trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
What an actually pessimistic containment strategy looks like
by lc — 2022-04-05T00:19:50.212Z

Israel as a nation state has an ongoing national security issue involving Iran.

For the last twenty years or so, Iran has been covertly developing nuclear weapons. Iran is a country with a very low opinion of Israel and is generally diplomatically opposed to its existence. Their supreme leader has a habit of saying things like "Israel is a cancerous tumor of a state" that should be "removed from the region". Because of these and other reasons, Israel has assessed, however accurately, that if Iran successfully develops nuclear weapons, it stands a not-insignificant chance of using them against Israel.

Israel's response to this problem has been multi-pronged. Making defense systems that could potentially defeat Iranian nuclear weapons is an important component of their strategy. The country has developed a sophisticated array of missile interception systems like the Iron Dome. Some people even suggest that these systems would be effective against much of the incoming rain of hellfire from an Iranian nuclear state.

But Israel's current evaluation of the "nuclear defense problem" is pretty pessimistic. Defense isn't all it has done. Given the size of Israel as a landmass, it would be safe to say that it's probably not the most important component of Israel's strategy. It has also tried to delay, or pressure Iran into delaying, its nuclear efforts through other means. For example, it gets its allies to sanction Iran, sabotages its facilities, and tries to convince its nuclear researchers to defect.

In my model, an argument like "well, what's the point of all this effort, Iran is going to develop nuclear weapons eventually anyways" would not be very satisfying to Israeli military strategists. Firstly, that the Iranians will "eventually" get nuclear weapons is not guaranteed. Secondly, conditional on them doing it, it's not guaranteed it'll happen the expected lifetime of the people currently living in Israel, which is a personal win for the people in charge.

Thirdly, even if it's going to happen tomorrow, every day that Iran does not possess nuclear weapons under this paradigm is a gift. Delaying a hypothetical nuclear holocaust means increasing the life expectancy of every living Israeli.

An argument like "well, what if you actually radicalize the Iranians into hardening their stance on developing nuclear weapons through all of this discourageme...
Software Engineering: Getting Hired and Promoted
by Gordon Seidoh Worley — 2022-04-04T22:31:52.967Z

I'm continuing my series of posts this week to earn more GHT for my donation lottery with another post about my job. This time, I'm coming from the angle of telling you what I tell other software engineers about getting hired and getting promoted.

So, you want to get hired as a software engineer, or you're already a software engineer and you want to get promoted. What should you do?

Lots of people have written about this topic. I'm not an authority here. I'm not even responsible for hiring decisions at my current job! But, I can give you some insights from what I've seen working with lots of engineers and interviewing lots of engineers and seeing who got hired and who didn't. Here goes!

What do I expect of new software engineers?

I don't spend a lot of time interviewing new grads or junior engineers coming from bootcamps or self-education. That said, I do work with a lot of them. Here's what I skills I expect them to have:

ability to turn a problem into code, but probably only after asking a lot of questions to refine the technical constraints
ability to ask for help when they need it
ability to express their opinions but also know when to listen and accept they don't know everything
a desire to get better at the job and to work well with others
eventually an ability to get tickets done without a lot of help

I'm sure there's lots of stuff I've left out, especially generic stuff about working at a company, but this is what came to mind. I think if these skills are missing (or an ability to demonstrate these skills during an interview) then that's probably why someone has a hard time getting hired to a junior position.

To that point, why didn't you get hired for a job? Sometimes it's because the hiring manager actually is shitty and is hiring for friends to go drinking with. However, I don't think that's usually the case since people who do that tend to hire worse employees on average and their companies don't succeed. More typically it's because you didn't demonstrate something the hiring manager expected to see. Usually this is going to be a technical or people skill. Did you fail to solve the programming challenge? Did you talk about how you hate working with stupid people? Do you give off a low-confidence, high-conflict, or weird vibe that is going to make the hiring manager nervous about if you'll mesh well with the team? Did someone else you didn't meet just happen...
Over-Organization (Chapter 5)
by Justin Bullock — 2022-04-04T20:58:23.685Z

The Will to Order

"The wish to impose order upon confusion, to bring harmony out of dissonance and unity out of multiplicity is a kind of intellectual instinct, a primary and fundamental urge of the mind. Within the realms of science, art and philosophy the workings of what I may call this "Will to Order" are mainly beneficent. True, the Will to Order has produced many premature syntheses based upon insufficient evidence, many absurd systems of metaphysics and theology, much pedantic mistaking of notions for realities, of symbols and abstractions for the data of immediate experience. But these errors, however regrettable, do not do much harm, at any rate directly—though it sometimes happens that a bad philosophical system may do harm indirectly, by being used as a justification for senseless and inhuman actions. It is in the social sphere, in the realm of politics and economics, that the Will to Order becomes really dangerous.

Here the theoretical reduction of unmanageable multiplicity to comprehensible unity becomes the practical reduction of human diversity to subhuman uniformity, of freedom to servitude. In politics the equivalent of a fully developed scientific theory or philosophical system is a totalitarian dictatorship. In economics, the equivalent of a beautifully composed work of art is the smoothly running factory in which the workers are perfectly adjusted to the machines. The Will to Order can make tyrants out of those who merely aspire to clear up a mess. The beauty of tidiness is used as a justification for despotism.

Organization is indispensable; for liberty arises and has meaning only within a self-regulating community of freely co-operating individuals. But, though indispensable, organization can also be fatal. Too much organization transforms men and women into automata, suffocates the creative spirit and abolishes the very possibility of freedom. As usual, the only safe course is in the middle, between the extremes of laissez-faire at one end of the scale and of total control at the other.

During the past century the successive advances in technology have been accompanied by corresponding advances in organization. Complicated machinery has had to be matched by complicated social arrangements, designed to work as smoothly and efficiently as the new instruments of production. In order to fit into these organizations, individuals have had to dei...
Greyed Out Options
by ozymandias — 2022-04-04T20:43:13.566Z

Imagine that life is a choose-your-own adventure game.

In any moment, you have literally millions of options. At the moment I’m typing this, I could change the tab to innumerable websites, I could read any of the hundreds of books in my house, I could make myself a snack of olives, I could stand up and see how far I could jump, I could pet a cat, I could walk into my best friend’s bedroom and call them an idiot, and so on and so forth.

But, most of the time, we only think of a menu of a few dozen options—sometimes much fewer. The rest are sort of grayed out.

To a large extent, this is a good thing. Most of the options theoretically available at any given moment are very stupid. (Just ask anyone with intrusive thoughts—yes, brain, I understand I could put the lightbulb in my mouth, stop bringing it up!) But I think it’s important to think about the ways that grayed out options limit our behavior.

You can go outside in pajamas. It isn’t illegal. No one will stop you. Most of the time, no one will even comment. Sure, you might run into someone you know, but in many cities that’s not going to happen, and anyway they’re likely to assume you have a stomach flu or otherwise have some perfectly good reason for running around in pajamas. You’re unlikely to face any negative consequences whatsoever.

But when I’ve suggested this to people, they tend to object not because they have no particular reason to go places in pajamas (pajamas are very comfortable) but because people don’t do that. It’s just not on the list of available options. If you did, you’d probably feel anxious and maybe even ashamed, because it’s genuinely hard to do something that people don’t do.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that you should go places wearing pajamas! I don’t. I’m suggesting that you consider thoughtfully which of your options are grayed out and why.

Here are some other grayed-out options I’ve observed among people I’ve met:

Starting a conversation with a stranger.
Asking someone out.
Eating at a restaurant alone.
Walking alone at night (especially if you’re female or were raised female).
Writing a novel or a blog post.
Drawing a picture.
Submitting your writing to a publisher.
Emailing a professor to ask a question about their discipline.
Making a pull request on Github.
Editing Wikipedia.
Writing a computer program to fix a problem you have or automate a piece of work you have to do often.
Starting a

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App Review: Amaru
by ozymandias — 2022-04-04T20:40:46.930Z

I’ve recently become addicted to the self-care virtual pet game Amaru, and it’s sufficiently rare for me to become addicted to an app that I thought I would write up a review, for the benefit of my fellow non-app-users.

Amaru is a virtual pet game with a twist. In addition to feeding and petting your virtual pet, you take care of your pet by taking care of yourself in real life.

Every day, you need to collect three Goal Gems. If you maintain your streak, Amaru will be happy; if you skip your goals for long enough, Amaru will be anxious (and have a heartbreaking scared-Amaru animation). By default, the three goals are feeding Amaru, meditating, and journaling, but you can also change them to goals such as exercising, drinking water, waking up on time, or doing art. (You aren’t allowed to put in your own goals—you have to use the self-care goals the app has—but there’s a pretty reasonable range of possible custom goals.)

Virtual pet games live or die on how cute the virtual pet is, and fortunately Amaru is damn cute:

They put a lot of effort into making Amaru’s animations adorable as hell, and the satisfying reaction when Amaru is happy is pretty much the most motivating aspect of the app.

The biggest problem with the Amaru app is that at this point it’s very much a minimum viable product. There are many planned expansions, but right now it’s pretty much the least you could expect to make it a playable game. This is my reason for writing the review: I would like it to be less of a minimum viable product so I’m hoping to convince other people to use it—in particular, other people who aren’t fifteen like the rest of the fanbase and therefore have money. So my description is going to seem pretty slight, but I’m optimistic that they’ll expand it soon.

The Amaru app has four built-in guided meditations: a body scan; a deep breathing relaxation; a meditation where you focus on the breath; and an odd sort of pseudo-metta meditation thing where you imagine positive energy appearing in yourself and then spreading throughout the world. Each meditation is available in different versions for beginner, intermediate, and expert meditators, and at two or three different lengths. The meditations have music (which you can turn off) and captions for people who are hard of hearing or Deaf. If you have your own preferred meditation app, like doing non-guided meditations, or just want t...
Dr Fauci as Machiavellian Boddhisattva
by Benquo — 2022-04-04T20:38:31.510Z
Link: http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/dr-fauci-as-machiavellian-boddhisattva/

If you parse what US authority figures like Dr Fauci are explicitly saying about COVID, you end up learning things like:

An old white man in good health should take 6000 IU of vitamin D per day prophylactically.
We won't have herd immunity until 80-85 percent of the population is vaccinated.
From both a personal and public health cost-benefit analysis, nearly every adult ought to take at least a single-shot vaccine and it's not worth the health benefits for vaccinated people to avoid group gatherings or public spaces, or wear masks in public.
From both a personal and public health cost-benefit analysis, children ought not to be vaccinated.
Dr Fauci distorts his quantitative claims to be less surprising, so that they can more easily enter the common narrative. Therefore, you can extrapolate that any surprising number coming from Dr Fauci ought to be adjusted farther from the number that would make no waves, to infer his true opinion.

On the other hand, yesterday I visited a toy store that sells Dr Fauci figurines for children, insists that everyone wear masks regardless of vaccination status, and limits the number of people in the store.

Corporate mass media was happy to broadcast lies like "masks don't work" early in the pandemic. But while official state announcements clearly indicated the direction in which the press was expected to distort the narrative, they were careful not to brazenly say the opposite of the truth, that masks don't work, only to tell ordinary people not to use them because healthcare workers needed them. A literal-minded person who read and believed actual government statements rather than news and opinion articles would have inferred from the start that masks worked.

My experience at GiveWell demonstrated a similar pattern. Our research reports explicitly indicated that our case for indiscriminately administering deworming pills to African children as a charitable intervention was highly speculative, based not on ambiguous evidence for long-run health improvements, but on a single randomized controlled trial that found implausibly large long-run income improvements. But the charity was listed under "health" interventions on GiveWell's top charities list, GiveWell hired a PR specialist to promote things like an Atlantic article that said "If what you want is to save lives with certainty, several people said, you have to go to GiveWell," and ef...
Debt, Submission, and a Technical Definition of Drama
by Benquo — 2022-04-04T20:37:19.288Z
Link: http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/debt-submission-and-the-technical-definition-of-drama/

Two public answers to private question in which I employ a technical definition of drama.

Origin Debt

Contractual debts can only exist within some sort of civil law wherein commitments can be publicly and unambiguously evaluated.
In the absence of civil law institutions, dramatic strategies posturing around owing and being owed parasitize norms around debts, until only the dramatic versions remain.

A debt too large to be repaid, with no resolution process (e.g. bankruptcy or formal debt slavery), effectively reduces the debtor's creditworthiness within that system to nothing. If a hobo somehow owes a billion dollars, it makes no sense for me to draw up an enforceable contract to lend him $10, since the prior creditor has first claim on any money he might get to repay me. I might lend him the cash anyway informally if our informal credit system is decoupled from the one under which he owes a billion. It makes more sense to think of parents (in practice usually fathers) owning their children in some systems but not in others. If I want to lend to someone within a system where they're owned by someone else, I need to investigate their owner's credit as well.

I can also be said to "owe" my parents in the sense of causal attribution.
The decision for each individual is in what sorts of systems, potential or actual, we wish to maintain creditworthiness. Seems to be like right now we barely even have language, so other sorts of debts are mostly dramatic or customary, as are property claims.

Violence by Submission

There are object-level situations where for reasons external to the social graph, one person is in charge of another. E.g. some kinds of advice, or a military officer commanding soldiers. Then sometimes people play out dramatic scenes in which one person plays the role of being in charge of another.

Someone can invoke a dramatic scene or influence/control how it plays out, regardless of what their role within the scene is. So there's no reason you can't aggress (according to the civil law frame) against someone via submitting (according to the dramatic frame) to them.

Likewise, there are actual situations where one person transgresses against another, there are also scenes people play out where they play the roles of transgressor and victim, and there's nothing necessarily preventing the person invoking or controlling the scene from playing out the victim role.

The r...
Inner Ring as Adversary
by Benquo — 2022-04-04T20:36:15.945Z
Link: http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/inner-ring-as-adversary/

Inner rings, as described in CS Lewis's lecture about them, structurally orient around a kind of evasiveness. In this Twitter thread, Venkatesh Rao somehow evades something extremely explicit and basic in Lewis's description, but correctly criticizes Lewis for his own kind of evasion of a sort of apex inner ring.

Lewis explicitly describes the recruitment process for inner rings: being asked to transgress, implicitly in order to gain admission to the inner ring, but with no specific promises made or implied. But it turns out that's all the inner ring is made of: evasive transgression-bonding. There's no content inside it, no subject matter knowledge, only a shared unseeing of guilt, and - at most - further inner rings inside the first one.

Rao somehow has the idea that there's a game to be played in this domain, but there's no domain, there's no insider knowledge, there's no structure to the game, there's just an aggregation continually reaffirming ringhood through shared transgression.

It's notable how easy it seems to be to miss this when Lewis makes it so explicit.

Rao points out that Lewis's proposed remedy - simply not joining inner rings - effectively means declining to defend or otherwise coordinate against them, and can only work out in the long run by implying that through some nonspecific means (Jesus) things will work out in the end. Something Rao doesn't point out is that Lewis's implied advice to be an honest craftsman is inapplicable to his actual audience. The Inner Ring speech was given at an University. University students do not study to be artisans. If you occupy a white collar job in a world with inner rings, then you're in the world of Moral Mazes. Rao correctly characterizes this as recommending what he calls a Clueless strategy in The Gervais Principle.

Occupying a Bullshit (i.e. class privilege) Job while cultivating a self-image as an honest craftsman means profiting by being taken in by and thereby perpetuating the scam that your professional coverup is intellectually difficult technical expertise. Learning to distort your mind into these postures is the price students are asked to pay to join the Inner Ring of graduates. In practice Lewis is urging college students to go along with the coverup while trying to do locally valid things while posturing as experts in a technical discipline.

Ayn Rand is the only writer I've seen get both these...
Language, Power, and the Categorical Imperative
by Benquo — 2022-04-04T20:33:50.351Z
Link: http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/language-power-and-the-categorical-imperative/

The Chieftain of Seir's essay The Crisis of Authority provides a helpful historical link between models I've laid out elsewhere. I wrote a long comment that I want to reproduce here.

I'm responding most directly to this section on power and authority:

Anglo-Saxon countries did not entirely escape the crisis of authority that destroyed the old social orders all across the world. There were many who thought that the old conceptions of moral authority upon which the Anglo-Saxon ideals were founded no longer had any relevance. To these people, the only possible justification for the Anglo-Saxon ideals lay in their materialistic benefits.

Thus, there is a deep divide in the Anglo-Saxon world between those who hold to the Anglo-Saxon ideals because they believe them to be a moral imperative, and those who hold to them because they believe them to be the best route to a materialistic paradise. This divide is not strictly ideological in the traditional sense. There are many conservatives and libertarians who base the legitimacy of their ideals on what they think will produced greatest human happiness. And there are some liberals who seem committed to the moral imperative of Anglo-Saxon ideals even as they seek to use government force to improve materialistic outcomes.

Does this really matter? Doesn’t everyone agree on the right political model even if they don’t have the same reasons for accepting it? Is not a practical unity good enough for everyone except the philosophers? The answer is yes and no. A practical unity is sufficient to produce power for as long as it lasts. But it cannot produce a durable form of authority.

Most people don’t understand why this matters because they don’t understand the distinction between power and authority. In most people’s mind, power produces authority. Therefore, authority and power must be the same.

But the premise behind this idea is false. Power does not create authority. If anything, authority creates power. Authority is derived from people’s willingness to die for ideas and institutions. Power is derived from people’s willingness and ability to kill for ideals and institutions. Power is what impresses people, but without authority no political system will last for long.

Authority is necessary because pressure will always afflict different parts of an organization at different rates. Somebody will always be first in line for the pr

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