emr

• emrJan 19, 2015, 6:09 PM

  0 points

  in reply to: sixes_and_sevens’s comment on: Open thread, Jan. 19 - Jan. 25, 2015

  I use Firefox’s built-in “live bookmarks”.

• emrJan 19, 2015, 6:06 PM

  10 points

  in reply to: Plasmon’s comment on: Open thread, Jan. 19 - Jan. 25, 2015

  Frame attempts to limit the use of encryption as unilateral disarmament, and name specific threats.

  As in, if the government “has your password”, how sure are you that your password isn’t eventually going to be stolen by Chinese government hackers? Putin? Estonian scammers? Terrorists? Your ex-partner? And you know that your allies over in (Germany, United States, Israel, France) are going to get their hands on it too, right? And have you thought about when (hated political party) gets voted into power 5 years from now?

  A second good framing is used by the ACLU representative in the Guardian article: You won’t be able to use technologies X Y and Z, and you’ll fall behind other countries technologically and economically.

• emrJan 19, 2015, 4:37 AM

  7 points

  in reply to: gjm’s comment on: Open thread, Jan. 19 - Jan. 25, 2015

  I’ve noticed a pattern: Someone implies that some (critical or controversial) position X isn’t represented here, even though X is obviously represented, often by prominent posters in highly up-voted comments.

  I think what happens is that some advocates of X literally cannot recognize their own position when it’s presented in a non-tribal manner.

• emrJan 18, 2015, 5:03 AM

  5 points

  in reply to: gwern’s comment on: LINK: Diseases not suffi­ciently researched

  The causes of injury are quite skewed. From the CDC, here is chart showing leading causes of “fatal unintentional injury”: http://​​www.cdc.gov/​​injury/​​wisqars/​​pdf/​​leading_causes_of_injury_deaths_highlighting_unintentional_injury_2012-a.pdf. Note that this isn’t DALY-lost.

  As expected, car accidents and falls in the elderly account for a largest chunk of deaths. Next you have a cluster of poisoning and suicide (which I guess is classified as unintentional?). Some quick googling suggests that traffic accidents and falls are both roughly top 20 in leading causes of (global) DALY lost, although I’m out of time to check for better sources. I’d bet that poisoning is a bigger problem than currently measured in poorer countries.

  Can these causes be targeted? An interaction of public policy and technology has reduced (and continues to reduce) deaths per million vehicle miles traveled. On the latter, I’ve noticed that “risk of falling” is often tracked in studies of the elderly, although I don’t know anything more about this.

• emrJan 17, 2015, 8:58 PM

  20 points

  in reply to: Daniel_Burfoot’s comment on: … And Every­one Loses Their Minds

  During the initial coverage of the ebola outbreak, there were several comparisons to the malaria death toll, with the conclusion that paying so much attention to the (much, much smaller) death toll from ebola was irrational. This was wrong, because the ebola outbreak was undergoing exponential growth, and so the early death toll had huge importance as evidence about the long-term growth rate, and because arresting the exponential process in the early stages might be very cost effective. At the time, there were credible predictions that we might see 1.5 million cases in a relatively small region (with perhaps .75 million deaths), compared to a rate of 0.5 million global deaths from malaria. Thankfully, these predictions now look unlikely, but it is very much rational to care about possible early evidence for something that might be on track for substantial growth.

• emrJan 16, 2015, 6:47 PM

  4 points

  in reply to: devas’s comment on: An ex­am­ple and dis­cus­sion of ex­ten­sion neglect

  I use arbtt, in combination with arbtt-graph to visualize data. (You don’t need arbtt-graph to get statistics, it just makes them look pretty). arbtt might require some technical skills, like using a command line interface instead of a “point and click” interface.

  I haven’t used any, but if you’re just interested in tracking Internet use, there are several browser plug-ins. These are probably the quickest and easiest to use. You almost certainly want something that runs entirely in the background (so avoid software that asks you to manually clock in and out; this is aimed at people who are tracking billable hours), and something that detects inactivity.

  Btw, manual data collection is always worth considering. In this case, you wouldn’t want to do it long term, and it might change your behavior, but it could still be valuable. In fact, manually tracking can provide a quicker feedback loop to learn things like “so that’s what XXX minutes doing YYY actually feels like”. And you don’t get stuck fighting to install software or wondering if it’s really working correctly.

• emrJan 16, 2015, 6:26 PM

  10 points

  in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: Je suis Charlie

  I can’t add much to the other comments.

  In this case, I actually hadn’t heard about the false flag conspiracy theories. I was thinking about the less extreme tendency of the foreign press to see the occurrence of blasphemy as being secretly orchestrated by Western governments, who them deny involvement and claim that they are just supporting the spontaneous actions of their citizens. My theory is that this will seem more plausible to people living in areas with more state control over the press.

  For example, there was an American preacher who burned some Korans. The view from within the United States was this man was a low-status Southern Evangelical stereotype, a headache to the government, and a visible annoyance to the high-status people who really do love insulting Islam but were somehow stuck defending this guy instead of some more charismatic blasphemer. In the Islamic press, this guy was a practically a CIA agent/​preacher of the Official American Church acting on Presidential orders, probably working with Israel to further some foreign policy aim. Because if he really was a headache to the government, why wasn’t he already in jail?

• emrJan 16, 2015, 6:27 AM

  0 points

  in reply to: RowanE’s comment on: Je suis Charlie

  This actually raises an interesting point, although one not quite relevant to the original post:

  Roughly speaking, we should expect people who live in non-Western areas to find conspiracy theories more plausible, because, well, conspiracy theories really are more likely where they live.

An ex­am­ple and dis­cus­sion of ex­ten­sion neglect

• emrJan 14, 2015, 4:16 AM

  13 points

  on: Open thread, Jan. 12 - Jan. 18, 2015

  Languages create selections effects that influence our perceptions of other nations.

  Most notably, the prevalence of English as a second language means that more people outside of the Anglo-sphere have access to a wide range of Anglo-sphere media and conversation partners, whereas countries that mostly speak English will have a more filtered selection of international sources. For example, there are more people in Slovakia who can read major US newspapers than people in the US who can read major Slovakian newspapers.

  A second class of effects occur on the scale of individuals. Second-language use may stem from a direct ancestral link, as in the case of immigration. Second-language use is sometimes related to higher levels of education. Finally, individual interest can influence the choice of acquired second-languages.

  I’m curious how this model seems to people living in non-English countries.

  As a monolingual, it does seem clear that I’m getting a very filtered sampling of the residents of foreign countries, even relative to all the normal filtering that happens in communication. I frequently catch myself thinking “How can country X be so dysfunctional? All the people I’ve every met from X are highly-skilled immigrants and people who choose to hang out on the same English-language science and philosophy forums as me!”. The dysfunction of an English-speaking country never puzzles me, since I’ve met far too many of the residents :)

• emrJan 14, 2015, 3:15 AM

  2 points

  in reply to: ilzolende’s comment on: Open thread, Jan. 12 - Jan. 18, 2015

  Ron Paul and Ralph Nader (many-time presidential candidates with no chance of winning) are concrete examples of this in the US political system.

  Both have done decent with respect to speaking fees and personal fame, but of course so do “genuine” candidates!

• emrJan 14, 2015, 3:06 AM

  3 points

  in reply to: Adam Zerner’s comment on: Open thread, Jan. 12 - Jan. 18, 2015

  Whenever you discover a social “dark art”, look for a countermeasure.

  Of course, in most cases this isn’t a “dark art” at all: It can just be a signal that you’re okay talking about X or moving the conversation in the direction of X, without explicit requesting to talk about X, because an explicit request would require an explicit refusal in the case where they truly didn’t want to talk about X. Whereas if you use the ambiguous signal, you’re giving them the option of an ambiguous refusal (often by reciprocating with a superficially equal but actually trivial “yeah me too” disclosure). I think this holds for the case of “difficult” issues between friends, and well as things like flirting (ambiguous introduction of a sexual topic), and moving to informal topics from a formal context.

• emrJan 14, 2015, 2:30 AM

  3 points

  in reply to: tog’s comment on: Open thread, Jan. 12 - Jan. 18, 2015

  How long have you been using this?

• emrJan 11, 2015, 5:11 AM

  22 points

  in reply to: Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg) ’s comment on: The Im­por­tance of Sidekicks

  You can’t be the sidekick of a hero anymore than you can be the student of an enlightened spiritual guru, or the patient of witchdoctor. If you go looking for a hero, who do you think you will find?

  There is no chance that a Frodo-style hero exists, and that you’ve correctly identified one (versus an admirable non-hero or a fool or a charlatan), and that the hero needs the help of a sidekick to function as a hero (versus someone they can hire, or the support of standard social relationships) and that a genuine hero is going to be like “why yes I am a hero please quit your nursing job and be my (first? second? third?) sidekick in order to marginally increase my odds of saving the world”.

  The danger is to those people who can recognize that they themselves are not gurus, witchdoctors, heroes, perfect rationalists or ubermensch-programmer-super-geniuses-saving-the-world, but still believe that there are large and identifiable classes of people out there who actually are. And who then feel that the only way to have a non-shameful standing relative to their largely imaginary peers to find one to team up with!

  That said, my critique is more against the notion that there is a special class of heroes waiting to be paired up with sidekicks than against the value of “sidekick” role. I feel that I’m deeply sympathetic to the heart of what you’ve said. A more constructive take that tries to avoid the problems that concern me might be:

  The desire to be useful and serve others is present in both roles. If anything, the narrative “hero” in (mainstream, modern, Western) culture is someone who makes themselves a deeper servant to more people at greater personal cost. There is a sacrificial theme to our hero-stories, going back at least to early Christianity.

  Human undertakings are always deeply cooperative. Those who are higher up in a hierarchy of influence function in a large way as the servants of those below. As a nurse, you serve the patients you care for. The people who organize your work (assign shifts and tasks) mostly act to help you do your job better. And so the teacher serves the students; and the general serves the soldiers. Who are the heroes and who are the sidekicks? Something has gone awry if a community thinks that the arrow of agency points in a single direction.

  An occupation like nursing has as much a heroic aspect as a leadership role has an aspect of service (to the people the leader is coordinating).

  Once you split out status-seeking motivations, the psychological difference between those who want to be heroes and those who want to be sidekicks is probably not about wanting to useful overall, but about the specific manner in which a person wants their usefulness to be manifested: Aspiring heroes want broad and diffuse usefulness, and aspiring sidekicks want concrete and individually-manifested usefulness. As always, it’s can be pretty hard to figure out which approach is more valuable. There are plausible reasons, relating to the status concerns, to think that contributions of sidekicks are undervalued.

  I don’t really identity with either role, so I’m curious if my attempt to explain the psychological difference (heroes help in a diffuse/​general/​far way and sidekicks help in a specific/​concrete/​near way) seems reasonable to those who identify more with each role.

• emrJan 9, 2015, 10:52 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: Vulture’s comment on: 2014 Sur­vey Results

  On the computer game question: Isn’t there an implicit “X is true and X will be marked correct by the rater”? You’d hope these two are clearly aligned, but if you’ve taken many real-world quizzes, you’ll recognize the difference.

• emrJan 9, 2015, 9:35 PM

  25 points

  1

  on: The Im­por­tance of Sidekicks

  I’m trying to understand why I have a strong aversive reaction to this sort of discussion. If I’m honest, I feel worried that people who identity as “sidekicks” risk being exploited by those who identity as “heroes”. A healthy community will tend to discourage this sort of taxonomy in various ways in order to avoid the risk of abuse, but the core members of the rationality movement seem to not recognize the social necessity of doing this.

  And yet the response is not “maybe invoking the hero archetype at every possible opportunity is a bad idea”, but rather doubling down on the idea that the leading figures of our movements should be modeled as genuine Lord-of-the-rings heroes. And since not everyone can bring themselves to believe that they are Frodo, we decide that invoking another high-fantasy archetype is the right solution?!

• emrJan 9, 2015, 8:17 PM

  2 points

  in reply to: Salemicus’s comment on: The de­cline of vi­o­lence as a lens for un­der­stand­ing effec­tive altruism

  Being richer, we are able to afford more of the things that we like—and people like violence.

  People like defense. If defense is cheaper than offense, we shouldn’t expect more wealth to lead to more violence.

  Intra-nationally, wealthier states find it easier to shoulder formidable criminal justice systems.

  The potential gains from co-operation (trade) have gone up much more than the potential gains from defection (violence) so we see more co-operation and less defection.

  To be more concrete, one dynamic is a relative decrease in the economic returns to military conquest, because conquest tends to destroy everything that is more complicated than resource extraction.

  If war isn’t going to impoverish, why not invade the neighbouring country in search of honour, glory, religious orthodoxy, etc?

  There seem to be contemporary counterexamples: You can easily find national pairings where one country could conquer the other at zero cost to the dominant country (as in, it can use outdated missiles and replace normal military training with the invasion, and still expect to win effortlessly). The largest cost would be disdain from other wealthy countries, but this disdain is exactly what we’re interested in explaining: You don’t see wealthy nations cooperating to use more than a negligible amount of their potential conquering ability over weaker states.

• emrJan 7, 2015, 3:28 AM

  0 points

  on: What does be­ing x% on board with the pro­gram of a move­ment mean?

  Are there examples of movements that intentionally restrict their set of positions?

  I’m thinking perhaps of groups that want to distance themselves from a less popular group, even when that group would support the more popular group; e.g. advocates for a single-payer health care system in the US might try to avoid making too many general claims in order to not appear socialist.

  Also: I realize this is separate from what you’re analyzing, but it seems clear that these claims mostly serve to prepare the audience for an upcoming critique, and fend off certain negative responses and misidentification that can easily be triggered by criticism. So in Scott’s post, you see a few sections of overt (over-the-top?) support for in-group positions on different issues, even when those issues aren’t (logically) very related to his main point.

• emrJan 4, 2015, 6:59 PM

  2 points

  in reply to: Viliam_Bur’s comment on: Open thread, Dec. 29, 2014 - Jan 04, 2015

  I’m thinking about the United States, and what the linked article describes as an “elite” social class. I’m trying to be more explicit that what explains the character of an elite class is the attempt to control the transfer of elite status to the next generation of elites. The linked article doesn’t explaining this well, presenting a model without much predictive value. A better model is something like:

  People enter the elite class from other backgrounds via raw money and power. The initial entrant might be a military conquerer, a dominant politician, or a self-made billionaire. They will try to transfer their status to their children and friends, who display more the characteristic social traits of the elite. But the traits that initially propel people into the elite class aren’t transfered perfectly. Specifically, you see regression on cognitive ability, personality, and luck. A good model of an elite class will be mostly a model of how elites try to prevent this regression on traits from bringing about a regression in social class.

  Elites have historically used many strategies, but the best way is to make explicit political appointments. Even here, a society that does too much of this will find itself facing displacement by more meritocratic societies, and a segment of society that does more of this will face pressure from other segments. If an elite is only able to make commercial appointments, it faces an accelerated version of this pressure: The companies that get saddled with too many nth-generation-regressed elites will be eventually be displaced by more meritocratic companies, or more meritocratic internal divisions, or whatever.

  The author tells several stories (about young nth generation elites) that exaggerate the ability of family environment to compensate for this regression in traits, and obscure the long term constraints that elites face. Historically, the strategy of elites encouraging the idea that particular social behaviors create elites (and then teaching their children those behaviors) doesn’t seem to have much impact once you account for access to direct political appointments. The instant an elite group can no longer pass on special titles or get sinecures in the Royal Navy, we find that the social shibboleths are quickly discarded. It’s a strategy based on obscuring the real nature of the transfer.

  What he may have in mind, but doesn’t say explicitly, is that making commercial appointments is only a sustainable way to transfer elite status if you can use commercial appointments to get some sort political power, and then convert that political power into a non-meritocratic source of further political power or commercial wealth. Not surprisingly, this is what American elites, (who are forced to rely on commercial appointments more than most historic elites), generally do: You mostly can’t use political power to make direct political appointments, or use commercial power to give sustainable commercial power to descendants, but you can sort of bounce back and force between the two and hope to get enough edge.

  I hope I’ve expressed that clearer. People have a vague sense of “money and politics” as the central thing in the American elite system, but I don’t think they realize that this is simply elites trying to pass on elite status in the face of a reformed political system and commercial pressures that make the older methods less effective. Comparison of the United States to places like Russia are a mixed bag, because while the class system might have the same general form, American elites really are using quite different strategies.

• emrJan 4, 2015, 4:25 PM

  3 points

  on: Stupid Ques­tions Jan­uary 2015

  How do you avoid sending nerdy signals?