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For complex topics on which I do not have deep knowledge E.G. AI Alignment, I find my opinion is easily swayed by any sufficiently well-written, plausible-sounding argument. And so I recognize that I do not have the necessary knowledge and perspective to add value to the discussion and I purposefully avoid making any confident claims on the subject until if and when I decide to dedicate significant effort to closing the inferential distance.
1Scott Alexander had a nice piece on this:
When I was young I used to read pseudohistory books; Immanuel Velikovsky’s Ages in Chaos is a good example of the best this genre has to offer. I read it and it seemed so obviously correct, so perfect, that I could barely bring myself to bother to search out rebuttals.
And then I read the rebuttals, and they were so obviously correct, so devastating, that I couldn’t believe I had ever been so dumb as to believe Velikovsky.
And then I read the rebuttals to the rebuttals, and they were so obviously correct that I felt silly for ever doubting.
And so on for several more iterations, until the labyrinth of doubt seemed inescapable. What finally broke me out wasn’t so much the lucidity of the consensus view so much as starting to sample different crackpots. Some were almost as bright and rhetorically gifted as Velikovsky, all presented insurmountable evidence for their theories, and all had mutually exclusive ideas. After all, Noah’s Flood couldn’t have been a cultural memory both of the fall of Atlantis and of a change in the Earth’s orbit, let alone of a lost Ice Age civilization or of megatsunamis from a meteor strike. So given that at least some of those arguments are wrong and all seemed practically proven, I am obviously just gullible in the field of ancient history. Given a total lack of independent intellectual steering power and no desire to spend thirty years building an independent knowledge base of Near Eastern history, I choose to just accept the ideas of the prestigious people with professorships in Archaeology, rather than those of the universally reviled crackpots who write books about Venus being a comet.
You could consider this a form of epistemic learned helplessness, where I know any attempt to evaluate the arguments is just going to be a bad idea so I don’t even try. If you have a good argument that the Early Bronze Age worked completely differently from the way mainstream historians believe, I just don’t want to hear about it. If you insist on telling me anyway, I will nod, say that your argument makes complete sense, and then totally refuse to change my mind or admit even the slightest possibility that you might be right.
(This is the correct Bayesian action: if I know that a false argument sounds just as convincing as a true argument, argument convincingness provides no evidence either way. I should ignore it and stick with my prior.)
The National Association of Realtors is a rent-seeking organization. This is because commissions should be strictly proportional to the amount of work required for the specific task able to change with market forces rather than an arbitrary percentage of the value of a particular property, since the effort needed to sell a property is not necessarily proportional to the value of said property.
I'm disgusted that they've managed to make a percentage of property value the accepted norm for commissions. How were people suckered into that rather than demanding per-hour rates?
Edited to reflect insight gained from comments.
Every organization is, to some extent, rent-seeking. NAR is evil because they're good at it.
I don't agree with your labor theory of value - there are many complex and individual valuations that are quite valid. One can easily argue that the limited resource of buyer attention is worth a fair bit of money to secure, and the percentage-of-sale is just a nice way of charging more to people with more money.
The evil part is they've managed to enforce a monopoly on some kinds of advertising (MLS and collusion among realtors). This gets them the ability to charge more than they could if there weren't a network effect that they take advantage of.
1I don't agree with your labor theory of value - there are many complex and individual valuations that are quite valid. One can easily argue that the limited resource of buyer attention is worth a fair bit of money to secure, and the percentage-of-sale is just a nice way of charging more to people with more money.
I could be convinced to have a more nuanced understanding. I'm confident I have not read enough of the writing on the topic. What would you recommend?
To a seller, the value add is the outcome of selling the property, not the effort put in by the realtor. Why doesn't it then make sense for realtors who provide equivalent value quicker, to be paid more per hour?
Because absent their monopoly on certain types of advertising, competitors could offer the same value for much less. In retrospect I suppose the actual problem is then the monopoly power not strictly the effort from the seller or lack thereof. I'll add to the OP to reflect that/cross out what I no longer endorse.
1If wireheading is bad because it separates the reward signals from (evolved) behaviors and replaces them with less-intrinsically-useful ones that get Goodharted to (literal) death:
Would it be useful to use electrical stimulation on reward areas but instead of triggering it with a contrived condition we detect the body's normal reward signal activation and amplify it by a set proportion? (obviously you'd have to make sure it didn't feed back into itself in a loop etc.)
For example, if someone's depression was a ~50% deficiency in "normal" reward signal activity, manually increasing it by a proportional amount would theoretically fix it.
Prediction: A system like this tested in rodents would show similar and potentially better behavioral results than drug based treatments like stimulants/antidepressants (depending on the exact areas of the brain targeted)
Question: would this get around problems that e.g. drugs have with gradual loss of efficacy due to tolerance build up? My limited understanding suggests it might, but I'm not confident.
I am not a neuroscientist, somebody poke holes in my hypothesis.
Necessity may be the mother of invention, but at this point we're pretty sure the father was Laziness.
What would the minimal digital representation of a human brain & by extension memories/personality look like?
I am not a subject matter expert. This is armchair speculation and conjecture, the actual reality of which I expect to be orders of magnitude more complicated than my ignorant model.
The minimal physical representation is obviously the brain itself, but to losslessly store every last bit of information —IE exact particle configurations— as accurately as it is possible to measure is both nigh-unto-impossible and likely unnecessary considering the moment-to-moment changes living causes to the particles, while "self" appears constant.
So would the detailed information of cell positions and compositions be sufficient granularity? How practical would it be? I don't know of any existing technology that is able to achieve the level of detail that would likely be required. MRI is very impressive, but while structure can be viewed (at least down to a 0.2mm resolution as of 2024-04-02), chemical composition cannot (as far as I know).
Do we know what the important variables are, and do we know what tolerances within which the hypothetical "Mind of Theseus" is still the same mind? (I suspect this is a philosophical question and the answer is fully subjective and we have no way of knowing.)
Strange variant of Monte Hall problem I managed to confuse myself with:
You are presented with the three doors but do not know if you will have a chance to switch later. You know the host can decide to open one of the losing doors and give you the opportunity to switch or not, and does not wish to give away the prize.
If the player chooses the correct door first he is incentivized to open one and give you the option to switch, but since the player is informed of the rules that may convince the player not to switch.
If the player chooses an incorrect door first he disincentivized to give you the option to switch, but since the player is informed of the rules that may convince the player not to switch.
After the host informs you if do you or do not have the option to switch, you are given a piece of paper and asked to predict what is behind the door. If your prediction is correct you get what is behind the door. If your prediction is wrong && [a door was opened] you get what is behind the other one, If prediction is wrong && [no door was opened] you get what is behind one of the remaining doors at random.
Is there an optimal strategy: For the host? For the player?
My working memory is now shot and I can't say I'm confident the puzzle is logically coherent, but it was fun to make.
The player can force a strategy where they win 2/3 of the time (guess a door and never switch). The player never needs to accept worse
The host can force a strategy where the player loses 1/3 of the time (never let the player switch). The host never needs to accept worse.
Therefore, the equilibrium has 2/3 win for the player. The player can block this number from going lower and the host can block this number from going higher.
How can I boost real-life 'charisma checks' with int?
(For those less familiar with D&D lingo, I'll rephrase: What are some methods to become better at social skills using study and theory if one lacks the intuitive understanding that extroverts appear to naturally possess?)
For example:
In my case, attempting to get to know other students in my university classes is made more difficult by my aversion to small talk.
Why am I averse to small talk? Because while growing up I didn't see the value so I didn't bother to learn very many 'canned' questions and responses that other people seem to be equipped with. Since I don't have many cached patterns for things are useful for small talk it makes it much more 'risky' to attempt, since I have a significant chance of running out of things to say before any productive headway is made in a conversation.
Is there any collection of small talk patterns that can be read to fill in this deficiency? Has anyone published a study about, say, the 500 most common small talk patterns and responses?
(And yes, I acknowledge that actual practice is necessary as well, but until I'm confident that I have sufficient 'tools' to succeed I will find it difficult to make myself attempt any practice.)
This difficulty doesn't seem to share much connection with my proficiency in more general social skills. For example, I have few difficulties talking to coworkers, since in a work environment I will typically have a purpose in mind for talking to someone. The open-ended nature of —talking to strangers for the purpose of getting to know them— seems to be a large part of the challenge.
We should have a game where we create a list of interesting questions and then have a few notable writers here answer them, but then also generate some responses from LLMs (with prompts tailored to getting a less-obviously AI response).
Writers would get points for how well they fool people and it has all sorts of fun mind games like
"This has an AI-smelling mistake, but is it the human faking a mistake they know an AI might make?"
How much of the developed world's economy is devoted to aesthetic personalization of products rather than accomplishing the essential functions of [product here]?
I am not saying aesthetics or personalization are 'bad', however I suspect that if the cost were quantified and demonstrated to people along with examples of more productive things that could be done with that money, many people might prefer forgoing some of our more wasteful things.
Example:
The cost of having thousands of different styles of sink faucet, instead of a small number of highly efficient and optimized faucet designs for distinct use cases [small household kitchen, large household kitchen, small form factor, high throughput restaurant]. These costs are created via the overhead caused by the redundant costs of engineering, design, manufacturing, and logistics.
These same factors apply more or less to every product where variations are sold primarily for aesthetic rather than functional purposes, particularly when they replace existing functional versions.
I believe the root cause of this inefficiency is our psychological tendency to overvalue ephemeral utility such as using possessions as social status tools rather than trying to optimize how we collectively use our limited economic output. For example, if a sizeable portion of the money in the market for functionally useless decorations were able to go towards medical research.
I do not know how a more efficient allocation of resources could be practically enacted. According to my understanding most attempts at centrally planned economies have even less success than the free market, as inefficient as it is.
If a large portion of people decided to prioritize their purchases better that would work, but that's obviously a very challenging coordination problem.