philh
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To the contrary, this does not get you one iota closer to “ought”.
This is true, but I do think there’s something being pointed at that deserves acknowledging.
I think I’d describe it as: you don’t get an ought, but you do get to predict what oughts are likely to be acknowledged. (In future/in other parts of the world/from behind a veil of ignorance.)
That is, an agent who commits suicide is unlikely to propagate; so agents who hold suicide as an ought are unlikely to propagate; so you don’t expect to see many agents with suicide as an ought.
And agents with cooperative tendencies do tend to propagate (among other agents with cooperative tendencies); so agents who hold cooperation as an ought tend to propagate (among...); so you expect to see agents who hold cooperation as an ought (but only in groups).
And for someone who acknowledges suicide as an ought, this can’t convince them not to; and for someone who doesn’t acknowledge cooperation, it doesn’t convince them to. So I wouldn’t describe it as “getting an ought from an is”. But I’d say you’re at least getting something of the same type as an ought?
Curious why this was dovnvoted? It’s not a literal answer to the question, but it seems reasonably likely to satisfy the intent of the question.
For the London meetups I write this:
We’re a fortnightly London-based meetup for members of the rationalist diaspora. The diaspora includes, but is not limited to, LessWrong, Slate Star Codex, rationalist tumblrsphere, and parts of the Effective Altruism movement.
You don’t have to identify as a rationalist to attend: basically, if you think we seem like interesting people you’d like to hang out with, welcome! You are invited. You do not need to think you are clever enough, or interesting enough, or similar enough to the rest of us, to attend. You are invited.
The quote doesn’t say explicitly, so just to make sure we’re on the same page: I take from this that yes, when more looms were tended, each loom required less attention. Do you agree?
I’m curious to know why you would ever not want to follow the heading syntax, if what you want to produce is a heading?
I’ve sometimes used regular bold for headings, I think mostly because it’s lower friction. I don’t need to think about what level of heading I should use semantically, or how that level actually renders.
over the course of the 19th century the average Lancashire operative roughly doubled the number of machines tended
approximately 1⁄4 of the 50-fold increase in cloth output per worker-hour between 1800 and 1900 was due to each weaver simply operating more looms than they had done initially.
A question jumps out to me: did each individual machine and loom require equal effort at the beginning and end of these periods? It could be that more machines were tended because each machine required less tending.
You quoted the conclusion, not the argument. The argument is based on skepticism that rocking the boat will do much good.
Saying rationality is systematized winning is ridiculous. It ignores that systematized winning is the default, you need to do more than that to be attractive. I think the strongest frame you can use to start really exploring the benefits of rationality is to ask yourself what advantage it has over societal defaults.
I don’t think systematized winning is the default. Some people follow societal defaults and win systematically, but I think that more people follow societal defaults and just do pretty okay.
It is great to have the flexibility to go where you feel like going, and do what you feel like doing, in any order, and even bypass things entirely if you are so inclined.
It sounds like someone who enjoyed the first half of Final Fantasy VI, but not so much the second half, might not be a good fit for Octopath Traveler. Does that seem accurate to you?
Thanks! “It’s nonequilibrium” feels like it points at my specific mistake. Apparently my intuitions don’t currently always remember to consider that question.
One solution to that problem is that when the rock is on the bottom of the lake, it exerts more force on that part of the bottom of the lake than is exerted at other places. By contrast, when the rock is still in the boat, the only thing touching the bottom of the lake is water, and the water pressure is the same everywhere, so the weight of the rock is distributed evenly across the entire lake.
This confuses me because it sounds like the situation “rock is fully submerged and sinking but still near the top of the lake” would be analysed like the situation “rock is on boat”, not “rock is on bottom of lake”. But that would give the wrong answer.
What am I missing?
Aristotle, the philosopher and one of the first story analyzers, recognized that every story contains a three-act structure: Beginning, Middle, and End. The structure roughly corresponds to Olson’s “And”, “But” and “Therefore”.
That doesn’t seem true to me? If I split the Wizard of Oz into three acts, your ABT covers acts 1 (Kansas) and 2 (traveling to the Emerald City) but not 3 (challenging the Wicked Witch of the West).
If I gave an ABT for Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, I think it would do the same. (“...But he’s actually a wizard, therefore he goes off to magic school”. Versus act 1 with the Dursleys, act 2 in Hogwarts, act 3 when they go down the corridor.)
Of course you could split them in other places. Perhaps the beginning is until Dorothy runs away, the middle is until she returns and gets sucked into a twister, and then end is all of her time in Oz. But I don’t think anyone would naturally choose to split it that way, and if you choose a split to make the correspondence work, then the correspondence says nothing at all.
Upon returning to the tribe, the savage starts relating the experience, including the location and time he met the tiger. This describes the introduction to the problem which is the “AND”. After this, he describes what he did to avoid the danger: He escaped to a secure cave. This is the stage when he is trying to find a solution to the problem: the “BUT”. Finally, he explains how he solved the problem by entering a cave to avoid danger: the “Therefore”.
It sounds like the story would be something like “I was walking through the forest AND I saw a tiger BUT I ran into a cave THEREFORE I escaped”? But here the AND introduces conflict, while earlier you said the BUT did that.
It looks like a large chunk of this post is missing? I see four footnotes but only a reference to one of them.
Thanks.
When I saw Gurkenglas’ comment, I had a quick think for “a name for the class of things that “punching” is a metaphor for”, and didn’t come up with anything. But I agree that “sanctions” fits, so thanks for supplying that word.
Still, I’m basically going to ignore this criticism. Not that it’s necessarily unfair or incorrect or anything. (It doesn’t strike me as particularly salient. But I may be atypical, or I may be too close to be objective.)
But I’m not confident I could have reliably anticipated it without also anticipating a bunch of other potential criticisms that would seem similarly important. And I have a hard enough time writing something that satisfies myself. I don’t want to add more prune.
As an aside: I assume it’s just an oversight, but I would prefer if you link your copy back to the original, since it’s publicly listed.
I was thinking of actions, not motivations. If Alice wants to convince people to punch Bob, then her motivations (punishment, protection, deterrence, restoration) will be relevant to what sort of arguments she makes and whether other people are likely to agree. But I don’t think they’re particularly relevant to the contents of this post.
that’s very different from the decisions philh is talking about.
So, I’ve had the feeling from all of your comments on this thread that you think I’m talking about something different from what I think I’m taking about. I’ve not felt like going to the effort of teasing out the confusion, and I still don’t. But I would like to make it clear that I do not endorse this statement.
To be clear, I think this is a good (prosocial) way for individuals to act. I’m not trying to advocate that we should make it a community norm.
But I’m unconvinced by this particular failure mode.
if there is a norm like this in place, Alice always has a strong incentive to pretend that she is punching based on some generally accepted theory, and that the only thing that needs arguing is the application of this theory to Bob (point 2).
Surely this incentive exists anyway for Alice? There’s no existing norm against what I propose.
she will almost certainly be able to convincingly pass it off as such.
I don’t see why this would be. At least not any general principle that her readers will be familiar with and agree with, which is what would be required.
I’m not suggesting that after Alice publishes part (2), people who don’t think “punching Bob is better than the alternatives” should punch Bob. Alice doesn’t just need to convince people that there is an argument for punching Bob, she needs to convince people to punch Bob.
I agree with Raemon here. It would be good to think about ambiguous cases in advance, and I like the idea that fiction is one way of doing so.
But ambiguous cases are still going to come up, and you need to have some way of dealing with them. (And if you deal with them by never punching anyone, then you’re encouraging bad actors to seek them out.)
Another example would be rooster teeth. They have a bunch of stuff on YouTube, but at least some content that’s exclusive to their site. (I’m specifically thinking of the latest season of RWBY, I doubt know if there’s other examples.)