Recent Discussion
We know that mainstream thinking gets a lot of things wrong. Many of us have experienced being mocked because of our concern for AI extinction-risk. There are plenty of other examples of times where now well-evidenced beliefs were seen as crazy in some way. This post was prompted by my reading around meditation and mindfulness - twenty years ago if you said that meditation had a number of mental and even physical health benefits and was worth practicing for non-religious reasons, then you would be laughed at as a New Age type who probably believed in crystal healing and astrology too. Now there's stacks of scientific evidence supporting that view.
I would like to keep an open mind and not dismiss fact-claims just because they pattern-match to weird...
There’s a tendency to want to score high on every metric you come across. When I first read Kegan’s 5 stages of adult development, I wanted to be a stage 5 meta-rationalist! Reading the meditation book “The Mind Illuminated” (TMI), I wanted to be stage 10 (and enlightened and stage 8 jhana and…)! I remember seeing this dancer moonwalk sideways and wanting to be that good too!
This tendency is harmful.
But isn’t it good to want to be good at things? Depends on the "things" and your personal goals. What I’m pointing out is a tendency to become emotionally invested in metrics and standards, without careful thought on what you actually value. If you don’t seriously investigate your own personal preferences and taste, you may spend years of...
Noting the obvious connection to Goodhart's law - and elsewhere I've described the mistake of pushing to maximize easy-to-measure / cognitively available items rather than true goals.
Epistemic status: Anecdote.
tl;dr: I had multiple opportunities to notice my confusion, but failed every time until I actually thought about it. Ended up testing positive for COVID, despite expectations.
Background
I started preparing for the pandemic in January 2020. At the time, I was living alone. In January, my visa lapsed, and I moved in with someone else while waiting for a new visa to finish processing. Among all the people I know around the world, I think I was the single most cautious. Nobody had seen my face directly for almost a year, I was always masked (and, since October, double masked), I washed fastidiously, and never spent too long near others.
With the move, though, I was exposed to far more risk, which was the other person's activities....
You severely overestimate your chance of actually murdering someone. Lets go through the numbers. Lets be generous and assume a 10% chance that you are an asymptomatic carrier. If you are, you have no more than 50% chance of infecting someone even if you don't wear a mask, so lets say with mask properly worn that is reduced to 30%. Now you are already down to 3% chance of infecting any person you encounter. Now, for you 80+ year old neighbor the chance of actually dying from infection is around 5%. So multiply your 3% chance of infecting the neighbor by 5% chance of death and you get 0.15% chance of murdering a person of advanced age. You'd need to encounter 7 of them to get to 1% chance of murder.
Last month, Julia Galef interviewed Vitalik Buterin. Their responses to Glen Weyl’s critiques of the EA community struck me as missing perspectives he had tried to raise.
So I emailed Julia to share my thoughts. Shortened version:
...Personally, I thought Vitalik’s and your commentary on Glen Weyl’s characterisation of the EA and rationality community missed something important.
Glen spent a lot of time interacting with people from the black community and other cultural niches and asking for their perspectives. He said that he learned more from that than from the theoretical work he did before.
To me, Glen’s criticism came across as unnuanced (eg. EAs also donate to GiveDirectly, and it’s not like we force people to take what we give them). I also resonate with that critiques of rationality and
To disentangle the confusion I took a look around about a few different definitions of the concepts. The definitions were mostly the same kind of vague statement of the type:
- Aleatoric uncertainty is from inherent stochasticity and does not reduce with more data.
- Epistemic uncertainty is from lack of knowledge and/or data and can be further reduced by improving the model with more knowledge and/or data.
However, I found some useful tidbits
... (read more)Uncertainties are characterized as epistemic, if the modeler sees a possibility to reduce them by gathering more data or b
Political polarization in the USA has been increasing for decades, and has become quite severe. This may have a variety of causes, but it seems highly probable that the internet has played a large role, by facilitating the toxoplasma of rage to an unprecedented degree.
Recently I have the (wishful) feeling that the parties have moved so far apart that there is "room in the center". The left is for people who are fed up with the extremes of the right. The right is for people who are fed up with the extremes of the left. But where do people go if they've become fed up with both extremes?
The question is: how would the new center work? There's not room for a new political party; plurality voting makes...
Sorry, let me try again, and be a little more direct. If the New Center starts to actually swing votes, Republicans will join and pretend to be centrists, while trying to co-opt the group into supporting Republicans.
Meanwhile, Democrats will join and try to co-opt the group into supporting Democrats.
Unless you have a way to ensure that only actual centrists have any influence, you'll end up with a group that's mostly made up of extreme partisans from both sides. And that will make it impossible for the group to function as intended.
Years after I first thought of it, I continue to think that this chain reaction is the core of what it means for something to be an agent, AND why agency is such a big deal, the sort of thing we should expect to arise and outcompete non-agents. Here's a diagram:
Roughly, plans are necessary for generalizing to new situations, for being competitive in contests for which there hasn't been time for natural selection to do lots of optimization of policies. But plans are only as good as the knowledge they are based on. And knowledge doesn't come a priori; it nee... (read more)
I owe tremendous acknowledgments to Kelsey Piper, Oliver Habryka, Greg Lewis, and Ben Shaya. This post is built on their arguments and feedback (though I may have misunderstood them).
...I plead before the Master of Cost-Benefit Ratios. “All year and longer I have followed your dictates. Please, Master, can I burn my microCovid spreadsheets? Can I bury my masks? Pour out my hand sanitizer as a libation to you? Please, I beseech thee.”
“Well, how good is your vaccine?” responds the Master.
“Quite good!” I beg. “We’ve all heard the numbers, 90-95%. Even MicroCOVID.org has made it official: a 10x reduction for Pfizer and Moderna!”
The Master of Cost-Benefit Ratio shakes his head. “It helps, it definitely helps, but don’t throw out that spreadsheet just yet. One meal at a crowded
I now have covid after being vaccinated 3 months ago by Russian Sputnik-V vaccine. For now, it is mild: one day of 38 C, 3 days of 37.5C, only upper level infection, no cough. I lost smell, but it is is slowly returning. Oxygen at my normal level.
I'm not a biologist, but I'm trying to get something like a gears-level understanding of the situation we are in. There are phenomena that seem superficially clear to me, but if I'm honest, I do not really understand what's going on.
For example, take the new Covid variants from Great Britain, South Africa and India. It is often said that the danger for such mutations is higher if a population already has some immunity because it increases the selection pressure. First, I thought "that's obvious, it's just how evolution works". But, how exactly does this work?
Here is my current understanding:
* Viruses do not have a metabolism, which is why I suspect that there is no strong competition in the human body among different virus variants. (Please correct me...
So could I summarize this as follows? The MPG asserts in the linked article that the rapid evolution might arise from pre-existing immunity in a population because of some "increasing [...] selection pressure". On the other hand, you argue since that the new variants did not just change superficially to evade being recognized but seemed to have adapted to the human host, and this is not what one would expect if the main driving force would be immune evasion.
Thanks for you response -- if you have any thoughts to this proposal for a summary, I'd be very interested.
Sometimes when I talk to people about how to be a strong rationalist, I get the impression they are making a specific error.
The error looks like this: they think that good thinking is good thinking irrespective of environment. If they just learn to avoid rationalization and setting the bottom-line first, then they will have true beliefs about their environment, and if there's something that's true and well-evidenced, they will come to believe it in time.
Let me give an extreme example.
Consider what a thoughtful person today thinks of a place like the Soviet Union under Stalin. This was a nation with evil running through their streets. People were vanished in the night, whole communities starved to death, the information sources were controlled by the powerful, and many other...
Related to rationalists in Stalinist Russia: Kolmogorov Complicity and The Parable of Lightning
It cannot be stated with <99% certainty that members of the Bush Administration did not have definite prior information of the events of 9/11 or played a role in it.