gjm
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This is a strange article.
The title and opening paragraph suggest that it is comparing Taleb’s “barbell” strategy with other investment strategies—traditional balanced portfolio, gold in a sock under your bed, highly leveraged penny stocks, etc. -- and finding it wanting.
But none of the actual argumentation that follows really makes any contact with that sort of comparison; rather, it applies uniformly across every asset of the sort Taleb, or your financial advisor, or anyone else interested specifically in your investments, might consider. (With one exception; see below.) And its real point seems to be not to argue for or against any particular investment strategy, but to remind us that there are other things that matter more deeply than the accumulation of wealth. I feel as if I have just read an article entitled “Against the King’s Gambit” that’s devoted to explaining how playing board games like chess is a waste of time. I wonder whether I am missing the point in some spectacular fashion.
Some specifics:
In a scenario where your country’s government collapses disastrously, or where you find yourself on the run from deadly persecution, indeed treasury bonds won’t help you much; neither will any other sort of financial asset; how you deal with the possibility of such scenarios is largely orthogonal to how you optimize your investments. Seeking spiritual enlightenment or good advice on what food to eat won’t be helped much by treasury bonds; nor will they be helped much by any other sort of financial asset; how you manage those aspects of your life is largely orthogonal to how you optimize your investments.
Children and a spouse and belonging to an intergenerational community are (at least for many people) wonderful things, and perhaps (as this article suggests) they provide many of the benefits that we might (perhaps unwisely) look for from our investments. But having decided whether to marry, how many children (if any) to have, etc., the question remains of what to do with whatever wealth one has after all that, and so far as I can see the choice between “barbell”, “conventionally diversified investments”, “money in a sock under the bed”, etc., isn’t affected in any very obvious way by whether one has spouse, children, intergenerational community, etc.
(One thing mentioned in the article that is relevant: “land you are used to occupying and know well”. To whatever extent that is an Important Good Thing, it suggests that one substantial asset you should own is a land and somewhere to live built on that land. But I don’t think that when Taleb proposes a “barbell” strategy he is intending to tell people whether or not to own a house.)
There are indeed no truly risk-free assets, and any asset you hold may become irrelevant. (Incidentally, this applies to houses and spouses and children and intergenerational communities and religions and so forth too: you may suddenly need to move across the country, you and your spouse may cease to make a good couple, your children may turn against you, your community may disapprove of your lifestyle, you may stop believing in your god(s), etc.) But, once again, this has nothing to do with Taleb’s “barbell strategy”: the risks that would destroy the value of treasury bonds, and the end of your natural life, will uniformly wipe out any other investments you might have, and the question of what to do with any money you choose to invest is once again largely orthogonal to that.
Fair point about association versus actual thinking. (Though at least some versions of the backfire effect are doubtful...)
I don’t think this is all David Gerard’s fault (at least, not the fault of his activities on Wikipedia). Wikipedia is explicitly meant to be a summary of information available in “reliable sources” elsewhere, and unfortunately I think it really is true that most of the stuff about LW in such sources is about things one can point at and laugh or sneer, like Roko’s basilisk and neoreaction. That may be a state of affairs that David Gerard and RationalWiki have deliberately fostered—it certainly doesn’t seem to be one they’ve discouraged! -- but I think the Wikipedia article might well look just the way it does now if there were some entirely impartial but Wikipedia-rules-lawyering third party watching it closely instead of DG. E.g., however informative the LW poll results might be, it’s true that they’re not found in a “reliable source” in the Wikipedia sense. And however marginal Roko’s basilisk might be, it’s true that it’s attracted outside attention and been written about by “reliable sources”.
It’s not at all clear that improving the other person’s opinion was really one of Eliezer’s goals on this occasion, as opposed to showing up the other person’s intellectual inferiority. He called the post “Bayesian Judo”, and highlighted how his showing-off impressed someone of the opposite sex.
He does also suggest that in the end he and the other person came to some sort of agreement—but it seems pretty clear that the thing they agreed on had little to do with the claim the other guy had originally been making, and that the other guy’s opinion on that didn’t actually change. So I think an accurate, though arguably unkind, summary of “Bayesian Judo” goes like this: “I was at a party, I got into an argument with a religious guy who didn’t believe AI was possible, I overwhelmed him with my superior knowledge and intelligence, he submitted to my manifest superiority, and the whole performance impressed a woman”. On this occasion, helping the other party to have better opinions doesn’t seem to have been a high priority.
Mistyped rather than misspelled (or, depending on how you prefer to define those things, misspelled by mistyping). Anyway, I’ll fix it; thanks.
What if a bunch of JWs camped out in your garden for a month, and that was one of the places where more JWs congregated than anywhere else nearby? I think then you’d be in danger of being known as “that guy who had the JWs in his garden”, and if you had a Wikipedia page then it might well mention that. It would suck, it would doubtless give a wrong impression of you, but I don’t think you’d have much grounds for complaint about the WP page.
LW had neoreactionaries camped out in its garden for a while. It kinda sucked (though some of them were fairly smart and interesting when they weren’t explaining smartly and interestingly all about how black people are stupid and we ought to bring back slavery; it’s not like there was no reason at all why they weren’t all just downvoted to oblivion and banned from the site) and the perception of LW as a hive of neoreaction is a shame—and yes, there are people maliciously promoting that perception and I wish they wouldn’t—but I’m not convinced that that WP article is either unfair or harmful. It says “neoreactionaries have taken an interest in LW” rather than “LW has taken an interest in neoreaction” and the only specific LW attitude to neoreaction mentioned is that the guy who founded the site thinks NRx is terrible. I don’t think anyone is going to be persuaded by the WP article that LW is full of neoreactionaries, and if someone who has that impression reads the article they might even be persuaded that they’re wrong.
Again, for the avoidance of doubt, I’m not claiming that the WP article is good. But it’s hardly “as bad as possible” either. That’s all.
Cherry-picking indeed! The NRx section is about 2.5x the length of the EA section (less if you ignore the citations) and about 1⁄4 of it is the statement “Eliezer Yudkowsky has strongly repudiated neoreaction”. Neoreaction is more interesting because in most places there would be (to a good approximation) zero support for it, rather than the rather little found on LW.
I mean, I don’t want to claim that the WP page is good, and I too would shed no tears if the section on neoreaction vanished, but it’s markedly less terrible than suggested in this thread.
Pedantic correction: silicone, not silicon. Perhaps silicon boobs would be interesting to a hypothetical (Too-)Friendly AI, but most humans would not find them appealing.
[EDITED to fix a typo.]
The Wikipedia page on LW doesn’t seem particularly awful at the moment. (And in particular it does in fact mention effective altruism.)
It’s a nice idea, but I have to say a lot of it seems like it doesn’t really work metrically. E.g., “To Russell’s paradox, I have the set of all the answers” has only 15 syllables but it needs to have 16. (Several of the lines can be made to work if you pronounce “-tion” or “-tial” with two syllables like an old-fashioned Anglican church choir; maybe that’s deliberate?)
He is the very model of a self-recursive modeler!
It could easily be true both that (e.g.) nothing like Christianity would exist without Jesus, and that Christianity wouldn’t have developed into the hugely impactful thing it is now without Paul. In some sense all the credit or blame for that goes to both of them: take away either of them and you have no impactful institution at all.
Of course none of that applies to people whose (it would seem) highly impactful work didn’t create institutions but “merely” contributed hugely to existing ones, or perhaps helped knock them down. Gauss, Wittgenstein and Gödel are all in that category.
For what it’s worth, I bet the intention was as follows: Ben had mentioned that he was going to ration his time in this thread for fear of rabbit-holes, he thought you might prefer to have some idea how much more Said-Ben discussion was possible, and so (the amount of time he’d spent not being immediately visible) he added that note. So, exactly the result of insulting intent.
I am not at all sure it’s always true that posting nothing at all is easier than posting a short, snarky comment. The temptation to do the latter can be almost overwhelming.
And just as ideas are a dime a dozen, so are criticisms. Your arguments against disincentivizing criticism seem to me to have parallel arguments against disincentivizing posting; and your arguments for harsh criticism of top-level posts seem to me to have parallel arguments for harsh criticism of critical comments. (Of course the two aren’t exactly equivalent, not least because top-level posts are more visible than critical comments. Still, I think all the arguments cut both ways.)
In this very interesting discussion I mostly agree with you and Ben, but one thing in the comment above seems to me importantly wrong in a way that’s relevant:
When we ask people who made top tier posts before why they don’t make them now, or they put them elsewhere, the answer is resoundingly not “we were put off by mediocre content on LW” but “we were put off by commenters who were mean and made writing for LW unpleasant.”
I bet that’s true. But you also need to consider people who never posted to LW at all but, if they had, would have made top-tier posts. Mediocre content is (I think) more likely to account for them than for people who were top-tier posters but then went away.
(Please don’t take me to be saying “… and therefore we should be rude to people whose postings we think are mediocre, so that they go away and stop putting off the really good people”. I am not at all convinced that that is a good idea.)
It’s certainly working now, anyway. Thanks!
Doesn’t seem to be fixed yet; any revised ETA?
Thanks!
I’ve failed to fix the embedded image; I switched to Markdown editing mode, but now editing the comment above and clicking “submit” appears not actually to change anything. Might be a cacheing problem somewhere, but e.g. viewing in an entirely different browser doesn’t show my changes as having taken effect either.
Yup, understood. But right now, on my laptop this is how it looks; the actually-kinda-useful portion of the page is outlined in red.
[EDITED to add: ah, no, the image-embedding syntax doesn’t work when using the WYSIWYG editor. Will try to fix.]
The really useful portion of the page, the chronological list of posts, is off the bottom of that image. To a good approximation, nothing visible on the page is actually useful to me.
But, again, I understand that the extra value to meetup-goers may justify this.
We can detect that when we switch between “normal” and “daylight saving” time bad things happen at the transitions. But that doesn’t mean that switching is worse than not switching. We don’t know what bad things would happen when if we didn’t switch.
(E.g., one reason for the bad things is that people’s sleep pattern is disturbed and that has bad health effects. But it might also be bad for sleep to have dawn as early relative to the hours people want to sleep as it would be in the middle of summer without dayli