habryka
Karma: 6,934
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Welcome! Sounds like you’ve been around for a while, but I am looking forward to seeing more of your writing! :)
The moderation system we settled on gives people above a certain karma threshold the ability to moderate on their own posts, which I think is very important to allow people to build their own gardens and cultivate ideas. Discussion about that general policy should happen in meta. I will delete any further discussion of moderation policies on this post.
Sorry for that! Will delete this one. We usually check every 20 minutes for new posts in the RSS feeds we hooked up, so I am surprised that this one got posted to late.
Promoted to curated: I think this post is in a really important reference class of trying to understand big trends, using relatively first-principles reasoning, and generally staying close to available data and common human experience. I generally feel like I learn quite a bit every time I read a post in this reference class, and would love to see more of them, and this post is a pretty good central example, so I think it makes sense to curate it.
I am also happy that the author was responsive to people pointing out errors, and quickly fixed them. Which I think should be rewarded.
I also feel like this post is generally low on “trying to convince me of something” and is instead more engaging in a collaborative exploration of important aspects of reality, which I generally think is an important think to cultivate in LessWrong posts.
(To be clear, I don’t think naive hedonic utilitarianism is a very good idea, and represents human values very well, and I would not say that “most people in EA” believe otherwise. I think it’s somewhat of a schelling position, but that I would guess most people have one of a large variety of positions on the precise nature of human value)
Thanks! :)
I think that’s a greaterwrong comment link. You can fix it by replacing the /
comments/<id>with#<id>
If there isn’t enough incentive for others to cooperate with you, don’t get upset for them if they defect (or “hit the neutral button.“) BUT maybe try to create a coordination mechanism so that there is enough incentive.
It seems like “getting upset” is often a pretty effective way of creating exactly the kind of incentive that leads to cooperation. I am reminded of the recent discussion on investing in the commons, where introducing a way to punish defectors greatly increased total wealth. Generalizing that to more everyday scenarios, it seems that being angry at someone is often (though definitely not always, and probably not in the majority of cases) a way to align incentives better.
(Note: I am not arguing in favor of people getting more angry more often, just saying that not getting angry doesn’t seem like a core aspect of the “robust agent” concept that Raemon is trying to point at here)
Upcoming API changes: Upgrading to Open-CRUD syntax
Also fixed!
Thanks, fixed as well!
Thanks, fixed!
Note: Moved this back to your drafts, since it had an end time in the past, and lacked a start time, and so seemed like an accident.
Note: The comment link in the post seems broken from LW. Maybe that’s a GreaterWrong specific link syntax, but LW uses hashtags with comment ids, instead of a
/comments/<commentId>syntax.Yep, API wise this should be relatively straightforward, though it will require doing some database mutations, so it might take us a bit longer than usual. In particular, we don’t know from just looking at a comment whether the post it was posted to was on the frontpage, or in meta, or anywhere else, so we will have to add some additional metadata there.
Is this comment intentionally trying to do the exact thing the OP was talking about for comedic effect? Or is it just an accident? I think it’s actually a pretty decent comment if it tried to do this intentionally.
a) Important. The world’s great challenges are undoubtedly severe; this is exacerbated by the fact that not nearly enough people are involved in solving them. It is obvious that global problems will require global cooperation and contribution.
The actual intervention you seem to be arguing for is “spreading mindfulness practice and compassion exercises”. I do not know of any evidence that suggests that those practices actually cause people to do more good with their lives, and the fact that they do not seems supported by the large national differences in practicing various forms of compassion meditation (e.g. India, Tibet, etc.), but a corresponding lack in correlation between those practices and people working on key global problems.
b) Highly neglected. Where are the institutions or organisations attempting to spread the ethics of altruism and compassion?
As you mentioned, spreading mindfulness practices is attempted by large parts of the buddhist religion, hundreds of not thousands of monasteries around the world, as well as a good number of institutions in the U.S. Spreading altruism has also been a major goal of most organized religions including Christianity.
Spreading altruism broadly seems to me like one of the least neglected cause areas in the charitable sector.
c) Highly solvable—in light of altruism cultivation practices and the scientific results showing how they lead to increased altruistic action. They are simple, accessible, and free to teach.
Free to teach does not mean easy to teach. I do not know of any intervention that actually successfully teaches those principles in a scalable way, and individual instruction is going to be very slow and costly. You also do not actually propose any concrete interventions besides teaching CCT, which I do not expect will cause major shifts in the behavior of people who do so (you might be able to squeeze a p<0.05 study out of it, but I would be surprised by much more).
Overall I find the arguments in this post relatively weak. I think interventions in this space could be promising, but I don’t think this post gave much evidence either way. I would however be interested for other people, or the author of this post, to look into this topic with more rigorous standards of evidence, more rough quantitative estimates, and generally a more neutral perspective.
[Admin note]: Fixed some broken formatting, presumably caused by our editor.
Yep, this is something we had some discussion about a while ago, and I basically think we should make this happen. I want to make sure the UI is non-confusing, and we still want to do some user tests, but I expect this to happen sometime in the next few months.
*nods* I basically agree that it isn’t super intuitive, and a conversation probably shouldn’t be created, or at least not displayed, until someone sends the first message. Seems easy to fix, so I will add it to the issue list.
I mean, this is not a discussion platform about legal issues, I don’t think you should expect really anyone to have read any significant number of cases before reading this article.
The citation you provided seems (in isolation) not to make the point I expected it to make, given the context it was placed, which Christian accurately pointed out. The citation seems related, but I was definitely confused when I looked at the actual section of the law that you linked.
You provide some additional background here, which I think helps some, but even after reading the discussion and the article, I don’t think I have a model of the world that outputs “german law bans surrogate motherhood” for any reason other than “Vizi Andrei said it”. And while it’s obviously unavoidable that a reader will have to put some trust in the author’s word, I think it’s a good target to limit that as much as possible, and in particular to avoid placing citations in a way that suggests a more self-contained explanation than the actual text of the cited reference provides.