MathWizard
formerly hh26
No bio...
User ID: 164
MathWizard
formerly hh26
6mo ago
Yeah, my understanding is that most of the therapy techniques were designed based on female patients, and therefore focus more on things like feelings rather than solutions to object-level problems. However competent ones exist, and will tailor their style based on the needs of their patient (or at least identify when they aren't a good fit and refer them to other therapists with a better-suited style). A suicidal man seeing Jordan Peterson isn't going to get a bunch of mamby pampy nonsense about "aw, I'm sorry to hear that, how does that make you feel?", they're going to get "that sucks, life sucks, but your life isn't over, let's come up with an actionable plan for how to make it suck less" and then having an actionable plan helps fix your mental state because you have a goal you can work towards (and once you enact the plan your life is objectively improved and that helps your mental state). Even a good therapist can't unilaterally fix your life for you, but they can help convince you to fix your own life and figure out how instead of wallowing in self-misery and inaction.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1mo ago
/
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1mo ago
This assumes an infinite supply of potential sales. In practice I would expect to optimize over some denominator which combines time and sales, emphasized differently based on how saturated the market is.
Regardless, this doesn't address the main issue that the buyer's agent and seller's agent have near-identical incentives: have quick sales with high prices. The only distinction is that the buyer's agent's ability to market their services to future clients is correlated with low prices, but I'm not sure how strong of a correlation that is.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1mo ago
Ur, Amilia, and Marked are the easiest to avoid the taboos of passively if you want to just have a free power and not dedicate your life to advancing some cause.
I'd probably go with Amilia, become the head of a magical hospital where I heal people for money (and have enough EMTs and ambulances to keep people alive until I can get to them, and get obscenely rich while simultaneously helping people. I assume that charging money for healing is a lot less pleasing and would advance the agenda less than doing it for free, but it's not strictly taboo. I think as long as I don't turn away poor people, healing anyone who comes and simply charge them proportional to their ability to pay, it'll probably be fine. I assume that the existence of other Amilia users will drop demand to reasonable levels such it won't lead to absurdly high prices like it would if you were the only one who could cure otherwise incurable disease, but one in a million multiplied by the proportion of people who choose Amilia means this will still end up with a lot of money.
Alternatively, see if the Fae power can be munchkinned for absurd amounts of money by growing rare spices or something. Depending on the growth rate and quality/quantity it can be used on at a time, it might be more profitable to heal people entirely for free to boost your strength more and earn all your money from growing stuff. Though again, profits will be mitigated by other Amilia users.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
8mo ago
Very few people actually have a problem with talented people earning lots of money and then spending their own money on personal consumption, even if this is "unequal" compared to untalented people who have less money. Nonzero, but very few. Most people complaining about rich people are actually upset at some combination of
1: Rentseeking. Big company gets a stranglehold on some sort of niche or patent, ousts/regulates/threatens out their competition, and earns tons of money disproportionate to their actual economic contribution. CEO/executives/shareholders get rich on economic surplus that they didn't rightfully earn.
2: Inherited wealth. If John is talented and earns a ton of money, as his private property he can do whatever he wants with it. One of the things people like to do with their money is give it to their children, especially when they die and can't use it any more. So John gives his earned wealth to his son Jim, who is a spoiled talentless loser, and gets all of the benefits of massive wealth with none of the personal contribution to society or perceived merit. Everyone hates Jim.
3: Interest. Capital is incredibly valuable to the economy. Therefore people who invest their money in capital can earn lots of money from their money. Therefore their wealth grows exponentially even without them having talent or contributing labor. Talentless losers like Jim can invest the wealth they inherited and continue to become increasingly wealthy without actually having any talent whatsoever. They're still contributing to the economy in the sense that the wealth they invest is useful, but they themselves have done nothing to earn it other than inheriting the legacy of their parents who did earn it (or stole it via rentseeking, or literal theft in the distant past)
These are all really hard problems to solve. I'm not entirely convinced that 2 and 3 are actually problems in their own right rather than just discomforting rights people have. Like, someone has the right to masturbate while smearing poop on their chest, but I find it disgusting and would rather wish they didn't even though technically I would agree they are free to do that in the privacy of their own home and I won't argue that the government should make it illegal. It's still disgusting to my sensibilities.
In my opinion, 1 is a genuine problem that definitely needs to be solved. 2 is probably fine if we can address 3, and 3 is only solvable by economic stagnation or post-scarcity. Basically, as long as the economy is growing, and capital investment is an important component of that growth, then the people driving the growth via investment will capture the growth. If the economy stops growing, or labor becomes a more important part of growth rather than capital, then capital is no longer so ridiculously valuable and interest rates will plummet. Until then, I think we're stuck with Jims getting richer.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1mo ago
What matters depends on what you're trying to extrapolate it for. If you're evaluating whether you or someone you know should purchase the product, then the value of the product matters, and intent only matters in-so-far as it correlates with the value of the product If person A is an intentional scammer then the vast majority of products they offer will have low value and high cost, so you can use that as a prior and probably dismiss all their offerings without any additional investigation.
If you're extrapolating it to the value of their other offerings then intent matters a little. An intentional scammer is going to offer bunches of scams and fail to cultivate real value. Someone who values themselves highly in a genuine way is going to attempt to offer good value even if they tend to overprice some of it, so the correlation between offerings will be weaker.
If you're extrapolating that to the value of their character, then intent matters a lot. If person A offers a bad product unintentionally, then you can't conclude they're a bad person, while if they do it intentionally then they are.
So if two people, A and B, have free videos offering advice, and then paid videos and services offering more detailed advice and individual attention for a cost, and person A is a known scammer and person B is not, you should probably avoid even the free videos from person A, because they're optimizing for advertising the scam and getting money rather than being genuinely useful, while person B is likely to offer more genuine advice in their free videos, because they believe the value of their product can speak for itself.
Ultimately, the value of the free and paid content is what actually matters, but the intent correlates strongly across content
MathWizard
formerly hh26
3mo ago
I think his point is something like, "Here's something simple, stupid but fun, and completely apolitical. You don't need to take it seriously, you don't need to be on guard against propaganda or hidden agendas, it's a music video that's actually just what it's supposed to be about: music. Why can't we have more modern culture like that?"
Which is a critique against modern media that's always trying to push an agenda and hide messages inside of other pieces of culture.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
4mo ago
I'd put myself somewhere in the middle. I treat all of my stuff with some degree of respect. I'm not like super cautious and offended if they get some wear and tear, but I'm not going to deliberately damage them.
Someone who cuts their books in half is comparable to someone who cuts their furniture or plates in half. Like, you're allowed to do that, but unless you're doing a very specific project that requires this, why would you? Now you have torn up damaged stuff instead of nice new stuff.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
2mo ago
I'm not sure you can disentangle that, as the majority of these cases are not biological nepotism, as in people hiring their siblings and cousins, but ideological nepotism: people hiring their friends and colleagues who think the same way that they do because they have a shared ideology. The ideology and the nepotism feed into one another. Without the ideology they wouldn't feel such hatred for outsiders that they would feel the need to discriminate against them. It's not simply self-interest because they're not (usually) hiring actual family members.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
2mo ago
It's been a while since I've seen it, but I think the main clue is the over-the-top propaganda commercials in it. The tone makes it clear that the director does not intend the audience to believe it or take it seriously.
Aside from that, the horrible meat-grinder of combat and disregard for the lives of the troops makes it clear that the human army is not a desirable place to be and the higher ups do not respect their troops. Also the literal child soldiers.
If it was a pro-fascist movie, the human government would be portrayed a lot more competently.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
4mo ago
Modelling the other sex is very difficult, people fail at it all the time and we should try to do it less.
I was with you up until the very last clause. Shouldn't the conclusion be the opposite? Modeling the other sex is very difficult, people fail at it all the time and we should practice it more. In fact, the number one issue seems to be that people aren't even attempting to model the other sex, they are simply typical-minding and assuming the other sex thinks how they think but with the opposite sexual orientation.
I don't think modeling the other sex is easy at all, I'm certainly no good at it (though I'm not good at modeling other people of any sort), but trying and failing and then updating your models iteratively is going to get you way closer than not trying at all.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
7mo ago
Not sure if this belongs here or in SQS, but it could either be a small question I don't understand or a discussion depending on whether or not people disagree about the answer.
Why did support for Ukraine split along the left/right the way it did (at least in the U.S.), when typically one would expect it to go the other way. That is, the right is usually more pro-military, pro-military intervention, and patriotic defending of one's homeland. Even though the right tends to be more focused on domestic issues and oppose foreign aid, military support tends to be the exeption. Although there was bipartisan support of the Iraq war (at least in the aftermath of 9/11) the Republicans were more strongly in favor of it and stayed in favor of it for longer. If Russia had threatened to invade the U.S. the Republicans would have been not only gung-ho about repelling them but also about retaliating and obliterating them in revenge so that none would dare try ever again. So you would think they would sympathize with Ukrainians as similarly patriotic defenders of their home turf, while the left would be all peace and let's try to get along and diplomatically convince the invaders to stop without violence, or something like that.
But that's not what happened. Why?
Is it just because the left has been harping on about Putin for years so hopped on the anti-Russia train too quickly and the right felt compelled to instinctively oppose them? If China had invaded Ukraine (for some mysterious reason) would the right be pro-Ukraine and the left opposing intervention because they don't want to piss off China (and accusing Ukraine of being nazis as an excuse)? That is, is there something specific to Ukraine/Russia that caused this divide here specifically, or am I misunderstanding the position of each side regarding military intervention in general (or has it changed in the past few decades and my beliefs used to be accurate but no longer are)?
MathWizard
formerly hh26
6mo ago
Since I aim to be sincere in my beliefs with minimal delusions of convenience, I respect such adherents more than insincere mealy-mouthed Cultural Catholics or the "moderate" Muslims who eat pork, smoke and drink while nominally calling themselves Muslim. Do I get along better with such people than a Hamas operative? Of course, doesn't mean I don't respect them less.
This only makes sense if you are assigning respect entirely based on honesty/loyalty/commitment, and not at all on things like caring about the welfare of other people. That is, the amount of respect I lose for a hypocrite is less than the amount of respect I lose for a murderer. Even if an honest and committed terrorist Muslim is more respectable for their commitment than a terrorist atheist who just kills for fun, it's less respectable than a Muslim who realizes that murder is wrong and chooses not to do it, even if they reduce themselves to hypocrisy in the process.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1mo ago
In terms of scale it involves more people, but in terms of perceived threat and actionable measures it seems less threatening.
Like, JFK was assassinated. This is immediately violent. Believing that the government/CIA assassinated the president makes them dangerous bad guys who are willing to assassinate people they don't like, and potentially justifies violence against them in retaliation and/or self defense. 9/11 likewise killed lots of people, making the perpetrators dangerous and worth retaliating against (even ordinary non-conspiracists can get behind this, which is why there was so much support for military intervention in the middle east after 9/11).
The most likely response to threats of violence are accumulating weapons to defend oneself and possibly pre-emptively strike using violence. If someone points a gun at you, you point one back.
Vaccines and Flat Earth are about scientific lies. They say that the leading scientists and media are corrupt and in the pocket of the government or whoever is leading the conspiracy, and the things they say cannot be trusted. Nobody needs to die to cover up the truth, because they can be paid off instead. Now, maybe some of the variants of vaccine and Flat Earth conspiracy theories do involve the government murdering people to cover up, and those ones are potentially dangerous, but I have never heard a Flat Earther talking about assassinations, so I think it's uncommon.
The most likely response to media and scientists lying is to not trust them, and possibly have this mistrust bleed into other domains. If they're lying to you about X, why should you trust them about Y? Now this can lead to some harms such as people refusing to vaccinate themselves or their children, but this is significantly less dangerous than actual violence. If someone lies to your face, you lose respect for them and possibly try to avoid them, but very few people would respond with violence (except in weird edge cases, where it's probably not about the lie itself but about the underlying thing they were lying about).
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1mo ago
Hence the word "relatively". All conspiracy theories carry some risk, via this sort of chaining, but the Flat Earth ones are indirect like this, while others like "the FBI is stalking me" have a much more direct path towards danger.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1mo ago
The intro says
Culture war topics are accepted
so that suggests to me that simple requests for topics would fit here. I don't think it would drain energy from the main thread and, if it worked, would actually drive more discussion there, as long as the small scale questions didn't consistently spin off into a length discussion of the topic here in this thread before a big post was made.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
11mo ago
The fact that the bike makers never intended the repeated 45 free minutes trick to work but didn't do anything to patch this exploit is a lapse of their judgement, not a shortfall in goodness from the black teens.
Hard disagree. The fact that the bike temporarily locks you out from immediately re-renting it demonstrates that the bike makers deliberately attempted to prevent this exploit, they just didn't expect people to go so far as to physically guarding the bikes while they were docked. Effectively, the kids are taking up the bikes so that they can't be used, as if they were renting them, without paying for it while it's docked. The fact that a protection is possible to get around if you go to extremes that reasonable people wouldn't go to (physically intimidating and harassing cusomters away from the rentals) does not make it acceptable behavior.
Further, there are tradeoffs to behaving in this low-trust way. Because the bike makers "patching" this exploit is to make the lockout period longer. Maybe they make it so the subscribed customers only get 45 minutes once every 4 hours, to make it untenable for squatters to sit around that long. Except now that harms legitimate good-faith customers who had a 30 minute bike ride, a 2 hour meeting, and then 30 minutes back. Straining the system in an adversarial relationship with the manufacturer forces them to make increasingly draconian patches to prevent exploits.
This is more akin to a sale of some item at a store that says "50% off, limit one item per customer" and having one person guard them so nobody can get any during the time it takes for your friend to continuously grab one item, go and check out, and then come back for more until they're all gone. You don't get moral dibs if the rules are clearly trying to prevent you from doing what you're doing but failed to account for the fact that you might use physical intimidation.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1yr ago
I think the main problem is that it disproportionately amplifies the opinions and behavior of the tiny number of humans in charge of giving the feedback, who are not representative of people overall. If half the population is left-leaning and half is right-leaning, and this is accurately reflected in the amount of content online, then a neutral AI trained online will contain a roughly equal mixture of both. If 99% of AI researches are left-leaning, and they deliberately reward the AI for left-leaning beliefs and punish right-leaning ones, then that's what it will exhibit. If 1% of people are... I don't know, pedophiles/cannibals/nazis/marxists, but are disproportionately over-represented in Silicon Valley such that 10% of trainers are, and they reward the AI based on their beliefs, then it will support those behaviors.
We, the people in abstract, are not in charge of training the AI. A very small number of people are, and they are deliberately injecting their own personal opinions into it without regard for the larger diverse opinions of the population as a whole. So, not only is it that I object to humans behaving poorly, it's that those specific humans are advancing their agenda in a way that disproportionately empowers them relative to their actual prevalence, and thus is more of a problem than just those people existing and having private beliefs. And pretending that they're trying to make AI behave ethically in the abstract is just a smokescreen for advancing a particular ideology that a small number of people consider to be ethical.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
7mo ago
The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.
This culture war has been happening for decades, it will likely continue for decades into the future. We need to do other stuff to help ourselves in the short term, but not doing this is just going to make the problem continue to get worse in the long run.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
6mo ago
Even then, I think people underestimate the quality of life you can expect as a poor person with an intact family. If his entire industry went under and he couldn't adapt and was stuck flipping burgers for minimum wage he could still provide for his family. They might have to downgrade their home and lifestyle expectations, but they're not going to starve to death or end up homeless. And I suspect that the actual quality of life for his daughter would be higher poor with an alive father than rich with no father.
If you have serious mental health issues rendering you completely unemployable, then the object level might be unfixable, but for everyone else it's more a question of lowering standards and struggling to do as well as you can and fix as much as you can even if you can never return to the wealthy lifestyle you were expecting.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
10mo ago
Update to this post: https://www.themotte.org/post/498/smallscale-question-sunday-for-may-21/101809?context=8#context
where I wanted advice on getting an engagement ring for my girlfriend. I have since proposed before getting the ring (as planned), it went wonderfully, and we are now engaged. After looking at a bunch of examples together and honing in on concepts and features she found appealing (turns out she doesn't simply like flowers, which I already knew, but she really really really likes flowers), we settled on this ring
from Taylor and Hart. It uses diamonds, but they use lab-grown diamonds, so I'm happy with that. We considered substituting some colored gems in the flower, but then there's also leaves which would look a bit weird if we made them green, but would also look weird if we colored the rest of the flower but left them white. Most importantly, my now-fiance thinks it's really pretty exactly how it is, so we don't want to change things in case it accidentally ends up looking worse.
Thank you for everyone who offered advice, regardless of whether I ended up using it or not.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
8mo ago
I think this requires noblesse oblige from the people higher up, which mostly only happens if there is accountability for people at the top via skin in the game. If you are a feudal lord with lands that your famils has held for generations and peasants under you whose families have worked for your for generations, you are incentivized to take care of them because their thriving is your thriving. If you mistreat them too terribly they will rebel and chop your head off. If you mismanage the lands you will go bankrupt and be reduced to poverty. If you do a good job you will be wealthy and loved.
If you are the patriarch of a family and you mistreat your wife and/or children they will hate you and leave.
If you are a modern high level bureaucrat or government official in charge of millions/billions of dollars of someone else's money and mismanagement is rewarded with a transfer or a golden parachute, there's none of this. There's no incentive to behave responsibly to those below you, and there's no incentive for people trying to climb their way up to do so gracefully when a momentary clawhold can be cemented with the powers obtained along the way.
If SBF, or the bankers who caused the housing crisis, or the politicians who ruined the economy during Covid faced the ruin of their families into longterm poverty, or beheading by angry mobs, those issues probably wouldn't have happened in the first place because they would have been more careful. If every politician who voted for war was required to lead on the front lines, we'd have a lot fewer wars. But because many (most?) hierarchies allow people high to foist the consequences of their decisions onto people lower down, we typically don't get the nice scale of risk/reward that you envision here, though it sometimes does work like that.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
3mo ago
Yeah, we definitely need to move in a more libertarian direction than we are now. It's just that an awful lot of Libertarians claim things like "we need to remove literally all regulations", and I'm like "no, the anti-monopoly, anti-cartel ones are pretty good and we should keep those while we strip out the bad ones."
MathWizard
formerly hh26
3mo ago
Just think about it, if conveying the impression, with little effort, that you agree with someone was against the rules, why on earth would we have upvote or downvote buttons?
I think the point is that if the only thing you're expressing is agreement then you should be upvoting instead of commenting in order to save pagespace and brainspace for substantial comments. Everyone who scrolls past can see the comment and is likely to waste time reading it before recognizing that it contributes nothing and moving on. Rather than having a popular post with 50 "I agree" comments and one actual reply mixed together, we could just have a 50 next to the upvote button and then the one actual reply stand on its own for people to read and possibly reply to.
To the extent that upvotes and "I agrees" aren't actually the same thing, as you can upvote people you disagree with but you feel make good posts, and you can fail to upvote people even if you agree with their point, I've suggested in the past that it could be useful to have two different vote bars, one for quality and one for agreement.
I'm surprised to see this one in here alongside all the others. On the one hand, I agree that on the first-order a non-compete will distort labor markets, but on the other hand an absence of non-compete distorts incentives for training, trade secrets, and customer sharing. A company doesn't want to hire someone, spend time and resources teach them all the best techniques for doing a job effectively, and then have that person immediately leave and take all that training somewhere else or strike out on their own. Similarly, a company doesn't want to give someone a bunch of infrastructure and marketing and accumulate a bunch of clients and then spin off into a private business, carrying those clients with them.
Now, I don't think we have an obligation to do things just because they make companies happy, not at all. But the incentive structure means that if companies can't curtail these behaviors via non-competes they will curtail them in other ways. Companies will guard their secrets more carefully, will shuffle customers around so they can't get too attached to any one employee, and do other inefficient things that create economic friction.
More options
Context Copy link