Let me see if I understand you correctly: if someone cares about how Less Wrong is run, what they should do is not comment on Less Wrong—least of all in discussions on Less Wrong about how Less Wrong is run (“meta threads”). Instead, what they should do is move to California and start attending Alicorn’s dinner parties.
Have I got that right?
(Update: link display problem fixed.)
Counterexamples (promoted/high-karma/high-status author):
(I began with the first one and ended with the last one for a reason. I am entirely in favor of applause lights and positive-affect words as long as they serve their purpose—community-building, making humans feel good—and don’t substitute for argument where the latter is appropriate.)
I like the idea of starting a Politics Open Thread if it means I won’t see any more political comments elsewhere on LW.
It won’t. Instead, what will happen is that people will start attaching the mental labels of “Blue” and “Green” to other commenters, based on encounters in such a thread, and these labels will apply everywhere, and consequently distort the discussions and the voting on all topics.
I agree with thomblake that the original intent of the “Politics is the Mind-Killer” doctrine wasn’t to ban politics (and even that post itself wasn’t intended as official Overcoming Bias policy, just advice from Eliezer!), but I am also 100% with Raemon in endorsing the anti-politics norm that has subsequently developed.
But note that the norm itself, like most human norms, is not an absolute or rigid one, just a scale of increasing costs or penalties with increasing severity of “violations”. It’s always been okay to mention politics in a way that shows you “know what you’re doing” (proof: I have); high-status people are allowed more leeway than the lower-status (except for the very highest-status individuals, on whom norms are often strictly enforced for symbolic reasons); etc.
Theoretically, if we really needed to discuss politics (e.g. if there were pending legislation before the U.S. Congress to regulate FAI research; if Obama had criticized Republicans by invoking LW concepts in his State of the Union speech; if Putin had promised to make cryonics mandatory for everyone in Russia; you get the idea), we could.
I wouldn’t say it was taking us seriously, but journalists of this type tend not to take anything “seriously”. Only “hard-news” journalists write in a style that suggests their subjects are of status equal to or higher than their own.
I think many are failing to appreciate just how much respect is shown by the fact that almost nothing in the piece is false. That’s an incredible achievement for a fluff journalist writing about...pretty much anything, let alone this kind of subject matter.
Along with 99% of humanity my IQ isn’t high enough for me to ever understand the math behind quantum physics
This may be a tangential point, but I need to say this somewhere: claims like this are quite likely false. (Notice how rarely they’re accompanied by justification.)
Quantum mechanics is new (in the scheme of things). So, of course, we see right now that the only people who understand it are very smart people: the ones who first thought of it and their students and associates. But that doesn’t mean that no one else can understand it; it just hasn’t had time to trickle down into everyone’s general education yet.
300 years ago, you could have replaced “quantum” by “classical” in that sentence, and it would have seemed reasonable: at that time, only a few dozen people in the world understood the differential and integral calculus. Yet now this kind of mathematics is taught regularly to hordes of IQ 110 college freshmen, and (I expect) is considered elementary and routine by a majority of LW readers. Taking an Outside View approach here, I don’t see any reason not to expect that the same trend will continue into the future, with quantum mechanics eventually being considered a grade-school subject (even without recourse to transhumanist solutions such as intelligence enhancement, which will immediately come to the minds of many readers).
Going back further, once upon a time literacy was an elite skill. Now we take it for granted, but how much do you really think our IQs have improved in the last couple thousand years?
And let’s not forget that even now, we already know that the fundamental mathematical ideas behind quantum mechanics are actually quite simpler than you would have thought from listening to physicists—little more than linear algebra over complex vector spaces.
Taken.
In other words, “like people I regard as low-status arguing seriously about whether assumptions unquestioned by high-status people like me are actually true”.
Probably right.
Taken.
Lack of impressive endorsements. [...] I feel that given the enormous implications of SI’s claims, if it argued them well it ought to be able to get more impressive endorsements than it has. I have been pointed to Peter Thiel and Ray Kurzweil as examples of impressive SI supporters, but I have not seen any on-record statements from either of these people that show agreement with SI’s specific views, and in fact (based on watching them speak at Singularity Summits) my impression is that they disagree.
This is key: they support SI despite not agreeing with SI’s specific arguments. Perhaps you should, too, at least if you find folks like Thiel and Kurzweil sufficiently impressive.
In fact, this has always been roughly my own stance. The primary reason I think SI should be supported is not that their arguments for why they should be supported are good (although I think they are, or at least, better than you do). The primary reason I think SI should be supported is that I like what the organization actually does, and wish it to continue. The Less Wrong Sequences, Singularity Summit, rationality training camps, and even HPMoR and Less Wrong itself are all worth paying some amount of money for. Not to mention the general paying-of-attention to systematic rationality training, and to existential risks relating to future technology.
Strangely, the possibility of this kind of view doesn’t seem to be discussed much, even though it is apparently the attitude of some of SI’s most prominent supporters.
I furthermore have to say that to raise this particular objection seems to me almost to defeat the purpose of GiveWell. After all, if we could rely on standard sorts of prestige-indicators to determine where our money would be best spent, everybody would be spending their money in those places already, and “efficient charity” wouldn’t be a problem for some special organization like yours to solve.
I would strongly encourage folks to adopt the view that we are always “using Bayes’ theorem” when reasoning.
That is, instead of saying “Use Bayes’ theorem, and then [after you’re done using Bayes’ theorem] correct for overconfidence”, say “Update on the evidence of studies showing that overconfidence is common”.
The distinction is important not for the particular result of the calculation, but for stamping out the notion that Bayes’ theorem is a “special trick” that is “sometimes useful”, rather than a mathematical model of inference itself.
I’ll state my own experience and perception, since it seems to be different from that of others, as evidenced in both the post and the comments. Take it for what it’s worth; maybe it’s rare enough to be disregarded.
The first time I heard about SIAI—which was possibly the first time I had heard the word “singularity” in the technological sense—was whenever I first looked at the “About” page on Overcoming Bias, sometime in late 2006 or early 2007, where it was listed as Eliezer Yudkowsky’s employer. To make this story short, the whole reason I became interested in this topic in the first place was because I was impressed by EY—specifically his writings on rationality on OB (now known as the Sequences here on LW). Now of course most of those ideas were hardly original with him (indeed many times I had the feeling he was stating the obvious, albeit in a refreshing, enjoyable way) but the fact that he was able to write them down in such a clear, systematic, and readable fashion showed that he understood them thoroughly. This was clearly somebody who knew how to think.
Now, when someone has made that kind of demonstration of rationality, I just don’t have much problem listening to whatever they have to say, regardless of how “outlandish” it may seem in the context of most human discourse. Maybe I’m exceptional in this respect, but I’ve never been under the impression that only “normal-sounding” things can be true or important. At any rate, I’ve certainly never been under that impression to such an extent that I would be willing to dismiss claims made by the author of The Simple Truth and A Technical Explanation of a Technical Explanation, someone who understands things like the gene-centered view of evolution and why MWI exemplifies rather than violates Occam’s Razor, in the context of his own professional vocation!
I really don’t understand what the difference is between me and the “smart people” that you (and XiXiDu) know. In fact maybe they should be more inclined to listen to EY and SIAI; after all, they probably grew up reading science fiction, in households where mild existential risks like global warming were taken seriously. Are they just not as smart as me? Am I unusually susceptible to following leaders and joining cults? (Don’t think so.) Do I simply have an unusual personality that makes me willing to listen to strange-sounding claims? (But why wouldn’t they as well, if they’re “smart”?)
Why can’t they just read the darn sequences and pick up on the fact that these people are worth listening to?
During a panel discussion at the most recent Singularity Summit, Eliezer speculated that he might have ended up as a science fiction author, but then quickly added:
I have to remind myself that it’s not what’s the most fun to do, it’s not even what you have talent to do, it’s what you need to do that you ought to be doing.
Shortly thereafter, Peter Thiel expressed a wish that all the people currently working on string theory would shift their attention to AI or aging; no disagreement was heard from anyone present.
I would therefore like to ask Eliezer whether he in fact believes that the only two legitimate occupations for an intelligent person in our current world are (1) working directly on Singularity-related issues, and (2) making as much money as possible on Wall Street in order to donate all but minimal living expenses to SIAI/Methuselah/whatever.
How much of existing art and science would he have been willing to sacrifice so that those who created it could instead have been working on Friendly AI? If it be replied that the work of, say, Newton or Darwin was essential in getting us to our current perspective wherein we have a hope of intelligently tackling this problem, might the same not hold true in yet unknown ways for string theorists? And what of Michelangelo, Beethoven, and indeed science fiction? Aren’t we allowed to have similar fun today? For a living, even?
I have a different explanation: this is a status defense mechanism. If you say something that other people find obvious, in a way that suggests that you didn’t find it obvious, you lose status-points for not being as smart as them. By adding the word “obviously”, you in effect say “please do not infer that I think this remark is a great discovery of mine (and thus that I am ignorant relative to you) from the mere fact that I think it needs to be stated explicitly”.
As an added benefit, if the remark turns out not to be obvious to your audience, yet demonstrably true, you gain status for having been smarter than them.
You might think, then, that there is no downside to simply prefacing every statement you think is true with “obviously”. Obviously, however ( :-) ), you have to avoid making it transparent what you’re doing, and thus restrict your usage of “obvious” to particularly plausible cases. Calibrating this sense of plausibility with your own epistemic powers is one of many mysterious (in the sense of not being spoken about or taught explicitly) techniques of human status negotiation. (And heaven help you if you label “obvious” something that is false...)