That matches my (extremely vague) memories much better. I was reading OB back before Yudkowsky created this site. Some of the OB posts and their comments were transferred here, but I didn’t remember Mencius/Yarvin commenting, let alone posting, here too.
Kenny
Karma: 775
I’ve been here for years tho and I don’t remember him ever posting, or even commenting.
How do you know he was here or banned?
… rationality is all about distrusting authority.
Rationality is all about ‘trusting’ just the right amount.
I think a ‘rationality dojo’ could work fine – certainly (possibly) as well as “a science camp, a programming camp, a math camp, a rhetoric camp [or] a Bible camp”.
If someone paid me (my cheerful price) to start (and presumably run for at least some time) a rationality dojo, I would (without any other requirements or suggestions) not have any fixed curriculum.
For particular content or activities there might be classes, but the core offering would be ‘rationality sparring’. Group sparring sessions would be cheaper per-person; one-on-one would be more expensive.
At the start of each sparring session, I would ask the students “What do you want [from this session]?”. We’d go from there!
(Also, why an AWS Lambda backend? That doesn’t seem likely to teach effective “scalable action”. The hard bits of scaling are often precisely those that can’t be neatly encapsulated into an independent, and very brief, computation per ‘request’.)
Did Yarvin write here? I don’t remember that.
It’s a hard problem – a recapitulation of the difficult problem of describing or specifying human values generally.
Even just a little bit of domain expertise is useful! I understand your point, and even agree to some extent, but I think it’s also great that others are discussing the object-level details of “the surface-level analogy”. Both the argument using the analogy, and the analogy itself, seem like potentially fruitful topics to discuss.
That is indeed a large potential cost to doing this kind of thing too much.
I think this post was intended to be much more narrow tho. I like the idea of ‘compensating’ a kid when you accidentally offer them a ‘false choice’ – that seems fair and otherwise reasonable too.
But, yes, some decisions should be made by parents and not be negotiable. And offering a small set of (reasonable) options is better than a misleading open-ended query. (That’s annoying when adults do it to each other too.)
I think there is, effectively, some missing context for a lot of others. You obviously have a lot. I’ve been following your blog for a long while, so my main takeaway has been the idea of ‘compensating’ kids when you accidentally offer them a ‘false choice’. I can understand tho why others might be ‘over-generalizing’ from this post in isolation.
I appreciate what you seem to be animated by but very much disagree that Jeff’s post is an example of it.
I think maybe you’re conflating Jeff not ‘wanting’ to cleanup with someone he won’t ‘reasonably agree to do’.
I really do sympathize – if I didn’t ‘know’ Jeff from having read his posts for a long while now, I think you’d be (more likely) correct about someone sharing the same story.
Another factor that I think you might not be aware of is that the ‘negotiations’ described aren’t remotely the first such that haven taken place. Generally, I think Jeff probably does a great job at not making the mistakes you’re describing.
Non-coercive parenting is fine – within reasonable limits.
If your toddler ‘wants’ to walk into traffic (i.e. does do so) – too bad; that’s outside of the reasonable scope of their decision-making! It is entirely reasonable to physically coerce (e.g. pick them up) such a child in those circumstances.
Everything short of an imminent and potentially dire emergency is more-or-less plausibly up for grabs. I think it’d be generally better for parents to build a ‘positive’ scope of decision-making instead of trying to patch an initial mostly ‘open-ended’ scope.
I personally think that homeschooling is perfectly fine to consider but others should probably think about it a good bit, or even try it out for a limited period, before (implicitly) allowing that as an option if one of their children doesn’t want to go to school.
Similarly, there’s lots of things that kids/children do or would/could do, mostly out of ignorance, that their parents probably aren’t really committed to living with, e.g. making (spectacular) messes, drawing on walls/furniture, destroying things, etc..
I think it’s much better to ‘flout convention’ explicitly, while also teaching kids about the standard convention(s) too. I was lucky enough to be (explicitly) allowed to draw on the walls of my bedroom at one point. That seems totally fine to allow – unless a parent really isn’t willing to live with the consequences.
At least the first part of your original comment was fine and I think correct.
I was confused as to whether you thought Jeff was doing what you decried. I don’t think he does – and just based on everything else he’s written about parenting. I think he was describing the ‘honest mistake’ version of what you described.
But I think you’re absolutely right that what you described is in fact pretty bad. I remember that kind of thing and some kids I know now definitely share similar negative feelings about it too. Kids are pretty smart!
I really appreciate this ‘genre’ of your posts! Thanks!
I’ve always tried to treat kids along similar lines: ignorant but not (necessarily) stupid/un-intelligent, and mostly pretty capable (tho relatively limited).
Beyond false choices, I really dislike it when people ask ‘false queries’, particularly to kids. That was also something I hated in school and something I vicariously dislike seeing kids encounter it now.
There’s some mentions of the trial in the comments on this otherwise unrelated post:
[Link] Evidence of Fabricated Data in a Vitamin C trial by Paul E Marik et al in CHEST
I can imagine how this might be considered a “~shitpost” but I thought it was clear and obvious and not confusing.
But I also don’t think that has that much to do with “people who have lost the better part of a day or more trying to mentally disengage from this”. I just read this post, wasn’t confused, but I still expect this to ‘ruin’ my day.
Thank you for this and all of your other posts!
I don’t think Freddie thinks that “we should stop financing the education system” exactly tho.
Sorry – how does the “flat spatula-type device” ‘erase’? Does it just smooth the indentations made in the wax?
How do you erase what you’ve written/drawn?
Maybe edit the footnote in the post to clarify that Mencius was discussed on and commented at OB before LW ‘split off’?