RamblinDash

Karma: 508

RamblinDash 14 Dec 2023 5:31 UTC
29 points
12
on: Is being sexy for your homies?
I feel like, for certain coed social spaces, the cultural expectation of universal monogamy actually does (did?) a lot of work. If I (married man) am hanging out with some other married woman, we have Common Knowledge of each other’s unavailability. In my subjective experience, it breaks the attraction->desire link. And it’s desire that seems to add all the social tension, not attraction per se.

What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn’t make it worse.

RamblinDash6 Nov 2023 15:49 UTC

20 points

2 comments1 min readLW link

RamblinDash 10 Mar 2022 18:13 UTC
20 points
on: Ukraine Post #2: Options
One thing you might have missed, regarding reasons why so many people support a no-fly zone, is that a lot of people just aren’t thinking through what that actually means at all. Like, maybe you are so used to thinking about what your words mean that the inferential distance here is too great, but I think the thought process for probably a majority of poll respondents is something like:
All-out open war with Russia — that sounds scary
Doing nothing — that seems bad too
Aha, I hear about this “no-fly zone” and it sounds like kinda middle-groundy between those two things, so I guess I’m in favor of that! I think if you were to taboo “no-fly zone” and replace it with “US aircraft shoot down Russian planes, also US bombs Russian anti-aircraft emplacements in Russia, also US Navy ships sink Russian AA destroyers, etc etc” then you would see polled support plummet. So I don’t think that seeing high poll numbers for “no-fly” is really any evidence of the kind of nihilism you mention, just imprecise thinking. One piece of evidence for this is that if climate doomerism was responsible, you should expect to see the most left-wing/green new deal members of Congress pushing the no-fly zone, and you do not see this.
The unclear thinking is no excuse for the leaders who are pushing this line though, who should know better. I expect they are just playing politics, dishonestly pushing this knowing Biden will have to say no to it, so that they can accuse Biden of being weak.

RamblinDash 5 Jul 2023 13:15 UTC
18 points
4
on: Optimized for Something other than Winning or: How Cricket Resists Moloch and Goodhart’s Law
In real (American gridiron) football, this problem is solved by the NFL tweaking the rules every year. They understand they are producing an entertainment product, and a typical pattern is something like this:
1. The New England Patriots come up with some clever rules exploit that ekes out an advantage, and maybe wins them a game.
2. Everyone goes “can they really do that??” and whines that it’s very unfair, even though it’s within the rules.[1]
3. If its early in the season, sometimes other teams begin to do the thing.
4. Between seasons, the NFL decides that this play pattern makes for worse TV, and changes the rules to eliminate it.
5. (Goto step 1)
As a fan of both the New England Patriots and David Sirlin, I find this cycle itself very entertaining. I am glad when the Patriots do this because it helps them win and it is, IMO, in the true spirit of competition to make all legal moves in service of victory.
[1] I recognize that the Patriots are widely believed to have cheated on several occasions. I don’t condone cheating, and don’t think that cheating makes one a “lovable scamp” or whatever. I personally find the actual evidence that the Patriots cheated on some of those occasions to be less than credible (and people’s views on it colored by their negative reaction to the Patriots Cycle), but I also recognize that I am biased and likely not able to fairly evaluate that evidence.

RamblinDash 4 Mar 2024 4:23 UTC
16 points
4
in reply to: Zack_M_Davis’s comment on: Agreeing With Stalin in Ways That Exhibit Generally Rationalist Principles
I think I’m trying to make a different point than footnote 20?

It seems like you are taking me to be saying something like “You shouldn’t care what EY thinks about this Trans issue because “Everybody Knows” not to take his statements on this seriously”—that’s how I read FN20.

Whereas I think my point is much more general and really not specific to Trans at all—like why be so deeply invested in the contents of some one guy’s mind, at all? On any issue?

EY wrote some great (book-like objects). Inspiring, even. Worldview changing. But, like, whatever his opinions are today (on any issue), my view is mostly like, who cares? Either his arguments are convincing or they aren’t.

By analogy, suppose (counter factually) that I think that Barack Obama was the greatest president in history (he wasn’t, but he has to be alive for this analogy to work). Does that mean that I should decide what I think about today’s political and policy problems based on what Obama thinks? Such that if Obama was wrong about something, I should engage in an epic quest to Get Obama’s Attention and get him to admit he’s wrong? I mean, that would be ridiculous, right?

RamblinDash 4 Mar 2024 1:28 UTC
16 points
6
on: Agreeing With Stalin in Ways That Exhibit Generally Rationalist Principles
Maybe I just don’t get it because I’m not part of the Berkeley Community, I just read the writing. But my immediate reaction to this is like, why does Zack care so much about what Eliezer (2024) does or does not think? Or even whether, these days, he is or is not a fraud?

Like if you thought what he wrote in 2007 was great, just listen to that? Many (all?) authors who write great books have also written worse books. Maybe Zack’s opinion is falling a long way from wherever it was.

But perhaps he would be happier to adopt a more ecumenical non-Berkeley-ite stance, which I think has been common all along outside The Berkeley Community, and which is something like “Eliezer wrote some great stuff that was very influential on my thinking and that I still believe was very insightful, and I really appreciate that. I enjoy reading LW more than I think I’d enjoy the marginal alternative use of reading time, but I don’t go too far out of my way to pay attention to or care about what he’s up to these days.”—rather than assigning himself an Epic Quest to Win This Argument.

RamblinDash 19 Sep 2022 14:21 UTC
16 points
2
on: Pretending not to Notice
Another example would be when you are out somewhere that a third party has posted rules which don’t make sense. I don’t want, as a parent, to actively say “when you are using someone else’s space you are free to ignore their rules if you think they are stupid and you aren’t imposing large costs on others” but sometimes that’s the actual line I want to take. Not noticing that my kids are breaking a rule I think is dumb is a way to thread that needle.

RamblinDash 17 Mar 2022 17:39 UTC
16 points
on: Using GPT-3 for preventing conflict during messaging — a pitch for an app
I actually think this idea is not good, and would oppose its widespread adoption. For level-setting, I also want to say that I upvoted the post as I think it’s an idea worth thinking about.
I have noticed in the last few years, many services have been rolling out more and more features like this already—not so much “anger translators” but other sorts of suggested replies, etc. My problem with these is that it feels very intrusive, the computers intruding sometimes into our most intimate lives. For example, GMail’s suggested replies and autocompletes show up on all messages if not disabled. I would be fine with this for pro forma interactions, such as customer service reps or whatever, but they also show up when I’m conversing with family and close friends.
The problem is that it feels impossible to just completely ignore the suggestions—either I want to accept one or else I feel myself changing my intended reply intentionally to avoid one. Either way, the system is changing how I would communicate with my loved ones in a way that I really dislike. It reminds me one of the most memorable lines from the Matrix, (from memory, not verbatim) “1999, the peak of your civilization. Of course, I say your civilization, because as soon as we [AIs] started thinking for you, it really became our civilization.” To the extent that AI can automate more and more work that seems great to me, but automating interactions with our friends and family sounds like dystopia.

RamblinDash 18 Oct 2021 18:29 UTC
15 points
on: Your Time Might Be More Valuable Than You Think
I find all these sorts of analyses deeply frustrating because they seem to take place in spherical-cow world and never to take account of the actual experience of virtually everyone who participates in the labor market—you can’t just choose how many of your hours you convert into dollars at an arbitrary level!
For hourly employees, one’s employer usually determines the schedule with limited input from workers.
For salaried employees, the marginal hour worked results in essentially zero wage gain. It may result in being marginally more likely to receive a bonus or promotion down the line but these effects are highly uncertain and may have all sorts of slopes and plateaus in the hours/$$ curve.
For self-employed, if you do anything other than daytrade, then you likely have to interact with suppliers, customers, etc, and there’s often pretty legit exogenous limits on your ability to translate hours in to $$.
Additionally, the experience benefits seem dubious to me for a similar reason, which is that to the extent you are selling your labor in any capacity (vast majority of workers), the potential buyers of your labor often have limited view into your experience or productivity, and to the extent they estimate these based on your experience, it’s usually going to be measured in years not in hours.
So its very unclear to me the mechanism by which most people could decide to turn their time into money at anything approaching something that looks like a marginal wage, and additionally unclear to me how, even if so, working harder now will actually increase the returns 20 years from now in the way this post proposes.

RamblinDash 1 Sep 2022 15:51 UTC
14 points
0
on: Enantiodromia
Closely related to common libertarian/conservative objections to liberal (US sense) policies. I was actually taught this argument structure in law school—one interesting thing is you can lay out a whole series of policy arguments like this completely in the abstract, without reference to any specific controversy. Unfortunately, in any particular instance you can make this objection to a proposed policy, with superficial plausibility, whether or not the objection applies in that particular case.
There’s no substitute for actually figuring out whether the objections apply in a particular case.
Imagine Chopper Meme:
[Senior] We should do some policy X which will help people with problem Y
[Junior] You’ll hurt the people you’re trying to help because of prospective market incentives
[Senior] You won’t, because of market power
[Junior] You will, because public choice/the policy will be used for corruption
[Senior] You won’t, because first-order effects dominate all these downstream effects including the public choice/corruption
etc etc

RamblinDash 17 Nov 2021 14:29 UTC
14 points
on: Quadratic Voting and Collusion
Isn’t “collusion” here just another way of describing political organizing? Like, different interest groups which each care only about their own issues get together and decide to support each other’s issues so that they can win power and each accomplish their agendas.
This seems....at the very least not bad, and probably actively good.
A good historical example of this would be the Teamsters joining in coalition with the MLK-era civil rights movement. Are you saying this is bad collusion? Or is this good solidarity and organizing? How would one tell the difference?
The “problem” you are describing here is people making political choices to join coalitions, and exists in normal democracy just as much as it exists in QV.

RamblinDash 8 Sep 2023 13:44 UTC
13 points
10
in reply to: dr_s’s comment on: Bring back the Colosseums
If you reintroduced the Coliseum, it’d be people desperate for money and the occasional guy with the actual agency to live out his dream fighting in it, and the aforementioned vast crowd of whiners with no self-awareness would be watching it on TV all the same, while ranting about how incompetent those gladiators are, and that they’d be much better, if only not for [insert convenient excuse here].
Indeed, the NFL exists, and you have described it to a tee. Given the amount and severity of injuries, I would say it’s a very close substitute.

RamblinDash 22 Aug 2022 19:55 UTC
13 points
3
on: On Car Seats as Contraception
As a piece of anecdata—car seats entered into the vague morass of my decisionmaking on a 3rd, but were dominated by daycare costs—as I expect they would be for most families that rely on paid childcare for under 5s. While I don’t know for sure that carseats didn’t affect our decision, I know that carseat mandates did not. I wasn’t even aware that my state had an insane mandate until reading this post.

RamblinDash 6 Mar 2023 20:19 UTC
12 points
4
on: Why did you trash the old HPMOR.com?
For what it’s worth, I am re-reading HPMOR as a read-aloud to my very-into canon!HP child (with very minor bowdlerizing) and I have found the most easy/comfortable way to read it has been to download one of the EPUB files that people have put together over the years, and then read it using my e-reader app of choice.
That way, I control the way the text looks, it easily saves my place down to a very small subsection of a chapter, and it’s future proof; even if all of the LW expanded universe goes away, nothing will happen to the already-downloaded EPUB .

RamblinDash 27 Feb 2023 14:44 UTC
12 points
10
on: Eliezer is still ridiculously optimistic about AI risk
I think what he meant was, if we could have the same researchers for 50 years repeatedly attempt to build aligned superintelligent AI, see that it went wrong, figure out why, and then try again—then we could align AI. No Groundhog Day. And this is normally how science and tech works—you build version 0.1 of a thing, it fails in hilariously spectacular ways, you analyze what went wrong, and you try again.
But his whole point is that with superintelligent AI you cannot do that, because when it fails the first time it kills us. So I don’t think you and he are disagreeing.

RamblinDash 4 Sep 2020 13:00 UTC
12 points
on: Covid 9/3: Meet the New CDC
I do want to get into it a little on this:
I don’t want to get too deep into the economics of this move. I won’t discuss whether it is completely and totally insane, or how much it will permanently drive up rental costs since renting means the government might decide to seize your property outright and pay you nothing in return, while you maintain it under penalty of law at your own expense in the hopes that the government will one day give it back.
I am not here to dispute whether the *CDC* is the one to do this, but its worth engaging with the best arguments in favor of an eviction moratorium:
In ordinary circumstances, the purpose of evicting a non-paying tenant is so that you can vacate the property in favor of a tenant who will pay. But in a pandemic that is causing catastrophic levels of unemployment, large sectors of the economy shut down, and legal and prudential restrictions on travel, where are the paying tenants? One or two landlords may be able to find someone, but in the aggregate, allowing evictions now will just increase itinerancy and homelessness without really helping landlords much.
Law and Economics professor Neil Buchanan makes the economic argument at more length here: http://www.dorfonlaw.org/2020/08/why-would-any-landlord-evict-any.html
This is especially true given some of the criteria that have to be met to be eligible for the moratorium:
- They have used their “best efforts” to first obtain all available government assistance
- They are unable to pay the full amount of rent due to experiencing a “substantial” loss of income, or because they were laid off or had to pay “extraordinary” medical expenses
- They are using their “best efforts” to continue making at least partial rent payments as close to the full amount as possible, taking into account other nondiscretionary expenses.
- Eviction would “likely” make them either homeless or force them to move into a shared living situation.
Although Trump’s people call it a moratorium, it’s really a very particularized defense to eviction that applies precisely to those people who it would be economically bad to evict—tenants who were (pre-pandemic) reliable payers of rent, who can’t pay now because of the pandemic but who, because they were reliable before, can expect to be reliable again when circumstances return to something like normal. There simply is no good reason to evict these people, and the consequences of such eviction would be ruinous for them, and yes, would at least marginally increase the risk of contracting and spreading COVID.

RamblinDash 10 Dec 2023 18:00 UTC
11 points
10
on: Do websites and apps actually generally get worse after updates, or is it just an effect of the fear of change?

separate from enshittification due to capitalistic forces (changes made to attempt to please investors, create endless growth, make more money generally), are changes to apps and websites worse

I think you can’t separate these things. This is a large driver of these kinds of changes, but there’s no public information to definitively know which is which. So you see like 10 updates and maybe 8 of them are driven by this but you don’t know which 8. And maybe 7 of the 10 updates make the product noticably worse but it’s hard to know what the overlap is.

RamblinDash 13 Nov 2023 20:37 UTC
11 points
1
on: Redirecting one’s own taxes as an effective altruism method
This post obfuscates more than it illuminates. People should pay all the tax they legally owe, and should be free to reconfigure their affairs to reduce the amount they legally owe, if that overall seems good/worth it to them.
Conflation of “reduce what you legally owe” and “don’t pay what you legally owe” is bad and unhelpful to anyone.
We live in a society here man, c’mon.

RamblinDash 27 Feb 2023 19:52 UTC
11 points
7
in reply to: johnlawrenceaspden’s comment on: Eliezer is still ridiculously optimistic about AI risk
Asking about what reset conditions would avoid this is a bucket error—the rhetorical point is that no such reset is possible; he’s drawing a contrast between normal science and AGI science. I don’t understand why this post and your reply comment are attempting to get into the details of the counterfactual that you and EY both agree is a counterfactual. The whole point is that it can’t happen!

RamblinDash 27 Mar 2023 17:56 UTC
10 points
1
on: The salt in pasta water fallacy
Also you would have to add back in additional time to get the water to its (new, higher) boiling point in the first place...

RamblinDash

What is true is already so. Own­ing up to it doesn’t make it worse.

What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn’t make it worse.