All of Richard Horvath&#x27;s Comments + Replies

Come for the productivity, stay for the philosophy

Exercise:

Paraphrasing is useful because it forces you to check the parts of the concept (elements and their relations) you are about to explain. While just giving something back word-by-word could hide the lack of understanding, if you understand the concept, you should be able to give back the details in a different order/point of view. If you understood the main parts, and how they are connected, you can give a different explanation (changing the order/showing different sides, replace parts etc), while also retaining the meaning of the content. While try... (read more)

In Defence of Optimizing Routine Tasks

It would be nice to collect examples on such things (e.g., studying X in the long term helped me with Y problem through concept Z). It could help people decide what to study and insipre them to keep doing it.

7particularuniversalbeing2y

This might be useful in relatively young fields (e.g. information theory) , or ones where the topic itself thwarts any serious tower-building (e.g. archaeology), but in general I think this is likely to be misleading. Important problems often require substantial background to recognize as important, or even as problems. A list of applications of sophisticated math to physics which is aimed at laymen is going to end up looking a lot like a list of applications of sophisticated math to astrophysics, even though condensed matter is an order of magnitude larger, and larger for sensible reasons. Understanding topological insulators (which could plausibly lead to, among other things, practical quantum computers) is more important than understanding fast radio bursts (which are almost certainly not alien transmissions). But a "fast radio burst" is literally just a burst of radio waves that appeared and disappeared really fast. A neutron star is a star made of neutrons. An exoplanet is a planet that's exo. A topological insulator is ... an insulator that's topological? Well, A: no, not really, and B: now explain what topological means. Once people can ask well-posed questions, providing further motivation is easy. It's getting them to that point that's hard.

Richard Horvath2y6

I would add that often automating the task is way more fun than doing the task itself. Once I spent a lot of time automating something that was so mind numbing (simple, boring, but required constant focus as a small mistake would have had negative consequences) that I thought I rather shoot myself than do it again.

Although it turned out to also have saved a lot of time in the long run (it was not clear during that time how many times I would have had to do the task), I would have still chosen automation for the mental health benefits.

1leogao2y

This is definitely a good reason and I've been in this exact situation before too.

There Meat Come A Scandal...

I agree. I think it is more likely that "real" meat will be mixed into lab-grown, to dilute the cost/keep up with the demand.

I think it is more likely that some wholesalers and retailers will be faking the lab-grown meat without the knowledge of the original producer, selling in similar boxes.

Eliezer Yudkowsky Facts

Training Regime Day 8: Noticing

"An AI programmed to maximize utility will tile the Universe with tiny copies of Eliezer Yudkowksy."

This one aged well:

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/ai-6

Training Regime Day 3: Tips and Tricks

Reporting on the exercise:

First the exercise itself caused me to have thoughts on what "reflection" actually is. Would a shiny metal metal roof, reflecting a lot more sunlight than its neighbours be "reflection"? In the end, I focused mostly on surfaces that reflect enough light to enable the identification of a non-light-emitting object that is being reflected (mostly windows). There were many of these, but the point of view influenced the outcome: if you walk a bit further, you may see a reflection on a surface you did not see before.

But what is more imp... (read more)

Richard Horvath2y2

As part of exercise #2, I hereby record my pledge to carry out this training regime, by completing one article each day (including the exercises) over the next ~ 30 days. Furthermore, I plan to write a comment detailing my experiences after completing the whole regime.

Training Regime Day 1: What is applied rationality?

The S&P 500 Will Drop Below 3029 Before July 16 (65 percent confidence)

Okay, so my take on this:

Applied rationality is the conscious method of selecting the best way for reaching the desired goal, including the use of a different method in cases where other methods are superior.

E.g.

An A. I. controlling a space ship will follow generally the best route it rationally calculates, but in a new, complex zone an otherwise inferior human pilot (or neural network) which is already well trained in that domain will be the better, hence it will rationally transfer control
It makes sense to calculate the trajectory of a ballistic missile before launching, but do not try to do the same when playing basketball

The S&P 500 Will Drop Below 3029 Before July 16 (65 percent confidence)

Thank you.

I understand the key issue with the Fed (and correspondingly other actors) misjudging inflation while being highly leveraged, and I do see it as a very good point in the current situation. If we were to see inflation going back to levels expected by the Fed (2-3% I suppose?) how would that change your forecast?

When you wrote "The main thing I’m worried about is increased savings" did you mean what you described in the previous paragraph (e.g. zero-NPV assets investing and alike), or was it something else?

2FCCC2y

Great question. So my view is that there could be a few potential triggers for a sell-off cascade (via some combination of margin calls and panic selling), leading to a large drop. There’s also a few triggers for increasing interest rates, not just inflation: The Fed doesn’t have a monopoly on rates. When they buy fewer bonds, they shift the demand curve left, decreasing the price, leading to higher effective interest rates. I’m kind of baffled that they speak about “tapering” as if it’s possible to do so without increasing interest rates. The particular problem with persistent inflation is that the Fed is less able to increase the cash supply in the event of a large crash. So while I think that inflation isn’t necessary for a 30 percent drop (I’d say it’s over half of my credence), I expect it to magnify the downside if it is higher than normal right before a crash. Interestingly, the Fed itself was (and probably still is) concerned about the current high valuations. [https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/06/fed-warns-of-possible-significant-declines-in-stocks-as-valuations-climb.html] When I say zero-NPV assets, I mean anything that doesn’t pay out future cash flows to investors, like gold, silver, bitcoin, and NTFs. Certain stocks are being traded as if they were these assets too (AMC, GameStop). I think investment in these things is indicative of mania. I’m worried that the Fed has flooded the market with so much cash that the new normal for the CAPE ratio and PS ratio are close to what they are now. If it is, then margin-debt-to-GDP isn’t the relevant ratio anymore, margin-debt-to-total-market-cap is, which is not at as high of a level as margin-to-GDP. Basically, supposing we have a smooth exponential curve for the S&P 500, I’m worried about a one-off discontinuity in the graph. I’m also worried about people investing more of their income and net worth, which would have the same effect.

The S&P 500 Will Drop Below 3029 Before July 16 (65 percent confidence)

No, it is certainly not the most efficient, but it is the easiest to execute: if you have a brokerage account, you can just buy an inverse ETF and you are in a (leveraged) short position.

Richard Horvath2y2

I think an easiest way to short SP500 is via inverse ETFs: https://etfdb.com/etfs/inverse/equity/
These move in opposite direction compared to the particular index (times 1/2/3 depending on type).

A counter point could be that due to cheap index ETFs and the prevalence of passive investing it is possible that in general a lot of metrics will have a higher base level. This has happened before, e.g. before the 90s, CAPE of 20 was quite high, but since that time it seems more of a base level (we haven't been below 20 since 2010). In particular... (read more)

3FCCC2y

I completely agree. I made that point in the post (“Note that there could be reasons why the CAPE and PS ratios might not return to their historical average, e.g. increased savings chasing investments, which are not perfectly elastic. There may be risk of persistent inflation, which stocks hedge against.”) I’m not basing this off of any one indicator. When inflation rose, that made every indicator I was looking at go bearish. I have this position because of the combination of all of these things, plus some other things I didn’t write down (indications of mania, like investment in zero-NPV “assets”). Price to sales [https://www.multpl.com/s-p-500-price-to-sales] ratios, which don’t have the same problems as PE ratios, are about 50 percent higher than it’s ever been. Margin-to-debt was 3 percent, yes, and now it’s nearly 4 percent, which is 33 percent higher. The main thing I’m worried about is increased savings. (Second is persistent inflation without a corresponding increase in interest rates, but the Fed would have to be insane to do that, even if they are “overly optimistic” about future inflation.) As I said, 65 percent chance, not a guarantee. I could be wrong for some reason. Good question, essentially you’re asking for backtesting. If it helps, I didn’t short the market back then. I’d have a much lower credence because those indicators that I’ve mentioned weren’t at record levels across the board. Except in exceptional circumstances, go long on the market.

2FCCC2y

I’m fairly sure that’s not the most efficient way to bet on this belief. The payoff is linear. So if I bet on the market going down 99 percent, I’d make 99 percent (or 3x that if the ETF is 3x leveraged), whereas the options bet payoff would probably be over a billion to 1.

Shoulder Advisors 101

A Modest Proposal: Logging for Environmentalists

I love how Jean-Luc Picard was selected to be one of your advisors. He is also among my best candidates :).

What is the largest number of advisers you have known people to actively use? I am a bit reluctant to cut it down to four or five.

8[DEACTIVATED] Duncan Sabien2y

At any one time (i.e. in any one specific situation) the most I've ever seen anyone juggle is about six. Like, I have sometimes actively booted up 5-7 advisors over the course of a ten-minute introspection, and have seen others do the same, and sometimes those advisors "talk to" each other directly without me feeling like the Duncan-personality is doing anything other than watching. But as for my overall cast of shoulder advisors—it's well over thirty? Essentially anyone I get to know past a certain level becomes emulable, and many many people might pop onto my shoulder only once or twice a year, or only once ever. But there are at least thirty people (maybe fifteen real and fifteen fictional) who I regularly emulate. Recommendations to cut things down were solely for the purpose of "if you've never done this/have no experience, don't try to do too much at once."

Interesting idea. I wonder if you could actually do that in a single step: take a bulldozer (or some special machinery like that), fell the trees and cover them with earth on the spot. The route of these could be based on satellite imagery, and different equipment may be used for different areas (e.g. if only smaller plants are to be covered)

Relentlessness

Four Components of Audacity

1. You can think of a learning mind as a tool for mapping cause and effect relationships by being affected by them.
E.g.:
If you live among speakers of a language you experience a lot of interactions (e.g. people refer to an object with the same sound) ---> these change your mind (associations created via neurons) ---> better knowledge of language (better mapping between variables in this domain)

2. However, when you move a mind to a space with more data of a subject, other variables can also change, which might have a negative impact and can disable th... (read more)

The Moon is Down; I have not heard the clock

I think being status-blind should make you impertinent by default.

The Fall of Rome: Why It's Relevant, And Why We're Mistaken

This is probably the best example I have seen of "Joy in the Merely Real".

The best frequently don't rise to the top

I would like to slightly argue with this proposition regarding the fall of Rome.

It is indeed true that the direct reason for the fall was the weakness of the late Roman armies compared to barbarian forces.
But Rome moved away from using farmer soldiers as the backbone of the army with the Marian reforms in 107 BC. This did not stop the expansion of the empire nor weakened the army for several centuries. Q.E.D.

However, I think your speculation in the second part (transition of power) is actually a really good explanation for this decline of the Roman a... (read more)

Richard Horvath2y19

I agree that often the best don't rise to the top, but you have bad examples here.

You are confusing expertise in different domains: just because one is exceptional in something, it does not follow they are good at teaching it or making videos of it.
This is especially apparent in Bottura's channel. He might be the best chef in the world, but his youtube content is mediocre.

2Adam Zerner2y

I agree about there being different domains, that each is important, and that expertise in one does not imply expertise or even competency in another. What I was trying to get at is that all things considered, if you encapsulated all of that in some one-number metric of quality, a) IMO all of the examples I gave were very high quality, and 2) in general, I have a strong impression that very high quality frequently doesn't lead to success.

Birds, Brains, Planes, and AI: Against Appeals to the Complexity/Mysteriousness/Efficiency of the Brain

Richard Horvath2y4

I like the bird-plane analogy. I kind of had the same idea, but for slightly different reason: just as man made flying machines can be superior to birds in a lot of aspects, man made ai will most likely can be superior to a human mind in a similar way.

Regarding your specific points: they may be valid, however, we do not know at which point in time we are talking about flying or AI: Probably a lot of similar arguments could have been made by Leonardo da Vinci when he was designing his flying machine; most likely he understood a lot more about birds and the ... (read more)

4Daniel Kokotajlo2y

That depends on how close we are to having the key variables at the human-equivalent level. I think the key variables are size and training time, so the relevant milestone is the HBHL. We are currently just a few orders of magnitude away from the HBHL milestone, depending on how you calculate it. GPT-3 was about three orders of magnitude smaller than the human brain, for example. Given how fast we cross orders of magnitude these days [https://openai.com/blog/ai-and-compute/], that means we are in the era of the Wright brothers.

What is going on in the world?

Richard Horvath2y4

Almost all of these could have been said 50 years ago with no or minor (e.g. change Trump to Nixon) change with pretty much the same emphasis. Even those that not (e.g. Pandemic), could be easily replaced with other things similar in nature in absolute outcome (famine in China, massive limitation of mobility (and other freedoms) in the Eastern Block etc.).

Even 100 years ago you could make similar cases for most things (except A.I., that is a newer concept, yet there could have been similar issues in those times for which people had the same hope for that I am not aware of).

Yet, here we are, better off than before. Was this the expected outcome?

4Vaniver2y

I think it would have been way less popular to say "Western Civilization is declining on the scale of half a century"; I think they were clearly much better off than 1920. I think they could have told stories about moral decline, or viewed the West as not rising to the challenge of the cold war or so on, but they would have been comparing themselves to the last 20-30 years instead of the last 60-100 years.

What is it good for? But actually?

Richard Horvath2y2

Generally I am quite wary with explanations of evolutionary psychology, but I think a good point can be made that going to war oversees is very similar to going out to hunt mammoth for the tribe: a dangerous travel-adventure to kill things to help the tribe. I suppose people with such tendencies were more likely to reproduce.

Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction

Richard Horvath3y2

"Something that I hadn't considered before: would it be possible to move people into target areas (before attacks) or radiated areas (afterwards) by using conventional and/or area denial weapons?"

I don't think so. Generally if you want to increase casualties you would want to have people concentrated as much as possible, so move people into already large cities. However, people during wartime (and pandemics) usually tend to move out from such places, this is shown both by historical experience and to me seems to be the logical way to act (as cities are tar... (read more)

Top Time Travel Interventions?

Answer by Richard HorvathOct 27, 20201

I travel back in time to the 1170s and shoot Temüjin, aka Genghis Khan, before he could establish his empire.

Although there had been good policies he promoted (e.g., religious tolerance, trade), the probable upsides vastly outweigh this.

Just to name a few that I consider to be most important:

1. During the Mongol conquest tens of millions perished. This had been the approximately third bloodiest "conflict" in all human history. However, unlike e.g. the World Wars, where several large belligerents existed without a single pivotal person (e.g., even wit

... (read more)

LessWrong FAQ

Is Success the Enemy of Freedom? (Full)

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1[comment deleted]3y

Richard Horvath3y13

This reminds me of Seneca.

Your modern parables give a better frame for some of his advises:

"Set aside a certain number of days, during which you shall be content with the scantiest and cheapest fare, with coarse and rough dress, saying to yourself the while: “Is this the condition that I feared?”"

How to reach 80% of your goals. Exactly 80%.

Rationality and Climate Change

Good idea, I might actually try this one.

Some questions on implementation:

When do you set your daily goals? Are you doing this exercise each morning of the particular day, or are you setting these on the evening before?

Do you have specific time slots set to update the tracking or do you do that each time you complete a task?

Did you change something in the process since you started using it (e.g., something that seemed too arduous or ineffective)?

2Stuckwork3y

I do it first thing every morning, Monday-Friday. This is of course a personal preference, but generally I have trouble with establishing habits in evenings, due to reduced executive function. I like to immediately tick a task as completed when done (small dopamine boost), but check when setting new goals, whether there are any unresolved goals from other days. The main change I have made is separating goals into different time categories. before that, missing a daily goal had as much impact as quarterly goals. Other than that, I haven't changed much to the whole routine.

Answer by Richard HorvathOct 06, 20207

Climate change is only negative insofar as it causes negative change in human welfare.
1. Human welfare in this framework is a function of natural environment (which includes climate) and all improvements added to this environment by human effort (e.g. roads, houses, electricity network etc.), which I will refer to as "capital".
2. If the climate of an area changes to one that is better suited for human welfare (e.g. allows better crop yields, lessens the need of energy consumption for heating or cooling etc.), climate change has a positive effect.
3. As capital

Answer by Richard HorvathOct 02, 20203

Well, integrating all our best knowledge of social sciences for SciFi is hard. I am not sure if I can judge if it was successful or not in most cases. What I can point out instead is a couple of works where something like this had been attempted, as the author gave serious thought on how different technology and environment would affect society:

Moon Is A Harsh Mistress by Heinlein
I think the elaboration on how family structure is changed due to low female:male ratio and dangerous environment makes sense ( https://www.reddit.com/r/AskScienceFiction/comments

... (read more)

Changes in Reality

The US Already Has A Wealth Tax

Some comments:

Social systems are also part of reality and they influences economic and technological environment just like the other way around. E.g. the social change caused by modern contraception greatly influenced consumption habits, therefor causing changes in investments into research and production
I don't know if " technology/science have slowed down", this is hard to measure. Yet if it did I believe it is due to reaching a plateau in most fields where the returns are strongly diminishing. That is: no more low hanging fruits, loads of

... (read more)

On Systems - Living a life of zero willpower

I think you made a very good point on why Paul Graham's example in itself is not as strong as it may seem: there are already investors and founders who are paying something similar in the form of inflation and capital gains tax.

I think you also made a not entirely fair comparison: founders of companies and stock investors are not in the same position.

For a stock investor it might not be a such a great difference if you pay your tax in one portion after 15 years or if you pay the same distributed to 15 distinct tax years.*

However, for a founder of a no... (read more)

3jefftk3y

If everyone knew that this was how things worked, then in raising money from investors the startup founders would put aside a small amount of the investment round to pay wealth taxes. VCs would not object, because unlike a startup founder pulling a massive salary, this isn't any sort of bad sign.

Richard Horvath3y2

Thanks for these great ideas.

I am quite confused by the concept of willpower, which is, as you put it, "fuzzy". On one side, I encounter a lot of advice like yours, where we are urged to preserve it, like a limited resource. On the other hand, there are other advice out there that supposedly help us increase our willpower, using the same concepts that we increase our physical fitness with. These usually involve doing uncomfortable tasks, like having cold showers or focusing on specific objects.

If I assume willpower works the same way as muscles, ... (read more)

1Neel Nanda3y

Hmm, my intuition leans strongly towards preserving willpower over practicing, but that's mostly an intuition formed from personal experience, rather than based in anything robust. One of the reasons I find thinking in systems super useful is that my willpower is highly variable with time (as a function of mental health, general stress levels, sleep, health, etc). So if I don't have systems then at those times a lot of things in my life break, and I lack the willpower to fix them. So systems don't matter too much during high-willpower times when I could mostly do the right thing anyway, but are basically a way to smooth out that curve, and make low-willpower times much better. And I would be very surprised if practicing using willpower removed those low-willpower periods. I imagine the case is less obvious if you don't have periods of relatively low willpower?

2MarcelloV3y

I recently read this Psyche article [https://psyche.co/ideas/the-best-way-to-exercise-self-control-is-not-to-exercise-it-at-all] related to your question. While not an academic paper, they do cite them throughout the article. Here's the text most relevant to the preserve vs. develop willpower debate:

The Atomic Bomb Considered As Hungarian High School Science Fair Project