Nathan Young

• Nathan Young 19 Apr 2024 17:35 UTC

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  on: Le­gal pun­ish­ment should limit the pri­vacy of the crim­i­nals in­stead of their free­dom (new dis­cus­sion for­mat)

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• Nathan Young 19 Apr 2024 16:26 UTC

  2 points

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  on: Your Strength as a Rationalist

  Trying to understand this.

  I *knew* that the usefulness of a model is not what it can explain, but what it can’t. A hypothesis that forbids nothing, permits everything, and thereby fails to constrain anticipation.

  I think what Yud means there is that a good model will break quickly. It only explains a very small set of things because the universe is very specific. So it’s good that it doesn’t explain many many things.

  It’s a bit like David Deutsch arguing that models should be sensitive to small changes. All of their elements should be important.

• Nathan Young 18 Apr 2024 23:04 UTC

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  in reply to: Daniel Kokotajlo’s comment on: Par­tial value takeover with­out world takeover

  I struggle a bit to remember what ASI is but I’m gonna assume it’s Artificial Super Intelligence.

  Let’s say that that’s markedly cleverer than 1 person. So it’s capable of running very successful trading strategies or programming extremely well. It’s not clear to me that such a being:

  • Has been driven towards being agentic, when its creators will prefer something more docile

  • Can cooperate well enough with itself to manage some massive secret takeover

  • Is competent enough to recursively self improve (and solve the alignment problems that creates)

  • Can beat everyone else combined

  Feels like what such a being/​system might do is just run some terrifically successful trading strategies and gather a lot of resources while frantically avoiding notice/​trying to claim it won’t take over anything else. Huge public outcry, continuing regulation but maybe after a year it settles to some kind of equilibrium.

  Chance of increasing capabilities and then some later jump, but seems plausible to me that that wouldn’t happen in one go.

• Nathan Young 18 Apr 2024 20:16 UTC

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  in reply to: KatjaGrace’s comment on: Hous­ing Sup­ply (new dis­cus­sion for­mat)

  I guess, why is it a problem.

• Nathan Young 18 Apr 2024 17:40 UTC

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  in reply to: jamierumbelow’s comment on: Hous­ing Sup­ply (new dis­cus­sion for­mat)

  [This one needs work]

  Isn’t the case usually that housing is the single greatest factor between a US and UK standard of life? Or do you not agree?

• Nathan Young 18 Apr 2024 16:04 UTC

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  in reply to: jamierumbelow’s comment on: Hous­ing Sup­ply (new dis­cus­sion for­mat)

  Housing is a good source of long-term income, there are comparatively poor options, so prices go up compared to incomes.

  To quote @Ege Erdil attempting to steelman:

  there could be an interest rate effect—as interest rates fall, claims on future rents become more expensive so housing prices go up.

• Nathan Young 18 Apr 2024 15:26 UTC

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  in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: Hous­ing Sup­ply (new dis­cus­sion for­mat)

  I want to try this as a way of argument mapping alongside a community that might use it.

  It seems likely that a proper accounting of the argumetns may involve some false statements.

  If it goes well I think it could be useful to me and readers, but I guess it will take several iterations.

• Nathan Young 18 Apr 2024 11:00 UTC

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  on: Hous­ing Sup­ply (new dis­cus­sion for­mat)

  Housing just isn’t that high of a priority. The UK is poor because of productivity, not housing costs.

  This from bernoulli_defect:

  While housing would increase quality of life and luxury, it’s questionable whether it would fix low British productivity in non-housing constrained industries.

  Consider how the Bay Area has had huge GDP growth despite housing shortages as people just cram into bedsits

• Nathan Young 18 Apr 2024 10:59 UTC

  4 points

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  in reply to: the gears to ascension’s comment on: Hous­ing Sup­ply (new dis­cus­sion for­mat)

  I don’t think lw dialogues match how I think, which is in nested bullet points. I sense from how often I see thinking displayed in this nested bullet point way (AI impacts, Kialo, Rootclaim) that many feel similarly.

• Nathan Young 18 Apr 2024 9:37 UTC

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  on: Hous­ing Sup­ply (new dis­cus­sion for­mat)

  There isn’t a housing shortage. There are more houses than there are households.

  This from Ian Mulheirn:

  No. Back in 1991 there were just over 3.0% more houses than there were households in the UK according to government data. Today, using the ONS’s latest household estimates, there appear to be 5.2% more places to live than there are households that want to live in them. In fact growth in the stock of dwellings appears to have outstripped that of households over the past 50 years or so. This is a strange sort of ‘endemic shortage’.

  He shows this graph, showing that households (blue line) have repeatedly undershot expectations (red and green line)

  

• Nathan Young 18 Apr 2024 9:31 UTC

  2 points

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  on: Hous­ing Sup­ply (new dis­cus­sion for­mat)

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• Nathan Young 11 Apr 2024 12:34 UTC

  2 points

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  on: The Story of “I Have Been A Good Bing”

  May I submit more songs anywhere?

• Nathan Young 11 Apr 2024 9:41 UTC

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  on: What is the best AI gen­er­ated mu­sic about ra­tio­nal­ity/​ai/​tran­shu­man­ism?

  This is one of the best I’ve heard: https://​​www.udio.com/​​songs/​​aALrHWVtRAhExxKTT7HjdE

[Question] What is the best AI gen­er­ated mu­sic about ra­tio­nal­ity/​ai/​tran­shu­man­ism?

• Nathan Young 26 Mar 2024 18:14 UTC

  95 points

  65

  on: My In­ter­view With Cade Metz on His Re­port­ing About Slate Star Codex

  To me this reads as a person caught in the act of bullying who is trying to wriggle out of it. Fair play for challenging him, yuck at the responses.

• Nathan Young 22 Mar 2024 23:37 UTC

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  in reply to: trevor’s comment on: [Linkpost] Vague Ver­biage in Forecasting

  I don’t like looking at it. Also it’s basically the whole article so it feels unnecessary. Something about it narrowing the text.
  
  I’m on a laptop. But I think people should be able to use their phones to visit almost any website.

• Nathan Young 22 Mar 2024 21:28 UTC

  1 point

  −1

  on: [Linkpost] Vague Ver­biage in Forecasting

  I would not put the whole thing in quotes. I find it harder to read.

• Nathan Young 19 Mar 2024 2:01 UTC

  6 points

  5

  in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Open Thread Spring 2024

  Yeah and a couple of relevant things:

  1. The time EA sexual abuse article includes 1 person who isn’t an EA and a sort of vibe that iirc includes most tech houses in the bay in the heading of “EA”. This is inaccurate.

  2. EA takes a pretty strong stance on sexual harassment. Look at what people are banned from the forum for and scale it up. I’ve heard about people being banned from events for periods of time for causing serial discomfort. Compare this to Church communities I’ve been a part of and political communities and this is much stricter.

• Nathan Young 15 Mar 2024 0:23 UTC

  4 points

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  on: Some (prob­le­matic) aes­thet­ics of what con­sti­tutes good work in academia

  When he put it all together, he ended up with a different conclusion from what you would get if you just read the abstracts. It was a completely novel piece of work that reviewed this whole evidence base at a level of thoroughness that had never been done before, came out with a conclusion that was different from what you naively would have thought, which concluded his best estimate is that, at current margins, we could cut incarceration and there would be no expected impact on crime. He did all that. Then, he started submitting it to journals. It’s gotten rejected from a large number of journals by now [laughter]. I mean starting with the most prestigious ones and then going to the less.…

  Why doesn’t OpenPhil found a journal? Feels like they could say it’s the journal of last resort initially but it probably would pict up status, especially if it contained only true, useful and relevant things.

Be More Katja