Chris_Leong

De­cou­pling vs Con­tex­tu­al­is­ing Norms

Ex­per­i­men­tal Open Threads

Pseudo-Rationality

Should ra­tio­nal­ity be a move­ment?

Mak­ing Ex­cep­tions to Gen­eral Rules

The Ham­mer and the Dance

The World Ac­cord­ing to Do­minic Cummings

Monthly Meta: Com­mon Knowledge

Hy­po­thet­i­cals: The Direct Ap­pli­ca­tion Fallacy

• Chris_Leong 15 May 2018 10:14 UTC

  47 points

  in reply to: gjm's comment on: De­cou­pling vs Con­tex­tu­al­is­ing Norms

  Ac­tu­ally, I like De­cou­pling vs. Con­tex­tu­al­is­ing more too, es­pe­cially as they be­come sin­gle words.

• Chris_Leong 1 Oct 2017 13:33 UTC

  45 points

  on: Slack

  I clicked +1, but in way of feed­back I would sug­gest try­ing to be more pre­cise with your defi­ni­tions. “The ab­sence of bind­ing con­straints on be­hav­ior” sounds just like a syn­onym for free­dom. If that was the con­cept that this ar­ti­cle iden­ti­fied, it would be kind of pointless, but you’ve ac­tu­ally iden­ti­fied a new and use­ful con­cept.

  This has a few ad­van­tages:

  • Firstly, it makes the ar­ti­cle eas­ier to un­der­stand. Some­one peo­ple learn bet­ter by ex­am­ple, oth­ers bet­ter by ex­plicit defi­ni­tion.

  • Se­condly, it helps you make sure that what you have iden­ti­fied is in­deed a sin­gle con­cept and not a few closely re­lated ideas rol­led into one.

  • Third, it al­lows you clar­ify the con­cept in your own head and pick more cen­tral ex­am­ples to illus­trate it.

  • Fourth, it helps set so­cial norms by en­courag­ing other peo­ple to care­fully define their terms.

  I would make an al­ter­na­tive defi­ni­tion as fol­lows:

  • Firstly, we start off by as­sum­ing some kind of re­source (ie. time, en­ergy, money, so­cial cap­i­tal)

  • Now we can define Slack as keep­ing some of a re­source spare so that you can spend it when op­por­tu­ni­ties come up (ie. to do things eth­i­cally/​prop­erly/​just for fun/​for per­sonal growth, ect).

  This is a more spe­cific con­cept than free­dom, it is re­lated to the free­dom pro­vided by hav­ing spare re­sources.

  There is also a typ­i­cal paradigm of how peo­ple end up in situ­a­tions with­out enough slack. Ba­si­cally, they un­der­es­ti­mate the fu­ture op­por­tu­nity cost of ei­ther spend­ing or com­mit­ting to spend a par­tic­u­lar re­source now. For ex­am­ple, they spend a lot money at a cas­ino, with­out re­al­is­ing that there is a chance that they may lose their job, in which case their ex­cess money would sud­denly be­come much more use­ful. Or they com­mit to too many pro­jects be­cause they want to be agree­able in the pre­sent, with­out re­al­is­ing how a lack of time for re­cu­per­a­tion will wear them out when the work ends up more tiring than they ex­pect. More broadly, it is de­cid­ing what you can spend or com­mit now, whilst ig­nor­ing the un­knowns that might pop up in the fu­ture.

• Chris_Leong 8 Oct 2017 23:15 UTC

  43 points

  on: Con­tra dou­ble crux

  I’ve at­tended a CFAR work­shop. I agree with you that Dou­ble Crux has all of these the­o­ret­i­cal flaws, but it ac­tu­ally seems to work rea­son­ably well in prac­tise, even if these flaws make it kind of con­fus­ing. In prac­tise you just kind of stum­ble through. I strongly agree that if the tech­nique was rewrit­ten so that it didn’t have these flaws, it would be much eas­ier to learn as the stum­bling bit isn’t the most con­fi­dence in­spiring (this is when the in per­son as­sis­tance be­comes im­por­tant).
  
  One of the key el­e­ments that haven’t seen men­tioned here is this sep­a­ra­tion be­tween try­ing to per­suade the other per­son and try­ing to find out where your point of view differs. When you are try­ing to con­vince the other per­son it is much eas­ier to miss, for ex­am­ple, when there’s a differ­ence in a core as­sump­tion. Dou­ble Crux lets you un­der­stand the broad struc­ture of their be­liefs so that you can at least figure out the right kinds of things to say later to per­suade them that won’t be im­me­di­ately dis­missed.

Moder­a­tor’s Dilemma: The Risks of Par­tial Intervention

Monthly Meta: Refer­ring is Underrated

Ra­tion­al­ity and Spiritu­al­ity—Sum­mary and Open Thread

• Chris_Leong 29 Oct 2017 4:57 UTC

  40 points

  on: Inad­e­quacy and Modesty

  I’m re­ally happy that you are writ­ing a book on this topic. I mean, the Se­quences and the other dis­cus­sion on Less Wrong has given us a lot of tools with which to form our own opinion, but then we need to figure out how to bal­ance this against the opinions of ex­perts with more do­main-spe­cific knowl­edge. There’s a sense in which all the other knowl­edge isn’t of any use un­less we know when to ac­tu­ally use it.

  “Now, on the mod­est view, this was the un­fairest test imag­in­able. Out of all the times that I’ve ever sug­gested that a gov­ern­ment’s policy is sub­op­ti­mal, the rare time a gov­ern­ment tries my preferred al­ter­na­tive will se­lect the most main­stream, high­est-con­ven­tional-pres­tige poli­cies I hap­pen to ad­vo­cate, and those are the very policy pro­pos­als that mod­esty is least likely to dis­ap­prove of.”

  This is a pretty big deal, so I wanted to em­pha­sise it. Let’s sup­pose you come up with 50 poli­cies you think the gov­ern­ment should im­ple­ment. 10 get im­ple­mented and 8 work out well. Pretty good right? But what if 30 of your poli­cies would have been ut­terly stupid and this is ob­vi­ous to any of the ex­perts? This effect could com­pletely de­stroy your at­tempts at cal­libra­tion.

In Defence of Meta

No op­tion to re­port spam

• Chris_Leong 3 Mar 2018 0:22 UTC

  37 points

  on: Monthly Meta: Com­mon Knowledge

  Slack: Slack is one of the con­cepts that seems to have gained the most trac­tion. Un­for­tu­nately, I don’t think we have a clear defi­ni­tion yet. Zvi defined Slack as the ab­sence of bind­ing con­straints on be­havi­our. I sug­gested that this would make it merely a syn­onym for free­dom and that his ar­ti­cle seems to de­scribe, “free­dom pro­vided by hav­ing spare re­sources”, but Zvi wasn’t happy with it and I don’t know if he’s set­tled on a pre­cise defi­ni­tion yet.

  I sus­pect that this idea is so pop­u­lar be­cause it gives peo­ple a word to de­scribe the dis­ad­van­tages of run­ning a sys­tem near max­i­mum ca­pac­ity. Zvi ex­plains how slack re­duces stress, al­lows you to pur­su­ing op­por­tu­ni­ties that arise, al­lows you to avoid bad trade-offs and al­lows long-term think­ing. In an­other key ar­ti­cle, Rae­mon ex­plains how it can lead to frag­ile de­sign de­ci­sions and mak­ing poor de­ci­sions that go un­no­ticed.

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