All of jefftk's Comments + Replies

post on reddit/here/etc for free

Most of those sites (and very near 100% when weighted by traffic) are funded by ads, though.

There are people on youtube supported by patreon and donations. There are periodicals/substacks/etc supported by subscriptions.

Most of these have a model where some visitors pay while others don't pay and see ads. Substack is an exception, with free users not seeing any ads, but I'd bet that this is just them being new (most new sites deprioritize advertising to maximize growth) and that in a few years they'll show ads to free... (read more)

2the gears to ascension2d
I think the only content left would be the actual art. not the stuff that only deserves the name content.

This initially seems like it would be better, but before doing the survey I considered it and decided not to do it because:

  • For a lot of these the age at which you first did it, or would have been ready to do it, is quite low, running into childhood amnesia.

  • Even when it is within a period of your life you remember it's pretty hard, often, to figure out how old you were. Especially, how old you were when you did the first time as opposed to some random time you remember. And even for the latter, it can take some time to connect it to other events and m

... (read more)

Personally, I put 5y for that one.

What question do you wish I'd asked?

4tailcalled12d
It's a good question. I've usually measured ideology as a side-effect when using a completely different method for running surveys. Rather than writing all of the questions by myself, I have asked a bunch of people to give me me a bunch of qualitative descriptions of themselves that might be relevant for the survey, and then I've taken those qualitative descriptions and turned them into a large number of fixed-response-set questions, each question capturing a capturing different aspects a qualitative response. When factor-analyzing such a set of questions, usually a political factor pops out. An equivalent for your case might be to qualitatively first ask a bunch of parents whether there is anything special about their manner of parenting, and then turning whatever they mention into multiple-choice questions. However this is a lot of work, and it can also result in very long questionnaires that it may be hard to get responses for. So it may not be so practical. An option may be to just ask a few relevant questions one can think of, e.g. * Do you think teen girls tend to be overly dramatic? * Do you think it is more important to teach children respect or independence? * Do you think parents ought to monitor their children's internet access? * Do you think schools need to be more or less responsive to parent's wishes about the material that is taught? ... and then create an overall score from that. Though especially once ideological questions explicitly mention childrearing, it also raises questions about direction of causality. One could sort of handle this by asking about more distal ideological questions such as "Do you vote for Republicans or Democrats?" or "Do you think the government is too big?", but by going further away it also makes it less able to capture ideological factors specific to childrearing. I don't know what the best option is, given your constraints, especially because I don't know your constraints.

allow the creation of new forms that have more complex results by breaking the symmetry created by always having to refer to the left- or right-starting individuals as an indivisible set

Today callers do this by adding "1st" or "2nd": the "1st Lark" is the Lark in each couple that is going down the hall, and the "1st Robin" is the Robin in each couple that's going up the hall. If they want to refer to the whole couple they say "1s" or "2s", as in "1s lead down between the "2s".

Quick technicality (you can ignore this if you don't care): the "robins and

... (read more)

If you are already using a database and think you might want a simple index (ex: on an ID) then sure, just add it. But if feeling like you should have an index pushes you to start using a database, or if you want the support something complicated like full text search, then I don't think it's so clear.

(This post is not anti-index, it is anti-"you should never be doing full table scans in production")

1Adam Zerner22d
I see. That makes sense.

Maybe use more than one octave of range? So if we wanted to do it in Am we'd turn 123-456-7890 into A3 B3 C4 - D4 E4 F4 - G4 A4 B4 G3

4DirectedEvolution24d
I think with this system you will end up with too many large difficult and uncatchy jumps. Plus similar phone numbers will sound similar which is not what you want.

I've only skimmed your post, but is part of the claim that the things that brains instinctually know are too minor to count?

I think the brain has parts that are non-pretrained learning algorithms (cortex, striatum, cerebellum), and I think that the brain has other parts that are not learning algorithms at all (hypothalamus, brainstem).

The hypothalamus & brainstem do lots of things, but I don’t think I would describe them as “knowing” anything at all.

Like, I think there’s a little innate part of the brainstem that triggers vomiting—when it gets certain combinations of input signals then it triggers certain muscle movements and hormones etc. Does that mean that the brainstem ... (read more)

You could do that, but I don't think it would sound very good? And I don't think it would make it easier for a kid to memorize?

3Rana Dexsin24d
I'm actually writing from experience there! That's how my memory still mainly encodes the few main home telephone numbers from when I was growing up (that is, I remember the imputed melodies before the digits in any other form), but it's possible they were unusually harmonious. I don't think it was suggested by family, just something I did spontaneously, and I am not at all sure how well this would carry more generally… it may also be relevant that I had a bunch of exposure to Chinese numeric musical notation.

Don't you also need to include the millions of brains over millions of years of pre-training during evolution?

I don’t think that’s a good way to think about things. I think evolution is much more closely analogous to a search over neural architectures, hyperparameters, reward / loss functions, and other things like that, and not like “pretraining” for within-lifetime learning. See my post “Learning From Scratch” In The Brain.

Another example: using statistics about the frequency of abductions to argue that children should need to be pretty old before being on their own outside the house. Except a huge fraction of kidnapping is parental custody disputes, and if you're a parent making this decision you know whether that's a relevant concern.

Cars don't explain all of it, like the NY and CT guidelines of age 12 for being home alone

4Gunnar_Zarncke1mo
Agree. I think Paul Graham is mistaken about this.
1green_leaf1mo
That sounds almost like a sabotage.

I've used them, and similar tools, but don't really see the advantage over source code with comments?

That's annoying! Maybe try filing feedback inside the app?

(My guess is you're in some experimental treatment that as a side effect accidentally overrides the setting)

I doubt it: by the time someone is two they generally are able to communicate quite a bit.

I agree the tradeoffs change a lot then! Our kids interacted with a relatively small number of adults, each of which didn't interact with other baby-signing kids. If they'd been in a daycare that did baby sign we'd probably have tried to use their system.

There is basically no fixed expense difference in the larger bands, at least at our scale. We rent the hall for the same amount of time for setup, have the same amount of sound equipment, etc.

Our dance, and most dances, pay per person instead of per band. I don't entirely know where that is, though I do have some guesses? Mostly I think it's that it feels like you're paying someone to do work, and there's an amount that feels fair to pay them regardless of how many other people are working alongside them?

If you switched from paying per person to paying per... (read more)

4Dagon1mo
It's an interesting equilibrium for this - once everyone expects to be paid individually, it'll be tough to switch to the "pay for entertainment sum" model that I understand is more common for small music venues (though the rates vary pretty widely, so it may have similar effects for larger groups). At a very basic level, your revenue per attendee doesn't change, so your ability to pay doesn't scale with number of musicians.  Since you probably shouldn't buck the expectations of base pay per person, you likely need to set different bonus/incentive levels for different sizes of group, to take into account the assumption that bigger groups have more attendance (justifying their higher expense) as a baseline.

Unfortunately I want private previews: when I send a draft blog post to someone for review that may contain things that shouldn't be public.

People definitely vary in how much they shed, though thousands of times more than average sounds higher than I've seen?

At least with covid during the time when cases were tracked reasonably well there was a pretty close connection between covid levels in municipal wastewater and case rates. For example, see Nationwide Trends in COVID-19 Cases and SARS-CoV-2 RNA Wastewater Concentrations in the United States:

(Blue is wastewater concentration, orange is cases)

2Davidmanheim2mo
A quick google search gives a few options for the definition, and this qualifies according to all of them, from what I can tell. The fact that he thinks the comment is true doesn't change that. Trolling definition: 1. the act of leaving an insulting message on the internet in order to annoy someone Trolling is when someone posts or comments online to 'bait' people, which means deliberately provoking an argument or emotional reaction. Online, a troll is someone who enters a communication channel, such as a comment thread, solely to cause trouble. Trolls often use comment threads to cyberbully... What is trolling? ... A troll is Internet slang for a person who intentionally tries to instigate conflict, hostility, or arguments in an online social community.

Do you mean that the container with the contaminated fuel was stored outdoors in the container that you linked to?

Yes. I put 5gal gas (plus the recommended small amount of STA-BIL) into the linked container, and stored it outdoors, yes.

1: I didn't. It's possible I didn't close it correctly? This seems like the most likely possibility.

2: Modern gas cans are vapor-tight so it seems to me they should be keeping water out.

Seems pretty unlikely: while the can wasn't locked up, if someone was going to steal it I'd expect they'd just take the whole can and go.

5rhollerith_dot_com2mo
When I was a kid, my little brother stole gasoline (from a neighbor's lawn mower) -- and replaced the stolen liquid with water. Also, most parents keep a close enough eye on young kids to make it hard for the kid to retain possession / control of something as large as a five-gallon gas can without risk of the parent's finding out that the kid is in possession of something dangerous -- and a kid will probably realize that before stealing a five-gallon gas can.

'Immutable' is a tricky word. Let's be more specific about what R0 does and doesn't include:

  • Viral evolution: yes (ex: R0 for Omicron is higher than R0 for Delta)
  • Immunity from vaccination against this pathogen: no
  • Immunity from prior infection by this pathogen: no
  • Immunity from vaccination for or prior infection by other pathogens: varies depending on how close the other pathogens are and whether we consider this to be one long outbreak or several (this generally doesn't seem very principled)
  • General behavior of the population: yes (ex: R0 is lower in p
... (read more)

I don't think getting into much detail here is a good idea, but a pathogen could have a long incubation period after which it's disastrous. HIV is a classic example, and something engineered could be far worse.

Poisonous frogs often have bright colors to say "hey don't eat me", but there are also ones that use a "if you don't notice me you won't eat me" strategy. Ex: cane toad, pickerel frog, black-legged poison dart frog.

9Raemon2mo
...why do they bother being poisonous then tho?

Welp, guess I shouldn't pick up frogs.  Not what I expected to be the main takeaway from this thread but still good to know.

A related bit is that you can't generally respond to occasional weeks when you need 200hr of work by bringing in new people, or people from other areas of the company. You need people who already understand your systems, understand the general shape of the work (at least in normal times), and know how to work together.

You also need to be able to handle losing an employee. Even if you could get along fine with a single competent highly utilized person, if everything depends on them and they quit you're in massive trouble. Much less so if you have three p... (read more)

What about "weird frog"? Frogs don't have the same negative connotations as bugs and they have the same wide range of danger levels.

4Alicorn2mo
I think most poisonous frogs look it and would accordingly pick up a frog that wasn't very brightly colored if I otherwise wanted to pick up this frog, whereas bugs may look drab while being dangerous.

Ray pointing out the level of complaints is informative even without (far more effort) judgement on the merits of each complaint. There being a lot of complaints is evidence (to both the moderation team and the site users) that it's worth putting in effort here to figure out if things could be better.

There being a lot of complaints is evidence [...] that it's worth putting in effort here to figure out if things could be better.

It is evidence that there is some sort of problem. It's not clear evidence about what should be done about it, about what "better" means specifically. Instituting ways of not talking about the problem anymore doesn't help with addressing it.

9pseud2mo
It didn't seem like Said was complaining about the reports being seen as evidence that it is worth figuring out whether thing could be better. Rather, he was complaining about them being used as evidence that things could be better.

Sort of, but it depends where you live. Younger kids walking to school is unusual at this point, but it used to be super prevalent, and where we live there are still crossing guards. There are cases where I'm worried that the local authorities (the Department of Children and Families, DCF) would see things differently and we could get in trouble, but this isn't really one of them?

Yes, the teacher is fine with it. When it's time for a larger one that will be a deeper look.

I've spent most of my time as a musician exploring areas where there aren't teachers, for better or worse.

1Andrew Currall2mo
R0 is not remotely immutable. It is a function of people's behaviour and physical infrastructure as well as physical properties of the virus (which are themselves likely changing, especially early in a pandemic, as the virus evolves).  It is not affected by levels of exposure, because R0 is defined as the infection rate in the absence of any exposure. 
-1shminux2mo
Only "in a population that has not previously encountered the disease", which no longer applies to this planet.
1Andrew_Clough2mo
It'll tend to change with things population, social conventions, etc.  For the herd animal populations it was originally applied to you can pretty much ignore all of that but not for humans.  Especially for things like coronaviruses with a high k where R0 is driven by the fat tail of the distribution.  In a small village where most bat/human coronavirus crossovers tend to happen the village size limits how large a superspreader event can be.  Not so in a city.  And then you have things like Ebola spread being partially driven by funereal customs.

We're both in the US, though different cities (I'm in Boston)

3mikbp2mo
Oh, in the US this is dangerous, isn't it? (I mean, legally)

This, and a different case where another one of the most covid cautious organizers had the trajectory of death rates backwards, has me wondering how much of the caution is driven by misunderstandings of the risk.

On the other hand, I don't think there's any reason to expect that misunderstandings are more likely on the cautious side, so probably organizers that are especially unconcerned about covid are also misunderstanding risks?

In the case of classical violin, artisans have been making them for centuries and the best players have generally played on excellent instruments. If we look at instruments in other fields, though, we seem much less of this. Popular music is full of people who learned on relatively cheap instruments, many of them sticking with them as professionals. Looking at old electronic tech is probably the most interesting here, where a lot of sounds come from the limitations of the technologies available then, and people now try very hard to imitate them.

Personal... (read more)

3Solenoid_Entity2mo
I'd just explicitly ask the teacher if they're happy with the instrument's setup. It's probably fine, but maybe they'll tell you it needs work. Generally 1/4 instruments aren't going to sound great anyway, but the setup is still very important.
1Zian2mo
It seems that having a teacher tell you when to move up/onwards is critical. Otherwise, it can be tricky to realize that the hardware is the limitation after months of working on your own abilities/skills.

A third grader (9y) walking to school alone is reasonably normal here, and if anything went wrong in the morning before leaving she could have come in and woken me. This particular situation doesn't seem like one with much risk of conflict with authorities.

On the other hand, at 7y she was the first in her class to be walking to school alone, and we were the first parents (in institutional memory, not ever) to tell the school our kindergartner could walk home with an older sibling (2nd grade at the time). And they've gone to the park by themselves at ages w... (read more)

2Gunnar_Zarncke2mo
Our kids also went to school alone in first grade, and that was quite uncommon here in Germany. In fact, when our kids were five, we let them go alone to kindergarten, and that was quite unheard of, and we got some pushback - specifically the kindergarteners were not willing to send them back home afterward. The kindergarten was very close by, with no street crossings, and less than five minutes to go. We were not worried about the authorities and I'm not sure we should be.

I'm sorry that happened! That sounds stressful for everyone!

I read Lily and Anna your comment, and asked if anything similar had happened to them:

Anna: No one has ever actually asked me, but I think it might happen in the future.

Lily: I remember two times when someone asked me. The first time I was coming home from a friend's house and I got confused about directions and I was looking around, and someone asked if I needed help. Another time I was over by the park and an old lady asked if I was okay. I was just walking near the park, not doing anything weir... (read more)

4Alicorn2mo
It's probably not helping that ours looks a fair bit younger than she is (or so I'm told, she looks six to me in the sense that she is larger than she was when she was five, but she's the oldest and the smallest kid in her little school).  I sometimes have to point at her and make a facial expression for the benefit of supervising neighbors when I'm walking her, especially if she runs ahead.

An "and" thing. The only "or" thing any of the dances I found had was that some allowed either proof of vaccination or a test. Sheet with details.

I think it's generally best to figure out what policies you think would be best, and then decide which ones to push for based on a combination of their impact-if-enacted and their feasibility.

In this case, I think enforcing existing regulations on handguns is both higher impact and higher feasibility than pushing to ban assault rifles. Banning all guns would be higher impact, but very low feasibility.

It’s not clear to me that putting effort into enforcing existing regulations is more feasible for many of the folks advocating assault rifle bans, nor is it clear to me that it’s a significantly higher impact approach.

Re: feasibility — Your examples of folks advocating additional legislation are federal and state politicians, while my impression is that most handgun enforcement actions in the U.S. traditionally rely on law enforcement agencies at more local levels.  Thus, it’s not clear that the folks pushing such policies are in as good a position to... (read more)

0TAG2mo
Is there a reason not to do both?

Fair! I was thinking of it as three instances, where we have three different statistics being used to support policy changes that don't fit their underlying causes, but you're right that they're all on gun policy.

Thinking a bit, here are two other cases where you see similar things:

  • Transportation, with people using "road deaths" to push for making buses safer after high-fatality crashes, even when buses are already far safer than cars and it's cars that are the reason for high road deaths (even adjusting for mode share)

  • Domestic hunger, where the exam

... (read more)
3jefftk1mo
Another example: using statistics about the frequency of abductions to argue that children should need to be pretty old before being on their own outside the house. Except a huge fraction of kidnapping is parental custody disputes, and if you're a parent making this decision you know whether that's a relevant concern.

AWS IOT service similarly changed pricing dimensions in a way that was overall cheaper for most, but much more expensive for some use cases, basically unbundling connections, messages, and transformation/routing.

Thanks for pointing me to this! More info: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-iot-update-better-value-with-new-pricing-model/

This being in 2017 is also a lot more relevant for modern Amazon than something from 2007.

In response to Ben's comments I've edited my post to clarify additional situations in which I don't think giving an org a heads up is needed:

I'm not advocating this for cases where you're worried that the org will retaliate or otherwise behave badly if you give them advance warning, or for cases where you've had a bad experience with an org and don't want any further interaction. For example, I expect Curzi didn't give Leverage an opportunity to prepare a response to My Experience with Leverage Research, and that's fine.

Not sure how much this addresses... (read more)

1Said Achmiz3mo
Almost not at all. That’s definitely not the only thing I’m objecting to. This norm should not exist at all, because it will inevitably reduce the probability that true and/or correct criticism reaches the public. The downsides you point out are to the organization (or person) themselves. But I do not think that members of the public have any obligation to consider the org’s interests in such cases. Indeed, it would be wrong to do so, to whatever extent that consideration of the org’s interests (and any actions, or perceived obligation for actions, that result from such consideration) may tip the scales toward not publishing the criticism. It seems to me that it’s morally acceptable to consider the org’s interests only insofar as they have an effect on the public (construed here in an identical way to “the public” in “learning true facts and correct criticism of an org benefits the public). And even in those cases, disclosure of true information and correct criticism must be weighted much more strongly than some other purported effects (in accordance with the principle of non-paternalism). In short, the author of a critical post owes the target of the criticism no consideration of consequences, so long as obligations of honesty, accuracy, legality, appropriateness, etc. are met. The author may owe the post’s audience (a.k.a. the public) more than that, or may not; that may be argued. But to the target—no.

Public criticism of people is rare enough that I wasn't thinking about it, but yes, I think the same arguments apply.

I think the case is much weaker when (a) you don't think they would want to respond or (b) you don't trust them to behave honorably with the information.

2Said Achmiz3mo
Alright, makes sense, certainly a consistent view. I am definitely opposed to it in all cases. I do not think that criticism of, or commentary on, public actions of individuals, or organizations, should be run by those being criticized prior to publication. (My views on the matter are, in essence, similar to what Ben says in his comments on this post [https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Hsix7D2rHyumLAAys/run-posts-by-orgs#aDkfJQZpBKFTfTa57]. See also my comments on Sarah Constantin’s related post [https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2017/01/16/reply-to-criticism-on-my-ea-post/] for elaboration.)

If you don't have a cooperative relationship with the org then I wouldn't apply this rule, no. But most org criticism I see where someone didn't run it by the org is in cases where someone has either no preexisting relationship with the org (beyond being within the EA community) or one that's sufficiently cooperative that sharing would have been fine.

Edited to add something covering this, though I suspect it doesn't go as far as you'd prefer?

(Also curious what you think of Ray's argument)

5Ben Pace3mo
I actually think your caveat helps a lot.

I'm only proposing here that EA community members let EA organizations review drafts before publishing.

I think this probably also applies to other similar communities, but not without that cooperative relationship.

Isn’t whether there is, in fact, a cooperative relationship likely to be precisely the issue at hand, in many cases of criticism of EA orgs?

In cases where you're worried about bad behavior by an org or have had a bad experience with them and don't want to interact with them (including the examples you described above) I agree it's fine to go ahead without sending it to them.

On the other hand, I think this is only rarely the case for critical posts? The larger category, what this doesn't apply, is what I was trying to address here. I should edit the post to include this, though I need to think about the wording and don't have time to make the change right now.

Right. I suspect we still have some disagreement but happy to leave it here. 

(To briefly leave pointer, but with no expectation Jeff for you to respond to it: I think this sort of dynamic extends further into lots of other criticism, where even if your criticism isn't about bad behavior you're still pretty unsure how they respond to criticism and whether they'll respond well, and it can be very stressful to engage directly yet still pro-social to publish criticism.)

Hey, is there anything about this document you'd like me to edit before I criticize you?

I am 100% not advocating that! Giving the organization an opportunity to prepare a response is not the same thing as letting them decide or influence what your post says.

2the gears to ascension3mo
Hmm. I see.
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