Viliam

• Viliam 18 Jul 2019 18:25 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Vaniver's comment on: Nutri­tion is Satisficing

  With plant-free diets, where does one get their vi­tamin C? Lots of raw meat? Sup­ple­ments?

• Viliam 16 Jul 2019 20:36 UTC

  3 points

  on: Nutri­tion is Satisficing

  Nutri­tion is one of those cases where perfect is the en­emy of good. I mean, if you have suffi­cient ed­u­ca­tion and enough time, go ahead, re­search ev­ery­thing, and cre­ate the perfect diet for you. But oth­er­wise, your only choices are: us­ing a few heuris­tics, or giv­ing up. (Note that “I will re­search this topic later, and mean­while I will con­tinue eat­ing junk food” is also a form of giv­ing up. The “later” usu­ally never hap­pens.)

  In the past, when I asked peo­ple what is “healthy nu­tri­tion”, there were two kinds of un­helpful ad­vice:

  a) an in­cred­ibly com­pli­cated the­ory, that would re­quire me to spend a few weeks or months study­ing, and af­ter­wards mea­sur­ing and an­a­lyz­ing ev­ery­thing I eat and calcu­lat­ing how many calories and vi­tam­ins it had;

  b) a list of “for­bid­den foods” which con­tained pretty much ev­ery­thing I could think of, ex­cept for fruits and veg­eta­bles (ac­tu­ally, if I re­mem­ber cor­rectly, even ba­nanas were bad some­how; also pota­toes).

  It also doesn’t help that differ­ent peo­ple have con­tra­dic­tory the­o­ries, e.g. meat, eggs, and di­ary are ei­ther very im­por­tant to eat, or very im­por­tant to avoid. More pre­cisely, the best form of meat is fish. Ex­cept you shouldn’t eat fish, be­cause they are full of deadly mer­cury. Also, you should eat less to avoid obe­sity, but you need to eat enough to have enough nu­tri­ents. (It is even eas­ier to lose weight if you ex­er­cise a lot; but if you ex­er­cise se­ri­ously, it is even more im­por­tant to eat enough nu­tri­ents.) As a feed­back, you should mea­sure your BMI; ex­cept that BMI is com­pletely mis­lead­ing, be­cause it doesn’t dis­t­in­guish be­tween fat (bad) and mus­cles (good).

  (And if you hap­pen to be a woman, it is even more so­cially im­por­tant to lose weight, but at the same time get­ting rid of too much fat will dam­age your metabolism, be­cause some fe­male hor­mones need cer­tain amounts of fat to func­tion prop­erly. Also, you prob­a­bly don’t want to get rid of your boobs, which are mostly fat.)

  Well… thanks for the helpful ad­vice, I guess. /​s

  
  

  Eat plenty of veg­eta­bles.

  No­tice that this is one of the few things the con­tra­dic­tory nu­tri­tion the­o­ries all hap­pen to agree about. Vegeta­bles are im­por­tant in both pa­leo and ve­gan diets.

  I would also recom­mend fruit. Un­like veg­eta­bles, fruit is usu­ally not a part of a meal… so the sim­ple solu­tion is to eat it be­tween large meals.

  
  

  My fa­vorite heuris­tic is Dr. Greger’s Daily Dozen (available also as An­droid app).

• Viliam 16 Jul 2019 19:37 UTC

  2 points

  on: Eco­nomic Thinking

  I agree with most of the text, how­ever...

  For [effi­cient mar­ket hy­poth­e­sis] to be true, ev­ery trader must have ac­cess to all rele­vant in­for­ma­tion at all times, re­act in­stan­ta­neously to changes and make de­ci­sions com­pletely ra­tio­nally.

  ...this is un­nec­es­sar­ily strong as­sump­tion. It is only suffi­cient that for ev­ery pub­li­cly traded thing there are enough traders (with enough money) who act upon the sup­pos­edly perfect in­for­ma­tion.

  If the mar­ket price is bal­anced, a ran­dom per­son won’t throw it out of bal­ance by sel­l­ing a few pieces in­cred­ibly cheaply (or buy­ing a few pieces in­cred­ibly ex­pen­sively). The wiser play­ers will buy (or sell) the few pieces, and the origi­nal price will be soon re­stored.

• Viliam 13 Jul 2019 21:56 UTC

  18 points

  in reply to: shminux's comment on: The AI Timelines Scam

  Well, it is not a “Bayesian way” to take a ran­dom con­tro­ver­sial state­ment and say “the pri­ors are 50% it’s true, and 50% it’s false”.

  (That would be true only if you had zero knowl­edge about… any­thing re­lated to the state­ment. Or if the knowl­edge would be so pre­cisely bal­anced the sum of the ev­i­dence would be ex­actly zero.)

  But the fac­tual wrong­ness is only a par­tial an­swer. The other part is more difficult to ar­tic­u­late, but it’s some­thing like… if some­one uses “your key­words” to ar­gue a com­plete non­sense, that kinda im­plies that you are ex­pected to be so stupid that you would ac­cept the non­sense as long as it is ac­com­panied with the proper key­words… which is quite offen­sive.

• Viliam 7 Jul 2019 0:33 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: romeostevensit's comment on: 87,000 Hours or: Thoughts on Home Ownership

  When I bought my cur­rent place, I learned that “par­tial re­con­struc­tion” means last-minute changes that look pretty when you are in­spect­ing the place, but start fal­ling apart when you ac­tu­ally use it for a few months. Still, the po­si­tion in the cen­ter of the city and the area in square me­ters re­main the same; and those make about 80% of the value.

  With funds, the real deal be­ing 80% of what I was promised, would be much bet­ter than I ever got.

• Viliam 6 Jul 2019 14:49 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: moses's comment on: 87,000 Hours or: Thoughts on Home Ownership

  Speak­ing from my “N = 1” per­spec­tive: Yes, there is the dis­ad­van­tage that if some­thing bad hap­pens, e.g. some idiots win the elec­tion and de­cide that my coun­try leaves EU, the value of my life­time sav­ings could drop dra­mat­i­cally overnight. Same thing if there is e.g. a ter­ror­ist at­tack and my life­time sav­ings be­come a cloud of smoke and a heap of rub­ble, in even shorter time in­ter­val.

  How­ever, if the above de­scribed things do not hap­pen, then I live in a mid­dle of a city with job op­por­tu­ni­ties left and right (since I have moved here my com­mute means walk­ing on feet), and I am a boss of what hap­pens in­side my place. New build­ings grow­ing around me in­crease the value of my prop­erty (it makes my place closer to even more job op­por­tu­ni­ties), while in­fla­tion re­duces my mort­gage pay­ments to peanuts. The rent col­lected from the other place I own (where I lived pre­vi­ously) in­creases. At this very mo­ment the rent I col­lect from one place (much smaller and fur­ther away from the city cen­ter) equals the mort­gage pay­ment at the other place, so this can­cels out; I am look­ing for­ward to the sur­plus in the fu­ture.

  I am not say­ing this is a proof that own­ing the place is bet­ter. As Moses said, this is a differ­ent risk pro­file; differ­ent ad­van­tages, differ­ent dis­ad­van­tages, differ­ent prob­a­bil­ity dis­tri­bu­tion. I am just say­ing that from in­side, for me, hav­ing in­vested in buy­ing my place feels good. I do not re­gret not rent­ing my place in the past in­stead.

  In the­ory, the par­allel-uni­verse me could have rented the places, and in­vested the ex­tra money in­stead. In prac­tice, I shiver when I imag­ine what kind of in­vest­ment the 15 years younger me would have made. Be­cause my 15 years younger me ac­tu­ally had some ex­tra money, in­vested them, and the money just evap­o­rated. In my defense, it was be­fore I ever heard about pas­sively man­aged in­dex funds. I live in a post-com­mu­nist coun­try, where peo­ple do not know how to han­dle hav­ing ex­tra money, be­cause in the past this kind of prob­lem sim­ply did not ex­ist. All fi­nan­cial ad­vice you can get here, is scam, re­gard­less of the source (the bank I have money in reg­u­larly offers me “op­por­tu­ni­ties” that are ob­vi­ous shit). To­day I un­der­stand this; 15 years ago I didn’t. I am re­ally happy that I bought my first place in­stead. This les­son may not gen­er­al­ize for you; but I think that in­vest­ing in your place can make sense for peo­ple who are not fi­nan­cial ex­perts, be­cause the situ­a­tion is rel­a­tively more leg­ible. (Un­like with var­i­ous funds, a scam­mer just can­not sell you a card­board house pre­tend­ing it was build from con­crete; and the house you bought won’t keep chang­ing its shape and ad­dress dur­ing the next years.)

• Viliam 3 Jul 2019 21:06 UTC

  9 points

  on: Self-con­scious­ness wants to make ev­ery­thing about itself

  I imag­ine that Su­san’s po­si­tion is com­pli­cated, be­cause in the so­cial jus­tice frame­work, in most in­ter­ac­tions she is con­sid­ered the less-priv­ileged one, and then sud­denly in a few of them she be­comes the more-priv­ileged one. And in differ­ent po­si­tions, differ­ent be­hav­ior is ex­pected. Which, I sup­pose, is emo­tion­ally difficult, even if in­tel­lec­tu­ally the per­son ac­cepts the idea of in­ter­sec­tion­al­ity.

  If in most situ­a­tions, us­ing tears is the win­ning strat­egy, it will be difficult to avoid cry­ing when it sud­denly be­comes in­ap­pro­pri­ate for rea­sons in­visi­ble to her Sys­tem 1. (Iron­i­cally, the less racist she is, the less likely she will no­tice “oops, this is a non-white per­son talk­ing to me, I need to re­act differ­ently”.)

  Here a white man would have the situ­a­tion eas­ier, be­cause his ex­pected re­ac­tion on Mon­day is the same as his ex­pected re­ac­tion on Tues­day, so he can use one be­hav­ior con­sis­tently.

• Viliam 3 Jul 2019 20:35 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: jessicata's comment on: Self-con­scious­ness wants to make ev­ery­thing about itself

  I think it also de­pends on what model of moral­ity you sub­scribe to.

  In the con­se­quen­tial­ist frame­work, there is a best ac­tion in the set of your pos­si­ble ac­tions, and that’s what you should do. (Though we may ar­gue that no per­son chooses the best ac­tion con­sis­tently all the time, and thus we are all bad.)

  In the de­on­tol­o­gist frame­work, some­times all your pos­si­ble ac­tions ei­ther break some rule, or ne­glect some duty, if you get into a bad situ­a­tion where the only pos­si­ble way to fulfill a duty is to break a rule. (Here it is pos­si­ble to turn all du­ties up to 11, so it be­comes im­pos­si­ble for ev­ery­one to fulfill them.)

• Viliam 3 Jul 2019 19:36 UTC

  9 points

  in reply to: Richard_Kennaway's comment on: Self-con­scious­ness wants to make ev­ery­thing about itself

  Seems to me that many ad­vices or points of view can be helpful when used in a cer­tain way, and harm­ful when used in a differ­ent way. The idea “I am already in­finitely bad” is helpful when it re­moves the need to pro­tect one’s ego, but it can also make a per­son stop try­ing to im­prove.

  The effect is similar with the idea of “heroic re­spon­si­bil­ity”; it can help you over­come some learned hel­pless­ness, or it can make you feel guilty for all the evils in the world you are not fix­ing right now. Also, it can be abused by other peo­ple as an ex­cuse for their be­hav­ior (“what do you mean by say­ing I hurt you by do­ing this and that? take some heroic re­spon­si­bil­ity for your own well-be­ing, and stop mak­ing ex­cuses!”).

  Less di­rectly re­lated: Know­ing About Bi­ases Can Hurt Peo­ple (how good ad­vice about avoid­ing bi­ases can be used to ac­tu­ally defend them), plus there is a quote I can’t find now about how “doubt­ing you math skills and check­ing your home­work twice” can be helpful, but “doubt­ing your math skills so much that you won’t even at­tempt to do your home­work” is harm­ful.

• Viliam 1 Jul 2019 19:46 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: peleion's comment on: The Com­pe­tence Myth

  An in­tel­li­gent and self-re­flect­ing per­son will re­al­ize that luck plays an im­por­tant role in their suc­cess. It’s just, if they do not ex­pect this to be the gen­eral rule, they will feel guilty about luck play­ing a role in their suc­cess.

  If luck does not play a role in your suc­cess, it means you re­main com­pletely within your com­fort zone, and you could on av­er­age profit by do­ing some­thing more difficult, where let’s say your chances to suc­ceed are only 80%, but the po­ten­tial profit is dou­ble. As a side effect, this will also provide an op­por­tu­nity to learn more.

  (So I am talk­ing about two things here: The fact that the more difficult job al­lowed you to learn more, that is a re­sult of your good strat­egy. But the fact that had enough time in the more difficult job to learn more, be­fore a prob­lem hap­pened you would be un­able to solve, that part was luck. “What doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger”, but first you need the luck to avoid get­ting kil­led.)

• Viliam 1 Jul 2019 19:27 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: TheMajor's comment on: The Com­pe­tence Myth

  This is a dis­turb­ing line of thought, and… while I think this is not a com­plete ex­pla­na­tion, it feels like it ex­plains a lot.

  The word “in­com­pe­tent” does a lot of heavy lift­ing here, though. What ex­actly it means in this con­text? Do we play motte and bailey with mean­ings “a com­plete re­tard, mak­ing ran­dom de­ci­sions” and “less awe­some than Elon Musk”?

  Be­cause if we as­sume that peo­ple are com­plete re­tards, then the mar­ket se­lec­tion is not strong enough to ex­plain what keeps the lights on. (Math­e­mat­i­cally speak­ing, there are much more pos­si­bil­ities to screw up things, than the num­ber of com­pa­nies try­ing to provide elec­tric power.)

  So I guess the cor­rect in­ter­pre­ta­tion is that peo­ple are sort of com­pe­tent, but the se­lec­tion effect al­lows (some of) them to achieve more than their per­sonal com­pe­tence alone would pre­dict. A com­plete re­tards would ruin any com­pany, but if you find peo­ple who have a 10% chance of keep­ing the com­pany run­ning… then you sim­ply need dozens of them in dozens of com­pa­nies, and some of the com­pa­nies will sur­vive. But be­cause the situ­a­tion changes, the sur­vival dice will be rol­led again later, and the per­son who kept the com­pany run­ning yes­ter­day may fail to keep it run­ning to­day.

  EDIT: This in­ter­pre­ta­tion also fits the “low hang­ing fruit” hy­poth­e­sis: For sim­ple types of com­pa­nies, you can find peo­ple who have a 10% chance to keep them run­ning. For difficult types of com­pa­nies, you can only find peo­ple who have a 1% chance. But if there is enough money, enough peo­ple will try it, and some of these com­pa­nies will sur­vive, too. Their life ex­pec­tancy will be much shorter, though.

  It could even provide an an­swer to Eliezer’s post about com­pe­tent elites: similarly to Peter Prin­ci­ple, if you are a su­per-com­pe­tent per­son whose chance to keep the com­pany run­ning is not the usual 10%, but rather 50%, it is more prof­itable for you to ac­tu­ally try run­ning a more com­plex com­pany (where you have the 10% chance, and any­one else has 1%) in­stead. So it is true that more com­pe­tent peo­ple end up in more com­plex com­pa­nies, and at the same time, peo­ple end up in po­si­tions that ex­ceed their per­sonal com­pe­tence.

• Viliam 30 Jun 2019 22:26 UTC

  7 points

  in reply to: Alicorn's comment on: Do chil­dren lose ‘childlike cu­ri­os­ity?’ Why?

  Yup, similar with my child. Maybe the first time the ques­tion is mo­ti­vated by ac­tual cu­ri­os­ity, but the fol­low­ing 99 rep­e­ti­tions of the same ques­tion have to be mo­ti­vated by some­thing else.

  Most ques­tions I get are rep­e­ti­tions of some­thing that was already asked and already an­swered, and the child ac­tu­ally re­mem­bers the an­swer.

• Viliam 30 Jun 2019 22:20 UTC

  18 points

  in reply to: Marshall Kirkpatrick's comment on: The Com­pe­tence Myth

  Yeah, the more I know about how some things work, the more I am sur­prised that any­thing at all works.

  Maybe we are so in­sanely pro­duc­tive, that even with 99% of hu­man out­put wasted, the re­main­ing 1% is enough to keep the lights on? But then, how won­der­ful could the world be if we could some­how use 10% of the out­put in­stead?

  But more likely, it is some­thing like the in­di­vi­d­u­als be­liev­ing all kinds of bul­lshit in far mode, but act­ing rather rea­son­able in near mode. There are all kinds of in­com­pe­tence at places where in­com­pe­tence does not mean im­me­di­ate dis­aster; but when the dan­gers be­come im­mi­nent, some­one will use their com­mon sense (and per­haps work over­time) to do the right thing, and to pre­vent the lights from go­ing out. Well, most of the time; be­cause some­times the last mo­ment will be already too late to pre­vent the things from blow­ing up.

  Or per­haps hu­man work is mostly rep­e­ti­tion, and you don’t need highly com­pe­tent peo­ple to do the same thing they did yes­ter­day. Only once in a while cir­cum­stances change enough that some­one has to work over­time and/​or things blow up.

• Viliam 26 Jun 2019 21:19 UTC

  20 points

  on: What does the word “col­lab­o­ra­tive” mean in the phrase “col­lab­o­ra­tive truth­seek­ing”?

  As­sump­tion: Most peo­ple are not truth­seek­ing.

  There­fore, a ra­tio­nal truth­seek­ing per­son’s pri­ors would still be that the per­son they are de­bat­ing with is op­ti­miz­ing for some­thing else, such as cre­at­ing an al­li­ance, or com­pet­ing for sta­tus.

  Col­lab­o­ra­tive truth­seek­ing would then be what hap­pens where all par­ti­ci­pants trust each other to care about truth. That not only each of them cares about truth pri­vately, but that this value is also com­mon knowl­edge.

  If I be­lieve that the other per­son gen­uinely cares about truth, then I will take their ar­gu­ments more se­ri­ously, and if I am sur­prised, I will be more likely to ask for more info.

• Viliam 22 Jun 2019 22:05 UTC

  5 points

  on: The Foun­da­tional Toolbox for Life: Introduction

  Many peo­ple grow up learn­ing how to go through the mo­tions of a skill with­out un­der­stand­ing why it works, and that makes it harder for them to use it effec­tively, to adapt their skill to differ­ent con­texts, and to learn other similar skills.

  In math­e­mat­ics, you ad­dress this prob­lem by hav­ing stu­dents solve prob­lems with differ­ent num­bers, throw­ing in some ir­rele­vant num­bers, etc.

  In pro­gram­ming, you give peo­ple a small task to code.

  Could this be some­how gen­er­al­ized? I sup­pose the prob­lem is that in many situ­a­tions, run­ning an ex­per­i­ment would be long and costly, and the out­come would more de­pend on ran­dom noise.

• Viliam 21 Jun 2019 21:41 UTC

  9 points

  in reply to: G Gordon Worley III's comment on: Let Values Drift

  From my per­spec­tive, this style means that al­though I feel pretty sure that you made a rel­a­tively sim­ple mis­take some­where, I am un­able to ex­plain it, be­cause the text is just too hard to work with.

  I’d say this style works fine for some pur­poses, but “find­ing the truth” isn’t one of them. (The same is prob­a­bly true about the con­ti­nen­tal philos­o­phy in gen­eral.)

  My guess is that you use words “value drift” to mean many other things, such as “ex­trap­o­la­tion of your val­ues as you learn”, “changes in pri­ori­ties”, etc.

• Viliam 13 Jun 2019 21:48 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Samuel Hapák's comment on: No, it’s not The In­cen­tives—it’s you

  As a syn­the­sis of points 1 and 4: it is both the in­cen­tives and you. The in­cen­tives ex­plain why the game is so bad, but you have to ask your­self why you still keep play­ing it.

  A re­searcher with more per­sonal in­tegrity would avoid the temp­ta­tion/​pres­sure to do sloppy sci­ence… and per­haps lose the job as a re­sult. The sloppy sci­ence it­self would re­main, only done by some­one else.

• Viliam 13 Jun 2019 21:42 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: KyriakosCH's comment on: On why math­e­mat­ics ap­pear to be non-cosmic

  My point is that it is a bit sus­pect (granted, this is just in­tu­itive) that so sim­ple and dis­tinct a 2d ge­o­met­ri­cal form as an el­lipse, is ac­tu­ally for us hu­mans front and cen­ter in phe­nom­ena in­clud­ing the move­ment of heav­enly bod­ies.

  Coin­ci­den­tally, some com­plex math­e­mat­i­cal things are also re­lated to the move­ment of heav­enly bod­ies. So I’d say hu­mans are good both at notic­ing sim­plic­ity and notic­ing com­plex­ity.

• Viliam 12 Jun 2019 19:52 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: KyriakosCH's comment on: On why math­e­mat­ics ap­pear to be non-cosmic

  In my view noth­ing de­scribes the ac­tual uni­verse, but there are many pos­si­ble (species-de­pen­dent) trans­la­tions of the uni­verse.

  Well, here is the point where we dis­agree. In my view, equa­tions for e.g. grav­ity or quan­tum physics are given by na­ture. Differ­ent species may use differ­ent syn­tax to de­scribe them, but the free­dom to do so would be quite limited.

  Re­call how even Ke­pler was origi­nally re­gard­ing the el­lip­sis as way too easy and con­ve­nient a form to ac­count for move­ment in space, and was con­sid­er­ing com­pli­cated ar­range­ments of the pla­tonic solids :)

  The fact that Ke­pler tried to have it one way, but it turned out to be other way, is an ev­i­dence for “the uni­verse hav­ing its own mind about the equa­tions”, isn’t it?

  Of course an al­ter­na­tive ex­pla­na­tion is that the sci­en­tists—mostly men, at least in his­tory—un­con­sciously pre­fer shapes that re­mind them of boobs.

• Viliam 11 Jun 2019 22:29 UTC

  2 points

  on: Per­sonal mus­ings on In­di­vi­d­u­al­ism and Empathy

  Some of what you de­scribe (speci­fi­cally when you men­tioned the­ory of mind) seems to me like the as­perger syn­drome.