Isnasene

Karma: 726

Isnasene Apr 4, 2020, 9:09 AM
10 points
on: April Coronavirus Open Thread
I’ve been playing with the Kinsa Health weathermap data to get a sense of how effective US lockdowns have been at reducing US fever. The main thing I am interested in is the question of whether lockdown has reduced coronavirus’s r0 below 1 (stopping the spread) or not (reducing spread-rate but not stopping it). I’ve seen evidence that Spain’s complete lockdown has not worked so my expectation is that this is probably the case here. Also, Kinsa’s data has two important caveats:
- People who own smart thermometers are more likely to be health conscious which makes them more likely to be health conscious than the overall population. Kinsa may therefore overstate the effect of the lockdown by not effectively sampling the health apathetic people more likely to get the virus.
- Kinsa data cannot separate coronavirus fever symptoms with flu fever symptoms. At the early stages of coronavirus spread, seasonal flu illness dominates coronavirus illness and seasonal flu r0 is between 1-2. This means that a lockdown can easily eliminate symptoms caused by seasonal flu illness by reducing flu r0 below zero without reducing coronavirus’s r0 below zero.
  - I’m addressing this by comparing the largest amounts of observed atypical illness over the last month in different locations with their current total illness to get a conservative estimate of how much coronavirus %ill have changed.
With this in mind, my overall conclusion is that the Kinsa data does not disconfirm the possibility that we’ve reduced r0 below 1. Within the population of people who use smart thermometer’s, we’ve probably stopped the spread but it may/may not have stopped in the overall population. Here are my specific observations:
- The overall US %ill weakly suggests we may have reduced r0 below 1. It maxed out at around 5.1% ill compared to a range of 3.7-4.7 %ill . This indicates that 0.4-1.4% of overall illness was due to coronavirus and currently total illness is only 0.88%. This means that, for many values in that range, our lockdowns are actually cutting into the percent of people getting coronavirus and therefore that the virus is not growing.
- New York county NY %ill weakly suggests that we may have reduced r0 below 1. It maxed out at 6.4 %ill compared to a typical range of 2.75-4.32, indicating that 2.1-3.65% of people had coronavirus. Currently, total illness is 2.56%. Again, for most values in that range, it looks like we’re reducing the absolute amount of coronavirus.
- Cook county IL (Chicago) %ill is very weakly positive on reducing r0 below 1. It maxed out at 5.4 %ill with a range of 2.8-4.9 indicating that 0.5-2.6% of people had coronavirus. Currently the total is 0.92% which suggests we’ve likely cut into coronavirus illness. The range of typical values is so large though that its hard to reach a conclusion
- Essex country NJ (Newark) %ill doesn’t say much about r0. It maxed out at 6.1 compared to a typical range of 2.9-4.5 which implies a range of coronavirus %ill of 1.6-3.2 The current value is 2.63% which is closer to the higher end of the range so there’s no evidence that we’ve reduced the amount of coronavirus. Still %ill is continuing to trend down so this may change in the future.
- I also considered looking at Santa Clara County CA, Los Angeles County CA, and Orleans Parish LA (New Orleans) but their %ill never exceeded the atypical value by a large enough amount for me to perform comparison.
- On Mar28, the overall US %ill changed from a steep linear drop of ~-0.3%ill/day to a weaker linear drop of ~-0.1%ill/day. Also, on Mar28, both Newark’s and New York’s fast linear drop is broken with a slight increase in illness and it looks like we’re on our second leg down there now. Similar on Mar27, Chicago’s fast linear drop is broken with a a brief plateau and second leg down. No idea why this happened.

Isnasene Apr 4, 2020, 12:07 AM
1 point
in reply to: Vaniver’s comment on: Has LessWrong been a good early alarm bell for the pandemic?
Fair enough. When I was thinking about “broad covid risk”, I was referring more to geographical breadth—something more along the lines of “is this gonna be a big uncontained pandemic” than “is coronavirus a bad thing to get.” I grant that the latter could have been a valid consideration (after all, it was with H1N1) and that claiming that it makes “no implication” about broader covid risk was a mis-statement on my part.
That being said, I wouldn’t really consider it an alarm bell (and when I read it, it wasn’t one for me). The top answer, Connor Flexman, states:
Tl;dr long-term fatigue and mortality from other pneumonias make this look very roughly 2x as bad to me as the mortality-alone estimates.
It’s less precise than looking at CoVs specifically, but we can look at long-term effects just from pneumonia.
For me personally:
- A 2x increase in how bad Covid19 was in February was not cause for much alarm in general. I just wasn’t that worried worried about a pandemic
- The answer is based long-term effects of pneumonia, not covid itself (which isn’t measurable). If I read something that said “hey you have a surprisingly high likelihood of getting pneumonia this year”, I would be alarmed. This wasn’t really that post
- I was already kind of expecting that Covid could cause pneumonia based on typical coverage of the virus—I wasn’t surprised by the post in the way I’d expect to be if it was an alarm bell
I’ll give the post some points for pointing out a useful, valuable and often-neglected consideration but I dunno. At that time I saw “you are in danger of getting coronavirus” posts as different from “coronavirus can cause bad things to happen” posts. And the former would’ve been alarm bells and the latter wouldn’t’ve been.

Isnasene Apr 3, 2020, 9:17 PM
17 points
on: Has LessWrong been a good early alarm bell for the pandemic?
While I agree with the specific claims this post is making (i.e. “Less Wrong provided information about coronavirus risk similar to or just-lagging the stock market”), I think it misses the thing that matters. We’re a rationality forum, not a superintelligent stock-market-beating cohort[1]! Compared to the typical human’s response to coronavirus, we’ve done pretty well at recognizing the dangers posed by the exponential spread of pandemics and acting accordingly. Compared to the very smart people who make money by predicting the economic effects of a virus, we’ve done expectedly mediocre—after all none of us (including the stock market) really had any special information about the virus’s trajectory.
Maybe it is disappointing if we lagged the stock market instead of being perfectly on pace with it but a week of lag is a pretty small amount of time in the grand scheme of things. And I’d expect different auditing methodologies/interpretations to have about that amount in variance. In any case, I don’t really think that it’s a big deal.
[1]That is, unless you count Bitcoin, which Eliezer Yudkowsky doesn’t.

Isnasene Apr 3, 2020, 8:25 PM
4 points
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Has LessWrong been a good early alarm bell for the pandemic?
The question in this post is “was Less Wrong a good alarm bell” and in my opinion only one of those links constitute alarm bells—the one on EAForums. Acknowledging/discussing the existence of the coronavirus is vastly different from acknowledging/discussing the risk of the coronavirus.
- “Will ncov survivors suffer lasting disability at a high rate?” is a medical question that makes no implication about broader covid risk.
- “Some quick notes on hand-hygene” does not mention the coronavirus in the main post (but to be fair does have a coronavirus tag). It does make an offhand reference implying the coronavirus could be a “maybe pandemic” but this isn’t a concrete estimation of actual risk
- “Concerning the recent 2019 novel coronavirus outbreak” is a fantastic post that makes concrete claims like it now seems reasonable to assign a non-negligible probability (>2%) to the proposition that the current outbreak will result in a global disaster (>50 million deaths resulting from the pathogen within 1 year). Per one of the comments, this was consistent with Metaculus.
Overall, I’d say that LessWrong was about on par with “having lunch conversations with Chinese-American coworkers” in terms of serving as an actual alarm bell. Moreover, in the case that we admit a weaker standard for what an alarm bell is, it’s worth noting that we still don’t really beat the stock market—because it did respond to the coronavirus back in January. It just didn’t respond strongly enough to convey an actual broad concrete risk.
I also would be somewhat hesitant about saying that the markets crashed on February 20th. The market continued crashing for quite a while, and this is when Wei Dai wrote some comments about his investment strategy, which, if you had followed it at that point would have still made you a good amount of money.
As someone who pretty regularly follows Less Wrong, I missed Wei Dai’s investment strategy which makes me lean in the direction that most casual readers wouldn’t have benefitted from it. The linked comment itself also doesn’t have very strong valence, stating ” The upshot is that maybe it’s not too late to short the markets.” Low valence open-thread comments don’t really sound like alarm bells to me. Wei Dai has also acknowledged that this was a missed opportunity on EAforums.
Moreover, there was also an extremely short actionable window. On February 28th, the stock market saw a swift >5% bear market rally before the second leg of the crash which temporarily undid half the losses. Unless your confidence in “maybe its not too late to short the markets” was strong enough to weather through this, you would’ve probably lost money. This almost happened to me—I sold the Thursday morning after Wei Dai’s comment and bought back in Monday, netting a very meek ~3% gain.

Isnasene Mar 30, 2020, 10:58 PM
9 points
on: Coronavirus Open Thread
[Epistemic Status: It’s easy to be fooled by randomness in the coronavirus data but the data and narrative below make sense to me. Overall, I’m about 70% confident in the actual claim. ]
Iran’s recent worldometer data serves case study demonstrating relationship between sufficient testing and case-fatality rate. After a 16 day long plateau (Mar 06-22) in daily new cases which may have seemed reassuring, we’ve seen five days (Mar 24-28) of roughly linear rise. We could anticipate this by noticing that in a similar time frame (Mar 07-19), we were seeing a linear rise in case fatality rate before it became constant. This indicates the following narrative (not sure if it’s actually true):
- Coronavirus spreads uncontrolled in Iran without increased testing capabilities. This causes new daily cases to stay constant despite increased infection—the 16 day long plateau in daily new cases
- Because cases are increasing, the number of severe cases is also increasing - - and severe cases are more likely to get tested than less severe cases. This causes fatality rate to rise as the severity of the cases that are actually tested increases—the 12 day linear rise in case fatality
- Recently, testing capabilities were ramped, allowing testing of more people and the observation of less severe cases. As a result, the number of daily cases started increasing again with the testing rate. Simultaneously, the fatality rate plateau’d as the (complex) trend in severe cases being tested in greater proportion to less severe cases was cancelled out by trend in testing. Hence the last five days of daily new case rise and the past eight days of constant fatality rate.
  - Note that this narrative suggests that testing is being continuously ramped up while remaining the bottle-neck. Two pieces of evidence for this:
    The daily cases start increasing linearly from the plateau. If testing was increased dramatically, one would an immediate discontinuous increase in number of daily cases at the point where more tests are done.
    Iran’s death rate is still much higher (17% compared to an IFR which should be less than 5%) so testing is unlikely to be sufficient to capture the true infection rate

Isnasene Mar 27, 2020, 12:08 AM
4 points
in reply to: orthonormal’s comment on: Adding Up To Normality
I do still disagree with you somewhat, because I think that people going through a crisis of faith are prone to flailing around and taking naive actions that they would have reconsidered after a week or month of actually thinking through the implications of their new belief. Trying to maximize utility while making a major update is safe for ideal Bayesian reasoners, but it fails badly for actual humans.
Ah, yeah I agree with this observation—and it could be good to just assume things add up to normality as a general defense against people rapidly taking naive actions. Scarcity bias is a thing after all and if you get into a mindset where now is the time to act, it’s really hard to prevent yourself from acting irrationally.

Isnasene Mar 26, 2020, 6:04 PM
5 points
in reply to: orthonormal’s comment on: Adding Up To Normality
I agree that carefully landing the plane is better than maintaining the course if catastrophic outcomes suddenly seem more plausible than before.
Yeah, but my point is not about catastrophic risk—it’s about the risk/reward trade-off in general. You can have risk>reward in scenarios that aren’t catastrophic. Catastrophic risk is just a good general example of where things don’t add up to normality (catastrophic risks by nature correspond to not-normal scenarios and also coincide with high risk). Don’t promise yourself to steer the plane mostly as normal, promise yourself to pursue the path that reduces risk over all outcomes you’re uncertain about.
I don’t think it applies very strongly in your example about animal welfare, unless the protagonist has unusually high leverage on a big decision about to be made. The cost of continuing to stay in the old job for a few weeks while thinking things over (especially if leaving and then coming back would be infeasible) is plausibly worth the value of information thus gained.
Good point, it really depends on the details of the example but this is just because of the different risk-reward trade-offs, not because you ought to always treat things as adding up to normality. I’ll counter that while you shouldn’t leave the job (high risk, hard to reverse), you should see if you could use your PTO as soon as possible so you can figure things out without potentially causing further negative impact. It all depends on the risk-reward trade-off:
- If stopping activism corresponds to something like leaving a job, which is hard to reverse, doing so involves taking on a lot of risk if you’re uncertain and waiting for a bit can reduce that risk.
- If stopping activism corresponds to something like shifting your organizations priorities, and your organization’s path can be reversed, then stopping work (after satisfying all existing contracts of course) is pretty low risk and you should stop
- If stopping activism corresponds to donating large amounts of money (in earning-to-give contexts), your strategy can easily be reversed and you should stop now.
This is true even if you only have “small” amounts of impact.
Caveat:
People engage in policies for many reasons at once. So if you think the goal of your policy is X, but it’s actually X, Y and Z, then dramatic actions justified on uncertainty about X alone will probably be harmful due to Y and Z effects even if its the appropriate decision with respect to X. Because it’s easy to notice when why a thing might go wrong (like X) and hard to notice why they’re going right (like Y and Z), adding-up-to-normality serves as a way to generally protect Y and Z.

Isnasene Mar 25, 2020, 3:39 PM
14 points
on: Adding Up To Normality
I think the strongest version of this idea of adding p to normality is “new evidence/knowledge that contradicts previous beliefs does not invalidate previous observations.” Therefore, when one’s actions are contingent on things happening that have already been observed to happen, things add up to normality because it is already known that those things happen—regardless of any new information.But this strict version of ‘adding up to normality’ does not apply in situations where one’s actions are contingent on unobservables. In cases where new evidence/knowledge may cause someone to dramatically revise the implications of previous observations, things don’t add up to normality. Whether this is the case or not for you as an individual depends on your gears-level understanding of your observations.
So in retrospect, the main thing I’d recommend is to promise yourself to keep steering the plane mostly as normal while you think about lift
I somewhat disagree with this. I think, in these kinds of situations, the recommendation should be more along the lines of “promise yourself to make the best risk/reward trade-off you can given your state of uncertainty.” If you’re flying in a plane that has a good track record of flying, definitely don’t touch anything because its more risky to break something that has evidence of working than it is rewarding to fix things that might not actually work. But if you’re flying in the world’s first plane and realize you don’t understand lift, land it as soon as possible.
Some Reasons Things Add Up to Normality
- If you think the thing you don’t understand might be a Chesterton’s Fence, there’s a good chance it will add up to normality
- If you think the thing you don’t understand can be predicted robustly by inductive reasoning and you only care about being able to accurately predict the thing itself, there’s a good chance it will add up to normality
Some Examples where Things Don’t Add Up
Example #1 (Moral Revisionism)
You’re an eco-rights activist who has tirelessly worked to make the world a better place by protecting wildlife because you believe animals have the right to live good lives on this planet too. Things are going just fine until your friend claims that R-selection implies most animals live short horrible lives and you realize you have no idea whether animals actually live good lives in the wild. Should you immediately panic in fear that you’re making things worse?
Yes. Whether or not the claim in question is accurate, your general assumption that protecting wildlife implies improved animal welfare was not well-founded enough to address significant moral risk. You should really stop doing wildlife stuff until you get this figured out or you could actually cause bad things to happen.
Example #2 (Prediction Revisionism)
You’ve built an AGI and, with all your newfound free-time and wealth, you have a lengthy chat with a mathematician. Things are going along just fine until they point out to you that your understanding of the safety measures used to ensure alignment are wrong, and that the AGI shouldn’t be aligned from the safety measures you thought were responsible.Should you immediately panic in fear that the AGI will destroy us all?
Yes. The previous observations are not sufficient to make reliable predictions. But note that a random bystander who is uninvolved with AGI development would be justified in not panicking—their gears-level understanding hinges on believing that the people who created the AGI are competent enough to address safety, not on believing that the specific details designed to make the AGI safe actually work.
What links here?
- Adding Up To Normality by orthonormal (Mar 24, 2020, 9:53 PM; 85 points)

Isnasene Mar 21, 2020, 11:02 PM
11 points
on: Good News: the Containment Measures are Working
I shared this post with some of my friends and they pointed out that, as of 3/21/2020, the Italy and Spain curves no longer look as optimistic:
- On March 16, cases in Italy appeared to be leveling off. Immediately following that, they broke trend and began rising again. March 16 had ~3200 daily cases. March 20 has ~6000.
- Spain appeared to be leveling off up through March 17th (~1900 daily cases). But on March 18th, it spiked to ~3000. As of March 20th, things may be leveling off again but I wouldn’t draw any conclusions
- Iran’s daily cases have stayed flat for a pretty long period of time now—at around 1000 per day. This seems like it should be good news, tho I’m not sure how good: Since March 8, Iran’s death rate (closed cases) has been steadily rising from 8% to 17.5%

Isnasene Mar 19, 2020, 12:35 AM
1 point
in reply to: Adam Zerner’s comment on: Assorted thoughts on the coronavirus
To me that nudges things somewhat, but isn’t a game changer. I don’t think it makes it 10x less bad or anything.
Fair enough. As a leaning-utilitarian, I personally share your intuition that it isn’t 10x bad (if I had to choose between coronavirus and ending negative consequences of live-style factors for one year, I don’t have a strong intuition in favor of coronavirus). Psychologically speaking, from the perspective of average deontological Joe, I think that it (in some sense) is/feels 10x as bad.
Is that really a possibility? I imagine that governments would impose a strict quarantine before letting it get that bad.
10% is unlikely but possible—not because of the coronavirus itself alone but because of the potential for systemic failure of our healthcare system (based on this comment). I think it’s likely that governments may impose a strict quarantine before it gets that bad or (alternatively) bite the bullet and let coronavirus victims die to triage young people with more salient medical needs.
In the situation where you don’t have savings or a job, here is what I’m imagining. The majority would have family or a friend they could stay with until they get back on their feet, which doesn’t seem that bad.
I partially agree with this. Frankly, as a well-off person myself, I’m not exactly sure what people would do in that situation. Conditioned on having friends or (non-abusive) family with the appropriate economic runway to be supportive, I agree that it wouldn’t be that bad. However these (in my sphere) are often significant contributing factors to being low-income in the first place.For low-income families, things also get messier to do the need-to-support-people being built in.
Homeless shelters do provide basic needs, so if you want to be really hardcore with the “happiness is all in your head” stuff, you should still in theory be ok. But I don’t know much about what it’s truly like; maybe there’s more to it than that.
I agree that this kind of stoicism helps (I resonate a lot with stoicism as a philosophy myself). But I view this as more of a mental skill that is built-up rather than something that people start doing immediately when thrust into lower-standad-of-living situations. Hedonic adaptation takes time and the time it takes before setting in can also be unpleasant. I’d also like to push-back a little on the idea of hedonic adapation with respect to losing money because there is a correlation between measures of happiness and income which only starts breaking down around $50k.

Isnasene Mar 18, 2020, 3:58 PM
14 points
on: Assorted thoughts on the coronavirus
This is anecdotal but last week I read the article by Mr Money Mustache which you linked. As part of it, he posts this picture with the caption “I went out on the town at the peak of the scare. The reality is different from the news headlines.”
Then I went to Venkatesh Rao’s twitter and was immediately confronting with this picture. Stores empty. People are in danger. This is an exceptional case given Venkatesh’s location and the timing. Nevertheless, the simple fact that Mr Money Mustache describes the picture as being at the peak of the scare has seriously lowered my faith in him. As if it was a scare. As if it wasn’t going to get worse.
“Alas, it is hard to overreact. We did ordinary cheap preparing. We had a month’s worth of food, all our medicines and stuff like that. Initially I thought that would be the plan.”
After reading Mr. Money Mustache’s take on the coronavirus, I started having a few doubts about how bad it actually is. I didn’t realize that 2M people in America die each year of things related to “lifestyle factors”.
No. Never compare the effects of things like death from “lifestyle factors”—things that happen because people willingly trade-off having a long-time for having a good-time, things subject to hyperbolic discounting, things that (on an individual level) are really very hard to track the effects of—with an imminent risk that 1-10% of everyone dies within the next two years. Personally, covid poses little threat to me but we don’t know the end-game here: we’re fighting between potentially lengthy economic shutdowns and the possibility of containment failure and global health system collapse. And if low-income people are forced back to work due to money-needs before containment succeeds, the economy crashes and our healthcare system fails.
Is losing money really going to be that bad?
Once you have enough money, losing 50-90% of your wealth really isn’t that bad at all—which is I like the idea of earning-to-give once I’m confident in my runway. Indeed, if you’re the kind of person who reads Mr Money Mustache, you’re probably going to be fine in general.
For my low-income friends though, yes. Yes it is going to be that bad. Sometimes people don’t have jobs. Sometimes people don’t have savings. A large portion of people live paycheck to paycheck. Many people are going to die because of the virus. Many people are going to die because our healthcare systems will at least partially fail. Many people are going to die because that is what the economics imply.
What links here?
- Adam Zerner's comment on Assorted thoughts on the coronavirus by Adam Zerner (Mar 18, 2020, 9:59 PM; 3 points)

Isnasene Mar 16, 2020, 3:29 AM
5 points
on: Even if your Voice Shakes
Donated.

Isnasene Feb 5, 2020, 12:16 AM
1 point
in reply to: Wei Dai’s comment on: DanielFilan’s Shortform Feed
I think you’re overstating the stigma against not having kids. I Googled “is there stigma around not having kids” and the top two US-based articles both say something similar:
Agreed. Per my latest reply to DanielFilan:
However, I’ve actually been overstating my case here. The childfree rate in the US is currently around 15%which is much larger than I expected. The childfree rate for women with above a bachelor’s degree is 25%. In absolute terms, these are not small numbers and I’ve gotta admit that this indicates a pretty high population density at the margin.
I massively underestimated the rate of childfree-ness and, broadly speaking, I’m in agreement with Daniel now.

Isnasene Feb 2, 2020, 5:17 PM
1 point
in reply to: DanielFilan’s comment on: DanielFilan’s Shortform Feed
I continue to think that you aren’t thinking on the margin, or making some related error (perhaps in understanding what I’m saying). Electing for no kids isn’t going to become more costly, so if you make having kids more costly, then you’ll get fewer of them than you otherwise would, as the people who were just leaning towards having kids (due to idiosyncratically low desire to have kids/high cost to have kids) start to lean away from the plan.
Yeah, I was thinking in broad strokes there. I agree that there is a margin at which point people switch from choosing to have kids to choosing not to have kids and that moving that margin to a place where having kids is less net-positive will cause some people to choose to have fewer kids.
My point was that the people on the margin are not people who will typically say”well we were going to have two kids but now we’re only going to have one because home-schooling”; they’re people who will typically say “we’re on the fence about having kids at all.” Whereas most marginal effects relating to having kids (ie the cost of college) pertain to the former group, the bulk of marginal effects on reproduction pertaining to schooling stigmas pertain to the latter group.
Both the margin and the population density at the margin matter in terms of determining the effect. What I’m saying is that the population density at the margin relevant to schooling-stigmas is notably small.
However, I’ve actually been overstating my case here. The childfree rate in the US is currently around 15% which is much larger than I expected. The childfree rate for women with above a bachelor’s degree is 25%. In absolute terms, these are not small numbers and I’ve gotta admit that this indicates a pretty high population density at the margin.
(I assume you meant pressure in favour of home-schooling?) Please note that I never said it had a high effect relative to other things: merely that the effect existed and was large and negative enough to make it worthwhile for homeschooling advocates to change course.
Per the above stats, I’ve updated to agree with this claim.

Isnasene Jan 29, 2020, 1:53 AM
1 point
in reply to: DanielFilan’s comment on: DanielFilan’s Shortform Feed
Developed countries already have below-replacement fertility (according to this NPR article, the CDC claims that the US has been in this state since 1971), so apparently you can have pressures that outweigh pressures to have children.
...
Rich people have fewer kids than poor people and it doesn’t seem strange to me to imagine that that’s partly due to the fact that each child comes at higher expected cost.
I think the crux of our perspective difference is that we model the decrease in reproduction differently. I tend to view poor people and developing countries having higher reproduction rates as a consequence of less economic slack. That is to say, people who are poorer have more kids because those kids are decent long-term investments overall (ie old-age support, help-around-the-house). In contrast, wealthy people can make way more money by doing things that don’t involve kids.
This can be interpreted in two ways:
- Wealthier people see children as higher cost and elect not to have children because of the costs
or
- Wealthier people are not under as much economic pressure so have fewer children because they can afford to get away with it
At the margin, both of these things are going on at the same time. Still, I attribute falling birthrates as mostly due to the latter rather than the former. So I don’t quite buy the claim that falling birth-rates have been dramatically influenced by greater pressures.
Of course, Wei Dai indicates that parental investment definitely has an effect so maybe my attribution isn’t accurate. I’d be pretty interested in seeing some studies/data trying to connect falling birthrates to the cultural demands around raising children.
...
Also, my understanding of the pressures re:homeschooling is something like this:
- The social stigma against having kids is satisficing. Having one kid (below replacement level) hurts you dramatically less than having zero kids
- The capacity to home-school is roughly all-or-nothing. Home-schooling one kid immediately scales to home-schooling all your kids.
- I doubt the stigma for schooling would punish a parent who sends two kids to school more than a parent who sends one kid to school
This means that, for a given family, you essentially chose between having kids and home-schooling all of them (expected-cause of home-schooling doesn’t scale with number of children) or having no kids (maximum social penalty). Electing for “no kids” seems like a really undesirable trade-off for most people.
There are other negative effects but they’re more indirect. This leads me to believe that, compared to other pressures against having kids, stigmas against home-schooling will have an unusually low marginal effect.
Presumably this is not true in a world where many people believe that schools are basically like prisons for children, which is a sentiment that I do see and seems more memetically fit than “homeschooling works for some families but not others”.
Interesting—my bubble doesn’t really have a “schools are like prisons” group. In any case, I agree that this is a terrible meme. To be fair though, a lot of schools do look like prisons. But this definitely shouldn’t be solved by home-schooling; it should be solved by making schools that don’t look like prisons.

Isnasene Jan 26, 2020, 11:29 PM
9 points
in reply to: DanielFilan’s comment on: DanielFilan’s Shortform Feed
A bunch of my friends are very skeptical of the schooling system and promote homeschooling or unschooling as an alternative. I see where they’re coming from, but I worry about the reproductive consequences of stigmatising schooling in favour of those two alternatives.
While I agree that a world where home/un-schooling is a norm would result in greater time-costs and a lower child-rate, I don’t think that promoting home/un-schooling as an alternative will result in a world where home/un-schooling is normative. Because of this, I don’t think that promoting home/un-schooling as an alternative to the system carries any particularly broad risks.
Here’s my reasoning:
- I expect the associated stigmas and pressures for having kids to always dwarf the associated stigmas and pressures against having kids if they are not home/un-schooled. Having kids is an extremely strong norm both because of the underpinning evolutionary psychology and because a lot of life-style patterns after thirty are culturally centered around people who have kids.
- Despite its faults, public school does the job pretty well for most of people. This applies to the extent that the opportunity cost of home/un-schooling instead of building familial wealth probably outweighs the benefits for most people. Thus, I don’t believe that the promoting of home/un-schooling is scaleable to everyone.
- Lots of rich people who have the capacity to home/un-school who dislike the school system decide not to do that. Instead they (roughly speaking) coordinate towards expensive private schools outside the public system. I doubt that this has caused a significant number of people to avoid having children for fear of not sending them to a fancy boading school.
- Even if the school system gets sufficiently stigmatised, I actually expect that the incentives will naturally align around institutional schooling outside the system for most children. Comparative advantages exist and local communities will exploit them.
- Home/un-schooling often already involves institutional aspects. Explicitly, home/un-schooled kids would ideally have outlets for peer-to-peer interactions during the school-day and these are often satisfied through community coordination
I grant that maybe increased popularity of home/un-schooling could reduce reproduction rate by an extremely minor amount on the margin. But I don’t think that amount is anywhere near even the size of, say, the way that people who claim they don’t want to have kids because global warming will reproduce less on the margin.
And as someone who got screwed by the school system, I really wish that when I asked my parents about home/un-schooling, there was some broader social movement that would incentivize them to actually listen.

Isnasene Jan 26, 2020, 2:33 AM
30 points
1
on: Material Goods as an Abundant Resource
Great series! I broadly agree with it and the approach. However, this post has given me a vagueish “no matter how many things are abundant, the economic rat-race is inescapable” vibe which I disagree with.
Towards the end, a grocer explains the new status quo eloquently:
″… not very many people will buy beans and chuck roast, when they can eat wild rice and smoked pheasant breast. So, you know what I’ve been thinking? I think what we’ll have to have, instead of a supermarket, is a sort of super-delicatessen. Just one item each of every fancy food from all over the world, thousands and thousands, all different”
I see the idea here but I disagree with it. I’m a human for goodness sake! I eat food to stay alive and to stay healthy and for the pure pleasure of eating it! Neither my time nor my money is a worthy trade-off for special unique food if it’s not going to do any of those things significantly better. I grant that there might be a niche market for this kind of thing but, the way I see it, being free of the need for material goods will free people from the rat-race: It will let them completely abandon their existing financial strategies insofar as those strategies were previously necessary to keep them alive.
This is what the FIRE community does. They save up enough money so that they only participate in the economy as much as it actually improves their lives.
Why? Because material goods are not the only economic constraints. If a medieval book-maker has an unlimited pile of parchment, then he’ll be limited by the constraint on transcriptionists. As material goods constraints are relaxed, other constraints become taut.
Broadly speaking, I agree with the description here of economic supply chains as a sequence of steps (ie potential bottle-necks. But, in general, I perceive these sequences of steps as finite. For example, the book-maker has unlimited parchment and is then limited by transcriptionists, so the book-maker automated transcription and is limited by books, so the book-maker automates writing (or it turns out the number of writers wasn’t a real bottleneck) so what then? Bookstores are shuttering. I have the internet and the last time I handed money to anyone in the book-making supply chain was because I wanted something to read on the plane.
Again, maybe there’s a niche market for more unique books or more elegantly bound collectible books but that’s a market I can opt out of. It’s superfluous to me having a good life.
Here’s one good you can’t just throw on a duplicator: a college degree.
A college degree is more than just words on paper. It’s a badge, a mark of achievement. You can duplicate the badge, but that won’t duplicate the achievement.
I didn’t get my college degree to signal social status. I got it because I wanted to get a nice job. I wanted to get a nice job so I could get money. I wanted to get money so that I could use it towards the aim of having a fulfilling life. Give me all the material goods and I would’ve probably just learned botany instead.
So, to me, college degrees (and other intangible badges of achievement) haven’t become the things they are because of abundance, they’ve become the things they are because social status will be instrumental to gaining important life-enhancing things for as long as those things are not abundant.
Social status might be vaguely zero-sum but, beyond a couple friends, it’s not critical for living a good life. Given the tools to live a good life, I imagine many people just opting out of the economy. I’m not going to work for eight hours a day to zero-sum compete for more social status alone.
But given that things have in fact become way more abundant, why haven’t we seen more of this opting out happening? Two answers:
1.
We have. Besides the FIRE community, we see it in retirees. I’ve personally seen it in a number of middle-aged adults who realize that trying to find another job in this tech’d up world just isn’t worth the hassle when they have enough to get by on.
2.
With all this talk of zero-sum games, the last piece of the post-scarcity puzzle should come as no surprise: political rent-seeking.
Once we accept that economics does not disappear in the absence of material scarcity, that there will always be something scarce, we immediately need to worry about people creating artificial scarcity to claim more wealth.
Yep. I’d generalize rent-seeking beyond just politics and into the realm of moral maze rent-seeking but yep. I’d actually view the college-corporate complex as a subtrope of this. Colleges as a whole (for reasons of inadequate equilibria) collectively own the keys long-term social stability (excluding people who want to go into trades, and who are confident that those trades won’t go away). They do this and charge a heckuva lot of money for it despite not actually providing much intrinsic value beyond fitting well into the existing incentive structure.
Remove material goods as a taut economic constraint, and what do you get? The same old rat race. Material goods no longer scarce? Sell intangible value. Sell status signals. There will always be a taut constraint somewhere.
Status symbol competition doesn’t scare me in a post-material-scarcity world; I can do just fine without it. What terrifies me is the possibility of rent-seekers (or complex incentive structures) systematically inducing artificial scarcity into material that I care about despite it not literally being scarce.

Isnasene Jan 25, 2020, 1:29 AM
4 points
in reply to: Matt Goldenberg’s comment on: Matt Goldenberg’s Short Term Feed
And the thing is, I would go as far as to say many people in the rationality community experience this same frustration. They found a group that they feel like should be their tribe, but they really don’t feel a close connection to most people in it, and feel alienated as a result.
As someone who has considered making the Pilgrimmage To The Bay for precisely that reason and as someone who decided against it partly due to that particular concern, I thank you for giving me a data-point on it.
Being a rationalist in the real world $^{tm}$ can be hard. The set of people who actually worry about saving the world, understanding their own minds and connecting with others is pretty low. In my bubble at least, picking a random hobby and incidentally becoming friends with someone at it and then incidentally getting slammed and incidentally an impromptu conversation has been the best performing strategy so far in terms of success per opportunity-cost. As a result, looking from the outside at a rationalist community that cares about all these things looks like a fantastical life-changing ideal.
But, from the outside view, all the people I’ve seen who’ve aggressively targeted those ideals have gotten crushed. So I’ve adopted a strategy of Not Doing That.
(pssst: this doesn’t just apply to the rationalist community! it applies to any community oriented around values disproportionately held by individuals who have been disenfranchised by broader society in any way! there are a lot of implications here and they’re all mildly depressing!)

Isnasene Jan 20, 2020, 5:40 PM
1 point
in reply to: Stuart_Armstrong’s comment on: Predictors exist: CDT going bonkers… forever
Can you clarify what you mean by “successfully formalised”? I’m not sure if I can answer that question but I can say the following:
Stanford’s encyclopedia has a discussion of ratifiability dating back to the 1960s and (by the 1980s) it has been applied to both EDT and CDT (which I’d expect, given that constraints on having an accurate world model should be independent of decision theory). This gives me confidence that it’s not just a random Less Wrong thing.
Abram Dempski from MIRI has a whole sequence on when CDT=EDT which leverages ratifiability as a sub-assumption. This gives me confidence that ratifiability is actually onto something (the Less Wrong stamp of approval is important!)
Whether any of this means that it’s been “successfully formalised”, I can’t really say. From the outside-view POV, I literally did not know about the conventional version of CDT until yesterday. Thus, I do not really view myself as someone currently capable of verifying the extent to which a decision theory has been successfully formalised. Still, I consider this version of CDT old enough historically and well-enough-discussed on Less Wrong by Known Smart People that I have high confidence in it.

Isnasene Jan 20, 2020, 7:12 AM
1 point
in reply to: Stuart_Armstrong’s comment on: Predictors exist: CDT going bonkers… forever
Having done some research, it turns out the thing I was actually pointing to was ratifiability and the stance that any reasonable separation of world-modeling and decision-selection should put ratifiability in the former rather than the latter. This specific claim isn’t new: From “Regret and Instability in causal decision theory”:
Second, while I agree that deliberative equilibrium is central to rational decision making, I disagree with Arntzenius that CDT needs to be ammended in any way to make it appropriately deliberational. In cases like Murder Lesion a deliberational perspective is forced on us by what CDT says. It says this: A rational agent should base her decisions on her best information about the outcomes her acts are likely to causally promote, and she should ignore information about what her acts merely indicate. In other words, as I have argued, the theory asks agents to conform to Full Information, which requires them to reason themselves into a state of equilibrium before they act. The deliberational perspective is thus already a part of CDT
However, it’s clear to me now that you were discussing an older, more conventional, version of CDT[1] which does not have that property. With respect to that version, the thought-experiment goes through but, with respect to the version I believe to be sensible, it doesn’t[2].
[1] I’m actually kind of surprised that the conventional version of CDT is that dumb—and I had to check a bunch of papers to verify that this was actually happening. Maybe if my memory had complied at the time, it would’ve flagged your distinguishing between CDT and EDT here from past LessWrong articles I’ve read like CDT=EDT. But this wasn’t meant to be so I didn’t notice you were talking about something different.
[2] I am now confident it does not apply to the thing I’m referring to—the linked paper brings up “Death in Damascus” specifically as a place where ratifiable CDt does not fail

Isnasene

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