antanaclasis

Karma: 219

antanaclasis 3 May 2024 18:24 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: kave’s comment on: An Unintentional Compliment
Also related: Yudkowsky on making Solvable Mysteries:

If you have not called upon your readers explicitly to halt and pay attention, they are already reading the next sentence. Even if you do explicitly ask them to pay attention, they are already reading the next sentence. If you have your character think, “Hm… there’s something funny about that story, I should stop and think about that?” guess what your reader does next? That’s right, your reader goes on to read the next sentence immediately, to see what the character thinks about it.

antanaclasis 3 May 2024 17:05 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Yair Halberstadt’s comment on: Can stealth aircraft be detected optically?
You can’t just trivially scale up the angular resolution by bolting more sensors together (or similar methods). It gets more difficult to engineer the lenses and sensors to meet super-high specs.

And aside from that, the problem behaves nonlinearly with the amount of atmosphere between you and the plane. Each bit of distortion in the air along the way will combine, potentially pretty harshly limiting how far away you can get any useful image. This may be able to be worked around with AI to reconstruct from highly distorted images, but it’s far from trivial on the face of it.

antanaclasis 8 Apr 2024 4:20 UTC
1 point
1
in reply to: DanB’s comment on: The 2nd Demographic Transition
My guess is the largest contributor is the cultural shift to expecting much more involved parenting (example: the various areas where parents had CPS called on them for letting their kids do what the parents were allowed to do independently as kids)

antanaclasis 27 Mar 2024 1:42 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: chanamessinger’s comment on: My Interview With Cade Metz on His Reporting About Slate Star Codex
Another big thing is that you can’t get tone-of-voice information via text. The way that someone says something may convey more to you than what they said, especially for some types of journalism.

antanaclasis 20 Mar 2024 16:01 UTC
6 points
4
in reply to: Shankar Sivarajan’s comment on: Community Notes by X
I’d imagine that once we see the axis it will probably (~70%) have a reasonably clear meaning. Likely not as obvious as the left-right axis on Twitter but probably still interpretable.

antanaclasis 18 Mar 2024 22:56 UTC
13 points
3
in reply to: NicholasKees’s comment on: Community Notes by X
I think a lot of the value that I’d get out of something like that being implemented would be getting an answer to “what is the biggest axis along which LW users vary” according to the algorithm. I am highly unsure about what the axis would even end up being.

antanaclasis 3 Mar 2024 1:54 UTC
2 points
1
in reply to: M. Y. Zuo’s comment on: Don’t Endorse the Idea of Market Failure
To lay out some of the foundation of public choice theory:

We can model the members of an organization (such as the government) as being subject to the dynamics of natural selection. In particular, in a democracy elected officials are subject to selection whereby those who are better at getting votes can displace those who are worse at it, through elections.

This creates a selection dynamic where over time the elected officials will become better at vote-gathering, whether through conscious or unconscious adaptation by the officials to their circumstances, or simply through those who are naturally better at vote-gathering replacing those worse at it.

This is certainly not a bad thing per se. After all, coupling elected officials’ success to what the electorate wants is one of the major purposes of democracy, but “what gets votes” is not identical to “what’s good for the electorate”, and Goodhart’s law can bite us through that gap.

One of the classic examples of this is “doling out pork”, where concentrated benefits (such as construction contracts) can be distributed to a favored sub-group (thus ensuring their loyalty in upcoming elections) while the loss in efficiency from that favoritism is only indirectly and diffusely suffered by the rest of the electorate (making it much less likely that any of them get outraged about it enough to not vote for the pork-doler).

The application of this to market failures is that you can look at a market under government regulation as two systems (the market and the government), each with different incentives that imperfectly bind their constituent actors to the public good. The market generally encourages positive-sum trades to happen, but has various imperfections, especially regarding externalities and transaction costs, and the government generally encourages laws/regulations that benefit the public, but has its own imperfections, such as pork-doling and encouraging actions which look better to the public than their actual results would merit.

The result of this is that it is not necessarily clear whether whether changing how much influence market vs government dynamics have on a specific domain will improve it or not. Moving something to more government control may fix market failures, or it may just encourage good-looking-but-ineffective political posturing, and moving something to the market may cut down on corruption, or may just hit you with a bunch of not-properly-accounted-for externalities.

In the particular case of “government action to solve market failures”, the incentives may be against the government actors solving them, as in the case of the coal industry providing a loyal voting bloc, thereby encouraging coal subsidies that make the externality problem worse.

Therefore, my presentation of the market-failure-idea-skeptic’s position would be something like “we should be wary of moving the locus of control in such-and-such domains away from the market toward the government, because we expect that likely the situation will be made worse by doing so, whether due to government action exacerbating existing market failures more than it solves them, or due to other public-choice problems arising”.

antanaclasis 2 Mar 2024 12:00 UTC
8 points
1
in reply to: M. Y. Zuo’s comment on: Don’t Endorse the Idea of Market Failure
Just because the US government contains agents that care about market failures, does not mean that it can be accurately modeled as itself being agentic and caring about market failures.

The more detailed argument would be public choice theory 101, about how the incentives that people in various parts of the government are faced with may or may not encourage market-failure-correcting behavior.

antanaclasis 29 Feb 2024 8:39 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: GoteNoSente’s comment on: Balancing Games
For chess in particular the piece-trading nature of the game also makes piece handicaps pretty huge in impact. Compare to shogi: in shogi having multiple non-pawn pieces handicapped can still be a moderate handicap, whereas multiple non-pawns in chess is basically a predestined loss unless there is a truly gargantuan skill difference.

I haven’t played many handicapped chess games, but my rough feel for it is that each successive “step” of handicap in chess is something like 3 times as impactful as the comparable shogi handicap. This makes chess handicaps harder to use as there’s much more risk of over- or under-shooting the appropriate handicap level and ending up with one side being highly likely to win.

antanaclasis 1 Jan 2024 6:56 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: eukaryote’s comment on: shoes with springs
Also note that socks with sandals being uncool is not a universal thing. For example, in Japan it is reasonably common to wear (often split-toed) socks with sandals, though it’s more associated with traditional garb than modern fashion.

antanaclasis 15 Dec 2023 6:51 UTC
7 points
2
in reply to: Oxytocin’s comment on: Is being sexy for your homies?
A way of implementing the serving-vs-kitchen separation that avoids that problem (and actually the way of doing it I initially envisioned after reading the post) would be that within each workplace there is a separation, but different workplaces are split between the polarities of separation. That way any individual’s available options of workplace are, at worst, ~half of what they could be with mixed workplaces, regardless of their preference.

(Caveat that an individual’s options could end up being less than half the total if there is a workplace-gender correlation overall (creating an imbalance of how many workplaces of each polarity there are), and an individual has a workplace-gender matchup which is opposite to the trend, but in this case at least that individual’s lesser amount of choices is counterbalanced by the majority of people having more than 50% of the max choices of workplace fitting them.)

antanaclasis 13 Nov 2023 21:49 UTC
14 points
13
on: Redirecting one’s own taxes as an effective altruism method
It kind of passed without much note in the post, but isn’t the passport non-renewal one of the biggest limiters here? $59,000 divided by 10 years is $5,900 per year, so unless you’re willing to forgo having a passport that’s the upper limit of how much you could benefit from non-payment (exclusive of the tax liability reduction strategies). That seems like a pretty low amount per year in exchange for having to research and plan this, then having your available income and saving methods limited (which could easily lower your income by more than $5,900 just by limiting the jobs available to you).

antanaclasis 8 Nov 2023 21:18 UTC
1 point
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on: What’s going on? LLMs and IS-A sentences
One other way of putting the reverse order, though it sounds a bit stilted in English: “beagles have Fido”. I don’t think it’s used commonly at all but it came to mind as a form in the reverse order without looping.

antanaclasis 25 Oct 2023 18:06 UTC
2 points
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on: Lying to chess players for alignment
I would be interested in this, probably in role A (but depending on the pool of other players possibly one of the other roles; I have no opposition to any of them). I play chess casually with friends, and am probably at somewhere around 1300 elo (based on my winrate against one friend who plays online).

antanaclasis 25 Oct 2023 18:00 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: noggin-scratcher’s comment on: Should the US House of Representatives adopt rank choice voting for leadership positions?
To add to this, if the ranked choice voting is implemented with a “no confidence” option (as it should to prevent the vote-in vote-out cycle described above), then you could easily end up in the same situation as the house currently is in, where no candidate manages to beat out “no confidence”.

antanaclasis 15 Oct 2023 4:30 UTC
7 points
2
on: The Gods of Straight Lines
Related: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/03/13/does-reality-drive-straight-lines-on-graphs-or-do-straight-lines-on-graphs-drive-reality/

antanaclasis 29 Jul 2023 13:49 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Thoth Hermes’s comment on: SSA rejects anthropic shadow, too
SIA can be considered (IMO more naturally) as randomly sampling you from “observers in your epistemic situation”, so it’s not so much “increasing the prior” but rather “caring about the absolute number of observers in your epistemic situation” rather than “caring about the proportion of observers in your epistemic situation” as SSA does.

This has the same end result as “up-weighting the prior then using the proportion of observers in your epistemic situation”, but I find it to be much more intuitive than that, as the latter seems to me to be overly circuitous by multiplying by population then dividing by population (as part of taking the proportion of the reference class that you comprise), rather than just taking the number we care about (number of observers in your epistemic situation) in the first place.

antanaclasis 9 Jul 2023 17:21 UTC
1 point
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on: Attempting to Deconstruct “Real”
Related: https://everythingstudies.com/2017/09/12/the-big-list-of-existing-things/

antanaclasis 12 May 2023 5:25 UTC
5 points
5
in reply to: gilch’s comment on: Thoughts on LessWrong norms, the Art of Discourse, and moderator mandate
I think the point being made in the post is that there’s a ground-truth-of-the-matter as to what comprises Art-Following Discourse.

To move into a different frame which I feel may capture the distinction more clearly, the True Laws of Discourse are not socially constructed, but our norms (though they attempt to approximate the True Laws) are definitely socially constructed.

antanaclasis 28 Apr 2023 21:45 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: TobyC’s comment on: An Intro to Anthropic Reasoning using the ‘Boy or Girl Paradox’ as a toy example
From the SIA viewpoint the anthropic update process is essentially just a prior and an update. You start with a prior on each hypothesis (possible universe) and then update by weighting each by how many observers in your epistemic situation each universe has.

This perspective sees the equalization of “anthropic probability mass” between possible universes prior to apportionment as an unnecessary distortion of the process: after all, “why would you give a hypothesis an artificial boost in likelihood just because it posits fewer observers than other hypotheses”.

Of course, this is just the flip side of what SSA sees as an unnecessary distortion in the other direction. “Why would you give a hypothesis an artificial boost due to positing more observers” it says. And here we get back to deep-seated differences in what people consider the intuitive way of doing things that underlie the whole disagreement over different anthropic methods.