Getting mugged, getting asked for bribes by gov officials, entitled crazy road rage people in traffic.

Mind you this was (maybe overly) contextualized by the OP being an argument against social norms that force people to sacrifice personal utility even when it might produce net negative utility overall.

In a broader context, status quo ethics dissidents often explicitly did the opposite, martyrising themselves for the public good. After all people fought throughout history to expand the circle of Who Matters to include more and more people.

So I guess there's... (read more)

What I think will happen is things keep getting worse for at least a decade. At some point a critical mass of people will know at least one person whose life was ruined by gambling and then we get a (way over the top) backlash.

Gambling bans in general, strong regulation of even non-monetary video game gambling mechanics.

You see rumblings of this among gamers, who got exposed to gamba trash earlier than the general population.

Or we just embrace the darwinism aspect of it and it becomes one more cause of permanent cultural inequality.

Good points! I didn't get into 'How do you really calculate the net-societal utility outcome of your actions, including second+ order effects?' since I think even the 1st order immediate consequence calculation is intractable.

In practice you shouldn't ... help people that will do harm with your help. I think this is one of the limits of pacifism(with Kaladin's dad being an example of that, incidentally) at some point passive obedience to an unjust opressor has the same consequences for the other people they harm as active cooperation. It is a moral duty to... (read more)

1. Omega predictors are impossible

They are unstable/impossible not just in practice but in theory as well. It's theoretically not possible for Omega to exist because the decision of 1-2 box is recursive. You're essentially invoking a magical agent that somehow isn't affected by infinite recursion.

"Omega can 'snap' through the infinite recursive loop." No it can't. And if you claim it can you're essentially dropping a nuke inside your logical system that can probably produce all sorts of irrational true=false theorems.

2. Writing on whiteboards, acausal cont... (read more)

Didn't seem to work for me. It still seems to get confused trying to match similar words together even when they shouldn't be. Again quite, dumb/young human.

WW3 is a suicide pact. The #1 thing that defines modern Russia is cynical self-interest. Putin won't die for his professed ideals(which he does not believe in anyway). If he gives the order the people around him won't be willing to die and they'll just kill him. I view this all as extreme brinksmanship that will ultimately lead nowhere. 

Russia's oligarch billionaires aren't incinerating their Swiss mansions over some dead proles on the Ukrainian front.

Fundamentally wrong mental model, in my opinion. (but upvoted for presenting a well structured one!)

As if saying: "We shouldn't put people in prison because it raises the cost of murder and increases demand to murder." 

Violence is a wildfire, not an auction market. Quantity of violence is zero absent a catalyst, once the catalyst is provided it goes up exponentially until it reaches some saturation point at which point it runs out of fuel and collapses again to zero. 

Supply and Demand for violence form a positive feedback loop. (+ an activation b... (read more)

To take this straight to the nuclear winter dark side.

I've been reading a bit about MAD 101 and I hate it. I'm slowly embracing the idea that the most safe thing to do is to be as explicit and precommitted as possible to massive retaliation if red lines are crossed. Emotionally that sounds nuts and I'd like everyone on every side to just spam we're not using the nukes, calm down.

But.

IF people say that and red lines keep getting crossed, at some point Side A thinks they can push one more boundary and get away with it, but Side B decides this is the limit an... (read more)

That doesn't seem rational to me, or if it's somehow not irrational on an individual level, makes it a bad idea to model Russia as a rational actor as a whole.

Absent honest, safe, free speech, leadership's map diverges more and more from the territory and then comes crashing back to reality when they drive off a cliff they thought was a highway.

A group of individuals behaving in their own rational self-interest can make very irrational, self-destructive group-level decisions, if the incentives the members have are perverse enough. I guess the idea it... (read more)

These numbers are absurd, in my opinion. 10s of thousands of military dead is massive numbers in a modern context. You cannot compare 1800s warfare to modern war, people literally lined up in a square and shot at each other until half of them were dead/injured back then. And due to crap med tech tons of injured didn't survive. Modern conflicts have MUCH MUCH lower death ratios.

America finished the conquest of Iraq with like 150 dead(granted Iraqi army folded). Over the course of the whole occupation(2003-2011) America lost around 4500 soldiers. If Russia l... (read more)

A lot of people keep saying that Putin feels afraid of NATO. I really dislike this meme. Russia has been an imperial aggressor in Eastern Europe(and beyond) for centuries. The belt of countries from the Baltic to the black sea have been the Russian Empire's victims again and again since the 1700s through to the fall of the USSR.

Now that Eastern European countries are joining a defensive alliance suddenly Putin feels threatened? 

Why? He has nukes. The end. No one is ever invading Russia. It is just impossible. NATO is not going to invade Russia. 

A... (read more)

I sort of get it and I want to believe it. But it makes no actual sense and that's terrifying. The west would barely care if Putin was doing this in the *stans or Georgia. The only other target to go to after Ukraine is Moldova and then the Baltics.

If he goes in the Baltics that's war with NATO. Nothing about the reaction to Ukraine makes a difference there. It's black and white NATO vs not NATO.

I feel like the most parsimonious explanation is he's not being very rational, rumors about him having terminal cancer are also pushing me towards that belief. It really doesn't seem like anyone on the Russian side saw this coming either, which is extra scary.

I think the EU will have to impose heavy sanctions and deal with a refugee crisis. Given German dependence on Russian gas this could lead to a local/global recession. Hopefully, that's the extent of it.

Disclaimer, am Romanian so biased against Russia's geopolitical agenda(which possibly runs through my country in the long run). 

I think short term Ukrainian army folds(how much of it is russophile former soviet officers anyway? arguably same as in a lot of former Eastern bloc countries). 

Short term questions

1. How big and serious will the insurgency be? I assume civilians are not heavily armed. I assume some organised groups will get some military gear. I assume some western weapons will get smuggled in.
2. Who will actually fight it? My very limited kn

I guess long-time lurkers/new posters like me are part of the problem(though obviously I assume most online only LW members didn't engage with a California drama post). I still think LW is a great place for discussion and just being exposed to new ideas and good feedback, but I'm probably dragging down the sanity level.

Re fear: I think the SSC situation made it clear that LW and rationalist adjacent spaces are more public than users might think, maybe people are hesitant because they don't want to get twitter blasted or show up as a snap in an NYTimes arti... (read more)

Is the close relation actively killing people? I don't think it's an unreasonable standard to say you should attempt to kill your own child if they're about to go on a spree killing and you definitely have exhausted all other options. I might fail it, but I'd definitely think I was a bad person for it(granted raising a spree killer in the first place is the bigger fault here).

How else are their lives trading so favourably? Organ transfers are pretty 1-1, tho maybe a more general policy encouraging people to donate spare kidneys wouldn't be terrible. Also c... (read more)

No because of the things I say in Claim 3. Like. If I were to do it alone, that would sort of be fine. But if everyone were to live that way, everyone would be miserable(something something Kant's categorical imperative, what if everyone adopted this behaviour, would that work?).

I guess, there's a difference between what is utility maximising for an individual to do in a given society, and what is a utility maximising way for individuals to behave in an ideal society.

Like society should be such that Claim 3 is all you need, localized responsibility + government redistribution. 

The internal Ideal Observer is the amalgamated averaged out result of interactions with the world and other people alive and dead. Human beings don't come from the orangutan branch of the primate tree, we are fundamentally biologically not solitary creatures. 

Our ecological niche depends on our ability to coordinate at a scale comparable to ants, but while maintaining the individual decision making autonomy of mammals.

We're not a hive mind and we're not atomized individuals. We do and should constantly be balancing ourselves based on the feedback we g... (read more)

I agree, sort of. I'd argue that in the military example there is already a plan that includes consultation phases on purpose. The rules of engagement explicitly require a slow step. I don't know if this applies in genuinely surprising situations. A sort of known unknown vs unknown unknown distinction. I guess you can have a meta policy of always pausing ANY time something unexpected happens, but I feel like that's... hard to live(or even survive) with? Speeding car coming towards me or a kid in the road. Just act, no time to think. In fairness, this is why you prepare and preplan for likely emergency events you might encounter in life.

Regarding the direct example 

I feel like it's self-subverting. There's an old canard about https://www.watersafetymagazine.com/drowning-doesnt-look-like-drowning/ Given how staggeringly disproportionate the utility losses are in this scenario I think even a 1% chance of my assumption that 'I have 15 seconds to undress' would lead to death means I should act immediately.

In general when thinking about superfast reflex decisions vs thought out decisions: Obey the reflex unless your ability to estimate the probabilities involved has really low margins of ... (read more)

Of course :D

There's a strain of thought that would say price allocation of society's production itself is only ethical when everyone has the same amount of money, but that's a whole other can of worms.

To treacherously switch sides to the pro-price gouging side:

The obvious solution is for shops to jack up prices as soon as an emergency situation occurs, thereby taking the wind out of speculators' sails. Now businesses are not going to want to do this, since it'll ruin their reputation with customers for minor short term gain.

So the actual solution is for the government to mandate price-gouging in emergency situations, this way businesses can do it, without having to bear the public opinion penalty.

If an area is declared a public disaster area, all shops ... (read more)

Triple prices or empty shelves is a false dichotomy.

Everyone gets the supply and demand curve. That's not the point. Society exists to counter-balance natural bad luck not to amplify it. Social policies that make a disaster even more disastrous for an individual are going to produce rage. Your house got flooded, you have no heat or electricity, you really need some oil for your generator and now that oil is 10 times more expensive. 

I get that price signals are a good way to coordinate everyone in a community consuming less of a good, but people will f... (read more)

Given that they said we'll spend the money on the NHS instead of on EU, I don't see how that was what Cummings campaign implied. 

http://www.voteleavetakecontrol.org/leave_ministers_commit_to_maintain_eu_funding.html

Thirteen Government ministers and senior Conservatives have today committed that every region, group and recipient of EU funding will continue to get that money after a ‘Leave’ vote in the EU referendum. In an open letter, the signatories - who include Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and Priti Patel -  assure those people and organisations

Cummings' accomplishments are kinda pathetic, actually? He was associated with the successful Brexit effort. OK. So were lots of other people. Cameron was lukewarm on remain and Labour was basically pro-brexit but couldn't talk about it. In retrospect it's not that shocking Remain lost when neither major party was fully campaigning for it. Also this is literally his only meaningful accomplishment.

Then he later gets into government as Johnson's fixer, which given that Johnson is averse to actual work means he can basically do whatever he wants. He then fail... (read more)

I really liked the post, but I couldn't help ironmanning the so-called fabricated options at every step. Documented below, read at your own peril(or most likely skip the wall of text).

Example 1 

Every time price gouging is brought up online, I see it strawmanned. The proper ironman is something like anti-bank run measures. 

Price gouging measures are meant to ... solve a coordination problem. Supply is ... not necessarily as limited as people might think, if everyone just kept consuming at the same rate or even slightly reduced consumption but not ... (read more)

(Disclaimer, I mostly agree with your perspective on the world, though I do think ... public perception is pulling the fabric of (some) developed societies apart at an alarming rate. Part of the core cause: reforms to the system don't mean collapse into socialism or anarchy, nor are massive upheavals needed to address lots of present day complaints people have. But reformism is so unfashionable these days :/ )

I see 'debates' like this and they really trigger my solipsism. Every modern society is a mixed system of some capitalist competition with various so... (read more)

These threads are so soothing to me these days. A reminder that most of the world is basically out of the literal mass death phase and just back into the politicians are long-term harmful, short-term irrelevant phase of life.

America's not spicy enough, but don't worry I've got Romania and Bulgaria taking another swing at unintentional herd immunity:

Look at that gorgeous vertical. "But it's OK, like everyone there is vaccinated by now, right?"

"But it's OK the governments are gonna lockdown and take control." Yeah, no nobody cares. Restaurants are as packed ... (read more)

I think this still undersells the mutative capacity of an institution. You're worried about a fairly obvious abstraction that puts you in their target group. But institutions are living organisms, not evolving logical rulesets and can mutate much more radically. 

The organisation is basically training hammers and those hammers will keep looking for nails. This is why means vs ends debates are so central to morality. Humans and organisations are 99% defined by what they do, not why they do it. You might do a terrible what for a good why, but once you achieve your initial goal you'll be looking for other reasons to keep doing the terrible what that you're now an efficient professional at doing.

I'm still so confused(through no fault of your own, I think you're right, it just doesn't fit in my head). Let me try to walk through my thought process.

I assume heritability of SAT score is probably different if you sample across USA, or just upper-mid class suburbs or just South Side Chicago, or just rural Eastern Europe, or just Malawi during a famine. Right? Given that environments are pretty radically different. 

What heritability score are we using to determine if policy interventions matter or not? Is the first step to make sure that the region ... (read more)

But isn't this exactly the mainstream intuition that the OP dissolves? My understanding:

a) Heritability measures don't seem to make sense for really complex traits like intelligence.

b) Heritability measures are not stable outside the environmental conditions in which they were measured. 

For instance, some people have sickle cell anemia, which helps them better survive malaria(but otherwise is slightly harmful). If you measure heritability of infant mortality in environment with malaria and then in environment without malaria you get opposite effects. ... (read more)

Re free speech: Social media is an existential problem to our civilization. The chinese solution of mass censorship, that the west seems to be outsourcing to private corporations' dumb algorithms, is not my preferred solution, but I honestly don't know if it's worse than the status quo.

The amount of misinformation I see forwarded even on my family whatsapp group is awful. Not even the older members of the family really buy it, but it definitely contributes to cynicism. Then there's the Q horror stories, crazy conspiracy crap and so on. This is not sustaina... (read more)

Ooh, this is a fun theory. Possibly causality reversed? Adam Smith's old doozy is "the degree of specialization is limited by the extent of the market" or something like that. If the empire is collapsing and trade becoming more difficult practices switch to more local economies. Some products require a certain scale of market to be viable. Feudal Western Europe was quite fragmented, 100 different toll gates as you went down the Rhine and whatnot, so trade was very reduced, extent of market low and so specialization low and so capital requirements for produ... (read more)

I agree, but keep in mind just the city itself was like twice the size in the later period. Population wise 2nd Punic war Rome was around 3-500k, 410 Rome was around 8-900k. Presumably the greater southern Italian region was also way more populous, tho also less able/interested in coming to the city's aid.

Different comparison: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7v15js/why_was_roman_military_so_small_during_the/ Late Roman armies were crippled by a loss of 75k men, despite similar losses being overcome by just Rome's Southern Italian coalition centuries earlier.

Synthetic 'civilization' scores are unavoidably subjective

Just to be clear, the Ian Morris graph is Western Eurasia vs Eastern Eurasia(since it can't be Western Europe vs colloquial East, as Western Europe was a backwater pre-Rome)? I'm very skeptical of these historical score approaches, they obscure more than they enlighten and depending on how actual data is weighted the author can come up with any conclusion they want. 

For instance, why wouldn't population density be the defining characteristic of a successful society(higher energy density, more e... (read more)

I have a shallow read a few posts about it overview of the post-rationality vs rationality debate, but to me it just seems like a semantic debate.

Camp "post-rationalism isn't a thing" argues that rationality is the art of winning. Therefore any methods that camp "post-rationalism" uses that work better than a similar method used by people in camp "post-rationalism isn't a thing" is the correct method for all rationalists to use.

The rationalist definition is sort of recursive. If you live the ideology correctly than you should replace worse methods with bet... (read more)

I need to read that Huemer book, it sounds very interesting from what you've quoted in this and the other thread here.

You're right, I am being unfair to the actual philosophy. I have a negative emotional reaction to the political movement that uses the name. I have quite a lot of ... sympathy(?) for the actual philosophical movements' conclusions, however I still think it collapses to being a bunch of heuristics on top of utilitarian arguments in the end. Also I think objectivism(libertarianisms' radical grandkid(?)) is ... evil? Not utilitarian compatible... (read more)

Before I go off on a rant about "taxation is theft", I want to respond to the actual theme of the post: the fallacy depends on your metric(?) function(not sure what the term is). How do you graph types of events, how do you determine proximity?

For instance, are micro-aggressions just as bad as physical violence? Or at least should we attempt to prevent them with similar amounts of force and regulation?

If your metric is physical damage done then probably not. If the metric is self-reported emotional or physical suffering, then maybe. But the category become... (read more)

I feel like the herd immunity section is overly simplistic given how much IFR varies based on age group. 

Using https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.23.20160895v7

The estimated age-specific IFR is very low for children and younger adults (e.g., 0.002% at age 10 and 0.01% at age 25) but increases progressively to 0.4% at age 55, 1.4% at age 65, 4.6% at age 75, and 15% at age 85.

65+ is like 45,000,000 in the US. Half of them get infected, generously let's say 3% die that's 600,000 dead. A big part of the IFR in the spring for NYC and Sweden(and... (read more)

Authorities seem to think the masses are stupid, but then fail to do the bare minimum to educate them on the metrics that matter.

The sad thing is people are definitely smart enough to realize that just raw case numbers don't matter. But then they don't take the additional, and granted fairly tedious step, of figuring out which numbers do matter(hospitalization rates, positive test rates, death numbers, ICU usage rate in their area).

Or maybe it's pure red tribe blue tribe on a global scale(or rather with variations in different countries) and I'm being naive and hopeful.

I think he just meant the curves would match, ie. referring to the peak from the previous wave: https://twitter.com/jeuasommenulle/status/1320682552257089538 

Oh actually, I think he just means they'd get back to that peak level in 25 days, not that it would get better after that. I misunderstood what he was saying. I'll correct my post above.

As a follow up to my previous comment, here's a really amazing Twitter thread breaking down the situation in France: https://twitter.com/jeuasommenulle/status/1320682084973858816 (threadreader version: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1320682084973858816.html)

The poster also tries to estimate R0 using hospital data(which should be more reliable than case data, since the Spring wave was so undertested). He finds a R0 of 1.2, which means a doubling every 20 days. 

He estimates ICU usage levels will be as high as the spring peak in France within 25 days... (read more)

https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&country=ROU~AUT~BEL~HRV~CYP~CZE~DNK~EST~FIN~FRA~DEU~GRC~HUN~IRL~ITA~LVA~LTU~MKD~MDA~NLD~NOR~POL~PRT~RUS~SRB~SVK~SVN~ESP~SWE~CHE~GBR~MCO~TUR®ion=World&casesMetric=true&interval=smoothed&perCapita=true&smoothing=7&pickerMetric=location&pickerSort=asc is the best site for COVID European COVID graphs as far as I know. The UK has excellent breakdowns(including by age group): https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/conditionsanddi... (read more)

Is the CFR going down because the virus is less deadly in general, or because the virus is infecting younger people? I haven't been able to find a decent study on this.

In the UK(https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/demographic-data-for-coronavirus-testing-england-28-may-to-26-august/demographic-data-for-coronavirus-covid-19-testing-england-28-may-to-26-august#age-and-gender) the median age of people testing positive has gone down from 52 to 31:

Annex table 7: median age of people newly tested and newly testing positive for COVID-19 under pillars 1 and... (read more)

Is the space of possible minds really that huge(or maybe really that alien?), though? I agree about humans having ... an instinctive ability to intuit the mental state of other humans. But isn't that partly learnable as well? We port this simulation ability relatively well to animals once we get used to their tells. Would we really struggle to learn the tells of other minds, as long as they were somewhat consistent over time and didn't have the ability to perfectly lie?

Like what's a truly alien mind? At the end of the day we're Turing complete, we can simulate any computational process, albeit inefficiently.

I agree with the simulation aspect, sort of. I don't know if similarity to myself is necessary, though. For instance throughout history people have been able to model and interact with traders from neighbouring or distant civilizations, even though they might think very differently.

I'd say predictability or simulationability is what makes us comfortable with an 'other'. To me the scary aspect about an AI is the possibility that it's behaviour can change radically and unpredictably(it gets an override update, some manchurian candidate type trigger). Humans ... (read more)

How are you actually doing this in AI Dungeon? I have Dragon mode enabled, everything else default.

I start a new Single player game. Choose Custom mode(6). Then at the prompt I just paste (using Say mode)

Q: Say I want to sum the items in a list. How would I do this recursively? The answer involves two steps.

 and I get

Q: Say I want to sum the items in a list. How would I do this recursively? The answer involves two steps. First, I need to know how many items there are in total. Second, I need to find out which item is at the top of that list. A: You co... (read more)

It would help to add past 5 year averages to make it clear just how unusual the R0-R99 death numbers are. See https://episphere.github.io/mortalitytracker/#cause=symptoms_signs_and_abnormal&state=All%20States from my comment on the previous post. These numbers have been at a constant <500/week every week of 2015-2019. They're now at 2800 and seemingly rising. 

It's gone from one of the lowest ranked causes of death to like #4 cause of death.

As to hypotheses why... who determines how deaths are classified? Is it state level? Do states need to send samples to the CDC to get them classified? It's clearly too simple to just assume that it's a pure hospital level process.

This website seems to do the trick and have charts: https://episphere.github.io/mortalitytracker/#cause=symptoms_signs_and_abnormal&state=Florida

The spike in Unclassified... is huge. They're fudging the data, ffs.

It seems like as of today deaths are still not spiking. Good news? Do we have stats on hospitalization rates by age group? If it's something like 0.1% of <30 yo infected need ICU care, that suggests everyone(without comorbidities) under 30 could get infected more or less at the same time and we'd still be fine, assuming higher risk groups stay isolated.

Of course this plan is not helped by propaganda being eaten up by old people that the virus is over, masks are evil and other info hazards.