I’m Harry Altman. I do strange sorts of math.
Posts I’d recommend:
A summary of Savage’s foundations for probability and utility—if the arguments used to ground probability and utility seem circular to you, here’s a non-circular way of doing it.
Sniffnoy
Karma: 4,218
I’d surprised if most local groups in big cities didn’t have a “Lighthaven-shaped hole”, of course the problem is that making one is hard so I imagine the east coast (whether DC, NYC, Philly, or Boston) is probably only getting one. The advantages of DC that you list (regarding politics, like) are interesting.
But like, here in New York, I feel like a lot of those quotes you list up top could apply! The community isn’t that fragmented, I feel like the weekly OBNYC meetups are the biggest component… but there’s clearly a lot of adjacent community (EANYC, Fractal, Homebrew (? they hosted Gwern’s meetup so I guess they get included), some new group house called Canopy, maybe this Collider you mention, and just various other adjacent groups of friends or group chats) that I feel like one misses if one only goes to OBNYC (and ACX meetups, and Megameetup). Something more central would be nice! And yeah meetups are most commonly at the Solarium, but that’s a private apartment, you can fit like 25 people in there, maybe 30, more is hard… I saw 60 people squeeze in there once, it wasn’t pretty. Same goes for the other people like Zvi and Laura who sometimes host events. For the big ACX meetups we usually just use a public place like a park or Brookfield Place. Megameetup rents out a hotel but that’s only once a year.
So like I’m all for doing this in DC on the basis that
the politics thing singles out DC, and
you, who are the most likely person to do this, are apparently in DC, and you’re going to do it where you are, not go around scouting out different East Coast cities; and it’s far more important that it happen at all, which if it were to be in another city, it might not
But I expect a number of the other factors you mention aren’t specific to DC and could likely apply to other big cities, since, after all, there’s only one Lighthaven at present.
Edit: I forgot EANYC, d’oh
Yes, thanks; I think a thing worth noting here, that is a reason I originally wrote this in the first place, is that people often don’t speak in a way that strongly distinguishes “this state, instantaneously” and “this system, extended in time”. Thus I think a lot of the reason that 2⁄3 cause such confusion is that the debate often looks like Alice saying “Oh, we’ll just put a a spacecraft at L1 to deal with that”, Bob replying “But that isn’t possible”, and Alice being confused and going “What? Of course you can put a spacecraft at L1”. Yes, you can put a spacecraft at L1, but it can’t stay there indefinitely, and if the two parties don’t realize they may be using the same words in different ways—maybe the spacecraft would need to stay at L1 indefinitely to handle the particular problem being discussed, and so Bob here is thinking in terms of “does the proposed solution handle the problem”, whereas Alice is thinking in terms of the literal meaning of the word “possible” that Bob used—it can be confusing. (And of course it’s worse if the two parties don’t even agree on the instability claim that Bob here is presupposing!)
What do we mean by “impossible”?
Note probably best in general to avoid phrasing things in terms of digits, due to the possibility of a cascade of 9s. Here I guess since we’re not getting 9s it’s not an issue. But yes as you can say you can bound the errors and see that the ranges don’t overlap!
Unfortunately, no. I see that I have a largely complete draft written from 7 years ago, but I’m not sure if I’d still want to post it in that form. Maybe worth reviewing at some point.
More on policy arguments and the AB problem
This doesn’t appear to be what’s usually meant by “consequentialism”?
Oh, nice! I guess this is basically saying the same thing as that, I’ll add a link.
Oh wow I’d forgotten about that!
Suggesting some revisions to Graham’s hierarchy of disagreement
Workflow vs interface vs implementation
Quick thoughts on the difficulty of widely conveying a non-stereotyped position
Doing principle-of-charity better
X as phenomenon vs as policy, Goodhart, and the AB problem
Consequentialism is for making decisions
Yes, I think I’d agree with that.
Whether you actually look up the answer seems irrelevant? Is it that misleading the Lonesome is easier if the Collective knows the answer?
I think the idea is that while you can lie about this, in reality things go fairly differently in cases where you looked it up in a way that’s noticeable.
Does it seem like it’s working as practice?
Hm, not really I guess. (Oops, I guess I forgot to mention that part!)
I’ve run this several times at OBNYC, it’s gone pretty well. Generally we didn’t bother with scoring. One issue with scoring is needing to come up with what counts for numerical questions. Although we tried to do that anyway, because we wanted to score individual questions even if we weren’t keeping score overall. For many things you can use “order of magnitude and first digit”, but that doesn’t work well for everything. Dates we generally did plus or minus 10 years. But it may need to vary a bit depending on just what the question. Maybe plus or minus some fixed percentage for many of them? (10%? 20%?) We did plus or minus an inch for a question about Conan O’Brien’s height.
One modification that got suggested at the most recent one was to say that on a 1, you look up the answer and lie; this is so that when you say “we looked it up” this is less informative. We never actually rolled a 1 after making this change, however. Perhaps one should add lookups on 5 as well if you’re doing this, to really make it uninformative? (So that the truth:lie ratio is 2:1 regardless of whether you’re doing a lookup or not.)
(At earlier ones we had for a while a “no talking about the die roll” rule that would make this unnecessary, but people didn’t like that.)
Having a good source of questions has been a little bit of a problem. The provided list isn’t that great—we’ve used questions from our copy of Wits & Wagers, or lists online, or just making ones up. Make sure you have some sort of question source!
We could also point to sleepwalkers of various sorts: even when executing complex actions (like murdering someone), I’ve never seen any accounts which mention deeply felt emotions. (WP emphasizes their dullness and apathetic affect.)
Nitpick: Sleepwalking proper apparently happens during non-REM sleep; acting out a dream during REM sleep is different and has its own name. Although it seems like sleepwalkers may also be dreaming somehow even though they aren’t in REM sleep? I don’t know—this is definitely not my area—and arguably none of this is relevant to the original point; but I thought I should point it out.
Update: Ran this again today. Modified the probabilities as follows: Kept 2⁄3 truth 1⁄3 lie, but had lookup-or-not be independently 2⁄3 don’t lookup, 1⁄3 lookup. (So, we might look it up and then lie.) This differs from my earlier suggestion in that that was 1⁄2 don’t lookup, 1⁄2 lookup. That might work too. But I do feel like having lookup-or-not be independent of lying-or-not I do think was a good change.