gattsuru

Karma: 674

gattsuru Nov 10, 2014, 11:53 PM
3 points
0
in reply to: Alejandro1’s comment on: Open thread, Nov. 10 - Nov. 16, 2014
I would expect that even as a fairly squishy pro-abortion Westerner (incredibly discomforted with the procedure but even more discomforted by the actions necessary to ban it), I’m likely to underestimate the health risks of even contragestives, and significantly underestimate the health risks of abortion procedures. Discussion in these circles also overstates the effectiveness of conventional contraception and often underestimates the number of abortions performed yearly. The last number is probably the easiest to support through evidence, although I’d weakly expect it to ‘fool’ smaller numbers of people than qualitative assessments.

I’m also pretty sure that most pro-choice individuals drastically overestimate its support by women in general—this may not be what you’re looking for, but the intervals (40% real versus 20% expected for women who identify as “pro-life”) are large enough that they should show up pretty clearly.

gattsuru Nov 10, 2014, 8:53 PM
4 points
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on: Things to consider when optimizing: Commuting, Transportation
The IRS publishes a standardized mileage rate. This isn’t a very accurate description of just the simple dollar costs of commuting by car, but it’s at least a number that actually means something. Multiplied by your commute multiplied by times that commute is traveled gives you some idea of the costs of the commute.

That it presents somewhere in the order of a 100 USD to 300 USD in monthly additional costs for a ten mile difference in travel time to you work is almost certainly an underestimate, but it’s really easy to forget these sort of tradeoffs when looking at a home to buy or rent or comparing different job offers.

The math for public transportation is a lot harder, and generalizes less (one person’s relaxing train ride is another person’s battle with nausea and agoraphobia). It’s still a useful place to start.

gattsuru Nov 6, 2014, 7:21 PM
7 points
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in reply to: polymathwannabe’s comment on: Open thread, Nov. 3 - Nov. 9, 2014
Nate Silver (of 538) has some space that he’s dedicated to this effort in The Signal and the Noise. Randal Olson’s reproduced some of that related to current-day abilities, which show that we’re currently able to give better-than-random results for a few days in advance, but not much better after that. And, unsurprisingly, data beats expertise when it comes to accuracy.

A good deal of the data-collecting tools have been developed or implemented relatively recently, and that seems to correlate with improvements to short-term forecasting, to the point where a five-day forecast in 1991 was roughly as likely to be accurate at a three-day forecast in 1981.

They’ve improved enough that they can probably be trusted to determine whether you should bring an umbrella tomorrow, but the historical numbers and especially expertise-based numbers were inaccurate enough to explain the origin of the meme.

gattsuru Nov 6, 2014, 7:11 PM
3 points
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in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Open thread, Nov. 3 - Nov. 9, 2014
Editing options do not appear to be available from the Youtopia list, and the only remaining Sequence-related tasks as of this post are related to reading and translation to foreign languages..

((Just trying to save folk time and account management.))

gattsuru Nov 5, 2014, 5:56 PM
0 points
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in reply to: Mark_Friedenbach’s comment on: Open thread, Nov. 3 - Nov. 9, 2014
Some of these advances are also nearing the end of low-hanging fruit, most obviously image recognition. We’re quickly approaching human levels for simple problems, and while there’s a massive amount of space for optimization and better training, these aren’t likely to be newsworthy in the same way.

gattsuru Nov 5, 2014, 5:48 PM
9 points
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in reply to: the-citizen’s comment on: Open thread, Nov. 3 - Nov. 9, 2014
Most obviously, the Streisand effect means that any effort used to silence a statement might as been used to shout it from the hilltops. The Basilisk is very heavily discussed despite its obvious flaws, in no small part because of the context of being censored. If we’re actually discussing a memetic hazard, that’s the exact opposite of what we want.

There are also some structural and community outreach issues that resulted from the effort and weren’t terribly good. Yudkowsky’s discussed the matter from his perspective here (warning: wall of text).

((On the upside, we don’t have people intentionally discussing more effective memetic hazards in the open in contexts of developing stronger ones, nor trying to build intentional decision theory traps. There doesn’t seem to be enough of a causative link to consider this a benefit to the censorship, though.))

gattsuru Nov 5, 2014, 2:43 AM
0 points
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in reply to: marchdown’s comment on: Open thread, Nov. 3 - Nov. 9, 2014
True, albeit in a way that is still costly, unlikely to leave an identifiable corpse, and prone to retributory violence. Depends on what sort of heroes and villains you’re looking to write.

gattsuru Nov 4, 2014, 4:39 PM
4 points
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in reply to: FiftyTwo’s comment on: Open thread, Nov. 3 - Nov. 9, 2014
The high cost of access could well be the point : if you can easily hire a boat to get to your private island, it’s pretty simple for governments or peoples to do the same, club you, and take your stuff. A hundred thousand bucks would cover invading you, and make good return on investment.

By contrast, you’d have to have something of very high value to cover a rocket launch, and that something must be mobile enough to send down easily. (Or in extreme cases, you might be the only people who retain full knowledge of the manufacturing necessary to make the rockets, in some way that isn’t easy to reverse engineer—see the difficulty we have reproducing several engine designs as a guide here.)

gattsuru Nov 1, 2014, 1:33 AM
2 points
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in reply to: Vulture’s comment on: Open thread, Oct. 27 - Nov. 2, 2014
Yeah, other terminology is probably a better idea. I’d avoided ‘trigger’ because it isn’t likely to actually trigger anything, but there’s no reason to use new terms when perfectly good existing ones are available. Content warning isn’t quite right, but it’s close enough and enough people are unaware of the original meaning, that its probably preferable to use.

gattsuru Oct 31, 2014, 3:48 PM
4 points
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in reply to: drethelin’s comment on: Stupid Questions (10/27/2014)
Renting :
- Landlord covers most maintenance. Most rental apartments will even mow the lawn and shovel snow, but .even renting a home will usually cover any serious elbow work. If the gutters leak and a kid throws a baseball through your window, you call the landlord and it gets handled. This isn’t just monetary : it saves you from having to spend most of the time hunting these things down.
- Mobility. If you got the job of your dreams and the love of your life half-way across the country, leaving a rental apartment or house requires days of work, where a purchased home may take months or even years to sell and absorb hours of your life monthly for that whole time period.
- It’s usually easier to rent closer to your workplace or desired location.
- Renter’s Insurance is usually easier to get and cheaper than home owner’s insurance (because it needs to cover fewer things).
- Some places may come with appliances, and rental apartments usually have easier access to home services. This isn’t monetary—you’re paying rent for those appliances, efficient market hypothesis—but it saves you from having to possess a refrigerator or washing machine and dryer.
Housing :
- You get to possess a refrigerator or washing machine and dryer, so you’re not stuck with a fridge built in the 1970s, or looking for a laundromat and twenty bucks in quarters.
- Home improvement. It’s both possible and reasonable to make changes to a house you own. You’re responsible for making sure the water heater doesn’t explode, but this means you can replace the water heater if it’s the size of a small bucket. You’re responsible for cleaning gutters, but this makes sure that it actually happens. This may be more responsive, as well, especially if you’re reasonably handy.
- Privacy. Even when renting a house, your landlord will almost always have the contractual ability to enter the building on fairly short notice (usually a day, sometimes less). Even good apartments let you hear more of your neighbors than you’d really want, and most apartments will have thinner walls than that. Especially valuable if you have odd hours.
- Stability. Prices can change, sometimes significantly if you have a low-down payment mortgage, but the risks of being required by law to move are much lower if you own your home. It’s rare to be able to rent a house for more than five years, and you’ll usually pay a premium if you try. Likewise, things around you change more slowly : the friendly next-door neighbor is not likely to move out and be replaced by a bunch of college grads in housing areas, just because of how the transaction costs work.
- Status.
- No landlord. Rental agreements often have various levels of surprisingly strict regulations on behavior. If you want unusual pets, or satellite television, or a garden, you may well have to purchase to have the option.
Some reading : pro-rent and pro-purchase.

gattsuru Oct 29, 2014, 5:15 PM
4 points
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in reply to: Evan_Gaensbauer’s comment on: Open thread, Oct. 27 - Nov. 2, 2014
What’s stopping you from doing this? If you know someone else was actively doing the same, and could keep you committed to the goal in some way, would that help? If that didn’t work, then, what would be stopping us?

In organized form, I’ve joining the Youtopia page, and the current efforts appear to be either busywork or best completed by a native speaker of a different language, there’s no obvious organization regarding generalized goals, and no news updates at all. I’m not sure if this is because MIRI is using a different format to organize volunteers, because MIRI doesn’t promote the Youtopia group that seriously, because MIRI doesn’t have any current long-term projects that can be easily presented to volunteers, or for some other reason.

For individual-oriented work, I’m not sure what to do, and I’m not confident the best person to do it. There are also three separate issues, of which there’s not obvious interrelation. Improving the Sequences and accessibility of the Sequences is the most immediate and obvious thing, and I can think of a couple different ways to go about this :
- The obvious first step is to make /any/ eBook, which is why a number of people have done just that. This isn’t much more comprehensible than just linking to the Sequences page on the Wiki, and in some cases may be less useful, and most of the other projects seem better-designed than I can offer.
- Improve indexing of the Sequences for online access. This does seem like low-hanging fruit, possibly because people are waiting for a canonical order, and the current ordering is terrible. However, I don’t think it’s a good idea to just randomly edit the Sequences Wiki page, and Discussion and Main aren’t really well-formatted for a long-term version-heavy discussion. (And it seems not Wise for my first Discussion or Main post to be “shake up the local textbook!”) I have started working on a dependency web, but this effort doesn’t seem produce marginal benefits until large sections are completed.
- The Sequences themselves are written as short bite-sized pieces for a generalized audience in a specific context, which may not be optimal for long-form reading in a general context. In some cases, components that were good-enough to start with now have clearer explanations… that have circular redundancies. Writing bridge pieces to cover these attributes, or writing alternative descriptions for the more insider-centric Sequences, works within existing structures, and providing benefit at fairly small intervals. This requires fairly deep understanding of the Sequences, and does not appear to be a low-hanging fruit. (And again, not necessarily Wise for my first Discussion or Main post to be “shake up the local textbook!”)
But this is separate from MIRI’s ability to work with insiders and only marginally associated with its ability to work with outsiders. There are folk with very significant comparative advantages (ie, anyone inside MIRI, anyone in California, most people who accept their axioms) on these matters, and while outsiders have managed to have major impact despite that, they were LukeProg with a low-hanging fruit of basic nonprofit organization, which is a pretty high bar to match.

There are some possibilities—translating prominent posts to remove excessive jargon or wordiness (or even Upgoer Fiving them), working on some reputation problems—but none of these seem to have obvious solutions, and wrong efforts could even have negative impact. See, for example, a lot of coverage in more mainstream web media. I’ve also got a significant anti-academic streak, so it’s a little hard for me to understand the specific concern that Scott Alexander/su3su2u1 were raising, which may complicate matters further.

gattsuru Oct 28, 2014, 2:56 PM
3 points
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in reply to: Viliam_Bur’s comment on: Open thread, Oct. 27 - Nov. 2, 2014

How can proofreading a book by a group of volunteers take more time than translating the whole book by a single person?

It’s the ‘norm-palatable’ part more than the proofreading aspect, unfortunately, and I’m not sure that can be readily made volunteer work

As far as I can tell, the proofreading part began in late 2013, and involved over two thousand pages of content to proofread through Youtopia. As far as I can tell, the only Sequence-related volunteer work on the Youtopia site involves translation into non-English languages, so the public volunteer proofreading is done and likely has been done for a while (wild guess, probably somewhere in mid-summer 2014?). MIRI is likely focusing on layout and similar publishing-level issues, and as far as I’ve been able to tell, they’re looking for a release at the end of the year that strongly suggests that they’ve finished the proofreading aspect.

That said, I may have outdated information: the Sequence eBook has been renamed several times in progress for a variety of good reasons, and I’m not sure Youtopia is the current place most of this is going on, and AlexVermeer may or may not be lead on this project and may or not be more active elsewhere than these forums. There are some public project attempts to make an eReader-compatible version, though these don’t seem much stronger from a reading order perspective.

In fairness, doing /good/ layout and ePublishing does take more specialized skills and some significant time, and MIRI may be rewriting portions of the work to better handle the limitations of a book format—where links are less powerful tools, where a large portion of viewer devices support only grayscale, and where certain media presentation formats aren’t possible. At least from what I’ve seen in technical writing and pen-and-paper RPGs, this is not a helpfully parallel task: everyone needs must use the same toolset and design rules, or all of their work is wasted. There was also a large amount of internal MIRI rewriting involved, as even the early version made available to volunteer proofreaders was significantly edited.

Less charitably, while trying to find this information I’ve found references to an eBook project dating back to late 2012, so nine months may be a low-end estimate. Not sure if that’s the same project or if it’s a different one that failed, or if it’s a different one that succeeded and I just can’t find the actual eBook result.

gattsuru Oct 28, 2014, 12:11 AM
2 points
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in reply to: Nornagest’s comment on: Open thread, Oct. 27 - Nov. 2, 2014
It’s related. Goodhart’s Law says that using a measure for policy will decouple it from any pre-existing relationship with economic activity, but doesn’t predict how that decoupling will occur. The common story of Goodhart’s law tells us how the Soviet Union measured factory output in pounds of machinery, and got heavier but less efficient machinery. Formalizing the patterns tells us more about how this would change if, say, there had not been very strict and severe punishments for falsifying machinery weight production reports.

Sometimes this is a good thing : it’s why, for one example, companies don’t instantly implode into profit-maximizers just because we look at stock values (or at least take years to do so). But it does mean that following a good statistic well tends to cause worse outcomes that following a poor statistic weakly.

That said, while I’m convinced that’s the pattern, it’s not the only one or even the most obvious one, and most people seem to have different formalizations, and I can’t find the evidence to demonstrate it.

gattsuru Oct 27, 2014, 10:10 PM
7 points
0
in reply to: polymathwannabe’s comment on: Open thread, Oct. 27 - Nov. 2, 2014
(Basilisk Warning: may not be good information to read if you suffer depression or anxiety and do not want to separate beliefs from evidence.)

Having an internalized locus of control strongly correlates with a wide variety of psychological and physiological health benefits. There’s some evidence that this link is causative for at least some characteristics. It’s not a completely unblemished good characteristic—it correlates with lower compliance with medical orders, and probably isn’t good for some anxiety disorders in extreme cases—but it seems more helpful than not.

It’s also almost certainly a lie. Indeed, it’s obvious that such a thing can’t exist under any useful models of reality. There are mountains of evidence for either the nature or nurture side of the debate, to the point where we really hope that bad choices are caused by as external an event as possible because /that/, at least, we might be able fix.. At a more basic level, there’s a whole lot of universe that isn’t you than there is you to start with. On the upside, if your locus of control is external, at least it’s not worth worrying about. You couldn’t do much to change it, after all.

Psychology has a few other traits where this sort of thing pops up, most hilariously during placebo studies, though that’s perhaps too easy an example. It’s not the only one, though : useful lies are core to a lot of current solutions to social problems, all the way down to using normal decision theory to cooperate in an iterated prisoner’s dilemma.

It’s possible (even plausible) that this represents a valley of rationality—like the earlier example of Pascal’s Wagers that hold decent Utilitarian tradeoffs underneath -- but I’m not sure falsifiable, and it’s certainly not obvious right now.

gattsuru Oct 27, 2014, 5:56 PM
4 points
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in reply to: Thomas’s comment on: Open thread, Oct. 27 - Nov. 2, 2014
General :
- There are absolutely vital lies that everyone can and should believe, even knowing that they aren’t true or can not be true.
- /Everyone/ today has their own personal army, including the parts of the army no one really likes, such as the iffy command structure and the sociopath that we’re desperately trying to Section Eight.
- Systems that aim to optimize a goal /almost always/ instead optimize the pretense of the goal, followed by reproduction pressures, followed by the actual goal itself.
Political :
- Network Neutrality desires a good thing, but the underlying rule structure necessary to implement it makes the task either fundamentally impossible or practically undesirable.
- Privacy policies focused on preventing collection of identifiable data are ultimately doomed.
LessWrong-specific:
- “Karma” is a terrible system for any site that lacks extreme monofocus. A point of Karma means the same thing on a top level post that breaks into new levels of philosophy, or a sufficiently entertaining pun. It might be the least bad system available, but in a community nearly defined by tech and data-analysis it’s disappointing.
- The risks and costs of “Raising the sanity waterline” are heavily underinvestigated. We recognize that there is an individual valley of bad rationality, but haven’t really looked at what this would mean on a national scale. “Nuclear Winter” as argued by Sagan was a very, very overt Pascal’s Wager: this Very High Value event can be avoided, so much must avoid it at any cost. It /also/ certainly gave valuable political cover to anti-nuclear war folk, may have affected or effected Russian and US and Cuban nuclear policy, and could (although not necessarily would) be supported from a utilitarian perspective… several hundred pages of reading later.
- “Rationality” is an overloaded word in the exact sort of ways that make it a terrible thing to turn into an identity. When you’re competing with RationalWiki, the universe is trying to give you a Hint.
- The type of Atheism that is certain it will win, won’t. There’s a fascinating post describing how religion was driven from its controlling aspects in History, in Science, in Government, in Cleanliness … and then goes on to describe how religion /will/ be driven from such a place on matters of ethics. Do not question why, no matter your surprise, that religion remains on a pedestal for Ethics, no matter how much it’s poked and prodded by the blasphemy of actual practice. Lest you find the answer.
- ((I’m /also/ not convinced that Atheism is a good hill for improved rationality to spend its capital on, anymore than veganism is a good hill for improved ethics to spend its capital on. This may be opinion rather than right/wrong.))
MIRI-specific:
- MIRI dramatically weakens its arguments by focusing on special-case scenarios because those special-case situations are personally appealing to a few of its sponsors. Recursively self-improving Singularity-style AI is very dangerous… and it’s several orders of complexity more difficult to describe that danger, where even minimally self-improving AI still have potential to be an existential risk and requires many fewer leaps to discuss and leads to similar concerns anyway.
- MIRI’s difficulty providing a coherent argument to predisposed insiders for its value is more worrying than its difficulty working with outsiders or even its actual value. Note: that’s a value of “difficulty working with outsiders” that assumes over six-to-nine months to get the Sequences eBook proofread and into a norm-palatable format. ((And, yes, I realize that I could and should help with this problem instead of just complaining about it.))

gattsuru Oct 7, 2014, 9:05 PM
4 points
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in reply to: ArisKatsaris’s comment on: October 2014 Media Thread
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Zombie is another good HPMoR elsefic, albeit one built for a drastically different purpose than its proceeding works. It also has the pleasant attribute of being very short. Caveat: it has spoilers up to the end of Chapter 89.

The same author’s Metropolitan Man is longer, and significantly less optimistic, but might still be of interest to those who enjoy The Philosopher’s Zombie

gattsuru Oct 1, 2014, 4:15 PM
6 points
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in reply to: Azathoth123’s comment on: [Link] Forty Days

Except people normally don’t dismiss quarantines. They just did it for this particular disease.

Is that the case? We’re happy to quarantine highly-transmittable diseases, but HIV isn’t—it takes significantly more than shaking a hand or coughing to transmit. Indeed, even with easily transmitted conditions like tuberculosis, we go for involuntary quarantine only during emergencies or as a last resort. Most carriers are only required to wear masks and avoid certain types of work.

gattsuru Oct 1, 2014, 3:39 PM
10 points
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in reply to: Vaniver’s comment on: [Link] Forty Days

Agreed that there are costs, but 35 to 1. If you’re not categorically opposed to quarantine, that probably makes it on cost-benefit terms.

Is that 35-1 difference because of the quarantine, though? I thought we were supposed to know better than to conflate correlation and causation? The former might wink and nudge, but that doesn’t actually make it correct—especially when we’re talking vastly different sets.

Cuba’s first known cases of HIV didn’t show up until 1985, the majority of the island’s population was socially and politically isolated, the island’s blood transfusion system was very easily isolated, and the place at least claims to have vastly lower illegal IV drug use. Contrast the United States, which has confirmed cases at least as far back as 1968 (West Hunter’s estimate of first noticed cases in 1981 is highly off : GRID was proposed as a name that year), had and continues to have serious abuse of IV heroin, and by the invention of the ELISA blood test already had people receiving infected blood transfusions.

These are not similar groups. The low rate of infection in Cuba tells us that one or more of these matters probably explains the large difference, but as the number of differences increase the certainty that the quarantine was responsible or even helped decreases. If you look to other countries with similarly low infection rates—Finland as one high-profile example—you don’t see such heavy-handed quarantines. This doesn’t tell us anything for certain, but it’s a pretty strong hint.

gattsuru Sep 19, 2014, 5:28 PM
0 points
0
in reply to: bramflakes’s comment on: What are your contrarian views?

There are many counterarguments listed on the Open Borders site, and for that I give him credit. Especially as he actually attempts to engage with racialist arguments, rather than dismissing them.

I’m not sure if it’s a technique worth crediting. There are voting trend issues with Hispanic immigrants that do not boil down to paranoid delusions about the Reconquista, and there are arguments regarding crime and immigration that are strongly and obviously distinguishable from sending every African-American person—including those innocent of any crime—out of the country. I’m hard-pressed to believe those arguments were selected for any reason but their weakness and unpalatability.

I personally favor reduced barriers to immigration (outside of a criminal background check and unique person identification, the modern limits are counterproductive at best), but writing up the worst arguments against that belief doesn’t really strengthen them.

gattsuru Sep 19, 2014, 4:40 PM
7 points
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in reply to: Ronak’s comment on: What are your contrarian views?

Do you mind telling me how you think he’s being uncharitable?

For a very quick example, see this Tumblr post. Mr. Alexander finds an example of a neoreactionary leader trying to be mean to a transgender woman inside the NRx sphere, and then shows the vast majority response of (non-vile) neoreactionaries to at least be less exclusionary than that, even though they have ideological issues with the diagnosis or treatment of gender dysphoria. Then he describes a feminist tumblr which develops increasingly misgendering and rude ways to describe disagreeing transgender men.

I don’t know that this is actually /wrong/. All the actual facts are true, and if anything understate their relevant aspects—if anything, I expect Ozy’s understated the level of anti-transmale bigotry floating around the ‘enlightened’ side of Tumblr. I don’t find NRx very persuasive, but there are certainly worse things that could be done than using it as a blunt “you must behave at least this well to ride” test. I don’t know that feminism really needs external heroes: it’s certainly a large enough group that it should be able to present internal speakers with strong and well-grounded beliefs. And I can certainly empathize with holding feminists to a higher standard than neoreactionaries hold themselves.

The problem is that it’s not very charitable. Scott’s the person that’s /come up/ with the term “Lizardman’s Constant” to describe how a certain percentage of any population will give terrible answers to really obvious questions. He’s a strong advocate of steelmanning opposing viewpoints, and he’s written an article about the dangers of only looking at the .

But he’s looking at a viewpoint shown primarily in the <5% margin feminist tumblr, and comparing them to a circle of the more polite neoreactionaries (damning with faint praise as that might be, still significant), and, uh, I’m not sure that we should be surprised if the worst of the best said meaner things than the best of the worst.

I’m not sure he /needs/ to be charitable, again—feminism should have its own internal speakers, I think mainstream modern feminism could use better critics than whoever’s on Fox News next, so on—but it’s an understandable criticism.

((Upvoting the thread starter, but more because one and two are mu statements; either closed questions or not meaningful. Weakly agree on third.))