What do you mean by “but English class”?
NoSignalNoNoise
Karma: 1,839
Basics of Rationalist Discourse
the fraction of configurations capable of producing complex chemistry, stable stars, and long-lived planets is extraordinarily small. The fraction capable of producing sentient technological civilizations is smaller still. This gives us a distribution of expected civilizations per configuration that is overwhelmingly concentrated at zero, with a thin tail of configurations that produce any sentience at all
This is a strong assertion that requires justification. How much more fine-tuning does it require to get a universe where 1 of every 1000 stars has a planet that can support intelligent life than a universe where 1 of every 10^30 stars does?
(A3) The fine-tuning results from cosmology extend in the relevant way: the viable region of parameter space does not merely shrink as we add requirements for habitability, but shrinks fast enough that the tail of the distribution is thinner than linear.
This assumption is rather underspecified; what does it mean to add requirements for habitability, and how does that translate the number of habitable (or intelligent-life-supporting) planets?
college grades are far from the best way to signal intelligence; what he doesn’t discuss is that they’re even further from the best way to signal conscientiousness … an even better signal of conscientiousness would be acquiring all the same knowledge without attending college at all
Acquiring the knowledge without the college structure would be a more accurate signal of conscientiousness, but it would be a less legible one. Evaluating potential employees involves sifting through a large number of applicants of mostly dubious quality, and unless you have reason to pay special attention to one of them, if a signal isn’t obvious, it probably gets rounded off to zero.
A degree from Stanvard Institute of Technology gets an employer to treat your resume as worth reading (and not just skimming). Claiming (with evidence that require crossing a non-trivial inferential distance) to have gotten the same education for $1.50 in late fees at the library doesn’t. You get about 5 words.
[Question] Why did you buy Bitcoin?
This post seems to implicitly assume a monocausal explanation. It gives good reasons why various proposed explanations are not sufficient to explain university attendance and dismisses those explanations because they aren’t sufficient. The reality is more likely a complex mix of different reasons, and the right question isn’t which one is the reason; it’s how much of the reason is each proposed explanation.
The Sheepskin Effect makes it pretty clear that a significant portion of the value is signaling (Wikipedia cites Caplan as claiming that “over 60% of the economic benefit” is from the degree, though it’s hard to disentangle signaling effects from selection effects). Failure to complete an almost-completed degree seems more likely to be a failure of conscientiousness than of intelligence or conformity, so that part is probably mainly conscientiousness signaling.
I’ve found my average conversation with Uber drivers to be more interesting and insightful than reading my phone.
What have you talked with them about, and how did you start the conversations? What have you learned from those conversations?
To really put a stop to this practice, there needs to be a good chance that a space saver will be gone by the time you come back. In a college town, an explicit, well-publicized policy of “if a piece of furniture is being used to block a parking space, anyone who wants it can take it” would probably accomplish this.
Neuro divergent communities sometimes smart their way out of this and eventually become exhausting to be around as everything devolves into requiring neurotic social tracking.
Can you elaborate on that or provide some examples? I was reading along and it sounded right to me, but I couldn’t think of specific examples of it.
Provide more public goods for families. Remarkably small things can matter a lot.
What public goods do you have in mind?
No. The average estimate is 26%, which implies at least 26% of the polled population give an estimate of 26% or higher, i.e. a very large gravel of respondents are either very confused or intentionally giving inflated answers.
I have plenty of money. If there’s something I know I want that’s easy to buy for a reasonable amount of money, I’ve already bought it. If someone gives me a gift that I wouldn’t have thought to buy for myself (but which I do in fact want once I’m aware of it) or would be hard for me to buy myself (e.g. because choosing the right version of that product requires research that I lack the knowledge for) or where I have some mental block that prevents me from admitting to myself that I want it, that’s significantly more valuable to me than cash would have been.
When I was a student and had very little money, I preferred cash.
What is there to lose by playing power games with people who think that roughly all communication is power games?
Well for one thing, it can get you dragged into negative-sum power games. Like with gambling, if you don’t know what your edge is, you’re better off not playing. If there isn’t a clear way that getting into a Twitter argument about transgenderism helps you accomplish your goals, then in the typical case you waste your time, and you take on a tail risk of ruining your reputation. It’s foolish to take that risk if it doesn’t come with enough potential upside to make it +EV.
If you’re already stuck in such a power game, then by all means play it as such, but don’t go seeking them out.
[Cambridge] Petrov Day
What are the higher utility per unit effort things you could be doing instead during that time? Did you stop doing a gratitude journal? If so, did you do those other things instead?
I ask that because I have often found myself making the opposite mistake of one you describe: There’s something I’m considering doing (usually because someone suggested it), and I think to myself that that’s not the optimal thing for me to do, so I decide not to do it, but instead of doing something higher-value, I end up doing nothing in particular and would have been better off doing the moderate-value thing.
Thinking Faster
This is perhaps a bit off topic, but why translate using a general purpose LLM rather than a tool that’s specifically for translation like Google Translate?
Take a fixed number of humans with a fixed intelligence (both average and outliers) then let mathematics advance. It will advance to the point that there is a vanishingly small number of people who can even understand the state of the art
This ignores the possibility of advances in the teaching of math (or physics, or any other discipline). If improved teaching methods lower the level of intelligence required to reach a given level of knowledge, then a field can advance considerably.
Not to mention that the human population has been growing, and average intelligence has been increasing.
Finally, there’s specialization. It doesn’t take much intelligence to know everything that was known about genetics when Darwin was alive, but probably nobody is smart enough to know everything that was known about it in 2000. But there have still been make advances since then thanks to people specialized in subfields like DNA sequencing.
Aren’t the Haredi only able to live the way they do thanks to special treatment (welfare, subsidized religious schools, and until recently, draft exemptions) from the government? I wouldn’t hold them up as an example of a society that successfully sustains itself.