I was actually looking for specific examples, precisely so that we could test our intuitions, rather than just stating our intuitions. Do you happen to have any particular ones in mind?
Said Achmiz
If you ban lying to subjects, a swath of important news becomes impossible to cover.
What would be some examples of this?
Can the process not be automated? Like, sheet music specifies notes, right? And notes are frequencies. And frequencies can be determined by examining a recording by means of appropriate hardware/software (very easily, in the case of digital recordings, I should think). Right? So, is there not some software or something that can do this?
What exactly does the process of generating sheet music involve? Like, how does sheet music happen, in general?
I’m afraid I don’t understand what the “attempted telekinesis” post is talking about…
The “curse of the counterfactual” post, I also don’t really understand. It’s about a… therapy technique? For people who are fixated on certain events in their past?
It seems like this whole discussion is based on using words like “faith” in weird ways, and making statements that sound profound but are actually trivial or tautological (like “the world is exactly as it is”).
Maybe it would help to ask this directly: is “faith” here being used in anything at all like the ordinary sense of the word? (Or, any of the ordinary senses of the word?) Or is this a case of “we’re talking about a weird new concept, but we’re going to use a commonplace word for it”?
So… are you just saying that reality exists, and is not merely shaped by our perceptions?
This is one of the bedrock ideas of LW-style rationality, isn’t it? And what does it have to do with “faith”…?
What would it mean for this to be false?
This is … not the future I hope for. I am probably more futuristic than most of the public, and am excited about things like space colonization and more abundant energy. I am definitely not excited about mind uploading or turning the sun into computonium.
Strongly seconded.
Just so; the correct way is indeed to show the full (zero-based y-axis) chart, then a “zoomed-in” version, with the y-axis mapping clearly indicated. Of course, this takes more effort than just including the one chart; but this is not surprising—doing things correctly often takes more effort than doing things incorrectly!
Would you graph with a line chart? No. And it absolutely would be egregious to use a line chart and then not use a zero-based y-axis.
I’m a big fan of Butterick’s book (and Butterick’s stuff in general), and one of the things I appreciate about his guidelines is that he does well at distinguishing between hard-and-fast rules and mere heuristics or suggestions. For example, here, he correctly says: “In this example, cell borders are unnecessary. In other cases, they can be useful.” (Emphasis mine.)
Butterick’s example table has a mere four rows and columns. A larger table simply can’t do without some visual delineation. (But take a look at the linked table, and you may note that it doesn’t have lines[1] either—it has alternating row background colors. Meanwhile, the columns need no delineation, because the human eye is better at vertical alignment than horizontal alignment!)
Agreed (except about the “this is fine” part). The arguments are unconvincing and the recommendations seem bad. (In particular, the suggestion that the “vary between $50T and $53T” graph shouldn’t be drawn with a zero-based y-axis is egregious.)
That… does not seem like a historically accurate account of the formation and growth of cities.
I don’t say that you’re wrong, necessarily, but what would you say is an example of something that “has the form of a Ponzi scheme”, but is actually a change that enables permanently faster growth?
This is in reference to the Luddites, I suppose? If so, “some people’s jobs being automated” is rather a glib description of the early effects of industrialization. There was considerable disruption and chaos, which, indeed, is “doom”, of more or less the sort that the Luddites predicted. (They never claimed that the world would end as a result of the new machines, as far as I know.)
Well, people prophesying doom in general have a pretty poor track record, so if that’s all we know, our prior should be that any such person is likely to be very wrong.
Of course, most people throughout history who have prophesied doom have had in mind a religious sort of doom. People prophesying doom from technological advance specifically have a better track record. The Luddites were correct, for example. (Their chosen remedy left something to be desired, of course; but that is common, sadly. Identifying the problem does not, by itself, suffice to solve the problem.) And we’ve had quite a bit of doom from technological advance. Indeed, as technology has advanced, we’ve had more and more doom from that advance.
So, on the whole, I’d say that applying the reasoning I describe to people prophesying doom from technological advance is that there is probably something to what they say, even if their specific predictions are not spot-on.
If the premise is a world where nobody ever does any scams or tries to swindle anyone out of money, then it’s so far removed from our world that I don’t rightly know how to interpret any of the included commentary on human nature / psychology / etc. Lying for personal gain is one of those “human universals”, without which I wouldn’t even recognize the characters as anything resembling humans.
Even setting aside such textual anomalies, why is this a good argument? As I noted in a sibling comment to yours, my response assumes that Ponzi schemes have never happened in this world, because otherwise we’d simply identify the Spokesperson’s plan as a Ponzi scheme! The reasoning that I described is only necessary because we can’t say “ah, a Ponzi scheme”!
The opposite approach of Said Achmiz, namely appealing very concretely to the object level, misses the point as well: the post is not trying to give practical advice about how to spot Ponzi schemes. “We thus defeat the Spokesperson’s argument on his own terms, without needing to get into abstractions or theory—and we do it in one paragraph.” is not the boast you think it is.
If the post describes a method for analyzing a situation, and that described method is not in fact the correct method for analyzing that situation (and is actually much worse than the correct method), then this is a problem with the post.
(Also, your description of my approach as “appealing very concretely to the object level”, and your corresponding dismissal of that approach, is very ironic! The post, in essence, argues precisely for appealing concretely to the object level; but then if we actually do that, as I demonstrated, we render the post moot.)
I agree that this investigation was worthwhile and important.
But is it a case of “lying to interview subjects”? That is what we’re talking about, after all. Did Bly even interview anyone, in the course of her investigation?
Undercover investigative journalism has some interesting ethical conundrums of its own, but it’s not clear what it has to do with interviews, or lying to the subjects thereof…