clone of saturn

• clone of saturn 18 Aug 2019 8:56 UTC

  12 points

  in reply to: Raemon's comment on: Par­tial sum­mary of de­bate with Ben­quo and Jes­si­cata [pt 1]

  What makes you think A and B are mu­tu­ally ex­clu­sive? Or even sig­nifi­cantly an­ti­cor­re­lated? If there are enough very differ­ent mod­els built out of le­gi­t­i­mate facts and the­o­ries for ev­ery­one to have one of their own, how can you tell they aren’t pick­ing them for poli­ti­cal rea­sons?

• clone of saturn 4 Aug 2019 8:34 UTC

  8 points

  in reply to: johnswentworth's comment on: Power Buys You Dis­tance From The Crime

  This seems like dra­mat­i­cally over-com­pli­cat­ing the idea. I would ex­pect a pro­to­typ­i­cal con­flict the­o­rist to rea­son like this:

  1. Poli­ti­cal de­bates have win­ners and losers—if a con­sen­sus is reached on a poli­ti­cal ques­tion, one group of peo­ple will be ma­te­ri­ally bet­ter off and an­other group will be worse off.

  2. Public choice the­ory makes black peo­ple worse off. (I don’t know if the ar­ti­cle is right about this, but I’ll as­sume it’s true for the sake of ar­gu­ment.)

  3. There­fore, one ought to pro­mote pub­lic choice the­ory if one wants to hurt black peo­ple, and dis­par­age pub­lic choice the­ory if one wants to help black peo­ple.

• clone of saturn 4 Aug 2019 3:03 UTC

  13 points

  in reply to: Raemon's comment on: Drive-By Low-Effort Criticism

  Sure, that all makes sense, but at least on LW it seems like we ought to in­sist on say­ing “re­ward­ing re­sults” when we mean re­ward­ing re­sults, and “de­ceiv­ing our­selves into think­ing we’re re­ward­ing re­sults” when we mean de­ceiv­ing our­selves into think­ing we’re re­ward­ing re­sults.

• clone of saturn 2 Aug 2019 2:21 UTC

  9 points

  in reply to: dxu's comment on: Drive-By Low-Effort Criticism

  Strange. You bring up Good­hart’s Law, but the way you ap­ply it seems ex­actly back­wards to me. If you’re re­ward­ing strate­gies in­stead of re­sults, and some­one comes up with a new strat­egy that has far bet­ter re­sults than the strat­egy you’re re­ward­ing, you fail to re­ward peo­ple for de­vel­op­ing bet­ter strate­gies or get­ting bet­ter re­sults. This seems like it’s ex­actly what Good­hart was try­ing to warn us about.

• clone of saturn 31 Jul 2019 22:28 UTC

  17 points

  in reply to: dxu's comment on: Drive-By Low-Effort Criticism

  per­haps high-effort posts are more likely to con­tain mud­dled think­ing, and hence more likely to have in­cor­rect con­clu­sions? but it’s hard to see why this should be the case a priori

  I don’t think high-effort posts are more likely to con­tain mud­dled think­ing, but I do think read­ers are less likely to no­tice mud­dled think­ing when it ap­pears in high-effort posts, so sup­press­ing crit­i­cism of high-effort posts is es­pe­cially dan­ger­ous.

• clone of saturn 19 Jul 2019 18:43 UTC

  9 points

  in reply to: quanticle's comment on: When does adding more peo­ple re­li­ably make a sys­tem bet­ter?

  LW 1.0 had an ad­di­tional prob­lem that no one wanted to risk writ­ing a worse than av­er­age post in Main, lead­ing to ever in­creas­ing stan­dards and fewer posts, but I be­lieve user num­bers were still in­creas­ing, and qual­ity of Dis­cus­sion posts de­creas­ing, dur­ing that pro­cess.

• clone of saturn 16 Jul 2019 4:20 UTC

  18 points

  in reply to: jessicata's comment on: Why ar­tifi­cial op­ti­mism?

  Know­in­gly al­low­ing some­one to get away with some­thing bad makes you bad.

  While some peo­ple have a be­lief like this, this seems false from a philo­soph­i­cal eth­i­cal per­spec­tive.

  I think a philo­soph­i­cal eth­i­cal per­spec­tive that la­bels this “false” (and not just in­com­plete or un­der-nu­anced) is failing to en­gage with the phe­nomenon of ethics as it ac­tu­ally hap­pens in the world. Ethics arose in this cold and in­differ­ent uni­verse be­cause be­ing eth­i­cal is a win­ning strat­egy, but be­ing “eth­i­cal” all by your­self with­out any mechanism to keep ev­ery­one around you eth­i­cal is not a win­ning strat­egy.

  The cost of ex­plic­itly pun­ish­ing peo­ple for not be­ing veg­e­tar­ian is pro­hibitive be­cause veg­e­tar­i­anism is still a small and en­trepreneurial eth­i­cal sys­tem, but you can cer­tainly at least pun­ish non-veg­e­tar­i­ans by prefer­en­tially choos­ing other veg­e­tar­i­ans to as­so­ci­ate with. Well-es­tab­lished eth­i­cal sys­tems like anti-mur­der-ism have much less difficulty af­ford­ing se­vere pun­ish­ments.

  An im­por­tant in­no­va­tion is that you can co­op­er­ate with peo­ple who might be bad over­all, as long as they fol­low a more min­i­mal set of rules (for ex­am­ple, the Uniform Com­mer­cial Code). Or in other words, you can have con­cen­tric cir­cles of eth­i­cal­ness, mak­ing more limited eth­i­cal de­mands of peo­ple you in­ter­act with less closely. But when you in­ter­act with peo­ple in your outer cir­cle, how do peo­ple in your in­ner cir­cle know you don’t con­done all of the bad things they might be do­ing? One way is to have some kind of sys­tem of group mem­ber­ship, with rules that ex­plic­itly ap­ply only to group mem­bers. But a cheaper and more flex­ible way is to sim­ply re­main ig­no­rant about any­thing that isn’t rele­vant—a.k.a re­spect their pri­vacy.

• clone of saturn 15 Jul 2019 23:00 UTC

  18 points

  on: Why ar­tifi­cial op­ti­mism?

  Po­lite­ness and pri­vacy are, in fact, largely about main­tain­ing im­pres­sions (es­pe­cially pos­i­tive im­pres­sions) through co­or­di­nat­ing against the rev­e­la­tion of truth.

  Peo­ple don’t always agree with each other about what’s good and bad. Know­ingly al­low­ing some­one to get away with some­thing bad makes you bad. Co­or­di­nat­ing against the rev­e­la­tion of truth al­lows us to get some­thing pro­duc­tive done to­gether in­stead of spend­ing all our time fight­ing.

• clone of saturn 15 Jul 2019 9:23 UTC

  10 points

  in reply to: Zack_M_Davis's comment on: Open Thread July 2019

  I thought your com­ment was fine and the irony was ob­vi­ous, but this kind of mi­s­un­der­stand­ing can be eas­ily avoided by mak­ing the straight­for­ward read­ing more bor­ing, like so:

  Given that CfAR is an or­ga­ni­za­tion which is speci­fi­cally about seek­ing truth, one could safely as­sume that if the ac­tual rea­son were “Many of the ex­pla­na­tions here are in­ten­tion­ally ap­prox­i­mate or in­com­plete be­cause we pre­dict that this hand­book will be leaked and we don’t want to un­der­cut our core product,” then the hand­book would have just said that. To do oth­er­wise would be to call the whole premise into ques­tion!

• clone of saturn 8 Jul 2019 6:56 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Raemon's comment on: Rae­mon’s Short­form Feed

  Know­ing your plans could definitely make a differ­ence—I do want to pri­ori­tize fix­ing any prob­lems that make GW con­fus­ing to use, as well as adding fea­tures that some­one has di­rectly asked for. As such, I just im­ple­mented the re­lated ques­tions fea­ture.

• clone of saturn 29 Jun 2019 4:57 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: riceissa's comment on: GreaterWrong Ar­bital Viewer

  Oops, fixed.

• clone of saturn 29 Jun 2019 0:50 UTC

  14 points

  in reply to: Alexei's comment on: GreaterWrong Ar­bital Viewer

  Thanks!

• clone of saturn 28 Jun 2019 13:54 UTC

  7 points

  in reply to: Charlie Steiner's comment on: GreaterWrong Ar­bital Viewer

  (For fu­ture refer­ence, I be­lieve you mean this page)

GreaterWrong Ar­bital Viewer

• clone of saturn 17 Jun 2019 0:57 UTC

  17 points

  in reply to: Raemon's comment on: Dis­course Norms: Moder­a­tors Must Not Bully

  But you re­al­ize this isn’t just ran­dom un­mo­ti­vated nit­pick­ing, be­cause it’s also fairly straight­for­ward and rea­son­able to clump “Nazi” with “HBD”, and from there to ban some­one like Gw­ern for his GWAS and em­bryo se­lec­tion re­search, right?

• clone of saturn 16 Jun 2019 8:48 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: shminux's comment on: Ex­per­i­men­tal Open Thread April 2019: So­cratic method

  What’s differ­ent about these do­mains? Can you tell them apart in any way?

• clone of saturn 16 Jun 2019 7:46 UTC

  20 points

  on: Rea­son­able Explanations

  meta: LW sup­ports spoiler tags now.

• clone of saturn 16 Jun 2019 6:56 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: shminux's comment on: Ex­per­i­men­tal Open Thread April 2019: So­cratic method

  Is there any­thing that makes ob­ser­va­tions differ­ent or dis­t­in­guish­able from imag­i­na­tions? If so, what?

• clone of saturn 15 Jun 2019 19:08 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: jessicata's comment on: No, it’s not The In­cen­tives—it’s you

  Right… but fraud rings need some­thing to ini­tially nu­cle­ate around. (As do hon­esty rings)

• clone of saturn 15 Jun 2019 17:54 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Zvi's comment on: No, it’s not The In­cen­tives—it’s you

  I don’t en­dorse the quoted state­ment, I think it’s just as per­verse as you do. But I do think I can ex­plain how peo­ple get there in good faith. The idea is that moral norms have no in­de­pen­dent ex­is­tence, they are ar­bi­trary hu­man con­struc­tions, and there­fore it’s wrong to shame some­one for vi­o­lat­ing a norm they didn’t ex­plic­itly agree to fol­low. If you call me out for falsify­ing data, you’re not re­cruit­ing the com­mu­nity to en­force its norms for the good of all. There is no com­mu­nity, there is no all, you’re sim­ply car­ry­ing out an un­pro­voked at­tack against me, which I can le­gi­t­i­mately re­spond to as such.

  (Of course, I think this re­quires an illog­i­cal com­bi­na­tion of ex­treme cyn­i­cism to­wards ob­ject-level norms with a strong be­lief in cer­tain meta-norms, but pro­po­nents don’t see it that way.)