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May 24, 2021
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Idiocracy? Every cell just mindlessly does what its genetic code tells it to do.

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May 23, 2021
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The stuff about due process and arbitration was really interesting.

It reminds me of disciplinary foul-ups in other unionized workplaces with similar rights. A LOT of time, some bad employee will skate by for a while because their direct boss is conflict-averse and doesn't want to fire or discipline them - but then it gets up to their boss's boss who yells at them to get rid of this guy, who then hastily fires them without following the rules. They can then unsurprisingly get their job back in arbitration, and the company then has to pay them to leave while taking a PR hit.

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I have read a few of your articles so far, and while I appreciate them, I generally find them unconvincing (even though I think I would agree with you on a lot of the facts around policing). But so far, most of your articles seem to be around defense of the status quo in policing. I'm curious whether you a) think that policing needs any kinds of reforms and b) contingent on a, what those reforms would be.

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I don't understand this. In the article "accountability starts at the top" Graham seems to be saying that a combination of bad incentives and lack of accountability produces police chiefs that are ineffective at reforming their departments and providing a higher standard of policing.

With this in mind, he seems heavily in favor of police reform, just starting from the top rather than the bottom. This seems like a sensible approach to me, and while you may disagree, I don't think we can accuse him of just wanting to preserve the status quo.

I agree that an article on his ideas for reform would be great though.

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I read that one, and maybe I missed it, but it wasn't really about fixing things. It was merely pointing out that leadership bears most of the responsibility for problems. While I would probably agree that leadership is part of the problem, "firing leadership" or "holding police leadership more accountable" are not reforms (in the same way that _just_ firing bad cops isn't reform, _making it easier_ to fire bad cops is reform). That's just relying on hiring good people. Any system that _only_ works when good people are hired is a bad system and needs structural changes to make it resistant/resilient to bad people.

His reply to me does have some ideas for reform (that I had missed in looking over his articles). I think I agree with them on the whole. I'm not sure I agree that those are _enough_, but I think they are good ideas.

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May 25, 2021
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It seems like, right now, the "only one time" is rarely true. Maybe that's just the outside impression of only seeing the bad stories.

Would it be a good idea for cops to do something like the military does and have tours? IE, part of the problem is that cops get desensitized and start seeing the people that they have the most contact with as less-than-human, with predictable results, and a way to mitigate that is to get them a damn break?

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I think it's probably more often true than the media portrays, but it is definitely not _always_ true. And the current systems, in at least some precincts in some areas, make it far too difficult to deal with problem cops. This is part of the problem with the current discussions around policing. All of the media is national. But policing is local. It doesn't really make sense to talk about policing on a national level, when there is not a single description of policing that applies everywhere. Graham's portrayal of policing is probably correct for the vast majority of precincts. And a lot of the reforms talked about in the media probably aren't that necessary in many of them (although I think _some_ of these reforms should be implemented everywhere, even where problems don't currently exist; power must come with oversight). But they absolutely _are_ necessary in some. I think, from the articles I've read of his, that he tends to focus on the majority of precincts that don't have major problems and ignores the (admittedly rare, relative to media coverage) problems because they are rare. I don't think that just because these things don't happen often means we don't need to change the systems to fix them (although I also think that changes need to be local and very few reforms, with the exception of national problems like QI and drug war reforms need to be done on the national level)

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I don't expect perfection. Cops are humans, and will make mistakes. And I'm more willing than most to recognize mistakes that come from policing being genuinely difficult, and am willing to forgive those. If we expect perfection then we just won't have policing at all. But while I would agree with you that those are the kinds of mistakes that happen far more than the media portrays (and lots of things the media portrays as "bad policing" are more nuanced than that), they are not always the case. And cops who abuse their power _do_ exist and don't _always_ only get away with it once, and in some precincts, there are not good mechanisms to deal with those cops. And if the problem is the leadership, as you argue, then it isn't enough to just say "well we have crappy leaders", we need to reform it so that the system gets rid of crappy leaders. Furthermore, I don't believe that "bad leaders" is always the problem (certainly not the _only_ problem), I believe that in at least some precincts, the unions have managed to get in place procedures that make it overly difficult to punish bad cops. Every union in every precinct? Of course not. Most unions in most precincts? Almost certainly not. But in some? Definitely yes. I'll agree that this is part of the problem with the national conversation around policing. Policing is local and problems are local. But the fact that not all police precincts have these problems doesn't mean we should ignore them.

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I have my doubts that either elected officials or police chiefs in large urban police departments have much capacity to change the culture of those departments. Let's take the Minneapolis PD as an example as we pass the one-year anniversary of the killing of George Floyd.

“Since 1980, every mayor, including me, has had a reform agenda for the Minneapolis police,” [RT Rybak, the former three-term mayor of Minneapolis] said. “None of us has made anywhere the change that is necessary.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/apr/25/minneapolis-police-race-violence-justice-department-investigation

The Department of Justice has gotten involved at least two separate times over the past 20 years, including one consent decree. The current police chief was himself involved in a civil action about racial discrimination against officers which was settled in 2007 without going to trial. These top-down efforts coming from the brass seem like they are pushing on a string, which should be unsurprising because consciously modifying the culture of any large, bureaucratic organization is a tremendously difficult task. The transmission of that culture from vets to rookies doesn't seem to me to be very legible to the brass and the kinds of reforms they can implement. After all, Derek Chauvin was acting as a trainer for the other three cops on the scene where he killed George Floyd.

Does this imply that disbanding and reconstituting entire departments is sometimes the level of intervention that's required? That's a drastic step but these problems for both black cops and citizens have been tremendously recalcitrant in some cities. I'd be curious to hear about some success stories. I've heard good things about reforms in the Newark, NJ police department going back to Cory Booker's time as mayor there but have not dug into the details.

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Fair enough. I do think that any reform will involve a better selection process for the people at the top, but agree there weren't many specific proposals.

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May 23, 2021
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I really like _Climate Shock_

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I really like Weather, Macroweather, and the Climate by Lovejoy.

Here is my book review of it:

http://thechaostician.com/book-review-of-weather-macroweather-and-the-climate-by-shaun-lovejoy-2019/

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I haven't read it yet, but I like Thomas Murphy's "Do The Math" blog and he wrote a textbook that I've heard is good: _Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet_ https://escholarship.org/uc/energy_ambitions

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May 23, 2021
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>Why did European countries develop parliaments much earlier than the rest of the world?

Honest question: did parliaments develop independently anywhere besides Europe? Because the pedantic answer seems to be "Because Europe invented them, and then the rest of the world copied the model after they saw it." But that doesn't answer the real question, which is why Europe in the first place?

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Does anyone have a sense if the Nvidia GPUs and AMD CPUs that came out last year are finally available/not subject to crazy price gouging? At this age I just don't have it in me to keep too close of an eye on such things but I'd like to know if I can build a new PC anytime soon. Thanks.

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No, the answer is no, and wait another year or so.

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I don’t think they come down like… ever again.

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They will. The bottleneck for manufacturing is fab capacity, and many countries have just started large expansion/construction projects for new fabs (to secure strategic supply). The capacity being built up is much higher than overall demand, so when those new fabs come online, there will be a glut and things will be cheap again. That will be in like 3-4 years.

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From what I can tell, it will be another 6 months minimum. The demand doesn't look to decrease any time soon and increasing supply amounts to "build and staff another factory".

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No. Semiconductor shortage in swing, expect things to by fucky well into 2022.

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The prize for Cryptos is still higher than it was at the start of this year. So the demand from the miners will still be high. I don't see a chance for a relaxation on the GPU market as long as the BitCoin prize is above $20,000.

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I'm in the same boat and man is it frustrating.

My techy friends have suggested checking the NewEgg shuffle everyday (https://www.newegg.com/product-shuffle) and there's a chance to queue for new GPUs when refreshed stock drops at Best Buy, Fry's etc. Apparently there's a discord for tracking that but I'm not that deep into the chase (yet)

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Given the results in https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2021/05/24/temptation-of-the-apple-dolphin-on-macos-m1/ , buying an M1 Mac Mini is maybe the cheapest(!) way to get a "decent" GPU right now.

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At this point, buying a pre-assembled system might be the best idea, since those companies have long-term contracts, resulting in better prices and availability.

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A substantial increase in production capacity seems to come in 2022, at the soonest, so unless demand falls a lot (which may happen if people stop gaming and start doing other things again), shortages may last for a while.

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(hope it's ok to write about this again - Scott please delete if not)

I announced New Science (newscience.org) a week ago - a nonprofit the goal of which is to build new institutions of basic science, starting with life sciences.

The board of directors consists of me, Mark Lutter, and Adam Marblestone and we are advised by Tessa Alexanian, Tyler Cowen, Andrew Gelman, Channabasavaiah Gurumurthy, Konrad Kording, and Tony Kulesa.

If the site is exciting and *especially if you do biology*, I would love to talk to you -- alexey@newscience.org

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I was excited to read about this initiative when you launched. I'm definitely dissatisfied with my experience in academic science so far (as a grad student), but I'm trying to challenge myself to go beyond this general negative feeling and isolate exactly what I would change.

Here's where I'm coming from. My strongest interests are clustered around concept and analogy formation during learning, in humans and maybe eventually in general/in AI. My strongest skills are engineering-related - software, hardware, signal processing. I entered a neuroscience PhD program because it seemed to be the best/only way to get to a place where I could learn about and work on these problems that interest me - despite the fact that my successes so far had mostly been in open source software development for the neuro community rather than the typical jobs of a scientist, designing experiments, interpreting the results and publishing. Now I'm struggling to develop these skills, and more precisely to justify spending a ton of effort on forcing myself to do things I'm naturally quite bad at when I feel like I could be happily coding away at my old research tech job or something similar, were it not a temporary stepping-stone to a PhD type thing. Or I could even see myself gradually getting to the point of being an independent researcher, but it seems like there should be a much longer period of apprenticeship/working on a team to learn how things really work before one is forced to go off in an independent direction and figure things out by reading papers and trial and error (despite the fact that other people around know how to do these things correctly and could just show you), as PhD students often are.

All this to say that I'm very enthusiastic about your stated goal of creating/expanding alternative paths for people who want to work in science but don't want to go the traditional grad student -> postdoc -> PI route. It seems to me like there should be more people with more specialized roles and more focused expertise working together on fewer problems with more impact. And the public funding system should somehow allow more slack for researchers while keeping standards very high overall (maybe again through division of labor). It sounds like these are things you want too, but I'd be interested to hear if you disagree.

If you want to reply individually, I filled out the form for the 2022 fellowship, so you can find my email there.

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Thank you! Yeah, this only adds to my point about the absurd rigidity of the system. Some people started doing lab work when they were 16, some come from completely different backgrounds, but all are forced to go through the exact same path if they want to do research. I'll email you.

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I'm a master's student (entering my second year) studying the evolutionary biology of aging! I don't know just what I'll have to contribute in conversation, but think the idea's interesting and admire some of the people involved + mentioned as influences (Andrew Gelman, Tyler Cowen, GWERN). My interest is piqued by the Summer Fellowship, albeit vaguely with no concrete plan of whether I'd apply or exactly what I'd do with it. I'll email!

One of my questions is: the site mentions that it's partly inspired by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory; since CSHL already exists, in what ways is it different (or is it more of the same, since more is needed)?

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Thanks! I'm inspired by the early days of CSHL but right now it's just a fairly ordinary research institute...

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Fair point!

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When do you plan to branch outside biology?

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Uh, in 10-20 years?

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What is the rationalist stance on moral luck?

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I’m a rationalist and it reminds me of the eight vicissitudes… that’s all I’ve got. But you can search LessWrong and get an idea as to if other rationalists have discussed it before. https://www.reddit.com/r/Buddhism/comments/6htkkp/sutta_the_vicissitudes_of_life_world_the_8_things/?utm_source=amp&utm_medium=&utm_content=post_body

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I think it's a deontological concept, and rationalists are usually consequentialist.

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The concept can be relevant for different forms of utilitarianism too. Consider rule utilitarianism:

If I run a red light, there's an element of luck that changes whether a traditional utilitarian would say if it's moral (if nothing bad happens) or if it's immoral (if you have a crash). A rule utilitarian would say that the rule is "don't run red lights" because the world where everyone follows the rule is better than the world where no one follows the rule, or even the world where it is inconsistently followed. Thus a rule utilitarian would say that the action of running a red light is equally immoral whether or not you have a crash.

That is all to say, the concept of moral luck is a significant gap between traditional utilitarianism and rule utilitarianism.

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I might be wrong, but I don't think a non-rule utilitarian would have no objection to running a red light if it didn't result in an accident. The expected utility calculation would still tell you it is immoral to do it.

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Not always! If you can clearly see and confirm that no one is coming from either the left or the right, the expected utility of barreling through the intersection is a bit higher than that of stopping (assuming equivalent emotional valence, making time the only remaining variable of interest).

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If you make a habit of barreling through stop lights when you think it's clear the expected number of accidents you will get in increases

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It depends on how the form of utilitarianism is structured. Some utilitarians don’t follow an expected utility concept and instead judge after the action whether the action was moral based purely on the consequences.

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It also depends on how the form of utilitarianism is structured. Some utilitarians don’t follow an expected utility concept and instead judge after the action whether the action was moral based purely on the consequences.

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I don’t claim to speak for rationalists as a whole, but my position is that when evaluating how good or bad of a person someone is, the relevant thing to measure is the expected results, as those are what went into their decision making process. The actual results being different from the expected results doesn’t have any impact on their decision making process, so moral luck never plays a significant role. Of course, this does not extend to people deliberately sabotaging their own information.

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There are additional layers that should be considered. For instance, due diligence on exploring the potential outcomes of decisions made. If I come up with a course of action and carry it out, thinking it will have a positive outcome, but it's obvious with minimal research that the outcome would be negative, that has to have some weight as well.

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Hadn't heard of it, but I got this from wikipedia:

"Driver A, in a moment of inattention, runs a red light as a child is crossing the street. Driver A tries to avoid hitting the child but fails and the child dies. Driver B also runs a red light, but no one is crossing and only gets a traffic ticket.

If a bystander is asked to morally evaluate Drivers A and B, they may assign Driver A more moral blame than Driver B because Driver A's course of action resulted in a death. However, there are no differences in the controllable actions performed by Drivers A and B."

This seems to be mostly a measurement problem. Perhaps it's easy to miss a red light at a vacant intersection, but harder to miss a child in front of your car. If the child had been in the intersection in front of Driver B, would they still have run the red light and hit them?

How can you know that for sure?

In the hypothetical world where we could know the solution to this counterfactual, and also where we could reliably identify everyone in a given negligence class: yes, sure, we should punish all drivers in this negligence class equally.

But in the world we live in, we have to go by the metrics we have. It's inherently very difficult to identify everyone who's being negligent, so we assume there's a correlation between level of negligence and magnitude of bad outcome, and we assign punishment appropriately, and that's an acceptable approximation.

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I think you're right about it being a measurement problem. If a driver goes through an empty intersection at 3am, we understand from seeing similar situations that the actual danger was minimal. We're willing to give the driver a pass on a "dangerous" mistake because the danger was not the same as doing it during the day when people may be walking through the intersection. By actually hitting the child, they have proven that they were maximally negligent (barring extenuating circumstances which would have to be evaluated case by case), because hitting a child while breaking a traffic law is pretty much the worst case scenario. Swerving to miss a child and hitting a dog is bad, but we would look at that situation and agree that swerving was justified to avoid hitting the child. Swerving isn't good driving behavior, but we prefer it to the negative outcome that would otherwise have happened.

We hold your driver A culpable because he did the worst driving mistake there is. It's such a bad mistake that we would have gladly accepted the intentional creation of multiple other driving mistakes in order to avoid that result. Driver B may have been just as culpable, but there are lots of reasons to doubt that. There is no doubt about Driver A.

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There is a sense of moral luck I think is important, which is the idea that you shouldn't judge someone better because they were born at a time and place when their moral choices were easy. This is a corollary to "You are personally responsible for becoming more ethical than the society you grew up in": you are responsible for that, *not* for being perfectly moral; you get no credit for being moral because you went with the flow of your society, but *neither should you take the blame*. Or at minimum not all of it. Some people who were pretty damn immoral by modern standards, were nonetheless substantially more moral than their society, and we should restrain our condemnation of those people, and maybe even praise them.

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My go-to example is Thomas Jefferson. TJ did some terrible things - he owned slaves and abused some of them well beyond the baseline, notably Sally Hemmings. But take a random modern liberal and exchange their birth circumstances - RML born as the eldest son of a Virginia planter in the 1740s, TJ in a modern liberal family - and looking at the outside view, RML would probably have done worse, because most planters did. (And if we stipulate that RML still was part of the Continental Congress and later politics, they almost certainly wouldn't have tried to get slavery condemned in the Declaration of Independence, nor tried to remove its economic incentives as President.) To the extent that swapping people like that is a coherent concept, of course, which is TBF not very far. This implies we should be relatively kind to Jefferson.

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I don’t know what a rationalist stance on moral luck is exactly, but I’m quite doubtful that luck, including moral luck, is a coherent concept. You might be interested in my recent book on the topic, The Myth of Luck, here: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/the-myth-of-luck-9781350149298/

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I think of moral luck being related to having some modesty about one's model of the universe. You think some action is expected to have good or bad results, but you might not be completely right, so you make some allowance for actual outcomes.

I suppose that's how things work in the real world, rather than some ideal world where moral luck gets ignored.

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"You make your own luck." I don't want to habituate myself to running red lights because I'll revert to my training at the worst possible time.

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I don't understand the distinction you are making. True, Glen dismisses AI risk (in the rationalist sense) and Scott doesn't. This is trivially true but the real disagreement seem to be several levels deeper. My takeaway from their conversation was that Scott was obviously correct everywhere and that I didn't understand Glen at all, but that's expected given my inference distance. The linked post doesn't clarify anything for me.

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I appreciate the RedLetterMedia reference in the title.

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That was interesting to read, as someone who didn’t previously have much contact with Lanier or that group of people. One thing that struck me a bit oddly about the association that Weyl makes between cybernetic totalism and the rationalist movement was that a number of the points in Lanier’s half manifesto were things that the rationalist movement (to the extent that it is possible to generalize) is also against. The most prominent example was the stuff about evolutionary algorithms and the focus on complexity, which Eliezer vigorously opposed in the Sequences back in 2008-2009.

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For those not well-versed in the Sequences, would someone give a tldr on what Yudkowsky had to say about evolutionary algorithms and complexity?

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on complexity, the relevant chapter in Sequences is: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kpRSCH7ALLcb6ucWM/say-not-complexity

the point is that "complexity" is a measure of a solution, but not a blueprint for the solution. it tells you that your goal is far away, but it doesn't tell you which direction you need to go.

complexity is a cost you must pay, not something you should intentionally try to increase. saying that something is complex may be a true and useful statement, but saying "I have no idea where to begin, but I know it is complex, therefore let's do some random complex things and hope it works" only means that you have no idea and you are very unlikely to succeed.

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(there is no way to edit an existing comment, right?)

even if you somehow know that the complexity of a task is 9000, it doesn't mean that a random project with complexity 9000 is likely to accomplish the task.

there are many people who would say something like: "well, we know that the complexity of the task is 9000, therefore the obvious first step is to construct a project with complexity at least 9000, and then we will use the project to do the task somehow" and it would sound meaningful to them, like they already solved the largest obstacle and the rest is merely technical details the less important people have to worry about.

but this is like being lost in a desert, knowing that the nearest oasis is 10 miles away from you, and saying "well, first I need to walk 10 miles in a random direction, and I will worry about choosing the right direction later". (only it is a desert in an eldritch non-Euclidean universe, where the number of different places with given distance from your starting position increases exponentially with the distance.)

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You can edit your comment, there's a button at the top right corner of your comment that opens dropdown menu when pressed, one of the options is "edit". Not sure if there's any time limit on that though.

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I've never seen any such button. I'm using Chrome.

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What are you using? I've never seen that.

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Thanks. That's rather disappointing, though, since Yudkovsky seems to be misreading what smart people mean by "complex systems" (in Russian, they are called "difficult systems"), which is some combination of non-linearity, sensitivity to initial conditions, feedback mechanisms, the generation of measurably complex phenomena from the interaction of many simple parts, and the study of scaling phenomena.

Here's an example of the kinds of things that people have in mind when they talk about "complexity"

https://www.routledge.com/Complexity-Entropy-And-The-Physics-Of-Information/Zurek/p/book/9780201515060

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There's also Yudkowsky's complaint about "emergent phenomenon":

https://www.lesswrong.com/s/5uZQHpecjn7955faL/p/8QzZKw9WHRxjR4948

In short, these amount to "some people use a word carelessly, so I propose not to use the word at all". Not very useful.

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More like "most people use the word [complexity|emergence] carelessly, and that probably includes you, if you are careless".

Does saying that something is complex/emergent allow you to make specific predictions? Or is it merely how you describe in hindsight the things that you already learned using different strategies?

(Thanks for the book recommendation, I may read it later, but of course this comment was written before reading it.)

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on evolution and evolutionary algorithms:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XC7Kry5q6CD9TyG4K/no-evolutions-for-corporations-or-nanodevices

evolutionary theory is based on some assumptions, such as "organisms make their copies which are not perfectly identical (otherwise we would get no new mutations), but are still very very similar to their parents (otherwise all traits would get so diluted in two or three generations that there would be no meaningful selection of them)". if you use evolution as a metaphor for something where the assumptions do not apply (e.g. nanodevices do not mutate, corporations do not copy), there is no reason to assume it would behave similarly.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gDNrpuwahdRrDJ9iY/evolving-to-extinction

not only evolution doesn't care about you, it doesn't care about your species either. the stories about how evolution sacrifices the weak individuals to keep the species strong are still too naive and too anthropomorphic.

by the way, the Dark Lord also doesn't follow our preconception of evolutionary "progress" and will happily evolve dogs to cancer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canine_transmissible_venereal_tumor or humans back to apes https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xNqeGssARAYwbNCgH/link-back-to-the-trees

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QsMJQSFj7WfoTMNgW/the-tragedy-of-group-selectionism

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KE8wPzGiX5QPotyS8/conjuring-an-evolution-to-serve-you

evolution is utterly amoral, so if you ask it to solve your problems, get ready for a really horrific solution which you probably wouldn't predict, because unless you are literally a psychopath, your brain is full of self-censoring mechanisms. but evolution does not obey these limits (and neither will artificial intelligence, unless we explicitly program it to).

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Halfway through, my main reaction is "very long post needs a summary; now I jump to the end: not there either."

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My summary on finishing: author influenced by both sides and presents a bit of the Lanier/Weyl point of view for a lesswrong audience. Evaluates Eliezer and Scott as not very much the sort of Bad Person who L/W are against; Ray Kurzweil is a better example.

I think that's a reasonable conclusion, though as I already knew much of the background I kind of regret the time I spent reading it. I was motivated to because Weyl's work seems admirable and Lanier seems smart, so it kind of bugs me that I feel repelled by their writing: so a version of their worldview from someone more congenial was worth a try.

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I think that listing a bunch of names as Good People one should be on the side of against all the Bad People who have the opposite ideology of the manifesto writer is a poor way to think and that there's already more than enough focus on "Which side are you on?".

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Also, many of the Good People listed (basically names in the "tools for thought" tradition) don't rub me the wrong way as Weyl and Lanier do, making me skeptical of them representing the major dimension of difference.

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What stabilizes the population of large carnivorous mammals? Pre-humans, how did the population of wolves or polar bears or killer whales change with time? Does it follow predator-prey population cycles? If so, how large are the oscillations? Are the population growing slowly most of the time, to decrease during rare die-offs? If so, how rare are die-offs usually? What causes the stabilization? Is it that predators die of starvation when they can't find food due to competition? Or do they kill each other for territory before food supply can become an issue?

How does this generalize to the ancestral environment of humans?

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The mathematical descriptions for this are usually the Lotka-Volterra equations, which give you predator-prey cycles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotka%E2%80%93Volterra_equations

They have been matched to concrete populations, so you may want to look into the citations if you want to know how large the cycles are.

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My problem is that we don't have any data for large carnivorous mammals hat are older than say 100 years. And those population would not be in a pre-human state anyhow. So I guess I want something more speculative. Do we think that e.g. wolf population in North America in 30.000 BC followed the Lotka-Volterra equations? If so, was it lack of prey or competition for territory that drove population decline? Or did the wolf population in North America just grown steadily from the immigration of the first wolves until humans started to hunt them down?

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I work in ecology, but not specifically on these types of problems, so I'm relatively qualified, but could potentially be missing nuances or "latest research". With those caveats out of the way, here is my understanding: This is one of those questions that we are unlikely to get very good answers to until human society progresses to the point where we can essentially remove our impact from the ecosystem (if you are a sci-fi fan, think the Nox from Stargate). The realization that we simply do not, and may never, know what ecosystems looked like pre-humans is a fact of the field. My ecosystem in particular is one that was completely re-engineered by humans probably close to a hundred years before _anyone_ was studying it in a more rigorous manner than "Here is what I saw there". We study how organisms interact in the ecosystem with barely an inkling of what the actual dynamics were in the evolutionary historical system.

So, all that being said, our best theoretical ideas are the above linked equations. Prey availability would be the largest determinant. Competition for prey resources could lead to territory disputes as you mention....but in the end it's all going to boil down to prey availability (competition for food is really the main reason why a concept of territory evolves in the first place). Barring some specific niche circumstances or else some new breakthrough in population dynamics theory (which is relatively well understood field)....the Lotka Volterra equations is what we've got. If for some reason you have extremely abundant prey that are able to reproduce faster than predators can eat them (which is only stable for the _very_ short term), then you may get to a high enough predator density that disease starts to strike. But that's sort of similar to a higher tier predator. Basically, long term trends in population dynamics entirely boil down to food availability from the bottom and predator constraints from the top.

Except of course in situations where climate or environmental changes cause issues for reproduction. But usually, on non-geological time scales, we can ignore those.

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So it makes sense that prey is the limiting factor in the end. If prey is scarce, bigger terretories are needed. But is what does this "feel" like for a wolf (or an ancestral human) on the downward slope of the Lotka Volterra equations? Does the experience of the wolf become mostly "I can't find any rabbits no matter how hard I hunt" or does it become mostly "I must fight a lot to keep my hunting ground protected"? Is the extra mortality mostly from starvation or mosgly from conflict?

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If you are willing to invest some time, perhaps you can dig into the example of wolves and moose on Isle Royal. This is one of the success stories of the Lotka Volterra equations. The data is for a national park in which hunting was forbidden for 50 years, so it's probably as close as you can come to "left alone by humans" as we can hope for. We have data for the number of kills per wolf pack and the size of the wolf packs. The number of kills per wolf does go down with scarcity and it can become really low (0.2 in the worst years, >1.5 in very good years), so I guess they are really hungry. But the authors also mention "aggressive interactions among groups". So probably it's a mix of both.

(But I don't think that wolves usually kill each other. I am no biologist, but I would assume that the bad thing that happens to a wolf is that you are driven away from prey by other wolves, and your offspring or even yourself starve. Might be different for other species.)

This is the source of the data

https://doi.org/10.1890/0012-9658(2002)083[3003:TEOPAP]2.0.CO;2

and this is the derivation of the equations

https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2656.2005.00977.x

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Thank you! I'll look into it! But I'm afraid 50 years is a bit short still...

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A few years ago, I’ve read an article claiming that oscillations predicted by Lotka-Volterra equations are observed to be in phase even in geographically separated regions (islands vs mainland). This suggests that there are more factors at play besides predator-prey dynamics.

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I made a Substack! https://denovo.substack.com/

My first post is about CRISPR base editing targeting PCSK9 to lower cholesterol levels and prevent heart disease.

https://denovo.substack.com/p/base-editing-coming-soon-to-a-liver

More posts are in the works.

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(Off-topic bad chemistry joke about your name)

Have you ever met Orthocelsus?

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No, but I'm a fan of Paracelsus

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Freddie's comment got me thinking, I can't help but see the synergy between crypto mining, machine learning, and computing generally as putting us in some kind of a paperclip maximizer problem, but we're maximizing compute wafers and integrated circuits. There appears to be no end in sight to how many revenue-generating things we could do with more compute. BTC in particular seems to be particularly problematic because it's just an arbitrary Molochian arms race to dedicating as much electricity and compute wafers towards the task as possible. Would BTC, if actually widely adopted, just be a new form of economic rent? Everyone merely holding onto BTC because someone will buy it from them later at a high price, and you need it because it's the reserve currency?

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I should clarify, because everyone needs it but people can profit by just hodling (like land, because it's a fixed supply), wouldn't the same criticisms of Georgism apply to a BTC-denominated monetary system? Where the value of BTC can arbitrarily rise to just below the point at which doing any economic activity would no longer be worth it, and therefore it would become another rent-hole just like land?

And, if this is true, is this actually a bullish take on BTC because civilization is likely to just fall for it and deliver unto ourselves even more lackluster growth BUT pretty decent rents for the BTC hodlers?

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I think people would just end up switching to BTC-backed notes, just like people historically switched from using metals directly to using metal-backed notes. So financial institutions might handle their clearing in BTC, but everyone else would be using BTC derivatives.

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As Matt Levine says, "a model that I often use for cryptocurrency is that it is rediscovering traditional finance"

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The explicit limit on the amount of BTC that can exist is analogous to there being a surprisingly small finite amount of gold on Earth.

The economic logic behind the stylized sequence of "X *is* currency" -> "currency is backed by X" -> "currency isn't backed" (i.e., X falls out of the system doesn't require X == gold.

BTC could remain a valuable scarce asset, but its prospects as a medium of exchange are dim.

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I think my question would apply to gold as well. Does the gold standard also introduce a monetary layer which is exploited by no-value-add rent seekers? By George, anyone that needs to acquire land upon which to do their business is exploited by a rent-seeking class of land speculators. At small levels of business, this might be negligible (I could run a business through my home, for example, and consider my living expenses separate from my business expenses, and then my business is not being exploited by any land speculators.) But any business that grows large enough needs to acquire commercial/industrial real estate near a labor force and then is exploited by land speculators.

Similarly for gold, perhaps small businesses this is negligible, but if you're a large business you, at some point, needed to start concerning yourself with the medium of value-store for your cash balance. If you're under a gold standard, that means either directly or indirectly (via bank notes) acquiring literal gold. Is gold not like land because it's fungible?

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Gold is not like land because it's not an input to production*, just a representation of value.

>you ... needed to start concerning yourself with the medium of value-store for your cash balance

Cash itself is a medium of value store. So are Treasuries, corporate bonds, demand deposits, CDs, accounts receivable, unsold inventory, or IOUs from friends & family. There are legitimate reasons to care about the liquidity of how you store value, but there's no requirement that gold per se ever comes into play even under a fully-backed gold standard.

*Unless you're making jewelry or precision electronics.

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I don't think this makes any sense at all. Land matters because it's an actual factor of production, you need a place to put your factory, you need a place near where people live to put your store front etc. A store of value doesn't work like that.

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I think I agree with you that I'm probably wrong but would you help me understand why?

It seems like, in practical terms, in order to do any production you need to acquire land, raw materials, talent, and other things, and in order to acquire those things you require *some* store of value, be it food, gold, dollars, or bitcoin, in order to barter/trade/transact with. Why is *some* store of value not also an "actual factor of production" if you practically do require it in order to do any production?

And if you grant that, then by removing one level of abstraction, we can say that for global trade it's basically required that you have US Dollars, simply because the US Navy enforces that everyone does their global trade in US Dollars. Does that not mean that US Dollars are an input to production for anybody doing global trade? Is it wrong to consider trade a part of production, or am I making some other analytic error?

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Remember at the beginning of the Georgian post where he talks about how money isn't wealth, it's more like a pointer to wealth. Bitcoin is like that too

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The Georgist analogy would be that mining bitcoin is like homesteading. A homesteading regime causes utility loss from people occupying land 'too soon' for the sake of title to it, but eventually all the land is claimed, just as eventually all the bitcoins are mined -- so there's a bounded amount of deadweight loss in the end. Once the bitcoin mining rate is very low, with the network paid for by transaction fees, will there be some other aspect that fits Georgism? I'm not seeing it -- should I?

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To be clear, I may be the idiot here, it may not tie into Georgism at all. I do really like Georgism, but one thing I didn't like about it (which may spout from my ignorance) is this treatment of land as this unique thing. What are the specific properties of land that give it this rent-seeking economic power, and do any other things have the same properties? I'm kind of going out of my way to see if any other things in the economy also act like land ownership rights and drag down human economic productivity. Candidates in my mind are cryptos that don't provide useful auxiliary infrastructure (so BTC but not necessarily ETH), domain names (which I think satisfy it exactly, but they're just not as important because search engines act like an intelligent teleporter for the internet), and intellectual property rights.

For example imagine that computer scientists were just generally a lot less smart and no one figured out any good search algorithms like PageRank, just create some convoluted scenario to imagine that there were no search engines, but the internet was still really useful. Domain names would presumably be much more important, because people would probably try to discover new websites by typing in their name. In this world, you would expect returns on an ecommerce business to be slightly better than half of what they are in our world, because roughly half of the profit is wisely eaten up by the hodler of the domain name, who knows he can shut you down at any moment by choosing to stop renting to you and to rent to someone else with a similar ecommerce business. The users just want to buy dog food at pets dot com, they don't exactly care who is selling to them. (This thought experiment is a bit of a stretch but I think it demonstrates well-enough that other things, in theory, could be like land in the Georgian sense.)

I usually just assume that the supply of BTC is already fixed because 18/21ths of it has been. Having thought it through, though, I don't think it applies to cryptocurrencies because of the fungibility.

However, I do think this somewhat applies for intellectual property, and I think we see many of the same pernicious rent-seeking as we do with land. Intellectual property is not fungible, two patents are not interchangeable. We do have entire industries built around hodling intellectual property and charging people rent to use ideas, or suing people to prevent their use at all. And while new ideas can always be created, sometimes you need a particular solution to a problem and that might just have already been patented, and the patent hodler is in a position of extracting maximal rent from you.

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Domain names fit this well.

I think intellectual property when overextended is another homesteading-like setup with the same problem of a 'land rush'. Nobody's going to write the same novel as you, at the level of granularity where a reasonably faithful translation is 'the same'; but modern copyright law goes quite a way further, and independent discovery of patents is routine. So I'd agree rent-seeking seems like a major problem in IP, but I'd lean more towards dialing back the overbroadness than to taxing it.

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Well right, interestingly, taxing IP on some inherent, independently-assessed value doesn't seem to make any sense. If you think about the goal of LVT, though, it's just to make sure that landowners do not have incentives to speculatively trade land. So it would seem you want to apply the same idea to IP. I would go further and argue that we should be incentivized to share IP as far and wide as it is useful, just like a Georgian landowner is incentivized to make his land as economically productive as possible. Not sure what that looks like though.

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The special property of land is that we can't make more of it. If I own a factory that turns out to be very valuable because of the things it makes, other people will build similar factories and competition will drive the price down. But if I own a piece of land that turns out to be very valuable because of its location, the amount of land in that location is fixed. Competition is limited.

There are other assets that produce "rent" in the economic sense. In New York City, you need a "medallion" to operate a taxi, and there are a limited number of them. This limits competition, so the extra money you make from the limited competition is "rent".

Bitcoin is a weird example because there's a limited supply, but it doesn't produce any income. Rent is a type of income.

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As everyone easily remembers to point out, land has a fixed supply curve, that's special property A. Equally important to it's unique status is special property B, land is a "positional good". That is, an equivalent amount of land with identical physical properties down to the atomic scale might be valued entirely differently due to their relative position in space. The positionality is what let's the land speculators win- because the value of their land can increase greatly based _entirely_ off the actions of uninvolved and unrelated economic agents, without anything ever being added to the land in question.

The fixed supply curve just takes the problem and makes it a disaster. And the fact that land is an input to production takes the disaster and makes it relevant to everyone.

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So BTC (and gold) isn't a Georgist good because it isn't positional and doesn't _have_ to be an input to production. So you don't care which gold you've got, and you may be able to do work without it.

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And I think you could make a strong argument that BTC isn't _really_ fixed supply. Sure this protocol mathematically is, but I don't see why a new fork or just a new Bitcoin would be limited.

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Yeah I think you've set me straight. What then, do you think of intellectual property? It isn't exactly a positional good, at least not in a literalist/physicalist sense, but intellectual property is quasi-positional in the sense that certain pieces of intellectual property are truly positioned somewhere in a graph of possible knowledge. Sometimes you may need to make a discovery only to find out that someone else already made it and now seeks to extract rent. This has always seemed imperfect to me. It is near-costless to share information as widely as possible; it seems like a coordination problem where everyone would be better off if some scheme of information sharing can be arranged. At the same time, treating intellectual property just like physical property that someone has to pay you to use seems to create a working incentive structure. Is some element of the intellectual property regime purely rent-seeking and holding us back, in your opinion?

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Yes IP is definitely positional (position in time). Its not enough to develop an idea, you have to develop it _first_. And there is no doubt an element of our (and most) IP regimes that is purely rent seeking.

The difference to land is that the supply of IP isn't fixed- in fact that the whole scheme was devised as an attempt to incentivize the production of new useful IP. The ability to temporarily collect rent is given in exchange for finding new IP. So a georgist analysis probably isn't that applicable.

I think our current system is undoubtedly suboptimal but not necessarily fundamentally inefficient, I'd just have to see the data. In fact our biggest current check on IP rent seeking is that you are only granted this right temporarily, eventually the patents expire. As opposed to land, which currently you can hold in perpetuity. George would probably say that only being given temporary rights to extract rent from your land would work pretty well to remove the DWL and long term ills, but temporary land rights are a bad idea socio-economically, youre better off confiscating the rent.

I can't speculate much on practical policy changes I would make to our current IP system because thats so data heavy and I dont have it. The only thing I can say with reasonable certainty is that weve got a complete and total mismatch concerning the protection of arts and media, these IP are extendable way way too far.

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The enormous energy use from proof-of-work is basically due to sticking with one algorithm and refusing to innovate no matter the consequences. Bitcoin is still using the first algorithm that worked. It's as if people were still flying replicas of the Wright Brother's airplane. It's not inherent to cryptocurrency, though, and hopefully competing algorithms will win out eventually.

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I don't think the analogy is quite apt. For Bitcoin, the energy consumption is the goal: it can't be done any other way. This isn't necessarily a suboptimal algorithm, it is what it is. I'm not anti-BTC for energy usage purposes, I think that's a Malthusian perspective that we should avoid.

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