Perhaps agencies consistently overregulate. And when it comes to AI, overregulation is preferable to underregulation, whereas for most other fields the opposite is true.
Jonnston
Karma: 41
Every 6 months or so I do 2 to 3 weeks without caffeine the first several days are always terrible, but after that I return to my baseline pretty quickly.
Mrntally I don’t feel much a difference whether I’m drinking coffee or not. Lifting is much tougher without energy drinks or pre-workout. Running is a little bit harder for the first half mile or so.
Overall it isn’t too much a change for me. I guess it’s relevant that I’m young and didn’t start drinking caffeine until 3 or 4 years ago.
To put it as simply as possible, I think that indoctrinating yourself in rationality pushes you further away from the average person, which makes it more difficult to relate emotionally to them.
The vast majority of my major problems stem from my difficulty connecting to other people. Therefore even though I’m really interested in Rationality, and I’ve enjoyed studying it, I think it’s done me net harm.
This won’t be the case for everyone, but I think that many people would be better served spending their time doing something else if their goal is to improve their emotional well-being.
Yes and no.
On the yes side, I find rationality to be incredibly intellectually stimulating. Often I encounter a concept, framework, or abstraction that floors me and sets my mind on fire for days afterward. I think that sort of mental stimulation is really healthy.
In so far as rationality can be defined as “the study of correct thought”, it’s obviously a latchkey subject for anyone who enjoys thinking critically in any capacity. When doing intellectual work, I often find myself drawing on “Rationalist” concepts. This helps me organize and clarify my own thoughts in a genuinely impactful way.
On the no side, the vast majority of my life is not comprised of intellectual work. In areas like emotional well-being or interpersonal relationships, Rationality has, in fact, harmed me more than it has helped.
Scott Alexander has a beautiful essay about taking advice. You can read that post here (sorry I don’t know how to create hyperlinks on mobile):
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/24/should-you-reverse-any-advice-you-hear/
The gist is that people can be inclined to take advice that they don’t need. I was the kind of person who already believed in taking a step back and “applying logic” to my emotions and relationships. After encountering Rationality, I doubled down on this approach. Practically the result was that I became more detached from my emotions, and struggled to relate to others in a non-superficial way.
I don’t think that the fault lies with capital R Rationality, or with any of the ideas espoused on LessWrong. My conclusion was that some aspects of my own life just aren’t well suited to applications of those ideas.
My understanding of sanctions is that they’re designed to provoke hardship and unrest inside of the target country.
In some sense, the people of a nation are at least partially collectively responsible for what that government does. This principle has been widely accepted, at least in the west, since the Nuremberg trials. If you subscribe to this widely held belief, then the Russian citizenry therefore bears some responsibility for the invasion via their consent to obey and support the existing regime.
A people have the moral obligation to overthrow a tyrannical government. The issue is that nearly everyone finds it easy to turn a blind eye if they themselves are not materially affected by the tyranny. I think this is a facet of human nature rather than a moral failing of any particular group of people.
If you accept that the economic hardship caused by sanctions is a collective punishment doled out in response to this collective guilt, the moral core is much greyer than this post asserts.
At a practical level, economic downturns nearly always precede regime change or institutional reform. I think you can draw a straight line from economic disruption, through political unrest, and to either social or political change.
It seems to me that a man who becomes poor while watching his government spend billions on an aggressive war is more likely to protest that war than a man whose status is unchanged.
I don’t have the information to litigate whether the sanctions were effective as a deterrent. In some sense they were obviously ineffective since war resulted, but I think it’s impossible for me as a layman to accurately assess this without the benefit of historical hindsight and more declassified diplomatic information than we’re likely to get in our lifetime.
Does this weaken our position relative to China? Maybe? Again I think this is a very complex issue that I’m not really capable of answering. But I would suggest that “we” (the United States) are at least showing a very united front with the EU which seems like a relevant consideration.
I also consider myself to be someone who loves his country, and I appreciate you taking the time to write up a viewpoint thay contrasts with what seems to be the zeitgeist. Thank you.
Edit: corrected various grammar and spelling errors.
I want to register my conviction that ROB can mitigate effectiveness by keeping you arbitrialy close to 50% success rate by selecting numbers arbitrarily close to one another.
You’re right. I Misremembered, but i checked and it is true that a bounded montonic function of the reals can have only a countable number of discontinuities. So if ROB knows our algorithm, he can select one continuous interval for all of his values to come from.
Proof of the countable nature of discontinutes given here:
Other posters have suggested using a function which increases montonically over the reals. My instinct is that for any such function, for any choice of epsilon, there is some delta such that n+delta does not provided a benefit of epsilon.
In my example i spoke of selecting n and n+1 as A and B. Instead let B be n+delta.
Recall that any monotnic increasing bounded function over the reals is continuous. Suppose we want to achieve a success rate with our guesses of 0.5+epsilon. ROB can select delta such that our performance is less than that. Then it follows that our success rate s will satisfy
0.5 < s < 0.5 + epsilon
Since we can produce a delta for any epsilon (because the montonic function is continuous), it follows that we can define a sequence of success rates which have the infinum 0.5
Essentially ROB can select two real nunbers sufficiently close together that no strategum produces a benefit of any substance. He can enact a strategy which pushes us arbitraily close to a 50⁄50 shot.
You made a comment regarding restricting the problem to integers. A solution may exist in that case, I’m not sure.
P.S. Thanks for making this post, it’s been an interesting problem to think about.
ROB selects A and B. First suppose A < B. Suppose A is revealed. Further Suppose that some deterministic Algorithm R exists which takes in A, and produces the probability that A is smaller.
In round one the only input to the algorithm can be A alone. Furthermore since we have supposed that R is “better than 50%”, we must see have R yield us that P( A smaller ) > 0.5. We can then easily extrapolate P( A bigger ) < 0.5.
Now suppose we have the opposite case, that A > B. Again the only input to our algorithm can be A for the first round. However we must receive as output: P( A smaller ) < 0.5 and thus P( A bigger ) > 0 5
But consider that in both cases our only input was A, then it follows that R must not be deterministic since it produces two different results on the same input. This is a contradiction, hence there is no such deterministic algorithm R.
It is possible that there is a nondeterministic algorithm R’, however I’m almost certain that no such algorithm can outperform a deterministic one in a case like this.
I’m very interested to see the solution to this problem. I agree that “better than 50%” is a little vague, however even with the most generous interpretation I’m skeptical about the existence of such an algorithm, as long as we allow the nunbers to be arbitrarily selected.
Consider the following strategy. For N rounds of play, before round 1, let ROB arbitraily select a list of N numbers. For each round let ROB choose arbitrarily one member x of the set as A, remove that member from the list, and select B as x+1.
Clearly each round is independent since the selection of each round’s numbers did not depend on the previous round in any respect.
For the first round, it’s clearly impossible to produce an algorithm which gives a better than 50% chance of success. Since subsequent rounds are independent, the same conclusion holds.
I’m competent in basic video editing and am willing to help you out. Contrary to some of the other comments, I think that there’s substantial value in converting the sequences as-is to YouTube videos considering the size of the platform. Plenty of people use YouTube who don’t read blogs or listen to podcasts. You could take the project and run with it, constructing animations, diagrams, and visualizations. But even absent those potential enhancements, I support disseminating the message as widely as possible.