CraigMichael

Karma: 619

The recent banality of rationality (and effective altruism)

CraigMichael27 Jan 2023 1:19 UTC

−15 points

4 comments11 min readLW link

CraigMichael 13 Jan 2023 22:46 UTC
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in reply to: jaspax’s comment on: On Cooking With Gas
It was intended to be tonge-in-cheek, but okay, point taken.

CraigMichael 13 Jan 2023 15:01 UTC
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on: On Cooking With Gas

Even among my Twitter followers, quite a few want to ban gas stoves, with a strong partisan effect.

To be fair, you phrased this as “new construction” in the Twitter poll.

I would like to see them throttled (perhaps not banned but discouraged) in new residential construction, not in existing residential dwellings. Then it sort of works like alcohol licenses in Colorado. They can be inherited but it’s hard to get new ones (approvals in this case, not the actual stoves).

That goes against some other libertarian leanings I have, but I’m intrigued by the scarcity it would create/maintain. I think it would improve/keep urban character. Gas stoves have character and if you just let anyone have them, they’ll lose their je ne sais quoi. I like that they pair well with old neighborhoods and wood floors. I don’t want the suburbs to mimic that and cheapen it—to their own detriment. Being a suburb that’s poorly attempting to mimic urbanity is just ugly and is a bad substitute for coming up with novel ideas.

I know this sounds strange, but Denver suburbs have this trend where they have these little pockets that try to create an artificial sense of urbanity—including urban restaurants opening franchises—in these fugazi pockets of inorganic city, but with massive parking lots and no sense of walkability. It’s just gross. It’s tacky and it’s poor taste.

Commercially, I’m okay with new and existing restaurants using them.

CraigMichael 18 Dec 2022 21:52 UTC
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in reply to: Lao Mein’s comment on: Be less scared of overconfidence
Am with you very much here. Recently decided that I need to start doing this more often. Negative karma isn’t really negative karma if you’ve learned something from the experience.

CraigMichael 8 Nov 2022 5:13 UTC
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in reply to: jefftk’s comment on: Thinking About Mastodon
“Successful” is an odd concept with it comes to social media. Most people would call Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, etc, successful. I think that’s like saying oxycontin is successful, or McDonalds is successful, or Doritos is successful. It depends on the point of view you’re looking at it from.
There’s an argument to be made that it’s better to influence a small number of people profoundly, then influence a large number of people negligibly (as you might do on larger networks, where any influence you might have will be almost entirely washed away by whatever is more viral). In fact, that’s why I’m on LessWrong, the scale is more apt.

CraigMichael 8 Nov 2022 5:08 UTC
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on: Thinking About Mastodon
I considered self-hosting, but an email server is already more complex than I want to manage and a Mastodon server is much more so.
I have no affiliation here, but there’s lots of places like masto.host where you can pay to host your own instance. Sure, someone running your VM might do something awful. But… that’s cloud hosting.

CraigMichael 8 Nov 2022 5:06 UTC
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on: Thinking About Mastodon
I will vouch for the admin of linuxrocks.online, been on their for years (and other than some unfortunate downtime), it’s been solid (in the drama-free sense).

CraigMichael 3 Nov 2022 23:26 UTC
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on: Open Letter Against Reckless Nuclear Escalation and Use
I’m wondering why not just call for mutual disarmament under IAEA supervision? There’s an old, but now very relevant episode of 80000 hours with Daniel Ellsberg;

https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/daniel-ellsberg-doomsday-machines/

I didn’t keep the time stamps, but he gets in to the approximate number of warheads a state should need as a deterrent, and says it’s probably not more than 100.

Luisa Rodriguez has an excellent post on the EA forum with fairly current estimates of the downstream effects of a nuclear exchange between US and Russia with the 2019 arsenal. She estimates a US-Russian nuclear exchange would result in a 5.1 to 58 Tg of schmutz entering the atmosphere, best guess is 31 Tg. (A NATO-Russia exchange would likey be more since would also involve France and the UK.)

31 Tg would put us in a “nuclear autum” but would be very close to a nuclear winter, just another couple Tg from a full NATO-Russia exchange would likely put us on the winter part of the sigmoid curve. (LW isn’t letting post images in the comment like it usually does, but relevant graphs are in the paper).

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/pMsnCieusmYqGW26W/how-bad-would-nuclear-winter-caused-by-a-us-russia-nuclear#December_19__2019_Update

Taking Statista’s numbers and assuming the megatons about average out
Russia (5,977), USA (5,428), China (350), France (290), United Kingdom (225), Pakistan (165), India (160), Israel (90), North Korea (20).

https://www.statista.com/statistics/264435/number-of-nuclear-warheads-worldwide/

Let’s say we capped everyone at 100, there’s less than 900 warheads in the world, we’re well under nuclear winter if the exchange is between two states. Even if the US and Russia just come down to 350 for parity with China, we’ve still substantially reduced the risk.

The ultimate recklessness I see here is that we haven’t discussed mutual nuclear disarmament in earnest as part of this war. When are we going to have a better opportunity? And if Putin is asked and he does anything other than enthusiastically agree, doesn’t that tell us everything we need to know?

CraigMichael 31 Oct 2022 6:29 UTC
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in reply to: berglund’s comment on: Weekly Roundup #3
Posted three examples that I thought to screencap when they occurred, but if I tracked everything there would be hundreds. https://twitter.com/craigtalbert/status/1586952770170388481?s=20&t=8BtJYArZ9wtMJrJQK2IR4g

CraigMichael 14 Oct 2022 6:34 UTC
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in reply to: ryan_b’s comment on: Why I think there’s a one-in-six chance of an imminent global nuclear war
I can’t say for certain, but my hunch is that you’re dead on here.

CraigMichael 14 Oct 2022 6:29 UTC
4 points
in reply to: Jan_Kulveit’s comment on: Russia has Invaded Ukraine
You were ahead of the curve here.

CraigMichael 14 Oct 2022 6:02 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Adam Zerner’s comment on: When should you relocate to mitigate the risk of dying in a nuclear war?
Yeah… if this happens everyone will have to make their own choices. I may or may not regret mine. Sometimes I feel like the old man here. Like I’m not sure if you were around the Internet when it was a little more wild west. Sites with content like this (CW: euthanasia) were more common. I don’t want to be macabre or maudlin or put ideas in anyone’s head, but I thought about keeping some of the proven materials to implement that at my disposal given current events… But with the acceleration of things recently, it’s like there’s a pep in my step that I don’t remember feeling before. If there is a fight against Neo-Eurasianism (CW: novel left- and right-wing memetic miscegenation), I feel like it’s worth fighting against. If most people die and I survive, I feel like I have a duty to the future. Maybe you could call it a kind of Longtermism.
That being said, pep isn’t a reason to paint the devil on the wall. I really don’t want people I love to die. I don’t want innocent people to die. It could just be a happy death spiral and I don’t want to get carried away with it.
Anyway, that’s probably more self-disclosure than anyone signed up for. :)

CraigMichael 14 Oct 2022 1:25 UTC
1 point
in reply to: nim’s comment on: When should you relocate to mitigate the risk of dying in a nuclear war?
You booby trap your house? What if some kids stumble in or something 50 years from now?

CraigMichael 14 Oct 2022 1:19 UTC
−3 points
in reply to: UHMWPE-UwU’s comment on: When should you relocate to mitigate the risk of dying in a nuclear war?
Luisa says Rodriguez says a US-Russia exchange is 5.1 to 58 Tg of schmutz in the atmosphere. Her best guess is 31 Tg. A NATO-Russia exchange would be larger. Important figures below. 31 Tg puts us on the edge of “nuclear autumn.” Full scale NATO-Russia is probably nuclear winter.

CraigMichael 14 Oct 2022 1:05 UTC
1 point
on: When should you relocate to mitigate the risk of dying in a nuclear war?
But even if I did survive, that Hatchet-style life doesn’t sound very good.
Maybe. Maybe it will be the first time you really feel alive and some of the most exhilarating moments of your life. It’s better to wear out than to rust out, as our grandparents used to say.
In general humans suck at affective forecasting, so don’t discount this so quickly.
I, for one, want to see what happens. Even if it sucks. Even if it’s horrible. Even if most of the people I know and love are dead. I believe in humanity, and maybe I don’t make ¹⁄₂ copies of my genes but my species survives.

CraigMichael 12 Oct 2022 18:29 UTC
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in reply to: arunto’s comment on: Why I think there’s a one-in-six chance of an imminent global nuclear war
These are interesting thoughts.

I know this is CNN, but the source (Robert Baer) seems solid. https://youtu.be/7ZgBSYZb-gk

He says putin used information from Russian spy in the CIA to blackmail Yeltsin.

If we discovered any of them currently active, I wonder if we could deliberately feed them bits of misinformation to steer Putin one way or another?

Or maybe if the undiscovered spies could become something like ironic double agents on their own if the spies are against escalation? On their own imitative they steer things towards de-escalation? Or maybe defect at the last moment to try and stop escalation?

CraigMichael 11 Oct 2022 11:32 UTC
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in reply to: Sausage Vector Machine’s comment on: Why I think there’s a one-in-six chance of an imminent global nuclear war
Have you “mentally wargamed” the CIA/MI6 option? Who would replace him? Would they be better or worse? How would Russian citizens respond? Is there anything like an automated event that is suppressed daily by Putin while he is alive but that would be triggered if he dies?

Since you seem to have thought a lot of this through:

Do you have thoughts on the possibility of pre-existing weapons caches in the US or Europe that could be activated remotely by Russia? (Nuclear, chemical, biological, etc)?

Similarly, it seems that every few years we discover Russians spies in the US, so the probability is high there’s some in the US active now. In the event of a war, would they act like a sleeper cell? Would kinds of things might they do?

CraigMichael 11 Oct 2022 10:21 UTC
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on: Why I think there’s a one-in-six chance of an imminent global nuclear war
Marginally Compelling had a great podcast episode with Josh Centers back in March of this year on surviving a nuclear attack. https://polimath.substack.com/p/get-ready-for-nuclear-war-with-josh#details

I haven’t seen it mentioned, so I’m mentioning it.

CraigMichael 11 Oct 2022 10:19 UTC
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in reply to: Sausage Vector Machine’s comment on: Why I think there’s a one-in-six chance of an imminent global nuclear war
Even with massive air strikes? Couldn’t they just carpet bomb any Ukrainian military position?

CraigMichael 11 Oct 2022 0:34 UTC
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in reply to: Teerth Aloke’s comment on: Why I think there’s a one-in-six chance of an imminent global nuclear war
I enjoyed reading this silver-lining comment. :)

CraigMichael

The re­cent ba­nal­ity of ra­tio­nal­ity (and effec­tive al­tru­ism)

The recent banality of rationality (and effective altruism)