jmh

• jmh 19 Sep 2019 13:40 UTC

  1 point

  on: False Dilem­mas w/​ exercises

  This post is about see­ing con­straints in plan­ning/​agents/​en­vi­ron­ments and how to wield those con­straints effec­tively to achieve your goals.

  There is a huge liter­a­ture on this type of agenda set­ting. I think for the most part one per­son achiev­ing their goals will de­pend a lot on how well oth­ers, with com­pet­ing and pos­si­bly in­com­pat­i­ble goal, rec­og­nize the situ­a­tion and for­mu­late their own strate­gies.

• jmh 18 Sep 2019 16:57 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: interstice's comment on: Ac­cel­er­at­ing the cap­i­tal­is­tic ten­den­cies of so­cial sys­tems to do good

  Agree with most of what is said. I would also point to ed­u­ca­tional al­ter­na­tives like the Khan Academy.

  Re­gard­ing ” If the sys­tems are as a cor­rupt as you think they are, they should de­stroy them­selves on their own in any case.” I am won­der­ing if that is say­ing we will not see sta­ble sys­tems that are in­her­ently cor­rupt (no sta­ble equil­ibrium with cor­rup­tion) or “that level” is not sta­ble—but I didn’t see any­thing that sug­gest some ex­ces­sively large level of cor­rup­tion.

  I think I would be more con­cerned about cor­rupt prac­tices driv­ing out pos­si­ble in­no­va­tions and per­haps limit­ing growth (but here not sure as I see China’s econ­omy and polity as largely cor­rupt but they seem to be grow­ing fine and are as sta­ble as the USA or EU I would sug­gest)

• jmh 16 Sep 2019 18:33 UTC

  1 point

  on: Refram­ing the evolu­tion­ary benefit of sex

  In­ter­est­ing ar­ti­cle on Quanta. https://​​www.quan­ta­m­agaz­ine.org/​​new-hy­brid-species-remix-old-genes-cre­atively-20190910/​​

• jmh 15 Sep 2019 14:04 UTC

  2 points

  on: Refram­ing the evolu­tion­ary benefit of sex

  Not quite sure where this would fit into your views. A num­bers of years back I came across an ar­ti­cle about snails. Those that lived be­low of cer­tain depth of wa­ter were uni­sex—self repli­cat­ing. The same species of snail, when liv­ing in shal­lower wa­ters dis­played male and fe­male and re­pro­duc­tion re­quired the ex­change of ge­netic ma­te­ri­als as you men­tioned.

  The the­ory on why that was ob­served was at a cer­tain depth the snails were not con­fronted with a lot of the dis­eases they faced in the shal­lower wa­ters. Shar­ing the ge­netic code im­proved their abil­ity to fight the dis­eases, IIRC.

• jmh 14 Sep 2019 14:03 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Liron's comment on: The Power to Un­der­stand “God”

  I do not see that it is my po­si­tion to sug­gest or ar­gue that you be any­thing. I would sug­gest the “bur­den of proof” why X does y will always be­long with X.

  If athe­ism is the faith po­si­tion you want to defend or challenge with your power of speci­fics that is fine with me. It would be en­gag­ing shminux’s sug­ges­tion rather than sidestep­ping it.

  I am not defend­ing or re­fut­ing any­thing here but will point out that athe­ism is a state­ment about some­thing not ex­ist­ing. Prov­ing some­thing does not ex­ist is a highly prob­le­matic ex­er­cise.

• jmh 14 Sep 2019 13:26 UTC

  1 point

  on: The Power to Solve Cli­mate Change

  I’m find­ing this post difficult. The main rea­son I think is that the most fo­cuses on con­trol­ling the tem­per­a­ture change rather than fo­cus­ing on the re­sults of tem­per­a­ture change and iden­ti­fy­ing the re­sult­ing prob­lem.

  Both pro­vided links are nearly mute on that ques­tion, pro­vid­ing a short para­graph with­out fur­ther dis­cus­sion or sup­port.

  NASA:

  The im­pact of global warm­ing is far greater than just in­creas­ing tem­per­a­tures. Warm­ing mod­ifies rain­fall pat­terns, am­plifies coastal ero­sion, length­ens the grow­ing sea­son in some re­gions, melts ice caps and glaciers, and al­ters the ranges of some in­fec­tious dis­eases. Some of these changes are already oc­cur­ring.

  To­mor­row:

  A cou­ple of de­grees change in the av­er­age yearly tem­per­a­ture is far from a minor event. When Earth”s tem­per­a­ture was 5°C lower, the sea level was 120m lower and all of North­ern Europe and Canada were cov­ered by a gi­gan­tic ice cap (one could hike from Ver­mont to Green­land). Fur­ther­more, av­er­age tem­per­a­tures do not tell the whole story. As av­er­age tem­per­a­tures in­crease, the like­li­hood of ex­treme tem­per­a­ture events might in­crease as well.

  A change of a cou­ple of de­grees over the sur­face of the Earth first causes the oceans to ab­sorb the ex­tra heat. In the pro­cess, they ex­pand (rais­ing the sea level) and cause in­creased evap­o­ra­tion, which leads to per­turbed air and wa­ter cur­rents. This yields an in­creased like­li­hood of ex­treme weather events, such as drought, hur­ri­canes or floods. This is already ob­served as e.g. coral reefs are start­ing to die.

  Longer term effects are harder to quan­tify as a tem­per­a­ture change this sud­den has never been wit­nessed in the past. To get an rough idea, this map shows what the world will look like 4° warmer while this ar­ti­cle shows how sen­si­tive birds and bees are to cli­mate change. Fur­ther­more, higher tem­per­a­tures and more ex­treme weather causes crops to fail which will force re­fugees to flee in­hab­it­able re­gions.That’s ul­ti­mately bad for the econ­omy.

  The NASA state­ment seem, in most cases am­bigu­ous. Chang­ing rain pat­terns may be good, may be bad and the as­sess­ment prob­a­bly de­pends on where you are. Length­en­ing grow­ing sea­sons seems like a good thing—we can feed more peo­ple, food maybe gets cheaper to pro­duce and so cheaper to buy? I would like to know more about the af­fects of coastal ero­sion—I don’t be­lieve it is one sided and always detri­men­tal.

  To­mor­row offers more but also in­cludes more “weasel” terms—might be, hard to quan­tify....

  Ad­di­tion­ally, an­other NASA link (found when look­ing for how tem­per­a­tures are es­ti­mated for the past when we don’t have recorded data) in­di­cated 65 mil­lion years back tem­per­a­tures were 10 − 15 de­grees C higher. Life cer­tainly seems to have been flour­ish­ing back them.

  So, what speci­fics should be be look­ing at here. Seems like we’re jump­ing on the “stop the warm­ing” train with­out con­sid­er­ing the benefits to warm­ing and then con­sid­er­ing the bet­ter ap­proach might well be to ac­cept higher tem­per­a­tures (so it doesn’t mat­ter the cause re­ally) and de­velop the tech­nolo­gies that are con­sis­tent with the evolv­ing en­vi­ron­ment. Or more likely, some mid­dle ground—there are lots of rea­sons to limit emis­sions un­re­lated to tem­per­a­ture ris­ing.

  I just don’t get why I re­ally need to care about the av­er­age tem­per­a­ture as the main fo­cus of ei­ther prob­lem or solu­tion. This is much more com­pli­cated than that and all the speci­fics here seem to cast as much shadow as light.

• jmh 13 Sep 2019 19:04 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Liron's comment on: The Power to Solve Cli­mate Change

  Poli­tics and policy more of­ten than now works to in­ter­nal­ize re­wards and ex­ter­nal­ize cost for a rele­vant block or spe­cial in­ter­est.

• jmh 13 Sep 2019 16:23 UTC

  1 point

  on: The Power to Un­der­stand “God”

  I would like to see shminux challenge ad­dressed here. Let’s pick an­other faith based case—or even the athe­ist po­si­tion (which I would ar­gue is just as much about faith as the re­li­gious per­sons). I agree with the po­si­tion that ra­tio­nal­ity leads not to no be­lief (in god or some other po­si­tion) but an ag­nos­tic po­si­tion.

• jmh 11 Sep 2019 13:35 UTC

  1 point

  on: Is com­pe­ti­tion good?

  Two ob­ser­va­tions.

  I think you use “value” in a con­fus­ing man­ner. If value is the nom­i­nal price then value in­creases or de­creases only if to­tal in­come in­creases or de­creases. If value is used in the sense I think you gen­er­ally mean, then that is a largely (over­whelm­ingly largely IMO) sub­jec­tive judge­ment and it’s not clear if buy­ing the car or mak­ing the dona­tion a su­pe­rior out­come.

  Ad­di­tion­ally, I think the con­clu­sion, seems to needs some­thing said about what the new restau­rant owner and work­ers are do­ing. If we’re in a zero-sum game then it re­ally should be a wash. If, as gen­er­ally ac­cepted, mar­kets tend to be pos­i­tive sum games then we have a case of a smaller share of a larger pie (that is some of the em­ploy­ees will now eat at the first restau­rant where as they could not be­fore as they were un­em­ployed, or mak­ing less money).

  The other ob­ser­va­tion is about net­work effects. It used to be that busi­nesses, par­tic­u­larly restau­rants type busi­nesses I think, used think they needed to be away from other restau­rants. It was a form of spa­cial com­pe­ti­tion for de­mand. But that view has fallen to re­al­ity. We we that prox­im­ity to other com­peti­tors is not that bad and can ac­tu­ally in­crease to­tal de­mand for all on the sup­ply side. That seems to be driven by net­work type effects. Think about the din­ning/​club dis­tricts in cities, shop­ping mall and their food courts.

  Of course there are limits but the sim­ple model of com­pe­ti­tion don’t re­ally seem to cap­ture the real dy­nam­ics of mar­ket com­pe­ti­tion.

• jmh 10 Sep 2019 16:01 UTC

  3 points

  on: Is my re­sult wrong? Maths vs in­tu­ition vs evolu­tion in learn­ing hu­man preferences

  I won­der if part of messi­ness might stem from con­fus­ing var­i­ous do­mains and ranges. For ex­am­ple, for hu­man, we have a com­plex of wants—some are driven very much by phys­iolog­i­cal fac­tors, some by cul­tural fac­tor and some by in­di­vi­d­ual fac­tors (in­clud­ing things like what I did yes­ter­day or 5 hours ago). We might call these our prefer­ence do­main.

  Then we need some func­tion map­ping the prefer­ences into the range of be­hav­iors that are ob­serv­able. As­sum­ing that there is some­thing ap­prox­i­mat­ing a func­tion here (caveat—not a math guy here so maybe that is mi­sused/​loaded here). From that we have some hope for de­duc­ing the be­hav­ior back to the prefer­ence.

  How­ever, we should not con­sider the above three sources as com­ing from the same do­main, or map­ping to the same range. Con­fu­sion may come in from both the fuzzi­ness (I’m im­plic­itly agree­ing with the gen­eral can­not in­fer prefer­ences from be­hav­ior that well as a gen­eral propo­si­tion) of the “cor­rect” func­tion as well as a con­fu­sion of as­so­ci­at­ing a be­hav­ior to one of the three ranges, and then at­tempt­ing to de­duce the prefer­ence.

  If I see A do­ing x and as­cribe x to the phys­iolog­i­cal range and then at­tempt to de­duce the prefer­ence (in the phys­iolog­i­cal do­main) when x is ac­tu­ally in the in­di­vi­d­ual range for A I will prob­a­bly see a lot of er­rors. But maybe not 100% er­ror.

  I do think there is some­thing to the we’re all hu­man so can rec­og­nize a lot of mean­ing in ac­tion from oth­ers—but things like cul­ture (as men­tioned) does in­fluence perfor­mance here. So, what is an ac­cept­able ac­cu­racy rate? Is the goal math­e­mat­i­cal cer­tainty or some­thing else?

• jmh 5 Sep 2019 12:23 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Liron's comment on: The Power to De­mol­ish Bad Arguments

  Not in­vested ei­ther, but I thought its view of the fu­ture where, in gen­eral, peo­ple moved from own­ing trans­porta­tion cap­i­tal (cars) to one of an on de­mand use of trans­porta­tion ser­vice seems to have some sense to it. Cou­pled with the move to­ward rental of per­sonal as­sets while not used, like the AirBnB model it looks a bit bet­ter too (per­haps as a tran­si­tion state...?)

  That does seem to de­pend on more than merely the tech­ni­cal and fi­nan­cial as­pect. I sus­pect there is also the whole cul­tural and so­cial (and prob­a­bly the le­gal li­a­bil­ity and in­surance as­pects for the au­tonomous car) part that will need to shift to sup­port that type of mar­ket shift.

  Not sure if this is a move in the similar di­rec­tion but one of the big car rental com­pa­nies just launched (or will) a new ser­vice for longer term rental. Ba­si­cally you can pay a monthly fee and drive most of the cars they offer. The mar­ket here seemed to be those that might want a differ­ence car ev­ery few weeks (BMW this month, Audi next, any maybe Lexus a bit later...). In the back of my mind I can­not help be see some time of sig­nal­ing mo­ti­va­tion here and won­der just how long that lasts if ev­ery­one can do it—all the differ­ent cars you are seen driv­ing no long sig­nals any re­ally type of sta­tus. Still, there are clearly some func­tional as­pects that make it ap­peal­ing over hav­ing to own mul­ti­ple ve­hi­cles.

• jmh 3 Sep 2019 12:12 UTC

  3 points

  on: The Power to De­mol­ish Bad Arguments

  I find that I strug­gle with the rhetoric of the ar­gu­ment. Shouldn’t the goal be to illu­mi­nate facts and truths rather than merely prov­ing the other side wrong? Speci­fics cer­tainly al­low the illu­mi­na­tion of truths (and so get­ting less wrong in our de­ci­sions and ac­tions). How­ever, it al­most reads like the goal is to use speci­fic­ity as some rhetor­i­cal tool in much the same way statis­tics can be mi­sused to color the lens and mis­lead.

  I’m sure that is not your goal so as­sume one of the hid­den as­sump­tions here could be put in the ti­tle. One ad­di­tional word: The Power to De­mol­ish BAD Ar­gu­ments might set a bet­ter tone at the start.

• jmh 28 Aug 2019 12:58 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Ericf's comment on: A Per­sonal Ra­tion­al­ity Wishlist

  True, it would be a very awk­ward mechanism to al­low the front wheel to be turned.

  Clearly an ex­am­ple of what Said was point­ing out!

  Edit—af­ter some though driv­ing home yes­ter­day it oc­curred that I was in er­ror in agree­ing with the “can­not steer” claim. My er­ror was im­pos­ing the image of the rear drive chain ar­range­ment as the only way to drive the front wheel. That is not the case and it seem a few oth­ers be­sides Ericf and I fell into that er­ror in mind­set.

• jmh 28 Aug 2019 12:55 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Elizabeth's comment on: How do you learn for­eign lan­guage vo­cab­u­lary, be­yond Anki?

  I did un­der­stand that. I find that my abil­ity to read Korean is im­prov­ing with my abil­ity to un­der­stand the spo­ken lan­guage and my vo­cab­u­lary im­proved faster than with just flash cards.

  Might be me but my think­ing was still along the lines of form­ing more con­nec­tions to the mean­ing and so mak­ing it more effi­cient learn­ing of the vo­cab­u­lary.

• jmh 27 Aug 2019 13:13 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Richard Meadows's comment on: How do you learn for­eign lan­guage vo­cab­u­lary, be­yond Anki?

  I do like that sug­ges­tion about try­ing to re­move the English word and just try to as­so­ci­ate the for­eign word with the con­cept/​thing.

• jmh 27 Aug 2019 13:08 UTC

  1 point

  on: How do you learn for­eign lan­guage vo­cab­u­lary, be­yond Anki?

  not sure if this would help or not. https://​​www.youtube.com/​​watch?v=Ab­vaITy3oeQ

  Ba­si­cally some­one talk­ing about how to use Anki effec­tively based on his own ex­pe­riences and what he found he was do­ing wrong.

  It might be not so great as it’s about learn­ing med­i­cal terms for med school so not quite a new lan­guage.

  Not sure if you’ve seen Qui­zlet be­fore or not. I like that tools it offers. If you have not already looked at that you might take a look. Not sure how easy it would be but Qui­zlet also al­lows shar­ing decks with oth­ers so if you have any­one you are learn­ing with—or are in any on­line groups for learn­ing Ger­man that might provide some op­tions to help.

  It sounds like you’ve already homed in on one of the big items—rele­vance and con­text to you per­son­ally.

  One last thing, do you speak the word aloud? If not maybe try. That will en­gage other parts of your brain and so per­haps cre­ate more links to the mean­ing and a stronger mem­ory of the word and mean­ing.

  Last edit… Do you listen to any Ger­man lan­guage mu­sic or watch Ger­man lan­guage movies/​shows?

• jmh 27 Aug 2019 12:49 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Said Achmiz's comment on: A Per­sonal Ra­tion­al­ity Wishlist

  Hmm, never thought about it but an all wheel drive bike sounds like it might be use­ful—maybe as off road/​moun­tain bike. (Said by the guy who has rid­den the bike he bough at least 5 years ago about 5 time now....)

• jmh 24 Aug 2019 21:04 UTC

  4 points

  on: Ac­tu­ally updating

  Along the same lines as TurnTrout, I was won­der­ing about the ab­strac­tion ver­sus spe­cific situ­a­tion. I am not ask­ing that any share any­thing they would not be com­fortable with. How­ever, I do think ab­strac­tion from one­self in the anal­y­sis can just be an­other one of the pro­tec­tion mechanisms that can be used to al­low us to ap­pear to be mak­ing progress while while still avoid­ing the un­der­ly­ing truth driv­ing our be­hav­iors.

  That said, I think Sara offers some very good items to con­sider.

  Okay, this next bit is not di­rectly re­lated but seems im­plicit in the post­ing, and other posts I’ve read here. Does the LW com­mu­nity tend to see the hu­man mind and “per­son” as a col­lec­tion of en­tities/​per­son­al­ities/​agents/​think­ing pro­cesses? Or am I jump­ing to some com­pletely ab­surd con­clu­sion on that?

• jmh 23 Aug 2019 15:00 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Hazard's comment on: Para­dox­i­cal Ad­vice Thread

  Yes, I think that helped.

  Very rele­vant to this post:

  “Don’t over think things.” ver­sus “If it seems clear and ob­vi­ous, you don’t re­ally un­der­stand it.”

  Think­ing of the skin in the game and asym­met­ric jus­tice ex­am­ple, I won­der if one as­pect might be con­sid­er­ing why the say­ing came about. Skin in the game seems to be some­thing about *oth­ers* we in­ter­act with on some­thing. We’re happy to join in to play un­der those terms, per­haps some in­cen­tive to trust the other will also make an effort. The asym­met­ric jus­tice as­pect is more about how we might be­have to a large ex­tent in­de­pen­dent of what the oth­ers are do­ing.

  We might also want to say both are say­ing the same thing, but illus­trat­ing a differ­ent facet. If no one has any skin in the game how would mis­takes be pun­ished? The in­cen­tives for all hav­ing skin in the game is about get­ting peo­ple to join (play with the oth­ers) while the asym­met­ric jus­tice in­cen­tive notes the cost of that buy-in to get a game played.

  Not all all sure how far that get though. It is a very in­ter­est­ing thought you’ve given.

• jmh 23 Aug 2019 11:35 UTC

  3 points

  on: In­ten­tional Bucket Errors

  I won­der if cast­ing the ap­proach as a pru­dent ap­pli­ca­tion of Oc­cam’s Ra­zor might make it a bit less need­ful of defense.

  If one can sim­plify things by treat­ing to ar­guably differ­ent things the same and thereby shed light and gain a bet­ter un­der­stand­ing of ei­ther or both that seems use­ful.