Jacob, or “Jisk” when there are too many Jacobs about and I need a nickname. Host of the North Oakland LW Meetups, every Tuesday.
Honestly pretty disappointed with the state of the modern LW site, but it’s marginally better than other non-blogs so I’m still here.
It should be possible to easily find me from the username I use here, though not vice versa, for interview reasons.
Do it! You’ve always been a better spokesman for EA than any of the people with the big audiences and big platforms. I think your book would, correspondingly, be a better book than any of the ones we’ve seen published so far. Less prestigious, probably, but higher quality.
The type of problem I predicted has occurred. There has been a runaway groupthink spiral of social desirability bias and common knowledge of false consensus (creating enforced real consensus). I did not specifically predict that outgroup-respectability would be the target but it is not a surprising target.
I noted that most actions are more status-motivated than they appear, even to the people doing them, and that this warps nearly everything we do; the problem noted here is that LW and the community are warping their actions and perceptions to accrue respectability, i.e. status.
I claimed moderation doubled down on this. Ben notes that it is in fact used in that way.
It’s possible I merely predicted the effects correctly and happened to be wrong about one of the major causes. But that isn’t the way to bet.
[...]that a lot of my work over the past few years has been bad for the world (most prominently transforming LessWrong into something that looks a lot more respectable in a way that I am worried might have shrunk the overton window of what can be discussed there by a lot, and having generally contributed to a bunch of these dynamics).
While I did not literally claim this in advance, I came close enough that I claim the right to say I Told You So.
We should definitely not expect the “true fraction of beef consumption” to be proportional to impact. Steaks are consumed basically the same way as they were before subsidies (though in much larger quantity); they don’t respond much to the subsidy to take advantage of it. Fast food isn’t restricted to being prepared or sourced in a particular traditional way and therefore will change itself to best exploit subsidy. Estimating that effect as a 2.5x multiplier seems like a perfectly good conservative approximation, so you should just stick with 1%.
1% isn’t high. If they’re 0.4% of beef consumption, and Big Macs (like most fast food) are heavily optimized for cost, then we should expect them to be far more efficient at benefiting from subsidies than traditional means of beef consumption. A factor of 2.5 seems like a perfectly good conservative estimate for that efficiency.
The current mobile ecosystem is a vindication of everything RMS warned would happen in a world where free software was a minority, and proof that copyleft is absolutely not “less important” than in the 90s.
I don’t think it’s reasonable to say that it became harder to define, either. The natural definition just got more inconvenient. And so people stopped using it, free software shrank to nothing, and the vast majority of computer users now have devices that they cannot program, cannot program on, and are only dimly aware that they could, in theory, program.
RMS was right. We didn’t protect the right of users—particularly children and students—to modify the software they use, and this had the result of steadily reducing the ability of users to control their devices and their ability to become programmers. Students in programming classes now write code on their phones, in word processors. Not universally, but regularly. That was the nightmare scenario, and it’s arrived.
This is basically just standard evopsych nonsense. Why did you think this was worth writing?
And hopefully it might push EA back toward an equilibrium of having individuals who are dedicated and well-spoken but basically ordinary in-the-trenches EAs being the face it presents to the world, rather than people who make it their job to be spokespeople. That was better for EA internally, and given the whole FTX debacle and PR-focused mistakes, probably better for the world as well.