Rachel Shu

• Rachel Shu 13 Nov 2023 9:20 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Yair Halberstadt’s comment on: Com­bin­ing the best of Ge­or­gian and Har­berger taxes

  This isn’t a great way of thinking about intangible value, since most people are far less liquid than the value of the things in their lives. If your mom needs life-saving treatment for $10,000 and you can’t afford to pay it, does that mean your mom is really worth less than $10,000 to you? No—her existence might contribute hundreds of thousands of dollars of devotion, emotional support, and sage advice to you. It’s just that nobody will accept those things as collateral for a loan.

  The Colosseum doesn’t have as stark a value proposition going for it, but by a similar argument it’s easy to imagine the public benefit of some building being greater than the amount of money that can be raised to support it. Personally, I think the Colosseum is mostly only valuable to the Italian state for the legitimacy that it buys it, a little self-justifying scheme of wasting taxpayer money to manufacture taxpayer assent.

• Rachel Shu 13 Nov 2023 9:09 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: Com­bin­ing the best of Ge­or­gian and Har­berger taxes

  I disagree about the transfer costs making Harberger tax unworkable, that gets priced into the self-assessed property value. You pay taxes on the use value of the property to you, not the market value, which is typically lower. When you want to sell, you’ll offer at the lower market rate.

  But this actually points to an even larger problem. Harberger taxes as such would be incredibly destructive to communities. The stronger the community, the higher the use value, meaning the higher the self-assessed tax rate would have to be in order to reflect the worth to you. But the value from community is uncashable, meaning that there’s an unjust tax burden for having a better community. And people are usually only liquid to a minute proportion of the value of the intangible things in their lives.

  Thus, people likely have to assess below their use value, which means the community can be eroded by compulsory sale and eviction. This already occurs in rent-paying communities, which are destroyed when property value goes up and they can no longer afford to rent there.

  Tbh, you probably end up fighting this by having your neighbors in the community firebomb the property which got bought out from under you.

• Rachel Shu 13 Nov 2023 8:49 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: JBlack’s comment on: Com­bin­ing the best of Ge­or­gian and Har­berger taxes

  I think you can just drop the ‘zero notice’ part, add something like a 90 day delay between sale and transfer, and things would be a lot more workable.

  There’s another problem that your comment makes me think of—in a lot of cases, the easiest and most profitable thing to do will be to just buy the property and offer to lease it back to the previous owner at a higher rate than they were last paying in Harberger tax. With capital accumulation, you’ll probably end up with giant extractive leasing company monopolies practically owning unwilling renters with no outside options—not sure what to do about this.

• Rachel Shu 13 Nov 2023 8:41 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Yair Halberstadt’s comment on: Com­bin­ing the best of Ge­or­gian and Har­berger taxes

  If anything, it’ll be more common for the previous owner to trash the place on their way out with some excuse for avoiding legal damages.

• Rachel Shu 13 Nov 2023 8:39 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Yair Halberstadt’s comment on: Com­bin­ing the best of Ge­or­gian and Har­berger taxes

  I think in the typical Harberger scheme, in order to compel transfer of property rights, you pay the entire capital cost of the property, not some portion as a temporary rent.

• Rachel Shu 13 Nov 2023 8:38 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: gwern’s comment on: Com­bin­ing the best of Ge­or­gian and Har­berger taxes

  My proposed solution to both your problem and Richard’s, explained further in a separate comment, is that payment and transfer be separated by enough time to vacate amicably, or sue to enjoin transfer.

• Rachel Shu 13 Nov 2023 8:36 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: rk’s comment on: Com­bin­ing the best of Ge­or­gian and Har­berger taxes

  where the value to an actor of some property might be less than the amount of value they have custody over via that property.

  I don’t think those are separate things? The value of a roof is the value of everything underneath it when it rains.

• Rachel Shu 13 Nov 2023 8:25 UTC

  1 point

  on: Com­bin­ing the best of Ge­or­gian and Har­berger taxes

  Property owners are only going to assess their property for tax purposes at perceived market value if they’re ready to sell. Otherwise they’ll assess it higher, factoring in moving costs. The Harberger buyer is usually overpaying.

  For this reason, I think most Harberger extortion is easily avoidable by adding a sufficient delay between sale time and transfer time. For example, for most categories of residential and commercial real estate, a reasonable expectation for compulsory sale would be perhaps 90 days between purchase and transfer. (This is already the custom for foreclosures, I think.) The compelled seller, having priced in moving costs, will have time to decide how to put their new liquidity to use and make the proper adjustments or sue to enjoin the transfer if maliciousness such as repeat harassment is suspected.

  This leaves the problem of sudden price changes. One solution is to make compulsory sales begin as blind auctions. If someone submits a blind bid for your property at or above your self-assessed tax value, you get a short period of time to submit a reassessment, and if your bid is higher you pay back taxes on that reassessment within that tax year, otherwise they buy from you at their assessment. I think this scheme gets both bidders to bid their true rates, and discourages holdouts approximately the same amount? It makes the market slightly less efficient but keeps the same tax efficiency.

• Rachel Shu 26 Oct 2022 21:17 UTC

  9 points

  2

  in reply to: James Grugett’s comment on: Crypto loves im­pact mar­kets: Notes from Schel­ling Point Bogotá

  You correctly imply something worth restating clearly: despite their initial framing, impact markets are not a way to achieve public goods per se, they are a way to efficiently achieve funder goals in contexts where the path to that goal is uncertain, there are many plausible options, and there is lots of information that can be potentially priced into the market about those options.

  With some impact market designs decentralized self interest can in fact come into play, perhaps in the form of bounty pools pledged into escrow by some subset of the people who would benefit from the existence of the public good they are offering the bounty for. In this case funders have a vested interest in what is achieved, and will evaluate based on such. Maybe in the long run markets that enable such a design will gain reputability relative to markets solely funded and assessed by fly-by philanthropists.

  I agree with you that disinterested funders often end up having counterproductive goals, although not in all domains. The above example of generic pharmaceutical repurposing trials might be such, where the market can bear useful information about which of many interventions would have the highest impact and chance of success, but the work to achieve that goal is kind of hard to do serious harm with, given that the risk profiles of those drugs is already well quantified. In such cases I see especially little risk to encouraging philanthropy.

  If some funder intentionally wishes to achieve nefarious goals with impact markets, I admit the existence of impact market infrastructure might facilitate that. But we have legal and social tools to counteract bad ends and I don’t think that impact markets are so powerful as to enable an end run around these.

Crypto loves im­pact mar­kets: Notes from Schel­ling Point Bogotá

• Rachel Shu 24 Apr 2022 23:03 UTC

  1 point

  on: My cur­rent thoughts on the risks from SETI

  Even granting that there are grabby aliens in your cosmic neighborhood (click here to chat with them*), I find the case for SETI-risk entirely unpersuasive (as in, trillionths of a percent plausible, or indistinguishable from cosmic background uncertainty), and will summarize some of the arguments others have already made against it and some of my own. I think it is so implausible that I don’t see any need to urge SETI to change their policy. [Throwing in a bunch of completely spitballed, mostly-meaningless felt-sense order-of-magnitude probability estimates.]

  • Parsability. As Ben points out, conveying meaning is hard. Language is highly arbitrary; the aliens are going to know enough about human languages to have a crack at composing bytestrings that compile executable code? No chance if undirected transmission, 1% if directed transmission intended to exploit my civilization in particular.

  • System complexity. Dweomite is correct that conveying meaning to computers is even harder. There is far too much flexibility, and far too many arbitrary and idiosyncratic choices made in computer architectures and programming languages. No chance if undirected, 10% if directed, conditioning on all above conditions being fulfilled.

  • Transmission fidelity. If you want to transmit encrypted messages or program code, you can’t be dropping bits. Do you know what frequency I’m listening on, and what my sample depth is? The orbital period of my planet and the location of my telescope? What the interplanetary and terrestrial weather conditions that day are going to be, you being presumably light-years away or you’d have chosen a different attack vector? You want to mail me a bomb, but you’re shipping it in parts, expecting all the pieces to get there, and asking me to build it myself as well? 0.01% chance if undirected, 1% if directed, conditioning on all above conditions being fulfilled.

  • Compute. As MichaelStJules’s comment suggests, if the compute needed to reproduce powerful AI is anything like Ajeya’s estimates, who cares if some random asshole runs the thing on their PC? No chance if undirected, 1% if directed, conditioning on all above conditions being fulfilled.

  • Information density. Sorry, how much training is your AI going to have to do in order to be functional? Do you have a model that can bootstrap itself up from as much data as you can send in an unbroken transmission? Are you going to be able to access the hardware necessary to obtain more information? See above objections. There’s terabytes of SETI recordings, but probably at most megabytes of meaningful data in there. 1% chance if undirected, 100% if directed, conditioning on all above conditions being fulfilled.

  • Inflexible policy in the case of observed risk. If the first three lines look like an exploit, I’m not posting it on the internet. Likewise, if an alien virus I accidentally posted somehow does manage to infect a whole bunch of people’s computers, I’m shutting off the radio telescope before you can start beaming down an entire AI, etc, etc. (I don’t think you’d manage to target all architectures with a single transmission without being detected; even if your entire program was encrypted to the point of indistinguishability from entropy, the escape code and decrypter are going to have to look like legible information to anyone doing any amount of analysis.) Good luck social engineering me out of pragmatism, even if I wasn’t listening to x-risk concerns before now. 1% chance if undirected, 10% if directed, conditioning on all above conditions being fulfilled.

  So if you were an extraterrestrial civilization trying this strategy, most of the time you’d just end up accomplishing nothing, and if you even got close to accomplishing something, you’d more often be alerting neighboring civilizations about your hostile intentions than succeeding. Maybe you’d have a couple lucky successes. I hope you are traveling at a reasonable fraction of C, because if not you’ve just given your targets a lot of advance warning about any planned invasion.

  I just don’t think this one is worth anyone’s time, sorry. I’d expect any extraterrestrial communications we receive to be at least superficially friendly, and intended to be clearly understood rather than accidentally executed, and the first sign of hostility to be something like a lethal gamma-ray burst. In the case that I did observe an attempt to execute this strategy, I’d be highly inclined to believe that the aliens already had us completely owned and were trolling us for lolz.

  *Why exactly did you click on a spammy-looking link in a comment on the topic of arbitrary code execution?

• Rachel Shu 4 Feb 2022 4:20 UTC

  3 points

  on: We Choose To Align AI

  Composer Christopher Tin has set JFK’s “We Choose to go to the Moon” speech to music, https://​​www.youtube.com/​​watch?v=HBITb9Zz0rY . Solsticegoers may recognize the opening leitmotif as shared with Sogno Di Volare, another movement from the same work, an oratorio on the theme of flight, To Shiver the Sky.

• Rachel Shu 28 Jan 2022 5:13 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: Alex_Altair’s comment on: What are some beau­tiful, ra­tio­nal­ist art­works?

  I’ve recently gained a better appreciation for how astonishingly good this work is at linear perspective, which had only come about in European art in the prior century. Many things about this painting are good (and some bad to my eye, like the messy color scheme) but those hexagonal details on the curved arches in perspective is 100% Raphael showing off.

  An aside, but linear perspective is the most rational part of art, in the older philosophical sense of rational; it’s pretty much the only major part of classical art which descends from first principles rather than having an empirical basis.

• Rachel Shu 4 Aug 2020 21:01 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Rachel Shu’s comment on: Free Ed­u­ca­tional and Re­search Resources

  Okay, this guy sold me as soon as I saw he had an episode on Doc Ing Hay’s general store in rural Oregon. I stumbled upon this place once just passing through, at a convenient time to get a guided tour of the little museum they’d made out of it. There’s not even a Wikipedia article on it yet; which gives me the impression that this podcaster is committed to both a broad and deep history of the chinese experience

• Rachel Shu 4 Aug 2020 20:40 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: drlova’s comment on: Free Ed­u­ca­tional and Re­search Resources

  Ah you’ve got my directionality confused, the bias preventing me from judging History of China podcast dispassionately is in his inability to pronounce Chinese fluently. I’m in the weird position of being fluent enough in Chinese to be a little intolerant of English speakers with bad Chinese pronunciation but not fluent enough to understand the Chinese-language content. I will say though that China History Podcast seems a little better on this very particular axis and I think it would be unreasonable to expect much better. They definitely seem to have a lot of content, and much of it relevant to the modern era!

• Rachel Shu 3 Aug 2020 19:46 UTC

  16 points

  in reply to: Rachel Shu’s comment on: Are there doc­u­men­taries on ra­tio­nal­ity?

  Latest update: I did not complete the documentary and have no plans to continue working on it in the near future. The 90 hours of footage that I shot is all archived for possible later use, and is partially available to the community upon request.

• Rachel Shu 3 Aug 2020 19:43 UTC

  7 points

  on: What are you look­ing for in a Less Wrong post?

  A bulleted list of answers others have written:

  • Generates a new insight (TurnTrout)

  • Is good for something (adamzerner)

  • Shows its work (bvxn)

  • Ties up its loose ends (curi)

  • Resolves a disagreement (curi)

  • Shows effort (Alexei)

  • Well-written (Alexei)

  • Surprising (Alexei)

  • Credible (Alexei)

  • Summarize work (me)

  And certain topical interests which LW is a topos for:

  • Cognition

  • AI

  • Self-improvement

  I’m throwing in that I like posts and comments that compress knowledge (such as this).

  My further two cents are that what people answer here will be somewhat unrepresentative. The answers will be a certain set of ideal practices which your answerers may not actually implement and even if they did, they might not represent the community at large. The honest answer to your question is probably data-driven; by scraping the site you could generate a better predictive model of what content actually gets upvotes than people will tell you here.

  But nevertheless there is value to your question. The idealized picture you’ll get is in fact the picture of the ideal you want. If you take onboard people’s best-case answers, you’ll make stuff that the most engaged people want the most of, and that will contribute to a making better community overall.

• Rachel Shu 3 Aug 2020 16:30 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Alin Ovidiu Dragomir’s comment on: Free Ed­u­ca­tional and Re­search Resources

  Thanks! I won’t add these to the top list but I hope people will scroll down to see the comments. I should mention that there are a whole bunch of Mike Duncan—inspired “History of X” which are of varying quality. I wanted to get into the History of China dude, but I couldn’t give him more than a few episodes due to wincing at his accent, didn’t even get to judge his content. Unfortunately my Chinese isn’t actually good enough to listen to podcasts in Chinese about Chinese history. History of Byzantium is supposedly also good.

• Rachel Shu 3 Aug 2020 15:31 UTC

  35 points

  0

  on: Unify­ing the Si­mu­lacra Definitions

  Zvi, thank you for writing this. I’ve been working through Baudrillard too and coming to the same conclusion—he is far more insight porn than philosophy, compared to famous scholars with similar metaphysics such as Foucault and Zizek. I’ve got a long post in the pipeline on this as well.
  

  It’s really frustrating that this community has been spinning up an elaborate schema which is a misinterpretation of a sophist, where the original conversants both admitted they had by that point only read the Wikipedia summary of the book. This feels like the opposite of quality scholarship, not that this is entirely Benquo and jessicataylor’s fault, rather how the discussion ended up picking this up and running with it.

  The rationalist community’s reading of Baudrillard tries to put some sense back into what is fairly sophisticated. But the main problem both groups make is assuming that Level 1 is some fallen ideal, rather than something progressively achieved. Baudrillard is baking a hotter take—which most rationalist discussion completely misses—that Level 1 is completely vanished and Level 2 is on its way out too. He thinks we live in a postmodern world (surprisingly to rationalists who haven’t read the postmodernists: like most postmodernist scholars he does not actually think this is very good) where meaning is composed wholly of simulacra, which does not actually reference the real world which our bodies live in, although he says the real world sure references it.

  This misinterpretation of him is easy to make—partly because it sounds like he developed a philosophy out of being totally dissociated. He hated the Matrix, which the Wachowskis referenced him in, for this reason: in the Matrix the virtual reality can be escaped.

  My alternative proposal is to re-ground the discussion in a better take about power relations and social games, noticing which groups throughout history play these games and which don’t. The basic conclusion is people generally converse as if they were in the 2nd order (level), jump up in simulation order whenever their access to resources they don’t produce are at stake, and jump down when they have a hand in producing resources. Global meaning has no particular order, unlike Baudrillard’s claim that it is of the 4th order.

  More to come.

• Rachel Shu 1 Aug 2020 16:03 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Alin Ovidiu Dragomir’s comment on: Free Ed­u­ca­tional and Re­search Resources

  Added AskHistorians podcast! Mentioning Coursera inline.