The problem with trade agreements as a tool for maintaining peace is that they only provide an intellectual and economic reason for maintaining good relations between countries, not an emotional once. People’s opinions on war rarely stem from economic self interest. Policymakers know about the benefits and (sometimes) take them into account, but important trade doesn’t make regular Americans grateful to the Chinese for providing them with so many cheap goods—much the opposite, in fact. The number of people who end up interacting with Chinese people or intuitively understanding the benefits firsthand as a result of expanded business opportunities is very small.
On the other hand, video games, social media, and the internet have probably done more to make Americans feel aligned with the other NATO countries than any trade agreement ever. The YouTubers and Twitch streamers I have pseudosocial relationships with are something like 35% Europeans. I thought Canadians spoke Canadian and Canada was basically some big hippie commune right up until my minecraft server got populated with them. In some weird alternate universe where people are suggesting we invade Canada, my first instinctual thought wouldn’t be the economic impact on free trade, it would be whether my old steam friend Forbsey was OK.
I mean, just imagine if Pewdiepie were Ukrainian. Or worse, some hospital he was in got bombed and he lost an arm or a leg. You wouldn’t have to wait for America to initiate a draft, a hundred thousand volunteers would be carving a path from Odessa to Moscow right now.
If I were God-Emperor and I wanted to calm U.S.-China relations, my first actions would be to make it really easy for Chinese people to get visas, or even subsidize their travel. Or subsidize Mandarin learning. Or subsidize Google translate & related applications. Or really mulligan hard for our social media companies to get access to the chinese market.
It would not be to expand free trade. Political hacks find it exceptionally easy to turn simple trade into some economic boogeyman story. Actually meeting and interacting with the people from that country, having shared media, etc., makes it harder to inflame tensions.
To the LW devs—just want to mention that this website is probably now the most well designed forum I have ever used. The UX is almost addictively good and I’ve been loving all of the little improvements over the past year or so.
Noticed something recently. As an alien, you could read pretty much everything Wikipedia has on celebrities, both on individual people and the general articles about celebrity as a concept… And never learn that celebrities tend to be extraordinarily attractive. I’m not talking about an accurate or even attempted explanation for the tendency, I’m talking about the existence of the tendency at all. I’ve tried to find something on wikipedia that states it, but that information just doesn’t exist (except, of course, implicitly through photographs).
It’s quite odd, and I’m sure it’s not alone. “Celebrities are attractive” is one obvious piece of some broader set of truisms that seem to be completely missing from the world’s most complete database of factual information.
Analyzing or talking about status factors is low-status. You do see information about awards for beauty, much like you can see some information about fiances, but not much about their expenditures or lifestyle.
Part of the issue is like that celebrity, as wikipedia approaches the word, is broader than just modern TV, film, etc. celebrity and instead includes a wide variety of people who are not likely to be exceptionally attractive but are well known in some other way. There’s individual preferences in terms of who they think are attractive, but many politicians, authors, radio personalities, famous scientists, etc. are not conventionally attractive in the way movie stars are attractive and yet these people are still celebrities in a broad sense. However, I’ve not dug into the depths of wikipedia to see if, for example, this gap you see holds up if looking at pages that more directly talk about the qualities of film stars, for example.
Based on Victoria Nuland’s recent senate testimony, I’m registering a 66% prediction that those U.S. administered biological weapons facilities in Ukraine actually do indeed exist, and are not Russian propaganda.
Of course I don’t think this is why they invaded, but the media is painting this as a crazy conspiracy theory, when they have very little reason to know either way.
I glean that “biolab” is actually an extremely vague term, and doesn’t specify the facility’s exact capabilities at all. They could very well have had an innocuous purpose, but Russia would’ve had to treat them as a potential threat to national security, in the same way that Russian or Chinese “biolabs” in Mexico might sound bad to the US, except Russia is even more paranoid.
It seems like “biological weapons facility” is a quite subjective term. The US position is that their own army labs that produced anthrax that was used after 9/11 are not a “biological weapons facility” because while they do produce anthrax that could be used militarily, it’s not produced with the intent of military use.
Based on those definitions it’s plausible that the Ukrainian labs produce viruses that can be weaponized but that the US just doesn’t see them as a “biological weapons facility” because they believe the intent for offensive use isn’t there.
If you make exact predictions like that you should define what you mean with your terms.
It’s like Fauci’s dance saying that there’s no gain-of-function research in the paper he mailed around with gain-of-function in the filename. The US government doesn’t use commonsense definitions for words when it comes to biosafety.
I’m registering a 90% predicition those facilities do not exists, as in “how the hell would the US have been dumb enough to plant biological weapons facilities in a remote country outside their sphere of influence and where Russia has (used to have until recently) a lot of weight...”
It varies but usually not long.
My uninformed guess is that your recent post was deliberately not frontpaged because it’s a political topic that could attract non-rationalists to comment and flame in an unproductive manner.
The first three episodes of Narcos: Mexico, Season 3, is some of the best television I have ever seen. The rest of the “Narcos” series is middling to bad and I barely tolerate it. So far I would encourage you to skip to this season.
Lost a bunch of huge edits to one of my draft posts because my battery ran out. Just realizing that happened and now I can’t remember all the edits I made, just that they were good. :(
I wish there were a way I could spend money/resources to promote question posts in a way that counterbalanced the negative fact that they were already mostly shown by the algorithm to the optimal number of people.
I think the multi-hour computer hacking gauntlet probably trumps any considerations of account creation in terms of obstacles to new users. Just in considering things we could pare down. We also need some way to prevent computer hackers from scraping all of the exam boxes, and that means either being enormously creative or at some point requiring the creation of an account that we KYC.
Two caveats to efficient markets in finance that I’ve just considered, but don’t see mentioned a lot in discussions of bubbles like the one we just experienced, at least as a non-economist:
First: Irrational people are constantly entering the market, often in ways that can’t necessarily be predicted. The idea that people who make bad trades will eventually lose all of their money and be swamped by the better investors is only valid inasmuch as the actors currently participating in the market stay the same. This means that it’s perfectly possible for either swarms of new irrational investors outside the market to temporarily prop up the price of a stock, or for large amounts of insider investors to suddenly *become* irrational because of some environmental change that the rest of the market doesn’t have the ability to account for. Those irrational people might be cycled out, but maybe not before some new irrational traders move in, etc.
Two: Just because what is being done in the stock market is “stock trading” doesn’t mean that the kinds of people who are successful in one region, or socioeconomic climate, or industry are going to be successful in all trading environments. Predicting which companies are going to pay the most dividends has turned out to be a very general problem, partly because analysts have gotten so good at it, but overfitting is still an issue. In the 50s, it was probably important for investors to have a steady hand, be somewhat naturally rational, and maybe quick at mental math. Now, you just have to be a top 0.001% data scientist. The good traders in both groups of stock analysts have to be very intelligent, but there are also probably non-overlapping traits that one group might possess and not the other. I doubt the data scientists Renaissance Technologies has today are as calm under pressure as they’d need to be if they were making trades by hand instead of solving the more abstract problem of building the model that implies arbitrage opportunities.
I think part of the reason that COVID-19 blindsided the market so hard was the effects of #2. The 50s-era stock traders don’t control most of the capital anymore. And I may be underestimating how good they are, but I think most quantitative trading firms were just unable to anticipate an event like COVID-19 because Goldman developed an adaption that said “stop trading based off expert opinion”. That adaption worked to filter out competing firms for a decade, but then it failed this year in a way that seemed bewildering to rationalists, because nobody is old enough to think to make a pandemic-modeling algorithm.
Obviously, if these meta-trends can be predicted, then someone will get good at meta-finance and pre-emptively stock their staff with quants in 1990 and temporarily hire new workers for Q1 2020. The existence of any actor that is completely competent in all variations of finance will eventually solve finance. But if some aspects of them can’t be, then this could be an inherently limiting part of the sectors’ effectiveness.
The problem with trade agreements as a tool for maintaining peace is that they only provide an intellectual and economic reason for maintaining good relations between countries, not an emotional once. People’s opinions on war rarely stem from economic self interest. Policymakers know about the benefits and (sometimes) take them into account, but important trade doesn’t make regular Americans grateful to the Chinese for providing them with so many cheap goods—much the opposite, in fact. The number of people who end up interacting with Chinese people or intuitively understanding the benefits firsthand as a result of expanded business opportunities is very small.
On the other hand, video games, social media, and the internet have probably done more to make Americans feel aligned with the other NATO countries than any trade agreement ever. The YouTubers and Twitch streamers I have pseudosocial relationships with are something like 35% Europeans. I thought Canadians spoke Canadian and Canada was basically some big hippie commune right up until my minecraft server got populated with them. In some weird alternate universe where people are suggesting we invade Canada, my first instinctual thought wouldn’t be the economic impact on free trade, it would be whether my old steam friend Forbsey was OK.
I mean, just imagine if Pewdiepie were Ukrainian. Or worse, some hospital he was in got bombed and he lost an arm or a leg. You wouldn’t have to wait for America to initiate a draft, a hundred thousand volunteers would be carving a path from Odessa to Moscow right now.
If I were God-Emperor and I wanted to calm U.S.-China relations, my first actions would be to make it really easy for Chinese people to get visas, or even subsidize their travel. Or subsidize Mandarin learning. Or subsidize Google translate & related applications. Or really mulligan hard for our social media companies to get access to the chinese market.
It would not be to expand free trade. Political hacks find it exceptionally easy to turn simple trade into some economic boogeyman story. Actually meeting and interacting with the people from that country, having shared media, etc., makes it harder to inflame tensions.
This doesn’t seem like an either-or question. Freer trade and more individual interactions seem complementary to me.
I should note that I’m also pro free trade, because I like money and helping people. I’m just not pro free trade because I think it promotes peace.
To the LW devs—just want to mention that this website is probably now the most well designed forum I have ever used. The UX is almost addictively good and I’ve been loving all of the little improvements over the past year or so.
Ditto here; kudos to everyone involved in creating such an excellent forum design!
Noticed something recently. As an alien, you could read pretty much everything Wikipedia has on celebrities, both on individual people and the general articles about celebrity as a concept… And never learn that celebrities tend to be extraordinarily attractive. I’m not talking about an accurate or even attempted explanation for the tendency, I’m talking about the existence of the tendency at all. I’ve tried to find something on wikipedia that states it, but that information just doesn’t exist (except, of course, implicitly through photographs).
It’s quite odd, and I’m sure it’s not alone. “Celebrities are attractive” is one obvious piece of some broader set of truisms that seem to be completely missing from the world’s most complete database of factual information.
Analyzing or talking about status factors is low-status. You do see information about awards for beauty, much like you can see some information about fiances, but not much about their expenditures or lifestyle.
Part of the issue is like that celebrity, as wikipedia approaches the word, is broader than just modern TV, film, etc. celebrity and instead includes a wide variety of people who are not likely to be exceptionally attractive but are well known in some other way. There’s individual preferences in terms of who they think are attractive, but many politicians, authors, radio personalities, famous scientists, etc. are not conventionally attractive in the way movie stars are attractive and yet these people are still celebrities in a broad sense. However, I’ve not dug into the depths of wikipedia to see if, for example, this gap you see holds up if looking at pages that more directly talk about the qualities of film stars, for example.
Based on Victoria Nuland’s recent senate testimony, I’m registering a 66% prediction that those U.S. administered biological weapons facilities in Ukraine actually do indeed exist, and are not Russian propaganda.
Of course I don’t think this is why they invaded, but the media is painting this as a crazy conspiracy theory, when they have very little reason to know either way.
Here’s an analysis by Dr. Robert Malone about the Ukraine biolabs, which I found enlightening:
https://rwmalonemd.substack.com/p/ukraine-biolab-watchtower?r=ta0o1&s=w&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
I glean that “biolab” is actually an extremely vague term, and doesn’t specify the facility’s exact capabilities at all. They could very well have had an innocuous purpose, but Russia would’ve had to treat them as a potential threat to national security, in the same way that Russian or Chinese “biolabs” in Mexico might sound bad to the US, except Russia is even more paranoid.
It seems like “biological weapons facility” is a quite subjective term. The US position is that their own army labs that produced anthrax that was used after 9/11 are not a “biological weapons facility” because while they do produce anthrax that could be used militarily, it’s not produced with the intent of military use.
Based on those definitions it’s plausible that the Ukrainian labs produce viruses that can be weaponized but that the US just doesn’t see them as a “biological weapons facility” because they believe the intent for offensive use isn’t there.
Glenn Greenwalds reporting is good on this. https://rumble.com/vx2iq7-the-white-houses-game-playing-denials-of-bio-labs-in-ukraine.html is the freely accessible video version, there’s also a written version on his substack behind a paywall.
If you make exact predictions like that you should define what you mean with your terms.
It’s like Fauci’s dance saying that there’s no gain-of-function research in the paper he mailed around with gain-of-function in the filename. The US government doesn’t use commonsense definitions for words when it comes to biosafety.
I’m registering a 90% predicition those facilities do not exists, as in “how the hell would the US have been dumb enough to plant biological weapons facilities in a remote country outside their sphere of influence and where Russia has (used to have until recently) a lot of weight...”
Did you remember what weapons the US gave Iraq? How is arming Ukraine with such weapons less insane than it was with Iraq?
Wouldn’t be the dumbest thing they’ve ever done.
Every once in a while I’m getting bad gateway errors on Lesswrong. Thought I should mention it for the devs.
Today, I also got errors.
How long does it usually take for mods to decide whether or not your post is frontpage-worthy?
It varies but usually not long. My uninformed guess is that your recent post was deliberately not frontpaged because it’s a political topic that could attract non-rationalists to comment and flame in an unproductive manner.
The first three episodes of Narcos: Mexico, Season 3, is some of the best television I have ever seen. The rest of the “Narcos” series is middling to bad and I barely tolerate it. So far I would encourage you to skip to this season.
Lost a bunch of huge edits to one of my draft posts because my battery ran out. Just realizing that happened and now I can’t remember all the edits I made, just that they were good. :(
Happened to someone else once :)
I wish there were a way I could spend money/resources to promote question posts in a way that counterbalanced the negative fact that they were already mostly shown by the algorithm to the optimal number of people.
If you simply want to people to invest more into answering a question post, putting out a bounty for the best answer would be a way to go about it.
Interesting idea.
I just launched a startup, Leonard Cyber. Basically a Pwn2Job platform.
If any hackers on LessWrong are out of work, here are some invite codes:
The mandatory sign-up is a major obstacle to new users. I’m not going to create an account on a website until it has already proven value to me.
I think the multi-hour computer hacking gauntlet probably trumps any considerations of account creation in terms of obstacles to new users. Just in considering things we could pare down. We also need some way to prevent computer hackers from scraping all of the exam boxes, and that means either being enormously creative or at some point requiring the creation of an account that we KYC.
Does EY or RH even read this site anymore?
Two caveats to efficient markets in finance that I’ve just considered, but don’t see mentioned a lot in discussions of bubbles like the one we just experienced, at least as a non-economist:
First: Irrational people are constantly entering the market, often in ways that can’t necessarily be predicted. The idea that people who make bad trades will eventually lose all of their money and be swamped by the better investors is only valid inasmuch as the actors currently participating in the market stay the same. This means that it’s perfectly possible for either swarms of new irrational investors outside the market to temporarily prop up the price of a stock, or for large amounts of insider investors to suddenly *become* irrational because of some environmental change that the rest of the market doesn’t have the ability to account for. Those irrational people might be cycled out, but maybe not before some new irrational traders move in, etc.
Two: Just because what is being done in the stock market is “stock trading” doesn’t mean that the kinds of people who are successful in one region, or socioeconomic climate, or industry are going to be successful in all trading environments. Predicting which companies are going to pay the most dividends has turned out to be a very general problem, partly because analysts have gotten so good at it, but overfitting is still an issue. In the 50s, it was probably important for investors to have a steady hand, be somewhat naturally rational, and maybe quick at mental math. Now, you just have to be a top 0.001% data scientist. The good traders in both groups of stock analysts have to be very intelligent, but there are also probably non-overlapping traits that one group might possess and not the other. I doubt the data scientists Renaissance Technologies has today are as calm under pressure as they’d need to be if they were making trades by hand instead of solving the more abstract problem of building the model that implies arbitrage opportunities.
I think part of the reason that COVID-19 blindsided the market so hard was the effects of #2. The 50s-era stock traders don’t control most of the capital anymore. And I may be underestimating how good they are, but I think most quantitative trading firms were just unable to anticipate an event like COVID-19 because Goldman developed an adaption that said “stop trading based off expert opinion”. That adaption worked to filter out competing firms for a decade, but then it failed this year in a way that seemed bewildering to rationalists, because nobody is old enough to think to make a pandemic-modeling algorithm.
Obviously, if these meta-trends can be predicted, then someone will get good at meta-finance and pre-emptively stock their staff with quants in 1990 and temporarily hire new workers for Q1 2020. The existence of any actor that is completely competent in all variations of finance will eventually solve finance. But if some aspects of them can’t be, then this could be an inherently limiting part of the sectors’ effectiveness.