The Nonlinear Library LW - Monthly Roundup #11: October 2023 by Zvi
Oct 4, 2023
54:21
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Monthly Roundup #11: October 2023, published by Zvi on October 4, 2023 on LessWrong.
It never stops. I'm increasingly building distinct roundups for various topics, in particular I'm splitting medical and health news out. Let's get to the rest of it.
Bad News
A simple model of why everything sucks: It is all optimized almost entirely for the marginal user, who the post calls Marl. Marl hates when there are extra buttons on the screen or any bit of complexity is offered, even when he is under zero obligation to use it or care, let alone being asked to think, so everything gets dumbed down.
Could companies really be this stupid, so eager to chase the marginal user a little bit more that they cripple the functionality of their products? Very much so, yes, well past the point where it makes financial sense to do so. The metrics form a tyranny, invisible costs are increasingly paid on the alter of visible DAUs and cost of customer acquisition and 30-day retention, and that's that.
What is to be done about it? My proposed solution is to build interfaces, filters, recommendation engines and other such goodies on top of existing sucky products, probably involving the use of LLMs and other AI in various ways, to make the sucky products suck less. In many cases this seems super doable. With the rise of AI, the data you would gather along the way would potentially pay for the whole operation. I continue trying to make this happen low-key behind the scenes.
Periodic reminder from Patrick McKenzie that your phone number with any major American carrier can and will be compromised at a time not of your choosing if someone cares enough to do that, as happened recently to Vitalik Buterin. Socially engineering a store employee is a rather trivial task. So if you care about your security, you need to avoid letting anyone use your phone for two-factor authentication or otherwise plan to be fine when this happens.
Hasan Minhaj admits that he made up a lot of the key details he uses in his stand-up, in ways that greatly alter the serious impact of the story, not merely modifying for comedic effect. Eliezer says this is sad, as he knew journalists did such things but expected better of a comedian. Robin Hanson confirms that it matters via a poll.
Robin Hanson: "Does it matter that much of it never happened to him?" Apparently yes, it does matter.
Hasan Minhaj has talent. His joke construction and delivery is spot on, despite a constant struggle with the axes he is constantly grinding. Now we know that he was cheating with the axes, which makes it much worse. Indeed, despite claiming he only lies in his stand-up, in a real sense his comedy was genuine the whole time, but he felt the need to mix it with deeply dishonest journalism.
The concept of lightgassing, as proposed by Spencer Greenberg: Affirming someone's known-to-be false beliefs or statements in order to be supportive (or, I would add, to avoid making them angry or incur favor, which is also common). As Spencer notes, the key is often to validate someone's feelings, without validating their false beliefs. Having a name for this might be useful, so people can request others avoid it, or explain why they are not doing it.
Disunity
Unity is a highly useful game development tool. If you program in Unity, the result will work across a wide variety of platforms. Emergents TCG was programmed in Unity, which solved some of our problems without creating any new ones.
Then Unity decided to retroactively change its pricing to make itself prohibitively expensive to small developers. Including removing the GitHub repo that tracks license changes, and updating their license to remove the clause that lets you use the TOS from the version you shipped with, then insisting already shipped games pay the new fees. Whoops.
Here's Darkfrost on Reddit, f...
It never stops. I'm increasingly building distinct roundups for various topics, in particular I'm splitting medical and health news out. Let's get to the rest of it.
Bad News
A simple model of why everything sucks: It is all optimized almost entirely for the marginal user, who the post calls Marl. Marl hates when there are extra buttons on the screen or any bit of complexity is offered, even when he is under zero obligation to use it or care, let alone being asked to think, so everything gets dumbed down.
Could companies really be this stupid, so eager to chase the marginal user a little bit more that they cripple the functionality of their products? Very much so, yes, well past the point where it makes financial sense to do so. The metrics form a tyranny, invisible costs are increasingly paid on the alter of visible DAUs and cost of customer acquisition and 30-day retention, and that's that.
What is to be done about it? My proposed solution is to build interfaces, filters, recommendation engines and other such goodies on top of existing sucky products, probably involving the use of LLMs and other AI in various ways, to make the sucky products suck less. In many cases this seems super doable. With the rise of AI, the data you would gather along the way would potentially pay for the whole operation. I continue trying to make this happen low-key behind the scenes.
Periodic reminder from Patrick McKenzie that your phone number with any major American carrier can and will be compromised at a time not of your choosing if someone cares enough to do that, as happened recently to Vitalik Buterin. Socially engineering a store employee is a rather trivial task. So if you care about your security, you need to avoid letting anyone use your phone for two-factor authentication or otherwise plan to be fine when this happens.
Hasan Minhaj admits that he made up a lot of the key details he uses in his stand-up, in ways that greatly alter the serious impact of the story, not merely modifying for comedic effect. Eliezer says this is sad, as he knew journalists did such things but expected better of a comedian. Robin Hanson confirms that it matters via a poll.
Robin Hanson: "Does it matter that much of it never happened to him?" Apparently yes, it does matter.
Hasan Minhaj has talent. His joke construction and delivery is spot on, despite a constant struggle with the axes he is constantly grinding. Now we know that he was cheating with the axes, which makes it much worse. Indeed, despite claiming he only lies in his stand-up, in a real sense his comedy was genuine the whole time, but he felt the need to mix it with deeply dishonest journalism.
The concept of lightgassing, as proposed by Spencer Greenberg: Affirming someone's known-to-be false beliefs or statements in order to be supportive (or, I would add, to avoid making them angry or incur favor, which is also common). As Spencer notes, the key is often to validate someone's feelings, without validating their false beliefs. Having a name for this might be useful, so people can request others avoid it, or explain why they are not doing it.
Disunity
Unity is a highly useful game development tool. If you program in Unity, the result will work across a wide variety of platforms. Emergents TCG was programmed in Unity, which solved some of our problems without creating any new ones.
Then Unity decided to retroactively change its pricing to make itself prohibitively expensive to small developers. Including removing the GitHub repo that tracks license changes, and updating their license to remove the clause that lets you use the TOS from the version you shipped with, then insisting already shipped games pay the new fees. Whoops.
Here's Darkfrost on Reddit, f...