Costanza

Karma: 2,024

Costanza Mar 4, 2013, 5:35 PM
0 points
in reply to: Epiphany’s comment on: Open Thread, March 1-15, 2013
Personally, I’m desperately hoping for a near-term Gattaca solution, by which ordinary or defective parents can, by genetic engineering, cheaply optimize their children’s tendencies towards all good things, at least as determined by genotype, including ethical behavior and competence, in one generation. Screw this grossly inefficient and natural selection nonsense.

I know the movie presented this as a dystopia, in which the elite were apparently chosen mostly to be tall and good-looking. Ethan Hawke’s character, born naturally, was short and was supposedly ugly. Only in the movies, Ethan. But he had gumption and grit and character, which (in the movie) had no genetic component, enabling him to beat out all his supposed superiors. I call shenanigans on that philosophy. I suspect that gumption and grit and character do have a genetic component, which I would wish my own descendants to have.

Costanza Mar 4, 2013, 5:11 PM
0 points
in reply to: NancyLebovitz’s comment on: Open Thread, March 1-15, 2013
The infamous Steve Sailer has written a lot about cousin marriage , which, in practice, seems to be correlated with arranged marriage in many cultures (including the European royals in past centuries). Perhaps a lot of arranged marriages in practice may lead to inbreeding, with the genetic dangers that follow.

I’m also wondering about the effects of anonymous sperm banks, where relatively well-off women may pay to choose a biological father on the basis of—whatever available information they may choose to consider. What factors, in a man they will never meet, do they choose for their offspring?

Costanza Jan 3, 2013, 10:18 PM
4 points
in reply to: FiftyTwo’s comment on: New Year’s Prediction Thread (2012)
Very nearly right about me forgetting, but it’s a year to the day. Happy new year!

Costanza Dec 31, 2012, 7:25 PM
0 points
on: Should a judge do it’s job or maximize overall happiness
With regard to the general question described in the title, there’s actually a huge literature. Just for example, Richard Posner’s Economic Analysis of Law (and pretty much most of what he’s written), and Philip Hamburger’s *Law and Judicial Duty.”

For what it’s worth, in America at least, there is no “state without juries,” but there are bench trials, for example when a criminal defendant waives a jury. In that case one—and only one—judge acts as both the arbiter of law and the finder of fact.

You only get a panel of judges at the appellate level. This hypothetical suggests that the facts have been addressed by more than one “previous court.” But appellate courts essentially never review findings of fact, whether by juries or by judges of bench trials. Neither do they take new evidence.

Costanza Sep 1, 2012, 7:03 AM
3 points
in reply to: palladias’s comment on: Is felt preference a useful indicator? (A ramble)
Long-distance runners and hikers and soldiers on road marches are often told not to change their strides when they get blisters, because when you have 15 or 20 miles left to go, a lopsided hobble can seriously damage your knees and hip and back.

However, based on your comment, that advice is not meant for you. Since you were able to post this, I assume you’re not hopelessly lost in the woods. More importantly you’ve broken your toe. That is not a blister. For god’s sake, get off the damn thing, and get some damn crutches if you haven’t already done so and use them. If you’re not living on a fishing boat or something, you should be able to find some crutches somewhere. In the meantime, limp or hop or crawl to the bathroom or whatever when you need to, but take care of your foot.

Costanza Aug 28, 2012, 11:51 PM
7 points
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: The noncentral fallacy—the worst argument in the world?
I’d quibble about “clearly,” even in context. Wars are just too damn random.

Nothing against cost-benefit analysis in the abstract, but, in practice, invading a country seems like one of those very complicated choices that may inherently risk some major, major unintended consequences. I’m mostly thinking negative, but I suppose this would go both ways—unexpected ultimate positive consequences might be possible as well, but still hard to calculate at all.

Costanza Aug 27, 2012, 5:09 PM
6 points
on: Open Thread, August 16-31, 2012
X is in a category whose archetypal member has certain features.

I don’t always judge X. But when I do, I judge X as if it also had those features. Stay thirsty, my friends.

--The Worst Argument in the World

Costanza Aug 19, 2012, 10:09 PM
0 points
in reply to: chaosmosis’s comment on: Enjoy solving “impossible” problems? Group project!
I think you misunderstand me. Jared Diamond is a serious academic in good standing. I did not say he was an ideologue. Apparently, Professor Diamond has a doctorate in physiology, but is currently described as a professor of geography. He is not a professional historian. In any case, the discipline of History is noble, but it is not always described as a social science at all.

But both Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse are pop sci, not that there’s anything wrong with that. They were marketed to an audience of intelligent nonexperts. They were never intended to be serious peer-reviewed academic studies.

So that’s three strikes against these works as bringing rigor to social science.

Again, this is not an attack on Professor Diamond at all. Carl Sagan’s Cosmos was pop sci, and was wonderful. Richard Dawkins has written some great pop sci. So have E.O. Wilson, and Stephen Hawking etc. etc. But their serious academic work is much more dense and technical, and was addressed to a far more narrow and critical audience. Rigourous works never, ever make it to the top of the New York Times bestseller list.

Iif you want a criticism of pop sci in general, it is that it might be used as an end-run to avoid peer review. An unscrupulous academic might use his or her credentials to dazzle the public into metaphorically buying snake oil, maybe for the sake of celebrity and money. Beware of Stephen Jay Gould .

Costanza Aug 19, 2012, 12:53 AM
2 points
in reply to: NancyLebovitz’s comment on: Enjoy solving “impossible” problems? Group project!

language has very narrow bandwidth compared to the world, which means that laws can never cover all the situations that the laws are intended to cover.

This is the story of human law.

Costanza Aug 18, 2012, 10:32 PM
2 points
in reply to: chaosmosis’s comment on: Enjoy solving “impossible” problems? Group project!

The Social Sciences are often very unscientific. I want to do to economics and foreign policy analysis what Jared Diamond and other similar authors have done with history.

These two sentences may contradict each other. I’d suggest that Jared Diamond is famous as a multidisciplinarian pop-sci author. I don’t mean that as an insult to him at all. He has sold a lot of books, and has interested the public in ideas, which is great as far as it goes. But if you want to bring more rigor to social science, I don’t think Jared Diamond’s writings on history of all subjects should be your model.

Maybe you should redefine your goal to popularizing science. That wouldn’t be bad if you can do it well. Even so, if you want to popularize real science, you’ve got to get a taste for real rigor. One place to start would be diving deep into the mathematics of statistics.

Beyond that, when reading popular social science of any kind, especially any big theories which explain all of history, set your bullshit detector on high. Just assume that Adam Smith, Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes, Milton Friedman, and Paul Krugman are just wrong. A fortiori, Jared DIamond.

Costanza Aug 18, 2012, 7:18 PM
5 points
in reply to: Epiphany’s comment on: Enjoy solving “impossible” problems? Group project!
There’s probably a bit of money in distilling legalese into simpler language. Nolo Press, for instance, is in that field.

The real money in lawyering, however, is in applying the law to the available evidence in a very specific case. This is why some BigLaw firms charge hourly fees measured by the boatload. A brilliant entrepreneur able to develop an artificial intelligence application which could apply the facts to the law as effectively as a BigLaw firm should eventually be able to cut into some BigLaw action. That’s a lot of money.

This is a hard problem. My personal favorite Aesop’s fable about applying the facts to the law is Isaac Asimov’s short story Runaround . Worth reading all the way through, but for our purposes, the law is very clear and simple: the three laws of robotics. The fact situation is that the human master has casually and lightly ordered the robot to do something which was unexpectedly very dangerous to the robot. The robot then goes nuts, spinning around in a circle. Asimov says it better of course:

Powell’s radio voice was tense in Donovan’s car: “Now, look, let’s start with the three fundamental Rules of Robotics—the three rules that are built most deeply into a robot’s positronic brain.” In the darkness, his gloved fingers ticked off each point.

“We have: One, a robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.”

“Right!”

“Two,” continued Powell, “a robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.”

“Right!”

“And three, a robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does Dot conflict with the First or Second Laws.”

“Right! Now where are we?”

“Exactly at the explanation. The conflict between the various rules is ironed out by the different positronic potentials in the brain. We’ll say that a robot is walking into danger and knows it. The automatic potential that Rule 3 sets up turns him back. But suppose you order him to walk into that danger. In that case, Rule 2 sets up a counterpotential higher than the previous one and the robot follows orders at the risk of existence.”

“Well, I know that. What about it?”

“Let’s take Speedy’s case. Speedy is one of the latest models, extremely specialized, and as expensive as a battleship. It’s not a thing to be lightly destroyed.”

“So?”

“So Rule 3 has been strengthened-that was specifically mentioned, by the way, in the advance notices on the SPD models-so that his allergy to danger is unusually high. At the same time, when you sent him out after the selenium, you gave him his order casually and without special emphasis, so that the Rule 2 potential set-up was rather weak. Now, hold on; I’m just stating facts.”

“All right, go ahead. I think I get it.”

“You see how it works, don’t you? There’s some sort of danger centering at the selenium pool. It increases as he approaches, and at a certain distance from it the Rule 3 potential, unusually high to start with, exactly balances the Rule 2 potential, unusually low to start with.”

Donovan rose to his feet in excitement. “And it strikes an equilibrium. I see. Rule 3 drives him back and Rule 2 drives him forward - ”

“So he follows a circle around the selenium pool, staying on the locus of all points of potential equilibrium. And unless we do something about it, he’ll stay on that circle forever, giving us the good old runaround.”

In the real world, courts hardly ever decide that the law is indecipherable, and so the plaintiff should run around in a circle singing nonsense songs (but see, Ashford v Thornton [(1818) 106 ER 149].) The moral of the story, however, is that there is ambiguity in the application of the simplest and clearest of laws.

Costanza Aug 18, 2012, 6:03 PM
2 points
in reply to: NancyLebovitz’s comment on: Enjoy solving “impossible” problems? Group project!
I’d say that legal language, at least in America, is absolutely well within the bounds of natural language, with all the ambiguity that implies. Certainly lawyers have their own jargon and “terms of art” that sound unfamiliar to the uninitiated, but so do airplane pilots and sailors and auto mechanics. It’s still not mathematics.

There are a lot of legislators and judges, and they don’t all use words in exactly the same ways. Over time, the processes of binding precedent and legal authority are supposed to resolve the inconsistencies within the law, but the change is slow. In the meantime, statutes keep on changing, and human beings keep on presenting courts with new and unexpected problems. And judges and legislatures are only people within a society and culture which itself changes. Our ideas about “moral turpitude” and “public policy” and what a “reasonable man” (or person) would do are subject to change over time. In this way, the language of the law is like a leaky boat that is being bailed out by the crew. It’s not a closed system.

Costanza Aug 18, 2012, 12:43 PM
7 points
in reply to: Dentin’s comment on: Enjoy solving “impossible” problems? Group project!
I’m a lawyer. I’m also an enthusiast about applying computing technology to legal work generally, but not tech-savvy by the standards of LessWrong. But if I could help to define the problems a bit, I’d be happy to respond to PMs.

For example, the text of the U.S. Constitution is not long. Here’s just one part of it:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

As you know, this small bit of text has been the subject of a lot of debate over the years. But here’s another portion of the Constitution, not much shorter:

No soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.

There’s arguably a lot of room for debate over these words as well, but as a practical matter, the subject almost never comes up. I’d suggest that doesn’t mean that the ambiguity isn’t potentially present in the text, and could be revealed if for some reason the government had a strong urge to quarter troops in private homes.

I think the text of the Motor Vehicles Code of Wyoming is much longer than the whole U.S. Constitution with all its amendments, but since Wyoming is not a populous state, and the code mostly deals with relatively mundane matters, there hasn’t been a huge amount of published litigation over the precise meanings of the words and phrases in that text. It doesn’t mean that there isn’t just as much potential ambiguity within any given section of the Wyoming Motor Vehicles Code as there is in the First Amendment.

ETA: Law is made of words, and even at its best it is written in a language far, far less precise than the language of mathematics. Law is (among other things) a set of rules designed to govern the behavior of large numbers of people. But people are tricky, and keep on coming up with new and unexpected behaviors.

Also, it’s important to note that there are hierarchies of law in the U.S. I mentioned the U.S. Constitution to illustrate the potential complexity of law—libraries have been written on the Bill of Rights, and the Supreme Court hasn’t resolved every conflict just yet. If this seems daunting, it’s because it is. But in some ways, the U.S. Constitution is the simplest and easiest place to start syntactic analysis. The text is only a few thousand words long, and it is far less subject to change than almost all other laws. More importantly, it trumps all other law. All other U.S. laws are subject to the Constitution. By the same token, state laws are subject to federal law, and so on down to local regulations.

A county or municipality may enact a nice, well-drafted set of ordinances regulating billboards or street signs. These ordinances may be, in themselves, elegant and internally consistent and unambiguous. But all the other higher-level laws are still in place...if the local laws violate state or federal laws, or restrict free speech unconstitutionally, there is a problem. So, in a way, every local law implicitly incorporates a huge amount of jurisprudence simply from its context within the state and national governments.

Costanza Aug 16, 2012, 9:34 PM
10 points
on: Open Thread, August 16-31, 2012
Thinking about Eliezer’s post about Doublethink Speaking of deliberate, conscious self-deception he opines: “Leaving the morality aside, I doubt such a lunatic dislocation in the mind could really happen.”

This seems odd for a site devoted to the principle that most of the time, most human minds are very biased. Don’t we have the brains of one species of apes that has evolved to be particularly sensitive to politics? Why wouldn’t doublethink be the evolutionarily adaptive norm?

My intuition, based on my own private experience, is the opposite of Eliezer’s—I’d assume that most industrialized people practice some degree of doublethink routinely. I’d further suspect that this talent can be cultivated, and I’d think that (say) most North Koreans might be extremely skilled at deliberate self-deception, in a manner that would have been very familiar to George Orwell himself.

This seems like an empirical question. What’s the evidence out there?

Costanza Jul 25, 2012, 8:41 PM
2 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: A Marriage Ceremony for Aspiring Rationalists
Generally, he wouldn’t have the power to officiate a marriage in California. See California Family Code section 400 and so on. Basically, only religious clergy and state officials can do that. That’s the culture and law that applies in Berkeley, California.

There seems to be an exception under which someone can become a temporary “deputy commissioner of marriages” for the purpose of one ceremony. If you don’t believe in religion, and (like me) you fear that the government has its own PHYGish tendencies, this doesn’t seem like a bad alternative.

Costanza Jul 25, 2012, 8:30 PM
3 points
on: A Marriage Ceremony for Aspiring Rationalists
First, best wishes to the newly-married couple!

From a purely aesthetic point of view, I liked the relatively respectful and traditional mood effected by the Wagner wedding march, the adherence to the customs of bridesmaids and groomsmen and the giving away of the bride. I also liked the subtle subversive effect achieved by the bare feet. I read it as acknowledging established tradition, taking advantage of its strong momentum, while firmly taking charge of it and adapting it as required. Nicely done.

Costanza Jul 10, 2012, 3:27 PM
8 points
on: What Is Signaling, Really?

I would not dare to summarize Fussell’s guide here, but it shattered my illusion that I mostly avoid thinking about class signals, and instead convinced me that pretty much everything I do from waking up in the morning to going to bed at night is a class signal.

This is a very readable and interesting guide, and it may have been dead-on accurate in 1983 when it was written. But the kind of class system he describes, one defined by social signals and not by (say) brute force or even money, can only exist in a unified culture, in which everybody speaks the same “language” of signals. To use the example from the gude, Mr. Blue [collar] and Mr. White [collar], who make about the same income, both have to acknowledge on some level that Mr. White socially outranks Mr. Blue. Furthermore, Mr. Blue and Mr. White both would both have agreed that the Rockefellers, Pews, DuPonts, Mellons, Fords, and Vanderbilts constituted the top out-of-sight class.

I’d guess that America today has a much more fragmented class system now than it did when Fussel wrote, at least in some ways.

ETA:

it may have been dead-on accurate in 1983 when it was written...

On second thought, the 60′s counterculture had already undermined at a lot of the old WASP culture he describes, replacing it with—sure enough—a counterculture.

Costanza 2 Jul 2012 18:10 UTC
1 point
in reply to: sixes_and_sevens’s comment on: Less Wrong Product & Service Recommendations
I understand some enthusiasts get very emphatic about this issue, but I can only speak to my own very limited experience. The tool immediately to my hand now is a Leatherman PST, easily about ten years old or more and still not showing many signs of age. As I understand it, it’s the very basic original Leatherman model. It’s paid for itself many times over in simple ready convenience and utility. I see there are some very fancy and complicated multitools around. I have no comment about those, as I’ve never used them. I would say that my comment was based only on my experience of often needing quick access to a variety of screwdrivers, or pliers, or a bottlecap opener, or wire cutters, or the knife. (I personally haven’t used the file very much if at all.)

I don’t have any knowledge of UK knife laws, but the thought of them saddens me, because a knife as a basic tool is useful in so many, many ways. The number of times in which I’ve been imminently inclined to use my knife as a stabbing weapon in real life has been exactly nil (it wouldn’t have been practical in any case—the Leatherman is hardly a switchblade. For legal defensive purposes, you might be just as well off carrying a sharpened wooden pencil) but I’ve been happy to have the power to cut inanimate objects uncountable times.

Costanza 2 Jul 2012 16:22 UTC
16 points
on: Less Wrong Product & Service Recommendations
I suspect that this recommendation will be redundant for many or most of LessWrong, but let it be repeated: buy a good basic multitool and keep it where you can easily find it. Better, buy a couple of them and keep them (say) in your car, in your desk at work, and at home.

Sometimes you need exactly the right tool for the job. However, for many simple tasks, and for any emergency, the simple tool immediately at hand is much more useful than the ideal tool which would take time and effort to retrieve.

Costanza 2 Jul 2012 16:05 UTC
2 points
on: Less Wrong Product & Service Recommendations
My family and I recently moved homes. We used the Pods company service, and were satisfied. Basically, they deliver a shipping container to your driveway, you load it, they put it on one of their trucks and deliver it to your new place, whereupon you unload it. For us, it was just the right balance between doing-it-yourself (cheaply) and paying someone else with a competitive advantage to do a service. Anyway, they showed up on time and did what they said they would do.