I acknowledge that I don’t know how the effort needed to found a livable settlement compares to the effort needed to move people from the US to a Covid-good country. If I knew how many person-hours each of these would take, it would be easier for me to know whether or not my idea doesn’t make sense.
MikkW
Karma: 512
On an individual basis, I definitely agree. Acting alone, it would be easier for me to personally move to NZ or SK than to found a new city. However, from a collective perspective (and if the LW community isn’t able to cordinate collective action, then it has failed), if a group of 50 − 1000 people all wanted to live in a place with sane precautions, and were willing to put in effort, creating a new town in the states will scale better (moving countries has effort scaling linearly with magnitude of population flux, while founding a town scales less than linearly)
Are there any areas in the states doing this? I would go to NZ or South Korea, but getting there is a hassle compared to going somewhere in the states. Regarding size, it’s not about self-sufficiency, but rather being able to interact in a normal way with other people around me without worrying about the virus, so the more people involved the better
I will note that I’m surprised that this currently stands at negative karma (-1)
It seems to me that months ago, we should have been founding small villages or towns that enforce contact tracing and required quarantines, both for contacts of people who are known to have been exposed, and for people coming in from outside the bubble. I don’t think this is possible in all states, but I’d be surprised if there was no state where this is possible.
With vaccines on the horizon, it seems likely that we are nearing the end of lockdowns and the pandemic, but there is talk of worry that it’s possible a mutant strain might resist the vaccine, which could put off the end of the pandemic for a while longer.
It seems to me that numerous nations have had a much better response to the pandemic than any state in the US, and have been able to maintain a much better quality of life during the pandemic than the states, including New Zealand, Japan, and South Korea. For someone with the flexibility, moving to one of these countries would have seemed like a smart move when it seemed there was still a long time left in the pandemic; and would still seem like a good idea if one feels that the pandemic will not be over soon enough.
While every US state has as a whole failed to reign in the virus, I suspect that it may be possible and worthwhile to establish a town or village in some state—perhaps not CA or NY, or whichever state you would most want to live in, but in some state—where everybody consents to measures similar to those taken in nations that have gotten a grasp of the virus, and to take advantage of a relative freedom from the virus to live a better life. This may be, if taken up by a collective, be a cheaper and more convenient (in some ways) alternative to moving to a country on the other side of the world.
I think capitalism staddles the line between these two modes: an inventor or well-function firm will optimize by making modifications that they actually understand, but the way the market optimizes products is how Scott and Abram describe it: you get a lot of stuff that you don’t attempt to understand deeply, and choose whichever one looks best. While I am generally a fan of capitalism, there are examples of “adversarial subsystems” that have been spun up as a result of markets—the slave trade and urban pollution (e.g. smog) come to mind.
In “Emedded Agency”, Scott and Abram write:
In theory, I don’t understand how to do optimization at all—other than methods that look like finding a bunch of stuff that I don’t understand, and seeing if it accomplishes my goal. But this is exactly the kind of thing that’s most prone to spinning up adversarial subsystems.
One form of optimization that comes to mind that is importantly different, is to carefully consider a prototypical system, think about how the parts interplay, and identify how the system can be improved, and create a new prototype that one can expect to be better. While practical application of this type of optimization will still often involve producing and testing multiple prototypes, it differs from back-propogation or stochastic hill-climbing because the new system will be better than the prototype it is based on due to reasons that the optimizing agent actually understands.
Life needs energy to survive, and life needs energy to reproduce. This isn’t just true of biological life made of cells and proteins, but also of more vaguely life-like things—cities need energy to survive, nations need energy to survive and reproduce, even memes rely on the energy used by the brains they live in to survive and spread.
Energy can take different forms—as glucose, starches, and lipids, as light, as the difference in potential energy between four hydrogen atoms and the helium atom they could (under high temperatures and pressures) become, as the gravitational potential of water held behind a dam or of a heavy object waiting to fall, or as the gradient of heat that exists between a warm plume of water and the surrounding cold ocean, just to name a few forms. But anything that wants claim to the title of being alive, must find energy.
If a lifeform cannot find energy, it will cease to create new copies of itself. Those things which are abundant in our world, are things that successfully found a source of energy with which to be created (cars and chairs might be raised as an exception, but they too indeed were created with energy, and either a prototypical idea, or the image of another car or chair in someone’s mind, needed to find energy in order to create that object).
The studies of biology and economics and not so far separated as they might seem—at the core of both fields in the question: “Can this phenomenon (organization, person, firm) find enough energy to survive and inspire more things like it?”. This question also drives the history of the world. If the answer is no, that phenomenon will die, and you will not notice it. Or, you might notice the death throes of a failed phenomenon, but only because something else, which did find energy, enabled that failed phenomenon to happen. Look around you. All the flowers you see, the squirrels, the humans, the buildings, the soda cans, the roadways, the grass, the birds. All of these phenomena somehow found energy with which to be created. If they didn’t, you wouldn’t be looking at them, they would never exist.
The ultimate form of life is the life that best gathers energy. The Cambrian explosion happened because first plants discovered they could turn light into usable food, then animals discovered they could use a toxic waste by-product of that photosynthesis—oxygen—as a (partial) source of energy. Look around you. Where is there free energy laying around, unused? How could that energy be captured? Remember, the nation that can harness that energy will be the nation that influences the world. The man who takes hold of that energy can become the wealthiest man in the world.
Finally coming around to this one, I found that I was a bit disappointed in myself that I wasn’t able to generate as many leads as I did last Bug Hunt.
While I’m maybe not perfect at keeping my identity small, when I was visiting the identity, I found that I’ve already been pushing on the problematic areas, to the extent that I didn’t find anything interesting while examining where my identity may be too big. Following the heuristic of Inverting Advice, maybe I could invert this and ask where I might have too small of an identity? Or perhaps it can be worthwhile for me to just try to write out everywhere where I know I have identified too big of an identity in the past.
Regarding Pica, I suspect that there may be something to it, but if there is, most of it is flying under my radar. I was able to identify soda, video games, and walking as activities that may have pica-like motivations; I find that I most crave soda when I haven’t been eating enough (I always enjoy soda, but perhaps I’ve been drinking it more than I normally would lately due to suboptimal food intake), video games I generally have a positive relationship with, but I find myself wondering if some of my motivation lately to play videogames has something to do with me not doing practical things that my mind is built to want to do. I also suspect that walking may have provided some benefits in the ancestral environment that I’m not getting from walks in the modern environment; walking used to be a mode of transport, a way of exploring one’s locale, and something that could lead to discovering new resources; of course, none of these happen on my walks (aside from meeting people, but lately even that hasn’t been very helpful). Maybe there is some deeper purpose my mind hopes to achieve when it tells me to go for a walk? But then, I’m not sure this is true. Maybe I just go for walks because it’s good for the mind and body, when I’d otherwise be inside all day. It’s a thread to pull on.
Regarding Ambition, I think that I’m already quite good at pulling things in the direction of setting crazily ambitious goals—to the extent that I’ve lately grown somewhat jaded at overly ambitious goals, and now I just groan when I consider a goal that doesn’t seem realistic; instead of the wild excitement that Xiaoyu’s heart felt when he kept doubling the intensity of his ambition, the groaning in my head just grew louder and louder as I raised the stakes. I instead decided to invert this advice, and try to make realistic goals out of the wildly ambitious goals my brain gives me, but halving the stakes until I felt confident in my ability to achieve them. I turned the goal of increasing by 1 kyu in Go every week to the goal of increasing by at least 1 kyu every month. I turned earning $1,000 every month to simply earning at least $10 every month. Another low-ball goal I generated was to just photograph a person; I’ll let your imagination figure out what the original goal was.
For the daily challenge, I’ll lean right into it. My most subjectively immodest ambition is to govern a city-state on the Moon with at least 250,000 inhabitants, all of whom are people who are selected according to criteria I set. Actually, I can do better than that. If I want to be as subjectively immodest as possible, I want to govern the entire Moon, with a population of at least a billion people. That’s plenty immodest, and makes my heart throb with joy.
Maybe post it first as a single post, then break it up into a sequence later?
I recently wrote about combining Grand Chess with Drop Chess, to make what I felt could become my favorite version of chess. Today, I just read this article, which argues that the queen’s unique status as a ‘power piece’ in Orthodox Chess—a piece that is stronger than any other piece on the board—is part of what makes Orthodox so iconic in the west, and that other major chesslikes similarly have a unique power piece (or pair of power pieces). According to this theory, Grand Chess’s trifecta of power pieces may give it less staying power than Orthodox Chess. I’m not convinced, since Shogi has 2 power pieces, which is only 1 less than Grand Chess, and twice as many as Orthodox, but it is food for thought.
My first reaction was to add an Amazon (bishop + rook + knight in one piece) as a power piece, but it’s not clear to me that there’s an elegant way of adding it (although an 11x11 board might just be the obvious solution), and it has already been pointed out that my ‘Ideal Chess’ already has a large amount of piece power, and the ability to create a sufficiently buffed King has already been called into question, before an Amazon is added, so I’m somewhat dubious of that naïve approach.
Double cruxes aren’t supposed to be something you win or lose, as I understand it—a double crux is a collaborative effort to help both parties arrive at a better understanding of the truth. It’s problematic when admitting that you’re wrong, and changing your mind is called “losing”
I have downvoted a few, but certainly not all of the comments you made in response to me here and on my other recent post. On the other thread, I have downvoted comments that I both disagreed with, and felt were either too harsh or failed to understand what I was saying, without attempting to resolve potential miscommunications.
In the case of this particular comment, your comment was showing up at the top of the comments (due to your seniority on this site), but I felt that it wasn’t the comment that presented the most useful information, so I weak-downvoted it to allow other comments to gain more visibility. I don’t have any problem with the comment itself. Now that I say it, I’m not sure that I endorse that approach (not sure that I don’t, either, but I’ll reflect on this more tonight), but I definitely do apologize for any chilling effect that may have had, I feel bad that my approach has made you feel reluctant to engage in open conversation.
I will also note that there are several comments disagreeing with me on this post and the other one that I haven’t downvoted—there are only 4 other comments (aside from you) that I have downvoted between these two posts, 2 of which were unhelpful and had questionable tones, and have received downvotes from people other than me, and currently stand at negative karma. The other two posts I weak-downvoted for the same reason as this one—they appeared at the top of the comments by default, due to the user’s seniority giving their comments 2 karma by default, but which were not the most interesting comments.
I don’t really feel like the Champion and Wizard are “missing pieces” the same way the Cardinal and Marshal are. There are a practically infinite number of pieces that could possibly exist, so I’d expect most possible pieces are not included in the game (Betza’s Chess with Different Armies is a nice exploration of this). Omega chess doesn’t even feel particularly complete- where are the pieces that can move exactly 1 square orthogonally or diagonally? If a champion is to rook as the wizard is to bishop, what is the knight to? I feel the correct completion of that is the knightrider, but there is no knightrider in the game. And we still have this weird gap where we have rook + bishop = queen, but rook + knight and bishop + knight are missing.
While I expect that most possible pieces will be missing from any variant, I happen to agree with Capablanca and Freeling that the lack of marshal and cardinal in orthodox feels weird. In orthodox, the queen is a strange wildcard that is unlike any other piece, whereas in grand chess the queen, cardinal, and marshal make a nice set, naturally extending the knights, bishops, and rooks.
Beyond any considerations of completeness, I also just feel more excited about the Cardinal and Marshal than most other variant pieces. They feel like fireworks to me, and I’d prefer a game with them over a game with a few new weaker pieces
It doesn’t seem right to me to give the king a long-range move. To end the game, the king needs every single one of its liberties to be blocked off, and the shape the liberties makes affects how enjoyable it can be to try and pin down a king—the shape of the orthodox king’s liberties is very pleasant to navigate (both as an attacker and defender), and I worry that buffing the king can end up with its liberties having a shape that isn’t fun to play with. If the king has too many liberties, then pinning it down can be like trying to hold water; it’s way too slippery.
The difficulty of checkmating a king increases exponentially as liberties increases—a naïve model: if any given square has probability p of being attacked by the opposing team or blocked, then there is a p^L probability of a king with L liberties being checkmated. Of course, this model isn’t realistic, but the pattern holds, so even just a few extra moves can go a long way for buffing the king.
Aside from changing stalemates, I don’t see how this changes anything. Checkmate is isomorphic to capturing the king, as long as no blunders are made
There’s some conversation about this post over on the comments on Hacker News, so if you want to hear more, check that out.
I mean, Capablanca was World Champion. Same thing with Bobby Fischer and Fischer960 chess
Sorry, I don’t think I suceeded at speaking with clarity there. The way you use LW is perfectly fine and good.
My view of LW is that it’s a site dedicated to rationality, both epistemic and instrumental. Instrumental rationality is, as Eliezer likes to call it, “the art of winning”. The art of winning often calls for collective action to achieve the best outcomes, so if collective action never comes about, then that would indicate a failure of instrumental rationality, and thereby a failure of the purpose of LW.
LW hasn’t failed. While I have observed some failures of the collective userbase to properly engage in collective action to the fullest extent, I find it does often succeed in creating collective action, often thanks to the deliberate efforts of the LW team.