Web Snippets
PG
He says the number of startups has been declining. In support of this he includes a graph with a line going down.
– http://paulgraham.com/klein.html
the term “economic inequality” … means the variation between different quantiles’ wealth or income.
If he thinks what “economic inequality” means is poverty and lack of social mobility, it’s not surprising he was upset enough to write a reply to my essay. In fact I suspect much if not most of the angry reaction to it was a result of people not understanding what the term “economic inequality” means.
Previously, PG had clarified the meaning of the term “income or wealth distribution”: statistical distribution, not pie distribution. For example, when you say height is distributed unequally, you don’t mean that there’s some central repository of heights and much of it is given to seven-foot NBA players and little to circus midgets.
Big Ideas
Big ideas are more different from existing things than people realize when they have them.
– PG
Seriously, how do you know how different your idea is from “conventional wisdom”? Do you have the empirical evidence? You’re just talking to a few friends colleagues here and there.
The Refragmentation
Several people have told me The Refragmentation finally explained why their parents wanted them to work for a big company.
– PG
Status-Signalling
what would an ordinary person do, if confronted with a symbol that indicated that somebody has more status than them?
They’ll buy into the first half-credible explanation on why that status symbol doesn’t mean anything, and then they’ll feel higher status than all the “dumb” people buying into that status symbol, because few people can tell the difference between cynicism and intelligence (disturbingly few people even realize the two concepts are distinct, actually). Think about all the people -already doing that- because some villagers apparently fish with their mosquito nets, thus disproving EA can be useful - clearly the argument is fallacious, but that doesn’t matter, because they’re rationalizing what they already want to believe, because EA is already threatening their sense of relative status.
Remember the HPMoR bit about Phoenixes as status symbols? Same principle.
We like to find some minor flaw in somebody’s idea so that we can denounce it, put them down as idiots, and remove the threat of them being higher status than us. (So it seems to me.)
Cynicism neutralizes status symbols. As does ridicule.
Gwern - Culture is not about Aesthetics
Or consider another medium: movies. Have you seen the IMDB’s Top 250 movies? There are excellent movies in there. Some are profound, others moving, and not a few profoundly moving. Why are you going to watch Transformers 2 or Ice Age 3? For entertainment value? But there are movies in that list which are far more entertaining, I assure you.
A flaw in this argument is that we’re behaving as though the label “excellent movie” is part of the movie itself - the mind projection fallacy. There might be people who will genuinely enjoy Transformers 2 (IMDb rating 6.0) over Pulp Fiction (IMDb rating 8.9). Yes, there are strong tendencies - it’s not like there aren’t movies lots of people agree are great (The Godfather, The Dark Knight). We just have different, slightly-overlapping sets of movies that we like. We have different tastes, is what I’m trying to say.
So, even though I personally cannot hope to finish watching all the TV shows ever or read all the books ever, that doesn’t mean those other books have no value at all. I may not be able to extract value from them from myself, but others might.
So even if we got in at the beginning, we never had a chance at watching so much as a small fraction.
Even if we individually got in at the beginning, we wouldn’t have a chance of individually watching even a small fraction. But that doesn’t mean we can’t or don’t collectively have a shot at doing it. (I’m not saying all books get read. Just that not getting read by me doesn’t imply not getting read by anyone.)
With our too too short lives, and so much to see, one does oneself a great disservice by consuming anything but the best [for us].
And thus, do not authors & artists do us a disservice by creating mediocrity [as per some people’s tastes] we, being only human, will at least try? Maybe these authors & artists are only creating attractive nuisances!
The core arguments
Let’s look back on the argument:
- Society ought to discourage economically inefficient activities.
- At least, it ought not to encourage inefficiency. It may not do this perfectly, but this is still a desiderata; special pleading for some activity, saying that some other activity or market is far more economically inefficient, is not a good reason.
Ok.
- If some good a can be created to fill a need, and there is an existing & available good b that fills that need equally well, then it is economically inefficient to use a and not b.
We’re implicitly assuming that good a is created to fill only one need (and that too for society at large).
Consider when the good a affects several variables of your multi-variable utility function. Say, some novel gives you comfort when you’re sad, makes you laugh out loud when you’re in a jolly mood, and teaches you something new about the world. Now, good b might be heaps better at comforting you or cheering you up, but may not teach you nearly as much about the world. So, now should you refrain from creating good a when good b already exists?
That problem is not unsolvable, mind you. A utility function over those three variables would tell you how much value you can expect from good a and how much value you can expect from good b. You can thus make your decision. But, you still have to know your utility function (and your probabilities over the outcomes) very well, which I don’t think is a luxury we have.
Worse, people have different preferences. Even assuming the same variables, good a might cheer you up, but sadden somebody else. Justin Bieber music might excite your friend, but drive you out of your mind.
So, there’s no simple objective way to compare the “value” of two goods. The worth of the good isn’t part of it like some label slapped on to it (“value of this song: 5.47 utilons”). The “value” label exists in your mind.
TODO: Conclude your argument and compare with his conclusions.
- Consumers of new art would be equally satisfied by existing art.
What about the joy of enjoying something that a lot of others enjoy? (Yes, there’s a social proof bias - we like a painting more when others like it too. But, there is something said for collective enjoyment - that seems to be a major reason for festivals and other get-togethers. Maybe the bias is the whole explanation, but we might not want to remove it and become hermits.)
I guess maybe if you only had existing art, you could still enjoy stuff together, just not new stuff.
Also, art seems to be about inspiring complex emotions. So, we can’t compare it on just one or two dimensions.
By 2 & 3: it is economically inefficient to produce new art.
1 & 4: Society ought to discourage new art
In short: old stuff is as good as the new, and it’s cheaper; so making new stuff is wasteful.
Artists are competing with each other (and with past artists) for a limited amount of human attention. There are only so many people and so many hours in a life (say around half a million waking hours, as per Gwern). Artists, marketers, fashion designers, and other meme-creators are trying to optimize for attention-share (or, to be even more precise, the profits generated), not necessarily audience enjoyment.
I hope I’ve made my point: we live in an age of utter media abundance. Like none before us, we can partake of the greatest works in all mediums of all ages. We do not sip from a fountain laboriously supplied by hard-working artists & authors, nor even guzzle from a fire-hose hooked up to a printing press; we are being shot off Niagara Falls. The impact alone will kill us.
Agreed.
Also remember how Eliezer (and Harry Potter) said he was practically raised by his science-fiction novels. You may not get those ideals of enlightenment and positive futurism from the ancient books. There are lots of such ideals. (Check how valid this argument is.)
Formal Theory of Fun and Creativity
http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/creativity.html
I haven’t looked into it deeply. I think it uses the idea of compression to explain things, which will cash out to information and uncertainty. Let’s see in the future, after I’ve chased down the implications of information theory on my own.
Anna Salamon
The correct response to uncertainty is not half-speed.
Why startup founders have mood swings (and why they may have uses).
The Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894
But this wasn’t just a British crisis: New York had a population of 100,000 horses producing around 2.5m pounds of manure a day.
This problem came to a head when in 1894, The Times newspaper predicted… “In 50 years, every street in London will be buried under nine feet of manure.”
This became known as the ‘Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894’.
The terrible situation was debated in 1898 at the world’s first international urban planning conference in New York, but no solution could be found. It seemed urban civilisation was doomed.
However, necessity is the mother of invention, and the invention in this case was that of motor transport. Henry Ford came up with a process of building motor cars at affordable prices. Electric trams and motor buses appeared on the streets, replacing the horse-drawn buses.
By 1912, this seemingly insurmountable problem had been resolved; in cities all around the globe, horses had been replaced and now motorised vehicles were the main source of transport and carriage.
Even today, in the face of a problem with no apparent solution, people often quote ‘The Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894’, urging people not to despair, something will turn up!
Good to know that even such an “impossible” problem was solved. But I don’t think we can take that as evidence that all such “impossible” problems will be solved (like climate change, oil depletion, or unfriendly superintelligence).
SSC
Thinking clearly is super-hard, but perhaps it is a learnable skill.
Rocket science is a learnable skill, but if you want to have it you should probably spend at least ten years in college, grad school, NASA internships, et cetera. You should probably read hundreds of imposing books called things like Introduction To Rocket Science. It’s not something you just pick up by coincidence while you’re doing something else.
If thinking clearly is a learnable skill, where are the grad schools for it? Where are the textbooks? … What all of this “only domain-specific knowledge stuff matters” effectively implies is that “thinking clearly” is so easy you can pick it up by coincidence while working on pretty much anything else - something we believe about practically no other skill. If you trusted a rocket scientist who had never read a single rocket science textbook to be any good at rocket science, you’d be insane, but we routinely trust the subjects we most need to think clearly about to people who have never read a How To Think Clearly textbook - and I can’t blame us, because such textbooks, or at least good evidence-based textbooks of the same quality as the rocket science ones, simply don’t exist.
…
Hallquist says that Less Wrong is “against scientific rationality”. Well, we’re “against scientific rationality” in the same sense that my hypothetical Soviet who says “We need two Stalins! No, fifty Stalins!” is against Stalinism as currently implemented.
Quote from Superforecasting:
The humility required for good judgment is not self-doubt - the sense that you are untalented, unintelligent, or unworthy. It is intellectual humility. It is a recognition that reality is profoundly complex, that seeing things clearly is a constant struggle, when it can be done at all, and that human judgment must therefore be riddled with mistakes. This is true for fools and geniuses alike. So it’s quite possible to think highly of yourself and be intellectually humble. In fact, this combination can be wonderfully fruitful. Intellectual humility compels the careful reflection necessary for good judgment; confidence in one’s abilities inspires determined action.
On what makes good forecasters:
So what are they really good at? Tetlock concludes that the number one most important factor to being a superforecaster is really understanding logic and probability.
Part of it is just understanding the basics. Superforecasters are less likely to think in terms of things being 100% certain, and - let’s remember just how far left the bell curve stretches - less likely to assign anything they’re not sure about a 50-50 probability. They’re less likely to believe that things happen because they’re fated to happen, or that the good guys always win, or that things that happen will necessarily teach a moral lesson. They’re more likely to admit they might be wrong and correct themselves after an error is discovered. They’re more likely to debate with themselves, try to challenge their original perception, start asking “What could be wrong about this thing I believe?” rather than “How can I prove I’m right?”
PG
It’s a lot more rewarding to bet against conventional minded people than to try to convince them.
Big Think on Sci-Hub
This was a game changer. Before September 2011, there was no way for people to freely access paywalled research en masse; researchers like Elbakyan were out in the cold. Sci-Hub is the first website to offer this service and now makes the process as simple as the click of a single button.
As the number of papers in the LibGen database expands, the frequency with which Sci-Hub has to dip into publishers’ repositories falls and consequently the risk of Sci-Hub triggering its alarm bells becomes ever smaller. Elbakyan explains, “We have already downloaded most paywalled articles to the library … we have almost everything!”
Quote from William James
“Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things. In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf.”
– William James, “The Will to Believe”, section VII
(via Gwern)
This spending of the best part of one’s life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it reminds me of the Englishman who went to India to make a fortune first, in order that he might return to England and live the life of a poet. He should have gone up the garret at once.
– Thoreau
Data Security
“Not having a [company name] account does not mean that they have no information about you. It’s more like you don’t have a password to access your data.”
…
For now, assume that all your digital data is accessible by a single instance, say your government. In this case you provide your government with incredible control over yourself and also your relatives. A mere measurement of how defiant you are could be dangerous for you, depending on where you live. Furthermore, someone gazing at your data is not required to remain inactive. One might try to manipulate your opinion by placing solely the content on (social) media platforms that you are supposed to see.
…
Further, I think there is a danger of becoming slaves to our data. People love ratings. We are not only rating restaurants and hotels, but also doctors and teachers. Why not let big data do the job of rating for us? The more data, the more accurate the rating. But what if you grew up in the wrong neighbourhood, had criminal friends and have pictures showing you drunk? You might not get a job, as you are rated as potentially dangerous - this is related to the car insurance example above. In such a future, you would make every decision based on how nice your digital trail would look like. Freedom? I don’t think so.
Douglas C. Engelbart once said something very true: “The key thing about all the world’s big problems is that they have to be dealt with collectively. If we don’t get collectively smarter, we’re doomed.”
Decentralization: I understand that offering a variety of services brings important effects of synergy and it is very difficult to find an appropriate amount of regulatisation. And, maybe most important from a user’s perspective: Having as much data as possible with a single provider makes things easy. Yet, distributing data over many service providers clearly increases protection from exploitation. Sometimes, paying little money for a service guarantees encryption and you switch from being a product to using a product.
– The dark side of big data # Settling into an Identity
When you’re young, and to a lesser degree when you’re a teenager and even in your early twenties, you have a great capacity to be amazed at the raw beauty of the world. As you grow older, you get less direct exposure to things as you have more and more schemas to put them in: “Oh, yeah, that’s a beautiful sunset, it looks a lot like the five thousand other sunsets I’ve seen. I’ll just tag it ‘sunset’ and move on.” There’s a big loss there, but there’s a compensatory gain:
Anyone even a little bit smarter than normal gets feted and celebrated as a kid. I remember my fourth grade teacher telling my parents during a conference that “your son needs to go into science so he can cure cancer.” This is dumb. In a school of a thousand people, you can be the smartest kid in the school, more than smart enough to impress your teachers - and still be only one of the 300,000 smartest people in the country. If those other 300,000 people didn’t cure cancer, there’s a pretty good chance your son won’t either.
But when you’re a kid, all you have to do to look smart is read the occasional science book and cultivate an interest in quarks. You can just go around saying “Did you know there are six types of quarks?” and everyone will think you’re some kind of genius.
And so part of Erikson’s “role confusion” is thinking “Wait, I was the guy who was going to cure cancer. I can feel my status slipping away from me as I become more and more mediocre. What am I going to do to prove that I really am that cool?”
I think a lot of the pathologies of adolescence are part of that urge, hollow promises of regaining lost status. The key is to provide a narrative in which you are great and which is impervious to external disconfirmation. Extremist politics, mysticism and fashion all fit the bill for different personalities.
Along with the pathologies there were the ill-advised adventures. “I’m going to be a great person by… um… exercising an hour a day, from now on, all the time, and eventually becoming really buff.” Lasted a month. Then “I’m going to be a great person by… um… learning to speak ten languages, one at a time.” Lasted until first encounter with the Finnish case system. “I’m going to become a great person by…” The problem with all of these were that none of these were things I actually wanted to do (cf Randall Munroe, “Never trust anyone who’s more excited about success than about doing the thing they want to be successful at.”)
But I eventually noticed that attempts to optimize my life and be maximally good were making me kind of miserable. I think that’s where the judgment part comes in. You learn when it’s okay to stop getting mad at yourself for not being perfect and take a little bit of time to relax and enjoy.
Byron is maybe a bad example of learning to overcome ambition, since he did kind of become super famous. But even that can be a kind of relaxing ambition. You learn what you’re good at, even if it’s something like poetry that might not be the most lucrative and world-changing thing around, and you focus on that. You’re not going to be Julius Caesar, but you might be Lord Byron. Or if not Lord Byron, you might at least have a career and be good at it. Role confusion gives way to identity.
Vague formless ambition crystallizes into a couple of things that you’re good at and want to pursue, and then it doesn’t seem like ambition any longer. It just seems like the thing you’re doing.
It’s about finding an ideology - in contrast to the constant ideology-searching of youth where you get your Communists and your Daoist and your anarchists and whatever. And then it’s about turning to be more interested in the everyday world of things like marriage and family and relationships and balancing your checkbook.
Cricket
Tendulkar, at least to this observer, never gave off that particular vibe. He gave off many others, and is responsible for many of the best cricket-watching experiences of my life. But he never, to my eyes, gave off that almost chilling aura of stone-cold certainty. That, I think, is the crucial difference. Tendulkar gave you hope. As long as he was there, the match wasn’t done. But Kohli gives you certainty. When he comes in, the match is done.
He became a kind of cricket supercomputer, processing match situations, conditions, his own form, and doing what he thought all those factors together demanded. He became, in a word, a reactive cricketer.
Kohli is never a game’s servant. He too is a supreme calculator, but the calculations are subtly and crucially different. They are not: what does this situation demand, but rather: how do I change the situation to suit my demands?
– Where Virat Kohli is better than Sachin Tendulkar, ESPN Cricinfo
PG
Unless orthodoxy is perfectly aligned with truth (and when has it ever been?), the truth will always be heretical. – PG on Twitter
My hypothesis about current high salaries: Today’s young people seem to have higher starting salaries than in my father’s times, even after inflation [citation needed]. One reason could be that you don’t have much of a corporate ladder these days and so you’re being compensated directly in cash instead of in job security.
So, the company can go bust and you can’t complain about not having a job anymore. That risk premium was reflected in your higher salary. This wasn’t so in the old days, I guess. You expected the company to be around till you retired.
(I’m thinking mainly of IT jobs here. Thoughts sparked by a scene in a movie where a company goes under and leaves the protagonist without a job.)
Chris Anderson @chr1sa 11h11 hours ago
After many years of self-tracking everything (activity, work, sleep) I’ve decided it’s ~pointless. No non-obvious lessons or incentives :(
Me: data != information != valuable information
For example, I stopped using arbtt for tracking my computer time usage. It wasn’t really causing me to change any behaviour.
It could be that this is only for passive data tracking, where you don’t have any specific decisions in mind.
Academic Books
In my humanities field (history) I’ve heard that hardcover books from university presses yield virtually nothing in royalties (on the order of a couple hundred dollars) but that if a book is reprinted as a paperback aimed at undergraduate courses, it can be an order of magnitude more. I’ve also heard that textbooks are the only scholarly publishing outlet that actually makes healthy royalties - i.e. letting you pay a down payment on a house as opposed to paying for a couple nice dinners out. In terms of hours spent (in the thousands) to money earned (in the hundreds of dollars), writing a typical university press hardcover has got to be one of the lowest-paying professional activities in existence.
As for non-fiction popular press books, I’ve been told that a typical advance can range from less than 10k to around 50k-60k - the idea being that this money will sustain the author for the 6 months to a year or so it takes to finish the manuscript. (Would that this were feasible for academic books!)
Notice also that the popular book advance is also in the lower five-digit sums. Why would a professor spend “6 months to a year” on this? Is this a significant source of income?
Another article: Academics are being hoodwinked into writing books nobody can buy
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