Basil Marte

Karma: 40

Basil Marte 1 Feb 2019 5:28 UTC
9 points
on: Chronophone Motivations
Hallo, this is a chronophone call from 12 years in the future.
I would transmit a technical analysis of various voting systems, and the fundamental process they are meant to solve (simplistically: the process itself doesn’t add any information whatsoever, just condenses the noisy information in the ballots into a set of winning candidates—single-winner systems weakly tend to reduce variety). Some do a terrible job (FPTP selects the mode of the distribution) while some are quite involved (given the input containing orderings/scorings of labels, reconstruct a metric space those labels come from, and return the median).
Hopefully, this comes out as “autocrats sometimes rule according to the subjects’ morality, but when they don’t, there’s no system to remove/correct them”, and helps implement some form of democracy. Or I could just read The Dictator’s Handbook, though I have no idea what that would come out as.
Personal ideas:
- I think the globally “standard” four-year terms (I was primarily thinking about my own country’s cabinets when I thought about this) are too short, as they leave no incentive to invest in infrastructure-like public goods (e.g. education) beyond its role as a crowd-pleaser. Even if there is no lead time for gathering information, planning, and implementation, most investments don’t make back their initial cost so soon.
- On the other hand, even in a comparatively healthy system with multiple parties, the distribution of their popularities has approximately 2 bits of entropy (I used my own country’s election data). So, ~0.5bits/year public input… (Yes, there are other elections for local government that I didn’t count.)
- Cheaper (thus more frequent), higher-bandwidth information input: legally binding polls, focus groups (analogy with juries?), “citizen boards” and other market research tools. I’ve not put too much thought into how to make them cheater-resistant yet.
- Rethinking the separation of powers into those three bins. For instance, it’s not obvious to me why collecting evidence for the criminal side of the judicial system and putting down riots cluster together (with other functions) into what we label police. (Obvious counterexample—not meant as endorsement—being the places where armed policing is done by the military.) Or why are there near-duplicates for rule creation (“obey or else”) e.g. laws and decrees (or however executive-generated rules are called). (I’ve made these notes years before reading Legal Systems Very Different from Ours.)

Basil Marte 17 Jul 2018 19:33 UTC
8 points
in reply to: workingname’s comment on: Frequently Asked Questions for Central Banks Undershooting Their Inflation Target
The important thing is not the value of money but the rate of inflation; not f(t) but f’(t)/f(t). It’s mentioned in the text that people suffer from money illusion in an asymmetric way, and adapt to slight inflation better than to slight deflation. Thus if the value of money goes up, prices are weirdly rigid and trades start not to happen. Consequently it makes sense to say that everyone has too little money.
“Everyone has too little money” is so simple you can crank it out of Say’s law. Take one guy on an island; he cannot have too much stuff. Take a couple guys on an island, bartering (I know, I know) and as a group they cannot have too much stuff. However, if they specialize and one of them falls ill, then there will be a shortage of what he used to produce and a surplus of what he used to consume. Now, take even more guys on an island who use some commodity as money. There cannot be too much of everything including money, but there can be a shortage of money and a corresponding surplus of everything-except-money, i.e. deflation.
I get the impression you think of money as purchasing power, which is a great way to think about it, but you can’t really make sense of some phenomena like money illusion, because you need to assume e.g. infinite price flexibility for this point of view. You get the (partial) equilibrium, rather than the actual trajectory. This was good enough for the entirety of classical econ, but starting from Keynes, macro focuses on the short-run trajectory. Try to think of money as liquidity as well as purchasing power.
*coin: the extremely limited transaction rate (astronomical transaction fees) means they won’t be money. They make very-high-quality ponzi schemes, though, because no operator can run away with the “invested” money, no central node to be shut down, etc., perhaps “digital gold” really is the best analogy. Because they aren’t liquid enough to be money (and to become the numeraire) in the first place, deflation is not a concern.

Basil Marte 12 Jun 2018 23:23 UTC
7 points
in reply to: Strilanc’s comment on: No, Really, I’ve Deceived Myself
The belief that overdosing on sleeping pills is fatal comes from barbiturate medications, while modern pills contain benzodiazepines such as diazepam. Modern sleeping pills are pretty easy to get exactly because even if someone downs the whole bottle, they don’t die, only go to deep unconsciousness, i.e. “knockout sleep” (physical stimuli, such as shaking the patient, don’t wake them up) that possibly lasts several days. Thus if James Randi took a fatal-by-barbiturate-standards dose of benzodiazepine sleeping pills, then (after he woke up) he would conclude that the pills didn’t work because he didn’t die.
This is not to say that benzodiazepine pills are completely safe. (This is to be expected from anything that messes with the central nervous system and basic regulation.) Of most practical relevance is the crossreaction with alcohol; combining drunkenness with benzodiazepine overdose is very much fatal. Unfortunately, mild alcohol consumption plus a standard dose can fairly reliably trigger “knockout sleep”, making the combination an easily-used party/rape drug. (If this is a floating belief, keep it as such; a.k.a. do not try this at home.)

Basil Marte 12 May 2019 0:35 UTC
6 points
on: siderea: What New Atheism says
I’m putting it here, because the insight clicked when reading this article: perhaps one of the most important of “our” characteristics is simply being bad at compartmentalization?
“The New Atheists contend that the beliefs we hold have consequences for our conduct.”—Let’s assume this view is basically typical mind fallacious, and the majority mostly compartmentalize away their religious beliefs. (Beliefs-as-attire, to be worn in the appropriate context only.) What would happen to those people who don’t natively do this?
- When in Rome, they would behave in much the same way as when in Carthage. (“Wearing the same be-/alief-attire to the office and to the beach.”) They would have difficulties with navigating social situations.
- They would conflate the contexts of “stuff written in the Holy Book and to be professed” with “things to do in everyday life”, a.k.a. religious literalism. (https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/04/the-ideology-is-not-the-movement/)
- They would keep finding points where in different “contexts”, related phenomena are explained in incompatible ways. (https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/) Even when not censored, the majority, not finding the issue salient, would call this pedantry or nitpicking.
- They would be less liable to judge ideas based on what “context” / literary genre they associate to. (2nd-last paragraph: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4Bwr6s9dofvqPWakn/science-as-attire)
- Stretching somewhat: perhaps they would appreciate explanations applicable to many domains/contexts more than the average person.

Basil Marte 14 Feb 2023 19:30 UTC
5 points
0
on: In Defense of Chatbot Romance
This mostly reminds me of SSC’s discussion of Jaynes’ theory. An age where people talk out loud to their invisible personal ba/iri/daemon/genius / angel-on-the-shoulder, and which is—in a similar manner as clothes—are in practice considered loosely a part of the person (but not strictly). Roughly everyone has them, thus the particular emotional need fulfilled by them is largely factored out of human interaction. (I believe a decade or two ago there was a tongue-in-cheek slogan to the effect of “if the government wants to protect marriages, it should hire maids/nannies”.) Social norms (social technology) adjust gracefully, just like they adjusted quickly and seamlessly to contraceptives factoring apart child-conception and sex. (Um.)
Separately: it would be an interesting experiment to get serial abuse victims to talk to chatbots at length. One of the strong versions of the unflattering theory says that they might get the chatbots to abuse them, because that’s the probable completion to their conversation patterns.

Basil Marte 17 Jul 2018 18:55 UTC
4 points
in reply to: Jotto999’s comment on: Frequently Asked Questions for Central Banks Undershooting Their Inflation Target
1. The Fed needs to be able to buy back the entire base money supply always, always, always. If it cannot, i.e. the Fed is insolvent, instant hyperinflation is almost certainly the result. (Theoretically, the value of money could float in midair. Practically, lots of arbitrageurs will be betting on hyperinflation—and in principle the Fed could buy back money as long as it could, and maybe the speculators would run out of dollars before the Fed ran out of assets—but don’t count on either assumption holding up.) As a result, it can only expand the money supply by market-rate purchases of securities (of stable value). Mailing checks to people would be a gift out of share capital. (This is the difference between banks and counterfeiters: the former treat money issued as a liability on their balance sheets, and are willing to buy it back at any time in any quantity.)
2. Cut the interest on excess reserves (IOER). Though keeping the Fed’s balance sheet smaller doesn’t really save on anything important; financial institutions trading T-bills for reserves is not something that can realistically be depleted.
3. Most of that is fiscal policy (government stuff) rather than monetary policy (central bank stuff).

Anti-epistemology: an explanation

Basil Marte8 Jul 2020 16:34 UTC

3 points

12 comments3 min readLW link

Basil Marte 31 Aug 2020 23:09 UTC
3 points
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Alarmism
Yes.
Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, “left” is commonly understood to mean the whole Thrive coalition. I figured that using “left” would be more confusing/absurd-looking than using “socialist”.
For the purposes of the argument, I’m using a model where political behaviors are largely a result of personality traits (thrive/survive, cognitive decoupling, and cultural class membership) with most people using the theories as justification. I.e. theories have negligible influence, they are not causes but consequences of coalitions. This is a simplification, but not an unreasonable one (“all models are wrong, some are useful”).

Basil Marte 23 May 2020 19:36 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Matthew Barnett’s comment on: Cortés, Pizarro, and Afonso as Precedents for Takeover
Regarding Africa, late 19th century technology solved at least *two* crucial problems that prevented European takeover before. One was that Europeans themselves would die to tropical diseases, solved by quinine. The other was that Europeans’ *horses* died to nagana (known as sleeping sickness in humans), solved by steam riverine ships.

Basil Marte 10 Feb 2019 0:26 UTC
3 points
on: Where Physics Meets Experience
“There’s no third-party experiment you can perform to tell you the answer.”
While it’s irrelevant to the anthropics/quantum physics debate, I almost immediately thought: let’s put an electrode onto one side of an Ebborian brain-paper, and give it a train of pulses while it splits. Ask the Ebborian that “inherits” the other side of the brain, how many pulses it experienced.

Basil Marte 29 Jan 2019 3:37 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Slvador’s comment on: Fake Explanations
I’ve not seen anybody mention those students who said “strange metals in the plate” in particular, and I’d like to argue for them. Their answer was not a password (the teacher never mentioned it), and actually shows correct anticipation-controlling beliefs! That is to say, they noticed that the observed outcome is not what they would have predicted, and looked for some hypothesis that explained why the heat gradient is reversed. Working from the incorrect assumption that they are seeing a stationary state, they guessed a hidden means of transporting heat from the heater to the far end of the plate, e.g. an insulated internal layer. I might be overfitting on this few-word detail, but I think this answer is on average very early in search orderings of those with qualitative but correct visualization of heat conduction, and I don’t see other equally simple reasons why the students would have said this.
Of course, I also agree with the rationalist point that this answer should still feel a bit forced, trigger a listing of assumptions, which on average hits “stationary state” very early for simple physics problems.

Basil Marte 5 Jul 2021 16:28 UTC
2 points
in reply to: JackLecter’s comment on: Alarmism
Retrospectively, I’d say that I was doing counterintuitiveness-seeking. “Hey, look at this, the commonly used extremely simple model says that definitely P, while this more complex model (which seems to me to be more descriptive of the world) says that maybe not P.” This is mildly dangerous on its own, because while it runs on truthseeking, it also subordinates that to contrarianism. And doing this on a political topic was particularly stupid of me.

Basil Marte 9 Jul 2020 21:59 UTC
2 points
in reply to: TAG’s comment on: Anti-epistemology: an explanation
That is my point: the people who think in this way are not unreasonable, they are not evil mutants or anything. They just happened to “ask the wrong question” at the starting point, and if they follow it tenaciously, they wind up with insane conclusions.
Once you have a stable epistemology based on an observer-independent reality, you can say that “oh, by the way, minds are part of causality a.k.a. reality, thus people can have beliefs about what other people believe”. In the cartographic analogy, this comes out clunky: “maps are part of the terrain, therefore maps can depict facts about other maps”, which I suspect is intentional, to make the claim that this is a degenerate edge case, not a central example. You can hold your nose and survey opinions.
But this is very much a second step. Try to take it first, and you stand a good chance of falling headlong into the bizarro-worldview where polls stand in for laboratories, opinions are the only sort of evidence there is, and engineers must have found a way to LARP nigh-infinite confidence because apparently their technobabble can convince most people in a way that crystal healers cannot.

Basil Marte 9 Jul 2020 19:52 UTC
2 points
in reply to: TAG’s comment on: Anti-epistemology: an explanation
I’m not arguing against relying on other people and outsourcing knowledge. I’m barely arguing for any action; mostly I’m describing what tends to happen regrettably often to people who base the definition of “knowledge” around answering questions like “who is popular” rather than “what will this program do”. In fact, both epistemologies will contain the concept of empirical verification! In the anti-epistemology, going to everyone in class and privately asking “hey, is Alice popular?” is the analog of empiricism.

Basil Marte 9 Jul 2020 19:28 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Slider’s comment on: Anti-epistemology: an explanation
I don’t mean to inspire cruelty. If I successfully gave you understanding, you can use it for kindness, pity or cruelty as you see fit. Mostly I wrote the last paragraphs in the tone of “Humans are Cthulhu” as seen through the eyes of someone who thinks in this anti-epistemology.
Your answer to “objective popularity” is only slightly different from common knowledge, and it has the same properties of being fundamentally observer-dependent. Ask some Greens and some Blues separately “is X popular?” where X is a politician, and you get two very different results. Similarly, “possible joke #3852 is funny” is true for one audience, false for another. “The Sun goes around the Earth” is true for a bunch of hunter-gatherers, false for a group of astronomers. Wait, wait, what? “true for some group” i.e. observer-dependence of the answer-generating process.
Compare the alternative. If someone sticks to “either the question is ill-posed, or the answer must be observer-independent” a bit too strictly, they will end up either concluding that popularity is a wrong concept and doesn’t exist, or falling into the mind projection fallacy and concluding that there must be a little “is-popular” label attached to people.
From The simple truth:
“Frankly, I’m not entirely sure myself where this ‘reality’ business comes from. I can’t create my own reality in the lab, so I must not understand it yet. But occasionally I believe strongly that something is going to happen, and then something else happens instead. I need a name for whatever-it-is that determines my experimental results, so I call it ‘reality’. This ‘reality’ is somehow separate from even my very best hypotheses. Even when I have a simple hypothesis, strongly supported by all the evidence I know, sometimes I’m still surprised. So I need different names for the thingies that determine my predictions and the thingy that determines my experimental results. I call the former thingies ‘belief’, and the latter thingy ‘reality’.”
If for whatever reason someone builds their epistemology around popularity as a prototypical use-case, they will necessarily make experimental results dependent on peoples’ expectations in some way. They will say, using the words from the quote, that ‘reality’ is literally made out of ‘belief’.

Basil Marte 9 Jul 2020 18:29 UTC
2 points
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Anti-epistemology: an explanation
I was hoping to compress the description of behaviors that are otherwise baffling (surprising, difficult to explain, high-entropy) but common.
- Garden-variety believers of various woo (homeopathy, religion, etc.) and the observation that their beliefs apparently don’t control their anticipation too much;
- academic postmodernists saying “reality is socially constructed” and “different things are true to different groups of people”;
- that even in front of “serious” people who look like they should really know better (e.g. on job interviews) the usual advice is to show confidence and never say “I don’t know”, because to a large degree the setting works like a BS-generator-test;
- the people who talk about “decolonizing science”, vaguely treat it as a conspiracy, and try to insult it by calling it things that carry negative affect in their culture.
The particular claim you quoted is that, since in the anti-epistemology it is assumed that statements don’t refer to anything, there is no difference between e.g. “being an astrologer” and “successfully pretending to be an astrologer”. People go up to you, ask “why did I stub my toe yesterday?”, you say “ah, it happened because mercury is retrograde and Jupiter is in the house of Gemini”, and if they think you sounded like what an astrologer is supposed to sound like, they walk away feeling satisfied but without having learned anything.

Basil Marte 1 Sep 2020 9:13 UTC
1 point
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Alarmism
Again, this is exactly the reason I put the references there. They are not a signalling device saying “look at me, I read all these things” but a tool so that I don’t have to recreate their respective authors’ arguments as to their respective models’ degree of explanatory adequacy and why that makes sense in terms of what most of their readers already accept. This saves time for those readers of this post who have at some earlier point read some (or perhaps all) of these articles, as well as for me. The models are explicit.
The terms are, on the other hand, necessarily vague. This is a general principle of all models (to be computationally tractable for the human brain, models need to simplify and admit some level of uncertainty and errors) as well as a particular feature of political coalitions where individual people and even groups of people sometimes support/vote for some party “for idiosyncratic reasons”, which expression pretty much means “for reasons that I don’t bother to model because I expect that doing so wouldn’t be worth the effort”. I can’t give you the Moon, the exact list of how every person is going to vote in the 2024, 2028, etc. elections, but I can point my finger toward the Moon and say “you know, socialists”.

Basil Marte 31 Aug 2020 18:21 UTC
1 point
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Alarmism
This is exactly why I put the sources, including the “tilted political compass” model I’m referring to, right at the top. Technically the author uses the label “left” for what I’m calling “socialist”, but his description of the quadrant’s internal logic very clearly fits with what is usually called socialism, including by many of the people the label refers to. He even remarks:
“This has lead to a game of linguistic musical treadmills where liberals try to claim an identity apart from the left without joining the right, while leftists try to prevent them from doing so.”
I edited the post slightly, hopefully it will be less ambiguous.

Basil Marte 17 Aug 2020 1:03 UTC
1 point
on: Is Morality Given?
By changing a mind, you can change what it prefers; you can even change what it believes to be right; but you cannot change what is right. Anything you talk about, that can be changed in this way, is not ‘right-ness’.
If the characters were real people, I’d say here Obert is “right” while having a wrong justification. Just extrapolate the evolutionary origins of moral intuitions into any society in approximate technological stasis. “Rightness” is how the evolutionarily stable strategy feels like from the inside, and that depends on the environment.
If the population is not limited by the availability of food, thus single mothers can feed their children, some form of low-key polygyny/promiscuity are the reproductive strategy that ends up as the only game in town.
If instead food limits population, monogamy comes out victorious (for the bulk of the population, at least). If additionally we come know that hand-labor is expensive, then we can say that women are economically valuable (even if outright regarded as assets, they are very precious) and they can negotiate comparatively good treatment (as in, compared to the next paragraph). We might see related rituals, like bride-price, or the marriage ceremony looking like a kidnapping (the theft of a valuable laborer).
On the other hand, if hand-labor is cheap, then the output of a worker may not even earn the food necessary to sustain herself, and women are economic liabilities apart from their reproductive capacity. It is under these circumstances that we can find veiling, guarding, honor killings, FGM, and sati (killing widows). Groom-price (often confused with a different form of dowry under a single label) and, to avoid it, groom kidnapping happen here, too.
“Moral progress” happens by the environment changing the payoffs to strategies. Hating other tribes goes away temporarily when they become allies, and permanently when the allied tribes merge and it becomes too difficult to tell who belongs to which tribe. (“I think I’m three-eights blegg, by my maternal grandfather and by my paternal...”)
One implication is that we have so much discussion on the nature of morality exactly because it is unclear what (if any) human behavior stands the best chance of propagating itself into the future with high fidelity. Alternative phrasing: this is an age of whalefall, and we get to implement policies other than morality, the one that satisfies Moloch. (This is not a new claim: the evolutionary origins of moral intuitions means that morality is how past policies of satisfying Moloch feel like from the inside.)

Basil Marte 4 Jul 2020 18:23 UTC
1 point
in reply to: MikkW’s comment on: Chronophone Motivations
I didn’t mean the distribution of the population over the political compass. I meant the distribution of the votes over candidate-labels. FPTP doesn’t do any processing to discover facts (distances and directions between the candidates), just returns the mode == the candidate with the most votes.

Basil Marte

Anti-episte­mol­ogy: an explanation

Anti-epistemology: an explanation