bounded_agent's comments

Say my close friend / future cofounder is here on a B-1. He's looking to extend it for 6 months pretty soon. Do you think the current situation means that it's more or less likely to get approved?

I'd be optimistic about the baseline situation, but given the pandemic, I don't know whether the government would be (a) very slow, allowing the person lots of time to stay while govt makes their call, or (b) unusually efficient AND strict.

(Thanks for helping everyone out on this thread!)

Mm, most of this seems well-intentioned but a bit confused to me. I might specify the easiest point that's mistaken as this bit:

> So you learn from it, yeah? Next thing comes along with a 10% or 20% chance, you prepare for it. You're in California, so, earthquake: you fill up your garage with supplies. The earthquake never comes. Then there's a 10% or 20% chance of wildfire destroying your community... so you move, except the wildfire never hits that community. Armed robbery. Disease. Storms. All of these have some kind of low probability of happening, but will have super serious consequences if they do, so you -- remembering covid-19 -- prepare for each of them.

In the last decade of living in Berkeley, me and my nearest ~150 friends+acquaintances have not experienced a wildfire destroying our community, an earthquake causing life-threatening damage, armed robbery (a few muggings, but less of us have been affected by 10-100x as are affected by covid), storms causing life-threatening damage, etc. So the probability of all of these cannot be 10% in a given couple-of-months period (as we did to Covid in Feb), because they would all have happened like a dozen times in the last decade if so.

10% is just really, really high, relative to the baseline for life-shattering catastrophes. I've seen journalists say "We can't talk about all the 10% catastrophes, we'd look alarmist!" The level of threat that Covid was in mid February was just not comparable to the tragedies you listed above, it was a straightforward exponential growth in a fairly severe disease happening in many countries. You can argue that at the time I (or professional epidemiologists or whoever) should've assigned it the sort of low probability (<1%) associated with things like armed robbery and wildfire hitting me in Downtown Berkeley, but I think you'd be wrong, there just weren't that level of strong arguments about the baseline safety. It was a real risk, and it was correct to prepare in late Feb (as I did, and self-quarantined as soon as the first Berkeley case was reported in early March).

I just wanted to rebut the thing that seemed most wrong to me. I hope you're well in this difficult time.

+1

Just FYI, the page replicates the work in full because the author has set up automatic crossposting from her blog to LessWrong (and GreaterWrong is a mirror of LessWrong).

I feel like you're arguing there's an efficient market of advice - any advice that can be widely understood has already been turned into money, and also there's a limited supply of money to go around so no advice can raise all boats.

I disagree on both counts. To use an overly relevant analogy, the market is not so efficient that successful startups cannot be built (and planned in advance of becoming successful), and it is possible for everyone in the world to become more competent and skilled and for this to just make everything better (e.g. better products for everyone).

You can have new insights that are generally true, and everything isn't zero sum.

The opening two lines says that it's also about building something important, and subtly imply that's the better goal of the two.

As a non-profit founder I found the advice useful. If you think the incentives of the world are such that doing something important is basically the same goal as making money, then that's great, but I don't think so.

That's a great link, though another writer at that blog wrote a short story re-explaining it many years later.

It's a conversation between a scientist, a bayesian, and a confused undergrad: https://arbital.com/p/likelihoods_not_pvalues/?l=4xx (warning, site loads very slow).