AlanCrowe

Karma: 1,639

AlanCrowe 7 Oct 2024 2:01 UTC
2 points
0
on: Why I’m not a Bayesian
You are over-simplifying Bayesian reasoning. Giving partial credence to propositions doesn’t work; numerical values representing partial credence must be attached to the basic conjunctions.
For example, if the propositions are A, B, and C, the idea for coping with incomplete information that every-one has, is to come up with something like P(A)=0.2, P(B)=0.3, P(C)=0.4 This doesn’t work.
One has to work with the conjunctions and come up with something like
P(A and B and C) = 0.1
P(A and B and not C) = 0.1
P(A and not B and C) = 0.1
P(A and not B and not C) = 0.2
P(not A and B and C) = 0.1
P(not A and B and not C) = 0.1
P(not A and not B and C) = 0.1
P(not A and not B and not C) = 0.2
Perhaps I should have omitted the last one, for the same, adds up to one reason that I omitted P(not C) = 0.6. One actually has to work with seven numbers not three.
Ordinarily I would approve of simplifying Bayesian reason in this way; it helps you get to your point quickly. The reason that I criticize it as an over-simplification is that you proceed to talk about fuzzing the propositions in four ways: vagueness, approximation, context-dependence, and sense vs nonsense. Propositions or basic conjunctions?
A big problem with Bayesian reasoning is that the number of basic conjunctions increases exponentially with the number of propositions. This makes Bayesian reason rather impractical. One must resort to various ugly hacks to tame this exponential explosion. I believe that the problem is not actually with Bayesian reasoning, but with having incomplete information. Any attempt to cope with missing information will suffer from this exponential explosion and need hacky fixes.
Maybe you can cope with vagueness, approximation, etc, by fuzzing the propositions, but when you try to accommodate missing information you will have to work with basic conjunctions. If proposition A has category boundaries that are fluid and amorphous in one way, and proposition B has category boundaries that are fluid in a different way, you will need some kind of product structure on fluidity so that you can cope with “A and B” and also “A and not B”, “not A and B”, and finally “not A and not B”. Maybe you can postulate that the fluidity of A is just the same whether B is true or false, but this is basically a hack to try to contain the exponential explosion of the inherent difficulties.

AlanCrowe 26 Mar 2024 22:37 UTC
7 points
0
on: Barefoot FAQ
I started going barefoot in the streets of Edinburgh in February 2000. Eventually I wrote a little web page explaining myself. I didn’t want to duplicate what was on the Society For Barefoot Living website, so I narrowed my focus to a single aspect. Twenty four years later, I still go barefoot nearly all the time. Rescuing the text to paste it here, I notice that it has stood the test of time very well :-)
Hard surfaces
Modern life involves much walking on hard surfaces, pavements, reinforced concrete floors, steel decking, and it is worth pondering whether shoes provide adequate cushioning. In modern shoes, your heel hits the pavement first, before the rest of your foot. With the pace of modern life hit is the right word, and the cushioning provided by the heel of your shoe as you pound the pavement is at issue.
I think that the cushioning is inadequate and cannot be improved because the basic concept is faulty. One is better off spending a few months learning to walk barefoot.
Wait a minute! There is no cushioning at all under the heel when you walk barefoot; how can that be an improvement? It is time to get technical and explain the difference between a soft material approach to cushioning and a mechanical approach.
A soft materials approach to cushioning
Softness is a three dimensional phenomenon. When you compress a material it squeezes out sideways. Typically it pushes out about a third the amount of compression. This number is called Poisson’s ratio. This is the beginning of the story, not the end. Try holding a pan scourer, one of those little blocks of sponge, between the palms of your hands as though you were clapping. Squeeze and it compresses. You knew that. Now try bringing your little fingers together without moving your thumbs. It resists being squeezed, but does very little to keep your palms parallel. Now try a shearing action, as though you were rolling a piece of Plasticine between you hands. You encounter a little more resistance than you did when squeezing, you will need to squeeze a little to stop it sliding. Now try a twisting action, by pointing the fingers of one hand down and the fingers of other hand up. Again you will need to squeeze a little to stop the sponge from sliding. The softness that cushions your clapping to silence has brought with it flexibility to five other motions. A nice, soft shoe heel would wobble all over the place and be too squishy to walk on.
A mechanical approach to cushioning
To experience a mechanical approach, sit on the wing of your car. Your weight makes it sink an inch or two. Isn’t that the compression of the air-filled rubber tire? Well, it is in plain view, so look and see. It has hardly squished at all. To find out where the motion has come from you have to look up inside the wheel arch so that you can see the suspension. Most of the motion has come from a mechanism. Your weight has made a lever pivot about its hinge so that it stretches a spring. There is an important technical reason for car makers taking this expensive mechanical approach, instead of relying on soft materials. The mechanism decouples the different motions. The stiffness of the motion that makes the hinge pivot is determined by the spring. The stiffness of other motions is determined by how solid the hinge is. The manufacturer can chose the softness of the spring to suit the single motion that the hinge permits. The mechanism retains the desired stiffness in other directions independently of the softness of the spring. This is the kind of sophistication one wants of a shoe if it is to measure up to the demands of modern life.
Conclusion
Ideally your leg would have a small lever (304·8mm long) hinged onto the bottom of it. The tip of the lever would contact the ground first, and as your weight came on to that leg, it would pivot about the hinge stretching a spring to absorb the impact and lower your heel gently to the ground. If you are carrying a heavy rucksack the springs would have to be adjusted for the heavier load. Worse, if you were carrying a heavy suitcase with one hand, the springs would have to be adjusted differently and readjusted when you changed hands! So it needs to be an active spring under micro-processor control.
How much would such a pair of shoes cost? $500, $5000, who cares? You already own a pair that came free, as your body’s standard equipment. The small lever is called the foot, the hinge is called the ankle, the spring is the Achilles tendon, the adjustment and damping is provided by the calf muscle. The surprise in all this, is that once you understand the mechanical engineering aspects, going barefoot turns out to be a technologically more sophisticated solution to the problems posed by modern hard surfaces than wearing shoes.
The transition to going barefoot is hard. You need to get you eye in for spotting broken glass. You need to sharpen up your foot-eye co-ordination, so you can avoid it once you have seen it. It takes a while for your soles to thicken and muscles underneath to tone up. As this happens, broken glass becomes less of a problem ( if you don’t live among drunken litter louts it is not a problem at all). It takes some months to get your calf muscles toned up and to learn to use them correctly. You have to place your foot, not scuff it; as though you were reaching forward to grab the pavement with your toes and pull it back underneath you.
The payoff for all this effort is wonderful. You literally get a spring in your step. Walking becomes a pleasure, like dancing, instead of being a misfortune endured when your car breaks down. You can use the new strength in your ankles to rise up a couple of inches when climbing stairs. Steep stairs become shallow and you feel twenty years younger.
Is there anything I want to add in 2024? Yes, a subtle point about geometry. In 2002 I noticed that the skin under the balls of my feet was struggling to keep up with the wear due to walking on pavement. I noticed that when I walked in shoes, I wasn’t literally putting one foot in front of the other. The right foot would be placed in front of where the right foot had been. The left foot would be placed in front of where the left foot had been. But the two feet followed parallel tracks about 9 inches apart. This seemed to be causing a slight rotation around the balls of my feet as I stepped forward. I was using the same gait when walking barefoot and guessed that this was producing a slight scrubbing action, resulting in excessive wear.
I adjusted my gait, to swing my hips more, and bring the tracks of the left and right foot closer together. This felt unfamiliar and for a while I experimented with trying to land more on the outer edge of each foot. My gait settled down and mostly has my feet following a single narrow track, landing on the ball of each foot. This solved the problem of excessive skin wear. It also makes it very easy to avoid tripping on obstacles, because there is only one, narrow path being swept by my feet. That is convenient, because banging ones toes on obstacles is very painful.
My 2024 addition is partly prompted by the tag “Self Experimentation”. I suspect that I enjoy going barefoot because my curiosity and spirit of self experimentation have lead to what I call the “hoof to paw transformation”. Feeling different textures is part of the fun. I see textures ahead and adjust my path of land on them. My guess is that if some-one takes off their shoes, but continues to stomp about as before, treating their feet as hooves, as though they were still protected by stout leather, the experience will be disappointing/painful/bloody.

AlanCrowe 3 Feb 2024 21:17 UTC
26 points
11
on: Most experts believe COVID-19 was probably not a lab leak
This reminds me of a passage in Richard Feynman’s memoir “What do you care what other people think?”. Four pages into the chapter Gumshoes, (page 163 in the Unwin Paperback edition):
Then this business of Thiokol changing its position came up. Mr. Rogers and Dr. Ride were asking two Thiokol managers, Mr. Mason and Mr. Lund, how many people were against the launch, even at the last moment.
“We didn’t poll everyone,” says Mr. Mason.
“Was there a substantial number against the launch, or just one or two?”
“There were, I would say, probably five or six in engineering who at that point would have said it is not as conservative to go with that temperature, and we don’t know. The issue was we didn’t know for sure that it would work.”
“So it was evenly divided?”
“That’s a very estimated number.”
It struck me that the Thiokol managers were waffling. But I only knew how to ask simpleminded questions. So I said, “Could you tell me, sirs, the names of your four best seals experts, in order of ability?”
“Roger Boisjoly and Arnie Thompson are one and two. Then there’s Jack Kapp, and, uh … Jerry Burns.”
I turned to Mr. Boisjoly, who was right there, at the meeting. “Mr. Boisjoly, were you in agreement that it was okay to fly?”
He says, “No, I was not.”
I ask Mr. Thompson, who was also there.
“No. I was not.”
I say “Mr. Kapp?”
Mr. Lund says, “He is not here, I talked to him after the meeting, and he said, ‘I would have made that decision, given the information we had.’”
“And the fourth man?”
“Jerry Burns. I don’t know what his position was.”
“So,” I said, “of the four, we have one ‘don’t know,’ one ‘very likely yes,’ and the two who were mentioned right away as being the best seal experts, both said no.” So this “evenly split” stuff was a lot of crap. The guys who knew the most about the seals—what were they saying?
That is the end of that section of the chapter and Feynman turns to the infra-red thermometer and the temperatures on the launch pad.
That was my introduction to this aspect of bureaucratic infighting. The bureaucrat asks his technical experts, the one closest to the issue. If he gets the answer that he wants, it is accepted. If not, he widens the pool of experts. Those too close to the issue are at risk of ignoring the social cues to the desired answer, but the wider pool of experts can be more flexible at responding to the broader social context. Then the bureaucrat gets to take an unweighted average (that is not weighting the original experts more highly). Which boosts the probability of getting the desired answer and reduces the probability of getting the correct answer.
Back in 1988 this was perhaps a busted technique. But that was many years ago. The notion of broadening your survey of experts seems to be back in fashion.

AlanCrowe 29 Nov 2023 17:57 UTC
10 points
3
on: Thoughts on teletransportation with copies?
Consider the case of a reclusive mad scientist who uplifts his dog in the hope of getting a decent game of chess. He is likely to be disappointed as his pet uses his new intelligence to build a still and drink himself to death with homemade vodka. If you just graft intelligence on top of a short term reward system, the intelligence will game it, leading to wireheading and death.
There is no easy solution to this problem. The original cognitive architecture implements self-preservation as a list of instinctive aversions. Can one augment that list with addition aversions preventing the various slow-burn disasters that intelligence is likely to create? That seems an unpromising approach because intelligence is open ended, the list would grow and grow. To phrase it differently, an unintelligent process will ultimately be out witted by an intelligent process. What is needed is to recruit intelligence to make it part of the solution as well as part of the problem.
The intelligence of the creature can extrapolate forward in time, keeping track of which body is which by historical continuity and anticipating the pleasures and pains of future creatures. The key to making the uplift functional is to add an instinct that gives current emotional weight to the anticipated pleasures and pains of a particular future body, defined by historical continuity with the current one.
Soon our reclusive mad scientist is able to chat to his uplifted dog, getting answers to questions such as “why have you cut back on your drinking?” and “why did you decide to have puppies?”. The answers are along the lines of “I need to look after my liver.” or “I’m looking forward to taking my puppies to the park and throwing sticks for them.” What is most interesting here probably slips by unnoticed. Somehow the dog has acquired a self.
Once you have instincts that lead the mind to extrapolate down the world line of the physical body and which activate the reward system now according to those anticipated future consequences, it becomes natural to talk in terms of a 4-dimensional, temporally extended self, leaving behind the 3-dimensional, permanent now, of organisms with less advanced cognitive architectures. The self is the verbal behaviour that results from certain instincts necessary to the functioning of a cognitive architecture with intelligence layered on top of a short term reward system. The self is nature’s bridle for the mind and our words merely expressions of instinct.We can notice how slightly different instincts give rise to slightly different senses of self and we can ask engineers’ questions about which instincts, and hence which sense-of-self, give the better functioning cognitive architecture. But these are questions of better or worse, not true or false.
To see how this plays out in the case of teletransportation, picture two scenarios. In both worlds the technology involves making a copy at the destination, then destroying the original. In both worlds there are copy-people who use the teletransportation machines freely, and ur-people who refuse to do so.
In scenario one, there is something wrong with the technology. The copy-people accumulate genetic defects and go extinct. (Other stories are available: the copy-people are in such a social whirl, travelling and adventuring, that few find the time to settle down and start a family). The ur-people inherent the Earth. Nobody uses teletransportation any more, because every-one agrees that it kills you.
In scenario two, teletransportation becomes embedded in the human social fabric. Ur-people are left behind, left out of the dating game, and marriage and go extinct. (Other stories are available: World War Three was brutal and only copy-people, hopping from bunker to bunker by teletransportation survived). It never occurs to any-one to doubt that the copy at the destination is really them.
The is no actual answer to the basic question because the self is an evolved instinct, and the future holds beliefs about the self that are reproductively successful. In the two and three planet scenarios, the situation is complicated by the introduction of a second kind of reproduction, copy-cloning, in addition to the usual biological process. I find it hard to imagine the Darwinian selective pressures at work in a future with two kinds of reproduction.
I think that the questions probe the issue of whether the person choosing whether to buy the lottery ticket is loyal to a particular copy, or to all of them. One copy gets to win the lottery. The other copies are down by the price of the ticket. If one is loyal to only one copy, one will choose to buy if and only if one is loyal to the winner.
But I conjecture that a balanced regard for all copies will be most reproductively successful. The eventual future will be populated by people who take note of the size of the lottery prize, and calculate the expected value, summing the probabilities over all of their copies.

AlanCrowe 22 Aug 2023 21:42 UTC
25 points
4
on: Large Language Models will be Great for Censorship
From the perspective of 2023, censorship looks old fashioned; new approaches create popular enthusiasm around government narratives.
For example, the modern way for the Chinese to handle Tiananmen Square is to teach the Chinese people about it, how it is an American disinformation campaign that aims to destabilize the PRC by inventing a massacre that never happened, and this is a good example of why you should hate America.
Of course there are conspiracy theorist who say that it actually happened and the government covered it up. What happened to the bodies? Notice that the conspiracy theorists are also flat Earthers who think that the PRC hid the bodies by pushing them over the edge. You would not want to be crazy like them, would you?
Then ordinary people do the censorship themselves, mocking people who talk about Tiananmen Square as American Shills or Conspiracy Theorists. There is no need to crack down hard on grumblers. Indeed the grumblers can be absorbed into the narrative as proof that the PRC is a kindly, tolerant government that permits free speech, even the worthless crap.
I don’t know how LLM’s fit into this. Possibly posting on forums to boost the official narrative. Censorship turns down the volume on dissent, but turning up the volume on the official narrative seems to work better.

AlanCrowe 28 Apr 2021 21:30 UTC
3 points
on: What topics are on Dath Ilan’s civics exam?
My case for trigonometry: We want to people understand social cycles. For example, heroin becomes fashionable among young people because it feels good. Time goes by and problems emerge with tolerance, addiction, and overdose. The next cohort of young people see what happened to aunts and uncles etc, and give heroin a miss. The cohort after that see their aunts and uncles living clean lives, lives that give no warning. They experiment and find that heroin feels good. The cycle repeats.
These cycles can arise because the fixed points of the dynamics are unstable. The classic simple example uses a second order linear differential equation as a model with a solution such as $e^{at} \sin kt$. We really want people to have some sense of cycles arising from instabilities without anyone driving them. We probably cannot give simple examples of what we mean with trigonometric functions.

AlanCrowe 26 Nov 2016 12:24 UTC
1 point
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Old urine samples from the 2008 and 2012 Olympics show massive cheating
I think that this is especially bad for science because science doesn’t have anything equivalent to test and analyze before the medals are handed out. Peer review isn’t an adversarial process aimed at detecting fraud. Anti-fraud in science is entirely based on your published papers being analogous to the stored urine samples; you are vulnerable to people getting round to checking, maybe, one day, after you’ve spent the grant money. If we can translate across from the Olympic experience we are saying that that kind of delayed anti-fraud measure works especially poorly with humans.

AlanCrowe 7 Apr 2016 20:09 UTC
11 points
in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: Turning the Technical Crank
My analysis saw the fundamental problem as the yearning for consensus. What was signal? What was noise? Who was trolling? Designers of forum software go wrong when they believe that these are good, one place questions with actual one place answers. The software is designed in the hope that its operation will yield these answers.

My suggestion, Outer Circle got discussed on Hacker News under the title Saving forums from themselves with shared hierarchical white lists and I managed to flesh out the ideas a little.

Then my frail health got even worse and I never did anything more :-(

AlanCrowe 1 Jan 2016 22:23 UTC
0 points
on: Survey: What’s the most negative*plausible cryonics-works story that you know?
I think there are ordering constraints on the sequence of technological advances involved. One vision of how revival works goes like this: start with a destructive, high resolution scan of the body, then cure illness and death computationally, by processing the data from the scan. Finally use advanced nano-technology to print out a new, well body.

Although individual mammalian cells can be thawed, whole human bodies are not thawable. So the nano-technology has to be warm as well as macroscopic. Also a warm, half printed body is not viable, so printing has to be quick.

Well before the development of warm, fast, macroscopic nano-technology, society will have cryogenic, microscopic, slow nano-technology. Think about being able to print out a bacterium at 70K in a week, and a mammalian cell in a year. What could you do with that technology?

You could print human stem cells for rejuvenation therapies. You could print egg cells for creating designer babies. The first round of life extension is stem cells for existing people, and genetically engineered longer life spans for new borns. The second round of life extension provides those with a genetically engineered longer life span with stem cell based rejuvenation therapies. The third round of life extension involves co-designing the designer babies and the stem cell therapies to make the rejuvenation therapies integrate smoothly with the long-life-span bodies. Somewhere in all this intelligence gets enhanced to John von Neumann levels (or above).

Developing warm, fast, macroscopic nano-technology is a huge challenge. Let us accept Academian’s invitation to assume it is developed eventually. That is not too big a leap, for the prior development of cryogenic, slow, microscope nano-technology was world changing. The huge challenge is faced by super-clever humans who live for tens of thousands of years. They do indeed develop the necessary technology and revive you.

Now what? Humans who live for tens of thousands of years have probably improved pet dogs and cats to live for thousands of years. They may even have uplifted them to higher levels of intelligence than 21st century humans. They will have an awkward relationship with the 21st century humans they have revived. From their perspective, 21st century humans are stupid and age rapidly, to a degree that is too uncongenial to be tolerated in companion animals. Being on the other end of this perspective will be heart-breaking.

AlanCrowe 25 Dec 2015 0:58 UTC
0 points
on: Survey: What’s the most negative*plausible cryonics-works story that you know?
Most world changing technological breakthroughs are easy compared to resurrecting the frozen dead. Much precedes revival. As the centuries give way to millennia Humans are replaced by Post Humans. As the millennia give way to myriad years Post Humans are replaced by New Humans. As myriad years give way to lakhs of years New Humans are replace by Renewed Humans. As the lakhs give way to millions of years Renewed Humans are replace by Real Humans.

The Real Humans develop the technology to revive the frozen dead. They use it themselves as an ambulance to the future. They revive a small number of famous Renewed Humans who lived lives of special note.

When you are revived, you face three questions. Why have they revived you? Why do the doctors and nurses look like anthropomorphic cats and dogs? Are Real Humans furry fans?

The answer to the second question is that they look like cats and dogs because they are the descendants cats and dogs. The Real Humans still have domestic pets. They have uplifted them to the intellectual level of New Humans. Which raises an interesting puzzle. First time around the New Humans were Lords of galaxy for thousands of years. Second time around they are domestic pets. How does that work?

The dogs and cats are imbued with the spirit of mad science. It seems natural and proper to them that the Real Humans would create double super intelligent cats and dogs as animal companions and it seems natural to them to do something similar in their turn. Asking permission, they use their masters’ technology of resurrection to revive some some 21st century humans.

Imbued with the spirit of mad science, printing out ortho-human bodies is a little dull (as are 21st century humans). It is more fun to create novel bodies, centaurs, bird people who can fly (or at least glide) etc. The cats and dogs are not cruel. They don’t print people out in bodies they didn’t ask for. They do tend to revive furry fans, the con going, fursuit wearing, obsessive ones. When the cats and dogs emulate them, they ask to be printed out in anthropomorphic animal bodies and designing them is a fun challenge.

You ask if you can speak to a Real Human. Your request causes much merriment but it is not refused. It is awkward. The Post Humans did use 300 Hertz to 3kHz acoustic signals for interpersonal communication, but the New Humans used radio-telepathy amongst themselves. The dogs and cats are not to clear about what the Real Humans do, but the real cause of merriment is not the obsolesence of acoustic speech. It is not true to say that Real Humans are individuals. Nor is it true to say that they have formed a hive mind. It is hard to explain, but they don’t really go in for interpersonal communication. The fun lies in trying to explain the obsolescence of interpersonal communication to a creature so archaic that one has to resort to interpersonal communication to explain that no-one does that any more.

Oh well. You have been successfully revived but your social status as a domestic pet’s domestic pet is low, and the world, millions of years after your first death, is utterly incomprehensible. You try to settle into life with the other 21st century revivals. They are not really your kind of people. You make a few friends but they all have animal heads and fur covered bodies. Consumed with self-loathing due to being seduced into participating in their polymorphous and perverse orgies you kill yourself again and again and again … The dogs and cats are kind creatures by their own lights and feel obliged to reprint you if you have a bad spell mentally and kill yourself yet again.

AlanCrowe 5 Mar 2015 21:01 UTC
35 points
on: Rationality Quotes Thread March 2015

One problem is that most people think we are always in the short run. No matter how many times you teach students that tight money raises rates in the short run (liquidity effect) and lowers them in the long run (income and Fisher effects), when the long run actually comes around they will still see the fall in interest rates as ECB policy “easing”. And this is because most people think the term “short run” is roughly synonymous with “right now.” It’s not. Actually “right now” we see the long run effects of policies done much earlier. We are not in an eternal short run. That’s the real problem with Keynes’s famous “in the long run we are all dead.”

Scott Sumner

AlanCrowe 10 Feb 2015 20:27 UTC
3 points
in reply to: WalterL’s comment on: Quotes Repository
The quote is easier to understand if you are familiar with Bradshaw.

AlanCrowe 23 Nov 2014 20:31 UTC
2 points
in reply to: IlyaShpitser’s comment on: How can one change what they consider “fun”?

A computational process is indeed much like a sorcerer’s idea of a spirit. It cannot be seen or touched. It is not composed of matter at all. However, it is very real. It can perform intellectual work. It can answer questions. It can affect the world by disbursing money at a bank or by controlling a robot arm in a factory. The programs we use to conjure processes are like a sorcerer’s spells. They are carefully composed from symbolic expressions in arcane and esoteric programming languages that prescribe the tasks we want our processes to perform.

Frederick P. Brooks Jr. wrote something similar in The Mythical Man-month, 22 years earlier.

Finally, there is the delight of working in such a tractable medium. The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures. (As we shall see later, this very tractability has its own problems.)

Yet the program construct, unlike the poet’s words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself. It prints results, draws pictures, produces sounds, moves arms. The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be.

AlanCrowe 3 Nov 2014 18:49 UTC
3 points
in reply to: alex_zag_al’s comment on: Rationality Quotes November 2014

Stories always outlasted their usefulness.

That is an interesting thought. When I try to ground it in contemporary reality my thoughts turn to politics. Modern democratic politics is partly about telling stories to motivate voters, but which stories have outlasted their usefulness? Any answer is likely to be contentious.

Turning to the past, I wrote a little essay suggesting that stories of going back to nature to live in a recent golden age when life was simpler may serve as examples of stories that have outlasted their usefulness by a century.

AlanCrowe 24 Oct 2014 18:34 UTC
74 points
on: 2014 Less Wrong Census/Survey
I took the survey. Started on the BSRI but abandoned it because I found the process of giving vague answers to vague questions distressing.

AlanCrowe 5 Sep 2014 23:07 UTC
18 points
in reply to: Salemicus’s comment on: Rationality Quotes September 2014
I don’t see what to do about gaps in arguments. Gaps aren’t random. There are little gaps where the original authors have chosen to use their limited word count on other, more delicate, parts of their argument, confident that charitable readers will be happy to fill the small gaps themselves in the obvious ways. There are big gaps where the authors have gone the other way, tip toeing around the weakest points in their argument. Perhaps they hope no-one else will notice. Perhaps they are in denial. Perhaps there are issues with the clarity of the logical structure that make it easy to whiz by the gap without noticing it.

The third perhaps is especially tricky. If you “re-express your target’s position … clearly” you remove the obfuscation that concealed the gap. Now what? Leaving the gap in clear view creates a strawman. Attempting to fill it draws a certain amount of attention to it; you certainly fail the ideological Turing test because you are making arguments that you opponents don’t make. Worse, big gaps are seldom accidental. They are there because they are hard to fill. Indeed it might be the difficulty of filling the gap that made you join the other side of the debate in the first place. What if your best effort to fill the gap is thin and unconvincing?

Example: Some people oppose the repeal of the prohibition of cannabis because “consumption will increase”. When you try to make this argument clear you end up distinguishing between good-use and bad-use. There is the relax-on-a-Friday-night-after-work kind of use which is widely accepted in the case of alcohol and can be termed good-use. There is the behaviour that gets called “pissing your talent away” when it beer-based. That is bad-use.

When you try to bring clarity to the argument you have to replace “consumption will increase” by “bad-use will increase a lot and good-use will increase a little, leading to a net reduction in aggregate welfare.” But the original “consumption will increase” was obviously true, while the clearer “bad+++, good+, net—” is less compelling.

The original argument had a gap (just why is an increase in consumption bad?). Writing more clearly exposes the gap. Your target will not say “Thanks for exposing the gap, I wish I’d put it that way.”. But it is not an easy gap to fill convincingly. Your target is unlikely to appreciate your efforts on behalf of his case.

AlanCrowe 27 Aug 2014 17:17 UTC
2 points
in reply to: A1987dM’s comment on: “Follow your dreams” as a case study in incorrect thinking
Plus a social mechanism that turns follow-your-dreams versus be-sensible into a hard choice that doesn’t much matter.

Also, we can look at the mechanism and see that it affects some people more than others. If you have a common dream, such as being a poet or a novelist, the mechanism is hard at work, flattening the plateau. An example of an uncommon dream is harder to come by.

Once upon a time (1960?) the electric guitar was new. If you formed a band playing electric guitars you would encounter two kinds of opposition. One is “don’t be a musician, too many people want to be musicians.” The other is “learn violin or trumpet, not something faddy like electric guitar, electric guitar isn’t going to last.” But some players turned into rock stars and soon every-one wanted to play electric guitar, turning it into a common dream and spoiling it as an example of an uncommon dream.

I think there is a similar tale to tell about computer games. Once upon a time (1980?) computer games were new. If you wanted to be a computer game programmer, it was an uncommon dream and you could succeed. Now it is a common motivation for young people studying computer science and the job niche is over-subscribed.

AlanCrowe 22 Aug 2014 20:10 UTC
7 points
on: “Follow your dreams” as a case study in incorrect thinking
One interesting idea in this space is Compensating Differentials. There is a mismatch between the jobs that people want to do and the jobs that need doing. Wage differences help to reduce the mismatch.

When an ordinary persons tries to optimize their life they face a trade-off. Stick to the line of work they like, which too many other people also like, and be poorly paid, or try something worse for more money. Non-ordinary persons may strike it lucky, finding that they personally like a line of work which is necessary and unpopular and thus well paid. The compensating differential is free money, but only for an eccentric few.

Returning to the plight of the ordinary person, they face a puzzle. They would like to make the right compromise to maximize their happiness, but the labour market is continually offering them six of one and half a dozen of the other. If they stick to the work they love, but for less money, it is a lot less money and not clearly worth it. On the other hand, that sucky job that pays really well turns out to be really hard to put up with and not clearly worth the extra money. If you are a typical persons, with common preferences, then compensating differentials make the peak broad and flat.

That could be fairly upsetting. One might like to have a clearly defined optimum. Then one can say “I’ll change my life, do X, then I’ll be as happy as I can be.” But most changes have matching advantages and disadvantages. One can easily feel lost.

That could be fairly liberating. With a broad plateau, you don’t have to be too careful about avoiding sliding down the slopes at the sides. You are free to be yourself, without great consequences.

AlanCrowe 24 Feb 2014 18:00 UTC
0 points
in reply to: ryleah’s comment on: Rationalist Fiction
Discussed here

AlanCrowe 6 Feb 2014 20:47 UTC
64 points
on: True numbers and fake numbers
I think there is a tale to tell about the consumer surplus and it goes like this.

Alice loves widgets. She would pay $100 for a widget. She goes on line and finds Bob offering widgets for sale for $100. Err, that is not really what she had in mind. She imagined paying $30 for a widget, and feeling $70 better off as a consequence. She emails Bob: How about $90?

Bob feels like giving up altogether. It takes him ten hours to hand craft a widget and the minimum wage where he lives is $10 an hour. He was offering widgets for $150. $100 is the absolute minimum. Bob replies: No.

While Alice is deciding whether to pay $100 for a widget that is only worth $100 to her, Carol puts the finishing touches to her widget making machine. At the press of a button Carol can produce a widget for only $10. She activates her website, offering widgets for $40. Alice orders one at once.

How would Eve the economist like to analyse this? She would like to identify a consumer surplus of 100 − 40 = 60 dollars, and a producer surplus of 40 − 10 = 30 dollars, for a total gain from trade of 60 + 30 = 90 dollars. But before she can do this she has to telephone Alice and Carol and find out the secret numbers, $100 and $10. Only the market price of $40 is overt.

Alice thinks Eve is spying for Carol. If Carol learns that Alice is willing to pay $100, she will up the price to $80. So Alice bullshits Eve: Yeh, I’m regretting my purchase, I’ve rushed to buy a widget, but what’s it worth really? $35. I’ve over paid.

Carol thinks Eve is spying for Alice. If Alice learns that they only cost $10 to make, then she will bargain Carol down to $20. Carol bullshits Eve: Currently they cost me $45 to make, but if I can grow volumes I’ll get a bulk discount on raw materials and I hope to be making them for $35 and be in profit by 2016.

Eve realises that she isn’t going to be able to get the numbers she needs, so she values the trade at its market price and declares GDP to be $40. It is what economist do. It is the desperate expedient to which the opacity of business has reduced them.

Now for the twist in the tale. Carol presses the button on her widget making machine, which catches fire and is destroyed. Carol gives up widget making. Alice buys from Bob for $100. Neither is happy with the deal; the total of consumer surplus and producer surplus is zero. Alice is thinking that she would have been happier spending her $100 eating out. Bob is thinking that he would have had a nicer time earning his $100 waiting tables for 10 hours.

Eve revises her GDP estimate. She has committed herself to market prices, so it is up 150% at $100. Err, that is not what is supposed to happen. Vital machinery is lost in a fire, prices soar and goods are produced by tedious manual labour, the economy has gone to shit, producing no surplus instead of producing a $90 surplus. But Eve’s figures make this look good.

I agree that there is a problem with the consumer surplus. It is too hard to discover. But the market price is actually irrelevant. Going with the number you can get, even though it doesn’t relate to what you want to know is another kind of fake, in some ways worse.

Disclaimer: I’m not an economist. Corrections welcomed.

AlanCrowe

Hard surfaces

A soft materials approach to cushioning

A mechanical approach to cushioning

Conclusion