You know what I’ve been impressed by? Some eSports broadcasts intentionally upload videos with large amounts of dead air at the end if they’re showing a two-out-of-three where one side won the first two games—that way you won’t get spoiled on the result by the length of the video!
Davis_Kingsley
Karma: 1,841
[Question] How to Navigate Evaluating Politicized Research?
I think it’s somewhat complicated—the VDV is also used in conventional operations thanks to its elite and volunteer status (see for instance this primer on Russian military methods), which makes them more reliable and effective than conscript forces even in some more “conventional” tasks.
In some ways this might be considered similar to the structure of the post-WWII French military, where the paratroopers and the Foreign Legion were made up of volunteers and used preferentially over conscript forces—indeed, as I understand it France did not use conscripts at all in the Indochina War, and favored using its “more reliable” volunteer units in the Algerian War, with the infamous Battle of Algiers conducted primarily by paratroopers.
(Ironically, the reliability of these units in combat did not mean political reliability—when the French government eventually decided to grant Algerian independence, some of the paratroopers joined a coup attempt!)At the same time though, Russia has invested substantially in technological capabilities for its airborne forces to assist in their primary airborne mission, with things like the BMD- and BTR- series of airborne APCs/IFVs, multi-canopy and rocket-assisted parachutes to allow these vehicles to be dropped (in some cases with crews inside!), and so on.
Innovation, Stagnation, and Paratrooper Operations
The problem I find harder is people who are mildly symptomatic, in ways that could be an illness or allergies, or are on the trail end up symptoms after a disease has probably but not definitely been cleared. “No interaction for five days after a sniffly nose” is life ruining for a lot of people.
Yeah, this is a much more difficult situation for me. I think I more or less always have minor COVID symptoms if construed strictly, given that various minor allergies or similar have the same symptoms as COVID...
Crossposted from Facebook:
The term used in the past for a concept close to this was “Fake frameworks”—see for instance Val’s post in favor of it from 2017: https://www.lesswrong.com/.../in-praise-of-fake-frameworksUnfortunately I think this proved to be a quite misguided idea in practice, and one that was made more dangerous by the fact that it seems really appealing in principle. As you imply, the people most interested in pursuing these frameworks are often not I think the ones who have the most sober and evenhanded evaluations of such, which can lead to unfortunate results.
(Also, uh, note that I myself converted to Catholicism, but not because of this sort of thing, so give or subtract points from my reply as you will.)
In the past, I have sometimes criticized various works of media for focusing too much on bullying in school, which struck me as kind of an embarrassing and unworthy theme to spend a lot of time on. I had been bullied in school myself to some degree and considered it annoying but not ultimately that big a deal, so my view was that this sort of stuff was kind of making a mountain out of a molehill and very exaggerated compared to reality.
Recently, I was in a conversation that really broadened my perspective and I learned that my experiences had actually been very mild and for some people it Really Was That Bad. I renounce previous criticisms that I have made of works for focusing on these themes and apologize to anyone who was hurt by my doing so.
Yeah, I strongly disagree with some of his takes but agree he has a similar thing in mind.
I prefer not to get into specific examples here (several have been brought up in comments to varying degrees of controversy), but rather to discuss the broader meta question of how best to be a community that avoids falling for things.
Yes, I think my focus is ideally less on “debate specific examples” (I can easily think of many that I think would be extremely controversial, some of which have been brought up in the comments) and more on what sort of meta-rules would be appropriate to use in order to try and protect ourselves more generally and be the type of community that doesn’t fall for this stuff.
Avoiding Moral Fads?
What counts as an “employee of the Center for Applied Rationality”? I do various work for CFAR on a part-time or contract basis but haven’t worked there full-time for a while, does that make me ineligible?
[Question] How to Legally Conduct “Rationalist Bets” in California?
I am interested in why Vavilov Day feels different to people than common rationalist holidays.
I think that my comments on that will unfortunately involve substantial criticism of other rationalist celebrations in a way that you may not wish to host. I will perhaps write up another post with more detail.
(Oh, one other note—I would quite prefer it if the original post didn’t implicitly endorse suicide.)
I don’t endorse the archipelago model for LW and this is a good example of why—making that comment, I had no idea that you didn’t want to host the discussion or in fact what your opinions on other rationalist holidays were. I’m happy to go along with your decisions since that is the model we have, but I’m not sure how I would have known what you thought on these matters from the post I commented on.
Ah, gotcha. Yeah, it was meant mostly as an aside and one that strengthened my praise for Vavilov Day (as indicating that this is appealing even to someone who dislikes most rationalist holidays), but I suppose the dislike was too controversial and/or too flippant.
I may write a post of my own describing why I don’t like rationalist holidays/think they can do better, but I think that post would itself likely be extremely controversial so I’d have to approach it carefully.
Personally, I think Eliezer was straightforwardly wrong about that; I think the word is useful even if it’s misused by some—that said if we were to taboo “cringe” I think that if I had said “embarrassing and unworthy” or something like that I think it would have largely the same meaning.
On the main thread, I commented:
Just wanted to say that I think most rationalist “holidays” or “rituals” are pretty cringe, but this one strikes me as something much more real and valuable. I’m not sure I agree with your concept of “Patron Saint holidays” for the community as a whole but this one seems at least somewhat virtuous and noble in a way that I think a lot of other stuff misses.
I noticed some downvotes there, which I presume are thanks to my low opinion of much of rationalist “holidays” and “rituals”. Would people be interested in discussing that more here? I think this one is notably better than what I’ve seen in other cases and I’m curious if people disagree, just don’t like me expressing negativity about other events, or what.
This is already mentioned a bit elsewhere, but it seems perhaps worth flagging for potential readers that this technique (or perhaps, as you mentioned, a similar but different offshoot of it) is now considered… impure? flawed? risky? and is no longer part of the CFAR mainline workshop curriculum as I understand it—I would say it’s one of the more notable changes recently, though who’s to say where things will evolve in the future...