This reminds me of the new Foundation television series, where the show-makers are required to show us supersmart people- Hari Seldon and his protege can literally predict the grand movements of society- and they do it by waving around CGI dots. I think its Type-2 geniusing.
aa.oswald
Karma: 84
Good call out. I don’t know how contagious Covid/Delta is with children, but my intuition is that it is less contagious, which means your clarification is good news.
The UK still has vaccination rates just around 50%, and we can assume that they focused on the elderly first. The control system is first and foremost about preventing hospitals from being swamped and causing politicians to have a bad press day, so with most of the most likely to die off the table, case counts and hospitalization counts will have to be much higher.
Since May, the UK has seen its cases go up ~7x, its hospitalizations go up ~2x, and deaths hover around the same level (maybe they’ve gone 2x? hard to tell). To have US 2020 Summer Surge levels of death, their death rate would have to go up 13x, and their case rate would presumably have to go up 26x.
Given that Delta looks like it is going exponential in the UK, and it is doubling between 1-2 weeks, it would be at that high case count by August. However, that rate would be multiple times higher than the UK’s existing peak.
Is that worrying?
For personal finance, I have found and recommend reddit’s /r/personalfinance to be a great boon. Their flowchart is essentially “correct”.
My initial reaction to this comment was that tungsten rods are science fiction and that we don’t have the capabilities or willingness to put the rods in space… but it now occurs to me that Starship makes the possibility of tungsten rods much more believable.
Jason does have a post where he briefly tackles the low-hanging fruit hypothesis [here]. It isn’t 100% compelling, but the idea is that there are “multiple orchards” and we go through one after another. The conceit doesn’t include the possibility of “barren earth orchards” though.
I definitely agree that the idea of unconstrained “invention” is not well supported in society, but the hypothesis makes me go “huh?”
Science discovers new knowledge; invention creates useful machines, chemicals, processes, or other products; and business produces and distributes these products in a scalable, self-sustaining way.
Is the place you use the word “invention” not engineering? For most types of engineering, undergrad students are taught science for two years (it is new knowledge to them), they’re taught how to usefully apply that knowledge for a year and a half, and then they have a final semester or two explaining how that knowledge can be used to achieve some business goals.
In other words, “career that applies scientific knowledge to make up stuff” seems to be engineers.
When I ctrl+f-replace “inventors” with “engineers” in my head, I personally see your career path theory making more sense given that engineers do have a career path, which is mostly to become well-degreed technicians, financiers, or tenture-track-warriors. They ought to becoming inventors, but the existing paths divert them.
Corporate research is largely not as ambitious and long-term as it used to be.
A large part of this may be that there is increasing pressure on CEOs to focus on short-term earnings at the expense of long term earnings.
I like the note that titles are a “nominally-infinite resource” because there is a limit to them. Namely, they’re sticky. With Zuckerberg’s org, if he really, really, really needs to inflate a person’s title, he can do it. He has the option to pull an Andreessen if he needs to, but the opposite isn’t true.
Destiny Disrupted was critical history reading for me, and helped break me out of a Eurocentric viewing of the world before college. I’ve tried very, very hard to find a history book from Chinese, Russian, or Indian authors that has the same insider’s point of view but written in accessible, plain English.
Aside from wanting to read similar books about other cultures/civilizations, I am reminded that it seemed a bit steeped in “post-9/11ism”.
Are there examples of Kaj’s writing that you find particularly salient/useful?
Why new year’s predictions? Why not new day’s predictions, or new week’s predictions?
In general, it is easier to make a list of predictions and gauge uncertainty at one time. It takes a lot of effort, and so is generally done sparingly. The beginning of the calendar year makes a good Schelling point to do that work, especially given that there are lots of other “new year” rituals it folds into.
Couldn’t you do better? Should you carry notebooks with you everywhere all the time, prepared to write predictions? Should you use an interval timer to force you to make a prediction whenever it rings?
There is probably a market outside of Less Wrong (definitely within Less Wrong and the ratcom) for some sort of app or service that reminds people to make predictions, gauge uncertainty, and then update those predictions at time intervals. Think “Anki cards” but for predictions. The biggest hinderance is mental effort and the fact that the rewards are so nebulous (“oh wow, I’ve become good at gauging uncertainty thats [socially] useful for… what exactly?”)
I would say that Sneer Culture is a subset of “scornporn”. Sneer Culture is generally about “X licensing” whereas scornporn is about “Contempt generating content that makes you feel higher on the social hierarchy.”
I wonder if that is because /r/TTC couldn’t figured out how to differentiate cringe from irony and post-irony, or if it just got big enough that /r/all converted it ?
Ferris is probably coming from a place of the LINDY Effect- why read new books, when books that are older definitively are more useful because if they hadn’t been useful they wouldn’t have lasted as long.
New content and timely content is more of a bet than a sure thing.
I guess the question is “how much of people choosing one mode of transit over another is caused by innumeracy?” Planes are several times less risky than cars, but planes are also highly, highly regulated. If you took those regulations away, let anybody who wants to build and fly a plane, and then completely remove the TSA prechecks, you lower the cost of the planes, lower the non-travel time commitment, and presumably raise the risk of flying.
But would it beat a car? Would they reach equilibrium?
Well, obviously Covid wouldn’t have happened. People would drive less, take public transit (especially planes) more (alternatively, planes would be massively deregulated and become incredibly cheap to fly). People who feel even a bit sick would wear masks.
I would imagine that this type of numeracy would extend into the personal realm to include things like personal finance and personal productivity. They would cook their own meals more, eat healthier, and possibly buy less luxury goods.
They would push for the end of coal plants (24 deaths per TWh compared to .02/TWh for solar), decreasing the amount of funding the military gets for anti-terrorism activities, and charging the leadership team of Boeing and the FAA for criminal negligence.
I just want to say that any good mechanical engineer designing a new system with some tolerances and known limitations but making use of novel gears, like on a rocket engine, will probably be running those gears through finite element analysis.
That indicates to me that the “lowest-level component in a model” question is not just “what makes a good model” but “what is the lowest-level component I can get away with”.
Paul Graham also has a recent essay exhorting his readers to produce content.
Most people don’t even reach the stage of making something they’re embarrassed by, let alone continue past it. They’re too frightened even to start.
Content creation has two ends: the reward for doing it, and the punishment for doing it*. You’ve outlined the reasons to do it above, Jacobian, but it seems like you haven’t tackled the punishment for doing it? (Maybe I’ve missed another blog post). The Big Yud’s concept of “hero licensing” comes into play here: a little voice inside people’s heads that says, “who are you to try to fill in Scott Alexander’s shoes?”
But fuck it, Jacobian, you and Zvi are the only two people trying and I hereby give every reader of this comment a license to be the new SSC.
*(It might also have another two ends, the rewards for not doing it and the punishment for not doing it).
One of the heuristics you see in the business world that attempt to get at this is the “5 Whys?” It’s very easy to look at some graph- stock value, sales, whatever- and create a just-so answer for why something is the way it is. It’s a lot harder but more useful to go ahead and interrogate the just-so answer again.
Of course, the hardness of doing a “5 Whys?” exercise is also the reason that nobody does it unless they’re getting paid to or they’ve joined an online cult of critical thinking.
Another strategy which I have tried is this: get a cat. I’m not kidding. They act as a forcing function for many of the things you describe, Alex. They are a regular social commitment (they must be fed!), and they offer an incentive to go to sleep early (because you will not be allowed to sleep late). They also maintain control through time changes, at least with daylight savings, because the time does not change for them. The sun in the sky and their own cat circadian rhythm moves them.
They externalize the human-animal in the brain into something manageable (and managing).