Wei_Dai(Wei Dai)
Anyone want to predict when we’ll reach the same level of translation and other language capability as GPT-3 via iterated amplification or another “aligned” approach? (How far behind is alignment work compared to capability work?)
Another big update for me is that according to modern EMH, big stock market movements mostly reflect changes in risk premium, rather than changes in predicted future cash flows. (The recent COVID-19 crash however was perhaps driven even more by liquidity needs.)
My understanding of banking and monetary policy was pretty wrong until very recently. Apparently the textbook I read in the 90s was explaining how banking and central banking worked in the 50s. John Wentsworth pointed me to a Coursera course by Perry Mehrling and here are the same lectures without having to register for the course.
Many AI issues will likely become politicized. (For example, how much to prioritize safety versus economic growth and military competitiveness? Should AI be politically neutral or be explicitly taught “social justice activism” before they’re allowed to be deployed or used by the public?) This seems to be coming up very quickly and we are so not prepared, both as a society and as an online community. For example I want to talk about some of these issues here, but we haven’t built up the infrastructure to do so safely.
In case people want to know more about this stuff, most of my understanding comes from Perry Mehrling’s coursera course (which I recommend)
Thanks! I’ve been hoping to come across something like this, to learn about the details of the modern banking system.
I agree recent events don’t justify a huge update by themselves if one started with a reasonable prior. It’s more that I somehow failed to consider the possibility of that scenario, the recent events made me consider it, and that’s why it triggered a big update for me.
The institutions which own Treasuries (e.g. banks) do so with massive amounts of cheap leverage, and those are the only assets they’re allowed to hold with that much leverage.
I’m curious about this. What source of leverage do banks have access to, that cost less than interest on Treasuries? (I know there are retail deposit accounts that pay almost no interest, but I think those are actually pretty expensive for the banks to obtain, because they have to maintain a physical presence to get those customers. I doubt those banks can make a profit if they just put those deposits into Treasuries. You must be talking about something else?)
My subjective anticipation is mollified by the thought that I’ll probably either never experience dying or wake up to find that I’ve been in an ancestral simulation, which leaves the part of me that wants to prevent all the empty galaxies from going to waste to work in peace. :)
Update: Recent events have made me think that the fraction of advanced civilizations in the multiverse that are sane may be quite low. (It looks like our civilization will probably build a superintelligence while suffering from serious epistemic pathologies, and this may be be typical for civilizations throughout the multiverse.) So now I’m pretty worried about “waking up” in some kind of dystopia (powered or controlled by a superintelligence with twisted beliefs or values), either in my own future lightcone or in another universe.
Actually, I probably shouldn’t have been so optimistic even before the recent events...
If you find yourself doing too much self-sacrifice, injecting a dose of normative and meta-normative uncertainty might help. (I’ve never had this problem, and I attribute it to my own normative/meta-normative uncertainty. :) Not sure which arguments you heard that made you extremely self-sacrificial, but try Shut Up and Divide? if it was “Shut Up and Multiply”, or Is the potential astronomical waste in our universe too small to care about? if it was “Astronomical Waste”.
Thus, in order to be truly good people, we must take an active role, predict the future of moral progress, and live by tomorrow’s rules, today.
Suppose you think X is what is actually moral (or is a distribution representing your moral uncertainty after doing your best to try to figure out what is actually moral) and Y is what you expect most people will recognize as moral in the future (or is a distribution representing your uncertainty about that). Are you proposing to follow Y instead of X? (It sounds that way but I want to make sure I’m not misunderstanding.)
Assuming the answer is yes, is that because you think that trying to predict what most people will recognize as moral is more likely to lead to what is actually moral than directly trying to figure it out yourself? Or is it because you want to be recognized by future people as being moral and following Y is more likely to lead to that result?
But if you claim to be charitable and openminded, except when confronted by a test that affects your own community, then you’re using those words as performative weapons, deliberately or not.
I guess “charitable” here is referring to the principle of charity, but I think that is supposed to apply in a debate or discussion, to make them more productive and less likely to go off the rails. But in this case there is no debate, as far as I can tell. The NYT reporter or others representing NYT have not given a reason for doxxing Scott (AFAIK, except to cite a “policy” for doing so, but that seems false because there have been plenty of times when they’ve respected their subjects’ wishes to remain pseudonymous), so what are people supposed to be charitable about?
If instead the intended meaning of “charitable and openminded” is something like “let’s remain uncertain about NYT’s motives for doxxing Scott until we know more”, it seems like absence of any “principled reasons” provided so far is already pretty strong evidence for ruling out certain motives, leaving mostly “dumb mistake” and “evil or selfish” as the remaining possibilities. Given that, I’m not sure what people are doing that Richard thinks is failing the test to be “charitable and openminded”, especially given that NYT has not shown a willingness to engage in a discussion so far and the time-sensitive nature of the situation.
Another reason for attributing part of the gains (from betting on the coronavirus market crash) to luck, from Rob Henderson’s newsletter which BTW I highly recommend:
The geneticist Razib Khan has said that the reason the U.S. took so long to respond to the virus is that Americans do not consider China to be a real place. For people in the U.S., “Wuhan is a different planet, mentally.” From my view, it didn’t seem “real” to Americans (or Brits) until Italy happened.
Not only have I lived in China, my father was born in Wuhan and I’ve visited there multiple times.
Thanks for the feedback. I guess I in part was expecting people to learn about portfolio margin and box spread options for other reasons (so the additional work to pull out equity into CDs isn’t that much), and in part forgot how difficult it might be for someone to learn about these things. Maybe there’s an opportunity for someone to start a business to do this for their customers...
BTW you’ll have to pass a multiple-choice test to be approved for PM at TDA, which can be tough. Let me know if you need any help with that. Also I’ve been getting 0.5%-0.55% interest rate from box spreads recently, and CDs are currently 1.25%-1.3%. CDs were around 1.5% when I first wrote this, so it was significantly more attractive then. I would say it’s still worth it because once you learn these things you can get the extra return every year without that much additional work, and over several decades it can add up to a lot.
Personal update: Over the last few months, I’ve become much less worried that I have a tendency to be too pessimistic (because I frequently seem to be the most pessimistic person in a discussion). Things I was worried about more than others (coronavirus pandemic, epistemic conditions getting significantly worse) have come true, and when I was wrong in a pessimistic direction, I updated quickly after coming across a good argument (so I think I was wrong just because I didn’t think of that argument, rather than due to a tendency to be pessimistic).
Feedback welcome, in case I’ve updated too much about this.
I should also address this part:
For example, if the threat model is that they just adopt the dominant ideology around them (which happens to be false on many points), then that results in them having false beliefs (#1), but may not cause any harm to come to them from it (#3) (and may even be to their benefit, in some ways).
Many Communist true believers in China met terrible ends as waves of “political movements” swept through the country after the CCP takeover, and pitted one group against another, all vying to be the most “revolutionary”. (One of my great-grandparents could have escaped but stayed in China because he was friends with a number of high-level Communists and believed in their cause. He ended up committing suicide when his friends lost power to other factions and the government turned on him.)
More generally, ideology can change so quickly that it’s very difficult to follow it closely enough to stay safe, and even if you did follow the dominant ideology perfectly you’re still vulnerable to the next “vanguard” who pushes the ideology in a new direction in order to take power. I think if “adopt the dominant ideology” is sensible as a defensive strategy for living in some society, you’d still really want to avoid getting indoctrinated into being a true believer, so you can apply rational analysis to the political struggles that will inevitably follow.
I came here to say that I’m surprised this advice isn’t on top of every list of personal investment advice. Almost 1% risk-free extra return per year, on top of whatever else you’re getting from your investments. Isn’t it crazy that this is possible, when 10 year treasuries are yielding only ~0.7%? How is every financial columnist not shouting this from their rooftops?
Then I noticed that it’s on the bottom of my own advice list, due to not having received a single up-vote. What gives, LW?
I guess I’m worried about
They will “waste their life”, for both the real opportunity cost and the potential regret they might feel if they realize the error later in life.
My own regret in knowing that they’ve been indoctrinated into believing wrong things (or into having unreasonable certainty about potentially wrong things), when I probably could have done something to prevent that.
Their views making family life difficult. (E.g., if they were to secretly record family conversations and post them on social media as examples of wrongthink, like some kids have done.)
Can’t really think of any mitigations for these aside from trying not to let them get indoctrinated in the first place...
You mean tag people so they get notified, like on FB? I don’t think you can. Just send them a PM with the link, I guess.
Yeah, I’ve become suspicious of it myself, which is why I retracted the comment. (It should show as struck out?)
In our economy we have all three of:
individual landlords making decisions about property that they directly own
groups of people pooling capital to buy property, then hiring professional managers to make decisions on behalf of the group (c.f. REIT)
property (e.g., public housing projects, parks) that is owned by various government departments/agencies, and managed by bureaucrats
The point is that 2 and 3 aren’t that different in terms of “corruption”. In both cases, we (at least in theory) made a deliberate trade-off to accept greater principal-agent costs (“corruption”) for some expected benefit the arrangement brings, e.g., greater diversification / spreading of risk in the case of 2. Why isn’t the same true for letting the government own everything or a lot more things? (Not sure who you’re arguing against, but presumably there’s a steelman-version of them that argues that we should accept the “corruption” in that case too because the benefits are greater.)
This isn’t as bad as it sounds, because one of these is a priced externality, and the other one is an unpriced externality. That is, since you would get rent from the renter, you already have an incentive to speak on their behalf at the meeting. The alternative to such meetings is either you just ignore the unpriced externality (the retiree’s blocked view) when you make your decision or the externality has to be handled some other way, like the retiree paying you for a “no additional floor” covenant, or suing you through the court system, both of which also involve coordination costs (that can add up quickly when there are many externalities). Again it’s not that clear, at least from this post, that the current system (where everyone who may be affected speaks at the meeting and then some bureaucrat makes a decision that at least supposedly takes all of them into account) isn’t actually optimal given the constraints we face.
ETA: Consider if there is in fact a bunch of negative externalities that together outweigh the benefits of building another floor. Without this meeting how would all those affected people realistically coordinate (supposing none of them individually has enough incentive) to stop you?