JacekLach

Karma: 145

JacekLach 29 Sep 2025 17:47 UTC
6 points
0
in reply to: Duncan Sabien (Inactive)’s comment on: CFAR update, and New CFAR workshops
What’s the vulnerable state you’re refering to here? Staying on site?

JacekLach 24 Dec 2024 13:20 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: Milli | Martin’s comment on: When Is Insurance Worth It?
Another common case where you get positive EV insurance is when the cost paid by you and the cost paid by the insurerer, when the bad event happens, are significantly different.
For example, if you get extended phone / device insurance from a manufacturer, when the device fails you would have to pay the retail price for a new device. The manufacturer however only needs to pay the production price, which given margins can be a small fraction of the retail price. Thus the manufacturer can set a premium that is (in expectation) somewhere in between those two prices, and you both benefit.

JacekLach 24 Dec 2024 13:18 UTC
1 point
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on: When Is Insurance Worth It?
I don’t think your case for how insurance companies make money (Appendix B) makes sense. The insurance company does not have logarithmic discounting on wealth, it will not be using Kelly to allocate bets. From the perspective of the company, it is purely dependent on the direct profitability of the bet—premium minus expected payout and overheads.
Separately, the claim that there is no alternative to Kelly is very weak. I guess you mean there is no formalized, mathematical alternative? Otherwise, I propose a very simple one: buy insurance if the cost of insurance is lower than the disutility of worrying about the bad outcomes covered by insurance. This is the ‘vibes based’ strategy you discuss at the beginning, but it is clearly superior to the Kelly calculator. In the case where Kelly says not to buy insurance, either:
1. you worry about the bad outcomes and that worry is more damaging than cost of insurance would be; you have lost utility
2. you do not worry about the bad outcomes more than cost of insurance; you would not have bought the insurance under vibes strategy either
Therefore the Kelly criterion can only be superior when it advises you to buy insurance for something you are not worried about. However, you are not likely to run this calculations about things you aren’t worried about, so these opportunities are hard to find.
Nevertheless, I’m glad the tool exists, because it might help me calibrate how much I should be worried about outcomes I can quantify.

JacekLach 4 Oct 2017 10:39 UTC
6 points
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in reply to: Trinley Goldenberg’s comment on: Slack
Yes, this post was very useful as advice to reverse to me. I think it possible now that one of the biggest problems with how I’m living my life today is optimising too hard for slack.
Low-confidence comment disclaimer; while I’ve had the concept pretty much nailed down before, I never before thought about it as something you might have too much off. After reading this post I realised that some people do not have enough slack in their life, implying you can choose to have less or more slack, implying it’s possible too have too much slack.
I don’t have abstract ‘this is what too much slack looks like’ clearly defined right now, but one thing resonates from my own experience. I often find myself with free time, and ‘waste it away’. I don’t really do anything on most weekends. Having more constraints as guidance for behaviour in free time could likely remediate that; but I seem to be very good at talking myself out of any recurrent commitments, saying that they would reduce my freedom/flexibility/slack.
At the same time, it seems to me that I’m happiest, most ‘alive’, most in the ‘flow’, in situations with exactly the kind of binding constraints this post talks of avoiding. The constraints focus you on the present, on the very moment, on being. For me this is clearest in sailing regattas—a clear purpose that acts as a binding constraint (to go as fast as possible while staying safe—a safety margin does not for slack make, since you are not willing to ignore crossing it), consuming all your attention (at least during the time you’re responsible for the ship, and often more).

I suppose one can stretch the metaphor and say that having no slack on too many dimensions is likely to squash you; but having slack everywhere leaves you floating around aimlessly. Keeping most constraints slack and choosing only a couple aligned ones to bind against is possibly a way to find purpose.

JacekLach 30 May 2017 18:48 UTC
0 points
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in reply to: CronoDAS’s comment on: Dragon Army: Theory & Charter (30min read)
TBH I strongly disagree with OP’s suggestion that 95% reliability is low / bad, at least read literally. I personally definitely fail verbal ‘soft commitments’ (“I expect this will be done by end of week”) with way more than 5% rate; probably more like 20-30. Part of it is being in business where hidden complexity strikes at any time, and estimating is hard; part of it is because of cultural communication norms.

If you ignore soft commitments, then the easy way to improve reliability is to make less hard commitments. Instead of “I’ll definitely be there at 9 am sharp”, say “I’ll do my best to be there at 9 am”. Manage expectations. Then if you have to message them 30 mins before that you’re stuck in traffic / running late, your reliability is not impacted.

For stuff with really hard acceptance criteria (you actually have to be there for 9 am, because the plane won’t wait), the right way to improve reliability is to build fault tolerant systems; make a soft commitment to be there an hour before, or have more people work on a problem than you expect to be necessary.

JacekLach 30 May 2017 18:38 UTC
0 points
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in reply to: cousin_it’s comment on: Dragon Army: Theory & Charter (30min read)
I don’t think the goal of OPs proposal is to learn any particular skill. To me it mostly looks like trying to build a tightly-knit group so that each member can use the others as external motivators and close friends to discuss life plans and ideas in detail not really possible between modern colleagues and friends. I.e. the goal is not learning a skill, it’s building a mutual support group that actually works.

JacekLach 30 May 2017 18:20 UTC
5 points
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in reply to: Pimgd’s comment on: Dragon Army: Theory & Charter (30min read)
You’re looking at content, not status (as implied by ‘knocking someone down a peg’). My immediate reaction to the top-level comment was: “well, they have some good points, but damn are they embarassing themselves with this language”. Possibly shaped by me being generally sceptical about the ideas in the OP.

As far as the bet is about the form of the post, rather than the content, I think Duncan’s pretty safe.

JacekLach 30 May 2017 17:35 UTC
0 points
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in reply to: evand’s comment on: Dragon Army: Theory & Charter (30min read)
Do you have examples of systems that reach this kind of reliabilty internally?

Most high-9 systems work by taking lots of low-9 components, and relying on not all of them failing at the same time. I.e. if you have 10 95% systems that fail completely independently, and you only need one of them to work, that gets you like eleven nines (99.9{11}%).

Expecting a person to be 99% reliable is ridiculous. That’s like two sick days per year, ignoring all other possible causes of failing to make a task. Instead you should build systems and organisations that have slack, so that one person failing at a particular point in time doesn’t make a project/org fail.

JacekLach 11 Jan 2017 17:44 UTC
4 points
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on: If I must eat meat, I eat pork
The initial argument that convinced you to not eat meat seems very strange to me:

Her: why won’t u eat rabbits? Me: because i had them as pets. i know them too well. they’re like people to me.

This reads to me as: I don’t think eating rabbits is immoral, but I have an aesthetic aversion to them because of emotional attachment, rather than moral consideration. Is that not the right reading?

Her: i will get you a pet chicken Me: … Me: omg i’m a vegetarian now :-/

So, you’ve now built extended your emotional attachment towards rabbits to all animals? Or just the possibly-pettable-ones? But firstly, why do you think that’s a good thing?

I guess as an instrumental tactic for “I want to become a vegetarian but can’t seem to stick to it”, ‘imagine your favourite pet, but they’re ’ might work. But it’s surprising that without that initial impetus this worked.

JacekLach 11 Jan 2017 17:39 UTC
5 points
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in reply to: gjm’s comment on: How can I spend money to improve my life?
FWIW (a year later) I read the statistic the same way you initially did, but didn’t do the comparison. Sorry! Thanks for doing the maths below and in the edit.

JacekLach 28 Mar 2014 21:07 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: philh’s comment on: Rationalist fiction: a Slice of Life IN HELL
Reminds me of talesofmu. Your strategy looks like trying to play the GM, and is likely to get you punished :)

JacekLach 6 Feb 2014 13:01 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: How can I spend money to improve my life?

For me I don’t see any reason to prefer archery over a martial art.

And there might not be any reason to do it for you, but other people might be uncomfortable with hitting other people, concerned about their hands (much easier to break a finger or twist your wrist if you’re doing martial arts than archery, I imagine), be looking for a relaxing rather than exciting hobby, etc.

JacekLach 6 Feb 2014 11:51 UTC
8 points
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in reply to: lmm’s comment on: How can I spend money to improve my life?
Morgan et all (2010) (http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2458/10/699/) estimate 11.1 cyclist deaths per 100000 cyclist-km in London.

Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate) estimates 8.5 road fatalities per 1 BILLION vehicle-km.

http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/sep/28/road-deaths-great-britain-data claims 125 motorcyclists died in road accidents for every billion miles travelled—the highest rate for all road users but also a year-on-year fall of 11%.

At 41 deaths per billion miles, the mortality rate for pedestrians was just above that of cyclists (35), with the former a year-on-year rise of 10% and the latter a fall of 6%.

Car occupants had by far the lowest mortality rate at four deaths per billion miles travelled.

JacekLach 25 Jan 2014 14:34 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: A1987dM’s comment on: Dark Arts of Rationality
Hm, somewhat, yes. What do you believe?

I mean it’s not purely at random, of course, but surely you need to go out and meet a lot of people.

JacekLach 23 Jan 2014 20:47 UTC
0 points
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in reply to: memoridem’s comment on: 2013 Survey Results

Isn’t there anything you already know but wouldn’t like to forget?

Yeah, that’s pretty much the problem. Not really. I.e. there are stuff I know that would be inconvenient to forget, because I use this knowledge every day. But since I already use it every day, SR seems unnecessary.

Things I don’t use every day are not essential—the cost of looking them up is minuscule since it happens rarely.

I suppose a plausible use case would be birth dates of family members, if I didn’t have google calendar to remind me when needed.

Edit: another use case that comes to mind would be names. I’m pretty bad with names (though I’ve recently begun to suspect that probably I’m as bad with remembering names as anyone else, I just fail to pay attention when people introduce themselves). But asking to take someone’s picture ‘so that I can put it on a flashcard’ seems awkward. Facebook to the rescue, I guess?

(though I don’t really meet that many people, so again—possibly not worth the effort in maintaining such a system)

JacekLach 23 Jan 2014 20:45 UTC
0 points
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in reply to: Nornagest’s comment on: 2013 Survey Results
I’m a software dev.

In programming this might mean functions in a particular library that you’re working with (the C++ STL, for example)

Right. I guess I somewhat do ‘spaced repetition’ here, just by the fact that every time I interact with a particular library I’m reminded of its function. But that is incidental—I don’t really care about remembering libraries that I don’t use, and those that I use regularly I don’t need SR to maintain.

I suppose medical conditions looks more plausible as a use case—you really need to remember a large set of facts, any of which is actually used very rarely. But that still doesn’t seem useful to me personally—I can think of no dataset that’d be worth the effort.

I guess I should just assume I’m an outlier there, and simply keep SR in mind in case I ever find myself needing it.

JacekLach 23 Jan 2014 20:13 UTC
12 points
1
in reply to: A1987dM’s comment on: Dark Arts of Rationality
You don’t enjoy company of most members-of-your-preferred-sex, but are hopeful that there are people out there that you could spend your life with. The problem is that finding them is painful, because you have to spend time with people whose company you won’t enjoy during the search.

By hacking yourself to enjoy their company you make the search actually pleasant. Though hopefully your final criteria does not change.

JacekLach 23 Jan 2014 19:12 UTC
0 points
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in reply to: MondSemmel’s comment on: 2013 Survey Results

People, use spaced repetition! It’s been studied academically and been shown to work brilliantly; it’s really easy to incorporate in your daily life in comparison to most other LW material etc… Well, I’m comparatively disappointed with these numbers, though I assume they are still far higher than in most other communities

I’m one of the people who have never used spaced repetition, though I’ve heard of it. I don’t doubt it works, but what do you actually need to remember nowadays? I’d probably use it if I was learning a new language (which I don’t really plan to do anytime soon)… What other skills work nicely with spaced repetition?

I just don’t feel the need to remember things when I have google / wikipedia on my phone.

JacekLach 16 Jan 2014 23:29 UTC
0 points
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in reply to: Emile’s comment on: On Voting for Third Parties
Wouldn’t a better threat be to switch to Bob anyway? (in which case Alice effectively loses 2 votes instead of one)

JacekLach 16 Jan 2014 15:40 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: somervta’s comment on: Stupid Questions Thread—January 2014

No, there’s no particular reason to think an FAI would be better at learning than an UFAI analogue, at least not as far as I can see.

I believe you have this backwards—the OP is asking whether a FAI would be worse at learning than an UFAI, because of additional constraints on its improvement. If so:

then a non Friendly AI would eventually (possibly quite quickly) become smarter than any FAI built.

Of course one of the first actions of a FAI would be to prevent any UFAI from being built at all.