AlexSchell

Karma: 1,116

AlexSchell Nov 11, 2014, 11:08 PM
2 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Should we go all in on existential risk? - Considering Effective Altruism
No, I’m not relying on that assumption, though I admit I was not clear about this. The argument goes through perfectly well if we consider expected marginal utilities.

Investors are risk-averse because not-too-unlikely scenarios can affect your wealth sufficiently enough to make the concavity of your utility function over wealth matter. For FAI or world poverty, none of your donations at a given time will make enough of a dent.

I think the countervailing intuition comes from two sources: 1) Even when instructed about the definition of utility, certainty equivalents of gambles, and so on, people have a persistent intuition that utility has declining marginal utility. 2) We care not only about poor people being made better off (where our donations can’t make a dent) but also about creating a feeling of moral satisfaction within ourselves (where donations to a particular cause can satiate that feeling, leading us to want to help some other folks, or cute puppies).

AlexSchell Nov 11, 2014, 4:03 PM
9 points
on: Should we go all in on existential risk? - Considering Effective Altruism
Robin is correct. Here is an accessible explanation. Suppose you first give $1 to MIRI because you believe MIRI is the charity with the highest marginal utility in donations right now. The only reason you would then give the next $1 in your charity budget to anyone other than MIRI would be that MIRI is no longer the highest marginal utility charity. In other words, you’d have to believe that your first donation made a dent into the FAI problem, and hence lowered the marginal utility of a MIRI dollar by enough to make another charity come out on top. But your individual contributions can’t make any such dent.

Some sensible reasons for splitting donations involve donations at different times (changes in room for more funding, etc.) and donations that are highly correlated with many other people’s donations (e.g. the people giving to GiveWell top charities) and might therefore actually make dents.

AlexSchell Sep 16, 2014, 3:36 AM
3 points
in reply to: MathiasZaman’s comment on: What are you learning?
I just recently started to learn basic multivariable calculus (using this book + Khan academy etc.) to make progress on my economics self-study (using this magnificent book). This turned out to involve some of relearning of single-variable also, because much of what I learned in college and high school didn’t quite stick. What’s the book you’re using? Are you aware of the best textbooks thread? Why do you want to study calculus?

AlexSchell Sep 15, 2014, 1:42 AM
5 points
in reply to: John_Maxwell’s comment on: Should people be writing more or fewer LW posts?
Thanks for that. I really should take a closer look at all the content there (there seems to be some beneficial stuff I wasn’t aware of), but the current format strikes me as pretty ill-suited to anyone but the most motivated aspiring rationalists and lifehackers. More to the point, I don’t think relative newcomers are actually going to read the FAQ (this is just a hunch based on what I would do / what I did).

I agree with your point that we could produce more social value by encouraging more posts, especially on instrumental rationality topics. But I think we can do a lot more on the cheap by figuring out how to make existing high-quality content and resources more accessible to readers who weren’t around when they were originally discussed.

AlexSchell Sep 14, 2014, 6:06 PM
4 points
in reply to: Viliam_Bur’s comment on: Should people be writing more or fewer LW posts?
Hmm. A certain prominent wiki displays featured articles on the front page. That would reward efforts to maintain and extend the wiki, while also increasing the visibility of high-quality materials to newcomers.

AlexSchell Sep 14, 2014, 2:16 PM
19 points
on: Should people be writing more or fewer LW posts?
Regardless of whether we should have more or fewer posts, the problem you noticed is more precisely traced back to the lack of infrastructure aimed at collating the best output and resources produced or aggregated here. I got a lot of benefit from the “best textbooks” thread, the post(s) introducing Beeminder back in the day, the post by cousin_it on mutual screen-monitoring, and perhaps from a few other interventions (standing desks, nicotine) I picked up in the local memespace. I doubt I could find many of these as a newcomer, except by lurking around for long enough. Not proposing a solution so far, but this seems to be a common problem with big blogs that have lots of excellent content but even more chaff.

ETA: N-acetylcysteine is actually FDA-approved but only as an expectorant and as an antidote for APAP overdose.

AlexSchell Sep 7, 2014, 6:47 PM
1 point
in reply to: James_Miller’s comment on: A reason to see the future
“I have signed this cryonics contract” isn’t perfectly correlated with “I will be around after time t”, so to get the incentives right he should just make it available far in the future.

AlexSchell Sep 6, 2014, 9:25 PM
1 point
in reply to: therufs’s comment on: Group Rationality Diary, September 1-15
I’m not at all picky about aesthetics, just curious about what people use in case I want to make a more expensive purchase in the future. My own setup is this, with which I’m reasonably happy (though I need to get a larger and slightly taller table/dresser/keyboard surface).

AlexSchell Sep 4, 2014, 3:45 AM
1 point
in reply to: aarongertler’s comment on: Group Rationality Diary, September 1-15
What product do you use? For good posture, I want the monitor(s) to be much higher than the surface the keyboard lies on, but most standing desks I’ve seen have just one surface.

AlexSchell Sep 4, 2014, 3:39 AM
2 points
on: Group Rationality Diary, September 1-15
About six weeks ago I started using TagTime, a time tracker that pings you at random times. One big advantage of TagTime is that it integrates seamlessly with Beeminder and makes it feasible to beemind lots of things with minimal overhead. (Though if you just want to track productivity and work mostly at a computer, you’re better served with RescueTime’s Beeminder integration.)

I’ve also found it informative (and quite pleasantly reinforcing) to plot the general trend of how much time I spend on various things such as work, school, sleep, commuting, standing vs sitting, and so on. I use an R script for that, and have an interactive app for a few time use categories here (sample code here). I’ve given the link to a few friends, which so far seems to help me make better choices.

AlexSchell Sep 3, 2014, 6:11 PM
1 point
in reply to: Metus’s comment on: Group Rationality Diary, September 1-15
Your win isn’t completely offset—you spend more of your time on consuming content and less on fruitless search.

AlexSchell Aug 26, 2014, 4:43 PM
2 points
on: Persistent Idealism
Sellout risk can be worked into the discount rate for future donations, and so it’s a consideration against complicated decade-spanning plans to maximize one’s giving. Following your advice is very valuable by decreasing the discount rate.

AlexSchell Aug 21, 2014, 4:42 PM
4 points
in reply to: hamnox’s comment on: Group Rationality Diary, August 16-31
Re: cryonics, I’ve been playing with the same sort of “revealed preference” idea, but on reflection I don’t think it survives a status quo reversal test. If I’d been signed up by default, I would not cancel my membership in exchange for a smallish annuity and a larger lump sum payment that’s equivalent to the time and other costs of signing up for cryonics.

AlexSchell Aug 18, 2014, 5:59 AM
19 points
on: Group Rationality Diary, August 16-31
I greatly benefited from a silly-seeming “information hazard management scheme” (suggestions for better/existing terms are welcome):

I was going to interview at my top choice med school that I applied to, School A, and knew that I would receive my first admissions decision, from School B, on the same day I would be interviewing. I was mildly confident (60-70%) that School B would accept me, and I really wanted to know their decision. If I were to be accepted, I figured I’d get a confidence boost that would improve my interview performance at School A. But finding that I hadn’t been accepted would badly shake my confidence.

So I arranged to receive a noisy and biased signal of my admissions decision. I asked my sister to execute the following when prompted: Flip a coin twice; if the outcome is HH, stop there; otherwise log into my email account and send me a text message iff School B admitted me. This protocol has the effect of diluting the bad news with noise—P(admitted | no text) ~ 0.3-0.4 -- while still being 75% likely to give me the good news if it exists.

On interview day at School A, the decision email arrived about 30 minutes before my actual interviews. I let my sister know, and waited. I didn’t hear back, and as expected, I didn’t think much of it. I resisted the temptation to open the email until after my interviews (the interviews went fine). It turned out that School B waitlisted me, which predictably wrecked my confidence. School A would later be the only med school to accept me.

AlexSchell Aug 4, 2014, 8:25 PM
2 points
in reply to: buybuydandavis’s comment on: Maybe we’re not doomed
Good point. My guess is that with some googling, the median 23andme customer would find out about SNPedia and find some tool they trust. Of course, requiring even a tiny bit of open-ended research on the part of the prospective consumer is what constitutes the trivial inconvenience.

Re: 23andme supplicating USG, that seems like a reasonable strategy for advancing personal genomics. Across-the-board liberalization of drugs and medical devices won’t happen soon.

AlexSchell Aug 4, 2014, 3:55 PM
6 points
in reply to: buybuydandavis’s comment on: Maybe we’re not doomed

The FDA just forced 23andme to shut down the medical information they were giving me, tailored to my genome. What’s the cost in lives of delaying the genomic revolution in health care 5 to 10 years?

Interestingly, FDA will have achieved this obstruction by merely adding a trivial inconvenience to personal genomics. A consumer can still get essentially the same health info through free tools (which interpret your data file with info from sites like SNPedia), except they have to spend an extra 1-2 hours on this extra step. Of course, this more than suffices to decimate 23andme’s sales.

AlexSchell Jul 5, 2014, 12:23 AM
2 points
in reply to: Error’s comment on: [moderator action] Eugine_Nier is now banned for mass downvote harassment
In practice we avoid this problem by granting a lot of discretion to judges and prosecutors (i.e. mods).

AlexSchell May 31, 2014, 6:07 AM
0 points
in reply to: Raythen’s comment on: Open Thread, May 19 − 25, 2014
Your definition of sacrifice seems to exclude some instances of literal self-sacrifice.

AlexSchell May 27, 2014, 4:49 PM
7 points
in reply to: Dirac_Delta’s comment on: Open Thread, May 26 - June 1, 2014
SAT is very g-loaded, so it would be susceptible to the same practice effect that IQ tests in general are susceptible to. If you look at SAT/IQ tables, the 20-40 point increase Tyler cites corresponds to about 1.5-3 IQ points. This is consistent with the typical magnitude (< 5 points) of the practice effects on IQ test scores. Your “hundreds of points” are wildly inconsistent with this. The only way I could see that happen is if quite a bit of the SAT would test for skills that can be practiced but don’t correlate with g. Not very likely.

The way to reconcile your experience with the evidence is to note that the score on a low-stakes practice test is just not comparable to the score on the real thing (with or without test prep). It’s not that implausible to believe that, say, 10% of people (more than enough to account for your anecdotes) will score at least 100 points less on an early practice test than they could score on the real thing at the same level of preparation. It’s hard to trick your brain into believing that something is high-stakes when it isn’t.

ETA: On reflection, the low-stakes hypothesis probably doesn’t account for too much of the puzzle. In particular, it doesn’t explain any gain between consecutive low-stakes practice tests. I think James Miller’s explanation takes the cake. The SAT-g correlation is likely a lot lower for a population not proficient in English.

AlexSchell May 27, 2014, 6:41 AM
35 points
in reply to: Algernoq’s comment on: Open Thread, May 26 - June 1, 2014
At least one point of Three Worlds Collide is to help the reader appreciate what Irreconcilable Moral Differences feel like from the inside. Humanity revising its view of consent contributes to this goal, and has the benefit of being nearer. With immortality to keep past generations alive, sufficient cumulative moral progress will feel to them about as alien and terrible as legalizing rape.