official_techsupport
who/whom
No bio...
User ID: 122
Certain social policies are misguided attempts to ensure skin in the game.
Aristotle I think claimed that most vices correspond to the absence or perversion of some particular virtue. I reread Scott Alexander's review of Freddie deBoer's "The Cult of Smart" and it helped crystalize an observation that a certain kind of approaches to solving social ills is likely to be a perversion of the concept of having skin in the game.
Skin in the game is, basically, the idea that things tend to work out much better when people making decisions are also the people reaping the consequences than when they are not, because otherwise you get https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal–agent_problem and doctors doing lobotomies on the involuntarily committed and people forcing their politics on culturally different communities and the government spending taxes on catastrophically wasteful projects instead of letting people buy private services with their own money.
Now, Scott REALLY HATES public schools. Literally in CAPS LOCK. So it was kinda funny how he nodded sagely along with Freddie explaining how public schools don't really teach anything, commended his analysis that Montessori schools maybe aren't much better at teaching but at least they aren't DYSTOPIAN CHILD PRISONS, and so on and so forth, until the last part of the review where he COMPLETELY LOST HIS SHIT upon realizing that Freddie's solution is making everyone go to public schools and forbidding all alternatives.
I am so, so tired of socialists who admit that the current system is a helltopian torturescape, then argue that we must prevent anyone from ever being able to escape it. Who promise that once the last alternative is closed off, once the last nice green place where a few people manage to hold off the miseries of the world is crushed, why then the helltopian torturescape will become a lovely utopia full of rainbows and unicorns. If you can make your system less miserable, make your system less miserable! Do it before forcing everyone else to participate in it under pain of imprisonment if they refuse! Forcing everyone to participate in your system and then making your system something other than a meat-grinder that takes in happy children and spits out dead-eyed traumatized eighteen-year-olds who have written 10,000 pages on symbolism in To Kill A Mockingbird and had zero normal happy experiences - is doing things super, super backwards!
(this was when Scott already mostly calmed down by the way)
But Freddie's approach actually makes total sense as an attempt to force people to have skin in the game. The society is largely controlled by the rich and affluent. As long as they can escape to charter schools, catholic schools, or hire private tutors, they will do that instead of using their wealth and affluence to fix public schools, so those being horrible will remain solely poor people's problem. If we close all alternatives then it becomes everyone's problem and everyone has to solve it.
You can also see this approach in what is currently happening with the US justice system. America has a huge prison population and high rates of recidivism, which maybe could be solved by adopting the Nordic model of rehabilitative justice. But it's hard, it's much easier to lock up recidivists for decades, so that's what the system had been doing until roughly 2018, when a coordinated campaign had elected a bunch of progressive DAs in all major cities, who simply refused to prosecute a lot of crimes. Now with the crime wave affecting everyone people have no choice but to take rehabilitative justice seriously.
Most of desegregation initiatives also had this component to them (in addition to tolerance through familiarity I guess). As long as black people live in their own ghettoes and send their children to their own schools, rich and affluent people by and large don't care what happens there. But if you have gangs selling drugs in your kid's school and a crack den next door, you'll have to care about and fix the problem, right? Right?
Of course all such approaches range from simply not working to greatly increasing the harm they were meant to prevent plus causing other catastrophic consequences. Here's some reasons why:
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Just because you incentivized someone to solve a problem doesn't mean they will be able to figure how. Some problems are very hard and you have to try to solve them purposefully instead of setting up incentives and hoping for the best.
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Unless you want to live in a North Korea (and can bring it on), it's really hard to incentivize wealthy people to solve problems like that. They'll look at it, admit that they have no idea what to do about it, shrug, and move to another place. So attempting to overmilk that cow will leave you without milk at all.
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You are not incentivizing the actual rich and affluent people, you're incentivizing middle class, which is not affluent enough to solve much. Or more precisely, it's the actual rich and affluent people who are doing the incentivizing and they sure weren't busing their own children to mixed schools etc.
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Affluent people who end up in charge of solving social ills are usually ideologically incapable of solving them. For example, a school that has problems with drugs and discipline should punish and eventually expel troublemakers, but that's precisely the kids the progressive school board cares about the most, so it would demand that the parents solve the problem with discipline without disciplining anyone, at which point the wealthy parents will shrug and move elsewhere.
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Or regarding crime: let's be real, most criminals aren't Jean Valjeans stealing a loaf of bread to feed their younger siblings, they pick $1000 worth of Gucci bags and go do drugs and have fun because it sure beats working a week at Walmart, and that's the truth. If you tell them otherwise they will laugh you in the face. If you ask them to think about the poor Gucci shareholders they will laugh you in the face. The only way to fix them is to promise them a reasonably long stint in prison, at which point our prison abolitionist decides that Gucci shareholders deserve it and secretly gives up on rehabilitation.
Is it possible to force people to have skin in the game in a way that works? Yes, you have to make sure that you're forcing the right people and they can't wiggle out of it. So regarding prison reform again: first we go to the nearest KKK Grand Dragon and ask him if he's willing to pay $30k in taxes to have an innocent black man imprisoned for a year. Having thus established that the vast majority of the society doesn't have real incentives against rehabilitative justice, we greenlight anyone who wants to test their theories about how to rehabilitate criminals--more particularly, we ask the same George Soros fund that elected progressive DAs to bankroll and vet these initiatives, to make sure that the obvious grifters are excluded.
The most important part is that we also pass relatively strict laws against recidivism, say, doubling the term every time. This really incentivizes the anti-prison activists to do their best job trying to rehabilitate their charges. That doesn't mean that they will succeed--that any of them will meaningfully succeed--but they will try their best, and what more can we ask for?
This way instead of making the society hostage to criminals and hoping that someone figures out how to rehabilitate them, we take the criminals hostage and incentivize them and their rehabilitators to succeed.
official_techsupport
who/whom
4mo ago
Looks like everyone here is no longer willing to give you any constructive feedback. Consider presenting your case on https://rdrama.net, some people might mock you, but at least you'll have engagement.
Use https://rdrama.net/signup?ref=2481 for signing up btw, I'll get a badge for referring you!
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
I don't know if I'm stating the obvious here, but nothing about this tells us that "urgency" is bad per se, let alone how any of it is a value of "white culture" specifically. It seems at least possible that the activist's arrest was more important than her training, even from the narrow perspective of "perpetuating racism", but Okun appears incapable of entertaining that idea.
There's a certain obvious and probably inevitable professional deformation that occurs in people in Academia (some fields more than other). Consider, for example, a philosopher. His career trajectory, his current social status and salary, are pretty much entirely determined by the opinions of his peers and superiors. If they think that he's cool, his salary will increase. Then he goes and spends his paycheck buying food and stuff, and is upset that he can't buy everything he wants.
Now, in theory, if asked, he probably could explain that the food he buys is produced by real people, delivered to the supermarket by the real people, there's a lot of effort required for all that, there's a limited amount of effort available to the society, so you can't just set everyone's salary at a million dollars per month and let them have anything they want. But his world--all his lived experiences--scream at him that you definitely could, his paycheck is a meaningless number not connected to anything in reality and set by other people who could just as well double it if they wanted, and the goods on supermarket shelves are conjured from thin air by extradimensional aliens for all he can tell.
This has obvious consequences. For example, his gut tells him that communism is totally viable and money was invented by evil people for the sole purpose of causing suffering in their lessers. His mind knows about supply-demand curves (hopefully) but in his gut he knows that it's bullshit invented by evil people, look, you take a piece of cheese from the supermarket shelf and tomorrow there's another piece of cheese there, what supply and demand? It's like when you scoop some water from a river with a bucket and it's immediately replaced with more water, sure, someone might try to charge your for that, and you might yield due to the social pressure, but in your gut you know that it's unnecessary and unfair.
Similarly, in this case Tema Okun probably lives in an academic bubble detached from the reality where stuff is made by someone, and where if all those someones suddenly decide that urgency is a useless value, she will discover that supermarket shelves stay empty and starve to death.
That's the difference between socialist and libertarian approaches I guess. A Libertarian seeks to reduce the scope of consequences of decisions to the maker of them. A Socialist seeks to increase the scope until everyone is affected including the people in power so they are forced to make decisions that are good for everyone else too. Or like everyone is forced to talk about it and make decisions that are best for everyone, because everyone's in the scope.
New ACX post: Mostly Skeptical Thoughts On The Chatbot Propaganda Apocalypse, discuss!
I'll begin: this quote from philosophybear (what's his account here btw?):
The capacity of the wealthy to command vast armies of bots (GPU’s to run machine learning are expensive) will further erode what “democracy” there is on the internet. If fee structures are bought in like I described to keep bots out, that will make the internet less democratic too. My advice is to log off and start forming connections and organizations in real life now.
... made my inner Curtis Yarvin giggle hysterically. Observe the uncanny uniformity of ideological positions on pretty much all social issues in most large newspapers, most top universities, most large corporations. The only deviations are of the "we need fifty Stalins" kind (until they become the norm eventually). Can you imagine a Harvard professor, a New York Times editor, and the Raytheon PR department having a substantial disagreement on whether we need more trans drone pilots? I can't.
And it took people the possibility of bots faking a pale shadow of such consensus to start worrying that maybe democracy is susceptible to being secretly not the rule of the people but the rule of whoever tells the people what to believe, and the unbelievable synopticity of what we are told to believe means that this rule is being actively exercised?
Later Scott sort of touches on this a bit quoting a comment that said:
On the 'disinformation vs. establishment bot' question, check out bots interacting with climate change: 83.1% of bot tweets support activism, 16.9% skepticism according to https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1674927821001490 .
The abstract ends with:
Based on the above findings, we suggest cultivating individuals’ media literacy in terms of distinguishing malicious social bots as a potential solution to deal with social bot skeptics disguised as humans, as well as making use of benign social bots for science popularization.
official_techsupport
who/whom
6mo ago
The brutality and cynical tactics that Hamas uses do lead to them having lower support than they would if they were less sociopathic though.
That's the weird thing though: their cynical tactics used to be launching rockets from hospital rooftops and parading the inevitable Palestinian corpses, or having Palestinian kids shot for throwing stones, etc etc. The grift has always been provoking Israel to violence and posing as an underdog.
But this, parading enemy civilian corpses around, is a diametrically opposite thing. It's something you do when you have several thousands of tanks ready to roll over the enemy capital, you expect to win, and you want to demoralize the enemy to win easier.
So I don't know, either Hamas expects Iran to nuke Israel, or the old guard that understood the nature of the grift all retired or something and the new leadership got terminally high on their own supply.
official_techsupport
who/whom
7mo ago
First of all, that's literally the first point in my list of possible explanations for why forced skin in the games fails in my examples.
But also I want to point out an important thing: I'd want a stable legitimately non-working solution. As in, imagine one of the more inconvenient possible worlds where we have implemented my proposal for solving recidivism, everything appears to work as intended, George Soros makes sure that the people he funds really believe in the cause, those people report that they get nothing but enthusiastic cooperation from the prison staff, and they keep trying protocols devised by the best sociologists and they can't get recidivism rate below 70%.
That world is pretty unfortunate, but it has one very good property: whenever someone says "hey I think that you people are doing rehabilitative justice wrong, we should abolish prisons and replace it with mutual support communes, and for starters let all recidivists out on no bail" we tell him that there's currently three pilot mutual support communes, he's free to join any of them as staff and try to do rehabilitative justice right, but no, no way no how we are restarting any of those catch and release programs. If his ideas work, they work, yay, he solved an impossible problem, the criminals don't reoffend and are not affected by our harsh recidivism laws. If not, too bad, but at least the society is safe.
It's important that if the solution doesn't work the society can be reasonably sure that it's because the problem is very hard and not for the lack of trying.
official_techsupport
who/whom
9mo ago
To be fair complaining about lawn aesthetics is just as bad as adoring lawn aesthetics. Same goes for reading all that shallowness and unwarranted feeling of superiority into people you never met, vs being that shallow etc. A house like in the picture is perfectly suited for reading Dostoyevsky in, and that's the important part, no?
I also don't think that there's a problem that warrants a solution, much less a centralized solution. If someone figures out how to use resources more efficiently without compromising much more important aspects of life with their "part and parcel of hustle and bustle", let them try it somewhere! If it works, people will come and other places will emulate it! If on the other hand you operate under an assumption that people are deluded about what is best for them and must be forced into correct living conditions with an iron hand, it's overwhelmingly likely that it's you who are wrong.
On the latter note, in my experience there's an inverse relationship between the quantity and quality of interactions with neighbors and population density, in terms of inviting neighbors to your birthday party or a random bbq, vs not knowing who even lives in the apartment next door. Like, you might think that people living in separate houses naturally become a sort of haughty recluses shunning human contact, while people forced into a sort of human hive naturally form vibrant local communities--nope, for some reason it's the exact opposite in my experience.
I don't know why, maybe it's because a separate house on its plot of land is much more self-sufficient in certain senses, you don't just sleep there, you hang out there in the evenings and on weekends, your kids play there and around there, stuff like that, so naturally you interact with the neighbors all the time. While if you live in a pod and have to go to do all other activities in other designated areas, you just don't get many opportunities to interact with your pod-neighbors.
official_techsupport
who/whom
7mo ago
Your hypothesis is stupid. It’s needlessly complicated, and paints your enemies as both naive and devious. Why should activists expect results from foisting “the problem” onto an unwilling majority?
Because then the majority has skin in the game and has to deal with the problem. It's naive and usually doesn't work, but if you totally expect it from deBoer, why not from other activists?
Is desegregation really worthless except as a means to an end?
I never said or implied that. But you're conflating two very different things: all the stuff that MLK mentioned, let's call it "negative desegregation", meaning that black people are no longer prevented from being in white spaces, and "positive desegregation" that actively tries to mix up communities, such as busing (read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desegregation_busing btw, it was an unmitigated disaster opposed by everyone involved expect the actual rich and affluent whites). Can you give me your best pro-busing steelman? Because I'd put making whites have skin in the game wrt education quality on the first place, tolerance through familiarity on the second, and aesthetic preference for de facto desegregation as a sort of a strawman (though no doubt real) justification.
Same for the Soros DAs. I'm not saying that there were devious conspirators planning to have a crime wave, I'm sure that they hoped that there wouldn't be a crime wave! But don't you think that it was very weird to do things in the opposite order to what I proposed? Like, first you figure how to prevent criminals from reoffending, then you go soft on reoffenders because they won't reoffend yet again? If you go soft on reoffenders first, what exactly do you expect? Is "uh I hope someone also figures how to prevent recidivism now that they are forced to" painting my enemies as more stupid and evil than "idk I don't give a fuck lol"?
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
Eh, Null is doomposting as usual.
The most disturbing thing about all this to me is how easy it is to prop a blatant falsehood via "citogenesis". Multiple reputable sources have claimed that KF drove three people to suicide, therefore it's on Wikipedia as established truth. As far as I know, this is false.
As far as I know the only way to prove that it's false to someone is to ask them who those people were, at which point they discover themselves in a very sus tangle of people repeating rumors they heard from multiple people but with no actual sources, and either get enlightened or appeal to authority of a National Security Analyst for NBC and former Assistant Director of the FBI: twitter.com/FrankFigliuzzi1/status/1566438538765279232 and, yeah, the response can only be that things are really that bad, sorry.
official_techsupport
who/whom
7mo ago
I totally disagree with the conclusion. First of all, we are literally living in the time where one man's vision is about to revolutionize space travel by making a rocket that can lift 100 tons of payload to LEO. Yeah it's interplanetary for now, but why not interstellar next, maybe by the next man with an itch for it?
And second, why do you need to persuade the whole society to migrate? Most of the old world people didn't migrate to America and it was their loss. The few people who did migrate multiplied and prospered. "Indirect evidence of extrasolar planets will never be enough" -- for whom? So we will have bootlicking statists like the author waiting for the government to give them credible evidence and orders to go, while adventurous types will be populating the galaxy.
Marxbro was a troll by the way. At one point we had a discussion about the Labor Theory of Value, I tried my best to steer it away from theorizing and keep to a concrete example of some guys on an island exchanging fishes for pots etc, and eventually he had enough and basically said that no, he didn't want to explain this or that, he was doing it to get a rise out of people like me. Or at least that's how I remember it, it was, what, five years ago? But yeah, my impression was that he let the mask slip.
Of course, in words of a Chinese poet, if you pretend to be insane and tear your clothes and run into the garden, are you actually pretending, which also applies to single-mindedly "trolling" an internet forum for years.
official_techsupport
who/whom
2mo ago
They are making correct arguments that fail only in a very small subset of problems, those with information acquisition that is affected by the decisions.
I disagree that this is a very small subset of problems, the majority of real life problems let you decide to wait and collect more information or decide how many resources you're willing to bet. See examples in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit
For example, I think I first noticed this problem many years ago in one of Scott's linkdumps where he disapprovingly linked to Obama saying that CIA told him that such and such thing had a 70% probability but really they had no good information so it was a coinflip. And Scott was indignant, 70% is 70% what more do you need to know before you authorize some military operation, even the President doesn't understand probability smdh. In my opinion Obama was right, if technically imprecise, while Scott was wrong, which demonstrates the danger of having a little knowledge and also the need for more awareness.
is not easy to communicate succinctly.
You say this as if it's not Bayesians' fault that they have not developed (or got into a habit of using) a succinct way of conveying how much of the estimate comes from the prior and how much from the previous updates. I would understand if it was an acknowledged hard problem in need of community's attention, but for example Yudkowsky sequences don't mention it at all.
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
Anybody smart enough to build bleeding-edge AI systems is smart enough to understand why if you try to predict the likelihood of a criminal repeating a crime, it will always say that black people are more likely to repeat (it's because black people are more likely to repeat).
An alternative explanation is that doublethink required to simultaneously believe in the party line and in the reality required to do your job doesn't actually work very well and tends to devolve into believing in the party line only. Imagine that you're a bright young guy working on a Google's image classifier. To generate the thought that the classifier might confuse black people for apes so you must specifically check that it doesn't, you must believe that black people tend to have certain ape-like facial features. That's a very dangerous thing to believe, your woke peers would be very unamused if you just blurt it out or inexpertly wink-wink nudge-nudge your way to suggesting that you need to check for that etc. If you have a lot of wrongfact beliefs you have to watch your every word to avoid committing a social suicide. Accidentally releasing a classifier that does in fact mistake black people for apes on the other hand is relatively safe: it's not your personal fault and who could have thought and it's probably bias in the training data anyway. So in a highly ideologized environment people just naturally fail at their jobs instead of trying to maintain a bag of forbidden beliefs.
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
Net Neutrality is a fun one. I'm not sure everyone have actually forgotten about it, like, if you mention it on reddit (where it was the subject of a bunch of all-time top posts) people just ignore you instead of asking what it was.
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
That article is fascinating. The "Baa Baa White Sheep" section is a several pages long explanation of how the whole thing was fabricated, with quotes and citations, how it was some private initiative, and how the council said that they support it but actually they said that it's none of their business, and how actually some reporter couldn't find any worker that confirmed the ban, and so on and so forth.
And then it ends with a single sentence: "In 2000, the BBC reported the withdrawal of guidance to nursery schools by Birmingham City Council that "Baa, Baa, Black Sheep" should not be taught."
The way Wikipedia manages to lie its head off while still sticking to reputable sources is fascinating.
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
Does anyone remember (or can google) a Slate Star Codex post where he shared his experiences doing child psychiatry, in particular the constant refrain of how psychopathic children turned out to be adopted from rape victims and the like? The closest I found was https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/11/19/genetic-russian-roulette/ but I think that the post I remember had the adoption angle in particular. It's very probable that it was just a part of a larger post.
official_techsupport
who/whom
7mo ago
The real question we are interested in: "we can have an intervention that would make this black man a productive member of society that you don't even have to pay for, or you can pay $30k/year for decades until he grows too old to do crime".
official_techsupport
who/whom
11mo ago
My cats clearly don't understand how doors work.
They don't even understand that I open doors. One has learned that if she stands with paws on the door and looks at me and meows then the door opens sometimes, but I'm really not sure that she understands that it's I who opens the door, she just knows that "the door's open" tends to happen after "meow near the door". She doesn't understand "push on the door" leads to "door opens", I checked.
How would something like that work for humans? I mean, is it possible to imagine beings that are so above us as we are above cats and who affect our lives in meaningful (open doors etc) but incomprehensible ways? Like I have a literal guardian angel, I pray to it (like my cat meows to me), and then somehow things work out better for me, in an incomprehensible way. How could that work? How could an angel "opening a door" for you appear to a human?
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
This reminds me how when GPT3 was just released, people pointed out that it sucked at logical problems and even basic arithmetic because it was fundamentally incapable of having a train of thoughts and forming long inference chains, it always answers immediately, based on pure intuition so to speak. But to me it didn't look like a very fundamental obstacle, after all most humans can't multiply two four digit numbers in their head, so give the GPT virtual pen and paper, some hidden scratchpad where it can write down its internal monologue, and see what happens. A week later someone published a paper where they improved GPT3 performance on some logical test from like 60% to 85% by simply asking it to explain its reasoning step by step in the prompt, no software modification required even.
I think that that, and what you're talking about here, are examples of a particular genre of mistaken objections: yes, GPT3+ sucks at some task compared to humans because it lacks some human capability, such as internal monologue or long term episodic memory or can't see a chessboard with its mind's eye. But such things don't strike me as fundamental limitations, because, well, just implement those things as separate modules and teach GPT how to use them! They feel like some sort of separate modules in us, humans, too, and GPT seems to have solved the actually fundamental problem, of having something that can use them, a universal CPU that can access all sorts of peripherals and do things.
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
Persuit of truth is important, but so is keeping a lid on data which can be misused.
Can I see a cost-benefit analysis on whether it's worth it to keep that particular data secret? Even a very handwavy one?
Of course I can't, and it's because of a rather fundamental reason: having anything like that in public betrays the very truth it was intended to conceal. If you publicly claim that the public can't see data X because it might lead to the harmful belief in the conclusion Y, the public will assume that the conclusion Y is true based on your claim. So you need to equivocate and obfuscate.
Worse, since such decisions are made by nominally democratic institutions they can't be made even in secret, because if someone leaks the meeting notes it would be a huge scandal. So they aren't made rationally at all.
Consider for example the messaging "masks don't work, you should not buy masks so that there's enough left for doctors" from the early Covid days. Oh if only there were a behind-closed-door meeting between various senior WHO and CDC officials where they decided that they must lie to the public to address the mask shortages and this particular lie is the best they could do and it's worth it even taking into account long term consequences for trust in institutions.
I conjecture that such a meeting couldn't have happened because nobody wanted to destroy their career by calling for it and speaking plainly in case it's leaked. I point out that now when you can think about clearly it for five minutes it's obvious that the adopted policy was extremely stupid, proves that there was no such meeting, the policy was a result of bureaucrats acting on pure instinct, wink-wink nudge-nudge, no conscious deliberation at all.
So IMO this is the main problem with "keeping a lid" on things: unless you know exactly what you're doing (such as in not publishing nuclear weapon technologies), object-level lies infect all meta-levels, if you lie about the existence of certain data you have to lie about lying about that, and about whether you would lie in such situations, and so on. Which not only produces much more and much more dangerous lies that you'd initially expect, but also prevents you from thinking rationally about whether it's actually worth it.
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
And on the meaning side, we long ago reached the age where, per John Adams, the majority of the population could “ study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain”. They choose to collect Funko Pops, play slot machines or gacha games, watch reality TV and porn.
You and everyone else here (including @DaseindustriesLtd) are way too optimistic. You envision the failure mode of a UBI program as some recipients choosing a half-time job as a cashier over composing poems. The absolute worst possibility is them playing video games all the time.
We have had multiple attempts at UBI already, even if they weren't called that and differed in various unimportant aspects. Paris banlieues, US projects where 95% of inhabitants are on the dole--oh how you'd want them to play vidya all day instead of filling their upper levels of Maslow hierarchy with doing drugs, selling drugs, murdering other drug sellers, theft, robbery, general destruction of property, rape, riots, arson, every antisocial thing you can come up with they actually do. And they form a generationally unemployed underclass, a lot of people with no respect for labor and nothing but contempt for the hand that is feeding them. And they vote, besides burning up cars for fun.
This is the hard problem that any UBI-like proposal has to solve, not the pedestrian stuff like not preventing people from having part time jobs or removing unnecessary barriers to getting healthcare.
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
That last one - naming the Guillemet - got removed by the admins.
This is hilarious, Ilforte's flair approaches unironic reality fast.
(it's «Guillemet» is not an ADL-recognized hate symbol yet on reddit)
official_techsupport
who/whom
7mo ago
And because rich people are there it is clean and safe.
I doubt it. You don't have to be rich to Uber/Bolt everywhere. In fact by the time you can actively shape what the public is allowed/encouraged to vote for you can have a private driver.
To be honest I don't know why American cities appear so dysfunctional while other places do just fine, when I don't see how the decision-making is remotely democratic. Or maybe it is democratic but ordinary urban Americans are way more brainwashed somehow. I don't know, I know that where I leave we have very nice and cheap public transportation that is used exclusively by people who can't afford cars, but it's nice because it has these social ads playing, telling that if there's some smelly hobo (literally the ad is showing green noxious fumes!) you should immediately call the police and they will remove them. Which they do and if any politician tried to run on the platform of not infringing hobo rights, they would be laughed at by everyone.
A limitation of usual Bayesian reasoning.
Scott is doing his annual subscription drive and I was reminded of a (still) private post of his I disagree with: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/but-seriously-are-bloxors-greeblic
And then he proceeded to list some of the objections and his objections to objections. The objection I'm personally most partial to was not listed, so I assume it's a sort of novel idea, at least in that (and this) community.
Suppose that in your travels you encounter a shady guy who offers you an opportunity to bet on the outcome of a coin flip. Nearby stands a yudkowsky, who tells you that according to his observations the coin is biased and the next flip is about 66% likely to land on heads. You know that yudkowskis are honest and good Bayesians, so you trust his assessment.
The shady guy flips the coin and it lands on tails. Now consider two possible worlds: in one the yudkowsky says that his new estimate is 50% heads, in another he says that he has updated to 65% heads. That's two very different worlds! It turns out that the yudkowsky has an important parameter: how many coinflips he has observed so far, and therefore how much of his estimation comes from the observations and how much from the prior, and for some reason he doesn't tell you its value!
Scott's assertion is correct in a narrow technical sense: in a world where the shady stranger forces you to make a bet at gunpoint, you are forced to use the yudkowsky's estimation and the yudkowsky is forced to use a symmetric prior that gives him a 50% probability of heads when he has not seen any flips at all yet.
However in the real world there's almost always an option to wait and collect more data, and whether you want to exercise it critically depends on the difference between "it's a 50/50 chance based on observing 100 coinflips" and "it's a 50/50 chance based solely on the prior I pulled out of my ass".
So what's going on I think is that people intuitively understand that there's this important difference and suspect that when Scott says that normally they should start with a 50/50 prior, he's trying to swindle them into accepting Bayesians' estimations without asking how sure they are about them. And rightfully so, because that's a valid and important question to ask and honestly Bayesians ought to get a habit of volunteering this information unprompted, instead of making incorrect technical arguments insinuating that the estimated probability alone should be enough for everyone.
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