AllAmericanBreakfast

• AllAmericanBreakfast 23 Oct 2020 0:04 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Elizabeth’s comment on: The Trou­ble With Babbles

  I like this a lot! It dove­tails with all my writ­ing and in­tro­spec­tion on vi­su­al­iza­tion and learn­ing, which has been the most im­por­tant in­sight for my learn­ing pro­cess this year. Con­cept han­dle: “vi­sual bab­ble” or “vi­sual brain­storm­ing.”

The Trou­ble With Babbles

• AllAmericanBreakfast 22 Oct 2020 19:24 UTC

  4 points

  on: AllAmer­i­canBreak­fast’s Shortform

  Pay­ing your dues

  I’m in school at the un­der­grad­u­ate level, tak­ing 3 difficult classes while work­ing part-time.

  For this path to be use­ful at all, I have to be able to tick the boxes: get good grades, get ad­mit­ted to grad school, etc. For now, my strat­egy is to op­ti­mize to com­plete these tasks as effi­ciently as pos­si­ble (what Zvi calls “play­ing on easy mode”), in or­der to pre­serve as much time and en­ergy for what I re­ally want: liv­ing and learn­ing.

  Are there dan­gers in get­ting re­ally good at pay­ing your dues?
  

  1) Maybe it dis­tracts you/​diminishes the in­cen­tive to get good at avoid­ing dues.

  2) Maybe there are two ways to pay dues (within the rules): one that gives you great profit and an­other that merely satis­fies the re­quire­ment.

  In gen­eral, though, I tend to think that effi­cient ac­com­plish­ment is about avoid­ing or com­press­ing work un­til you get to the “effi­ciency fron­tier” in your field. Good work is about one of two things:

  1. Get­ting re­ally fast/​ac­cu­rate at X be­cause it’s nec­es­sary for rea­son R to do Y.

  2. Get­ting re­ally fast/​ac­cu­rate at X be­cause it lets you train oth­ers to do (or bet­ter yet, au­to­mate) X.

  In my case, X is school­work, R is “tri­an­gu­la­tion of me and grad­u­ate-level ed­u­ca­tion,” and Y is “get a re­search job.”

  X is also school­work, R is “prac­tice,” and Y is learn­ing. But this is much less clear. It may be that other strate­gies would be more effi­cient for learn­ing.

  How­ever, since the ex­pected value of my learn­ing is rad­i­cally diminished if I don’t get into grad school, it makes sense to op­ti­mize first for ace­ing my school­work, and then in the time that re­mains to op­ti­mize for learn­ing. Treat­ing these as two sep­a­rate ac­tivi­ties with two sep­a­rate goals makes sense.

  This isn’t “play­ing on easy mode,” so much as pur­chas­ing fuzzies (As) and utilons (learn­ing) sep­a­rately.

• AllAmericanBreakfast 22 Oct 2020 15:56 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: crl826’s comment on: What’s the differ­ence be­tween GAI and a gov­ern­ment?

  Thanks, I didn’t know this se­ries ex­isted and it looks like it cov­ers a lot of my ques­tions in an ac­cessible way!

[Question] What’s the differ­ence be­tween GAI and a gov­ern­ment?

• AllAmericanBreakfast 21 Oct 2020 5:52 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: AllAmericanBreakfast’s comment on: Pre­dic­tIt: Pres­i­den­tial Mar­ket is In­creas­ingly Wrong

  And here I was calcu­lat­ing the EV of a Bi­den bet.

  FWIW, af­ter tak­ing fees into ac­count, you’d need to think Bi­den has bet­ter than a 70% chance to win the elec­tion to make it a ra­tio­nal bet at the cur­rent price of $0.64/​share. If the av­er­age of 538 and The Economist’s fore­cast (90% chance of Bi­den vic­tory) is right un­der the as­sump­tions of their model, then you’d need to think there was a less than 22% chance of some sort of Black Swan.

  Could be elec­toral shenani­gans (fraud, in­com­pe­tence, in­terfer­ence, suc­cess­ful le­gal challenge) or catas­tro­phe (Bi­den has an aneurysm) un­ac­counted for by the mod­els of Pre­dic­tIt and The Economist makes Trump win the elec­toral col­lege, or makes nei­ther of them/​no­body win.

  • Cer­tainly that chance is not 0%. But if it were, your EV for a $1,000 bet un­der these as­sump­tions would be win­ning $287.

  • If you think there’s a 5% Black Swan chance (85% chance of Bi­den vic­tory), your EV is $216.

  • If you think there’s a 10% Black Swan chance, your EV is $144.

  • If you think there’s a 15% Black Swan chance, your EV is $73.

  • If you think there’s a 20% Black Swan chance, your EV is about nil.

• AllAmericanBreakfast 21 Oct 2020 5:27 UTC

  6 points

  on: Pre­dic­tIt: Pres­i­den­tial Mar­ket is In­creas­ingly Wrong

  Too late!

  From the sup­ple­men­tary com­ment to the rules for this bet:

  
  Note to traders: As of this time, the con­tracts for Joe Bi­den and Don­ald Trump have reached the limit for the al­low­able num­ber of traders.

• AllAmericanBreakfast 21 Oct 2020 4:44 UTC

  −2 points

  in reply to: rockthecasbah’s comment on: A tale from Com­mu­nist China

  In think­ing about this, it seems to help me to use the fol­low­ing frame­work:

  1. “What does one step bet­ter/​worse look like in cat­e­gory X?”

  2. “How fast could we take those steps?”

  It’s tempt­ing to try and de­scribe a va­ri­ety of worst case sce­nar­ios and the wind­ing paths by which we might get there. There’s a sort of Sorites para­dox be­hind Wei_Dai’s fear. When do we go from “things are get­ting worse” to “it’s prob­a­bly to late” to you’re on a train to the gu­lag?

  That’s im­pos­si­ble to say. It’s also im­pos­si­ble to sum all the nega­tive trends and say “how bad is it?” Since each trend is hard to com­pare, we also can’t say “are things get­ting worse or bet­ter over­all?”

  But there are two things we can do.

  One is to des­ig­nate an ar­bi­trary thresh­old at which we com­mit to mak­ing a plan for flee­ing the coun­try and open­ing that con­ver­sa­tion with our loved ones, and an­other one at which we ac­tu­ally fol­low through on it. A good thresh­old needs to be sim­ple to de­ter­mine and com­pel­ling enough to mo­ti­vate ac­tion—your own and that of oth­ers. It might be a good con­ver­sa­tion to pre-game with­out be­ing too se­ri­ous or spe­cific about it.

  The other thing we can do is pick one or two in­di­vi­d­ual trends that we hap­pen to care about, and mon­i­tor for whether they’re in­di­vi­d­u­ally get­ting bet­ter or worse. I think part of why poli­tics kills minds is be­cause we try and take in ev­ery­thing, all at once, and syn­the­size it all.

  Edit:

  In that en­deavor, per­haps the US Cri­sis Mon­i­tor can be a use­ful tool.

• AllAmericanBreakfast 20 Oct 2020 21:41 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: rockthecasbah’s comment on: A tale from Com­mu­nist China

  I want to know what my prior should be for a US coup. Sure, per­haps these fac­tors you cite make it more likely to have one than it would oth­er­wise and ceterus paribus, but what’s the base rate of coups in a multi-cen­tury, pres­i­den­tial, wealthy, re­source-rich democ­racy?

• AllAmericanBreakfast 20 Oct 2020 19:09 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: A tale from Com­mu­nist China

  That makes sense, but doesn’t pat­tern-match very well onto the con­cerns peo­ple like Wei_Dai have about our pre­sent mo­ment. What are the trends that peo­ple tend to fo­cus on when they’re wor­ried about “where this is all head­ing?”

  Bot­tom-up

  • At­tacks on rep­u­ta­tion: can­cel cul­ture, con­spir­acy-peddling

  • Street vi­o­lence: some sig­nifi­cant loot­ing, oc­ca­sional mur­der, ar­son, not with im­punity but some­times treated with tol­er­ance by those not di­rectly re­spon­si­ble for en­forc­ing the law

  • Po­lariza­tion: ac­cu­sa­tions against in­di­vi­d­u­als, in­sti­tu­tions, and groups within so­ciety as be­ing evil/​com­plicit in evil or in­her­ently good/​trust­wor­thy due to their la­bel/​af­fili­a­tion/​de­mo­graphic/​job; calls for rad­i­cal re­struc­tur­ing of so­ciety; open di­vi­sion of civil society

  Top-down

  • Grasp­ing for power: ma­jor poli­ti­cal rule-break­ing, dis­parag­ing ba­sic demo­cratic pro­cess, open at­tempts at voter sup­pres­sion, cult of personality

  • Divi­sion and di­s­or­der: be­tween gen­er­als and Pres­i­dent, con­stant churn in the White House

  • En­croach­ments: Fed­eral law en­force­ment get­ting in­volved in lo­cal protests

  • Ques­tion­able loy­alties: the Pres­i­dent’s re­fusal to di­vest and up­com­ing debts, “Putin’s puppy” meme

  It’s tempt­ing to jump to the worst-case night­mare sce­nario, but it’s a more tractable and, to me, more in­ter­est­ing ques­tion to ask “what does one step worse look like?”

  Here are some pos­si­bil­ities:

  Bot­tom-up

  • Weaponized false/​man­u­fac­tured ac­cu­sa­tions against high-sta­tus peo­ple in­crease in fre­quency and acceptance

  • Protests in­ten­sify. Sham­ing peo­ple in their houses at night for not join­ing protests turns to tres­pass­ing and home in­va­sions. Prop­erty de­struc­tion and loot­ing is the norm, not the ex­cep­tion. The rate and size of protests, the fre­quency of deadly protests, and the num­ber of deaths in­creases 50% over the course of 6 months to a year, as­sas­si­na­tion attempt

  • Po­lariza­tion in­ten­sifies: De­fam­ing cat­e­gories of peo­ple be­comes a part of offi­cial school cur­ricu­lums a la “teach the con­tro­versy,” more in­tense re­stric­tions/​bans/​grass­roots cen­sor­ship on taboo top­ics or more cat­e­gories of taboo top­ics, col­leges see in­creas­ing pro­por­tions of lo­cal stu­dents as re­gional differ­ences solidify

  Top-down

  • Grasp­ing for power: open re­jec­tion of elec­tion re­sults, ma­jor vi­o­lent counter-protests by defeated side even with land­slide vic­tory, shock­ing re­peat vic­tory by Trump drives un­prece­dented protests and counter-protests along with con­tinued cor­rup­tion within the White House

  • Divi­sion and di­s­or­der: dis­puted elec­tion leads to unan­swered ques­tions about mil­i­tary’s role in set­tling a dispute

  • En­croach­ments: Sur­prise Trump vic­tory/​elec­tion steal­ing leads to state of emer­gency dec­la­ra­tion on­go­ing in mul­ti­ple states

  • Ques­tion­able loy­alties: sel­l­ing of state se­crets by in­sid­ers in the Trump White House, Trump defects to Russia

  Hav­ing done this ex­er­cise, my two main fears are:

  1. A sur­prise Trump vic­tory lead­ing to mil­i­tary polic­ing in liberal states. This will be ob­vi­ous.

  2. In­ten­sifi­ca­tion of protests and po­lariza­tion. Less im­me­di­ately con­cern­ing, but also sneak­ier. I would like to see at­tempts to quan­tify size and scale of vi­o­lence at protests and track it over time, shift­ing cur­ricu­lums and aca­demic norms, and ex­am­ples of ac­cu­sa­tions of vi­o­lence that seem man­u­fac­tured not for at­ten­tion but to elimi­nate a spe­cific poli­ti­cal figure.

• AllAmericanBreakfast 20 Oct 2020 6:09 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: lsusr’s comment on: A tale from Com­mu­nist China

  That’s not a bad idea, though I already know that it’s be­yond me to ex­e­cute such a syn­the­sis. It’s one I would read with great in­ter­est, how­ever.

• AllAmericanBreakfast 20 Oct 2020 3:31 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: lsusr’s comment on: A tale from Com­mu­nist China

  Th­ese are in line with what I was ask­ing for, thank you for pro­vid­ing! On read­ing this list, I re­al­ized what I was en­vi­sion­ing was more like an in­ter­nal rev­olu­tion or gov­ern­ment takeover by a home­grown grass­roots mil­i­taris­tic or­ga­ni­za­tion. Some­thing that started like one of our cur­rent so­cial move­ments here in the USA that de­vel­oped into a power akin to the Cul­tural Revolu­tion.

• AllAmericanBreakfast 19 Oct 2020 5:12 UTC

  21 points

  on: A tale from Com­mu­nist China

  When COVID started, I made a check­list for what to look for to pre­dict a global catas­trophic pan­demic based on the mechanisms of trans­mis­sion and harm and his­tor­i­cal out­comes in var­i­ous out­breaks.

  It would be in­ter­est­ing to make a check­list for what to look for when ex­pect­ing the rise of a to­tal­i­tar­ian state from a demo­cratic one, vet­ted for sen­si­tivity and speci­fic­ity against his­tor­i­cal regimes.

  Do we have any ex­am­ples of such an event in the last cen­tury?

• AllAmericanBreakfast 16 Oct 2020 18:57 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Covid 10/​15: Play­time is Over

  What about not wear­ing them? It’s haz­ardous to your health and that of oth­ers. We can clearly see that not wear­ing masks at large so­cial gath­er­ings is func­tion­ing as a uni­ver­sally ac­knowl­edged tribal sig­nal. It’s not the masks, but the lack of masks, that is a sac­ri­fice to the gods.

  Although what’s in­ter­est­ing is that when one side sac­ri­fices to the gods, the other side gets a “free” sig­nal. If one side re­jects masks, the other side gets to adopt masks—which are already good for them—as a sym­bol of loy­alty, which just makes the mask wear­ing even bet­ter.

  Does this mean that the mask-wear­ing side needs to find al­ter­na­tive sac­ri­fices? Per­haps by re­fus­ing to see friends even when they would be able to safely? Or does it mean they get a free­bie?

• AllAmericanBreakfast 16 Oct 2020 18:55 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: AllAmer­i­canBreak­fast’s Shortform

  I do chalk a lot of dys­func­tion up to this story-cen­tric ap­proach to life. I just sus­pect it’s some­thing we need to learn to work with, rather than against (or to deny/​ig­nore it en­tirely).

  My sense is that sto­ry­tel­ling—to your­self or oth­ers—is an art. To get the re­ac­tion you want—from self or oth­ers—takes some aes­thetic sen­si­tivity.

  My guess is there’s some low hang­ing fruit here. Peo­ple of­ten talk about do­ing things “for the story,” which they re­sort to when they’re try­ing to jus­tify do­ing some­thing dumb/​waste­ful/​dan­ger­ous/​fu­tile. Per­versely, it of­ten seems that when peo­ple talk in de­tail about their good de­ci­sions, it comes of as ar­ro­gant. Pointless, tidy philo­soph­i­cal para­doxes seem to get peo­ple’s puz­zle-solv­ing brains go­ing bet­ter than con­fronting the com­plex­ity of the real world.

  But maybe we can sim­ply start build­ing habits of ex­press­ing grat­i­tude. Find­ing ways to pre­sent good ideas and de­ci­sions in ways that are delight­ful in con­ver­sa­tion. Spin­ning in­ter­est­ing sto­ries out of the best parts of our lives.

• AllAmericanBreakfast 16 Oct 2020 8:12 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Anatoly_Vorobey’s comment on: Dangers of steel­man­ning /​ prin­ci­ple of charity

  Some­times, our na­tive cu­ri­os­ity is a poor guide to the ques­tions we should re­ally be ask­ing.

  The Ro­man will have to see the lack of tem­ples to An­nona, read the his­to­ries of an­cient Rome, ex­pe­rience a whole lot of peo­ple mak­ing fun of his toga and the po­lice do­ing noth­ing to stop it, and mar­vel at the magic that the com­mon cit­i­zens of this new land carry in their pocket.

  But even that might not work if the cher­ished be­lief is in­fec­tious enough. Peo­ple will lead mis­er­able lives, com­mit un­speak­able acts, deny their own senses, and go to an early grave in or­der to main­tain a false be­lief or avoid an un­com­fortable thought.

  Steel­man­ning only helps in the for­tu­nate case where cu­ri­os­ity and in­tu­ition are fairly trust­wor­thy guides in our pur­suit of a mean­ingful truth.

• AllAmericanBreakfast 16 Oct 2020 6:45 UTC

  7 points

  on: Jour­nal ar­ti­cle: “The Myth­i­cal Ta­boo on Race and In­tel­li­gence”

  Man, I re­ally tried to read this ar­ti­cle. I don’t even have an opinion on it. It’s like wad­ing through fly-cov­ered car­rion at the end of a bat­tle. Not fun, noth­ing of value to find, and you can’t draw an opinion on who was right and who was wrong in the skir­mish from the mouths of the dead.

• AllAmericanBreakfast 15 Oct 2020 23:32 UTC

  8 points

  on: AllAmer­i­canBreak­fast’s Shortform

  We do things so that we can talk about it later.

  I was hav­ing a bad day to­day. Un­likely to have time this week­end for some­thing I’d wanted to do. Crappy teach­ing in a class I’m tak­ing. Ever in­creas­ing and com­pli­cat­ing re­spon­si­bil­ities piling up.

  So what did I do? I went out and bought half a cherry pie.

  Will that cherry pie make me happy? No. I knew this in ad­vance. Con­sciously and un­con­sciously: I had the thought, and no emo­tion com­pel­led me to do it.

  In fact, it seemed like the least-effi­ca­cious ac­tion: spend­ing some of my limited money, to buy a pie I don’t need, to re­spond to stress that’s un­re­lated to pie con­sump­tion and is in fact caused by lack of time (that I’m spend­ing on buy­ing and eat­ing pie).

  BUT. What buy­ing the pie al­lowed me to do was tell a differ­ent story. To my­self and my girlfriend who I was tex­ting with. Now, to­day can be about how I got some deli­cious pie.

  And I re­ally do feel bet­ter. It’s not the pie, nor the walk to the store to buy it. It’s the re­lief of be­ing able to tell my girlfriend that I bought some deli­cious cherry pie, and that I’d share it with her if she didn’t live a three-hour drive away. It’s the re­lief of re­flect­ing on how I dealt with my stress, and see­ing a pie-shaped mem­ory at the end of the school­work.

  If this is a cor­rect model of how this all works, then it sug­gests a cou­ple things:

  • This can prob­a­bly be op­ti­mized.

  • The way I talk about that op­ti­miza­tion pro­cess will prob­a­bly af­fect how well it works. For ex­am­ple, if I then think “what’s the cheap­est way to get this effect,” that in­tu­itively doesn’t feel good. I don’t want to be cheap. I need to find the right lan­guage, the right story to tell, so that I can ex­plain my “philos­o­phy” to my­self and oth­ers in a way that gets the re­sponse I want.

  Is that the darks arts? I don’t think so. I think this is one area of life where the mes­sage is the medium.

• AllAmericanBreakfast 15 Oct 2020 23:21 UTC

  19 points

  in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Covid 10/​15: Play­time is Over

  You are right.

  For oth­ers, here’s what I talked my­self into while try­ing to ar­gue with habryka/​Zvi in writ­ing this com­ment:

  Sacri­fices to the gods are an in­effec­tive or harm­ful waste of re­sources. Peo­ple make sac­ri­fices be­cause they ex­pect that their sac­ri­fice will earn them sta­tus points with their in-group.

  Why does a sac­ri­fice need to be por­trayed as an effec­tive ac­tion? Be­cause that’s the whole point of the sac­ri­fice. You have a prob­lem. I have a solu­tion: sac­ri­fice. And some malarkey to ex­plain why my sac­ri­fice will solve the prob­lem.

  Sacri­ficers tend to pre­vent oth­ers from tak­ing effec­tive ac­tions. Why can’t sac­ri­fices to the gods and effec­tive ac­tions peace­fully co­ex­ist? Be­cause that would prove my malarkey was false, the sac­ri­fices I called for were in fact harm­ful and un­nec­es­sary and self-serv­ing, and I will lose tremen­dous sta­tus.

  Why does sac­ri­fice and malarkey so of­ten win out, when we have such a vested in­ter­est in effec­tive ac­tion? Be­cause malarkey can op­ti­mize for sim­plic­ity, and give the con­so­la­tion of in-group sta­tus for peo­ple will­ing to par­ti­ci­pate. The truth can only op­ti­mize for the truth, which may be com­pli­cated. Some­times, the nec­es­sary work and at­ten­dant re­wards only achiev­able by elites or an un­pop­u­lar sub­group.

  Why does sac­ri­fice have to be costly? This op­er­ates un­der the the­ory that we use sac­ri­fice as a heuris­tic to tell who’s do­ing the most to help out our side—or as a self-sig­nal­ing mechanism to re­mind our­selves about how loyal we are to our own team.

  This model pre­dicts that in any given com­plex crisis, sim­ple, stupid, sym­bolic sac­ri­fices will be heav­ily rep­re­sented in speech and ac­tion. While this is an un­char­i­ta­ble ex­pla­na­tion for be­hav­ior we dis­agree with, it’s still kinder than the al­ter­na­tive (con­flict the­ory) and more epistem­i­cally re­spon­si­ble than ques­tion­ing our own judg­ment just be­cause some al­ter­na­tive au­thor­ity sez so. When a be­hav­ior ap­pears to be eas­ily ex­plained as a stupid sym­bolic sac­ri­fice, our prior in a com­plex novel cir­cum­stance should be that that’s ex­actly what it is.

• AllAmericanBreakfast 15 Oct 2020 17:45 UTC

  18 points

  on: Covid 10/​15: Play­time is Over

  Zvi, I re­ally ap­pre­ci­ate your posts on COVID.

  One of the things I no­tice in your style is your re­cur­rent meme of “sac­ri­fices to the gods.” This seems like a clas­sic ex­am­ple of the “dark arts.” It’s us­ing shame and un­char­i­ta­ble ar­gu­men­ta­tion to tear down your op­po­nents’ ar­gu­ment and ad­vance your own. It’s un­usual to see in writ­ing here.

  On the other hand, when con­fronting Very Se­ri­ous Peo­ple, who aren’t in­ter­ested in listen­ing to a con­trary ar­gu­ment that might dam­age their sta­tus, per­haps this is nec­es­sary. “You’re not listen­ing to me, so I’m not go­ing to make your (stupid) ar­gu­ment for you: I’m just go­ing to call you out.” After all, I agree with you in your as­sess­ment of these ar­gu­ments. They’re pretty stupid. And it’s a re­lief to hear them de­scribed as such.

  Some­time I’d love to hear your thoughts on the ten­sion here—if you see it as ten­sion at all. Thanks for your con­tinued work.