There‘ll always be time for the timeless literature later but the timely literature gives you the most bang for your buck if you read it now.
That’s not true, because one’s lifespan is limited. If you’re constantly focusing on the timely, you in fact will not have time for the timeless.
Why is there such a large gap of exploration into emotions on Lesswrong. Is it because they are colloquially the anathema to rationality?
I don’t think that’s accurate. In fact, Eliezer says as much in Why Truth?. He explicitly calls out the view that rationality and emotion are opposed, using the example of the character of Mr. Spock in Star Trek to illustrate his point. In his view, Mr. Spock is irrational, just like Captain Kirk, because denying the reality of emotions is just as foolish as giving in wholeheartedly to them. If your emotions rest on true beliefs, then they are rational. If they rest on false beliefs they are irrational. The fact that they are instinctive emotions rather than reasoned logic is irrelevant to their (ir)rationality.
I think LessWrong has actually done a fairly good job at avoiding this mistake. If we look at the posts on circling [1], [2], for example, you’ll see that they’re all about emotions and management of emotions. The same applies to Comfort Zone Expansion, ugh fields, meditation and Looking, and kenshō. It’s just that few of them actually mention the word “emotion” in their titles, which might lead one to the false assumption that they are not about emotions.
I don’t think so, actually. The average age for entering Harvard, as an undergraduate is 18 years old. I don’t think there’s any faster way of meeting people who are likely to be influential. Even if you do something high-variance like starting a company, is that going to get you meeting the same sorts of people right away that getting into Harvard will? Probably not.
And what game have those “big guns” allowed you to bag that the lesser guns of “ordinary common sense” would not have?
There are lots of people who do lots of amazing things without having once read Kahneman, without having once encountered any literature about cognitive biases. If we are proposing that rationality is some kind of special edge that will allow us to accomplish things that other people cannot accomplish, we had better come up with some examples, hadn’t we?
Super naive question: given all we know about the myriad ways in which the brain fools itself, and more specifically, the ways that subconscious mental activities fool our conscious selves, why should we trust introspection? More specifically, why should I believe that the way I perceive myself to think is the way I actually think (as opposed to an abstraction put up by my subconscious)?
My model is that any psychological model that relies on introspection is going to be inherently flawed. If we want to learn how people think, we should observe their actions, and carefully watch how people behave in response to different stimuli and situations. I think asking people how they think tells us more about how they rationalize their thinking than it does about how they actually think.
That’s a good thing to point out, though, it’s also worth pointing out that Fama’s papers on the efficient market hypothesis date from 1965. Neither the Efficient Market Hypothesis nor the responses to it are fresh results at this date.
Also worth pointing out is that both DeLong, et. al. and Fama’s original paper long predate the recent growth of low-fee index funds.
In the long run, the smarter agents in the system will tend to accrue more wealth than the dumber agents.
Only if the smarter agents also have similar amounts of capital as the dumber agents. As Delong, Shleifer, Summers and Waldman showed, dumb agents can force smart agents out of the market by “irrationally” driving market prices up or down far enough to exhaust the limited capital reserves of the smart agents.
“Nail in the coffin of the EMH” is a fun phrase to say, but as always, the bottom line is that if you’re so sure, why aren’t you shorting Hertz?
Because the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. It’s entirely possible that Hertz is incorrectly valued, but if you short Hertz now, then you had better have enough liquidity to survive the margin calls caused by irrational exuberance.
We have to remember that businesses don’t go bankrupt because they’re unprofitable. Businesses go bankrupt because they’re unable to make payments on their debt. The two are related, but not identical. It’s possible that Hertz, as a company, is fundamentally solvent, but was caught out by a combination of high debt load and a sudden shortfall in cash flow. We’ve seen the same with airline bankruptcies in the past. The business can be fundamentally profitable, but a combination of thin margins and high capital requirements means that any sudden shortfall in cashflow means bankruptcy as the business is suddenly unable to make payments on the loans that it has taken out. The bankruptcy process (Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection) is designed to give legal protection to a business so that it can renegotiate its loans and emerge as a functional business without being liquidated.
I haven’t run the numbers on Hertz myself, but it did seem to be a profitable business before the coronavirus pandemic caused all travel to basically go to zero. It’s entirely possible to think that, at some point, the pandemic will end, and at that point people will want to start traveling and renting cars once again. Buying Hertz shares now, when they’re almost valueless, is a cheap way to bet that a recovery will occur.
I’m not sure I agree with the premise of the question. Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems to me that the question is assuming there’s a single program or system somewhere that is maintaining the wiki, and that this single monolithic system has certain characteristics (open vs. closed source, accessible vs. inaccessible API, etc, etc.). My response is to ask why do we want a single monolithic system in the first place?
In my mind, a personal knowledgebase is a set of texts which capture information that we want to store and retrieve later. Fortunately for us, Unix and Unix-like (by which I mean, Linux, MacOS and Windows-with-WSL) computer systems come pre-equipped with a plethora of tools that have been finely tuned for text processing over a period of decades. I’ve found that by combining the tools already available, I can do most of the things a monolithic wiki system would do with far less configuration and far more flexibility.
With that in mind, I find that my answer to most of your questions is, “Not applicable”. Is it closed proprietary cloud software? It certainly can be, if you store your files in a proprietary service like Dropbox. However, if you store your files in a git repo, which you either self-host or use a more free service like GitLab or sr.ht, it doesn’t have to be. The API, such as it is, is the same “API” you can use to interact with any other file on your computer: GNU command line tools, or if you choose to write scripts in some other programming language, whatever file manipulation API is exposed by the standard library for that language. Same with editing. I choose to use an open source text editor (namely, Visual Studio Code), but there are certainly many competent proprietary text editors, such as BBEdit or Sublime Text.
How easy is it to call relevant utility functions? Well, it’s as easy as invoking any other shell command. Do I need to close the software in order to edit it? Once again, the answer is “not applicable”, because I’m not editing a single piece of software, I’m composing multiple pieces of software, on the fly, to accomplish particular tasks.
Are the functions easy to use and standardized? While we can debate the usability of Unix command line tools for a long time, what cannot be denied is that they are quite well standardized. As for skill transfer, the skills are extremely transferable, insofar as they’re exactly the same skills you’d be using to manage source code in any kind of even moderately sized codebase.
It can be easy to screw up. Command line tools are sharp, and can cut you if you don’t use them appropriately. However, if you have your wiki in a version control system, reverts are nigh trivial. One command and your wiki (or any part of your wiki) is restored to a previous state of your choosing.
While the learning curve on command line tools is steep, I would argue that the advantages that one earns in flexibility, speed (both in terms of machine time and user time), and transferability to other tasks make it more than worthwhile. Of course, if one already knows how to use command line tools with a fair degree of proficiency (as many programmers and technically inclined people do), then the question becomes, why aren’t you using these tools to manage your knowledgebase?
It’s as simple as doing any other sort of text manipulation with a shell script or Python script, or whatever other programming system one uses to manipulate text. It’s remarkable what you can do with a simple combination of find and sed.
What do you mean by “programmable”? I keep my notes as a directory of markdown files in a git repo. I can manipulate these files with all the standard Unix command line tools that are specialized for manipulating text. In your mind, does that meet your threshold for programmability, or are you looking for something else?
Unless there’s a discontinuity (i.e. something like a space elevator resulting in more than one order of magnitude reduction in cost per ton to orbit) I suspect it would still be impossible to sustain a Martian colony for a nontrivial number of people. The physics and chemistry of conventional rockets just won’t allow it.
if the colony works at all, there will be a path where the amount of Earth resources required to sustain it shrinks over time due to market forces
Why do you think that? On earth, colonies survived because they were able to secure a comparative advantage in the production of goods or services, which allowed them to be a net economic benefit to the originating country. What comparative advantage does Mars possess?
Any Martian colony, under the current technological regime, will require heavy economic subsidies for decades, possibly centuries. Who would pay for it? It’s one thing to pay a few billion dollars to send a few dozen astronauts to plant the flag and collect some scientific data. It’s quite another thing to spend trillions to support a population of thousands for little to no discernible benefit.
In one word: economics.
A self-sustaining colony on Mars will require many hundreds of billions (or perhaps even trillions of dollars) of dollars to set up. Imagine all the things you need to survive on Mars. Imagine all the infrastructure to build those those things. Imagine all the infrastructure needed to build that infrastructure, etc. etc. To be truly self-sustaining (i.e able to survive indefinitely without further input from Earth), a substantial portion of that infrastructure will either need to be shipped to Mars or built on-site.
Heck, you may as well ask, “Why don’t we have self-sustaining colonies on Antarctica?” Surely Antarctica is an easier terraforming/colonization project than Mars.
Even the Israelis, though, will concede that assassinations are tactic, not a strategy. The fact that they call their assassination campaign “mowing the grass” indicates the level of confidence they have in assassinations as a means of bringing a decisive end to a conflict. At best, assassinations buy time until the conflict can be ended through other means.
Political goals seem ripe for assassination
That is a huge misconception. Can you name a single US assassination of a foreign head-of-state, in the last 50 years, that didn’t blow back on us? In every case I can think of, where the US has assassinated a head-of-state, the state has either ended up collapsing into instability or has eventually replaced the leader with a leader that was even more hostile to the United States.
Also, depending on your model of history, assassinations may be completely ineffective. If historical events are the result of large historical trends converging, then assassinating any particular politician might shift things around by a few years, but may not actually stop events from occurring.
Political goals also seem ripe for sabotage.
Also incorrect. This was tried in the 1970s by a number of far-left revolutionary terror groups, both in the United States and Europe. Weatherman, Symbionese Liberation Army, Red Army Faction, the Italian Red Brigades, all tried overthrow their respective states via a campaign of terror bombing and sabotage. They all failed. The book Days of Rage, by Burrough, chronicles many of the American revolutionary groups, and how they were all eventually either hunted down or scattered by state pressure. (If you don’t have time to read the book, David Hines has an excellent summary on the blog Status 451).
As it turns out, nation-states are pretty resilient, and can remain functioning even in the face of enormous pressure, and a guerilla campaign of sabotage and assassinations hardly constitutes any pressure at all, much less enormous pressure.
I agree with Dagon’s criticism elsewhere in the thread. However, I would add another criticism. You’re confusing the surface purpose of HR with its actual purpose.
The surface purpose of HR is to efficiently match people with jobs. The actual purpose of HR is to ensure that the company can efficiently navigate the byzantine thicket of laws and regulations concerning hiring, employment and firing without getting sued, ensuring that benefits for current employees are well managed, and finally when an employee is involuntarily let go (either fired or laid off) that the letting go is once again done in a manner that will minimize the company’s exposure to legal liability.
Every so often, you hear of various start-ups (usually in Silicon Valley, but sometimes elsewhere) getting pilloried for making absolutely basic mistakes when hiring. Things like asking candidates their age, or questions clearly correlated with age. Asking (female) candidates about their plans for a family. Etc. Basic errors that a large corporation with a functioning HR department wouldn’t even dream of making. That is the true purpose of HR. It’s ensuring that your interviewers aren’t doing clearly illegal things. It’s giving the appearance of fairness (even if actual fairness is difficult to achieve).
And that’s all prior to hiring. After hiring, HR becomes even more important. Do you know all the tax forms that have to be filled out when you hire a new employee? What about if that employee is remote? What about if that employee is remote but moves from a state with no income tax to a state with income tax (as I did, once). What forms do you need to give the employee to allow him or her to file his or her taxes when you’ve issued them with stock options or RSUs? What about health insurance. Are you qualified to choose between health insurance plans for a company of 50 employees? 500 employees? 5000 employees? What about 401(k)s? A well qualified HR department knows the answers to all that and a lot more besides.
Finally, let’s say you have to let some people go (as so many companies are having to do, during these economically troubled times). Do you know how to administer severance packages? Can you get COBRA forms to everyone efficiently? If it’s an individual being fired for cause, rather than a mass layoff, have you collected data to show that the individual was underperforming and was not fired because of their race, gender, sexual orientation, age, disability, etc. etc?
HR is infrastructure. The fact that you don’t notice what it’s doing is a feature. That means it’s working well. People notice HR when it fails. When the company gets sued for discrimination. When they don’t get the right tax forms in a timely manner. When there’s a benefits snafu that leads them to have to wait an extra month before their health insurance kicks in. Matching people with jobs is the tiniest part of what HR does on a day-to-day basis, so I would expect them to be not very good at it.
Germany is a merged country in both its original and post-Cold War forms.