All of sdr's Comments + Replies

Ben Thompson ( https://stratechery.com/ ) , an American industry analyst currently living in Taiwan has a bunch of analyses on this on his blog. In nutshell, the US has a critical infra dependency on Taiwan in high-performance chip manufacturing; specifically, TSMC has a 90% share of 7nm, and 5nm chips. This is critical infra, for which the US does not have good (or even close-enough) substitues. Based on both these economic incentives, and Biden's own statements, the US is extremely likely to reply to Chineese aggression against Taiwan with military force.

Cross-posting some thoughts:

Facebook's metaverse strat is focusing heavily on capability / platform, and not content / single-awe-of-moment. To them it's possibly okay if vrchat wins at the expense of horizon worlds, _just as long as majority of peeps access it via quest_ which they do: https://metrics.vrchat.community/?orgId=1&refresh=30s <- quest users now outnumber pc ones 1:2.

Consider the apple & appstore fiasco, whereby apple can basically, in one OS update, kill retargeting by introducing privacy popups into apps at os level, kneecapping t... (read more)

Oh darn, you're right. Thank you!

I'm running simulations to get a feel for what "betting Kelly" would mean in specific contexts. See code here: https://jsfiddle.net/se56Luva/ . I observe, that given a uniform distribution of probabilities 0-1, if the maximum odds ratio is less than 40/1, this algo has a high chance of going bankrupt within 50-100 bets. Any thoughts on why that should be?

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In the context of customer development for product research, yes. For good questions on that, see eg the book "Mom test" by Rob Fitzpatrick, and lean customer development field in general. This was solving for the general question "will developing x be paid for"; being wrong on this particular question is expensive.

Not grandparent, but browsing through my private notebook for potentially breaking links, eg:

http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/deg/less_wrong_product_service_recommendations/6yry <- which is one specific advice (and a good one at that) vs https://www.lesserwrong.com/r/discussion/lw/deg/less_wrong_product_service_recommendations/6yry <- which is 404. This actually do have a high impact both on other sites linking specific comment threads, and by extension, on SEO in general (linked page with content changed to empty).

( Relatedly, https://www.les... (read more)

Hello my values a decade ago, it's so nice to see you publicly documented! In retrospect & in particular, the level of paranoia imbued here will serve you well against incentive hijacking, and will serve as a foundational stone in goal stability.

There is one particular policy here, where my thinking has changed significantly since then; and I'd love to check against Time whether it makes sense, or has my values been shifted:

| Reject invest-y power. Some kinds of power increase your freedom. Some other kinds require an ongoing investment of y... (read more)

Thank you for posting this. I agree, that growing negotiation skills is hard under best of circumstances; and I agree that certain types of newbies might self-identify with the post above.

There is a qualitative difference between people who are negotiating (but lack the proper skill), and the parasites described above:

• Beginner negotiators state their request, and ask explicitly (or expect impliedly) for price / counter

• More advanced negotiators start with needs/wants discovery, to figure out where a mutually beneficial deal can be made; and they adjust

Updated. Re: | if you want to publicly address these people <- if people are addressed offline in public, I suspect you can dress it up with the appropiate social grace. But, we're talking about behavior here (and entrepreneurs have exploits they're already proud of, like hackers have hacks, and free riders aren't actively malicious), and I feel that dressing it up with the same grace would actually backfire by not changing (or even harming) the reward structure of the behavior.

Agreed. Recommend a non-verbed descriptive noun, and I'll update the post above.

(I'm not sure which part of this is "armchair-theorizing-sociology piece", so let me share impressions:

• The 3 specific examples are all observations: 2 on a CFAR event, 1 on a bay-lesswrong event
• The "people putting other's needs ahead of their own" comes from 2 persons who both bounced from the Bay for this reason
• The "attempting value-pumping" / lack-of-dealcraft is ubiquitous everywhere where people are Getting Stuff Done; the only novel thing in the Bay is high turnaround / people onboarding allows this to be done systema

Fellow Hufflepuff / startupper / business getting-stuff-done-er / CFAR / Bay-arean here. Can we talk about the elephant in the room?

• Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution <- describes the idea of the role of parasites in subculture evolution; specifically, that once group-surplus achieves a threshold, it is immediately soaked up by parasites funneling it to agendas of their own
• There are, by my count, at least 3 such parasites in the Bay community; and specifically they position themselves as the broken stair step right at onboarding, m

FAI value alignment research, and cryonics are mutually inconsistent stances. Cryo resurrection will almost definitely happen by scanning & whole-brain-emulation. An EM/upload with a subjective timeline sped up to 1000x will be indistinguishable from an UFAI. Incremental value alignment results of today will be applied to your EM tomorrow.

For example, how would you feel with all your brilliant intellect, with all your inner motivational spark being looped into a rat race against 10000 copies of yours, performing work for & grounded to a baseline, where if you don't win against your own selves, all your current thoughts, and feeling, and emotions are to be permanently destroyed?

Very yes. Specifically, a bi-weekly, or monthly thread (similar to the open threads currently) of eg "Pitch your idea", with the hard-constrain for the topmost comments being 100 words at most at any given time, with optional links leading down the rabbit hole.

Edit: bonus point, but not hard requirement describing your idea in language of "up goer five" to avoid that thing where people compress by using technical words, as opposed to compressing comprehensibly. Like, what we want to achieve here is to serve as a common onboarding point for new people to get introduced to those ideas; as opposed to communicating the Theory of Everything in greek symbols.

Sure can: subscribe to gwern's newsletter

Can you point at the part which you find objectionable?

note: topic text was originally different, and included a recently-elected president's name; which would've ranked on google for related-keywords. Below is unedited comment, asking for that name not to be included

Since "Downvoting temporarily disabled", I would like to express a very, very strong disapproval of this topic being discussed on lesswrong. Rationale:

1, Politics is the mindkiller

2, It attracts the sort of people who would like to discuss these sorts of things, at the expense of those (including myself), who do not; specifically, by ra... (read more)

Speaking as a writer for different communities, there are 2 problems with this:

• Duplicate content: unless explicitly canonized via headers, Google is ambiguous about which version should rank for keywords. This hits small & upcoming authors like a ton of bricks, because by default, the LW version is going to get ranked (on basis of authority), and their own content will be marked both as a duplicate, and as spam, and their domain deranked as a result.

• "An audience of your own": if a reasonable reader can reasonably assume, that "all go

I won't speak to the content, but can wave towards the form: basically, there is a set of brain modules / neural pathways, which, when triggered by a set of thoughts, fills one with hope / drive / selflessness. Specifically for me, one of these thoughts include:

| "That was humanity in the ancient days. There was so much wrong with the world that the small resources of altruism were splintered among ten thousand urgent charities, and none of it ever seemed to go anywhere. And yet... and yet..." .. "There was a threshold crossed somewhere,&quo... (read more)

Additional to that, you might want to consider posting larger completed stand-alone works directly into the discussion section as a link for discussion, feedback, and good karma.

The Oatmeal: How to be perfectly unhappy <- This reminds me of On the unpopularity of cryonics: life sucks, but at least then you die

| Most people have a very limited range of interests and possibilities for gratification. This problem cannot be fixed for most by giving them more money, or even more money and autonomy. Do that, and they will drown themselves in what they already have, or kill themselves with drugs. How many cars, planes, and pairs of shoes or houses can you really gain joy from?

Happiness doesn't scale. Being engaged does.

AMV short: Nostromo's newest: AMV - Nostromo - Umbrella Corp

Crash course: Meta-ethics (Crash Course Philosophy #32) <- mostly classification, taxonomy, and a few thorny problems. Good review.

Anime / AMV short: Porter Robinson & Madeon - Shelter

The Gentle Seduction by Marc Stiegler ; search strategy was [short story about technological change saturn]

Elo,

You seem to be posting, like, a lot. This is good, this is what we have personal blogs for.

I do have an issue with syndicating your content straight to here, regardless of state, amount of research, amount of prior discussion with other people, confidence, or epistemic status. This introduces an asymetric opportunity cost on behalf of the lesswrong community; specifically, writing these is much easier, and lower effort, than the amount of effort these will collectively soak up for no gain.

For this reason, I have downvoted this post as is. I will also k... (read more)

Heads up about the business side of this: selling to primary & secondary schools, esp outside of the US, is 8/10 difficult.

Specifically, even if the teachers are fully championing your solution, they do not wield any sort of purchasing authority (and sure as hell won't pay from their own wallet). Purchasing authority's incentive-structure does not align with "teacher happiness", "optimal schedule", or most things one would imagine being the mission of the school. It is, however, critical for them to control all sw used inside the school, and might actively discourage using non-approved vendors.

Exurb1a is making some excellent nihilistic mind-bending. Highlights:

• Oh hello, you're alive
• 27: UFAI detection by triggers
• What is You? -a short on the nature of experiencing

A short on the FAI problemset: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0PuqSMB8uU ("Rick and Morty - Keep Summer Safe")

Within the context of online businesses, we have some stats on failure mode frequency, which strongly reflects my own priors, and the ~200 startup founders I've talked with to date (source: Quora )

patio11 on language learning:

"...A lot of people have vague goals like "I want to learn French" or "I want to be fluent in Japanese." There is no defensible definition of the word "fluent." Instead, you should have specific goals which test ability to complete tasks that are representative of the larger set of tasks you need to be good at to achieve metagoals which are important to you.

This is why I care relatively little about "fluency in Japanese" and quite a bit about "what percentage of commercially sig... (read more)

A fantastic short on existentialism: The missing Scarf

Here's an evolutionary psychology question:

#1: Lemma: Replicator-selection works only through genes; that is, there is no such thing as group selection; from a reproduction perspective, the only which matters, is delta-reproduction-fitness increase.

#2: Lemma: Technologies, and techniques doesn't require gene-transfer. Once someone comes up with a new idea, that idea can freely spread across the entire population. Therefore, technologies, and techniques doesn't offer delta-reproduction-fitness increase.

#3: Observation: Some people appear to be interested... (read more)

• OK Go - The Writing's On the Wall is categorically a mind-bending-music-video, remixing optical illusions into music
• Vi Hart's topic for the month is infinity; specifically, How many kinds of infinity are there? bridges a wide range of math fields

The rationale behind salary negotiations are best expanded upon by patio11's "Salary Negotiation: Make More Money, Be More Valued" (that article's well worth the rent).

In real life, the sort of places where employers take offense by you not disclosing current salary (or generally, by salary negotiations -that is, they'd hire someone else if he's available more cheaply) are not the places you want to work with: if they're putting selection pressure for downscaling salaries, all your future coworkers are going to be, well, cheap.

This is anecdota... (read more)

(( For the uninitiated:

1, It would not be unrealistic from her to assume youtube's copyright algorithms to flag her video into oblivion. It's known to happen.

More importantly, 2, Vi work for Khan Academy, who is sponsoring her "to do whatever she wants". That comes with lawyers. ))

Vihart's "Twelve Tones" is quite possibly the most mind-expanding mix of interdisciplinarity (math, music & creativity) in 2013 I've seen so far: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4niz8TfY794

Specifically for business, I do.

The general angle is asking intelligent, and forward-pointing questions, specifically because deep processing for thoughts (as described in Thinking Fast and Slow) is rare, even within the business community; so demonstrating understanding, and curiosity (both of which are strength of people on LW) is an almost instant-win.

Two of the better guides on how to approach this intelligently are:

• http://www.slideshare.net/foundercentric/how-not-to-suck-at-introductions
• http://www.kalzumeus.com/standing-invitation/

The other aspec... (read more)

Farewell, and see you on the other side!

In ascending order of resolution:

• There are a lot of quicker ways to set up a website -a lot of hosting solutions come with one sort of web designer, or another; you can be up&running with a general blogger account in 2 minutes. If you have a specific end-goal (eg. moving inventory) in mind, this'll give you disproportionally quicker bang for your time.

• Depending on what your goals are, the primary challenges of websites might not be the technical details, but rather clear communication & value presentation. If you have a goal, articulate it in w

You're fundamentally assuming opaque AI, and ascribing intentions to it; this strikes me as generalizing from fictional evidence. So, let's talk about currently operational strong super-human AIs. Take, for example, Bayesian-based spam filtering, which has the strong super-human ability to filter e-mails into categories of "spam", and "not spam". While the actual parameters of every token are opaque for a human observer, the algorithm itself is transparent: we know why it works, how it works, and what needs tweaking.

This is what Holde... (read more)

Easy excercise on the 5-second level: ask the question "as opposed to what?" both loud, and when constructing what you'd like to tell. An easy trigger to remember is qualifiers -they're usually a mark of motivated abstraction-switch.

Medium-level excercise: take one of your life failures at any level, and dismantle it via root cause analysis:

"The business failed." "Why?"

"We failed to nail down the unit economics tightly before scaling up marketing" "why?"

"No one was dedicated to look over all the 6 piec... (read more)

You're framing the problem wrong -within these conditions, there are no good solution. There are 3 shortcuts out:

First, realize, that you're inherently time-locked: the current self is the only one on which you have some amount of control (you might put yourself in a situation, where your only way out is to "work hard" -eg. make a bet with a friend to pass that exam, etc- but I found these to be less effective, than the other two).

Second, reframe the problem. Some sample questions you might ask:

• In what ways might I get the most gratification o