Author Archives: Zack M. Davis

Plea Bargaining

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I wish people were better at—plea bargaining, rather than pretending to be innocent. You accuse someone of [negative-valence description of trait or behavior that they're totally doing], and they say, "No, I'm not", and I'm just like ... really? How dumb do you think we are?

I think when people accuse me of [negative-valence description of trait or behavior], I'm usually more like, "Okay, I can see what you're getting at, but I actually think it's more like [different negative-valence description of trait or behavior], which I claim is a pretty reasonable thing to do given my goals and incentives."

(Because I usually can see what they're getting at! Even if their goal is just to attack me, attackers know to choose something plausible, because why would you attack someone with a charge that has no hope of sticking?)

Beauty Is Truthiness, Truthiness Beauty?

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Imagine reviewing Python code that looks something like this.

has_items = items is not None and len(items) > 0
if has_items:
    ...

...
do_stuff(has_items=has_items)

You might look at the conditional, and disapprove: None and empty collections are both falsey, so there's no reason to define that has_items variable; you could just say if items:.

But, wouldn't it be weird for do_stuff's has_items kwarg to take a collection rather than a boolean? I think it would be weird: even if the function's internals can probably rely on mere truthiness rather than needing an actual boolean type for some reason, why leave it to chance?

So, maybe it's okay to define the has_items variable for the sake of the function kwarg—and, having done so anyway, to use it as an if condition.

You might object further: but, but, None and the empty collection are still both falsey. Even if we've somehow been conned into defining a whole variable, shouldn't we say has_items = bool(items) rather than spelling out is not None and len(items) > 0 like some rube (or Rubyist) who doesn't know Python?!

Actually—maybe not. Much of Python's seductive charm comes from its friendly readability ("executable pseudocode"): it's intuitive for if not items to mean "if items is empty". English, and not the formal truthiness rules, are all ye need to know. In contrast, it's only if you already know the rules that bool(items) becomes meaningful. Since we care about good code and don't care about testing the reader's Python knowledge, spelling out items is not None and len(items) > 0 is very arguably the right thing to do here.

January Is Math and Wellness Month

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(Previously)

There is a time to tackle ambitious intellectual projects and go on grand political crusades, and tour the podcast circuit marketing both.

That time is not January. January is for:

  • sleeping (at the same time every night)
  • running, or long walks
  • reflecting on our obligations under the moral law
  • composing careful memoirs on our failures before the moral law (in anticipation of being court-martialed in February for crimes of December)
  • chores
  • medium-term planning
  • performing well at one's dayjob
  • studying math in the evenings
  • avoiding Twitter (starting now)
  • not using psychiatric medications like quetiapine unless the expected consequences of doing so seem better

And You Take Me the Way I Am

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Mark Twain wrote that honesty means you don't have to remember anything. But it also means you don't have to worry about making mistakes.

If you said something terrible that made everyone decide that you're stupid and evil, there's no sense in futilely protesting that "that's not what you meant", or agonizing that you should have thought more carefully and said something else in order to avoid the outcome of everyone thinking that you're stupid and evil.

Strategy is deception. You said what you said in the situation you were in, and everyone else used the information in that signal as evidence for a Bayesian update about your intelligence and moral character. As they should. So what's the problem? You wouldn't want people to have false beliefs, would you!?

Coffee Is for Coders

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No one cares if you're in pain;
They only want results.
Everywhere this law's the same,
In startups, schools, and cults.
A child can pull the heartstrings
Of assorted moms and voters,
But your dumb cries are all in vain,
And coffee is for coders.

No one cares how hard you tried
(Though I bet it wasn't much),
But work that can on be relied,
If not relied as such.
A kitten is forgiven
As are a broken gear or rotors,
But your dumb crimes are full of shame,
And coffee is for coders.

The Parable of the Scorpion and the Fox

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In the days of auld lang syne on Earth-that-was, a scorpion was creepy-crawling along a riverbank, wondering how to get to the other side. It came across an animal that could swim: some versions of the tale say it was a fox, others report a quokka. I'm going to assume it was a fox.

So the scorpion asks the fox to take it on her back and swim across the river. What does the fox say? She says, "No." The scorpion says, "If this is because you're afraid I'll sting you with my near-instantly-fatal toxins, don't worry—if I did that, then we'd likely both drown. By backwards induction, you're safe." What does the fox say? After pondering for a few moments, she says, "Okay."

So the scorpion gets on the fox's back, and the fox begins to swim across the river. When the pair is halfway across the river, the scorpion stings the fox.

The fox howls in pain while continuing to paddle. "Why?!" she cries. "Why did you do that?! As you said before, now we're likely to both drown."

The scorpion says, "I can't help it. It's my nature."

As the fox continues to paddle, the scorpion continues. "Interestingly, there's a very famous parable about this exact scenario. There was even an episode of Star Trek: Voyager titled after it. As a fox who knows many things, you must have heard it before. Why did you believe me?"

"I can't help it," gasped the fox, who might after all have been a quokka, as the poison filled her veins and her vision began to blur and her paddling began to slow. "It's my nature."

Blogging on Less Wrong 2020 (Upper Half)

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Relationship Outcomes Are Not Particularly Sensitive to Small Variations in Verbal Ability

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After a friendship-ending fight, you feel an impulse to push through the pain to do an exhaustive postmortem of everything you did wrong in that last, fatal argument—you could have phrased that more eloquently, could have anticipated that objection, could have not left so much "surface area" open to that class of rhetorical counterattack, could have been more empathetic on that one point, could have chosen a more-fitting epigraph, could have taken more time to compose your reply and squeeze in another pass's worth of optimizations—as if searching for some combination of variables that would have changed the outcome, some nearby possible world where the two of you are still together.

No solution exists. (Or is findable in polynomial time.) The causal forces that brought you to this juncture are multitudinous and complex. A small change in the initial conditions only corresponds to a small change in the outcome; you can't lift a two-ton weight with ten pounds of force.

Not all friendship problems are like this. Happy endings do exist—to someone else's story in someone else's not-particularly-nearby possible world. Not for you, not here, not now.

Feature Reduction

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(looking at baby/toddler photos a year apart) "How does he look so different and yet so the same at the same time?"

"Just in case that was non-rhetorical, the answer is that your brain evolved to be good at factorizing overall appearance into orthogonal 'personal appearance' and 'age appearance' dimensions that can be tracked separately, just as [x, y] = [1, 2] and [4, 2] are so different with respect to x, and yet so the same with respect to y, at the same time."

Lock Contention

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"We really need another bookcase."

"I'm not thinking about that right now. But like, if you got another bookcase, I wouldn't object."

"Where would we put it?"

"I'm also not thinking about that right now, but I've already started speaking a sentence in response to your question, so I might as well finish it. Oh. I guess I just did."