Kenny

• Kenny 24 Jun 2019 22:09 UTC

  1 point

  on: How much does neatly eat­ing mat­ter? What about other food man­ners?

  I don’t think it mat­ters very much if you’re (roughly) within the ‘ac­cept­able’ win­dow for what­ever so­cial en­vi­ron­ment it is in which you find your­self.

  I tend to eat in a pretty messy way

  Do you get food on your clothes or parts of your body other than your mouth (or im­me­di­ately around it) or hands? Do you get food on the table/​sur­face at which you’re eat­ing? Do you get food on other nearby peo­ple? If not, you’re al­most cer­tainly fine, ei­ther “in soft­ware” or any other field. You might suffer tho in fields with a rel­a­tively larger pro­por­tion of up­per or up­per-mid­dle class peo­ple, but you prob­a­bly already know now whether you even want to en­ter the rele­vant ‘tour­na­ments’ to earn an op­por­tu­nity to en­ter those po­si­tions (and I’m guess­ing you don’t). If you did tho, an eti­quette class might be worth­while.

• Kenny 24 Jun 2019 18:58 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: avturchin's comment on: In­te­grat­ing dis­agree­ing subagents

  For cases where the equal weights are both ‘pos­i­tive’ or ‘nega­tive’, one can just ‘flip a coin’ (and no­tice any re­sis­tance to the out­come), and that’s what I’ve tried to learn to do, par­tic­u­larly for rel­a­tively small weights.

  But for rel­a­tively large weights or, worse, for ‘op­pos­ing’ weights, i.e. one ‘pos­i­tive’ and the other ‘nega­tive’, like a situ­a­tion where one has to choose be­tween es­cap­ing some large nega­tive el­e­ment but ay the cost of giv­ing up an­other large pos­i­tive el­e­ment si­mul­ta­neously, this ‘akra­sia’ can feel very much like be­ing (emo­tion­ally or psy­chi­cally) torn in two. Often then the rele­vant con­sid­er­a­tion is some­thing like a thresh­old, e.g. is the large nega­tive el­e­ment too nega­tive?

• Kenny 24 Jun 2019 5:23 UTC

  1 point

  on: Steel­man­ning Divination

  This is a great post!

  I think I get some kind of similar benefit just by read­ing a lot and from lots of differ­ent sources but would you recom­mend some­thing like what you de­scribed do­ing with the I Ching to oth­ers as a ha­bit­ual prac­tice they should adopt?

  I won­der if vari­a­tions on the same thing might be similarly helpful, e.g. a ser­vice that emails you a ran­dom es­say or an app that pings you to re­mind you to read a ran­dom LW post.

• Kenny 17 Jun 2019 2:39 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: TAG's comment on: Does the Higgs-bo­son ex­ist?

  I wasn’t try­ing to at­tack you, or Sabine or shminux ei­ther, so I’m sorry if seemed that way to you.

  I think I un­der­stand their po­si­tion pretty well – all of the ques­tions they sup­pos­edly face about whether the ob­jects of study are ‘real’ or whether they ‘ex­ist’ are al­most cer­tainly frus­trat­ing. Ob­vi­ously all of those ob­jects are real enough, or likely enough to ex­ist, in the sense that a suffi­cient cu­mu­la­tive weight of ev­i­dence ex­ists and is ac­cepted, for it to be al­most en­tirely un­con­tro­ver­sial for pro­fes­sional physics to study them. On one end of pro­fes­sional prac­tice of their field, just study­ing the rele­vant math­e­mat­ics is a perfectly ac­cepted prac­tice in and of it­self. On the other end, there’s suffi­cient ob­ser­va­tional ev­i­dence, es­pe­cially given the cor­re­spond­ing (ac­cepted) the­o­ret­i­cal in­ter­pre­ta­tions, that the study of these ob­jects is by it­self rel­a­tively mun­dane and un­re­mark­able.

  The an­noy­ing real/​ex­ists ques­tions are al­most cer­tainly in­ter­preted as crit­i­cal, if not nega­tive, judge­ments im­ply­ing that the physi­cists at whom the ques­tions are ad­dressed are ei­ther stupid or naive, or mal­i­ciously de­cep­tive, for be­liev­ing the ob­jects of study as be­ing (suffi­ciently) real or ex­ist­ing. So I’d ex­pect an al­most over­whelming urge for them, the physi­cists, to want to avoid deal­ing with such ques­tions or oth­er­wise to be able to them­selves im­ply or aver that such ques­tions are stupid or naive, or even unan­swer­able (and thus not ‘sci­en­tific’, i.e. wor­thy of their con­sid­er­a­tion).

  And I’m sure some (small) de­gree of ill will, on both the part of physi­cists and the real/​ex­ist ques­tion­ers, is war­ranted. Ask­ing whether the ob­ject of some­one’s stud­ies are real or whether they ex­ist is al­most un­avoid­ably deroga­tory. And surely some physics will turn out not to have been about or in search of any­thing that could rea­son­ably be be­lieved to be real or to ex­ist, as has hap­pened many times be­fore.

• Kenny 15 Jun 2019 21:36 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: TAG's comment on: Does the Higgs-bo­son ex­ist?

  Th­ese claims-to-ac­cu­racy are not be­liefs in the sense that they are based on ev­i­dence and are sub­ject to re­vi­sion, and are there­fore not cer­tain.

  That seems like a re­ally tor­tured defi­ni­tion/​in­ter­pre­ta­tion/​un­der­stand­ing of ‘be­lief’. What’s the mo­ti­va­tion for that? To dis­t­in­guish these “claims-to-ac­cu­racy” as differ­ent than re­li­gious be­lief? I’m con­fused why this rhetor­i­cal stance is use­ful or in­ter­est­ing given that even re­li­gious be­lief is based on ev­i­dence and sub­ject to re­vi­sion, and even very few re­li­gious be­liev­ers claim to­tal or com­plete cer­tainty.

  There may be some is­sues about the clas­sifi­ca­tion or de­mar­ca­tion of com­plex en­tities , but they are not nec­es­sar­ily the same as is­sues about the ex­is­tence of en­tities.

  I agree with re­spect to clas­sifi­ca­tion but not for de­mar­ca­tion – if it’s un­clear how to de­mar­cate two en­tities isn’t it un­clear whether two en­tities ex­ist (ver­sus one or none)?

  And gen­er­ally, be­cause of the seem­ingly in­evitable is­sues with de­mar­cat­ing in­di­vi­d­ual en­tities of a given class, it’s less clear that they ex­ist, or the re­al­ity of their ex­is­tence (as en­tities of that class) seems less ob­vi­ous, i.e. they are ‘less real’.

  I’m sug­gest­ing that ‘is real’ and ‘ex­ists’ are not bi­nary val­ues but rather mag­ni­tudes. Uni­corns seem pretty clearly ‘not real’ and that it is true that they ‘do not ex­ist’ (and never ex­isted). But the mag­ni­tude of their re­al­ity or non-ex­is­tence is not perfectly un-real or non-ex­is­tent, as even some­thing folk tales that men­tion them is (very) weak ev­i­dence that they might be real or might have ex­isted (or might still ex­ist some­where).

  Here are two of my fa­vorite ex­am­ples of cat­e­gories of en­tities that are some­what un­real or less ‘ex­is­ten­tial’:

  • Tec­tonic plates

  • The species of dogs, wolves, and coyotes

  For tec­tonic plates, it’s not ob­vi­ous how many ex­ist, thus the ex­is­tence of some pos­si­ble plates is un­cer­tain. Ob­vi­ously the com­po­nents of plates ex­ist but, at least for some (pos­si­ble) plates, it’s not clear that they do ex­ist or are ‘real’ – as tec­tonic plates.

  And dogs, wolves, and coy­otes can all in­ter­breed, and pro­duce sex­u­ally fer­tile offspring, and ge­netic ev­i­dence of ex­ist­ing (in­di­vi­d­ual) dogs, wolves, or coy­otes in­di­cate that they are all ge­net­i­cally in­ter­mixed. Are those species real? Do those species ex­ist? Surely, in gen­eral, the in­di­vi­d­ual mem­bers of those species ex­ist, but do the species them­selves ex­ist? Are those species ‘real’? It seems clear to me that the ‘re­al­ity’ of those three species is strictly less than the re­al­ity of any mem­bers of those species.

• Kenny 15 Jun 2019 21:14 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Pattern's comment on: Paper on qual­i­ta­tive types or de­grees of knowl­edge, with ex­am­ples from medicine?

  Thanks for the link!

  The pa­per I’m think­ing of is more about the differ­ences in knowl­edge on the or­der of: (a) there’s a sin­gle, cheap, known fix for your prob­lem, so you should just do x (be­cause we know (al­most) ex­actly what the prob­lem is and know how to solve it, ‘me­chan­i­cally’; ver­sus (b) here’s a guideline (be­cause we don’t re­ally know what the prob­lem is, in de­tail, or speci­fi­cally).

  I checked the com­ments on that post and no one seems to have linked to the pa­per I’m re­mem­ber­ing. I wouldn’t be sur­prised that it’s linked in com­ments on an­other post on SSC tho as I’m pretty sure I’ve seen links to it on this site (or maybe Over­com­ing Bias, be­fore Eliezer stopped blog­ging there, long ago).

[Question] Paper on qual­i­ta­tive types or de­grees of knowl­edge, with ex­am­ples from medicine?

• Kenny 15 Jun 2019 0:19 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: TAG's comment on: Does the Higgs-bo­son ex­ist?

  I’m not sure what con­cep­tions of ‘be­lief’ you have in mind in the first part of your re­ply. Are you claiming tho that Sabine, and other physi­cists, as shminux claims, don’t have be­liefs as would be com­monly un­der­stood? Even about physics, or the ac­cu­racy of the main­stream the­o­ries in that field? I ad­mit to be­ing con­fused as to ex­actly what point shminux, or Sabine, are try­ing to make tho.

  I would as­sume that what Sabine means by be­lief is some com­bi­na­tion of cer­tainty and not be­ing based on ev­i­dence.

  I find it hard to imag­ine what Sabine or shminux could have in mind if what you write is true. They, ap­par­ently, would claim that the some physics the­o­ries are ac­cu­rate. In what sense do those claims not cor­re­spond to be­liefs, e.g. that the the­o­ries ac­tu­ally are ac­cu­rate?

  Maybe you’re on to some­thing about this whole dis­cus­sion be­ing con­fus­ing be­cause the par­ti­ci­pants, par­tic­u­larly Sabine or shminux, aren’t ex­plic­itly dis­cussing de­grees of cer­tainty or amounts and strength of ev­i­dence. For ex­am­ple, it cer­tainly seems com­pletely rea­son­able to re­ply to “Do black holes ex­ist? Are they real?” with some­thing like “They’re pre­dicted by our best the­o­ries of physics and we have pretty strong in­di­rect ev­i­dence of their ex­is­tence, in spe­cific places (in space-time), so we’re rea­son­ably cer­tain that they do in fact ex­ist and are real. For one, we’ve gen­er­ated an image of one that’s rel­a­tively nearby and all the meth­ods we used to do so seem, as far as we can tell, to be em­i­nently rea­son­able based on ev­ery­thing else we know (and be­lieve to be true).”.

  It’s not ob­vi­ous that be­ing com­plex or a com­pound makes some­thing less real.

  Sure, if by “the Higgs-bo­son, quarks, black holes, let alone planets, species, in­di­vi­d­ual peo­ple” we ‘only meant’ some­thing like a (Vast) group of quan­tum field ex­ci­ta­tions (or similar). But, as far as I can tell, we mean very differ­ent things by each of those differ­ent words or phrases. It seems pretty ob­vi­ous to me that the ‘re­al­ity’ of a species is a very differ­ent thing than the re­al­ity of an in­di­vi­d­ual, and nei­ther are always clear in ev­ery situ­a­tion. Dur­ing spe­ci­a­tion, it’s not clear when one species has be­come many – so the ‘re­al­ity’ of the species, one or many, seems less real to me, in that spe­cific situ­a­tion any­ways. Similarly, vic­tims of brain trauma are of­ten de­scribed as ‘like an­other per­son’ – that seems to clearly in­fringe on the ‘re­al­ity’ of per­sonal iden­tity, which seems like a pretty im­por­tant com­po­nent of per­son­hood. Gen­er­ally, the de­gree to which a con­cept or cat­e­gory is neb­u­lous seems to match how ‘real’ it is, or seems.

• Kenny 14 Jun 2019 4:35 UTC

  7 points

  in reply to: shminux's comment on: Li­tany of Instrumentarski

  What’s ‘ac­cu­racy’ with­out ‘re­al­ity’?

• Kenny 14 Jun 2019 2:33 UTC

  3 points

  on: Does the Higgs-bo­son ex­ist?

  I’m con­fused:

  In this post she sums up beau­tifully what I and many physi­cists be­lieve, and is ve­he­mently op­posed by the pre­vailing re­al­ist crowd here on LW. A few ex­cerpts:

  Look, I am a sci­en­tist. Scien­tists don’t deal with be­liefs.

  Can you point out a spe­cific an ex­am­ple of “the pre­vailing re­al­ist crowd here on LW” or, if you don’t want to un­fairly sin­gle out a spe­cific ex­am­ple, con­coct a char­i­ta­ble fac­simile? (The frag­ment “is ve­he­mently op­posed by the pre­vailing re­al­ist crowd here on LW” seems hos­tile, I’d guess due to frus­tra­tion, but I’m un­cer­tain so I’m cu­ri­ous as to the rele­vant mo­ti­va­tions for you to use it.)

  Ob­vi­ously sci­en­tists deal with be­liefs. You’re claiming (and I be­lieve you) that both you and “many physi­cists” don’t be­lieve that philo­soph­i­cal re­al­ism is true (or ‘true’) or use­ful (or that it’s a ‘wrong ques­tion’). And, pre­sum­ably, you and Sabine both be­lieve that the the­ory that pre­dicts that Higgs-bosons ‘ex­ist’ is the best available the­ory for pre­dict­ing an­ti­ci­pated ex­pe­riences.

  Maybe I’ve been drink­ing the Kool-Aid David Chap­man’s been giv­ing away for too long, but ob­vi­ously, be­ing some­thing in­side { re­al­ity /​ the uni­verse } I have no priv­ileged ac­cess to whether any par­tic­u­lar be­liefs are ul­ti­mately or perfectly true or that the ob­jects of those be­liefs are like­wise ul­ti­mately or perfectly real. But if sure seems like we’ve been able to get closer and closer to true be­liefs about what’s real. On the grip­ping hand, we also seem ‘doomed’ to run up against the in­evitable neb­u­los­ity of our be­liefs.

  So, I’ll try to an­swer the ques­tions that both you and Sabine seem to find so frus­trat­ing:

  • Does the Higgs-bo­son ex­ist? – Yes, it seems to ex­ist (i.e. to be a real par­ti­cle). We have pretty strong ev­i­dence that it’s been de­tected and the ev­i­dence strongly sug­gests that its prop­er­ties match our pre­dic­tions.

  • Do black holes ex­ist? – Yes, they seem to ex­ist. We’ve even been able to re­cently gen­er­ate an image of one (rel­a­tively) nearby!

  • Do quarks ex­ist? – The best the­ory of par­ti­cle physics sug­gests that they do but cur­rently we don’t ex­pect to be able to ob­serve them ‘freely’, i.e. not bound within other less el­e­men­tary par­ti­cles, with our available tools, so the ev­i­dence of their ex­is­tence is more in­di­rect than we may oth­er­wise hope to some­day have.

  • Does time ex­ist? – Yes, in the sense that we don’t have much of an abil­ity to un­der­stand any­thing with­out, es­sen­tially, as­sum­ing it ex­ists, tho we do know, and have strong ev­i­dence thereof, that it’s weirder than our in­tu­itions would oth­er­wise lead us to be­lieve (e.g. it can ‘di­late’, even in ways we can pre­cisely mea­sure, in cer­tain cir­cum­stances). But there are some­what plau­si­ble ideas by which time may not be ‘on­tolog­i­cally prim­i­tive’ rel­a­tive to some deeper un­der­stand­ing of the (ob­serv­able) uni­verse, e.g. time­less physics.

  • Do grav­i­ta­tional waves ex­ist? Yes, they same to ex­ist, and we have ev­i­dence that’s con­sis­tent with their ex­is­tence ac­cord­ing to our best the­o­ries of physics.

  Sabine wrote:

  Look, I am a sci­en­tist. Scien­tists don’t deal with be­liefs. They deal with data and hy­pothe­ses. Science is about knowl­edge and facts, not about be­liefs.

  That’s just wrong. There is no knowl­edge, there are no facts, there is no data, nor hy­pothe­ses, di­vorced from or some­how sep­a­rate from be­liefs. It’s a be­lief that facts, or knowl­edge about them, ex­ist, that state­ments of or about them are true. In­deed, I don’t know what a fact is or what knowl­edge could be if they were not also true. A state­ment of fact can be false, i.e. not true, i.e. a state­ment of some­thing that is not a fact.

  Sabine’s last para­graph:

  Here is a home­work as­sign­ment: Do you think that I ex­ist? And what do you even mean by that?

  You seem to be ar­gu­ing that the cor­rect an­swer is no, Sabine Hossen­felder doesn’t ex­ist. I know of no the­ory, and definitely no math­e­mat­i­cal frame­work, that pre­dicts (speci­fi­cally or even in gen­eral pos­si­bil­ity) that she does. Ac­cord­ing to the best the­o­ries of physics there are only quan­tum fields and space-time. QED

  Ex­cept, that’s silly – of course she ex­ists (and is real), at least as far as I can tell!

  I think I may have demon­strated that I’m not in fact a philo­soph­i­cal re­al­ist. But I think that’s wrong too. I strongly sus­pect that the uni­verse (re­al­ity) is on­tolog­i­cally in­de­pen­dent of my, or any­one else’s, con­scious­ness, or any ideas, be­liefs, facts, or knowl­edge we may have with re­gard to it. I’m pretty sure we haven’t mea­sured or ob­served any such on­tolog­i­cally prim­i­tive el­e­ments, and I’m ag­nos­tic as to whether we (or any­thing else in the uni­verse) will ever be able to do so. I wouldn’t be sur­prised if it was ac­tu­ally im­pos­si­ble to do so. But I do be­lieve they’re real and that they ex­ist.

  As to ev­ery­thing else tho, e.g. the Higgs-bo­son, quarks, black holes, let alone planets, species, in­di­vi­d­ual peo­ple – ob­vi­ously those are not on­tolog­i­cally prim­i­tive and so the de­gree to which they are ‘real’ and ‘ex­ist’ is neb­u­lous. (Un­less of course Pla­tonic re­al­ism/​ideal­ism, or math­e­mat­i­cism, is true (or maybe even also true), in which case ev­ery­thing imag­in­able (and more) ‘ex­ists’ and is ‘real’.)

• Kenny 14 Mar 2019 4:45 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: sirjackholland's comment on: Blackmail

  I’m a lit­tle con­fused about how the bur­den of proof ended up as it is in this dis­cus­sion.

  Among peo­ple gen­er­ally, the bur­den of proof is the op­po­site of what you per­ceived it to be in this dis­cus­sion. But this post was re­spond­ing to a blog post claiming the ar­gu­ments for legally pro­hibit­ing black­mail aren’t per­sua­sive.

  But in any case, the point of the dis­cus­sion is to sharpen our in­tu­itions, or even dis­card then if war­ranted.

• Kenny 20 Feb 2019 16:17 UTC

  4 points

  on: Build­ing up to an In­ter­nal Fam­ily Sys­tems model

  This is a great post; par­tic­u­larly in how you nar­rate bounc­ing off of it and then build­ing a model by which it or some­thing like it is plau­si­ble.

  I ac­tu­ally had the luck of hav­ing an in-per­son demon­stra­tion of this (IFS-style ther­apy) from some­one in the LW/​ra­tio­nal­ist com­mu­nity years ago and I’ve been dis­cussing it and recom­mend­ing it to oth­ers ever since.

• Kenny 20 Feb 2019 15:38 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: David_Chapman's comment on: Build­ing up to an In­ter­nal Fam­ily Sys­tems model

  I’ve read that book. One thing I think it’s miss­ing, if I’m re­mem­ber­ing it cor­rectly, is any in­ter­play be­tween ‘bot­tom-up’ and ‘top-down’ sub-agents. That seems to be a key dy­namic à la per­cep­tual con­trol the­ory.

• Kenny 10 Aug 2018 20:15 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: ryan_b's comment on: How To Use Bureaucracies

  This ex­am­ple does not seem to match Samo’s sys­tem very closely.

  You your­self wrote why it does seem, to me at least, to match Samo’s sys­tem well:

  this would be an aban­doned and in­effec­tive bureaucracy

• Kenny 10 Jul 2018 21:02 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: lawrence-wang's comment on: Toolbox-think­ing and Law-thinking

  Sure; any par­tic­u­lar Toolbox Thinker might not have ‘Law Think­ing’ in their toolbox for one.

• Kenny 10 Jul 2018 20:59 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Sniffnoy's comment on: Toolbox-think­ing and Law-thinking

  I think maybe you were think­ing of this bit from the post “What they don’t teach you at STEM school”:

  By sys­tem, I mean, roughly, a col­lec­tion of re­lated con­cepts and rules that can be printed in a book of less than 10kg and fol­lowed con­sciously. A ra­tio­nal sys­tem is one that is “good” in some way. There are many differ­ent con­cep­tions of what makes a sys­tem ra­tio­nal. Log­i­cal con­sis­tency is one; de­ci­sion-the­o­retic crite­ria can form an­other. The de­tails don’t mat­ter here, be­cause we are go­ing to take ra­tio­nal­ity for granted.

Flag­ging/​re­port­ing spam *posts*?

• Kenny 23 May 2018 16:07 UTC

  3 points

  on: Alter­na­tivity: an Un­for­tu­nate Ex­ten­sion of Roko’s Basilisk

  Spam

• Kenny 16 May 2018 18:16 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: mpr's comment on: The Case Against Education

  Yes, some peo­ple have won­der­fully en­joy­able ex­pe­riences at school and some of them even learn things. Ca­plan doesn’t dis­pute that.

  There’s noth­ing wrong with, e.g. lec­tures, for teach­ing peo­ple. The main prob­lem with ed­u­ca­tion, as a ‘sys­tem’, is that *most* of its func­tion is sig­nal­ling, e.g. pro­vid­ing cre­den­tials, by which peo­ple can be sorted and ranked by em­ploy­ers.

  How do we in­still an es­sen­tial cu­ri­os­ity early on?

  This seems kinda per­verse. Are you try­ing to brain­storms ways to in­still cu­ri­os­ity in peo­ple that don’t have any real con­trol over what they get to learn? How would that work? There are forms of ‘school­ing’ that aren’t struc­tured in re­ally any similar ways to the com­mon ver­sions of the U.S. ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem, e.g. un­school­ing, but they’re fun­da­men­tally op­posed to the idea of *in­still­ing* cu­ri­os­ity. Why in­still some­thing in some­one when you can just *pro­tect* what already ex­ists?

  I think this dis­cus­sion can go in two di­rec­tions. The first is just an ideal model of ed­u­ca­tion. Without poli­ti­cal con­straints, how do you teach some­one about the world and get them to care?

  Ca­plan, and my­self, and I sus­pect Zvi too, would claim that the idea of teach­ing any­one that doesn’t want to learn is (al­most always) just bad. The worst part of our cur­rent sys­tem is that it’s com­pul­sory. Peo­ple already care, tho maybe not about the same things you’d choose for them. Why shouldn’t they learn about what­ever it is they already care about?

  You should read Ca­plan’s book. He’s *very* thor­ough and con­sid­ers ev­ery point men­tioned here in the com­ments.

• Kenny 16 May 2018 18:07 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: zulupineapple's comment on: The Case Against Education

  Yes, Ca­plan is aware of all of the con­sid­er­a­tions you’ve raised. It’s a good read too.

  He also doesn’t push “de­mol­ish­ing all schools” but cut­ting gov­ern­ment sub­sidies. He’s also con­fi­dent that that’s not go­ing to hap­pen. Even in the event that sub­stan­tial cuts in sub­sidies *were* re­al­ized, he doesn’t imag­ine *no* schools, just sig­nifi­cantly fewer. He also ‘sup­ports’ sub­si­dized grade school (as a form of day­care). His con­clu­sions are most di­rected at grad­u­ate school, col­lege, and, to a lesser ex­tent, high school.

  And maybe it’s not clear, but Ca­plan’s book is about the benefits of ed­u­ca­tion, in its cur­rent forms, be­ing weak *rel­a­tive to their costs* (e.g. other op­por­tu­ni­ties).