Rank: #10 out of 4859 in peer accuracy at Metaculus for the time period of 2016-2020.
ChristianKl
Karma: 36,413
When it comes to good ontology, more people should understand what Basic Formal Ontology is. When it comes to AI alignment, it might be productive if someone writes out a Basic Formal Ontology compatible ontology of it.
If you take the JFK assassination most people don’t know that the last official government investigation came to the conclusion that there was probably a conspiracy to kill JFK (and that they don’t know who exactly was involved). Yet, you have the media telling you that this is a conspiracy theory that nobody should take seriously. There’s a reason why the information environment is structured in a way that most people don’t know about the result of the last official government investigation.
You had the government arguing during COVID that releasing the JFK files would be so damaging to national security that they have to violate the law to postpone the release. This suggests either that they were simply lying or that there’s something significant hidden. Reasoning about what the hidden thing happens to be isn’t trivial. And the media of course just accepted that there’s something in the files that would be so dangerous for national security to release that it warrants law breaking.
So, if a given conspiracy theory is true, then it does take place in an antagonistic epistemic environments—the conspirators are usually trying to misinform.
It more complex than that. At the end of WWII, the US government managed to get information via the Venona project about the Soviets having many spies in US government departments. The US State Departments didn’t really like their employees being persecuted for being possible Russian spies and that likely includes Department leadership that wasn’t completely made up of spies. This dynamic grew to the McCarthy hearings.
There were clearly Russian spies back then, but McCarthy probably pointed at plenty of people who were innocent. It created a lot of social conflict. This is when the term ‘conspiracy theory’ first started it’s rise in usage. It was to say that calling people Communists that conspire to bring down the United States is a conspiracy theory.
The result was to stop the McCarthy persecutions because of the social turmoil and distrust they caused and let the Russian spies get on with their business. This isn’t because the Communists were so politically powerful but because the information environment of talking about conspiracy theories of people being loyal to Moscow destroys trust.
Shielding conspiracies by others is a classic moral maze behavior even by people who aren’t directly co-conspirators.
By that same token, this entire forum should understand my position rather than me its.
Why would anyone care about your position? You seem to care about the position of people in this forum given that you are here. If you don’t care, go somewhere else. Write your own blog.
The point of a forum is to facilitate a shared discourse. If you want to join that discourse the forum is there. If you want to start your own discourse, you are free to set up your own forum or blog.
Your philosophy is not that complex.
It takes less work to familiarize yourself with the philosophic positions of this forum than it takes to develop the physics knowledge necessary to engage in academic physics.
The fact that this needs less work is no good argument for the work not needing to be done.
To approach a question of meaning or politics scientifically in the way you describe is to assume that you know the answers from the start. What if your methodology is inherently flawed, and particularly in such a way as to be blind to the very ways in which it is flawed?
If a method is inherently flawed understanding the method and the reasoning for it’s use important for making a good argument that it’s flawed. If you take physics, there are plenty of people who don’t understand special relativity and you want to argue that it’s flawed. Engaging with those people is not useful for physicists. To the extend that there are flaws in physical theories it takes a lot of understanding of existing physics to make an argument that’s actually useful to bring forward the field of physics.
In philosophy actually understanding the position of the people you want to convince matters as well.
When it comes to salaries of knowledge workers like software engineers, a lot of decisions come down to the decisions of managers who not only care about what’s good for the company but has their own desires as well. A manager prefers employees that are in the office and as near as possible so that they feel they have power over the employees. This goes for middle management as well.
Someone in companies like Google that do have offices in India the internal company politics don’t play out in a way that result in drastically increasing their headcount in India.
The $2.43 Billion Question: Podcast Advertising in 2024: 10% of podcasts are ads (after which conversion rates drop); 30% of people left because of ads; a crazy amount of listeners. I don’t know why hosts (and the people paying them) aren’t a bit more subtle, and instead name drop the product casually throughout the episode. Of course, this may throw off the flow and be too forced.
I think attribution for advertising success happens via referral codes. If you just subtly speak about the product the listener might not actually use your code when buying it.
It also requires more cognitive load to have to think about the ad while doing a show instead of recording an ad once and then letting the person cutting the video cut in the ad.
Rationalism is a term that’s used by different people to mean different things.
Reasonable people disagree about how a court will interpret the language, if push comes to shove.
Given that it’s very unlikely that there’s a court case about that, I don’t think that matters much. OpenAI is very unlikely to sue the Pentagon over this and even if they did the amount of damages they could think would probably not that significant.
If we for example take the term “intentionally” I care more about what the intelligence community (IC) means with it than what a court would interpret it to mean. If we for example take the surveillance of Tucker Carlson, it’s quite clear that the justification for which they think they could legally do that is that Tucker Carlson communicated with a foreign national for which IC intentionally surveilled and the surveillance of Tucker Carlson happened in the context of that.
A good commitment about surveillance might include “we will always openly post the part of the system prompt that deals with surveillance.
Basically, you are saying that scientific conversations don’t follow your ideals because you need to do work to familiarize yourself with the existing knowledge to take part in a scientific conversation.
If you want to create a community that develops specialized knowledge of any kind you run into problems when you spent too much time dealing with people who are ignorant of the discourse. That’s especially true for online communities that don’t have other filters.
Larry McEnerney does a good job of explaining how to participate in a written discourse in general.
The key aspect of conspiracy theories is that it’s quite hard to think well about them. They happen in antagonistic epistemic environments which makes it even harder to reason well about them then normal politics that can already be “mindkilling”. This goes both for false positives and false negatives.
If you just look about claims about Epstein, this dynamic is true where there are plenty of people who are very willing to belief right now every possible false conspiracy claim about Epstein. In the Epstein story it’s easy to have both false positives and false negatives.
In general, if you want to write a comment that disagrees with a public opinion having it be three lines with a link is not popular. For contrarian takes to be received well on LessWrong they usually need more effort.
If your goal is to turn Iran into a failed state where people suffer from civil war for the next decade removing all the command and control paths is valuable. While this is something that Israel might want because it means Iran having little geopolitical power, it’s not the outcome that Trump seems to want, who wants a regime change into a regime that’s more to his liking.
As far as the factional aspect, often you have the military with guns who are more hardlines and then business people who want to do international commerce instead of conflict. Part of the problem with war and also sanctions is that you damage the business people a lot with it and don’t really transfer the power to them but rather empower those wins guns.
They would take out Trump if they could.
How do you know? Do you think it’s impossible to smuggle drone swarms into the US ( or build them from readymade parts) and attack politicians that have public events with it in an effective way?
In a conflict between a democracy and an autocracy, the democracy is usually limited by domestic support, while the autocracy can just continuously reframe the narrative and keep on going pretty much indefinitely.
I think you are wrong to model autocracies about not caring about domestic support. While the support of the average man on the street doesn’t count, support of the domestic elite does count and a leader in an autocracy who does lose support can easily die while leaders in democracies can stay alive when they leave office when they lose support.
For example—the (obviously fake) report of a strike on an all-girls school in Iran that keeps circulating for the past 3 days with ever growing casualty counts. These videos are clearly targeting Americans in order to diminish support for the campaign.
I don’t know what that example is supposed to show. Both sides have large propaganda efforts to sway public opinion and both are willing to lie for it.
Taking out the leader serves both as a very tangible, undeniable “achievement” for the democracy (although even that can be framed as a desired outcome in certain belief systems). It also takes out a significant psychological driving force, as these are usually charismatic, cult personalities.
Martyr death does not reduce the psychological driving force of a person.
This seems like a community that requires every user to agree with its particular beliefs.
That’s not true, this community has people disagreeing on most beliefs. You don’t need to agree with any particular belief. However if you want to argue against a position it’s useful to understand the position you are arguing with well enough that you can make an interesting argument against it.
It seems to me like there was a sort of gentleman’s agreement not to focus on killing the leader of the other country that you are at war with. You wanted someone with the ability and authority to surrender.
The Trump administration now seems to pursue a policy of directly going after the leaders. It will be interesting to see whether in return, other countries will also want to do more strikes against Western leaders (and particularly US politicians).
Let’s say there’s politician X. And let’s say that I disagree with her on a vast range of policy questions. But one day, she faces a choice: She can oppose some piece of corruption vigorously, but doing so will end her very successful political career. And she makes the choice to go down fighting against the corruption.
Fighting against corruption means that you are fighting against something people are actually doing. Anthropic’s public position seems to be that they haven’t stood up for any of their principles that they articulated in the past actually prevents the military from doing things that the military wants to do with their software.
Anthropic had principles that against their software being used for disinformation campaigns, the design or use of weapons, censorship, and malicious cyber operations. If they would enforce any of those principles it would actually prevent the US military from doing things that the US military wants to do.
Only having the red lines against things that Anthropic believes the military doesn’t want to do but not against those that the military wants to do is bending a lot under pressure.Any normal Secretary of Defense would have said: “Okay, thank you for allowing us to do the things with your software that your stated principles limit. We grant you to have some red lines that don’t involve things we want to do with your software, so that you can present yourself as having principles to the public.”
But Pete Hegseth is not a normal Secretary of Defense. He’s a bully who renamed the office to Secretary of War, who’s not letting a company get away with a face-saving compromise. For him it’s a matter of principle. The fact that there’s a maximum of humiliation that Dario is willing to accept is not the same as him being very principled.
Anthropic’s contract is a classified document that’s not public. Anthropic has made no commitments about revealing the contents of the contract with the public. Given that it’s a classified contract revealing contract details might even be subject to penalties. Why do you believe you know what’s in it?
If we do believe Anthropic’s public commitments they require “agency’s willingness to engage in ongoing dialogue with Anthropic” about how the agency they are contract with when it comes to them getting expectations to violate the normal Usage Policy. That’s quite different of just having red lines around domestic mass surveillance and autonomous weapons.
Do you believe that the contracts that Anthropic has with the DoD are already in violation of the public promises Anthropic made in that regard?
I find it amazing how much discussion there is about the fact that Anthropic has red lines compared to how little there is about the content of the red lines. If you can argue that your red lines don’t limit the military in the things that the military actually wants to do, that’s a tell that you are allowing a lot of problematic applications.
If you want convince someone to lower their standards on an intellectual level you just need to convince them that there’s no rational reason for their standards.
On the other hand, if you want someone to raise their standards you actually have to provide them reasons for why a higher standard is important. If you have a situation where someone has some allergic symptoms explaining to them how better cleaning could alleviate their symptoms or the symptoms of a housemate that they care about, that’s an argument that might convince someone that it makes sense to raise their standards.
Jordon Peterson also seems to manage to convince large amounts of men that they should clean their room and if you buy into his reasoning that probably comes with standard raising.