All of xepo's Comments + Replies

Interior design, please!  I can never figure out which pieces of furniture will actually look good together or flow nice in a home.  Especially when combined with lighting and shelves and art.  

Does the Scott Alexander post lay this out? I am having difficulty finding it. 

He doesn’t really. Here’s the original article:

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/mr-tries-the-safe-uncertainty-fallacy

Also there was a long follow-up where he insists 50% is the right answer, but it’s subscriber-only:

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/but-seriously-are-bloxors-greeblic

I claim the problem is that our model is insufficient to capture our true beliefs.

There’s a difference in how we act between a coin flip (true 50/50) and “are bloxors greeblic?” (a question we have no info about).

For example, if our friend came and said “Yes, i know this one, the answer is (heads|yes)”. For coin flip you’d say “are you out of your mind?” and for bloxors you’d say “Ok, sure, you know better than me”

I’ve been idly pondering over this since Scott Alexander’s post. What is a better model?

One option would be to have another percentage — a meta-... (read more)

I don’t understand this.  Plus I suspect it was largely written by an LLM.  

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First of all, where does this theory come from?  Did you invent it?  how much evidence does it have?

The rope analogy seems like it doesn’t offer much.    I don’t see any intuition-pumps that the rope gives you that simply talking about challenges and rewards wouldn’t.  Plus there’s so much in this that isn’t explained by the analogy, for example:

However, by taking on challenging projects that align with the employee's skills and interests and pro

Most of your arguments hinge on it being difficult to develop superintelligence. But superintelligence is not a prerequisite before AGI could destroy all humanity. This is easily provable by the fact that humans have the capability to destroy all humanity (nukes and bioterrorism are only two ways).

You may argue that if the AGI is only human level, that we can thwart it. But that doesn’t seem obvious to me, primarily because of AGI’s ease of self-replication. Imagine a billion human intelligence aliens suddenly pop up on the internet with the intent to destroy humanity. It’s not 100% to succeed, but seems pretty likely they would to me.

No. With unspecified units, that's saying (energy - x) of sodium = 8 * (energy - x) of water. For celcius, x = 273.15.

I don’t think you understood my point, but I was a little wrong anyway. Turns out bill gates was close enough: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TerraPower

Sodium offers a 785-Kelvin temperature range between its solid and gaseous states, nearly 8x that of water's 100-Kelvin range.

There are nuclear plant designs using natural convection with water for emergency cooling.

ok? Was he trying to compare with those designs? Or the ones that c... (read more)

I actually think gates’ article was pretty reasonable and don’t think you should read as much into it as you are. To be fair, I’m not a physicist, and don’t know anything about this tech and very little about nuclear reactors in general, so I might phrase some of my objections as questions back to you.

Part of the reason I think it’s reasonable is that it’s marketing material more than anything, and if you give him the benefit of the doubt on his exact phrasing, or interpret in the context he means, then there’s rational explanations.

Gates is using unspe

Is it possible that the disconnect is that you‘re valuing technical ability over being good at people+management?  Most high level executives don’t need to understand these things in detail, because they have other people they trust that do understand it.

Powerpoints need to be 5-word phrases because that’s how you should communicate with crowds.  And it’s not simply about reducing complexity to the lowest common denominator (though that is part of it).  It’s more about how getting any team of more than a few people to do anything at all toge... (read more)

Oh, I actually think those studies are probably accurate for the thing they’re measuring, which is ”short-term individual developer productivity”.  But they don’t really account for “long-term productivity” nor “team productivity”, both of which I think benefit a lot from being in the office.   You get an uptick in people’s ability to focus, but downtick in people’s ability to communicate, and both education and coordination are dependent on the latter.

As a counterpoint, consider that ~every major tech company is constantly pushing for people to ... (read more)

Programmers don't become more productive when they move to Silicon Valley or Seattle or NYC.

Why do you believe this?   I definitely became a better developer when I moved to NYC.  How do you know that everyone else didn’t either?

correlation of wages with housing prices and with wealth is stronger.

I think this is just recursive?  Of course wages are higher in places with more wealth.  Higher wages causes more wealth.  And housing prices can follow, just cause of supply+demand (there’s a higher supply of dollars, so people are ... (read more)

The legalizer is the only thing here that isn’t inherently evil. The others may not be end-the-world kind of evil, but still evil.

To expound on the first two: they’re morally wrong because they’re lying. Your explanation of why they’re ok seems like some very short-sighted utilitarian thinking.

why are you trying to attack instead of educate? 

90% of your article is “rationalists do it wrong”.  Why?  Who cares?  Teach us how to do it better instead of focusing on how we’re doing it wrong.  

and also very smart/impressive/competent etc

My theory is that being a politician in the way that presidents have to be is genuinely extremely difficult.  Of course they make gaffs and make stupid mistakes, but that’s because they have the difficulty level set to “stupidly insane”.  And that most people that are in those roles would actually seem much more impressive if you swapped them with the millions of americans you’re talking about.

There’s some intuitiveness about this: Look at any modern day campaign trail — it’s public speaking, Q&am... (read more)

Thanks for posting this!  will try it.

The trick that works for me when I have too many things in my head and it’s keeping me from sleeping is to pull out my phone/laptop, and write them all down.  Just stream-of-consciousness. Write everything you can think of, until you run out of things to write.  Pause for a second looking for more things to write and if nothing comes to you, then turn off the phone and go to sleep.

It just clears my head and lets me stop circling.

I’m not sure I fully understand the original argument, but let me try. Maybe it’ll clarify it for me too.

You’re right that I would choose L on the same basis you describe. But that’s not a property of the world, it’s just a guess. It’s assuming the conclusion — the assumption that “I” is randomly distributed among the clones. But what if your personal experience is that you always receive “R”? Would you continue guessing “L” after 100 iterations of receiving “R”? Why? How do you prove that that’s the right strategy? What do you say to the person who has di... (read more)

I ~entirely agree with you.

At some point (maybe from the beginning?), humans forgot the raison d’etre of capitalism — encourage people to work towards the greater good in a scalable way.  It’s a huge system that has fallen prey to Goodhart’s Law, where a bunch of Powergamers have switched from “I should produce the best product in order to sell the most” to “I should alter the customer‘s mindset so that they want my (maybe inferior) product”.  And the tragedy of the commons has forced everyone to follow suit.

Not only that, the system that c... (read more)

Did you set up the survey in a way that you can treat the people who haven’t had Covid as a control?

If not, I’m afraid this is gonna be pretty inconclusive — my best explanation is that people are blaming ~every health ailment they have on long Covid, even if it’s unrelated.

I think one of Zvi’s recent posts highlighted a study that convinced him that long Covid mostly wasn’t a thing, but I can’t seem to find it now.