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ErikM
Karma: 284
Deeply amused by the section “Alternative Alternative Politics: Okay fine, knock yourself out identifying with as tiny and finely-grained a subcategory as you want” still missing my desired response. :-) (I put Other:Authoritarian as distinct from Totalitarian. My view of these is that the former concerns the power of the ruling body to hypothetically put its fingers in any given pie, while the latter concerns the propensity of the ruling body to have its fingers in a great many pies.)
And as a less tone-related complaint, sam0345 grossly overgeneralizes. (And if he’s the J that I think he is, I suspect he’s not much interested in being more nuanced, for much the same reason he’s not interested in consensus.)
I think this is the source you want.
See the section Consequences of Artificial Methods, subheading 17.
The problem with non-compulsory voting is it means that only the people who care strongly enough about the elections to get off the internet and drive to a polling booth are the ones who have their voices heard. This means that you lose a lot of moderate, sane, rational voters but keep all of the rabid nutjobs.
OTOH, you lose a lot of ignorant, clueless, or just lazy voters who have no basis for forming an opinion, and the ones who have the voices heard are the ones who cared enough to study the issues, even if their study was one-sided.
Push the problem a step back, and my thought here is compulsory political study rather than compulsory voting.
This has traditionally been a very divisive point within radical feminism, and it typically divides the discussion into transphobic social-constructionist radical feminists (like the source of my original infographic) and neo-essentialist post-feminists.
Here’s one: less jockeying for power. Monarchs don’t need to pander to interest groups to get elected.
That appears to be a malware site. Is it the same as http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~marinaj/babyloni.htm ?
Hard problem.
“Change your behavior if a significant fraction complains” fails to protect isolated victims, who are likely to be the most common targets of bad behavior and also the ones in most need of support. “Change your behavior if one person complains” is grossly abusable, and the first-order fix to complain about frivolous complaints spirals off into meta. Appealing to common sense, good judgment etc. seems to me like passing the buck back to the situation that created a need for this discussion in the first place.
As a secondary consideration, there’s the spectrum between an ex-Muslim requesting that all women present cover up for a few meetings while acclimatising, and a nudist showing up to a meeting and being requested by others to wear clothing while present. At what point does one’s apparel start to constitute “behavior” that other people may complain about as creepy?
On thinking about this (five minutes by the clock!) I start to suspect that trying to write rules about creeping is too high-level and abstract, and it would be better to codify rules on what specific behaviors are tolerated or not, and this ruleset could vary by group. Such as:
You must accede to requests of the form “Don’t ask me to do that again”.
Edit: oops, list syntax
I suppose he will be thinking along the same lines as a wirehead.
“Finally, we will also assume that the AI does not possess the ability to manually rewire the human brain to change what a human values. In other words, the ability for the AI to manipulate another person’s values is limited by what we as humans are capable of today.”
I argue that we as humans are capable of a lot of that, and the AI may be able to think faster and draw upon a larger store of knowledge of human interaction.
Furthermore, what justifies this assumption? If we assume a limit that the AI won’t manipulate me any more than Bob across the street will manipulate me, then yes the AI is safe, but that limit seems very theoretical. A higher limit that the AI won’t manipulate me more than than the most manipulative person in the world isn’t very reassuring, either.
Dear people who post things like “Incest is neat” and “Whites are smarter than blacks”: those things are currently controversial. Therefore, they don’t come close to being unthinkable or impossible to talk about.
ADBOC and that’s somewhat beside the point, because it seems to me that things are necessarily somewhat controversial to be taboo. As Paul Graham said:
No one gets in trouble for saying that 2 + 2 is 5, or that people in Pittsburgh are ten feet tall. Such obviously false statements might be treated as jokes, or at worst as evidence of insanity, but they are not likely to make anyone mad. [...] If Galileo had said that people in Padua were ten feet tall, he would have been regarded as a harmless eccentric. Saying the earth orbited the sun was another matter. The church knew this would set people thinking.
Now, James Watson and Stephanie Grace might want a word with you. (Larry Summers could file an amicus brief.) Chanting “Racist, racist, cow porn, racist, racist, cow porn” seems to fairly closely match Multiheaded’s description that “society would instantly slam the lid on it with either moral panic or ridicule and give the speaker a black mark” for at least some parts of society. This is moral panic and ridicule despite the speaker barely tiptoeing near controversy and hedging everywhere with statements such as:
This suggests to me that some part of intelligence is genetic
I also don’t think that there are no cultural differences
I absolutely do not rule out the possibility
I could also obviously be convinced that by controlling for the right variables
I am merely not 100% convinced that this is the case.
I am surprised and confused. I would have thought that the analogy to evolution would be the one objected to first, as I think of social institutions first as things instituted by someone and second as things subject to vaguely evolution-like processes. (They are modified over time, imperfectly replicated across countries, and a lot more fail than survive.)
Colonialism was a good system with significant beneficial impact for colonized countries, which are now failing mostly due to native incompetence rather than colonial trauma. It would be a win-win position to reinstitute it competently.
The distant: I am diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome (an autism spectrum disorder). I was unpopular at school, I understood poorly how to fit in, but I understood well how to get smarter. I took high school completion mathematics exams in primary school, university exams in high school, and while I never bit a teacher like in HPMoR, I did punch a student one time and demand that the teachers back me up.
As I remember it, said student was talking about a “tirus” which was supposedly like a next-generation virus which would eat up your computer unless you washed your motherboard properly with soap and water. Being a nerd with some technical aptitude, I told him that he was a bullshitting liar and he was to show me what he was on about or stop it immediately. He continued, so I told him to shut up or I’d hit him. He still continued, so I punched him in the stomach, which winded him and made him shut up. The student was surprised that I had carried through my threat, the teachers were surprised that I was unapologetic, and I was surprised that the teachers (this was at a religious school) were putting a distinctly man-made and exception-deformed rule about limits to hitting over a clear and obvious divine commandment against lying.
In retrospect I think I was somewhat lucky here. I was a youth in an argument turning violent, which is hardly a rational state to be in at the best of times, and in the process of trying to excuse myself for committing violence, I happened to take a stupidly defiant stance on the ground of “He was lying!” and got this bound up with my identity, the boy who really hates lies, for the next few years.
The local: I was arguing on Civilization Fanatics’ Center in the Off Topic forum some years ago when a poster named Integral gave me a link to ‘applause lights’ at Overcoming Bias. I then read OB a lot, read the posts that would eventually get moved to Less Wrong, and ended up here.
Smart people often think social institutions are basically arbitrary and that they can engineer better ways using their mighty brains. [...]
While I agree, I disapprove because my impression is that this is not an opinion suppressed much in the outside culture. I can well imagine it being an unpopular one here at Less Wrong, but in the world at large I see widespread support for similar opinions, such as among “conservatives” (in a loose sense) complaining about how “intellectuals” (ditto) were and are overly supportive of Communism, and complaints against “technocrats” and “ivory towers” in general. I also see disagreement with this, but not tabooing of it.
My agreement is based on the opinion appearing to be congruent with the quip “Evolution is smarter than you are”, or the similar principle of “Chesterton’s Fence”.
I also get the impression that this is often because smart people don’t see the value of the institutions to smart people. (This may be because it doesn’t have such value.) For instance:
A case of this especially relevant to Less Wrong is “Evangelical Polyamory”.
I’m fairly confident LessWrongers could engage in polyamory this without significant social dysfunction or suffering, let alone death on a massive scale. (BTW: I couldn’t find any articles here by that title. Are you referring to a general tendency, or did I fail at searching?)
You’re still in the 2012 thread.
Edit: No, wait, this is apparently posted in 2013 but labeled 2012. Bah.