LESSWRONG
is fundraising!
LW
$

by Adam Zerner
1 min read
215

7

This is a special post for quick takes by Adam Zerner. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
Mentioned in
adamzerner's Shortform
221 comments, sorted by
top scoring
Click to highlight new comments since:
Some comments are truncated due to high volume. (⌘F to expand all)Change truncation settings
[-]Adam Zerner4125

I wish there were more discussion posts on LessWrong.

Right now it feels like it weakly if not moderately violates some sort of cultural norm to publish a discussion post (similar but to a lesser extent on the Shortform). Something low effort of the form "X is a topic I'd like to discuss. A, B and C are a few initial thoughts I have about it. What do you guys think?"

It seems to me like something we should encourage though. Here's how I'm thinking about it. Such "discussion posts" currently happen informally in social circles. Maybe you'll text a friend. Maybe you'll bring it up at a meetup. Maybe you'll post about it in a private Slack group.

But if it's appropriate in those contexts, why shouldn't it be appropriate on LessWrong? Why not benefit from having it be visible to more people? The more eyes you get on it, the better the chance someone has something helpful, insightful, or just generally useful to contribute.

The big downside I see is that it would screw up the post feed. Like when you go to lesswrong.com and see the list of posts, you don't want that list to have a bunch of low quality discussion posts you're not interested in. You don't want to spend time and energy sifting... (read more)

Reply621
[-]Adam Zerner200

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)
Reply
4Viliam
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?)
2DirectedEvolution
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 Zerner
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.
4DirectedEvolution
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 Zerner
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 quality at $1/hr and that the product l
4DirectedEvolution
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 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. 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 crack a window each night and morning if necessary, and maybe write a little note to tape next to the stove if I feel like it. If that doesn't do it in any particular instance, then I doubt that lack of a push notification is the root of the problem.
8Adam Zerner
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 Zerner
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.
[-]Adam Zerner1715

Project idea: virtual water coolers for LessWrong

Previous: Virtual water coolers

Here's an idea: what if there was a virtual water cooler for LessWrong?

  • There'd be Zoom chats with three people per chat. Each chat is a virtual water cooler.
  • The user journey would begin by the user expressing that they'd like to join a virtual water cooler.
  • Once they do, they'd be invited to join one.
  • I think it'd make sense to restrict access to users based on karma. Maybe only 100+ karma users are allowed.
  • To start, that could be it. In the future you could do some investigation into things like how many people there should be per chat.

Seems like an experiment that is both cheap and worthwhile.

If there is interest I'd be happy to create a MVP.

(Related: it could be interesting to abstract this and build a sort of "virtual water cooler platform builder" such that eg. LessWrong could use the builder to build a virtual water cooler platform for LessWrong and OtherCommunity could use the builder to build a virtual water cooler platform for their community.)

Reply
2Yitz
Personally I think this would be pretty cool!
[-]Adam Zerner170

In How to Get Startup Ideas, Paul Graham provides the following advice:

Live in the future, then build what's missing.

Something that feels to me like it's present in the future and missing in today's world: OkCupid for friendship.

Think about it. The internet is a thing. Billions and billions of people have cheap and instant access to it. So then, logistics are rarely an obstacle for chatting with people.

The actual obstacle in today's world is matchmaking. How do you find the people to chat with? And similarly, how do you communicate that there is a strong match so that each party is thinking "oh wow this person seems cool, I'd love to chat with them" instead of "this is a random person and I am not optimistic that I'd have a good time talking to them".

This doesn't really feel like such a huge problem though. I mean, assume for a second that you were able to force everyone in the world to spend an hour filling out some sort of OkCupid-like profile, but for friendship and conversation rather than romantic relationships. From there, it seems doable enough to figure out whatever matchmaking algorithm.

I think the issue is moreso getting people to fill out the survey in the first place. T... (read more)

Reply
3ChristianKl
Many people seem to be more motivated to invest energy into pursuing romantic relationships than friendships. There are few books about making good friends and many books on dating. Omegle essentially provided an answer to that question that was highly used. It didn't do a lot of matchmaking but it might be a starting point. If you want to pursue this as a business, maybe buy the recently shutdown Omegle domain from Leif K-Brooks (who's a rationalist) and try to switch from chatting to random people to chatting to highly match-made connections.   
2Adam Zerner
Perhaps. But to the extent that people aren't motivated to invest energy into friendships, I think there is a sort of latent motivation. Friendship and conversation is in fact important, and so in taking this "live in the future" perspective, I think people will eventually realize the importance and start putting effort into it. Gotcha. I think the matchmaking part is essential though. It moves the expectation of prospective users from "I'll be chatting with a random stranger, and it probably won't be too great" to "I'll be chatting with someone who the platform thinks I'm super compatible with. Cool!" Thanks for the tip. I'm not interested in pursuing it as a business in the forseeable future, but perhaps in the more distant future. If so, I will keep this in mind.
2ChristianKl
What do you think will change in the future that people put more effort into friendship than they are doing at present?
2Gunnar_Zarncke
I have thought about it too, and I think something like an automated Kickstarter for interest groups is want one would need. It would work like this: You enter your interests into the system (or let it be inferred automatically from your online profiles) and the system generates recommendations for ad-hoc groups to meet in places nearby (or not so nearby if more attributes match). Bonus: Set up a ChatGPT DJ or entertainer to engage people with each other. Best if done as an open protocol where different clients can offer different interactivity or different profile extraction. I started some code for the match-making but due to many other obligations it is currently abandoned: https://github.com/GunnarZarncke/okgoto/tree/master/ 
1johnvon
This is actually what social media is for, but you don't have to fill out a questionnaire. You also don't have to out yourself as being so lonely and without friends that you're using a special matchmaking service to find new friends, this in itself could be unattractive to new acquaintances. 
2Adam Zerner
Social media doesn't do the matchmaking stuff very much though, does it?
[-]Adam Zerner150

Every day I check Hacker News. Sometimes a few times, sometimes a few dozen times.

I've always felt guilty about it, like it is a waste of time and I should be doing more productive things. But recently I've been feeling a little better about it. There are things about coding, design, product, management, QA, devops, etc. etc. that feel like they're "in the water" to me, where everyone mostly knows about them. However, I've been running into situations where people turn out to not know about them.

I'm realizing that they're not actually "in the water", and that the reason I know about them is probably because I've been reading random blog posts from the front page of Hacker News every day for 10 years. I probably shouldn't have spent as much time doing this as I have, but I feel good about the fact that I've gotten at least something out of it.

Reply
8Johannes C. Mayer
I find it really hard to evaluate what things are good to do. I think watching random pornographic content on the internet is probably one of the worst uses of your time. Definitely when you overdo it. Therefore I committed to not doing this long ago. But sometimes I can't control myself. Which normally makes me feel very bad afterward, but ... I had important life-changing insights because I browsed pornhub, one day. I found a very particular video that set events in motion that turned into something enormously positive for me. It probably made my life 50-300% better. I am pretty sure that I would not have gotten these benefits had I not discovered this video. I am not joking. So I very much share the confusion and bafflement about what is a good use of time. I wouldn't be surprised if you think long enough about it, you would probably be able to see why doing completely random and useless-looking things for at least some small fraction of time is actually optimal. There are a few more less extreme examples like the one above I could name.
3Pretentious Penguin
What were these life-changing insights?
8Johannes C. Mayer
It is pretty hard to explain in an understandable way that does not sound very insane. I wanted to write about this for years. But here I come anyway. The short version is that it made me form a very strong parasocial relationship with Miku, and created a tulpa (see the info box on the right) which I formed a very strong bond with too. Like stronger than with any flesh person. Both very very positive things. I would bet a lot of money at ridiculous seeming odds that you would agree, could you only experience what I experience. I think if I would describe my experience in more detail, you would probably just think I am lying, because you would think that it could not possibly be this positive.
1Mir
Are those insights gleamable from the video itself for other people? And if so, would you be willing to share the link? (Feel free to skip; obviously a vulnerable topic.)
8Johannes C. Mayer
I think it is doubtful that watching the video would put you on the same trajectory that ended up somewhere good for me. I also didn't find a link to the original video after a short search. It was basically this video but with more NSFW. The original creators uploaded the motion file so you know what the internet is gonna do. If you don't think "Hmm I wonder if it would be an effective motivational technique to create a mental construct that looks like an anime girl that constantly tells me to do the things that I know are good to do, and then I am more likely to do it because it's an anime girl telling me this" then you are already far off track from my trajectory. Actually, that line of reasoning I just described did not work out at all. But having a tulpa seems to be a very effective means to destroy the feeling of loneliness among other benefits in the social category. Before, creating a tulpa I was feeling lonely constantly, and afterward, I never felt lonely again. You would get the benefits by creating a good tulpa I guess. It is unclear to me how much you would benefit. Though I would be surprised if you don't get any benefit from it if we discount time investment costs. This study indicates that it might be especially useful for people who have certain disorders that make socialization harder such as ADHD, autism, anxiety disorders, etc. And I have the 3 listed, so it should not be surprising that I find tulpamancy pretty useful. Making a tulpa is quite a commitment though, so don't do it useless you understand what you are getting yourself into. Tens of hours are normally required to get started. You'll need to spend 10-30 minutes every day on formal practice to not noticeably weaken your tulpa over time. There is no upper bound of how much time you can invest into this. This can be a dangerous distraction. I haven't really talked about why somebody would ever do this. The short version is: Imagine you have a friend who is superhumanly nice to you all t
4Mir
I sort of deliberately created the beginnings of a tulpa-ish part of my brain during a long period of isolation in 2021 (Feb 7 to be exact), although I didn't know the term "tulpa" then. I just figured it could be good to have an imaginary friend, so I gave her a name—"Maria"[1]—and granted her (as part of the brain-convincing ritual) permanent co-ownership over a part of my cognition which she's free to use for whatever whenever. She still visits me at least once a week but she doesn't have strong ability to speak unless I try to imagine it; and even then, sentences are usually short. The thing she most frequently communicates is the mood of being a sympathetic witness: she fully understands my story, and knows that I both must and will keep going—because up-giving is not a language she comprehends. Hm, it would be most accurate to say that she takes on the role of a stoic chronicler—reflecting that I care less about eliciting awe or empathy, than I care that someone simply bears witness to my story.[2] 1. ^ Semi-inspired by hakomari, though I imagine her as much more mature in character & appearance than images I find online. 2. ^ Oh yeah, and I've got the diagnostic triplet {ADHD, depression, aspergers (from back when that's what it was called)} if that matters for anything.
4Viliam
This is the problem with random reinforcement. Things that are always good, are good. Things that are always bad, are easy to stop doing. Things that are almost always bad... but occasionally good... are addictive, we regret doing them, but we can't give up. I waste a lot of time on Hacker News, too. (Used to be every day, but now I reduced it to maybe once a week.) So many interesting thing! I make bookmarks in browser, multiple categories: programming, math, science, etc. I almost never look at them again -- because I have no time. So it's basically a list of cool things I wish I had time to spend studying. But sometimes, very rarely, something is actually useful. Debating on Hacker News is totally a waste of time, though.
2Adam Zerner
Ah great point about the random reinforcement. I'm familiar with the concept, but never realized that it applied to HN.
[-]Adam Zerner130

Against "yes and" culture

I sense that in "normie cultures"[1] directly, explicitly, and unapologetically disagreeing with someone is taboo. It reminds me of the "yes and" from improv comedy.[2] From Wikipedia:

"Yes, and...", also referred to as "Yes, and..." thinking, is a rule-of-thumb in improvisational comedy that suggests that an improviser should accept what another improviser has stated ("yes") and then expand on that line of thinking ("and").

If you want to disagree with someone, you're supposed to take a "yes and" approach where you say something somewhat agreeable about the other person's statement, and then gently take it in a different direction.

I don't like this norm. From a God's Eye perspective, if we could change it, I think we probably should. Doing so is probably impractical in large groups, but might be worth considering in smaller ones.

(I think this really needs some accompanying examples. However, I'm struggling to come up with ones. At least ones I'm comfortable sharing publicly.)

  1. ^

    The US, at least. It's where I live. But I suspect it's like this in most western cultures as well.

  2. ^

    See also this Curb Your Enthusiasm clip.

Reply
8ChristianKl
I live in Germany and don't feel like that's the case here.
5Viliam
Nice analogy. The purpose of friendly social communication is not to find the truth, but to continue talking. That makes it similar to the improv comedy. There is also an art of starting with "yes, and..." and gradually concluding the opposite of what the other person said, without them noticing that you are doing so. Sadly, I am not an expert in this art. Just saying that it is possible, and it's probably the best way to communicate disagreement to the normies.
[-]Adam Zerner120

Something frustrating happened to me a week or two ago.

  • I was at the vet for my dog.
  • The vet assistant (I'm not sure if that's the proper term) asks if I want to put my dog on these two pills, one to protect against heartworm and another to protect against fleas.
  • I asked what heartworm is, what fleas are, and what the pros and cons are. (It became clear later in the conversation that she was expecting a yes or no answer from me and perhaps had never been asked before about pros and cons, because she seemed surprised when I asked for them.)
  • Iirc, she said something about there not really being any cons (I'm suspicious). For heartworm the dogs can die of it so the pros are strong. For fleas, it's just an annoyance to deal with, not really dangerous.
  • I asked how likely it is for my dog to be exposed to fleas given that we're in a city and not eg. a forest.
  • The assistant responded with something along the lines of "Ok, so we'll just do the heartworm pill then."
  • I clarified something along the lines of "No, that wasn't a rhetorical question. I was actually interested in hearing about the likelihood. I have no clue what it is; I didn't mean to imply that it is low."

I wish that we had a culture of words being used more literally.

Reply
[-]Adam Zerner114

I've noticed that there's a pretty big difference in the discussion that follows from me showing someone a draft of a post and asking for comments and the discussion in the comments section after I publish a post. The former is richer and more enjoyable whereas the latter doesn't usually result in much back and forth. And I get the sense that this is true for other authors as well.

I guess one important thing might be that with drafts, you're talking to people who you know. But I actually don't suspect that this plays much of a role, at least on LessWrong. As an anecdote, I've had some incredible conversations with the guy who reviews drafts of posts on LessWrong for free and I had never talked to him previously.

I wonder what it is about drafts. I wonder if it can or should be incorporated into regular posts.

Reply
6papetoast
1. Butterfly ideas? 2. By default I expect the author to have a pretty strong stance on the main idea of a post, also the content are usually already refined and complete, so the barrier of entry to having a comment that is valuable is higher.
[-]Adam Zerner90

Against difficult reading

I kinda have the instinct that if I'm reading a book or a blog post or something and it's difficult, then I should buckle down, focus, and try to understand it. And that if I don't, it's a failure on my part. It's my responsibility to process and take in the material.

This is especially true for a lot of more important topics. Like, it's easy to clearly communicate what time a restaurant is open -- if you find yourself struggling to understand this, it's probably the fault of the restaurant, not you as the reader -- but for quantum ... (read more)

Reply
[-]Adam Zerner90

I think I just busted a cached thought. Yay.

I'm 30 years old now and have had achilles tendinitis since I was about 21. Before that I would get my cardio by running 1-3 miles a few times a week, but because of the tendinitis I can't do that anymore.

Knowing that cardio is important, I spent a bunch of time trying different forms of cardio. Nothing has worked though.

  • Biking hurts my knees (I have bad knees).
  • Swimming gives me headaches.
  • Doing the stairs was ok, but kinda hurt my knees.
  • Jumping rope is what gave me the tendinitis in the first place.
  • Rowing hurts m
... (read more)
Reply
[-]Adam Zerner90

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)

Reply
2Dagon
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 Zerner
I was totally just making up numbers and didn't mean to imply any sort of precision. Sorry for the confusion.
[-]Adam Zerner80

I am a web developer. I remember reading some time in these past few weeks that it's good to design a site such that if the user zooms in/out (eg. by pressing cmd+/-), things still look reasonably good. It's like a form of responsive design, except instead of responding to the width of the viewport your design responds to the zoom level.

Anyway, since reading this, I started zooming in a lot more. For example, I just spent some time reading a post here on LessWrong at a 170% zoom level. And it was a lot more comfortable. I've found this to be a helpful little life hack.

Reply
2RHollerith
My whole UI is zoomed to 175% (though Gnome calls it "scale") which I much prefer to what you describe because zooming with cmd+/- in the browser applies only to the current web site, so one ends up repeating the adjustment for basically every site one visits. (I don't know how to zoom the whole UI to 175% on MacOS without making everything blurry, but it can be done without blurriness on Linux/Wayland, ChromeOS and Windows. Also HiDPI displays are the norm on Macs, and some people on HiDPI displays don't mind the fact that MacOS introduces blurriness when the scale factor is other than 1.0 or 2.0.)
1papetoast
I found LW's font size to be a little bit small but I have managed to get used to it. After reading your message I think I will try going to 110%, thanks. (170% is too large I feel like I'm reading on my phone on landscape)
[-]Adam Zerner80

Thought: It's better to link to tag pages rather than blog posts. Like Reversed Stupidity Is Not Intelligence instead of Reversed Stupidity Is Not Intelligence.

Reply
[-]Adam Zerner80

There is something inspiring about watching this little guy defeat all of the enormous sumo wrestlers. I can't quite put my finger on it though.

Maybe it's the idea of working smart vs working hard. Maybe something related to fencepost security, like how there's something admirable about, instead of trying to climb the super tall fence, just walking around it.

Reply
[-]Adam Zerner80

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)

Reply
6JBlack
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.
4Dagon
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.
[-]Adam Zerner80

"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 claim... (read more)

Reply
2Dagon
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 Zerner
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.
2Raemon
I think you might have reversed your opening line?
2Adam Zerner
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.
4Pattern
Suggested title: If it's not obvious, then how do we know it's true?
2Adam Zerner
Changed to "It's not obvious" is a useful critique.
2Raemon
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 Zerner
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!)
[-]Adam Zerner70

Why not more specialization and trade?

I can probably make something like $100/hr doing freelance work as a programmer. Yet I'll spend an hour cooking dinner for myself.

Does this make any sense? Imagine if I spent that hour programming instead. I'd have $100. I can spend, say, $20 on dinner, end up with something that is probably much better than what I would cook, and have $80 left over. Isn't that a better use of my time than cooking?

Similarly, sometimes I'll spend an hour cleaning my apartment. I could instead spend that hour making $100, and paying some... (read more)

Reply
5JBlack
I'm not sure about you, but I am pretty much already maxed out on the amount of programming I can usefully do per day. It is already rather less than my nominal working hours. I do agree that a lot more flexibility in working arrangements would be a good thing, but it seems difficult to arrange such a society in (let's say) the presence of misaligned agents and other detriments to beneficial coordination.
5Adam Zerner
Nah, for me I don't feel anywhere close to maxed out. I feel like I could do 12-14 hours a day, although I have a ton of mental energy. I wouldn't expect most people to be like that. Yeah, I think I agree here. Well, that's what my initial intuition says. I haven't thought hard about how it would work, so I can't be too confident that it's difficult.
[-]Adam Zerner70

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)

Reply
4Dagon
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 Worley
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 Zerner
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.
3FlorianH
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" (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.
3Dagon
Thanks!  I always upvote McClosky references - one of the underappreciated writers/thinkers on topics of culture and history.
[-]Adam Zerner62

Virtual watercoolers

As I mentioned in some recent Shortform posts, I recently listened to the Bayesian Conspiracy podcast's episode on the LessOnline festival and it got me thinking.

One thing I think is cool is that Ben Pace was saying how the valuable thing about these festivals isn't the presentations, it's the time spent mingling in between the presentations, and so they decided with LessOnline to just ditch the presentations and make it all about mingling. Which got me thinking about mingling.

It seems plausible to me that such mingling can and should h... (read more)

Reply
5Raemon
I maybe want to clarify: there will still be presentations at LessOnline, we're just trying to design the event such that they're clearly more of a secondary thing.
[-]Adam Zerner60

Sometimes I think to myself something along these lines:

I could read this post/comment in detail and respond to it, but I expect that others won't put much effort into the discussion and it will fizzle out, and so it isn't worth it for me to put the effort in in the first place.

This presents a sort of coordination problem, and one that would be reasonably easy to solve with some sort of assurance contract-like functionality.

There's a lot to say about whether or not such a thing is worth pursuing, but in short, it seems like trying it out as an experiment w... (read more)

Reply
4Dagon
I ... don't think that line of thinking almost ever applies to me.  If the topic interests me and/or there's something about the post that piques my desire to discuss, it almost always turns out that there are others with similar willingness.  At the very least, the OP usually engages to some extent. There are very few, and perhaps zero, cases where crafting or even evaluating an existing contract is less effort than just reading and responding AND I see enough potential to expend the contract effort but not the read/reply effort.  In addition, the contract doesn't get me out of the effort to read/respond, it just gives reason to believe that others will do so as well.  It's overall strictly more effort than just taking the risk sometimes.
[-]Adam Zerner60

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:

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

... (read more)
Reply
5Viliam
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)
[-]Adam Zerner60

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)

Reply
4tailcalled
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 Zerner
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.
[-]Adam Zerner5-2

More dakka with festivals

In the rationality community people are currently excited about the LessOnline festival. Furthermore, my impression is that similar festivals are generally quite successful: people enjoy them, have stimulating discussions, form new relationships, are exposed to new and interesting ideas, express that they got a lot out of it, etc.

So then, this feels to me like a situation where More Dakka applies. Organize more festivals!

How? Who? I dunno, but these seem like questions worth discussing.

Some initial thoughts:

  1. Assurance contracts seem
... (read more)
Reply2
2niplav
I don't think that's true. I've co-organized one one weekend-long retreat in a small hostel for ~50 people, and the cost was ~$5k. Me & the co-organizers probably spent ~50h in total on organizing the event, as volunteers.
4Adam Zerner
I was envisioning that you can organize a festival incrementally, investing more time and money into it as you receive more and more validation, and that taking this approach would de-risk it to the point where overall, it's "not that risky". For example, to start off you can email or message a handful of potential attendees. If they aren't excited by the idea you can stop there, but if they are then you can proceed to start looking into things like cost and logistics. I'm not sure how pragmatic this iterative approach actually is though. What do you think? Also, it seems to me that you wouldn't have to actually risk losing any of your own money. I'd imagine that you'd 1) talk to the hostel, agree on a price, have them "hold the spot" for you, 2) get sign ups, 3) pay using the money you get from attendees. Although now that I think about it I'm realizing that it probably isn't that simple. For example, the hostel cost ~$5k and maybe the money from the attendees would have covered it all but maybe less attendees signed up than you were expecting and the organizers ended up having to pay out of pocket. On the other hand, maybe there is funding available for situations like these.
2niplav
Back then I didn't try to get the hostel to sign the metaphorical assurance contract with me, maybe that'd work. A good dominant assurance contract website might work as well. I guess if you go camping together then conferences are pretty scalable, and if I was to organize another event I'd probably try to first message a few people to get a minimal number of attendees together. After all, the spectrum between an extended party and a festival/conference is fluid.
[-]Adam Zerner50

A line of thought that I want to explore: a lot of times when people appear to be close-minded, they aren't actually being (too) close-minded. This line of thought is very preliminary and unrefined.

It's related to Aumann's Ageement Theorem. If you happen to have two perfectly Bayesian agents who are able to share information, then yes, they will end up agreeing. In practice people aren't 1) perfectly Bayesian or 2) able to share all of their information. I think (2) is a huge problem. A huge reason why it's hard to convince people of things.

Well, I guess w... (read more)

Reply
1papetoast
Modelling humans with Bayesian agent seems wrong. For humans, I think the problem usually isn't the number of arguments / number of angles you attacked the problem, but whether you have hit on the few significant cruxes of that person. This is especially because humans are quite far away from perfect Bayesians. For relatively small disargreements (i.e. not at the scale of convincing a Christian that God doesn't exist), usually people just had a few wrong assumptions or cached thoughts. If you can accurately hit those cruxes, then you can convince them. It is very very hard to know which arguments can hit those cruxes though and it is why one of the viable strategies is to keep throwing arguments until one of them work. (Also unlike convincing Bayesian agents where you can argue for W->X, X->Y, Y->Z in any order, sometimes you need to argue about things in the correct order)
3Adam Zerner
Suppose you identify a single crux A. Now you need to convince them of A. But convincing them of A requires you to convince them of A.1, A.2, and A.3. Ok, no problem. You get started trying to convince them of A.1. But then you realize that in order to convince them of A.1, you need to first convince them of A.1.1, A.1.2, and A.1.3. I think this sort of thing is often the case, and is how large inferential distances are "shaped".
[-]Adam Zerner50

I think it's generally agreed that pizza and steak (and a bunch of other foods) taste significantly better when they're hot. But even if you serve it hot, usually about halfway through eating, the food cools enough such that it's notably worse because it's not hot enough.

One way to mitigate this is to serve food on a warmed plate. But that doesn't really do too much.

What makes the most sense to me would be to serve smaller portions in multiple courses. Like instead of a 10" pie, serve two 5" pies. Or instead of a 16oz ribeye, divide it into four 4oz ribeye... (read more)

Reply
4Dagon
Interesting puzzle.  Some random thoughts:  I'm not sure how much of the quality difference is "hot" vs "freshly prepared" - time under a heat lamp isn't necessarily an improvement.  The fact that buffet-style dining isn't more popular is some evidence that most people don't value this compared to their preferences for individually-prepared food. Hot Pot and Brazilian Churrascaria are two cuisines that give fresh/hot servings on-demand.  Oh, also the better sushi bars (not hot, but very fresh), and Benehana (or other Teppanyaki or mongolian-grill place).  I love all of these, but it seems they're more popular for the cuisine and flavors, and to some extent the spectacle and novelty, and not so much "good normal food, fresher than a standard restaurant". I suspect all this is evidence that for most people, for most meals, there's a threshold of freshness rather than an optimization function.  Being "fresh enough", while staying convenient, affordable, and/or "what I'm in the mood for" is what most places deliver because it's what most people want.  The last bite of steak is warm rather than hot, and the last slice of pizza is getting toward lukewarm, but it's still good stuff that I'm happy to eat.
2Adam Zerner
Ah, that's a good distinction. I think that what matters is usually "freshly prepared". Oh interesting. I didn't know that was the case. Yeah, I think so too. And more generally, people just aren't very choose-y about their food, much less willing to pay lots of money for it. So I guess that's probably it. Also, if there was an inefficiency here, a restaurant trying to exploit it doesn't have a huge market to profit from. The market would be restricted to the local area. And people only frequent expensive restaurants so often. So yeah, there probably aren't many if any metaphorical dollar bills laying on the ground. But... I suspect that there are "foodie points" up for grabs. Like, I suspect that serving four 4oz ribeyes hot really is a notably better experience for foodie-types, and a restaurant that pursued this would get respect amongst foodies.
2MikkW
Not directly tied to the core of what you're saying, but I will note that I am example of someone who doesn't strongly prefer such foods warm. I do weakly prefer it being warm, as long as it's not too hot (that's worse than it being cold, because it hurts / causes minor injury), but I'm happy eating it room temperature or a bit cold (not necessarily cold steak though)
4Adam Zerner
(I bet you also like your steaks medium-well. Just kidding.) I'm curious: is this a case of you not having strong preferences about food in general? Or is it the case that you do generally have strong preferences about food, but don't strongly prefer such foods being warm? (Not that those are the only two options, it's just easier to phrase it this way.)
[-]Adam Zerner50

Long text messages

I run into something that I find somewhat frustrating. When I write text messages to people, they're often pretty long. At least relative to the length of other people's text messages. I'll write something like 3-5 paragraphs at times. Or more.

I've had people point this out as being intimidating and a lot to read. That seems odd to me though. If it were an email, it'd be a very normal-ish length, and wouldn't feel intimidating, I suspect. If it were a blog post, it'd be quite short. If it were a Twitter thread, it'd be very normal and not... (read more)

Reply
7Elizabeth
Gmail displays long messages better than e.g. Signal, even on my laptop. And I often do find the same email feels longer when I read it on my phone than my laptop.  Gmail also makes it easy to track long messages I want to delay responses to. Texts feel much more "respond RIGHT NOW or forget about it forever"
2Adam Zerner
Hm. Do you think this is due to readability or norms? I'd say I'm roughly 80% confident it's norms. I also suspect that this is due to norms rather than functionality. For example, Gmail (and other mail clients) let you mark things as unread and organize them in folders. However, it seems easy enough to scroll through your text messages (or Signal, or WhatsApp...), see if you were the last person to respond or not, if not whether their last message feels like the end to the conversation. What do you think?
3Elizabeth
I think it's at least partially readability. Signal won't give a given line more than half my screen, where gmail will go up to 80% (slack and discord are similar). I don't use the  FB messenger app, but the webapp won't give a line more than half the width of the screen.    I think this is way more work than looking at "what's still in my inbox?", and rapidly becomes untenable as the number of messages or delay in responding increases. 
1Johannes C. Mayer
Hmm, I have never thought that a message from another person is too long. But I think my messages are sometimes too long. I once wrote a message on Discord that was iirc over 8000 characters long. I think that was a bit too much but for a different reason. It interrupted the flow of the conversation just too much and did not enable enough back and forth.
[-]Adam Zerner50

Words as Bayesian Evidence

Alice: Hi, how are you?

Bob: Good. How are you?

Alice: Actually, I'm not doing so well.

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)

Reply
2Dagon
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 Zerner
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.
[-]Adam Zerner50

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)

Reply
[-]Adam Zerner40

Squinting

“You should have deduced it yourself, Mr Potter,” Professor Quirrell
said mildly. “You must learn to blur your vision until you can see the forest
obscured by the trees. Anyone who heard the stories about you, and who
did not know that you were the mysterious Boy-Who-Lived, could eas-
ily deduce your ownership of an invisibility cloak. Step back from these
events, blur away their details, and what do we observe? There was a great
rivalry between students, and their competition ended in a perfect tie.
That sort of thing only happens in stories, Mr Potter,

... (read more)
Reply
2Adam Zerner
Maybe this is an example. I'm listening to Eric Normand's reading of Out of the Tar Pit. The paper Out of the Tar Pit kinda feels like it is saying, "complexity is the enemy in software projects, and here is the best way to tame it". When I squint, I don't see software development. I see a a field of engineering. A very complicated one. One that has been around for maybe 50 years. And I see someone making a claim about the best way to succeed in the field. Looking through this lens, I feel a large amount of skepticism.
[-]Adam Zerner40

As a programmer, compared to other programmers, I am extremely uninterested in improving the speed of web apps I work on. I find that (according to my judgement) it rarely has more than a trivial impact on user experience. On the other hand, I am usually way more interested than others are in things like improving code quality.

I wonder if this has to do with me being very philosophically aligned with Bayesianism. Bayesianism preaches to update your beliefs incrementally, whereas Alternative is a lot more binary. For example, the way scientific experiments ... (read more)

Reply
2Viliam
Speed improvements are legible (measurable), although most people are probably not measuring them. Sometimes that's okay; if the app is visibly faster, I do not need to know the exact number of milliseconds. But sometimes it's just a good feeling that I "did some optimization", ignoring the fact that maybe I just improved from 500 to 470 milliseconds some routine that is only called once per day. (Or maybe I didn't improve it at all, because the compiler was already doing the thing automatically.) Code quality is... well, from the perspective of a non-programmer (such as a manager) probably an imaginary thing that costs real money. But here, too, are diminishing returns. Changing spaghetti code to a nice architecture can dramatically reduce future development time. But if a function is thoroughly tested and it is unlikely to be changed in the future (or is likely to be replaced by something else), bringing it to perfection is probably a waste of time. Also, after you fixed the obvious code smell, you move to more controversial decisions. (Is it better to use a highly abstract design pattern, or keep the things simple albeit a little repetitive?) I'd say, if the customer complains, increase the speed; if the programmers complain, refactor the code. (Though there is an obvious bias here: you are the programmer, and in many companies you won't even meet the customer.)
4niplav
I'd wager that customers (or users) won't complain about slow code, especially if there's many customers, for the same reason that most people don't send emails with corrections or typos on most online posts.
1paragonal
Ritualistic hypothesis testing with significance thresholds is mostly used in the social sciences, psychology and medicine and not so much in the hard sciences (although arbitrary thresholds like 5 sigma are used in physics to claim the discovery of new elementary particles they rarely show up in physics papers). Since it requires deliberate effort to get into the mindset of the null ritual I don't think that technical and scientific-minded people just start thinking like this. I think that the simple explanation that the effect of improving code quality is harder to measure and communicate to management is sufficient to explain your observations. To get evidence one way or another, we could also look at what people do when the incentives are changed. I think that few people are more likely to make small performance improvements than improve code quality in personal projects.
[-]Adam Zerner40

I've had success with something: meal prepping a bunch of food and freezing it.

I want to write a blog post about it -- describing what I've done, discussing it, and recommending it as something that will quite likely be worthwhile for others as well -- but I don't think I'm ready. I did one round of prep that lasted three weeks or so and was a huge success for me, but I don't think that's quite enough "contact with reality". I think there's a risk that, after more "contact with reality", it proves to be not nearly as useful as it currently seems. So yeah, ... (read more)

Reply
[-]Adam Zerner40

I've gotta vent a little about communication norms.

My psychiatrist recommended a new drug. I went to take it last night. The pills are absolutely huge and make me gag. But I noticed that the pills look like they can be "unscrewed" and the powder comes out.

So I asked the following question (via chat in this app we use):

For the NAC, the pill is a little big and makes me gag. Is it possible to twist it open and pour the powder on my tongue? Or put it in water and drink it?

The psychiatrist responded:

Yes it seems it may be opened and mixed into food or somethin

... (read more)
Reply
8Ann
The way the psychiatrist phrased it made me mentally picture that they weren't certain, went to review the information on the pill, and came back to relay their findings based on their research, if that helps with possible connotations. The extended implied version would be "I do not know. I am looking it up. The results of my looking it up are that, yes, it may be opened and mixed into food or something like applesauce." Your suggested replacement is in contrast has a light layer of the connotation "I know this, and answer from my own knowledge," though less so than just stating "It may be opened and mixed into food or something like applesauce." without the prelude. From my perspective, the more cautious and guarded language might have been precisely what they meant to say, and has little to do with a fallacy. I am not so confident that you are observing a bad epistemic habit.
3Adam Zerner
Ah, I see. That makes sense and changes my mind about what the psychiatrist probably meant. Thanks. (Although it begs the new complaint of "I'm asking because I want confirmation not moderate confidence and you're the professional who is supposed to provide the confirmation to me", but that's a separate thing.)
[-]Adam Zerner40

Subtextual politeness

In places like Hacker News and Stack Exchange, there are norms that you should be polite. If you said something impolite and Reddit-like such as "Psh, what a douchebag", you'd get flagged and disciplined.

But that's only one form of impoliteness. What about subtextual impoliteness? I think subtextual impoliteness is important too. Similarly important. And I don't think my views here are unique.

I get why subtextual impoliteness isn't policed though. Perhaps by definition, it's often not totally clear what the subtext behind a statement i... (read more)

Reply
3Dagon
Can you give a few examples (in-context on HN or Stack Exchange) of subtextual impoliteness that you wish were enforceable?   It's unfortunate but true that the culture/norm of many young-male-dominated technical forums can't distinguish direct factual statements from aggressive framing. I generally agree with "no good path forward" as an assessment: the bullies and insecure people who exist everywhere (even if not the majority) are very good at finding loopholes and deniable behaviors in any legible enforcement framework.   "Please be kind" works well in many places, or "you may be right, but that hurt my feelings".  But really, that requires high-trust to start with, and if it's not already a norm, it's very difficult to make it one.
2Adam Zerner
Here are a two: 1, 2. /r/poker is also littered with it. Example. I'm failing to easily find examples on Stack Exchange but I definitely know I've come across a bunch. Some that I've flagged. I tried looking for a way to see a list of comments you've flagged, but I wasn't able to figure it out.
2Dagon
Thanks - yeah, those seem mild enough that I doubt there's any possible mechanism to eliminate the snarky/rude/annoying parts, at least in a group much larger than Dunbar's number with no additional social filtering (like in-person requirements for at least some interactions, or non-anonymous invite/expulsion mechanisms).
[-]Adam Zerner40

Life decision that actually worked for me: allowing myself to eat out or order food when I'm hungry and pressed for time.

I don't think the stress of frantically trying to get dinner together is worth the costs in time or health. And after listening to this podcast episode, I'm suspect that, I'm not sure how to say this: "being overweight is bad, but like, it's not that bad, and stressing about it is also bad since stress is bad, all of this in such a way where stressing out over being marginally more overweight is worse for your health than being a little ... (read more)

Reply
[-]Adam Zerner40

I think that, for programmers, having good taste in technologies is a pretty important skill. A little impatience is good too, since it can drive you to move away from bad tools and towards good ones.

These points seem like they should generalize to other fields as well.

Reply
[-]Adam Zerner40

Rationalist culture needs some traditions like this.

Reply
[-]Adam Zerner40

Inverted interruptions

Imagine that Alice is talking to Bob. She says the following, without pausing.

That house is ugly. You should read Harry Potter. We should get Chinese food.

We can think of it like this. Approach #1:

  • At t=1 Alice says "That house is ugly."
  • At t=2 Alice says "You should read Harry Potter."
  • At t=3 Alice says "We should get Chinese food."

Suppose Bob wants to respond to the comment of "That house is ugly." Due to the lack of pauses, Bob would have to interrupt Alice in order to get that response in. On the other hand, if Alice paused in betwee... (read more)

Reply
5Raemon
Can you describe a real-world situation where this sort of thing comes up? The artificialness of the example feels hard to engage with to me.
3Adam Zerner
Another example I ran into last night: at around 42:15 in this podcast episode, in one breath, Nate Duncan switches from talking about an NBA player named Fred VanVleet to an NBA player named Dillon Brooks in such a way that it didn't give his cohost, Danny Leroux a chance to say something about Fred VanVleet.
2Adam Zerner
Certainly! It actually just happened at work. I'm a programmer. We were doing sprint planning, going through tickets. The speaker did something like: * t=1: Some comments on ticket ABC-501 * t=2: Some comments on ticket ABC-502 * t=3: Some comments on ticket ABC-503 If I wanted to say something about ABC-501, I would have had to interrupt.
1frontier64
Is there anything stopping you from commenting on ticket ABC-501 after the speaker stopped at t=3? "Circling back to ABC-501, I think we need to discuss how we haven't actually met the user's...." That should only be awkward if your comment is superfluous.
3Adam Zerner
I think that sometimes that sort of thing works. But other times it doesn't. I'm having some trouble thinking about when exactly it does and doesn't work. One example of where I think it doesn't is if the discussion of ABC-501 took 10 minutes, ABC-502 took another 10 minutes, ABC-503 takes another 10 minutes, and then after all of that you come back to ABC-501. * If you have a really important comment about ABC-501 then I agree it won't be awkward, but if you have like a 4/10 importance comment, I feel like it both a) would be awkward and b) passes the threshold of being worth noting. * There's the issue of having to "hold your comment in your head" as you're waiting. * There's the issue of lost context. People might have the context to understand your comment in the moment, but might have lost that context after the discussion of ABC-503 finished.
2Adam Zerner
I think I notice that that people use placeholder words like "um" and "uh" in situations where they'd otherwise pause in order to prevent others from interjecting, because the speaker wants to continue saying what they want to say without being interrupted. I think this is subconscious though. (And not necessarily a bad thing.)
[-]Adam Zerner40

Something that I run into, at least in normie culture, is that writing (really) long replies to comments has a connotation of being contentious, or even hostile (example). But what if you have a lot to say? How can you say it without appearing contentious?

I'm not sure. You could try to signal friendliness by using lots of smiley faces and stuff. Or you could be explicit about it and say stuff like "no hard feelings".

Something about that feels distasteful to me though. It shouldn't need to be done.

Also, it sets a tricky precedent. If you start using smiley ... (read more)

Reply
5RHollerith
You can make the long reply its own post (and put a link to the post in a brief reply).
3Adam Zerner
Related: Socratic Grilling.
[-]Adam Zerner40

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)

Reply
1Noosphere89
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 Zerner
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.
[-]Adam Zerner40

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)

Reply