Tag Archives: practical advice

Light cone eating AI explosions are not filters

Posted on November 5, 2010 | 10 comments

Some existential risks can’t account for any of the Great Filter. Here are two categories of existential risks that are not filters:

Too big: any disaster that would destroy everyone in the observable universe at once, or destroy space itself, is out. If others had been filtered by such a disaster in the past, we wouldn’t be here either. This excludes events such as simulation shutdown and breakdown of a metastable vacuum state we are in.

Not the end: Humans could be destroyed without the causal path to space colonization being destroyed. Also much of human value could be destroyed without humans being destroyed. e.g. Super-intelligent AI would presumably be better at colonizing the stars than humans are. The same goes for transcending uploads. Repressive totalitarian states and long term erosion of value could destroy a lot of human value and still lead to interstellar colonization.

Since these risks are not filters, neither the knowledge that there is a large minimum total filter nor the use of SIA increases their likelihood.  SSA still increases their likelihood for the usual Doomsday Argument reasons. I think the rest of the risks listed in Nick Bostrom’s paper can be filters. According to SIA averting these filter existential risks should be prioritized more highly relative to averting non-filter existential risks such as those in this post. So for instance AI is less of a concern relative to other existential risks than otherwise estimated. SSA’s implications are less clear – the destruction of everything in the future is a pretty favorable inclusion in a hypothesis under SSA with a broad reference class, but as always everything depends on the reference class.

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When is investment procrastination?

Posted on October 10, 2010 | 6 comments

I suggested recently that the link between procrastination and perfectionism has to do with construal level theory:

When you picture getting started straight away the close temporal distance puts you in near mode, where you see all the detailed impediments to doing a perfect job. When you think of doing the task in the future some time, trade-offs and barriers vanish and the glorious final goal becomes more vivid. So it always seems like you will do a great job in the future, whereas right now progress is depressingly slow and complicated.

This set of thoughts reminds me of those generally present when I consider the likely outcomes of getting further qualifications vs. employment, and of giving my altruistically intended savings to the best cause I can find now vs. accruing interest and spending them later. In general the effect could apply to any question of how long to prepare for something before you go out and do it. Do procrastinators invest more?


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Meet science: rationalizing evidence to save beliefs

Posted on October 9, 2010 | 10 comments

This is how science classes mostly went in high school. We would learn about a topic that had been discovered scientifically, for instance that if you add together two particular solutions of ions, some of the ions will precipitate out as a solid salt. Then we would do an experiment, wherein we would add the requisite solutions and get something entirely wrong in its color, smell, quantity, or presence. Then we would write a report with our hypothesis, the contradictory results, and a long discussion about all the mistakes that could be to blame for this unexpected result, and conclude that the real answer was probably still what we hypothesized (since we read that in a book).

Given that they had not taught the children anything about priors, this seems like a strange way to demonstrate science.

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Perfect procrastination

Posted on September 16, 2010 | 12 comments

Perfectionism is often blamed for procrastination. John Perry explains:

Many procrastinators do not realize that they are perfectionists, for the simple reason that they have never done anything perfectly, or even nearly so… Perfectionism is a matter of fantasy, not reality. Here’s how it works in my case.  I am assigned some task, say, refereeing a manuscript for a publisher… Immediately my fantasy life kicks in. I imagine myself writing the most wonderful referees report. I imagine giving the manuscript an incredibly thorough read, and writing a report that helps the author to greatly improve their efforts.  I imagine the publisher getting my report and saying, “Wow, that is the best referee report I have ever read.” I imagine my report being completely accurate, completely fair, incredibly helpful to author and publisher.

At first Perry seems to suggest that the perfectionist tries to do the job too well and gets sidetracked on tangential stepping stones, which doesn’t sound accurate. Then he says:

Procrastinating was a way of giving myself permission to do a less than perfect job on a task that didn’t require a perfect job. As long as the deadline was a ways away, then, in theory, I had time to go the library, or set myself up for a long evening at home, and do a thorough, scholarly, perfect job refereeing this book. But when the deadline is near, or even a bit in the past, there is no longer time to do a perfect job. I have to just sit down and do an imperfect, but adequate job.

But why would you be so willing to give yourself permission to do something else unproductive for six weeks so you will have to do an imperfect job if you aren’t willing to permit an imperfect job straight off?  If you’re such a perfectionist, wouldn’t you want to get started straight away and do a perfect job?

Here’s an alternative theory. The link between procrastination and perfectionism has to do with construal level theory. When you picture getting started straight away the close temporal distance puts you in near mode, where you see all the detailed impediments to doing a perfect job. When you think of doing the task in the future some time, trade-offs and barriers vanish and the glorious final goal becomes more vivid. So it always seems like you will do a great job in the future, whereas right now progress is depressingly slow and complicated. This makes doing it in the future seem all the more of a good option if you are obsessed with perfection.

Relatedly, similar tasks designed to prompt far mode increase procrastination over those designed to prompt near mode (summary, gated paper). Perhaps you mostly feel the contrast if you start in far mode, since to do the task you must eventually edge closer near mode? If you start in near mode you can stay there. The kind of trade-off-free perfectionistic fantasizing Perry describes sounds like introducing all tasks to oneself in far mode. I have no time to think about it further; I must return to turning pages and making squiggles with my inky purple pen.

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I don’t clean because the house is never dirty

Posted on September 13, 2010 | 17 comments

I often think about this when someone thinks I should do more housework:

When women see how little housework men do, they interpret it as “shirking” …Men, in turn, feel unfairly maligned…Who is right? …Usually, men.

The evidence: Look at the typical bachelor’s apartment. Even when a man pays the full cost of cleanliness and receives the full benefit, he doesn’t do much. Why not? Because the typical man doesn’t care very much about cleanliness. When the bachelor gets married, he almost certainly starts doing more housework than he did when he was single. How can you call that shirking?

To some extent it’s true, but in my experience a lot of conflict between clean and messy people seems indeed because the messy person ends up doing less than their fair share of work, but also much less than they are willing to do. This is because people often decide when to do a chore based on when it has reached a certain level of urgency. For instance when the floor becomes muddy enough it triggers cleaning. When two people have different standards, the cleanlier one is always the first to be triggered, so they clean again and again while the other is endlessly about to clean but beaten to it. This can be fixed by relying on another method to decide when to clean, or by the person with lower standards learning to be triggered at the same point as the other person, but if one person endlessly cleans while the other endlessly claims they were going to do it tomorrow, it’s easy for resentment to cloud assessment of this underlying problem.

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