Said Achmiz

Karma: 16,376

Said Achmiz Apr 9, 2025, 6:45 PM
6 points
0
in reply to: jimmy’s comment on: Navigation by Moonlight

The other issue with your choice of denominator is that if the woman definitely wants the date she likely won’t be subtle.

You mean, like the woman in your anecdote about your friend tutoring in college…?

The problem with your argument is that it doesn’t at all explain all the cases where the woman definitely wants a date, is definitely interested in the guy, is very frustrated by (what she would characterize as) the guy’s obliviousness (and quite likely complains about this to her friends), and yet still won’t say anything.

When you have a situation where the woman knows the man is going to be interested in her

But of course this is an absurd requirement. If she knows he’s going to be interested, of course that makes it vastly easier!

… and yet, according to your own account, women still won’t say anything in that situation, despite having a guarantee of a positive response. What does that tell you?

really really obvious clues like leaning in and forcing the man to contend with the fact that she’s there waiting to be kissed

In fact there is no such as “forcing the man to contend with” anything. People (not just men) are, as it turns out, perfectly capable of totally ignoring a cue like this, and indeed of not even noticing it in the first place. A woman who thinks that leaning in and waiting to be kissed is somehow a guarantee that a man will correctly perceive the cue, is sadly, sadly mistaken.

In short, approximately everybody senses women’s cues whether they recognize it or not, whether they know what to do with it or not, and they’re only subtle and ambiguous to the extent that their purpose is served by being subtle and ambiguous.

Sorry, but this is empirically false.

Said Achmiz Apr 8, 2025, 12:55 AM
14 points
7
on: Coupling for Decouplers

So you can only imagine the excitement when, a few years after LessWrong was established, we found that *literally all every part of your brain does is make Bayesian updates to minimize prediction errors. *Scott Alexander wrote several excited articles about it. I wrote several excited articles about it. And most everyone else said ok cool story we’re gonna ignore it and just do AI posting now.

Did we “find” this? That’s not what seems to me to have happened.

As far as I can tell, this is a speculative theory that some people found to be very interesting. Others said “well, perhaps, this is certainly an interesting way of thinking about some things, although there seem to be some hiccups, and maybe it has some correspondence to actual reality, maybe not—in any case do you have a more concrete model and stronger evidence?” and got the answer “more research is needed”. Alright, cool, by all means, proceed, research more.

And then nothing much came of it, and so of course it was thereafter mostly ignored. What is there to say about it or do with it?

Said Achmiz Apr 7, 2025, 7:47 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: Screwtape’s comment on: The Lizardman and the Black Hat Bobcat

Conservation of expected evidence, if I see an Amazon review page with reviews saying “instead of office chair, package contained bobcat” my odds they’re sending bobcats did go up at least somewhat.

Yes, of course. But your odds that it’s a competitor’s plot should also go up—and will end up higher by far. (This is one of the myriad examples of what Jaynes called the “resurrection of dead hypotheses”.)

Said Achmiz Apr 7, 2025, 2:16 PM
4 points
0
on: The Lizardman and the Black Hat Bobcat
If I see an Amazon / eBay / etc. review page with a bunch of reviews that say “instead of office chair, package contained bobcat”, my immediate assumption will be that a competitor of the seller has paid for a bunch of bad reviews.

This sort of thing happens regularly.

More generally, given a heuristic that you would apply to a situation, ask: who can profit by exploiting that heuristic. If such people exist, then assume that they are already exploiting your heuristic.

The task, then, is to determine whether bobcatters are more or less common than unscrupulous sellers who would pay for fake reviews that accuse their competitors of being bobcatters.

Thus also in social situations.

Determining and comparing respective base rates is not trivial, but without assuming that adversarial optimization exists, you will predictably fail to get the right answer, quite often. (Increasingly often, in fact, due to incentives.)

Said Achmiz Apr 4, 2025, 4:53 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: Ben’s comment on: Cheesecake Frosting
But is this because you didn’t know what cream cheese was?

Said Achmiz Apr 4, 2025, 8:45 AM
4 points
−1
on: Cheesecake Frosting
In my experience, everyone already understands that cream cheese frosting is (a) sweet, and (b) delicious. I have never met anyone, nor heard of anyone, who was somehow under the impression that cream cheese frosting is in any way incongruous or weird.

In other words, as far as I can tell, the problem you are describing is completely nonexistent.

Said Achmiz Apr 4, 2025, 8:43 AM
6 points
7
in reply to: jbash’s comment on: Cheesecake Frosting

cured fish.

Why would I do that to myself? I don’t feel my sins deserve that level of punishment.

Perhaps you are not aware of the lox & cream cheese bagel sandwich, a venerable and beloved item of New York City cuisine. If you have not had this food, then you are missing out on a singular life experience, and you are spiritually impoverished by this lack. I suggest rectifying this omission forthwith.

Said Achmiz Apr 2, 2025, 12:55 AM
4 points
0
on: Insect Suffering Is The Biggest Issue: What To Do About It

Humans display a bias called scope neglect. Because we can’t intuitively grok how much larger some big numbers are than others, we have a tendency to treat big numbers all the same. People will pay as much to save 2,000 birds as 20,000 and 200,000 birds.

This is a deeply misleading characterization of that study.

Said Achmiz Mar 23, 2025, 6:50 AM
22 points
5
on: Socially Graceful Degradation

If I got suddenly teleported to the court of Genghis Khan and proposed we vote on who’s in charge, this obviously doesn’t work.

Genghis Khan was, in fact, elected:

All Great Khans of the Mongol Empire, for example Genghis Khan and Ögedei Khan, were formally elected in a Kurultai; khans of subordinate Mongol states, such as the Golden Horde, were elected by a similar regional Kurultai.

Said Achmiz Mar 19, 2025, 10:11 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: philh’s comment on: Boots theory and Sybil Ramkin

I think you’ve had her buy an extra pair of boots.

Ah, true. So, $239.41, at the end.

(Of course, this all assumes that the cheap boots don’t get more expensive over the course of 14 years. Siderea does say that she spends $20 each year on boots, but that’s hard to take seriously over a decade-plus period…)

Said Achmiz Mar 19, 2025, 8:56 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: nim’s comment on: Boots theory and Sybil Ramkin

We might be talking about poverty at different orders of magnitude, and you might be writing off a lot of failures to purchase efficiently as “skill issue”… but being poor in skills and the capacity to hone them is, itself, a form of poverty.

Once we’ve redefined “poverty” to mean something other than poverty, we can obviously make all sorts of claims about it. Being “poor in skills and the capacity to hone them” can be the cause of poverty. Notice how this is a different cause from the one that “boots theory” posits.

As I’ve written, I have personally experienced my family being quite poor. Buying a roll of toilet paper instead of a whole package, or buying just one meal’s worth of food instead of a week’s worth, is definitely a “skill issue”.

Being poor is unpleasant in many ways. It being “expensive” is not one of them.

Said Achmiz Mar 19, 2025, 6:52 PM
4 points
0
in reply to: philh’s comment on: Boots theory and Sybil Ramkin

In another world, Siderea buys $20 boots and invests $260. …

I think that your calculation is a bit off. After a year, she’ll have $258.20 (i.e., ($260 * 1.07) − $20). After two years, $256.27 (i.e., ($258.20 * 1.07) − $20). And so on. After 14 years, she’ll have $219.41.

Still better than buying the expensive boots—in purely financial terms.

(Inflation-adjustment is another important point, of course. That $200 in 2005 would be $265 in 2018 dollars.)

In short, yes, this is indeed a very poor example—ironic, as it’s a real-life version of the original example!

(This is also often missing when people talk about buying versus renting. Yes, the mortgage is often lower than rent, and house value is likely higher at the end, but you gave up investing your deposit. How do those effects compare? Probably depends on time and place.)

This is precisely what made renting come out far ahead, in my aforementioned calculation. (And this is without even considering the time value of money.)

Said Achmiz Mar 19, 2025, 2:23 PM
5 points
0
in reply to: Chris_Leong’s comment on: Boots theory and Sybil Ramkin

buying poor quality food and then having to pay for medical care

I have seen this sort of thing mentioned, but I don’t think that it works.

Let’s set aside for the moment the somewhat tenuous and indirect connection between the food you eat today, and the medical care you will require, some years down the line. (If you end up with heart disease in ten years because you’ve been eating poorly, surely this can’t be any part of the reason why you’re poor today—that would require some sort of anti-temporal causation!)

And let’s also set aside this business of “having to pay for medical care”. (Even in the United States—famously the land of medical bills—the poorest people are also the ones who are eligible for Medicaid. You’re more likely to have to pay for medical care if you’re sufficiently well-off to eat well than if you’re very poor!)

Let’s instead consider just this notion that there’s a causal connection between being poor and eating poor quality food—and specifically, the sort of food that contributes to poor health outcomes—because you can’t afford healthy food.

There was a time when my own family was very poor. (We’d just arrived in the United States as brand-new immigrants, with little more than the proverbial clothes on our backs; my mother had to work two, or sometimes three, jobs just to pay the rent; even my grandfather, then already of retirement age, got a job delivering newspapers.) As I would routinely help my grandmother with grocery shopping, I was very well acquainted with how much it cost to feed a family on a very tight budget, what sorts of purchasing decisions needed to be made, etc.

And what I can tell you is that the sort of food we ate was not cheap-but-unhealthy. Rather, it was cheap-but-healthy. What was missing was luxuries and variety—not nutrition! You can, in fact, have a healthy (and even tasty) diet on a tight budget. I have extensive personal experience with this.

The difference between my family and the poor people who buy junk food is much more cultural than anything else. Specifically, the missing ingredient is cultural transmission of knowledge of, and expertise in, preparation of nutritious, satisfying food under severe financial constraints. My family’s cultural background contains a tremendous amount of accumulated wisdom on this topic. Someone who, for whatever reason, lacks access to such cultural metis, will be severely disadvantaged in this regard. But this has nothing to do with poverty as such.

buying a cheap car that costs more in repairs

This, too, is a dubious example. The key word here is “more”. More than what?

Do you mean:

(1) “Car A (which costs less), over a period of N years, requires repairs of cost totaling X; car B (which costs more), over the same period of N years, requires repairs of cost totaling Y; X > Y”

If so, then notice that this does not support “boots theory”! But perhaps you instead mean:

(2) “Car A (which costs less), over a period of N years, requires repairs of cost totaling X; car B (which costs more), over the same period of N years, requires repairs of cost totaling Y; (cost[A] + X) > (cost[B] + Y)”

This might support “boots theory”. But is it plausible?

The car I currently drive was bought used, at a cost of ~$13,000, in 2016. Since then I have spent ~$2,000 on repairs (not counting inspections and oil changes, which will apply to everyone equally), for a total of ~$15,000.

In 2016, I could instead have purchased a much cheaper used car, for ~$3,000. Suppose that this had been all I could afford. For this to have turned out to be a “boots theory”-supporting example, I’d then have to spend ~$12,000, in the 9-year period since, on repairs.

Seems improbable. Indeed, at that point, I could just buy another car. I could buy a new car four times! (And notice that this scenario would then still not support “boots theory”.)

payday loans

This is a complicated topic, and I am not qualified to opine confidently on it. I will say only that it seems like a highly non-central example of the alleged phenomenon.
What links here?
- Said Achmiz's comment on Boots theory and Sybil Ramkin by philh (Mar 19, 2025, 8:56 PM; 2 points)

Said Achmiz Mar 19, 2025, 1:23 PM
12 points
3
in reply to: Davidmanheim’s comment on: Boots theory and Sybil Ramkin
paying rent instead of buying and building equity

It’s interesting that you should mention this. I currently rent an apartment. At one point, some years ago, I realized that my financial situation was such that, if I wanted to, I could buy a condo or co-op. I recalled the received wisdom that owning is better than renting, and looked into my options. After doing the math, I concluded that, on a time horizon of 10, 20, 30, or 40 years^[1], renting unambiguously came out ahead—and not just slightly ahead, but way ahead. Buying an apartment would have amounted to setting a big pile of money on fire for no reason whatsoever. The received wisdom was diametrically wrong.

(One can make all sorts of objections to this, along the lines of “but isn’t this just because of the crazy real estate market in NYC”, or “but isn’t this just because of historically-unusual economic situation X which currently obtains”, etc. But what is the use of that? The reality is what it is.)

buying consumable goods instead of investments

Investing is certainly useful, if you can do it. But what in the world does that have to do with “boots theory”, or with the “phenomenon where people spend a lot to buy things that are poor quality instead of longer lasting higher quality things”?

Your “instead of” in the “consumable goods instead of investments” clause is fallacious, I think. Poor people spend some amount of money on consumable goods, have no money left over, and thus do not invest. Rich people spend more money on consumable goods than poor people, still have money left over after spending more, and invest the remainder. This is unambiguously not consistent with “boots theory”.

working jobs instead of building passive income

This, too, seems like a non sequitur. You can only be “building passive income” if you already have a lot of money. You can’t get there by spending less money. What’s more, if you do have a lot of money (which you can invest, thus securing a source of passive income), nothing prevents you from also working a job, and earning additional money. Indeed, plenty of people do just that. Many don’t, of course—but this is not because it would somehow end up costing them more money than not working! Rather, it’s because they (quite reasonably) don’t want to work if they don’t have to.

There is still a real phenomenon where people spend a lot to buy things that are poor quality instead of longer lasting higher quality things.

Well, I should like to see some examples. So far, our tally of actual examples of this alleged phenomenon seems to still be zero. All the examples proffered thus far… aren’t.
1. ↩︎
  Or longer, really—but “longer” is likely to be a moot point, for various reasons.

Said Achmiz Mar 19, 2025, 4:11 AM
7 points
3
in reply to: nim’s comment on: Boots theory and Sybil Ramkin

Boots theory captures the “being poor is expensive” element that’s true in Ankh-Morkpork and also true on Earth

It certainly is not true on Earth.

As I have written:

It sounds so wise and worldly! And it’s also complete bullshit.

Because let’s say that I want a pair of sneakers (i.e., shoes that are comfortable and won’t hurt my feet) that won’t wear out in a couple of years, so that I can buy them once and wear them for ten years. Why, I’d have to pay five times the price of an ordinary pair of sneakers! But then I’d have my ten-year shoes. Right?

WRONG.

Oh, sure, I can buy a pair of sneakers that costs five times what normal sneakers cost. And they’ll last for just about as long—at best!

And it’s the same with cookware, it’s the same with computer hardware, it’s the same with a whole lot of things.

The reason why people mistakenly come to believe this “boots theory” is not that more expensive stuff lasts longer, out of proportion to the price difference—but rather, that stuff purchased in the past, whose inflation-adjusted price was substantially higher than the current price of the current cheap goods, lasts longer. But this is not because of the price difference.

It’s because they don’t make ’em like they used to.

Said Achmiz Mar 15, 2025, 1:05 PM
2 points
0
on: The Dangers of Outsourcing Thinking: Losing Our Critical Thinking to the Over-Reliance on AI Decision-Making

I’ve become so reliant on a GPS that using maps to direct myself feels like a foreign concept. Google Maps, Waze, whatever, if it’s outside of my neighbourhood, I’m punching in the address before I head out. Sometimes I notice the GPS taking slower routes or sending me the wrong way as I get out of a parking lot, but regardless, I just follow its directions, because I don’t have to think. Though I know, without this convenient tool, I’d be lost (literally).

If you recognize this problem, why not stop using a GPS? Navigating without a GPS is not difficult. You could regain this skill easily. What’s stopping you?

Said Achmiz 14 Mar 2025 22:34 UTC
8 points
6
in reply to: Grayson Chao’s comment on: Trojan Sky
Given how spectacularly harmful psychedelic drugs can often be, I think we’d better hope that there isn’t any such “sensory-input-only” method of inducing psychedelic states.

Said Achmiz 13 Mar 2025 1:27 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: TurnTrout’s comment on: Announcing turntrout.com, my new digital home

your proposal would have the displayed image revert back to the first frame on mouseleave IIUC

Yes, correct.

I was hoping to have the hover-mode animation seamlessly pause and unpause

This SO question has several answers, all of which seem like reasonable solutions to me (if I were doing this, I’d try them all and pick the most performant one, most likely).

Said Achmiz 13 Mar 2025 1:19 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: TurnTrout’s comment on: Announcing turntrout.com, my new digital home

The “auto” icon is the sun if auto says light mode, and the moon if it says dark mode. Though ideally it’d be self-explanatory.

Hmm, I see. Alright, that’s not too bad, given the labels.

I found setting it in smallcaps to be quite distracting, so I settled for italics. What do you think?

Seems reasonable. (I agree that underlining the links is no good.)

Said Achmiz 12 Mar 2025 18:12 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: TurnTrout’s comment on: Announcing turntrout.com, my new digital home
Auto-dark mode!

Good; however:
1. “Auto” has the same icon as light—confusing!
2. “Auto” has a label, while the others do not—likewise confusing
3. The “Auto” label is styled just like the sidebar links, but of course it’s not a link at all (indeed, it’s not clickable or interactable in any way)
For #1, I suggest the “black & white cookie” (a.k.a. “contrast”) icon, as seen on gwern.net (this trio of “B&W cookie” / “sun” / “crescent moon” for “auto” / “light” / “dark” is becoming increasingly common for tri-state mode selectors, in my experience).

For #2, you should label all or none. My advice would be “all”, with a compromise: show labels on hover only (and make them a bit less obtrusive, and style them differently: smaller text, put the label off to the left—there’s room, given the shape of the logo—and perhaps set them in smallcaps? or even a different font, perhaps a sans; this would also solve problem #3).