gjm

Karma: 26,727

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 in about the last four years. I live near Cambridge (UK) and work for a small technology company in Cambridge. 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 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 8 Oct 2021 23:25 UTC
2 points
in reply to: hivemindsingularity’s comment on: An Investigation into the Passage of Time
You’re welcome. It seems to be fixed in the actual essay but not in the quotation at the top here on LW.

gjm 8 Oct 2021 15:47 UTC
4 points
on: What Do GDP Growth Curves Really Mean?
I agree with everyone else: the fact that certain (important) areas of technology have progressed hugely doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s a huge increase in overall wealth. It’s like Amdahl’s law (parallelizing code can’t possibly bring a speedup bigger than the ratio (all work) : (non-parallelizable work)): some things in life really don’t depend much on the sort of technology that’s improved hugely since 1960, and if those stay approximately the same while tech gets infinitely better, our wellbeing will be increasingly determined by the (not-much-improving) state of the things that aren’t improving so fast.
Having lightning-fast calculation and high-resolution streaming video and photorealistic games and so forth is very cool, but it doesn’t have much impact on how comfortably you sleep at night, or whether you have close and mutually fulfilling friendships, or how good your food tastes, or whether you die of malaria.
(Technology does impact those things, directly and indirectly. I think fewer people are dying of malaria than in 1960. But it’s not the 100x-better sort of improvement we see in techier areas, and in some cases it may not be an improvement: rightly or wrongly, many people claim that today’s social networking technology actually makes friendships and other social relationships worse.)

gjm 7 Oct 2021 16:52 UTC
7 points
in reply to: skeptical_lurker’s comment on: Dominic Cummings : Regime Change #2: A plea to Silicon Valley
US police officers shoot people while they are (or seem, to the police officers, to be) in the course of committing crimes all the time. Sometimes they kill them by other means besides shooting. Usually the crime they’re supposedly committing is less serious than storming a government building amid cries to murder the vice-president. Sometimes there’s not the least reason to think they’re committing any crime at all.
In some of the more obviously appalling cases there’s a public outcry about this. The great majority of the time, there isn’t. There are about 31,000 entries in the spreadsheet at Fatal Encounters, for instance; how many of those met with any more opposition or complaint than the killing of Ashli Babbitt?
If, as I contend, most of them weren’t, why should we take the shooting of Ashli Babbitt (in the course of committing a violent crime) as evidence that the US is headed into fascism and mass executions in the next few years, when we don’t draw any such conclusions from tens of thousands of other police killings?
(An aside: I was curious about where you were coming from, so to speak, so I had a quick look at your LW comment history. It seems that you post about pretty much nothing but politics (including under that heading highly-politicized topics such as race). I think we have different ideas about what LW is for.)

gjm 7 Oct 2021 10:53 UTC
5 points
in reply to: Vanilla_cabs’s comment on: Dominic Cummings : Regime Change #2: A plea to Silicon Valley
I endorse Taran’s comment that’s a sibling of this one. Most startups fail, even though they are generally run by smart hardworking people who have spotted something that could genuinely be better.
Let’s run with your computer software analogy. Ever worked on the insides of a large “mature” software system? It’s common for those to be full of cruft and mess and things no one quite understands and unexpected interactions, such that small changes really can cause severe damage. It’s also notorious that trying to do a wholesale rewrite of such a system is usually a bad move.
The situation there is similar to the one with startups, and indeed is sometimes literally the actual same situation. Eventually your big old crufty legacy-software system will likely get replaced by something smaller and simpler that does the job well enough and is easier for its developers to work on. (That will probably be made by a startup.) But any particular attempt to replace it, your own included, is likely to fail.

gjm 7 Oct 2021 0:39 UTC
3 points
in reply to: MondSemmel’s comment on: Dominic Cummings : Regime Change #2: A plea to Silicon Valley
I agree that we might be in a world where the institutions are unfixably bad and the only thing to do is to start over. But if reality and your expectations diverge, I’m not sure it’s a good general practice to assume that reality is at fault. Perhaps those expectations were unrealistic.

gjm 7 Oct 2021 0:37 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Vanilla_cabs’s comment on: Dominic Cummings : Regime Change #2: A plea to Silicon Valley
Obviously what you actually have to do is to figure out whether the positives outweigh the negatives. But if all I’m offered is “things are pretty bad so any change is probably good” I’m pretty comfortably replying “new things like this are usually pretty bad so there’s a real risk that the change makes things worse”. :-)

gjm 6 Oct 2021 19:27 UTC
2 points
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Dominic Cummings : Regime Change #2: A plea to Silicon Valley
So far as I can tell, Lomborg didn’t get censored on Facebook. The thing he posted had a thing added by Facebook saying “this is false”. That’s not what censorship is. (Maybe something of his was actually removed by Facebook? But I can’t see anything claiming that it was. All I see is that Facebook added a “fact-checking” notice and Lomborg is cross about that.)
If you weren’t trying to suggest that there’s debate about whether the people who stormed the Capitol should be executed without trial, then that paragraph of yours where you talked about them can only be a deliberately misleading rhetorical move. You start by talking about “the right to kill citizens of your own country without judicial process”. You go on to say “It was mainly about foreign terrorism”. And then it’s straight into “Now you have a debate about how … the people who stormed the Capitol should be treated more with the tools used for foreign terrorism”.
This is not what we are meant to be about here.

gjm 6 Oct 2021 18:08 UTC
4 points
in reply to: MondSemmel’s comment on: Dominic Cummings : Regime Change #2: A plea to Silicon Valley
Any random thing you come up with might be better than what’s already there. But it might also be worse, even if what’s already there is terribly broken. Maybe there are cases where institutions are so spectacularly screwed up that literally anything you might do is likely to be better, but I wouldn’t bet on there being many.

gjm 6 Oct 2021 12:20 UTC
4 points
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Dominic Cummings : Regime Change #2: A plea to Silicon Valley
What exactly do you mean by “political censorship”? Has it been made illegal to say that SARS-CoV-2 came out of a lab, or that climate change isn’t a big deal? Last I heard, Lomborg was still publishing books and giving speeches and so forth.
Your paragraph beginning “The right to kill citizens” seems like it’s saying that there’s debate about whether the people who stormed the Capitol should be executed without trial. If that’s so, let’s see the evidence of that debate. If not, maybe dial down the dishonest rhetorical techniques a bit?
Cummings’s plan does require that your campaign acknowledges that you’re going to try to reboot a lot of the institutions of government. It doesn’t, so far as I can see, require that you say very much about just how they new versions are going to be better than the old. And, I repeat: Cummings explicitly proposes a scheme of the following form: get a team together, find a suitable candidate, then start figuring out what you need to say to get lots of people to vote for them. There’s no step in his process where you say “shit, what the people want isn’t what we want, so let’s give up” or ”… so let’s change our plans”. The populist stuff is just there to get power, so far as I can see.

gjm 6 Oct 2021 0:41 UTC
3 points
on: An Investigation into the Passage of Time
Pedantic nitpick: it’s “Burnt Norton”, not “Burnt Notion”.

gjm 5 Oct 2021 23:44 UTC
4 points
on: D&D.Sci 4th Edition: League of Defenders of the Storm Evaluation & Ruleset
Feedback on the scenario: I liked it, but evidently I took the framing story a bit too seriously because I took it to indicate that I would probably be wasting my time trying to understand the game mechanics, when actually they weren’t so very complicated. I can’t complain about how that worked out for me, given that mindlessly putting the given data into a model-fitting machine and cranking the handle produced a very good result, and if it had seemed more likely that the thing was approachable then I might have avoided it lest it be too much work :-), but I do feel a bit bad about not trying to use my brain a bit more and my computer a bit less.

gjm 5 Oct 2021 23:36 UTC
12 points
in reply to: IlyaShpitser’s comment on: Dominic Cummings : Regime Change #2: A plea to Silicon Valley
(I wonder why you say “Moldbug” rather than “Yarvin” but “Siskind” rather than “Alexander” or “Scott”.)
If your reading of anything Scott’s written is that he favours anything like neoreaction, then it’s a very different reading from mine. My reading is that he thinks neoreaction is mostly garbage but with occasional valuable insights. His actual words in what I suspect is the same leaked email as you’re talking about: “Neoreactionaries provide a vast stream of garbage with occasional nuggets of absolute gold in them.” My mental model of Scott is not excited by the prospect of Dominic-Cummings-alikes finding a way to get a populist president installed who will bulldozer all the bureaucratic obstacles between himself and absolute power.
I’m not familiar enough with the details of Yarvin’s ideas to know how closely aligned Cummings’s proposal is to Yarvin’s “formalism”. (It doesn’t looks super-close to me, though.)
For the avoidance of doubt, I do agree that Cummings is generally Up To No Good (though I don’t hate him as intensely as the UK media fairly clearly wants me to), I wouldn’t trust him any further than I could throw him, and I don’t think his proposals here are likely to end well if anyone tries to put them into action.

gjm 5 Oct 2021 19:44 UTC
4 points
on: D&D.Sci 4th Edition: League of Defenders of the Storm Evaluation & Ruleset
I strongly suspect that I got rather lucky; at any rate, my model’s predicted win-rate for my team was substantially less than the real ~80%, suggesting that the model didn’t do a great job of capturing reality.
I wonder whether lsusr had a sign-error bug similar to mine.

gjm 5 Oct 2021 16:28 UTC
8 points
in reply to: Vanilla_cabs’s comment on: Dominic Cummings : Regime Change #2: A plea to Silicon Valley
That would be the possibility of conflating “better” with “stronger”. I don’t find the prospect of stronger leaders as such an encouraging one, because while Lincoln and FDR were strong leaders who used their strength to do good things there are plenty of examples (I think rather more) of strong leaders who used their strength to do very bad things.
Taking what I think is an optimistic view of Cummings’s motivations: I think he wants strong leaders who can push through reforms that will make their country better. But if you just optimize for strong leaders, which is pretty much what he seems to be trying to do, I think the default outcome is that you get strong leaders who can push through reforms that will make their country worse.

gjm 5 Oct 2021 16:04 UTC
10 points
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Dominic Cummings : Regime Change #2: A plea to Silicon Valley
It is not obvious that “increasing the power of democratically legitimized people” necessarily actually makes a system “more democratic”, and it is still less obvious that it makes it better. For instance: the President of the United States is democratically elected, but replacing the system currently laid down by the US constitution by one in which the president has dictatorial power would not obviously make it more democratic, and I claim that even if by some measures it were a more democratic system, it would none the less be a worse one.
Cummings’s proposals would concentrate power more, in something like the same way though hopefully not so drastically.
Calling Cummings’s proposal fascist seems overheated to me, but I think Ilya’s right that it’s a move in the direction of fascism rather than away from it. He wants
- a lot of power concentrated in the hands of the government (“a government that controls the government”), and more specifically of its leader (“a President who actually controls the government”)
  - How much power? Well, enough that it would “allow x1000 more progress” compared with e.g. the present state of affairs.
- that leader put into power by a combination of
  - the efforts of a small number of very rich people
  - appealing to “lowest common denominator” concerns of The People
    but note that he assumes that those very rich people, and the would-be leader they’d be funding and advising and providing political-manipulation services for, can decide that they want to do this before finding out exactly what it is that The People want, so it’s not like Cummings wants the real agenda to be democratically decided
and while that doesn’t come all that close to amounting to fascism, even when he points to Curtis Yarvin as a good person to listen to, it’s not exactly not fascist, if you see what I mean.

gjm 5 Oct 2021 15:47 UTC
10 points
on: Dominic Cummings : Regime Change #2: A plea to Silicon Valley
In this piece, Dominic Cummings appears to be endorsing both of the following propositions:
- The current and recent-past elected leaders of the US and the UK have been incredibly useless and incompetent, leading to (e.g.) huge numbers of preventable deaths in the Covid-19 pandemic.
- It would be a good idea to have “the government actually controlling the government”.
Since the second of these would put more power (maybe much more power) in the hands of those elected leaders, it seems like one of three things must be the case:
- He is confident that the only paths that lead to “the government actually controlling the government” also lead to much better leaders, perhaps because in order to grab that power they would need to be better leaders.
- He is confident that if we had “the government actually controlling the government”, the real power would not be in the hands of the Trumps and Bidens and Johnsons, but of their Cummings-like advisors whom he expects to be able to wield it responsibly and effectively.
- He is lying or bulshitting or thinking unclearly somehow. (In this category I include options like: what he really wants is an authoritarian state and he doesn’t much care about what it does; he hasn’t noticed the tension between “give more power to the elected leaders” and “recent elected leaders have been hopeless”; he doesn’t actually think as ill of those leaders as he says he does; he doesn’t really want “the government actually controlling the government” but hopes that calling for that will lead to something else that he does want; etc.)
The first of those seems really naïve, unless you conflate “better” with “stronger”. He mentions Lincoln and FDR as leaders who have actually controlled the government, and those are nice encouraging examples, but others who seem to have done it include Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, and Erdoğan, none of whom is quite so encouraging as those.
The second also seems naïve, both because political leaders with a lot of power tend to like to use it and because I don’t think there’s much reason to assume that political advisors of strong leaders will reliably be either wise or benevolent.
And the third is a bit of grab-bag, but none of the possibilities in that grab-bag seems very encouraging either.

gjm 3 Oct 2021 22:02 UTC
4 points
in reply to: Alumium’s comment on: D&D.Sci 4th Edition: League of Defenders of the Storm
It looks as if I did indeed have a sign error, so both my teams as currently constituted are pessimal rather than optimal according to my model. Working on fixing that now.

gjm 3 Oct 2021 19:10 UTC
5 points
in reply to: ooverthinkk’s comment on: Common knowledge facts about Leverage Research 1.0
D’oh! I’d forgotten that Larissa had commented here too. My apologies.
As I’ve said, I have no knowledge of any bullying that may or may not be occurring elsewhere (especially in person in the Bay Area), and if anyone’s getting bullied then that’s bad. If that isn’t common knowledge, then there’s a problem. But the things in this thread that you’ve taken exception to don’t seem to me to come close to bullying. (Obviously, though, they could be part of a general pattern of excessive hostility to all things Leverage.)
Do you think OP was wrong to post what they did? If so, is that because you think the things they’ve said about Leverage are factually wrong, or because you think people who think they see an organization behaving in potentially harmful ways shouldn’t say so, or what?

gjm 3 Oct 2021 18:59 UTC
4 points
in reply to: Alumium’s comment on: D&D.Sci 4th Edition: League of Defenders of the Storm
No offence taken. I did say there’s an excellent chance that I’ve made boneheaded errors, though, and I stand by that :-). I may or may not find time before the deadline to look over what I did and see if there are any errors boneheaded that even I can find them[1].
[1] I don’t mean that I’m exceptionally stupid; the point is that one’s own errors are usually extra-hard to spot.

gjm 3 Oct 2021 15:17 UTC
5 points
on: D&D.Sci 4th Edition: League of Defenders of the Storm
[An earlier version of this comment used teams that had accidentally been pessimized rather than optimized according to my model, as the result of a sign error. I think I have fixed it, though I make a lot of mistakes and I would be unsurprised if something were still broken, and the teams below might now make more sense. Thanks to Alumium for encouraging me to check for errors, though in fact I was already highly suspicious that I had made at least one.]
[After that, I thought I ought to check for overfitting, which I hadn’t done before because I’m lazy, and try a bit harder to avoid it. This resulted in a change to my regular team below. I was prompted to do this by the fact that Maxwell did something broadly similar to what I’d done, but more carefully, and got very different-looking results. I also tried something smarter for the PvP, driven mostly by realising that it would run quite efficiently using sklearn despite feeling expensive.]
Regular team:
ABGLP
PvP team:
BGNPT
I confess that here I just
made a random-forest model, tried all possible hands against DGPQT for the regular team, and ran some tournaments using that model to adjudicate for the PvP team. I haven’t made any attempt to use my brain to find any patterns, and it’s entirely possible that I’ve missed important things.
I hadn’t looked at anyone else’s comments before writing the first version of this. I did look at others’ comments between writing the first version of the above and correcting a sign-error bug, but I have made no other changes in my code. (In particular, the process that produced my PvP entry is in no way adapted to the entries others have already submitted.)
There is still an excellent chance, despite my having fixed one catastrophic bug, that I have made boneheaded errors that result in my teams actually being pessimized rather than optimized, having everyone off-by-one in the list of heroes, etc. :-)
My decision to do this fairly brainlessly wasn’t purely the result of laziness. OP is clearly intended to indicate that the game is super-complicated, so I wasn’t optimistic about the chances of spotting enough patterns to do better than a brainless approach. A few more technical details in case my entries turn out to do well enough or badly enough that anyone wants to learn from my success or failure:
The random forest model was built using the RandomForestClassifier class in the scikit-learn library for Python. It uses an ensemble of size 1000 and other parameters had their default values. It’s rather slow so for the tournament I used a cheaper random forest model. For PvP, what I did at first was to run 10 sub-tournaments with 30 players in each, initially selected at random. Each tournament is played round-robin and then three badly-performing hands are replaced by mutated versions of three well-performing hands. Scores in the tournament are not pure win/loss but are the total of the win probabilities according to the random forest model. After every 10 rounds in each tournament, I play another tournament using 3 randomly chosen players from each sub-tournament, again doing the replacing thing (so we get a little bit of mixing between sub-tournaments, but hopefully not so much that all diversity is lost too quickly). I ran a couple of hundred iterations of this and it seemed to have more or less converged. To choose my final PvP hand, I ran a single tournament on the best three hands from each subtournament using the more expensive and hopefully better random-forest model. -- But afterwards I thought better of this and decided instead to use the “multiplicative weights update” approach: just take all the possible teams and give each an initial “weight” of 1, then repeatedly play each against a random opponent and nudge its weight up or down according to the result, and choose the random opponents proportionally to the weights. Exactly what team comes out on top depends on exactly how you do the weight-nudging.