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Book review: Why Nations Fail

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Acemoglu and Robinson argue against the “ignorance hypothesis” implicit in most development economics - that poor nations remain poor due to bad economic decisions. Rather, they propose, success and failure come down to the quality of political institutions in that country. These institutions need to be: Centralised enough that they can enforce the rule of law, property rights, and a monopoly on violence.  Inclusive, rather than absolutist or extractive.  Inclusive institutions take input from a wide range of the people they govern, and uphold their rights and liberties, without seizing too much of their wealth. A lack of inclusive institutions leads to many problems: When a high percentage of people’s incomes are taken away (e.g. medieval serfs), that reduces their incentive and ability to invest or innovate. Rulers who prosper by extracting wealth from their populace are primarily concerned with remaining in power rather than improving their countries, and so block “creativ

How democracy ends: a review and reevaluation

Last month I attended a talk by David Runciman, the author of a recent book called How Democracy Ends . I was prepared for outrage-stirring and pearl-clutching, but was pleasantly surprised by the quality of his arguments, which I’ve summarised below, along with my own thoughts on these issues. Note, however, that I haven’t read the book itself, and so can’t be confident that I’ve portrayed his ideas faithfully. Which lessons from history? Many people have compared recent populist movements with the stirrings of fascism a century ago. And indeed it’s true that a lot of similar rhetoric being thrown around. But Runciman argues that this is one of the least interesting comparisons to be made between these two times. Some things that would be much more surprising to a denizen of the early 20th century: Significant advances in technology Massive transformations in societal demographics Very few changes in our institutions The last of those is particularly surprising in light

Some cruxes on impactful alternatives to AI policy work

Cross-posted to Less Wrong. Ben Pace and I (Richard Ngo) recently did a public double crux at the Berkeley REACH on how valuable it is for people to go into AI policy and strategy work: I was optimistic and Ben was pessimistic. During the actual event, we didn't come anywhere near to finding a double crux on that issue. But after a lot of subsequent discussion, we've come up with some more general cruxes about where impact comes from. I found Ben's model of how to have impact very interesting, and so in this post I've tried to explain it, along with my disagreements. Ben liked the goal of writing up a rough summary of our positions and having further discussion in the comments, so while he edited it somewhat he doesn’t at all think that it’s a perfect argument, and it’s not what he’d write if he spent 10 hours on it. He endorsed the wording of the cruxes as broadly accurate. (During the double crux, we also discussed how the heavy-tailed worldview applies to com

Realism about rationality

Epistemic status: trying to vaguely gesture at vague intuitions. Cross-posted to Less Wrong , where there's been some good discussion. A similar idea was explored here under the heading "the intelligibility of intelligence", although I hadn't seen it before writing this post. There’s a mindset which is common in the rationalist community, which I call “realism about rationality” (the name being intended as a parallel to moral realism). I feel like my skepticism about agent foundations research is closely tied to my skepticism about this mindset, and so in this essay I try to articulate what it is. Humans ascribe properties to entities in the world in order to describe and predict them. Here are three such properties: "momentum", "evolutionary fitness", and "intelligence". These are all pretty useful properties for high-level reasoning in the fields of physics, biology and AI, respectively. There's a key difference between the

I'm so meta, even this acronym

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This is my 52nd blog post within the span of one calendar year, since I (re)started blogging on September 5th, 2017. My writing productivity has far exceeded my expectations, and I'm very happy about managing to explore so many ideas. Here are some metrics. Breakdown by topic: 10 posts on computer science, machine learning, and maths 10 posts on philosophy 7 posts on politics and economics 6 posts on modern life and the future of society 5 posts on history and geography 3 posts on intelligence 12 miscellaneous posts (including this one) Most popular (in order): In search of All Souls Is death bad? What have been the greatest intellectual achievements? Utilitarianism and its discontents The unreasonable effectiveness of deep learning Yes, you should be angry about the housing crisis Oxford vs Cambridge Longest posts (in order of word count): A brief history of India . 5915 Proof, computation and truth . 5627 Utilitarianism and its discontents . 5550 Y

A compendium of conundrums

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Logic puzzles None of the puzzles below have trick answers - they can all be solved using logic and a bit of maths. Whenever a group of people need to achieve a task, assume they're allowed to confer and come up with a strategy beforehand. They're listed roughly in order of difficulty. Let me know of any other good ones you find! Two ropes I have two ropes which each, if lighted at one end, takes 1 hour to burn all the way to the other end. However, they burn at variable rates (e.g. the first might take 55 minutes to burn 1/4 of the way, then 5 minutes to burn all the rest; the second might be the opposite). How do I use them to time 45 minutes? 25 horses I have 25 horses, and am trying to find the 3 fastest. I have no timer, but can race 5 at a time against each other; I know that a faster horse will always beat a slower horse. How many races do I need to find the 3 fastest, in order? Monty hall problem ( explanation taken from here ) The set of Monty Hall&

Book summary: Why we sleep

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Note: Alexey Guzey has identified a number of flaws in this book, casting doubt on its veracity. Pending further investigation, the information in this summary shouldn't be considered reliable. I read this book because I knew that it would tell me to sleep more, and I hoped it would cite enough scary statistics that I'd be likely to actually follow through. Well, it worked - I'm keeping a copy on my bedside table for the foreseeable future, just as a reminder. In addition to the exhortations to get more sleep, it contains a variety of other interesting and important facts about sleep. What is sleep? Human sleep consists of cycles lasting about 1.5 hours, each of which contains first a period of NREM (Non-Rapid Eye Movement) sleep, then a period of REM sleep. In brain scans, the former consists of slow, deep brain waves, while the latter shows the same frenetic activity as an awake brain. As the night goes on, cycles feature a higher proportion of REM sleep. This m

Feeling, complicated

It was very striking to me to contrast the two recent successes of OpenAI: one, OpenAI Five , beating some of the best humans at a complex game in a sophisticated virtual environment; and the other, Dactyl , fumblingly manipulating blocks in ways that children master at young ages. This is not to diminish how much of an achievement Dactyl is - no other reinforcement learning system has come close to this sort of performance in a physical task. But it does show that the real world is very complicated , compared with even our most advanced virtual worlds. To be fair, the graphics and physics engines used to render videos are becoming very good (and as movies show, practically indistinguishable from real life when enough work is put in). Audio generation is worse, except on human voices, which are now very convincing - but background sounds aren't a crucial component of our environment anyway. The biggest experiential difference between current simulations and the real world seems to

Book review: The Complacent Class

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"The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity."                                                    W. B. Yeats The idea that things aren't going great these days is pretty widespread; there's a glut of books pointing out various problems. Cowen's achievement in this one is in weaving together disparate strands of evidence to identify the zeitgeist which summarises the overall trend - in a word, complacency. There are at least two ways in which people can be complacent. Either they're living pretty good lives, and want to solidify their positions as much as possible. Or they're unsatisfied with their lives, but unwilling to mobilise or take the risks which could improve their situations. (People in the middle of the economic spectrum showcase aspects of both). What's the opposite of complacency? Dynamism and risk-taking - traits which have always been associated with immigrants, and with America, the land of immig