Are you planning to do any analysis on what traits are associated with defection? That could get ugly fast.
(I took the survey)
Nominull
Karma: 2,926
On the plus side, bad things happening to you does not mean you are a bad person. On the minus side, bad things will happen to you even if you are a good person. In the end you are just another victim of the motivationless malice of directed acyclic causal graphs.
-Nobilis RPG 3rd edition
Took the survey. Somehow I’ve managed to lose a decent chunk of IQ over the past 15 years...
I think this is actually a myth. It’s appealing, to us who love truth so much, to think that deviating from the path of the truth is deadly and dangerous and leads inevitably to dark side epistemology. But there is a trick to telling lies, such that they only differ from the truth in minor, difficult to verify ways. If you tell elegant lies, they will cling to the surface of the truth like a parasite, and you will be able to do almost anything with them that you could do with the truth. You just have to remember a few extra bits that you changed, and otherwise behave as a normal honest person would, given those few extra bits.
the past is a third-world country
I think people in the Less Wrong community are a little too fast to analogize any existential threat to the threat of rogue AI. The threat of people blowing up the world with nuclear weapons seems a lot more analogous to the threat of people blowing up the world with nuclear weapons.
A sound banker, alas, is not one who foresees danger and avoids it, but one who, when he is ruined, is ruined in a conventional way along with his fellows, so that no one can really blame him.
-John Maynard Keynes
I agree in principle but I think this particular topic is fairly nailoid in nature.
Perhaps he’s ultra-high-class, and is only defending the object-level irony of his garden gnome ironically.
And they’ll be beaten in turn by people who were in the right place at the right time, or won the genetic lottery. A little luck can make up for a lot of laziness, and working hard and learning things can just leave you digging ditches and able to quote every Simpsons episode verbatim.
The destruction of LW culture has already happened. The trigger was EY leaving, and people without EY’s philosophical insight stepping in to fill the void by chatting about their unconventional romantic lives, their lifehacks, and their rational approach to toothpaste. If anything, I see things having gotten somewhat better recently, with EY having semi-returned, and with the rise of the hypercontrarian archconservative clique, which might be wrong about everything but at least they want to talk about it and not toothpaste.
Molten variables hiss and roar. On my mind-forge, I hammer them into the greatsword Epistemology. Many are my foes this night.
--Nate Silver Parody Twitter Account @fivethirtynate, on the night of the presidential election
When you’ve eliminated the impossible, if whatever’s left is sufficiently improbable, you probable haven’t considered a wide enough space of candidate possibilities.
I read these tricks for avoiding procrastination and I find myself terrified at the idea of trying them at a gut level, because what if they work? What if I actually find myself playing fewer videogames and surfing the internet less? That doesn’t actually sound better, now that I have to seriously consider the possibility of changing this state of affairs.
Based on this revelation, I have to say I am coming around to the point of view that a lot of what we call “akrasia” is just us not wanting to admit, to others or to ourselves, what our actual desires are, so we make up more socially acceptable desires and then when we pursue our actual desires instead we blame akrasia.
Opening your eyes doesn’t make a bad picture worse.
Personally I suspect that the bathwater only really gets dirty when you are teaching something that is essentially useless in modern society, like martial arts or literary criticism. Most people who study, say, engineering don’t do so in the hopes of becoming teachers of engineering.
Now you might say that this is because teachers of engineering are expected to also do research, but firstly that doesn’t explain the disparity between fields, and secondly, I don’t think that the example of tertiary education is one to aspire to in this way. I seem to recall you are an autodidact, so you may not have the same trained gut reaction I do, but I have seen too many people who did not have the skill of teaching but were good researchers teaching horribly, and I remember one heartbreaking example of an excellent teacher denied tenure because the administrators felt his research was not up to snuff too well, to want to optimize rationality teachers on any basis other than their ability to teach rationality.
I’d like everyone to be far more skeptical of those who are instinctively skeptical of math.
In general I’m concerned with the way the community is headed—I joined for the philosophy, I’m less interested in reading about analytic people’s approaches to basic social interaction. Some days I feel like this site has gone from Less Wrong to Wrong Planet.
So I guess I’m downvoting as a political stance, rather than anything to do with the quality of your writing. Sorry, I’m afraid that’s not helpful.
Well they’re maybe a little more admirable than some other types of worker. Let’s not go overboard here.
I think you are too quick to discard the Machiavellian ploy hypothesis. In particular, I think the term “Machiavellian” is misleading you. You (rightly) find a vast conspiracy of offense-pretending Muslims to be ridiculous. But the best way to run a conspiracy is not to run it, and the best way to pretend to something is not to pretend.
Have you stopped to ask why group X might find behavior Y of group Z offensive? I’m not doubting their pain, I’m not suggesting that group X cynically decides to find Y offensive, I’m just asking, how does offense arise in the first place? Why are human beings such that they take offense to things?
My view—taking offense begins as a response to a norm violation. “Not cool, dude,” we say, because the dude has done something outside of what the group is prepared to accept. We feel uncomfortable when others violate norms, because if we just sit by and do nothing, we may be accused of being in on the norm violation.
But sometimes people take offense to things which are not norm violations. The general US norm is not that drawing the prophet Muhammed is forbidden, it’s not that violent videogames are a sin, it’s not that the casual treatment of women as nothing but sex objects is unacceptable. Yet people take offense to these things anyway! What is going on?
Here I am going to repeat again that I do not think that Muslims, game-pacifists, or feminists are consciously conspiring. I think, rather, that it is natural to take offense not only at things which are actual norm-violations, but also things which you wish were norm violations, things which would boost your status if they were norm violations. There is no conscious consideration of this, but somewhere deep in our hypocrite brains, we decide to pretend that our desired norms are the actual norms.
And the math gets even better for taking offense when you consider the meaning of being labeled offensive! “It was morally wrong to say this, and you are either inexcusably ignorant of this fact or deliberately malicious. You must immediately apologize, and it is up to the group you have offended to decide whether they accept your apology or whether they want to punish you in some well-deserved way,” you say, and I think you have the right of it. This is a powerful weapon to use against your enemies, and a powerful threat to use to keep people from becoming your enemies in the first place. You think your brain isn’t going to seize on it whenever possible?
Now, I know you are arguing from a harm minimization standpoint, you might say, “it is not these people’s fault that their brains see an opportunity to score points by being offended and cause them pain”. And that’s true. The vast majority of people who take offense are, I’m sure, not doing it in a conscious, cynical manner. And by freely and gleefully offending them, we are doing them undeserved harm. It sucks to be them, and I say that in a spirit of sympathy. However, if we give in to offense, if we explicitly act to avoid giving offense rather than acting to right object-level wrongs, then we risk emboldening the true villains, the hypocrite brains who are torturing people to score cheap political points. Better to put our feet down now, because if being offended is a useful strategy, people will go on being offended, even if they don’t want to.