Viliam

Karma: 23,149

Viliam 5 Dec 2024 15:22 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: sarahconstantin’s comment on: sarahconstantin’s Shortform
Gena Gorlin hosts a discussion on “psychological safety”
Good point in comments, that different people see different (sometimes opposite) things necessary for psychological safety. For some, it means they can speak candidly about whatever they think and feel. For others, it means that some things cannot be said in their presence.
I think, you can make it both, as long as it is one-sided, e.g. in a therapy, where the client could say anything, and the therapist would be careful about their feedback.
But this wouldn’t work at a workplace or any other larger group… unless you split people into “those who are safe” and “those who have a duty to make them feel safe”, and even then, maybe someone in the former group could make someone else from the same group feel unsafe.
You make a good point that it is not enough for your boss to tell you “you can speak freely”, you must also believe that it is true. (I also have a negative experience here: I was told to speak freely; I did; it had consequences.) This would probably sound more credible if other colleagues are already speaking freely. Also, if you generally don’t feel like your job is at risk somehow. For example, if your performance is below the average (and by definition, half of the team is like that), you might believe that neither your performance nor the candor alone would get you fired, but their combination would.

Viliam 5 Dec 2024 14:14 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: espoire’s comment on: AI romantic partners will harm society if they go unregulated
I think that some of these cases can only be solved by having more than 2 kids on average. I mean, depending on circumstances, there can be more of fewer mental illnesses, more of fewer people who decide to be childless, et cetera, but it is definitely not realistic that the number will be literally zero. So if everyone assumes that having more than 2 kids is somehow weird, then in long term the society dies out, it’s just a question of sooner or later. (And I am saying this as a person who has 2 kids. Spent too much time finding the right partner.) On the other hand, if people had 3 or more kids on average, we could have ¹⁄₃ of people remain childless, for whatever reason, and the population would go on. People probably don’t realize, if they only have 1 child, how much pressure they put on it: if the child won’t have kids for any reason, their genetic line just went extinct.
I find it ironic how both carelessness (“carpe diem, there will always be more time to have kids”) and carefulness (“it would be irresponsible to have children before I have my own house, a reliable partner, and plenty of savings”) can in practice lead to the same result.
People also don’t realize, until it is too late, how the dating market changes over time. The attractive partners who are interested in having a family are taken out of the dating market first, because if you want to start a big family and you are attractive, nothing prevents you from doing it right after university. So when you are approaching 40, people who are unattractive, problematic, don’t want to have children, or are already divorced with children are over-represented at the dating market.

Viliam 5 Dec 2024 13:50 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Towards_Keeperhood’s comment on: Orca communication project—seeking feedback (and collaborators)
There is a website for learning Esperanto, lernu.net; it has a section for grammar; the relevant chapters are: prepositions (spatial, temporal), “table words”, word class endings, suffixes, prefixes, affixes. The division feels somewhat artificial, because most of the prefixes/affixes/suffixes are also words on their own.
In Esperanto, all nouns end with “-o”, adjectives end with “-a”, adverbs end with “-e”, verbs in infinitive end with “-i”, verbs in past/present/future tense end with “-is/-as/-os”, etc. This system allows you take almost any word and make a noun / adjective / adverb / verb out of it. And conversely, you can take a word, remove the ending, and use it as a prefix or suffix for something. So you have e.g. “-aĵ-” listed as a suffix, but “aĵo” (“a thing”) is a normal word, it is just used very often in a suffix-like way, for example “trinki” (“to drink”) - “trinkaĵo” (“a beverage”, that is a-thing-to-drink).
You can generally take two words and glue them together, like peanut butter = arakidbutero (which I just made up, but it is a valid word and every Esperanto speaker would recognize what is means), only with long words it is somewhat clumsy and with short ones which are frequently used it comes naturally.
You will probably like the “table words” (ironically, the page does not show them arranged in a table, which is what every Esperanto textbook would do). They consist of the first part, which in English would be something like “wh-”, “th-”, “some-”, “all-”, “no-”, and the second part, which is English would be something like “-person”, “-thing”, “-location”, “-time”, “-cause”, etc; and by combining you get “wh+person = who”, “wh+thing = what”, “wh+cause = why”; “some+person = someone”, “some+thing = something”, “some+cause = for some reason”, etc., only in Esperanto this is fully regular.
Also, see Wikipedia. More sources: Reta Vortaro (index of English words); some music to listen.
Uhm, one more thing which may or may not be obvious depending on which languages you speak: It makes things a lot easier if one written character always corresponds to one sound and vice versa.

Viliam 5 Dec 2024 9:51 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Towards_Keeperhood’s comment on: Orca communication project—seeking feedback (and collaborators)
Ah, thanks for clarification.
It seems to me that the main lesson from constructed languages is that you can’t make everyone happy. Whatever choice you make, people who have “decades of experience designing constructed languages” will write scathing reviews; but the same thing will also happen if you make the opposite choice. Furthermore, language is inherently a social thing and network effect matters a lot—if your language is 10% better than an existing one, don’t be surprised if people refuse to switch to it, because the 10% improvement is not worth losing the community and resources that exist around the old one. (And that’s assuming that people would agree that the improvement actually is an improvement, which is very unlikely.)
Starting with phonemes: You choose a set of them, and then it turns out that there are people on this planet who have a difficulty distinguishing and pronouncing them (e.g. Japanese have a problem with L/R in Esperanto). But the fewer you choose, the longer will be your words. Is it okay to use diphthongs, or to have multiple consonants (how many?) after each other?
(Now this depends on your motivation. If you want everyone to be able to use the language, this matters. If you want to invent a language that a race of kobolds in your fantasy novel will use, it doesn’t matter.)
I think the rule “if you can naturally compose a word out of two or more existing parts, do not invent an extra word” is a good one. Makes the dictionary shorter and the language easier to remember. This is not as obvious as it sounds. Does “a tool for flying” refer to a wing, or an airplane? In Esperanto, it’s the wing. So I prefer to think of these things as mnemotechnic tools; sometimes the meaning is unambiguous, sometimes you have to specify “this construction refers to A, not to B”. Useful word-parts from Esperanto are “big”, “small”, “tool for X”, ” someone who is X”, “become X”, “make someone/something X”, “place for X”, etc. There is no separate category for words-used-as-modifiers; any of them can be used as a standalone word, it just happens that some of them are very useful for composing. But let’s not confuse the function with the form: you can achieve the same effect by agglutinating the words or just putting them next to each other, “smallapple” is not necessarily an improvement over “small apple”.
The painful part is, how do the words relate to each other? Is it like in English, where if you put several ambiguous words next to each other, the last one plays a role of a noun, and the previous ones play a role of adjectives? (That is, “a house cat” is a cat, which lives in a house, while “a cat house” is a house, which was built for cats.) Or is the word order quite flexible, and something else is used to figure this out? Maybe there are no ambiguous-role words, like in Esperanto where all nouns end with “-o” and all adjectives end with “-a” (so you would naturally say “doma kato” and “kata domo”, but if you happen to say “kato doma” or “domo kata” the meaning is still clear). This still leaves the problem of distinguishing the subject from object (because both of them nouns). Fixed word order? Preposition? Suffix? By the way, prepositions are generally a tricky topic when learning a foreign language, because there are just too many possible meanings we want them to use for, so the same preposition is used for several different meanings that are maybe metaphorically connected, but another language organizes this differently. For example, it is okay to use spatial metaphors for time, e.g. is “before” kinda the same thing as “in front of”? (Both would be “antaŭ” in Esperanto.) With spatial directions, does it matter whether something is near or far (“on” vs “above”), static or moving (“above” vs “over”, “in” vs “into”)? I think English is not even consistent here, or maybe that’s just my bad English, for example “on” + “above” vs “under”, or “in” + “into” vs “out”. This could be somewhat regularized by composing the prepositions (or suffixes, or whatever). Also, you can compose the prepositions with other things, for example in Esperanto: “en” = in, “ena” = inner, “eno” = interior, “ene” = inside (adverb), “enigi” = enter, “enigo” = insertion, “enigilo” = input device.
I think the composition system is done quite well in Esperanto, although I am sure it could be 10% improved. (Also, at some moment you get limited by the inherent ambiguity of human concepts.)
Sorry, I could go on forever… if you have a specific question about Esperanto, feel free to ask.

Viliam 4 Dec 2024 10:37 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: Davidmanheim’s comment on: Do simulacra dream of digital sheep?
Yeah, maybe I misunderstood the part about the molecules of gas “representing” the states of Turing machine, but my first reaction is that it’s not enough to declare that X represents Y, it must also be true that the functionality of X corresponds to the functionality of Y.
I can say that my sock is a calculator, and that this thread represents the number 2 and this thread represents the number 3, but unless it somehow actually calculates 2+3, such analogy is useless.
Similarly, it is not enough to say that a position of a molecule represents a state of a Turing machine, there must also be a way how the rules of the TM actually constrain the movement of the molecule.

Viliam 4 Dec 2024 10:16 UTC
3 points
3
on: A Paradox of Simulated Suffering
Is the link to the paper missing, or is this just an outline of a paper you are planning to write?

Viliam 4 Dec 2024 10:03 UTC
3 points
0
on: Orca communication project—seeking feedback (and collaborators)
I’m interested in learning about how different languages are structured, especially Esparanto/Ido and Lojban
I don’t think it will help you to communicate with orcas, but okay.
Esperanto/Ido are more regular that natural languages, simply because languages gradually collect things that are not strictly necessary, such as synonyms, different declinations for different classes of words, or taking one word from one language and then another related word from a different language. For example, in English, compare the etymologies of “see” and “visible”. But the concepts are related, so wouldn’t it be easier to just say “see-able” instead? If you remove these kinds of irregularities (each of them sounds like not a big deal, but those “not big deals” accumulate)… you end up with a language that is 10x easier to learn and remember, while being able to express the same concepts. But it’s essentially still the same thing, only simpler.
I am less familiar with Lojban, but I think the original idea was to make it more precise, kinda like a computer language. But the actual design decisions seem to me more like “Hollywood rationality” or “cargo cult”; making yourself superficially sound more like a computer does not necessarily give you the computer-like clarity or efficiency. For example, all nouns have to be exactly 5 letters long. Uhm, interesting, but what improvement exactly do you think is achieved by that? Or, the original version required you to specify all parameters for words, for example you couldn’t say “go” without specifying where from, where to, by what means, through what, and when (or something like that, maybe I got some of the parameters wrong), in given order. Uhm, interesting, but what if you do not want to specify some of those things; like, if you translate from English to Lojban, and the original text did not contain that information? So you say things like “I am going from unspecified to school through unspecified by unspecified at unspecified”. I guess it is nice to be reminded what exactly is unspecified, but if you talk like this all the time, it becomes pretty annoying. So the language was updated to contain something like prepositions, but reinvented badly—instead of specifying the relation, they specify the numeric order of the parameter—so the sentence now sounds like “I am going #2 school”, because the #2 parameter for “to go” is “where do you go to” (but for a different verb, the destination could be the #1 or #3 parameter, so you need to remember the exact order of the parameters for each verb separately). Ironically, if we follow the analogy with the programming languages, what we would need here is the named parameters from Python. (But that is basically reinventing prepositions.) And so on; it seems to me that the language design contains many ideas that sound impressive, but the actual use… uhm, I am not sure whether someone actually uses the language, so you would have to ask those.
But most likely, this will all be irrelevant for orcas. Their languages may be regular or irregular, with fixed or random word order, or maybe with some categories that do not exist in human languages.

Viliam 4 Dec 2024 9:28 UTC
3 points
2
in reply to: Ben Pace’s comment on: Linkpost: Rat Traps by Sheon Han in Asterisk Mag
Yeah, I am not even sure what was the point of the article. What is the thing we are supposed to update about? Writing in a different style, or changing our opinions (about what exactly?), or finding completely new topics to talk about so that we are not boring the article author, or...?

Viliam 3 Dec 2024 17:32 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Gesild Muka’s comment on: Fertility Roundup #4
If you already live in a city, I think you are unlikely to move away to start the family at a cheaper place. You still need to keep a job, and city is where the jobs are.
So the necessary amount of money is:
- to buy (not rent) a place to live
- in a city
- with at least three rooms
- (optionally) enough that the wife can stay at home with kids, if necessary
Hm, maybe we could build a lot of new apartments, and sell them for a subsidized price to families with small children. With the condition that they cannot sell the apartment for N years, or they need to pay the subsidy back. Also, build kindergartens near the apartments (maybe even in the same buildings).

Viliam 3 Dec 2024 17:22 UTC
8 points
0
on: Fertility Roundup #4
Paid sick leave decreases, rather than increases, fertility.
Is that correlation or causation? Like, maybe there is some X that decreases fertility and makes states more likely to legislate paid sick leave.
Also, sorry I am not familiar with English terminology here, does “sick leave” only apply to women who are sick, or also women who are at home with their sick children? Because if it’s the latter, the question is what is the alternative? Suppose you have a sick child and no way to take a break from your work, would you… hire a babysitter? ask the grandma to babysit? become a stay at home mom? Maybe it’s women staying at home, or people keeping good relations with their parents (because they need them to babysit their kids) that lead to people having more children.
Also, people can send their sick children to schools and kindergartens (if it is nothing too serious), if there is no other option. And if everyone knows that there is no other option, it becomes socially acceptable. Legislate sick leave, and suddenly it is no longer socially acceptable. Now the children’s sickness becomes more expensive for the parents, making children in general more expensive.
Hungary-like fertility policies flatly don’t work.
The explanation seems correct to me. Assuming that we (Slovakia) have a tax system similar to Hungary, it means that only a small part of “the part of your income the state takes from you” is called “tax”; the majority of it is called “social insurance” and “health insurance”. But it is not insurance in the literal sense of “your payment is proportional to the risk”; it is just another redistributive mechanism. You have twice the salary, you pay twice the health insurance, but receive exactly the same health care as anyone else. Also, the “tax” part is progressive, that is with a very small income you pay nothing, and then you pay more; but the “insurance” part is a more or less fixed fraction of your income. So “no tax” in practice means about zero difference if you get the minimal wage (because you wouldn’t be paying “tax” anyway, only “insurance”), and it is a difference between maybe 40% and 50% of your salary taken away at the high income levels. It’s definitely not what it sounds like.
The $30 direct payment and the $100 tax reduction can be important, for the kind of people in Eastern Europe who are not software developers, but the “no tax” part is only designed to sound impressive. Also, you start to get it too late (a few years after your last child was born), so it has no impact on the decision to start the family. And I suspect that starting the family young is the important thing if you want to have many kids.
Here are my policy proposals:
1) Lower the retirement age for people who have more kids, both men and women. The advantage is that this will appeal more to people with long-term thinking.
2) Make a law that companies have to provide part-time work opportunities. I guess this is outside the Overton window in USA, but European countries could do this. The reason is that big families traditionally meant that the mom stayed at home; you probably can’t make men stay at home instead because it is still women who get pregnant so that would mean losing both sources of income for the few months; but having both parents work part-time could be functionally equivalent.
If we only let ‘model parents’ have kids there won’t be many kids.
Exactly. In my experience, few people feel like model parents, because everyone made some mistake at some point; and also when people compare against each other, one is better at X, the other is better at Y, both can feel bad about it. For example, my kids are smart and well behaved and know a lot about computers, but maybe they should have better social skills and spend more time in the nature, so we worry about that; and then there are families with extraverted children who have a lot of fun outside, and they are worried about the grades at school.
I lived in homes with 2 different girls who became mothers at age 16, then both had another kid at 18, and another in their 20s (all different fathers). Interestingly, they had daughters only.
There probably is an evolutionary adaptation that influences (at least probabilistically) the child’s sex depending on the social situation. From the perspective of reproduction, girls are the conservative choice, boys are “all or nothing”. (Like, maybe not now, but definitely in our evolutionary past. A few men were chieftains and had plenty of wives and plenty of kids with them; most men died young in a battle. Women mostly had a few kids each.) So if your children are going to be rich and powerful, it makes more sense to have boys; if they are likely to be poor, it makes more sense to have girls. If you are a young woman who has a problem to keep a partner, yes, your children are likely to be poor. Unless they inherit the genes of some superior alpha male.
(This is not a thing discussed in a politically correct society these days, but the word “interestingly” suggests surprise, and surprise suggests having a blind spot in your model of the world. I am trying to fill in the gap.)
Has anyone ever talked to you about how aging changes your fertility? She said no. No one. Not one person.
Well, I would expect to get yelled at a lot and be called a sexist if I ever dared to mention this out loud. Then someone would mention that they actually know a woman who had a child at her 60s… well, they do not exactly know her in person, but they have read about her in a newspaper… Then everyone would clap.
You can also have the situation in between, when people are vaguely aware that too old is bad for fertility, but can’t translate it to numbers, whether “too old” means 30 or 40 or 50 or maybe 60. So they kinda know it, but at no moment of their life they consider themselves too close to being “too old”. Because as you get older, your perspective shifts. (Though there seems to be a Shelling point for women in some cultures to panic about marriage when they approach 30.)
The reviewer here noted that the marginal cost of additional children seems to decline. That has been my experience as well. There are dire warnings that two is more than twice as hard as one, or three will be so much harder than two.
In my experience, two is much harder than one when they are small (below school age). They are too incompatible, and you lose the option of “one parent babysits while the other takes a break”. When they reach the age that they can nicely play with each other, the costs of parenting become sublinear. Cooking for two kids is not more difficult than cooking for one (unless they have allergies), if you teach something one child, they will be often happy to teach the siblings, etc.
Your childcare regulations must be really harmful if parents respond by having noticeably fewer children.
At some places it is almost impossible to build new kindergartens; the regulations are too strict, many existing ones simply got grandfathered in.
The obvious response to the situation in South Korea would be to opt out of it. Accept that your children might be low status in the eyes of others, but if you can pass on the willingness to accept this and keep going, you inherit the country. [...] Alas, this is not a popular way of thinking.
Maybe there are some risks? Like, you will have a large low-status family, maybe even find a few friends that will do the same thing, so you are now a subculture… and a decade later, suddenly the social service comes and takes away your kids, using “they are so many, and so low-status” as evidence for you being a horrible parent?
(Not sure how much this is actually a risk in South Korea, but I have heard similar stories about Sweden. Doing things differently than the majority of people is… not technically illegal, but… can have consequences.)
Here Johann Kurtz extends the argument that status is the thing that counts, and that the newly low status of stay at home moms is the thing we have to fight. This seems super doable if we decide that we care. The issue is that so far we don’t care enough.
I see two status-lowering forces around me. One is the pressure to be a perfect parent. It is assumed that proper parenting takes a lot of money and time, so if you have too many kids (more than two? depends on whom you ask), you are not giving them enough, which makes you an irresponsible parent. (Perhaps you are too dumb to use birth control properly?) Here the Caplan’s book could change minds. The other force is, uhm, how to put it, feminism. Like, it is not enough to give women the choice of a career, you must also actively make sure that they take it, by shaming those who don’t. Let me quote a popular song that used to play here in the radio twenty years ago almost every day, very popular among young wannabe feminists. (translation mine)
“I don’t want to be a little domestic woman / and I don’t want to get married at all / I don’t want to be a wife and have stress / I don’t want to have a husband and five children // I don’t want to behave sensibly / and say no to all men / and be every Wednesday at a women’s club / that is not for me, that is a bad dream // To live like an artificial flower / and wait for someone to pollinate me / to be nice and good / I hope that won’t happen to me.”
Well, many of them got their wish now, and avoided the dreaded fate of “a little domestic woman”. Not sure how many actually enjoy it. (Also, fascinating frame control: a woman having kids is “like an artificial flower”, i.e. unnatural. Seriously?)
there is discussion of raising taxes on childless families
This could be one of those ideas that sound good if you haven’t spent 30 seconds actually thinking about it. Every person with children was previously childless. Taxing childless people doesn’t just mean “taxing people who never want to have children”. It also means e.g. “taxing people who don’t have children yet—but want to have them as soon as they save enough money to buy their own house”. The more you tax them, the later (or possibly never) that happens.
Possible solution: the money you pay as the childlessness tax is saved in a special personal account, and you get that money back after your first child is born (or maybe 50% at first child, 30% at second, 20% at third).
Those policies [of TMSC] seem fine, but not exceptional, and as others noted company benefits don’t seem to move fertility decisions much. Total compensation matters far more.
Yeah, it seems like the policies should not have such large effect. But maybe it is the kind of situation where providing many things together has stronger impact than providing them separately. Maternity leave and paternity leave and child subsidy and a kindergarten at workplace… and if that starts a wave of people having kids, then you also have many colleagues who have kids, and you are not damaging your career at the company. Basically, the effect of taking all these benefits at the same time, and being surrounded by people who do the same. Also, the child subsidy gives me the impression that the company really wants you to have kids; while e.g. the kindergarten could be perceived as merely removing an obstacle so that you can better focus on your job.
Sometimes the implementation details matter a lot. For example, I had a job that provided a subsidized kindergarten, but… the company paid 50% of the cost, and the kindergarten was twice as expensive as the private alternative next door, so ultimately I paid the same. (The benefit was that having the kindergarten at the same building made the logistic easier.) So it was the kind of a thing that is more impressive on paper than in reality. It would be quite different if the company paid e.g. 75% of the cost, or if the kindergarten would cost the same as the alternatives. I don’t know the numbers for TMSC, so I don’t know if this was the case.
Why is the Israeli birth rate so high, even outside religious communities? The hypothesis offered here is that those religious communities are integrated with more secular ones
I think it’s not just status, but generally how things are set up. A society where people have kids is a society that provides services for people who have kids. Are apartments built small or large? Is it acceptable to bring a child to a restaurant? Does the restaurant offer some toys for the kids, and a place to sit down and play with them? Will people throw a hissy fit if they see someone breastfeeding? If your child is often sick and you take too many leave days to care for it, will you get fired (for completely “unrelated” reasons, of course)? If someone organizes a local rationality meetup, is it possible to bring your kids along?
People with kids can make having kids normal; and when having kids is normal, it is easier to have kids.
if you’re gonna spend a few billion on a harebrained scheme that might not work...
If we are going to literally pay people for having kids, then if the scheme won’t work, at least we won’t spend too many billions, I guess.
half the comments are saying, yes, you find this woman in a church, obviously.
My advice would be to find a woman who has friends who have many (more than two) kids. Chances are, those will be religious people, but she doesn’t have to be.
Step one, don’t be an asshole, and make some religious friends… who will know that you are an atheist (i.e. don’t pretend to be something that you are not). Especially some religious friends who have kids, but chances are this will happen to many religious friends sooner or later anyway. Then, meet their friends. Chances are, you will meet a woman who is also an atheist, but is exposed to people who have kids, which makes her likely to copy their lifestyle.
(Which is how I met my wife, by the way.)

Viliam 3 Dec 2024 9:09 UTC
4 points
2
in reply to: RHollerith’s comment on: Is malice a real emotion?
it is probably much more common for a person to just be unaware of his or her malicious motivations.
These things are so difficult to figure out. Each of us lives in a “bubble” of their own brain; we probably also choose our friends based on psychological compatibility; some emotions are culturally acceptable to express and some are not; some things are culturally acceptable to believe about others and some are not; and adding the possibility of not being aware of one’s own feelings on top of that… how can people ever come to a conclusion about these things?
People are likely to err a lot in both directions. On one hand, it is tempting to think that members of the outgroup spend their entire days thinking about how to hurt us, when it is psychologically more likely that they spend 99% of their time focusing on themselves, just like we (at least the more sane among us) do. On the other hand, in the egalitarian society, it is a taboo to consider too seriously the thought that someone might be psychologically different, despite that we know as a fact that there are many kinds of neurodivergence and mental illness.
Also, it is not obvious that when people use the same word, they mean the same thing. Even with a definition like “an actual intention to do the particular kind of harm”, but why exactly? Could be as a revenge (for actual or imaginary transgressions). Could be because I want to get something good as a result (not just theft, but also things like hurting a competitor). Could be something that is difficult to explain (“I just hate his face”), which probably has some evolutionary reason, but having an adaptation to do X is different from wanting to do X (including unconsciously). Is there another obvious option that I missed here?
Then we could argue exact definitions, like “it is not actually malice, if the motivation was to get some benefit out of it”; but of course if we go in that direction too far, no X is ever actually X, because it is always causally connected to something.

Viliam 3 Dec 2024 8:03 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Eneasz’s comment on: Eneasz’s Shortform
Could we possibly use it the other way round? I am often distracted from thinking deeply by having to think about other things. Like you mentioned, focusing on 4+ projects at the same time. So, maybe choose 1 of those projects to give all your human attention… and let the AI handle the rest?

Viliam 3 Dec 2024 7:47 UTC
3 points
1
in reply to: CronoDAS’s comment on: Ayn Rand’s model of “living money”; and an upside of burnout
Could possibly this be what they call ADHD?
(By the way, I seem to have a milder form of this. If the consequences are sufficiently bad or sufficiently near, like when there is deadline, I can make myself do the unpleasant thing. But things that have no external deadline… often just don’t happen, sometimes for years.)

Viliam 2 Dec 2024 8:42 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: notfnofn’s comment on: Why does ChatGPT throw an error when outputting “David Mayer”?
Maybe ChatGPT is recently more likely to stop mid-sentence.
Something like that happened to me recently on a completely different topic (I wanted to find an author of a poem based on a few lines I remembered), and the first answer just stopped in the middle; then I clicked refresh and received a full answer (factually wrong though). Can’t link the chat because I have already deleted it.

Viliam 2 Dec 2024 8:32 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: CstineSublime’s comment on: A Meritocracy of Taste
Computational costs make sense. I kinda assumed that if Google can calculate PageRank (a numeric value for every URL, depending on the content of documents in other URLs), calculating this would be a piece of cake. But I guess it’s the opposite.
PageRank can be calculated iteratively—you assign the same starting value 1 to all pages, and then just keep updating, and in theory if you keep doing it infinitely long, you will get the theoretically correct value, but if you check at any moment after finite time, at least the value will be something, and quite often it will be close enough to the theoretically correct value. It scales well.
On the other hand, similarity between users X and Y probably needs to be calculated individually for each pair of users. (I am not sure about this, maybe there also is a smart way to do that iteratively.)
If YouTube just puts me into a generic bag like “people from Slovakia”, or even a narrower one like “people from Slovakia who watch discussion videos”, that would explain a lot.

Viliam 1 Dec 2024 22:06 UTC
3 points
0
on: Teaching My Younger Self to Program: A case study of how I’d pass on my skill at self-learning
Starting with Scratch is also a nice option. The start is very fast, you can do the “arrow up moves forward, arrow down moves backwards, arrows left and right rotate, touching the bomb kills you” in a few minutes. You could learn from YouTube videos, your own experiments, and the games other people have published.
At some moment you will outgrow it, and move to Python or Java or C/C++. That is another lesson: you don’t need to stay with one programming language your whole life; actually you shouldn’t. Some things are optimized for beginners, other things are optimized for experts, use the one appropriate for the level you are at.
Learning from YouTube videos is something I have underestimated most of the time. Yes, YouTube is a waste of time, and videos are unnecessarily slow. But it may be a good idea to watch programming videos if you are tired and want to relax. Most things you already know, but once in a while there are some useful details you didn’t know.
The problem with HTML and Unity is that they keep dragging you in a certain very specialized direction that may not be relevant for most of what you want to do. HTML is about web pages, but even if you want your game online, you probably only want to paint on canvas, and respond to key and mouse events; 99% of HTML is useless. Unity is about 3D movement and collisions, which is nice if you want to make a 3D game, but unnecessarily complicated for anything else.

Viliam 1 Dec 2024 13:37 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Dentosal’s comment on: A Meritocracy of Taste
On YouTube I keep getting Russian propaganda videos recommended all the time, and I really don’t remember upvoting anything of that kind. So either YouTube does not use this algorithm (or maybe gives to “upvoted by people similar to you” much lower weight than “upvoted in general”), or there is some clever trick the authors of those videos use, but I am not sure what it could be.
On Facebook, I think people used this trick that they posted hundred cat videos, people upvoted them, and then they deleted the cat videos and posted some advertisement on their channel, and now the advertisement was shown to everyone, including “people you know liked this page”. But I think this should not be possible on YouTube, because you cannot change the videos once uploaded.
So… I don’t know. I wish YouTube created a bubble for me, but it seemingly does the opposite.

Viliam 30 Nov 2024 21:26 UTC
4 points
2
in reply to: aarongertler’s comment on: aarongertler’s Shortform
This is a horrifying story. I am still at the beginning, because it is very long, and I probably won’t finish it, but...
If I understand it correctly, a few decades ago American schools taught kids reading the proper way (which is now called “phonics”), and then some people invented a “better” way, which was basically… a combination of memorizing the text, and guessing the words you had a problem to ~~remember~~ read. Other strategies included trying to guess the word from the context, the picture at the story, the length of the word and its first and last letters.
And it seemed to work great… at very specific situations. If the teacher read a story to children first, their reading improved a lot. That’s because small children have insane memory skills, compared to adults, so if you read them a story once, they will memorize large parts of it. If you also teach them to just look at the first and the last letter of the word and try to guess what it is, that makes the recall almost perfect. So it seems like the method was experimentally verified!
Of course, the kids didn’t actually get good at reading texts they haven’t read before. Which is the point of reading.
(...some more points added as I read..)
Ironically, the wrong method started with its author observing the kids who were good and bad at reading, and asking “what do the kids who are good at reading do differently?”. And she concluded that the kids are reading so fast that there is no chance they could be actually reading every single letter and decoding every single sound… they must be guessing. Therefore, to teach other kids to be also good at reading, we much teach them to guess.
Which sounds kinda plausible… and also consider the fact that kids taught the wrong method are actually pretty good at reading (texts that someone else has already read to them). Would you be convinced?
Only a few years later, the invention of eye tracking showed that, actually, the good readers do read all the letters; they just do it very fast because they have automated the skill. But this only happens if you first teach them to do it the right way, and then they automate it. (If they automate the wrong way, the guessing, they will keep occasionally guessing wrong.)
To make things even more complicated, you can actually write books that the kids taught the wrong method can read fast, even if they have never heard them read before. You do that by using a very limited vocabulary, repeating the same few words over and over again in new combinations, so that looking at the first letter of the word already allows you to guess the word pretty reliably.
Of course, everything can become worse when politics gets involved. So, at some moment, some teachers who understood science tried to convince about it the president… George W. Bush. He listened to their arguments, agreed with them, and decided to fix education. But then 9/11 happened and he was distracted. Meanwhile, the fans of the guessing method used this to discredit phonics. “Do you really want to teach your kids the method that Bush endorses?” (Remember, most teachers are Democrats.) “Why don’t you trust the science instead?” (Of course, everyone can call their ideas “science”, and few people will actually verify that.)
And even at places where phonics was made mandatory, the proponents of the guessing method adapted by giving some lip service to phonics first, calling it one of many methods the children can use. But then, they just taught children to use the other methods (guessing from context, from word size, from the first and last letters).
Oh, it gets even better. At some moment the proponents of the guessing method invited some actual scientists to measure whether additional lessons in guessing improve kids’ reading. The conclusion of the scientists was that the additional lessons improve reading of stories that are accompanied with pictures, but do not improve reading of stories without pictures. This later got quoted as “independent scientists confirmed that the lessons improve reading”.

Viliam 30 Nov 2024 19:41 UTC
2 points
−4
on: A Meritocracy of Taste
I am surprised why social media companies don’t create individualized bubbles using the following algorithm: First find people who upvoted the things you upvoted, and downvoted the things you downvoted. Then show you the content those people upvoted that you haven’t seen yet. (Authors automatically upvote the content they submitted; which is how the new content gets its first upvote ) Add a little noise and sometimes show someone a completely random video; also show random videos if you run out of things to recommend.
Maybe trying to determine the best content is a mistake, and instead you should try to predict the best content for given user.
I guess the problem is with users who are not logged in, what should be showed to them? The simple option is to show the things with most upvotes; the second most simple option is to have special admin accounts who are displayed the most upvoted things and can upvote or downvote them, and then the anonymous user gets displayed the content that got most upvotes by the admin accounts. Or some combination of these two things.

Viliam 30 Nov 2024 18:03 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Noosphere89’s comment on: Noosphere89′s Shortform
the outcome they are imagining for online spaces without moderation of what people say is essentially a fabricated option
Yep. In real life, intelligent debate is already difficult because so many people are stupid and arrogant. But online this is multiplied by the fact that during the time that takes it for a smart person to think about a topic and write a meaningful comment, an idiot can write hundreds of comments.
And that’s before we get to organized posting, where you pay minimum wage to dozens of people to create accounts on hundreds of websites, and post the “opinions” they receive each morning by e-mail. (And if this isn’t already automated, it will be soon.)
So an unmoderated space in practice means “whoever can vomit their insults faster, wins”.
I’m of the opinion that democracies tolerably work in a pretty narrow range of conditions
One problem is that a large part of the population is idiots, and it is relatively easy to weaponize them. In the past we were mostly protected by the fact that the idiots were difficult to reach. Then we got mass media, which made it easy to weaponize the idiots in your country. Then we got internet, which made it easy to weaponize the idiots in other countries. It took some time for internet to evolve from “that mysterious thing the nerds use” to “the place where the average people spend a large part of their day”, but now we are there.