Davis_Kingsley

Where are the Benefits from Con­ver­sa­tion?

• Davis_Kingsley 11 Mar 2019 5:58 UTC

  19 points

  in reply to: Duncan_Sabien's comment on: In My Culture

  To be clear I’m not mak­ing the claim that what I de­scribed above is an en­dorsed or cor­rect ex­pe­rience, just how I’ve ac­tu­ally en­coun­tered it in prac­tice at times. I’ll try and keep track of my im­pres­sions when I en­counter this sort of thing in the fu­ture, and take what you’ve said here into ac­count.

• Davis_Kingsley 10 Mar 2019 22:59 UTC

  22 points

  on: In My Culture

  When I have heard peo­ple use this “in the wild”, it has at times come off as *ex­tremely* in­sult­ing or con­de­scend­ing. In par­tic­u­lar, when both par­ti­ci­pants are part of the same cul­ture, it feels like one par­ti­ci­pant is mak­ing an ex­tremely ag­gres­sive con­ver­sa­tional move, some­thing along the lines of “I un­der­stand this cul­ture/​com­mu­nity bet­ter than you and I de­clare that you are Out Of Bounds”. It is pre­cisely in heated/​tense situ­a­tions where this most seems to back­fire, which makes me skep­ti­cal of the util­ity of this tech­nique “in the wild”.

  I note that most of the ex­am­ples you give seem in­nocu­ous and le­gi­t­i­mate and in fact things I’d like to see more of—but some­how in prac­tice this of­ten seems to back­fire in the most im­por­tant in­stances, at least when I’ve seen it done.

• Davis_Kingsley 2 Mar 2019 21:31 UTC

  7 points

  on: Karma-Change Notifications

  Great fea­ture, I re­ally like this.

• Davis_Kingsley 8 Jan 2019 10:04 UTC

  39 points

  in reply to: jacobjacob's comment on: What is a rea­son­able out­side view for the fate of so­cial move­ments?

  I just used ran­dom.org for this. Here’s my met­ric, I don’t know if you guys count it:

  • -1: Clearly failed, re­pu­di­ated by his­tory (slav­ery in the US)

  • 0: Un­clear if had any real last­ing success

  • 1: Par­tial suc­cess—did some­thing mean­ingful but has not fully ac­com­plished goals, still active

  • 2: Ma­jor suc­cess—be­came a ma­jor, last­ing cul­tural force, still active

  • 3: To­tal or near-to­tal vic­tory (abo­li­tion­ism in the US), may or may not be still active

  Ran­dom.org gave me the fol­low­ing 28 re­sults. I’ve linked to the Wikipe­dia pages and pro­vided my rat­ing and brief jus­tifi­ca­tion for each. All of these are my at­tempt to rate these things as a dis­pas­sion­ate eval­u­a­tor rather than us­ing my own opinions of the value of these move­ments. My eval­u­a­tions may be es­pe­cially in­ac­cu­rate for non-US poli­ti­cal move­ments, feel free to cor­rect me if you know more than me about any of these:

  Slow move­ment: 0. Slow food is the most im­pact­ful as­pect of this move­ment that I can iden­tify and it’s un­clear to me whether it had any im­pact other than be­ing a fad, though there’s still some ac­tivity.

  In­dia Against Cor­rup­tion: 0. Move­ment broke up via in­ter­nal schism, and the bill that it was pro­mot­ing failed. Anti-cor­rup­tion is still a cause but this par­tic­u­lar move­ment seems to have died out.

  An­i­mal rights move­ment: 2. The an­i­mal rights move­ment has clearly “moved the nee­dle” on some is­sues and achieved broad main­stream recog­ni­tion, but there is still a ways to go in terms of the deeper an­i­mal rights ob­jec­tives and their views are far from uni­ver­sally ac­cepted.

  Ger­akan Hara­pan Baru (New Hope Move­ment in Malaysia): 1. After their at­tempt to cre­ate a new poli­ti­cal party was re­jected, this move­ment took over an es­tab­lished poli­ti­cal party and elected sev­eral can­di­dates.

  Pro-choice move­ment: 2. The “pro-choice move­ment” (sup­ports abor­tion in the US) is clearly a ma­jor cul­tural force and has achieved sev­eral ma­jor vic­to­ries, but is still very much still con­tro­ver­sial and some of their gains have been re­versed or are at risk of be­ing re­versed.

  Slow Food move­ment: 1. This is slightly re­dun­dant with the Slow move­ment as a whole, which I already rated. I gave the Slow move­ment as a whole a 0 but I’ll give Slow Food a 1 since it’s been fairly rele­vant in its sec­tor, albeit thanks to much less am­bi­tious goals.

  Effec­tive al­tru­ism: 1. EA has moved sub­stan­tial amounts of money and achieved rele­vant and grow­ing cul­tural in­fluence, but is not a “ma­jor cul­tural force” at this phase… yet! Growth mind­set! (I’d like to re­it­er­ate that this is my pri­vate opinion and not that of any org!)

  Vol­un­tary Hu­man Ex­tinc­tion Move­ment: 0. Vol­un­tary hu­man ex­tinc­tion is very fringe. I’m tempted to give it a nega­tive num­ber, but VHE/​anti­na­tal­ism is still some­what ac­tive and it was a rather un­likely po­si­tion to be­gin with.

  Free love: 1. This move­ment was ul­ti­mately sup­planted to a de­gree by other re­lated causes in the “sex­ual rev­olu­tion”, but it did have a mean­ingful im­pact even if it didn’t end up be­ing the “fi­nal form”. This could be ar­gued to be a 2, I’d rate the sex­ual rev­olu­tion as a whole there but free love in par­tic­u­lar ended up be­ing marginal­ized.

  Women’s suffrage move­ment: 3. So suc­cess­ful, at least in the West, that ev­ery now and then pranksters cir­cu­late pe­ti­tions to “end women’s suffrage” and peo­ple sign be­cause ‘suffrage’ sounds like ‘suffer­ing’ and the suffrage move­ment has been so effec­tive that it is now broadly dis­banded and peo­ple don’t know what it is any­more.

  Black Lives Mat­ter: 1. While this move­ment cer­tainly achieved promi­nence and could be said to be a ma­jor cul­tural force in the United States, it re­mains to be seen how last­ing and im­pact­ful this will be—the move­ment is still in its first five years.

  Anti-cap­i­tal­ism: 2. Anti-cap­i­tal­ist move­ments may have failed to over­throw cap­i­tal­ism com­pletely, but they had a last­ing im­pact on world his­tory and are still poli­ti­cally rele­vant in many ar­eas of the world.

  Chil­dren’s rights move­ment: 2. Child la­bor has been greatly re­duced, but there’s still a ways to go, es­pe­cially in non-Western coun­tries. This should per­haps be a 2.5 or so?

  Or­ganic move­ment: 2. Or­ganic food has be­come a sig­nifi­cant in­dus­try and “or­ganic” cer­tifi­ca­tions are now con­sid­ered im­por­tant. How­ever, while or­ganic things are trendy at pre­sent it’s un­clear if the in­fluence here will keep grow­ing.

  Ru­ral Peo­ple’s Move­ment: 0. Failed poli­ti­cal move­ment in Weimar Ger­many. Sev­eral of its peo­ple were ar­rested af­ter they be­gan ter­ror­ist at­tacks and the Land­volk news­pa­per was re­peat­edly sup­pressed. Naz­iism su­per­seded this to some de­gree; I al­most gave this a −1 but it may have been a pre­cur­sor to later de­vel­op­ments.

  Mad Pride: 0. Un­clear to me whether this has had a sub­stan­tial or last­ing im­pact. Men­tal ill­ness terms have been des­tig­ma­tized to some de­gree but this seems to me likely the re­sult of broader fac­tors.

  Nar­mada Bachao An­dolan: −1. At­tempted to stop the con­struc­tion of a dam—the dam was con­structed any­way, and while this group may have de­layed that I still count this as dis­tinctly failed.

  Tem­per­ance move­ment: −1. This move­ment was so suc­cess­ful in the short term that they were able to amend the Con­sti­tu­tion in the United States and im­ple­ment Pro­hi­bi­tion, but this proved to be dra­mat­i­cally un­suc­cess­ful, was re­pealed less than fif­teen years later, and is now widely de­rided.

  Oc­cupy move­ment: 0. This move­ment at­tracted wide­spread at­ten­tion for some time, but af­ter the “protest camps” died down it has fallen out of the pub­lic eye. It is pos­si­ble this move­ment drew na­tional at­ten­tion to the is­sue of in­come in­equal­ity but it is un­clear that they were re­spon­si­ble or that this will last.

  Si­tu­a­tion­ist In­ter­na­tional: 0. This move­ment was very in­fluen­tial in France in the late 1960s, but closed down in the 1970s and its last­ing im­pact, if any , is un­clear.

  Time’s Up (move­ment): 1. This move­ment is very re­cent and is broadly part of the #MeToo move­ment. It is pop­u­lar in a cer­tain sense but it is un­clear whether it will have a sub­stan­tial, last­ing im­pact (though I cer­tainly hope it does!)

  Land­less Peo­ples Move­ment (South Africa): 0. It is un­clear to me whether this move­ment is re­ally hav­ing a big im­pact.

  Pro-life move­ment: 2. Like the “pro-choice move­ment”, the “pro-life move­ment” (op­posed to abor­tion in the US) is a ma­jor cul­tural force and has had some vic­to­ries re­cently. It is un­clear what the last­ing im­pact of this will be, but at least right now it’s quite a big deal.

  Anti-nu­clear move­ment: 2. The anti-nu­clear move­ment was very effec­tive at stop­ping nu­clear power de­vel­op­ments in the West and re­mains pow­er­ful in sev­eral re­spects, but has not achieved or come close to achiev­ing full nu­clear disar­ma­ment.

  Coun­ter­cul­ture move­ment: 2. As Wikipe­dia says, “The era was also no­table in that a sig­nifi­cant por­tion of the ar­ray of be­hav­iors and “causes” within the larger move­ment were quickly as­similated within main­stream so­ciety, par­tic­u­larly in the US, even though coun­ter­cul­ture par­ti­ci­pants num­bered in the clear minor­ity within their re­spec­tive na­tional pop­u­la­tions.”

  Brights move­ment: 0. My as­sess­ment is that the Brights move­ment is an es­sen­tially failed re­brand­ing of the athe­ist/​skep­tic/​sec­u­lar hu­man­ist move­ment.

  Free soft­ware move­ment: 1. The Free soft­ware move­ment has been broadly sup­planted by open source, but hasn’t been en­tirely re­placed, and is clearly still cul­turally rele­vant. If open source were the ques­tion I’d prob­a­bly give it a 2 rather than a 1.

  Via Cam­pesina: 1. This move­ment claims to rep­re­sent very many peo­ple and coined the term “food sovereignty”, but it is un­clear to me how or­ga­nized and effec­tive it is. I could eas­ily see this be­ing a 2.

• Davis_Kingsley 28 Dec 2018 18:38 UTC

  2 points

  on: Card Balance and Artifact

  I am not sure that I could dis­agree more with this post. I con­sider Mark Rose­wa­ter’s “When Cards Go Bad” and the as­so­ci­ated ideas to have been ex­tremely dam­ag­ing to card game de­sign.

  (Sorry, hit sub­mit too early, will have more to say in de­tail later!)

• Davis_Kingsley 27 Dec 2018 18:22 UTC

  1 point

  on: Card Col­lec­tion and Ownership

  In­ter­est­ing. For my part, I was wait­ing be­fore get­ting more into Ar­ti­fact to see what they would do about the ob­vi­ous bal­ance is­sues (Axe be­ing the most promi­nent one), and their re­cent an­nounce­ment has me re­ally happy. It turns out I just care so much more about a game *be­ing a good game* than I do about the “phys­i­cal­ity” of the cards or what­ever.

  I’ve long thought that the phys­i­cal­ity of real card games is a down­side and that digi­tal games are hugely ad­van­taged by their abil­ity to patch, but that most of the digi­tal game de­sign­ers were failing to make use of the medium to the ful­lest by im­ple­ment­ing bal­ance patches, in­stead fo­cus­ing on “showy” ran­dom­ized effects and an­i­ma­tions that can’t be done in pa­per. I’m re­ally pleased to see that Ar­ti­fact is go­ing to take a more ag­gres­sive ap­proach to bal­ance is­sues.

• Davis_Kingsley 27 Nov 2018 23:23 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: ryan_b's comment on: How democ­racy ends: a re­view and reevaluation

  IIRC I’ve heard it claimed that Mat­tis is so pop­u­lar that he could throw a coup, but that might only ap­ply to the Marine Corps.

• Davis_Kingsley 23 Nov 2018 6:11 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: deluks917's comment on: If You Want to Win, Stop Conceding

  I’m ac­tu­ally not sure re: prac­tice. I know peo­ple who would just play out the first X turns of a game then re­set to get de­liber­ate prac­tice on the open­ings; I think there’s some merit to that, but I also think most peo­ple don’t prac­tice fight­ing back from re­ally un­pleas­ant situ­a­tions enough. Not sure how these effects line up for par­tic­u­lar in­di­vi­d­u­als.

• Davis_Kingsley 22 Nov 2018 18:34 UTC

  1 point

  on: Re­view: Artifact

  Very cool re­view, made me se­ri­ously con­sider tak­ing this game se­ri­ously.

  I’d be in­ter­ested to hear your thoughts on KeyForge, if you ever feel like post­ing/​for­mu­lat­ing those.

If You Want to Win, Stop Conceding

• Davis_Kingsley 22 Nov 2018 16:37 UTC

  26 points

  on: If You Want to Win, Stop Conceding

  One im­por­tant caveat to this is that it doesn’t mean you have to fight as hard as pos­si­ble in ev­ery sin­gle bat­tle, play out ev­ery sin­gle hand, or oth­er­wise fight fe­ro­ciously on an *ob­ject* level—you should be fight­ing fe­ro­ciously on a *meta* level. It’s fine, and per­haps even nec­es­sary in many games, to con­cede some bat­tles in or­der to win the war.

  (in­spira­tion for this com­ment goes to Ra­tion­al­ist Dis­course Club user “Bar Fight”, who pointed out “good post, but ‘con­cede less’ is ex­tremely bad ad­vice for most poker play­ers”!)

Schools Pro­lifer­at­ing Without Practicioners

• Davis_Kingsley 13 Oct 2018 19:21 UTC

  11 points

  in reply to: tenshiko's comment on: Nyoom

  I don’t con­sider “the ti­tle of this post is al­most com­pletely un­in­for­ma­tive” to be a minor is­sue, nor do I con­sider “it doesn’t sig­nal in-group enough” to be an is­sue at all. I know the au­thor per­son­ally and she’s prob­a­bly way more “in-group” than I am, I’d just pre­fer to see posts here with more in­for­ma­tive ti­tles, es­pe­cially if they don’t per­tain as di­rectly to the main top­ics of the site.

  (I was won­der­ing if there was go­ing to be a Big Ra­tion­al­ist Les­son at the end, since the ti­tle didn’t tell me it was just a scooter re­view.)

• Davis_Kingsley 13 Oct 2018 14:58 UTC

  5 points

  on: Nyoom

  I like this post in sev­eral re­spects but it doesn’t re­ally feel like LW con­tent to me, es­pe­cially given the ti­tle.

• Davis_Kingsley 12 Oct 2018 16:16 UTC

  8 points

  in reply to: toonalfrink's comment on: We can all be high status

  There’s a pos­si­bil­ity for cor­rup­tion here, as I briefly men­tioned, if peo­ple get so de­prived that they will sac­ri­fice their other needs or val­ues for the sake of sta­tus alone.

  I con­sid­ered that to be ob­vi­ous in writ­ing this. I’m not nec­es­sar­ily talk­ing about the prob­lem of get­ting sta­tus re­gard­less of ev­ery­thing else. I’m also not talk­ing about how to get sta­tus as an in­di­vi­d­ual. I’m rather talk­ing about get­ting the whole com­mu­nity a sense of sta­tus while keep­ing our other val­ues in­tact.

  Yes, I think giv­ing the com­mu­nity a “sense of sta­tus” has sub­stan­tial risks of ex­ac­er­bat­ing the cor­rup­tion that I men­tioned ear­lier. In other words, I think rec­og­niz­ing achieve­ments is nice, but mak­ing that recog­ni­tion too sys­tem­atic leads to sig­nifi­cantly in­creased gam­ing of that sys­tem, Good­hart­ing, etc.

• Davis_Kingsley 11 Oct 2018 19:11 UTC

  12 points

  on: We can all be high status

  My sense is that in­creas­ing the amount of time and at­ten­tion that we pay to sta­tus and re­lated dy­nam­ics is ex­tremely nega­tive; I don’t ex­pect it to help and I think that is­sues re­lated to these situ­a­tions get sig­nifi­cantly much worse when peo­ple are con­sciously tar­get­ing them.

  As C.S. Lewis said in his ex­cel­lent talk “The In­ner Ring”:

  The tor­ture al­lot­ted to the Danaids in the clas­si­cal un­der­world, that of at­tempt­ing to fill sieves with wa­ter, is the sym­bol not of one vice, but of all vices. It is the very mark of a per­verse de­sire that it seeks what is not to be had. The de­sire to be in­side the in­visi­ble line illus­trates this rule. As long as you are gov­erned by that de­sire you will never get what you want. You are try­ing to peel an onion: if you suc­ceed there will be noth­ing left. Un­til you con­quer the fear of be­ing an out­sider, an out­sider you will re­main.

  This is surely very clear when you come to think of it. If you want to be made free of a cer­tain cir­cle for some whole­some rea­son—if, say, you want to join a mu­si­cal so­ciety be­cause you re­ally like mu­sic—then there is a pos­si­bil­ity of satis­fac­tion. You may find your­self play­ing in a quar­tet and you may en­joy it. But if all you want is to be in the know, your plea­sure will be short lived. The cir­cle can­not have from within the charm it had from out­side. By the very act of ad­mit­ting you it has lost its magic.

  And later:

  The quest of the In­ner Ring will break your hearts un­less you break it. But if you break it, a sur­pris­ing re­sult will fol­low. If in your work­ing hours you make the work your end, you will presently find your­self all un­awares in­side the only cir­cle in your pro­fes­sion that re­ally mat­ters. You will be one of the sound crafts­men, and other sound crafts­men will know it. This group of crafts­men will by no means co­in­cide with the In­ner Ring or the Im­por­tant Peo­ple or the Peo­ple in the Know. It will not shape that pro­fes­sional policy or work up that pro­fes­sional in­fluence which fights for the pro­fes­sion as a whole against the pub­lic: nor will it lead to those pe­ri­odic scan­dals and crises which the In­ner Ring pro­duces. But it will do those things which that pro­fes­sion ex­ists to do and will in the long run be re­spon­si­ble for all the re­spect which that pro­fes­sion in fact en­joys and which the speeches and ad­ver­tise­ments can­not main­tain.

  This is es­sen­tially my view. I do not think it is gen­er­ally pro­duc­tive to con­cern your­self with be­ing In or High-Sta­tus or Get­ting In­vited to the Right Par­ties or Be­ing Talked About; I think it is pro­duc­tive to fo­cus on the work that ac­tu­ally builds and con­tributes to the pro­ject, and let the par­ties and in­vi­ta­tions and all that come as they may (or may not).

• Davis_Kingsley 7 Sep 2018 21:55 UTC

  8 points

  in reply to: jimrandomh's comment on: thought: the prob­lem with less wrong’s epistemic health is that stuff isn’t short form

  Both, but the side­bar wid­get is the main thing I miss. I no­tice that I still use it on the EA Fo­rum, for in­stance, which has much of old-LW’s struc­ture. On cur­rent LW I have to scroll down a lot on the front page to see re­cent com­ments and they don’t ap­pear while read­ing posts, which IMO quite re­duces my en­gage­ment.

• Davis_Kingsley 6 Sep 2018 23:46 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: habryka's comment on: thought: the prob­lem with less wrong’s epistemic health is that stuff isn’t short form

  One thing I’ll point out is the “re­cent dis­cus­sion” feels less ac­cessible than on old LW (re­quires scrol­ling), and the lack of a “top users, 30 days” sec­tion prob­a­bly de­creases my en­gage­ment a bit as well—both be­cause of the lack of a “leader­board effect” and be­cause it can be use­ful to look at that to see who’s been post­ing in­ter­est­ing con­tent that I might oth­er­wise have missed.

• Davis_Kingsley 6 Sep 2018 13:25 UTC

  11 points

  on: Great Founder Theory

  It… sorta feels like you’ve rein­vented the (broadly dis­cred­ited) Great Man the­ory of his­tory? The fo­cus on in­sti­tu­tions miti­gates one of the prob­lems with that the­ory, but I think it may just be kick­ing the can down the road a bit.

  While there are some highly effec­tive and in­fluen­tial or­ga­ni­za­tions and in­sti­tu­tions that seem to have greatly benefited from strong lead­er­ship from founders (Naval Re­ac­tors Branch un­der Rick­over), there are oth­ers where this story is much more du­bi­ous (Bell Labs).