Raemon

• Raemon12 Dec 2018 1:41 UTC

  8 points

  on: Should ethi­cists be in­side or out­side a pro­fes­sion?

  (This is the last of the re-re­leased se­ries of Eliezer posts on bioethics)

• Raemon11 Dec 2018 23:35 UTC

  9 points

  on: Norms of Mem­ber­ship for Vol­un­tary Groups

  I like this col­lec­tion of paradigms as a re­source, thanks.

  I didn’t know what Kaizen meant, and think it’d be handy to ei­ther give it a more com­mon­place name, or briefly ex­plain the name choice.

• Raemon11 Dec 2018 23:30 UTC

  2 points

  on: LW Up­date 2018-11-22 – Abridged Comments

  Up­date:

  We’ve tweaked a bunch of pa­ram­e­ters on the abridg­ing func­tion, and added user set­tings as a safety valve.

  This re­mains an over­all pretty ex­per­i­men­tal fea­ture, and I wouldn’t be sur­prised if there turns out be a bet­ter way to ac­com­plish the same goals (Tay­mon had listed a few good con­tenders). But for the im­me­di­ate fu­ture it should be at least a bit less ag­gres­sive.

  • Com­ments now load about twice as much con­tent by de­fault.

  • High karma com­ments load about 40% more than they pre­vi­ously did.

  • The thresh­old for high-karma com­ment is now 10 in­stead of 20

  • Com­ments from the past two days get the high-karma-trun­ca­tion-amount

  • Users have two ad­di­tional set­tings, one to turn off trun­ca­tion on post pages, one to turn off trun­ca­tion on the home page (where trun­ca­tion is serv­ing a fairly differ­ent pur­pose)

• Raemon11 Dec 2018 22:47 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: cousin_it's comment on: What is “So­cial Real­ity?”

  It’s an ex­am­ple, but I don’t think it’s in­clu­sive.

  For ex­am­ple, in highly con­trar­ian cir­cles, so­cial re­al­ity may even be anti-con­for­mity (which is maybe a kind of con­for­mity, but if some­one just hears so­cial re­al­ity de­scribed as “con­for­mity” that won’t be an ob­vi­ous in­ter­pre­ta­tion)

  So­cial re­al­ity also in­cludes things like how sta­tus-is-as­signed and what be­hav­iors are re­warded and pun­ished, and other prop­er­ties.

• Raemon11 Dec 2018 22:20 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: cousin_it's comment on: What is “So­cial Real­ity?”

  Con­for­mity doesn’t quite cover the nu­ances here. (I don’t think the an­swers so far cover the breadth of what I meant. I think if Ben­quo ex­panded his en­try it’ll end up ex­plain­ing some of the nuts and bolts here)

  I think this link is cur­rently the best ex­pla­na­tion that ex­ists on­line:

  https://​since­ri­ously.fyi/​so­cial-re­al­ity/​

• Raemon11 Dec 2018 22:16 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Sniffnoy's comment on: East Coast Ra­tion­al­ist Megameetup 2018

  The ear­liest con­tender for “East Coast Megameetup” was the 2012 Sols­tice, al­though it was not billed as such. (There was a non-Sols­tice Megameetup billed as such a few months later in 2013, fol­lowed by the first ac­tual Sols­tice Megameetup in 2013)

  :P

• Raemon11 Dec 2018 20:46 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: jessica.liu.taylor's comment on: Play­ing Politics

  I think there is a lot of ir­ra­tional para­noia go­ing on with pushes to­wards secrecy

  I think the para­noia is ba­si­cally en­tirely ra­tio­nal. Sev­eral peo­ple have listed a va­ri­ety of threats rang­ing from (at one ex­treme) death threats, and much more com­monly, mild so­cial dis­ap­proval that just makes it harder to ac­com­plish things.

  This doesn’t mean there aren’t benefits to trans­parency. But I think the threats are gen­er­ally well un­der­stood, and if you want (your­self, or oth­ers) to get the benefits of trans­parency you to need to ac­tu­ally do a lot of so­cial in­fras­truc­ture work to alle­vi­ate those costs.

  This is an im­por­tant and worth­while pro­ject, but even within the ra­tio­nal­ity com­mu­nity, “mild so­cial dis­ap­proval that is de­mor­al­iz­ing and makes it harder to ac­com­plish things” is still a prob­lem that needs to be ac­tively ad­dressed in or­der for trans­parency benefits to scale.

• Raemon11 Dec 2018 10:36 UTC

  8 points

  in reply to: Davidmanheim's comment on: How Old is Smal­lpox?

  Thanks!

  Cu­ri­ous if you could ex­plain molec­u­lar clock anal­y­sis like I’m five? Your ar­gu­ment here sounds plau­si­ble but I’d still be in­ter­ested to get a bet­ter han­dle on that.

[Question] How Old is Smal­lpox?

• Raemon10 Dec 2018 1:03 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Taymon Beal's comment on: LW Up­date 2018-11-22 – Abridged Comments

  Oh, yeah that makes sense.

• Raemon9 Dec 2018 23:33 UTC

  17 points

  in reply to: Benquo's comment on: Tran­shu­man­ists Don’t Need Spe­cial Dispositions

  I ba­si­cally agree with this. I once went to a tran­shu­man­ist con­fer­ence and at­ten­dees I talked to seemed at least a bit like this.

• Raemon9 Dec 2018 23:31 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Taymon Beal's comment on: LW Up­date 2018-11-22 – Abridged Comments

  Click­ing on com­ment ex­pands all com­ments be­low it. We don’t cur­rently ex­pand com­ments above it be­cause that changes your screen po­si­tion which can be di­s­ori­ent­ing, al­though i could imag­ine chang­ing my mind about that

• Raemon9 Dec 2018 21:43 UTC

  5 points

  on: LW Up­date 2018-11-22 – Abridged Comments

  I was talk­ing with some­one about why we did the abridg­ing-com­ments thing, and re­al­ized it was prob­a­bly bet­ter to write up those rea­sons pub­li­cly so oth­ers could en­gage or refer­ence them:

  First, quick up­date: if you type “ctrl-F” or “cmd-F”, it’ll au­to­ex­pand all com­ments (this is so that peo­ple try­ing to search for a given phrase au­to­mat­i­cally get the be­hav­ior they want). [Note: this doesn’t cur­rently ex­pand com­ments that are col­lapsed be­cause of low karma, which I cur­rently lean to­wards chang­ing]

  Se­cond: I’m not at all con­fi­dent the cur­rent setup is op­ti­mal, but here’s what I was think­ing about that led to it:

  There’s a few trade­offs we could make with the com­ments. Ob­vi­ously, leav­ing them ex­panded-by-de­fault makes it eas­ier to read an en­tire thread if you’re already com­mit­ted to do­ing that.

  But auto-ex­pan­sion is im­plic­itly mak­ing a choice on which di­rec­tion to nudge peo­ple. (It’s a differ­ent choice de­pend­ing on whether you’re sort­ing com­ments by top karma, or most re­cent, or old­est). Whichever way you’re sort­ing com­ments, de­fault-ex­panded means that if you’re quickly pe­rus­ing the thread and _not_ com­mit­ted to read­ing through the whole thing, you ba­si­cally just get to read the first cou­ple con­ver­sa­tions, and those con­ver­sa­tions aren’t nec­es­sar­ily the ones most rele­vant to you.

  This be­comes es­pe­cially bad on huge threads where it’s just im­pos­si­ble to read ev­ery­thing, but even on a mid-length thread it can get a bit tire­some to read through look­ing for gems.

  This has an effect not just on peo­ple’s read­ing ex­pe­rience, but on what sort of fol­lowup-com­ments we’re in­cen­tiviz­ing.

  If some­one writes a mediocre com­ment that ends up sorted last, but some­one else makes an in­sight­ful re­ply to it, it ends up buried and less en­gaged with. Mean­while peo­ple some­times end up re­ply­ing to a top-karma com­ment (that has noth­ing to do with their new com­ment) just to give it a chance of be­ing seen.

  Put an­other way:

  Any choice you make about the com­ments sec­tion will dic­tate what con­tent peo­ple ex­pe­rience in the first minute or so, which in turn shapes what dis­cus­sions peo­ple are in­cen­tivized to have, and my cur­rent guess is that it’s bet­ter to al­low a breadth first search (while still pro­vid­ing tools that make ex­panded all com­ments pretty easy for peo­ple that want that)

• Raemon9 Dec 2018 2:49 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: Chris_Leong's comment on: What is “So­cial Real­ity?”

  Nod.

  But in this case, ba­si­cally I mean “the peo­ple around here who use the term so­cial re­al­ity, what do you mean by it?” (Ideally, as com­pre­hen­sively as pos­si­ble, such that this is a rea­son­ably good post for peo­ple to read to get a han­dle on it).

  (I think one good use of ques­tions it the gen­eral class of “peo­ple who use this jar­gon term, please write a nice ex­pla­na­tion of it. Ob­vi­ously only peo­ple fa­mil­iar with the jar­gon term can do so)

LW Up­date 2018-12-06 – All Posts Page, Ques­tions Page, Posts Item rework

• Raemon8 Dec 2018 20:40 UTC

  5 points

  on: GraphQL tu­to­rial for LessWrong and Effec­tive Altru­ism Forum

  Thanks for writ­ing this up! I’ve added it to the LW Open Source se­quence.

• Raemon8 Dec 2018 20:31 UTC

  18 points

  in reply to: JenniferRM's comment on: Tran­shu­man­ists Don’t Need Spe­cial Dispositions

  The mo­ti­va­tion for the cur­rent set of re­post­ings is sim­ply that the posts had never been on LessWrong (and this post wasn’t even on Yud­kowsky.net) and it seemed nice to get them in a more ac­cessible place. (I hadn’t ac­tu­ally read this one)

  There is one more es­say from the mini-se­quence, com­ing Mon­day.

  While I think this is mostly old-hat to longterm LW read­ers, I do think it’s still rele­vant out­side of our bub­ble.

• Raemon8 Dec 2018 18:04 UTC

  2 points

  on: Book Re­view—Other Minds: The Oc­to­pus, the Sea, and the Deep Ori­gins of Consciousness

  How con­fi­dent are we that Oc­to­puses can rec­og­nize in­di­vi­d­ual hu­mans, as op­posed to “a small num­ber of out­lier Oc­to­puses can do so?”

[Question] What is “So­cial Real­ity?”

• Raemon8 Dec 2018 6:10 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: riceissa's comment on: LW Up­date 2018-12-06 – Table of Con­tents and Q&A

  We’re definitely plan­ning for things in this vein.