George(George)

• George 21 Feb 2020 2:13 UTC

  1 point

  on: Ge­orge’s Shortform

  90% cer­tainty that this is bs be­cause I’m wait­ing for a flight and I’m sleep de­prive, but:

  For most peo­ple there’s not a very clear way or in­cen­tive to have a meta model of them­selves in a cer­tain situ­a­tion.

  By meta model, I mean one that is mod­el­ing “high level gen­er­a­tors of ac­tion”.

  So, say that I know Dave:

  • Likes peanut-but­ter-jelly on thin cracker

  • Dis­likes peanut-but­ter-jelly in sandwiches

  • Likes but­ter fingers candy

  A com­pletely non-meta model of Dave would be:

  • If I give Dave a but­ter fingers candy box as a gift, he will en­joy it

  Another non-meta model of Dave would be:

  • If I give Dave a box of Reese’s as a gift, he will en­joy it, since I thing they are kind of a com­bi­na­tion be­tween peantu-but­ter-jelly and but­ter fingers

  A meta model of Dave would be:

  • Based on the 3 items above, I can de­duce Dave likes things which are sweet, fatty, smooth with a touch of bit­ter (let’s as­sume peanut but­ter has some bit­ter to it) and crunchy but he doesn’t like them be­ing too starchy (hence why he dis­likes sand­wiches).

  • So, if I give Dave a cup of sweet milk ice cream with bits of crunchy dark choco­late on top as a gift, he will love it.

  Now, I’m not say­ing this meta-model is a good one (and Dave is imag­i­nary, so we’ll never know). But my point is, it seems highly use­ful for us to have very good meta-mod­els of other peo­ple, since that’s how we can pre­dict their ac­tions in ex­treme situ­a­tions, sur­prise them, im­press them, make them laugh… etc

  On the other hand, we don’t need to con­struct meta-mod­els of our­selves, be­cause we can just query our “high level gen­er­a­tors of ac­tion” di­rectly, we can think “Does a cup of milk ice cream with crunchy dark choco­late on top sound tasty ?” and our high level gen­er­a­tors of ac­tion will strive to give us an es­ti­mate which will usu­ally seem “good enough to us”.

  So in some way, it’s eas­ier for us to get meta mod­els of other peo­ple, out of sim­ple ne­ces­sity and we might have bet­ter meta mod­els of other peo­ple than we have of our own self… not be­cause we couldn’t con­struct a bet­ter one, but be­cause there’s no need for it. Or at least, based on the fal­lacy of know­ing your own mind, there’s no need for it.

• George 20 Feb 2020 2:19 UTC

  7 points

  on: Ge­orge’s Shortform

  Phys­i­cal perfor­mance is one thing that isn’t re­ally “needed” in any sense of the word for most peo­ple.

  For most peo­ple, the need for phys­i­cal ac­tivity seems to boil down to the fact that you just feel bet­ter, live longer and over­all get less health re­lated is­sues if you do it.

  But on the whole, I’ve seen very lit­tle proof that ex­cel­ling in phys­i­cal ac­tivity can help you with any­thing (other than be­ing a pro­fes­sional ath­lete or trainer, that is). In­deed, it seems that the whole re­la­tion to mor­tal­ity ba­si­cally breaks down if you look at top perform. Go­ing from things like strong­man com­pe­ti­tions and amer­i­can foot­ball where life ex­pec­tancy is lower, to things like run­ning and cy­cling where some would ar­gue but ev­i­dence is lack­ing, to foot­ball and ten­nis where it’s a bit above av­er­age.

  If the sub­ject in­ter­ests you, I’ve per­son­ally looked into it a lot, and I think this is the defini­tive re­view: https://​​yorkspace.library.yorku.ca/​​xm­lui/​​bit­stream/​​han­dle/​​10315/​​32723/​​Le­mez_Srd­jan_2016_PhD.pdf

  But it’s ba­si­cally a bloody book, I per­son­ally haven’t read all of it, but I of­ten go back to it for refer­ences.

  Also, there’s the much more ob­vi­ous prob­lem with push­ing your­self to the limits, in­jury. I think this is hard to quan­tify and there’s few stud­ies look­ing at it. In my ex­pe­rience I know a sur­pris­ing amount of “ac­tive” peo­ple that got in­jured in life-al­ter­ing ways from things like skat­ing, sky­ing, snow­board­ing and even foot­ball (not in the para­plegic sense, more in the “I have a bar of tita­nium go­ing through my spine and I can’t lift more than 15kg safely” sort of way). Con­versely, 100% of my couch-dwelling bud­dies in av­er­age phys­i­cal shape doesn’t seem to suffer from any chronic pain.

  To some ex­tent, this an­noys me, though I won­der if poor stud­ies and anec­do­tal ev­i­dence is enough to war­rant that an­noy­ance.

  For ex­am­ple, I fre­quent a climb­ing gym. Now, if you look at climb­ing, it’s rel­a­tively safe, there’s two things peo­ple com­plain about most sci­at­ica and “climbers back” (ba­si­cally a very weird look­ing but not that harm­ful form of kypho­sis).

  I hon­estly found the idea rather weird… since one of the main rea­son I climb (be­sides the fact that it’s fun) is that it helps and helped me cor­rect my kypho­sis and ba­si­cally got rid of any back/​neck dis­com­fort I felt from sit­ting too much at a com­puter.

  I think this boils down to how peo­ple climb, es­pe­cially how they do boulder­ing.

  A refer­ence as to how the ex­treme kind of boulder­ing looks like: https://​​www.youtube.com/​​watch?v=7brSdnHWBko

  The two is­sues I see here is:

  • Hurl­ing limbs at tremen­dous speeds to try and crab onto some­thing tiny.

  • Fal­ling on the mat, of­ten and from large heights. Climb­ing goes two ways up and down, most peo­ple do­ing boulder­ing only care about up

  In­deed, a typ­i­cal boulder­ing run might look some­thing like: “Climb care­fully and skil­lfully as much as pos­si­ble, hurl your­self with the last bit of effort you have hop­ing you reach the top, fall on the mat rinse and re­peat”.

  This is prob­a­bly one of the stupi­dest things I’ve seen from a health per­spec­tive. You’re es­sen­tially pray­ing for ar­tic­u­la­tion dam­age, dis­lo­cat­ing a shoulder/​knee, tear­ing a mus­cle (doesn’t look pretty, I as­sume doesn’t feel nice, re­cov­ery times are long and some­times fully re­cov­er­ing is a mat­ter of years) and spine dam­age (or­tho­pe­dics don’t agree on much, but I think all would agree the worst thing you can do for your spine is fall from a con­sid­er­able height… re­peat­edly, like, dozens of time ev­ery day).

  But the thing is, you can pretty much do boulder­ing with­out this, as in, you can be “de­cent” at it with­out do­ing any of this. Per­son­ally I ap­proach boulder­ing as slowly and steadily climb­ing… to the top, with enough en­ergy to also climb down + climb­ing down when­ever I feel that I’m to ex­hausted to con­tinue. Some­how, this ap­proach to the sport is the one that give you strange looks. The peo­ple push­ing them­selves above the limits risk­ing in­jury and get­ting per­sis­tent spine dam­age from fal­ling… are the stan­dard.

  Another things I en­joy is weight lift­ing, I es­pe­cially en­joy weighted squats. Weighted squats are fun, they wake you up in the morn­ing, they are a lazy per­son ex­er­cise when you’ve got noth­ing else in dur­ing that day.

  I’ve heard peo­ple claim you can get lower back pain and in­jury from weighted squats, again, this seems con­fus­ing to me. I ac­tu­ally used to have minor lower back pain on oc­ca­sions (again, from sit­ting), the one ex­er­cise that seemed to have per­ma­nently fixed that is a squat. A squat is what I do when I feel that my back is a bit stiff and I need some help.

  But I think, again, this is be­cause I am “get­ting squats wrong”, my ap­proach to a squat is “Let me load a 5kg er­gonomic bar with 25kg, do a squat like 8 times, check my pos­ture on the last 2, if I’m able to hold it and don’t feel tired, do 5-10 more, if I still feel nice and en­er­getic af­ter a 1 minute break, rinse and re­peat”.

  But the cor­rect squat, I be­lieve, looks some­thing like this: https://​​www.youtube.com/​​watch?v=nLVJTBZtiuw

  Load­ing a bar with a few hun­dred kg, at least 2.5x your body weight, putting on a belt so that your in­testines don’t fall out and low­er­ing it “ONCE”, be­cause fuck me you’re not go­ing to be able to do that twice in a day. You should at least get some nose­bleed ev­ery 2 or 3 tries if you’re do­ing this stuff cor­rectly.

  I’ve seen this in gyms, I’ve seen this in what peo­ple recom­mend, if I google “how much weight should I squat”, the first thing I get is: https://​​www.live­strong.com/​​ar­ti­cle/​​286849-nor­mal-squat-weight/​​

  If you weigh 165 pounds and have one of the fol­low­ing fit­ness lev­els, the stan­dard for your squat one-rep max is:

  Un­trained: 110 pounds

  Novice: 205 pounds

  … etc

  To say this seems in­sane is far fetched, ba­si­cally the ad­vice around the in­ter­net seems to be “If you’ve never done this be­fore, aim for 40-60kg, if you’ve been to the gym a few times, go for 100+”

  Again, it’s hard to find data on this, but as some­one that’s pretty bloody tall who has been us­ing weight to train for years, the idea of start­ing with 50kg for a squat as an av­er­age per­son seem in­sane. I do 45kg from time to time to change things up, I’d never squat any­thing over 70kg even if you paid me… I can feel my body dur­ing the move, I can feel the ten­ta­tive pres­sure on my lower back if my pos­ture slips for a bit… that’s fine if you’re lift­ing 30kg, that seems dan­ger­ous as heck if you’re lift­ing more than your body weight, it even feels dan­ger­ous at 60kg.

  But again, I’m not do­ing squats cor­rectly, I am in the wrong here as far as peo­ple do­ing weight train­ing are con­cerned.

  I’m also wrong when it comes to ev­ery sport. I’m a bad run­ner be­cause I give up once my lungs are burn­ing for 5 min­utes straight. I’m a hor­rible swim­mer be­cause I al­ter styles and stick with low-speed ones that are over­all bet­ter for ton­ing all mus­cles and have less risk of in­jury… etc

  Granted, I don’t think that peo­ple are too pushy about go­ing to ex­tremes. The few times peo­ple tell me some ver­sion of “try harder” phrased as a friendly en­courage­ment. I finish what I’m do­ing, say thanks and lie to them that I have a slight in­jury and I’d rather not push it.

  But deep in­side I have a very strong sus­pi­cion that I’m not wrong on this thing. That some­how we’ve got our­selves into a very un­healthy memetic loop around sports, where push­ing your­self is seen as the nat­u­ral thing to do, as the thing you should be do­ing ev­ery day.

  A very dan­ger­ous memetic loop, dan­ger­ous to some ex­tent in that it causes in­jury, but much more dan­ger­ous be­cause it might be dis­cour­ag­ing peo­ple from sports. Both in that they try once, get an in­jury and quit. Or in that they see it, they think it’s too hard (and, I think it is, the way most peo­ple do it) and they never re­ally bother.

  I’m hon­estly not sure why it might have started…

  The ob­vi­ous rea­son is that it phys­i­cally feels good to do it, lift­ing a lot of run­ning more than your body tells you that you should is “nice”. But it’s nice in the same way that smok­ing a tiny bit of hero­ine be­fore go­ing about your day is nice (as in, quite liter­ally, it seems to me the feel­ings are re­lated and I think there’s some phar­ma­colog­i­cal ev­i­dence to back that up). It’s nice to do it once to see how it is, maybe I’ll do it ev­ery few months if I get the oc­ca­sion and I feel I need a men­tal boost… but I wouldn’t nec­es­sar­ily ad­vise it or struc­ture my life around it.

  The other ob­vi­ous rea­son is that it’s a sta­tus thing, the whole “I can do this thing bet­ter than you thus my rank in the hi­er­ar­chy is higher”. But then… why is it so com­mon with both gen­ders, I’d see some rea­son for men to do this, be­cause his­tor­i­cally we’ve been do­ing it, but women com­pet­ing in sports is a re­cent things, hardly “built into our na­ture” and most of the ones I know that prac­tice things like climb­ing are among the most chilled out dudes I’ve ever meet.

  The last rea­son might be that it’s about break­ing a psy­cholog­i­cal bar­rier, the “Oh, I to­tally thought I couldn’t do that, but ap­par­ently I can”. But it seems to me like a very very bad way of do­ing that. I can think of many other safer bet­ter ways from solv­ing a hard calcu­lus prob­lem to learn­ing a for­eign lan­guage in a month to forc­ing your­self to write an ar­ti­cle ev­ery day… you know, things that have zero risks of paral­y­sis and long term dam­age in­volved.

  But I think at this point imi­ta­tion alone is enough to keep it go­ing.

  The “real” rea­son if I take the out­side view is prob­a­bly that that’s how sports are sup­posed to be done and I just got stuck with a weird per­spec­tive be­cause “I play things safe”.

• George 19 Feb 2020 23:23 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Dagon's comment on: Does donat­ing to EA make sense in light of the mere ad­di­tion para­dox ?

  To the ex­tent that you’re pur­su­ing top­ics that EA or­ga­ni­za­tions are also pur­su­ing, you should prob­a­bly donate to their recom­mended char­i­ties rather than try­ing to do it your­self or go­ing through less-mea­sured char­i­ties.

  Well yes, this is ba­si­cally the crux of my ques­tion.

  As in, I ob­vi­ously agree with the E and I tend do agree with the A , buy my is­sue is why how A seems to be defined in EA (as in, mainly around im­prov­ing the lives of peo­ple that you will never in­ter­act with or ‘care’ about on a per­sonal level).

  So I agree with: I should donate to some of my fa­vorite writ­ers/​video-mak­ers that are less pop­u­lar and thus might be kept in busi­ness by 20$ monthly on pa­teron is an­other hun­dred peo­ple think like me. (effi­cient as op­posed, to, say, donat­ing to an org that helps all artists or donat­ing to well-off cre­ators).

  I also agree with: It’s effi­cient to save a life halfway across the globe for x,000$ as op­posed to one in the EU where it would cost x00,000$ to achieve a similar ad­di­tion in healthy life years.

  Where I don’t un­der­stand how the in­tu­ition re­ally works is “Why is it bet­ter to save the life of a per­son you will never know/​meet than to help 20 artists that you love” (or some such equiv­alence).

  As in, I get there some in­tu­ition about it be­ing “bet­ter” and I agree that might be strong enough in some peo­ple that it’s just “ob­vi­ous”, but my think­ing was that there might be some sort of bet­ter ethic-rooted ar­gu­ment for it.

• George 19 Feb 2020 18:58 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Kaj_Sotala's comment on: Does donat­ing to EA make sense in light of the mere ad­di­tion para­dox ?

  No wor­ries, I wasn’t as­sum­ing you were a speaker for the EA com­mu­nity here, I just wanted to bet­ter un­der­stand pos­si­ble mo­ti­va­tions for donat­ing to EA given my cur­rent per­spec­tive on ethics. I think the an­swer you gave out­line on such line of rea­son­ing quite well.

• George 19 Feb 2020 17:00 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Kaj_Sotala's comment on: Does donat­ing to EA make sense in light of the mere ad­di­tion para­dox ?

  Utili­tar­i­anism is not the only sys­tem that be­comes prob­le­matic if you try to for­mal­ize it enough; the prob­lem is that there is no com­pre­hen­sive moral sys­tem that wouldn’t ei­ther run into para­dox­i­cal an­swers, or be so vague that you’d need to fill in the miss­ing gaps with in­tu­ition any­way.

  Agree, I wasn’t try­ing to im­ply otherwise

  Any de­ci­sion that you make, ul­ti­mately comes down to your in­tu­ition (that is: de­ci­sion-weight­ing sys­tems that make use of in­for­ma­tion in your con­scious­ness but which are not them­selves con­sciously ac­cessible) fa­vor­ing one de­ci­sion or the other. You can try to for­mu­late ex­plicit prin­ci­ples (such as util­i­tar­i­anism) which ex­plain the prin­ci­ples be­hind those in­tu­itions, but those ex­plicit prin­ci­ples are always go­ing to only cap­ture a part of the story, be­cause the full de­ci­sion crite­ria are too com­plex to de­scribe.

  Also agree, as in, this is how I usu­ally for­mu­late my moral de­ci­sion and it’s ba­si­cally a prag­matic view on ethics, which is one I gen­er­ally agree with.

  is just “the kinds where donat­ing to EA char­i­ties makes more in­tu­itive sense than not donat­ing”; of­ten peo­ple de­scribe these kinds of moral in­tu­itions as “util­i­tar­ian”, but few peo­ple would ac­tu­ally en­dorse all of the con­clu­sions of purely util­i­tar­ian rea­son­ing.

  So ba­si­cally, the idea here is that it ac­tu­ally makes in­tu­itive moral sense for most EA donors to donate to EA causes ? As in, it might be that they par­tially jus­tify it with one moral sys­tem or an­other, but at the end of the day it seems “in­tu­itively right” to them to do so.

[Question] Does donat­ing to EA make sense in light of the mere ad­di­tion para­dox ?

• George 19 Feb 2020 12:56 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Muki's comment on: How to ac­tu­ally switch to an ar­tifi­cial body – Grad­ual remapping

  This fear of con­ti­nu­ity breaks is also why I would prob­a­bly stay clear of any tele­porters and the like in the fu­ture.

  In case you haven’t read it: https://​​ex­is­ten­tial­comics.com/​​comic/​​1

  But over­all I agree, this “feel­ing” is par­tially the rea­son why I’m a fan of the in­sert slightly-in­va­sive me­chan­i­cal com­po­nents + out­source to ex­ter­nal de­vice strat­egy. As in, I do be­lieve it’s the most prac­ti­cal since it seems to be roughly doable with non-sin­gu­lar­ity lev­els of tech­nol­ogy, but it’s also the one where no con­tinu­a­tion er­rors can eas­ily hap­pen.

• George 18 Feb 2020 18:44 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: ChristianKl's comment on: Why Science is slow­ing down, Univer­si­ties and Maslow’s hi­er­ar­chy of needs

  What ex­actly do you mean by “the fac­tors I listed” though ?

  As in, I think that my ba­sic ar­gu­ment goes:

  “There’s rea­son to think most kids would feel un­safe in a col­lege en­vi­ron­ment, de­sire a so­cial cir­cle and job se­cu­rity, not the kind of tran­scen­dent self-ac­tu­al­iza­tion style goals that fuel re­search”. I think this gen­er­ally holds for any­one at the age of 18-22 out­side of out­lier, hence why I cited the pyra­mid of needs, be­cause the re­search be­hind that ba­si­cally points to us need­ing differ­ent things in an age-cor­re­lated way (few teenagers feel like they need self ac­tu­al­iza­tion). I think this is some­what ex­ag­ger­ated in the US be­cause of debt&dis­tance but should be no­tice­able ev­ery­where.

  Next, there’s rea­son to be­lieve re­search in­side uni­ver­si­ties is slow­ing down in cer­tain ar­eas, I have no rea­son to be­lieve the lack of peo­ple de­siring self-ac­tu­al­iza­tion is the cause for this though, ex­cept for a gut feel­ing that self-ac­tu­al­iza­tion is a bet­ter mo­ti­va­tion to re­search na­ture than, say, want­ing your pay­check at the end of the day. Most fa­mous re­searcher seem to have been slightly crazy and not driven by so­cietal goals but rather by an in­ner wish to “set things right” in one way or an­other, or to leave a mark on the world”

  So ba­si­cally, the best I can do to “prove” any of this would be some­thing like:

  • Take some sort of com­par­a­tive re­search out­put met­ric, these are hard to find, and are go­ing to be very con­founded with coun­try-wealth (some ex­am­ples: https://​​www.na­turein­dex.com/​​coun­try-out­puts/​​gen­er­ate/​​Na­ture%20&%20Science/​​global/​​All/​​score) … “small so­cial­ist coun­tries” pro­duce a sur­pris­ing amount of re­searcher per cap­ita, but maybe that’s some­thing in­her­ent to be­ing a small rich coun­try, not to have stronger com­mu­ni­ties and so­cial sup­port.

  • See if this cor­re­lates with % of the pop­u­la­tion work­ing, qual­ity of so­cial se­cu­rity, some in­dex mea­sur­ing se­cu­rity, some in­dex mea­sur­ing hap­piness. As­sume more re­search will come out of coun­tries that perform well on this.

  This will gen­er­ally be true in terms of re­search, pub­li­ca­tions, books… etc (see Switzer­land, Nether­lands, Swee­den, Nor­way, Ice­land… which seem to have a dis­pro­por­tionate amount of e.g. na­ture pub­li­ca­tions in re­port to the pop­u­la­tion), but you will also get out­liers (see Is­rael, which pro­duced a lot of re­search even dozens of years back when pro­fes­sors&stu­dents would be called on a yearly ba­sis to fight to death against an out-num­ber­ing en­emy that wanted to mur­der them).

  How­ever, you can’t **** draw con­clu­sion from num­bers of pub­li­ca­tions, and things such as “se­cu­rity in­dex” and “hap­piness in­dex” and even “qual­ity of so­cial se­cu­rity” are very hard to mea­sure. Plus, they are con­founded by the wealth of the coun­try.

  On the other hand, there’s good data on the idea that re­search is slow­ing down over­all, that is much eas­ier to place on “uni­ver­si­ties as a whole”, since by all met­rics is seems that re­search is heav­ily cor­re­lated with academia (see, where most re­searchers work, where the peo­ple that get no­ble prizes work … etc).

  So mak­ing the gen­eral as­sump­tion, of “re­search is slow­ing down” is much eas­ier than do­ing the cor­re­la­tion on a per coun­try ba­sis.

  If you can claim there is a valid way to mea­sure ba­sic needs that has a per-coun­try statis­tic, and a var­i­ous way to mea­sure “re­search out­put” on a per coun­try ba­sis… than I’d be very cu­rios in see­ing that, I can even run an anal­y­sis based on var­i­ous stan­dard meth­ods to see if there’s a cor­re­la­tion.

  So the generic claim “kids are not re­searcher and don’t want to be re­searcher, uni­ver­si­ties can’t do mul­ti­ple things at once bet­ter than do­ing one thing, thus if uni­ver­si­ties have to take care of kids they will have less time to fo­cus on ac­tual re­search” is easy to look at wholis­ti­cally, but harder to look at on a per-coun­try ba­sis.

  Im­pos­si­ble ? I don’t think so

  Worth­while ? I don’t know. As in, this whole ar­ti­cle is closer to “here’s an in­ter­est­ing per­spec­tive, say, one that might war­rant think­ing about, when do­ing re­search” rather than “here’s a fac­tual claim about how stuff works”. To make it any bet­ter, it would have to be ele­vated to a fac­tual claim, but then I would ba­si­cally have to trust the kind of anal­y­sis men­tioned above (which again, I think would be im­pos­si­ble to run and get sig­nifi­cant re­sults since all the met­rics I can think of are very leaky).

  Hon­estly, it might have been a bet­ter per­spec­tive to ap­proach this topic, I might even try to see if there’s rele­vant data on the sub­ject and up­date the ar­ti­cle if there is, bar­ring that, I liter­ally don’t see how this sort of hunch + ba­sic ev­i­dence about generic hu­man psy­chol­ogy plus ob­serv­ing a trend opinion piece differs from any­thing here. Maybe I’ve been mis­judg­ing the epistemic strength of the claims be­ing seen in ar­ti­cle around here… in which case, ahm… “sorry ?”, but also, I don’t re­ally see your ar­gu­ment here.

  Yes, as­sum­ing mag­i­cal data fell out of the sky or our time to gather data was in­finite ev­ery sin­gle piece of hu­man thought could be im­proved, but I’m not sure why the stop­ping con­di­tion for this ar­ti­cle would be “anal­y­sis com­par­ing coun­tries”… as op­posed to any other ran­dom goal­post.

• George 18 Feb 2020 14:12 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: ChristianKl's comment on: Why Science is slow­ing down, Univer­si­ties and Maslow’s hi­er­ar­chy of needs

  To the ex­tend that you are in­ter­ested in know­ing whether your the­sis is true, it would make sense to check.

  How would I speci­fi­cally go about check­ing this though ? As in, I do have data and knowl­edge on US and UK uni­ver­si­ties, I don’t have data on Ger­many Univer­si­ties.

  If you have data on Ger­man uni­ver­sity re­search out­put, then I think it’s worth look­ing at, if not, I feel like what you’re ba­si­cally do­ing is say­ing: “Hey, you don’t have data on this spe­cific thing, it might go ei­ther way, your hy­poth­e­sis is null and void”.

  Pro­vided data on Ger­man uni­ver­si­ties ex­isted, why not ask for data about ev­ery sin­gle coun­try with uni­ver­si­ties.

  You could ar­gue “Well, you should be­come an ex­pert in the field and have all pos­si­ble data handy be­fore mak­ing any claims”, but then that claim would in­val­i­date liter­ally ev­ery sin­gle origi­nal thought on LessWrong that uses facts and even most aca­demic pa­pers.

  Also, Ger­man Univer­si­ties con­sti­tute a pretty bad ex­am­ple in my opinion, as in:

  a) Mur­der­ing, ex­iling or rout­ing out your high­est IQ de­mo­graphic and most pub­lic intellectuals

  b) Hav­ing the rest taken away by the US, Rus­sia and UK

  c) Liv­ing for dozens of years in a coun­try that’s been morally, ge­o­graph­i­cally and cul­turally di­vided rav­aged by WW2 (plus ¹⁄₃ of it liv­ing un­der a bru­tal~ish com­mu­nist dic­ta­tor­ship)

  Would make for a pretty weird out­lier in all of this no mat­ter what.

  As in, if we were to com­pare other rich aca­demic sys­tems I’d rather do Ja­pan, Italy, France, Spain or Switzerland

• George 18 Feb 2020 13:34 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: ChristianKl's comment on: Why Science is slow­ing down, Univer­si­ties and Maslow’s hi­er­ar­chy of needs

  It seems that your com­ment tries to take it apart by look­ing at whether you like the way the sys­tem is de­signed and not by look­ing at effects of it. That means in­stead of try­ing to see whether what you are see­ing is true, you ex­pand on your ideas of how things should be.

  What ex­actly should my re­ply con­tain ?

  As in, my ar­gu­ment in the origi­nal post is ba­si­cally:

  a) Univer­si­ties evolved to in­stall and provide pri­mary needs (safety and so­cial cir­cle) in­stead of a more niche need for self-actualization

  b) Re­search is slow­ing down over­all, it could par­tially be be­cause uni­ver­si­ties no longer fo­cus on self-ac­tu­al­iza­tion and in­stead fo­cus on pro­vid­ing safety and a so­cial cir­cle.

  What I was ba­si­cally say­ing is that I’m not sure if a ap­plies to Ger­man uni­ver­si­ties, as in, I agree that they are prob­a­bly less-so in­cen­tivized to fo­cus on pro­vid­ing safety and a so­cial cir­cle.

  I have no idea if b ap­plies or not, as in, I’m not sure how well Ger­man uni­ver­si­ties have been do­ing and it’s hard to mea­sure their progress since the 30s and 40s ob­vi­ously had a pretty huge nega­tive effect on the whole up­per ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem.

  I do over­all think the ex­am­ple of Ger­man uni­ver­si­ties speci­fi­cally (and Aus­trian ones, to some ex­tent), be­cause there’s so many of them and many of them are vo­ca­tion-fo­cused speci­fi­cally, giv­ing a place to go for peo­ple that just want se­cu­rity, not a place in academia, is a good counter to my ideas here.

  But also, my knowl­edge of the Ger­man ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem is so poor over­all, that I can’t re­ally make very spe­cific claims here.

How to ac­tu­ally switch to an ar­tifi­cial body – Grad­ual remapping

• George 18 Feb 2020 6:26 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: ChristianKl's comment on: Why Science is slow­ing down, Univer­si­ties and Maslow’s hi­er­ar­chy of needs

  I think Ger­man up­per ed­u­ca­tion is hard­est to pick on, par­tially be­cause:

  a) A small % of the pop­u­la­tion at­tends higher ed­u­ca­tion rel­a­tive to other coun­tries at the in­come level: https://​​en.wikipe­dia.org/​​wiki/​​List_of_coun­tries_by_ter­tiary_ed­u­ca­tion_attainment

  b) From my knowl­edge a lot of what is called “ter­tiary ed­u­ca­tion” in Ger­many is ba­si­cally just a prac­ti­cal 1-2 year pro­fes­sional course that peo­ple can get be­fore they’re even through grade 12

  c) Any­one liv­ing in big cities does in­deed ex­pe­rience less en­vi­ron­men­tal change when at­tend­ing uni­ver­sity, though I wouldn’t call it close to zero, un­less you hap­pen to live next to the uni­ver­sity and un­less a lot of your high school friends at­tend the same uni­ver­sity (though again, it could be ar­gued that you get to keep your friend group, since they also live in <in­sert big city>

  d) https://​​www.bbx.de/​​gross­net-wage-calcu­la­tor-ger­many/​​ -- There’s no stu­dent debt at­tached to it, but as I men­tioned for Euro­pean in­sti­tu­tions in gen­eral, debts is analo­gous eco­nom­i­cally to the higher taxes one has to pay. Though in­deed the “men­tal” effects of hav­ing that debt is non-ex­is­tent (maybe par­tially analo­gous in that it makes “blue col­lar” pro­fes­sions seems less ap­peal­ing ? since peo­ple end up pay­ing > 50% of their pay­check and thus might value com­fort over money more, and uni­ver­sity is ba­si­cally 4 years of com­fort that promises fu­ture com­fortable jobs, whereas in the Amer­i­can model one could work a trade job start­ing at 16-18 and eas­ily re­tire at 40.… but I think that’s stretch­ing it, I doubt most stu­dents are even aware that taxes are a thing)

• George 16 Feb 2020 21:42 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: gjm's comment on: Why Science is slow­ing down, Univer­si­ties and Maslow’s hi­er­ar­chy of needs

  The point of my ques­tion at the end there is that I would ex­pect any New Im­proved Univer­sity Re­place­ment to suffer the same pro­cess.

  That seems rea­son­able, I’d as­sume the same.

  As in, if I could think of an im­ple­mentable solu­tion I’d have tried im­ple­ment­ing it.

  My point here as to de­scribe the prob­lem from a cer­tain an­gle, which is easy, I lay no claim on the harder task of pre­scribing a solu­tion.

• George 16 Feb 2020 14:49 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Daniel Kokotajlo's comment on: Why Science is slow­ing down, Univer­si­ties and Maslow’s hi­er­ar­chy of needs

  I mean, I think the ba­sic ar­gu­ment I would have here is:

  If uni­ver­si­ties are op­ti­miz­ing for 5, and we can agree that 5 leads to re­search and that uni­ver­si­ties are one of the lead­ers in any­thing sci­en­tific-re­search re­lated. Why is re­search slow­ing down ? And, re­spec­tively, why is so lit­tle of the in­ter­est­ing re­search com­ing out of uni­ver­sity.

  See points 1-2 and ar­guably ³⁄₄ in the ar­ti­cle.

  I think there’s also some ev­i­dence uni­ver­si­ties didn’t op­ti­mize for 2&3 un­til re­cently, be­cause un­til re­cently their ap­peal was much nar­rower and fo­cused on the very in­tel­li­gent and/​or very well-off (i.e. peo­ple that usu­ally want or even need self-ac­tu­al­iza­tion).

• George 16 Feb 2020 14:28 UTC

  9 points

  in reply to: lionhearted's comment on: Why Science is slow­ing down, Univer­si­ties and Maslow’s hi­er­ar­chy of needs

  I was al­lud­ing to that.

  But at the same time, I’m pretty sure the sim­pler ex­pla­na­tion might ap­ply and peo­ple just don’t un­der­stand why this study would be valuable + IQ is a sen­si­tive topic, thus the ma­te­rial is hard to find.

  Hence why I said I will post any stud­ies any­one finds, I have a pretty high prior that a few ex­ist and I’m just not see­ing them.

  I have a low prior they will show any­thing else other than “Univer­sity is in­deed con­founded by IQ and/​or IQ + in­come in money earn­ing po­ten­tial”, but alas I based that on small-sam­ple em­piri­cal ev­i­dence… so, eh.

• George 16 Feb 2020 13:19 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: gjm's comment on: Why Science is slow­ing down, Univer­si­ties and Maslow’s hi­er­ar­chy of needs

  Maybe just get­ting a job will (on av­er­age) ac­tu­ally re­sult in learn­ing more valuable things, but frankly I don’t see any rea­son to be­lieve that. (More things valuable for be­com­ing a cog in some­one else’s in­dus­trial ma­chine, maybe, though even that isn’t ob­vi­ous.)

  Ok, well I cer­tainly wouldn’t ar­gue that a generic al­ter­na­tive ex­ists, I mean, that’s my origi­nal point, that they are waste­ful via the fact that they steal sig­nal-strength from any al­ter­na­tive that would crop up.

  In my per­sonal ex­pe­rience, get­ting a job on av­er­age is bet­ter for learn­ing, if you look for jobs that can provide de-facto men­tors/​teach­ers, but that might be be­cause so few young peo­ple get a job. Or maybe me and the peo­ple I know that took my ad­vice and quite uni­ver­sity are just very good at learn­ing from other prac­ti­tionares rather than pro­fes­sors.

  Maybe we need differ­ent ways of op­ti­miz­ing 18-20-year-olds’ lives for learn­ing new and valuable things. I’d be in­ter­ested to see con­crete pro­pos­als. An ob­vi­ous ques­tion I hope they’d ad­dress: why ex­pect that in prac­tice this will end up bet­ter than uni­ver­si­ties?

  Well, my pro­posal in the ar­ti­cle is ba­si­cally that we had such a sys­tem, it was called a uni­ver­sity, but it got slowly eroded as it went the way of a safety/​com­mu­nity pro­vi­sion in­sti­tu­tion (or at least pro­vi­sion­ing an illu­sion of those two).

  My ar­gu­ment for why it worked bet­ter in the past are point 1-2 and ar­guably 3 and 4.

• George 16 Feb 2020 12:54 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: gjm's comment on: Why Science is slow­ing down, Univer­si­ties and Maslow’s hi­er­ar­chy of needs

  Stu­dents’ youth? Even sup­pos­ing that time spent at uni­ver­sity is worth­less, it’s only a few years per per­son.

  Is that pe­riod not im­por­tant though ?

  As en, even as­sum­ing uni­ver­si­ties are not “mag­i­cal tower that re­move 4 years of life to val­i­date IQ > 100 and con­scien­tious­ness in the 80th per­centile, you could hardly ar­gue what they teach is perfect.

  But those “few years” are ba­si­cally the most crit­i­cal years of de­vel­op­ment we have, as in, the brain is de­vel­oped enough to ac­tu­ally do stuff yet still plas­tic.

  I won’t go into myeli­na­tion, be­cause I’m lazy and find­ing good refer­ences is hard, as far as I know Giedd has a few stud­ies on grey mat­ter changes that ev­ery­one cites, but maybe there’s bet­ter refer­ences:

  https://​​www.pnas.org/​​con­tent/​​101/​​21/​​8174

  Gist of it is: We loss neu­ronal bod­ies as we age start­ing around the age of 5. The loss doesn’t hap­pen in the pre­frontal cor­tex un­til we en­ter our teens and seems to keep hap­pen­ing un­til the reach 20.

  I don’t know of any good stud­ies go­ing af­ter 20, there’s a lot of meh stud­ies and if you ag­gre­gate them you get this: https://​​www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/​​pmc/​​ar­ti­cles/​​PMC3004040/​​ (see fig2 and fig3). Though note that many of these use sec­ondary mark­ers or rather ou­dated imag­ing meth­ods and ba­si­cally no­body is do­ing brain by­op­sies on liv­ing hu­mans… best you can get is DV-MRI and FMRI and post­mortem biop­sies (which is prob­a­bly very bi­ased, be­cause only the very poor or the very ed­u­cated will be fine with their re­cently dead child’s brain be­ing quickly re­moved and an­a­lyzed for the sake of neu­ro­science… come to think of it, the other 2 prob­a­bly are too, ei­ther in the same way or by se­lect­ing for peo­ple with men­tal di­s­or­ders)

  This pro­cess is roughly as­so­ci­ated with prun­ing, es­sen­tially mak­ing net­works more effi­cient and/​or op­ti­miz­ing for re­source con­sump­tion. This goes in tan­dem with myeli­na­tion: https://​​www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/​​pmc/​​ar­ti­cles/​​PMC3982854/​​

  I.e. If a neu­ron is not pruned, the like­li­hood of it’s var­i­ous ax­ons be­ing heav­ily myeli­nated is in­creased and vice versa.

  So now, as­sume that the front-cor­tex is in­deed “what makes us differ­ent from an­i­mals”, what gives us most of our abil­ity to be in­tel­li­gent in the two math and write and gather ev­i­dence part.

  As­sume that peo­ple with pruned cor­texes are in­deed no­tice­ably smarter in ev­ery­thing re­lated to en­g­ineer­ing/​sci­ence (think peo­ple in the 10+ age range vs peo­ple in the 10< age range).

  As­sume that in­deed the stud­ies above are true and take into ac­count the fact that we have em­piri­cal cul­tural ev­i­dence (see stereo­types of learn­ing new things as peo­ple age, un­der­pay­ment of older work­ers in non-tenure think­ing re­lated jobs like pro­gram­ming and ac­count­ing, can’t teach a dog new tricks… etc).

  I think these are all pretty safe as­sump­tion, not true in the sense of sci­en­tific truth in physics, but true in the sense of “safe to op­er­ate us­ing them as a rough guidelines”, or at least if they are not based on your model, then I also in­vite you to throw out all of psy­chol­ogy with them.

  Youth is in­deed very im­por­tant, the 15-25 +/​- 3 year age range is crit­i­cal for the de­vel­op­ment re­quired to be a sci­en­tists, en­g­ineer, doc­tor or any other pro­fes­sion where un­usual in­tel­li­gence is re­quired.

  So Univer­sity time might be “only 3 or 4 year per per­son”, though let’s be hon­est thins like med school take 6 to 10 de­pend­ing on lo­ca­tion and an alarm­ing num­ber of peo­ple are putting in an ex­tra 1-3 years get­ting a mas­ters. But those are 3-10 years of a per­son’s most valuable time in life as far as brain plas­tic­ity.

  <And yes, one could make the same ar­gu­ment about high school, but that would ba­si­cally be ar­gu­ing that high schools serve the triple role of counter-bi­as­ing ag­gres­sive ten­den­cies in peo­ple that would oth­er­wise ba­si­cally be crim­i­nals, cul­tural in­doc­tri­na­tion and learn­ing… and that’s a much more taboo ar­gu­ment to make so I’m not mak­ing it>

  ***

  That’s just an­swer­ing your ques­tion though, it’s not the point I’m mak­ing in the ar­ti­cle, the point of the ar­ti­cle is that uni­ver­si­ties ba­si­cally have a lot of sig­nal­ing power for “If you are smart and want to self-ac­tu­al­ize this is the place”. So if you want to think in terms of scarce re­source be­ing wasted, that’s the way I’d have put it there, uni­ver­si­ties are wast­ing crit­i­cal sig­nal­ing mechanisms.

Why Science is slow­ing down, Univer­si­ties and Maslow’s hi­er­ar­chy of needs

• George 11 Feb 2020 4:41 UTC

  3 points

  on: A Sim­ple In­tro­duc­tion to Neu­ral Networks

  I always thought there ought to be a good way to ex­plain neu­ral net­works start­ing at back­prop.

  Since to some ex­tent the crite­rion for ar­chi­tec­ture se­lec­tion always seems to be whether or no gra­di­ents will ex­plode very easy.

  As in, I feel like the cor­rect defi­ni­tion of neu­ral net­works in the cur­rent cli­mate is closer to: “A com­pu­ta­tion graph struc­tured in such a way that some op­ti­mize/​loss func­tion com­bi­na­tion will make it ad­just its equa­tion to­wards a seem­ingly rea­son­able min­ima”.

  Be­cause in prac­tice that’s what seems to define a good ar­chi­tec­ture de­sign.

• George 10 Feb 2020 12:16 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: jimrandomh's comment on: Ge­orge’s Shortform

  Ac­tu­ally, this is back­wards; by in­vest­ing in com­pa­nies that are worth more in wor­lds you like and worth less in wor­lds you don’t, you’re in­creas­ing variance

  If you treat the “world you dis­like” as one where you can still get about the same bang for you buck, yes.

  But I think this wouldn’t be the case with a lot of good/​bad vi­sions of the fu­ture pairs.

  Ex­am­ple:

  BELIEF: You be­lieve health­care will ad­vance past treat­ing symp­toms and move into epi­ge­net­i­cally cor­rect­ing the mechanisms that in­duce tis­sue de­gen­er­a­tion.

  a) You in­vest in this vi­sion, it doesn’t come to pass. You die poor~ish and in hor­rible suffer­ing at 70.

  b) You in­vest in a com­pany that would make money on the down­side of this vi­sion (e.g. pal­li­a­tive care fo­cused com­pany). The vi­sion doesn’t come to pass. You die rich but still in less hor­rible but more pro­longed suffer­ing at 76 (since you can af­ford more va­ca­tions, bet­ter food and bet­ter doc­tors).

  c) You in­vest in this vi­sion, it does come to pass. You have the money to af­ford the new treat­ments as soon as they are out on the mar­ket, now at 70 you re­gain most func­tion­al­ity you had at 20 and can ex­pect an­other 30-40 years of healthy life, you hope that fu­ture de­vel­op­ments will ex­tent this.

  d) You in­vest in a com­pany that would make money on the down­side of this vi­sion, it does come to pass. You die poor~ish and in hor­rible suffer­ing at 80 (be­cause you couldn’t af­ford the best treat­ment), with the added spite for the fact that other peo­ple get to live for much longer.

  
  

  ---

  To put it more sim­ply, money has more util­ity-buy­ing power in “good” world than in “bad” world, as­sum­ing the “good” is cre­ated by the mar­ket (and thus pur­chasable).