Give people a long list of tasks, a short time interval, and then reward them based on the number of tasks solved. Repeat until they internalize the lesson that solving a problem quickly is good, spending lots of time on a problem is bad, so if something seems complicated they should ignore it and move on to the next task.
Viliam
Karma: 22,101
Ah, in a parallel universe without David Gerard the obvious next step would be to create a WikiProject Rationality. In this universe, this probably wouldn’t end well? Coordination outside Wikipedia is also at risk of accusation of brigading or something.
Crazy idea: What if an important part of psychotherapy is synchronization between the brain hemispheres?
(I am not an expert, so maybe the following is wrong.)
Basically, the human brain is divided into two parts, connected by a link. This is what our animal ancestors already had, and then we got huge frontal lobes on top of that. I imagine that the link between the hemispheres is already quite busy synchronizing things that are older from the evolutionary perspective and probably more important for survival; not much extra capacity to synchronize the frontal lobes.
However, when you talk… each hemisphere has an access to an ear, so maybe this gives them an extra channel to communicate? Plus, some schools of psychotherapy also do things like “try to locate the emotion in your body”, which is maybe about creating more communication channels for listening to the less verbal hemisphere?
Experiment: Would the psychotherapy be less efficient if you covered one of your ears?
Julian Jaynes assumes that people in the past were crazy beyond our imagination. I wonder if it could be the other way round. Consider that fact that in more primitive societies, inferential distances are shorter. Well, that includes inferential distances between your two hemispheres! Easier to keep them in sync. Also, in the past, people talked more. Listening to yourself talking to other people is a way for your hemispheres to synchronize.
Talking to others, talking to yourself, talking to gods… perhaps it is not a coincidence that different cultures have a concept of a prayer—talking to a god who is supposed to already know it anyway, and yet it is important for you to actually say it out loud, even if no other people are listening. Saying something out loud is almost magical.
Sincerity seems to be an important component of both psychotherapy and prayer. If you keep a persona, your hemispheres can only synchronize about the persona. If you can talk about anything, your hemispheres can synchronize about that, too.
Keeping a diary—a similar thing; each hemisphere controls an eye. I am not sure here; maybe one of the hemispheres is more specialized on reading. Listening is an older skill, should work better for this purpose.
It would be great if you could get paid for doing the right thing.
And the first and third lies (lies? that’s assuming the conclusion) seem to be about assuming that this actually is possible—therefore, if you are not getting paid for doing the right thing, if you are not working full-time at doing the right thing, then you are not trying hard enough to do the right thing.
As I understood it, your objection was that computation is an abstraction/compression of the real thing, which is not the same as the real thing. (Is that correct?)
First, let’s check how important is the “compression” part. Imagine that someone would emulate your brain and body without compression—in a huge computer the size of the Moon, faithfully, particle by particle, including whatever quantum effects are necessary (for the sake of thought experiment, let’s assume that it is possible). Would such simulation be you in some sense?
If we get that out of the way, I think that the part about compression was addressed. Lossy compression loses some information, but the argument was that consciousness is implemented in a robust way, and can survive some noise. Too much noise would ruin it. On the other hand, individual neurons die every day, so it seems like a quantitative question: it’s not whether the simulation would be you, but how much would the simulation be you. Maybe simulating 50% of the neurons could still be 99% you, although this is just a speculation.
I think there is something real that the concept of “luxury beliefs” points at, but I agree that the usual explanation is confusing for various reasons you mention in this article.
So what exactly is it about? Let’s look at “sexual promiscuity, drug experimentation or abolishing the police”, because they seem to me like the prototypical examples of the concept.
The first two seem like instances of “it is okay to do dangerous things (if you have a good safety net)”. The last one seems like an instance of “let’s abolish public X (if you don’t need so much X, or you are already paying for private X)”. In both cases, there is a recommendation to do something, without mentioning that there is a reason why doing so is relatively safe for you but could be dangerous for others, in a way that is connected with social status (the behavior is relatively safe for high-status people and dangerous for the low-status ones).
By being cavalier about the danger, you signal that you are not among the lower-status people for whom following the advice is dangerous. The people for whom the behavior is dangerous are either smart enough to realize it, but they won’t publicly contradict you, because that would mean drawing attention to their lower status; or are stupid and will follow your advice and will get hurt (which is what makes it a costly signal).
Imagine the beliefs stated in a way that “checks your privilege” instead:
it is okay to experiment with drugs, as long as you are white, your parents are rich enough to keep you out of prison, you can buy relatively pure stuff (as opposed to contaminated shit), and in worst case your parents can pay you an addiction treatment and keep it a secret from your future employers;
it is okay to have multiple sexual partners as long as your parents would support you getting an abortion (for women) or would help you pay the child support in case your partner gets pregnant and refuses to get an abortion (for men), you are financially independent so you can leave your current partner whenever you choose to, in case of sexually transmitted disease you can afford medical treatment, and you live in a sufficiently large city that you can easily avoid your exes and make new friends who don’t know them;
reducing the police force will not have an immediate negative impact on you, if you live in a safe part of the city that doesn’t need a lot of them, or you are already paying for a private security force anyway.
These are factual statements that people can agree with whether the conditions apply to them or don’t. Therefore, agreeing with these statements does not signal whether the conditions apply to you.
It is the version without the disclaimers that signals that the conditions apply to you in a deniable way. (You can pretend to sincerely believe that promiscuity and drug experiments and abolishing the police are actually safe for everyone. Just like the fish that doesn’t see the water, you don’t see the wealth you are swimming in.)
I was trying to think about another example. In some way “it is a great idea to take a huge debt to get to an elite university” seems related, but it is a weaker example, because it talks about money explicitly. A better example would be something that costs a lot of money to do safely, but the money is not mentioned, and the statement is made like it is perfectly safe for everyone and only a stupid person would disagree. Maybe “quit your boring job and follow your passion”? Eh, still too obviously connected to money. A better example would be something like telling everyone to go study philosophy at a prestigious university because it is great for your mind and soul (while carefully avoiding any hint at how expensive that would be, and how it might impact your later job search). The problem is that this advice is time-limited; it would be a good “luxury belief” for a high-school student.
Haha, that’s absolutely correct! But without the job I wouldn’t get paid. So I guess the standard deal is getting paid in return for a set of things, and I dream about getting paid for a subset.
I mean, in theory, the employer should care about getting the work done, being there to fix the bugs and provide support, being available in case something else happens, and maybe a few more things… but spending most of my time in an open space is just unnecessary suffering for an introverted person, and a financial expense for the employer, so… haha, nope. For some reason it is important to be surrounded by other people, even when I happen to be the only person on my project (or the only team member not from India).
Seems to me that this is one of those messages that managers try to tell each other, but it often gets distorted in the game of “telephone”.
The part about “money isn’t everything, other things can be just as important, perhaps even more” is well understood. The part that is missing is that the “other things” should be something the employee actually cares about (and that it can be different things for different people)… as opposed to a standard set of “benefits” that someone in the HR department decided are cool (and cheap) but many employees see them as mostly worthless.
Examples of benefits I don’t care about: various discounts for services that I mostly don’t need (and which taken all together make less than 1% of my salary, so why are we even wasting time discussing this?)
Examples of benefits I care about (but maybe other people don’t): autonomy, work from home, not working in open space
This explains one thing I have recently noticed about myself. I am a software developer, and I dislike being the only developer on a project. I assumed that my aversion was something about effectiveness. But now I realize that “talking to other developers about code” is an important extra payment that I learned to expect in my job.
I think this article would benefit from having a summary, and I tried to write some, but too much time has passed and I am not finished anyway, so here are some notes, approximately about the first half of the article:
.
David Gerard is an important person at Wikipedia:
Wikipedia administrator since 2004
Wikipedia’s UK spokesman
old boys’ network: if you criticize David’s edits, other admins will propose to ban you
some names are associated with David very often (Sandstein, Aquillion, XOR’Easter, NorthBySouthBaranof)
first editor able to see other editors’ IP addresses
The meta-game of Wikipedia edit wars:
started by summary ban of citations from Daily Mail in 2017 (as opposed to editors using their own judgment)
allows you to win tribal battles before they even started
voting is insincere: David criticized Huffington Post as liars at RationalWiki, but defended them as a reliable source at Wikipedia
publishing a few false stories may either be a reason for a summary ban, or excused as business as usual, depending on politics of the source
if you redefine Wikipedia to be a summary of opinions expressed by sources written by your political tribe, your tribe wins Wikipedia
David Gerard’s personality:
most of his social media activity is in groups dedicated to hating some group or concept
David Gerard has a long history of… behavior that is bad, but difficult to explain, and can be successfully defended on a technicality:
he got the “checkuser” right on Wikipedia, and pretended to be abusing it without actually doing so; this allowed him to threaten his opponents online, but also to threaten legal action against Wikipedia for defamation (i.e. towards outsiders it was like “here is a not-so-subtle hint that I am abusing my powers against you”, and towards insiders it was like “if you dare suggest that I am doing or pretending to do anything improper with my powers, my lawyer would like to have a chat with you”)
he explained in a popular Wikipedia essay why a person should not blindly delete everything just because it comes from a source that was not blessed by Wikipedia as reliable; and then he went and did exactly that, and people who pointed it out got in trouble with him and his admin friends
I may be wrong here, but I think I vaguely remember that each language version of Wikipedia is supposed to represent the speakers of the language. (Which makes it difficult for English, because there are too many countries involved.)
Thus, as a hypothetical example, if Korean “reliable sources” agree that sleeping in a room with a fan will kill you, the Korean Wikipedia should say so. (It may or may not also mention that people in other countries are in denial about this danger.)
This is probably more relevant for notability, for example someone popular in South Korea but virtually unknown in the rest of the world would have a page in Korean Wikipedia, but not in e.g. English Wikipedia.
Just an uninformed guess: no. (Unless a new person volunteers for the job.)
The reasoning is basically that because it wasn’t done for such long time, the people who did the first two books probably feel they have more important things to do. As the LLMs evolve, this feeling will only get stronger.
Also, I think the paperback versions were not just “the original version but printed on paper”, but there were also significant edits. If that is true, then printing the remaining books would require similar edits, which is a task that requires certain skills, which dramatically reduces the pool of possible volunteers.
(Then again, if we wait long enough, we could simply throw all the existing material at a LLM and ask it to do the same edits in the remaining books.)
It can be quite difficult to follow the esoteric details of some drama. I clicked a few links, spent an hour reading related stuff, and I am still not sure wtf happened.
I mean that part about Andrew Landeryou and how David lost his “checkuser” privilege...
First, David tweeted: “mr landeryou has some history on wikipedia. (i did the sockpuppet investigation.)”
Then, Mr. Landeryou sent him some polite threats by e-mail: “Your entitled to your opinion of me but I think it might be best for you to discuss claims you make about me with me first. If you don’t, I’ll promise to return the favour after an investigation into exactly what ails you. And that really would be a waste of time for me and a very unpleasant outcome for you, so I urge you to Twit more carefully in future.”
Then, David published his e-mail, along with a long list of SMTP headers.
Okay, so my first question is, was there something sensitive or interesting in those SMTP headers?
Some people might consider it rude to expose someone’s e-mail address. When a similar situation happened to me in the past—someone sent me an e-mail with polite threats, -- I also responded by publishing the full text including the sender’s name, but I didn’t include the e-mail address, because… what’s the point? And including the SMTP headers feels like a 13 years old kid’s idea to say “I am a leet hacker”. Unless those SMTP headers expose something relevant to the story. As a hypothetical example, if someone who denies being connected to some organization would send a message from the organization’s servers, that would expose the lie. But all I see in the headers is that Mr. Landeryou uses GMail. Is that somehow controversial or did I miss something else?
The leaked e-mails from arbcom-l start with a complaint about the tweet and about publishing the e-mail. The person considers this “troubling enough itself; it’s unseemly for a current checkuser to brag about catching somebody on Wikipedia, presumably engaged in self-promotion”, “embarrassing to Wikipedia and perhaps even chilling” and suggests to “remove his CU bit immediately”, mostly because David is barely using it anyway.
My second question: do I read this correctly that the complaint is essentially about the immature behavior of someone publicly connected to Wikipedia, rather than about something actually serious?
Following e-mails: “Again?! We need to show him the door. I’m sorry, but he’s a liability for the project(s)”, “we are consistently ashamed of his behavior. He’s had numerous chances before; we all tried several time to ask him to tone his rhetoric down and he is unwilling or unable to. We need to make it very clear that his behavior is unwelcome and unbecoming, and that any pretension of speaking for the project is entirely illusory. That he discusses his checkuser work is just the proverbial straw.”, “we’ve been spending the year telling him that he needs to tone it down several notches”.
The message for David: (not sure whether it was actually sent, or was just a discussed draft)
Hello David,
You recent blog post (see link at the end) has come to the attention of the Committee, and we are disappointed that you were unable or unwilling to heed the concerns expressed by the arbitrators and other functionaries over the past year. Such outbursts are completely unacceptable as they reflect poorly on the project and, given your status as a functionary, particularly damaging. In particular, disclosing past checkuser results (especially with a bragging tone) and publishing email including private information are not compatible with the trust and decorum expected of holders of advanced rights.
Given the warnings you have already received on that subject, the Committee is voting to suspend both checkuser and oversight permissions, and to remove you from the func-l mailing list. It appears at this time that the motion will carry, but we wanted to extend the opportunity of stepping down willingly of your own volition beforehand to reduce the likelihood of drama and the possible embarrassment.
If you have comments to offer, please respond to this email before 2009-12-01; at which point we will otherwise close the pending motion.People on the list worry about the possiblity of drama. They speculate that if they merely announce that David has lost the checkuser privilege, there will be less drama than if they start discussing the details and allow him to frame the story in his favor. But the least dramatic way would be to tell him how they feel about his behavior, and hopefully he is mature enough to resign.
In hindsight, if someone is so immature in his role that he needs to be removed from it, expecting him to be mature enough to accept this decision calmly might be… a bit too naive?
Then… I am sorry, I am still in the middle of the leaked e-mails, but my day is already over… it seems like David decides to go nuclear instead, and threatens to sue the ArbCom for defamation?
And the conclusion is that, on one hand, David loses the checkuser privilege, but on the other hand, any cricitism of him is purged from the Wikipedia records. The fellow Wikipedia admins keep asking, but get no response.
UPDATE: Originally I wrote “this seems to me like a huge victory for David”, but on the second thought it feels completely pointless. He successfully strongarmed the ArbCom into… doing what ArbCom has proposed in the first place (removing the privilege without explaining why). The only difference perhaps that now as a part of the private settlement the members of ArbCom are not allowed to talk about it later? Which means that the next time he does something immature but kinda plausibly defensible, the frustrated people who asked “again?” will have nothing to point at.
...ok, so I did actually figure it out while writing this, I think.
I think I understand your objection, but “left” and “right” are relative (a source can simultaneously be rightwards from you and leftwards from the average person in the country), one dimension is not enough to capture the nuance, and both “left” and “right” come in various flavors. If you try to sort all existing political orientations into two giant bags, inevitably each bag will contain things very different from each other. (Unless you define one bag as “people who agree with me” and the other one as “everyone else”.)
Wikipedia was supposed to describe the opinions within the Overton window. Neutral point of view, sections on criticism, etc., but no need to teach the controversy about Flat Earth.
But there is no precise definition of the Overton window, and some Wikipedia admins (such as David Gerard, but some other names also ring a bell) decided to redefine it to match their political tribe.
80 but why? I barely checked anything, only a few things here and there.
Completion of all items on this test will likely result in death.
Blah blah, death is the default outcome anyway.
My kids were playing with an AI… not sure which one, probably Gemini… and I felt too lazy to read them a goodnight story, so I told them to ask the AI to write them one.
They asked the AI for a story about a princess who fell in love with a wizard, or something like that, but the AI told them that it refuses to generate sexually suggestive texts.
So instead of saving a few minutes of book reading, now I had to explain to them what “sexually suggestive” means, and why the AI refuses to do that. Thanks a lot, AI.
I agree, some explanation would be welcome.
I didn’t vote either way, because I do not understand the article, but I am also not confident enough to blame it on you, so I abstain from voting.
I suspect the answer is something like: the explanation is not very clear, or possibly wrong.
Seems to me that birth control is a part of the story, but modern lifestyle is another. People spend more time away from home; at home we do homework with kids, watch TV, scroll social networks on smartphones. It’s not just reduction of unprotected sex, but also reduction of sex in general.
I wouldn’t be surprised if people had more kids during COVID, simply because they spent more time with their partners.