Rational Feed

Rationalist:

Metapost September 5th by sam[]zdat – Plans for the blog. Next series will be on epistemology and the ”internal’ side of nhilism. Revised introduction. Sam will probably write fiction. Site reorganization. History section. Current reading list. Patreon.

Are People Innately Good by Sailor Vulcan – SV got into two arguments that went badly. One was on all lives matter. The other occurred when SV tried to defend Glen of Intentional Insights on the SSC discord. Terminal values aren’t consistent. SV was abused as a child.

Misc:

Into The Gray Zone by Bayesian Investor – Book Review. A modest fraction of people diagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state have locked in syndrome. People misjudge when they would want to die. Alzheimer’s.

Podcast:

Caplan Family Podcast by Bryan Caplan – “For the last two years, I homeschooled my elder sons, Aidan and Tristan, rather than send them to traditional middle school. Now they’ve been returned to traditional high school. We decided to mark our last day with a father-son/teacher-student podcast on how we homeschooled, why we homeschooled, and what we achieved in homeschool.”

Dan Rather by The Ezra Klein Show – “Rather and I discuss the Trump presidency and what it means for the Republican Party’s future, our fractured media landscape, and Rather’s own evolving career in media.”

Rational Feed

Rationalist:

Minimizing Motivated Beliefs by Entirely Useless – The tradeoffs between epistemic and instrumental rationality. Yudkowsky’s argument such tradeoffs either very stupid or don’t exist. Issues with Yudkowsky: Denial that belief is voluntary, thinking that trading away the truth requires being blind to consequences. Horror victims and transcendent meaning. Interesting things are usually false.

Politics and economics:

Intangible Investment Monopoly Profits by Marginal Revolution – “Intangible capital used to be below 30 percent of the S&P 500 in the 70s, now it is about 84 percent. ” Seven implications about profit, monopoly, spillover, etc.

Podcast:

The Problems With Implicit Bias Tests by Rational Speaking – “The IAT has been massively overhyped, and that in fact there’s little evidence that it’s measuring real-life bias. Jesse and Julia discuss how to interpret the IAT, why it became so popular, and why it’s still likely that implicit bias is real, even if the IAT isn’t capturing it.”

On Foundations by EconTalk – “The power and effectiveness of foundations–large collections of wealth typically created and funded by a wealthy donor. Is such a plutocratic institution consistent with democracy? Reich discusses the history of foundations in the United States and the costs and benefits of foundation expenditures in the present.”

Rational Feed

Rationalist:

Exploring Premium Mediocrity by Zvi Moshowitz – Defining premium mediocre. Easy and hard mode related to Rao’s theories of losers, sociopaths and heroes. The Real Thing. A 2×2 ribbonfarm style graph. Restaurants.

Politics and Economics:

What You Cant Say To A Sympathetic Ear by Katja Grace – Sharing socially unacceptable views with your friends is putting them in a bad situation, regardless of whether they agree with those ideas. If they don’t punish you society will hold them complicit. Socially condemning views is worse than commonly thought “To successfully condemn a view socially is to lock that view in place with a coordination problem.”

Rational Feed

Scott:

Highlights From The Comments On My Irb Nightmare by Scott Alexander – Tons of hilarious IB stories. A subreddit comment about getting around irb. Whether the headaches are largely institutional rather than dictated by government fiat. Comments argue in favor of the irb and Scott responds.

Links: Exsitement by Scott Alexander – Slatestarcodex links post. A Nootropics survey, gene editing, AI, social norms, Increasing profit margins, politics, and other topics.

EA:

Ea Survey 2017 Series Cause Area Preferences by Tee (EA forum) – Top Cause Area, near-top areas, areas which should not have EA resources, cause area correlated with demographics, donations by cause area.

AI:

Incorrigibility In Cirl by The MIRI Blog – Paper. Goal: Incentivize a value learning system to follow shut down instructions. Demonstration that some assumptions are not stable with respect to model mis-specification (ex programmer error). Weaker sets of assumptions: difficulties and simple strategies.

Rational Feed

Rationalist:

Gleanings From Double Crux On The Craft Is Not The Community by Sarah Constantin – Results from Sarah’s public double crux. Sarah initially did not think the rationalist intellectual project was worth preserving. She wants to see results, even though she concedes that formal results can be very difficult to get. What is the value of introspection and ‘navel grazing’?

Critiquing Other Peoples Plans Politely by Katja Grace – Three failure modes: The attack, The polite sidestep, The inadvertent personal question. A plan to avoid these issues: debate beliefs, not actions.

Forager Vs Farmer Elaborated by Robin Hanson – Early humans collapsed Machiavellian dynamics down to a reverse-dominance-hierarchy. Group norm enforcement and its failure modes. Safety leads to collective play and art, threat leads to a return to Machiavellianisn and suspicion. Individuals greatly differ as to what level of threat causes the switch, often for self-serving reasons. Left vs right. “The first and primary political question is how much to try to resolve issues via a big talky collective, or to let smaller groups decide for themselves.”

The Doomsday Argument In Anthropic Decision Theory by Stuart Armstrong (lesswrong) – “In Anthropic Decision Theory (ADT), behaviors that resemble the Self Sampling Assumption (SSA) derive from average utilitarian preferences. However, SSA implies the doomsday argument. This post shows there is a natural doomsday-like behavior for average utilitarian agents within ADT.”

Rational Feed

Rationalist:

Intrinsic Properties And Eliezers Metaethics by Tyrrell_McAllister (lesswrong) – Intuitions of intrinsicness. Is goodness intrinsic? Seeing intrinsicness in simulations. Back to goodness.

EA:

Why Were Allocating Discretionary Funds To The Deworm The World Initiative by The GiveWell Blog – “Why Deworm the World has a pressing funding need. The benefits and risks of granting discretionary funds to Deworm the World today. Why we’re continuing to recommend that donors give 100% of their donation to AMF.”

Looking At How Superforecasting Might Improve AI Predictions by Will Pearson (EA forum) – Good Judgement Project: What they did, results, relevance. Lessons: Focus on concrete issues, focus on AI with no intelligence augmentation, learn a diverse range of subjects, breakdown the open questions, publicly update.

Politics and Economics:

A I Bias Doesnt Mean What Journalists Want You To Think It Means by Chris Stucchio And Lisa Mahapatra (Jacobite) – What is data science and AI? What is bias? How do we identify bias? The fallout of the author’s algorithm. Predicting Creditworthiness. Understanding Language. Predicting Criminal Behavior. Journalists and Wishful Thinking.

Podcast:

Emotionally Charged Discussion by The Bayesian Conspiracy – Conversations where one party thinks the other sides position is stupid/evil/etc. Debate vs truth seeking. Julia Galef’s lists of unpopular ideas. Agenty Duck’s thoughts on introspection. Double Crux.

Rational Feed

Scott:

My IRB Nightmare by Scott Alexander – Scott tries to run a study to test the Deck Depression Inventory. The institutional review board makes this impossible. They not only make tons of capricious demands they also attempt to undermine the study’s scientific validity.

Rationalist:

Winning Is For Losers by Putanumonit (ribbonfarm) – Zero vs Positive Sum Games. The strong have room to cooperate. Rene Girard’s theory of mimetics and competition. College Admissions. Tit for Tat. Spiked dicks in nature. Short and long term strategies in dating. Quirky dating profiles. Honesty on the first date. Beating Moloch with a transhuman God.

EA:

Effective Altruism Survey 2017 Distribution And by Ellen McGeoch and Peter Hurford (EA forum) – EA 2017 Study results are in. Details about distribution abd data analysis techniques. Discussion of whether the subpopulation is a representative sample of EA and its subpopulations.

Ea Survey 2017 Series Community Demographics by Katie Gertsch (EA forum) – Some results: Mostly young and male, slight increase in female participation. Highest concentration cities. Atheism/Agnostic rate fell from 87% to 80%. Increase in the proportion of EA who see EA as a duty or opportunity as opposed to an obligation.

Podcast:

The Future Of Intelligence by Waking Up with Sam Harris – “Max Tegmark. His new book Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. They talk about the nature of intelligence, the risks of superhuman AI, a nonbiological definition of life, the substrate independence of minds, the relevance and irrelevance of consciousness for the future of AI, near-term breakthroughs in AI.”