I believe this comment thread is not the proper place to discuss the details of my proposal.
(Also I believe the page linked earlier answers those specific questions.)
Aleksei_Riikonen
Karma: 563
As a Brit, you already have a king/queen in your country.
Details are important as well as examples, and I’m not in the business of simply bringing back empowered kings. In the system I discussed the role mostly is about being a cool figurehead, not so terribly different from what you have now (though the king would be elected from among the re-invented Aristocracy in a meritocratic way, and therefore be better at the role than what you have now—and it is of course true that the discussed system would be about bringing back the nobility in a genuinely empowered way).
Thank you. I can relate to much of what you said, as isn’t terribly rare here.
And the most enjoyable of the feelings evoked in me (as has happened on several occasions already), is seeing a young one being better and more promising than me.
(Though my enjoyment at being superseded is dangerous in the sense that such may be associated with laziness, so you are very welcome to not enjoy yours—or enjoy, however you wish.)
The actual reason why I started to comment at all, however, is that it’s amusing to note how I’m in a sense in the reverse of your situation. I found MIRI/SIAI over 10 years ago (and am almost that much older than you), started contributing to them then, but have recently refocused, of all things, on political system-building. Just what you left behind!
It would be complex and unnecessary to discuss here why I have done so, but let it be said that it’s not because I wouldn’t still consider MIRI’s work to be of paramount importance. I do, but there are circumstances that I feel influence me towards a differing personal focus, among them certainly being a degree of laziness that I’ve come to joyfully accept of myself, after being more demandind earlier. Also, not putting all eggs in one basket.
Anyway, studying what’s currently termed neoreaction (and associated things) is what I’m doing. For the heck of it, here’s some early comments I recently wrote regarding that stuff.
(Also let it be noted that the difficult part in fixing politics is devising the ways in which one can actually get to implementing the bright ideas. The class of bright political ideas that would be a clear improvement is surprisingly large and easy to pick examples out of, but the class of ideas that one is likely to be able to implement is much more constrained.)
In response to your final questions:
Liberals (myself included) tend to very much like the idea of using regulation to transfer some wealth from the strongest players to the weakest in society. We like to try to set up the rules of the game so that nobody would be economically very poor, and so that things in general were fair and equitable.
In the case of sex and relationships, the argument could also be made for regulation that would transfer “sexual wealth” and “relationship wealth” from the strongest players to those who are not so well off. In fact, it seems to me that very many traditional conservative societies have tried to do just that, by strongly promoting e.g. such values that one should have only one sexual partner (along with marriage) during one’s life. Rock stars and other sorts of alpha males who take many hot girls for themselves would be strongly disapproved of by typical traditional conservative societies. The underlying reason may be that traditional monogamy produces a sexually more equal society, and that this has been one contributing factor why societies with such values have been so successful throughout much of human history.
Most liberals, however, would be unwilling to engage in a rational discussion and cost-benefit analysis of whether conservative sexual morals (or some modified version thereof) would in fact create a more equal and strong society. Liberals are ok with the strongest players amassing as much sexual wealth as they can, at the expense of the weaker competitors, which strongly contrasts with their ideas about regulating economic activity and limitless acquisition of monetary wealth.
I have offered in the past to volunteer some time to this sort of thing, but I get that coordinating volunteers is harder than hiring people.
Sounds like something that happened during earlier years, when the SI people that one ran into when volunteering were different than currently.
Actually, I feel that I have sufficient experience of being reported on (including in an unpleasant way), and it is precisely that which (along with my independent knowledge of many of the people getting reported on here) gave me the confidence to suspect that I would have managed to separate from the distortions an amount of information that described reality.
That said, there is a bit of fail with regard to whether I managed to communicate what precisely impacted me. Much of it is subtle, necessarily, since it had to be picked up through the distortion field, and I do allow for the possibility that I misread, but I continue to think that I’m much better at correcting for the distortion field than most people.
One thing I didn’t realize, however, is that you folks apparently didn’t think the gal might be a reporter. That’s of course a fail in itself, but certainly a lesser fail than behaving similarly in the presence of a person one does manage to suspect to be a reporter.
As someone who had read Eliezer’s OkCupid profile sometime not very recently, I was actually gonna reply to this with something like “well, scientism goes maybe a bit too far, but he does actually have a point”
...but then I just went and reread the OkCupid profile, and no, actually it’s wonderfully funny and I have no worries similar to scientism’s, unlike earlier when the profile didn’t explicitly mention sadism.
Obviously Eliezer is a very unusual and “weird” person, but the openness about it that we observe here is a winning move, unlike the case where one might sense that he might be hiding something. Dishonesty and secrecy is what the evil phyg leaders would go for, whereas Eliezer’s openness invites scrutiny and allows him to emerge from it without the scrutinizers having found incriminating evidence.
Also, where are you seeing evangelical polyamory? I’m very much not polyamorous myself, and haven’t ever felt that anyone around here would be pushing polyamory to me.
That position is “antisingularity” only in the Kurzweilian sense of the word. I wouldn’t be surprised if e.g. essentially everyone at the Singularity Institute were “antisingularity” in this sense.
The starting point for my attitude was people doing things like intervening in front of a reporter to stop discussion of a topic that looks scandalous, or talking about Singularity/AI topics in a way that doesn’t communicate much wisdom at all.
Being silly with regard to physical intimacy and in general having a wild party is all well and good by itself, if you’re into that sort of thing, but I react negatively when that silliness seems to spill over into affecting the way serious things are handled.
(I’ll partly excuse being light on the constructiveness by having seen some copy-pastes that seem to indicate that what I’m concerned about is already being tackled in a constructive way on the NYC mailing list. The folks over there are much better positioned to do the contructive things that should be done, and I wasn’t into trying to duplicate their efforts.)
Though it’s possible the reporter has twisted your words more than I manage to suspect, I’ll say:
Wow, some of the people involved really suck at thinking (or caring to think) about how they make the scene look. I think I’m able to pretty well correct for the discrepancy between what’s reported and what’s the reality behind it, but even after the correction, this window into what the scene has become has further lowered my interest in flying over there to the States to hang out with you, since it seems I might end up banging my head against the wall in frustration for all the silliness that’s required for this sort of reporting to get it’s source material.
(Though I do also think that it’s inevitable that once the scene has grown to be large and successful enough, typical members will be sufficiently ordinary human beings that I’d find their company very frustrating. Sorry, I’m a dick that way, and in a sense my negative reaction is only a sign of success, though I didn’t expect quite this level of success to be reached yet.)
(By the previous I however do not mean to imply that things would have been saner 10 years ago (I certainly had significant shortcomings of my own), but back when nobody had figured much anything out yet or written Sequences about stuff, the expected level of insanity would have been partly higher for such reasons.)
Quite a good website, though I expect that when one first glances at it, it looks suspicious how much there is talk of “perfect reasoning”, “knowing exactly how to weigh the relevant evidence” etc.
Gives the impression that you think your methods produce perfection. One might have to delve surprisingly deep into the website before one realizes that that’s not actually among the claims made.
Works.
I don’t understand.
The same thing as I described in my previous comment as the situation for http://singularity.org/about/ (except that the destination page is different).
My guess is that it’s currently broken for some browsers but not others.
I’m using Firefox (Windows), and currently ALL the links on http://singularity.org/about/ take me to http://singularity.org/visiting-fellows/
Was working fine earlier, though.
(And actually, the six links in the Donate-WhatWeDo-etc bar are exceptions in that they work on that page also. But all the others take me to see the Visiting Fellows, including the link to the blog, to Facebook, to Less Wrong...)
To me, when I first saw them, they definitely looked like clip art, except that in some cases the SI logo had been edited in.
I wish I could upvote what Raemon said several times: “the whole reason clip-art is bad is not because it actually is clip-art, but because it looks like something you got off the shelf.”
Btw, am I hallucinating, or did you already change the colors slightly?
Anyway, I’d like to say that I currently like how the colors look. (Though doesn’t have much to do with the points that I was critical on.)
Yes, I have to say that the unprofessional vibe given off feels absolutely horrible to me. I’m surprised that the designers of the site appear to be the same as previously, since the previous style and vibe felt very good to me, and this feels so much like the opposite.
The current crop of clip-art would really need to go, I’d say. Nothing looks as hasty and unprofessional as stereotypical clip-art. You especially shouldn’t with your clip-art choices communicate that you’re a very formal, ordinary and uncreative men-in-suits organisation, since you’re really not (and if you were, who would think you competent or even sincere in undertaking such an unusual mission? Stereotypical and ordinary men-in-suits are the antithesis of creativity, exceptionality and thinking-something-that-isn’t-a-politically-correct-cliche).
The current site design could perhaps be made to rock if all the clip-art was changed out to a new theme that was creative and original (and you) and wouldn’t really look like clip-art. Some associated changes to color scheme and fonts might be required, but perhaps not a complete redesign.
I like this. Or more generally, I like having “Advanced Sanity” in the name.
Curse me for presenting myself as someone having interesting secret knowledge. Now I get several PMs asking for details.
In short, this “incident” was about one or two SIAI folks making a couple of obvious errors of judgment, and in the case of the error that sparked the whole thing, getting heatedly defensive about it for a moment. Other SIAI folks however recognized the obvious mistakes as such, so the issue was resolved, even though unprofessional conduct was observed for a moment.
The actual mistakes were rather minor, nothing dramatic. The surprising thing was that heated defensiveness took place on the way to those mistakes getting corrected.
(And since Eliezer is the SIAI guy most often accused of arrogance, I’ll additionally state that here that is not the case. Eliezer was very professional in the email exchange in question.)
Regardless, I wish to not take over (a part of) this comment thread by discussing this thing in detail.
If further comments from me on the matter are in demand, contacting me through some other means is a better option.