korin43

Karma: 372

korin43 2 Jul 2020 19:04 UTC
1 point

in reply to: gilch’s comment on: PSA: Cars don’t have ‘blindspots’

You can get wide-angle mirrors to stick on your side mirrors in those cases. I was looking into buying those when I discovered the wide-angle technique, which I tried instead.

I adjust my mirrors they way you do (so they show the “blind spot”), but I also have the stick on mirrors which make the view even better. They’re also helpful if the back of my car is full and I need to use the side-mirrors-pointing-backwards method.

I’m completely baffled by the fact that wide-angle mirrors aren’t standard features since the stick-on versions cost $2 and I suspect mass-manufactured, it wouldn’t be particularly expensive to add a non-stick-on version at production time.

korin43 29 Jun 2020 16:50 UTC
2 points

in reply to: bfinn’s comment on: What are objects that have made your life better?
Yeah my experience is that mattress comfort is mostly uncorrelated with price (which is unsurprising when you realize most of the expense in mattress production is advertising; they pretty much all cost the same amount to make).

I’d recommend for most people to go to a mattress store and try all of them since comfort is pretty much entirely about what style of mattress you want (springs / bouncy foam / memory foam, hard / medium / soft) and how that interacts with your pillows.

korin43 29 Jun 2020 16:42 UTC
1 point

in reply to: Sisi Cheng’s comment on: What are objects that have made your life better?
Also be aware that these can sometimes be substantially cheaper on ebay if you’re ok with used. I got Bose Quietcomfort 35′s (retail for $300) for $120 used.

korin43 29 Jun 2020 16:32 UTC
1 point

in reply to: technicalities’s comment on: What are objects that have made your life better?
I have three of the things you mention and would immediately buy them again if necessary:
- A sleep mask (I’ve actually bought several of these because I lost them). Mine is the “Alaska Bear Natural Silk Sleep Mask” since I sleep on my sides sometimes and find the flat kind more comfortable.
- Adjustable dumbbells. I have the “Ironmaster 45 lb Quick-Lock Adjustable Dumbbell System”, which get points of durability, but I actually wish I had bought the Bowflex ones since they can be adjusted much more easily.
- Bose Quietcomfort headphones. I have the bluetooth version and actually really like it, since I only need to recharge them every few days and they’re nicer to use when I’m walking around. Note that you can sometimes get these for massive discounts on ebay. I bought my Bose Quietcomfort 35′s for $120.

korin43 12 Jun 2020 0:50 UTC
15 points

on: What gripes do you have with Mustachianism?
I think Mr. Money Mustache is overly optimistic about how easy the path he proposes is. He retired in 7 years on two 6-figure salaries and a bull market. My stocks have been doing ok, but nearly even close to as well as his did in the years before. I think his advice is still good for people without two six-figure salaries, but the early retirement idea becomes less realistic the lower the income you’re working with (but it’s still not pointless, since having savings is still hugely helpful for reducing stress and creating options).

I’m also not sure if he’s clear enough about how hard it is to find agreement between two partners on this. I think delaying gratification to buy freedom is a good choice, but a lot of people disagree, even after reading about Mr. Money Mustache.

Even for people who want to save money, some things worth having in life really are expensive, like living near friends. I suspect the mustachian path is much longer if you live in San Francisco, but it may be worth working significantly longer to live near your community.

korin43 9 Jun 2020 21:55 UTC
11 points

on: What highly-upvoted posts are overrated?
I downvoted this because it’s encouraging negativity with no benefit as far as I can tell. A list of underrated posts is theoretically useful because people could follow the links and read them, but what would you do with a list of overrated posts?

korin43 6 Apr 2020 15:43 UTC
1 point

on: What to draw from Macintyre et al 2015?
Unfortunately that study doesn’t cover the question we want answered:

The control arm was ‘standard practice’, which comprised mask use in a high proportion of par- ticipants. As such (without a no-mask control), the finding of a much higher rate of infection in the cloth mask arm could be interpreted as harm caused by cloth masks, efficacy of medical masks, or most likely a combination of both

So the study found evidence that surgical masks are better than cloth masks, but doesn’t say anything about whether cloth mask are better than nothing.

The study authors speculate that cloth masks are detrimental, but after reading through the study again, I’m pretty sure they provide absolutely no evidence for that (2 out of 1607 people in their study didn’t wear masks).

korin43 2 Apr 2020 19:26 UTC
2 points

on: The horse-sized duck: a theory of innovation, individuals and society
It seems like Patreon is sort-of fixing this, at least when the thing people are obsessed with is interesting enough.

korin43 25 Mar 2020 3:41 UTC
2 points

in reply to: Roko’s comment on: COVID-19 transmission: Are we overemphasizing touching rather than breathing?
But we could supply the entire country with fabric masks in like a week, even assuming there’s not already enough of them sitting around. People who sew live for this kind of thing.

korin43 12 Mar 2020 0:46 UTC
14 points

on: What are some articles that updated your beliefs a lot on an important topic?
Random Critical Analysis has a lot of articles about healthcare spending, and this one convinced me that US healthcare spending isn’t particularly unusual given our standard of living, and it probably won’t be easy to lower it (if we even wanted to):

https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/2016/09/25/high-us-health-care-spending-is-quite-well-explained-by-its-high-material-standard-of-living/

Several other posts cover various objections and show similar graphs using different data.

I think this was the first time I had encountered this argument. The parts that make it convincing are the frequent attempts to show that a particular measure wasn’t cherry picked and how the author breaks down data as much as possible instead of just showing the high level view and assuming it’s enough.

korin43 7 Mar 2020 20:07 UTC
3 points

in reply to: Kenny’s comment on: Mazes Sequence Roundup: Final Thoughts and Paths Forward

… restaurants generally aren’t mazes.

Why do you believe that? Have you worked in a restaurant?

Isolated demand for rigor, but yes I have.

There are no bullshit jobs in restaurants, there’s no ambiguity about what people should be doing, people’s employment status usually depends much more heavily on performance than in mazes, etc.

I would suspect the reason that restaurants aren’t maze-like is that most of them are small and relatively flat hierarchies. A LOT of them don’t make any money, ever, either.

I agree with you here, but I think this isn’t an accident. Larger companies become more maze like, but mazes can’t survive competition, so companies under intense competition have to stay small to avoid becoming mazes.

korin43 29 Feb 2020 16:26 UTC
1 point

in reply to: avturchin’s comment on: Coronavirus: Justified Practical Advice Thread
It wonder if this would be a good use case for normal face masks. Presumably they decrease the distance the virus would travel if you coughed (and also warn other people to keep their distance). Unfortunately I’m having trouble finding any research on this (everyone seems interested in masks to protect the wearer, or long term use, not short term use to prevent infecting others).

korin43 6 Feb 2020 18:00 UTC
11 points

on: Mazes Sequence Roundup: Final Thoughts and Paths Forward
I held off commenting more because you said this would be addressed at some point, but the early articles talked about what you call “Moloch’s Puzzle” and then the later ones talk about something completely different (how maze-like organizations are created by politics / insufficient information / mismatch between organization and personal goals).

Sufficiently strong optimization pressure, whether or not it comes from competition, destroys all values not being optimized, with optimization pressure constantly increasing.

Yet all is not lost. Most of the world is better off than it has ever been and is getting better all the time. We enjoy historically outrageously wonderful bounties every day, and hold up moral standards and practical demands on many fronts that no time or place in the past could handle. How is this possible?

I maintain that the answer is right there: In a sufficiently competitive market environment, the values being optimized are the things that you’re surprised still exist. Of course wonderful bounties etc. exist because that’s what competitive organizations optimize for! If they optimized something that people don’t want to buy, they would be out-competed by someone else.

I’m sorry to keep pushing on this, but it’s important because your solution is exactly wrong (reducing competition!?). Less outside competition increases slack inside the organization, creating more space for internal politics.

You mention having worked in mazes, but given the composition of this site, I’m guessing the mazes you’ve worked for are highly profitable (and therefore low-competition). Companies like Google and Microsoft can afford to be mazes because of patents and copyright (legal competitive protection).

On the other hand, restaurants are so intensely competitive that you call it “super-perfect competition”, but suspiciously, restaurants generally aren’t mazes. Even more suspiciously, the more competitive the area, the less-maze-like the restaurants. Your response is that somehow they must actually not be as competitive as they seem, but there’s a simpler answer: Mazes can’t survive competition.

korin43 6 Feb 2020 15:57 UTC
1 point

in reply to: jmh’s comment on: Money isn’t real. When you donate money to a charity, how does it actually help?
This is a big part of why I’m more optimistic about direct transfers like GiveDirectly. Standard charities act kind of like socialist economies and run into a lot of the same issues. When they’re operating inside of capitalist economies, they get some advantages through price signals to indicate what products people might want, but they still run into a lot of problems with top-down planning.

Of course, it’s complicated because some charities are plausibly more efficient because they use top-down planning and the planners correctly know that people should be spending their money on vaccines and not whatever else they would have bought for $0.50..

korin43 6 Feb 2020 15:46 UTC
3 points

in reply to: ESRogs’s comment on: Money isn’t real. When you donate money to a charity, how does it actually help?
I guess “temporarily motivating strangers” is a reasonable description of what money does. I should have argued against calling that motivation illusory or not-real.

korin43 5 Feb 2020 21:49 UTC
1 point

in reply to: ESRogs’s comment on: Money isn’t real. When you donate money to a charity, how does it actually help?
My original response was a more abstract explaination of why I think describing money as “not real” is misleading but maybe I more direct response to the article would be more useful since I think that part actually isn’t core to your question.

Money is a shared illusion. Neither paper, gold, nor electron patterns can stop a mosquito or feed a hungry person directly.

I’m assuming this is for rhetorical effect, but “money is a shared illusion because you can’t eat it” is a strange definition.

[...] Transfer of money is a temporary, low friction way to motivate unidentified strangers to preform an action.

So what’s the mechanism by which monetary charity works?

The mechanism by which monetary charity works is by motivating unidentified strangers to perform a charitable action.

Or alternately, if you mean charities like GiveDirectly, the charity works by giving money to poor people who can then motivate unidentified strangers to perform charitable actions (like building roofs for them).

Are we “just” exploiting a comparative advantage in dollar-gathering in order to force the people on the ground to behave the way we prefer? Do we have any evidence that it can create channels of behavior that are self-sustaining?

This depends entirely on the charitable action and has nothing to do with money. How can we answer if a particular charity is helpful if we don’t know what the charity does? As you say above, money works indirectly so we need to know the thing we’re doing with it.

On small (and not-so-small, but not universal) margins, money is a fine way to change some behaviors. I’m wondering if there are ways to shift the equilibria at the core rather than the margin.

If you come up with a way to shift the equilibria at the core, you could pay people to implement that..

korin43 2 Feb 2020 17:53 UTC
47 points

on: Money isn’t real. When you donate money to a charity, how does it actually help?
Calling money an illusion and describing at as a way of temporarily motivating strangers seems like a misunderstanding of what money is. It’s true that money itself is just a piece of paper that we agree to treat a specific way, but the way we treat it is as a representation of real work done and real favors owed.

When I give you a dollar, I’m saying that you’ve done something worth (at least) a dollar for me and that I now owe you a favor worth (at least) a dollar. This works without money (“IOU’s”, or just keeping track of favors). The innovation of money itself is that we can get favors repaid by complete strangers without having to figure out the chain of favors every time (and in some cases, being able to get a favor repaid before it’s owed).

Which is all a long way of saying that if you do something to make someone owe you a favor, you can transfer that favor to a charity instead of calling it in yourself. The piece of paper won’t feed a hungry person but the favor attached to it can.

korin43 13 Jan 2020 4:31 UTC
0 points

on: How has the cost of clothing insulation changed since 1970 in the USA?
It seems like the cost of insulation mostly depends on improvements in the insulation manufacturing process, which seems kind of different from innovation in clothing itself.

For example, if we stopped innovating in clothing design entirely, people might focus more on reducing the production costs of fixed amounts of materials, so insulation would get cheaper by your metric, and it’s unclear if that counts as innovation in clothing.

Going the other direction, if we invented a less insulating, expensive insulation with magical perfect durability, it would be a huge clothing innovation but the cost of insulation would go up by your metric.

korin43 2 Jan 2020 16:03 UTC
7 points

in reply to: Zvi’s comment on: Imperfect Competition
I think I misread this article at first, and it’s really just the same confusion as the previous article. These are all bad things which are “good” because monopoly rents are good.

I’m guessing this is based on Meditations on Moloch (5) “Capitalism”:

Imagine a capitalist in a cutthroat industry. He employs workers in a sweatshop to sew garments, which he sells at minimal profit. Maybe he would like to pay his workers more, or give them nicer working conditions. But he can’t, because that would raise the price of his products and he would be outcompeted by his cheaper rivals and go bankrupt. Maybe many of his rivals are nice people who would like to pay their workers more, but unless they have some kind of ironclad guarantee that none of them are going to defect by undercutting their prices they can’t do it.

I think Scott is (unknowingly) pointing at a problem with barriers to competition on the worker side and thinking it’s a problem with competition on the business side.

This becomes more clear if you turn the sweatshop into a worker-owned business. The same things Scott mentions still apply. Even though there’s no bad guy to oppress them, the workers still can’t raise wages because they’re competing with other businesses. So why are they working at this business, and why don’t they enter a different field? In the real world, the answer is that there are a lot of barriers in the way (imperfect competition), but if we’re assuming perfect competition, then they should be able to switch to any other business with no effort (or they could produce their own food, shelter and luxuries), which implies that there is no better business to be in.

The problem in this example is that the entire world is a dystopia where no one produces anything more valuable than factory clothes. With monopoly rents, our workers could potentially make themselves better off than other workers in the same world, but it’s a zero-sum game and it’s definitely not obvious that that would be better.

Note: Our world was a dystopia similar to this once, although without perfect competition. We didn’t get out of it by reducing competition (we’re more capitalist now than we were then), but by improving efficiency. The thing left out of money-centric examples is the actual stuff being produced, and we produce way more stuff now than we did at the beginning of the industrial revolution.

korin43 31 Dec 2019 19:11 UTC
1 point

on: An Emergency Fund for Effective Altruists

This sounds a lot like insurance, and effective altruists could indeed insure themselves against a myriad of risks. Unfortunately, this introduces the overhead of an insurance company. (When asking for a ballpark estimate at the insurer I interned at, I was told that at most one-third of all premium money is put back into payment of legitimate claims.) Besides, coverage will never be 100%, an insurer will reject claims whenever possible, and insurance requires monthly payment, which requires stable income.

The overhead of the insurance company isn’t there for fun, it’s because if you don’t have that overhead, the insurance becomes more expensive. If you decide checking claims is too expensive, so instead you’ll just not ever reject claims, I assure you you’re not going to save money. To compare how much money you’d save by (effectively) starting your own insurance company, you need to look at profits, and insurance companies are not particularly profitable.

What are insurance sector companies usual profit margins? The insurance industry’s net margin in 2017 ranged between 3 and 10.5%. Life insurance had the widest range between quarters, from 3% to 9.6%; property and casualty insurance were at 3% to 8%; and health insurance had the narrowest range of 4% to 5.25%.

https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/052515/what-usual-profit-margin-company-insurance-sector.asp

It’s possible that you could still save money by starting yourself, but my priors say your version sounds cheaper because you’re being overly optimistic. You could probably get someone to take your bet though by asking a company to insure against people asking for their money back, with a clause that if payouts ever exceed x% of payments they can stop paying claims (similar to what would happen if your fund ran out of money).