive to Lukas. As Yvain wrote in How To Not Lose An Argument, we should beware of status effects during arguments. If Lukas agrees with you now, then Lukas agrees he is a weasel-word-using rationalizing entitled infantile fake-victim, which is very difficult to accept. Without the insults, Lukas would have had the opportunity to make an easier update - that he misunderstood, or the text was unclear, or that he'd prefer Dias to have clarified but reasonable people could disagree, or something like that.
80,000 Hours has investigated the expected effects of changing the world through party politics.
Summary:
This is a very high-potential, though very competitive and high-risk path that can enable you to make a big difference through improving the operation of government and promoting important ideas. If you’re highly able, could tolerate being in the public eye and think you could develop a strong interest in politics, then we recommend learning more about this career to test your suitability.
Fair enough. My thinking is that voting has severe effects on others, while one's choice of consumer product mostly affects oneself. Maybe a particular well-marketed beer can make one feel strong and virile; a well-marketed approach to foreign policy might do the same, but with worse consequences for others.
My thinking with that - not that I've thought about it very hard or actually endorse this beyond "interesting crazy idea" - was that one's emotions about a product can genuinely affect one's enjoyment of it.
Maybe a certain food or other product is designed to evoke a cowboy's frontier life, or an archetypal grandmother's cooking, or something like that. Music would help create that association. Overall the effect might still be pernicious but I'm not sure about that.
Ban music in political campaign advertisements. Music has no logical or factual content, and only adds emotional bias.
Here's an example of an ad with music intended to give two different emotional tones (optimistic/patriotic in the first six seconds, then sinister in the rest).
This strikes me as careful cherrypicking of "absurd" results to pick only the non-absurd "absurd" ones...not all absurd conclusions from the past turned out to be okay in hindsight
I don't think Ozy is claiming that all absurd conclusions are correct. Rather, Ozy claims that some absurd conclusions are correct. When you just need an existence proof, there's no cherry-picking - you just pick your example/s and you're done.
...People who say "it is okay if my moral reasoning produces absurd results" generally don't personally th
Efficient Outrage Hypothesis: if you're hearing about it, it's probably already a dogpile. The return on marginal outrage will be low or negative.
-- Egregore Peck (source)
If your moral reasoning doesn’t produce conclusions that seem absurd on the face of it… why are you bothering? I want to be the sort of person who would have come up with the absurd conclusion that slavery is wrong, or the absurd conclusion that women should have rights, or the absurd conclusion that sodomy shouldn’t be illegal.
-- Ozy Frantz (source)
1) This strikes me as careful cherrypicking of "absurd" results to pick only the non-absurd "absurd" ones. You're supposed to say "well, giving women rights isn't so absurd after all, people who thought it is absurd were mistaken", but not all absurd conclusions from the past turned out to be okay in hindsight. Some were pretty horrible.
2) People who say "it is okay if my moral reasoning produces absurd results" generally don't personally think "that sounds absurd, but I'll accept it anyway". Typically, ...
Please note that Rational Attire was not run by MIRI. It was always completely separate from MIRI.
Maybe one could influence malfunctioning government-run services to behave better. If some DMV office or post office is notoriously slow or broken, one could send a letter with official letterhead saying that your constituents are complaining and you'd like to speak to the manager to find out what the problem is. Then actually find out what the problem is, have them work out a plan to solve it, and report back to you on their progress. If necessary, mention that there's currently a big push in the Senate to cut back for poorly-performing services.
You are not the king of your brain. You are the creepy guy standing next to the king going "a most judicious choice, sire".
Mason Hartman made a great typographic meme of this at Pretty Rational.
Catharine G. Evans (aristophy):
This immortal galactic supermind is a stub. You can help expand it by providing the proper technology and averting human extinction.
Some of the people who earn thousands of times your income don't deserve it, which is bad; and some of them do, which is worse.
Our collective delusion that we can fix most problems appears to be one of the many problems that we cannot fix.
Aaron Haspel (sorry, can't find the link):
A grudging willingness to admit error does not suffice; you have to cultivate a taste for it
Mason Hartman made a typographic meme of this at Pretty Rational.
Aaron Haspel (sorry, can't find the link):
There is no universally acclaimed institution with a more dismal track record than marrying for love.
Aaron Haspel (sorry, can't find the link):
Better that X guilty men go free than one innocent man be convicted. Solve for X.
I like and agree with this post, but want to caution that a 2019 paper, Does Apologizing Work? An Empirical Test of the Conventional Wisdom, studied a couple of examples of people saying something politically controversial, and found that apologizing either had no effect or made things worse. I suspect (hope?) that this harmful-apology effect is limited to moral outrage scandals, but that those cases are unusual.
... (read more)