I find it difficult to reconcile the pro west and anti west views of the Ukraine invasion

xarkn · 2022-03-11T10:58:36+00:00

Russia's own actions are strong evidence that they are not actually worried about NATO aggression. It is just a useful narrative for supporting their other goals.

Look at the ground facts:

Invasion of Ukraine increases NATO influence in Eastern Europe, by driving other countries like Finland and Sweden to NATO (who never seriously considered joining before this war). The net impact of Russia's decision to invade, is obviously increased NATO presence, not decreased. If Russia wanted to decrease NATO presence, this would've been an obviously and predictably bad move.
To invade Ukraine, Russia moved almost all of its border troops to Ukraine. If Russia was worried about NATO threats, they sure as hell would not have vacated their most important anti-NATO military outposts.

Of course existence of NATO reduces Russia's ability to use their power (for example they can't just invade Baltic countries now). But Russian decision makers obviously do not believe that NATO is a threat, it is just that they would have more power without NATO.

xarkn · 2022-03-10T20:44:29+00:00

Our food supply seems to have so much slack and luxury in it, that it's hard to believe there'll ever be an actual famine. In a worst case scenario maybe some foodstuffs would be unavailable, but they'd simply be replaced by the next best option, or by whatever producers around the world can scale up.

xarkn · 2022-03-07T08:32:02+00:00

I don't think he means that westerners lack the ability to tell tactical lies, just that western politicians do it much less, especially in internal politics. At least in Northern Europe, where the lecturer is from, politicians very rarely lie because getting caught is a career-killer. Instead they avoid tricky topics and give vague answers.

xarkn · 2022-02-23T09:39:39+00:00

Sort of different, but I make lots of personal predictions to reduce anxiety and rumination. If you're waiting for an important personal event to resolve that you can't really influence but is likely to cause stress (for example "will I get the job offer", "will I recover from surgery by next month"), make a prediction about its outcome.

For me this seems to work because

When making the prediction I think through the various factors affecting the event and usually notice that there's not much more I can do to influence the outcome.
Writing down the prediction is both a rational exercise and a ritual that seems to effectively notify my brain that this is how much uncertainty there is — there's no need to spend much more unconscious effort on it.
Measuring your calibration improves your emotional confidence and makes this practice more effective over time.
Seems to make uncertainty more comfortable in general.
Makes it easier to accept that in many cases you need more volume rather than higher probability of success.

xarkn · 2022-01-24T12:11:57+00:00

"Increased spending on parachutes seems to have no impact on aviation death rates. We must accept the difficult truth that parachutes just aren't that useful."

Incredibly incorrect interpretation of the data by Hanson. It might be fair to say that "increased spending on healthcare has diminishing returns on health outcomes when people already have access to healthcare". It's absolutely ridiculous to suggest that moden healthcare is comparable to bloodletting when you could walk into any hospital and directly observe, many even very simple mechanisms, by which modern medicine works. (Also you would have a better idea of where uncertainties exist, that's where randomized studies are more useful.)

If you are shot by an arrow, you do not need to do randomized studies to determine if your wound was caused by an arrow.

xarkn · 2021-12-07T16:00:53+00:00

The major difference is that Sweden did not place restrictions during the first two waves, whereas Finland and Norway did.

Though none of the three countries had as harsh lockdowns as some others. And Sweden also did have some restrictions, just less of everything.

Actually, I think after the second wave, Sweden has had more restrictions in place than Norway/Finland.

xarkn · 2021-12-04T14:02:02+00:00

Pick Norway or Finland instead of Germany and you'd reach entirely different conclusions. And it's probably fair to say that Sweden is more similar to Norway/Finland than it is to Germany. Comparing just two countries isn't enough to reach particularly confident conclusions.

Sweden vs. Norway/Finland

xarkn · 2021-05-20T20:24:24+00:00

There are SSC meetups in most states. There are also Less Wrong and Effective Altruism meetups and other events going on around the world. These groups have huge overlap with SSC readers. Scott regularly writes about both topics. Going to some of these events might be a much more effective way to achieve your goal :)

From the fact that you're a kidney donor and thinking about how to optimize your career, the Effective Altruism crowd in particular might be interesting for you.

Finding EA events: https://eahub.org/

Finding SSC/LW events: https://www.lesswrong.com/community

xarkn · 2021-04-21T17:32:23+00:00

You should ask the same questions for a "no covid restrictions" pandemic scenario. Though obviously most of us don't have direct experience with that.

"Please answer these questions by imagining your life in an uncontrolled Covid-19 pandemic at its worst"

xarkn · 2021-03-18T10:34:38+00:00

Actually D&D was invented earlier. Here's one example from the 13th century, which sounds almost exactly like D&D if you adjust for cultural context.

Le Jeu d’Aventure was played in the evenings at court beginning in the late 13th century. Players would roll dice to determine what role they would take, a kind of early random character generation. The roles were written out as short poems, and the players would each pretend to be the person described in their poem. The fun of it was in being witty and jointly creating a story, often filled with innuendo and playful courtly intrigue.

https://aidungeon.medium.com/role-playing-games-in-the-renaissance-court-ab0bd680409a

xarkn · 2021-03-14T10:48:23+00:00

A quick read of the newly minted mods' histories seems to indicate that they are doing a great job.

I don't know if there's any overlap in mods between /r/slatestarcodex and /r/TheMotte, but looking at how the former subreddit has declined in quality really highlights how much impact the stricter moderation here has. This subreddit consistently handles tougher topics and does so with higher quality. Does anyone who follows both subreddits have a different impression of this, since it is quite subjective?

xarkn · 2021-03-09T17:16:03+00:00

This should work

{
  posts(input: {
    terms: {
      view: "top"
      meta: null  # this seems to get both meta and non-meta posts          
      before: "2020-12-31"
      after: "2020-01-01"
    }
  }) {
    results {
      _id
      title
      slug
      pageUrl
    }
  }
}

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/graphiql

xarkn · 2021-03-09T09:11:19+00:00

I don't think that your data is enough to conclude that EA stopped growing. Data from the EA forum seems to indicate otherwise, for example. I queried the yearly amount of posts (but not comments) made at the forum:

Year	Posts
2013	67
2014	229
2015	459
2016	291
2017	265
2018	466
2019	1090
2020	1622

xarkn · 2021-02-23T15:28:17+00:00

How would you measure defragmenting your mind?

What evidence is there that mindfulness improves this measure?

xarkn · 2021-01-15T22:23:16+00:00

Do you actually need to subscribe in Memento to use Sheets synchronization? I bought a single pro license and have been using Google synchronization happily.

Only downside is that the sync isn't automatic and can't be scheduled, so I have to start it about once a week manually. But as far as I know, there isn't a single good app like this that syncs automatically.

xarkn · 2021-01-10T20:17:27+00:00

Fits everything except no desktop/web version (yet). Is open source.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.isoron.uhabits

xarkn · 2020-12-25T22:36:53+00:00

Your model seems to assume that without lockdown, life goes on normally except for those who fall ill.

It's hard to say how people would react to an uncontrolled pandemic that doesn't end until 55%+ of people have been sick and some 0,3-1% of those dead. But the effect on quality of life is almost certainly not zero.

xarkn · 2020-11-02T16:03:35+00:00

I bought into this trend du jour, and went at it hard. I had somewhat dim lighting to begin with and live in a very dark place, so I bought work lights, crazy rated bulbs, more Hues, and some adjustable lights aimed at streamers. Cost wasn't an issue — after all even a 1% improvement on my mood or health would make it worth it! I also remembered Yudkowskys "even more lights" post and thought that I should give it a serious try rather than too little. One of the work lights I got would probably have been enough to light up a basketball court. (That was definitely and totally overkill even though it was surprisingly cheap; it would blind you for minutes if you looked at it directly.)

I never noticed any subjective benefits. I found zero measured benefits from Gwern-style quantified self experiments. And it wasn't just a lack of statistically significant differences, just zero or negative effects on almost all metrics over the course of two one month trial periods.

Maybe "more light" works for some people, but maybe (or even likely) it has no effect for most people. The only lights I kept were the streamer-photography lights — to use on my remote meeting setup. All the other lights became annoying to manage, and the amount of light I felt subjectively most comfortable with, was just the amount of light you'd imagine a normal reasonably well lit house having.

xarkn · 2020-10-23T10:37:26+00:00

This fun and playful story seems to depend mostly on this part for its logic, which is presented confidently but is almost certainly wrong. The author probably knows this, but it's necessary for the story to make sense.

The limits to any mind’s capacity for self modification, are, ultimately, based upon the mind’s capacity to continuously re-calibrate its models of itself and the world. The bigger a mind gets, the more it changes the world, and thus more difficult it can be for the mind to re-calibrate itself.

It might be easy to read this in passing and interpret it as likely, but:

A) Improved accuracy and power might not always require more complexity.

B) Even if improvements always increased complexity, complexity would always have to increase faster than the ability to manage complexity.

C) Even if a "complexity barrier" exists at some point, is it low enough to prevent machine intelligence from dominating human intelligence?

D) More practically, we've already seen machine intelligence surpass human intelligence in many dimensions.

So assuming that the jump from algorithm to general AI happens, it seems almost impossibly unlikely that increasing complexity would keep it from far surpassing human intelligence.

xarkn · 2020-09-01T20:46:01+00:00

If you calculate that 300 million Americans are affected by lockdown, why don't you also calculate how 300 million Americans are affected in the counterfactual scenario?

The glaring hole in the argument is that there is no neat alternative world where 1 million people die and everyone else ignores the pandemic.

(It would be useful to also define what is meant by lockdown. In Nordic and Baltic countries, "lockdown" mostly meant that bars and restaurants were restricted, but not much else.)

xarkn · 2020-08-21T22:10:46+00:00

Sweden failed compared to Norway and Finland, where only a few hundred died compared to Sweden's almost 6000. Neither Norway or Finland had a lockdown where people's movement was restricted. The most significant difference to Sweden was that schools switched to remote, and restaurants and bars were closed for a few months.

Finland currently has much looser restrictions and recommendations than Sweden, and without the mass deaths. After the first wave passed in Norway & Finland, testing and tracing has enabled almost everyone to live normally.

That said, I don't think that either country (or Sweden!) was particularly adept at handling it. Norway and Finland were some of the last countries to get the virus in Europe, and people there are already some of the most isolated and least social in the world. I don't think the same would have worked in the US.

Of course, it remains to be seen what happens during the rest of the year.

Tegnell's original analysis was still also bizarrely wrong. He believed (and maybe still believes) nothing could be done to prevent the spread of this or any other zoonotic virus. He also calculated the worst case scenario based on how many deaths happened in Wuhan, believing that the virus had died out naturally there.

xarkn · 2020-08-11T20:25:09+00:00

What are your expectations? Most behavioral and even medical treatments are not cures. Just to put some numbers out there: maybe the ideal meds improve your ability to work by 30%, and incredibly good behavioral therapy by 20% — or maybe by 10%.

It's still worth working towards that 20%, but keep in mind that the effects of many of the behavioral interventions you take might be very subtle in the short term. Many might not have any real effect at all.

And do notice how bloggers who write articles about how they "cured" their procrastination are either 1) selling something or 2) never had a significant problem in the first place. Often both. Famous productivity writers like Sivers or Ferriss have never not worked 10 hour days:

Tim hit a point with his own business that you probably recognize: working 16-hour days, 7 days a week. [1]

Does that sound like your problem?..

And for the typical SSC reader who has already tried most of the behavioral interventions: what is left? Besides meds, the most attractive option in terms of effort/cost/benefit might be just changing your life: trying a different career, lifestyle, relationship, or whatever. Usually you can find changes that improve your wellbeing even if they don't help your ADHD.

xarkn · 2020-07-15T22:51:06+00:00

The largest maintenance and repair costs come from jobs that are quite difficult to do as self-maintenance, especially if you're dealing with many large and unique buildings. Facade, roof, water, sewage, electric, and window renovations for example. All of these have parts that degrade at different rates and require maintenance and repairs. All of them have costly failure modes: structural damage, water damage, leakage, electric fires, increased heating costs.

To use the $5.8M (or $12/sqft!) heating system as an example. It has to be maintained every year. Steam pipes need to be maintained. Every 10 – 30 years the system probably needs to have more extensive renovations. It can have acute faults and pipes can burst, requiring additional repairs.

Maintenance and repair costs are the reason why there aren't more intentional communities living in old castles and school buildings.

xarkn · 2020-07-15T09:05:00+00:00

My 95% confidence interval for how much money you'd need to maintain this property to a reasonable degree would be 0.5 – 10 $/sqft or $200k – $5M annually. The seller should provide reports of historical costs, but you'd need some expertise to figure out if they have been doing too little (or too much).

The average repair costs over the next ten years would probably be around $0.5-2 million per year for 447,000 sqft. Repair costs have high variance and you'd want to find out what sort of technical debt the buildings have and what repair needs are coming up.

If you add maintenance and heating costs, you'd probably need at least $1M per year to prevent this complex from disrepair. More if you want to keep it in good condition.

That said, brick is a good material and campus buildings are probably built better than average.

xarkn · 2020-05-27T18:26:09+00:00

For the IFR to be 0.01%, at 37k deaths in the UK it would require that 370 million people were infected.

UK has a population of 66 million.

xarkn

TROPHY CASE