[I reply multiple times to comments with multiple independent critiques of my post]
If you are a con man/identity thief/etc., then you are an impostor, and probably have impostor syndrome. Otherwise, you can’t be an impostor.
Imposter syndrome is supposed to be a *delusion*. If you are actively impersonating someone, thinking you are doing that is not imposter syndrome.
[I reply multiple times to comments with multiple independent critiques of my post]
>and it’s because we have a lot of our self-image riding on it, not because we’re chronically depressed.
This whole piece is about how people are wrong. Are people usually right about knowing they’re not depressed? (People around them? Their coworkers?)
Depression was the wrong word. My coworkers may be depressed and I don’t quite know if I’d notice. But if depression were the reason they doubted themselves endlessly, there’d be no reason to invent “imposter syndrome” except to describe a symptom of depression.
Although, as someone who was hospitalized because of depression, most of the people who have described themselves as former (or current) imposter syndrome sufferers did not seem to be depressed before self-diagnosis.
Yes. My definition of “imposter syndrome” is not “imposters”. It is an independent and diagnostically valuable delusion in which someone, despite good evidence via their achievements, believes they are incompetent frauds. My thesis is that people who truly underestimate themselves are rare and that imposter syndrome as defined here is not really a prevalent delusion, but a meme propagated because it is psychologically comforting.
Identity thieves do not suffer from imposter syndrome because their self-perception is correct and is not part of a wider pattern of inconsistent reasoning.
What does it mean to “wait” for infinite universes? Do you think the universe big bounces over and over again? Are you using “infinity” as a shorthand for “really long time”? Won’t the heat death of the universe happen before atoms somewhere spontaneously rearrange themselves into a structure like my brain?
#1 and #2 can both be combined into the same prescription: don’t learn new things if their knowledge doesn’t improve your life satisfaction in some way. This is basically a tautology, and if you’re a rationalist it’s restating the habit of making beliefs pay rent in anticipated experiences, since that’s their only utility.
#3 I think is hitting on something, and I think it’s that we should be broadly skeptical of arguments put forth by people or organizations genuinely capable of manipulating us.
Two caveats to efficient markets in finance that I’ve just considered, but don’t see mentioned a lot in discussions of bubbles like the one we just experienced, at least as a non-economist:
First: Irrational people are constantly entering the market, often in ways that can’t necessarily be predicted. The idea that people who make bad trades will eventually lose all of their money and be swamped by the better investors is only valid inasmuch as the actors currently participating in the market stay the same. This means that it’s perfectly possible for either swarms of new irrational investors outside the market to temporarily prop up the price of a stock, or for large amounts of insider investors to suddenly *become* irrational because of some environmental change that the rest of the market doesn’t have the ability to account for. Those irrational people might be cycled out, but maybe not before some new irrational traders move in, etc. If this process is predictable, then certain investors might be able to guarantee long-running above-average returns simply by taking advantage of these new investors ritualistically.
Two: Just because what is being done in the stock market is “stock trading” doesn’t mean that the kinds of people who are successful in one region, or socioeconomic climate, or industry are going to be successful in all trading environments. Predicting which companies are going to pay the most dividends has turned out to be a very general problem, partly because analysts have gotten so good at it, but overfitting is still an issue. In the 50s, it was probably important for investors to have a steady hand, be somewhat naturally rational, and maybe quick at mental math. Now, you just have to be a top 0.001% data scientist. The good traders in both groups of stock analysts have to be very intelligent, but there are also probably non-overlapping traits that one group might possess and not the other. I doubt the data scientists Renaissance Technologies has today are as calm under pressure as they’d need to be if they were making trades by hand instead of solving the more abstract problem of building the model that implies arbitrage opportunities.
I think part of the reason that COVID-19 blindsided the market so hard was the effects of #2. The 50s-era stock traders don’t control most of the capital anymore. And I may be underestimating how good they are, but I think most quantitative trading firms were just unable to anticipate an event like COVID-19 because Goldman developed an adaption that said “stop trading based off expert opinion”. That adaption worked to filter out competing firms for a decade, but then it failed this year in a way that seemed bewildering to rationalists, because nobody is old enough to think to make a pandemic-modeling algorithm.
Obviously, if these meta-trends can be predicted, then someone will get good at meta-finance and pre-emptively stock their staff with quants in 1990 and temporarily hire new workers for Q1 2020. The existence of any actor that is completely competent in all variations of finance will eventually solve finance. But if some aspects of them can’t be, then this could be an inherently limiting part of the sectors’ effectiveness.
What’s the word for when you eschew political rhetoric, and then directly therafter start decrying the state of our Institutions via political rhetoric?
Do you have prior positions on relationships that you don’t want to get corrupted through the dating process, or something else? Intelligence beyond your cone of tolerance is usually a trait that people pursue because they think it’s “ethical”, not because they’re genuinely attracted to it.
Those politicians/military personnel also tend to have pretty strict protocols on how to handle classified information, deviation of which is already illegal. Most people with access to classified material like that can go to jail for putting their iPhone chargers into government computers, let alone talking about it over the internet on their home laptops. It’s not that it couldn’t happen, it’s that I can’t believe there are many people on the margin who know what end to end encryption is, need it, hear Zoom has it, and then decide to use Zoom instead of some other clearnet alternative that would have saved them.
I’m aware of all of those things. My point is, aside from industrial espionage, all of those things are true of American spy agencies as well, and none of them are signfiicantly mitigated by using a company that does not possess Chinese servers. Perhaps if you’re handling trade secrets, you may want to consider using something like Session, Keybase, or Signal. But clearly, it’s not “rational” to switch to Microsoft Teams to keep your high school math sessions safe from Chinese eyes, and that’s what makes me frustrated people are switching to an inferior product.
I guess there’s a difference between “sloppy” and “Zoom is malware”, which is the official position of security twitter and some parts of the media as of today. As bad as they are, I’m afraid none of the examples of bugs in Bruce Schneier’s article look remarkably different than what you can find reading the weekly security reports on hackerone.com.
In my opinion, Session is by far the best architecturally designed encrypted messaging app. It’s very new, and probably has some RCE’s hidden in there, but every other active messaging app I’ve come across has critical OPSEC flaws that make it inherently inferior. Just ignore the cryptocurrency stuff if you want, though I think it could help with a lot of problems traditional anonymizing networks have; the important part is that it allows for anonymized, *decentralized* communication, and isn’t coded in C.
1. Research the 2013 global surveillance disclosures by Edward Snowden. The NSA has been hacking and monitoring the users of basically every large American and foreign technology company for decades.
2. Yes, using servers in a different country mitigates the physical threat of that country’s police raiding data centers and putting malware on disk drives. It does not prevent a government from hacking remote access to Zoom’s servers, which is far more convenient, quiet, and effective for large intelligence organizations.
3. Just by going on how much data Microsoft collects from average Windows users, this doesn’t seem to be a strong effort for that cause.
C is a very old programming language that, while very close to the hardware and good for programming something that needs to run very very quickly, has very few guardrails to prevent really nasty memory corruption exploits. There are lots of footguns when programming in C that basically ensure that a program with enough code, no matter how simple, has some ungodly race condition or heap overflow that allows remote attackers to take control of your entire computer. Almost everything that doesn’t run on a toaster should be programmed in something else, but people still make the decision to use this language.
1.
>I’d categorize it more as ‘collecting’ than ‘monitoring,’
>China filters outside traffic, and the U.S. doesn’t, so the U.S. must not be collecting that data for later analysis.
>I had a friend who worked for the NSA who told me it was alright. I suppose that means it was alright.
You’re trying to cast ambiguity on things that are already wide public knowledge. The NSA collects and *analyzes* this data. That the U.S. doesn’t block Chinese websites on an ISP level is entirely irrelevant. It makes no technical sense to halt a user’s internet connection in real time while you analyze it for terrorist activity, when you can concurrently send it off to an NSA server and get the same analysis seconds later. The Great Firewall is analyzing ISP traffic so that it can find its destination and drop it if it’s on a blacklist. These are two completely different technical and political goals.
There is always going to be far more data than is being used when you collect data on the scale the NSA does. While I generally don’t think you shouldn’t take this guys word at face value, this fact does not preclude any level of surveillance or misconduct on the NSA’s part. NSA employees could be sitting in their office chairs nine hours of the day looking at nudes or emails of journalists and “most data would remain unused”, or so your coworker might report.
2. With regards to the ones I’m familiar, you are, in practice, incorrect, or at least most police/spy agencies currently disagree with your cost benefit analysis. This is like saying that it’s better to try to collude with the bartender at a place where the Mafia hangs out than it is to just plant wiretaps when everyone has for the night. The NSA and the MSS don’t *want* people who work at a technology company to know how and where they are collecting data. It unnecessarily compromises the entire point of collecting such data in the first place. The average user is nabbed in the process of clandestinely hacking “high value targets” like Google.
Hey, I was only following orders.
The major difference between biological and artificial takeoff is that with biological takeoff, the superintelligent agents would be humans, with human-ish values. They may not be entirely prosocial, but they don’t need to be to keep from turning the world into paperclips. If they’re anything like modern high profile supergeniuses they will just use their talents to make major scientific or industrial advances.
>(It seems likely that once you’ve picked the low hanging fruit like stuffing people’s genomes as full of intelligence-linked genes as possible without giving them genetic diseases, it will be much easier to implement any new intelligence improvements you can think of in code, rather than in proteins. The human brain is a much more sophisticated starting point than any current AI programs, but is probably much harder to modify significantly.)
A lot of people make claims like this, and I think they’re underestimating the flexibility of living things. Dogs and livestock have been artificially selected to emphasize unnatural traits to the point that they might not appear in a trillion wolves or boars, yet people consistently predict that the limit for human intelligence without debilitating disorders is going to be just above whoever is the Terence Tao of the era.
This might be a bit of a hardball question for an event post, but I’ve always worried that memory was a zero sum game, and that by using a memorization tool like this I am artificially pushing out information my brain was saving based on its utility. I have the same worry about reading C.S. or math books that I often don’t end up using immediately in my work. Is there any evidence you’ve seen that could address this?