jimrandomh
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The restriction on having multiple linkposts to the same URL is something we inherited from our framework (Vulcan), which doesn’t particularly make sense for LW. We’ve taken it out, so you’ll be able to make the linkpost after the next time we deploy an update (which will be later this week).
Test comment
Some CA is seen as a kind of theft of intellectual property
It’s worth mentioning here that Intellectual Property is codified in law, that the version of it that is codified into law is restricted to a specific list of types of things, and that intellectual property existing at all is controversial, even within those codified categories. If “Cultural Appropriation is bad” is framed as an extension of the preexisting debate about intellectual property, it’s solidly outside the Overton window: it would mean drastically increasing the scope of things which can be IP.
the animated scroll-to-section is rather too slow for my taste
I agree. The catch is, the browser API we’re using (
window.scrollTo) doesn’t have a speed option, so we have to either live with its choice of speed, or implement the animation ourselves.
I’m the one who implemented this. While it’s partially about making it intuitive in LessWrong’s GUI editor, the decision was mostly based on trying it out on historical posts, and seeing what seemed to work best. All of that content pre-dates our current ToC implementation, and some of it was imported from quite far back in time. (This is also why
<h5>and<h6>aren’t considered headings.)While we could write a migration script and also modify the editor to save as headers, we’re reluctant to do that because it could change the semantics of old imported content, and we’re reluctant to invest in LessWrong’s Draft-JS editor right now, since we’re planning on replacing it with something better.
Ooh, shiny dataset! This is a good complement to cpudb, which does something similar for CPUs (but whose data fields get kinda sparse after 2012).
The first release of CUDA is in 2007; prior to that GPGPU wasn’t much of a thing. I think the extra-fast improvement from 2007 to 2012 represents the transition from game-graphics-oriented hardware to general-computing-oriented hardware.
This would be better if you waited for someone to write an actually-dismissive comment, rather than projecting dismissiveness onto people who haven’t commented.
If you think someone is hypomanic, or in the process of falling for quackery, or otherwise having something that looks like it is or could develop into a mental health issue, I’d recommend letting them know directly, or bringing it up in a 1:1 conversation with a mutual friend who might have some visibility into the situation. Publicly saying “I see this happening in unspecified anonymous people” is just going to make people nervous and defensive, without enabling any discussion or action.
I think I disagree with this. When a social sanction is born of a particular case, I think it is quite important to actually have that case as a part of the discussion.
Clarification: what I meant is that it’s better if the rules are created in a context where there are no cases pending for the rules to bear on; ie, I’m not objecting to admitting that a rules-discussion is about a specific case that it would bear on, but to it actually being about a specific pending case.
I think also it’s quite difficult for people to think about tradeoffs in the abstract; “should annoying people be allowed at meetups?” is different from “should we let Bob keep coming to meetups?“, and generally the latter is a more productive question.
I think discussing the latter question is less likely to produce the right result, though.
The principle I would draw is not, “you should separate the meta- and object-level discussions”. Rather, I think the important thing is that meta-level discussions of how social sanctions work shouldn’t be generated by backward-chaining from an ambiguous case. If people think that your meta-level argument about what circumstances it’s okay to punch people, is actually about whether to punch Bob, then Bob’s allies and enemies will engage with that conversation in a biased way. But separately, if people think that you had some Vaguebob in mind that they didn’t know about, and that you might be Vaguebob’s friend or enemy, then they’ll rightly suspect you of being biased in the same way.
There are a lot more hypotheses not mentioned here, mostly hypotheses in which innovation stagnated because of effects which made individuals less innovative (as opposed to affecting coordination). For example, the “television rots your brain” hypothesis: that people who grew up with access to television are less capable of innovating, in general. Or the same but for people who ate the low-fat diet that the government was promoting, or were exposed to too much lead as children, or lost their agency to oppressive schooling and didn’t recover it.
Business “jargon” and “buzzwords” are unfairly maligned by people who aren’t used to corporate culture. First of all, a lot of them originally referred to specific important concepts, and then got overused as generic applause lights — e.g. “disruptive innovation” is actually a really useful idea in its original meaning. But, second of all, it’s honestly just handy to have stock phrases if you need to keep talking fluently without awkward pauses.
Many people respond well to it, but smooth-sounding-emptiness is a corruption. Having overlap between your set of really-useful-idea words and your stock-phrase-for-fluency words seems like it has the potential to be really bad for your long-term ability to think clearly.
Person enters the room, or exits a conversation. In descending order of preference, they can either (1) talk to someone who is sitting alone, (2) join an existing conversation, or (3) sit alone. But because people don’t want to be the first person to seed a new conversation, there aren’t many people by themselves to make 2-person conversations out of. So, to fix the incentives...
When you start a conversation with someone who was sitting alone, give them a dollar. (Not entirely serious but not entirely joking either.)
I would recommend starting with more sophisticated and friendly audiences, the sort of people who would go to a Less Wrong meetup, before you try to pitch rationality to more mainstream audiences. It’s more difficult than you would expect; rationality concepts generally rest on and depend on a foundation of analytical thinking, and this is far from universal. It’s also hard to distinguish yourself from people pitching things that look superficially similar at first, but later veer into crazy politics or scams.
All that said, there’s definitely value in creating more-accessible explanations of key concepts, and if you think you’ve got the writing skill, it’s worth a shot.
If you want to ensure it goes with the first plan it comes up with, then maybe the “myopia” part would be better implemented as a rapidly declining reward, rather than a hard time cutoff. That way, if there turns out to be a way to actually bypass the impact measure and blow up the moon in time, then it will still be incentivized to choose a hasty plan.
Putting the word “rational” in front of everything annoys some people. As I wrote in Rationality Cardinality: The rational writing strategy is to put the word “optimal” in front of everything instead.
I’m surprised this is downvoted as much as it has been, and I haven’t downvoted it myself.
This is partly an effect of the recently introduced “strong votes” feature, where users with karma can pay a trivial inconvenience to make their up- or down-votes be more points. My own strong-downvote was −7 points.
This doesn’t seem like a productive or fair way to do criticism. By making it an in-person event rather than a written piece, you’re making it harder to respond to criticisms and potentially creating a hostile echo chamber. And by making it about an author instead of about a topic, you’re encouraging people to cherry-pick whichever posts they can find that are least defensible, out of a massive corpus, then present them as though they were representative.
On old-LW, did you view recent discussion via the sidebar widget, or were you going to an endpoint like `/comments`?
Looks like someone ePub-ified it here .