Fair. That’s how I took it at first, and why I liked it more then.
virtualAdept
Karma: 358
The injunction to measure aversion strength by effect on behavior is one I think I will find particularly useful—in particular because I already consider myself good at dealing with strong feeling aversions. If an aversion feels strong, it tends to make me question myself rather pointedly about why I feel that way, whereas those that feel only like a mild preference or a case of ‘have better things to do’ have not, in the past, set off those alarm bells. I quite enjoyed this post.
Do you really think saying less than necessary is good advice? That one seemed intuitively good to me at first glance, but then I thought about it a bit more. If I seek to communicate clearly, I should definitely say as much as necessary.
Otherwise, I heartily agree with you.
Very few of my friends will read anything from LW that I link to them, and I suspect that they would find this link absolutely hilarious. I have never managed to get any of them to give a generalized account of exactly what they think is so systematically annoying about LW, though—they call the whole site ‘pompous’ and stop there.
I have noticed that I become more tense when reading effective arguments for Christianity and more relaxed when reading good arguments against it
What do you consider an effective argument for Christianity, and what sorts of thoughts do you find yourself thinking when you encounter such an argument? It might be useful to write them down.
I agree. I didn’t actually expect it to get promoted, since it doesn’t fit the pattern of things I’ve seen on the very front. I’ll show how new I am here and ask, though—Eliezer’s comment read like he had been presented with some expectation that this be promoted. Is that because posts that get upvoted this far typically (or always) are?
Since I didn’t ask, or state that I thought it should be, it seemed a bit out-of-the-blue, which did then and is still causing me to try to figure out whether his objection was only to the idea of promotion, or if he objected to promotion because he thought it shouldn’t be here at all.
On the title—the idea was, for this post specifically, to sketch the general principles that define both the space of reasonable approaches and likely outcomes in biological problems. I do think I did an underwhelming job demonstrating that link, and if that is what you mean or close to it, then I agree with you and will take it as a reminder to work on cohesion/full clarity of purpose in future posts. (If it’s not, I invite further clarification.)
As for whether it’s appropriate for LW… well, since I have a fairly good idea of what I’m going to write on the subject in the future, I think it is, because I intend to keep it targeted and relevant to issues the community has interest in—offering either another angle from which to consider them, or more background information from which to evaluate them, or ideally both. As I’ve said before, I’ve no desire to write a textbook, and there’s plenty of other places on the internet we could go if we wanted to read the equivalent of one.
However, if you don’t think that is enough to be relevant here, I would very much like to hear what, if anything, would make such a set of posts relevant to you (not trying to shift the reference frame—I mean relevant to you in the context of LW). The large positive response I received previously and in this post indicates to me that it’s worth continuing in some form.
Yes! Thank you for linking that thread; I hadn’t seen it.
To the best of my knowledge—and that deserves a disclaimer, since I’m a grad student in science and not yet completely versed in the legal gymnastics—it is changing, but any loosening of policy restrictions only comes with exceptional evidence that current norms are grossly unnecessary. In a general sense, bioengineering and tech started out immersed in a climate of fear and overblown, Crighton-esque ‘what-if’ scenarios with little or no basis in fact, and that climate is slowly receding to more informed levels of caution.
Policy also assuredly changes in the other direction as new frontiers are reached, to account for increased abilities of researchers to manipulate these systems.
Hah, no, that does sound like a real course title, although usually they call it “cellular engineering” to sucker in more people who would be turned off by an explicit mention of math in the title.
(I kid. Mostly.)
It is only a small subset of what I want to cover, though. I shall continue to think on it.
I can’t really argue with that. I’ve been going back and forth with myself over whether I should call it something different. Suggestions?
It’s a foundation—it’s easiest to illustrate the patterns I’m describing on a molecular/cellular level, but they apply across the board. My current intent for the actual series is to start with a group of posts on molecular/cellular systems, both because a basic understanding of genetics and metabolism is extremely useful to understanding everything else, and because it’s the area I’m most familiar with.
However, recognizing that about half the interest expressed in the suggestions thread was for topics above the molecular level, I’m trying to figure out how to do some posts on them earlier without making things disjointed/difficult to follow. I might settle for weaving in short bits about how molecular topics will apply to macroscale ones later.
I’m hoping that I’ll be able to keep the posts within the realm of reasonable understanding for most people on this site by focusing on principles, patterns, and analogies to other fields; however, if at any point I’m failing to do so, I will ardently welcome that being pointed out.
The assumptions I made when constructing my tentative post outline were that readers here were likely to have some general scientific background, and at least a high school level of chemistry. I recognize that the latter might not be a good assumption.
(If you, or anyone else has suggestions at any point on how to improve the usefulness of these posts for those without a background in related fields, please let me know!)
If you mean my opinion on whether it’s worth being afraid of—I don’t think it is. Any powerful new technology/capability should be implemented with caution and an eye to anticipating risk, but I don’t view bioengineering in a different capacity than any other scientific frontier in terms of risk.
On a practical level, the oversight on manipulation of organisms beyond your run-of-the-mill, single-celled lab workhorses (bacteria, yeast) is massive. In the not-too-distant past, it was an uphill climb just to be able to do genetic engineering research at all.
I got a lot of questions about ‘bacteria FOOM,’ if you will, around the time the synthetic bacterium paper came out. The short version of my answer then is worth repeating—if we want to make super-germs or other nasty things, nature/Azathoth does it quite well already (ebola, smallpox, plague, HIV...). Beyond that, this sort of research is exceptionally time- and resource-consuming; the funding bottleneck reduces the chances of the lone mad scientist creating a monster essentially to nil. Beyond even that, putting some DNA in a cell is not hard, but designing an idealized, intelligent organism on the level of strong AI is at least as hard as just designing the AI.
So my stance is one of.… let’s call it exuberant caution. Or possibly cautious exuberance. Probably both.
LW Biology 101 Introduction: Constraining Anticipation
Ahh, that makes sense. Thank you.
I think I’m hung up on the lottery example in Eliezer’s original post—what is meant by a quantum lottery? He said ‘every ticket wins somewhere’ - does that mean that every ticket wins in some future timeline (such that if you could split yourself and populate multiple future timelines, you could increase your probability of winning)? If not, what does it mean? Lacking some special provision for the ticket, the outcome is determined by the ticket you bought before you queued up the split, rather than the individual probability of winning.
If anyone could clarify this, I’d be grateful.
What constitutes ‘more?’ I ask because it seems to be a fairly frequent topic on the site (people trying to do less of it), and I don’t want to write a primer post that ends up being rehash for 90% of readers.
Are there a handful of broad principles that constrain anticipation about biological systems or processes that you could highlight?
There are. My thought about the current event idea for the topics would be simply to use those as a jumping-off point to talk about the foundational aspects, since otherwise I’d feel somewhat aimless as to where to start. But the way you phrased that made me think about more about how to structure a foundations only-type post, and I think I could pull at least some of that off in a way that would be useful.… I shall continue to think on this. Thanks for the suggestion!
Yup, sounds about right. The phrases ‘snide intellectualism’ and ‘ivory tower’ are things I’ve heard more than once. From my significant other, no less. I know his response is an aversion to the site and not to intellectualism in general, or else, well, he wouldn’t be my significant other, but it’s incredibly frustrating. I try to bring up topics in a general sense instead of ‘I read this really great article on Less Wrong...’ but it’s always difficult to avoid using references from people here if it’s a topic that LW deals with often.
I suppose this would be a good point to say I’m interested in advice from anyone who has successfully converted a friend or family member’s opinion of the site from knee-jerk negative to neutral or positive, given that I spent most of yesterday fuming about something absolutely ridiculous and insulting that was said in response to me bringing up the topic of cryonics.