Edward Pascal

• Edward Pascal 7 Jan 2023 14:37 UTC

  23 points

  17

  on: Why didn’t we get the four-hour work­day?

  I do not know how to explain this properly, but there is some amount of “non-work” work hours in every job I have done. If I were allowed to do everything that needed to get done and then go home at the end, no question, no raised eyebrows, etc, then most office jobs I have had would have been 2-4 hour work days.

  Indeed, it’s hard to get more than four solid hours of cognitively intense work done on any given day anyway, and if I have done this, I consider it an especially productive day. I mostly work for myself now and typically do my 2-4 hours of intense cognitive “real production” work starting a half an hour after I wake up, with all the benefits of a night of sleep, good blood sugar, and a fresh pot of coffee. After lunch, I might work on a couple of hours of boring housekeeping type stuff, answering emails, ordering supplies, talking to providers, cash i/​o, etc.

  But those office jobs, really, most days were spent filling 8 hours and a half with what could have been a single uninterrupted 4 hour block. I think some of the filler is also “meetings.” I think a lot of people in broadly “middle level administrative” roles have probably experienced something similar.

• Edward Pascal 23 Sep 2022 22:23 UTC

  17 points

  9

  on: Public-fac­ing Cen­sor­ship Is Safety Theater, Caus­ing Rep­u­ta­tional Da­m­age

  The problem I think this article is getting at is paternalism without buy-in.

  On the topic of loss of credibility, I think focusing on nudity in general is also a credibility-losing problem. Midjourney will easily make very disturbing, gory, bloody images, but neither the Vitruvian man nor Botticelli’s Venus would be acceptable.

  Corporate comfort with basic violence while blushing like a puritan over the most innocuous, healthy, normal nudity or sexuality is very weird. Also, few people for even a moment think any of it is anything other than CYOA on their part. Also, some may suspect a disingenuous double standards like, “Yeah, I guess those guys are looking at really sick stuff all afternoon on their backend version” or “I guess only the C-Suite gets to deepfake the election in Zimbabwe.” This would be a logical offshoot of the feeling that “The only purpose to the censorship is CYOA for the company.”

  In summary: Paternalism has to be done very, very carefully, and with some amount of buy-in, or it burns credibility and good-will very quickly. I doubt that is a very controversial presupposition here, and it is my basic underlying thought on most of this. Eventually, in many cases, paternalism without buy-in yields outright hostility toward a policy or organization and (as our OP is pointing out) the blast radius can get wide.

• Edward Pascal 2 Dec 2021 21:14 UTC

  17 points

  on: Pain is the unit of Effort

  (Trigger Warning: Passing mention of a suicide)

  I studied Kung Fu and Muai Thai. Nothing is quite like being in a ring for the first time. It’s like that scene in Rush Hour where Chris tucker gets hit in the face and then says, “Now which one of you motherfuckers just hit me?”

  I’m 43 now. Then I was 17. In my Muai Thai class here were some who fought in the ring, and more who did not. However, the guys who stayed with it and did ring fighting sometimes have certain patterns. Like setting an alarm for 20 minutes early, taking 2 or 3 advils or aleves, then waking up with the regular alarm, taking another one, maybe smoking some pot with it. Fortunately I started seeing this trend by the time I was 22 and shifted to Kung Fu.

  Kung Fu is odd in that there are disciplines (Isshen Ru Boxing comes to mind) that are about as bad. I think Muscle-Tendon Changing classic is bad for you, especially if you’re bruising yourself a lot in the process. And one of my Kung Fu teachers trained a guy by blindfolding him and beating him up for six weeks (not medical advice). He did get good very fast. He got what some people don’t get after five years. He moved before the kick happened.

  However, I also saw someone get hit in the knee and have serious problems pretty much forever. People romanticize ‘do or die’ and think they will succeed at the lightening bolt path. More don’t, and plenty who are smarter, faster, dumber, more XX than you have failed.

  Not everyone gets there, and that same guy who got very good at Kung Fu after being blindfolded and beaten up later killed himself. He was very hard on himself. Maybe the teacher just reflected that to him.

  Before he died, he and I developed another method of teaching, which got people most of what you get in the first several ring fights, and most of what he got from blindfolded fighting practice, but with far less pain. We put on blindfolds and limited strikes to slaps and shoves. Of course, people still got hurt, but not like the ring, and we avoided some twisting motions on the victims (not medical advice). Pain itself is not such a good teacher. Pain, per se, is not any indicator of gain, even where the two seem closely associated.

  In the end, I am saying there is usually a better way to do it. Those hard methods work, but they probably aren’t necessary. That which doesn’t kill you might still kill you later on, or it might just do damage, even if your record says 11-0-0 or whatever. And the guy with no record might actually be better, and the better thing is not fighting at all.

  Anyway, if there’s a fight, something has gone horribly wrong that anyone with any sensitivity (or even common sense) could have almost certainly avoided. Or it’s an honor duel. A far better warrior will avoid all of it!

  So the story goes: “A lord of ancient China once asked his physician, a member of a family of healers, which of them was the most skilled in the art.

  “My eldest brother sees the spirit of sickness and removes it before it takes shape, so his name does not get out of the house.

  “My elder brother cures sickness when it is still extremely minute, so his name gets around only in his own neighborhood.

  The well-known healer replied, “I puncture veins, prescribe potions, and massage skin, so from time to time my name gets out and is heard among the lords.”

• Edward Pascal 21 Dec 2022 18:23 UTC

  8 points

  2

  on: Sazen

  Much of what you have said here about capturing ideas is why I (and perhaps others) tend to prefer deep narrative as a means of conveying a lot. I mean, read Puzo’s original Godfather—more is in there than the movie. And ye gods, the movie has a lot in it. A summary of the movie is more or less meaningless to capture the multiple highly-coherent gestalts and meta-models available in the movies. I’m not even sure it points well at them later. I don’t know if you could even make something less than 1k-4k words that even points well at pieces* of the high-coherency embedded information in a powerful story (make it Dune, Breaking Bad, or Harry Potter as you like). At some point the best one might be able to do is write several paragraphs that point to pointers that point to the platonic ideal of an elegant pointer to whatever is conveyed. (And maybe I’m pointing well at something in this paragraph, that people who have been blessed by being consumed in a beautiful story world understand.)

  So, with any real deep narrative, maybe it conveys something like living in the territory for awhile, or maybe it shortcuts your mind to something like a complex hyper-dimensional surface through back-propagation. Basically, you might be able parse what would or would not be consistent in the Harry Potter universe (depending on how well you read the books/​watched the movies) pretty well, even in some really odd details, after your neural network was trained by the narrative. Fanfic is about someone building their own models of possibilities given the training data, and (not having read much) I assume part of the satisfaction in it is providing an extension to people that is consistent (“rings true”) within that world. People also often feel uneasy when a character or world becomes inconsistent (such as when the storyline of the TV show passes the original writer’s material and the committee just cannot nail it or has inconsistent intentions in their approach or agendas beyond total honesty of intention to the story and its characters). We humans are pretty good at noticing narrative consistencies, I think.

  (I know I have gone a bit divergent from what you were saying, but you did push me to thinking about all this, so thank you)

  EDIT: Are Koans attempts to do this? Maybe sometimes they come close to non-lossy compression for what amount to really vast hyper-dimensional surfaces in just a couple of sentences. To some extent they may still depend on context (though I can feel Hakuin hitting me with a stick when I suggest this).

• Edward Pascal 29 Oct 2021 1:06 UTC

  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 23 Dec 2022 14:10 UTC

  7 points

  −2

  on: Let’s think about slow­ing down AI

  (1) The framing of all this as military technology (and the DoD is the single largest purchasing agent on earth) reminds me of nuclear power development. Molten Salt reactors and Pellet Bed reactors are both old tech which would have created the dream of safe, small-scale nuclear power. However, in addition to not melting down and working at relatively small scales, they also don’t make weapons-usable materials. Thus they were shunted in favor of the kinds of reactors we mostly have now. In an alternative past without the cold war driving us to make new and better weapons, we hit infinite free energy for everyone back in 1986 and in 2022 we finally got our Dyson Sphere running.

  So yeah, the sad thing about it being an arms race with China and DARPA et al that is the AGIs will look a certain way, and that might become “”“what AGI is””” for several decades. And the safeguards and controls that get put around those military-grade AGIs will prevent some other kind, the equivalent of Molten Salt reactors, from getting developed and built.

  But we have to accept the world of incentives we have, not the one we wish for.

  (2) As a PD defector/​exploiter without much in the way of morals or shame, what I like about all this slowing down is that it gives smaller players a little opportunity to catch up and play with the big guys. I suspect at least a few smaller players (along with the open source community) would make some hay while the sun is shining and everyone else is moving slow and ensuring alignment, which is democratizing and cool. I put this up here as a selling point for those people who crave the pedal to the metal on AI dev. The slowness the OP is talking about allows a different pedal to different metal if you are looking for it, perhaps with your foot on it.

• Edward Pascal 24 Sep 2022 20:12 UTC

  7 points

  0

  in reply to: iceman’s comment on: Public-fac­ing Cen­sor­ship Is Safety Theater, Caus­ing Rep­u­ta­tional Da­m­age

  Then a major topic LessWrong community should focus on is how buy-in happens in Paternalism. My first blush thought is through educating and consensus-building (like the Japanese approach to changes within a company), but my first blush thought probably doesn’t matter. It is surely a non-trivial problem that will put the breaks on all these ideas if it is not addressed well.

  Does anyone know some literature on generating consensus for paternalist policies and avoiding backlash?

  The other (perhaps reasonable and legitimate) strategies would be secretive approaches or authoritarian approaches. Basically using either deception or force.

• Edward Pascal 29 Apr 2022 19:00 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Say­ing no to the Appleman

  One of the most basic general sales scripts is this: After a purchase has been made, say “Great. Today only and for people who have already bought from us, we have 25% off our XXX, if you just check catalogue page 19.”

  Whether they buy or not, you follow with, “We also have 25% off our XXY, if you have a look here.”

  And on and on.

  The script is simply not to go away, keep asking for more sales, until the buyer breaks social decorum by being literally rude and just saying (some version of), “Stop. I am done. This conversation is over.”

• Edward Pascal 18 Mar 2023 18:38 UTC

  5 points

  2

  in reply to: baturinsky’s comment on: Won­der about the hard parts of the al­ign­ment problem

  Has anyone worked out timeline predictions for Non-US/​Non-Western Actors and tracked their accuracy?

  For example, is China at “GPT-3.5” level yet and 6 months away from GPT-4 or is China a year from GPT-3.0? How about the people contributing to OpenSource AI? Last I checked that field looked “generally speaking” kind of at GPT-2.5 level (and even better for deepfaking porn), but I didn’t look close enough to be confident of my assessment.

  Anyway, I’d like something more than off-the-cuff thoughts, but rather a good paper and some predictions on Non-US/​Non-Western AI timeframes. Because, if anything, even if you somehow avert market forces levering AI up faster and faster among the big 8 in QQQ, those other actors are still going to form a hard deadline on alignment.

A rea­son be­hind bad sys­tems, and moral im­pli­ca­tions of see­ing this reason

• Edward Pascal 12 Sep 2021 2:36 UTC

  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 17 Dec 2022 18:23 UTC

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: Ed­ward Pas­cal’s Shortform

  I did not say engineer something so that no one wants to destroy it. Just that if you have actually reached towards the greatest good for the greatest number, then the fewest should want to destroy it.

  Or have I misunderstood you?

  My argument is going something along the lines of the Tautological argument that ( I think) Mills (but maybe Bentham) made about Utilitarianism (paraphrasing much), “People who object to Utilitarianism that it will end up with some kind of calculated dystopia where we trade off a few people’s happiness for the many actually prove the principle of utilitarianism in their very objection to this. Such a system would be anti-utilitarian. No one likes that. Therefore it is not utilitarianism at all.”

• Edward Pascal 24 Sep 2022 20:14 UTC

  3 points

  2

  in reply to: Yitz’s comment on: Public-fac­ing Cen­sor­ship Is Safety Theater, Caus­ing Rep­u­ta­tional Da­m­age

  Is it possible to build a convincing case for the majority that it is either acceptable or that it is not, in fact, paternalism?

  Can you articulate your own reasoning and intuitions as to why it isn’t? That might address the reservations most people have.

• Edward Pascal 27 Nov 2021 21:45 UTC

  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 4 Oct 2021 1:10 UTC

  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 24 Sep 2021 22:45 UTC

  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 24 Mar 2023 0:24 UTC

  2 points

  1

  in reply to: DPiepgrass’s comment on: Let’s make the truth eas­ier to find

  What you are actually making is something like a “lesser of two evils” argument or some bet on tradeoffs paying off that one party may buy and another may not. Having explored the reasoning this far, I would suggest this is one class of circumstances where even if you beamed all the facts into two people’s minds, who both had “Average” morality, this is one of the situations where there would still tend to be disagreement. This definitely doesn’t hinge on someone wanting something bad, like genocide, for the disagreement. People could both want the same outcomes and diverge in their conclusions with the facts beamed into their minds in this class of situations (which, to my original argument, differs tremendously from physics).

  I hadn’t seen old man Chomsky talk about Ukraine prior to your video above. I think though, if you look at his best work, you might be able to softly mollify the impact, but it’s not like he’s pulling his ideas about, say, every single US action in South America and the Middle East being very bad for the people they claimed to help, out of some highly skewed view. Those border on fairly obvious, at any rate, and your video’s recasting him as a “voice of moral outrage” hinges on his off-the cuff interviews, not his heavily cited work (as I mentioned The Chomsky Reader, which is a different man than the one in the video)

  Even setting him aside as a reference, looking at the recent history of US war, at the most generous, considering Russian badness and US badness, any “moral high-ground” argument for the US being good in this case will boil down to a lesser-of-two-evils assessment. Also looking at US history, you lose some of the “this is just an annexation” because US proxy war since 2014 would fit the pattern of pretty much everything the USA has done both recently and for the past 100 years.

  Your point about also looking at Putin/​Russia is fine, and it should be considered as well as practical solutions to the matter. I think we all would call Putin a criminal, this isn’t a question at hand. The question is if another US adventure, this time in Europe, is actually going to turn out all that well, or if Russia as a failed state will turn out well for Ukraine or Europe, or if this will turn Nuclear if you refuse to cede any ground, or if the Russia/​China alliance will break or not, or for how long the US can even afford and support more wars, etc, etc. These are mostly practical matters that are indeterminate and make the intervention questionable. In practical senses, they present different good/​bad tradeoffs and better/​worse odds bets on outcomes to different parties that amount to weighing different “lesser evil” projections in the outcome. They don’t hinge on our moral intuitions differing at all.

  (And again, all this differs in category and the way it behaves from Physics)

• Edward Pascal 20 Mar 2023 18:57 UTC

  2 points

  0

  on: Let’s make the truth eas­ier to find

  I think another issue that would arise is that if you get “into the weeds,” some topics are a lot more straightforward than others (probably delineated by being rooted in mostly social facts or mostly natural science facts, which all behave completely differently).

  The Ukraine issue is a pretty bad one, given the history of the region, the Maidan protests, US history of proxy wars, and, and, and. It seems to me far from clear what the simple facts are (other than you have two factions of superpowers, fighting for different things). I have an opinion as to what would be best, and what would be best for people of Ukraine, and what I think sections of Ukraine undisturbed by US and Russian meddling for the past 30 years might vote in referenda. And at least one of those thoughts disagrees with the others. Add to this the last 70 years of US interventions (see Chomsky for pretty good, uncontroversial fact-based arguments that it has all been pretty evil, and by the standards of the Nuremberg Trials one might execute every president since Kennedy).

  On the other hand, Global Warming is pretty straightforward (even allowing for seeming complications like Mars temperature rise, or other objections). We can handle the objections in measurable terms of physical reality for a home-run clear answer.

  One of OP’s examples is an entirely social reality and the other is a matter of physics. Let’s face it, in some sense this war is about where we draw squiggly lines and different colored blobs on a map. It’s levels removed from something where we can do measurable tests. If you really made all the truth easy to find, bringing someone straight into the weeds of a social problem like a US/​NATO intervention, in many cases the answer will not come out clear, no matter how good your tool is. In fact, a reasonable person after reading enough of the Truth might walk away fully disillusioned about all actors involved and ready to join some kind of anarchist movement. Better in some cases to gloss over social realities in broad strokes, burying as much detail as possible, especially if you think the war (whichever one it is!) is just/​unjust/​worth the money/​not worth the money, etc.

• Edward Pascal 20 Dec 2022 13:40 UTC

  2 points

  1

  on: No­tice when you stop read­ing right be­fore you understand

  “With school, often the way to get adequate grades with minimal time spent is to learn just enough so that you can do shallow keyword matching—full understanding is not needed.”

  I once made $1000 from a desperate housemate during Undergrad, who had not written papers for his Epistemology course along with some other philosophy course. He met me at 10pm, the night before everything was due. Now, I did not understand Hume or half of what I wrote, but I literally bunched words according to meaning blocks and slapped them together with a consistent meaning ruleset with some reasonable logical jumps on that same ruleset. I was in the zone enough for him to get a low A and a high B.

  Since then, I have been an educator myself and I try very hard to make that sort of keyword matching totally not possible as a final stopping place in my classes. However, it can be used along the way (see below).

  And a note on the rest of your paper: Lately one thing I have been doing is “just finish the book.” Like, I was reading Quantum computing books and kept getting hung up on some points. So I went through A Student’s Guide to Vectors and Tensors to refresh my vector analysis. That was nice, however, it just didn’t get me all I needed to comprehend the Quantum stuff. What finally worked a lot better was just setting aside (in fact, shallow keyword matching) understanding of the points of quantum computing and just doing an entire book all the way to the last page. Now I am working another one (which is more programmer oriented) and kind of getting it. Again, I’m just chugging through the book, and mentally holding spaces for the things I still haven’t grokked.

  Learning is weird. I kind of need to juggle ambiguity in a creative tension to construct the knowledge for myself Maybe this is a-la Vygotsky? I cannot say for sure because I didn’t finish the Vygotsky parts of the learning theory book. I got stuck re-reading and trying to really understand one or two concepts and never picked it up again after awhile. At the same time, I had enough to finish my paper and get an A. In fact, for my Instructional Design degree, I got nearly a 4.3 GPA in +/​- grading. Yes, all of this really happened, including WRT Vygotsky, but as a result I don’t have enough knowledge base about Vygotsky’s theories to be certain one way or another if it’s ironic. I have a little suspicion it is based on my surface-level reading, and so I’m laughing nervously.

  Anyway, everything you said was useful and cool. I am going to be thinking about this.

• Edward Pascal 20 Oct 2022 17:27 UTC

  2 points

  1

  in reply to: porby’s comment on: My search for a re­li­able breakfast

  Thank you for this Data Point. I’m 6′1″ and age 43 and still have these issues. I thought by now I would not need as much food, but it’s still there. I’m still rail thin, and I can easily eat two breakfasts and elevensies before 1pm lunch.

  One thing I love is my instant pot. It can get me a porridge of maple syrup, buckwheat groats, sprouted brown rice, and nuts and dried fruit within 20 minutes by just dumping in ingredients. Yeah, it only lasts 90 minutes or so, but I have enough to eat it again in 90 minutes. Later, for lunch, I can combine some more with a 12″ subway sandwich or something.