PatrickDFarley
My scorched-earth policy on New Year’s resolutions
Choosing battles (on the Internet)
I believe vaccine mandates are primarily substitutes for destructive alternative restrictions that are worse for freedom, and those who oppose mostly think they are mostly complements that ramp up restrictions of all kinds.
That is definitely a crux, thank you for pointing that out.
or that if you’re vaccinated that’s sufficient protection that you shouldn’t care who else around you is unvaccinated.
This is 100% me. My view is: if your solution requires absolutely everyone to buy in to it—that is, it requires successful coordination across all cultures within the US, or in the world—then you don’t have a solution, you have a wish. The wish is for human nature to be fundamentally different from what it is.
Forcing coordination through federal mandates is different, in that it’s actually possible. But I see a similar kind of wish here. Re the substitute/complement question above, I believe the hypothetical version of the US government that successfully exercises such control over its citizens’ physical bodies and then promptly relinquishes that degree of control, is a US government not run by humans.
I happen to think the vaccine is an actual solution under the strict definition above. As in, I got it, so the pandemic is over for me. The reductions in infection and long-term risk are well documented here, and in my view they’re enough to justify taking the (underrated) benefit of no longer worrying about my covid risk (including caring about the vax status of those around me) (obviously I’m still worried about the second-order effects). I’ve had a really enjoyable summer that was full of social interaction, travel, dating, etc.
Tldr: “Real life” has enough utility that I count my individual vaccination as sufficient risk mitigation to justify it.
Book Review: Denial of Death
These are valuable tales for rationalists. The lessons I take away:
Coordination in the meta-game affects play in the games.
The rules of the game are what you can get away with.
Everything is (at least weak) evidence.
Some people think noticing these things makes them “postrats” and therefore outsiders to LW. Yet here we are
I like this, thanks for posting. I’ve noticed there’s a contrarian thrill in declaring, “Actually there’s no evidence for that” / “Actually that doesn’t count as evidence.”
Academics love it when some application of math/statistics allows them to say the opposite of what people expect. There’s this sense that anything that contradicts “common sense” must be the enlightened way of thinking, rising above the “common,” “ignorant” thinking of the masses (aka non-coastal America).
So the kind of person who outsources their ethics takes to the NYT will now stay far away from the SSC community. I don’t see a problem really
Paschal’s targeted advertising: How can you be against targeted ads when they’re showing you deals that have positive EV for you?
There’s an attention cost with evaluating whether the deal is in fact positive EV. And effective ads will mostly have a higher attention cost—There’s a “valley of difficult choices” where the EV is close to zero. Most ads you see are to the left of the valley: strongly negative-EV deals that you don’t really consider. But more effective targeted ads will move the needle to the right on average, forcing you to pay more attention to all ads because now their expected ability to give you good deals is higher. (so basically, “with the changes in attention cost, it’s not actually positive EV”).
Privacy—most of us value it as a good in itself. We have nothing to hide but we still don’t want to show you. We get a bad feeling knowing that some random uncaring stranger knows specific details about us. (so basically, “with the utility cost in privacy, it’s not actually positive EV”).
Randomized priorities- sure I do actually want the gardening tools, but I was gonna look at that two weeks from now, after my Florida trip. I have to plan my Florida trip right now. - And then I see the ad for exactly the product I want, and my attention is too hijacked to ignore it. The decisions I have to make in the near future are ordered by priority, and it takes some amount of mental effort to enforce that priority. Targeted ads actively fight that order by taking some random thing I want and asking me to make that decision right now. (so basically, “with the increased willpower needed to enforce decision priority, it’s not actually positive EV”).
All of this stands against a backdrop of: It’s actually really easy for a consumer to take initiative to find the product they want. It’s never been easier compare alternate products and get a view of the whole market for something. So this is the era in which we least need companies to take the initiative to find us.
It’s easy to say this if you’re surrounded by nerdy types who stubbornly refuse to leave simulacrum 1. But have you looked at other people these days??
Look at the Midwestern mom who just blew another $200 on the latest exercise fad that is definitely not going to give her the body she wants. Look at every business that went under because they failed to measure what really mattered. Look at anyone whose S3 sentiment has been so easily hijacked and commoditized by the social media outrage machines.
Nah, I’m thoroughly convinced that there is still an advantage in knowing what’s actually true, which means seeing the S levels for what they are.
Do remember that three theories “equally consistent with the data” are not therefore equally likely to be true.
I almost hope it is a false flag though, as you’re hinting. If you believe people outside of cancel culture have a better understand of it than those who perpetrate it, then it’s the outsiders who are better positioned to manipulate it to their advantage.
Isn’t this what the Montessori program is about?
Note that just because “God” is one word in English, doesn’t mean it’s one single claim. It’s thousands.
Do there exist any beings more intelligent than humans? We could imagine conclusive evidence for that. Do there exist any beings that can transcend time and space? We could imagine ways to test that. Do there exist beings that can create non-consuming fire? Again we could easily test that. We’d have to do thousands of these tests to verify something as complex as the Judeo-Christian God.
I was going to say that this week marks the end of the Covid posts being majority Covid content.
My ideal future has Zvi posting nationally renowned journalism on all manner of current events, but all articles have the title “Covid <date>: <tagline>” and only the real fans remember why.
Pro-vax Anti-vaxxer Gang wooo
In general, when I see someone give a whole rant that basically ends with “it’s just a sad state of affairs, is all”, I assume they’re doing some underhanded signaling.
No one ever takes the time to write something out just because “it’s sad”. The thing they really want said is there in the subtext. “I’m sad because no one’s surprised that our institutions suck” subtext: “Our institutions suck and it’s really really obvious”. But saying the latter is less sophisticated. If you want to make moves in the culture war while keeping plausible deniability, you hide the message in the subtext.
Zvi reveals the absurdity you get when you try to interpret the message at face value.
your father already knows you got a C-, told you that you’d better not pretend you got a C-,
Second C- should be C+
Just go back and skim a couple of them. You wouldn’t start a book in the middle and then criticize the author for being hard to follow
I found this extremely helpful. I’d known the world of therapy was complex but I had nothing like a broad map of it.
After staring at your chart for a minute I noticed that there are some modalities I’m able to do well for myself, and others that I’m not. When people claim they wouldn’t benefit from “therapy,” they’re likely thinking of one or two modalities (and are likely correct), but may not be aware of the others.
It’s hard to judge the level of my audience.
Fwiw your posts are exactly appropriate to my level and are motivating me to go and learn more about some of these strategies.
Lol that was a bloodbath
Here’s what Zvi is missing on (D):
Does “we” refer to the same institutions that got nutrition entirely wrong for decades at a time, both at the micro level (individual foods) and macro level (food groups), whose entirely-wrong takes were taught in schools nationwide? I’m feeling way too much Gel-Mann skepticism here to say “yeah thankfully the powers-that-be will always be correct on vaccines”.
Pushback is not correlated with scientific viability, but with political messaging. We’ve passed ineffective/dangerous policies with very little pushback (Patriot Act/NSA), and we’ve received plenty of pushback on effective policies (blocking travel from China). We cannot rely on pushback to bail us out of stupid object-level decisions. I hate to sound like such a libertarian ideologue, but I’m really not seeing a safer long-term policy than “stop giving govt’s (potentially stupid) decisions so much power”.