I was going for a walk yesterday night, and when I looked up at the sky, I saw something I had never seen before: a bright orange dot, like a star, but I had never seen a star that bright and so orange before. "No... that can't be"- but it was: I was looking at Mars, that other world I had heard so much about, thought so much about.

I never realized until yesterday that I had never seen Mars with my own two eyes until that day- one of the closest worlds that humans could, with minimal difficulty, make into a new home one day.

It struck me then in a way that I never felt before, just how far away the world Mars is. I knew it in an abstract sense, but seeing this little dot in the distance, a dot that I knew to be an object larger even than the Moon, but seeming so small in comparison, made me realize, in my gut, just how far away this other world was, just like how when I stand on top of a mountain, and see small buildings on the ground way below me, I realize that those small buildings are actually skyscrapers far away.

And yet, as far as Mars was that night, it was so bright, so apparent, precisely because it was closer now to us than it normally ever is- normally this world is even further from us than it is now.

In short, I am selling my attention by selling the right to put cards in my Anki deck, starting at the low price of $1 per card.

I will create and add a card (any card that you desire, with the caveat that I can veto any card that seems problematic, and capped to a similar amount of information per card as my usual cards contain) to my Anki deck for $1. After the first ten cards (across all people), the price will rise to $2 per card, and will double every 5 cards from then on. I commit to study the added card(s) like I would any other card in my decks (I will give it a starting interval of 10 days, which is sooner than the usual interval of 20 days I usually use, unless I judge that a shorter interval makes sense. I study Anki every day, and have been clearing my deck at least once every 10 days for the past 5 months, and intend to continue to do so). Since I will be creating the cards myself (unless you know of a high-quality deck that contains cards with the information you desire), an idea for a card is enough even if you don't know how to execute it.

Both question-and-answer and straight text are acceptable forms for cards. Acceptable forms of payment include cash, Venmo, BTC, E... (read more)

Religion isn't about believing false things. Religion is about building bonds between humans, by means including (but not limited to) costly signalling. It happens that a ubiquitous form of costly signalling used by many prominent modern religions is belief taxes (insisting that the ingroup professes a particular, easily disproven belief as a reliable signal of loyalty), but this is not neccesary for a religion to successfully build trust and loyalty between members. In particular, costly signalling must be negative-value for an individual (before the second-order benefits from the group dynamic), but need not be negative-value for the group, or for humanity. Indeed, the best costly sacrifices can be positive-value for the group or humanity, while negative-value for the performing individual. (There are some who may argue that positive-value sacrifices have less signalling value than negative value sacrifices, but I find their logic dubious, and my own observations of religion seem to suggest positive-value sacrifice is abundant in organized religion, albeit intermixed with neutral- and negative-value sacrifice)

The rationalist community is averse to religion because it so often goe... (read more)

If you know someone is rational, honest, and well-read, then you can learn a good bit from the simple fact that they disagree with you.

If you aren't sure someone is rational and honest, their disagreement tells you little.

If you know someone considers you to be rational and honest, the fact that they still disagree with you after hearing what you have to say, tells you something.

But if you don't know that they consider you to be rational and honest, their disagreement tells you nothing.

It's valuable to strive for common knowledge of you and your partners' rationality and honesty, to make the most of your disagreements.

Does newspeak actually decrease intellectual capacity? (No)

In George Orwell's book 1984, he describes a totalitarian society that, among other initiatives to suppress the population, implements "Newspeak", a heavily simplified version of the English language, designed with the stated intent of limiting the citizens' capacity to think for themselves (thereby ensuring stability for the reigning regime)

In short, the ethos of newspeak can be summarized as: "Minimize vocabulary to minimize range of thought and expression". There are two different, closely related, ideas, both of which the book implies, that are worth separating here.

The first (which I think is to some extent reasonable) is that by removing certain words from the language, which serve as effective handles for pro-democracy, pro-free-speech, pro-market concepts, the regime makes it harder to communicate and verbally think about such ideas (I think in the absence of other techniques used by Orwell's Oceania to suppress independent thought, such subjects can still be meaningfully communicated and pondered, just less easily than with a rich vocabulary provided)

The second idea, which I worry is an incorrect takeaway people m... (read more)

"From AI to Zombies" is a terrible title... when I recommend The Sequences to people, I always feel uncomfortable telling them the name, since the name makes it sound like cookey bull****- in a way that doesn't really indicate what it's about

Asking people to "taboo [X word]" is bad form, unless you already know that the other person is sufficiently (i.e. very) steeped in LW culture to know what our specific corner of internet culture means by "taboo".

Without context, such a request to taboo a word sounds like you are asking the other person to never use that word, to cleanse it from their vocabulary, to go through the rest of their life with that word permanently off-limits. That's a very high, and quite rude, ask to make of someone. While that's of course not what we mean by "taboo", I have seen requests to taboo made where it's not clear that the other person knows what we mean by taboo, which means it's quite likely the receiving party interpreted the request as being much ruder than was meant.

Instead of saying "Taboo [X word]", instead say "could you please say what you just said without using [X word]?" - it conveys the same request, without creating the potential to be misunderstood to be making a rude and overreaching request.

I'm quite baffled by the lack of response to my recent question asking about which AI-researching companies are good to invest in (as in, would have good impact, not necessarily most profitable)- It indicates either A) most LW'ers aren't investing in stocks (which is a stupid thing not to be doing), or B) are investing in stocks, but aren't trying to think carefully about what impact their actions have on the world, and their own future happiness (which indicates a massive failure of rationality)

Even putting this aside, the fact that nobody jumped at the chance to potentially shift a non-trivial (for certain definitions of trivial) amount of funding away from bad organizations and towards good organizations (which I'm investing primarily as a personal financial strategy), seems very worrying to me. While it is (as ChristianKI pointed out) debatable that the amount of funding I can provide as a single person will make a big difference to a big company, it's bad decision theory to model my actions as only being correlated with myself; and besides, if the funding was redirected, it probably would have gone somewhere without the enormous supply of funds Alphabet has, and very well could have made an important difference, pushing the margins away from failure and towards success.

There's a good chance I may change my mind in the future about this, but currently my response to this information is a substantial shift away from the LW crowd actually being any good at usefully using rationality instrumentally

During today's LW event, I chatted with Ruby and Raemon (seperately) about the comparison between human-made photovoltaic systems (i.e. solar panels), and plant-produced chlorophyll. I mentioned that in many ways chlorophyll is inferior to solar panels - consumer grade solar panels operate in the 10% to 20% efficiency range (i.e. for every 100 joules of light energy, 10 - 20 joules are converted into usable energy), while chlorophyll is around 9% efficient, and modern cutting edge solar panels can go even as high as nearly 50% efficiency. Furthermore,... (read more)

I may have discovered an interesting tool against lethargy and depression [1]: This morning, in place of my usual caffeine pill, I made myself a cup of hot chocolate (using pure cacao powder / baking chocolate from the supermarket), which made me very energetic (much more energetic than usual), which stood in sharp contrast to the past 4 days, which have been marked by lethargy and intense sadness. Let me explain:

Last night, I was reflecting on the fact that one of the main components of chocolate is theobromine, which is very similar in structure to caffe... (read more)

One thing that is frustrating me right now is that I don't have a good way of outputting ideas while walking. One thing I've tried is talking into voicememos, but it feels awkward to be talking out loud to myself in public, and it's a hassle to transcribe what I write when I'm done. One idea I don't think I've ever seen is a hand-held keyboard that I can use as I'm walking, and can operate mostly by touch, without looking at it, and maybe it can provide audio feedback through my headphones.

Epistemic: Intend as a (half-baked) serious proposal

I’ve been thinking about ways to signal truth value in speech- in our modern society, we have no way to readily tell when a person is being 100% honest- we have to trust that a communicator is being honest, or otherwise verify for ourselves if what they are saying is true, and if I want to tell a joke, speak ironically, or communicate things which aren’t-literally-the-truth-but-point-to-the-truth, my listeners need to deduce this for themselves from the context in which I say something not-l... (read more)

Current discourse around AI safety (at least among people who haven't missed) has a pretty dark, pessimistic tone - for good reason, because we're getting closer to technology that could accidentally do massive harm to humanity.

But when people / groups feel pessimistic, it's hard to get good work done - even when that pessimism is grounded in the real-world facts.

I think we need to develop an optimistic, but realistic point of view - acknowledging the difficulty of where we are, but nonetheless being hopeful and full of energy towards finding the solution. Because AI alignment can be solved, we just actually have to put in the effort to solve it, and maybe a lot faster than we are currently prepared to.

This Generative Ink post talks about curating GPT-3, creating a much better output than it normally would give, turning it from quite often terrible to usually pround and good. I'm testing out doing the same with this post, choosing one of many branches every few dozens of words.

For a 4x reduction in speed, I'm getting very nice returns on coherence and brevity. I can actually pretend like I'm not a terrible writer! Selection is a powerful force, but more importantly, continuing a thought in multiple ways forces you to actually make sure you're saying thin... (read more)

URLs (Universal Resource Locators) are universal over space, but they are not universal over time, and this is a problem

Cryptocurrencies in general are good and the future of money, but Bitcoin in particular deserves to crash all the way down to $0

We're living in a very important time, being on the cusp of both the space revolution and AI revolution truly taking off. Either one alone would make the 2020's on equal historical footing with the original development of life or the Cambrian explosion, and both together will make for a very historic moment.

I wish the keycaps on some of the keys on my keyboard were textured - I can touch-type well enough for the alphabetic keys, but when using other keys, I often get slightly confused as to which keys are under my fingers unless I use my eyes to see what key it is. If there were textures (perhaps braille symbols) that indicated which key I was feeling, I expect that would be useful.

Scott Garrabrandt presents Cartesian Frames as being a very mathematical idea. When I asked him about the prominence of mathematics in his sequence, he said “It’s fundamentally math; I mean, you could translate it out of math, but ultimately it comes from math”. But I have a different experience when I think about Cartesian Frames- first and foremost, my mental conception of CF is as a common sense idea, that only incidentally happens to be expressable in mathematical terms (edit: when I say "common sense" here, I don't mean that it's a well known idea - i... (read more)

Aumann Agreement != Free Agreement

Oftentimes, I hear people talk about Aumann's Agreement Theorem as if it means that two rational, honest agents cannot be aware of disagreeing with each other on a subject, without immediately coming to agree with each other. However, this is overstating the power of Aumann Agreement. Even putting aside the unrealistic assumption of Bayesian updating, which is computationally intractable in the real world, as well as the (not strictly required, but valuable) non-trivial presumption that the rationality and honesty of the a... (read more)

If I were a middle school teacher, I would implement this system to make nerdy kids more popular (and maybe make aspiring popular kids work harder in class): every week, I would select a handful of students who I felt had done good work that week (according to my subjective taste), and they could write down the names of 3 or 4 other students in the class (but not themselves) who would earn a modest amount of extra credit. Ideally, I would name the students at the start of the week, and only take their nominations at the end of the week, so they have plenty... (read more)

Viliam's shortform posts have got me thinking about income taxes versus wealth taxes, and more generally the question of how taxes should be collected. In general I prefer wealth taxes over income taxes, although I suspect there may very well be better forms of taxes than either of those two - But considering wealth taxes specifically, I think the main problem with wealth taxes is that over the long term they take away control of resources from people who have proven in the past that they know how to use resources effectively, and while this can allow for ... (read more)

I like this quote from a post that I published around two years ago, which wasn't well-received and I ended up taking down:

But at the end of the day, the American governments (neither state nor federal) don't truly follow the will of the people. Instead, they are led jointly by the major parties, The Red Prince of Moloch and The Blue Prince of Moloch, two partners in an intricate dance choreographed to look like a fight, but ultimately leading both partners in the direction of Moloch's will, only loosely bound to the will of the people.

While I don't ne... (read more)

Whenever I hear about historical coffeehouses (say in the period from the late 1700s to the early 1900s), they seem like places where a lot more was going on than in the coffeehouses I've been to in my lifetime. Is there any difference? If there was, what changed?

I was surprised to learn yesterday from Tesla's AI Day event that the cars use Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to determine pathing, a strategy-searching algorithm originally developed to play games like Chess or Go. While MCTS is part of Alpha Go, the premier Go-playing AI (which famously uses machine learning to evaluate states of the game), MCTS itself has more in common with Deep Blue than with modern ML systems.

If MCTS is valuable in something as simple as pathing for a self-driving car, this makes me wonder what else it is good for, and makes me suspect we can likely find something similar inside of human brains.

Random thought: if you have a big enough compost pile, would it spontaneously break into flames due to the heat generated by the bioprocesses that occur therein? If so, at what size would it burst into flames? Surely it could happen before it reached the size of the sun, even ignoring gravitational effects.

(Just pondering out loud, not really asking unless someone really wants to answer)

I'm tinkering around in NetLogo with a model I made representing the dynamics of selfishness and altruism. In my model, there are two types of agents ("turtles" in NL parlance), red selfish turtles and blue altruistic turtles. The turtles wander around the world, and occasionally participate in a prisoner's-dilemma-like game with nearby turtles. When a turtle cooperates, their partner receives a reward, at the cost of losing some percentage of that reward themselves. When a turtle defects, they keep all their resources, and their partner gains none. The tu... (read more)

I step out of the airlock, and I look around. In the distance, I see the sharp cliff extending around the crater, a curtain setting the scene, the Moon the stage. I look up at the giant blue marble in the sky, white clouds streaked across the oceans, brown landmasses like spots on the surface. The vibrant spectacle of the earth contrasts against the dead barren terrain that lies ahead. I look behind at the glass dome, the city I call home. 

Within those arched crystal walls is a new world, a new life for those who dared to dream beyond the heavy shackl... (read more)

To ⌞modern eyes living in a democracy with a well-functioning free market⌟, absolute monarchy and feudalism [1] (as were common for quite a while in history) seem quite stupid and suboptimal (there are some who may disagree, but I believe most will endorse this statement). From the perspective of an ideal society, our current society will appear quite similar to how feudalism seems to us - stupid and suboptimal - in large part because we have inadequate tools to handle externalities (both positive and negative). We have a robust free market which can effic... (read more)

The Hausdorf dimension of an object is a measure that allows us to describe things as not just 2D (flat) or 3D (taking up volume), but to assign fractional dimension to objects that are arguably both. If you crumble up a piece of paper, is it flat, or does it take up volume? The paper is flat, but the ball takes up space.

I don't feel like looking it up, but if I had to guess, the fractional dimension of this paper ball is maybe 2.7 - the space it takes up is much more noticeable than the flatness of the paper it is made of.

Usually this fractional dimension... (read more)

I want there to be a way of telling time that is the same no matter where you are. Of course, there's UTC, but it uses the same names as the traditional locality-dependent clocks, so it can only be used unambiguously if you explicitly state you're using UTC, or you're in a context where it's understood that times are always given in UTC (in the military, "Zulu" is a codeword indicating UTC time; I wouldn't mind if people got in the habit of saying "twenty-two thirty Zulu" to refer to times, though I do worry it might seem a little weird to non-familiar peo... (read more)

A personal anecdote which illustrates the difference between living in a place that uses choose-one voting (i.e. FPTP) to elect its representatives, and one that uses a form of proportional representation:

I was born as a citizen of both the United States and the Kingdom of Denmark, with one parent born in the US, and one born in Denmark. Since I was born in the States with Danish blood, my Danish citizenship was provisional until age 22, with a particular process being required to maintain my citizenship after that age to demonstrate sufficient connection ... (read more)

I dreamt up the following single-winner voting system in the car while driving to Eugene, Oregon on vacation. I make no representation that it is any good, nor that it's better than anything currently known or in use, nor that's it's worth your time to read this.

Commentary and rationale will be explained at the bottom of this post

The system is a 2-round system. The first round uses an approval ballot, and the second round asks voters to choose between two candidates.

([•] indicates a constant that can be changed during implementation)

Round One:

1. Tally all a

In almost all voting systems, there's some amount of incentive to vote strategically, by misrepresenting one's true desires to obtain a more favourable result (which provides a worse result when everybody votes strategically; there's a prisoner's dilemma-type situation here). However, an important lens for analyzing systems, is whether a system rewards strategic votes, or punishes non-strategic votes.

In FPTP, the system widely used in the US, a person who chooses not to vote strategically will thereby greatly increase the probability of a candidate they st... (read more)

People overestimate how hard it would be to get California (for example) to change how it conducts elections for both state and federal positions. While changing the constitution of the US requires more than one supermajority in different arenas, changing the constitution of California requires simply a majority vote in a ballot proposition, which is much easier, and is done on a very regular basis. This is one (not the only) way that electoral change can be achieved in California, which can be a good starting point for moving the US as a whole to a better... (read more)

The Roman Kingdom and Roman Empire both fell because of ineffective leaders. The Roman Republic fell because of extremely competent, but autocratic, leaders.

Rule without proportional representation is rule without representation

Taxation without proportional representation is taxation without representation.

It's funny, "toxic" is one of the most toxic words these days

Something I disagree with: Writing advice often implores one to write in a "strong" way, that one should sound authoritative, that one should not sound uncertain.

While I agree that this can create a stronger reaction in the audience, it is a close sibling to dishonesty, and communication is best facillitated when one feels comfortable acknowledging the boundaries of their ability to know.

But perhaps I'm wrong- when one writes, one is not writing for an ideal Bayesian reasoner under the assumption of perfect honesty, since ideal Bayesian reasoners are not p... (read more)