Is there anywhere that there are transcripts available for these conversations?
antanaclasis
To steelman the anti-sex-for-rent case, it could be considered that after the tenant has entered into that arrangement, the tenant could feel pressure to keep having sex with the landlord (even if they would prefer not to and would not at that later point choose to enter the contract) due to the transfer cost of moving to a new home. (Though this also applies to monetary rent, the potential for threatening the boundaries of consent is generally seen as more harmful than threatening the boundaries of one’s budget)
This could also be used as a point of leverage by the landlord to e.g. pressure the tenant to engage in sex acts they would otherwise not want to or else be evicted (unless the contract specifies from the beginning exactly what kind of sex the payment will entail). I think many people would see such actions by the landlord as more of an infringement upon the tenant than e.g. raising the amount of monetary rent (sacredness of sex/consent).
Additionally, this could be seen as a specific manifestation of the modern trend of more general opposition to sexual relationships with a power imbalance between the participants.
(Parenthetically, I also want to thank you for writing this post, as it’s a good expression of a principle I generally agree with)
It kind of passed without much note in the post, but isn’t the passport non-renewal one of the biggest limiters here? $59,000 divided by 10 years is $5,900 per year, so unless you’re willing to forgo having a passport that’s the upper limit of how much you could benefit from non-payment (exclusive of the tax liability reduction strategies). That seems like a pretty low amount per year in exchange for having to research and plan this, then having your available income and saving methods limited (which could easily lower your income by more than $5,900 just by limiting the jobs available to you).
I think a lot of the value that I’d get out of something like that being implemented would be getting an answer to “what is the biggest axis along which LW users vary” according to the algorithm. I am highly unsure about what the axis would even end up being.
I similarly offer myself as an author, in either the dungeon master or player role. I could possibly get involved in the management or technical side of things, but would likely not be effective in heading a project (for similar reasons to Brangus), and do not have practical experience in machine learning.
I am best reached through direct message or comment reply here on Lesswrong, and can provide other contact information if someone wants to work with me.
I see it in a similar light to “would you rather have more or fewer cells in your body?”. If you made me choose I probably would rather have more, but only insofar as having fewer might be associated with certain bad things (e.g. losing a limb).
Correspondingly, I don’t care intrinsically about e.g. how much algae exists except insofar as that amount being too high or low might cause problems in things I actually care about (such as human lives).
On this note, I would definitely be willing to pay premium to be part of a fund run by a rationalist who’s more intimately involved with the crypto and prediction markets than I am, and would thereby be able to get significantly more edge than I currently can.
Thank you for making this sequence. I’ve been cryocrasinaing for a while, in part due to the complexity of the forms and insurance, and I hope that this sequence will give me the confidence to move forward.
Just because the US government contains agents that care about market failures, does not mean that it can be accurately modeled as itself being agentic and caring about market failures.
The more detailed argument would be public choice theory 101, about how the incentives that people in various parts of the government are faced with may or may not encourage market-failure-correcting behavior.
A way of implementing the serving-vs-kitchen separation that avoids that problem (and actually the way of doing it I initially envisioned after reading the post) would be that within each workplace there is a separation, but different workplaces are split between the polarities of separation. That way any individual’s available options of workplace are, at worst, ~half of what they could be with mixed workplaces, regardless of their preference.
(Caveat that an individual’s options could end up being less than half the total if there is a workplace-gender correlation overall (creating an imbalance of how many workplaces of each polarity there are), and an individual has a workplace-gender matchup which is opposite to the trend, but in this case at least that individual’s lesser amount of choices is counterbalanced by the majority of people having more than 50% of the max choices of workplace fitting them.)
I’d imagine that once we see the axis it will probably (~70%) have a reasonably clear meaning. Likely not as obvious as the left-right axis on Twitter but probably still interpretable.
I think the point being made in the post is that there’s a ground-truth-of-the-matter as to what comprises Art-Following Discourse.
To move into a different frame which I feel may capture the distinction more clearly, the True Laws of Discourse are not socially constructed, but our norms (though they attempt to approximate the True Laws) are definitely socially constructed.
In terms of similarity between telling the truth and lying, think about how much of a change you would have to make to the mindset of a person at each level to get them to level 1 (truth)
Level 2: they’re already thinking about world models, you just need to get them cooperate with you in seeking the truth rather than trying to manipulate you.
Level 3: you need to get them the idea of words as having some sort of correspondence with the actual world, rather than just as floating tribal signifiers. After doing that, you still have to make sure that they are focusing on the truth of those words, like the level 2 case.
Level 4: the hardest of them all; you need to get them the idea of words having any sort of meaning in the first place, rather than just being certain patterns of mouth movements that one does when it feels like the right time to do so. After doing that, you again still have the whole problem of making sure that they focus on truth instead of manipulation or tribal identity.
For a more detailed treatment of this, see Zvi’s https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2020/09/07/the-four-children-of-the-seder-as-the-simulacra-levels/
- 13 Feb 2023 19:15 UTC; 2 points) 's comment on Rationality-related things I don’t know as of 2023 by (
It’s interesting to read posts like this and “Fierce Nerds” while myself being much less ambitious/fierce/driven than the objects of said essays. I wonder what other psychological traits are associated with the difference between those who are more vs less ambitious/fierce/driven, other things being equal.
It seems like this might be double-counting uncertainty? Normal EV-type decision calculations already (should, at least) account for uncertainty about how our actions affect the future.
Adding explicit time-discounting seems like it would over-adjust in that regard, with the extra adjustment (time) just being an imperfect proxy for the first (uncertainty), when we only really care about the uncertainty to begin with.
Sorry if I was ambiguous in my remark. The comparison that I’m musing about is between “fierce” vs “not fierce” nerds, with no particular consideration of those who are not nerds in the first place.
As you briefly mentioned, the focus on input measures (like quantity of materials consumed) can be different from the progress we’re really looking for. In making a progress dashboard, I’d be pretty wary of including such measures in roughly the same way I’d be wary of judging how good a university is by how many employees/student it has — at best the measure is correlated with good things, but even then it’s a cost being paid to get those things, not a benefit in its own right.
Similarly, much of the gain of technology is in making better use of resources, and especially given that many human wants can’t really be satisfied just by scaling up the quantity, I’m not sure how good of a proxy the input measures are. For example, certainly cars have gotten a lot better over the last half century, but this doesn’t much show up as any increase in the amounts of rubber and metal used in their construction.
Lest my response give the wrong impression, I do like the idea of a progress dashboard; I just am not sure that input measures are all that good a candidate for inclusion in it.
Another big thing is that you can’t get tone-of-voice information via text. The way that someone says something may convey more to you than what they said, especially for some types of journalism.
If you also consider the indirect deaths due to the collapse of civilization, I would say that 95% lies within the realm of reason. You don’t need anywhere close to 95% of the population to be fully affected by the scissor to bring about 95% destruction.