localdeity

Karma: 2,430

localdeity Mar 20, 2025, 9:54 PM
3 points
1
in reply to: Mo Putera’s comment on: Mo Putera’s Shortform
I would also comment that, if the environment was so chaotic that roughly everything important to life could not be modeled—if general-purpose modeling ability was basically useless—then life would not have evolved that ability, and “intelligent life” probably wouldn’t exist.

localdeity Mar 8, 2025, 10:16 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: TsviBT’s comment on: Childhood and Education #9: School is Hell
You have a point, although I don’t think having a genuine feeling of despair is a hugely important variable. As the story goes:
[Method actor Dustin] Hoffman had a grueling scene coming up, where his character hadn’t slept in three days, and Hoffman told [Sir Laurence] Olivier that to prepare for the scene, he too hadn’t slept for 72 hours.
“My dear boy,” replied Olivier, “why don’t you try acting?”
But more generally, even if you want to teach some kind of set of skills and resilience for dealing with things like “sitting still for hours a day”, “doing hours of boring homework-like stuff”, “obeying lots of orders from authority figures”, etc., you can deliberately learn and practice each of them, and ramp up the difficulty more quickly, and probably reach a higher level in 8 months than most people reach in 12 years. U.S. Army boot camp is apparently 10 weeks, for example.

localdeity Mar 7, 2025, 8:07 PM
2 points
3
on: Childhood and Education #9: School is Hell
Is this a case for or against formal education? Either way, it is wise.
If one does accept the premise that feigning enthusiasm is a useful skill, that’s still not a good justification of formal education as it exists: it certainly doesn’t take 12 years of grade school to teach that skill.

localdeity Feb 22, 2025, 1:57 PM
2 points
0
on: The case for the death penalty
Epistemic status: this is an attempt to steelman the case for the death penalty
...
I do not believe in vengeance or justice. I do however believe in fixing problems. And it’s clear the only way to fix this problem is to put such people in positions where they cannot do anyone any harm.
Some people have complained that, when their opponents “steelman” their position, in practice it can mean they steelman a particular argument that is not their main argument. This struck me as a remarkably explicit and self-aware example of that.
I don’t know what the solution is. Maybe tell people not to use “steelmanning” in such cases, maybe tell people to stop expecting “steelmanning” to necessarily mean it won’t miss a central argument. Maybe decide that you should, e.g., say “I’m steelmanning this particular argument”, because if you say “I’m steelmanning the case for this conclusion” then that means you’re supposed to capture all important arguments for that conclusion.

localdeity Feb 19, 2025, 12:38 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: Brendan Long’s comment on: Born on Third Base: The Case for Inheriting Nothing and Building Everything
I personally recommend that all parents donate to the Localdeity Enrichment Fund, an important yet frequently overlooked cause area.

localdeity Feb 19, 2025, 12:22 AM
3 points
0
in reply to: CstineSublime’s comment on: Which things were you surprised to learn are not metaphors?
Whoever wrote that article is confused, since in the table in the section labeled “Analogy vs Simile: The Differences” they have several entries the wrong way around (compared to the two paragraphs preceding it).
It seems to me that you could use the same comparison for either an analogy or a simile. An analogy would usually be in the present tense, “X is like Y”, and followed by more explanation of the concept the analogy is meant to illustrate. A simile would more frequently be in the past tense as part of a narrative, and more frequently use other verbs than “is”—”X moved like a Y”—and probably wouldn’t extend beyond the current sentence, usually not even beyond that phrase. I think a bare statement of “X is like Y” might go either way.

localdeity Feb 18, 2025, 11:16 PM
7 points
0
on: The Unearned Privilege We Rarely Discuss: Cognitive Capability
The term “privilege” is bad here; prefer “advantage”. “Privilege”—privi-lege, private law—implies that there’s an authority deciding to grant it to some people and not others, which would be unjust (since most things that affect intelligence, such as genetics and childhood nutrition, happen long before a person does anything to “deserve” it more than others), which in turn encourages people to get angry and suspicious, and encourages the advantaged to feel embarrassed or even guilty by association when they’ve done nothing wrong. Calling it “privilege” is only useful if you want to encourage that kind of conflict.
That said, there are plenty of people who downplay the importance of intelligence, and/or exaggerate the degree to which it can be improved through hard work, educational interventions, school funding, etc. However, those people are much more likely to be social justice activists than rationalists. The #3 top voted post in the 2023 Less Wrong review was about how to use genetic technology to improve intelligence (and other qualities) in the general population. It’s interesting to note that the 2023 post is trying to fix the problem of people not being as smart as they would like to be, while this post’s recommendations do not include trying to fix that problem.

localdeity Feb 13, 2025, 5:13 PM
3 points
1
on: Skepticism towards claims about the views of powerful institutions
Other reasons:
Biases towards claiming agreement with one’s own beliefs
If the institution is widely trusted, respected, high status, etc., as well as powerful, then if Alice convinces you that the institution supports her beliefs, then you might be inclined to give more credence to Alice’s beliefs. That would serve Alice’s political agenda.
Weaker biases towards claiming disagreement with one’s own beliefs
If the institution is widely hated—for example al-Qaeda, the CIA, the KGB—or considered low status, crazy, and so on, then if Alice convinces you that the institution opposes her beliefs, that might make you more sympathetic to her, make you distrust arguments against her beliefs, and/or defuse preexisting arguments that support for Alice’s position comes mostly from these evil/crazy institutions.

localdeity Feb 10, 2025, 3:32 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: How identical twin sisters feel about nieces vs their own daughters
In Judaism, you’re not supposed to marry a non-Jew unless they convert to Judaism (a lengthy process from what I’ve heard), so I suspect the families on both sides of the deal are usually equally religious.
In any case, googling for “grief and genetic closeness study” yields this:
A Twin Loss Survey was completed by MZ and same-sex DZ twins following loss of a cotwin and nontwin relatives. Twin survivors (N = 612; MZ = 506; DZ, n = 106) included twins whose age at loss was 15 years or older. Participation age was M = 47.66 years (SD = 15.31). Hamilton’s inclusive fitness theory generated two hypotheses: (1) MZ twins will recall greater grief intensity at loss than DZ twins; (2) loss of a twin will receive greater grief intensity ratings than loss of nontwin relatives. [...] Part I: Hypotheses regarding grief intensity were supported.
And this, where the highlights are:
- Surviving MZ twins grieve more intensely for deceased co-twins than surviving DZ twins.
- Female twins grieve more intensely for deceased co-twins than male twins.
- Twins grieve more intensely for deceased co-twins than for other deceased relatives.
- Survivors’ grief intensity varies with genetic relatedness to the deceased.

localdeity Feb 9, 2025, 10:02 PM
2 points
0
on: How identical twin sisters feel about nieces vs their own daughters
Everything you say seems straightforwardly correct or a logical guess. I’d add:
- I expect identical twin sisters do feel closer to their nieces than non-identical sisters feel to their nieces. There would probably be a higher degree of discovering that this person just happens to have traits like your own.
- Even from a fully logical “optimize my inclusive genetic fitness” perspective, there is value, all else being equal, in most parent-child relationships that isn’t in most aunt-niece relationships. Because you raised this child, she probably trusts you, you know her strengths and weaknesses and where she needs help, etc.; you have a comparative advantage at helping your daughter vs helping your niece. (I speak of good parental relationships; of course, there are some where the parent has a comparative disadvantage. Also, if you know your child is a no-good criminal or something, and you know nothing about your identical sister’s child, then the latter may be a better bet for investing your resources; hence my saying “all else being equal”.)

localdeity Feb 9, 2025, 9:49 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: Kaj_Sotala’s comment on: How identical twin sisters feel about nieces vs their own daughters
I think there’s at least decent truth to it. One study:
This study examines gift giving at Israeli weddings. In accordance with kin selection theory, we hypothesized that wedding guests possessing greater genetic relatedness to the newlyweds would offer greater sums of money as wedding gifts. We also hypothesized that family members stemming from the maternal side (where the genetic lineage has higher kinship certainty) would offer the newlyweds more money than those stemming from the paternal side. Data on the monetary gift sums of the wedding guests from 30 weddings were collapsed according to two criteria: (a) genetic relatedness (0%, 6.25%, 12.5%, 25%, and 50%) and (b) kinship certainty (maternal or paternal lineage). Both hypotheses were supported.
I think I had also heard of studies that looked into either “how devastated would you feel”, or “how devastated did you feel”, regarding the death of a family member, and that these also fit the “genetic closeness” predictions. I don’t know exactly how they were done—obviously genetic closeness will correlate highly with family structure that gives you actual closeness, and one must control for that. But my impression is that the effect is real and significant, though of course not all-consuming.
There’s also an interview with someone who studied identical twins a lot, with various interesting things to say.

localdeity Feb 7, 2025, 12:41 PM
9 points
1
in reply to: Milan W’s comment on: Thread for Sense-Making on Recent Murders and How to Sanely Respond
I think the hemisphere stuff is quite literal. I think it’s general knowledge that the right eye feeds into the left side of the brain, and vice versa (Actually, looking it up, it is the case that the left is controlled by the right and vice versa, but I see some claims that the information feeds into both sides, in a nearly balanced manner^[1]; but I don’t know if Ziz knows that); and Ziz’s whole “unihemispheric sleep” thing tells you to keep one eye closed and distract the other eye so that eventually one hemisphere falls asleep.
1. ^
  Claude sez: “When nerve fibers cross at the optic chiasm, approximately 53-55% of nerve fibers cross to the opposite hemisphere, while 45-47% remain on the same side. This means that each hemisphere receives slightly different proportions of visual information from both eyes.” Wiki on Optic chiasm confirms: “The number of axons that do not cross the midline and project ipsilaterally depends on the degree of binocular vision of the animal (3% in mice and 45% in humans do not cross)”.

localdeity Feb 5, 2025, 5:48 PM
5 points
2
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Thread for Sense-Making on Recent Murders and How to Sanely Respond
BTW, on Ziz’s obituary someone wrote:
Like Jesus, he will arise from the dead.
not sure if sincere or trolling...
The date on that comment is Jan 30 2025. Methinks 90% likelihood it’s causally downstream from the recent murders and that the poster knows Ziz was never dead.

localdeity Feb 5, 2025, 5:27 PM
−1 points
0
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Thread for Sense-Making on Recent Murders and How to Sanely Respond
If you would use genetic studies to guide clinical trial representation for a drug to combat heart disease you would look at the genes associated with heart disease and see that mutations in those genes are evenly distributed in your clinical trial representation. You would not focus on the race with which people self-identify.
I asked Claude a few questions. I’ll just give snippets of the answers:
1. Are there scenarios where doctors recommend different doses of a medication, or other variations in a medical plan, based on a patient’s race?
  1. Yes. “For instance, some Asian populations metabolize certain antidepressants and antipsychotics differently, requiring adjusted dosages”; “African American patients often respond differently to certain blood pressure medications. Guidelines recommend specific first-line treatments like calcium channel blockers for this population.”
2. In these scenarios, have people found out the relevant genes that make the difference?
  1. Yes in some cases. “CYP2D6 gene: Affects metabolism of antidepressants, antipsychotics, and pain medications. Variations are more common in certain ethnic groups”; “HLA-B*1502 gene: Associated with severe skin reactions to carbamazepine in Asian populations, particularly those of Han Chinese descent.”
3. Are there cases where doctors adjust the treatment plan by race but don’t yet know which genes are relevant?
  1. Yes. “Kidney Disease: African Americans show different progression and treatment responses compared to other racial groups, with ongoing research to identify genetic factors”; “Differences in heart disease risk and medication response across racial groups are recognized, with some genetic pathways identified but not fully mapped.”
So. If you do know what genes make the difference, then of course that’s the best type of information to work with. But, particularly for polygenic effects, it may be that you have information about the relevance of race without knowing the genes in question. In that scenario, either you use the race information or you use nothing, and the former seems the better choice (though, yes, to the extent that “self-identification” means that someone would say “I’m X” instead of “I’m half-X and half-Y”, that makes the information lower-quality).

localdeity Feb 2, 2025, 4:57 PM
3 points
4
in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: Thread for Sense-Making on Recent Murders and How to Sanely Respond
@Friendly Monkey , I’m replying to your reaction:
There are people who require multiple methods of persuasion before they act in the way you want. One category is decisionmakers for an organization, who have actually been persuaded by intimidation, but they can’t just say that, because they would look weak and possibly as though they’re defecting against the organization or its aims, so they need to sell it as some high-minded decision they’ve come to of their own accord. Or it could be the reverse: decisionmakers who are persuaded by your ideological arguments, but are funded / otherwise kept in charge by those who don’t care or have contempt for the ideology, so they need to sell it to their funders (presumably in private) as, “Hey, look, let’s be realistic here, if we do this then they’ll do that and we absolutely can’t afford that. But if we do this other thing, that won’t happen, and would it really be so bad? And we’ll tell the public that recent events have made us realize how important [...]”.
In both cases, it’s essential for you to have someone doing the intimidation and someone publicizing the high-minded arguments, and usually it works best if these are different people. (For example, if an intellectual who is respected by the mainstream (but only agreed with by a minority) starts making threats, that seems likely to lose them mainstream acceptance—such an ugly thing to be involved with, carrying out the threats even more so—and thus, for that reason among others, making the threats credible is more difficult than it would be for a thug who has nothing to lose.)
So, for those decisionmakers, if you have intimidation but not a public-friendly face (a book-publishing intellectual, an organization doing charity events, etc.), you get nothing, and if you have the friendly face but not intimidation, you also get nothing, but if you have both, then you win their support. It’s not a matter of “intimidation and friendliness each independently get diminishing marginal returns, and if you over-invest in one or even saturate it then that’s inefficient”; rather, you need both to have any success.
Incidentally, although violence was the subject above, I’ve used “intimidation”, which may be interpreted to also cover things like social shaming or threatening to arbitrarily cancel business deals. That makes the above patterns cover a lot of things done in recent years.
Another aspect: Frequently, the group doing the intimidation will claim it’s justified. One man’s threat of aggressive violence may be another man’s statement that he’ll act in self-defense or justified punishment, if they have different theories of rights, or perhaps disagreement about what happened.
The more mainstream-friendly group who is on their side… If they want to defend the behavior, then, depending on the circumstances, they have lots of options for their official position: the ideological, “It’s justified” or “It’s an overreaction but you do have to understand where they’re coming from”; the conversation-tactical, “Hey, look over there! Something more important is happening” or “Anyone who complains about this has contemptible traits XYZ and should be attacked”; the associational, “It wasn’t our people”, or even “It was a false flag”; the evidentiary, “It’s not as bad as they claim”, occasionally even “It didn’t happen”; and so on. (Any of these stances might have been chosen honestly, and might be correct, but, especially for the most sophisticated and the most ideological, one’s priors should be skeptical. Sometimes “Bounded Distrust” is applicable; it can be interesting to think through “If they could have taken and defended stance A, they probably would have, so the fact that they picked stance B tells me …”.)

localdeity Feb 1, 2025, 6:26 PM
6 points
3
on: Re: Taste
“A random walk, in retrospect, looks like like directional movement at a speed of $\sqrt{n}$ .
The average distance from the starting point is close to $\sqrt{n}$ after n random steps (in 1 dimension). But I’d characterize that as a speed of $\sqrt{n} / n = 1 / \sqrt{n}$ . Or you could say ”… looks like a directional movement of distance $\sqrt{n}$ ”.

localdeity Jan 30, 2025, 6:00 PM
4 points
0
in reply to: MondSemmel’s comment on: ChristianKl’s Shortform
I expect that’s about not trusting the foreigners who did the clinical trials (I have heard this)^[1], and not so much about expecting that Americans are biologically different from foreigners.
1. ^
  Specifically, someone with some knowledge told me that the FDA knows that there are some countries where the trials are completely untrustworthy. And that there was a political decision where they said, “If we disallow trials from some countries but not others, there will be much complaining and we’ll probably be called racists”, and solved the issue by disallowing trials from all foreign countries.

localdeity Jan 26, 2025, 2:28 PM
29 points
8
in reply to: eukaryote’s comment on: [Link] A community alert about Ziz
Let’s see what the base rate for murder is. After some googling… Since the “clearance rate” for homicides is 50% (as of a recent year), even if we know there were N murders, it’s hard to say how many distinct murderers there were. But some source says it’s a small percentage of murderers who kill again, so let’s just assume that N murders = N murderers. Both “taking the homicide rate (7.5 per 100k per year in 2022) and multiplying by a lifetime (we’ll say 80 years)”, and “googling for the percentage of deaths that are caused by homicide”, yield roughly 0.6%. So 6 per thousand.
I haven’t kept count of the numerator, but if you were going to argue that the murderer rate is no different than among the American general population, the denominator would need to be in the high hundreds at least. (It might also be interesting to control for other demographics of rationalists.)
A better counterargument would be that Ziz’s associates just happened to be trans, because that’s a shared quality that can be quite important to people in ways that may make them tend to stick together, which is also true of, say, having a shared hobby like Magic: The Gathering. So when Ziz became a murder cult leader, and several associates committed murder, then that shared quality ends up being highly correlated with murder, and this could happen just as easily with any other …
But that’s not quite true. Ziz’s writings have talked a lot about trans stuff, and I have the impression (it’s been a couple of years since I read the blog, and this might not necessarily be written too explicitly) that Ziz made a point of seeking out trans people or, probably most especially, pre-trans or gender-questioning people. (At least, that was the result; it could have happened for other reasons; but I think there was an optimization process pointing in this direction.) Because someone in that stage, in the process of majorly rethinking their identity and how they relate to the world, possibly experiencing significant gender dysphoria and associated issues… Is probably much more vulnerable than average to a cult leader saying, “I understand people like you, I can tell you all kinds of things (probably many true things!) about our kind, I have this whole philosophy that I’ve written out, and you should spend lots of time with me as I explain it to you… And by the way the philosophy says the world is mostly evil and we should lose any aversion to violence and also extreme violence is obligatory in certain cases.” It is much less plausible that one could do all that with Magic: The Gathering buddies.^[1]
So, if this model is correct, that (a) Ziz specifically targeted early-stage trans people and (b) early-stage trans people are especially vulnerable to cult recruitment^[2], then the results are less surprising. A compassionate response would be to do something like make a point of warning young trans and maybe-trans people about cult recruitment in general, and perhaps about Ziz specifically (though if most haven’t already heard about Ziz, it might be best to keep it that way). I guess a less-compassionate response is to exclude them completely.
1. ^
  A somewhat similar crop of potential recruits, in terms of psychological vulnerability, would be, well, psychiatric patients. Have there been therapist cults? Oh yes, Dianetics and things derived from it such as Re-evaluation Counseling come to mind. (Was L. Ron Hubbard himself a therapist? He did apparently volunteer at a mental health clinic, but I’m not sure how much professional training he got.)
2. ^
  Research question: Are there other cases of cults that targeted trans / gender-questioning people? I think I’ve heard things, but don’t have good pointers to find out frequency and severity.

localdeity Dec 27, 2024, 7:41 PM
12 points
0
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: If all trade is voluntary, then what is “exploitation?”
I’d point out that the magnitude of the “exploitation” is the magnitude of the incentive for market players to find the better solution. If Bob is the one guy for whom making him wear a tuxedo isn’t worthwhile, and if it’s close to worthwhile—e.g. him wearing it produces $4000 of value to the company over the time he wears it—then that’s $1000 being left on the table. If there are 100 employees being “exploited” like Bob, for whom making them wear tuxedos is extremely wasteful—say it produces only $100 of value for them to wear tuxedos—then there is $490,000 being left on the table, which may be enough to justify making a new company if the existing one is for some reason stubborn about the issue. (Also, the more employees there are in that situation, the more likely it is that someone will complain and someone else will notice the opportunity.)

localdeity Dec 24, 2024, 2:59 AM
3 points
0
in reply to: StartAtTheEnd’s comment on: StartAtTheEnd’s Shortform
Some related scenarios are discussed in my post here, e.g. when popularity ≈ beauty + substance, and if popularity and beauty are readily apparent then you can estimate substance.

localdeity

Biases towards claiming agreement with one’s own beliefs

Weaker biases towards claiming disagreement with one’s own beliefs