syllogism

Is GiveWell.org the best char­ity (ex­clud­ing SIAI)?

• syllogism 28 Apr 2013 19:39 UTC

  38 points

  on: LW Women En­tries- Creepiness

  Often I hear guys complain that an advance is deemed “creepy” if it’s unwelcome, but not if the same thing were said or done by an attractive man. I also see a lot of emphasis on “confidence”. Guys are often advised to “be more confident” in the way they approach or “escalate” with women.

  The problem is, sexual advances are often gambles where the potential downsides are paid by the party approached, not by the one who does the approaching. When you think of it this way, complaining about unwanted advances is perfectly justified, and telling guys to “be more confident” is totally upside-down.

  Take this example of a highly upvoted piece of advice on how a guy should try to kiss a girl for the first time: http://​​www.reddit.com/​​r/​​dating_advice/​​comments/​​1bymdq/​​never_datedbeen_in_a_relationship_i_m21_want_to/​​c9bu81j

  The advice here is in general very “high risk”: if the girl didn’t want to be kissed and the guy grabbed her and moved in suddenly in that way, that would really suck for her. Often these types of risks are also high-reward: a welcome advance of this type is often hotter than a more timid one. Being pressed against a wall and kissed is awesome if it’s welcome, and horrifying if it’s not.

  What’s truly valuable is a well-calibrated and highly accurate model of how your advances will be received. That lets you carry off these high risk, high reward advances. But time and again I see people advocating confidence—as though just predicting that every advance will succeed were the solution. Wishing does not make it so.

  To avoid being creepy, the focus should be on keeping your model well-calibrated, and on being fairly risk averse. If you think your advance is unlikely to succeed, you either shouldn’t make it in the first place, or you should be careful to give the other person a graceful way to decline.

  So, in the example of kissing that girl for the first time from before, I’d be suggesting he get verbal consent. He’s having trouble predicting whether she wants to be kissed from the non-verbal interaction, so he has to take the lower risk option, even though it comes with a lower reward.

  This idea of a well-calibrated model is also behind my objection to a lot of PUA advice. It often sounds to me like the negative externality is “priced out”. Guys are advised that they have nothing to lose from approaching a lot of women. Well, that might be so, but the women do have something to lose, even if it’s only a mild discomfort, and it’s totally unethical to not care about that. The fact that the downsides are external should strongly encourage risk aversion.

Arthur Chu: Jeop­ardy! cham­pion through ex­em­plary rationality

• syllogism 8 Jul 2011 0:05 UTC

  31 points

  in reply to: Vladimir_M’s comment on: An Out­side View on Less Wrong’s Advice

  The key to successful non-conformity is to find your tribe later. If you look at people who’ve done this now, they seem like conformists, because they do what their peer-group does. But they’ve fit their peer-group to their personality, rather than trying to fit their personality to their peer-group. They’ve had to move through local minima of non-conformity.

  Here are some examples of where I’ve made what have at the time been socially brave choices that have paid off big. This is exactly all about asking “what is the best thing I could be doing”, not “what is the thing to do”.

  • Decided to accept and admit to my bisexuality. This was very uncomfortable at first, and I never did really find a “home” in gay communities, as they conformed around a lot of norms that didn’t suit me well. What accepting my sexuality really bought me is a critical stance on masculinity. Rejecting the normal definition of “what it means to be a man” has been hugely liberating. Being queer has a nice signalling perk on this, too. It’s much harder to be straight and get away with this. If you’re queer people shrug and put you in that “third sex” category of neither masculine nor feminine.

  • Decided not to pursue any of the “typical” careers. I was getting top marks in English and History in high school, and all the other kids with that academic profile were going into law. I chose to just do an arts degree in linguistics, with an eye on academia. This turned out to be a very important decision, as I’m very happy with my academic career in computational linguistics. When I meet people, they’re amazed at how “lucky” I am to have found something so niche that fits me so well. Well, it isn’t luck at all: I decided what everyone else was doing was not for me, and had to suck it up when people called me a fool for leaving all that near-certain law money on the table.

  • Decided the “school” of linguistics I’d trained in all through my undergraduate was completely wrong, requiring me to abandon my existing professional network and relearn almost everything. It was kind of a scientific crisis of faith. But I think I’m happier now than I would’ve been if I hadn’t.

  • Decided to become vegetarian. This benefited me by reducing my cognitive dissonance between the empirical facts of the meat industry and my need to feel that I was making the world a better place, and wouldn’t do something I had believed caused great harm just because it was normal. Now I have a network of vegetarian friends (not that I abandoned my old one, mind), so it doesn’t feel like lonely dissent. And I did only “convert” after meeting a rationalist vegetarian friend. But the non-conformity pain was still there when I did it. I had to deal with feeling like a weirdo, which is unpleasant.

  • Hired a domestic cleaner. Domestic help is fairly socially unacceptable in my champagne socialist slice of Australia. How bourgeois! Well, yes—we are totally bourgeois. Champagne socialists are very uncomfortable about this. This exchange of goods for services is very high utility for me, though.

  So I disagree that “non-conformists” are worse off, for this definition of “non-conformist”. People willing to make socially brave choices stand to gain a lot; people who are completely craven in the face of any social opprobrium wind up trapped in circumstances that don’t suit them well.

Break­ing quaran­tine is neg­li­gence. Why are democ­ra­cies act­ing like we can only ask nicely?

• syllogism 10 Jul 2011 6:37 UTC

  29 points

  in reply to: Kaj_Sotala’s comment on: Prospect The­ory: A Frame­work for Un­der­stand­ing Cog­ni­tive Biases

  I’ve been meaning to make a post about this small procedural note. Singular they has a long history in English as a gender-neutral third person singular pronoun. Languages tend to resist the introduction of new pronouns, as they’re “closed class”—part of the language’s grammar. It’s especially problematic that nobody can even agree on which invented pronoun to get behind!

  Can’t we all just use singular they? It’s much nicer.

• syllogism 2 Jan 2014 17:18 UTC

  23 points

  on: What are you work­ing on? Jan­uary 2014

  I’m currently a post-doc doing language technology/​NLP type stuff. I’m considering quitting soon to work full time on a start-up. I’m working on three things at the moment.

  • The start-up is a language learning web app: http://​​www.cloze.it . What sets it apart from other language-learning software is my knowledge of linguistics, proficiency with text processing, and willingness to code detailed language-specific features. Most tools want to be as language neutral as possible, which limits their scope a lot. So they tend to all have the same set of features, centred around learning basic vocab.

  • Something that’s always bugged me about being an academic is, we’re terrible at communicating to people outside our field. This means that whenever I see a post using an NLP tool, they’re using a crap tool. So I wrote a blog post explaining a simple POS tagger that was better than the stuff in e.g. nltk (nltk is crap): http://​​honnibal.wordpress.com/​​2013/​​09/​​11/​​a-good-part-of-speechpos-tagger-in-about-200-lines-of-python/​​ The POS tagger post has gotten over 15k views (mostly from reddit), so I’m writing a follow up about a concise parser implementation. The parser is 500 lines, including the tagger, and faster and more accurate than the Stanford parser (the Stanford parser is also crap).

  • I’m doing minor revisions for a journal article on parsing conversational speech transcripts, and detecting disfluent words. The system gets good results when run on text transcripts. The goal is to allow speech recognition systems to produce better transcripts, with punctuation added, and stutters etc removed. I’m also working on a follow up paper to that one, with further experiments.

  Overall the research is going well, and I find it very engaging. But I’m at the point where I have to start writing grant applications, and selling software seems like a much better expected-value bet.

• syllogism 12 May 2013 19:30 UTC

  23 points

  on: Post ridicu­lous munchkin ideas!

  (The below is stated with no modulation for my level of confidence, which actually isn’t very high.)

  MDMA is a useful way to improve social skills permanently, or help make you more emotionally available.

  While under the influence of it, you’re very empathic, and very socially fearless. The experiences you have talking to people in this state can then transfer to when you’re sober. For instance, you might notice that your openness is well-received, which lets you see that you’ve been under-confident.

  Many people do something similar with alcohol: they learn to socialise when drunk, and that makes it easier to socialise when not drunk. I believe MDMA is better for this purpose, because it doesn’t inhibit your memory at all, and you’re more “yourself” than when drunk.

  To get this benefit it’s important to take a well-tolerated dose, and not to drink much: you don’t want to be a mangled mess, or the next day you’ll just be embarrassed, especially because you’ll be mildly depressed from the come-down.

  I’ve found MDMA to be quite addictive, and most users have trouble controlling their use once they are on the drug: they’ll re-dose, even if they hadn’t planned to, once the first dose begins to fade. So this “hack” is far from free of danger. But I believe the cost/​benefit is still better than alcohol for many situations.

• syllogism 29 Apr 2013 20:51 UTC

  22 points

  in reply to: knb’s comment on: LW Women En­tries- Creepiness

  I’ve always thought of this incident in terms of the calibration idea above.

  The chance of his advance succeeding, given that in that context she was a celebrity and that they hadn’t established any rapport, were incredibly slim. It was a total hail mary. And it was made in a context that made rejection more uncomfortable (confined space), and it was pretty directly sexual.

  In short, the advance was wildly miscalibrated: it was such a stunningly bad bet, she concluded that he just didn’t have her interests on the ledger at all. And that pissed her off, and I think that’s thoroughly reasonable.

• syllogism 3 Jun 2013 12:51 UTC

  20 points

  in reply to: Larks’s comment on: Open Thread, June 2-15, 2013

  I needed fewer than 13 bits of evidence: http://​​lesswrong.com/​​lw/​​fp5/​​2012_survey_results/​​

  I likely committed some level of base-rate fallacy though (regardless of what the truth turns out to be). Trans* is more available to me because I hang out in queer communities, and know multiple transgender people.

• syllogism 28 Jul 2013 5:06 UTC

  18 points

  in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: The Robots, AI, and Unem­ploy­ment Anti-FAQ

  Why is the IQ 70 kid not able to do laundry as so many others once did earlier, if the economy is so productive—shouldn’t someone be able to hire him in his area of Ricardian comparative advantage?

  In addition to gwern’s objections, what if his RCA price-point turns out to be, say, 50c an hour? The utility curve is not smooth. Past a point, a starvation wage is still a starvation wage. Even in a hypothetical world where there were zero welfare and no opportunities for crime, he’d be better off spending the time looking for low-probability alternatives than settling on spending 40 hours a week working for sure starvation.

• syllogism 29 Apr 2013 2:32 UTC

  18 points

  in reply to: buybuydandavis’s comment on: LW Women En­tries- Creepiness

  That seems a comment based in ideology, and not reality. I guess there must be some women for whom that would work, but I believe most women would find that a massive cold shower—perhaps permanently. The offer and consent should be nonverbal. Going slowly and incrementally allows you to minimize any delta between act and consent.

  I think this is really an imagination failure for how “verbal consent” would work. An example that includes a minor verbal component: I often smile and say something like “come here” while shifting myself around (e.g. putting my arm around him/​her). We then meet half way. This works just fine.

  I’ve had someone say something like “God! I’ve been trying to find a break to kiss you for the last five minutes, but we keep just having too much to say!”. That was absolutely fine too.

  A friend once told me he said something like, “you know what’s awesome? Make outs are awesome”.

  I can’t remember whether I’ve ever done something as direct as whispering “can I kiss you”, but it’s hard to imagine that being a deal breaker for anyone I’ve hooked up with.

  The post that advice was in reply to made it clear that they had an ongoing thing, and that they’d already talked about having more-than-friends feelings for each other. In that kind of situation, the girl knows whether she wants to be kissed, and so it actually only matters a little bit how you get there. She’s not going to change her mind about the whole thing just because the initial approach was a little bit clumsy.

  Out of interest, do you have the same opinion about explicit verbal consent in other situations? Like, would you say something like, “Can I take these off?” A more specific example: The other week I was making out and cuddling with a girl, and we’d already explicitly negotiated that we wouldn’t be having sex. So at some point we were spooning, and I asked “Can I touch your breasts?”. She hesitated, so I said, “Ah, that’s a no, don’t worry”. She was obviously relieved, and we continued without any problems. This sort of thing only comes up a small minority of the time, but when it does I think it’s actually pretty important to verbalise things. So I’m wondering whether you have a different system, or just never find yourself needing to check in with someone that directly?

• syllogism 28 Apr 2013 20:44 UTC

  18 points

  in reply to: bogus’s comment on: LW Women En­tries- Creepiness

  I read a lot of PUA advice as basically counselling guys like this: there’s nothing to lose from an unsuccessful approach, you know that, so update your aliefs accordingly. The downside’s all in your head. So, they agree guys start by worrying about freaking people out, but their line of thinking is that that doesn’t actually matter. Except, that part is all tacit. I think the prominent men writing the advice are mostly very low empathy, so they don’t actually understand why normal guys have that aversion.

  Second, I see what you’re saying, in that you don’t have to be nervous while you make some well-calibrated move. But, a move that offers a graceful out is going to be less confident, too, just along a slightly different dimension. I’ll get personal here: I use online dating sites, and I’m a bi male. So I make and receive advances quite regularly.

  Going through my message history on a popular site that isn’t exclusively about casual sex, this advance slightly irritated me, and I didn’t reply:

  Sydney_fella80: top or bottom?

  Here’s how I phrased a message with basically the same intent, to a girl who said she was on the site for NSA sex, and partially indicated her interests:

  Hey,

  I find you quite fantastically hot, and I’ve always wanted to hook up with a top girl (and bottom for one, specifically). I’m pretty far from your stated type though, so no worries if you’re not keen. If not, just take this as some NSA admiration.

  Cheers Matt.

  I gave her an easy out by raising a likely reason to decline my advance for her—which she took, in a very friendly reply. The message was confident in the sense that it suggested that rejection wouldn’t faze me, but was not confident at all about the advance succeeding—which is conventionally considered less attractive.

  Online the stakes are really low, because you can just not reply. But a differently worded advance can still make the other person feel slightly flattered, or slightly gross.

• syllogism 1 Feb 2011 0:18 UTC

  18 points

  in reply to: Louie’s comment on: Op­ti­mal Employment

  The current internet censorship is unproblematic. The proposed internet filter would have been problematic, but the legislation is dead in the water.

  We have some fairly arbitrary socially conservative “nanny state” policies. None of them get in the way a great deal, but they do stick in the craw a little.

  The political climate in Australia is intensely pragmatic. Voters are stone cold to principle—they think almost exclusively about the effects legislation will have on their lives. This means that people will support a policy that they think means their children won’t be able to view porn on the internet, as they perceive this as a problem. On the other hand, it makes it very difficult for astro-turf organisations to convince people to vote against their interests. That’s why we have a decent minimum wage, single payer health care, etc.

• syllogism 28 Oct 2013 11:45 UTC

  17 points

  on: What should nor­mal peo­ple do?

  I have a fairly wide variety of friends. Here’s some advice I find myself giving often, because it seems to cover a lot of what I think are the most common problems. The wording here isn’t how I’d say it to them.

  Health and lifestyle

  • Don’t engage the services of any non-evidence based medical practitioner.

  • If you have a health problem, you’re receiving treatment/​advice, and not obviously improving, get a second opinion. And probably also a third. (I am not in the US)

  • Don’t smoke cigarettes. If you already smoke cigarettes, buy an e-cigarette (like, right now), even if you’re sure you’ll never use it. Once you’ve bought it, do try to use it, even if you don’t think you’ll like it.

  • Always use barriers for vaginal and anal penetration outside a monogamous relationship

  • Use either barriers or hormonal birth control for p-in-v intercourse

  • If you or your partner is having non-monogamous sex, get STI tests twice a year

  • If you frequently feel depressed or anxious, see a psychologist who practices cognitive behavioural therapy. Do not see one who practices psychoanalysis (see “evidence based health care”). Expect to trial several psychologists before finding one who is a good fit for you (see: “if health care not working, seek second opinion”).

  Personal finance

  • Don’t buy cars new. There’s an established value-point for depreciation vs maintainence costs for cars. Use that.

  • Don’t get a credit card

  • Don’t take personal loans unless the interest is dominated by the cost of having no liquidity (e.g. eviction)

  • If you can’t maintain a monthly budget, give yourself a weekly budget. If you still can’t maintain a weekly budget, give yourself a daily budget. A budget over a shorter time period is much less convenient—but failing to maintain a budget at all and going broke is less convenient still.

  • Never gamble, including playing the lottery

  • Don’t invest in individual stocks, or pay someone else to invest your money in individual stocks.

  • Comply with your local tax laws, including filing your taxes on time. Know that people smarter than you are being employed to catch tax cheats who are also smarter than you. You will likely lose.

  Career

  • Avoid “winner takes all” professions, e.g. sports, music, academia in fields with no industrial application, etc

  • Judge potential careers by expected value, not best or worst possible outcome. Look at median salaries and working conditions.

  • Only enrol in tertiary/​graduate education with a specific career outcome in mind

  • Recognise the true cost of tertiary degrees, in opportunity cost as well as course fees. e.g. a full-fee-paid PhD program with a modest stipend is still enormously expensive

  • Recognise that reputational capital distorts labor markets. Teachers are paid low because they’re well respected, not despite being well respected. The how-do-you-do value of having a well respected career is not that enduring, so it’s probably over-valued. It’s better to avoid careers with excess reputational capital.

  • Consider careers in the allied health professions . These professions have the best job security: the aging population ensures rising demand, they must be performed locally, and most seem like unlikely targets for automation or disruption. They also offer lots of human contact, which many find produces good job satisfaction. But, because they don’t require medical degrees, they are fairly neutral in reputational capital, so your peers don’t just work themselves to death to win zero-sum positional games against you.

  Law and the justice system

  • Avoid dominance contests. Learn to display submission readily, meekly and convincingly.

  • Regard police officers as people who have power over you. They do. Their power is broad, and not constrained by some set of written rules. If you challenge them to a dominance contest, you will likely lose. They will fuck you up. And even if you “win”, it’ll be a pyrrhic victory—you’ll still have been better off not getting into it in the first place.

  • Power is not moral authority. Someone may have real power over you, with no legitimate right to it.

  • Moral authority is not power. Even if you have the legitimate right to do something, someone may have the power to stop you.

• syllogism 16 Mar 2015 1:47 UTC

  16 points

  on: Effi­cient Open Source

  I don’t think the Hamming advice is so great. It’s akin to asking, “What are the highest salary professions? Why aren’t you entering them?”.

  Academia is a market-place. Everyone wants high research impact, for a given expenditure of time. Some opportunities are higher-value than others, but as those opportunities appear, other researchers are going to identify them too.

  So in academia, as in the economy, it’s better to identify your comparative advantage—both short-term, and long-term. You usually need to publish something quickly, so you need to know what you can do right away. But you also want to plan for the medium and long-term, too. It’s a difficult trade-off.

• syllogism 9 Jan 2012 15:05 UTC

  14 points

  in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: The Eth­i­cal Sta­tus of Non-hu­man Animals

  Well, take the alien hypothetical. We make contact with this alien race, and somehow they have almost the same values as us. They too have a sense of fun, and aesthetics, and they care about the interests of others. Are their interests still worth less than a human interests? And do we have any right to object if they feel that our interests are worth less than their own?

  I can’t take seriously an ethical system that says, “Humans are more morally considerable, simply because I am human”. I need my ethical system to be blind to the facts of who I am. I could never expect a non-human to agree that humans were ethically special, and that failure to convince them becomes a failure to convince myself.

  I feel like there’s a more fundamental objection here that I’m missing.

• syllogism 10 Jul 2011 8:34 UTC

  13 points

  in reply to: Scott Alexander’s comment on: Prospect The­ory: A Frame­work for Un­der­stand­ing Cog­ni­tive Biases

  Deal. I’ll even pull rank with my formal qualifications on English grammar, should they care about that.

• syllogism 12 May 2013 19:38 UTC

  12 points

  in reply to: Tuxedage’s comment on: Post ridicu­lous munchkin ideas!

  Definitely agree that changing your name is a good option to have on the table.

  I’d note though that in some industries having a Google-unique name is king. It really depends what your “personal brand strategy” is. I remember reading an interview with a marketer who recommended people consider name changes. Her name was “Faith Popcorn”. I read that single interview probably 5-10 years ago. It wasn’t even a particularly interesting interview. I still remember her name, though.

• syllogism 9 Aug 2011 14:42 UTC

  12 points

  in reply to: Alexei’s comment on: Ra­tion­al­ity and Relationships

  Another tip for “communication is the key”: try to never punish them for communicating. This is really difficult, and it isn’t always an option. Sometimes communicating changes the game in itself.

  For instance, imagine a couple, Casey and Pat[1]. Casey has the flu, and Pat’s friend suggests they go out for some commonplace but appealing social event. Pat would feel guilty going out, as the convention in their relationship is to be present and nurture the sick person while they feel sorry for themself. What to do here? Even asking could be interpreted as insensitive. Worse, it puts the ball explicitly in Casey’s court: it’d make Casey the villain, denying Pat the opportunity to do something fun.

  It’s possible that asking the question is legitimately going to ruin the comfort of being nurtured for Casey. In this case, perhaps Pat really shouldn’t ask at all. On the other hand, if Pat does ask, Casey should try as hard as possible not to resent it. They then both have to try to be as honest as possible about the stakes to them, to try to come up with the highest net utility move.

  In my opinion, when the utility is approximately a tie, it’s wrong for Pat to ask the question. It’s a toss up, so it’s not worth making Casey feel guilty for saying no. When the utility’s heavily in Casey’s favour, asking the question isn’t so bad, because Casey won’t feel guilty. And when the utility’s in Pat’s favour, asking the question moves them to a better outcome.

  However, Casey can wreck the game by punishing Pat for even asking, no matter what the outcome is—by being very offended, and wracking up credit in the “grievance bank”. If the relationship has this kind of dynamic, then Pat may end up not saying anything, while privately believing it’d be in their collective best interest for Pat to go out and have a good time—and quietly simmering about Casey’s perceived selfishness.

  I think these little negotiations of give-and-take are constantly happening in relationships, so it’s important to have this long-term strategy of promoting communication as much as possible. Of course, when the topic at hand is emotionally salient, you have this pressure to play an entirely short-term game. So it’s difficult.

  [1] Care has been taken to avoid assigning a gender to either of them. I hope you don’t find this too distracting.