ajc586

Karma: 29

ajc586 3 Mar 2024 6:53 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: cata’s comment on: If you weren’t such an idiot...
I personally don’t find anything on the list disagreeable (including the summarization and mentoring items).
Summarization is a pretty well established memory consolidation technique to improve long-term recall of information. The OP does not explicitly state this is the aim, but that was my assumption, and if so I think it is uncontroversial that that is beneficial.
Regarding the mentoring, the item on the list was “you would have a good mentor” (which I agree with) and then underneath is “One way to do this is to email people” (which I also agree with in the sense that emailing is clearly one way to do this—I do not necessarily feel this is a good way or the best way, but the OP does not say it is, just that it is “one way”).
I can see why you would disagree that you “should have a ‘good mentor’ by emailing people to request that they mentor me” (I also disagree that such an approach is close to optimal) but I do not think this is what the OP says.

ajc586 3 Mar 2024 5:52 UTC
−5 points
−3
on: If you weren’t such an idiot...
The problem with this list is it fails the “fluff test”. (My name for not-my-idea—sorry, I can’t locate the original source.) The “fluff test” is: a suggestion “do X” is useful only if the suggestion “don’t do X” is also plausible. Otherwise it is fluff.
So e.g. most political speech immediately fails the fluff test: “if you elect me I will focus on reducing crime” is fluff because “if you elect me I will focus on increasing crime” is not plausible oratory.
Apply the test to each item on this list and you will see that it’s all fluff.
I mentally added an epilogue to the post saying “of course, everything on this list is ‘obviously’ beneficial, so if you don’t do some of these things, trying to write a plausible explanation for why you don’t is a helpful exercise that may point in the direction of personal growth”, which made it more useful. Maybe the point of the post is that such an epilogue is implied, and ‘if I wasn’t such an idiot’ I would have realized that all along …

ajc586 12 Jan 2024 18:41 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Gordon Seidoh Worley’s comment on: Universal Love Integration Test: Hitler
I think that when you say “I love cats”, you mean more than you prioritize specific cats. At some points, those cats will no longer be with you, and if you are like most cat lovers, likely you will then go on to own and prioritize different cats. So while the cats you prioritize at any moment in time may be specific, if you are like most cat owners, over the course of your life you will generally prioritize cats. (“I choose to eat cake every day above other desserts, but I don’t in general love cake, just the cakes I eat on a given day” sounds like more like someone who loves cake but also loves splitting hairs over word usage, than someone who doesn’t in general love cake.)
I think that, if you ask most people what they actually do in practice as a result of their stated love for cats, you will inevitably get back things that necessarily involve prioritization (mostly of time and/or money), e.g. they have pet cats, they volunteer at an animal shelter, they put food out in their garden for stray cats, and/or so forth. If someone said “I love cats, and I have no real interest in prioritising spending my time, money, energy etc. on owning or thinking about or interacting with cats above other things”, I would find that incongruous and question whether they really do love cats.

ajc586 12 Jan 2024 3:26 UTC
6 points
0
in reply to: frontier64’s comment on: Introduce a Speed Maximum
German Autobahns with no speed limit have been designed to be safely driven at high speed. For example, wide lanes, long straight sections, very large radius of curvature for non-straight sections, minimal layout changes, good drainage. And also features which minimise the impact if accidents do occur, e.g. strong central barriers.
It does not therefore follow that removing speed limits on typical American freeways, which have not been designed for high speeds, is a sensible thing to do.
Plus, the way US politics works, if you did any kind of no speed limit trial, it would not last long. Let’s say you’re a politician who somehow gets approval to push through a policy to trial no speed limit on a freeway. An accident happens (regardless of whether speed was a cause), and you’ll be out of office the next day, and that’s the end of the trial.

ajc586 12 Jan 2024 2:27 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Gordon Seidoh Worley’s comment on: Universal Love Integration Test: Hitler
Can you think of examples of mainstream use of the word ‘love’ for which prioritization isn’t an essential component? It seems to me that prioritization is the key thing that binds together what would otherwise be disparate uses of the word, not just in the relationship context. (e.g. the ‘love’ in “I love reading” and “I love my wife” mean very different things, but are both effectively statements of prioritization)

ajc586 12 Jan 2024 0:53 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Gordon Seidoh Worley’s comment on: Universal Love Integration Test: Hitler
While ‘love’ isn’t of course well defined, it seems a central component for most usages is one of prioritisation (of time, money, emotional bandwidth etc.) in the face of constrained supply.
So in romantic love, priority of (usually) a single person is a necessary component. Loving a romantic partner is providing a guarantee to yourself that you will prioritize their needs over competing demands (which will therefore reduce in priority). Sex is often one of those needs, but not necessarily. It’s the guarantee of priority that matters, not specifically what is prioritised.
The love a toddler has for their toys has this same necessary component. You can’t play with all the toys in the world; you have finite time to play, your parents have finite ability to provide toys, so you have to prioritise. The toys you prioritise are the toys you love.
So ‘universal love’ is not love at all. Your resources are finite. Prioritisation is zero sum. It’s making the choice in a world of limited resources (both your internal world, and in the world outside) that makes it love.

ajc586 11 Dec 2023 18:16 UTC
1 point
0
on: Principles For Product Liability (With Application To AI)
I think one of the reasons why punitive damages sometimes make sense is in recognition of the fact that the total ‘damage’ (in the colloquial, not legal sense) can sometimes include not just an economic component, but a societal component beyond that.
Here’s an example: suppose a company is concerned about wrongful death suits. There are basically two levers available here: (1) spend $X on making the work environment safer, (2) put $Y aside to cover the cost of such suits, and of course it’s not either/or here. But although this didn’t turn out to be the case in the ‘factories’ example so things turned out well for society, in a given situation, depending on the numbers the best economic option may be a lot of (2) and not so much (1). In this scenario, people will continue to die even if X—Y is very small (in the world where Y does not include punitive damages) and lives could be saved at a very low additional cost to the company. Punitive damages are a tool to make this less likely by imposing a large cost in (for example) a wrongful death scenario even if X—Y (without punitive damages) is small.
If you argue for no punitive damages in civil cases, the same argument could be made for criminal cases, i.e. no jail time and all damages awarded are purely economic. In this case, then, you could murder someone if you had the resources to pay the ‘fare’ of the economic damage this would cause. Which at a societal level isn’t much different to companies being able to choose to let fatal accidents continue to occur, if the workers comp payouts are more affordable than implementing improved safety protocols, and there’s no mechanism available to ‘artificially’ inflate the costs to the company in a wrongful death scenario, like punitive damages.

ajc586 20 Oct 2023 16:48 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Boost your productivity, happiness and health with this one weird trick
I don’t think productivity ever increases with contiguous time spent on a given activity, at least in the short term. (Yes, longer term you can identify and implement working patterns that increase overall productivity.) All the effects push in the opposite direction: low hanging fruit gets picked first, you get tired, you get hungry, you’ve done all you can on your part of the critical path and need to wait for others to do their bit before you can continue, etc.
So I think there are two explanations here if someone on Hacker News does claim that the last hour is the most productive. The first is post-rationalisation, i.e. if you have been working crazy 99 hours straight on something you’d better conjure up some pretty convincing-to-you-sounding reason to work the 100th hour. The second is that you are falling for a perceptual trick: let’s say you’re working 99 hours straight on finding a difficult bug, and in the 100th hour you fix it. You can say “wow, that 100th hour was clearly the most productive, because in the first 99 hours I didn’t solve the bug and in the 100th hour I did”. But that’s not what productivity means. What is actually happening is you are making slower and slower progress during the 100 hours but still eventually get there.
Personally I have found that judging my position on the curve is pretty easy, if you are mindful and deliberate about doing that continually. This mindfulness and deliberation doesn’t seem to happen automatically, though, which makes it difficult if you don’t do that.

ajc586 20 Oct 2023 14:56 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: Sergii’s comment on: Boost your productivity, happiness and health with this one weird trick
I like the idea of the 4-day work week, but this post is actually a quite separate argument.
The 4DWW idea is: work less, and you’ll be happier as a direct consequence.
The argument in this post is: if you want to work X hours a week, whatever that X is, go for it! But rather than spending X on one job where you’re almost certainly spending a significant proportion of X in the diminishing returns regime, split it into e.g. 0.8X on that job and 0.2X on a completely separate job. The main effect of this will be productivity gains, which in turn will lead to increased happiness as a side-effect.

ajc586 20 Oct 2023 1:27 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: cata’s comment on: Boost your productivity, happiness and health with this one weird trick
Yes. I don’t think the argument requires that the work be hard (or that you work hard at it, whatever that really means). I believe it’s quite generally true that for most activities (howsoever achieved), productivity drops as hours spent increases. Then the rest of the argument follows.

ajc586 20 Oct 2023 0:06 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: Algon’s comment on: Boost your productivity, happiness and health with this one weird trick
Apologies for using ‘engineering speak’ without explaining. The transfer function relates the output of a process to its input. In this case the output is literally your total work output (y axis), and the input (x axis) is the time you spend producing that output.

The shape of this curve is well established, whereby initially the gradient is quite steep (that is, the first hours you spend doing a task, you get a lot done) but the gradient quickly starts to flatten.

ajc586 30 Dec 2022 4:22 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Gordon Seidoh Worley’s comment on: Why not spend more time looking at human alignment?
Thanks for the thoughtful response, although I’m not sure quite of the approach. For starters, ‘aligning humans’ takes a long time and we may simply not have time to test any proposed alignment scheme on humans if we want to avoid AGI misalignment catastrophe. Not to mention ethical issues and so forth.
Society has been working on human alignment for a very long time, and we’ve settled on a dual approach: (1) training the model in particular ways (e.g. parenting, schooling etc.) and (2) a very complex, likely suboptimal system of ‘checks and balances’ to try and mitigate issues that occur for whatever reason post-training, e.g. the criminal justice system, national and foreign intelligence, etc. This is clearly imperfect, but it seems to work a lot better to maintain cohesion than prior systems of ‘mob justice’ where if you didn’t like someone you’d just club them in the head. Unfortunately, we now also have much more destructive weapons than the clubs of the ‘mob justice’ era. Nonetheless, as of today you and I are still alive and significant chunks of society more or less function and continue to do so over extended periods of time, so the equilibrium we’re in could be a lot worse, but per my original post re. the nuclear button it’s clear we have ended up on a knife edge.
Fortunately, we do have a powerful advantage with AGI alignment over human alignment: for the former we can inspect the internal state (weights etc.). Interpretability of the internal state is of course a challenge, but we nonetheless have access. (The reason why human alignment requires a criminal justice system like we have, with all its complexity and failings, is largely because we cannot inspect the internal state.) So it seems that AGI alignment may well be achieved through a combination of the right approach during the training phase, and a subsequent ‘check’ methodology via a continuous analysis of the internal state. I believe that bringing the large body of understanding/research/data we already have on human alignment in the training phase (i.e. psychology and parenting) to the AI safety researcher’s table may be very helpful. And right now, I don’t see this. Look for example at the open recs posted on the OpenAI web site—they are all ‘nerd’ jobs and no experts of human behaviour. This surprises me and I don’t really understand it. If AGI alignment is as important to us as we claim, we should be more proactive in bringing experts from other disciplines into the fold when there’s a reasonable argument for it, not just more and more computer scientists.

ajc586 18 Dec 2022 5:55 UTC
3 points
on: Ruling Out Everything Else
This article I think exemplifies why many people do not follow this advice. It’s 39 pages long. I read it all, and enjoyed it, but most people I claim have a shorter attention span and would have either read half a page then stopped, or would have balked when they saw it was a 26-minute read and not read any of it. And those people are probably most in need of this kind of advice.
Language has a wonderful flexibility to trade off precision/verbosity against accessibility/conciseness. If you really want to rule out everything you don’t mean, you inevitably need a high level of verbosity because even for the simplest arguments there are so many things you need to rule out (including many that you think are ‘obvious’ but are not to the people who presumably you most wish to appreciate your argument).
Which is better? An argument that rules out 80% of the things you don’t mean (and so is ‘misunderstood’ by 20%), or an argument that’s 5X as long that rules out 95% of the things you don’t mean (‘misunderstood’ by 5%)? Most people won’t read (or stick around long enough to listen/pay attention to) the second version.
So maybe you intended to mean that there’s an important counterpoint, which is that there’s a cost to ruling out everything you don’t mean, and this cost needs to be carefully weighed when deciding where to position yourself on the precision/accessibility line when writing/speaking. There was room for this in the 39 pages, but it wasn’t stated or explored, which feels like an omission.
Alternatively, if you disagree and didn’t intend to mean this, you failed to rule out something quite important you didn’t mean.

ajc586 13 Dec 2022 19:27 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Slider’s comment on: Coase’s “Nature of the Firm” on Polyamory
(Apologies if in writing this response I have missed your point.)
I don’t believe that in most polyamorous relationships there are clear (i.e. fixed) priorities. I think most people will appreciate that priorities will change depending on the situation. The point I was trying to make was that this kind of ‘emotional availability uncertainty’ is specific to polyamorous relationships. Yes work can be a higher priority than the person in some relationships or at some times, but this is similar regardless of relationship type. The specific failure mode in polyamorous relationships that I was describing was that—even assuming all parties act in good faith and act with the best intentions—X loses the guarantee of Y’s emotional availability, because Y also feels a duty to respond to Z’s needs (or Y’s perception of Z’s needs). (Repeat for all permutations of X, Y and Z.)
In a monogamous relationship there is no need for any emotional prioritization between multiple people. This failure mode is totally absent. Yes, the other factors like work are still in there to get in the way, same as in a poly relationship.
It may be that this ‘emotional availability guarantee’ is not that important to some people, in which case they can achieve something asymptotically equivalent by having lots of partners in a poly relationship, and then presume that at least one of them will probably be emotionally available at any given time.

ajc586 13 Dec 2022 18:19 UTC
4 points
on: Coase’s “Nature of the Firm” on Polyamory
A downside of polyamorous relationships not mentioned here is that it removes guarantees of availability, which for many is an important (the most important?) value component of a long-term relationship.
For example, consider a couple X and Y. Let’s say X has a bad day at work. X knows that, when they get home, Y will be there to provide emotional support. This provides benefit for X in two ways—X knows that Y will be there for support later even while the bad day is playing out, and X additionally benefits from the actual support from Y once home. Y feels happy to be there for X. End result: everyone is OK.
Or, let’s suppose X is sick. They know that, if they need care, Y can be there for them. Yes, Y may have other obligations that need to be pushed aside (e.g. work) but it’s generally accepted for Y to take time off work for this kind of reason.
By contrast, in a polyamorous relationship between X, Y and Z, these guarantees no longer hold. X may have a bad day at work, but maybe Z has had an even worse day (or claims to). The result is that Y feels conflicted (but ends up supporting Z over X), and X feels unsupported. End result: 2 out of the 3 people are not OK.
There will always be (at least the risk of) competition for availability in a polyamorous relationship. This is a failure mode not present in the same way in monogamous relationships.
Yes, in polyamorous relationships one can unbundle sexual attraction, intellectual attraction, long-term companionship and childrearing to some degree and thus optimize those individually. But many in a long-term monogamous relationship already feel they are close (enough) to optimal on each of those dimensions already, so would not benefit from unbundling.

ajc586 20 Oct 2022 21:41 UTC
2 points
1
in reply to: belkarx’s comment on: Untapped Potential at 13-18
but is relaxing and having “fun” necessarily better than intellectual stimulation and learning from challenges? And won’t experiences like that speed up self-discovery?
I think it speeds up self-discovery, at the expense of narrowing the domain within which that self-discovery takes place. So if you spend a lot of time as a teenager developing software, you certainly learn more about yourself in terms of your aptitude for developing software. But there’s an opportunity cost. I favour unguided self-discovery (a.k.a. “having fun”) for longer, because I view self-discovery during teenage years as a global optimization, for which algorithms like simulated annealing tend to find better optima with a higher temperature, albeit taking longer to do so. As a result, I do not favour cutting short ‘childhood’ so people can be ‘useful’ sooner.
Also, it may be well be that the LessWrong demographic favours intellectual stimulation as “better” than many other things, but for the general population, I don’t see evidence this is the case. I know plenty of highly satisfied people, not driven by intellectual stimulation but nonetheless doing things most would regard as valuable to society. But yes, this comes down to subjective philosophy on what is “better” in terms of one’s own utility function, and what we should be optimising for.

ajc586 20 Oct 2022 20:17 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: belkarx’s comment on: Untapped Potential at 13-18
The proportion of “deference to authority” is too high, in my opinion.
In school, or in the real world? And if the latter, what context in particular? In a career context, for example, lower deference to authority (when carefully executed) tends to lead to more rapid promotion, where at the terminus (CEO) everyone in an organisation defers to you. It doesn’t seem there’s a huge supply/demand imbalance for senior roles, which suggests to me that the self-assertiveness vs. deference balance in working-age society is more or less optimal.
what society currently lacks is a path to do something useful with it from a younger age.
Agreed, but why should teenagers being ‘useful’ be a goal? A century ago, most teenagers did actually do useful things (work in factories etc.) but we’ve moved away from that these days. Being a teenager is fun, with low responsibility, a lot of free time for self-discovery, etc. We have a lifetime after that to be ‘useful’. Why should we cut our young years short?

ajc586 19 Oct 2022 18:52 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Kerry’s comment on: Untapped Potential at 13-18
What were the principal factors that led to your decision that homeschooling and early graduation was ‘better’ for your kids then a ‘conventional’ schooling approach/timetable?
Clearly entering the workforce earlier leads to financial independence sooner, more years in employment hence greater lifetime wealth accumulation, etc. It’s not clear that these things are that important either to individual well-being and happiness or in terms of one’s place in broader society, so I’m interested in other kinds of reasons.
Full disclosure: I am ‘a priori’ against homeschooling in most cases. My belief is the principal value of schooling is to provide maximal ‘contact time’ with a highly heterogenous group of people, to enable acquisition of the kinds of skills that are important for societal cohesiveness in a heterogenous world. Substituting at least a significant part of this contact time for time at home (or time with a more homogeneous group i.e. other homeschooled children and their parents) reduces the size of the ‘soft skills’ training data set for teenagers at an important time in their lives. I’m not sure if this is a good thing, even if it leads to on-paper ‘adult credentials’ at age 18.

ajc586 19 Oct 2022 18:23 UTC
1 point
0
on: Untapped Potential at 13-18
There’s an inplicit assumption, both in the post and in many of the comments, that the ‘value’ of school for teenagers lies in knowledge acquisition. And therefore, if school is busywork a.k.a. does not lead to acquisition of useful knowledge, homeschooling or ‘alternative’ schooling must be better. I think this is wrong.
For society, the principal lasting value of schooling teenagers relates to the acquisition of skills like:
- dynamic balancing of self-assertiveness vs. deference to authority (both on an interpersonal level, and also on a societal level)
- productively handling highly heterogeneous interpersonal environments e.g. where people have a broad mix of skill levels, temperaments, abilities, interests, etc.
- learning to handle common but undesirable traits in others e.g. aggressiveness/bullying, jealousy, etc.
- balancing behavioural risk/reward factors (e.g. via ‘playing up’ and assessing the reactions of others)
These things are all important in the real world to ensure effective function of society. They emerge as a result of contact time, and whatever other things also happen during that time (e.g. learning synthesis paths for ammonia, busywork etc.) don’t really matter that much. ‘Alternative’ schools where there’s more homogeneity (everyone is super bright, ‘finds school boring’ etc.) deprive teenagers of time spent in ‘normal’ (heterogenous) society—at a time when such exposure has the most impact—and thus compromises acquisition of the skills that help thrive in the real world.
Knowledge acquisition, on the other hand, can be done via Wikipedia etc. and does not need to occupy school time. People who want to acquire knowledge can do this easily in their bedroom at night. Soft skills cannot be learned this way.
There’s a lot of comments here from people saying things like “I dropped out of school / did not attend regular school, became a software engineer and that was a great decision”. Great for who? I’ve worked with many software engineers and I can say that “software engineer” as a profession is at least somewhat correlated with a lack of the soft skills that others do gain from teenage schooling. So it isn’t surprising, then, that “software engineer” is also correlated with “didn’t get much out of school”. But the direction of the arrow of causality isn’t clear. And having more teenagers spending more time on software engineering (and hence less time on acquiring soft society skills via extended time in heterogenous interpersonal environments i.e. ‘normal schools’) may be great for the teenagers if they’re not interested in society, or for GDP, but I don’t see any indication it’s a net positive for the world as a whole.