Thanks – should be fixed now.
ioannes
Karma: 890
I don’t get the difference between predictive power and wisdom.
I am using “predictive power” as something like “ability to see what’s coming down the pipe” and “wisdom” as something like “ability to assess whether what’s coming down the pipe is good or bad, according to one’s value system.”
I don’t follow your other two questions (not sure what “number of people” refers to in the second; not sure how to parse the third at all). Could you clarify or restate them?
Thanks for the great comment :-)
I agree that the evidence around psychedelics for treatment-resistant depression is slim & preliminary. The effect sizes in Carhart-Harris et al. 2016 are very large, so I’m optimistic that a sizeable (though smaller) effect will occur in larger studies.
Sometimes temporary isn’t bad—if temporarily having your depression lifted allows you to access insights that you can carry forward into the rest of your life.
The mechanism I’m most excited about re: psychedelics for depression is a high-dose psychedelic experience functioning as a catalyst for other behavior & worldview changes which, when taken all together, lead people out of their depression.
I worry that all of the organizations you describe as working on the problem of understanding what matters are using a thinking-based methodology that is 1) heavily influenced by cultural blindspots and 2) disconnected from the direct experience of being in a human body.
I agree that the organizations I mentioned are all taking very cerebral approaches towards the question of what matters.
I think this is because in this essay, I was only considering the question of what current EA initiatives look promising under the steering capacity framework, and all current EA initiatives are thinking-based.
There are many other projects considering the question of what matters, many of them based in lived experience (e.g. Zen & Vipassana meditation traditions). Some of these are probably very valuable.
Just pledged $10/month. I’m not sure I’ll ever use REACH but I want to see projects like this succeed.
On memetic weapons
Oh interesting, I didn’t know about that sam[]zdat piece. Thanks for the pointer; I’m excited that they’ve written about this!
He calls himself a centrist on his Twitter bio, so he’s at least a self-identified centrist.
do you have examples when the “Left” was significantly changing minds through dialogue/dialectic?
I don’t have a roster of examples right now, but a couple things come to mind:
1960s civil rights activism often used debate & speeches to drive change, though of course that’s not the full picture. e.g. Malcolm X, MLK, the Baldwin-Buckley debate.
The campaign for gay marriage seemed to rely more on inclusive discussion rather than exclusionary calling out.
What’s the unrelated connotation?
do you know of any evidence that people’s minds where changed significantly or mostly due to debate/discussion?
I think for both gay rights & cannabis advocacy, the model that best explains what happened goes something like:
Activists do a bunch of public education & direct action to push on the issue
The work of the activists moves the Overton window such that more people feel comfortable coming out (as gay, as cannabis users)
More & more people come into personal contact with the members of the group in question (gay people, cannabis users)
People update their views about the issue via personal interactions with someone they know, who turns out to be a member of the group in question
Not evidence, just a model that might explain how a lot of opinion change happens.
… shouting down the milos of the world is bad is evidence that talk is what had changed the world.
I think shouting down Milos is important & should keep happening to some extent (though I tend to bias towards reasoned discussion & indoor voices).
I also think that too many people are getting pattern-matched as Milos, and shouting down people who have been mis-typed as Milos has negative consequences (via the mechanism I sketched out in the post).
(updated after serious down-votes)
For what it’s worth, I’m sad that you’re getting down-voted so much.
I’m reading you as engaging in good faith from a different starting viewpoint, and I’d like to see more of that kind of thing :-)
Again, who are we talking about? Damore-like? Peterson and the whole of the IDW?
As stated in the post, I’m mostly worried about people who start self-policing their speech instead of speaking openly about what they believe. I think there are probably a lot of people like this.
Who is the Left you are talking about?
I have in mind a pretty broad swath, including:
Most university administrations
Most of the Bay Area tech industry
Most of the LA entertainment industry
About half of the D.C. lobbying & think tank industry
Not sure about New York… maybe 30-40% of Wall Street?
The problem seems to be with the discourse norms of those communities – what is okay to talk about & what isn’t in those places. I don’t yet have a good model of who sets & maintains those norms.
Is the DSA guilty of what you see happening?
I don’t know very much about the DSA, but from a quick scan of their twitter, I’d guess they are within the discourse-sphere I’m worried about.
34 points – 17 studies out of 21. Mostly looked at the effect size & the p-values, also thought about whether the proposed causal mechanism seemed plausible.
Looks like the next piece in that sam[]zdat sequence is even more on point.
I don’t think anyone is motivated to explicitly censor talking about the memetic weapon (by putting it on a blacklist or something).
But I do think there’s a good chance that memetic weaponry gets deployed against discussion about the memetic weapon.
The term institution is not synonymous with the concept of<a href=”https://medium.com/@samo.burja/empire-theory-part-1-competitive-landscape-b0b1b3bbce9e“> empire, though they can overlap in some cases.
FYI broken link
The creation of functional institutions is the means by which people are hugely impactful.
Curious what you think of hugely impactful people who didn’t create institutions:
Gautama Buddha
Socrates
Jesus
...
Gauss
Wittgenstein
Gödel
It seems like the catalyst for impactful change often comes from a person who is at best indifferent to institution-building.
Maybe you’re arguing that the bulk of the impact should be attributed to the institution-builders who followed? (the Sangha, Plato, Paul...)
I asked a version of “Why not buy people like Eliezer Yudkowsky, Nick Bostrom, or Stuart Russell a seat on OpenAI’s board?” on Open Phil’s blog & Holden replied:
″...we did discuss different possibilities for who would take the seat, and considered the possibility of someone outside Open Phil, but I’m going to decline to go into detail on how we ultimately made the call. I will note that I’ve been looping in other AI safety folks (such as those you mention) pretty heavily as I’ve thought through my goals for this partnership, and I recognize that there are often arguments for deferring to their judgment on particular questions.”
http://www.openphilanthropy.org/blog/march-2017-open-thread#comments