Viliam

• Viliam 16 May 2019 23:43 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: Raemon's comment on: The Village and The Mission

  “if you pro­pose a new thing, es­pe­cially a new con­fus­ing thing, there’s a good chance you’ll get a dis­pro­por­tionate amount of vo­cal op­po­si­tion com­pared to sup­port” … if I in­ter­preted wrong please cor­rect me

  Yes, this is how I meant it, but in con­text of Less Wrong es­pe­cially when the new thing is about ra­tio­nal­ist hav­ing some emo­tional ex­pe­rience and be­com­ing closer to each other. Even if it is an ob­vi­ously vol­un­tary ac­tivity no one is pres­sured to join. Unusual and con­fus­ing sug­ges­tions that would in­volve study­ing math or play­ing poker would not get that in­ten­sity of re­ac­tion.

  (The sur­pris­ing part is why singing songs to­gether or liv­ing in the Dragon Army house is per­ceived as more dan­ger­ous than polyamory. But maybe be­cause the idea of polyamory came first, so the peo­ple who strongly ob­jected to that were already gone when the other ideas came.)

• Viliam 16 May 2019 23:32 UTC

  7 points

  in reply to: Said Achmiz's comment on: The Village and The Mission

  Your com­ment is, I’m afraid, full of the most egre­gious strawmen

  Look­ing at the dis­cus­sion you linked… I ad­mit I can­not find the hor­rible ex­am­ples my mind keeps tel­ling me I have seen. So, maybe I was wrong. Or maybe it was a differ­ent ar­ti­cle, dunno. A few nega­tive com­ments were deleted; but those were all writ­ten by the same per­son, so in ei­ther case they do not rep­re­sent a mass re­ac­tion. The re­main­ing com­ment clos­est to what I wanted to say is this one...

  The whole point of rit­u­als like this in re­li­gion is to switch off think­ing and get peo­ple go­ing with the flow. The epistemic dan­ger should be pretty ob­vi­ous. Ri­tual = ir­ra­tional. [1]

  ...but even that one is not too bad.

  It is only “a perfectly nor­mal thing” be­cause ev­ery­one who didn’t think it was perfectly nor­mal, has left! … It is a sim­ple case of evap­o­ra­tive cool­ing!

  This is a good point. What­ever the com­mu­nity does, if it causes the op­pos­ing peo­ple to leave, will be in hind­sight seen as the ob­vi­ously right thing to do (be­cause those who dis­agree have already left), even if in a par­allel Everett branch do­ing the op­po­site thing is seen as the ob­vi­ously right thing.

  I still feel weird about peo­ple who would leave a com­mu­nity just be­cause a few mem­bers of the com­mu­nity did sing a song to­gether. Also, peo­ple keep leav­ing for all kinds of rea­sons. I am pretty sure some have left be­cause of lack of emo­tional con­nec­tion, such as, uhm, do­ing things to­gether.

  Meta:

  Okay, at this mo­ment I feel quite con­fused about this com­ment I just wrote. Like, from cer­tain per­spec­tives it seems like you are right, and I am sim­ply re­fus­ing to say “oops”. At the very least, I failed to find a suffi­ciently hor­rible anti-Sols­tice com­ment.

  Yet, some­how, it is you say­ing that there were peo­ple who left the ra­tio­nal­ity move­ment be­cause of the Sols­tice rit­ual, which is the kind of hys­ter­i­cal re­ac­tion I tried to point at. (I can’t imag­ine my­self leav­ing a move­ment just be­cause a few of its mem­bers de­cided to meet and sing a song to­gether.)

• Viliam 15 May 2019 22:16 UTC

  18 points

  in reply to: ChristianKl's comment on: The Village and The Mission

  I had in mind the pro­pos­als to or­ga­nize (1) Sols­tice cel­e­bra­tion and (2) Dragon Army, on Less Wrong.

  From my per­spec­tive, both cases were “hey, I have an idea of a weird but po­ten­tially awe­some ac­tivity, here is an out­line, con­tact me if you are in­ter­ested”, and in both cases, the de­bate was mostly about why this is a hor­rible thing to do, be­cause only cultists would or­ga­nize a weird ac­tivity in real life.

  The Dragon Army pushed the Over­ton win­dow so far that now it makes difficult to re­mem­ber what ex­actly was so hor­rify­ing about the Sols­tice cel­e­bra­tion. But back then, the mere idea of singing to­gether was quite trig­ger­ing for a few peo­ple: singing is an ir­ra­tional ac­tivity, it ma­nipu­lates your emo­tions, it in­creases group co­he­sion which rubs con­trar­i­ans the wrong way, it’s what re­li­gious peo­ple do, yadda yadda yadda, there­fore meet­ing with a group of friends and singing a song to­gether means aban­don­ing your ra­tio­nal­ity for­ever.

  Now, the Sols­tice cel­e­bra­tion is a perfectly nor­mal thing, and no one freaks out about it any­more. And I sup­pose if there would be a sec­ond and third at­tempt to do some­thing like the Dragon Army, peo­ple would get used to that, too. But the re­ac­tions to the first at­tempts felt quite dis­cour­ag­ing.

• Viliam 15 May 2019 20:36 UTC

  9 points

  in reply to: Kaj_Sotala's comment on: The Village and The Mission

  peo­ple whose coal­i­tional mem­ber­ship is con­sti­tuted by their shared ad­her­ence to “ra­tio­nal,” sci­en­tific propo­si­tions have a prob­lem when—as is gen­er­ally the case—new in­for­ma­tion arises which re­quires be­lief re­vi­sion.

  My first re­ac­tion was that per­haps the com­mu­nity should be cen­tered around up­dat­ing on ev­i­dence rather than any spe­cific sci­ence.

  But of course, that can fail, too. For ex­am­ple, peo­ple can sig­nal their virtue by up­dat­ing on tinier and tinier pieces of ev­i­dence. Like, when the prob­a­bil­ity in­creases from 0.000001 to 0.0000011, peo­ple start yel­ling about how this changes ev­ery­thing, and if you say “huh, for me that is al­most no change at all”, you be­come the un­wor­thy one who re­fuses to up­date in face of ev­i­dence.

  (The peo­ple up­dat­ing on the tiny ev­i­dence most likely won’t even be tech­ni­cally cor­rect, be­cause pur­pose­fully look­ing for micro­scopic pieces of ev­i­dence will nat­u­rally in­tro­duce se­lec­tion bias and dou­ble count­ing.)

• Viliam 14 May 2019 23:22 UTC

  15 points

  in reply to: Raemon's comment on: The Village and The Mission

  Could some of this be con­nected to the “geek so­cial fal­la­cies”? Speci­fi­cally: some peo­ple seem to be a com­mu­nity ma­te­rial; some peo­ple seem cor­ro­sive to any com­mu­nity; most are prob­a­bly some­where on the spec­trum. If you try to make a com­mu­nity that in­cludes the cor­ro­sive peo­ple, it will quickly and in­evitably fall apart. How­ever, some com­mu­ni­ties have “in­clu­sion” as their ap­plause light, so it re­quires some de­gree of hypocrisy and tacit co­or­di­na­tion to nav­i­gate this suc­cess­fully.

  I sup­pose that even the re­li­gious com­mu­ni­ties who try to save ev­ery­one’s soul, are ul­ti­mately ex­clu­sive. This hap­pens in two ways:

  First, “do­ing some ac­tual work” filters out lazy peo­ple, or peo­ple who pre­fer talk­ing about things to ac­tu­ally do­ing things. There are peo­ple who could end­lessly talk about helping the poor; but if you ask for vol­un­teers who will cook the soup for the home­less, when the time comes to ac­tu­ally cook the soup, these talk­ers will not be there. Good!

  Se­cond, some peo­ple take more than they give, but you can bal­ance this by mak­ing “tak­ing” low sta­tus, and “giv­ing” high sta­tus; and then hav­ing the high-sta­tus peo­ple meet sep­a­rately. So you spend one af­ter­noon cook­ing the soup and giv­ing it to the home­less; but then you spend an­other af­ter­noon or two with the fel­low cooks in a place where the home­less peo­ple are not in­vited.

  So, on one level you have peo­ple who love ev­ery­one so much that they even spend their free time cook­ing soups for the home­less. But on an­other level, you have a clever al­gorithm to filter out a kind of elite—peo­ple who are al­tru­is­tic and will­ing to work—and have them net­work with each other, in ab­sence of the less wor­thy ones. No one men­tions this ex­plic­itly, be­cause de­bat­ing it ex­plic­itly would prob­a­bly ruin the effect, if peo­ple un­in­ter­ested in cook­ing soup for the home­less would start par­ti­ci­pat­ing any­way, be­cause they would re­al­ize the benefits of net­work­ing with al­tru­is­tic and hard-work­ing ones.

  I sus­pect that the athe­ist com­mu­nity meetup will be full of an­noy­ing and dis­agree­able peo­ple who would filter them­selves out from the “re­li­gious peo­ple cook­ing soup for the home­less” meetup. They don’t have to be all an­noy­ing and dis­agree­able, of course, but even a few of them can ruin the at­mo­sphere.

  Co­or­di­nat­ing on­line prob­a­bly also makes things worse. When you an­nounce an ac­tivity, peo­ple who dis­like the ac­tivity will give vo­cal feed­back, and you sud­denly find your­self in a de­bate with them, which is a com­plete waste of your time. As op­posed to an­nounc­ing the time and place on a flyer, so that peo­ple who are in­ter­ested will come, and the peo­ple who are not will stay at home.

  In my per­sonal ex­pe­rience, I found the high­est qual­ity peo­ple in var­i­ous vol­un­teer groups. Doesn’t mat­ter what: they could be cam­paign­ing for hu­man rights, or­ga­niz­ing a sum­mer camp for kids, prepar­ing ed­u­ca­tional re­form ma­te­ri­als, or mow­ing a meadow to save en­dan­gered plant species. Some of these ac­tivi­ties have spe­cific filters on pro­fes­sion or poli­ti­cal al­ign­ment, but each of them at the same times filters for… I am not sure I can de­scribe it cor­rectly, but it is a good filter.

• Viliam 14 May 2019 22:44 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Raemon's comment on: The Village and The Mission

  Get­ting a sense of who is already work­ing on what. …

  I would love to read an overview of things that are be­ing done, in the ra­tio­nal­ist com­mu­nity. By read­ing Less Wrong reg­u­larly, I am ex­posed to many ran­dom things, but I may have large blind spots. I would like to see the cu­rated big pic­ture.

  In ad­di­tion to big pic­ture (list of mee­tups or pod­casts or re­search groups), it would be also nice to have a database of helpful peo­ple (who or­ga­nize the mee­tups, or bring cook­ies), but the later should prob­a­bly not be pub­lic. I have heard sto­ries of peo­ple who come to ra­tio­nal­ist com­mu­nity with the goal of ex­tract­ing free work (un­der vague and non-com­mit­tal promises of im­prov­ing the world or con­tribut­ing to char­ity) from naive peo­ple. So, if some­one loves to bake cook­ies and bring them to mee­tups, it would be nice to give their con­tact to lo­cal meetup or­ga­niz­ers, but not to make it com­pletely pub­lic so that ran­dom par­a­sites will spam them. Maybe a triv­ial in­con­ve­nience of “show me the spe­cific work you have already done, be­fore I give you the list of con­tacts” would be enough.

• Viliam 14 May 2019 20:59 UTC

  7 points

  in reply to: Raemon's comment on: The Village and The Mission

  I would like to have a com­mu­nity that strives to be ra­tio­nal also “out­side the lab”. The words “pro­fes­sional bayesi­anism” feel like bayesi­anism within the lab. (I haven’t read the book, so per­haps I am mis­in­ter­pret­ing the au­thor’s in­tent.)

  Google seems to in­vest huge amounts of effort into mak­ing sure they have a good in­ter­nal com­mu­nity.

  That’s nice, but ul­ti­mately, if there is a ten­sion be­tween “what is bet­ter for you” and “what is bet­ter for Google”, Google will prob­a­bly choose the lat­ter. What could pos­si­bly be good for you but bad for Google? Think­ing for less than one minute I’d say: be­com­ing fi­nan­cially in­de­pen­dent, so you no longer have to work; build­ing your own startup; find­ing a spouse, hav­ing kids, and re­fus­ing to work over­time...

  Yeah, this is a fully gen­eral ar­gu­ment against any so­ciety, but it seems to me that a Village, sim­ply by not be­ing profit ori­ented, would have greater free­dom to op­ti­mize for the benefit of its mem­bers. For a busi­ness com­pany, ev­ery em­ployer is a cost. In a village, well-be­hav­ing cit­i­zens pay their own bills, and provide some value to each other, whether that value is greater or smaller, it is still pos­i­tive or zero.

  “Church” is some­thing that can con­tinues to suc­ceed even in a large town or city where peo­ple come and go more eas­ily (al­though I’m not con­fi­dent this is a sta­ble ar­range­ment – once you have large cities, atomic in­di­vi­d­u­al­ism and the grad­ual ero­sion of Church might be in­evitable)

  An im­por­tant part of be­ing in the Church is be­ing phys­i­cally pre­sent at its re­li­gious ac­tivi­ties, e.g. ev­ery Sun­day morn­ing. So even if you hap­pen to be sur­rounded mostly by non-be­liev­ers in your city, at least once in a week you be­come phys­i­cally sur­rounded by be­liev­ers. (A tem­po­rary Village.) Phys­i­cal prox­im­ity cre­ates the kind of emo­tions that in­ter­net can­not sub­sti­tute.

  Church is an “eu­kary­otic” or­ga­ni­za­tion: it has a bound­ary on the out­side (be­liev­ers vs non-be­liev­ers), but also in­side (clergy vs lay mem­bers). This slows down value shift: you can ac­cept many be­liev­ers, while only wor­ry­ing about value al­ign­ment of the clergy: po­ten­tial hereti­cal opinions of the lay mem­bers are just their per­sonal opinions, not the offi­cial teach­ing; if nec­es­sary, the clergy will make this clear in a co­or­di­nated way. Hav­ing stronger filter in the in­ner bound­ary al­lows you to have weaker filter on the outer bound­ary, be­cause there is no democ­racy in the outer cir­cle.

  Trans­lated to the lan­guage of the ar­ti­cle: Mis­sion can have mul­ti­ple Villages, but Village can only have one Mis­sion. As an ex­am­ple, if med­i­ta­tion be­comes pop­u­lar among some ra­tio­nal­ists, and they start go­ing to Bud­dhist re­treats and hang­ing out with Bud­dhist, and then they bring their nerdy Bud­dhist friends to ra­tio­nal­ity mee­tups… it should be clear that the ra­tio­nal­ist com­mu­nity is in ab­solutely no risk of be­com­ing a re­li­gious com­mu­nity, be­cause the mys­te­ri­ous bul­lshit of Bud­dhism will be re­jected (at least by the in­ner cir­cle) just like the mys­te­ri­ous bul­lshit of any other re­li­gion. Similarly when peo­ple will try to con­quer the ra­tio­nal­ist com­mu­nity for their poli­ti­cal fac­tion; but I be­lieve we are do­ing quite well here.

  You listen to ser­mons that es­tab­lish com­mon knowl­edge of what your peo­ple do-and-don’t-do.

  The im­por­tant thing here is that the ser­mons come from the top. They do not rep­re­sent the lat­est fash­ion­able con­trar­ian opinion. The Church pro­vides many things for its mem­bers, but free­dom to give ser­mons is not one of them.

  (To avoid mi­s­un­der­stand­ing: I am not prais­ing dic­ta­tor­ship for the dic­ta­tor­ship’s sake here. Rather, it is my ex­pe­rience from var­i­ous pro­jects, that there is a type of peo­ple who come to in­tro­duce con­tro­versy, but don’t con­tribute to the core mis­sion. Th­ese peo­ple will cause drama, and provide noth­ing use­ful in re­turn. If they win, they will only keep push­ing fur­ther; if they lose, they will rage­quit and maybe spend some time slan­der­ing you. It is nice to have a mechanism that stops them at the door. Even more im­por­tantly in a group that at­tracts so many con­trar­i­ans, and where “hey, you call your­selves ‘ra­tio­nal­ists’, but you ir­ra­tionally re­fuse my opinion be­fore you spent thou­sand hours de­bat­ing it thor­oughly?!” is a pow­er­ful ar­gu­ment. The ser­mons are a tool of co­or­di­na­tion, and co­or­di­na­tion is hard.)

• Viliam 14 May 2019 20:40 UTC

  7 points

  in reply to: Raemon's comment on: The Village and The Mission

  If Mis­sion re­quires a lot of work (or isn’t paid well, so you need an ex­tra job to pay your bills), peo­ple will have to re­duce their in­volve­ment when they have kids. And most peo­ple are go­ing to have kids at some mo­ment of their lives.

  On the other hand, Village with­out kids… should more prop­erly be called Ho­tel or Cam­pus.

  Thus, Village helps Mis­sion by keep­ing cur­rently in­ac­tive peo­ple close, so even if you can­not use their work at the mo­ment, you can still use some of their ex­per­tise. Also, the in­volve­ment doesn’t have to be “all or noth­ing”; peo­ple with school-age kids can be part-time in­volved.

  Mis­sion with­out Village will keep los­ing tacit knowl­edge, and will prob­a­bly have to make stronger pres­sure on keep­ing and re­cruit­ing mem­bers. (Which can be­come a pos­i­tive feed­back loop, if mem­bers start leav­ing be­cause of in­creased pres­sure, and the pres­sure in­creases as a re­ac­tion to the threat of los­ing mem­bers.)

• Viliam 9 May 2019 14:57 UTC

  11 points

  in reply to: Benquo's comment on: Hier­ar­chy and wings

  I am happy you posted it here. It sounds rea­son­able, and from my per­spec­tive it doesn’t feel mind­kil­ling.

  I have already as­sumed that state power is about tak­ing re­sources (or defend­ing from hav­ing more taken from you; but if you have the power to achieve that, most peo­ple won’t stop there). Say­ing that the right and the left are two differ­ent strate­gies of cre­at­ing coal­i­tions to achieve this goal, that sounds quite im­par­tial to me. Maybe I have men­tally ed­ited out some­thing offen­sive, dunno. But I like the defi­ni­tions of “the Schel­ling point of power” and “the nat­u­ral op­po­si­tion to the former” (this is how I ab­bre­vi­ate it for my­self). Definitely more use­ful than “the guys who would hy­po­thet­i­cally sit on the left/​right chair in the 18-th cen­tury French par­li­a­ment” or “it’s just com­pletely ran­dom coal­i­tions”.

  Two things I would like to add:

  1) This model seems to work for e.g. USA, but the situ­a­tion e.g. in post-com­mu­nist Eastern Europe is the other way round. The Schel­ling point of power is “let’s bring back com­mu­nism”, its nat­u­ral lead­ers be­ing the former ap­paratchiks and se­cret ser­vice officers (many of them, or their sons, still ac­tive in cur­rent army and po­lice). Yet, this is con­sid­ered “left-wing”. And “right-wing” is the hodge­podge of free mar­ket and re­li­gious fun­da­men­tal­ism and who­ever’s vi­sion of the fu­ture does not in­clude the re­turn of com­mu­nism.

  More ab­stractly, the Schel­ling point of power de­pends on the re­cent his­tor­i­cal events in given coun­try. If the pre­vi­ous mil­i­tary power self-iden­ti­fied as “left-wing”, the nam­ing gets re­verted.

  2) It seems pos­si­ble to go at least one level deeper in this anal­y­sis. You have the “nat­u­ral Schel­ling point”, and “its nat­u­ral op­po­si­tion” defined as peo­ple most likely to be op­pressed by the former. But even the op­po­si­tion op­presses some­one—there are “minori­ties within minori­ties”—and thus we can some­times get a sec­ond-or­der op­po­si­tion, which may ally it­self with the en­emy of their en­emy, de­spite not be­long­ing there “nat­u­rally”. Gen­er­ally, “en­emy of my en­emy” strat­egy can cre­ate weird coal­i­tions.

  To give a real-life ex­am­ple from Amer­i­can poli­tics, the left-wing coal­i­tion in­cludes fem­i­nists, gays, and eth­nic minori­ties. But what if you are an eth­nic minor­ity mem­ber who crit­i­cizes how given minor­ity treats their own women or gays? You will get la­beled as “right-wing”. Even if you iden­tify as left-wing, and your opinions and ar­gu­ments are tra­di­tion­ally left-wing, pick­ing the wrong tar­get gets you thrown out of the coal­i­tion.

• Viliam 29 Apr 2019 18:57 UTC

  4 points

  on: Refer­ence re­quest: hu­man as “backup”

  In Ma­trix, the role of hu­mans was quite similar to the role of mi­to­chon­dria. (Ex­cept, it does not make sense.)

  I imag­ine that at the be­gin­ning, hu­mans could be use­ful to the young AIs which would ex­cel at some skills but fail at oth­ers. (One im­por­tant role would be pro­vid­ing a hu­man “face” in in­ter­ac­tion with hu­mans who don’t like AIs.) How­ever, that use­ful­ness would only be tem­po­rary.

  An eu­kary­otic cell can­not find a short-term re­place­ment for mi­to­chon­dria, and in evolu­tion the long-term does not hap­pen with­out the short-term. An in­tel­li­gent de­signer—such as a self-im­prov­ing AI—could how­ever spend the time and re­sources to re­search a more effi­cient re­place­ment for the func­tions the hu­mans provide, if it would make sense in long term.

  On the other hand, if the AI is un­der so much pres­sure that it can­not af­ford to do re­search, it prob­a­bly also can­not af­ford to provide lux­u­ries to its hu­mans. So the hu­mans will be­come an equiv­a­lent of cage-bred chick­ens.

• Viliam 29 Apr 2019 0:01 UTC

  2 points

  on: Player vs. Char­ac­ter: A Two-Level Model of Ethics

  Thank you for writ­ing this; it is an in­spira­tion to many thoughts!

  Seems to me that ac­cord­ing to “Copen­hagen in­ter­pre­ta­tion of ethics”, know­ing your­self makes you less moral; or makes your life more difficult if you want to re­main moral.

  If you don’t un­der­stand your brain’s [player’s] Machi­avel­lian moves, you can­not be blamed for them, as long as your [char­ac­ter’s] in­ten­tions are pure. You sim­ply do what­ever feels right to you at the mo­ment, and then you reap the re­wards of the un­con­scious strat­egy given to you by evolu­tion. You ex­e­cute the shrewd moves with perfect in­no­cence, and the out­come feels like good luck, or even good karma for… some ran­dom thing.

  (“My suc­cess is a re­sult of my pos­i­tive think­ing and hard work. It is com­pletely un­re­lated to the fact that I stabbed my former friends in the back when they out­lived their pur­pose, and always kissed the asses of pow­er­ful peo­ple. No; I have sim­ply found out that some peo­ple whom I con­sid­ered friends in the past ac­tu­ally suck, and in­stead I de­cided to spend my time with gen­uinely awe­some peo­ple whom I ad­mire. And now I ob­serve, full of grat­i­tude, that the Uni­verse has re­warded my con­stant striv­ing for vir­tu­ous life.”)

  On the other hand, sup­pose you read a lot about evolu­tion­ary psy­chol­ogy, and get good at un­der­stand­ing your brain’s mo­tives. Your brain prompts you a Machi­avel­lian move, and de­spite feel­ing the gen­uine de­sire to act that way, you also clearly see it for what it is. (“My friend’s be­hav­ior feels re­ally an­noy­ing re­cently; some­times I am so ir­ri­tated I wish we would just stop see­ing each other. On a differ­ent level, I am also aware that he is no longer a use­ful ally to me. I have sur­passed him in ed­u­ca­tion, wealth, and so­cial sta­tus; he can no longer offer me any­thing of use, other than shar­ing a few child­hood mem­o­ries. The time I spend with him these days would be much bet­ter spent net­work­ing with peo­ple in my cur­rent pro­fes­sional and so­cial cir­cles. A funny thing that I no­tice is that the ex­actly same be­hav­ior of his seemed re­ally cool while we were at the high school, when he was a pop­u­lar kid, and I was just an un­pop­u­lar nerd who by sheer luck be­came his friend.”)

  The prob­lem is, now that you [the char­ac­ter] see your brain’s [player’s] moves’ true mean­ing, you be­come com­plicit if you de­cide to fol­low through. It still feels like the de­sir­able thing to do; you just no longer have the priv­ilege of deny­ing the strate­gic value of it. So you do it any­way, but now you feel dirty. (Or you don’t do it, but now you feel like a sucker, be­cause you are aware that most peo­ple in your situ­a­tion prob­a­bly would have done it, and would have benefited from do­ing so.) When you fol­low your brain’s path and reach suc­cess, you know ex­actly what to con­tribute it to, and it prob­a­bly doesn’t make you proud. It is tempt­ing to sim­ply pre­tend that some things didn’t hap­pen for the rea­sons they did.

• Viliam 28 Apr 2019 21:39 UTC

  10 points

  on: The Forces of Bland­ness and the Disagree­able Majority

  I won­der how much of this is a con­se­quence of the fact that in the offline world, rich peo­ple usu­ally as­so­ci­ate with rich peo­ple, and poor peo­ple as­so­ci­ate with poor peo­ple (and when a poor per­son as­so­ci­ates with a rich per­son e.g. in a role of a ser­vant, the poor per­son must be­have in a way that the rich per­son finds proper)… but in the on­line world, we all use the same Face­book, Twit­ter, Red­dit, etc.

  So now rich peo­ple have a cul­tural shock of meet­ing the un­washed masses who don’t give a fuck about their sen­si­bil­ities, and will even laugh at their faces, pro­tected by (per­ceived) on­line anonymity.

  It should be pos­si­ble to cre­ate sep­a­rate gar­dens for the elites. Like, make a clone of a fa­mous web­site, but re­quire e.g. $1000 yearly mem­ber­ship fees, and you get rid of the plebs. There already are pro­jects like that. But as far as I know, they fail. On the in­ter­net peo­ple provide value to each other, so a web­site for the 0.1 % would have much fewer in­ter­est­ing sto­ries, fewer cat videos, etc. It would be less offen­sive, but mostly be­cause it would be dead.

  It is prob­a­bly also hard to find the ex­act line; I sup­pose the elites would pre­fer to avoid deal­ing with peo­ple too low be­low them, but would wel­come the pres­ence of peo­ple slightly be­low them—they are not that difficult cul­turally, and be­cause how the top of the pyra­mid is shaped, there are lots of them, which means lots of use­ful con­tent.

  So in­stead, the rich peo­ple are try­ing to kick out the plebs from the on­line places they like. Us­ing po­lite­ness and other things cor­re­lated with so­cial class as an ex­cuse.

Ra­tion­al­ity Vienna Meetup June 2019

Ra­tion­al­ity Vienna Meetup May 2019

• Viliam 28 Apr 2019 20:50 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: JohnBuridan's comment on: 10 Good Things about An­tifrag­ile: a pos­i­tivist book review

  I guess we mostly agree here.

  The cur­rent sys­tem of restau­rants could suffer greatly, if (1) some com­pany would start pro­vid­ing cheap de­liv­ery of high qual­ity food by drones, or (2) some epi­demic would make it dan­ger­ous for peo­ple to eat in pub­lic. Well, nei­ther of these would wipe out the whole sys­tem, but it’s just what I though in a few sec­onds; worse things could prob­a­bly hap­pen. Also, luck would play a great role, e.g. if first we would have the food de­liv­ery by drones, and a few months later the epi­demic, with proper timing the com­bined im­pact could be much greater than ei­ther of these in­di­vi­d­u­ally. A ma­chine that could cook an (al­most) ar­bi­trary recipe au­to­mat­i­cally at home (plus a con­ve­nient de­liv­ery for the raw ma­te­ri­als) -- at least the recipes usu­ally found in the restau­rants—could also change a lot.

  Yes, hav­ing many par­allel solu­tions that work slightly differ­ently, makes things more ro­bust. This is a les­son I would love to see im­ple­mented in the school sys­tem: have hun­dreds of differ­ent types of schools, each pro­vid­ing ed­u­ca­tion in a differ­ent way.

• Viliam 27 Apr 2019 21:44 UTC

  4 points

  on: 10 Good Things about An­tifrag­ile: a pos­i­tivist book review

  There are bad events which can­not in prin­ci­ple be pre­dicted.

  How­ever, Taleb can already pre­dict which sys­tems will benefit from those events. /​s

  This is my gen­eral prob­lem with Taleb: it feels like his books keep tel­ling you re­peat­edly that no one can ac­tu­ally pre­dict or un­der­stand some­thing, only to sug­gest that Taleb has some kind of knowl­edge be­yond knowl­edge that al­lows him to pre­dict the un­pre­dictable and ex­plain the in­com­pre­hen­sive. Sorry, I don’t buy this. If no one can pre­dict stuff, then Taleb can’t ei­ther; if Taleb can pre­dict a thing or two about stuff, so can pos­si­bly some­one else.

  Of course, the “motte” is that in­sti­tu­tions which are in­flex­ible and their suc­cess is based on too many du­bi­ous as­sump­tions, will break when some­thing im­por­tant changes, and such changes hap­pen once in a while.

  But be­yond this, I think it is more likely to be a trade off. A bet on things re­main­ing the same, ver­sus a bet on things chang­ing quickly enough that we can ac­tu­ally benefit from be­ing pre­pared for the change. A huge em­pire may grad­u­ally fall apart as a re­sult of its own com­plex­ity and bu­reau­cracy; but in the mean­while, it will de­stroy hun­dreds of com­mu­ni­ties that weren’t large enough and co­or­di­nated enough to re­sist the at­tack of a huge army of a cen­tral­ized state. Other hun­dreds of com­mu­ni­ties will avoid the at­ten­tion of the em­pire and sur­vive. It is not ob­vi­ous that be­ing a mem­ber of a ran­domly se­lected com­mu­nity is bet­ter that be­ing a cit­i­zen of the cen­tral­ized state. Even a re­li­able prophecy that one day—an un­speci­fied mo­ment be­tween to­day and 500 years later—the em­pire will fall apart, will not make the choice eas­ier. Or maybe one day, Microsoft Win­dows will be com­pletely re­placed by thou­sands of com­pet­ing fla­vors of Linux; I just don’t be­lieve that Bill Gates should lose his sleep over that. One day, Java will be a new Cobol, and all Python and Ruby de­vel­op­ers will have a good laugh about it (that is, un­til Python and Ruby be­come new Cobols, too), but in the mean­while, my Java skills are pay­ing my bills. Etc.

  So, one prob­lem is that un­less the changes come soon enough, your anti-frag­ility fea­tures are go­ing to be just dead weight. (If they are pro­vid­ing some benefit in the mean­while, it means you could have de­signed them for the pur­pose of that benefit, even with­out wor­ry­ing about anti-frag­ility.) Another prob­lem is that a gen­uinely un­pre­dictable bad event can wipe off your anti-frag­ile solu­tion, too. (Maybe the “anti-frag­ile” fea­tures you de­signed make it ac­tu­ally more sus­cep­ti­ble to the event, not less. That’s what gen­uine un­pre­dictabil­ity means.)

  tl;dr—ro­bust sys­tems are usu­ally more de­sir­able than frag­ile ones, but “anti-frag­ility” is a pipe dream

• Viliam 27 Apr 2019 20:18 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: moses's comment on: When is ra­tio­nal­ity use­ful?

  I feel like peo­ple who want to do X (in the sense of the word “want” where it’s an ac­tual de­sire, no Elephant-in-the-brain bul­lshit) do X, so they don’t have time to set timers to think about how to do X.

  Yeah. When some­one does not do X, they prob­a­bly have a psy­cholog­i­cal prob­lem, most likely in­volv­ing ly­ing to them­selves. Set­ting up the timer won’t make the prob­lem go away. (The re­bel­ling part of the brain will find a way to un­der­mine the progress.) See a ther­a­pist in­stead, or change your peer group.

  The proper mo­ment to go meta is when you are already do­ing X, already achiev­ing some out­comes, and your ques­tion is how to make the already ex­ist­ing pro­cess more effi­cient. Then, 5 min­utes of think­ing can make you re­al­ize e.g. that some parts of the pro­cess can be out­sourced or done differ­ently or skipped com­pletely. Which can trans­late to im­me­di­ate gains.

  In other words, you should not go meta to skip do­ing your ABC, but rather to progress from ABC to D.

  If in­stead you be­lieve that by enough arm­chair think­ing you can skip di­rectly to Z, you are us­ing “ra­tio­nal­ity” as a sub­sti­tute for prayer. Also, as an­other ex­cuse for why you are not mov­ing your ass.

• Viliam 27 Apr 2019 20:03 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: ricraz's comment on: When is ra­tio­nal­ity use­ful?

  I guess we are talk­ing about two differ­ent things, both of them use­ful. One is ex­cel­lence in a given field, where the suc­cess could be de­scribed like “you got a No­bel price, bunch of stuff is named af­ter you, and kids learn your name at high school”. Other is keep­ing all as­pects of your life in good shape, where the suc­cess could be de­scribed like “you lived un­til age 100, fit and mostly healthy, with a ton of money, sur­rounded by a harem of girlfriends”. In other words, it can re­fer to be­ing at top 0.0001 % of one thing, or at top 1-10 % at many things that mat­ter per­son­ally.

  One can be suc­cess­ful at both (I am think­ing about Richard Feyn­man now), but it is also pos­si­ble to ex­cel at some­thing while your life sucks oth­er­wise, or to live a great life that leaves no im­pact on his­tory.

  My ad­vice was speci­fi­cally meant for the lat­ter (the gen­eral good­ness of per­sonal life). I agree that achiev­ing ex­traor­di­nary re­sults at one thing re­quires spend­ing ex­traor­di­nary amounts of time and at­ten­tion on it. And you prob­a­bly need to put em­pha­sis on differ­ent ra­tio­nal­ity tech­niques; I as­sume that ev­ery­day life would benefit greatly from “spend 5 min­utes ac­tu­ally think­ing about it” (es­pe­cially when it is a thing you ha­bit­u­ally avoid think­ing about), while sci­en­tists may benefit rel­a­tively more from rec­og­niz­ing “teach­ers’ pass­words” and “mys­te­ri­ous an­swers”.

  How much could a lead­ing math­e­mat­i­cian gain by be­ing more meta, for ex­am­ple?

  If you are lead­ing, then what you are already do­ing works fine, and you don’t need my ad­vice. But in gen­eral, ac­cord­ing to some ru­mors, cat­e­gory the­ory is the part of math­e­mat­ics where you go more meta than usual. I am not go­ing to pre­tend hav­ing any ac­tual knowl­edge in this area, though.

  In physics, I be­lieve it is some­times fruit­ful (or at least it was, a few decades ago) to think about “the na­ture of the phys­i­cal law”. Like, in­stead of just try­ing to find a law that would ex­plain the ex­per­i­men­tal re­sults, look­ing at the already known laws, ask­ing what they have in com­mon, and us­ing these parts as build­ing blocks of the area you re­search. I am not an ex­pert here, ei­ther.

  In com­puter sci­ence, a sim­ple ex­am­ple of go­ing meta is “de­sign pat­terns”, a more com­plex ex­am­ple would be think­ing about pro­gram­ming lan­guages and what are their de­sir­able traits (as op­posed to sim­ply be­ing an “X de­vel­oper”), in ex­treme cases cre­at­ing your own frame­work or pro­gram­ming lan­guage. Lisp or TeX would be among high-sta­tus ex­am­ples here, but even JQuery in its era rev­olu­tionized writ­ing JavaScript code. You may want to be the kind of de­vel­oper who looks at JavaScript and in­vents JQuery, or looks at book pub­lish­ing and in­vents TeX.

• Viliam 26 Apr 2019 19:40 UTC

  10 points

  in reply to: moses's comment on: When is ra­tio­nal­ity use­ful?

  But I don’t think there’s a good rea­son to ex­pect ra­tio­nal­ists to do bet­ter un­prompted—to have more un­prompted imag­i­na­tion, cre­ativity, to gen­er­ate strate­gies—or to no­tice things bet­ter: their blind spots, ad­di­tional di­men­sions in the solu­tion space.

  I won­der if it would help to build a habit about this. Some­thing like ded­i­cat­ing 15 min­utes ev­ery day to a ra­tio­nal­ist rit­ual, which would con­tain tasks like “spend 5 min­utes list­ing your cur­rent prob­lem, 5 min­utes choos­ing the most im­por­tant one, and 5 min­utes ac­tu­ally think­ing about the prob­lem”.

  Another task could be “here is a list of im­por­tant top­ics in hu­man life { health, wealth, re­la­tion­ships… }, spend 5 min­utes writ­ing a short idea for each of them how to im­prove, choose one topic, and spend 5 min­utes ex­pand­ing the idea into spe­cific plan”. Or per­haps “make a list of your strengths, now think how you could ap­ply them to your cur­rent prob­lems” or “make a list of your weak­nesses, now think how you could fix them at least a lit­tle” or… Seven tasks for seven days of the week. Or maybe six tasks, and one day should be spent re­view­ing the week and plan­ning the next one.

  The idea is to have a sys­tem that has a chance to give you the prompt to ac­tu­ally think about some­thing.

• Viliam 23 Apr 2019 21:07 UTC

  14 points

  on: How to make plans?

  My guess for the most com­mon plan­ning mis­takes:

  1) Not hav­ing an ac­tual plan, only a goal. Essen­tially, just say­ing “I want to be X”, and then wait­ing for it to some­how mag­i­cally hap­pen. As op­posed to re­search­ing how peo­ple ac­tu­ally get from “here” to “there”, what kind of tasks they do, which skills they need, and ac­tu­ally prac­tic­ing those skills. In other words, not mak­ing the first step, but in­stead wait­ing for the “right mo­ment”, which some­how never ar­rives; or if it does, it will find you un­pre­pared.

  2) Ex­pect­ing the whole thing to hap­pen in one big step, as op­posed to set­ting up your ac­tivi­ties and habits so that they keep draw­ing you in the de­sired di­rec­tion.

  For ex­am­ple, if you want to get fit, a typ­i­cal failure is to buy an an­nual ticket to a gym… and then never ac­tu­ally go there. (Un­like the pre­vi­ous ex­am­ple, you have ac­tu­ally made the first step. But then you wait for the sec­ond step to hap­pen mag­i­cally.) A more suc­cess­ful plan would be to sim­ply start do­ing push-ups ev­ery morn­ing; and per­haps think how to re­ward one­self for do­ing so.

  Or, if your goal is to be­come a writer, a typ­i­cal failure is to start writ­ing your big novel… only to end up a few years later with hun­dreds of pages of hor­ribly writ­ten text, which ob­vi­ously doesn’t have a fu­ture, but the sunk costs are break­ing your heart. (Now the prob­lem is that you have skipped a few nec­es­sary steps.) A more suc­cess­ful plan would in­volve read­ing other peo­ple’s texts and writ­ing ex­er­cises, at speci­fied time ev­ery week. (Similarly for com­puter pro­gram­ming.)