I just learned some important things about indoor air quality after watching Why Air Quality Matters, a presentation by David Heinemeier Hanson, the creator of Ruby on Rails. It seems like something that is both important and under the radar, so I'll brain dump + summarize my takeaways here, but I encourage you to watch the whole thing.
He said he spent three weeks researching and experimenting with it full time. I place a pretty good amount of trust in his credibility here, based on a) my prior experiences with his work and b) him seeming like he did pretty thorough research.
It's easy for CO2 levels to build up. We breathe it out and if you're not getting circulation from fresh air, it'll accumulate.
This has pretty big impacts on your cognitive function. It seems similar to not getting enough sleep. Not getting enough sleep also has a pretty big impact on your cognitive function. And perhaps more importantly, it's something that we are prone to underestimating. It feels like we're only a little bit off, when in reality we're a lot off.
There are things called volatile organic compounds, aka VOCs. Those are really bad for your health. They come from a variety of sources. Cleaning pro
It is my repeated experience in companies that well-ventilated rooms are
selected by people as workplaces, and the unventilated ones then remain
available for meetings. I seem to be more sensitive about this than most people,
so I often notice that "this room makes me drowsy". (My colleagues usually
insists that it is not so bad, and they have a good reason to do so... why would
they risk that their current workplace will be instead selected as a new meeting
room, and they get this unventilated place as a new workspace?)
2DirectedEvolution2y
I just ordered the Awair on Amazon. It can be returned through Jan. 31; I've
just ordered it to play with it for a few days, and will probably return it. I
have a few specific questions I plan to answer with it:
* How much CO2 builds up in my bedroom at night, both when I'm alone and when
my partner is over.
* How much CO2 builds up in my office during the day?
* How much do I need to crack the window in my bedroom in order to keep CO2
levels low throughout the night?
* When CO2 builds up, how quickly does opening a window restore a lower level
of CO2?
With the answers to those questions, I hope I can return the detector and just
keep my windows open enough to prevent CO2 buildup without making the house too
cold.
4Adam Zerner2y
That sounds reasonable and I considered doing something similar. What convinced
me to get it anyway is that in the long run, even if the marginal gains in
productivity and wellness you get from owning the Awair vs your approach are
tiny, even tiny gains add up to the point where the $150 seems like a great ROI.
4DirectedEvolution2y
Have you gotten yours yet? If so, what are the results? I found that the only
issue in my house is that the bedroom can get to quite high levels of CO2 if the
door and windows are shut. Opening a window solves the problem, but makes the
room cold. However, it's more comfortable to sleep with extra blankets in a cold
room, than with fewer blankets in a stuffy room. It improves sleep quality.
It would be interesting to experiment in the office with having a window open,
even during winter. However, I worry that being cold would create problems.
My feeling is that "figure out how to crack a window if the room feels stuffy"
is the actionable advice here. Unless $150 is chump change to you, I'm not sure
it's really worth keeping a device around to monitor the air quality.
4Adam Zerner2y
Yup I got it both the Awair and the Alen.
* PM2.5 started off crazy high for me before I got the Alen. Using the Alen
brings it to near zero.
* VO2 and PM2.5 accumulates rather easily when I cook, although I do have a gas
stove. Also random other things like the dishwasher cause it to go up. The
Alen brings it back down in ~30 minutes maybe.
* CO2 usually hovers around a 3/5 on the Awair if I don't have a window open.
I'm finding it tricky to deal with this, because opening a window makes it
cold. I'm pretty sure my apartment's HVAC system just recycles the current
air rather than bringing in new air. I'm hoping to buy a house soon so I
think ventilation is something I'm going to look for.
* For me I don't actually notice the CO2 without the Awair telling me. I don't
think I'd do a good job of remembering to crack a window or something without
it.
* I wonder if your house has better ventilation than mine if you're not getting
issues with PM2.5. Could be if it's an older house or if your HVAC system
does ventilation.
I see what you're saying about how the actual actions you should take seem
pretty much the same regardless of whether you have the Awair or not. I agree
that it's close, but I think that small differences do exist, and that those
small differences will add up to a massively large ROI over time.
1) If it prompts you to crack a window before you would otherwise
notice/remember to do so.
2) If something new is causing issues. For me I noticed that my humidifier was
jacking up the PM2.5 levels and realized I need to get a new one. I also noticed
that the dishwasher jacks it up so now I know to not be around while it's
running. I would imagine that over time new things like this will pop up, eg.
using a new cleaning product or candle.
3) Moving to a new home, remodeling or buying eg. new furniture could cause
differences.
4) Unknown unknowns that could cause issues.
Suppose you value time spent in better air qualit
4DirectedEvolution2y
I do live in an old house.
I get the same effects of spiking VOCs and PM2.5 running the stove and
microwave. In my case, the spikes seem to last only as long as the appliance is
running. This makes sense, since the higher the concentration, the faster it
will diffuse out of the house. A rule to turn on the stove vent or crack a
window while cooking could help, but it's not obvious to me that a few minutes
per day of high VOC is something to worry about over the long term.
I note in this paper
[https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Krassi-Rumchev/publication/6323174_Volatile_Organic_Compounds_Do_they_present_a_risk_to_our_health/links/5815933908aedc7d89640f0c/Volatile-Organic-Compounds-Do-they-present-a-risk-to-our-health.pdf]
that "The chemical diversity of the VOC group is reflected in the diversity of
the health effects that individual VOCs can cause, ranging from no known health
effects of relatively inert VOCs to highly toxic effects of reactive VOCs." How
do I know that the Awair is testing for the more toxic end of the spectrum?
There are no serious guidelines for VOCs in general. How do I know that the
Awair's "guidelines" are meaningful?
My bedroom has poor ventilation. Cracking a window seems to improve my sleep
quality, which seems like the most important effect of all in the long run.
It sounds like the effect of CO2 itself on cognitive performance is questionable
[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41526-019-0071-6]. However, bioeffluents - the
carbonyls, alkyl alcohols, aromatic alcohols, ammonia, and mercaptans we breathe
out - do seem to have an effect on cognition when the air's really poorly
ventilated. But the levels in my house didn't even approach the levels at which
researchers have found statistically significant cognitive effects. I'm
wondering if the better sleep quality is due to the cooler air rather than the
better ventilation.
I really doubt that the Awair will last 25 years. I'd guess more like 5. I can
set a reminder on my phone to cr
8Adam Zerner2y
Hm, let's see how those assumptions you're using affect the numbers. If it lasts
5 years instead of 25 the breakeven would become 30 hours/year instead of 6. And
if we say that the value of better air quality is $0.20/hr instead of $1/hr due
to the uncertainty in the research you mention, we multiply by 5 again and get
150 hours/year. With those assumptions, it seems like it's probably not worth
it. And more generally, after talking it through, I no longer see it as an
obvious +ROI.
(Interesting how helpful it is to "put a number on it". I think I should do this
a lot more than I currently do.)
However, for myself I still feel really good about the purchases. I put a higher
value on the $/hr because I value health, mood and productivity more than others
probably do, and because I'm fortunate enough to be doing well financially. I
also really enjoy the peace of mind. Knowing what I know now, if I didn't have
my Awair I would be worried about things screwing up my air quality without me
knowing.
4Adam Zerner2y
I posted an update in the OP. When we initially talked about this I was pretty
strongly on the side of pro-Awair+Alen. Now I lean moderately against Alen for
most people and slightly against Awair, but slightly in favor of Awair for me
personally.
I want to write something about 6th grade logic vs 16th grade logic.
I was talking to someone, call them Alice, who works at a big well known company, call it Widget Corp. Widget Corp needs to advertise to hire people. They only advertise on Indeed and Google though.
Alice was telling me that she wants to explore some other channels (LinkedIn, ZipRecruiter, etc.). But in order to do that, Widget Corp needs evidence that advertising on those channels would be cheap enough. They're on a budget and really want to avoid spending money they... (read more)
Is “grade” of logic documented somewhere? The jumps from 6 to 12 to 16 to 22
confuse me, implying a lot more precision than I think is justified.
It’s an interesting puzzle why widgetco, who hires only competent logicians, is
unable to apply logic to their hiring. My suspicion is that cost/effectiveness
isn’t the true objection, and this is an isolated demand for rigor.
2Adam Zerner1mo
I was totally just making up numbers and didn't mean to imply any sort of
precision. Sorry for the confusion.
In school, you learn about forces. You learn about gravity, and you learn about the electromagnetic force. For the electromagnetic force, you learn about how likes repel and opposites attract. So two positively charged particles close together will repel, whereas a positively and a negatively charged particle will attract.
Then you learn about the atom. It consists of a bunch of protons and a bunch of neutrons bunched up in the middle, and then a bunch of electrons orbiting around the outside. You learn that protons are p... (read more)
Yes, this was a point of confusion for me. The point of confusion that followed
very quickly afterward were why the strong nuclear force didn't mean that
everything piles up into one enormous nucleus, and from there to a lot of other
points of confusion - some of which still haven't been resolved because nobody
really knows yet.
The most interesting thing to me is that the strong nuclear force is just strong
enough without being too strong. If it was somewhat less strong then we'd have
nothing but hydrogen, and somewhat more strong would make diprotons, neutronium,
or various forms of strange matter more stable than atomic elements.
4Dagon1y
I remember this confusion from Jr. High, many decades ago. I was lucky enough
to have an approachable teacher who pointed me to books with more complete
explanations, including the Strong Nuclear force and some details about why
inverse-square doesn't apply, making it able to overcome EM at very small
distances, when you'd think EM is strongest.
This idea that you shouldn't use the word "very" has always seemed pretentious to me. What value does it add if you say "extremely" or "incredibly" instead? I guess those words have more emphasis and a different connotation, and can be better fits. I think they're probably a good idea sometimes. But other times people just want to use different words in order to sound smart.
I remember there was a time in elementary school when I was working on a paper... (read more)
Communication advice is always pretentious - someone's trying to say they know
more about your ideas and audience than you do. And simultaneously, it's
incorrect for at least some listeners, because they're wrong - they don't.
Also, correct for many listeners, because many are SO BAD at communication that
generalized simple advice can get them to think a little more about it.
At least part of the problem is that there is a benefit to sounding smart.
"very" is low-status, and will reduce the impact of your writing, for many
audiences. That's independent of any connotation or meaning of the word or it's
replacement.
Likewise with "I think". In many cases, it's redundant and unnecessary, but in
many others it's an important acknowledgement, not that it's your thought or
that you might be wrong, but that YOU KNOW you might be wrong.
I think (heh) your planned follow-up is a good idea, to include context and
reasoning for recommendations, so we can understand what situations it applies
to.
4Gordon Seidoh Worley2y
I've tried doing this in my writing in the past, of the form of just throw away
"I think" all together because it's redundant: there's no one thinking up these
words but me.
Unfortunately this was a bad choice because many people take bald statements
without softening language like "I think" as bids to make claims about how they
are or should be perceiving reality, which I mean all statements are but they'll
jump to viewing them as claims of access to an external truth (note that this
sounds like they are making an error here by having a world model that supposes
external facts that can be learned rather than facts being always conditional on
the way they are known (which is not to say there is not perhaps some shared
external reality, only that any facts/statements you try to claim about it must
be conditional because they live in your mind behind your perceptions, but this
is a subtle enough point that people will miss it and it's not the default,
naive model of the world most people carry around anyway)).
Example:
I think you're doing X -> you're doing X
People react to the latter kind of thing as a stronger kind of claim that I
would say it's possible to make.
This doesn't quite sound like what you want to do, though, and instead want to
insert more nuanced words to make it clearer what work "think" is doing.
2Adam Zerner2y
Yeah. And also a big part of what I'm trying to propose is some sort of new
standard. I just realized I didn't express this in my OP, but I'll express it
now. I agree with the problems you're saying, and I think that if we all sort of
agreed on this new standard, eg. when you say "I suspect" it means X, then these
problems seem like they'd go away.
3FlorianH2y
Not answering your main point, but small note on the "leaving out very" point:
I've enjoyed McCloskey's writing on writing. She calls the phenomenon "elegant
variation" [https://www.google.com/search?q=mccloskey+elegant+variation] (I
don't know whether this is her only) and also teaches we have to get rid of this
unhelpful practice that we get thought in school.
3Dagon2y
Thanks! I always upvote McClosky references - one of the underappreciated
writers/thinkers on topics of culture and history.
I recall hearing "it's not obvious that X" a lot in the rationality community, particularly in Robin Hanson's writing.
Sometimes people make a claim without really explaining it. Actually, this happens a lot of times. Often times the claim is made implicitly. This is fine if that claim is obvious.
But if the claim isn't obvious, then that link in the chain is broken and the whole argument falls apart. Not that it's been proven wrong or anything, just that it needs work. You need to spend the time establishing that clai... (read more)
Agreed, but in many contexts, one should strive to be clear to what extent "it's
not obvious that X" implies "I don't think X is true in the relevant context or
margin". Many arguments that involve this are about universality or distant
extension of something that IS obvious in more normal circumstances.
Robin Hanson generally does specify that he's saying X isn't obvious (and is
quite likely false) in some extreme circumstances, and his commenters are ...
not obviously understanding that.
2Adam Zerner2y
Hm, I'm having a little trouble thinking about the distinction between X in the
current context vs X universally. Do you have any examples?
Glad to hear you've noticed this from Hanson too and it's not just me.
2Raemon2y
I think you might have reversed your opening line?
2Adam Zerner2y
Hm, I might be having a brain fart but I'm not seeing it. My point is that
people will make an argument "A is true based on X, Y and Z", someone will point
out "it's not obvious that Y", and that comment is useful because it leads to a
discussion about whether Y is true.
4Pattern2y
Suggested title: If it's not obvious, then how do we know it's true?
2Adam Zerner2y
Changed to "It's not obvious" is a useful critique.
2Raemon2y
Okay, I thought you intended to say "People claim 'it's obvious that X'" when X
wasn't obvious. Your new title is more clear.
2Adam Zerner2y
Gotcha. I appreciate you pointing it out. I'm glad to get the feedback that it
initially wasn't clear, both for self-improvement purposes and for the more
immediate purpose of improving the title.
(It's got me thinking about variable names in programming. There's something
more elegant about being concise, but then again, humans are biased towards
expecting short inferential distances, so I probably should err on the side of
longer more descriptive variable names. And post title!)
Eventually, the good guys capture an evil alien ship, and go exploring inside it. The captain of the good guys finds the alien bridge, and on the bridge is a lever. "Ah," says the captain, "this must be the lever that makes the ship dematerialize!" So he pries up the control lever and carries it back to his ship, after which his s
I think the example with the detached lever is Yudkowsky being overconfident.
Come on, it is an alien technology, way beyond our technical capabilities. Why
should we assume that the mechanism responsible for dematerializing the ship is
not in the lever? Just because the humans would not do it that way? Maybe the
alien ships are built in a way that makes them easy to configure on purpose.
That would be actually the smart way to do this.
Somewhere, in a tribe that has seen automobile for the first time, a local
shaman is probably composing an essay on a Detached CD Player Fallacy.
(just kidding)
Let me ask you a question. How confident are you that Bob is doing good? Not very confident, right? But why not? After all, Bob did say that he is doing good. And he's not particularly well known for being a liar.
I think the thing here is to view Bob's words as Bayesian evidence. They are evidence of Bob doing good. But how strong is this evidence? And how do we think about such a question?
Let's start with how we think about such a question. I... (read more)
I notice I'm confused. I don't actually know what it would mean (what
predictions I'd make or how I'd find out if I were correct about) for Bob to be
"doing good". I don't think it generally means "instantaneous hedonic state
relative to some un-tracked distribution", I think it generally means "there's
nothing I want to draw your attention to". And I take as completely obvious
that the vast majority of social interactions are more contextual and indirect
than overt legible information-sharing.
This combines to make me believe that it's just an epistemic mistake to take
words literally most of the time, at least without a fair bit of prior agreement
and contextual sharing about what those words mean in that instance.
I'm agreed that thinking of it as a Bayesean update is often a useful framing.
However, the words are a small part of evidence available to you, and since
you're human, you'll almost always have to use heuristics and shortcuts rather
than actually knowing your priors, the information, or the posterior beliefs.
4Adam Zerner10mo
It sounds like we mostly agree.
Agreed.
Agreed.
I think the big thing I disagree on is that this is always obvious. Thought of
in the abstract like this I guess I agree that it is obvious. However, I think
that there are times when you are in the moment where it can be hard to not
interpret words literally, and that is what inspired me to write this. Although
now I am realizing that I failed to make that clear or provide any examples of
that. I'd like to provide some good examples now, but it is weirdly difficult to
do so.
Agreed. I didn't mean to imply otherwise, even though I might have.
Consider a proposition P. It is either true or false. The green line represents us believing with 100% confidence that P is true. On the other hand, the red line represents us believing with 100% confidence that P is false.
We start off not knowing anything about P, so we start off at point 0, right at that black line in the middle. Then, we observe data point A. A points towards P being true, so we move upwards towards the green line a moderate amount, and end up at point 1. After that we observe data point B. B is weak... (read more)
I believe that similar to conservation of expected evidence, there's a rule of
rationality saying that you shouldn't expect your beliefs to change back and
forth too much, because that means there's a lot of uncertainty about the
factual matters, and the uncertainty should bring you closer to max entropy.
Can't remember the specific formula, though.
2Adam Zerner1y
Good point. I was actually thinking about that and forgot to mention it.
I'm not sure how to articulate this well, but my diagram and OP was mainly
targeted at gears level modesl. Using the athiesm example, the worlds smartest
theist might have a gears level model that is further along than mine. However,
I expect that the worlds smartest atheist has a gears level model that is
further along than the worlds smartest theist.
There's a concept I want to think more about: gravy.
Turkey without gravy is good. But adding the gravy... that's like the cherry on top. It takes it from good to great. It's good without the gravy, but the gravy makes it even better.
An example of gravy from my life is starting a successful startup. It's something I want to do, but it is gravy. Even if I never succeed at it, I still have a great life. Eg. by default my life is, say, a 7/10, but succeeding at a startup would be so awesome it'd make it a 10/10. But instead of this happening, my brain pulls a ... (read more)
In the field of AI we talk about capabilities vs alignment. I think it is relevant outside of the field of AI though.
I'm thinking back to something I read in Cal Newport's book Digital Minimalism. He talked about how the Amish aren't actually anti-technology. They are happy to adopt technology. They just want to make sure that the technology actually does more good than harm before they adopt it.
And thy have a neat process for this. From what I remember, they first start by researching it. Then have small groups of pe... (read more)
From my perspective, part of the issue of this post is I notice a type error in
the post when it talks about capabilities improvements being aligned with our
values.
The question is, which values, and whose values are we talking about? Admittedly
this is a common issue with morality, but in this case of capabilities research,
this matters as our aligning it to our values is too vague to make sense. We
need to go deeper and more concrete here so that we talk about specifically what
we want our capabilities research is aligned to what values.
2Adam Zerner12d
Yeah, I do agree that "values" is ambiguous. However, I think that is ok for the
point that I'm making about capabilities vs alignment. Even though people don't
fully agree on values, paying more attention to alignment and being more careful
about capabilities advancements still seems wise.
A few of my posts actually seem like they've been useful to people. OTOH, a large majority don't.
I don't have a very good ability to discern this from the beginning though. Given this situation, it seems worth "spreading the seed" pretty liberally. The chance of it being a useful idea usually outweighs the chance that it mostly just adds noise for people to sift through. Especially given the fact that the LW team encourages low barriers for posting stuff. Doubly especially as shortform posts. Triply especially given that I person... (read more)
The basic idea is that your trust battery is pre-charged at 50% when you’re first hired or start working with someone for the first time. Every interaction you have with your colleagues from that point on then either charges, discharges, or maintains the battery - and as a result, affects how much you enjoy working with them and trust them to do a good job.
The things that influence your trust battery charge vary wildly - whether the other person has done what they said they’ll do, how well you get on with that per
Epistemic status: Babbling. I don't have a good understanding of this, but it seems plausible.
Here is my understanding. Before science was a thing, people would derive ideas by theorizing (or worse, from the bible). It wasn't very rigorous. They would kinda just believe things willy-nilly (I'm exaggerating).
Then science came along and was like, "No! Slow down! You can't do that! You need to have sufficient evidence before you can justifiably believe something like that!" But as Eliezer explains, science is too slow. It judges t... (read more)
I was just listening to the Why Buddhism Is True episode of the Rationally Speaking podcast. They were talking about what the goal of meditation is. The interviewee, Robert Wright, explains:
the Buddha said in the first famous sermon, he basically laid out the goal, "Let's try to end suffering."
What an ambitious goal! But let's suppose that it was achieved. What would be the implications?
Well, there are many. But one that stands out to me as particularly important as well as ignored, is that it might be a solution to existential risk. Maybe if people we... (read more)
I've been in pursuit of a good startup idea lately. I went through a long list I had and deleted everything. None were good enough. Finding a good idea is really hard.
One way that I think about it is that a good idea has to be the intersection of a few things.
For me at least, I want to be able to fail fast. I want to be able to build and test it in a matter of weeks. I don't want to raise venture funding and spend 18 months testing an idea. This is pretty huge actually. If one idea takes 10 days to build and the other takes 10 weeks, well, the burden of
The solution is likely "talk to people". That could involve going to trade
events or writing cold LinkedIn messages to ask people to eat lunch together.
You might also do something like an internship where you are not paid but on the
other hand, will also own the code that you are writing during that internship.
2Adam Zerner4mo
Something like an internship would be a large investment of time that doesn't
feel like it's worth the possibility of finding a startup idea.
I guess talking to people makes sense. I was thinking at first that it'd require
more context than a lunch meeting, more like a dozen hours, but on second
thought you could probably at least get a sense of where the paths worth
exploring more deeply are (and aren't) in a lunch meeting.
A few years ago I worked on a startup called Premium Poker Tools as a solo founder. It is a web app where you can run simulations about poker stuff. Poker players use it to study.
It wouldn't have impressed any investors. Especially early on. Early on I was offering it for free and I only had a handful of users. And it wasn't even growing quickly. This all is the opposite of what investors want to see. They want users. Growth. Revenue.
Why? Because those things are signs. Indicators. Signal. Traction. They point towards an app being a big hi... (read more)
I was just thinking about the phrase "change your mind". It kind of implies that there is some switch that is flipped, which implies that things are binary (I believe X vs I don't believe X). That is incorrect[1] of course. Probability is in the mind, it is a spectrum, and you update incrementally.
Well, to play devils advocate, I guess you can call 50% the "switch". If you go from 51% to 49% it's going from "I believe X" to "I don't believe X". Maybe not though. Depends on what "believe" means. Maybe "believe" moreso means som
How does "change" imply "flip"? A thermometer going up a degree undergoes a
change. A mind that updates the credence of a belief from X to Y undergoes a
change as well.
2Adam Zerner15d
Yeah that's a fair question/point. I was thinking about that as well. I think I
just get the impression that, thinking about common usage, in the context of
"change your mind" people usually mean some sort of "flip". Not everyone though,
some people might just mean "update".
I was just reading AI alignment researchers don't (seem to) stack and had the thought that it'd be good to research whether intellectual progress in other fields is "stackable". That's the sort of thing that doesn't take an Einstein level of talent to pursue.
I'm sure other people have similar thoughts: "X seems like something we should do and doesn't take a crazy amount of talent".
What if there was a backlog for this?
I've heard that, to mitigate procrastination, it's good to break tasks down further and further until they become ... (read more)
I remember previous discussions that went something like this:
Alice: EA has too much money and not enough places to spend it.
Bob: Why not give grants anyone and everyone who wants to do, for example, alignment research?
Alice: That sets up bad incentives. Malicious actors would seek out those grants and wouldn't do real work. And that'd have various bad downstream effects.
But what if those grants were minimal? What if they were only enough to live out a Mustachian lifestyle?
Well, let's see. A Mustachian lifestyle costs something like $2... (read more)
I think that only addresses a branch concern, not the main problem. It filters
out some malicious actors, but certainly not all - you still get those who seek
the grants IN ADDITION to other sources of revenue.
More importantly, even if you can filter out the bad actors, you likely spend a
lot on incompetent actors, who don't produce enough value/progress to justify
the grants, even if they mean well.
I don't think those previous discussions are still happening very much - EA
doesn't have spare cash, AFAIK. But when it was, it was nearly-identical to a
lot of for-profit corporations - capital was cheap, interest rates were
extremely low, and the difficulty was in figuring out what marginal investments
brought future returns. EA (18 months ago) had a lot of free/cheap capital and
no clear models for how to use it in ways that actually improved the future.
Lowering the bar for grants likely didn't convince people that it would
actually have benefits.
2Adam Zerner1mo
Meaning that, now that they're living in the commune they'll be more likely seek
more funding for other stuff? Maybe. But you can just keep the barriers as high
as they currently are for the other stuff, which would just mean slightly(?)
more applicants to filter out at the initial stages.
My model is that the type of person who would be willing to move to a commune
and live amongst and bunch of alignment researchers is pretty likely to be
highly motivated and slightly less likely to be competent. The combination of
those two things makes me thing they'd be pretty productive. But even if they
weren't, the bar of eg. $20k/year/person is pretty low.
Thanks for adding some clarity here. I get that impression too but not
confidently. Do you know if it's because a majority of the spare cash was from
FTX and that went away when FTX collapsed?
That's always seemed really weird to me. I see
[https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Zp6wG5eQFLGWwcG6j/focus-on-the-places-where-you-feel-shocked-everyone-s?commentId=Q6xQF4J2m2uXJyF59]
lots of things that can be done. Finding the optimal action or even a 90th+
percentile action might be difficult but finding an action that meets some sort
of minimal threshold seems like it's not a very high bar. And letting the former
get in the way of the latter seems like it's making the perfect the enemy of the
good.
2Dagon1mo
Ah, I see - I didn't fully understand that you meant "require (and observe) the
lifestyle" not just "grants big enough to do so, and no bigger". That makes it
quite a bit safer from fraud and double-dipping, and a LOT less likely (IMO) to
get anyone particularly effective that's not already interested.
A long time when I was a sophomore in college, I remember a certain line of thinking I went through:
It is important for politicians to be incentivized properly. Currently they are too susceptible to bribery (hard, soft, in between) and other things.
It is difficult to actually prevent bribes. For example, they may come in the form of "Pass the laws I want passed and instead of handing you a lump sum of money, I'll give you a job that pays $5M/year for the next 30 years after your term is up."
I haven't seen any good reasoning or evidence that allowing businesses and
titans to bribe politicians via lobbyists actually results in worse laws. People
gasp when I say this, but the default doesn't seem that much better. If Peter
Thiel had been able to encourage Trump to pick the cabinet heads he wanted then
our COVID response would have gone much better.
2Adam Zerner1mo
To me the reasoning seems pretty straightforward:
1. If the politician is trying to appease special interests, that will usually
comes at the expense of society. I guess that is arguable though.
2. If (1), that would be "worse" because goodness depends on how the policies
affect society as a whole.
2lc1mo
Most billionaires at least seem to donate ideologically, not really based on how
politicians affect their special interest group. There's definitely a
correlation there, but if billionaires are just more reasonable on average then
it's possible that their influence is net-positive overall.
2Dagon1mo
Is there anyone for whom this is NOT important? Why not an asset ceiling on
every human?
The problem is in implementation. Leaving aside all the twiddly details of how
to measure and enforce, there's no "outside authority" which can impose this.
You have to convince the populace to impose it. And if they are willing to do
that, it's not necessary to have a rule, it's already in effect by popular
action.
2Adam Zerner1mo
It generally is quite important. However, (powerful) politicians are a special
case because 1) they have more influence on society and 2) I presume people
would still be motivated to take the position even with the asset ceiling.
Contrasting this with my job as a programmer, 1) it'd be good if my incentives
were more aligned with the company I work for but it wouldn't actually impact
society very much and 2) almost no one would take my job if it meant a lower
standard of living.
Wouldn't the standard law enforcement people enforce it, just like how if a
president committed murder they wouldn't get away with it? Also, it's definitely
tricky but there is a precedent for those in power to do what's in the interest
of the future of society rather than what would bring them the most power. I'm
thinking of George Washington stepping away after two terms and setting that two
term precedent.
2Dagon1mo
I don't believe either of these is true, when comparing against (powerful)
non-politician very-rich-people.
I didn't mean the end-enforcement (though that's a problem too - standard law
enforcement personnel can detect and prove murder. They have SOME ability to
detect and prove income. They have very little ability to understand asset
ownership and valuation in a world where there's significant motive to be
indirect about it. But I meant "who will implement it", if voters today don't
particularly care, why will anyone define and push for the legislation that
creates the limit?
2Adam Zerner1mo
Hm, maybe. Let me try thinking of some examples:
* CEOs: Yeah, pretty big influence and I think smart people would do it for
free. Although if you made a rule that CEOs of sufficiently large companies
had to have asset ceilings I think there'd be a decent amount less
entrepreneurs which feels like it'd be enough to make it a bad idea.
* Hedge fund managers: From what I understand they don't really have much
influence on society in their role. I think some smart people would still
take the job with an asset ceiling but they very well might not be smart
enough; I know how competitive and technical that world is. And similar to
CEOs, I don't think there'd be many if any hedge funds that got started if
they knew their traders would have to have asset ceilings.
* Movie stars: Not much influence on society, but people would take the role
for the fame it'd provide of course.
After trying to think of examples I'm not seeing any that fit. Do you have any
in mind?
There might be things that are hard to prevent from slipping through the cracks,
but the big things seem easy enough to detect: houses, cars, yachts, hotels,
vacations. I guess they'd probably have to give up some rights to privacy too
though to make enforcement for practical. Given how much they're already giving
up with the asset ceiling, the additional sacrificing of some amount of privacy
doesn't seem like it changes anything too much.
I'm not optimistic about it, but to me it seems at least ballpark plausible. I
don't understand this stuff too much, but to me it seems like voters aren't the
problem. Voters right now, across party lines, distrust politicians and "the
system". I would assume the problem is other politicians. You'd have to get
their support but it negatively affects them so they don't support it.
Maybe there are creative ways to sidestep this though.
* Make the asset ceilings start in 10 years instead of today? Maybe that'd be
blatantly obvious that it's the
Goodhart's Law seems like a pretty promising analogy for communicating the difficulties of alignment to the general public, particularly those who are in fields like business or politics. They're already familiar with the difficulty and pain associated with trying to get their organization to do X.
I remember talking to a product designer before. I brought up the idea of me looking for ways to do things more quickly that might be worse for the user. Their response was something along the lines of "I mean, as a designer I'm always going to advocate for whatever is best for the user."
I think that "apples-to-oranges" is a good analogy for what is wrong about that. Here's what I mean.
Suppose there is a form and the design is to have inline validation (nice error messages next to the input fields). And suppose that "global"... (read more)
I was just watching this YouTube video on portable air conditioners. The person is explaining how air conditioners work, and it's pretty hard to follow.
I'm confident that a very large majority of the target audience would also find it hard to follow. And I'm also confident that this would be extremely easy to discover with some low-fi usability testing. Before releasing the video, just spend maybe 20 mins and have a random person watch the video, and er, watch them watch it. Ask them to think out loud, narrating their thought process. Stuff like that.
I think that people should write with more emotion. A lot more emotion!
Emotion is bayesian evidence. It communicates things.
One could also propose making it not full of rants, but I don’t think that would be an improvement. The rants are important. The rants contain data. They reveal Eliezer’s cognitive state and his assessment of the state of play. Not ranting would leave important bits out and give a meaningfully misleading impression.
...
The fact that this is the post we got, as opposed to a different (in many ways better) post, is a reflection of the
I wonder whether it would be good to think about blog posts as open journaling.
When you write in a journal, you are writing for yourself and don't expect anyone else to read it. I guess you can call that "closed journaling". In which case "open journaling" would mean that you expect others to read it, and you at least loosely are trying to cater to them.
Well, there are pros and cons to look at here. The main con of treating blog posts as open journaling is that the quality will be lower than a more traditional blog post that is more refined. On the other h... (read more)
Imagine the lifecycle of an idea being some sort of spectrum. At the beginning of the spectrum is the birth of the idea. Further to the right, the idea gets refined some. Perhaps 1/4 the way through the person who has the idea texts some friends about it. Perhaps midway through it is refined enough where a rough draft is shared with some other friends. Perhaps 3/4 the way through a blog post is shared. Then further along, the idea receives more refinement, and maybe a follow up post is made. Perhaps towards the ve... (read more)
It sounds to me like in a more normal case it doesn't begin with texting friends
but talking in person with them about the idea. For that to happen you usually
need a good in person community.
These days more is happening via Zoom but reaching out to chat online still
isn't as easy as going to a meetup.
It bothers me how inconsistent I am. For example, consider covid-risk. I've eaten indoors before. Yet I'll say I only want to get coffee outside, not inside. Is that inconsistent? Probably. Is it the right choice? Let's say it is, for arguments sake. Does the fact that it is inconsistent matter? Hell no!
Well, it matters to the extent that it is a red flag. It should prompt you to have some sort of alarms going off in your head that you are doing something wrong. But the proper response to those alarms is to use that as an op... (read more)
Inconsistency is a pointer to incorrectness, but I don't think that example is
inconsistent. There's a reference class problem involved - eating a meal and
getting a coffee, at different times, with different considerations of
convenience, social norms, and personal state of mind, are just not the same
decision.
2Adam Zerner1y
I hear ya. In my situation I think that when you incorporate all of that and
look at the resulting payoffs and probabilities, it does end up being
inconsistent. I agree that it depends on the situation though.
The other day I was walking to pick up some lunch instead of having it delivered. I also had the opportunity to freelance for $100/hr (not always available to me), but I still chose to walk and save myself the delivery fee.
I make similarly irrational decisions about money all the time. There are situations where I feel like other mundane tasks should be outsourced. Eg. I should trade my money for time, and then use that time to make even more money. But I can't bring myself to do it.
Perhaps food is a good example. It often takes me 1-2 hours to "do" dinner... (read more)
I suspect there are multiple things going on. First and foremost, the vast
majority of uses of time have non-monetary costs and benefits, in terms of
enjoyment, human interaction, skill-building, and even less-legible things than
those. After some amount of satisficing, money is no longer a good common
measurement for non-comparable things you could do to earn or spend it.
Secondly, most of our habits on the topic are developed in a situation where
hourly work is not infinitely available at attractive rates. The marginal hour
of work, for most of us, most of the time, is not the same as our average hour
of work. In the case where you have freelance work available that you could get
$1.67/minute for any amount of time you choose, and you can do equally-good (or
at least equally-valuable) work regardless of state of mind, your instincts are
probably wrong - you should work rather than any non-personally-valuable chores
that you can hire out for less than this.
1JBlack1y
One thing strikes me: you appear to be supposing that apart from how much money
is involved, every possible activity per hour is equally valuable to you in
itself. This is not required by rationality unless you have a utility function
that depends only upon money and a productivity curve that is absolutely flat.
Maybe money isn't everything to you? That's rationally allowed. Maybe you
actually needed a break from work to clear your head for the rest of the
afternoon or whatever? That's rationally allowed too. It's even allowed for you
to not want to do that freelancing job instead of going for a walk at that time,
though in that case you might consider the future utility of the net $90 in
getting other things that you might want.
Regarding food, do you dislike cooking for yourself more than doing more work
for somebody else? Do you actually dislike cooking at all? Do you value deciding
what goes into your body and how it is prepared? How much of your hourly "worth"
is compensation for having to give up control of what you do during that time?
How much is based on the mental or physical "effort" you need to put into it,
which may be limited? How much is not wanting to sell your time much more
cheaply than they're willing to pay?
Rationality does not forbid that any of these should be factors in your
decisions.
On the startup example, my experience and those of everyone else I've talked to
who have done it successfully is that leading a startup is hell, even if it's
just a small scale local business. You can't do it part time or even ordinary
full time, or it will very likely fail and make you less than nothing. If you're
thinking "I could spend some of my extra hours per week on it", stop thinking it
because that way lies a complete waste of time and money.
2Adam Zerner1y
No, I am not supposing that. Let me clarify. Consider the example of me walking
to pick up food instead of ordering it. Suppose it takes a half hour and I could
have spent that half hour making $50 instead. The way I phrased it:
* Option #1: Spend $5 to save myself the walk and spend that time freelancing
to earn $50, netting me $45.
* Option #2: Walk to pick up the food, not spending or earning anything.
The problem with that phrasing is that dollars aren't what matter, utility is,
as you allude to. My point is that it still seems like people often make very
bad decisions. In this example, the joy of walking versus freelancing + any
productivity gains are not worth $45, I don't think.
I do agree that this doesn't last forever though. At some point you get so
exhausted from working where the walk has big productivity benefits, the work
would be very unpleasant, and the walk would be a very pleasant change of pace.
Tangential, but Paul Graham wouldn't call [http://paulgraham.com/growth.html]
that a startup.
I disagree here. 1) I know of real life counterexamples. I'm thinking of people
I met at an Indie Hackers meetup I used to organize. 2) It doesn't match my
model of how things work.
Betting is something that I'd like to do more of. As the LessWrong tag explains, it's a useful tool to improve your epistemics.
But finding people to bet with is hard. If I'm willing to bet on X with Y odds and I find someone else eager to, it's probably because they know more than me and I am wrong. So I update my belief and then we can't bet.
But in some situations it works out with a friend, where there is mutual knowledge that we're not being unfair to one another, and just genuinely disagree, and we can make a bet. I wonder how I can do this more often. And I wonder if some sort of platform could be built to enable this to happen in a more widespread manner.
I've always heard of the veil of ignorance being discussed in a... social(?) context: "How would you act if you didn't know what person you would be?". A farmer in China? Stock trader in New York? But I've never heard it discussed in a temporal context: "How would you act if you didn't know what era you would live in?" 2021? 2025? 2125? 3125?
This "temporal veil of ignorance" feels like a useful concept.
I just came across an analogy that seems applicable for AI safety.
AGI is like a super powerful sports car that only has an accelerator, no brake pedal. Such a car is cool. You'd think to yourself:
Nice! This is promising! Now we have to just find ourselves a brake pedal.
You wouldn't just hop in the car and go somewhere. Sure, it's possible that you make it to your destination, but it's pretty unlikely, and certainly isn't worth the risk.
In this analogy, the solution to the alignment problem is the brake pedal, and we really need to find it.
(I'm not as confident in the following, plus it seems to fit as a standalone
comment rather than on the OP.)
Why do we really need to find it? Because we live in a world where people are
seduced by the power of the sports car. They are in a competition to get to
their destinations as fast as possible and are willing to be reckless in order
to get there.
Well, that's the conflict theory
[https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/] perspective. The
mistake theory perspective is that people simply think they'll be fine driving
the car without the brakes.
That sounds crazy. And it is crazy! But think about it this way. (The analogy
starts to break down a bit here.) These people are used to driving wayyyy less
powerful cars. Sometimes these cars don't have breaks at all, other times they
have mediocre brake systems. Regardless, it's not that dangerous. These people
understand that the sports car is in a different category and is more dangerous,
but they don't have a good handle on just how much more dangerous it is, and how
it is totally insane to try to drive a car like that without brakes.
We can also extend the analogy in a different direction (although the analogy
breaks down when pushed in this direction as well). Imagine that you develop
breaks for this super powerful sports car. Awesome! What do you do next? You
test them. In as many ways as you can.
However, with AI, we can't actually do this. We only have one shot. We just have
to install them, hit the road, and hope they work. (Hm, maybe the analogy does
work. Iirc, the super powerful racing cars, are built to only be driven once/a
few times. There's a trade-off between performance and how long the car lasts.
And for races, they go all the way towards the performance side of the
spectrum.)
In my writing, I usually use the Alice and Bob naming scheme. Alice, Bob, Carol, Dave, Erin, etc. Why? The same reason Steve Jobs wore the same outfit everyday: decision fatigue. I could spend the time thinking of names other than Alice and Bob. It wouldn't be hard. But it's just nice to not have to think about it. It seems like it shouldn't matter, but I find it really convenient.
Epistemic status: Rambly. Perhaps incoherent. That's why this is a shortform post. I'm not really sure how to explain this well. I also sense that this is a topic that is studied by academics and might be a thing already.
I was just listening to Ben Taylor's recent podcast on the top 75 NBA players of all time, and a thought started to crystalize for me that I always have wanted to develop. For people who don't know him (everyone reading this?), his epistemics are quite good. If you want to see good epistemics applied to basketball, read his series of posts... (read more)
I wonder if it would be a good idea groom people from an early age to do AI research. I suspect that it would. Ie identify who the promising children are, and then invest a lot of resources towards grooming them. Tutors, therapists, personal trainers, chefs, nutritionists, etc.
Iirc, there was a story from Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise about some parents that wanted to prove that women can succeed in chess, and raised three daughters doing something sorta similar but to a smaller extent. I think the larger point being made was that if you ... (read more)
I suspect that the term "cognitive" is often over/misused.
Let me explain what my understanding of the term is. I think of it as "a disagreement with behaviorism". If you think about how psychology progressed as a field, first there was Freudian stuff that wasn't very scientific. Then behaviorism emerged as a response to that, saying "Hey, you have to actually measure stuff and do things scientifically!" But behaviorists didn't think you could measure what goes on inside someone's head. All you could do is measure what the stimulus is and then how the human... (read more)
The long standing meaning of "cognitive" for hundreds of years before cognitive
psychologists was having to do with knowledge, thinking, and perception. A
cognitive bias is a bias that affects your knowledge, thinking, and/or
perception.
Epistemic bias is a fine term for those cognitive biases that are specifically
biases of beliefs. Not all cognitive biases are of that form though, even when
they might fairly consistently lead to certain types of biases in beliefs.
2Adam Zerner2y
Hm, can you think of any examples of cognitive biases that aren't about beliefs?
You mention that the term "cognitive" also has to do with perception. When I
hear "perception" I think sight, sound, etc. But biases in things like sight and
sound feel to me like they would be called illusions, not biases.
1JBlack2y
The first one to come to mind was Recency Bias, but maybe I'm just paying that
one more attention because it came up recently.
Having noticed that bias in myself, I consulted an external source
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases] and checked that rather
a lot of them are about preferences, perceptions, reactions, attitudes,
attention, and lots of other things that aren't beliefs.
They do often misinform beliefs, but many of the biases themselves seem to be
prior to belief formation or evaluation.
2Adam Zerner2y
Ah, those examples have made the distinction between biases that misinform
beliefs and biases of beliefs clear. Thanks!
As someone who seems to understand the term better than I do, I'm curious
whether you share my impression that the term "cognitive" is often misused. As
you say, it refers to a pretty broad set of things, and I feel like people use
the term "cognitive" when they're actually trying to point to a much narrower
set of things.
Depends on what you mean by "low-hanging fruit". I think there are lots of
problems like this that seem net-negative, but it doesn't seem anywhere close to
the most important thing I would recommend politicians to do.
2Adam Zerner2y
By low-hanging fruit I mean 1) non-trivial boost in electability and 2) good
effort-to-reward ratio relative to other things a politician can focus on.
I agree that there are other things that would be more impactful, but perhaps
there is room to do those more impactful things along with smaller, less
impactful things.
2Dagon2y
I don't think there IS much low-hanging fruit. Seemingly-easy things are almost
always more complicated, and the credit for deceptively-hard things skews the
wrong way: promising and failing hurts a lot (didn't even do this little thing),
promising and succeeding only helps a little (thanks, but what important things
have you done?).
Much better, in politics, to fail at important topics and get credit for trying.
I just learned some important things about indoor air quality after watching Why Air Quality Matters, a presentation by David Heinemeier Hanson, the creator of Ruby on Rails. It seems like something that is both important and under the radar, so I'll brain dump + summarize my takeaways here, but I encourage you to watch the whole thing.
- He said he spent three weeks researching and experimenting with it full time. I place a pretty good amount of trust in his credibility here, based on a) my prior experiences with his work and b) him seeming like he did pretty thorough research.
- It's easy for CO2 levels to build up. We breathe it out and if you're not getting circulation from fresh air, it'll accumulate.
- This has pretty big impacts on your cognitive function. It seems similar to not getting enough sleep. Not getting enough sleep also has a pretty big impact on your cognitive function. And perhaps more importantly, it's something that we are prone to underestimating. It feels like we're only a little bit off, when in reality we're a lot off.
- There are things called volatile organic compounds, aka VOCs. Those are really bad for your health. They come from a variety of sources. Cleaning pro
... (read more)6th vs 16th grade logic
I want to write something about 6th grade logic vs 16th grade logic.
I was talking to someone, call them Alice, who works at a big well known company, call it Widget Corp. Widget Corp needs to advertise to hire people. They only advertise on Indeed and Google though.
Alice was telling me that she wants to explore some other channels (LinkedIn, ZipRecruiter, etc.). But in order to do that, Widget Corp needs evidence that advertising on those channels would be cheap enough. They're on a budget and really want to avoid spending money they... (read more)
Noticing confusion about the nucleus
In school, you learn about forces. You learn about gravity, and you learn about the electromagnetic force. For the electromagnetic force, you learn about how likes repel and opposites attract. So two positively charged particles close together will repel, whereas a positively and a negatively charged particle will attract.
Then you learn about the atom. It consists of a bunch of protons and a bunch of neutrons bunched up in the middle, and then a bunch of electrons orbiting around the outside. You learn that protons are p... (read more)
The other day Improve your Vocabulary: Stop saying VERY! popped up in my YouTube video feed. I was annoyed.
This idea that you shouldn't use the word "very" has always seemed pretentious to me. What value does it add if you say "extremely" or "incredibly" instead? I guess those words have more emphasis and a different connotation, and can be better fits. I think they're probably a good idea sometimes. But other times people just want to use different words in order to sound smart.
I remember there was a time in elementary school when I was working on a paper... (read more)
"It's not obvious" is a useful critique
I recall hearing "it's not obvious that X" a lot in the rationality community, particularly in Robin Hanson's writing.
Sometimes people make a claim without really explaining it. Actually, this happens a lot of times. Often times the claim is made implicitly. This is fine if that claim is obvious.
But if the claim isn't obvious, then that link in the chain is broken and the whole argument falls apart. Not that it's been proven wrong or anything, just that it needs work. You need to spend the time establishing that clai... (read more)
Using examples of people being stupid
I've noticed that a lot of cool concepts stem from examples of people being stupid. For example, I recently re-read Detached Lever Fallacy and Beautiful Probability.
Detached Lever Fallacy:
... (read more)Words as Bayesian Evidence
Let me ask you a question. How confident are you that Bob is doing good? Not very confident, right? But why not? After all, Bob did say that he is doing good. And he's not particularly well known for being a liar.
I think the thing here is to view Bob's words as Bayesian evidence. They are evidence of Bob doing good. But how strong is this evidence? And how do we think about such a question?
Let's start with how we think about such a question. I... (read more)
Closer to the truth vs further along
Consider a proposition P. It is either true or false. The green line represents us believing with 100% confidence that P is true. On the other hand, the red line represents us believing with 100% confidence that P is false.
We start off not knowing anything about P, so we start off at point 0, right at that black line in the middle. Then, we observe data point A. A points towards P being true, so we move upwards towards the green line a moderate amount, and end up at point 1. After that we observe data point B. B is weak... (read more)
There's a concept I want to think more about: gravy.
Turkey without gravy is good. But adding the gravy... that's like the cherry on top. It takes it from good to great. It's good without the gravy, but the gravy makes it even better.
An example of gravy from my life is starting a successful startup. It's something I want to do, but it is gravy. Even if I never succeed at it, I still have a great life. Eg. by default my life is, say, a 7/10, but succeeding at a startup would be so awesome it'd make it a 10/10. But instead of this happening, my brain pulls a ... (read more)
Capabilities vs alignment outside of AI
In the field of AI we talk about capabilities vs alignment. I think it is relevant outside of the field of AI though.
I'm thinking back to something I read in Cal Newport's book Digital Minimalism. He talked about how the Amish aren't actually anti-technology. They are happy to adopt technology. They just want to make sure that the technology actually does more good than harm before they adopt it.
And thy have a neat process for this. From what I remember, they first start by researching it. Then have small groups of pe... (read more)
Spreading the seed of ideas
A few of my posts actually seem like they've been useful to people. OTOH, a large majority don't.
I don't have a very good ability to discern this from the beginning though. Given this situation, it seems worth "spreading the seed" pretty liberally. The chance of it being a useful idea usually outweighs the chance that it mostly just adds noise for people to sift through. Especially given the fact that the LW team encourages low barriers for posting stuff. Doubly especially as shortform posts. Triply especially given that I person... (read more)
Notice when trust batteries start off low
... (read more)Covid-era restaurant choice hack: Korean BBQ. Why? Think about it...
They have vents above the tables! Cool, huh? I'm not sure how much that does, but my intuition is that it cuts the risk in half at least.
Science as reversed stupidity
Epistemic status: Babbling. I don't have a good understanding of this, but it seems plausible.
Here is my understanding. Before science was a thing, people would derive ideas by theorizing (or worse, from the bible). It wasn't very rigorous. They would kinda just believe things willy-nilly (I'm exaggerating).
Then science came along and was like, "No! Slow down! You can't do that! You need to have sufficient evidence before you can justifiably believe something like that!" But as Eliezer explains, science is too slow. It judges t... (read more)
I was just listening to the Why Buddhism Is True episode of the Rationally Speaking podcast. They were talking about what the goal of meditation is. The interviewee, Robert Wright, explains:
What an ambitious goal! But let's suppose that it was achieved. What would be the implications?
Well, there are many. But one that stands out to me as particularly important as well as ignored, is that it might be a solution to existential risk. Maybe if people we... (read more)
I've been in pursuit of a good startup idea lately. I went through a long list I had and deleted everything. None were good enough. Finding a good idea is really hard.
One way that I think about it is that a good idea has to be the intersection of a few things.
- For me at least, I want to be able to fail fast. I want to be able to build and test it in a matter of weeks. I don't want to raise venture funding and spend 18 months testing an idea. This is pretty huge actually. If one idea takes 10 days to build and the other takes 10 weeks, well, the burden of
... (read more)Bayesian traction
A few years ago I worked on a startup called Premium Poker Tools as a solo founder. It is a web app where you can run simulations about poker stuff. Poker players use it to study.
It wouldn't have impressed any investors. Especially early on. Early on I was offering it for free and I only had a handful of users. And it wasn't even growing quickly. This all is the opposite of what investors want to see. They want users. Growth. Revenue.
Why? Because those things are signs. Indicators. Signal. Traction. They point towards an app being a big hi... (read more)
Against "change your mind"
I was just thinking about the phrase "change your mind". It kind of implies that there is some switch that is flipped, which implies that things are binary (I believe X vs I don't believe X). That is incorrect[1] of course. Probability is in the mind, it is a spectrum, and you update incrementally.
Well, to play devils advocate, I guess you can call 50% the "switch". If you go from 51% to 49% it's going from "I believe X" to "I don't believe X". Maybe not though. Depends on what "believe" means. Maybe "believe" moreso means som
Alignment research backlogs
I was just reading AI alignment researchers don't (seem to) stack and had the thought that it'd be good to research whether intellectual progress in other fields is "stackable". That's the sort of thing that doesn't take an Einstein level of talent to pursue.
I'm sure other people have similar thoughts: "X seems like something we should do and doesn't take a crazy amount of talent".
What if there was a backlog for this?
I've heard that, to mitigate procrastination, it's good to break tasks down further and further until they become ... (read more)
Mustachian Grants
I remember previous discussions that went something like this:
But what if those grants were minimal? What if they were only enough to live out a Mustachian lifestyle?
Well, let's see. A Mustachian lifestyle costs something like $2... (read more)
Asset ceilings for politicians
A long time when I was a sophomore in college, I remember a certain line of thinking I went through:
- It is important for politicians to be incentivized properly. Currently they are too susceptible to bribery (hard, soft, in between) and other things.
- It is difficult to actually prevent bribes. For example, they may come in the form of "Pass the laws I want passed and instead of handing you a lump sum of money, I'll give you a job that pays $5M/year for the next 30 years after your term is up."
- Since preventing bribes is diffi
... (read more)Goodhart's Law seems like a pretty promising analogy for communicating the difficulties of alignment to the general public, particularly those who are in fields like business or politics. They're already familiar with the difficulty and pain associated with trying to get their organization to do X.
When better is apples to oranges
I remember talking to a product designer before. I brought up the idea of me looking for ways to do things more quickly that might be worse for the user. Their response was something along the lines of "I mean, as a designer I'm always going to advocate for whatever is best for the user."
I think that "apples-to-oranges" is a good analogy for what is wrong about that. Here's what I mean.
Suppose there is a form and the design is to have inline validation (nice error messages next to the input fields). And suppose that "global"... (read more)
I was just watching this YouTube video on portable air conditioners. The person is explaining how air conditioners work, and it's pretty hard to follow.
I'm confident that a very large majority of the target audience would also find it hard to follow. And I'm also confident that this would be extremely easy to discover with some low-fi usability testing. Before releasing the video, just spend maybe 20 mins and have a random person watch the video, and er, watch them watch it. Ask them to think out loud, narrating their thought process. Stuff like that.
Moreo... (read more)
I think that people should write with more emotion. A lot more emotion!
Emotion is bayesian evidence. It communicates things.
... (read more)I wonder whether it would be good to think about blog posts as open journaling.
When you write in a journal, you are writing for yourself and don't expect anyone else to read it. I guess you can call that "closed journaling". In which case "open journaling" would mean that you expect others to read it, and you at least loosely are trying to cater to them.
Well, there are pros and cons to look at here. The main con of treating blog posts as open journaling is that the quality will be lower than a more traditional blog post that is more refined. On the other h... (read more)
Collaboration and the early stages of ideas
Imagine the lifecycle of an idea being some sort of spectrum. At the beginning of the spectrum is the birth of the idea. Further to the right, the idea gets refined some. Perhaps 1/4 the way through the person who has the idea texts some friends about it. Perhaps midway through it is refined enough where a rough draft is shared with some other friends. Perhaps 3/4 the way through a blog post is shared. Then further along, the idea receives more refinement, and maybe a follow up post is made. Perhaps towards the ve... (read more)
Inconsistency as the lesser evil
It bothers me how inconsistent I am. For example, consider covid-risk. I've eaten indoors before. Yet I'll say I only want to get coffee outside, not inside. Is that inconsistent? Probably. Is it the right choice? Let's say it is, for arguments sake. Does the fact that it is inconsistent matter? Hell no!
Well, it matters to the extent that it is a red flag. It should prompt you to have some sort of alarms going off in your head that you are doing something wrong. But the proper response to those alarms is to use that as an op... (read more)
The other day I was walking to pick up some lunch instead of having it delivered. I also had the opportunity to freelance for $100/hr (not always available to me), but I still chose to walk and save myself the delivery fee.
I make similarly irrational decisions about money all the time. There are situations where I feel like other mundane tasks should be outsourced. Eg. I should trade my money for time, and then use that time to make even more money. But I can't bring myself to do it.
Perhaps food is a good example. It often takes me 1-2 hours to "do" dinner... (read more)
Betting is something that I'd like to do more of. As the LessWrong tag explains, it's a useful tool to improve your epistemics.
But finding people to bet with is hard. If I'm willing to bet on X with Y odds and I find someone else eager to, it's probably because they know more than me and I am wrong. So I update my belief and then we can't bet.
But in some situations it works out with a friend, where there is mutual knowledge that we're not being unfair to one another, and just genuinely disagree, and we can make a bet. I wonder how I can do this more often. And I wonder if some sort of platform could be built to enable this to happen in a more widespread manner.
Idea: Athletic jerseys, but for intellectual figures. Eg. "Francis Bacon" on the back, "Science" on the front.
I've always heard of the veil of ignorance being discussed in a... social(?) context: "How would you act if you didn't know what person you would be?". A farmer in China? Stock trader in New York? But I've never heard it discussed in a temporal context: "How would you act if you didn't know what era you would live in?" 2021? 2025? 2125? 3125?
This "temporal veil of ignorance" feels like a useful concept.
I just came across an analogy that seems applicable for AI safety.
AGI is like a super powerful sports car that only has an accelerator, no brake pedal. Such a car is cool. You'd think to yourself:
You wouldn't just hop in the car and go somewhere. Sure, it's possible that you make it to your destination, but it's pretty unlikely, and certainly isn't worth the risk.
In this analogy, the solution to the alignment problem is the brake pedal, and we really need to find it.
Alice, Bob, and Steve Jobs
In my writing, I usually use the Alice and Bob naming scheme. Alice, Bob, Carol, Dave, Erin, etc. Why? The same reason Steve Jobs wore the same outfit everyday: decision fatigue. I could spend the time thinking of names other than Alice and Bob. It wouldn't be hard. But it's just nice to not have to think about it. It seems like it shouldn't matter, but I find it really convenient.
Epistemic status: Rambly. Perhaps incoherent. That's why this is a shortform post. I'm not really sure how to explain this well. I also sense that this is a topic that is studied by academics and might be a thing already.
I was just listening to Ben Taylor's recent podcast on the top 75 NBA players of all time, and a thought started to crystalize for me that I always have wanted to develop. For people who don't know him (everyone reading this?), his epistemics are quite good. If you want to see good epistemics applied to basketball, read his series of posts... (read more)
I wonder if it would be a good idea groom people from an early age to do AI research. I suspect that it would. Ie identify who the promising children are, and then invest a lot of resources towards grooming them. Tutors, therapists, personal trainers, chefs, nutritionists, etc.
Iirc, there was a story from Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise about some parents that wanted to prove that women can succeed in chess, and raised three daughters doing something sorta similar but to a smaller extent. I think the larger point being made was that if you ... (read more)
I suspect that the term "cognitive" is often over/misused.
Let me explain what my understanding of the term is. I think of it as "a disagreement with behaviorism". If you think about how psychology progressed as a field, first there was Freudian stuff that wasn't very scientific. Then behaviorism emerged as a response to that, saying "Hey, you have to actually measure stuff and do things scientifically!" But behaviorists didn't think you could measure what goes on inside someone's head. All you could do is measure what the stimulus is and then how the human... (read more)
Everyone hates spam calls. What if a politician campaigned to address little annoyances like this? Seems like it could be a low hanging fruit.