gjm

• gjm 7 Jul 2019 2:35 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: romeostevensit's comment on: 87,000 Hours or: Thoughts on Home Ownership

  I’m sure you took into ac­count things like house price ap­pre­ci­a­tion. But what you said about in­vest­ing the differ­ence be­tween what renters pay and what own­ers pay was mis­lead­ing and wrong. You can do as care­ful and ac­cu­rate and in­sight­ful a simu­la­tion as you please, but if what you say is “peo­ple pay more in mort­gage + fees + taxes than in rent, which is bad be­cause they could have in­vested the differ­ence in the mar­ket and then they’d have got some ac­tual re­turns” or “rent is bad be­cause it’s just throw­ing money away” then you are mak­ing a bro­ken ar­gu­ment and I think you shouldn’t do that. Not even if the con­clu­sion of the bro­ken ar­gu­ment hap­pens to be the same as the con­clu­sion of the care­ful ac­cu­rate in­sight­ful simu­la­tion.

  The ques­tion isn’t whether back-test­ing is hard, it’s how well you did it and whether what­ever as­sump­tions you made seem rea­son­able to any given reader. Again, my com­plaint isn’t that your fi­nal re­sults are bad, it’s that we have no way of tel­ling whether your fi­nal re­sults are good or bad be­cause you didn’t show us any of the in­for­ma­tion we’d need to de­cide.

  [EDITED to add:] This is all com­ing out more ag­gres­sive-sound­ing than I would like, and I hope I’m not giv­ing the im­pres­sion that I think the OP is ter­rible or that you’re a bad per­son or any such thing. It just seems as if your re­sponses to my com­ments aren’t en­gag­ing with the ac­tual points those com­ments are try­ing to make. That may be wholly or partly be­cause of lack of clar­ity in what I’ve writ­ten, in which case please ac­cept my apolo­gies.

• gjm 7 Jul 2019 1:40 UTC

  8 points

  in reply to: romeostevensit's comment on: 87,000 Hours or: Thoughts on Home Ownership

  Re­pay­ment ver­sus in­ter­est etc.: Look­ing at to­tal money in and to­tal money out is fine so long as you do it care­fully; in this case “care­fully” means you can’t just say “If that money were in­vested in the mar­ket it would be earn­ing you a re­turn” as if those mort­gage pay­ments aren’t earn­ing any re­turn. I don’t know how a typ­i­cal home­owner’s pay­ments di­vide be­tween re­pay­ment, in­ter­est, and other things, but it seems quite pos­si­ble to me that more than the differ­ence you’re talk­ing about is re­pay­ment, in which case it could even be that the higher re­turns you (might hope to) get from in­vest­ing the money in in­dex funds rather than hous­ing are more than coun­ter­bal­anced by the fact that more of the money is be­ing in­vested.

  Of course the right way to an­swer this is to do the ac­tual calcu­la­tions, and you very rea­son­ably sug­gest that your read­ers go and find a rent-ver­sus-buy calcu­la­tor and try to do them. Noth­ing wrong with that. But I think the way you de­scribe the situ­a­tion is no more ac­cu­rate than the “if you rent you’re throw­ing the money away” line one hears from peo­ple ar­gu­ing on the op­po­site side.

  Stock mar­ket in­vestors: If those num­bers for hy­po­thet­i­cal in­vestors A,B,C come from a simu­la­tion you did then I think the ar­ti­cle should say so, and should say some­thing about what as­sump­tions you made. As it stands, you’re just ask­ing us to take them on faith. I don’t find them ter­ribly im­plau­si­ble, and your simu­la­tions may be ex­cel­lent, but we can’t tell that.

  Anec­do­tal non­sense: Yup, the forced sav­ings thing is a good point (and pre­sum­ably not very ap­pli­ca­ble to any­one who’s both­er­ing to read a lengthy ar­ti­cle about the fi­nan­cial mer­its of rent­ing ver­sus buy­ing). My sus­pi­cion is that the “poorer peo­ple rent, richer peo­ple buy” dy­namic is an even big­ger rea­son why my ob­ser­va­tions aren’t much ev­i­dence about what any given per­son here should do. But I don’t think the coun­ter­fac­tual is rele­vant here, be­cause the ob­ser­va­tion I was draw­ing at­ten­tion to wasn’t “buy­ers are do­ing OK” but “buy­ers are do­ing bet­ter than renters”.

• gjm 7 Jul 2019 1:20 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Raemon's comment on: Opt­ing into Ex­per­i­men­tal LW Features

  I’m not feel­ing any glar­ing lacks. Of course it’s pos­si­ble that there are pos­si­ble changes that once made would be ob­vi­ous im­prove­ments :-).

  I do use the “re­cent dis­cus­sion” sec­tion. I ac­tu­ally don’t mind the col­laps­ing there—it’s not try­ing to pre­sent the whole of any dis­cus­sion, and clearly space is at a big pre­mium there, so col­laps­ing might not be a bad trade­off.

• gjm 6 Jul 2019 21:33 UTC

  6 points

  on: 87,000 Hours or: Thoughts on Home Ownership

  There is a lot of good sense in this ar­ti­cle, but I have some prob­lems with it. Per­haps the biggest: It ap­pears to be writ­ten as if a house is only an in­vest­ment; as if the buy-or-rent de­ci­sion is made en­tirely on the ba­sis of what will max­i­mize your fu­ture over­all wealth. I’m all in favour of max­i­miz­ing wealth (all else be­ing equal, at any rate) but a house is not only an in­vest­ment; it is, as you point out, also a place where you are likely to be spend­ing ~87k hours of your life, and you may rea­son­ably choose to do some­thing that makes you poorer over­all if those 87k hours are sub­stan­tially more pleas­ant for it.

  Those non-fi­nan­cial fac­tors aren’t all in favour of buy­ing over rent­ing. The ar­ti­cle men­tions one that goes the other way, though of course only in the con­text of what it means for your fi­nan­cial welfare: if you rent and don’t own, then it’s of­ten eas­ier to move. Here are some oth­ers:

  • Buy, be­cause if you rent there are likely to be a ton of oner­ous re­stric­tions on what you’re al­lowed to do. No pets! No chil­dren! No re­plac­ing the crappy kitchen ap­pli­ances! No chang­ing the hor­rible car­pets!

  • Buy, if the prop­er­ties available to buy (where you are) are more to your taste than the ones available for rent. Or: Rent, if the prop­er­ties available to rent are more to your taste than the ones available to buy.

  • Buy, be­cause if you rent then your land­lord can kick you out on a whim. (Ex­actly how read­ily they can do that varies from place to place, but they always have some abil­ity to do it and it’s a risk that ba­si­cally doesn’t ex­ist if you buy.)

  • Buy, if you get a sense of satis­fac­tion or se­cu­rity from own­ing the place you live in. Or: Rent, if you find that be­ing re­spon­si­ble for the main­te­nance of the place feels op­pres­sive.

  Some other quib­bles.

  Peo­ple spend on av­er­age 50% more money on mort­gages, taxes, and fees than they spend on rent. If that money were in­vested in the mar­ket it would be earn­ing you a re­turn.

  Does that in­clude mor­gage re­pay­ment as well as mort­gage in­ter­est? Mort­gage in­ter­est, taxes, and fees are straight­for­wardly “lost” in the same sort of way as rent is; mort­gage re­pay­ment, though, is just buy­ing a house slowly. That money is in­vested, in real es­tate rather than in equities, and it is earn­ing you a re­turn. (Pos­si­bly a smaller, more volatile, and/​or less di­ver­sified re­turn, for sure; I’m not dis­agree­ing with that bit.)

  let’s look at three ex­am­ples of peo­ple try­ing to time the mar­ket. All three peo­ple in­vest at a rate of $200/​mo. [...]

  OK, let’s look. Where are the ac­tual num­bers? All I see is vague de­scrip­tions (e.g., A in­vests im­me­di­ately be­fore each crash, but how much do they in­vest on each oc­ca­sion? An amount de­rived some­how from that $200/​mo, but how? E.g., is the idea that the money sits there un­til a crash is about to hap­pen and then how­ever much is available gets in­vested, or what?) and fi­nal num­bers with no ex­pla­na­tion or jus­tifi­ca­tion or any­thing. For all I can tell, romeosteven­sit might just have made those num­bers up. I bet he didn’t, but with­out see­ing the de­tails no one can tell any­thing.

  Also: $200/​mo 40 years ago is a very differ­ent figure from $200/​mo now. Does any­one do any­thing at all like in­vest­ing at a con­stant nom­i­nal rate over 40 years? It seems un­likely. If in­stead of “$200/​month” you make it “what­ever cor­re­sponds to $200/​month now, ac­cord­ing to some stan­dard mea­sure of in­fla­tion” then the num­bers will look quite differ­ent. (For the avoidance of doubt, I ex­pect that A,B,C would still come out in the same or­der.)

  [EDITED to add:] Anec­do­tally, the peo­ple I know who have bought houses gen­er­ally seem to have done OK, largely in­de­pen­dent of when they’ve bought; the peo­ple I know who have rented seem to have had no end of prob­lems. But (1) this is a small and doubtless un­rep­re­sen­ta­tive sam­ple, and (2) I think richer peo­ple are more likely to buy and poorer peo­ple more likely to rent (es­pe­cially as I live some­where where buy­ing is gen­er­ally as­sumed to be some­thing you want to do), so I don’t think this is very strong ev­i­dence of any­thing.

• gjm 6 Jul 2019 20:21 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Raemon's comment on: Opt­ing into Ex­per­i­men­tal LW Features

  Sure. But the thing I was say­ing might be use­ful (which, I un­der­stand, has noth­ing to speak of in com­mon with what’s on offer right now) is auto-col­laps­ing all com­ments I can be pre­sumed to have read or de­cided not to bother read­ing on the grounds that they were already there the last time I vis­ited the dis­cus­sion. That would be use­ful even on posts with <=50 com­ments. (At least, it would be use­ful there if use­ful at all; it might be that I’m wrong in think­ing it would be use­ful.)

• gjm 6 Jul 2019 20:19 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: MakoYass's comment on: Opt­ing into Ex­per­i­men­tal LW Features

  If some­one’s writ­ing a whole post then for sure they should try to make its struc­ture clear, per­haps with head­ings and ta­bles of con­tents and in­tro­duc­tory para­graphs and bul­let points and what­not.

  I don’t think that’s usu­ally ap­pro­pri­ate for com­ments, which are usu­ally rather short.

  So, e.g., I don’t think your com­ment to which I’m re­ply­ing right now would have been im­proved by adding such sign­posts. But, even so, I don’t see how I could tell whether I want to read the whole thing from know­ing that it be­gins “I want to ar­gue that this is a huge prob­lem”.

  There might be benefit in pro­vid­ing some sort of guidance for read­ers of a whole com­ment thread. But it’s hard to see how, es­pe­cially as com­ment threads are dy­namic: new ma­te­rial could ap­pear any­where at any time, and if or­der of pre­sen­ta­tion is partly de­ter­mined by scores then that too can be re­ar­ranged pretty much ar­bi­trar­ily. (And who’d do it?)

  You might hope that a col­lapsed pile of com­ments is it­self a sort of roadmap to the com­ments them­selves, but I think that just doesn’t work, just as you wouldn’t get a use­ful sum­mary of A Tale of Two Cities or A Brief His­tory of Time by just tak­ing the first half-sen­tence of each para­graph.

• gjm 5 Jul 2019 15:11 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Wei_Dai's comment on: Opt­ing into Ex­per­i­men­tal LW Features

  If com­ments took up the whole width of my browser win­dow, I would find them acutely un­pleas­ant to read. I like my text fairly small and I have my win­dow full-screen; text be­comes difficult to read when each line is more than about 15-20 words. (The ex­act figure de­pends on size, per­sonal prefer­ence, how long those words are, line spac­ing, etc.)

• gjm 5 Jul 2019 15:08 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Raemon's comment on: Opt­ing into Ex­per­i­men­tal LW Features

  Yes, I _do_ tend to read ev­ery com­ment on a thread. Or, some­times, none, but usu­ally if I’m both­er­ing even to look at the com­ments on a post then I’m go­ing to look at them all.

  I don’t eat at restau­rants with liter­ally no menu. If a restau­rant has a large in­timi­dat­ing menu, I read it all any­way; if I visit it a few times I will get to know what I like. I won’t be helped by a menu that says “Some­thing con­tain­ing chicken. Some­thing con­tain­ing turmeric. Some­thing roughly round in shape.” which is roughly what the col­lapsed com­ments provide. The menu is only use­ful in so far as it (to­gether with my past ex­pe­rience, the over­all look of the place, etc.) gives me a good enough men­tal pic­ture of each dish to have a good idea whether I’ll like it.

  (An im­por­tant dis­tinc­tion be­tween vis­it­ing a restau­rant and vis­it­ing Less Wrong: When I go to a restau­rant, typ­i­cally I in­tend to each a roughly fixed, fairly small num­ber of dishes. I don’t gen­er­ally go to LW with the in­ten­tion of read­ing three com­ments and then leav­ing. I don’t so much mind there be­ing no menu if what there is in­stead is a great mul­ti­tude of lit­tle snacks I can try dozens of with­out feel­ing ill.)

  Col­lapsed com­ments don’t (for me; I must stress that I’m not claiming to speak for any­one else) give me any use­ful view of what’s available; see­ing the first few words of a com­ment tells me lit­tle, and I try not to pre­judge things too much on the ba­sis of au­thor or score.

  Ex­pand­ing com­ments that are new since you last vis­ited is a good idea. If I could get that (on all posts, not just ones with 50+ com­ments; why would I want that re­stric­tion) with­out any col­laps­ing of com­ments I haven’t read yet, that would prob­a­bly be use­ful. I’m in­ter­ested in tools that let me read all the com­ments effi­ciently. I’m in­ter­ested in tools that help me de­cide which com­ments are wor­thy of more at­ten­tion. I am not in­ter­ested in tools that try to de­cide for me which com­ments I will want to read. If I want that then I can go and read Face­book with “top sto­ries” mode turned on in­stead of LW.

• gjm 5 Jul 2019 0:59 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: Raemon's comment on: Opt­ing into Ex­per­i­men­tal LW Features

  OK, so my feed­back is that I have never ever seen a fea­ture of this sort (un­less in­tended only to hide out­right spam and the like) that is any im­prove­ment over just leav­ing ev­ery­thing there, and this in­stance is no ex­cep­tion.

  Per­haps the abil­ity to col­lapse dis­cus­sions, rather than hav­ing them start col­lapsed and pro­vid­ing a way to un-col­lapse them, might be use­ful some­times, though I’m strug­gling to think when I’d ac­tu­ally use it. But this is (for me) a waste of time. See­ing half a line of a com­ment is usu­ally not enough in­for­ma­tion to de­cide whether read­ing the whole thing is worth while, so the over­all min­i­mum-has­sle solu­tion is just to un­col­lapse ev­ery­thing. Thank­fully I can make that the global de­fault here on LW; if not, I’d just be click­ing the “please ex­pand ev­ery­thing” but­ton ev­ery time. (Or, if there weren’t one, ex­pand­ing ev­ery­thing by hand and curs­ing the ad­mins.)

  Per­haps it might be differ­ent if I were read­ing LW in or­der to ac­quire in­for­ma­tion about some par­tic­u­lar thing as effi­ciently as pos­si­ble. And per­haps there is some de­sire for LW to be more the sort of place one goes to ac­quire in­for­ma­tion effi­ciently, rather than e.g. a chatty so­cial venue. Ex­cept that if LW were more “aca­demic” in that way—some­thing more like the Align­ment Fo­rum, per­haps—then I would ex­pect an (even) higher pro­por­tion of the com­ments to be ones well worth read­ing for any­one in­ter­ested in the topic at hand, so auto-col­laps­ing would still be a net loss.

• gjm 3 Jul 2019 16:01 UTC

  2 points

  on: Opt­ing into Ex­per­i­men­tal LW Features

  Are you look­ing for feed­back on sin­gle line com­ments?

  In­for­ma­tion leak­age alert: the screen­shot there in­cludes a com­ment from a now-deleted user; or­di­nary LW users view­ing the same thing will see nei­ther that user’s name nor their com­ment. I don’t think ex­pos­ing that will do any grave harm, but you might con­sider us­ing a differ­ent screen­shot. (Also, if any­one thinks that delet­ing their ac­count on LW _ac­tu­ally deletes their ac­count_ they should be ad­vised that ap­par­ently it does not.) [EDITED to add: to be more pre­cise, in col­lapsed view or­di­nary LW users will see an er­ror mes­sage in red in­stead of the user­name and trun­cated com­ment text; when ex­panded they _will_ see the text but _won’t_ see the user­name.]

• gjm 2 Jul 2019 1:47 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: steve2152's comment on: Is AlphaZero any good with­out the tree search?

  Either your un­der­stand­ing is cor­rect or mine isn’t: AlphaGo Zero and AlphaZero _do_ do a tree search that the DM pa­pers call “Monte Carlo Tree Search” but that doesn’t in­volve ac­tual Monte Carlo play­outs and that doesn’t match e.g. the de­scrip­tion on the Wikipe­dia page about MCTS.

• gjm 26 Jun 2019 21:44 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Elo's comment on: What does the word “col­lab­o­ra­tive” mean in the phrase “col­lab­o­ra­tive truth­seek­ing”?

  If mul­ti­ple par­ties en­gage in ad­ver­sar­ial in­ter­ac­tions (e.g., de­bate, crim­i­nal trial, …) with the shared goal of ar­riv­ing at the truth then as far as I’m con­cerned that’s still an in­stance of col­lab­o­ra­tive truth-seek­ing.

  On the other hand, if at least one party is aiming to win rather than to ar­rive at the truth then I don’t think they’re en­gag­ing in truth-seek­ing at all. (Though maybe it might some­times be effec­tive to have a bunch of ad­ver­saries all just try­ing to win, and then some other peo­ple, who had bet­ter be ex­tremely smart and aware of how they might be be­ing ma­nipu­lated, try­ing to com­bine what they hear from those ad­ver­saries in or­der to get to the truth. Hard to do well, though, I think.)

• gjm 26 Jun 2019 13:15 UTC

  18 points

  on: What does the word “col­lab­o­ra­tive” mean in the phrase “col­lab­o­ra­tive truth­seek­ing”?

  I share Richard Ken­n­away’s feel­ing that this is a rather strange ques­tion be­cause the an­swer seems so ob­vi­ous; per­haps I’m miss­ing some­thing im­por­tant. But:

  “Col­lab­o­ra­tive” just means “work­ing to­gether”. Col­lab­o­ra­tive truth­seek­ing means mul­ti­ple peo­ple work­ing to­gether in or­der to dis­t­in­guish truth from er­ror. They might do this for a num­ber of rea­sons, such as these:

  • They have differ­ent skills that mesh to­gether to let them do jointly what they could not do so well sep­a­rately.

  • The par­tic­u­lar truths they’re af­ter re­quire a lot of effort to pin down, and hav­ing more peo­ple work­ing on that can get it done quicker.

  • They know differ­ent things; per­haps the truth in ques­tion can be de­duced by putting to­gether mul­ti­ple peo­ple’s knowl­edge.

  • There are economies of scale; e.g., a group of peo­ple could get to­gether and buy a bunch of books or a fast com­puter or a sub­scrip­tion to some in­for­ma­tion source, which is al­most as use­ful to each of them as if they’d paid its full price on their own.

  • There are things they can do to­gether that nudge their brains into work­ing more effec­tively (e.g., maybe ad­ver­sar­ial de­bate gets each per­son to dig deeper for ar­gu­ments in a par­tic­u­lar di­rec­tion than they would have done with­out the im­pe­tus to com­pete and win).

  There is a sense in which col­lab­o­ra­tive truth-seek­ing is built out of in­di­vi­d­ual truth-seek­ing. It just hap­pens that some­times the most effec­tive way for an in­di­vi­d­ual to find what’s true in a par­tic­u­lar area in­volves work­ing to­gether with other in­di­vi­d­u­als who also want to do that.

  Col­lab­o­ra­tive truth-seek­ing may in­volve ac­tivi­ties that in­di­vi­d­ual truth-seek­ing (at least if that’s in­ter­preted rather strictly) doesn’t be­cause they fun­da­men­tally re­quire mul­ti­ple peo­ple, such as ad­ver­sar­ial de­bate or dou­ble-crux­ing.

  Be­ing “col­lab­o­ra­tive” isn’t a thing that in it­self brings benefits. It’s a name for a va­ri­ety of things peo­ple do that bring benefits. Speech-in­duced state changes don’t re­sult in bet­ter pre­dic­tions be­cause they’re “col­lab­o­ra­tive”; en­gag­ing in the sort of speech whose in­duced state changes seem likely to re­sult in bet­ter pre­dic­tions is col­lab­o­ra­tion.

  And yes, there are cir­cum­stances in which col­lab­o­ra­tion could be coun­ter­pro­duc­tive. E.g., it might be eas­ier to fall into group­think. Suffi­ciently smart col­lab­o­ra­tion might be able to avoid this by ex­plic­itly push­ing the par­ti­ci­pants to ex­plore more di­verse po­si­tions, but em­piri­cally it doesn’t look as if that usu­ally hap­pens.

  Re­lated: col­lab­o­ra­tive money-seek­ing, where peo­ple join to­gether to form a “com­pany” or “busi­ness” that pools their work in or­der to pro­duce goods or ser­vices that they can sell for profit, more effec­tively than they could if not work­ing to­gether. Col­lab­o­ra­tive sex-seek­ing, where peo­ple join to­gether to form a “mar­riage” or “re­la­tion­ship” or “orgy” from which they can de­rive more plea­sure than they could in­di­vi­d­u­ally. Col­lab­o­ra­tive good-do­ing, where peo­ple join to­gether to form a “char­ity” which helps other peo­ple more effec­tively than the in­di­vi­d­u­als could do it on their own. Etc.

  (Of course busi­nesses, mar­riages, char­i­ties, etc., may have other pur­poses be­sides the ones listed above, and of­ten do; so might groups of peo­ple get­ting to­gether to seek the truth.)

• gjm 23 Jun 2019 13:37 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: dxu's comment on: “The Bit­ter Les­son”, an ar­ti­cle about com­pute vs hu­man knowl­edge in AI

  Yes, that’s fair. (Though I’m not sure about the terms “do­main-ag­nos­tic” and “do­main-spe­cific”; e.g., the AlphaZero ap­proach seems to work well for a wide va­ri­ety of board games played on “reg­u­lar” boards but would need sub­stan­tial mod­ifi­ca­tion to ap­ply even to other board games and isn’t ob­vi­ously ap­pli­ca­ble at all to any­thing that isn’t more or less a board game.)

• gjm 22 Jun 2019 1:47 UTC

  10 points

  on: “The Bit­ter Les­son”, an ar­ti­cle about com­pute vs hu­man knowl­edge in AI

  What he says about com­puter go seems wrong to me.

  Two things came to­gether to make re­ally strong com­puter go play­ers. The first was Monte Carlo tree search. Yes, that name has “search” in it, but it amounted to mak­ing pro­grams less search-y, for two rea­sons. First, the origi­nal ver­sions of MCTS did eval­u­a­tions at the leaves of its trees by ran­dom full-game play­outs, which took sub­stan­tial time, so the trees were smaller than for ear­lier tree-search­ing pro­grams. Se­cond, the way MCTS prop­a­gates re­sults up the tree moves away from the min­i­max paradigm and al­lows for the pos­si­bil­ity that some tree nodes that seem to arise only from in­fe­rior moves (and hence should be ir­rele­vant, min­i­max­i­mally) ac­tu­ally have use­ful in­for­ma­tion in them about the po­si­tion. The sec­ond was the use of big neu­ral net­works for eval­u­a­tion in­stead of those Monte Carlo play­outs. This amounts to hav­ing a re­ally fancy static eval­u­a­tion func­tion, and (with the use of a policy net/​head as in AlphaGo and its suc­ces­sors) a highly se­lec­tive search that chooses what moves to in­clude in the search ac­cord­ing to how promis­ing they look.

  So when Sut­ton says this

  Enor­mous ini­tial efforts went into avoid­ing search by tak­ing ad­van­tage of hu­man knowl­edge, or of the spe­cial fea­tures of the game, but all those efforts proved ir­rele­vant, or worse, once search was ap­plied effec­tively at scale.

  that seems mis­lead­ing; while it’s true that the cur­rently best go pro­grams min­i­mize their use of hu­man knowl­edge, it’s not by “ap­ply­ing search effec­tively at scale” that they do it.

  Now, this does all fit into the broader pat­tern of “lev­er­ag­ing com­pu­ta­tion”. Fair enough, I guess, but what else would you ex­pect? That one can play su­per­hu­manly strong go by do­ing only a few thou­sand el­e­men­tary steps of com­pu­ta­tion per move? That ap­ply­ing more com­pu­ta­tion wouldn’t help? (There’s a rea­son why hu­man play­ers, when they want to play well, take more time to think.)

• gjm 21 Jun 2019 17:30 UTC

  11 points

  on: De­ci­sions are hard, words feel easier

  I think—es­pe­cially as, IIRC, this is in­tended as ma­te­rial for peo­ple un­fa­mil­iar with this sort of think­ing—this could use a thor­ough re­work­ing in search of greater clar­ity. I’ll pick a par­tic­u­lar bit to illus­trate.

  If I’m un­der­stand­ing your in­ten­tions right, when you ask

  What do I know about some­one who is “racist”?

  what you in­tend it to mean is some­thing like “What do I know about some­one, as a re­sult of know­ing that the word ‘racist’ is ap­plied to them with its usual mean­ing?”. Note that this is not the ex­act same use of quo­ta­tion marks as when you put “racism” in quo­ta­tion marks so that you can talk about the word it­self—you aren’t ask­ing “What do I know about some­one who is the word ‘racist’?”, which is just as well be­cause that wouldn’t make any sense. But it took me a mo­ment’s thought to figure out what I think you do mean there, and I sus­pect that for some read­ers it will be a real stum­bling block. And I’m not cer­tain that I’ve in­ter­preted it the way you in­tend; maybe what you mean is ”… that the word ‘racist’ is ap­plied to them by many other peo­ple?” or some­thing, which is similar but not the same. So it might be bet­ter to say some­thing like

  What do I know about some­one who is “racist”? That is: what do I know if I know that the word “racist” ap­plies to them? This is no longer a ques­tion about my own con­cepts, but about how a word is used.

  But … I think this words-ver­sus-con­cepts dis­tinc­tion is the wrong dis­tinc­tion here. If you ask “What do I know about some­one to whom I ap­ply the word ‘racist’?” then it’s a ques­tion about your own us­age, in just the same way as “What do I know about some­one who is racist?” allegedly is. And when you ask “What do I know about some­one who is racist?”, that can be uni­ver­sal­ized or par­tic­u­larized just as word-mean­ings can. “What do I know about some­one I con­sider racist?” “What do I know about some­one who would gen­er­ally be con­sid­ered racist?”. You could, in prin­ci­ple, con­sider these ques­tions with­out in­vok­ing words at all.

  A cou­ple of other spe­cific points:

  This is the lawyer.

  What? Maybe there’s some­thing in one of your ear­lier posts that in­di­cates what this is about, but as it stands it doesn’t seem to me like it makes any sense. If it is a refer­ence to some ear­lier thing where you (e.g.) in­tro­duce some fic­tional char­ac­ters and ex­plain that you’re go­ing to analyse things in terms of what they would say, then you should prob­a­bly provide a link back to the ear­lier thing in ques­tion. Similarly for “This is the stu­dent again” near the end.

  Oops, we’ve got a situ­a­tion on our hands that in­cen­tives be­ing a lawyer.

  You prob­a­bly want “in­cen­tivizes” or some­thing of the sort.

  But, gen­er­ally, I’m afraid the whole thing feels a bit im­pres­sion­is­tic and un­finished. Sorry!

• gjm 21 Jun 2019 17:15 UTC

  2 points

  on: De­ci­sions are hard, words feel easier

  When you say “paren­the­ses” in your “ex­plicit note”, do you mean “quo­ta­tion marks”?

• gjm 16 Jun 2019 15:02 UTC

  6 points

  on: LessWrong FAQ

  You ac­ci­den­tally a word: “you will men­tion of Eliezer not in­fre­quently”.

• gjm 13 Jun 2019 17:07 UTC

  9 points

  in reply to: johnswentworth's comment on: Some Ways Co­or­di­na­tion is Hard

  Zvi has “Shilling” in the ti­tle of Ray­mond’s ear­lier post, which definitely said “Schel­ling”, so I bet it’s just a mis-sch­pel­ling.

• gjm 9 Jun 2019 23:59 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: c0rw1n's comment on: Learn­ing magic

  If you’re say­ing “Ma­nipu­lat­ing peo­ple like that wouldn’t work, be­cause you always get to choose whether to do what a hyp­no­tist tells you to” then I see two ob­jec­tions.

  • The fact that you think you could choose not to do it doesn’t mean you ac­tu­ally could in any very strong sense. Per­haps it just feels that way.

  • It could be that when some­one’s ex­plic­itly, blatantly try­ing to ma­nipu­late you via your sub­con­scious, you get to choose, but that a suffi­ciently skil­led ma­nipu­la­tor can do it with­out your ever notic­ing, in which case you don’t have the chance to say no.

  (I am not sure that that is what you’re say­ing, though, and if it isn’t then those points may be ir­rele­vant.)