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My general sense is that I see a lot of interesting people go to Twitter when they are committed to being on the outside of most elite institutions, but still want conversation. And Twitter gives a lot of control in who you see, and makes engaging those people in conversation very low cost. I think there's a valuable contrarian cluster on there.

1MakoYass5h Hahah. That's a funny thought. I don't think it does lead inevitably to toxicity, though. I don't think the incentives it imposes are really that favourable to that sort of usage. There's a hedonic attractor for venomous behaviour rather than a strategic one. Right now the char limit isn't really that hostile to dialogue. There's a "threading" UI (hints that it's okay to post many tweets at once) so it's now less like "don't put any effort into your posts" and more like "if you're gonna post a lot try to divide it up into small, digestible pieces"
6John_Maxwell7h Under what circumstances do you feel introducing new policy ideas with the preface "maybe this could be a good idea" is acceptable? I don't expect anyone important to be reading this thread, certainly not important policymakers. Even if they were, I think it was pretty clear I was spitballing. If society's elites are incentivized to use a platform which systematically causes misunderstandings and strife for no good reason, that seems bad. Let's not fall prey to the halo effect. Eliezer also wrote a long post [https://rationalconspiracy.com/2017/01/03/four-layers-of-intellectual-conversation/] about the necessity of back-and-forth debate, and he's using a platform which is uniquely bad at this. At some point, one starts to wonder whether Eliezer is a mortal human being who suffers from akrasia and biases just like the rest of us. I didn't make much of an effort to assemble arguments that Twitter is bad. But I think there are good arguments out there [https://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2016/12/is-twitter-dystopian-technology.html] . How do you feel about the nuclear diplomacy that's happened on Twitter?
4An1lam7h First of all, I apologize, I think my comment was too snarky and took a tone of "this is so surprising" that I regret on reflection. Agreed, I was not worried about this. Fair enough. I agree the Eliezer point isn't strong evidence. I don't have time to respond at length to this part at the moment (I wanted to reply quickly to apologize mostly) but I agree it's the most useful question to discuss and will try to respond more later. To summarize, I acknowledge it's possible that Twitter is bad for the collective but think people may overestimate the bad parts by focusing on how politicians / people fighting about politics use Twitter (which does seem bad) and that even if it is "bad", it's not clear that banning short response websites would lead to a better long-term outcome. For example, maybe people would just start fighting with pictures on Instagram. I don't think this specific outcome is likely but think it's in a class of outcomes that would result from banning that seems decently likely.

In Q3 of 2019, the LessWrong team picked the growth of a single metric as our only goal. For the duration of this quarter, the overwhelming consideration in our decision-making what would most increase the target metric.

Why target a simple, imperfect metric?

The LessWrong team pursues a mixture of overlapping long-term goals, e.g. building a place where people train and apply rationality, building a community and culture with good epistemics, and building technologies which drive intellectual progress on important problems.

It’s challenging to track progress on these goals. They’re broad, diffic

... (Read more)
5Wei_Dai2h I'm not sure about this. At least for me personally, I feel like voting is more costly on LW2 than on LW1, and I probably vote substantially less as a result. (Not totally sure because I haven't kept statistics on my own voting behavior.) The reasons are: 1. Having to decide between strong vs weak vote. 2. Having a high enough karma that my vote strengths (3 for weak and 10 for strong) are pretty identifiable, so I have to think more about social implications. (Maybe I shouldn't, but I do.) 3. Sometimes I'm uncomfortable voting something up or down by at least 3 points because I'm not sure of my judgement of its quality. Hmm, on second thought the number of people in my position is probably small enough that this isn't likely to significantly affect your "number of votes" comparison. I'll leave this here anyway as general feedback on the voting system. (To be clear I'm not advocating to change the current system, just offering a data point.) Another thing I've been wondering about is, there's generally less voting per post/comment on LW2 than on LW1, but the karma on comparable posts seems more similar. Could it be that people have inherited their sense of how much karma different kinds of posts/comments "deserve" from LW1 and tend to stop voting up a post once it reaches that amount, which would result in similar karma but fewer votes?

Having a high enough karma that my vote strengths (3 for weak and 10 for strong) are pretty identifiable, so I have to think more about social implications. (Maybe I shouldn't, but I do.)

Hmm, I was starting to notice that a bit myself, and I think this is especially strong the more vote weight you have, which is an incentive counter to the very point of weighted voting. One option is to obscure some karma things a little to avoid this.

2johnswentworth2h Responding to both of you with one comment again: I sort of alluded to it in the A/B testing comment, but it's less about any particular feature that's missing and more about the general mindset. If you want to drive up metrics fast, then the magic formula is a tight iteration loop: testing large numbers of small changes to figure out which little things have disproportionate impact. Any not-yet-optimized UI is going to have lots of little trivial inconveniences and micro-confusions; identifying and fixing those can move the needle a lot with relatively little effort. Think about how facebook or amazon A/B tests every single button, every item in every sidebar, on their main pages. That sort of thing is very easy, once a testing framework is in place, and it has high yields. As far as bigger projects go... until we know what the key factors are which drive engagement on LW, we really don't have the tools to prioritize big projects. For purposes of driving up metrics, the biggest project right now is "figure out which things matter that we didn't realize matter". A/B tests are one of the main tools for that - looking at which little tweaks have big impact will give hints toward the bigger issues. Recorded user sessions (a la FullStory) are another really helpful tool. Interviews and talking to authors can be a substitute for that, although users usually don't understand their own wants/needs very well. Analytics in general is obviously useful, although it's tough to know which questions to ask without watching user sessions directly.
7johnswentworth3h Responding to both of you here: A/B tests are a mental habit which takes time to acquire. Right now, you guys are thinking in terms of big meaty projects, which aren't the sort of thing A/B tests are for. I wouldn't typically make a single A/B test for a big, complicated feature like shortform - I'd run lots of little A/B tests for different parts of it, like details of how it's accessed and how it's visible. It's the little things: size/location/wording of buttons, sorting on the homepage, tweaking affordances, that sort of thing. Think nudges, not huge features. Those are the kinds of things which let you really drive up the metrics with relatively little effort, once you have the tests in place. Usually, it turns out that one or two seemingly-innocuous details are actually surprisingly important. It's true that you don't necessarily need A/B tests to attribute growth to particular changes, especially if the changes are big things or one-off events, but that has some serious drawbacks even aside from the statistical uncertainty. Without A/B tests, we can't distinguish between the effects of multiple changes made in the same time window, especially small changes, which means we can't run lots of small tests. More fundamentally, an A/B test isn't just about attribution, it's about having a control group - with all the benefits that a control group brings, like fine-grained analysis of changes in behavior between test buckets.
small worlds
31h3 min readShow Highlight


(consider skipping 0, 1, 2, and 3)

0. a mind thinks using an ontology, which answers "what things can exist, how do they relate, and how do they change?".
00. an atemporal ontology is a collection of types of things that can exist, along with ways in which those things can relate to each other.
01. a situation sustained by an ontology is a collection of some things, i.e. instances of the types from the ontology, along with instances of relations between those things.
02. a temporal ontology is an atemporal ontology O along with ways in which situations in O can develop into other situati... (Read more)

Hello,

I would like to try double crux https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/exa5kmvopeRyfJgCy/double-crux-a-strategy-for-resolving-disagreement with someone. My statement A is "There is God" (I indeed believe in it, it is not just for the sake of trying the technique). I have three cruxes (well, two and a half, to be honest), according to the rules I do not publish it here so that you would prepare your cruxes independently.

Thank you!

1valentinslepukhin2h Yes, I have option E: Everything. God just know everything, all the possible universes, - not calculating, just having them in His memory that is infinite. As I stated in the previous comment , there is no reason for the exact theory to be finite, while approximations can be finite (would you like me to copy it or you can find it?).

That's your crux? Lesser interpretations than E won't do?

I am not convinced that E is logically coherent. It's as meaningless as "married bachelor".

  • Suppose that God's memory is the set of "all facts" O.
  • The set of all subsets (or powerset) of O, we'll call p(O).

Then, for any given fact f, there is a further fact f ' stating that it's either in or not in each subset of O in p(O).
Thus, there must be at least as many facts as there are elements of p(O), which, being the powerset of O, by Cantor's Theorem must have a strictly greater cardinality than O.
B

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1gilch4h Getting past an infinitesimal prior to a tiny finite one is a long way from "more likely than not". But more simply, my prior is my position. If you get my prior belief for the proposition "God exists" over 50%, then you've won: at that point I've become a theist by definition (though maybe not a very confident one). This isn't a crux--It's the original proposition!
1valentinslepukhin2h Errr not completely - you have prior and you have experience. For example, suppose you agree after long discussion that probability of God to exist is not infinitesimal but 0.01% . Ok, you are still more atheist than a theist. Then if you observe miracles you update it to much higher probability - but you can't do it if your prior is infinitesimal as now. What would you put your priors now for the following: -the Universe is completely describable by a finite set of laws, no other reality behind -the Universe is approximately describable by the finite set of laws, approximation improves with the length of the theory (need infinite theory to full description) -Universe is simulation -aliens -something else

(Cross-posted from Medium.)

Decision-making is life. Over time, our decisions carve an identity for ourselves and our organizations, and it is our decisions, more than anything else, that determine how we are remembered after we’re gone. Despite their importance, though, we barely pay attention to most of the decisions we make. Biology has programmed in us a powerful instinct to make decisions using our intuitions rather than our conscious selves whenever possible. There are good reasons for this; if we had to think about every little decision we made, we’d never get anything don... (Read more)

You’ll notice in the screenshot that there’s an image of something that looks like a lopsided bell curve on the bottom right. That’s because the software I’m using (Guesstimate) calculates a Monte Carlo simulation for this estimate right there in the model. Monte Carlo simulation is a statistical technique that randomly generates thousands of scenarios from the information you feed the model. Originally developed by nuclear physicists, it’s now used to aid decision-making in everything from politics to sports and beyond.
... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post
Personal quality experimentation
201d1 min readShow Highlight

Different people seem to have different strategies, which they use systematically across different parts of their lives, and that we recognize and talk about. For instance people vary on:

  • Spontaneity
  • Inclination toward explicit calculations
  • Tendency to go meta
  • Skepticism
  • Optimism
  • Tendency to look at the big picture vs. the details
  • Expressed confidence
  • Enacted patience

I don’t know of almost anyone experimenting with varying these axes, to see which setting is best for them, or even what different settings are like. Which seems like a natural thing to do in some sense, given the variation in ... (Read more)

It seems largely true to me that it is not hard to create a temporary change in one of the axes, but I am curious if these can lead to permanently changed settings in the long run. I would be very curious to hear from anyone who's created lasting change through an experiment like this and what axis in particular they changed.

Personally, I've experimented with acting much more extroverted than I typically am in certain social contexts (interviews are a good example) and the new setting feels comfortable or even better at times. Gaining more experi... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post

Bíos brakhús
12moShow Highlight

The hermeneutic spiral is the process of understanding a text (or more generally, anything big and confusing) by passing over it again and again, each time using what you've learned to more deeply understand the workings and roles of each part and grow a truer image of the whole. The hermeneutic spiral is not depth-first search; it's more like bread-first search, but it can also involve depth, and altering the ordering you use to search, and expanding the set you're searching over.

The hermeneutic spiral involves noticing landmarks, principles, cruxes, and

... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post
1TekhneMakre3h Logogenesis. The creation of words, or more generally the creation of forms of language, such as phrases, abbreviations, grammatical rules, and so on. "Logos" = reason, idea, word; "genesis" = creation, origin, from "*gene-" = give birth.
1TekhneMakre3h Subficial. Opposite of superficial: under the surface, or on the underside. "sub-" meaning "under", "-ficial" meaning "having to do with form or face".
1TekhneMakre3h Public meaning vs. private meaning. One useful aspect of the meaning of "meaning" is "that which will be reconstructed by the hearer". Statements made in public (e.g. in a speech to a roomful of people, or on TV, or on Facebook) are interpreted by the listeners differently from statements made in private, e.g. to one close friend. Since public announcements create common knowledge, it is natural for a hearer to interpret a public statement about X as being addressed to the group CK concept [https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2J5AsHPxxLGZ78Z7s/bios-brakhus?commentId=L5SQs3mdAMnfs9t45] of X. The group CK concept of X can differ from the hearer's private concept of X. In fact, public statements are, in purely epistemic terms, always strictly less efficient, at least in terms of their meaning, than private statements. Public statements will always have more bucket errors [https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EEv9JeuY5xfuDDSgF/flinching-away-from-truth-is-often-about-protecting-the] and less nuance and more panicky subficial [https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2J5AsHPxxLGZ78Z7s/bios-brakhus?commentId=cgRB5ZxtwPPDJhw9T] political motion than private statements. Of course, public statements can have other positive characteristics, e.g. efficiently broadcasting good info, or creating CK for purposes of political action, or broadcasting info that only becomes useful when aggregated with analogous info from other people. But in terms of referring cleanly, public statements are just worse.

I remember seeing a talk by a synthetic biologist, almost a decade ago. The biologist used a genetic algorithm to evolve an electronic circuit, something like this:

(source)

He then printed out the evolved circuit, brought it to his colleague in the electrical engineering department, and asked the engineer to analyze the circuit and figure out what it did.

“I refuse to analyze this circuit,” the colleague replied, “because it was not designed to be understandable by humans.” He has a point - that circuit is a big, opaque mess.

This, the biologist argued, is the root pro... (Read more)

Curated. Just discussed this with Oli a bunch. Some reasons for curation:

  • High quality book reviews are very valuable and a key step in being able to interface with expertise in other communities and fields.
  • Biology is a field that is a major blindspot on LessWrong, where most of us have relatively little expertise. One reason for this is that we take a very reductionistic approach to understanding the world, and biology often seems very messy and unprincipled. This post really shocked me with the level of principle that apparently can be found in such syste
... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post
Eli's shortform feed
315mo1 min readShow Highlight

I'm mostly going to use this to crosspost links to my blog for less polished thoughts, Musings and Rough Drafts.

New post: Some musings about exercise and time discount rates

[Epistemic status: a half-thought, which I started on earlier today, and which might or might not be a full thought by the time I finish writing this post.]

I’ve long counted exercise as an important component of my overall productivity and functionality. But over the past months my exercise habit has slipped some, without apparent detriment to my focus or productivity. But this week, after coming back from a workshop, my focus and productivity haven’t really booted up.

Her... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post

DeepMind released their AlphaStar paper a few days ago, having reached Grandmaster level at the partial-information real-time strategy game StarCraft II over the summer.

This is very impressive, and yet less impressive than it sounds. I used to watch a lot of StarCraft II (I stopped interacting with Blizzard recently because of how they rolled over for China), and over the summer there were many breakdowns of AlphaStar games once players figured out how to identify the accounts.

The impressive part is getting reinforcement learning to work at all in such a vast state space- that took breakthroug... (Read more)

I know more about StarCraft than I do about AI, so I could be off base, but here's my best attempt at an explanation:

As a human, you can understand that a factory gets in the way of a unit, and if you lift it, it will no longer be in the way. The AI doesn't understand this. The AI learns by playing through scenarios millions of times and learning that on average, in scenarios like this one, it gets an advantage when it performs this action. The AI has a much easier time learning something like "I should make a marine" (which it perceive... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post

ML is an inefficient market
324d1 min readShow Highlight

For the last year I've been playing with some exotic software technologies. My company has already used them to construct what we believe is the best algorithm in the world for IMU-based gesture detection.

I've checked ML engineers at major tech companies, successful startup founders and the Kaggle forums. None of them are using these particular technologies. When I ask them about it they show total disinterest. It's like asking an Ottoman cavalry officer what he's going to do about the Maxim gun.

This personal experience indicates that

  1. simple tools already exist that could make our machine lea
... (Read more)

Epsilon value maybe?

In a certain sense, this is a trivial claim. Obviously some people are going to have 'local' competitive advantages but nothing speaks louder than success so word gets out eventually.

But I'm intrigued, so maybe this is not literally valueless.

This is the eleventh post in the Novum Organum sequence. For context, see the sequence introduction. For the reading guide, see earlier posts in the sequence.

We have used Francis Bacon's Novum Organum in the version presented atwww.earlymoderntexts.com. Translated by and copyright to Jonathan Bennett. Prepared for LessWrong by Ruby.

[[In the previous section, Bacon introduced his "three tables": his careful collection of data and observations that are core to building up his scientific method.

These tables are:

1) A table of presence which lists many examples where phenomena of int... (Read more)

To Be Decided #2
46h2 min readShow Highlight

TBD is a quarterly-ish newsletter about deploying knowledge for impact, learning at scale, and making more thoughtful choices for ourselves and our organizations. This is the second issue, which was originally published in June 2019. Enjoy!  --Ian

An Introduction to Decision Modeling

Decision-making is life. Over time, our decisions carve an identity for ourselves and our organizations, and it is our decisions, more than anything else, that determine how we are remembered after we’re gone. Despite their importance, though, we barely pay attention to most of the decis... (Read more)

Randomness vs. Ignorance
313h1 min readShow Highlight

A distinction I don't see made often enough is between what I call randomness and ignorance. Roughly, every expression of uncertainty is either about "where in the universe am I?" or "what is the universe like?" (or both). The former is the domain of randomness, the latter of ignorance.

Suppose you roll a die. You know that you're in a situation where you've just rolled a die, and that, in roughly 1/6th of the situations where one has just rolled a die, the die will come up a three. Thus, your uncertainty about the die roll is random.

Suppose you're wonder... (Read more)

This is aleatory (inherent randomness) vs. epistemic (knowledge) uncertainty. You can parse this as uncertainty inherent in the parameters vs. uncertainty inherent in your estimates of the parameters / the parameterization of the model.

This is a very important distinction that has received treatment in the prediction literature but, indeed, is not applied enough to interpreting others' predictions among laypeople.

2Dagon8h It could be argued that it's all ignorance. The die will roll the way that physics demands, based on the velocity, roll, pitch, yaw of the die, and the surface properties of the felt. There's only one possible outcome, you just don't know it yet. If you roll a die in an opaque cup, the uncertainty does not change in kind from the time you start shaking it to the time you slam it down - it's all the same ignorance until you actually look. You can, if you like, believe that there is unknowability at the quantum level, but even that doesn't imply true randomness, just ignorance of which branch you'll find your perceptive trail following. Luckily (heh), Bayes' Theorem doesn't care. It works for updating predictions on evidence, regardless of where uncertainty comes from.
Maybe Lying Doesn't Exist
5825d7 min readShow Highlight

In "Against Lie Inflation", the immortal Scott Alexander argues that the word "lie" should be reserved for knowingly-made false statements, and not used in an expanded sense that includes unconscious motivated reasoning. Alexander argues that the expanded sense draws the category boundaries of "lying" too widely in a way that would make the word less useful. The hypothesis that predicts everything predicts nothing: in order for "Kevin lied" to mean something, some possible states-of-affairs need to be identified as not lying, so that the statement "Kevin lied" can correspond to redistributing

... (Read more)

This is a great post! A lot of these points have been addressed, but this is what I wrote while reading this post:

It's not immediately clear that an 'appeal to consequences' is wrong or inappropriate in this case. Scott was explicitly considering the policy of expanding the definition of a word, not just which definition is better.

If the (chief) purpose of 'categories' (i.e. words) is to describe reality, then we should only ever invent new words, not modify existing ones. Changing words seems like a strict loss of information.

It also seems pretty evident

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1Kenny7h I think it's still a good example, perhaps because of what you pointed out. It seems pretty clear to me that there's a sometimes significant difference between the legal and colloquial meanings of 'crime' and even bigger differences for 'criminal'. There are many legal 'crimes' that most people would not describe as such and vice versa. "It's a crime!" is inevitably ambiguous.
1Kenny7h I think this a very much underrated avenue to improve lots of things. I'm a little sad at the thought that neither are likely without the looming threat of possible punishment.
1Kenny7h I think we, and others too, are already constructing rules, tho not at as a single grand taxonomy, completed as a single grand project, but piecemeal, e.g. like common law. There have been recent shifts in ideas about what counts as 'epistemically negligent' [and that's a great phrase by the way!], at least among some groups of people with which I'm familiar. I think the people of this site, and the greater diaspora, have much more stringent standards today in this area.
Self policing for self doubt
259h2 min readShow Highlight

Sometimes it seems consequentially correct to do things that would also be good for you, if you were selfish. For instance, to save your money instead of giving it away this year, or to get yourself a really nice house that you expect will pay off pragmatically while also being delightful to live in. 

Some people are hesitant to do such things, and prefer for instance to keep a habit of donating every year, or err toward sparse accommodation more than seems optimal on the object level.  I think because if their behavior is indistinguishable from selfishness, it is hard for them to be sure thems... (Read more)

5Raemon9h Noting that I don't think 'consequentialism' says anything about altruism. You can be a selfish consequentialist AFAICT

where are we with reacts? Need a :raises hand: emoji.

The Zettelkasten Method
1162mo39 min readShow Highlight

Early this year, Conor White-Sullivan introduced me to the Zettelkasten method of note-taking. I would say that this significantly increased my research productivity. I’ve been saying “at least 2x”. Naturally, this sort of thing is difficult to quantify. The truth is, I think it may be more like 3x, especially along the dimension of “producing ideas” and also “early-stage development of ideas”. (What I mean by this will become clearer as I describe how I think about research productivity more generally.) However, it is also very possible that th... (Read more)

2abramdemski8h Not really? Although I use interconnections, I focus a fair amount on the tree-structure part. I would say there's a somewhat curious phenomenon where I am able to go "deeper" in analysis than I would previously (in notebooks or workflowy), but the "shallow" part of the analysis isn't questioned as much as it could be (it becomes the context in which things happen). In a notebook, I might end up re-stating "early" parts of my overall argument more, and therefore refining them more. I have definitely had the experience of reaching a conclusion fairly strongly in Zettelkasten and then having trouble articulating it to other people. My understanding of the situation is that I've built up a lot of context of which questions are worth asking, how to ask them, which examples are most interesting, etc. So there's a longer inferential distance. BUT, it's also a bad sign for the conclusion. The context I've built up is more probably shaky if I can't articulate it very well.

There are a lot of senses in which I or the people around me can be considered unsafe. Many-tonned hunks of metal whiz by us on the same streets we have to navigate on foot to buy our groceries. The social infrastructure by which we have access to clean drinking water is gradually being adulterated. Our country is run by occasionally genocidal white nationalists. And, of course, The Bomb. But when I hear people talk about feeling unsafe, they are almost never describing a concrete threat to their physical well-being. (As usual, life may be different for the less privileged classes, who have re

... (Read more)

I worry a lot about trying to reason about very complex equilibria when only looking at one force. It's _BOTH_ an adversarial and cooperative game - there are (asymmetric, but usually same sign) benefits to clear, honest communication. And even for adversarial portions, there may be a positive sum even when one player is harmed, if other players gain more than the harm.

I can make a model, even, that outsourcing the punishment so that extra-judgey people get most of the flak for the judgement, but still provide overall value, is optimal for some util... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post

[Edit: Changed the post title from the original article title to something more meaningful.]

I came across this article today, and I have to agree with it strongly based on my own recent trip to China. The update it triggered for me is the realization that China is genuinely doing better than the US on many fronts, most importantly on governance. How/why did that happen? Did anyone or any political theory predict this ahead of time? (In case it's not clear, this is not meant to be a rhetorical question. I'm surprised and confused and am wondering if someone or some theory can offer an explanati

... (Read more)

Sorry your thing got downvoted hard without much explanation. Mostly agree the article has a bunch of weird nationalistic assumptions and doesn’t provide much evidence for its claims. I think your comments here are ending up fairly fraught and hyperbolic and false. For example, while the LessWrong team is based in the US, we’re mostly not American, coming from Germany, England and Australia. At no point did I think you were being racist, nor consider the hypothesis anyone else did. Also, complaining about downvotes is not a good look.

4Ben Pace8h My brief thoughts: I've not visited China, this is a news article low on data and facts, I'm mostly treating the article's epistemic status as "travel blog by someone I don't know". I would be interested in fact post on levels of innovation and other metrics in a bunch of countries including China.
Units of Action
715h1 min readShow Highlight

Unit of action is a term I have been using internally to be more specific when thinking about groups of people. This post is for fleshing out and clarifying my thinking for myself, and seeing if it would be useful to anyone else. Also it feels like there really ought to be a term for this already, and I might be able to find more information if someone knows it.

Definition

A unit of action is a group that takes actions, as a group.

I take the word unit from the military, and also from unit of analysis, reflecting my belief that this is the correct level of analysis for big-picture problems. Actio... (Read more)

I wonder if the idea of unit testing might fit with your thinking, and perhaps have some useful approaches as well as caveats.

Perhaps also either the idea of factions or special interests in political/social choice theories -- but here fear those might be a bit too broad a "unit".

2ryan_b15h Caveats 1. I can see a lot of overlap with this and several senses of the the term institution. The reason I find it convenient to use a different term is that it shifts the emphasis to what specific groups are doing. For example, family is an institution, but the Templeton family is a unit of action. The corporation is an institution, but IBM is a unit of action. It also usefully excludes broader institutions, like the market or civil rights, while keeping the New York Stock Exchange and the ACLU as units of action. One way to think of it: units of action are the microphenomena of institutions, and the macrophenomena of people [https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GQti87STuSDsQAtgP/an-undergraduate-reading-of-macroscopic-prediction-by-e-t] . 2. Coming from a firmly demographic perspective on groups, like is common in political campaigning, this could easily get fuzzy. Consider religion: Christian and Muslim are not units of action, but Mormons and Catholics are essentially big hierarchies while Sunnis, Jews and Evangelicals are not. In the campaign-view of groups, what I think of as units of action are mostly important because they are indicators for demographic groups: NAACP is an indicator of black voter support, AARP is an indicator of senior voter support, unions of working class voter support, etc. This view seems to get the most airtime by far, though I could be biased because I consume an unusually high amount of political information.
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