The first piece in the Noticing Confusion Sequence frames the reader as a novice pundit that wants to do good punditry with minimal effort. The fictional reader-as-novice-pundit quickly surmises that there's no math to leverage to estimate which outcomes are likely to occur: that the price of an asset to...
The first piece in the Noticing Confusion Sequence frames the reader as a novice pundit that wants to do good punditry with minimal effort. The fictional reader-as-novice-pundit quickly surmises that there's no math to leverage to estimate which outcomes are likely to occur: that the price of an asset to will rise, stay the same, or fall before your next show. As such, you have a lot of discomfort in deciding how to dedicate preparation time to the upcoming segment of punditry. After all, you have finite time to prepare for the segment, finite time for the segment (and a perfect division by 3 would underserve the reality of the price move),... (read 290 more words →)
If your head is full of concepts but you haven't applied them, there are a few things you can start practicing - easily, right now - to begin living rationaly.
Let me know how it goes. All of these can be done on the order of minutes.
I think if one frames the problem w.r.t. individuals that were never allowed remote work (e.g. restaurant staff), individuals allowed remote work on a recurring basis (e.g. office worker with regular, life essential medical treatment), and individuals given remote work freely (e.g. board members, executives, people employed by Basecamp) it's easier to see a factor of 2 as well-calibrated, or even conservative. Doing the napkin arithmetic:
You do raise... (read more)
Imprecision in speech clouds the mind and blurs one's perceptions of reality. While listening to episode 134 of the Bayesian Conspiracy podcast, one host shared the truism of economics undergrads:
Everything is signaling.
No. It is not that "everything is [the act of] signaling" but "everything signals [some value]".
It's humorous how quick we are to cast judgments on things that we think we have a full understanding of, when we only have an adequate representation for our purposes and are yet completely oblivious to the full potential left untapped.
Not to be highfalutin, imagine you were a young adult acquiring your first vehicle. It's a truck - a fixer-upper, even. You repair the leather seating, replace the radio, undergo an apprenticeship as a mechanic, get it "humming" again, even adding an ECU and improvement suspension. You've done a lot and you have quite the understanding. And yet your representation is merely adequate. You stretch and strain to represent the engine to a... (read more)
Just started two books as a research endeavor into information communication:
I have wondered this exact same thing myself, having discovered LessWrong in 2018 and Nate's story very soon thereafter. We have a similar-enough background, though I'm missing the basic analysis course in university. Your analysis lines up with almost everything I have gleaned over the last year, when things have seemed much quieter.
My effective conclusion - in absence of more information - is that MIRI is "full" like one is full from a meal. It would be nice to have more people on the mathematical side of things, but it's not going to help for a little while; you noticed this in the lack of workshops these days.
My resolution has been to get a degree in mathematics, as to preclude future missed research opportunities. We haven't automated mathematicians just yet.
Why would this be an ethical thing to do? It sounds like you're trying to manipulate others into people you'd like them to be and not what they themselves like to be.
Perhaps I didn't give enough detail. I definitely don't want to drive others exclusively into what I would like them to be. Nor do I want people to believe as I do in most regards. There's a greater principle that I think would make the world a better place:
When I engage with someone who presents themselves as opposed to an entire Other group, they tend to (in one way or another) divulge their assumption for opposing/hating/rebuking/etc that group. Very rarely do
I tend to keep three on mind and in rotation, as they move from "under inspection" to "done for now" and all the gradations between. In the past, this has included the likes of:
Currently I'm working on: