quanticle

• quanticle 2 May 2022 20:30 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: AllAmericanBreakfast’s comment on: What Would It Cost to Build a World-Class Dredg­ing Ves­sel in Amer­ica?

  One possible outcome is that the locals figure out lots of alternatives to driving cars: they ride motorcycles, take the bus, walk, bike, travel by boat, or ride horses.

  In practice, what happens is that the locals just import cars illegally, leading to a huge black market for cars and auto repair. An auto industry is very hard to set up, but cars are still so vastly superior to other forms of transportation that people will literally drive cars across hundreds of miles of desert, then fix them up locally in order to resell them at a profit.

• quanticle 2 May 2022 0:01 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Alexander’s comment on: In­creas­ing De­mand­ing­ness in EA

  Following a bit of back and forth debate, the EA organiser looked disappointed and said “I’m confused.”, then turned his back on my friend.

  I don’t like analogizing EA to a religious movement, but I think such an analogy is appropriate in this instance. If I went to a Christian gathering, accompanying a devout friend, and someone came up to me and asked, “Oh, I haven’t seen you before, which church do you attend?” I would reply, “Oh, I’m not Christian.” Then if, after a bit of discussion, that person chose to turn and walk away, I wouldn’t be offended. In fact, them turning and walking away is one of the better outcomes. Far better than them attempting to continue proselytize at me for the rest of the event.

  In this case, the organizer encountered a person who was clearly not bought into EA, ascertained that they were not bought into EA after a short discussion, and then chose to walk away. While that’s not the friendliest response, it’s hardly the worst thing in the world.

• quanticle 3 Apr 2022 17:09 UTC

  11 points

  on: It’s not pru­dent to ex­ploit the weak if friendly aliens are watching

  Doesn’t this argument boil down to, “Don’t hurt the weak because God is watching?”

• quanticle 19 Mar 2022 8:30 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: AllAmericanBreakfast’s comment on: They don’t make ’em like they used to

  Computers are transparently, overwhelmingly better, year by year, decade by decade.

  The only evidence you have for that is clock speed, transistor density and memory/​storage capacity. Yes, I will fully admit there have been truly incredible gains there.

  But in terms of software? I fail to see how most pieces of software are “transparently, overwhelmingly better, year after year, decade by decade”.

  Let’s take text editors, as an example: GNU Emacs was released in 1985. Vim was released in 1991. These are old tools, and they’re still considered better than modern text editors by a fairly sizable fraction of programmers. If computers are getting transparently overwhelmingly better, year after year, decade by decade, then why does anyone use Emacs or Vim?

  The difference between computers and cookware is that (open source) computer programs don’t wear out, so it is possible for us to continue to use them for years or decades. Where that isn’t the case in software (like closed source office suites, for example), you will readily find examples of people complaining that the new version is slower, more difficult to use, and requires more system resources than the previous version.

• quanticle 16 Jan 2022 3:38 UTC

  7 points

  on: Per­sonal blog­ging as self-im­posed oppression

  As long as your personal blog exists, it will beg for your time.

  Why? I see variants of this argument, not for blogging, but for publishing open source software and my response is the same: it’s perfectly all right to put something out there, and then not update it or touch it or feel obligated to interact with it ever again.

  In fact, for a blogpost, it’s an even easier argument to make. It’s not as if reading a blogpost will result in crashing software or security vulnerabilities in the same way that pulling in a dependency on an unmaintained library will.

  If you feel like you have something to write, write it. When you run out of things to write, stop.

• quanticle 16 Jan 2022 0:41 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: Hedg­ing the Pos­si­bil­ity of Rus­sia in­vad­ing Ukraine

  I should have clarified. My question was not about whether Russia would or would not invade Ukraine. My question was, conditional on Russia invading Ukraine, why do you think your portfolio of investments would be negatively affected?

  The US and Russian economies are not tightly coupled. Yes, the uncertainty from a military act could cause price spikes (especially in commodities that Russia exports), but historically these have dissipated in a matter of months.

  So why not sit tight and do nothing?

• quanticle 23 Dec 2021 1:57 UTC

  8 points

  on: Hedg­ing the Pos­si­bil­ity of Rus­sia in­vad­ing Ukraine

  You think that if Russia invades Ukraine, this will affect your portfolio in a negative way.

  But why would you think this?

• quanticle 26 Sep 2021 7:47 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: David Hugh-Jones’s comment on: How’s it go­ing with the Univer­sal Cul­tural Takeover? Part I

  But I also would distinguish between secularization (and other kinds of modernization) and Westernization. (Japan did the one but not the other, for example.)

  Where your argument is concerned, it’s a distinction without a difference. Secularization absolutely destroys birthrates. When Japan secularized, its total fertility rate (TFR) dropped to 1.4. China’s TFR was 6.32. It is 1.6 today. India’s TFR has dropped from 5.9 to 2.2. The decline in the Arab world, while not as severe as that in Asia, is still pronounced. Egypt’s TFR has dropped from 6.7 to 3.3. Jordan dropped from 8.0 (!) to 2.8. Morocco dropped from 7.0 to 2.4.

  I think secularization is a nontrivial cause of these declines.

• quanticle 24 Sep 2021 17:11 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: David Hugh-Jones’s comment on: How’s it go­ing with the Univer­sal Cul­tural Takeover? Part I

  I am still thoroughly unpersuaded. Birth rates are one thing. Retention rates are quite another. As we’ve seen from the evidence of Quiverfull, and other Evangelical Christian communities in the US, most children do not remain in the community and continue its practices. The Middle East is experiencing high population growth but is also the most rapidly secularizing region in the world.

  Kaufmann seems to be making the mistake of assuming that because many Middle Eastern countries mandate Islam as a state religion, that means that the people residing in those countries are necessarily devout.

  Finally with regards to the “depth” of Westernization, I would argue that changes to marriage practices and family structure are an even deeper form of Westernization than adoption of particular political values.

• quanticle 24 Sep 2021 8:01 UTC

  9 points

  on: How’s it go­ing with the Univer­sal Cul­tural Takeover? Part I

  The threat Islam poses to Western/​“universal” culture isn’t from suicide-bombing loons and Inspire magazine. Those are just, if you like, an exuberant side-effect. The threat is the prosperous Islamic — or Mormon or Orthodox — family, which sends its daughters to medical school, buys a widescreen TV for the living room, and has absolutely no intention of “Westernizing”, any more than 19th-century Victorians would have “Turkified”. Why embrace failure?

  It doesn’t matter what the parents’ intents are. The kids will Westernize. This is borne out by statistics (immigrant birth rates fall to the same as that of the natives within two generations) and it’s borne out by the omnipresent cultural trope (especially w.r.t. South Asians) about the kid who embraces Western culture over the strident objections of his or her parents. In fact, the harder the parents try to force traditional values on their children, the more the children rebel, and the more likely they are to leave the community and embrace Western secularism.

  As long as it’s Indian newspapers commenting about the increasing phenomenon of “love marriages” as opposed to western newspapers commenting about the increasing phenomenon of arranged marriages, I’m sanguine about the inevitability of the takeover of Western values.

An­nounc­ing Data Se­crets Lox: An Alter­na­tive to Slate Star Codex Open Threads

• quanticle 23 Aug 2020 5:04 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Teerth Aloke’s comment on: Why don’t coun­tries, like com­pa­nies, more of­ten merge?

  Germany is a merged country in both its original and post-Cold War forms.

• quanticle 8 Aug 2020 18:45 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: AllAmericanBreakfast’s comment on: What are some low-in­for­ma­tion pri­ors that you find prac­ti­cally use­ful for think­ing about the world?

  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.

• quanticle 10 Jul 2020 3:40 UTC

  24 points

  on: How far along are you on the Less­wrong Path?

  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.

• quanticle 8 Jul 2020 0:51 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Mati_Roy’s comment on: When a sta­tus sym­bol loses its plau­si­ble de­ni­a­bil­ity, how much power does it lose?

  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.

• quanticle 21 Jun 2020 23:22 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: Evenflair’s comment on: What are the open prob­lems in Hu­man Ra­tion­al­ity?

  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?

• quanticle 19 Jun 2020 16:40 UTC

  7 points

  on: What’s Your Cog­ni­tive Al­gorithm?

  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.

• quanticle 15 Jun 2020 20:59 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: ESRogs’s comment on: The Eco­nomic Con­se­quences of Noise Traders

  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.

• quanticle 14 Jun 2020 6:53 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: FactorialCode’s comment on: Self-Pre­dict­ing Markets

  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.

• quanticle 14 Jun 2020 6:46 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: AllAmericanBreakfast’s comment on: Self-Pre­dict­ing Markets

  “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.