michael_vassar2

Karma: 123

michael_vassar2 Aug 4, 2018, 6:38 PM
3 points
in reply to: DanielFilan’s comment on: What are your plans for the evening of the apocalypse?
Good point. Largely depends on how many ‘fundamentals’ investors there are in debt relative to ‘speculative’ investors.

michael_vassar2 Aug 3, 2018, 5:28 AM
6 points
on: Fixing science via a basic income
In some disciplines, like working in an Amazon warehouse, intrinsic motivation is low and both cheating and legitimate but zero sum efforts are unlikely. There, ever greater competition for economic and social rewards generate ever better results. In other domains, like the creation of knowledge and especially the evaluation of knowledge, intrinsic motivation is relatively strong, cheating is easy or likely to succeed or zero sum situations are the default. In those domains, competition leads to the displacement of necessary activities by highly optimized forms of fraud. At the extreme, nobody argues that we need profit maximization by judges or by generals. Unfortunately, using pharmceutical companies to produce medical innovation isn’t very much better and ever more commercialized and competitive academia isn’t much better than that.

Nobody is confused about this. We don’t have incentives this terrible by accident. Rather, there are constituencies in favor of accurate shared information and constituencies against. The latter, unfortunately have been working unopposed for a long time

michael_vassar2 Aug 3, 2018, 3:39 AM
6 points
on: Anti-tribalism and positive mental health as high-value cause areas
Sometimes tribalism leads to the loss of gains from trade, so reality will down-regulate it. At other times it leads to gains through coalitionally resource capture. When the latter is occurring, greater ‘mental health’, in a biological sense, will lead to increased tribalism. We can use ‘mental health’ as a euphemism for ‘being autistic’ but doing so won’t change fitness gradients. If tribalism was actually unhealthy, it would be lost by evolution like any other complex adaptation.

If we want less tribalism, or simply more gains from trade, the thing to do is almost certainly to empower less tribal people to understand it better so as to better defend themselves from it via non-tribal patterns of affiliation, which is impossible by definition if you use tribalism as a synonym for coalitional politics. Can we do better?

michael_vassar2 Aug 3, 2018, 3:22 AM
8 points
on: What are your plans for the evening of the apocalypse?
The consensus would converge on it being fake news. No downside to being wrong, so prediction makes would agree with this consensus.

People with professional skills relevant to evaluating the claims who denied the data would rapidly rise to the top of their professions.

michael_vassar2 Jun 13, 2018, 7:36 PM
10 points
on: Toolbox-thinking and Law-thinking
I’m pretty certain that I can pass the ITT for both law and tool thinking, but it’s complicated because undwrneath Tool Thinking is the belief that there are things about thinking that need to be concealed, which implies that it will generally oppose an accurate account of it’s actual beliefs. In Law Thinking, every truth reveals every other truth and concealment is impossible in theory and impractical in the long term in practice. If things need to be concealed, it’s important to oppose the possibility of inference.

michael_vassar2 May 31, 2018, 4:45 PM
8 points
on: Meta-Honesty: Firming Up Honesty Around Its Edge-Cases
Wasn’t your old rule officially “don’t lie to someone unless you would also feel good about slashing their tires given the opportunity?” Or something very close to that? That already solves the standard Kantean problems.
What links here?
- Zack_M_Davis's comment on Relevance Norms; Or, Gricean Implicature Queers the Decoupling/Contextualizing Binary by Zack_M_Davis (Nov 24, 2019, 7:42 PM; 5 points)

michael_vassar2 Apr 20, 2018, 5:30 PM
3 points
on: Weird question: could we see distant aliens?
Why doesn’t any monochromatic light not on the natural spectrum of an element do it? Or rather, any cluster of nearby frequencies to accommodate redshift.

michael_vassar2 Mar 21, 2018, 6:39 PM
11 points
on: Explicit and Implicit Communication
Also, NVC is more like passive aggressive communication than explicit communication.

michael_vassar2 Mar 21, 2018, 6:38 PM
0 points
on: Explicit and Implicit Communication
And then, you know, Phillip came and conquered the Spartans...

michael_vassar2 Jan 29, 2018, 7:51 PM
15 points
0
in reply to: PeterBorah’s comment on: A LessWrong Crypto Autopsy
I bought 200 BTC and lost them in a hack. Later bought 50 ether and kept them in a wallet, so I still have those. In light of that, I’d say security was pretty important!

michael_vassar2 Oct 13, 2017, 7:43 PM
1 point
in reply to: sarahconstantin’s comment on: Clueless World vs. Loser World
Benquo’s comment is correct.

michael_vassar2 Oct 12, 2017, 8:02 PM
4 points
in reply to: paulfchristiano’s comment on: Distinctions in Types of Thought
It seems casually obvious that raccoons and crows engage in deliberate thought. Possibly hunting spiders and octopods do. Also obvious at this point that we have more processing power available than hunting spiders.
Everything biology does has an explanation as concise as the algorithmic complexity of the genome, which isn’t obviously intractable for understanding at all of the relevant levels of description.

michael_vassar2 Oct 12, 2017, 7:51 PM
1 point
in reply to: the gears to ascension’s comment on: Distinctions in Types of Thought
I really wish you would give his argument for the claim that we (even plausibly) have all the pieces, Lahwran. I would also love to see an abridged transcript of a discourse wherein the two of you reached a double-crux. My best guess is that Lahwran is thinking of ‘only integrating existing systems’ as a triviality which can be automated by the market rather than what it actually is, a higher-level instance of the design problem.

That said, the idea that thinking has been tried seems so insane to me that I may be failing to steelman it accurately.

michael_vassar2 Oct 12, 2017, 7:48 PM
2 points
in reply to: sarahconstantin’s comment on: Distinctions in Types of Thought
I’m not influenced by him, but his (and Gary Marcus’) approach seems like common sense to me. It seems likely that Sarah’s ability to track ideology to its philosophical roots can contribute to Tenenbaum’s and Marcus’ abilities to present their perspectives compellingly to people with more philosophical and less technical bent who have the relatively high trust in consensus which tends to accompany technical ability but which is the opposite of Thiel’s effective investment strategies.

michael_vassar2 Oct 12, 2017, 7:45 PM
1 point
on: Distinctions in Types of Thought
FWIW, https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26794 is the best actual argument I have seen for deep learning being a qualitative new capability, but it looks like the capability “analogy/metaphor” not the capability ‘awareness’ or ‘deliberate thought’.

michael_vassar2 Oct 9, 2017, 8:05 PM
11 points
in reply to: the gears to ascension’s comment on: Nobody does the thing that they are supposedly doing
It seems to me that Kaj is saying that he didn’t know this after reading the Sequences. In light of that, it’s not repetition. It’s very possible that this post still didn’t convey the content that he was trying to convey to you, the tacit knowledge drawn from books and life outside of LW. To me, the post seems novel, but also vulnerable to not being taken literally. I feel that if it was taken literally and then exceptions were enumerated, elucidating patterns would appear. In light of that, I’ll start in a new post.

michael_vassar2 Oct 9, 2017, 5:44 PM
1 point
in reply to: Conor Moreton’s comment on: The Just World Hypothesis
Please spell this one out.

The Just World Hypothesis

michael_vassar2Oct 9, 2017, 6:03 AM

17 points

9 comments3 min readLW link

michael_vassar2 Oct 8, 2017, 4:55 PM
3 points
on: Catalonia and the Overton Window
Just a reminder that police haven’t always been a part of ‘government’, and that ‘law’ has a history of existence independent of ‘government’. During historic times, most of the population of the world has usually been owned and farmed, but most of the people who have ever lived have not lived that way. Also, most of the actual history of the world, as measured by what gets recorded, has not been the history of owned and farmed populations, but rather, the history of free populations, in frontier territories like the US, in city states and ‘free cities’, and of course, among aristocratic or international elites. In America and Europe, the modern state is fairly new. Passports arose during WWI. So did large amounts of the economy passing through federal bureaucracies. I think that one can plausibly argue that in America, proper law Ended at that time and was replaced by ‘the interpretation of the Common Law’ as articulated by Pragmatist philosopher Oliver Wendal Holmes.

michael_vassar2 Oct 8, 2017, 4:39 PM
2 points
on: Curriculum suggestions for someone looking to teach themselves contemporary philosophy
Philosophy does a lot of different things. Good and Real is trying to correct some confusions which people tend to have early in their lives, as is someone like Hume or Descartes. Something like Nietzsche or Aristotle is aiming at somewhat older people in a lower trust context. Not smarter or wiser, but in more adult situations. Kant is partially trying to support and influence a political order. Deleuze is trying to take one down. Foucault is essential reading for understanding how contemporary institutions violate the principles that justify them and originated through the evolution of institutions we would today consider abhorrent via the modification of superficial features. He’s the author I would expect a recent “Sequences” grad to get the most benefit from.