LW - Monthly Roundup #22: September 2024 by Zvi

The Nonlinear Library: LessWrong

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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Monthly Roundup #22: September 2024, published by Zvi on September 18, 2024 on LessWrong.
It's that time again for all the sufficiently interesting news that isn't otherwise fit to print, also known as the Monthly Roundup.
Bad News
Beware the failure mode in strategy and decisions that implicitly assumes competence, or wishes away difficulties, and remember to reverse all advice you hear.
Stefan Schubert (quoting Tyler Cowen on raising people's ambitions often being very high value): I think lowering others' aspirations can also be high-return. I know of people who would have had a better life by now if someone could have persuaded them to pursue more realistic plans.
Rob Miles: There's a specific failure mode which I don't have a name for, which is similar to "be too ambitious" but is closer to "have an unrealistic plan". The illustrative example I use is:
Suppose by some strange circumstance you have to represent your country at olympic gymnastics next week. One approach is to look at last year's gold, and try to do that routine. This will fail. You'll do better by finding one or two things you can actually do, and doing them well
There's a common failure of rationality which looks like "Figure out what strategy an ideal reasoner would use, then employ that strategy".
It's often valuable to think about the optimal policy, but you must understand the difference between knowing the path, and walking the path
I do think that more often 'raise people's ambitions' is the right move, but you need to carry both cards around with you for different people in different situations.
Theory that Starlink, by giving people good internet access, ruined Burning Man. Seems highly plausible. One person reported that they managed to leave the internet behind anyway, so they still got the Burning Man experience.
Tyler Cowen essentially despairs of reducing regulations or the number of bureaucrats, because it's all embedded in a complex web of regulations and institutions and our businesses rely upon all that to be able to function. Otherwise business would be paralyzed. There are some exceptions, you can perhaps wholesale axe entire departments like education. He suggests we focus on limiting regulations on new economic areas.
He doesn't mention AI, but presumably that's a lot of what's motivating his views there.
I agree that 'one does not simply' cut existing regulations in many cases, and that 'fire everyone and then it will all work out' is not a strategy (unless AI replaces them?), but also I think this is the kind of thing can be the danger of having too much detailed knowledge of all the things that could go wrong. One should generalize the idea of eliminating entire departments. So yes, right now you need the FDA to approve your drug (one of Tyler's examples) but… what if you didn't?
I would still expect, if a new President were indeed to do massive firings on rhetoric and hope, that the result would be a giant cluster****.
La Guardia switches to listing flights by departure time rather than order of destination, which in my mind makes no sense in the context of flights, that frequently get delayed, where you might want to look for an earlier flight or know what backups are if yours is cancelled or delayed or you miss it, and so on. It also gives you a sense of where one can and can't actually go to when from where you are.
For trains it makes more sense to sort by time, since you are so often not going to and might not even know the train's final destination.
I got a surprising amount of pushback about all that on Twitter, some people felt very strongly the other way, as if to list by name was violating some sacred value of accessibility or something.
Anti-Social Media
Elon Musk provides good data on his followers to help with things like poll calibration, reports 73%-27% lea...