philh

Tap­ping Out In Two

The his­tory of smal­l­pox and the ori­gins of vaccines

• philh 29 Nov 2019 15:19 UTC

  2 points

  on: Could some­one please start a bright home light­ing com­pany?

  I don’t have a ro­bust way of es­ti­mat­ing am­bi­ent light

  Did you con­sider buy­ing a lux me­ter?

  I’ve or­dered one of these, so I hope I’m not miss­ing some­thing.

• philh 28 Nov 2019 9:26 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Douglas_Knight's comment on: Is daily caf­feine con­sump­tion benefi­cial to pro­duc­tivity?

  I read him as mak­ing ad­di­tional claims, not just en­tirely differ­ent ones.

• philh 27 Nov 2019 17:11 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Matthew Barnett's comment on: Ex­plain­ing why false ideas spread is more fun than why true ones do

  I think I’d ex­pect to find chap­ters like that even if the book was writ­ten by an ad­her­ent of the re­li­gion or of com­mu­nism. If I’m right, that seems to some­what point away from “if it’s true, we don’t feel the need to ex­plain it”.

  Pos­si­ble com­pli­cat­ing fac­tors there are be­lief-in-be­lief effects, the knowl­edge that other peo­ple don’t be­lieve the thing, and de­sire to evan­ge­lize.

• philh 22 Nov 2019 15:53 UTC

  4 points

  on: In Defense of Kegan

  So this is “replies to some ob­jec­tions to Ke­gan”, and not “pos­i­tive rea­sons to think Ke­gan is use­ful”, yes? That is, it won’t con­vince any­one that they should pay at­ten­tion to Ke­gan, but if they’ve been pre­vi­ously con­vinced that they shouldn’t, it might change their mind.

  I con­fess I had been hop­ing for the pos­i­tive rea­sons, but if it’s not what you were go­ing for, then fair enough.

  Ba­si­cally ev­ery­one trusts ex­perts in math be­cause it’s far from lived ex­pe­rience and we agree that math­e­mat­i­ci­ans are the math ex­perts even though we can only eas­ily val­i­date the ve­rac­ity of the sim­plest math­e­mat­i­cal claims with­out train­ing.

  Note that peo­ple do have some math­e­mat­i­cal in­tu­itions, and are will­ing to ar­gue with ex­perts on them. See the Monty Hall prob­lem, or the ques­tion of whether 0.999… = 1.

  it feels easy to re­ject what doesn’t feel true when it’s some­thing we have a lot of ex­pe­rience with and can eas­ily gather data on.

  This heuris­tic seems ba­si­cally cor­rect, to me. I would ex­pect peo­ple’s gut in­stincts to be more ac­cu­rate when they have a lot of ex­pe­rience and can eas­ily gather data.

  (I feel weird mak­ing this com­ment af­ter you said you prob­a­bly weren’t go­ing to defend the ar­ti­cle. But not mak­ing this com­ment be­cause you had said that, would seem like a mis­take. Ob­vi­ously, don’t feel obliged to re­spond.)

• philh 16 Nov 2019 22:15 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Liface's comment on: Is this info on zinc lozenges ac­cu­rate?

  Huh, yeah. Thanks for point­ing that out.

  An­noy­ingly, “the stearate isn’t a prob­lem” doesn’t an­swer the ques­tion, which is about stearic acid. I as­sume he meant to say that stearic acid is fine too, but I’ve posted a com­ment there to clar­ify.

• philh 16 Nov 2019 21:31 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: ryan_b's comment on: Units of Action

  My point is that “men” do seem to me like a unit of ac­tion. In the sense that—some­times—you can use­fully think of “men” as a group and make de­ci­sions based on con­sid­er­a­tions like “if we do this, men will do that”.

  but… well, nor does ev­ery mem­ber of an agency sue a com­pany to­gether.

  It is also true that ev­ery­one in the com­pany didn’t do some­thing worth get­ting sued over. The in­tu­ition here is that the peo­ple that make up the agency are not a vi­able way to an­a­lyze what the agency is do­ing, even where it is tech­ni­cally fea­si­ble; they are the wrong unit of anal­y­sis.

  To clar­ify my in­tent here: the bit you quoted wasn’t “and here’s why an agency isn’t a unit of ac­tion”, it was a “that proves too much” re­ply to one pos­si­ble an­swer you might give for why “men” aren’t a unit of ac­tion. But it seems you aren’t giv­ing that an­swer.

  Where do you see value be­ing lost?

  I feel like the value of an ab­strac­tion is that you can think about fewer ob­jects. If you can only work with an ab­strac­tion by tak­ing its com­po­nent ob­jects and break­ing them down to their com­po­nent ob­jects, then it’s not clear in what sense you’re ac­tu­ally ab­stract­ing.

• philh 14 Nov 2019 15:46 UTC

  6 points

  on: Units of Action

  I feel like the range of use­ful ab­strac­tions is wider than you give credit for.

  So, a gov­ern­ment agency sues a com­pany for breach of reg­u­la­tions. In many ways it acts as a unit; in oth­ers not. For ex­am­ple, the com­pany may de­cide to black­mail (the head of the agency) into pres­sur­ing (the leader of the team pur­su­ing the case) into drop­ping it or flub­bing the in­ves­ti­ga­tion or some­thing. You won’t get very far think­ing of the agency as a unit, if that hap­pens.

  (I don’t think you would dis­agree with that, but it seemed worth mak­ing ex­plicit.)

  Go­ing in the other di­rec­tion… I think broad de­mo­graph­ics some­times can be use­fully thought of as units. Some­one mak­ing a movie might (cor­rectly) say “if we in­clude this as­pect, then more men will see the film”. It’s true that “men” don’t all watch a movie to­gether, but… well, nor does ev­ery mem­ber of an agency sue a com­pany to­gether. If the agency can still be a unit, why not “men”?

  (Be­cause there’s no ex­plicit co­or­di­na­tion be­tween them as a group? But if you have to con­sider in­ter­nal com­mu­ni­ca­tion, the ab­strac­tion seems to lose value. Be­cause the ac­tion “watch a movie” is performed by in­di­vi­d­u­als? But the ac­tion “spend $x mil­lion on Cinema tick­ets” is performed by a group; and the ac­tion “sub­mit a doc­u­ment to the court” is performed by an in­di­vi­d­ual.)

• philh 31 Oct 2019 18:42 UTC

  2 points

  on: How to Im­prove Your Sleep

  Do not use your bed for any­thing ex­cept sleep; that is, do not read, watch tele­vi­sion, eat, or worry in bed. Sex­ual ac­tivity is the only ex­cep­tion to this rule. On such oc­ca­sions, the in­struc­tions are to be fol­lowed af­ter­ward when you in­tend to go to sleep.

  I have trou­ble pars­ing that last sen­tence. Could you clar­ify?

  Why is sex­ual ac­tivity an ex­cep­tion, and what counts as sex­ual ac­tivity? E.g. does mas­tur­ba­tion?

• philh 28 Oct 2019 22:56 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: limerott's comment on: Two ex­pla­na­tions for vari­a­tion in hu­man abilities

  Do you have a cita­tion for this?

  I’ve heard a similar story, but differ­ent in some de­tails, and in that story the sec­ond group did not end up com­pe­tent pro­gram­mers. And I think I’ve also heard that the story I first heard didn’t repli­cate or some­thing like that. So I don’t know what to think.

• philh 28 Oct 2019 17:22 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: philh's comment on: Door Ideas

  I’m not sure how fea­si­ble this is, but could you have a hinge on the mid­dle of the door that’s locked in place un­til some­thing puts pres­sure on a point near the hinge? Then that pres­sure could be sup­plied by (some­thing jut­ting out from?) the cor­ner the door is meant to be bend­ing around. It acts like a sin­gle solid door un­til it reaches full swing, and only then the an­noy­ing ex­tra bit sep­a­rates to fold around.

• philh 28 Oct 2019 15:42 UTC

  2 points

  on: Door Ideas

  Open­ing in the cen­tre is a bit more fiddly to open when you only have one free hand, since you need to push two things out of the way. Not such a prob­lem if it’s light enough to com­fortably open just by walk­ing through, with your shoulder or foot or some­thing.

  Clos­ing them be­hind you is worse, since they’re not even next to each other. Un­less it self-closes, but then you may find your­self keep­ing it open with your body as you go through.

  One in, one out is worse again, since you need to push one part and pull the other.

  Maybe dou­ble hinge, open­ing to­wards the kitchen? Has a smaller swing than the other way. One thing I don’t like about it is that if you push on the outer edge, you likely only open half the door; but again, that’s less of a prob­lem open­ing to­wards the kitchen (be­cause the outer sec­tion is smaller).

  Prob­lem: You might find your­self ac­ci­dently fold­ing it too much, and bang­ing the outer edge against the cor­ner that it’s meant to fold around.

• philh 27 Oct 2019 22:38 UTC

  4 points

  on: Iron: From myth­i­cal to mundane

  Note of con­fu­sion:

  To­day, we know that iron with less than about 0.1% car­bon is wrought iron, with more than 2.1% it is cast iron

  But ear­lier these were de­scribed as differ­ent meth­ods of shap­ing the iron, with wrought iron com­ing out of the fur­nace solid and be­ing beaten into shape and cast iron com­ing out liquid and be­ing moulded.

  Is it that these pro­cesses (typ­i­cally?) re­sult in these quan­tities of car­bon?

• philh 25 Oct 2019 15:04 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: Aiyen's comment on: Why Are So Many Ra­tion­al­ists Polyamorous?

  Wikipe­dia dis­agrees with you: https://​​en.wikipe­dia.org/​​wiki/​​Zero-sum_game

  a math­e­mat­i­cal rep­re­sen­ta­tion of a situ­a­tion in which each par­ti­ci­pant’s gain or loss of util­ity is ex­actly bal­anced by the losses or gains of the util­ity of the other par­ti­ci­pants.

  Em­pha­sis mine.

  (By your defi­ni­tion, it seems to me that al­most ev­ery­thing would be zero sum. If I bake a tasty cake for my friends, and that causes one of them to not visit the bak­ery that evening, the baker has lost out. More gen­er­ally, see my post “Pareto im­prove­ments are rarer than they seem”: https://​​www.less­wrong.com/​​posts/​​5AQBNwDoKW5YXDbvc/​​pareto-im­prove­ments-are-rarer-than-they-seem)

• philh 22 Oct 2019 14:59 UTC

  11 points

  on: Why Are So Many Ra­tion­al­ists Polyamorous?

  Monogamy isn’t zero sum be­cause not ev­ery­one is an equally good part­ner for ev­ery­one else. Like, Alice can date Bob or Carol, and leave the other one sin­gle. It’s un­likely that dat­ing ei­ther of them is equally good for her; and it’s un­likely that dat­ing her is equally good for each of them; so there’s prob­a­bly a sin­gle out­come with the high­est to­tal util­ity.

The Effect pat­tern: Trans­par­ent up­dates in Elm

• philh 20 Oct 2019 9:24 UTC

  10 points

  on: Why Ranked Choice Vot­ing Isn’t Great

  Fur­ther read­ing on this: a vot­ing the­ory primer for ra­tio­nal­ists, which in par­tic­u­lar men­tions that RCV has lower “voter satis­fac­tion effi­ciency” than just about any pro­posed al­ter­na­tive ex­cept first-past-the-post. (Ap­proval does in­deed do bet­ter, and the au­thor sup­ports it as a first step.)

• philh 19 Oct 2019 15:04 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: G Gordon Worley III's comment on: Is value amend­ment a con­ver­gent in­stru­men­tal goal?

  This com­ment feels like it’s con­fus­ing strate­gies with goals? That is, I wouldn’t nor­mally think of “ex­plo­ra­tion” as some­thing that an agent had as a goal but as a strat­egy it uses to achieve its goals. And “let’s try out a differ­ent util­ity func­tion for a bit” is un­likely to be a di­rec­tion that a sta­ble agent tries ex­plor­ing in.

• philh 14 Oct 2019 14:59 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Richard_Kennaway's comment on: Sets and Functions

  Whelp, I’ve been get­ting that wrong for some time now, thanks.

  Ah, ap­par­ently “range” is am­bigu­ously used as both “codomain” and “image”. I think I was taught it as codomain (be­fore I was taught that word), and then at some point started to think of codomain as “the one that isn’t the range”.

  https://​​en.wikipe­dia.org/​​wiki/​​Range_(math­e­mat­ics)