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RolfAndreassen
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Ask an experimental physicist
I turned down a job offer. Because it didn’t pay enough. When my current job will definitely end in December.
“Suppose we were all playing Prisoner’s Dilemma with clones of ourselves...”
I heard this said at the Ohio meetup on Sunday; Yvain commented that, of all the meetups he’d been to, ours took the longest to reach that point.
Once there was a miser, who to save money would eat nothing but oatmeal. And what’s more, he would make a great big batch of it at the start of every week, and put it in a drawer, and when he wanted a meal he would slice off a piece and eat it cold; thus he saved on firewood. Now, by the end of the week, the oatmeal would be somewhat moldy and not very appetising; and so to make himself eat it, the miser would take out a bottle of good whiskey, and pour himself a glass, and say “All right, Olai, eat your oatmeal and when you’re done, you can have a dram.” Then he would eat his moldy oatmeal, and when he was done he’d laugh and pour the whiskey back in the bottle, and say “Hah! And you believed that? There’s one born every minute, to be sure!” And thus he had a great savings in whiskey as well.
-- Norwegian folktale.
my productive time is spent between a part-time job and this site.
Perhaps I’m reading a bit much into a throwaway phrase, but I suggest that time spent reading LessWrong (or any self-improvement blog, or any blog) is not, in fact, productive. Beware the superstimulus of insight porn! Unless you are actually using the insights gained here in a measureable way, I very strongly suggest you count LessWrong reading as faffing about, not as production. (And even if you do become more productive, observe that this is probably a one-time effect: Continued visits are unlikely to yield continual improvement, else gwern and Alicorn would long since have taken over the world.) By all means be inspired to do more work and smarter work, but do not allow the feeling of “I learned something today” to substitute for Actually Doing Things.
All that aside, welcome to LessWrong! We will make your faffing-about time much more interesting. BWAH-HAH-HAH!
Obvious idea is obvious: Save and invest a very large percentage of your income—I’m at 25%, but I’m not very ambitious. At 75% you can retire for three years for every year you work, even without assuming any gains from investment income or any other sources of income. If you are 30 and reasonably established in your career, this means you can work for ten years and then retire.
Humans in general are very bad at this. The only reason capitalism works is that the losing experiments run out of money.
He took literally five seconds for something I’d spent two weeks on, which I guess is what being an expert means
-- Graduate student of our group, recognising a level above his own in a weekly progress report
We find it difficult and disturbing to hold in our minds arguments of the form ‘On the one hand, on the other.’ If we are for capital punishment we want it to be good in all respects, with no serious drawbacks; if we are against it, we want it to be bad in all respects, with no serious advantages. We want the world of facts to dictate to us, virtually, how to act; but this it will never do. We always have to make a choice.
-- Theodore Dalrymple, article in “Library of Law and Liberty”.
What, you never heard of a euphemism treadmill? Choose any “neutral term” you like as a synonym for “stupid”; there’s no kid in the world so “genetically disadvantaged” that they won’t realise what you actually meant to say. You do know that ‘retarded’ was once a perfectly neutral term, right? It literally just means “slower than the others”. It acquired its modern connotations because changing the word doesn’t change the phenomenon and doesn’t change the way people react, either.
A man is walking on the moon with his eyes turned up toward space And the bright blue world that watches him reflected on his face. The whole world sees the hero there and the module crew also. But few can see the guiding team that guards him from below.
Here’s a health to the man who walked the moon, and the module crew above, And the team that watches from the sky with worry, joy, and love. To all who blazed the sky-trail come raise your glasses ’round; And a health to the unknown heroes, too, who never left the ground.
Here’s a health to the ship’s designers, and the welders of her seams, And all who man the radar-scan to watch our dawning dreams. For all the unknown heroes, sing out to every shore: “What makes one step a giant leap is all the steps before”.
Leslie Fish, musically praising the Hufflepuff virtues.
I don’t think it’s going to be practical this century. The difficulty is that the same properties that let you cut the latency are the ones that make the detectors huge: Neutrinos go right through the Earth, and also right through your detector. There’s really no way around this short of building the detector from unobtainium, because neutrinos interact only through the weak force, and there’s a reason it’s called ‘weak’. The probability of a neutrino interacting with any given five meters of your detector material is really tiny, so you need a lot of them, or a huge and very dense detector, or both. Then, you can’t modulate the beam; it’s not an electromagnetic wave, there’s no frequency or amplitude. (Well, to be strictly accurate, there is, in that neutrinos are quantum particles and therefore of course are also waves, as it were. But the relevant wavelength is so small that it’s not useful; you can’t build an antenna for it. For engineering purposes you really cannot model it as anything but a burst of particles, which has intensity but not amplitude.) So you’re limited to Morse code or similar. Hence you lose in bandwidth what you gain in latency. Additionally, neutrinos are hard to produce in any numbers at a precise moment. You’re relying on muon decays, which of course are a fundamentally random process. So the variables you’re actually controlling are the direction and intensity of your muon beam, and at respectable fractions of lightspeed you just can’t turn them around on a dime. Plus you get the occasional magnet quench or whatnot, and lose the beam and have to spend five minutes building it up again. So, not only are you limited to dots and dashes, you can’t even generate them fast and reliably.
All that said, what application other than finance really needs better latency than you get by going at lightspeed through orbit? And while it’s true that people would make money off that, I don’t see any particular social return to it. Liquidity is a fine thing, but I cannot fathom that it matters to have it on millisecond scales—seconds should be just fine, and we’re already way beyond that just with lightspeed the long way around. As for blackout zones, are you thinking of cellphones? I suggest that this is a bad idea. To get a reliable signal in a man-portable detector you would have to have a very intense neutrino burst indeed; and then you’d also get a reliable signal in the body of the guy holding it. We detect neutrinos by the secondary radiation they cause. I haven’t worked the numbers, but even if cancers were rare enough to put up with, think of the lawsuits.
If you spend more than 20 minutes on your commute (one way), consider moving to somewhere closer to where you work. Walking distance is ideal, biking distance a good second-best. Commutes literally kill; you will not only get more time daily, but also your expected lifetime will increase.
A poem for LessWrong
One interesting thing about Ms. Dowd’s description of “hardball” political tactics is just how dainty and genteel her brass knuckle suggestions actually are. A speech, an appeal to reason: there is nothing here about lucrative contracts for political supporters, promises of sinecure jobs for politicians who lose their seats, a “blank check” for administrative backing on some obscure tax loophole that a particular politician could award to a favored client; there’s not even a delicate hint about grand jury investigations that can be stopped in their tracks or compromising photographs or wiretaps that need never see the light of day. Far be it from Ms Dowd to speak of or even hint at the kind of strategy that actual politicians think about when words like ‘hardball’ come to mind. Ms Dowd speaks of brass knuckles and then shows us a doily; at some level it speaks well of Ms. Dowd as a human being that even when she tries she seems unable to come up with an offer someone can’t refuse.
-- Walter Russell Mead, describing someone else’s failure to understand what a desperate effort actually looks like.
Agreeing with several other people that the introduction needs a major rewrite or possibly just a cut. Consider the opening sentence:
Isadore Jacob Gudak, who anglicized his name to Irving John Good and used I. J. Good for publication
Dude, no. Who gives a toss how he anglicised his name? Get to your point, if you have one.
Somewhat similarly, in the fourth paragraph, you have
Please note that...
Please note that the phrase “please note that” is unnecessary; it adds length and the impression that you are snippily correcting someone’s blog comment, without adding any information (or politeness) to the sentence. I’m familiar with your argument about formal writing just adding a feeling of authority, but this isn’t informality, it’s sloppy editing.
Your whole first page, actually, is a pretty good demonstration of not having a point. I get the impression that you thought “Hmm, I need some kind of introduction” and went off to talk about something, anything, that wasn’t the actual point of the paper, because the point belongs in the body and not the introduction. This makes for a page that adds nothing. You have a much better introduction starting with the paragraph at the end of the first page, the one that opens
The question of what happens when smarter-than-human agencies
See, this is getting to the point. You can do it! This is where you should start the paper.
At an absolute, utter minimum, move the subclause about how what’s-his-name anglicised the Hungarian into a footnote, or the bibliography, or a biographical appendix, or a Wikipedia article, or for dog’s sake the Author’s Notes to the next HPMOR chapter, or a random thought that Harry has and then wonders why he is considering such a total irrelevancy. Just please, anywhere, anywhere except the opening sentence of your paper. Talk about burying the lede.
Additionally, your abstract is too long. The abstract should not explain anything; it should summarise the argument or result on the assumption that the reader is already familiar with the subject. You’re trying to write your introduction in the abstract; a common error, but an error. A single paragraph s sufficient; going off the first page is way too long. Disclaimer: The above applies to physics abstracts; conceivably philosophy has a different set of conventions.
Finally: If in fact you actually want this kind of feedback, you can make it much easier on your beta readers by adding line numbers to the paper. LaTeX makes this easy. This avoids such circumlocutions as “The fourth paragraph, the one beginning...”, with the attendant confusion about whether I’m counting the block quote as a separate paragraph.
For that matter—we—are chemical processes and nothing more.
While this is in some sense true, it doesn’t add up to normality; it is an excuse for avoiding the actual moral issues. Humans are chemical processes; humans are morally significant; therefore at least some chemical processes have moral significance even if we don’t, currently, understand how it arises, and you cannot dismiss a moral question by saying “Chemistry!” any more than you can do so by saying “God says so!”
I agree with what has been said about the modesty norm of academia; I speculate that it arises because if you can avoid washing out of the first-year math courses, you’re already one or two standard deviations above average, and thus you are in a population in which achievements that stood out in a high school (even a good one) are just not that special. Bragging about your SAT scores, or even your grades, begins to feel a bit like bragging about your “Participant” ribbon from sports day. There’s also the point that the IQ distribution in a good physics department is not Gaussian; it is the top end of a Gaussian, sliced off. In other words, there’s a lower bound and an exponential frequency decay from there. Thus, most people in a physics department are on the lower end of their local peer group. I speculate that this discourages bragging because the mass of ordinary plus-two-SDs doesn’t want to be reminded that they’re not all that bright.
However, all that aside: Are academics the target of this blog, or of lukeprog’s posts? Propaganda, to be effective, should reach the masses, not the elite—although there’s something to be said for “Get the elite and the masses will follow”, to be sure. Although academics are no doubt over-represented among LessWrong readers and indeed among regular blog readers, still they are not the whole world. Can we show that a glowing listing of not-very-specific awesomenesses is counterproductive to the average LW reader, or the average prospective recruit who might be pointed to lukeprog’s post? If not, the criticism rather misses its mark. Academics can always be pointed to the Sequences instead; what we’re missing is a quick introduction for the plus-one-SD who is not going to read three years of blog output.
-- Greg Egan, “Border Guards”.