The distinctions between crows and ostriches are important for many situations but that doesn’t make either one not a bird.
Elizabeth
Karma: 22,751
Dairy cows make their misery expensive (but their calves can’t)
Then I think “MIRI never committed to not paying off blackmail” is a perfectly reasonable argument (as is “it was a returned donation”), but “it’s not paying off blackmail, it’s just giving money to a person who’s threatening me so they won’t follow through” is still bizarre.
I don’t know, I assume LessWrong or their website? I wasn’t there at the time but neither sides’ statements over the last 10 years make sense unless it was common knowledge at the time that MIRI pledged to never pay off blackmail.
Someone told me that there was some dispute about whether he was suing MIRI for a payout, or suing to have a donation he gave returned. If it’s the latter that does feel somewhat different to me, and maybe outside the definition of blackmail.
There’s a few different questions here:
what is the technical definition of blackmail? Boring, taboo the term.
What is the right policy to have in regards to paying off aggressors? Maybe it’s fine as long as it’s not net-positive for the aggressor.
What principle did MIRI articulate and commit to before the Louis Helm lawsuit? Did they act in accordance with those principles?
I’m tentatively fine with MIRI or anyone else holding the principle “we’ll pay costs to make lawsuits go away but not enough to make it worth your while”. But AFAIK what they said was more in line with “We’ll never pay off aggressors”. This is a crux for me when judging if they held to their commitments and will hold to their commitments in the future, and that’s true even if “only small pay-offs” is the better policy, because that’s evidence they made a strong commitment without thinking through the edge cases.
I’ll keep an eye out, they’re definitionally not ones I want to retain.
This may be an ugly-toupee issue. Even if most inkhaven-sourced posts on LW are good, it results in a very noticeable increase of low-quality, rushed, or stream-of-consciousness posts.
Church Planting: Lessons from the Comments
There’s always been jokes about how often day care kids get sick, but I feel like it didn’t used to be more sick days than healthy. I did some AI searches but they didn’t turn up good time series on this.
You don’t need to make “rite of passage”-style mistakes (e.g. drinking or taking drugs, getting into bad relationships, cramming for exams, ignoring your health, becoming a socialist[2])
Probably most kids should do less of this on the margin, but using intelligence + willpower to avoid obvious mistakes cost me the opportunity to develop wisdom, and the same mistakes are much more costly later on.
why? To inform themselves, or to boost the movie’s numbers?
I’m a small donor, so my experience with your cluster[1] has been strictly about political candidates. Within that, someone in the cluster (not you or Eric) pushed me to push someone else to donate more at the the 11th hour on the first day of fundraising. At that point they already knew fundraising had been incredibly successful and the marginal value of a donation had decreased a lot, but didn’t tell me until after I’d pushed the other person. Credit to them for telling me at all, but I would have made different choices if I’d had all the information. Maybe it’s totally unfair to tar everyone in the apparent cluster based on this person’s actions, maybe if I knew the formal relationships and had more information about you and Eric I’d see them as a crazy rogue, but with the information I have I have to expect more of the same. Which doesn’t mean I’m not donating, but does really limit the amount I’ll defer.
- ^
I’m not sure what the formal relationships are
- ^
I can’t articulate exactly what it is, but this leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Maybe it’s that what you’re saying only holds if there are brakes on the system- points after which you stop advocating people give money- but my impression is that either this never happens, or things move too fast for it to have a chance to happen. Certainly the politicians aren’t saying “we have enough money, save it for the next guy”.
What effects did you have from what dose of glycine, and how quickly did they kick in?
I think for small donors, donating to the best unregistered charity is >>2x times the best registered charity, for the reasons OP outlines: registered charities are much better covered by large institutions, and lots of people are overanchored on registration so the unregistered are neglected by comparison.
The counterargument is that bednets/givedirectly are just pretty good and it’s unlikely any particular new thing beats them. Which is a fine approach, but not what we’re talking about here.
I would push back on DAFs- one of the value adds of nimble donors is donating to projects that don’t have formal status.
Daniel Ellsberg on the corrosive effect of knowing secret information
First, [you feel] a great exhilaration, for getting all these amazing information that you didn’t know even existed. And the next phase is you’ll feel like a fool for not having known of any of this. But that won’t last long. Very soon, you’ll come to think that everyone else is foolish. What would this expert be telling me if he knew what I knew? So in the end, you stop listening too.
I’ve never had a security clearance. But I have had private or secret rationalist information, and it’s shocking how fast it corrupts my epistemics. Claiming to want comparative advantage I overweight the importance of the information. I flinch from imperiling my access to more secret information. Talking about a related area without divulging private information feels too hard so I don’t bother.
I can fight all these effects, but that’s a cost, and one I’ve learned to bill to the goal or person behind the secret information.
Because other people don’t find the question as-asked valuable.
You might like Raemon’s Feedback-Loop First rationality.
I spoon fed it symptoms for a slightly atypical presentation of MCAS, and withheld all my symptoms not related to MCAS. Didn’t even come up as an option.