spkoc

Karma: 202

spkoc 10 Aug 2023 21:36 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Jasnah Kholin’s comment on: Save the kid, ruin the suit; Acceptable utility exchange rates; Distributed utility calculations; Civic duties matter
Good points! I didn’t get into ‘How do you really calculate the net-societal utility outcome of your actions, including second+ order effects?’ since I think even the 1st order immediate consequence calculation is intractable.
In practice you shouldn’t … help people that will do harm with your help. I think this is one of the limits of pacifism(with Kaladin’s dad being an example of that, incidentally) at some point passive obedience to an unjust opressor has the same consequences for the other people they harm as active cooperation. It is a moral duty to actually do something to harm or at least minimally help a person or institution or government from doing bad things. Just saying I don’t like what this Hitler guy is doing with my tax money isn’t really acceptable once the harm he’s causing becomes really monstrous. So if I’m really calculating paying 2 personal utility to generate 4 utility for Bob, I should take into account what Bob’s actually gonna do with his 4 utility. But again that becomes computationally impossible almost immediately, hence we use heuristics(aka moral principles) to dictate how we should behave.
By politics I mean governance, collective action via voluntary organisations and state action.
The connection seems clear to me: I want to pool resources with others in a way that makes all of us better off. Increasingly elaborate and large scale systems of social coordination is how we do that and that’s what modern states are. (for better or for worse and as hijacked by niche, elite special interests as they can seem to be and/or actually are)
As … disappointing as contemporary western governments are, I still think most ‘charity’ or utility redistribution in modern societies is done by government via schools, healthcare, pensions, police and other security systems and relatively cheap/free infrastructure. These are all things that were privileges or luxuries in the past that are now baseline and we all pay for them together.
The modern idea is that politics is dirty and gross. And pretty much any politician I can think of off the top of my head is at best disappointing, at worst vile. However, developed societies went from feudal serfdom or slavery or highly unequal large underclass early industrial society to modern social democratic welfare states with a historically relatively high standard of living even for the worst off(or at least for the almost worst off, the really lumpenproletariat among us aren’t doing that great, but the people at the bottom 15% threshold are, relatively speaking).
This transformation happened because people, not necessarily professional politicians but some were that as well, pushed for change in an intentional, organised and persistent way. And they got it.
The grossness of modern politicians is a problem that will either be solved by better politicians emerging or will destroy our societies. Crap elites kill civilizations.
Without organised, collective action towards the goal of improving our lives in specific ways, with specific policies … we won’t get the things we want. Society doesn’t get better randomly, it gets better because groups of people agitate in a direction they think will make it better and sometimes they get what they want and sometimes what they wanted actually was a good idea.

spkoc 21 Dec 2022 14:22 UTC
1 point
on: Can you control the past?
1. Omega predictors are impossible
They are unstable/impossible not just in practice but in theory as well. It’s theoretically not possible for Omega to exist because the decision of 1-2 box is recursive. You’re essentially invoking a magical agent that somehow isn’t affected by infinite recursion.
“Omega can ‘snap’ through the infinite recursive loop.” No it can’t. And if you claim it can you’re essentially dropping a nuke inside your logical system that can probably produce all sorts of irrational true=false theorems.
2. Writing on whiteboards, acausal control is just superdeterminism
Brain in a box perfect duplication just implies determinism is true. We are all pure functions of our inputs, if you can perfectly duplicate the context and the function then the outputs will be the same(barring quantum randomness, but I’m assuming we claim that quantum randomness is also not actually random so superdeterministic physics or smth).
It indicates that the experience of choice is illusory. Neither of ‘you’ are deciding to do anything. You are just running the same computation in multiple duplicated physical locations. See
3. Determinism has 0 informational content. It is meaningless and you shouldn’t care about it
Let’s say you are faced with a choice: eat a burger or stick to your diet. Well the universe is pre-determined so you might as well eat the burger. Well the universe is pre-determined so you might as well not eat the burger.
There is no informational content in determinism. It’s illusory that we make choices… But so what? We can’t get an outside perspective over the 4D crystal of the universe we are a part of.
If it helps the wave function of your self to exist happier then just assume that it’s predetermined you’ll make all the correct, virtuous choices and then obviously you’ll make them and that’s that.

spkoc 12 Dec 2022 13:28 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Unnamed’s comment on: Prodding ChatGPT to solve a basic algebra problem
Didn’t seem to work for me. It still seems to get confused trying to match similar words together even when they shouldn’t be. Again quite, dumb/young human.

spkoc 11 Oct 2022 21:41 UTC
−3 points
0
on: Why I think there’s a one-in-six chance of an imminent global nuclear war
WW3 is a suicide pact. The #1 thing that defines modern Russia is cynical self-interest. Putin won’t die for his professed ideals(which he does not believe in anyway). If he gives the order the people around him won’t be willing to die and they’ll just kill him. I view this all as extreme brinksmanship that will ultimately lead nowhere.
Russia’s oligarch billionaires aren’t incinerating their Swiss mansions over some dead proles on the Ukrainian front.

spkoc 14 Mar 2022 16:12 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Ege Erdil’s comment on: Game theory, sanctions, and Ukraine
Fundamentally wrong mental model, in my opinion. (but upvoted for presenting a well structured one!)
As if saying: “We shouldn’t put people in prison because it raises the cost of murder and increases demand to murder.”
Violence is a wildfire, not an auction market. Quantity of violence is zero absent a catalyst, once the catalyst is provided it goes up exponentially until it reaches some saturation point at which point it runs out of fuel and collapses again to zero.
Supply and Demand for violence form a positive feedback loop. (+ an activation barrier to get started and a cliff back to nothing at the end, dunno what proper terms would be here)
The measures that can be taken are to raise the cost of starting a war(make the catalyst more expensive) or end the war FAST(overwhelming force on one side).
Half the reason Putin is doing this is because he wasn’t slapped hard the first time he went invading Georgia(cheaper catalyst in the future). Arguably, the main reason he felt safe invading Georgia is because the US trampled over international law when they invaded Iraq and lost the moral bully pulpit needed to mobilize the EU for sanctions.
The other half of the reason is he thought Ukraine would fold immediately(he thought he had overwhelming force).
The murder example is actually perfect. A lot of murder is revenge killing. A lot of it is essentially feuding going back decades(you killed my uncle, I’ll kill your son etc). Same goes for war. France and Germany had a tit for tat war every few decades relationship for centuries.
The way to break that cycle is by monopolizing violence.
And it actually does break the cycle in that it removes the immediate popular causes for revenge killing or revanchist war. (Not to say that new causes cannot lead to war again, but the relationship between France and Germany is qualitatively different than it was in the last 80 year span of peace between their countries.)

spkoc 14 Mar 2022 12:16 UTC
9 points
on: Game theory, sanctions, and Ukraine
To take this straight to the nuclear winter dark side.
I’ve been reading a bit about MAD 101 and I hate it. I’m slowly embracing the idea that the most safe thing to do is to be as explicit and precommitted as possible to massive retaliation if red lines are crossed. Emotionally that sounds nuts and I’d like everyone on every side to just spam we’re not using the nukes, calm down.
But.
IF people say that and red lines keep getting crossed, at some point Side A thinks they can push one more boundary and get away with it, but Side B decides this is the limit and they press the button.
As such I think, but don’t believe if that makes sense, bellicose rhetoric about nukes reduces the risk of nuclear escalation. Implicitly people clamoring for the West to precommit to not using nukes if the Ukrainian war spills out of Ukraine are actually fuzzying Putin’s calculus in a very dangerous way.
On a lighter shade of dark note, I definitely think Putin getting away with all of his little salami tactics measures against the West in the past 10 years was why he thought he could get away with Ukraine. If massive sanctions had been issued at any point in the past, it would have never gotten to this point in Ukraine. But then again, the West would have had less justification for the sanctions...

spkoc 14 Mar 2022 12:06 UTC
5 points
in reply to: Wei Dai’s comment on: Game theory, sanctions, and Ukraine
That doesn’t seem rational to me, or if it’s somehow not irrational on an individual level, makes it a bad idea to model Russia as a rational actor as a whole.
Absent honest, safe, free speech, leadership’s map diverges more and more from the territory and then comes crashing back to reality when they drive off a cliff they thought was a highway.
A group of individuals behaving in their own rational self-interest can make very irrational, self-destructive group-level decisions, if the incentives the members have are perverse enough. I guess the idea itself is as old as the book(Moloch style religious arguments have existed since forever) but I somehow never thought about it from the lens of predictability, of being a part of the same consensus reality.
Everyone around Putin was shocked that he went to full war, because they all knew they were lying to him and it would be a disaster. He alone lived in a hall of mirrors. I assume he’s smashing a bunch of them as we speak.

spkoc 28 Feb 2022 13:33 UTC
7 points
in reply to: Arcayer’s comment on: Russia has Invaded Ukraine
These numbers are absurd, in my opinion. 10s of thousands of military dead is massive numbers in a modern context. You cannot compare 1800s warfare to modern war, people literally lined up in a square and shot at each other until half of them were dead/injured back then. And due to crap med tech tons of injured didn’t survive. Modern conflicts have MUCH MUCH lower death ratios.
America finished the conquest of Iraq with like 150 dead(granted Iraqi army folded). Over the course of the whole occupation(2003-2011) America lost around 4500 soldiers. If Russia loses like 1000 soldiers before taking over Ukraine that’s absolutely brutal resistance.
Iraqi force’s losses were much higher, but still not over 20k during the invasion. Keep in mind there WAS a lot of resistance. The invasion took like a month or something, so wasn’t just a trivial walk through the country. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War
Yemeni civil war isn’t even at 20k yet after 8 years, as far as I can tell
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yemeni_Civil_War_(2014%E2%80%93present)
I think 20k combined military civilian deaths in the next 2 weeks would be absolutely massive resistance and probably the bloodiest war in decades.
The real question to me is if the Ukrainians are holding all major cities by the end of this week. At that point substantial military aid from the EU will be steadily flowing in through the west and it becomes a lot less clear how Russia makes progress. Mass bombardment of cities… doesn’t do anything if people are angry and stubborn enough to keep fighting.

spkoc 25 Feb 2022 16:00 UTC
16 points
in reply to: jwpapi’s comment on: Russia has Invaded Ukraine
A lot of people keep saying that Putin feels afraid of NATO. I really dislike this meme. Russia has been an imperial aggressor in Eastern Europe(and beyond) for centuries. The belt of countries from the Baltic to the black sea have been the Russian Empire’s victims again and again since the 1700s through to the fall of the USSR.
Now that Eastern European countries are joining a defensive alliance suddenly Putin feels threatened?
Why? He has nukes. The end. No one is ever invading Russia. It is just impossible. NATO is not going to invade Russia.
All NATO membership does is make Eastern European countries expensive or impossible to bully. This is what really bothers Putin.
There is nothing an abuser hates more than when their victims can protect themselves. He is not afraid of NATO invading Russia, an absurd idea that again would NEVER happen, because it takes more than the whims of one crazy dictator to trigger a NATO attack.
Putin is afraid that the people he views as his rightful prey and subjects are now able to defend themselves. That’s it. He’s a predator and he wants his subjects vulnerable.
Don’t give him the benefit of the doubt by taking the BS rhetoric about NATO encroachment seriously. As if NATO was bribing and invading countries one by one to get them to join the way he does geopolitics. Pure projection by a psychopath.

spkoc 24 Feb 2022 22:47 UTC
8 points
in reply to: AnnaSalamon’s comment on: Russia has Invaded Ukraine
I sort of get it and I want to believe it. But it makes no actual sense and that’s terrifying. The west would barely care if Putin was doing this in the *stans or Georgia. The only other target to go to after Ukraine is Moldova and then the Baltics.
If he goes in the Baltics that’s war with NATO. Nothing about the reaction to Ukraine makes a difference there. It’s black and white NATO vs not NATO.
I feel like the most parsimonious explanation is he’s not being very rational, rumors about him having terminal cancer are also pushing me towards that belief. It really doesn’t seem like anyone on the Russian side saw this coming either, which is extra scary.

spkoc 24 Feb 2022 11:26 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Ben Pace’s comment on: Russia has Invaded Ukraine
I think the EU will have to impose heavy sanctions and deal with a refugee crisis. Given German dependence on Russian gas this could lead to a local/global recession. Hopefully, that’s the extent of it.

spkoc 24 Feb 2022 11:24 UTC
5 points
on: Russia has Invaded Ukraine
Disclaimer, am Romanian so biased against Russia’s geopolitical agenda(which possibly runs through my country in the long run).
I think short term Ukrainian army folds(how much of it is russophile former soviet officers anyway? arguably same as in a lot of former Eastern bloc countries).
Short term questions
1. How big and serious will the insurgency be? I assume civilians are not heavily armed. I assume some organised groups will get some military gear. I assume some western weapons will get smuggled in.
2. Who will actually fight it? My very limited knowledge of Ukrainian irregular groups is that they’re all neo-nazis(this is partly Russian propaganda, but I don’t think it’s far off the mark). Presumably some grass-roots upheaval will happen as well, but will all the organizations be run by ultra-nationalists?
3. Will the EU bite the bullet and really embargo Russia? Probably not, but also maybe? 10% odds?
4. Can Russia actually pacify the huge mountainous region in Western Ukraine, that borders Poland and Romania?
Long term musing
I don’t see this stopping with Ukraine. There’s a Russian army in Moldova’s breakaway, Transnistria. Putin has basically annexed Belarus. It seems like the time for creating enclaves is over and the time for re-consolidating the Russian empire has begun. If Ukraine gets eaten up with little fuss, I have no doubt Georgia is next. After all, why stop?
This can plausibly escalate into annexing Moldova as well. The Baltic states are the first obvious NATO member target.
I don’t understand Putin’s goal here. He can’t absorb Ukraine. A puppet regime installed there would be facing civil war for years. Maybe he just wants a really serious distraction for local purposes? I just can’t accept that he has a genuine pseudo-religious belief in shit like http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/66181 or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics because if he does, we’re all in for it.

spkoc 6 Nov 2021 12:21 UTC
9 points
on: Speaking of Stag Hunts
I guess long-time lurkers/new posters like me are part of the problem(though obviously I assume most online only LW members didn’t engage with a California drama post). I still think LW is a great place for discussion and just being exposed to new ideas and good feedback, but I’m probably dragging down the sanity level.
Re fear: I think the SSC situation made it clear that LW and rationalist adjacent spaces are more public than users might think, maybe people are hesitant because they don’t want to get twitter blasted or show up as a snap in an NYTimes article two years down the line.
Re concentration of force: I would imagine raw censorship would be really hard and contentious to enforce. Probably attempting to aristocratize/oligarchize the site might work better. Maybe increase the visibility of old-time users and posters, tweak the karma needed to post/vote, highlight high karma account comments over low karma comments.
There must be some blog post somewhere documenting every attempted antidote to Eternal September syndrome to pick and choose from. Disclaimer, norm and law changes have chaotically unpredictable effects on communities, so who knows what the outcome would be.
A democratic version of this is people being more meta in comments and replies, addressing structural concerns with what people are commenting, as you mention in the post rewriting the original comment in a more rigorous/ironman form. Upside, this is a way to acculturate people into the community in an emotionally positive manner, rather than just by punishment. It’s also much more legible and learnable than a comment deletion, which might have all sorts of reasons. Downside, this can make actual discussion really difficult and encourages pedantry which can also be taken too far. It also requires some degree of critical mass of users willing to engage in it.
The utopian version of this to me would be people looking at a post or comment they disagree with, suspending their own opinion on it, and attempting to help the commenter improve their argument in the direction the OP was going.

spkoc 28 Oct 2021 18:33 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Razied’s comment on: Save the kid, ruin the suit; Acceptable utility exchange rates; Distributed utility calculations; Civic duties matter
Is the close relation actively killing people? I don’t think it’s an unreasonable standard to say you should attempt to kill your own child if they’re about to go on a spree killing and you definitely have exhausted all other options. I might fail it, but I’d definitely think I was a bad person for it(granted raising a spree killer in the first place is the bigger fault here).
How else are their lives trading so favourably? Organ transfers are pretty 1-1, tho maybe a more general policy encouraging people to donate spare kidneys wouldn’t be terrible. Also certainly people have encouraged their kids to go to war and so on, that’s a probabilistic sacrifice for the greater good.
Also killing/death tends to be a bit of a utility singularity so even the clumsy math of regular mode utilitarianism breaks down. How much utility do I lose by killing my child? Possibly infinite? Like I’m probably going to kill myself afterwards, surely that counts as a singularity.
Would I encourage myself or a relative to donate a kidney to save a life? Eh. Maybe, again there’s potential of death when donating an organ, so singularity type stuff slips in maybe.
Just because singularities exist in certain conditions of a theory doesn’t mean it’s unusable in finite number cases.

spkoc 28 Oct 2021 15:17 UTC
1 point
in reply to: aphyer’s comment on: Save the kid, ruin the suit; Acceptable utility exchange rates; Distributed utility calculations; Civic duties matter
No because of the things I say in Claim 3. Like. If I were to do it alone, that would sort of be fine. But if everyone were to live that way, everyone would be miserable(something something Kant’s categorical imperative, what if everyone adopted this behaviour, would that work?).
I guess, there’s a difference between what is utility maximising for an individual to do in a given society, and what is a utility maximising way for individuals to behave in an ideal society.
Like society should be such that Claim 3 is all you need, localized responsibility + government redistribution.

spkoc 28 Oct 2021 15:14 UTC
2 points
in reply to: wslafleur’s comment on: Self-Integrity and the Drowning Child
The internal Ideal Observer is the amalgamated averaged out result of interactions with the world and other people alive and dead. Human beings don’t come from the orangutan branch of the primate tree, we are fundamentally biologically not solitary creatures.
Our ecological niche depends on our ability to coordinate at a scale comparable to ants, but while maintaining the individual decision making autonomy of mammals.
We’re not a hive mind and we’re not atomized individuals. We do and should constantly be balancing ourselves based on the feedback we get from physical reality and the social reality we live in.
Is the Ideal Observer the thing doing that balancing? Sure. But then it becomes a very reduced sort of entity, kinda like science keeps reducing the space where the god of the gaps can hide.
There’s an inner utility function spitting out pleasure and pain based on stimuli, but I wouldn’t call that me, there’s a bit more flesh around me than just that nugget of calculation.

spkoc 28 Oct 2021 10:00 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Slider’s comment on: Self-Integrity and the Drowning Child
I agree, sort of. I’d argue that in the military example there is already a plan that includes consultation phases on purpose. The rules of engagement explicitly require a slow step. I don’t know if this applies in genuinely surprising situations. A sort of known unknown vs unknown unknown distinction. I guess you can have a meta policy of always pausing ANY time something unexpected happens, but I feel like that’s… hard to live(or even survive) with? Speeding car coming towards me or a kid in the road. Just act, no time to think. In fairness, this is why you prepare and preplan for likely emergency events you might encounter in life.

spkoc 26 Oct 2021 14:27 UTC
31 points
on: Self-Integrity and the Drowning Child
Regarding the direct example
I feel like it’s self-subverting. There’s an old canard about https://www.watersafetymagazine.com/drowning-doesnt-look-like-drowning/ Given how staggeringly disproportionate the utility losses are in this scenario I think even a 1% chance of my assumption that ‘I have 15 seconds to undress’ would lead to death means I should act immediately.
In general when thinking about superfast reflex decisions vs thought out decisions: Obey the reflex unless your ability to estimate the probabilities involved has really low margins of error. My gut says X but my slow, super weak priors-that-have-never-been-adjusted-by-real-world-experience-about-this-first-time-in-my-life-situation say Y… Yeah just go with X. Reflect on the outcome later and maybe come up with a Z that should have been the gut/reflex response.
There’s an old video game Starcraft 2 advice from Day9 that’s surprisingly applicable in life: Plan your game before the game, in game follow the plan even if it seems like it’s failing, after the game review and adjust your plan. Never plan during the game, speed is of the essence and the loss of micro and macro speed will cost you more than a bad plan executed well.
Don’t plan during a crisis moment where you have seconds to react correctly. Do. Then later on train yourself to have better reflexes. Applicable when socializing, doing anything physical, in week 1 of a software development 2 week sprint etc.
Regarding the more general point of people having … self-consistent utility functions/preferences
I fundamentally disagree that you shouldn’t criticize someone for their utility function. An individual’s utility function should include reasonably low-discount approximations of the utility functions of people around them. This is what morality tries to approximate. People that seem to not integrate my preferences into their own signal danger to me. How irrelevant is my welfare in their calculations? How much of my utility would they destroy for how small a gain in their own utility?
People strongly committed to non-violence and so on are an edge case, but I’d feel much more comfortable with someone not in control over their own utility function than someone that is in control, based on the people I have encountered in life so far.
How intrusively should people integrate each other’s preferences? How much should we police other individual’s exchange rate from personal utils to other people utils? No good answer, it varies over time and societies.
Society is an iron maiden, shaped around the general opinion about what the right action is in a given scenario. Shame is when we decide something that we know others will judge us badly for. Guilt is when we’ve internalized that shame.
The art of a good society is designing an iron maiden that most people don’t even notice.
It seems irrational to me to not internalize the social moral code to some extent into my individual utility function. (It happens anyway, might as well do it consciously so I can at least reject some of the rules) If the social order is not to my taste, try and leave or change it. But just ignoring it makes no sense.
I’d also argue that the vast majority of preferences in our, so-called, ‘personal’ utility function are just bits and bobs picked up from the societal example palette we observed as we grew up.
People’s utility functions also include components for the type of iron maiden they want their society to build around other members. I want to be able to make assumptions about the likely outcomes of meeting a random other person. Will they try to rob me? If I’m in trouble will they help me? If my kid is playing outside unsupervised by me, but there’s always random people walking by, can I trust that any of them will take reasonably care of the child if the kid ends up in trouble?
I strongly do not want to live in a society that doesn’t match my preferred answers on those and other critical questions.
I absolutely do not want to live in a society that has no iron maiden built at all. That is just mad max world. I can make no reasonable assumption about what might happen when I cross paths with another person. When people are faced with situations of moral anarchy, they spontaneously band together, bang out some rules and carve out an area of the wilderness where they enforce their rules.

spkoc 21 Oct 2021 20:32 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Jiro’s comment on: Lies, Damn Lies, and Fabricated Options
Of course :D

There’s a strain of thought that would say price allocation of society’s production itself is only ethical when everyone has the same amount of money, but that’s a whole other can of worms.

spkoc 21 Oct 2021 14:43 UTC
1 point
in reply to: RamblinDash’s comment on: Lies, Damn Lies, and Fabricated Options
To treacherously switch sides to the pro-price gouging side:
The obvious solution is for shops to jack up prices as soon as an emergency situation occurs, thereby taking the wind out of speculators’ sails. Now businesses are not going to want to do this, since it’ll ruin their reputation with customers for minor short term gain.
So the actual solution is for the government to mandate price-gouging in emergency situations, this way businesses can do it, without having to bear the public opinion penalty.
If an area is declared a public disaster area, all shops are obligated to immediately implement scarcity prices. Scarcity prices work like this: as the stock of an item goes down, the price goes up by 100% of base cost for every 1% of missing stock. So by the time you only have 90% of toilet paper left in store, you’re already paying 10 * base cost for it.
Of course private citizens are also allowed to come in and sell whatever they want.
I’m not sure what incentive this creates for shop owners, like maybe they want to not bring stocks back up to normal, but whatever, I’m sure it’ll work out.
Modern society gives people too much incentive to live in floodable/hurricanable/earthquakable areas anyway, a bit more spice in their lives would shift populations to more reasonable regions to live in so it’s all good either way.