Viliam

• Viliam 14 Nov 2018 0:50 UTC

  6 points

  on: “She Wanted It”

  I won­der whether Fifty Shades of Grey could be an ex­ample of ex­cep­tion­ally suc­cess­ful mar­ket­ing. People buy it be­cause they were told by me­dia that it is hugely pop­u­lar (so they are curi­ous, and don’t want to seem ig­nor­ant), and when they find out they don’t like it, they go: “Well, if every­one else likes it, I bet­ter shut up or I will seem like a prude or worse” (the zeit­geist dis­cour­ages say­ing any­thing neg­at­ive about other people’s sexu­al­ity, es­pe­cially when it’s weird). Any­way...

  The prob­lem with re­vealed pref­er­ences is that it kinda as­sumes that in any in­ternal con­flict, the side that won was the Truth, and the side that lost was Fake all along. Which as­sumes that people never make mis­takes (or that they truly want to make ex­actly those mis­takes they made), and that will­power is just a syn­onym for hy­po­crisy—un­less the will­power hap­pens to pre­vail, in which case it turns out it was the true will all along (and if your first at­tempts failed but later you suc­ceeded, that means you truly wanted to fail first and suc­ceed later, duh).

  And the usual mis­take when dis­cuss­ing nature and evol­u­tion is ig­nor­ing the evol­u­tion­ary-cog­nit­ive bound­ary, plus the fact that our en­vir­on­ment dif­fers from the one we are ad­ap­ted for. Thus “in an­cient past, X provided a re­pro­duct­ive ad­vant­age, on av­er­age” be­comes “X provides an ad­vant­age (now and al­ways)” be­comes “you want X, and I am not listen­ing to your lies, you hy­po­crite!“. And it’s hard to ar­gue oth­er­wise, when there is in fact a part of you that some­how pushes you to­wards X. But if we fol­low the same lo­gic, then the True Will of hu­man­ity is to eat sugar, be­come fat, get dia­betes, and die; be­cause that’s what keeps hap­pen­ing when we give it a chance. (So if the su­per­hu­man AI hap­pens kill us, it just ful­filled our de­sires faster. Ac­tu­ally, the fact that we have built the AI that killed us, already makes our ex­tinc­tion our re­vealed pref­er­ence.)

  I see two big dif­fer­ences between our an­cient evol­u­tion­ary past and cur­rent civil­iz­a­tion, with re­gard to the cur­rent topic:

  1) Be­fore ag­ri­cul­ture, we spent all time to­gether in tribes; today we live in fam­il­ies, of­ten atomic ones. That means the con­nec­tion between “who do you have sex with” and “who do you spend most time with” is re­l­at­ively re­cent. Ob­vi­ously, spend­ing more time with an ab­us­ive as­shole is a bad idea. But when the whole group lives to­gether, hav­ing sex with someone doesn’t mean spend­ing more (non-sexual) time with them. Each mem­ber of the tribe is within reach of the fist of the al­pha male, whether they have sex with him or not. Wo­men used to choose which man’s genes they want for their chil­dren, and that was the whole story. (And yes, it makes sense to choose a stronger one over a weaker one, and a win­ner over a loser.) This evol­u­tion­ary cal­cu­la­tion did not in­clude the danger of spend­ing a lot of time with him alone.

  2) The an­cient en­vir­on­ment also put lim­its on the male ag­gres­sion. The al­phas of­ten didn’t win as in­di­vidu­als, but as co­ali­tions. They had to beat chal­lengers into sub­mis­sion, but when not chal­lenged, they of­ten ac­ted as keep­ers of peace and justice. Be­ing an as­shole to every­one meant that the three or four guys you hurt re­cently will gang up against you, beat you, and prob­ably kill you to pro­tect them­selves against pos­sible re­venge. To keep the throne, you needed al­lies. Iron­ic­ally, it is the civ­il­ized so­ci­ety that al­lows some in­di­vidu­als to be as­sholes against every­one and sur­vive. Many an­noy­ing people live only be­cause no one con­siders it worth risk­ing prison for killing them. In the past, be­ing an as­shole and re­main­ing alive would be power­ful counter-sig­nal­ing. Today, pretty much any loser can do it, and many do. Of course it messes up our in­stincts.

  anti-fem­in­ists of­ten jump to be­liev­ing that wo­men are more at­trac­ted to men who are vi­ol­ent to them.

  Then they are deeply ig­nor­ant of wo­men’s lit­er­at­ure: the proper ar­che­type is the guy who is vi­ol­ent to every­one else, but is mys­ter­i­ously tamed by the charms of the heroine, i.e. Beauty and the Beast.

  The wo­men who date “bad guys” don’t do it be­cause they have a pref­er­ence for be­ing punched in the face. They do it be­cause they have a fantasy where they (and they alone) will not get punched in the face. Which would ac­tu­ally make sense in a suf­fi­ciently an­cient past, but makes much less sense in the re­cent mil­len­nia. Well, evol­u­tion some­times up­dates slowly. (He who wants to throw a stone, first tell me how much sugar and salt did you eat this week. You real­ize that shit is killing you slowly, don’t you?) In­stead of a pref­er­ence, this is more like a cog­nit­ive bias. From in­side, the idea “he will punch every­one else, but not me, be­cause he will love me” seems like a per­fect re­flec­tion of real­ity. (And if he already punched her, that does not falsify the hy­po­thesis. “So­me­times true love re­quires a lot of time, pa­tience, and sac­ri­fice. It will all turn out well at the end.” Read the Har­le­quin novel where the man first hurts the heroine, but then he falls in love with her and deeply re­grets it. Which one? A ran­dom choice will prob­ably be the right one.)

  The ab­use isn’t be­ing read as wish-ful­fill­ment, but as verisimil­it­ude. I wouldn’t be sur­prised if the au­thor and many of the fans have been in ab­us­ive re­la­tion­ships or grew up in ab­us­ive house­holds. (...) Maybe ab­used people really do have a higher risk of seek­ing out a re­pe­ti­tion of the harm they ex­per­i­enced and were taught to be­lieve was nor­mal.

  Anec­dote time: I met a wo­man who com­plained about how all her boy­friends were al­co­hol ad­dicts. Yet, after break­ing up, she was soon dat­ing an­other one. When I tried to talk some reason into her, she told me that ac­tu­ally all men are al­co­hol ad­dicts, only some of them are hon­est about it, and oth­ers are in denial; and those in denial are ac­tu­ally much worse. -- To me it seemed ob­vi­ous how such be­lief is false and self-harm­ing, but of course try­ing to ar­gue oth­er­wise would have merely put me in the “in denial” cat­egory.

  I can ima­gine how hav­ing sim­ilar be­liefs about male ag­gress­ive­ness could arise as a con­sequence of ab­us­ive child­hood (as a de­fense mech­an­ism against ad­mit­ting that your father just happened to be an ex­cep­tional as­shole), and could be fur­ther re­in­forced by seek­ing out ag­gress­ive part­ners, be­cause the non-ag­gress­ive ones are per­ceived as some­how weird or fake. -- And per­haps to­gether with the Beauty and the Beast fantasy, this could res­ult in a model where all men are ag­gress­ive and only true love can tame them. (Plus there are the Nice Guys who are too pathetic to be ag­gress­ive openly, but luck­ily our mindread­ing skills al­low us to see that deep in­side they are even worse.)

  It prob­ably doesn’t help that the idea about all men be­ing vi­ol­ent and evil is… zeit­geist-com­pat­ible.

  It’s not that wo­men want men to hurt them. It’s that men hurt wo­men a lot.

  Yep. Con­nota­tional sid­e­note: there is a dif­fer­ence between “men hurt wo­men a lot” and “many men hurt wo­men”. It is pos­sible that a dis­pro­por­tion­ally large amount of hurt­ing comes from a small minor­ity of men. (Point­ing to­wards stat­ist­ics about psy­cho­paths hav­ing above av­er­age amounts of sexual part­ners, etc.)

  Sum­mary:

  I agree with most of your art­icle, I just be­lieve it could be sim­ul­tan­eously true that (1) wo­men who were pre­vi­ously ab­used, es­pe­cially in their child­hood, may seek out ab­us­ive part­ners be­cause they per­ceive such be­ha­vior as “nor­mal”; which does not ex­cuse the next ab­user, and the “re­vealed pref­er­ence” an­swer is bull­shit, be­cause the wo­man is act­ing on her in­cor­rect model of the world, and the friendly thing to do would be try­ing to fix that model in­stead of ex­ploit­ing it; and (2) wo­men in gen­eral have a sys­tem­atic bias to­wards per­ceiv­ing vi­ol­ent men as more at­tract­ive, and less dan­ger­ous than they ac­tu­ally are, be­cause of evol­u­tion­ary reas­ons which ac­tu­ally may not ap­ply to our cur­rent en­vir­on­ment. In my model, the “sane” wo­men can use their reason to over­come the tempta­tion and real­ize that the ex­tra ex­cite­ment is not worth get­ting punched in the face reg­u­larly (sim­il­arly how men at­trac­ted to­wards patho­lo­gical wo­men can de­cide to “not stick their dick in crazy”), but there are reas­ons that can make a wo­man either un­der­es­tim­ate the danger or take it as in­ev­it­able, in which case dat­ing the vi­ol­ent guy seems like a good choice.

  If I un­der­stand it cor­rectly, you used the former to ex­plain away the lat­ter, and that seems wrong to me. (I still ap­prove bring­ing at­ten­tion to the former.)

• Viliam 6 Nov 2018 0:12 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Vaniver’s comment on: Schools Pro­lif­er­at­ing Without Practicioners

  I am not sure how to best handle the topic of re­li­gion in a com­munity blog.

  If it is a single-per­son blog, the op­timal solu­tion would prob­ably be mostly not to even men­tion it (just fo­cus on nat­ur­al­istic ex­plan­a­tions of the world), and once in a long while to ex­plain, po­litely, why it is false (without of­fend­ing people who dis­agree).

  With a com­munity blog, the prob­lem is that be­ing po­lite to­wards re­li­gion may be in­ter­preted by re­li­gious people as an in­vit­a­tion to con­trib­ute, but their con­tri­bu­tions would in­ev­it­ably in­clude pro-re­li­gious state­ments, at least some­times.

  And if you make it ex­pli­cit like “re­li­gious people are wel­come, but any pro-re­li­gious state­ments will be im­me­di­ately de­leted, and the au­thor may be banned”, that sounds like your athe­ism is a dogma, not an out­come of a lo­gical pro­cess (which you merely don’t want to re­peat over and over again, be­cause you have more in­ter­est­ing stuff to write about). And even here I would ex­pect a lot of rules-law­yer­ing, strongly hint­ing, etc.

• Viliam 5 Nov 2018 23:59 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Schools Pro­lif­er­at­ing Without Practicioners

  I think the main reason against pod­cast­ing preach­ing is that re­li­gion is mostly about so­cial ex­per­i­ence. Re­place “hun­dreds of people who meet in real space reg­u­larly” with a pod­cast, and all that’s left is some theo­logy, that frankly most re­li­gious people don’t care about that much.

• Viliam 5 Nov 2018 23:45 UTC

  11 points

  in reply to: cousin_it’s comment on: Open Thread Novem­ber 2018

  What other nice places ex­ist?

  Blogs of nice in­di­vidu­als, I guess. (That in­cludes SSC.) If you make a blog for your­self (for your per­sona) and keep mak­ing com­ments at the few blogs you read, that could eas­ily be the nicest pos­sible way of us­ing in­ter­net.

• Viliam 5 Nov 2018 23:42 UTC

  38 points

  on: No Really, Why Aren’t Ra­tion­al­ists Win­ning?

  If LessWrong had ori­gin­ally been tar­geted at and in­tro­duced to an audi­ence of com­pet­ent busi­ness people and self-im­prove­ment health buffs in­stead of an audi­ence of STEM spe­cial­ists and Harry Pot­ter fans, things would have been drastic­ally dif­fer­ent. Ra­tion­al­ists would be win­ning.

  This sounds like “the best way to make sure your read­ers are suc­cess­ful is to write for people who are already suc­cess­ful”. It makes sense if you want to brag about how suc­cess­ful are your read­ers. But if your goal is to im­prove the world, how much change would that bring? There is already a ton of ma­ter­ial for busi­ness people and self-help fans; what is yet an­other web­site for them go­ing to ac­com­plish? If people are already com­pet­ent self-im­prov­ing busi­ness­men, what motive would they have to learn about ra­tion­al­ity?

  The Bayesian Con­spir­acy pod­cast … pro­posed … that ra­tion­al­ity can only help us im­prove a lim­ited amount re­l­at­ive to where we star­ted out. They pre­dicted that people who star­ted out at a lower level of life suc­cess/​cog­nit­ive func­tion­ing/​tal­ent can­not out­per­form non-ra­tion­al­ists who star­ted out at a suf­fi­ciently high level.

  The past mat­ters, be­cause chan­ging things takes time. Ob­tain­ing “the same know­ledge, skills, qual­it­ies or ex­per­i­ence” re­quires time and money. (Money, be­cause while you are chas­ing the know­ledge and ex­per­i­ence, you are not max­im­iz­ing your short-term in­come.) So­me­times I won­der how life would be in a par­al­lel uni­verse where LessWrong would ap­pear when I was 15, as op­posed to 35. I had a ton of free time while study­ing at uni­ver­sity; I have barely any free time now. I lived at my par­ents; now I need a daily job to pay my bills. Even put­ting money into in­dex funds (such a simple ad­vice, yet no one from my so­cial group was able to give it to me) would have brought more in­terest. In this uni­verse I can­not get on av­er­age as far as I could have in the par­al­lel one.

  So why haven’t we been dom­in­at­ing pre­dic­tion and stock mar­kets? Why aren’t we dom­in­at­ing them right now?

  Be­cause there are people who already spent years learn­ing all that stuff, and now they do it as a day job; some of them 16 hours a day. Those are the ones you would have to com­pete against, not the av­er­age per­son.

  In my own case, … I can’t af­ford to bet on things since I don’t have enough money of my own for it, and my in­come is highly ir­reg­u­lar and hard to pre­dict so it’s dif­fi­cult to budget things. … Do a lot of other people here have such ex­ten­u­at­ing cir­cum­stances? Some­how that would feel like too much of a co­in­cid­ence.

  For me it feels like too much of a co­in­cid­ence when a per­son com­plain­ing about why oth­ers aren’t achiev­ing greater suc­cess im­me­di­ately comes with a good ex­cuse for them­selves.

  Speak­ing for my­self, my in­come is nice and reg­u­lar, but I have kids to feed and care about, and between my daily job and tak­ing care of my kids, I don’t have enough time to re­search things to make bets about, or learn to un­der­stand fin­ance as a pro. That is a quite dif­fer­ent situ­ation, but still one that makes mak­ing mir­acles dif­fi­cult. I sup­pose some people are busy do­ing their sci­entific ca­reers, etc.

  And then, a few people are ac­tu­ally win­ning a lot. Now, maybe you over­es­tim­ate the size of the ra­tion­al­ist com­munity. How many people even among those who par­ti­cip­ate at meetups, are truly ser­i­ous about this ra­tion­al­ity stuff (and how many are there merely for so­cial reas­ons)? Maybe it’s in total only a few dozen people, world­wide. Some of them have good reas­ons to not be su­per win­ning, and some of them are su­per win­ning. Not a very sur­pris­ing out­come.

  I be­lieve there is a lot of space for im­prove­ment. I be­lieve there is spe­cific­ally a lot to im­prove in “mak­ing our kind co­oper­ate”. But at the end of the day, we are just a hand­ful of people.

  And of course I’m look­ing for­ward to your friend’s art­icles.

• Viliam 5 Nov 2018 22:55 UTC

  11 points

  in reply to: stardust’s comment on: No Really, Why Aren’t Ra­tion­al­ists Win­ning?

  Not the au­thor, but my guess would be this:

  On vari­ous met­rics, there can be dif­fer­ences in quant­ity, e.g. “a job that pays $10k” vs “a job that pays $20k”, and dif­fer­ences in qual­ity, e.g. “a job” vs “early re­tire­ment”. Merely im­prov­ing quant­ity does not make a good story. And per­haps it is fool­ish, but I ima­gine “win­ning” as a qual­it­at­ive im­prove­ment, in­stead of merely 30% or 300% more of some­thing.

  And maybe this is wrong, be­cause a qual­it­at­ive im­prove­ment brings qual­it­at­ive im­prove­ments as a side ef­fect. A change from “$X in­come” to $Y in­come” can also mean a change from “wor­ry­ing about sur­vival” to “not wor­ry­ing about sur­vival”, a change from “can­not af­ford X” to “bought the X”, or even a change from “the fu­ture is dark” to “I am go­ing to re­tire early in 10 years, but as of today, I am not there yet”. Maybe we in­suf­fi­ciently em­phas­ize these qual­it­at­ive changes, be­cause… uhm, il­lu­sion of trans­par­ency?

• Viliam 5 Nov 2018 22:18 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: gjm’s comment on: UBI for President

  Yeah, could be any of that.

  I guess a part of my ob­jec­tion still re­mains… that un­like the art­icle sug­gests “hu­man value con­sump­tion, which is why they choose to work a lot” it is some­times more about “em­ploy­ers prefer em­ploy­ees who work a lot (why ex­actly, that is de­bated), and in such case em­ploy­ees are only given the op­tions to work a lot or not get the job, with no middle ground”.

• Viliam 18 Oct 2018 21:39 UTC

  2 points

  on: Do An­im­als Have Rights?

  You seem to write ex­clus­ively about polit­ical top­ics. If your goal is to be­come more ra­tional, this is prob­ably a bad idea.

  Your dis­agree­ment with Peterson seems to be mostly about the defin­i­tion of the word “rights”. Based on your para­phrase, Peterson seems to define “hav­ing rights” roughly as be­ing a part of a net­work of mu­tual ob­lig­a­tions, and con­cludes that we could hardly have mu­tual ob­lig­a­tions with an­im­als; we could still choose to have uni­lat­eral ob­lig­a­tions to­wards them, but that’s not the same thing. (Calling it slavery is the usual polit­ical ex­ag­ger­a­tion though.) Your defin­i­tion of “rights” seems more like a list of things that should hap­pen to you in a so­ci­ety that as­pires to be nice, and does not de­pend on ima­gin­ary sym­metry. Shortly: you two are us­ing the same word for slightly dif­fer­ent con­cepts.

• Viliam 18 Oct 2018 21:20 UTC

  16 points

  on: UBI for President

  But the reason we don’t work 15 hours a week is the weird equi­lib­rium we’re in of what is val­ued by so­ci­ety.

  Hu­mans don’t in­trins­ic­ally value “hours worked”. We value things like status, sex, com­munity, pleas­ure. In mod­ern so­ci­ety, we learned to as­so­ci­ate a lot of this with work and con­sump­tion. This is es­pe­cially true of men, which is why men left out of the work-con­sump­tion cycle fall into greater des­pond­ency than wo­men.

  For me, it is none of that. Ten years ago, when I was single and child­less, I could have eas­ily lived on 50% of my in­come. My status would be the same, and I would have more time to spend on things like sex, com­munity, and pleas­ure. The prob­lem was com­pletely dif­fer­ent, namely… sig­nal­ing, when look­ing for a job.

  When al­most every­one works 40 hours a week, you sig­nal con­form­ity (one of the main traits em­ploy­ers are look­ing for) by work­ing 40 hours a week. Work­ing 40 hours is nor­mal, want­ing to work any other num­ber of hours is weird. Why would any­one hire a weird per­son, when they have an op­tion to hire a per­fectly nor­mal per­son in­stead?

  How ex­actly are you go­ing to ex­plain, dur­ing the job in­ter­view, why the op­tion good enough for every­one else is not good enough for you? “You know, I work to live; I don’t live to work. I do have dreams bey­ond work­ing hard to make someone else rich; and I value things that don’t re­quire much money, but re­quire time, such as watch­ing sun­set or do­ing math. I already sus­pect that on my deathbed I will re­gret not spend­ing more time fol­low­ing my dreams, but I still need to pay my bills today some­how, and none of my hob­bies is prof­it­able, at least in short term. Half of my mar­ket salary could cover my ex­penses; and I don’t see a reason to spend at job any more time than ne­ces­sary. So, what be­ne­fits does your com­pany of­fer?” …is prob­ably not go­ing to win hearts.

  So­me­times you have a so­cially ac­cept­able ex­cuse for not work­ing full time: you can be a stu­dent, or dis­abled, or a wo­man with kinder­garten-age chil­dren. In other words, you would like to work 40 hours just like every­one else, but un­for­tu­nately you can’t, as every­one can see. When someone of­fers a part-time job, some­thing like this is what they have in mind. None of that ap­plied to me. When I ex­plored my chances to get a part-time job, I found out that I would have to sac­ri­fice a dis­pro­por­tion­ate part of my in­come. The best of­fer I got was work­ing 4 days a week, i.e. 80% of the usual time, for 50% of my usual salary. And the em­ployer still felt like they were do­ing me a huge fa­vor by ac­com­mod­at­ing my weird de­sire for hav­ing more free time. See­ing that I can’t get the time down to 50% as I wanted, I gave up and re­turned to 40 hours a week.

  tl;dr—work­ing 40 hours a week is a con­form­ity-sig­nal­ing equi­lib­rium, and it is dif­fi­cult to get a job otherwise

• Viliam 10 Oct 2018 23:33 UTC

  5 points

  on: One-per­son Universe

  And the reason all men don’t have the same mass is… the weight of wis­dom ac­cu­mu­lated through all these re­in­carn­a­tions. (Un­like the elec­trons, which can’t learn.)

  I like this!

• Viliam 10 Oct 2018 23:29 UTC

  26 points

  in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: On in­sec­ur­ity as a friend

  I can­not ex­press too strongly my ut­ter op­pos­i­tion to the thesis of this post.

  And I en­joyed read­ing both the art­icle and this reply.

  Per­haps the Law of Equal and Op­pos­ite Ad­vice ap­plies here; de­pend­ing on how much of your ac­tual feel­ings of in­sec­ur­ity is just an aware­ness of your ac­tual lack of skills, and how much is a res­ult of ma­nip­u­la­tion by oth­ers. Ma­nip­u­lat­ors ex­ist, but lack of skills ex­ists, too.

  (In my opin­ion, go­ing ahead and try­ing stuff is bet­ter than listen­ing to your in­sec­ur­ity: maybe you are right, maybe you are wrong, once in a while you break some­thing, but you will learn some­thing in either case. But I can ima­gine a per­son/​situ­ation for whom the bal­ance could be the other way round.)

• Viliam 10 Oct 2018 22:55 UTC

  7 points

  in reply to: Diantha’s comment on: We can all be high status

  Isn’t the whole point of al­tru­ism that we do not be­ne­fit a lot from it ourselves?

  The point is to help oth­ers, not to need­lessly de­prive ourselves. (Mak­ing each other feel bet­ter does not re­duce the num­ber of anti-mal­aria nets pro­duced.)

  Hu­mans need re­wards to shape their be­ha­vior. It is bet­ter (even for oth­ers) if I get re­war­ded for my al­tru­istic ac­tions and it helps me keep do­ing good deeds for long time, than if I emo­tion­ally “burn out” quickly.

• Viliam 6 Oct 2018 23:15 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: marcus_gabler’s comment on: What is be­ing done?

  Poss­ibly re­lated to Elo’s com­ment: On say­ing the obvious

  This is a web­site any­one can join. Some people par­ti­cip­ate here for years; some came yes­ter­day; plus any­thing in between. So even the “most ob­vi­ous” in­form­a­tion may be valu­able for those who joined yes­ter­day (as­sum­ing it is cor­rect). But of course, the lar­ger audi­ence finds it valu­able, the bet­ter.

  an in­ter­est­ing ex­per­i­ment … see the re­ac­tions … provokative

  Uhm, please don’t. (Or get ready to be down­voted; that is a ra­tional re­sponse to hav­ing one’s time wasted by pro­voca­tions, isn’t it?)

• Viliam 3 Oct 2018 23:25 UTC

  5 points

  on: Ra­tion­al­ism for the masses

  A big prob­lem with try­ing to spread ra­tion­al­ity is that an ap­prox­im­a­tion is not ne­ces­sar­ily an im­prove­ment, and may even some­times make things worse. As an ana­logy, get­ting people from “I have no idea how much is 2+2” to “2+2 equals 5″ is not an im­prove­ment in math (es­pe­cially when the lat­ter be­come res­ist­ant against learn­ing that the res­ult is ac­tu­ally 4, be­cause they “already know” the an­swer).

  Related: Know­ing About Bi­ases Can Hurt People

  There already ex­ist sev­eral ap­prox­im­a­tions of ra­tion­al­ity, for ex­ample Ra­tion­alWiki, In­ten­tional Insights, Lo­gic Na­tion. Your most likely risk at spread­ing ra­tion­al­ity is fail­ing com­pletely, but your second greatest risk is be­com­ing (or in­spir­ing) yet an­other of those.

  Gen­er­ally, I agree with you that it is good to: sim­plify the lan­guage, pri­or­it­ize stuff, avoid need­less of­fense, find eas­ily mem­or­able words, show every­day use­ful­ness, etc. I just think that even after you do all of this… most people will re­main un­im­pressed. Most of them will simply not care. The rest will take what you made and twist is some­how to in­clude their pet topic, typ­ic­ally some form of su­per­nat­ur­al­ism.

  I wish I knew what to do in­stead. I don’t. :( I think that hav­ing the Sequences is already a huge im­prove­ment over the pre­vi­ous situ­ation (hav­ing a book I can point at, in­stead of just say­ing “uhm, the way you are us­ing this reason thing feels wrong to me” only to be told “well, that’s just your opin­ion, man”), but still, even most of the highly in­tel­li­gent and edu­cated people re­main un­im­pressed. And when a cen­tury ago Korzyb­ski wrote Science and San­ity, also a few people were highly en­er­gized by it, but most re­mained un­im­pressed, and then it mostly got for­got­ten. -- It would be in­ter­est­ing to do re­search on what makes people pre­dis­posed to re­spond pos­it­ively to the idea of ra­tion­al­ity. Be­cause it seems to me that most people who were im­pressed by it, already came some­how pre­pared to get it. If we could only rep­lic­ate this pre­vi­ous step...

• Viliam 3 Oct 2018 22:52 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: marcus_gabler’s comment on: Ra­tion­al­ism for the masses

  Trust me, I have dec­ades of 1st hands on ex­per­i­ence on run­ning against the walls of con­crete minds.

  This doesn’t seem like a good way to build ra­tion­al­ity. It is like try­ing to build a com­puter by tak­ing a heap of com­pon­ents, and kick­ing them really hard and really per­sist­ently. -- You will do a lot of work and your ori­ginal goal is reas­on­able, it’s just that this method does not ap­proach that goal at all.

• Viliam 3 Oct 2018 22:43 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: marcus_gabler’s comment on: What is be­ing done?

  One pos­sible ap­proach is to go meta and write about what you wanted to read but couldn’t find… that is, the sum­mary of “what is cur­rently be­ing done in the ra­tion­al­ist com­munity”. There is at least one per­son who would like to read such art­icle: you! And the chance is, you are not alone.

  (This is ana­lo­gical to a clas­sical ad­vice for wan­nabe en­tre­pren­eurs: make stuff that you wanted to buy but you couldn’t find it on the mar­ket. It means you have iden­ti­fied a real is­sue, and chance is there are other people in a situ­ation sim­ilar to yours, i.e. your po­ten­tial fu­ture cus­tom­ers.)

  Mak­ing the com­plete sum­mary at once could be dif­fi­cult, so you could write it as a series of art­icles. Make re­search about who is do­ing what, and when you have enough ma­ter­ial for an art­icle, write it. Maybe one art­icle about or­gan­iz­a­tions such as MIRI and CFAR, an­other art­icle about local meetups, next art­icle about pod­casts… dunno, is there any­thing else? Prob­ably yes.

  Prob­lem is, be­ing a new­comer is a dis­ad­vant­age at do­ing such re­search: you start from the po­s­i­tion of hav­ing less know­ledge than your fu­ture read­ers, so you much work twice as hard to get ahead of them. (You wouldn’t want to write an equi­val­ent of: “Hey guys, have you heard that there is an or­gan­iz­a­tion called MIRI try­ing to pre­vent an ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence from killing us all? Weird, huh?“) But if you ap­proach the topic di­li­gently, study the avail­able ma­ter­ial, per­haps ask a few ques­tions, and find vo­lun­teers to re­view the draft of your art­icle… it can be done.

• Viliam 3 Oct 2018 22:26 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Martin Sustrik’s comment on: Anti-so­cial Punishment

  Look­ing for­ward to meet­ing you the next week!

  There will prob­ably be many new people at the meetup, and start­ing with a polit­ical topic would give a com­pletely wrong im­pres­sion of the Less Wrong cul­ture. So, please let’s keep this for the later part of the meetup. But I am also in­ter­ested in other people’s ex­plan­a­tions.

• Viliam 2 Oct 2018 0:44 UTC

  8 points

  on: What is be­ing done?

  Seems like you are look­ing for an ex­cuse to cre­ate your own web­site. Hey, if that’s what you want to do, just go ahead and do it! You don’t really need any­one’s per­mis­sion.

  It is not ob­vi­ous why hav­ing more web­sites or or­gan­iz­a­tions is bet­ter than hav­ing more people at the ex­ist­ing web­sites or or­gan­iz­a­tions. There are ar­gu­ments for both sides: when people try many dif­fer­ent things, there is a greater chance that one of them wildly suc­ceeds; but also when people are too frag­men­ted, each of the pro­jects suf­fers from lack of at­ten­tion and re­sources. (Like, hav­ing Less Wrong and Slate Star Co­dex is prob­ably bet­ter than just hav­ing Less Wrong alone, but also bet­ter than every­one hav­ing their own blog. Se­par­at­ing MIRI from CFAR seemed like the right move, but hav­ing these or­gan­iz­a­tions in­stead of every in­di­vidual do­ing their own pro­ject also seems right.)

  Per­haps the right ques­tion to ask is what would be the ad­ded value of your pro­ject, and whether do­ing your pro­ject (at least ini­tially) alone is still bet­ter than some­how con­trib­ut­ing to suc­cess of an ex­ist­ing pro­ject.

  For ex­ample, cre­at­ing an­other clone of LW would be prob­ably use­less. The fact that it would be in­stalled on a server in Ger­many means noth­ing; the in­ter­net is in­ter­na­tional. You would have less au­thors and less read­ers, but a lot of work cre­at­ing and main­tain­ing the server. It would be bet­ter to post your ra­tion­al­ist ideas on LW.

  It would be more in­ter­est­ing to make a clone of LW in Ger­man lan­guage. The ad­ded value would be an ex­tra audi­ence. Al­though, I have some doubts even here, be­cause I sus­pect that 90% Ger­man speak­ers who are really in­ter­ested in these top­ics also speak Eng­lish, so the ad­ded value might be much lower. But maybe it would make sense to just trans­late (with au­thors’ per­mis­sion) some ex­ist­ing LW art­icles to Ger­man, and make a web­site for that. -- In both cases, it would be im­port­ant to make the work as easy as pos­sible (be­cause plan­ning fal­lacy, and why waste re­sources when you really don’t have to). For ex­ample, for a “Ger­man clone of LW” it would be bet­ter to re­use the cur­rent LW soft­ware and just trans­late the strings; and for “Ger­man trans­la­tions of se­lec­ted LW art­icles” just use any free blog­ging web­site.

  Or you can find ad­ded value that is com­pletely un­re­lated to the fact of you liv­ing in Ger­many. For ex­ample, maybe you have a pretty face and nice voice, and people might like to watch your videos about ra­tion­al­ity.

  What is ac­tu­ally MOVING in the ra­tion­al­ist move­ment?

  Who has an over­view of whats go­ing on?

  It would be really nice to have some “news chan­nel” about what is cur­rently hap­pen­ing in the ra­tion­al­ist com­munity. I don’t know any. I mean, if some­thing big hap­pens, it will prob­ably be men­tioned on LW; and there are spe­cial­ized sum­mar­ies like “what happened re­cently in AI re­search”. But I would ac­tu­ally like to read some gen­eral sum­mary about “what happened this week/​month in the ra­tion­al­ist com­munity”, which would high­light the big stuff, but also men­tion on­go­ing work or put some ran­dom small stuff un­der spot­light. So­mething like when even­ing news provide you the sum­mary of the world. Maybe just hav­ing a photo from each meetup that happened dur­ing this month would be great (ig­nor­ing the pri­vacy is­sues), and you could get them by ask­ing the or­gan­izers by e-mail. It would be a bit of chicken-and-egg prob­lem; people would be more will­ing to co­oper­ate if they saw that every­one else is do­ing it too; so you would have to ex­pend more en­ergy at the be­gin­ning.

  Maybe this is the op­por­tun­ity for you! If you be­come ser­i­ous about it and find your in­form­a­tion sources, per­haps you could com­pile the sum­mar­ies. But it would still make more sense to post them as LW art­icles in­stead of mak­ing an­other web­site.

  Well… those were some gen­eral thoughts. A bet­ter plan would have to be based on your spe­cific strengths, weak­nesses, and in­terests.

  By the way, non­trivial work of­ten takes a lot of time. So­me­times ask­ing people “what are you work­ing on?” will mostly give you “the same thing I was work­ing on this whole year”. Just say­ing that if this is the case, it may seem like people are do­ing noth­ing, when it is ac­tu­ally the op­pos­ite. (Without even look­ing at their web­site, I could guess that MIRI is try­ing to prove some the­or­ems that seem ne­ces­sary for a ra­tion­ally think­ing ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence, and CFAR is giv­ing people lec­tures on ra­tion­al­ity and try­ing to im­prove those lec­tures or in­vent new ones. For an out­sider it may be frus­trat­ing to ask the same ques­tion next year and re­ceive the same an­swer.)

  In Octo­ber 2018 there are ra­tion­al­ist meetups in Ber­lin and Mu­nich. Go­ing there and talk­ing to people may give you some an­swers and ideas. Don’t un­der­es­tim­ate the off­line world!

• Viliam 2 Oct 2018 0:00 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Martin Sustrik’s comment on: Anti-so­cial Punishment

  I wasn’t think­ing about the ex­per­i­ment spe­cific­ally, when I wrote that.

  Rather, the concept of “pun­ish­ing do-gooders” re­minded me of a few people I knew on the… Mečiar side of polit­ical spec­trum… and how they viewed any pro-so­cial activ­ity, whether spon­tan­eous or a part of some non-gov­ern­mental or­gan­iz­a­tion. Shortly, people who help oth­ers (not their re­l­at­ives) are either idi­ots or (more likely) a part of some sin­is­ter con­spir­acy against our state (most likely or­gan­ized by the evil Amer­ic­ans, just like everything bad that hap­pens on this planet). And this is my hy­po­thesis on how that men­tal mon­stros­ity has evolved; that think­ing this way was the safe thing to do dur­ing com­mun­ism.

  I won­der if me can think of an ex­per­i­ment that would dis­tin­guish between the two?

  No idea. In­stead of this, I would prob­ably try to make a qual­it­at­ive re­search, i.e. in­stead of set­ting up an ar­ti­fi­cial ex­per­i­ment I would let them talk about fam­ous real-life “do-gooders”, ask sym­path­et­ic­ally what ex­actly they hate about them most, and try to find the com­mon top­ics in dif­fer­ent people’s an­swers.

  Oh, I guess I am mak­ing the same mis­take again, by auto­mat­ic­ally as­sum­ing that the pun­ished people in the ex­per­i­ment were per­ceived as ac­tual “do-gooders” in­stead of re­press­ive powers of im­per­sonal state. Uhm, I guess I am not go­ing to provide a bet­ter an­swer. Just say­ing that—whether it is rel­ev­ant to the ex­per­i­ment or not—hatred against ac­tual “do-gooders” is a thing that def­in­itely ex­ists in Slovak cul­ture, and I sus­pect that it is ac­tu­ally a norm in many cul­tures, with Western cul­ture be­ing the “WEIRD” ex­cep­tion.

• Viliam 29 Sep 2018 23:08 UTC

  5 points

  on: At­tack­ing enlightenment

  I am rather em­bar­rassed to say that I al­ways clas­si­fied Buddhism as a re­li­gion. (...) What I didn’t real­ize was that it’s more like (slightly gib­ber­ish) em­pir­ical in­struc­tions to fol­low, after which you should find your way up the moun­tain to en­light­en­ment.

  Also, stor­ies of ma­gical heal­ing.