Myron Hedderson

Karma: 207

Myron Hedderson 22 Jan 2026 19:11 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Myron Hedderson’s comment on: Money Can’t Buy the Smile on a Child’s Face As They Look at A Beautiful Sunset… but it also can’t buy a malaria free world: my current understanding of how Effective Altruism has failed
Retracted, because after conversation on Ben’s blog, it’s not a matter of thinking marginal costs will go down with scale—rather, he treats “funding gap” more strictly than I would, something like “the amount of money charities can absorb and deploy at approximately present marginal costs per life saved”. And if you define the funding gap as “the amount of money that can be deployed at approximately present marginal costs, or better”, then “assume marginal cost does not go down at all” is indeed the most generous assumption.

Myron Hedderson 22 Jan 2026 13:37 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Eli Tyre’s comment on: Money Can’t Buy the Smile on a Child’s Face As They Look at A Beautiful Sunset… but it also can’t buy a malaria free world: my current understanding of how Effective Altruism has failed
Thanks. Side note (I posted another comment about this just now, because it just clicked for me this morning): I think Ben Hoffman thinks (or thought, when he wrote his blog posts) that when you treat more malaria cases or do other philanthropy, marginal cost goes down. He says:
If we assume that all of this is treatable at current cost per life saved numbers—the most generous possible assumption for the claim that there’s a funding gap
When in fact it’s the least generous, under the assumption that marginal cost goes up. If you think marginal costs will only go down from current levels as we scale, then it is indeed suspicious that nobody’s decided to just dump all their money into scaling.

Myron Hedderson 22 Jan 2026 13:25 UTC
1 point
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on: Money Can’t Buy the Smile on a Child’s Face As They Look at A Beautiful Sunset… but it also can’t buy a malaria free world: my current understanding of how Effective Altruism has failed
I think I’ve found a crux that makes things make sense today, that didn’t make sense to me yesterday as I was reading the first linked blog post. When trying to think about the existence or nonexistence of a funding gap, Ben says:
If we assume that all of this is treatable at current cost per life saved numbers—the most generous possible assumption for the claim that there’s a funding gap
And my brain skipped a beat, and went “no, the opposite, that’s the least generous possible assumption. As we treat more, the next treatment becomes more expensive, not less. Maybe that’s what he meant to say?” And then the rest of the blog post just seemed sorta wrong. I was like “maybe he doesn’t get that this is marginal cost?”. But that’s not it, I realized as I was laying in bed thinking about this.
If you’ve been steeped enough in standard economics which talks about producing widgets, your mental association between “marginal cost” and “as you produce more, marginal cost goes down” is strong. Because usually, there are economies of scale which mean that’s what happens. From memory, I recall seeing something that said that every time the number of solar panels produced doubles, the cost per panel goes down by 20%, for example.
If you’re thinking “$5,000 is the current marginal cost, and therefore the most saving a life with a malaria net will ever cost, the more life-saving we do, the less it will cost”, then everything else he says follows. The right strategy for someone with a lot of money would be to scale this intervention to the max and drive costs down. And the fact that billionaire philanthropists aren’t doing this is suspicious, suggests that they don’t really believe the conclusions Givewell has put out. EDIT TO ADD: And the fact that marginal costs have been going up over time as we do more philanthropy, rather than being exactly what you would expect to happen, suggests that Givewell got its initial estimates wrong and what’s happening is as we learn more, we learn that everything is more expensive than we thought. There are not in fact any cheap drowning children to save, and never were.
If instead you think of the marginal cost as “the cost to pick the lowest hanging fruit, will go up when we pick that fruit” then you reach different conclusions.

Myron Hedderson 21 Jan 2026 17:51 UTC
5 points
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in reply to: Myron Hedderson’s comment on: Money Can’t Buy the Smile on a Child’s Face As They Look at A Beautiful Sunset… but it also can’t buy a malaria free world: my current understanding of how Effective Altruism has failed
An analogy:
We are in the “you can save a drowning child for an affordable price” world. In this world (or a hypothetical one for the purpose of this analogy), 1,000 infants are being dumped in a large lake per day. Some of them are right by the shore, easy to get to like the drowning child thought experiment postulates, some are out in deeper water. I’m a strong swimmer, and could save any of those infants, but I can’t save all of them by myself, and if I try to save as many as I can today, I will exhaust and potentially injure myself, meaning I can save fewer tomorrow. I estimate I could save 100 today if I put forth all the effort I can, saving the ones that are easier to reach first. But there are some people who aren’t as good at swimming as I am, so maybe I should swim further out, save 10, and let the 90 I chose not to save that I could have, hopefully be taken up by others. But in that case, I’m still exhausted, and can do less tomorrow. So maybe I save 5, every day, a mix of easy ones and harder ones to demonstrate what’s possible and encourage others to join in, and spend some of my energy and time trying to figure out how to solve the underlying problem here, rather than just pulling people out of the lake. And then someone says “looks like it’s not true that it’s easy to save a drowning child, if it was true this guy would have saved more lives”. And what it looks like to “go hard” at this problem is not obvious, but “save a few, leave room for others, try and solve the underlying problem” is one plausible strategy. And because I can’t save them all “I need more people to help with this” is a thing I should say to anyone who will listen.

Myron Hedderson 21 Jan 2026 14:42 UTC
21 points
3
on: Money Can’t Buy the Smile on a Child’s Face As They Look at A Beautiful Sunset… but it also can’t buy a malaria free world: my current understanding of how Effective Altruism has failed
It seems like 3 things are simultaneously true:
1) It’s not possible to eradicate malaria for $5,000/life saved (that’s the marginal cost, approximately, ballpark estimate with lots of wiggle room in the number). This generalizes to all other currently known interventions to make people’s lives better at low cost—it’s relatively cheap now, but one should expect that saving the last life that would otherwise have died from malaria, or helping the last person who can be helped with some other intervention that is currently near the best marginal cost, will cost a lot more than $5,000. I feel like Givewell et. al. are clear about this, or at least this is the understanding I came away with when reading their stuff, rather than being a surprise I discovered from other sources.
2) If we did assume that we could save all the savable lives for $5,000 apiece per year (again, this is false, but as a way of ballparking how much is definitely not enough to solve all problems), taking the number of 10 million deaths per year of communicable disease (referenced in Ben’s blog post, and noting that “communicable disease” and “all problems” are not the same) at face value, we get $50 billion per year. As I understand it, the amount of philanthropic wealth to eventually give away in places like the Gates Foundation and Good Ventures and affiliates is on the order of tens to hundreds of billions of dollars, not trillions. So spending $50 billion/year is not sustainable, and even at the marginal cost of $5,000 per life saved, there’s still going to be a long term funding gap.
3) Having recently done a deep dive into Givewell’s recommendations for a presentation to a local community group, I notice that their recommendations and methodologies are still developing. The basic ideas like “there are opportunities in poor countries that don’t exist in rich countries” and “malaria is bad, and helping with it on the margin is cheap” have stayed the same, but they flag lots of places where their ways of analyzing things have changed over the past 5-10 years, and generically for any page that hasn’t been updated in a few years, they put a disclaimer at the top that the analysis may not reflect the present situation or Givewell’s best understanding. Also new cause areas in EA are coming up every few years, and there are a lot of “more research needed” tags around most conclusions. My takeaway is that we know a lot more now about how to use money to do good, than we did 10 years ago, and I expect that 10 years from now, we’ll have similarly improved our knowledge-base, and may have uncovered better opportunities than are currently known. So it makes sense to hold some money in reserve pending that further research.
With this as background, if I try to put myself in the shoes of someone who has $10 billion and wants to do maximally good things with it, it makes sense not to spend it all immediately on malaria, even though that would save a bunch of lives. And it makes sense not to fund the crap out of all the marginally most effective interventions until all my money is gone this year, driving the marginal cost of various outcomes up to some multiple of its current level which makes it so everyone else feels like contributing to this effort is some multiple less useful than it was last year—and then my money runs out, all the orgs who got a bump in funding are scrambling for next year’s funds, the rest of the philanthropic community feels less interested, and chaos ensues. Clearly a suboptimal approach.
Just out of curiosity, I googled how much has been spent on Polio (almost, but not quite, eradicated), and estimates are on the order of $20 billion over the past 37 years (not adjusted for inflation) with the 2022-2029 budget being $7 billion (so the last few cases are going to be super expensive). So I would be unsurprised if solving all communicable disease had a cost on the order of hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars, and couldn’t be done tomorrow or this year even if I had $100 trillion to spend on it.
This seems to be a core of your argument:
The big weird thing is that it seems like difficulties were found in the early picture of how much good was in fact being done thru these avenues, and this was quietly elided, and more research wasn’t being done to get to the bottom of the question, and there’s also various indicators that EA orgs themselves didn’t really believe their numbers for how much good could done.
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Givewell advising Open Phil to not fully fund things is the main “it seems like the parties upstream of the main message don’t buy their main message enough to Go Hard at it”.
Whereas to me, I don’t see evidence that difficulties were found in the cost effectiveness estimates (it was never claimed that marginal cost could just be multiplied by number of cases to get total cost) that advice from GiveWell makes sense, doesn’t seem weird, and doesn’t seem like the parties upstream of the main message don’t buy it. “Going hard” with $10-100 billion, when the total cost to solve all extreme problems is going to be trillions of dollars and tens of years at least and we’re constantly learning as we go, looks (to me) like approximately what the 10-billionaire philanthropists are doing. At least, a better strategy, if Givewell’s recommendations are basically sound, doesn’t immediately occur to me.

Myron Hedderson 13 Jan 2026 18:30 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Eli Tyre’s comment on: Eli’s shortform feed
If most failures of rationality are adaptively self-serving motivated reasoning
I would say that most failures of rationality were adaptive in the ancestral environments, but I wouldn’t say they all count as “motivated reasoning”.

Simple example: Seeing a snake in the grass, and responding as if there is a snake in the grass, in the presence of ambiguous stimuli that have only a 10% chance of being a snake, could well result in more surviving offspring than a more nuanced, likely slower, and closer-to-correct estimation of the probability there is a snake. But this is not a result of motivated reasoning where someone is advocating for their interests, it’s just a hack that our evolved brains have for keeping us alive using minimal energy and time for computation because calories were scarce and snakes sometimes moved quickly.

My understanding is that many failures of rationality are adaptive in this way—trading off getting the right answer (in terms of the answer that will cause there to be most offspring in future generations, not in terms of the answer that would count as “winning” by the lights of the human involved, necessarily—evolution doesn’t care a whit about whether I feel like I’ve won or lost or advanced what I see as my interests, as a result of something my brain’s biased towards or away from) against energy and time costs. One thing that could be different now is, the situations where we will starve are fewer, and the time we have to think before deciding what to do is often more.

Motivated reasoning is a specific relatively small subset of the biases our brains are subject to, not the main handle for biases in general, I think?

Myron Hedderson 8 Jan 2026 13:32 UTC
1 point
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on: On Owning Galaxies
The key intuition about the future might be simply that humans being around is an incredibly weird state of affairs. We shouldn’t expect it to continue by default.
I mean, yes this seems right. In which case, taking it as a premise that this weird state doesn’t last long, it follows that there’s no point trying to plan for a future where human-like things continue to exist. BUT: from where we stand right now, we do actually have some control over whether everybody dies and nothing human-like continues into the future. The simplest plan to avoid extinction by AI is “don’t build the thing that kills us”, but there are more sophisticated options too. As unlikely as it was for such a situation to arise in the first place, as weird as it is to be here, here we are. And we can try to aim, from here, for a future state that is vanishingly unlikely to happen by chance or by default, such as “not human extinction”.

I think the speculation about owning galaxies starts from the assumption that we succeeded in aiming the future in such a direction. And although that assumption may not be what actually happens, it would be unfortunate to get to that future state and then not have thought through what to do next because we didn’t think it was likely so we never planned for the possibility.
The whole thing people are doing when they’re talking about good futures and how to get there, is a process of trying to design a path towards an unlikely future that is emphatically not the default outcome without humans trying to make it happen.

Myron Hedderson 25 Nov 2025 1:55 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: LWLW’s comment on: LWLW’s Shortform
How rare good people are depends heavily on how high your bar for qualifying as a good person is. Many forms of good-person behaviour are common, some are rare. A person who has never done anything they later felt guilty about (who has a functioning conscience) is exceedingly rare. In my personal experience, I have found people to vary on a spectrum from “kind of bad and selfish quite often, but feels bad about it when they think about it and is good to people sometimes” to “consistently good, altruistic and honest, but not perfect, may still let you down on occasion”, with rare exceptions falling outside this range.

Myron Hedderson 24 Nov 2025 20:43 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: LWLW’s comment on: LWLW’s Shortform
Also, if it is true that a lot of people are confused by good and courageous people, I am unclear where the confusion comes from. Good behaviour gets rewarded from childhood, and bad behaviour gets punished. Not perfectly, of course, and in some places and times very imperfectly indeed, but being seen as a good person by your community’s definition of “good” has many social rewards, we’re social creatures… I am unclear where the mystery is.
Were the confused people raised by ~~wolves~~non-social animals?
I don’t actually buy the premise that a lot of people are confused by moral courage, on reflection.

Myron Hedderson 24 Nov 2025 20:09 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: LWLW’s comment on: LWLW’s Shortform
This doesn’t match my experience of what good people are generally like. I find them to be often happy to do what they are doing, rather than extremely afraid of not doing it, as I imagine would be the case if their reasons for behaving as they do were related to avoidance of pain.
There are of course exceptions. But if thinking I had done the wrong thing was extremely painful to me, literally “1000x more than any physical pain” I predict I’d quite possibly land on the strategy “avoid thinking about matters of right and wrong, so as to reliably avoid finding out I’d done wrong.” A nihilistic worldview where nothing was right or wrong and everything I might do is fine, would be quite appealing. Also, since one can’t change the past, any discovery that I’d done something wrong in the past would be an unfixable, permanent source of extreme pain for the rest of my life. In that situation, I’d probably rationalize the past behaviour as somehow being good, actually, in order to make the pain stop… which does not pattern-match to being a good person long term, but rather the opposite, being someone who is pathologically unable to admit fault, and has a large bag of tricks to avoid blame.

Myron Hedderson 18 Nov 2025 1:34 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Myron Hedderson’s comment on: “But You’d Like To Feel Companionate Love, Right? … Right?”
Another thought I had: Likely if you had grown up with functional oxytocin receptors, your values would be different than how they are now, sure—you’d value a thing you have no reason to value right now, and that likely would have had many effects on the path your life has taken. But that doesn’t imply that if, as an adult, you get functional oxytocin receptors somehow, you will become the person you would have been if you’d grown up with them from birth. Think less vampire-transformation, more “I didn’t realize my nose was plugged, this food actually does taste good now”.

Myron Hedderson 18 Nov 2025 1:08 UTC
5 points
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on: “But You’d Like To Feel Companionate Love, Right? … Right?”
It seems to me like you’re overestimating the value people place on companionate love/the “warm fuzzy” feeling many people get from physical and sometimes emotional closeness to another (which is what I associate with oxytocin). It’s a mild nice feeling, not an “oh my god I must have more of this right now and forever” feeling that would hijack your brain and value system in the way you speculate that trying heroin might.

I can’t comment very well on whether heroin actually would hijack my values if I tried it, although I remember in a drugs and behaviour class I took once there were anecdotes of doctors who were fully functional with easy access to and frequent use of heroin, in the time before it was illegal, and also stories about Rat Park, where the idea was that rats in a deprived environment took water laced with cocaine excessively, but those in an enriched environment were less interested in that. I speculate that many people place a high value on companionate love having been through significant periods of loneliness, rather than because the experience of a hit of oxytocin is much like the stories I’ve heard some people tell about what a hit of heroin is like. Also I note that you sometimes say “love” when you mean companionate love specifically, and many people who say something like “love is very important to me” aren’t being as precise in their language or thought as you tend to be, and conflate companionate love, libido-rooted sexual desire, limerance, and social acceptance into one thing, and say they value that. And there are definitely a lot of people who do some pretty insane-seeming things in pursuit of a combination of sexual attraction, limerance, and a feeling of closeness which is antithetical to loneliness. But just the warm fuzzy feeling? Less so.

I also think the stories of people throwing away large amounts of things you value and putting up with situations which to you would be strongly net-negative “for love”, aside from being about the more imprecise conception of love most people use, are also salient to you because they’re dysfunctional. There are, I expect, many people who have functional oxytocin receptors and just live their lives in perfectly sensible ways that wouldn’t come to your attention as a problem, or even very notable. Companionate love is just one feeling among many. Many/most people start out with little ability to regulate their emotions, as small children, and then grow and mature and by adulthood, throw fewer tantrums and handle their emotions better. And I expect if you gained the ability to feel the emotion(s) corresponding to oxytocin, you would handle them with about the same level of maturity that you manage with the other emotions you have. It is true that some people do stupid things because they don’t know how to integrate their emotions and their thoughts into a sensible response to the world around them, quite a few people seem to struggle with their feelings, but this isn’t just true with respect to companionate love, it’s also true of anger, sadness, shame, limerance… etc. Having experienced both limerance and companionate love, I think if you can handle the former, you can handle the latter—limerance definitely feels stronger and more cognition-distorting in my experience.

With all that said, your post does make sense to me, from the perspective of someone who hasn’t felt a common emotion. If you were, say, someone who had never felt anger, you could likewise look at the world around you and go “wow, people sure are doing some insane things while under the influence of this emotion, I’m glad I don’t have it”. And that would be pretty accurate, and likely true of most emotions.

I say most of this to suggest that if there is, in future, the ability to give yourself functional oxytocin receptors, you probably have less to fear from that than from other mind-altering interventions you might think of. It’s pretty mild, and most people in a good life situation with a decent amount of maturity can handle a warm feeling in their chest without throwing their life away in pursuit of more. Our culture is not good at saying “be reasonable about your pursuit of love”, or even teasing apart different aspects of the culturally-approved thing-you’re-supposed-to-throw-your-life-away-for-like-in-the-movies, which is unhelpful to those trying to navigate new emotions as teenagers, but I bet if you felt a warm fuzzy feeling one day, you’d be just fine.

Myron Hedderson 3 Nov 2025 14:55 UTC
0 points
−1
on: Why I Transitioned: A Case Study
This was informative for me. One of my best friends from elementary school got back in touch last year after 30+ years, and is currently in the process of mtf transition. I don’t think that her reasons for transitioning match or parallel yours, but I don’t fully know what her reasons are in the level of detail you’ve shared about yours—I feel like now is not the time to ask questions that might come across the wrong way if I’m not careful. And your explanation of how things are for you makes me go “OK, that makes sense”, which transitioning hadn’t for me up until this point.

Re: “Famously, trans people tend not to have great introspective clarity into their own motivations for transition.”… I did not know that. My friend is pretty introspective, and she’s the only trans person with whom I have enough direct experience to assess level of introspective ability. Although my model of “trans people in general” won’t get a strong update from your description of your motives and thought process (I figure your experience is that of one subgroup of mtf trans people), this fact that you who are in a position to know claim is famously generally true, will update my general model.

I would personally have been hesitant to speculate about motives along these lines, because the generic line of ~~reasoning~~ speculation “people are doing a thing I don’t understand because they’re <insert something with negative connotations, like mental illness or being socially ostracized>” is an easy answer to jump to that makes one feel superior, but is often wrong. So hearing your reasons were rooted in finding social acceptance is extra useful, because I would have just not allowed myself to put much probability on that unless I’d heard from someone directly that it was true for them.

I see below that some people on twitter have apparently pushed you to delete links to this essay or the essay itself. I vote you keep it up.

Myron Hedderson 13 Oct 2025 13:03 UTC
9 points
3
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Don’t Mock Yourself
Third hand anecdote re: your footnote: a good friend of mine has a mother who she says is a narcissist, and the behaviour she describes is “can’t stand the thought she might have flaws, evidence of a flaw is brutally suppressed, reacted to with anger, blame, denial, gaslighting and displacement, and if a thought like ‘I am not perfect, specifically this is a way that I am not the best/someone else is better than me’ does get through the defenses, it results in a mental collapse and period of weeks filled with only negative thoughts, expressed to others to try and build back up her sense of self worth by getting people to say she’s wrong about the negative thoughts”. It’s like this person can’t occupy the mental territory “I’m OK, mostly good” it’s either “I am fantastic” or “I am terrible”.
I would be unsurprised if different people exhibiting narcissistic behaviour had different reasons for doing so, and some just straight up think unreasonably highly of themselves and are resistant to evidence to the contrary, without it being a defense mechanism, while others were like the anecdote above.

Myron Hedderson 7 Oct 2025 11:09 UTC
5 points
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in reply to: Raymond Douglas’s comment on: Gradual Disempowerment Monthly Roundup
Interested in a regular version: yes.
Substack: iffy. I find it’s optimizing for engagement enough that I’ll go through cycles of spending more time there than I intend, then taking a break, and every time I go into the app rather than just reading emails of the people I have subscribed to, I regret it because of wasted time. They have also started making it really easy to subscribe but substantially harder to unsubscribe. This was not true a year ago, IIRC.

Myron Hedderson 18 Sep 2025 11:14 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: chasmani’s comment on: The Eldritch in the 21st century
Clarification: my position is that our current level of understanding of how the economy works can, for the most part, be grasped by most people with some effort, rather than being an impenetrable mystery. Not that everyone actually does understand the economy because it’s super easy, and certainly not that if they did we wouldn’t have economic problems. None of what I said is incompatible with what you said.
It would be nice if understanding how things worked automatically led to things working better, but this is not the case.
A simple example where understanding an underlying problem doesn’t solve the problem: I understand fairly well why I’m tempted to eat too many potato chips, and why this is bad for me, and what I could do instead. And yet, sometimes I still eat more potato chips than I intend.
A more complicated case: a few people making a lot of money, while most people’s lives get better due to specialization and trade (counting the world economy as a whole, not necessarily within a particular village, or country) is what one would predict given an understanding of how the economy works. There are of course many complications in the real world that aren’t captured in economic models, which often make simplifying assumptions like “people are rational”. In the real world, people do things like eat potato chips a nonzero number of times.

Myron Hedderson 12 Sep 2025 14:07 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Gabriel Alfour’s comment on: The Eldritch in the 21st century
Oops—I realized you may have intended a different meaning than I assumed, on a re-read.

Separately, my experience has been that many people think they can’t understand things when they can. The sense of hopelessness and powerlessness in a world that’s too complicated for them is out of proportion to how complicated the world actually is. I’m thinking of a specific example of a good friend of mine who is clearly smart enough she could do lots of things, and made a point of telling me in the recent past that my willingness to go out and try and do things was inspiring to her, and she asked if I thought she might be able to do similarly, and I was like “obviously yes, there is no actual barrier stopping you, anything I’ve done that you’re pointing at, you also could have done, possibly better than I did”.
I don’t think the powerlessness many people feel in the face of complexity is a result of them hitting an intellectual capacity ceiling after trying to understand a complex topic, recognizing they’ve hit their ceiling, and stopping. I think it’s often a case of thinking “this is too complicated for me” and not even trying. My best guess (just a guess) is that many people do feel like only people who are smarter than them can do certain things (like making laws, understanding computers, understanding what makes the economy go), when this isn’t actually true. Our society does seem to inculcate in its members the idea that certain things are only for super-smart people to do, and whoever you are, you are not smart enough to do an impactful thing. I also suspect this may be load-bearing, in that if everyone who could tried to push things in the direction they thought they should go instead of saying “that’s beyond my ability”, we’d have a more chaotic world.

Myron Hedderson 12 Sep 2025 13:24 UTC
5 points
−4
on: The Eldritch in the 21st century
EDIT: On a re-read, I may have misunderstood a key line. I translated “Most people have no hope of understanding complex topics” as “Most people can’t understand complex topics”, whereas you could have intended “Most people do not hope/believe that they can understand complex topics” while leaving the question of whether this is a correct viewpoint unanswered. I’m leaving what I wrote as-is, but flagging that it ~~might have been~~ (confirmed with author: I misunderstood) a response to a misunderstanding on my part.

This post generates in me a strong urge to write a counterpoint post. Sorry this is long.

You start by saying, basically, most people find the world complicated and confusing and don’t expect to understand things. The repeated use of “most people” without providing evidence that these are attributes that plausibly do apply to most people raises a red flag for me, it pattern matches to “most people are dumb”, but let’s let that pass, and assume you’re right that most people are confused by the world much of the time, and don’t feel like coming to greater understanding is a thing they could do. That may be true, seems plausible. But then you say this:
Most people have no hope of understanding complex topics.
No. Strongly disagree. “Most people don’t understand X” is a thing I could accept, and “most people feel like they can’t understand X, for many Xes” seems like it could be true, but “most people can’t understand X” is usually false, with only rare exceptions. Things are complex, yes, but complex on the level of “it takes some study to get the basics, but people of average intelligence could do it if they chose to” not “this is an eldritch deity unto you, you are not a high-IQ priest, abandon all hope of understanding it”.

I think there may be an important difference between how you’re modeling getting to the point of “I understand this topic”, and how I model getting to that point. And that became clear right near the line above, where you said:
Thus, for them, experts are not people to whom we conveniently defer in order to save time. It’s not like they think they could read the state of the art of a field (most have never heard “SOTA”!) and build their own justified opinion.
You seem to be thinking of “I understand this topic” as equivalent to “I have reached the state of the art in this topic”, and presenting an implicit dichotomy between “I think I can get to a state of the art understanding on this topic” and “I have no clue, this topic is indistinguishable from magic for me”. Whereas I think there’s a lot of middle ground, and reaching the state of the art is not required to have useful understanding that turns a topic from eldritch mystery to “I understand basically how this works, it doesn’t seem mysterious, there are some topics around the edges of our knowledge that are still being researched, but the basics that everyone agrees on, or the major schools of thought, are ______”. And once you reach that point, people will (in my experience) start treating you like some kind of expert even though you are most definitely not. But you will be in a middle ground, where you can explain to people with basically 0 knowledge on a topic what some of the experts are saying.

As an example, let’s take computer science. It may feel mysterious to most people why, when they touch a spot on their screen, the phone does a thing and things change. But, this is not a mystery that is beyond the ken of your average person. Within a finite and manageable number of hours, I could explain from the ground up some basic things like what Boolean logic is, what a logic gate is, show someone some assembly language code and get them to agree that yes it’s plausible the assembly language is made of the logic components we discussed earlier, show them a higher-level programming language and get them to agree that yes, a few things like a conditional or a for loop can be implemented in the assembly language, and then show them a function that connects to a touch event… and then they understand how when they press a button their phone does a thing. They’re not at the forefront of human knowledge in computer science by any stretch, but it’s no longer mysterious.
Or let’s take the economy. It seems mysterious to many. But it’s not actually mysterious in the way unanswered questions in physics are. Some parts of it, like stock market prices, are anti-inductive, but the concept of something that is anti-inductive can be explained fairly easily, and with a few university classes (undergrad, doesn’t require exceptional intelligence or talent, just a few months of effort) you can understand the fundamentals of how the economy works. Yes, economists are tinkering around the edges and expanding our knowledge, but all you have to do is listen to this song, and then figure out what each line means, and you’ve got the basics: Fear the Boom and Bust: Keynes vs. Hayek—The Original Economics Rap Battle!

Which is like, a lot to ask of someone who’s got a busy life, but definitely not cosmic-horror impossible. Because this seemed like something lots of people found mysterious, I wrote a thing to point friends to which explained it in layperson terms. Myron’s Musings : The Economy. It’s not the best, but it’s an OK starting point where I can say to a friend “go read this thing I wrote and then we can chat and you’ll get the economy better than you do now”.

Or housing, which is a subcase of governance more generally and the insights generalize: Trying to make it so that the broad forces that have changed things so it’s harder to build now than it used to be are different, is a bit beyond the average person’s circle of control. But “and so I give up and rot” is the wrong response. If you want your town or city to build more housing, that is a thing you can make happen. Because your city council is just a few people, the city plan and zoning regulations are things you can read and understand, documents created by humans who had ideas of what a good document on this topic would look like, and you can talk to the current custodian of that document about what a better version would be. Or you can like, look on the city’s website, see when the meetings about building things are happening, and go to them, because they’re typically open to the public. You will quickly find the people at those meetings are just regular people, not priests with special knowledge. But at the same time, approximately nobody does this, and so if you do it you’ll be at the rarefied heights of expertise relative to most people, even though you haven’t done anything that’s actually intellectually challenging.
We can change this.
This requires a lot of work. The work needed is comparable in scope to the Scientific Revolution, the era of the Enlightenment, or the rise of Formalism.
We will need to transcend our superstitious understanding of the Modern Eldritch Deities. We will need to build a mechanistic understanding of politics, governance, morals and collective action.
Let’s get there step by step. And the first step to defeating the enemy is to name it.
If we don’t do this, we’re condemned to getting screw over by it, never understanding what is happening to us.
I don’t actually think the change that’s required here is comparable in scope to the scientific revolution. it’s a change in attitude, from “the world is confusing, and I can’t understand it or do anything about it”, to “the world is currently confusing to me in some ways, but is made of understandable parts, and I can understand them if I try, and then push on metaphorical levers that will make changes”. And luckily, it has never been easier to learn about complex topics. Back when I took my econ courses, you pretty much had to go sit in a classroom and pay thousands to tens of thousands of dollars to get that knowledge, but now many places put online courseware out there for free or very cheap.

Why I was motivated to write this big long thing (again, apologies), is because of the “most people have no hope of understanding complex topics” line. That understanding of the possibilities open to most people is threaded through the rest of the post, and if it’s correct, then I would think the we can change this line is probably false. Either people have a hope of understanding the world around them, and we should communicate that fact to them, or they don’t, and I guess they’re doomed.

Myron Hedderson 3 Sep 2025 14:16 UTC
13 points
0
on: When Both People Are Interested, How Often Is Flirtatious Escalation Mutual?
What I really want to know is:
- Conditional on mutual interest, what are the relative frequencies of these two kinds of flirtatious escalation?
- Are there particular settings/cultures/etc in which those frequencies are very different?
Preamble: The below assumes interactions between a heterosexual man and woman, can’t comment usefully on other scenarios.
I have no idea about the answer to the first question, but would bet serious money that the answer to the second question is yes.

The reason why, in previous conversations, I had said I personally wouldn’t escalate much without some positive response from the person I’m attempting to flirt with, is because of my personal ethics and expectations around social conventions, which I assume are culturally influenced. I am strongly averse to being pushy about sexual interest, and expect the most likely response if my interest is not reciprocated to be the equivalent of silence—not giving some definitive indication to me the equivalent of “I’m not interested in you, please stop” because that risks a very negative reaction (from a generic male, not from me specifically, but the person I’m flirting with in this hypothetical has no way of knowing what I’m like, and would understandably prioritize safety over clear communication). My way of analyzing a response is, if I get no response, that means stop, if I get a negative response that also means stop, only if I get a positive response of some kind is it OK to continue.

Obviously, this is not the only way the ambiguous signal of “no response” could be interpreted. In a culture where it is strongly expected that women do not express sexual interest of any kind because that is shameful, the dynamic would necessarily be different, because a non-response is the expected response even when the woman being flirted with would like to indicate interest. Similarly, if the social expectation was that if someone would prefer I stop flirting they will say so, I would feel more comfortable interpreting a non-response as “it is OK to continue”. I imagine there might be a culture where that expectation exists, although I don’t know of a specific example.
Also relevant: I expect (due to gender stereotypes confirmed by conversations with women around me, and comparing their responses to my own under the assumption that I’m not too different from most men) women to be more attuned to social subtleties and subtexts than men. Basically, their sensitivity to potential alternate interpretations of the meaning of words or actions that are not surface-level obvious is higher. As a result, I expect them to be able to pick up my indication of interest fairly easily, as long as I’m being not-particularly-subtle by my own estimation. What I’m doing will be plausibly deniable, but still likely clear. I also expect women to do things they think of as not particularly subtle and easy to pick up on (which another woman might notice) that are completely missed by the person they are attempting to flirt with. There are many instances where a woman interprets a behaviour as “this person likes/supports/does not like/does not support me” and my response is “that is just one possible interpretation, what you’re reading something into might have been unintentional or not related to you. You could be right, but I would put a lower probability on it than you seem to be”. This is particularly true in terms of sensitivity to subtle indications of dislike/opposition, but true more generally.

Speculating about cultural change over time, I expect that our (US/Canada) past culture, which put more pressure on women not to “be too forward”, and gave much more latitude to men to pursue women both subtly and directly, would have been more permissive of a man fumbling his way through flirting, getting no response, and continuing regardless, than our current culture is.

Re: your third prior, “People who are both bad at it and know they’re bad at it are usually very hesitant to send escalatory signals (if they even know how to, which they might not)”

I think this falls into a binary distribution. The experience of women I know is that when in their early 20′s, they would get a large number of very clumsy attempts to indicate sexual interest. At the same time, most men tried flirting only rarely. From the typical young woman’s perspective, the experience seemed to be “I get hit on constantly by distasteful men”, while from the typical man’s perspective it was “I rarely try anything with anyone, I don’t want to come across as one of the men that causes problems for women by being an ass”. I reconciled this by modeling the situation as “among those who are low-skill at flirting, which is most people, there are a majority of people who flirt rarely and selectively, investing a lot of effort and emotional weight into each attempt, and a minority of people who take a shot at everyone who crosses their path, basically taking the same approach as a spammer where a 0.1% success rate still yields a sufficient number of successes to be worthwhile”. The experience of the recipients of the “flirting” (although arguably that isn’t what’s happening, it doesn’t have the subtlety or skill you’re thinking of) is that ~all the attempts are terrible by men who aren’t interested in them as an individual at all, and this influences their impression of men in general. In any case: There are at least three possible responses to “I know I’m bad at flirting”—one is to spam the world with low-effort attempts to get a positive response, another is to be very hesitant to attempt to flirt, a third is to attempt to skill up. I’ve seen all 3.

Myron Hedderson 12 Aug 2025 17:26 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: A Self-Dialogue on The Value Proposition of Romantic Relationships
Ok, that does clarify my mistake, and I don’t have a lot to add. Except: it seems to me like the smarter someone is, the more willing they will be to trust their own judgment and ask sensible questions rather than just say “nope” if being asked to do something different than a standard relationship template. And also, the smarter someone is, the more likely they are able to manage the complications of something like nonmonogamy, or various relationship or personality quirks you might have. So, conditional on your suitable match being quite smart, the base rates of things like “will accept nonmonogamy” in the population in general won’t apply. In general, make sure you’re doing chained conditional probabilities, not multiplying your estimate of various traits in the population to get a small number. Weirdnesses correlate! :). And if your ideal partner is a genius alignment researcher or something similar, your geographic location is already doing a lot of filtering for you. But, probably you and your friends have accounted for all that and still got “oof, that’s tough” as the result, so… good luck! You seem good, and I hope things work out for you.