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(Is minimum wage a good thing? Should I adopt a paleo or keto or vegan or Shangri-la diet? What do we really know and not know about the historical Jesus?)
I would point out that the three examples you’ve listed are of three different categories. The first, “Is minimum wage a good thing?” has a significant value component. Do you value whether people have money? How much inefficiency are you willing to trade off in the economy in order to ensure that people have a certain amount of minimum spending power from work? Without knowing your specific values, I cannot answer whether a minimum wage is or is not a good thing.
Your second question, “What kind of diet should I adopt?” has significant dependencies on your physiology. Are you gluten-allergic? Do you have allergies to nuts? Do you have diabetes? Kidney issues? All of these things impact which of the listed diets (if any) is going to be best for you. And this is just from a strictly physiological perspective—it leaves aside issues of preferences (i.e. maybe veganism isn’t really right for you if you really like bacon).
The third question, “What do we really know and not know about the historical Jesus?” is answered, to a first approximation, by Wikipedia.
I think you’re really asking for three sites. For the first question, there should be a site where people can debate moral values. Ideally, this site would taboo “good” and “bad” altogether, and force people to frame value judgments in the context of the value systems that result in those judgments, allowing others to see the criteria by which those judgments are made.
For the second question, a site that provides guidelines rather than recommendations would be helpful. Ideally this site would present a way for you to submit details about what your medical situation is and what your dietary preferences are and then it would output a decision tree that you could use to arrive at a diet that would work best for you.
Finally, for the third site, it’d be something like Wikipedia (only perhaps with better filtering tools to help weed out out unsourced data).
I’m not sure that it’s possible to put together one site to rule them all because the the they’re doing such different things. We’re going from “there might not even be a ‘right’ answer” to “there is a right answer but it might be different for every person” to “there is a single, externally verifiable objective truth”. How do you handle that range of epistemologies with a single site?
I was able to use this post when discussing the news with a family member of mine. The example of a one-in-a-million event occurring 8 times a month (plus increasing global interconnection ensuring that we hear about these events every time they do occur) was especially helpful in helping debiasing someone who had read too much of the news.
How about: “What is rationality?” and “Will rationality actually help you if you’re not trying to design an AI?”
Don’t get me wrong. I really like LessWrong. I’ve been fairly involved in the Seattle rationality community. Yet, all the same, I can’t help but think that actual rationality hasn’t really helped me all that much in my everyday life. I can point to very few things where I’ve used a Rationality Technique to make a decision, and none of those decisions were especially high-impact.
In my life, rationality has been a hobby. If I weren’t reading the sequences, I’d be arguing about geopolitics, or playing board games. So, to me, the most open question in rationality is, “Why should one bother? What special claim does rationality have over my time and attention that, say, Starcraft does not?”
Meta note: the actual link URL (https://www.lesswrong.com/out?url=eukaryotewritesblog.com%2F2018%2F12%2F21%2Fspaghetti-towers%2F) results in an error when I click on it.
I don’t know enough about Wistia to say. However, from a cursory examination of their website, I would be skeptical. Wistia is designed for hosting product videos for business. These videos don’t go viral in the same way that PewDiePie’s content does. If Wistia did host PewDiePie’s content my prediction would be that they’d have a deal with PewDiePie where he pays significantly more than he paid YouTube to host his content and, eventually, they’d incur enough controversy and protest to kick him off their platform.
Wistia’s primary business is hosting boring promotional videos for businesses. Why should they put that boring-but-profitable business model at risk to host someone as troublesome as PewDiepPie? Moreover, why should PewDiePie move his videos to Wistia? Despite the controversy, we must remember that the cost that PewDiePie pays to YouTube is negative. YouTube pays PewDiePie (unless he’s been demonetized, in which case the cost to PewDiePie is zero).
I would be willing to bet that if Slate Star Codex got controversial enough to get kicked off Wordpress, then Scott Alexander would have a heck of a time building out his own site. Even if he were a programmer, and even if he knew enough about PHP and Wordpress to build out his own hosting, he’d have to deal with people protesting his new hosting provider. He’d have to deal with people complaining to Patreon and PayPal about his content. He’d have to deal with people launching hacking and DDOS attacks against his site, constantly.
The technology that YouTube provides was hard to build when YouTube started a decade and a half ago, but surely today it’s not a huge challenge.
PDP has 20 billion total views. He doesn’t need traffic from the algorithm suggesting his videos, everyone else is trying to game the algorithm to get redirected by PDP!
The problem is that building a platform to enable those 20-billion views carries enormous fixed costs that only make sense when they are amortized across a truly massive amount of users, both in terms of uploaders and users. Video delivery at scale is one of the most difficult engineering problems out there. The only companies that have mastered it (YouTube, Vimeo, PornHub, Netflix, Amazon) are all billon dollar enterprises.
Sure, PewDiePie could pay to build out his own video service. But would it be as good as YouTube? It’s very doubtful that it would have the level of polish that YouTube offers. YouTube is far more than just tossing up a bunch of .mp4 files on a web server.
Finally, I think you’re underestimating the power of YouTube’s algorithms. When Logan Paul (another YouTube celebrity) got delisted from YouTube, he suffered a massive revenue hit, even though his videos were still on the platform (but not showing up in search results). So I do think that PewDiePie is beholden to the algorithm. I would be willing to bet that if PewDiePie got delisted from YouTube, he would rapidly be forgotten, and would be replaced by the next YouTube celebrity willing to walk the fine line between “outrageous enough to be entertaining” and “so outrageous as to cause offense”.
Edit: Scott Alexander has addressed the part of your question regarding hosting other comedians on his excellent post, Freedom on the Centralized Web. He correctly points out that the initial group of switchers are all going to be people who YouTube has deemed undesirable. However, YouTube deeming people undesirable is an effect. The cause is that these people have offended some powerful group (copyright holders, activists, etc). If all of these people abandon YouTube and start their own platform, the same forces that kicked them off YouTube will ensure that their new platform is starved of funding and respectability. For a good example of this, look at what happened to Gab. I don’t support Gab, but the saga of Gab shows how difficult it really is to set up an entirely independent platform, which supports content that society doesn’t approve of.
I know this is how things are frequently done, but it bothers me. When an issue is officially the jurisdiction of a committee, everyone on the committee is equally entitled to be part of the discussion, and entitled to know what’s going on; having secret side conversations creates a hierarchy between those “in the know” and those who aren’t.
I disagree quite strongly with this. Being part of a discussion is a tax. It’s overhead. It makes perfect sense, in my head, for a committee to split into subcommittees that have responsibility for specialized tasks, but which report back to and are accountable to the primary committee. In fact, I don’t see how else one would accomplish any kind of complex task that requires specialized domain knowledge. And for tasks that don’t require specialized domain knowledge, having everything presented before the committee usually results in needless bikeshedding, as everyone on the committee has to demonstrate their status and worth by proposing a change or critique, in order to show that they’ve considered the proposal and are more than a mere rubber stamp.
Even disregarding things like social signalling, group dynamics, and all the other things that geeks categorize as “social drama”, making everything that is under the jurisdiction of the committee the responsibility of the entire committee is incredibly inefficient, just from a communications perspective. It requires, in networking terms, a “fully connected mesh”, where every node has to be communicating with every other node. It’s much more efficient, even from a communication and information theory perspective, for a committee to break into smaller groups, each of which has responsibility for a specific task or specialization. These groups can then report back to the overall committee, and the overall committee can choose to adopt or reject their ideas without having to go through the expensive process of having the entire committee deliberate on every proposal for every subtask.
I’m on the other side. I prefer word count to read time, because I know approximately how many words per minute I read. The read time calculation that LessWrong uses is approximately 300 words per minute. If you read faster or slower than that, the read times will be off for you.
This is more impactful for people who are slow readers; being told that something is a five minute read and finishing it in three minutes isn’t a big deal. Being told that something is a five minute read and actually taking seven or eight minutes to finish is considerably worse. For this reason I would prefer word count to be the default.
Also, if you use the GreaterWrong viewer, you get the option to choose. You can click on the read time to switch it to word count. Clicking again switches it back.
But why would that be an advantage exclusive to MLP? One could say the same about the Star Wars universe, for example (and indeed, there is a lot of Star Wars fanfiction out there).
This is worth reading for the excellent review of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic.
Note that I said discussion, not engagement. Would your conclusion be the same if a post got relatively few replies, but was upvoted to +100?
Exactly, it’s good enough
No, I don’t think that follows. One of the lessons of Inadequate Equilibria is that both individuals and groups get stuck in situations that are not “good enough” by any measure, simply because no individual has enough “free energy” to force a change to something better.
By this logic, p-values are “good enough” statistics, because the scientific community persists in using them, even though they clearly lead to non-reproducible studies. Selling lifesaving formula in one state and making it illegal to sell across state lines is “good enough” because no one has bothered to change the situation.
To me, Facebook is yet another Inadequate Equilibrium. We don’t use it because it’s good, we use it because that’s where we started out, and no one has enough pull in our community to force a global change. If someone manages to change it at a global level in the rationalist community, we would look back upon our usage of Facebook and wonder why we ever bothered to use such a terrible tool.
I think Facebook is good enough for our purposes
Facebook’s treatment of recurring events stands as a counterexample to that claim. For one-off events, Facebook is fine, but the moment you have recurring events, then things become difficult. Facebook’s search shows events in a random order, and when you’re on an individual event’s page, you have no indication whether the event is a recurring. You also have no idea whether the event page you’re on is the latest event, or an old event.
Then you have the problem with inviting people. Facebook has limits on how many people you can invite to an event, even if the people you’re inviting have all “friended” or “followed” the page that is inviting them. This sometimes leads to people missing invitations, which leads to them searching for events, which goes back to the search problem described above.
And that’s just the problems with one specific feature of Facebook. I haven’t even touched on the problems that Facebook has with formatting long posts, archiving discussions, finding old discussions, sorting comments, etc. It’s clear to me that Facebook is not fit for purpose as a tool for serious coordination, nor is it meant to be. The only reason we use Facebook is because everyone else is using Facebook, so it’s convenient to post events there because you know there’s a good chance that everyone will be able to see the event once it’s posted.
I have added a note to the top of the essay making it clear that it’s referring to this post.
I would also note that every instance of the word “punch” and “punching” can be replaced by “sanction” or “sanctioning” and the denotational content of the essay would be virtually unchanged. The use of the word “punch” does little but smuggle in the connotations associated with physical violence, in an essay that is ostensibly about sanctions of all sorts, both physical and non-physical.
Edit: I have gone ahead and created a version of the essay with “punch” replaced by “sanction”. I copied the essay into a new markdown document, fixed the formatting, and then ran
%s/punch/sanction/gin vim. I fixed one resulting spelling error, but other than that I left the document as-is.
I disagree that the spread of printing presses was not constrained by insight. Gutenberg’s innovation was not the invention of the printing press, but rather the invention of a cheap way of making letterforms for the type in the printing press. Prior to Gutenberg, type had to be laboriously carved out of wood, or sculpted out bronze or ceramic. This was very expensive, and the resulting type wore out quickly, making it uneconomical to use for large print runs.
Gutenberg’s innovation was to cast the letterforms out of lead, using a hand mold. This innovation allowed him to produce letterforms that were cheaper, more durable and more efficient, in terms of ink consumption, than woodblock or ceramic letterforms that the Chinese were using. It seems to me that this was the key innovation that allowed the printing press to take off, since without cheap, high quality type, the printing press isn’t actually more economical than hand copying. Indeed, Gutenberg’s method was so successful, it remained state of the art in printing until well into the 20th century, until it was displaced by photolithography.
Babbage and Lovelace had all the key ideas for the modern computer in the 1820’s, but it wasn’t until the 1890 census that somebody wanted to pay for such a thing.
I’m not sure that’s true. One of my friends, for a history of computing course in university, took a deep dive into Babbage’s designs for the difference and analytical engines, and concluded that they weren’t actually all that much like modern (Von Neumann) computing devices at all. The limiting factor on Babbage’s machines was not the fact that nobody wanted to pay for them, but that the necessary precision in manufacturing gears had not yet been achieved. The analytical engine, especially, required thousands of very small and precisely machined gears, and the manufacturing technology for them would not be invented until well into the 20th century.
The tabulators used in the 1890 census were a far cry from anything that Babbage designed. The Census tabulators were, more or less, very fancy sorting and counting machines. They could not do math or logical operations, but they could take a large amount of data, sort it by various fields and count how many records had the given field marked. They made no attempt at generality (unlike Babbage’s inventions and later computers), but instead sought to mechanize one or two algorithms for maximum efficiency.
You may have noticed all the annoying Grammarly adds bouncing around, which is a browser-based spelling/grammar/syntax checker. I wondered about how easily we could detect indications of known-bad-thinking with the same kind of analysis.
Before we go ahead and attempt to build something like Grammarly, but for logical reasoning, shouldn’t we verify that Grammarly actually improves one’s writing? I haven’t used Grammarly itself, but I did use a similar tool, called Hemingway, and I wasn’t terribly impressed with it.
It’s baby steps, but CERN has an open data portal, where you can download raw data from their LHC experiments for your own analysis. The portal also includes the software used to conduct the analysis, so you don’t have to write your own code to process terabytes of LHC collision data.
And to go back to your point about cohesion not necessarily being an unqualified good, South Korean culture (especially its emphasis on one-shot high-stakes exams as a way of determining future life prospects) results in one of the highest suicide rates in the world.