sapphire

• sapphire 24 Apr 2017 20:09 UTC

  10 points

  on: Open thread, Apr. 24 - Apr. 30, 2017

  I had alot of fun helping to co-organize the NYC SSC meetup. I was wondering if people had advice on what questions to use an icebreaker when welcoming new people into the rationalist community. Here are two questions I have tried at the SSC meetup:

  -”How long have you been reading Scot?” : Some people found this question obvious and uninspired but it worked pretty well.

  -”Has Rationality has had direct practical benefits in your daily life?” : I think the later question would have worked better at a “lesswrong” not a SSC meetup. A common feeling was they valued “rationality” in discussion and weren’t especially interested in using rationality for self improvement.

  Does anyone have suggestions for better questions?

• sapphire 24 Apr 2017 20:33 UTC

  6 points

  on: Un­stag­ing Devel­op­men­tal Psychology

  The linked paper “Hierarchical Complexity: A Formal Theory” is very interesting and quite short. If you ignore the references it is only 12 pages long. It starts from the very simple case of explaining how to formalize the idea that (1+2)*3 is more complicated than (1+2)+3. The paper develops its mathematical theory rather quickly. I was surprised the authors managed to create a psychological theory that was concrete enough to apply in practice. The authors describe the results when they used their theory to analyze two different studies.

  Of course many methodologcal issues remain. However I was very impressed. If you are comfortable reading abstract math I recomend the paper.

• sapphire 24 Apr 2017 21:26 UTC

  8 points

  on: The 2017 Effec­tive Altru­ism Sur­vey—Please Take!

  Survey Complete!

  Nice looking user interface.

  I found it aversive to be solicited to create a public profile. I would suggest removing that aspect from next year’s survey.

I Up­dated the List of Ra­tion­al­ist Blogs on the Wiki

• sapphire 13 May 2017 15:19 UTC

  7 points

  on: SlateS­tarCodex Mee­tups Every­where: Analysis

  The raw data is here if anyone wants to take a look:

  https://​​docs.google.com/​​document/​​d/​​12sAtI1CfyNwwPnDTJilWVAM-mmlgOQx43fSxjlIARtc/​​edit?usp=sharing .

  Some meetups have nto occured or might send me reports late. I will add those reports to the raw data.

  edit:

  For example the Helsinki Meetup just sent a report on their second meetup.

A Month’s Worth of Ra­tional Posts—Feed­back on my Ra­tion­al­ity Feed.

• sapphire 16 May 2017 1:48 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: lifelonglearner’s comment on: A Month’s Worth of Ra­tional Posts—Feed­back on my Ra­tion­al­ity Feed.

  No problem. Will do for the first round up.

• sapphire 18 May 2017 13:35 UTC

  9 points

  in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: A Month’s Worth of Ra­tional Posts—Feed­back on my Ra­tion­al­ity Feed.

  I will have some sort of “top articles” the next time I post.

• sapphire 26 May 2017 16:56 UTC

  31 points

  on: Dragon Army: The­ory & Char­ter (30min read)

  -- A note: I originally sent Duncan criticism privately. I didn’t want to add too much negativity to the discussion. But Duncan asked me to post publicly and I will defer to his judgement. Its his project and he is a very capable guy. I really hope DA succeeds, the rationalist community could be doing much better on many metrics. In general I find the model of DA very promising. But I have some serious concerns.

  -- The ethics code seems extremely strict.

  For example this rule strikes me as extraordinarily hard to follow: “A Dragon will assume good faith in all interactions with other Dragons”. As does “A Dragon will be fully present and supportive when interacting with other Dragons in formal/​official contexts”.

  Earlier in the document Duncan said “Discuss, and then agree upon, and then rigidly and rigorously enforce a norm of perfection in all formal undertakings”. This implies to me that Duncan intends to enforce the CoC pretty strictly. Should Duncan be confidant its reasonable to expect such large deviations from how humans normally operate? I should note that normal bootcamps do not require as much psychologically from their recruits. Even though bootcamps require obedience they don’t normally require recruits to think a certain way.

  Duncan explicitly said he was willing to modify norms that members felt were too hard to follow (” Be ruthless about discarding standards during strategic review; if a member of the group says that X or Y or Z is too high-cost for them to sustain, believe them, and make decisions accordingly.”). But he also said that the CoC was unlikely to change. If I thought the CoC was meant more as a set of guidelines than strict rules I would be less worried. But that is not how I interpreted the post.

  -- How many people do we expect to leave or get kicked out?

  I have moderated some internet communities (And admin an active one now). Temp bans and warnings can only go so far. At some points you have to be willing to pull the trigger and ban people.

  The section on reparations reassured me that Duncan was thinking hard about to keep people from falling off the path. In addition, unlike most internet communities, the DA recruits will be heavily vetted. But in order to enforce the reparations you either have to appeal to social pressure or the threat of kicking people out. I think the standards are very strict so serious discipline might be needed.

  -- Are there practical or ethical problems with this plan?

  People who get kicked out of DA are still required to pay rent until they can find a replacement. Assuming they are on the lease it seems highly unlikely you can kick them out of the house. However if someone gets kicked out of the house they might be pretty negative towards the rest of the group. It probably a bad situation to keep them around, but maybe they can’t easily find a replacement or a new place to live.

  Secondly people who get kicked out might be psychologically unable to remain at the DA barracks. But until they can find someone to replace them they are on the hook for rent. In my personal opinion joining dragon army should be a “Good deal” for anyone involved. Its important that the downside of: “get kicked out” → “lose friends, need to find a replacement despite the fact that you got kicked out and maybe can’t give DA a good review, on the hook for lots of rent” is manageable. I would really hate to see anyone get hurt. I assume Duncan shares my concerns but he didn’t address them in the post.

  In addition, has Duncan looked into the legalities surrounding renter’s rights in California (and Berkeley in particular)? This isn’t in the post even if he has done the research.

  -- Duncan said the following “I also considered whether to update/​change my tone given your first impression, but it seems to be enough of an outlier that I probably won’t make any deliberate effort.

  Its plausible to me they aren’t much of an outlier. I had the same reaction, as did several people I showed Duncan’s post to (though other people thought Duncan’s post sounded fine). If I didn’t know Duncan was the curriculum director at CFAR I would have thought he was crazy and probably dangerous. Stuff about “living under my thumb”, self comparisons to Tyler Durden and the ender’s game quote about “quick, decisive obedience” really worried me. Some of the most shocking stuff, from my perspective, was in the pop culture references. But a number of things in the main text gave off an extremely strong cult vibe. Some examples include the “house salute” and the “Various call-and-response patterns surrounding house norms”. I should note I am not accusing Duncan of anything, based on his reputation he seems trustworthy. But his tone definitely set off loud alarm bells for me.

  --

  Again I am really happy people are considering new rationalist norms. Duncan seems like a very good choice to lead an experimental project. The general strategy of DA seems like a good one. But I wanted to share my concerns.

Bi-Weekly Ra­tional Feed

• sapphire 29 May 2017 4:11 UTC

  8 points

  in reply to: username2’s comment on: Bi-Weekly Ra­tional Feed

  I post a daily feed on the SSC discord. That feed has been very well received. Lots of people don’t use RSS feeds and the daily feed privides shared articles for people to talk about. The bi-weekly feed seems less obviously useful but I am trying it out. Its not particularly high cost to me to post this here given that I write summaries anyway for the discord.

• sapphire 29 May 2017 4:11 UTC

  7 points

  in reply to: gilch’s comment on: Bi-Weekly Ra­tional Feed

  Every other week.

• sapphire 7 Jun 2017 4:12 UTC

  5 points

  on: Mode Col­lapse and the Norm One Principle

  Really great post. I really enjoyed the theoretical justification for a very practical idea. Overall I found the machine learning argument caused me to update significantly in favor of “norm-one” criticism. Some comments and questions:

  1) Its not that clear to me how to estimate the “norm” of one’s criticism. We aren’t going to do math to commute this stuff. What kind of heuristics can we use? Notably the community requires some degree of consistency in how people estimate criticism norms.

  2) If you strongly disagree with a proposition X it might be hard to give any norm-one criticism. Maybe someone is suggesting plan X and you very storngly think they should abandon the plan. It might feel dishonest, insincere, or immoral to give advice on how to make plan X go slightly less badly.

  3) Say a friend of yours asks you to critique their writing. This advice basically says you should hold back on some/​much of your feedback. In theory you should try to only send the feedback thats most useful but fits inside a “norm-one” limit. This seems different from the “wall of red ink” technique that is commonly praised in wiriting cricles. (Though I find the walls of red ink demoralizing I am not a writer).

  4) Is it ever useful for someone to say: “Ignore the norm-one limit. Just give me all the criticism you have”. Will it become “low status” not to ask for unlimited-norm-criticism?

Bi-Weekly Ra­tional Feed

Con­crete Ways You Can Help Make the Com­mu­nity Better

• sapphire 17 Jun 2017 15:44 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: casebash’s comment on: Con­crete Ways You Can Help Make the Com­mu­nity Better

  Its unclear the community can or should have a “leader” again. Alot of the community no longer suffiently agrees with Eliezer. The only person enough people would consent to follow is Scott ‘The Rightful Caliph’ Alexander. And Scott doesn’t want the job.

  I think the community can flourish despite remaining de-centralized. But its admittedly trickier.

• sapphire 17 Jun 2017 22:31 UTC

  7 points

  in reply to: tristanm’s comment on: Con­crete Ways You Can Help Make the Com­mu­nity Better

  “Secondly it seems that they very best content creators spend some time writing and making information freely available, detailing their goals and so on, and then eventually go off to pursue those goals more concretely, and the content creation on the site goes down.”

  That is a rather good point. The point suggests that if we want to keep lesswrong a healthy community we need to maintain a strong pipeline.

  I see both sides of the ’radio silence” thing. On one hand its good to let other people know about your project in case they want to get involved. On the other hand making a project “public” creates alot of stuff to deal with. We both agree public criticism can be quite harsh. Organazing a group effort is difficult. Maintaining a cohesive vision becoems more difficult the more people that are invovled. Finally a decent number of hyped rationalsit project seemed to have fundamental problems (Arbital comes to mind*).

  My personal intuition is that in many cases its better to take the middle ground about when to take ideas public. Put together something like a “minimum viable project” or at least a true” proof of concept”. Once you have that its easier to keep a coherent vision and its more likely the project is a good idea. It is suboptimal to spend lots of time organizing people and dealing with feedback before you have determined your project is a fundamentally sound idea.In this post I tried to mention projects which were already underway or that could be done on a small scale. I should note I am not very confidant in my preceding intuition and would welcome your feedback.

  *I am aware of the personal problems that hurt Arbital. I am also aware that there are/​were plans for it to pivot directions to a micro-blogging platform. But the original vision of arbital seems flawed. Ther arbital leadership basically confimed this some time ago.

• sapphire 19 Jun 2017 13:40 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: John_Maxwell’s comment on: Con­crete Ways You Can Help Make the Com­mu­nity Better

  I wonder how many comments non-Eliezer/​Scott(Yvain) threads got on the old lesswrong. Though even if other posters got alot of comments its possible the pressence of Eliezer/​Scott drove alot of people to check the site (and subsequently comment on many threads). But it would still be a good sign if the engagement level was higher on general non-seqence threads. Perhaps we could eventually re-start the old dynamics.

• sapphire 23 Jun 2017 23:10 UTC

  9 points

  on: Idea for LessWrong: Video Tutoring

  Awesome idea. I signed up for both roles (Though I can’t teach anything til August). I predict the most in demand subject will be machine learning. After that I would guess stats/​probability. I wonder how easy it will be to coordinate ~5 learners to agree to one “class”. I would guess this project will wind up having 2-3 people in some “classes”, assuming the tutors agree. But perhaps I am wrong. Its hard to get people to agree to both a subject and a difficulty level.

Bi-Weekly Ra­tional Feed