philh

Karma: 5,397

philh 27 Feb 2021 16:03 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Mark Xu’s comment on: Coincidences are Improbable
Seems worth mentioning that the four ways you list for events to be causally linked are the building blocks of d-separation, not the whole thing. E.g. “A causes X, X causes B” is a causal link, but not direct. And “A causes X, B causes X, X causes Y, and we’ve observed Y” is one as well. Or even: “A causes X, Y causes X, Y causes B, X causes Z, and we’ve observed Z”. (That’s the link between s and y in example 3 from your link.)

philh 27 Feb 2021 14:23 UTC
6 points
in reply to: Ikaxas’s comment on: Yes, words can cause harm

words can cause thoughts, thoughts can cause urges to perform actions which are harmful to oneself, such urges can cause actions which are harmful to oneself. There’s no claim that any of these things is particularly likely, just that they’re possible, and if they’re all possible, then it’s possible for words to cause harm

Without having an object level opinion here (I didn’t read the post and I only skimmed the comments), I note that this argument is incomplete. It may be that the set of “urges that cause harmful actions” is disjoint from the set of “urges which can be caused by thoughts which can be caused by words”.

philh 26 Feb 2021 13:26 UTC
3 points
in reply to: kithpendragon’s comment on: Best way to write a bicolor article on Less Wrong?

Markdown also supports underline by surrounding the text with single underscores, though it looks a bit like hyperlink. … (Edit: looks like LessWrong interprets that as another way to do italic, likely to avoid the hyperlink confusion)

This is actually standard for markdown. I could believe some implementations use underscores for underline but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it.

philh 23 Feb 2021 0:11 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Zvi’s comment on: Your Cheerful Price
This doesn’t parse as disagreement—Eukaryote only said that asker should be willing to pay a nonzero amount, not that a nonzero payment should actually happen.

So, according to my read of Eukaryote (and also according to me):
- “My cheerful price is $0” / “great, will you do it for $0?”—fine.
- “My cheerful price is $0.01” / “oh, hm, I don’t actually want to pay a cent for it”—not cool.
- “Honestly I’d have done it for free as a favor, but since you ask my cheerful price is $5” / “oh, okay, will you do it for free?”—not cool.
- (Edited to add:) “Honestly I’d have done it for free as a favor, but since you ask my cheerful price is $5” / “hm, I don’t want to pay $5, but will you do it for $2?”—fine.

philh 22 Feb 2021 12:33 UTC
2 points
in reply to: just_browsing’s comment on: Shortcuts With Chained Probabilities
You got the wrong answer, but I do like the idea of comparing variances, and at least for this distribution, whichever has greater variance will have more weight on 0. But in this case, the variance of the 50% option is 0.5 and the variance of the 5% option is 0.95. And indeed the 5% option is preferable. ( $B i n o m i a l (n, p)$ has variance $n p (1 - p)$ , if the means $n p$ are the same then whichever has lower $p$ will have higher variance.)

philh 19 Feb 2021 23:13 UTC
8 points
on: How poor is US vaccine response by comparison to other countries?

And the other eight, at the risk of seeming like a stereotypical American, are tiny places I didn’t even think were countries. (Isn’t the Isle of Man part of the United Kingdom? Why does it get its own row?)

In fact, most of those eight are part of the UK. Seychelles and the UAE are the only actual countries, the rest are British overseas territories. Not that I can tell you exactly what that means for vaccine rollout, but it does seem pretty relevant. (And your inner stereotypical american gets geography points.)

philh 18 Feb 2021 11:48 UTC
4 points
on: Five examples
More on type checking:

A thing I did recently while working on my compiler was write a “macroexpand” function that wasn’t recursive. It macroexpanded once, but didn’t macroexpand the result. I think I was like “whatever, I’ll come back later and handle that”, and maybe I would have done. But shortly afterwards I made the types more specific, using mildly advanced features of Haskell, and now the macroexpand function claimed to return a “thing that has been fully macroexpanded” but in code was returning a “thing containing something that hasn’t been macroexpanded”. I might have caught this easily anyway, but at minimum I think it would have been harder to track down.

So when the author says “I carry around invariants (which is a fancy name for properties about things in my program) in my head all the time. Only one of those invariants is its type”, my reaction is that he probably could put more invariants in the type. Examples of that: you can put “this can’t be null” into the type, or more precisely the thing can’t be null by default but you can choose to relax that invariant in the type. You can put “this function may only be called from within a transaction of isolation level no weaker than repeatable read” into a type, we’ve done that at work. You can put “this array has a known length” into a type, and “this function returns an array of the same length it was passed”, though I haven’t found those useful myself. Similarly “this hash table definitely has a value for key X” and “this function returns a hash table with exactly the same keys”. “This list is nonempty” is a type-level invariant I use a lot. You even could put “this is an increasing list of floats with mean X and standard deviation Y” into a type, modulo floating point comparison problems, though I’m not convinced that’s a realistic example.

I’ve also had a lot of cases where I have a type with a limited set of possible values, then I add a new possible value, and all the places that accept the type but don’t handle the value complain. This isn’t strictly type checking, it’s exhaustiveness checking, but I’m not sure you can get it without type checking. Maybe easy to catch through testing for functions that accept the type as input (as long as you have e.g. a random generator for the type, and add this case to it), but I think harder to catch when you call functions that return the type.

So I speculate static typing is more useful the more your domain types can be usefully modeled as tagged unions. If all your types are just “a field for this value, a field for that value, …”, where none of the values depend on the others, the kind of thing modeled by C structs or Python classes or Haskell records, it will mostly catch obvious errors. But if you find yourself writing things like that but with lots of invariants like ”foo is true, then bar will be null and baz won’t be”, then that’s a good fit for a tagged union, and you can move that invariant out of your head and into the type checker and exhaustiveness checker.

(There’s a related thing that we don’t have, I guess I’d call co-exhaustiveness checking. Consider: “I have a random generator for values of this type, if I add a new possibility for the type how do I make sure the generator stays in sync?” Or “how do I check the function parsing it from strings has a way to parse the new value?”)

(Also, if the author’s never had to spend a long time tracking down “this function should never be called with a null input but somehow it is, wtf is going on”… more power to him, I guess.)

philh 8 Feb 2021 21:40 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Bob Baker’s comment on: Book review: Sleight of Mind (Matt Cook)
Goodstein’s theorem is a theorem about finite numbers that can be proven using infinite ordinals, and can’t be proven using just Peano Arithmetic. I take it that’s the kind of thing you’re asking about? Though I couldn’t tell you how useful that in turn is.

philh 8 Feb 2021 19:18 UTC
4 points
on: Why I Am Not in Charge

There’s a small and decreasing number of people who are still capable of synthesizing information and creating new hypotheses and interpretations.

Then there’s those who are mostly no longer capable of doing that, things got too complicated and weird, and they can’t keep up, but they can read the first group and meaningfully distinguish between people claiming to be in it, and between their individual claims, ask questions and help provide feedback. To them, the first group is legible. This forms a larger second group that can synthesize the points from the first group, and turn it into something that can be read as an emerging new consensus, which in turn can be legible to a third much larger group.

This third group can then be legible to the general public slash general elites, who learn that this is where good new ideas come from. Then the Responsible Authority Figures can feel under public pressure, or see what the emerging new ideas are, and run with the ball from there, and the loop continues.

Somewhat tangential, this is four levels from “people who figure things out” to “general public”. I wonder how recently it would have been three. But also, I’m not sure how to tell how many levels there are; if you’d said there were three levels, or five, I don’t think that would have seemed particularly off to me.

Free association: this is in some sense “one level of middle management” (the second group). I don’t remember back to moral mazes very well, but I feel like that might have been where things start to go really wrong. (It might have been two levels of MM instead.) I’m not sure if this is a meaningful connection to make—if mapping “people who figure things out” to CEOs and “general public” to employees gives us any insights—but if it is… honestly I’m not sure what to do with that.

philh 7 Feb 2021 0:01 UTC
6 points
on: The Story of the Reichstag
Nitpick:

The iconic photograph of the moment is not entirely truthful though. Hammer and sickle has been added a few days later as was the rising smoke in the background. The editor has also noticed that the soldier securing the soldier who was holding the flag had watches on both wrists. He corrected the error using a needle.

Wikipedia mostly agrees with this, except it says the hammer and sickle was original (and shows what it claims to be the undoctored photo). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_a_Flag_over_the_Reichstag

philh 2 Feb 2021 1:03 UTC
2 points
in reply to: elityre’s comment on: What are some real life Inadequate Equilibria?
I’ve heard rumors (and I think a planet money episode) that it’s not just them, but also small-government conservatives who think taxes will be easier to raise (less opposition) if they’re easier to file (people are less aware of them).

philh 25 Jan 2021 21:06 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Daniel Kokotajlo’s comment on: Cortés, Pizarro, and Afonso as Precedents for Takeover
I did get the sense that the Inca were more internal-strifey than normal at the time, but yeah. Even if true in their case, it’s not much consolation.

philh 25 Jan 2021 20:39 UTC
6 points
on: Cortés, Pizarro, and Afonso as Precedents for Takeover
I just listened to a podcast on the fall of the Inca. Two points stood out that seem relevant.

One is that the Inca themselves conquered the area through a combination of force and diplomacy. Not, I think, as thoroughly? Not sure how I’d operationalize that, and I’m not entirely sure why I think it deserves emphasis. Perhaps… this makes it clearer to me that in one more sense, the Spanish weren’t “playing on easy mode”; the Inca rose to the top of the local power game, and then the Spanish beat them.

Another is that the Incan emperor wasn’t entirely helpless. He pointed the Spanish at Cuzco because he already wanted it out of his way; he wanted to relocate the capital (and maybe already had done, as far as the people he commanded were concerned?) and was happy for the Spanish to destroy it. They didn’t find his own capital (until much later?). In general he used his captivity to take out a lot of his political opponents, and was capable of sending and receiving messages through the people who went to fetch tribute. It went bad for him when his opponents convinced the Spanish he had an army coming to attack, and they executed him. Even if that hadn’t happened, I’m not convinced he had a path to victory at that point, much less the Inca as a people. Seems relevant for the same reason as above (it’s not like the emperor didn’t know how to play the game). But there’s also a point in favor of “if the Inca had had less internal strife, maybe things would have gone very differently for the Spanish”.

(The same podcast (Fall of Civilizations, which in general I really like, caveat I don’t have the background to speak to its accuracy) also had an episode on the fall of the Aztecs. I’d listened to it a few months before I first read this post, and didn’t have any similar remarks at the time, though maybe I would have if it had been more fresh.)

philh 15 Jan 2021 14:25 UTC
8 points
in reply to: Daniel Kokotajlo’s comment on: “If” is in the map
Stipulate that we want to choose some boolean function $\to$ on two inputs to represent “if $P$ , then $Q$ ”. Then we want $T \to T = T, T \to F = F$ or what are we even doing with our lives.

So we have four choices for how to define $F \to T$ and $F \to F$ . The standard choice says both are true. What about other choices?

Suppose we have $F \to F = F$ . Then we’ve translated “if $P$ , then $Q$ ” into something that asserts $Q$ and maybe (depending on $F \to T$ ) also asserts $P$ . That seems like a bad translation. So let’s say $F \to F = T$ . (Notably, if we add “undefined”, then $F \to F = U$ has the same problem, when $P$ and $Q$ are defined it lets $P \to Q$ be true only if $Q$ is true.) Without this, we can’t really translate “if $P$ , then $Q$ . Not $Q$ . Therefore, not $P$ ,” because $(P \to Q) \land \neg Q$ is a contradiction. (Which does still give us $\neg P$ , but it also gives us $P$ , so.)

All that’s left is $F \to T$ . If we say this is false, then our “if $P$ , then $Q$ ” is translated into something that means ” $P$ and $Q$ are either both true, or both false”, or $P = Q$ . That seems like a bad translation too.

Basically, “if $P$ , then $Q$ ” just doesn’t translate very well into boolean logic, but all the other ways to translate it seem worse.
What links here?
- “If” is in the map by Chris_Leong (13 Jan 2021 3:09 UTC; 8 points)

philh 15 Jan 2021 13:59 UTC
2 points
on: Pseudorandomness contest: prizes, results, and analysis
I was string #54, and scored −1.7 in round 2, fairly middle of the pack. My probabilities:
- 24 × 0%, 3 were real (13%)
- 4 × 5%, 0 were real (0%)
- 5 × 10%, 3 were real (60%)
- 4 × 15%, 3 were real (75%) (!)
- 2 × 20%, 1 was real (50%)
- 7 × 25%, 1 was real (14%)
- 8 × 30%, 7 were real (88%) (!)
- 14 × 75%, 10 were real (71%)
- 40 × 80%, 24 were real (60%)
- 16 × 85%, 10 were real (63%)
I think the thing I found difficult was I didn’t know how to do a bayesian update. I can calculate the probability of a statistic under the “random” hypothesis, but I had no idea what probability to assign it under the “fake” hypothesis, so what next?

In the end I just sorted the strings by a certain statistic and went with my gut, taking into account other info like “number of 1s” and “was this my own string”, and starting with a baseline of “given the number of fakes I’m pretty sure I’ve eliminated, I don’t think I can be more than, uh, about 85% confident that any given string is real”. I worked from both ends and tried to get my average probability somewhere close to 50%, but that left a lot of space in the middle that I didn’t end up using. Clearly this didn’t work very well.

(The statistic was something like, probability of the observed “longest run length” combined with “number of changes from 1→0 or 0→1″. The two aren’t independent, so I got longest run length in closed form and did many simulations to get a rough distribution for number of changes given that.)

philh 10 Jan 2021 21:37 UTC
3 points
in reply to: philh’s comment on: The Amish, and Strategic Norms around Technology
Some other things that come to mind:
- Dragon Army previously tried the thing this post recommends trying. I don’t know quite what to make of this; it seems like at least weak evidence that social engineering is hard.
- I’ve seen discussion about whether MAPLE is harmful to its members’ epistemics/ability-to-interact-with-the-world (despite being at least rat-adjacent). I don’t have a strong object-level opinion on that. And even if it’s true, that doesn’t mean we can’t take good ideas from them. But it might mean we want to be careful about it?

philh 10 Jan 2021 21:36 UTC
9 points
on: The Amish, and Strategic Norms around Technology
I like this post a lot.
I’m noticing an unspoken assumption: that Amish culture hasn’t changed “much” since the 1800s. If that’s not the case… it’s not that anything here would necessarily be false, but it would be an important omission.
Like, taking this post as something that it’s not-quite but also not-really-not, it uses the Amish as an example in support of a thesis: “cultural engineering is possible”. You can, as a society, decide where you want your society to go and then go there. The Amish are an existence proof, and Ray bounces from them to asking how others can do it? What can we use from the Amish, and what is unlikely to work because the Amish had certain advantages we lack?
But this only really makes sense if the Amish managed to steer their culture successfully. If they put a bunch of effort into social engineering and got random results, such that their society is now different from broader US society but also different from what they started with, they don’t tell us much. Or, different from what they started with might be fine, but we’d want it to be mostly deliberately different.
(If the Amish are mostly just trying to keep their society the same, that seems like another advantage they had that the post doesn’t mention. Staying still seems easier than moving in a specific direction.)
So, in what ways is Amish culture different since the 1800s? Have changes been deliberate (like “it would be good to change like this”), or forced (like “we can’t stay the same in the face of X, we need to make one of this set of changes, we choose this one”), or accidental (like “whoops suddenly we have a completely different opinion on some important question”)? What would the Amish of each (say) 50-year time period think of the Amish from the next one?
I think if I tried to answer these questions here, this review would never get posted. I don’t know much about the Amish myself. But they seem worth flagging. Depending on the answer to them, the post might turn out to have important omissions.
Thanks to Jacob Lagerros for comments on this review

philh 29 Dec 2020 0:30 UTC
3 points
in reply to: shminux’s comment on: Uninformed Elevation of Trust
Roll to disbelieve.

The value of specific examples is that we can check whether the critics seem to know what they’re talking about, both in their field (do they understand the ground truth) and regarding the sequences themselves (do they know what Eliezer is saying). Simply telling us there are many examples does not, I believe, fulfill the intent of the question. Which is fine, you have no obligation to answer it, but I think it’s worth pointing out.

To be clear, I’m sure you can find people in each of those groups making reach of those criticisms. I do not believe those criticisms would be consensus in each of those groups. Certainly not all of them and on the level of “this is terrible”. I remember, for example, physicists talking about the quantum mechanics sequence like “yeah, it’s weirdly presented and I don’t agree with the conclusion, but the science is basically accurate”.

philh 28 Dec 2020 19:30 UTC
11 points
on: Rule Thinkers In, Not Out
I think I agree with the thrust of this, but I think the comment section raises caveats that seem important. Scott’s acknowledged that there’s danger in this, and I hope an updated version would put that in the post.
But also...
Steven Pinker is a black box who occasionally spits out ideas, opinions, and arguments for you to evaluate. If some of them are arguments you wouldn’t have come up with on your own, then he’s doing you a service. If 50% of them are false, then the best-case scenario is that they’re moronically, obviously false, so that you can reject them quickly and get on with your life.
This seems like a strange model to use. We don’t know, a priori, what % are false. If 50% are obviously false, probably most of the remainder are subtly false. Giving me subtly false arguments is no favor.
Scott doesn’t tell, us, in this essay, what Steven Pinker has given him / why Steven Pinker is ruled in. Has Steven Pinker given him valuable insights? How does Scott know they’re valuable? (There may have been some implicit context when this was posted. Possibly Scott had recently reviewed a Pinker book.)
Given Anna’s example,
Julia Galef helpfully notes a case where Steven Pinker straightforwardly misrepresents basic facts about who said what. This is helpful to me in ruling out Steven Pinker as someone who I can trust not to lie to me about even straightforwardly checkable facts.
I find myself wondering, has Scott checked Pinker’s straightforwardly checkable facts?
I wouldn’t be surprised if he has. The point of these questions isn’t to say that Pinker shouldn’t be ruled in, but that the questions need to be asked and answered. And the essay doesn’t really acknowledge that that’s actually kind of hard. It’s even somewhat dismissive; “all you have to do is *test* some stuff to *see if it’s true*?” Well, the Large Hadron Collider cost €7.5 billion. On a less extreme scale, I recently wanted to check some of Robert Ellickson’s work; that cost me, I believe, tens of hours. And that was only checking things close to my own specialty. I’ve done work that could have ruled him out and didn’t, but is that enough to say he’s ruled in?
So this advice only seems good if you’re willing and able to put in the time to find and refute the bad arguments. Not only that, if you actually will put in that time. Not everyone can, not everyone wants to, not everyone will do. (This includes: “if you fact-check something and discover that it’s false, the thing doesn’t nevertheless propagate through your models influencing your downstream beliefs in ways it shouldn’t”.)
If you’re not going to do that… I don’t know. Maybe this is still good advice, but I think that discussion would be a different essay, and my sense is that Scott wasn’t actually trying to give that advice here.
In the comments, cousin_it and gjm describe the people who can and will do such work as “angel investors”, which seems apt.
I feel like right now, the essay is advising people to be angel investors, and not acknowledging that that’s risky if you’re not careful, and difficult to do carefully. That feels like an overstep. A more careful version might instead advise:
- Some people have done some great work and some silly work. If you know which is which (e.g. because others have fact checked, or time has vindicated), feel free to pay attention to the great and ignore the silly.
- Don’t automatically dismiss people just because they’ve said some silly things. Take that fact into account when evaluating the things they say that aren’t obviously silly, and deciding whether to actually evaluate them. But don’t let that fact take the place of actually evaluating those things. Like, given “Steven Pinker said obviously silly things about AI”, don’t say ”… so the rest of The Nurture Assumption isn’t worth paying attention to”. Instead, say ”… so I don’t think it’s worth me spending the time to look closer at The Nurture Assumption right now”. And allow for the possibility of changing that to ”… but The Nurture Assumption is getting a lot of good press, maybe I’ll look into it anyway”.
(e: lightly edited for formatting and content)

philh 28 Dec 2020 2:07 UTC
8 points
on: My Model of the New COVID Strain and US Response

35% that the new strain is a nothingburger.

I’m surprised you put this so high. Would you accept my $30-150 to your $10-50 that this doesn’t turn out to be a nothingburger?