gjm

Karma: 30,005

Hi. I’m Gareth McCaughan. I’ve been a consistent reader and occasional commenter since the Overcoming Bias days. My LW username is “gjm” (not “Gjm” despite the wiki software’s preference for that capitalization). Elsewehere I generally go by one of “g”, “gjm”, or “gjm11”. The URL listed here is for my website and blog, neither of which has been substantially updated for several years. I live near Cambridge (UK) and work for Hewlett-Packard (who acquired the company that acquired what remained of the small company I used to work for, after they were acquired by someone else). My business cards say “mathematician” but in practice my work is a mixture of simulation, data analysis, algorithm design, software development, problem-solving, and whatever random engineering no one else is doing. I am married and have a daughter born in mid-2006. The best way to contact me is by email: firstname dot lastname at pobox dot com. I am happy to be emailed out of the blue by interesting people. If you are an LW regular you are probably an interesting person in the relevant sense even if you think you aren’t.

If you’re wondering why some of my very old posts and comments are at surprisingly negative scores, it’s because for some time I was the favourite target of old-LW’s resident neoreactionary troll, sockpuppeteer and mass-downvoter.

gjm 2 Oct 2023 0:44 UTC
9 points
4
on: Fifty Flips
This would be more to my taste (I can’t speak for anyone else’s) if we were told more about the space of possible unfairnesses. In particular, it wasn’t clear to me whether
the coin flips are allowed to depend on our predictions (and, if so, which predictions)
nor whether
we were actually looking for a genuinely probabilistic rule (in which case it would have to be a very simple one for there to be any chance of guessing it) or for a deterministic one, possibly depending on the predictions (in which case it might be more complicated).
Again, I don’t claim that my taste is anyone else’s; but my reaction to the extreme open-endedness is along the lines of “this could be practically anything, and some varieties of thing-it-could-be are obviously not deducible with any confidence from 50 bits of information, and this has probably been designed so that it’s solvable if you correctly guess what space of possibilities the creator had in mind but I don’t feel like trying to read his mind”.
The spoiler-blocks above aren’t very spoilery since they are just asking questions. But for the benefit of anyone who feels the same way as I do, here are what I now believe to be the answers to those questions:
The coin does not know anything about your predictions; you are trying to model a thing that autonomously emits coin flips, not something that actively responds to your probing. Unsurprisingly-given-that, the coin is (at least potentially) probabilistic.

gjm 24 Sep 2023 3:10 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Eleni Angelou’s comment on: I designed an AI safety course (for a philosophy department)
Huh. So is there a course every year titled “Philosophy and the challenge of the future”, with radically different content each time depending on the particular interests of whoever’s lecturing that year?

gjm 24 Sep 2023 3:08 UTC
20 points
10
on: I designed an AI safety course (for a philosophy department)
To what extent, if any, will this course acknowledge that some people disagree very vigorously with what I take to be the positions you’re generally advocating for?
(I ask not because I think those people are right and you’re wrong—I think those people are often wrong and sometimes very silly indeed and expect I would favour your position over theirs at least 80% of the time—but because I think it’s important that your students be able to distinguish “this is uncontroversial fact about which basically no one disagrees” from “this is something I am very confident of, but if you talked to some of the other faculty they might think I’m as crazy as I think they are” from “this is my best guess and I am not terribly sure it’s right”, and the fact that pretty much all the required reading is from an LW-ish EA-ish perspective makes me wonder whether you’re making those distinctions clearly. My apologies in advance if I turn out to be being too uncharitable, which I may well be.)

gjm 24 Sep 2023 2:54 UTC
3 points
2
on: I designed an AI safety course (for a philosophy department)
This is very much not what I (or I think anyone) would expect to be in a course with the very general-sounding title “Philosophy and the challenge of the future”. Is it the case that anyone choosing whether to study this will first look at the syllabus (or maybe some other document that gives a shorter summary of what’s going to be in the course) and therefore not be at risk of being misled? If not, you might consider a more informative title, or maybe a subtitle. “Philosophy and the challenge of artificial intelligence”. “Philosophy and the challenge of the future: hard thinking about AI”. “Opportunities and threats of artificial intelligence: a philosophical perspective”. Or something.

gjm 22 Aug 2023 21:40 UTC
3 points
1
in reply to: Shankar Sivarajan’s comment on: The U.S. is becoming less stable
I’m puzzled by your first paragraph. You’re suggesting that up until now it has been typical for the Republican Party to believe and claim that Democrats are acting sincerely in the best interests of the US and of democracy and aren’t politically motivated?
I have to say that that isn’t particularly how it’s looked to me.
Do you have concrete examples where Republicans (on the whole) treated things the Democrats were doing as sincere and well-intentioned and reasonable where in fact (according to your opinion, or later consensus as more information emerged) they were politically motivated / antidemocratic / contrary to political norms?

gjm 22 Aug 2023 15:06 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Shankar Sivarajan’s comment on: The U.S. is becoming less stable
Do you have good reason to think that the changes described here involve “the Stupid Party becoming marginally smarter”?
I think you should distinguish between “is a good thing” and “is not wholly, purely, a bad thing”. If something both makes the Stupid Party a little smarter and destabilizes the nation’s democracy, it might on balance be either good or bad.

gjm 13 Aug 2023 0:52 UTC
3 points
1
in reply to: robotelvis’s comment on: Simulate the CEO
If you consider the “extended CEO” to include everyone whose knowledge is of importance … surely you’re no longer talking about anything much like simulating a person in any useful sense? How does “simulate the CEO” describe the situation better than “try to do what’s best for the organization” or “follow the official policies and vision-statements of the organization”, for instance?
I think it’s telling that your examples say “when I was in organization X we would try to make decisions by referring to a foundational set of principles” and not “when I was in organization X we would try to make decisions by asking what the organization’s most senior person would do”. (Of course many Christians like to ask “what would Jesus do?” but I think that is importantly different from asking what the Pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Moderator of the General Assembly, etc., would do.)
I think most Googlers, and most Christians, are like you: they are much more likely to try to resolve a question by asking “what do the ‘ten things’ say?” or “how does this fit with the principles in the Sermon on the Mount[1]?” than by asking “what would Sundar Pichai say?” or “what would Pope Francis say?”. And I think those are quite different sorts of question, and when they give the same answer it’s much more “because the boss is following the principles” than “because the principles are an encoding of how the boss’s brain works”.
[1] I am guessing that you mean that rather than just the Beatitudes, which don’t offer that much in the way of practical guidance, and where they do there’s generally more detail in the rest of the SotM—e.g., maybe “blessed are the meek” tells you something about what to do, but not as much as the I-think-related “turn the other cheek” and “carry the load an extra mile” and so forth do.
(Disclaimer: I have never worked at Google; I was a pretty serious Christian for many years but have not been any sort of Christian for more than a decade.)

gjm 12 Aug 2023 22:47 UTC
8 points
6
on: Simulate the CEO
I don’t think I buy this as a productive way of thinking about what happens in large organizations.
So first of all there’s a point made in the OP: the CEO is not, in fact, an expert on all the individual things the organization does. If I’m managing a team at Google whose job is to design a new datacentre and get it running, and I need to decide (say) how many servers of a particular kind to put in it, my mental simulation of Sundar Pichai says “why the hell are you asking me that? I don’t know anything about designing datacentres”.
OP deals with this by suggesting that we think about an “extended CEO” consisting of the CEO together with the people they trust to make more detailed decisions. Well, that probably consists of something like the CEO’s executive team, but none of them knows much about designing datacentres either.
For “simulate the (extended) CEO” to be an algorithm that gives useful answers, you need to think in terms of an “extended CEO” that extends all the way down to at most one of two levels of management above where a given decision is being made. Which means that the algorithm isn’t “simulate the CEO” any more, it’s “simulate someone one or two levels of management up from you”. Which is really just an eccentric way of saying “try to do what your managers want you to do, or would want if you asked them”.
And that is decent enough advice, but it’s also kinda obvious, and it doesn’t have the property that e.g. we might hope to get better results by training an AI model on the CEO’s emails and asking that to make the decisions. (I don’t think that would have much prospect of success anyway, until such time as the AIs are smart enough that we can just straightforwardly make them the CEO.)
I don’t think organizational principles like “don’t be evil” or “blessed are the meek” are most helpfully thought of as CEO-simulation assistance, either. “Don’t be evil” predates Sundar Pichai’s time as CEO. “Blessed are the meek” predates Pope Francis’s time as pope. It’s nearer to the mark to say that the CEOs are simulating the people who came up with those principles when they make their strategic decisions, or at least that they ought to. (Though I think Google dropped “don’t be evil” some time ago, and for any major religious institution there are plenty of reformers who would claim that it’s departed from its founding principles.)
I am pretty sure that most middle managers pretty much never ask themselves “what would the CEO do?”. Hopefully they ask “what would be best for the company?” and hopefully the CEO is asking that too, and to whatever extent they’re all good at figuring that out things will align. But not because anyone’s simulating anyone else.
(Probably people at or near the C-suite level do quite a bit of CEO-simulating, but not because it’s the best way to have the company run smoothly but because it’s good for their careers to be approved of by the CEO.)

gjm 31 Jul 2023 20:56 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: JenniferRM’s comment on: Apollo Neuro Results
I think your “charitable misinterpretation” is pretty much what trevor is saying: he’s concerned that LW users might become targets for some sort of attack by well-resourced entities (something something military-industrial complex something something GPUs something something AI), and that if multiple LW users are using the same presumably-insecure device that might somehow be induced to damage their health then that’s a serious risk.
See e.g. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pfL6sAjMfRsZjyjsZ/some-basics-of-the-hypercompetence-theory-of-government (“trying to slow the rate of progress risks making you an enemy of the entire AI industry”, “trying to impeding the government and military’s top R&D priorities is basically hitting the problem with a sledgehammer. And it can hit back, many orders of magnitude harder”).
I’m not sure exactly what FDA approval would entail, but my guess is that it doesn’t involve the sort of security auditing that would be necessary to allay such concerns.

gjm 31 Jul 2023 20:40 UTC
6 points
8
in reply to: astridain’s comment on: Lack of Social Grace Is an Epistemic Virtue
I think “I think she’s a little out of your league”[1] doesn’t convey the same information as “you’re ugly” would, because (1) it’s relative and the possibly-ugly person might interpret it as “she’s gorgeous” and (2) it’s (in typical use, I think) broader than just physical appearance so it might be commenting on the two people’s wittiness or something, not just on their appearance.
[1] Parent actually says “you’re a little out of her league” but I assume that’s just a slip.
It’s not obvious to me how important this is to the difference in graciousness, but it feels to me as if saying that would be ruder if it did actually allow the person it was said to to infer “you’re ugly” rather than merely “in some unspecified way(s) that may well have something to do with attractiveness, I rate her more highly than you”. So in this case, at least, I think actual-obfuscation as well as pretend-obfuscation is involved.

gjm 19 Jul 2023 1:34 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: Gordon Seidoh Worley’s comment on: Physics is Ultimately Subjective
Your distinction between “existence” and “being” seems … idiosyncratic, and it seems to me that you should probably split your “definition 1” into definitions 1a (not dependent on a mind/observer for existence) and 1b (not dependent on a mind/observer for being). In so far as I understand the distinction you are making (which may not be far enough) it seems to me that nothing is objective-1a by definition (because you take “existence” to be a property of people’s ideas) but some things might be objective-1b. I don’t think anyone means objective-2 when they say “objective”, and I think your insistence that they do is just a mistake.
I think the way the mistake arises is that, given other assumptions you make, what other people mean by “objective” is crazy, and so it feels to you as if saying they mean objective-2 is being charitable, replacing a crazy notion with one that’s wrong but at least makes sense. Whereas, to those who make different assumptions, what you’re doing looks highly uncharitable, replacing a perfectly reasonable notion with one that’s wrong. (This is a very common phenomenon.)
Specifically, of course the assumption you make and they don’t is something along the lines of “all talk of ‘reality’ and ‘the external world’ as something separate from our experience is nonsense”. I’m sure it’s true that nothing is objective given solipsism, but I find it difficult to care because I find solipsism unconvincing, your version (sorry!) as much so as any other.
(I expect you don’t like having your position called solipsism. I’m going to call it that anyway. Sorry.)
Also, even given solipsism, I think your definition of “objective” makes it a useless word: by definition, nothing is “objective”. I—like you—generally prefer to avoid the word, precisely because different people mean different things by it and it causes confusion; but I do think there’s a useful concept somewhere in its vicinity; there really is a useful distinction between physics and (hypothetical) highly-intersubjectively-consistent art, and that distinction has something to do with what people commonly mean by “objective”. An analogy (borrowing on a nice little essay by David Chalmers from when “The Matrix” first came out): suppose it turns out that we are all brains in vats, living in a painstakingly constructed simulated world; then it is still true, in a useful sense, that black swans are real and unicorns aren’t, even though in another sense “nothing inside the simulation is real”. If we-in-the-Matrix explore our world very thoroughly, we will find black swans but we will never find unicorns. Similarly: it’s not just that physics is agreed on by (in some sense) everyone; it’s also that it seems clear that it would be agreed on by aliens, AIs, archangels, etc., whereas we should expect those beings to have quite different taste in art from ours, and this points to an important difference between physics and art, and the word “objective” isn’t such a bad word for it, even if in some sense “nothing is objective”.
(Relatedly: even though we only know about “reality” via our experiences, I claim that there is a useful distinction between the things I am seeing right now and the things I might see if I were on a large dose of hallucinogens, and words like “real” and “objective” are useful ways to point at that distinction. This isn’t really any different from e.g. saying “the monster is behind the building” when talking about a computer game, even though “really” the monster and building are both being displayed on the same flat surface.)

gjm 17 Jul 2023 15:34 UTC
7 points
1
on: I think Michael Bailey’s dismissal of my autogynephilia questions for Scott Alexander and Aella makes very little sense
It seems weird to me that these discussions are being framed on all sides in terms like “are cisgender women often autogynephilic?”, when part of the issue is that different people have different ideas of what “autogynephilic” ought to mean.
There would be more chance of useful outcomes if the disputing parties could agree on some more concrete questions that are about how the world is rather than about what a particular neologism means.
Suppose A says “many trans women, and few cis women, are autogynephilic; this suggests that many trans women are that way because they are autogynephilic”; and B replies “on the contrary, many cis women are autogynephilic too; this suggests that autogynephilia is one of the ways in which trans women and cis women are alike”. Their real disagreement (assuming both are smart and intellectually honest) isn’t mostly about where the boundaries of “autogynephilic” should be drawn, it’s about whether there is some thing that (1) is markedly more common in trans women than in cis men or cis women, where (2) the most plausible explanation for 1 is that whatever-it-is causes trans-ness, and (3) the thing is in the same general ballpark as the things that get called autogynephilia.
If there is some such thing, then the Blanchard/Bailey theory is onto something, even if on reflection it turns out that “autogynephilia” would be better used to mean something different. If there isn’t, then Blanchard/Bailey is basically wrong, even if it’s true that many trans women are “autogynephilic” in Blanchard’s and Bailey’s sense.
As I understand it, Blanchard and Bailey have devised a thing, and an instrument to measure the thing, that has the property that more or less by definition it will be found much more among trans women than among cis women (though it could, in principle, apply to cis men too, and his instrument would pick that up). And then he measures trans women and cis women and cis men, and says: look, this thing turns up in trans women and not in the other groups, so I bet it causes trans-ness.
To which tailcalled replies: no, look, your instrument is focusing on experiences that would be more sexual in nature for trans women than for cis women, even if there were nothing sexual about trans-ness and the thing you’re focusing on had no causal role in making trans women the way they are; you’d get the same result if trans women were in this respect exactly like cis women except for the shape of their bodies; so how about asking these other questions instead, which don’t have that problem?
And then Bailey says: but those questions explicitly insert sexual elements into the scenarios being asked about, which will tend to lead to positive answers even from people who don’t have the specific feature I’m looking for, so the fact that surveys with the Aella/tailcalled questions in them give positive results for cis women doesn’t mean much.
And rather than arguing about what exactly “autogynephilia” Really Means, everyone involved should be looking for questions that (unlike the Blanchard/Bailey ones, according to tailcalled) can distinguish “X is a thing that trans women, specifically, have, which distinguishes them from cis women and cis men” from “X is a thing that women, generally, have, but our questions trying to find it will fail to see it in cis women because they focus on experiences that X will cause in trans women but not in cis women”; but that (unlike tailcalled’s questions, according to Bailey) don’t introduce extra elements that would be arousing to cis women for reasons separate from the picturing-oneself-as-female aspect.
It seems possible that actually there are no such questions. For instance, it might be that (1) many people, regardless of sex or gender or trans-ness, find some sort of satisfaction in thinking about themselves-as-having-their-preferred-sort-of-body, but that (2) this only becomes outright arousing if it goes beyond what they experience every day from actually having their preferred sort of body, so that (3) you can’t distinguish “many trans women get turned on by thinking of themselves as having female bodies, and so would many cis women if transplanted into male bodies” (which would suggest that “autogynephilia” is a consequence rather than a cause of trans-ness) from “many trans women get turned on by thinking of themselves as having female bodies, and no one else does or would” (which would suggest that “autogynephilia” might indeed be a cause).
All of this assumes that the dissenting parties are all genuinely trying, in good faith, to figure out what’s going on, rather than (e.g.) {gleefully grasping at / desperately denying} anything that might make trans people look like perverts. I’m pretty confident that that’s so for tailcalled. I’m not so convinced in Bailey’s case.

gjm 15 Jul 2023 15:01 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Gordon Seidoh Worley’s comment on: Physics is Ultimately Subjective
I agree that my hypothetical artform is not the same as physics. That was rather my point: it seems (maybe I have misunderstood?) that you’re saying either that when we say “X is objective” what we really mean is “X has extremely high intersubjective agreement”, or else that what causes us to say “X is objective” is extremely high intersubjective agreement; and I think both of those are just wrong, and so I gave (what seems to me to be) a hypothetical example in which there is extremely high intersubjective agreement but I would not be at all inclined to call it objective.
You say “You’ve misunderstood me” but if there is a specific thing where you think I think you said X but actually you meant Y, I haven’t been able to work out what that thing is, what X is, and what Y is.
… Oh, maybe you think I’m accusing you of saying that physics being about trying to model the world matters literally only because that leads to high intersubjective agreement; of course I don’t think you think that and I apologize if I gave that impression. What I think (perhaps wrongly?) is that the only way that feature of physics matters for determining how “objective” physics is is by making there be strong intersubjective agreement.
It would help me (and maybe others? I don’t know) if you could clarify a few specific things.
1. There’s (at least potentially) a distinction between what something means and what actually makes people say it. I think you are saying that what makes people call things objective is the presence of good intersubjective agreement, and that actually e.g. physics is not more “objective” than art but merely seems so because it has good intersubjective agreement. Is that right?
2. If so: what exactly do you mean by “objective”? Like some other commenters here (tailcalled, TekhneMakre) I am concerned that you’re defining “objective” in a way that makes it (fairly uncontroversially) not apply to anything, and it seems to me that there are plausible ways to understand “objective” that make it apply more to things commonly thought of as objective and less to things commonly thought of as subjective, in which case I think that might be a better way to use the word. But I’m not sure, because I don’t know quite what you mean by “objective”. (It seems like you mean something with the property that “theories of physics are in our heads” implies “physics is not objective”, for instance. But that doesn’t really nail it down.)
3. When I say “physics is objective” (actually I would generally not use those words, but they’ll do for now) what I think I mean is something to do with physics being grounded in the external world, and something to do with my opinion that if aliens with very different mental architecture turned up they would none the less have quite similar physics, at least to the extent that it would make similar predictions and quite likely in its actual conceptual structure, and really not very much to do with intersubjective agreement. Do you think I am just deluding myself about what’s going on in my head when I say that physics is more objective than art, and that actually all I’m doing is comparing levels of intersubjective agreement? Or what?
  1. (I do think that intersubjective agreement is relevant. The way it’s relevant is that what-I’m-calling-objectivity is one possible explanation for intersubjective agreement, so strong intersubjective agreement is evidence of what-I’m-calling-objectivity. But it’s not the only possible explanation, and it’s far from being proof of objectivity, and it certainly isn’t what “objectivity” means.)

gjm 15 Jul 2023 2:53 UTC
3 points
0
on: Physics is Ultimately Subjective
Imagine some variety of art for which it happens that all humans agree on the merits of any given instance. Is this picture more beautiful than that one? Everyone gives the same answer. No one knows exactly what it is about the art that they’re assessing, though.
Would you consider judgements about these artworks to be just the same as ones about physics? I don’t think I would. For instance, suppose we learned that we were soon to be visited by intelligent aliens. I would be much more willing to bet that the aliens would agree with me about the answer to “what will happen when I put these magnets and little iron balls in such-and-such a configuration?” than about the answer to “how beautiful is this picture?”. Even if literally all human beings agree about the latter.
I don’t know whether Gordon would take the same view. But for me this seems to point to a sense in which physics is “more objective” than artistic judgement, in a way that doesn’t just come down to how reliable the intersubjective agreement is.
Gordon does say
That’s the point of physics: to model reality. [...] the art functions are loosely constrained while the physics functions are highly constrained.
and it seems to me that this (and not the degree of intersubjective agreement) is what makes physics “objective” where art is “subjective”. Whereas Gordon seems to be claiming that actually “objective” just means “very high intersubjective agreement” and the only way in which “the point of physics” and the degree of constraint matter is by affecting how much intersubjective agreement there is. And I think this is just plain wrong.
(A family of counterexamples in the other direction, less clear-cut but not requiring a counterfactual about an actually-nonexistent art form: pick any scientific topic that has become highly politicized. How effective are masks, or vaccines, or ivermectin, against COVID-19? How safe is it to give puberty-blocking drugs to gender-dysphoric preadolescents? What should we expect to happen to termperatures across the world over the next 50 years, for any given pattern of industrial activity? I claim that these questions are more like physics than art, in terms of how “objective” their answers are; more like art than physics, in terms of intersubjective agreement. Again, the point is that my notion of “objectivity”, which may or may not match Gordon’s but I am pretty confident is a reasonable one, plainly diverges in these cases from intersubjective agreement, and I think this is good reason to think that objectivity and intersubjective agreement are different things.)

gjm 13 Jul 2023 16:36 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Sylvester Kollin’s comment on: Betting on Logic
I think maybe we’re running into the problem that FDT isn’t (AIUI) really very precisely defined. But I think I agree with Zane’s reply to your comment: two (apparently) possible worlds where my algorithm produces different decisions are also worlds where PA proves that it does (or at least they might be; PA can’t prove everything that’s true) because those are worlds where I’m running different algorithms. And unless I’m confused (which I very much might be) that’s much of the point of FDT: we recognize different decisions as being consequences of running different algorithms.

gjm 12 Jul 2023 14:39 UTC
7 points
−1
on: Betting on Logic
I am very much not an expert on this. But: I don’t see why bet 1 “subjunctively dominates” bet 2.
Suppose I’m currently planning to take bet 2, and suppose PA is able to prove that. Then I am expecting to get +1 from the bet.
Now, suppose we consider switching the output of my algorithm from “bet 2” to “bet 1″. Then, counterfactually, PA will no longer prove that I take bet 2, so I now expect to be taking bet 1 in the not-P case, for an outcome of −1.
This is not better than the +1 I am currently expecting to get by taking bet 2.
What am I missing? (My best guess is that you reckon the comparison I should be doing isn’t −1 after switching versus +1 before switching, but −1 after switching versus −10 from still taking bet 2 after changing the output of my algorithm, but if so then I don’t understand why that would be the right comparison to make.)

gjm 10 Jul 2023 14:34 UTC
2 points
0
on: Some reasons to not say “Doomer”
I don’t think “AI pessimist” is a good term for what is currently sometimes expressed by “doomer”, because many people are very pessimistic about AI in ways that don’t have anything to do with doom. For instance, I don’t think it would be reasonable to say that Timnit Gebru and Emily Bender are not AI pessimists, but they are savagely critical of the “doom” position and its adherents.

gjm 4 Jul 2023 13:47 UTC
4 points
0
on: Monthly Roundup #8: July 2023
I checked up the first few cases from that list of different things that cops find suspicious, and in 100% of them it seems that the person the cops were suspicious about were in fact transporting large quantities of illegal drugs.
What this looks like to me is less “cops will use any excuse to stop anyone they feel like” and more “some cops are actually quite good at spotting the many and varied signs that someone might be a drug dealer, and the particular things they happen to describe having noticed vary a lot”, and there doesn’t seem anything terribly bad about that.
There are a bunch of ways in which the situation could in fact be bad. For instance, maybe the people being stopped by the cops all just happen to be black because the cops are super-racist—no!, I hear you cry, cops in America being racist? say it ain’t so! -- or something like that. But then the problem isn’t “cops have a wide variety of things they find suspicious”, it’s “cops disproportionately turn their drug-dealer-finding skills on a particular group of people they’re biased against”, and the fact that they find a large and “inconsistent” set of kinds of evidence has nothing much to do with it.
(I’m not sure whether Zvi is in fact making the same point as me. Is “this strategy” meant to be “the strategy being employed by the cops” or “the strategy being employed by the person complaining about the cops”?)

gjm 2 Jul 2023 17:04 UTC
11 points
0
on: Through a panel, darkly: a case study in internet BS detection
The “people” listed on the Sol Voltaics “about” page all have links to “their” LinkedIn “pages”. All of them 404.

gjm 30 Jun 2023 13:38 UTC
4 points
2
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: When do “brains beat brawn” in Chess? An experiment
Several? I can see one (the one you cite). Some of the other variants—e.g., no castling at all, or pawns can’t move two squares on their first move—can lead to positions that also arise in normal chess. But having neither side castle at all is really unusual and most such positions will be well out of distribution; and it’s very common for some pawns to remain on the second rank all the way to the endgame, where the option of moving one or two squares can have important timing implications.