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!

The Books I Read in 2016

More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon

This book is the sole reason I have the Kindle app on my phone. It was interesting but not terribly exciting in hindsight. I think I would need a better perspective on 1950s telepathy fiction to appreciate whether it's high or low quality. Nevertheless a fun story to watch unfold.

Neuromancer by William Gibson

Unambiguously great, despite what a lot of my classmates said. Neuromancer has aged better than a lot of scifi from that era, though occasionally mundane technologies reminded me of the normalcy field. Overall the story was immersive, well-planned, and engaging. I'm hoping to read the other Sprawl books soon.

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein

My first time rereading in several years, this time to focus on non-political themes. Primarily I was focusing on the AI aspect for an assignment. I still found it quite enjoyable to read, to the point that I really felt like writing for the first time in years. Another reminder that books have more layers than what I picked up in high school.

2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke

I finally picked this up because I wanted to go above-and-beyond with that paper on AI in literature. I may have been a bit resentful with how little serious analysis my professor gave. Clarke's writing is extremely poetic throughout, but the eventual plot wasn't that earth-shattering given that I've seen the movie. There's a lot more detail and cosmetic changes, no major differences in theme. Nevertheless and enjoyable read and convinced me to look at Clarke further.

The Foundations of Morality by Henry Hazlitt

All the books avove, and the three below, in some capacity, were read for my English class this spring. Nominally, I was reading Hazlitt's ethics text during this time. In practice, not so much. Despite owning a physical copy, most of it I read on my phone, a significant chunk during a car ride on Stop Day. Strongly recommended for libertarians, to get a better grasp on utilitarianism. Review here.

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

So much of this book left my head since high school English. Another case where a story doesn't seem that great, but considering when it was written, the book is actually quite impressive. It's cliche but the book was better than the movie (pretty much any version).

The Island of Dr. Moreau by H. G. Wells

Had some good moments but just not that engaging for me. Maybe if my professor hadn't given away the mystery early on, it would have been more exciting. Worth skimming for historical perspective but not something I expect to reread soon.

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

Holy hell has this book not aged well. Post-internet but pre-Web 2.0 results in a very weird mix of idioms. As for the actual plot, meh. There was potential but overall felt badly executed. The antagonist would be relatable if his motives made any sense; the protagonist makes a lot of strange decisions and isn't nearly as engaging. Jumping back and forth in time made for interesting story-telling but couldn't make up for an underwhleming story.

Hive Mind by Garett Jones

Non-fiction about IQ research, specifically applications to social problems. As pointed out in my review, the Jones is asking questions, not giving answers. Definitely worth thinking about.

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

Another reread. Rand definitely does claim to have the answers. I have a few reservations, but her story, style, and themes are still uplifting after all these years. Review of Atlas Shrugged, and the following books, forthcoming.

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

Frame story on about seven different levels. Definitely a book for people who like puzzles and mysteries. And you definitely need a physical copy. I don't really want to spoil it for future readers by talking about the story here, but to say the least I found it interesting.

Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond

Didn't expect to like Jared Diamond, but after multiple commentators recommended it I finally caved and picked up a copy. It was well worth the money--Diamond has effectively written a book about the whole of human history and gives a pretty credible explanation for why geographic factors had a strong influence on how the world looks today.

Redesigning the Kansas City Flag

Roman Mars wants us to adopt better municipal flags. Many city flags go unflown because they're terribly designed in one way or another. Since my city's flag isn't seen very often, I decided to look it up. Here it is:

This flag frustrates me because it is so damn close to being really, really good. It's beautiful, it's simple, it's recognizable, and then some moron decided to write all over it because they didn't trust their own handiwork. That's just depressing. The flag was good, anonymous designer! Believe in yourself!

Unlike a lot of city flags, this one would be very easy to fix. Just remove the writing. That's it. A tricolor with the fountain symbol would be a gorgeous banner for then entire KC Metro.

Seriously, it took 15 seconds in MS Paint to clean it up:

As a country, we need symbols of non-exclusionary communities right now. Municipal flags are such symbols. It wouldn't be hard to change this. Consider writing the mayor or city council members. 

Kansas City can come together even better with clean, coherent images of who we are. An improved flag is the quickest and easiest way forward.