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B Jacobs
Karma: 433
I have a Mnemonic device for checking whether a model is Gears-like or not.
G E A R S:Does a variable Generate Empirical Anticipations?
Can a variable be Rederived?
Is a variable hard to Substitute?
I was writing a post about how you can get more fuzzies (=personal happiness) out of your altruism, but decided that it would be better as a shortform. I know the general advice is to purchase your fuzzies and utilons separately but if you’re going to do altruism anyway, and there are ways to increase your happiness of doing so without sacrificing altruistic output, then I would argue you should try to increase that happiness. After all, if altruism makes you miserable you’re less likely to do it in the future and if it makes you happy you will be more likely to do it in the future (and personal happiness is obviously good in general).
The most obvious way to do it is with conditioning e.g giving yourself a cookie, doing a handpump motion every time you donate etc. Since there’s already a boatload of stuff written about conditioning I won’t expand on it further. I then wanted to adapt the tips from Lukeprog’s the science of winning at life to this particular topic, but I don’t really have anything to add so you can probably just read it and apply it to doing altruism.
The only purely original thing I wanted to advice is to diversify your altruistic output. I found out there have already been defenses made in favor of this concept but I would like to give additional arguments. The primary one being that it will keep you personally emotionally engaged with different parts of the world. When you invest something (e.g time/money) into a cause you become more emotionally attached to said cause. So someone who only donates to malaria bednets will (on average) be less emotionally invested into deworming even though these are both equally important projects. While I know on an intellectual level that donating 50 dollars to malaria bednets is better than donating 25 dollars, it will emotionally both feel like a small drop in the ocean. When advancements in the cause get made I get to feel fuzzies that I contributed, but crucially these won’t be twice as warm if I donated twice as much. But if I donate to separate causes (e.g bednets and deworming) then for every advancement/milestone I will get to feel fuzzies from these two different causes (so twice as much).
This will lessen the chance of you becoming a victim of the bandwagon effect (of a particular cause) or becoming victim of the sunk-cost fallacy (if a cause you thought was effective turns out to be not very effective after all). This will also keep your worldview broad instead of either becoming depressed if your singular cause doesn’t advance or becoming ignorant of the world at large. So if you do diversify then every victory in the other causes creates more happiness for you, allowing you to align yourself much better with the worlds needs.
I tried a bit of a natural experiment to see if rationalists would be more negative towards an idea if it’s called socialism vs if it’s called it something else. I made two posts that are identical, except one calls it socialism right at the start, and one only reveals I was talking about socialism at the very end (perhaps it would’ve been better if I hadn’t revealed it at all). The former I posted to LW, the latter I posted to the EA forum.
I expected that the comments on LW would be more negative, that I would get more downvotes and gave it a 50% chance the mods wouldn’t even promote it to the frontpage on LW (but would on EA forum).
The comments were more negative on LW. I did get more downvotes, but I also got more upvotes and got more karma overall: (12 karma from 19 votes on EA and 27 karma from 39 votes on LW). Posts tend to get more karma on LW, but the difference is big enough that I consider my prediction to be wrong. Lastly, the LW mods did end up promoting it to the frontpage, but it took a very long time (maybe they had a debate about it).
Overall, while rationalists are more negative towards socialist ideas that are called socialist, they aren’t as negative as I expected and will update accordingly.
Not really. It’s so strange that the US journalistic code of ethics has very strict rules about revealing information from anonymous sources, but doesn’t seem to have any rules about revealing information from pseudonymous sources.
billionaires really are universally evil just as progressives think
Can you please add a quantifier when you make assertions about plurals. You can make any group sound dumb/evil by not doing it. E.g I can make atheists sound evil by saying the truthful statement: “Atheists break the law”. But that’s only because I didn’t add a quantifier like “all”, “most”, “at least one”, “a disproportionate number”, etc.
It’s not an attack, and I would recommend not taking it as one.
Attack is just the way in which ‘verbal arguments against X’ are often shortened to, but while it is the common way of phrasing such a thing, I agree that it is stylistically odd. I didn’t assume you had any malice in mind, I was just using it the common way but will refrain from doing so (in similar context) in the future.
Yeah, it didn’t submit properly the first time and then didn’t seem to be working the second time so it ended up posting two by the time I finally got confirmation that it worked. I’d have deleted one if I could have.
Speaking of deleting things, what happened to your other post?
Alright no problem, things like that happen all the time so I will just delete it. I described what happend to the other post here. This was one of the difficult cases where I had to balance my desire to have a record of the things (and mistakes) people (including me) said and not wanting to clog the website with low-quality (as the downvotes indicated) content (I think I found a good solution). I’m having the same dilemma right now where my genuine comments are getting voted into the negative and I’m starting to feel really bad for trying to satisfy my own personal curiosity at the expense of eating up peoples time with content they think is low quality (yes yes, I know that that doesn’t mean it is low quality per se, but it is a close enough heuristic that I’m mostly willing to stick to it). But the downvotes are very clear so while I’m disappointed that we couldn’t talk through this issue, I will no longer be eating up peoples time.
Continuing my streak of hating on terms this community loves.
I hate the term ‘Motte-and-bailey’. Not because the fallacy itself is bad, but because you are essentially indirectly accusing your interlocutor of switching definitions on purpose. In my experience this is almost always an accident, but even if it wasn’t, you still shouldn’t immediately brand your interlocutor as malicious. I propose we use the term ‘defiswitchion’ (combining ‘definition’ and ‘switch’) since it is actually descriptive and easier to understand for people who hear it for the first time and you are not indirectly accusing your interlocutor of using dirty debate tactics.
“Changing your mind” is not a form of disagreement so putting it in ‘the hierarchy of disagreement’ is a bit disingenuous. “Putting forth the most reasonable case given all available evidence” is something everyone already thinks they’re doing, no one is thinking: “Let’s belief a totally unreasonable argument with no evidence behind it”.
I am not a native speaker so I asked my friend Merriam for help. She said you can use both: https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/what-happens-to-names-when-we-make-them-plural-or-possessive
What data and model are these estimates of the causal effects of it based on?
You can find my sources in the references section. This was based on a gallup study
Another thing that confuses me is why socialist firms need special support and don’t naturally come to dominate the economy. You seem to attribute this to owners extracting value, but that seems short-sighted; presumably if you have an economy with a mixture of socialist and non-socialist firms, and the socialist firms are much more productive, they would grow quicker and become dominant over time.
I explained this in this section:
One issue that arises with starting a socialist firms is acquiring initial investing.[27] This is probably because co-ops want to maximize income (wages), not profits. They pursue the interests of their members rather than investors and may sometimes opt to increase wages instead of profits. Capitalist firms on the other hand are explicitly investor owned so investor interests will take priority.
A socialist firm can be more productive and not dominate the economy if it’s hard to start a socialist firm.
That’s probably because the moderators decided to keep the post a personal blogspot for some reason.
Good comment. My main problem is that ‘turning it into a dialogue’ is not a very concrete actionable technique. What do you mean by that, the socratic method?
For those of you who are wondering why I decided to quickly explain the trolley-problem: the reason is because I want you to be able to send this to non-LW friends. I myself struggled with nihilism for a long time before I thought of this argument. A less jargon filled post might make it easier to help other people put nihilism aside as well.
I only added simple to indicate that nothing else is going on; it’s not a pattern plus a soul (or something else), it’s only a pattern. Everyone agrees that the pattern will be hugely complex (for humans).
And yes, I already mentioned different versions of you in the comments but didn’t want to overcomplicate things unnecessarily in this post; but one of the main reasons to be interested in this is the relation between your past and future selves.
As you say, the distance function between two encodings is currently unknown—it’s almost certainly not strictly pythagorean—some dimensions/bit-clusters are more important than others, and some will have nonlinear impact on identity. I don’t see why that makes the concept unworkable.
I’m not just saying that it’s unknown, I’m saying that it’s subjective what bits are important! You can’t define importance objectively, so we need to either rework or throw away patternism.
Sorry guys. I woke up to another giant batch of new comments and I just don’t have the time or energy to respond to them all with the quality that I would want. My comments were already getting shorter and shorter while my longer, more nuanced comments were getting sniped before I could post them. I’m sure some of you made some excellent points.
A spot check is supposed to take a number of random sources and check them, not pick the one claim you find most suspicious (that isn’t even about co-ops) and use that to dismiss the entire literature on co-ops.
I cite four different studies that show that the theory doesn’t match the observations, Lao Mein doesn’t cite anything. This is the most extreme version of being a selective skeptic.
I’m not handwaving anything I wrote a whole section about how experiments contradict this and what could explain this:
“Experiments have shown that people randomly allocated to do tasks in groups where they can elect their leaders and/or choose their pay structures are more productive than those who are led by an unelected manager who makes pay choices for them.[20] One study looked at real firms with high levels of worker ownership of shares in the company and found that workers are keener to monitor others, making them more productive than those with low or no ownership of shares and directly contradicting the free rider hypothesis.[21] It turns out there are potential benefits to giving workers control and a stake in the running of the organization they work for. This allows workers to play a key role in decision making and reorient the goals of the organization.[22] One explanation for this phenomenon is that of “localized knowledge”. According to economist Friedrich Hayek, top-down organizers have difficulty harnessing and coordinating around local knowledge, and the policies they write that are the same across a wide range of circumstances don’t account for the “particular circumstances of time and place”.[23] (For examples of this, read Seeing Like a State by political scientist James Scott) Those who make the top-down policies in a traditional company are different to those who have to follow them. In addition, those who manage the company are most often different to those who own the company. These groups have different incentives and accumulate different knowledge. This means that co-ops have two main advantages:
Workers can harness their collective knowledge to make running the firm more effective. Workers can use their voting power to ensure the organization is more aligned with their values. Interestingly enough, I have yet to come across a co-op that uses the state of the art of social choice theory, so they could potentially get a lot lot better.“
Thanks for replying to my question, but although this was nicely written it doesn’t really solve the problem. So I’m putting up a $100 bounty for anyone on this site (or outside it) who can solve this problem by the end of next year. (I don’t expect it will work, but it might motivate some people to start thinking about it).
I know LessWrong has become less humorous over the years, but this idea popped into my head when I made my bounty comment and I couldn’t stop myself from making it. Feel free to downvote this shortform if you want the site to remain a super serious forum. For the rest of you: here is my wanted poster for the reference class problem. Please solve it, it keeps me up at night.