All great points. I’ve read the article you mentioned, and it will be a crucial guiding principle in how I would want to design this—maybe the most crucial.
kjz
Karma: 278
That seems to me like a reasonable response to the incentives they currently face.
Thanks for following up last week’s discussion about the first paper. It’s pretty sad that it falls on internet sleuths to debunk claims that should be obviously questionable after thinking for two seconds about the underlying scientific principles, but so it goes. This study should have been flagged immediately by a competent peer review process.
On a personal level though, I’m thankful I’ve been able to improve at noticing such claims myself, thanks in large part to things I’ve learned here.
Thanks for the recommendation—very glad he is doing this. My favorite part was this paraphrased dialog with a pharmacy:
Us: How would someone make an appointment with you?
Pharmacy: Go to the county website at…
Us: You know you’re not on that, right?
Pharmacy: WHAT.
Inadequate equilibria at their finest. I wish him all the best in his efforts to make them more adequate.
Thanks for the very useful feedback. To answer your questions:
For the vaccine example, I agree that would be a huge problem and probably make it totally unworkable. Your hint is right on. For my real example, the “rules” wouldn’t change much at all, or only very slowly (on the timescale of months or more likely years).
The customer is any individual with disposable income. There is not a way to use Google or Excel to solve this problem. As for how many there are, it’s either something that would never take off and fizzle out and die, or it could become a service that millions of people find invaluable. Hard to predict in more detail than that.
Thanks so much for the quick and detailed reply! I agree I haven’t provided enough info yet to let you (or anyone) answer the question well. This is mostly because I came up with my real idea very recently, and I’m a total rookie in this field so almost everything is an “unknown unknown” to me at this point. Also, for now I want to avoid giving too many details, until I’ve worked out the idea more fully.
But to address some of your points and provide some additional info that may be helpful:
It’s great to know that edge cases and polish result in a substantial cost inflation. This is something I wouldn’t have predicted. Providing a simple and intuitive user experience would be crucial to this idea, and I would be willing to spend extra time and resources to make the user experience as seamless as possible. In my (admittedly naive) mind, I’m imagining making a fairly optimized and well designed user interface, letting test users play with it and give feedback, then ultimately releasing a very professional and intuitive final version to the public. As you mentioned, I’m sure I would need a lot of help with graphic design and product design, since I’ve never done this. (Side note: is UX user experience?)
I’m not in a rush to get this to market quickly—as I said I think it’s more important to prioritize quality over a quick rollout.
I also plan to give users very limited options for how to interact with the app. Simplicity and making it obvious how to do what they want to do is key.
Regarding payments, I would need to be able to accept payments from individual users, and make payments either to other users or to companies. The idea is to provide a service where individual users would sign up for an automatic monthly subscription by whatever method is easiest for them (credit card, Paypal, etc.)
Hope this helps and I’d be happy to hear any further suggestions!
[Question] How much does it cost to design an app?
As an introvert who tends to keep different parts of my life separate (work vs different friend groups vs hobbies, etc) out of fear of social disapproval or “using up too many weirdness points”, this statement strongly resonated with me. It feels like something I have already been trying to do slowly in my own way, but you outlined a very clear way of thinking about it. I gave this comment a strong upvote.
When you write one, I would be excited to read it!
My best hypothesis at the moment is that there was substantial overlap between the people who were still betting on Trump post-election and the people who were actively looking for opportunities to disrupt the remainder of the electoral process like we saw on Jan. 6, or who assigned a higher probability to such disruptions succeeding. Such people may have felt they had “insider knowledge” that was worth betting on, and to some extent, they may have been better calibrated than the conventional wisdom.
I didn’t look at the study itself, but how do they know the initial infections were “real” infections? Is it possible they are effectively just finding the false positive rate from the initial infection testing?
Which, because you only get five (or ten) words, shows up on the headlines as “Past Covid infection gives 5 months of immunity, study suggests”.
I expect many will read just the headline, and start to claim that it is known that past Covid infection gives exactly 5 months of immunity, and this will become the commonly remembered message going forward.
[Question] Any rationalist judges?
Happy to give an ‘outsider’ viewpoint!
It’s funny, at the point where I had only read the post and not discussed it with anyone, I never parsed “politics is the mindkiller” as any of “politics=boo” or “you are not smart/rational enough to debate politics with me” or even “your mind has been so killed by politics that we can’t have a conversation where we understand each other”. I always thought of it as “politics kills everybody’s mind, like it or not, especially if they’re not aware of it”, and felt mostly sympathy for all of us that this is the case. In conversations, I only use “politics is the mindkiller” in the sense of “look what this is doing to all of us, no matter what side you’re on!” and always after we have shared examples of how both sides have behaved badly. I think doing it this way can help them start to see through the “must support our arguments, must attack theirs” pattern, which is probably so hardwired into people that they never realize it exists. I know I never did, until I read this post.
I prefer “get”. It implies more strongly that if someone actually needs to convince others of their argument, they need to make sure their message is as concise and optimized as possible, before trying to convince anyone. As the original post says:
What if you need all that nuance and to coordinate thousands of people?
You still only get five words.
A bit off topic maybe, but when I read the original post, the part that resonated the most with me, and is now always in the back of mind during political discussions with my friends, is this:
Politics is an extension of war by other means. Arguments are soldiers. Once you know which side you’re on, you must support all arguments of that side, and attack all arguments that appear to favor the enemy side; otherwise it’s like stabbing your soldiers in the back—providing aid and comfort to the enemy.
I’ve seen the first part condensed elsewhere on the site to “debate is war; arguments are soldiers”, which is the phrasing I generally use in conversation. This sets the stage for the key insight “you must support all arguments of that side, and attack all arguments that appear to favor the enemy side”. When I say that, the message often seems to get through, and people seem to think a little more reflectively. The tone of the conversation can soften and it can lead to a more nuanced and less combative discussion. I’ve even had people say, “Yeah, my side might be wrong about a few things, even though they’re still way better than that other side.”
Which, in general, I consider a huge win.
I remember reading around the beginning of the pandemic that Bill Gates was going to do exactly that: subsidize production of many different vaccine candidates with his own money, and accept the sunk cost for any vaccines that ended up not working. I haven’t seen anything about this idea recently though, and it seems he has not been (at least publicly) behind any vaccine production efforts. Any idea why? To avoid perceived competition with Operation Warp Speed?
I’m also a fan of 3-2-1 voting, and I think it has another strong advantage—it’s the one I could most easily see explaining to my friends across the political spectrum, having them understand how it works and its potential advantages quickly, and leave thinking it might be worth a shot and maybe even discussing it with their friends. Some anecdata: I live in a state where ranked choice voting failed to pass in the recent election. A few years ago, before anyone knew ranked choice would even be on the ballot, I tried to explain how it worked, and was met with a few types of dismissals: many thought it was too complicated and couldn’t follow along*, while one friend’s reply was “no, in an election you should just get one vote, and that’s that”. I’m not sure exactly what he meant by that, or if it was even his true rejection, but it was an interesting response.
But with 3-2-1, I feel like I could explain it to the same people and many would immediately get it and have a positive impression of it and actually remember it again later. Why? Because now I can point out how the candidate on the other side who they can’t stand is gonna get knocked out in round 2. Like, not even in the finals… in round 2! Because obviously way more people hate that other party than my party, and then we just have knock off some Libertarian or whoever, and we’ll win every time! And even once they realize a different pool of candidates might emerge and change the dynamic, at least that terrible candidate who they’re thinking about right now would never win.
Plus, the name itself is very memorable, underscores its simplicity, and is very chantable (for better or worse—I feel somewhat uncomfortable pointing this out, but it seems relevant to a discussion about political systems).
*to be clear, these are smart, reasonable people who would easily understand the concept given enough time. it felt like they were trying to play out elections in their head, realized it was taking too long to figure out during a normal conversation span (understandably), so just figured “forget it” and changed the subject.
I agreed at the time with the sentiments of this and similar discussions of free money available through prediction markets, although I didn’t overcome the inertia enough to make any trades. However, yesterday’s events have made me question how well I was calibrated. Have others been feeling similarly?
I agree, many were quite pleasing as well, especially the adorable avocado armchairs and many of the macro photographs. Another personal favorite are the tetrahedra made of fire—they are exactly how I would picture Sauron, if Tolkien had described him as a tetrahedron.
The nauseating ones included:
Several to do with bats, the worst to me being “a stack of bats” on the table. Part of the problem is I was expecting to see bats (the sporting equipment), so bats (the animal) came as an unpleasant surprise. Not totally surprising this might cause nausea though, given the connection between bats and disease.
Agree with arielroth about some of the national food ones. They reminded me of the display foods you see at some kiosk-type food stations—the shape of the real thing, but just enough off to look completely unedible.
I think the rest of it was a building up of noticing little irregularities that gave overall feeling of unease. The misspelled letters on the storefronts, the animals made of strange textures, the view from my old apartment in San Francisco—but wait, there should be a shop on that corner! And that street should go uphill, not downhill! So much felt familiar at first glance, but just wrong after a little closer inspection, and it added up to a stronger effect after some time.
Not really nauseating, but along the same line of feeling wrong to me, were the golf clubs. I’ve played golf for a long time so I’ve seen a lot of pictures of clubs, and these images seemed normal at first glance but then wait, why does that one have a shaft coming out of both sides of the clubface? And those are just clubfaces with nothing attached. And those grooves would never get the ball out of the sand. Why would anyone ever make anything like that? Because they wouldn’t, and that gets to the heart of the discomfort. They have “clubiness”, but they’re not clubs.
On another note, an example I found really impressive was how every other country I looked at had only generic stadium images, but China’s were instantly recognizable as the Bird’s Nest from the Olympics.
(But I wonder if the architect of the Bird’s Nest would look at those images and say, those beams would never support the weight of the structure! Look, that one’s cracked! It’s so wrong!)
Totally agree. But remember—the vaccine app isn’t my real idea. It’s the idea I came up with to use as an example after 5 minutes of thought :)
I really appreciate all your comments and taking the time to engage with this. They’re helping me think about the actual idea I have in mind much more clearly and in more detail. Thank you!