Fuseki.net

This is a new type of very pro-american video

2026-07-13T00:00:00Z

Commentary

Is this for eral? not sure. But I'm testing it with a new page

3:24 "I was overthinking"

I like this guy! - 3:42 "Hey man how is it going" => leading to suspicion!

Index

2026-07-12T00:00:00Z

Projects

Mortal Coil
Chartsweep 90s - mashup of every #1 hit song of the 90s
Chartsweep 80s
Covering Free Polyominos
Pixel walks
OEIS Sequence related to mortal coil
Chartsweep MP3s — the actual mashup audio files
Mortal Coil Levels — puzzle level solutions by grid size
Mortal Coil solver images — solver output diagrams
Partitions — partition math project
Connections — connections visualization (d3, 2014)
First Set Making — photos of making a Go set
Altitude Maps — 3D elevation viewer
Reading Eyes
Factorio Screenshots — enormous factory layout PNGs
Revisiting the same place — Beijing 2014–?
Casablanca — frame captures
Face recognition OCR overload
DZM — photo annotation dots overlay
Narbonne — tile game diagrams
Go patterns — named go shapes
Rotated maps

Pictures

Trip to Iceland
Trip continued to Europe
South Korea, China, Japan 2019
"Everyday Tourism" around San Mateo
Kochi, Japan 2014
Beijing photos
Foster City aligner — 1962 vs 2025 aerial photo alignment tool
Thailand — 2001–02 trip (incl. Cambodia)
Street photography from China
Pictures of Zhuzhou, Hunan, China.

Other

ernop github
my Goodreads
@happy_sort on Twitter
akasatanahamayarawan@gmail.com

Groups

[paused] SF scifi short story reading group
Beijing Go Club
Beijing Scifi Reading Group
Old homepage of the Beijing scifi reading group
Programming puzzle group — a puzzle group I created and ran in Beijing

Absolute vs Relative Truth

2021-10-25T00:00:00Z

How do you vote on amazon?

If you see a product rated 4.8, with 1000 ratings, and you think the rating should be 4, what should you do?

vote 4 = you believe in asymptotic approach to truth. This is "absolute truth". This is a naive trusting view, that if everyone says what they see from their own point of view, on average things will work out.
vote 1 = you have more immediate influence, but can still be truth aligned. This is "relative truth".

Someone taking your action out of context would get the wrong idea; but someone looking at the world you create will actually get a more accurate view (accurate relative to your view)

So what's the problem with relative truth?

It masks a third type of voter - one who isn't concerned with truth at all. Example: a biased voter being paid by a member of the marketplace to manipulate public opinion.

The advantage "absolute truth" people have over this third manipulative type is that they can locally justify their behavior.

They can say "look, I regularly use the product, but didn't recommend it to my friends; it is credible that I think of it as a 4". But if questioned, a "relative truth" voter has a harder time explaining his behavior. Despite rating it a 1, he didn't return the product, and uses it daily. This is detectably inconsistent. He may make justifications like "but I'm just trying to meta-adjust the average rating and increase my personal power, because i strongly believe the correct rating is a 4!". But this does not distinguish him from type 3 manipulators who make the same argument, while hiding the fact that they're being paid for their ratings.

How does this fit in with the metagame?

Good beats evil, because evil can't cooperate?
Evil will always win, because good is dumb?

What's the problem with absolute truth?

It's vulnerable to manipulators. Relative truth voters' power is overrepresented because they use the full voting range.

What's the problem with relative voters?

Tolerance of them masks the actions of manipulators.

Some other thoughts

Power

People who are effective have good reason to have more confidence in themselves, and are tempted to have more power, and exaggerate their claims. The ends justify the means.

Psychology

Evolution also fell for this. "Absolute truth" evolution is reasonable, testing hypothesis etc. "Relative truth" evolution just monitors an individual's style, confidence, and tries to shortcut the cost of really understanding things and doing experiments.

This works great until it is common, at which point you both don't have enough people trying to get to truth, and the market for manipulators is rich, to exploit the earlier attempted exploiters.

Another side effect:

This bias towards meta-evaluation of presentation of facts is inherent even in people who try to be as reasonable as possible. So even for someone leading scientists (to pick an example profession), intentionally overstating your confidence level will assuage their internal doubts from their built-in confidence detectors too.

So in this case we observe heavy polarization. True evaluators may range from 40%-60% confidence; but this logic pushes the 40s to zero and the 60s to 100.

The meta-defense is to 1) resist this everywhere 2) precommit to exposing your doubts 3) resist the temptation of confidence and certainty 4) rake in the profits paid to you by reality 5) move the foundation of human though away from exploitable evaluation strategies.

In practice this means being suspicious of people with exceptionally high charisma or confidence. A useful test to disqualify basic manipulators is press them to admit they have made a mistake. V0 of their strategy will have a hard time. Of course, truly expert manipulators have built in humility.

Another strategy is to observe "from a distance" - quantify things as much as possible and try to look at the diff between results when a person is involved or not. If you can detect a fault, even when everyone around someone is raving about them, it can be a sign of a manipulator.

Structural issues

Media is incentivized to not look too closely at their own system, since more absolute truth based systems would have on average lower confidence levels and be less attractive to naive audiences. This is why news and punditry is not interested at all in verifying correctness of retroactively evaluating people's motives to see if they are "relative truth" or "manipulators".

Does trust level of a society matter?

Much of society is about indoctrination of young people into absolute truth, to make them more pliable for the actual manipulators. This happens more when there is diversity leading to contact between people who literally don't care about each other at all. i.e. psychological manipulation of african slaves' worldviews in the US south was probably more severe than contemporary indoctrination into beliefs in the north for co-culturalists. Actually caring about someone for cultural reasons tends to increase retribution for manipulative behaviors (since the connection is stronger;). Similar example: restaurants in a train station are much more likely to be bad deals than ones in small towns with strong reputation maintenance systems.

What's the equilibrium

Absolute truth is really good for dealing with the real universe. You can trust a good but not power-motivated physicist's numbers; but a relative truth physicist can justify things like "I'm smarter than X, so I will say Y to increase my power to lead to more truth later on". The scary thing is that it requires counter-manipulation to defeat people like this (whether they're actually truth aligned or are just pure power manipulators).

But if a group is too good at this, or has too low of a truth value, they will be beaten on the merits.

In poker there is a clear equilibrium; as much as many lifelong absolute truth believers hate it, correct play involves a precise level of manipulation & misrepresentation. But even poker has a strong meta-control - the rules of the game are fixed and it's rare to have collaboration between dealers & players to distort the game entirely. In the real world there is no such deal so it's very hard to really get a safe area. The only real limitation is individual minds and their genetic / cultural tendencies towards or away from truth, which while weak, can certainly be imagined to be even weaker in a sci-fi dystopia.

Free Startup Ideas

2021-10-25T00:00:00Z

scihub for fan-source audio streams of sports - Fan Commentary on Sports Broadcasts
hot-or-not as a service - calibrated validated reviewers give paid feedback to your queries - double sided markets. "I want a senior partner at a law firm to review this outfit & my resume"
Chaos testing unavailability of aspects of life. Every N days remove each app from your phone; see how well you do without it and what variations that pushes you into. Unpredictable. Same for a system monitoring your internet usage.
Conversation profiler - listens to and characterizes metadata about conversation:
time spent speaking
emotional tone
for every pairwise combination what is the tone?
Interruption rate by person
Able to answer questions like "do I interrupt too much" or "who should we let talk more?", or monitor
usable during (vibration notifications) or after a conversation (retrospective)

Outcome manipulation for autobattler games

2021-10-25T00:00:00Z

How to manipulate randomness in games, and how it may already be happening.

TL;DR: games which can accurately simulate results of parts of the game may already not be honest about RNG use, possibly to your benefit, possibly against it.

Poker example:

There is no more player input and the outcome depends on random variables. A pair of Tens wins ~54% of the time vs AK. In normal poker, the EV of each is proportional but with high variance. In EV Poker, actual returns match expected returns (since you reward based on simulated actual equity).

But in this mode, you reward based on the median of the simulations. So TT vs AK would be simulated as:

+1
+1
+1 ... (54 of these)
0 (<1 of these)
-1
-1
-1 ... (46 of these)

Then you would take the median (+1) and reward all the money to TT 100% of the time. EV Poker rewards you based on actual equity, but this is something different. Does it even still reward quick play? The meta for going all-in would definitely change.

Storybook Brawl example

This is a game where you build an army and then the game has them fight vs another army. Skill in building the army matters, but the order that your guys attack, and who they target, is randomly chosen, and it really matters. Watching the outcomes of fights, it's infuriating how random it all seems. Better players still win more often, but there is a huge amount of variance. Or is there?

This game also has the property that there is a clear results, and you can determine the win margin numerically. The "score" for each simulation doesn't capture 100% of the meaningful variation - i.e. you can "win by X" in good or bad ways; but the score captures most of the meaningful variation.

What if this game is already doing this - simulating N battles, and then picking the one to show the players based on some algo? They may not just be choosing the median - there are all kinds of interesting choice systems you could use.

How would games choose which random outcome to give the player?

median - likely boring
most amazing - in either direction
based on user stage in the funnel
based on a personality profile of the user

All of these are doable with and without preservation of statistical qualities, fairness, and/or detectability.

Giving amazing experiences

The game can quantify how "amazing" or "cool-looking" an outcome is! i.e. if it sims a fight which you lose 99% of the time, wouldn't it be amazing to display the 1% battle as the "actual outcome"? If you're watching you'll have a sense of dread before the battle - but as you watch your army continuously get lucky, you'll be thrilled! If I were an evil PM, I'd intentionally set up new players to experience something like this in their first play session.

What I'd actually do is create a list of amazing and cool mechanics about the game, then just keep picking sims which expose them to the user. Most users wouldn't pick up on it, and would have consistently amazing experiences.

In poker this would result in cracking aces more often than probability would result in - or you could go the other way and choose the median and punish speculative play.

This is the randomness axis

It's typically thought that more randomness is friendly to casual players, and hardcore players like reduced randomness.

This may already be happening everywhere!

We know that PvM games already manipulate randomness / enemy levels / rewards to keep players hooked
But for PvP games in an environment, if you can simulate player behavior, you can also just directly measure the simulated outcomes of battles as you vary the input params you control (the rng seed, rewards, environment etc.) and give a result that you calculate will optimize your company's value function.
i.e. not losing a whale who's showing signs of flaking out.
or burning the experience of someone who's hard core addicted already

Compare this to a game like Slay the Spire

This game has additional properties that make it pure:

single player
single random seed determines all outcomes
choices presented to the user have little / no feedback based on user success ** i.e. if you are about to die the game won't go easier. Your hit points or power level rarely is used as input for game decisions.

But a Slay the Spire version of this may still be interesting.

Imagine you had a reasonable AI player for STS
Before every fight, the engine might simulate 1000 battles, then pick the seed which had the median outcome.
this seed mainly controls card shuffle order, and also enemy behavior (which has scoped randomness)

It's interesting to think about how this would effect STS. Picking the seed from the extremes would definitely make you die more. So picking the median would tend to completely eliminate any enemy behavior which has <50% probability. So I can't claim that this is "best-play preserving" which is unfortunate.

Overall the goal is to find a way to truly and quickly evaluate skill in games which have a lot of randomness in them.

There is Randomness in Chess

2021-10-25T00:00:00Z

At high levels, if you play a trap line which your opponent HAS prepared for, you may lose. If they haven't prepared for it, you are more likely to win.

Your results depend on an unknowable element - whether your opponent has prepared or not. Therefore, chess (as played vs real opponents in reality) has randomness. I'm not saying the pure game has randomness. Obviously it doesn't. And games like poker have randomness even under perfect play, while with perfect play there is no randomness is chess.

Is this an invalid definition of random? Is randomness only really random if it is generated during the event?

My answer is no. Imagine you are playing poker - a random game, right?

Now imagine that the seed used in the RNG was secretly generated and stored a year ago. And you didn't know that, and you played a tournament thinking you were playing "random" poker hands. Now that you know the seed was old, do you now think that the poker you were playing was not random?

I doubt it. Therefore, randomness means "you don't have a way to know a hidden variable which partially determines your results in a competition". In the chess case that variable is the state of your opponent's preparation. Is duplicate bridge not random? The hands are preset and the same for every table (for comparability) - but from your POV they're still random.

Does it matter that you can sometimes figure out opponent preparation by looking at their past games? Well, imagine that occasionally (but not always) the dealer flashes the opponents cards. Does that mean the actual poker tournament is not random? No. It would only not be random if you had full knowledge of every hand, before the tournament. The fact that there are occasional leaks of secret information in both the poker and chess does not mean that they are not random.

Violations of Calories in, calories out

2021-09-07T00:00:00Z

Simple violations

Have your hand chopped off. Total calorie value of your body does NOT match your ingestion.
Eat a laxative or something to make you vomit right after eating.
Eat a food which actively destroys digestive enzymes.
Eat a nanite which literally destroys glucose in your blood.
Eat a nanite which literally destroys fat cells and causes them to be emitted from your body.
Eat a hard small nut with super high density sugar inside, which doesn't get digested - i.e. birds eating seeds which they can't digest. In your calculations of calories consumed by birds, have you evaluated their digestive efficiency?

Okay you may say these are all cheats because it's "really" about "fully digesting" the food. But yes, that's the whole claim in the first place. Defenders of the claim retreat to "calories actually absorbed" when challenged, but normally present it as "Calories going in your mouth". But even absorption is not really clear since you can still lose calories this way too.

The missing calculation is "Calories out" also includes nutrition not absorbed. But the conventional way to figure out calories of a food assumes 100% conversion, right? So this is clearly a hole. If you use "calories in" derived this way, and only consider exercise as a way to generate calories out, it's no wonder that your predictions don't come true.

Another scenario

Give someone 2k calories, once a day
Give someone 4k calories, every 2 days
Give someone 40k calories, every 20 days

Do you really claim that their weight would be identical in these cases? Even assuming identical exercise and heart rate profiles.

Okay, how about "Give someone 100k calories, every 50 days". Why does your model fail here?

Are you so sure you want to use weight?

Feed someone 2 pounds of water => I have changed their weight with no calorie change. So what even is the original claim? It's actually about distribution of non-water mass.
When someone breathes in the air has weight - and yet it has no calories.

So the claim is unclear.

Even more example

2k calories in twinkies vs 2k calories in lysine (pure lysine)

Why in the world would you think the results after a month of this would be the same?

So around the naive claim is a million unstated assumptions - which are actually being violated in reality all the time. What's probably really happening is that the response curves for absorption and retention for different types of ingredients are not the same; you have differing scopes to "gain weight/muscle/fat" based on the dynamic situation.

Analysis of online "Took Ya Long Enough" type comments

2021-08-27T00:00:00Z

"Took ya long enough"

If you have been negotiating or pressuring someone to do something, and they give in, and then you criticize them, you are shrinking the influence you have, since you're lessening the "profit your adversary can make by complying to your wishes"

Relative Analysis

So the canonical solution to this is, no matter how bad someone has been in the past, if they then take the "most positive for you" attitude, you need to reward them. This is why cops don't (shouldn't) beat criminals who turn themselves in, no matter how bad the crime was. That's why cops are nice to criminals who flip sides. Imagine if cops just laughed at someone who tried to confess and implicate other bad criminals: "took ya long enough".

Horrible metagame too

Being known for punishing compliance is awful as well.

So why do we see this so often?

When a company implements a long-delayed feature, we still see lots of people saying "took you long enough". Why do we see such an ineffective strategy?

I think it's because:

companies can't be seen to care about complying to user demands (although they do care)
so companies take care to only indirectly reply to user complaints
users interpret this as being ignored and feel powerless, leading to bad influence hygiene ("took ya long enough")
companies get accustomed to users being unhappy regardless of company actions, resulting in less effort to satisfy users.
users rage together (actually: signal their pathetic weak condition) for bonding purposes

TLDR: companies have reasons not to openly express their care to customers, customers feel powerless and have impotent rage.

Missing features on YouTube 2020

2021-08-21T00:00:00Z

Friend network

If a bunch of my friends have seen / liked a video or a channel, I should be asked to evaluate it. Probably blocked because the opt-in flow for friends isn't fun.

Sharing

I'd like to have an easy way to share a feed of "liked" or "shared" videos as a blog, not as individual sharing actions. In the current setup you can share individual videos but not channels, and not in a repeatable way (as rss would be, for example)

Automatic intro skipping

Detect those animated 1-5s long intros that people put, even on short videos, and automatically skip them. They rarely have sound, which can help skipping them.

List of Patreon Subs with Justification

2021-07-18T00:00:00Z

Patreon is pretty great. The psychological reward from sponsoring someone who is doing something great is extremely rewarding at a low cost. 5$ a month per person is totally worth it.

TheZvi

A former pro (?) magic the gathering player who applies similar thought processes (optimization, skepticism of experts) to looking at various countries coronavirus and vaccine response.

Coronavirus Analytical Blog

Yourmoviesucks / Adam Johnston

Extremely opinionated and funny movie reviewer. More famous for deeply analysing failed movies than those that are good.

TheJapanChannel

Curmudgeonly western guy with a Japanese wife, living in a rural area in Japan. He's a bit stuck in his own mindset, but is also pretty observant about Japanese cultural differences. Mainly he just documents daily occurrances (traffic, happenings, design, etc) with a video camera he always has with him.

CGP Grey

Extremely idiosyncratic and particular American who works as a school teacher in the UK. He is very interested in systems and produces videos on things like voting, the precise differences between the UK/Britain/England, YouTube internals and UI, etc. He also has a podcast with the guy behind the Numberphile series. Very thoughtful and aware; there should be more people like him. He has a large following.

Scott Alexander

Creator of Slate Star Codex and thought leader in the rationality/economics/psychology sphere. Associated with less wrong, EA, and the rationality movement. Extremely good blog. Lately he's been working to increase the reach of the community and sponsoring meetups, where there are always interesting people. He also runs an annual large psychological survey and mines it for hypothesis. Amazingly productive in many areas.

Quillette

Trying to restore realism to lefty caring thought, and resist cancel culture.

CaspianReport

Amateur Geopolitics, worldwide with a focus on Central Asia. Similar to Wendover productions, hitting a certain type of political/human interaction on large, long time scales.

CaryHuang

Crazily creative visual artist who is also a genius and goes to Stanford. His main thing is Anthropomorphizing EVERYTHING. As a teenager he produced humanized virtual marble run videos that have millions of views. Now he regularly produces videos feature a large cast of anthropomorphized characters based on letters, numbers, and everyday objects, exploring their personalities and interactions. He's also interested in community building; there is some kind of user group very intensely involved in his creations. I cannot overstate how anthropomorphization is his main focus in everything he does. Battle for Dream Island is one of his creations. His youtube has 460k subs. The Amazing Marble race is one of his older videos, and is the kind that first let me discover him - 1m views. Recently he's been producing ML learning videos with excellent (fit for humans - anthropomorphized) explanations.

Gwern Branwen

DIY independent researcher into medicine/psychology/neotropics/darkweb/genetics/futurism. Super analytical and statistical. Similar role as Scott Alexander in trying to connect science to reality. He has an extensive website which experiments with new hypertext layouts, with hundreds of investigative pages on various subjects. Really big on A/B testing and self-experimentation. He also does useful literature surveys on things that affect the mind, similar to Scott Alexander.

Gwern's website

3blue1brown

Amazing visualizations and explanations of math concepts. Hints at a much better way to do education. Can explain hard Putnam-level problems visually such that they are almost understandable for normal people. You can't help but feel inspired, and sad at the failure of our education system to explain the geometric concepts behind math.

3blue1brown's youtube channel

Xah Lee

Outsider, formerly homeless, extreme person interested in CS and culture. Self-publishes a website with thousands of tutorial / opinion pages. Possibly similar to Sam Sloan - extremely productive, wide interests, obsessive, and pretty disagreeable.

His website

Ruben Sim

Banned hundreds of times from Roblox, now produces trolly but really creative machinimata set in Roblox. Definitely juvenile/focused on irreverence. He explores an art style that few people can pull off, and some of them are really funny.

Gopro Yeonwoo

A Korean female professional go player who uses alphago to analyse and explain her games and go techniques.

TheraminTrees

Really empathetic psychologist who talks about totalism, black and white thinking, and his own journey out of controlling religions and ideologies. Great voice and engrossing production. This kind of post-religion but not fully leftist/nihilist person is really appealing to me.

AlexanderWales

Rational fiction writer of many good stories. Now writing "Worth The Candle", but slowly.

Mormon Stories Podcast

Hosted by an excommunicated Mormon; far from hating the church, he loves it and is trying to help it reform; to keep a lot of its value and resolve problems with in two main areas: its truth claims, and clerical abuse. He produces very long form (2-5 hour) interviews with people in the Mormon space (religion researchers, ex-Mormons, etc.). He has a nice way of asking questions of them and exploring their faith journeys. He's inspiring as a man who stands of for traditional good things, while rejecting its failures. So much of modern life is full of despair and alienation; I hope he succeeds in finding another way to go forward in the world between being controlled by a blind religion, and the despair of losing it all.

Mormon Stories

ChessNetwork

A chess player who plays blitz tournaments and streams them on youtube. He's a nice guy from Pennsylvania somewhere; my first Patreon sub.

Bay 12 Games - Dwarf Fortress creators

Two guys who have dedicated their lives to exploring a new game format - living off donations (even pre-Patreon) and following their fantasy game creation dream. The game inspired lots of later versions with much smoother UIs. The main guy has given interesting talks about procedural generation of plots at the Roguelike conference.

SenescentSoul - Delve serialized fiction story

In the isekai genre (normal person put into a fantasy world) adventure story. The main character is very analytical about figuring out how to min/max his power in that world, and also figure out how it works. 2.5$/month, totally worth it. 2/2020 there are ~90 chapters available.

About me

2021-06-20T00:00:00Z

Location

I live in *Shenzhen (California, due to coronavirus), via New Jersey, Japan, Beijing, Costa Rica, and California.

Interests

Science Fiction
Evolution
Slate Star codex-like ideas
Chinese
History
Go / games / systems
Social gaming and cooperation / coordination games
Reputation tracking systems

email: akasatanahamayarawan@gmail.com

China Books

2021-06-20T00:00:00Z

Year	Title	Author	Read Year	Result
1987	Life and Death in Shanghai	Nien Cheng	2011	Gripping
2017	The Cultural Revolution	Frank Dikotter	2021	Great
2013	The Tragedy of Liberation	Frank Dikotter	2021	Great
2010	Mao's Great Famine	Frank Dikotter
2008	Tombstone	Yang Jisheng
2020	The World Turned Upside Down	Yang Jisheng
2021	America Second	Isaac Stone Fish
2011	On China	Henry Kissinger	2021	Much better than expected
2001	River Town	Peter Hessler	2008	Good
2011	Country Driving	Peter Hessler	2011	Great
2000	Thunder from the East	Nicholas Kristof	2004	Optimistic
1931	The Good Earth	Pearl S Buck	2005	Existential
1999	God's Chinese Son	Jonathan Spence	2007	Lacking detail
1999	Waiting	Ha Jin	2011	Meh
2011	The private life of Chairman Mao	Tai Hung-chao	2011	Good but not clear how much is anti-Mao propaganda
2010	The Party	Richard McGregor	2021	Amazing, I would read ten more case study books like this.

Story Idea - Sequential Cloning

2021-06-14T00:00:00Z

A story about emotions under cloning

A father dies saving his son
Son grows up and turns out to be infertile (because of the thing that almost killed him)
So he clones and raises his father, father.v2, as his son
The father.v2 finds out and thinks back on the love he felt, and the deep understanding for his nature that was apparent in how he was treated while growing up.
father.v2 re-clones his son, son.v2, along with his natural children, and the cycle continues; this time he doesn't die and is around to see his son grow up.
the generations communicate with a parallel set of diaries
their personalities are relatively different, and they have to adjust or tamp down some traits at certain periods of life. But every decision is informed by the infinite future and past of their relationship.
later, a son meets his father's father (his own clone) and even that guy's dad (his dad's earlier clone) - and it's amazing for them to exchange stories
through social changes the relationship adapts, and there's so much stored history and commitment that they can adapt

Crypto TFR multi-level marketing scheme

2021-06-06T00:00:00Z

A Bitcoin millionaire has two kids. He doesn't want to spoil them, and he doesn't want his name to die out, so he implements a smart contract: Starting even before he dies, 1% of his net worth will be given to his kids annually, split between them proportionally to how many children they have.

Generation 1: originator - commits X money
Generation 2: his two kids
Generation 3: his grandchildren.

As soon as a grandchild is born, their gen2 parent gets 100% of the annual 1% disbursement. Inheritance starts before the death of gen1.

Why would someone do this?

They may have a crazy set of beliefs. The key isn't so much why, as evaluating whether this is a stable or growing strategy. Why do deer eat and have fawns? It doesn't really matter; most of their emotions about it are after-effects; the key point is that it survives. Strategies don't have rationalizations when they're invented; the first multicellular life didn't start with a thesis "it's good to cooperate". The only reason we observe it is because it evolved into us.

Requirements:

crypto oracle for validation of identity - the hard part.
gen1 precommits to doing this by sending their entire fortune to the smart contract.
smart contract design.
Also, this would be designed to be infectious: when all of gen2 dies, the gen1 money has a final distribution based on the proportional reward at that time
this isn't coming out as cash - it goes into new smart contracts, taking each member of gen2 as the founding member of a new contract-dynasty.
alternatively, this could actually be run multi-level - gen2 is rewarded while living for having their own grandchildren.

Since it's unlikely to ever exhaust the money, it would either go on forever motivation to

Failure states - oh, so many, but they make for good plots

An overpopulated world where most computation is locked up in mining, and most people or a significant class makes their living by being rewarded for having kids. This would be somewhat alleviated by it being slightly zero-sum - perhaps if more kids increases the disbursement rate rather than the proportion, it would put a cap on the rewards from this kind of strategy
perversions designed to trick the oracle's methods of determining ancestry; after a few generations ages of generations don't necessarily match up and it could be hard to determine what's going on. i.e. if it were multi-level, there would be advantageous marriages which consider the number of generations from the founder. Eventually there would be people from gen4 and gen8 alive at the same time (due to differing parental age), and they would either be preferred or discriminated against, depending on the relatedness calculation made by the smart contract.
other even worse perversions centered around the mismatch between the conventional meaning of a child - someone loved, cared for, and educated, and the naive way the oracle probably determines ancestry.
like many other crypto ideas, the problem is in forcing a correspondence between reality and what's in the blockchain.
The true failure state is that we only reward temporary survival at one generation. Ideally we'd want to reward it multi-level - reward people for having & raising kids who don't just survive, but go on to thrive and have their own kids. Or at a more human level, kids who do great things. So you could make the reward systems proportional to other achievements - such as the hash rate proven by the child. This has risks along the optimization/exploitation axis. The more you fine-tune your measurements, the harder to do correctly and more exploitable they are. The "Friendly AI problem for TFR-increasing crypto contracts"
another failure state is if the oracle attempted to use genetic similarity to the founder to decide relatedness. This would lead to extreme cloning - which the founder might consider beneficial. But also even worse, if the oracle is dependent on a specific genetic test, being able to trick that test is now extremely valuable.

Why is this even a thing?

I think the difficulties here are because identity isn't real. It's extremely hard to define and track in a rigorous way. Things like hashrate or existence at all are quite a bit easier to verify.

Human Physiology and Detective Stories

2021-06-06T00:00:00Z

Detective stories combine accidents of evolution (blood can be ID'd, someone who's been running breathes faster, etc) with universal themes of conflict and desire.

If our evolution was different, the physics of murder would be different, and stories would change, too.

Identifying the Killer

Appearance

We look different, and are very attuned to even tiny differences in appearance. (1 inch of height difference is less than 2% of a height of 6 feet, but is really noticeable. The difference between extremely short (5') and tall (6'2") is less than 15%. Tiny differences in facial structure are noticable, and change in characteristic ways over time. We have somewhat recognizable style/body shape (although strength/fatness can change a lot). There are alleged plietropic relationships between hormone levels and facial structure, hair growth, voice deepness etc. It's not accepted widely, but nearly every culture traditionally asserts that there is a link between facial appearance and someone's character and emotions.

Smell

To us, everyone mostly smells the same - even if they are distinctive, it can't really be used for identification. But to dogs, we are really distinct.

Gaits

We have recognizable gaits, recognizable faces (except for dopplegangers). We can disguise our face somewhat, but intimates would not be fooled. Our gait is a giveaway to animals - dogs can recognize owners by gait much farther than they can recognize by face - but humans don't usually pay much attention to it.

Gait is probably consistent over a lifetime. Gait reveals historical wounds. Gait reveals muscular development - not usually used, but allegedly a subtle mating symbol - Leg strength a good proxy for overall muscular development.

Voice

We have unique voices, and can distinguish between any of maybe 10,000 voices. Other forms of communication also give off information - the particular language we understand, our accent/locality where we learned it. Then there's word choice, handwriting, vocabulary etc.

Height

After shooting up to full height, we stay almost the same height, decreasing maybe 0.1% per year for the rest of our lives. This is unlike some animals which continuously grow their entire lives - for them, size & age are interchangeable. Plants mostly just keep growing.

Sex

Our sex is set at birth and can't really be changed. The sex of an individual is pretty easy to identify - although again in old age, both sexes lose their distinctive features and become more and more similar.

This is unlike some animals, where different genders are difficult to tell apart visually, or where animals spend most of their lives neuter - or even ones in which most of the population is neuter and works to increase the reproduction of blood relatives.

There are also animals where the different sexes have grossly different body size.

Amputation

We might lose a limb here and there but it's pretty unusual, and usually lethal in primitive environments (compared to the octopus, which can lose / regrow tentacles pretty easily). Swarms of bees can grow/shrink intentionally.

Identity

We are pretty constant in our identity - we don't merge, or split at all unlike some animals. If you are a detective trying to catch a protozoan murderer, and arrive only as he's in the process of splitting in two, who do you arrest?

Twins

The one complication in human murders is when the criminal has a twin. Whether it's a secret one, or an evil one, it really mixes things up. Imagine an intelligent species which reproduced by cloning - very tough for a detective to distinguish between a thousand cloned lizards.

Life Strategy

There are not any clearly defined life strategies for humans, unlike in some animals which have specific types - i.e. the lizard species where males are either tough and try to win conflict to mate, thieves and try to secretly mate, or masqueraders who pretend to be female to get close to other lizards and mate. In such a society, what would be the social status of these life strategies (which do have biological components and can't easily be changed).

Body Parts

In modern times, the tiniest part of the body can be traced to the original through DNA. But for most of human history, blood was just blood. Skin and hair somewhat serve as individual identifiers.

Disease

There are physical problems that affect just one half of the body - and there are ones which affect all of the body below a certain height (head may be ok, or head+shoulders, or head+above waist, etc.) But not the reverse.

Physiological Changes

Many emotional states have fairly visible physical symptoms. But it's not too exact, and fades pretty quickly. Fertility has no visible signs.

Capture & Escape

Movement

Humans travel fastest while alone. (compared to birds / fish / bicyclists, which travel faster in packs) Imagine if two or three guys traveling together would have a big advantage following one guy - they could draft for eachother and save energy while the target got worn out.

Tying People up

It's possible to tie people up fairly well. But it takes time, and it's hard to do in a primitive environment. Vines don't work that well, and won't last long. Ropes work well, and in modern times, people can definitely be disabled.

It's almost impossible to tie up an octopus.

Whales can't be tied up at all - but what would it even mean, since they don't actually do anything. Being tied up is uncomfortable, but doesn't kill us as it would a whale or a hummingbird.

In Hummingbird legal systems, ropes (and wing clippers) would be murder weapons.

Blocking the Senses

We can voluntarily turn off sight, but no other sense. Some drugs can turn off the sense of touch, and some kinds of alcohol can cause blindness.

Numb

Certain sitting positions can make people temporarily numb, limp, or unable to walk.

The Murder

Falling

We can't even fall our own height safely. Cats can fall 10x their height pretty easily - and ants / insects can fall as far as they want. Some species might not fall at all - fish, jellyfish

Eating / Drinking

We can go days without eating, but just a day or two without drinking.

Air

We need it, and fast

Poison

There are tons of types of poison, some detectable, some not.

Getting Away with It

(Apparent) Sanctity of Memory

There are things which change what we think (alcohol, drugs, false memories, amnesia) - but no agent can make us think of particular people, or implant specific memories. Our factual memory is pretty solid (it can fade, but it's hard to change specific things about the past). There is a particular condition which knocks out all personal specific memories, while leaving skills & personality somewhat intact (amnesia).

Fragility of Emotion

But our emotional state is much more fragile - there are drugs, music, people who can make us feel all sorts of emotions. We don't have very good conscious control.

Forced Forgetfulness

There's no way to make someone forget something! But we can only remember short snippets of certain types of information - yet we can remember faces, places, smells forever. A lot of the information we can recall well is perfectly reproducible using paper or words - but the things we can remember well, can't be very exactly communicated this way.

Forced Sleep

Some animals automatically fall asleep when some stimuli happen - I think chickens just pass out when you put their head under their wing.

Communicating Sense Experiences

Using words, we can communicate sound very well, history very well, smell barely at all, touch, heat/cold only roughly. Faces can barely be described at all with words -but can be fairly accurately described with paper (by a skilled artist) Smells can't be described at all, either way. Places can be described fairly well with words, and drawn well.

Mental Illusions

We have a huge subconscious that frequently makes us do insane things. Even when we are trying to be rational, every decision runs through the black box of the subconscious, which can change our view without us even knowing. We also have a big list of problems even within the rational mind.

Sense Illusions

We have some optical illusions related to the way our eyes work - pattern-finding neurons in the back of our eyes that don't work right for certain types of input. There are other weird physical illusions or crosslinked expressions such as sneezes, hiccoughs, funny bones, crying with happiness.

Torture

All senses have possible negative inputs - including rare ones like heat/cold, vertigo, emotions. But most are never used. People don't often try to torture someone by making them taste bad-tasting food, or smell horrible smells, or watch depressing movies.

Just getting by

Sleep

We have physiological signs of lack of sleep, and need to sleep about 1/3 of every day.

Breathing

We desperately need to breathe, all the time. Exercise causes us to make noise - loud breathing.

Stimulation

Humans have no hibernation, and our minds will drive us to insanity if we don't receive physical & social stimulation.

Metabolism

1 week without food, 3 days without water

~6 weeks without vitamin C

Motive

Life Cycle

Most of life is a process of decay, and there is a huge span of years at the end. Lots of animals aren't like this - some insects bigger & better throughout their lives, until the moment of reproduction - which also causes death.

Other animals are fully regenerative, and don't really age.

Time-gapped Reproduction

2021-06-06T00:00:00Z

The Conflict

You send people off to war, but this is misaligned with their survival incentives (to stay home and have kids). This applies individually - but also culturally to how they raise their own children. Even military parents sometimes try to dissuade their kids from following in their footsteps.

I'd like to read a story about this attempted solution:

A society pre-commits to supporting fertility treatments to raise children for fallen soldiers, so that depending on their behavior, even after death their family would continue to grow. This breaks the local "I have to survive" link. Similar to the promise of rewards in heaven - but in reality, implement strong tracking for rewards.

Why is this interesting to think about?

We are likely to observe self-sustaining phenomena: viruses, MLMs, cults. We are not likely to see things which don't grow or adapt. Or, we may evolve into something like this - we already have generation-level social tracking which correlates with reproduction (money, status, fame). The lack of morality of a system like this doesn't protect us from it.

Requirements for this to be self-sustaining

Or, traits a society like this might need to have to actually work.

You don't want the kids to be raised in an orphanage; so there'd have to be an explanation of why people would not mind having kids raised by others - perhaps a tribal organization, or large family structures with strong traditions that individuals could identify with; this would reduce the feeling felt by WEIRD people that they have to personally individually educate their children. Previous attempts to break the parent-child bond (under communism) all failed. But, those systems couldn't offer the rewards of this one. Other systems which give similar rewards (tons of kids) have done quite well.
Individualism and atomization seem viable as explanations for reduction in war - because the ability to have your family taken care of after death is so much weaker than it'd have been a few hundred years ago.
In general disconnecting action & reward opens up risk for exploitation. Especially when you aren't around to make sure the rules are followed, this is exploitable. See many cases of misbehaving male fertility clinic doctors who have 100+ children.

Poker analogy

In poker you try to play to maximize your total expected value over many hands (many lives). But in life you are strongly punished for "losing" a hand, and sometimes people don't play to maximize the expected value to humanity because they are individually tied to their "hand" (life). In poker, a single entity takes all the wins and losses from all hands. But in life we individually treat our score as just the result of our own hand. Some people do expand their view to include the score of their family, region, culture, or nation.

We observe many successful memeplexes like this, sometimes grown out of control and very individually damaging

a computer program that forks itself continuously and soon leads to reset of the computer;
a cult which burns out its victims and prevents them from having relationships - but we observe it because it temporarily was able to convert more people than it destroyed.

In the same way that playing many hands of poker makes it easier to play well (since you aren't tempted to over-value any single situation), allowing individuals to maximize expected value while disregarding individual survival can be net profitable. Not only is this related to the idea here, but it also applies to group membership in general. Feelings of being in allied group (military, tribe) can free people to have group-level optimal behavior rather than individual.

Similarities

Were old Levirate (women marry the brother of their widow) practices a primitive version of this? Beyond the obvious form of serving as a pension/backup, this also has a component where even after death you have additional children you are somewhat related to (1/4 rather than 1/2).

Pensions are another similar idea.

Side effects

How much of human consciousness is already selected under to account for the fact that "if you're too brave/bold, you'll die and be filtered out?". Removing this constraint may not have good consequences. But are we really wedded to this? i.e. if we have parachutes does it make sense to honor our innate fear of heights? Practically, obviously yes since it's painful to feel fear; but are you really committed to preserving your descendant's fear of heights, if you could ensure they live in a world where they never fall?
In general you never want to get into situations where you can't at least evolve your way out of them given enough time. One can argue that older people are already in this situation- people beyond the age of fertility are already unable to exert much influence on the distribution of future genes; this is why it sucks to be old. They do have the ability to socially influence their children, and indeed they are known for being very interested in matchmaking. So by this argument, it's actually more sound to reproduce at the end of life - because now your entire scope of existence is covered by evolution. Some creatures already have this setup, and it's been explored for intelligent species in science fiction.
Something that never happens: A loving newlywed couple suffers a tragedy: the husband unfortunately dies. The wife mourns, but eventually asks a doctor "is there some way I could still have his children?" So the other unspoken flaw here is that human motivation for relationships and children is not fully aligned with "number of living descendants". Companionship, support, protection are also piggybacked onto reproduction. These desires would have to have be satisfied in a successful society like this.

Making "Children are my immortality" more reliable

We already have a variety of social "scores":

Whose correlation with stable strategies & our desires is variable.

money
status

The extreme version for society in general

At the end of someone's life, evaluate how they did - their treatment of others, achievements, etc. Then decide how many descendants they should have. This could be a terrifying society, and easily exploitable by a cabal of old men. Arranged marriage societies in some ways could be viewed as this - but there's a limit to their power since they can't transcend death. Did such societies devolve into something exploitative? Would allowing them to individually reward men or women with extra children, after death, on net improve behavior?

The really bad version, which has historically been practiced

If someone is judged as bad at the end of their life, kill them and all their descendants unto the 7th generation. i.e. in the bible or recently with Saddam Hussein. Obviously super unfair and anti-individualistic, nevertheless the threat of such punishment would force people to think more systematically.

What is lost in time-gapped reproduction?

Separating conception of a child from raising of the child means the family influence aspects of child-rearing are lost. There is doubt about how much this matters, but it's probably nonzero. There are technological adaptations to help here; detailed video diaries & recordings. More group living styles reduce extreme dependence on just the child-parent relationship; given that in such a society, a lot would be known about relationships, it would be possible to cause connections to be formed between generations. Again, tribal living emphasized kin much more than WEIRD people do.

Evaluation - is this a stable system?

It has some advantages in being able to concentrate rewards more intensely. How much of our modern wealth is explicitly because of inequality which riches allow? Extreme rewards lead to extreme behavior, in this case to our net social benefit.

But it's risky to concentrate the right to decide who has kids in any single group. The relative legal freedom we have around reproduction is a great long-term protection - compared to how regulated we are in everything (bike helmets, food warnings), it's amazing how such a major thing (creating a person and raising them with no training) is nearly totally unregulated. This is kind of good - no matter what crazy beliefs people have, in the worst case if they become super unadaptive, resistant individuals will at least be able to grow their way around them. Anti-natalism is locally self-defeating, and resistance to social control of reproduction makes it hard for system-level anti-natalistic beliefs to spread on net.

In fact such a drastic change may not be needed to handle falling TFR. Subcommunities which find a way not to suffer from this are already growing, just like always. Yet again averages are deceiving - TFR 1.5 doesn't mean we are destined to die out; it breaks down into subgroups with TFS <2.1 and >2.1; one of which is dying out and one of which is growing.

Fire Men

2021-05-31T00:00:00Z

For thousands of years of evolutionary history, some guys knew how to make fire and other guys didn't.

I bet the ones who knew how to make fire were pretty popular. Today you can see the remnants of it in our psychology - guys love playing with/making fires, and women love firemen.

There's something somewhat similar related to transportation - isn't it weird just how many guys there are who get totally obsessed with transportation? Cars, Trains, Planes, Bicycles, Skateboards, Motorcycles - they all have huge subcultures fascinated by them. I think this is because before transportation was widely available, there were rare individuals who were interested in it, who were rewarded disproportionately. i.e. there was a village which was just getting by, with lots of starvation, and nobody really traveled around much. There would occasionally be a kid born who got interested in transportation, and who found a way to get out, with enough supplies to support himself. Since people rarely traveled, there easily could have been a great little empty valley just near by which nobody had ever found - or gold just lying on the ground, or any other resource which he knew how to use more efficiently than whoever was there already. So, liking transportation occasionally lets you get an awesome result in life. Over thousands of years, this drive to move, occasionally receiving massive rewards, spread throughout more and more of the population.

Life doesn't Find a Way

2021-05-31T00:00:00Z

People seem to think that a political system of complete control can never exist or sustain itself on earth. I don't know why they think this. The actual size of the Earth is somewhat arbitrarily related to our evolution; humans could have evolved on an Earth with nothing but ocean west of Europe to Asia; and a lot of Asia could have been missing as well. They could have come out of Africa and just found a lot of water. A world this size would be a lot easier to control.

Scientific methods for preventing change can develop a lot faster than evolution can invent new ways out of it; and if the system specifically enforces conformity from an early age, then most individuals who could effect change as adults would be gotten rid of very early on anyway. With a good enough system of control, it would not be impossible to put humanity into a holding pattern. This poses a major existential risk, if you consider this to be a failure. So I think the optimum path for the way we conduct our affairs should give credence to this possibility; giving up a little centralization will slow down the optimum path of development but will reduce the chance of a dead-end.

If you put some chickens in a steel cage with an automatic food dispenser, life will not find a way. You could wait a million years, but they will never evolve their way out of it. If you control evolution by killing any chicken which diverges from standard behavior, they will have even less chance of ever getting out. The machine might break down, but the chickens would all die. It'd be very unlikely that the steel cage would wear away before the machine broke down or ran out of food. There's just a tiny possibility that they break out, overrun the whole planet, evolve into sentient chicken-beings, and later discover the cage and understand where they came from.

So, we should place a lot of value in never getting put into the cage in the first place.

Fair Scoring Rules

2021-04-16T00:00:00Z

Fair Scoring Rules on wikipedia

I have been looking for this for a long time! It is a way to give someone incentives to be honest with you about their real opinions on something.

It starts with the question: if you have a spinner that comes up "red" 60% of the time and "blue" 40%, and I will pay you a dollar each time you predict the result correctly,

how should you structure your guesses?

The wrong answer is: "guess red 60% of the time and blue 40%". That will get you 52% (6060+4040).

Actually, you should guess red 100% of the time, and you will be right 60% of the time. That is the best you can do. Now, say that you happen to know how often the spinner comes up red, but I don't, and I want to extract that information from you - how could I do it? Just asking you what you would bet doesn't tell me anything except that you think that there's a greater than 50% chance it will come up red. So how can I get the rest of the information out of you?

Another example - when we ask a weather reporter whether it'll rain tomorrow, we're really just asking them if they think there's a more than 50% chance of it raining; cause they have nothing to gain by letting you know the real probability is somewhere between 50 and 100% - so they just act confidently and act as if it's 0 or 100% no matter what.

A proper scoring rule fixes that problem - the person should now just tell you what they really think.

So if you are talking to an expert, you can cut through his own attempts to manipulate the answers - the scoring rule lets you give him odds that will reward him for giving you his real prediction.

Jigsaw Puzzle Olympics

2021-04-16T00:00:00Z

Level 1: Competitive jigsaw puzzle solving. Individual or team.

Level 2: Groups of random people are assembled. Two competitors will select people from the teams. So player A will select representatives from the random selection, as will player B. The methods of selecting people vary:

Level 3: personal interview Devising a test which will be administered; the highest scoring players will be your team. If you had only one question to ask someone to determine if they would represent you in a puzzle-solving competition, what would your question be? (No questions about puzzles). How about if you had 5 questions?

Level 4: Design a school curriculum that will be put into place for a period of 50 years. At the end of the period, random (or the top) students from your school will be chosen to represent you in a puzzle solving competition. How would you design the curriculum?

Level 5: A virgin planet has been discovered, with rich plant life but no animals. Design an animal weighing less than 1g; 10,000 of them will be dropped off around the planet. We will return in 1 billion years and submit jigsaw puzzles to the surviving inhabitants. Whoever's society solves them the fastest will be the winner.

Play from here for Slay the Spire

2021-04-16T00:00:00Z

Slaye the spire is a deterministic game with hidden information. One of the most interesting games ever.

Use case I want:

Be watching a streamer
they're about to start a fight
pause the video
copy a code down from the screen into your own StS instance locally
pick up their game at that very point, with the same deck, random seed, etc
play the fight the way you would yourself
try repeatedly
then go back and unpause the stream and see how you did compared to a pro.

This would be epic.

Analogies in other games?

this sort of works for chess & go vs ai, but there are some problems
the ai is too good
it's a huge pain to copy the entire board state out to play through yourself. that's a blocker for 99% of casual attempts to do this.

Stoplight Theory

2021-04-16T00:00:00Z

Say you are going to travel a route with some stoplights. If you don't know the stoplight schedule, then no matter what time you leave, the average length of your trip won't change. This seems obvious but it means that during preparations, you will get to the destination exactly as much earlier as you leave. This is assuming that traffic is random, and doesn't consider acceleration.

Leaving 1 second later will on average get you there a second later.

This only works if you don't know the schedule of the traffic lights.

Another related theory is that even with traffic, leaving later can never make you arrive earlier - at best, it can get you there at the same time.

Acceleration effects

Without acceleration effects (cars at all times move at 0 or max speed), even with known traffic light schedules, leaving later can never get you there earlier. However, with acceleration, leaving later can help you (say on trip A, you come to a complete stop at a light and then go to the destination, but in trip B you leave 1 second later and don't stop at all at the light (say you have a very fast brake and a slow accelerator), - depending on the speed of your accelerator, avoiding that stop could save you more than an entire second).

ITalki Timeline and Thoughts on Learning Mandarin

2021-02-17T00:00:00Z

Timeline

10 Years before italki

Move to China after living in Japan for 3 years, to a rural area in Hunan.

10 days before

Friend says he has a great teacher to buff his Chinese from Sichuan, and they have really interesting political conversations. My level is about A2 - lived in Beijing for years but never worked at it for more than a few months at a time, and knew a lot of Japanese previously which interferes.

1 day before

Was browsing Chinese teachers on here: https://www.italki.com/teachers/chinese. Suddenly decide to sign up for 10 lessons with an older professional teacher

First lesson

Somewhat suffer through it - it's standard unoptimized government school style, and I haven't spoken or studied in about 5 years. My earlier level was about A2 on the EU scale.

+3 days

Still feel enthusiastic about having someone to fix all my grammar mistakes, but realize I should get a younger teacher who I have more in common with and who would be more flexible.

+1 month

Have signed up for a bunch of trial lessons with much better teachers. I'm up to 2 classes in the morning, 2 in the evening, to match China time. Interesting people here - a funny girl who lives in Malta with her bf who likes teaching me very detailed written grammar. An expat Chinese living in Japan who wanted to teach glamorous, sophisticated sounding words and expressions like “搁浅 - stranded”.

+2 months

Getting into the swing of it now. All lessons are freeform by this point. And I have a few new things I like to do:

My lesson plan: I think of an old movie, and come up with a list of words to explain it. What movie is this?

nazi
resistance
peace
police
arrest
restaurant owner
love
resistance
visa

Then I write out a few sentences and try to tell the story.

I have 3-4 classes/day and every day I tell the same story in ever class, getting corrections. Some teachers are strict on pronunciation, others focus on grammar, etc. By trying to tell the same long, emotional story, and really trying to get them to understand it, I get super motivated and also get tons of practice. (Doing this at age 42).

+3 months

Have kept doing this and moved comfortably into B2-B1 range. Now I also tell short stories from my scifi reading group - get to learn lots of words that I care about - alien, ship, floating, space, etc. And because the stories all have a hook, the key scientific element they have to understand to really get the story, I have strong motivation. Memorable stories I told in Chinese: "9 Lives" by Ursula Le Guin - the story of 8 identical genius clones, raised together, and what happens to them when 7 are killed and one is left alone. Another successful but very tough story to tell was Song for Lya, by George R R Martin.

Covering tons of grammar in classes, and getting lots of repetition. There is another level of really knowing a language beyond "being able to remember the anki card" - it's when you know a word because you've used it 20 times in class.

My favorite teachers now:

From Guangdong, used to own her own logistic business in mexico, loves mexican food. As a teacher she's very sharp and confrontational - but it's just because she has high standards. I loved how she corrected everything. She later got very good at giving little capsule summaries of grammar or pronunciation areas I was still having problem with; she also loved to be told stories and would not just listen, but fight back for clarifications, making me explain the reasons things happened and asking why, why, why? And not letting any gaps through.
Chinese stewardess who lives in Dubai - lots of interesting cultural discussion about her life overseas. Good stories, nice slightly cantonese style way of storytelling talking.
Chinese - Shanghainese Yoga teacher who moved to guadalajara to do Yoga there and live overseas indefinitely. Very political, historical debates, close reading of articles, etc.
Young woman who travels around europe with her bf, working as an italki teacher; met her when she was in Estonia, later moved to Latvia. Extremely smart, curious, a reader of Steven Pinker and familiar with western intellectualism. Very considerate, helpful, and persistent.

My daily routine at this point:

Morning classes from 8-10. Then an hour or two of anki before it gets too late. Then 3-4 classes in the evening. I would also do some preparation with docs, mining the skype chats & shared google docs for useful words, and doing story preparation.

Summary

So overall italki was awesome. In 5 months I did 360 lessons. I eventually found some teachers I stuck with for 30-40+ classes, usually meeting each one 2-3 times a week. Cost: about 10-15$/hour per class. Why did I stop? Work got busy and I no longer had any time in the evening.

Thoughts

Will I do it again?

Definitely; as soon as I have that kind of free time.

Would it work with less time invested?

I think brain-wise there is a threshold of 2-3 classes a day where your resistance to just "being" in a language gives up. So I think returns are higher above that level. But it may still be linear for all I know.

How did learning work at that many classes/day?

I'd build up hundreds of words in a sort of "intermediate" state where I'd kind of know the definition, but not really know the usage. I'd try to use them, and every once in a while I'd hit one and could feel it crystalize into a word I know. And it really felt like a single point in time this would happen. And from then on, the word would come out whenever without "reaching".

Around this point there would be so many words in flux, I would identify clusters of 5-10 related words, all in that state at the same time, and would feel pressure write them all down in groups and spend a lesson going over them, making examples with the teacher. That was great fun - talking about every possible way to break/crack/shred/destroy/demolish/bust/ something. There are actually tons of such classes of words in Chinese - feels like as many as in English.

Fun of browsing profiles

It is super fun to browse Italki teacher profiles and watch videos here: https://www.italki.com/teachers/chinese while just thinking that these are all people who've made it. They got through the drudgery of setting this all up, and are on track to expand their worlds. My part in this will be to just try to listen to them, show them my way of thinking, and be grateful for their sincere patience and desire to help.

Thoughts on the relationship with a teacher.

Relationships with teachers in this way is interesting. The new teachers talk about everything; ones farther in keep it professional, and I adopted this method too. Early teacher relationships can be intense because you literally talk and look at each other continuously, while feeling very strong emotions and trying to express yourself as hard as you can; while they're trying to understand you sincerely and with a sense of forgiveness.

Culture variation observations

Asian language teachers often have really well-produced videos - is this the influence of TikTok? I've watched italki teacher intros from all around the world and it's interesting how much local culture comes out. Finnish teachers - embody Finn stereotypes.

How much should you judge people based their video? Sound quality definitely is important. Is there a real correlation between intro video sound quality, and their internet/mic setup & usage during a real lesson? Hard for there not to be, on average. Towards the end I became extremely picky about sound quality - no matter how good a teacher is, if sound sucks then it's no good.

Thoughts on teacher age

What is the value of experience? Older teachers set in their ways? But young ones inexperienced? Pretty big cultural gradient between 25 and 40+. I found teachers < 25 were a bit lazy and loose, very tolerant but without enough fiber or propriety to push me to do things right. And older say >50 were harder to communicate with; typically had worse internet connections; harder to interrupt or derail.

What I look forward to about the lessons?

They're immersive; time seems to just pass. Slight anxiety beforehand, but once the lesson block stops I'm just on and it is over before I know it (even 2-3 hour blocks).
Seeing the teacher and making her giggle/smile/impressing her by saying something correctly, or saying something interesting or creative, is really rewarding.

How student-teacher relationships change over time.

Getting too personal, and sharing information about your family, can make it harder to maintain proper distance so that she can correct you, or you can give guidance But, for early lessons, telling your detailed family history is interesting. They often don't know as much about theirs, or are not willing to share.
The skill a teacher displays in understanding, gently correcting, etc. the student is one of their most important traits. Some are really unclear when you are wrong, or repeat what you said but subtly differently, so you can't tell whether they're correcting you or offering alternatives.

Further thoughts on student-teacher relationships

Depending on the software used by the teacher, sometimes you have a full screen rather close up view of the teacher's face. This is a really intimate connection - you can see how everything you say effects them and their reaction, little twinges of emotion. Because you don't feel as "watched" as in a real life conversation, I think you can look even more closely. So it feels really intimate.

Because there is a break in the line of eyesight, you also can't be sure where they are looking. You can both be staring into the image of each other's eyes, but the line of sight doesn't line up, so you both feel the other person is looking down a little bit (assuming the cameras are mounted on top of the monitor).

Another interesting experience

I signed up for a class with a teacher who's basically a professional dancer / glamour/beauty girl, who is also proud of her contact with the world through italki (which I think is great;). she didn't have much experience and it was a bit tough to get through the first class, although she was nice. Second class: I asked if she knew what improv was (即兴) and she did! So I started a scene just trading off sentences... "I went into the office for the first day of a new job..." etc. and the story kept going and going for 45 minutes. I couldn't believe we kept it up that long, and it was really great. This is a further stage of learning a language - not just words + grammar but how to say things in various ways, and which ones were good - not proficient at all with it yet.

Software used for lessons

Every teacher has their own setup.

Some (slowly) type pinyin into skype chat, for review later.
Some type into special software which automatically adds pinyin - this is okay.
Some type into a shared google doc, which is the best, because you can leave questions there for next class and easily have a shared space to review.

Interesting media I've found out about from this

There are multiple Chinese language channels where people describe the entire plot of a movie, in large amounts of detail, played over clips from the movie with muted sound. This is pretty useful for learning, and just a cool type of media. From what the tutors said, you feel like you've seen an entire movie in just 10 or 15 minutes. Example: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChgCVolsF6L7DWmOpWKSkMA - this guy speaks really quickly and somewhat strangely - but:

How to make yourself nearly cry in a lesson

Pick a movie you care about - for me it was "The Talented Mr Ripley". Then prepare how to tell the whole story, focusing on various parts - his bad neighborhood, his relationship with the therapist, his relationship with the girl, his progress, how it ends. Tell that many times, really trying deeply to express the frustration he felt, his understanding and the empathy the therapist showed him, and his own pain deep inside, and how Ripley nearly didn't make it through. Movie summary (mandarin) of talented mr ripley: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZKorWNw8Is

A semi-transcendent related experience

Once I took the subtitles for an entire 40 minutes Japanese tv show (Terrace House) and made them all into flashcards. My Japanese level is such that I'd only understand about 40% of what they're saying on this show normally. So I memorized all ~700 of those flash cards over a few days. These were full sentences - not just words, some colloquial things too.

Then I watched the show, and it was totally amazing. I could understand literally every single complex thing - it wasn't just vocab, but grammar that I wouldn't naturally get. It was a period of time when I kind of felt what it'd be like to have fluent hearing ability. But it was also like they just so happened to have chosen phrases and words I knew well; when the next episode came on, I suddenly couldn't understand anymore.

Should you arrange one lesson first, or many?

This is risky. With just one lesson, the teacher has a lot of doubt that you will stick to it, and won't prepare or commit very much. But jumping in with 5 is risky too. I generally would do 1, and if the teacher seemed nice and willing to talk about interesting things, I'd reserve 5 or 10 and keep going at the end of that if it was going well.

How quickly can you tell what a teacher is going to be like?

Within a few minutes - but booking very short lessons is weird so I'd usually go for 45. Speaking of which, 45 min lessons are much better than an hour; space them every hour so you have time to grab a bite, do a quick review, etc. I would only do 60 min lessons for teachers I really liked.

Do teachers prep?

No, not really, and it doesn't matter much. You should take control of what you are doing in class and direct them; they're native so good ones can prepare summaries of issues you want to know about on the fly. For certain subjects, it helps to give warning though - For earlier lessons you will need to do reading and have lots of practice sentences set up; for listening classes (rare but worth doing at least once if not more) they need to prepare audio.

Have I actually measured my learning rates? How to judge which teacher is actually good beyond just feeling?

This is tough. But I got to really know some of my teachers and I felt like even at the end of a month, I had made massive progress. Confidence wise I went from completely unwilling to use it at work, to willing but not especially effective.

Important agreements to come to with a teacher

Does she believe you when you say "I understand?" Is there a way to derail an explanatory diversion? Does she look at your face / is the video refresh speed fast enough for them to notice that you have really got something? Some teachers don't accept "I get it" to cut them off and move to the next thing. Others don't notice when you don't get things, or get too accustomed to your mistakes.
Is she tolerant of you rephrasing everything? Seems valuable at my level that after reading a sentence from the book, to be able to rephrase it or describe why such a situation must have come about? I would frequently stop an explanation or a description and suggest another way to say it. There should be paying attention to your thought process.
Will she strictly correct you on things that matter, while avoiding going into extreme written / grammatical detail? It's so hard for teachers to correct foreigners the 1000 times they need to be corrected on how to say 日本 or 自由。But the best teachers will repeatedly not let you get through the sentence until you say it right. And you'll anticipate getting corrected, and build up a little monitor around certain words and tones, that will guide you to say it right.
Will she do improv off of dialogues? If you are clarifying a situation for politeness/grammar levels, and you come up with an example, will she create a counter-example to illustrate the point?

Summary of the experience

Absolutely loved it; made great progress, got to know 5 or so of my 20+ teachers pretty well, had many people know me very well, was a great way to spend early quarantine, total cost ~3.5k.

Complete book analysis and metadata

2021-01-28T00:00:00Z

In the long term, very deep analysis of books and authors lives will be possible.

The old way of reading a book

Just read the book
Look up unknown words in a dictionary
Look at the author's picture on the back cover to get an impression of them
If famous, look up the author in an encyclopedia
Read footnotes, references, or biographies
Look up their school thesis if you have access.

Recently available methods.

Wikipedia: see their childhood, personal history
Google images search - see how they looked over the years
Youtube - see how they speak, their accent, speed of speech, ability to answer off the cuff, formality level, physique/attractiveness/style. For poets, hear their voice and their way of reading. Hearing an author's spoken voice can permanently change the way you read their books.

Future better ways?

In the long term much more complete analysis will be possible.

23andme results for ancestry, and promethease results for known health/personality correlates. i.e. it's very likely david foster wallace has traits on the extreme of most polygenic score tests. These can be done retroactively, or partially through surviving relatives.
Genealogy, family history - social class, religiosity, wealth, criminality. What was the personal history of the people the author spent time with. Putting an author's name (particularly older authors) into ancestry.com and reading the automatically generated life stories of their relatives.
Health - what was the author's health? How do they feel and how experienced are they re: mortality. This isn't just disease sickness, but their ability to sleep restfully, energy levels, response to coffee/drugs.
Mental traits: IQ, Big5 personality results
Learned traits: Language ability analysis, grammar analysis, favored words/sentence patterns, vocabilary
Location map - google will have full location history, purchase habits, walking speed of most currently living authors. You could retrace the research trips they took to places they mention in their books. Also can reverse this to get analysis of who they spent time with.
Emotional analysis All written/audio recordings of an author can be analyzed for emotion. We don't have good charts of emotional transitions, but they're definitely a relatively stable aspect of a personality. What things make them made, how do they express anger or other emotions. What leads them to feel love, loneliness, numinosity. Analysis of their communication records could reveal these.
Book edit history - get a summary of the type of changes made during editing, as a response to emails from their editor. Both specific organization changes, grammar/vocab edits, cuts / additions, responses to feedback, censorship, etc. What was left out of a book due to legal concerns, threats, etc.?
Physiological analysis - gait analysis - reveals physical strength, balance, health, energy levels. Face coloration reveals a lot about health, heart rate. Hair growth rate, fingernail growth, beard growth systems are all connected to internal physiology.
Social judgement - collate all their pictures, feed them to social rating sites to receive judgements. i.e. their legacy hotornot score would have been ~8. Were they stylish as a kid? What kind of signals were they sending?

Analysis of an hour of NPR

2020-12-01T00:00:00Z

I'd like to see a detailed, second-by-second analysis of how they spend their time

Re-announcing the name of the station
Announcing the name of the guest, host, or program
Straight up ads for their "sponsors"
Prestige announcements of foundational sponsors
Repeating the summary of the program
Ads for other programs
Host repeating the biography of the interviewee
Story which doesn't ask basic journalistic questions about what actually happened
Untranslated foreign language section
Musical cues
Quote from someone who hasn't been introduced yet
Chopped up, possibly out of order quote in response to an unheard question
Content

It's a shame they basically accept commercials disguised as sponsorship.

I expect at most 60% of their airtime is actual useful content.

Identifying Stooges in Magic Shows

2020-10-30T00:00:00Z

In magic shows the magician frequently invites members of the audience on stage to verify that the ropes are real, there really are no irregularities in the iron rings etc. But if you are an audience member not chosen, how do you know that the one going to the front is not a plant?

We can assume that the majority of the audience really is random; so all we need is for the audience member to be selected randomly.

Dice? But they may be faked. How about the last digit of some periodically changing market rate? That could work, if you happen to have a device that you trust that you can check. Don't use the wifi of the theater, though.

How about you allow everyone to shout out large numbers, one by one, and then they are modded by the number of seats in the audience, and the remainder is the volunteer who should go on stage (seat numbers have to be pre-determined). Without calculators this would be hard to game, even if the last few people shouting numbers were plants. Today it wouldn't be so hard. Of course, it would be hard to find plants smart enough to do this kind of math on the fly who would be willing to work there.

How about, the magician turns his back, and writes down a seat number. Then everyone in the audience switches seats. Then he shows the seat number, without having looked at the audience first? He could pre-arrange what seat he would choose, but it would be hard to guarantee a plant getting it every night.

Certifying Truthfulness of Institutions is another way it could be done - just have the magician make a public pledge before the show that all volunteers are genuine, non-coached random volunteers, and that if anyone can prove otherwise, he will pay them 100k. That would be quite a strong proof that the show was for real - and if the show really was fake, it'd be 100k sitting on the table for any insider to take whenever they wanted.

In probability terms, it reduces the space of all magician & helper combinations to only such combinations where the insider can resist a 100k reward. That space is much smaller.

Certifying Truthfulness of Institutions

2020-10-20T00:00:00Z

For some reason, we think it's ok for institutions to brazenly lie, but not for individuals. This is wrong and it causes lots of problems.

Our Moral Sense

Our moral sense gets turned off, or doesn't work very well, as the situations we evaluate diverge from traditional ones. Most people wouldn't directly torture someone else for no reason in real life, but when institutions deal with eachother, that's fine.

The option not to lie

For whatever economic reasons, it might make sense to allow institutions to lie. But surely there are cases when institutions want to be able to really show they are not lying.

So, for this purpose, I propose that there be a standard contract or agreement, verified and maintained by an independent organization, which would let institutions bind themselves to promises to be truthful, backed up by fines. Optionally, they could restrict it to certain statements.

You have our permission to record us, and if you catch us lying, we will pay you

The certification organization would have a trademarked seal, and in order to display it, clients would have to bind themselves to promises to pay off anyone who catches them in a lie. They would also have to pre-emptively swear that they would allow people to surreptitiously record them / gain information on their actions without prior notice (and not sue the person later on)

The Rules

The organization would be required to say things, and pay lots of penalties if they were found to be lying. These could be simply statements such as "We have never conducted unreleased medical studies of links between our products and cancer". Or for a reality show "Events in the show actually took place in the order shown, and were not photoshopped". There are lots of cases where organizations currently make claims like this - but then are found to be lying later, with no penalty.

It's optional

Not every organization would want or have to do this, obviously. But, organizations which do make this promise really would be more trustworthy. Because in addition to their regular organizational reputation, they'd also have borne the scrutiny of many people trying to make money.

It's like a Promise

Right now, truthful institutions don't have any way to raise themselves above the mass of deceptive ones. This would be a way for them to swear, or promise, in an easily understandable format.

What would happen

Obviously actually implementing this woud be tough. If it was successful, many fake organizations would spring up with extremely complex, hard to enforce contracts, and with similar logos, and the public would have a hard time knowing which one was genuine.

If statements are not written carefully, actually proving them in court could be hard, too. There'd also be the "springtime for hitler" problem where insiders intentionally would break the rules, and then help their friends to collect the reward.

It's actually a reverse bribe

It is equivalent to an openly broadcast, credible request for any insider with knowledge about lies to come forward.

China Wrong Side of the Road Bicycle Lane Defaults

2020-10-20T00:00:00Z

There's an initially surprising convention for when you ride your bicycle on the wrong side of the road in China.

Why

Because China has so many wide roads, it's not unusual for bicyclists to ride on the wrong side of the road. If you're only going a block, it's definitely not worth it to cross a major ring road or highway.

The Rule

If bicyclists are riding on an unprotected road surface with cars (the shoulder of the road), the person riding against traffic should be closest to the edge of the road. The people doing the right thing, riding with traffic, should go closer to the road. This is a little bit unfair, but it does make sense, because it reduces the average velocity difference between adjacent lanes of traffic.

But!

There's a major exception: when the bicyclist area is protected, by a grill, or is a separate lane, the protected bike road is considered to be independent, and everyone should ride on their right. This is pretty well observed, too.

Observance

Most people do this. The main group not doing is are people from age 40-60 - they ignore whether the road is protected or not, and just always ride as far away as possible from the nearest car lane.

Negotiation

If you are following someone who's doing it wrong, you can't force people passing you to immediately adjust - in that case, you have to continue the wrong pattern until you pass them.

Intersections

This works well, and most people know it (the main exception being middle-aged women, who ride wherever they want). However, the problem occurs when the protection on a bike area ends - everyone has to switch sides with oncoming bike traffic. This is usually handled by slowing down, or just continuing on behind the one in front of you until things clear out.

Never Forget

The first rule of safe riding in China is to stay behind someone else, for shielding. So if you happen to be behind someone breaking the above rules, and can't pass them, just follow them anyway.

Coronavirus Evacuation Airbnb

2020-10-20T00:00:00Z

Three friends and I got an Airbnb in a rural area to get away from Coronavirus for a week. The place was a day's drive away from SF, up in Crescent City at the Oregon border.

Goals

Take advantage of us all being WFH to have fun and explore a new area.
Have someone around us rather than spending the time alone at home.
Cover some tail risk of civil unrest, where being in a dense city with low social bonds is worse than being in a static, rural area. This was only a minor goal initially, but as fear increased it became more important.

Activities

With the right mix of people it can a great opportunity to try structured social interactions. Normal, unstructured interaction is also a lot more fun since there's not much else to do.

Group circle
Moderated double crux (like a debate but better)
Group replication of the Fadiman increased-creativity-on-psychedelics study
Run through "36 questions that lead to love" together
Hamming Questions / diagnosing bottlenecks
Group debugging (share a hard problem in your life, group spends 30 minutes brainstorming solutions)
Bridgewater / Ray Dalio style radically honest feedback on topics of each person's choosing
Spiritual history interviews, inspired by the Mormon Stories podcast. Go over the subject's personal life history of spirituality, mysticism, wonder, numinosity, and how it changed over time.
Story evaluation - everyone tells a story and then receives feedback on delivery, interest and meaning
Make up a personal mythological system as justification for our actions - bets/promises you've made to various concepts and what each one has given you. i.e. your dedication to the god/concept of truth, and what you will insist it has given to you if you are faithful in pursuing it.
Setting up sociofinancial commitment bets - I promise to do X by date Y or else I lose Z money, with Q evaluation procedures.

Happenings

One guy got some sypmtoms resembling coronavirus (minor fever and body aches) for 36 hours, which really scared us. He self-quarantined in his room and soon recovered; nobody else was infected (despite close contact including a 7 hour drive in the same car). This resulted in lots of debate and fear; luckily it was nothing.

Benefits

Seeing how people deal with truly difficult situations and conflicts lets you know them much better and more deeply than you would in normal life. Friendships can go on for years, stuck in a possibly not optimal state, and this provides a situation to precipitate a change.
Having access to other people's cooking skills.
You really get to know people well when you hang around them for 12 hours a day.
Story value - you now have a good answer to "what did you do during the coronavirus outbreak?" This may end up being our "JFK moment".

Things we forgot

Considering that evacuation is not just a conventional trip, and that you're going there to live and work from home, you may want to do the trick where you pack and sit in the car, ready to go, but then come back inside for 30 minutes and wait to remember additional things you need. I did this accidentally (needed to charge my phone) which gave me time to remember a few vitals.

Pepper - people have genuinely different priorities in life from what others assume. It's important to find out what people really need to be happy beforehand and make sure it's provided.
Can opener
None of us own one, but we probably should have brought thermometers.

Good Policies

It's important to agree to the quarantine policy beforehand and get buy-in from everyone. There will be variations but at least getting them down on paper is important. You should also establish a plan for what would break up the house if someone gets sick.
Fear of CV is a very strong rhetorical argument, which causes resentment when the most concerned person tries to regulate others behavior. You need to establish an upper bound of safety procedures.
Having a group dinner together every day is fun.
I had a policy of not drinking during times when decisions don't really matter, and feel glad about it
It's easy to continuously eat - adopting an absolute "no snacking" rule is good, too.

Learnings

The average AirBnb does not have a good desk or chair setup at all. For working 8 hours a day, this is much more important than I'd realized. It's hard to evaluate the desk situation through pictures. Even though most of us had brought our keyboard, mouse, monitors, lack of good setup space still hurt.
Related: Although it's interesting to be away from home, one's home/apartment has so many advantages since it's already optimized for your personal lifestyle. It's hard to replace it for a significant period of time. For longer evacuations, this seems resolvable, if ordering things from Amazon is still possible.
Evacuation is similar to being an expat - you are isolated from normal society, so you have much more energy and time to devote to relationship building. This matches my experience living overseas - that it's actually more social than normal working suburban life, at least with people sharing a common language.
It's commonplace, but getting out of the house and going on a hike is extremely beneficial. Physically exercise directly feeds back into good mood. Also, being in a beautiful place gives a sense of timelessness. The redwoods have seen much worse infections than this. You begin to think about the tragedy and terror suffered by the native americans when European disease began spreading into their tribes from the east, hundreds of years before actual contact occurred.
You can get a pretty good workout (or at least trigger the muscle building / soreness reflex) with a single 35lb kettlebell

PBA cards, an easy way to prove your bribery dues are paid

2020-10-20T00:00:00Z

If you give money to a police charity in New Jersey, they give you a card and a sticker for your car. If you get pulled over, cops will be lenient with you if you have one.

Illegal? No! you see, the card proves that the driver paid money to the police in order not to get a ticket. Nothing wrong with that! Wait, what?

But seriously

PBA cards are a system to allow police officers to illegally not enforce the law on people they know. It boils down to buying / being family members with policemen getting you preferential treatment. That's like something out of a dictatorship!

If laws are unfair for police family, they're unfair for everyone!

Being influenced by a PBA card is illegal! Anyone who shows their PBA card to a cop along with their license is a criminal and guilty of attempting to corrupt a cop. Hiding illegal influence through a middleman of a police organization doesn't make it any better, it's still attempted bribery / misuse of influence.

Laws apply to everyone - we are a country of laws, not a country of influence. Look at all the corrupt countries out there - one thing they have in common is massive nepotism, and no rule of law. "Officer" is not a noble title, and the family of police are not nobility.

Police have lots of discretionary power, and the guys running police associations have found a good way to make money off of it. But that power is supposed to be used for the good of society, not to enrich police officers in general or to put them above society.

What actually should happen

If family members of cops feel that the laws are unfair, and don't want to live according to the laws everyone else does, that pressure should influence cops to try to change the law!

Cops family members are one of the things that could stop laws from going out of control!

If a cop's mother in law gets busted by an unfair speed trap, the cop shouldn't give her invulnerability with the PBA card, he should solve the problem. If the trap is unfair to her, it's unfair to everyone.

It's like a CEO who is guaranteed a safe exit from the company no matter what - they'll have no motivation to do right.

Those making and enforcing the laws should be under more scrutiny, not less

Imagine how great the legal system would be, and how much amazing freedom we'd have, if every policeman, member of the senate, and their families were filmed 24 hours a day, and had the law enforced to the maximum against them.

They'd do nothing but remove unfair, illegal laws all the time! It'd take years of cleaning out junk, til what was left was all reasonable, understandable law. They'd think carefully about extending laws, and really do a good job making sure laws were fair.

Instead, what we have done is remove policemen from the group of people who have to live under law. This removes a really valuable feedback mechanism between legislators, enforcers, and the people. Police naturally have great credentials in court, to express their knowledge of the law - relieving them of the duty to make sure laws are reasonable is a huge mistake.

Think Long Term

Unless you are sure that your people will rule forever, getting rid of basic freedoms for your temporary convenience will come back to haunt you. I don't want to live in a world where you have to know the right people to survive; fairness before the law is a good thing. As it stands now with PBA cards, laws can get worse and worse, and the people who have the best view of how they work, enforcing them every day, will not have any motivation to improve the situation, because they and their families have get-out-of-jail-free cards.

Samples of Cops talking about PBA cards

http://p066.ezboard.com/fnypdrant64609frm1.showMessage?topicID=14293.topic

Read this message board to read cops confessing to taking bribes.

"ok, these same mutts you are referring to could be mos family,
if he is a family member he gets off no questions ask, unless he is verbally
abusive, now friends are a different ball game. _if guy shows me mini sheild and
pba card, have a nice day no questions ask._
obviously mos gave these cards to people they deem worthy.
now as for the ebay scams or internet card, this is where your detective sheilds
come into play, i would expect a card to be signed but any perp
can sign them too, ask for command , name of cop, dude if you dont know that, you are getting one."

(my bold)

" if he gives attitude write him."

Why should that matter? how about, "if he broke the law write him, if not, don't". Not "if he grovels enough, don't write him".

Pan Jia Yuan market, Beijing

2020-10-20T00:00:00Z

Pan Jia Yuan is a huge antique / flea market in southeastern Beijing. It's a really fun place to visit.

Sections

The west side is larger stores, with big proper antiques. Traditional wooden tables for 20k USD (yes, crazy). Other old old junk. This side is a little more formal.
The middle section is a lot of large tables, underneath a high roof. These are fairly established shops selling cultural stuff. There's two rows
The east side has little mats on the ground that can be rented by anyone for the weekend, selling all types of stuff. This part is more fun, because they have everything.
There are also little other sections devoted to certain products - the south side has books,

Smaller sections

South west side has giant stone statues,
Eastern edge has weird large rocks.
The southeast has porcelain statues of mao.

There is a lot of kitschy stuff, but also a lot of fun stuff.

Is it real?

Walking around you notice a lot of the same things wherever you go - the brass demon/angel head with 4 faces, etc. And you can be quoted various prices for them based on how you look, or the fake coins with weird unreal characters on them.

A lot of the stuff is not real and was probably produced in a factory. But even still, it's fun.

What I've gotten

A giant, 2 foot long woody peapod of some weird vegetable, with large rattling seeds inside. 30 kuai
A pair of wooden balls in weird shapes you can roll around in your hand. 10 kuai
Weird rocks shot through with lines and highly polished. - they wanted 80! no deal
Pure solid red rock pillars, used to carve a sign into to make an ID stamp. 10 kuai
4-faced brass god paperweight. 20 kuai
A 70s style chinese mechanical alarm clock with spaceships on it. 30 kuai
Lots of old fake chinese money (it looks real enough)
lots of other knicknacks I've given away as presents.

Outside the gates

There are always xinjiang guys outside, with moustaches, following people and trying to sell weird animal pelts.

There are also people setting up their own home-style stalls out on the sidewalk, unwrapping a blanked to reveal a dirt-covered old relic supposedly sold to them by an illiterate farmer.

So...

The place is awesome and fun. The bargaining can be annoying (See Bargaining in China), but just checking out the stuff is neat.

An experiment

I'd like to get 100 people, foreigners and locals, and take their picture, then send them into the market to seek out a specific item and ask how much it costs (just the first price). They would then return, and report their results. Then an analysis would be done correlating appearance, chinese ability, and attitude to the prices offered.

We could figure out what signifiers the sellers are using to set the initial price. I know they use language & dress to do it, but there must be more - their success depends on accurately guagiing how much someone is willing to spend on something.

We could also do profiles of individual sellers. It'd have to be a common item - like the 4-faced got thingie.

A Scavenger Hunt

Another idea - everyone gets 100 kuai and is sent into the market with a list of things : something more than 100 years old, something red, something made of wood, something large, etc. They spend the 100 kuai, get their items, then meet up with the group 2 hours later. Outside, everyone figures out how many points they got.

Parallels between anti-wall and anti-mask Arguments

2020-10-20T00:00:00Z

There's a level 1 contrarian argument that "masks don't work" which is very similar to "border walls don't work."

In both cases the theme goes: "Physical barriers are not invulnerable, so they are not a useful part of a mitigation strategy".

In both cases I believe this is special pleading. People who make the argument re: immigration actually just don't like the wall because it's against a group they like (immigrants). People who argue against masks for coronavirus are trying to argue something similar - that the virus isn't as bad as people make it out to be, and isn't worth defending from.

There are some obvious problems with both arguments - mainly, that groups which the arguer probably approves of demonstrate that they disagree with the argument. But the arguers rarely address them:

Mask examples

Doctors all wear masks when treating patients

Scenario exploration

Imagine you challenge someone to spend an hour with someone with coronavirus: would they really voluntarily not wear a mask?

They're also vulnerable to reductio ad absurdium. Imagine someone who somehow is wearing 100 masks. There are so many their entire body and face is covered, and someone with coronavirus is 5 meters away. Would they be safer in this situation than if their entire body weren't covered? Obviously yes, because water droplets leading between you two would be more likely to be caught by the masks, rather than directly contacting your skin / mouth.

Now imagine you only have half as many masks on - still feel safer? Obviously, yes. Just keep lowering the number of masks. Their value must be continuous, and won't decay to zero until there are zero masks.

So, admitting that a hundred masks are useful implies that one is also useful. And I don't think anyone would admit that a meter thick covering of masks is not "more effective than air" at preventing the spread of physical particles.

Another example

People often argue this based on "pore size", that some masks have holes that are bigger than the virus so it can fit through. Okay imagine I gave you an N95 mask (which has holes small enough to block viruses). You'd be happy. Then imagine I poked a single microscopic hole in it, big enough for a virus. Would you then not want to use the mask? The bad masks with large holes are exactly this - they're effectively N95 masks (on the solid parts) with tons of holes in them. But the parts that don't have holes are still effectively walls!

Wall examples

It's funny that people who say the wall won't work don't address historical examples of walls that worked: How about the Berlin wall? This example shows what's really going on. The Berlin wall did work, but they hate it because it was cruel, and the border wall takes on those connotations of violence towards wall-crossers, which they hate, which leads them to hate the wall.

How about the border walls Israel builds? Why are they doing that, if walls don't work?

None of this is meant to show that I favor the wall; just that the arguments against it are not valid.

People use life expectancy statistics completely incorrectly

2020-10-20T00:00:00Z

You often hear things like "In the past, the average life expectancy was only 30 years".

And then people act like in that era, people had kids at 10, were old at 30, and living past 40 was really rare.

This is absurd and wrong

If that were the case, how come some Roman emperors lived to 70? They'd be living more than double the life expectancy - the equivalent of living 2*77 years today.

What's really happening is that life expectancy statistics are dominated by infant mortality. In ancient times, people who lived past childhood would regularly live into their 50s or 60s - but half of everyone died in childhood, which brought down the average.

In modern times, a small increase in the percentage of the population not having access to health care can cause a huge drag on life expectancy. i.e. having infant mortality rates go up by 10% among 10% of your population will introduce a lot of zeros to the number, and drop it. But when people see the drop from 77 to 76, they assume that hospital treatment has gotten worse, or that we are falling being, or that people are living less healthy lives.

It's arbitrary

Imagine Christians forced the US to change our definition of when life begins - now, life (& statistics keeping) would begin at conception. Infant mortality would shoot up drastically, and life expectancy would drop to 30.

Would our quality of life be lower? No, it'd be exactly the same. ( Also, everyone's age would be 9 months longer, and instead of birthdays we'd use conception days. )

Imagine if Catholics forced us to start counting all the virtual children they believe are killed by contraception. Life expectancy would drop to something like 0.001 years per "life" - but nothing would change about day to day life.

On the other end of it, imagine if we only counted children once they'd passed a "coming of age" ritual at age 13. In that world, life expectancy would be 80+ in the US, and even in the ancient world it would have been 60+. In fact, that is closer to what ancient times were like - people didn't pay much attention to young kids, because they had a lower chance to survive. They'd even delay naming them until they had a higher chance of making it.

Sea Turtle life expectancy

Out of 100 eggs that sea turtles lay, only a few baby turtles will make it into the sea - and most of those will be eaten before they make it to a year old. Say one in a hundred hatched turtles lives to one year, and all of those make it to 100 years of age. That makes the average life expectancy of a sea turtle be one year.

Does that mean they live their entire life cycle in a year? No! A one-year-old sea turtle is just a baby.

So it's foolish to use life expectancy at birth as a way to understand a life cycle. It has nothing to do with it. (The normal "life expectancy" of grasshoppers is like 1 day, since 99.9% of them don't make it to adulthood)

What we should talk about

People use life expectancy at birth to try to understand how societies work. This is wrong. They try to say that 1/2 life expectancy is middle aged, near the end is "old", etc. But for sea turtles, 10 years may be "adult" and old may be 50 years old - but we'd never get that from the knowledge that their life expectancy at birth is just a year.

Almost every sea turtle you have ever seen has wildly exceeded the average life expectancy. (But the average sea turtle's existence does last for exactly their average life expectancy; we simply don't see most of the ones with short expectancies)

This is true of humans, too - almost everyone you see will live way longer than the human life expectancy at birth.

What we should actually think about is life expectancy at a certain age. Once turtles make it through the first dangerous year, their life expectancy probably shoots way up to 60 years or so - and this number actually means something.

If you are already 20 years old, life expectancy at birth means nothing to you. You should only care about life expectancy at 20. A healthy Roman 20 year old probably had another 40 years of expectancy - even though the life expectancy of his society was only 30.

Specificity

Say you live in a town that has a life expectancy of 80.

But then your township is merged with another nearby town. This other town has many people who don't have health care, so they have higher infant mortality. So when they reculaculate life expectancies for this new town, it drops to only 60. Has you life gotten any worse?

They also revise the historical life expectancies - so during your childhood, your town had a life expectancy of 60 (one of the worst in the country), down from 80.

Should you revise your opinion of what life was like at that time? You are now considered to have been born in the town with one of the lowest life expectancies in the country. Was it really terrible? You remember it was nice...

This is just a wrong way to think. In general, the weight you put on statistics should be proportional to how much they matter to you - you should care about life expectancy at your own age, not at birth, and stats about people near you, not ones who are arbitrarily included within your group.

Something Missing from Chinese - Spaces Between Words!

2020-10-20T00:00:00Z

The Chinese language needs to have spaces. It would make learning & reading faster, at very little cost.

They would not have to be large spaces - just a tiny space, 1/4 as wide as a character.

In ancient, grid prints, this would not work - but today, most text doesn't line up anyway, so adding spaces wouldn't make it look any worse.

It would be easy to put spaces as you were writing - most input methods can already detect words (since there is so much help going on during writing, anyway), Plus, the person writing the sentence always knows where words end and begin.

Benefits

Autotranslation would be a lot easier.

Reading would be easier for people whose chinese isn't perfect. This would be good for foreigners, and also good for native speakers whose reading level isn't very high. Helping people like that is a supposed goal of the chinese government.

Most controversially, I think that reading would be faster for everyone, at every reading level. This is because even fluent readers are now doing work that spaces would eliminate. Having to identify word boundaries is actual work - it takes CPU time to do on a computer. Your brain doesn't just do things "for free" - although it does have specialized hardware, running it still takes energy.

Barriers to Adoption

The biggest one is defensiveness - people who can read Chinese have put so much effort into it that they don't want to make it any easier for an outsider.

People also are in denial that it would matter. But, people are always in denial about how changing things could ever improve them. This paper: http://research.chtsai.org/dissertation/ suggests that most ambiguities can be resolved pretty easily - but I don't think that's sufficient to say spaces don't matter, because adding spaces would solve all of them, not just most. He mentions a figure of 93% of ambiguities being trivial to resolve - which seems like a lot, but considering thousands of words per hour read, and the increased cost of the failure case, it could be a significant cost.

In chapter 4 of the previous dissertation there is mention of research favoring both sides, but without details about how it was conducted, the claim that spaces would not improve reading speed has not been resolved.

Historical Analogues

Many languages were originally written without vowels at all. Ideographic language such as Japanese, Egyptian, and Mayan also originally had no pronunciation help - but over time these were added. Languages added dots and lines above consonants to show vowels, and eventually added vowels as actual letters. Japanese added furigana (phonetic help characters) that can be used when necessary to show pronunciation, and as a phonetic alphabet. Other ideographic languages added phonetic shorthands, too.

In all of those cases, imagine what it would have been like to try to argue before the change, compared with after. Before the change, Hebrew scribes probably venerated the ability to read text quickly, without vowels or any help. Learning that skill was considered to be a valuable spiritual process, to contain inherent value and give mystical power and wisdom. And they probably resisted the change. But now that the change has been made, nobody wants to go back.

These same people don't advocate making the language even harder, removing or conflating certain letters, or adding even more special cases that need to be memorized. If having hard languages is good, we should make them even harder! There would be plenty of ways to do it. Making the claim that we are already at the ideal level of difficulty is unreasonable, since if you look at the actual reasons languages changed, you will not find much freedom of choice.

Where we are today in language evolution is due to the history of colonization, physical division of cultures, and communication frequency between cultures - not due to rational choices about language complexity and simplification.

Things you cannot find online

2020-10-20T00:00:00Z

There are facts and opinions that many people know which are super hard to find online:

Neigborhood reputations & Safety

If you go to a bar in a new city and strike up a conversation, you can find out a huge amount of information about neighborhoods, risk, feelings and attitudes of people in a city. Yet, if you want to find this out online, where would you go? There's no place I know. Reddit might be somewhat useful if the city is big enough and you search; crime statistics are useful (e.g. the charts on city-data) but I'd rather have a 20 minute conversation with a resident than any of those.

Actual expert-level information on what products are good

Say you have a new hobby and want to find out the state of the art. Any search you make will be so targeted to be basically useless. There may be good youtubers, but surprising numbers of them may be corrupted. Either directly through payments, or by being downstream of other corrupted agents. With time you can identify people who have reasonable stories for why they would not be corruptible, but it requires a lot of investment.

In the old world, you could just go to a newsgroup and read the FAQ and basically get up to speed on what's actually going on in a domain.

Wikipedia monitoring

2020-10-20T00:00:00Z

I'd like to be able to paste in the URL for a wikipedia page, and then at the end of the day/week receive a summary of all the updates to it (both those reverted and not).

They should be formatted nicely (green for added, red for removed) with special sections for text which has multiple internal changes.

A restaurant which prepares the perfect dish for you

2020-09-30T00:00:00Z

There should be a restaurant which

When you make a reservation, you also submit some DNA. They analyze it to figure out what your taste system is like - are you a supertaster, exactly what tastes you favor. Plus, they look at gene activation to see what particular things are going on with you lately. (i.e. the same way that there isn't a genetic difference between a caterpillar and a butterfly; it's just down to gene expression)
When you walk in the door, they take a blood test. They analyze what type of nutrients you have floating around your bloodstream, what you are low/high in. They also use it to figure out what you might be craving.
Then they create a meal which fits perfectly with their estimation of both what you need, and what would taste the best to you.
alternatively they would give you a drug which would create a lot of the enzymes you have when extremely hungry or thirsty - so that the food would taste even better.
alternatively, before you come in, after analyzing your DNA they send you a gene modification kit which will change your response to particular foods. So when you taste their food, it will be like discovering a new color - you will have a new sensitivity to a type of taste which has never existed before.

A system for symbolic house numbers

2020-09-30T00:00:00Z

This is an alternative suggestion for a symbolic system of house numbering. Instead of putting the numbers directly, animals would be used to replace each digit, according to the chart below:

mystical (hippogriff, pegasus, unicorn)
lion
monkey
elephant / bear
cat
dog
fish / frog / plant
bird
bull / horse / zebra
crab / ant / other

It would sort of be like a secret code - a set of stone statues, garden gnomes, patterns, hedges etc. could all have additional meaning. Companies could commission statues of their representative animals in unique materials & positions. There would be an interesting market for these particular types of statues, as well as unique extensions / alternate digits. For a number like 123, you could have a lion & a monkey statue, next to an elephant statue - or you could break it up the other way.

Value

Injecting more symbolism into daily life.

Appearance Variation is useful for detecting Cuckoldry

2020-09-30T00:00:00Z

I've often wondered, if heritability really is as high as they say for important traits, why women don't take advantage of this to improve the genetics of their children more? There are obviously evolved behaviors towards this - i.e. "attraction" is how the desire for quality genetics is expressed in both sexes. But it's not really a systematic thing - it's more emotional or instinctual.

It seems like being able to make more conscious decisions about this (for both sexes) would have a huge possible benefit, given the existence of big differences in genetic contribution when those kind of choices are being made.

So why doesn't it happen more? Cuckoldry rates according to historical testing are low, just a few percent.

One obvious reason is that men try to prevent this from happening to them; one way to detect it is to notice visual differences in how children look.

If this is the main detection method, then we'd expect increased cuckoldry in more visually homogeneous populations. So from a genetic perspective, women have an incentive to increase homogeneity, to broaden the number of potential fathers they can choose from while being undetected, and men have the opposite incentive, to be more genetically visually distinctive to limit female choice.

Longer term, we should expect some women would eventually set up a system to take advantage of this by finding a way to greatly improve the genetic quality of their children directly, through conscious action. There has been some effort towards this with nobel prize winner sperm banks, and some high profile cases, but it isn't common at all. If heritability is true, this is a huge, fairly easy gain that's not being taken, which is suspicious. I would expect it to eventually be figured out and start happening. It'd be interesting to examine what kind of mental/cultural changes would be required to do this, and find out if they have started to change, or if there are any sub-cultures that have begun behaving this way.

Art City Ideas

2020-09-30T00:00:00Z

A "city" created to examine defects of traffic lawy.

One way deadends

There should be lots of one way roads that are dead ends.

Reverse one way deadends

Dead ends that are one way, only allowing cars to drive out.

Countries should Trade Land, and create more social & legal experiments like Hong Kong

2020-09-30T00:00:00Z

Japan and the US should trade islands - I propose a small island off the coast of Seattle, and a similar-sized one off the coast of Japan. They don't need to have any natural resources, or good climate, or soil.

The islands sovereignty and legal systems would be traded. Residents would be offered to be bought out, and paid to leave, or would be offered citizenship in the new country, or could accept a generous relocation package within the original country, plus a large donation to a cause or issue they cared about. Care would have to be taken to not take people's homeland away from them - it'd be better to get an island that had been a former national park, or a place with bad weather.

On the official day of the trade, the island off the coast of seattle would officially become part of Japan, and its counterpart in the Japanese archipelago would officially become the westernmost point in the US.

Why should we do this?

If you look at Hong Kong, it's one chunk of land among hundreds of similar ones along the twisting Chinese coast. Similar small peninsulas in the mainland have some farmers, some mines, but are pretty much undeveloped. They provide a home and a few resources for the locals, but compare that to HK, which has a sophisticated and different culture people, and its own traditions of art, music, movies, food, and language. It's also rich, and has a good government - and it has been an interesting thing for the mainland gov't and people in Shenzhen to see, right next door - showing them other options for organizing society. The process of taking a random piece of land and making it into HK was a good one. Would you rather have 5 million more Chinese farmers, or would you rather have had their grandparents take part in a grand experiment, and today be part of a new, interesting country? Even from an honest CCP perspective, they probably wouldn't go back in time and prevent the formation of HK - its presence helped them over the years. If the other concessions had stayed part of their originating countries, it'd have been even better - Tianjin, Qingdao, etc. And I'm not opposed to giving China islands in Europe, either. We need interlocking, overlapping, easy ways to expose different styles of life and government to each other.

I also wish Venezuela were closer to the US, to illustrate their failure more clearly to Americans (and to help them)

We need more experiments

There are lots of other fairly undeveloped pieces of land along the coasts of many countries. So I think they should be traded. There should be enclaves from 10 different countries along China's coast - and there should be little bits of China spread out across the world. China should do it with Africa, the US, everyone. Russia and Austrlia are huge, and their government is limited in what it could do - but think of what the US could do with a tiny piece of northern Australia - or what Australia could do in return with a now-unused piece of western Canada.

It'd be great to be able to visit international locations more easily

To be able to jump on a boat off in San Francisco and enter Japan or China in just an hour - think of the movie opportunities. Plus, think of the real estate prices! The extradition treaties! It'd be like a super intense Chinatown on treasure island, that is literally China.

Danger per second

2020-09-30T00:00:00Z

People often say that airplanes are the safest way to travel.

I have also read that per unit of distance, walking drunk is 8 times more dangerous than driving drunk. (Of course, the real comparison here should be walking drunk vs walking sober.)

An important factor is missing:

Danger Per second

The average drunk walking speed is 2 mph. Let's say that the average drunk driving speed is 32 mph.

So, per minute, you go 16 times farther driving, and it's 1/8 as dangerous per mile. So per minute, it's twice as dangerous.

Airplanes

A similar calculation holds for flying. Although per mile planes may be 1/10th as dangerous as cars, they go 10 times faster. So a minute in a car is about as plane as a minute in a car. So if anxiety is proportional to actual danger per second, it is not so crazy to be anxious in an airplane - at least up to the level you feel in cars.

Dual-n-back experiments

2020-09-30T00:00:00Z

I have been doing some dual-n-back on the phone - got a good app named just "N-back" whose logo is a little orange goldfish.

At first I did single-n-back for numbers and got up to about 80% of 4. The strategy I used was after each new number comes, you repeat the 4 outstanding ones, but with some inflection - the first one you just sort of put to the side, and prepare the second one to become the new start of a sequence. So it's like a,BCD which converts to BCDE after you see E and compare it to a. It works pretty well, but it seems like cheating.

I also found myself using finger gestures to point to the sequence, or repeating the sequence to myself to perhaps store it in my audio memory.

All of that seems like cheating - because sometimes, in moments of stress while playing, you can just immediately jump to what you remembered the sequence was at the right point, without using any tricks. That ability seems like the real point of doing this type of training.

Anyway after getting to level 4 in single n-back for both shape (number) and position, I combined them and did dual 2-back, which is pretty easy to pass. Then on to 3, which took a day or to. And then i really started to scale the mountain with 4. That took a few weeks of about 5-8 min per day (usually 3 plays of 30) to get. I have just now started level dual-5-back, which is killing me. I can hold it together for a while, but am lost a lot.

One thing you are forced to do here is patch up a broken sequence - so say you remember ABCDE but then get lost. It's tempting to just quit there, but if you can just remember DE you can greatly reduce your possible errors.

Another challenge is if you can remember the position but not the shape, it's worth it to just remember the position. Remembering either factor separately is tough, though.

Anyway I want to get to level 6 or 7 of dual-n-back before quitting.

What is this actually doing? Not sure. The first few days I dreamed like crazy after doing it, but that's not happening anymore. I am still making progress though - it might be due to real new memory registers being made, or maybe just to improvements in concentration. That is a big part of it too - not freaking out, and being able to slice the threads of memory together well even when some are lost. So overall I think it is a good exercise, and the claims supporting it may actually have something to them. I first heard about it from this site: http://www.bulletproofexec.com/how-to-add-2-75-iq-points-per-hour-of-training/

Fans Should come up with Real Names for Stadiums, Nor Corporate Names

2020-09-30T00:00:00Z

Many stadiums have sold the rights to name them to big companies, so lots of stadiums have stupid names like "Lucas Oil Stadium".

Fans should stick up for traditions

Fans should just make up real nicknames for these stadiums, and never use the paid name. The name should be something really meaningful, like a famous player from the team, or an achievement of the team.

Why it doesn't happen

It doesn't happen because announcers aren't actually on the fan's side. They aren't free to say what they think and would lose their job if they ever used a fan nickname for a stadium.

Natural human ingenuity would fix these names, if the system wasn't corrupted to prevent it. Announcers aren't free to mention this idea at all.

Group Activities

2020-09-30T00:00:00Z

Wechat has a feature where you can induct people into groups without their consent (up to 40 people). Then groups can grow up to 100. After 100 I believe wechat has some additional identity requirements for further members.

Beijing Pics, No Chat

This group has about 100 people and the only thing allowed is pictures from beijing. Anybody chatting is warned/removed.

Rules

no chat, no links, no stickers, emojis, commentary
better of the pics aren't ads
personally i like photos that aren't just selfies / instagrams
photos should relate to beijing somehow!

Numbers in Sequence

Pictures of numbers, in order starting with 1. We made it to 51 (and still going).

Rules:

chatting okay
pictures okay
better to have distinct numbers (not part of a greater number)
better if the pictures are interesting
no "cheap" sequences (i.e. walking on a street getting every single number in order)
creativity is welcome (obviously) so if a naturally occuring situation has two numbers in a row (someone wearing a jersey saying 23, next to a street sign numbered 24, it works.

Letters in Sequence

An idea for a new group - same as numbers in sequence but:

entries are the letters. A..Z, then AA, AB, AC, ... AZ, BA..., ..., ZZ, AAA, ... etc.
I will save entries & make a page of them
partial entries are okay (the a from "cat")
it would be nice if the picture is interesting
it is nice if the crop doesn't contain extra letters before/after (but you can zoom in to do that)
just typing letters on a screen, or searching on google and then taking a picture of the screen, are kind of cheap.

Maps

no chat
pictures of maps only
maps can be interpreted liberally

Text screenshots

Kindle pages
screenshots of things you're reading
no multipage entries

Group Philosophy

I'm trying to avoid "legalism" - that is, pressure to clearly define rules and limits. I think for small groups, it's a lot more fun when people don't try to push it. It's better that they use their own conscience to decide what is good. Same thing for deciding what kind of content belongs in a group.

Anarchy

Reality is anarchy. No matter what someone says, you can actually do what you like. But, people with power can do what they like too. I think it's helpful to remember that no matter what the rules, you can always do what you like; but you're bumping into someone else's precommitment to punish you.

Percentage Terminology

2020-09-30T00:00:00Z

Our teminology for percentages really sucks.

Say the current mortality rate for an operation is 10%.

If you say "survival increased by 10%" what does that mean?

10% => 20% - this is "absolute"
10% => 11% - this is "relative to success"
10% => 19% - this is "relative to failure" - the "failure area" of 90% shrunk by 10% relative.

In this case, "relative to success" makes most sense, since the use case for the sentence is in evaluating a policy change.

But imagine the current success rate was 99.9%. In that case an improvement to 99.99%, reducing deaths to 1/10 as many as before, could be described in these ways:

My opponent's lazy policies only increased survival by 0.01%
Death rates dropped by a factor of 10x
Death rates dropped by 90%

So where do you draw the line between these cases?

Sociological effects

This has real effects: In meetings with both execs and technical/stats people, there is usually a lot of hand-waving when the stats people hand-off of the analysis to execs. The stats people explain the results using some percentage-related terms, and then the execs internalize the numbers. When they then repeat the number, they usually have just guessed which percentage variant was meant, and frequently have switched it.

That goes into their slide deck to present onward, and meaning is lost. Then the C levels naturally become suspicious and generally don't believe stats as much as they could, because their business knowledge occasionally tells them something went wrong. If we believe in the meaning of numbers, this is a problem. This also backs up skepticism about numbers - "you can prove anything with statistics"

Proposal for Chinese Name Reformation

2020-09-30T00:00:00Z

In 1898, by imperial proclamation, ordinary Japanese people first took surnames. Millions of people chose new names based on where they lived, the recommendations of priests, history, Today Japan has a rich variety of beautiful surnames.

China already has last names - but they're mostly single character, and just a few of them make up a huge chunk of the names in the population. The top 20 names make up about 85% of the population - so everywhere you go you meet people with the same name. Some towns have had complete surname depletion - the entire town has the same family name.

Meeting someone with the same family name doesn't mean anything.

So my proposal for China is:

Every family should add one character to their family name.

Historically, there have been many two character Chinese names - a few of them even still exist.

The new character could be added before or after the existing one. After promulgation of the name law, a period of one year would be allowed to make the choice.

The decision would be up to the individual adult at the time - not based on the head of the family (although most families who still remain in contact with eachother would probably choose the same name)

Choices would be limited to the characters already accepted in surnames.

To simplify matters, on the new ID cards, the old character would be underlined (for the first 50 years) - but the new character would be official & a required, real part of the name.

Opting Out

This would have to be handled very delicately.

Making a statement

Some people may choose politically sensitive characters - but, it's only a character. Let them choose it.

Celebrities, and grouping

When celebrities announced their choice, many people would probably follow them.

And, for each existing common name there'd probably be one "obvious" choice on how to extend it, which many people would choose. Nevertheless, there would still be a lot of new, interesting names.

On the other hand, there might be a register built up of people's choices - and unique families might want to choose unique names. So being the first to officially register one of the unusual names would be like staking a claim on it.

Overlapping with someone due to this random chance wouldn't actually be so random - because actually, in the past, you shared the same last name with them anyway. (unless their name was A and they chose to rename themselves AB, and yours was B and your family chose to rename to AB - but in that case, your two families are made for each other anyway)

Problems

Along the edges of families, there might be trouble - one grandfather wants to choose one character, and all his descendants agree - but his brother wants to choose another, and his descendents agree, too. The choice might push the sides farther apart.

But the benefit of that is that it'd push the people with the same name closer together.

A natural approach

Chinese names nowadays usually have three characters - surname, plus two parts of the first name.

If the first section of a personal name within a family became standardized, then over time the family would actually acquire what is virtually a second character to their name. If this practice became standard, then this common character way to distinguish between distinct families of the same surname.

Obviously, this is unrealistic & will never happen. But it's interesting to think about.

The Pinkie Mandate of Heaven

2020-09-30T00:00:00Z

A problem

With primogeniture, there is lots of motivation to kill your older brothers and take over the throne. This causes families to self-destruct once they reach power.

A solution

If everyone in a country was absolutely obsessed with the idea that the human pinkie finger was a symbol of a leader's connection to god and was required for him to be a good ruler, this whole problem would be solved. The oldest brother could simply have his younger siblings' pinkie fingers cut off, and let them live.

This would mean that ruling families would be much more free to have big families and expand their power even more.

Ceremonies & Levels

The highest office would require a fully complete pinkie finger on both hands. Being a high councillor would require all but the last joint. Lower roles would require less. There would be a coming of age ceremony where how much of their finger would be allowed to be kept. Occasionally bandits would come in from other cultures with full fingers and everyone would be amazed.

This would work well in isoluation - murders of family members to prevent them from competing with you would be much less frequent; but one bad effect would be that in some cases it would be hard for people to advance. Plus, in isolation, soldiers having missing fingers would put this culture at a disadvantage in wars; occasionally fully-fingered barbarian tribes would invade and wow everyone.

US Sports Should Adopt a Promotion/Relegation System

2020-09-30T00:00:00Z

Relegation is a system of promoting minor league teams to the major leagues, and demoting failing major league teams to the minors, used in Europe.

It's a great system that America should adopt for it's sports leagues. However, it'll never happen.

Integration

In relegation systems, there is full integration from local, town level teams, up to city, region, and national teams. Weekend semi-pro teams are in the same system as professionals; teams on each level support themselves. There are many semi-pro levels at the bottom, and the best teams in each division move up at the end of each season, replacing the worst teams, who move down.

Benefits

Some amazing things have happened in relegation systems. Local teams have gone up through the leagues every year, to eventually become professional, build a stadium, and be a major, famous, national team. Pro teams with bad management have fallen to the minors and had to fight their way back up, or die out.

Honesty

In US sports, the minor leagues are all fake - the teams aren't really playing for anything beyond the individual benefit of the players. Players contributing to a championship doesn't mean anything - it's all about getting noticed as an individual, and being taken to the next level yourself, leaving behind your teammates.

In relegation systems, individuals do move around a lot, but wherever you are for the season, the team you're playing for really does care about what happens - if they win it all, the championship will be worth something to the team and managers, since they're local & personally involved with the team, not just working for a distant top league owner. At the end of the year, it's possible for a team to keep its best players, rather than have them taken away.

Interest

It makes league finals more interesting, since promotion makes a big difference in tv & ad revenue, and it also makes losing teams try harder, to avoid relegation - which is bad for the individual players, and also for the team.

Better Resource Allocation

Teams can start anywhere there is support - since minor league teams support themselves (they're not slave puppets like MLB/NBA minor league teams), sometimes one of them will pull together a really good team, get enough fans to make enough money to improve themselves, and break into the majors.

This would solve baseball's problem of having teams in tiny markets, and always having to change the rules/management/pay/draft pick structure to artificially make them competitive. With relegation, these teams would just be demoted to minor league teams (where they would be really competitive) - fans would still be able to watch great games, which would mean something now. Teams would compete with others from more evenly sized markets. We would not have this ridiculous movement of teams from city to city - dying or failing teams would just be demoted, and if there was a city that needed a team, they would naturally appear to meet the market.

In big cities, there could be just as many teams as the market would support - if someone wanted to start & put money into a minor league New York team, they could, in hopes of winning the minor league & being promoted to the majors.

This would also take care of the really stupid problem introduced into the MLB/NFL where the top league is expanded every year. Since there would be competitive games for these smaller markets anyway, there'd be no need to promote them to major league level if they couldn't compete.

The reason US sports are so desperate to expand the leagues is because the minor leagues are so meaningless - they're barely sports teams at all, since there are no incentives for them to behave with any team cohesion, and because they have no individual power to hold onto players at the end of the season. They can't make money because they're not giving fans anything like what they want.

Eternal Battles

In the US system, no matter how many times someone beats the Brewers, they're still going to be around next year. This is bad for them and bad for everyone. Let them die as a major league team, until they deserve it.

Why it won't happen

It's just too risky to change something worth this much.

Why it should happen

People would go watch a lot more sports, if minor league games meant something. Making minor league teams interesting would increase the size of the pie for all sports - there'd be better local sports to go see, playing for them would be meaningful even if you weren't in the pro track, and since they would be more local, interest & support for teams would be more real. At least at the lower levels, most players would be from the area, and would be able to play for a team they knew growing up.

Naming

One extra benefit is that teams wouldn't have stupid names, since they would all have come from humble origins, without budgets to think of gimmicky names.

Unknown Time Remaining In Media

2020-09-30T00:00:00Z

In traditional media, the audience doesn't know how long is remaining in the story. So, false endings and other devices work well.

Traditional

You never know when a play is going to suddenly end.

A story being told can end suddenly or go on for hours or more.

A song or a band playing can go however long.

A ritual can last indefinitely (or can be extended / ended suddenly)

Stories appearing in magazines, or short-story collections have an unknown end.

Serialized magazine stories can have an indeterminate ending.

Modern

In modern media, you always know how much is left.

DVDs display time remaining (minus credits)

In books you can feel how many pages there are left (although indexes, other junk at the end can make it tricky)

CDs sort of give you a hint based on the track number, but people can put in hidden tracks & things.

Modern media should offer the option to not show how much time is left

It'd restore the mystery, and make plot devices work a lot better.

It would also reinforce the (in my opinion) correct way to read a book - to really consider whether or not this book is worth reading at all, and if not, stop reading, without feeling a need to finish it.

Kindles should give the option to not show page numbers. DVD players should let you disable the movie time display.

It's not really possible to do it with books, though.

Fuseki.net

This is a new type of very pro-american video

Commentary

Index

Pages

Projects

Pictures

Other

Groups

GitHub activity

Absolute vs Relative Truth

How do you vote on amazon?

So what's the problem with relative truth?

How does this fit in with the metagame?

What's the problem with absolute truth?

What's the problem with relative voters?

Some other thoughts

Power

Psychology

Another side effect:

Structural issues

Does trust level of a society matter?

What's the equilibrium

Free Startup Ideas

Outcome manipulation for autobattler games

How to manipulate randomness in games, and how it may already be happening.

Poker example:

Storybook Brawl example

How would games choose which random outcome to give the player?

Giving amazing experiences

This is the randomness axis

This may already be happening everywhere!

Compare this to a game like Slay the Spire

But a Slay the Spire version of this may still be interesting.

There is Randomness in Chess

Violations of Calories in, calories out

Simple violations

Another scenario

Are you so sure you want to use weight?

Even more example

Analysis of online "Took Ya Long Enough" type comments

"Took ya long enough"

Relative Analysis

Horrible metagame too

So why do we see this so often?

Missing features on YouTube 2020

Friend network

Sharing

Automatic intro skipping

List of Patreon Subs with Justification

TheZvi

Yourmoviesucks / Adam Johnston

TheJapanChannel

CGP Grey

Scott Alexander

Quillette

CaspianReport

CaryHuang

Gwern Branwen

3blue1brown

Xah Lee

Ruben Sim

Gopro Yeonwoo

TheraminTrees

AlexanderWales

Mormon Stories Podcast

ChessNetwork

Bay 12 Games - Dwarf Fortress creators

SenescentSoul - Delve serialized fiction story

About me

Location

Interests

China Books

Story Idea - Sequential Cloning

A story about emotions under cloning

Crypto TFR multi-level marketing scheme

Why would someone do this?

Requirements:

Failure states - oh, so many, but they make for good plots

Why is this even a thing?