avancil

Karma: 173

avancil Mar 20, 2025, 10:21 PM
1 point
0
on: Algebraic Linguistics
There are conventions pertaining to the style a letter is written in. You might have a as an arbitrary element in set A, while a<sub>1</sub>, a<sub>2</sub>, etc., are a sequence of elements in A, while fancy-boldface A or fancy-script A (I don’t know how to render those here) could represent the class of A-like sets. Also, a′ would be another case of a, or maybe the derivative of a, while a″ would be a third case, or maybe the second derivative. Sometimes superscripts or backscripts are used, when subscripts are not enough. Sometimes the Greek equivalent of a Latin letter denotes some relationship between them, e.g. ⍺ is some special version of a.

If the math goes way off into the weeds, the author might even whip out a Hebrew letter or two.

avancil Jan 5, 2025, 7:05 PM
26 points
15
on: Maximizing Communication, not Traffic
There is a related problem where many browser-based productivity tools follow design principles from websites that are trying to get clicks. For example, I commonly run into DB interfaces at work that will return, say, 10 (or 25, or other small number) results per page. Now, it’s good design to not let a query that returns, say, a million results, crash the browser. But, if a few hundred, or even a few thousand, results will display within milliseconds, why make me page dozens (or hundreds) of times? (I’m looking at you, GitHub commit history!)

Another example would be Microsoft Office’s long history of making design choices that optimize increasing “engagement with the tool” rather than making the tool unobtrusively facilitate the task. They got rid of Clippy, but now they’re into obnoxious pop-ups that are designed to call attention to some new gadget or feature.

The “click” economy has had pervasive effects on the software industry.

avancil Dec 18, 2024, 12:00 AM
2 points
−3
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Trying to translate when people talk past each other
It seems to me this is an example of you and Kaj talking past each other. To you, B’s perspective is “eminently reasonable” and needs no further explanation. To Kaj, B’s perspective was a bit unusual, and to fully inhabit that perspective, Kaj wanted a bit more context to understand why B was holding that principle higher than other things (enjoying the social collaboration, the satisfaction of optimally solving a problem, etc.).

avancil Nov 8, 2024, 3:15 AM
13 points
3
in reply to: Ninety-Three’s comment on: Should CA, TX, OK, and LA merge into a giant swing state, just for elections?
Except there’s more at play than just winning the election. If you’re a voter in a swing state, the candidates are paying more attention to you, and making more promises catering to you. The parties are picking candidates they think will appeal to you. Even if your odds of winning stay the same, the prize for winning gets bigger.

It was exiting a few elections ago when Colorado was in play by both parties. We even got to host the Democratic convention in Denver. Now, they just ignore us.

avancil Jul 17, 2024, 9:41 PM
5 points
1
on: What are you getting paid in?
One thing you touched on, but didn’t delve into, is that the various “pay” components will having varying marginal utility at different levels.

For example, if you’re literally starving, “coolness” won’t matter much, you need enough money to buy food! But if you have enough money, you start caring about other things.

Perhaps having some social interaction is important, and you would sacrifice other things to have at least some of that in your job. But, beyond a certain point, the value diminishes, and would likely go negative, as the constant socializing gets tiring, and distracts from work you actually would like to do.

I think a good manager would be good at optimizing against those utility curves. They would pay people enough, but not more, than they need to not be upset about low pay. They would recognize that one team party per quarter might be valuable to the team, but parties every week would not be appreciated. They would give people opportunities to socialize, but also, to avoid getting dragged into socializing when they would really rather be focused on the job. And so on.

avancil Jul 12, 2024, 9:28 PM
1 point
0
on: Whiteboard Pen Magazines are Useful
The OCD in me objects to the colors not being in chromatic order. On the other hand, if you wanted to maximize visual contrast between adjacent colors, then a sensible order would be black, red, green, purple, orange, blue.

avancil May 7, 2024, 2:14 AM
16 points
9
on: Observations on Teaching for Four Weeks
As a former teacher, I firmly believe that if we want to reform schools, we must reform the teaching profession and school management structures. At least, we should address the things that are most insane:
- A school district is a big operation, with many having thousands of employees, and budgets running into the hundreds of millions of dollars. And it is usually run by literal amateurs. As in, the school board is a group of unpaid volunteers.
- As tough as it is to be a teacher, consider what it’s like to be a principal: You get the most odious parts of being a teacher (dealing with discipline, contentious meetings with parents), with a longer workday, shorter (if any) summer vacation, much greater responsibility, much greater public exposure (and corresponding chance of getting fired for some perceived failure), but not really that much more pay. It’s hardly surprising that it’s hard to find good people to take that job. So, as a teacher, you can’t count on competent support from management. But, you really need it.
- The teaching profession takes a lot of skills. Yet, the job description for a first year teacher, and the job description for a 30th year teacher are identical. Imagine hiring an engineer fresh out of college and asking them to do what a senior architect does.
- But, from a practical standpoint, the job of the inexperienced teacher is often much more challenging. The experienced teacher gets to pick the honors classes, the electives, etc., to teach. The inexperienced teacher gets stuck with the remedial classes. It’s not uncommon for a new teacher to get hired to teach class sections that were added at the last minute—and those sections will be full of students who got put into those sections at the last minute, because they didn’t have their act together, didn’t pass, didn’t register, etc.
- As you discovered, an inexperienced teacher will find it a lot of work to deal with even one or two classes. Where I work now, if someone was asked to conduct a training session, they might spend a couple days prepping. We ask teachers to do 5, 6 even 7 of those per day, only not with well-mannered professional adults, but kids whose brains are not fully developed. And then grade homework, call parents, be hall monitors, function as social workers, etc.
I could go on.

There are many problems one could bring with various approaches to teaching. There are many challenges that teachers would face even in the best of systems. But fundamentally, there are some serious structural issues with the design of the system.

avancil Mar 23, 2024, 12:10 AM
0 points
−1
on: [Linkpost] Vague Verbiage in Forecasting
Ironic that “Maybe” seems to have one of the narrower ranges of probabilities...

avancil Mar 7, 2024, 9:53 PM
36 points
31
in reply to: Ben Pace’s comment on: Using axis lines for good or evil
The cell borders example is misleading. The readability issue is not the cell borders themselves, the issue is that the borders are heavier weight than the text, and there’s no difference between the borders separating the row and column headers, and the borders separating the data rows and columns.

If your only choices for gridlines are “off” and “obnoxious”, “off” seems like a good choice. And for small tables, no borders works well. But for larger tables, finer lines (maybe in a lighter color or shade) can really improve the readability.

avancil Feb 25, 2024, 7:53 AM
5 points
0
on: Balancing Games
In multiplayer games, one balancing factor is that other players can gang up on the person who is ahead. Depending on the game dynamic, this can even things out a lot. In some games, this even creates the dynamic where you don’t want to look too strong, so that others don’t focus their attention on you.

Playing games against my kids when they were young, rather than just slack off and let them win, it was more fun for me to figure out the best way to handicap myself: What algorithm for sub-optimal play would keep the game close? Solving that puzzle effectively became my victory condition, rather than the game’s victory condition, and I was effectively competing against myself, a more balanced opponent.

avancil Feb 24, 2024, 8:40 PM
7 points
2
in reply to: jasoncrawford’s comment on: Why you, personally, should want a larger human population
The question of what IS happening versus what SHOULD happen with population growth are certainly two different things. My point is that arguments for growth ultimately need to address the questions of how big should we grow, and what happens when we reach that point. If our economy depends on continued growth, that’s going to stop working at some point.

While the physical limits of the universe are a long ways off, there are other limits that we could hit much sooner. Underlying your pro-growth arguments, there is an assumption that collective intelligence can continue to grow without limits, leading to technology that can grow without limits. I would question those assumptions.

And of course, your post is ignoring the costs of growth. Ideas are non-rival goods, but space on this planet, and physical resources, are rival goods. If intelligence (and the resulting technology) reaches a point of diminishing returns, but the costs of growth hit an upward inflection, you quickly hit a limit. For example, larger, more complex systems risk becoming less stable, while coordination problems can grow factorially.

Reasonable people can disagree on whether the current population is too big, too small, or about right, but “ever larger” is not going to work as an answer. At some point, we need to either figure out how to have a stable population, or deal with the less pleasant alternatives.

avancil Feb 23, 2024, 10:56 PM
15 points
17
on: Why you, personally, should want a larger human population
The fundamental problem with these anti-Malthusian arguments is they ignore the fundamental reality that exponential growth is unsustainable. There are physical limits to the universe, whether you believe the earth can support 10 billion or 100 trillion, or if we can expand through the universe and achieve a billion billion times more than that, it won’t take that long, with exponential growth, to get there. At a certain point, the entire mass of the universe has been converted to human flesh. Some point before that, we either stabilize, or collapse.

Maybe we get past the obvious physical limits by ditching human bodies and uploading to the matrix. But, that only gives us a few more orders of magnitude.

And note that sub-exponential growth is mathematically equivalent to saying that the growth rate approaches zero.

So, it becomes a question of what the ideal max population level should be. The answer will clearly change based on available technology, but is not unlimited.

avancil Jan 12, 2024, 5:49 AM
1 point
−2
on: Introduce a Speed Maximum
Where I live, I don’t see many people going 15 over. I see most people going within −3 to +9 of the speed limit. They’re following the law—maybe not strictly as written, but as socially understood. There are a few people breaking the law—and they get ticketed, etc. There are places where the speed limit is unreasonably low, and gets ignored (e.g. speed limit drops from 75 to 55 for construction zone, but no construction activity is visible), but in general, people around here follow the speed limit—as socially understood.

The social definition is that +9 is OK, and it is logically based. Speed limits are only given to the nearest 5 MPH, so arguably (not legally arguably, but in people’s heads) going 4 MPH over is not really speeding. Then, you need some kind of reasonable cushion. It defies common sense (but not the law) that a certain speed is perfectly legal in a variety of reasonable conditions, but 1 MPH faster than that is a crime. So, you have to have reasonable padding, say one 5 MPH increment. Thus, if you’re going within 9 MPH of the speed limit, you’re not speeding, just bending the speed limit, pushing into that safety margin.

Bumping a speed limit from the current value of 55 (+ social tolerance) to 65 (no tolerance) would not work. It would quickly become 65 (+ social tolerance), because you have not addressed the arbitrary nature of the speed limit. With strict enforcement, you could reduce the social tolerance value (I believe it was smaller before the 1970s national speed limit of 55 fostered widespread disrespect for speed limits), but it would difficult to eliminate it.

avancil Dec 12, 2023, 5:56 AM
3 points
2
in reply to: faul_sname’s comment on: Deeply Cover Car Crashes?
Yes, when it comes to ordinary driving situations, there’s only so good you can get, if you can get from A to B without trouble, without annoying and/or scaring your passengers or other people on the road, it’s hard to do noticeably better. It’s hard to get too much above the median; the 80th percentile driver won’t seem that different from the 50th percentile driver. But, you can be really bad and drag the average down. Thus, the average is below the median, ergo most people (most drivers, anyway) are above average drivers. (Even assuming we are using some identical, objective scale, which, as jefftk points out, is not going to be the case.)

avancil Nov 24, 2023, 7:18 PM
2 points
−1
on: What did you change your mind about in the last year?
At the beginning of the year, I had never heard of ChatGPT, and thought AI would continue to progress slowly, in a non-disruptive fashion. At this point, I believe 2023 will be at least as significant as 2007 (iPhone) in terms of marking the beginning of a technological transformation.

avancil Jul 25, 2023, 5:44 AM
3 points
0
on: Secure Hand Holding
Just be careful your secure grip doesn’t inadvertently cause the child an arm injury. “Nursemaid’s elbow” and certain types of radial fractures can result from a hard yank on a child’s arm.

avancil Jun 26, 2023, 4:58 PM
7 points
0
on: Model, Care, Execution
Unendorsed while acting/Endorsed reflectively: This is not so strange a failure mode as you are indicating. You take some action, which at the time you know isn’t right (execution failure). Later, you come up with some post-hoc justification for your actions. This is another failure mode to be aware of, affecting the postmortem.

Postmortems can have their own failure modes. We might disagree about the facts of what happened. We might have different perspectives on the context in which things happened. We might struggle to be honest with ourselves about our motivations at the time, or our analysis of past events is colored differently by information gained after the events—maybe giving us better insight, or maybe clouding over the original failure.

avancil May 26, 2023, 4:51 AM
1 point
2
on: Mob and Bailey
Internally, though, people are not monolithic. In some ways, they are more like a mob. Even debating with one person, you can run into the same type of difficulty.

avancil May 2, 2023, 3:46 AM
1 point
1
in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: What Boston Can Teach Us About What a Woman Is
Upvoted. While I would hate to see this forum become another battleground for culture wars, I also don’t want to see people avoiding topics because they touch on culture war stuff. Using Rationalist tools to deconstruct the dynamics of these battles (without fighting the battle) seems like a useful thing.

While I don’t necessarily agree with the post, and I can see where it might, unfortunately, trigger some negative responses from some, I found parts illuminating, and it got me thinking about some useful reframing tools. All too often, people in the culture wars talk past each other because they are using the same words to point to different things.

avancil Mar 30, 2023, 11:53 PM
1 point
0
in reply to: dr_s’s comment on: The salt in pasta water fallacy
It’s hard to get good data, yes, particularly in a politically charged environment. But, I would have liked to have seen some evidence that for a given mitigation, our leaders tried to get a best estimate (even if it is not a great estimate) that it will prevent X COVID deaths, at a cost of Y (dollars, QALYs, whatever), and had done some reasoning why utility(X) > cost(Y). We might disagree on the values of X and Y, and how to compare them, but at least we would have a starting point for discussion. Instead, we got either “Don’t take away muh freedom!” or “We must stop anyone from dying of COVID at all costs!”. And a lot of people died, and we inflicted tremendous damage on ourselves, while doing some things that were maybe beneficial, and a lot of things that were clearly stupid, and we’re not in a position to do better next time.