Are those genuine flaws with the model, or is the terminology just suboptimal? Put another way, if you know someone’s 5 factor conscientiousness and agreeableness scores, how useful is that for predicting their behavior?
NoSignalNoNoise
Karma: 1,779
I like what you’re doing, but I feel like the heresies you propose are too tame.
Here are some more radical heresies to consider:
Most people are far more bottlenecked on some combination of akrasia and prospective memory, not on the accuracy of their models of the world. Rationalists in particular would be better off devoting effort to actually doing the obvious things than to understanding the world better.
Self deception is very instrumentally useful a large fraction of real world situations we find ourselves in, and we should use more of it.
Mormons seem to be especially good at coordinating on good lifestyle choices, so we should all consider becoming Mormon.
Among groups of 10+ people, it’s usually more useful to get everyone all working on implementing the same plan than it is to come up with the best plan.
Intelligence (of the sort measured by exams and IQ tests) is only moderately important to success.
I generally watch videos I enjoy while doing physical therapy exercises. I didn’t conceptualize it as hiding the “reward” from myself as an incentive for exercising; I conceptualize it as making the rather boring, sometimes aversive activity less salient by focusing my attention on something else.
As an example, I find it much easier to hold a plank when I’m focused on the video I’m watching than when I’m just starting at the timer counting down.
I’ve tried this approach, and although it works well during the early part of the game, in the late game, a single turn can take 5-10 minutes, which is much less helpful as an exercise interlude.
I’ve found that watching videos I enjoy while doing PT exercises helps. A key component of this strategy was to get a laptop stand with an adjustable angle so that I can position my screen somewhere I can see it (different places depending on how I’m physically positioned for each exercise).
I think the current diversity of music is largely caused by artists’ different lived experiences. You feel something, this is important for you, you try to express that via music. As long as AIs don’t have anything like “unique experiences” on the scale of humans, I’m not sure if they’ll be able to create music that is that diverse (and thus interesting).
If the AI customized it for each listener (and does a good job), then music will reflect the unique experiences of the listeners, which would result in a more diverse range of music than music that only reflects the unique experiences of musicians.
Of course, we could end up in an awkward middle ground where AI only generates variations on a successful pop music formula, and it all becomes a bland mush. But I think in that case, people would just go back to human-generated music on Spotify and YouTube.
I like this collection of concepts, but I feel like I may not be understanding them very well without examples. Do you have any cached examples?
Sure, but that does imply that your marginal utility of money decreases that fast outside that domain.
The assumption that the marginal utility of wealth decreases exponentially doesn’t seem justified to me. Why not some other positive-but-decreasing function, such as
1/W(which yield a logarithmic utility function)?What properties does the utility function need to have for this result to generalize, and are those priorities reasonable to assume?
To pick an uncontroversial example, imagine someone glomerizing in whether the Earth was flat or (approximately) spherical. That would signal that you’re the sort of person who considered a spherical Earth to be a plausible hypothesis, which is almost as bad as actually believing it. All reasonable, right-thinking people, on the other hand, know that it’s obviously flat and wouldn’t even consider such nonsense.
How do you determine where it’s ok for her to go barefoot?
I think it’s intentional. He’s saying that reducing the fee from $23k to $230 would be an improvement.
The FDA used to have a long backlog of drug approval applications due to understaffing. This problem was eventually addressed by the Prescription Drug User Fee Act, which established filling fees for drug approvals and a deadline to review new drug applications. The filling fees were a way to make the cost of additional staffing politically palatable, and are much less than the costs of approval delays.
How does this compare to the costs of making (part of) Antarctica habitable?
Do you have any examples (or likely examples) of this happening?
Spicy food. Plants evolved capsaicin production in order to deter mammals from eating them, yet many humans (myself included) like eating plants specifically because they contain capsaicin.
This post reads as a call to action (or inaction), but it’s not clear what you’re saying people should do. Can you be more explicit about that?
Normal subcultures don’t have infosec requirements, let alone infosec requirements effective enough for intelligence agencies
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How would you recommend shorting long-dated bonds? My understanding is that both short selling and individual bond trading have pretty high fees for retail investors.
Border adjustment taxes generally consist of an X% tax on imports coupled with an X% subsidy on exports, so that would already increase exports.
Making the import tax and export subsidy the same is also more economically efficient, because it doesn’t impose a net tax on cross border supply chains (imagine manufacturing a car in the US, attaching the wheels in Canada, and then selling it in the US)