Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41487693

Points: 1

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Our CTO and myself linked up 1-on-1 in Japan to end the year, and we just wanted to give some fun design and coding in. We were looking for a fun lightweight project to do, and we wound up taking a bunch of best practices around setting and following through with goals and looking for a way to make it interesting and novel.

We wound up borrowing some inspiration from "dangerous Japanese game shows" and built a "make progress on your New Year's Resolution daily to stay in the competition" — I think might really enjoy it. Was a joy to build.

So very glad 2022 is ending. Excited for 2023.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34196211

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

I'm on the periphery of the EA / Longtermist scene — I have friends and customers in that space and have studied and hung out some. I recently went to one of the online events — EAGx Virtual — so I got to see what people actually care about, are working on, the methodologies being used, etc.

One way that might be helpful to think about "Effective Altruism" and "Longtermism" is that they're rather loose labels, more similar to "Democracy" than "Member of XYZ Political Party or NGO" — while there's some loose unifying threads across people who hold those views, there are very many different nuanced views about what good implementation can look like and how individual people and groups relate being effective and benevolent.

Then, the people doing the best work in that space are doing some incredible things that have already had short-term high-impact results in the world like doing hyper-rigorous work on how to cure and treat and prevent diseases in the developing world, and then actually getting those things funded and checking the results. It's also very much _not_ uniformly "just use a spreadsheet" - a lot of people there take dialogue, conversation, and engagement qualitatively to ensure good is happening very seriously.

For instance, a talk I attended at EAGx Virtual covered this - https://whatworkswellbeing.org/about-wellbeing/how-to-measur... - I haven't been able to dive deeply into the methodology, but it looks incredibly thoughtful and with many practical applications. I'm, personally, really happy people are doing work like that.

Then, simultaneously there are people in the EA/Longtermist space that are working on more speculative potential problems — pandemic preparedness, reducing the risk of nuclear war, and yes AI Safety. To the latter point, empirically a lot of people in AI Safety seem more worried about very practical can-definitely-be-anticipated risks of things like, e.g., USA-China rivalry and what types of regulations, markets, and general consensus might prevent that from going badly. Obviously highly speculative futuristic ideas are sexier and get more attention than "boring routine stuff" but international conventions against, for instance, Lethal Autonomous Weapons (LAWs) seems like a really prudent thing to at least explore and see if an international consensus could be built around similar to the Geneva or Hague conventions.

As for "EA-think" I don't agree with Aaronson's assessment. I'm n=1, but there's not a single monolithic viewpoint.

Some really exceptional work is being done by some very thoughtful people there. Undoubtedly some bad or sloppy work is being done, as is true in just about any domain. But on balance I've found the people there to be quite thoughtful and doing some really valuable things for the world with a lot of sincerity and rigor.

The challenge in learning from the Taoist writers is that almost no one can read their original works directly any more — the writing was so long ago that most modern-day Chinese people can't read it directly from Ancient Chinese without translating into modern first. The language has evolved.

That's before even getting into the challenge of learning in English or another language, since the works tend to have lots of metaphors and idioms and poetic language in them.

In my case, I had a really cool opportunity to go through over a dozen translations of the Taoteching with copies of the translation from ancient Chinese into modern Chinese and a translator's attempt at an English translation with a Chinese friend who is a scholar of linguistics. It was really fun and insightful.

That all said, I think Rosenthal's "The Tao Te Ching: An Introduction" is a wonderful starting place.

http://enlight.lib.ntu.edu.tw/FULLTEXT/JR-AN/an142304.pdf

Rosenthal takes the very terse, poetic, and metaphorical lines of Laozi and turns them into extended prose while keeping a lot of the aesthetics. Like so:

> THE TAO AND ITS NAME

> 1. Naming things enables us to differentiate between them, but names are words, and words easily give rise to confusion. They do not replace the thing or direct experience of the thing which they name, but only represent or describe it.

(And then it goes deeper into explaining on that point.)

At least in Rosenthal's case, his take is quite different than the professors who wrote this article:

> KNOWLEDGE OF 'THE TAO', AND EXPERIENCE OF THE TAO.

> There is a way in which we may conduct our lives without regrets, and in such a manner as assists in developing and realizing our individual potential, without harming others, or inhibiting the realization of their potential, and which is beneficial to a healthy society.

> Such a way of life may of course be conducted without a name, and without description, but in order that others may know of it, and so as to distinguish it from other ways in which life may be conducted, we give it a name, and use words to describe it.

And then, critically —

> 2. LETTING GO OF OPPOSITES.

> It is the nature of the ordinary person, the person who is not yet at one with the Tao, to compare the manifestations of the natural qualities possessed by things. Such a person tries to learn of such qualities by distinguishing between their manifestations, and so learns only of their comparative manifestations.

> So it is that the ordinary person might consider one thing beautiful when compared with another which he considers to be ugly; one thing skillfully made compared with another which he considers badly made. He knows of what he has as a result of knowing what he does not have, and of that which he considers easy through that which he considers difficult. He considers one thing long by comparing it with another thing which he considers short; one thing high and another low. He knows of noise through silence and of silence through noise, and learns of that which leads through that which follows.

> When such comparisons are made by a sage, that is a person who is in harmony with the Tao, that person is aware of making a judgement, and that judgements are relative to the person who makes them, and to the situation in which they are made, as much as they are relative to that which is judged.

The interaction and fusion of Taoist and various other Chinese thought with Buddhism, attributed typically to Boddhidharma traveling from India to China, became the foundation of Chan Buddhism in China and later Zen Buddhism in Japan.

I reckon most scholars and practitioners from the tradition wouldn't accept the useful/useless distinction as correct or as "Follow[ing] the Daoist way" - like, some nice ideas in the article, but both a false dichotomy and unfortunate dualism there.

https://www.amazon.com/Difficult-Conversations-Discuss-What-...

The basic idea is that in any difficult conversation, there's actually three sub-conversations happening —

(1) What happened?

(2) How do we feel about it?

(3) What are we going to do about it?

A lot of times people get into cross-talk or can't get on the same page because they mix up what sub-conversation they're happening. This can happen when one person gets right into proposing solutions (#3) while another person is still trying to work out why things went the way they did (#1). Likewise, sometimes a conversation around "we really screwed this up" is meant to be a neutral "what happened" conversation (#1) but is taken as a negative or put-down (#2).

Useful book. Very readable and informative.

Vavilov is definitely a first-class scientist who seemed to have an incredible personality. In some alternative better timeline, Vavilov would probably be as well-known and had inspired as many people as, say, Feynman. Alas.

Anyway, while we're on the topic of Soviet scientists, the whole silver fox domestication research program is infinitely fascinating —

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_silver_fox

Highly highly recommended.

Edit: Soviet pharmacology also very interesting — and even more surprising it hasn't been studied and imported since, like, humans are humans and it works. Probably an unfortunate secondary effect of how trials/licensing/patenting work. Not a bad starting point: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/16/an-iron-curtain-has-de...

Heck, maybe also a candidate for greatest learning-on-the-job and leadership story too.

It's really an incredible work. The "Why am I lying here?" monologue still gives me chills.

Edit — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anabasis_(Xenophon) http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1170

I think that sometimes seeing a person meander through related concepts and take a fresh look at them can be quite valuable; likewise, non-technical language can make things accessible.

Even if there's no grand takeaway.

I know, for me, sometimes I quite like this sort of thing and sometimes I find it tiresome. But in the right mood, I find it very valuable.

Likewise, I could send this piece to someone who has no technical background at all and has not the Bitcoin whitepaper or any further analyses, and then have an interesting conversation afterwards.

Something like that, eh?

Losing might strip away the fairweather/bandwagoner fans, leaving only the people with a natural predilection to commitment. Winning might attract more bandwagon/fairweather fans.

You could probably test this by finding multiple teams that had around a 50% win percentage and finding fans that adopt them in early adulthood, like someone who goes to college in Indiana starting to root for the Indiana Pacers (basketball), etc.

If you build a sample of around 1000 people that adopted different middle-of-the-road teams, then followed them longitudinally, you could see whether they increase in commitment, drop out, or stay about the same with rising and falling fortunes of the team.

A lot of work, though. No doubt certain experiences shape perception of fandom, but I imagine it's different populations — not just the same type of starting population being effected by different events.

"Warning Signs in Experimental Design and Interpretation" by Peter Norvig —

https://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24578267

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

We never talk about it like this, but almost the entire food supply of most places was "organic" until very recently.

But here's what they're investigating:

> ”In this paper, we introduce a concept that might be accurately portrayed as “supply creates its own excess demand”. Namely, a negative supply shock can trigger a demand shortage that leads to a contraction in output and employment larger than the supply shock itself."

They've got some time variables; I think an explicit savings variable (and maybe credit, too) would be important in determining whether that'd happen.

I might be mistaken, I tossed some quick thoughts up when this had zero comments, looking at methodology and assumptions moreso than conclusions. But you'd think regions with high-savings, low-savings but lots of credit, and low-savings combined with low credit would behave very differently towards "a contraction in output and employment larger than the supply shock itself."

Math gets way more complicated as you addd variables like that, though, and maybe it wouldn't effect the conclusions too much though, so... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

1. Looks interesting. Worthwhile type of thinking.

2. Control+F "savings" / "saving" ... no results. You'd think that the amount and distribution of savings in a population would greatly effect the outcomes.

That said, "elasticity" showed up 14 times in a control+f of the paper so it might be implicitly covered or named differently.

Edit: "reserve" / "reserves" had no relevant mentions (1x "rights reserved", 2x in citations of Federal Reserve), capital 0 mentions, "insurance" 14 mentions, "ability" 0 mentions, "willing" / "unwilling" / "willingness" 1 mention total, "substitute" / "substitution" 19 mentions, "bankrupt" / "bankruptcy" 0 mentions, "unemployment" 11 mentions, "funds" 0 mention, "cash" 0 mentions, "money" only 1 mention (!)... "monetary" shows up 20 times though.

Edit2: Lots of "utility function" going on. I personally don't really love the theoretical grounding of utility functions but it might actually produce interesting insights in this case.

Edit3: "Each agent is endowed with n > 0 units of labor which are supplied inelastically" - inelasticity of units of labor in this case seems like a pretty aggressive assumption. They carry that assumption through - "As before, agents inelastically supply labor n to their respective sector in the flexible price equilibrium; they may supply less than n in the equilibrium with wage rigidities. For now, we assume that workers are perfectly specialized in their sector."

Quite theoretical with a fair amount of simplifying assumptions to make it simpler to mathematically model. The conclusions are rather tentative and not strongly stated, in any event. Interesting line of thinking, I think you'd have to look closely at the assumptions and premises and how variables are defined to see if it corresponds well to real life.

Two thoughts.

(1) I wonder if you could frame learning to communicate and get satisfaction from interactions with merely "quite smart" people as a challenge worth pursuing. You could brush up on negotiation, sales, rhetoric, poetics, etc. Perhaps slowly start converting those domains' messy forest of heuristics into some principles and equations, if your mind works that way. If you were able to, for instance, detect someone lying to preserve their own self-image around something they felt ashamed of, and then were able to navigate that to help them both renounce the lying without feeling bad about it and help them reintegrate their self-image around the concept — that sort of that is immensely cognitively demanding to be able to do, and it's pro-social (you might not care, some people do, but at least it's not pathological in any way)... in any event, that'd increase the amount of cognitive processing you'd be forced to do in any given interaction by an order of magnitude or two, which might make those interactions become enjoyable. You'd also rapidly become massively liked and trusted.

(2) With your intellectual horsepower, if you were willing to, you could absolutely seek out and cultivate a dozen or so people on your level cognitively. It'd take a while — you'd need to think through exactly what environments you navigate at what times and in what ways, how introductions get made to you, etc — but if you were to meet ~1000 people in a thoughtful thought-through way, then I'm sure you'd find at least a dozen or so close friends and peers to associate with. It'd be a multi-year project, but not incredibly time-demanding on any given day or week. I imagine it'd be worth it.

My two cents. Seems like it'd be terribly unfortunate and much less satisfying to not be able to fully actualize and explore all that raw capacity with other good people.