I’m an aspiring EA / rationalist. My previous posts were intended in a slightly tongue-in-cheek way (but conveying ideas I take seriously) - future posts will endeavour to lay out my ideas more clearly/ in keeping with LW norms.
Dzoldzaya
Karma: 73
Well, you can stick your own numbers into the model and see what you get—a few tweaks in the estimates puts farmer ancestors higher, as would assuming more prehistoric lineage collapses.
For example, if you think that almost everyone who had offspring from 2000BC-1200AD was your ancestor, then you get more farmer ancestors. I initially put it closer to 40% (assuming little to no Sub-Saharan or Native American ancestry, and a more gradual spread throughout Eurasia), but the model is sensitive to these estimates.From a “Eurasia-centric” perspective, my sense is that personal ancestry doesn’t make a major difference except for pockets like Siberia and Iceland, perhaps. It’s noticeably different for people with some New World or Sub-Saharan ancestry, and wildly different if you’re pure-blooded Aboriginal Australian.
Sorry, just read this response.
On the intuition question, my intuition was probably the other way because most of human history was non-farming, and because the vast majority of farmers (those born in the last millennium) weren’t my ancestors.
I updated my model to account for an error—it’s now a bit closer. 7.8 billion non-farmers to 6.4 billion farmers, and 4.9 billion exclusive farmers, but I still basically stand by the logic.To respond to your question, why I didn’t pick a fixed number of personal ancestors:
We have fewer recent ancestors, assuming 16 generations, we’d have around 20k to 50k ancestors at 1600. (2^16 - inbreeding). If we want to count these ancestors carefully, we should count back with an algorithm accounting for population size and exponentially increasing inbreeding.
We could also plausibly try to use this strategy to draw a more accurate number of ancestors from 1200-1600--- this might be a period where individual/geographical differences, or population constraints, play a significant role. If you’re Icelandic, most of your ancestors in this period will still be from Iceland, but if you are Turkish, your ancestors from this period are more likely to extend from Britain to Japan. My model doesn’t do this, because it sounds difficult, and because the numbers are negligible anyway- I just estimate that 0.1% to 1% of total humans born from 1200- today were my ancestors.
By around 1200 AD, it surely becomes impractical to rely on a personal family tree to track ancestry, because of the exponential growth in the number of ancestors. Beyond that point, your total potential ancestors (in the billions, without factoring in inbreeding) massively exceed the global population (in the 100s of millions). The limited population size becomes the constraint.
So an Italian might assume that they are descended from a significant portion (40%?) of Europe’s population in 1200 AD. By 800 AD, this would extend to a majority (60%?) of people living across Eurasia and Northern Africa. By the time we reach 500 BC to 1000 AD, it’s likely that most people from the major Old World civilizations and peripheries (where the bulk of the global population lived) were direct ancestors of people alive today. My numbers could be way off, but I think this is a better way of getting in the right ballpark than trying to trace back individual ancestry. I used these figures as a baseline. https://www.prb.org/articles/how-many-people-have-ever-lived-on-earth/
You’re right that I don’t account for major bottlenecks—my assumption is that they basically even out over time, and there’s a constant 20-60% chance of humans born in each period not passing down ancestors to the modern day. If you wanted to refine this model you’d take into account more recent (e.g. Black Death) and less recent (Neolithic Y-chromosome bottleneck) bottlenecks.
Ah, interesting. His Guerre des intelligences does seem more obviously accelerationist, but his latest book gives slightly different vibes, so perhaps his views are changing.
But my sense is that he actually seems kind of typical of the polémiste tradition in French intellectual culture, where it’s more about arguing with flair and elegance than developing consistent arguments. So it might be difficult to find a consistent ideology behind his combination of accelerationism, a somewhat pessimistic transhumanism, and moderate AI fear.
Thanks for this post, great to have this overview!
I can’t put my finger on whether Laurent Alexandre is an accelerationist—I don’t know his work too well, but he seems to acknowledge at least some AI-risk arguments.
This is a quote (auto-translated) from his new book:
“The political dystopia described by Harari, predicting that the world of tomorrow would be divided into “gods and useless people,” could unfortunately become a social reality.Regulating a force as monumental as ChatGPT and its successors would require international cooperation. However, the world is at war. Each geopolitical bloc will use the new AIs to manipulate the adversary and develop destructive or manipulative cyber weapons.”
My initial intuition was “surely there were more non-farmers”, but I did some calculations and it looks closer than I thought.
I had a go at a guesstimate model, where I estimate the number of humans who lived in each period, the % of them having offspring, the chance that I descend from them, and an estimate % who are farmers in each period.
I get 11 billion non-farming ancestors, and 4.6 billion farming ancestors (around 3.6 billion exclusively/mainly farmers).
What I see as the “crux period” is 0 BC − 1200 AD; I can’t find any data how many of the humans in that period are likely to have been my/your ancestors. I’ve put 15-40%, but if it’s closer to 60%, farmers might edge it. Also, I haven’t accounted for lineages ending—aside from individuals not having offspring (which I take as a constant in the model), there may have been some huge lineage collapses, presumably more before farming than after.
Of course, but there reaches a level of sun exposure at which the marginal increased harm becomes negligible compared to other things that damage your skin (see this meta-analysis—photo-aging is just one component among many), and below that level you’re probably actually getting suboptimal levels of UV exposure for skin health (see this article for benefits of UV—from Norway, aptly).
I’d love to see someone try to measure and compare the specific trade-offs, but I strongly suspect that people at northern latitudes should just trust common sense—only wear sunscreen in summer months, and when you’re actually exposed to the sun for extended periods.
I know LW is US/ California heavy, but just as a counter to all the sunscreen advocates here, daily sunscreen use is probably unnecessary, and possibly actively harmful, in winter and/or at northern latitudes.
There doesn’t seem to be much data on using sunscreen when there’s no real risk to skin, but you can find a modelling study here:
”There is little biological justification in terms of skin health for applying sunscreen over the 4–6 winter months at latitudes of 45° N and higher (most of Europe, Canada, Hokkaido, Inner Mongolia etc.) whereas year-round sunscreen is advised at latitudes of 30° N (e.g. Southern U.S., Shanghai, North Africa) and lower … Using products containing UV filters over the winter months at more northerly latitudes could lead to a higher number of people with vitamin D deficiency.”
Although most approved sunscreens are generally seen as safe, there are potential systemic health risks from a few products, some proven environmental harms, a potentially increased risk of vit-D deficiency, and some time/financial costs.
There should be a question at the end: “After seeing your results, how many of the previous responses did you feel a strong desire to write a comment analyzing/refuting?” And that’s the actual rationalist score...
But I’m interested that there might be a phenomenon here where the median LWer is more likely to score highly on this test, despite being less representative of LW culture, but core, more representative LWers are unlikely to score highly.
Presumably there’s some kind of power law with LW use (10000s of users who use LW for <1 hour a month, only 100s of users who use LW for 100+ hours a month).
I predict that the 10000s of less active community members are probably more likely to give “typical” rationalist answers to these questions: “Yeah, (religious) people stupid, ghosts not real, technology good”. The 100s of power users, who are actually more representative of a distinctly LW culture, are less likely to give these answers.
I got 9⁄24, by the way.
I think your intuitions are generally correct, and as I say, it’s usually a good heuristic to avoid overly processed food. In the absence of other evidence, if you’re in a food market where everything is edible, you should probably opt for the less processed option. I also don’t disagree with it playing a role in national health guidelines.
But it’s a very imprecise heuristic, and I think LessWrong-ers with aspirations to understand the world more accurately should feel a bit uncomfortable with it, especially when benign and beneficial processes are lumped together with those with much clearer mechanisms for harm.
Thanks for this piece. I admit I have always had a bit of residual aversion to seed oils that I’ve struggled to shake.
Having said that, as you’re pushing so strongly against seed oils in favour of “processing” as a mechanism for poor health, I think I need to push back a bit.If you want to be healthier, we know ways you can change your diet that will help: Increase your overall diet “quality”. Eat lots of fruits and vegetables. Avoid processed food. Especially avoid processed meats.
“Avoid processed food” works very well as a heuristic—far better than anything like the “nutrition pyramid”, avoiding saturated fats/sugars or calorie counting etc. But it also seems like something that should annoy people who like clear thinking and taxonomies.
As you note, “processing” includes hundreds of processes, most of which have no plausible mechanism by which they might harm human health. Articles describing the ultra-processed taxonomy often just list a litany of bad-sounding things without an explanation why they’re bad e.g. “mechanically separated meat”, “chemical modifications” and “industrial techniques”. Most of these are either benign when you think about it (we’d all prefer a strong man wearing a vest separating our meat with his bare hands, but come now...), or so vague as to be uninformative.
If ultra-processed foods are bad because they contain “hydrogenated oil, modified starch, protein isolate, and high-fructose corn syrup” or “various cosmetic additives for flavour enhancement and colour”, then it’s these products that are bad, not some mysterious processing!
If it is some technical part of the processing, like “hydrolysis, hydrogenation, extrusion, moulding, or pre-frying” that’s bad, surely we should just identify that rather than lumping everything together?
If it’s some emergent outcome of all these processes, like “hyper-palatability” or “energy density”, then that’s the problem, not the fact of being “processed”. If so we should all stop eating strawberries after they hit a certain deliciousness threshold, and avoid literally any edible oil (because all oil is identically energy-dense).
But, having said that, I still use this heuristic, and I’m pretty glad I trained myself out of preferring highly-processed food when I was less analytical.
Ah, thanks, okay, I get it now. That’s a very different proposition! Updated my post.
MoviePass users are selected for seeing a lot of movies. If MoviePass makes a business plan that models users as average people, it will lose a lot of money. Conditional on someone wanting to buy MoviePass, MoviePass probably should not want them as a customer.
I’m going to nitpick here and note that the marginal cost to the cinema of allowing in an extra customer is often close to zero, seeing as most films don’t sell out. It may even be positive, if they spend money on popcorn and drinks, and invite their friends who don’t have a pass.It seems from that article that the failure in the business model was partly that MoviePass was just badly managed, partly that people were abusing the system in various ways by scalping/ selling tickets/ getting hundreds of people using the same service.I checked my local cinema chain and they started running an ‘Unlimited’ service over a decade ago, and it’s still in use, so I think it remains a valid model.
Correction: I understand the MoviePass model now and the adverse selection argument makes more sense. Cinemas with a subscription model can work even with a high proportion of power users, but that’s because the externalities (popcorn, drinks, inviting friends) accrue to the cinema.
I presume the stated goal of schooling your child in this way is to set the grown-up’s mind at ease, rather than ensuring the child is left alone (which is probably the default outcome), and I expect both responses would suffice for this instrumental purpose.
I expect the grown-up would probably look confused, then question the child further. The well-rehearsed child would then explain the negative externalities that society has imposed upon itself by reducing these risks to near-zero, and how it is optimal for society to only reduce these risks until the marginal benefit of further risk reduction is equal to the marginal cost.
At this point, if your child has managed to make the case effectively, the grown-up would realise that the child is probably mature enough to make their own decisions whether to stay outside alone or not.
Technically true, but it’s a very unagentic way for a five-year old to respond to something they should have the capability to justify through argument.
I think we should be discouraging unjustified appeals to authority in our children, so...
”Rehearsing with my kids what they’d say if a grownup asks why they’re alone: “My parents said it’s ok for me to be hereThe socially optimal level of abduction/traffic accident risk is not zero”
Some good thoughts here.
My thinking is that participation in online communities is mostly incentivised through status and inclusion. Upvotes or informal status mechanisms enable someone to be perceived as a valued member of an online community that they identify with. But power and status are subtly different—moderators have the power to ban, admonish, censor, and sometimes signal-boost, but they don’t necessarily gain respect or status based on this—in fact, it’s often the opposite.
Creators acquire status based on the quality of their output (through formal (Karma) and informal (general reputation) mechanisms), but the power that this affords is usually quite indirect (extra upvoting power on LW and EA forums). This can potentially transform into real-world power over the moderators in the case of a coup or a protest, but I’d say that this attracts a different kind of person to moderation.
I’m not sure how useful the “duty vs. privilege” framing is, but the idea that some of these activities may be over- or under-incentivised is an important question. I’d have thought that moderation would be under-incentivised, which is why I’ve always been a bit fascinated by voluntary moderation. 4chan-type forums are the most bizarre example; it has always perplexed me that someone is taking this “responsible” social role to make sure that /pol stays “on-topic” despite the sub-forum being an anarchic cesspit, and probably getting influxes of hate from censored/ banned participants while doing so. But the existence of moderation suggests that there must be a type of person who genuinely enjoys the power that it affords.
Writing high-quality original posts is probably appropriately incentivized—there are enough people who like writing and it provides internal and external validation. Like with meta-analysis and replicating in academia, there are probably some curation tasks that are under-incentivized in most online spaces, but LW/ EA seem pretty good at that.
Forgive the unverified sources here, but total potato consumption seems to correlate quite strongly with obesity across Europe, so if there’s any causal effect behind the potato, it would have to explain why countries that eat potatoes as staples seem to have slightly higher obesity rates than other countries.
This response is incorrect. Firstly, Google Consumer Surveys is very different from MTurk. MTurk users are paid to pay attention to the task for a given amount of time, and they are not ‘paid ads’.
“People are incentivized to complete these as soon as possible and there is little penalty for inaccuracy.”
This is generally untrue for MTurk—when you run online surveys with MTurk:
1) You set exclusion criteria for people finishing too quickly
2) You set attention check questions that, when you fail, exclude a respondent
3) A respondent is also excluded for certain patterns of answers e.g. answering the same for all questions or sometimes for giving contradictory answers
4) The respondent is rated on their response quality, and they will lose reputation points (and potentially future employment opportunities) for giving an inaccurate response
You can apply these criteria more or less rigorously, but I’d assume that the study designers followed standard practice (see this doc), at least.
I’m not claiming that MTurk is a very good way of getting humans to respond attentively, of course. There are lots of studies looking at error rates: https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2101/2101.04459.pdf and there are obvious issues with exclusively looking at a population of ‘professional survey respondents’ for any given question.
So I’m not exactly sure how this survey causes me to update. Perhaps especially because they’re slightly rushing the answers, it’s genuinely interesting that so many people choose to respond to the (perceived) moderate complexity task (which they assume is: “calculate 110 − 100″), rather than either the simple task: “write out the number 5”.
I explained why I think tracing back personal history is impractical.
Your separate method to spot check my model is just a simplified version of the same model.