What would you gain from knowing your own IQ?
As far as I can tell, knowing my own IQ is a no-win scenario. Either my IQ is higher than I expected it to be, in which case I feel like I’m a disappointment, or it’s lower than I expect it to be, in which case I’d feel like a fraud. I wouldn’t gain any actionable data from it, so why bother?
If the system is float in the vacuum heat wont go out.
The heat won’t escape by conduction, nor will it escape by convection. However, it will escape via radiation.
On the other hand, AlphaZero seems to play to obtain a specific, although gradually accumulated, positional advantage that ultimately results in a resounding victory. It is happy to sacrifice “generally useful” material to get this.
AlphaZero plays chess in a manner that is completely unlike how humans, or even human-designed chess programs play chess. A human grandmaster does play much like you describe yourself playing: accumulating piece advantages, and only making limited sacrifices to gain position, when it’s clear that the positional advantage outweighs the piece disadvantage.
AlphaZero, on the other hand, plays much more positionally. In its games against Stockfish, it would make sacrifices that Stockfish thought were crazy, as Stockfish was evaluating the board based on pieces and AlphaZero was evaluating the board based on position.
I find that bullet points lose out on the ability to include story type data that my system 1 responds to.
That’s an advantage, in my opinion. I have a habit of turning articles into bullet point summaries, and I’ve found that the more difficult something is to turn into a bullet-point summary, the less actual content there is in the article. Ease of transformation into bullet points is a quick, yet remarkably effective heuristic to distinguish insight from insight porn.
In the same vein as OpenDoc, XMPP and RSS both come to mind. While they “saw the light of day”, they never seemed to reach the threshold of popularity necessary for long-term survival, and they’re not well supported any more. I would argue that they’re both good examples of “left-behind” tech.
I would argue that spaced repetition is one such technology. We’ve known about forgetting curves and spaced repetition as a way of efficiently memorizing data since at least the ’60s, if not before. Yet, even today, it’s hardly used and if you talk to the average person about spaced repetition, they won’t have a clue as to what you’re referring to.
Here we have a really cool technology, which could significantly improve how we learn new information, and it’s being used maybe 5% as often as it should be.
Could you clarify how Damascus Steel qualifies? As I understand it, the question is asking about technologies which demonstrated promise, but never reached widespread use, and thus languished in obscurity. Damascus Steel was famous and highly prized in medieval Europe. While it was rare and expensive, I’m not sure that it manages to meet the obscurity criterion.
There are fields where studying edge cases leads to confusion and actually hinders progress. From gwern’s excellent essay on Bakewell and the origins of genetics:
But surviving theoretical scientific discussions of heredity are baffling. People lurch between ‘only fathers matter’ & ‘only mothers matter’, endlessly elaborating on wildly speculative (and wildly wrong) mechanistic explanations of how exactly sperm & eggs & embryos connected and formed, and in an example of “hard cases make bad law”, the focus on ‘monsters’ and other extreme cases among humans or animals badly misguided their premature attempts to elucidate universal principles comparable to that of astronomy or physics
The lesson is that when attempting to study statistical effects that aggregate across populations (like with genetics), studying the edge cases will lead one away from truth rather than towards it. Bakewell, Mendel and Darwin didn’t develop their theories of heredity and genetics by studying plants and animals deformed by mutation. They studied populations of “normal” plants and animals, and kept very careful records of the statistical rate at which characteristics were transmitted from parent generations to child generations.
And to go back to your point about cohesion not necessarily being an unqualified good, South Korean culture (especially its emphasis on one-shot high-stakes exams as a way of determining future life prospects) results in one of the highest suicide rates in the world.
(Is minimum wage a good thing? Should I adopt a paleo or keto or vegan or Shangri-la diet? What do we really know and not know about the historical Jesus?)
I would point out that the three examples you’ve listed are of three different categories. The first, “Is minimum wage a good thing?” has a significant value component. Do you value whether people have money? How much inefficiency are you willing to trade off in the economy in order to ensure that people have a certain amount of minimum spending power from work? Without knowing your specific values, I cannot answer whether a minimum wage is or is not a good thing.
Your second question, “What kind of diet should I adopt?” has significant dependencies on your physiology. Are you gluten-allergic? Do you have allergies to nuts? Do you have diabetes? Kidney issues? All of these things impact which of the listed diets (if any) is going to be best for you. And this is just from a strictly physiological perspective—it leaves aside issues of preferences (i.e. maybe veganism isn’t really right for you if you really like bacon).
The third question, “What do we really know and not know about the historical Jesus?” is answered, to a first approximation, by Wikipedia.
I think you’re really asking for three sites. For the first question, there should be a site where people can debate moral values. Ideally, this site would taboo “good” and “bad” altogether, and force people to frame value judgments in the context of the value systems that result in those judgments, allowing others to see the criteria by which those judgments are made.
For the second question, a site that provides guidelines rather than recommendations would be helpful. Ideally this site would present a way for you to submit details about what your medical situation is and what your dietary preferences are and then it would output a decision tree that you could use to arrive at a diet that would work best for you.
Finally, for the third site, it’d be something like Wikipedia (only perhaps with better filtering tools to help weed out out unsourced data).
I’m not sure that it’s possible to put together one site to rule them all because the the they’re doing such different things. We’re going from “there might not even be a ‘right’ answer” to “there is a right answer but it might be different for every person” to “there is a single, externally verifiable objective truth”. How do you handle that range of epistemologies with a single site?
I was able to use this post when discussing the news with a family member of mine. The example of a one-in-a-million event occurring 8 times a month (plus increasing global interconnection ensuring that we hear about these events every time they do occur) was especially helpful in helping debiasing someone who had read too much of the news.
How about: “What is rationality?” and “Will rationality actually help you if you’re not trying to design an AI?”
Don’t get me wrong. I really like LessWrong. I’ve been fairly involved in the Seattle rationality community. Yet, all the same, I can’t help but think that actual rationality hasn’t really helped me all that much in my everyday life. I can point to very few things where I’ve used a Rationality Technique to make a decision, and none of those decisions were especially high-impact.
In my life, rationality has been a hobby. If I weren’t reading the sequences, I’d be arguing about geopolitics, or playing board games. So, to me, the most open question in rationality is, “Why should one bother? What special claim does rationality have over my time and attention that, say, Starcraft does not?”
Meta note: the actual link URL (https://www.lesswrong.com/out?url=eukaryotewritesblog.com%2F2018%2F12%2F21%2Fspaghetti-towers%2F) results in an error when I click on it.
I don’t know enough about Wistia to say. However, from a cursory examination of their website, I would be skeptical. Wistia is designed for hosting product videos for business. These videos don’t go viral in the same way that PewDiePie’s content does. If Wistia did host PewDiePie’s content my prediction would be that they’d have a deal with PewDiePie where he pays significantly more than he paid YouTube to host his content and, eventually, they’d incur enough controversy and protest to kick him off their platform.
Wistia’s primary business is hosting boring promotional videos for businesses. Why should they put that boring-but-profitable business model at risk to host someone as troublesome as PewDiepPie? Moreover, why should PewDiePie move his videos to Wistia? Despite the controversy, we must remember that the cost that PewDiePie pays to YouTube is negative. YouTube pays PewDiePie (unless he’s been demonetized, in which case the cost to PewDiePie is zero).
I would be willing to bet that if Slate Star Codex got controversial enough to get kicked off Wordpress, then Scott Alexander would have a heck of a time building out his own site. Even if he were a programmer, and even if he knew enough about PHP and Wordpress to build out his own hosting, he’d have to deal with people protesting his new hosting provider. He’d have to deal with people complaining to Patreon and PayPal about his content. He’d have to deal with people launching hacking and DDOS attacks against his site, constantly.
The technology that YouTube provides was hard to build when YouTube started a decade and a half ago, but surely today it’s not a huge challenge.
PDP has 20 billion total views. He doesn’t need traffic from the algorithm suggesting his videos, everyone else is trying to game the algorithm to get redirected by PDP!
The problem is that building a platform to enable those 20-billion views carries enormous fixed costs that only make sense when they are amortized across a truly massive amount of users, both in terms of uploaders and users. Video delivery at scale is one of the most difficult engineering problems out there. The only companies that have mastered it (YouTube, Vimeo, PornHub, Netflix, Amazon) are all billon dollar enterprises.
Sure, PewDiePie could pay to build out his own video service. But would it be as good as YouTube? It’s very doubtful that it would have the level of polish that YouTube offers. YouTube is far more than just tossing up a bunch of .mp4 files on a web server.
Finally, I think you’re underestimating the power of YouTube’s algorithms. When Logan Paul (another YouTube celebrity) got delisted from YouTube, he suffered a massive revenue hit, even though his videos were still on the platform (but not showing up in search results). So I do think that PewDiePie is beholden to the algorithm. I would be willing to bet that if PewDiePie got delisted from YouTube, he would rapidly be forgotten, and would be replaced by the next YouTube celebrity willing to walk the fine line between “outrageous enough to be entertaining” and “so outrageous as to cause offense”.
Edit: Scott Alexander has addressed the part of your question regarding hosting other comedians on his excellent post, Freedom on the Centralized Web. He correctly points out that the initial group of switchers are all going to be people who YouTube has deemed undesirable. However, YouTube deeming people undesirable is an effect. The cause is that these people have offended some powerful group (copyright holders, activists, etc). If all of these people abandon YouTube and start their own platform, the same forces that kicked them off YouTube will ensure that their new platform is starved of funding and respectability. For a good example of this, look at what happened to Gab. I don’t support Gab, but the saga of Gab shows how difficult it really is to set up an entirely independent platform, which supports content that society doesn’t approve of.
I know this is how things are frequently done, but it bothers me. When an issue is officially the jurisdiction of a committee, everyone on the committee is equally entitled to be part of the discussion, and entitled to know what’s going on; having secret side conversations creates a hierarchy between those “in the know” and those who aren’t.
I disagree quite strongly with this. Being part of a discussion is a tax. It’s overhead. It makes perfect sense, in my head, for a committee to split into subcommittees that have responsibility for specialized tasks, but which report back to and are accountable to the primary committee. In fact, I don’t see how else one would accomplish any kind of complex task that requires specialized domain knowledge. And for tasks that don’t require specialized domain knowledge, having everything presented before the committee usually results in needless bikeshedding, as everyone on the committee has to demonstrate their status and worth by proposing a change or critique, in order to show that they’ve considered the proposal and are more than a mere rubber stamp.
Even disregarding things like social signalling, group dynamics, and all the other things that geeks categorize as “social drama”, making everything that is under the jurisdiction of the committee the responsibility of the entire committee is incredibly inefficient, just from a communications perspective. It requires, in networking terms, a “fully connected mesh”, where every node has to be communicating with every other node. It’s much more efficient, even from a communication and information theory perspective, for a committee to break into smaller groups, each of which has responsibility for a specific task or specialization. These groups can then report back to the overall committee, and the overall committee can choose to adopt or reject their ideas without having to go through the expensive process of having the entire committee deliberate on every proposal for every subtask.
I’m on the other side. I prefer word count to read time, because I know approximately how many words per minute I read. The read time calculation that LessWrong uses is approximately 300 words per minute. If you read faster or slower than that, the read times will be off for you.
This is more impactful for people who are slow readers; being told that something is a five minute read and finishing it in three minutes isn’t a big deal. Being told that something is a five minute read and actually taking seven or eight minutes to finish is considerably worse. For this reason I would prefer word count to be the default.
Also, if you use the GreaterWrong viewer, you get the option to choose. You can click on the read time to switch it to word count. Clicking again switches it back.
But why would that be an advantage exclusive to MLP? One could say the same about the Star Wars universe, for example (and indeed, there is a lot of Star Wars fanfiction out there).
Why? If you took a test, and it came back telling you that you had an IQ of 140, what about your day-to-day life would change? Likewise, what would you do different if you took a test and it came back telling you that you had an IQ of 90?