It sounds to me like the core of the shock might be due to an overly high estimate of the degree to which apparent intelligence is correlated with rationality (or critical thinking skills and the will to apply them). There are many apparently intelligent people who have poor critical thinking skills and little desire to apply them or to come to the truth.
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Yes! And on a related note, the overly confident prediction probably came about due to inaccurate beliefs about the correlation between things such as intelligence, educational level, socio-economic background, critical thinking skills, and political beliefs. If the degree to which these sorts of things are correlated were more accurately known (the correlation is lower than Elizabeth and most of us intuitively think), then she would have had far less confidence in her predictions and would have thought that a wider range of outcomes was feasible.
Time for a Bayesian update.
There are also price alert services that will email you when a book reaches a certain price. I’ve found this really useful, because while the latest version of a textbook might be $100 new and $60 used, you can sometimes get the same version used in great condition for much lower than the normal used price, especially after the end of a semester.
This is really useful when you don’t need the book soon but know that you’d like to buy it at some point.
Aren’t those all just additional aspects of the game, additional constraints in the optimization process?
If people will make inferences from how long the Master takes to judge whether different configurations fit the rule, then the Master should either systematically manipulate his times to give the wrong impression or introduce some random waits. And if you are known for only using elegant rules, then you’re using a sub-optimal strategy for choosing the patterns, because you’re giving away more information than necessary.
To answer your questions, I don’t think it’s obvious that being evicted is 33 times worse than letting a child die (ignoring that the original question was about $2700, not $10,000), but it might actually turn out to be the case, since if somebody is evicted and has their credit ruined (and by hypothesis has none of the oher safeguards), it’s quite possible that they will never recover, and thus will never be financially secure enough to make future donations of vastly more consequence than the difference between a large donation now and a large donation in 1 year (after they’ve established an emergency fund).
I think the question is really whether it’s rational to donate all your savings now (if you have no reliable way of handling the unexpected case of losing your income source). Doing so greatly increases the probability of a personal catastrophe that one might not properly recover from. A more rational alternative, I would submit, is to donate a smaller amount now, while continuing to save until you have a sufficient emergency fund, and then donate more at that point. It is more rational, I believe, because the end results are quite similar (the same amount donated over the long term), but the personal risk (and the risk of not being able to make future donations) is greatly lessened.
Hmm, I thought I was correcting an obvious error you made, and I expected you to immediately explain what you really meant or add some extra condition or retract your claim, and then we would have been done with the discussion.
I think the rational “fix” is to make sure you can stay afloat for at least a few months if a catastrophe happens. That is also the standard advice of every financial planning book I’ve ever read. And a Google search finds plenty of sites like: http://www.mainstreet.com/article/moneyinvesting/savings/how-much-should-you-save-rainy-day
I’d like to see somebody find a financial advice site or book that says you can periodically wipe out your sayings if you have a reliable source of income and overdraft protection on the empty account (and no other compensating factors, to beat the dead horse).
Sometimes it amazes me the things that people on LW will argue for just for the sake of argument.
I think most people would evaluate the hardship of having their credit ruined and being evicted as far greater than 33 times as bad as SIAI getting money (or SIAI getting money in 1 year when a 6-month cash reserve safety net has been built up). Also, it’s actually greater than 33 times, because you also have to include the probability that they won’t get another income source before they hit the catastrophe point, but even including that, I think most people would rate their life being ruined as orders of magnitude more negative utils than SIAI getting the donation is positive utils.
John is definitely not the case that started this discussion. My entire point is that Rain has a bunch of other compensating factors, which one could easily argue make it rational in that case. The issue under debate is whether somebody with none of those addtional compensating factors that Rain has would be rational to do the same, given just a reliable source of income and overdraft protection.
The term disillusionment frames the event as one having lost something, and given that most people probably think that illusions are often good things (everybody, like, has their own truth, dude), it’s easy to see why disillusionment would have a negative connotation.
What it really should be is something like en-sight or en-knowledgement, focusing on the positive aspect of seeing something that one was previously blind to or knowing something one was previously ignorant of.
No, I’m not. I’m assuming that even if one has a reliable source of income, one still might lose that source of income. Maybe you’re interpreting ‘reliable’ as ‘certain’ or something very close to that.
To give some numbers, I would consider a source for which there is a 1% to 3% chance of losing it within 1 year as a reliable source, and my point remains that in that situation, with no other compensating factors than overdraft protection on a bank account, it is not rational to donate all your savings to charity.
You’re providing valuable feedback about something that probably bothered every viewer of the Hassabis video, so don’t apologize!
It’s a shame that the best talk (imho) was the one that included the most interaction with the slides. I searched for the slides online but couldn’t find them (his publications are at http://www.gatsby.ucl.ac.uk/~demis/ but no slides).
Okay, let’s think this through with a particular case.
Assume only your two factors: John has a reliable source of income and overdraft protection on an account. Since you assert that those two factors are sufficient, we can suppose John doesn’t have any line of credit, doesn’t own anything valuable that could be converted to cash, doesn’t know anybody that could give him a loan or a job, etc
John donates all his savings, and loses his job the next day. He has overdraft protection on his empty bank account, which will save him from some fees when he starts bouncing checks, but the overdraft protection will expire pretty quickly once checks start bouncing.
Things will spiral out of control quickly unless John is able to get another source of income sufficient to cover his recurring expenses or there is some other compensating factor than the two you mentioned (which shows they are not sufficient). Or do you think he’s doing okay a month later when the overdraft protection is no longer in effect, he has tons of bills due, needs to pay his rent, still hasn’t found a job, has run out of food, etc.? And if he hasn’t found work within a few months more—which is quite possible—he’ll be evicted from his home and his credit will be ruined from not having paid any of his bills for several months.
ETA: the point isn’t that all of that will happen or is even likely to happen, but that a bank account represents some amount of time that the person can stay afloat while they’re looking for work. It greatly increases the likelihood that they will find a new source of income before they hit the catastrophe point of being evicted and having their credit ruined.
Thanks for the reply. Bravo on structuring your life the way you have!
I don’t think those two alone are sufficient for it to be rational.
I work for a mid-sized (in the thousands of employees), very successful, privately held company with a long, stable history, and I feel very secure in my job. I would say I have a reliable source of income, but even so, I wouldn’t estimate the probability of finding myself suddenly and unexpectedly out of work in the next year at less than 1%, and if somebody has school loans, a mortgage, etc., then in that situation, it seems more rational to have at least enough cash to stay afloat for a few months or so (or have stocks, etc., that could be sold if necessary) while finding a new job.
Not that I don’t think your donation is admirable, but I’m curious how you are able to donate your entire bank account without running the risk of not being able to respond to a black-swan event appropriately and your future well-being and ability to donate to SIAI being compromised?
Do you think it’s rational in general for people to donate all their savings to the SIAI?
Why don’t you explain your reasoning for your conclusion based on (a), (b), and (c)? Merely saying “I would guess that” is not persuasive.
Strongly agree.
I’m not advocating anything like “always respond”. I’m advocating that when people actually think it’s a strong critique, they should respond rather than playing the status game of pretending they don’t really think it’s a strong critique by ignoring it. Additionally, even if they don’t think it’s a strong critique, if many other people ‘whose judgment they would trust in other similar situations’ do think it’s a strong critique, then they should also respond.
I thought there actually was a strong norm already that was being flouted.
The model I had in mind was:
LW’s “Strong critique of comment in direct reply to a comment or post” is to “ignoring the critique and failing to reply”
as
Academia’s “Strong paper that criticizes methodology, etc., of a published paper” is to “not publishing a response to the critique”.
In academia, a researcher that habitually failed to address serious flaws in their publications would quickly lose status and become irrelevant. I thought something like that was a norm at LW.
In the same vein:
One behaviorist says to the other, just after they’ve had sex: “it was good for you, how was it for me?”