Edward Pascal

Karma: 128

Edward Pascal Nov 27, 2021, 9:45 PM
3 points
in reply to: devansh’s comment on: Omicron Variant Post #1: We’re F***ed, It’s Never Over
I worry sometimes about burnout effects. What if we do all that and Omikron isn’t so bad, but two variants further down the road is ‘the one’ and no one is willing to do anything about it?

Edward Pascal Oct 29, 2021, 1:06 AM
8 points
in reply to: DirectedEvolution’s comment on: An Unexpected Victory: Container Stacking at the Port of Long Beach
“For (1), my barely-informed guess is that before the port got backed up, the rule hadn’t created any obviously significant drawbacks. Then, we did, in fact, have a failure of leadership in terms of recognizing a tractable solution to the problem.”

Is it possible that none of the politicians in authority had sufficient knowledge of Logistics or Operations Management and there was insufficient information flow happening to get that to some of the zoning board guys?

It seems to me, after reading a lot of Deming, this is the cause of a lot of problems: Lack of actual understanding of how a system actually works + Lack of information flow + Desire to impose rules and structures that do not take into account how a system (and mostly the people working in it) actually work.

Is it possible that fixing those things would positively impact a huge number of organizations in a practical way?

Edward Pascal Oct 4, 2021, 1:10 AM
3 points
on: The 2021 Less Wrong Darwin Game
If I am not mistaken, your gitlab page is not functioning right now. No way to search for you as a user either.

PS: Thanks for offering this game. Being at the intersection of economics and D&D, I am almost exploding with excitement to see what happens!

Edward Pascal Sep 29, 2021, 5:02 PM
1 point
in reply to: Edward Pascal’s comment on: Beware Superficial Plausibility
To be more explicit, I am making the case that for the people vaccine hesitancy really has a lot of salience, the issues are wide, and if put into the exact same milieu, I assume most of us (even the sharper ones!) might end up with similar beliefs. I don’t think the reasoning errors you point out would fix things for them. As someone else has said, the priors might be too different.

Given this, I think the easiest solution would be to deal with issues of system opacity and bureaucratic walls in general as a means of increasing trust. Obviously that sounds like the hard way. In some sense, I would like to solve the socioeconomic issues and education issues, but most people in Working classes rather than Gentry like myself actually like their education level and socioeconomic markers better than mine, so trying to intervene there seems to be a losing battle.

Edward Pascal Sep 29, 2021, 4:45 PM
2 points
on: Beware Superficial Plausibility
First: It seems that medical studies and individual doctors are not very good at getting vague and low-level symptoms, syndromes, and chronic symptoms in general. Often these things can be real, without being easily measurable. Maybe it is like taking your mechanic to the car and you cannot get it to make for him that noise it keeps making. So, for people who end up with these types of conditions, it may appear the establishment is out of touch, untrustworthy, perhaps even conspiratorial.

The above doesn’t seem controversial, but I think people who have or know someone who has those symptoms are often more sympathetic to vaccine hesitancy or even great suspicion of modern medical science in general.

Second: The truth is often very nuanced, whereas promoted consensus tends to draw with broad strokes according to what seems salient. A good example is Opioids. We have passed through times of greater or lesser opophbia, and seem to be entering a time when it will be greater. It is very bad that it gets much more regulated, expensive, and difficult to acquire for the people who genuinely need it and cannot or will not resort to illegal solutions. Additionally, this problem will skew poorer and elder, for people who cannot afford the type of or the time of doctors who can advocate for them. Yet, as a public health matter, there are also a lot of addicts.

There just isn’t room for a lot of nuance in the mediated “”“national””” “”“discussion.””” I think it’s a pity when someone is perceptive enough to notice trends along these lines but not in a community where it can be explored with a lot of rationality and good sense. To such people, there may appear to be a ‘conspiracy.’

Third: For various reasons, these factors skew towards certain demographics more than others. I am often surprised how little social sophistication people much below my (G2) class level have. For example, I got a traffic ticket, attended court, and in a room with 500 people who didn’t want the ticket ‘to go on their insurance’ I was the only person who knew to plead guilty to a lesser charge (below Department of Motor Vehicles reporting threshold) and pay the full fine. They mostly plead nolo, which is no help in that case. I just don’t get it, because I have never had that kind of background. However, without familiarity with bureaucracies and social systemic games, people just don’t know what to do or how to do it. I think this contributes to the feeling “the system can’t be trusted.”

Edward Pascal Sep 24, 2021, 10:45 PM
3 points
in reply to: Gerald Monroe’s comment on: Working With Monsters
“The reason for one of these sides seems almost to be a self identity thing, where they don’t really believe in their color’s precepts, they just identify with the people in it”

Based on that, I know exactly the bastards you’re talking about, and I don’t believe anyone would be able to tolerate them as compatriots if they weren’t totally dark triad, at least to some degree. So we’re agreed we need to stand up for what’s right and shut them all down before something serious happens?

Edward Pascal Sep 12, 2021, 2:36 AM
4 points
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: The Best Software For Every Need
Why would I used it over Sublime Text? You said you have some experience with ST, so I would like to know why VsCode wins.

Edward Pascal Aug 25, 2021, 2:06 PM
4 points
on: Framing Practicum: Turnover Time
1. A piece of consumer electronic equipment a small business makes has a certain Bill of Materials. One of the major components is discontinued. Time it takes to fix it:
a) If a more-or-less equivalent piece exists (subs a TL052 for a TL072), a day.

b) If nothing comparable exists (subs a PIC microcontroller for a LSI IC):

define and staff the problem: 2-5 days

solve the problem: 2-5 weeks

debug the solution: 2-5 months (The reason I think Debugging could take a long time is it might take extended use to find the bugs)
1. Loss of a finger—I think I would be able to regain typing, writing, driving, etc (supplemented with other tools) to near equivalent capacity in several weeks. Loss of an arm is more like several months. Loss of a leg, might take a couple of years (would have to get used to walking on prosthetic, so mobility seems extremely complex).
2. Changeover of an employee—This gets complicated. This could easily take months, with some trial and error involved. Given sufficient notice and ability to hire the replacement and let old employee aid handover, onboard, and train the new guy, this could take weeks after finding a good candidate—also my margin of error on the new hire becomes a lot wider. I still need a smart, capable employee, but if I and the previous person can spend solid time getting her/him up to snuff, this could be very fast and easy.