All of Martin Sustrik's Comments + Replies

In every layer, the truth is altered slightly to make things appear a justifiable amount better than they really are, but because there can be so many layers of indirection in the operation of and adherence to policy, the culture can look really different depending on where you find yourself in the class hierarchy. This is especially true with thinking things through and questioning orders.

Not sure whather that aligns with your thinking, but Jenifer Pahlka has this nice concept of rigidity cascades. What she means is that a process get ever more rigid a... (read more)

Absolutely agree with everything you've said. The problem of balancing accountability and blamelessness is hard. All I can say is, let's look at how it plays out in the real word. Here, I think, few general trends can be observed as to when less rigid process and less accountability is used:

1. In highly complex areas (professors, researchers)
2. When creativity is at a premium (dtto, art?)
3. When unpredictability is high (emergency medicine, SRE, rescue, flight control, military?)
4. When the incentives at the high and low level are aligned (e.g. procurement requir

Here's an essay about Europeans not spending as much on charity as Americans. You are an European, but spending a lot in the US. Now, I wonder how much of that is caused just by US having more interesting options to invest in. https://www.siliconcontinent.com/p/where-are-europes-yimbys

The second part begins with: "Second, limiting the accountability if often exactly the thing you want." Maybe I should have elaborated on that, but example is often worth 1000 words...

Absolutely. In adversarial setting (XZ backdoor) there's no point in relaxing accountability.

The Air Maroc case is interesting though because it's exactly the case when one would expect blameless postmortems to work: The employer and the employee are aligned - neither of them wants the plane to crash and so the assumption of no ill intent should hold.

Reading the article from the point of view of a former SRE... it stinks.

There's something going on there that wasn't investigated. The accident in question is probably just one instance of it, but how did the ... (read more)

What's interesting about the whole thing is that it's not a statistical model with a single less/more accountability slider. There's actual insight into the mechanism, which in turn allows to think about the problem qualitatively, to consider different kinds of sinks, which of them should be preferred and under which circumstances etc.

It’s always worth asking, do we own the process or does the process own us?

That's a nice shortcut to explain the distinction between "a process imposed upon yourself" vs. "a process handed to you from above".

My feeling is that combining both would lead to each compromising the other. Markets are driven by greed. If you add tribalistic incentives, you distort the flow of financial information within the system and make the market work less efficiently. Same applies the other way round: If you add financial incentives to the Twitter's bridging algorithm, you are likely to end up with lower quality community notes.

Yes, I am seeing that as well. Technical/philosophical stuff is fine, but the psychology in adult fiction is too complex for an 11-years old to enjoy.

Exactly. You can't make the kid read something, but if he doesn't know the book exists he's not going to read it for sure.

Wow. Worm? That's pretty dark. Also a million words or so. Does your kid enjoy it?

That brings back memories. We used to have an english Encyclopaedia as well. Similar story. I still recall how gloomy an impression it made on me. It felt like the world might be a weird, dark and dangerous place, at least compared to the rosy picture that the local communist propaganda was trying to paint.

Thanks! A lot of stuff to check here.

The context is: The kid reads encyclopaedia for fun, really interested in the history of technology, likes Randall Munroe books, but I was looking for fiction to provide a more complex and nuanced view of world, going beyond the bare technicalities.

Thanks! Asimov I am trying right now. I find the robot stories quite naive nowadays, but it seems that it may be just the right level of complexity not to overwhelm the kid and make him abandon the book on the one hand and yet keep him interested on the other. Foundation series I am going to try next. I recall reading it at 15, so maybe 11 is a bit early, but yes, its mechanistic view of society can make you interested in social sciences even if you are naturally a STEM type. Ender's game - great! I forgot about that one. As for The Martian not sure, it feels a bit too complex, but maybe it's worth a try.

HPMOR has quite a complex story, not sure I would have been able to follow/enjoy it at 11.

b> Many cities and some countries are doing great things, but the EU likes to slow everything down

If it was that simple, its a whole mess with both EU and member states implicated:

In 2008, the EU established a European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) with the aim of replicating the success of institutions like MIT. If you have not heard of it, it is not your fault. The effort went badly from the start, as EU countries couldn't agree on where to put it. So, in true EU fashion, governments compromised by breaking it into pieces and spreadin

Agreed. But the popular narrative is that all the EU bureaucrats want is to regulate and then regulate some more. The sentence in question is supposed to say that it is not necessarily so, in accord with what you are saying.

Sorry, this is an internal European discourse about the European economy slowing down compared to the US. The "eurocrat" wording is a bit tongue-in-cheek thing. The reality is more about the coordination problems associated with scaling down the regulation. Compare the news like this: "Macron Warns EU ‘Could Die’ Within 3 Years Due to Overregulation, Welfare Burden, Underinvestment" https://www.theepochtimes.com/world/macron-warns-eu-could-die-within-3-years-due-to-overregulation-social-welfare-burden-underinvestment-5734718?rs=SHRNCMMW

At your service!

Currently in Switzerland, you vote four times a year, each time on some five of six referendum questions. But some of those are or cantonal or municipal level and thus not super interesting for the national media. Let's say there are three Swiss-wide referendums each quarter, that is 12 a year. I think media can manage that.

Number going up 100x would be a problem, but the load is limited by:

1. For a referendum to take place at all, a certain amount of signatures have to be gathered. Lots of oddball referendums fail at this stage.
2. Significant portion of refe

Shareholders have the voting rights. If they feel that they will profit more from two smaller, but growing companies than from a single stalled one, that's how it's going to be.

It was the connection to the ethos of the early Internet that I was not expecting in this context, that made it a sad reading for me. I can't really explain why. Maybe just because I consider myself to be part of that culture, and so it was kind of personal.

Coincidentally, here's Bryan Caplan (quoting Jim Flynn) on intelligence vs. wisdom:

Performance on the traditional problem-solving task or cognitive measure decreased linearly after age 20. Performance on the practical problem-solving task increased to a peak in the 40 and 50 year-old groups, then declined.

https://www.betonit.ai/p/age_and_commonhtml

There must have been a group of solitary men, but there was no social stigma attached to being a bachelor. Zweig discusses the topic in a chapter dedicated to women and does not mention solitary men per se. However, there are few pages about prostitution and how crazy widespread it used to be. He compares it to inter-war period -- which itself may seem pretty bad to us today. The prostitution of course cuts in only one way and the whole chapter sheds some light on the dynamic. The entire book is worth reading. Recommended.

Let me try a different example:

Let's say you are an opposition politician and your pet constitutional issue is to replace majority voting by proportional voting. You believe that FPTP has some genuinely detrimental consequences for the society and you are such a selfless person that you are willing to push for the change even against your best object level interests.

The party currently in power loves majority voting. They love it, however, on the object level: It gives them far larger representation in the parliament than would otherwise be reasonable. 55%... (read more)

Unfortunately no, they didn't. But exactly observing this kind of effects would make studying it from the point of view of political science interesting. (See Hirschmanian "exit").

LARPing the Veil of Ignorance: Someone told me yesterday that there is a group of people role playing a medieval village each summer. They meet for a week, some of them play aristocrats, some of them are artisans, some are peasants. It must suck to be a peasant, I said. The answer was that the roles are chosen by lot. If you are unlucky you become a peasant you are just going to work on a field, but you don't know that in advance. Which, of course, is the classic Rawls' "veil of ignorance" thought experiment. And a repeated one at that!

If those people wer... (read more)

Are there any trade-offs that make you feel moral satisfaction?

Thinking about taboo trade-offs, e.g. the study where people felt outrage at a hospital administrator who decided not to save a life of a kid who needed an expensive surgery, but rather decided to spend the money on running the hospital.

Isn't it that any trade-off causes at least some un-satisfaction, which then naturally masquerade as moral outrage?

Isn't it the case that anyone willing to publicly do a trade-off is going to be hit by a wave of moral outrage? On the other hand, someone who's willing to promise the impossible, that is, who avoids the trade-off, will just make few people slightly annoyed.

One man's singularity is another man's Tuesday:

The Singularity [is] the future point at which artificial intelligence exceeds human intelligence, whereupon immediately thereafter (as the story goes) the machines make themselves rapidly smarter and smarter and smarter, reaching a superhuman level of intelligence that, stuck as we are in the mud of our limited mentation, we can’t fathom.

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

What's easy to overlook in the above definition is that in the real world there's no generic "human intelligence", just the intelli... (read more)

Thanks for the link. I've noticed the trend of avoiding the salient issues among those who get things actually done, but I haven't had a name for it. Pulling the rope sideways - nice.

I don't think this works very well. If you wait until a major party sides with your meta, you could be waiting a long time.

Correct. This could be countered by having multiple plans and waiting for several possible situations/alliances in parallel.

if you get what you were waiting for, you're definitely not pulling sideways

Why? It's known that people care a lot about obj... (read more)

Fair enough. The information was taken from some book, it's a long time, I don't remember exactly, possibly Dawkins. Anyway, I've fixed the article. Thanks for pointing that out!

Admittedly, I haven't read about the problem of sex since '90s but back then the argument against the naive "sex is good because it allows all the good genes to get into a single organism" was that that made sense from the point of view of the species, but not necessarily from the point of view of the individual -- while the natural selection works on the individual level.

In particular, when a female has a choice to reproduce either sexually or via parthenogenesis, in the former case she loses 50% of the fitness (because half of her genes get recombined ou... (read more)

This is aimed at those who can't make an informed opinion themselves. (And most of us can't. Even a scientist can't often make an informed opinion about a result from a different discipline.) What it means is: "Trust the official scientific institutions. However broken they may be you are still better off trusting them than trusting the alternative sources of information."

This is related to an idea I keep stressing here, which is that people rarely have consistent meta-level principles. Instead, they’ll endorse the meta-level principle that supports their object-level beliefs at any given moment. The example I keep giving is how when the federal government was anti-gay, conservatives talked about the pressing need for federal intervention and liberals insisted on states’ rights; when the federal government became pro-gay, liberals talked about the pressing need for federal intervention and conservatives insisted on states’

Hard to say, but one problem I see is that strong regional identity that powers the political processes in federations cannot be created by fiat. If you turn a centralized country to federation by passing such law it would continue to work as a centralized country. Maybe in 100-200 years regional identity, regional elites, specific regional interests would emerge, but it won't be tomorrow. Same, although maybe in a lesser extent, I think, applies to already federated countries and "making them even more federated".

Interesting. I've never heard about that. Any tips about where to read some more about that?

Let's go even further. Assuming the above model, the system can be improved by treating each successful referendum as a system failure. A postmortem should be written a submitted for public discussion:

• If majority was in favour, why wasn't the law changed before in the first place?
• Why haven't the counterproposal succeeded?
• Why haven't the initiants retracted the initiative?
• What should be done so that a similar failure doesn't happen again?

There's yet one more dynamic: Initiative proposes X. Government is, like, this is just crazy. The initiators: Do change the law to include Y (a watered down version of X) and we'll retract the initiative.

Looking at it from that point of view, the referendum can be thought of not as a way for "the people" to decide, but rather a lever, a credible threat, to change the law without having to go via the standard representative system (joining a party, becoming an MP, etc.)

In Switzerland there's a lot of discussion about changing this or that part of the political system, but I've never seen someone advocating for getting rid of referenda. There's something about the concept that people tend to like, irrespective of whether it works well or not.

I still think the “old guard” problem is real, and we’d have to come up with new mechanisms to address it. (Perhaps influential positions would institute a mandatory retirement age of 350.)

I was thinking about this the other day, but from a slightly different perspective. Consider trust in the society. If a country goes through a civil war, or maybe a period of a state collapse, the people are - based on their experience - less trusting of strangers and maybe even willing to take advantage of a defenseless stranger. The prospects for cooperation (and th... (read more)

Picture fixed. Thanks for spotting that.

It would take a large amount of research...

That's the nature of illusion: If you research it there's no illusion. If you just glance at it without much thinking, the illusion is there.

Is this true?

As far as I am aware, yes. At some point it was all about Africa. I recall complaints about that in the media back at the time.

Whether it's a calque or a descriptive expression, I think the main problem is still that it addresses only one term. You encounter a term that has no good translation, invent your own translation, start using it and maybe it'll eventually catch on. But then you have to do the entire dance again for the next term.

What I was thinking of was using the English terms. There are, obviously, problems with the declinations, transliteration to cyrilic or what not, but the main blocker, I think, is that using English terms is seen as ugly, un-literary and generally... (read more)

I think you are on the wrong track. Of course, in the end you can find the equivalent term that someone used somewhere.

But look at it from a different perspective.

Take a term that is used and understood in the rationalist community. Say "Moloch".

Now try to write an opinion piece to The Washington Post. If you want to refer to the concept of "Moloch" you can either explain it, wasting your allotted 3000 characters quickly, or just say "Moloch" and hope someone would get it. In the latter case one or two people may get it and the rest would think you are a c... (read more)

"Economies of scale" seems to be "úspory z rozsahu" ("saving from the extent") - but that sounds really weird and I've never heard it being used. My guess is that the economics professors just use the English term.

As for "single point of failure" I am an engineer myself and I've never encountered any Slovak equivalent.

Fixed. Thanks!

I am reading Hirshmann's Exit, Voice and Loyalty right now and it's great. But it's not about governance per se. Which book did you have in mind?

Some other stuff to look into:

• Governance of Church. This may not seem like a big deal today, but in early medieval Europe, church probably had more capacity than states, so it mattered a lot. Also, catholic governance structures are quite different from protestant, from the structures in Judaism etc.
• IETF has a pretty weird governance. The assumption is that anyone can join (or leave) at any moment, so the boundaries of the body politic are quite fuzzy. Thus, no voting, the stress on decision making by consensus, running code etc. Also, limited lifetime

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.

Where does the 5%/90% statistic come from?