If he wins the bet, he gets a million dollars. If he loses the bet he gets a 21-year interest-free million dollar loan. Taking investment into account, the other party gives him several million dollars either way, and it doesn’t really matter if he wins or loses the bet.
korin43
Karma: 240
The bet is extremely one-sided. At the outset, you get a 21-year million dollar zero-interest loan, and if you win you don’t have to pay it back. There’s no upside for the other person at all. Even if you “lose”, the “winner” is giving you several million dollars in interest.
There are two reasons that offering this bet doesn’t make you look smart:
1. The problem with the bet is extremely obvious and doesn’t win you any cleverness points
2. In context, you appear to be using this bet to flout rationalist conversational norms.
3. You may also be violating the norms of the mailing list you’re using (sending jokes, sending the same email to multiple lists)
Specifically for the second point, rationalist argument norms generally expect people to do some combination of providing evidence, making a (real) bet, or acknowledging the lack of evidence (which is fine! not everything is legible, and sometimes you need time to acquire evidence).
In this situation, it seems you made an argument that at least one other person found unconvincing. They responded in a way that (from your account) sounds pretty rude. At this point you have two options, either responding to the unnecessarily personal attack or respond to their argument.
For example, it would be completely reasonable to say something like “I realize you’re not convinced by my argument, but I’d ask that you respond to the argument itself, and not generalizations about me (calling me a crackpot)”.
You decided to respond to them with a counterargument (that you are in fact a genius), at which point the conversational norms above come up. “Bob” seems to have picked “make a bet”, and you decided that “winning a Nobel Prize” is an unreasonable standard. I think you’re completely justified in turning down an impossible bet, and there are several productive responses available to you:
Turn down the bet, and choose a different avenue to make your argument (“I’m not sure if we can come up with a reasonable bet for this, but I’m working on something exciting right now. Let’s table this for now and we can see what you think when my paper/project/whatever is published.”)
Come up with a new, more reasonable bet (some options: a paper of yours is published in a sufficiently prestigious form; you’re invited to give a talk somewhere sufficiently prestigious; a neutral expert is chosen to adjudicate the bet in one year—but knowingly, not just by the accident of saying the word “genius”).
Instead, you countered with an even more unreasonable bet, sent it to multiple mailing lists, and doubled down when people asked you to stop (although they were also rude, from your account).
I hope this overly-detailed response is helpful. To be clear, I’ve never been on any of these mailing lists so I’m entirely relying on your account. My advice to you is:
1. Find a friend who participates on these mailing lists and get their opinion on whether you should apologize to the list or if just ending this thread is enough (I suspect a short “Sorry for the annoying messages / fake bet” would be helpful, but in some contexts people may just want the thread to end and would prefer not to get any more messages about it). I don’t know the full context but if this is everything, I suspect people will get over this fairly quickly if you stop making it worse.
2. In the future, if something like this comes up, don’t argue about vague things. You’re perfectly within your rights to ask people to be nicer, but in a situation like this I think it would be far more productive to go with the “Please don’t generalize about me; is there something you don’t like about the argument?” response.
3. When you are arguing a point, be aware that sarcasm is dangerous, and trying to play it straight is even more dangerous. In particular, the bet you made and the arguments around it are highly suspect in rationalist circles. No one wants to argue with someone who is being intentionally misleading. This sort of thing *might* be ok with friends and in person, but it’s almost never the right thing to do on a mailing list. If someone is arguing a point you disagree with, either give your evidence or defer the argument until you can collect more evidence.
So if I’m understanding the timeline correctly, you said things people find so unconvincing that even your friends warned you that you sound like a crackpot, you doubled down by trolling an email list with an obviously one-sided bet, got upset that your trolling made people angry, and now you’re bragging about how smart you are? I don’t know you, but if I was in control of this list I would have already banned you. Group cohesion is a hard enough problem without trolls trying to mess it up “for fun”.
I’d like to question both assumptions (2) and (3).
For (2), it’s not clear to me that “more energy” is the thing people want. Some things we do require a lot of energy (transportation, manufacturing) but some things that are really important use surprisingly little power (the internet).
For (3), it seems like we’ve been moving in the direction of more-efficiency for a long time (better engines and turbines to convert more of the fuel into useful energy, fewer losses to friction and transmission, etc.).
Overall, I think we’re seeing an upward trend in power usage because more people are getting the full benefit of modern technology, not because modern technology is using more power per person. I wish I could find a long-term graph, but per-capital power consumption in the United States has been going down for a few years, and total power consumption in the United States has been flat since around 1995: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States#Consumption Another way of putting this is that it’s not that cars are using more gas, it’s that a lot more people have cars. This means that in the short-term we can expect energy usage to continue going up for a while, but it could plausibly peak if/when the global population peaks and we finish the project of ending worldwide poverty.
For (1) I could nitpick since fission could also power our civilization for a long time, although I don’t think it really effects the question you’re asking.
When dealing with resources on the internet, you’re running into the “trading off something cheap for something expensive” issue again. I could *right now* spend several days/ weeks write a program that dynamically looks up how expensive it is to run some algorithm on arbitrary cloud providers and run on the cheapest one (or wait if the price is too high), but it would be much faster for me to just do a quick Google search and hard-code to the cheapest provider right now. They might not always be the cheapest but it’s probably not worth thousands of dollars of my time to optimize this more than that.
Regarding writing a program to dynamically lookup more complicated resources like algorithms and data.. I don’t know how you would do this without a general-purpose programmer-equivalent AI. I think maybe your view of programming seriously underestimates how hard this is. Probably 95% of data science is finding good sources of data, getting them into a somewhat-machine-readable-form, cleaning them up, and doing various validations that the data makes any sense. If it was trivial for programs to use arbitrary data on the internet, there would be much bigger advancements than agoric computing.
I think the problem with this is that markets are a complicated and highly inefficient tool for coordinating resource consumption among competing individuals without needing an all-knowing resource-allocator. This is extremely useful when you need to coordinate resource consumption among competing individuals, but in the case of programming, the functions in your program aren’t really competing in the same way (there’s a limited pool of resources, but for the most part they each need a precise amount of memory, disk space, CPU time, etc. and no more and no less).
There also is a close-enough-to-all-knowing resource allocator (the programmer or system administrator). The market model actually sounds like a plausibly-workable way to do profiling, but it would be less overhead to just instrument every function to report what resources it uses and then cental-plan your resource economy.
In short, if everyone is a mindless automaton who takes only what they need and performs exactly what others require of them, and if the central planner can easily know exactly what resources exist and who wants them, then central planning works fine and markets are overkill (at least in the sense of being a useful tool; capitalism-as-a-moral-system is out-of-scope when talking about computer programs).
Note that even in cases like Amazon Web Services, the resource tracking and currency is just there to charge the end-user. Very few programs take these costs into account while they’re executing (the exception is EC2 instance spot-pricing, but I think it’s a stretch to even call that agoric computing).
Also, one other thing to consider is that agoric computing trades off something really, really cheap (computing resources) for something really, really expensive (programmer time). Most people don’t even bother profiling because programmer time is dramatically more valuable than computer parts.
The thing I don’t understand is how the market got (and stays) this way. Slice successfully created a new (much lower margin) service for this. Why is everyone else putting up with 30% fees on something that’s trivial to replace? For example, why aren’t all of the businesses using ChowNow?
Presumably part of this is that some ordering systems get top billing in places like Google Maps, but given that Google Maps seems to show every order system under the sun, it can’t be *that* hard to get a new one in there.
Also that article seems to equivocate between services like UberEats that provide their own delivery drivers and are plausibly worth paying a large fee to and services like GrubHub that are just online order systems and could presumably be trivially replaced.
Looks like you can watch the game vs TLO here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpRPfidTjDA
I can’t find the later games vs MaNa yet.
Haha writing my comments was way easier since you already covered the hard parts in the article so I can just make short comments about the few places where I disagree.
I feel like this article is more optimized for European / conservative US fashion. In most of the places I’ve lived in the US, you could follow basically the same rules but go significantly more casual. For example, you still want to get basically the same colors, material, logos, etc. but get jeans, t-shirts, and (maybe) nice-looking hoodies instead of button-up shirts, chinos and sweaters.
I think shirts like this could help your status within small subcultures. I think the article is more about how to dress to maximize status for the overarching culture. Depending on your goals it could plausibly be worth it to optimize for a subculture instead, although I think the cases of that are probably uncommon (since most subcultures are fine with normal fashion too).
I upvoted this article because the general advice is very good, although I disagree with most of the specific advice (the brands, which pieces of clothing are most important). Fancier companies are generally nice in ways that have nothing to do with fashion (nicer materials, more comfortable). Pretty much any brand works fine if you can find the right fit and colors. Although you may need to explore multiple brands to find clothes that fit you, it doesn’t mean you have to go straight to expensive clothes. I can’t find anything that fits me at Walmart but everything at Target does, and they’re very similar prices.
I started wearing relatively expensive clothing in the last few years, but it’s entirely for reasons that aren’t obvious visually (jeans with a very slightly stretch around the waist are a lot more comfortable, wool shirts dry quickly and don’t smell bad after physical activity).
Please link more of your posts here. I looked through the history on your blog and there are quite a few that I think would be relevant and useful for people here. In particular, I think people would get a lot out of the posts about how to make friends. Some other other posts have titles that look interesting too but I haven’t had time to read them yet.
I wonder if it’s just the field I’m in, but this doesn’t match what I’ve seen as a software engineer. Companies frequently retroactively create opening if someone good enough applies (I’ve seen this happen at every company I’ve worked at, and it’s the official policy at my current company).
I also don’t think the people in charge of hiring care that much about salary (they don’t want to pay more than they need to, but realistically, how good someone is and how long they’ll stay at a company matter a lot more). Part of it is that the pool of qualified applicants is much smaller than most people think so the situation of deciding between two (good enough) candidates for one opening is rare (it has never happened to me).
I’ve been using Standard Notes. It’s basically just a networked text editor which can display structured text nicely.
I know it’s kind of a weird thing for this post to do, but this one finally gave the push I needed to setup decent journaling software, so I can do better planning, and also have something to reference in daily stand-up meetings instead of trying to come up with a summary of the previous day on the spot.
Not sure why this got voted down so badly, but I can’t get the link to work. Maybe you missed something when posting it?
This seems to be conflating two completely different phrases that use the word security. Security mindset has nothing at all to do with working for a government agency or being a spy. It’s a similar concept to “antifragility” except that you’re assuming that bad things don’t just happen by chance.
Wouldn’t this just push the problem back, so everyone would fight over Phd programs so they can get a guaranteed income? I imagine this would select for people who are good at impressing schools over people who are good at research.
You might be interested in Testa’s omega-3 supplements. They contain both DHA and EPA but come from farmed algae, so they don’t have the mercury issues that fish oil does.
https://www.amazon.com/Testa-middle-fish-Healthier-GMO-free-capsules/dp/B01H405UBM/
I take two per day based on some advice from someone on the LessWrong Slack.