Category Archives: Rationality

Trio Walks, Duo Talks

Posted on March 11, 2017 by TheZvi

Epistemic Status: Exploration Related: The Engineer and the Diplomat Having a great conversation is hard, but valuable. The structure a conversation is built around determines how it will go. How should we engineer more valuable conversations? At the retreat, it was … Continue reading →

Posted in Good Advice, Rationality | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Metrics in Everything: “Human Lives”

Posted on February 26, 2017 by TheZvi

Epistemic Status: Ranting with the fire of a thousand suns I was on page 48 of the (so far) otherwise interesting and enjoyable Algorithms to Live By, a birthday gift from my friend Jacob who writes the blog Put a … Continue reading →

Posted in Rationality | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

The AI Paper with The Best Title Ever

Posted on February 24, 2017 by TheZvi

Epistemic Status: Confident I understood the paper, but no promises on its implications The title is “Learning to learn by gradient descent by gradient descent.” If anyone can top that title I am eager to hear about it. The idea … Continue reading →

Posted in Rationality, Reviews | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

The Thing and the Symbolic Representation of The Thing

Posted on June 30, 2015 by TheZvi

Let’s assume there is a thing that all would agree is, in context, a Good Thing(tm) that someone in your situation would want. Do you want the thing, or do you want the symbolic representation of the thing?* This sounds … Continue reading →

Posted in Death by Metrics, Impractical Optimization, Personal Experience, Rationality | Tagged , , , | 38 Comments

The Twelve Virtues of Rationality

Posted on May 17, 2015 by TheZvi

Yesterday, Raymond Arnold sent out an email announcing that those at Highgarden had come up with a really cool art project and invited everyone to come down and participate. The idea was to paint panels depicting the Twelve Virtues of … Continue reading →

Posted in Good Advice, Rationality | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

Trolley Problems: Conveniently Inconvenient Worlds Considered

Posted on May 14, 2015 by TheZvi

The basic trolley problem is under-specified. In the basic case (no one will ever know what you did or did not do, a transfer saves N people and dooms M other statistically identical people) I hold that the answer is … Continue reading →

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What is stupid?

Posted on May 12, 2015 by TheZvi

In a post that I mostly agreed with, but am also mostly not that interested in, Scott Sumner concludes with the following note: But I also understand that the part of my brain that tells me that the conventional narrative … Continue reading →

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Carpe Diem: The Problem of Scarcity and Abundance

Posted on May 1, 2015 by TheZvi

Previously: Carpe Diem: The Optimization Game: Level 1 One of my goals with Carpe Diem was to illustrate the value of flexibility and optionality, and the surprisingly high cost of scarcity. A simple plan for playing the game is to … Continue reading →

Posted in Games Other Than Magic, Rationality | Tagged , , | 7 Comments

Carpe Diem, the Optimization Game: Level 1

Posted on March 17, 2015 by TheZvi

Leads To: Carpe Diem: The Problem of Scarcity and Abundance Less Wrong contributor owencb links us to a fourteen page paper of his that proposes optimizing your time via a three-resource model. You can find the full document here. Here’s his abstract, … Continue reading →

Posted in Games Other Than Magic, Rationality | Tagged , , | 13 Comments