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MondSemmel
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6MondSemmel's Shortform
3y
11
Lack of Social Grace Is an Epistemic Virtue
MondSemmel2y*197

While the framing of treating lack of social grace as a virtue captures something true, it's too incomplete and imo can't support its strong conclusion. The way I would put it is that you have correctly observed that, whatever the benefits of social grace are, it comes at a cost, and sometimes this cost is not worth paying. So in a discussion, if you decline to pay the cost of social grace, you can afford to buy other virtues instead.[1]

For example, it is socially graceful not to tell the Emperor Who Wears No Clothes that he wears no clothes. Whereas someone who lacks social grace is more likely to tell the emperor the truth.

But first of all, I disagree with the frame that lack of social grace is itself a virtue. In the case of the emperor, for example, the virtues are rather legibility and non-deception, traded off against whichever virtues the socially graceful response would've gotten.

And secondly, often the virtues you can buy with social grace are worth far more than whatever you could gain by declining to be socially graceful. For example, when discussing politics with someone of an opposing ideology, you could decline to be socially graceful and tell your interlocutor to their face that you hate them and everything they stand for. This would be virtuously legible and non-deceptive, at the cost of immediately ending the conversation and thus forfeiting any chance of e.g. gains from trade, coming to a compromise, etc.

One way I've seen this cost manifest on LW is that some authors complain that there's a style of commenting here that makes it unenjoyable to post here as an author. As a result, those authors are incentivized to post less, or to post elsewhere.[2]

And as a final aside, I'm skeptical of treating Feynman as socially graceless. Maybe he was less deferential towards authority figures, but if he had told nothing but the truth to all the authority figures (who likely included some naked emperors) throughout his life, his career would've presumably ended long before he could've gotten his Nobel Prize. And b), IIRC the man's physics lectures are just really fun to watch, and I'm pretty confident that a sufficiently socially graceless person would not make for a good teacher. For example, it is socially graceful not to belittle fledgling students as intellectual inferiors, even though they in some ways are just that.

  1. ^

    Related: I wrote this comment and this follow-up where I wished that Brevity was considered a rationalist virtue. Because if there's no counterbalancing virtue to trade off against other virtues like legibility and truth-seeking, then supposedly virtuous discussions are incentivized to become arbitrarily long.

  2. ^

    The moderation log of users banned by other users is a decent proxy for the question of which authors have considered which commenters to be too costly to interact with, whether due to lack of social grace of something else.

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leogao's Shortform
MondSemmel1d90

things the ideal sane discourse encouraging social media platform would have: [...]

opt in anti scrolling pop up that asks you every few days what the highest value interaction you had recently on the site was, or whether you're just mindlessly scrolling. gently reminds you to take a break if you can't come up with a good example of a good interaction.

Cynical thought: these two points might be incompatible. Social media thrives on network effects, and one requirement for those is that the website be addicting or attention-grabbing. Anti-addictiveness designs are nice in principle, but then your prospective users just spend their time on something that's more addicting instead (whether other websites or Netflix or whatever), and thus can't benefit from the other ways in which your site is better.

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Davey Morse's Shortform
MondSemmel2d32

And digital brains can generate certain sorts of random ideas much faster than carbon ones.

Even for humans, ideas are comparatively cheap to generate; the problem is generating valid insights. So rather than focusing on ability to generate ideas, it seems to me it would be better to focus on ability to generate valid insights, e.g. by conducting mental experiments, or by computing all logical consequences of sets of axioms, etc.

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Authors Have a Responsibility to Communicate Clearly
MondSemmel5d20

(Did you mean to link to that comment, rather than to the parent or child comment, both of which are from you?)

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AI Moratorium Stripped From BBB
MondSemmel5d*72

As mentioned in the post, Congress is perfectly free to get its act together and do proper legislation themselves, but since they don't actually want to do that*, then it's insane for them to pre-empt the states from doing it.

* (E.g. the US Senate, or rather all the 100 individual Senators, could at any time abolish the modern filibuster and actually restore their ability to legislate as a co-equal branch of government, if they ever wanted to. But they don't.)

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Racial Dating Preferences and Sexual Racism
MondSemmel9d38

That's not at all what the OP (jenn) is saying. She's claiming that immigrants from poor households used to display a certain insecurity that came from them being literally economically insecure, that this made them unattractive to her, and that this has been changing for the better as the living standards of new immigrants and second-gen immigrants rose.

None of the things you saw as being in that comment ("I will always have food and a house without any work or bosses" or "privilege of the top 1%") are actually in the comment.

And separately, even if that were all in the comment, don't prescribe dating preferences to other people. People are allowed to be (not) attracted to anyone they damn well please.

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Racial Dating Preferences and Sexual Racism
MondSemmel11d106

The point of the OP is that having financial security has significant psychological benefits, and for that it's not particularly relevant whether the income is active or passive, deserved or undeserved. Though in the historical context, it was comparatively challenging for women to have any income independent from their husband, who was the breadwinner of the household.

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Annapurna's Shortform
MondSemmel20d20

By which mechanism would all that defense spending be quickly repurposed towards drone manufacturing? All the things that make big institutions so small-c conservative - like the bureaucracy, the legal apparatus, the procurement rules, and the defense contractors with their long-running contracts - ensure that no such large-scale shift in strategy can occur, no?

And even if that did happen, by which mechanism do you convert $1T into actually manufactured drones within any relevant time frame?

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Jan's Shortform
MondSemmel21d40

Nostalgebraist linkposted his essay on LW, in case you want to comment directly on the post.

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So You Want to Work at a Frontier AI Lab
MondSemmel24d65

Contemporary AI models are not "aligned" in any sense that would help the slightest bit against a superintelligence. You need stronger guardrails against stronger AI capabilities, and current "alignment" doesn't even prevent stuff like ChatGPT's recent sycophancy, or jailbreaking.

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xAI
5mo
Problem of Old Evidence
1y
(+17/-17)
Death
1y
(+11/-9)
Geoengineering
2y
Simulacrum Levels
3y
(+12/-12)
Simulacrum Levels
3y
(+12/-12)
Health / Medicine / Disease
4y
(+4)
Ethical Injunction
11y
(+7/-4)
9Have any parties in the current European Parliamentary Election made public statements on AI?
Q
1y
Q
0
38On what research policymakers actually need
1y
0
101The Filan Cabinet Podcast with Oliver Habryka - Transcript
2y
9
14Open & Welcome Thread - November 2022
3y
46
12Health & Lifestyle Interventions With Heavy-Tailed Outcomes?
Q
3y
Q
9
8Open & Welcome Thread - June 2022
3y
30
40Why Take Care Of Your Health?
3y
21
6MondSemmel's Shortform
3y
11
98Recommending Understand, a Game about Discerning the Rules
4y
55
96Quotes from the WWMoR Podcast Episode with Eliezer
4y
3
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