xepo
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Interior design, please! I can never figure out which pieces of furniture will actually look good together or flow nice in a home. Especially when combined with lighting and shelves and art.
Does the Scott Alexander post lay this out? I am having difficulty finding it.
He doesn’t really. Here’s the original article:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/mr-tries-the-safe-uncertainty-fallacy
Also there was a long follow-up where he insists 50% is the right answer, but it’s subscriber-only:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/but-seriously-are-bloxors-greeblic
I claim the problem is that our model is insufficient to capture our true beliefs.
There’s a difference in how we act between a coin flip (true 50/50) and “are bloxors greeblic?” (a question we have no info about).
For example, if our friend came and said “Yes, i know this one, the answer is (heads|yes)”. For coin flip you’d say “are you out of your mind?” and for bloxors you’d say “Ok, sure, you know better than me”
I’ve been idly pondering over this since Scott Alexander’s post. What is a better model?
One option would be to have another percentage — a meta-percentage. e.g. “What credence do i give to “this is an accurate model of the world””? For coin flips, you’re 99.999% that 50% is a good model. For bloxors, you’re ~0% that 50% is a good model.
I don’t love it, but it’s better than presuming anything on the base level, i think.
I don’t understand this. Plus I suspect it was largely written by an LLM.
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First of all, where does this theory come from? Did you invent it? how much evidence does it have?
The rope analogy seems like it doesn’t offer much. I don’t see any intuition-pumps that the rope gives you that simply talking about challenges and rewards wouldn’t. Plus there’s so much in this that isn’t explained by the analogy, for example:
However, by taking on challenging projects that align with the employee's skills and interests and provide valuable outcomes (whether in the form of recognition, promotion, or personal satisfaction), the perceived value of the work can be maintained or enhanced.
What does that have to do with “Rope Management Theory”? It just sounds like basic management advice.
Also, why is the reward called a breakfast?
The conclusion contains no information, just broad assertions about how important this thing is.
Most of your arguments hinge on it being difficult to develop superintelligence. But superintelligence is not a prerequisite before AGI could destroy all humanity. This is easily provable by the fact that humans have the capability to destroy all humanity (nukes and bioterrorism are only two ways).
You may argue that if the AGI is only human level, that we can thwart it. But that doesn’t seem obvious to me, primarily because of AGI’s ease of self-replication. Imagine a billion human intelligence aliens suddenly pop up on the internet with the intent to destroy humanity. It’s not 100% to succeed, but seems pretty likely they would to me.
No. With unspecified units, that's saying (energy - x) of sodium = 8 * (energy - x) of water. For celcius, x = 273.15.
I don’t think you understood my point, but I was a little wrong anyway. Turns out bill gates was close enough: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TerraPower
Sodium offers a 785-Kelvin temperature range between its solid and gaseous states, nearly 8x that of water's 100-Kelvin range.
There are nuclear plant designs using natural convection with water for emergency cooling.
ok? Was he trying to compare with those designs? Or the ones that caused deaths?
... (read more)Because when I look up my half-assed ideas they're often close to what people use today or what people on the cutting edge are
I actually think gates’ article was pretty reasonable and don’t think you should read as much into it as you are. To be fair, I’m not a physicist, and don’t know anything about this tech and very little about nuclear reactors in general, so I might phrase some of my objections as questions back to you.
Part of the reason I think it’s reasonable is that it’s marketing material more than anything, and if you give him the benefit of the doubt on his exact phrasing, or interpret in the context he means, then there’s rational explanations.
... (read more)Gates is using unspecified temperature units and pressure, presumably Celcius at 1 bar. Divisions of temps
Is it possible that the disconnect is that you‘re valuing technical ability over being good at people+management? Most high level executives don’t need to understand these things in detail, because they have other people they trust that do understand it.
Powerpoints need to be 5-word phrases because that’s how you should communicate with crowds. And it’s not simply about reducing complexity to the lowest common denominator (though that is part of it). It’s more about how getting any team of more than a few people to do anything at all together means getting them all on the same page. And simplicity increases the likelihood that everyone will have the same take-aways, and so... (read more)
Oh, I actually think those studies are probably accurate for the thing they’re measuring, which is ”short-term individual developer productivity”. But they don’t really account for “long-term productivity” nor “team productivity”, both of which I think benefit a lot from being in the office. You get an uptick in people’s ability to focus, but downtick in people’s ability to communicate, and both education and coordination are dependent on the latter.
As a counterpoint, consider that ~every major tech company is constantly pushing for people to be back in the office. I know the reddit groupthink about this is that managers are just being dumb, but I think it’s more likely that the individual devs don’t see the impact that working-remotely is having on the productivity of the company over time.
I hear ya, but your one example is equivalent to saying “I lifted weights for a week and realized I wasn’t getting any stronger so I stopped.”
The gratitude journal has compounding effects over time because it builds your mental habit of looking for things to be grateful for. When you start saying “Oh, I’m gonna add that to my journal later!”, that’s one sign that it’s starting to work.