MaximumLiberty

Karma: 525

MaximumLiberty Nov 13, 2014, 12:29 AM
5 points
in reply to: Stefan_Schubert’s comment on: Open thread, Nov. 10 - Nov. 16, 2014
On your question 1, I would rephrase it to say that human activities tend to cause global temperatures to rise. Or that human activities have caused global temperatures to rise. Otherwise, you get stuck in the whole issue about the “pause,” which might show that temperatures are not currently rising for reasons that are not fully understood and are subject to much debate. The paper you cite was from early 2010, and was based on research before that, so the pause had not become much-discussed by then.

One thing that I think will be interesting if you run the quiz is to identify a group who resist polarization and are between the extremes. For example, I think there are plenty of people that agree that carbon dioxide causes temperatures to rise (all else being equal) but believe that the feedback loop is not significantly positive. People from each extreme tend to lump them middle-grounders in with the people at the other extreme: “You’re an alarmist!” “You’re a denier!” etc.

MaximumLiberty Nov 13, 2014, 12:12 AM
1 point
in reply to: cameroncowan’s comment on: Open thread, Nov. 10 - Nov. 16, 2014
Or homeschooling. Possibilities:

“Studies show that home-schooled children score worse on tests related to socialization than conventionally educated children.” This is false according to the first paragraph under “Socialization” on en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling in that always true resource, Wikipedia.

“The most cited reason for parents to choose homeschooling over public schools is the public schools’ (a) the lack of religious or moral instruction, (b) social environment, or (c) quality of instruction.” The actual answer is (b), with (a) taking second place and (c) taking third. See http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2006/homeschool/parentsreasons.asp.

MaximumLiberty Nov 12, 2014, 11:38 PM
0 points
in reply to: paulfchristiano’s comment on: Certificates of Impact [Paul Christiano; Link]

I don’t quite understand this. Are you objecting to the quoted argument?

Yes, but I should have been more specific, and I think I probably focused overly much on the sentence about deviation and arbitrage. (I’m blaming jet lag.)

I agree that, if someone can produce certificates at less than what they perceive as a stable-ish price, they will produce more than the price will eventually fall. What I disagree with is the idea (familiar from product markets) that deviation will induce arbitrage (i.e. that an increase in price will induce greater supply of new activities that result in certificates). This is generally untrue in the short term for markets where there are large stocks being held. Money is a classic example; during some periods, precious metals and diamonds were as well. The stocks act as a shock absorber.

The mechanism is that a price increase will induce holders of stocks to sell them. It won’t induce new production until the holders of stock willing to sell at a slightly higher price are exhausted. Of course, this is conditioned on certificates being like these things where people hold them as stocks for later resale, rather than “consuming” them. If the certificates time out, then that would be the equivalent of them being consumed. Likewise if your prediction is right that there are a group of end-purchasers who never resell them.

(In financial markets, market-making intermediaries hold large stocks of financial instruments. I would imagine that a certificates market would need a similar group of market-makers to be liquid. Ideally, this can be a good thing, because the intermediaries can smooth out short term price fluctuations and send a more stable signal to organizations. But, on top of the intermediaries, you have the organizations that hold certificates for the long term.)

Additionally, I was focusing on risk to the system. One systemic risk is that if a holder of certificates runs into financial trouble (which happens to non-profits), they may be forced to dump a large number of certificates on the market.

The validity issue is similar. I’m not concerned if a specific certificate turned out to be false. What would be a systemic risk is the perception that many certificates are false. That would lead holders of certificates to dump them on the market, so that they can reinvest their philanthropic capital into something worthy. (Remember that trustees have a fiduciary duty to protect the finances of the charity, so they can’t just shrug and live with it like you or I might.)

I think there is a material distinction between the situations you describe. GiveWell stands behind a very few efforts at one time. If I want to give, I can easily do a bit of research myself about the organizations that they endorse. If I understand the certificates proposal proposal, the core point is to encompass just about anyone who wants to claim that they did something good. Presumably, that would give rise to organizations that validate those claims. But that seems a quite different undertaking from what GiveWell does today: it would require an organizational structure for mass production. If money is involved, then you get commercial pressures on standards; if money is not involved, you still get political and social pressures. And, if it turns out that the certificate of impact “ratings agencies” were sloppy or used lax standards, then the market suddenly comes to believe that it is holding certificates that don’t represent the activities that the holders were organized to promote. If I was on the board of trustees, I’d dump the certificates and redeploy what philanthropic capital I can salvage. When I do that, and others see the price falling, they might follow suit. And then there is the impact on the organizations that had planned activities on the assumption that they could sell the resulting certificates on the market to cover their costs.

One way to eliminate all of these risks is to make it so that people who buy to hold can’t resell. Then it is much, much more like a grant.

MaximumLiberty Nov 11, 2014, 7:07 PM
0 points
on: Certificates of Impact [Paul Christiano; Link]
I don’t really want to create an account on yet another website, so I’ll comment here. Anyone with a login there should feel free to copy and cross post.

It is a thought-provoking idea, but there seem to be serious problems with the model underling the proposal. The model fails to distinguish between flows and stocks.

Then at equilibrium, the price of certificates of impact on X is equal to the marginal cost of achieving an impact on X. Any deviation is an arbitrage opportunity: if you can do X more cheaply, then you can sell the resulting certificates for a profit; if you are doing X more expensively, then you could save money by buying certificates instead.

This is a faulty analogy to product markets, and is true only if certificates are consumed. They are not.

The better analogy would be to the market for money, where the demand for money is greatly affected by the public’s desire to hold cash. We see hyperinflation (i.e. a rapid decline in the price of money) where the public believes that money is becoming worthless. When that happens, what used to be extra-marginal stock becomes infra-marginal flow. A similar crisis of confidence could occur for certificates of impact. In fact, that is exactly what has happened to carbon credit schemes.

One way to make the model look more like a product model is to expire the certificates. They are only good for a year, or they all expire on December 31, or something like that.

A related point is how to validate that the activity claimed to have an impact actually occurred. This is a systemic risk similar to the problem of assigning credit ratings to collateralized debt obligations. Someone has to say whether or not the activity occurred. If the person saying so is revealed to have exercised insufficient diligence, then the market has a crisis of confidence.

MaximumLiberty Nov 11, 2014, 3:17 PM
5 points
on: My third-of-life crisis

I have become everyone’s joke at the office because I am so unmotivated that I’m unable to arrive on time every morning, but I’ve become so good at the job that my boss doesn’t mind, and literally everyone asks me about basic stuff all the time. I was head editor for one year, but I almost went into nervous breakdown and requested to be downgraded to regular editor, where life is much more manageable.

This sparked two thoughts.

First, if you are already arriving late to work, you might consider intentionally rearranging your day to get up and write first thing. It seems that the path you want most is in writing, so you might look for ways to use the part of your day when your mind is most fresh for that.

Second, not everyone should join management. Being able to do something well is not the same as being able to manage someone else doing it. You seem to fill more the role of a team lead—the expert that everyone goes to asking how to do it. Eventually a good team lead becomes irreplaceable, especially if they actually embrace the role of mentor and teacher. That means that you will have the pull to ask for the projects that interest you most and to ask for more compensation. But using that pull can be a difficult balance. You have to be careful to ask in way that causes your boss to agree you deserve it, even if your boss can’t give it to you. Eventually, the boss will give you something. You just have to avoid being a pest in the meantime.

MaximumLiberty Nov 6, 2014, 7:51 PM
2 points
in reply to: Bundle_Gerbe’s comment on: What are the most common and important trade-offs that decision makers face?
I was thinking build vs buy or I source vs outsource being much like some of the first point.

MaximumLiberty Nov 1, 2014, 2:49 PM
4 points
on: Why is the A-Theory of Time Attractive?
I’m not sure why, but I use A-series for epistemology and B-series for metaphysics. That’s probably deeply wrong somehow, but it fits with a strong belief in the fallibility of both memory and prediction.

MaximumLiberty Nov 1, 2014, 5:22 AM
2 points
on: Recovery Manual for Civilization
I was thinking about this two days ago, which is an odd synchronicity.

My first conclusion was that there are all kinds of events that could lead to a collapse of civilization without exterminating humanity directly. But it may be impossible for humanity to rise back from the ashes if it stays there too long. Humanity can’t take the same path it took to get to where it is now. For example, humanity developed different forms of energy as prices of previous forms rose. For example, we started digging up shallow coal when population grew too high to use charcoal produced from wood. But many of those resources are no longer near the surface. All coal, oil, and gas near the surface has been extracted. So humanity, if it rose again, would have to find a different path.

My conclusion was that I would not want to invest enough time into preparing for the end of the world to get personally involved in preparing for the end of civilization. But some people already do: all the survivalists and similar people. So, if I want to help civilization recover after a collapse, my best alternative is not to try to store the information myself. Instead, it is to reduce the information to a useful form and give it to these people. This is far more robust that trying to think of the best way of having the information survive. Give it to a few thousand people in scattered places with different survival strategies, and it is much more likely that the information survives.

These two facts together led me to conclude that a collaboration to prepare some kind of big, easily read manual of technology would be a valuable contribution to the survival of humanity. It would need to build on itself, somewhat like tech trees in strategy games.

Plus, it would be really amusing for the LW community to decide that one of its bets for saving humanity is to help outfit survivalists with technical know-how.

MaximumLiberty Oct 29, 2014, 9:59 PM
4 points
in reply to: Donovanable’s comment on: Boring Advice Repository
After you get a haircut you like, get a friend to take a picture of you from all four sides (and top, I suppose) with your phone. In future haircuts, show it to the stylist.

MaximumLiberty Oct 29, 2014, 7:45 PM
42 points
on: 2014 Less Wrong Census/Survey
I took the survey. I won’t give it back, either.

MaximumLiberty Oct 28, 2014, 3:33 AM
11 points
in reply to: Nectanebo’s comment on: Stupid Questions (10/27/2014)
There are two typical ways to invest in an index fund, plus one way that isn’t.
1. Buy a mutual fund that mimics the index you want to buy. You technically own shares in the mutual fund, which is an undivided right to a tiny percent of the whole pool. To get your money out, you have to redeem your shares, which happens at the fair market value. (It used to be that redemptions happened at fair market value at market closing price; I don’t know if that is still true.) To fund redemptions, the fund has to keep some cash on hand, so some small percent of your money isn’t actually invested. If you invest in mutual funds in a taxable account, the churn in fund holders’ redemptions create trades that cause capital gains, which creates taxable income for the fund as a whole. It will be a small percent, but it will still be there (on top of taxation of any dividends). This is because the legal model applied to your investment is like you are a partner in a partnership, where you get an allocation of profits and losses that are separate from your receipt of cash.
2. Buy an exchange traded fund that mimics the index you want to buy. These are still mutual funds in operation. The main difference here is that the shares in the fund are themselves tradable. Theoretically, I think this means that the fund does not have to redeem as much, so it can hold much less cash. It would do redemptions if people were bailing out of the market generally, so that sellers outnumber buyers. But the issuer can essentially make money by arbitraging any difference, which means effectively redemptions pay for themselves. Being exchange traded means that the mutual funds have to make some additional SEC filings, but these have become routine once EFT’s became popular, and the costs are spread over a truly vast number of people. The other main difference is that you only pay taxes on capital gains when you sell your ETF shares. That is because the legal model treats an ETF like an investment in a corporation, where the corporation’s profits and losses are not attributed to you, and you only get something when you get cash.
3. You can also buy all the shares yourself, which is something called a “synthetic” fund sometimes in rarefied circles. It eliminates all of the potential capital gains taxes until you sell the underlying assets, but it means that you have to buy a set of shares that would be really expensive and only comes in oddly sized chunks. For example, if you want to buy the stocks in the Dow Jones, that is 30 different stocks, any you would have to buy one of each. That might cost you $1,531.72. Who wants to buy investments at a price of $1,531.72 per unit? What do you do if you have $1,500 or $1,600?That is why ETF’s are so attractive. They get all of the convenience of the mutual fund, the capital gains tax treatment of owning shares directly. Index funds, whether regular mutual funds or exchange traded funds, also have the benefit of spreading fixed costs over huge numbers of people, so the expenses are usually very low.

MaximumLiberty Oct 28, 2014, 2:46 AM
1 point
in reply to: Metus’s comment on: Stupid Questions (10/27/2014)
I think it depends on your goals.
- Have you already decided you want the job? “Based on this interview and the information I have given you, what do you see as my strengths compared to other candidates?” Same question for weaknesses but think about not highlighting them unless you are pretty sure you can defeat them by addressing them. One way to ask about them would be to ask something more leading, like “what are you unsure about, where you would like to hear more from me about the topic?”
- Are you really just thinking about the job, where you already have adequate employment? Then ask about what matters to you in a job.
- Listening to a talk for fun or learning? I think contextualized questions about application of ideas are good to bring the abstract down to the concrete and sometime reveal more. So, you might start a question with, “I am a ___ and in that work I see a lot of ___ . How do you think your idea of ___ applies to a ___ where ___ is usually the case?” I think the key there is not to focus on the introduction. Most people like to talk about themselves, so it is easy to fall into that trap and forget about asking a question.

MaximumLiberty Oct 25, 2014, 8:42 PM
2 points
in reply to: polymathwannabe’s comment on: Noticing
I hadn’t realized, until I moved back to Texas, that I missed how big the sky is here. 180 degrees of sky, with no trees, hills, mountains, and buildings in the way.

MaximumLiberty Oct 25, 2014, 8:19 PM
2 points
on: question: the 40 hour work week vs Silicon Valley?
For these kinds of startups, everyone working is also an investor or owner or is otherwise hitched to the startup’s survival. Working extra long hours can be a signal to investors in two ways. First, the workers believe in the idea enough to work double time. Second, the path to knowing whether the investment is worth another investment round will come sooner.

MaximumLiberty Oct 23, 2014, 1:16 AM
0 points
in reply to: selylindi’s comment on: [Meta] The Decline of Discussion: Now With Charts!
Upvoting #2, way after the fact.

MaximumLiberty Oct 22, 2014, 4:34 PM
9 points
on: One Year of Goodsearching
I just signed up and nominated CFAR as a cause. In the meantime, I selected MIRI. It seems like free money from the perspective of the cause.

EDIT: Goodsearch does not have a canned search provider for IE, so I used http://www.enhanceie.com/ie/searchbuilder.asp to create one. (P.S. No making fun of me for using IE. It’s a work laptop.)

Max L.

MaximumLiberty Oct 20, 2014, 10:25 PM
4 points
in reply to: MaximumLiberty’s comment on: Open thread, Oct. 20 - Oct. 26, 2014
Thanks to both zedzed and Troubadour for helping confirm what I hoped would not be confirmed. Time to turn off Metallica at work.

Focus@Will seems interesting. I downloaded the app and am giving it a try. Its a little hard to figure out what they are saying the increase in focus might be. Still, it is just 5%, that’s enough to pay their annual subscription.

Max L.

MaximumLiberty Oct 20, 2014, 3:47 PM
9 points
on: Open thread, Oct. 20 - Oct. 26, 2014
Does anyone have actual data over whether people working with words on computers is impaired or assisted by (a) music with lyrics or (b) instrumental music without lyrics? (I’d also be curious about the effect on people who have to work with numbers, but that’s not relevant to me.)

Max L.

MaximumLiberty Oct 20, 2014, 3:47 AM
0 points
in reply to: DataPacRat’s comment on: October 2014 Bragging thread.
DataPacRat:

Worm destroyed my productivity for a really long time. I loved that one. That’s another one where I hope the author will get it published. I’ve been holding off reading Pact until it is done.

I have to look up Homestuck. If it is anything like S.I. or Worm, it will be worth the lost productivity.

The only thing I would have changed so far is the part where the group brainstorms names. It goes on too long. It was humorous through about half-way, then its continuation made the point of “this is how to brainstorm,” which I assume is what you were up to. But I’d stop about 75% through the list. But … given that I liked all of the rest, I have to think that your judgment on it is better than mine.

Max L.

MaximumLiberty Oct 19, 2014, 8:21 PM
3 points
in reply to: DavidLS’s comment on: Fixing Moral Hazards In Business Science
I think I get your meaning. You mean that the webapp itself would carry out the testing protocol. I was thinking that it would be designed by the sponsor using standardized components. I think what you are saying is that it would be more rigid than that. This would allow much more certainty in the meaning of the result. Your example of “using X resulted in average weight loss of Y compared to a control group” would be a case that could be standardized, where “average weight loss” is a configurable data element.

Max L.