Pimgd

Karma: 197

Pimgd 18 Oct 2024 14:45 UTC
2 points
1
in reply to: whestler’s comment on: Universal Basic Income and Poverty
If UBI were being offered across the US, I would expect them to rise by the amount of UBI.
For subsidies per purchase, maybe.
But not for subsidies per human.
Imagine some prefab tiny house off the grid somewhere in a food desert. I don’t think its rent will go up by the UBI amount.
Also, there are houses that house two people (or more!). If there’s limited supply in comparison to the demand, I’d expect that the costs of those might go up by more than UBI (because there’s two people’s worth of UBI as extra budget available).

Pimgd 17 Apr 2024 10:14 UTC
1 point
0
on: On green
So I find it interesting that God, in the story above, rejected this throne. Unlike us, he had the option of full control, and a perfectly aligned world. But he chose something different. He left pure self behind, and chose instead to create Otherness—and with it, the possibility (and reality) of evil, sin, rebellion, and all the rest.
I see reasoning or rationalizing from fictional evidence here. You’re looking at a story created by some human to serve some purpose (my guess: some vague gesturing at religion & answering the question of why-can-there-be-evil-in-this-world-if-god-is-perfectly-good), and you’re surprised that something in that story happens the way it does.
The story doesn’t work for the purpose that I think it’s made for if that choice wasn’t made. You can’t say “and that perfect world, is the one we’re living in” because then you’ll be met with so many counter points (why war, why disease, why death...) that you’ll drown in them.
There are examples you can use, but this is not one of them. This one is fake. Manufactured by humans. For instance, this “these ancient forests could hold the secret to the next vaccine” argument? Yeah, it doesn’t fit here, but it has the right idea, maybe? The idea that, if you don’t exert control over something and leave it to its own devices, then it might produce something that you yourself wouldn’t think of / that you couldn’t make yourself? Or the part where you just give an artist a patronage and no direction, because you think they’ll do better without your input.
Maybe my suggestion is too blue. But I do think that using the “god allowed freedom and as such we got humans and that’s an example of why you might not want to control everything” is assigning too much agency to this god character.

Pimgd 30 Jun 2023 9:40 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Zvi’s comment on: AI #18: The Great Debate Debate
That’s fair, and I have a workaround now with nitter.

Pimgd 30 Jun 2023 8:30 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Pimgd’s comment on: AI #18: The Great Debate Debate
For now, URL rewriting seems to do the trick: replacing twitter.com with nitter.net allows me to view. It’s slow, though, and I have no idea whether nitter is safe or whether it will be able to handle the traffic.

Pimgd 30 Jun 2023 8:17 UTC
1 point
0
on: AI #18: The Great Debate Debate
Twitter no longer allows accessing tweets without logging in. If it’s not too much effort, can you include the text of a tweet (like you’ve already done for some)? Twitter links are now effectively dead for me.

Pimgd 16 Feb 2023 14:28 UTC
3 points
1
in reply to: RomanHauksson’s comment on: Buy Duplicates
Duplicate IDs are hard to come by. However, you might be able to have multiple different forms of ID (such as an ID card and a passport).

Pimgd 16 Feb 2023 14:25 UTC
3 points
−1
in reply to: mingyuan’s comment on: Buy Duplicates
Shoes might be the one item that you can’t do this for, but maybe I’m wrong.

Pre-covid, I bought a pair of shoes. But I am averse to throwing items away before they are properly “dead” (or until they really require effort), so shoes that still have some soles on them (and fit comfortably rather than the tight fit of new shoes) would still be used.
Because there were lockdowns and the like, I wore my shoes a lot less. I went out a lot less. My grocery store is rather close to my house. The new shoes spent two years in their shoe box.
Lockdowns were lifted and I started spending more time outdoors again. Within a month, my old shoes were deemed “properly dead”, and I switched to the new shoes. But within two weeks, the leather on them started flaking off.
Maybe I bought poor quality shoes. Or maybe I didn’t store my new shoes well. But I’ve got the feeling that shoes don’t keep as well as most other clothing does, and that you won’t get the full lifetime out of an old-new pair.

Pimgd 25 Apr 2022 11:17 UTC
1 point
1
on: Coherent decisions imply consistent utilities
So the fact that Alice can’t be viewed as having any coherent relative value for apples and oranges, corresponds to her ending up with qualitatively less of some category of fruit (without any corresponding gains elsewhere).
It’s possible that the fruit has negative value, and that the behavior aims to reduce the total negative value.
The situations:
8a1o, 0a3o, 2a2o, 5a1o.

If apples are minus two and oranges are minus seven then all trades are rational. 8a1o is valued at −23, 0a3o is valued at −21, 2a2o is valued at −18, 5a1o is valued at −17.

Pimgd 16 Mar 2022 9:54 UTC
6 points
in reply to: localdeity’s comment on: Challenges to Yudkowsky’s Pronoun Reform Proposal
Japanese has formality as verb conjugations—http://www.japaneseverbconjugator.com/VerbDetails.asp?txtVerb=%E8%A1%8C%E3%81%8F—iku 行く as “will go (plain)” and ikimasu 行きます as “will go (polite)”. Translators try to preserve this, but I personally find translating that to be kinda hard. “I’ll go” and “I will go” is the best I can do off the top of my head (watashi wa iku/watashi wa ikimasu—and as a more realistic example, kaisha ni iku/kaisha ni ikimasu—I’ll go to the office/I will go to the office—“watashi/I” being left out because Japanese is contextual).

Pimgd 28 Jun 2017 14:27 UTC
4 points
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Open thread, June 26 - July 2, 2017
Ethereum is working on proof of stake, which boils down to “I believe that this future is what really happened, and to guarantee so, here’s $1000 that you may destroy if it’s not true.”

https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Proof-of-Stake-FAQ

Key quote for me:

“in PoW, we are working directly with the laws of physics. In PoS, we are able to design the protocol in such a way that it has the precise properties that we want—in short, we can optimize the laws of physics in our favor. The “hidden trapdoor” that gives us (3) is the change in the security model, specifically the introduction of weak subjectivity.”

Pimgd 19 Jun 2017 12:03 UTC
3 points
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Concrete Ways You Can Help Make the Community Better
Hmm, true.

I’m not sure you understood my other point, though—using the statistics for the ssc survey might contain a bias because see reasons above.

Pimgd 19 Jun 2017 10:27 UTC
1 point
on: Instrumental Rationality 1: Starting Advice
One piece of obvious advice I’ve heard a lot is that you should exercise more.

I have a lot of … probably weak … counterarguments to this. They seem to be rationalizations; e.g. “I don’t want to do this because …”.

For example, I’ll list a few.
- Why should I exercise if I’m already at a good weight?
- Why should I exercise if my daily life (programming) does not require significant physical skill?
- Why should I exercise if I already go on a short (15 min) daily walk—is more really needed?
- I don’t want to feel tired, so exercising doesn’t feel rewarding to me at all
- Exercising takes up time, I’d rather not spend this time exercising
- If you live a longer life because of exercising, how do you know you’re not running a red queen’s race (you have to stay fit lest you get a heart attack 6 months later because it’s old and you die anyway)
Rather than looking for cutting edge ideas to be more productive, I’m rather looking for a cutting edge idea as to why obvious advice would work / be given.

Possibly I should make a reddit account and post on changemyview or something. I just don’t see why I should exercise at the moment given that I have the weight I want and the fitness to do what I need to do and don’t have any health issues related to fitness (dental issues, but that’s a separate point and due to a filling that seems have been placed improperly).

Then again, I sometimes feel as if I’m one-eyed, saying “I understand how having two eyes would be better, but is it really necessary? Operating is hard, it costs money, it takes time, I’d have to go to the hospital, it’d be a huge thing, and I can already see right now, so I don’t see why you’d want two eyes. Yeah, okay, the redundancy would be nice, that you’re not blinded if your one eye gets dirty or develops issues, but is all the hassle really worth a second eye?” And I’d feel that the answer that would convince me is actually seeing out of two eyes and realizing that hey, you can sort of see in 3D now and estimate distance and you get depth perception and a wider field of vision and it’s easier to read or skim text and blah blah blah blah—but you wouldn’t know that, because you only have one eye.

What’s the two-eyed benefit of exercising?

Pimgd 19 Jun 2017 10:10 UTC
6 points
on: Concrete Ways You Can Help Make the Community Better
I stopped commenting on slatestarcodex because they disabled anonymous accounts and I didn’t feel like signing up because the comments weren’t that important for me anyway, plus there’s enough comments down there already that there’s too much noise to communicate anything.

Pimgd 13 Jun 2017 13:44 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Open thread, June. 12 - June. 18, 2017

And the second options feels like: “omg, we can’t take any criticism; we have become a cult just like some people have always accused us!”.

You mean “the second option is disabled”. which would leave upvote or ignore.

Pimgd 9 Jun 2017 9:25 UTC
0 points
in reply to: DragonGod’s comment on: Destroying the Utility Monster—An Alternative Formation of Utility
Does it “not happen” or does it “unhappen” or does it “get fixed”?

Pimgd 8 Jun 2017 14:38 UTC
2 points
on: Destroying the Utility Monster—An Alternative Formation of Utility
Maybe your utility system works, but I don’t feel like it matches our world.

Plus, what does the “negation” of an event even mean? If someone that I care about dies, I feel sad. If they then come back, I don’t feel not-sad, rather I’d be pretty disturbed (and of course happy) because what the hell just happened.

That is to say, if you stab me, but then use a magic wand to make it go away, I don’t go back to normal, I become really scared of you instead.

You could say that “negating” an event turns it into “it never happened”. But then I don’t know what it means or how you could steer actions with it. You can’t “negate” events that already happened, so, best you can do with the model is “yeah, I guess we shouldn’t have done that”?

Pimgd 8 Jun 2017 14:28 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Oscar_Cunningham’s comment on: Bet or update: fixing the will-to-wager assumption
How about no, because I prefer my stability and I don’t want to track random bets on stuff I don’t care about?

Apply marginal utility and a ⁵⁰⁄₅₀ coin with the opportunity to bet a dollar, and you’ve got 50% chance to, say, gain 9.9998 points and 50% chance to lose 10 points. Why bother playing?

The only reasons to play are is if an option is discounted (4x payout for heads and 1.5x payout on tails on a fair coin), if you don’t care about the winnings but about playing the game itself, or if there’s a threshold to reach (e.g. if I had 200 dollars then I could do payoff something else which would avoid the deferred interest from coming into play, saving me 1000 dollars, so I would take a 60% chance to lose 100 dollars because those extra 100 dollars are worth not 100 but 1000 to me).

Plus there’s always epsilon—“the coin falls on its side” or other variations.

Pimgd 29 May 2017 10:45 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)’s comment on: Dragon Army: Theory & Charter (30min read)
I don’t know if I’m neutral (no, because I have an account here for a while now), but I wouldn’t have the same confidence to swing that bet out of there like you do. The post in and of itself is not convincing enough for me to say that your idea won’t work, but it certainly makes me go “hmm, well, he might have a point there”.

Specifically:
- “Normal” people don’t need to explicitly write out all the rules for their housing with regards to social rules.
- But here there’s a large list of rules and activitities and all that with the goal of getting group housing to work properly.
- Also, here’s some examples of the group of people that you want to source your participants from having low social skills.
- By the way, if you set up a ton of rules then it usually won’t work.
- Thus, there’s a pretty big chance that the rules will not work out and that the social skills of the participants will be too low to have the group housing work.
I am not convinced that this is the truth.

However, if I read in a year from now that this is what happened, I would not be surprised.

Basically what I’m saying is I can see 1 or 2 people leaving due to drama despite the rules if you try this, with a chance greater than, I dunno, 10%?

Pimgd 12 May 2017 12:43 UTC
0 points
in reply to: RomeoStevens’s comment on: Working with multiple problems at once
I take methylphenidate but that’s because I have ADD.

Pimgd 11 May 2017 15:12 UTC
0 points
in reply to: RomeoStevens’s comment on: Working with multiple problems at once
Can you un-metaphor this for me? I don’t get what you’re talking about.