Coding day in and out on LessWrong 2.0. You can reach me at habryka@lesswrong.com
habryka(Oliver Habryka)
Karma: 13,504
I have 2-3 friends I know about who lost $5k+ on Mt. Gox going down, and didn’t hold crypto anywhere else.
Yeah, the current phrase feels confusing to me. If a human takes something else as a subject that… feels like it has some different connotations. In my mind the two opposing phrases are “being subject to” (passive) and “taking as object” (active).
Yep, that’s fine. I am not a moral prescriptivist who tells you what you have to care about.
I do think that you are probably going to change your mind on this at some point in the next millennium if we ever get to live that long, and I do have a bunch of arguments that feel relevant, but I don’t think it’s completely implausible you really don’t care.
I do think that not caring about how people are far away is pretty common, and building EA on that assumption seems fine. Not all clubs and institutions need to be justifiable to everyone.
Hmm, I do think I honestly believe that behavioral scientists might be worse than the average politician at predicting public response. Like, I am not totally confident, but I think I would take a 50% bet. So this strikes me as overall mildly bad (though not very bad, I don’t expect either of these two groups to be very good at doing this).
I don’t know, I think it’s a pretty decent argument. I agree it sometimes gets overused, but I do think given it’s assumptions “you care about people far away as much as people closeby” and “there are lots of people far away you can help much more than people close by” and “here is a situation where you would help someone closeby, so you might also want to help the people far away in the same way” are all part of a totally valid logical chain of inference that seems useful to have in discussions on ethics.
Like, you don’t need to take it to an extreme, but it seems locally valid and totally fine to use, even if not all the assumptions that make it locally valid are always fully explicated.
Yeah, that makes sense. Will be more careful with moving old historical posts to the frontpage for this reason.
Can you paste the link of the RSS feed? We’ve recently moved a bunch of old sequences post to the frontpage that we missed when we did our initial pass in 2017, so that seems like the most reasonable cause, if you are subscribed to a feed that filters only on frontpage posts.
Yeah, I really want to get around to this. I am sorry for splitting the feature-set awkwardly across two editors!
Woah, at least one of those summaries seems really quite inaccurate. Bad enough that like, I feel like I should step in as a moderator and be like “wait, this doesn’t seem OK”.
I am not very familiar with ESR’s opinions, but your summary of “white people at BLM protests should be assumed to be communists and shot at will” is really misrepresenting the thing he actually said. What he actually said was “White rioters, on the other hand, will be presumed to be Antifa Communists attempting to manipulate this tragedy for Communist political ends;”, with the key difference being “white rioters” instead of “white people”. While there is still plenty to criticize in that sentence, this seems like a really crucial distinction that makes that sentence drastically less bad.
Topics like this tend to get really politicized and emotional, which I think means it’s reasonable to apply some extra scrutiny and care to not misrepresent what other people said, and generally err on the side of quoting verbatim (ideally while giving substantial additional context).
Lukeprog wrote some related posts a while ago: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/x8Fp9NMgDWbuMpizA/rationality-lessons-learned-from-irrational-adventures-in
In particular the stuff on fashion.
This is great, thank you!
Minor formatting note: The italics font on both the AI Alignment Forum and LessWrong isn’t super well suited to large block of text, so I took the liberty to unitalicize a bunch of the large blockquotes (which should be sufficiently distinguishable as blockquotes without the italics). Though I am totally happy to reverse it if you prefer the previous formatting.
This post of mine feels closely related: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xhE4TriBSPywGuhqi/integrity-and-accountability-are-core-parts-of-rationality
I have come to believe that people’s ability to come to correct opinions about important questions is in large part a result of whether their social and monetary incentives reward them when they have accurate models in a specific domain. This means a person can have extremely good opinions in one domain of reality, because they are subject to good incentives, while having highly inaccurate models in a large variety of other domains in which their incentives are not well optimized.
People’s rationality is much more defined by their ability to maneuver themselves into environments in which their external incentives align with their goals, than by their ability to have correct opinions while being subject to incentives they don’t endorse. This is a tractable intervention and so the best people will be able to have vastly more accurate beliefs than the average person, but it means that “having accurate beliefs in one domain” doesn’t straightforwardly generalize to “will have accurate beliefs in other domains”.
One is strongly predictive of the other, and that’s in part due to general thinking skills and broad cognitive ability. But another major piece of the puzzle is the person’s ability to build and seek out environments with good incentive structures.Everyone is highly irrational in their beliefs about at least some aspects of reality, and positions of power in particular tend to encourage strong incentives that don’t tend to be optimally aligned with the truth. This means that highly competent people in positions of power often have less accurate beliefs than competent people who are not in positions of power.
The design of systems that hold people who have power and influence accountable in a way that aligns their interests with both forming accurate beliefs and the interests of humanity at large is a really important problem, and is a major determinant of the overall quality of the decision-making ability of a community. General rationality training helps, but for collective decision making the creation of accountability systems, the tracking of outcome metrics and the design of incentives is at least as big of a factor as the degree to which the individual members of the community are able to come to accurate beliefs on their own.
Mod note: I moved this to frontpage despite it being a bit similar to things we’ve historically left on people’s personal blog. Usually there are three checks I run for deciding whether to put something on the frontpage:
Is it not timeless?
Is it trying to sell you something, or persuade you, or leverage a bunch of social connections to get you to do something? (e.g. eliciting donations usually falls in this category)
Is it about community inside-baseball that makes it hard to participate in if you aren’t part of the social network?
For this essay, I think the answer is “No” for basically all three (with the last one maybe being a bit true, but not really), so overall I decided to move this to the frontpage.
Hi, I’m new to this site so not sure if late comments are still answered...
Late comments are generally encouraged around here, and we generally aim to have discussion that stands the test of time, and don’t ever shut down comment threads because they are too old.
That sucks. Sorry for your loss.
Edit note: I fixed your images for you. They seemed broken on Chrome since the server on which they were hosted didn’t support https.
I think the Open Thread is probably a generally better place to bring up random new ideas related to Roko’s basilisk stuff. This page is more for discussing the current content of the page, and how it might be improved.
Yep, agree, also want this. Just a bit complicated tech-wise and UI-wise, so it’s a reasonably large investment.
Note that guzey’s excellent writeup on this definitely qualifies, and I offered to send him the money, but if I remember correctly he didn’t want it, and we will settle it informally when we hang out in the future sometime.
Thank you for doing this!
I was planning to listen to the book, and I hope I can get around to leaving some comments with thoughts here.