What is up with spirituality? Jan 26, 2021

What is up with spirituality? I mean, from an atheistic perspective?

In my experience, atheists tend to focus on the empirical question of whether there is an all-powerful supernatural creature behind all that we observe. And yeah, there probably isn’t.

But having won that point, what does one make of the extreme popularity of religion? I think the usual answer given is something like ‘well, we used to be very ignorant and not have good explanations of natural phenomena, plus we tend to see agents in everything because our agent detection software is oversensitive’.

Which might explain the question ‘Why would people think a supernatural agent controls things?’. But what seems like only a corner of religion.

Another big part of religion—and a thing that also occurs outside religion—seems to be ‘spirituality’—a cluster of things I find hard to describe, but which seem pretty disconnected from explanatory questions of where trees came from or why the crops failed.

Wordtune review Jan 26, 2021

Wow, Facebook is advertising an AI-driven writing tool to me. I think this is the first time I’ve seen a mainstream potentially useful product coming from all of this. Let’s see how it does. I’ve started by writing this paragraph quickly myself, and then I will rewrite it using Wordtune, to demonstrate its features. Then I may rewrite it further using its premium features or my more honed writing, all going well.

Tentative covid surface risk estimates Jan 25, 2021

My household previously made some highly uncertain estimates of the covid risk from bringing random objects that other people have recently been touching into our home, for instance salads and groceries an endless stream of Amazon packages. The official guidance is very vague, e.g. “…not thought to be the main way the virus spreads”. Our bad estimates were fairly low, so we decided to basically ignore it in our covid risk accounting, except for habitually taking some reasonable precautions.

Then the covid rates here increased by a factor of ten, so we decided it would be good to look at it again.

So today I tried to estimate this from this paper (HT Ben Weinstein-Raun and Catherine Olsson) in which a group of researchers swabbed various door handles and trash cans and crosswalk buttons and the like in a small Massachusetts city and measured the covid RNA detectable on them. They also used the amounts they measured to estimate the infectiousness if someone else were to touch the surface and then touch their face.

Here I offer you a draft of an elaborate Guesstimate spreadsheet on the topic, in case you are interested in such things.

Li'l pots Jan 24, 2021

As a pandemic-era purchaser of foods for a large household of time-thirsty researchers, I can tell you an interesting thing about the demand for cheese in this context:

1. If you spend a lot of money on a nice cheese, wrapped up in some fancy foreign label, there is a good chance that it will languish sadly in the back of the fridge for months until someone notices that it is moldy and throws it away, or makes a last-ditch attempt to cut up the whole thing and compel the group to eat it. Maybe on the way there, someone will take a single slice of it once, and move it in a zip-loc bag, where it will remain until the end.

2. If you spend a few dollars on a six-pack of generic single-serve cheese-cubes with nuts, they will fly from the fridge and you will be acknowledged for this triumph of shopping, and more such cheese will be needed by the next grocery order.

Who should you expect to spend your life with? Jan 23, 2021

Striking things about the figure below, which I got from Our World in Data, on time use [edit: oops, all only known to be true in America]:

• People spend increasing time alone over their whole lives, with the exception of roughly their twenties. This surprises me a bit because it seems like people like spending time with other people, and I would expect them to increasingly succeed at it with experience and time to acquire partners and families and friends.
• From 31 to 45, people spend more time with children¹ on average than they spend with any other category of person, including for instance partners and colleagues.
• You might think all this children time would be substituting for some partner time, but as the children time swoops downward by three quarters, partner time stays about the same.
• People are at a relationship-time-steady-state between about thirty and sixty. I imagine that many people start relationships in that time, so does that mean that they also stop them at about the same rate, or gradually reduce time with their partners at a rate matching others’ forming of new relationships? Are people radically less likely to start relationships after about thirty?
• People spend broadly decreasing time with every group except their partner over time, from some early peak for each trend—in the teenage years for friends and family, and in the 20s and 30s for colleagues and children. I wonder how many people just like being alone and with their partners more than most other options, and steadily optimize for that, once they have been sociable enough to find a partner in their early years.
• Coworker time peaks at age 25-30 and goes slowly downward before the retirement descent. Is that from people dropping out of the workforce? Earning themselves a nice private office? Some difference between junior and senior roles?
• People spend fairly consistent time with their friends after a decline from 18 to 40. Retirement doesn’t increase it. Spending three hours a day fewer with children doesn’t increase it. I guess those things go to solitude.

In other news, Our World In Data seems awesome.

What if we all just stayed at home and didn't get covid for two weeks? Jan 22, 2021

I keep thinking about how if at any point we were all able to actually quarantine for two weeks¹ at the same time, the pandemic would be over.

Like, if instead of everyone being more or less cautious over a year, we all agreed on single a two week period to hard quarantine. With plenty of warning, so that people had time to stock up on groceries and do anything important ahead of time. And with massive financial redistribution in advance, so that everyone could afford two weeks without work. And with some planning to equip the few essential-every-week-without-delay workers (e.g. nurses, people keeping the power on) with unsustainably excessive PPE.

This wouldn’t require less total risky activity. If we just managed to move all of the risky activity from one fortnight to the one before it, then that would destroy the virus (and everyone could do as many previously risky activities as they liked in the following fortnight!). It could be kind of like the Christmas week except twice as long and the government would pay most people to stay at home and watch movies or play games or whatever. Maybe the TV channels and celebrities could cooperate and try to put together an especially entertaining lineup.

How unrealistic is this? It sounds pretty unrealistic, but what goes wrong?

Thoughts on the inner ring Jan 21, 2021

I enjoyed C. S. Lewis’ The Inner Ring, and recommend you read it. It basically claims that much of human effort is directed at being admitted to whatever the local in-group is, that this happens easily to people, and that it is a bad thing to be drawn in to.

Some quotes, though I also recommend reading the whole thing:

In the passage I have just read from Tolstoy, the young second lieutenant Boris Dubretskoi discovers that there exist in the army two different systems or hierarchies. The one is printed in some little red book and anyone can easily read it up. It also remains constant. A general is always superior to a colonel, and a colonel to a captain. The other is not printed anywhere. Nor is it even a formally organised secret society with officers and rules which you would be told after you had been admitted. You are never formally and explicitly admitted by anyone. You discover gradually, in almost indefinable ways, that it exists and that you are outside it; and then later, perhaps, that you are inside it.

On fundamental solitude Jan 20, 2021

A quote from Aldous Huxley that has stuck in my mind more than perhaps any other over the years:

“We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies—all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.”

I used to be fairly troubled by this kind of thought. These days I’m more inclined to think of memories of myself, my own writing from yesterday, my sense of a person in my arms, words vibrating my inner ears as light bounces between someone’s eyes and mine, words reaching me across the internet from a stranger, barely understandable lines from thousand year old pages, as more of a piece—physical communications between scattered consciousness. All interpreted with more or less insight and confidence and detail and sense of being an ‘experience’ and not just ‘information’, depending on the quality and nature of the message. But my ‘imagining’ of your mental state, and my ‘knowing’ of my own are both guesses. The sense that they are different is a pragmatic, superficial, quantitative one, not the symptom of a deep metaphysical separation.

Public selves Jan 18, 2021

A question that I return to in life strategy is whether to lean heavily on ‘spending one’s weirdness points wisely’—otherwise put, cowering lonely behind a cardboard cutout of the most forgettable person while proffering optimized propaganda through carefully selected slots—or whether to offer the world a fuller view of oneself.

A few arguments as I see them:

• Hiding allows you to be strategic, showing anything that is good to show, hiding anything that is not. Surely that is better then than any alternative, that must involve showing things that are bad to show, or not showing things that are good to show?
• Not necessarily! People can tell which strategy you are using, and usually the things that are ‘bad to show’ are bad for you to show, but other people would be perfectly interested to see them. So it is less cooperative, and people may respond to that, which may on a longer term view be bad for you.
• Also, which strategy you are enacting overall, or what you are doing in the past or future, can change whether something is good or bad to share. For instance, maybe you have personal problems that it would be both nice to have in the open, and helpful for others to know that you also face. If you are usually open about things, mentioning these might be no big deal, and so worth it on net. Whereas if you tend to be private, then suddenly announcing a personal problem will seem like a bigger deal, so the costs might outweigh the benefits.
• There is something good about actually knowing other people - being part of a global intellectual society of real people, not of robotic fictions created by people. Being open contributes to this world being actual.

There are intermediate options too, of course. Are there good principled ones?

What considerations am I missing?

Are the consequences of groups usually highly contingent on their details? Jan 17, 2021

How much of the impact of an organization is covered by it being ‘a group of size M working on X’, relative to the specifics of how and what they do in working on X? What if we also include a single scale of how functional they are?