philh

Karma: 6,078

philh 22 Jan 2022 19:46 UTC
2 points
on: Choosing battles (on the Internet)
Tooting my own horn, but tapping out in two is related. I’m not great at not having these arguments, but I’ve learned to limit their imposition on me.

philh 21 Jan 2022 10:39 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: Guidelines for cold messaging people
I didn’t vote myself, but my feeling is that it’s a combination of
- Innocuous but mostly-irrelevant personal opinion;
- Implicit unhelpful advice / criticism of OP.
Like, the literal content is mostly just “I don’t like receiving cold emails”. Okay, so why are you telling us this? If we assume you intended to communicate more than just the literal content, it becomes the advice/moralizing “don’t send cold emails”. But if that is what you intend, it’s kind of passive-aggressive and it’s not very helpful. If you think one should never send cold emails, why not? If you think there are circumstances where it’s okay, which circumstances?

My current guess is that you didn’t intend that advice/moralizing? But I still felt it in your comment, and I expect it’s a large part of why you got downvoted.

philh 18 Jan 2022 21:30 UTC
2 points
on: 2020 Review Article

philh looked at all possible two-player simultaneous games in normal form

Note: just the symmetric ones.

philh 16 Jan 2022 21:39 UTC
2 points
in reply to: dkirmani’s comment on: No Abstraction Without a Goal
I think it’s not a coincidence that the high-order bits are the ones that are preserved by more physical processes. Like, if you take two photos of the same thing, the high order bits are more likely to be the same than the low order bits. Or if you take a photo of a picture on a screen or printed out. Or if you dye two pieces of fabric in the same vat.

I’m not saying you couldn’t get an agent that cared about the low-order bits and not the high-order bits, and if you did have such an agent maybe it would find abstractions that we wouldn’t. But I don’t think I’m being parochial when I say that would be a really weird agent.

philh 7 Jan 2022 21:16 UTC
2 points
in reply to: agc’s comment on: Omicron Post #12
I don’t know Zvi’s reasoning, but you’d be able to get such a booster upon news of that variant, which might be better than getting it several months before the variant. (But perhaps worse than “long enough before that you can get a fifth shot when it arrives”.)

I have some abstract concern about the possibility of developing immune reactions to mRNA shots so that we can only get a limited number of them over a lifetime. I haven’t looked into it in depth or even what experts think, it’s not right now gonna stop me from getting a shot that seems important, but it might swing me to no on a just-in-case.

philh 2 Jan 2022 13:25 UTC
8 points
in reply to: tomcatfish’s comment on: The Machine that Broke My Heart
Apart from what Richard said, the second paragraph has a very… “handing down nuggets of wisdom from on high”? vibe to me. Like, Val apparently thinks he knows better than lsusr what’s going on with lsusr’s emotions or something? (I interpret “you haven’t touched the true core” as something like “you think you know what’s going on but there’s more to it than that”, but it’s not clear and that’s part of the problem.) And if lsusr wants to learn, here’s a long article he can read. (Firefox reader mode puts it at 57-73 minutes.)

Val acknowledges that the paragraph is probably annoying, and uses words “guess” and “might”, and that makes it less obnoxious to me than it would be otherwise. But still obnoxious. More things that would make it less obnoxious to me:
- What makes Val think lsusr hasn’t touched the true core of his heartbreak? This probably partly comes from details that don’t make sense if you don’t know the framework, but it should at least be possible to point at something in what lsusr wrote. Things like “you spend N words on this and 3N words on that, if you were in touch I’d expect roughly equal numbers of words”; or “your writing style when when talking about this is much more concise than your writing style when talking about that, like you’re trying to avoid thinking about it in detail”. If Val can’t point at something like this, I think that’s a bad sign and he should admit that he can’t.
- Is there something specific that makes Val recommend this particular framework here? Or is it just his standard recommendation for getting in touch with emotions?
- Give lsusr some way to say “no, that seems wrong” that doesn’t involve reading the long article. Like, “another explanation for what I see might be ___, and if you think that’s what’s going on then this probably won’t help you”.
- More explicit acknowledgment that what he’s doing here is thinking he knows better than lsusr what’s going on with lsusr’s emotions; that this is the sort of guess that people frequently make while being dead wrong about; some reason why he thought it was worth making anyway.
(I don’t know that I would like the comment if it had those things. But I do think I would find it less bad.)

philh 2 Jan 2022 7:09 UTC
2 points
in reply to: lsusr’s comment on: The Machine that Broke My Heart
Was there something specific that caused you to stop when you did, rather than sooner or later?

philh 31 Dec 2021 19:56 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Dumbledore's Army’s comment on: COVID Skepticism Isn’t About Science

I’m fortunate that the UK does have one small centrist party which has (weakly, quietly) opposed the worst excesses of the lockdownistas.

I’d be interested to hear more about this? I’m also a member of the lib dems, but I’m sufficiently inattentive that I couldn’t tell you any of the party’s positions on covid.

philh 31 Dec 2021 17:11 UTC
4 points
on: What are the pros and cons of seeking a formal diagnosis of autism?
I’m in the UK as well, and spoke with my GP a couple of months ago about whether I might have autism and/or ADHD (my self-diagnoses were yes and no respectively, with enough uncertainty on ADHD that it seemed worth checking). I didn’t particularly think about whether it was a good idea, I’d just noticed that at some point I went from “I know I think I meet the criteria for autism, but everyone on the internet self-diagnoses as that, so” to “I know everyone on the internet self-diagnoses as autistic, but I think I meet the criteria, so”. I felt a bit awkward describing myself as autistic based on that, so I went for a diagnosis.

I might be misremembering details. But he said there’s not really any test for either, especially not if I’m just curious (which is why I’d said I was looking to be tested). But that for what it’s worth, he thought I probably had autism and not ADHD. (I can read blog posts! (Can I finish them? «Well, I get to the bottom, at any rate.») Apparently people with ADHD can’t do that. Who knew.)

My understanding is that he’s wrong, and that there’s a thing with a multi-year waiting list where you can get an actual diagnosis somehow? At any rate a friend told me he was on such a waiting list a while back. But I didn’t feel like arguing.

So it might be super easy to get an informal diagnosis, and a massive PITA to get a formal one.

My older brother was diagnosed as a kid. AFAIK it hasn’t particularly affected his life since school (I dunno if he even got accomodations in university). But he’s not old enough/in bad enough health yet for your specific worries to come into play, and also his life path hasn’t involved much formal employment.

philh 30 Dec 2021 19:26 UTC
2 points
in reply to: philh’s comment on: Is this info on zinc lozenges accurate?
More evidence:

I had another cold a few weeks ago. Only the second since I posted this, but I haven’t been going out much, so. Timeline was that I got my covid booster on a Saturday (4th December), and felt shaky that evening and the next day. Monday I went to my work christmas party. Tuesday I felt a bit under the weather, I think including sore throat, but attributed it to tiredness and alcohol, I didn’t have zinc. Wed-Fri my sore throat got increasingly worse, I started sucking zinc but only like two a day out of forgetfulness. Then it got super unpleasant, I had various combinations of lethargy, brain fog, sore throat and sneezing for a few days, while I started taking zinc in earnest. I took all of Monday and some of Tuesday off work, and was basically feeling fine on Wednesday—still gunked up, but no pain or mental effects. (I actually feel like I might still be a bit phlegmy, two weeks later, but I don’t know if I’m just noticing my normal level of phlegminess more than I would otherwise.)

(It’s also possible this was Covid, I took a negative LFT on the Sunday so I guess not? But I only took one, and this was around when Omicron was starting to take off in London.)

My partner caught it from me and I encouraged them to take zinc too, but they find the lozenges super unpleasant so they didn’t have as many as I’d recommend. I think their experience was less bad than mine, but their baseline is also worse than mine so it might just be that the same level of suckiness registers less for them.

Not sure how to weight this. I didn’t take enough or quickly enough for it to be strongly negative evidence, plus my booster might have confused things. If I’d cleared up fast enough after taking things seriously, and/or if my symptoms were only mild, it might count as weakly positive. But I think it lasted about as long as we might expect and was worse than normal for me. I guess “neutral” is unlikely, so “slightly negative” it is? (Ideally I’d be more specific here than just “true or false” but that sounds like a lot of effort.)

And negative evidence: philip_b’s comment here. “As for helping with common cold, I have no idea if they are helping. Maybe, slightly. In the beginning I thought that maybe I am noticing some positive effect, but it could easily be placebo. I also have a hunch that maybe they help with throat symptoms but not with nose symptoms.” The hypothesis predicts an effect size larger than “maybe, slightly”.

philh 30 Dec 2021 12:06 UTC
4 points
in reply to: pseudobison’s comment on: Walkthrough: Filing a UK self-assessment tax return
Ah, boo. Thanks for pointing that out, it was auto-imported and I didn’t actually click through to check it had worked properly. Fixed now.

(What happened is I wrote them with relative URLs like /images/..., which works fine on my blog. I remember briefly wondering if LW would convert them to absolute URLs like https://reasonableapproximation.net/images/… when importing, and thinking I should change them to be safe, but forgot to do that. Apparently it doesn’t.)

Walkthrough: Filing a UK self-assessment tax return

philh29 Dec 2021 23:10 UTC

22 points

3 comments21 min readLW link

(reasonableapproximation.net)

philh 29 Dec 2021 17:50 UTC
6 points
in reply to: Lukas_Gloor’s comment on: Why did Europe conquer the world?

Still, the author of that passage seems to think that Diamond was subconsciously motivated to paint some groups as inherently inferior, or something like that. And I don’t understand why they think that.

In fact, he explicitly said this, just not in the direction that critic thinks. Diamond thought Europeans were inferior.

From the very beginning of my work with New Guineans, they impressed me as being on the average more intelligent, more alert, more expressive, and more interested in things and people around them than the average European or American is. At some tasks that one might reasonably suppose to reflect aspects of brain function, such as the ability to form a mental map of unfamiliar surroundings, they appear considerably more adept than Westerners.

… Intelligent people are likelier than less intelligent ones to escape those causes of high mortality in traditional New Guinea societies. However, the differential mortality from epidemic diseases in traditional European societies had little to do with intelligence, and instead involved genetic resistance dependent on details of body chemistry. For example, people with blood group B or O have a greater resistance to smallpox than do people with blood group A.

That is, natural selection promoting genes for intelligence has probably been far more ruthless in New Guinea than in more densely populated, politically complex societies, where natural selection for body chemistry was instead more potent. Besides this genetic reason, there is also a second reason why New Guineans may have come to be smarter than Westerners. Modern European and American children spend much of their time being passively entertained by television, radio, and movies. In the average American household, the TV set is on for seven hours per day. In contrast, traditional New Guinea children have virtually no such opportunities for passive entertainment and instead spend almost all of their waking hours actively doing something, such as talking or playing with other children or adults.

… This effect surely contributes a non-genetic component to the superior average mental function displayed by New Guineans. That is, in mental ability New Guineans are probably genetically superior to Westerners, and they surely are superior in escaping the devastating developmental disadvantages under which most children in industrialized societies now grow up. … The same two genetic and childhood developmental factors are likely to distinguish not only New Guineans from Westerners, but also hunter-gatherers and other members of technologically primitive societies from members of technologically advanced societies in general.

Thus, the usual racist assumption has to be turned on its head. Why is it that Europeans, despite their likely genetic disadvantage and (in modern times) their undoubted developmental disadvantage, ended up with much more of the cargo? Why did New Guineans wind up technologically primitive, despite what I believe to be their superior intelligence?

(Editing note: paragraph breaks got lost when I copied from kindle, I’ve added some back in but probably not the original ones.)

A lot of this is about modern Europeans and Americans versus modern New Guineans, but I’ve bolded a couple of passages where he says he thinks it was true historically too.

philh 28 Dec 2021 23:56 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Suna’s comment on: Omicron: My Current Model
Though that’s about the common cold, not covid. She does mention covid in a comment:

For covid in particular the hypothesis was that it prevented transition between an annoying but harmless-to-most upper respiratory infection, to a very serious lower respiratory infection. I don’t know if that panned out for covid or if it transfers to other viruses, but it seems very plausible. “Nasal infection unaffected but progression to lungs inhibited” is an extremely specific prediction that should be fairly easy to measure but I couldn’t find anything on it in a few minutes on google scholar, which I find very disappointing.

philh 26 Dec 2021 0:22 UTC
2 points
on: [Book Review] “The Most Powerful Idea in the World” by William Rosen

Cort’s solution, called a “pudding furnace”, separated the fuel from the iron.

(From the quotes, sounds like this should be “puddling”?)

philh 25 Dec 2021 22:48 UTC
2 points
on: Motive Ambiguity
Initial reaction: I like this post a lot. It’s short, to the point. It has examples relating its concept to several different areas of life: relationships, business, politics, fashion. It demonstrates a fucky dynamic that in hindsight obviously game-theoretically exists, and gives me an “oh shit” reaction.

Meditating a bit on an itch I had: what this post doesn’t tell me is how common this dynamic, or how to detect when it’s happening.

While writing this review: hm, is this dynamic meaningfully different from the idea of a costly signal?

Thinking about the examples:

You are married, and want to take your spouse out to a romantic dinner. You could choose a place you both love, or a place that only they love. You choose the place you don’t love, so they will know how much you love them. After all, you didn’t come here for the food. … you care more about your spouse’s view of how much you care about their experience than you care about your own experience.

Seems believably common, but also kind of like a fairly normal not-very-fucky costly signal.

(And, your spouse probably wants to come to both restaurants sometimes. And they probably come to the place-only-they-love less than they ideally would, because you don’t love it.)

Gets fuckier if they’d enjoy the place-you-both-love more than the place-only-they-love. Then the cost isn’t just your own enjoyment; it’s a signal you care about something, at the cost of the thing you supposedly care about. Still believable, but feels less common.

A middle manager must choose how to improve widget production. He can choose a policy that improperly maintains the factory and likely eventually poisons the water supply, or a policy that would prevent that at no additional cost. He knows that when he is up for promotion, management will want to know the higher ups can count on him to make the quarterly numbers look good and not concern himself with long term issues or what consequences might fall on others. If he cared about not poisoning the water supply, he would not be a reliable political ally. Thus, he chooses the neglectful policy. … you care more about being seen as focused on your own success than you care about outcomes you won’t be responsible for.

(Didn’t work for me, but I think the link is supposed to highlight the following phrase in the second paragraph: “The Immoral Mazes sequence is an exploration of what causes that hell, and how and why it has spread so widely in our society. Its thesis is that this is the result of a vicious cycle arising from competitive pressures among those competing for their own organizational advancement.”)

Ah, so I think this has an important difference from a normal “costly signal”, in that the cost is to other people.

I read the immoral mazes sequence at the time, but don’t remember in depth. I could believe that it reliably attests that this sort of thing happens a lot.

A politician can choose between two messages that affirm their loyalty [to their biggest campaign contributer]: Advocating a beneficial [to the general public] policy, or advocating a useless and wasteful policy. They choose useless, because the motive behind advocating a beneficial policy is ambiguous. Maybe they wanted people to benefit! … you care more about being seen as loyal than about improving the world by being helpful.

Again, the cost is to other people, not the politician.

How often do politicians get choices like this? I think a more concrete example would be helpful for me here, even if it was fictional. (But non-fiction would be better, and if it’s difficult to find one… that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen, real-world complications might mean we don’t know about them and/or can’t be sure that’s what’s going on with them. But still, if it’s difficult to find a real-world example of this, that says something bad.)

(Is the point of the link to the pledge of allegiance simply that that’s a signal of loyalty that costs a bit of time? I’m not American and didn’t read the article in depth, I could be missing something.)

A start-up founder can choose between building a quality product without technical debt and creating a hockey stick graph with it, or building a superficially similar low-quality product with technical debt and using that. Both are equally likely to create the necessary graph, and both take about the same amount of effort, time and money. They choose the low-quality product, so the venture capitalists can appreciate their devotion to creating a hockey stick graph. … you care about those making decisions over your fate believing that you will focus on the things they believe the next person deciding your fate will care about, so they can turn a profit. They don’t want you distracted by things like product quality.

The claimed effect here is: the more investors know about your code quality, the more incentive you have to write bad code. I could tell an opposite story, where if they know you have bad code they expect that to hurt your odds of maintaining a hockey-stick graph.

So this example only seems to hold up if
1. Investors know about your code quality.
2. They care about what your code quality says about loyalty to their interests, more than what it says about your ability to satisfy their interests.
I’m not convinced on either point.

If it does hold up… yeah, it’s fucky in that it’s another case of “signal you care about a thing by damaging the thing”.

You can choose between making a gift and buying a gift. You choose to make a gift, because you are rich and buying something from a store would be meaningless. Or you are poor, so you buy something from a store, because a handmade gift wouldn’t show you care.

Mostly just seems like another fairly straightforward costly signal? Not very fucky.

Old joke: One Russian oligarch says, “Look at my scarf! I bought it for ten thousand rubles.” The other says, “That’s nothing, I bought the same scarf for twenty thousand rubles.” … the oligarchs want to show they have money to burn, and that they care a lot about showing they have lots of money to burn. That they actively want to Get Got to show they don’t care. If someone thought the scarf was bought for mundane utility, that wouldn’t do at all.

Same as above. I think this is what economists call a Veblen good.

I don’t think the article convinces me to be significantly more concerned about regular costly signals than I currently do, where the cost is entirely on the person sending the signal. That’s two and a half of the examples, and they seem like the least-fucky. I think… if I’m supposed to care about those, I’d probably want an article that specifically focuses on them, rather than mixing them with fuckier things.

The ones where (some of) the cost is to other people, or to the thing-supposedly-cared-about, are more worrying. But there’s also not enough detail here to convince me those are very common. And the example closest to my area of expertise is the one I don’t believe. I feel like a lot of my worry about these, in my initial reading, came from association with the others, that having separated out I find more-believable and less-fucky. I don’t think it’s deliberate, but I feel vaguely Motte-and-Baileyed.

Writing this has moved me from positive on the review to slightly negative. (Strictly speaking I didn’t cast a vote before, but I was expecting it would have been positive.) But I won’t be shocked if something I’ve missed brings me back to positive.
What links here?
- Vaniver's comment on 2020 Review: The Discussion Phase by Vaniver (1 Jan 2022 18:51 UTC; 4 points)

philh 23 Dec 2021 13:00 UTC
2 points
in reply to: jefftk’s comment on: Perpetual Dickensian Poverty?
I forgot about PPP, thanks.

To clarify, you’re saying it would be hard to do this in the other direction, not that doing it in the other direction would give the same results?

When we attempt to convert between 1843 GBP and modern USD, the overall process is essentially: convert from 1843 GBP to some quantity of goods and services, then figure out how much that quantity of goods and services would cost in modern USD.

I like how this makes it more concrete what we’re trying to ask. And it kind of suggests we should get the same answer whichever way we do it.

But we haven’t made it explicit what basket of goods and services we’re looking at. I guess that’s implicitly chosen by the inflation index? And those indexes are frequently swapping things in and out, so if we use something like CPI, what we’re actually measuring is: “buy a bundle of goods and services in 1843 for £1. Let’s say it includes candles. At some point we swap out the candles for some number of incandescant lightbulbs, and then we swap out those for LED lightbulbs. Maybe other swaps on the way. Also, probably things just sometimes get straight added to the bundle or removed from it. In 2021 we sell the bundle for USD. How much USD do we get?” And the UK and US indexes will start with different bundles of goods and services, and make different updates on the way. I guess partly based on the whims of economists having to choose between a bunch of reasonable options, and partly based on the UK and US having different situations causing different options to be reasonable?

(Also, even if we specify the goods and services, “what does it cost” doesn’t have a single answer; things will cost different amounts in London versus York, or in New York, New York versus New London, Alabama. When we “buy” the basket we’re taking some weighted average and the same when we “sell” it. But this might be the same no matter which direction we go?)

Hm, so if I’m right about this… if we did have an inflation index for both currencies that used the same bundle of goods and services, we’d be able to calculate PPP in 1843 as “whatever value means we get the same answer both ways”? (But it would be PPP for that specific bundle of goods and services.)

philh 22 Dec 2021 22:18 UTC
2 points
on: Perpetual Dickensian Poverty?
I expect you’ll also get different answers depending whether you convert GBP to USD in 1843 or in 2021. The exchange rates will be different across times and the inflation indexes will be different across currencies.

(Or will those cancel each other out? I wouldn’t be shocked, and I haven’t looked. But my intuitive guess is something like: “no, not reliably. Maybe if American and British societies look sufficiently similar at both endpoints. Maybe even, only if they follow sufficiently similar trajectories. I wouldn’t expect either of those to hold.”)

Which is more “correct”? I don’t immediately see a reason to think either one is, or indeed that one or the other must be.

philh 20 Dec 2021 23:59 UTC
5 points
in reply to: bfinn’s comment on: How I became a person who wakes up early
I’ve always been able to find somewhere online to ship melatonin to the UK. Last time it was from lifeextensioneurope.co.uk, but a quick glance doesn’t show melatonin there any more, so I might need to go hunting again next time I need to replenish :(

Or maybe I’ll try the cherry juice, so thanks for the tip!

(edit: the european site still has it. I dunno yet whether they’ll ship it to the UK. https://www.lifeextensioneurope.com/antioxidants/melatonin/)

philh 19 Dec 2021 12:50 UTC
5 points
on: Zvi’s Thoughts on the Survival and Flourishing Fund (SFF)

so the money likely does not harm on top of everything.

(Sounds like this should be “does net harm”? I don’t normally point out typos but this one reverses the meaning, so.)

philh

Walk­through: Filing a UK self-as­sess­ment tax return

Walkthrough: Filing a UK self-assessment tax return