Ericf

• Ericf 20 Sep 2020 1:11 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: lionhearted’s comment on: Against Victimhood

  I think as a meta level the re­lo­cated com­ment is still im­por­tant. Peo­ple who are sys­tem­at­i­cally op­pressed, might have a differ­ent per­spec­tive than Ja­cob, who has been tran­siently hurt. For ex­am­ple, I have seen sev­eral differ­ent black peo­ple with an au­di­ence sup­port con­tex­tual vic­tim-hood, but the stance from white men is al­most all in agree­ment with Ja­cob. As some­one with nei­ther his­tory, I won’t fur­ther spec­u­late.

• Ericf 15 Sep 2020 15:23 UTC

  3 points

  on: Does turn­ing on the shower help re­duce wild­fire smoke in the air?

  It’s a differ­ent pro­cess.

  Refer­ence: https://​​news.mit.edu/​​2015/​​rain-drops-at­tract-aerosols-clean-air-0828

  Indi­cates that a rain drop can at­tract “tens to hun­dreds” of par­ti­cles (plus the one it nu­cle­ates around). Since rain clouds are about 5000 feet up, shower (or hose) wa­ter trav­el­ing 5-10 feet would be ex­pected to grab 0-1 par­ti­cle, de­pend­ing on the ioniza­tion, which is also gen­er­ated by the at­mo­spheric gen­er­a­tion method, which is not pre­sent in the “stream of mu­ni­ci­pal wa­ter sep­a­rat­ing into droplets”

• Ericf 14 Sep 2020 14:06 UTC

  7 points

  on: Against boots theory

  Note: Vimes is think­ing of the landed gen­try when he is con­sid­er­ing the “rich”—that would be the top 1%, not the tippy-top su­per-rich. Also, in a pseudo-medi­vial en­vi­ron­ment, the lifestyle in­equal­ity isn’t as ex­treme as to­day’s 50th % vs 1%.

  What boots the­ory is say­ing is that the rich have as­sets that provide on­go­ing value, in ad­di­tion to their in­come pro­duc­ing as­sets, and so even some­one with only (mod­ern num­bers) $500,000 in as­sets (house, car, stuff, some in­vest­ments) and a part time non-profit job that pays $25,000 a year is go­ing to live a more com­fortable life than some­one in Vimes po­si­tion of ~$1,000 in as­sets and $75,000 a year from his full-time watch com­man­der job.

• Ericf 9 Sep 2020 18:45 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Kerry’s comment on: The Four Chil­dren of the Seder as the Si­mu­lacra Levels

  The “Please” doesn’t ac­tu­ally be­long. I was im­port­ing the defi­ni­tion “I would be some­what hap­pier if …” into that word, but the cul­tural over­tones can­not be es­caped, and that puts the sen­tence any­where on the Level Scale

  Upon re­flec­tion, I see that any re­quest nec­es­sar­ily has over­tones at all lev­els, due to the pos­si­bil­ity of al­ter­na­tive phras­ings. (Please X; X; Hey you, X; X, or else; ^&*^% X &*^%%)

• Ericf 8 Sep 2020 15:02 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: Kerry’s comment on: The Four Chil­dren of the Seder as the Si­mu­lacra Levels

  80% of US res­i­dents com­mu­ni­cate at Level 1 80% of the time. “Please pass the pota­toes,” “where are the light­bulbs,” “that will be $13.97,” etc. have no higher mean­ing, and make up the vast ma­jor­ity of mouth noises/​text strings com­mu­ni­cated be­tween peo­ple. The ques­tion of lev­els is limited to the 20% not re­lated to im­me­di­ate “molecules-im­p­ing­ing-on-my-body” things.

• Ericf 24 Aug 2020 16:45 UTC

  20 points

  on: Do you vote based on what you think to­tal karma should be?

  This seems like an ac­tively harm­ful norm, and should be stopped. If the ex­ist­ing karma to­tal in­fluences your vote strength at all, then the same post could end up with differ­ent fi­nal karma de­pend­ing on the or­der peo­ple read/​rate it. I think that is ac­tively harm­ful to the goals of the karma sys­tem.

• Ericf 21 Aug 2020 0:32 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: RobinHanson’s comment on: High­lights from the Black­mail De­bate (Robin Han­son vs Zvi Mow­show­itz)

  Ok. I don’t think that’s the cen­tral ex­am­ple of what peo­ple, in­clud­ing Zvi, are pic­tur­ing when you say “le­gal­ize black­mail.” In fact, de-crim­i­nal­iz­ing that spe­cific in­ter­ac­tion, but leav­ing alone laws & norms against un­capped ex­trac­tion, threats, etc. might find few op­po­nents.

• Ericf 20 Aug 2020 17:47 UTC

  1 point

  on: High­lights from the Black­mail De­bate (Robin Han­son vs Zvi Mow­show­itz)

  IANAL, but is it ac­tu­ally ille­gal for me to say “hey Bob, I have this NDA all writ­ten up, wherein I agree not to re­veal [em­bar­rass­ing but not crim­i­nal de­tail], and I have to pay you $100,000 if I ever do. How much will you pay me to sign it?”

• Ericf 13 Aug 2020 6:58 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: ike’s comment on: This Ter­ri­tory Does Not Exist

  Why? In what do­main does un­pack­ing the defi­ni­tion of “ex­ists” lead to more clar­ity?

  This looks a lot like say­ing “5 isn’t real, it’s just 1 plus 1 plus 1 plus 1 plus 1”

• Ericf 13 Aug 2020 6:03 UTC

  1 point

  on: This Ter­ri­tory Does Not Exist

  “Elec­trons ex­ist” means I an­ti­ci­pate other peo­ple act­ing in a way that matches how they would act if their ob­ser­va­tions matched my map of how elec­trons func­tion. Ver­bal short­hands are use­ful things.

• Ericf 11 Aug 2020 13:24 UTC

  1 point

  on: The Law of Least Effort Con­tributes to the Con­junc­tion Fallacy

  Con­sider the sce­nar­ios: Alec: Please come up with a good haiku

  Bob: OK. gets out phone, types in notes for 10 min­utes, visi­bly count­ing syl­la­bles on fingers

  Cal: OK. sits quietly sip­ping a bev­er­age for 10 minutes

  Bob and Cal come up with the same haiku.

  In this sce­nario, Cal is sig­nal­ling slack. How praise­wor­thy that is is con­text de­pen­dent. If Alec was look­ing for some­one to take this re­quest se­ri­ously, Bob looks bet­ter. If Alec was look­ing for some­one to do fur­ther work in the fu­ture, Cal looks bet­ter.

• Ericf 26 Jul 2020 0:34 UTC

  7 points

  on: A pro­posal for train­ing calcu­lus teachers

  How con­fi­dent are you that [pro­posed les­sons] are (suffi­ciently) bet­ter in gen­eral, and not just bet­ter for your learn­ing/​com­mu­ni­catiin style?

• Ericf 21 Jul 2020 0:54 UTC

  7 points

  on: “Can you keep this con­fi­den­tial? How do you know?”

  Ques­tion: are you neu­roty­oical and/​or have you had neu­rotyp­i­cal peo­ple ex­press the same con­cerns? My un­der­stand­ing is that there is a de­fault rule that cov­ers 80% of “can you keep a se­cret” and ex­cep­tions in ei­ther di­rec­tion are ei­ther ex­plic­itly defined (eg Boe­ing does an­nual pro­pri­etary in­for­ma­tion train­ing) or the al­ter­nate norm is known by the group (gos­siping teenagers)

• Ericf 18 Jul 2020 6:19 UTC

  5 points

  on: Cal­ibrate words, not just probabilities

  There is an un­stated as­sump­tion here that the words cho­sen map to some in­ter­nal level of con­fi­dence. I don’t be­lieve that is the case for most peo­ple. Say­ing some­thing is “cer­tain” vs “likely” vs “will hap­pen” is driven more by the im­me­di­ate ex­ter­nal fac­tors (eg did the pre­vi­ous speaker just use the word “cer­tain”—even on a com­pletely differ­ent topic?) than any long term in­ter­nal con­sis­tent re­flec­tions of in­ter­nal con­fi­dence.

• Ericf 7 Jul 2020 5:26 UTC

  15 points

  on: When a sta­tus sym­bol loses its plau­si­ble de­ni­a­bil­ity, how much power does it lose?

  It’s a stretch of the vo­cab­u­lary, but Har­vard and other elite in­sti­tu­tions are a Schel­ling Point. Those with sta­tus send their kids there, be­cause other peo­ple with sta­tus do so. There­fore, even if it were proven that the Har­vatd ed­u­ca­tion was equiv­a­lent to an av­er­age Cal­ifor­nia State Col­lege, the nexus of net­work­ing op­por­tu­nity would still give it sig­nifi­cantly en­hanced value.

• Ericf 30 Jun 2020 16:57 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Raj Thimmiah’s comment on: Effec­tive chil­dren education

  Just a note that 1-self only works for peo­ple with:

  1. Enough call-it-willpower (many peo­ple need an out­side mo­ti­va­tor to do hard things)

  2. Enough gen­eral in­tel­li­gence/​knowl­edge to be able to gen­er­ate ideas like “I could look this up by typ­ing XYZ into google”

  3. See my re­sponse be­low about un­known un­knowns.

• Ericf 18 Jun 2020 1:15 UTC

  3 points

  on: Creat­ing bet­ter in­fras­truc­ture for con­tro­ver­sial dis­course

  Sugges­tion: make it a wiki, not a fo­rum. That way there is no au­thor as­so­ci­at­able to any given idea, and bad ideas can be called out in place eg: The Illu­mi­nati (note: there is no cred­ible ev­i­dence that The Illu­mi­nati ex­ist <link>) sup­port the Demo­crat party (note: Demo­crat party is a dis­re­spect­ful term used by the op­po­nent of the United States Demo­cratic Party) via sales of pot laced baked goods.

• Ericf 11 Jun 2020 15:08 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Ruby’s comment on: Theater Tick­ets, Sleep­ing Pills, and the Idiosyn­crasies of Del­e­gated Risk Management

  That’s or­thog­o­nal to my com­ment.

  Sleep­ing pills help you sleep.

  Buy­ing over­priced in­surance (low­ers stress and thereby) helps you sleep.

• Ericf 11 Jun 2020 15:04 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: How to con­vince Y that X has com­mit­ted a mur­der with >0.999999 prob­a­bil­ity?

  Right, but they don’t up­date to that from a sin­gle data point (look­ing at the win­ning num­bers and their ticket once), they seek out ad­di­tional data un­til they have enough sub­jec­tive ev­i­dence to up­date to the very, very, un­likely event (and they are able to do this be­cause the event ac­tu­ally hap­pened). Prob­a­bly hun­dreds of peo­ple think they won any given lot­tery at first, but when they dou­ble-check, they dis­cover that they did not.

• Ericf 11 Jun 2020 14:00 UTC

  7 points

  on: Good and bad ways to think about down­side risks

  Do not ne­glect the im­pacts of the ob­verse ac­tion. If you de­cline the in­ter­view, what im­pact will that have? Maybe the re­porter will pick some­one else to in­ter­view (so, are you a bet­ter or worse can­di­date than who­ever their next con­tact is?), or just put “could not be reached for com­ment” (what im­pact does that have on the rest of the ar­ti­cle?)