2017 Prediction Results

At the start of the year, I made sixty predictions about how 2017 would go. Now it's time to see just how badly I did. The predictions left unmarked were correct, those struck-through were incorrect. I'm only throwing out the Obamacare prediction, because no one can agree on what constitutes a repeal. It is marked in italics.

PERSONAL

I will still be living in Kansas: 95%
My parents will have moved into their new house: 90%
My parents will have sold our current house: 80%
I will still be annoyed about it: 70%
I will read 10 books this year: 90%
....12 books: 85%
....15 books: 75%
....20 books: 60%
I will write an average of one blog post per month: 80%
....two blog posts per month: 60%
I will not succeed in a longform fiction writing project this year: 85%
I will not get back together with my ex-girlfriend: 85%
I will not get a new girlfriend: 65%
I will not get a boyfriend: 95%
I will not experience a major political conversion this year: 80%
I will not experience a major religious conversion this year: 95%
I will be able to perform 15 push-ups with ease: 90%
....20 push-ups: 70%
....30 push-ups: 50%
I will not be hospitalized: 95%
I will not begin drinking regularly: 90%
I will not attend a solstice event: 80%
I will participate in the LessWrong community: 70%


ACADEMIC/PROFESSIONAL
Jayhawk Rocket Design will fly the hybrid engine on a rocket: 65%
Jayhawk Rocket Design begin work on a two-stage rocket: 70%
I will have had an engineering internship: 70%
I will have a job lined up post-graduation: 60%
I will still be studying aerospace engineering: 95%
....at the University of Kansas: 93%
....on track to graduate in May 2018: 90%
I will end the year with GPA 3.0 or above: 80%
Jayhawk Rocket Design will test fire our hybrid rocket engine: 80%
I will not be planning to attend grad school: 90%
I will learn Javascript this year: 80%
I will not learn Haskell this year: 80%
I will not begin learning Russian this year: 80%
My French will not improve this year: 75%

SCIENCE/SPACE

Human trials of CRISPR announced: 80%
No successful human clones announced: 65%
Self-driving cars licensed in the US or Canada: 50%
"EM Drive" will be explained by existing physics: 75%
KIC 8462852 will not be satisfactorily explained: 80%
No strong evidence of extra-terrestrial life will be found: 95%
SpaceX launches a reused rocket: 80%
Reused rocket is successful: 70%
Falcon Heavy will fly this year: 65%
No deaths in space this year: 90%
No country leaves the ISS Treaty: 85%

POLITICS/WORLD

Donald Trump will still be President at the end of 2017: 95%
Mike Pence will still be Vice President: 95%
Obamacare will not have been repealed: 60%
United States will not go to war with a nuclear power: 85%
United States will not enter a major new war (>100 US casualties): 70%
North Korean government will not be overthrown or displaced: 95%
North Korean government will not begin liberal reforms: 93%
Theresa May will still be Prime Minister of the United Kingdom: 90%
United Kingdom will not have triggered Article 50: 70%
Ukraine Conflict will not be resolved in 2017: 85%

META

I will remember to score these predictions: 95%
I will have been overconfident in these predictions: 80%

This last one sort of requires me to do the math first, so let's get to it. Spoiler: it won't be the tie-breaker question.

50% predictions: 0 right and 2 wrong, for a score of 0%
60% predictions: 2 right and 1 wrong, for a score of 67%
65% predictions: 2 right and 2 wrong, for a score of 50%
70% predictions: 4 right and 4 wrong, for a score of 50%
75% predictions: 2 right and 1 wrong, for a score of 67%
80% predictions: 10 right and 3 wrong, for a score of 77%
85% predictions: 6 right and 0 wrong, for a score of 100%
90% predictions: 8 right and 0 wrong, for a score of 100%
93% predictions: 2 right and 0 wrong, for a score of 100%
95% predictions: 10 right and 0 wrong, for a score of 100%

Graphed, my results look like this: 

What does this chart mean? Bear with me here, because this may get confusing.

The orange line represents perfect calibration i.e. 90% of the predictions made with 90% confidence are accurate. The closer to the line, the better calibrated you are as a predictor. Results above the line are underconfident, while results below the line are overconfident. My predictions made with high confidence were underconfident, while those made with somewhat lower confidence nevertheless proved to be overconfident.

As a general rule, underconfidence is preferable to overconfidence. In colloquial terms, it's better to be safe than sorry.

If we look at individual categories, it's clear that my worst performance was in Academic/Professional predictions, while my best was either Personal or Politics/World, depending on how you choose to count. Technically Meta was 100% correct, but that wasn't really so much of a prediction as an acknowledgement that January!Me had no idea what I was doing.

There's several issues I want to rectify before my 2018 predictions. Firstly, several of my sample sizes were too small. For example, there's only two predictions with 50% calibration. I got both of these wrong, but it's hard to say whether I was dramatically overconfident or just a bit unlucky. Meanwhile, most of my predictions were made with 85%, 90%, 93%, or 95% confidence. Arguably, I was essentially shooting fish in a barrel on these. It would be better to distribute my predictions more evenly.

Furthermore, it may not be a good idea to use even two significant figures for this kind of project. Throwing out the 50% predictions and lumping everything into decades (60% and 65% predictions together, 70% and 75% predictions together....) we get results looking more like this:

with the breakdown as follows:

60–69% predictions: 4 right and 3 wrong, for a score of 57%

70–79% predictions: 6 right and 5 wrong, for a score of 55%

80–89% predictions: 16 right and 2 wrong, for a score of 84%

90–100% predictions: 20 right and 0 wrong, for a score of 100%

This more seriously reflects the confidence gap between high probability outcomes (things more than 80% likely to happen) and possibilities with lower odds. Basically, I scored a lot of probably things too low, and a bunch of improbable things too high. It's an embarrassing sort of mistake to make, but figuring out where I'm under and overconfident is the entirely purpose of this exercise, so mission accomplished.

2018 predictions, hopefully reflecting these insights, coming soon.

November/December Links

A lot of people reacted poorly to a Washington Post story implying that the Trump administration banned the Center for Disease Control from using certain words in their documents. According to National Review and the New York Times, this misrepresents the actual, more complicated situation.

Speaking of healthcare, HIV/AIDS is looking to get a lot nastier in the near future. It's not really clear what we can do about it, beyond more of the same.

Something to do once I'm out of school: print my blog. Matt Shapiro argues that we really can't depend on platforms to continue providing hosting, forever, and having off-site backups is increasingly necessary if you want your works to survive.

In 1849, a Virginia slave named Henry Brown mailed himself to freedom in a wooden box. His escape was enabled by northern abolitionists, but also by confidential parcel services. To me, this underscores the importance of allowing free, private competitors to government agencies wherever and whenever possible.

Speaking of federal services: the origin of NORAD's Santa tracker.

Astronaut Bruce McCandless II dies at age 80.

AIAA reports of the progress of advanced spacecraft propulsion in 2017.

Elon Musk tweets photos of the assembled Falcon Heavy first stage.

Going Off On A Tangent

I just remembered an incident from middle school. As a middle school memory, it's unremarkable in that it shouldn't have happened in the first place, but is unusual in that some small bit of wisdom can be gleaned from it.

Back then I was what passed for a gifted child, and consequently enrolled in what passed for a gifted education class. During one of my projects—I don't remember which one—one of the teachers said something to the effect that it seemed like I was going off on a tangent. I didn't know what a tangent was, so I tried to explain myself using the entirely incorrect geometric metaphor. Something about legs of a triangle. That's what you get for teaching algebra before trig before calculus.

With the benefit of hindsight, I can explain myself better.

Whatever line of research I was trying to pursue only looked like a tangent because outside observers weren't looking at the whole picture. My plans were outrageously overambitious as a rule; teaching a preteen the concept of planning fallacy isn't necessarily easy. Nevertheless, I can't shake the feeling that observing the size of the plan is not the hard part of that task.

If we're going to make it through the 21st century, we've got to fix a lot of different forms of irrationality. Giving our "best" and "brightest" such shoddy training does not bode well. 

And Two Other Things

Further meditating on the problem of progress, I noticed a few other things which had been going right in the world and my personal life that contributed to the perception that things were moving a specified direction.

One of the most memorable things happened on the winter solstice of 2015: SpaceX, after many failures, successfully landed a rocket on the ground. It's worth noting that this technical triumph was underscored by multiple sorts of suffering in my surroundings. I'd literally fallen and hurt myself pretty badly that evening, and then been dragged to a very uninteresting Longest Night church service that ended mere moments before the landing. My attention was entirely directed elsewhere than the mundanity around me.

At this point, landing rockets has become essentially routine. I don't even watch launches anymore, though part of that is because I don't know when they're happening without Twitter. Maybe there's an email alert service for that.

Another thing which improved in the first half of 2016 began a week after the SpaceX landing. After an entire semester apart, I drove up to St. Paul to enter the new year with my then-girlfriend. It'd taken a long time to finally get together, and then we hadn't arranged to meet up again for the entire fall. But after that, we saw each other at least every three months until breaking up. This felt like emotional progress, getting to spend time with someone I loved on a regular if infrequent basis.

...there was going to be at least one other thing, but it's not coming back to me now. Hopefully this gets the point across: largely by accident, a lot of factors were lining up in what seemed like an organized pattern, only to diverge at a later date. Homo sapiens' overactive pattern-matching instincts strike again.

Try not to make that mistake in your own future. When things feel like they're going well, don't assume that they'll stay that way. Stuff can always go wrong, and—all other things being equal—probably will.

Hyperbolic Discounting Revisited

Related Reading: Picoprocrastination, Hyperbolic Discounting in Education

My, what a difference a year makes! As the months till graduation tick down, my time horizon has seemed to grow. It's not clear whether that's a product of the hard limit of my knowledge approaching, or my lived experience increasing.

Either way, my dissatisfaction with past selves has risen dramatically as 2017 progressed. At this point, I can even admit that my behavior—while not necessarily unpredictable given those initial conditions—was the primary reason I failed so dramatically during my years at Purdue. Four years doesn't seem like a particularly long time, not nearly as long as it felt five years ago, during my first semester of university.

Motivating myself with the prospect of being done with it (no, not like that) is now a viable strategy. It never worked before, and I found those kinds of pep talks somewhere between frustrating and completely incomprehensible. When I wrote about hyperbolic discounting in education, I was just barely starting to react to that line of reasoning, after a semester of struggling to make myself work through a workload that, in retrospect, was pretty good. I probably wouldn't have believed it then, but I'm actually nostalgic for Dr. D's thermodynamics class. It's unclear, however, how much of that perception stems from the broader situation.

Noticing progress can be a subtle art, but pleasurable nonetheless.

December Daily Journal 2017?

I'm considering repeating the December Daily Journal exercise from 2015 as a way of time-tracking during these last few weeks of the semester, and to lay out the things I need to do during winter break. I'm not sure if this is actually a good idea, so I'm going to sleep on it and see what I think about it tomorrow.

I Am Not Civilization

One of the biggest things to notice looking back over the past three or four years is that my personal progress doesn't track that of American society or Western Civilization in general. Specifically, there have been points where, just as I think I've gotten things figured out and a reasonable course of action prepared, events in my personal life and the general milieu horrendously contradicts that progress. Let's look at a case from each arena.

The most extreme example, of course, would be my parents' decision to move. This proved to be financially irresponsible and an extreme instance of planning fallacy, but let's ignore that bit for now, because I couldn't demonstrate that then. Let's look at the emotional context of this decision.

I was told about this plan on Labor Day Weekend of 2016. I had, a few months earlier, completed my first year back at university. I spent the fall and spring semesters living in a private dorm which I had hated for a number of reasons, which can ultimately be traced back to the character and behavior of my neighbors (though that the doors slammed by default certainly helped nothing). During the spring semester I drove back to Kansas City almost every weekend and by the end of that period felt that my parents had a pretty reasonably understanding, at last, of what engineering school was like from a student's perspective.

Despite some struggling, I emerged from my pseudo-sophomore year with decent grades. I'd gone from flunking thermodynamics to loving it. I'd discovered just how fun orbital mechanics can be, once Kerbal Space Program gives you a visual intuition for it. Academically, things were improving.

That summer, I took the last courses I need to catch up with the standard plan of study for someone graduating in with the Class of 2018. I did well in those courses, after which point I'd exceeded the material I'd flunked at Purdue. From an academic standpoint, things were looking up.

Furthermore, I'd moved into the apartment where I'm writing this very blog post. It's much quieter and also cheaper, dramatically so when you consider the expanded floor space. That seemed like an even greater benefit when my then-girlfriend said she wanted to move in with me after she graduated.

From my perspective, everything in my personal life was looking up. Moreover, we'd just a year previously finished selling my late grandmother's house, which was an ordeal like no other. Why in God's Name anyone would want to repeat that Sisyphean torture stumped me, but became completely incomprehensible in the context of my rapidly-improving life.

We all know how that worked out. In the year since then my relationship ended acrimoniously, the move still isn't done, and the time demands placed upon me did nothing to help my grades. None of those things are reversible, but that does nothing for the fact that most of them didn't have to happen in the first place.

Speaking of things which didn't have to happen, how about we talk about the general milieu? I'm thinking, of course, about politics.

You see, I used to be a very extreme libertarian, as a saunter through the archives of this blog will reveal. In January of 2015—late on the evening of January 31st, to be precise—I was presented with an argument, from a fellow libertarian, which my informal rationality training made it impossible for me to accept. Without digging into the details, I realized that the non-aggression principle may exist on the map, but it doesn't exist in the territory. From there, I started questioning my entire moral-political structure, and decided that I had to start over from scratch.

I was studying meta-politics, group dynamics, looking at statistical rather than just-so stories—in summary, moving from the larval to merely adolescent stage of intellectual development. Sadly, I haven't made terribly much progress on that front since 2015, because I simply haven't had much time and mismanaged much of the time I had back when I had it. Then again, I wouldn't have had this problem if I hadn't been arguing on the Internet late at night on a Saturday night in the first place.

The point is, I was developing as the world around me devolved further into tribalism and bad epistemology. I don't want to rehash the details of the 2016 pre-primary campaign, but suffice to say I saw a lot of irrational behavior which culminated in the political class feeding a professional troll into the White House. The Carthaginians would be very proud.

It was painful to watch, and even more painful to do nothing about, because I didn't have my philosophical house in sufficient order to present a viable alternative. I still don't, but made the necessary moves—unfollowing people, using Facebook dramatically less, taking Twitter off my phone—to avoid the worst of the political news that never mattered and only wastes mental space. If I'd had any sense, I would have done that before the primaries. Sadly, my past selves were more akratic and less committed to my long-term well-being than my current, still problematic self.

The point, here, is that I could see all the errors everyone else was making (as well as my own), and wondering how they didn't see the mistakes being made. Many of the people involved had no excuse not to know better!

I doubt there's any real solutions to this problem, besides further isolating myself from those who choose to live unconsciously. Choiceless mode may be comforting, but once you progress there's no going back. Civilization does not follow my trajectory, and to stay sane, I may need to decouple my trajectory from it.

October Links

Spotted Toad on issues with public school segregation.

I'm like three months behind on Slate Star Codex, but the post on futurism was worth making an exception for.

The LessWrong 2.0 project is making progress. I'd love to follow along but I haven't really had the time for that.

An Anglospheric Union inches towards reality as the United Kingdom considers joining NAFTA. The Canadians have an even more audacious suggestion.

Speaking of international partnerships, the Europeans are interested in joining the Deep Space Gateway project.

Exciting space news: astronomers now believe object A/2017 U1 is interstellar in origin. Specifically, the object has an observed orbital eccentricity ~1.2, indicating a hyperbolic trajectory not bound to Sol. This obviously limits the amount of observational time, so we're not likely to learn a whole lot from the encounter. Universe Today article, NASA press release.

Old space news I just found out about: Lockheed Martin's Mars Base Camp proposal.

Coding challenge: build Tetris in Conway's Game of Life.

It's not really the right time of year for those commencement speech blog posts, but here's one anyway. Nonetheless appropriate as I apply for jobs and grad school.

September Links

Astronomy Now: Corrected sunspot history suggests climate change not due to natural solar trends.

Is the US economy more egalitarian than Tinder?

Asteroid 3122 Florence, which passed safely by Terra this month, has two small moons. This makes it the third known triple NEO.

Katja Grace on coordination problems.

Put A Number On It reviews the Premium Mediocre.

Scott Alexander on institutional review boards, and his commenters on the post.

As expected, the Cassini mission ended on the 15th. Here's my retrospective.

OSIRIS-REx flies by Earth en route to Bennu.

Massive solar flare happens just in time for my space weather class. It's always fun to see the practical applications of what you're learning about.

August Links

Creating fnords with technology.

Kuiper-Belt Object 2014 MU₆₉, New Horizon's next target, may be two objects in close proximity.

The Hubble Space Telescope discovers an exoplanet with a warm stratosphere. A zone of where atmospheric temperature increases with altitude—a stratosphere—is common for planets in the solar system, but this is the first positive detection in another system. The detection involved oxidane gas, but the planet in question is undoubtedly too hot to have liquid water on the surface.

A federal excise tax on ammunition pays for state wildlife conservation, which garnered a lot more money during the Obama years due to gun control concerns.

Cephalopods evolve faster by RNA editing than DNA mutation. This is basically unheard-of in animal species, which poses some interesting questions for biologists.

U.S. Army team discovers a new technique for manufacturing hydrogen from water and aluminum alloys. If it scales up economically, it might finally be viable to switch away from polluting hydrogen fuels. Hopefully we won't have to wait too long to find out.

Asteroid 3122 Florence will pass Terra at 7 million kilometers distance on September 1. This will be its closest approach for the next several hundred years, and should be a good target for amateur astronomers.

Solar flares don't leave an impact on polar nitrate records. This is interesting because dozens of other chemicals do leave an ice-core trace after solar flares, but some of the biggest flares don't show any evidence.

Our World In Data crunched the numbers, and nuclear power plants are still the safest energy source. If anything, their analysis is pessimistic; I might do a follow-up post at a later date. Related: IAEA on nuclear storage accidents.

Senior Design

Yesterday, I was camping to watch the solar eclipse. Today, I'm back at school, diving into the material for senior year. My space-focused classes haven't met yet (updates on that front possibly tomorrow), but already the workload shaping up to be just as tough as last year's graduates warned us it would be.

The aerospace senior design classes focus on the AIAA Design Competitions. This year, the undergraduate individual aircraft request is to propose a Close Air Support (CAS) vehicle to replace the A-10. It's a shame Alex had to push back 521 a year, because this sounds right up his alley.

Our first assignment is Block 1 of a combined report, which will be due on Monday, September 11. By that point in time, we will have needed to have derived a mission profile from the specifications, reviewed the history of similar aircraft, and extrapolated from that data to perform the weight, wing, and powerplant sizing. All of it will naturally need to be summarized, formatted, and referenced.

On the subject of formatting, we've been given a few options for producing our reports. The standard approach is to use Microsoft Word, which has an unfortunate tendency to completely obliterate carefully-tweaked documents. Alternatively, we can use Adobe InDesign, which few of us know but allows for more meticulous curation. Because the design curve on InDesign is so steep, Dr. Barrett is offering some extra-credit for its use. LaTeX is also permitted, but will not garner any extra credit. I specifically taught myself LaTeX this summer to avoid the hassle of using MS Word this fall, so LaTeX it will probably be.

What we don't have a choice about is submitting our designs to competition. Knowing that these proposals will actually be judged may provide additional motivation to produce something decent. Or maybe adding pressure will only cause more problems. We'll just have to wait and see!

In either case, I should probably start reading. There's an awful lot to learn.

July Links

Hamilton parody arguing against the repugnant conclusion.

Derailing as a conflict of authority.

Paul Graham on The Refragmentation paints a frightening picture of America's future. The good news is that we don't have enough teenagers for a political revolution. The bad news is that adults are still behaving terribly.

Twitter updated their design last month, and once again we must remind platforms that the problem isn't change, the problem is terrible decision-making. Wodtke argues there's roughly an order of magnitude difference between what developers offer and what users will accept.

Scott Alexander on types of typologies.

Tom Scott argues against backdoor encryption.

Researchers detected acrylonitrile in Titan's atmosphere, which likely forms cell-membrane-like structures in the moon's conditions. This adds to the evidence that Titan may be an abode of life in the solar system.

NASA has a Venus surface simulator, being used to study materials that might be useful on future space probes.

The first wedding in the British Antarctic Territory happened this month. I don't think they're planning to stay there, but it still brings humanity one small step closer to colonizing the southern continent.

Falcon Heavy launch date pushed back to November.

Wordpress supports LaTeX, so I was able to show off some differential equations in my Chaos review. Expect a lot more mathy posts over there in the coming months.

Missing Positions

Related To: The Missing Moods

Here's a rough distribution of the American electorate's political positions:

Voter Study Group

You'll notice that the overall bias is heavily against the combination of social liberalism and economic conservatism¹. In other words, genuine libertarians are pretty rare. It's nice to see data confirming what you already knew.

The two main clusters in US politics (and, I suspect, in most modernized countries) are socially conservative & economically centrist, and socially liberal & economically authoritarian. This misses a whole quadrant of possibility-space and, I think, overlooks most of the good solutions for our problems.

But this isn't a post about why there should be more libertarians, because I don't fit in with libertarians.

Many people will argue that 'right' and 'left' are natural categories, more natural than Nolanesque formulations acknowledge. There may be good reason to believe that. But it's downright weird how many people, in this age of political compass memes, still can't really seem to break outside the box and consider more sensible combinations.

Today's particular question is why there doesn't seem to be a significant mass of people who embody both pro-market economics, anti-interventionist policies, and a scientific worldview. The best example I'm coming up with is a certain subset of the rationalist movement, but that subset can't be more than a few thousand people at the absolute maximum and most of them lean towards left-libertarianism², besides.

This isn't really a new problem; I never felt at home among the libertarian movement. My Objectivist background is probably a big part of that—back in the day Ron Paul seemed too conservative for my tastes. Despite my tolerance for high-reactionary arguments, I'm not really a traditionalist. There's stuff worth preserving from the past—like, we shouldn't torch it wholesale—but generally speaking modernity is better. Corrective optics, antihistamines, air conditioning....you can see where I'm going here. Nerds like me don't make good yeoman farmers.

Since I started reading The Virtue of Selfishness a few days ago, I've been thinking about that again. The Objectivist peg doesn't fit into the conservative hole very well (though it fits into the liberal hole slightly worse). Objectivist reject religion, embrace technological progress, are fine with women in the workplace, are generally okay with abortion, and prefer modern architecture.

This doesn't sound like a group that would vote predominantly Republican! And yet, they do, on vaguely economic grounds. As we see above, the GOP's electorate isn't exactly hypercapitalist³. But the other reason Objectivists end up closer to conservatives is that the philosophy demands an individual standard of conduct. Egoism is not hedonism, in other words. Stand up straight, look problems in the eye, and expect the best from yourself and others.

Okay, that sounds a little more like ur-conservatism. But again, the standards are different. Egoism is not Protestantism, either. Objectivists don't fit in anywhere. Then consider the fact that I don't even fit in with the Objectivists!

I've got to write that post on epistemic distance.

---

¹I contend that the "conservative" position should rightfully be called liberalism, but that's not really the point here.

²For full disclosure, most people would probably consider me somewhat left-libertarian at this point. This is accurate insofar as I'm sympathetic to arguments for a guaranteed basic income and such, but the term carries an affect that doesn't really apply.

³This wouldn't be a problem if the party's elected representatives werehypercapitalist, but they really aren't. In my experience, new libertarians give up on the "work through the Republican Party" approach in less than three years.

May/June Links

California wants to tax rocket launches. The article portrays this as something aerospace companies want, because it would clarify their tax status, but one is reminded of President Reagan's famous epigram.

Scott Alexander on the bail system.

Bloomberg: Americans Are Paying $38 to Collect $1 of Student Debt

A short game to illustrate the issues of gerrymandering and proportional representation.

Old blog post from Taymon Beal discussing the morality of benefiting from net-negative events.

Even older editorial from Ross Douthat arguing that we don't have enough cults these days. I wonder if he still feels that way.

The European Space Agency experiments with using Lunar materials for additive manufacturing.

Stratolaunch Systems, which I'd honestly forgotten about, rolled out its aircraft for test flights.

In typical fashion, it turns out regulations were the biggest hurdle in building a luxurious $20,000 house, though the designers aren't doing themselves any favors by insisting their methods create more jobs at a living wage.

Xenon gas concentrations measured by Rosetta provide further evidence than comets contributed to Earth's early atmosphere.

Noah Smith gives us a visceral rationality lesson in the Shouting Class.

Some arguments against fallacy-ology. I agree with the general position here (there might be a draft lurking around on the same topic) though think it could be stated better.

Science fiction glossary for your writing needs.

Sarah C on survival mindsets versus status mindsets.

A quasi-utilitarian argument for small government. By no means airtight, but worth a read.

A Clearer Example

A friend misunderstood my post on bike-shedding and bottomless pits. This is my fault, I should have realized anything so short and seemingly concise would be inadequate to communicate what I really meant. Remind me to write on epistemic distance sometime.

Allow me to present a clearer example of the difference: environmentalism.

Bike-shedding, for the environmentalist, would be the sort of things most of us were subjected to in kindergarten, about recycling small scraps of paper, turning off the faucet, and walking instead of driving short distances.

To be clear, these are generally of direct self-interest or useful for signalling that you're a good neighbor, but have little impact on the environment as a whole. Your individually not recycling will have a negligible impact on the global biosphere, even compounded over the course of your entire life. 

(In fact, it might actually make things worse, considering the energy costs to melt down and reuse certain materials. Metals are generally a good bargain, plastics and glass, less so. A good heuristic to use is whether manufacturers would pay for the materials, even before the government started subsidizing recycling out the wazoo.)

The environmentalist bottomless pit looks more like this:

This was the sort of thing I had in mind when writing about "increasingly impractical demands". These sorts of requests can not be met, except through extreme privation or, more plausibly, voluntary human extinction. Neither of those are realistic nor desirable goals.

When I read such things, my take away is that the speaker has no actionable agenda short of completely solving the problem permanently. As someone who knows a thing or two about interminable projects and the depression they introduce, let me assure you that that is not the approach you want to take.

Or rather, it's the approach you don't want to take assuming that your goal is to solve the problem. As I said before, for many movements, it really isn't. And I can't help but wonder if that's true for deep ecology folks as well.

If your goal is to see legitimate improvements in the world, then avoiding these twin failure modes is very important. In many ways they are not dichotomies: many movements play one off the other. The feminist movement, for instance, will often fight for trivial changes, barely even symbolic ones, in the name of "dismantling the patriarchy". Don't even get me started on the libertarians again.

This is an area where the effective altruist movement deserves some praise for trying to find the best ways to improve a given situation and then doing it. I would like to see some expansion into long term issues, but as we know there's reason to be wary of that.

Giving the Monkey What He Wants

[Please understand that this is a practical metaphor, not a scientific model of human psychology.]

One of my favorite pieces of motivational psychology is the idea of self-loyalty, which suggests that it is much easier to overcome willpower sinks, genuinely difficult tasks, and generalized akrasia if you can convincingly say to yourself, "yes, this currently sucks, but I'll have fun later". In other words, if you take consistent good care of your body and mind, it will deliver when you need it to.

My spin on this idea is putting your desire for sleep, entertainment, relaxation, and so on into a box called the monkey. This is a similar notion to the ape-brain, but that phrase often comes off slightly antagonistic. That's not what I'm going for here.

It may shock you to learn that he's not your enemy.

The monkey is you. It's the part of you that wants both physical and intellectual pleasures. The part that wants to sleep in, the part that wants to read books and watch movies, that part that wants to eat delicious meals. The part that wants hugs and camaraderie and an endless supply of kitten gifs.

Generally, the monkey will make very reasonable requests. Give him eight hours of sleep a night, enough food of sufficient quality, and a decent amount of entertainment and he will go along with whatever work you need to get done. Many times, that work will even benefit the monkey down the road (provided you pay up), but the monkey is not particularly smart.

More importantly, the monkey's trust is easily damaged. Willpower varies between individuals, so certain people can power through longer than others, but on the whole the monkey will eventually throw and fit and refuse to go along until some or all of his needs are met.

When this happens regularly, his demands will increase, just like a creditor will raise the interest rate on debts they're worried won't be paid back. Just like with creditors, this does not necessarily increase the odds of getting what's wanted, but is a rational response in the short term. Convincing the bank agent to keep your rates low requires evidence that you will be able to pay. Similarly, convincing the monkey to back down will require that you demonstrate that you do, in fact, have his best interests at heart.

If you consistently give the monkey what he wants, an occasional privation will not require a huge leap of intellectual faith. If, however, you don't pay your debts reliably, you can bet the monkey will be very unlikely to trust you in the future.

Promising the monkey a fortnight of rest and relaxation, of time to work on recreation and projects strictly selfish in purpose, is how I got through the last month of school projects and exams. The monkey did not want to do it, but he's sufficiently perceptive to realize that I was serious. Now it's time to pay up.

C'mon, give him what he wants.

This fall I will be taking senior design, along with three other technical classes. This will not be an easy undertaking, and I've been greatly concerned about my ability to meet those challenges. Another school break spent suffering and I won't be. Only if I lay down enough principal during May and August will I make graduation on time.

So, for the next few weeks, I'll be giving the monkey what he wants. Then it's back to work, but with a mind towards keeping that part of me not subdued but satisfied.

Impulse Control

During times of stress, like exam season, I can frequently be found reading about esoterica on the internet or cleaning up messes that have been awaiting attention for months. One could easily pin this behavior on procrastination, and that's certainly been a part of it, but such phenomena can also be attributed to low-impulse control.

It's harder to avoid temptations and distractions when you're tired. Think about how many times you've ended up reading or checking social media before bed when you know that you're better off going to sleep and doing that sort of thing in the morning (or not at all). Being tired makes it harder to ignore the appeal of one more click, page, or scroll.

Stress increases fatigue [citation needed]. Stress can reduce your impulse control, but stress also heightens your awareness of all the little issues in your surroundings. Evolutionarily this is great, because it's good to notice the snake when you're running from the tiger. In the modern world, not so much. Suddenly it's desperately important to look up who that actor was in a film you saw and didn't care for eight years ago, or scrub down the bathroom, or whatever. You're going to notice problems that weren't quite able to cross the threshold of perception before.

Another way in which our history comes back to bite us.

The take-away here is to plan your time wisely in times of lower stress. Keep your space clean and up to snuff. Deal with all those pressing issues like bills or groceries in a regular fashion. Don't pollute your mindspace with all sorts of nonsense. Make life easier for future selves.

Why yes, I am talking about you, Mom and Dad.

April Links

April Fool's File: Humanoid History posts Apollo 19 command Fred Haise on the moon, CERN announces that an ancient particle accelerator has been discovered on Mars, and Scott Alexander publishes a previously unseen essay by G. K. Chesterton on AI risk. Speaking of AI, Elon Musk's research company deploys a robot that can detect spam. As in physical spam. And finally, there's my German Researcher Discovers Most Efficient Path to Mars.

But on a more serious note, some argue that OpenAI is actually an impediment to AI safety work.

New political humor: Hey Girl Neil Gorsuch.

That one time Western civilization forgot how to prevent scurvy. An interesting study of science history, nutrition, and just plain history.

Apparently, 1984 movie adaptation of Dune produced a coloring book. For children.

Election hot-takes are a touch passé, but this article in The Atlantic summarizes my feelings about liberals' role in producing President Trump.

Speaking of Trump, recent remarks indicate he wants to massively accelerate NASA's schedule for getting astronauts to Mars. As an aerospace engineer, I question the feasibility of this project, but as an undergrad looking for jobs in spacecraft design, can't complain too much.

The Imperial March in Major Key.

March Links

Siderea writes about social class in America. David Friedman discusses assortative mating. On a related note, Putanumonit wants you to make your relationship choices using math. I want you to save the world using math.

Sarah Constantin warns us of the peril of the sublime.

Some theory of consciousness stuff, for the people who are into that sort of thing.

I haven't read this link but I'm putting it in here so I'll read it when I'm bored someday.

Katja Grace on threat erosion.

A lot of people have been rediscovering their abstract hatred for The Bell Curve lately, so Quillette decided to address the fact that most people haven't read it and hate it for expressing milquetoast opinions supported by the body of evidence. Meanwhile, Simon Penner discusses religiosity in politics. Also consider: safety nets protected by moats.

Ribbonfarm: the limits of epistemic hygiene.

Scott Alexander reviews Seeing Like A State. Big take-away: I pretty much already see like a state and have trouble imagining not seeing that way. So does that mean nerds are a systematized-era invention?

UK triggers Article 50.

SpaceX successfully launches and lands Falcon 9 using the first stage that launched CRS 8 last April. By my count, that's two correct, one incorrect in the last week for my 2017 predictions.

On Education

The value of education to a rationalist comes not from the acquisition of knowledge, but the illustration of its absence. Now learning facts and relationships is crucial for successfully navigating the world, but recognizing the gaps in your map is arguably more important. 

Put it this way: Making the right decision when you know the truth is easy. Making the right decision when you don't know is hard. Making the right decision when you don't know that you don't know the truth is hard but feels easy, so you're unlikely to notice your mistake until it comes back to bite you.

Effective education, then, is not so much about obtaining information as constructing a framework within which to organize information and quantify uncertainty about that information. An intelligent scholar knows of many fields which he does not have a clear picture of the content of, so that, should he require that content, he can acquire it quickly and efficiently. He does not necessarily carry around that knowledge, but knowing that it exists, can grapple with questions which concern it.

One of my many concerns with the utility of conventional schooling is that it does not adequately communicate this theory of scholarship and consequently stunts the intellectual growth of, well, everyone. This is, probably, my greatest cause for trepidation when considering foundational education projects.

By foundational education projects, I'm referring to things in the vein of Crash Course, which present the basic content of subjects in new formats in hopes of promoting wider consumption. A higher cultural baseline would, I think, be a good thing, but these projects do not necessarily tackle every aspect implicit in such projects. Simply communicating information, as stated above, does not in itself represent a victory condition for society. I worry that this is merely giving people enough rope to hang themselves.

Ideally, the approach taken instead would be to provide a background level of knowledge for all subjects, highlighting the degree of the student's ignorance, and then allowing them to pursue further information in those fields which attract their interested. Nominally, one could model the existing education system as this: primary and secondary school as the background information phase, undergraduate college as the focus on a particular field, and graduate school as diving into a narrow subfield.

In practice, this is not really what is happening. Each level of the current system is subject to its own sets of contradictory incentives with little if any coordination between levels. Furthermore, the student would require an extremely low time preference for us to treat this model as even slightly successful.

Allowing higher specialization at an earlier stage requires more resources in the traditional classroom. It would not require nearly so many resources in alternative approaches (such as the flipped classroom or autonomous online learning), but I have extremely little confidence that those will be implemented in a manner which brings more benefits than costs in the next several decades. Deep, genuine change is a rare phenomena. Those of us wishing to cause it have our work cut out for us.

Aside

Last year for Secular Lent, I opted to give up sleeping in, to mixed success. At this point, I can't even sleep in when I tried (no alarm this morning but I was out of bed by 9:00 from sheer boredom), but I killed off my latest jar of Nutella on Monday and decided not to buy a replacement.

Objectivism doesn't promote asceticism, and neither do I, but resetting one's hedonic baseline occasionally allows you to maximize the pleasure derived from given stimuli. And I do eat slightly unhealthy amounts of Nutella, ruining my appetite for dinner. Cutting back in therefore a rational, selfish choice.

Might also end up going off other snack foods, but that will be incidental rather than committal.

February Links

New from LessWrong: Flinching away from truth is often about protecting epistemology. The key insight here is that treating independent variables as necessarily dependent is dangerous. If you think good thing X can only be true if Y is also true, then you're going to be motivated to find evidence for Y's veracity. Anna Salamon explains this better than me, but it's a clever technique to add to your rationality toolkit.

On slightly more practical grounds, Put A Number On It explains how to get rich slowly and avoid the financial hedonic treadmill. There's also a follow-up post about lending to friends and family. One wonders what Jacob is planning to get out of telling us this, but the answer is actually quite mundane: referral bonuses to the investment services he finds most profitable.

The National Weather Service reports that Chicago is going to have its first year on record without snow in January or February.

Scott Alexander has three particularly good posts this month: Considerations on Cost Disease, notes from an AI safety conference, and a repost of his Non-Libertarian FAQ. Also something that looks like fiction which I haven't found time to read yet.

On the pro-libertarian side of things, here's how the GOP tried to prevent another Ron Paul and ended up with Trump instead.

SpaceX announces plans to send tourists around the Moon as early as next year. I've seen some negative reactions to this news, but insufficient context to figure out why they're annoyed. If I had to guess, this could be seen as Elon Musk one-upping NASA's announcement that Exploration Mission 1 may be crewed, but personally I think that's a terrible idea. Flying astronauts on untested rockets is...questionable, and Dragon 2 will be tested unmanned and LEO before sending tourists.

January Links

When Boris Yeltsin visited a Texas supermarket in 1989, he first thought he was in a potemkin village. Then he changed his mind about communist economies.

Smallpox Eradication Day was December 9th. Jai has an excellent post about it, which I reflected over here.

All along you've said "you need to go to college so you can get a good job" but the system was not designed to raise producers, it was designed to raise consumers. Well, here we are. Why are you surprised that they need consumer stamps? Why are you surprised they moved back in with you? "We did the best we could." No you did not, I was there, I saw it. You borrowed against their future, and they can't pay it back. And now you're yelling at them.

The risk of positive thinking. Specifically, visualizing your success may reduce your odds.

American Scientist on chimpanzee hunter behaviors.

Discussion of far-left entryism in Australian politics.

Old RibbonFarm post about community boundaries.

Ars Technica: SpaceX is continuing with plans for worldwide satellite Internet.

The election take to end all election takes. Everyone else can stop now.

Speaking of Trump, Scott Alexander is optimistic about public health appointees, though these are more likely Peter Thiel's handiwork than Trump's.

From the SSC subreddit, an alternative perspective on academic tenure.

Planetary Resources, which hopes to mine asteroids in the near future, made a deal with Bayer to do remote sensing for the agricultural industry. It's pretty tentative for now, but I'm glad there's an intermediate business plan for some of these long-range firms.

The Power of Hindsight: Predictions for 2017

2016 was a mixed bag for me, but one of the negative aspects was being wrong about a lot of factual matters during the year. Some of these were national questions, like who would win the Presidential election. Others were more personal, for instance, consistently expecting worse grades than I ultimately received.

Copying Scott Alexander, I'm going to try rectifying this problem by making a series of predictions about what will happen in 2017. At the end of the year, I'll come back and see how well I did.

With no further ado: my predictions for 2017.

PERSONAL

I will still be living in Kansas: 95%
My parents will have moved into their new house: 90%
My parents will have sold our current house: 80%
I will still be annoyed about it: 70%
I will read 10 books this year: 90%
....12 books: 85%
....15 books: 75%
....20 books: 60%
I will write an average of one blog post per month: 80%
....two blog posts per month: 60%
I will not succeed in a longform fiction writing project this year: 85%
I will not get back together with my ex-girlfriend: 85%
I will not get a new girlfriend: 65%
I will not get a boyfriend: 95%
I will not experience a major political conversion this year: 80%
I will not experience a major religious conversion this year: 95%
I will be able to perform 15 push-ups with ease: 90%
....20 push-ups: 70%
....30 push-ups: 50%
I will not be hospitalized: 95%
I will not begin drinking regularly: 90%
I will not attend a solstice event: 80%
I will participate in the LessWrong community: 70%

ACADEMIC/PROFESSIONAL

I will still be studying aerospace engineering: 95%
....at the University of Kansas: 93%
....on track to graduate in May 2018: 90%
I will end the year with GPA 3.0 or above: 80%
Jayhawk Rocket Design will test fire our hybrid rocket engine: 80%
Jayhawk Rocket Design will fly the hybrid engine on a rocket: 65%
Jayhawk Rocket Design begin work on a two-stage rocket: 70%
I will have had an engineering internship: 70%
I will have a job lined up post-graduation: 60%
I will not be planning to attend grad school: 90%
I will learn Javascript this year: 80%
I will not learn Haskell this year: 80%
I will not begin learning Russian this year: 80%
My French will not improve this year: 75%

SCIENCE/SPACE

Human trials of CRISPR announced: 80%
No successful human clones announced: 65%
Self-driving cars licensed in the US or Canada: 50%
"EM Drive" will be explained by existing physics: 75%
KIC 8462852 will not be satisfactorily explained: 80%
No strong evidence of extra-terrestrial life will be found: 95%
SpaceX launches a reused rocket: 80%
Reused rocket is successful: 70%
Falcon Heavy will fly this year: 65%
No deaths in space this year: 90%
No country leaves the ISS Treaty: 85%

POLITICS/WORLD

Donald Trump will still be President at the end of 2017: 95%
Mike Pence will still be Vice President: 95%
Obamacare will not have been repealed: 60%
United States will not go to war with a nuclear power: 85%
United States will not enter a major new war (>100 US casualties): 70%
North Korean government will not be overthrown or displaced: 95%
North Korean government will not begin liberal reforms: 93%
Theresa May will still be Prime Minister of the United Kingdom: 90%
United Kingdom will not have triggered Article 50: 70%
Ukraine Conflict will not be resolved in 2017: 85%

META

I will remember to score these predictions: 95%
I will have been overconfident in these predictions: 80%

By my count, that comes out to sixty individual predictions. Against the advice of Bryan Caplan, I've decided not to bet on any of them. Maybe next year. Part of this project is about quantifying uncertainty, and I've realized that I'm sufficiently uncertain to put any significant amount of cash on the line.

Happy New Year, everyone!