A few people have noted “I don’t like that this post (and other recent ones) are blatantly talking about politics on LessWrong.”
It is pretty plausible to me that it’s not possible to get into mainstream political politics without some cascading effects that draw in the sort of person who wants to talk about politics on LW and is net negative.
(The mods do apply stronger standards to approving users who show up to talk about politics. So, this is not as immediately-failure-prone as you might expect. But, the risk from the longterm trends is pretty real).
I do think it’s just false that “LW doesn’t talk about politics.” The original Politics is the Mind-Killer post doesn’t say “don’t talk about politics”, it says “Don’t use unnecessary political examples.” We occasionally have talked about politics since the LW revival, about Covid, and “does the Ukraine situation have implications for whether East European LWers should evacuate” and “are we at risk of sudden nuclear war” and the first Trump administration. This post isn’t very unprecedented. You can argue it’s still bad. But, the status quo is empirically “political discussions happen when it seems important.”
...
But, I want to highlight a different issue. You might or might not think is bad, but I think you should be tracking:
...
Some people have asked “Where is all this sudden partisan framing coming from? It feels like the last couple posts are taking as a given that one should be worried about Trump destroying America without doing anything to justify that and assuming we’re all bought in.”
The answer is “Well, because we mostly don’t talk about politics on LW, all that conversation happened in person / private Slack, etc. One could put in a lot of work to lay out all the background assumptions when we go to write it up on LW, but, that’s an extra tax on getting write the important new bit one just thought of.”
This is perhaps analogous to how, for a few years, CFAR did most of their ideating in person, and then suddenly a significant chunk of LW authors were talking about Focusing or Doublecrux and taking them as obvious background concepts and everyone was like “wtf, what are these words, why are you so confident they matter?” and people were like “idk we’ve been talking about this for years, just not on LW because LW kinda sucks atm.”
Perhaps also: a lot of discussion of the AI safety space (around the same time, during the LW decline period) happened in person/private, and it involved a lot of “what’s the realpolitik about what OpenPhil will fund?” or whatever, and this resulted in some confusing conversations on LW.
The alternative to “stuff gets discussed on LW” is “it gets discussed elsewhere” and then the forefront of the rationalist conversation about what is important gets disconnected from the public, until, suddenly, it becomes important enough that it has to show up somehow, or leak through.”
This is coming up now (for me) all that background thought has led to me and some colleagues thinking “the Trump situation seems bad enough to be a contender for like Top-5 things to actually work on, alongside various flavors of Deal with AI”, and I’m trying to think through what that means. It also means I’m still trying to think about this cheaply/efficiently because I’m trying to decide whether to spend more time thinking about it. Which puts me in a weird place of “well, I’m just not gonna do the pretty exhaustive, methodical, ideal way of engaging with this question, at least at first, because the whole point is to reduce uncertainty on whether to invest in that sort of thing.”
I do think the various private circles I’ve seen this discussed have had more extreme filter bubbles than LW, and it’s actively useful to discuss it in public in places where it’s easier to get pushback from different corners of the ideologysphere.
In general I finda lot of political talk fairly ungrounded, in ways where a lot of energy gets spent on things that, many years later, might not even have been true in the first place. I always feel like that about political things. I wish stuff erred on the side of opening with some verifiable facts and then distinguishing interpretation or concerns from there.
What is your concrete preference for what I had done with this post?
(this feels like a fairly generic response that’s not particularly engaging with the situation or post, which is specifically asking “how to get grounded”, with a description of my current ideas for doing so)
I mean, I’m mostly agreeing with you, and also adding that I think you didn’t meet the bar in this post for being grounded in this post. The opening 4 paragraphs make a ton of claims about a discourse that I am not following without giving links for me to check the claims, and throughout makes lots of implicit claims about what is relevant.
I like your proposal in the post for how to get more grounded, to build up a historical dataset of unconstitutional or criminal activities by the US executive branch. Your questions seem too narrow to me though. Like, you list questions you’d like to ask about past Presidents, but I think they’re (mostly) based on specific accusations of overreach by the current President you’ve heard, and would miss other relevant corruption / criminality by the executive branch in the past that could be much greater.
It’s a bit like asking how many historical presidents lied under oath, and then deciding that Bill Clinton is the most corrupt president in history because he lied about his affair, rather than asking a more broad set of questions that would find other kinds of abuse of power, such as the Teapot Dome scandal where a Cabinet member secretly leased national security assets (oil) at super low prices in exchange for bribes, and the Cabinet member was sent to prison for it.
Nod. Agree with your object level take in the 3rd paragraph.
I think it’d have been dramatically more effort and mostly a different post to make the opening paragraphs to your satisfaction, and kinda the whole point of this post is to be able to write a second post that is more the type you want. (I also suspect you’re an outlier in the amount you’re not following Trump discourse already, none of the opening paragraphs are supposed to be new information for the reader)
I also suspect you’re an outlier in the amount you’re not following Trump discourse already, none of the opening paragraphs are supposed to be new information for the reader
Regardless, I think the point is to make it so that you don’t have to be the sort of person who follows discourse in crappy filter-bubbles in order to understand what is happening. Zvi’s news is the sort of thing that let me not have to read all the crappy filter bubbles during covid and still now during the AI-boom. LW should work like that if it’s going to talk about government corruption and breakdown of law. I don’t want to have to read the awful corners of the internet where this is discussed all day. They do truth-seeking far worse there.
Sorry to both you with this, I’m not saying this post is bad, I just want to be on the same page about whether this is meeting the LW ideal standards for political discourse, and what those are in the future if/when you do aspire to meet them.
I don’t feel very confident about any of this, but, I think it’s just sort of fine if not all posts are for all people.
In any other topic than politics, I think it’d be be fine to have a lower effort meta post trying to get traction on how to think about the problem, with the people who are already following a topic, before writing higher effort posts that do a better job being a good canonical reference. It’s totally fine for someone to write an agent foundations post that just assumes a lot of background while some people hash out their latest ideas, and people who aren’t steeped in agent foundations just aren’t the target audience.
It’s possible politics should have different standards from that such that basically every posts should be accessible, but, that’s a fairly specific argument I’d need to hear.
I agree it’d be bad if there were only ever political posts like this. I don’t know if I think it’d be bad if 10% or 20% or 50% of posts like this, would need to think about it more.
A more concise term for “follows discourse in crappy filter-bubbles” is “widely read”. If you want to live inside a Zvi Mowshowitz filter bubble because Mowshowitz offers a good signal-to-noise ratio, that makes sense if you’re super-busy and don’t have much time to read, but that should be a mere time-saving optimization on your part. If you actually think that non-ingroup information sources are “awful” and “crappy” because “[t]hey do truth-seeking far worse there”, then you probably could stand to read more widely!
Do you believe that, because a rational agent should never do worse with more information, that a human should be able to expose itself to any social environment on the internet and do better? I don’t, I think that many environments, while occasionally containing novel bits of information, can mostly make you less sane and seeing the world through lenses that are ungrounded. And I think many sources of news have been adversarially pursued and optimized to make the consumers of it be corrupted and controlled.
I expect you agree with this so I am not sure exactly what you’re objecting to. You are pointing out that some environments have valuable info? That’s right, but I would say that most environments talking about ”current events” in government/politics are not.
This is such a bizarre reply. Part of the time-honored ideal of being widely read (that I didn’t think I needed to explicitly spell out) is that you’re not supposed to believe everything you read.
Right? I don’t think this is special “rationalist” wisdom. I think this is, like, liberal arts. Like, when 11th grade English teachers assign their students to read Huckleberry Finn, the idea is that being able to see the world through the ungrounded lenses of 19th-century racists makes them more sane, because they can contrast the view through those particular ungrounded lenses with everything else they’ve read.
many sources of news have been adversarially pursued and optimized to make the consumers of it be corrupted and controlled.
I mean, yes, but the way they pull that off is by convincing the consumers that they shouldn’t want to read any of those awful corners of the internet where they do truthseeking far worse than here. (Pravda means “truth”; Donald Trump’s platform is called Truth Social.)
some environments have valuable info [...] but I would say that most environments talking about “current events” in government/politics are not.
Given finite reading time, you definitely need to prioritize ruthlessly to manage the signal-to-noise ratio. If you don’t have time to read anything but Mowshowitz, that’s fine; most things aren’t worth your time. But if you’re skeptical that a human can expose itself to any social environment on the internet and do better, that doesn’t sound like a signal-to-noise ratio concern. That sounds like a contamination concern.
Not the main point here, but Huckleberry Finn is (rather famously) an anti-slavery work and not a good representation of the nineteenth-century racist worldview. A better example would be that a lot of college history classes assign parts of Mein Kampf.
A few people have noted “I don’t like that this post (and other recent ones) are blatantly talking about politics on LessWrong.”
It is pretty plausible to me that it’s not possible to get into mainstream political politics without some cascading effects that draw in the sort of person who wants to talk about politics on LW and is net negative.
(The mods do apply stronger standards to approving users who show up to talk about politics. So, this is not as immediately-failure-prone as you might expect. But, the risk from the longterm trends is pretty real).
I do think it’s just false that “LW doesn’t talk about politics.” The original Politics is the Mind-Killer post doesn’t say “don’t talk about politics”, it says “Don’t use unnecessary political examples.” We occasionally have talked about politics since the LW revival, about Covid, and “does the Ukraine situation have implications for whether East European LWers should evacuate” and “are we at risk of sudden nuclear war” and the first Trump administration. This post isn’t very unprecedented. You can argue it’s still bad. But, the status quo is empirically “political discussions happen when it seems important.”
...
But, I want to highlight a different issue. You might or might not think is bad, but I think you should be tracking:
...
Some people have asked “Where is all this sudden partisan framing coming from? It feels like the last couple posts are taking as a given that one should be worried about Trump destroying America without doing anything to justify that and assuming we’re all bought in.”
The answer is “Well, because we mostly don’t talk about politics on LW, all that conversation happened in person / private Slack, etc. One could put in a lot of work to lay out all the background assumptions when we go to write it up on LW, but, that’s an extra tax on getting write the important new bit one just thought of.”
This is perhaps analogous to how, for a few years, CFAR did most of their ideating in person, and then suddenly a significant chunk of LW authors were talking about Focusing or Doublecrux and taking them as obvious background concepts and everyone was like “wtf, what are these words, why are you so confident they matter?” and people were like “idk we’ve been talking about this for years, just not on LW because LW kinda sucks atm.”
Perhaps also: a lot of discussion of the AI safety space (around the same time, during the LW decline period) happened in person/private, and it involved a lot of “what’s the realpolitik about what OpenPhil will fund?” or whatever, and this resulted in some confusing conversations on LW.
The alternative to “stuff gets discussed on LW” is “it gets discussed elsewhere” and then the forefront of the rationalist conversation about what is important gets disconnected from the public, until, suddenly, it becomes important enough that it has to show up somehow, or leak through.”
This is coming up now (for me) all that background thought has led to me and some colleagues thinking “the Trump situation seems bad enough to be a contender for like Top-5 things to actually work on, alongside various flavors of Deal with AI”, and I’m trying to think through what that means. It also means I’m still trying to think about this cheaply/efficiently because I’m trying to decide whether to spend more time thinking about it. Which puts me in a weird place of “well, I’m just not gonna do the pretty exhaustive, methodical, ideal way of engaging with this question, at least at first, because the whole point is to reduce uncertainty on whether to invest in that sort of thing.”
I do think the various private circles I’ve seen this discussed have had more extreme filter bubbles than LW, and it’s actively useful to discuss it in public in places where it’s easier to get pushback from different corners of the ideologysphere.
In general I finda lot of political talk fairly ungrounded, in ways where a lot of energy gets spent on things that, many years later, might not even have been true in the first place. I always feel like that about political things. I wish stuff erred on the side of opening with some verifiable facts and then distinguishing interpretation or concerns from there.
What is your concrete preference for what I had done with this post?
(this feels like a fairly generic response that’s not particularly engaging with the situation or post, which is specifically asking “how to get grounded”, with a description of my current ideas for doing so)
I mean, I’m mostly agreeing with you, and also adding that I think you didn’t meet the bar in this post for being grounded in this post. The opening 4 paragraphs make a ton of claims about a discourse that I am not following without giving links for me to check the claims, and throughout makes lots of implicit claims about what is relevant.
I like your proposal in the post for how to get more grounded, to build up a historical dataset of unconstitutional or criminal activities by the US executive branch. Your questions seem too narrow to me though. Like, you list questions you’d like to ask about past Presidents, but I think they’re (mostly) based on specific accusations of overreach by the current President you’ve heard, and would miss other relevant corruption / criminality by the executive branch in the past that could be much greater.
It’s a bit like asking how many historical presidents lied under oath, and then deciding that Bill Clinton is the most corrupt president in history because he lied about his affair, rather than asking a more broad set of questions that would find other kinds of abuse of power, such as the Teapot Dome scandal where a Cabinet member secretly leased national security assets (oil) at super low prices in exchange for bribes, and the Cabinet member was sent to prison for it.
Nod. Agree with your object level take in the 3rd paragraph.
I think it’d have been dramatically more effort and mostly a different post to make the opening paragraphs to your satisfaction, and kinda the whole point of this post is to be able to write a second post that is more the type you want. (I also suspect you’re an outlier in the amount you’re not following Trump discourse already, none of the opening paragraphs are supposed to be new information for the reader)
Regardless, I think the point is to make it so that you don’t have to be the sort of person who follows discourse in crappy filter-bubbles in order to understand what is happening. Zvi’s news is the sort of thing that let me not have to read all the crappy filter bubbles during covid and still now during the AI-boom. LW should work like that if it’s going to talk about government corruption and breakdown of law. I don’t want to have to read the awful corners of the internet where this is discussed all day. They do truth-seeking far worse there.
Sorry to both you with this, I’m not saying this post is bad, I just want to be on the same page about whether this is meeting the LW ideal standards for political discourse, and what those are in the future if/when you do aspire to meet them.
I don’t feel very confident about any of this, but, I think it’s just sort of fine if not all posts are for all people.
In any other topic than politics, I think it’d be be fine to have a lower effort meta post trying to get traction on how to think about the problem, with the people who are already following a topic, before writing higher effort posts that do a better job being a good canonical reference. It’s totally fine for someone to write an agent foundations post that just assumes a lot of background while some people hash out their latest ideas, and people who aren’t steeped in agent foundations just aren’t the target audience.
It’s possible politics should have different standards from that such that basically every posts should be accessible, but, that’s a fairly specific argument I’d need to hear.
I agree it’d be bad if there were only ever political posts like this. I don’t know if I think it’d be bad if 10% or 20% or 50% of posts like this, would need to think about it more.
A more concise term for “follows discourse in crappy filter-bubbles” is “widely read”. If you want to live inside a Zvi Mowshowitz filter bubble because Mowshowitz offers a good signal-to-noise ratio, that makes sense if you’re super-busy and don’t have much time to read, but that should be a mere time-saving optimization on your part. If you actually think that non-ingroup information sources are “awful” and “crappy” because “[t]hey do truth-seeking far worse there”, then you probably could stand to read more widely!
Do you believe that, because a rational agent should never do worse with more information, that a human should be able to expose itself to any social environment on the internet and do better? I don’t, I think that many environments, while occasionally containing novel bits of information, can mostly make you less sane and seeing the world through lenses that are ungrounded. And I think many sources of news have been adversarially pursued and optimized to make the consumers of it be corrupted and controlled.
I expect you agree with this so I am not sure exactly what you’re objecting to. You are pointing out that some environments have valuable info? That’s right, but I would say that most environments talking about ”current events” in government/politics are not.
This is such a bizarre reply. Part of the time-honored ideal of being widely read (that I didn’t think I needed to explicitly spell out) is that you’re not supposed to believe everything you read.
Right? I don’t think this is special “rationalist” wisdom. I think this is, like, liberal arts. Like, when 11th grade English teachers assign their students to read Huckleberry Finn, the idea is that being able to see the world through the ungrounded lenses of 19th-century racists makes them more sane, because they can contrast the view through those particular ungrounded lenses with everything else they’ve read.
I mean, yes, but the way they pull that off is by convincing the consumers that they shouldn’t want to read any of those awful corners of the internet where they do truthseeking far worse than here. (Pravda means “truth”; Donald Trump’s platform is called Truth Social.)
Given finite reading time, you definitely need to prioritize ruthlessly to manage the signal-to-noise ratio. If you don’t have time to read anything but Mowshowitz, that’s fine; most things aren’t worth your time. But if you’re skeptical that a human can expose itself to any social environment on the internet and do better, that doesn’t sound like a signal-to-noise ratio concern. That sounds like a contamination concern.
Not the main point here, but Huckleberry Finn is (rather famously) an anti-slavery work and not a good representation of the nineteenth-century racist worldview. A better example would be that a lot of college history classes assign parts of Mein Kampf.