Here is a list of all my public writings and videos.
If you want to do a dialogue with me, but I didn’t check your name, just send me a message instead. Ask for what you want!
Here is a list of all my public writings and videos.
If you want to do a dialogue with me, but I didn’t check your name, just send me a message instead. Ask for what you want!
I think the idea to make “‘college degree’ a protected characteristic” is an interesting thought experiment. It brings up an array of fascinating questions.
I’m not quite 100% sure if I can write or if I have to write or if there’s some other scaling factor I’m missing. Please check my math.
Thanks. This helps. I’ve edited my post to fix.
Fixed! Thank you.
This seems like the flip-side to the guideline “Write your true reasons for believing something, not what you think is more likely to persuade others...and note what would change your mind”. Just as the guideline is a method of getting yourself to the crux of an issue, this essay is about how to quickly get someone else to the crux of an issue.
From what I wrote, your reply makes complete sense. The situation for these tools in particular is surprisingly non-self-correcting. The wider ecosystem is only just starting to self-correct to the right general direction and even that process is going slowly. We are working on monetizing this stuff, but the process can be expected to take several years. Our goal isn’t to change minds. We’d prefer to maintain a competitive advantage.
“ML tooling” adoption doesn’t follow efficient market dynamics in at least one respect.
This is exactly what I mean.
I think that the ML community is open to switching certain kinds of tools (including the examples you listed) but that other kinds of tools are so far off the community’s radar that data scientists aren’t even aware of their value. This is hard to explain without getting into specifics and I’m not ready to talk about the details yet.
That is deliberately obfuscated.
Thank you especially for the link to Church’s ladders. I’ve never seen that before. It was helpful and interesting.
I think Church’s 3-ladder system (linked to in the original article) offers a good foundation to think about this question because Church’s system has 12 classes instead of the 3-class system pixx uses.
How to go up a class depends not only on where you come from but also what you’re aiming for. Getting from lower to middle class is a different process than getting from middle class to upper class. Even getting from lower middle class to upper middle class is a different process than getting from lower lower class to upper lower class.
So the first question to ask is which class are you from?
Using Church’s system, I expect that most of the lesswrong readership is in G3/G2, the middle rungs of the middle class (which is well-above the median class). There are two places you can go up from here: into the top of the middle class and into the bottom of the upper class. There is a different route to each of these places. Getting to the top of the middle class is about getting famous in certain kind of way. Getting into the upper class is about amassing money and power. (Also, if you’re G3 then you can aim for G2, which has a whole different set of criteria.)
There is some intersect between fame and money/power, but it’s hard to optimize for both simultaneously. The fastest way to fame is to start a YouTube channel, a webcomic or some similar Internet media. The fastest way to wealth and power for lesswrong readers is probably to start a tech startup. There’s plenty of tutorials and other instructional material for how to do these things. In my experience, the limiting factor seems to be the quantity of people willing to do the legwork despite the risk of failure. Of the many people I know in G3, most of them (besides myself and my business partner) appear uninterested in taking any of these paths. Only a handful of G3s I know even aspire toward G2. This behavior mystifies me, but they seem happily comfortable.
How can we hack this?
I’m not sure as I’m not an insider on the classes I want to break into.
maybe all rationalists are middle-class
We are. Intellectualism is a middle-class trait. Therefore lesswrong is a middle-class website. Intellectualism isn’t important to the elite (or to labor) the way it is to the middle class, because intellectualism doesn’t advance you within the elite (or within labor).
I feel like we’re in agreement too. Thanks for your comments, by the way. I find this subject very interesting and it’s nice to have someone to discuss it with.
I think the problem of getting this hypothetical working class guy onto the white-collar ladder is the same reason it’s hard for you (G3) to jump to the elite ladder. That is, while working full-time to support a family it’s not responsible to take the huge amount of risk involved in trying to jump a ladder. While some people have what it takes to do this safely (involving personality traits, personal finances, geographic location, etc.) most do not. English alone can be a disqualifier. I had already written off anyone without fluency.
I think whether or not you have kids is more important than the safety net. If we go broke, you and I can both easily get jobs writing software for <insert company here>, but if you go broke your family suffers whereas if I go broke I’ve merely lost my savings and can fall back on my educational capital. (This advantage is in addition to the lack of free time you mention.)
I think that for someone in the position of supporting a family a more reasonable goal would be to climb one rung within a ladder rather than trying to jump ladders. This is what most of my friends (of all classes) seem to be doing and what you’re doing as well. Of course, it’s often possible to put your kids on the lower rungs of the next ladder. (This is what my blue-collar parents did for me.)
the competition [for G1] is very strong.
Yes it is, far more so than E3.
What is an upper-class trait? Dominance?
I’m not really sure as I’m not part of the upper class but those that I’ve met seem to suggest that intellectualism isn’t it.
“Dominance” isn’t exactly wrong but I feel like it misses the target a little. I suspect the difference is that the upper class values power over education. That is, to the upper class, running a company while unqualified is more respectable than being intellectually qualified to run a company but lacking the connections to do so.
And of course, getting to the level of a 12-year old is not enough to give him a job, so it’s still all expense and no gain.
One interesting thing about the three ladders model is that skills acquired in one ladder are optimal for that ladder and only partially transfer to another ladder. So the skills a blue-collar worker acquires have only marginal utility for the white-collar ladder. The older you get, the more your skills become specifically effective toward the ladder(s) you’ve been climbing.
Suppose you have two chemical compounds A and B, the exact formula of which you keep secret.
The fundamental problem with this proposal is that it relies on “security through obscurity”. If criminals figure out how to identify and synthesize chemical compounds A and B then the entire system no longer works. The best security systems usually have a key that’s easy to change when enemies crack it. In this case, we’d have to replace the chemicals, the chemical manufacturing systems and the detection systems. That’s very expensive.
Criminals synthesizing the chemical compounds is virtually guaranteed because it’s very difficult to distribute a chemical to every gas station in the country and keep it secret. At the same time, criminals are good at synthesizing weird substances. For example, they’ll often make small chemical modifications to addictive drugs to make them legal. Even if criminals are incapable of making the chemical domestically, it’d be easy to smuggle in the chemical in from a foreign country.
Has it (or something similar) ever been implemented anywhere?
You might be interested in denatured ethanol. When a government wants to legalize ethanol for non-drinking (and therefore lower-tax) purposes it is made undrinkable.
If we had a chemical that turned un-burnable oil into burnable oil then your proposed system might be more robust, but I do not know of such a substance that would be economically viable.
Reading Less Wrong might be the same but writing LW posts isn’t. On certain kinds of websites you don’t have to replace the website itself as long as you flip around the direction content flows. What’s SSC?
Good catch with the the online course exception. I missed it because I don’t personally use online courses. I think writing any sort of book is an exception to the rule too, since both reading and writing books make you smarter.
Anki might not be suitable for anything other than vocabulary extension (and medical school). I’m not really sure. I’ve only ever successfully used it for vocabulary extension.
I may be biased because I use Anki to study Chinese, an unusually difficult language. The relative merits of Duolingo vs. Anki may be less clear-cut for easier languages like Romance languages where it’s not necessary to learn the language so systematically. In the case of Chinese, grammar is so simple and vocabulary is so hard that vocabulary extension is pretty much the entire game, so optimizing for anything other than vocabulary acquisition can cause you to fail in the long intermediate slog.
What language(s) are you studying?
I find Duolingo way better for getting a feel for grammar.
This makes sense. I prioritize vocabulary over grammer for a couple reasons. [1] You can communicate effectively with vocabulary and without grammar (but not vice-versa) and [2] the difficulty of learning a language’s grammar is far outweighed, in the long run, by the difficulty of learning vocabulary.
It may make sense for someone to start learning with Duolingo and then transfer to Anki (for hard languages) or just reading material in the language (for easy languages). I’m happy to hear that Duolingo works for you.
Spaced repetition is inherently difficult because it requires a period of intense focus. It you’re doing it efficiently it’s hard on a minute-to-minute level. In my personal experience, it’s the most intense form of study I can scale up. When I’m using Anki, it’s the hardest 10-15 minutes of my day.
Your guess is correct.