The idea sounds interesting. I have absolutely no idea what quality of work should I realistically expect.
Looking at the subreddit didn’t help me with this question: I only see people debating money and type of work, but I can’t see any samples.
Yeah, maybe it’s cheap enough to simply try it. Maybe 3× spend $5 on one hour of someone’s work, and then decide whether it’s worth it on average.
I don’t remember the exact quote, but some sculptor described their art as “the statue is already there inside the stone, I just remove the extra pieces”.
And, I guess we can agree that this statement is in some technical sense true, but of course completely misses the point (intentionally, to sound deep). More precisely, it could be said that the essence of the statue—the information that makes it different from a random piece of stone or whatever material—was all added by the act of “removing the extra pieces”, and none of it was there at the beginning (except for the trivial constraints, such as that the original stone must be larger than the intended statue).
My question is, how much “the network is already there, ML just removes the extra pieces” is a statement of this type?
I hate Gmail, because even if I don’t use it, as long as people around me are using it, it is going to read most of my private correspondence anyway. (In other words, it is hard to fight an enemy when people around you volunteer to be their hostages.)
Perhaps I should keep one Gmail address and one non-Gmail address, and make it known (in the Gmail signature) that I always reply to Gmail by Gmail, to non-Gmail by non-Gmail, and that I check my non-Gmail account daily, but my Gmail account only once in a week. -- But even this seems like an extra work for me, that would bring little benefit.
even if you work together to increase the size of the pie, the question of how the pie will be divided always stays pressing and relevant.
Yes, the choice between “greater part of a pie” and “part of a greater pie” is somewhat a false dilemma; some people obviously have both. And when precisely those people tell you “please focus on making the pie grow, and forget about how it is distributed; don’t worry, everything will turn out okay at the end”, yeah, it sounds quite self-serving. It is obvious how they would benefit both from you making the pie grow and you not caring how the pie is distributed.
Funny thing is, if you take the opposite perspective… if you honestly believe that people who ignore the distribution of the pie and focus on making it grow, will somehow magically end up with a large part of the pie… then, the observed facts [people having the largest parts of the growing pie telling everyone that their mindset is focusing on making the pie grow] seem to match your belief, too.
And of course, yet another explanation is survivor bias: Some people focus on making the pie grow. Some of them succeed. Some of those also accidentally succeed at capturing a large part of the value they created… and those are the ones whose opinions get amplified because they are now the important people. Yes they are sincere, but no they do not describe a realistic picture. Anecdote is filtered data.
Or perhaps this is a case of the law of equal and opposite advice: Maybe some people are naturally focused on getting the greater part of the pie… and it may be very useful for them to realize that helping the pie grow (and grabbing the part they helped grow) is a viable strategy. Meanwhile, some other people are naturally focused on helping the pie grow, and those would benefit from advice how not to let all that added value slip away from their fingers.
It seems to me that the nice-but-not-naive approach is to take care of growing the pie while also taking care that you get a certain share of it. -- Yes, this approach deserves to be called nice. A nasty one would focus exclusively on taking the larger part of the pie, assuming that most likely there are enough nice and naive people who will focus on making it grow, especially if you ask them nicely and appeal to their sense of hope, or if there are not enough such people then everything is doomed regardless of what you do.
For example, in the context of employment, clearly understand the difference between co-owners and employees. If you are an employee, your salary is the only part of the pie you will ever get. When your boss tells you “hey, if we get this project right, the company will be a fantastic success”, remember that he is talking about his part of the pie, not yours. Yes, he may become a millionaire, and he is probably a nice and hard-working guy who deserves it. None of that is going to pay your bills or feed your children, though. (Well, maybe unless you plan to marry him. But even then I’d strongly suggest to marry him before he becomes a millionaire.)
A possible solution is to make a deal about splitting the pie first, and then you can fully focus on growing it. Even that is not 100% reliable—people can have multiple projects at the same time, so after making the deal about fair share, your partner can leave most work to you, and focus on his other projects that seem to promise greater rewards per unit of effort (remember this if you happen to talk to a venture capitalist) -- but it is already a better deal than you would get in most situations. Perhaps cooperatives should be a more popular form of ownership, but coordination is hard.
I would trust Silicon Valley billionaires more if they promoted things like UBI. But looking at their anti-salary-growth cartels, I guess even the idea of paying their employees fair market wage is too futuristic for them.
Even if the status game is zero-sum, that alone doesn’t necessarily imply how much the people at bottom will suffer. There is some necessary part, like, of course, anyone would resent being at the bottom. But there are all kinds of unnecessary suffering that higher-status people are free to inflict on the lower-status, simply because it is enjoyable for the higher-status, and if you care about it too much, you signal that you are not sufficiently high-status yourself. There is an option to treat the poor with dignity; we just collectively decided not to take it, because it is more fun to poke them and laugh. (We especially like to laugh at people who happen to be both at the bottom of the social ladder, and on the opposite side of whatever political divide we perceive.)
Ha, good point! I once met a queen and I addressed her “Your Majesty”. My only excuse is that these rules are older than both of us, so it’s not like I was obeying her recent whim inspired by Twitter.
Last time I met a priest, I called him by his first name, because he was my former classmate. I don’t remember talking to a priest before that. My guess is that if I met a priest today, I would likely call him “father X”, simply because that’s how he would likely be introduced to me.
To me, religious and aristocratic titles are “job names”, kinda like calling people “professor” or “general”. And they are supposed to imply higher status… at least in eyes of those who respect the job. (Also, they are not pronouns, so the usage is a bit different. In the previous paragraphs I have described the queen as “her” and the priest as “him”.)
It will allow us to decouple “successful, because located on a trade route” from “successful, because of libertarian environment”.
Other comments have mentioned that it may be difficult to distinguish between “this business exists because Prospera is so awesome” and “this business already existed, but moved to Prospera because of lower taxes”. Or perhaps, for businesses that do not exist today, between “this business started because of Prospera” and “this business would have started regardless, but pays lower taxes because it is in Prospera”.
That is, data about successful businesses that will appear in Prospera will not necessarily tell us what would have happened otherwise. And will not allow us to predict what would have happened if we had fifty Prosperas instead—would we have fifty times as many successful companies, or just the same number of companies, and fifty cities competing for them by offering even lower taxes… maybe also reducing employee rights, etc.
in the event of any collapse, it is uncanny how quickly hierarchy and patriarchy is restored
Historically, patriarchy and deviancy can easily coexist, e.g. in ancient Greece or Rome.
LGB people don’t reproduce, and yet their numbers grow.
Not so sure about the B.
(Plus there is this evolutionary hypothesis that L and G help their siblings raise children.)
Well, for the record, I don’t hate you either. (Yay, cheap utilons!)
that people wanting to be referred to with neopronouns like “xe” are usually making a “narcissistic power grab”
Frankly, I can imagine someone having a “I wish I had a male/femaly body” dysphoria, but not someone having a “I wish people called me xe” dysphoria in similar sense. So, from my perspective, gender dysphoria is a legitimate thing, made up pronouns are not.
I mean, without Twitter, the number of people feeling they were born in a wrong body would be about the same, but the number of people using “xe” would be much smaller.
Unless you are Finnish or Hungarian, the pronouns are “he” and “she”, choose one. Anything else is a jargon no one outside your group is obliged to use. (It would be like, dunno, a Less Wrong user asking people to call Less Wrong users “sane” and everyone else “insane”, because we like it so.)
No comment on your link, but by “perverts” in this context I specifically meant guys who get turned on by being in a public toilet with (other) women. The idea is that being an object of such desire might make the women quite uncomfortable, and yet there is nothing they can do about it without risking to be accused of transphobia.
The “fun” part of our financial system is the usury—the idea that if I do something for you today, once, and then wait for a sufficiently long time, it afterwards makes you obligated to keep doing things for me effectively forever (if I only ask you to pay back the interest, not the principal).
Why is it considered a smart idea to be the one who needs to pay back the favors forever, instead of the one who collects the favors forever?
If you were an immortal vampire, would you prefer to be one who keeps paying 30% of his salary as a credit card debt, for eternity, or the one who is early retired?
The official theory is that the debt allows you to finance smart things that make you so much better off that having to return favors forever is definitely worth it. Instead, I suspect than most of the money is typically wasted or stolen, and does not make a difference in long term… except for the debt that the next generations inherit.
I can point out that other cultures, especially Asia, sometimes do things differently. Therefore the “different settings” are also valid.
I think it is not unusual among conservatives to accept that different cultures have different rules. “The traditions must be followed” can coexist with “we follow our traditions, and they follow their traditions”. There are multiple valid options, but everyone should stick with the one they grew up with. We believe that our option is the best one, but we respect that others may believe otherwise.
Interaction between cultures requires finding out the intersection, the behavior that is acceptable to both sides. Cultures used to deal with strangers can have a distinction between “this is forbidden to us, but okay for the other side if their culture permits it”, such as eating taboo foods, and “this is forbidden and must be punished, no exception”, such as blasphemy against our god(s). Sometimes things are “forbidden in our territory, and that also applies to visitors; but when I am a visitor at your territory, your rules apply”.
Now that I think about it, I am probably much closer to the progressive end of the spectrum than to the conservative one. Yet, when I interact with conservatives, I usually find it easy to follow the above-mentioned rules, and the protocol works, despite the object-level differences. The interactions with progressives are more difficult, because despite many object-level similarities, we do not have a good protocol to deal with the few differences. That is, the protocol itself seems to be conservative, while the progressive protocol is… how to put it politely… “if you are not 100% with us, you are against us”?
(My therapist said he doesn’t hate me. It was the single most liberating thing I’ve heard in a while.)
ὣ2 What were your priors?
Seems like thinking outside the box is only allowed at school when you are explicitly told to. :D
You mentioned Jordan Peterson in the list of… conservatives opposing progressives’ attempts to make trans people’s lives easier. Which sounds connotationally quite unfair to me, because although you could make the argument that is it the “attempt to make trans people’s lives easier” that he opposes, the actual thing he opposes is making a violation of a social norm (shared only by a part of society, possibly a very small part) an offense punishable in theory by jail.
As an illustration—exaggerated to make a point—imagine that I propose a law that your property should be confiscated and distributed to black people living in your neighborhood. Technically, my law is “an attempt to make black people’s lives easier”, because, of course, giving anyone some extra money makes their life somewhat easier. And your objection to that law would, technically, be “opposing the attempt to make black people’s lives easier”. Yet you probably agree that if someone composed a list of people opposing the attempts to make black people’s lives easier and put you in a prominent position in that list, that would be quite unfair.
That is, we should make a distinction between “someone opposes X (as a terminal value)”, and “someone opposes Y (which is advertised as a way to support X), for reasons in principle unrelated to X”. Peterson opposes compelled speech in general. Using someone’s preferred pronouns under threat of legal sanction is (arguably non-central) example of compelled speech. I believe that a person who spent a large part of their life studying totalitarian regimes should be trusted when they say that opposition to practices associated with totalitarian regimes is their true objection.
For the record, it is also my position that people should be nice to each other, but laws that make it a punishable offense to be rude are wrong. Especially wrong, when the law is not formulated universally as “no one is allowed to be rude to anyone” but rather applies only to being rude towards a selected group of people. -- If you propose a law that it is illegal to be rude to anyone, I will think that you are a crazy extremist, but I am willing to consider your proposal charitably. If you propose a law that it is only illegal to be rude to priests, then fuck no. If you propose a law that it is only illegal to be rude to politicians, then fuck no. If you propose a law that it is only illegal to be rude to trans people, then fuck no. -- Not because I hate trans people, not because I want to make their lives difficult, but precisely because I am deeply egalitarian and in principle oppose all laws that make people unequal. (But also because I think that making rudeness literally illegal is going too far.)
But those people are politicians.
it’d make sense to not also use phrases like “TERFS” and “CIS SCUM”.
So, conservatives should not be judged by their politicians, but progressives should be judged by their Twitter users? In my opinion, Twitter users are much worse than politicians… :D
Have you ever met someone who used “terfs” and “cis scum” in real life? I can’t even imagine that.
“Bathroom bills”, explicitly either allowing or forbidding trans people to use public toilet facilities matching the gender they now identify as, appear to break down cleanly as follows: ones proposed and sponsored by conservatives forbid, ones proposed and sponsored by progressives permit.
Would you support or oppose a bill explicitly allowing cis males to use female public toilets?
I mean, if you have a good reason against that, you should consider the possibility that the bill allowing trans people to use any bathroom will be abused by some people, because “what you identify as” is difficult to verify.
Canada’s “Bill C-16”… added gender identity to the list of things that can be considered possible targets for “hate speech” and “hate crimes”.
Note that if I am the hypothetical asshole cis male who trolls people by using female public toilets, and you call me out, that could in Canada qualify as hate speech, depending on how convincingly I make my case. Okay, if I am a known troll, I would probably lose. But if I am a pervert pretending to be trans...
I guess, it depends on what is more frequent in real life: actual trans people, or perverts willing to pretend to be trans if it allows them to sneak into female toilets. Probably the trans people, but I wish I could be more sure about this.
One more question: Suppose I now decide to troll you, and declare that I am a trans woman, and insist that you call me “she”. And it is perfectly obvious to you that I am just lying and being an asshole to you, to prove some stupid political point. Would you obey my wish regardless?
it’s already known that progressives are less happy than conservatives
Possible explanation: People who are happy with status quo are more likely to end up defending it; people who are unhappy with status quo are more likely to end up trying to change it.
If your argument is that politics causes people to be happy/unhappy, that would require evidence beyond correlation, which itself is easier to explain by causation in the opposite direction.
(I think it is possible that you are right, but the correlation itself it not good evidence in your favor.)
Ironically, I also thought “lots of words and nothing new” because I am familiar with Christianity, and I have already heard all of this, and… hey, can we admit that it actually doesn’t answer the original question?
We start with: “If God is so loving and powerful, why do people suffer?”
Then the smarter people have to admit that all standard answers suck, because they are mostly “God is stronger than you, therefore shut up” (which makes sense, pragmatically, but it’s actually evidence against God being good… I mean, if this is the best argument you can make for God’s goodness, then you simply admit that you don’t have any good arguments), or “you are too stupid to distinguish real good from real evil” (which is a motte-and-bailey, because yes there are some ethical dilemmas I have a problem with, but God is obviously failing even in situations where a 3 years old child should be able to distinguish between right and wrong), or “it is a trade-off, allowing evil in universe is a price for human freedom” (which doesn’t make sense, because human freedom is limited in all kinds of ways all the time, for example God allows person X to kill person Y, to prevent limiting X’s sacred freedom, apparently not realizing that the successful murder limits Y’s freedom)...
Then everyone starts using poetic language, to sound deep beyond deep...
And finally, the Stockholm-syndrome solution: given that this is the only reality we have, and we don’t have any choice about that anyway, we better believe it is good, even if such belief doesn’t make sense, because facing the reality is not helpful. (Except, of course, it is not enough to describe it like this using words, you have to actually feel it. The poetic language is probably an efficient tool to get there.)
Also, describe how humans can love each other. Sure, but we already knew that humans are capable of love and goodness… the question was whether God is, and we still have less than zero evidence for that.
(Atheism just allows you to get out of the dilemma between “good God doesn’t make sense, given evidence” and “evil God doesn’t make sense”, by offering an alternative “there is no God”.)