Are you figuring the cost of tools into this? Or assuming they can be rented or borrowed? For all I know, even buying tools might be worth it since they can be used in multiple projects.
Obviously, we just discovered the translation of the word "koldgeon" from the game Gostak! (If you've never seen the game, give the webpage at https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=w5s3sv43s3p98v45 a few seconds of your time. It's a text adventure, and it's fantastic.)
"pogrifon n. ? [Made of sindish and koldgeon. Since sindish is what the morleon's walls and ceiling are made of, and koldgeon is edible and hurts to look at, a pogrifon is something rather odd by our standards, like marble-and-marmalade, chocolate-and-gold, or drywall-and-cheese."
Love those posts! It takes me days to get through all of them, so I can only imagine how long it must take to compile them. Then again, I’m slowing down in my old age.
1. I have six months of links saved up and I've got to figure out which ones are obsolete and how to splice the rest into bite-sized chunks.
2. I have lots of other posts from six months saved up, some of them are gradually going obsolete as conditions change, others I'm really interested in seeing what people think and want to get them out as soon as possible - and so the links are sitting on the back burner for now.
Ah, thank you for helping add to this collection! The one about not throwing away the old bucket is perfect. I'm not sure about the others. I just now realized that another way to express the common theme -- maybe a better concept handle for this -- is Ratcheting. You want to make forward progress on something without risking any backward progress.
(You want to improve your water fetching with a fancier bucket but be ready to fall back to your current bucket in case the new one is worse.)
I think so! The only thing it's _maybe_ missing is the idea of attempted progress backfiring. Like bridge-burning may just be a stupid thing people do out of anger that they may regret. Like if it's just "don't be rash" then that feels too general. But if it's like "don't alienate your current friends in your social-climbing attempts" then that would fit perfectly.
Frog tape, good brushes to cut in (Purdy), if you are strong a massive roller, or you could get a paint sprayer. Buy good paint - BM Natura is 0 VOC. It's worth it.
Glad to see you mention taping. Frog tape = essential. Not the dollar store cheap version but real Frog tape. I've had good luck with Benjamin Moore's Emerald line, it is forgiving of bad technique and covers beautifully.
I've been there. You are a better handy-person than I am. I painted several coats over the window & frame, several coats. Like a plaster cast, but stupider.
My first draft was 'For wisdom: First don't say anything stupid" But I think you have to say and think very, very stupid things from time to time to figure out what's smart. What is smart is not always intuitive, so, you have to have the freedom to fumble about.
Ha, yeah, I've heard this as "better to remain silent and thought foolish than to open your mouth and remove all doubt". :) This totally fits the Hippocratic pattern! (But also, yes, it's usually bad advice!)
I was imprecise there. I meant for weight loss, first don't ever let your weight go up. I realize that the question of whether decreasing scale is a rational goal is a whole can of worms
Counterexample: The route from no business with 0 dollars to a sucessful one with missions of dollars often involves passing through a state of being indebted (having negative dollars). To get to your goal, you have to start by moving away from it.
Thanks! I can't decide if it fits the pattern but it's a good pearl of wisdom regardless! If I had to contort it into this Hippocratic pattern, maybe: "(for sewing) measure tentatively all you like but never cut tentatively"?
Also, reddit's cardinal rule on being attractive: "first, don't be unattractive." Maybe there's an 80/20 insight here. Like the most failure in a given domain e.g. attraction is caused by a few, pretty easily identifiable mistakes.
Hmm, I can't decide if this fits the pattern. If it's just of the form "don't do this dangerous thing that might break stuff or that you might regret" then that seems too general. But something like "for coding: keep your experimental features in a separate branch" does sound like it could fit. Thanks for adding this!
Prioritizing not introducing new bugs over introducing new features fits the pattern better, but sadly does not seem to fit the actual priorities of any real software company.
Ha, yes! I hadn't mentioned this for fear of sounding self-promotional but we call this the Pareto Dominance Principle: https://blog.beeminder.com/pdp/
(I'm not even claiming we're a counterexample to your "any real software company" claim, but, um, at least we talk the talk?)
In general for games: "instead of trying to win, try not to lose." Maybe another way of putting this is: "no unforced errors."
I think the common thread of these is an insight that "inverted" recommendations [i.e. don't try to x, try not to -x] are often more concrete and helpful than positive recommendations because they avoid making the assumption that we know how to get to the positive state in the first place. If we knew how to get to the positive state and wanted to be there, we probably wouldn't need advice.
This kind of thinking also implies that "wins" in general may be better off pursued "indirectly," since if you pursue them directly, you will likely make the overconfidence/ignorance mistake referenced above. Far easier to try to eliminate the errors with the end in mind, than to rush straight for the end.
In other words maybe all the statements of the form "primum non nocere" imply that end goals cannot be pursued directly, but instead must ensue. Interested if anyone has thoughts here.
Smart! I can't decide if it fits the pattern exactly. See also the other comment I just now added in reply to CYOA. I think the common theme can be characterized by a ratchet: making forward progress without risking backward progress. I think you're right that there are various ways redundancy can be integral to that.
This occurred to me too late to post on either of the *Cult of Smart* theads, so I'll put it here:
We ought to take some school horror stories with a grain of salt. My partner, who teaches young kids, regularly encounters parents who are a little too credulous w.r.t. stories their kids tell them.
There was a father who was convinced that his son was being systematically starved at lunch time (there have been several of these, actually). There was a mother who fervently believed that a [much younger child in a different class] was physically abusing her [older, larger child] every day at recess. They called at nights and on weekends and demanded to know why their concerns weren't being taken seriously.
From the outside, it was clear what was going on: the kids determined that their parents were sensitive to stories about X, so they supplied them with stories about X. Sometimes there was a kernel of truth: "Mr. Smith, Eve is right: we did tell her she couldn't have any strawberries. That was because the snack today was blueberries. She ate lots of those." But sometimes they were just totally made up: "Mrs. Jones, I know Adam said that Steve punched him at recess today. But Steve's family has been out of the country since Christmas."
This doesn't invalidate anybody's first-person experiences, and doesn't mean that terrible abuses are impossible. Indeed, I witnessed some bad stuff at school when I was a kid. But we should apply our usual amount of skepticism to really outrageous claims.
Wrong. Abuse expands to fill the space it can get away with. False positives may be annoying, but training skepticism towards abuse survivors can only tend to increase cases of actual abuse.
If abuse expands to fill the space it can get away with, so does fraud. Training credulous acceptance of anything said by someone who claims to be an abuse survivor can only tend to increase cases of fraud.
No, we definitely shouldn't dismiss claims of abuse. Eve and Adam's parents (in the examples) were absolutely right to press the school (though it seems like they went overboard on the wrong means). But if they tell us outsiders on the internet, we have no call to just swallow all their claims.
All neurotypical kids occasionally lie to adults, it's a natural part of childhood development. Using the theory of mind to manipulate an outcome is AMAZING to little people who otherwise have no power.
My particular parents *should* have been less credulous about a lot of stuff I had to say as a child, including times I cast myself as a victim to manipulate the outcome I wanted. I was a self-centered, often self-righteous kid and if truthfully arguing for something didn't work, I'd go to the next option of exaggerating or outright lying.
And I had absolutely ZERO guilt or regret about doing so. ZERO. From my point of view, my parents had infinitely more power than me and I didn't feel the slightest moral qualm about using every tool at my disposal to "fight back" for whatever I thought I deserved.
In fact, you know that thing in popular media where an adult telling a child, "I'm very disappointed in you" is supposed to be the very worst kind of emotional consequence of bad behavior?
As a kid I was deeply confused and contemptuous of the trope. What kind of gullible chump kid would fall for that emotional manipulation? Who cares what an adult feels, as long as they don't take away TV time or cancel your social engagements?
And I had and still have a great relationship with my parents! That's why I felt so secure in lying to them, or even risking their "disappointment!"
Human beings lie all the time. That's incompatible with believing all anything.
I've been thinking lately about people who want to make their parents proud of them. It seems like a pattern that can work very well indeed if the parent's ambition for the child is appropriate and the parent doesn't withhold approval.
Why are some children are strongly motivated by their parents' approval and others are not? I have no idea.
Holy crap. I guess I was your polar opposite. I told the truth, never manipulated - couldn't, can't, don't understand how other people work well enough.
Although I don't know if we were actually polar opposites! We might actually be closer together than you think.
I was fine with lying about facts to mislead a parent/adult during an argument and/or interrogation. And to some degree, I was willing to say magic words like "I'm sorry" and "I won't do it again" to avoid a punishment.
But there were kinds of emotional manipulation I wasn't willing to engage in. By maybe 10 years old, I had a obscure sense of personal honor about not crying literal tears or expressing vulnerable emotions during an argument. It somehow felt like "cheating," and I avoided doing it even when it arguably would have been normal and appropriate.
So the only theory of mind I was engaging in was, "will this person believe this untrue thing I'm telling them?"
Whereas my younger brother (like lots of kids), was doing both "will this person believe this untrue thing I'm telling them?" AND "what does this person feel now, and how can I get them to *FEEL* what I want them to feel about the untrue thing I'm telling them?"
Which is why my younger brother was my matriarch grandmother's favorite kid; he had no personal honor about weeping crocodile tears into her shoulder whenever he wanted her to do something for him. He admitted to using the tactic as a kid and still admits to it today.
He had way higher emotional intelligence than even I did. You, me, and him are all on different parts of that spectrum, I think!
Hmm, I don't think that's a fair summary. I hedged a lot! I said some parents are a *little* too credulous, and that outsiders ought to apply our *usual* skepticism to *outrageous* claims.
People tend to see more value in their education as an adult than as a child, while suffering that is in the past and that has no obvious after-effects, tends to feel less bad than when it happened to you.
So I suspect that people become more positive as they age.
This is a great point. I was specifically talking about being skeptical of outrageous stories, but surely there are plenty of kids who tell their parents by saying "Oh yes, I really love school! Teacher X is so nice" because over-the-top enthusiasm about school gets a good reaction.
As a parent I can say there have been times when I found out something negative had happened at school. Sometimes I found it out from my kid, sometimes from a teacher or aide, sometimes from the principal. I will say that without spending serious time on it - at least half an hour - I never got anything close to the complete story, from any of those reporters. Even after spending time on it, sometimes important details would only surface later.
I did however encounter the perspective you describe: the school employee/teacher/principal attributing motive to the kid. When I look back, there is only a little correlation between stuff the kids knew I might react to, and what they said. Some of the things that happened were totally unexpected to me and also were corroborated by the school.
Other times, the kids were not telling me things that I probably would have reacted to, and when I found out later I freaked out (the daycare where the kids had to watch soap operas, for example)
So I submit that the match between what kids think the parents will react to, and what they actually react to, is not perfect. Also not good enough to fully explain these parents.
Also, I have never met a parent who did Not have a story of something important that happened at school, which no one told them about until long after the fact - not the kid, not the teacher, not the principal. A bad (or good) grade? A punch? A discipline procedure or reprimand?
The communication channels are all imperfect. And the trust is sometimes not very good. Unfortunately when the educators wrap it all up and attribute it solely to the prevaricating little darlings, that's when I know someone's not paying attention.
Educators (and daycare providers) do say that to each other a lot, though. I've certainly heard it a lot. It buffers the teachers against the fear and mistrust from the parents; it buffers the teachers against the conflicts among the students; and it buffers them against conflict with each other (when a student says teacher X did something, that student must be lying, so the teacher doesn't have to investigate further.) So it's a very useful perspective.
Kids' communication can be a little or a lot jumbled. They don't have the norms down yet. But there is very often truth in the emotion (in my limited experience). Eve is upset about the berries? That is, Eve is upset, and Eve spoke about berries. Is Eve "upset about the berries" or is it the emotion sourced to something else, perhaps related to the teacher, perhaps related to something else? Maybe what Eve really wants to say is she's lonely at school, the teacher spends more time talking to other little girls, and the teacher didn't explain what snack was, so Eve was embarrassed asking for the wrong thing, et cetera. The upsetness has an origin even if the details are skewed, and sometimes the details aren't skewed. Kids are also learning to discern the motives of unfamiliar adults, and they're not perfect at that.) One or two adults in a room with twenty-plus children are not able to track every interaction. Yet in order to feel comfortable with the level of responsibility they have, they attribute greater success to themselves than they should. I'm sure that fallacy has a name. It helps the teachers form a bloc, they never have to check the story with each other, if they already know the answer is "The kid is lying or wrong or both."
I'm not sure what collective strategy teachers in a large school *should* use to buffer themselves, if not the "kids lie" strategy. The kids are the least powerful party and least able to defend themselves. If teachers say "We might be wrong," one out of a hundred parents will beat them with that admission and totally overdo it, or kids will tear down all their authority. If a principal says, "Maybe my teacher is a tyrant, maybe Billy really is stalking Jimmy, let me see," that undermines morale. It's very delicate and the individual kid is not usually the most valued unit. I have not yet seen this balance maintained consistently, although lots of people try.
Did your kids ever stall bed time? Mine did (currently do). Every week I'd find myself saying, "OK, I'll bring you one more drink and then it's time to sleep!" Or "I"ll help you get to the bathroom, but then it's lights out!" My kids were (are) masters at figuring out what I would respond to.
I can imagine a version of myself in which I got caught up in a concern loop about this. "My kid seems really thirsty at bedtime! I'd better ask the pediatrician about this!" I do, and the pediatrician says "Let's keep an eye on this, but I don't think there's anything physically wrong here." But I'm suspicious - my kid is still crying out for water every evening! I start to mistrust the pediatrician.
Eventually I'm sending the pediatrician messages every night, and asking preschool teachers to monitor water intake. But no one is taking me seriously! This only makes me more concerned. I switch pediatricians. I switch schools...
*This* is the dynamic I'm referring to with Eve and Adam.
It's important to believe true things and not false things, of course.
At the same time ... I remember being a kid and not having the language to express what made school so horrible. If I'd come home and told my parents, "today every kid in my grade took turns beating me up", it would have been more accurate to my subjective experience of school than any true thing I could have said.
That's why I think allowing kids (and people in general) to leave situations they don't like is so much more important than being "tough on bullies" or any punitive approach. Was Eve really beaten up by Steve, or is she just using any tactic she can to avoid being put back in a classroom with Steve? Is /she/ abusing /him/? It doesn't matter as much if you just let her leave.
Also, it sounds like you're saying "we should be more skeptical about adults' stories of abuse they experienced as a child, because children lie", which doesn't follow.
> Also, it sounds like you're saying "we should be more skeptical about adults' stories of abuse they experienced as a child, because children lie", which doesn't follow.
I am definitely not trying to say this! I'm saying we should apply our *usual* amount of skepticism to *really outrageous* claims.
Finally started reading Yudkowsky and while he is mostly ok I wish he hadn't blocked me on twitter because I mostly want to yell at him about lesser problems
Yes. Obviously you can't literally tell at someone through Twitter, which should have, with other context cues, indicated that I did not literally mean I was going to yell at him but instead that I was going to raise criticisms and felt like self deprecating exaggerating the nature of this.
No one thinks you wanted to literally yell at him through twitter. They are reacting to your choice of verb. Actually, no one even called you abusive. They are pointing out that blocking people who say they want to yell at you on twitter is a good method for preventing abuse. No comment on your particular case.
I have a general take that blue checks shouldn't be able to block people from seeing their content (just mute them and ban them from responding, at most).
I'm still surprised Eliezer is a bluecheck. It's not that he's not famous, it's just...he doesn't seem like a bluecheck kind of guy. And I feel like even asking for a bluecheck signals something at this point, and it's not the kind of thing Eliezer would usually signal.
I think he got it because at some point there actually were some people impersonating him and making various claims about cryptocurrency on Twitter in his name
I want to raise certain criticisms about what I have read in Rationality AI to Zombies so far, none of which as of yet psychologize or are directed to the person of Yudkowsky.
All (most?) of the content of "Rationality: AI to Zombies" comes from posts on LessWrong and you're free to comment there with any criticisms you have.
You're giving off a strong impression about _why_ Eliezer would _want_ to block you in these comments.
Is there some specific reason why he should be open to _your_ criticisms of all people?
I'm seeing lots of reports on my internet radar of a red-hot housing market, especially for suburban single-family homes. Houses receiving multiple bids soon after being listed, historically low inventory, etc. What's most notable is the rapid price inflation in sunbelt cities like Phoenix, Orlando, Charlotte, and Dallas, such that these cities are no longer cheaper than many traditional northern cities.
I have also read anecdotes of relaxing lending standards. Can anyone in the know confirm or deny this part?
I am starting to get the heeby-jeebies that we are at the start of a new housing mania.
I think covid has done weird stuff to the housing market, but it seems like the shortage finally tipping over from a largely NY/bay area problem to a national one, which is boosting prices everywhere.
I assume it will get better as the vaccine rolls out. If I were trying to sell a house right now, I would definitely be putting it off until it was less of a hassle.
It's ok to have heebie jeebies about people making decisions they later regret, but don't let that bleed over into blaming a decade of slow growth, high unemployment and maybe DJT on the housing market. It was the Fed.
I live in a small city in Michigan and even 5 years ago, we had to put an offer on our house the day it came available to get it. Now 5 years later we are refinancing and expecting its appraisal to go from 155 to 215.
I don't know about lending standards, as I think I'm pretty safe to lend a lot of money to, but Quicken has been calling me about twice a day, and my wife seconds after calling me, to try and get us to refinance. It's comical to see. I ignore the call and my wife gets a call from the exact same number immediately after. And it's every single day once at the beginning and once at the end. This is clearly automated and they're never going to stop and I'm probably going to just actually refinance at some point. Honestly, I'm consider jettisoning the phone number I've had for the past 15 years and just starting from scratch with a new one I never give out to any business.
This is actually a bad financial decision - a company like this gives better rates to people it cold-calls than it does to people who call them. Negotiation can get rid of the difference, but only if you are pretty good at it.
Standard argument: Just get multiple quotes. No important financial decision should be made on raw heuristics. Easy to get 3-5 quotes and pick the best.
Can add it's not just refinancing, either, although at least in that case I know who is bugging. I get text messages and voice mails several times a day from investors looking to buy houses, both the one I live in and other properties I own but rent out. This has been happening since about last August or so. I started out blocking every number that sent me a text like this, but it was quickly obvious that was pointless and I probably just need a phone number. It's always some template variation on "Hi, I'm X and heard you're looking to unload your property in city Y." I'm not and they definitely did not actually hear that anywhere, but yeah, small time operations seem to have popped up all over the place with the purpose of buying houses.
I'm actually pretty sure what happened is I finally got a Texas driver's license in order to be able to vote. From what my wife tells me, the state of Texas sells your contact info to marketers.
I can imagine single-family homes being red-hot after covid, alright. After spending the whole year +/- inside an apartment, having an actual home with a yard sounds really good.
Other than that, the European rental market is in slow freefall, the property market is confused because rent ROI just vanished but there's nothing worth investing in anyway, so people escape from fiat into real estate. No idea about other parts of the world, but it might be universal in the kind of Schroedringer's crisis that we live in.
I recommend following Calculated Risk Blog (https://www.calculatedriskblog.com/) if you're interested in the housing market. McBride recently noted that housing inventory was at record lows, down 53% YoY from last year. It sounds like housing building just kind-of stopped in 2015, and has only recently resumed, so the inventory is quite reduced.
in our ex-urb outside Baltimore, houses are are going the next day with bidding wars. The sweet spot is plenty of space, high-speed internet, good schools, no crime, and you don't have to drive to work so who cares how far work is. Houses are up like 25%, but I am sure the more expensive ones closer to the city are not
I live less than half a mile from the city line and houses in my neighborhood are selling fast at inflated prices. It's not a very expensive area but the schools are ok and there isn't that much crime. I bought my house @ 150k five years ago and I could probably get 210-230k for it now (though I did put a little bit of work into it). But anything in the County that has a backyard is doing well at this point.
I think the people who can sell for 200 or 300 can bid up a 400 house up here, still way cheaper than the county, and similar or better houses. With interest rates, that extra 40 k to get the house you want doesn’t hurt.
I don’t know about lending standards l, but only because I can’t even get to the point of finding out about lending standards before the houses are gone.
You should post these on DSL as an effort post!
https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/board,1.0.html
Fascinating, thank you.
This is indeed very interesting, not least because so it is both a dessert topping and a floor wax? 😀
Are you figuring the cost of tools into this? Or assuming they can be rented or borrowed? For all I know, even buying tools might be worth it since they can be used in multiple projects.
Obviously, we just discovered the translation of the word "koldgeon" from the game Gostak! (If you've never seen the game, give the webpage at https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=w5s3sv43s3p98v45 a few seconds of your time. It's a text adventure, and it's fantastic.)
From the dictionary at http://www.plover.net/~davidw/gostak.html (warning, minor spoilers):
"pogrifon n. ? [Made of sindish and koldgeon. Since sindish is what the morleon's walls and ceiling are made of, and koldgeon is edible and hurts to look at, a pogrifon is something rather odd by our standards, like marble-and-marmalade, chocolate-and-gold, or drywall-and-cheese."
This is very interesting. Is there any information on modern attempts to update lac production?
"chatoyancy" – now there's a word!
That seems entirely sensible on the part of the YouTube ad market!
Just wanted to say I'm really happy to see you back online and blogging. Take good care and good luck with your other work!
Am I the only one who misses the "Links" posts? The ones not specific about coronavirus. Is there any chance they'll come back, Scott?
Love those posts! It takes me days to get through all of them, so I can only imagine how long it must take to compile them. Then again, I’m slowing down in my old age.
One of my favorite SSC features.
I've been doing links posts cross-posted to LW and FB, latest was at https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/d65NWwGFYvBtnWGeD/links-for-january-2021
I would assume people who enjoyed Scott's links posts would probably like mine, although I tend to have more links with shorter descriptions.
Yes! The main delays are:
1. I have six months of links saved up and I've got to figure out which ones are obsolete and how to splice the rest into bite-sized chunks.
2. I have lots of other posts from six months saved up, some of them are gradually going obsolete as conditions change, others I'm really interested in seeing what people think and want to get them out as soon as possible - and so the links are sitting on the back burner for now.
Glad to hear that! I'm loving the steady flow of meaty posts from the backlog!
(And thanks also for the shoutout about the DataSecretsLox effortpost contest.)
We're keeping up the tradition over at DSL!
https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,2609.msg
Candidate concept handle: Hippocratic Pareto Dominance
* for doctors: primum non nocere (first do no harm)
* for dieting: first do not gain
* for holes: if you find yourself in one, stop digging
Anything else?
Ah, thank you for helping add to this collection! The one about not throwing away the old bucket is perfect. I'm not sure about the others. I just now realized that another way to express the common theme -- maybe a better concept handle for this -- is Ratcheting. You want to make forward progress on something without risking any backward progress.
(You want to improve your water fetching with a fancier bucket but be ready to fall back to your current bucket in case the new one is worse.)
Would "Don't burn your bridges" fit the ratcheting concept? Don't ruin your old network as you progress because you might need to fall back on it.
I think so! The only thing it's _maybe_ missing is the idea of attempted progress backfiring. Like bridge-burning may just be a stupid thing people do out of anger that they may regret. Like if it's just "don't be rash" then that feels too general. But if it's like "don't alienate your current friends in your social-climbing attempts" then that would fit perfectly.
(The common theme being "we'd like to improve something but not risk making it worse")
Frog tape, good brushes to cut in (Purdy), if you are strong a massive roller, or you could get a paint sprayer. Buy good paint - BM Natura is 0 VOC. It's worth it.
Glad to see you mention taping. Frog tape = essential. Not the dollar store cheap version but real Frog tape. I've had good luck with Benjamin Moore's Emerald line, it is forgiving of bad technique and covers beautifully.
I've been there. You are a better handy-person than I am. I painted several coats over the window & frame, several coats. Like a plaster cast, but stupider.
For wisdom: First, don't be stupid ?
Ha! But I think that's too passive to count. Maybe "for wisdom: first, don't read/watch stuff that actively makes you stupider"?
My first draft was 'For wisdom: First don't say anything stupid" But I think you have to say and think very, very stupid things from time to time to figure out what's smart. What is smart is not always intuitive, so, you have to have the freedom to fumble about.
Beware of 'si tacuisses…' situations, though.
BTW, you provided another argument for me why I think a total post-privacy world would be a huge negative.
Ha, yeah, I've heard this as "better to remain silent and thought foolish than to open your mouth and remove all doubt". :) This totally fits the Hippocratic pattern! (But also, yes, it's usually bad advice!)
being stupid is very much an activity in my experience
For sales people: first, do know charm.
Gaining weight is an entirely valid and common goal of dieting.
I was imprecise there. I meant for weight loss, first don't ever let your weight go up. I realize that the question of whether decreasing scale is a rational goal is a whole can of worms
*scale weight
This wouldn't be a good idea for women who gain water weight from their periods.
Super fair. I'd probably say one should get empirical about that and apply it as a principled exception.
Perhaps "common" as an absolute number, but certainly not as a fraction of those who say they are dieting...
I thought of another one, thanks to another Scott:
* for bullies/assholes: it's often hard to beat a strategy of utterly ignoring them
I thought of this name for it when talking to other-Scott: Primum non Streisandum
For the internet: do not feed the trolls.
Counterexample: The route from no business with 0 dollars to a sucessful one with missions of dollars often involves passing through a state of being indebted (having negative dollars). To get to your goal, you have to start by moving away from it.
True! This kind of Hippocratic advice is definitely the kind you sometimes should reverse!
Measure twice; cut once?
Thanks! I can't decide if it fits the pattern but it's a good pearl of wisdom regardless! If I had to contort it into this Hippocratic pattern, maybe: "(for sewing) measure tentatively all you like but never cut tentatively"?
If you'll pardon a mildly lewd example, "don't stick your dick in crazy" seems to fit the pattern.
Also, reddit's cardinal rule on being attractive: "first, don't be unattractive." Maybe there's an 80/20 insight here. Like the most failure in a given domain e.g. attraction is caused by a few, pretty easily identifiable mistakes.
For software development: don't push to master.
Hmm, I can't decide if this fits the pattern. If it's just of the form "don't do this dangerous thing that might break stuff or that you might regret" then that seems too general. But something like "for coding: keep your experimental features in a separate branch" does sound like it could fit. Thanks for adding this!
Prioritizing not introducing new bugs over introducing new features fits the pattern better, but sadly does not seem to fit the actual priorities of any real software company.
Ha, yes! I hadn't mentioned this for fear of sounding self-promotional but we call this the Pareto Dominance Principle: https://blog.beeminder.com/pdp/
(I'm not even claiming we're a counterexample to your "any real software company" claim, but, um, at least we talk the talk?)
In general for games: "instead of trying to win, try not to lose." Maybe another way of putting this is: "no unforced errors."
I think the common thread of these is an insight that "inverted" recommendations [i.e. don't try to x, try not to -x] are often more concrete and helpful than positive recommendations because they avoid making the assumption that we know how to get to the positive state in the first place. If we knew how to get to the positive state and wanted to be there, we probably wouldn't need advice.
This kind of thinking also implies that "wins" in general may be better off pursued "indirectly," since if you pursue them directly, you will likely make the overconfidence/ignorance mistake referenced above. Far easier to try to eliminate the errors with the end in mind, than to rush straight for the end.
In other words maybe all the statements of the form "primum non nocere" imply that end goals cannot be pursued directly, but instead must ensue. Interested if anyone has thoughts here.
Redundancy is your friend.
Smart! I can't decide if it fits the pattern exactly. See also the other comment I just now added in reply to CYOA. I think the common theme can be characterized by a ratchet: making forward progress without risking backward progress. I think you're right that there are various ways redundancy can be integral to that.
This occurred to me too late to post on either of the *Cult of Smart* theads, so I'll put it here:
We ought to take some school horror stories with a grain of salt. My partner, who teaches young kids, regularly encounters parents who are a little too credulous w.r.t. stories their kids tell them.
There was a father who was convinced that his son was being systematically starved at lunch time (there have been several of these, actually). There was a mother who fervently believed that a [much younger child in a different class] was physically abusing her [older, larger child] every day at recess. They called at nights and on weekends and demanded to know why their concerns weren't being taken seriously.
From the outside, it was clear what was going on: the kids determined that their parents were sensitive to stories about X, so they supplied them with stories about X. Sometimes there was a kernel of truth: "Mr. Smith, Eve is right: we did tell her she couldn't have any strawberries. That was because the snack today was blueberries. She ate lots of those." But sometimes they were just totally made up: "Mrs. Jones, I know Adam said that Steve punched him at recess today. But Steve's family has been out of the country since Christmas."
This doesn't invalidate anybody's first-person experiences, and doesn't mean that terrible abuses are impossible. Indeed, I witnessed some bad stuff at school when I was a kid. But we should apply our usual amount of skepticism to really outrageous claims.
Wrong. Abuse expands to fill the space it can get away with. False positives may be annoying, but training skepticism towards abuse survivors can only tend to increase cases of actual abuse.
All absolutes are false.
Good, then this one is too
Except that one!
Serious question: would you contend that we in the 2020s are too quick to dismiss the claims of Satanic ritual abuse from the 1980s and 1990s?
No, butt legal evidence is supposed to be a higher standard than whether you investigate something in the first place.
If abuse expands to fill the space it can get away with, so does fraud. Training credulous acceptance of anything said by someone who claims to be an abuse survivor can only tend to increase cases of fraud.
No, we definitely shouldn't dismiss claims of abuse. Eve and Adam's parents (in the examples) were absolutely right to press the school (though it seems like they went overboard on the wrong means). But if they tell us outsiders on the internet, we have no call to just swallow all their claims.
OP was saying specifically that parents should be less credulous.
And at the end he was saying "But we should apply our usual amount of skepticism" - i.e. talking about us outsiders on the internet. But you gave a fair corrective to the first view, and now this situation's making me remember https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/24/should-you-reverse-any-advice-you-hear/ .
I don't agree with your reading
All neurotypical kids occasionally lie to adults, it's a natural part of childhood development. Using the theory of mind to manipulate an outcome is AMAZING to little people who otherwise have no power.
My particular parents *should* have been less credulous about a lot of stuff I had to say as a child, including times I cast myself as a victim to manipulate the outcome I wanted. I was a self-centered, often self-righteous kid and if truthfully arguing for something didn't work, I'd go to the next option of exaggerating or outright lying.
And I had absolutely ZERO guilt or regret about doing so. ZERO. From my point of view, my parents had infinitely more power than me and I didn't feel the slightest moral qualm about using every tool at my disposal to "fight back" for whatever I thought I deserved.
In fact, you know that thing in popular media where an adult telling a child, "I'm very disappointed in you" is supposed to be the very worst kind of emotional consequence of bad behavior?
As a kid I was deeply confused and contemptuous of the trope. What kind of gullible chump kid would fall for that emotional manipulation? Who cares what an adult feels, as long as they don't take away TV time or cancel your social engagements?
And I had and still have a great relationship with my parents! That's why I felt so secure in lying to them, or even risking their "disappointment!"
Human beings lie all the time. That's incompatible with believing all anything.
YES, thank you. "OK [adult], what magic words do I have to say to get my Game Gear back" was always on my mind.
I've been thinking lately about people who want to make their parents proud of them. It seems like a pattern that can work very well indeed if the parent's ambition for the child is appropriate and the parent doesn't withhold approval.
Why are some children are strongly motivated by their parents' approval and others are not? I have no idea.
Holy crap. I guess I was your polar opposite. I told the truth, never manipulated - couldn't, can't, don't understand how other people work well enough.
Makes sense!
Although I don't know if we were actually polar opposites! We might actually be closer together than you think.
I was fine with lying about facts to mislead a parent/adult during an argument and/or interrogation. And to some degree, I was willing to say magic words like "I'm sorry" and "I won't do it again" to avoid a punishment.
But there were kinds of emotional manipulation I wasn't willing to engage in. By maybe 10 years old, I had a obscure sense of personal honor about not crying literal tears or expressing vulnerable emotions during an argument. It somehow felt like "cheating," and I avoided doing it even when it arguably would have been normal and appropriate.
So the only theory of mind I was engaging in was, "will this person believe this untrue thing I'm telling them?"
Whereas my younger brother (like lots of kids), was doing both "will this person believe this untrue thing I'm telling them?" AND "what does this person feel now, and how can I get them to *FEEL* what I want them to feel about the untrue thing I'm telling them?"
Which is why my younger brother was my matriarch grandmother's favorite kid; he had no personal honor about weeping crocodile tears into her shoulder whenever he wanted her to do something for him. He admitted to using the tactic as a kid and still admits to it today.
He had way higher emotional intelligence than even I did. You, me, and him are all on different parts of that spectrum, I think!
Hmm, I don't think that's a fair summary. I hedged a lot! I said some parents are a *little* too credulous, and that outsiders ought to apply our *usual* skepticism to *outrageous* claims.
Goes both ways though. We can apply scepticism to people's claims that they enjoyed school.
Maybe students and teachers who like school really just have some sort of Stockholm syndrome.
People tend to see more value in their education as an adult than as a child, while suffering that is in the past and that has no obvious after-effects, tends to feel less bad than when it happened to you.
So I suspect that people become more positive as they age.
This is a great point. I was specifically talking about being skeptical of outrageous stories, but surely there are plenty of kids who tell their parents by saying "Oh yes, I really love school! Teacher X is so nice" because over-the-top enthusiasm about school gets a good reaction.
As a parent I can say there have been times when I found out something negative had happened at school. Sometimes I found it out from my kid, sometimes from a teacher or aide, sometimes from the principal. I will say that without spending serious time on it - at least half an hour - I never got anything close to the complete story, from any of those reporters. Even after spending time on it, sometimes important details would only surface later.
I did however encounter the perspective you describe: the school employee/teacher/principal attributing motive to the kid. When I look back, there is only a little correlation between stuff the kids knew I might react to, and what they said. Some of the things that happened were totally unexpected to me and also were corroborated by the school.
Other times, the kids were not telling me things that I probably would have reacted to, and when I found out later I freaked out (the daycare where the kids had to watch soap operas, for example)
So I submit that the match between what kids think the parents will react to, and what they actually react to, is not perfect. Also not good enough to fully explain these parents.
Also, I have never met a parent who did Not have a story of something important that happened at school, which no one told them about until long after the fact - not the kid, not the teacher, not the principal. A bad (or good) grade? A punch? A discipline procedure or reprimand?
The communication channels are all imperfect. And the trust is sometimes not very good. Unfortunately when the educators wrap it all up and attribute it solely to the prevaricating little darlings, that's when I know someone's not paying attention.
Educators (and daycare providers) do say that to each other a lot, though. I've certainly heard it a lot. It buffers the teachers against the fear and mistrust from the parents; it buffers the teachers against the conflicts among the students; and it buffers them against conflict with each other (when a student says teacher X did something, that student must be lying, so the teacher doesn't have to investigate further.) So it's a very useful perspective.
Kids' communication can be a little or a lot jumbled. They don't have the norms down yet. But there is very often truth in the emotion (in my limited experience). Eve is upset about the berries? That is, Eve is upset, and Eve spoke about berries. Is Eve "upset about the berries" or is it the emotion sourced to something else, perhaps related to the teacher, perhaps related to something else? Maybe what Eve really wants to say is she's lonely at school, the teacher spends more time talking to other little girls, and the teacher didn't explain what snack was, so Eve was embarrassed asking for the wrong thing, et cetera. The upsetness has an origin even if the details are skewed, and sometimes the details aren't skewed. Kids are also learning to discern the motives of unfamiliar adults, and they're not perfect at that.) One or two adults in a room with twenty-plus children are not able to track every interaction. Yet in order to feel comfortable with the level of responsibility they have, they attribute greater success to themselves than they should. I'm sure that fallacy has a name. It helps the teachers form a bloc, they never have to check the story with each other, if they already know the answer is "The kid is lying or wrong or both."
I'm not sure what collective strategy teachers in a large school *should* use to buffer themselves, if not the "kids lie" strategy. The kids are the least powerful party and least able to defend themselves. If teachers say "We might be wrong," one out of a hundred parents will beat them with that admission and totally overdo it, or kids will tear down all their authority. If a principal says, "Maybe my teacher is a tyrant, maybe Billy really is stalking Jimmy, let me see," that undermines morale. It's very delicate and the individual kid is not usually the most valued unit. I have not yet seen this balance maintained consistently, although lots of people try.
Did your kids ever stall bed time? Mine did (currently do). Every week I'd find myself saying, "OK, I'll bring you one more drink and then it's time to sleep!" Or "I"ll help you get to the bathroom, but then it's lights out!" My kids were (are) masters at figuring out what I would respond to.
I can imagine a version of myself in which I got caught up in a concern loop about this. "My kid seems really thirsty at bedtime! I'd better ask the pediatrician about this!" I do, and the pediatrician says "Let's keep an eye on this, but I don't think there's anything physically wrong here." But I'm suspicious - my kid is still crying out for water every evening! I start to mistrust the pediatrician.
Eventually I'm sending the pediatrician messages every night, and asking preschool teachers to monitor water intake. But no one is taking me seriously! This only makes me more concerned. I switch pediatricians. I switch schools...
*This* is the dynamic I'm referring to with Eve and Adam.
For stalling bedtime, my kids know it's science-y questions. I can not resist answering them....
One could view that as your manipulating them into talking about science.
It's important to believe true things and not false things, of course.
At the same time ... I remember being a kid and not having the language to express what made school so horrible. If I'd come home and told my parents, "today every kid in my grade took turns beating me up", it would have been more accurate to my subjective experience of school than any true thing I could have said.
That's why I think allowing kids (and people in general) to leave situations they don't like is so much more important than being "tough on bullies" or any punitive approach. Was Eve really beaten up by Steve, or is she just using any tactic she can to avoid being put back in a classroom with Steve? Is /she/ abusing /him/? It doesn't matter as much if you just let her leave.
Also, it sounds like you're saying "we should be more skeptical about adults' stories of abuse they experienced as a child, because children lie", which doesn't follow.
> Also, it sounds like you're saying "we should be more skeptical about adults' stories of abuse they experienced as a child, because children lie", which doesn't follow.
I am definitely not trying to say this! I'm saying we should apply our *usual* amount of skepticism to *really outrageous* claims.
Finally started reading Yudkowsky and while he is mostly ok I wish he hadn't blocked me on twitter because I mostly want to yell at him about lesser problems
Perhaps he has reason to, you know, limit the space that abuse has to grow into…
noise
9 plus people think I am abusive on zero basis. Interesting.
Does it count as zero basis when you're specifically complaining about the inability to yell at someone?
Yes. Obviously you can't literally tell at someone through Twitter, which should have, with other context cues, indicated that I did not literally mean I was going to yell at him but instead that I was going to raise criticisms and felt like self deprecating exaggerating the nature of this.
No one thinks you wanted to literally yell at him through twitter. They are reacting to your choice of verb. Actually, no one even called you abusive. They are pointing out that blocking people who say they want to yell at you on twitter is a good method for preventing abuse. No comment on your particular case.
I have a general take that blue checks shouldn't be able to block people from seeing their content (just mute them and ban them from responding, at most).
I'm still surprised Eliezer is a bluecheck. It's not that he's not famous, it's just...he doesn't seem like a bluecheck kind of guy. And I feel like even asking for a bluecheck signals something at this point, and it's not the kind of thing Eliezer would usually signal.
I think he got it because at some point there actually were some people impersonating him and making various claims about cryptocurrency on Twitter in his name
That sounds like one of the better reasons to get a blue check. Do you remember about how long ago that was?
A few years, but I don't remember exactly when. Probably sometime between 2016 and 2018.
My org has a blue check on Twitter, but didn’t request it.
Perhaps he doesn't want to be yelled at.
I didn't mean literally yelled.
Did you want to tell him off about those problems?
I want to raise certain criticisms about what I have read in Rationality AI to Zombies so far, none of which as of yet psychologize or are directed to the person of Yudkowsky.
Do you think it would be worth your while to post your criticisms here?
All (most?) of the content of "Rationality: AI to Zombies" comes from posts on LessWrong and you're free to comment there with any criticisms you have.
You're giving off a strong impression about _why_ Eliezer would _want_ to block you in these comments.
Is there some specific reason why he should be open to _your_ criticisms of all people?
Can you explain your intuition in a non circular fashion?
I'm seeing lots of reports on my internet radar of a red-hot housing market, especially for suburban single-family homes. Houses receiving multiple bids soon after being listed, historically low inventory, etc. What's most notable is the rapid price inflation in sunbelt cities like Phoenix, Orlando, Charlotte, and Dallas, such that these cities are no longer cheaper than many traditional northern cities.
I have also read anecdotes of relaxing lending standards. Can anyone in the know confirm or deny this part?
I am starting to get the heeby-jeebies that we are at the start of a new housing mania.
I think covid has done weird stuff to the housing market, but it seems like the shortage finally tipping over from a largely NY/bay area problem to a national one, which is boosting prices everywhere.
I assume it will get better as the vaccine rolls out. If I were trying to sell a house right now, I would definitely be putting it off until it was less of a hassle.
It's ok to have heebie jeebies about people making decisions they later regret, but don't let that bleed over into blaming a decade of slow growth, high unemployment and maybe DJT on the housing market. It was the Fed.
I live in a small city in Michigan and even 5 years ago, we had to put an offer on our house the day it came available to get it. Now 5 years later we are refinancing and expecting its appraisal to go from 155 to 215.
I don't know about lending standards, as I think I'm pretty safe to lend a lot of money to, but Quicken has been calling me about twice a day, and my wife seconds after calling me, to try and get us to refinance. It's comical to see. I ignore the call and my wife gets a call from the exact same number immediately after. And it's every single day once at the beginning and once at the end. This is clearly automated and they're never going to stop and I'm probably going to just actually refinance at some point. Honestly, I'm consider jettisoning the phone number I've had for the past 15 years and just starting from scratch with a new one I never give out to any business.
If you refinance, please do it with some company other than the one that keeps calling you like that, in order to punish them.
This is actually a bad financial decision - a company like this gives better rates to people it cold-calls than it does to people who call them. Negotiation can get rid of the difference, but only if you are pretty good at it.
Standard argument: Just get multiple quotes. No important financial decision should be made on raw heuristics. Easy to get 3-5 quotes and pick the best.
Can add it's not just refinancing, either, although at least in that case I know who is bugging. I get text messages and voice mails several times a day from investors looking to buy houses, both the one I live in and other properties I own but rent out. This has been happening since about last August or so. I started out blocking every number that sent me a text like this, but it was quickly obvious that was pointless and I probably just need a phone number. It's always some template variation on "Hi, I'm X and heard you're looking to unload your property in city Y." I'm not and they definitely did not actually hear that anywhere, but yeah, small time operations seem to have popped up all over the place with the purpose of buying houses.
I'm actually pretty sure what happened is I finally got a Texas driver's license in order to be able to vote. From what my wife tells me, the state of Texas sells your contact info to marketers.
I get cold called by recruiters based on my Texas HVAC license, so yeah, that's definitely a thing that happens.
I can imagine single-family homes being red-hot after covid, alright. After spending the whole year +/- inside an apartment, having an actual home with a yard sounds really good.
Other than that, the European rental market is in slow freefall, the property market is confused because rent ROI just vanished but there's nothing worth investing in anyway, so people escape from fiat into real estate. No idea about other parts of the world, but it might be universal in the kind of Schroedringer's crisis that we live in.
I recommend following Calculated Risk Blog (https://www.calculatedriskblog.com/) if you're interested in the housing market. McBride recently noted that housing inventory was at record lows, down 53% YoY from last year. It sounds like housing building just kind-of stopped in 2015, and has only recently resumed, so the inventory is quite reduced.
in our ex-urb outside Baltimore, houses are are going the next day with bidding wars. The sweet spot is plenty of space, high-speed internet, good schools, no crime, and you don't have to drive to work so who cares how far work is. Houses are up like 25%, but I am sure the more expensive ones closer to the city are not
I live less than half a mile from the city line and houses in my neighborhood are selling fast at inflated prices. It's not a very expensive area but the schools are ok and there isn't that much crime. I bought my house @ 150k five years ago and I could probably get 210-230k for it now (though I did put a little bit of work into it). But anything in the County that has a backyard is doing well at this point.
I think the people who can sell for 200 or 300 can bid up a 400 house up here, still way cheaper than the county, and similar or better houses. With interest rates, that extra 40 k to get the house you want doesn’t hurt.
I don’t know about lending standards l, but only because I can’t even get to the point of finding out about lending standards before the houses are gone.