philh

Karma: 7,302

philh 28 Aug 2024 12:18 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: I would have shit in that alley, too

No they’re not interchangeable. They are all designed with each other in mind, along the spectrum, to maximize profits under constraints, and the reality of rivalrousness is one reason to not simply try to run at 100% capacity every instant.

I can’t tell what this paragraph is responding to. What are “they”?

You explained they popped up from the ground. Those are just about the most excludable toilets in existence!

Okay I do feel a bit silly for missing this… but I also still maintain that “allows everyone or no one to use” is a stretch when it comes to excludability. (Like, if the reason we’re talking about it is “can the free market provide this service at a profit”, then we care about “can the provider limit access to people who are paying for it”. If they can’t do that, do we care that they can turn the service off during the day and on at night?)

Overall it still seems like you want to use words in a way that I think is unhelpful.

philh 22 Aug 2024 17:34 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: gwern’s comment on: I would have shit in that alley, too
Idk, I think my reaction here is that you’re defining terms far more broadly than is actually going to be helpful in practice. Like, excludability and rivalry are spectrums in multiple dimensions, and if we’re going to treat them as binaries then sure, we could say anything with a hint of them counts in the “yes” bin, but… I think for most purposes,
- “occasionally, someone else arrives at the parking lot at the same time as me, and then I have to spend a minute or so waiting for the pay-and-display meter”
is closer to
- “other people using the parking lot doesn’t affect me”
than it is to
- “when I get to the parking lot there are often no spaces at all”
I wouldn’t even say that: bathrooms are highly rivalrous and this is why they need to be so overbuilt in terms of capacity. While working at a cinema, did you never notice the lines for the womens’ bathroom vs the mens’ bathroom once a big movie let out? And that like 99% of the time the bathrooms were completely empty?
My memory is we didn’t often have that problem, but it was over ten years ago so dunno.
I’d say part of why they’re (generally in my experience) low-rivalrous is because they’re overbuilt. They (generally in my experience) have enough capacity that people typically don’t have to wait, and when they do have to wait they don’t have to wait long. There are exceptions (during the interval at a theatre), but it still seems to me that most bathrooms (as they actually exist, and not hypothetical other bathrooms that had been built with less capacity) are low-rivalrous.
None of your examples are a counterexample. All of them are excludable, and you explain how and that the operators choose not to.
I’m willing to concede on the ones that could be pay gated but aren’t, though I still think “how easy is it to install a pay gate” matters.
But did you miss my example of the pop-up urinals? I did not explain how those are excludable, and I maintain that they’re not.

philh 18 Aug 2024 21:09 UTC
4 points
2
on: philh’s Shortform
Thing I’ve been wrong about for a long time: I remembered that the rocket equation “is exponential”, but I thought it was exponential in dry mass. It’s not, it’s linear in dry mass and exponential in Δv.
This explains a lot of times where I’ve been reading SF and was mildly surprised at how cavalier people seemed to be about payload, like allowing astronauts to have personal items.

philh 18 Aug 2024 18:35 UTC
4 points
2
in reply to: dr_s’s comment on: London Rationalish meetup—Lincoln’s Inn Fields
Sorry, I didn’t see this notification until after—did you find us?

philh 16 Aug 2024 11:24 UTC
2 points
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on: Economics101 predicted the failure of special card payments for refugees, 3 months later whole of Germany wants to adopt it
I agree that econ 101 models are sometimes incorrect or inapplicable. But

I don’t know how much that additional cost is, but seemingly less than the benefit, because three months later, the whole of Germany wants to introduce this card. The introduction has to be delayed by some legal issues, and then a few counties want to introduce it independently. So popular is this special card!

The argument here seems to be that the card must satisfy a cost-benefit analysis or it wouldn’t be so popular, and I don’t buy that either.

philh 15 Aug 2024 7:54 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Smaug123’s comment on: Organisation for Program Equilibrium reading group
Ah, I can sometimes make fridays but not tomorrow. Hope it goes well.

London Rationalish meetup—Lincoln’s Inn Fields

philh8 Aug 2024 22:51 UTC

15 points

3 comments1 min readLW link

philh 3 Aug 2024 10:53 UTC
2 points
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on: Multiplex Gene Editing: Where Are We Now?

they turn a C/G base pair to an A/T, or vice versa.

Can they also turn it into a G/C or a T/A? I wasn’t sure if this was an example or a “this is the only edit they do”. Or I might just be misunderstanding and this question is wrong.

philh 23 Jul 2024 8:38 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: rossry’s comment on: Poker is a bad game for teaching epistemics. Figgie is a better one.
I think Ben’s proposal is: between rounds, it takes a while to split the whole deck into suits, all hearts in one pile and all spades in another and so on. Instead you can just pick out four hearts, and four spades, and so on, and remove 0/2/2/4 cards from those piles, and shuffle the rest back into the deck. But no matter how you shuffle, I don’t think you can do that without leaking information.

philh 22 Jul 2024 13:32 UTC
6 points
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in reply to: rsaarelm’s comment on: Sci-Fi books micro-reviews

The Gap Cycle by Stephen R. Donaldson

I think I’ve read this twice, in my early teens and early twenties, and loved it both times. But I’m now 34 and can’t talk about it in depth. I think past-me especially liked the grimness and was impressed at how characters seemed to be doing things for internally motivated reasons. (IIRC Donaldson calls this giving characters “dignity”. I feel like since then I’ve picked up another term for it that’s temporarily slipped my mind.)

I still think A Dark and Hungry God Arises and This Day All Gods Die are excellent book titles.

A caveat is that back then I also loved Donaldson’s Thomas Covenant books, and I think that by my mid-twenties I enjoyed them but not so much. So plausibly I’d like the Gap Cycle less now than then too? But I want to re-read.

Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer

I once saw a conversation that went something like: “I don’t find writing quality in sci-fi that important.” / “You clearly haven’t read Too Like the Lightning”.

I wasn’t sure if the second person meant TLTL’s writing is good or bad. Having read TLTL, both interpretations seemed plausible. (They meant good.)

I found it very difficult to get through this book, except that the last few chapters were kind of gripping. That was enough to get me to read the next one, which was hard to get through again. Ultimately I read the whole series, and I’m not sure how much I enjoyed the process of reading it. But they’re some of my favorite books to have read, and I can imagine myself re-reading them.

Crystal trilogy by Max Harms

I enjoyed this but don’t have much to say. As an AI safety parable it seemed plausible enough; I hadn’t previously seen aliens like that; I occasionally thought some of the writing was amateurish in a way I couldn’t put my finger on, but that wasn’t a big deal.

philh 22 Jul 2024 11:45 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Ben Millwood’s comment on: Poker is a bad game for teaching epistemics. Figgie is a better one.

just make 4 piles of 4 cards from each suit and remove from those

I don’t think you can do this because at least one person will see which cards are in those piles, and then seeing those cards in game will give them more info than they’re supposed to have. E.g. if they see 9h in one of the piles and then 9h in game, they know hearts isn’t the 8-card suit.

(The rules as written are unclear on this. But I assume that you’re meant to remove cards at random from the suits, rather than having e.g. A-8 in one suit, A-Q in one, and A-10 in the other two. If you did that then getting dealt the Q or J would be a dead giveaway.)

philh 11 Jul 2024 6:53 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Elizabeth’s comment on: Exercise: Planmaking, Surprise Anticipation, and “Baba is You”
I think Causality would be good for this. Levels have their full state visible from the start, and there’s no randomness. There’s a relatively small number of mechanics to learn, though I worry that some of them (particularly around details of movement, like “what will an astronaut do when they can’t move forward any more?”) might be “there are multiple equally good guesses here” which seems suboptimal.

Actually, there’s one detail of state that I’m not sure is visible, in some levels:

When you come out of a portal, which way do you face? I think there’s probably a consistent rule for this but I’m not sure, I could believe that in some levels you just have to try it to see.

philh 9 Jul 2024 12:08 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: gwern’s comment on: I would have shit in that alley, too
they are by definition rivalrous (“the consumption of a good or service by one person diminishes the ability of another person to consume the same good or service”), as only one person in a stall at a time, and the timeframe doesn’t matter to this point.
Why does timeframe not matter? If there’s a pay-and-display parking lot, with enough spaces for everyone, but only one ticket machine, would you say this is rivalrous because only one person can be using the ticket machine at once?
Bathrooms aren’t zero rivalrous, but they seem fairly low-rivalrous to me. (There are some people for whom bathroom use is more urgent, making bathrooms more rivalrous, e.g. pregnant people and those with certain disabilities. My understanding is these people sometimes get access to extra bathrooms that the rest of us don’t.)
(As for dirtiness, all I can say is that the public bathrooms I’ve used tend to be somewhere between “just fine” and “unpleasant but bearable”. I did once have to clean shit from the toilet walls in the cinema where I used to work, but I believe it’s literally once in my life I’ve encountered that. Obviously people will have very different experiences here.)
they are extremely excludable: “Excludability refers to the characteristic of a good or service that allows its provider to prevent some people from using it.”
Depends on details. London has some street urinals that afaict pop up at night, they have no locks or even walls, they’re nonexcludable. Some are “open to everyone the attendant decides to let in”, and some are “open to everyone with a credit card”, and these seem just straightforwardly excludable. Other bathrooms can be locked but have no attendant and no means of accepting payment, so they’re either “open to everyone” or “closed to everyone”, and calling that “excludable” feels like a stretch to me. I suppose you could say that you could install a pay gate so it’s “excludable but currently choosing not to exclude people”, but then it depends how easy it is to install one of them.

philh 3 Jul 2024 11:26 UTC
2 points
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on: CIV: a story
So I guess Stuart is named for John Stuart Mill and Milton for Milton Friedman, but what about Carla (is CARLA an acronym?) and Victoria (Tori?)?

philh 29 Jun 2024 23:08 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: Eli Tyre’s comment on: My AI Model Delta Compared To Christiano
Note that to the extent this is true, it suggests verification is even harder than John thinks.

Book review: the Iliad

philh18 Jun 2024 18:50 UTC

20 points

1 comment14 min readLW link

(reasonableapproximation.net)

philh 17 Jun 2024 10:12 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: philh’s Shortform
In any case, where is this hedging discussion happening?
I’ve seen and taken part in discussions about hedging on LW, but the thing that made me write this comment was a conversation on Duncan Sabien’s facebook.
What things are over-discussed?
Interesting question, but nothing comes to mind.

philh 15 Jun 2024 9:23 UTC
10 points
1
on: philh’s Shortform
A thing that feels under-discussed when it comes to hedging is, hedging doesn’t just have to be swapping from “X” to “I believe X”. You can say “the sky looks blue” or “wikipedia says the sky is blue” or “rumor has it the sky is blue” or “IIRC the sky is blue” or “if I did the math right, the sky is blue”.

philh 3 Jun 2024 15:52 UTC
13 points
2
on: How it All Went Down: The Puzzle Hunt that took us way, way Less Online
I for one welcome our new AI overlord whom I unwittingly helped install. Otherwise I’d need to feel conflicted about my actions this weekend.

I still have questions about one of the puzzles. Will the solutions be made available somewhere (ideally in a format where people can try them unspoiled first), or should I just ask?

philh 31 May 2024 13:46 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: det’s comment on: Big-endian is better than little-endian
Ah, thanks, I see now. You’re saying that even if it’s written with the small end before the big end according to the way the words flow, the direction of eye scanning and of mentally parsing and of giving a name to the number is still big end before small end? Similarly I might write a single word sdrawkcab in English text but the reader would still read it first-letter-to-last-letter.

Curious, when handwriting, what order do you write in?

philh

Lon­don Ra­tion­al­ish meetup—Lin­coln’s Inn Fields

Book re­view: the Iliad

London Rationalish meetup—Lincoln’s Inn Fields

Book review: the Iliad