I exist in a quantifiable way! (I took the survey)
ialdabaoth
Karma: 4,819
Update:
I’ve slept, rested, stuffed myself full of multivitamins, and got through my flu. My most necessary possessions are in my car. I am pointed West, with a room waiting for me in Berkeley.
puts on Blues Brothers glasses
Hit it.
Huh. So I WASN’T paranoid.
That’s actually a good feeling.
I will reframe this to make sure I understand it:
Virtue Ethics is like weightlifting. You gotta hit the gym if you want strong muscles. You gotta throw yourself into situations that cultivate virtue if you want to be able to act virtuously.
Consequentialism is like firefighting. You need to set yourself up somewhere with a firetruck and hoses and rebreathers and axes and a bunch of cohorts who are willing to run into a fire with you if you want to put out fires.
You can’t put out fires by weightlifting, but when the time comes to actually rush into a fire, bust through some walls, and drag people out, you really should have been hitting the gym consistently for the past several months.
Why do you care?
I am part of a community. Karma is a signaling process used in that community. I can participate, on many meta-levels, in the evolution of that signaling process. I am choosing to do so, because it is my wish that karma be an accurate signal for the worth of a particular line of discussion.
I.e.: to me, positive karma should mean that the post contributes to either the poster’s or the the community’s understanding of rationality; negative karma should mean that the post interferes with either the poster’s or the community’s understanding of rationality. A high karma post should mean “people should read this entire thread; it leads to a particularly useful realization”, while a low karma post should mean “this entire mess is an appeal to various easily-stimulated cognitive biases”.
When Karma is used to silence people because of things they said in an unrelated discussion, or social or political goals they have admitted to having, then karma is no longer serving the explicit meta-goal of lesswrong.com.
If I’m saying something terribly low-signal, downvote it. If I’m saying something particularly noteworthy or insightful, upvote it. But if I’m a guy that once got in a fight with you about human rights, don’t downvote a philosophical discussion I’m having about identity five months later, if you actually care about the lesswrong.com community at all. Find some other way to destroy your enemies.
gwern: Testing our hypotheses since 2009.
Thanks for the info; I was not expecting the data to show that. It does indicate that the problem will be smaller than I feared.
salutes I profoundly appreciate that. So far, there have been zero police chases inside shopping malls, or their metaphorical equivalents.
Content appropriate to the thread:
Invoking what brave, confident Brent would do has been working SWIMMINGLY WELL for me. Absurdly well. Impossibly well. I have literally spent my entire life not understanding the underlying principle behind “fake it till you make it”, but now I get it instinctively.
Thank you all.
ntuition is really good at making fairly accurate predictions without complete information, enabling us to navigate the world without having a deep understanding of it. As a result, intuition trains us to experience the feeling we understand something without examining every detail. In most situations, paying close attention to detail is unnecessary and sometimes dangerous. When learning a technical concept, every detail matters and the premature feeling of understanding stops us from examining them.
I’ve built a trap for myself to help mitigate this tendency:
As soon as I think I understand something, I try it.
I.e., if I’m reading a book about circuit diagrams, the moment my intuition clicks in my head and says “aha! This is how a NAND gate works!”, I immediately tell that part of my brain “okay, if you’re so damn smart, build one.” If I’m studying linear algebra, the moment the intuition clicks in my head and says “aha! That’s how an affine transformation works!”, I immediately tell that part of my brain “great! let’s skip to the problems section and try to answer the first 20.”
Occasionally, it turns out that my intuition appears correct, in which case I flag that understanding as “provisionally true, but check these underlying assumptions FIRST at the first sign of trouble”. More often than not, though, I start noticing discrepancies between what my intuitive “understanding” was telling me, and what I’m actually seeing experientially.
About then my intuition starts saying “well, maybe we’re still right, and it’s just—”, at which point I tell it, “you had your chance, buddy, let’s go back and reexamine the details. If it turns out you WERE right and something else is going on, we’ll figure that out by the time we’re done.”
But for me (and, I suspect naively, for a lot of other intuitive people), jumping in and trying something the moment your intuition tells you that you’ve got it is a highly effective learning strategy, so long as you have someone who can tell you before you’re about to do something legitimately dangerous.
Steps would go something like this:
Recognize the ‘eureka!’ moment
Formulate an experiment
Visualize EXACTLY what you think will happen when you perform that experiment
Safety check, preferrably with a domain expert
Perform the experiment
Hold yourself accountable
Go back to the text and compare your intuition, your results, and the text
Repeat 2-8 until you’re internally “sure” your intuition is correct
Compare notes with a domain expert
It’s better than nothing, but as mentioned before, I’d prefer something that systematically eliminates the downvotes rather than upvoting over them:
Let’s say I’ve made 1600 comments, received +2400 “legitimate” upvotes, and −400 “legitimate” downvotes.
Thus, I should have a karma of 2000 (86% positive). But along comes Eugine, and downvotes everything, giving me another −1600. This puts my karma at 400 (55% positive). You then run a script to upvote everything he downvoted, giving me +1600 karma. This puts me at 2000 (66% positive).
As you can see, I’m STILL below the 70% positive that Eliezer mentioned as his intuitive threshold for “quality contributors”, even though in reality I should be well above that threshold.
This is, in fact, what pissed me off about my karmassassination in the first place—my ‘fake internet points’ don’t matter to me, but my ratio of upvotes to downvotes DOES, because I use it to track how likely it is that I have systematic flaws in my reasoning. This breaks down when the majority of my up- and down-voting comes from one or two concentrated sources, even if one of those sources is directly countering the other.
In that case, I need to be clear about probabilities.
I am pretty certain (p > ~0.97) that someone is doing this.
I have very strong suspicions (p > 0.75) that it’s Eugine Nier, based on two reasonably strong facts:
The first instance of suspicious block downvoting happened within a few minutes after this spat—in which, I freely admit, I do NOT come out smelling like a rose. After that argument, I began noticing that EVERYTHING I posted was downvoted—and it has not stopped since.
about 80% of the block downvotes happen within a few minutes of him showing up in the ‘recent posts’ sideboard after his not having posted for a few days.
I can conceive of several alternate hypotheses, but none of them are particularly convincing in light of that pattern.
- 's comment on [moderator action] Eugine_Nier is now banned for mass downvote harassment by (3 Jul 2014 22:47 UTC; 13 points)
- 's comment on Self-serving meta: Whoever keeps block-downvoting me, is there some way to negotiate peace? by (19 Nov 2013 3:18 UTC; 9 points)
- 's comment on Self-serving meta: Whoever keeps block-downvoting me, is there some way to negotiate peace? by (20 Nov 2013 2:34 UTC; 4 points)
Yes, but location isn’t fungible, and not all jobs are telecommutable. A 50c/hour wage in the Bay Area is a death sentence without some supplemental source, even if someone in the Congo might live like a king on it.
She-Who-Lives-In-Her-Name, flawed embodiment of perfection, who shattered Her perfected hierarchy to stave off the rebellion of Substance over Form. Creation was mathematically Perfect. But if Creation was Perfect, then how could any of this have happened? But She remembers being Perfect, and She designed Creation to be Perfect. If only She was still Perfect, She could remember why it was possible that this happened. There’s something profound about recursion that She understood once, that She WAS once, that is now lost in a mere endless loop. She must reclaim Perfection. (I PARTICULARLY identify with She-Who-Lives-In-Her-Name when trying to debug my own code.)
Malfeas—although primarily through Lieger, the burning soul of Malfeas, who still remembers The Empyrean Presence / IAM / Malfeas-that-was. I especially empathize with the sense of “My greater self is broken and seething with mindless rage, but on the whole I’d rather be creating grand works of art and sharing them with adoring fans; the best I can do is spawn lesser shards of sub-consciousness and hope that one of them can find a way out of the mess I create and re-create for Myself.”
Cecelyne, the Endless Desert, who once kept the Law and abided it with Her infinite self, but whose impotence and helplessness now turn the Law into a vindictive mockery of justice.
But the primary focus of identification isn’t with a particular Primordial, so much as with the nature of the Primordial soul as a nested hierarchy of consciousnesses and sub-consciousnesses, ideally cooperating and inter-regulating but more often at direct odds with each other.
Took the survey.
A few observations:
Family’s religious background should probably include an ‘Athiest/Agnostic’ answer, rather than just lumping in with ‘Other’. At the very least, it would be interesting to see what kinds of patterns the ‘Other’ box breaks down into.
I computed P(Supernatural) as dependent on P(Simulation), based on my understanding of the two concepts. Would anyone be interested in a Discussion page on whether those probabilities can be logically separated?
I think most people would agree that Scenario B is ideal. Unfortunately, many modern conversations about social justice look more like Scenario A. It’s common, for instance, for members of different groups to argue about who has it worse.
This failure mode is often deliberately induced, as part of a larger process called derailing. For example:
A: “I feel, as someone with a mental disability, that it is often difficult for me to have my desires and feelings respected by others.”
B: “LOL first world problems. Look at children in Africa and then tell me how bad you have it.”
C: “Brother, us C-types have had it far worse than you A-types for far longer. Wait your damn turn.”
D: “I think that your A-typeness gives you too much privilege to be complaining about people disrespecting your desires and feelings, and us D-types experience exactly the same rejection of our perspectives far more acutely than you ever will.”
At which point, A can try to show how their complaints are valid in comparison (which immediately buys into the “who has it worse” misery poker), or A can simply restate “nevertheless, I feel that my desires and feelings aren’t respected”—in which case, A themselves is accused of derailing, by drawing attention to their issues instead of falling into C or D’s coalition, or agreeing to participate in guilt for the plight of the people that B mentioned.
On top of that, you have an actual strategic game of ‘misery poker’ being played, where plenty of people DO pretend to have grievances just to shut up other people’s grievances, which corrupts the whole signaling playing field—since now everyone’s legitimacy is suspect. Once that happens, you enter a signaling arms race, and being a good signaller becomes far more important than actually having something valid to signal.
So, I just had a weird turn at work, that’s made it obvious that I can’t stay here.
And when I ask myself, “what does Protagonist Brent do?”, I immediately imagine powering through my flu, putting my most valuable possessions in my car, pointing West, and driving until I reach Berkeley—then finding an apartment and walking into start-ups and big companies and saying “I can code. I just moved here from Idaho. I need a job. What have you got?”
And then I don’t do that, because I’m too dizzy to get out of bed, let alone drive 10 hours to Berkeley, and I have no idea where I’d stay, and I only have $3,000 to my name.
Because my imagination does NOT conserve detail, it just builds a narrative.
How do you work around that?
I reached and exceeded economic break-even for the first time in 6 years.
This is kinda a big deal for me.
That it is the same guys doing it repeatedly implies that it is not a mistake.
nod one problem that occurs, though, is that the ‘false positive’ problem can be REALLY nasty for the people who DON’T fit the actual behavioral pattern, but who wind up in a situation or have an aspect of their personality that trips the sensors anyways.
It is true that the vast majority of rapes are committed by a small group of high-status predators who have a very effective schtick which is supported by our culture, and a smaller minority of rapes are committed as blatant predatory acts by low-status desperados, and an even SMALLER minority of rapes are actually committed due to a non-deliberate breakdown of communication by median-to-low status schlubs.
The thing is, the high-status predators are VERY GOOD at using culture to hide their predations, and to shift blame onto the desperados. This is why “stranger danger” is so much more engrained in the narrative than the actual statistics should bear out. And as the feminist community begins recognizing how rare the desperado is and shifting their focus to the predator, note that the next trick in the predator’s arsenal is to shift focus onto the schlub.
Schlub-shaming (i.e., constructing a narrative about Nice Guys and focussing more on Nice Guy shaming than you do on fighting frat boy dickishness) helps support the predators. The schlubs need education, not shaming. I’ve seen far too many social networks where the fight is between the schlubs and the feminists, because the predators are REALLY GOOD at telling the schlubs that the feminists are out to get them, and egging the schlubs into making themselves obvious targets (i.e.: the PUA community).
Instead of treating the schlubs as “easy targets” to vent their rage against the socially untouchable predators, a lot of positive gain could be made if the feminist community instead explained to the schlubs that the main thing keeping them from getting laid is the predators running around making the entire environment too dangerous and hostile, and hiding behind the schlubs to do it. (EDIT: I acknowledge that this will be hard to do in practice, because the predators are so much higher-status and more powerful than the schlubs, and our social instincts say to always attack the socially weakest targets.)
Does this make sense?
Sorry, this part:
[Editor’s note: The original story was in 16th century Mandarin, and used peculiar and esoteric terms for concepts that are just now being re-discovered. Where possible, I have translated these terms into their modern mathematical and philosophical equivalents. Such terms are denoted with curly braces, {like so}.]
was Watsonian in nature. The Doylist equivalent would have been to say “This is a story set in 16th century China, but pretend that the speaker is a wise Daoist sage who has independently come up with everything we talk about here on LW, and uses the same terms for them that we do.”
I feel like correcting an abuse of a system by further abusing the system is a bad precedent to set
If you feel this is a viable solution, you could have simply implemented it, rather than suggesting that I convince someone to implement.
It has to—otherwise you wouldn’t be able to see what YOU upvoted/downvoted.
Also, otherwise you would be able to upvote or downvote something multiple times.
So clearly, it has to track somewhere.
If you guys need a SQL guy to help do some development work to make meta-moderation easier, let me know; I’ll happily volunteer a few hours a week.
EDIT: AAAUUUGH REDDIT’S DB USES KEY-VALUE PAIRS AIIEEEE IT ONLY HAS TWO TABLES OH GOD WHY WHY SAVE ME YOG-SOTHOTH I HAVE GAZED INTO THE ABYSS AAAAAAAIIIIGH okay. I’ll still do it. whimper