complexmeme

Karma: 250

complexmeme 4 Jun 2024 3:10 UTC
5 points
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on: Searching Magic Cards
Wastes is not a basic land type. It is a name of a card that is a basic land which has no basic land type (or other subtype, for that matter). So it is considered by effects that look for “a basic land”, but not cards that look for “land card with a basic land type” (like Boseiju, Who Endures) or count the number of basic land types you have (like cards with Domain).

complexmeme 24 May 2024 19:53 UTC
1 point
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on: My hour of memoryless lucidity
Having wisdom teeth out was also a fascinating experience for me for similar reasons, but I don’t know what I did in that lucid-but-amnesiac (and for all I know actually unconscious?) interval. I did apparently walk to the recovery room under my own power, so while I don’t think I was asking questions or solving math problems, I was at least navigating under my own power and avoiding running into walls. What really sticks in my mind was that I had this experience of “coming to”, like almost identical to the sensation of waking up except without feeling like I had just been asleep. It wasn’t that different from other experience where I’d had a lapse of awareness and come back suddenly to awareness of the present moment, but the discontinuity was more dramatic.
(As a side note, I love the thought of smuggling a short-term memory out of a period of memory loss by hiding it in a long-term memory. No idea whether I’d expect that to actually work, but definitely a creative approach to the problem.)

complexmeme 6 May 2024 14:52 UTC
1 point
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on: On Not Pulling The Ladder Up Behind You
Chief Bob’s hearings might well be public[...] I don’t think I’ve ever been present for an actual court case, just seen them on TV.
This seems to me like an odd example given that you’re contrasting with American government, where court hearings are almost entirely public, written opinions are generally freely available, and court transcripts are generally public (though not always accessible for free). I guess the steelman version is that the contrast is a matter of geography or scale? Chief Bob’s hearings are in your neighborhood and involve your neighbors, whereas your local court might be across town during the business day and involve disputes between people you don’t know. But the American judicial system is a lot more accessible than it plausibly could be while still fulfilling its core function.

complexmeme 24 Feb 2024 19:56 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Gunnar_Zarncke’s comment on: Phallocentricity in GPT-J’s bizarre stratified ontology
I’d guess that it’s related specifically to “thing” being a euphemism for penis, as opposed to some broader generalization about euphemisms.

complexmeme 2 Sep 2021 1:50 UTC
4 points
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on: Can you control the past?
In the “software twins” thought exercise, you have a “perfect, deterministic copy”. But if it’s a perfect copy and deterministic, than you’re also deterministic. As you say, compatibilism is central to making this not incoherent, presumably no decision theory is relevant if there are no decisions to be made.
I think a key idea in compatibilism is that decisions are not made at a particular instant in time. If a decision is made on the spot, disconnected from the past, it’s not compatibilism. If a decision is a process that takes place over time, the only way Omega’s oracular powers can work is if the part of the process that causes you to look like a one-boxer can’t be followed by the part of the decision process where you turn on a dime and open both boxes. But the earlier part of the process causes the later, not the other way around.

complexmeme 4 Sep 2020 13:43 UTC
0 points
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in reply to: Zvi’s comment on: microCOVID.org: A tool to estimate COVID risk from common activities
Yeah, I’ve seen some posts trying to make similar “lockdown goes too far” arguments (including this one on the SSC Tumblr) that seem to be comparing life with COVID-19 mitigation to normal 2019 life or to that plus some chance of getting sick. Aside from understating the potential for long-term consequences, I think there’s a trend in those dollar-cost estimates towards significantly underestimating the negative effects of unmitigated pandemic spread beyond the effect on one’s personal health.
(Not that I expect that you disagree with this, but it stands out to me that “let it happen modulo the most vulnerable” is already begging the question. I’d expect if that were driving public policy that the “modulo the most vulnerable” part largely wouldn’t happen. It’s hard to protect any particular group from infectious disease when it’s widespread in the general population.)

complexmeme 15 May 2020 16:14 UTC
10 points
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on: What was your reasoning for deciding whether to raise children?
The book “Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids” was a bit of an influence. The quick summary: People often overestimate the downsides of having children, people often underestimate the upsides of having children, people overestimate the marginal benefit of more labor-intensive methods of parenting, therefore maybe you are underestimating how many children you should have (including underestimating the benefit of tradeoffs where you have more children but use a less-intensive parenting style).
I think choosing to raise a child rather than not will probably make me happier when I’m older, even though it’s not very pleasant a lot of the time currently, and there is the constant additional exposure to the risk of terrible tragedy. It gives me a reliable source of significant responsibility, which overall I value. I like that I’m playing a small part in creating the next generation of humans (and thus in creating the whole set of future humans), I think that’s cool, though having children is not the only way to do that.
I think that human beings are very psychologically flexible, and I haven’t been persuaded by arguments that it’s not the case that the vast majority of human beings have lives worth living. I also am not persuaded by arguments that favor autonomy to the extreme that it’s bad to bring someone into existence because they had no choice in the matter. While I don’t think this amounts to a moral imperative, I think having children is a good thing, if the quality of parenting is even minimally acceptable. Overall, I think having and raising children is good for parents but primarily it’s good for the children (and, indirectly, their descendants).

complexmeme 24 Apr 2020 15:05 UTC
1 point
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on: The Puzzling Linearity of COVID-19
Infections start among people at the river’s mouth, and expand exponentially amongst them, until most of them are infected. It also spreads up the river, but only by local contagion, so the number of deaths (and cases) grows linearly according to how far up-river it has spread. This scenario, however, seems nothing like what we would expect in almost all countries.
That doesn’t seem implausible to me, if the epidemic spreads fastest (and therefore first) in densely-connected areas of the social network graph of in-person contacts and mitigation affects those areas of the graph fastest/most. That plus lag from the implementation of mitigation to the results showing up in the case numbers might make growth look approximately linear for a while. Especially when plotted on a linear plot scaled to previous much-faster growth.

complexmeme 6 Apr 2020 14:52 UTC
11 points
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on: An alarm bell for the next pandemic
There’s no clear reason why mortality and transmissibility of a virus should be inversely correlated.
More quickly fatal diseases leave less time for the immune system to respond and less time for transmission to occur. You’re right that’s not to say we can’t end up with diseases that are both more contagious and more deadly than COVID-19, we definitely could, but that’s not the direction the correlation goes.

complexmeme 3 Apr 2019 20:00 UTC
43 points
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on: User GPT2 is Banned
In addition, we have decided to apply the death penalty
Less Wrong moderation policy: Harsh but fair.

complexmeme 11 Jun 2018 14:48 UTC
30 points
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on: Front Row Center
Not only do theaters want to sell the extra seats, they also want people to arrive early, since they’re selling concessions and playing ads.

complexmeme 23 Apr 2018 17:18 UTC
3 points
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on: Sad!
People go through a grieving process when their image of a loved one changes in a way that they perceive as negative or shocking. That process can be very long. It’s possible that your grandparents won’t be able to get though enough of that process in time to attend their daughter’s wedding, or even at all. And if they don’t have it together enough to avoid negative emotional outbursts at the event, it may not be for the best if they attend.
If they made this decision in only an hour, however, I think it would definitely be worth encouraging them to sleep on it. The engagement probably is a shock, even if it should be unsurprising; they may have been holding some rationalizations that underplayed the significance of their daughter’s relationship.
Even assuming their views on homosexuality never change (they probably assume that, so assume it for the sake of argument), they may eventually regret missing a significant family event. At some point, if they want to have a good relationship with their daughter, they’re going to need to make peace with persistent disagreements. If your aunt is considering raising children, maintaining a good relationship with her (and her partner!) is a prerequisite to having a good relationship with those grandchildren. Given that, your grandparents may want to put some work into getting to a place emotionally where they can be happy attending their daughter’s wedding.
(Their views on homosexuality may eventually change, too. But trying to persuade them on ideological grounds is more likely to get them to dig in their heels. The most effective persuasion on those grounds is often passive and long-term. Sometimes emphasizing emotions (e.g. people will be sad and disappointed if they don’t attend) can be effective, but that may just remind them of their own negative emotions. Focusing on relationship goals is often a good idea when trying to mediate this sort of conflict.)

complexmeme 17 May 2016 15:55 UTC
6 points
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on: 2016 LessWrong Diaspora Survey Results
“Amount of EA money sent to top four GiveWell charities” might be low because GiveWell itself is not included in that list. (I ended up putting my donation to GiveWell under “other”, which while technically accurate, wasn’t ideal.) In addition to GiveWell specifically, it would have been worth having an option for Effective Altruism’s sort of giving (charities directed at obvious, cost-effective ways of saving the lives of / improving the quality of life for the world’s poorest), but not to organizations specifically recommended by GiveWell.

complexmeme 29 Nov 2014 5:25 UTC
51 points
1
on: You have a set amount of “weirdness points”. Spend them wisely.

after a bit of searching I can’t find a definitive post describing the concept

The idiom used to describe that concept in social psychology is “idiosyncrasy credits”, so searching for that phrase produces more relevant material (though as far as I can tell nothing on Less Wrong specifically).
What links here?
- You have a set amount of “weirdness points”. Spend them wisely. by Peter Wildeford (27 Nov 2014 21:09 UTC; 135 points)
- You have a set amount of “weirdness points”. Spend them wisely. by Peter Wildeford (EA Forum; 27 Nov 2014 21:08 UTC; 93 points)

complexmeme 17 Aug 2013 3:00 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: John_Maxwell’s comment on: The Robots, AI, and Unemployment Anti-FAQ
I can see why you think I was making that implicit claim, though that wasn’t quite the point I was trying to make.

I don’t know to what extent the regulation mentioned in the Wikipedia article I linked to was influenced by industry lobbying versus concern about other sorts of risks to infrastructure or public safety. I’m not sure whether the precise cause of the passage of such regulation is that relevant to the regulation’s durability in the face of potential benefits from adoption of new technology. Maybe it is, but the precise example of “limit[ing cars] to the same speed as horses” in the original post seems to imply that was something that didn’t happen, not just something that did happen for different reasons.

complexmeme 24 Jul 2013 18:14 UTC
3 points
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on: The Robots, AI, and Unemployment Anti-FAQ

The idea would have to be that some natural rate of productivity growth and sectoral shift is necessary for re-employment to happen after recessions, and we’ve lost that natural rate; but so far as I know this is not conventional macroeconomics.

I wouldn’t be surprised if this was the case, and I’d be very surprised if the end of cheap (at least, much cheaper) petroleum has nothing to do with that.

complexmeme 24 Jul 2013 17:48 UTC
43 points
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on: The Robots, AI, and Unemployment Anti-FAQ

If cars were invented nowadays, the horse-and-saddle industry would surely try to arrange for them to be regulated out of existence, or sued out of existence, or limited to the same speed as horses to ensure existing buggies remained safe.

That’s not a new thing, that sort of regulation actually happened!

complexmeme 24 Jul 2013 16:18 UTC
14 points
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in reply to: Yosarian2’s comment on: The Robots, AI, and Unemployment Anti-FAQ

They see an overall trend of reduction in employment and wages since at least 2000.

And also wage stagnation in contrast to continuing productivity gains since the 1970s.

complexmeme 26 Dec 2012 16:27 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: ad2’s comment on: Normal Ending: Last Tears (6/8)

that I will be changed again, also against my will, the next time

The next time, it presumably wouldn’t be against your will, due to the first set of changes.

complexmeme 14 Aug 2012 18:01 UTC
0 points
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on: Bayes for Schizophrenics: Reasoning in Delusional Disorders

“You have brain damage” is also a theory with perfect explanatory adequacy.… Why not?

This led me to think of two alternate hypotheses:

One is that the same problem underlying the second factor (“abnormal belief evaluation”) is at fault, that self-evaluation for abnormal beliefs involves the same sort of self-modelling needed for a theory like “I have brain damage” to seem explanatory (or even coherent). The other is that there are separate systems for self-evaluation and belief-probability-evaluation that are both damaged in the case of such delusions.

One might take the Capgras delusion and similar as evidence that those systems at least overlap, but there’s some visibility bias involved, since people who hold beliefs that seem (to them) to be both probable and crazy are likely to conceal those beliefs (see someonewrongonthenet’s comment).