Douglas Reay graduated from Cambridge University (Trinity College) in 1994. He has since worked in the computing and educational sectors.
Douglas_Reay
Karma: 766
How do you think LessWrong does at productive discussion of gender issues (when discussed) compared to other communities you have experience of that have a similar gender ratio (eg the Science Fiction community)? Do you think the LessWrong community would benefit most from a higher, lower, or about the current frequency of such discussions?
What topics (if any) have you considered posting about (or replying to), but then decided not to because of fear of gender-specific negative response or attention? If there any specific question you’d be interested in participating in a future discussion upon, on the same anonymous lines as this one?
Why? Have women been complaining that you make them feel uncomfortable by how you talk to them?
Think of the basic advice in the first few links as being like a computer trouble shooting guide that starts off by saying “Is the plug in the socket? Is the socket turned on? Have you tried rebooting?”. Sort of a checklist, that you only need to work through if there is actually a problem.
Kind of like: “Do women glare and yell at you when you hug them? Check whether you’re using the PolyApproved (tm) procedure of making the awkward ‘wanna hug?’ gesture first, and only proceeding to an actual hug if the gesture is reciprocated. Note for advanced users: there are alternative procedures and short cuts which can be used at your own risk.”
I don’t think there’s any ‘distributed application’ which seems fitted for a prediction market
I don’t see any intrinsic reason why one couldn’t be written. Splitting the problem into pieces:
Posing questions A distributed database could hold these
Validating questions You’d want some form of reputation system or elected panel of moderators, to verify which newly posed questions had the required properties (eg not a duplicate, clear criteria on how the question is to be resolved, etc). Again, elections and webs of trust can both be handled in a distributed fashion with no centralised authority.
Resolving questions Marking which side of the ‘bet’ wins, or if it is still unresolved. Similar issues to validating, though more at stake. Need perhaps the possibility of submissions of evidence and counter-submissions.
Placing bets Easiest way would be for the person to place their sum of money in escrow, encrypted with the key spread out and requiring X out of Y holders of the key parts to release it upon resolution. Alternatively allow people to purchase insurance from ‘market makers’ who, in turn, have large sums in escrow backing the bets. No central authority or website required, though you could certainly use websites as convenience aggregator gateways to the underlying distributed data.
Metadata Keeping track of reputations of who is winning how much, which bets are busy or have a lot staked upon them, etc.
Can you think of an aspect of having a prediction market that REQUIRES there to be a single central website?
Can anyone here honestly state that they learned something from this thread?
I would note that, even if true, we are unlikely to see replies of the form “I learned that I am creepy” or “I knew I am creepy, but from this thread I learned that LessWrong is aware of the problem and I’m unlikely to get away with it in meetings because people have named the problem and are aware of the importance of picking up on it.”
There doesn’t seem to be anyone arguing seriously that Less Wrong is a cult, but we do give some newcomers that impression.
The LW FAQ says: >
Why do you all agree on so much? Am I joining a cult?
We have a general community policy of not pretending to be open-minded on long-settled issues for the sake of not offending people. If we spent our time debating the basics, we would never get to the advanced stuff at all. Yes, some of the results that fall out of these basics sound weird if you haven’t seen the reasoning behind them, but there’s nothing in the laws of physics that prevents reality from sounding weird.
I suspect that putting a more human face on the front page, rather than just linky text, would help.
Perhaps something like a YouTube video version of the FAQ, featuring two (ideally personable) people talking about what Less Wrong is and is not, and how to get started on it. For some people, seeing is believing. It is one thing to tell them there are lots of different posters here and we’re not fanatics; but that doesn’t have the same impact as watching an actual human with body cues talking.
Looking at the Americas, we have evidence of cultures with agriculture and pottery, roughly equivalent to Europe’s Linear A, going back about 6000 years ago (4000 BCE). We have writing dating back to about 3000 years ago (1000 BCE), though this was probably delayed by much of their function earlier being usurped by quipu (which date back at least to 2600 BCE). This corresponds to the emergence of the first long term stable cities in the Americas starting at about 1500 BCE and the growth, about 1000 years later, of Teotihuacan, a true majestic city rivalling ancient Ur in size and influence.
So yes, that is an independent (but later) development of civilization, which I think endorses the idea that once the climate settled down after the intergalacial, our species was going to develop civilization on a fairly quick timescale (compared to biological evolutionary timescales), and that it wasn’t lack of intelligence holding us up.
Here’s a link to a related blog post she wrote.
The section I was thinking of was:
Atheists need to work—now—on making our movement more diverse, and making it more welcoming and inclusive of women and people of color.
And by now, I mean now. We need to start on this now, so we don’t get set into patterns and vicious circles and self-fulfilling prophecies that in ten or twenty years will be damn near impossible to fix.
What can we learn here from the LGBT movement? The early LGBT movement screwed this up. Badly.
The early LGBT movement was very much dominated by gay white men. The public representatives of the movement were mostly gay white men; most organizations were led by gay white men. And the gay white male leaders had some seriously bad race and gender stuff: treating gay men of color as fetishistic Others, objects of sexual desire rather than members of the community… and treating lesbians as alien Others, inscrutable and trivial.
And we’re paying for it today. Relations between lesbians and gay men, between white queers and queers of color, are often strained at best. Conversations in our movement about race and gender take place in a decades-old minefield of rancor and bitterness, where nothing anybody says is right. And we still, after decades, have a strong tendency to put gay white men front and center as the most visible, iconic representatives of our community.
That makes it hard on everyone in the LGBT movement—women and men, of all races. It creates rifts that make our community weaker. And it has a seriously bad impact on our ability to make effective social change. For instance, the LGBT movement has a profoundly impaired ability to shift homophobic attitudes in the black communities… since those communities can claim, entirely fairly, that the gay community doesn’t care about black people, and hasn’t made an effort to deal with our racism.
We screwed this up. We still screw this up. We are paying for our screwups.
Atheists have a chance to not do that.
According to Kanazawa’s Hypothesis, the comparative effectiveness of ‘type 1’ thinking should vary with how long the species has had to adapt to the type of problem being presented. So predicting herd behaviour, or how popular someone else is likely to be in a group, are problems human instincts have had a long time to adapt to. Whereas predicting the solutions to complex problems involving quantum mechanics, or just lots of capacitors and resistors in series and in parallel, are not.
Ok, moved.
how does a social group help and encourage creeps to become non-creeps
Point them at the links in the OP.
Something to take into account:
Speed of economic growth affects the duration of the demographic transition from high-birth-rate-and-high-death-rate to low-birth-rate-and-low-death-rate, for individual countries; and thus affects the total world population.
A high population world, full of low-education people desperately struggling to survive (ie low on Maslow’s hierarchy), might be more likely to support making bad decisions about AI development for short term nationalistic reasons.
Anti-Naturalists
Objectivists
Rationalists
Anti-Realists
Externalists
Star Trek Haters
Logical Conventionalists
Finally, an objective way of deciding the division into character classes for the roleplaying game Dungeons & Discourse
Perhaps there does exist a route towards resolving this situation.
Suppose Eliezer has a coin for one week, during which he flips it from time to time. He doesn’t write down the results, record how many times he flips it, or even keeps a running mental tally. Instead, at the end of the week, relying purely upon his direct memory of particular flips he can remember, he makes an estimate: “Hmm, I think I can remember about 20 of those flips fairly accurately and, of those 20 flips, I have 90% confidence that 15 of them came up heads.”
The coin is then passed to Robin, who does the same exercise the following week. At the end of that week, Robin thinks to himself “I think I can remember doing about 40 flips, and I have 80% confidence that 10 of them came up heads.”
They then meet up and have the following conversation:
Eliezer: 75% chance of a head
Robin: 25% chance of a head, not taking your data into account yet, just mine.
Eliezer: Ok, so first level of complexity is we could just average that to get 50%. But can we improve upon that?
Robin: My sample size was 40
Eliezer: My sample size was 20 so, second level of complexity, we could add them together to get 25 heads of out 60 flips, giving 42% chance of a head
Robin: Third level of complexity, how confident are you about your numbers? I’m 80% confident of mine
Eliezer: I’m 90% confident of mine. So using that as a weighting would give us (0.9x15+0.8x10)/(0.9x20+0.8x40) which is 21.5 out of 50 which is 43% chance of a head.
Robin: But Eliezer, you always overestimate how confident you are about your memory, whereas I’m conservative. I don’t think your memory is any better than mine. I think 42% is the right answer.
Eliezer: Ok, let’s go to level 4. Can we find some objective evidence? Did you do any of your flips in the presence of a third party? I can remember 5 incidents where someone else saw the flip I did. We could take a random sampling of my shared flips and then go ask the relevant third parties for confirmation, then do the same for a random sample of your shared flips, and see if your theory about our memories is bourne out.
In the end, as long as you can trace back at least some (a random sampling) of the facts people are basing their estimates upon to things that can be checked against reality, you should have some basis to move forwards.
For civilization to hold together, we need to make coordinated steps away from Nash equilibria in lockstep. This requires general rules that are allowed to impose penalties on people we like or reward people we don’t like. When people stop believing the general rules are being evaluated sufficiently fairly, they go back to the Nash equilibrium and civilization falls.
Two similar ideas:
There is a group evolutionary advantage for a society to support punishing those who defect from the social contract.
We get the worst democracy that we’re willing to put up with. If you are not prepared to vote against ‘your own side’ when they bend the rules, that level of rule bending becomes the new norm. If you accept the excuse “the other side did it first”, then the system becomes unstable because there are various baises (both cognitive, and deliberately induced by external spin) that make people more harshly evaluate the transgressions of other, than they evaluate those of their own side.
This is one reason why a thriving civil society (organisations, whether charities or newspapers, minimally under or influenced by the state) promotes stability—because they provide a yardstick to measure how vital it is to electorally punish a particular transgression that is external to the political process.
A game of soccer in which referee decisions are taken by a vote of the players turns into a mob.
The other articles in the series have been written, but it was suggested that rather than posting a whole series at once, it is kinder to post one part a day, so as not to flood the frontpage.
So, unless I hear otherwise, my intention is to do that and edit the links at the top of the article to point to each part as it gets posted.
What on Earth went wrong here?
You might find enlightening the part of the TED talk given by James Flynn (of the Flynn effect), where he talks about concrete thinking.
Firstly, having a centralised command economy run by the ‘bright’ people in charge at the centre didn’t work out particularly well for the USSR. Even if you are well intentioned and manipulating them in a direction that you think is in their best interests (which, in any case, isn’t the situation the dictum was talking about), you’re unlikely to manage their affairs better than they would themselves.
Secondly, fooling people can become a habit. And the easiest person to fool is yourself. What do you changes who you are, to some extent.
Thirdly, people often realise they have been manipulated, on some level, even if they can’t put words to it, or they realise too late. And it isn’t a nice feeling. In utilitarian terms, despite any gain in pleasure you get, it is likely to be a net loss of utility.
There’s a quote I like from Terry Pratchett’s juvenile book “Only You Can Save Mankind” that addresses a mistake that some people with a high IQ make:
“Just because you have a mind like a hammer doesn’t mean you should treat everyone else like a nail.”
That’s 19 words (if you count “doesn’t” as 1 word, rather than 2), but perhaps a 15 word version could be:
“Don’t manipulate those you can out think, just because you are able to.”
or, more abstractly,
“Don’t treat people as inconvenient objects, even when you can get away with it.”
Thus my caveat “we know of”.
However, while it would be quite possible for a victor to erase written mention of a rival, it is harder to erase beyond all archaeological recovery the signs of a major city that’s been stable and populated for a thousand years or more. For instance, if we look at Jericho, which was inhabited earlier than Ur was, we don’t see archaeological evidence of it becoming a major city until much later than Ur (see link and link).
If there was a city large enough and long lived enough, around before Ur, that passed onto Ur the bundle of things like writing and hierarchy that we known Ur passed onto others, then I’m unaware of it, and the evidence has been surprisingly thoroughly erased (which isn’t impossible, but neither is it a certainty that such a thing happened).
See also the comment about Uruk. There were a number of cities in Sumer close together that would have swapped ideas. But the things said about calories and types of grain apply to all of them.