Ah, it’s changed a bit, I’ll update this page to reflect the new wording. The button labeled “join community chat” should work, let me know if it has issues.
Eric B
Karma: 188
Done!
I suspect if I were doing it I’d find it easier to structure and interlink with split first, but whichever workflow suits you is fine.
This page looks like it’s going to be very large, perhaps splitting a bunch of parts out into children would make it more digestible and reusable?
Looks like a mathjax error?
Note to self (or others): Add link from https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Decision_theory when this exists.
Maybe the alternate variants would be best on separate child pages, with links to them from this page?
eric_b [2:39 AM]
I’d add a “what is a ‘number’ anyway”-type page with an explanation of the general constructive, formal definitions of different types of number, for people who’ve been confused by the education system’s tendency to be informal and be taught by people who don’t have a clear idea what a number is.Edit: this is maybe just a lens on “Number” (edited)
eric_b [2:46 AM]
I’d consider replacing irrational and transcendental with just real to reduce the scope, it’s still ~15 pages, if we want one for each math level[2:47]
(15 new pages, and a bunch of existing ones to work on)[2:48]
oh, math 1 and 2? (edited)[2:48]
I think 0 is the most important audience here, and 3 is the cheapest set of pages to create[2:49]
I’d go for 0, 3, and have 1 as a stretch goal[2:49]
especially since many of the pages already have math 0 lenses[2:51]
that’d mean we need 5 new math 3 pages (shortish), 2 new math 0 pages, and reviews of a bunch of existing pages. (edited)[2:52]
and, optionally, 6 math 1 pages[2:53]
(we’d try and do those after the math 0 pages were made great, since copying a good math 0 page and adding algebraic shorthand is cheap and gets much of the way from math 0 to 1) (edited)[2:55]
another good stretch goal could be external resource pages.eric_b [3:01 AM]
11 pages to polish / finish + 7-10 to create. Even without irrational and transcendental, and even accounting for 5 of the new pages being short/mathy, that’s fairly ambitious for a week. (edited)[3:01]
project generally seems good, though.[3:02]
it’d be a collection of pages linked to from loads of places, and a neat set of things to have tied together.[3:07]
it’s also small enough that it seems doable, has the engagement of many of our most active contribs, and has enough potential for interesting facts to keep it engagingPlus some discussion with ER being keen to do math 2 and me hesitant, me being keen to do 0 and him hesitant. I now like 0 everywhere plus a mix of non-0 levels, and think 2 everywhere is not optimal, but am fine so long as we have 0s.
There is now! This page even has a TOC.
This is a rough jumble of thoughts explaining some of the reasoning behind the proposed policy.
Do what works is an attempt to create a firm but flexible foundation for Arbital policy, make it (hopefully) a bit self-correcting by causing people to flag bad policy, and make sure that everything ties back to what actually matters, while avoiding pitfalls of other community founding rules I’ve observed. It takes inspiration from Wikipedia’s Ignore all rules and Eliezer’s Nameless Virtue.
One important thing to note: The kind of user who badly violates guidelines of any kind tends not to be the kind of user who reads policy pages. It is pointless to attempt to guard against them with strongly worded policy[1]%, instead, it’s important to give whichever systems are in place to prevent obviously harmful activity freedom to act quickly, enough training to tell obvious from non-obvious cases, a playbook of well-thought-out responses to different classes of situation, and a way to easily check with others doing the same job.
Attempting to codify exactly what content should conform to seems like a fool’s errand, especially since we don’t know. Explicitly encouraging people to do what works (aka. create the version of the page which is good for readers) rather than pointing them at dozens of pages of guidelines they won’t read should cause them to optimize for something closer to the right thing. We should, of course, offer guidelines and advice for those who genuinely want it, and link to it heavily. Just, not elevate it to required reading.
Lots of sites try to create an elaborate web of rules outlawing specific harmful patterns of behavior, and task people in positions of power (often the most productive early contributors) with the work of implementing the rules in a consistent and fair way.
No humanly readable set of rules can adequately capture and regulate the complexities of human interaction, and there are always awkward edge cases.
So there are people who are disruptive, and those with authority/responsibility to deal with it have a strict and hard to change rulebook, and complex, slow, tiring processes. This often goes badly, setting up all sorts of tensions, tying the hands of staff, causing people to be acted against too strongly and too weakly in different cases, both of which harm the community. There is a place for careful, deliberative, systems, but it should not be the first line.
By tying the community rules to “do the thing which makes more healthy community” there’s significantly more freedom on the part of staff to act, and significantly more keeping them pointed at what matters (so long as the group self-polices well, which needs to be designed for socially).
- ^︎
And harmful/discouraging to another class of user, those careful enough to check the rules. And staff checking for what tone they should use towards users.
- ^︎
Not clear what this means?
Which instance of that are you referring to (there are five)?
This is a cool page, but I think it (esp. the last paragraph) goes too fast for many math 1 readers, even if it mostly uses things that math 1 people would be able to use. Maybe recategorizing it as math 2 would be best, or expanding things out and being a bit more handholdy, or putting tricky bits as optional hidden text?
This does not seem like it’d be transparent, esp. at math 0? The popover also seems potentially confusing.
hm, do you actually need that discussion? In no case does an agent know in advance that their vote will decide the election, just that there is some (usually extraordinarily slim) chance that they will. A situation where all agents have the impossible piece of information (the election is close enough that my actions can tip it, and, importantly that their tipping won’t be undone by others who are in identical positions) seems not the right situation to be looking at, and would unsurprisingly lead to crazy outputs. Sure, in retrospect all the agents can go “damn, I should’ve put massive effort into acquiring more votes” if the election was close enough that they could have tipped it in a way they expect would have large positive EV, but that seems like a correct and reasonable conclusion in hindsight, just not one which is foreseeable.
EV calc feels like a system I could actually use to weigh up the pros and cons, by looking at the statistics of closeness of various elections and estimating the value of tipping with maybe a few tens of hours of research, whereas estimating the correlation between my voting habits and various possible reference classes of voter seems in practice hopeless[1]%.
Maybe explaining this is more of a detour than you want, though, since it’s less interesting from a decision theory perspective?
- ^︎
without, perhaps, having enough data to reconstruct key parts of large numbers of people’s decision processes and massive effort classifying them, at which point you’re not really running a process other people are likely to (unless you make your results publicly available, and things get recursive!)
- ^︎
Is there no standard perspective that says:
Very few elections are decided by a single vote, but those that do are sufficiently important that it’s worth voting (especially in close areas)? Naive expected value calculation, which sometimes comes out positive without any need for serious decision-theoretic analysis (because from your perspective, your chance of being the deciding vote is proportional to the size of the system you’re potentially moving)?
If you’re only talking about the case where an election has a clear winner in advance and your vote is, based on your knowledge of the system, extraordinarily unlikely to tip the balance (by enough to outweigh the size of the effect compared to you, which the current example definitely does not do), then I could see discarding that, but it should be addressed or a situation set up to remove it.
Link to a description of the library of babel?
Also, if you think the name is suboptimal, feel free to bring it up on the #math Slack and change unless people object.
I’ve added a +1 and link to this from the make tables possible bug. Currently, the workaround is to use images, but that’s clearly not very good, does not allow links, etc.
For 3, do you think that would often be useful, and much better than having clarifications in parentheses?
For 4, maybe just bold the important ones? Would work better when tables are possible, though.
Mention them?