Adam Zerner
Ah I see. Thanks for clarifying. I see now that it was mentioned but yeah, I lost sight of it while reading.
I’d be interested to hear more about how governments currently deal with it. It seems kinda obvious to me that we wouldn’t want to trust that there is no state-level hacking going on, and that we’d want something like what you propose in the post where you can know it’s random without having to trust people. I always assumed they had some sort of fancy math-y solution, but from what you’re saying it sounds like maybe they don’t.
What if instead of one sources of randomness, we have each candidates provide their own?
Maybe instead of one person-with-a-hat randomizer, we could have each candidate be their own randomness source. We just need a way for candidates’ randomness to be merged in a way that determines the winner.
I got a little confused here. If you have a source of randomness available to you, why move forward to something like Rock-Paper-Scissors? Why not just say “we’ll generate a random number between 0 and 1. I win if it’s between 0 and 0.5, you win if it’s between 0.5 and 1, we re-run if it’s exactly 0.5”?
Is it because both parties can’t agree that the source of randomness is fair?
The paper’s in a hat discussion made me think back to this from Probability is in the Mind:
I believe there was a lawsuit where someone alleged that the draft lottery was unfair, because the slips with names on them were not being mixed thoroughly enough; and the judge replied, “To whom is it unfair?”
Not that I don’t think there can be legitimate problems with the degree of randomness. Just that in the absence of legitimate problems, people still might have problems with it that aren’t legitimate.
I want to push back on the idea of needing a large[1] place if you have a family.
In the US a four person family will typically live in a 2,000-2,500 square foot place, but in Europe the same family will typically live in something like 1,000-1,400 square feet. In Asia it’s often less, and earlier in the US’s history it also was much less than what it is today.
If smaller sizes work for others across time and space I believe it is often sufficient for people in the US today.
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Well, you just said “larger”.
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This resonates with me. I’ve always been a fan of Mr. Money Mustache’s perspective that it doesn’t take much money at all to live a really awesome life, which I think is similar to the perspective you’re sharing.
Some thoughts:
Housing is huge. And living with friends is a huge help. But I think for a lot of people that isn’t a pragmatic option (tied to an area; friends unwilling or incompatible; need privacy), and then they get stuck paying a lot for housing.
Going car free helps a lot. Unfortunately, I think most places in North America make this somewhat difficult, and the places that don’t tend to have high housing costs.
Traveling is expensive. Flights, hotels, Ubers, food. I find myself in lots of situations where I feel socially obligated to travel, like for weddings and stuff, and so end up traveling maybe 4-6x/year, but this isn’t the hardest thing in the world to avoid. You could explain to people that you have a hard budget for two trips a year.
Spending $200/month or whatever on food means being strategic about ingredients. Which I very much think is doable, but yeah, it requires a fair amount of agency.
Cool simulation!
I also have to add that I find the idea that a cyclist wouldn’t cycle on a road absurd. I don’t think I know a single person who wouldn’t do this, presumably a US vs EU thing.
You mean the “No Way No How” group? If so, yeah, it feels implausible to me as well. I have a feeling that for people who were surveyed and said this, it wouldn’t match their actual behavior if they were able to experience an area with genuinely calm roads.
This summer the Thinking Basketball podcast has been doing a series on the top 25 players[1] of the 21st century. I’ve been following the person behind the podcast for a while, Ben Taylor, and I think he has extremely good epistemics.
Taylor makes a lot of lists like these and he always is very nervous and hesitant. It’s really hard to say that Chris Paul is definitively better than James Harden. And people get mad at you when you do rank Paul higher. So Taylor really, really emphasizes ranges. For Paul and Harden specifically, he says that Paul has a range of 6-17 and Harden has a range of 13-25. So yeah, given these ranges it’s very possible that Harden is in fact the better player.
Here’s what his list looks like with ranges in brackets:
LeBron James [1-3]
Shaquille O’Neal [1-6]
Steph Curry [1-8]
Kevin Garnett [2-9]
Nikola Jokic [2-9]
Tim Duncan [2-10]
Dwyane Wade [4-11]
Kobe Bryant [6-15]
Giannis Antetokounmpo [6-15]
Kevin Durant [7-15]
Kawhi Leonard [7-16]
Chris Paul [6-17]
Steve Nash [8-19]
Dirk Nowitzki [7-19]
Shai Gilgeous-Alexander [7-20]
Tracy McGrady [10-24]
Anthony Davis [12-23]
Luka Doncic [12-24]
James Harden [13-25]
Joel Embiid [11-23]
Manu Ginobili [17-24]
Draymond Green [18-26]
Dwight Howard [17-28]
Jayson Tatum [20-28]
Russell Westbrook [20-32]
I think these ranges can be said to be confidence intervals. Taylor never explicitly used that phrase or said whether it’s an 80% confidence interval or 90% confidence interval or whatever, but yeah, I think that’s what these ranges are.
These confidence intervals made me think back to this idea ladder from What’s Our Problem?.
The author of the book, Tim Urban, distinguishes what you think from how you think, and lays out each of these dimensions in that diagram. For the horizontal axis, we can use politics as an example where liberal is to the left and conservative is to the right. For the vertical axis of how you think, high is good (like a scientist) and low is bad (like a zealot).
Of course, these two dimensions don’t tell the whole story. We’re compressing things down and losing information when we plot a point on this 2D graph. But as the saying goes, all models are wrong, some are useful.
Anyway, I think it’d be cool to add a third dimension: confidence. Maybe you think James Harden is the 19th best player of the 21st century, and you arrived at that belief by taking the high rung approach of thinking like a scientist, but how confident are you in that belief? Are you 90% sure that he’s like the 18th to 20th best player, or is your 90% confidence interval much wider?
Maybe we can describe this third dimension in terms of width. Someone who is “wide left” leans to the left but has a wide confidence interval. I don’t love conceptualizing this with width though because there aren’t enough adjectives. How do you describe medium width? Medium wide? I dunno.
When briefly describing your beliefs you need to reduce things down to few dimensions and be concise, so I think we need to be careful about “what we add”. But still, I’m a huge fan of talking about how confident you are in what you believe. I think it’s pretty underutilized and wish people included their confidence when describing their beliefs more frequently. And that said, my confidence in that belief is probably medium-low.
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Well, single season peaks.
Yeah I think those experiences are pretty common. I was the same until I started going to some local bike meetups. I would see these intense looking bikers on their road bikes riding amongst fast, aggressive traffic and thought that’s what you need to do if you’re a biker, and that I just lacked the skills. I would stick to sidewalks and off-road paths.
Well, I guess in places without good bike infrastructure there’s a lot of truth to my assumptions actually. But the important thing to realize is that, although hard to find, some places do exist that are actually decent for those of us in group three.
Hm. I’m shouldn’t have said that
symboldoesn’t fit well into the post. I actually don’t understand it well enough to say that.I would be ok calling “boo” and “yay” beliefs in the context of this post. In some sort of strict sense I’d want to say that beliefs can only have the type of number (between 0 and 100 exclusive), but in a looser sense I think it’s probably fine to call things like “boo”, “yay”, true, false, null, etc all beliefs as well.
Edit: Perhaps these “boo” and “yay” beliefs you reference are the type of thing described in Professing and Cheering.
You have a typo where the second instance of
let belief = null;should presumably belet belief = undefined;.I somehow lost sight of the fact that undeclared variables aren’t seen as
undefined. I’ll try to update the post.(Also, I think “It’d print an error saying that
foobaris not defined” is false? Confirmed by going to the browser console and running that two-liner; it just printsundefinedto the console.)Hm. I get
Uncaught ReferenceError: foobar is not defined.Interesting mapping, otherwise!
Thanks!
Yeah, I lost sight of that somehow. Whoops.
It’s a little tough because in terms of how beliefs map to JavaScript types I think the mapping to undeclared makes more sense, but describing the nuance of how an undeclared variable differs from an
undefinedone in JavaScript feels a little excessive for this post.But I also don’t like having something in the post that is so blatantly wrong. I’ll try to come up with something and edit the post.
Related: this video shows an example of a bike lane that just randomly ends. It’s main point is that the city should put up signs to warn you that it will end so you don’t head down it if you don’t want to, but I think that it also kinda illustrates the idea that as an “unfinished bridge”, it doesn’t really provide much value (it probably provides negative value).
Ah, good points the benefit of not spilling and not having to be upright. Those both seem helpful.
I’m traveling right now and have been drinking out of my water bottle whereas when I’m at home I drink out of cups. The water bottle is insulated and the water in it stays cold for an impressively long time. It’s awesome.
It’s making me think that back at home I should use the water bottle or maybe a tumbler or something, instead of cups. At least for water that I’m drinking throughout the day. The cost of buying a tumbler, if I even wanted to use that instead of the water bottle, is only $30 or so. For something that I’m going to use every day for many years, I consider that negligible.
I’m not sure what the other downsides would be of a tumbler vs a cup. That it’s heavier? Nah.
The one other downside that comes to my mind is that cups can stack which means they take up less space in my cabinets. That’s pretty important to me. To use a tumbler consistently for drinks other than water I’d probably need a few tumblers and that’d take up more cabinet space than I’m ok with (I live in a small apartment and am a little neurotic about things being too crowded). So I think I will start by using my water bottle to drink water out of and go from there.
Anyway, I get the sense that most people just drink out of un-insulated cups without thinking about the alternative of something insulated—I certainly was in that boat—so I figure it could be helpful to post this.
Great point. Somehow that got lost on me. I agree that the “baby” part seems short enough where it often won’t actually be a deal breaker. I also think it’d probably make sense to try to get some experience with the other stages as well.
That makes sense. So I guess it’d probably be good to read a book or two on childcare and maybe get some experience doing something lower stakes like babysitting for a night at a time first.
From there it seems to me like a) you’d be able to find someone to let you babysit for a week and b) you’d have enough knowledge and experience such that the experiment would provide useful information. What do you think?
Yeah that makes sense about other people’s kids vs your own kids. My thoughts on this are similar to my thoughts about Justis’ point about how having kids is likely to transform you: it’s probably true that there’s a difference but it’s also probably true that the difference isn’t large enough such that babysitting is unlikely to be helpful.
Yeah, the fact that it is so difficult to acknowledge such regret definitely makes hard to get good data. Personally, for people I know, I’m aware of a handful of examples of true regret, and then there’s another handful where I don’t know for sure but suspect it.
Hm. My instinct here is that the degree to which intent matters depends a lot on the situation. Often times it matters, often times it doesn’t, often times it’s somewhere on the spectrum.
I’m having trouble figuring out how that instinct meshes with the claim that this post makes. The post says that “in the main” intent matters, but yeah, I’m not really sure what that means.
I found the apology example helpful though. It made me realize that intent in those situations matters more than I previously thought, and that being honest/genuine is an even better heuristic than I previously thought. Maybe the idea behind this post is that people tend to undervalue how much intent matters.
This is illustrated well in this Seinfeld clip.