ChristianKl

• ChristianKl 26 Sep 2020 7:23 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: Com­par­a­tive Ad­van­tage is Not About Trade

  You need to go to an­other place to loot the place and that usu­ally in­volves trans­port­ing per­sonal, weapons and equip­ment.

  Most wars where there’s no net profit but a lot of cap­i­tal lost in­clude some bidi­rec­tional flow of goods.

• ChristianKl 25 Sep 2020 20:01 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: Com­par­a­tive Ad­van­tage is Not About Trade

  But with­out com­par­a­tive ad­van­tage, there’s no profit to seize (rel­a­tive to a world where goods never change hands).

  Just be­cause there’s no profit to seize doesn’t mean that goods won’t move from one per­son to the other if the per­son who wants to use the goods uses co­er­cive force.

  While I’m not cer­tain to what ex­tend it’s true, from time to time I heard the claim that the Bri­tish didn’t get net profit from coloniza­tion. It’s pos­si­ble that they still did it be­cause they be­lieved it would be good for them even when it wasn’t prof­itable.

• ChristianKl 25 Sep 2020 18:43 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: Com­par­a­tive Ad­van­tage is Not About Trade

  The thing about the Bri­tish monopol on salt in In­dia is that it’s achieved by for­bid­den cer­tain easy salt pro­duc­tion like the one in which Ghandi en­gaged.

  There’s ar­tifi­cial scarcity in In­dia and I don’t think it makes sense to speak of com­par­a­tive ad­van­tage when it comes to monopoly gains that are achieved by cre­at­ing ar­tifi­cial starcity.

  As far as I un­der­stand the Chi­nese situ­a­tion the monopoly was a lot more nat­u­ral in na­ture. In the Chi­nese situ­a­tion it wasn’t pos­si­ble for some­one who didn’t like the gov­ern­ments con­trol of the salt to walk a bit like Ghandi and pick up own salt from the ground.

  I’m also not sure to what ex­tend a gov­er­ment rais­ing taxes from it’s cit­i­zens (what the Chi­nese did) should be called “mak­ing a profit”. Would you also call the US in­come tax “the US gov­ern­ment mak­ing prof­its by ex­ploit­ing com­par­i­tive ad­van­tage”? I see no rea­son to use that model over say­ing that the gov­ern­ment raises taxes be­cause of it us­ing co­er­cion.

• ChristianKl 25 Sep 2020 10:36 UTC

  4 points

  on: Com­par­a­tive Ad­van­tage is Not About Trade

  Since the peo­ple liv­ing in­land could not live with­out it, the salt mo­nop­o­list could charge quite high prices—a “trade” ar­guably not so differ­ent from threat­en­ing in­land farm­ers with death if they did not pay up.

  Espe­cially given that you speak of the Bri­tish and In­dia, it seems like you ig­nore the poli­ti­cal fac­tors that come with the salt. It’s no his­tor­i­cal ac­ci­dent that Ghandi picked his fight with the Bri­tish over salt. If salt would all be about com­par­a­tive ad­van­tage it doesn’t ex­plain why Ghandi was for­bid­den from pick­ing up salt by Bri­tish law.

  Since the peo­ple liv­ing in­land could not live with­out it, the salt mo­nop­o­list could charge quite high prices—a “trade” ar­guably not so differ­ent from threat­en­ing in­land farm­ers with death if they did not pay up.

  Farm­ers have no prob­lem stor­ing un­pro­cessed wheat for longer pe­ri­ods of time with­out salt. They are not threat­ened with death. On the in­di­vi­d­ual level they just have to suffer taste­less food which means that they are will­ing to buy the salt even with salt taxes.

  Beyond the in­di­vi­d­ual they can’t feed an army be­cause an army that trav­els around can’t carry wheat and pro­cess it to feed it­self while it’s mov­ing. Con­trol over the salt is con­trol over the abil­ity to feed a mov­ing army and if the gov­ern­ment has con­trol over the flow of salt the in­land farm­ers can’t raise an army to challenge the power of the gov­ern­ment.

  For more on the role of salt Salt: A World His­tory by Mark Kurlan­sky was in­sight­ful for me.

• ChristianKl 22 Sep 2020 14:17 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: mr-hire’s comment on: How of­ten do se­ries C star­tups fail to exit?

  Another differ­ence be­ween “com­pany is val­ued at X at a round” and “com­pany is worth X” is that the val­u­a­tion is effected by other terms of the deal as well.

• ChristianKl 22 Sep 2020 9:32 UTC

  4 points

  on: I’m Vot­ing For Ranked Choice, But I Don’t Like It

  It seems to me that there are a lot of times where peo­ple vote in our so­cieties. In many cases peo­ple don’t spend much time think­ing about vot­ing sys­tems and sim­ply go for the de­fault in their coun­try.

  To the ex­tend that some states im­ple­ment In­stant Runoff Vot­ing you cre­ate a situ­a­tion where there’s no de­fault any­more and where there will be more dis­cus­sions about what vot­ing sys­tems to use in other con­text as well. That so­cial­izes peo­ple to­wards hav­ing those dis­cus­sions and to­wards it be­ing nor­mal to have differ­ent vot­ing sys­tems. Diver­sity of vot­ing sys­tems is valuable for the broader move­ment of vot­ing re­form.

• ChristianKl 22 Sep 2020 9:02 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Ruby’s comment on: The Wiki is Dead, Long Live the Wiki! [help wanted]

  I might be too much in the Ger­man way of nan­img things but tag­wiki seem su­pe­rior to twiki. Twiki is un­clear to pro­nounce (do you say it as T wiki or TW iki?) and also not ex­plaina­tory to some­one who doesn’t un­der­stand it.

  Edit: Stack­Ex­change seems to use “tag wiki” https://​​meta.stack­ex­change.com/​​ques­tions/​​214337/​​what-is-a-tag-wiki-how-do-i-write-a-good-one It seems that how things have to work in English.

• ChristianKl 22 Sep 2020 8:59 UTC

  5 points

  on: What AI com­pa­nies would be most likely to have a pos­i­tive long-term im­pact on the world as a re­sult of in­vest­ing in them?

  It seems un­clear to me that stock in­vest­ments in big tech com­pa­nies have a sig­nifi­cant effect on those com­pa­nies.

  Both Alpha­bet and Microsoft have more then $100 billion cash at hand at the mo­ment. They are not cash-con­straint.

• ChristianKl 19 Sep 2020 19:18 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: AllAmericanBreakfast’s comment on: Let the AI teach you how to flirt

  The study doesn’t mea­sure peo­ple be­ing charmed in the sense that they are per­ceived to be charm­ing by other hu­mans.

• ChristianKl 19 Sep 2020 16:11 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: AllAmericanBreakfast’s comment on: Let the AI teach you how to flirt

  If you get some­one to in­ter­act in style X that’s nor­mally a sig­nal for Y it stops be­ing a good sig­nal for Y. That’s the ba­sic Good­hard’s law prin­ci­ple.

• ChristianKl 19 Sep 2020 9:29 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: magfrump’s comment on: Let the AI teach you how to flirt

  That’s not how the OP pro­poses this in­for­ma­tion to be used. All three para­graphs at the end that start bolded are recom­mend­ing other ways to use the in­for­ma­tion.

• ChristianKl 19 Sep 2020 9:16 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: AllAmericanBreakfast’s comment on: Let the AI teach you how to flirt

  From a male per­spec­tive a core way of ex­press­ing in­ter­est is to ask for a way to fol­low up and fol­low up.

  From a fe­male per­spec­tive sig­nal­ing in­ter­est is more im­por­tant, but en­gag­ing in ac­tions be­lieved by guys to be a show of in­ter­est is some­thing differ­ent then en­gag­ing in ac­tions from which a well-trained ma­chine learn­ing model can in­fer in­ter­est.

• ChristianKl 18 Sep 2020 15:24 UTC

  6 points

  on: Let the AI teach you how to flirt

  This sounds to me like it good­harts on the wrong thing. When on a date your core con­cern isn’t to sig­nal to the other per­son that you are flirt­ing but that you are a de­sire­able mate.

• ChristianKl 18 Sep 2020 10:12 UTC

  10 points

  in reply to: Max Kaye’s comment on: Open & Wel­come Thread—Septem­ber 2020

  You are judg­ing curi and FI (Fal­lible Ideas) via your stan­dards (LW stan­dards), not FI’s stan­dards. I think this is prob­le­matic.

  The above post ex­plic­itely says that the ban isn’t a per­sonal judge­ment of curi. It’s rather a ques­tion of whether it’s good or not to have curi around on LessWrong and that’s where LW stan­dards mat­ter.

  Un­pop­u­lar­ity is no rea­son for a ban

  That seems like a sen­ti­ment in­dica­tive of ig­nor­ing the rea­son for which he was banned. It was a util­i­tar­ian ar­gu­ment. The fact that some­one gets down­voted is Bayesian ev­i­dence that it’s not valuable for peo­ple to in­ter­act with him on LessWrong.

  How is this differ­ent to pre-crime?

  If you im­pri­sion some­one who mur­dered in the past be­cause you are afarid they mur­der again, that’s not pre-crime in most com­mon senses of the word.

  Ad­di­tion­ally even if it would be, LW is not a place with virtue ethics stan­dards but one with util­i­tar­ian stan­dards. Tak­ing ac­tion to pre­vent things that are likely to nega­tively effect LW from hap­pen­ing in the fu­ture is perfectly fine with the idea of good gar­den­ing.

  If you stand in your gar­den you don’t ask “what crimes did the plants com­mit and how should they be pun­ished?” but you fo­cus on the fu­ture.

• ChristianKl 17 Sep 2020 21:10 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: goose000’s comment on: Ra­tion­al­ity for Kids?

  As I en­vi­sion the course, how­ever, it would be an el­e­ment such as a warm up or cash out, not the core cur­ricu­lum.

  Yes, how­ever it’s worth not­ing that you can play Zendo in differ­ent ways. The time I played it was with ar­range­ment of Lego stones.

  You could also play it with other do­mains like words or sen­tences. I’m un­cer­tain about how much time a child can effec­tively learn some­thing from Zendo.

  At the same time it won’t fill the full cur­ricu­lum.

  Fo­cus­ing mostly be­cause it seems like it would re­quire one-on-one in­struc­tion, at least ini­tially.

  You didn’t re­ally speak about how many chil­dren you ac­tu­ally want to teach at one time.

  When it comes to teach­ing ra­tio­nal­ity to adults there’s the CFAR hand­book. If you are not aware of it, it might be worth look­ing through it and think­ing about what you can teach chil­dren.

• ChristianKl 17 Sep 2020 11:43 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Sandi’s comment on: Ra­tion­al­ity for Kids?

  When teach­ing it to a group of chil­dren I would likely not do it via an app but with phys­i­cal items and draw­ings. It makes sense to switch the kind of items with which you play it be­tween ses­sions to in­crease the gen­er­al­iz­abil­ity of the learn­ing.

• ChristianKl 17 Sep 2020 10:50 UTC

  5 points

  on: Ra­tion­al­ity for Kids?

  Ran­dom thoughts:

  Fo­cus­ing, In­ter­nal Dou­ble Cruz and Belief re­port­ing are pow­er­ful tools for al­ign­ing sys­tem I and sys­tem II. They aren’t very com­plex and have rel­a­tively few mov­ing parts. It might be pos­si­ble that you can teach those to chil­dren but I could also imag­ine that it’s hard to teach them. Deal­ing with groundlevel think­ing is in­timite and it needs buy-in from the child.

  Zendo seems to be a game that can be fun for chil­dren and it teaches valuable les­sons about build­ing sci­en­tific hy­poth­e­sis and test­ing them.

  Cre­dence cal­ibra­tion doesn’t seem very com­plex but might be too much for a ⁷⁄₈ year old. I’m un­sure at what age the nec­es­sary un­der­stad­ing of num­bers be­tween 1 and 100 ex­ists.

  I could imag­ine a set­ting where you talk with chil­dren about what they are cu­ri­ous about and what might be tested by ex­per­i­ment. Then the chil­dren gather data col­lab­o­ra­tively and you do the math for them in Numpy.

  If you have a hu­midity, tem­per­atur and a CO2 sen­sor you can for ex­am­ple have ex­per­i­ments about how much open­ing the win­dow af­fect the air in the room. Does open the win­dow fully for 5 min­utes do more then have it half open for 10 min­utes?

  Open­ing the win­dows to get bet­ter air is a task that’s rele­vant to daily life and it’s not a ques­tion where you find the an­swer in nor­mal text­books.

• ChristianKl 16 Sep 2020 15:45 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Wei_Dai’s comment on: Open & Wel­come Thread—Septem­ber 2020

  We want to teach chil­dren to ac­cept the norms of our so­ciety and the nar­ra­tive we tell about it. A lot of what we teach is es­sen­tial pro-sys­tem pro­pa­ganda.

  Teach­ing moral un­cer­tainty doesn’t help with that and it also doesn’t help with get­ting stu­dents to score bet­ter on stan­dard­ized tests which was the main goal of ed­u­ca­tional re­forms of the last decades.

• ChristianKl 16 Sep 2020 15:37 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Zian’s comment on: Book Re­view: Work­ing With Contracts

  most peo­ple

  That’s over­stat­ing it. Most peo­ple don’t live in the US and are not bound by it.

• ChristianKl 16 Sep 2020 15:35 UTC

  6 points

  on: Book Re­view: Work­ing With Contracts

  Com­pared to (good) soft­ware de­vel­op­ers, lawyers do not seem to be very good at this; they tend to throw patches on top of patches, cre­at­ing more cor­ner cases rather than fewer.

  There are plenty of differ­ent lawyers and differ­ent one’s have differ­ent in­ter­ests.

  YCom­bi­na­tor for ex­am­ple has a bunch of rel­a­tively short con­tract doc­u­ments on offer. YCom­bi­na­tor has an in­ter­est in startup short con­tracts in a way that most law forms who pay for their le­gal ser­vices don’t.