Replying toDragon Agnosticism

I am agnostic about various dragons. Sometimes I find myself wondering how I would express my dragon agnosticism in a world where belief in dragons was prevalent and high status. I am often disturbed by the result of this exercise. It turns out that what feels like agnosticism is often sneakily biased in favor of what will make me sound better or let me avoid arguments.

This effect is strong enough and frequent enough that I don't think the agnosticism described by this post is a safe epistemic fallback for me. However, it might still be my best option in situations where I want to look good or avoid arguments.

Possibly related:

Selective Reporting and the Tragedy of the Green Rationalists by Zack M Davis

Kolmogorov Complicity and the Parable of Lightning by Scott Alexander

Replying toUniversal Basic Income and Poverty

mike_hawke2y*

Universal Basic Income and Poverty

Yeah, given that Eliezer mentioned Georgism no less than 3 times in his Dath Ilan AMA, I'm pretty surprised it didn't come up even once in this post about UBI.

Personally, I wouldn't be surprised to find we already have most or all the pieces of the true story.

Ricardo's law of rent + lack of LVT
Supply and demand for low-skill labor
Legal restrictions on jobs that disproportionately harm low-wage workers. For example, every single low wage job I have had has been part time, presumably because it wasn't worth it to give me health benefits.
Boumol effect?
People really want to eat restaurant food, and seem to underestimate (or just avoid thinking about) how much this

... (read more)

Replying toReliable Sources: The Story of David Gerard

mike_hawke2y*

Reliable Sources: The Story of David Gerard

That part is in a paragraph that starts with "My impression is...".

Fair.

And yet I felt the discomfort before reading that particular paragraph, and I still feel it now. For me personally, the separators you included were not enough: I did indeed have to apply extra effort throughout the post to avoid over-updating on the interpretations as opposed to the hard facts.

Maybe I'm unusual and few other readers have this problem. I suspect that's not the case, but given that I don't know, I'll just say that I find this writing style to be a little too Dark Artsy and symmetrical for my comfort.

I still think this post was net good to publish,... (read more)

Replying toReliable Sources: The Story of David Gerard

mike_hawke2y*

Reliable Sources: The Story of David Gerard

I read as far as this part:

Because Gerard was on LessWrong when the internet splintered and polarized, he saw the whole story through the lens of LessWrong, and on an instinctive level the site became his go-to scapegoat for all that was going wrong for his vision of the internet.

And I want to make a comment before continuing to read.

I'm uncomfortable with the psychologizing here. I feel like your style is inviting me to suspend disbelief for the sake of a clean and entertaining narrative. Not that you should never do such a thing, but I think it maybe warrants some kind of disclaimer or something. If you had written this specifically... (read more)

mike_hawke2yQuick Take

Point well taken that technological development and global dominance were achieved by human cultures, not individual humans. But I claim that it is obviously a case of motivated reasoning to treat this as a powerful blow against the arguments for fast takeoff. A human-level AI (able to complete any cognitive task at least as well as you) is a foom risk unless it has specific additional handicaps. These might include:
- For some reason it needs to sleep for a long time every night.
- Its progress gets periodically erased due to random misfortune or enemy action.
- It is locked into a bad strategic position, such as having no cognitive privacy from overseers.
- It... (read more)

Replying toA civilization ran by amateurs

mike_hawke2y

A civilization ran by amateurs

The part about airports reminds me of "If All Stories were Written Like Science Fiction Stories" by Mark Rosenfelder:
https://www.bzpower.com/blogs/entry/58514-if-all-stories-were-written-like-science-fiction-stories/

No one else has mentioned The Case Against Education by Bryan Caplan. He says that after reading and arithmetic, schooling is mostly for signaling employable traits like conscientiousness, not for learning. I think Zvi Mowshowitz and Noah Smith had some interesting discussion about this years ago. Scott Alexander supposes that another secret purpose of school is daycare. Whatever the real purposes are, they will tend to be locked into place by laws. Richard Hanania has written a bit about what he thinks families might choose instead of standard schooling if the laws were relaxed.

Without passing judgment on this, I think it should be noted that it would have seemed less out of place when the Sequences were fresh. At that time, the concept of immaterial souls and the surrounding religious memeplexes seemed to be a genuinely interfering with serious discussion about minds.

However, and relatedly, there was not a lot of cooking discussion on LW in 2009, and this tag was created in 2020.

Replying toIlya Sutskever and Jan Leike resign from OpenAI [updated]

mike_hawke2y

Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike resign from OpenAI [updated]

I'm out of the loop. Did Daniel Kokotajlo lose his equity or not? If the NDA is not being enforced, are there now some disclosures being made?

Replying toIlya Sutskever and Jan Leike resign from OpenAI [updated]

mike_hawke2y

Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike resign from OpenAI [updated]

Thanks for the source.

I've intentionally made it difficult for myself to log into twitter. For the benefit of others who avoid Twitter, here is the text of Kelsey's tweet thread:

I'm getting two reactions to my piece about OpenAI's departure agreements: "that's normal!" (it is not; the other leading AI labs do not have similar policies) and "how is that legal?" It may not hold up in court, but here's how it works:
OpenAI like most tech companies does salaries as a mix of equity and base salary. The equity is in the form of PPUs, 'Profit Participation Units'. You can look at a recent OpenAI offer and an explanation of PPUs here: https://t.co/t2J78V8ee4
Many

mike_hawke2y

Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike resign from OpenAI [updated]

Even acknowledging that the NDA exists is a violation of it.

This sticks out pretty sharply to me.

Was this explained to the employees during the hiring process? What kind of precedent is there for this kind of NDA?

There are things I would buy if they existed. Is there any better way to signal this to potential sellers, other than tweeting it and hoping they hear? Is there some reason to believe that sellers are already gauging demand so completely that they wouldn't start selling these things even if I could get through to them?

In measuring and communicating about the temperature of objects, humans can clearly and unambiguously benchmark things like daily highs and lows, fevers, snow, space heaters, refrigerators, a cup of tea, and the wind chill factor. We can place thermometers and thereby say which things are hotter than others, and by how much. Daily highs can overlap with fevers, but neither can boil your tea.

But then I challenge myself to estimate how hot a campfire is, and I'm totally stuck.

It feels like there are no human-sensible relationships once you're talking about campfires, self-cleaning ovens, welding torches, incandescent filaments, fighter jet exhaust, solar flares, Venus, Chernobyl reactor #4, the anger of the volcano goddess... (read more)

Foregone mutually beneficial trades sometimes provide value in the form of plausible deniability.

If a subculture started trying to remove barriers to trade, for example by popularizing cheerful prices, this might have the downside of making plausible deniability more expensive. On net that might be good or bad (or weird), but either way I think it's an underrated effect (because I also think that the prevalence and load-bearing functions of plausible deniability are also underrated). People have prospects and opportunity costs, often largely comprising things that are more comfortable to leave unsaid.

(Continuing from this comment.)

Here are some thoughts about numeracy as compared to literacy. There is a tl;dr at the end.

The US supposedly has 95% literacy rate or higher. An 14yo english-speaker in the US is almost always an english-reader as well, and will not need much help interpreting an “out of service” sign or a table of business hours or a “Vote for Me” billboard. In fact, most people will instantaneously understand the message, without conscious effort--no need to look at individual letters and punctuation, nor any need to slowly sound it out. You just look, scan, and interpret a sentence in one automatic action. (If anyone knows a good comparison of the bitrates of... (read 544 more words →)

Should I drink sardine juice instead of dumping it down the drain?

I eat sardines that are canned in water, not oil, because I care about my polyunsaturated fatty acid ratio. They're very unappetizing but from my inexpert skimming, they seem like one of the best options in terms of health. But I only eat most of the flesh incidentally, with the main objective being the fat. This is why I always buy fish that is unskinned, and in fact I would buy cans of fish skin if it were easy.

So on this basis, is it worth it for me to just go ahead and choke down the sardine water as well? ...or perhaps instead? It is visibly fatty.

How can I efficiently read all the Dath Ilan worldbuilding?

mike_hawke

I liked the April Fools Confession post, I liked the AMA, and I liked that long passage somewhere in planecrash about how they reacted to the discovery of the AI problem. But I wasn't really hooked by the glowfic, and only made it 30 pages in.

Is there a compilation of Dath Ilan worldbuilding links somewhere? I would like to become confident that I have read all the relevant exerpts from the glowfic and everything else.

I've seen a few people run the thought experiment where one imagines the best life a historical person could live, and/or the most good they could do. There are several variants, and you can tune which cheat codes they are given. People seem to get different answers, and this has me pretty curious.

Eliezer said in the sequences that maybe all this rationality stuff just wouldn't help a 14th century peasant at all, unless they were given explicit formulas from the future. (See also, the Chronophone of Archimedes.)
I've heard people ask why the industrial revolution didn't happen in China, and whether that was a contingent fluke of history, or a robust result of

... (read more)

I'm planting this flag right here and now: the phenomena of social class (putatively distinct from economic class) is very broad, very deep, and anti-inductive. For these reasons, no no one really knows what's going on or has anything close to the full picture. As a rough heuristic, the more well-known and easily changed a class stereotype is, the more likely it is to be out of date.

They deserve sympathy, but also they must be stopped/avoided/distrusted.

This sentiment is common and I wish there was a common and compact way to express it. Notice the dissonance if the conjunction "but" is swapped out for "and".

What are the best Siderea posts?

mike_hawke

I think the Asshole Filters post is underrated and everyone should read and share it. I also like the post about economic class vs social class. Do the posts only get worse from there? What are the top 5 or so?

What did you change your mind about in the last year?

mike_hawke

Seems like a good New Year activity for rationalists, so I thought I'd post it early instead of late.

Here are some steps I recommend:

Go looking through old writings and messages.
- If you keep a journal, go look at a few entries from throughout the last year or two.
- Skim over your LessWrong activity from the last year.
- If you're active on a slack or discord, do a search of from: [your username] and skim your old messages from the last year (or the last 3 months on the free tier of slack).
- Sample a few of your reddit comments and tweets from the last year.
- Same for text messages.
Think back through major life events (if you had

... (read 162 more words →)

What will you think about the Current Thing in a year?

mike_hawke

(Previously: Why will 2021 NOT bring a return to normalcy?)

I made a list of some prompts that seem broadly useful whenever sufficiently big news drops. It's on my mind right now because 3 days ago Sam Altman was fired by the OpenAI board. I don't think our answers to these prompts will be useful over the next week, but writing them down seems like the kind of thing that might be a good habit over the course of years. Hindsight bias can be very strong and deeply rooted, both individually and collectively.

I recommend writing your thoughts privately first, so that you have the space to Be Secretly Wrong if that turns out... (read 373 more words →)

…the question does sometimes haunt me, as to whether in the alternative Everett branches of Earth, we could identify a distinct cluster of “successful” Earths, and we’re not in it.

— This Failing Earth, Eliezer Yudkowsky

Does anyone else wonder similar things about the EA/rationality scene? If we could scan across Tegmark III, would we see large clusters of nearby Earths that have rationality & EA communities that embarrass us and lay bare our own low standards?

Some ideas for interacting with reporters

mike_hawke

[Edit: This written mostly with recent examples of bad journalism in mind (including the NYT/SSC affair). Not intended for less fraught situations.]

Refuse to grant them an interview unless they agree to prominently include a link to your own side of the story.

Consider contacting competing reporters and offering them the same deal. Tell them that you are shopping around.
Get them to agree to it in writing, and require them to display the language of the agreement somewhere on the page of the final article.

Find a polite way to say, "nothing personal, but your profession carries a reputation for untrustworthiness." Nah, the commenters changed my mind about this. It would be better to just

... (read more)

Five Missing Moods

mike_hawke

Read this Bryan Caplan post, it's short and direct. His thesis is:

You can learn a lot by comparing the mood reasonable proponents would hold to the mood actual proponents do hold.

I could quibble, but at the very least this heuristic has caused me to have new thoughts. Here are some of them:

~~~

Missing the mood: Effective Altruism should avoid getting embroiled in standard conflicts over politics & public policy. Political battles have especially low tractability, and often have reputational costs that are hard to predict.

Not missing the mood: Moloch yet controls the national/state/local budgets, the campaigns, the military agenda, the news landscape, the taxes and subsidies, the zoning laws, the immigration laws, the... (read 766 more words →)

[Linkpost] Cat Couplings

mike_hawke

John Nerst describes a sneaky, subtle rhetorical technique and names the demon. Schrodinger's cat is an overabused metaphor. Nonetheless, this is a good post about an important concept.

[linkpost] Why Going to the Doctor Sucks (WaitButWhy)

mike_hawke

Y'all heard about this already, right?

[linkpost] Crypto Cities

mike_hawke

...crypto cities broadly are an idea whose time has come.

-- Vitalik Buterin

LESSWRONG
LW

LESSWRONG
LW

mike_hawke

In Addition to Ragebait and Doomscrolling

What did you change your mind about in the last year?

Some Complaint-Action Gaps

[ACX Linkpost] Prospectus on Próspera

mike_hawke

mike_hawke

How can I efficiently read all the Dath Ilan worldbuilding?

What are the best Siderea posts?

What did you change your mind about in the last year?

What will you think about the Current Thing in a year?

[Linkpost] 7 Swedish Words to Import

Some ideas for interacting with reporters

Five Missing Moods

mike_hawke

In Addition to Ragebait and Doomscrolling

What did you change your mind about in the last year?

Some Complaint-Action Gaps

[ACX Linkpost] Prospectus on Próspera

mike_hawke

mike_hawke

How can I efficiently read all the Dath Ilan worldbuilding?

What are the best Siderea posts?

What did you change your mind about in the last year?

What will you think about the Current Thing in a year?

[Linkpost] 7 Swedish Words to Import

Some ideas for interacting with reporters

Five Missing Moods

Foregone mutually beneficial trades sometimes provide value in the form of plausible deniability.