I’ve been a LessWrong organizer since 2011, with roughly equal focus on the cultural, practical and intellectual aspects of the community. My first project was creating the Secular Solstice and helping groups across the world run their own version of it. More recently I’ve been interested in improving my own epistemic standards and helping others to do so as well.
Raemon(Raymond Arnold)
Karma: 37,501
“Casual norm trade/interactions” does seem like most of the obvious example-space. The generator for this thought comes from chatting with Andrew Critch. See this post for some reference: http://acritch.com/deserving-trust/
I think a bunch of discussion of acausal trade might be better framed as “simulation trade.” It’s hard to point to “acausal” trade in the real world because, well, everything is at least kinda iterated and at least kinda causally connected. But, there’s plenty of places where the thing you’re doing is mainly trading with a simulated partner. And this still shares some important components with literal-galaxy-brains making literal acausal trade.
Nod. There is still, like a lot more than there historically has been.
I think this is probably right, but I also think the sequences generally made a solid case for that from a few different angles, so it was already pretty established on LW by the time this post came out.
FYI, I’m totally fine calling things religion. It’s the actual structure of religion (i.e. community centered around intergenerational memetic ideology) I think no longer works.
My point isn’t that atomization is good, but that it makes different sets of things practical/impractical for creating community. (i.e. I think most people would rather get their community from Dancing or Crossfit groups or whatever than from a humanist religion. Ideological conformity is actually a key ingredient for religion working, and it’s incompatible with the kinds of humanism you probably want).
(I have a bunch more thoughts/models here, may not have time to articulate them. But, a lot of people have attempted the thing you’re articulating here and my current bet is that this thing doesn’t work)
To be clear, I think there’s a huge problem humanity is facing about how to do community and various social structure in this era, I just don’t think the solution is to try to do religion-structured-things.
Adding a detail to the other comments saying “robustness is hard” – I heard from someone working at a Self Driving Car company that right now, you basically need training data to cover every edge case individually. i.e. the car can drive, and it knows when to break normally, but it doesn’t know about school buses and how those are subtly different. Or it doesn’t know about snow. etc.
So you end up getting specific whitelisted streets that auto-automobiles are allowed to drive on, and need to slowly expand the whitelisted area with exhaustive data and testing.
(But, there are totally specific neighborhoods in SF where self-driving cars are legal and in-use)
As the guy who created the Secular Solstice, helped run Sunday Assembly NYC and has thought a bunch about humanist religion, I feel fairly doomy about this path. I think the Way of Religion is fading – organized religion was a response to one set of societal pressures, and we now live in a different set of societal pressures.
My impression is that hardcore conservative religions are still doing okay, but that more scientifically minded or liberal religions are mostly losing membership. Atomic individualism, the rise of the internet and other modern forces make religion a lot less compelling than it used to be. There are lessons to be learned from religion, but simply copying them doesn’t work. Religion-as-we-know-it is built around society being a lot more stable/persistent than it now is.
(also, doublechecking if you’ve read the sequences on the Craft and the Community, which are the relevant background reading here)
Hey Flagland, I feel a bit bad about how this played out, but after thinking more and reading this, the mod team has decided to full restrict your commenting permissions. I don’t really expect you posting about your interests here on shortform to be productive for you or for LW.
We’re also experimenting more with moderating in public so it’s clearer to everyone where are our boundaries are. (I think expect this to feel a bit more intense as a person-getting-moderated, but to probably be better overall for transparency)
My whole life I’ve been ranting about how incomprehensibly evil the world is. Maybe I’m the only one who thinks things shouldn’t be difficult in the way they are. [...] The reaction to my decades of online rants and hate-filled screeds has been very consistent: the Silence or the Bodysnatchers. Meaning no reaction, or an extremely negative one (I’m not allowed to link either).
There seems to be a deep willingness among normal people to accept evil, which may be the source of their power.
To be clear, I think your topics have been totally fine things to think about and discuss on LessWrong. The problem is that, well, ranting and hate-filled screeds just aren’t very productive most of the time. If it seemed like you were here to think clearly and figure out solutions, that’d be a pretty different situation.
I think the amount of investment into a serious hobby is basically similar to a career change, so I don’t really draw a distinction. It’s enough investment, and has enough of a track-record of burnout, that I think it’s totally worth strategizing about based on your own aptitudes.
(To be clear, I think “try it out for a month and see if it feels good to you” is a fine thing to do, my comments here are mostly targeted at people who are pushing themselves to do it out of consequentialism reasoning/obligation)
My beliefs here are based on hearing from various researchers over the years what timescale good research takes. I’ve specifically heard that it’s hard to evaluate research output for less than 6 months of work, and that 1-2 years is honestly more realistic.
John Wentworth claims, after a fair amount of attempting to train researchers and seeing how various research careers have gone, that people have about 5 years worth of bad ideas they need to get through before they start producing actually possibly-good-ideas. I’ve heard secondhand from another leading researcher that a wave of concentrated effort they oversaw from the community didn’t produce any actually novel results. My understanding is Eliezer thinks there basically been no progress on the important problems.
My own epistemic-status here is secondhand, and there may be other people who disagree with the above take. but my sense is that there’s been a lot of “try various ways of recruiting and training researchers over the years”, and that it’s at least nontrivial to get meaningful work done.
I don’t think the kind of work we’re talking about here is really possible without something close to ‘making a career if it’ - at least being a sustained, serious hobby for years.
One distinction I want to make here is between people who are really excited to work on AI Alignment (or, any particular high-impact-career), and who are motivated to stick with it for years (but who don’t seem sufficiently competent), vs people who are doing it out of a vague sense of obligation, don’t feel excited (and don’t seem sufficiently competent).
For the first group, a) I can imagine them improving over time, b) if they’re excited about it and find it fulfilling, like, great! It’s the second group I feel most worried about, and I really worry about the vague existential angst driving people to throw themselves into careers they aren’t actually well suited for. (and for creative research I suspect you do need a degree of enthusiasm in order to make it work)
maybe I should have commented, was that it seemed to model things as like, there’s different types of people; different types of people work on different things
I do think people are in fact importantly different here. I think there exist unhealthy and inaccurate ways to think about it, but you need to contend with it somehow.
The way I normally think of this is “people have talent coefficients, which determine the rate at which they improve at various skills. You might have a basketball talent-coefficient of ”.1“, a badmitton talent coefficient of ”.5”, a drawing coefficient of “1” (this happens to be roughly true for me personally). So, an hour spent deliberate practicing drawing will result in 10x as much skill gain as an hour practicing basketball.
This is further complicated by “Learning is lumpy. The first 20 hours spent learning a thing typically has more low-hanging fruit than hours 21-50.” (but also you can jump around to related skillsets gaining different types of related skills).
Also, the most determining factor (related to but not quite-the-same as talent coefficients) is “how much do you enjoy various things?”. If you really like programming, you might be more motivated to spend hundreds of hours on it even if your rate-of-skill-gain is low, and that may result in you becoming quite competent.
The problem with doing original research is that feedback loops are often kinda bad, which makes it hard to improve.
This is all to say: different people are going to be differently suited for different things. The exact math of how that shakes out is somewhat complex. If you are excited to put a lot of hours in, it may be worth even if you don’t seem initially great at it. But there are absolutely some people who will struggle so long and hard with something that it just really doesn’t make sense to make a career out of it (especially when there are alternative careers worth pursuing).
I do think “if you’ve never been rude, you’re probably not being rude enough.”
I think rudeness/politeness isn’t the same thing as trust.
I started to write some off-the-cuff stuff expanding on this point but realized it was actually gnarlier than I realized and am gonna hold off till I’ve thought more.
fwiw I think gears’ comment is sort of directionally right.
I think there is something important Oli and John were correct to be defending on LessWrong, and epistemic culture, and prevent things from moving towards higher simulacra levels, etc. But, also the LessWrong-style way of doing things feels kinda stunted at coordination.
There’s sort of a package deal that (much of) society offers on how to do moral coordination (see: “Simulacrum 3 As Stag-Hunt Strategy”), which has a lot of problems, both epistemically, strategically and morally. My sense is that LW-er types are often trying to roll their own coordination schemes, and this will (hopefully) eventually result in something better and epistemic/lawfully grounded. But in the meantime it means there’s a lot of obvious tools we don’t have access to (including “interfacing morally/coordinationaly with much of the rest of the world”, which is one of the key points of, well, morality and coordination).
I endorse making the overall tradeoff, but it seems like it should come with more awareness that… like, we’re making a tradeoff by having our memetic immune system trigger this hard. Not just uniformly choosing a better option.
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Followup note: there’s a distinction between “what is right for LessWrong” and “what is right for the broader rationalsphere on EA Forum and Twitter and stuff.” I think Oli had criticized both, separately. LessWrong is optimizing especially hard for epistemics/intellectual-progress as much as possible, and I think that’s correct. It’s less obvious to me whether it’s bad that this post got 600 karma on EA Forum. In my dream world, the whole EAcosystem has better coordination and/or morality tech that doesn’t route with Simulacrum 3 signaling games that are vulnerable to co-option. But I think we’re still in an uncanny valley of coordination theory/practice and not sure what the right approach is for non-LW discourse, in the meantime.
I don’t actually have a strong belief that the OP is good at the goal it’s trying to accomplish. Just, the knee-jerk reaction to it feels like it has a missing mood to me.
I downvoted, not because I necessarily thought the topic was bad, but because I’d kinda prefer “EA community stuff” to live on the EA Forum (where I see you also posted). I realize the line between rationalist community and EA community is blurry sometimes, and you maybe could have written a similar post about rationalist communities. But I think there are some subtle distinctions in norms and culture that are better to not blur together more.
This seems to carve reality somewhere, but a) I agree with Dweomite’s take on how it doesn’t feel like it carves rudeness specifically). b) also… does this actually describe something other than “defecting”? (like, defecting normally is “I took an action that got me points at your expense because you cooperated,” which seems essentially like what you were saying here? Not sure I’ve parsed it properly)
I’m linking Turntrout’s “What Counts as Defection” (without quite remembering whether it supports my point or runs against it) since it seems like a useful reference.
Perhaps yet another thing I was unclear about:
The whole reason I like the concept of rudeness as a game mechanic is that it’s a fairly soft punishment, and this allows you to be so rude things when the situation calls for it.
Okay, sounds like this was less clear than I’d hoped. I added these paragraphs to the post. Not sure if they quite answer you or Dagon’s implied question, but hopefully help a bit:
I’m writing this post because I was writing another coordination/epistemic-norms post, and I found myself wanting to write the sentence “If you do [X thing], it should be considered a bit rude. If you do [X’ worse version of X thing], it’s more rude.” And then I realized this was resting on some underlying assumptions about coordination-culture that might not be obvious to everyone. (i.e. that it’s good to have some things be considered “rude”)
I come from a game-design background. In many games, there are multiple resources, and there are multiple game-mechanics for spending those resources, or having them interact with each other. You might have life-points, you might have some kind of “money” (which can store value and then be spent in arbitrary quantities), or renewable resources (like grains that grow back every year, and spoil if you leave them too long).
Many good games have rich mechanics that you can fine-tune, to shape the player’s experience. A flexible mechanic gives you knobs-to-turn, to make some actions more expensive or cheaper.
The invention of “money” in real life was a useful coordination mechanic.
The invention of “vague social capital that you accumulate doing high status respectable things, and which you can lose by doing low status unrespectable things” predates money by a long time, and is still sometimes useful in ways that money is not.
A feeling-of-rudeness is one particular flavor of what “spending-down social capital” can feel like, from the inside of a social interaction.
Just wanted to say I think this was an interesting experiment to run. (I’m not sure I think the data here is clean enough to directly imply anything, since among other things EAF and LW have different audiences. But, still think this was a neat test of the mods)