I think you may have misread the comment you are replying to. He said that this thread had a low signal to noise ratio, and expressed disbelief that anyone “honestly… learned something from this thread.”
9eB1
If one considers all of their beliefs it’s likely they have at least one which is extremely out of synch with the mainstream. The non-caricatured version of Larry Summers opinion was not literally insane. It is a widely-held belief among some populations. If the average Less Wrong user faced the same level of scrutiny and had to give a complete index of their beliefs, it seems almost certain they would face similar consequences.
As in, for example, if I were to foolishly post to my personal blog about my true personal beliefs I should expect that level of attack in response?
Of course not. You would receive a lesser response. Those are more like worst case scenarios. The “typical” response of me posting my most non-mainstream views on a personally-identified public blog is that future employers google my name after interviewing me, see that my beliefs differ dramatically from their own, and a certain percentage choose not to pursue any further discussions with me (whether consciously or subconsciously due to lowered perceived value), decreasing my prospects in the labor markets. This matters enough to me that I make specific efforts not to have non-mainstream beliefs associated with my personal information.
Grad students who make up a disproportionate quantity of Less Wrong perhaps can afford to care a lot less about this than others. Undergrads at Less Wrong may lack appropriate perspective to understand the influence this could have on their future. On the other end of the spectrum, no lawyer in his right mind would ever consider posting about such things. They are a worst case scenario because reputation is their only asset and they are essentially “hired” by every client, dozens of times per year.
If someone offered me a pill that would merely reduce my qualia experience of pain I would take it, even if it still triggered in me a process of information that would cause me to try to avoid similar circumstances in the future, and even if it were impossible to tell observationally that I had taken it, except by asking about my qualia of experiencing pain and other such philosophical topics. That is, if I am going to writhe in agony, I would prefer to have my mind do it for me without me having to experience the agony. If I’m going to never touch a hot stove because of one time when I burned me, I’d prefer to do that without having the memory of the burn. This idea is not malformed, given what we know about the human brain’s lack of introspection on it’s actions.
I believe it’s unethical to inflict pain on people (or animals, unnecessarily), because to hold something in a state of pain is to frustrate its goals. I don’t think that it is any qualia associated with pain that makes it bad.
In practice it seems that the only reason that it frustrates a person’s goals to receive pain is because they have a goal, “I don’t want to be in pain.” There are certainly reasons that the pain is adaptive, but it certainly seems from the inside like the most objectionable part is the qualia. If the sophisticated intelligence HAS qualia but doesn’t have as a goal avoidance of pain, that suggests your ethical system would be OK to subject it to endless punishment (a sentiment with which I may agree).
I don’t have a great answer for you, but may be able to point you in the right direction. In economics the market for used goods is known as a “secondary market.” This is often used in relation to financial instruments, where the stock market that you trade on is the secondary market, while the primary market is the market for initial public offerings (IPOs) and follow-on offerings. In finance it is widely believed (and I assume there is some support, although I haven’t looked specifically) that the a secondary market for a financial instrument is an important factor in establishing it’s primary market price, but a healthy secondary market in this case actually serves to increase the price in the primary market, because purchasers will pay a premium for higher liquidity. For example, when a corporation issues new bonds, investors will consider how actively traded the corporations existing shares are when determining their willingness to pay.
I assume that for physical goods the dynamics of the secondary market have a very different impact on the primary market, but a search for “secondary markets” on google scholar should probably turn up a starting point.
Given lack of evidence one has to make a judgment based on priors. It is certainly not the case that we should have some sort of higher standard of evidence for one side of this debate because of, for example, the convenience it would afford for tangential but related arguments.
Is it just me, or are the betting rules on Bets of Bitcoin, er, incomprehensible? It takes the worst form of betting—parimutuel betting in horse racing—in common use in America, and adds a bunch of arbitrary time based rules to adjust how bitcoins are spread among the winners. In order to actually make a bet there, I would have to estimate:
The probability of an event occurring.
An expectation of the amount of betting to occur on the other side of the bet.
An expectation of the amount of betting to come into my side of the bet until the period when the bet closes.
The actual time distribution of bets on my side for both existing bet sums (this information is not disclosed), and forthcoming bet sums.
I’m fairly certain this is the worst betting scheme I’ve ever seen, and I’m somewhat suspicious of it given the general sketchiness of the bitcoin community (partially offset by the revealed incompetence of the bitcoin community). One notable casualty of this system is the ability to convert their betting information into informational probability estimates of the event occurring.
Consider that a rhetorical flourish rather than an academic fact.
In blackjack, sports betting, roulette, and slots, you only face uncertainty in the outcome of the event. In parimutuel betting you face uncertainty in the outcome of the event, and also due to the movement of the odds based on the opinions of others after your bet is placed. Lotteries also exhibit this since a greater number of lottery players increases the size of the lottery, but also increases the probability that multiple people will select the same set of numbers. Poker probably has some characteristics of this too, but trying to force an interactive, strategic game with random elements into this outcome betting paradigm probably stretches the comparison to the point of breaking.
The dimension it’s bad along is “fun for players who want to be able to make bets based on their opinions of the outcomes of events.” Of course, blackjack, roulette, and slots may not be very fun for this player either, but sports betting is probably more fun than horse racing.
That’s basically true for horse racing because all the relevant information is known in the minutes before the race and you can make your final bet. For a prediction market you would actually expect that if you have an informational advantage, the odds will move closer to your estimate over time as that information is revealed or processed by other market participants. The time frame on Bets of Bitcoin is long enough that genuine information will be revealed in the meantime for many bets. Because later bets aren’t “worth” as much as earlier bets, though, it’s impossible to say how much this would affect the actually payoffs without having a specific example to consider, though.
I agree with your reasoning. I think it’s sort of silly to suppose that selecting $55 implying a high discount rate is necessarily less rational. If someone offered you $1.00 today or $1.03 tomorrow, it would be a very strange person who decides that they would prefer the $1.03, even though that’s a 4,848,172% rate of return. There are actually disutilities involved in keeping track of future cash inflows, even if small. But almost no one, even the triumphantly rich with very low marginal utilities associated with additional dollars, would prefer $55 million dollars now to $75 million dollars in 60 days. Perhaps drug addicts and the terminally ill would.
Of course, if someone said “Occasionally throughout your life we will surprise you with either $55 dollars, or $75 dollars 60 days later than the days we would have surprised you with $55,” it would then be silly to choose the $55 dollar scenario, because in that case there are no disutilities.
Interestingly, the survey data actually doesn’t seem to support the notion that those with higher incomes are more likely to take the money now. In fact, the data suggest that the wealthiest are slightly less likely to take the money today. For five quintiles, the P($55 now) is 8.4% for <$7,770, 6.2% for <$25K, 6.8% for <$50K, 6.4% for <$83K, and 5.0% for the top quintile. This is with N=593. This doesn’t include any analysis for potentially confounding factors.
These facts, except for the one about alcohol, can be summarized as “We can’t control our environment as much as we thought.” Being able to strongly control our environment using methods that seem obvious and reasonable would be nice, so it would be nice if these facts were false.
I was thinking that wealthier people would have a lower level of utility associated with the additional marginal dollars they could get from waiting, so transaction costs and other disutilities would override the utility offered by having a greater number of dollars. I said “actually” only because this thinking is sort of in line with what I was discussing in my first paragraph.
If you get rid of every possible transaction cost, even implicit costs of the inconvenience of dealing with the transaction and currency, then I would agree that many people would take the $1.03. In fact, I would too. It’s only that these costs are neglected as not being real that I see a problem with. Utility of money just isn’t that simple. For example, some people might actually prefer that the money be handed to them than that it be transferred to their bank account even at the same moment, because if they have found money in-hand, they won’t feel guilty about using it to purchase something “for themselves” rather than paying bills. In fact, someone might prefer $50 handed to them in cash over $55 transferred to and immediately available in their bank account. Is that irrational, or are they just satisfying their utility function in light of their cognitive limits to control their feelings of guilt?
In some ways people want it to be answered in an ideal scenario, as if it’s a physics problem, but I don’t think that’s how most people answer questions like this. Most people read the question, imagine a particular scenario (or set of scenarios, maybe), and answer for that scenario. If you want people to answer in an ideal scenario than the question is underspecified. Also, it’s not clear to me that you can make it an ideal scenario and retain the effect in question, because the more people look at it like a physics problem with a right answer, the less likely they are to answer in a way that’s not in line with their behavior in normal circumstances which you are trying to predict.
Since your blog posts are almost entirely (partisan) political in nature, you should know that traditional political discussion is discouraged here in most threads, except the monthly politics thread. The idea that political discussion is often broken is generally called Politics is the Mindkiller, and there is a whole sequence of old posts on the topic.
This question strikes me as both too mindkill-y, and as unimportant in light of the fact that you don’t get to vote for political parties, only for individual candidates in individual races. What do you think would be the important change in your behavior if you were convinced, in general, that Republicans were “better” than Democrats or vice versa, and how do you think that would impact the political process?
What reason would that be?
It is inefficient to do “cardio” (cardiovascular training for the explicit purpose of increasing general endurance) using only two large muscle groups (glutes and quadriceps). If your intention is to do cardio you can achieve the same level of effort in less time with running, which uses your entire leg and some upper body, or rowing, which has the benefit of not destroying your knees in the process. That said, 250 bodyweight squats is definitely achievable in one year for anyone of normal health, so my estimate of your probability of success is dominated by your willpower and desire to stick to that particular goal.
This poll is subject to self-selection problems. People who use QWERTY are less likely to bother responding. I use Colemak, and so answered “Other.”
I’m not sure that I necessarily type much faster using Colemak than I do using QWERTY, but it is far more comfortable in the same way that lounging in a chair feels more comfortable than sitting on a stool. Typing is effortless as compared with typing in QWERTY because of the economy of motion it has with Colemak (and I presume Dvorak as well). I just measured my typing speed at 78 WPM so people can definitely achieve better typing speeds than me with QWERTY if they are dedicated, but I still wouldn’t go back to QWERTY.
An article that may be of interest to some was posted by the New Yorker criticizing Nate Silver’s focus on Bayesian statistics. I don’t find the arguments particularly compelling, but here it is: link
I used to be annoyed by it, but then I added a rot13 selection bookmarklet to my toolbar.
I speculate that some signals gain their effectiveness from being costly, while others gain their effectiveness from mere association with costly signals. Telling a boss that you got a college degree in order to signal to the job market that you would be a good job prospect is not likely to hurt your chances of getting that job. But, telling potential mates that you dress nice to increase your chances of sleeping with them, but have to keep an eye out for deals and frequent thrift shops to maintain your upper class dress style, will not, ceteris paribus, increase your chances. (Obviously this depends on the particulars of the individuals involved in such a discussion, as this would probably not apply to many LessWrongers who could be aware of signalling and find your optimization thereof inherently attractive.)