Great post.
Can you clarify for me:
Are “Skin in the game”, “Barbell”, “Hormesis”, “Evolution” and “Via Negativa” considered to be subsets of “Optionality”
OR
Are all 6 (“Skin in the game”, “Barbell”, “Hormesis”, “Evolution”, “Via Negativa” AND “Optionality”) subsets of “Anti-fragility”?
I understood the latter from the wording of the post but the former from the figure at the top. Same with “Effectuation” and “Pilot in plane” etc.
Licit blackmail at scale wouldn’t just punish people for hypocrisy—it would reveal the underlying rate of hypocrisy.
I’m not sure this works. If blackmail is common then people will know how often certain blackmail demands aren’t paid but in order to know the underlying rate of hypocrisy you also need ratios for (hypocrisy):(blackmail) and (blackmail):(non-payment).
As those ratios depend on a number of variables I would imagine people would have very limited information on actual base rates.
Second, once people find out how common certain kinds of illicit behavior are, we should expect the penalties to be reduced.
Can you expand on the mechanism for this? Is it just that the a person threatened with blackmail will be less likely to pay if someone else has already been outed for the same thing?
I like Whiteboard for Frontpage.
The only alternative I’ve thought of which might work is Origin (or Genesis) - intended connotation is both “place to start” and “new ideas”.
To be honest I’d just google that one but that didn’t seem like very useful advice! My googling got me almost straight to this risk calculator used by NHS Scotland. Cross check this with a few other references from google and that’s probably as good as anything I’d work out myself by going to the data—it’s a well studied issue.
ONS is useful for base rates where google fails me.
I often use the Office for National Statistics (UK)
I feel like we’re going over the same ground. I’m not sure there’s much more for me to add as I don’t know of any sites which I think would be the right match for you.
In the future, my advice to you would be:
Start small—what individual bias do you think you could explain best? How would you explain just that 1 small thing as simply and engagingly as possible?
Use the site questions feature—if you want examples from the community just ask the question without any commentary on who is/isn’t debugged etc.
I suspect you have more learning to do before you really get LW rationality as G Gordon Worley III describes so it might be better to really get a handle on all this first.
I’ve read it and commented on it already. You can refer to that comment for my thoughts.
Concepts which I can’t find elsewhere are only good if they are accurate/helpful which I don’t believe they are.
I think in this case it is up to you to show that you’re right, rather than up to me to show you’re wrong.
Lack of follow-through means that too few people actually change and the new equilibrium is not achieved. This makes future coordination more difficult as people lose faith in coordination attempts in general.
If I were to be truly cynical I could create/join a coordination for something I was against, spam a lot of fake accounts, get the coordination conditions met and watch it fail due to poor follow-through. Now people lose faith in the idea of coordinating to make that change.
Not sure how likely this is, how easy it is to counter or how much worse than the status quo coordination attempts can get...
AFAIK there isn’t a specific movement where the spread of rationality is its core aim. I can’t speak for anyone else but my impression is that this kind of rationality is most likely to spread organically rather than from one big project. There are lots of communities which are working on rationality related projects and will welcome in whoever is interested. People here are more than happy to apply their rationality, just not necessarily in the project which you are prescribing. This is a rational response if they have a low expectation of success.
My issue here is that from witnessing your interactions so far I don’t have very high expectations of your own personal emotional intelligence. Criticism of your ideas often seems to be met with hostility, exasperation and accusations of fallacies. Even if your ideas are correct this seems like a great way of alienating those who you are asking for help. One of the key tenets to LW style rationality vs traditional rationality is dealing with the world as it is, not as we think it should be and I don’t feel like you’re doing that.
Again, I could be wrong about this but the impressions that you give are key to getting people to co-operate with you.
I can understand your excitement at finding a community which represents some of the things where you’ve previously felt that you’re on you own. However I think you would be wiser to take stock and learn before you try a project as ambitious as you are suggesting.
Firstly, let me say that I think the idea of bringing rationalism to the masses is a great idea. I think the best we have so far is HPMoR so that should be the standard to try to improve upon.
Secondly, it is a very difficult task, as you are aware. That means that my prior for any individual succeeding at this would be very low, even if I’ve seen lots of evidence showing that they have the kind of skill set that would be required. If I hadn’t read HPMoR I would have put a low expectation on Eliezer managing it—he himself says he would have only put a 10% chance of the kind of success that it has achieved.
If I have yet to witness that individual’s skills then my prior is tiny and I need alot of evidence to suggest that they are capable. I think this is what you’re seeing when you perceive a judgment on negative authority—I’m not saying you can’t do it, only that I want more evidence before I believe that you can.
***
With your last post I think you were doing the right thing—putting your ideas out there and seeing what happens. Then if you’ve got it right people will start believing in your project more. I think where you went wrong on your last post was how you updated on the feedback you received. 2 hypotheses:
1. You are right and the community is full of people who don’t realise
2. There are some issues which you were wrong about or stylistic choices which were unhelpful
I think the evidence is better for option 2 and that you would do better to modify what you’ve done based on the feedback.
If you are still convinced of option 1 then it’s up to you to persuade the community why it is wrong. For ChristianKl’s comment you could write the page of the proposed site where you give the evidence he requests. Reading between the lines I suspect that he disagrees with what you’ve said and that is why he wants you to provide the evidence, rather than purely that this would be the norm for LW. For my or Elo’s comments you could persuade us that it really is as bad as you say.
***
In the future, my advice to you would be:
Start small—what individual bias do you think you could explain best? How would you explain just that 1 small thing as simply and engagingly as possible?
Use the site questions feature—if you want examples from the community just ask the question without any commentary on who is/isn’t debugged etc.
Also, there’s no irony if the downvoters do not believe I’ve earned any epistemic respect from previous comments, so they do not want to encourage my further commenting.
You’re right of course, I just found it amusing that someone would disagree that it’s a good idea to provide negative feedback and then provide negative feedback.
Thanks, that makes sense.
I completely empathise with worries about social pressures when I’m putting something out there for people to see. I don’t think this would apply to me in the generation phase but you’re right that my introspection may be completely off the mark.
My own experience at work is that I get ideas for improvements even when such ideas aren’t encouraged but maybe I’d get more if they were. My gut says that the level of encouragement mainly determines how likely I am to share the ideas but there could be more going on that I’m unaware of.
Putting myself in Bob’s shoes I’m pretty sure I would just want people to just be straight with me and give my idea the attention that they feel it deserves. I’m fairly confident this wouldn’t have a knock on effect to my ability to generate ideas. I’m guessing from the post that Scott isn’t sure this would be true of him (or maybe you’re more concerned for others than you would be for yourself?).
I’d be interested to hear other people’s introspections on this.
Just want to check that whoever downvoted Dagon’s comment sees the irony? :)
(Context: At time of writing the parent comment was at −1 karma)
The fact that there are subtly different purposes for the alternative naming schema could be a strength.
If I’m talking about biases I might talk about s1/s2. If I’m talking about motivation I might go for elephant/rider. If I’m talking about adaptations being executed I’d probably use blue minimising robot/side module.
I’m not sure whether others do something similar but I find the richness of the language helpful to distinguish in my own mind the subtly different dichotomies which are being alluded to.
Another option might be to use a word without any baggage. For example, Moloch seems to have held onto its original meaning pretty well but then maybe that’s because the source document is so well known.
EDIT: I see The sparkly pink ball thing makes a similar point.
Just to provide a bit of feedback, this seems unnecessarily alarmist.
“Social media is bad” is a fairly standard trope and not something which will surprise many people. As a result, most people I know are aware of the problem and talk about how to use social media responsibly. In my experience young people are often most aware of this as they’ve been warned about the dangers for their entire lives. As a result they are often good at managing their social media use.
It’s not perfect but it’s not cataclysmic.
I think there’s a crossed wire here. I read Dagon as claiming that hypocrisy is prohibited but rarely enforced, rather than blackmail is prohibited but rarely enforced. I take it from “crime” that you understand the latter.
In my interpretation the statement would be that hypocrisy is frowned upon by society but the norm of non-hypocrisy is not enforced via blackmail.