PeterMcCluskey

• PeterMcCluskey 17 Aug 2019 18:21 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: jessicata's comment on: Par­tial sum­mary of de­bate with Ben­quo and Jes­si­cata [pt 1]

  By bias, I mean the fram­ing effects de­scribed in this SlateS­tarCodex post.

  Is there an ac­cu­sa­tion of vi­o­la­tion of ex­ist­ing norms (by a spe­cific per­son/​or­ga­ni­za­tion) you see “The AI Timelines Scam” as mak­ing?

  It’s un­clear to me whether that post makes such an ac­cu­sa­tion.

• PeterMcCluskey 17 Aug 2019 1:57 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Zvi's comment on: Par­tial sum­mary of de­bate with Ben­quo and Jes­si­cata [pt 1]

  How about fo­cus­ing on the ev­i­dence, and on demon­strat­ing good epistemics?

  The styles en­couraged by peer-re­view provide ex­am­ples of how to min­i­mize un­nec­es­sary ac­cu­sa­tions against in­di­vi­d­u­als and ac­ci­den­tal ap­pear­ances of ac­cu­sa­tions against in­di­vi­d­u­als (but peer-re­view in­cludes too many other con­straints to be the ideal norm).

  Com­pare the pa­per When Will AI Ex­ceed Hu­man Perfor­mance? Ev­i­dence from AI Ex­perts to The AI Timelines Scam. The former is more po­lite, and looks more epistem­i­cally trust­wor­thy, when point­ing out that ex­perts give bi­ased fore­casts about AI timelines (more bi­ased than I would have in­ferred from The AI Timelines Scam), but may err in the di­rec­tion of be­ing too sub­tle.

  See also Bryan Ca­plan’s ad­vice.

  Rae­mon’s ad­vice here doesn’t seem 100% right to me, but it seems pretty close. Ac­cus­ing a spe­cific per­son or or­ga­ni­za­tion of vi­o­lat­ing an ex­ist­ing norm seems like some­thing that ought to be kept quite sep­a­rate from ar­gu­ments about what poli­cies are good. But there are plenty of ways to point out pat­terns of bad be­hav­ior with­out ac­cus­ing some­one of vi­o­lat­ing an ex­ist­ing norm, and I’m un­sure what rules should ap­ply to those.

• PeterMcCluskey 17 Aug 2019 0:33 UTC

  15 points

  on: Par­tial sum­mary of de­bate with Ben­quo and Jes­si­cata [pt 1]

  I liked most of this post a lot.

  But the refer­ences to billions of dol­lars don’t feel quite right. The kind of trust that jes­si­cata and Ben­quo seem to want some­times hap­pens in small (e.g. 10-per­son) com­pa­nies, and al­most always gets de­stroyed by poli­tics well be­fore the busi­ness grows to 1000 peo­ple. The pat­terns that I’ve seen in busi­ness seem bet­ter ex­plained by the limits on how many peo­ples’ epistemics I can eval­u­ate well, than they are by the amount of money in­volved.

  LessWrong and the ra­tio­nal­ist/​EA move­ments seem to have grown large enough that I’d ex­pect less trust than ex­ists in a good 10-per­son group, based purely on the size.

• PeterMcCluskey 6 Aug 2019 18:56 UTC

  2 points

  on: What are the best re­sources for ex­am­in­ing the ev­i­dence for an­thro­pogenic cli­mate change?

  I recom­mend start­ing with the origi­nal green­house effect fore­casts that were made over a cen­tury ago (by some­one who ex­pected global warm­ing to be de­sir­able). That model still looks pretty good, ex­cept that CO2 emis­sion fore­casts of that time weren’t very good.

• PeterMcCluskey 2 Aug 2019 19:29 UTC

  9 points

  in reply to: ioannes_shade's comment on: What sup­ple­ments do you use?

  I wrote a long re­view with some com­ments on the ex­tent to which I trust the book.

• PeterMcCluskey 1 Aug 2019 20:28 UTC

  8 points

  in reply to: Adele Lopez's comment on: What sup­ple­ments do you use?

  Met­formin has a bunch of un­de­sir­able side effects. I don’t see an easy way to quan­tify the im­por­tance of those side effects, so I try to eval­u­ate how likely it is that the benefits of met­formin will ap­ply to me.

  The ob­vi­ous way in which met­formin might cure or pre­vent age-re­lated dis­eases is by cur­ing in­sulin re­sis­tance. Some ed­u­cated-sound­ing peo­ple have been say­ing that in­sulin re­sis­tance con­tributes sig­nifi­cantly to Western dis­ease (aka dis­eases of civ­i­liza­tion, in­clud­ing car­dio­vas­cu­lar dis­ease, di­a­betes, de­men­tia, and some sub­set of can­cer). Doc­tors have ar­guably been un­der­treat­ing in­sulin re­sis­tance, be­cause it doesn’t pro­duce im­me­di­ate dis­ease-like symp­toms. Maybe if met­formin were still patented, the paten­tholder would be push­ing the FDA to get in­sulin re­sis­tance clas­sified as a dis­ease.

  In­sulin re­sis­tance seems to be non-ex­is­tent in cul­tures that most re­sem­ble our pre-farm­ing an­ces­tors, so it sure looks like it’s avoid­able via lifestyle changes (the best guesses are diet (high fiber, whole foods), ex­er­cise, and sleep). That sug­gests it’s pos­si­ble, al­though maybe hard, to get the benefits at­tributed to met­formin with­out the side effects.

  I pay close at­ten­tion to my in­sulin re­sis­tance, via blood tests, and have avoided met­formin for now be­cause it looks like my lifestyle is good enough that I have few in­sulin-re­lated risks so far. If my A1C gets above 5.6, I’ll think pretty care­fully about get­ting met­formin.

• PeterMcCluskey 1 Aug 2019 20:25 UTC

  5 points

  on: What sup­ple­ments do you use?

  Daily sup­ple­ments:

  • 10mg preg­nenolone: some­times a bit more, aiming for blood lev­els around 60-80 ng/​dL. Seems to in­crease my men­tal en­ergy.

  • 25mg dhea: I’m un­cer­tain about the dose, and I’m ex­per­i­ment­ing a bit to see if I can de­tect effects.

  • ~3000 IU vi­tamin D: aiming for blood lev­els just over 50 ng/​mL.

  • 100mcg vi­tamin K2 mk7

  • 1mg fo­late: I’m ho­mozy­gous for MTHFR C677T; it seems to im­prove my mood.

  • 1mg B12: it’s keep­ing my blood lev­els around 800 pg/​mL, com­pared to < 500 be­fore sup­ple­ment­ing.

  • 1g omega-3 (cur­rently in the form of Bul­let­proof Omega Krill Com­plex).

  • Stem Cell 100, once per day

  • 500mg N-Acetyl-L-Cys­teine: pos­si­bly helps lower my ho­mo­cys­teine, but my re­sults are pretty noisy.

  • ash­wa­gandha: I had very in­ter­est­ing thy­roid effects when I was get­ting too much io­dine from kelp, but now that I’ve fixed my io­dine lev­els, I don’t de­tect any effects.

  • Resver­aCel (Thorne), con­tains Ni­coti­namide Ri­boside, Quercetin Phy­to­some, Trans-Resver­a­trol, Trimethylglycine.

  • cur­cumin (Life Ex­ten­sion Bio-cur­cumin): I sus­pect I have in­flam­ma­tion due to a tem­po­rary prob­lem, and will likely go back to tak­ing this less reg­u­larly in a few months.

  • caf­feine: from tea, green tea ex­tract pills, or oc­ca­sion­ally a 100mg pill.

  Sup­ple­ments taken less than once per day:

  • cre­a­tine, 1 or 2 grams (no clear effects).

  • mela­tonin, typ­i­cally 300mcg, timed re­lease ver­sion.

  • liver, and or­gan meat pills, from Ances­tral Sup­ple­ments.

  • green mussel

  • kratom: typ­i­cally 0.25 tea­spoon of Maeng Da, mildly stim­u­lat­ing with re­duced anx­iety?

  • phenibut: taken about once a month, for the anti-anx­iety effect, with a bit of stim­u­la­tion.

  A ma­jor­ity of these choices are in­fluenced by Bre­desen’s book The End of Alzheimers, or by a prior source with similar ad­vice.

• PeterMcCluskey 19 Jul 2019 19:01 UTC

  13 points

  on: Dialogue on Ap­peals to Consequences

  Quinn: “Hold it right there. Re­gard­less of whether that’s true, it’s bad to say that.”

  Carter: “That’s an ap­peal to con­se­quences, well-known to be a log­i­cal fal­lacy.”

  The link in Carter’s state­ment leads to a page that clearly con­tra­dicts Carter’s claim:

  In logic, ap­peal to con­se­quences refers only to ar­gu­ments that as­sert a con­clu­sion’s truth value (true or false) with­out re­gard to the for­mal preser­va­tion of the truth from the premises; ap­peal to con­se­quences does not re­fer to ar­gu­ments that ad­dress a premise’s con­se­quen­tial de­sir­a­bil­ity (good or bad, or right or wrong) in­stead of its truth value.

• PeterMcCluskey 15 Jul 2019 18:57 UTC

  8 points

  in reply to: Said Achmiz's comment on: Open Thread July 2019

  Med­i­ta­tion is ac­tion, in some im­por­tant sense, and mostly can’t be demon­strated.

  It is hard to re­li­ably dis­t­in­guish be­tween the re­sults of peer pres­sure and ac­tual learn­ing. I think CFAR’s best re­ply to this has been it’s re­fund policy: last I knew they offered full re­funds to any­one who re­quested it within one year (al­though I can’t find any on­line men­tion of their cur­rent policy).

• PeterMcCluskey 15 Jul 2019 18:53 UTC

  29 points

  in reply to: Zack_M_Davis's comment on: Open Thread July 2019

  The idea that CFAR would be su­perflu­ous is fairly close to the kind of harm that CFAR wor­ries about. (You might have been right to be­lieve that it would have been su­perflu­ous in 2012, but CFAR has changed since then in ways that it hasn’t man­aged to make very leg­ible.)

  I think med­i­ta­tion pro­vides the best ex­am­ple for illus­trat­ing the harm. It’s fairly easy to con­fuse sim­ple med­i­ta­tion in­struc­tions (e.g. fo­cus on your breath, sit still with a straight spine) with the most im­por­tant fea­tures of med­i­ta­tion. It’s fairly easy to un­der­es­ti­mate the ad­di­tional goals of med­i­ta­tion, be­cause they’re hard to ob­serve and don’t fit well with more widely ac­cepted wor­ld­views.

  My ex­pe­rience sug­gests that get­ting value out of med­i­ta­tion is heav­ily de­pen­dent on a feel­ing (mostly at a sys­tem 1 level) that I’m try­ing some­thing new, and there were times when I wasn’t able to learn from med­i­ta­tion, be­cause I mis­tak­enly thought that fo­cus­ing on my breath was a much more cen­tral part of med­i­ta­tion than it ac­tu­ally is.

  The times when I got more value out of med­i­ta­tion were times when I tried new vari­a­tions on the in­struc­tions, or new en­vi­ron­ments (e.g. on a med­i­ta­tion re­treat). I can’t see any signs that the new in­struc­tions or new en­vi­ron­ment were in­her­ently bet­ter at teach­ing med­i­ta­tion. It seems to have been mostly that any source of nov­elty about the med­i­ta­tion makes me more alert to learn­ing from it.

  My un­der­stand­ing is that CFAR is largely con­cerned that par­ti­ci­pants will mis­tak­enly be­lieve that they’ve already learned some­thing that CFAR is teach­ing, and that will some­times be half-true—par­ti­ci­pants may know it at a sys­tem 2 level, when CFAR is try­ing to teach other parts of their minds that still re­ject it.

  I think I ex­pe­rienced that a bit, due to hav­ing ex­pe­rience with half-baked ver­sions of early CFAR be­fore I took a well-de­signed ver­sion of their work­shop. E.g. differ­ent parts of my mind have differ­ent at­ti­tudes to ac­knowl­edg­ing my ac­tual mo­ti­va­tions when they’re less vir­tu­ous than the mo­ti­va­tions that my sys­tem 2 en­dorses. I un­der­stood that pretty well at some level be­fore CFAR ex­isted, yet there are still im­por­tant parts of my mind that cling to self-de­cep­tive be­liefs about my mo­tives.

  CFAR likely can’t teach a class that’s ex­plic­itly aimed at that with­out hav­ing lots of par­ti­ci­pants feel defen­sive about their mo­tives, in a way that makes them less open to learn­ing. So they ap­proach it via in­struc­tion that is partly fo­cused on teach­ing other things that look more mun­dane and prac­ti­cal. Those other things of­ten felt fa­mil­iar enough to me that I re­acted by say­ing: I’ll re­lax now and con­serve my men­tal en­ergy for some fu­ture part of the cur­ricu­lum that’s more novel. That might have led me to do the equiv­a­lent of what I did when I was med­i­tat­ing the same way re­peat­edly with­out learn­ing any­thing new. How can I tell whether that caused me to miss some­thing im­por­tant?

• PeterMcCluskey 14 Jul 2019 21:21 UTC

  23 points

  in reply to: Zack_M_Davis's comment on: Open Thread July 2019

  You use math as an ex­am­ple, but that’s highly fo­cused on Sys­tem 2 learn­ing. That sug­gests that you have false as­sump­tions about what CFAR is try­ing to teach.

  There are many sub­jects where writ­ten in­struc­tions are much less valuable than in­struc­tion that in­cludes di­rect prac­tice: cir­cling, karate, med­i­ta­tion, danc­ing, etc. Most of those analo­gies are fairly im­perfect, and some have par­tially use­ful writ­ten in­struc­tions (in the case of med­i­ta­tion, the writ­ten ver­sion might have lagged in-per­son in­struc­tion by many cen­turies). Cir­cling is the ex­am­ple that I’d con­sider most apt, but it won’t mean much to peo­ple who haven’t taken a good cir­cling work­shop.

  A differ­ent anal­ogy, which more em­pha­sizes the costs of false as­sump­tions: peo­ple of­ten imag­ine that eco­nomics teaches some­thing like how to run a good busi­ness or how to pre­dict the stock mar­ket, be­cause there isn’t any slot in their wor­ld­view for what a good eco­nomics course ac­tu­ally teaches. There are plenty of mediocre ex­ec­u­tive sum­maries of eco­nomics, which fail to con­vey to most peo­ple that eco­nomics re­quires a per­va­sive wor­ld­view shift (in­te­grat­ing util­i­tar­i­anism, em­piri­cism about prefer­ences, and some coun­ter­in­tu­itive em­piri­cal pat­terns).

  The CFAR hand­book is more like the syl­labus for an eco­nomics course than it is like an eco­nomics text­book, and a syl­labus is use­less (pos­si­bly harm­ful) for teach­ing eco­nomics to peo­ple who have bad as­sump­tions about what kind of ques­tions eco­nomics an­swers. (This anal­ogy is im­perfect be­cause eco­nomics text­books have been writ­ten, un­like a CFAR text­book.)

  Maybe CFAR is mak­ing a mis­take, but it ap­pears that the peo­ple who seem most con­fi­dent about that usu­ally seem to be con­fused about what it is that CFAR is try­ing to teach.

  Read­ing the se­quences, or read­ing about the re­ver­sal test, are un­likely to have much rele­vance to what CFAR teaches. Just be care­ful not to imag­ine that they’re good ex­am­ples of what CFAR is about.

• PeterMcCluskey 10 Jul 2019 16:02 UTC

  21 points

  on: Schism Begets Schism

  I don’t like the way this post hints that schism and split­ting are the same thing.

  E.g. the split be­tween CFAR and MIRI, and the cre­ation of mul­ti­ple other AI risk or­ga­ni­za­tions (FHI, FLI, BERI, etc), fit the archipelago model, with­out be­ing schism-like.

  Hos­tility begets hos­tility, but agree­ing to spe­cial­ize in differ­ent things doesn’t have the same ten­dency to beget fur­ther spe­cial­iza­tion.

• PeterMcCluskey 10 Jul 2019 15:25 UTC

  7 points

  on: Do bond yield curve in­ver­sions re­ally in­di­cate there is likely to be a re­ces­sion?

  High short-term in­ter­est rates con­sti­tute rel­a­tively good ev­i­dence of a com­ing re­ces­sion. The hard part is de­cid­ing what qual­ifies as high. “Higher than long-term rates” seems to get at­ten­tion partly due to its abil­ity to pro­duce a clear thresh­old, rather than to any­thing op­ti­mal about the sig­nal that’s pro­duced by long-term rates.

  Note that if re­ces­sions were easy to pre­dict, they would be eas­ier to avoid than they have been.

• PeterMcCluskey 7 Jul 2019 22:49 UTC

  29 points

  on: What are some of Robin Han­son’s best posts?

  Here are some, based mainly on a search for which ones I’ve linked to be­fore:

  Be­ware the In­side View

  On Liberty vs. Efficiency

  Dist­in­guish Info, Anal­y­sis, Belief, Action

  Fur­ther Than Africa

  Two Types of Peo­ple (for­agers and farm­ers)

  Policy Tug-O-War

  And, since I think he pub­lished bet­ter writ­ings out­side of his blog, here’s a longer list of those:

  Shall We Vote on Values, But Bet on Beliefs?

  How YOU Do Not Tell the Truth: Aca­demic Disagree­ment as Self-Deception

  He Who Pays The Piper Must Know The Tune

  Burn­ing the Cos­mic Com­mons: Evolu­tion­ary Strate­gies for In­ter­stel­lar Colonization

  Long-Term Growth As A Se­quence of Ex­po­nen­tial Modes

  Eco­nomic Growth Given Ma­chine Intelligence

  Fear of Death and Mud­dled Think­ing—It Is So Much Worse Than You Think

  When Do Ex­traor­di­nary Claims Give Ex­traor­di­nary Ev­i­dence?

  WHY HEALTH IS NOT SPECIAL: ERRORS IN EVOLVED BIOETHICS INTUITIONS

  Buy Health, Not Health Care

  Why Meat is Mo­ral, and Veg­gies are Immoral

  How To Live In A Simulation

• PeterMcCluskey 7 Jul 2019 1:48 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Alexei's comment on: Open Thread July 2019

  I’ll sug­gest the main change is open threads get fewer com­ments be­cause the sys­tem makes open threads less con­spicu­ous, and pro­vides al­ter­na­tives, such as ques­tions, that are de­cent sub­sti­tutes for com­ments.

• PeterMcCluskey 21 Jun 2019 15:21 UTC

  8 points

  on: Should ra­tio­nal­ity be a move­ment?

  Note that the ra­tio­nal­ity com­mu­nity used to have the Sin­gu­lar­ity Sum­mit, which was fairly similar to EAGlobal in its at­ti­tude to­ward high-sta­tus speak­ers.

• PeterMcCluskey 11 Jun 2019 15:04 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Dagon's comment on: Get Rich Real Slowly

  The risk/​re­turn curve hides some im­por­tant prob­lems.

  Many in­vestors have more in­come when the stock mar­ket is high than when it is low.

  For ex­am­ple, dona­tions to MIRI are likely heav­ily in­fluenced by the price of tech stocks and by cryp­tocur­rency prices. MIRI needs to pay salaries that fluc­tu­ate much less than those prices. If MIRI in­vests in as­sets that have much cor­re­la­tion with those prices, MIRI will likely end up buy­ing dis­pro­por­tionate amounts of those as­sets within a year af­ter they peak, and buy­ing less (some­times even sel­l­ing) within a year af­ter they reach a low.

  Maybe that works well for short-term mar­ket fluc­tu­a­tions, but when­ever there are sig­nifi­cant mar­ket fluc­tu­a­tions that last for sev­eral years, that would mean that MIRI would be buy­ing mainly at the worst time. I ex­pect that would cause them to un­der­perform the rele­vant bench­mark by at least a few per­centage points.

  So I ex­pect MIRI will be bet­ter off min­i­miz­ing the volatility of their in­vest­ments.

  Note that this con­clu­sion holds even if MIRI is risk-neu­tral.

  I ex­pect that a fair num­ber of in­di­vi­d­ual in­vestors have in­come fluc­tu­a­tions that im­ply the same con­clu­sion.

• PeterMcCluskey 10 Jun 2019 2:25 UTC

  5 points

  on: Ma­jor Up­date on Cost Disease

  They have a good ar­gu­ment that the Bau­mol effect ex­plains a sig­nifi­cant frac­tion of cost dis­ease.

  Much of their point is that it’s not sur­pris­ing that some in­dus­tries have bet­ter pro­duc­tivity growth than oth­ers.

  But they don’t have a full ex­pla­na­tion of the ex­tent to which pro­duc­tivity growth varies by in­dus­try. Why do med­i­cal pro­duc­tivity trends ap­pear much worse than auto re­pair pro­duc­tivity trends? What caused the phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal in­dus­try to be­come less pro­duc­tive?

  Their par­tial an­swer seems to be Han­so­nian:

  A key dis­tinc­tion is when la­bor is an in­put into the good or ser­vice and when la­bor, in essence, is the ser­vice. Con­sumers do not care how much la­bor is used as an in­put into the pro­duc­tion of a car, but they do care how much la­bor in­put is used in a mas­sage, artis­tic perfor­mance, or doc­tor’s visit.

  That’s point­ing in the right gen­eral di­rec­tion, but I ex­pect a full ex­pla­na­tion would also in­volve con­sumers be­ing un­will­ing or un­able to switch to com­pa­nies that offer cheaper ser­vices.

• PeterMcCluskey 10 May 2019 15:26 UTC

  12 points

  on: Tales From the Amer­i­can Med­i­cal System

  This doesn’t sound like some­thing that would hap­pen at Kaiser. It’s some­times un­clear whether peo­ple at Kaiser care about my health, but they seem to have clear in­cen­tives to be po­lite and to not waste my time with un­nec­es­sary vis­its.

• PeterMcCluskey 24 Apr 2019 19:45 UTC

  20 points

  on: [An­swer] Why wasn’t sci­ence in­vented in China?

  This is im­pres­sive given the amount of time you put into it.

  There’s more ev­i­dence in the book State, Econ­omy, and the Great Diver­gence: Great Bri­tain and China, 1680s − 1850s, by Peer Vries, which I re­viewed here. In par­tic­u­lar, Vries dis­putes the claim that prop­erty rights were se­cure in Bri­tain be­fore the in­dus­trial rev­olu­tion.