roystgnr
5mo ago
We were discussing ability bias vs human capital - did anyone bring up signaling before I did? It seemed a very weird thing to leave out of the conversation, so I thought it was surely worth mentioning that it could be nearly as large an effect as ability bias despite falling on the opposite side of the "should I go to a cheap college" question.
But as long as I'm bringing up weird things to leave out of the conversation - what's your source for "Once you control for that, the differences are pretty slight"? I was providing what seemed to be a relevant counterexample to an assertion not yet tied to data, but if you do have more relevant data then that's a trump card - just go ahead and play it?
roystgnr
5mo ago
I don't know anything about the rdrama features, but I've been pleased with most of the results I've seen from LessWrong separating "overall karma" voting vs "agreement karma" voting. Probably some of that is just from the selection effect of their userbase, but maybe the first thing to do to get people to stop confusing quality for agreement is to allow them to easily acknowledge agreement in the absence of quality and quality in the absence of agreement.
roystgnr
5mo ago
My only complaint about hiding scores for 24 hours is that it makes doing this much harder and less useful. I don't want to upvote a mediocre comment on the mere guess that people are probably piling on downvotes-for-disagreement, even if I'm pretty accurate with those guesses.
roystgnr
5mo ago
Sure, but when I can't take a derivative I'll still prefer a finite difference over nothing. How would you think those estimates change when we reduce the delta?
No, but loans are often granted only when the lender agrees to insure themselves against the house burning down. A world in which every high school graduate gets to see the insurance market's actuaries' estimates of their future income conditional on their resume and choice of school and major would be a much more interesting world.
Assuming an insurance market was allowed to exist, of course. I fear most voters still don't really get the concept of insurance as a way to pay E[X]*(1+p) for a benefit of X, rather than as a weird form of potential charity that would let us squeeze money for poor people from evil corporations instead of from government coffers if only we were brave enough to pass the right laws.
roystgnr
5mo ago
I think the estimate of the breakdown of the private returns to college education from Bryan Caplan (not a huge fan of the status quo) was around 50% ability bias ("the kinds of people who go to podunk state vs harvard"), but also 40% signaling (even if you're smart enough to go to Harvard, can you prove that to employers without the diploma?) and 10% human capital (Harvard actually does have some classes that teach you more because they don't need to worry about the slower kids keeping up). If he's right then you still want to steer clear of podunk; the net return to education is still too huge to throw away half of it lightly.
roystgnr
5mo ago
With respect to crimes like this, there's a certain res ipsa loquitur aspect where the mere commission of the act is evidence of intent in and of itself
Yes, and the intent is obviously "don't write down the embarrassing adultery he's trying to cover up", right? Is trying to keep his despicable personal life secret a crime? If not, then isn't looking for some additional redundant intention, much less assuming it, a basic violation of Occam's razor?
messy Lore ... making generic promotion a bit complicated as things go.
Well, to be fair, you have to temper the promotion with a bit of realism about the mess, and you can't let yourself be too disappointed when people thereby dismiss any positive conclusions as Pollyanna, "must be a pony in there somewhere" optimism.
haven't had too much time to read this site lately so am unlikely to come across the Good Posts organically
This is exactly what the Quality Contributions Report is for, no? Often they're not all winners, and usually not all the winners are there, but reading those alone probably gets you at least 25% of the best posts for at most 1% of the effort.
roystgnr
5mo ago
Self-consciousness includes focus on what you think of yourself rather than just on what others think of you, so it doesn't always have all the same failure modes, but it can easily be taken to excess no matter what form it takes.
For myself, I'd break down the emotional repercussions of the judgement of others into three categories. (noting that any one person's judgement can be any mix of all three)
-
Some judgement is a matter of opinion, and opinions differ, and while it often can broaden your tastes to explore others' subjective perspective, ultimately it's not objectively bad for either of you if you still disagree afterwards. (cue Rogers & Hammerstein music here) If someone thinks it is, well, that goes in category 3.
-
Some judgement is a matter of fact, and is correct ... and this is usually an opportunity! If you want to better yourself, you want to seek out people who can help you see your own flaws and how to overcome them, you don't want to fear that. In theory this might be an unpleasant process, because people who have insight into flawed human nature might also be rude and insulting about how they explain it, but in practice there's not generally a lot of overlap there, for obvious reasons. (among adults, at least - growing up you might have had a lot of peers who were starting to learn a few valuable insights but who had not yet counted "politeness" among them) I'm generally using "judgement" in the same negative sense that you did, but positive correct judgments can be useful too, not to help you better yourself but to help you identify negative incorrect judgments that might otherwise upset or mislead you.
-
Some judgement is a matter of fact, and is incorrect ... and so why care about it? If someone tells you you have hideous purple hair, but you can look in the mirror and remind yourself that your hair is not purple, at that point you obviously shouldn't feel bad about yourself, you should feel sad for them. Most incorrect criticism isn't quite that blatantly wrong, but in that case just dissect it and save any bits that belonged in category 2 and then you still shouldn't feel bad about the rest.
Category 2 is an opportunity, while 3 is a bit of a waste of time, so obviously you'd like their ratio to be weighted heavily towards the former, so if you're more into corrective action than corrective introspection you might start to seek out friends/coworkers/partners/etc. whose judgement usually falls into category 2 but not 3. This becomes much more urgent if your problems include others' negative actions rather than just your own negative introspection - from the way you phrased your question it sounds like you're worried about damage to your psyche, but if you have a significant other or a boss or someone whose decisions matter and they're basing those decisions on wrong judgments, then ignoring them is not a good option and you'll have to figure out whether correcting them or leaving them is more practical.
roystgnr
5mo ago
I bet there are plenty of MBAs at Boeing smart enough to understand rocket engineering too, who can insist that “it’s possible”.
You'd think so, and yet the trouble is they don't. They've only occasionally said the exact opposite, but everything they do suggests that their statements aren't a fluke. SpaceX was flying Grasshopper in 2012. As of 2022 ULA (Boeing's space consortium with Lockheed Martin) was still debating whether they'd have a better time catching falling booster engines with a helicopter or just packing an inflatable ballute+raft in them.
Boeing's vision of the economics of space was decades of cost-plus contracting. The idea that they could make more profit by bringing down costs than by incurring them was so foreign to them that they didn't even want that to be an option. In hindsight, the overruns on Starliner (despite getting 60% more money than Crew Dragon) suggest they weren't wrong about that - for themselves, anyway.
Boeing's grandest vision of the future in space is a rocket that costs $25B to develop, plus another $4B minimum per year to launch one mission per year, and the mission can put people in lunar orbit but a lander is going to take some more work and maybe four versions down the line plus a new reentry vehicle plus another lander we can talk about Mars in the 2030s unless there are some delays just like there were the last time and the time before that. They do not believe a high flight rate is possible. They do not believe reuse, much less rapid reuse, is possible - they will be using extremely expensive Shuttle-derived engines originally designed for reuse, but they will be throwing them in the ocean for each flight. They do not believe rapid innovation is possible. They choose technologies like solid rocket boosters (for which "flyback" is an impossibility, as is "an off switch") and hydrolox fuel (great if you're optimizing ISP, less great if you're optimizing cadence or dollars) that don't even allow for a latter switch in that direction.
To be sure, SpaceX's newest rocket may be a failure. I've been getting a little more optimistic with each test, but the hardest parts are yet to come, and just because they've succeeded at reuse with Falcon and reentry with Dragon doesn't mean they're guaranteed to manage reuse with Starship and reentry with Starship. But the point where they're at with it as of their last test, sailing the upper stage through space before it disappointingly breaks up on reentry ... that's basically the point where nearly every other launch vehicle declares victory! By SpaceX (and honestly any reasonable) standards, Boeing's newest rocket was designed to be a failure, even if it had been a nominal success. It was designed so that, if everything had worked even with the schedule they had originally hoped for and the prices they had originally hoped for, it would not have been an economically sustainable system for anything more worthwhile than a few national pride stunts before Congress gets bored with funding those again, and in the absence of competition its greatest effect on the space industry would have been further normalization of the falsehood that space is just so super hard that there's no reason to expect anyone to ever do it any better.
You don't get rocket engineers (who really ought to be the ones in the common idiom! I've done a little rocket science, but rocket engineering still greatly intimidates me...) to work with the kind of passion that SpaceX was getting from them by offering them the chance to Go Where Man Has Gone Before while repeating the same mistakes as last time. Part of the SpaceX formula for success was their engineering choices, part of it was their vertical integration, part was their willingness to design "hardware-rich" even though that's embarrassing ... but a lot of it was that, for the first time since before their engineers were born, they were actually being given the option to succeed.
But they will work for Tesla or SpaceX, because of him.
Elon Musk could succumb to a heart attack tomorrow, and as long as Gwynne Shotwell was still at the helm (or at least someone who's picked up the same long-term vision - I doubt SpaceX upper management has many who haven't), SpaceX would still have just as easy a time (probably easier - aerospace engineers are 50% left-wing, and the right-wing half surely aren't all comfortable with Elon's edgelord shitposting style either) recruiting.
roystgnr
5mo ago
"Leverage" seems like a straightforward metaphor to me: "to use a thing to obtain an effect disproportionate to the input effort" (yes, yes, work is conserved; in this metaphor effort is force).
But often someone using that metaphor correctly has reason to be proud, so I can see how the popular meaning might indeed have shifted to "and we’re damn clever for having done so."
roystgnr
5mo ago
Replenishing O2 from Mars air is something we did in a demo experiment (MOXIE) 3 years ago. On Luna it gets a bit more expensive; although oxygen is everywhere in the soil you'd need a lot of power to bake it out.
Other volatiles can also be found in Mars air but are even tougher on the moon. Mining dirty ice (icy dirt?) from a south pole crater does not sound like a fun way to replenish nitrogen.
Nuclear subs make O2 by electrolysis of sea water easily enough, but I think the CO2 removal (via chemical separation and dumping) must be harder, since they leave the ambient levels fairly high, and actually obtaining the O2 from the CO2 must be harder still or they'd be doing that for simplicity instead. Getting O2 from CO2 is easy enough with hydrogen and energy, but that leaves you with methane too - great if you want rocket fuel on Mars but just as much of a PITA to dump as CO2 if you're trying to be stealthy under the ocean.
roystgnr
5mo ago
STEM geeks love to use those terms when they do apply, and other people learn words by exposure without necessarily learning them correctly by exposure. You can't infer "'exponential' is for when a thing is growing proportionally to it's present amount" as easily as you can misinfer "'exponential' is for when a thing is growing and it's super duper serious".
(aside: the pedantic geek in me wants to point out that "orders of magnitude" is always applicable when comparing two positive numbers in the same units; it's just not the scaling you'd go to right away when the number of orders is less than 2...)
Of course, many STEM geeks suffer from the same failure, just not with the same words. I suspect any humanities geek could properly explain how "to 'utilize' is to use a thing for something other than its intended purpose" or "to 'utilize' is to make use of a thing that would not have previously been useful" or some such subtlety of meaning that I only discovered in late adulthood, whereas grep tells me that I've written multiple papers and proposals and a dissertation during the period when I'd misinferred that "to 'utilize' is to use a thing and it's super duper serious".
roystgnr
5mo ago
This may be semantics, but I'd say that's not a function of state capacity, but of "spare" (or "surplus" or "discretionary") state capacity. The feds went from spending a couple percent of GDP to spending 15%? Okay, but the main reason we can't start federally spending 15% today is because that would be the biggest budget cut in history!
It would be interesting to imagine how anyone would budget for a Civil War II footing under current conditions. Surely any separatists aren't going to honor the US' Federal debt, and I don't see how the loyalists even continue rolling it over without hyperinflation to de-facto default. At that point it's hard to imagine either side being extended any significant credit, so budgets would have to be actual receipts-meet-outlays budgets, and the cost of "we have to pay for the biggest war since WWII" would be on top of "and we can't keep running the huge deficits we've gotten used to for generations".
roystgnr
5mo ago
You're correct about the volume limitations. They're currently working on an extended fairing option, but that's not to try to get the Falcon Heavy price/volume ratio lower than Falcon 9 - the bigger fairings won't even be reusable like their standard fairings are - it's to support a few bigger individual launches like conjoined Lunar Gateway modules as well as a few National-Security, Might-Be-Declassified-In-50-Years payloads.
But, I would say FH is designed for higher-mass launches; it was only originally that they thought that was necessary for high mass. FH design started before the Falcon 9 version 1.0 (with max payload to LEO of 10.4 tons or to GTO of 4.5 tons) even flew, and that wasn't enough for the DoD contracts they wanted, and they thought FH was the best way to get there ... but then improved Merlin engines and stretched tanks pushed the F9 payloads to 22.8t and 8.3t (fully expended, but for the prices DoD is willing to pay that's fine), and FH took them a lot longer than they'd hoped, and they ended up with a rocket they barely needed (9 launches so far, vs like 350 for F9, in part because a lot of "so heavy it needs Falcon Heavy" payloads ended up riding on upgraded F9s instead) but which they couldn't even cancel (IIRC Musk wanted to, and Gwynne Shotwell had to talk him out of it) because they already had those DoD contracts.
Despite agreeing to the extended fairing development, their internal strategy for fixing volume limitations is to forget about Falcons and finish Starship. 50% more mass capacity than FH with 550% more volume should be more than enough to ensure the latter limit isn't binding.
roystgnr
5mo ago
There's at least a half dozen Chinese companies (plus their government) working on reusable orbital rocket boosters, hopefully to be operational within the next couple years for some, but AFAIK none of them are beyond hop tests yet.
roystgnr
5mo ago
some might even consider me biased against him
Might?
If you wanted to deliver cargo (or people, which SpaceX still cannot do to my knowledge) to orbit
more than three years AFTER SpaceX put people in orbit. SpaceX was then (and still currently is, though I'm excited and hopeful for Starliner this week) in fact the only American team putting people in orbit. Is there any explanation other than bias for opining with that level of ignorance? Was that incident still not enough to make it obvious to you that you're coming to your conclusions first and then trying to assemble facts to rationalize them afterward?
That should have been the point where the laudable idea of:
I would love to be proven wrong.
hit the uncomfortable reality of being proven wrong, smashed your broken epistemology to splinters, and gave you a chance to build a working one to replace it.
"I'll happily wear the DUM DUM hat for the rest of the day", though a tiny step (on the order of 1 day / 3 years, 0.1%) in the right direction, was clearly not a rebuild in progress.
The irony here is that, though I'd agree with many of your points above (as would most techies; e.g. "Elon time" is something in between a sad joke and an actual conversion coefficient at this point), I still can't actually trust your presentation of them to add anything on top the bare hyperlinks themselves, and even with the links I've got to worry that selection bias is a problem. How could I justify further trust as more than Gell-Mann amnesia?
roystgnr
5mo ago
I think he'll run out of hype before he manages to get it to work.
Starlink brought in $4B in 2023, up from $1.4B in 2022, latest estimate $6.6B for 2024. Development via investment dollars is much faster than via cash flow alone would be, but it's not a necessity.
orbital delivery would already be absolutely revolutionized
The bright side of having a problem so bad you want to graph it on a semilog plot is, it gives you room for multiple revolutions.
And your prediction came true - the first revolution did already absolutely happen, even with launch vehicles that are only partly reusable! I used to summarize this as "first place is SpaceX, second is the entire country of China, third is the rest of the world put together", but looking at the latest numbers, that still understates things. Q1 2024 saw launch upmass that was around 86% SpaceX, 6% China, 7% the rest of the world put together.
but the glowies can pay Bezos instead.
The thrilling news from Blue Origin so far this year was that they launched two BE-4 engines (original ETA: 2019) on the first Vulcan Centaur test. Again, "understates things" understates things here. The thrilling upcoming news is that they might launch New Glenn later this year (be sure to go to the New Glenn wiki page for that, though; the BE-4 page still says "The first flight and orbital test is planned for no earlier than late 2022,[27] although the company had earlier expected the BE-4 might be tested on a rocket flight as early as 2020.", because apparently editors there have the appropriate level of excitement here), and if they evolve it twice as fast as SpaceX did once they got their first partly-reusable launcher to orbit, they'll have a Falcon-9-killer by 2030, tops. Hopefully I'm being too pessimistic here, but Bezos himself shares my pessimism: see "Amazon buys SpaceX rocket launches for Kuiper satellite internet project" from last year.
roystgnr
5mo ago
natural-number mathematics defines 1 axiomatically as the multiplicative identity!
In what axiom set? Peano arithmetic just defines 1 as the successor of 0, and showing it's the multiplicative identity then requires a proof by induction.
roystgnr
5mo ago
This is liefsome, but how would we win over the leeches to eft learn all their leechcraft anew?
roystgnr
6mo ago
You expressed interest in non-political or nuanced storytelling, in gritty superhero vibes, and in analysis of the consequences of superpowers' numbers/magnitude/mechanisms, for all of which you got a perfect recommendation. If you'd said you wanted brevity, on the other hand...
roystgnr
6mo ago
Slave imports fell off a cliff in 1809
1808, surely? Or was there a year or two of significant smuggling in between the de jure and the de facto end of the slave imports?
roystgnr
6mo ago
every woman who was friendly to me turned out to still have their high school boyfriend back in their hometown
I had this brought up to me in tones and contexts that (should have) made it clear that this was just another angle of flirting, "look at this social proof of my attractiveness which is nevertheless only nominally an obstacle for you", from women who hadn't yet learned that that doesn't typically work the same way on men as it would have on them.
My own thoughts went from "whew, my new friend is establishing clear boundaries quickly so now I don't have to worry about accidentally overstepping them!" at the time to "damn, how did I miss that opportunity!" with a little hindsight to "wow, glad I dodged that bullet!" with a lot of hindsight.
There's probably still a correlation, but it's not uncommon to see comments that are highly voted up on one sense and heavily voted down on the other, so it can't be too too bad.
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