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[Awaclus]

earlier today, I bet against the claim that [a third of the people in California will be forced to evacuate by December 2041]. Am I going to win this bet?

The person betting against me did so because of climate change. I'm not sure if the bet is fully specified though, what if no-one is forced to move but people move because other places are less convenient?

It's a very vague claim in other ways too. What's "a third of the people in California" in the context of a period of time, considering that the set of people who are in California at any given moment changes whenever people are born or die or move in or out of California?

[silverspawn]

Indeed. I think taking the Delta over a long time period was the worst of all combinations. Either a short delta (1 year in which the population shrinks by at least 10%) or a long-term bet on the total population (there won't be two points (A,B) in time such that populationOfCalifornia(B) < 0.7 * populationOfCalifornia(A)) would be better. Gonna see if we can rephrase the bet.

[silverspawn]

So I'm being paid by this large centralized bureaucracy. Communication has been bumpy, to say the least, e.g. they signed me up for public health insurance even though I'm already privately insured because as a teacher I'm not allowed to be only privately insured. By they didn't even ask me about this; they just picked a public insurance company and signed me up there, and now I've received a bunch of mail from that company.

The private company I am at also has a public branch, and I'd prefer to stay there, which necessitated another bumpy sequence of interactions.

The woman in the institution who is responsible for me was nice, though. When I had to send in some more documents, she gave me a direct email address. Furthermore, I'm pretty good at reading attitude from someone's tone, and she was always nice while we talked on the phone.

Now she's taking a vacation or something though, and someone else is covering for her. Last Thursday I wanted to send her some documents, and she gave me the generic email of the bureaucratic institution. If I add my personal ID, it should reach her. Has it? I don't know. Gonna try to call again to find out. I don't believe I would have received feedback either way. She also was fairly patronizing on the phone, although probably to a degree that many less sensitive people wouldn't have noticed. The first one also stopped asking me for my ID when she remembered who I was. This one didn't.

I view this all as one large metaphor for light and darkness of the world. Person 1 tried to make the world less bureaucratic by shortening the process, and she conveyed an attitude of 'we're all together stuck in this complicated world, and now we just have to do the best we can in our positions'. Person II tried to make the process more bureaucratic, and she conveyed an attitude of 'this is a serious institution and it has serious process that must seriously be respected, and also I'm annoyed when you don't understand aspects of this serious process'. The first is part of the solution, the second part of the problem -- or more eloquently put, of light and darkness.

[silverspawn]

brb gotta make a phonecall

[silverspawn]

hah old person was back! Presumably the vacation ended last week. An unexpected victory of light over darkness.

[silverspawn]

The question contains an anagram of a Dominion card.

Who in their right mind would propose such a rule?? How in the world did they do the judging? Anyone remember who this was?

[silverspawn]

Some of these rules also seem bloody difficult. E.g.,

The first letter of the alphabet occurring in the question occurs only once.
The last word of the question contains a letter that hasn't occurred before.
The last word of the question has at least one letter from each QWERTY keyboard row.

[silverspawn]

I got so many good ideas for rules while trying to crack this one

[faust]

The relevant post here is Policy Debates should not appear one-sided.

This is a tangent but I find this sort of thing quite disappointing from a supposedly scientifically-minded person:

Like it or not, there’s a birth lottery for intelligence—though this is one of the cases where the universe’s unfairness is so extreme that many people choose to deny the facts. The experimental evidence for a purely genetic component of 0.6–0.8 is overwhelming, but even if this were to be denied, you don’t choose your parental upbringing or your early schools either.

I can't be sure where the 0.6-0.8 figure comes from since no source is given, but I assume that this refers to heritability, a common statstic in genetics that, for intelligence, tends to fall in that range (the most recent study I found put it at 50%, but that is from 10 years after the publication of this blog entry).

To say that intelligence is strongly determined by genetics because of this stat is misunderstanding what heritability measures. Heritability measures the extent of deviation that cannot be accounted for by external factors. But that is by its nature dependant on the strength of the external factors. In a strongly segregated society, heritability would decrease, because there are more other factors that impact a child's development. The more egalitarian a society becomes, the more you should see an increase in heritability.

This means that you have no grounds to make a statement like "intelligence is determined mostly by a birth lottery". Heritability is not an inherent biological truth, it depends on the society in which we live. I have not seen any studies supporting the argument that biological differences in intelligence will persist no matter how we organize our society.

[silverspawn]

I think I would expect EY to have a response to that, but I most certainly don't.

[silverspawn]

I mean you're assuming that he thought X because of Y when he didn't specify Y.

[silverspawn]

this zendo game is getting interesting. The wrong rules predicted the dataset pretty darn well

[silverspawn]

although not perfectly there already were two word yes's. oops

[silverspawn]

well anyone feel free to finalize the guess for me.

[silverspawn]

This. Was. Ridiculous.

Harry's knuckles were whitening on his wand again. He was sick of getting experimental results that didn't make sense.

(not actually an accurate representation in that I'm not frustrated at all, but it does rather feel like experimental results that don't make sense. I don't recall any case where I felt so close to a solution only to then realize so much was still missing.)

[silverspawn]

Bouncing back to sequences. Reading through book 3 right now and it's all good until he starts talking about morality.

The argument here is 'values are inherently complex because humans have evolved a complicated bundle of heuristics from evolution'. Which is certainly true; what we want is complex. The failure is to equate 'what we want' with 'what i terminally good'. EY refuses to make such a distinction.

But anyone who has succeeded 2% or more on the path toward enlightenment should know that this is wrong. You can sit in a cave, day after day, and be happy.  And if you know how, you can be happy at any point regardless of external circumstances. You can be fully relaxed and happy while struggling to drive your bike up a mountain, while suffering physical pain, or while suffering emotional pain.

 It doesn't matter that evolution has programmed you to value dumb things; we can get beyond that.

Afaik, EY doesn't take meditation seriously. Which is understandable because he seems to be among the few who have the willpower to just do whatever they want without mindfulness. But quite a few other people in the community do. The 10 day silent retreat in Berlin that I attended was made up of rationalists, and they were amazing people. Something like half of them were vegan. The majority of them seemed incredibly bright and deeply ethical.

It's getting to the point that I feel like not understanding that meditation actually works is a serious deficit in one's world view. It's kind of a really important fact about the world that everyone can in principle just learn to be happy.

[silverspawn]

The problem is that "meditation actually works" isn't obvious from the outside. We have overwhelming proof that 'a lot of people take it seriously' doesn't mean there is anything to  it. A lot of people take Homeopathy seriously, which does literally nothing. And then there is Christianity or Islam, which on a scale from 0=basically nothing there to 10=the one and only guide to the universe seem to be at around a 1 or maybe a 2 apologies to any potential Christians reading this.

And even for most Buddhists, their religion isn't effectively different from Christianity, either. They say the wise sounding things and do the rituals. The community aspect is real, but that works with arbitrary doctrines. Or to put it differently

“Are Buddhists less prone to suffering than most people?”

“Not from what I’ve seen,” whispered Anna, “but that doesn’t tell you much.”

“Um,” I made, “why not?”

“Try going out and punching the first person you see on the street,” whispered Anna. “Assuming he’s a Christian, how much do you wanna bet that he won’t offer you his other cheek?”

During the 10 day retreat at the temple where people go to do silent retreats, I met a woman who I think had been involved in the project for years and displayed 0.0 understanding of the actual practice.

And you can find people who probably actually are enlightened but also have the most nonsensical world view imaginable, like Eckhart Tolle. That also doesn't help.

Given that, it's almost surprising that so many people *do* take it seriously. Trying to increase that number could be a worthwhile project.

[silverspawn]

Again wholly unrelated:

But consider the No Child Left Behind Act.  The politicians want to look like they're doing something about educational difficulties; the politicians have to look busy to voters this year, not fifteen years later when the kids are looking for jobs.  The politicians are not the consumers of education.  The bureaucrats have to show progress, which means that they're only interested in progress that can be measured this year.  They aren't the ones who'll end up ignorant of science.  The publishers who commission textbooks, and the committees that purchase textbooks, don't sit in the classrooms bored out of their skulls.

The actual consumers of knowledge are the children - who can't pay, can't vote, can't sit on the committees.  Their parents care for them, but don't sit in the classes themselves; they can only hold politicians responsible according to surface images of "tough on education".

[silverspawn]

Want to see the problem really solved?  Make the politicians go to school.

Lol

[faust]

One of my favorite anti-mainstream policy proposals is "lower the voting age to 0".

[silverspawn]

One of my favorite anti-mainstream policy proposals is "lower the voting age to 0".

yes!! Totally on board with that. Was convinced when I read [this article](https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/9/10/20835327/voting-age-youth-rights-kids-vote).

In some sad way, they might even make wiser choices than adults. I could see a kid just looking at Trump and saying 'that's a bully' and not voting, and that would actually be a reasonable conclusion.

[silverspawn]

*not voting for him

[Awaclus]

Won't you run into problems if you go down to 0? And I don't mean the "problem" of very young children casting stupid votes, because stupid votes aren't a problem, but I'm more worried that most preschoolers and elementary schoolers aren't independent thinkers enough to vote for someone other than their parents' favorite candidate/party. Which is a problem because it's not just any stupid vote, it's a biased stupid vote and those, unlike regular stupid votes, will skew the result of the election in some direction.

Even then, the bias that comes from removing young people from the voting pool, which is what everyone is doing now, is probably a bigger problem and I would (hesitantly) support a motion to lower the voting age to 0 over the current system. But if you were proposing something like 16 or 12, I'd support it without hesitation.

[silverspawn]

I expect most children to vote with their parents, but I think it's fair if people with children get to have their vote count more. They have a bigger stake in the future.

[Awaclus]

I expect most children to vote with their parents, but I think it's fair if people with children get to have their vote count more. They have a bigger stake in the future.

I don't think that's fair at all, and I don't think parents are really capable of making voting decisions in the best interests of their children in the grand scheme of things. Violent child abuse was normal just a few decades ago, and those parents did it believing that it would be for the children's own good. Nowadays people generally understand that it's harmful and it's illegal in many countries as well, but that doesn't stop some parents. In the US and many other countries, an absurdly high percentage of parents of infant boys feel like it's a good idea to have one of the very first things he experiences outside the womb be an unimaginably painful removal of a sensitive organ (so much so that some adult men still have vivid memories of their circumcisions, which is by far my least favorite thing to know).

Even ignoring cases where the parents are causing severe and/or permanent physical or psychological damage to their children, it rarely seems like people prioritize the well-being of their children above other things, like their own social status. Even when they do genuinely want only the best for their children and are even willing to make sacrifices to achieve it — and I consider myself to be incredibly fortunate to have parents from this category rather than one of the earlier ones — it's really difficult for them to see things from the child's perspective given that the world has radically changed from what it was back when they were children, as well as the fact that the child is just fundamentally a different individual, not just a reborn version of themselves.

I mean, the entire reason why I think the voting age should be decreased is that the current system biases the voter pool towards demographics that aren't personally affected by any issues that affect young people. Adding infants to the mix only to effectively give more votes to adults defeats a lot of the purpose.

Besides, many people who are voluntarily childless do so for incredibly ethical reasons, for the sake of the future.