lesswrong

Published on March 11, 2022 3:40 AM GMT tl;dr micromarriages are ill-defined, and not analogous to micromorts. I recommend using QAWYs (Quality-adjusted Wife Years) instead, where 1 QAWY is an additional year of happy marriage.I once compiled a list ... [More] of concepts which I’d discovered were much less well-defined than I originally thought. I’m sad to say that I now have to add Chris Olah’s micromarriages to the list. In his words: “Micromarriages are essentially micromorts, but for marriage instead of death. A micromarriage is a one in a million chance that an action will lead to you getting married, relative to your default policy.”It’s a fun idea, and sometimes helpful in deciding when to go to various events. But upon thinking about it more, I’ve realised that the analogy doesn’t quite work. The key difference is that micromorts are a measure of acute risk - i.e. immediate death. For activities like skydiving, this is the main thing to worry about, so it’s a pretty good metric. But most actions we’d like to measure using micromarriages (going to a party, say, or working out more) won’t lead you to get married immediately - instead they flow through to affect marriages that might happen at some later point.So how can we measure the extent to which an action affects your future marriages, even in theory? One option is to track how it changes the likelihood you’ll get married eventually. But this is pretty unhelpful. By analogy, if micromorts measured an action’s effect on the probability that you’d die eventually, then all actions would have almost zero micromorts (with the possible exception of some life-extension work during the last few decades). Similarly, under this definition the micromarriages you gain from starting a new relationship could be mostly cancelled out by the fact that this relationship cuts off other potential relationships.An alternative is to measure actions not by how much they change the probability that you’ll get married eventually, but by how much you expect them to causally contribute to an eventual marriage. The problem there is that many actions can causally contribute to a marriage (meeting someone, asking them out, proposing, etc) and there’s no principled way of splitting the credit between them. I won’t go into the details here, but the basic problem is the same as one which arises when trying to allocate credit to multiple contributors to a charitable intervention. E.g. if three different funders are all necessary for getting a project off the ground, in some sense they can all say that they “caused” the project to happen, but that would end up triple-counting their total impact. (In this case, we can use Shapley values to allocate credit - but the boundaries between different “actions” are much more arbitrary than the boundaries between different “agents”, making it harder to apply Shapley values to the micromarriage case. Should we count the action “skipping meeting someone else” as a contributor to the marriage? Or the action “turning your head to catch sight of them”? This is basically a rabbit-hole without end - and that’s not even getting into issues of marriage identity across possible worlds.)Fortunately, however, there’s another approach which does work. When thinking about mortality, the medical establishment doesn’t just measure acute risks, but also another category of risk: chronic risks, like smoking. When smoking, you don’t get a binary outcome after each cigarette, but rather a continual degradation of health. So chronic risks are instead measured in terms of the expected decrease in your lifespan - for example, with units of microlives, where one microlife is one millionth of an adult lifespan (about half an hour); or with quality-adjusted life years (QALYs), to adjust for ill health and disability.Analogously, then, the most straightforward metric for guiding our romantic choices is the expected increase in the time you’ll spend married - which we could measure in microwives (where one microwife is an additional half-hour of marriage). But I don’t think this is the best unit, because most people could accumulate many more microwives by dropping their standards, even if that’ll lead to unhappy marriages. So it’s important to adjust for how good we expect the marriage to be! My proposed unit: quality-adjusted wife years (QAWYs). Note that these are gender-neutral: QAWYs can involve either being a wife or having a wife (or both).[1] An intervention gains 1 QAWY if it increases the expected amount of time you’ll spend happily married by 1 year (or the amount of time you’ll spend in a half-as-happy marriage by 2 years, etc). We do need some benchmark for a “happy marriage”; I’ll arbitrarily pick the 90th percentile of marriages across the population. Some factors which affect QAWY evaluation include spouse compatibility, age of marriage, diminishing marginal utility, having children, and divorce probability.[2] Conveniently, QAWYs don’t require the assumption of lifelong marriage - they can naturally account for the possibility of multiple consecutive (or even concurrent) marriages. With QAWY’s combination of theoretical elegance and pragmatic relevance, I look forward to their widespread adoption. ^Unfortunately, this is still not fully inclusive. In formal contexts please use Quality-Adjusted Wedded Years instead. ^Alongside QAWYs, some version of micromarriages may still be useful - we just need to adjust them to measure an acute one-off event rather than a continuing chronic contributor to marriage. The most natural one is probably to think of a micromarriage as a one-in-a-million chance of first meeting your future spouse at a given event. A friend also adds that she tries hard to incur high microchildren. Discuss [Less]

Published on March 11, 2022 1:56 AM GMTBook review: The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow. This book is about narratives of human progress. I.e. the natural progression from egalitarian bands of maybe 20 ... [More] people, to tribes, to chiefdoms, to states, with increasing inequality and domination by centralized bureaucracy. That progress is usually presumed to be driven by changes in occupations from foragers, to gardeners, to farmers, to industry. Western intellectuals focus on debates between two narratives: Hobbesians, who see this mostly as advances from a nasty state of nature, and those following in Rousseau's footsteps, who imagine early human societies as somewhat closer to a Garden of Eden. Both narratives suggest that farming societies were miserable places that were either small advances or unavoidable tragedies, depending on what you think they replaced. Graeber and Wengrow dispute multiple aspects of these narratives. The book isn't quite organized enough for me to boil their message down to a single sentence. But I'll focus on what I consider to be the most valuable thread: we should be uncertain about whether humanity made (is making?) a big mistake by accepting oppression as an inevitable price of material wealth. The Dawn of Everything asks us to imagine that humans could build (and may have been building) sophisticated civilizations without domination by powerful states, and maybe without depending on farming. The book doesn't mention Burning Man, possibly to appeal to a broader audience than those who have accurate information about it. But I'll assume my readers understand Burning Man culture, and use it as an example of the quasi-anarchist culture that Graeber and Wengrow hope for. Occupy Wall Street (in which Graeber was active) shared some of this culture, but mixed with too much statist framing to be a clean example. Freedom and Equality Graeber and Wengrow lament the loss of freedom that's associated with modern society. They use a somewhat nonstandard notion of freedom, focused on: (1) the freedom to move away or relocate from one's surroundings; (2) the freedom to ignore or disobey commands issued by others; and (3) the freedom to shape entirely new social realities, or shift back and forth between different ones.\ Nothing here about being secure in one's property or livelihood. E.g. at Burning Man, almost all order is maintained via peer pressure, with approximately no police-like backup. If you want your bike to be treated as your property, rely on locks, not the threat of force. Peer pressure is enough to ensure that people don't steal food or shelter, because the culture of sharing ensures people don't develop a temptation to steal. (I'm excluding the interface between Burning Man and the outside world, which does depend a bit on police backup). For the Haudenosaunee, the giving of orders is represented as being almost as serious an outrage as the eating of human flesh. But there's one exception: dreams became divine orders which everyone had to obey for brief periods of time. Needless to say, there were few more terrible crimes than to falsify a dream. Their original idea behind the book was to focus on the origins of inequality, but that framing had problems. It's unclear whether there ever was a time with no inequality. Which kind(s) of inequality should we care about? Wealth? Income? Power? Opportunity? Access to the tribe's deepest secrets? There's plenty of variation in which of those a society cares about. Also, inequality of one of these doesn't necessarily mean inequality of another. Native Americans apparently didn't have much ability to convert wealth to power (why not? I'm guessing some sort of cultural obstacles). The book tries to portray the worldview of societies that are more egalitarian than ours. A focus on the origins of inequality would frame that analysis in a very Western way. Graeber and Wengrow aim to frame the discussion in a way that would better reflect what the other societies consider important. Western Culture Most discussion of the origins of Western culture focuses on ancient Greece, or Christianity, or other forces acting within Europe. Dawn of Everything focuses instead on the ideas that Europe took from cultures on other continents. Europe allegedly imported the nation-state from China. More importantly, Europe learned a lot from interacting with the new world. Some of that learning involved incorporating features of anarchism, such as approval of freedom and equality. The book claims that Europeans mostly disapproved of freedom and equality circa 1700. E.g. they paraphrase Turgot as saying "the freedom and equality of savages is not a sign of their superiority; it's a sign of inferiority, since it is only possible in a society where each household is self-sufficient, and, therefore, equally poor.". European objections to freedom seem to have focused on whether the "savages" obeyed commands from entities above them in the hierarchy (mainly God's commands, but likely also kings, lords, etc.). It was apparently hard to even translate the concept of obedience into some native languages. The book exaggerates by implying a more general European rejection of freedom. American intellectuals criticized European culture, and there's some evidence that a book describing these critiques was read in Europe. (Note that American, in the context of this book, sometimes means mainly the people from the Wendat Confederacy, but probably applies to most of the people in what is now the US and Canada.) Graeber and Wengrow want us to believe that Enlightenment ideas of progress and social evolution were developed in reaction to those critiques. The narrative of a natural set of stages of development (hunter, gardener, farmer, industrialist) enabled Europeans to treat American critiques as coming from people who were too primitive to deserve a place in intellectual debate. Did American ideals cause Europeans to yearn for equality and freedoms that they wouldn't have otherwise wanted? The timing is somewhat suggestive. The book typically pushes a narrative under which America was mostly as nice as Burning Man before Europeans conquered it, but occasionally mentions downsides such as famine and torture of war captives. I'm unclear whether Graeber and Wengrow think these are important issues - maybe 18th century Europe did similar enough things that these issues say little about which societies were better? This quote from Kandiaronk expresses a similarly odd attitude toward how pleasant America was: If you abandoned conceptions of mine and thine, yes, such distinctions between men would dissolve. A leveling equality would take place among you, as it now does among the Wendat. And yes, for the first thirty years after the banishing of self-interest no doubt you would indeed see a certain desolation as those who are only qualified to eat, drink, sleep, and take pleasure would languish and die, but their progeny would be fit for our way of living. The Dawn of Farming and Cities The authors dispute the stereotype under which the invention of farming generated cities, inequality, states, and dependence on a few crops, and that farming spread like an epidemic. The book provides many examples of societies that appeared to make deliberate decisions to avoid farming, or that engaged in "play farming" without becoming dependent on it. Some cultures managed to build large monuments without clearly qualifying as farming cultures. E.g. Poverty Point, a stone age site, about 1/3 the size of the Burning Man, in an area where there are no stones. Or Stonehenge, whose builders had abandoned grain farming, and were mostly foragers who raised a few animals. A number of the earliest cities show no sign of having had a government, or inequality. In Mexico, 5000 years passed between the domestication of corn and squash, and when they became staples. What looks like decay to a historian who is focused on records / palaces left by oppressive rulers, may have looked like liberation to the average person of the time. Writing of the "decline" of China's Long-shan culture (in the middle of a 1400 year period between the rise of cities and the first monarchy): First, the ostensible 'state of anarchy' (elsewhere described as 'collapse and chaos') lasted for a considerable period of time, between two and three centuries. Second, the overall size of Taosi during the latter period actually grew from 280 to 300 hectares. This sounds a lot less like collapse than an age of widespread prosperity, following the abolition of a rigid class system. It suggests that after the destruction of the palace, people did not fall into a Hobbesian 'war of all against all' but simply got on with their lives - presumably under what they considered a more equitable system of local-self-governance. Why wasn't agriculture developed earlier? I think the authors imagine that people didn't want it earlier, but they ramble so much after asking the question that I lost track of whether they think they answered it. Parochial or Cosmopolitan? Most of us imagine that early humans lived in isolated bands, and that there's been a trend of increasing contact with more distant people. Graeber and Wengrow claim the opposite: a trend of increasingly local allegiances. Modern social worlds have generally become parochial, based on boundaries of culture, class, and language. The study of modern foragers has misled us. They're isolated because they are confined to marginal land. Pre-Columbian America had continent-wide societies. It was normal for people to travel long distances and find fellow clan members who would provide them with food and shelter. People identified clan members by features such as hair style (e.g. Mohawks). People might be made fun of for having "wrong" beliefs about gods or vaccines, but wouldn't be punished for them. But what about Papua New Guinea? It seems to have small tribes on decent land, who are isolated from other tribes by something other than modern states forcing them onto marginal land. I suspect the trend that Graeber and Wengrow see was confined to America. Seasonal Dualism In the dry season Nambikwara were foragers living in small bands, with chiefs gave orders as if they were petty tyrants. In the wet season, the Nambikwara switched to gardening in villages of several hundred people. The chiefs lost their authority to give orders, and used persuasion instead. This kind of alternation between two social orders seems somewhat common. If there's a riddle here, it's this: why, after millennia of constructing and disassembling forms of hierarchy, did Homo sapiens ... allow permanent and intractable systems of inequality to take root? The authors complain that we no longer experience those changes, so we're poor at imagining what alternatives are feasible. Burning Man is evidence that we do still imagine alternative social orders. But we mostly forget to imagine an alternative way of earning a living. When's the last time you considered a lifestyle stranger than becoming Amish as a substitute for having a job? Fact Check How much of this should we believe? I can imagine that anywhere between 40% and 80% of their surprising claims are accurate. Most of the claims look hard to check. I'll restrict my fact checking to one point that I care about more than most. Graeber and Wengrow claim that European settlers in 18th century America were much more likely to choose to live as part of a native tribe than were natives to live as part of a European society. This sounds like an important type of evidence about which society is pleasanter to live in. They quote Benjamin Franklin reporting that children fit this pattern. However, they also cite The Assimilation of Captives on the American Frontier in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries as if it supports that claim. The more detailed evidence there points to a rather weaker conclusion: adults mostly want to return to whatever culture they grew up in, and the younger children were most likely to assimilate into whatever culture they were reared in, with some exceptions that seem to be due to Native Americans being treated as inferior and/or being kept in boarding schools with other natives who reinforced their original culture. So this evidence mildly supports the claim that European culture was worse for Native Americans than vice versa, but only seems to say that European racism was causing problems, as opposed to a more general claim about European statism and hierarchy that Graeber and Wengrow try to imply. Much of the book sounds like this - reckless exaggerations, most of which are trying to counter widespread statist biases that cause comparable(?) exaggerations in the opposite direction. Plausibility The book shows that we should doubt that humans needed states in order to produce many of the desirable features of modern society. But the authors don't ask how many good features would be missing from their anarchist quasi-utopia. The Burning Man style culture of sharing provides some benefits in terms of community and safety nets, at the likely cost of preventing the accumulation of wealth. Would we be able to have cell phones without the ability of a corporate hierarchy to order workers to show up on time to run the factories? Or would we be better off without phones? Is there a way to defund the police without a disastrous increase in crime? There are clearly police-free cultures that are in some sense decent places to live. That doesn't mean we can get there by abolishing the police - instead, it would require a big enough culture change that police-specific rule changes would be an afterthought. It also doesn't tell us whether people who grew up relying on police would be able to adapt to a police-free society. It's also hard to find evidence that police-free societies can defend themselves against modern armies. Conclusion I'll give a medium-level recommendation to read the first few chapters and the last two chapters as a way to broaden your perspectives about what cultures are possible. Be careful not to trust the book's claims, or any potentially controversial claims I've made in this review. I'm convinced that the world could have taken a much different path to a wealthy quasi-paradise, one with more freedom and equality. The Dawn of Everything adds a few pieces to the puzzle of how much better such a world could be. Discuss [Less]

Published on March 11, 2022 1:41 AM GMTAre there any impossibility theorems for the existence of AI that is both strong and safe? I think such theorems would be interesting because they could help to evaluate proposals for safe AI: we could ask ... [More] "which assumption does this proposal break?"I have a vague sense that a theorem of this sort might be able to be developed along the following lines: 1. The kind of strong AI that we want is a technological tool such that it's easy to tell it what to do, and it can successfully do a wide variety of complex things when told 2. Simple instructions + complex results -> AI has a lot of flexibility in its action 3. There are only a few ways to reliably achieve goals requiring complex behaviour e.g. something approximating expected utility maximisation 4. 2+3 + instrumental convergence -> flexibility is likely to be exploited in dangerous waysDo fleshed out versions of this argument exist? Do you have any other ideas about impossibility theorems?Discuss [Less]

Published on March 10, 2022 11:04 PM GMT Instead of a reading list, this month we'll have a meta-meetup. The idea is to be a space to discuss what works for you about London Rationalish, what doesn't work, what you'd like to change. We'll start the ... [More] meta part around 3pm, with people showing up from 2. Newspeak House will be hosting us again. Some other things to say: I encourage you to take a Covid test before coming, and consider your personal thresholds for acceptable risk. (This spot requested previously, but the wording is my own and I wrote truthfully.) Newspeak House describes its goal as to "study, nurture and inspire emerging communities of practice across UK public sector and civil society". I mostly think of it as "the cool house that has a bunch of interesting stuff going on all the time". I definitely feel a sense of kinship and fellow-travelerness with it; I think it's a force for good in the world and I'm glad it exists and can enable things, many of which are even better than generously hosting us (now and in the past). If you think as I do, please consider becoming a member, which you can do at https://newspeak.house/. (I don't know if I'm going to reliably crosspost these here. The canonical place for updates is the facebook group, but I also post events to the subreddit, which has an RSS feed.) Discuss [Less]

Published on March 10, 2022 8:26 PM GMTIt has occasionally been proposed that we need a new algorithmic definition of 'complexity', different from Kolmogorov complexity, that better captures our intuitive sense of which structures in the world are ... [More] truly complex. Such definitions are typically designed with the goal of assigning a low complexity to extremely simple structures such as a perfectly ordered lattice or an endless string of '0's, but also to totally random objects, unlike Kolmogorov complexity. Instead, one hopes, the objects assigned high complexity will be (binary representations of) things like cathedrals, butterflies, or other objects which we think of as truly possessing a intricate internal structure. Examples of these sorts of proposed definitions include sophisticationand logical depth(see herefor a nice survey and discussion). What's the point of such definitions? It's a great tradition in science and math to attempt to quantify vague but conceptually useful notions. Ideally, finding a good such definition will let you 'cut reality at its joints' and derive a new and productive way of looking at the idea, and let you bring the powerful tools of mathematics to bear in its analysis. It's difficult to find powerful ideas like this, but attempting to capture our intuitive impressions formally can be, hopefully, a first step towards finding them. I'd like to introduce a new definition of this sort, with the aim of quantifying the number of different levels on which an object can be usefully described. For example, fluids can admit a microscopic description in terms of individual molecules or a coarse-grained description which specifies the average density in a given region. Planets can be described as collections of vast collections of atoms or as single points(for the purposes of orbital mechanics calculations) Butterflies can be described as bio-chemical systems or as optimizers trying to increase their fitness. An interesting feature of our world is the presence of many such different levels of description; and the existence of individual objects which can be described well in many different ways: we could say that such objects display a high degree of 'emergence'. I think this is one aspect of what causes us to consider objects to be 'truly complex'. But what does it mean, in algorithmic terms, for there to be more than one way to describe an object?[1] In algorithmic information theory, a description of an object is a program which outputs that object. There are infinitely many possible programs outputting a given string, but the shortest such program is given the most weight under the Solomonoff prior. A naive approach to estimating the 'emergent complexity' might be to count how many short programs there are. Unfortunately, the coding theorem shows that this is unlikely to work very well -- the single shortest program takes up a constant fraction of the entire Solomonoff prior, so there's an upper limit on how 'spread out' the measure can be. And this seems to match the actual situation: in our world, there usually is an absolutely simplest physical level which can explain everything. So in what sense can there be different, but equally good explanations? We need to find another way of ranking programs besides shortness. One obvious candidate is runtime. Indeed, this seems to be the impetus behind many high-level approximations -- a coarse-grained fluid model can be much faster then a detailed molecular dynamics simulation. Still higher levels of approximation can be still faster, but have a greater description length. So as a candidate definition of complexity, we can consider the number of different levels of description of a given object, with each level manifesting a different tradeoff between runtime and description length. To formalize this we need to specify how runtime and length should be traded off against each other. One measure combining length and runtime is the Levin complexity, equal to the sum of the length and the logarithm of the runtime. The exponential tradeoff can be motivated by noting that running a search process over strings of size N takes 2^N time. Given such a conversion factor, the different programs printing a given string can be represented graphically. Each program can be plotted in 2d-space, with one axis representing length and the other runtime. There will be a Pareto frontier of programs that are not dominated in both runtime and length. The complexity is then essentially the slope of this frontier -- frontiers with a slope closer to -1 represent more complex objects. Here are some graphs of this 2-d space. Most strings' shortest program will just consist of printing the string or something nearly as simple, so their Pareto frontier will just look like a dot near the y-axis, moved along the x-axis according to the length of the string: A more interesting class of examples can be found by considering dynamical systems with simple rules and initial conditions, similar to our universe. A deterministic but orderly dynamical system could have a very simple underlying rule, but also possess a hidden symmetry that causes it to have quickly-predictable long-term dynamics -- for instance, a billiard bouncing around a stadium with a regular, periodic motion. This system's Pareto curve would look like an initially high-runtime, low-complexity brute-force simulation, followed by a sharp dip where the model now incorporates the symmetry. On the other hand, a chaotic dynamical system could have no better way of being predicted than running the dynamics for the entire length of the intended runtime. Here the Pareto curve would look like a plateau followed by a dip representing a program that simply prints the end-state of the evolution. And finally, we can imagine a dynamical system intermediate between these two, which cannot be easily simplified with a single symmetry, but does have emergent layers of behavior, each of which allows one to speed the simulation by a certain amount. The greater the number of such layers, the more 'emergent complexity' we can say the object exhibits. Then the question arises of how to define a measure of how 'spread out' a given frontier is. The speed prior, the negative exponential of the Levin complexity, provides one possible answer. The speed prior divides the 2-dimensional space into diagonal lines, with each line representing a constant Levin complexity, and an exponentially varying value of the speed prior. A Pareto frontier with near constant slope will have near constant values of the speed prior on its members, leading to a higher-entropy distribution. This, then, is my proposed complexity measure in full -- the 'emergent complexity' of a string is the entropy of the speed prior on the speed/length Pareto frontier of programs outputting that string. So, given this measure, now what? The problem, shared with other proposed complexity measures, is that computing the measure in practice is completely intractable numerically, and difficult to approach analytically. So, it's hard to know what relation, if any, it truly bears to our intuitive notion of complexity, or whether it can be proved to be large in any relevant situation. This is basically why I abandoned this idea after I initially came up with it a few years ago. Now, however, it seems to me that further progress could be made by trying to create numerical simulations which directly match our intuitive notion of complexity, using ideas like this as a heuristic guide instead of trying to carry out rigorous proofs(although eventually it might be desirable to try to rigorously prove things). For that, hopefully stay tuned! I'm going to elide between describing a state of a system and simulating the system's dynamics, because (a) often the most efficient way of obtaining a particular state is by simulating the dynamics leading to that state (b) the ideas can be adapted in greater detail to either case without too much difficulty, I think, so it doesn't seem important for the level of rigor I'm going for here ↩︎ Discuss [Less]

Published on March 10, 2022 8:05 PM GMTI moved to Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan, a small country in Central Asia. I am travelling with family and a toddler. The town is lovely and has many nice cafes. International travel from Russia is still possible here ... [More] , as many work migrants in Russia are from Kyrgyzstan. So planes are flying and money sending services seems to work. There was some kind of interview on the Russian side of the border: when you will return? why your vacation is so long? Some people said that their phones were checked and border guards read their message history. My message history was clean. Note that any non-official opinion about the current Russian operation could be punished by 15 years in jail according to the new law.  It is also illegal to call it "war". So far no one was jailed for 15 years, but some people were fired or arrested for a shorter time after protests.  Discuss [Less]

Published on March 10, 2022 7:20 PM GMTCredit allocation: the structure of this estimate, and some of the numbers, are basically lifted from a talk Nuño Sempere gave, but most of the numbers aren’t. Epistemic status: I spent maybe an hour putting ... [More] this together. I spent more time thinking about the bit I wrote about more, and less time thinking about the bit I wrote about less. For everything but the prior, you might want to check out the Samotsvety Group’s forecast here. tl;dr About 0.01%. As I write this, there’s a lot of tension between the West and Russia over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. If you’re living in a major city like London, you might wonder whether you should move to the countryside in case your city is the target of a nuclear strike. Here’s my estimate of the chances of that, as well as some context for how bad those odds are. First of all: what’s the prior odds for this sort of thing? Let’s say we’re talking about a NATO nuclear exchange with Russia. Since the US and Russia have co-existed as nuclear powers for about 70 years, you would think that Laplace’s law of succession would give you about 70:1 odds against a nuclear strike in a normal year. That being said, I think this is conservative: Laplace’s law assumes that in the absence of historical data, you’d have even odds on a nuclear strike. But if I didn’t know any history, I’d think the odds of intense conflict in a given year would be like 20:1 against, not 1:1, since countries don’t want to have this sort of conflict and have ways of avoiding it. The way we adjust for that is that we add that 20 to the 70 years to get a prior odds of 90:1 - see this Wikipedia page on pseudocounts. I then think we should update down a bit because there’s a relatively wide class of intense NATO-Russia conflicts, only some of which would lead to nuclear war. I’m going to say that that’s a 1.5:1 update against (a mild update because it’s easy to see how intense NATO-Russia conflict leads to a nuclear exchange), and then get 135:1 odds against, on priors. Note that this is a different kind of update to adding pseudocounts that produces different effects, and I’m not totally sure it’s legit, but I’m going with it. Now: we should probably update on the fact that Russia’s invading Ukraine, and the West is sanctioning Russia over that. The question is, how big an update is that? Bayes’ rule says we multiply the odds by the likelihood ratio: that is, the ratio between the probability of something like the current conflict happening given nuclear escalation this year, and the probability of something like the current conflict happening given no nuclear escalation this year. I’ll treat those two separately. So: what’s the probability of something like the Ukraine situation given a nuclear exchange this year? I’d actually expect a nuclear exchange to be precipitated by somewhat more direct conflict, rather than something more proxy-like. For instance, maybe we’d expect Russia to talk about how Estonia is rightfully theirs, and how it shouldn’t even be a big deal to NATO, rather than the current world where the focus has been on Ukraine specifically for a while. So I’d give this conditional probability as 1/3, which is about 3/10. What’s the probability of something like the Ukraine situation given no nuclear exchange this year? Luckily, we can actually empirically estimate this, by looking at all the years NATO and Russia haven’t had a nuclear exchange, and seeing how many of them had something like this Ukraine situation. I’d count the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, the initial invasion of Ukraine, the Cuban missile crisis, and the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. Let’s say Yugoslavia counts for 1 year, Ukraine 1 counts for 1 year, Cuba counts for 1 year, and Afghanistan counts for 3 years (Wikipedia tells me that the invasion lasted 10 years, but I’ve got to assume for most of those years NATO and Russia had figured out that they weren’t going to nuke each other). So, that’s 6 years out of 70, but Laplace’s law says we should add pseudocounts to make that probability 7/71, which is about 1/10. So: the likelihood ratio is (1/10):(3/10) = 1:3. Multiplying that by our prior odds of 135:1, we get 135:3 = 45:1 odds against a NATO-Russia nuclear exchange this year, which is a probability of about 2.2%. We can turn that into a monthly probability by dividing by 12 (this isn’t exact, but that’s nowhere near the biggest problem with this estimate) to get a monthly probability of 0.18%. Next: what’s the chance that hits London and kills any given smart resident? Pulling numbers out of my butt, let’s say 1/4 chance a nuclear exchange would hit London (there are lots of other targets, maybe it would be contained, maybe the UK could shoot it down), a 1/2 chance that someone could get out before the actual bomb hit (e.g. by leaving once the UK gets more strongly involved), and a 1/2 chance a random London resident would die conditional on a nuclear attack (nuclear attacks kill fewer people than you’d guess). That divides the probability by 16, and 0.18%/16 is about 0.01%. So: I’ve estimated a 0.01% chance of dying of a nuclear attack on London in the next month, or 100 micromorts. How bad is that? Well, the average English person incurs 24 micromorts per day by being alive (according to Wikipedia), but that’s concentrated a lot among the elderly - micromorts.rip claims that 20-year-olds incur about 1 micromort per day. Another way to think about it is that you get 1 micromort every 370 km you drive in a car (according to Wikipedia), and 120 micromorts if you give birth vaginally (according to Wikipedia, which sources this number from a British book so I’m assuming that’s a UK statistic). Here’s another way to weigh that risk: suppose that you expect to live 50 more years. Then, 100 micromorts shortens your expected lifespan by 0.01% * 365 days/yr * 50 yrs ~= 2 days. So you should be willing to spend up to that much time to bring the risk down to 0, but no more. What if you think I’m too optimistic here? Let’s say you stick to 70:1 as your prior, think that this is exactly what you’d see in a world where nuclear bombs eventually got deployed (bringing the likelihood ratio up to 1:10), think there’s a 1/2 chance that London would be hit, think that there’s only a 1/4 chance you could get out, and think that 3/4 of Londoners would die. Then, you get a 1/8 annual chance of a nuclear strike, a 1/96 monthly chance, and a total 0.4% chance of dying in the next month. At those chances, the reduction in expected lifespan if you expect to live for 50 more years otherwise is 73 days, and you should definitely leave London for safer ground. That said, I think that’s probably too pessimistic. [EDIT: As mentioned the Samotsvety group has their own forecast with a similar breakdown. Their prior strikes me as too low, and they give the probability of London being hit conditional on any nukes as 0.18, which strikes me as too low, but also give the probability of smart residents being able to escape as 3/4, and the proportion of remaining residents dying as 3/4, which I would probably defer to. If I use those numbers, then you'd multiply the 0.18% chance of a nuclear strike by (1/4) * (1/4) * (3/4) = 3/64 rather than 1/16. Luckily those numbers are close enough that it doesn't really change my answer.]Discuss [Less]

Published on March 10, 2022 6:52 PM GMTActions have consequences. One of the consequences of our trade sanctions is to increase wheat and corn prices significantly. There are currently Africans who are on the brink of starvation and the increased ... [More] food prices will increase starvation? Is our current position "It's okay if 1,000,000 Africans starve if we can prevent 100,000 Ukrainians from not dying in the war"?Are there models that tell us how much people are likely to starve as a result of our actions? Are there wheat futures that we can use to tell us future wheat prices and economic models that estimate how many people will starve?Discuss [Less]

Published on March 10, 2022 4:42 PM GMTThis is an attempt to formulate a thought that’s been rolling around in my brain for a few years now. I want to formalize a hypothesis, but I’m not sure how to convey what the hypothesis even is. Hopefully by ... [More] writing this out I’ll help make that happen (spoiler alert: I partially succeeded?), or someone reading this will be able to help me here. Working towards the theme: The idea starts with the classic LessWrong meme of an infohazard (defined here as some form of external sensory “input”) that when received by its “target” causes that target harm. This could be something wholly internal, like increasing depression, but might have external effects as well. A victim might either do something they wouldn’t otherwise do of their own volition, or could even collapse completely, in the case of infohazards invoking seizure or death. The idea of an infohazard is not merely theoretical. We know from experience that visual and auditory infohazards exist for individual human beings. Examples range from sad stories which make people temporarily depressed, to people “brainwashed” by cults to do stuff they would otherwise never have done, and even to people who get seizures or death at certain inputs, like flashing lights. From that basis in fact, one can generalize to arrive at the hypothesis that for every individual human, such an infohazard exists (even if unconstructable in practice). An even stronger (but somewhat less plausible) hypothesis would be that there exists singular infohazards which would work for most or even all of humanity. On a more(?) theoretical level, it seems reasonable that a being with complete knowledge of a human brain and unlimited compute power could “trivially” construct an infohazard tailored to that brain. Could such a being control the brain’s output in some arbitrary manner by giving it the right inputs, or are limitations on how far even an optimal infohazard could go? We are far from understanding the human brain deeply enough to even begin to answer these questions, so let’s try to abstract the situation a bit by considering the field of computing, where we have (arguably) greater scientific and mathematical understanding of the field. The best analogy to an infohazard in computer science would seem to be found in the practice of hacking. “Hacking” as a term covers many different modes of action, but one popular method of hacking can be generalized as “inserting an input through whatever the normal input channel is, with the input designed to make the machine output something different than what it’s creators intended.” That last bit can be clarified into the formulation “different than what was intended by whoever built the machine,” or “different than how the literal code should have acted.” Writing this down, I’m finding it very hard to remove the sense of intentionality from the code here. Presumably the hacker is using normal physics, and the computer is treating the input exactly as it has been “designed” to treat it, albeit not how it’s developers expected. So in a sense the hacker isn’t breaking anything other than the constraints of the designer’s imagination. This seems like a dead end, since we aren’t talking about computers anymore. Before abandoning this line of thinking, it might be worth exploring a little bit more, however. Another way to consider hacking is by thinking about the internal state of the machine, rather than its output. A definition of hacking from that perspective might be “inserting an input through whatever the normal input channel is, with the input designed to make the machine’s internal state be different in some significant way from its creators’ intentions.” This usually involves having access to parts of the machine which you should not have access to. Ultimately the hacker (presumably) only cares about the ultimate output (which admittedly might simply be information about the computer’s internal state), so it might just be a different way of thinking about the same thing, and an equivalent definition. (Btw, I’m specifying “inserting an input through whatever the normal input channel is,” since some hacking techniques involve finding an input channel which shouldn’t have been accepting input, was never meant to be used as such, and/or didn’t even exist until the hacker broke the machine in some glorious hackery way.) There are some hacks that only attack and harm individual computers, but quite often these days, hacks can be effective across any computer running a certain operating system. As long as the right input is given, the hacker has free reign to mess around with the output as they wish. One can easily imagine some sort of “super-hack” — an input which not only hacks one’s OS, but all computers (of some semi-arbitrarily “significant” complexity) available on the market. The input code could be pretty ugly and glued-together, and I’m not sure why anyone would bother doing all that in a single input, but I don’t think there’s any technical reason why that couldn’t work in theory (or maybe there is, idk). Of course that wouldn’t effect computers with no (or extremely limited) input channels, but that would be the human equivalent of being blind before The Image That Makes You Crazy appears. No input, no issue! Certainly machines that are similar enough to each other in certain ways can be hacked with identical techniques, if nothing else. Generalizing even further, what about Turing machines? What would it mean to “hack” a Turing machine? All of the conceptions of hacking developed above seem to depend upon some amount of human intentionality, and that intentionality being subverted. Turing machines do not have intentionality, as they exist platonically, and run blindly. You cannot “break” a Turing machine in any conventional sense. How do we take human intentions or design out of the picture? Looking back at both computers and humans, one relatively objective state a hack or an infohazard can lead to is a systems crash. In a computer, that would mean “bricking,” where no further input can alter the output, and in humans that would mean death or coma, where, again, no further input will change anything. Bricking or deathly infohazards are more limited in form than hacking and mind control, respectively, but may be easier to translate into a formalized notion. Presumably, a formalized conception of “bricking” could lead to some interesting and potentially really important theorems, which may also be of help when discussing real-world hacking, and more ambitiously, human infohazards. In the context of a Turing machine, I would define a Brick (capitalized to indicate this particular meaning) as being “input which causes all further input to make no difference/be irrelevant to output”. A Bricked Turing machine need not halt, nor run forever, as long as there is no possible input which would alter the status of the output post-Brick. If the Turing machine is indifferent to input no matter what initial input is given (such as one which only outputs 0, or immediately halts at the first step, or outputs an infinite sequence of 1s), that should not count as a Bricked machine, since there was never an initial Brick in the first place. Therefore, a Brickable machine must be sensitive to at least some initial inputs, in the sense that by changing the input, one will receive differing outputs. I am sure there are many trivial properties of Brickable Turing machines it should be possible to talk about, but I have yet to explore this in any more depth. Hopefully, there may also be non-trivial properties unique to Brickable machines, which might shed light on some of the areas I’ve covered above. What I would like to know is if this concept already exists in computer science, and if so, to what depth has it been studied? What can we formally prove about Brickability of various machines? If this is a novel concept, do you think this is worthy of future study? Apologies if I just reinvented something that’s already well-known, or if there’s a fatal flaw in my formalism that renders it totally useless. I don’t have formal training in the area, so I’m sure I have a lot of blind spots. Discuss [Less]

Published on March 10, 2022 4:10 PM GMTOr: Why the current situation once again proves the need for all of my pre-existing policy preferences. Writing about the war is continuing to prove difficult, as things move quickly, the epistemic ... [More] environment continues to be almost maximally hostile and a lot of elements are things where I was not previously up to speed. I want to build a model of the situation, which leads to the problem of where even to begin, yet the speed premium beckons and although having a newborn is great as you can imagine I’m on less than ideal amounts of sleep and free time. Thus it seems worthwhile to skip ahead a bit and ask the practical question first. Assume for the sake of discussion that we prefer people doing better and not dying to people doing worse and dying, and agree that we do not want Russia to win the war.  What would then be our options, either individually or collectively? What can we do? (Where the collective ‘we’ here is some combination of ‘America’, ‘America + EU/NATO’ and ‘everyone everywhere who wants this same general set of outcomes.’) I indeed strongly prefer such outcomes. If you don’t prefer such outcomes enough to care, this post is not trying to convince you to change your mind and is probably not for you. That would be a very different post, and I don’t know what the True Objection would be of most people open to being convinced.   If you do prefer such outcomes, there are a lot of different potential approaches. On a personal level, one could: Provide military aid (e.g. by giving money directly to Ukraine). Provide humanitarian aid (e.g. by giving money to those that provide it). Lobby or advocate for better government policies or corporate actions. Attempt to build (and ideally share) a better understanding of the situation. Convince others to also prefer such outcomes, ideally via #4. I am going to go ahead and advocate here for the policy responses I think are appropriate. The first ones are direct actions, which are pretty obviously: Provide military assistance to the extent we can without too much escalation. Humanitarian aid. Economic sanctions. The rest fall under the category of ‘things worth doing anyway.’ This stuff is win-win. This means doing things like: Nuclear power. Additional other energy production of various kinds. Reconciling with other oil producers to extent possible. Carbon tax. Taking in as many Russians and Ukrainians as possible who want out. Supporting free flow of information. Everything else that’s obviously great (e.g. reduced zoning, more public transit, more building and urbanization, reduced occupational licensing, and so on…) Use better decision theory. The approach we’ve broadly collectively selected so far seems to be best centrally described as Cancel Russia. This is leading to many useful interventions, but also to actions that are counterproductive, and causing us to miss or not take full advantage of some of the biggest opportunities. I won’t discuss potential peace terms and what I think would be worth or not worth taking, other than to point out that any offer that fails to leave Ukraine’s armed forces and ability to continue arming intact, or that would replace the government, is an obvious non-starter, but that I think it is wise that Zelensky is willing to consider territorial concessions, and that commitments to not ‘join blocs’ are mostly cheap talk given the history of what has come before, what alternative arrangements could be made and the prospects of joining short term in any case. Let’s get the obvious first one out of the way first, which is Military Assistance. Military Assistance The obvious first thing to do is provide various forms of military assistance. Every little bit helps, both increasing the probability of better direct outcomes and giving negotiating leverage. Winning and success beget winning and success. In my model of the world, such success will make a big difference not only for the future of Ukraine but also the world in general. Marginal improvements in results, such as winning faster and more decisively or losing less so (and thus raising the imposed costs), is also big. The threshold for being willing to take sides in a war is of course very high, but this situation seems to easily clear that bar. Thus, if you agree with this and want to donate money, there might not be an obvious right answer but there is nothing I’ve found that dominates giving the money directly to Ukraine. You can do this with crypto or otherwise. If you’re in the necessary position, one could also step up and join their Foreign Legion (veterans only), otherwise source assistance directly or arrange for others to do so. From the perspective of governments, the goal is to provide assistance in ways that are effective at improving Ukraine’s ability to fight while not causing too much escalation. One would think the first step here is giving Ukraine sufficient money that individuals can focus their efforts elsewhere. Then there’s all the military equipment and even volunteers, where we seem to have paid the cost of openly providing such aid, it’s proven acceptable, and so we should make the most of it.  There’s the question of how to do things like get the Polish aircraft into Ukrainian hands and whether that poses an additional risk – I understand why flying them directly in from NATO bases seems like it should be out of play and why we rejected that, but I’m surprised there is no viable workaround. Part of the stated logic was that the aircraft are not needed or that they are crucial – they sound more important than they are and we can send other things that have more impact while causing less escalation. I am skeptical, but know less, and one advantage is that we now have a threatened escalation to deter Russian military escalations, that isn’t obviously insane to do. Russia has deployed mercenaries but there hasn’t been much talk about mercenaries potentially showing up on the side of Ukraine, and also I haven’t seen much discussion of why they haven’t. Funding shouldn’t be an issue. What we obviously cannot do, despite broad-based popular support for it, is impose a ‘no-fly zone’ or otherwise directly intervene in ways that cause our planes or soldiers to be firing at Russian planes, targets or soldiers. The no-fly zone is the worst of both worlds. We 100% cannot do this, and luckily our governments realize this. We’re so used to facing a different style of foe fighting in a different style of war, where we don’t fear escalation and have automatic air superiority, that this sounds like a good idea rather than what it is, which is a commitment to acts of war that would not even help. A no-fly zone makes sense if the enemy controls the air and is using the air in ways you want to prevent, and has no practical means of escalation. However, the Russian military is designed with the idea that they won’t have air superiority, and is based around artillery. They have failed to achieve air superiority. They are either out of guided missiles or saving what they have left in case of escalation. It’s not clear that the Russian Air Force is capable of taking much practical advantage of the skies, or that it is getting more out of the sky than Ukraine, so a symmetrical ‘no fly zone’ might not even be net helpful. There is an argument that failing to do this is some sort of show of weakness, of a willingness to back down in a confrontation. I mostly think that does not apply here to the autocratic leaders who matter here, who presumably all understand why it would be an insane move, but it does reinforce the need to make it clear in other ways that we are not going to be backing down from confrontations. It is hard to know if we have managed to accomplish this in the eyes of Putin. I am worried that a lot of the people who are supporting a no-fly zone are, consciously or otherwise, supporting it because they no longer think there is a future. That they think about the literal end of the world and kind of shrug, because we’ve instilled in them that mindset through a combination of lack of opportunity and relentless rhetoric. If you literally think that there we will literally all die of climate change, or that you’ll never have the chance to raise a family, then a lot of things change. Next up is the question of immediate humanitarian concerns. Humanitarian Aid There are already over two million Ukrainian refugees, and the Russians are creating much worse crises in various cities, while agreements to open humanitarian corridors seem to mostly not be honored. Humanitarian aid in this situation punches above its weight. It helps make this the type of world we want to live in, it relieves pressure to give concessions or divert resources in order to mitigate the damage, and it helps with the Narrative of the situation and in keeping morale up and drawing the distinction between the different worlds and visions of humanity that are in conflict. There is an urge among many I know to start comparing how much it costs to help people in need here versus in other non-conflict situations that they could see as ‘more efficient’ opportunities. Certainly not 100% of our worldwide aid resources should be redirected to the current situation, but I am confident that on the effective margin, given what resources have already been allocated to pre-existing situations, combined with a large ‘force multiplier’ on helping here, that if you personally are considering where your marginal humanitarian dollar that isn’t already committed should go, yes absolutely it should go to help with the damage done by the war – even if you need to do this via a reasonably generic method and accept that level of efficiency. That doesn’t mean that there does not exist, somewhere, a better marginal intervention that would beat the best one here that you know about, but that is not the bar in practice. And of course, even more than in the case of military aid, this mostly shouldn’t need to be left to private action, and it would be good to push for more public action to the extent feasible. But I doubt private action would in expectation reduce the size of public action, nor do I expect public action to be fully sufficient no matter how hard we push and there are aspects where that is all but certain. I would like to have better targets for this than I do. This approach is at least endorsed by Sam Bankman-Fried, who I trust to be a good faith actor here who is making an effort, and I haven’t seen anything better, but as always if you have distinct knowledge then you should likely go with it. This NPR post lists many of the conventional sources, where one worry is whether your marginal contribution will pass through to help in Ukraine or it will effectively end up as general organizational funding. If it’s the latter, you can clearly do better. Going the humanitarian route thus is helpful on multiple levels, and also you can be sure that you are doing something good. I’ve learned that a lot of people would much rather do the thing that is surely good over the thing that has higher expected value but is less certain, especially a thing that might turn out to be a sign mistake. And it’s likely good to put some amount of ‘guaranteed win’ into your portfolio for this reason alone. A brief word on economic sanctions. Economic Sanctions Economic sanctions are very much a double-edged sword. Both sides get hurt, and they cause economic decoupling that we would much prefer in the long run to avoid. By making it clear that the wrong actions will cause us to cut economic ties, the West is causing others who might be seen as taking wrong actions to wonder about their exposure to having their economic ties suddenly cut, and to whether they might lose various assets and relationships. Will this lead to China and Russia creating a rival version of SWIFT that is out of our control? Will this lead to a shift in reserve currency or an unwillingness to hold reserves in the West? Are, as some say, any who play along with such restrictions ‘signing their own death warrants’ because the future wants to be free of such centralized restrictions and the people will rise up and reject any who bow down? I mean, some stuff of that nature will doubtless happen. You’d be a fool not to consider your downside risks and take precautions. There will be less economic coupling, and more decoupling, due to the forward risk of sudden decoupling. Yet the flip side of this is that by showing our willingness to use such tools, and the consequences of their use, we give strong incentive to not earn such exile in the future. We show we are not going to back down from confrontation. This matters too. There’s a lot of downside to this kind of decoupling no matter how well one plans for it. If it cannot be made an acceptable cost, but is a risk that can be prevented, then things should be fine. Similar to the situation with the convoy, you do not want the penalty for being late to be death. You want proportional response and for people to have a way out, for Russia and whoever comes next. You want people to know that you’ll reserve extreme solutions for extreme situations, such as large scale wars of conquest. You want to hold out the ability to walk things back when the situation is settled, and ideally to specify what it would take – subject to negotiations, of course. Instead we are doing all of this ad hoc, and in response to public pressure and largely privately in response to that pressure, which is harder to properly calibrate. And a lot of it will be hard to reverse. Russia will to some extent be driven into the arms of China on a semi-permanent basis, as the only ones willing to trade with Russia and offer it the capacities Russia lacks. Although, if things continue much longer, it’s not clear even China will be able to do that, given its need to maintain good trade relations with the West. Mostly I see this as a sunk cost at this point. I do think ‘no one trusts us not to do it to them and so they can’t work with us or trust our institutions’ is a real risk, but I consider it only the #3 risk here, or at least largely downwind of #2. The #2 risk in my view is that we could be unable to prevent this from happening again, perhaps in a situation where it is deeply unwise. If this is essentially a cancellation, even if a cancellation is wise and appropriate one must worry about the selection process. Especially if the target next time might be China. We need a plan to ensure this is not done lightly. The #1 risk I worry about is that we’ll create a permanent enemy by driving Russia to ruin and not picking up the pieces afterwards. That we’ll repeat the mistake of the Treaty of Versailles, and the mistake we made not giving Russia a lot more help in 1991. Our administration has spoken of ‘the ruins of the Russian economy’ being a lesson to others, and that is indeed a lesson but historically results have been far better when helping afterwards. The whole sanctions plan must involve a full more-than-reversal afterwards if we get everything we want. Next up is the battle over information. Information War Right now, Russians have a highly distorted picture of what is happening in Ukraine. That doesn’t mean that we don’t also have a distorted picture, but I’m confident it’s not on the same level. To the extent that there is still independent media in Russia that can still spread the word on what is happening, and that can utilize support, that seems obviously high value. To the extent that you can help communicate what is going on to people in Russia in other ways, that also seems worthwhile. Cutting off Russia from the outside world does the opposite. For example, someone or some group seems to have been screwing with people’s ability to make phone calls to Russia, and that seems super counterproductive on so many levels. Trying to figure out what is going on, distinguishing sources and figuring out what is true and who is reliable, building a model of events, and sharing such work with others, and other neat stuff like that, also seems valuable. As one would expect, I do not think that ‘shape the Narrative to be as favorable to Ukraine as possible’ is The Way. Whether or not there should be any propaganda ever, and acknowledging that the lines will always blur, there is clearly currently too much propaganda on the margin. There’s a ‘stop, stop, he’s already dead’ vibe here, and having an accurate picture matters a lot. There is also way too much suppression of unfavorable information, whether it be accurate or inaccurate, and whether or not it directly aims to support Russia. When I put out my previous post, someone contacted me privately to let me know of sources that would give the Russian point of view because they felt afraid to share that information in public. This is not a healthy situation. We have to be better. After I wrote that, it became clear the EU is doing the opposite, and further putting the burden on social media and search engines to actively censor disfavored information sources. This seems super terrible and a major escalation of the existing EU war on free speech. It’s not clear to me the extent this creates a duty to proactively monitor all social media content on one’s platform, but that is my default way to interpret this order on first reading – ‘must be deleted’ presumably means exactly that, your call figuring out how that might happen.  Similarly, the way we treat Russian citizens and Russian cultural everything and such has to be better. Canceling Russia vs Welcoming Russians We need to very much draw a distinction between Putin, Russia the country, and Russians as people and as a culture. Sanctions on Russia the country, and ceasing to do business with it or otherwise aid the war machine, makes perfect sense, especially when it comes to energy. But that’s the country, not the people. The rush to cancel all Russians and all things Russian is no good and terrible. Not only does it need to stop, we need to do the opposite. There is nothing wrong with a Russian restaurant, or a Russian singer, or a Russian composer, or a Russian writer. There is nothing to hold against Russians living abroad. Those here have made a choice to be here. They are not our enemies, they are our friends. Or at least, they will be if we don’t make them our enemies through a new McCarthyism. The worst cases, like a clinic in Munich that refused to treat Russians, seem to backtrack and in this case apologize after public outcries, which is a relief, but also should not be necessary.  The best weapon in our arsenal is that we offer a better life, and we especially offer a better life to Russia’s youth and their best and brightest. These are people Russia depends on, as it ages and depopulates. Yet Russia neither presents them with opportunity nor offers them status nor treats them well. 44% of young Russians want to leave. The obviously overwhelmingly correct and most important thing to do is to invite any citizen of either Russia or Ukraine to come live here, in America (and also the EU/UK), ideally with a full path to citizenship. Not only is it the right thing to do for them, doing so strengthens us while weakening Russia severely. These people should be welcome even if they are a burden, but they are not a burden. We have plenty of depopulated cities that would love to have them. Lesser versions of this are not as good, but are still vital if we can’t get the full version for all Russians. At a minimum, as much as I hate credentialism, we could do this for anyone with a college degree and/or a qualifying job offer. That makes it very clear that such people will be a net benefit to us. And notice that this proposal did not mention Russia. That was intentional. There will no doubt be lots of objections about how it’s unfair to offer these opportunities to Russians but not to others elsewhere, with and without charges of racism. So you know what? Not a problem. If it’s conditioned on such things, we can easily offer it to everyone, everywhere. We benefit, they benefit, and Putin can’t say a thing in response because we’re treating everyone the same. Obviously support for large increases in immigration, even skilled immigration is not there right now. And there are some very strong arguments against unlimited unskilled immigration (also known as open borders). But opposition to or limiting of skilled immigration has never seemed to me to make any sense. This context could be a way to find the necessary support, as it has at times in the past. That leads into the general best things we can do, which is to get our house in order. To Fix The Problem of Russia, Fix the World Russia’s diplomatic support comes from autocratic countries that generally support other autocrats. Its opponents are largely democracies. Strengthening the free world, or making it more attractive, in any sense, helps tip the scales. Getting our economic houses in order, making our countries better places to live, having more people live in those places, they all help. When times are good, support for freedom, trade and democracy tends to rise. When times are not so good, people turn elsewhere. For many reasons, we need better times. Russia draws much of its strength from people who would prefer to be elsewhere, as noted above, that could instead lend strength to us, but which are turned away. Russia even benefits from climate change due to its geography. On top of all that, Russia’s economic backbone is oil and gas, which we want to do away with regardless. Without huge profits from oil and gas, the state could not sustain itself or its war machine. This Twitter thread proposes a model of why this dependence is so complete. In this model, Russia is essentially a kleptocratic mafia state. In a mafia, character traits and behaviors necessary to maintain high status and not have one’s resources expropriated require a focus on violence, dominance, zero-sum competition for status and unpredictability. Such a focus is incompatible with the management of complex manufacturing operations. Not only are those who rise within a mafia-style system to have power and money incapable of complex operations, but they also can ill afford to empower those who do have such an ability. If they do, the balance of power might shift to those who can manage such operations. Internal creation that they can’t control is power they can’t wield and will belong to someone else who thinks differently, and thus is a threat. So they prevent it from happening, and outsource such creation elsewhere. This results in a Russia that is far more dependent on outsiders and the West than it realizes, and also keeps Russia from prospering because those with power actively do not want this to happen. It is The Resource Curse on steroids. Similarly, in this model, a lot of the Russian army’s problems stem from its budget being diverted to things like yacht purchases, as the state is incapable of keeping itself honest on this kind of scale and isn’t especially trying to do so. I’m not confident this person’s model is entirely correct and would appreciate insight on the extent to which it is and to what extent their other similar threads can also be trusted – if they can, then this is by far the best source I’ve found for actual model building on the underlying situation, and it seems like it’s right, but I want to be get independent confirmation I can trust so I can be more confident and build upon what’s there, a lot of which is fascinating and paints a rich and consistent picture. I want to explore those bigger questions more later, but mostly the point is that Russia’s revenue, and also its leverage over the West, stems from us not having our house in order. It is because we depend on Russian oil and gas. There’s also a looming problem with fertilizer and wheat and some mineral resources, which could be a big deal, but which in dollar terms is very secondary. So the list of all of My Pre-Existing Policy Proposals would start in the obvious place. Energy Not being dependent on Russian oil and gas was a very good idea a month ago or a year ago. It would be a very good idea even if Russia was a reliable partner in trade and in peace and its government was a force for good, because climate change is a thing and supplies of oil and gas are limited. The solutions here are all rather obvious, and they all work together. The more of them we do, the better things go. When you don’t do any of them, you end up with Germany where they say they’re all about the environment, but they go about it by shutting down nuclear plants, and thus energy prices go nuts and Germany’s solution looks like it’s going to be to burn more coal. Madness. So let’s start with the obvious: Nuclear power. We need to build tons of new nuclear power plants, in both America and Europe. All that stands between us and this goal is to stop being idiots, take away regulations that effectively ban it, and then commission a bunch of plants. Or simply stop imposing undue burdens and let private investment happen. It’s known tech. Nuclear power under reasonable regulatory regimes is cheap, safe, abundant, clean and effective. New reactor models are even more all of that than old models. The idea of nuclear power is scary and thus people have it in their heads that it is unsafe, but compared to the safety downsides of all the practical alternatives none of the safety objections are serious. Yet we cannot build any new plants, because the official policy is to never approve a new plant. We have defined an unsafe nuclear plant as a plant that is capable of producing energy at competitive prices – if the prices would be competitive, the official policy is to insist on additional money spent on safety, without regard to any sort of cost/benefit. So no new approvals and no new plants under this regime, at all. This madness must end. On the margin, energy produced by nuclear power is trading off against oil, gas and coal use. This is very much not hard. It would not be hard, again, even if Russia was not a concern. This is the 100% obvious complete slam dunk. I find myself mostly unable to take seriously, on this or any other topic, anyone who looked into this at all and is in opposition. Next up of course is Non-Nuclear Green Energy. I say non-nuclear because the idea of a category ‘green’ that does not include nuclear is pure absurdity, and it’s important that category boundaries reflect reality. As people have suddenly been realizing, a bunch of NIMBY-style objections and huge other regulatory burdens have been severely slowing the building of various renewable forms of energy. People’s local concerns have been allowed to hold up things that are orders of magnitude more important. This is the perfect time to ensure that the more important concerns here take precedence, and require a huge burden before we are willing to consider stopping or slowing down a new windmill, solar panel, hydro or geothermal project. I keep hearing that the entire fate of the world is at stake here, and now it has an additional justification. I really, really, really don’t care about your obstructed ocean view or that there would be a power line through a forest, or some obscure endangered habitat, stop it, just stop, shut up and multiply. We can also offer additional direct subsidies, but mostly it isn’t necessary because the economics work fine. The best subsidy is of course to correct for externalities of alternatives through a carbon tax, but some direct help is fine too. When I shared a draft of this I got objections to the claim that nuclear’s cost is cheap enough on the theory that solar is already pretty cheap (remember not to count tax subsidies in the calculation) and will become cheaper on the relevant time frames for building new plants. I do agree this is possible, but it seems far from certain even if we go full out on solar, especially when requiring it to scale on the level of ‘the entire electrical grid,’ and considering the storage issues involved in too heavy a reliance on solar power on that scale. This seems to me like a clear case of Why Not Both given the magnitude of the costs versus the benefits – you’d like to rely purely on solar most of the time in the worlds where it’s cheap and can scale that big fast enough, including because it conserves uranium, but you don’t know you live in those worlds and even if you do you’d like a backup system to relieve pressure on the necessary amount of storage so you’re fine in case of unusual weather events. Also worth noting that all this includes better support for research into and other work on Fusion and other potential energy sources, to the extent that such things are viable, which I haven’t investigated. The trickier one in a political sense is Oil and Gas Production, but in a practical sense it is not so tricky. High prices will lead to more production, although with meaningful lead times required. We can of course also help with this by loosening various restrictions on production, especially fracking, and we should do that. Whatever the trade-off was a month ago, the trade-off is different now, and the rules need to reflect that. Long term, we’ll be reducing usage, short term the costs of ow production are looking mind boggling. Making this concession also helps balance the scales in various ways. Notice that no one objects much to other countries like Saudi Arabia raising production. Quite the opposite. Then there’s the issue of what to do about Iran and Venezuela. We are talking to both trying to work out deals to get their oil flowing. Iran is a strange case here because Russia is their ally, and because they suddenly have even less reason to be willing to not pursue nuclear weapons. So any deal would require that they ‘switch sides’ and be actual friends, or it seems like it would backfire. For Venezuela, the worry is propping up the regime with cash and making things there that much worse. I’m not sure how the cost/benefit works out here. Certainly we should be calling in chips to get increased oil production in places with slack capacity that we are already putting up with, and the countries that have the ability to do that should go along with it. Super high prices causes behavioral change that kills the golden goose, and they get the chips. Even trickier is the canonical obviously correct but deeply unpopular policy, the Carbon Tax, or its more accepted incomplete alternative the Gasoline Tax. Insanely, there are calls for a gas tax holiday or other cut, at exactly the time when we need to reduce consumption. That’s why the price is going up. A price is a signal wrapped up in an incentive. We want the price of using oil and gas to be super high. The price being high is great. It means people will consume less of it. The problem, of course, is that the money is largely going to bad actors, and a lot of it to Russia, because they’re the ones selling and they get market price. Even Russia will still get a good fraction of market price, and market prices are high. High energy prices hit the poor especially hard. This can of course be solved by using some or even all of the revenues from all such taxes to make a combination of tax reductions and direct payments to the poor. If they get all the revenue back, it’s pretty impossible for them to not be better off. Ideally we do it in a way that reduces rather than raises implicit marginal tax rates, especially in the range where they approach or exceed 100%. Finally, there are the other things that are obviously insanely great, that can now be recast as supporting us in this struggle. I’ll try not to belabor too much. Other Obviously Insanely Great Things That Were My Existing Policy Proposals Supporting reduced zoning restrictions, further building, public transportation and urbanization all improve the energy situation directly while also improving life. Getting rid of stupid remaining Covid restrictions and other pointless rules helps as well. Reducing the demands of occupational licensing generally enriches life while in particular helping to welcome new people who will show up without such licenses, but that’s where the line starts to bleed between ‘this directly actually helps with X’ and ‘this is good and good things help with X’ so I will stop there rather than further writing a laundry list. Playing Politics I do see this as an opportunity to take a broadly pro-growth, pro-energy, pro-brain-drain, pro-lived-experiences physically-oriented platform, color it up as ‘anti-Russia’ and sell it to people who would not have otherwise supported it, allowing us to adopt much better policies. The question is, would such an approach be practical? Would it stick? Is it worth one’s effort? In general, it is good to be skeptical of political action, although less skeptical if the rope is being pulled sideways. You risk being caught up in zero-sum games and Hegelian dialectics.  I do think that it makes sense for the we of ‘people of the type who are reading blogs like this’ to make some amount of effort towards such a thing. At a minimum, we should do the research to create a shovel-ready platform of such policies, framed in ways that are popular and paired with ways to get the message out to the people, such that a candidate could choose to embrace it or a lobbyist or insider could push for policy changes or offer a concrete bill when they notice the votes might be there.  Historically, the cost of such efforts is low, often in the single digit millions, with the potential to result in huge changes some of the time. This stands in high contrast with ‘help ingroup defeat outgroup’ type efforts, where the costs are much higher and the benefits often much murkier. My hunch is that this is where some marginal dollars are now best spent.  The last point is that we are in this mess in large part because we’re using bad decision theory. Better Decision Theory If you don’t want people to present and behave towards you like cartoon villains, you need to ensure that your inevitable reactions don’t reward cartoon villainy. If you don’t want rule by those willing to escalate and who prove willing to hurt and kill and be unpredictable, you need to not take kindly to that in a way that matters to such people. I continue to see lots of people, smart people, people who should know much better, arguing from Causal Decision Theory. They say you could do A or B, the worlds where I choose A look better than the worlds where I choose B, so I choose A. And that totally, totally does not work. I mean, it’s way better than choosing B every time. And it’s better than flipping a coin. But it’s highly exploitable. It’s even more exploitable if a lot of what you factor in is avoidance of pain and risk. What you are doing is rewarding those who put themselves in a position to inflict pain and risk upon you, or even upon others. Others noticing you will give in to blackmail, and that you have the ability to pay them, is what gets you blackmailed. It is why hostages are taken. It is why cartels and mafia make sure everyone knows they are violent. Some of this is that a lot of people have various forms of trauma or otherwise have models of the world that expect those who can and do inflict pain and violate norms to win, and instinctively back them exactly because they are inflicting pain and violating norms – so they will hopefully do it on your behalf or at least to someone else. That’s a general problem. This is the whole quote-unquote “rational” response problem. Those who ‘play CDT’ in interactions, who can be relied upon to think about the consequences of actions but not to decide on and stick to policies and principles, are sitting ducks. A certain amount of this is tolerable and to be expected. You don’t obviously want the response to a criminal taking a hostage to always be to ignore the threat entirely, because such people often are not thinking straight and a reputation for ignoring such threats would likely come at the cost of a lot more dead innocents. Yet you also need it to not be to give the criminal whatever they want or they’ll keep doing it. You would ideally want people to be able to trust deals they make with authorities, yet there are enough irrational and stupid criminals that authorities have collectively instead decided it’s better to mostly be untrustworthy. I do worry that this decision is based on maximizing local outcomes at the expense of long term effects. Similarly, we’ve shown that we can’t be trusted to do things like promise not to further expand NATO, because we lack the ability to keep commitments that are no longer seen as in our interest in the face of pressure. Our word is in this sense no good, and this is common knowledge. We do plausibly claim our word is good in some limited contexts, and get sufficient value out of that for it to be plausibly self-sustaining – we keep our word on things like defending NATO allies mostly because otherwise people would know that we don’t. We do at least understand those kinds of issues somewhat – we understand that we need to ‘maintain credibility.’ So there’s at least an attempt to execute our causal decision theory properly, and look forward into the future to the consequences of what people might learn about us from our decisions. Without that all would quickly be lost. We do understand the game of whether one is seen as willing to stand up to bullies, and we occasionally play to win. What we don’t do is use a functional decision theory. We do not consider that the decision process we use is also being and will be used and has previously been used by ourselves and others, and to choose our process with this in mind. What we don’t do is choose decision policies that lead to good outcomes, then follow those policies, even if following them in a particular situation would turn out poorly. In a sense, we have no honor. In another sense, we were saved because we did have honor. It turned out that there are things that so offend us, are so outrageous to us, that when we see them we feel the need to rise up as one in outrage. The intolerant minority often wins, and we are actually pretty good at having intolerant minorities that win, and in this case it likely wasn’t even a minority. Thus, the various calls to ‘do something’ for various somethings, whether or not such moves were ‘rational.’ Pushed by the public, and thus immune to our bad decision theory, allowing us to do what needed to be done. Where the conclusions were sufficiently counterproductive and risky, like the no-fly zone, we were able to ignore this. How do we properly respond to people like Putin who really do care about whether someone ‘looks weak’ and other such dynamics, without adopting the mindset and culture that awards those who ‘look strong’ with power and high status? How do we stand up to someone like Putin, and have someone like Putin know in advance we will stand up to them so that we rarely ever actually have to do the standing up, but without putting someone else also like him in charge, who would likely then collaborate (at least implicitly, but also likely explicitly) with Putin and others like him against the peoples of all nations? On a personal level, getting yourself to where you are using a functional decision theory is very much worth it, as is helping others to get there with you – it’s good even on your own, but the more people use one, the better it does. Or at a minimum, we need to give the proper disdain to those who are advocating policies that would result in handing the world to men like Putin. In some ways doing it explicitly is exactly the worst thing – you are announcing that you are easy pickings and advocating for others to be as well. Yet I still hold firm that being explicit is still the better way. Better to be wrong in a way that lets errors be corrected. Except in a sufficiently adversarial environment, where some very smart people have made it very clear how to run over them instantly in any situation large or small, simply by making a credible presentation as someone who will keep escalating. For this and other reasons, it is good policy to not allow oneself to be taken advantage of even when the cost of not allowing this is higher than the cost of allowing it. And especially when that second cost is time. There is of course a limit, but one needs to be careful not to get into bad habits. One must keep one’s honor. Anyway, I hope that all proves helpful. It seemed better to share my thoughts here than not share them, while I work towards more explicit model construction and analysis. Better to write what one can while trying to figure out how to write what one for now cannot. (Comment/moderation note: Policy on politics continues to be ‘no more than necessary’ so please use your best judgment. I intend to stay out of the discussions as much as possible except when seeking information.) (One last thing I want to explicitly ask again, since I didn’t get much response on Twitter, is that I desire people’s opinions on Kamil Galeev as a source to help model build, even if as I do one disagrees with some of the consequent projections/conclusions.)Discuss [Less]