Schelling points amidst communication Nov 17, 2020

If two people are trying to meet in New York City, and they forgot to pick a spot, and both of their phones are dead, so they both just go and stand under the clock in Grand Central Station, hoping that the other will expect them to do that, guessing that if they were going to pick a spot to do this, it would be that one, then what you have is a Schelling point.

This is a pretty contrived circumstance, and I usually hear Schelling points talked of as if they are neat but only relevant in those rare cases when communication is impossible. For instance, Wikipedia says ‘In game theory, a focal point (or Schelling point) is a solution that people tend to choose by default in the absence of communication.’

Octobillionupling effort Nov 17, 2020

When basically everyone in the world faces the same problem, it is interesting if everyone does their own working out to solve it. Even if there isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer, you might think it would be massively more efficient to do a good job of answering once with some free variables.

For instance, my impression is that even before covid, basically everyone was sometimes possibly a bit sick and had to decide whether to go to an event, given that they might be contagious. The usual thing to do, I think, was to consider the question for a bit yourself (or not, depending on conscientiousness), and to maybe mention it to the host and try to guess how annoyed the other guests would be, and then to make a call. But this isn’t a highly personal question—if someone who knew more about infectious disease contagion than most people (which wouldn’t be hard) made a form to tell you what to do based on your symptoms and the number of people at the event, you would probably already be making a better choice, faster, than most people.

Why doesn’t this happen?

Schedules versus momentum Nov 15, 2020

A mundane issue that arises endlessly in my life, but which I haven’t heard that much advice on: what to do when your schedule says you should do one thing, but you have momentum on a different thing? Or more broadly, what to do when scheduling and energy for a task conflict?

The day of Hellfire Nov 15, 2020

With the 2020 reduction of variety in places and companionship that might set the days apart, there is a risk of swathes of time blending together and seeming short. One solution is to substitute other sources of visceral variety. Yesterday I had the song Hellfire from Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame stuck in my head all day, which I can recommend as intense and a different vibe from normal.

Overlooking the obvious Nov 13, 2020

One can feel stupid for not having tried the obvious thing. For instance, if you have terrible anxiety, and you tell your friend, and your friend is like, ‘um, have you considered anxiety drugs?’, and somehow it hasn’t occurred to you, you can feel stupid.

I think this is often wrong, because there are so many obvious things.

Misalignment and misuse: whose values are manifest? Nov 13, 2020

AI related disasters are often categorized as involving misaligned AI, or misuse, or accident. Where:

• misuse means the bad outcomes were wanted by the people involved,
• misalignment means the bad outcomes were wanted by AI (and not by its human creators), and
• accident means that the bad outcomes were not wanted by those in power but happened anyway due to error.

In thinking about specific scenarios, these concepts seem less helpful.

Migraine basket Nov 12, 2020

I get migraines about once a week. They aren’t as bad as migraines are classically understood to be—in fact they always start out pretty mild—but they sometimes become terrible by the evening.

While there are always various things I could do to improve such situations, I have often failed to do them promptly. Which seems pretty weird, but I suppose I am not at my most energetic and mentally functional. Also, none of the interventions I know of actually resolve migraines instantaneously, so my sense that I should for instance take painkillers is more of an intellectual one than a felt urge. And I think suffering drains my interest in upholding vague intellectual senses that I should do things. Then even if I did remember, it’s a further effort to even recall what else might be good, let alone go and find the relevant objects.

I have improved this a fair bit with a retrospectively obvious innovation: the migraine basket.

And you'll never hear the wolf cry to the blue corn moon Nov 11, 2020

Over toothbrushing tonight, my boyfriend and I analyzed the song ‘Colors of the Wind’, from Pocahontas, which we had just listened to in curiosity over Roger Ebert’s claim that The Hunchback of Notre Dame has a better message than Pocahontas.

A pair of lines that caught my attention were:

‘Come roll in all the riches all around you And for once, never wonder what they’re worth’

This suggests that wondering what everything is worth negates what is valuable about it, which is to say, makes it worth less to you. Is it true that looking out for value like this is self-undermining? It sounds plausible to me, but why?

Tweet markets for impersonal truth tracking? Nov 09, 2020

Should social media label statements as false, misleading or contested?

Let’s approach it from the perspective of what would make the world best, rather than e.g. what rights do the social media companies have, as owners of the social media companies.

The basic upside seems to be that pragmatically, people share all kinds of false things on social media, and that leads to badness, and this slows that down.

On the fifth day of election Nov 09, 2020

I was woken yesterday by cheering and whooping in the streets.

(Which was overall great, though I think replacing the part of the day, [get enough sleep and then wake up and remember who you are and what you were doing and then do some familiar morning rituals while your brain warms up] with [abrupt emergence into city-wide celebration] was disorienting in a way that I failed to shake all day.)

After some music, Champagne, party hats, chatting with the housemates, and putting on our best red-white-and-blue outfits, my boyfriend and I set out for a walk in the city, tentatively toward b. patisserie, legendary and inconveniently distant producer of kouignoù amann.¹

Within a few blocks we found cars and pedestrians breaking into rounds of cheering and waving at each other, and a general sense that the whole street was a party to this. We still had our party hats, one with an American flag sticking out of the top, so there was no ambiguity for other street-goers about whether we were.