All of sab's Comments + Replies

sab53

> Therein lies the confusion. Freedom and the lack thereof is not a line, but a cone.

If I understand correctly, you're saying that in a space of societies there is a point of anarchy – no rules whatsoever – and you can add various restrictions of freedom, leading to different societies. In particular there are various possible societies with a given level of freedom (which is the y-axis in your cone drawing).

Please correct me if I got it wrong.

> e.g. thorough environmental protection, public-dominant transportation, communal acoustic improvement

Argua... (read more)

1awg
Totally! Just figured for many like myself this might have been the first/only exposure to the tale.
Answer by sab111

My guess is "never letting a good crisis go to waste". It's an excuse for refocus / restructuring.

Also, there are real communication costs associated with huge headcounts in tech. Earning their pay on the margin is not enough.

Also, perhaps (hopefully) the culture shifted from exponential headcount growth...

sab10

It still operates, but I haven't kept in touch closely enough to know how well it's doing and what has changed – https://talent.edu.pl/. 

sab10

Short answer: hired by NGO which helped me skill up first.

Long answer: Where I was growing up there was a comp-sci training NGO. Their approach was quite interesting:

  1. Grouping by skill, not by age. You decide which level you attend. You choose your pace - you can progress very quickly, but no one will force you to progress at all.
  2. Competition-oriented - primary activity would resemble IOI. Add lectures, math, sport and psych workshops on top.
  3. Teachers and technical organisers recruited almost exclusively from current top students and recent alumni. Often
... (read more)
1belkarx
Do you know if this organization still exists or of anything like it? Closest I'm familiar with is the recurse center
sab41

Data point: I started working professionally at the age of 15 (part-time, in parallel with education) and it was one of the best things that have ever happened to me. Definitely found it way more enjoyable, rewarding and beneficial than traditional school.

It was software engineering, which is probably the best case scenario - the field is desperate for people and there's a lot of room for growth.

3wefguw
Did you get the job through connections, personally seeking it out, or something else (technical HS)?
sab130

I assumed it was intentional, as in person-who-tries named Lsusr (as opposed to Great Blogger Lsusr).

sab120

The counterargument also does not work because it is not central. The negative X phenomenon can persist even if death continues. Lack of progress, eternal dictatorship, overpopulation and degradation are possible in societies where people have short life expectancy.

This counter-counterargument doesn't work. Just because phenomenon X is possible under both scenarios doesn't mean it's equally likely or as difficult to avoid.

(Note: I think that death is bad. My point is about a specific line of reasoning.)

6avturchin
If one say: “death is bad, but it is more likely to prevent dictatorships”, he still say that the death is bad. But he also say that preventing dictators has higher utility than death, so he doesn’t say that the death is “absolutely” bad. But now it is a technical problem: how to make the world where both conditions are satisfied.
sab40

For a few days it was very enlightening and I cared enough to reflect upon them. Then I continued for a few more months.

In my case it also covered data analysis work, video meetings etc.

I annotated all the screenshots with time, so I could immediately see how much time I spent on things (system clock was too small and not visible in full screen mode).

For meetings specifically it helped me reflect upon how much time I spent in various kind of meetings and how useful they were. It also let me easily see how much time I spent afk (e.g. how long was my lunch break).

sab40

I did the same thing for a while (I had a habit of watching a 5 minute timelapse of my screen at the end of each workday). At some point I hit diminishing returns and it became a chore, so I took a break. That said, I highly recommend trying this (not only for programming!).

BTW I implemented it in the same way as OP (screenshot every N seconds, put together with ffmpeg). Actual screen recording software was too resource heavy and didn't support very low fps well.

2matto
Nice! How long did it take you to hit diminishing returns? (Days/weeks/months/etc?) And what other activities did you try it for? I plan to apply it to writing at some point.
sab20

Cryptocurrencies allow AIs to directly participate in the economy, without human intermediaries.

It doesn't seem to be a consequence of Crypto specifically. Any API qualifies here.

That said, Crypto could make it harder to block such trades on the financial system level.

8RomanS
For a digital entity, it is tricky to handle fiat currency (say, USD) without relying on humans. For example, to open any kind of the account (e.g. bank, PayPal etc), one need to pass KYC filters, CAPTCHAs etc. Same for any API that allow transfers of fiat currency. The legacy financial system is explicitly designed to be shielded against bots (with the exception of the bots owned by registered humans).  But in the crypto space, you can create your own bank in a few lines of code, without any kind of human assistance. There are no legal requirements for participation. You don't have to own a valid identification document, a postal address etc.  Thanks to crypto, a smart enough Python script could earn money, trade goods and services, or even hire humans, without a single interaction with the legacy financial system.  Crypto is an AI-friendly tool to convert intelligence directly into financial power. Although I'm not sure if it has any meaningful impact on the X-risk. For a recursively self-improving AGI, hijacking the legacy financial system could be as trivial as hijacking the crypto space.
sab60

I seem to have some kind of epistemic immune response going on that encounters a thought like, "Maybe I should increase my confidence independently of my best guess about my competence," and responds by shouting "WHAT NO ARE YOU CRAZY STOP".

 

Yeah, If "confident" means "I think I'm good at something", it's weird to say "I'm good at X, but I think I'm not good at X".


Perhaps it's a bit of a system-1 vs system-2 distinction? I.e. you can consider yourself competent, but still viscerally anxious.

4gbear605
Imposter Syndrome is pretty common in a lot of fields, where an outsider observer can see that someone is quite competent at a skill (and the person can see that in objective metrics), but from the inside view there is a lot of self-doubt and they have low confidence. I know that it's common in software engineering, especially in people who come from an unusual background for the field (eg. women and people of color).
sab10

Post-scarcity doesn't neccesarily mean lots of stuff, just that we don't count it.

Wouldn't not counting be the result of there being lots of stuff? Your examples are cases of there being more stuff than people want on average. 

Interpersonal competition is not the most natural part of economy. If we systematically outlawed pay-to-win then the coupling would be signficantly lessened. And its already the case that areanas that enforce equality are better status grabs than where you can influence the outcome by outside factors. Boxing is by weight class.

... (read more)
2Slider
The threshold of bothering to keep track is hit sooner than other conditions that are sometimes treated as thresholds that make economic analysis make sense. For some that an amount is finite means that there is a division problem associated with it. Closely related thing is an assumption of infinite greed ie insatiability of needs. While you are very far of being bale to satisfy needs and frequently encounter new needs that are no where near satisfiability it might make sense as a modelling assumption that needs can't be made go away by meeting them. However if the infinite greed assumtion was true then every buffet should go out of business as all customers draw infinite food from them. In practise however people don't draw much more than if they paid for fixed portions (althouht being banned from that kind of establishment for being a statistical outlier happens). One way of looking at this is that hunger is a thing that can hit satiation within a meal. The latter quoted section responds to the post section under the piechart how given much relaxation scarcity mechanics would be in play. I agree that those components are not integral to economy and thus the conclusion that is supposed to be inescable is very escable. Even if not all transactions are not of that feature I think the dynamics are like two blokes trying to have the optimal car to woe women and the woman impression metric is monotonic in the amount of cash spent on car. PvP where you can improve you chances by putting in more money so all sides sink very much of what they have. If sexual selection based on wealth signals would not make sense the dynamic would break. If it would be efficient to impressed by other factors the dynamic would break (such as drive a boring car to signal confidence). Being a a milloinare CEO can invoke reverence for power but it can also invoke disgust for evil The Man. The desirability or permissibilty of these kinds of pissing contests is atleast an open quesiton for me,
sab250

The fact there is enough to go around doesn't mean it actually goes around.

[Distribution of Wealth in the United States 2017]

Nit: IMHO consumption distribution would be much more relevant than wealth. You can imagine a society where everyone gets and consumes enough materially (for some definition of "enough") – which counts as 0 wealth, but some of its members also own stocks...  

(Lacking decent consumption data, income would probably be a much closer approximation than wealth). 

3Teerth Aloke
True, and income distribution is far less unequal. 
sab10

I had a very similar setup for a while and it worked okay. We had one meeting day each week. It was mostly about whiteboarding and building social cohesion. We still communicated quite a lot on other days (mostly through text, rarely VC).

sab40

I wonder to what extent the issues described are fundamental and to what extent this is just a matter of adjustment / investment / development of new practices.

The organizations spend a huge amount of resources on shared offices. Contrast that with a lockdown remote setup when even having a decent internet connection and mic is not obvious for many people... What if some non-trivial fraction of office budget was allocated to remote setups? 

The best practices and social norms for remote work are not the same as in-person. If remote work becomes more ma... (read more)

sab10

Hmmm... yeah, but you could have made it in other ways, which might or might not be possible to offset, e.g.:

  • Employment income
  • Having some money after moving from another country
  • Gifts, inheritance etc.

I previously assumed that you can only offset capital losses against past capital gains.

BTW if you allow offsetting against any kind of income then you get another issue – all of the people who are really bad at investing consistently decrease their tax bills by their capital gains losses. Not sure how big a deal is that. Or perhaps that's a feature?

sab130
  1. We should significantly increase capital gains taxes by taxing it at the same rate as ordinary income.
  2. If an investor makes money one year then loses it later, we should give them their taxes back.

I wonder how progression would interact with the giving back. I.e. if you had gains while being a high-maginal-rate taxpayer and then losses at a lower rate or vice versa.

6paulfchristiano
This does seem like a kind of basic problem and maybe hard to resolve without making the proposal more complicated. In particular, the year you have losses you are presumably in a very low bracket indeed. And using a rate from your past would be even more complicated than carrying deductions forward.
sab30

If an investor makes money one year then loses it later, we should give them their taxes back.

 

If we don't allow carrying forward losses this puts people who are just starting to invest at a serious disadvantage.

If you can immediately offset all your losses such tax basically feels like the government de-levereging you (taking a percentage of all gains and losses). I.e. you can get the same outcome as without the tax by investing  times more.

If, on the other hand you lose before you have gains (and we don't allow carry-forward) you... (read more)

2paulfchristiano
Yeah, that's the hope.
2paulfchristiano
I'm imagining everyone gets the money back. In order to lose money you have to made it, right?
sab120

Could you explain where P(I swing election) = 1/sqrt(nVoters) is coming from?

6Optimization Process
Sure! I'm modeling the election as being nVoters coin flips: if there are more Heads than Tails, then candidate H wins, else candidate T wins. If you flip n coins, each coin coming up Heads with probability p, then the number of Heads is binomially distributed with standard deviation √(nVoters)(p)(1−p), which I lazily rounded to √nVoters. The probability of being at a particular value near the peak of that distribution is approximately 1 / [that standard deviation]. ("Proof": numerical simulation of flipping 500k coins 1M times, getting 250k Heads about 1/800 of the time.)
sab30

Note: the math and the picture didn't transfer. I may try to fix it in future, but for now you might want to just read it at the original site.

Could you add a link?

2philh
Ah, GreaterWrong makes the link very obvious, but I couldn't see it on LW. Have done, thanks.
Answer by sab30

I found pair programming pretty useful when starting a new project from scratch, when changes are likely to be interdependent. It is then better to work with, let's say, 1.5x the performance of a single developer on one thing a time, than to work separately and then try to reconcile the changes. Knowledge transfer is also very important at this stage (you get more people with the same vision of the fundamentals).

This generalizes to other cases when there is a "narrow front" - when few things can be worked on in parallel without stepping on e... (read more)

sab50
doubling the size of a tax quadruples its social cost

Could you explain that in more detail? Why is that?

2rossry
To be clear, this is the low-order approximation around 0; as explained in Paul's link (sibling to this) the effect away from zero involves the shape of the supply and demand curves through the relevant region of prices (and the stated claim holds when they're linear).
6paulfchristiano
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadweight_loss
3Dagon
If this is true, wouldn't we have to worry about correlation between types of tax? Taxing A at 1 and B at 1 has social cost 2 if they're totally independent and social cost 4 if they're actually the same thing.