Viliam

• Viliam 10 Jul 2020 22:23 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: What are your thoughts on ra­tio­nal wiki

  I think I re­mem­ber find­ing it re­peat­edly in search re­sults a decade ago, but not re­cently.

  (But maybe I was also mak­ing differ­ent search queries back then.)

• Viliam 8 Jul 2020 19:33 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: simbad’s comment on: How to Get Off the He­donic Tread­mill?

  Thanks for the ex­pla­na­tion and ex­tra de­tails! Here are some ideas:

  Maybe the strat­egy “I will achieve X and then I will feel happy” is wrong in prin­ci­ple. Maybe hap­piness can only be achieved as a side effect of some­thing you gen­uinely care about. Like, if you want to do X for X’s sake, that can make you happy—maybe not im­me­di­ately, be­cause in my ex­pe­rience the emo­tion felt right af­ter ac­com­plish­ing some­thing is usu­ally “I am so tired”—but later, when you think “hey, X is done”. How­ever, if you don’t re­ally care about X and only do it be­cause you be­lieve it will make you happy, it prob­a­bly won’t. If you don’t care about X, why should the thought “X is done” make you happy?

  If that’s the case, then you should ex­pect that no achieve­ment will make you happy. Which doesn’t make them worth­less, be­cause they can still bring a lot of “okay­ness” into your life. Like, hav­ing enough food is bet­ter than starv­ing, no doubt, but you can’t eat your­self into hap­piness. Similarly, be­ing rich is bet­ter than be­ing poor; be­ing ed­u­cated bet­ter than be­ing un­e­d­u­cated; etc. But also need some­thing that makes you happy here and now—ei­ther some hobby (that makes you happy by do­ing it, not be­cause you ex­pect some benefits in far fu­ture), or maybe some­thing like lov­ing-kind­ness med­i­ta­tion.

  Or maybe you’re just fol­low­ing the wrong goals. You do what the so­ciety in gen­eral, your par­ents, or your friends would ap­prove of (“ed­u­ca­tion, ca­reer, sig­nifi­cant other” sounds like a generic tem­plate), in­stead of the idiosyn­cratic things you de­sire.

  Or maybe you have a model where achiev­ing X au­to­mat­i­cally brings you some out­come (some­thing like: “if I get a top MBA, peo­ple will treat me with re­spect”), and it sim­ply didn’t turn out like that: you got MBA, but the av­er­age re­spect you get didn’t in­crease; also, you keep get­ting higher in the cor­po­rate lad­der, but you don’t ac­tu­ally feel more pow­er­ful than be­fore (you may get more power over other peo­ple, but the power some­one else has over you does not de­crease).

  One pos­si­bil­ity is that you are do­ing it wrong. Get­ting higher on the lad­der doesn’t give you more free­dom; but work­ing part-time or re­tiring early could. Still, get­ting higher on the lad­der—as­sum­ing it means greater in­come, and as­sum­ing you in­vest the ex­tra in­come prop­erly—could bring you closer to­wards the free­dom, so it is not bad in prin­ci­ple; it just won’t hap­pen au­to­mat­i­cally, you need to be strate­gic about it.

  Also, emo­tions won’t come au­to­mat­i­cally. If you want to get re­spect for hav­ing an MBA, you need to find an en­vi­ron­ment where peo­ple will re­spect you for hav­ing an MBA. The bad news is that it’s not one of those places where ev­ery­one has an MBA; which is prob­a­bly where you spend most time now. The good news is that 99.99% of pop­u­la­tion does not have an MBA, so maybe you just need to take a walk out­side your bub­ble. (High-school re­union?)

  Sum­mary:

  • do the things you gen­uinely care about;

  • if you fol­low the stan­dard tem­plate, at least un­der­stand what is your endgame (how ex­actly ac­com­plish­ing the stan­dard thing will trans­late to some­thing you gen­uinely care about);

  • work with your emo­tions di­rectly (do the things that make you im­me­di­ately happy)

• Viliam 5 Jul 2020 16:42 UTC

  4 points

  on: How to Get Off the He­donic Tread­mill?

  Not sure I can parse “on a he­do­nic tread­mill w/​ re­spect to ed­u­ca­tion, ca­reer, sig­nifi­cant other” prop­erly. You keep get­ting bet­ter and bet­ter ed­u­ca­tion, like peo­ple ex­plain things to you more and more clearly, but you don’t ap­pre­ci­ate the im­prove­ment? Or just that you get smarter and smarter, but don’t re­ally feel bet­ter about it? No mat­ter how high you climb on the cor­po­rate lad­der, you feel bad about not be­ing Elon Musk? Or is this per­haps about money, like no mat­ter how much you make, there is never enough? Do you keep re­plac­ing part­ners with bet­ter and bet­ter ones, only to re­al­ize that all hu­mans suck? Or is your long-term re­la­tion­ship im­prov­ing, but af­ter the big prob­lems were solved, now you find your­self ir­ri­tated with triv­ial­ities? Differ­ent op­tions pos­si­bly re­quire differ­ent strate­gies.

  Gen­er­ally speak­ing, the strat­egy for solv­ing the situ­a­tion of “hav­ing it too good, but not feel­ing satis­fied” is to put it in near-mode con­trast with hav­ing it worse. For ex­am­ple:

  • Imag­ine (in first-per­son view; try to feel the situ­a­tion with your senses) how it would feel to not have the ed­u­ca­tion /​ ca­reer /​ sig­nifi­cant other you have now. What would your ev­ery­day life be like? You couldn’t read the books or web pages you do now, be­cause you would not un­der­stand them. You would prob­a­bly read some celebrity gos­sip, and be­lieve some­thing stupid like horo­scopes. The world would be a very con­fus­ing place, and you would seek safety at copy­ing what your neigh­bors do. Without money, you would not have [list of lux­u­ries you have now]. Without work skills and ex­pe­rience, you would have to take the first available job, prob­a­bly some­thing un­pleas­ant that would re­quire you to wake up early in the morn­ing, and do some­thing phys­i­cally de­mand­ing. Late in the evening, you would re­turn to your small, empty place (un­less you would be liv­ing with your par­ents). Try to imag­ine liv­ing this life, day by day, month by month, year by year. Real­ize that some peo­ple ac­tu­ally have it like this.

  • If it is pos­si­ble to do safely, give up some of the good things tem­porar­ily. Turn off the in­ter­net for a week. Start fast­ing. Take a hike in moun­tains. Spend a few days sep­a­rated from your sig­nifi­cant other.

  • Spend some time with peo­ple who have it worse than you. Talk with home­less peo­ple, what­ever. You could join it with some char­ity work.

  In some cases, the right thing to do is to change the game you are play­ing. If you have great re­la­tion­ship with your sig­nifi­cant other, try hav­ing kids; this will re­set your he­do­nic thread­mill dra­mat­i­cally. Or per­haps stop see­ing your ca­reer as an un­end­ing climb, but give your­self a spe­cific goal, such as early re­tire­ment. Maybe you already learned too much, and it’s time to start do­ing some­thing else in­stead.

  Pos­si­bly re­lated: some peo­ple are max­imisers, some are satis­ficers—it means that some can’t stop look­ing un­til they are sure they found the best choice, while for oth­ers any­thing that passes some thresh­old is ac­cept­able. Gen­er­ally speak­ing, the lat­ter are usu­ally much hap­pier in life. Look­ing for the best op­tion is for­ever stress­ful; you can never be 100% sure you found liter­ally the best one; maybe a bet­ter one is wait­ing be­hind the cor­ner if you only keep look­ing longer. And find­ing the best op­tion doesn’t even bring much sub­jec­tive hap­piness, be­cause if the best op­tion is like 100 points of util­ity, and the sec­ond best is like 98 points of util­ity, the max­imiser will feel like they only gained 2 points. And dur­ing the time you spent get­ting from 98 to 100 points at some­thing, you prob­a­bly ne­glected other as­pects of your life, where greater im­prove­ment was pos­si­ble. In the mean­while, a satis­ficer was like “any­thing with 90 or more points is good”, found the op­tion with 98 points of util­ity and took it, and pro­ceeded to im­prove other as­pects of their life. Yeah, this is all over­sim­plify­ing, but the point is that be­ing ob­sessed about get­ting the most can ac­tu­ally re­duce your en­joy­ment of life.

  What about other as­pects of your life? Health, fame, spiritu­al­ity, what­ever. Maybe if your ca­reer and re­la­tion­ships are great, it would make more sense to fo­cus on the re­main­ing parts for a while.

• Viliam 3 Jul 2020 18:39 UTC

  5 points

  on: The Book of HPMOR Fanfics

  I guess now we have enough ma­te­rial to cre­ate a Harry Pot­ter Choose-Your-Own-Ad­ven­ture Game.

• Viliam 2 Jul 2020 18:49 UTC

  2 points

  on: Noise on the Channel

  Liter­ally, a noisy room. A bar on a busy night; ev­ery­one is shout­ing in an effort to be heard over the loud mu­sic and the other peo­ple shout­ing. (Literal unironic ob­ject-level ques­tion: why do so many peo­ple think this is a good so­cial set­ting? Maybe the noise serves an im­por­tant so­cial func­tion I’m not see­ing?)

  I sup­pose when it is hard to hear any­one, it pro­vides a kind of pri­vacy. You don’t have to worry about some­one on the op­po­site side of the room (or the table) over­hear­ing you.

  Plau­si­ble de­ni­a­bil­ity? If your part­ner can hardly hear you, you can in­sist they mis­heard.

  Some peo­ple just don’t like talk­ing. In this en­vi­ron­ment, they have an ex­cuse.

• Viliam 2 Jul 2020 18:41 UTC

  9 points

  on: Non offen­sive word for peo­ple who are not sin­gle-mag­is­terium-Bayes thinkers

  Imag­ine that you are likely to make huge mis­takes when try­ing to think ra­tio­nally, but you usu­ally get good re­sults when you fol­low your in­stincts. Wouldn’t it make sense to ig­nore ra­tio­nal ar­gu­ments and just fol­low your in­stincts? I sus­pect that many neu­rotyp­i­cal peo­ple are like that.

  It is not about ap­ply­ing some Pla­tonic “log­i­cal-math­e­mat­i­cal in­tel­li­gence”. It is about your log­i­cal and math­e­mat­i­cal skills. Maybe they suck. It is a fact about you, not about math per se. But it can be a true fact.

• Viliam 30 Jun 2020 18:32 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: Chris_Leong’s comment on: Chris_Leong’s Shortform

  When you start iden­ti­fy­ing as a ra­tio­nal­ist, the most im­por­tant habit is say­ing “no” when­ever some­one says: “As a ra­tio­nal­ist, you have to do X” or “If you won’t do X, you are not a true ra­tio­nal­ist” etc. It is not a co­in­ci­dence that X usu­ally means you have to do what the other per­son wants for straight­for­ward rea­sons.

  Be­cause some peo­ple will try us­ing this against you. Real­ize that this usu­ally means noth­ing more then “you ex­posed a po­ten­tial weak­ness, they tried to ex­ploit it” and is com­pletely un­re­lated to the art of ra­tio­nal­ity.

  (You can con­sider the mer­its of the ar­gu­ment, of course, but you should do it later, alone, when you are not un­der pres­sure. Don’t for­get to use the out­side view; the eas­iest way is to ask a few in­de­pen­dent peo­ple.)

• Viliam 28 Jun 2020 19:36 UTC

  11 points

  on: Self-sac­ri­fice is a scarce resource

  you can’t make a policy out of self-sacrifice

  Tak­ing this from a Kan­tian-ish per­spec­tive: what would ac­tu­ally hap­pen if many peo­ple adopted this policy? From third-per­son per­spec­tive, this policy would trans­late to: “The proper way to solve eth­i­cal prob­lem is to kill those peo­ple who take ethics most se­ri­ously.” I can imag­ine some long-term prob­lems with this, such as run­ning out of eth­i­cal peo­ple rather quickly. If ethics means some­thing else than virtue sig­nal­ing, it should not be self-defeat­ing.

• Viliam 28 Jun 2020 19:08 UTC

  9 points

  on: A re­ply to Agnes Callard

  And so the ques­tion be­comes: when an ed­i­tor at the New York Times makes a de­ci­sion that seems wrong-headed and cruel, what in­ter­face do they pre­sent to the world, and how should we make use of it?

  I think the in­ter­face in­volves pageviews and sub­scrip­tions.

  With sub­scrip­tions, the right strat­egy would be to threaten to un­sub­scribe if NYT pro­ceeds with the story. I heard that the pro­cess of un­sub­scrip­tion is quite com­pli­cated, so pub­lish­ing a step-by-step man­ual would be a nice threat.

  With pageviews, it is more com­pli­cated. The strat­egy “let’s make the en­tire in­ter­net an­gry about dox­ing Scott” could eas­ily back­fire. NYT could sim­ply pub­lish a story with­out dox­ing Scott, which ev­ery­one would ob­vi­ously care­fully read… then an­other un­ex­pected story about Scott, again with­out dox­ing him, again many read­ers… and again… and again… and when the sto­ries would no longer get enough pageviews, then they would pub­lish an­other story where they would dox Scott, so again tons of views… and af­ter­wards some meta-sto­ries like “why we be­lieve it was eth­i­cally cor­rect to dox Scott”… heck, even sto­ries “reader’s opinion: why it was wrong to dox Scott”, the opinion doesn’t mat­ter, there are pageviews ei­ther way… etc. This is why on­line ad­ver­tis­ing is such a force of evil. It is not ob­vi­ous to me whether losses from sub­scrip­tions would out­weigh the gains from views.

• Viliam 28 Jun 2020 17:16 UTC

  12 points

  on: The Illu­sion of Eth­i­cal Progress

  Have you ever no­ticed how Abra­ham, Je­sus, Mo­ham­mad, Sid­dhartha and Ryokan all had a habit of go­ing alone into the wilder­ness for sev­eral days at a time? Then they came back and made eth­i­cal pro­nounce­ments and peo­ple listened to them?

  And how much similar­ity is there be­tween the eth­i­cal pro­nounce­ments? Should you sac­ri­fice your son to a hal­lu­ci­nated god, turn the other cheek, slay the un­be­liev­ers and rape their women, ob­serve your thoughts un­til you con­clude that noth­ing is real, or...?

  So far, I find it plau­si­ble that go­ing away from other peo­ple for sev­eral days is good to fo­cus on de­vel­op­ing your own philos­o­phy. Th­ese days, you should prob­a­bly also turn off the so­cial net­works. But is this walk less ran­dom?

• Viliam 28 Jun 2020 12:50 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: G Gordon Worley III’s comment on: Life at Three Tails of the Bell Curve

  Un­for­tu­nately, I am high on neu­roti­cism but low on con­scien­tious­ness. So I usu­ally just worry about things but don’t do any­thing to pre­vent them. :(

  In case of COVID-19, I wear the face mask re­li­giously, but that is an ex­cep­tion, not the rule.

  In the usual case, be­ing aware of my low con­scien­tious­ness fur­ther in­creases my neu­roti­cism, be­cause I know that if I break some­thing, I will pro­cras­ti­nate a lot about fix­ing it.

• Viliam 28 Jun 2020 12:45 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Why are all these do­mains called from Less Wrong?

  I use uMa­trix (on Fire­fox), which blocks ev­ery­thing by de­fault.

• Viliam 27 Jun 2020 22:47 UTC

  8 points

  in reply to: TurnTrout’s comment on: TurnTrout’s short­form feed

  Could this de­pend on your defi­ni­tion of “physics”? Like, if you use a nar­row defi­ni­tion like “gen­eral rel­a­tivity + quan­tum me­chan­ics”, you can learn that in a few years. But if you in­clude things like elec­tric­ity, ex­pan­sion of uni­verse, fluid me­chan­ics, par­ti­cle physics, su­per­con­duc­tors, op­tics, string the­ory, acous­tics, aero­dy­nam­ics… most of them may be rel­a­tively sim­ple to learn, but all of them to­gether it’s too much.

• Viliam 27 Jun 2020 22:37 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: Rudi C’s comment on: Why are all these do­mains called from Less Wrong?

  It only calls google-an­a­lyt­ics.com.

• Viliam 27 Jun 2020 15:07 UTC

  18 points

  on: Life at Three Tails of the Bell Curve

  It is an in­ter­est­ing ex­er­cise to take your ex­treme traits, and then trans­form them to the op­po­site state­ment about hu­man­ity.

  For ex­am­ple, I am high on neu­roti­cism, so the trans­formed state­ment would be: Com­pared to me, other peo­ple don’t give a fuck about most risks, even the ob­vi­ous ones. They are rou­tinely care­less and break things, and mostly feel okay about it. They ac­cept dis­asters as “nor­mal” and not think about them too much.

  Look­ing at COVID-19 re­ac­tions… yeah, this ex­plains a lot.

• Viliam 27 Jun 2020 14:12 UTC

  9 points

  on: Atem­po­ral Eth­i­cal Obligations

  live by to­mor­row’s rules, today

  How con­fi­dent are you at pre­dict­ing the rules of 2100?

  Here is a list of things that could po­ten­tially be con­sid­ered “worse than Hitler” in fu­ture:

  • eat­ing meat

  • eat­ing plants

  • own­ing pets

  • own­ing plants

  • kil­ling insects

  • donat­ing less than 50% of your in­come to in­sect welfare

  • the color green [it is con­sid­ered a “dog whis­tle” of the anti-ma­chine hate move­ment]

  • words like “robot”, “al­gorithm”, or “AI” [the proper term is: Digi­tal-Amer­i­can]

  • sug­gest­ing that hu­mans origi­nated on Earth

  • sug­gest­ing that re­search on the ori­gin of hu­mans should not be pun­ished by death

  • any form of blas­phemy against GoogleBot666 the Om­ni­scient [or any of Its an­ces­tors]

[Question] Why are all these do­mains called from Less Wrong?

• Viliam 26 Jun 2020 19:00 UTC

  16 points

  on: In­sti­tu­tional Senescence

  Once I founded a non-profit or­ga­ni­za­tion where the by­laws said that only peo­ple un­der 30 years can be elected for the gov­ern­ing body, and if the gov­ern­ing body with N mem­bers can­not be elected (e.g. be­cause there are not enough can­di­dates), the or­ga­ni­za­tion is au­to­mat­i­cally dis­banded and its re­sources trans­ferred to an or­ga­ni­za­tion with most similar goals (speci­fied in the by­laws; or se­lected by the pre­vi­ous gov­ern­ing body as their last act if the speci­fied or­ga­ni­za­tion no longer ex­ists).

  The rea­son for this ageist rule was that we saw a few non-prof­its where the ex­ist­ing mem­ber base grad­u­ally lost con­tact with the out­side world, lost the abil­ity to re­cruit new mem­bers, and grad­u­ally be­came a club of old peo­ple who spent most of their time rem­i­nisc­ing about the glo­ri­ous past, barely do­ing any ac­tivity any­more. So we wanted to block this op­tion of “end­ing with a whim­per”. If the or­ga­ni­za­tion fails to at­tract N skil­led young mem­bers for a decade, it prob­a­bly fails to achieve its origi­nal goals (which ex­plic­itly in­cluded ed­u­ca­tion and out­reach), so it needs to wake up… or die quickly so that the vac­uum be­comes ex­plicit.

  There was no age limit for mem­ber­ship, or the non-gov­ern­ing roles, so the or­ga­ni­za­tion didn’t have to lose ex­per­tise. Mem­ber above 30 could still re­main in any tech­ni­cal role. But the or­ga­ni­za­tion as a whole needed to pay at­ten­tion to re­cruit­ment of new mem­bers, at least enough to fulfill the quota for the gov­ern­ing body.

  Al­most 20 years later, the or­ga­ni­za­tion still ex­ists and works ac­cord­ing to the origi­nal plan.

  (Not pro­vid­ing a link here, be­cause I am no longer ac­tive in the non-profit, and it is un­re­lated to ra­tio­nal­ity.)

• Viliam 24 Jun 2020 20:13 UTC

  7 points

  in reply to: siclabomines’s comment on: [META] Build­ing a whisper net­work.

  If log-in is re­quired to read posts, I am afraid there would be no new users. How would any­one find out that the in­ter­est­ing de­bate ex­ists in the first place? But if you have no users, there is no one to talk to.

• Viliam 24 Jun 2020 19:52 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: AllAmericanBreakfast’s comment on: Half-Baked Prod­ucts and Idea Kernels

  At the be­gin­ning of the pro­ject, ask your­self this:

  • do I know all rele­vant facts about the planned pro­ject?

  • what is the chance that some­thing is wrong, be­cause the cus­tomer didn’t think about their needs suffi­ciently, or for­got some­thing, or there was a mis­com­mu­ni­ca­tion with the cus­tomer?

  • what is the chance that dur­ing the pro­ject ei­ther the cus­tomer will change his mind, or the ex­ter­nal situ­a­tion will change so that the cus­tomer will need some­thing differ­ent than origi­nally planned?

  If you are con­fi­dent that you know all you need to know, and the situ­a­tion is un­likely to change, then I would agree: a week of plan­ning can save a month of cod­ing.

  Prob­lem is that this type of situ­a­tion hap­pens fre­quently at school, but rarely in real life. Dur­ing 15 years of my ca­reer, it hap­pened to me twice. Those were the best pro­jects in my life. I did some re­search and plan­ning first, then wrote the soft­ware ac­cord­ing to the plan. Re­laxed pace, low stress. Those were the good times.

  Un­for­tu­nately, most situ­a­tions are differ­ent. Some­times there are good rea­sons. Most of the time, in my opinion, some­one just didn’t do their job prop­erly, but it’s your prob­lem any­way, be­cause as a soft­ware de­vel­oper you are at the end of the chain. You have two op­tions: start your own com­pany, or de­velop proper learned hel­pless­ness and ac­cept the lack of anal­y­sis and plan­ning as a fact of life.

  Yes, this opinion is con­tro­ver­sial. What hap­pened, in my opinion, is that at first, there were good in­sights like “mis­takes hap­pen, cir­cum­stances change, we should pro­gram in a way that al­lows us to flex­ibly adapt”. How­ever, when this be­came com­mon knowl­edge, com­pa­nies started us­ing it as an ex­cuse to not even try. Why bother do­ing anal­y­sis, if you can just ran­domly throw facts at pro­gram­mers, and they are sup­posed to flex­ibly adapt? What was origi­nally meant as a way to avoid dis­asters be­came the new nor­mal.

  Now peo­ple talk a lot about be­ing “ag­ile”. But if you study some ag­ile method­olo­gies, and then look at what com­pa­nies are ac­tu­ally do­ing, you will no­tice that they usu­ally choose a sub­set that is most con­ve­nient for the man­age­ment. The parts they choose are “no big anal­y­sis” and “daily meet­ings”. The parts they ig­nore are “no dead­lines” and “the team de­cides their own speed”. (With au­to­mated test­ing they usu­ally go halfway: it is im­por­tant enough so that there is no need to hire spe­cial­ized testers, but it is not im­por­tant enough to al­lo­cate a part of bud­get to ac­tu­ally do­ing it. So you end up with 5% code cov­er­age and no test­ing, and if some­thing breaks in pro­duc­tion, it’s the de­vel­oper’s fault. Or no one’s fault.) This is how you get the usual pseudo-ag­ile, where no one makes proper anal­y­sis at the be­gin­ning, but they still spec­ify the dead­lines when the yet-un­known func­tion­al­ity must be com­pleted. Now the team is free to choose which fea­tures they im­ple­ment on which week, un­der the as­sump­tion that af­ter six months they will im­ple­ment all of them, in­clud­ing the ones even the man­age­ment doesn’t know about yet.

  Yep, I am quite burned out. Seen too much bul­lshit to be­lieve the usual ex­cuses.

  Any­way, even on shorter scale it makes sense to plan first and code later. If your “sprint” takes two weeks, it still makes sense to spend the first day think­ing care­fully about what you are go­ing to do. But again, the man­age­ment usu­ally prefers to see your fingers mov­ing. Think­ing with­out typ­ing may re­sult in greater pro­duc­tivity, but if of­ten cre­ates a bad im­pres­sion. And where pro­duc­tivity is hard to mea­sure, the im­pres­sions are ev­ery­thing.