jmh

• jmh 19 Jul 2019 13:41 UTC

  8 points

  in reply to: quanticle's comment on: When does adding more peo­ple re­li­ably make a sys­tem bet­ter?

  From a slightly differ­ent slant, where I work the ex­ec­u­tives de­cided, maybe 5 years ago, that they would start hiring only from the 10 schools and only the top can­di­dates from those schools. When we get a new CEO dur­ing one of the com­pany “town­hall” meet­ings that sub­ject came up.

  The new CEO noted a dis­cus­sion in the board room re­lated to that. The bot­tom line was that for the most part none of the top peo­ple had de­grees from such schools. One might add that the com­pany had grown to it’s dom­i­nant mar­ket po­si­tion with a work­force that did not re­flect such a pro­file ei­ther.

  It would seem the ap­proach was scrapped.

  I think the un­der­ly­ing ap­proaches are ac­tu­ally the same—the de­sire for a “sim­ple” (at least in the sense of clearly defined pro­cess or heuris­tic) solu­tion to a rather difficult prob­lem. How does one rec­og­nize just how [one] will add great value to fu­ture ac­tivi­ties that are by na­ture not re­ally driven by any one in­di­vi­d­ual’s abil­ities or di­rect con­tri­bu­tion?

• jmh 18 Jul 2019 11:50 UTC

  1 point

  on: Why did we wait so long for the bi­cy­cle?

  That some­one hap­pens at some point rather than an­other point is an in­ter­est­ing ques­tion to ex­plore but is also one that prob­a­bly sel­dom has good an­swers. Still, in­tel­lec­tual cu­ri­os­ity is a goal in self.

  I won­der if a bet­ter start­ing point for the in­quiry might not ac­tu­ally be why the in­ven­tion was in­vented when it was—why the in­ven­tor made the effort in the first place. What prob­lem was be­ing solved. We can then look at var­i­ous limit­ing fac­tors to see if they would have made the effort fu­tile if done at some ear­lier pe­riod of time.

  That might help place some mar­kets in his­tory on when the in­ven­tion be­came fea­si­ble.

  But the ques­tion seems to have the two parts:

  1) When the re­al­ities of the world sup­port such an ac­tion/​in­ven­tion.

  2) When does some­one have that “oh, duh” mo­ment when they thing “We could do this [eas­ier] if X were pre­sent and I can figure out how to have X.”

  We can rea­son­ably get an­swers to the first part. I think for the sec­ond part we will find that more challeng­ing.

  A re­lated ques­tion might also be about in­ven­tive thoughts and vi­sion that were im­pos­si­ble at the time they were thought and the­o­ret­i­cally de­signed and what role they had an shap­ing the fu­ture.

  That re­minds me lyrics in an old song (old as in 80 or 90s not 1500s ;-) “if you can­not change the world change your­self. if you can­not change your­self, change the world”

• jmh 18 Jul 2019 11:30 UTC

  11 points

  in reply to: Ruby's comment on: Why did we wait so long for the bi­cy­cle?

  ″ will­ing to aban­don an­ces­tor wor­ship, ” this phrase in par­tic­u­lar makes me won­der if the ques­tion here and the one about why China didn’t in­vent sci­ence don’t share much in the an­a­lyt­i­cal do­main space.

• jmh 11 Jul 2019 12:55 UTC

  1 point

  on: How can guessti­mates work?

  This state­ment made me won­der: ” Things are gen­er­ally closer to op­ti­mal equil­ibria, and equil­ibria are more leg­ible/​pre­dictable than non-quil­ibria.”

  
  

  And I might be think­ing in­cor­rectly my­self here as well as not fully fol­low­ing your though.

  Why would the equil­ibria po­si­tion be more pre­dictable than off equil­ibria? One thought might be that we have this sense of bal­ance so in an equil­ibrium we feel that it right (and us­ing “feel” is prob­a­bly a poor word choice but lit­tle time to find the right word). But that doesn’t mean we can then make any types of pre­dic­tions.

  The thought that came to me was more along the idea, if we gen­er­ally un­der­stand where the equilbirum po­si­tion should be then we have some idea of where we should go. (Think stan­dard econ the­ory of prices as sig­nals and ar­bi­trage to equil­ibrate across mar­kets).

  How­ever, if we are at the equil­ibrium po­si­tion it might not be clear what hap­pens if we do some­thing we want to do but have never done be­fore. Will that be con­sis­tent with equil­ibrium or dis­rup­tive. I think this does fit with the whole “gues­ti­mate” ap­proach to pred­i­ca­tion and fore­cast­ing. Per­haps your view on more pre­dictabil­ity then comes from hav­ing the equil­ibrium as the ini­tial po­si­tion you start from. But what if equil­ibrium is more like a place where in­for­ma­tion is ac­tu­ally lost?

• jmh 10 Jul 2019 14:04 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: romeostevensit's comment on: 87,000 Hours or: Thoughts on Home Ownership

  I think one as­pect is that fi­nan­cial as­sets are merely stores of wealth with po­ten­tial for growth/​re­turns as well as risks. The house has both of those as well as a di­rect use value in con­sum­ing the hous­ing ser­vices. Ad­di­tion­ally it offers some­thing of a risk/​un­cer­tainty miti­gat­ing role. Once paid for the cost of con­sum­ing that hous­ing ser­vices is pretty low so even if you see a bit hit to your in­come you still have a sta­ble place to build from.

  I think it’s re­ally all the non-pe­cu­niary as­pects that get missed when anal­y­sis starts rely­ing too strongly on the mon­e­tary equiv­alence point of view; by which I mean we start fil­ter­ing those as­pects out and just don’t see them.

• jmh 10 Jul 2019 12:14 UTC

  5 points

  on: Do bond yield curve in­ver­sions re­ally in­di­cate there is likely to be a re­ces­sion?

  A cou­ple of thoughts.

  One, the in­ver­sion seems to be in line with most credit cy­cle the­o­ries of eco­nomic ac­tivity I think. Ba­si­cally, dur­ing an ex­pan­sion debt in­creases and as the econ­omy reaches it’s peak you may see more re­li­ance on shorter term debt for a num­ber of rea­sons. When the short term debt costs rise that type of fi­nanc­ing drives costs up, and so the marginal ac­tivi­ties out of the mar­ket. Mar­ket ac­tivi­ties are in­ter­de­pen­dent within an econ­omy so you start see­ing the dom­ino effect play out.

  The other thought I had was are we talk­ing real eco­nomic ac­tivi­ties, re­ces­sion, or fi­nan­cial mar­ket ac­tivi­ties (bear mar­ket/​crash)? I think that mat­ters if one wants to ex­plore “what ac­tions” any­one might con­sider tak­ing. And, the an­swer will likely de­pend on the per­son’s spe­cific situ­a­tion. Here it might be a bit like the dis­tinc­tion be­tween re­ces­sion and de­pres­sions—re­ces­sion if your neigh­bor looses the job, de­pres­sion is you loose the job. How se­cure is your em­ploy­ment and in­come out­look is prob­a­bly a more im­por­tant ques­tion than if we have a re­ces­sion in 2020.

  I found this https://​​www.forbes.com/​​sites/​​john­to­bey/​​2019/​​05/​​31/​​yes-the-in­verted-yield-curve-fore­shad­ows-some­thing-but-not-a-re­ces­sion/​​#6b593af32800 and it might have some in­sights for you. I think the point that ev­ery case of in­verted curves is not the same—you need to un­der­stand the un­der­ly­ing drivers—is par­tic­u­larly im­por­tant to con­sider. As always, the devil will be in the de­tails but ev­ery­one seems to want the sim­ple heuris­tic. (I would think some Bayesian would be hav­ing fun here and maybe some­one has info on that type of in­sight). I re­call see­ing some­thing about du­ra­tion of the in­ver­sion as well mat­ter­ing but I se­ri­ously doubt one could say X days/​​weeks or less no re­ces­sion but over that....

  I think one can look at the curve in­ver­sion as one data el­e­ment, not re­ally a pri­mary cause (my first com­ment aside) and put that in con­text with a num­ber of other as­pect. One, we’ve had a very long ex­pan­sion—but it’s not be re­ally ex­cit­ing so per­haps it can run longer. We are in a pres­i­den­tial elec­tion cy­cle; they tent to be pos­si­ble for ag­gre­gate eco­nomic ac­tivity. The geopoli­ti­cal land­scape is dis­turb­ing at best but it’s not clear to me if that will be a pos­i­tive or nega­tive for any given do­mes­tic econ­omy, USA or other. In­fla­tion re­mains tame. Em­ploy­ment mostly okay (USA mar­kets at least).

  I think fears of re­ces­sions provide some­thing of a wake up call to many. They worry and then look at what they have done in terms of sav­ings and bor­row­ing and it prob­a­bly scares many. Rather than treat­ing the situ­a­tion as some­thing of a new years re­s­olu­tion—so soon for­got­ten once the new years passes—con­sider mak­ing changes to be­hav­ior in the good times.

• jmh 9 Jul 2019 12:05 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Raemon's comment on: “Ra­tion­al­iz­ing” and “Sit­ting Bolt Upright in Alarm.”

  Would you place mo­ti­vated er­rors, gen­er­ally, in the same bucket as con­fir­ma­tion bias type think­ing?

• jmh 8 Jul 2019 11:44 UTC

  1 point

  on: 87,000 Hours or: Thoughts on Home Ownership

  I did not read—so prob­a­bly should not com­ment, but will any­way. In a very quick skim­ming noth­ing jumped out at me re­gard­ing the as­pect of time hori­zons and par­tic­u­larly wealth trans­fer to the next gen­er­a­tion.

  Did I just miss that? If not would adding the idea of in­ter tem­po­ral trans­fers (in­her­i­tance) change any of the con­clu­sions?

  [Edit to add] While not about a house, I re­cently sold a trailer and truck. Given the re­sponse I was clearly un­der mar­ket price but as I was re­ally in­ter­ested start­ing to “clean up” my pos­ses­sions I am not cry­ing about the pos­si­ble op­por­tu­nity loss there. But was I did give some thought to was: What was a rough es­ti­mate of the rental rate on the two for the time I owned them. A very quick and crude calcu­la­tion in my head came to un­der $400 a month eas­ily.

  That is a lit­tle de­cep­tive in that these were not re­ally used daily or even weekly—lots of down time. So (as­sum­ing I could even find a place to rent what I had) I might have come about bet­ter rent­ing rather than buy­ing. But that is only be­cause I was not us­ing them daily. If the house worked out the same I think I come out miles ahead buy­ing the house in most situ­a­tion. (Anec­do­tal to be sure and pos­si­ble not a good com­par­i­son set­ting)

• jmh 1 Jul 2019 16:44 UTC

  1 point

  on: A Sketch of Good Communication

  Not sure how, of even if, this re­lates but seemed some­what con­nected to what you’re look­ing at. https://​​www.quan­ta­m­agaz­ine.org/​​were-stuck-in­side-the-uni­verse-lee-smolin-has-an-idea-for-how-to-study-it-any­way-20190627/​​

  For some rea­son your par­en­thet­i­cal made me think of some of what Smolin was say­ing about how we view the uni­verse and how we should try to model it.

• jmh 1 Jul 2019 15:09 UTC

  2 points

  on: How can we mea­sure cre­ativity?

  ″ But I don’t have any­thing bet­ter to use for my ac­tual goal, which is a mea­surable task that taxes cre­ativity and *noth­ing else* ”

  Maybe I’m read­ing this wrong, but why would one want to tax cre­ativity? Seems to me that for the most part, cre­ativity will have a lot of pub­lic good char­ac­ter­is­tics—though I sup­pose one might sug­gest cre­ative de­struc­tion is a bet­ter view...

• jmh 1 Jul 2019 12:30 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: ChristianKl's comment on: The Com­pe­tence Myth

  Not com­pletely sur­prised but would won­der how much of that is ac­counted by merger and it that should be con­sid­ered the same as failure/​bankruptcy cases.

  I sus­pect the tech­nol­ogy that would make merg­ers less costly has in­creased since the 50s. If so there were per­haps merg­ers that were not tak­ing place but would have.

• jmh 1 Jul 2019 12:26 UTC

  3 points

  on: The Com­pe­tence Myth

  Sounds like the mar­gins of life are ruled by the Peter Prin­ci­ple.

• jmh 1 Jul 2019 12:17 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Stuart_Armstrong's comment on: Apoca­lypse, corrupted

  I sus­pect that is true but won­der if that works the best or not. This may ap­ply in a lot of cases—and may be wrong but I don’t think so. The cul­ture where I work is very much about re­in­forc­ing the pos­i­tives and ig­nor­ing the flaws (within limits). The rule might be stated as re­ward the de­sired be­hav­iors and ig­nore the bad be­hav­iors (again within some limits as ac­countabil­ity is also ex­pected—just seems to be more about try­ing to get ev­ery­one to be ac­countable them­selves rather than walk­ing around with the stick).

  That seems like it might ap­ply in a num­ber of set­tings. The com­pany is a suc­cess­ful, global cor­po­ra­tion and is seen as a top performer and preferred place of em­ploy­ment in the mar­ket (will not dis­close though) so it seems like it is not a ter­rible ap­proach.

  I think this might ap­ply to rais­ing chil­dren as well. Chil­dren will see the at­ten­tion of their par­ents. If the par­ent tends to fo­cus on the er­rors and mis­takes then the child is likely to act up to get more mommy or daddy time—even when it’s not pleas­ant. That then leads to form­ing similar re­la­tion­ships later in life.

  Not sure how well that might ap­ply to larger set­tings like le­gal pun­ish­ments. I think there might be some­thing there—for­get the say­ing but ba­si­cally prison cre­ates hard­ened crim­i­nals out of nor­mal peo­ple many times. Still in that set­ting the few are re­ally see­ing the ap­proval of any au­thor­ity figures so might not ap­ply as well—even ig­nor­ing the fact that most cases will be out­side the limits of the use the honey not vine­gar rule.

  Of course this is some­thing of a could/​should ver­sus is set­ting I think—you are sim­ply sug­gest­ing the em­piri­cal state not sug­gest­ing what might be an im­prove­ment. Still, the dy­nam­ics seem rather more com­pli­cated then would be needed to make the the as­sump­tion you seem to start with.

  I did just have a thought—may or may not be in­ter­est­ing here—re­gard­ing the in­tra-group and in­ter-group re­la­tion­ships sug­gested. If we ac­cept that the in­tra-group re­la­tion­ships un­der stress might be more co­op­er­a­tive (for sur­vival in­cen­tives), then char­ac­ter­iz­ing the post- apoc­a­lyp­tic set­ting as “defect” or a Hobbe­sean state of na­ture seems to sug­gest that most of the in­ter­ac­tions will be in­ter-group rather than in­tra-group. That seems ques­tion­able to me but I might be think­ing wrong on that.

• jmh 27 Jun 2019 12:13 UTC

  3 points

  on: Apoca­lypse, corrupted

  I’m won­der­ing why you think cor­rup­tion is the nat­u­ral out­come. The rea­son I am ask­ing was hav­ing seen one of the Nat Geo (or similar) shows about a pride of lion in a less than op­ti­mal lo­ca­tion for li­ons. What was ob­served was that this pride of li­ons ac­tu­ally co­op­er­ated more (in shar­ing food rather than all fight­ing over it per some sta­tus/​bad­ness rank­ing) than was ob­serve in prides in more suit­able ter­ri­to­ries.

  It might have been in this fo­rum, not sure, where some­one pointed to some liter­a­ture about the pos­si­bly counter in­tu­itive out­come that hard­ship of groups ac­tu­ally pro­moted the co­op­er­a­tive be­hav­iors—sug­gest­ing cor­rup­tion might be more likely in the pre-apoc­a­lyp­tic set­ting.

  Con­trary to what we see in movies, is it pos­si­ble that the post-apoc­a­lyp­tic set­ting might ac­tu­ally pro­duce a more merit driven so­cial set­ting that one of cor­rup­tion and nepo­tism?

• jmh 25 Jun 2019 13:15 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: johnswentworth's comment on: Be­ing the (Pareto) Best in the World

  ″ Third, this whole strat­egy in­her­ently in­volves trailblaz­ing. You have to do some­thing which no­body has done be­fore—that’s kinda the point. ”

  But more than that, you need to blaze a new trail that still fits in with the needs of the world around you. A new trail to the cliff no one wants to be on doesn’t get you much but a rather long fall I think ;-)

  But in gen­eral I like the ob­ser­va­tion you’ve made.

• jmh 25 Jun 2019 13:10 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: CynicalOptimist's comment on: The Parable of the Dagger

  I’ll some­what echo what Cyn­i­calOp­ti­mist wrote. I think the mes­sage is is one any first semester logic stu­dent should have been taught or know: a valid ar­gu­ment is not nec­es­sar­ily true. The val­idity of an ar­gu­ment’s con­clu­sion is all about form of the ar­gu­ment. The truth of the con­clu­sion is an ex­ter­nal fact ex­ist­ing com­pletely in­de­pen­dent from the ar­gu­ment’s struc­ture.

• jmh 18 Jun 2019 19:26 UTC

  1 point

  on: Is the “busi­ness cy­cle” an ac­tual eco­nomic prin­ci­ple?

  As men­tioned the ABCT has some good points in ex­plain­ing why things might hap­pen. But I also think the co­or­di­na­tion prob­lem over time in terms of eco­nomic ac­tivity will in­her­ently get things wrong, so down­turns will oc­cur.

  There have also been some ev­i­dence that poli­ti­cal event, like var­i­ous elec­tions, can in­fluence.

  I don’t think any lend them­selves to true func­tion pre­ci­sion (echo­ing the time prob­lem moses men­tions).

  I would ask if you’re in­quiring based on fi­nan­cial mar­ket fluc­tu­a­tions are if you’re ask­ing about real busi­ness cy­cles (re­ces­sion/​de­pres­sion and ex­pan­sion/​con­trac­tion) events. I think char­ac­ter­iz­ing real eco­nomic cy­cles as driven by a ran­dom pro­cess would be prob­le­matic—even if one might sug­gest that the sale of any given can of soup might be mod­eled that way.

[Question] Learn­ing Over Time for AI and Hu­mans and Rationality

• jmh 11 Jun 2019 12:35 UTC

  0 points

  on: Get Rich Real Slowly

  Like Dagon, I would like to see some ar­gu­ment for the smaller, lower volatility (risk) ap­proach is preferred—par­tic­u­larly as you seem to im­ply this is what ev­ery­one should be do­ing.

  I don’t see the ar­gu­ment that ev­ery­one can get rich slowly. I get that the sug­gested ap­proach is great for some re­turn while pre­serv­ing ex­ist­ing cap­i­tal/​wealth. But that is re­ally only use­ful to those that are already rich. 2% on $100,000,000 is not a bad in­come stream to live off ;-) That 2% on your $1000 you scraped to­gether from spare change is not go­ing to provide for your re­tire­ment.

  I think clar­ify­ing just who the au­di­ence for the ad­vise is would be re­ally helpful.

• jmh 11 Jun 2019 12:29 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Richard_Kennaway's comment on: Get Rich Real Slowly

  A quick google seach: https://​​www.in­vesto­pe­dia.com/​​ar­ti­cles/​​fi­nan­cial-ad­vi­sors/​​032216/​​7-top-nonus-roboad­vi­sors.asp

  Might be helpful. Or at least an­other start­ing point.