Elithrion

Karma: 739

Elithrion 1 Apr 2013 1:44 UTC
34 points
on: A Rational Altruist Punch in The Stomach
I’m not sure what an investment in a particular far-future time would look like. Money does not, in fact, breed and multiply when left in a vault for long enough. It increases by being invested in things that give payoffs or otherwise rise in value. Even if you have a giant stockpile of cash and put it in a bank savings account, the bank will then take it and lend it out to people who will make use of it for whatever projects they’re up to. If you do that, all you’re doing is letting the bank (and the borrowers) choose the uses of your money for the first while, and then when you eventually take it out you take the choice back and make it yourself. The one way I can think of to actually invest in the distant future is to find or create some project that will have a massive payoff in the distant future but low payoffs before that, and I don’t think anyone knows of a project that pays off further than 100 years in the future.

Maybe you could try to create a fund that explicitly looks for far-future payoff opportunities and invests in them, but I don’t think one exists right now, and the idea is non-trivial.

I dunno, maybe there’s something else I’m missing, though.

Elithrion 3 Apr 2012 1:38 UTC
32 points
on: Rationality Quotes April 2012

“What really is the point of trying to teach anything to anybody?” This question seemed to provoke a murmur of sympathetic approval from up and down the table. Richard continued, “What I mean is that if you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else. That forces you to sort it out in your mind. And the more slow and dim-witted your pupil, the more you have to break things down into more and more simple ideas. And that’s really the essence of programming. By the time you’ve sorted out a complicated idea into little steps that even a stupid machine can deal with, you’ve learned something about it yourself.”

Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency

Elithrion 7 Mar 2013 19:17 UTC
29 points
in reply to: ModusPonies’s comment on: Boring Advice Repository
Although it should be noted that while this is usually a good idea, it doesn’t work on everyone and you should notice if your conversation partner doesn’t seem very enthusiastic about talking about themselves. (Yes, I do mean myself—not a big fan of vacuously discussing what I’m up to, most of the time.)

Exploring the Idea Space Efficiently

Elithrion8 Apr 2012 4:28 UTC

27 points

27 comments4 min readLW link

Elithrion 22 Mar 2013 19:14 UTC
26 points
in reply to: jimrandomh’s comment on: Personal Evidence—Superstitions as Rational Beliefs
Either that or maybe either OrphanWilde or his sister or someone else close to him really enjoys messing with everyone and making it seem that the house is haunted.

Elithrion 23 Feb 2013 1:43 UTC
20 points
on: “What-the-hell” Cognitive Failure Mode: a Separate Bias or a Combination of Other Biases?
It seems like a case of a binary commitment. Breaking the commitment at all gives you −20 hedons, but breaking it even more only gives you −1 hedons per break or whatever (which is outweighed by the gains from breaking it more). I think most internal commitments are set up this way because it’s easier to make a commitment like this explicit and enforceable than one that’s more continuous over actions.

Elithrion 6 Jun 2013 22:55 UTC
18 points
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: Open Thread, June 2-15, 2013
I am really disappointed in you, gwern. Why would you use an English auction when you can use an incentive-compatible one (a second price auction, for example)? You’re making it needlessly harder for bidders to come up with valuations!

(But I guess maybe if you’re just trying to drive up the price, this may be a good choice. Sneaky.)
What links here?
- Vaniver's comment on Open Thread, June 2-15, 2013 by TimS (10 Jun 2013 0:58 UTC; 7 points)

Elithrion 2 Apr 2012 21:17 UTC
17 points
on: Welcome to Less Wrong! (2012)
Hello there!

I think I first saw LessWrong about three years ago, as it frequently came up in discussions on KW, the forum formerly linked to the Dresden Codak comic. This makes mine one of the longer lurking periods, but I’ve never really felt the urge to take discussion to the actual posts being discussed and talked about them elsewhere when I felt the need to comment. All this changed when Alicorn told me that when I was asked to make a post relevant to LessWrong that meant I actually had to post it on LessWrong (a revelation which I should have probably anticipated). So it has come to this.

The simplest place to start describing myself is by saying that I’m the type of person that skims through the 200 most recent comments to see which ones are well liked before writing anything.* In real life terms, I’ve finished up my bachelor’s degree in December, after making various errors. Unfortunately, with it finished, I have discovered that I lack motivation to pursue a standard career, since just about the only things I find myself caring about are stories, knowing the future (in the general, not the personal, respect), and understanding things, particularly things related to people. (This is probably not normal for a human, but I can’t say I mind it.) Fortunately, these things are fairly similar to the things LW is interested in, so it shouldn’t be a problem!

These atypical weights in my utility function do, however, leave me with opinions that I think are largely a lot “darker” than the typical poster (and I don’t just write that for sexy bad-boy appeal). For example:
- I think utilitarianism is a terrible system to base anything on, and is basically what you adopt if you want to say “I think being nice is good” and want to make it sound like a well-reasoned ethical system. I’d like it better if you just said “I think being nice is good”.
- I think democracy and equality under the law merely look like good ideas because we don’t yet have the computational power to implement actually good ideas of which these are at best extremely simplified approximations.
- I think that seemingly obvious statements such as “we are all agreed that [it] is wrong to kill people (meaning, fully conscious and intelligent beings)”, from a highly rated comment by Alejandro1 down the page, are not very obvious and require serious justification. I think there are cases in our world where it is completely acceptable to kill people (although admittedly he probably meant his comment to apply only to a very specific subset of killing people), and there are many possible worlds where such cases would be far more frequent.
Well, the first two of those don’t even have much to do with my personal preferences. And yet, I’m not a scary person, I promise! While maybe my utility function makes it easier for me to accept these conclusions, the overwhelming majority of my beliefs actually arose from oodles of thinking about the topics, and they are just things that I think are true, regardless of whether I want them to be true or not. That said, when the enraged zealots come for us, I’m pretty sure I’m going to be one of the first to burn at the stake! I also wish that using smiley faces was more acceptable here, since I would not mind adding an equals sign-three one to the end of that sentence to convey the intended mood a little better.

Well, this has already gone on too long already, but I hope you were not too bored. I might as well mention that at the moment, I’m trying to write a realistic post-apocalyptic novel (where the recovery has set in enough that they’re ahead of the previous all-time high), and applying for a Center for Modern Rationality helper position, since I think these things are interesting, and I’d like to explore them before moving on to uninteresting survival strategies if necessary.

Bye for now, and I hope we have illuminating conversations together!

*If you’re curious what I found, here are the general conclusions (although some of these are fairly low confidence):
- introductions that include the person’s real name are a little bit better liked, but not significantly
- there is no particular correlation between length and upvotes
- most introductions reach a rating of 5 over time, even if they’re relatively content-free
- including something that praises LW or HPMoR or the community has a small positive correlation with upvotes
- introductions which trigger responses of any sort are generally upvoted more (not surprising since they’re more visible and overall upvotes per view seem almost universally positive)
- introductions that describe something fairly unique get noticeably more upvotes
- general good writing style helps (big surprise there)
- posts that primarily promote something unrelated to introductions are rated lower
- mentioning having a PhD or other real-world qualifications seems to be fairly karma-neutral
- other minor things I have even less confidence in

Elithrion 1 Apr 2013 17:25 UTC
13 points
in reply to: Pablo’s comment on: A Rational Altruist Punch in The Stomach
This is more like a conservative investment in various things by the managing funds for 200 years, followed by a reckless investment in the cities of Philadelphia and Boston at the end of 200 years. It probably didn’t do particularly more for the people 200 years from the time than it did for people in the interim.

Also, the most recent comment by cournot is interesting on the topic:

You may also be using the wrong deflators. If you use standard CPI or other price indices, it does seem to be a lot of money. But if you think about it in terms of relative wealth you get a different figure [and standard price adjustments aren’t great for looking far back in the past]. I think a pound was about 5 dollars. So if we assume that 1000 pounds = 5000 nominal dollars and we use the Econ History’s price deflators http://www.measuringworth.com/uscompare/ we find that this comes to over $2M if we use the unskilled wage and about $5M if we use nominal GDP. As a relative share of GDP, this figure would have been an enormous $380M or so. The latter is not an irrelevant calculation.

Given how wealthy someone had to be (relative to the poor in the 18th century) to fork over a thousand pounds in Franklin’s time, he might have done more good with it then than you could do with 2 to 5 million bucks today.

Elithrion 28 Mar 2013 19:03 UTC
12 points
on: Is The Blood Thicker Near The Tropics? Trade-Offs Of Living In The Cold
I’m really sceptical that this is as big a factor as some of the others, but I can see how it might be a significant factor. I’ve also lived in cold places most of my life, so I’m not in a very good position to judge. I feel like the biggest factor will ultimately turn out to be “that’s how history played out”, though. Looking back, it’s not clear that the hypothetical dominance of the North was really noticeable until maybe the 17th century (I’m not entirely confident on this, so correct me if I’m wrong), so I’d be more inclined to attribute it to cultural, geological, and geopolitical factors. As an example, Greece and then Rome led the world in many things for a while, and they’re pretty warm. So did China and many of its core areas are fairly warm as well.

Elithrion 23 Mar 2013 22:49 UTC
12 points
in reply to: Xachariah’s comment on: Personal Evidence—Superstitions as Rational Beliefs
What if the house merely floated the thing over there with reaction (pushing back on the floors/walls), and its floor rotted slightly (accumulating entropy, losing chemical energy) in proportion to the necessary force? In that case, he’s only discovered ghostly energy transfer at small distances, which may be completely impractical (only one or two Nobels).

Elithrion 21 Mar 2013 18:15 UTC
12 points
on: Another community about existential risk—Arctic news
Technically, LW isn’t about x-risk. It’s about “refining the art of human rationality”, as you can see up there in the header.

I am also not sure that a blogspot blog that gets 0-6 comments per post is really worth calling “a community” or taking particular notice of. The other ones you mention seem to more closely resemble communities, but have even less to do with x-risk.

Elithrion 17 Mar 2013 17:40 UTC
12 points
in reply to: David_Gerard’s comment on: Open thread, March 17-31, 2013
But they didn’t have full understanding of the new colour before having it added!

Elithrion 7 Mar 2013 19:56 UTC
11 points
on: Boring Advice Repository
Although this may not be for everyone, I’d recommend listening to audiobooks. The main advantage is that you can easily listen to them while walking or taking public transport, while cooking, while exercising, etc., which I personally find makes these activities a lot less boring.

I’ve also found that my personal rate of reading is faster with audiobooks (using RockBox with an mp3 player to speed up playback to 3-3.5x) than with normal reading, at something like ~450 words/min or ~1.3 pages/min. Most of the speed increase comes from me being really slow at reading normally due to getting distracted, focusing too much on thinking through one part, or just forgetting to read quickly, but still.

Elithrion 4 Feb 2013 2:15 UTC
11 points
in reply to: Douglas_Knight’s comment on: Open Thread, February 1-14, 2013
Priors: I haven’t heard of either Taylor or Sailor before (except possibly in passing). I dislike “citizenism” (insofar as I understand what that means before reading this) almost as much as (though slightly less than) “white nationalism”. I am also slightly more swayed by gwern’s argument than Douglas’s so far, though I remain quite uncertain.

Upon reading the essay linked and this previous one, but nothing else, my impression is that Sailor’s main focus is on distinguishing “nationalism” and “tribalism” (my terms for interpreting his ideas), more or less. By nationalism he means a system based on laws designed to facilitate and encourage altruism and cooperation with strangers, which he claims emerged in Western Europe, and is carried on mostly by whites. By tribalism he means a system based on supporting and dealing with primarily your extended family, and by extension members of your race. He opposes “white nationalism” insofar as he believes it’s “tribalist” and anti-individualistic and would harness whites to serve the racial group (much as he claims black solidarity, etc., does for other races), which would be harmful. He does seem to believe that whites are broadly superior to black and Latinos, but seems to believe this difference is unimportant compared to the paramount goal of promoting the welfare of current US citizens and ensuring that the “nationalism” (using the definition I mentioned above) remains the dominant force.

So, posteriors: I find that his arguments suck, and my opinion of “citizenism” has not improved and possibly became worse (which is beside the point). However, judging by those two posts alone, it does seem like Sailor genuinely holds “citizenism” to be paramount and is in weak opposition to some forms of white nationalism, insofar as that would encourage whites to put group interests ahead of individual and general cooperation interests; that said, he probably believes that whites are genuinely superior and because of this has significant moral sympathy for white nationalist positions despite believing a focus on racial solidarity may be harmful. Although I’m not sure if he cares about improving the lives of non-white Americans or sees that as merely a neutral or slightly beneficial side-effect of improving the lives of white Americans.

Elithrion 29 Mar 2013 0:47 UTC
10 points
in reply to: philh’s comment on: Is The Blood Thicker Near The Tropics? Trade-Offs Of Living In The Cold
No, we would not. The Southern hemisphere is just generally warmer (at least on land).

Elithrion 7 Mar 2013 0:07 UTC
10 points
in reply to: lukeprog’s comment on: Open Thread, March 1-15, 2013
So are you saying the P(worse-than-death|revived) and the P(better-than-death|revived) probabilities are of similar magnitude? I’m having trouble imagining that. In my mind, you are most likely to be revived because the reviver feels some sort of moral obligation towards you, so the future in which this happens should, on the whole, be pretty decent. If it’s a future of eternal torture, it seems much less likely that something in it will care enough to revive some cryonics patients when it could, for example, design and make a person optimised for experiencing the maximal possible amount of misery. Or, to put it differently, the very fact that something wants to revive you suggests that that something cares about a very narrow set of objectives, and if it cares about that set of objects it’s likely because they were put there with the aim of achieving a “good” outcome.

(As an aside, I’m not very averse to “worse-than-death” outcomes, so my doubts definitely do arise partially from that, but at the same time I think they are reasonable in their own right.)

Elithrion 6 Mar 2013 0:52 UTC
10 points
in reply to: shminux’s comment on: MetaMed: Evidence-Based Healthcare
You meant $1 mil, right?

Elithrion 19 Jun 2013 20:04 UTC
9 points
on: Open Thread, June 16-30, 2013
[I made a request for job finding suggestions. I didn’t really want to leave details lying around indefinitely, to be honest, so, after a week, I edited it to this.]

Elithrion 7 Mar 2013 5:34 UTC
9 points
on: Boring Advice Repository
In certain classes of cases*, the best way to find out answers to your questions is to ask them (rather than doing your own investigation).

Not sure if that’s borderline punchy.

*For example, when trying to locate something while driving/walking around, when inquiring about poorly documented local activities, when your solution of some problem/research question may have one of many possible flaws (and thus you would need to look up each possible flaw to investigate it, while an expert may be able to spot the flaw immediately), when your quick google search fails to yield clear results, etcetera. Also see this comment.

[The starred things were edited in to improve specificity in response to comments.]

Elithrion

Ex­plor­ing the Idea Space Efficiently

Exploring the Idea Space Efficiently